Here are some of the advocates that Corcoran names who died recently, with a link to info about each:
Kate Hendricks Thomas, April 5, 2022. Jennifer Kepner, October 18, 2017. Staff Sergeant Wesley Black. Lauren Price, founder of Veteran Warriors, March 30, 2021. Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson, dead at 39 (here’s his daughter Brielle, looks to be 9-10 years old, advocating for the bill).
All of these veterans worked with burn pits, essentially garbage dumps where trash was burned. The issue with the bill was a small technical issue that Jon Tester tried to fix immediately, but was blocked by Pat Toomey, and then the rest of the caucus (with a few exceptions) went along.
As far as I can tell, the deal was blocked because Republicans threw a hissy fit over the reconciliation deal that Prime Minister Manchin announced yesterday.
(Here’s a link to Corcoran’s whole tweet thread.)
Baud
Anyone who responds by saying “Congress” is the problem is part of the problem.
p.a.
When they show you time after time
whowhat they are, believe them, America.Thanks to the lazy and/or corrupt MSM, this just gets lost in translation.
Baud
My current guess is that this is petulant delaying tactic, so the bill will pass and the GOP won’t be held accountable. Still….
Betty
They are just horrible human beings. With any luck, Toomey will soon be replaced by Fetterman.
Soprano2
I think they picked the wrong bill to throw their hissy fit about. What obnoxious assholes Republicans are.
Dangerman
Hold on, Democrats can use reconciliation, too?! The nerve!!
Betty Cracker
Different issue, but I saw some speculation on Twitter that Manchin might have pulled one over on McConnell:
So maybe PM Manchin used his powers for good instead of evil this time.
Soprano2
@Betty Cracker: My very first thought when I heard about this was that they could just reverse course after the CHIPS bill passed, so McConnell didn’t actually get anything!
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I could actually see Manchin being upset at McConnell’s attempted gamesmanship. Manchin didn’t like tying infrastructure to the BBB either, so in this one instance, he would be acting consistently.
West of the Cascades
This seems unusually stupid for Republicans because the attack ads practically write themselves.
Tony G
@West of the Cascades: A lot of the Republican base don’t give a damn about veterans either. These horrible politicians keep getting re-elected because their constituents are horrible too.
Belafon
Can you provide a link to the tweets?
jnfr
I’ll trust Manchin to do the right thing only once I see the bill fully passed and in place. Republicans you can always trust to be assholes.
jonas
If Democrats could run the media the way Republicans do, this is all anyone would be talking about for the next week. But since we don’t command anything like the Fox-talkradio-Sinclair propaganda ecosystem, to say nothing of the MSM, a few people tweet about it and then it goes down the memory hole while everyone else jumps on some verbal gaffe Biden made at a news conference or something because every GOP Congressional aide and Fox news producer spent the morning coordinating on it. By noon, your crazy MAGAt uncle has already posted a Facebook rant about it and on it goes. Even most veterans, I wager, aside from the ones who have been campaigning for this, will never hear about it.
Also, fuck Pat Toomey with every rusty implement imaginable.
Belafon
@Belafon: Never mind.
The Moar You Know
@West of the Cascades: There will be no attack ads. Dems consistently only do that to each other in primaries.
Also, the GOP party line towards vets who have been injured/maimed/died/sickened for their country is “they knew what they signed up for” so expect no shame from that half of this fucked up country.
jonas
But of course the current recruitment problems facing the armed forces are because they’re too “woke”.
lowtechcyclist
@The Moar You Know:
So why isn’t the DSCC creating those ads and getting them out there? Getting Dem Senators elected is their job, hell, their reason for existence.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap between people who never served and those who vote against minimum wage increases, as they never worked for the minimum wage in their lives.
sixthdoctor
Daily Beast had a funny People’s Front of Judea vs. Judean People’s Front story of two right wing convoys slapfighting: https://www.thedailybeast.com/police-called-as-rival-right-wing-convoy-groups-duke-it-out-in-dc?ref=home
insert clever nickname here mistermix
@Belafon: I added a link to the tweets to the post.
Cameron
If Manchin’s going to lie, better he lie to Republicans.
schrodingers_cat
Whenever Ds have a good day, the ends of the horseshoe start whining.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: Ugh.
kindness
Republicans are pissed but isn’t that their normal state? Republicans admitted they were pissed, blocking a previously bill passed by 84-14, because Democrats came together and will pass a (better than expected) Reconciliation bill thus breaking Republicans #1 rule when they are a minority party. That is Democrats will celebrate NO victories under our watch.
Suck it Republicans.
Barbara
@sixthdoctor: That might explain why the police presence in the area around my office seemed a lot higher than usual this morning.
Feckless
Republicans vote against the troops.
Democrats never mention this fact ever
Rinse and repeat.
Lyrebird
@schrodingers_cat: 100% agree with you there!
Not going to click. Those horshoe enders will ruin my appetite.
Wanted to also say I really enjoyed seeing some of your recent artwork! I am usually too late to the threads to comment.
Baud
I’ll never understand the mindset that causes someone to immediately attack Dem messaging the day after the Republicans do something awful.
Tony Jay
Ah, an innocent open thread. Have some rant.
Please scroll past if large blocks of text offend you.
A LETTER FROM BREXITANIA
“The calls were coming from inside the Party…”
Every now and again, when the black dog starts howling and reruns of 70’s UK TV cop shows just aren’t cutting it anymore, I find myself propped up here at the Juice Bar with an open bottle of single malt bile, glass in hand, spreading the latest news about Tory mendacity to anyone who’ll listen. Not because anyone resident in your Temporarily Autonomous Colonies of Vespuccia necessarily needs to know about the political churn taking place across the ocean, or to remind you good people that it’s not just the TACV suffering from a bitter legacy of conservative greed battening upon the nation’s leg and doing death-rolls whenever we try to swim for shore. I do it because it makes me feel a bit better when I can express my anger and disgust in endlessly scrolling walls of bitter humour. It’s a little like the Vietnam Memorial or a prenup with Elon Musk, in that the subject matter needs room to get the true scale of the mistake across. What I don’t tend to do so much is emote about the state of the NuNew Labour Party and its slow, self-inflicted death as a progressive force, because, well, that’s like reading the version of Lord of the Rings where Denethor succeeded in burning Faramir and Aragorn ended up as a head on a spike over the door of The Prancing Pony. It’s depressing and hard to find even the blackest humour in it.
Sometimes, however, you just have to vent.
