Earlier today Jo Cox, the Labour Party Member of Parliament for Batley and Spen was attacked in the street by a man yelling “Britain First!” Ms. Cox was stabbed and then shot in the street and ultimately succumbed to her wounds. The leaders of the movement behind the British Exit (Brexit) from the EU campaign, the motto of which is “Britain First!”, quickly moved to distance themselves from this act of terrorism. While they are not immediately/personally responsible for the attack on Ms. Cox, it will remain to be seen how much fallout they will face because their professional rhetoric and activities helped to set the conditions for an attack like this to take place.
The investigation into the man who assassinated Ms. Cox is underway and the information is currently fluid, so the usual 48-96 hour caveats on information need to be kept in mind. Dr. David Brockington – an expatriate American who is a professor in England – posted an excellent analytical piece this morning at Lawyers, Guns, and Money about the likelihood of the Brexit one week out from the referendum. The effect of today’s political assassination on the Brexit vote are likely to be significant and they may not be possible to measure them adequately or accurately before the actual vote next week. It will depend on how healthy Britain’s civil space actually is right now and the resilience of the British grey zone to withstand this type of pressure.
Ms. Cox was 41; she is survived by her husband and their children.
redshirt
Wow. Pretty shocking for the UK. Just another day in the USA.
Can someone explain Brexit to me? I don’t understand how anyone can think the UK would do better outside of the EU rather than with their current position. What’s driving this vote?
Baud
Her kids are young. Tragic.
I’ve read various reports about the killer’s mental health. I guess will find out in the next couple of days.
Cacti
@redshirt:
Anti-immigrant and refugee xenophobia.
debbie
Liberals use their bodies to protest (climbing redwoods, chaining themselves to fences, sit-ins, passive resistence, etc.); conservatives use their guns. Chicken shits, all of them.
Mike J
@Baud:
White guy=troubled, mentally ill. Non-white guy=terrorist.
England has normally been good about not drawing the line that way, thanks to having plenty of pasty skinned IRA terrorists around, but UKIP et all want to emulate the worst things about the United States.
Peale
@Cacti: And the fact that the “Stay” people haven’t been making a very coherent case for staying, but have instead been focused on claiming that catatrophe and catatrophe will fall upon the UK. The only benefits of being in the EU now is that catastrophe isn’t happening on a daily basis. There isn’t a positive case for staying.
JPL
A few days ago, polling showed that the Brits were in support of exit. I read that the markets changed after the assassination in support of stay.
@Baud: The killer was a neo-nazi who was heard yelling Britain First. I wonder how many times tonight, Trump will yell America First in support.
Baud
@Mike J:
@JPL:
Ok. You’ve got more updated info, it seems.
Major Major Major Major
This is very upsetting. But not surprising.
The stock photo of the guy has him wearing camo.
Never trust somebody whose publicly-available picture is them wearing camo (unless it’s a uniform).
redshirt
This sounds like a job for CAPTAIN BRITAIN!
JPL
This article from the Independent tells a little about her life and includes a statement from her husband. link
maya
Unfortunately, the history of political assassinations that emanate from the right is that the right winds up in absolute power as a result with virtually no backlash or price to pay. Rabin in Israel comes to mind. And who has all those stockpiles of AR-15s here? Something to be very concerned about.
Mnemosyne
When gun assholes say, An armed society is a polite society, this is exactly what they mean. Jo Cox was impolite about racists and xenophobes, and she paid the price.
Several people on other threads have noted that they used to get involved in anti-gun local politics, but they had to give it up because they were getting death threats. This is no way to run a democracy.
Tony J
@redshirt:
Two decades of constant, repetitive, daily propaganda on the pages of Britain’s best selling tabloid and ‘quality’ newspapers blaming the EU for everything under the sun and nearly a decade of the same press vehicles striving mightily to redirect blame and disgust for the 2008 crash away from bankers and towards migrants, public-sector workers, the very poor and ‘Europe’.
Every single day most Britons read a headline about how Migrants or Immigrants or Asylum Seekers or whatever today’s euphemism for Those People might be are responsible for whatever scandal or outrage is in the news, and it’s all the fault of Europe for forcing us to take them. Plus they’re just coming here to leech off our welfare system (while poor white people – except for those featured every day in stories about ‘Scrounger Mother of 10 children gets £10,000 a day in benefits and thinks that’s right” stories – can’t get any help at all) and take all our jobs at the same time! Oh, and we’ve got a housing crisis because dark people who can’t speak English get all the houses because private landlords are afraid of Political Correctness.
Every. Single. Day. For. Years.
But it’s really all about how we need our sovereignty back, honest.
Ruviana
Don’t yell at me but it’s “expatriate” rather than “expatriot” which does make an awesome pun sometimes. I corrected it in so many papers that I’m a bit sensitive about it./pedant
Mary G
She lived on a boat while in London. Cool.
This reminds me of Gabby Giffords – another great progressive in politics that I’ve never heard of, because hate-spewing men soak up all the media’s time.
hovercraft
@redshirt:
Here is a NY Times summary
And from the BBC
Mnemosyne
@maya:
That may be the history in Israel, but it is not the history in the United States. We didn’t end up a right-wing country in the wake of the series of Civil Rights assassinations that culminated in the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Quite the contrary, in fact — right-wing violence in the US usually backfires on the perpetrators, at least for a while.
(We did eventually end up as a right-wing country, but it was a decade after the string of Civil Rights assassinations, and it could be argued that it was only able to happen because the memory of those assassinations had faded.)
Mary G
@Mnemosyne: O/T but did you know that Hamilton is coming to Costa Mesa in the 2017-2018 season? Maybe if I start saving up now?
redshirt
@hovercraft: Is Cameron pro or nay Brexit?
hovercraft
@Tony J:
Ahh Rupert Murdoch, he has such a wonderful legacy to leave behind. He can proudly look to three continents and be proud of the hatred he has sown.
hovercraft
@redshirt:
nay
Labour is against, the Tories are split and then there are the Trumpsters anxious to take their country back. The feeling among many of them is that it’s bad enough that the “Paki’s” and the “Wog’s” have to be accepted because they are commonwealth nations. But now with the EU open border policy they are going to be over run.
