Almost A Limerick

From a cousin across the pond:

Roses are red

River hogs grunt

Nigel Farage is a racist old...

...former UKIP leader who has failed to be elected to the UK Parliament on seven separate occasions, and was once beaten by some guy dressed as Flipper.

In Search Of Real Americans

The people at our southern border have come here because deep inside, they have a strong desire for freedom, a reasonable expectation of justice and a powerful instinct for democracy.

I think that says quite a bit about them - but it says even more about the people who see them as enemies, and want to keep them out.

Jesus Rodriguez, Politico Magazine:

The caravan migrants who arrived at the border nearly a month ago don’t have a country. But they do have a government.

In the time since the caravan left Honduras in mid-October, the asylum-seekers have fashioned a proto-democracy out of their group of some 6,000 migrants overwhelmingly from Central America, most of whom have walked for most of the trip, at times hitching rides in the backs of cars or trucks.

To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the caravan is nothing more than a “lawless” mob of potentially violent criminals. But dozens of phone interviews and WhatsApp conversations with advocacy groups and migrants, as well as social media updates from groups on the ground, show that the migrants have organized a surprisingly sophisticated ruling structure, complete with everything from a press shop to a department of public works.

When the migrants needed to make public announcements, debate the best routes and vote on different plans, they established a nightly general assembly as a forum open to all, Athens-style. Their legislative floor was an abandoned truck parking lot or an unused sports stadium. Some of the migrants even took turns as communications directors, drafting press statements that were transmitted through a media group of more than 370 journalists on WhatsApp.


- and -

Ask some on the right to define the caravan and they might conspire about highly organized hordes of criminals funded by the Venezuelan state or billionaire philanthropist George Soros who want to rush the American border. (“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Trump said Oct. 31 in reference to the Soros claim, one day after the migrants elected their Governance and Dialogue Council.) Some liberals, on the other hand, will try to convince you that this is a hapless, hopeless lot with no agency, no rights and no recourse for help.

- and -

The only U.S. government representative who has taken action so far has been Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who traveled to the border in early December and helped broker the passage of five asylum-seekers across the border. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) swiftly criticized Jayapal, blasting her as a “congressional coyote.”

(Walter) Coello, the Honduran migrant who once had to negotiate for his life with MS-13, thinks he could rise above the classic Washington mudslinging and appeal to a higher sense of humanity. He knows exactly how he would lobby Trump if he was sitting across from him.

“First, may God bless you,” Coello would say. “We want work. We are not criminals. We hope that God will soften your heart.”

You know we're going to see The Ten Commandments at some point between now and Year Year's Day. And you know I'm about to reference the scenes where Chuck Heston's saying let my people go and Ann Baxter's fucking with Yul Brynner "hardeneing Pharoah's heart", right?  And I knew you knew that.

He Never Stops

I had to go and listen to the remarks.

"Inarticulate", and leaving normal people wondering "what the president stood for" is part of the plan.

You're not the one who's supposed to hear a message about what he stands for. There are plenty of rubes who heard his message 5-by-5.

At about 1:38 - "It is our duty to preserve the civilization they defended..." 

It never fails. He always makes it sound like "White Nationalism". And I don't think it sounds that way just because I'm listening for it.

Stephen Miller writes this shit for him, and there's no secret about where Mr Miller's head is at.

Murder Is Just Alright

Today's Asshole Alert via WaPo's Robert Costa and Karoun Demerjian:

Hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom.

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights.


So, standard GOP playbook shittiness - "he was no angel" - with every Virginian's favorite Bull-Conner-wanna-be, Corey Stewart, chiming right in, on cue and in perfect harmony:

The message was echoed on the campaign trail. Virginia Republican Corey A. Stewart, who is challenging Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), told a local radio program Thursday that “Khashoggi was not a good guy himself.”

And WaPo puts up an appropriate defensive fact for Khashoggi (something I certainly didn't know) - but buries it in the 9th paragraph.

While Khashoggi was once sympathetic to Islamist movements, he moved toward a more liberal, secular point of view, according to experts on the Middle East who have tracked his career. Khashoggi knew bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s during the civil war in Afghanistan, but his interactionswith bin Laden were as a journalist with a point of view who was working with a prized source.


I shit on the press whenever I think they're doing their little Press Poodle show, and I'll continue doing that, but there's always a line that you don't cross. Ever. 