Back in the dark days of 2019, when Britain was still technically inside the EU, Donald Trump was still terrorising inside the White House, and the then Labour Party leader Jeremy ‘British History’s Greatest Monster Ever’ Corbyn was still roaming the land astride a hell-spawned Warg, shamelessly expressing the violence inherent in the system by salting fields, burning crops and befuddling herds of cattle with his promises of wealth redistribution, infrastructure investment and fair taxation (the bastard! – Ed), Labour was the first major political party in the UK to be placed under investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
The EHRC is an independent (though Government funded and headed by Government appointees) group established by Labour in 2007 to act as the last word in cases where people felt they had been discriminated against on the grounds of race, religion, gender, etc. The investigation itself was sparked by claims made by the Campaign Against Antisemitism over Labour’s handling of a small number of antisemitism complaints and on behalf of a number of Labour Party staffers who made accusations of bullying and top-down interference in a BBC Panorama documentary produced by notorious Islamophobe John Ware.
After the 2019 Election, but before the EHRC’s final report came out, an additional Labour Party report was put together by staff seconded from the UNITE Union that used official Labour Party documentation, interviews, and records of private WhatsApp group conversations to make the case that, far from it being a matter of evil Leftist antisemites polluting the Party with their Jew-Hate and then being cynically protected by a secretly antisemitic Leader, the whole issue of antisemitism in the Labour Party was being deliberately overblown to use as a weapon by the Labour Party’s Right or Blairite wing, which had always been maniacally determined to undermine a Leader they hated on nakedly ideological grounds, even if that meant smearing their own Party as a racist cesspit and thus enabling a Tory Government.
This report was supposed to be given to the EHRC as an annex to the Labour Party’s main evidentiary submission but, given the speed with which it was produced and the accusations it was levelling at very senior members of the Labour Party’s internal bureaucracy and Parliamentary Party, the party’s lawyers advised that it should be driven to an undisclosed location, tossed out of the back of a private jet, and never spoken of again. Inevitably, it was leaked to journalists, which set off a firestorm of internal recriminations that saw various legal cases being filed against the Party by the shitbags people whose incriminating messages had been published.
Following his election as Labour leader in the wake of Corbyn’s resignation, the strung together assemblage of cheap plastic dog-whistles known as Sir Kier Starmer moved quickly to install a new Internal Security Commissar General Secretary of the Party (David ‘no members, no problem’ Evans), who immediately issued a summary diktat threatening suspension and expulsion for any Party member who dared to so much as think about maybe mentioning the issue. After a lot of dithering and attempts to simply ‘move on’, Starmer was forced to task Martin Forde, an eminent Queen’s Council, with investigating the source, contents and accuracy of the leaked report. It was supposed to come out in 2020 but had been delayed for years, partly because Forde needed more time to fully investigate the backstory, partly because of the existing legal proceedings, partly because the slithering invertebrates currently running Labour were waiting for the whole issue to get memory holed, and partly because from the day his name was put into the frame by Starmer, Forde was bombarded with threats of legal action by senior Labour figures who didn’t want their dirty little secrets put on display where any old peon could judge them.
Pause. Sip some fruit juice. Breathe.
Now, it would appear that the cosmic level geniuses at the top of NuNew Labour were rather unhappy with the meat of Forde’s eventual conclusions, but they’d run out of excuses for keeping the report back and now had a real turtlehead of a problem. It was absolutely, definitely, going to have to come out, but when? I like to think that at this point a staffer cum fluffer using the executive toilet in Starmer’s office discovered a 2003 issue of Aeroflot’s inflight magazine (which had been serving as packaging in a box of quite lovely Burgundian reds Peter Mandelson once brought back from a Davos conference) and read, with mounting excitement, an article by noted Russian political theorist Igor Abrejzaszelya about how ‘the savvy politician’ would always use periods of intense political drama to bury bad news.
Lightbulb!
So, the decision was made to approve the publication of Forde’s Report while the Tory Party is publicly immolating itself on a post-Flobby pyre of vapid vanity and the nation’s political media are fixated on the Stones v Beatles level clash between (checks notes) Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss (Really? Fucking hell. – Ed) for Flobalob’s not-quite vacant throne. They evidently hoped they could rush it out the door with a blanket over its head, skate across a floor greased with entirely deceitful briefings to friendly stenographers (so much choice!), downplay and lie about its findings, and then bury the whole thing in an unmarked grave behind a burnt-out diner in the middle of an abandoned industrial park in Northamptonshire.
They sooooo smart, these guys. It’s amazing they can fit their big old cerebellums through normal people’s doorframes. Nothing could possibly go wrong, except, while the UK’s terrible, terrible News Media were more than happy to play along, they weren’t the only people who’d be reading it.
Having seen Forde’s findings, I’m hardly surprised NuNew Labour’s towering intellects have done their best to Mueller them. Well, I am surprised, but not about that. I’m surprised in a “I really did not expect him to be allowed to say that” way. And just to avoid the appearance of bias (because I am incredibly biased where this issue is concerned) here’s what Elliot Chappell, the Editor of the very, very middle-of-the-road Labour List website says are (some of) Forde’s main takeaways.
Phew. I don’t smoke anymore, but… Jesus Christ. And those are only a few of the rockets contained in the Report. They don’t even touch on Forde’s other major findings, like how decades of Blairite-only recruitment for staffing positions at Labour HQ created a toxic and hostile ‘monoculture’ that rejected the legitimacy of any other ideological grouping or democratic authority than their own. Or how the deliberate attempt to fix the 2015 and 2016 leadership elections (which they’ve always lied about) by scouring social media looking for comments or links they could use to bulk-ban ‘trots’ (i.e. Trotskyites) included the ringing of bells and cheering in the offices of Labour HQ’s disciplinary unit whenever a ‘trot hunting’ expedition ended in a successful suspension or expulsion of anyone they suspected might vote for Corbyn as leader. Or the flashing red DANGER alert Forde includes about how the recruitment and disciplinary systems are still being exploited by stalwarts of this London-centric, incestuous ‘monoculture’ to keep the Party machine in their hands and purge both membership rolls and candidate lists of anyone foolish enough to raise their voices in mild disagreement.
In the simplest terms, what happened was that the Blair Years saw the Labour Party turned into a top-down political machine where all of the major decisions were made by the leadership and all the important positions within Labour’s permanent civil-service (which is what Labour HQ is) were held by Blair loyalists. Recruitment and progression through the Party machinery was often reliant more on who you knew or were related to than ability, and over the decades the recruitment and advancement of the ‘right kind of person’ with the right name and social background became self-perpetuating. When the Party membership were, for the first time in 30+ years offered a leadership candidate who rejected the creed of Blairite orthodoxy in favour of actual democratic socialism and opposition to the post-Thatcherite consensus, they jumped at it. This led to a collapse of the system, as the senior figures at Labour HQ and the bulk of the Parliamentary Party (also selected and promoted on the same, orthodox basis) simply refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Corbyn’s authority.
It wasn’t his place, but he came in and wrecked the place, and it wasn’t his place.
