They all knew.

(Of course they did. How could they not? How could anyone? He’s not subtle about it.)

Trump is trying out a new brand of birtherism: pretending Biden wasn’t born where he was born.

Which is weird because…what? Who cares? What difference does it make what town or city or village or megalopolis someone was born in?

President Trump traveled to Old Forge, Pennsylvania, just miles away from former Vice President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, to deliver a scathing speech in which he claimed Biden ‘wasn’t born’ in Scranton, just hours before the Democratic presidential hopeful was set to accept his party’s nomination.

Oh no, not Not Born in Scranton! The horror!

But perhaps Trump’s most vicious and bizarre attack was on Biden’s claim to be a native son of Scranton, asserting that Biden, who

This isn’t the approach to the climate crisis, this is the climate crisis. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano, authors of Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy, have the details.

In few places is this as clear as California, where extreme wildfires have become the new abnormal. There is currently a “fire siege” in northern California, with wildfires burning in every one of the nine Bay Area counties except for San Francisco, which is entirely urbanized. Tens of thousands of residents have evacuated and people are choking on smoke.

And that’s not some random inexplicable thing, it’s the climate crisis.

California’s governor announced on Wednesday that there were 367 fires, and conflagrations have grown so rapidly that there are

Trump is attacking California, again, for being on fire.

“I see again the forest fires are starting,” he said at a rally in swing-state Pennsylvania. “They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”

“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us,” he added.

He wants to make “them” pay for it because California votes for Democrats plus it’s full of Those people – you know the ones.

“I’ve been telling them this now for three

Proud to demand the end of women’s sport.

“We are asking rugby clubs at all levels of the game to stand with us against a ruling that is exclusionary and that will impact some of the most vulnerable people in the community”.

Join us and @LgbtiqS in calling @WorldRugby to #TackleTransphobia https://t.co/Y0ngO2VbQE pic.twitter.com/Qj8KSdOL5S

— Stonewall (@stonewalluk) August 21, 2020

… Read the rest

Navalny needs to get out of Russia. Putin has nailed the doors shut.

The Berlin-based Cinema for Peace Foundation organised an air ambulance to pick up Mr Navalny and bring him back to Berlin, where it said the Charite hospital was ready to treat him.

…

At a news conference in Berlin, Mr Navalny’s aide Leonid Volkov said at first doctors at the hospital had been helping to facilitate his transfer but abruptly stopped doing so.

“[It was] like something was switched off – like medicine mode off, cover-up operation mode on – and the doctors refused to co-operate any more, refused to give any information even to Alexei’s wife,” he said.

“The doctors who were helping to do

Ari Berman is reporting on DeJoy’s testimony.

Embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified before the US Senate on Friday that he will not reinstall more than 600 mail sorting machines that have been removed under his leadership. Postal workers say the removal of these machines has contributed to major mail delays that could affect whether mail ballots are counted in the 2020 election.

He’s said he’ll stop taking any more out for now, since he got caught, but that’s all he’ll concede. It’s as if someone breaks into your house and the police show up and the intruder says “well ok I’ll leave now but all that stuff I stashed in my car before you got here? I’m keeping … Read the rest

The BBC a couple of weeks ago:

Twelve months into her gender transition, Grace McKenzie was recruited out of the blue to join the Golden Gate Women’s rugby club in San Francisco.

Cue Rebecca Solnit to remind us how awesome and accepting San Francisco is.

McKenzie says playing rugby has given her a platform to “just focus on living and enjoying myself” – but a new proposal to ban trans women from women’s contact rugby could bring that to an end.

Because, oddly enough, women’s safety and right to fair competition is more important than one trans woman’s “platform to enjoy herself.”

“There’s a lot of rhetoric out there about where trans people fit into sports overall, and it

Oh and let’s not forget Trump’s tax returns.

A federal judge on Thursday cleared the way for Manhattan’s top prosecutor to get Donald Trump’s tax returns, rejecting a last-ditch attempt by his lawyers to block a subpoena issued to his accounting firm.

US district judge Victor Marrero’s ruling echoes his prior decision in the case, which was upheld by the US supreme court last month. The high court returned the case to Marrero so Trump’s lawyers could get another chance to challenge the subpoena issued by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr.

Trump, through his lawyers, has argued that the subpoena was issued in bad faith, might have been politically motivated and amounted to harassment of him, especially

What’s the deal with Stephen Miller? How did he get to be a racist fanatic?

Jean Guerrero’s new book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda follows Miller through a conservative media landscape where key figures — including right-wing radio talk-show host Larry Elder; David Horowitz, who founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center; and former Breitbart chief Steve Bannon — propelled the rise of a man who now influences who gets to be an American.

…

“I just became all the more fascinated with trying to understand how a descendant of Jewish refugees who grew up in Southern California — how does that person become the person crafting Trump’s harshest rhetoric and policies, targeting people fleeing violence

It’s saad, saad, he never hurdovum, never hurdovum, showboating, they were showboating, saad, he never hurdovum.

I asked Trump in the Oval Office for his reaction to the indictment of Steve Bannon. He said, in part:

I feel very badly.

I haven't been dealing with him for a very long period of
time.

Don't know anything about the project at all.

It's a very sad thing about Mr. Bannon.

— Geoff Bennett (@GeoffRBennett) August 20, 2020

I asked Trump what it says about his judgment that Bannon, Stone, Flynn, Gates, Manafort and Cohen have all been indicted. What's it say about the culture of lawlessness in his campaign?

