All entries by this author

The hand descends on the shoulder at last

Sep 24th, 2019 3:16 pm | By

Welp, it’s on.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday evening that the US House of Representatives will launch impeachment proceedings into Donald Trump, setting up an extraordinary constitutional clash over allegations he sought the help of a foreign country to harm a political rival.

“The president must be held accountable. No one is above the law,” Pelosi said on Capitol Hill moments after 5pm on Tuesday.

After months of resistance amid calls from many fellow Democrats in Washington, Pelosi determined that Trump’s alleged conduct and his administration’s refusal to comply with congressional requests for information and testimony has forced the House’s hand, leaving them no choice but to move forward with a formal impeachment inquiry.

The sharp change

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The future belongs to fire flood and famine

Sep 24th, 2019 11:27 am | By

Also disgusting:

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Nice to see

Sep 24th, 2019 11:09 am | By

Trump of course also found it necessary to jeer at Greta Thunberg. He retweeted WIRED:

”People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.” Watch Greta Thunberg speak at the UN Monday morning.

And commented:

She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!

Yes it’s all so hilarious. He’s doing what he can – which is quite a lot – to make the futures of everyone her age bleak and horrible.… Read the rest



Misery at the UN

Sep 24th, 2019 10:39 am | By

Trump just gave the world nausea by addressing the UN General Assembly.

“Wise leaders,” he says, idiotically, “always put the good of their own country, and their own people, first.”

No they don’t. Wise leaders want to avoid wars, and Trump’s formula is a formula for war.

Wise leaders also want to avoid looking like an absolute dick in public, so that lets Trump out. Standing up at the UN General Assembly and saying “Us first us first us first!!!” makes a leader look like an absolute dick, and Trump a thousand times more so. It’s all too obvious that what he’s really saying is “Me first me first me first” – that he wants and demands all the money, … Read the rest



Women need not apply

Sep 24th, 2019 9:57 am | By

Another comment on the Get the L Out post:

This is a wider issue with our police and criminal justice system. This is the Advice & Information page of the Sussex Police website. You will notice that the term sex is almost eradicated and replaced by gender. Even for crimes that largely affect women and girls (Domestic Abuse and Rape), there is not one reference to that fact. See the Hate Crime section and note that, despite sex being one of 9 protected characteristics, the abuse of a person based on their sex is not considered a criminal act. And there you have the core of the issue here….men banging on windows and obstructing women is not a criminal

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If this is the reason women were not protected

Sep 24th, 2019 9:44 am | By

Get the L Out UK:

TRA’s best friends in Brighton = MRA police! #WPUKLab19

A comment:

Never ever seen one police station flying the women’s liberation flag on IWD … yet they fly this baby pink/blue nonsense without reference to the fact it’s making political statement, which is not the police role. It discriminates against all other members of the public. Because they only fly selected flags.

Well we don’t want them flying white supremacy flags or UKIP flags, but still, yes – the zeal for “Trans Pride” from institutions that have never shown much enthusiasm for Black Pride or Female Pride is puzzling and, at this point, alarming.

Another:

This is very serious. If this is the

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Doing Putin a solid

Sep 24th, 2019 7:08 am | By

New in Trump:

Donald Trump ordered his staff to withhold nearly $400m in aid to Ukraine days before he repeatedly pressured the country’s president to investigate a political rival, it emerged on Monday night.

The revelation has further intensified demand among Democrats for the president to be impeached.

As news of Trump’s personal intervention broke, an influential group of seven Democrats, all first-term members of Congress with military or national security backgrounds, said that “if true”, the president’s actions regarding Ukraine, Joe Biden and the former vice-president’s son Hunter would “represent an impeachable offense”.

The Washington Post first reported Trump’s freezing of $391m in aid to Ukraine. Trump ordered acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, it said, to

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The response was that they didn’t give a shit

Sep 23rd, 2019 5:18 pm | By

The police just stood by at the WPUK meeting in Brighton, doing nothing while “activists” kicked the windows and shouted.

