So this is where we are.

Authorities said Wednesday they had intercepted packages containing “potential explosive devices” addressed to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in New York and former president Barack Obama in Washington, while another possible bomb was discovered at CNN’s offices in Manhattan.

These devices and other suspicious packages were located after an explosive device was found this week in a mailbox at the Bedford, N.Y., home of George Soros, the liberal philanthropist who is a frequent target of criticism from far-right groups.

Not a “target of criticism” so much as a bogey-man, a scarecrow, a hate-figure, a protocol of the elders of zion in one person.

Anyway. This is where we are. Not yet two years of Trump playing president and they’re trying to kill us off.

Authorities were quick to label the string of packages terrorism, something that is often debated after attempted or successful violent attacks. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement “condemning today’s attempted acts of domestic terrorism.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), speaking alongside O’Neill and Miller at a news briefing near CNN, used similar language.

“This clearly is an act of terror, attempting to undermine our free press and leaders of this country through acts of violence,” de Blasio said.

And who has done more than anyone else to foster and inspire and promote this kind of thing? The president of the US. You could say people like Mike Cernovich spend more time at it, but if you combine time and effort and reach, Trump wins by miles.

These devices were sent to people and an organization that have all prompted anger among the far right. Soros, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, has funneled much of his fortune into liberal projects around the world and is the focus of considerable conspiracy theories. Clinton and Obama have also long been the focus of intense far-right anger, while CNN has repeatedly come under intense criticism from a range of figures on the right, including President Trump.

Including President Trump, who detests free journalism and critical reporting, and feels no responsibility to restrain his public explosions of rage at them.

Another law enforcement official said the packages sent to the public officials this week shared similar markings, and at least one of them had a return address from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). Authorities do not believe she is involved, an official said. Law enforcement officials were also investigating a suspicious package sent to her. Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

A similarly-constructed package addressed to former attorney general Eric Holder Jr. was intercepted by law enforcement officials, according to people familiar with the investigation.

So that should have been in the headline and the lede. Soros, Obama, the Clintons, CNN, and Holder.

Unlike the packages intercepted before reaching Obama and Clinton, the device sent to CNN was found while its building was teeming with employees. CNN’s headquarters at the Time Warner Center in New York evacuated suddenly Wednesday morning after the suspicious package was discovered there.

Will Trump stop screeching about “fake news”?

Nope.

Deb Haaland on the voter suppression in North Dakota:

On Oct. 9, our U.S. Supreme Court green-lighted voter suppression of Native Americans in North Dakota in a move that should outrage all of us. It comes just two short years after the Native American environmental movement skyrocketed into the national spotlight through the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. Now, those same Water Protectors are under attack again.

As a Pueblo Indian woman, I traveled to North Dakota and stood with the Water Protectors to protect land and water. Now, I support them and Native Americans across North Dakota as they organize to keep their right to vote during a contentious election year.

…

As a country, we should be moving forward, but instead conservative lawmakers keep dragging us back. As an organizer in the most underrepresented communities in my state, I have felt the frustration that so many voters must feel when other states limit polling locations, require photo IDs, and put unnecessary barriers in front of voters. In this case, targeting Native American voters is shameful and wrong.

This moral bankruptcy is exactly what November’s “blue wave” candidates seek to correct. The stark number of women candidates, primarily women of color, seek to change the trajectory of our country and offer leadership that is both compassionate and fierce.

And that’s why conservatives are so determined to suppress the vote: it will be mostly Democratic voters who will be suppressed.

Tribal leaders and activists are working around the clock to ensure our sister nations in North Dakota can vote.

The Turtle Mountain Band is printing free IDs for anyone who needs one to vote—demand has been so high that the machines have melted the IDs. The Native American Rights Fund, according to their latest news update, “is working in conjunction with the Spirit Lake Tribe, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and the Three Affiliated Tribes (‘MHA’), as well as community organizations Four Directions and Western Native Voice, to ensure tribal members living in North Dakota who come to the polls on Election Day will be provided voter identification free of charge.”

We all have work to do. I joined dozens of New Mexicans to knock doors and educate voters on how and when to vote. Join us. Knock doors, make phone calls, donate. If our friends at Standing Rock and Turtle Mountain are giving this their all, we should too. Together, we can fight back by ensuring more, not fewer, people vote.

This is the spirit I want to carry with me to Congress. There is no higher patriotic duty than when we exercise our right to vote, ensure others do the same, and fight so that all of us are represented. Come November, let’s elect fierce candidates who will melt the machines, fighting for equity and justice for all.