In his Labour List piece Chappell makes the point that, for all its frequently brutal dismantling of the favourite myths the Labour Right has erected to shield itself from responsibility, Forde’s Report is not going to draw a line under the destructive factionalism that has hobbled Labour for a decade, because, while the Report is considerably fairer and more damning than many on the Left of the Party expected, Forde’s decision to slather many of his findings with a mile thick layer of ‘Both Sides’ mucus has blunted their effect and allowed the people who come in for the vast majority of well-deserved blame to claim, dishonestly as ever, that it actually validates their bullshit arguments.
Supporters of the previous leadership, Chappell says, are (rightly – IMHO) furious that “the effect of finding both sides equally culpable in factional war is to make an equivalence between an elected leader of the party and the unelected staff trying to undermine him”. Which is a very fair point and what jumped out at me as I sat reading it with my mouth hanging open, but I don’t think goes nearly far enough in spelling out exactly what Forde shows was happening between 2016 and 2019 and the disconnect between that and his inferences as to cause and effect. The elected leadership of a Party and the membership that elected him aren’t a ‘faction’ within a Party, they are the Party. The only ‘faction’ is the unelected bureaucracy determined to frustrate, smear and replace a leader they don’t like by any underhanded means necessary, even if that means working with the Tory Party and its allies.
That’s not factionalism. That’s sabotage.
Even while most of his report is made up of page after page of examples of the Labour Right and its loyalists waging a multi-front war on the resurgent Left and the elected Leader, Forde really does go out of his way to try and imply that there was some kind of widely agreed but temporarily unbalanced division of decision-making authority in effect between unelected Party bureaucrats and a Leader with not one but two landslide electoral mandates in his pocket, and when these bureaucrats, their allies in the Parliamentary Party and the temporarily unified national Media establishment seized on antisemitism “as a way to attack Jeremy Corbyn”, and defenders of Corbyn called it out “as an attack on the leader and his faction”, the only possible conclusion was that ‘Both Sides’ were guilty of “weaponising the issue and failing to recognise the seriousness of antisemitism”.
Clearly, that’s bullshit. If someone picks up a gun and shoots me with it, and I accuse them of wanting to kill me, we are not both equally culpable for failing to recognise the seriousness of gun crime, so if someone accuses me of being an antisemite to attack my character, and I call them out on it, we are not both equally culpable for failing to recognise the seriousness of antisemitism. How the fuck do you use false accusations thrown at you as a ‘factional weapon’, anyway?
“Oi! Teacher! You’re a kiddie-fiddler!”
“What? How dare you!”
“You’re a kiddie-fiddler and you like to fiddle with kids, you shouldn’t be allowed near a school!”
“You’re a bloody liar! Are you trying to get me sacked?”
“Hey! You two! Put those factional weapons down and start recognising the seriousness of paedophilia.”
See? Both Sides.
Forde’s false equivalence is a major failure of his report, and his attempt to pull a bait and switch by pretending that “Denying Corbyn is an antisemite/protector of antisemites” = “Denying that there were any instances of antisemitism in the Labour Party” is just daft, and it permeates the rest of the report like a mislaid blue cheese. Constantly repeating how sure he feels that the anti-Corbyn staffers and officials he interviewed had only wreaked their havoc “in good faith” and with “the best of intentions”, (before going onto private WhatsApp groups to backslap about it) is bad enough, but speculating (yes, he does specify that he’s only speculating) that staff and officials from the Leader’s Office might have had their own private WhatsApp groups where they might have been equally as disgusting and factional, though he hasn’t seen any evidence that they did, but they might have, isn’t by itself evidence of anything more than a clear desire on Forde’s part not to rock the boat too much.
But the boat, she be sinking.
Maybe Forde allowed the opinions of certain Party bigwigs, the constant threat of legal action by individuals on the Labour Right and pressure from the British version of AIPAC and the ADL to overlay a kind of convoluted “Blaming one side will only exacerbate the factionalism” editorial policy on the text, because the Both Sides gloss really doesn’t mix well with the meat of his findings. I don’t know what was in his heart, but we do know for sure that draft copies of the report were auto-sent to the e-mail address of a PR firm whose top executives are a good friend of Alastair Campbell (Blair’s former Comms Chief and attack dog) and a former political advisor to Tory PM John Major, so there’s that to ponder.
Anyway, it’s no surprise that the people who, created, exploited and benefitted from the manufactured Antisemitism Panic of 2017/2020 have dived on Forde’s ‘both sides’ framing like holidaying Goths on the last tube of Factor 50, using it to declare that there’s nothing to see here and the only adult thing to do is to admit that mistakes were made (by those dirty Lefties) and move on (without the dirty Lefties), but it’s never surprising when those people lie and smear and try to dodge responsibility for their awful actions. That’s, like, literally all they ever do.
The entire section on those complaints of bullying and overt pressure by the Leader’s Office which formed the basis of the EHRC’s investigation will make painful reading for the Labour Right, which is why they (and their friends in the Press, especially the Guardian, who had daily Breaking News alerts on the topic throughout 2018/19) have said jack shit all about them. You can read it yourself, but Forde basically says that in the only cases the EHRC considered that have actual paper trails and correspondence logs he could audit (i.e. that aren’t based entirely on oral claims made by anti-Corbyn staffers) the storyline about Corbyn’s office pressurising the complaints team to protect antisemites is utter bullshit. It was complaints staff at Labour HQ who asked for, even demanded, the involvement of the Leader’s office, and what involvement they did have was strictly limited, with people sometimes overly mindful of the distance there was supposed to be and interested mostly in ensuring that members would only be expelled for actual antisemitic comments and not political disagreements about Israel’s occupation of Palestine. He gives due (I say entirely undue) weight to the insistence of the these Labour HQ staff (the same people, operating in the same culture, that he earlier calls out as obsessed with forcing left wingers out of the Party) that there definitely was a lot of pressure and bullying and interference… only it took place entirely offline and you’ll just have to take their word for it.
I do not. I simply do not and will not take their word for it. I won’t give them that, because they’ve been proven in both Forde’s Report and the Leaked Report not to deserve it. Sir Kier Starmer gave them enough when he overrode his own legal team to shove almost a million pounds of Labour members’ money into their pockets rather than risk them being exposed as liars in court. They can be satisfied with that. They don’t need my approbation on top of it, and they’re not getting it.
The fact of the matter is, and I’d like to underline this for emphasis, an eminent QC with all of the evidence at his disposal is quite unequivocal in his assessment that not only did the anti-Left mutineers in Labour use antisemitism as a weapon to delegitimise a leader they opposed, but that both the BBC Panorama documentary that formed the basis for the claims of bullying and intimidation that the EHRC investigated and the British Media’s coverage of that documentary and the EHRC’s investigation into it, were “entirely misleading” in the claims they made.
