Tumblr is self-destructing and the entire conservative government just got found to be in contempt of parliament for the first time in HISTORY this is the greatest 24h of my life
What did I miss?!
Oh man. This is absolutely golden.
So first off. What’s contempt of parliament? In short, obstructing parliament from its duties. In the UK that extends to publication of reports and papers that would be necessary for parliament to, well, parliament. Normally this extends to an individual person being especially obstructive.
Now. The Conservative government obtained legal advice for the Brexit shitshow. But they refused to publish it in full which means parliament (which includes, y’know, opposition parties and non-conservatives in general) can’t parliament.
What reason could they possibly have to refuse to publish legal advice on something that effects the whole country? I wonder. Hmm. Thinking emoji.
Anyway. Today the entire Conservative government have been found to be in contempt of Parliament. The entire government have been found to be obstructing the proper running of the country. We hold votes on that sort of thing, and the general consensus (18-vote majority) was “the Tories are obstructive little pigshits”
Also they have to publish that legal advice. In full. Tomorrow.
No word yet on whether the entire government is going to be sent to the Elizabeth Tower yet. We haven’t done that since the 1880s but I’m willing to bring it back.
Glorious!
Readers from other countries: you have to understand that, so far, Brexit has been about three years of nothing happening and still somehow dominating the news cycle. A random MP from Croydon will say that they don’t think Theresa May is doing well and it’ll make headline news. Like, that’s not news, that’s rolling above a nat 1 on perception. The ‘nothing happens’ is occasionally broken by Something happening, except it’s always terrible. At this stage, people keep arguing about whether to accept a shitty deal or no deal, because nobody took Critical Thinking at AS Level and the concept of a false dilemma is somehow unthinkable to them.
Meanwhile a good portion of the Labour party really do not want Brexit to happen, except the leader (Jeremy Corbyn, and I would require a whole other post to talk about him) who is like ‘Brexit is okay but ONLY if we do it.’
Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats are like ‘we’ll cancel Brexit! And we’ll legalise weed!’, but nobody’s forgiven them for double-crossing us on tuition fees and they keep accidentally electing bigots, so the twelve voters who support them can’t really do all that much.
The Green party do technically exist, and that’s all I can really say on them.
UKIP, the nationalist bastards who got us into this mess in the first place, haemorrhaged membership back to the Tories in the most recent election (shocking. i know). General cretin Nigel Farage quit as party leader when Brexit got voted for, claiming he’d done his job, and recently he just left the party altogether because he doesn’t like where it’s going. something something moral backbone of a chocolate eclair something
Also the Leave campaign were found to have lied, accepted dodgy donations and pulled some VERY shifty things, meaning that a lot of people who voted for Brexit now feel they made a mistake.
So the people have been trying to demand a second vote on Brexit, or to at least have some say on the conditions of the leave agreement (did I mention everything we’ve done so far is fully reversible?), but TMay just keeps repeating things like ‘will of the people’ and ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and then going home to relax by killing a few disabled people after dinner. You know how it is.
But then the actual Brexit agreement is released and ministers start dropping like flies. The guy who wrote it quits IMMEDIATELY after it’s published because he Doesn’t Like It. Cue the tiniest violin in the world. People are squabbling over the right way to do Brexit and keep mentioning just leaving without a deal, which is like quitting your cushy job by taking a shit on the counter and just hoping things will work out for you.
So, essentially, I’ve given up hope on this not becoming a complete clusterfuck. It already is a clusterfuck. My only hope is that it will be an entertaining one, as it’s been so astonishingly dull, and this has very much met my hopes. They fucked up so badly that the whole government is on the naughty step. The fucktangular omnishambles continue, and I for one say throw them all in the tower, vote them out of government one-by-one like Big Brother, and televise it to make money for the BBC.
President
Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to
order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political
adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the former F.B.I.
director James B. Comey, according to two people familiar with the
conversation.
The lawyer, Donald F.
McGahn II, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to
order a prosecution. Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an
investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. To
underscore his point, Mr. McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo
for Mr. Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate
his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible
impeachment.
The encounter was one of
the most blatant examples yet of how Mr. Trump views the typically
independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his
political enemies. It took on additional significance in recent weeks
when Mr. McGahn left the White House and Mr. Trump appointed a
relatively inexperienced political loyalist, Matthew G. Whitaker, as the
acting attorney general.
It is
unclear whether Mr. Trump read Mr. McGahn’s memo or whether he pursued
the prosecutions further. But the president has continued to privately
discuss the matter, including the possible appointment of a second
special counsel to investigate both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey,
according to two people who have spoken to Mr. Trump about the issue. He
has also repeatedly expressed disappointment in the F.B.I. director,
Christopher A. Wray, for failing to more aggressively investigate Mrs.
Clinton, calling him weak, one of the people said.
…
It
is not clear which accusations Mr. Trump wanted prosecutors to pursue.
He has accused Mr. Comey, without evidence, of illegally having
classified information shared with The New York Times in a memo that Mr.
Comey wrote about his interactions with the president. The document contained no classified information.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers also privately asked the Justice Department
last year to investigate Mr. Comey for mishandling sensitive government
information and for his role in the Clinton email investigation. Law
enforcement officials declined their requests. Mr. Comey is a witness
against the president in the investigation by the special counsel,
Robert S. Mueller III.
