This is what those “unsung heroes” who are secretly trying to keep Trump from smashing all the porcelain are actually doing: giving huge tax cuts to billionaires while seeing to it that poor people are thrown out of the food stamps program. Please tell us more about how noble and courageous they are.

Nearly two million low-income Americans, including 469,000 households with young children, would be stripped of benefits under the House version of the farm bill being considered this week by congressional negotiators, according to an analysis by a nonpartisan research firm.

The bill, a multiyear spending measure that narrowly passed the House in June, includes a proposal to reformulate income and expense criteria for the 42 million recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Under the bill, states could remove about 8 percent of those receiving aid from the rolls, according to the research firm, Mathematica, which used data from the Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service.

Yeah! Stick it to those disgusting losers who don’t have much money, oh and by the way Trump will be needing Air Force One for another golfing/shopping/ranting trip today/tomorrow/over the weekend.

About 34 percent of seniors in the program, or 677,000 households, would lose benefits under the proposal, according to the study. More than one in 10 people with a disability, another 214,000 households, would also lose eligibility.

Good! They should be out digging for coal; it builds character.

Those estimates do not account for another proposal in the measure, which would impose strict new work requirements on beneficiaries. An additional 1.2 million people could be stripped of aid under that plan, according to a separate analysis released in May by the Congressional Budget Office, the study’s authors said.

…

President Trump favors imposing stricter requirements on adult recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as food stamps, and has disparagingly described beneficiaries as “welfare” recipients.

On Wednesday, he called for lawmakers to adopt the House version of the bill, which also includes billions in subsidies for agricultural states in the Midwest.

“The Trump Economy is booming with the help of House and Senate GOP,” he wrote on Twitter. “#FarmBill with SNAP work requirements will bolster farmers and get America back to work. Pass the Farm Bill with SNAP work requirements!”

Then he went back to watching tv.

The Democrats at the Kavanaugh hearing are throwing down.

On Day 1, Senate Democrats tried to stop the hearing before it even started. On Day 3, they went into full-on revolt: One by one, starting with Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), they threatened to release confidential documents about President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Brett M. Kavanaugh.

“I am going to release the email about racial profiling, and I understand the penalty comes with potential ousting from the Senate,” he said. Within the hour, Booker did just that.

Other Democratic senators soon joined in, threatening to release confidential emails and documents from Kavanaugh’s time as a lawyer in the George W. Bush White House. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) cheered them on via Twitter.

Because they shouldn’t be confidential.

I stand w/ Judiciary Committee Democrats who are well within their rights to release these very important documents that a former Kavanaugh deputy designed as “committee confidential.”

The American ppl deserve to know the truth about Judge Kavanaugh’s record. #WhatAreTheyHiding?

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) September 6, 2018

Within the hour, Sen. Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) released another email chain from Kavanaugh in 2002, with him debating whether Native Hawaiians should have the same protection as Indian tribes. The words “Committee Confidential” are stamped diagonally across each page.

“I would defy anyone reading this document to conclude this document should be deemed confidential in any way, shape or form,” she said.

Wait, there’s more.

These are two of tens of thousands of documents a lawyer for Bush who is vetting the Kavanaugh documents marked as confidential, meaning members of the Senate Judiciary Committee can see them, but the public cannot.

Practically, for Booker, that meant he could not display an email in which Kavanaugh discussed government racial profiling in 2002 when he used it Wednesday to try to pin down the nominee on his views of the policy. Republicans on the committee immediately raised a point of order during Booker’s questioning, claiming that the senator was unfairly cross-examining Kavanaugh without providing him the documents. They argued that Kavanaugh could not respond to specific questions about this email if he did not have the email in front of him.

He doesn’t have it in front of him because the Republicans have classified everything!

Make America a mob state again.

Sarah Sanders ventriloquising the lunatic she works for:

For those of you asking for the identity of the anonymous coward: pic.twitter.com/RpWYPHa6To

— Kayleigh McEnany 45 Archived (@PressSec45) September 6, 2018

The media’s wild obsession with the identity of the anonymous coward is recklessly tarnishing the reputation of thousands of great Americans who proudly serve our country and work for President Trump. Stop. If you want to know who this gutless loser is, call the opinion desk of the failing NYT at 212-556-1234 and ask them. They are the only ones complicit in this deceitful act. We stand united together and fully support our President Donald J. Trump.

We might as well be brawling in a bar.

Don’t worry, folks, it’s all just hysteria.

During opening statements at the start of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) repeatedly dismissed concerns that Kavanaugh will play a key role in restricting women’s reproductive rights as mere “hysteria.”

Is it time to remind Ben Sasses that the root word of hysteria means “uterus”?

Also, is Ben Sasses seriously claiming that Kavanaugh will not tip the balance of the Court? Because nine is really not such a big number that he should be confused about it.

