Category: [Politics]

Talking of great headlines…

Well, we’ve all been there, I’m sure. This charming character has now replaced the dog murderer Kristi Noem as the head of Homeland Security, with Mushroom Cock apparently deciding she’d finally become too much of a liability even for him… cos apart from her terrible management of events in Minneapolis, there’s also this:

Simultaneously, reports began to emerge of turmoil at the department and Noem engaging in a personal relationship with Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who is her senior adviser, despite both being married.
In February, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy report into her leadership of the department that found Noem and Lewandowski had done little to obfuscate their personal relationship, while berating staff and administering polygraph tests to those they did not trust.
The pair had been traveling on a luxury 737 Max jet equipped with a private cabin, which the department has been seeking to acquire for around $70m for “high-profile deportations”. In one instance, Lewandowski fired a US Coast Guard pilot who left a blanket belonging to Noem on a plane, but then reinstated him because there was no one else to fly them back.

Not that Marklar will be much better, I’m sure:

America’s tax dollars at work.

The big boy did it

US strikes on Iran triggered by Israel’s plan to launch attack, Rubio says

Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that US troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said, in a new explanation for Washington’s surprise entry into the conflict.
The rationale drew divided reviews from top members of Congress who on Monday evening received the first briefing by the Trump administration since it ordered the air campaign to begin over the weekend.
a man in a suit speaks into a microphone
Rubio; the CIA director, John Ratcliffe; and joint chiefs of staff, chair Dan Caine; spoke to the lawmakers behind closed doors in the Capitol ahead of a vote expected later this week in the House of Representatives on a war powers resolution that presents an unlikely opportunity to force Trump to end hostilities against Iran.
“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters at the Capitol.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

So technically it’s all Israel’s fault that the US got into this war because Israel wasn’t going to not bomb Iran and the latter was going to blame the US for it and retaliate against them accordingly, so the US may as well get in first if Israel was going to make them. As if the US were ever going to keep out of this bullshit anyway, of course.

Happy new war

Yeah, great, just what we all needed, Israel and the US swinging its collective dick once again… Conceding that Khamenei was an entire piece of shit, I still feel like this is a less than ideal solution to him (worked so well in Iraq, eh). You can’t even say Iran will be better off cos who can say that whoever comes next won’t be as bad if not worse. But this wasn’t going to not happen, was it? There’s been so much talk about it that it was bound to happen sooner or later, though I don’t know if people expected it quite so soon…

…or maybe someone did, and has been duly financially rewarded as a result.

But yeah, Trump was going to do this eventually. He was going to start a way so that he could then end the war and claim his Nobel Peace Prize. Indeed, he’s been predicting it himself for over a decade:

As they say, “there’s always a Tweet”. And also…

Woof. That’s a bit more blunt than some commenters about this being a distraction from the Epstein thing, but it’s not necessarily wrong… though some would tell me off for thinking so:

But surely no one minimises the situation as much as the regime does. I mean, Mushroom Cock and Bibi wouldn’t even have considered those hundred plus schoolgirls who were killed in that one attack to have been human in the first place. They wouldn’t even be considered collateral damage. Of course, you can take an even worse approach to the matter:

So… the school was on a military base that was the real target and no kids wer killed, but if they were that was kind of their tough shit, apparently, for being a legitimate military target. Is that what Emily’s saying? I see claims that the base was also a medical facility, though I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it still doesn’t exactly make the situation better. As i also saw someone say on BS, either the US/Israel attacked this place without knowing there was a school full of students there on a day when they would’ve been there (apparently Saturday is the first day of the week in the Iranian calendar), or they did know and didn’t care. Intelligence failure vs humanity & morality failure. I’m actually inclined to believe the latter is more the case.

