#Diwali message and wishes from #VP #KamalaHarris.@VP @KamalaHarris #Diwali2022 #DiwaliWishes #DiwaliCelebrations pic.twitter.com/DTcfdA9M6a
— Diya TV – 24/7 * Free * Local (@DiyaTV) October 22, 2022
Kamala Harris threw and epic Diwali Party last night at her residence. Thank you for the invite! @VP #KamalaHarris #diwali pic.twitter.com/OFyeMxgMpA
— Anip Patel (@AnipPatel) October 22, 2022
Tonight I wore my @KhushDC button at Vice President @KamalaHarris’ Diwali reception. It prompted over a dozen conversations with LGBTQ Desis introducing themselves to me warmly. I had no idea how many queer & trans South Asians there are in Democratic politics! ?????? ?????? ???? ???? ???? ???? pic.twitter.com/aAQeTKM5nP
— K. Travis Ballie (@KTravisBallie) October 22, 2022
Also:
.@VP Kamala Harris sat down with POPSUGAR’s @lenakfelton to discuss abortion, Beyoncé, and why action is so essential in this moment. (1/5)https://t.co/IeEkIjcIXg
— POPSUGAR (@POPSUGAR) October 20, 2022
.@VP Kamala Harris on what’s at stake for bodily autonomy in the midterm elections: “I think we have to make clear that we trust the women of America to make decisions based on their best interest defined by them. That’s where elections matter.” (2/5)https://t.co/n5FbDA1Pf6 pic.twitter.com/tXrPH5bsMU
— POPSUGAR (@POPSUGAR) October 20, 2022
“One of the things I can’t stress enough is to remind people they are not alone, they’re not alone. And they’re not being judged.” — @VP Kamala Harris (3/5)https://t.co/IeEkIjcIXg
— POPSUGAR (@POPSUGAR) October 20, 2022
We agree, it’s B-A-N-A-N-A-S, bananas. For the rest of our exclusive sit-down interview with @VP @KamalaHarris where she talked abortion, Beyoncé, and her greatest fear for women, click here: https://t.co/vioHGDd1aT pic.twitter.com/ZfjXN2nh0P
— POPSUGAR (@POPSUGAR) October 20, 2022
“You have to always be vigilant in knowing that our democracy and your rights are only as intact and as strong as your willingness to fight for them.” — @VP @KamalaHarris
Watch our exclusive interview with her here: https://t.co/n5FbDAjYte pic.twitter.com/1ttFbQpqns
— POPSUGAR (@POPSUGAR) October 20, 2022
…. PopSugar: Besides voting, what can people do if they want to support abortion rights in this moment, and I wonder, on your end, what is the administration doing on this issue?
Kamala Harris: Well, I do want to stress that if we are going to be able to stop . . . so many states from doing what they’re doing, which is passing these abortion bans, passing bans with no exceptions for rape or incest, criminalizing healthcare providers — I mean, criminalizing doctors, nurses, healthcare providers. If we’re going to stop that, we’re going to have to have a national law that says we will protect and defend a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. And the only way that’s going to happen is to have the people in the United States Congress who will support that and have it in the numbers that we need, which is about two more United States senators and holding onto the House. So I have to really stress that.
But also, why do elections matter on this issue? Because in those states that have criminalized healthcare providers, it matters who your county prosecutor is. So take a look at those races. It matters who your governor is, because if you’re in a state where the legislature is maybe trying to pass a ban on reproductive healthcare but your governor is prepared to veto it, right, or if you have a governor who says, “I protect the woman’s right to make decisions about her own body,” that’s going to be important. So there’s that.
The work that can be done also includes supporting providers. But also it includes supporting women. You know, there’s so much about this issue that I think has been designed and meant to make women feel ashamed or embarrassed or make them feel alone. One of the things I can’t stress enough is to remind people they are not alone, they’re not alone. And they’re not being judged. That’s very important. And it’s also really important to use your voice in a way that provides clarity around what a person’s rights are, so that people won’t be alone and confused about where to go for help…
Vice President @KamalaHarris gave an incredibly personal and heartfelt story about her childhood memories of Diwali. I did not capture all of it, but I look forward to her re-telling the story in future Diwalis, maybe even in the Oval Office. ?? pic.twitter.com/EY9IwwllAK
— K. Travis Ballie (@KTravisBallie) October 21, 2022
Baud
Happy Diwali.
lowtechcyclist
Also, VP Harris’ 58th birthday was this past Thursday.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I would not have guessed she was 58.
gene108
I will never stop being awestruck by her grandparents.
Her mom’s in the same generation as my parents, aunts and uncles. Her grandparents are from the same generation as my grandparents.
I know none of my grandparents would’ve let my mom or aunts attend college abroad at 19, like her mom did. They wouldn’t have been okay if she married a Jamaican man and then divorced him.
Her grandparents were mind bogglingly forward thinking.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud: She definitely looks younger than her age.
Which it’s easy for me to keep track of, because my wife also turned 58 this past Thursday.
Tony Jay
A LETTER FROM BREXITANIA
“Sometimes… They Don’t Come Back”
As Craig Whittaker, the Tory Party Deputy Chief Whip put it only a few days ago, “I am fucking furious, and I don’t give a fuck anymore’, but whereas Craigie Boy’s ‘principled’ resignation from his post as deputy chief ball-basher lasted less than an hour (presumably he thought again about how storming off would reflect on his chances of one day getting a peerage) I’m always fucking furious with these buggers and the fucks I give about them are so few and tiny they wouldn’t paper over a flea’s flaccid wing-wang.
However, they are still the Government of the United Kingdom, so here goes.
First off, I don’t really know what to say about the mayfly Premiership of Liz ‘The Lettuce’ Truss, mainly because I don’t actually feel anything about it.
