FWIW, I spoke to my financial adviser yesterday. He and his firm are very bullish about UK investment opportunities currently. If you have liquidity, he said, now is a very exciting time.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
The rumours that a rogue enormo-haddock, styling himself Baron Von Fischklop, was the aristocrat seeking to become head of the German state are entirely false.
Monty Python is very popular in Germany.
Yes. They laugh at the bits of Mony Python that even the Brits didn't find funny.
FWIW, I spoke to my financial adviser yesterday. He and his firm are very bullish about UK investment opportunities currently. If you have liquidity, he said, now is a very exciting time.
Yes, UK companies are under priced and the recession risk is overblown. Even the BoE have walked back a lot of the rhetoric, maybe realising that there's a doom loop they're feeding. Hopefully British investors realise this rather than seeing companies picked off by American PE.
Some clearly do. The under-pricing is pretty clear now, but short-termism reigns.
BERLIN — Germany on Monday walked back its promise to swiftly raise defense spending to at least 2 percent of its economic output — breaching the key commitment made days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to become a more serious military force.
Who the fuck are they supposed to be defending themselves against? The Russians are busy kill feeding the AFU in Bakhmut and certainly won't be going anywhere near Germany.
There is zero real justification for any Western European country to increase defense spending at the expense of more socially useful government activity.
Defence spending plans for the next decade, not next year. A similar argument over the last decade is what led to Putin thinking he could get away with his Ukrainian gamble.
And your 8:05 comment backs that up.
Not that convinced that low European defence spending has encouraged Putin to instigate the war in Ukraine. Even with that low level of spending, it seems that it was sufficient to defeat Russia?
Poland spending 2% of GDP obviously equates to quite a different level of capacity than Germany spending 2%.
Putin seems to have believed that he could roll through Ukraine and have a go at the Baltics. The state of military preparedness in Europe was well known. As was American disengagement. The unknown was the extraordinary hollowing out of the Russian military since 2014.
Perhaps in practice the level of US support for Ukraine came as a surprise to Russia also. If Putin had tried this under Trump things might have been very different.
The Baltics are protected by NATO though - so I think that, at least theoretically, would be a different proposition.
Yes - the US/UK stepped up immediately. And were roundly condemned for it, before the war started.
Quite a few people on here were trying to sell - "Why die for the Baltics? Far off countries of which we know little."
'There's a good chance you won't get an unwanted pregnancy if you engage in intercourse one time.'
'So why use a condom?'
'Because its better to have some protection than no protection.'
Politics is mostly about priorities and relative risk. I agree that it's possible that Putin or a successor might launch further military adventures, though it seems unlikely given the current failure. I agree that we should support anyone attacked if he did. But it seems very unlikely that it will happen AND that our aid will make the difference to the outcome because we've spent 3% more on defence for the next few years. Say an 0.0001% chance?
By contrast, there are people literally going hungry in Britain, and people dying because the ambulance service can't cope. Do I feel that it's possible that the same 3% diverted from defence to improving the ambulance service might save some lives? Yes - I'd put that at 50%.
So, while it might be nice to buy some more HIMARs to stockpile just in case they can help someone, I wouldn't vote for it myself.
A rather unusual set of local by-elections tomorrow. There are 8 seats up for grabs and 6 are Ind defences. They are in Colchester(x2), Lincolnshire, Medway, North Devon (Ind elected as Con) and South Holland. There is a Con defence in Brighton and Hove, and a Lab defence in Dumfries and Galloway. Expect gains and losses.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
FWIW, I spoke to my financial adviser yesterday. He and his firm are very bullish about UK investment opportunities currently. If you have liquidity, he said, now is a very exciting time.
When are financial advisers ever not so?
Mine has been very bearish on the UK until recently.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
Is there a Delusion epidemic circulating through the Right?
Trump's 'election steal' crap, Truss's neoliberal nonsense, and now this. WTAF were they thinking? Any of them.
I mean, the right, especially the far-right, has always been run on delusion. The UK takes less asylum seekers per capita than most countries, but we're being invaded at the border. The globalist elites are destroying the rights of women and entrapping children with drag shows, but ignore that in the 80s and 90s we had drag queens hosting prime time television shows and panto has had dames and innuendo (for all the family) for a few centuries. In the past (and unfortunately moreso now since Ye has been going on his crusade) there was always the Jew to blame. Trickledown economics was recognised as voodoo economics from other republicans before Reagan, and after that they forgot it and just accepted the middle class wage destroying economic model. Putting monarchs back on non existent thrones is what the reactionary right exists to do, and is relatively normal considering everything else...
