Just so’s you know, two or three weeks ago when the call went out for volunteers to sub in for Meg I specifically picked today so I could announce who the new British Prime Minister will be. The 160,000 Conservative Party members were sent mail-in ballots, the deadline was Friday at 5 PM, and the results are to be announced today. I assumed that they’d announce as soon as possible and with the time difference I’d have the news, but no. The announcement will be made at 12:30 PM, which will be 7:30 AM here in New York. Wankers. Sorry. That wasn’t very polite.
Well, Happy Labo(u)r Day to all! An especially happy one to @SplinterRIP, who taught me how to embed links as text. Huzzah!
If you’re in Atlanta, you can go to an All White Day event. This is not Gone With the Wind cosplay; attendees are encouraged to wear white.
If you are in Arthur, Illinois, population 2,180, you can go to the Arthur Amish Country Cheese Festival.
In Romeo, Michigan, the Romeo Peach Festival is in full swing.
And in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, you can sign up for a lunch or Happy Hour holiday cruise.
Over in the UK, the Duke and Duchess of Montecito, Hazza and Megs, have landed back in Hazza’s old stomping grounds, the Windsor estate, and they won’t be celebrating Labo(u)r Day but will instead be studiously avoiding his brother Wills (him especially), Pa, and Gran. It is as yet unknown how many Netfix crew members they’re going to try and squeeze into their vacation home, Frogmore Cottage.
So many choices. What are your plans?
I was hoping there would be a resolution to this by the time I wrote this up but there is not yet: 10 dead, at least 15 wounded, 2 knife-wielding lunatics on the loose in Saskatchewan. Somewhat interestingly, they know who did it, two men named Sanderson, but it’s not clear how or even if the two perps are related. Maybe Sanderson is a very common name in the larger Saskatoon area.
Lindsey Graham repeated his prediction that there will be street rioting if the DOJ attempts to prosecute former reality television star and impressario of the short-lived Tour de Trump Donald J. Trump for his somewhat casual filing system of classified documents. In that case, I recommend that opening arguments be presented on January 6, 2023, at the United States District Court in Fargo, North Dakota.
Tom Emmer, a name familiar to at least one commenter and the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, predicts that the midterms will hinge on “security,” saying something about open borders and rampant urban street crime. I’m a little concerned about security myself, now that the Supreme Court has struck down New York’s laws about concealed-carry handguns. Although, as I’ve mentioned before, New York seemed to be awash in people concealed-carrying weapons even when it was a very naughty thing to do.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, helmed by Sen. Rick “Crypt Keeper” Scott, managed to blow through $160 million and, according to the Times, has precious little to show for it. But Republicans are famous for being good stewards of fiscal prudence, you say, how could this be? If you believe that, well, but part of the answer might be “Mr. Scott installed a new digital team, spearheaded by Trump veterans, and greenlit [etc.]”
The Trump-era US Ambassador to Russia is retiring. The Ambassador, John J. Sullivan, is a lawyer (originally from Boston, just like my Better Half!) who’s been cycling back and forth between his law firm (Mayer, Brown) and advising various administrations on national security issues for decades. In the chaotic Trump administration he was Secretary of State for six months after Rex Tillerson was fired by tweet. His law firm work included advising clients about how to do business in Russia. Well, at least he knew the country. Might be time that we start robbing the Russians blind for a change, right, Sully? One wonders if Ambassador Sullivan might deserve some sort of award, because isn’t it likely that as Trump’s Ambassador he arranged “discreet” backroom deals whereby shady third parties sold absolutely shitty military hardware and software to the Russians and that’s at least partly why they’re doing so catastrophically in Ukraine? The Ambassador’s replacement has not been announced yet.
Also in the Times, in a guest essay, a man tells us that “Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It”.
Yes. Well. Over in the Washington Post (and can I just tell you how much it pisses me off that the media capital of the United States has such an inferior newspaper with international reach compared to Washington, DC?) we learn that Peter Thiel, the man who funded the lawsuit that drove Gawker into bankruptcy, was hit up by Mitch McConnell for money and he “demurred.” Yes. Skeletor Sen. Rick Scott, having blown all that money (vide supra) left precious little for Senate contenders in their races. Thiel generously funded J. D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona in their primaries. Now they have to run in the general elections. In Ohio it’s neck and neck. In Arizona it’s looking grim for Masters. Yertle the Turtle came a-callin’. Thiel said no.