Her utter and complete failure wasn’t a surprise, even if the rapidity and completeness of it came as a bit of a shock. She always was a totally ephemeral presence, like B.O. lingering in an empty lift. Designed by bored animators as a replicable NPC in our political drama, her destiny was to be no more than a limp punchline to a bad joke. At the end of the day, she was just another back-stabbing chorus-line clogger willing to do anything – and I do mean anything – for a crack at the Big Time, only to prove herself utterly incapable of rising to the occasion when it mattered.
Truss was handed power with zero policy ideas of her own at a time of national crisis, and she lost it all by being the same self-centred, vapid, oblivious twit we already knew she was, far more interested in being in a position to laugh in the faces of defeated rivals than in understanding what was required of her. That’s her utterly ruined now, the poster-girl for humiliating failure. I haven’t seen a car-crash come-uppance like it outside of the ‘preppy suck-up snob’ character from any 80s Michael J. Fox movie you care to name. She might not think any of it was her fault, and the lunatics she was fronting for are never going to stop trying to carve up the entire world into digestible assets, but surely (surely!) that’s turbo-charged trickle-down ‘Trussonomics’ shot in the head for a generation?
Isn’t it?
We’ll see.
In the meantime, she leaves in her wake a Conservative Party languishing at 14% in the polls, which is… well… what do you say about that? It’s the lowest level the Tories have been at since polling began, which is both simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. I know that it’s not how polls really work but 14% of the British electorate is around six and a half million people. That’s 6,500,000 actual sentient human beings who think the Tory Party are doing just fine and can’t see what the fuss is about. I can only assume that they are mostly elderly shut-ins brainwashed by Downton Abbey and childhoods spent sticking lead pencils up their noses, with the usual smattering of upper-middle class wannabes who think it’s their solemn duty to save Blighty from the unwashed hordes by Backing the Blue from their second homes on the Dordogne.
How are the Tories going to recover from this? Hopefully, they’re not. It’s very possible that the cumulative effect of the last 12 years has slowly striped away layer after layer of Conservative credibility in thicker and thicker increments, leaving the Party with all the charm of a stale donut dropped in a cowpat no matter who leads it. This isn’t 2015, when they were able to masquerade as a grown-up Party whose ideas needed unshackling from the bounds of Coalition Government, or 2017 when they faced a Labour Party still recovering from multiple coup attempts by its right wing faction, or 2019 where they had Brextremism, Continuity-Blairism and every media outlet from the BBC on down spewing pro-Tory propaganda 24/7.
It’s 2022 now, and as bad as things got for the Tories under Flobalob Johnson’s disinterested stewardship, the disaster that was 45 Days of Truss was so much worse. If Flobby’s reign of sleazy corruption was comparable to the steady attrition of night-time bombing raids, Truss’ brief tryst with relevancy was the atom bomb, which is funny, because if anyone deserves to be compared to ‘Fat Boy’ it’s the Tory Party’s own cut-rate Falstaff. Brexit isn’t a winning argument anymore, the Blairites have their puppet in place atop the NuNew Labour Party, and while the media from the BBC on down are as willing as ever to carry water for their betters, the Tory Party itself is so fractured that each faction is more interested in drowning their rivals in barrels of cut-price malmsey than fashioning a united message. They can’t do anything for a nation already bleeding out from the effects of previous Tory ‘victories’, because all they have to offer is more of the same or worse, and that’s finally leaking through into the general non-political conventional wisdom.
All it took was over a decade of the Tories booting the nation in the balls over and over again for the Man on the Clapham Omnibus to feel it safe to whisper that maybe, just maybe, electing a conveyer belt of sun-bloated gammon steaks to office has not necessarily worked out to the UK’s advantage.
Ya think?!?
Anyway, the News Media’s obsession with who replaces Truss is really just a testament to its tabloid longing for easy narratives and celebrity stories. This is what they live for. Offer them detailed policy statements that deal with the actual long-term and systemic problems bedevilling the country and they glaze over faster than an astronaut’s face-shield. Offer them hour after hour of ‘he said/she said’ rolling news on the most inconsequential topic though, and as long as it doesn’t mean leaving central London or having a clue what anyone is talking about, they’re on it faster than a mongrel that’s just sneaked into the Bitches Only tent at Crufts.
Enter Flobalob, rising like a doughy erection from his extra-wide sunlounger to stride bleached, restless and starved for attention towards the nearest microphone like a flatulent Napoleon in a pair of budgie-smugglers, if a millionaire’s private beach were Elba and the editors of the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph were half a million moustachioed French veterans. Three months holidaying around the luxurious retreats of the Donor Class and a few hours spent flobalobbing in front of well-paying corporate audiences apparently constitute ‘punishment enough’ for the Media’s blue-eyed boy, and the time had come for him to return from exile and take up once again the heavy burden of office (parties).
Or not. It would appear that it takes more than a weekend of frenzied hand-jobbery to make Vive l’Empereur a thing on the Tory benches. They tried everything. Only ‘BoJo’ had a mandate (since the 2019 Election was all about Him vs Corbyn), only ‘BoJo’ could reunite the Party (since he’d reward anyone who helped him back into power), only ‘BoJo’ had the charisma to win back favour with the voters (since he had the News Media in his pocket). They even tried making a pre-emptive deal with Sunak before trying to elbow Mordaunt out of the race, all to no avail.
It was never going to work, and I’m sure all of the Media fluffers who talked about nothing else for two days knew it. It’s only been two months since the lardy parasite was forced to resign in disgrace. All the post-humiliation whitewashing in the world (and the British Press leads the world at that) couldn’t begin to obscure the fact that scores of MPs from his own Party had called him out as a lying sack of shit who was losing them seats in traditionally Tory areas, and on top of that there’s a Parliamentary committee just about to start calling witnesses to give evidence about his open lawbreaking and lying to Parliament. The Tories were swimming in shit back in August because Flobalob was a terrible prime Minister and an even worse person, did they really think that 100+ MPs were going to dive back into that murky bog all over again?