Unite and fight.

Hangin’ with Hannah:

https://twitter.com/HannahMouncey/status/1054208545812434944

https://twitter.com/HannahMouncey/status/1054210534390685696

https://twitter.com/HannahMouncey/status/1054211818535546880

https://twitter.com/HannahMouncey/status/1054509307897638912

Awww – sister!

Oh no.

They murdered his Dad, dismembered his body, orchestrated a cover-up, lied about the murder, then lied about the cover-up…and now are forcing Khashoggi's son, who is a captive in his own country, to participate in a photo-op shaking hands with the prince who murdered his Dad. https://t.co/LfEym9CxAR

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) October 23, 2018

Business Insider:

The son of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi was pictured with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the man widely believed to have orchestrated the journalist’s death.

The state-run Saudi Press Agency reported that Khashoggi’s son, Salah Khashoggi, met the king and crown prince on Tuesday in Riyadh.

…

The journalist had four adult children, all of whom were US-educated, NPR reported. It is not clear whether Salah, who was pictured with the Saudi monarchs, has US citizenship. His siblings were neither mentioned nor pictured on Tuesday.

Karen Attiah, Khashoggi’s editor at The Washington Post, has tweeted concern about Khashoggi’s family. She said that Saudi Arabia had imposed a travel ban on his children to put pressure on him for his writing.

But I’m sure he went in for that photo op completely voluntarily.

There was this guy on a plane in Barcelona the other day.

Police say they have identified a man filmed racially abusing an elderly woman on a Ryanair flight.

The woman, Delsie Gayle, 77, said she had been left stunned and depressed after a man shouted at her to move seats as they boarded a plane last Friday.

In footage shared on social media, Gayle’s daughter tries to stand up to the man and tells him her mother is disabled. The man says he does not care “whether she’s fucking disabled or not. If I tell her to get out, she gets out”.

I watched the clip a couple of days ago; it’s horrible.

In the footage, the man appears to call Gayle an “ugly black bastard” and shouts: “Don’t speak to me in a foreign language, you stupid ugly cow.” The incident is believed to have taken place on Ryanair flight FR015 at Barcelona airport before it left for London Stansted.

Bafflingly, Ryanair did not call security and have the man removed from the plane.

In an interview with ITV News, Gayle, from east London, said the incident had left her feeling very low. “He pays his fare, I pay mine. So why did he abuse me for that? Because of the colour of my skin … If I had done that to him, I’m sure they would have called the police,” she said.

Ryanair apparently did not remove the man from the flight, instead moving Gayle from her seat. Gayle said it had put her off flying with the airline in the future. “I feel really depressed about it. I go to bed and say ‘what have I done?’,” she said.

Her daughter, Carol, 53, criticised Ryanair’s response and claimed they had not yet received an apology from the airline. “He should have been moved or taken off the plane and nothing was done … Nobody has apologised. We’ve not had nothing. We just want an open apology from Ryanair,” she said.

The guy should be on a no-fly list forever. Ryanair should apologize to Delsie Gayle and her daughter and fly them free forever.

Speaking of gender and stupid rules about gender and stupid cruel bullying about stupid rules about gender – a thread.

https://twitter.com/DaddyFiles/status/1054527579204530176

https://twitter.com/DaddyFiles/status/1054527834121736193

https://twitter.com/DaddyFiles/status/1054528067601948675

https://twitter.com/DaddyFiles/status/1054528220727558144

Kids do that. I suppose it’s part of the process of learning to live in the social world – they police each other and are policed in turn. It’s awful.

Trump thinks women don’t get enough shit yet, he wants to make sure they get more.

The Trump administration is expected to soon issue regulations that would expand religious and moral exemptions for covering birth control in employer health insurance plans, a move that critics say would limit women’s access to contraception.

“a move that critics say would limit women’s access to contraception” – why do news outlets say stupid things like that? Of course it would limit women’s access to contraception, by definition; if you remove an item from insurance coverage, then access to that item becomes limited. That’s like saying if you cut workers’ pay then workers have less money.

The exact details of the exemptions, and when they would take effect, remain unclear. But women’s health advocates are bracing for a legal fight. They expect the rules to mimic earlier regulations enacted by the Trump administration last year before being blocked by federal judges.

The rules allowed nearly any employer — nonprofit or for-profit — with a religious or moral objection to opt out of the Affordable Care Act provision requiring the coverage of contraception at no cost for the employee. The rules vastly expanded which companies could be exempt from the mandate and why, including a broad exemption for a “sincerely held moral conviction” not based in any particular religious belief. Perhaps most significantly, it required employers to provide no other accommodations for employees seeking birth control coverage.

