No election security for you! Next question?

Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi on Wednesday blocked the advancement of a trio of bills aimed at strengthening election security just hours after former special counsel Robert Mueller warned of the continued threat that foreign powers interfering in US elections.

…

Two of those bills would require campaigns to report to federal authorities any attempts by foreign entities to interfere in US elections, and the third is aimed at protecting from hackers the personal accounts and devices of senators and some staffers.

So the Republicans want foreign entities to interfere in US elections. That’s interesting.

Hyde-Smith’s move is in line with past action from Republicans in the Senate. McConnell is refusing to buckle to the near constant drumbeat from Democrats — and some in the GOP — about the need to pass election security legislation in the wake of Mueller’s report.

The Kentucky Republican, who believes strongly that elections should be primarily controlled by state and local authorities and not managed by Washington, argues that the federal government has already responded to the problems raised from the 2016 campaign and more does not need to be done at this time.

Oh please. McConnell doesn’t believe strongly anything except Republican domination.

From Hindustan Times:

At a time when the Central government has been aggressively promoting its ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ scheme, sex ratio at birth data from 132 villages in Uttarkashi district reveal that no girl child was born in these areas in the last three months.

According to official data, 216 children were born in 132 villages of the district in the last three months. However, not a single girl was among the newborns which has left the district administration baffled.

Well not really “baffled.” Frustrated maybe, but not baffled.

Speaking to ANI, social worker Kalpana Thakur alleged that zero girl child birth clearly indicated the prevalence of female foeticide. “No girl child was born for three months in these villages. It cannot be just a coincidence. This clearly indicates female foeticide is taking place in the district. The government and the administration are not doing anything.”

One has to wonder how they think all those sons are going to have children themselves.

From the Guardian’s live coverage:

Representative Mike Quigley, a Democrat of Illinois, documented the many instances of Trump applauding the website after it leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 campaign.

Note that “Democratic National Committee.” You hardly ever see the UK press say “Democratic” in its reporting. I guess they can’t very well call it the Democrat National Committee since it’s an organization and that’s not its name, but when it’s simply a descriptor they adopt the deliberately obnoxious Republican usage: Schiff is a Democrat member of Congress, Warren is a Democrat candidate, and so on. It’s a solecism and it’s rude but they do it anyway. I don’t understand why.

That’s an aside though. What’s interesting is an actual value judgement from Mueller.

Quigley then turned to Mueller, who said of Trump’s repeated praise, “Problematic is an understatement … in terms of giving some hope or some boost to what is and should be illegal activity.”

"I love Wikileaks."
"This Wikileaks is like a treasure trove."
"Boy, I love reading those Wikileaks."@RepMikeQuigley asks Mueller to react to Trump's statement's on Wikileaks.

"Problematic is an understatement," Mueller says https://t.co/Nwn1OnEyZi pic.twitter.com/SgLJm2T05s

— Bloomberg Politics (@bpolitics) July 24, 2019

Okaaay so that’s noteworthy.

WATCH: Mueller on Russian interference in the 2016 election:

“It wasn’t a single attempt. They’re doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.”https://t.co/m9KGQtGMJ7 pic.twitter.com/s1Aa1nyLsU

— NBC News (@NBCNews) July 24, 2019

And it could work! Again! We could be stuck with this malevolent ignorant sack of shit for another four years thanks to Putin!

The degradation continues:

Republicans seeking to run cover for Donald Trump are using Robert Mueller’s refusal to stray from his report as a weapon to bludgeon his credibility. The president’s allies on the House Judiciary Committee used their allotted time during Wednesday’s hearing to float wild conspiracy theories about his integrity and the Russia probe, suggesting that Mueller is biased against Trump and that his investigation was corrupt. Mueller, his hands tied by his wish not to appear politically-motivated, largely declined to fight back.

Representatives Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, and Matt Gaetz are among the Republicans who used Mueller’s reticence to their advantage. Jordan, sporting his signature shirtsleeves, pressed the former special counsel on a conspiracy theory about the origins of the FBI’s probe that suggested Joseph Mifsud, the professor who reportedly told George Papadopoulos that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton, was actually sent by the United States government to set up Papadopoulos and justify the probe’s launch. Trump, who has spread numerous conspiracy theories of his own about Mueller’s efforts, appeared to give Jordan a nod of approval, retweeting a video of his monologue with the caption, “Boom…Jim Jordan just blew the lid off the Hoax.”

