Wait a minute.

The premier of Alberta:

Eid Mubarak!
Wishing all Albertans who celebrate Eid al-Adha tonight peace and joy, and many blessings for the year ahead.#EidAlAdha #ableg #abpoli pic.twitter.com/LSA47PDUrz

— Rachel Notley (@RachelNotley) August 20, 2018

I’m all for politicians being welcoming and affirming and all that, especially of groups who are targets of hatred and scorn…but putting on hijab to do it? Women are targets of hatred and scorn, and one version of that is forcing them to wear uncomfortable stifling concealing layers of cloth, often on pain of violence or even death. I don’t see why Notley couldn’t send a friendly Eid Mubarak without putting on a Modesty Garment to do it.

– OK, why you wear hijab!

– OK, pourquoi tu porte un hijab! https://t.co/kURX6aGI3u

— Ensaf Haidar (@miss9afi) August 21, 2018

Mark Joseph Stern has a very useful backgrounder at Slate on the move to stifle the black vote in Georgia.

Because of its history of racist voting laws, Randolph County was once required to seek federal permission before altering its election procedures. But after the Supreme Court gutted this oversight in 2013, the county was freed to crack down on the franchise. It is no coincidence that its election board chose this moment to shutter most of its polls: In November, the popular Democrat Stacey Abrams will compete for the governorship against Republican Brian Kemp, the current Georgia secretary of state. Kemp, who has devoted his time in office to a ruthless campaign of voter suppression, called upon Randolph County to abandon the plan when it spurred widespread outrage. That being said, the key figure in the Randolph County controversy is a Kemp ally who was handpicked by the secretary of state to close polls throughout Georgia.

Emphasis added.

To understand the brazen attack on black suffrage now occurring in Randolph County, it’s important to remember that Georgia is in the midst of a seismic demographic shift. As whites cease to be the majority in more and more counties, Republicans have clung to power by disenfranchising minority voters. Kemp’s opposition to the Randolph County plan marks the first time that he has adopted an affirmatively pro-suffrage stance. During his nearly eight years as secretary of state, Kemp engaged in mass voter purges, removing hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls. State officials appear to have singled out black voters in targeted purges.

…

Perhaps most egregiously, Kemp launched an investigation into Abrams’ efforts to register more minority voters despite no evidence of fraud. He used the probe to harass and intimidate voting rights advocates. Later, he refused to register 40,000 would-be voters who had signed up through the drive. Speaking to Republicans behind closed doors, Kemp explained the stakes: “Registering all these minority voters that are out there … if they can do that, they can win these elections.” During Kemp’s tenure, Georgia’s population has increased substantially—yet the number of registered voters has actually gone down.

And Kemp seems to have played a big part in the Randolph County closures, even though he backed away once people noticed.

At the meeting on Thursday night, the election board revealed that the move had been encouraged by Mike Malone, an associate of Kemp’s. Malone, who attended the meeting, explained that Kemp—who now claims that the poll closures are a bad idea—had asked him to go around the state and “recommend polling place closures” to various counties. Ten Georgia counties have already taken Malone’s suggestions and closed polling places. All of those counties have large black populations.

Emphasis added again.

Kemp doesn’t need to continue shuttering polling places to disenfranchise minority voters in November. He has spent eight years purging black voters from the rolls and canceling their registrations. Last-minute chicanery may be helpful to Kemp, but it probably isn’t worth the publicity nightmare. It’s possible he’s already suppressed enough to votes to win himself four years in the governor’s mansion, a perch he’d doubtless use to continue his erosion of democracy in Georgia.

I recommend reading the whole piece; it’s shockingly informative.

Trump at his most graceful:

Speaking before agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection officers, Trump lashed out at opponents of ICE and CBP (which Trump repeatedly referred to as CBC) who have blocked access to ICE offices and called for abolition of the agency over the administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents and strict enforcement of immigration laws.

“The vast majority, they’re all with you,” Trump said, calling opponents a small group that gets a lot of publicity.

“They have no courage, they have no guts, just big loudmouths. We don’t want to put up with that.”

Ah that reminds me of someone, who can it be. Oh yes, chickenshit  big loudmouth Trump, that’s who.

Trump singled out several ICE and Border Patrol agents during his remarks, including Border Patrol agent Adrian Anzaldua, who was responsible for discovering a trailer truck containing nearly 80 immigrants in Laredo, Texas.

Trump asked Anzaldua to come up to the stage to recount his actions, saying “He speaks perfect English.”

Geddit? Geddit? Despite the weird creepy foreign name that sounds like somebody brown from Down There, he speaks perfect English.

Too bad Trump doesn’t.

That Georgia county that’s planning to close 7 of its 9 polling places is getting a lot of attention from civil rights groups.

