A couple of weeks ago:

University of Virginia professors, alumni and others are up in arms over the school’s plan to hire President Donald Trump’s former legislative affairs director, calling it “unconscionable” as the one-year anniversary of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, approaches.

Marc Short, a frequent Trump spokesman on television, is leaving the White House Friday and is slated to serve as a senior fellow at the Miller Center, a wing of the university focused on presidential history and public policy. Short received an MBA from the university’s business school.

A business degree, and a job working for Trump. That seems like a very odd CV for a wing of a genuine university focused on presidential history and public policy. Granted Short probably has insider knowledge of the Trump presidency, but surely senior fellow is more of an academic position than a source material position.

Short said he sympathized but on the other hand Trump did put out a strong statement condemning racism (a statement written by others that he promptly undercut with the “on both sides, on both sides” remark, but Short didn’t say that).

Short also said he and his family “feel a particular bond and closeness to the community” of Charlottesville. He said he’s been visiting the town and the campus since he was a kid attending sporting events there.

“I think that there is, as well, a cherished tradition at Thomas Jefferson’s university, hopefully, of welcoming diversity of opinion,” Short said. “I hope that the message isn’t that anyone who worked in the administration can’t work at a university.”

Well, if it’s not, it should be. The administration is intensely hostile to any kind of intellectual work or inquiry or background. Trump attacks the press daily, and he is no fan of diversity of opinion when it comes to himself and his doings. Diversity of opinion is a good, but “opinion” isn’t the issue.

On Thursday night, a spokesman for the Miller Center said it is committed to nonpartisan and bipartisan study of the presidency and employs former officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“We understand and respect those UVA faculty members and other critics — even some from within the Miller Center — who disagree with the decision to name Marc Short a senior fellow. One of our core values is fostering robust, but civil, debate across our nation’s bitter partisan divide,” said Howard Witt, director of communications and managing editor at the Miller Center, in an email.

Yes but again, it’s not a matter of partisan or non-partisan. It’s a matter of truth telling, of rights respecting, of bullying avoidance. Trump and his people aren’t partisan, they’re Trumpan.

Today two historians resigned from the Miller Center in protest.

William I. Hitchcock and Melvyn P. Leffler announced Monday they are resigning from the Miller Center, a wing of the university focused on presidential history and public policy, over its hiring of Short, Trump’s former legislative affairs director. They remain tenured faculty in the university’s history department.

In their resignation letter, the historians blasted Short for not distancing himself from Trump’s response to the August 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., which resulted in the death of a 32-year-old woman and in which Trump famously blamed “both sides.”

“By not speaking out at the time, by not emphasizing the threats to human decency posed by the public display of Nazi symbols and racist diatribes in our own neighborhood, Mr. Short was complicit in the erosion of our civic discourse and showed an appalling indifference to the civility of our own city and university,” they wrote.

It’s the latest fallout over the center’s decision to appoint Short to a one-year fellowship. Professors, alumni and others have strongly objected, calling it “unconscionable” as the one-year anniversary of the violent rally in Charlottesville approaches. An online petition with thousands of signatures blasts the school for hiring Short, saying “the university should not serve as a waystation for high-level members of an administration that has directly harmed our community.”

Leffler is a former dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at UVa. Hitchcock is a New York Times bestselling historian and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Hitchcock posted their letter on Facebook so we can read the whole thing.

The appointment of Mr. Short runs counter to the Center’s fundamental values of non-partisanship, transparency, openness, a passion for truth and objectivity, and civility.

Mr. Short has been a partisan activist during his entire professional career. He has associated himself with people and institutions who disregard, circumvent, and even violate the norms and laws that are fundamental to civil discourse and democratic politics. He began his career working for the Senate campaign of Oliver North, a man who had been engaged in illegal covert actions and who directly and knowingly contravened congressional legislation. Mr. Short worked for years for the Koch Brothers Freedom Partners fund, an organization that prides itself on the surreptitious funneling of big donor money into the political arena, thereby violating the transparency on which a democratic polity must rest.

