jakee

So.... um... they want to gather everyone who's left for another big parade? Sounds good to me.

Ah ok, good points. The Conservative party as a whole forced him out as PM because they figured he was becoming an electoral liability rather than because of ethics. The other MPs resigning now are throwing tantrums after being blocked from receiving the honours he’d promised them as a reward. But what we do have still are committees that work. It does seem like the MPs on committees which exist to work for Parliament as a whole rather than for their party, do still take that role very seriously. A world away from Jordan, Gaetz, MTG et Al over there.

Oh please don’t use BoJo and integrity in the same sentence. That would be quite a misunderstanding of what happened. He was toast, it was unavoidable that he would lose his job. Parliament would have voted on whether to impose the sanction recommended by the committee - he would have lost that vote. His constituency would then have held a recall petition, he would have lost that petition. He then could have stood in a by-election to try and get his job back, he would have lost that by-election. The only reasons he stood down now were to avoid that damaging series of public losses, and to release a resignation statement that viciously and falsely slandered the Standards Committee and their investigation of him. It was absolutely the most Trumpian thing he could have done within the constraints of our system (now that he’s not in charge anymore and can’t simply ignore the rules)

Why? She literally can’t be removed politically, right? The only people who can make her recuse herself (which it really seems like she should) are the members of the judiciary sitting directly above her.

The activities alleged (and apparently well supported by evidence and testimony) in the indictment are so brazen, so selfish, so clearly illegal and so obviously against the national interest that this will not be the case for any voter who is remotely paying attention. Sure, his faithful partisan media will push that line, and it’ll further galvanise those who were always going to vote Republican anyway but they’ll have a really hard time swinging the moderates the way they did with Hillary’s emails. The reality of the situation is just too clear and obvious this time

I love the conversation with his lawyers that absolutely nails the (always ridiculous) argument from the right of ‘why didn’t they just ask him to give them back’. Well they did ask and Trump’s immediate responses were 1) What if we just ignore them? 2) Why don’t we just tell them we don’t have anything? 3) Wouldn’t it be better if there were no documents? (Not to mention that he then criminally conspired on multiple occasions to hide them from the FBI and lied about it.) Also - his ‘Beautiful Mind’ boxes

Lol. For all his flowery words Winsor is one of the most closed minded reactionaries to have ever posted on this forum.

The thing that shows how clueless all of these Biden bribery muppets are is that firing the Burisma prosecutor wasn’t Biden’s idea. He was the Vice President, right? Unlike Trump he didn’t get to make up policy on the hoof, and unlike Bush he didn’t have control of intelligence gathering / output. Getting the Burisma prosecutor fired was official state department policy. Not only that, it was an international policy goal shared by most NATO countries. The idea that Biden as VP was able to seed the idea and create not just a domestic state department consensus but a consensus of international allies just because he was getting a kickback and without any evidence that it was the right thing to do is just bonkers. I won’t even bother mentioning that the reason we wanted the guy fired was that he was burying the Burisma investigation (and others) because he was corrupt. We wanted someone who would investigate!

I fail to see how your post about responsible parents and sex education has anything to do with Biden. Ive also never seen a single allegation, even from the fringe right, that Biden took money from our enemies.

And irresponsible parents ALL fail to tell their children about it.

I don’t see how that can be explained away as poor wording. It was your entire itemised first point that you were opposed to abortion after a fetal heartbeat. If that’s not what you meant, what on earth did you mean?

There really is no low this despicable amoral individual won’t stoop too. Meanwhile Ukraine has released an eavesdropped phone call between Russian officials suggesting they only intended to blow up part of the dam and took out the whole thing as a result of sheer incompetence. Which tallies with their first public statements immediately after the explosion suggesting that only the power generator building on top of the dam had been destroyed.

There was recently a big event (in right wing circles) in the UK called NatCon which was attended by quite a few government ministers. It stood for Nationalist Conservatism, and was a first effort to import the politics of the looney wing of the Republican Party into Britain. One of the speakers was the chair of the Heritage Foundation and he directly praised Viktor Orban’s regime as the kind of conservative government the US and UK should be aiming for if only we could get the liberal power brokers out of the way. I don’t think he understood how fucking crazy that sounds to most ears on this side of the pond. Why do US conservatives love Orban? He’s a proto-dictator who will crack down on any personal or press freedom that he doesn’t like or which works against his interests. Is there any other reason to admire him than because he’s an overt racist and homophobe?

