“You all heard about what happened today … We are reminded there's nothing guaranteed about our democracy, nothing guaranteed about our way of life. You have to fight for it, defend it and earn it by voting." – Biden pic.twitter.com/60ByU4Yfrc
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) July 4, 2022
MEDIA BIAS ALERT: Kamala Harris hasn’t had a positive profile in a year. DeSantis sneezes and he’s framed as the rising star of politics. And yet the Great White Hope STILL loses is every head-to-head matchup with Harris. The VP also draws even with Trump. https://t.co/w6Z8kVHuw4
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) July 3, 2022
… Phuc’s iconic Associated Press photo in which she runs with her napalm-scalded body exposed, was etched on the private nongovernmental organization plane that is flying the refugees to the city of Regina, the capital of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.
Kim, 59, a Canadian citizen, said she wants her story and work for refugees to be a message of peace. With her husband, Bui Huy Toan, she traveled from Toronto to board the humanitarian flight.
The refugees, mostly women and children from across Ukraine, are among thousands of Ukrainians that Canada has provided humanitarian visas in the wake of Russia’s invasion of their country. Millions of Ukrainians have fled since Russia attacked on Feb. 24. Almost 5.5 million have registered with humanitarian organizations in Europe, according to the U.N…
The founder of the NGO Solidaire, Argentine philanthropist and pilot Enrique Pineyro, piloted the Boeing 787. Oscar Camps from the Spanish organization Open Arms was also aboard…
Worse comes to worst, CERN is turning on the Large Hadron Collider again, at 10am EDT:
.@CERN is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.
Delivered via: #VegaLMS pic.twitter.com/gut73e9osR— Eva (@EvaSmartAI) July 5, 2022
I leave to your imaginations (or your google skills) the kree8tiv terrors that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has sparked…
Ben Cisco
Good morning!
Also, Joe posting about media bias – weird.
Also also – am I the first poster?
Steeplejack
@Ben Cisco:
Good morning!
Steeplejack
I’m pleased to see that about Harris vs. DeSantis. And I agree with Scarborough: I see Harris being “active” in news stories, so she’s apparently doing a lot, but the pundits seem to ignore her (at best).
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ben Cisco: You’re supposed to say “Frist!” [sic]
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone
Tony Jay
Good morning. Things are heating up in Perfidious Albion. I’m feeling compelled to drop a longish rant about it this morning if that’s okay with everyone?
Raoul Paste
Good morning . In an era of apparent impermanence, it’s good to know that you can rely on electrons
Ben Cisco
@Steeplejack: Hey Steep!
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I was expecting to have someone beat me to it and cracked the joke
Ben Cisco
@Steeplejack: Harris’ efforts are being suppressed by several entities for the usual and obvious reasons. I’m frankly surprised that Joe brought it up.
SiubhanDuinne
@Tony Jay:
Yes please!
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Tony Jay
@SiubhanDuinne:
On your head be it. 8-)
Tom Levenson
@Tony Jay: And mine. Please rant.
Here’s my abbreviated complaint: Starmer’s photo should be in the dictionary next to “useless git.”
Baud
@Ben Cisco:
Yeah, it’s pretty blatant.
WereBear
@Tony Jay: Please! DO!
WereBear
I’m not. He’s a windsock, and the way he’s blowing lately is good for us.
Lapassionara
@Tony Jay: I saw hints of it on Twitter, but not enough to understand what is going on. So please, tell us what’s happening.
Baud
IIRC, the Republicans stymied efforts for particle accelerators here in the US.
Ben Cisco
@WereBear: I haven’t seen anything of him in quite some time. What I remember of him was along the lines of “no matter what the GOP has done, Dems are a worse choice.”
If he’s changed, it’s a pleasant (and probably TEMPORARY) state of affairs.
RandomMonster
If CERN kicks us out of this current timeline, I’m all for it.
Tony Jay
A LETTER FROM BREXITANNIA
‘Two in the head, it’s better off dead’
Boom. Boom.
Well, they only went and did it. The voters in two very different Tory held seats at opposite ends of the UK (okay, England) were asked the question du jour and delivered roughly the same conclusion about the Government of Sub-Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Using the ballot box as their megaphone they hurled a guttural “Fuck You!” into his drooping face and ran away screaming from the modern Tory Party, delivering in the process the most immediately devastating one-two combination to English Nationalism’s glass jaw since the black-shirted and ever so manly men of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists got stomped into weepy paste on the cobbles of Cable Street by that sinister Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy their thinly moustached Leader was always going on about.
The Tiverton and Honiton By-Election
Over in Tiverton and Honiton, a Somerset constituency so overwhelmingly rural that 50% of the inhabitants go shoeless, share three fathers and have the surname Brandybuck, the Tories managed to throw away 100 years of electoral droit de seigneur and a 24,000+ majority via a 30%+ swing to the formerly 3rd place Liberal Democrats. Couple this with the loss of North Shropshire last year on a similar sized swing, and we have the clearest signal yet that continuing to rely on Flobalob’s style of Bullshitarian Far-Right leadership has the potential to resurrect the moribund Lib-Dems as the ‘safe’ Party of Protest for somewhere around 1/3 of the habitually Tory electorate.
To say this would be damaging to Tory hopes at the next Election would be like saying that a personal endorsement from Matt Gaetz would be damaging to a Miss Teen Supreme pageant brand. In 2019 the Tories absolutely walked Tiverton and Honiton with 35,893 votes out of 59,613 cast, which translates to about 60% of a 72% voter turnout being happy to scrawl their X in the box for the Tory, any Tory, even an inbred, mutton-headed tractor-porn enthusiast like Neil Parish. This time, however, turnout was down to 52%, and only 16,393 burrow-dwellers were willing to Gamgee themselves along to the voting-booth and vote for the Blue Meanies, which translates to a very measly 38.4% of the reduced vote. So, while the figures show a 21.8% fall in the Tory vote percentage compared to 2019, it’s actually worse than that. So much worse, in fact, that the very pro-Flobby Tory candidate, Helen Hurford, chose to perform a witless homage to her beloved cult-leader by locking herself in the Press room after the result was called rather than face the cameras. Bless her heart.
The Tories threw absolutely everything they had into this race over the preceding few weeks, and it was all for nothing. Sweeeeeet.
The winner, a very tall and vaguely clerical looking ex-soldier called Richard Foord, garnered a massive 22,537 votes, while Liz Pole, the 3rd place Labour candidate, took 1562 (3.7% of the vote, not enough to retain her deposit). This is in comparison to the 2019 Election where Pole got 11,654 votes and the then Lib-Dem candidate 8,807. What all of this says to me is that it’s currently unclear exactly where Foord’s extra 13K to 14K votes actually came from. It could be that a LOT of Labour voters loaned their votes to the Lib-Dem candidate, with many, many more Tories boycotting the election booth and a small number crossing over to register their disapproval. Or it could just as easily be the other way around, with Labour’s voters preferring to sit it out while the Tory vote both collapsed and split to benefit the Lib-Dems.
If I had to put money on it, I’d guess the former. Most Labour voters in a seat like this wouldn’t want to risk the Tories squeaking back in and would hold their noses to vote Lib-Dem (I know I would), and to be honest, if you’re a Labour voter in a generational Tory constituency like Tiverton and Honiton, you’re going to be so inured to defeat that even a 2nd hand victory like this one feels like a blood-spattered victory on the Pelennor Fields. OTOH, what this scenario does mean (if it’s in any way right) is that the number of Tory voters shifting to Lib-Dem was very considerably smaller than the number of Tory voters who stayed at home to watch reruns of One Man and His Dog on Countryside TV, which bodes ill for the prospects of it staying non-Tory should the Party do the smart thing and dump Johnson in time for a less shit-stained Tory messiah to get frotaged into gleaming, factory-fresh electability by the ever compliant British News Media.
Still, fuck it and just savour that juice. There’s never been a larger electoral majority overturned, and it’s all down to Flobalob. Get that hammered sideways up your prolapsed nethermouth, you self-regarding snobbish wrecker.