Mueller, who told lawmakers in his opening statement that there were matters he could not and would not discuss, mostly avoided hitting back at the Ohio Republican, telling him, “I can’t get into it.” He responded similarly to Gohmert, who mostly used his time to shout accusations at the former special counsel, saying that the episodes in which Trump attempted to obstruct justice outlined in the second part of Mueller’s report were merely a justified reaction by the president to an unfair, unlawful investigation. It was not Trump who obstructed justice, Gohmert charged, but Mueller himself. Minutes later, Gaetz used his allotted time to fire off a number of conspiracy theories, including that the dossier prepared by Christopher Steele was based on Russian disinformation.

This is the swamp.

Updating to add, with thanks to Screechy Monkey:

And another one. “Year after year after year…”

The Guardian has more on the murder of Yelena Grigoryeva:

Russian campaigners have said that a woman found murdered with multiple stab wounds in the city of Saint Petersburg was a well-known activist who had received threats over her protests for LGBT rights and opposition causes.

Authorities said they had found the body of a 41-year-old woman with multiple knife wounds in St Petersburg on Sunday, but did not identify her.

Activists and media reports in the city named the victim as local campaigner Yelena Grigoryeva, who was a regular participant in rallies supporting a range of unpopular causes in modern Russia, including LGBT rights and freedom for Ukrainian political prisoners.

In Putin’s Russia, activists for unpopular causes get killed. Trump wants to see the US go that way.

In recent days, activists at an LGBT resource centre in the city of Ekaterinburg said they had received a threatening letter, signed by “a liquidator of gays”, warning that if they did not close down the centre “something very bad and very sad” could happen.

Photographs posted to Grigoryeva’s Facebook page in recent months showed her holding placards at various rallies and protests. One called for “A Russia which people will not be scared of, but be inspired by”. Another read: “In Russia there are more than 5 million gay people. Because of backwardness and hatred, they have to live secretly.”

And if they don’t, look what happens to them.

Ah, Pink News.

Critics say that Newsnight presented being transgender as something that children should be encouraged out of. https://t.co/4ElI96Wi2o

— PinkNews (@PinkNews) July 23, 2019

Shock horror!

Wait. Is it? Is it bad to present being transgender as something that children should be encouraged out of? At least when the issue is “being transgender” in the sense of getting medical interventions,  hormone blockers or surgery or both? Should children be encouraged to make irreversible changes to their bodies on the grounds that they “feel” like the other sex? Should children be encouraged to do that in this climate in which “being transgender” has become a craze like sitting on flag poles or accusing daycare workers of Satanic ritual abuse?

What about children who are not encouraged out of it, and get those irreversible changes, and then in five or ten years realize that they’re not transgender after all? What if their sex lives and love lives are permanently limited because of irreversible physical changes they made when they were 8 or 12 or 15? What if it turns out that that cohort has a much higher suicide rate than trans people have ever had?

It’s as if there were a huge evil corporation, The Acme Trans Your Kid corporation, busy PRing everyone into jumping on the bandwagon…except that then the left wouldn’t be cheering it on.

What happens when you put a target on people:

A Russian LGBTQ activist, Yelena Grigoryeva, was fatally stabbed in St. Petersburg Sunday night after her name was listed on a website that encourages people to “hunt” LGBTQ activists, inspired by the torture-themed film “Saw.”

Reports in the Russian newspaper Fontanka said that a suspect, a “40-year-old resident of Bashkortostan,” had been detained by police.

Grigoryeva, 41, was active with Russia’s Alliance of Heterosexuals and LGBT for Equality and other activist causes, according to the Russian LGBT Network.

According to friends’ and colleagues’ online posts, Grigoryeva was worried about her safety after she found her name and personal information listed on the snuff site.

“I learned today that Lena asked a mutual friend to take care of her cat in the event of her death when she was threatened with murder,” friend and fellow activist Dinar Idrisov wrote on Facebook.

The friend and activist also posted a lot of photos of her. Here’s one:

Oddly enough, Afghanistan has not reacted with pleasure to Donald Trump’s brainless exclamations that he could wipe the country off the map.