And with all due respect to Greg, and I do respect him:

I’m as sick of doomerism as he is, especially when, frankly, I engage in it myself, but… I’m even more sick of there being neither precedent nor process for Trump to do the things he keeps doing anyway. He can’t do this war he’s doing right now. That’s not stopping him. They’re still trying to get rid of Kilmar Abrego Garcia after a judge said they’d illegally deported him to El Savador. I keep seeing people say “the Constitution doesn’t let TrumpCorp do XYZ” as if they think Trump et all give a fuck about the rule of law when it comes to them. You want to complain about people being “doomers” in the face of… *vaguely gestures*… then you need to offer them something more than the threat of being blocked on social media.

And what have Krasnov’s underlings had to say?

Oh. Always a Tweet (or WSJ opinion piece) indeed…

Good advice

I mean, sometimes you do need to explicitly state this sort of thing, and after Labour got kind of thumped by the Greens at a by-election in Manchester the other day, I suspect it’s the sort of thing that Keir Starmer really needs to hear. Stop making mistakes like, you know, trying to convince people the Greens are as extreme as Reform, or not giving people a reason to vote for you rather than them, or just generally looking like a bit of a cunt.

Oh no! Anyway…

Yeah, Britain’s least sweaty man is finally being dealt with by The Law, who I can only assume timed this bust to fuck up his birthday royally (if you’ll pardon the expression). By the look of it, though, they don’t seem to be going after him for the putative sex stuff but some rather more prosaic stuff involving government business, when Randy Andy was working as a trade envoy and supposedly passing on confidential info to Epstein… And it should be said that his Dukedom’s association with Epstein was considered problematic even 15 years ago, along with a few other dubious friendships he’d been cultivating, and he wound up being forced to step down in 2011. I wonder if there were suspicions then that Andrew might be doing things he shouldn’t be doing in that capacity. I don’t know. At any rate, the story’s still only just breaking so we have very few details as such, but I have a feeling this could turn into something quite interesting; after all, you don’t often get stories about royalty (lapsed or not) getting arrested like this…

Bye?

Tommy Robinson flees UK claiming he’s ‘a priority target for ISIS’

FAR-RIGHT agitator Tommy Robinson has claimed that he has fled the country because he is a priority target for terror group Daesh.
Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, posted a video on X/Twitter, sharing what he alleges are conversations between himself and Bedfordshire Police.
The video purports that police informed Robinson that a Daesh publication is “encouraging others to commit violence” against him.
The three-minute long video has been viewed over 280,000 times, with Robinson posting a link to donate underneath the post. […]
In the footage, Robinson appears to be having a conversation with someone from Bedfordshire Police on speaker phone.
The publication is reportedly called Yalgaar, a propaganda magazine linked to Daesh that is proscribed material.
Robinson asks for a copy of the magazine but is told that he could be charged with a terrorism offence if he accesses it.
The person on the phone then tells Robinson that this does not mean that he can legally carry a weapon for self-defence, or take any pre-emptive action.

Like that would stop this silly cunt anyway? I don’t know, something about this feels off, and not just the idea that ISIS thinks he’s that important or even knows he exists… I mean, why was this putative conversation being recorded in the first place. Does Stevo just record every incoming phone call as a matter of course? Have Bedfordshire police confirmed the authenticity of call? Has he even left the UK at all? Cos some airline must have a record of taking him somewhere… And this call for donations? Yeah, the bullshit is strong with this one, all right:

The video then cuts to a black and white slow-motion video of Robinson walking in front of a Wizz Air plane on a runway, with the caption: “Tommy has now left the country.”
It adds: “Tommy is looking into relocating his family for their safety. Please can you help with this, and any ongoing security costs.”
A web address to donate then appears across the bottom of the screen.
The link leads to a “secure donation” website, which reads: “Help support Tommy and his work for a better future for the UK.
“Tommy has invested time and risks everything daily to speak and act on behalf of the people. Help him to help you more!
“Together we will Make England Great Again and Unite The Kingdom.”

Stevo cares for his family so much he made sure he was somewhere safe before they were. And Uniting the Kingdom by making England great again? Do the other countries in the UK just go and fuck themselves? Does whoever wrote this shit thinks the Scots will just let the English “be great” by themselves? There’s only so much bullshit even we’ll put up with from those southerners…

I’m shocked, shocked, etc.