Corbyn had the Labour whip removed from him for saying exactly this. I wonder when Starmer is going to apologise and return it to him?
Seriously. The former leader of the Labour Party has spent most of the last two years as an Independent because Starmer grossly violated the Party’s already dangerously partisan disciplinary system to overrule the body that decides on punishments and ban him from being a Labour MP, claiming that he had to do it because the former leader’s 2020 statement that the antisemitism issue was “dramatically overstated for political reasons” was an attack on the legitimacy of the EHRC report, even though the EHRC Report itself defined exactly that kind of comment as perfectly cromulent speech protected by Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
Forde’s Report, which Starmer himself commissioned, says that Corbyn was 100% right in what he said. It’s there in black and white. There never were any grounds for taking the whip away, it should never have happened, and Starmer should immediately restore it to him.
But he won’t. Because he’s an entirely artificial amalgamation of half melted Action Man parts (the British G.I. Joe – Ed) who doesn’t dare turn his head to the left unless it’s approved by representatives of The One True Leader and run through half a dozen focus groups stuffed with specially selected ‘former Labour, current Tory, don’t like gays, blacks, or those Woke lot’ target voters. From the moment he won the leadership election by promising Corbyn’s policies without the drama, Starmer has reneged on every single pledge he made to his voters and jumped at every opportunity to present himself as not just the Anti-Corbyn, but as Corbyn’s nemesis. Taking the whip away from his predecessor was basically the act of a bully, a betrayal, cynically designed to signal to the Blairite mutineers that he was their man, and his election was their victory over the horrible old socialist who had dared to win two leadership elections (and almost won a General Election) on a platform based entirely on rejecting the soft-Right, keep the VIPs happy, continuity Thatcherism that Blair epitomised.
Acknowledging that Corbyn was right? That the alliance of convenience between the Labour Right, their co-dependents in the Media, and the extremists of the Jewish Labour Movement, Board of Jewish Deputies and Campaign Against Antisemitism was a horrible ethical and moral mistake that could still break the Party apart? That would be tantamount to a death sentence for Starmer’s political career. He simply couldn’t do it, the people he’s sold his soul to in return for sweet, sweet donations and a future peerage would crush him like an overripe grape, which is why he’s refused to make any voluntary statement on the Report and continues to lie whenever he’s asked questions about it.
(Daisies. Fields of daisies waving in a seaside breeze. Puppies with wet noses. Cold water diving on a hot day. Custard tarts. Pubs with dart boards……… ahhhhh, that’s better.)
Where was I? Oh yes, speaking of having the whip removed, the release of the Forde Report hasn’t happened in isolation. These other, connected, things have also happened and provide a delightful depth of colour to all this virulent Red Tory scarlet.
Last week the clockwork tribune of the Drang nach Rechts tendency masquerading as Labour leader toddled off to Berlin with his minders to play serious nodding politician and inadvertently found himself filming a campaign video that included footage of him looking moody at the Holocaust Memorial. He was immediately squished like Wile E. Coyote between two swinging logs by both the Jewish Voice for Labour (leftwing, barely tolerated by the Blairites, half its management suspended from the Party for being The Wrong Kind of Jew) and the Campaign Against Antisemitism (of whom I have already used applicable bad language) for disrespecting the Memorial by using it as just another propaganda backdrop.
Now, what’s funny is that the odious ‘Dame’ Margaret Hodge, the eternally self-aggrandising Labour MP who notoriously showed the anti-Corbyn faction exactly what they could get away with back in June 2018 by screaming “fucking racist antisemite” into her Party leader’s face on the floor of the House of Commons (a place where an MP can’t be guilty of slander – what a coinkydinky) and then being both lauded for her courage by the Labour Right and paraded as a martyr by the media for possibly (but in the end not) facing disciplinary consequences for it, jumped onto Twitter to accuse the Campaign Against Antisemitism of being a front for throwing partisan accusations of antisemitism at the Labour Party.
As one wag put it, the only way to comprehend the magnitude of this repositioning is to imagine how very fucking weird it would be if someone like, say, Dame Margaret Hodge jumped onto Twitter to accuse, say, the Campaign Against Antisemitism of being a front for throwing partisan accusations of antisemitism at the Labour Party. It’s that weird. It’s a statement that takes hypocrisy by the throat, straps it to the bonnet of a fire-red hot-rod, and tops 100mph as it crashes straight through the guardrails on the edge of Mount Monumental Arrogance and plunges a thousand foot down into the black waters of Lake Get The Fuck Outta Here. That said, what Hodge actually did was to accuse a Jewish watchdog organisation (that she very recently promoted) of being politically opposed to the Labour Party and deliberately misrepresenting an incident involving a Labour leader in order to fabricate an accusation of antisemitism. That’s several degrees of WTF worse than the statement Corbyn made and Starmer exploited to take the whip from him.
In case you’re wondering, no, Dame Margaret hasn’t had the whip taken from her. Of course not, she’s on the Right of the Party, and she knows where all the bodies are buried. Her e-mail account all on its own could probably occupy a team of forensic intelligence specialists for a year as they joined the dots on who funded who and who took the lead on what through 2016-2019. But she did announce, only two days before the release of the Forde Report, that she won’t be standing as an MP in the next election. I wonder if there’s any connection?
Also, too, a few months ago there was a brief report in the Guardian about a court case where Laura Murray, a former top Corbyn staffer and head of the complaints department in the Leader’s Office, sued both the Daily Telegraph ‘newspaper’ and Ian Austin, a former Blairite Labour MP and current Tory Lord (ennobled by Flobalob for services rendered) for a December 2021 article where Austin called her an ‘anti-Jewish racist’ and part of what the article described as the “vile anti-Semitism of [Jeremy] Corbyn’s Labour”. Austin, who the Guardian had treated as an unimpeachable source of truth during the whole Antisemitism Panic and who also, apparently, loves him some bestiality, had to make a grovelling apology to Murray and pay her £40,000 in costs and damages. Here’s the Telegraph apology in full.
“In an article “Rachel Riley deserves every bit of compensation for the hard-Left abuse she’s endured” (23 December 2021) written by Ian Austin, we suggested that Laura Murray, a former staff member at the Labour Party, was an “anti-Jewish racist” and part of the “vile anti-Semitism of Corbyn’s Labour” who had been stood up to by Rachel Riley during a recent court case. These allegations were and are untrue. We accept that there was and is no basis to suggest that Ms Murray is anti-Semitic. On the contrary; the court heard in unchallenged evidence that Ms Murray devoted significant time and energy to confronting and challenging antisemitism within the Labour Party whilst she was employed there. The Telegraph and Ian Austin apologise to Ms Murray. We have agreed to pay her substantial damages.”