In his recent work in the White House Mr. Short has associated himself with ongoing attacks on a free media. He has associated himself with rhetoric and policies that have empowered and emboldened white supremacists and that have led to spectacular increases in racist and misogynistic talk and behavior. He has been a visible and active spokesman for an administration that has attacked our law enforcement agencies, that has tried to disenfranchise millions of voters, and that has separated immigrant asylum-seeking mothers from their children. By associating himself with an administration that shows no respect for truth, he has contributed to the erosion of civil discourse and democratic norms that are essential to democratic governance and that are central to the mission of the Miller Center.

That even understates it – the administration doesn’t just fail to show respect for truth, it actively undermines and attacks it. The administration is hostile to truth.

We firmly believe that Mr. Short has a right and should be given an opportunity to present his views at the Miller Center. The Miller Center has welcomed, and should always welcome, people of diverse political views. We ourselves have brought many Republican and Democratic policymakers as well as many distinguished conservative and liberal scholars to the events we have coordinated at the Miller Center. But it violates the practices of the Miller Center to hire such a notoriously partisan political appointee as a paid distinguished fellow, and to do so without any open discussion – prior to his appointment – with the faculty and staff. This seems all the more true because Mr. Short will be joining the powerful Washington lobbying firm, Guidepost Strategies, an explicitly partisan organization.

Democracy in the United States today is in peril. As teachers, we have often told our students that the defense of democracy and its basic ideals – respect for truth, inquiry, reason, decency, civility, and humanity – requires constant vigilance and active engagement. We must not normalize or rationalize hateful, cruel and demeaning behavior. We should not reward and honor those who defend such behavior. When we see things we believe to be wrong, we must speak out and take a stand. We do so now by tendering our resignations from the Miller Center.

Sincerely,

William I. Hitchcock Melvyn P. Leffler

More righteous enraged outraged indignant furious huffy anger:

!!!!! OPEN LETTER FROM A MELBOURNE SEX WORKER TO READINGS RE: HOSTING JULIE BINDEL. PLEASE SHARE !!!!!

Dear Readings,

I am a Melbourne-based sex worker writing to express my concerns about an event that is being held at the Readings store in Hawthorn on Thursday, the 26th of July: the launch of Julie Bindel’s book The Pimping of Prostitution. This event involves a Q&A between Bindel and Mary Crooks, the Executive Director of the Victorian Women’s Trust.

Where to begin.

Bindel is a whorephobe, plain and simple. She has spent decades doing her utmost to stigmatise sex workers, misrepresent and demonise our peer organisations, and campaign for the Swedish Model, an approach to sex work regulation that has been proven to undermine our labour rights and human rights. Where it has been implemented, the Swedish Model has led to increased violence against sex workers and other negative impacts on sex workers’ safety, health, and wellbeing.

Blah blah blah all the phobias blah blah well documented blah blah opinions blah blah platform blah.

Her (incoherent at best) writing is regularly featured in high-traffic news publications such as The Independent and The Guardian. She is regularly invited to speak on television programs and at public events. She travels the world to plug books she has the time to write and capital to get published. When she does, books shops are more than happy to profit from the ‘buzz’ created by her hatespeech.

It must be stopped!!1

And now Readings is one of them.

This is the point at which I’m accused of stifling ‘debate’. Surely, a bookshop is a place in which diverse views about controversial topics can be expressed and challenged?

I am actually quite comfortable with diverse opinions, and as a reader, writer, and heretic, I am grateful that stores like Readings stock texts that Dymocks won’t touch. I’m also a fan of debate, but only when it is fair — that is, when both sides have the platform and resources to make their case on their own terms.

Yes, that’s very clear – big big fan of debate.

She went on in the same vein for several more paragraphs. As far as I can tell the event went ahead as scheduled.

Also, this happened:

This afternoon pro-sex trade protesters broke into the #asase2018 conference to shout over world-renowned Professor S. Caroline Taylor speaking about her experiences of horrific child sexual exploitation. They threw objects at audience members and trashed display tables.

