Month: November 2025

Coast Guard Backtracks on Swastika Policy Change After ‘Fake’ WaPo Report

“Information has impact,” the Washington Post has insisted. And on Thursday, the paper showed how quickly its reporting could lead to results. At the same time, it got labeled as a purveyor of fake news because of the change it led to.
“U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses as hate symbols,” the Post reported, citing publicly available updated guidelines set to take effect Dec. 15 that revised the description of the Nazi insignia and representation of lynchings to “potentially divisive.” […]
Tara Copp, one of the two reporters of the Post story, said on X that the Coast Guard initially did not respond to requests for comment, but after publication, a Coast Guard spokesperson said that the Armed Forces branch disagreed with the story and that it would look into the policy and “will be reviewing the language” that apparently downgrades the classification of these symbols. Lunday also reportedly sent an email to the force afterwards that emphasized the symbols remained “prohibited.”
“The claims that the U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses or other extremist imagery as prohibited symbols are categorically false,” Lunday said in a statement posted on X. “These symbols have been and remain prohibited in the Coast Guard per policy.”

But they weren’t claiming that, though. They were claiming the Coast Guard wouldn’t call them hate symbols, not that they wouldn’t necessarily prohibit them…

…and they’re right about that, the Coast Guard’s booklet on harrassing behaviour distinctly calls them “potentially divisive”. I know, because I got a PDF of that booklet via TruthOut, whose article on the story links to it, and took that screenshot of it myself. Anyway, the Time article notes that the Coast Guard have rather hastily issued a new policy confirming they actually do consider those things hate symbols and tut-tutting the Washington Post for its dastardly lying… but was it, or were the CG scared into backflipping? Well, one Democratic senator is unconvinced:

And the guidelines I screenshotted above did refer to the swastika as merely “potentially divisive”, so whatever the new policy may say, that was the language used in the document that was still available as of 7:42pm AEST when I downloaded it from the Coast Guard website. In any case I don’t think TrumpCorp actually care about antisemitism per se and the hysteria about it in recent times has only really been to keep in with Israel; after all, they’re demonstrably unconcerned about any other sort of bigotry cos so many of their policies rely on it…

This is… not what I was expecting from the much-delayed vote on the Epstein files. Even considering Mushroom Cock’s abrupt 180 turn on them the other day, I still fully expected the Republicans to vote it down, and the fact that only one of them did astonishes me. Probably he was expecting the same as me. I wonder if Trump was, too. But there you go, the Senate has already promised to pass it which means it more or less goes straight to Krasnov, who’s said he’ll sign it.

Why?

What are they doing this for, and why now?

I don’t think anyone should find this exciting or hopeful, nor should we expect the Republicans to actually handle the situation properly:

Yeah. I think a remarkable number of files will be excluded for legal reasons, an even more remarkable number will have “gone missing”, and whatever we do get will be redacted to buggery. Anyone who thinks they haven’t spent all this time tampering with if not actively destroying the evidence is not being serious, and we shouldn’t trust anything that comes out from this. And we definitely shouldn’t expect justice to come from it either…

Tony Abbott admits he was fighting the urge to thump journalist in 2011 interview

In the densely packed annals of hostile encounters between Australian political figures and the journalists who report on them, it is hard to find a more mesmerising one than “The Stare-Off”.
The Stare-Off took place on February 8, 2011, between then-opposition leader Tony Abbott and Seven News reporter Mark Riley.
Questioned by Riley in a Parliament House courtyard about deploying the phrase “shit happens” on a recent Afghanistan visit when discussing the death of an Australian soldier, Abbott did not — for the most part — reply verbally.
Instead, for 24 seemingly endless seconds, he stared levelly at his questioner, his only response an agonised and slightly woodpeckerish series of taut nods as Riley prompted him for an answer.
Tony Abbott stares into the distance.
The encounter — which went viral in the early days of virality — has since racked up more than half a million views on YouTube.
And nearly a decade and a half later, Abbott has confirmed what many transfixed viewers at the time suspected: the former Oxford boxing blue was struggling with his urge to thump Riley.

Obviously I was curious when I saw the headline, and I was neither disappointed nor surprised. With hindsight it’s only surprising that he didn’t do it; there’s an old story in the SMH by Michael Duffy which emphasises that basic aggression that was bred into him by his dad (cos the latter was kind of pissy about not seeing action in WW2, apparently) …and how it’s kind of manifested in everything he did thereafter…

Abbott recalls: “I said to General Cantwell, ‘So you’re saying that there was no lack of firepower, this was a simple case of shit happens’. And he said, ‘You’re right, Tony, it was a case of shit happens.'”
According to the original video, Cantwell does not say the words recalled by Abbott, but he does nod.
Abbott’s view is that Riley tried to “take out of context that expression, ‘shit happens’, and present me as somehow making light of the death of Lance Corporal Jared MacKinney”.
“Honestly, it was a contemptible thing to do. I’m not saying that Mark Riley is a, you know, terrible person, but I thought that was an unprofessional thing to do.”

As opposed to beating the crap out of him, presumably? No offence to Mark Riley, but I kind of wish Abbott had thumped him, cos it probably would’ve been the end of the cunt and we might’ve never had to put up with him again…