Mnemosyne
@Mary G:
We ended up buying season tickets to the Pantages Theatre just so we would be guaranteed “Hamilton” tickets. There are 5 other shows we want to see as well (including the return of “Book of Mormon”), so it ended up being a surprisingly good deal.
LMM has said that they’re going to continue the $10 Ham4Ham lotteries for all of the touring companies, so I guess it depends on if you feel lucky and can head to Costa Mesa on a moment’s notice (or at least a couple of hours’ notice).
Poopyman
@hovercraft:
I’m pretty sure that’s what critics in the US said about sequestration.
maya
@Mnemosyne: Au contraire. MLK was assassinated in 1968. Who got elected to the Presidency that same year with his southern strategy? And then came Reagan with his “black mother on welfare” as the root cause of all our ills? Now we consider this country and even the Democratic party to be right-center at best. That includes both Clintons and even Obama. I guess you haven’t noticed. To tie it up in a nice neat knot for you,the Obama admin is going to be giving Israel the biggest increase in military aid ($3million a day, every day). What for? And they’re still arguing over cluster bombs, which Bibi and Israel really like.
quakerinabasement
@Ruviana: Thanks for mentioning that so I don’t have to!
Frank Wilhoit
Who remembers that Britain would have gone to civil war (over Ireland) in 1914, if World War I had not fortuitously supervened? They’re tough. Dim, atavistic memories of the English Civil War of the 17th Century still shape political attitudes in Britain and in America — for our Founding Fathers, the English Civil War was, if not quite a living memory, still the kind of defining, never-again historical moment that the Holocaust is today. They’ve been through things that we, from our coddled and infantile perspective, can’t imagine; and they know how to learn, which we don’t. They’ll be all right. This is a horrible shock, but it will be salutary.
Major Major Major Major
@Poopyman: This is something of the opposite though, right? It makes it harder to do things, not ‘easier’ like sequestration was supposed to.
God, that was dumb.
Cacti
@Frank Wilhoit:
Yes, at a mere cost of 744,000 lives.
How fortunate.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne: Read Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. He rode white resentment and fear into the White House, and the GOP has relied on that tactic ever since.
Villago Delenda Est
@Frank Wilhoit: Madison’s insistence on “no religious test” is based on memories of the havoc played in the 17th Century in England (and in the colonies).
Chris
@Cacti:
That, plus a longstanding sentiment that Britain is special and seperate from Europe and should not tie itself too much to it, which I understand has been a thing at least since the EEC was formed and Britain was not one of the original signatories.
Poopyman
@Major Major Major Major: It was a “threat” hanging over both parties that was undesired, ostensibly, by “both sides”. We know how that worked out.
The analogy is far from perfect. I threw it out there as, again, something that no one (theoretically) wants to resort to. It would amount to more of a pain on the ass for most, not the economic shackling that sequestration was for us.
Full disclosure, I was unemployed for 8 months due to sequestration.
Mnemosyne
@maya:
Whose party completely fell apart in 1968 because the incumbent president refused to run again? Nixon didn’t win in 1968 because of the Southern Strategy, though it did help him in 1972.
And haven’t you ever heard of Medgar Evers, Louis Allen, or James Chaney? Many civil rights activists were murdered well before 1968.
Sorry, but your claim is ridiculously simplistic and ignores actual US history.
ETA: Are you arguing about US history or Israel’s history? We are, in fact, two different countries with separate histories.
Poopyman
@Cacti: I read it as sarcasm. Too soon?
(Yeah, I’m fully aware that for many, especially Europeans, it’ll never not be too soon.)
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne:
There was that Bobby Kennedy guy who got shot.
ETA: RFK would have won the nomination and the Dems would have been much less divided in 1968 and Tricky Dick would have been defeated by another Kennedy.
Mnemosyne
@Villago Delenda Est:
And then Nixon was forced to resign and Carter was elected. It ain’t the straight line from MLK to Nixon to today that maya is trying to claim. And I’m still trying to figure out why she thinks our post-Jim Crow history is identical to Israel’s current apartheid state.
Poopyman
@Villago Delenda Est: In this part of Maryland (south-east), it’s possible to refer to civil war skirmishes and refer only to the English Civil War, since the Union was so heavily entrenched 200 years later that there was no possibility of any action. Too few people remember the religious freedom created by the Catholic Calverts was quickly subverted by an influx of Puritans, who quickly outnumbered the original Catholic settlers, moved the capitol to Annapolis, and generally became the dicks that the religious right
usuallyalways are. The founding fathers were indeed much closer to the preceding unpleasantness, temporally and geographically.maya
@Mnemosyne: In 1968 Johnson did not run because of Viet Nam. You’d think the anti-war movement and McGovern would have been the perfect solution. Not even close. According to you, we now live in a liberalized, racially harmonious America where black lives always matter and none ever gets shot down in the streets……. Where are you living?
Mnemosyne
@BillinGlendaleCA:
That, too. Of course, Sirhan murdered RFK out of anger for the US’s warmongering Israel policies and RFK’s pledge to send weapons to Israel, which again doesn’t exactly fit maya’s claims that our Israel policy has become increasingly right wing.
Feathers
@Tony J: There was an article recently about the Brexit where Murdoch’s support was explained in terms of ~when I go to Downing Street, they treat me right, when I go to Brussels they ignore me~ not remembering exact wording or if it was a direct quote, but it summed the situation up nicely. There are a certain set who’ve set up Britain to be run the way they like it and they don’t want the EU mucking up their fiefdom.