I think everything has something to do with drawing lines; and making decisions about where the lines should be; and trying to make sure we're staying on the "right" side of those lines. You know - Morality and Ethics, and all those silly notions of what it takes to maintain a civilization.

When things are as weird as they are in the middle east, those lines can get pretty fuzzy. And while I'm sympathetic to the frustration, and I've expressed that frustration on at least a few occasions by saying something like, "Fuck 'em - let's just turn the place into the world's biggest glass bowl and let the tourists take over".

But that doesn't work. I know that. Hell, until recently, I thought everybody knew that. But here we are, with Lord Commander Bonespurs at his rally in Montana, telling us that if we just kill enough people - the right people according to him and him alone - everybody gets real polite and agreeable all of a sudden. And the rubes eat it up.

Then, a possible glimmer of sanity via Reuters:

So grave is the fallout from the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi that King Salman has felt compelled to intervene, five sources with links to the Saudi royal family said.

Last Thursday, Oct. 11, the king dispatched his most trusted aide, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of Mecca, to Istanbul to try to defuse the crisis.

World leaders were demanding an explanation and concern was growing in parts of the royal court that the king’s son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to whom he has delegated vast powers, was struggling to contain the fallout, the sources said.

During Prince Khaled’s visit, Turkey and Saudi Arabia agreed to form a joint working group to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance. The king subsequently ordered the Saudi public prosecutor to open an inquiry based on its findings.

“The selection of Khaled, a senior royal with high status, is telling as he is the king’s personal adviser, his right hand man and has had very strong ties and a friendship with (Turkish President) Erdogan,” said a Saudi source with links to government circles.

Since the meeting between Prince Khaled and Erdogan, King Salman has been “asserting himself” in managing the affair, according to a different source, a Saudi businessman who lives abroad but is close to royal circles.


But - did you catch it? - "a joint working group". Erdogan and Prince Khaled are going to investigate the thing to find out if the Saudi government is a bunch of murdering assholes, and whether or not the Turks helped them.

I think we already know how this one turns out.

Today's PSA

From a Dutch TV show - Sunday With Lubach (Arjen Lubach)

N onsensical
R ifle
A ddiction

Let's Do It Better

The Rude Pundit thought he might be crashing while on a visit to Liverpool. And it turned out to be a rather pleasant experience instead.

An American in the UK National Health Service

It had been a stressful few weeks, with far more than the usual amount of fuckery and frantic frenzy, and I arrived in Liverpool last Friday on a total of about 4 hours of sleep in two days. Walking around the Liverpool One area shortly after dropping off my bags, heading towards the Tesco to get some supplies, I realized that I was sweating like Nicholas Cage on a meth bender and my heart was racing like, well, the same. I felt a tightness in my chest, short of breath, needing to sit down, and I thought, "Well, fuck, this would fuck up the next week or so." When your Dad dies of a heart attack at 46, you take that shit seriously.

So I found a National Health Service walk-in clinic just around the corner from Tesco. It was in the same space as the NHS's sexual health office, which offered free morning after pills, among other things. I went in and there were maybe twenty people sitting there. I don't know how many needed sex-related attention and how many needed regular medical help. But a very nice receptionist took my name, date of birth, and phone number, and then she asked what was wrong. I described my condition without the mention of Nicholas Cage or meth, which could have confused the whole situation. She very nicely told me to take a seat and that triage would be with me shortly. The triage nurse, I learned, examines everyone to see who might need to get in sooner than others. Apparently, I was looking terrible enough to be bumped to the front of the line.

After a few moments, I was called back to see the nurse practitioner, Niamh (pronounced "Neeve" because, well, Irish names). I can honestly say that I've never been treated with as much care, patience, and good humor by a medical professional as I was by Niamh. She asked permission every time she wanted to do anything, from take my blood pressure to listen to my pulse. Even as I kept insisting that I was probably just exhausted and whiny, she took everything about my condition incredibly seriously and assured me that I should just follow through with what she was recommending. "It won't cost you anything," she said more than once, as if understanding the anxiety that Americans have about health care spending. "Unless you're admitted to hospital." She laughed and joked, and we talked like we're human beings having a conversation, not a transaction.