The Wakefield By-Election
Over in Wakefield, meanwhile, it was a whole different story. This seat had been firmly Labour since the 1930s, and though it had become a sort-of marginal since Thatcher broke the mining industry (nothing like putting thousands out of work to win voters over, eh?) it wasn’t until 2019 and the Brexit Election that its heavily Leave voting electorate (more than 60% voted to leave the EU – the wankers) booted out the fervently pro-EU/anti-Corbyn New Labourite incumbent and gave the Tories 47.3% of the vote, which meant a 3,358 vote majority on a turnout of 45,027. All those promises thrown around about ‘Getting Brexit Done’ and how there would be a huge increase in central Government ‘levelling-up’ funds for constituencies canny enough to show they were willing to play the game by electing Tory MPs were very effective, but (shock, horror) they turned out to be typical Johnsonian garbage not worth the breath they took to utter, leaving the seat’s newly-minted Tory voters with nothing to show for their turn towards the Dark Side but sweet fuck all and, it would turn out, an unrepentant predatory paedophile as their MP.
That (deliberately nameless) turd’s eventual resignation led to this by-election, and lo and behold the Tory vote collapsed like a Guiliani assault charge. From 21,283 in 2019 down to a measly 8241 this time, 4295 behind Labour’s 13,166. Given the circumstances it’s hardly surprising, even less so when you factor in how incredibly, astonishingly, cringemakingly inept the Tory candidate was. If Labour had been in charge of picking their opponent, they couldn’t have done better than the hapless Nadeem Ahmed. From announcing on a vox-pop video that he regretted his Leave vote in 2016 and considered the Leave campaign to have been based on lies, to attempting to explain that Flobalob’s many crimes shouldn’t put Wakefield’s voters off voting for him because, I almost quote “People still trust their local doctor after (Wakefield resident and serial-killing Doctor) Harold Shipman, don’t they?”. Ahmed spent the campaign stepping on one self-inflicted rake after another and got roughly zero backing from Tory Central. It would have been astonishing if Labour hadn’t taken this seat back.
Good news for Labour, Right?
Before the Nu New Labour circular slobberfest begins (oops, too late, look away children, you’ll get Mandelson all over you) take a look at those numbers. This wasn’t anything like a ringing endorsement of the candidate Labour Central imposed on the constituency against the will of local Party members. The Tory vote in Wakefield completely collapsed, yes, but the Labour vote went from 17,925 in 2019 (when they LOST) to only 13,166 this time, in an election where at one point half of the Labour front bench could be found somewhere in the constituency campaigning alongside the transparent plastic codpiece known colloquially as Sir Kier Starmer. This was a must win, leadership defining election for the Labour Right, with everything in their favour and two full years invested in pandering to exactly the type of culturally conservative/economically anxious swing-voter Wakefield (we were told) was home to, but they still managed to shed enough votes to almost cover their winning margin over a candidate so bad I’m still half convinced he’s a new Sasha Baron Cohen character. That’s fucking shocking, and just more grist for the mill churning out arguments that Starmer’s ‘fully tucked under, eyes modestly lowered, don’t do anything to attract the Daily Mail’s attention’ style of minutely focus-grouped ‘leadership’ is failing to inspire anything more than bland distain in anyone outside of his immediate circle.
And what should be even more worrying for the Labour Right, these arguments aren’t just coming from the Left of the Party, which they would, a) ignore, and b) take a perverse relish in anyway. They’re coming from the same liberal-centrist commentators with platforms in the FTF Guardian who were their very bestest friends back when they were tag-teaming the previous Labour leadership into mega-smeared unelectability. It may even be dawning on a few of the brighter sparks over there in neo-Blairite land that the alliance of convenience which emerged to prevent Lefty Labour improving on its 2017 showing is well and truly over, and that the financial benefits of having a terrible Tory Government to plumb for outraged headlines are once again driving even the non-officially Tory Media narrative towards sneakily undermining Labour’s chances of winning a General Election, only this time they’ll be picking away at the previously out-of-bounds weak points (and there’s a lot to work with) of the Labour Right and giving formerly verboten Left-wing criticisms of their clumsily authoritarian incompetence the same kind of breathless front-page coverage that the faction running Starmer once benefited from.
It’s also worth pointing out that the Right-leaning vote in Wakefield was spread out across more than the Tory Party. A former Tory councillor turned Independent got over 2000 votes, while the various iterations of pro-Brexit/anti-immigrant/anti-Vax/blatantly racist opinion shared out over 1000. Get Flobalob out of Downing Street and a suitably nativist Brexitarian loon at the head of the Tory ticket for the next election, pump in the dark money to bribe Wakefield’s Independents and bring the far-Right home, and suddenly Nu New Labour’s ‘massive’ majority looks pretty damned shaky again.
But I digress.
What does this mean for Flobalob?
This is really all about the inevitability of Flobalob facing (and losing) another leadership vote, which from the sounds of things is rapidly approaching 100%. The last one was triggered (I’d say deliberately) to occur conveniently before these by-elections and included a gargantuan promise-dump from Flobby aimed at securing the votes of the very same subset of newly elected Northern Tory MPs he recently humiliated by backing out of a ‘Northern Tory Conference’ at the last minute so that he could jet off for Cosplay Churchill PR snaps with President Zelensky. These are the MPs, still smarting from that brush-off, who are now looking at Wakefield and thinking they might do better with someone who not only owes them some loyalty for their votes, but actually understands what loyalty means as a concept, and that’s most definitely not something you can say about the Bully of Bullingdon. A more solipsistic reprobate it would be hard to find without lifting more rocks than you’d find in a crystal-meth lab.
As for the Great White Wail himself, it’s got even worse for him since I started writing this report. First he shot off to Rwanda, ostensibly to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference, but mostly so he’d be out of area when the by-election results came in. Given the people he’d be interacting with on this jaunt it’s hard to avoid conjuring up images of Flobby boarding his tacky Air Force One rip-off and being immediately shoved into a sensory deprivation tank and forced to listen to a recording of Brian Blessed blaring one simple phrase on endless repeat – “Don’t call them piccaninnies. Don’t call them piccaninnies. Don’t call them piccaninnies”. Also on the agenda were some photo-ops with the Rwandans that his PR team could wave around to show how dedicated he is to ironing-out all the teething problems that have emerged with his Government’s appalling No Asylum policy.
Rwanda and Asylum
Have you heard about that one? Straight out of the Trumpian scrapbook. First, they squeezed off any and all legal routes for refugees claiming asylum in the UK, then they shopped around for a country distant and dusky enough to give their base of starched-shirt racists at least 40% engorgement by agreeing to become a ‘processing hub’ for asylum seekers; as in the British taxpayer will fork out £125 million in ‘fees’ to Rwanda’s Government and however much it costs to charter a horrendously expansive passenger jet every few months to take asylum seekers from the UK to central Africa where the Rwandan authorities would ‘process’ their applications, and, if they’re successful, the lucky duckies get to stay in Rwanda! That’s it. Asylum in the UK will no longer exist, replaced by a policy of forced deportation to a sub-Saharan police-state. Oh, and that passenger jet? The Rwandans get to fill it up with people they don’t want in their country and ship them to the UK on the return journey!
You may look at this and think “They can’t possibly be serious about this shit”, and you’d be dead right. It was never intended to be an actual policy, since the Tories don’t ‘do’ policy. It was always just a trolling operation designed to stroke the exposed pleasure-ganglia of the kind of voter who understands what Brexit was really about (nudge nudge, wink wink) and it definitely wasn’t about anything as esoteric as tariffs or trade corridors. Darkies Out! Send Em Back! There ain’t no black in the Union Jack, etc. It violates British law and Human Rights law, which is why no planes have actually left the UK yet, which is another reason why they did it. Currently winding its way through parliament is legislation that will align Great Britain with Russia and the breakaway Republic of South Calormen by withdrawing us from the European Court of Human Rights, that stuffy old creation of monocle wearing Eurotrash bureaucrats like (checks notes) Winston Churchill (surely not – Ed) and replacing all that namby pamby drivel about ‘human’ rights with modern, tastefully curated British Rights, for British People. Like the right to do exactly as you’re told and bloody well like it.
