Lindsey Graham will not be missed by me

There are many politicians who are awful because they espouse terrible policies. But there are others who are truly odious because they coat their evil actions with a veneer of smarmy smugness. I cannot bear to hear or see those people when they appear in the media which they often do because they love to be before the microphones and TV cameras and have a talent for harnessing attention. Their very appearance, voicing whatever view happens to serve their own interests of that moment, is enough for me to switch off.

Former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman was one such person and I will never forgive Al Gore for picking him to be his running mate in the 2000 presidential election, so elevating his profile so that we could not avoid constantly seeing him uttering his unctuous moralizing.

South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham was another such person. He was a total warmonger and one of those Republicans who was a harsh critic of Trump when he first ran for the presidency but when Trump won and he saw the size of the Trump cult, he became one of his biggest ass-kissers, supporting Trump in everything, even when he reversed himself as he often did. Graham was also mean and would impugn the basest motives to his critics.

Today came news that Graham had died suddenly. We will now see the usual dreary ritual of other political leaders paying tributes to him as some kind of statesman because of the longevity of his career in the US senate and trying to find some nice things to say about one of the most unprincipled people in Congress.

I will not be one of them. When I heard this morning that he had died, my first feeling was one of relief that I would no longer have to read or hear or see him in the news as he promotes the latest views required by his sycophancy to Trump.

His passing, like that of Lieberman or Henry Kissinger, seems to suddenly make the air feel cleaner and fresher and the sun shine more brightly.

There are no good billionaires

I share with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the belief that there are no good billionaires.

“There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said during a May appearance on “It’s Open,” comedian Ilana Glazer’s podcast. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”

Her remarks caused an explosion of outrage from a lot of very rich people — and the media outlets they own — but many experts agree with her views.

“Billionaires just have too much and give back too little,” Brian Galle, a law professor at the University of California at Berkley, told me. In January, Galle published a book-length report titled “How to Tax the Ultrarich” for the Roosevelt Institute, and he has argued that a major problem with hyper-wealth is it creates unchecked power. “They control media, other key enterprises, and today the Cabinet.”

Billionaires have almost always obtained their money either by dishonorable means or by inheriting it from people who obtained it by dishonorable means and that any system that allows people to achieve this status is immoral. By dishonorable, I mean either illegally, or by using their connections to get an unfair advantage over others, or by taking advantage of all the loopholes available to exploit their employees or the resources of the Earth, or to drive out their competitors. It is the very rare person who had a good idea and then turned that into extreme wealth without using dubious methods. Hence billionaires should be considered to be people of poor character and one should never vote them into positions of any authority because they will use their power to further enrich themselves.
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The best laid schemes o’ Nigel Farage gang agley

It looks like the Reform party’s leader Nigel Farage’s sudden decision to resign from parliament and re-contest in the ensuing by-election in Clacton has backfired badly. It seem like it was too clever by half, falling under the heading of ‘things that seemed like a good idea at the time’ but then went horribly wrong. Peter Walker and Rowena Mason explain what might have been the thinking behind his plan.

Farage is a grifter like his hero Trump who seems to spends most of his time making a lot of money from various side hustles. But since becoming an MP in 2024, he has been facing scrutiny about some of those things, particularly a £5 million gift by a cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harbone that he claims was not a bribe but a gift freely given with no strings or quid pro quo attached. There was a parliamentary and even police inquiry into this and Farage may have thought that at least one of those might provide grounds for a Recall Petition. If it does, then if at least 10% of voters in the constituency sign the petition, the MP will lose their seat and it will trigger a by-election. Even though Farage’s constituency of Clacton is solidly right wing, he, like Trump, is very divisive and roundly detested by those who are not his fans and so there was a very good chance that the threshold of 10% would be met, forcing him out. Although he can run again, being ousted from office is never a good look.
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We’re back to square one, again and again

As with all things involving Trump, things are never stable or decided but keep changing on him whims. After touting the Memorandum of Understanding that the US reached with Iran as a major achievement in creating a ceasefire and starting the process of normalizing relations with that country, the US is now back at war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is once again closed, with both nations exchanging fire. So it appears that the MOU, wobbly from the beginning, is dead

Trump declared that ceasefire is over and that he has ordered hte resumption of bombing on the ‘Islamic Republic of Japan’. Yes, that is what he said at the NATO summit. He also referred to Ukraine’s president as Putin.

And then as often is the case when Trump is faced with an embarrassing setback, he creates a diversion, this time that old standby, the annexation of Greenland.
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Vote for Count Binface!

One of the appealingly quirky features of UK politics is that pretty much anyone can stand for election to a parliamentary seat, provided that they can come up with 10 voter signatures in support and pay the required deposit of £500, which they lose if they do not get 5% of the total votes cast. This has resulted in novelty candidates, such those from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (founded by the rock musician David “Screaming Lord” Sutch) and, more recently, Count Binface, an extra-galactic being who wears a costume consisting of a trash can on his head. They serve as outlets for protest votes for people disgusted with the system. These candidates typically stand only in constituencies where there is a high-profile major party candidate which will draw media coverage because the UK system is one in which all the candidates for a parliamentary seat line up on stage to hear the vote totals at the end, so you can see them close to the major political figures. In the past, Binface has stood against Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

They also sometimes get interviewed by major media looking for a light-hearted take on the election. Here is Binface interviewed by Sky News during the recent by-election in Makerfield that Andy Burnham won on his way potentially to the prime ministership.


