Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Tatters.

You know, this is the thing that pisses me off with the ANC too.

For the Trumpies:

You’ve got the Whitehouse, you’ve got congress, you’ve got the Senate, you’ve got the majority of governorships, hell you’ve probably got the local dog catcher. You are the fucking system.

And you know what, this is the same thing I found a little off-putting about Bernie Sanders. Okay I thought he was the best option in the last elections, he had genuine grass-roots support, his popularity rose the longer he was in the race, and he was capable of delivering Democratic policy in a soundbite format.

It also didn’t hurt that in a nation … Read the rest

Deeyah Khan has made a film about white supremacists: White Right: Meeting the Enemy.

It focuses on the rise of nationalism in Donald Trump’s America, from the “alt-right” to all-out neo-Nazis. She spent time with various leaders in the movement, going to their meetings, including the August rally in Charlottesville where Heather Heyer, an anti-racist campaigner, was killed. She hung out with the followers of the movement, going out at night in the car with one as he leafleted a Jewish area with hate-filled flyers. She also met former neo-Nazis. “I’m a woman of colour,” she says at the beginning of the film as she sits down to interview Jared Taylor, a well-known white supremacist. “I am the

So, Mary Beard and Hillary Clinton, together at last.

Since the Cambridge professor began presenting TV programmes on the Romans nearly a decade ago, she has become world famous, as well as wildly popular for her robust refusal to stand for misogynistic online abuse. Trolls are publicly challenged; one was memorably shamed into taking Beard to lunch to apologise for calling her “a filthy old slut”. Her latest book, Women & Power: A Manifesto, brings an illuminating historical perspective to the contemporary abuse of powerful women.

I have that book. Maureen sent it to me as a surprise.

The pair met briefly four years ago when both received honorary degrees at the University of St Andrews University

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche aka let them eat cake, wot wot? Shoo the complaining peasants away and throw a few rotting cabbages at them.

After pretending for a brief moment in 2016 that the Republican Party stood for working people, the Republican-controlled Congress reverted back to trickle-down form on Friday when they passed a tax reform bill that overwhelmingly favored the rich. Not to be outdone, though, Senator Chuck Grassley made clear his disdain for those not benefiting under the new tax law.

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies,” Grassley told

The things these crooks get away with.

Jared Kushner failed to disclose his role as a co-director of the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation from 2006 to 2015, a time when the group funded an Israeli settlement considered to be illegal under international law, on financial records he filed with the Office of Government Ethics earlier this year.

The latest development follows reports on Friday indicating the White House senior adviser attempted to sway a United Nations Security Council vote against an anti-settlement resolution passed just before Donald Trump took office, which condemned the structure of West Bank settlements. The failure to disclose his role in the foundation—at a time when he was being tasked with serving as

Priorities.

This week, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) helped push a tax bill through the Senate that will cost about $1 trillion. At the same time, he lamented the difficulties of finding the money to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which pays forhealthcare for nine million children and costs about $14 billion a year — a program Hatch helped create.

A Sunday-morning tweet from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough quoting Hatch kicked off a dustup on Twitter over the Utah Republican’s take on CHIP. Funding for the program — which was created as a joint effort between Hatch and Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy in 1997 — expired at the end of September; Congress has yet to reauthorize it. That puts

HAPPY JESUS’S BIRTHDAY TO YOU TOO

… Read the rest

Stephen F. Cohen writes another love letter to Putin in The Nation:

Cohen argues that America is now in unprecedented danger due to two related crises. A new and more dangerous Cold War with Russia that is fraught with the real possibility of hot war between the two nuclear superpowers on several fronts, including Syria. And the worst crisis of the American presidency in modern times, which threatens to paralyze the president’s ability to deal diplomatically with Moscow. (To those who recall Watergate, Cohen points out that, unlike Trump, President Nixon was never accused of “collusion with the Kremlin” or faced reckless, and preposterous, allegations that the Kremlin had abetted his election by an “attack on American democracy.”)

(He’s … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on You had to be an ass-kissing corporate hack.

With the passage of the tax bill, the GOP gets to complete what was started when the draft was repealed – completely shift the burden and cost of defending the freedoms exploited by our elites to the backs of the poor. Of course this example of ‘governance’ also targets urban areas and blue states with their higher state and locals taxes and large numbers of college graduates. To do this in the dark, without debate, on the eve of the Russian connection coming home to roost is even more galling. A half century of progressive programs shot to hell in the legislative … Read the rest

Jill Filipovic notes that a lot of the fallen men in journalism helped Trump win the election.

Sexual harassment, and the sexism it’s predicated on, involves more than the harassers and the harassed; when the harassers are men with loud microphones, their private misogyny has wide-reaching public consequences. One of the most significant: the 2016 election.

Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official “commander-in-chief forum” for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interrupted Mrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr.

My Twitter feed is full of anger and disgust.

I wonder if the tour guides at the US Capitol will continue to describe the Senate as "the world's greatest deliberative body." If so, one can only hope that in the aftermath of the rushed vote on tax cuts they are regularly challenged by their fellow citizens who are visiting.

— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) December 2, 2017

As a consequence of this tax cut vote millions will lose access to health insurance and thousands will die.

— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) December 2, 2017

Thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands?) will die and many more will suffer, be disabled, be chronically ill.

During our Obama White House days we

Michael Goldfarb on Facebook:

(Trigger warning, racial epithets used ironically in this post)
So much to say about the US tax bill, so little time to say it and not sure whether the people who get to see this when it’s first posted here in London will understand.
What happened yesterday was the end of a forty year process of undoing the tax code that underwrote America’s meagre social democratic safety net. Starve the beast has been the mantra of the ideological, anti-progress GOP going back to Reagan.
The beast, the government, takes from you to give to the n-words and free-school meals & edcuation to the illegal spics and to Planned Parenthood and to the undeserving who did

The Times editorial board on last night’s theft:

With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.

Starve the beast. Government is the enemy. Yadda yadda.

Because the Senate was rewriting its bill till the last minute, only the dealmakers themselves knew what the chamber voted on. There will,