He was the youthful banker-president – a supposed liberal, feminist, pro-European foil to strongmen and populists alike.
But Emmanuel Macron has turned the Elysée Palace into “Macholand”, where a tight clique of male aides hold the levers of power while sipping whisky and Bordeaux.
We’d never have thought it.
Macholand: Inside Macron’s ‘boy band’ clique at the Elysée Palace
Thing about boy bands is that they normally screw the groupies not each other.
Moderate socialist Antonio Jose Seguro came out on top in the first round of Portugal’s presidential election on Sunday, followed by the far-right leader Andre Ventura, and the two will face off in a runoff on 8 February.
The “far-right” is somewhat to the left of Macmillan and the moderate socialist just wants to starve the kulaks slowly…..
The multimillionaire financier who has been made leader of Reform UK in Scotland has refused to say how wealthy he is, claiming that is a private matter.
Do we know Ed Miliband’s net worth? The Balls family?
At first glance a more benign contender, Netflix presents an equally serious threat. Although CNN is currently excluded from the deal and would be spun off along with some of its old-line cable networks into a new entity, Discovery Global, the world’s largest subscription video platform has its own troubling history of bowing to political pressure. In 2019, for example, after removing a satirical news show critical of Saudi Arabia, Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, defended the decision by saying: “We’re not in the news business. We’re not trying to do ‘truth to power’. We’re trying to entertain.”
This is a false binary. Entertainment shapes how people understand the world, often reaching audiences journalism alone cannot. Netflix’s record of yielding to political pressure cannot be dismissed as a dispute over entertainment, especially since the content most affected – satire, documentary and historical drama – is journalism-adjacent and has long functioned as a form of political accountability when news media are under pressure. When politically sensitive stories are removed, restricted or never commissioned in the first place, a vital channel through which societies test ideas, confront injustice and encounter dissent is lost, an effect that grows more consequential as press freedom weakens.
Ah. So Colbert, and by extentions, SNL and in fact every TV show is all politics. Because they’re all about confronting injustice. Or, an alternative read, now that we liberals – in the American sense – have control of the entertainment complex you’d be a right bastard to prise that from us.
A third read – Maga complaining that the mainstream media is biased is so, sooo, wrong, and it’s good that the mainstream is biased, see?
Of all the commandments for living under a politician, the first is always this: don’t believe him. Nothing he says can be taken at face value; everything should be fed into a polygraph. Those of scrupulous courtesy can wrap it up in red ribbon, or uncork that aphorism about how the man must be taken seriously but never literally. All the same, scratch a political promise and underneath will glint a pretext. Scrutinise his grand plans and you find only shabby tactics.
Aditya Chakrabortty
There might have been some light editing there.
This is not news:
Burnham ‘would make better PM than Starmer’
Survey reveals voters think Greater Manchester Mayor would be stronger on cost of living crisis and immigration
My (late and lamented) dog, Rosie, would be a better PM than Starmer.
Billionaires raised fortunes against him. The president threatened to strip his citizenship. Mainstream synagogues slandered him as the spawn of Osama Bin Laden and Chairman Mao. But today, Zohran Mamdani became the first socialist mayor of New York City.
For all the hysteria, when I look at Mamdani, I didn’t see some radical departure from the past. I see him as the heir to an old and venerable Jewish tradition – that of Yiddish socialism – which helped build New York.
….
Vladeck is the great-grandson of Baruch Charney Vladeck, a Marxist troublemaker from the Pale of Settlement, a tract of land in the Russian empire where Jews were permitted to live at a time of rampant antisemitic oppression. Baruch showed up in New York after the failed Russian Revolution of 1905 with a Cossack’s saber scars all over his face. He later became a socialist alderman and member of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s housing administration. Vladeck was not actually his birth name. It was rather a nom de guerre, adopted when he joined the Jewish Labor Bund, the socialist, secular and defiantly anti-Zionist movement whose slogan, “here where we live is our country,” would make an apt tagline for Mamdani’s New York.
Ahhh, defiantly anti-Zionist, eh?
Founded in 1884 and initially most closely associated with the pioneering social reformers Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the Fabian Society was a co-founder of the Labour party and has been affiliated with it ever since.
The political and economic idiocies of the Webbs – largely through their influence on Nehru and thereby delaying the economic breakthough there by 50 years – have caused more human poverty than anything except Marx.
So, you know, we should shoot them all.
He praises some of the policies pursued by Keir Starmer, who was a member of the Fabians’ executive committee – and penned a pamphlet of his own – before becoming prime minister. In particular, Dromey highlights the Renters’ Rights Act and the Employment Rights Act, which became law on 18 December.
“These things are quietly radical. They’re things that significantly change the balance of power in our housing market and in our labour market,” he says.
They’re wholly idiot ideas which screw the respective situations even more than they were already.
We do need a solution to those who propose, support, even think possibly useful, such idiot ideas.
Shoot them all.
