The natural endpoint of modern ‘Conservative’ thought:
with on point marketing like this who can doubt that the Tory Party can climb out of that -25 point polling hole https://t.co/551pd8oayV
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) January 31, 2023
Palmer is a British expat, and the Deputy editor at ForeignPolicy…
look I have hopes for Ukraine but the UK is simply too ridden with oligarchic corruption. https://t.co/Uyk1vReUjM
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) January 31, 2023
Blankets, Food Banks, and Shuttered Pubs: Brexit Has Delivered a Broken Britainhttps://t.co/lgGgOvuSUd reporting from @liz_cookman
— Robbie Gramer (@RobbieGramer) February 2, 2023
Just asking: Given Russian oligarchs’ takeover of the London financial market, are we sure Brexit wasn’t another GRU operation?…
"Global Britain" was a dangerous dream. "Singapore on Thames" was a dumbass, "move fast and break things"-level pitch. But at this point it's looking like "regional Britain" will be a stretch.
— Thankful Musgrave ?? (@profmusgrave) January 31, 2023
NotMax
When is it officially changed to Mediocre Britain?
//
Geoduck
@NotMax: When Scotland and Wales leave and join the EU.
LordAvebury
Brexit was absolutely a GRU operation. No question about it.
opiejeanne
@LordAvebury: I thought this might be so pretty early, but then I’m suspicious of Russia for every ill in the world right now.
Geminid
It seems that Politico wasn’t about to let Watergirl scoop them with her post about Rep. Ocasio-Cortez rebuking Republicans for throwing Rep. Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee. So their West Wing Playbook put up an article last evening about “AOC’s” upcoming role as second ranking Democratic member of the House Oversight Committee.
The article is titled “Joe Biden’s New Squad.” Besides Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, committee Democrats include ranking member Jamie Raskin and Katie Porter. These three members of the House Class of 2018 will be joined by freshmen Congressmen Maxwell Frost and Dan Goldman, as well as other capable Democratic Representatives.
Politico’s West Wing sources say they consider Oversight members as their “first line of defense” against snipe hunting Chairman James Comer and his sleazy sidekick Jim Jordan.
eclare
@LordAvebury: Oh absolutely, so the oligarchs in Londongrad could avoid those pesky EU financial regulations.
Martin
Remember when California passed the UK in GDP just after the Brexit vote? We’ve pulled an Ireland ahead since then.
But I’ve always assumed Brexit was a Russian influence campaign. It always had this kind of energy.
eclare
@Geminid: Glad to see Dan Goldman on there based on his impeachment work. I am unfamiliar with Frost except to know that he is the first member of Gen Z in Congress. Has anyone seen/heard him speak? Is this to put a younger face on Democrats, try to get more young people involved?
eclare
@Martin: Hahaha…I have been calling it an own goal, to use a soccer term. That is more illustrative.
Martin
@eclare: Yeah, he’s good. He was the organizing director for March for Our Lives. Here’s him talking to Chris Hayes.
Kay
Far Right court ensures men subject to restraining orders for domestic violence can arm up to stalk their victims.
We’re going back 50 years on domestic violence law too. A lot more women will die.
eclare
@Martin: Thank you! Wow, hard to believe he’s only 26, very well spoken
ETA> the kids are all right
Geminid
@eclare: Freshmen Reps like Maxwell Frost often serve on Oversight. It’s a good place to start out.
Dan Goldman brings more experience in investigations than most, and his background is unusual. Goldman’s mother is a member of the Levi Strauss family, and Goldman is the wealthiest House member, I believe. Goldman’s father was an attorney and federal prosecutor, and he died while Goldman was still a child. The son followed in his father’s footsteps and has spent most of his professional life as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Martin
@eclare: Well, the kids are really struggling, but I’d turn the world over to them in a heartbeat.
eclare
@Geminid: A friend of mine told me about Goldman’s background, which makes him impressive to me. The guy could literally lie around all day and do nothing, but chose to be useful.
eclare
@Martin: You know what I meant.
Kay
The US Right is tracking Putin on domestic violence too – gutting (federal) protections for domestic violence.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I’ve said it before, but when the UK voted narrowly in favor of Brexit, everybody lost, but not everybody realized it at the time.
And yeah, thinking about it, that includes the goddamned Russians, in that it puffed up their hubris enough that they thought they could do whatever the hell they wanted without suffering negative consequences, only for Ukraine to give them a very rude awakening.
But it seems like the Tories still don’t realize that everybody lost. That tweet’s akin to Captain Smith celebrating that the Titanic hit the iceberg.
Argiope
@Geminid: Rep Dan Goldman had me at impeachment. Glad he’s in oversight now!
Kay
All Right wing policy is now basically “let’s blame other people/countries for our problems” then when doing that just makes it worse they double down.
Argiope
@Kay: critical thinking, how does it work? I wonder how many examples will be needed before at least the local and regional business communities reject them. But as humans it’s apparently hard to overcome our priors.
Kay
@Argiope:
I love the photos of the shuttered restaurants – opened, run and staffed by immigrants. Good work, Brexiters!
They’re wandering around in that town bewildered and angry that the now have 1. nowhere to go and 2. no money to spend anyway even if they did. They’ll never admit a mistake. They have to play this out to the tragic end.
Tony Jay
I’m going to go ahead and assume that there’s an implied snark tag after that Cavuto Mark because there’s simply no doubt about what Brexit was, namely a massive propaganda-fuelled heist in which the activities of the Russian GRU were necessary, but not the sole reason for its implementation and ‘success’. A lot of people inside and outside the UK wanted it enough to set up a mechanism to get it done, the GRU just helped them out where it could.
Now, everyone and their bed-bound granny can see what a titanic fuck-up it all was, but the people who could actually – do – something about it are owned lock, stock and barrel by the myth and couldn’t change their tune if they wanted to.
The Tories purged their Party of anyone with a bad word to say about Our Glorious British Brexit, leaving it strapped to the rock of a radicalised membership with cords of (not just) Russian oligarch cash while cold, hard reality gnaws at their exposed entrails. If it wasn’t for the fact that dirty money owns the British Press and the main national News outlet is stuffed to the gills with Tory placemen they’d be down to minus figures in the polls and facing rioting in the streets, but this is Britain, and sullen resentment against a backdrop of shit TV programmes is how we roll.
As for the main Opposition, they’re just as deep in denial as the Tories. It’s pretty telling that the very same people who spent years screaming at the previous LOTO to “get off the fence!” and “show some leadership!” by writing off the votes of the 1/3 of Labour voters who supported Brexit and going full-on Remain or Die have, now that they’re in charge of the Party and Brexit is a fact (passed into law by 100% of Tory votes and with the Labour Party whipped to vote in favour) done a screeching 180 on the issue.
Suddenly being on the fence and refusing to question the awesomeness of Brexit is the sensible, moderate, grown-up thing to do, and there’s apparently no dank mire of anti-immigrant, anti-woke, anti-progressive toxicity too deep to plumb in order to win back the ‘culturally traditional’ voters who abandoned Labour for the Tories in 2019. All the talk about there being a Remain majority out there just begging for leadership stopped dead the moment they took over the Party, which is odd, because you’d think that such a majority would only grow and become more eager for leadership with Brexit actually in effect and damaging the country. But no, it’s like it never really existed, or if it did, they’re not interested in leading it anywhere.