The meeting was disrupted by continual loud banging on the windows and chanting, to the point where there was a fear some windows might be broken and the excellent speech by
@rebelyarns was almost drowned out #WPUKLab19

I have never experienced such a level of threat, and I’ve been to a lot of feminist meetings. This was not a peaceful protest, it was an attempt to prevent the meeting going ahead, and it persisted throughout the equally excellent talk from @OnjaliRauf

The response from @sussex_police was inadequate to the point of negligence. Women’s right in law to congregate peacefully was

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IF they gave it out fairly

Sep 23rd, 2019 5:03 pm | By

Trump still thinks he should get a Nobel Prize…”for a lot of things.”

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Banging on the window while the police did absolutely nothing

Sep 23rd, 2019 4:42 pm | By

Julie Bindel on the WPUK meeting:

State of this outside the venue where #WPUKLab19 were meeting to talk about women’s sex-based rights, a load of trans-activist misogynists screaming, shouting and banging on the window while the police did absolutely nothing:

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For a bank, for a lobbying firm, and for a hedge fund

Sep 23rd, 2019 4:06 pm | By

Ok here we go, Adam Entous did a New Yorker piece on Hunter Biden in July.

In speeches, Biden rarely talks about Hunter. But news outlets on the right and mainstream media organizations, including the Times, have homed in on him, reprising old controversies over Hunter’s work for a bank, for a lobbying firm, and for a hedge fund, and scrutinizing his business dealings in China and Ukraine.

He went to work for a lobbying firm right after he spent three years working in the Clinton administration. That’s not necessarily directly corrupt, but it is parlaying government employment into a job as a lobbyist, and not, I think it’s fair to assume, of the public interest kind. Lobbying for … Read the rest



They’d be getting the electric chair right now

Sep 23rd, 2019 3:21 pm | By

Trump is going farther out on that limb.

“Joe Biden and his son are corrupt,” Trump said, referring to unfounded claims that Biden’s son was involved in a corruption scheme in Ukraine.

Trump then claimed — with no proof — that, “If a Republican ever did what Joe Biden did, if a Republican ever said what Joe Biden said, they’d be getting the electric chair right now.”

Hmmyes, as a Republican did in that…um…er…

The President also denied claims he put pressure on the Ukrainian leader by threatening to withhold US aid, saying, “I did not make a statement that ‘you have to do this or I’m not going to give you aid.’ I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t

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Can barely hear for the banging on the windows

Sep 23rd, 2019 11:59 am | By

There’s a Woman’s Place UK meeting happening in Brighton right now. It’s being loudly and threateningly disrupted. There are police present but they’re not stopping the disruption.

WPUK:

Thank you to all the people and speakers for persevering tonight in the face of a noisy, threatening protest. The police are here but seem incapable – unwilling? – to stop protestors banging on windows. Democracy for some it seems. The law is an ass @BrightonPolice #WPUKlab19

An attendee:

Unbelievable mob outside the @Womans_Place_UK meeting in Brighton tonight, banging and pounding the windows, the din inside is deafening. Coming in we ran the gauntlet of hostile aggression, this is hate-filled public disorder and the police are not stopping it. #WPUKLab19

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They’re all dirty

Sep 23rd, 2019 11:13 am | By

On the other hand – it would be better if Joe Biden’s kid had never gone near any Ukrainian natural gas company (or any other kind of company).

It would, in fact, be better if this whole business of leveraging a political career into big cash flows from private companies and corporations had never been embraced. It would be nice if US politicians had always seen that as a profoundly wrong and bad and indefensible move, and stayed away. Instead we have the opposite – everybody does it, it’s normal, shrug shrug. That’s all Trump and Giuliani need. The fact that Trump is doing the same thing but more so is neither here nor there.

