Thought for the Day

[Stavros]

The Russians again? This is becoming a snowball story; are Disney involved too? How long will it be before we see photos of Rupert Murdoch dancing the Hopak with Vladimir Putin?
Senior members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) met the wife of the Russian billionaire who allegedly gave financial support to a woman accused of being a secret agent for Moscow in the US.
The NRA members met Svetlana Nikolaeva, who is the head of a gun company that supplies sniper rifles to the Russian military and intelligence services, during a trip to Moscow during the 2016 election campaign.
Nikolaeva’s husband, Konstantin Nikolaev, allegedly provided funding to Maria Butina, a young Russian woman charged with carrying out an illicit spying operation in Washington. Nikolaev reportedly once invested in his wife’s gun company.

The finding sheds further light on the links forged in recent years between America’s powerful gun lobby and well-connected Russians. US prosecutors allege Butina’s activities were directed by Alexander Torshin, a senior Russian state banker and an NRA member.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...antin-nikolaev

[buttslinger]

Thought #1
If you want Trump to rot in prison, you are OK.
If you want oil of vitriol thrown in his eyes, that's on you...…….
#2
My Psychiatrist had a routine test he gave all his new patients to see how "WITH IT" you are.
He asked me to name all the Presidents backwards.
#3
If Mueller has the stone cold evidence on Trump, is it routine that he would stay mum and continue on with the Investigation until it's completion? I'm sure after the Comey/Clinton fiasco, Mueller wants this one done right by the book, but he can't sit on information like that forever. Late September sounds like he wants the people to know the facts BEFORE the election. ???? Yes? I hope so.
#4
Has Rudy's bad Dental work poisoned his mind?

[buttslinger]

Thought provided by Judge Jeanine Pirro on Fox News a few minutes ago:
Federal Prosecutor Conviction Rate: 98%

[broncofan]

This will be the last time I post about the anti-Semitism scandal in Labour for a while, at least until there are more developments. Labour members seem to believe that if you can find a single Jew out of 300,000 in Britain to support a view then the view cannot be anti-Semitic. So you see them post statements from a Holocaust survivor saying "an anti-Semite is someone the Jews hate", or on Holocaust Memorial Day, you see a deluge of harassment of Jews saying essentially that we have made the Holocaust all about ourselves and are selfish for wanting to memorialize our dead. Again, they seem to think the support of a single Jew, or a letter penned by some random number of Jews like 31 (if they could get 32 would they or is there something special about 31?) means that no matter how hostile and hateful the sentiment, one Jewish endorsement inoculates it.

The anti-Semitism by random councilors and the silence and later obfuscation by their apologists are fairly obvious and well documented, from Holocaust denial to claims that Talmudic Jews drink blood to accusations that Rabbis who have expressed concern about Corbyn are really Mossad. But what is even more obvious is the behavior of rank and file members who will at various times say stuff like "I can't be anti-Semitic because Jews aren't real semites", which comes as a great relief to Jews I'm sure. There are the everyday accusations that individual Jews, some of whom have never said anything about Israel, are part of a fifth column, or the random, pretextual attacks on any Jew who speaks out. An article in skwawkbox recently titled "the Jewish War on Corbyn" was a highlight (why not Judea Declares War on Corbyn?), but it was written by a man whose last name is Cohen so all is well.

The sad thing is that no matter how many instances of anti-Semitism there are by rank and file members nor how many high profile cases emerge, there will be members who will continue to say "where's the evidence" and when provided with it say, well what's anti-Semitic about that.

I think the thing to keep in mind is that like any other group of people Jews are reasonable and able to identify hostility towards them. Occasionally you will find a Jewish person who believes a statement that is not anti-Semitic is, or one who will defend the most obvious anti-Semitic statement, but it is very unlikely that you have a large majority of a significant Jewish population think they are being harassed when they're not. The fact is, the evidence is there, but it often trails the objections because not every Jewish person compiles screenshots.

One thing I have asked a couple of Corbyn supporters online who were angry that Margaret Hodge, who in an undoubted moment of indecorous and uncivil conduct called Corbyn a "fucking anti-Semite", is why they are more upset by that than a councilor within their party who denied the Holocaust? Why are they more upset about that than that someone who handles disputes actually defended this person? Most of the time their response sounds improvised; in other words these are people who are day and night talking about a "smear campaign" against Corbyn but haven't heard of Alan Bull, or Damien Enticott, or Gerry Downing, et al.