Why, anyone might be forgiven for thinking that the whole “You’re Doing Opposing Brexit Wrong!!!” circus was just another example of the Labour Right using any convenient cudgel they could to sabotage the previous leadership, completely unconcerned with the damage their cynicism was inflicting on the Party and the country. Stopping Labour from beating the Tories in 2019 was their one and only political aim, and if that meant helping kneecap any chances of actually stopping Brexit happening, well, as with the anti-Semitism smears, that was a price they were happy for everyone else to pay on behalf of their careers inside and outside politics.
Whether senior Nu-Lab insiders had or have any contact with the GRU I don’t know, but even if they didn’t, they couldn’t have been any more helpful to Putin’s strategy regarding the UK.
Kay
@Tony Jay:
Half the responses to the author of the piece on Twitter don’t mention Brexit or trade or the economy at all- it’s ALL anti-woke ranting and ginning up the woke panic.
To defeat the Mighty Forces of Woke they must destroy their country. Bonkers.
Geminid
@Kay: It’s like the American commander in Vietnam who reportedly said, “We had to destroy the village to save it.”
Rusty
Brexit has been a complete success. The London financial markets didn’t want to abide by the EU rules to crack down on money laundering and tax evasion. Brexit was the escape hatch. Who cares if a bunch of yobs in Newcastle are hurting, the lucrative financial shenanigans can continue!!
Tony Jay
@Kay:
It’s all of a piece, same as over on your side of the pond. To be a member of the Tribe of the Right there’s an ever-expanding satchel of shibboleths and taboos you simply have to internalise and adopt as your personal dogma. Pro-Brexit = Anti-Woke = Pro-Police = Anti-Immigration = Pro-Monarchy = Anti-Leftist and on and on and on, it’s an endless mantra that takes the place of personal conviction. It’s not an ideology, it’s an ethos, and the ethos is Cleek’s Law blasted with gamma rays.
They’re right, I don’t like them when they’re angry. And they’re angry all the fucking time.
Kay
@Geminid:
Worth it! College students with bad manners and blue hair were going to put them all in Marxist re-education camps. We were THIS CLOSE to that result but thankfully Andrew Sullivan, the staff of The Atlantic and all the editorial writers at the NY Times bravely battled The Woke and won. The collateral damage to real world concerns like…heating their homes? A sacrifice that the guardians of liberalism were willing to make.
They’re ninnies. They’re afraid of things that aren’t scary.
Joe Falco
Just like in the US, conservatives talk big about keeping jobs for their chosen ethnic group to score political points with swathes of the public that are too racist/dumb to realize that they themselves don’t want to be employed at places where they’re treated like…the Others. And that some businesses have enjoyed their profits or simply survived for so long by how much they can extract from workers without paying them accordingly. It pushes everything down and when the common clay of society crumbles from the weight, the rest of the state will crumble as well.
Kay
@Tony Jay:
Truth and I agree they are just as bad in the US. They’ll destroy our economy too if they reach a critical mass again. All I want to do is run my little business in a normal, regulated modern economy and not have these crazy people FUCKING with it because they’re afraid of their own shadows and think someone saying “Latinex” is an existential threat.
Kay
@Tony Jay:
And that these tough guy, nationalist populists always get rolled by ginned-up panics generated OUTSIDE their own countries by malicious actors like Putin who doesn’t give a rats ass about them is just the icing on the cake.
Geminid
@eclare: I’ve known a couple people like Goldman. Their wealthy families instilled in them the belief that they had to achieve their own professional success in medicine, science or public service.
Dan Goldman’s public service may have been propelled by the tragedy of losing his father at a young age. He seems kind of driven, in a good way I hope.
Another wealthy New Yorker had a somewhat similar career trajectory 120 years before Goldman. That was Teddie Roosevelt.
eclare
@Kay: The governor of my state, TN, recently bravely rejected millions from the CDC for HIV awareness and testing, because woke-planned parenthood-“those people”-ICK!
No problem, just come on over to this evangelical church for an HIV test, I’m sure.
I honestly never thought there would be politicians dumb enough to turn down cash. Cue the line from The Wire: I’ll take anybody’s money if they givin’ it away.
Tony Jay
@Kay:
And we circle around again to the core of the problem. People only ‘know’ what they’re told or what they see with their own eyes. In the US and the UK what people are told, over and over and over again ranges between rancid, billion-decibel hatespeech and a soothing burble of both-sides but Teh Left is worse conventional wisdom, because that’s what the people who own the information streams want them to hear.
Control of the national megaphone array is vital to national mental health, but we’re stuck in a situation where almost all of the megaphones are being programmed by a wide-eyed nutter in a bunker somewhere in Cascadia who is convinced that the Gay Woke Feminazi Alien conspiracy is about to kick his door in if he doesn’t get the Truth* out there ASAP.
It’s getting to the point where the only thing we can do about that is arm the Gay Woke Feminazi Aliens and give them the bunker location. Worth a shot.
eclare
@Geminid: As I was reading your response, the Roosevelts came to mind.
Geminid
@eclare: That’s like Virginia Governor Youngkin declining to compete for a Ford battery plant in Southside Virginia because there is a Chinese partner. Protecting Virginia from bogus threats even if it means losing jobs in the part of the state that needs them most.
This illustrates a drawback of Virginia’s one term limit for governors. Youngkin doesn’t need to win reelection because he’s not allowed to. So he can use the state as a stepping stone, and shape his governance with an eye towards gaining advantage in Republican presidential primaries.
Betty Cracker
@eclare: Yep. I was surprised when red state governors like then-FL Gov Rick Scott told the feds to keep their filthy free money for Medicaid expansion. It’s no surprise a vile plutocrat like Scott relishes a chance to screw the poor! But I figured a fraudster like him would see a grift angle there, accept the money and find ways to siphon millions off the top like he did in his previous career stealing from Medicare.
I guess the calculus for someone like Scott is that Medicaid expansion would create an “entitlement” that might require him to pay taxes on his vast fortune someday, and that peril outweighs the grift opportunity. Greedy fucks like Scott are directly responsible for so much grief, pain and dysfunction, but idiots keep reelecting them.
eclare
@Geminid: I saw that, it was jaw dropping. That makes Kemp in GA look sane for welcoming battery/EV plants.
eclare
@Betty Cracker: Good point, take the money and grift. Unlike Scott, who is a hypocritical and evil ratboy, I think our governor is a true believer. Not sure which is worse.
Joe Falco
@Betty Cracker:
It also helps when said misfortune is partly the reason these kind of low-information voters keep being turned out. Keep them on the brink of life and fed a diet of misinformation and they’ll either be too ground down to vote or too enraged to realize whose hand is robbing them in plain sight.
Baud
The Tories did it wrong. Once you take action to ruin the economy, you hand the election to the opposition to deal with the fallout. Amateurs.
