Gorgeous moon this morning peeking out between the clouds:
I was only outside for a few minutes to take a couple of photos and am now inside scratching multiple mosquito bites. Damn! All the rain we’ve been having brought on a bumper crop of the blood suckers.
From the Twitters, a high-five gone terribly awry:
Worst high 5 of all time…? pic.twitter.com/XyIE5oYt7H
— Dan Hewitt (@danhewittsky) June 9, 2017
Still, great night for Corbyn, despite the inadvertent boobage. Looks like high turnout from younger voters made the difference. We need us some of that on this side of the pond.
The Guardian live blog reports that May won’t resign. Hmm.
On the other bank of De Nile, Uday. I don’t recommend clicking the video; it’s too early to subject yourself to that smarmy little shitweasel. I’m posting the tweet to highlight the breathtaking arrogance of, “Now that this is all passed…”
.@DonaldJTrumpJr: "Now that this is all passed…@POTUS can go back to doing the things he said he was going to do for the American people." pic.twitter.com/fcDtII8iQ1
— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 9, 2017
Oh, it’s just getting started, Uday.
Also, I read that if Twitler doesn’t tweet by 6:13 AM Eastern time today, it will be the longest he’s gone without tweeting since he launched his campaign. My guess is he breaks the record, is hog-tied by attorneys.
Anyhoo, open thread for the lunatics.
EBT
He has to be howling mad.
remima
I can’t sleep here either and finally came inside from looking at the moon because of the damn mosquitos, so I’m happy to see this post. (Thanks Betty!)
I’ve been following the UK election just hoping to see the austerians eat dirt. I’m kinda (not really) surprised that T May now has”no intention of resigning” despite previous promises. Trumpism may be contagious.
Mary G
I have 4:37 Eastern time in a pool, which is twenty minutes from now. His lawyer seems to be worth his pay. Probably all the good ones turned him down.
Republicans have to be sweating the British election, I think. Buyer’s remorse is a real thing.
Jeff
My theory is he hasn’t chewed through the leather restraints yet.
Betty Cracker
@Mary G: It’s kind of astonishing, really — despite establishing what will undoubtedly go down in history as the most corrupt, incompetent and lawless administration in US history (in less than six months!), Trump would be getting away with it pretty much scott-free if he could just keep his big fat mouth shut. But he can’t.
Anne Laurie
How’s your bug-bitten thumb, Betty?
Betty Cracker
@Anne Laurie: Definitely on the mend, thanks for asking! The swelling is mostly gone, and now there’s just a weird lump that doesn’t even hurt. I’m pretty sure it was a spider that got me. I should definitely start to develop super powers any day now, with all these attacks from venomous creatures. :)
J R in WV
Don’t bite anyone you love, you may be poisonous yourself now!
That’s a routine super power from being bitten and living through it. So bite a local Republican to try it out.
Mustang Bobby
@Jeff: The best way to stop him from tweeting would be with handcuffs, secured behind the back. Wait, have they come up with voice-activated Twitter yet?
Betty Cracker
Christ Jesus, the UK election results have activated every “Bernie woulda won!” nitwit on Twitter.
ETA: [Forrest Gump voice] It’s this whole other country.
fuckwit
May you live in interesting times.
Tony J
Less than two hours sleep and a full day of work ahead but somehow I’m still feeling incredibly chipper. Isn’t it amazing what a diet of late-night Tory tears can do for the constitution?
May can’t stay, not after this shit-show. But the Tories can’t hold another leadership election this close to the start of Brexit negotiations, not without taking a deep dive into a civil-war between the various factions that make up their Party. It’s delicious, really. A weak and humiliated PM leading a Party that blames her for knee-capping them, in hock up to her eyeballs to the Hard Brexit wing of the Party and 10 demanding Ulstermen, with a resurgent Opposition that now has proof that Corbyn’s policies are attractive across the country, and especially to the Young Voters who emerged from the swirling mists of Unicornland to give the Tories a kicking in seat after seat.
My completely unproven prognostication. The negotiations go nowhere, derisory laughter from across the Channel further weakens May’s position. She gets shived in the back and the next Tory leader has no choice but to hold another Election later in the year. The Tory aura of invincibility is gone, tactical voting gets turbo-charged and by November there’s a new Government with Corbyn in Number 10.
Hopefully.
Betty Cracker
@Tony J: From your keyboard to the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s al dente orecchiette!
Van Buren
Pretty soon the Media will be telling us that since he has stopped twitting, he’s become presidential. The long awaited pivot will have arrived.