Also the WaPo tells us that Maryland has it’s own Caribbean and it’s in Ocean City. I’ve been to Ocean City, MD, and…no. One Jamaican-themed megaresort does not a Caribbean island make.
A dollop of celebrity news, if I may: Did any of you get caught in the stampede yesterday at the celeb-ridden Malibu Chili Cook-off? Also, Timothée Chalamet has offered the insight that it’s tough to be alive now because of social media. Tim, it’s really not, as long as you’re not on social media. It’s also tough to survive on a diet of food you have to forage for yourself because you have decided to move into a tent in a remote part of a National Forest. Just don’t do it.
I imagine it would also be difficult to survive for 11 days in a cooler adrift in shark-infested waters, but one man did!
Let’s go back to Britain and I’ll wrap this up: I did not know that London’s famous Shard (aka The Gherkin) had residential and hotel components, with a very special kind of amenity for guests.
Happy Labo(u)r Day everybody!
…don’t apologize…I believe wankers would in fact be precisely the term
…to wit, I don’t have a link to hand but as they made their way to pronouncing that truss is the leader of the party (as of a few moments ago) today & subsequently will be the prime minister as of sometime tomorrow a new variant of the glass ceiling seems to have been coined…the glass cliff
…it’s sort of like what rugby players call a hospital pass…or politicians for a good long while have called a poison(ed) chalice
…she’s their third female PM…but only maggie got voted into post…the other two were bequeathed to the rest of the country by a plurality of tories who are a pretty small minority of the electorate at large…& the other thing they have in common is that they got the gig in part because it wasn’t likely to go well enough for them to be an attractive prospect to the men who otherwise would have tried to elbow their way past them to the top spot
…to a certain perspective it’s a win-win to be able to lay claim to a hat-trick of female prime ministers when other parties haven’t managed to get a single one on the board while also not having the problems two of them inherited blot the copybook of a male candidate who might prefer not to have that baggage be theirs next time around
…so…pretty much par for that course…& absolutely the sort of thing that deservedly files them firmly in the (self-serving) wankers column
My plans are happily doing nothing till about 2pm when a friend arrives for a one day visit.
My friend from out West was dropping his son off to uni… the son decided to go our alma mater, Queens over the objections of his grandma and mom. They stayed for most of the week with another friend (who I don’t like and has isolated himself from our mutual social group because he’s a racist unempathetic clown, a true Reformer Party asshole… my friend still likes him for things he did back in high school and ignores the shitty part. I don’t get it either but its not my decision/life so I don’t say anything. As an aside to an aside, I’m isolated from that group too partially because of my work schedule and the partially because my former housemate runs the group chat not that it bothers me… much.)
Apparently my friend isn’t staying tonight there due to unspecified drama. Again I don’t ask.
Oh, come on now. Who hasn’t inadvertently relied on a Nazi sympathizer as a rally prop?
Why did Trump choose to showcase a Nazi sympathizer as Jan. 6 prisoner at Pennsylvania rally: CNN reporter asks
Wasn’t CNN throwing a hissy fit about Biden’s luke warm speech about “Not All Repubs”?
Good job showing that Biden has a point, Trump.
Hee, hee.
Remember Margarine Toilet Garbage, all glory is fleeting. And you will ended up being the second headliner to a Puppet Show sooner than you think.
What a fucking dumbass.
She’s like my current director at work. So desperate and needy to prove herself to be smart and competent yet continually shows everyone how dumb she really is. If she were smart then she’d just shut up about most things except crossfit and infidelity, but thankfully she isn’t.
It would not surprise me if Trump fucked over the Russians (unintentionally) but the Russian failure in the Ukraine is almost entirely a Russian one. That’s what happens when your military is led by overly corrupt, inept wannabe Zhukovs without his military leadership/competence and you are in turn led by a viscous arrogant man who has everything except military experience, competency, patience and understanding.