Nah. Of course not. There was always just one question to be asked. Could the Tory MPs who backed Rishi Sunak in the last leadership race convince enough of their comrades to get behind the Boy from Gepettoman Sachs to render going to the membership an unnecessary encumbrance? They know full well that if it comes down to the opinion of the Tory Party’s rabid membership then their candidate has an insurmountable melanin problem, especially when up against Penny Mordaunt’s big-boobed Britishness. Can they keep Mordaunt below 100 official supporters? Can they pressure her to stand down ‘for the good of the Party and the Nation’ even if she does hit her target?
That’s still up in the air right now, though there are a LOT of Tories coming out as Sunak backers in the run-in to the 2pm deadline. Maybe the fix is in, and they’ve decided they stand a better chance with ‘Fishy Rishi’ than they do with ‘Penny Dreadful’, or maybe Mordaunt’s group are engaged in back-stairs negotiations to get her the necessary votes for a run-off ballot. Fucked if I know.
But if it is Sunak, then the Tories have a whole different problem. He is, after all, the man Flobalob’s supporters were blaming for knifing him in the back earlier this year, prompting a tidal wave of reveals about the financial affairs and tax dodging of the Sunak household that damaged his image quite a bit. This is the guy whose tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer saw huge amounts of Covid related fraud and basic financial incompetence that cost the country tens of billions. This is the guy who was so awesome that Liz fucking Truss beat him like a dusky dusty rug in a competition with 80,000 judges, now he thinks he can step over her twitching corpse on the say-so of a couple hundred MPs and he’s going to have legitimacy? Pull the other one.
Flobby’s outriders are already dropping hints that, without him on the team, the Tory Party has no choice but to call a General Election, something most of its MPs would rather sacrifice their first and third born children to the Dark Lord Mordoch than contemplate right now. It won’t happen, but when you engineer your figurehead’s ascension via backroom deals, attacks on your democratic mandate are not just to be expected, they’re mandatory.
What we can expect from a Sunak Premiership is hard-core Austerity and a briskly choppy media climate as the various Tory mouthpieces craft competing narratives to ball-wash and/or ball-garotte the lacquered lightweight. I said last time that what the Tories desperately needed was a couple of years of dull nothingness to put distance between them and the period 2019/22, and you can be sure that that’s exactly what Sunak will be offering. A slow, remorseless choking of the public sector and the NHS under cover of making ‘grown-up, difficult decisions’ about the nation’s finances, masked under an onslaught of friendly Media propaganda designed to blank-out all talk of other solutions to our (Tory made) problems and present all the other Parties as inexperienced naïfs who would only make matters worse if handed the reins of power.
I don’t think it’ll work, given the sheer enormity of the hole these exact policies have dug for the nation over the last decade and change… but this is Brexit Britain, people here can be made to believe any old shit as long as you give them someone even worse off and powerless to blame for their pain.
Roll on November, I could do with some good news.
YY_Sima Qian
Happy Diwali!
In other news, looks like Rishi Sunak is headed toward being the next PM of the UK
Even though he is a staunch Conservative, I wonder how many heads of Tory Party members will explode.
gene108
@YY_Sima Qian:
I don’t know how UK conservative voters will react, but so far the Tory push for diversity hasn’t hurt them.
They promised more diversity in the party, and so far have delivered a very diverse senior leadership without eroding support based solely on people objecting to diversity.
VeniceRiley
@Tony Jay: This isn’t nearly as entertaining up close. But I do enjoy teasing the wife about her string of new bosses.
MazeDancer
If you have ever wondered what you can do to turnout 4% more people to the polls, here’s your answer:
PostCards!
Virginia studied it. That’s what they found. You could help create the margin of victory in PA and NC by writing for Susan Wild and Wiley Nickel. In VA, by writing for Elaine Luria.
Get addresses at PostCardPatriots.com. Or click my nym.
Hold the House!
Tony Jay
@VeniceRiley:
Give it a few months and they’ll have gone though enough Tory MPs you’ll be constitutionally eligible to throw your name in the hat.
You don’t even need policies these days. It’s a sweet gig.
Baud
@YY_Sima Qian:
I’m confident Mr. Sunak will make a convert out of Tony Jay.
schrodingers_cat
Happy Diwali to all BJers.
Let us choose
Light over darkness
Hope over despair
Truth over lies
I made a new Twitter banner for Diwali complete with earthen lamps, paper lanterns and rangoli and sparklers!
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Happy Dawali to you.
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Tony Jay
@Baud:
I think that’s one of the things the Tory membership are worried about.
Tony Jay
@rikyrah:
And a very good morning to you.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Very pretty!
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Let’s not count the chickens before they hatch. Let him become the PM first
Thanks for the Diwali wishes
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Thanks!
Nelle
@schrodingers_cat: I like it!
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Tony Jay: I envy the ability to get rid of a toxic leader. We had to go through impeachment, and even then the Rs wouldn’t do it. The parliamentary system seems less prone to cult of personality.
Betty Cracker
@Tony Jay:
Maybe there’s hope for us all.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
All we need is a decade of Republican dominance!
WereBear
@schrodingers_cat: Lovely sentiment and banner!
Betty Cracker
@Baud: It’s been tested in the states, i.e., meth labs of democracy. Soon we’ll see if owning the libs is enough of an enticement for voters to excuse Abbott for policies that alternately freeze and fry Texans to death and arm adolescent psychopaths who slaughter children and educators while cops stand idly by. I mean, the choice is pretty clear to me!
schrodingers_cat
@Dorothy A. Winsor: May be in Britain. The cult of personality is pretty strong in India’s parliamentary democracy. Modi is just the latest most toxic example.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: Happy Diwali to you!
WereBear
It has occurred to me that in the Monopoly Olympics the 1% have become, grifters actually feed their own lifestyle, if not income stream.
The machinations at the top are barely distinguishable. The stolen money creates a bloated luxury market of everything they compete on. When someone augers in, they get bling at a discount.
This came to me watching a Youtube making righteous fun of one of the Kardashians peddling cement tissue holders at $80 apiece.