Unknown known
Very satisfying result here in the UK. Also a victory for the UK media rules that give the leaders unfiltered exposure how the electorate (in the form of hard hitting interviews tRyan to force them off their talking points, with varying degrees of success). Congrats to Corbyn, who was largely successful in filing off the corners from his most controversial sharp corners (IRA sympathies, unilateral nuclear disarmament), and running a legitimate left wing campaign. He has been on a very steep learning cuve since he came to power, but to his credit seems to be absorbing the lessons, and he has ended up being the first pol to have any success in holding the Tories’ feet to the fire for their vicious austerity.
May helped out by being a totally inept campaigner, but given their starting advantages (including a very complaint media, who treated Corby from day 1 as an utterly incompetent folly), you have to take it.
(And no, the Republicans had very little to do with any of it. Trump us regarded as a punchline over here, but there is very little awareness of American domestic politics here. There is a chain called “Kansas Fried Chicken”, because to Brits, Kansas and Kentucky are as easily interchangeable as Zambua and Zimbabwe are to Americans. That is a pretty good illustration of how well the US is understood here.
Mary G
@Tony J: Congratulations! Thank you also for the clear explanations despite the troll fight. Very exciting to see the 72% turnout by the
sm*t cl*de
@Tony J:
Please don’t throw us in the Boris-Johnson patch!
TenguPhule
@Tony J: Its a beautiful night.
raven
I have a blue light treatment today. Ah hour with an acid cream and then 17 minutes under the face lamp. I’ve done it before and it’s not bad but it does burn the shit out of you. I got to thinking that I didn’t want to do it on Friday because you have to stay out of the sun for a couple of days. When I called them and tried to change to early next week I learned why I set it up for a Friday. It’s the only day they do it!
Singular
@Tony J: I woke up expecting the worst, as has happened every single fucking time recently (Brexit was the most heinous). I’ll have a smile on my face all day, as Theresa May is FINALLY stripped of her completely undeserved reputation for competence.
It just hurts though, to think what Corbyn might have achieved had his own party not systematically sabotaged him for over a year, with the assistance of a “there is a club…” media. If Labour’s bigger name figures, Sadiq Khan, Yvette Cooper, Owen Smith, Chuka Umunna, Margaret Becket, the bloody Millibands had backed him instead of shitting the bed over their own careers. That disgusting warmonger Hillary Benn.
Anyway, if early reports are even in the ballpark about youth turnout (~70%), then the Tories might be forced to stop screwing young people over. And that’s something at least.
Unknown known
@Tony J: indeed!
Though it was apparently Davis (official head Brexit honcho) who insisted on the snap election, so he hasn’t made friends there, yet BoJo still seems a favourite for next conservative head. They are officially in shit show land.
TenguPhule
@Unknown known:
That is goddamn hilarious.
ETA: Also Lord Buckethead and Mr. Fishfinger.
Only in Britain.
TenguPhule
@Betty Cracker:
Betty, please do not fool around with this and get it checked if you didn’t before.
TenguPhule
@Singular: Its so good to see a change for the better. Even if its in another country.
JGabriel
@Mustang Bobby:
Yep – any device that takes voice input can be configured to deliver voice input to Twitter. So Trump must be both physically restrained and gagged to keep him off it. Or locked in a room without a device he could Twitter from, like a prison cell.
Applejinx
@Betty Cracker: Let me rephrase that, then, to make it more palatable:
Somebody running aggressively to the left and talking about nationalizing major things that have been ruined by privatization and vowing (convincingly) to bring working governmental support to the people, without shame or caveats, could have won. Not ‘would have’, but let’s say ‘could have’, because they were running against the most appalling person we’ve seen in public life.
The right wing in the UK were already attacking health care for the masses as hard as our Republicans plan to. They had and have a right wing press just as crazed and extreme as ours, or more. They defined neoliberalism as much as we ever have. They were cutting everything, up to and including police. And people hated it, just hated it, and this is what you get: Corbyn ascendant.
Let’s leave my Vermont senator out of it: he’s too old, we can retire him once he’s as gaga as McCain (THAT’LL take a while). We can find someone who actually means to go full-bloodedly Left, and you’ll be surprised how well that works. Kinda need to step outside the lines of discourse permitted during the last election. Hey, let’s nationalize Amtrak! And the post office, and set up postal banking :)
And if you say Amtrak and the Post Office aren’t privatized: fine, then let’s stop ACTING as if they are.
evap
@Tony J: Here’s hoping!
The spousal unit in Ireland (Republic of) just sent me a tweet with the map of Northern Ireland with election results, the country is split exactly in half with (apart from one independent seat) western part 100% Sinn Fein (7 seats) and eastern half 100% DUP (unionist party) and the two smaller parties losing all seats. What it all means I leave to the experts, but it appears NI has become a two party country.
rikyrah
So, did May get enough seats?
