Politics

Donald Trump on Thursday sued the US treasury department and Internal Revenue Service for $10bn over the disclosure of his tax returns to the media in 2019 and 2020.

In a complaint filed in Miami federal court, Trump, his adult sons, and his namesake company said the agencies failed to take “mandatory precautions” to prevent former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn from leaking their tax returns to “leftist media outlets”, including the New York Times and ProPublica.

$10b eh? Well, uf you go on to claim that that’s what lost him a tight election then consequential damages…..

California governor Gavin Newsom has accused TikTok of suppressing content critical of president Donald Trump, as he launched a review of the platform’s content moderation practices to determine if they violated state law, even as the platform blamed a systems failure for the issues.

Like, you know, the idea that the media – even social media – has ever been censored ovr political views. Good joke, right?

Trump ‘has stopped dyeing his hair and thinks he will be dead in a decade’

Life expectancy for an 80 year old is 8 -ish years.

OK, and?

A Labour committee controlled by the Prime Minister’s allies will decide on Sunday whether to block Mr Burnham’s return to Parliament, amid fears that he will use his return to the back benches to mount a leadership challenge.
Those close to Sir Keir are now faced with the dilemma of blocking Mr Burnham from standing as an MP – risking a backlash from his supporters – or permitting his return and effectively allowing a leadership challenge.
Loyalists on the NEC have suggested Mr Burnham’s return could be blocked by introducing rules that only allow women or ethnic minorities to be shortlisted for the by-election seat.

Andy declares himself to be a Northerner, from that void north of the A4, thus an oppressed minority. Job done.

The Green Party is being sued by a former member who was suspended for mocking “fairy” pronouns.
Emma Bateman, who was co-chair of Green Party Women, was found to have breached diversity rules by making “clearly antagonistic” comments about “fae/faer” pronouns, a type of “neopronoun” inspired by the mythical world.

So, if you can believe this, the Green Party just got even dimmer the day they threw this lady out.

Astonishing but true.

And the conspiracy of silence about her defects is allowing Harris to quietly rebuild her support. Harris still places second or even first in the polling for who should be the Democrats’ 2028 nominee.

Make JD’s job easier, obviously.

But this far out such surveys are records of who people have heard of, not who they would support. It’s a record of the few who can pass the “Who the fuck is that?” test.

Iran’s central bank using vast quantities of cryptocurrency championed by Farage, says report

What is this? FarageCoin is being used to beat sanctions?

Iran’s central bank appears to have been using vast quantities of a cryptocurrency championed by Nigel Farage, according to a new report.

Some close connection perhaps?

“I’m going to go tomorrow to say this,” Farage told LBC radio. “You know, Tether is a stablecoin. Stablecoins are the way which money goes from conventional currencies through into cryptocurrencies and back again. Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company.”

Farage criticised Bailey for imposing restrictions on crypto and urged the UK to catch up with the US, where Donald Trump, who chose Howard Lutnick, Tether’s banker, as his commerce secretary, has reversed efforts to police digital currencies.

Farage added: “You know, stablecoins, crypto – this world is enormous, and I’ve been urging for years that London should embrace it. We should become a global trading centre for this stuff, under proper regulation.”

One of Tether’s major shareholders, the tech investor Christopher Harborne, is Reform’s biggest donor.

Stablecoins are an issue and one where there is a discussion to be had with central banks about regulation. Not this is entirely seprate from Bitcoin etc.

Elliptic, a crypto analytics company, said it had traced at least $507m (£377m) of cryptocurrency issued by Tether – a company touted by the Reform UK leader – passing through accounts that appear to be controlled by Iran’s central bank.

Elliptic’s report tracked what it says is the Iranian central bank’s “systematic accumulation” of Tether stablecoins, a type of crypto that is pegged to the dollar so it can easily be exchanged for hard currency.

There’s around $190 billion of Tether in issuance. Iran, apparently, has $500 millkon of it. So, some naughty boys have 0.25% of a currency in issue. This poses questdions – deeply troubling ones – about a politician who muses of regulation of this new and important thing.

The representative said Tether followed US sanctions guidelines. “We work closely with law enforcement globally to identify and promptly, upon request, freeze assets to prevent further movement whenever they are identified to be in connection to illegal activity or illicit actors.”

Ho, right. It’s just that they’re desperate, see? ‘Bout Farage, noT Iran, obvs.

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?