My cousin is married to an Englishman who she met here when she was in grad school. She works in his research lab. She said it has become very difficult. Quite a few of these anti-immigrant rules would affect her, even though she’s married with two British kids. When the NHS is the only game in town, cutting people off from having access would make it next to impossible for them to remain. She’s had to tell people, “you do realize you are talking about me? Blue eyed, blonde, Harvard PhD, me?” She leaves the Harvard off, but probably shouldn’t.
The lab is also really being pushed to prove what the short term possible business world benefits of their (genetics) research will be. When they choose England over the US, they were much better off there (stem cell nonsense here part of the equation), but now they are wondering.
Mnemosyne
@maya:
Sorry, who said that? Because it sure wasn’t me.
What I ACTUALLY said was that right-wing violence in the US was unable to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, only slow them down. We are not as advanced as all of us hoped we would be, but if you think that living in the US in 2016 is like living in the US in 1966, you should probably read John Lewis’s book and educate yourself.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Just back from dinner. Here you go:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/14/brexit-what-would-happen-if-britain-left-eu-european-union-referendum-uk
Rand Careaga
@Cacti: fortuitous ≠ fortunate.
BillinGlendaleCA
@maya: Gene McCarthy and RFK were both anti-war. LBJ got out of the race because of a poor showing in New Hampshire(he won, but by a small margin). RFK got in the race and had momentum coming out of winning in CA, and then was shot right after his victory speech. Hubert Humphrey(LBJ’s VP) was essentially chosen in the ‘smoke filled room’ and was pro-war until late in the race.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: Here’s the Guardian’s entire coverage:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/eu-referendum
redshirt
@Mnemosyne:
This is the hill you’re going to die on? That we became a Right Wing nation but it had nothing to do with the turbulence of the 1960’s? Jeez.
Adam L Silverman
@Tony J: And who owns those tabloids and several of the quality newspapers you asK? Rupert Murdoch. Also the Sky satellite network too. Coincidence?
Adam L Silverman
@Ruviana: Sorry, was in a hurry as I was on the way out the door and wanted to get this posted. I’ll fix it right now.
maya
@Mnemosyne: The reason I bring up Israel is that you would think that Obama, of all people, would not condone feeding an apartheid state more guns, bombs and bullets. OK, pick South Africa if you prefer. A friend of mine recently came back from a vacation there. He hadn’t been there since the early days of Mandela. He was shocked to find that SA is even worse than it was before. We just don’t hear about it much, if at all. White Supremacists are busy everywhere and have never sat back in complacency.
BTW, I’m a HE. Maya was the name of my most loyal dog. She died just before I got involved with BJ and a few other blogs. I took on her name as my nym, purely out of love, not to deliberately confuse anyone.
Iowa Old Lady
@Chris: My husband’s French co-worker said that his attitude as a Frenchman is let them rot on their island. Which, when you think of it, has been the French attitude for at least 5 centuries.
sigaba
@Cacti: I was about to say… Instead of Britain having a little Dirty War with a colonial possession, Europe had a catastrophe unparalleled in human history that literally divided western civilization itself into a Before and After. And we’re STILL trying to explain it.
Ruviana
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks! And you should know that I always squee with happiness when I see your byline on a post. Very informative and also sometimes funny!
Adam L Silverman
@hovercraft: Which isn’t true as Britain is not a signatory to the Schengen Accords and is therefore exempt from the single border, immigration/entry, and custom policies.
sigaba
@maya: I assume we’re getting some kind of backchannel help in Syria for that. Or something. Or at least we’d better be.
Adam L Silverman
@Poopyman: You ever try to get 55% of EU member states to agree on anything?
amk
Political assassination? Aren’t you being dramatic? It was some deranged rw nutjob.
Betty Cracker
I was only vaguely aware of Britain First before this incident, so I looked them up online. Damn, those people are nuts! Calling them a pro-Brexit group is like calling the Bundy gang “ranchers.” Yeah, they’re that, but that’s the least of it. They are hateful extremists.
I was also stunned by how much the group sounds like the most extreme tea party goons and Trump’s “America First” flea circus. Their tag line is “taking our country back.” Sound familiar?
There’s a vid on their Twitter feed discussing the Orlando attack, and if you ignore the accent of the speaker, the woman delivering it could be the warm-up act for a Trump rally — same birther lunacy and insinuations that President Obama is a stealth Muslim who is bent on destroying America.
Britain First claims they had nothing to do with Cox’s death, and maybe they didn’t. But they’re calling Muslim elected officials “occupiers” and threatening “direct action,” according to news reports. They sound like a particularly nasty bunch of Christo-fascists to me after five minutes of Googling.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: And we aren’t being overrun by Central Americans with melon-like calves. Xenophobes are gonna xenophobe.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: I could get them to agree that processed American cheese is not cheese.
BillinGlendaleCA
@maya:
Obama is an American politician, they will all support(with guns, bombs and bullets) Israel. All of them, Katie.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
There’s a picture of the guy in the Guardian article, and there’s something about the look in his eyes that reminds me of a Trump supporter.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruviana: No worries on this end and thanks.
Adam L Silverman
@amk: When you purposefully target, attack, and kill an elected or appointed official that falls within the definition of political assassination.
Frank Wilhoit
@Cacti: “Fortunate” and “fortuitous”, despite having their first four letters in common, are different words.
“Fortuitously” in this sense means coming out of nowhere. Read, in Churchill’s The World Crisis, about the Cabinet meeting where Edward Grey read out the terms of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Read, in George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, about the leaders of the Conservative Party openly inciting His Majesty’s armed forces to mutiny.
…then go read everything else you can find. Your time will be better spent than here.
redshirt
@debbie: The dull gleam of incipient violence?
Villago Delenda Est
@amk: She was targeted because she was very strongly anti-Brexit.
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
If it’s only a couple hours notice on a weeknight, and you have to come from Glendale/Burbank, forget about seeing Act 1.