They really shouldn’t cross the streams. But it’s too late.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
My theory is that a lot of the redder states have been protected by Dems having some power at the national level. If we were to be in the unfortunate situation of extended GOP control over the federal government, I’m not sure things wouldn’t change. But it’s an experiment I don’t want to attempt.
schrodingers_cat
@WereBear: Glad you liked it. Will share pics of faral (Diwali goodies: sweet and savory) later.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
Good words in all circumstances. Happy Diwali to you!
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: Banner is lovely (as is slogan). I never tire of the Ukraine banner with sunflower you made, either.
Happy Diwali.
Tony Jay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
It’s a tricky one that.
As I understood it, Congressional Republicans were scared shitless of voting to impeach the Tangster because, as you say, his personality cult had the Base all aglow and they would be dooming themselves to primary challenges, which they would almost certainly lose. Better to be on the gravy train pissing out than thrown off the train and pissing blood.
Plus, voting to give the Godless Dems such a big win would have pissed off a major part of the Republican Establishment. If there’d been a way for them to remove him without it needing Democratic support, it may have happened, but other than the 25th you don’t really have any mechanism the GOP could have used.
The direct equivalent would have been Tory MPs ousting either Johnson or Truss by voting Yay on a Labour motion for a Vote of No Confidence in the Government, but there was never a chance of that happening either, for the same reason. You don’t give the Other Side a win like that.
In the cases over here the last three Tory leaders have been removed because they lost the support of enough of their MPs to cost them a majority in Parliament. Then again, the reason it took so very long to remove Flobalob was precisely because of the Cult of Personality that Flobby encouraged. Even now, if Tory MPs dared to let him stand in a membership vote he’d probably get a landslide.
The real difference is in the nature of the Primary system. GOP Congresscritters have to win their Base before they can appeal to the wider public. Tory MPs – can – face deselection challenges, but it’s much harder to do and so they make their calculations based on what their – entire – constituency electorate think about the leader of their Party.
Makes life a bit easier for them.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: The problem is that after a decade of Republican sabotage of democracy in an American swing state, 14% support probably counts as a winning majority.
Kay
If all of the lemming-like political media are wrong and Democrats do hold the House or Senate, Republican voters are going to go absolutely nuts with fraud accusations, since they have now been told for three weeks that Democrats have already lost.
Going to be really ugly and probably violent. Good job, as usual. Excellent, thoughtful and responsible work by media. I now understand why national political media stars are paid at least half a million a year while real local reporters make 50k. It’s the value they add.
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
Or maybe they’ll just elect a conveyer-belt of sun-pinked prawn cocktails instead. Just as smelly and they’ll make you even sicker in the long run, but when you’ve only got a limited menu…
NotMax
@WereBear
Cement tissues are a thing?
I’m so-o-o out of touch with the zeitgeist.
;)
Soprano2
@Kay: I’m not sure how much difference that will actually make, although it’s not good. I’ve read that Republicans were already planning to challenge the outcome if they lost regardless of the margins. Plus, I wonder how much of a shitshow elections in Nevada will be, and how many other places have had similar things happen to their election officials.
Gin & Tonic
Ted Cruz goes to Yankee Stadium. Hilarity ensues.
Um, NSFW if you have your audio on.
Ken
And yet many did; Conor Gogarty was making a list.
(I only saw that because I’m a regular reader of the political sniping of Number10Cat, who also posts great cat videos.)
Brachiator
So, Rishi Sunak will be the new prime minister. This will be interesting.
Tony Jay
@Ken:
It looks like he had around 50 to 60, maybe, with the blather about him cracking the 100 barrier being just that, blather. A humiliation for the Clown Prince. He should have stayed on the beach.
And it’s official, Mordaunt pulls out at the last second and Sunak slides into office without a shred of democratic legitimacy.
He’ll have a couple of days of honeymooning from the Murdoch Press and the BBC, then the flensing will begin.
Frankensteinbeck
@Tony Jay:
If the British economy is already sinking hard enough to make big changes in polling, austerity is not going to slow that down. Criminy. I’m sorry for the British people, but politically, it doesn’t sound like putting a bland cover over that disaster is going to help Sunak much. Truss is not going to be the last sacrifice here.
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
Take it away, Harry.
You gotta have hope
That’s the price you gotta pay
You gotta stay loose
That’s the only way to stay
.
Baud
@Tony Jay:
Maybe KCIII will die and Sunak can have a longer honeymoon.
Kind of remarkable to consider how short Truss’s tenure would have been without the QEII funeral.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I think the MAGA dopes will opt for chaos even if Republicans have a relatively good night. Any Democratic victory will be declared illegitimate. From Rolling Stone:
I do hope the “activist crusade” would include sore-loser MAGA dopes parading through Philadelphia. That’s an American city that seems uniquely suited to react to this type of nonsense.
MisterDancer
@Ken: All the spine of a bowl of well-cooked spaghetti, and even more pale.
Soprano2
I saw a post today where someone compared the price of hay in 2021 and today, and said “Vote on November 8th”. I asked if we were voting on the price of hay, and could the ongoing severe drought have anything to do with the higher price and if so what could a politician do about that? Also the drought is affecting barge traffic on the Mississippi River, what can politicians do about that? Why are conservatives so angry when the market works the way it’s supposed to?
Baud
@Soprano2:
Oppress women and immigrants.
Ken
@Soprano2: A true leader would execute hay farmers until they lowered their prices. Also the executives at whatever company makes Doritos.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Dear Older White People Whining About Inflation and Your Portfolio Value:
What price did you buy at? What are the PE ratios?
Do you receive dividends? And if not, why are you buying equities based on fictive statements of value as opposed to buying them based on a solid history of the payment of substantial, reliable dividends?
Why are your concerns about receiving money without work more important than the concepts of government by consent, a stable rules-based international order, full employment, business cleaning it’s own messes, medical privacy and a public sphere free from religious coercion?