Now, apart from the fact that Rachel Riley is a disgusting piece of work who exploits her celebrity and public status to get away with spewing really ugly garbage on Twitter at anyone, including children, who speaks up for Corbyn or speaks out on Israeli crimes (the Guardian loves her, natch) and that the case she brought against Murray was a travesty that any decent judge should have tossed (Corbyn got something thrown at him, Riley sneered that if you don’t want anti-Nazis throwing things at you then don’t be a Nazi, Murray said Riley had called Corbyn a Nazi, Riley said that was libellous and would hurt her career, the judge somehow agreed with Riley) the important bit here is that dog-fondler Austin and the Telegraph newspaper had to admit not just that their accusations were false, but that the entire theoretical basis behind them was also 100% false.
To which my question, and the question I’m sure the Guardian’s resident ‘experts’ on the whole issue of antisemitism in the Labour Party were absolutely gagging to ask (but somehow didn’t) would be, how could someone who “devoted significant time and energy to confronting and challenging antisemitism within the Labour Party whilst she was employed there” have remained in her post without noticing the “vile anti-Semitism of Corbyn’s Labour”? Surely, at some point, Murray must have stumbled across at least one incident of Corbyn and Co cackling over some choice Nazi propaganda or plotting the firebombing of a synagogue? Something? Anything? How could she possibly have missed it?
Unless…. it was all bullshit? Unless all of the slander and libel and smearing and constant, unchallenged, sickening barrage of abuse aimed at Corbyn (and the Labour Left) by the likes of Austin and Hodge and Streeting and Smeeth and Watson and Berger (etcetera, et-fucking-cetera) and the newspapers (especially the Guardian – fuck you Freedland you atrocious shitbird) that foghorned this false narrative for years on end “were and are untrue” as well. Otherwise, surely, they’d have wanted to interview Murray straight away to ask her to explain the discrepancy between what was routinely said about Corbyn’s Labour in the Media and what the courts say actually happened?
LOL. Only joking. Perhaps the Media just doesn’t want to speak to Murray for two other reasons.
Firstly, she and another Corbyn era official are in another tussle with Starmer’s NuNew Labour Party after they accused a senior Party official of sexual harassment and the Party huffed and puffed before offering them a settlement requiring their future silence. Their lawyer took the unusual step of releasing an open letter in which they laid out what the Party’s lawyers had asked them to sign (which would have prohibited them from talking about the case or pursuing claims against the Party or their harasser) before the Party would agree to a settlement, and asked what was the difference between that and an NDA. At this point there’s been no further comment from Starmer’s Labour other than to insist they don’t use NDAs, which is clearly false. I’d suggest that lying comes as easily to these bastards as breathing, but with Peter (Jacob Rees Mogg Mark One) Mandelson knocking around their cosy little coterie it’s quite possible that some of them don’t breathe because they derive their oxygen directly from the blood of virgins, so it’s probably a wash.
Secondly, Murray and the other official are two of the five Corbyn era figures Starmer’s Labour have accused being the leakers behind the original report that should have gone to the EHRC, the one that revealed the factional, racist, sexist, filth in which the Labour Right habitually wallow and which Forde has confirmed as accurate. They all deny it, but Starmer’s Labour was desperate to appease some of the slappable vermin named and shamed in the report who were demanding internal documents to help pursue their own legal cases against the Party, so they had to do something, and since telling the truth was out of the question (these people are their friends and dinner party guests, their kids go to the same schools and attend the same political science and corporate law courses at University, they couldn’t possibly admit what destructive, selfish swines they were. Who would they go skiing with?) throwing a few trot bitches under the bus was the obvious solution.
Not looking such a smart choice now, is it? Why, anyone would think they were a gang of circle-jerking political incompetents whose couldn’t orchestrate a viral outbreak if they were spotted 300 hungry rats and an all-access pass to Porton Down.
Party Conference is in Liverpool this year, and it should be lit. I mean, they’ll try to bulk-ban as many dirty, stinking trots from going to Conference as they can, and just tell Security to refuse entry to the ones they couldn’t, but the wider Party has been waiting for the Forde Report to come out for a long time, and the sheer scale of the treason (yeah, that’s what I’m calling it) revealed in its pages is seismic. If Starmer doesn’t take action pronto to punish the Right for what they did (he won’t – Ed) I can see action on the conference floor getting brutal. This isn’t like penny ante whining from the usual suspects about stolen caucuses and the DLC saying mean things about Bernie, this is actual internal Party sabotage and betrayal that cost Labour seats and led directly to the miserable horrorshow of the last five years. This is the kind of thing major political parties splinter and break up over.
And that’s before noting the obvious fact that the very same UK News Media that gleefully carried water for the Labour Right when they were united in preferring more Tory Government over putting British History’s Greatest Monster Ever in Downing Street are going to pop this report in their pocket to use against NuNew Labour as soon as they know when to expect the next election. They don’t really care who leads the Labour Party as long as it’s Tories who run the country, and this report gives them all the ammunition they’ll need to paint NuNew Labour’s leadership as a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic bullies who only pretended to care about antisemitism so they could hound good, honest democratic socialists out of the Labour Party, with the added bonus of it all being true! Left wingers who have been pretty much personae non grata to our Media for years will suddenly find microphones stuck under their noses as headline hungry journos go hunting for this week’s big “Why progressives, blacks, gays, muslims, women and whoever else we can think of shouldn’t vote Labour” story. And a lot of them will take the chance to vent their spleens,
Think it’s not going to happen? This week the FTF Guardian has had pieces quoting Rebecca Long Bailey (the left winger Starmer beat for the leadership) and, believe it or not, Jeremy fucking Corbyn himself, without tagging on anonymous quotes from ‘senior Labour sources’ rubbishing their opinions. That simply would not have happened ten days ago. And it’s been clear for a while that they’ve been eager to make Corbyn’s old ally and former Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott, the go-to gal for stories and statements about Labour racism and misogyny, since she was and is the target of so much of it, including back in the days when the Guardian was running stories pretending that the only female victims of hate tweets in the Labour Party were Jewish and on the Right. Give it a year and Corbyn will be getting offered seven figure sums for a sneak peek at his memoirs and Wes fucking Streeting will be found hanging from a lampost outside the BBC clutching a phone with a cracked screen on which can be read ‘No New Messages’.
So, anyway, these are the people running the Party I’m a member of. Currently forging a potent political steamroller to oust the Tories by (checks the newspapers) reneging on popular promises to renationalise monopoly utilities, rigging the numbers to get Leftwing MPs deselected, and sacking junior Shadow Ministers for daring to defy a diktat banning anyone in the Shadow Cabinet from standing on picket lines alongside workers striking for fair pay.
Sigh.