Citizen Alan
@LordAvebury:
Historians in the 22nd century, assuming the human race survives that long, will say that World War 3 took place in the summer and fall of 2016. It was fought entirely in the cyberspace. And Russia’s victory was so complete that Great Britain committed national suicide, while the Americans happily welcomed the Czar Putin’s hand picked viceroy into the White House.
Betty Cracker
I was reading something earlier about the rural hospital situation in Mississippi. It’s bad! The current governor, a talking canned ham named Tate Reeves, also refuses to accept Medicaid expansion even though healthcare systems are collapsing around the state. He justifies it by telling people those areas are being depopulated, so they no longer need a medical infrastructure.
Gee, I wonder why people are fleeing in droves? But the talking canned ham will probably be reelected in a landslide.
Tony Jay
@Baud:
They tried. They selected a thoroughly corrupt liar from the TV with multiple scandals and a ton of serious security issues in his immediate past to be their leader and spent every single moment in front of the camera blaring obvious nonsense and basically acting like sneering posh morons.
Unfortunately for them, the entire UK Establishment were united in their determination that the well-meaning anti-racism campaigner with the long history of being on the right side of (almost) every major national debate was not going to be Prime Minister, so the Tories’ best efforts to make themselves unelectable were transformed into electoral pluses via the magic of 24/7 propaganda.
Them’s the breaks, eh?
Anyway
@Betty Cracker:
Rethug governors are also adept at ignoring direct-vote results in favor of Medicaid expansion or anything that doesn’t suit their plutocratic aims. Have super-majority, will ignore people.
Anyway
@Baud:
They have the brown guy with the funny name in charge — next best thing, I s’pose.
//s
Geminid
@eclare: Brian Kemp was a land developer before entering politics. That’s not neccesarily a good thing, but it may have given him a more pragmatic viewpoint. Kemp professes to be an agnostic regarding climate change, but when it comes to economic development he is a true believer.
sab
@Kay: And if the women get their own guns and shoot the stalking bastards the women will be prosecuted and convicted.
eclare
@Geminid: Gotcha. That makes sense, I worked in ATL starting right after college in 1991 for fourteen years, and wow, the development. When I worked downtown we did a daily crane count of how many we could see. I see photos of the skyline now, and I don’t recognize it.
YY_Sima Qian
@Geminid:
I think Youngkin saw the writing on the wall that Michigan will likely get the Ford-CATL JV, & decided to make political hay, instead. But, the deal is not yet done. Even 3 years ago a GOP governor would have been wooing Ford & CATL w/ huge subsidies & tax rebates to get back in the game.
CATL is by far the larges battery maker in the world (34% market share), BYD being the 3rd largest (12%), & they are not just competitive on cost. By 2023 it is expected that BYD will surpass LG Chem to be 2nd largest, & CATL + BYD will have > 50% of global market share. The bottom 4 of the top 10 battery makers are all smaller but up & coming Chinese players. The IRA aims to establish a competitive battery supply chain ASAP (so needs inbound investment by Chinese manufactures, & Korean & Japanese ones), & the Chinese manufacturers want to add capacity in the US to sell into the market (otherwise risk getting locked out by the IRA).
Then you have Texas (among other GOP run states) passing laws that prohibit citizens from China, Russia, Iran & North Korea from purchasing land & properties there. The impact from inclusion of the latter 3 countries is negligible, but Chinese green card holders are prohibited, too. That is causing a great deal of anxiety among the Chinese & Chinese American community in the state. Not sure if the laws are Constitutional, but who knows w/ this SCOTUS.
So it looks like the GOP is banking on fanning the “Yellow Peril” & “Reds Under Beds” to win the WH & the Senate in 2024.
Gvg
I always assumed Brexit was a Russian operation, but I have changed my mind because of the UK support of Ukraine. I think it was British financial corruption, not specifically Russian. They, themselves are corrupt and did not want to or dare accept those new oversite laws. I think they were accepting everyone’s cash including their own buddies and blowing it too, corruptly. And they could not find another way to not be exposed, so they left the EU. If it was just that they were influenced by Russia, I don’t think their foreign policy would have been as reliable, BUT that is not going to be stable long term with them this corrupt.
They never would have gotten this corrupt if the liberal side wasn’t so weak and that seems to be due to a bunch of issues. The UK is not the US, and isn’t really in the same place we are. They also just don’t seem to have leaders most of them really like or trust.
raven
@Geminid: He’s a fucking moron from Oconee County.
Brian Kemp and the Triumph of Mediocrity
raven
@eclare: The big French fry pack is still on the connector!
eclare
@raven: Nice to see! I worked downtown in the GP building and the Georgia Power building before taking a job up the Alpharetta Autobahn near Perimeter Mall.
Anyway
@Gvg:
There was Russian rat-fucking in Brexit, for sure. Nigel Farrar always had Russian money. They wanted to weaken the EU and western democracies. I’ve been (happily) surprised at British support for Ukraine — everything doesn’t always line up.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: For a Republican state, West Virginia was fairly quick to adopt Medicaid expansion. I think they did it 2013, which would have been 5 years before Virginia.
There is one big difference between West Virginia and the red states to the south that still turn down the extra Medicaid funding: only 3,6% of West Virginia’s population are Black people.
Baud
@Geminid:
Exactamundo.
Soprano2
@Kay: That’s appalling! I guess letting men have their external penises is considered more important than women’s lives.
Betty Cracker
This is insane:
I grudgingly accept that we have to wait years for our legal system to deal with domestic coup-plotters and insurrectionists, but I don’t understand why the feds don’t kick this lying shit-stain out. According to NPR, the visa he used to enter the country probably expired this week. He applied for a 6-month tourist visa and will probably remain until it’s processed, which could take months.
raven
@eclare: I worked for the Board of Regents and our offices were in the “Trinity Building” right across from the Capitol. I had meetings there from time-to-time but mostly worked from home in Athens.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Is Brazil pushing the State Department for his return?
Martin
@Geminid: I’mma leave this here.
prostratedragon
@Baud: A couple of weeks ago their foreign office was charged with looking into extradition. Meanwhile Brazilian investgators are moving up the chain.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Not that I’ve heard. I think House Democrats wrote a letter to Biden urging him to revoke Bolsonaro’s diplomatic status after the rioting in Brazil, but I don’t know what came of that.
Kay
@sab:
Russia:
I read that Putin had decriminalized domestic violence in 2017 (when he did it) and I thought “we’ll get that here” because it was backed by conservative religious powers in Russia.
The “exceptions” for abortion in cases of rape that Right wing religious are drafting will either intentionally or inadvertently reduce rape reporting by women. They have turned their state codes over to religious extremists. We’re going back 50 years on violence against women and domestic violence.
Frankensteinbeck
@Joe Falco:
A big, big factor isn’t the money, it’s that they’re assholes who want to treat their staff like shit. The money is a side effect. You see it in big business a lot too. Because they’re assholes, they immediately scream “No one wants to work anymore!”
@Betty Cracker:
I wasn’t. There is a very, very old joke that a racist is willing to drown rather let a black man save him. It isn’t really a joke. My mother saw it straight up in the hospital ER, people telling her they refuse treatment unless a white man delivers it.
Obama gave American whites charity, and it’s a major reason they went bugfuck insane and never stopped.
kalakal
@Gvg: Brexit has a lot of roots.