Referring to a string of protesters who were thrown out of the hearing while yelling things like, “stop the oppression of women!“, Sasse said, “People are going to pretend that Americans have no historical memory, and supposedly there haven’t been screaming protesters saying ‘women are going to die’ at every hearing for decades. This has been happening.”

Well, Senator Smug, that’s because when abortion is illegal or prohibitively difficult and expensive to get, then women do die as a result. However uteral that may sound to you, it’s just a fact. Pregnancy has risks, and so do illegal abortions, and so do closures of abortion clinics.

As ThinkProgress detailed, it’s likely that Kavanaugh could provide a decisive vote chipping away at reproductive rights.

We know that Kavanaugh will almost certainly kill Roe v. Wade. There are currently four votes on the Supreme Court who consistently vote against abortion rights. Kavanuagh gave a speech in 2017 criticizing Roe and praising the dissent. And he sided with the Trump administration, at least temporarily, when the administration literally held women prisoner to prevent them from having an abortion.

Kavanaugh’s record also suggests he would give the Trump administration a free hand to curtail the Affordable Care Act independently of Congress, and would be resistant to any congressional efforts to further regulate firearms.

Despite what Sasse would have you believe, those positions have consequences — the greater availability of firearms correlates with more shooting deaths, and less access to health care correlates with higher mortality rates.

The Guardian has a piece by Hannah Mouncey, an Australian trans woman who plays Australian rules football.

 Graham Denholm/AFL Media/Getty Images

That’s Mouncey in the red jersey.

Late last week, the AFL released its long-awaited policy on transgender participation in Australian rules football. In it are a set of requirements trans women need to follow if they aim to play at AFLW level. These include having your testosterone below a certain level for two years, which I have no problem with, as well as the requirement that trans women undertake number of physical tests designed to ascertain if they have an advantage over cis women playing AFLW – the presumption being that this is because they are trans.

What does that mean, “the presumption being that this is because they are trans”? Surely the issue isn’t that they are trans but that they have male bodies.

The reasons I’m critical of the AFL’s policy are not the reasons people may assume. Essentially, every physical requirement the policy asks me to meet I will. I know what I can do, and I know how I compare overall. Yet, there are still a number of issues surrounding how the policy is applied.

It is not yet clear, for example, if the data being used by the AFL to compare cis and trans women can be independently verified. Nor can we be sure the clubs have accurately reported their data. The question that has been answered by the AFL, however, is that if a trans athlete and a non-trans athlete were both to perform above average on their testing regime, the trans athlete would be excluded from AFLW, but the cis athlete wouldn’t. Not very consistent, or fair.

Hold on just a second there. Framing it as “trans athlete” and “cis athlete” makes it sound like underdog and oppressor – but again, the issue isn’t “trans athlete,” it’s “athlete with male body.” In Mouncey’s case, very large solid powerful body. Even if you buy into the idea that “cis” people have privilege over trans people, that doesn’t automatically cancel out the advantage male bodies have over female bodies in sports like football.

My biggest concern is the fact that weight is being used as one of the key physical measures for possible exclusion. Forget the fact that in a game that has such an emphasis on endurance and speed, being heavy is not necessarily an advantage and think about the message it sends to women and girls about their bodies: if you’re too big, you can’t play. That is incredibly dangerous and backward.

Aw yeah, I’m sure that’s really what Mouncey cares about.

But what I find most puke-worthy here is Mouncey’s willingness and in fact determination to do this thing – to play a contact sport on a women’s team while having a body like a brick shithouse. That’s got nothing to do with being trans, it’s all about being an entitled self-centered shit.

Updating to add another photo of Mouncey playing on the women’s team:

Oh lord, so confused. About those “pronoun badges” offered by the Edinburgh Student Union…

While I personally see this as a fantastic step forward on EUSA’s part, the wider reaction on Facebook has been less than encouraging. In a poll, 81 per cent of people (at the time of publishing) said that they don’t think the pronoun badges are a good idea, with only 19 per cent of respondents voting in favour.

While the results of this poll surprised me, many of the comments on both the original article and the poll unfortunately did not. In response to the original article, one Facebook user simply responded with a gif which stated “we need a new plague”. On the poll itself, another user commented “mine better say microwave” and accused someone who argued against them of being “confused about their gender”. Pronoun badges are not just a trans issue, yet the majority of people are using it as an excuse to air their no doubt long held transphobia.

Oh no doubt. No doubt at all. Why? Because they’re transphobes. How do we know? Because they’re transphobic. How do we know? Because of their no doubt long held transphobia. How do we know? Because they’re transphobes. This is easy – tedious, but easy.