Or, to put it more simply, fuck women. Take everything away from women; load women with every burden; make women responsible for everything; ignore the fact that it takes two people to create a pregnancy; just fuck fuck fuck women. Beat them into the ground and then dance a tarantella on the dirt.

The birth control rules are part of a broader effort by conservatives inside and outside of the White House to prioritize what they call religious liberty.

And what “religious liberty” means is sticking it to women. Making women second-class and subordinate, forcing women to stay home and have 43 children apiece; denying women education and freedom of movement; keeping women broke barefoot and pregnant until they drop dead during the last childbirth.

I saw a thing today. I was out in the neighborhood, walking to and fro in the world and up and down in it; it’s very foggy here so there is heavy condensation on the bushes and trees and everything else. What happens when there’s condensation like that? You see how many spider webs there are everywhere. I stopped to look at one, because a spider web beaded in condensation is a damn pretty thing, and I looked so closely that I noticed a thing new to me. Webs have long radial lines, like spokes, and short lines between them. At the sides of the web, but not top and bottom, the short lines make a Y – they have 2 tiny lines to meet the radial line instead of just one – but only at the upper end.

I walked on and looked at another web and saw the same thing, then a bigger one and that had three lines on many of the short lines, a fork instead of a Y.

I searched Google images and found a perfect illustration:

See? Both Ys and forks on that one. Isn’t that interesting? Charlotte would be proud.

All the webs I looked closely at had a spider sitting placidly at the center, waiting for lunch.

This is a thing from October last year but I’m curious about it. A friend posted it on Facebook yesterday (probably not noticing the date – it happens to all of us), and there are a lot of angry comments and a lot of comments saying it looks fake. My reaction when first reading it was it’s fake. I still think it’s fake. I’m curious about what others think.

A daycare center received this letter. This is trump’s America. 

The text of the letter:

Hello I am writing this as a concerned parent and friend!

So most of us noticed you have a black girl working for the daycare. Our problem is she’s too dark most of the kids is scared of her. I am only telling you this because some of us are planning to pull our kid form the daycare shes an eye sore. I see you’re trying to touch all of the nationalities but maybe hire a light skinned black she would blend more and not look like a “NANNY”. She’s not the first thing a child nor the parents want to see soon as they walk in the daycare. So the choice is yours! Choose wisely remember WE THE PARENTS PAY YOUR MORTAGE. I hope you make her aware shes not wanted. I’m sending her a copy as well. However if she needs a job Mcdonalds is always hiring her kind. So work your magic and make it disappear!!!

P.S. Just trying “TO MAKE YOUR DAYCARE GREAT AGAIN”

Why do I think it’s fake? I’m not sure. Partly I think because the tone is wrong – too perky for what it’s saying. Too facetious for what it’s saying. It sounds too Milo-like, too 4chan-like. Not that the racism is fake, but I think the note is a provocation of some kind rather than a serious request.

Snopes reports the day care center confirmed getting the note:

Although it is not uncommon for nasty letters and other controversies to be faked by social media users for attention or viral fame, this appears to be genuine — at least to the extent that we reached out to the daycare center, who averred that they received the letter but didn’t know who sent it or why.

Sarah Wojcik, a reporter for the local Morning Call, told us that that police were also aware of the letter:

Whitehall police Chief Michael Marks said he has never seen a letter so offensive in his 20 years in police work.

“It’s disturbing. This is not something you want to see in your community,” Marks said. “This is something we as a police department are going to take very seriously.”

Marks said such a letter could carry harassment and ethnic intimidation charges, though he conceded locating the sender is tricky. He said there’s been no similar incidents reported in the township.

The day care already has security measures in place for the safety of its children, but McKelley said staff is on added alert.

If it is a fake that doesn’t make it any better – it’s a “real” fake and doubtless made the staff at that day care center feel horrible and threatened.

Aaron Blake at the Post points out that Trump’s abject hero-worship of dictators is a tell:

President Trump has once again given away the game on Saudi Arabia and his reverence for authoritarians. But his soft stance on the Saudis’ killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi also betrays this irony: By going easy on them, he’s conceding his own weakness.

Despite ostensibly putting pressure on Saudi Arabia this weekend to come clean, Trump in an interview with The Post’s Josh Dawsey seemed to marvel at that same government’s ability to snuff out unrest.