Afghanistan has demanded the United States clarify remarks made by President Donald Trump, who said the country “would be wiped off the face of the Earth” if he wanted to win the war in Afghanistan.

“The Afghan nation has not and will never allow any foreign power to determine its fate,” Sediq Sediqqi, the spokesman for the President of Afghanistan, said in a statement. “Given the multifaceted relationship between Afghanistan and the United States, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan calls for clarification on the US President’s statements.”

Trump on Monday had suggested that he could put an end to the Afghanistan war in a week, but that it would cost millions of lives and wipe the country “off the face of the Earth.”

And then perhaps some other nuclear power would wipe much of the US off the face of the earth. Granted the US is a lot more sprawling, but much of the population is quite concentrated.

“If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people,” Trump said, seated beside Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan at the White House on Monday. “I have plans on Afghanistan, that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone. It would be over in — literally, in 10 days, and I don’t want to do — I don’t want to go that route.”

Such a wise thing to say, especially while sitting next to the PM of Afghanistan’s neighbor.

He also annoyed Modi while he was at it.

Trump had claimed that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally asked him if he would like to be a mediator in the decades-long conflict between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region.

A spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Raveesh Kumar, denied Trump’s claim, saying on Twitter that “no such request has been made” by Modi.

Whatevs.

This just in: Vancouver’s Pride Society has told the Vancouver Public Library it can’t participate in the Pride Parade.

The Pride Society says the Vancouver Public Library is no longer permitted to take part because it allowed “transphobic and anti-sex worker” speaker, Meghan Murphy, to book space for an event in January.

Meghan is not “transphobic” and she is not “anti-sex worker” unless you restrict the meaning of “sex-worker” to pimps.

“VPS asserts that the conduct reflected both at this event, and in past public comments by these speakers, are discriminatory in a way that violates the British Columbia Human Rights Code,” the society says in a statement.

It can assert all it likes, but that doesn’t make it true.

Earlier this month, the University of British Columbia was barred from marching in the Vancouver Pride Parade because it hosted a controversial anti-SOGI speaker in June.

There will be fewer but better Russians marchers.

The Trump administration wants to make more poor people starve.

The Trump administration wants to change the way states determine who qualifies for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, also known as food stamps. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 3 million people would lose their food assistance as a result.

The administration says it wants to close what it calls a “loophole” that allows states to give benefits to those would not otherwise be eligible by raising or eliminating income and asset limits. Forty states and the Washington, D.C., now take advantage of this option, and have done so for many years.

“This proposal will not only save money, but more importantly it preserves the integrity of the program while ensuring nutrition assistance programs serve those most in need,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in announcing the proposed rule, published in the Federal Register. His agency estimates the change would likely save $2.5 billion a year.

Which is to say, it will withhold $2.5 billion worth of food from poor people. What a goal for a rich country!

But proponents of the current system say it helps low-income families who work, but have huge child care, housing and other expenses that leave them with insufficient money to buy food.

Let’s not forget, Senate Republicans refused to take up a bill to raise the minimum wage passed by the House last week. The minimum wage is far below a living wage, mostly because housing and child care are so expensive. An enormous chunk of the population don’t make a living wage and do have sky-high housing and child care expenses. Trump and his gang want to make them even worse off.

The proposed rule change is one of several the administration has made or is considering that restricts safety net programs for low-income individuals and families.

Because that’s what we need to do: not create programs that lift people out of poverty but tweak the few existing programs to push people down into poverty even more firmly.

So the UK has decided to join us in Crazytown. I don’t recommend it!

Boris Johnson has been elected new Conservative leader in a ballot of party members and will become the next UK prime minister.

He beat Jeremy Hunt comfortably, winning 92,153 votes to his rival’s 46,656.

The former London mayor takes over from Theresa May on Wednesday.

…

Donald Trump told an event in Washington “a really good man is going to be the prime minister of the UK now,” and Mr Johnson would “get it done”, referring to Brexit.

The president added: “They call him Britain Trump. That’s a good thing.”

No, it isn’t. It really isn’t.

Princess Ivanka was quick to send her congratulations.