As a gender non-conforming butch woman, I’m often mistaken for a man, and I’m often subject to the awkward “uh, actually” conversation that follows. While uncomfortable, as a cis woman (identifying with the gender I was assigned at birth) I know that I’m lucky to be able to correct people and feel safe in doing so.

Wait.

Wait.

She says she’s a gender non-conforming butch woman, and then a few words later she says she’s a cis woman, identifying with the gender she was assigned at birth. What sense does that make? Doesn’t “gender non-conforming butch” mean not “identifying with the gender she was assigned at birth”? If you’re gender non-conforming then you’re not identifying with the gender you were assigned at birth.

She actually means sex at birth, but the ideology of this pile of sick is so incoherent she doesn’t realize it.

For many trans people however, correcting people on their pronouns can be terrifying and downright dangerous. By introducing pronoun badges, EUSA is making sure that trans and gender non-conforming students are safer and less likely to receive harassment for their gender presentation.

Is it? Are we sure about that? If “correcting people on their pronouns” can be terrifying and downright dangerous, then why wouldn’t wearing badges announcing one’s pronouns be even more so? The badges turn up no matter what, while participants’ third person pronouns don’t turn up all that regularly in conversation, and when they do it’s not necessarily always the case that they need to be corrected.

It’s important to note these badges are in no way compulsory, but rather a new option for people to take advantage of if they please. The violent reaction makes it seem as if armed EUSA members will be holding people down and tattooing pronouns on them against their will.

The reaction isn’t violent.

Other than that, good piece.

There’s the dreadful news from Rio:

The stately national museum, once home to Brazil’s royal family, was still smoldering at sunrise on Monday when scores of researchers, museum workers and anthropologists began gathering outside, dressed in black.

Some sobbed as they began taking stock of the irreplaceable losses: Thousands, perhaps millions, of significant artifacts had been reduced to ashes Sunday night in a devastating fire. The hall that held a 12,000-year-old skeleton known as Luzia, the oldest human remains discovered in the Americas, was destroyed.

…

In recent years, state and city governments in Brazil have failed to pay police officers and doctors on time. Public libraries and other cultural centers have shut down. The ranks of the unemployed and homeless have swelled.

…

The museum itself was not spared, falling into disrepair as the country struggled. It got so bad, local news media reports said, that professors who worked at the museum resorted to collecting money to help pay for cleaning services. Beyond a few fire extinguishers and smoke detectors, the museum did not have a fire-suppression system, officials said.

No fire suppression system – good lord. I’d assumed, without thinking about it, that all museums would have the best fire-suppression system available, on account of how the stuff inside them is irreplaceable.

It took more than six hours for 80 firefighters from 21 stations to extinguish the blaze. On Monday, they scoured through piles of ashes searching for salvageable pieces from a museum that had housed a trove of indigenous artifacts, as well as Latin America’s pre-eminent collection of Egyptian mummies and Roman frescoes from the ancient city of Pompeii.

Cristiana Serejo, the deputy director of the museum, told reporters on Monday afternoon that about 10 percent of the museum’s collection had been spared. Among the surviving materials were a large meteorite and a portion of the zoology exhibit.

Mr. Oliveira, the paleoartist, said museum officials were all but resigned to the loss of the Luzia remains…

“We are strongly hoping that she survived, but it’s very difficult,” he said. “The skull is very fragile. The only thing that could have saved it is if a piece of wood or something fell and protected it.”

The fire wiped out years’ worth of research by botanists, marine biologists, paleontologists and entomologists.

Beatriz Resende posted photos on Facebook:

The word “lesbian” used to be considered ooky because lesbians were considered ooky. Then there was Stonewall, and activism, and increased visibility, and Alison Bechdel, and Ellen, and Maddow. And then the word somehow became ooky again, apparently because it was somehow not “inclusive” enough. So when York Civic Trust put up a plaque to honor Ann Lister it carefully avoided That Word. It said “Gender-nonconforming entrepreneur. Celebrated marital commitment, without legal recognition, to Ann Walker in this church. Easter, 1834.”

And there was a stink, and a petition, and it worked.

A draft of the new wording will be proposed and opened for public comment in the coming weeks.

An online petition calling on York Civic Trust to change the wording attracted more than 2,500 signatures. The petition said: “Anne Lister was, most definitely, gender non-conforming all her life. She was also, however, a lesbian. Don’t let them erase this iconic woman from our history.”

“Gender non-conforming” is fine in its way, but it’s far from identical to “lesbian.” To spell it out there are lesbians who are not particularly gender-nonconforming (except for the not hooking up with men part), and gender non-conforming women who are not lesbians.

Julie Furlong, who started the petition, told the BBC she was pleased the wording was to change: “I am very happy that they have realised that lesbian erasure is not acceptable, but I will wait to hear on the final wording before expressing opinion as to that.”