Frankensteinbeck
@Ken:
Elect me Prime Minister of England and I will immediately concede my position to Baud, who will execute the executives at whatever company makes Doritos, no matter which country in the world they live in!
Tony Jay
@Frankensteinbeck:
No, it won’t. All more Austerity will do is cut loose the ex-Labour seats Flobalob won by promising Government funding (Levelling Up) and Foreigners Out (Get Brexit Done) in favour of directing all of the public funding towards Tory seats in the south and Midlands, and set the stage for yet more privatisation of the NHS and its eventual carving up for Healthcare Corporations to feast on.
The Tory strategy seems to be trying to eek out a narrow majority based on the Tory heartlands or else consolidation of a chunky minority so they can lay all the blame for their disasters on NuNew Labour.
What a time to be alive.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Betty Cracker:
If some of the MAGA dorks were to shed their mortal coils in pursuit of this, I am pretty certain that I won’t be shedding tears.
Apologies in advance to anyone who thinks that this tone is shocking.
Tony Jay
@Baud:
I know. It’s like there was a cartoon spring under her seat that activated the second she sat down.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Baud:
You forgot “making tough choices” that disparately impact lower middle class workers and minorities.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Frankensteinbeck:
There shouldn’t be any Dorito hate. They’re the shit.
Matt McIrvin
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Really, it’s because we effectively made our retirement system dependent on investment income from securities, for the political purpose of making old people more economically right-wing. And so they are. They’re worried about receiving money without work because as retirees they don’t or won’t have much else, and that’s because we intentionally got rid of the alternatives or let them languish.
Frankensteinbeck
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Complain to Baud%*@!202X! It’s his jack-booted thugs marching into PepsiCo headquarters right now carrying flame throwers and chanting, “You can’t eat just one.” I support Baud for his economic policies.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Matt McIrvin:
Honestly, at this point, they can languish.
They created the cesspool, now let them live in it.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Frankensteinbeck:
What will life look like without Cool Ranch Doritos? Pretty fucking grim, if you ask me.
lowtechcyclist
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
FTFY.
Betty Cracker
This is discouraging:
The article notes that lying about opponents being communists or socialists is effective with voters who either fled communist/socialist hellholes themselves or have family who did. Ironically, it also says those same voters like DeSantis’s “strongman” attitude, which you’d think people who ran away from belligerent warlords in the old country would recognize as a danger.
Tony Jay
The Narrative Setting has started right out of the gate.
Apparently Rishi Sunak being selected by 200 or so of his fellow Tory MPs to be their leader is Britain’s ‘Obama Moment’.
As tone deaf takes go, that’s going to take a lot of beating.
The clear winner here is Penny Mordaunt. Three months ago only half a dozen people outside of her constituency remembered she existed. Now she’s getting lauded as a true Hero of the Party for sparing them from another terrible embarrassment at the hands of their lunatic Base, while at the same time cementing her own position as the next-in-line for the Succession when Sunak’s reign ends in scandal and disgrace.
Fucking ‘Obama Moment’. Jesus.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Haha. He maintains his smarmy smile. He’s used to this, methinks.
zhena gogolia
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I KNOW! PREACH IT!
Amir Khalid
@Tony Jay:
You’ve had a lot to say about racism among the Tory party’s rank-and-file membership — in particular, how it passed over Sunak because he isn’t white, and picked Truss, whose premiership took just six weeks to crash and burn. Only to see Sunak emerge with the party leader’s post and the right to be Larry the cat’s new roommate. How rough a ride do you think he will get from the party members?
Also too, what the hell is wrong with Liverpool this season?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty Cracker: Also they’re supporting a party that supports Putin. Anyone raised on Cold War politics has to find that confusing
Betty Cracker
@Tony Jay: Good lord. Is there even a tiny shred of sincerity about the Tory diversification project, or is it 100% cynical bullshit like Republicans latching onto Herschel Walker, the toxic rapper, etc.?
YY_Sima Qian
@Betty Cracker: The regime that the Cuban exiles were supporting wasn’t exactly paragon of liberalism or democracy.
phdesmond
@Gin & Tonic:
refreshing!
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Weird they his job approval is better than his election polling number.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: Well, I’m hoping that Latino support for DeSantis is overstated in these polls. It could be.
But I think one lesson here is that members of the diverse Spanish speaking community don’t neccesarily think like white liberals do. Congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona had some choice words to say about this a few months ago.
Betty Cracker
@YY_Sima Qian: True. One of my aunts is Cuban, and her generation and the one before them are/were staunch Republicans. The younger folks seem less reflexively anti-Dem, so I’d hoped that tie was fading based on my admittedly anecdotal exposure. I know a Venezuelan immigrant who’s very liberal, but according to her, that’s rare in her community and most are extremely susceptible to GOP fearmongering about Dems’ alleged socialism.
Tony Jay
@Amir Khalid:
The membership can’t be happy with it. A majority of them rejected Sunak weeks ago, now they’re having his skinny brownness shoved down their collective throats in a ‘contest’ designed from the start to deny them a voice. I’d imagine there will be no end of Vox Alba Populi bits done on Talk Radio and GB News lamenting this as yet more ‘Woke tyranny’, while the BBC tries desperately to focus on how amazing and inspirational this moment is.
And we’re not taking about Liverpool. Things are bad enough.
rikyrah
New PM
Parents immigrants.
He was born there in England.
Got his MBA from Stanford, where he met his Indian -Born wife. Her Daddy’s one of the richest men in the world.
Wife is worth a hair under a Billion dollars.
Two daughters.
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
Need we go on?
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@YY_Sima Qian:
All those anciano Cubanos wandering around the coffee shops and bodegas along Calle Ocho insisted for years that they were going to stroll right back into the beachfront family haciendas and boot out collaborators who licensed out their use to Spanish multinational corporations for hard currency. They also thought that the American companies that got run out would immediately and triumphantly get their land back, and that the descendants of faithful household retainers Juan and Maria would be eager to step back in to serve once more….