— Caitlin Roper (@caitlin_roper) July 28, 2018

They were unwilling to engage with us in our attempts to have conversations with them, they told us they were there to disrupt the event- again, the speech of a survivor of child sexual abuse who is now a strong advocate against #childsexualabuse.

— Caitlin Roper (@caitlin_roper) July 28, 2018

The tactics of the pro-sex trade are disgusting. I cannot fathom how anyone would think it appropriate to hijack the speech of a survivor of child sexual abuse and attack her in an attempt to advance their cause #asase2018

— Caitlin Roper (@caitlin_roper) July 28, 2018

Women present left shaking and crying after abuse from pro-sex trade protesters. One threw a bag in the face of speaker, a survivor of child sexual exploitation, while she was trying to address audience.

— Caitlin Roper (@caitlin_roper) July 28, 2018

Social justice, eh?

There’s an upside to all this grabbing immigrant children away from their parents – MONEY.

Detaining immigrant children has morphed into a surging industry in the U.S. that now reaps $1 billion annually — a tenfold increase over the past decade, an Associated Press analysis finds.

Health and Human Services grants for shelters, foster care and other child welfare services for detained unaccompanied and separated children soared from $74.5 million in 2007 to $958 million in 2017. The agency is also reviewing a new round of proposals amid a growing effort by the White House to keep immigrant children in government custody.

Persecution and profit in one exciting package.

Currently, more than 11,800 children, from a few months old to 17, are housed in nearly 90 facilities in 15 states — Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

They are being held while their parents await immigration proceedings or, if the children arrived unaccompanied, are reviewed for possible asylum themselves.

That’s a lot of potential cash.

I’ve been reading the New Yorker pretty regularly since Trump got elected, thanks to some useful person in the nabe who puts them in a Little Library a couple of days before the publication date. Reading it more regularly I’ve started to wonder what the hell has happened to their cartoon department, and why they have so many now that are just not funny even a little bit. Cartoon after cartoon after cartoon I look at and move on, stonefaced. They are not funny. But some of them are not just not funny, they’re also faintly or intensely repellent, and of those, the standout is one Edward Steed. I just decided to search him on Google images and find his cartoons as hideous as ever.

One from Facebook:

Conde Nast store:

Weird, isn’t it? The New Yorker used to have great cartoons. Or am I missing something?

The northern half of the planet is bursting into flames in many places, and in a few months it will be the southern half’s turn. We’re seeing the stories, but the stories aren’t disturbing our slumbers by mentioning the underlying mechanism. David Wallace-Wells considers what the reasons for that may be.

In a single week earlier this month, dozens of places around the world were hit with record temperatures in what was, effectively, an unprecedented, planet-encompassing heat wave: from Denver to Burlington to Ottawa; from Glasgow to Shannon to Belfast; from Tbilisi, in Georgia, and Yerevan, in Armenia, to whole swaths of southern Russia. The temperature of one city in Oman, where the daytime highs had reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit, did not drop below 108 all night; in Montreal, Canada, 50 died from the heat. That same week, 30 major wildfires burned in the American West, including one, in California, that grew at the rate of 10,000 football fields each hour, and another, in Colorado, that produced a volcano-like 300-foot eruption of flames, swallowing an entire subdivision and inventing a new term — “fire tsunami” — along the way. On the other side of the planet, biblical rains flooded Japan, where 1.2 million were evacuated from their homes. The following week, the heat struck there, killing dozens. The following week.

In other words, it has been a month of historic, even unprecedented, climate horrors. But you may not have noticed, if you are anything but the most discriminating consumer of news. The major networks aired 127 segments on the unprecedented July heat wave, Media Matters usefully tabulated, and only one so much as mentioned climate change. The New York Times has done admirable work on global warming over the last year, launching a new climate desk and devoting tremendous resources to high-production-value special climate “features.” But even their original story on the wildfires in Greece made no mention of climate change — after some criticism on Twitter, they added a reference.