Tony J
@Betty Cracker:
Yeah, but those people are dicks. Other than a certain level of dishevelment in the clothing arena and silver in their hair there’s very little to connect the two men. One’s a lifelong Party man who opposed its drift rightwards but stuck it out in the trenches until luck gave him an opportunity to challenge the consensus and make a difference, the other one is a millionaire hijacker who couldn’t even win a Primary against “The Worst Candidate in History”.
JGabriel
@Singular:
Perhaps, but I suspect the Tories will wait on that till they’ve lost their plurality.
cosima
Without delving into results discussion, here’s the turnout from our bit of Scotland:
A total of 147,104 votes were cast from an eligible electorate of 218,609, representing a turnout of 67.3%
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the US could get to that level of voting? Nearly 70%. Sad that we have set the bar so low, and that GOTV is the never-ending battle. I’ve heard it all, having spent hundreds of hours canvassing & registering voters (in the US, can’t do it here), so yes, I’m aware of how difficult it is.
Applejinx
@Unknown known:
May ate her own dog food. This is fatal. If you’re gonna do that right wing austerity-economics thing, you have to be ‘austerity for thee and not for me’, and exempt a bunch of people besides just your own stockbrokers: most notably, you can’t attempt to make your police and military ‘lean and efficient and fighting each other so they aspire to peak performance’. Because it’s an insane fantasy out of Ayn Rand, and doesn’t work.
You have to set up a cushy socialized system FOR your insiders and your police and everything your system structurally depends on, while lying about it and pretending that everybody else must compete for bare survival and it’s for their own good. You absolutely cannot allow yourself to believe it for realsies, and this is what May’s people fatally did. They thought they could apply a lie meant for the plebes, to real life.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah: Only if she manages to work out a Coalition of Chaos.
Tony J
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve spoken to the FSM just this morning, know what he said? Lumpy Finger = Hospital Visit.
Whatever could he mean?
TenguPhule
@Applejinx:
And the fact she couldn’t pretend to be human being when being peddled by a softball media didn’t help her.
I didn’t think anyone could match Trump for not answering a straightforward question until I saw Teresa May’s performance.
2 minutes of nothing indeed.
Applejinx
@Tony J: This is a really bad time to left-bash. Are you a Russian troll? This on the other hand is a really good time to tactfully play nice and play up commonalities, not differences. The narrative now is, ‘Left platforms might be the next big winner’ and it’s… not optimal to fuck with that narrative.
TenguPhule
@Tony J:
Potential complications.
Which is why Betty needs to get herself to a medical professional to get it checked out.
Betty Cracker
@Applejinx: Despite being typecast as a neo-lib Hillbot shill, I’m actually in favor of much of that agenda. I’m just not in the least bit interested in relitigating the goddamn 2016 Democratic Party primary or arguing about counterfactuals.
TenguPhule
@Applejinx:
Stand down Applejinx. He’s a Labor supporter who understandably feels a bit insulted to have Corbyn compared to Sanders.
Don’t start flying with the false assumptions.
Betty Cracker
@Tony J & @TenguPhule: My sister-in-law is an ER doc, and she’s keeping an eye on it. It really is healing up! :)
TenguPhule
@Betty Cracker:
Just as long as no white xenomorphs suddenly erupt out from that lump to wreck havoc.
Aimai
@Applejinx: I don’t forget who won the election by three million votes on a progressive platform.
Robert Sneddon
There’s a quick-reaction cartoon I saw on the web somewhere but I’ve lost the link:
A policeman is standing at the door of the Houses of Parliament. A couple of Tory MPs are talking to him, holding large knives.
“You can’t bring them in. Park them over there.” He points to a supine PM May slumped over a bench with several knives sticking out of her back.
Tony J
@Mary G:
The kids are alright, aren’t they. As the voting ended there were lots of reports about students at Keele University being turned away in their hundreds because their voter registrations hadn’t gone through. On the one hand, that’s awful and could have had a major impact on the election there (if it’s in the constituency I think it’s in, hell yes it did. Labour won with a majority of only 30 votes! 21,124 to 21,094). On the other hand, hundreds of students registered to vote, yay! And now they know their vote really does matter and they’re angry they were denied it, double yay!!
Come the next election I can only see the Youth Vote going up, which is not good news for the Tories.
amk
Years of hard right fever seems to be breaking up across the pond. For me, the whites only ukip lost its only seat was the icing.