The rumours that a rogue enormo-haddock, styling himself Baron Von Fischklop, was the aristocrat seeking to become head of the German state are entirely false.
Monty Python is very popular in Germany.
Yes. They laugh at the bits of Mony Python that even the Brits didn't find funny.
The Germans seem to love the style of deadpan utter absurdity - even more than the Dutch.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
The thing is that, nowadays, the state doesn't reside in a building. 100 years ago, taking the capitol, or parliament, or some other structure may have allowed a coup to happen, or toppled a system of government. But now states don't really work that way.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
It was a pseudo-coup
Trump arguably planned to use the unrest as an excuse to call a State of Emergency, impose martial law, postpone the handover of power
He wasn’t far off succeeding. If the plotters had, say, managed to lynch Mike Pence the shock and horror would have been so great many would have yielded to Trump the strongman cracking down hard. Trump is an avowed admirer of Putin and Erdogan. He’s not hiding anything
A coup in a western democracy begins to look quite plausible to me
Trump, now Germany? This is a theme
Both failed though as you need the full support of the army for a successful coup. See Egypt where it was the army that toppled President Morsi
Does any European democracy have an army big enough to launch a successful coup?
You don't need that big an army (or more accurately military since the other arms matter as well), you just need it to be unified in its intent and, more importantly, have significant support in the country at large.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
Of course there were rumours here in the 1970s, never proved of an ultra rightwing and military couple to topple the Wilson government and make Mountbatten leader of the government pre Thatcher
I heard those rumours at the time because they were rife in the army and my dad told me about them. A lot of people in the army seemed to think Harold Wilson was either a Russian plant or controlled by communists round about him. It is extraordinary what people can make themselves believe. Never came to anything though.
The Cecil King 'plot' which involved Mountbatten was in the 1960s.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
You look at me and say "blasé", I look at you and say "paranoid".
It obviously wasn't ever happening. And it didn't happen.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
For an authoritarian state prepared to harvest organs and staple people in apartments the Chinese regime is weirdly reluctant to enforce vaccination. I’ve yet to see a coherent explanation for this
I don't really understand it either, but there is undoubtedly some nervousness about reaction to policies that affect the whole population (which your examples didn't really). I remember a seminar I gave where the Chinese delegation expressed astonishment that we prohibit non-emergency cases from arranging treatment directly with the NHS hospital, and force them to go via their GPs. "We would never tolerate such authoritarianism", said one, without a hint of irony, and everyone nodded vigorously.
Still tighter than most of the planet, but a major loosening by China.
Presumably that is very good news for the world economy.
Unfortunately: not necessarily
The prediction says significant loosening by China leads to ~1m Covid deaths in pretty short order. Why should it not? China has poor vax rates in the elderly, zero natural immunity, and they’re not using the best jabs
If this does NOT happen then something is seriously wrong with
1. Our estimates of Omicron’s infectivity/lethality or 2. China’s reporting of its own health data
Or some combination thereof
Whatever happens, I'm looking very hard at number 2 on your list, anyway.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
It was a pseudo-coup
Trump arguably planned to use the unrest as an excuse to call a State of Emergency, impose martial law, postpone the handover of power
He wasn’t far off succeeding. If the plotters had, say, managed to lynch Mike Pence the shock and horror would have been so great many would have yielded to Trump the strongman cracking down hard. Trump is an avowed admirer of Putin and Erdogan. He’s not hiding anything
The great untold leadership story of that period is how the left-wing activists somehow managed to ignore the provocations and get their people to stay at home.
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
For an authoritarian state prepared to harvest organs and staple people in apartments the Chinese regime is weirdly reluctant to enforce vaccination. I’ve yet to see a coherent explanation for this
I don't really understand it either, but there is undoubtedly some nervousness about reaction to policies that affect the whole population (which your examples didn't really). I remember a seminar I gave where the Chinese delegation expressed astonishment that we prohibit non-emergency cases from arranging treatment directly with the NHS hospital, and force them to go via their GPs. "We would never tolerate such authoritarianism", said one, without a hint of irony, and everyone nodded vigorously.
I have no idea, but ... Chinese vaccine resistance is very highly concentrated among the elderly. That is also the cohort most likely to be supportive of the current regime because they remember how bad things used to be. If the old turn against Xi, then he is in very serious trouble.