Why? Ratings. News outlets have to make a living, and it seems that we’re happy (and I mean that literally) to watch fires and hurricanes but not to hear talk of climate change.

As I’ve written before, and as Wen Stephenson echoed more recently in The Baffler, climate change is not a matter of “yes” or “no,” not a binary process where we end up either “fucked” or “not fucked.” It is a system that gets worse over time as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases. We are just beginning to see the horrors that climate change has in store for us —but that does not mean that the story is settled. Things will get worse, almost certainly much, much worse. Indeed, the news about what more to expect, coming out of new research, only darkens our picture of what to expect: Just over the past few weeks, new studies have suggested heat in many major Indian cities would be literally lethal by century’s end, if current warming trends continue, and that, by that time, global economic output could fall, thanks to climate effects, by 30 percent or more. That is an impact twice as deep as the global Great Depression, and it would not be temporary.

They’ll get worse and they’re already horrific. The hurricanes and fires last summer were horrific and very expensive; if things keep getting worse this fast or in fact faster, we won’t be able to keep up. Maybe part of the reason the media don’t talk about that is because…you know, what do you say? “We’ve got maybe a couple of decades left and that’s it? And in the meantime a lot of us are just plain going to fry?”

Television networks covered those heat waves 127 times. That is, actually, a very lot! They just utterly failed to “connect the dots,” as Emily Atkin put it incisively at The New Republic —broadcasters told the story of the historic temperatures, but chose not to touch the question of why we were seeing so many of them, all at once, with the atmosphere more full of carbon, and the planet hotter, than it has ever been at any point in human history.

When you think about it, this would be a very strange choice for a producer or an editor concerned about boring or losing his or her audience — it would mean leaving aside the far more dramatic story of the total transformation of the planet’s climate system, and the immediate and all-encompassing threat posed by climate change to the way we live on Earth, to tell the pretty mundane story of some really hot days in the region.

Yes but some really hot days with fires or people dropping dead are immediate, while climate change is long-term and complicated.

At any rate, the real point is, it looks as if the doom brought by climate change is happening a lot faster than most of us expected.

Those evil demons.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plans to eliminate regulations that forced for-profit colleges to prove that they provide gainful employment to the students they enroll, in what would be the most drastic in a series of moves that she has made to free the for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.

The so-called gainful employment regulations put into force by the Obama administration cut off federally guaranteed student loans to colleges if their graduates did not earn enough money to pay them off. That sent many for-profit colleges and universities into an economic tailspin because so many of their alumni were failing to find decent jobs.

In a tailspin is where they belonged, then, because that’s a red flag for “colleges in name only.”

The Obama regulations — years in the making and the subject of a bitter fight that pulled in heavy hitters from both parties who backed the for-profit schools — also required such schools to advertise whether or not they met federal standards for job placement in promotional materials and to prospective students.

Now, a draft regulation, obtained by The New York Times, indicates that the Education Department plans to scuttle the regulations altogether, not simply modify them, as Ms. DeVos did Wednesday with new regulations that scaled back an Obama-era debt relief plan for student borrowers who felt duped by the unrealistic appeals of for-profit colleges.

Appeals? The word is advertising. For-profit schools advertise in order to attract paying customers, and they promise the moon.

The move would punctuate a series of decisions to freeze, modify and now eliminate safeguards put in place after hundreds of for-profit colleges were accused of widespread fraud and subsequently collapsed, leaving their enrolled students with huge debts and no degrees. The failure of two mammoth chains, Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institutes, capped years of complaints that some career-training colleges took advantage of veterans and other nontraditional students, using deceptive marketing and illegal recruitment practices.

But hey, they make a profit, so to Republicans that’s gud bizness.

The DeVos approach would undo nearly a decade of efforts to create a tough accountability system for the largely unregulated and scandal-riddled for-profit sector of higher education.

Which would not exist if it were not for federal student loans, which trap people under a mountain of debt; when the degrees are worthless that’s the final turn of the screw. The sour joke is that people could get better training for a fraction of the cost at a public community college, but the for-profit ones claim to be the gold standard.