Tony J
@sm*t cl*de:
I really, really, super-really with butter smeared over the top and dusted with chocolate flakes hope that Boris emerges as the Tory leader and has to hold another election. His rise to celebrity tracked the return of the Tories to electability, and it would be as poetic as a drunken Irishman at a midnight wake for a drowned puppy if he was leader when they went crashing down to well-earned defeat.
Fingers and toes crossed.
Betty Cracker
@Aimai: True, but she’ll never get credit for it in some quarters. I’m done bashing my head against that wall.
PsiFighter37
Corbyn still has 50+ less seats than May. It figures that Berniebros would see this as a ‘win’, given their affinity for participation ribbons and that kind of shit.
Tony J
@Singular:
The Media campaign against Corbyn was real, completely predictable and isn’t going to go away. The right-wing press have reason now to really go after him, while the ‘moderate’ media face a gut-check moment. Hopefully they’ll wise up and stop fellating the Blairite Old Guard, but I wouldn’t put money on it. Labour will just have to push harder on going around the traditional media to reach the voters directly. Is it fair? Of course not, but it is what it is.
And on the topic of Blairite faux-moderates, one moment that did make me go WTF occurred a couple of days ago when Yvette Cooper, who hasn’t had a good word to say about Corbyn since he trounced her in the leadership election last year, emerged from the dank pit of gripe where all of the pre-Corbyn Labour ex-Ministers have been hiding out since the Election was called and gave an interview in which she was actually fairly polite about Corbyn and very directly wouldn’t rule out serving in a Labour Cabinet under his leadership. It was so out of the blue that my first thought was “What polling has – she – been looking at?”
Now we know.
Pseudonymous Bosch
ETA context: “[I]f Twitler doesn’t tweet by 6:13 AM Eastern time today, it will be the longest he’s gone without tweeting since he launched his campaign. My guess is he breaks the record, is hog-tied by attorneys.”
And at 0610 — https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/873120139222306817
Tony J
@Unknown known:
It’s odd, isn’t it? Biggest party, just about able to form a Coalition Government, but they’re bleeding out with no good options. And to think, eight weeks ago they were looking at the electoral map and imagining 500 seats.
Please proceed now, dipshits.
dogwood
@PsiFighter37:
It’s 50+ fewer seats not 50+ less , but you are absolutely right. If I hadn’t seen the results of the election before reading here, I might have thought Labour had won the majority of seats.
Applejinx
@TenguPhule: ‘stand down’? Oh come on ;)
Tony J
@Applejinx:
Da Comrade, you have me bang to the rights. Remember me from the Troll Convention? I sat behind you at the lecture on “Totally and comically missing the point in one easy sentence”. Red cap? Glasses? False beard? No? You said I smelled like your babushka’s borscht?
Now you remember! Good times.
Betty Cracker
@Pseudonymous Bosch: Twitler busted loose! Good. He’ll may just tweet himself to an impeachment if we can flip the damned House in 2018.
EBT
@dogwood: She was looking to win something like 100 seats up when she called for elections. Being forced into a defencive fight and making the aggressor own goal so hard is kind of a win. Besides now May has to use political capital and acumen to govern, instead of weight of numbers.
Tony J
@Betty Cracker:
Good to hear. But are you sure a slitted eye didn’t emerge on a stalk and hypnotise her into saying that? It’s what happened in that movie. Nuke it. It’s the only way to be sure.
El Caganer
@Pseudonymous Bosch: Bigly! So much winning!
dogwood
@EBT:
I’m well aware of that, but I can still recognize that this isn’t some leftist revolution. May has been humiliated and that’s a good thing. But she still has significantly more seats and Trump is getting a State visit.
p.a.
@Betty Cracker: Wife and Baron moving to D.C. How will this affect America’s Pres-ID-ent?
TWITTER EXONERATION! It’s a floor cleaner, ice cream topping, and leaker!
dogwood
@Betty Cracker:
I remember all the controversy over President Obama’s phone. We were assured it was safe and secure. This asshole has a regular phone, no security measures, and he hands out his number whenever the spirit moves him. Where are all the VSPs now? They say nothing about this.
sm*t cl*de
@Tony J:
That is sheerest poetry in itself. Also, it is mine now.
EBT
@dogwood: Yeah, having to visit with donnie is a fitting punishment for all of this.
Unknown known
@Applejinx: sort of.
May’s first big mistake was her platform, which is absolutely true. She proposed altering the rules which shape what you have to pay for the elder care (it’s far better here than in the States – there are rules, for instance, that if your house is sold to cover costs, it doesn’t have to happen till after your death). That would have made some better off, but hurt others, particularly those with dementia who lived at home for a long time (plus some others). That rapidly became branded a dementia tax, which is a DUMB thing to put yourself in for, when your core constituency is old people. Plus it came over as exceptionally cruel, even by Tory standards. That’s the closest they came to dogfooding, making their base have to live with the same kind of shitiness they inflict on everyone else.