#fukda5
Adam L Silverman
@Betty Cracker: The UK Independence Party (UKIP) folks have taken the old British National Party schtick and run it way out to the furthermost right extreme. They are aligned, for lack of a better term, with some of the most virulently neo-Fascist, neo-NAZI, and ultra-nationalist parties and movements on the continent. As well as their equivalents here in the US. Geller and Spencer are quite tightly tied into these folks.
ETA: their denials is why I touched on not being personally responsible, but professionally, through pushing their agenda and putting forward their noxious, racist, neo-Fascist rhetoric, they set the conditions for something like this to happen. Its like O’Reilly with his repeated broadcasts on “Tiller the Baby Killer” or the Planned Parenthood hoax stuff, Daleidan, and Fiorina – among others – all contributing to and setting the conditions for the increase in attacks on women’s health centers and the terrorist attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado.
Corner Stone
Bernie Sanders sounds like Aquaman if he were from Noo Yoik.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s a very low hurdle to clear.
Baud
@Corner Stone: Not crazy about the backdrop and lighting.
boatboy_srq
@redshirt: @Cacti: That certainly plays into it. UK had a hard enough time integrating Commonwealth citizens. But there’s a lot more.
Britain has never been comfortable with Germany’s and France’s ambitions for continental political unity: since at least Maastricht there’s been real resistance to the EU. Britain joined what it thought was the European equivalent of NAFTA (IIRC NAFTA was originally modeled on what was branded for UK voters as the Common Market) and have been serially disappointed with Brussels’ insistence on more ever since. One reason they never signed on to the Eurozone was to create some distance between the UK and the Continent: and so far, that’s worked pretty well.
Sure there are wingnuts there, and there’s plenty of xenophobia to go around. But the UK has prided itself on not having been conquered by Europe for nearly a millennium, and to patriotic Brits the EU stinks of conquest by another name.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Do you know of any links between US and UK white supremacist groups? It seems like it would be a natural fit.
Baud
Defeating Donald Trump!
burnspbesq
Some outfit calling itself Brotain First has also threatened “direct action” against the “occupier” Mayor of London.
And if you haven’t seen video of the “naval battle” on the Thames between Leave and Stay, you’re in for a treat.
ETA: that started out as a typo, but it’s a decent enough pun that I’m leaving it as is.
Immanentize
@Mnemosyne: respect
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone: Did he just threaten to unleash the Kraken or yell at Black Manta or something?
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Well, sure. One does have to start somewhere.
Robert Sneddon
@boatboy_srq:
Well, we tend to elide over the William of Orange deal which was a military conquest in fact if not in the history books.
Baud
msnbc cut off Bernie’s speech.
boatboy_srq
@Tony J: Proof positive Murdoch is at the heart of the wingnutsery. On both sides of the pond.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: there are a lot. Especially the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups that try to straddle the line between mainstream politics and extremism.
redshirt
@Robert Sneddon: Close to a millennium ago!
Betty Cracker
So what did y’all think of Sanders’ speech? (Those of you who heard it.) Sounds like he’s going to be a pain in the ass to me, but I’ve grown biased toward the old coot, so maybe I’m not being fair.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
Actually it was Charles Pinckney who was the big proponent of the “No Religious Test” clause. When South Carolina was considering ratification of the Constitution, he was asked about the clause and if it meant that even a Muslim could hold an office. He famously replied that it meant exactly that, and that he hoped to see it happen- something anti-Muslim bigots today should be reminded of.
maya
@BillinGlendaleCA: Now I can remember a time ,1967 to be exact, when American pols were not so 110% in the bag for Israel. Prolly only 65%, especially after that USS Liberty attack But everyone loves a winner and AIPAC has also done a very impressive job mastering control of both parties, don’t you think?
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I think this speech like all his prior speech equivocated about what he is planning to do. I expect he’ll eventually endorse Clinton if only to get a prime-time speaking spot at the convention.
Villago Delenda Est
@Robert Sneddon: Well, yeah, but THAT was “The Glorious Revolution” and we got rid of that papist James II!
boatboy_srq
@Robert Sneddon: True; and mustn’t forget the Hanoverian Usurpation – um, Georgian monarchs – either. But nobody landed with an army and slew the leadership since 1066, and the last three powers (all of them Continental, naturally) that tried got walloped.
chopper
@Mnemosyne:
sorry but I have to laugh at the irony here.
hovercraft
@Adam L Silverman:
Try convincing the Britain is for the British brigade, nationalism has always spiked during periods of economic stress and the ’08 crash is no exception. Plus Murdoch’s fanning the flames has not helped. Funnily (not Really) one of the big catalysts has been the ‘takeover’ of black players in the FA. Given the obsession with football many of the nationalists have seen this as an affront. Also a big bugaboo is the prevalence of inter- racial dating/marriage. I’m sure that the numbers don’t back them up but they fear that white people are being bred out of the UK. I’ll check the numbers for fits and giggles.
Baud
Obama gave Rubio a lift on AF1!
Adam L Silverman
I just watched documentary footage of the Israeli Air Force bombing raid on the Osirak reactor. This was a bit surreal to watch as Osirak was built at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Facility just outside Jisr Diyala, Mada’in Qada, Iraq. The Coalition Forces built a combat outpost (COP) there for Operation Iraqi Freedom: COP Cashe South. I worked off of that COP with the Armor battalion, the Civil Affairs Team-A, or Alpha Company 1-35 Armor a lot while deployed.
Mnemosyne
@maya:
No one ever said that they have, or that they ever will. What I’m doubting is that they’re winning overall, or that fighting them is hopeless because they always win in the end. Arc of justice, and all that. A setback — or even a series of setbacks — is only a defeat if you let it be. You may have been defeated, but I haven’t.
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud: Sad.
rikyrah
this is so sad. she was far too young.