…
Mr.
Trump repeatedly pressed Justice Department officials about the status
of Clinton-related investigations, including Mr. Whitaker when he was
the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to a
person with direct knowledge of the conversations. CNN and Vox earlier reported those discussions.
If Congress does not pass legislation protecting the tribe and the legal challenge fails, the Mashpee would be stripped of their right to exercise sovereign jurisdiction over their land.
Jessie Little Doe Baird, the tribe’s vice-chairwoman, told Al Jazeera that loss of jurisdiction would prevent the tribe from running indigenous language schools, tribal courts, and housing projects, as well as its own police.
“We have our own police force, which is important because they’re tribal citizens and since we’ve had our own police force, none of our men have been beaten or shot, which we’ve had before with non-tribal police,” she said.
“Obamacare didn’t just give more people health insurance. It also caused more people to vote. That’s the conclusion of a new body of evidence that strongly suggests that giving people coverage through expansions of the Medicaid program increases their likelihood of participating in the next election. Medicaid expansions seem to raise both voter registration and voter participation, at least temporarily. On Tuesday, voters in three states approved measures to further expand Medicaid. The election of Democratic governors in three more could also prompt new expansions. Researchers who worked on three recent studies of the effects say it’s likely that those expansions will have a similar effect on voting in the next election cycle. “We can confidently say: When you expand Medicaid eligibility, participation goes up,” said Jake Haselswerdt, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, who wrote one of the papers. It’s not clear exactly why getting Medicaid makes people more likely to vote, but there are a couple of theories. It could be that Medicaid, which has been shown to increase treatment for depression and improve financial stability, makes it easier for people to participate in the political process by giving them direct benefits. Over all, wealthier and healthier Americans tend to be more likely to vote than their poorer, sicker counterparts. Perhaps enrollment in the program simply connected people with information about registration and voting, as it brought them into contact with government websites and case workers. Medicaid might also boost civic engagement by making people more grateful to the government and more interested in public policy. Earlier studies have shown that the creation of Social Security had a large effect on the civic participation of older Americans, and that the G.I. bill boosted participation from veterans who earned benefits under its program. “These are programs that have a major effect on people’s lives,” said Andrea Campbell, a professor of political science at M.I.T., who wrote a book on the political legacy of Social Security. She suggested Medicaid could work similarly, by improving people’s circumstances and making them more aware of the stakes of government action.”
The tragedy is that we don’t recognize how intractable these political climates are with a sudden timely realization, but rather as a slow burn—imperceptible until only after the damage is done.
And while the Projekt shows us that some German Jews were making arrangements to emigrate in the early months of ’38, we also learn of the businessmen who believed, or at least told themselves and others, that the growing animosity toward the Jews wasn’t alarming enough a reason to leave behind the family business. We can watch, day by day, the slow erosion of rights, peeled away one at a time: the seizure of Jewish businesses, orders that restrict the movements of Jews, rules about what kind of artwork can be shown. We watch the pincers close in a way that simply isn’t possible if you’re living it.
In many cases, even for those who did feel a sense of alarm it was still subdued and it was difficult to understand how a series of unfriendly bureaucratic rules could eventually lead to Kristallnacht only 10 months later: On Jan. 31, the Projekt’s website highlights a postcard from a Jew on vacation in the French Riviera. Jews were still going on vacation rather than selling all their belongings and leaving. But three weeks later comes one of the earliest of many heartbreaking letters: Writing to a friend, a young lover contemplates being apart from his beloved because his family had decided to emigrate and hers had chosen to stay behind.
The Projekt’s mission isn’t to highlight how German Jews didn’t get the picture. In fact, they may have understood it too well: Anti-Semitism felt like a fact of life and therefore was nothing to be alarmed by. Most of them simply didn’t believe that there was any credible reason why things would suddenly surpass normal levels of anti-Semitism and go from bad to catastrophic. You’d have to have been crazy to have predicted such a thing as the Holocaust. The story of 1938Projekt is more than just a catalogue of the final days of the European Jewry. It is the story of how easy it is to become inured to the progression of a deteriorating situation.
Through its lens, we see the time more clearly for what it was: not just another brief chapter in the thousands-of-years-old story called anti-Semitism, but a tinderbox heating up with the passage of each day. It’s easy to look now and see a series of warnings plastered onto the walls of the past, plain and clear for all Jews to see, only for fools to ignore. But if someone were to tell you about a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and swastikas graffitied on the Upper West Side and Nazi marches and Jewish cemeteries being defaced and a president who calls himself a nationalist and ordinances that dissolve the rights of immigrants and of the queer community and a caravan of refugees, and told you to leave behind your family business and your belongings and your home and move across the world to a place where you didn’t know a soul and didn’t know the language, would you? You’d have to be crazy.
hey @staff kindly stop marking this stuff under sensitive content
This is awesome.
It’s also worth spreading around that you do not have to take an oath on a Bible. If they’ll let her use this, then you can use pretty much any book, which might matter for atheists and people who’s religion lacks sacred texts.
Plot Designing 