Much to the surprise of the Tory Party brain-trust (which you’ll need a working knowledge of the science behind Pym Particles to successfully visualise) this didn’t succeed in drawing their base to the polls, or if it did, they just succeeded in measuring how small that base has become. All they seem to have done is disgust a huge chunk of the electorate and put the Tories on a steep nosedive towards electoral crash-splat as long as Bullshit Bunter clings onto the stick, which is fine by me. Even today, a great deal of political leadership revolves around being proximate enough to the people you need onside to get face-to-face with them for a friendly chat or a punch to the nuts. There wasn’t an awful lot Flobalob could do to shore up his position while he was stuck in central Africa pretending to care about Commonwealth issues, and it started falling apart within hours of the by-election results.
The Fallout from these By-Election losses
His Party Chairman (formerly loyal sycophant-without-portfolio and all around anti-Woke gobshite) Oliver ‘Creep’ Dowden resigned the same morning, citing in his resignation letter the need for ‘somebody’ (and he doesn’t mean him) to take some responsibility for the ongoing shambles that is this Tory Government. It was a move that most political bobble-heads viewed as an attempt to desert the sinking HMS Johnson before the rest of the rats could reach the lifeboats. This following Flobby’s equally useless ‘ethics advisor’ Lord Geidt resigning over what can euphemistically be described as technical disagreements revolving around when it’s correct to apply the term “criminal, bullshitting fucktard who wouldn’t know an ethical barrier if one were painted violet and fitted with flashing lights and claxons” to your boss, though Johnson’s spokesman tried to claim (cue much hilarity) that Geidt’s resignation was nothing to do with the ‘serious ethical failures’ he referred to in his resignation letter and was instead all about (checks notes) tariffs on Indian steel.
Whispers were getting louder by the hour that more and more Tory MPs were looking around for a method of levering the pustulant bulk out of Downing Street that wouldn’t trigger an immediate civil-war within the Party, but since there’s no one within the Cabinet or out in the wider Party with the heft or reputation to tell Flobby to his face that he simply has to go, the only route available to them is another vote of no confidence via the 1922 Committee, and since they just had one of those it would require a rule change to authorise a vote.
Now, it’s quietly understood that the cynical mandarins presiding over the 1922 Committee might be willing to enact that rule change if (and it’s a big if) the ‘No Johnson, No Cry’ faction could demonstrate that they have the numbers, organisation and (crucially) plan for what happens afterwards to make it a fait accompli, but apparently the ascendent Hard Right caucus within the Parliamentary Tory Party (the Brextremist Putinists who think their old kamerad Bozza is guilty of limp-wristed Lefty kowtowing to the Enemies of the State) can’t be bothered waiting for that to happen and apparently prefer to advance their Gammon-Pink Revolution by taking over the 1922 Committee from within, thus sidestepping the need for any rules at all.
Don’t you just love the clatter and splatter of Fascists at play? Sounds like fuckery.
The scandal hits home, quite literally
But while all this was happening, the other pincer of Operation: Dead Dog was closing in from the direction of Fleet Street. If you’ve just eaten, perhaps you’d like to pop to the toilet for a spot of ‘Dieting with Kate Moss’, because this gets testicular.
Does anyone recall a kerfuffle a few weeks ago when a story appeared in the early edition of The Times and on the Daily Mail’s Online version detailing how Flobalob, while he was screwing up being Foreign Secretary back in 2018, had tried to get his then mistress, Carrie Symonds, transferred from her role as Tory Party Comms Chief to a taxpayer-funded sinecure as his Chief of Staff? £100K a year to be Flobby’s very personal assistant, sounds awful. It never happened because someone with institutional oomph very firmly nixed the idea and Symonds left her Comms role soon afterwards. The article vanished from the later editions of The Times and was wiped (apart from screenshots) from the Interwebs, reportedly because Downing Street had gone on bended knee to the owners of those rags and pled with them to spike the story.
If this suggested a change in the tone and direction of the ‘Johnson Out’ leaking campaign, the suspicion became a certainty with last week’s belated revelation of yet another carefully unreported scandal from Flobby’s time at the Foreign Office. It had already been mentioned in Tory Peer Lord Ashcroft’s biography of Carrie Symonds (that must be a riveting read) that another MP (who The Independent is now saying was Connor Burns, the current Northern Ireland minister but at the time Flobby’s Principal Private Secretary) walked into the lardy gobshite’s office to find him and Symonds in a ‘compromising position’. No one followed up on it at the time, because why would they? Flobby and his girlies is a non-story for the well-connected Westminster stenography set, it would be rude to even mention it and would probably lead to icy silences at cocktail hour in the expensive bars they all frequent.
Private Eye magazine (which is normally very, very good at confirming its stories) doesn’t give a shit who it offends and ran an article claiming that Burns found Flobby on the couch, pants down, pecker up, receiving an, uh, an ‘oral report’ from Symonds. Burns told someone else, who told Flobby’s team, who then arranged an intervention during which they threatened to resign if Symonds was given the Chief of Staff job, and that this is what led to Symonds not only being denied her transfer to the Foreign Office but also her job in the Comms Unit.
In the Independent ‘exclusive’ (who owns the Independent again? Oh, yeah, Russian oligarch and – thanks to Flobby – Tory Peer Evgeny Lebedev, what a coinkydink) Burns hastens to explain that a) he only caught Johnson and Symonds enjoying a glass of wine, but somehow had a ‘sixth sense’ that there was more to it (bullshit) b) Flobby was never told that his staff suspected he was having an affair with Symonds (bullshit) but c) they did discuss how he would be vulnerable to blackmail by foreign governments if they discovered he was having an affair… at the same meeting where they threatened to resign if he brought Carrie Symonds in as Chief of Staff (mega bullshit).
What does this scandal mean?
Look, all we can take from this orgy of nonsense is that everyone knew Flobby was cheating on his cancer-stricken wife with Carrie Symonds and – as is his wont where striving to impress younger, blonder pieces of candy – he tried to use public money to sweeten the deal, and everyone kept it secret from the Public. By ‘everyone’ here I don’t just mean everyone in the Tory Party, I mean everyone in Westminster journalistic circles. These ‘exclusives’ and ‘revelations’ and ‘leaks’ aren’t coming out of the blue. They all knew exactly who Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was and what he got up to behind closed doors, but as an industry they closed ranks around his shameless bulk and kept what they knew secret all through the Tory leadership battles of 2019 and the General Election that followed, compromising their one simple duty to the country to protect him while simultaneously indulging in the most comprehensive campaign of character assassination British politics has ever seen against his Labour counterpart.
And breathe. Cool wet grass. Cool wet grass. Puppies and bunnies. Etc.
Pinchergate
Anyway, that happened. What also happened, and what should finally be the straw that breaks the camel’s back where Flobby and the Tory leadership is concerned, is the matter of Chris Pincher. Buckle up, it’s a rapid one.
On the 29th of June, Tory Party deputy Chief Whip, Chris ‘Arse’ Pincher (no, I’m not making that up, that’s his actual Westminster nickname) was ejected from the Diogenes Hellfire Carleton Club after becoming obscenely drunk and sexually assaulting two younger men who may or may not have been Tory MPs. This was reported to another Tory whip, and the next day Pincher wrote a sycophantic resignation letter to Flobby apologising for his actions, which Downing Street accepted and declared the matter closed.
Like fuck it was.
It very quickly emerged that Pincher had a long history of sexual predation inside and outside Westminster. He’d been forced to stand down as MP over one such incident in the past, but of course had been allowed to stand for the same seat in the next Election and re-elected with a stonking majority by its Tory voters. After this he’d been of great service to Flobby as an effective enforcer and arm twister, eventually being promoted to the deputy Chief Whip role and given real power over MPs and their staffs, which he then proceeded to exploit in ways you can probably imagine.