JPL
@Betty Cracker: I think it was the Bloomberg poll that showed only 55 percent of Bernie’s supporters switched to Hillary. That was the poll that included the Libertarian party and had Hillary trashing Trump. It’s time to cut him lose. He doesn’t have the money to continue. Maybe he can do call ins like Trump.
Mnemosyne
@burnspbesq:
I have guaranteed tickets in Hollywood, so I don’t have to go anywhere. I think Mary is in south OC.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: I saw reporting today that Ed Rendell told someone who was interviewing him that the DNC has informed Senator Sanders and his campaign that he will only get the prime time speaking slot at the convention if he endorses Secretary Clinton before the convention. I’m all for giving him a week or two to get his head, heart, and campaign around the concession, but if he keeps stiff arming the party he’s going to find himself locked out on the outside looking in.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@Cacti:
“Fortuitous” is absolutely not a synonym for “fortunate.”
Baud
@Adam L Silverman:
Of course. It has to be this way. That’s valuable air time, and it would be silly to give it to someone who hasn’t decided to be part of the team effort.
amk
@Betty Cracker: Sanders who?
boatboy_srq
@redshirt: Outside sourcing the same propaganda – cough cough Newscorp cough – there’s been surprisingly little. Until very recently Brit’s were still too wishy-washy for US bigots. Don’t forget also that many US bigots were either descendants of populations Britain had problems with at home (Irish, Welsh, Scots) or descendants of emigrants from countries not fond of Britain when they landed (Germany especially) and there are solid impediments to US wingnuts’ outreach Eastward. I have no doubt the National Front and its heirs would love Teahadi support, but until this iteration ita unlikely US bigots would give them much.
Adam L Silverman
@hovercraft: I’m well aware of the stunning parochialism of some Brits. My favorite was the joke about someone from England flying to the US. Gets off the plane, approaches immigration control and just stands there looking at the signs that say “this line for US citizen and resident nationals” and “this line for foreigners”. Eventually an immigration officer comes up and asks if everything is alright and if help is needed. The confused traveler replied to the immigration official: “I’m not sure where to go. I’m not a US citizen or resident national, but I’m certainly not foreign”.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: I do not disagree.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@amk:
And when a deranged rw nutjob kills for deranged rw reasons, it’s not political assassination exactly how?
PsiFighter37
@Adam L Silverman: I kind of hope it happens. He is nothing but trouble, and frankly, giving him a prime-time speech is basically handing him a live grenade and hoping he doesn’t toss it back at the party.
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
Are they taking money from Putin, the way so many other right-wing parties in Europe are? It would make sense for Putin to be funding them; getting the UK out of the EU would definitely weaken it, which seems to be one of his major goals.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: One line that stuck in my craw — something to the effect that he and his “movement” will transform the Democratic Party so it works for the people instead of just the fat cat donors. Excuse me? I’ve been a Democrat a lot longer than that mofo even though he’s older than my dad, and I’m neither fat nor a cat. The unmitigated gall!
BillinGlendaleCA
@burnspbesq:
When the kid lived down there(Errrrvine), we’d always take the 134/210 to the 57.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I caught that too. He insists on not building bridges. That’s his shtick, apparently.
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker: I’m saddened to learn you’re not a cat.
Poopyman
@Adam L Silverman: I’m thinking the refugee situation may be the ticket.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
As Bernie drifts off into Baud!like irrelevance.
Jeff Spender
“Reince Priebus without vowels is:
RNC PR BS
So we shouldn’t be surprised when he tries to live up to his name.”
Love me some snark.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@maya: AIPAC lost big on the Iran nuclear deal. And deservedly so.
Cheers,
Scott.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: Yep. They, like all the other similar parties and movements in the EU other than the Front National in France, are being covertly funded and supported by Putin. The Front National is being supported overtly. This is part of Putin’s strategy of fragmenting the EU to increase Russia’s economic leverage and undermine NATO to allow Putin to reestablish what he feels is Russia’s traditional/historic sphere of influence and near abroad.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: I welcome the company.
BillinGlendaleCA
@maya: It’s not AIPAC, it’s the religious right.
redshirt
@efgoldman: With modern medicine…..
Robert Sneddon
@Adam L Silverman: I was once asked by someone in the US about our odd habit of driving on the correct side of the road (i.e. the left-hand side). She went on, in apparent sincerity:
“Does that mean if I visited Britain I’d have to do the same?”
Pause. “Yes, it’s almost compulsory.” I answered.
Adam L Silverman
@Poopyman: There is a concerted effort to leverage it.
Baud
@redshirt: It would be cool to see efgoldman’s disembodied talking head in a jar.
Adam L Silverman
@efgoldman: We’ll dig you up and wheel you out!
Adam L Silverman
@Robert Sneddon: I’m not saying we don’t have our own issues. I also had no trouble adapting to driving on the other side of the road when I lived in Scotland.
redshirt
@Baud: Talking Head technology will be state of the art in 2066.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Republicans have for years said that Gov. Casey of Pennsylvania didn’t get to speak at the Dem convention in 1992 because he was ‘Pro-life’. The reason he didn’t get to speak is he hadn’t endorsed the Clinton/Gore ticket.
Baud
@redshirt: Oh God, we’ll never be rid of Chuck Todd, will we?
hovercraft
@Adam L Silverman:
Good one.
JPL
Adam, there is a story on the NYTimes about dozens of diplomats who want Assad taken out. Doesn’t that play into
ISIS hands. I might be wrong but ISIS is more aligned with the Saudi’s. I’m not defending Assad and his regime,but it seems as though that doesn’t help.
Major Major Major Major
@redshirt: Baud!’s Talking head 2064!
Roger Moore
@BillinGlendaleCA:
The 210 is getting pretty miserable going that way in the evening, and I don’t think the 57 is going to be a whole lot better. Getting from the Valley to OC during rush hour is not an easy task, no matter what route you take.
BillinGlendaleCA
@redshirt: I like the Talking Heads.