Niamh asked me a few questions about health insurance in the United States and shook her head at it. "I'm afraid we're going to head to that kind of system," she exclaimed. She told me a story about when she and her family - husband and five children - visited New York City the previous year. Her youngest, a toddler, had gotten an ear infection, so they went to a walk-in clinic, just as I had come to this one. She told the receptionist that they would pay out of pocket for expenses because they would be reimbursed when they came home. "Now, they prescribed my little one a medicine," Niamh said, "one that I know is in that locked cupboard behind you. And I know that it costs about three pounds. Do you know how much they charged me in the states? $354." She laughed, as one can when they get the money back for outrageous expenses. I told her that her experience is pretty typical.

This is more than some tiny example of Anecdote-over-Evidence. We hear versions of this story all the time, and we need to understand that a Profit-Centered approach to healthcare is not just a shitty way to treat people - it's costing us gazillions of dollars we don't need to spend on a system that delivers the world's 37th best outcomes.

By every measure, our system makes sense to nobody but Rent Collectors.

It doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to do it the way we're doing it. We're getting stuck in the same kind of ideological straightjacket that the USSR was in as we all watched that whole system crater in on itself almost 30 years ago.

We keep insisting on maintaining a blind faith in the Unfettered Free Market. And we're pushing it to the point where we plunge into the Logical Extreme - which is where good ideas go to die.

You don't build a durable form of government based on an economic system - not without ending up very close to that old Yakov Smirnoff bit, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

The version here in USAmerica Inc is fast becoming: "They pretend we're buying their shit and we pretend we have a choice."

The View From Out There

An irrelevant freak show

The View From Out There

It's politics, remember, so they don't tell us the whole truth.

But sometimes they tell some of the truth because - surprise surprise - it's in everybody's best interest to do it, and the Politcos not only recognize that, they manage to do the right thing (surprise surprise again).

This piece is chock-full of little slices of Scary-as-Fuck.

Buzzfeed, Alberto Nardelli:

The current standoff is a dramatic illustration of the grave international concerns over Trump.

On one level, the officials said, he is something of a laughing stock among Europeans at international gatherings. One revealed that a small group of diplomats play a version of word bingo whenever the president speaks because they consider his vocabulary to be so limited. “Everything is ‘great’, ‘very, very great’, ‘amazing’,” the diplomat said.

--snip--

Another diplomat said it had proved impossible to discuss serious international issues, such as Libya, with Trump. And seven months into his presidency, the European officials say they are still struggling to figure out who else they can engage with in the US administration.

Describing a meeting between their boss and the president as “basically useless,” they said: “He [Trump] just bombed us with questions: ‘How many people do you have? What’s your GDP? How much oil does [that country] produce? How many barrels a day? How much of it is yours?’”

“He’s not the kind of person you can have a discussion about how to deal with [Fayez] al-Sarraj [the prime minister of Libya]," the official added. "So you look for people around him, and that is where it’s a problem: The constant upheaval, it’s unclear who has influence, who is close to the president."

A number of European officials compared Trump with Italian former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi – but said the similarities end at their inappropriate jokes during meetings.

“Berlusconi wasn’t ignorant. And behind him he had officials and a whole government structure you could engage with,” one diplomat said.

The officials revealed that at international meetings, Trump has openly mocked his own aides, contradicting and arguing with them in front of other leaders. That has compounded the impression of an administration in chaos. “We can hear everything, it’s weird,” one diplomat said.

Officials also expressed concerns over the status of the State Department, and the lack of seasoned diplomats and experts within the White House. One diplomat suggested that US counterparts have privately lamented to Europeans about the number of roles in the administration that have yet to be filled resulting in a lack of clear positions on many policy areas.

“The White House lacks crucial expertise,” one said. “The State Department and others are isolated. You have the generals, the National Security Council, and then a void. There aren’t enough diplomats, experts etc. in the White House. [Secretary of state Rex] Tillerson has a small team. Does Trump listen to [James] Mattis [secretary of defence], [H.R.] McMaster [national security adviser], to the experts?”

Who's In Charge Here?

45*'s Grand Alienation Tour has made it pretty clear that almost every one of our old buddy countries is deciding Angela Merkel will be running the show from on out.  

And the US can fuck off until we come to our senses and put a grownup in the Oval Office again.

From Across The Pond

The world watches us pretty closely most of the time, but it's still a pretty neat trick when you've made the Brits notice just how fucked up our politics really is.