The closures would come just before a high-stakes midterm election in which Stacey Abrams, a black woman, is the Democratic nominee for governor.

“This is nothing more than a racially motivated, voter suppression scheme that aims to lock Black voters out of a historic election cycle,” Kristen Clarke, who leads the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, tweeted on Sunday. The Lawyers’ Committee, representing three Georgia civil rights groups, sent a letter to the Randolph County Board of Elections and Registration threatening legal action if the plan moves forward.

It’s a rural county, with no public transportation, and a majority-black population.

Some residents would have to travel more than 10 miles to vote in a county that lacks public transportation. According to the Census Bureau, the county is more than 60 percent black, and 30 percent of residents live in poverty, nearly twice Georgia’s 16 percent statewide poverty rate.

Last week, the Georgia chapter of the ACLU likewise threatened legal action against the county. In a letter, the group pointed out that the transportation difficulties of reaching a polling location would fall disproportionately on the county’s poor, black, rural voters. “When polling place configurations or closures have such a starkly disproportionate impact on racial minorities or lower-income rural voters without transportation, such closures almost certainly constitute a violation of the Voting Rights Act or the United States Constitution,” the letter warned.

That kind of crap used to be absolutely routine in the South, and that’s why Johnson pushed for the Voting Rights Act.

The election board defended its plan at two contentious public meetings last week, according to the local Fox affiliate. A consultant hired by the board explained that the seven locations slated for closure are not compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the board doesn’t have time to fix the problem before the election. The Lawyers’ Committee, finding the justification unreasonable, submitted a public records request in order to acquire information about how the board reached its decision. Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who is also the Republican nominee for governor, issued a statement urging the county to abandon the plan; Abrams likewise announced her opposition.

The plan to close these precincts was made possible by the Supreme Court, which in 2013 struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to clear changes to voting procedures with the federal government. In his decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the South had changed since the law passed in 1965, and that the burden of clearing changes with the government was no longer necessary.

Ha. Ha ha ha fucking ha.

Oh good god.

This is spectacular. pic.twitter.com/rGybFAAva4

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 20, 2018

Staggered by the malevolent stupidity of that opening I rushed to find the source: “The ‘Nanette’ Problem.”

It took me a while to write a critique of Nanette, the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby’s universally praised one-woman Netflix special that premiered in June, because I couldn’t quite figure out what I hated about it.

But when my cis, straight, liberal parents told me how much they loved it, the reason for my dislike coalesced: In order to make straight, cis viewers feel comfortably woke, Gadsby shits on an entire language of comedy developed over decades largely by Jews and queers. The greatest trick Gadsby pulls is convincing those who have little interest in actual gender, sexuality, or political radicalism — and apparently little knowledge of comedy — that they are watching something new and radical.

“Little interest in gender,” says a man about a feminist lesbian. I guess this man simply assumes that people he calls “cis” have little interest in gender, because of being “cis” and all? That it’s only people who declare themselves trans or queer or nonbinary who have lotta interest in gender? Needless to say, Peter takes care to let us know he’s nonbinary.

Comedy, Gadsby says, cannot hold her trauma — and so she spends the last half of her show explicating her trauma, saying that she actually cut off a true story at the halfway point earlier in the set, because in truth it ended with her being beaten up for being gay, and that no one would laugh at that.

Gadsby is good at relaying these powerful and heartbreaking stories of trauma. They’re important to tell. As a nonbinary person with trans and queer friends who have been harassed and assaulted for who they are, they resonated with me. But it’s in her analysis of comedy that Gadsby lost me.

So apparently it’s only nonbinary, trans, and queer people who understand about being harassed and assaulted for who they are? Lesbians aren’t good enough? Women aren’t good enough? They’re all way too old hat and wrong wave and “cis” and parent-like?

Comedy can be radical; it’s just that when it is, it’s not typically on Netflix. Queer and trans people have been performing comedy that transgresses how we traditionally think of the form: sets without easy punchlines that are weird and often unreadable unless you’ve been deep into the lexicon of queerness for years. There’s new, fresh, and interesting queer comedy being performed in basements and clubs in New York and elsewhere (see: here and here ) — but it’s comedy that is written and performed in a self-referential vernacular built over years that makes it mostly accessible only to fellow queers (and less-covered by the mainstream media).

In other words, Peter Moskowitz is cooler than any of us can dream of being, and obviously way cooler than that boring lesbian Hannah Gadsby.

In a few lines, Gadsby completely lets her audience off the hook, transforming justified queer rage (whether it comes in the form of outward anger or inwardly facing self-deprecating humor) that is often ignored by the mainstream press and the rest of society because it can be so challenging to power structures, into a fault within herself, and by extension all of us.