Origuy
@boatboy_srq:
Well, there was the First Barons’ War of 1312-17, when Prince Louis of France landed with an army and was proclaimed (though not crowned) King of England. He lost the support of the barons when King John died and finally gave up and went home.
Poopyman
@Baud: Well, there’s always the dead girl/ live boy possibility.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: Heh, take the train.
redshirt
@Baud: It’s funny that Todd has become a goto Villager because he only arrived in 2008 and at first he was hailed as a truth teller.
Now, just another Talking Head.
maya
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t feel defeated, just rather tired of it all. It’s for others, younger than me, to carry on the good fight. Whatever that fight may be. I have never considered myself to be a leftist – many of them are tiresome screeches in my book – and am only liberal in certain matters, like equality of sex and race. Other than that I’m fairly conservative in my habits. Aren’t we all?
What concerns me is the prevalence of resorting to the gun. It will not get better, only worse. We are heading towards war, albeit, a different kind of war. Civil. Internal. The cops and military will be of little use in this war . Even the right-wingers themselves will war with each other. Someone above asked ALS if he thought there is a connection between the British thugs and their American counterparts. I myself doubt it. They wouldn’t get along anymore than the Bundys got along with the Oathkeepers.
Now if you can find a way of turning them upon each other, perhaps nirvana can be achieved.
redshirt
@BillinGlendaleCA: Who doesn’t?
Omnes Omnibus
@Origuy: You are off by a little bit on your dates.
Baud
@redshirt: @redshirt: You were supposed to be the chosen one, Todd!
Adam L Silverman
@hovercraft: According to one of my flat mates, who told me this, she said: “this is usually a joke, but it actually happened with my grandmother when she flew to the US for the first time to go to a wedding.” So its both funny and, possibly, a true story as well.
Immanentize
@redshirt: Fa fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa fa!
Origuy
@Adam L Silverman: I didn’t have trouble adjusting either, except for coming out of car parks when i would pull out onto the wrong side (only happened a couple of times) and on single-tracks when I did the wrong thing at laybys. (The first car to reach the layby is supposed to pull into it if it’s on his left and stop, or stop opposite it as far to the left as possible if it’s on his right.) I didn’t know that until the second time I went to Scotland.
boatboy_srq
@efgoldman: There was great hoopla in 1966. My folks told me about it. No reason there wouldn’t be an even bigger bash 50 years from now.
Roger Moore
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Stop making sense, Bill.
Origuy
@Omnes Omnibus: Oops. That should have been 1215-17.
Omnes Omnibus
@boatboy_srq: Are you sure that the hoopla wasn’t World Cup based?
@Origuy: John would have been rather old.
hovercraft
@Betty Cracker:
The only movement he has are bowel movements. Real movements bring about real change and his did not. The reason his supporters feel betrayed by Warren is because she championed income inequality before he did, Occupy was there first. (Okay he has been talking about this for 40 years, but EW and Occupy brought them front and center). The democrats were already on the path toward being more liberal, the Obama years made the party more liberal. His campaign if it had remained on message would have been admirable, but it has degenerated into a bunch of ego driven process demands. That is not a movement.
redshirt
@Baud: From my point of view the Democrats are Evil!
boatboy_srq
@Robert Sneddon: I think a lot of the US myopia about the rest of the world comes from the lack of travel. Most US non-business travel is domestic, and there’s a substantial minority that thinks there’s nothing worth seeing on the rest of the planet. The stereotype of the American tourist is well earned, I’m afraid.
mike in dc
“Britain First!” sounds disturbingly similar to “England Prevails!”
Chancellor Sutler approves
raven
@boatboy_srq: @boatboy_srq: Ever see John Sayle’s “Men With Guns”?
JPL
@mike in dc: It sounds a lot like Trump saying America first
Baud
Barry Goldwater’s widow is voting for Hillary!
The Goldwater Girl experience finally pays off!
Adam L Silverman
@JPL: That’s not how I (just) read the report. The report indicates that a number of career foreign service officers have exercised an internal, formalized State Department process to register dissent. In this case they specifically want the US to engage in stand off strategic strikes to interdict the Assad’s governments attacks on civilians when they go after the rebel groups. That’s not the same thing as endorsing military action to remove Assad.
The problem here is that by Russia’s entry into the conflict on the side of Assad, the complexity of the Operating Environment is significantly increased. The Russians want Assad in. Partially to maintain their warm water port lease and access on the Med, partially as it hamstrings the US’s efforts in the region, partially as it prolongs the conflict, thereby increasing the number of refugees fleeing the region into Europe, which increases social, economic, religions, and political tension in the EU. The strategic concern is that if we interdict Assad’s military activity does that put is in direct conflict with Russia? Putin would love that. I’m not so sure that’s really an acceptable strategic choice right now.
boatboy_srq
@Adam L Silverman: There are plenty more like that about English tourists in foreign lands – like Scotland…
@Omnes Omnibus: No, but both parents were football fans (Mum loved Pele), and since I was minus-something-years-old at the time I can’t speak from my own experience.
Adam L Silverman
Got to go take care of something. I’ll be back later. Play nice.
boatboy_srq
@raven: I take it I should…
ThresherK
OT: Hillary isn’t president yet, and Texas is already stirring shit about secession.
I will take that as a good omen.
boatboy_srq
@mike in dc: V4V resonates on many levels there, for many reasons. Not like in the US where wingnuts see blowing up Big Gubmint as something laudable just for the act.
maya
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Now that all depends on what that beefed up “military aid” package to Israel has inside the wrapping paper doesn’t it? The Iran deal could not have gone down without assurances and value added benefits for Israel, now could it. Israel squeaks and Israel gets greased. Have a nice day. Maya
boatboy_srq
@ThresherK: Can the US sell TX back to Mexico? It would be only right and fair.
redshirt
@Adam L Silverman: Excellent analysis. No one ever mentions that it’s in Russia’s interest for Syria to be a shit storm. Why some Americans are now falling for Russian propaganda is astounding. Or maybe by this point, not so much.