Why do you think he’s not running? What chance does rationality have in the GOP primary system these days?

Oh they absolutely do. It’s not just a tactic they use, it’s something that the entire structure and equipment of their military is based around, and that their entire command and control structure is designed for. It makes sense when you have a military that is so deficient in training and standards, because it’s then the easiest way of moving forwards. This morning Russia blew up the biggest dam on the Dnieper river, putting all of Kherson province (that last year Russia declared as its own territory forever more) at risk of catastrophic flooding. As well as the huge number of homes that will be destroyed and people killed and displaced, it will destroy the entire agriculture and irrigation system of southern Ukraine, including the water supply to Crimea - which was something Russia had planned to restore as a result of the invasion. It sounds like the Russians had even intentionally raised the level of the lake to record levels over winter so that the flooding would be even more devastating. All this because they have no confidence they can defend against a Ukrainian counterattack in the south.

Errr, as Wendy just pointed they were telling gay people specifically to shut the fuck up. Everyone else who joined to do the same job could talk away to their heart’s content. Also, don’t ask don’t tell was a stupid policy. It required people to keep secret something that could still get them fired if it was disclosed. Ask anyone with a security clearance what you have to avoid at all costs? Personal secrets that someone can hold over you and blackmail you with. How mad is that?

That’s not difficult at all. It’s absolutely unacceptable. Not just because of the talk itself being a form of harassment but because it empowers the genuinely horrible people to go much further, as a recent damning review of the London Fire Brigade found. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-63749444 It was particularly interesting that there were multiple instances of firefighters’ safety gear being messed with because of misogyny and racism. Which illustrates the staggering naivety of certain posters here who think that racism is magically fixed through people of different backgrounds facing dangerous situations together.

And that’s all you have to say to justify your support for people and practices that make soldiers’ jobs more difficult and more dangerous? I’m sure it’ll work as well for you as it does for her.

How can you respect them if you think their superiors should be able to bully and coerce them into committing war crimes without any sort of come back? How can you respect them if you think they lie to the press and lie in court for reasons of petty personal jealousy? How can you respect them if you think they should have to work alongside sociopaths and murders that no-one is allowed to investigate? How can you respect them if you support the people who directly undermined the success of the 20 year mission they fought and died for? On the contrary, it's quite clear that you hold ordinary decent soldiers in utter contempt without the slightest regard for their lives and wellbeing.

Riiiiiight - the fact that they evaluated each allegation separately creates reasonable doubt that the ones they said were true were actually true. Ok, you have fun with that logic. Why do you think the soldiers who testified that the allegations were true - including ones who didn’t think there was anything wrong it - were lying to the court? Why don’t you have even a modicum of respect for the troops?

That’s why I didn’t use the word guilty. Well now I have to correct you. The court found that he wasn’t defamed because because the organisations demonstrated to the court that the allegations were true.

Won’t somebody think of the historical accuracy!?

Or review bomb a film because they hired a black actor. A bunch of racists - outright, unmitigated racists - have again attempted to overwhelm IMDB with hordes of bots posting 1 star reviews of The Little Mermaid just because the lead character is now black. And at least one of our lovely contributors is standing proudly with them.

In the wash today an Australian SAS VC recipient was found in court (in almost a carbon copy of the BBC reporting on the UK SAS) to have deliberately murdered Afghan civilians and prisoners, and to have ordered and bullied his colleagues and subordinates into murdering civilians and prisoners. In one instance, pushing a handcuffed man off a cliff. He also sent threatening letters to another soldier he believed was informing on him, saying he would expose murders that guy had committed. I wonder what you’ll have to say about respect now? About standards of reporting? Any concern about how these guys were out there materially aiding the Taliban and undermining the new Afghanistan we were supposed to create? Or maybe you’d rather just keep your head stuck firmly under the sand. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-65773942

I remember an episode of some con artist / heist tv show where they were working for a guy who collected original paintings by Hitler. The assumption was that the guy was a creepy white supremacist asshole, but the twist was that whenever he ‘collected’ one he burned it in order to remove it from the world. Buuuuut real life tends to be more straightforward. I doubt the right wing power broker Mr Crow is burning his collection.