With stories about Pincher’s groping and fondling coming from all sides, Downing Street circled the wagons once again around the Big Dog and released a series of ever shifting statements. First, they denied Flobby had been aware of any allegations against Pincher, then that he hadn’t been aware of any specific allegations against Pincher, then that he hadn’t been aware of any serious specific allegations against Pincher, because all of the allegations and evidence against him they were well aware of were “unsubstantiated” and had “been resolved and did not proceed to a formal complaint”.
This morning Simon McDonald, a former very, very senior Civil Servant, released an open letter he’d sent to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards detailing how Flobby was lying through his teeth about his knowledge of Pincher’s predilections, because McDonald himself had personally briefed Johnson in 2019 about a formal complaint against Pincher that was very much substantiated and had been resolved by Pincher apologising and promising to keep his hands to himself.
Why is this ‘Pinchergate’ farrago so devastating for Flobby? Well, because it manages to simultaneously hit all of the bases of his continued support within the Parliamentary Party. Not only did he appoint a proven creeper to a position of immense authority over Tory MPs, authority he absolutely misused, but Johnson’s instinctive reaction to Pincher’s downfall was to lie, repeatedly, and to send Ministers out to lie for him, repeatedly, knowing that there was cast iron evidence that he was, in fact, lying. All of this when the self-inflicted avalanche of scandal and the recent by-elections had put him on his last, final, absolutely no-more-after-this-one warning with the MPs whose continued employment he was threatening.
He can’t change. He won’t change. But he expects everyone around him to sacrifice their careers and reputations in defence of his job on a daily basis? Nah. It’s one thing for him to get hundreds of thousands of people killed by fucking up Covid and absolutely fine for him to waste tens of billions of pounds of public money enriching friends, family and donors, but empowering “Pincher by name, pincher by nature” to prey on them, like they’re all junior boys at Eton and being fair game for older predators is just something they’re expected to swallow and then cover up? Oh no, that’s a step too far.
Surely the Opposition are all over this?
Don’t, however, expect the official Opposition to lead the charge on this matter. Outside of a few figures who know who the real enemy is, they’re far too busy siding with managers and shareholders against striking workers, gleefully purging anyone with a single democratic socialist bone in their body from candidate lists, refusing to enter into any kind of post-election agreement with the Scottish National Party, and, most recently, announcing that a Nu New Labour Government wouldn’t change a thing about Flobby’s Hard Brexit agreement with the EU other than to “Make Brexit Work”.
What is there to say that hasn’t been said? These an entire political faction of Belulah Balbrickers from Porkies. They don’t care what else is going on or how ridiculous they look in the process, they will get their hands on that tallywacker if it’s the last thing they do. Only, in this case, they’re not fucking funny.
Never mind. I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end. Toodle-ooh.
Baud
Aren’t we supposed to get James Webb photos later this month?
Betty Cracker
In almost every photo of DeSantis, including the one that illustrates the FL Politics story linked above, his big fat yap is hanging open. Dear lord I hope a scandal takes him out or tfg turns the MAGA hordes against him and dashes his presidential dreams. Mainly because DeSantis is an authoritarian asshole, but also because I don’t know if I can take another four years of looking at his gaping maw and stubby fingers stabbing the air to emphasize a point.
Argiope
@Tony Jay: Right now those delicious reproductive rights, sensible gun policy, and universal healthcare are looking awfully tempting. So please, have at it. Regale us with BoJo and Brexit and any other bad ideas the UK has been FAFOing with lately.
ETA I see you did!
oldgold
@Baud: 07-12-22
https://wtop.com/science/2022/07/groundbreaking-photos-from-webb-telescope-coming-july-12/
Shalimar
@Ben Cisco: I met Joe long ago when he was my congressman. I doubt he is any less opportunistic and self-centered than he was then. But he has found an audience that gives him positive feedback at MSNBC and if that cause him to act like a good person, so be it.
edited knew to met. he wouldn’t have even recognized me.
Baud
@Tony Jay:
Even Ivanka had to agree to be unpaid.
Baud
@oldgold:
Woohoo. Thanks.
raven
@Shalimar: I like the show and have watched it since Imus melted down.
Steeplejack
@Tony Jay:
Hopefully including #BloJo? Rant on! ✊
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Bring it on
Now I see you brought it.
Geminid
@Tom Levenson: “Keir Hardly.”
Immanentize
“quintillion times the current age of the universe?”
That a yotta, yotta years!
oldster
@Tony Jay:
Thanks, Tony! Very informative, and entertaining as well.
Let’s hope that BJ really is on the way out, at last.
And that his support for Ukraine, one of his only redeeming features, will be carried forward by his successor.
Immanentize
@Tom Levenson: Useless, unless you consider he is there to be an understudy Tory.
Doug R
@Tony Jay:
Well, the Fraser Valley did have a heat warning last week, but things have been pretty quiet since they replaced the Albion Ferry with the Golden Ears Bridge.
Steeplejack
@Ben Cisco:
Hey, bro’. Was looking through the BJ Stasi files and saw that your late father’s birthday was yesterday. Hope you poured one out for Dad. I also seem to remember that he had a unique name—from an old family name?—but I can’t remember it for the life of me.
The Winstons, “Color Him Father.”
WereBear
@Ben Cisco: That’s why I call him a windsock. But he is deeply embedded in the tributaries of power, so which way he blows is significant.
He just wants to be with the winners. But such as he are craven enough to be perceptive about who is winning.
Immanentize
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I like your reply to Pierce. Perfect.
Also, DougJ has really hit his stride:
Shalimar
@raven: I haven’t watched it since the 2016 election, mostly because I haven’t had MSNBC a lot of that time. Back then, Scarborough was still somewhat conservative but my biggest problem was Geist. Not that he was saying or doing anything offensive at the time, but my memories from when he was getting his start as Tucker Carlson’s fratboy wingman were still strong. God, what a pair of offensive assholes.
Immanentize
@Steeplejack: To me, that song is one of the weirdest songs ever, right up there with “Patches.”
Doug R
@Tony Jay:
Same here. I’m named after Tommy Douglas, but I voted Liberal in the last Canadian federal election because they had the best chance to beat the Con in our riding.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Immanentize: That’s my standard comment on any of those pictures of families holding guns. Groomers
mrmoshpotato
@Tony Jay: Go for it! Your love letters to BoJo are always entertaining.
Steeplejack
@Ben Cisco:
Not to minimize their former sins, but the Morning Joe crew has been pretty good for a while. Maybe some windsock-ism, as WereBear pointed out, and Joe himself can always be relied on for at least one idiotic blat a week, but they get the threat of Trumpism and the GQP’s descent into madness. I am a little surprised that Joe noticed the Harris thing—surprised in a good way.
I wish they’d freshen up their talking heads, though. Too much Axios and Politico.
Baud
@oldster:
Nominated!
Starfish
VP Harris was trying to have a quietish weekend at home before heading out to Chicago, and it does not seem like it quite worked out. She had to make remarks on the most recent shooting while meeting with some local firefighters.
Soprano2
This week is going to be a hot one here – highs of 97º, 99º, 100º and 95º with a 30% chance of rain on Friday are forecast for the next four days. We’re lucky that we got over 1″ of rain at my house on Saturday. The “official” rainfall for Saturday here is 0.02″!
jnfr
@Tony Jay:
I wish to hear your longish rant please.
@Tony Jay:
And there it is. Thank you.
OzarkHillbilly
@Soprano2: 100 here today, 101 tomorrow, 99 Thursday, 97 on Friday. with a break of 89 on Saturday then back into the 90s. I hate July.
Steeplejack
@Immanentize:
I love “Patches”! All-time great line: “That was Daddy’s strictest rule” (1:05).
Soul music has its own deep well of sappy, maudlin songs, but with a good beat and a tight horn section you can get away with a lot.
My all-time favorite is O.C. Smith’s “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp.”
ETA: And Clarence Carter gave us the bona fide classic “Slip Away.”