When Britain joined the EEC (forerunner of the EU) in 1973 the Tories were all for it ( Business seeing export opportunities) and Labour agin ( impact on food prices, stopping implementation of socialist polices). There was a referendum in 1975 which was 67% in favour.
Labour gradually became pro ( in 1983 they still ran on leaving) and Tories anti and the Tories have been tearing themselves up over it for at least 40 years. John Major had a small majority of 21 from 1992 to 1997 and his life was made hell by a small group of ‘Eurosceptics”, the Tory equivalent to the Freedom Caucus, always threatening to burn the house down but never actually doing it ( it would have led to an election which the Tories would have lost. As Major put
By the time Cameron oozed into power in 2010 there was a full blown Tory civil war. To pacify the right wing nut jobs and to prevent losing votes to Nigel “a waste of skin” Farage and his UKIP party he included an EU referendum in his 2015 election manifesto. He expected the referendum to be for remain and that would end the Tory civil war ( for a few years anyway) , however as the only thing Cameron ever achieved in his life was having a rich Mommy & Daddy he totally fucked up the campaign.
The Brexiteers ran a very corrupt campaign with lots of murky money (hello GRU!) , outright lies and electoral malpractice. However the legal judgement was that as the referendum was only advisory breaking electoral law didn’t count. Large chunks of the left didn’t help by dreaming of Lexit, where free of the neo-liberal regulatory chains* of the EU the proletariats day in the sun would surely arise
After this the question was what exactly did Brexit mean, how hard or soft? And we were off the races as every ultra right wing nutjob and Little Englanders, fuelled by Murdoch’s merry men, Putins merry men, racists, disaster capitalists, and corrupt elites opposed to financial oversight ok pushed further and further to a maximalist exit and the hardcore Lexiteers weakened the opposition as they continued channelling their inner Ernst Thalmanns.
And now reality strikes. Summed up brilliantly with this bleakly funny video
https://youtu.be/jz5jUMVfJP4
* I never understood how someone could achieve the intellectual incoherence to arrive at the concept of “neo-liberal regulation”
Martin
@YY_Sima Qian: Didn’t know that states were banning Chinese home buying. In my city they’re a big cause for the rise in housing prices.
My city did a lot of its rapid growth right after the US expressed its One China policy, so there was a torrent of Taiwanese home buying as potential egress. You can spot these folks because 40 years later they’ll still tell you they dislike Democrats because Carter signed on to that. Soon turned into a pipeline to send your kid at the start of high school to establish residency, get into a UC, and dodge your compulsory military duty. Anyway, it means we have large Chinese communities here, so it’s attractive to PRC folks now. Similar dynamic – they swoop in with a fat stack, grab a house as soon as it hits the market cash (and I mean *cash*, they literally have the $1.5M in the car. No idea how they secure that kind of cash.) and same deal – fly the kid over to live in the house, residency, etc. It’s hard watching these 14 year olds get dumped off into a 3BR house in a country they’ve never been to with no family on the continent. Parents hire someone to check up on them, someone to take care of the house, etc. Maybe fly in twice a year.
But what Texas misses is that house, and the college tuition and everything else around that are effectively exports. They’re dollars coming in from outside the country to boost the economy. And it’s a LOT in a state like CA. UC foreign tuition alone works out to be about 3 billion toward the US trade deficit (about 1%). It’s not counted in that because it’s not a good that goes through a port, but same effect. I’d guess that real estate in my city alone is about that amount. Thankfully my city actually permits new construction, unlike many around here.
Kay
@sab:
Tennessee:
All women are liars, which is why we can’t trust them to report domestic violence or rape. Putin made DV the equivalent of a traffic offense and now Right wing judges in the US are arming men who are under restraining orders.
It was one of the justifications for why women couldn’t serve on juries in the US that anti-abortion activists want to return to- they’re all liars and they’re not good enough to judge men. All the anti-abortion legislation they are frantically scribbling is grounded in this archaic idea- women are liars and not reliable reporters, even as to their own health or lives.
PBK
@Kay: Kay, I always appreciate your comments because you clearly and succinctly get to the core of an issue. Thank you especially for your remarks on the ever more dire condition of women in this country. Your words express the thoughts I am too furious to get out coherently.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Kay:
I’m sure there are some serious harrumphing appellate lawyers who will tell us that the Federalist Society necromancers in black robes are deep thinkers and fabulous historians who are honorably doing their jobs by citing old English precedent in making our lives worse.
My take a this – if a right is only a right (or a prohibition only a prohibition) as it was understood when a law was passed, then we may as well revolt and burn the whole fucking document.
Thing was flawed from the start anyway. We’ve been patched together with duct tape for 230 years.
Geminid
@raven: Huh. So he’s not even a self made moron.
Kemp sure fell into a good thing with this EV boom, though. He even hot to represent the Peach State at Davos last month.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Kay:
Goddamned Christians. This is why I won’t go back to any Christian church.
It’ll probably pass by a large majority, Tennessee being the wretched white supremacist shithole that it is.
Frankensteinbeck
@kalakal:
For the American Hard Left, the thought process goes like this: Regulations aren’t eating the rich, they’re just punching the rich in the face. Since it’s a survivable wound, it’s an ineffectual punishment, and fixes nothing. That means it is, in fact, a cover, a deliberate way of conspiring with the rich by lying to voters.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I’m disappointed by federal prosecutors too – a situation that predates the current AG, IMO, but there is right now a huge federal corruption trial in Ohio so I was pleased they’re taking something to trial:
Here’s the super professional and mature GOP legal team:
They responded by accusing the judge of bias and asking him to recuse.
Oh, and one of the jurors refused to wear a mask so the defense team said that made him a MAGA Republican so the court ordering him to follow rules is also bias against Republicans. Against Republicans who steal 60 million dollars from citizens.
mrmoshpotato
Another round of applause for the stupid children who decided Hillary could fuck herself with their votes.
AnonPhenom
Seems there’s an assumption that re-admission for the UK will only require a show of sheepish embarrassment usually reserved for the Morning After. Don’t think that’s going to be the case. It’s going to involve changes to London banking opacity .
And adopting the Euro.
prostratedragon
Meanwhile elsewhere in Brazil, Meet the Contract Killer who Now Represents George Santos in Brazil
Frankensteinbeck
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
One of the greatest wisdoms of the founders is that they knew they were making an imperfect document that would need regular updating, and built a system into the constitution to do that. One of many reasons that originalism is horse shit.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
This crime was not that hard for the FBI to investigate because one of the lobbyists the GOP hired became disgruntled and reported them to the FBI and wore a wire therby recording the (other) criminals as they planned and executed the crime(s) :)
kalakal
@Frankensteinbeck: Thanks for that, so it’s basically the logic of people educated beyond their capacity for rational thought
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
I wish our side were better at long term thinking. I would love to see a generational project for a new modern bill of rights. But we tend to want our victories yesterday, so I think such an effort would be met with derision.
Kay
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
I think the people who believe this is “about” abortion or will be limited to abortion are naive and cavalier and not that smart, and they can be that- naive and cavalier and not that smart- because they don’t think it will matter to them. It will.
kalakal
@AnonPhenom: It sure will and a lot more besides. The UK had the best deal of any country in the EU in the form of rebates, opt outs etc. When they’re allowed to crawl back in it will be on least favoured nation status
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I didn’t know about the wire. Ha!