[broncofan]

Alright, this is genuinely the last post. If I feel compelled to post about it again, I'll create a thread. I just thought I would include the latest evidence as part of my last post. I honestly don't think you have politicians and others acting like this and it's just an aberration.

The recent councilor who was suspended was a man named Damien Enticott who wrote on his facebook "This is done by Talmud Jews. Talmud Jews are parasites. They also believe any child that is over 3 years old who isn't a Jew should be treated like a parasite, they believe it is okay to even rape that child because it's is worthless. To treat a nonjew decently means that you are as bad as them. All Talmuds need executing."

I am curious how many Labour members saw this and decided it wasn't worth saying anything about.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/e...post-1.6317844

It has also been reported that Corbyn and McDonnell supported a move to change the name of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain to Genocide Memorial Day: Never Again For Anyone. As it so happens, Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain is inclusive, hasn't been monopolized by Jews, and doesn't assert anything about the Holocaust that is inappropriate or appropriative.

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com...-memorial-day/

[Stavros]

Alright, this is genuinely the last post. If I feel compelled to post about it again, I'll create a thread. I just thought I would include the latest evidence as part of my last post. I honestly don't think you have politicians and others acting like this and it's just an aberration.

There are a number of threads in this latest crisis for the Labour Party, I can't unravel them all, and as I have not been a member since the mid 1980s and stopped voting for them because of the Iraq war I can't speak with much authority on recent events. Except to say with regard to Damien Enticott that just as Nigel Farage when he left UKIP said his party was full of 'low grade people' so is the Labour Party at local level, indeed most parties as it is not that easy to get decent people to run for the local council.

It is quite simple -Enticott claims he lives in a 'shared house' or a 'pub' and that his account was hacked by someone who posed the material 'for a laugh' when the reality is that he has been posting offensive material about Jews since 2015 -
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politi...ecute-12990670

I can only imagine that he has loyal supporters in the local party who even if they don't like what he says (?) stood by him, whereas there are clear guidelines in the Labour Party and someone should have lodged a complaint with the National Executive Committee when the first post in Facebook appeared in 2015. At the very least there would have been an enquiry.

Enticott represents the kind of people who feel empowered by Facebook, Twitter and social media but don't edit themselves, either because they don't care, maybe because they don't think many people read their stuff, but I suspect there has been as deep a vein of prejudice in Labour as there has been in other parties. In the past I have been chilled by anti-Black prejudice in the Labour Party, in one case from a councillor for an east London council who was also a shop steward the union would not take action to remove even when we could prove he had broken internal election rules to protect his position. It is also the case that there were members of the Trotskyist Militant group in the 1980s who were organizing on working class estates in Manchester and Liverpool with a barely disguised contempt for black people.

There is another thread which is quite simply anti-Corbyn, and will use any and all material they can get to present him as soft on issues related to the kind of 'radical' or 'revolutionary' political causes he has promoted since he entered politics in the 1970s. The current theory which links him to anti-semitism and Israel is the theory that the 'Americans' are behind this, and that it dates from the anti-war movement in 2003 which has since cast 'New Labour' and the Republican Party as failures with the knock on effect of undermining automatic support for the foreign policy of the US. To have in Corbyn so openly hostile to Israel a politician who could become Prime Minister has energized those Americans now said to be 'interfering' in British politics much as Steve Bannon has supported the criminal Tommy Robinson, thus -but note the source, we have:

The British state needs to restore the trustworthiness of a potential Labour government in the eyes of the USA. To that end Labour has to offer explicit support for US policy in the Middle East. This was the point of David Cameron’s demands for backing the bombing of the Syrian state and of the Syrian Islamist opposition, and the ridiculous momentary glorification of Hilary Benn in December 2015.
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1197/smears-roll-on/

In other words, something must be done to replace Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.

In effect, and this is the last point, Corbyn is now having to account for his past, which didn't matter so much when he was just a back-bench MP, one of those on both sides of the Commons who have been borderline if not actually extremists (they can also be found in the US Congress).
The diving line, as I have said before, is 1967 because it not only marked a major shift in attitudes towards Israel following the war and the illegal occupation of the Wes Bank, but coincided with an influx of those Trotskyists and Leninists who decided Labour and not a fringe Trostskyist party was their best vehicle for the 'parliamentary road to socialism' ie, using the law and the institutions of the state to achieve what the Bolsheviks achieved through violent revolution.