Steeplejack
@OzarkHillbilly:
Positively balmy here in NoVA this week: highs in the 80s, humidity “only” 60-70%. Anything under 90°/90% is great in the summer.
tokyocali (formerly tokyo ex-pat)
@Tony Jay: A rant of beauty. I lived in the UK for four years over twenty years ago. I don’t remember it being as exciting as you paint it to be. Then again, none of the papers I followed had your superb turn of phrase. Cheers!
Ben Cisco
@Steeplejack: I poured one out as well as several in .
He has the same first and middle name as a disgraced Confederate gereral, but we don’t talk about that.
Great tune!
Ben Cisco
@WereBear: From your lips to the FSM’s orecchiette!
Tony Jay
I feel much better now that that’s out.
Apparently Flobby’s latest defence for lying about Pincher is “Oh! I’d forgotten about that. Never mind, I remember now. So that’s okay then, eh?”
I’m no expert, but I think Zelensky should lose his phone for a bit, otherwise he’s going to be barraged with panicked requests for a certain flying pig to come visit ASAP.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: Does DeSantis attempt to have a “positive” persona? I don’t recall ever seeing a picture of him smiling (although I don’t live in Florida and don’t search for pictures of him – eeewww -, so it’s a small sample). He just always seems angry and intent on stomping on people.
Baud
@sdhays:
It’s how one wins the Republican primary.
oldster
@Baud:
Whoops! I meant the current prime minister of the UK, not the very blog we are writing on.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Huh, I’ve never seen this before—a nice Gregg Allman cover of “Slip Away.” Good horns and a tasty guitar solo.
Steeplejack
@Ben Cisco:
Nathan Bedford Cisco?
Tony Jay
@Tom Levenson:
Yes, indeedy. I’m pretty much convinced that he’s been told he’ll get the Home Office and a guaranteed place in the House of Lords if he takes the heat for breaking NuNew Labour’s links to the Unions, working class organisations and basically anyone who doesn’t instinctively know the right wines to accompany a thirteen course state banquet in honour of the exiled Royal House of Ruritania.
If it’s not that, he’s just astonishingly crap at his job.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@OzarkHillbilly: I have a pile of paving stones out back that was going to turn into a border around one of our gardens. I bought them sometime around May ’21. It seemed like a good idea then but then the hot weather kicked in and I lost all my oomph. And the the hot weather lifted and I still couldn’t get around to doing it, and then it was winter…
Anyway, we’re back to 90 degree weather but I re-promised my wife I’d actually do this project, so I’m working in short spurts early and late in the day, and I think I may actually finish it this week.
I actually got a lot of projects done during lockdown. Made me think I’d continue to be productive when lockdown ended. Ha!
Ken
Suggests all sorts of analogies for UK politics.
Aussie Sheila
@Tony Jay:
Hi there Tony. Excellent work. FWIW, I think Fear Starmer is taking his tactics from the ALP (Labor Downunder).
PM Albanese and his team put forward a very careful, even conservative looking manifesto in the run up to the recent election, which thank the FSM they won, albeit, narrowly. However the shockingly incompetent and deceitful antipodean Tories lost not one, not two , not three, but arguably nine safe Tory seats , six to ‘independents’ one of whom knocked off what would have been the next Tory leader.
Long story short, I get your gist re Starmer. I personally can’t stand the slightly strangled, faux petit piety of his public presentation, but I now get his game. You have FPP voluntary voting in the UK, like the US. It makes the task a lot harder for an insurgency, unless people can be persuaded to vote strategically.
I think he is trying to pull off what the independents did here, by ‘signalling’ to lib/Dem voters that he is a ‘safe’ pair of hands.
Much harder to do in your circumstances than in ours, but there is nothing like winning.
My view from here is that flobalob is burnt toast, and his party with him, because they only picked him for his faux populist vote getting ability and now that is gone, what use is he? Fortunately for anti fascists everywhere, the Tories appear to have no replacement remotely likely to be a popular vote getter, and Brexit is ‘done’ (not really), and the s#@t show of UK politics goes on.
I enjoy your diatribes and feel for you. However since the 21st May this year our own angst is mostly over. BTW, although the ALP only won two seats more than an absolute majority, there are so many independents and Greens in parliament, the local Tories are f….Ed for at least two terms.
Destroy the Tories as a party. That way you will have more time to knead Fear into shape.
Cheers
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: The thing is, here we usually don’t have temps like this until end of July and August. We already had a 99º day in June! This is starting to remind me of 2012, which is not a good thing – they were talking about water rationing in 2012 because it was so hot and dry. We had over 9″ of rain in May, but less than 2″ in June. The rain we got on Saturday wasn’t widespread, either – people on the south side of the city didn’t get any rain at all.
eclare
@Steeplejack: How could you forget Strokin’?
azlib
A good read about astrophysics and particle physics is “The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)” by Katie Mack.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Ken:
I don’t think any of Tony’s word choices are accidental.
There’s been this weird mutual echoing of UK and US political trends going back at least to Reagan-Thatcher. So I’m hoping BoJo’s and the Tories’ political woes are good omens for the Senate races this November.
OzarkHillbilly
@Steeplejack: 84% humidity at the moment.
OzarkHillbilly
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I spent an hour+ in the garden Sunday AM, roughly 5- 6:30 or so. I was soaking wet with sweat when I came in and spent the rest of the day rotating ice packs to muscle cramps all over my body.
OzarkHillbilly
@Soprano2: Wew got an 1 1/2″ of rain Saturday, much needed. In my book, August is more tolerable than July. Hurricane season is in full gear and we can usually expect 2 or 3 tropical storms or worse to come along and stir up the atmosphere. Of course, now that I have a son in NOLA I look at those storms a little differently.
Spanky
@Steeplejack: I figure our turn in the broiler will come.
Betty Cracker
@sdhays: DeSantis is like Trump in that way. He has no friends, just allies of convenience whom he drops the moment they’re no longer useful. He doesn’t have a sense of humor but does have a Trump-like demagogue’s talent for riling up yahoos by sneering at perceived enemies.
He adopts catch-phrases like “Let’s Go Brandon” and overplays them, maybe because he’s got nothing original. DeSantis once flew hundreds of miles (at taxpayer expense!) to a Tampa suburb called Brandon to sign a bill that had nothing particular to do with that town; it was just a backdrop for the Brandon “joke.”
ETA: I should note that DeSantis didn’t present this way during the 2018 general election. He tried to pass himself off as a regular guy who was conservative but not a hard-right ideologue. The hard-right heel turn came during the pandemic.
Another Scott
@Tony Jay: Thanks for the roundup.
From over here, it’s startling how dysfunctional Labour has been under Starmer. His manifesto was cringeworthy bad. I don’t know what the swing to the LibDems means, but as you say, they seem to be the least bad option at the moment.
I’m still wondering what the SNP is actually going to do on independence. It’s such a huge step and taking it is a leap into the unknown. Having it as a threat is a powerful thing, but using it means they take on all of the risks…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ben Cisco
@Steeplejack: Nope!
There go two miscreants
@Tony Jay: I never know who half these people are, but I enjoy the prose!
Steeplejack
@eclare:
Not forgotten! Just omitted for this tasteful white-bread group.
. . . Okay, this is on you. “Strokin’.”
Steeplejack
@Spanky:
Oh, yeah. I’m enjoying the reprieve while it lasts.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: Didn’t DeSantis run the “Build trump’s Wall” with his son commercial in that campaign?
Betty Cracker
@OzarkHillbilly: That was in the GOP primary, where everyone was trying to out-Trump each other. Once he got the nomination, he tacked to the center.
Ben Cisco
@Ben Cisco: Actually, I SHOULD have said first and last name, not middle. Robert Lee.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: Got it, thanx.
horatius
@Tony Jay: Don’t threaten us with a good time.
Ben Cisco
@Steeplejack: LOL
Baud
@Another Scott:
I should do a manifesto.
TriassicSands
Who cares about photos of James Webb? I want to see photos taken by the telescope named after James Webb.
Still waiting.
I’m a bit anxious ever since its recent collision with a micrometeoroid. Its so vulnerable sitting out there a million miles from the nearest repair shop. Fortunately, “space” is aptly named.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker:
But as far as I can tell from polling, this has made him more popular in Florida. The question is just how well it plays nationwide.