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Belgians rub Trump’s nose in the dirt after defeating US 4-1 in the World Cup

Trump managed to make the US even more disliked around the world by pressuring FIFA to suspend the red card given to their star player Falorin Balogun in the previous game that would have required him to sit out yesterday’s game with Belgium. I have not followed the games, have little knowledge about soccer, have not seen the foul in question, and so cannot judge if the red card was warranted or not. But I do know that reversing a red card ruling in highly unusual. Making it worse for FIFA was that Trump publicly bragged about calling on FIFA president Gianni Infantino to drop the suspension. Infantino, who has been sucking up to Trump in a big way, going to the extent of giving him a fake peace prize after Trump sulked about not getting the real one, is believed to have acquiesced to Trump’s wishes to allow Balogun to play.

This move caused widespread anger in the soccer world, not just in Belgium but also with the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).
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The Democratic Party establishment is rattled by the progressive surge

I recently wrote that the wins by more progressive candidates in Democratic primary races that ousted candidates favored by the party establishment would show us whether the party would embrace this new energy and help these candidates win the general election races or whether the establishment would instead seek to hold on to its grip on party power even if it meant losing in the general election. And it appears that at least some are opting for the latter course.

Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic national committee, directed a pointed message at candidates running under the party’s banner while openly criticizing its direction.

“I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” Harrison wrote on social media. “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support.”

It is curious how Harrison frames the progressives as ‘hating’ the Democratic Party purely because they want to take it in a different direction. He seems to think that the neoliberals who have dominated the leadership for so long are the rightful owners of the party and should not be challenged. He is not alone.

Over the last few days, prominent party figures have moved away from unifying under a “blue no matter who” banner to push for a more formal break with their left flank, and said the moment may have arrived for Democrats to confront their more socialist wing.

“I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: schism,” James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist and former Bill Clinton adviser, said on his podcast. He added that some DSA-aligned candidates “have no place in the Democratic party” and, of the broader coalition: “I’m not in that fucking political party.”

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The wheels on Trump’s fair keep falling off

Today is American Independence Day, a milestone in it being the 250th or semiquincentennial one, which I read is Latin for half of five hundred, which, like half of anything like half-baked or half-assed, makes it sound less impressive. It is a day when people are urged to put aside their differences and come together in patriotic unity.

Well, forget that.

I am a critic of the concept of patriotism and it takes some nerve for Trump and his cult to call for bipartisan unity when Trump hijacked the original bipartisan plans (as Jenora Feuer pointed out) and created his own celebration committee to make it all about himself. So it had long stopped being a national celebration and had become a Trump vanity project so it is hardly surprising that there is a lot of schadenfreude about how things have fallen apart bigly.

The big news is how an event that should have had massive crowds seems to have attracted tinier audiences than small local county fairs, with one band playing to audiences that were smaller than the band size. In fact, there seemed to be fewer people on the Mall than there usually are on any summer day.

“The Mall in the summer is a big tourist destination,” Democratic Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois wrote on X, resharing video of the performance. “Tourists, locals on their lunch break, people tossing frisbees, etc. A strong case can be made that there are FEWER people here than there would be but for Trump’s Tacky Craptacular.”

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The skill of headline writers

I scan a lot of news sites and in the process come across items that are not newsworthy in the sense of being important but are amusing and quirky. But there are some items that keep appearing in the headlines so frequently and so prominently that they signify something important but that I never click on.

One of these is the dispute involving Harry and Megan Windsor and his family. Such intrafamily conflicts can be very unpleasant and I do not wish them on anyone but I do not really need breathless commentary on that particular soap opera. The other is the impending wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. While I am pleased for any happy couple taking such a decisive step, the details of this event have zero interest for me.

But given how these things constantly appear on the newsfeeds, clearly a lot of people must be interested in them. And it testifies to the skill of news headline writers that even though I don’t follow up on the links, I still know something about these two things just from the headlines.

The Great American State Fair Fiasco

Did you know that at this moment the Trump administration is running what it calls the The Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington DC from June 25th to July 19th to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? Me neither. And so it seems did most of the country since the attendance was to, to put it mildly, sparse, consisting of a handful of people wandering around a largely empty mall. There were supposed to be 56 booths each representing a state or territory but even that was was pathetic, with some states making merely a token effort and not even manning the booths, leaving just empty rooms.

The opening event was to be a big concert featuring musical acts, but they could only line up mostly B and C listers and even they pulled out for various reasons, so Trump decided to hold a rally with himself as the speaker. But that too proved to be largely a bust.

Malcolm Ferguson describes what he saw.
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