The BBC traces the pathRead the rest



Strident avoidance syndrome

Sep 23rd, 2019 10:14 am | By

When reporting goes bad:

Nancy Pelosiwho has stridently avoided calling for impeachment, wrote in a letter that continued White House obstruction over releasing the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president would trigger severe consequences.

How do you stridently avoid calling for something? How do you stridently avoid anything?

I think they meant “strenuously advised against.”

It’s live reporting, so of its nature they do it quickly and without time for proofreaders to check it…but at the same time it does kind of hint at that unconscious bias thing we all drag around with us. Whether you agree with Pelosi or not, it is after all her job to advise for and against things, and … Read the rest



They were there to see Las Meninas

Sep 23rd, 2019 9:20 am | By

Way back on August 22

President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani confirmed Thursday that the State Department assisted his efforts to press the Ukrainian government to probe two prominent Democratic opponents of the president: former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee.

Specifically, Giuliani has wanted Ukrainian officials to look into any impropriety related to the former vice president’s push to crack down on corruption in Ukraine and his son Hunter Biden’s involvement in a natural gas company there. Giuliani also sought to have Ukraine examine whether the Democratic National Committee worked in connection with Ukrainian officials to harm Trump’s 2016 campaign by releasing damaging information on the president’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

Giuliani had … Read the rest



Confirmation

Sep 22nd, 2019 5:22 pm | By

That gabble of Trump’s this morning actually confirmed that he leaned on Ukraine to lean on Biden.

Trump told reporters on Sunday that his phone call with Zelensky was “absolutely perfect” and that he “did absolutely nothing wrong.”

Trump said his conversation with Zelensky focused on corruption and on “the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, [contributing to] the corruption already in Ukraine.”

He didn’t say “contributing to,” hence the brackets. He said “creating to” – which is gibberish.

Also:

Later, he told reporters he “had every right to” bring up Biden because “we don’t want a country that we’re giving massive aid to to be corrupting our system.”

No, he … Read the rest



Dinesh needs a better map

Sep 22nd, 2019 4:01 pm | By

Dinesh D’Souza being…well, Dinesh D’Souza.

Children—notably Nordic white girls with braids and red cheeks—were often used in Nazi propaganda. An old Goebbels technique! Looks like today’s progressive Left is still learning its game from an earlier Left in the 1930s

Left. In the 1930s. Goebbels.

The Nazis were not “the Left.” Not then and not at any time. They killed every communist and socialist they could get their hands on. The left in the 30s was socialist or communist or somewhere between the two, and it was anti-fascist when most people were ignoring the whole subject. The Communist Party did stab all that in the back when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler and CP policy reversed itself overnight, … Read the rest



His full and alarming incoherence

Sep 22nd, 2019 3:43 pm | By

Australian journalist sees Trump press conference for the first time, is taken aback by how much stupider he sounds than the press has reported. I know how she feels, even though I’ve listened to him babble extempore many times – he keeps surprising me even though I already know. He’s that bad.

But watching a full presidential Trump press conference while visiting the US this week I realised how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.

That but also he sounds and looks so much more cracked than even a fully accurate transcript can convey, because of all the head-twitching … Read the rest



WHY lord WHY

Sep 22nd, 2019 11:53 am | By
WHY lord WHY

Hmm.

[I removed the image; see comments]

Tiffany @catgirlsister asks

WHY are cis lesbians so transphobic

and adds

pls tell me I won’t be alone forever

Maybe it’s mean to make fun of what Tiffany says…but then again women who are accused of being “transphobic” or “cis” or lesbians or all three are subject to quite a lot of meanness themselves, often set off by people like Tiffany saying things like the things Tiffany said in those tweets.

So I’ll point at what Tiffany says, and ask why Tiffany feels entitled to demand that lesbians do something to prevent him from being alone forever. Why is that lesbians’ job? Why is it lesbians’ fault that Tiffany is alone? Why isn’t … Read the rest