A third of Reform UK’s council leaders across the country have expressed vaccine-sceptic views, openly questioning public health measures that keep millions safe.
The leaders of four of the 12 councils where Reform is in charge or the largest party – Kent, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Durham – are among those in the party who have publicly criticised vaccinations.
The health minister Zubir Ahmed, an NHS transplant and vascular surgeon, described their remarks as “dangerous and utterly irresponsible”, saying that politicians who cast doubt on vaccines risked exposing children and vulnerable people to harm.
It does sorta depend upon which vaccine and so on. But it’s an interesting attempt, isn’t it? Anyone who doubts my undoubtedly scientific insistence is to be cast out, is beyond the pale. Which does work as a political tactic as long as the vast majority of the population agree that that view gets you cast out, is beyond the pale.
It doesn’t work when any substantial portion of that voting population doesn’t. As is being found out about immigration, multiculturalism, waaacism and so on. Too many people don’t agree for this anathema to work.
Deakin conferred with colleagues in the staff room who corroborated accounts of harassment of fellow pupils and of Farage’s apparent fascination with the far right, including claims that he had been “goose-stepping” on combined cadet force marches.
“But initially I had heard it from boys,” she said. “I was shocked to hear that this Dulwich boy was apparently getting away with this kind of behaviour, at cadet camp etc, and I thought: ‘This is seriously out of order. It’s horrible.’”
Despite the chatter in the playground and staffroom, Farage was put on a draft list of prefects by the headteacher, David Emms, and his deputy, Terry Walsh. There was a meeting where strong views were aired, though Emms and Walsh were of the opinion that Farage was naughty, rather than being a malevolent racist.
“So when I heard that Farage’s name was on the finalised prefect list, I was appalled and that was why I wrote independently to Emms, because I felt strongly about it – I still do,” Deakin recalled.
Well, cancel the elections then, obviously.
Any risk of such a teenager taking power is too much risk, right? Right?
Fresh and detailed allegations about Farage’s teenage past, contained in a series of reports by the Guardian in recent weeks, have caused what has been described as the greatest crisis in the Reform leader’s political career, in large part because of the way he has responded.
Snigger. Most simply don’t care and of those that think about it teenage boys, eh?
Democracy only works if voting blocs are organised collectively. Rather than, say, each individual having their say and we tot up the result. It’s selling the pass, isn’t it?
PM Miliband with Polanski as his deputy? It’s not as crazy as you might think
The Greens have been allocated some on the grounds of having an MP. So why not Reform?
Sir Keir Starmer should grant Reform UK seats in the House of Lords, the Conservative Lords leader has said.
Lord True said that ensuring every party in the House of Commons had representation in the Upper Chamber was a “sensible constitutional principle”.
In a rare interview, the Conservative leader in the House of Lords said the Prime Minister should give Reform peerages to allow the party to give its point of view in both Houses.
Nigel Farage wrote to Sir Keir in August, demanding that he address the “democratic disparity” in the Upper Chamber by granting Reform peerages.
He received no reply, and in the most recent peerages list released earlier this month, there was no mention of Reform UK.
One possible answer is that Reform is different, see?
We saw this back in Ukip days. The BBC had rulz about who got to be on political programmes during election periods and all that. Oh, no Ukip, no, we don;t work on opinion polls, d’ye see, but seats won? Then it became oh, but yes, d’ye see it’s only for this type of election, Euros don’t count for GEs and so on. Every time we met the previous rulz they’d changed.
4 MPs should mean a peerage on the political list – or two perhaps.
And let’s be honest about it, who doesn’t want Gawain to get vermine?
Last week it emerged that local elections next year are set to be cancelled for millions of voters. Of 63 councils involved, 26 are Labour-run, 12 are Conservative and 10 are Liberal Democrat. One local authority is run by independents, while no party is in overall control in the remaining 14.
Cancelling elections because reasons…..
Last year, county council elections due in 2025 were postponed for a year in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hampshire and West Sussex, but the announcement means they could now be delayed for a further year.
And the reasons tend to get renewed.
After all, the Long Parliament worked out so well…..
Nigel Farage has avoided investigation over claims his general election campaign breached electoral law last year – in part because too much time has passed since the alleged offences.
The Reform UK leader was told on Thursday that Essex police could not open an investigation because it was now time-barred, more than a year having passed since any alleged offence. The Electoral Commission, which had been asked to open a separate inquiry into other elements, said it had not identified any undeclared spending that should have been reported.
Can’t be investigated therefore cannot be cleared. Except there’s no evidence it did happen.
Nice one, eh?
Is Donald Trump OK?