A coup in a western democracy begins to look quite plausible to me
Trump, now Germany? This is a theme
Both failed though as you need the full support of the army for a successful coup. See Egypt where it was the army that toppled President Morsi
Generally I think you are right, particularly in a 3rd world country where more are the Army supplanting a Government than a popular uprising. And there was no way the German thing was ever coming to anything. I'm not so sure of America though. I hope you are right and they would have stopped it, but if Trump could have stopped the certification and had enough people convinced he was cheated and the parliament had refused to certify the result and it all turned into a mess, would the military have intervened. How do they decide who is right if a significant number of the population and members of the parliaments believe Trump was right.
It was scary and still is, although less so.
In terms of all of Leon's fears, I'm surprised this one wasn't up there sooner.
A coup in a western democracy begins to look quite plausible to me
Trump, now Germany? This is a theme
Both failed though as you need the full support of the army for a successful coup. See Egypt where it was the army that toppled President Morsi
Does any European democracy have an army big enough to launch a successful coup?
You don't need that big an army (or more accurately military since the other arms matter as well), you just need it to be unified in its intent and, more importantly, have significant support in the country at large.
Yep, that is fair. I am just assuming the latter point would not the be the case.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
My understanding of the Bush vs Gore situation is a little bit less good-vs-evil: SCOTUS was hackish, but only in response to Dem-controlled Florida supreme court, which was doing everything it could to put its thumb on the scales in favour of Gore.
Someone by the name of Rod Crosby was banned permanently a few years back. He'd actually produced a lot of interesting threads on voting systems for the site before that.
Worth adding that he was banned for sustained and continuing Holocaust denial. Not as unfunny joke, either. Quite seriously.
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
Numbering of the Heinrichs
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
My understanding of the Bush vs Gore situation is a little bit less good-vs-evil: SCOTUS was hackish, but only in response to Dem-controlled Florida supreme court, which was doing everything it could to put its thumb on the scales in favour of Gore.
Bush vs Gore is a nonsensical decision. The argument boils down to "this is taking too long and makes the US look silly", which you may notice is not a legal argument. I am not a lawyer, but I do listen to 5-4, who discuss historic Supreme Court cases and started their series with Bush vs Gore and got real into why it was so awful. (Transcript can be found here: https://www.fivefourpod.com/episodes/bush-v-gore/)
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Police foil a far right and military coup to take power in Germany and install a minor aristocrat from Thuringia in power also backed by a former member of the hard right Afd
"An estimated 50 men and women are alleged to have been part of the group, said to have plotted to overthrow the republic and replace it with a new state modelled on the Germany of 1871 - an empire called the Second Reich.
"We don't yet have a name for this group," said a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office."
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
It was a pseudo-coup
Trump arguably planned to use the unrest as an excuse to call a State of Emergency, impose martial law, postpone the handover of power
He wasn’t far off succeeding. If the plotters had, say, managed to lynch Mike Pence the shock and horror would have been so great many would have yielded to Trump the strongman cracking down hard. Trump is an avowed admirer of Putin and Erdogan. He’s not hiding anything
The great untold leadership story of that period is how the left-wing activists somehow managed to ignore the provocations and get their people to stay at home.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
Numbering of the Heinrichs
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Real life Gormenghast.
I'll be sorely disappointed if he doesn't have a handlebar moustache and look like Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
It was a pseudo-coup
Trump arguably planned to use the unrest as an excuse to call a State of Emergency, impose martial law, postpone the handover of power
He wasn’t far off succeeding. If the plotters had, say, managed to lynch Mike Pence the shock and horror would have been so great many would have yielded to Trump the strongman cracking down hard. Trump is an avowed admirer of Putin and Erdogan. He’s not hiding anything
The great untold leadership story of that period is how the left-wing activists somehow managed to ignore the provocations and get their people to stay at home.
I thought they were too busy smashing Portland to pieces to notice?
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on and the result reversed, no matter how improbable that might be.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Which meant that thousands of votes went uncounted. Meaning that, essentially, SCOTUS said "Bush is the winner" because they stopped the counting of votes before they knew who the actual winner was and at a time when Bush was ahead.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
I think most would differ at the word "serious". They wanted to wind back the clock to 1918.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
But it would, ultimately, have been meaningless. Vast sections of the military and the country were not going to support it and, as others have mentioned, 'the buildings' are simply symbols rather than real seats of power.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It is like approaching an election where it is obvious who is going to win and saying 'let's not bother' and then saying 'well it didn't matter because we knew who was going to win'.
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
Numbering of the Heinrichs
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Real life Gormenghast.
I'll be sorely disappointed if he doesn't have a handlebar moustache and look like Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
Numbering of the Heinrichs
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Real life Gormenghast.