So apparently “inclusion” requires not mentioning lesbians and gays. Funny how “inclusion” somehow gets us back to the 1950s and calls it progressive.

One of the longest running LGBT film festivals has changed names for its 31st birthday. The Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival, happening September 6-9, is now officially the All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Film Festival. Festival director Jim Brunzell says this year is the perfect time to address issues of inclusion and intersection the queer community has faced all year. And judging by the festival’s lineup it’s totally walking its talk.

And this is different from “all lives matter” and “I don’t see color” how exactly?

Spoiler: the Advocate doesn’t say.

There are mantras. This is one of the mantras.

https://twitter.com/shonfaye/status/1022080203663785985

“I am a woman because I say I am.” It’s supposed to be, and often is, a conversation-ender. But that seems to be not so much because it’s convincing or persuasive (let alone a good argument) but because it’s a mantra. Repetition makes it true and shouting makes it mandatory – something like that. I googled the sentence in quotation marks and got about 96,600 results, so definitely a mantra.

But it’s strange that it is when it seems so obviously not true. There are some “because I say I am”s that work that way – like “I say I am quitting” for instance. Performative speech, as a linguist friend pointed out. If I say I quit, I resign, I refuse, I object, then that works. “I quit because I say I quit” makes sense. “I apologize” is another, though it’s possible to say it in such a way that it self-undermines. But it’s not the case that saying “I am a _____” necessarily makes me that ______. I could say I’m a government official who has the authority to fire Trump from the presidency, but it wouldn’t get me anywhere, not even if I went to DC and said it to John Kelly.

Humans aren’t magic. We can’t just say things into existence. We can perform certain things with words, certainly, but there are limits. We can’t change material reality just by saying “I am.”

Beautifully done.

Mueller has reached the tweets phase of the investigation.

For years, President Trump has used Twitter as his go-to public relations weapon, mounting a barrage of attacks on celebrities and then political rivals even after advisers warned he could be creating legal problems for himself.

Those concerns now turn out to be well founded. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is scrutinizing tweets and negative statements from the president about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to three people briefed on the matter.

Goes to intent, m’lud.

Several of the remarks came as Mr. Trump was also privately pressuring the men — both key witnesses in the inquiry — about the investigation, and Mr. Mueller is examining whether the actions add up to attempts to obstruct the investigation by both intimidating witnesses and pressuring senior law enforcement officials to tamp down the inquiry.

Now how could tweets sent out by the president of the United States himself possibly intimidate anyone?

Mr. Mueller wants to question the president about the tweets. His interest in them is the latest addition to a range of presidential actions he is investigating as a possible obstruction case: private interactions with Mr. Comey, Mr. Sessions and other senior administration officials about the Russia inquiry; misleading White House statements; public attacks; and possible pardon offers to potential witnesses.

In other words all that stuff we’ve been seeing for the past year and a half that looks like obstruction is in fact going to be investigated for obstruction. Fancy that.

The special counsel’s investigators have told Mr. Trump’s lawyers they are examining the tweets under a wide-ranging obstruction-of-justice law beefed up after the Enron accounting scandal, according to the three people. The investigators did not explicitly say they were examining possible witness tampering, but the nature of the questions they want to ask the president, and the fact that they are scrutinizing his actions under a section of the United States Code titled “Tampering With a Witness, Victim, or an Informant,” raised concerns for his lawyers about Mr. Trump’s exposure in the investigation.

The exposure that he created for himself by not ever shutting up for one second.

Giuliani scornfully brushed it off.

“If you’re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public,” Mr. Giuliani said.

If you’re a normal rational functioning person. Trump is not that.

Investigators want to ask Mr. Trump about the tweets he wrote about Mr. Sessions and Mr. Comey and why he has continued to publicly criticize Mr. Comey and the former deputy F.B.I. director Andrew G. McCabe, another witness against the president.

What can he say? “Because I’m an out of control rage-addled narcissistic goon who can’t stop himself?”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have pushed back against the special counsel about the tweets, saying the president is a politician under 24-hour attack and is within his rights to defend himself using social media or any other means.