The lead article:

HOW do people learn to accept what they once found unacceptable? In 1927 Frederic Thrasher published a “natural history” of 1,313 gangs in Chicago. Each of them lived by a set of unwritten rules that had come to make sense to gang members but were still repellent to everyone else. So it is with Donald Trump and many of his supporters. By normalising attitudes that, before he came along, were publicly taboo, Mr Trump has taken a knuckle-duster to American political culture.

The recording of him boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy”, long before he was a candidate, was unpleasant enough. More worrying still has been the insistence by many Trump supporters that his behaviour was normal. So too his threat, issued in the second presidential debate, to have Hillary Clinton thrown into jail if he wins. In a more fragile democracy that sort of talk would foreshadow post-election violence. Mercifully, America is not about to riot on November 9th. But the reasons have less to do with the state’s power to enforce the letter of the law than with the unwritten rules that American democracy thrives on. It is these that Mr Trump is trampling over—and which Americans need to defend.

And in light of some of our less than sterling political moments - Swift Boat, Iraq's WMD, Whitewater, Willie Horton, Iran-Contra, The Enemies List, Southern Strategy, Joe McCarthy (the list goes on and on) - the fact that this one stands out in bold relief is depressing.

Charity

From Vox:

In 1997, after a distinguished career in military service that culminated with stints as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Colin Powell launched a charity. Named America’s Promise, it’s built around the theme of Five Promises to America’s children. And while I’ve never heard it praised as a particularly cost-effective way to help humanity by effective altruists, it was surely a reasonably good cause for a famous and politically popular man to dedicate himself to.

Needless to say, however, Powell continued to be involved in American political life. His sky-high poll numbers ensured he’d be buzzed about as a possible presidential or vice presidential nominee, either as a moderate Republican or as an independent. Realistically, that wasn’t in the cards, and Powell was smart enough to know it. But his support for George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign lent him valuable credibility, and his recruitment to serve as Bush’s first secretary of state was considered an important political and substantive coup by Bush.

So what about the charity? Well, Powell’s wife, Alma Powell, took it over. And it kept raking in donations from corporate America. Ken Lay, the chair of Enron, was a big donor. He also backed a literacy-related charity that was founded by the then-president’s mother. The US Department of State, at the time Powell was secretary, went to bat for Enron in a dispute the company was having with the Indian government.

Did Lay or any other Enron official attempt to use their connections with Alma Powell (or Barbara Bush, for that matter) to help secure access to State Department personnel in order to voice these concerns? Did any other donors to America’s Promise? I have no idea, because to the best of my knowledge nobody in the media ever launched an extensive investigation into these matters. That’s the value of the presumption of innocence, something Hillary Clinton has never been able to enjoy during her time in the national spotlight.

I think this is a pretty fair viewpoint, even though the guy is straining pretty hard to take it right up to the edge of Tu Quoque without tipping over into it completely. 

I think this shit happens too much, and I think it's harder and harder to rationalize away disturbing thoughts of how corrupt it seems to be.

Like the author says, the tendency to believe the worst about most politicians, and Hillary in particular, has been in place for a long time.  But that just makes me wonder if The Clinton Foundation thing is a good example of the famous Too-Cute-By-Half that seems to characterize the Clinton gang.

Some Brain Puking:

People want something from Hillary's State Dept.
They call and ask.
They either get what they want or they don't (it looks sketchy, but nobody's made any direct Quid Pro Quo connections).
Anyway, the call goes thru to somebody on Hillary's staff, and after an appropriate length of time, the caller is contacted by The Foundation, there's a low-key soft-sell pitch, and before they know it, they're writing out a nice fat check.
So the Lithuanian Labor Minister gets a little help from the US Dept of State for his niece's visa problem, and 7 or 8 months later, Uganda gets some water filters with the money the grateful Minister donated to The Clinton Foundation.
Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.

So instead of Pay To Play (which is illegal), they've reversed it to Play Then Pay (which isn't; not really anyway) - and if anybody makes a big squawk, well, "just look at all the great things we've done with the money" - which they have, and which makes it harder to flat-out reject the "How Things Work In The Real World" narrative.

Seriously Now, Kids

...just what the fuck is going on here?

Resistance Is Life

The whole thing from Juan Cole:

Kurdish Women Fighting ISIL Send Solidarity to BlackLivesMatter

“You are among the most radical voices in today’s racist, sexist, capitalist world,” the YPJ wrote to Black Lives Matter.