I'll be sorely disappointed if he doesn't have a handlebar moustache and look like Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The Mail has a picture:
The article adds that he was allegedly negotiating with the Russians, with the help of a woman known as Vitalia B - who sounds more like a dietary supplement than an international terrorist.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
Numbering of the Heinrichs
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Real life Gormenghast.
I'll be sorely disappointed if he doesn't have a handlebar moustache and look like Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The Mail has a picture:
Ah thanks - no handlebar but otherwise excellent. The jacket is close to what I pictured. Pity we can't see his trousers.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Fine, if that was the case; I disagree with your insistence that it would have been the outcome, but it doesn't matter either way. So then it wouldn't have been a coup. But he did not win Florida based on all the votes legally cast. He won because of bad legal hackery. It went down to a ~300 vote margin before SCOTUS pulled the plug, and there were 10,000s of uncounted ballots.
Bush asked for a stay, which needed to show irreparable harm - what can the irreparable harm be of counting all the ballots again? If he wins, he wins either way, and if he didn't, he didn't win! But SCOTUS granted the stay! In literal reparable harm, they made the argument it was irreparable and the court sided with Bush's team.
And what is the legal ground for the eventual SCOTUS decision? Arguing that a recount of all votes would violate the Equal Protection clause because each individual county deciding what is and isn't a legitimate count would be unfair... which is insane, because that is how literally every election works. That is the equivalent of saying how, in our system, all the votes should be thrown out because what is or isn't a legitimate vote is decided by those present at the local counts, and therefore different local counts could view the same kind of vote in different ways. This is such bad legal argumentation that in the decision SCOTUS literally say it cannot be used as legal precedent... which is also really weird.
Also, you mention the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court as maybe having partisan intent; but also the Governor is Jeb Bush, and the Secretary of State is a partisan GOP office, who gives a criteria for what would be needed for a recount, and then ignores the counties that petition for a recount when using that criteria - which is what the Florida Supreme Court later uses to say "well, a general recount is probably easier than just doing this county by county".
It was hackery of the highest order, regardless of whether Bush had the votes to win Florida, he did not win it because of the votes, he won it because SCOTUS said to stop counting all the votes at a time when Bush was ahead when there were many more votes still to be counted.
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
Numbering of the Heinrichs
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Real life Gormenghast.
I'll be sorely disappointed if he doesn't have a handlebar moustache and look like Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The Mail has a picture:
Ah thanks - no handlebar but otherwise excellent. The jacket is close to what I pictured. Pity we can't see his trousers.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
But it would, ultimately, have been meaningless. Vast sections of the military and the country were not going to support it and, as others have mentioned, 'the buildings' are simply symbols rather than real seats of power.
I hope you are right and you might well be, but if Trump had stopped the certification and with a substantial minority of parliamentarians and substantial minority of population behind him and a massive legal wrangle who knows where this might have gone. And the military would be in a dilemma as to whether it should act or let matters take their course under those circumstances.
I hope and believe you are right, but I had my concerns as did many.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Fine, if that was the case; I disagree with your insistence that it would have been the outcome
It's not my insistence, it's the academics who analysed it after the event.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
I think most would differ at the word "serious". They wanted to wind back the clock to 1918.
3000 cops and over 100 properties raided. It sounds fairly large scale to me.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
BERLIN — Germany on Monday walked back its promise to swiftly raise defense spending to at least 2 percent of its economic output — breaching the key commitment made days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to become a more serious military force.
Who the fuck are they supposed to be defending themselves against? The Russians are busy kill feeding the AFU in Bakhmut and certainly won't be going anywhere near Germany.
There is zero real justification for any Western European country to increase defense spending at the expense of more socially useful government activity.
Defence spending plans for the next decade, not next year. A similar argument over the last decade is what led to Putin thinking he could get away with his Ukrainian gamble.
And your 8:05 comment backs that up.
Not that convinced that low European defence spending has encouraged Putin to instigate the war in Ukraine. Even with that low level of spending, it seems that it was sufficient to defeat Russia?
Poland spending 2% of GDP obviously equates to quite a different level of capacity than Germany spending 2%.
Read the RUSI analysis of the invasion.
What enabled its being halted in the first couple of months was the very large numbers of artillery and ammo possessed by Ukraine. Without that, the bits and pieces of NATO hardware would not have been sufficient.
Clearly Russia isn't going to have much capacity to do anything for the next couple of years or so, but beyond that, it remains unpredictable.
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
Numbering of the Heinrichs
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Real life Gormenghast.
I'll be sorely disappointed if he doesn't have a handlebar moustache and look like Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The Mail has a picture:
Ah thanks - no handlebar but otherwise excellent. The jacket is close to what I pictured. Pity we can't see his trousers.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Fine, if that was the case; I disagree with your insistence that it would have been the outcome
It's not my insistence, it's the academics who analysed it after the event.