Ivanka sends her congratulations to the Prime Minister of the United “Kingston” shortly after Trump praised the Prince of “Whales.” These people are so utterly incompetent and embarrassing even on the smallest stuff. pic.twitter.com/Q5c6v00YYv

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) July 23, 2019

Kingston’s all right. It’s on the other side of the river from Hampton Court and Bushy Park. Pleasant enough but not much to be Prime Minister of.

Glinner on Yaniv:

Because Jonathan Yaniv is the person we have constantly been told doesn’t exist: he is the sexual predator desperate for access to adolescent girls, he’s the privileged male determined to ruin the lives of women who fail to pander to his narcissism, he’s the misogynistic scheister who’ll dive on any opportunity to fuck women over. Many of us have been ringing alarm bells for the past year, but he merely has to yell “Bigot!” and major corporations step in to silence his accusers. He’s very far from being a member of any kind of oppressed community; he is an entitled white man exercising power over women.

And he has big plans. Suing 16 women for declining to wax his genitals is not his final prank; no indeed.

Perhaps most horrifying of all is Yaniv’s latest gambit– trying to arrange a swimming event for children where parents will be barred and clothing will be optional. Yes, you read that right. He has applied to hold what he is describing as an “All Bodies Swim” for LGBTQ youth aged 12+ at the civic pool in Langley Township. Parents and guardians will not be allowed to attend and “Individuals will be permitted to be topless”.

A 32 year old man wants to be alone in a swimming pool full of semi-naked children.

But we were told such things would never happen. We were told it was transphobic to talk about them. We were told to die in a fire TERF.

Sneeringly dismissed as a figment of the imagination of hysterical women, Yaniv is the embodiment of feminists’ objections to Self-ID and gender ideology.  The nominally progressive Left have been so busy calling women bigots and transphobes, they never stopped to listen to what they were actually saying; that gender ideology is the perfect Trojan horse for predators, paedophiles and grifters.

They smeared those who were trying to raise the alarm. Now a court is deciding if women have a legal right to refuse to handle a man’s penis and testicles. This is where we are.

Nearing social justice utopia, I gather.

Not exactly what we want cops to be doing, I think.

Louisiana police officer Charlie Rispoli was fired Monday following a social media post in which he suggested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) should be shot. This firing comes on the heels of various police departments bolstering their social media policies, in no small part due to the work of the Plain View Project.

Rispoli allegedly shared a fake news post claiming that Ocasio-Cortez said U.S. military personnel are “getting paid too much.” In sharing it, Rispoli also commented: “this vile idiot needs a round…and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve.”

Nope, I really don’t think we want cops doing that.

Goodbye Ok glacier.

Iceland has lost its first glacier to rising temperatures. Now, scientists from Rice University and Iceland are planning to install a plaque near the sad pile of ice and snow formerly known as Ok Glacier. The researchers say it’s the first memorial to a disappearing glacier, but climate change ensures it almost certainly will not be the last.

Glaciers are more than just ice. They’re defined by receiving more mass from snow than they lose from summer melt, which allows them to slide down mountains and grind up rock. Climate change has, of course, changed the equation by causing more glacial melting, causing ice to recede around the world. An increasing number of glaciers have turned into stagnant, rotten ice patches or disappeared completely. The OK Glacier reached the latter status in 2014, making it the first glacier in Iceland to disappear. Researchers expect all glaciers to melt away by 2200 on the island, which led to them memorializing Ok.

Meanwhile, much of the Arctic is on fire.

Hot weather has engulfed a huge portion of the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to Siberia. That’s helped create conditions ripe for wildfires, including some truly massive ones burning in remote parts of the region that are being seen by satellites.

Gizmodo has some extraordinary photographs of the fires.

Intense hot conditions have also fanned flames in Siberia. The remote nature of many of the fires there means they’re burning out of control, often, through swaths of peatland that’s normally frozen or soggy. But as Thomas Smith, a fire expert at London School of Economics, noted on Twitter, there are ample signs the peat dried out due to the heat and is ablaze. That’s worrisome since peat is rich in carbon, and fires can release it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

And that’s worrisome because it means that the warming could speed up much more than was predicted, eating up that vague generation or two that seemed to give the world time to start planting trees and stop electing trumps.