Thing is, they’ve pretty much died off – their first generation of children has picked up the cudgel.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Better a Woke Bloke than a Sus’ Truss.
Baud
@rikyrah:
I should have married rich.
Soprano2
@Betty Cracker: Lots of people like a strongman if they agree with what the strongman is doing, without realizing the danger. Democracy is hard and messy; lots of people just want things to get done and aren’t too concerned with how they happen.
Baud
@Soprano2:
I would be a safe and loveable strongman.
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I think a significant part of the Putin support among conservatives is about his hard line on gays and transgender people. They wish they could do that here.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Baud:
Isn’t part of being a strongman the ability to snag any intimate partner you want? How does that work if all you did was marry rich?
Baud
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
My jobs plan features concubines.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Baud:
Oh, sure, like any politician, you take care of yourself.
What about the rest of us? Don’t we rate concubines as well?
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Possibly very sincere in a perverse way. The British are strange. They may hate “foreigners,” but they have been trained to defer to their betters. A number of MPs in the Conservative Party come from elite backgrounds and exhibit all of the worst condescension towards ordinary people. Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, who both served as Home Secretary were both vicious nativists who advocated heartless policies for dealing with immigrants. It was once pointed out that the policies that Patel advocated would have prevented her own parents from coming to the UK had they been in force at that time.
Some sample backgrounds, with Rees-Mogg as the control.
Oh yeah. Sunak and his wife are the 222nd richest people in the UK, with a fortune of 730 million pounds. As always, money talks.
ETA. Winchester College is a public school in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It was founded by William of Wykeham in 1382 and has existed in its present location ever since. It is the oldest school of the nine considered by the Clarendon Commission and is regarded as among the most prestigious in the world.
BellyCat
Working for University of Texas. Received an email about political obligations of state employees and it included the following:
“May not engage in activities supporting or opposing a candidate or proposition during paid work time.”
[Expected]
“This also includes placing campaign posters in offices or wearing campaign buttons during worktime or in the workplace”
[Say WHAT?!?!]
Baud
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
In every garage.
Frankensteinbeck
@Baud: You heard it here first, everyone! Baud 2XXX will legalize sex work!
EDIT – Some say he already has.
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
Ha! If only.
No, Fishy Rishi is taking over a Party that recently released a ‘Report’ on institutional racism that not only denied it existed, but also blamed single-parents for underachievement amongst ‘those people’ and argued that the positive aspects of slavery (renamed, ‘The Caribbean Experience’) should receive more attention.
He’ll be under extra pressure to strengthen his anti-Woke credentials ASAP, hence his embrace of clinically mental Suella ‘Back2Africa’ Braverman during the contest.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Her daddy is also the funder of many RW thinktanks in India. And Bangalore now is the epicenter of BJP hate factories in the south.
Gin & Tonic
schrodingers_cat
@Tony Jay: Looking at Braverman and Sunak one realizes how the Raj was possible.
Tony Jay
@Frankensteinbeck:
“But then it won’t be as exciting! How an I supposed to know I’m enjoying myself if it’s not transgressive?”
“……….”
“Thank you for those words, Cardinal. Now, back to the studio.”
UncleEbeneezer
@MazeDancer: Thanks for pushing this. Just picked up 50 postcards yesterday to write this week for Will Rollins (CA-41) through my local SwingLeft/UDH
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator:Ideological ancestors of Braverman, Patel and Sunak were the enablers of the British Raj.
I wonder how long he will last?
Ken
@Gin & Tonic: The Hunter Biden laptop!
Tony Jay
@schrodingers_cat:
Cameron went fishing for ethnic-minority Tories to buff the pasty white sheen off the Party’s image. He found them amongst the “Kick that ladder away!” communities that shared what he defined as ‘Tory Values’, and gave them a step-up wherever possible.
Entirely cynical, but it worked. Meanwhile Labour have got a pretty huge reckoning coming with their own minority members because of the racism and arrogance of the mob currently running the show.
It didn’t have to be this way, but this is a country that’s been marinating in open tabloid racism for decades and certain bargains have been struck.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic: my guess is that it has nothing to do with Trump.
Josie
@schrodingers_cat:
“Let us choose
Light over darkness
Hope over despair
Truth over lies”
Such a beautiful sentiment and banner. Happy Diwali to you.
Layer8Problem
@Gin & Tonic: ” . . . press conference on significant national security matter at 1:30 pm”
Hm, Justice. National Security. Significant. I wonder what it could be? And how freighted with portent is “significant?”
Leto
@Gin & Tonic: related:
EXCLUSIVE: Jan. 6 Protest Organizers Say They Participated in ‘Dozens’ of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff
UncleEbeneezer
@Betty Cracker: I will never understand how any person could be dumb enough to think that the Dem Party in the US somehow has the ability or desire to recreate the horrors of Cuba, Cambodia, USSR etc. I suspect the people claiming such are doing it in bad faith, much like the White People I know who have been using that same bullshit excuse as cover for their Isms/Phobias and Gun-worship for decades. In this case Cuban-Americans have legitimate fears/gripes about communism, so this is the easiest excuse to vote GOP they can use.
Tony Jay
@Leto:
Yowzer.
That seems… important.
Leto
@Gin & Tonic: it might also have to do with the announcement that TikTok’s Chinese-parent company, ByteDance, was planning on using the app to track specific Americans, per Forbes.
Ken
“If only he had told us that murdering people while attempting to overthrow the government was illegal!”
Leto
@Tony Jay: they named names… a lot of names. And ofc most of them are the people we already suspected, but the fact we have the people who were helping to organize the insurrection naming specific names is a good/key thing.
Baud
@Leto: Great. How are we going to get Biden to stop using his TikTok?
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Ukraine related? Or TFG? Or both?