@kalakal: So the UK will eventually ask to be readmitted?
Baud
@kalakal:
I’d imagine dog collars and leather straps will be involved.
Princess
It certainly was a an GRU operation (I part). Farage is as close to Russia as our bad actors are. I don’t think this is even in question.
And I know there’s a lot of love for Corbyn around here but he wanted Brexit too and deserves blame. Labour’s hands aren’t clean here either. Brexit was a group project.
Kay
@PBK:
Thank you. That’s nice to say. I am lucky enough to have two grandaughters so this lurch backward came at a time where I was sort of re-engaging with girls – my own daughter is grown and voted against all this garbage.
My older grandaughter, who is three, was “line leader” at daycare this week and her teacher said there was a “misunderstanding” where the three year old thought “line leader” meant “teacher”. LOL.
Line leader has no real power, sadly.
Baud
@Kay:
I fear a coup is inevitable.
Geminid
@Princess: I don’t know if there is very much love here for Jeremy Corbyn. He does get some fierce support against the attacks made on him by Labour’s leadership on the question of anti-Semitism.
I’m no Corbyn supporter when it comes to his politics (at least as far as I understand them), but I think the support in this party matter may be justified.
Kay
@Baud:
I liked that the teacher said “misunderstanding”, giving her the benefit of the doubt that she misunderstood rather than being a power mad she devil, like NYTimes reporters do with girls and women.
kalakal
@Betty Cracker: Yes, but it won’t be soon, or rather it’ll be a long time between asking and admission
kalakal
@Baud: And gags
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: Unfortunately, the US Congress passed a law that forbade federal funding from directed to BYD & other Chinese manufacturers, including a China Railroad Rollingstock Corporation plant (also unionized) at Springfield, MA making subway cars. Among the supporters of the legislation were Sherrod Brown & other American Unions.
You are trying to analyze this from rational cost benefit perspective. That is not the calculation that the GOP governors are making. They are not banning purchases by Chinese citizens to contain a housing bubble (why ban Chinese green card holders?), they are staking out their “anti-CCP” positions to gain national notoriety & buttressing the overall 2024 GOP election strategy. Unlike ND & MN (other states that have passed or preparing to pass similar legislations), however, TX may find that there are unpleasant unintended consequences for the state’s attractiveness to high tech & higher education.
Both the ban on federal funding going to purchases from Chinese companies (even if Made in the USA) & the ban on Chinese citizens purchasing land/properties are animated by heightened Great Power Competition(TM). The latter comes from baser instincts, but the former is not necessarily more rational.
Tony Jay
@Princess:
Sorry, no.
Corbyn criss-crossed the country campaigning against the Leave vote, telling anyone who would listen that even he, someone who had real and long-standing issues with aspects of the EU, was voting Remain because – on balance – membership was a plus for the UK. The British Press simply didn’t pay any attention and concentrated what little non-Leave bandwidth it had left on the amateurish, painfully out-of-tune garbage fire that was the Cameron-Osborne led Stay campaign.
The ‘Blame Corbyn’ barrage started literally the second the polls closed and got ramped up when Cameron stepped down, because we couldn’t have all of that lovely anger wasted on a posh Etonian fuckwit who wasn’t in power anymore, not when it could be much more usefully redirected at the guy who actually delivered the vast majority of his party’s voters for the Remain camp.
During the entire period Corbyn was LOTO Brexit didn’t happen, because he whipped his MPs to vote against any of the various withdrawal deals the Tories coughed up. Within a few months of Starmer sliming his way into the post he was whipping his MPs to vote for Flobalob’s withdrawal deal and won’t have a word said against it on pain of suspension.
Nu-Labour’s hands certainly aren’t clean. They helped make this happen because they couldn’t bear the thought of the Labour Left getting into power, that’s where the blame lies.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
They let him go in 2006 so he committed bigger crimes:
The lobbyists impersonated progressive groups:
Can’t you just see the wingers and plutocrats getting together and coming up with “Generation Now”?
Princess
@Geminid: Meh. Corbyn is an anti-Semite. An awful lot of people are. Doesn’t make him MTG but he doesn’t think Jews are ever fully British. Labour has had a problem with antisemitism since the 40s at least, and frankly so has all of the UK. I’d still have voted for him. Tories are probably just as bad or worse. What killed them was not what Corbyn said but all the thousands of people who rushed in to tell us we weren’t hearing from him what we knew we were hearing from him and that we were idiots for believing our own ears.
But that’s besides the point with Brexit. Bottom line: Labour leaders and many of their voters wanted Brexit too.
NotMax
@Kalakal
Would that involve opening each session of the Commons with Yakety Sax?
:)
Geminid
@Tony Jay: I heard that the Conservatives flipped a lot of traditionally Labour seats in the last election, and they accounted for much of the large Tory majority.
I’m curious: had these been pro-Brexit districts? Do you think that Labour will win them back when a new election finally is held?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty Cracker: Mr DAW’s sister and BIL live in the Englewood area of Florida during the winter and Rhode Island during the summer. They’re Florida residents, but they’ve decided that within the next couple of years, as they age, they’ll sell the Florida house and live in RI full time. I was surprised because they were full-on anti-income tax. But one reason for their decision is what they think of as inferior medical care in their area.
Soprano2
But that’s a crucial difference. Many white people will deny themselves help if they think it will stop “those people” from getting something for free that they didn’t earn. In WVa it was probably seen as helping the poor white people in Appalachia. In MO it was the rural areas that were being hurt the most by not having the Medicaid expansion, and those areas in MO are mostly white except for in the Bootheel, but the widespread perception among white people here was that it would help too many of “those people” in the cities. It took the people of MO voting for it and the state Supreme Court ordering the state legislature to fund it for us to get the expansion. For now the R’s have quit trying to sabotage it, probably because our governor is from a relatively rural area (Bolivar, about 30 miles NE of me) so he understands how much the expansion helps those places. It’s infuriating to me when I hear people say things like “Why should those people who don’t work have health insurance when they don’t pay for it?” as a reason to not expand Medicaid, because those people probably already qualify for Medicaid!!! The expansion helps working people, not people who don’t work, but too many people don’t understand that.
Chris Johnson
No shit it was. What else would it be?
Soprano2
@Betty Cracker: I think they tread lightly when it comes to government officials from other countries, even former ones, because they’re worried about retaliation against Americans. I wish they’d kick him out, too.
Soprano2
@raven: Hey I meant to ask you – I see that Andy’s Frozen Custard has a store in Athens. Have you seen it, and have you tried it?
Baud
@Soprano2: Yeah, I’d imagine Bolsonaro would like to play the victim of American aggression. Brazil needs to step up if they want him back.
Soprano2
@Kay: Such a horrifying thought. Too many evangelical people believe that using violence against “misbehaving” women and children is justified. Here in MO they’re closing down Agape Boarding School – finally – and a former principal and his wife have filed to start a “new” school in the very same facility! It’ll probably get approved, too, and the cycle will start all over. They should show “The Burning Bed” on TV again.