Trump: "Well, I have no idea." He then pivoted to attacking the

A tweet yesterday:

We at IGR Rugby reject this proposal, and stand with our Trans & Non-Binary players in solidarity to protect their #RightToPlay and call on @WorldRugby to do the same! #TackleTransphobia #RugbyForAll #IGRugby #WorldRugby pic.twitter.com/jIwDZO1ngp

— IGR International Gay Rugby (@IGRugby) August 19, 2020

What proposal? You may think they said what proposal in a preceding tweet but they didn’t. Maybe they deleted something, maybe they’re just sloppy. I searched and found a BBC story from July 20.

World Rugby could ban transgender athletes from playing women’s rugby because of safety concerns.

It would be the first international sports federation to prohibit transgender women from competing.

World Rugby said it had undertaken a review of its “rugby-specific

Life under a dictator:

The Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny is in a coma and on a ventilator in a hospital intensive care unit after a suspected poisoning.

“We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed into his tea,” his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, tweeted. “That was the only thing he drank this morning. The doctors say that the toxin was absorbed more quickly because of the hot liquid. Right now Alexei is unconscious.”

An outspoken critic of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Navalny was returning to Moscow by plane from Tomsk in Siberia when he began to feel ill. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk and he was taken to hospital. A

Seems to be a busy morning. Steve Bannon has been arrested for fraud, and a breaking news banner at the top of that story says a judge has thrown out Trump’s challenge to the Manhattan DA’s subpoena of his tax records. Also Trump melted down the rest of the way while watching the Dem convention last night.

So, Bannon.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been arrested after being charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors through their campaign “We Build the Wall.” 

Bannon, along with three of his associates, w[as] indicted by investigators at the U.S. Southern District of New York on Thursday. They allege that the group of conservative leaders defrauded donors and that

Philip Bump at the Post says why Trump’s failure to disavow QAnon is so dangerous:

The FBI was concerned enough about the emergence of “anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories” last May that it issued a formal intelligence bulletin to American law enforcement agencies. It warned of people being inspired to engage in “criminal and sometimes violent activity” by such philosophies, given that they “tacitly support or legitimize violent action.”

So Trump thinks they sound nice.

The spread of QAnon is seen by federal law enforcement as a threat to the public. There are obvious cases in which QAnon is used by disturbed individuals as a rationale for their action, as in the murder of a reputed

Axios has more on Trump’s playdate with QAnon.

QAnon is a sprawling internet conspiracy theory that baselessly alleges that a powerful cabal of sex traffickers within the “deep state” is engaged in a global fight to take down Trump. The FBI identified fringe conspiracy theories, like QAnon, as domestic terrorist threats in 2019.

Why would sex traffickers want to take down Trump though? It’s not as if he’s a vocal opponent of sex trafficking or any other form of sexual exploitation.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal supporter of QAnon, won the Republican nomination in Georgia’s deep-red 14th Congressional District runoff last week. Trump tweeted his congratulations and called her a “future Republican Star.”

Well he had to say something… Read the rest

Others are not quite so cheery about QAnon as Trump is.

Background:

FBI: https://t.co/JC4l1ZtHDu

West Point: https://t.co/ifaWfzIw2m

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) August 19, 2020

I read some of that West Point one. It’s interesting.

Anyway it’s ok, a reporter explained it to Trump and he caught on perfectly.

REPORTER: QAnon believes you are secretly saving the world from this cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Are you behind that?

TRUMP: Is that supposed to be a bad thing? We are actually. We are saving the world. pic.twitter.com/rPYFU1B8WB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2020

And he says we are akshally, we’re saving the world, we’re saving the world from a radical left philosuffy that will destroy this country, an when this … Read the rest

Trump is asked about QANON. His response is that they like him.

Trump on Qanon: I heard these are people who love our country pic.twitter.com/PphJQHJ0Am

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 19, 2020

What else does he need to know? Nazis? “They like me very muccchh.” Mass murderers? “They like me very muccchh.” Pedophile rings? “They like me very muccchh.” Putin? “He likes me very muccchh.” Jeffrey Epstein? “He liked me very muccchh.” Michael Flynn? “He likes me very muccchh.” … Read the rest

Trump:

Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES – They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less! (This is what the Radical Left Democrats do. Two can play the same game, and we have to start playing it now!).

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2020

Jim Wright:

Guy who wanted you to inject bleach now wants you to buy shitty cheap tires made in a foreign country to own the libs.

Also, his MAGA hats are made in China.Remember when Republicans got mad and started throwing their Keurigs off balconies before they figured out they didn’t actually know how to make coffee for themselves?

Looking forward to Republican Pinterest where they offer tips on making

The verbal re-engineering continues. A self-described “Trans & Queer Centered Full-Spectrum Doula & Childbirth Educator” wants to know what you and you and YOU call that thing where you give a baby milk that your body produces and the baby derives nourishment thereby.

While we’re working to dispel stigma around feeding babies from our bodies this month, I just want to pipe up with a little reminder that this practice goes by many names for many different people! For some of us, it’s chestfeeding, for some of us it’s bodyfeeding, and for some of us it’s something else! What words do you use to talk about feeding your baby the milk that your body makes?

I gotta say, “bodyfeeding” sounds … Read the rest