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Frankensteinbeck:
😂
Geminid
@Leto: I wonder about Mark Meadows. He’s surely a target of investigators and prosecutors. Meadows is no Stone, and he could flip.
A report this spring said that trump loyalists had put out the word to stop talking to Meadows. It’s possible that Meadows’ attorneys have made tentative approaches to prosecutors about a deal, maybe more than tentative.
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
I think “bad faith” describes two different types of people. The first are people who committed Republicans who are looking for excuses for themselves and others about their vote. The second are wishy-washy normies who are influenced in subliminal ways by the general environment. It would be hard to crack the first group, but we need to think harder about how to deal with the second.
Tony Jay
@Leto:
I wonder how many of those named names made sure to keep recordings of the things other named names said to them in the run-up to the attempted coup.
Just for moments like this.
Leto
And just to close out my trifecta of feel good news stories for Monday: Los Angeles officials condemn demonstrators seen in photos showing support of Kanye West’s antisemitic remarks
I don’t think we spoke about this over the weekend, but Nazi’s/fascists are feeling safe demonstrating openly in Los Angeles
Edit: this line:
JFC CNN, there’s no “appears”. It’s a g-d Nazi salute, you worthless sack of shit outlet.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
Good question. In the debates with Truss, Sunak pointed out that the policies Truss advocated were stupid. But these are still the policies that Tory hardliners want enacted.
As Chancellor, he often acted like he wanted to be liked by ordinary people. But he has also often uttered nonsense that indicated that he wanted to be a member of the Club of the Condescending Ruling Elite. I don’t know how good a politician he is.
However, the Tories are stuck. They need to stay in power, so they may have to play nice with Sunak. And I don’t know if they could get away with avoiding a general election if they decided to dump Rishi.
Geminid
@UncleEbeneezer: I think an argument that might be resonating among Spanish speaking Floridians is that the Dems will introduce a sort of creeping socialism that will threaten their prospects for upward mobility.
schrodingers_cat
The crowing on Indian WhatsApp forwards about Sunak is going to be unbearable in the coming days.
His parents are immigrants from Pakistan and he was born in the UK so they (mostly bhakts of Modi) are crowing about his being a Hindu.
*sighs
Alison Rose
I love our VP. And that Diwali celebration looks heckin fun.
Betty Cracker
Here’s more on the press conference:
Huh. Could be anything.
Ken
@schrodingers_cat: Oh the other hand, I’ve seen lamentation from Indians in the UK that their parents and aunties are going to become unbearable. “That nice Mr. Sunak became PM, why haven’t you?”
Geminid
@Leto: A small group that foments hatred of Jews staged the action on the overpass, the “*** Defense Group.” The uproar over West’s statements was a good opportunity for them.
Anti-Semitism is still widely prevalent, just underground, so to speak. Now it’s in the open. The West affair and Doug Mastriano’s campaign in Pennsylvania are just two of many examples.
Betty Cracker
@Leto: I’ve been listening to Rachel Maddow’s “Ultra” podcast, and some of the parallels between what was happening in pre-WWII America and what’s happening in the U.S. today are staggering. There were plenty of folks rooting for Hitler back then, and their ideological heirs are rooting for Putin now.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: So not TFG.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@zhena gogolia: Unless it’s Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: I’m guessing not, unless maybe they uncovered evidence that a nation-state actor got ahold of the classified docs Trump hoarded at his Florida dump.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty Cracker: Ooh. That would be …. well, bad for the US, obviously, but also bad for Trump
Betty Cracker
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m so torn between wanting to see accountability for the criminal buffoon Trump and hoping he remains an object of worship among Republicans so they don’t ditch him for the more dangerous DeSantis. That said, it’s perfectly plausible — even likely! — that if the DOJ produces iron-clad evidence that Trump sold national secrets directly to Xi or Putin, he’d become even more popular among MAGA dopes.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
I thought that both his parents were born in African nations.
Frankensteinbeck
@schrodingers_cat:
How are they going to react when his tenure is not much longer than Truss’s?
PJ
@Brachiator: Tanzania and Kenya.
Jackie
@Betty Cracker: OT, but did you see this?
”GAINESVILLE, Fla. —
The faculty senate at the University of Florida has planned a vote of “no confidence” in Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse as the university’s 13th president.
He’s currently the only finalist for the job, but the faculty senate said the next leader “should come already equipped to lead an institution of this caliber rather than aiming to learn on the job.””
https://www.ketv.com/article/nebraska-senator-ben-sasse-university-florida-faculty-senate-calls-no-confidence-vote/41740576#
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Ken:
Reminds me of a twitter exchange I saw about Jonny Kim, the Mustang Navy Seal who ended up becoming an officer, and then a doctor and now an astronaut – all before his 35th birthday. Another prominent Asian twitter influencer said that his biggest nightmare would be if his mother and Jonny’s mother were friends….
Betty Cracker
@Jackie: I did see that, and good for them! It won’t be a speed bump for putting the unqualified partisan hack Sasse in that position — DeSantis stocked the university’s board with megadonors who always do his bidding. But it needed to be said, and I’m glad the faculty said it. It’s a disgraceful, insulting pick.
schrodingers_cat
@Frankensteinbeck: They will ignore it.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Must be his grandfather then who left Gujranwala in what is now Pakistan.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Jackie: I suspect that matters only if the PTB care about faculty or public opinion. And I’ve seen no sign DeSantis does
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Ken:
Also reminds me of the time my wife and I were in Nuremburg, touring the Document Repository at the old Nazi Congress hall. I remarked on how Hitler had conquered most of Europe by the time he was 52, but lost it all and blew his brains out at 56 as one of history’s greatest monsters – a few years younger than I was at that moment.
Her pithy comment was “you’ve always been such an underachiever”.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat: Love it!
Tony Jay
Horses lying down with zebras and cats playing banjo for dogs, it must be a Witches Moon because unelected Tory Party Leader Rishi Sunak just did something I wholeheartedly approve of.