Baud
@boatboy_srq: Maybe trade it for a state to be named later?
raven
@boatboy_srq: It’s all in Spanish in a mythical Central American country except for these two stupid American tourists that pop up and say dumb shit in English. It’s actually a really good film but quite violent. “Were they soldiers or revolutionaries that burned your village and killed your men. We don’t know, they were Men With Guns.”
“This is one of the greatest of American films. Many critics said so and it received universal accolades from everyone except the public. They stayed away in groves, and I, living in Philadelphia, had to plan carefully in order to see it twice. Those who are critical of American film, believing it can never equal the philosophical attainments of European film, should see this film. Few films have dealt with eschatological issues as assuredly as this one: The Seventh Seal, Persona, Cold Fever, Forbidden Games, are some that have, and this magnificent film is very much their equal.”
Amaranthine RBG
@chopper:
Heh
redshirt
@maya: I bet this is the case entirely. The Iran deal required bribing an already hostile Israel. And let’s not pretend Bibi and his Likuds are anything but an offshoot of the Republican Party. I would not be surprised to find out they have the same paymasters.
hovercraft
@Adam L Silverman:
Probably true, you have to understand that since England is birthplace of true civilization anything not English is foreign so they cannot be.
dogwood
@Betty Cracker:
The problem with Bernie at this point is that there’s no evidence he could really be trusted. You could give him everything he demands and there’d be no guarantee he would cooperate with the Clinton campaign. Anyone who objectively watched his campaign couldn’t have missed that he is stubborn and pretty self-important. Attacking Clinton, Obama and the Democratic Party as corrupt money grubbing failures was his appeal. He’d have to get a new stump speech if he were to campaign in the general. His fans don’t want that. We just have to get through this and hope any damage he inflicts will have minimal repercussions. I’m pretty optimistic that he’ll become an annoyance rather than a major threat. This should be a lesson though, when you let someone into your home who has no respect for you or your family, don’t be surprised when they shit on the floor, bust up the furniture and then sue you when they slip on your driveway when they leave.
boatboy_srq
@Baud: hmm… Baja, perhaps?
Mnemosyne
@boatboy_srq:
I’m assuming you mean foreign invaders, because if you’re also including revolutions and overthrows, Henry Tudor (Henry VII) definitely qualifies as someone who marched in and took over.
boatboy_srq
@raven: thanks. Adding it to the list. Sounds like a good watch.
redshirt
@Baud: lol. Despite the murder gangs, Mexico is awesome and in a trade it should command quite a bit. Like a Chile and Nicaragua and maybe a Caribbean Island to be named later in exchange. Mexico is that important.
raven
@boatboy_srq: Tough to find, $43 on Amazon.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@maya:
Not in my view.
AIPAC and its allies wanted absolutely no deal at all with Iran. They wanted the US to go to war with Iran.
Yes, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other regional opponents of the deal got a few sweeteners, but the deal with Iran is a good one and it happened over AIPAC’s (and Bibi’s) strong objections.
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
@sigaba:
Yes, but also, TWO of them, one started in, about 1914, and one started in 1938-ish? I’m hazy on dates, always have been. But I know which one came first, and why, and even that the first one had a causal relationship with the second one. Which started slowly at first. Little Poland, etc, etc.
My Dad’s family toured Europe in ’38, to visit cousins in Switzerland and see the sights before they were all blown up. Far too many stories to belabor you all with.
Just one: My uncle was collecting national flags from each nation they visited. They were in Vienna just days before Chancellor Hitler’s triumphant entrance, and the city was covered with red banners, with white circles, filled with black swastikas, and each streetlight had German flags mounted on it.
So Uncle decided that would do for a German flag, shinnied up and took one, wrapped it around the stick and stuck it down his pants. Just then, 4 German stormtroopers came around the corner. Seconds earlier and they would have stomped him to death, and probably my other uncle and my father. Seconds away from that.
Showing disrespect to the Fatherland! Trump really gives me the same shivers I got when my cousin and I found that flag in her father’s files when I was helping them go through things. And hearing the story from my father, she holding that crimson flag, which hadn’t seen the light of day in 55 years or so. Horror in your hands.
But all history is causal from back to front, in’t?
Omnes Omnibus
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Agreed.
hovercraft
I’m listening to BS and I don’t get his point. Yes a lot of people voted for him, but the goal was to win, not for second place. If he wanted to run against the democratic party he should have. As it was he ran in it and lost, the winner is under no obligation to adopt his platform. It would be one thing if the party was running a candidate with a dramatically different platform, but the differences are in degree and methods. Can someone please make it stop. Make him go away. That’s it no more, I can’t listen to this shit.
J R in WV
@amk:
And who do you think does the right-wing assassinations? Level-headed rabbis? Or crazy nut-job rightwingers?
redshirt
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Agreed. To be clear on my previous post, I don’t think Israel got much out of the Iran deal. But it got something.
The Iran deal will make a lot of American businesses a lot of money. Moderate Iran will be empowered by the economic impact of these contacts with the West. Eventually I hope, Iran will rejoin the world community as a responsible and trusted member of the UN.
I think it’s only a matter of time. The Iranian people want it. The Iranian leadership is leaning towards it. The old guard is old and dying.
boatboy_srq
@Mnemosyne: NeitherHenry Tudor (nor any of the Yorkists or Lancastrians, nor Cromwell, nor Charles II) were not English/British/whatever. There has been plenty of civil war and revolution, but it was all domestic. The last foreign powers to entertain plans to take the island were Spain (1588), France (1805) and Germany (1941): all repulsed. The last successful invaders were the Normans (and William I did have a claim to the throne): before them were the Danes, and the Angle/Saxon/Jute settlement of the Southeast. I gather some Brexit nuts are comparing EU citizens’ settlement in the UK to the “barbarian invasions” of the 600s.
hovercraft
@efgoldman:
That’s so wrong. I have a visual of him sitting on the can yelling. I need brain bleach. Thanks.
maya
@redshirt:
They do use the same bank – the Bank of Our Hard Earned Taxes.
aside: I’ve always been amused at that expression -hard earned taxes – historically, that expression goes way back. Thomas Paine may have even used it in Common Sense. Does anyone pay easy earned taxes?