Fighters from the Kurdish Women’s Defense Units or YPJ, have sent a message of solidarity to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.

“To our black sisters and brothers! The people of Kurdistan stand with you!” read the short statement posted Saturday by the group, who has been fighting the incursions of ISIS [Daesh] in northern Syria for close to two years. “Here are the women who fight ISIS in Rojava (northern Syria) – saluting your honorable struggle for freedom, dignity, and resistance!”

The call for Black Lives Matter has become a focal point for discussions around systemic racism and police brutality following the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, as well as numerous other incidents since. This past week, police killed Philando Castille and Alton Sterling – both incidents filmed and subsequently shared ober social media – touching off more protests across the United States.

For the women of the YPJ, solidarity and building “world revolution” against racism, sexism and capitalism, go hand in hand.

“As the women in Kurdistan know very well, we need to build our self-defense in all spheres of life. You are among the most radical voices in today’s racist, sexist, capitalist world and the freedom-loving peoples of the world deeply respect and salute your fight! Solidarity is the first step to world revolution!,” the statement continued.

Since the most recent string of high-profile U.S.police shootings of Blackpeople, expressions of solidarity from other communities in the United States as well as groups from around the world have been pouring in – with the radical, communist Kurdish groups being the latest.

“Black Lives Matter! As we say in Kurdish: “Berxwedan jiyan e!” – Resistance is life!,” the YPJgroup concluded.

Via TeleSur

I guess I'd worry a little about backlash because of a ringing endorsement from a group that espouses "communism" - if I thought anybody was gonna pay any real attention to it anyway.

We seem to think we can rule the world without actually having to live in it.

Today's Weird Irony

I guess I'm only partly glad to be reminded that Stoopid is not exclusive to USAmerica Inc.

But - that clip also serves as a happy reminder that Monty Python's Life Of Brian continues to inspire some pretty great thinking. 

The View From Out There

ThinkProgress:

New Concept

New to me anyway - Coercive Engineered Migration: The use of internal upheaval in one country to force the populations to move to another country in an attempt to destabilize that other country's economy and/or government.

This is Russia Today, so grains of salt are in order.  That said, differing perspectives are generally a plus when trying to figure out just what the fuck is actually going on here.

hat tip = Facebook pal DR

Paris

Friday The 13th can't get much worse than the shit that went down in Paris two days ago.

Except that, of course it can get worse - a lot worse - if the Right Radicals are allowed to hold sway.  (Remember that Marine Le Pen and her merry band of Franco-Nasties gained a lot after the Charlie Hebdo thing)

I posted this on my Facebook wall, saying I tho't the French people were pushing back in a good way, and that I hoped they'd keep their shit together.

And wouldn't you know it - as they try to rally and stay together and not let the forces of darkness overtake them, along come the French equivalent of The Trumpkins ...

The banner says something like "Expel The Islamists", but the ralliers chant "fascists go home", and instead of starting any shit (with the help of the cops), they stay together and apply steady pressure until the Brown Shirts back off and quit the scene. 

And it's striking that at the end, we see the "anti-islamists" just kinda dissolving into the crowd - some of them almost acting like they never really had anything to do with anything, and that maybe this whole thing never even happened.  

Run and hide, assholes.

Imagine That

Pew Research has found that 55% of Russians think it's unfortunate that the Soviet Empire is gone.

55%

Most Russians think they'd rather return to theirs lives under "communism" than keep things the way they are now under Putin and the new Russian aristocracy.

Stay Tuned

Reports are coming out of North Africa now that have Libyans storming some-to-several camps or buildings and militia headquarters and killing at least 2 people in protest of the attack on the American consulate in Bhengazi last week.

From The DailyTimes:

Libyan protesters ousted a militia from its headquarters and seized a raft of other paramilitary bases in second city Benghazi early on Saturday in heavy clashes that left four people dead.

The seizure of the headquarters of Ansar al-Sharia - which has been accused of, but denied, involvement in the murder of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans last week - came after tens of thousands took to the streets on Friday to protest against the power of the militias.

It bears watching.

Go Greeks

Y'know, some people just really know how to do that protest thing better than others.

Prostesters in Greece managed to get into the studio and pelted a TV Anchor Guy with eggs and yogurt (this is Greece after all).

Unofficially translated, they're chanting, "Cops, TV, neo-nazis, all the scoundrels are working together."