If a politician goes "I know I won the vote, we don't need to count them all, and the courts back me" you don't see that as a non democratic means to "winning" an election? Even if post hoc the votes did tally up to mean that politician did get the most votes, was the method of them gaining power democratically legitimate?
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
Numbering of the Heinrichs
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Real life Gormenghast.
I'll be sorely disappointed if he doesn't have a handlebar moustache and look like Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The Mail has a picture:
Ah thanks - no handlebar but otherwise excellent. The jacket is close to what I pictured. Pity we can't see his trousers.
Toss up between dark pink and mustard.
And surely a waistcoat with hunting tassels for when the talk gets serious.
I was remarking the other day (to @kinabalu I think) that I suspected Labour were aiming only for the right wing/unionist element in Scotland, insofar as they had any aims there. Sounds as if Prof C thinks so too (in much more coherent detail!).
“So Labour thinks they need to get these people back and therefore they would keep schtum [about Brexit]. Of course, that always meant they made a choice.
“They made a choice about which Red Wall to try to regain: Was it the North of England Red Wall or the Scotland Red Wall? In going for the North of England Red Wall they basically had to give up on the Scotland Red Wall, although of course they will never admit it.”
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
I give up. If you can't see that a court making a decision to stop a count (even if that is the correct thing to do) doesn't mean they decide, even if the outcome was probably the same, isn't them, well making a decision, what can I say.
I mean if they didn't decide why did anyone go to court in the first place and why did they come to any conclusion. This is nuts. They made a decision. That decision resulted in the election winner, regardless if it would have been the same by other means. There must have been at least some doubt, no matter how small, as otherwise nobody would have been in court.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
But one set of votes was an unknown at the time. It was a closed box. The supreme court had the option of saying "we take the votes we have, or we take a recount that we don't know" and they took the votes they had, giving it to their guy. They could have chosen the closed box, and it may have still been their guy who won, but at the time that was unknown. So they chose.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
The only book signing I ever went to was for Terry Pratchett and involved a long queue snaking around a nondescript part of London - possibly Croydon?
For the vast majority of the public their experience will be the same - if they go to a book signing it's likely to be one that lots of other people go to. It's only the author's who are at the book signings when nobody turns up.
So the first-time author has an unenviable opportunity to see their biased expectations challenged by a new experience.
For an authoritarian state prepared to harvest organs and staple people in apartments the Chinese regime is weirdly reluctant to enforce vaccination. I’ve yet to see a coherent explanation for this
I don't really understand it either, but there is undoubtedly some nervousness about reaction to policies that affect the whole population (which your examples didn't really). I remember a seminar I gave where the Chinese delegation expressed astonishment that we prohibit non-emergency cases from arranging treatment directly with the NHS hospital, and force them to go via their GPs. "We would never tolerate such authoritarianism", said one, without a hint of irony, and everyone nodded vigorously.
Don't Chinese hospitals house what are effectively GP services, though ?
Moving from one system to the other isn't a simple endeavour.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
It was a pseudo-coup
Trump arguably planned to use the unrest as an excuse to call a State of Emergency, impose martial law, postpone the handover of power
He wasn’t far off succeeding. If the plotters had, say, managed to lynch Mike Pence the shock and horror would have been so great many would have yielded to Trump the strongman cracking down hard. Trump is an avowed admirer of Putin and Erdogan. He’s not hiding anything
The great untold leadership story of that period is how the left-wing activists somehow managed to ignore the provocations and get their people to stay at home.
I thought they were too busy smashing Portland to pieces to notice?
A coup in a western democracy begins to look quite plausible to me
Trump, now Germany? This is a theme
Both failed though as you need the full support of the army for a successful coup. See Egypt where it was the army that toppled President Morsi
Does any European democracy have an army big enough to launch a successful coup?
A while back I was at a City dinner. The great and the good.
The inevitable BREXIT borefest of a conversation was turning into the Dreyfus Affair. So I changed the subject with the story of a Cameron aide who had opined that "Why should he care more about UK citizens than people abroad".
The liberal element on the table quite liked this point of view. At this, an HAC chap pointed out that he was on duty that weekend coming. Due to some of the vagaries of military things, he would have more armed men under his command than anyone else in London. He also said that he quite liked this "Loyalty to whoever you like" thing and asked me* who I thought should lead our new government.