Anyone still wonder why I prefer ranting about Tories?
Geminid
@Baud: Actually, Hogg tweeted that yesterday, before Democrats got their win on the Chip bill and announced their potential win on Reconciliation. But I’m not sure if he closely follows most legislation anyway.
Baud
@Geminid:
Thanks. Still unhelpful
ETA: The comment you linked to wasn’t directed at Hogg.
zhena gogolia
@Geminid: If he doesn’t closely follow legislation, then maybe he should STFU about the workings of Congress.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Tony Jay: Holy crow, Tony. How long did it take you to write that?
rikyrah
Like ‘ Republicans are good on the economy’
the bullshyt about them ‘ supporting the troops’ has always bugged the crap out of me.
They don’t give two shyts about the troops and anything positive that has come for the troops has come OVER GOP obstruction.
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: Will believe it when bill is signed. Darth Coaldust is a slippery one…
Geminid
@zhena gogolia: It was a general comment about the party’s leaders. I think it’s a very common strain of thinking. I encounter it mainly when Democrats I follow on Twitter push back against it. This is an ongoing battle, and I’m glad that elected Democrats for the most part don’t engage in it.
But I sure like to!
Tony Jay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
On and off, a few hours.
Anger is an energy, see?
jonas
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin):
 
They’re usually people who one time had to *pay* someone minimum wage and thought it a great inconvenience and injustice.
catclub
They are in the same trash bin as the ads saying Republicans want to, and always wanted to, kill Medicare, and successfully convinced senior citizens to repudiate the GOP. Also, killing Social Security.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tony Jay: One doesn’t see PIL quoted that often anymore.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Hogg is always dunking on the Democratic leadership for the sin of being old.
As if being young and stupid is a positive.
rikyrah
@Tony Jay:
I dare say that I hope a FrontPager grabs this comment, and well, makes it a post all unto itself.
Clap clap clap
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Thanks, that was very illuminating. Made me glad that Democrats have a more decentralized party system. That has it’s own problems but we seem to work them out ok.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
Hogg is a GOP Plant. No other explanation.
How can you be from a State like FLORIDA
Ground zero for Voter Suppression
Don’t say gay
Complete lying about COVID Stats
Suppression of Freedom of Speech in Education
And yet, this muthaphucka hasn’t come out in support for Val Demings or Charlie Crist.
He can only shyt on Democrats
Phuck him.
UncleEbeneezer
@rikyrah: “Support The Troops has always meant: Support Every War (except Ukraine, natch)
Miss Bianca
@Feckless: Oh, look, Fuckless is back with its fact-free whinging about how Democrats are the real enemy.
rikyrah
President Kamala’s Hand (Again) (@myronjclifton) tweeted at 1:27 PM on Wed, Jul 27, 2022:
Republicans mocking disabled folk, wanting to put homeless in camps, kidnapping children at border…are just following their European idols by now letting us know what they’d do to disabled folk. Hint: the same they’d do to, Jewish, Black, brown, Lgbtqi poor women… vote dem.
(https://twitter.com/myronjclifton/status/1552359920393080832?t=VW4kTShrDd2Hg6auo92h2A&s=03)
Cameron
@UncleEbeneezer: Might also mean “Support the Defense Industry.”
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
“The woke mob groomed Prince William into the world of pegging. Here is why this is bad news for Joe Biden.”
– by Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan
Tony Jay
@Omnes Omnibus:
There’s a reason for that, but give the nutter credit, he was right about that.
Granted, it also forms the basis of Sith theology, but you can’t have everything.
rikyrah
In a world full of 2520’s, who are trying to find anyone and everyone to scapegoat so that THEY will not be held accountable, and thus lose those good paying government jobs that they are unqualified to have.
Have said it before – the Police Department takes up 40% of the city’s budget. The demographics of the Department doesn’t look like the town. I would bet that they don’t live in the town. But, where else, with their limited education, will they get jobs that pay as well with benefits, all the while talking about others ‘living off of the government’.
These muthaphuckas have never been held ACCOUNTABLE for anything a day in their lives, and they are actually OFFENDED that folks want to hold them accountable for letting ‘ THOSE CHILDREN’ get SLAUGHTERED, while they did nothing.
Sherrilyn Ifill (@SIfill_) tweeted at 7:34 PM on Tue, Jul 26, 2022: In what world should the principal of this school be subject at this time to the equivalent punishment (for failed “locked door protocols) meted out to School Police Chief Arredondo who stood in a hallway for over an hour refusing to take leadership while hearing kids shot? (https://twitter.com/SIfill_/status/1552090052007804933?t=lZn7D4lQUrMg2zUHzg-Uxg&s=03)
Tony Jay
@rikyrah: Thankee. I feel better after a good vent.
@Geminid: Decentralisation is one of those things that British politicians love to promote, only not in any of the areas where they personally want to retain absolute power. It would probably help if the News Media that spent much of 2016/17 screaming about Stalinist Oppression of Dissent ZOMG!!!! because lots of ‘moderate-centrist’ Labour MPs didn’t receive promotions for refusing to work with the elected Leader would notice the authoritarianism becoming standard on Starmer’s watch, but first they’d have to give a shit.
rikyrah
Nothing but truth![]()
![]()
Environmental Services Weedle (@PartyWurmple) tweeted at 5:53 AM on Tue, Jul 26, 2022:
Biden’s approval rating is in the toilet because the media swore a blood vendetta against him for ending the 20 year military occupation of Afghanistan and he refuses to deliberately sabotage the economy for the sake of business owners who want cheap labor again.
(https://twitter.com/PartyWurmple/status/1551883490416893953?t=_02KrXr06DYdCsjce9sXqg&s=03)
catclub
@Tony Jay: Too terse.
Tony Jay
@catclub:
If I have one failing….
Barbara
@rikyrah: It’s a form of denial over the fact that the people he was probably most aligned with for most of his life hate him. Doubling down on the inadequacy of Dems gives him a kind of release from facing that hatred and owning what it means. See, e.g., Andrew Sullivan.
Barbara
@rikyrah: The occupation in Afghanistan was very lucrative for a lot of people both inside and outside of the media.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: I think a key difference between the British and American systems is that the parties here have limited control over who appears on the ballot. States set requirements for primary eligibility and after that it’s up to voters.
I think a few states give party commitees a veto over primary eligibility and this year a Kentucky or Tennessee GOP commitee denyed a candidate’s effort to run in a primary for Congress, but these are exceptions to the general rule.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I try to remind myself that he is (still, IMoldman’sO) a traumatized adolescent, but it is a sign of the politcal times that someone who is soon to be graduated from Harvard College (to use twitter Nixon’s old fashioned language that amuses me) would need Cliff Notes to watch that How A Bill Becomes A Law cartoon that I grokked when I was 8 years old
West of the Rockies
Hang this vote around the collective Republican neck like a truck tire rim, and kick ’em off the boat. Make them own it, eat it, and choke on it.
