Best Of

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This is at least more honest than a large number of news organisations.
The BBC's US editor has yet to be as honest.

Reuters North America editor Sally Buzbee on covering Trump's return: 'I don't think in those first few days we understood what an organized agenda they had.'
https://x.com/Reuters/status/2015122486384341196

Not entirely unreasonable, as Trump's first term was extremely chaotic and unfocused. I did have dinner with one of the principal architects of Project 2025 though and he scared the bejesus out of me. To be honest nothing Trump has done has surprised me. The goal of these people is total power, they carry a deep loathing for the coastal elites that comes from a place of intellectual insecurity and they want to destroy liberal America for ever. They won't stop until somebody stops them.

It ought to have been pretty obvious to any journalist doing their work that Trump's staff were a very different crew to the first time around.

And it's not as though his opponent hadn't described that agenda in some detail.

But I suppose it's fair to say the speed and extent of what they've done in a year might be a surprise - and Reuters deserve credit for acknowledging it out loud.

Meanwhile Smith and Webb cheerfully report it almost like business as usual.

Smith is bad enough but Webb is even worse. Of course Sopel who got Trump 45's back up on more than one occasion was put out to pasture at LBC.

Didn’t Sopel leave the Beeb so he could do his podcast and make lots of money which he couldn’t while employed at the BBC?

Yes. After he came back from the USA. Sopel, Maitlis and Goodall left the Beeb to set up their tedious podcast which speaks to like minded people.

If Burnham is allowed to stand he likely wins. If not Reform or the Greens could win though not Galloway as it is not a Muslim heavy seat

Always provides some entertaining moments though.

I still have no idea how WPB were organised enough to put up 150 candidates at the GE. Your Party have broken out into factional slates just to select their leadership committee.

My guess would be that WPB doesn't have much by way of centralised organisation; simply someone in charge of allowing candidates to use the name, and when someone popped up in a seat with left-wing credentials who wanted to stand under the WPB banner, they were essentially granted use of the party's name and left alone to get on with it.

Whereas the various factions involved with YP have the centralising mentality that's much more common on the left, and have immediately launched into pitched battles to take control of the central apparatus of the new party, before it's even been created.

Off topic, this from Freedman on the travails of government is interesting:

Quarter of a century ago, Professor Michael Moran came up with the concept of the “regulatory state” to describe the way British government works. He has since passed away but no one has yet produced a better analysis. Nor have many politicians engaged with his ideas, which is a shame because without doing so it’s hard to understand why we are where we are. His argument was that until the 1970s Britain was run like a London club with minimal regulatory oversight. Professions like medicine and finance were self-regulated. Public services had almost no accountability to central government. Private businesses were barely regulated at all. Nor was there any social regulation, like protection of disability rights. Though the state did a lot, Whitehall didn’t.

This form of “club governance” fell apart across a series of crises in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, from the collapse of Barings Bank to the mad cow disease scandal. Margaret Thatcher also wanted to use the power of government to attack what she saw as low quality taxpayer funded services and inadequate oversight of left-wing public sector workforces. The great myth of Thatcherism is that it was all about making the state smaller whereas, while it reduced capacity at local government level, it made Whitehall a lot larger and more powerful.

After 1997 New Labour added more oversight of the private sector and social regulation to enforce their human rights legislation. Collectively this led to the creation of a regulatory state without that ever being the intention. An enormous surveillance apparatus was created in an ad hoc fashion. We now have bodies that regulate the professions; that inspect hospitals, schools and other services; that oversee privatised utilities; and try to protect the vulnerable. Across government there are now almost a hundred regulators, and hundreds more public bodies many of which have a quasi-regulatory responsibility, for instance running school assessment or managing public complaints about the NHS. DEFRA alone works with 34 different agencies and public bodies.

But the creation of this apparatus was not accompanied by any change in the way politicians manage their departments. That has stayed as it was in the club government days, which has created a massive disconnect between expectations of politicians and what they can actually achieve.

It gets even worse . The victim was legally carrying a fire arm , in the tussle his gun was taken by a member of ICE who is seen walking away with it and then they executed him .

The defensive shots line from the scum surrounding Trump is a total lie .

The one thing that gives me optimism that democracy will continue after 2028 is that the administration seems to be determined to alienate everyone you might need for a successful coup d'etat. They've been doing everything they can to upset the military and now apparently they're trying to cancel the rights of gun owners.

You can't lie to gun owners about something involving a gun, if there's something involving a gun in the media they'll spend the next week obsessing over possible every detail of it.

I thought the elections would be held but compromised in 2026 and 2028. I think it is most likely they won't be held as the Insurrection Act will have been invoked for both events. They are not playing around this time.

IIUC the Insurrection Act isn't a magic thing that cancels elections. It allows them to sent the military to places to support law enforcement. They still have the same legal constraints that police do and they still have to obey the courts. If you can tell the military to act illegally to stop people voting then that might be relevant, but that's where you need the support of the military.

There are no legal constraints left. Mark Kelly will be prosecuted/ court martialed ( he has already had his pension cut and been recalled to service to invoke a court martial) for imploring military personnel to ignore ILLEGAL orders from the Commander in Chief.

What's happening here is that the administration is constantly doing illegal thing, getting told to stop by the courts, and then, grudgingly, stopping. They keep bringing prosecutions against political enemies and the courts keep throwing them out.

By stopping, do you mean - moving on to do something else illegal? I don't see much evidence of illegal activity reducing...

Well, we can only speculate on whether they'd be doing the second illegal thing if the court hadn't prohibited them from doing the first. But on the question "are there still legal constraints on what they're doing" the answer is, "yes".

I think administration is doing illegal thing, is getting away with it (e.g. ICE people who shot civilians aren't going to be prosecuted/investigated) and then they carry on doing it.

There are court orders all over the place that are getting ignored. The fact that they choose to comply with some doesn't mean they are constrained.

plus even in the highly likely event of an ice agent getting charged and convicted, orange or vance will just pardon them