Elon Musk posted about race almost every day in January

Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying. The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output. The posts, made on his platform X, reflect a renewed embrace of what extremism experts describe as white supremacist material.
“Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk said on 22 January, a short time before taking the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, while reposting an Irish anti-immigrant influencer’s video about demographic change.
Musk’s posts included him repeatedly claiming white people face systemic discrimination, endorsing the conspiracy that there is an ongoing genocide against white people in countries around the world and promoting a claim that white people would be “slaughtered” by non-whites if they become a demographic minority.
“If you stripped Elon Musk’s name off of these things and showed them to me, I would think that this was a white supremacist,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Extremism, who reviewed a selection of the posts.
Musk has for years promoted anti-immigrant and far-right content in his posts, as well as endorsed rightwing activists and political parties around the globe. The Tesla CEO’s most recent output displays a more consistent and explicit engagement with white supremacist content and nativist activists than in the past, however, lending them the imprimatur of the world’s richest person and spreading their ideas to his audience of over 200 million followers. Beirich said he appeared “deep into the world of white nationalism”.

Yes. Yes he has. People who have been paying attention have long since known this about him. I’m not sure why the Graun is presenting this as news. Still, it’s never not good to have Edolf’s bullshit on record like this. But at least he’s also willing to stand up for the Chinese…

Apparently what’s really behind this particular outburst is that he’s pissed because he can’t use Anthropic’s Claude AI thing to develop Grok because Claude’s terms of use specifically ban users from using it to build their own other things, or something like that. But in any case, Claude is apparently racist, heterophobic and misandrist. No one seems to be sure why he invoked this book at the end of his post nor what it has to do with anything, and he chose the name “X” for his own company so it’s not he has any right to mock others… Whatever, though, he’s just made himself look like a complete tit, which, again, is no surprise to anyone who used the Internet at all…

Well done Angus, etc.

Via the estimable Terry Sedgwick on FB:

So that’s two weirdly unsurprising things happened in local politics this week: the Coalition reunited again and Sussan Ley got the arse as Liberal leader. And this apparently leaves the Coalition with a potentially complicated parting gift:

[Ley] intends to resign in coming weeks, sparking a by-election in her massive western New South Wales electorate.
It could be a very interesting and complicated election.
Having served a few weeks longer than Alexander Downer did in 1994-95, and a couple of weeks less than Brendan Nelson after the defeat of the Howard government in 2007, Ley’s leadership is the second-shortest of any federal Liberal leader.
But her tenure as the member for Farrer is the second-longest in the seat’s history.
The seat was held by former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, a National, until his retirement in 2001.

This could be a headache on two fronts, one being the resurgence of One Nation who are going to want the seat, and the other being the Coalition’s own rules… under which, the sitting member in a Coalition-held seat isn’t challenged by the other side at election time, if the sitting member is Liberals then the Nationals don’t put up a candidate, and vice versa. But when there’s a by-election and there is no sitting member, it’s fair game for both sides… and given they’ve both only just patched up their differences, they probably don’t need this sort of potential tension. Ley has been saying things about clearing the way for Angus Taylor by not sticking around to undermine him, but I feel this is more like leaving a big steaming shit on his doorstep out of spite…

As for Angus Taylor himself…

…THIS is still what he’s best known for all these years, i.e. providing Australia with one of the great social media self-owns. But what has he done otherwise that was actually, you know, useful instead of just inadvertently comedic? I mean, he lost to Sussan Ley at the Liberal leadership contest after the last election; he was clearly considered so piss-poor that the Libs would rather vote for a woman of all things. Today Malcolm Turnbull was calling him the best-qualified idiot the party had ever met. I can’t believe the party couldn’t find a better option; obviously Sussan’s time was up (and I’m kind of impressed they let a woman run them for so long anyway), but was no one else available? This dickhead is the best they can do? How does Dave Shittleproud feel? Eh, whatever. As long as people (especially Labor) keep using that gift of a Facebook fuck-up against him while he’s there, cos that’s what matters most of all…