Critically, Israel shifted from being the socialist state founded by the Labour Party in 1948 to becoming an outpost of American imperialism in 1967. The Palestinians, pretty much ignored and written off before 1967 became the victims and the left their 'chapmpions', even as people like Corby tied themselves in knots trying, as happened later with the IRA and the Provisional IRA, to simultaneously justify and condemn acts of 'national liberation' even when they were clearly just acts of murder and the people involved for all their political claims running extortion rackets and much else beside, let alone the bizarre if not hypocritical position of someone on the left offering support for a Nationalist cause.

Somewhere in all this, the bitterness that has followed the war of 1967 and the extremism on both sides has polarised politics much as we have seen it polarised in the US and France and elsewhere albeit around other issues such as civil rights (in the US) and immigration (in Europe).

The language has declined to become raw, raucous and offensive, because it is intended to be so, in the US Newt Gingrich was a pioneer of this kind of dirty politics, with no regard for its consequences. Corbyn has been predictably provocative, because that in the 1980s was the 'language of resistance', but in an attempt to get people to question the 'official view' and question assumptions about Israel and the Palestinians Corbyn failed, because he does not have a coherent view of the issue anyway, just as his supposed interest in Latin America (via his Latin American wives) has not enabled him to mount a serious critique of the collapse of Venezuela or the failures in Cuba. Besotted with revolutionary politics, you defend the revolution at all times, before taking it to task, just as Corbyn stands by those members of his party who stand condemnded as Jews whose views on Israel are not so much critical as just downright offensive because they were instrumental in gettim him elected to the House of Commons and radicalizing the Labour party in the 1980s through Target '82. Solidarity means he is reluctant to call them out, let alone expel them from the party which has nevertheless expelled Ken Livingstone and the lesser known Moshe Machover.

In the end, Corbyn is a symptom of a deep malaise in British (and not just British) politics: a second rate politician. We have rarely been managed by such a poor class of politicians who seem unable to manage, shackled by one crisis after another, unable to control the members of their own party, and a hostage to a language and opinions that were once considered so outrageous they were left at the margins where they were seen to belong to wither and die. The worst part of it is that there do not seem to be any alternative candidates who inspire hope. If Corbyn is under so much pressure he agrees to go, he will only concede to John McDonnell, which would in policy terms be more of the same. just as the replacement for Theresa May could be the proven liar, managerially incompetent, rule and law breaking fraud called Boris Johnson.

We live in dark times.

[Stavros]

Extremism of a different kind, in this case Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as 'Tommy Robinson'. Ezra Levant, founder of Rebel Media in Canada was shredded by Eddie Mair on the BBC's PM programme last night (1 August 201 when Levant attempted to defend the manner in which Yaxley-Lennon broke the law -for which crime he may yet be returned to prison. The point of interest is the international support this nasty thug has received, a lot of which either does not understand how the Law of England works, or doesn't care, or believes the law should be suspended when dealing with Muslims, which is pretty much the same as doing away with the law altogether. The first link outlines the case, the second the international backers raising money for his so-called 'journalist'.

https://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co....ourt-1-9184513

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-a8472796.html

[buttslinger]

Will Trump flip to get Putin? They say he's got the keys to every door of the US Embassy in Moscow. But that's just what they say.
Jeez, these sleazoids sure get paid well, Manafort's "Endangered Species Line" of sports jackets cost a year's salary at McDonalds. I'm told that the Scammers all want jury trials, I guess they think they can sell anything. One of Manafort's houses is in the neighborhood that used to go to my high school. Man, those rich kids had it made. It's good to be rich. My thought of the day is it sure would be nice to be rich. Yeah Man. Stupid Rich.

[Stavros]

I wonder...

The US first lady, Melania Trump, said she would be open to visiting the NBA superstar LeBron James’s new public school, the day after her husband questioned the Los Angeles Lakers player’s intelligence.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-melania-trump

Who will the Republicans choose as their candidate in 2020? Oh wait, she wasn't born in the USA. Ah well. Maybe the question should be, who will she campaign for in 2020?

[buttslinger]

I remember when the thought of an Eastern European Trophy Fuck Wife as First Lady was a big laugh, I remember when John McCain would have been the worst President ever. In the broadest sense It seems like Democrats hate Republicans because of what they do to the Country, and Republicans hate Democrats because of what they do to them personally. It kinda seems like the people who like Trump like him because the Democrats detest him personally. Like in so many of my posts, this is where it all falls apart, who can say what's really in the mind of another, especially when half the time they don't know. After all this mess is over, we'll have a President that isn't a criminal, but I have a hunch we'll still have half the country hating the other half, because we have a two party system. There's only one person who can unite the country now: Vladimir Putin. Thanks Trump, you're a genius.