West of the Rockies
@rikyrah:
Why would “the media swear a blood oath” against Joe for ending our military efforts in Afghanistan? Why eould that issue so enrage this industry? If the Tweeter said the media missed the chaos of Trump and that Joe was boring, maybe…
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: Jeezus…makes us feckless Democrats look like a finely oiled machine. Think the Traitors should be expelled by the party. They can then slither their way back to their Tory paymasters.
Thanks for the screed!
HinTN
@Tony Jay: Jesus, about damn time!
If ever you find yourself in these here parts I’ll gladly pour you Talisker or The Laguvullin.
Now I’ll go read.
Ken
With radical — er, sorry, let me check your rant for correct terminology — troskyite attitudes like that, it’s not surprising there’s no place for you in the modern Labour party.
schrodingers_cat
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: IIRC he is in his early 20s now, so no longer a teen.
Ksmiami
@kindness: Republicans just suck.
Jackie
@Betty Cracker: That was my immediate thought when the news broke last night! LMAO!
Lots of Republican handwringing and whining on the various cable news today! So far I haven’t ran across any response from the Turtle.
Tony Jay
@Paul in KY: Unfortunately the traitors are running the whole shebang these days, and we all know what old saw about it not being treason if you win.
@HinTN: Good luck.
@Ken: If they fuck with the votes to deselect my local MP for being a dirty trot, I may well just walk.
SFAW
@Tony Jay:
What a Rotten thing to say. OK, write.
brantl
There’s a first time for every goddamned thing…
eversor
Shit like this makes my blood boil. I’m a vet and I’ve been “sick” now for a rather long time. Multiple bouts of various low level cancers that given they run in my family I have no ground to stand on it. I don’t mind it, I mostly hate the massive amount of “I need to work from home” it causes right up until they shit can you and then you have to get a new job. Which of course you can’t tell them what’s going on, and my resume is epic so I get hired and then end up back there. Due to the nature of my work, IT, companies just confirm you were there, they won’t get into the details because of social engineering issues and I’m savvy enough to know what to sign and when to tell someone to go fuck themselves.
I’ve lost a lot of weight but if you looked at me I’m a ripped six feet blonde hair blue eyes guy who runs 5ks, but I don’t feel like that. I haven’t had a solid shit in years. I moved to soups and lighter foods as I didn’t like hurling into the toilet each night. At one point it was projectile “coffee grounds” followed by a stream of blood. I like soup so oh well! If I had it my way I’d eat nothing but soup, pickled fish and cheese, yes I’m Dutch don’t judge! But for the past two decades I’ve probably almost, if not actually, shat myself and then hurled once a day.
At a point the rate of me getting violently illl out paced my savings. So I’ve been detonating 401ks, IRAs, Roth IRAs, left and right. Not good but I fully realize I won’t live to be around to use them, I’d just like to leave the love of my life something, and there is that odd moment where you realize you burn faster than you take in. The writing is on the wall for me. In a way, I welcome it.
The way it works is you get “let go” with some vague ass reason, because they can’t actually fire you for being sick and I’ve worked for the likes of Deloitte, and shoved with three months of money. As top end firms are all churn and burn nobody cares until they sort of figure out you aren’t OK. You sort of know it’s coming and then demand a ton of your pills to last you and go crash land somewhere else. Knowing full well you will crater as well so you make the friends you can and try to make yourself so liked they feel bad when they pull the trigger.
I’m on a rack ton of pills for various things and I sort of quit taking them seriously as I long since stopped caring. Locking your office door and then having a seizure and pretending your not in there does that.
I’m mostly at network person which means I have to be on site to run wires and do server work. It’s still classified as support but it’s not what you’d think. I’d love to find a nice calm job even if it’s sub 100k where I could sit at home with the cat and do it but those really don’t exist and I’m constantly told I’m to qualified when I find one.
These people, who hide that this is a huge issues, there is a place in hell if there is a hell for them. Cause I don’t think they know what it’s actually like. You look fine, you seem fine, but you are very not fine. Your savings drain, you’re on the financial edge, but you look hot and have a flat screen TV with surround sound so you can’t be stressed! I have no debt. I paid off all my cards, and am now churning through the last of my savings. The car is fully paid. I have no student loans personally.
It’s not just getting hit over the head with six figures of medical bills its the not being able to work and make more money that kills you.
None of these dickless wonders ever spent a moment in uniform or they wouldn’t do this. And they better be careful. Because if you have an actual veterans riot and not that half assed shit on Jan 6 you might see what an angry mob actually is!
West of the Rockies
@eversor:
Oh, man, that is beyond horrible! Is the VA advocating for you at all? Please think about reposting your comment as this is a dead thread. Maybe the BJ hive mind can help.
Ruckus
@Feckless:
Actually it gets mentioned all the time. But it doesn’t change the process because the process can be blocked extremely easy. And conservatives can say to their supporters that they blocked a multi billion dollar bill that the OTHER side wanted. The real problem is that they didn’t suffer all that much or at all so they don’t give a fuck that the bill passes, only that they didn’t spend money on something that dems wanted. The conservative party is not about humanity, not in any way shape or form. They are about money, getting it, keeping it, having more of it than others. Good/Bad mean crap to them. Money and Hate are their two big issues and Money outweighs Hate by a lot.
And their comeback, that people knew what they were getting into when they signed up, is full on bullshit. We know it, they know it but they don’t give a damn. They give a damn if it costs them 2 cents to make the opposition better or them to have to spend a dime. This can easily be life and death for some, but it isn’t for conservative politicians or their real supporters, the monied people who make up the power side of their support. They use their racism and conservatism to support keeping the money. They love money, they’d bath in it if that didn’t hurt the money. People that aren’t them? Not a tenth of a fuck do they give.
eversor
@West of the Rockies:
I’ll repost in a new thread but no the VA won’t and really can’t help me. A slew of my work was as private contractor. Once that ended I did work for NGOs out of STATE and USAID as a contractor/consultant.
There’s a whole slew of us that started off uniformed and while we aren’t “Blackwater” did a ton of above the board work but it was private sector.
I spent more hours armed working for a hippy dippy USAID firm than I did in the Navy. Yet this is never talked about. One of my major projects was maternal and infant mortality in Africa.
But we don’t really admit this or what it entails as it’s all IC related and questionable. So those of us who do the work are left out to hang.
And fuck these assholes who don’t want to care for those of us charged with enacting our foreign policy goals. There’s a nobility in this, there is a nobility in war. But stand up for it. Own it. Stand by us. Combat in arms can be a noble thing, foreign policy should be one. Quit fucking about and act like it!
