Untitled

Chris Stein at The Guardian:

Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked the advancement of a must-pass defense bill in protest of Donald Trump’s resumption of hostilities with Iran. The hold up of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) comes amid the fiercest exchange in fire between the countries in weeks, which has amplified frustration among Democrats that the US remains involved in the conflict despite the passage last month of a war powers resolution intended to force a ceasefire. Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, said that his party could not support advancing the NDAA, a comprehensive measure that Congress typically approves every year with bipartisan margins, as long as the fighting continues. “Republicans want the Senate to take up the NDAA, the defense bill, as though none of this is happening – as though Congress can debate the nation’s central national security bill while ignoring the nation’s most urgent national security crisis,” Schumer said. “We cannot.” All Democrats in attendance voted against the measure, denying it the 60 votes needed to clear the Senate’s bar for advancement. Trump had earlier in the week threatened to impose a 20% “security” fee on vessels transiting the strait of Hormuz, but backed down on Tuesday, while vowing to continue the US blockade of Iranian ports.

Good news: Democrats block cloture 50-46 to halt the advancement of the NDAA in protest of Donald Trump’s resumption of hostilities towards Iran.

See Also:

Al-Jazeera English: In 50-46 vote, US Senate Democrats block defence bill over Iran war, Israel integration

S. Baum at Erin In The Morning:

Billionaire TERF influencer J.K. Rowling has announced that she will cover the legal costs of anti-trans groups named in a report by Amnesty International (UK), which called them “anti-rights.” The report was retracted shortly after publication and replaced with a statement from the organization saying the report was uploaded “without going through the established internal review processes” and that its “language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK, which is why it was promptly removed.”

But the withdrawal and public acknowledgement was not enough to sate the organizations that have fought tooth and nail to exclude and/or antagonize the transgender community in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is notoriously more perilous for free speech than the United States. For our neighbors across the pond, the burden of proof lies with the defendant to prove the statement is true; here in the United States, the burden of proof lies with the aggrieved to prove that a statement is categorically false, and published knowingly or at least recklessly regardless. The US also benefits from “anti-SLAPP” laws to prevent such frivolous lawsuits waged by wealthy individuals or powerful corporations against those who criticize them.

So Rowling capitalized on the spectacle to, in essence, help dozens of groups in what appears to be an attempt to sue Amnesty into oblivion. The saga began earlier this month, when Amnesty International (UK) released a report titled “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.” It released a similar report last year, but this year, it added a new category for what appears to be the anti-rights movement’s most rapidly growing sector: “Gender critical” groups, or groups that are antithetical to transgender rights and inclusion. [...]

She lauded “LGB” groups—another anti-trans buzzword, which, as the name suggests, describes groups that wish to erase transgender people from the queer liberation movement—like the Gay Men’s Network, an organization that has pushed for anti-trans policies. That group posted a public letter indicating it might sue Amnesty International for defamation. The Network demanded a retraction of the report and then claimed that Amnesty is guilty of “trying to control gay and lesbian free speech.” In the day or so that followed, Rowling retweeted around a dozen similar letters. The posted letters include groups like Genspect, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that threatened Amnesty International with legal action, as well as groups like LGB Alliance and Sex Matters.

[...] Depending on who you ask, TERFs are considered either a self-branded liberal faction of gender critical ideology, or a different term for what is essentially the same movement. TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” a term to describe self-proclaimed “feminists” who oppose giving transgender women and cisgender women equal rights. Many of these TERF or “gender critical” groups have close ties to far-right Christian groups. DonorsTrust, the conservative donor behemoth and primary financier of initiatives like Project 2025, also forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups like the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and Thoughtful Therapists, both of whom made the “anti-rights” list because, as Amnesty International (UK) among many others have put it, they promote “conversion practices.”

One major point of contention was the inclusion of Rowling’s own organization, Beira’s Place. It does not primarily seem to function as any sort of advocacy organization. Rather, it’s a women’s shelter for those fleeing domestic violence, but it also has an explicit anti-trans policy, banning transgender women from accessing its services. However, as the report explained, none of these groups exist in a vacuum. “These entities must be understood as an ecosystem sharing values, goals, strategy and tactics and, for some of them, formal collaboration,” it reads. Amnesty isn’t the first or last institution or expert to call out gender critical ideology for being anti-rights. UN Women has published materials saying as much.

Prima ballerina froggie!! 🐸🐸🐸

😹😹😹😹😹

😹😹😹😹😹

Peter Montgomery at RWW:

The Heritage Foundation, the massive MAGA think tank and political operation behind Project 2025, is egging on the Trump administration’s ongoing war against the Smithsonian Institution, which is part of the MAGA movement's broader efforts to control, censor, and whitewash efforts to teach the full truth about American history. In its latest move against the Smithsonian, the White House on July 4 released a report called “Saving America’s Story,” which accuses the National Museum of American History of setting out to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” The country’s largest group of historians slammed the White House report, calling it an “example of executive branch overreach” and an attempt to “coerce Smithsonian leadership to shape its presentation of U.S. history so that it serves the administration’s political agenda—part of an ongoing and multi-pronged assault by the Trump administration against accurate and evidence-based history in American public life.” The group’s president called the report “a declaration of independence from history.” In a July 6 press release, Heritage Senior Fellow Mike Gonzales called the White House report “a clarion call for the Board of Regents to fire the Institution’s Secretary Lonnie Bunch III and the entire leadership.” “The timely report makes clear why we have Marxist politicians like Zohran Mamdani, Pramila Jayapal, and Katie Wilson,” said Gonzales. “They and their voters have been taught by institutions such as the Smithsonian to despise America’s history and heritage.” Gonzales had also called for the firing of the Institution’s “woke leadership” back in April. Bunch is a historian who oversaw the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture before taking the Smithsonian’s top job in 2019. He has said the White House report is “not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History.”

For a year, the regime has been trying to grab the private data of every voter in America—Social Security numbers, birth dates, home addresses, driver’s license numbers—by suing states that refused to hand them over. Friday night, a federal judge in New York became the twelfth in a row to throw the case out.

Judge Mae D’Agostino rejected every argument the regime made. And here’s the ugliest part: the law it leaned on was the Civil Rights Act of 1960—written to stop Southern officials from destroying Black citizens’ voter records. The regime tried to twist a law built to protect Black voters into a tool to seize their data. D’Agostino wouldn’t allow it.

it’s called