That seems like a silly way to push back. No doubt in general he is “within his rights to defend himself” in legitimate ways, but that doesn’t mean he gets to obstruct justice.

It would be quite satisfying if his Twitter habit helped bring him down.

Where the crazy is at the moment:

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said Thursday that he opposes an effort by conservatives to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, as Republican leaders of the chamber sought to avert a vote on the volatile issue later in the day.

Some House Republicans want to impeach the Republican Deputy AG over the investigation of the Republican president by the Republican former head of the FBI, and other House Republicans want to hold off on that for now.

Conservative hard-liners earlier agreed to hold off on pushing for an impeachment vote Thursday after securing a commitment from GOP leaders to declare Justice Department officials in contempt of Congress if they do not deliver specified documents in the coming weeks.

That might sound kind of normal if we didn’t know that ongoing investigations are routinely carried on behind closed doors because throwing the doors open puts the investigation in jeopardy.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said earlier Thursday that he supports the effort by conservative lawmakers to impeach Rosenstein, calling it “leverage” to get the Justice Department to provide Congress with more documents related to the Russia probe.

But it’s just routine for the Justice Department not to collaborate with Congress in its investigations. That’s how they do it.

Democrats have said that House Republicans’ clashes with Rosenstein are little more than a pretext to weaken Mueller’s efforts.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said Thursday that the push to get more documents “really has nothing to do with oversight.”

“This has everything to do … with getting the documents to the president’s allies in Congress so (Trump lawyer Rudolph W.) Giuliani can get his hands on them,” Schiff said.

And that’s not how that’s supposed to work.

For those within reach of London, a glorious opportunity:

Sunday 25 November 2018

Conference on Sharia, Segregation and Secularism

9:30am registration for 10:00am start

Central London

Join notable secularists and veteran women’s rights campaigners for a conference on Sharia, Segregation and Secularism at a spectacular venue in central London on Sunday 25 November 2018.

The conference will raise key issues surrounding religious arbitration, the veil and gender segregation at schools and universities, including as part of the religious-Right’s assault on women’s rights. It will also highlight the voices of people on the frontlines of resistance, the gains made by secularists both in the UK and internationally, and the importance of secularism as a minimum precondition for equality. Challenges that secularists continue to face and priorities for continued collective action will also be addressed.

The conference will mark the tenth anniversary of the One Law for All Campaign for equality irrespective of background, beliefs and religions.

Confirmed Speakers (Biographies):

Afsana Lachaux, Women’s Rights Activist
@Ahlam Akram, Founder of Basira
Amina Lone, Director of Social Action and Research Foundation
Annie Laurie Gaylor, Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation
Anna Zobnina, Strategy and Policy Coordinator at the European Network of Migrant Women (ENoMW)
Beatrix Campbell, Writer, Journalist, Broadcaster and Playwright
Bonya Ahmed, Activist, Writer, Blogger at Mukto-Mona
Caroline Criado Perez, Writer, Campaigner and Consultant
Cinzia Sciuto, Journalist
Diana Nammi, Founder and Executive Director of Iranian Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation
Eve Sacks, Trustee of Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance UK
Fariborz Pooya, Bread and Roses TV Producer
Gina Khan, One Law for All Spokesperson
Gita Sahgal, Founder and Director of Centre for Secular Space
Homa Arjomand, International Coordinator for One Secular School System
Houzan Mahmoud, Co-founder of Culture Project
Ibtissame Lachgar, Feminist, Human Rights Activist
Inna Shevchenko, FEMEN Leader
Marieme Helie Lucas, Algerian Sociologist, Political Theorist and Author
Maryam Namazie, Co-Spokesperson for One Law for All, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB)ms of Britain and Fitnah
Nadia El Fani, Tunisian film-maker
Nasreen Rehman, Women’s Rights Campaigner
Nina Sankari, Polish Feminist and Secularist
Peter Tatchell, Human Rights Campaigner
Pragna Patel, Founder and Director of the Southall Black Sisters
Rahila Gupta, Writer and Journalist
Rumana Hashem, Women’s Rights Activist
Sadia Hameed, Spokesperson of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain
Sadikur Rahman Rana, Solicitor and National Secular Society Council Member
Stasa Zajovic, Co-Founder of @Women in Black Belgrade
Victoria Gugenheim, Award-winning Body Artist

Tickets can be purchased here. Conference venue will be given to ticket holders closer to the date of the event. Please note that tickets cannot be bought at the door and must be purchased prior to the event.