The trust said following a meeting with the Churches Conservation Trust, York LGBT Forum and York LGBT History Month, a joint decision was made to change the wording on the plaque. It added: “The plaque is intended to be a positive celebration of the union of Anne Lister and Ann Walker, and this remains the case. The last thing we wanted to do was to cause offence or upset to any community.”

Oh? But that’s a hopeless way to look at it. They’re going to cause offence and upset to the “community” of people who hate the whole idea of same-sex love and attraction, just for one thing. So in trying to avoid annoying any “community” they managed to erase the very “community” the plaque is about. Ironic, isn’t it.

James Kirkup on Greens and Challenors and Terfblockers:

Aimee Challenor was a prominent Green activist. She was the party’s spokesperson on equalities issues and a candidate for the party’s deputy leadership. Aimee Challenor was a Green candidate in the 2017 general election and the 2018 local government elections. In both elections, her election agent was her father, David “Baloo” Challenor.

David Challenor was last month convicted of torturing and raping a ten-year old girl in the attic of the family home. He was charged with those crimes in 2016. So Aimee Challenor was nominated for public office for the Green Party by a man awaiting trial for the most serious sexual offences against a child. (Read more about this here, if you want to.) Aimee Challenor was aware of her father’s arrest at the time she accepted his nomination; at least some Green Party officials knew too.

Questions are being asked, inquiries are being predicted, tweets are being deleted.

Aimee Challenor was an active Green campaigner on transgender issues. As the party’s equalities spokesperson, she was an enthusiastic participant in the debate about changing the law on legal gender, arguing in favour of rules where a person can legally chose their own gender (and gain the relevant legal rights) without external check or verification.

Critics of such a “self-ID” policy say that among the issues it raises are worries about safeguarding and access to girls or vulnerable women. They fear that allowing any man who says “I am a woman” to be treated as a woman could allow unscrupulous men to declare themselves female in order to gain privileged access to female-only spaces or to supervise girls through organisations such as Girl Guides.

To summarise, then, a politician stood for public office knowing her election agent was awaiting trial for the rape and torture of a young girl. The politician also advocated a policy that some people fear could make it easier for sexual predators to get access to girls.

Not only do some people fear the policy of self-declared trans womanhood could make it easier for sexual predators to get access to girls, they also have a very hard time seeing how anyone can promise that would not happen. It’s not just “self-declaration could make it easier for sexual predators to get access to girls,” it’s also “you have not enunciated any way to ensure sexual predators would not get access to girls via self-declaration.”

The Green Party ardently defended Aimee Challenor when all this came out.

All of this focussed some attention, in the Green Party and elsewhere, on those safeguarding questions some people raise about the gender policy Aimee Challenor so enthusiastically promoted.

Some Green Party members suggested that Lucas should listen to the people who asked those questions. Some suggested she should meet A Women’s Place UK (WPUK) a group of (mostly) left-wing women who organise public meetings to discuss gender law. To some transgender activists, WPUK are a hate-group spewing out bigotry. To people with a slightly firmer grip on reality, WPUK are a bunch of ordinary women who talk earnestly about equality law and can’t quite believe that the politicians who are supposed to represent them aren’t doing their jobs and debating this stuff themselves. Sometimes they have biscuits too.

So, credit to Lucas for saying that she would indeed meet WPUK and listen to what they have to say:

Completely agree and am already doing that. Am in contact with Women’s Place & hope to meet next week

— Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) September 2, 2018

I saw that tweet yesterday. I also saw the predictable avalanche of oh noooooooo they are monsters, you mustn’t.

Never mind that Lucas had been an outspoken advocate of trans rights in general, and of Aimee Challenor in particular. Never mind that all she said she would do is meet some people and listen to them. None of that could mitigate her sins against transgenderism. The online mob quickly gathered to ensure Lucas was suitably chastised: she said she’d talk to witches, so she must be a witch! Burn her!

(As is common here, lots of the abuse directed at Lucas came from men keen to tell women what to do, say and think. My favourite reprimand was this one:  “Sincere word of warning Caroline: the people you’re agreeing to have dialogue w/ may appear to be reasonable & well-meaning individuals – couldn’t be more untrue. #WPUK and its associates spread hateful rhetoric, & seek to deny #trans people their existing legal rights. Avoid.” That came from a person using the name Adrian Harrop and claiming to be an NHS doctor; I assume it’s a parody account because the alternative explanation – that an actual real person is so comically stupid and awful – is too troubling to contemplate.)

He’s joking, of course. Adrian Harrop is all too real, and a genuine NHS doctor. He spends a great deal of time verbally abusing feminist women on Twitter.

So then Lucas was added to “Terfblocker” – the one set up by the Challenors themselves. The circle was closed.