The conversation that followed actually frightened a few people at the table, since he was doing deadpan.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
I was remarking the other day (to @kinabalu I think) that I suspected Labour were aiming only for the right wing/unionist element in Scotland, insofar as they had any aims there. Sounds as if Prof C thinks so too (in much more coherent detail!).
“So Labour thinks they need to get these people back and therefore they would keep schtum [about Brexit]. Of course, that always meant they made a choice.
“They made a choice about which Red Wall to try to regain: Was it the North of England Red Wall or the Scotland Red Wall? In going for the North of England Red Wall they basically had to give up on the Scotland Red Wall, although of course they will never admit it.”
Of course without the English redwall switching from the Tories Labour could not get into power even if it won every SNP seat.
Despite that Scottish Labour polling at 30%, its highest share since 2010
I was remarking the other day (to @kinabalu I think) that I suspected Labour were aiming only for the right wing/unionist element in Scotland, insofar as they had any aims there. Sounds as if Prof C thinks so too (in much more coherent detail!).
“So Labour thinks they need to get these people back and therefore they would keep schtum [about Brexit]. Of course, that always meant they made a choice.
“They made a choice about which Red Wall to try to regain: Was it the North of England Red Wall or the Scotland Red Wall? In going for the North of England Red Wall they basically had to give up on the Scotland Red Wall, although of course they will never admit it.”
Of course without the English redwall switching from the Tories Labour could not get into power even if it won every SNP seat.
Despite that Scottish Labour polling at 30%, its highest share since 2010
Largely as a result of the Tories collapsing, though. And subsamples, subsamples.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
The only book signing I ever went to was for Terry Pratchett and involved a long queue snaking around a nondescript part of London - possibly Croydon?
For the vast majority of the public their experience will be the same - if they go to a book signing it's likely to be one that lots of other people go to. It's only the author's who are at the book signings when nobody turns up.
So the first-time author has an unenviable opportunity to see their biased expectations challenged by a new experience.
In a past life I used to arrange book signings. The fact is, novelists (with a few exceptions, such as Terry Pratchett) tend to attract very few punters compared to celebs and sport stars. I remember dealing with a very grumpy Salman Rushdie when nobody had come to see him to sign his latest (one of his minor novels); novelists on the whole tend to be a bit entitled and miserable - a notable exception being David Mitchell, who probably not coincidentally had been a bookseller in the past.
The best were always the sportsmen and women - nearly always humble, often touchingly surprised by the number of people who wanted a book signing and generally cheerful with the punters.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
I thought Stowe was supposed to be pretty upmarket? Was at uni with a chap from there and it did sound quite decent academically.
BTW a nice object example of only the 'British' being able to parse 'British' English correctly, unlike any foreigner who would be totally wrong.
Probably it's meant as a sophisticated little joke for wellborn people who appreciate sophisticated little jokes but there's a 'tell' in it - which is that the class system is alive and well and is so anchored around public schools that the subtle differences between them assume a grand significance in the affairs of the nation. If this wasn't the case the comment would have no traction, either seriously or in jest.
We know what the answer is, don't we. End all that and create an egalitarian alternative.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
But it would, ultimately, have been meaningless. Vast sections of the military and the country were not going to support it and, as others have mentioned, 'the buildings' are simply symbols rather than real seats of power.
Not so. Once they have something vaguely constitutional, confirmed by the Supreme Court, then it requires an active choice to stand against that. Effectively a coup to stop a coup.
That's why the role of people like Pence was so crucial, and why the current situation is still so dangerous. If the counting of the electoral college votes had ended without the Senate declaring Biden had received most votes then the whole thing was up in the air. Could happen in the future.
A coup in a western democracy begins to look quite plausible to me
Trump, now Germany? This is a theme
Both failed though as you need the full support of the army for a successful coup. See Egypt where it was the army that toppled President Morsi
Generally I think you are right, particularly in a 3rd world country where more are the Army supplanting a Government than a popular uprising. And there was no way the German thing was ever coming to anything. I'm not so sure of America though. I hope you are right and they would have stopped it, but if Trump could have stopped the certification and had enough people convinced he was cheated and the parliament had refused to certify the result and it all turned into a mess, would the military have intervened. How do they decide who is right if a significant number of the population and members of the parliaments believe Trump was right.
It was scary and still is, although less so.
In terms of all of Leon's fears, I'm surprised this one wasn't up there sooner.
Though the Democrats holding the Senate means zero chance of Congress overturning the EC results in 2024 if Trump runs and loses
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Fine, if that was the case; I disagree with your insistence that it would have been the outcome
It's not my insistence, it's the academics who analysed it after the event.