Betty Cracker
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Englewood is a gorgeous place, but I think you’d have a fairly long drive to get to a large hospital and the associated facilities and people. Fort Myers maybe? I don’t know. Luckily I’ve never needed medical attention in the area!
Soprano2
@Kay: I’m sure “false report” will be defined vaguely enough in the law that they’ll be able to wield it selectively against poor and minority women if they want.
There was a TV show back in the 1990’s called “I’ll Fly Away”. It starred Sam Waterson as a district attorney in the South and Regina Taylor (might have been her first big role) as the family’s maid. One of the plot points was that his son’s GF got pregnant; she accused the son of rape under the mistaken idea that then she could get an abortion. It’s the one plot of that show that stuck with me, how desperate women then were to terminate pregnancies. In the end she found out that even if she had been raped she wouldn’t be able to get an abortion, so she destroyed him for nothing.
Kay
@Soprano2:
When I was working at the post office and could not miss work because I had to unlock everything I sent my oldest child – a rule follower and just really conservative person tempermentally although not politically thank God – to a fundie religious daycare for a snow day in desperation. He was SO MAD that they screamed at him for not standing behind tape on the floor to line up that he refused to speak for me for a whole evening.
He would naturally line up if spoken to respectfully. They didn’t get him at all. He was offended, like, “back off, freaks”
Geminid
@Soprano2: It took a while, but in 2017 Ralph Northam and Democratic candidates for the state House of Delegates made Medicaid expansion a major issue in that years election. Republicans were hard pressed to answer this line of attack, especially coming from a medical doctor.
That was a big reason Northam easily won, and Democrats picked up 14 seats in the 100 member House. In the next legislative session, 10 Republican Delegates and 3 Senators joined Democrats in putting through Medicaid expansion..
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: The case for letting the normal process run its course was stronger when Bolsonaro was lying low. Headlining a Turning Point USA event in Miami is a provocative move on his part, IMO. I guaran-damn-tee you they’ll be screaming about stolen elections — in Brazil and in the US. We need to kick that fucker out!
Soprano2
@Kay: Have you listened to Rachel Maddow’s “Ultra” podcast? If you do podcasts you really should, it’s about a Nazi plot to infiltrate our government and install a Nazi one. She talks about the sedition trial of these people; evidently it was a worse circus than the O.J. trial, with the defense attorneys objecting and talking during the prosecutor’s opening statement, and the defendants behaving atrociously in court. It sounds like the judge was weak-willed and totally unable to control them. I think with the wrong judge that’s what a trial of TFG would be like.
kalakal
@Princess:
British politicians on all sides( and other elites) have a long history of blaming the EU for all the nations woes, claiming that special* EU rules and regulations prevented them from turning good old Blighty into a land of milk and honey. In this they were ably assisted by the great British Media spearheaded by a young Johnson, Boris who as Torygraph Brussels correspondent made a career out of inventing poisonous garbage.**
I’m not a Corbyn fanboi, he’s a lousy politician ( his last election campaign was a total shambles) but I’d vote for him over Starmer. On Europe he’s been fairly consistent, in 1975 he voted against, against Maastricht in 1993, Lisbon in 2008, and for a proposed withdrawal referendum in 2011. Throughout his main reason was what he saw/sees as EU limitations on workers rights, he was/is in favour of Eu trade integration.
When Brexit became a thing he urged Remain for the same reason, that while he felt the EUs workers rights needed improving, after Brexit the Tories would destroy them. He had a tough needle to thread in the election, Labour voters were split remain/brexit by about 2 to 1 and he ended up pleasing neither and came across as indecisive. Personally I felt he should have taken a strong Remain stance, he’d have fired up all the Remain voters nationally
* special as in they didn’t exist
** He wrote articles
Soprano2
@YY_Sima Qian: It’s not just Republicans either, our Democratic candidate for senator campaigned against the Republican legislature in MO for changing the law and letting a Chinese company buy up a bunch of MO farmland. It’s a bipartisan thing.
Baud
Pence really took the wind out of the media’s sails in attacking Biden.
Soprano2
@Baud: I read somewhere that the Archives have sent letters to all surviving presidents requesting that they search their homes and offices for classified documents! LOL I bet the one person who doesn’t have any is Obama.
Baud
@Soprano2: That would be my guess too.
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: My money’s on Jimmy Carter.
Soprano2
This is a free link to a subscriber story. The Santos story keeps getting weirder and weirder – Meet the Contract Killer Who Represents Santos in Brazil
jonas
Tories are actually out there trying to *remind* voters that they’re responsible for Brexit? Holy shit. Why don’t they just come out in support of crotch lice?
Tony Jay
@Princess:
Undiluted horseshit. Trot off and read the report Sir Starmer paid a million quid for his friend the eminent QC to produce. The one he and the entire British Media couldn’t bury fast enough when it debunked their bullshit narrative so completely they had to switch to “Waaaah, Corbyn luvs Putin” smears to ‘justify’ keeping the Party whip from him.
Or watch Al Jazeera’s documentaries on the topic. They’re quite thorough too. But don’t come here mouthing off about that shit, it’s annoying.
@Geminid:
Virtually all of them were Leave voting constituencies, yes. Populated by the kind of ‘culturally traditional’ voter I was talking about before, the ones who had seen their communities and industries devastated by decades of Tory cuts, but who had been targeted and won over by the propaganda about Brexit releasing billions of pounds that would otherwise be wasted by the Woke EU and radical PC Lefties on ‘those people’.
Starmer’s entire post-takeover 180 has centred on convincing these voters that Nu-Lab is no threat to their hopes for Brexit and has no great love for ‘those people’ either. Couple that with the cratering reputation of the Tory Party and Nu-Lab should pick up a swathe of them, but with politics in this country being what they are it’s just as likely that the Labour vote could split in disgust over Nu-Lab’s rightward lunge and a plurality in some of them could plump for the 100% proof uncut lunacy of the Reform UK Party.
The next election isn’t a done deal, not by a long shot.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: I read that too. What struck me is that this means that there’s almost nowhere inside the state that isn’t just horrible. The capital (and I think biggest city) has serious problems with their water quality, and the state won’t do anything about it because the majority of people living there…aren’t the “right” people. They’re destroying their rural hospitals, so the rural parts of the state are going to be extra shit too. What’s left?
I know that a lot of rural black Americans live in Mississippi, so I assume that’s a big part of this – a lot of those hospitals serve the “wrong” rural population, so the Republican Party doesn’t care. It’s horrific to watch.
YY_Sima Qian
@Soprano2: There is a difference in banning the sale of land/properties to China domiciled companies (but how would any Chinese company be able to set up subsidiaries in that case) and not banning the sale of land/properties to Chinese citizens (including those who are US green card holders). Both are problematic, but the latter is casting suspicion on a group of individuals based on country of origin. D candidates might have campaigned against particular deals w/ Chinese entities, but I don’t think any D governors/state legislatures are proposing similar blanket bans.
Yes, D politicians are not above playing populist politics on China (see Tim Ryan).