As a queer person, I want my anger to be heard. I believe my anger constructive, even if it’s self-deprecating, and even if you don’t get it. By telling us we need to challenge our anger, sublimate it into love and understanding lest we destroy the world, Gadsby is not challenging her audience, she’s challenging her fellow queers to be more respectful, more civil, to display our pain in ways that cis, straight people can appreciate, in ways that get us called groundbreaking by those who have broken no ground, and have no interest in listening to us when we speak in ways that are unreadable. Gadsby hasn’t changed comedy, she’s just let cis and straight people in on the joke. And there’s nothing radical about that.

Seriously. The whole point is to exclude cis and straight people.

Heads of government aren’t supposed to punish their critics. That may be normal in Saudi Arabia, but it’s not normal in putative democracies.

Nixon did it anyway.

Nixon’s Enemies List, officially called his “Opponents List,” was a document that was initially compiled by presidential advisor George T. Bell for Charles Colson, the infamous “hatchet man.” Colson turned over the list to White House Counsel John Dean on September 9, 1971. The list, which at first included 20 names, was a compilation of figures from all walks of life, ranging from the actor Paul Newman (“Radic-Lib causes … Heavy McCarthy involvement ’68”) to journalists such as Mary McGrory and Daniel Schorr (a “real media enemy”) to politicians like the African American legislators Ron Dellums and John Conyers (“a leading black anti-Nixon spokesman”), to the labor leader Leonard Woodstock, president of the United Auto Workers. The New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath even made the document.

The goal of the Enemies List was to highlight and target some of the president’s most pesky critics. The document described “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

The White House attempted to use numerous tactics to go after these figures. The Internal Revenue Service turned to audits as a method of harassment, while federal contracts became a tool to punish other perceived enemies of the state.

Enemies of the Nixon, rather.

The list remained hidden from public view. In the early 1970s, the president and his advisers assumed that doing any of this out in the open would be devastating. There was still a sense of norms that restrained an administration from publicly abusing its power in this way. Americans only learned of the list on June 27, 1973, when Dean informed the Senate Watergate Committee about what his colleagues had done. Dean told the panel that “There was also maintained, what was called, an Enemies List, which was rather extensive and continually being updated.”

…

The Enemies List became yet one more piece of evidence that Nixon had abused his power. In the path toward Nixon’s resignation, the shocking news that a president was willing to act in this fashion against citizens who were legitimately doing their business fueled the feeling of anger and betrayal that played into a bigger narrative of how he misused the office. Colson went to visit Senator Lowell Weicker, a Connecticut Republican, to deny compiling the list. But when Colson admitted authoring the memo about Gibbons, Weicker exploded with anger and ordered Colson out of his office.

The list made it into Article II of the impeachment charges drawn up against Nixon: “He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in the income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.”

But that was then. Now? Trump has Fox News, and Putin, and Twitter, and a pack of craven Republicans in Congress. He also has a psychopathic level of indifference to norms and rules; he does what he wants until someone can stop him.

I guess some people are saying Trudeau should apologize to the Saudis, because a former Canadian ambassador to the UN says he should not.

Urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to jump on a plane to Riyadh to apologize for Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s tweet on Saudi human rights abuses is bad advice. Suggesting that we should seek U.S. President Donald Trump’s intervention with the Saudis is no better. And portraying Saudi Arabia as a friend and ally is preposterous.

Apologists for the Saudis need to give their heads a shake. Saudi Arabian authorities continue to subject peaceful dissidents to arbitrary arrests, trials and convictions. Human rights defenders are imprisoned and tortured into confessing.

Saudi authorities continue to discriminate against religious minorities and women. Without a man’s permission, women cannot marry, open a bank account, get major medical treatment, obtain a passport or travel. Nor can women dress as they please in public; black head-to-foot garb is the standard, even in the sizzling heat of a Saudi summer.

According to Human Rights Watch, judges routinely sentence defendants to floggings consisting of hundreds of lashes. Raif Badawi, whose wife and children are Canadian, was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes – for doing nothing more than blogging. His sister, prominent women’s rights activist Samar Badawi, was recently arrested, possibly for urging for his release. All this while Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman enthusiastically promotes his liberal Vision 2030 plans abroad.

And there’s the way they treat foreign domestic workers (hint: extremely badly and racist-ly).

Ms. Freeland’s tweet did not come out of the blue. The Trudeau government has been engaging in quiet diplomacy with the kingdom to release Mr. Badawi since it came to office three years ago. The tweet came after the regime’s arrest of Samar Badawi, which itself followed a phone conversation between Mr. Trudeau and King Salman. Quiet diplomacy has accomplished nothing so far. The language used in the tweet was consistent with past press releases by successive Canadian governments. Ms. Freeland’s detractors should focus their attention on the threatening language about Canada promoted on Saudi television and the aggressive style of governance of the inexperienced Crown Prince. But they blame Canada first.