If a politician goes "I know I won the vote, we don't need to count them all, and the courts back me" you don't see that as a non democratic means to "winning" an election? Even if post hoc the votes did tally up to mean that politician did get the most votes, was the method of them gaining power democratically legitimate?
If that politician goes "they counted the votes and the state court is trying anything to overturn the result", shouldn't they have some way of relying on the state court acting within its powers?
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
That's your view. It's nonsense to present that as an objective consensus.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
I give up. If you can't see that a court making a decision to stop a count (even if that is the correct thing to do) doesn't mean they decide, even if the outcome was probably the same, isn't them, well making a decision, what can I say.
I mean if they didn't decide why did anyone go to court in the first place and why did they come to any conclusion. This is nuts. They made a decision. That decision resulted in the election winner, regardless if it would have been the same by other means. There must have been at least some doubt, no matter how small, as otherwise nobody would have been in court.
They decided which set of votes to use. I was objecting to 148grss saying it "wasn't decided by votes" - of course it was. SCOTUS didn't require nonexistent votes to be created and added to the count.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
But one set of votes was an unknown at the time. It was a closed box. The supreme court had the option of saying "we take the votes we have, or we take a recount that we don't know" and they took the votes they had, giving it to their guy. They could have chosen the closed box, and it may have still been their guy who won, but at the time that was unknown. So they chose.
A coup in a western democracy begins to look quite plausible to me
Trump, now Germany? This is a theme
Both failed though as you need the full support of the army for a successful coup. See Egypt where it was the army that toppled President Morsi
Generally I think you are right, particularly in a 3rd world country where more are the Army supplanting a Government than a popular uprising. And there was no way the German thing was ever coming to anything. I'm not so sure of America though. I hope you are right and they would have stopped it, but if Trump could have stopped the certification and had enough people convinced he was cheated and the parliament had refused to certify the result and it all turned into a mess, would the military have intervened. How do they decide who is right if a significant number of the population and members of the parliaments believe Trump was right.
It was scary and still is, although less so.
In terms of all of Leon's fears, I'm surprised this one wasn't up there sooner.
Though the Democrats holding the Senate means zero chance of Congress overturning the EC results in 2024 if Trump runs and loses
They've got the House this time, can't they play silly buggers at that end?
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Which meant that thousands of votes went uncounted. Meaning that, essentially, SCOTUS said "Bush is the winner" because they stopped the counting of votes before they knew who the actual winner was and at a time when Bush was ahead.
The more important point is that Gore could have pursued the challenge. He chose not to do so in the interests of preserving confidence in the system.
At no time since then have Republicans ever reciprocated. Quite the opposite.
Comments
At least I can stop looking now. Who'd be interested in a poster of a loser
Quite a few people on here were trying to sell - "Why die for the Baltics? Far off countries of which we know little."
By contrast, there are people literally going hungry in Britain, and people dying because the ambulance service can't cope. Do I feel that it's possible that the same 3% diverted from defence to improving the ambulance service might save some lives? Yes - I'd put that at 50%.
So, while it might be nice to buy some more HIMARs to stockpile just in case they can help someone, I wouldn't vote for it myself.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
AI chose their outfits #EmilyInParis https://twitter.com/juliamacfarlane/status/1600426494840385538/photo/1
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
Trump arguably planned to use the unrest as an excuse to call a State of Emergency, impose martial law, postpone the handover of power
He wasn’t far off succeeding. If the plotters had, say, managed to lynch Mike Pence the shock and horror would have been so great many would have yielded to Trump the strongman cracking down hard. Trump is an avowed admirer of Putin and Erdogan. He’s not hiding anything
It obviously wasn't ever happening. And it didn't happen.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
It was scary and still is, although less so.
In terms of all of Leon's fears, I'm surprised this one wasn't up there sooner.
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Real life Gormenghast.
"We don't yet have a name for this group," said a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office."
Fascists already taken?
'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
https://twitter.com/edwest/status/1600408185008902145
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
It is like approaching an election where it is obvious who is going to win and saying 'let's not bother' and then saying 'well it didn't matter because we knew who was going to win'.
Who the fuck is this moron?
https://www.1828.org.uk/2022/12/05/classical-liberals-and-libertarians-should-admit-that-brexit-has-been-a-catastrophe/
Some uncomfortable points here
Bush asked for a stay, which needed to show irreparable harm - what can the irreparable harm be of counting all the ballots again? If he wins, he wins either way, and if he didn't, he didn't win! But SCOTUS granted the stay! In literal reparable harm, they made the argument it was irreparable and the court sided with Bush's team.
