New in Trump:

Donald Trump ordered his staff to withhold nearly $400m in aid to Ukraine days before he repeatedly pressured the country’s president to investigate a political rival, it emerged on Monday night.

The revelation has further intensified demand among Democrats for the president to be impeached.

As news of Trump’s personal intervention broke, an influential group of seven Democrats, all first-term members of Congress with military or national security backgrounds, said that “if true”, the president’s actions regarding Ukraine, Joe Biden and the former vice-president’s son Hunter would “represent an impeachable offense”.

…

The Washington Post first reported Trump’s freezing of $391m in aid to Ukraine. Trump ordered acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, it said, to

The police just stood by at the WPUK meeting in Brighton, doing nothing while “activists” kicked the windows and shouted.

The meeting was disrupted by continual loud banging on the windows and chanting, to the point where there was a fear some windows might be broken and the excellent speech by
@rebelyarns was almost drowned out #WPUKLab19

I have never experienced such a level of threat, and I’ve been to a lot of feminist meetings. This was not a peaceful protest, it was an attempt to prevent the meeting going ahead, and it persisted throughout the equally excellent talk from @OnjaliRauf

The response from @sussex_police was inadequate to the point of negligence. Women’s right in law to congregate peacefully was

Trump still thinks he should get a Nobel Prize…”for a lot of things.”

… Read the rest

Julie Bindel on the WPUK meeting:

State of this outside the venue where #WPUKLab19 were meeting to talk about women’s sex-based rights, a load of trans-activist misogynists screaming, shouting and banging on the window while the police did absolutely nothing:

… Read the rest

Ok here we go, Adam Entous did a New Yorker piece on Hunter Biden in July.

In speeches, Biden rarely talks about Hunter. But news outlets on the right and mainstream media organizations, including the Times, have homed in on him, reprising old controversies over Hunter’s work for a bank, for a lobbying firm, and for a hedge fund, and scrutinizing his business dealings in China and Ukraine.

He went to work for a lobbying firm right after he spent three years working in the Clinton administration. That’s not necessarily directly corrupt, but it is parlaying government employment into a job as a lobbyist, and not, I think it’s fair to assume, of the public interest kind. Lobbying for … Read the rest

Trump is going farther out on that limb.

“Joe Biden and his son are corrupt,” Trump said, referring to unfounded claims that Biden’s son was involved in a corruption scheme in Ukraine.

Trump then claimed — with no proof — that, “If a Republican ever did what Joe Biden did, if a Republican ever said what Joe Biden said, they’d be getting the electric chair right now.”

Hmmyes, as a Republican did in that…um…er…

The President also denied claims he put pressure on the Ukrainian leader by threatening to withhold US aid, saying, “I did not make a statement that ‘you have to do this or I’m not going to give you aid.’ I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t

There’s a Woman’s Place UK meeting happening in Brighton right now. It’s being loudly and threateningly disrupted. There are police present but they’re not stopping the disruption.

WPUK:

Thank you to all the people and speakers for persevering tonight in the face of a noisy, threatening protest. The police are here but seem incapable – unwilling? – to stop protestors banging on windows. Democracy for some it seems. The law is an ass @BrightonPolice #WPUKlab19

An attendee:

Unbelievable mob outside the @Womans_Place_UK meeting in Brighton tonight, banging and pounding the windows, the din inside is deafening. Coming in we ran the gauntlet of hostile aggression, this is hate-filled public disorder and the police are not stopping it. #WPUKLab19

When reporting goes bad:

Nancy Pelosi, who has stridently avoided calling for impeachment, wrote in a letter that continued White House obstruction over releasing the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president would trigger severe consequences.

How do you stridently avoid calling for something? How do you stridently avoid anything?

I think they meant “strenuously advised against.”

It’s live reporting, so of its nature they do it quickly and without time for proofreaders to check it…but at the same time it does kind of hint at that unconscious bias thing we all drag around with us. Whether you agree with Pelosi or not, it is after all her job to advise for and against things, and … Read the rest

Dinesh D’Souza being…well, Dinesh D’Souza.

Children—notably Nordic white girls with braids and red cheeks—were often used in Nazi propaganda. An old Goebbels technique! Looks like today’s progressive Left is still learning its game from an earlier Left in the 1930s

Left. In the 1930s. Goebbels.

The Nazis were not “the Left.” Not then and not at any time. They killed every communist and socialist they could get their hands on. The left in the 30s was socialist or communist or somewhere between the two, and it was anti-fascist when most people were ignoring the whole subject. The Communist Party did stab all that in the back when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler and CP policy reversed itself overnight, … Read the rest

Hmm.

[I removed the image; see comments]

Tiffany @catgirlsister asks

WHY are cis lesbians so transphobic

and adds

pls tell me I won’t be alone forever

Maybe it’s mean to make fun of what Tiffany says…but then again women who are accused of being “transphobic” or “cis” or lesbians or all three are subject to quite a lot of meanness themselves, often set off by people like Tiffany saying things like the things Tiffany said in those tweets.

So I’ll point at what Tiffany says, and ask why Tiffany feels entitled to demand that lesbians do something to prevent him from being alone forever. Why is that lesbians’ job? Why is it lesbians’ fault that Tiffany is alone? Why isn’t … Read the rest

Typical Trumpy behavior – if there’s an island that had had a ban on motorized vehicles since 1898, why, what’s there to do but go to that island with 8 SUVs and parade around in them.

Vice President Mike Pence arrived at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in an eight-vehicle motorcade Saturday, prompting cries of “sacrilege” on social media.

Cars are generally banned on the island, and that century-old ban is integral to its charm.

When President Gerald Ford visited the island in 1975 — the only sitting president to make such a visit — he and first lady Betty Ford traveled by horse-drawn carriage.

Pence, who spoke at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, is the first sitting

Trump this morning gave an eloquent defense of his phone call with the president of Ukraine:

While Democrats stepped up calls for impeachment, President Donald Trump directly acknowledged Sunday that he spoke with the president of Ukraine about an investigation into political opponent Joe Biden, but called the talk appropriate.

Speaking with reporters en route to a trip to Texas and Ohio, Trump said: “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, with largely corruption – all of the corruption taking place – and largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”

His brain is like a broken record. The word “largely” gets into … Read the rest

But don’t worry, the Ivankas are still enjoying their White House Years.

When in Rome …

Updating to add Alfalfa:

… Read the rest