Where would you prefer to live, Canada or Saudi Arabia? Especially if you’re a woman, an atheist, African, Malaysian, Sri Lankan…

As for asking for Mr. Trump’s intervention with Riyadh, the only thing worse than his rejection would be his acceptance. The last thing we need in the NAFTA context is to undermine Ms. Freeland, a very capable chief negotiator. Further, owing the U.S. President a favour would hand him another stick to beat us with.

Ms. Freeland was right to speak up. Canada has the wherewithal to let the chips fall where they may.

No apologies.

Nick Little on the busy Pennsylvania priests:

Yesterday a Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was released, detailing credible accusations of sexual abuse against over 300 priests in just six dioceses. Over 1,000 child victims were identified.

That’s a lot of priests and a lot of child victims. And yet, and yet, they still consider themselves to have the moral authority not only to tell us what to do, but also to stop us, forcibly, doing things they consider Religiously Forbidden. Women putting a stop to their own pregnancies is forbidden by god but priests raping children is not. That is one very fucked up god.

While the reports against individual priests shock the conscience, the descriptions of institutional knowledge, cover-ups, and complicity are perhaps more despicable.

“While each church district had its idiosyncrasies,” writes the Grand Jury, “the pattern was pretty much the same. The main thing was not to help children, but to avoid ‘scandal.’”

FBI agents who testified to the Grand Jury “identified a series of practices that regularly appeared, in various configurations, in the diocesan files they had analyzed. It’s like a playbook for concealing the truth.”

Children who reported abuse were belittled and disbelieved. Incontrovertible evidence was ignored. Rapist priests were treated with compassion and understanding by their employer, left in place to continue violating children, or moved to new hunting grounds without any warning given to the next crop of potential prey. Teenage victims were accused of seducing their abusers, the sort of blame shifting that is common amongst pedophiles and sex offenders.

It’s all about the church, the (all-male, never forget) priesthood, the insider powerful men – the children might as well be an infestation of weevils for all the church cares about them.

The Church hierarchy was (and is?) rotten to the core. “[D]espite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability,” states the report. The betrayal of trust in this situation cannot be overstated. Families and individuals looked to the church for solace and salvation. Instead, the rape of their children was swept under the carpet as an inconvenient occurrence that threatened the reputation and assets of the organization. “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”

Like Trump, they might as well be mob bosses. Like Trump, they assume they have the right to shout at us and tell us what to do. Like Trump, they are scum.

Does it make sense to see McCain as The Good Wing of the Republicans? The New Yorker toys with the question:

McCain spent the months after Trump’s Inauguration on an international reassurance tour, telling overseas allies the story that some Republicans in Washington were telling themselves—that Trump’s authoritarianism would be constrained by those around him, that this was a phase that would pass.

Or to put it another way, “It’s not our fault.”

“He has a lot of faith in Mattis,” Salter said, of James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense. In February, 2017, at the Munich Security Conference, an annual meeting of Western military officers and defense officials, McCain, without naming the President, delivered a broadside against Putin, Trump, and the national retrenchments across the West that struck some valedictory notes. “I refuse to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries,” McCain said. “I am a proud, unapologetic believer in the West, and I believe we must always, always stand up for it.”

Salter said, “That speech was really, ‘Hey, this thing we’ve done together is the greatest thing an alliance of nations has ever done in history. Be proud of it. It’s worth preserving. Don’t give up on us.’ ” Of course the nativism he so despised had taken hold of his own political party, and his choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential nominee marked an obvious pivot toward Trumpism.

Indeed it was. His repudiation of it came a good deal too late.

So here’s this very nice man in baggy T shirt and shorts and a baseball cap (not a MAGA cap, that I can see) talking to hotel workers in Uganda. He appears to be distraught because the electronic key to his room didn’t work. He’s apparently a missionary? Or maybe just a pretend missionary, aka a crank who uses “jesus” as a veil for abusing people. His favorite thing to call the hotel workers (who are all men, which is probably fortunate) is “bitch” – or more like “biiiitch.”

He got busted.

Uganda police arrested an older American man after reviewing a video that showed him striking out at hotel workers and using racial slurs.

The police identified the man as Jimmy L. Taylor, a U.S. citizen who claims to be a missionary. The alleged assault took place in the Grand Imperial Hotel in Kampala, the capital, according to police. Video of the incident surfaced on the internet on Friday, but it is unclear when it was filmed.

In the video, Taylor can be seen punching and slapping at the workers. He also calls them “n****rs,” tells them they have to obey him and threatens to kill them.