OzarkHillbilly
Matt McIrvin
@TriassicSands: Those micrometeoroid collisions are 100% expected and planned for.
Ben Cisco
@Matt McIrvin: Going to depend on how popular being an Assholis Maximus is among the GQP nationally.
Wait…
Old Man Shadow
Hmm. The Earth hasn’t been sucked into a black hole and I’m still in this universe.
Damn.
Steeplejack
Perfidous Albion was a great album, unlike their later bland studio crap.
UncleEbeneezer
@Betty Cracker: I’ll be very interested to see how MAGAts react when Trump inevitably calls DeSatan a RINO/BLM/Antifa/Demon-crat/Groomer (if DeSantis actually challenges him). So far I have seen no indication that they can defy the words of their Orange Emperor, no matter how ridiculous those words are. Sure some have refused to support Trump-endorsed candidates, but that is light years away from actually supporting another candidate who is directly threatening Trump. And I struggle to see any real chance that Trump simply passes the Fascist baton to another person, so long as he is alive. His ego simply won’t let him.
gene108
@Betty Cracker:
DeSantis seems like he’s trying to be Trump’s mini-me. He’s trying to copy Trump’s schtick.
It’s hard for most politicians to copy Trump. TFG is 100% sincere and honest with his racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc., in a way that few modern politicians can actually successfully fake
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@gene108: I’m leery of “body language analysis”, but people have made some videos suggesting that DeSantis is even copying trump’s habitual gestures when he speaks
@UncleEbeneezer: we haven’t really seen trump go full scorched earth against another Republican in a campaign. I thought he might do it against Kemp in GA. He seems to lose interest in that level of fight. If DeSantis actually runs against him, would he be able to hold himself back, or would that lizard-like self-preservation instinct kick in? “This guy would give me that full pardon…”
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: Maybe. I don’t put a lot of faith in polling, especially in Florida, but it’s true the state has moved further right in the last two national elections, so that’s data we can trust. My guess is becoming a national figure has helped DeSantis at home. The pundit consensus is he’ll win reelection handily. I still hope he can be stopped.
Ben Cisco
@UncleEbeneezer: Insert Godzilla “Let them fight” gif here.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: I love that news. I said the other day, I think she and Biden are learning from each other.
Scout211
Update on the wildfire in the foothills near us: The fire started yesterday around 3:00 pm and this morning it has exploded to 3,000 acres and is 0% contained. It’s less than 30 miles from us but it is not headed in our direction so we aren’t in danger but it is a dangerous fire. They are calling it the Electra fire and it’s in Amador and Calaveras Counties. It started in the same area as the destructive Butte fire of 2015. I guess it’s time to set up the go boxes. ☹️
Steeplejack
@Ben Cisco:
zhena gogolia
@Tony Jay: yes please oops read the thread first
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Let’s roll the tape…
Like you, I am leery of this type of analysis, but it is striking, especially the “accordion hands” thing.
Jeffro
@azlib: I read that and saved it in the hopes of reading it again and understanding it better.
(I think I got about 50% of what she was trying to tell little ol’ me =)
TriassicSands
@Betty Cracker: He adopts catch-phrases like “Let’s Go Brandon” and overplays them, maybe because he’s got nothing original.
But the brain dead require constant repetition so they can remember which lies they have to believe today. Without the neverending repetition in their mindless echo chamber, something from reality might sneak into earshot, and while their is virtually no chance they will believe whatever truth manages to survive the nearly impenetrable wall of idiocy, it could confuse them during the time they are reconnecting to Wonderland. And, as cult members, they thrive on absolute certainty.
DeSantis seems to know his audience and it’s not Mensa or even “The Random Saturday Night Gathering of Some of Nature’s Smartest Banana Slugs” (with apologies to banana slugs).
Watching a Jordan Klepper video (from the Daily Show) in which he interviews attendees at a Trump rally (post January 6) is more horrifying than hilarious. Most of the people interviewed or who represent that group come from states whose congressional representation is magically magnified into votes that count far more than do votes from blue states. The most powerful voter in the U.S.? A Trump supporter from Wyoming who knows without question that Trump won in 2020 and that Obama or Biden or Hillary was behind the stolen election. Shown video of Barr saying that Trump’s claims are “bullshit,” or of Ivanka saying she accepts Barr’s conclusion, they search desperately for any other explanation, even going so far as to suggest that it might not be Ivanka at all but rather a “clone” of Ivanka.
You don’t have to be a genius to manipulate an audience like that.
Wanderer
@Tony Jay: Yes, please
Amir Khalid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
On the other hand, I can see the 2024 campaign as an existential fight for TFG: he regains the White House, or he faces jail time. In such circumstances, he might be more motivated to fight DeSantis tooth and nail.
cain
On twitter, the response to Joe Biden’s sound bite or excerpt seems to be quite angry as everyone remarked that the party controls two branches of govt and demanding accountability.
I have no idea what tools Biden has that he’s not willing to use or if there are in fact any. But unless he gets 60 liberal senators, nothing is going to happen and given that we’ll need to take it away from the red states – that’s indeed going to be a tough road.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
Damn Betty, you are right – his mouth does seem to gape all the time.
Baud
@cain:
People who are not the GOP continue to think the US has a parliamentary system of government.
Dorothy A. Winsor
DeSantis scares me. Trump never did anything that didn’t directly benefit him. He would never have bothered going after the schools, because what was in that for him. But DeSantis is Trump without that limit.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: I was thinking of “accordion hands” but couldn’t remember what people were calling it. The little thumb-and-index finger stab for emphasis is notable, too.
eachother
Open Thread
Test
Test
Betty Cracker
@cain: Biden needs to hold the House and get 50 Democrats in the Senate who are willing to shit-can the filibuster — a minimum of two more — to do something about guns, voting rights, reproductive rights, etc. It’s a tall order.
Josh Marshall and other pundits have been saying for a while that Biden should make that deal explicit — get all non-Manchin/Sinema senators on the record as willing to break the filibuster and promise voters that if they elect two more Dems and hold the House, he’ll do XYZ.
Sounds like a good strategy to me.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: Obama carried Florida by 40 000 votes in 2012, Clinton lost the state by 113,000 in 2016, and Biden lost by 270,000 in 2020. So its been a steady trend towards the red in this state.
lowtechcyclist
zhena gogolia
@Tony Jay: transparent plastic codpiece. Love it
Scout211
A good opinion piece on CNN.com.
Governor Newsom is not just setting his sights to chip away at DeSantis’ Politico-manufactured perfect veneer, he is leading the Democratic Party to define the Republicans and even more importantly, to define the Democratic Party.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
I’m gonna reboot something I said over the weekend and dive a little deeper.
1. How do you train obstetric, gynecologic and oncologic residents in abortion ban states?
2. How secure does any practicing obstetrician, gynecologist or oncologist feel about doing work in abortion ban states?
3. If social conservative governance is best, why aren’t Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana knocking it out of the park on life expectancy, maternal health, educational attainment, median income, and GDP?
4. In the push-pull between corporations on favorable tax/regulatory environments and their labor force on lifestyle issues in red states/ban states, when do corporations say “enough, we’re out”.
rikyrah
@Tony Jay:
clap clap clap
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t disagree with this approach. The chief complication for our side is what gets left out of the commitment. Someone is going to be unhappy about being deprioritized.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Geminid:
This doesn’t surprise me. Shitty people from everywhere north of the Georgia state line and east of the Mississippi are going there in droves.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Another thought – the only thing keeping Tennessee from turning into a moribund, ungovernable hellhole has been foreign manufacturing plants.
Tony Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
I definitely agree that that’s what the Labour Right are trying to sell as their objective, but for it to be at all achievable they have to want to keep the Party base onside, and they’ve gone all out from day one to do the opposite.
Come Election day, I think a fair number of Extreme Centrist-Moderates within the Labour Party are going to get a hell of a shock when millions of people simply don’t turn out to vote or vote for other parties.