I suspect that this will go down in history as one of Russia’s greatest blunders along with the 1st Pacific Squadron and the 2nd Pacific Squadron (aka Baltic Fleet) disasters against the Japanese and the Kursk submarine disaster which Putin helped make much worse.
On a large scale, Afghanistan is similar. They rolled into the easy parts with brute force, but they unified the rest of the country against them, and kept getting messed up by weapons supplied by the US.
Speaking of Afghanistan, I wonder what things would have been like if Biden had followed the pattern of Trump, Obama and Bush and kept US troops in the middle of it, and subject to attacks whenever the Taliban felt like making its influence felt.
Well, we can be sure Republicans would be squealing about “supporting our troops” while slashing funding for veteran care. That’s Republican 101.
Also Republicans made a lot of hay about being “at war.” A big chunk of their elderly constituency will agree to anything to help a “war effort.” So they’d probably be promoting that going into the midterms, casting Biden as “weak” and “unfit.”
Beyond that, the usual theft, graft, and corruption, siphoning taxpayer dollars into manufacturers who then return it to the Republicans in the form of campaign contributions. Business as usual, in other words.
I missed the Chili Stampede but am a big fan of the Turnip Stampede…
Looks like I am going to spend my day helping a friend make a parking spot at an apartment complex. I have so many questions!
The idea that only 0.3% of the British population get to vote to pick the PM really fundamentally creeps me out.
…the figure I’d heard bandied about was 0.4% of the wider electorate being people eligible to vote in a tory leadership ballot
…& the 81,000 & change votes she picked up to scrape her way into the post would be approximately 1.75% of the 46.5 million or so members of the general electorate
…not just the tail wagging the dog…but a pretty small tail, at that
Apparently they picked up a few more dues-paying members during and after the “Red Wall” election of 2019 so they actually sent out 170,000 ballots.
Just the process to get to the two final contenders (Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak) was extremely torturous. Something like 12 or 14 people threw their hat into the ring and they had these multiple ballots where the lowest scorer(s) (either lowest or in some cases lowest 2 scorers) were eliminated from consideration, and the only ones who voted in those ballots were Conservative MPs. That’s a whopping 357 people. They had multiple ballots, and the whole country had to watch that.
In the last six years Britain has had four Prime Ministers (Cameron’s last year -> Theresa May -> Boris Johnson ->Liz Truss) and they’ve had two general elections. Another one could be called at any moment. Liz Truss might want to do this to prove legitimacy (see, the country as a whole still prefers me, not just a tiny sliver of the population) but she has vowed not to hold an election until at least 2024. She has to hold one in 2025 I think. There are no fixed election dates but there are more or less fixed maximum intervals between general elections.
…yeah…the whittling-down-to-the-final-two bit that’s all just in-house parliamentary jockeying for support is/was way too house-of-cards-y so I skipped over trying to add that to things to check in on in DOTs as it dragged on…but it was pretty claws-out stuff even by tory standards hence that reference the other day to nadine dorries being described as feral
…& the point by which she has to allow a general election is (iirc) jan ’25…which for various reasons is unlikely to be an appealing prospect…so the money seems to be on autumn of ’24…she hasn’t made a vow so much as proclamation that she’d deliver a general election victory to the tories in ’24
…so to other ears what little she said beyond repeating the word deliver too many times was roughly “I will govern as a tory” (rough translation “the richer you are the better you’re likely to make out” & “big businesses shouldn’t be unfairly burdened with paying their fair share or having to suffer regulations”) & “I expect to give you a chance to offer feedback on my efforts in 18months at the earliest…maybe round it up to two years to give you time to acquire a taste for my amazing & totally-not-deservedly-unpopular approach to things”
…there’ll be a supposedly-more-substantive speech tomorrow after boris goes to formally resign & she’s taken her first trip to see the queen as her latest PM…but luckily for everyone that won’t be until after I’m done with tomorrow’s DOT so I won’t wind up doing some annotated breakdown of all the ways fairly sure I won’t see it the way she’d like everybody to
…small mercies & all that sort of thing?