And what is the legal ground for the eventual SCOTUS decision? Arguing that a recount of all votes would violate the Equal Protection clause because each individual county deciding what is and isn't a legitimate count would be unfair... which is insane, because that is how literally every election works. That is the equivalent of saying how, in our system, all the votes should be thrown out because what is or isn't a legitimate vote is decided by those present at the local counts, and therefore different local counts could view the same kind of vote in different ways. This is such bad legal argumentation that in the decision SCOTUS literally say it cannot be used as legal precedent... which is also really weird.
Also, you mention the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court as maybe having partisan intent; but also the Governor is Jeb Bush, and the Secretary of State is a partisan GOP office, who gives a criteria for what would be needed for a recount, and then ignores the counties that petition for a recount when using that criteria - which is what the Florida Supreme Court later uses to say "well, a general recount is probably easier than just doing this county by county".
It was hackery of the highest order, regardless of whether Bush had the votes to win Florida, he did not win it because of the votes, he won it because SCOTUS said to stop counting all the votes at a time when Bush was ahead when there were many more votes still to be counted.
I hope and believe you are right, but I had my concerns as did many.
BTW a nice object example of only the 'British' being able to parse 'British' English correctly, unlike any foreigner who would be totally wrong.
With so many close House races it’s possible the Dems could have held the house .
Instead the GOP nutjobs have taken over and will be intent on causing as much chaos as possible .
What enabled its being halted in the first couple of months was the very large numbers of artillery and ammo possessed by Ukraine.
Without that, the bits and pieces of NATO hardware would not have been sufficient.
Clearly Russia isn't going to have much capacity to do anything for the next couple of years or so, but beyond that, it remains unpredictable.
Dark mustard, I would call it
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11511307/German-police-raid-far-right-terror-group-planned-overthrow-government.html
But he’s right on some points. Because of the structure of the Leave vote UK politics is now defined by the views of swing voters in the Red Wall
We are even further from the low tax, high growth economy than we were in 2016. Covid hasn’t helped, natch
https://www.thenational.scot/news/23174421.john-curtice-labour-gave-scotland-focus-english-seats/
“So Labour thinks they need to get these people back and therefore they would keep schtum [about Brexit]. Of course, that always meant they made a choice.
“They made a choice about which Red Wall to try to regain: Was it the North of England Red Wall or the Scotland Red Wall? In going for the North of England Red Wall they basically had to give up on the Scotland Red Wall, although of course they will never admit it.”
I mean if they didn't decide why did anyone go to court in the first place and why did they come to any conclusion. This is nuts. They made a decision. That decision resulted in the election winner, regardless if it would have been the same by other means. There must have been at least some doubt, no matter how small, as otherwise nobody would have been in court.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/07/join-the-club-stephen-king-margaret-atwood-and-more-reassure-debut-author-after-lonely-book-launch
The only book signing I ever went to was for Terry Pratchett and involved a long queue snaking around a nondescript part of London - possibly Croydon?
For the vast majority of the public their experience will be the same - if they go to a book signing it's likely to be one that lots of other people go to. It's only the author's who are at the book signings when nobody turns up.
So the first-time author has an unenviable opportunity to see their biased expectations challenged by a new experience.
Moving from one system to the other isn't a simple endeavour.
The inevitable BREXIT borefest of a conversation was turning into the Dreyfus Affair. So I changed the subject with the story of a Cameron aide who had opined that "Why should he care more about UK citizens than people abroad".
The liberal element on the table quite liked this point of view. At this, an HAC chap pointed out that he was on duty that weekend coming. Due to some of the vagaries of military things, he would have more armed men under his command than anyone else in London. He also said that he quite liked this "Loyalty to whoever you like" thing and asked me* who I thought should lead our new government.
The conversation that followed actually frightened a few people at the table, since he was doing deadpan.
*We had been sharing some jokes at this point.
Despite that Scottish Labour polling at 30%, its highest share since 2010
The best were always the sportsmen and women - nearly always humble, often touchingly surprised by the number of people who wanted a book signing and generally cheerful with the punters.
We know what the answer is, don't we. End all that and create an egalitarian alternative.
That's why the role of people like Pence was so crucial, and why the current situation is still so dangerous. If the counting of the electoral college votes had ended without the Senate declaring Biden had received most votes then the whole thing was up in the air. Could happen in the future.
For those wishing to bang their heads against the wall for a while, the Wikipedia entries on the decision -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
and the recount -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida
- are pretty comprehensive, and offer plenty of evidence to continue to argue either side of the proposition.
He chose not to do so in the interests of preserving confidence in the system.
At no time since then have Republicans ever reciprocated. Quite the opposite.