That’s what happens when you tell people we’re going to do fuck all for you and frankly hate you, but you should vote for us anyway. Eventually, they believe you.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: Claire McCaskill was saying a year or so ago that there weren’t forty votes in the Dem caucus to eliminate the filibuster, but I believe 48 are on record as supporting a carve-out for voting rights. I don’t know the numbers for a carve-out for abortion (privacy?) rights? I was pleasantly surprised to see Coons and Carper are co-sponsors of the bill that would, essentially, put the protections of Roe into law (I don’t want to use that very recently fashionable verb). Casey seems to me the biggest potential obstacle.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Casey will hopefully be replaced by Fetterman, so that’s an upgrade.
I don’t know about actual numbers, but I agree that it’s not just the Two who oppose an across-the-board elimination of the filibuster. But abortion is so fundamental, and the Supreme Court overruled a longstanding precedent. I don’t know who among the rest would stick their necks out to uphold the filibuster if there were a Roe bill on the table.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I agree. If it’s a transactional pitch, it has to be simple, but that means setting priorities, which will inevitably piss someone off. Does that reality make the strategy a nonstarter? I don’t think so, but it complicates things for sure.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: I missed this, and am pleasantly surprised. Still not quite a guarantee wrt the filibuster
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I don’t think it’s a nonstarter. And I support simple, focused messages. It’s one reason I’m a bit skeptical of taking the focus off of abortion by having candidates talk about court expansion. But the strategy does have to be thought through and, if they do it, defended when the critics take to social media to lash out against it.
Steeplejack
@Ben Cisco:
Been down the YouTube rabbit hole. Palate-cleansing hour of CTI jazz from the ’70s.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Query – in the unlikely event that it would pass, how would you constitutionally codify Roe v Wade into Federal law in a way the Justice Serena Joy and her Council of Six won’t eagerly slap away?
Its not a commerce power issue, so there are some big limitations.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Senate Dems who pledged to break the filibuster to codify Roe would face enormous pressure to promise to break it to ensure voting rights and do something more on gun safety, such as ban assault rifles. IIRC, we’ve already got everyone but the two usual suspects on board for voting rights. The gun issue would be tricky for folks like Tester.
trollhattan
@Baud: Isn’t daddy’s “love” pay enough?
Steeplejack
Damn, gonna have to give myself a Post-It note. Forgot that the Tour de France is on. Still 30 minutes to go to Calais.
Mike in NC
Florida has been Mecca for Rust Belt right-wingers for decades, and the pandemic motivated tens of thousands of those Baby Boomers to take an early retirement and pack their bags and head south. My two brothers and their spouses are due to visit us in the fall, and we might arrange to meet them in Charleston and/or Savannah, two of the few civilized cities in the Confederacy. No chance we’ll be visiting the Gunshine State ever again. I hope that Ron DeSatan has as much appeal to the general public as thirsty Marco Rubio did.
Geminid
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Some of this may also be due to qualitative differences between the two parties’ ground games.
And internet games; observers warned in 2020 that the Republicans were making vigorous outreach on social media, especially to Spanish speaking voters. The Biden campaign raised a lot of money but much of it came in with only 3 months left before the election, and to the extent they ran their own social media push they were playing catch up.
Kathleen
burnspbesq
@Tony Jay:
If your lot directly elected the PM, you’d be in for a dose of Johnny Bairstow, who must surely be the most popular man in England today.
What y’all really need is a coalition government—made up of SNP, Plaid Cymru, and Sinn Fein.
Anyway
@Baud:
Casey will hopefully be replaced by Fetterman, so that’s an upgrade.
Toomey.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: trying to think of moderate to conservative Democrats, I forgot about Tester. Here he is in May, after the leak but before the ruling
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
48 Senators, including Tester, have already voted to break the filibuster for voting rights. I don’t think that’s a big lift at this point. The problem is that you could make a case that voting rights is special. But once you do it for voting rights, and then for abortion, the case for keeping the filibuster at all becomes weaker, and the GOP is all but certain to ditch it completely if we don’t.
I don’t know how the red/purple-state Senators will handle it, but I agree with you that they will face pressure to continue to make exceptions for other worthy causes.
stacib
@Steeplejack: Nooooo, not Strokin. :-) Patches and Color Me Father I could listen to at least once a day. Stokin’ makes me race to turn change the station.
Baud
@Anyway: Oh, I got it mixed up. Thanks. Given Casey’s statement that Jim quoted above, hopefully he’s committed.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Didn’t even Manchin condemn the outcome of the Hobbs decision, albeit in words and not in deed?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: he said it was destabilizing and he supports (god help me!) codifying Roe. Kind of surprised
that last sentence is a big tell
Steeplejack
Ran across this great definition of bitcoin/cryptocash on Twitter:
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Good for him. Who knows what will happen between now and November, but I’ve gotta think we’ll hear more red state horror stories like the 10-year-old rape victim who had to leave Ohio for an abortion. I saw Gov. Noem was asked about that and gave a shitty answer (because there’s not a good one). Waiting for someone to ask DeSantis and every other red state governor that too. It’s relevant; they don’t back exceptions for rape.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That last sentence shows he doesn’t care how foolish he looks.
Steeplejack
@stacib:
eclare made me do it!
Jinchi
@Baud: Here’s Manchin’s statement.
He’s in a position to do something about it, if he feels it’s really important.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: he only care about how he looks in West Virginia, and in the mirror. And I’m not sure about that order.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
“She knows what she did.”
God help me, forcing a ten year old to give birth sounds both medically hazardous to the little girl–and let’s be specific, we’re talking about a fourth-grader–it will traumatize the poor victim an order of magnitude more than having been raped.
These people aren’t merely monsters, they’re extreme sadists.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: My hope is the pressure is insurmountable and the Dems ditch the filibuster while they control the Senate and pass some popular legislation. Like you said, the Republicans will do it anyway, even though the filibuster is to their advantage, which McConnell knows even if the base doesn’t. It’s a ball-and-chain for us and a shield for them.
Jinchi
I don’t think so. Lifting the filibuster just lets a bill come to a vote. He doesn’t have to vote for the underlying bill.
Getting rid of the filibuster entirely instead of ad hoc, solves the compound problem of having to vote for something before you vote against it.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
He might also care how he looks to his best bud Susan Collins.
sdhays
@Baud: Casey will be replacing Toomey (hopefully).
Aussie Sheila
@Tony Jay:
I hadn’t realised until lately how bad your Labor Right is. They are truly awful I agree. The best revenge on them is to work to return as many good Lab members as possible and try to ensure that young people actually vote. In a FPP system, if your base stays home, at best you will get a large enough Lib/Dem contingent that will allow the Right to ignore the Left altogether, and govern from an even worse basis than Fear presents now.
Can the TUs put up a good fight on the wages and benefits issues sufficient to force a better manifesto before the election?
Cheers.
PS Albo, as we fondly call our PM, was once an enfant terrible of the NSW left. He is still a very decent human being, and a very experienced politician, but to listen and watch him, you would think he never had much fire. It’s not true of course, but I think Starmer’s problem among other things, is that he had comparatively little political experience. Big mistake to put such a one in a top job.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: The Republicans certainly may ditch the filibuster, especially if they pick up a few Senate seats. I’m not sure, though, if Romney, Collins and Murkowski will go along (I’m assuming Murkowski wins reelection this fall). They are incentivised to remain vital components of any 60 vote supermajority, and they’ve bucked McConnell before.
bjacques
@Tony Jay: you know, that jeremiad of yours up there casts a whole new light on the Tories’ nickname for Carrie Symonds as “Princess Nut Nut”. (Who sounds like the daughter the Mikado doesn’t talk about.)
Another Scott
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yup. He – and Sinema – are not going to change the filibuster rules unless they feel they are forced to (and what that force would be is not clear). Everything is secondary to them to keeping the filibuster at this point. They lose their “moderate” “I fight the extreme, partisan libs who won’t compromise with the GQP so you need to support me” cred otherwise. They do support codifying Roe and all the rest – they just refuse to do so at the expense of the filibuster. It’s stupid, but it’s an ethos. (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)
That’s why we have to make their votes irrelevant by electing more Democrats as Senators (and keeping the House) in November.