I like the part where Boris will fly to Balmoral on a government plane and resign. I think as part of tradition he has to say something like, “And I recommend as my successor Liz Truss.” Liz will get up to Balmoral “by other means.” Then she “kisses the hands” (they don’t do this anymore, which is a shame, but that’s the term for meeting the queen and “accepting” your Prime Ministership) and she gets to fly back on the government plane and it is Boris who’ll have to find his way back to London “by other means.”
…it’s something of a turn up for the books that the trip is to balmoral at all…it’s generally a short drive up whitehall to hang a left & head down the mall to buck house
…if you’re looking at the tealeaves it seems to imply that her majesty is not feeling quite as regal as she might like & has been prevailed upon to finally start playing the old lady card…so in some cicles there’s no shortage of speculation about her health & such
…but it’s also a non-zero possibility that she sees that whole run around in very much the same sort of way you do & has found the only way available to her to metaphorically flip them both the bird by saying “you know what, I’m comfy where I am & you lot have been passing this buck too often so I don’t much care if it puts you out & you’ve wasted far too much of everybody’s time for me to be sympathetic to the idea yours is valuable enough not to waste it but one of you can spend the long hours getting here & hopefully have figured out some better answers to give me than she’s offered the public yet…& the other can drag his tail back home slow enough to maybe reflect a little on what he did to get himself that long way home”
…I can’t be sure…but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if it turned out she thought that shit was funny, to boot?
There’s precedence for the Monarch to receive new Prime Ministers in places other than Buckingham Palace, although the Queen has never previously done this:
Though it will be a first for Elizabeth, some of her predecessors have appointed prime ministers outside the capital.
In 1868, Queen Victoria appointed Benjamin Disraeli at Osborne House, a then-royal residence on the south coast Isle of Wight. In 1885, she appointed his successor, Lord Salisbury, the last prime minister of her life, at Balmoral itself.
Perhaps most strikingly, in 1908 King Edward VII appointed H. H. Asquith in a hotel room in the south of France. This had nothing to do with difficult circumstances, Prescott said, the king just didn’t want to interrupt his holiday.
That last one about Edward VII makes him sound like he was on an Edwardian easyJet package holiday. What really happened was he was in the Royal Suite at one of the most fashionable hotels in Biarritz at a time when Biarritz was one of Europe’s most fashionable resorts, especially for the British.
…I mostly knew about the asquith one…could have told you that it wasn’t the only example but not who the other ones would have been
…but whatever opinion one might have of of liz 2.0 I don’t think many would claim she’s known for not doing the thing…which in the case of dismissing/receiving prime ministers on their way out/into office has very much been a definitely-buck-house sort of formality for her…so the departure from established protocol is more than enough for some to leap to the conclusion that if she were capable of getting out of bed & walking across a room she’d have dragged herself back to london to do it all properly & therefore must be at death’s door
…I much prefer the too-old-for-tbis-shit + fuck-em-they-deserve-their-parade-rained-on = “tell a lie – one is actually quite amused” interpretation
…but I’m biased, I suppose…might be ambivalent about a monarchy in the abstract & in practice in various ways but of the three individuals involved the only one I’d feel any kind of comfortable putting in charge of other people would be the old lady with decades of the heavy-is-the-head routine under her belt?
I agree with you and you would know better than I, but I think they’re going to give Charles a chance, I mean they have no choice, but if he, uh, takes a more active role in the life of the nation, let’s say, by publicly expressing opinions on topics before the Commons or really anything I think the tide of Republicanism will start rising precipitously. His views on modern architecture, for example, are quite clear, and I agree with him mostly. Lots of it was designed like crap and even the good, innovative, thought-provoking, beautiful stuff is sometimes done on the cheap so it immediately achieves eyesore status.
What if he is called to open a hospital named for him that was built in a part of the country he doesn’t particularly care for? Will he be able to keep his remarks brief and cheery, or will he be moved to say something like, “In this singularly unpleasant city where many of you unfortunately have found your homes, you have chosen to erect this monstrosity and bestow it with my name. This is deeply regrettable. My sorrow and sincerest apologies in advance to any who find your last moments of life slipping away within its unutterably cruel walls. What a final indignity to endure. Thenk yew veddy much.”