Kay
@Soprano2:
I do like podcasts and I’m glad Rachel Maddow is famous and a liberal, but I cannot listen to her. She over explains. It’s like listening to someone read a Power Point. I want to tear my hair out.
She doesn’t trust her audience to make the simplest connections, so I feel “led” and manipulated and my natural inclination is to push back against that. It’s an error lawyers make – I fall into it myself so I recognize it. She’s not dishonest with it like Greenwald, who is just sleazy and uses weasel words and phrasing in a misleading way that is completely familiar to me because it’s what bad lawyers do – I look for “clearly” in lawyer work because then I know they’re not trustworthy- but it’s the same control impulse, I think. Greenwald needs you to STOP THINKING so he uses those words. Anyway. Glad she’s popular because she’s on my side.
Princess
@kalakal: “Personally I felt he should have taken a strong Remain stance, he’d have fired up all the Remain voters nationally.”
Yes, that’s my main gripe against him.
Betty Cracker
@sdhays: Racism is definitely a huge part of it, but other red states in the former Confederacy (and Confederacy-adjacent states) eventually accepted the money. IIRC, two of them did so with Democratic governors (LA and KY), which kind of explains it, but I think AR and MO did too? I wonder how those places got to yes.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Maddow would be a good and prepared prosecutor – ethical- and Greenwald would be a sleazy and dishonest one but they’re both of that mindset, I think. I think a lot of Greenwald’s anger and bitterness comes from never having been given any real (state) power over people (wisely, thank God).
Which is not bad! We need good prosecutors like we need a good defense. I just have to buck them :)
Baud
@Betty Cracker: It’s mostly the south. I believe MO was done by referendum. In AR, the GOP seems to have done the right thing
Status of State Medicaid Expansion Decisions: Interactive Map | KFF
Tony Jay
@kalakal:
Given the overwhelming weight of the ‘Stop Corbyn’ effort, I don’t think that would have happened. We saw in 2019 how many seats Labour stood to lose if their Labour-voting inhabitants thought Red Jez was going to take away their precious Brexit benefits (N*g N*gs and P**is out! Arthur Mullard back on the TV! Only women wear make-up! etc).
Were there really enough Remain leaning seats that would throw their votes to a dirty anti-Semite who wanted to steal away all of their taxes to give to the kind of people Channel 5 makes scrounger-porn documentaries about? Would the likes of Jo Swinson have ceded leadership of the Remain majority to a filthy Trot so that he could bring in Venezuelan customs and arrest all small business owners? Would Nicola Sturgeon have backed a Corbyn-led UK wide Remain campaign when having Flobalob and his Torykippers in power rebounded so sweetly to her SNP’s long-term benefit?
I don’t think so. I think the narrative would very quickly have shifted to “Tainted Corbyn soils the purity of the Remain campaign while stupidly throwing away scores of pro-Leave seats” and that would have hurt Labour even more at the ballot box.
But we’ll never know.
Soprano2
@Kay: No, the podcast is different. It’s nothing like those 15-minute explainers. You should download the first episode and give it a chance. It’s a fascinating story that was lost to history until she did this podcast. It’s hard to believe that a story where many members of Congress were actively conspiring with the Nazi government in Germany to bring down the U.S. government was basically unknown by anyone except historians. It was probably lost because they were never actually convicted of sedition. The parallels to what TFG and the MAGA’s are trying to do today are chilling.
Soprano2
@Betty Cracker: In MO it was done through a constitutional amendment the voters approved. It’s why the state legislature is trying to make it almost impossible for the voters to get any more constitutional amendments passed. That, and they’re afraid the voters will invalidate their horrible anti-abortion law.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I see that Arkansas’s Medicaid expansion began January 1, 2014 so I guess the legislature got it done in 2013.
A theory on how they did get it done: the radicals had not yet become dominant in the state’s Republican party and legislature, and the more pragmatic Chamberof Commerce types could still push expansion though. They might not have been able to pull that off a few years later.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Oh, thank you. I will try it because I want to like her work and I do like podcasts. I drive a lot and I listen to them in the car. I have an 4 hour trip to MI Monday so I’ll give it a try.
I tried her Spiro Agnew explainer and I was “oh help me- she’s reading me the PowerPoint”. I turn itno a surly 7th grade juvenile delinquent :)
Kay
@Soprano2:
Oh, thank you. I will try it because I want to like her work and I do like podcasts. I drive a lot and I listen to them in the car. I have an 4 hour trip to MI Monday so I’ll give it a try.
I tried her Spiro Agnew explainer and I was “oh help me- she’s reading me the PowerPoint”. I turn itno a surly 7th grade juvenile delinquent :)
Soprano2
@Kay: I think it’s an important piece of history that’s relevant to today’s situation. It starts off with a plane crash and a mystery about a senator’s speech. I found it gripping, but I’m not as annoyed with her explainers as you are. I hope she writes a book about it, because the story needs to get as much exposure as possible. I had no idea that Nazis had penetrated our legislature in the late 1930’s!
Kay
I wonder if we will ever get an explanation for why media completely misled people on the economy, telling them over and over that it was bad when it is fucking booming. This is Iraq invasion level lying they did.
Hope no one made any personal financial decisions based on their reporting! You really missed out!
Biden’s small business start up numbers are really good, so maybe no one listens to them. I hope. You’ll go broke listening to these people. Ask the people at the drve thru. Just as reliable.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: & @Geminid: & @Soprano2: Thanks! From that KFF map, it looks like Kansas, Wyoming and Wisconsin are the non-Confederate hold-outs. WTF?
Geminid
@Kay:
“Here are your fries. And go long on bonds!”
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: It really was an amazing story. I thought I had a pretty good handle on U.S. history, and I had no idea the 1930s fascism movement went that deep.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soprano2:
I think the main problem that many of us have with Maddow is that we are not her real intended audience. We, here at this blog, follow political minutia fairly closely. We don’t need the back story; we were following along already. Her audience really is my mom, my brother, and my sister-in-law. People who are on our side but don’t live for politics and have busy lives. They like the show because it does give the background all the time. They could take an hour a couple times in there busy week and get a chance to catch up on the whats and wherefores of politics. Then, at family dinners, they would have some idea what I was going on about.
Kay
@Geminid:
They’re just going to keep “predicting”a recession until one happens. “We TOLD YOU the economy would eventually stop running hot!” Oh, thanks. No one knew that.
God almighty. Please go on with your life- invest, look for a job, start your business, sell your business, be happy. They don’t want you to do well. Yiu must be crouched under a table waiting a really long time to get hit :)
kalakal
@Tony Jay: True we won’t know, we do know that his approach failed. Anecdata but I know a hell of a lot of Remainers who didn’t feel they had anyone to vote for.
Corbyn had a really tricky problem to solve and I understand why he tried to solve it the way he did. My problem with it was, harking back to my days as a canvasser, trying to imagine selling it on the doorstep. Punters want quick decisive answers, not a 5 minute exposition on the merits of an exploratory investigation into preliminary negotiations followed by a confimatory referendum… you’d come across as Dennis the Peasant. It was actually a sensible grown up policy but we live in a world of 30 second, decisive soundbites and he didn’t bother to come up with one which is why I said he was a lousy politician.