“He’s seen as a person who can keep things under check,” Trump said of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “I mean that in a positive way.”

It’s a bad time to mean it in a positive way, Blake points out. Yes, it is, and it’s also a bad time to drool wishfully about Keeping Things Under Check. That’s not actually the goal. We’re supposed to value open discussion and freedom of thought, not battening everything down whether or not there’s a storm.

While this might be the most poorly timed bit of Trumpian admiration for authoritarians, it’s hardly the first example of it. Trump has praised Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for doing an “unbelievable job” with his drug war, an initiative that has resulted in thousands of extrajudicial killings. He has praised North Korea’s Kim Jong Un for seizing power at the young age of 27, saying: “It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one.” He has praised stiflers of dissent such as China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sissi for consolidating power.

He’d like to keep us under check, but he can’t…yet.

Jelani Cobb on the resurgence of voter suppression:

Decades ago, amid the most overt privations of Jim Crow, African-Americans used to tell a joke about a black Harvard professor who moves to the Deep South and tries to register to vote. A white clerk tells him that he will first have to read aloud a paragraph from the Constitution. When he easily does so, the clerk says that he will also have to read and translate a section written in Spanish. Again he complies. The clerk then demands that he read sections in French, German, and Russian, all of which he happens to speak fluently. Finally, the clerk shows him a passage in Arabic. The professor looks at it and says, “My Arabic is rusty, but I believe this translates to ‘Negroes cannot vote in this county.’ ”

But that was in the old days, when people were so much less hip than we are now. This year it’s all “exact match” and purges and “your polling place is ten miles away and there’s no bus service, have a nice day.”

The race between the Republican, Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, and the Democrat, Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the state House of Representatives—who, if she wins, will be the first black female governor in the country—is a virtual tie. But Kemp has invoked the so-called exact-match law to suspend fifty-three thousand voter-registration applications, for infractions as minor as a hyphen missing from a surname. African-Americans make up thirty-two per cent of the state’s population, but they represent nearly seventy per cent of the suspended applications. Kemp’s move is particularly questionable given that Abrams’s electoral strategy hinges on mobilizing the six hundred thousand unregistered black voters who have long been seen as the holy grail of Democratic politics in the state.

It’s still amazing me that Kemp is both in control of these voter suppression tricks and running for governor.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, ninety-nine bills designed to diminish voter access were introduced last year in thirty-one state legislatures. Many of the recent Republican-led efforts stem from the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder. In an opinion that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that discrimination still exists, but not sufficiently to warrant the “extraordinary” remediation measures that the act imposed on the states of the former Confederacy. That argument is roughly equivalent to saying that a decline in the prevalence of an infectious disease means that we should stop vaccinating against it. Within hours of the decision, Texas announced a strict new voter-I.D. law. Mississippi and Alabama shortly afterward began enforcing similar laws that previously had been barred.

And there’s this.

Georgia Sec. of State Brian Kemp's office improperly purged 340,134 people from voter rolls by claiming that they moved, even though they still live at their registered addresses, says a Palast Investigative Fund analysis. pic.twitter.com/eXymeXP0nJ

— AJ+ (@ajplus) October 19, 2018

Maureen Dowd on the role of Saudi bribery:

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, presidential libraries and foundations, politically connected private equity groups, P.R. firms, think tanks, universities and Trump family enterprises are awash in Arab money. The Saudis satisfy American greed, deftly playing their role as dollar signs in robes.

I’ve long thought there should be a great deal more reporting on this.

Donald Trump, who may be the only person more fond of lavish displays of arriviste gilt than the Saudis, is bedazzled by a Saudi pledge to buy billions worth of American weapons, just as he was flattered by the Saudi sword dance and weird luminescent orb séance on his visit to the kingdom.

Bedazzled and flattered and utterly helpless to counter any of that with scruples or rational thought or information or anything else that might prompt him to resist. He’s too stupid, too greedy, too corrupt, too ignorant, too mindless, too impulsive, too narcissistic…with nothing at all to pull the other way.

The Saudis blithely assume abhorrence at their inhumane behavior — from beheadings to forcing teenage girls without head scarves back into a burning school to die, as the religious police did in Mecca in 2002, to the brazen murder of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist — can be lubricated away with oil and money.

And they’re right, too.

Our Faustian deal was this: As long as the Saudis kept our oil prices low, bought our fighter jets, housed our fleets and drones and gave us cover in the region, they could keep their country proudly medieval.