Conference sponsors include: Bread and Roses TV; Center for Inquiry; Centre for Secular Space; Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB); Culture Project; Equal Rights Now; Fitnah; National Secular Society; One Law for All; Southall Black Sisters; and Secularism is a Women’s Issue.

More information on the conference is available on its website.

For more information, please contact Maryam Namazie, onelawforall@gmail.com.

Perfect.

Jennifer Rubin finds the “impeach Rosenstein” stunt warped and contemptible.

The damage here is being done not by Rosenstein, but by irresponsible, hyper-partisan congressmen. Former White House ethics counsel Norman Eisen and Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21, recently wrote about the impeachment gambit:

Key House Republicans are abusing their offices and the public trust to blindly provide protection for [President] Trump. They are doing so instead of working to get to the bottom of the worst foreign attack on American elections in our history.

They need to be called on their scandalous efforts to undermine the Mueller investigation and ignore Russia’s cyber invasion of our democracy. A bipartisan outcry greeted Trump’s Helsinki betrayals. We should be hearing protests at least as loud and bipartisan in response to this parallel — and equally unmerited — attack on American law enforcement right here at home.

It is not Rosenstein who should be removed from office, but rather, the House Republican members who are obstructing an ongoing investigation of the Republican president and his cronies. While their actions are protected (most likely) under the” speech or debate” clause (preventing criminal prosecution or civil suit for actions that would otherwise be actionable), their pattern of conduct (cooking up a misleading memo about the FISA warrant application for Carter Page’s surveillance, exposing a confidential intelligence source, smearing the FBI) amounts to multiple blatant attempts to thwart an entirely legitimate investigation. If anyone in the White House is conspiring with them to interfere with the investigation, such individuals could be investigated for obstruction of justice.

Could but probably won’t – but her point is that that’s what they’re doing. We’re watching people obstructing justice and getting away with it because they can.

It’s the most conservative, farthest right Republicans who are pushing the impeachment of Rosenstein ploy, and what I’m wondering at the moment is what, exactly, is conservative about their lust to sabotage Mueller’s investigation.

After all, Mueller is a Republican, and a former Marine who fought in Vietnam, and a former head of the FBI. You would think all three of those descriptors would place him way the hell up there on the Conservative Checklist. Conservatives and Republicans generally favor other conservatives and Republicans, and men who enlisted voluntarily to fight in Vietnam, especially Marines. (I say “men” because the same doesn’t apply to women: conservatives and Republicans prefer the women to stay home and wait for their men to return.) As for the head of the FBI – come on now, you can’t get a better conservative Republican credential than that.

Yet these guys (I think they are all guys) who pride themselves on being to the right of most House Republicans (which makes them very far right indeed, do admit) are hell bent on discrediting Mueller and his investigation and the (Republican) Deputy Attorney General who is supervising both.

Why? What is conservative about that as a cause?

The explanation we see is entirely pragmatic – it’s worth it to them because Trump is destroying everything “liberal” he can get his hands on.

Maybe that’s all the explanation that’s needed, but it still niggles at me. Trump is a crook. He tells constant obvious lies. He’s mean. He fucks around and always has, including during all his marriages. He sexually assaults women and brags about it. He was a terrible father when his children were young. He hates our European allies and loves Russia. He’s a vulgar bullying asshole. You would think all those things would put extra-conservative conservatives way off, so way off that even the destruction of environmental and financial regulations wouldn’t be worth it.

It’s a puzzle; I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to not understanding it.