The anti-semitism thing gets me, Labour ( and both sides!) have anti-semitic members. However the UK media loves to equate any criticism of Israel with anti semitism which was the club used against Corbyn.
As for that loon Jo Swinson I have no idea but I know a lot of Lib Demish type who never forgave her and Clegg but would have held their noses for a strong Remain stance from Corbyn.
Sturgeon, I think would have gone for it, she’d have asked a high price which Jez may have felt was too much.
One thing that really hurt to watch was the last couple of weeks of the election. Labour were chucking out new proposals by the day, not that they were bad proposals, but it made them look weak and desperate. One thing flobalob did exude was self confidence and the Arfur Mullard ( holy fuck, I did not need that memory) fans go for that. Hell’s teeth, Sunderland is totally dependant on Nissan exporting cars, without that there is nothing and the stupid bastards voted to destroy international trade.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Good point. I am glad she’s on our side rather than the other one.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: To me, it is similar to political advertising. I often don’t care for what is being put out, but it’s not aimed at me. My vote is already in the bag for the Democrats and unreachable for the GOP. I can be ignored.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: I plan to listen to it again. Like you I had not idea, but I have to say the run-up to WWII, and WWII is an area I”m always meaning to do more reading. There’s so damn much to take into account….
There were a couple of names that jumped out at me as familiar but I had no idea! Burton K Wheeler, from the Progressive Party ticket to America First. I had no idea And another politician whose name it right on the tip of my brain…. his son was too. Who am I thinking of?
Boring Establishmentarian that I am, I was annoyed by all the times she said “the Justice Department failed“, with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer. I thought another way to put that might be: This is what can happen when what looks to non-lawyers like a slam-dunk case goes before the judicial branch and that un-predictable beast known as a jury….
Barry
@Baud: “The Tories did it wrong. Once you take action to ruin the economy, you hand the election to the opposition to deal with the fallout. Amateurs.”
why? They can trash the place, and suck more blood out of it.
Tony Jay
@kalakal:
I get what you mean, but I don’t think there was a way of threading that needle, and definitely not one that could have stitched together all the various parts of any winning Remain coalition when the aim of the Labour Right was to rip it apart in order to ‘win’ back control of the Party.
The actual Labour compromise proposal was IMHO sellable, but not against a background of constant negative propaganda and the underlying conceit that, even if you agreed with it, you couldn’t possibly vote for it because that would put a bullying, possibly senile Hitler clone in Downing Street, and how could you justify that around the dinner table?
The damage, sadly, was done in 2018 when the Labour leadership made the decision to try and ride out the waves of misinformation and smearing in the naïve hope that, surely, when an Election was in the offing and it came down to Tory vs Labour, everyone would rally around and save the country.
That was never going to happen. Not with the Labour Right far more comfortable with a Tory Government than one led by horrible Trots. They should have dropped off their last bag of fucks at the Lost & Found and gone to war against the smearers and their allies, even calling another leadership election if necessary and purging the Party of MPs like Streeting and Kinnock and Ashworth who had made it plain they were already at war with the Party and its membership.
But they didn’t. And here we are.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
Inflation affects them directly. It is real and important to the national press. It getting harder to hire people affects some of their friends and business contacts. Working class people having more employment options and getting better jobs has no direct contact with their lives, and is interesting but exotic trivia. From where they stood, the economy was terrible and predictions that the numbers on a facts page would soon catch up were obviously true.
There are several other reasons, but that’s a big one.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Hamilton Fish! Third of his name, father of fourth. That was gonna drive me nuts all day
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Hahaha, glad you thought of the name! I hate it when that happens.
Maddow’s descriptions of the DOJ failures didn’t land with me as a criticism of the department or its special counselors, prosecutors, etc. On the contrary, I thought she went out of her way to laud their integrity and competence — and to outline the forces arrayed against them.
My takeaway was that institutions alone can’t save us. It took motivated individuals (like the lawyer in LA who infiltrated fascist groups) and voters. That’s definitely a lesson that applies today.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
My experience listening to Maddow was that she went into “explaining the invention of the wheel” mode on slow news days or when she had some story way off the beaten track to explain. When news and hot issues were breaking she was mostly as tight as anyone else.
And now she’s on only once a week, so what the hell.
kalakal
@Tony Jay:
This is so true, Labour have had this idea for far too long that if only they’re nice and reasonable, the establishment will respond in kind. Doesn’t matter how far they warp into Tory-Lite it’s never worked, never will.
Barry
@Kay: “I wonder if we will ever get an explanation for why media completely misled people on the economy, telling them over and over that it was bad when it is fucking booming. This is Iraq invasion level lying they did.”
The media hates Democrats, and they hate uppity peasants getting raises and a real choice in jobs.
Brit in Chicago
@kalakal: I’m sure the EU doesn’t want a country leaving, rejoining, releaving, rejoining…. So the UK’s rejoining will also require all the major political parties to have being in the EU as part of their platform, and for a long enough for that position to seem stable. At the moment only the LibDems are in favour (counting them as a major party is an act of charity, which I’m hoping to deduct on my taxes). So, alas, not in my life time, I’m pretty sure. Too bad, I really liked having an EU passport and being a citizen of a country that was not a laughing-stock (and not repeatedly shooting itself in the foot).
sab
@AnonPhenom: It took the Brits 20 years to get into the EU. I think they had to wait for deGaulle to die. No way will France and Germany let them back in easily or at all.
J R in WV
@Kay:
My Wife listened to the Fascist reporting by Maddow in the kitchen, so I heard most of it in the next room. Was fascinating, actually. But I enjoy Maddow’s reporting in general. But if you have a 4 hour drive, you can get half of it done each way.
kalakal
@Brit in Chicago: Oh it won’t be quick. I can see a UK referendum etc in the not too distant future, actually rejoining will take a long, long time
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@sab: Women who shoot or even threaten to shoot their abusers or stalkers usually go to jail…generally after asking for help from the authorities and being turned down. Meanwhile those accused of domestic abuse get to keep their guns in many states…
Subsole
@Kay: Conservatism is nothing more than a midlife crisis that has metastasized into a national (soon to be global) murder-suicide attempt.
These people have nothing, and I mean NOTHING, left but looking down their nose at someone else. Without that, they’d wither up and blow away. They have only their arrogance. It is all that they are. They will burn everything to keep it.
Fake Irishman
@Geminid:
NB: West Virginia still had a Democratic trifecta in 2012-2013.
Subsole
@Citizen Alan: I feel your point (and frustration) here, but that’s a bit like saying WW2 ended in Axis victory because Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor went swimmingly.
Subsole
@YY_Sima Qian:
Another thing to be aware of there is that numbers don’t tell the entire tale. It’s also the type of work done.
Forex: We have a LOT of medical professionals here in my neck of TX who hail from Iran. East and South Asia are also heavily represented.
Nothing to see here folks. Just the party of Jesus the Vengeful (TM) brutalizing skilled professionals filling a critical role in the community.
JAFD
@Kay: “The unemployment rate fell to 3.4%, the lowest since 1969.”
That’s my entire working life, and a few years extra at each end.
Gravenstone
@Betty Cracker: Carter is exempt because the Presidential Records Act came into effect after he was out of office.