The moon-faced prick in the shirt who Sunak blanks and walks past is Matt ‘Hands on Ass’ Hancock, the former Health Secretary during the bad days of Covid who had to resign, not for condemning thousands of elderly care home residents to painful, lonely deaths, but because ‘someone’ leaked CCTV footage of him snogging an advisor he’d been crushing on since University.
It’s that expression of “Come here and hug me Rishi, I’d be happy to serve in your… oh… I see…” on Hancock’s punchable face that makes all the chefs kissable.
Kay
Police have basically been conducting a wildcat strike since George Floyd was murdered. They stopped doing their jobs completely because people weren’t kissing their ass enough, then they demanded billions more in funding and staffing just to get them to go back to their former (low) productivity.
San Francisco just fired a progressive DA because of the crime problem. Incredibly, that did not “cure crime”, despite what America’s billionaires believe. Wait until they figure out it was police all along. They won’t control crime. No one knows what they do all day.
FelonyGovt
@schrodingers_cat: Happy Diwali to you and to all jackals! Lovely sentiments.
Kay
I’m scared for San Francisco now that they’re finally looking at police. The punishment for that will be police won’t show up for work at all, while remaining on the payroll.
dww44
@Betty Cracker: Based on the post I saw about voters interviewed in a focus group by Morning Joe on MSNBC it is Just mindboggling the things they willfully choose to believe
Baud
@dww44:
Those aren’t “voters,” they’re specifically Donald Trump supporters. Why they deserve so much media attention is beyond me. Why don’t they do a focus groups of Biden supporters who love America and hate seditionists.
sab
@Baud: Biden is too old and she is too young to president. Who knew?
Kay
Local news outlets are doing a great job filling the hole left by national outlets on the consequences of Dobbs. Jezebel collects the stories every week.
Remember that local reporters only make about 50k (high end) while the people conducting the national black out on this news make hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars and that’s not even counting the book sales. They make millions on top for the books they release months after the news occurred.
Jezebel’s traffic is way up, so there’s interest in womens rights- it’s not a market issue. The public wants this information- It’s ideological- national media simply do not believe womens bodily autonomy is important.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Happy Diwali. Now that my spouse (grumpy old man defending his lawn) and Indian grandfather up the street (grumpy old man defending his lawn) have reconciled about their disputes over absolutely nothing this Diwali could be fun.
UncleEbeneezer
@Geminid: But are there any examples of this actually happening in the US?
Geminid
@UncleEbeneezer: No examples. But warranted or not, I think the specter of creeping socialism, not authoritarianism per se, is the line of attack used with effect among Spanish speaking voters.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: The cosplay socialism replete with the talk of revolution and guillotines of the BS inspired lefties is electoral poison. Ds should dissociate with that completely.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
You can talk all that socialism bullshyt if you want to.
I see it as seeking White-Adjacency, steeped in Anti-Blackness.
I see nothing to disabuse me of this notion.
cain
@Tony Jay: Followed by even more old people complaining because it doesn’t harm the people it was meant to harm.
zhena gogolia
What happened with Garland? I can’t find anything
Frankensteinbeck
@zhena gogolia:
From what I can tell, the announcement is late.
zhena gogolia
@Frankensteinbeck: thx
Dorothy A. Winsor
Reuters has it. Agents acting on behalf of China
zhena gogolia
@Dorothy A. Winsor: thanks
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Listening to DOJ press conference here at C-SPAN.
Huh. Weird to hear an announcement of criminal charges that does not appear to involve Trumpworld. At least, it doesn’t appear to involve Trumpworld.
It’s about Chinese Intelligence operations in the US.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: “Anti-Communist” and “anti-authoritarian” are very, very different things.
Tony Jay
@cain:
Yup. Those undeserving not-really poor they see on Channel 5 documentaries with their wide-screen TV, expensive phones and hordes of hoodie-wearing children.
Plenty of hate to go around.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: I get that, but the experience of living through a totalitarian regime fronted by a “strongman” would ideally teach people not to fall for that shit again, regardless of the ideology the particular caudillo is peddling. Apparently not!
catclub
@Tony Jay:
The Obama moment was “the economy is in the shitter and getting worse, lets put in the darkie and blame him for it.”
Seems apt.
catclub
@Geminid:
Indeed. Something I read made me realize that Blacks in the Democratic party are likely to be MORE conservative than whites in the party. Because whites can pick between two parties based on something other than “how much does this party hate people like me?”
Tony Jay
@catclub:
Ah, now that I could see.
cain
BTW to make Diwali extra sweet for those of Indian origins – we had a cricket match between rivals – India vs Pakistan in Melbourne, Australia. You couldn’t ask for a better sporting match – with high stakes, and a last minute win by India. It was pretty epic – so on top of Diwali we had this nail biting scorcher of a game with the Indians pulling through beating their rival.
Pakistan played a great game, but they lost their nerve towards the end there and lost the mental war of wills.
Geminid
@catclub: I think also that Black people have their feet on the ground in a way that many white Democrats do not. I remember how impressed I was by Senator Warren in the 2020 primary cycle. She had such good plans!
Warren never got much traction among Black Democrats and one reason is they could understand she was likely to lose in the general election. In retrospect I could see that they were right and I was wrong.
Geminid
@catclub: I hope I can dig up Ruben Gallego’s comments on the flaws in standard Democratic messaging to Latinos. It was excerpted from a Politico podcast made this spring. One complaint I remember is that Democrats don’t talk to Latinos about the American Dream- good jobs, safe communities, upward mobility for themselves and their children.
Gallego also talked about “this big fucking feedback loop” between “progressive” Democratic consultants and the “progressive” Latino consultants they hire. Gallego himself is a member of the Progressive Caucus, but he felt the people crafting the messaging were out of touch with his community and their political outlooks.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: I laughed out loud a few different times. I think I could listen to that on a loop!
NotMax
Cruz dismissal?
NotMax
Wrong thread at 170.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
Thanks for sharing
Any thoughts on the new PM?