Grr…,
Scott.
sdhays
@sdhays: Ugh, how embarrassing. I’m correcting someone and made my own glaring mistake!
Fetterman will be replacing Toomey.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Geminid: I think Chris Hayes was the first person I heard point out that for Rs the filibuster has effectively been eliminated. They can get judges and tax cuts with 50 votes. I can imagine McConnell would have a fine old time pretending to be the defender of bipartisan principle while using the filibuster to derail legislation he doesn’t want his members/candidates to have to answer for.
Soprano2
@TriassicSands: I saw that one, it was horrifying how even when presented with evidence from the mouths of people they say they trust they couldn’t re-evaluate their belief that the election was stolen from TFG.
Ben Cisco
@Steeplejack: Awesome and bookmarked.
Thanks!!
Soprano2
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I wish that Democrats would emphasize more that Republicans are not the party that values life. If they were, their position on things like maternal leave, availability of care for pregnant women, and guns would be completely different. They value religious beliefs and firearms more than they value life. Democrats should say that out loud, make them deny it.
Another Scott
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: +1
Yup, it’s always easier for folks who just want to slow everything down/break stuff to prevent progress.
We need to do the right thing now, and not worry about what Moscow Mitch will do in the future. The majority gets to implement its agenda – that’s the way Democracy is supposed to work. If we don’t want Moscow Mitch breaking stuff, we have to keep him from having the majority. Rules and norms can and will be changed…
People are policy.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ben Cisco
@Kathleen: I don’t doubt it – the “liberal” media save for MSNBC in the 9PM and later slots has been abysmal.
Tony Jay
@burnspbesq:
Mate, right now I’d take a President Gary Glitter and a coalition of Norsefire, Reformed Dadaists of the Third Dimension and the Monster Raving Loony Party.
Anything would be an improvement over The Flobs and Starmer’s Funny Tinge enthusiasts.
TriassicSands
@Soprano2:
The level of stupidity and ignorance required is incomprehensible to me.
StringOnAStick
@Tony Jay: Please do!
gene108
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
It depends on the industry.
Meat packing, for example, has a poor as fuck work force who they know don’t have the option of working remote or going anywhere. The same is true of people working on farms, especially big corporate farms.
Home healthcare or elderly care is also tied to being in a location.
Many extraction industry jobs pay better, but are tied to being in a physical location.
Outside of white collar office jobs, many industries have relatively captive workforces and don’t need to care about quality of life issues.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@trollhattan:
You wouldn’t allow a 10 year old to babysit a newborn (CPS would definitely be involved if they got a call) but Kristi Noem and that puffy, pasty doughball from Mississippi would make her carry one to term.
Tony Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
Unfortunately the Labour Right are currently weaponising their control of the Party to cull anyone they deem insufficiently NuNew Labour from the candidate rolls (opposition to the invasion of Iraq or a friendly tweet about Corbyn are equally acceptable as grounds for removal) so it’s going to be very difficult to find a good candidate.
Needless to say, if this were a Lefty Labour leadership systematically excluding anyone outside their ideological bubble it would be front page news and proof of their unelectability, but since it’s being done to the Left… almost complete radio silence. It won’t be allowed to become a news story until after the process is finished and the likes of The Guardian are looking for angry Lefties to interview for their “Labour in disarray” narrative.
Sad to say, but I think this is it for the Labour Party. The Right have proven that they’d rather wreck the entire show than give up a morsel of power, and now they’re actively working to turn it into a limited membership vehicle for corporately financed, anti-Woke, anti-Union suits acceptable to the likes of Murdoch and Dacre.
The millions of people who came back to Labour after 2015? They don’t want them. Simple as that.
gene108
@Baud:
Toomey’s seat is what’s being contested this year. Casey has a few more years before he’s up for re-election.
Miss Bianca
@Tony Jay: Always, by me, anyway.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
That’s pronounced “Toomey (ptui)”.
Geminid
@gene108: Bob Casey is up for reelection in 2024. He won Pennsylvania in 2018 by over 600,000 votes.
Another Scott
@gene108: All true, but the labor force has a lot more power than any time in the last 40 years.
Via CalculatedRiskBlog – Look at the gigantic numbers of job openings!
Yeah, many/most of those jobs are crap jobs with weird hours, etc. But employers are under pressures to make their jobs appealing in ways that they haven’t been in 2+ generations.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tony Jay
Oh, hello. Sajid ‘Hail Sontar!’ Javid, the UK Health Secretary, has just resigned.
Blood in the water. The end of Flobalob is on the cards.
Steeplejack
@Tony Jay:
Did he give a reason?
Miss Bianca
@Tony Jay: OK, now I really want that rant. With any hope your fingers are flying as we “speak”.
Tony Jay
@Steeplejack:
I’ve just caught the news on my phone, so I’m not sure. But Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, has gone as well, stating in leaving that the Government should be run ‘properly, competently and seriously’. Ooooh, burn.
Boom Boom. I heard two Ministers were thinking of resigning, but those weren’t the names.
That’s it. He’s done.
Tony Jay
@Miss Bianca:
Ha! It’ll come. I’ve been priming this one for a while.
Surely Comment 21 was enough to be getting on with? How many hours have you got in your day? 9-)
Geminid
@Tony Jay: The Tories can throw Johnson to the wolves, but will their sleigh run any faster?
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
Oh, there’s only further down in the barrel to scrape, but it will at least improve the general aesthetics.
The leadership bloodletting is going to be all kinds of Gorny.
sdhays
“And that’s why I’m leaving the government. It can’t be done as long as I have power.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Tony Jay: I imagine Chancellor of the Exchequer carries a lot more weight with public opinion/imagination than Minister for Health?
azlib
The most astonishing thing I remember was the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.
Tony Jay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Sure, but OTOH Health has been at the forefront for the last few years because of Covid.
These were both ‘senior’ Ministers, as in they’re both completely incompetent ideological libertarians promoted way above their capabilities, but the posts they held were very senior indeed.
Layer8Problem
@Tony Jay: Gorn as in gone? Or Gorn as in “I shall be merciful and quick[ly departing]?”
Soprano2
@Geminid: Here’s some good news on that front:
‘Liberal’ Latino Media Group to take over 2 ‘conservative’ Miami radio stations
Geminid
@Soprano2: A lot of people get their news from the radio. Way more still than off the internet I think.
Soprano2
@Geminid: The O-Boys were hollering about this a few years ago when 3 radio stations in south Florida came up for sale, and were purchased by some conservatives for around $300,000. They said it would have been a great way for liberals to reach Latino voters there (why can’t we just say “Latin”, wouldn’t that be both simpler and more inclusive?), and it would have been cheap considering how much money they waste on advertising. Just keeping them out of conservative talk radio’s hands would have been worth the purchase price.
Tony Jay
@Layer8Problem:
Gorn as in the bloodthirsty lizard aliens who slaughter each other until only one Alpha remains.
I’ve been watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
StringOnAStick
@Soprano2: I’d heard about sales of Latin stations to a liberal group but also that it wouldn’t close until after this year’s elections, has that changed?
Miss Bianca
@Tony Jay: Damn, how did I miss #21? Settlin’ in…
Layer8Problem
@Tony Jay: Knew it! I was quoting The Original Series, ’cause I’m Of a Certain Age.
Geminid
@Soprano2: No reason you can’t say “Latin.” As for me, I will keep saying “Latino” until I see members of this community like Reps. Veronica Escobar and Ruben Gallego adopt a different name and call for gringos like me to use it. But if “Latino” is not an issue for them it’s not an issue for me
I would note that in my earlier comment I referred to “Spanish speaking voters.” I guess I left out Brazilians but I doubt if they would mind. Too much.
prostratedragon
@Steeplejack: And with all those solved sudokus, who’d need heroin?
Steeplejack
@prostratedragon:
True.
Tehanu
@Tony Jay:
Tony, you are amazing. Thanks for another delicious rant, and condolences for having to put up with that crap in your government!