Recently, he’s looked tired. His famous fake tan is a bit more sallow than usual and seems painted on more thickly and clumsily than it was before. He appears to nod off in front of cameras more and more often, including in cabinet meetings and press events in the Oval Office. His public schedule is light: he is often at his golf clubs, has traveled around the country less frequently than at this point in his first term, and now only rarely holds the stadium rallies that once defined his preferred style of politics. He tends to sit, even when others are standing, and has shortened his daily schedule, often not conducting official duties before noon. A New York Times report found that his public appearances have declined by nearly 40% compared to his first year in office. He sometimes disappears from public view for days as he did in the late summer, and he and his administration have released unclear and conflicting information about his health. His right hand seems to be experiencing frequent injury or discoloration – it will often be covered with a band-aid or smeared with makeup; the White House has claimed, implausibly, that he is bruised from shaking too many hands. In some images, his ankles are visibly swollen.
Because he’s a Republican. The last one, who actually was GaGa, was a Democrat so that was OK.
These people are shameless bastards.
Farage’s response to the painful and, in the circumstances, considered reflections of those who say they experienced or witnessed his behaviour, is to heap salt into the wound. He is a man clearly shaken by the allegations and scrutiny, and has gone on the attack. He has denied claims, refused to apologise, attacked the BBC for airing the allegations, cycled through every insulting excuse in the book about it being just the sort of thing people said in those days, nothing more than “banter”, and, his most humble defence to date, “never directly, really tried to go and hurt anybody”. I guess we’ll just have to swallow the risible notion that when he apparently waited for the black student by the lower school gates “to repeat the vulgarity” it wasn’t meant as directly hurtful, more the sort of thing that casually happens in one’s youth. Let those among us who have not made their way to an entirely different part of the school to show a student in a lower year the way back to Africa cast the first stone.
Part of this is that they’re really, really, afraid of Nige and therefore searching for absolutely anything.
The other is that they’re mystified – or pissed – that the usual allegation of “waaaacist” isn’t working.
Nigel Farage has been reportedly referred to police over his electoral expenses amid claims that thousands of pounds worth of spending were not accounted for.
In July last year Farage finally became an MP after winning the Essex coastal seat of Clacton with an 8,405 majority at the general election.
It was his eighth attempt at doing so and represented the start of his return to the front line of British politics. He subsequently became leader of Reform UK and the party has consistently led in the polls since April.
However, Richard Everett, a whistleblower who was a member of Farage’s campaign team, claimed that Farage had failed to register all his election expenses.
Everett, who has since left Reform, obtained copies of Farage’s electoral returns, which covered £20,299.80 worth of expenses.
It’s the people supposedly in your own party you’ve got to be wary of. They’re the vile shits who will stab you in the back given half a chance. When I stood for Ukip two of the people who came lower down the party list than me tried to report me for not being resident in the UK. By the standards required for standing (being on the electoral roll) I was but they tried anyway.
As with my experience of the Soviet Union having turned me alarmingly free market, my actual experience of politics up close and personal makes me despise the entire enterprise.
This is not just some personality disorder, the more I know of something the more I hate it. I met a roast leg of lamb yesterday, some part of it is slowly becoming me in fact and I’m wholly in favour of roast legs of lamb.
The unhappy milestone was reached on Tuesday if you include election day, as most Dutch-language media do, although for some Francophone media the record will not officially be broken until Wednesday.
Either way, it is unlikely Brussels will have a government anytime soon. Rancorous divisions, sometimes descending into personal insults, continue among the 14 parties that won places in the 89-seat parliament.
That first para might explain that second.
It is a city that prides itself on the art of political compromise. But recently that quality has been sorely lacking in Brussels, which has gone a record-breaking 542 days without a government.
The Brussels Capital Region, which governs the Belgian capital of 1.25 million people, has not had a government since elections in June 2024.
Oh Dear. How Sad, Never Mind.
Of course, this is the system varied lefties would like here. To, you know, beat Farage with the thwack of firm governance.
Donald Trump said on Tuesday he is terminating all documents, including pardons, that he said his predecessor Joe Biden signed using an autopen – an unprecedented attempt to rollback a previous president’s actions using what legal thinkers view as a flimsy pretext.
The autopen is a device used to replicate a person’s signature with precision, typically for high-volume or ceremonial documents. It has been employed by presidents of both major parties to sign letters and proclamations.
Legal scholars broadly agree the constitution does not require a president to physically sign many documents, including pardons, with their bare hands to make them legally enforceable, according to PolitiFact. Federal law also lacks a mechanism for a president to overturn a previous president’s pardon.
There’s a gap in there – using the autopen for some signingns, sure, why not? But then the gap and then the bureaucracy using the autopen to sign things the President doesn’t know about. And so, in some sense, is not really signing.
So how much of the second as going on? My assumption, simply based upon no knowledge at all but my suspiciions of every bureucracy, ever, is quite a bit. Irrelevant of party or supposed senility too. But maybe that’s just me.
How to find out? Well, a useful first step is to throw the lot ourt and see what can in fact be proven……
Still, Trump is known for decisively taking action that flies in the face of legal precedent and then letting the courts sort it out. Autopens have not faced serious legal challenge until now.
‘Xactly.