It was such a disaster that she had to announce that they were going to change it, undermined her self-proclaimed USP of competence. She knew how bad that looked, so she repeatedly publicly denied that it was a U-Turn, which may have been true on a technicality, but nobody was really buying that (and even if they did, saying: “Ohhh, hm, what we REALLY meant was, um, we’d do it a bit differently, see…” doesn’t exactly scream competence)
Then, as TenguPhule points out, she was unable to simulate being a functioning human in public (she tried going on breakfast television with her husband for a humanizing interview, and it fell flat on its face because she is just not likeable – focus groups saw her as cold but competent – meaning she really REALLY couldn’t afford to take any hits to perceived competence).
She and her handlers decided not to send her to the debate, or some other events (she had Amber Rudd stand in for her), which made some strategic sense on paper – you are the run-away leader of the race, debates are just an opportunity to fuck up, and there’s not a long history of all-leader debates in the UK anyway), but in reality, she had already started looking weaker, and this just reinforced the narrative. The widely quoted closing hit on her from the green party leader (tiny party with 1 seat, but she comes over as super policy smart) was ““I think the first rule of leadership is to show up.”
Their biggest issue, though was that their strategy boiled down to “People like us, and everyone will think Corbyn is a muppet, so all we have to do is not stand on our own genitalia, and a crushing majority is in the bag.” Then it all went south when Corbyn didn’t oblige (he increasingly came across as basically pretty reasonable), and they did a bit of the said self-standing-on,..
Tony J
@dogwood:
Look at last night as a Proof of Concept test.
Could a Party in the throes of reinventing itself as a proper Left Wing movement after decades of centrist tacking fight a surprise General Election campaign in the teeth of withering media distain and attacks from a ruthless, well-funded Governing Party? Could its leader win back millions of lost votes when he was starting with his own approval rating in the toilet and his Party confidently expected to drop below 150 seats in Parliament? In short, could you spot the Party in Government every single acknowledged advantage in a short-form Election campaign fought on the single issue of “Who is a more credible leader?” and still expect the main Opposition Party to prosper, never mind survive?
We got the answers last night and they were overwhelmingly positive. Corbyn’s Labour overturned a 20 point Tory lead to increase its vote share, won seats in ‘safe’ Tory constituencies, galvanised millions of old and new voters to turn out for them and, most importantly, denied the Tories a majority in an Election they were expected not to win, but to absolutely stroll.
This is just the start of things. Last night Labour made itself an electable alternative to a crippled and leaderless Tory Party that simply can’t govern with the razor thin majority an alliance with the DUP would give it. When Britain inevitably goes back to the polls later this year (probably) it would only take a few percentage points of swing and 100 seats could easily change hands.
TLDR – Can this bird fly? Yup. She’s flies.
Tony J
@TenguPhule:
Last night got a bit heated, didn’t it? Nice to see you survived the Second Battle of Britain with Morzer and Patroculus.
James E Powell
@Betty Cracker:
I wouldn’t say scot-free but he is getting away with it and the Republicans are getting away with it. There is wailing and gnashing of teeth but not much more. The Republicans’ program to erase the 20th century rolls on.
MJS
Okay, which one of you resident pessimists is actually Donnie Jr.? “Now that this is all passed” could have been written by any number of the “Trump has not been impeached and removed from office 3 weeks after the investigation started in earnest. All is lost” brigade.
Cheryl Rofer
Good morning, everyone!
This
is interesting in contrast to this
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
…I think he means the opposite of what he said he’d do, because that’s what Trump is doing.
Cheryl Rofer
I was hoping that the photo of the cover whould show up, but you get the idea.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Jesus fucking Christ, Trump’s not even fit to lead a High School chess club he’s such a twat. What is so wrong with this country that people think this kind of childish, petty, no self control behavior is anything like “leadership”?
H.E.Wolf
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The current President is a disgusting person. I would respectfully ask that gendered slurs be avoided when describing him, as it furthers the implicit identification of female qualities with bad/negative qualities.
No One You Know
@H.E.Wolf: Cosign!
Origuy
@evap: The thing about Northern Ireland is that the Sinn Fein members won’t take their seats in Parliament. They never do, as it requires taking an oath to the Queen.
stinger
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: “passed”? Rich kid’s education is SAD.
TenguPhule
@Tony J: Thanks. Cheers to you and here’s to hoping the Tories take an even worse pounding next time with Boris at the helm to go down with the sinking ship!