Villago Delenda Est
@redshirt: Americans are eager to do the bidding of Daesh; why should Americans not be eager to do the bidding of Putin?
Omnes Omnibus
@boatboy_srq: And in Stephen/Matilda, Henry II/ his sons, John/the barons, Richard II/Henry IV and I am sure I missed violent domestic attempt at a transfer of power from before the War of the Roses.
Villago Delenda Est
@boatboy_srq: You’re leaving out the Dutch Invasion of 1689, aka “The Glorious Revolution”.
hovercraft
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Any defeat for Bibi is a victory, I dislike him as much as I dislike/despise McCain. Every prediction these two warmongers have made about doom and gloom has been wrong. They were two of the biggest proponents of the Iraq debacle that is still reverberating today.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@hovercraft: I heard the first few minutes of his speech tonight. I thought, OMG, this is the same speech he’s given a zillion times over the last several months.
Nothing like missing an opportunity because he’s apparently unwilling to change his approach in the face of changed circumstances.
:-/
(I didn’t hear the whole thing.)
Unless he changes his language soon, I don’t think he should be given a speaking spot at the convention, let alone during prime time. We’ve heard it all a million times before. (Of course, it’s not up to me. ;-)
I think he’s smart enough to get off the “corrupt campaign finance system™” and “millionaires and billionaires™” and “I don’t believe that she is qualified if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds” and so forth rhetorical bus, but I’m beginning to wonder…
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Bibi recently popped up on my FB page, expressing sympathy for Orlando and then started in on how that was like Israel every day. Mr. Sympathy.
Villago Delenda Est
@debbie: Right. Sure. Bibi. You putz.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: It was mentioned above. I’d argue that it was effectively internal.
hovercraft
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Agreed. Like Clint Eastwood no one would know what he will do till he’s on stage.
Scary.
patroclus
@Villago Delenda Est: You’re leaving out the American invasion in 1943-44 (“WWII”).
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@debbie: Wow.
The man is shameless, isn’t he?
Cheers,
Scott.
Cat48
: @Adam L Silverman:
No,the diplomats want regime change too. Not happening.
maya
@patroclus:
LOL!
In 1965, while in the military on a Med Cruise, (not, Club Med) I spent a few days in Portsmouth, England. Being in uniform in one of the pubs, a woman, in her late 30’s, told me that she fondly remembered US troops in England in the pre -DDay invasion years. She probably was a teenager then. The movie Yanks was a pretty good telling of that invasion you speak of..
Omnes Omnibus
@maya: Years later, in Germany, one of my last jobs in the army involved a bunch be friendly with the locals efforts. On the German side, the head of the local German-American Club had been a young mother and junior officer’s wife at the end of WWII. Americans could do no wrong in her eyes; they had given her powdered milk and other food with no strings attached at the end of the war. Her kids lived and her husband came home and started working for the Americans in clearing up rubble and stuff. He ended up with a successful construction company.
Adam L Silverman
@mike in dc: I almost put this up with the post, but decided it wasn’t appropriate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKvvOFIHs4k
Adam L Silverman
@boatboy_srq: What are you going to do with the Texans? Its a crime against humanity to make the Mexicans take them and I’m not sure anyone in the rest of the US would accept them for resettlement.//
Adam L Silverman
@Cat48: Our official policy is regime change in Syria. In this specific case, mid-level career foreign service officers that want to use military power to stop Syrian government forces’ attacks on Syrian civilians. That’s not the same thing as calling for using military force to remove Assad.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Turn your head at an angle and squint. Does that change things?
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, it gives me a crick in my neck and a slight headache.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: That’s what I figured.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: The one time I visited the UK, at one point I took an extended ride on a tour bus, and I started dozing off on the bus as it drove along the highway. From my seat I had a pretty good view out the windshield, and every time I woke up, I would have a few seconds of sheer terror thinking we were in the oncoming lane and about to have a head-on collision with the car in front of us.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: When my folks came to visit me in Scotland, my dad white knuckled it all over the highlands as we drove on B and C roads that were very narrow with little stone walls just a few inches from the side of the road. He knew we were on the correct side of the road and that we were, indeed, on the road, but the visual input was messing with his processor.
Annamal
@maya: Sadly WW2 US troops didn’t do so well in New Zealand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Manners_Street
A desegregated military apparently disagreed with a few of them
Robert Sneddon
@boatboy_srq: “Britain for the British! Angles and Saxons go home!”
sherparick
@Feathers: Canada. We are all going to move to Canada I expect since Justin Trudeau appears to be running the only civilized Government in the English/French speaking world.
sherparick
Reading the news yesterday, I found it extremely sad as Ms. Cox appears to have been a wonderful person as well as talented politician. A humanist and a humanitarian, she appears to have deeply touched all who knew her in her brief life, for example Lord Kinnock’s reaction, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36556925.
Miss Bianca
@Roger Moore: Wandering in late as always to this thread, but I’m glad to note that Charles Pinckney was responsible for something progressive – as I recall, he was the most insistent on the point of the nascent federal government being unable to do anything to control or outlaw slavery.
Miss Bianca
@sherparick: Yes, that’s the part I’m afraid will get lost in the weeds. A wonderful person all round. I find I don’t really give much of a shit what effect her death might have on the Brexit vote – or the stock market speculation surrounding it – I’m flashing back to Gabby Giffords’s attack and I find myself grieving that another goddamn RWNJ has decided that assassinating a woman politician somehow makes some sort of point for him.