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
I’m also a vet and use the VA. They are limited as to what they can do because they are a federal agency and their budget is part of what congress does. Also a lot of vet issues are long term and rather difficult to work with. IOW they have a larger customer base than support base, a lot of their customers are physically and/or mentally needy, with things that are not necessarily in the normal course of human needs. There are economic issues and therefore they have economic limitations for providing service. If you served in combat you do get a different level of coverage but it still depends on the local VA leadership to some degree. Also the hospitals are based upon the population of an area, so a more remote area means driving or a bus ride to a facility. I use the LA hospital as my base (45 miles from where I live) and there is a daily bus that comes from San Luis Obispo with vets because this is the nearest hospital. Sometimes there are clinics but the clinics are limited in what they can do. And even in LA the clinics may be a ways away. My closest reasonable clinic is 25 miles away and they don’t have things like an MRI. A lot of vets in my age group – old have problems due to injuries of war, missing limbs level. A good point is that as medical practice has improved with science, the level of care and the timely application of that for combat injuries has improved. But money is of course, as always, an issue.
As a side note, I find that the care I get at the VA is good but, and it’s a big but, if you are not a combat veteran it is your income that determines your level of care. If you make high five or in six figures, your level of care as a non combatant is going to be costly or non existent, because, in theory, you can afford it. Also as in any healthcare system, one also has to advocate for themselves or have someone who does and that is not always easy for most people.
Zelma
@Tony Jay:
Good heavens. The Labour Party leadership makes the Democratic Party leadership look like statesmen. I thought the “anti-semitism” brouhaha sounded fake but I thought the attacks were coming from the Tories.
Tony Jay
@Zelma: The Tories enjoyed stirring the pot, but no, the Labour Right and the Press did all the work for them.
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
I think I’m up to date. I also think I’m cute so my judgement might be questionable.
My summary is that British politics makes ours look positively demure, but that politics, practiced anywhere by humans is at best, crappy and at worst, well, the worst, mainly because some want to use politics as a way to grow their bank and personal accounts and if that fucks over enough people, that’s bonus points.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: Shit! Hope things get better, Tony.
Soprano2
@West of the Rockies: Because it was lucrative for a lot of people as long as our forces were there. It certainly does seem that you can trace the press’ continual savaging of Biden to that one thing. Based on the first day, they established the narrative that the evacuation was completely “botched”, and no facts can get them to budge off of that.
Ruckus
@Soprano2:
It gave them something to write and whinge about and getting out of that war ended that for them. That makes it a negative job experience for those who got paid to write/whinge about it. Joe barricaded easy street for them. And for some of their bosses, who liked conflict to have someone write/whinge about, that took away a blame point. So they blamed him for that. They gave two shits about Afghanistan, it was that they got to write about it, to sell words about it, to blame someone for something. He took that away without them being able to write about it beforehand. It was an unfixable situation from the outside, the President knew that, so he changed the plot on them, without including them. A massive faux pas it was – not.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Agreed. I am glad you said it. Last time I speculated on this person’s Republican leanings based on his incessant anti-D tweets I was attacked on this forum to an extent that I considered not posting here ever again.
planetjanet
@schrodingers_cat: David Hogg of March For Our Lives is not on the horseshoe. He is pushing young people to vote for Dems and vote every. damn. time. He expressed frustration over the House leadership planning to drop a police funding bill and an assault weapons ban this week. It is completely unrelated to the new bills we are celebrating. Here is the original context. Context matters.
https://twitter.com/davidhogg111/status/1552369832691212291?s=20&t=4EW0fbod6iJZ-AGcRa8ZQA
Paul in KY
@eversor: very sorry to hear of your situation. I hope it gets better for you.
schrodingers_cat
@planetjanet: I disagree with your characterization. He uses his platform to criticize Ds rarely the Rs. If he has said anything positive about Val Demmings or Charlie Crist or helped their campaigns in anyway, I have yet to see it.
satby
@rikyrah: @schrodingers_cat: Hogg is a survivor of the Parkland High School shooting and his primary focus is gun control. And
kidsyoung adults his age are all pretty uniformly furious at both parties for the continued school slaughters. He personally probably has PTSD. And he’s still pretty young. Tolerance seems warranted, and I am not AT ALL known for my tolerance.Tony Jay
@Ruckus: Yup. That’s about the shape of it. The numbnuts running NuNew Labour are going to get the shock of their wasted lives when the UK Media come for them hard with the Forde Report. They just don’t ‘get’ politics.
@Paul in KY: Well, I just attended a meeting about whether to deselect my (good) local MP so I gave a speech that condensed a 30 minute rant into three seething minutes of anger. I think it went quite well.
Tony G
From the point of view of the GOP, military service members are labor. If they’re sickened, wounded or killed on the job, that’s their problem. From the GOP point of view, they’re expendable.
Tony G
@Tony G: For example: Their treatment of Max Cleland.
planetjanet
@schrodingers_cat: He is a single issue activist, not a general Democratic operative.
Another Scott
@West of the Rockies:
FT.com:
Follow the money.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@planetjanet: So is Shannon Watts who is very effective Gun Control advocate, who manages to do her advocacy without constantly shitting on the only party which in alignment with her objective
schrodingers_cat
@satby: He is a public figure with a huge Twitter following criticism of his takes that damage the Democrats, who are the only thing standing between us and a theocracy led by Rs is not intolerance.
Another Scott
@Tony Jay: Thanks so much for that. The “anti-semitic” attacks on Corbyn always seemed strange to me, and really ramped up when Corbyn was able to grow his support (when the party membership expanded) (from 2018):
A party called Labour that historically talks about helping people left behind, and not being enamored with the millionaires and billionaires, finds that that’s popular again. Whodathunkit.
Hang in there.
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
I forget the actual amounts spent annually in Afghanistan, but I would wager they were in excess of a trillion $$ a year. Most of that money was spent with US companies, some went to Afghan leaders. But the defense contractors made BANK off that war, and Joe Biden shut that waterfall of cash $$ off short.
They hate him for cutting that waterfall of cash $$, and will do everything they can to punish him for that horrible act. The fact that there’s a brand new war in Ukraine for them to milk by manufacturing drones, guided missiles, artillery shells, trucks, etc, etc is irrelevant as their unbelievable profits for nothing in the eternal Afghanistan conflict are gone forever.
Tony Jay
@Another Scott:
Yup. And on the Labour Right it’s now an article of faith that attracting new members to the Party is a negative. Seriously. They have this weird idea that attracting large numbers with a progressive message automatically turns off ‘moderate’ voters, because everybody hates Lefties, dontchaknow?
I think a severe electoral thumping is coming for both major parties.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: Wish I’d been there, Tony!
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: The Liberals are dusting off their macks!