It was accepted wisdom that it was futile to press the Saudis on the feudal, the degradation of women and human rights atrocities, because it would just make them dig in their heels. Even Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, never made an impassioned Beijing-style speech about women in Saudi Arabia being obliterated under a black tarp.

And that hasn’t changed.

The president of the US engaged in active, blatant, highly visible voter suppression.

All levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING. Cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2018

Trump is pretending to believe the Saudis.

President Trump broke with his own intelligence agencies on Friday, appearing to accept Saudi Arabia’s explanationthat the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by accident during a fistfight, while the United States’ spy agencies are increasingly convinced that he was assassinated on high-level orders from the Saudi royal court.

A fistfight for godsake. Right because journalists in their 50s always fling themselves into fistfights with 15 or 18 young beefy hit men and get accidentally beheaded as a result.

The growing evidence that Mr. Khashoggi, a Virginia resident and a columnist for The Washington Post, was killed on orders from the Saudi royal family has put Mr. Trump in an increasingly untenable position.

On Friday evening, the president praised the statement issued by the Saudi government, which confirmed Mr. Khashoggi’s death, as a “good first step” and a “big step.” Earlier, the prince and other senior Saudi officials had denied any role in Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance.

Kushner has been leaning on his daddy-in-law to stay tight with MbS.

But as Turkish officials leaked details of the grisly killing of Mr. Khashoggi and of the dismemberment of his body, the White House has become increasingly isolated in its defense of Saudi Arabia.

A stream of prominent Wall Street and tech executives canceled plansto attend an investor conference convened by the prince next week in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

Yes yes yes but Trump is busy holding rallies.

For Mr. Trump, who is on a three-day swing in the West before the midterm elections, the Khashoggi affair has become a distraction during a period in which he had hoped to campaign for Republican congressional candidates on a message of economic growth and the recent confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Just after answering questions about the Saudi announcement, Mr. Trump flew to a “Make America Great Again” rally in Mesa, Ariz.

Dude’s got important business to take care of.

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1053334095114182657

Not a good analogy. Nobody is saying trans people shouldn’t compete in sport at all, some people are saying male-bodied people shouldn’t compete against women. Nobody is saying trans people are non-human animals. Nobody is saying trans people should be rounded up and sent to camps. Feminist women are not comparable to Nazis.

This impasse is one reason I can’t see most trans activism as genuinely progressive: it’s so resolutely blind and indifferent to the vulnerabilities and disadvantages of anyone else. Another way of putting it would be that it’s so unintersectional. A progressive trans activism would give a shit about any physical advantages trans women might have over women. It wouldn’t callously wave that off and carry on regardless. It wouldn’t be so grossly narcissistic.

Updating to add: Of course there’s another aspect, which I overlooked.

Oh. My. God.

People pointing out that being biologically male means having an athletic advantage over biological females, isn't equivalent to you being a victim of racism or the Nazis.

You have absolutely no shame whatsoever. This is excruciating. https://t.co/3MY3jEllGh

— Harvey Jeni (@GappyTales) October 20, 2018

Oh yes, that. Rachel McKinnon is not comparable to victims of Nazism. Rachel McKinnon being told that male bodies have an advantage over female bodies in cycle racing is not comparable to being a victim of genocide.

It’s all about the narcissism.

Talk about voter suppression…

At a time when many rural towns are slowly dying, the arrival of two massive meatpacking plants boosted Dodge City’s economy and transformed its demographics as immigrants from Mexico and other countries flooded in to fill those jobs.

Dodge City, Kansas, this is.

But the city located 160 miles (257 kilometers) west of Wichita has only one polling site for its 27,000 residents. Since 2002, the lone site was at the civic center just blocks from the local country club — in the wealthy, white part of town. For this November’s election, local officials have moved it outside the city limits to a facility more than a mile from the nearest bus stop, citing road construction that blocked the previous site.

One polling site…which is now outside of town and a hefty walk from the closest bus stop. That’ll keep those pesky immigrants from voting!

Do we not have any laws governing access to voting?

Some local voters and the American Civil Liberties Union have long criticized the use of a lone Dodge City polling site even before its move just weeks before the midterm election.

That single polling site services more than 13,000 voters in the Dodge City area, compared to an average of 1,200 voters per polling site at other locations, said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU in Kansas.

Well, the Roberts Court said they could.

Kansas is not the only state that has closed polling sites. Polling places across the country have also been shuttered since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act. A 2016 research report from the civil rights coalition Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights found local officials had shuttered 868 polling places in the three years after the court’s ruling.

That’s a lot of votes suppressed.