All told, northern fires released as much carbon dioxide in June as the entire country of Sweden does in a year, according to data crunched by the European Union’s Copernicus program. The agency said the wildfire activity is “unprecedented” amidst what was, incidentally, the hottest June ever recorded for the planet with the Arctic particularly sweltering. All that carbon dioxide released by fires represents one of the scarier feedback loops of climate change as hot weather ensures more fires, which releases carbon dioxide and makes climate change worse.

Scarier indeed.

Lucky lucky Detroit.

When nonbinary trans artist Jonah Welch went to check out their gorgeous new billboard in Detroit, someone drove by and yelled “what the fuck” at them.

“This is exactly why I made this billboard,” they told BuzzFeed News.

The billboard sits at 7 Mile and Kempa Street and proclaims, “Trans people are sacred.”

Well that’s modest.

Welch said their work delves into abstract surrealism and often goes to a place where trans identities and magic and mysticism meet. The billboard isn’t the first iteration of “trans is sacred,” but it’s definitely the largest.

Jonah Welch/Instagram

The phrase itself is something they heard from a friend years ago that always stuck with them. It made them feel like their trans identity wasn’t just okay, but a gift.

And in fact sacred.

This is good, because it’s not as if trans ideology is already riddled with narcissism and grandiosity.

Jonah Welch

See the pretty phallus collection. Very sacred.

Oh lord.

I’m finding the whole trans debate and safe spaces for women debate quite depressing. Not least because the debate is seemingly led by men on Twitter. Maybe it’s just Twitter that’s depressing? Maybe as a man, I should stay out of the debate? That would be easiest.

— Michael Legge (@michaellegge) July 22, 2019

Seemingly led by men on Twitter? Maybe just Twitter that’s depressing?

There is no “Twitter” in that sense – no universal or general Twitter. There’s only the Twitter each person sees because of which people she follows. Ok you can see a less curated Twitter via trends and the like, but it’s still not some generalized “Twitter.” It’s a selection.

And, no. It’s not the case that the debate is led by men.

Many women told him as much.

So what did he do? Ignored every single one of them, and replied only to men.

And they wonder why we pay attention to this gender stuff.

https://twitter.com/bailey6117/status/1153414830113665025

Please listen to women or have you tuned out our voices? You are dismissing years of works by feminists, female academics, lesbians, female child safeguarding experts, mums, female scientists, female sports professionals and on and on.

— Dr EM (@PankhurstEM) July 22, 2019

"led by men" ??? You have got to be KIDDING! Women have been speaking about this for ages. I, and numerous others, have entire blogs dedicated to the subject. My blog was censored then closed by wordpress; now I pay for it. We won't shut up. https://t.co/KCd1bSXivN

— Lily Maynard (@LilyLilyMaynard) July 22, 2019

He ignored them and all the others. No wonder he thinks the discussion is led by men.

More on the Laurel Hubbard question aka the trans women competing against women in sport question:

Hubbard is a transgender athlete, who as a male named Gavin did not make a ripple on the international stage until becoming a woman in her mid‑30s. Now, though, Hubbard is a realistic contender for an Olympic medal and creating a tsunami of protests from women who fear she has an unfair advantage because of the residual benefits of being a male. As the Australian weightlifter Deborah Acason put it: “I feel that if it’s not even, why are we doing the sport?” The Samoan prime minister has also weighed in.

The women don’t so much fear Hubbard has an unfair advantage as know he does. It’s not just some random weird inexplicable coincidence that he wasn’t a blip competing as a male but won all the things as a female. That happened for a reason.

But when it comes to the science, a new academic paper in the BMJ Journal of Ethics argues that elite transgender women do maintain an advantage when they transition – and that the current International Olympic Committee policies create what they call an “intolerable unfairness”, because testosterone has much more of an advantage on nearly every sport as opposed to say, being tall, having a large wingspan, or coming from a richer country, which the scientists say is more of a “tolerable unfairness” as it only provides a benefit in some sports.

…

As the academics note: “These differences largely underwrite the significant differences in world record times and distances set by men and women.” That, of course, is why women’s sport is protected. If it [weren’t] there would be no Serena Williams, no Dina Asher-Smith, no Megan Rapinoe as role models for millions: Novak Djokovic, Christian Coleman and Lionel Messi would smash them into dust every time.

And so would “Laurel” Hubbard, despite the lowered testosterone.