John T

I must admit I would appreciate one of those papers explaining whether Pritzker or Newsom have any real control over their state National Guards, and whether those NGs even theoreticalllyvhave the capability to fight without/against the US Army.
Else it's all a case of 'they and whose army?'

Speaking as I guy who often repeated the accusation that he was off on a plane (and regrets that) I think that's unfair.
On www.rishisunak.com/news I count about one constituency event a week, that's not bad for an ex-PM. Most of his new jobs are unpaid, so likely vague advisory stuff

I think the Tory party was always in danger once the age of elitism passed. My understanding is that since the 1990s at least the membership have been considered very right wing, and rather thoughtless. So once they were in charge, the slide right seemed inevitable, David Cameron notwithstanding.

Feiten doen er niet toe in de politiek, zegt #JoostEerdmans @nrc.nl lijsttrekker van #JA21.

Net even gerekend: de eerste 10 kandidaten van #JA21 zijn samen lid geweest van 30 (!!) politieke partijen.
En de eerste 3 kandidaten samen van 14 partijen.

Maar ze doen het voor ú.

Echt waar.

Quite. In retrospect it seems he was badly traduced by the Westminster commentariat, who were all certain he would be on the first plane to California after resigning.

Oy. That's worse than anything I've run into in Dutch or British cities. (genuinely rural people like your ignorant but not bad Queenslander later in the thread I have met in both, that's a different sort of thing & fairly universal across most countries)

If he did know for sure that there were untold hundreds of thousands whom he could safely stop payingt benefit he might have mentioned it in the 2 years he was in charge of the system.

To pick at another scab here, presumably the former Works & Pensions minister has some understanding that kicking people with 'minor mental health' issues off one kind of benefit is not going to be a huge saving, given that lots of them really aren't fit for work and will pop up with needs elsewhere

One doesn't want to be a Beta or an Epsilon or whatever, but I think having a few kids with someone, and raising them in a loving relationship, is also a legacy.
Helping your local community with their problems is also a legacy. Both ones which this advice will prevent you having.

More generally I believe UK Special Forces played a solid supporting role in the Falklands War

It *occasionally* works. The WW2 examples I know of were the 1) the defeat of Fort Eben-Emael by the Germans, 2) the freeing of Mussolini by the Germans and 3) the Telemark raids on German heavy water production (although that was more spy-y - the classic commando raid failed utterly)

(And just for clarity, the courage needed to not run away on a modern battlefield is pretty exceptional - i have no idea how they manage it)

Was discussing this yesterday. AFAICT the bulk of Russian casualties are caused by a combo of technically not-very-high quality Ukrainian infantry, often in their 40s, who have just enough bravery to not run away one more day, and a drone/artillery process that slaughters the Russians attacking them

The 'both' is what would give it extra spice!

I think Farage is way ahead of you and has invented the 'Boriswave' attack to deal with that.
The only way it works, ignoring the whole 'not an MP' problem, is if the rightwing media decide their liking him personally outweighs their Reform fun. Because he couldn't handle their opposition.

This was the interesting thing about Cleverly - his route to disaster was not as obvious (he found an early and unusual one, as it happened)

The thing about recent Tory leaders is that is that their faults were well known in advance. Johnson was a crook, Truss batty, Sunak a mediocre mass politician and Badenoch was a media-hating lightweight.
Jenrick is an unlikable sleazeball.
How exactly that manifests itself will be seen.

Ouch. Harsh but apparently fair

If my government was sending missiles for the Russians' use I'd go protest in The Hague every week.

Right, there's not many protests against Russia's equally unpopular potentially genocidal war against Ukraine because the British government is doing quite a lot to counteract that, including sending many shiny missiles to help deal with the perpetrators.

Irrespective of the wisdom/necessity of that peak in immigration the fact is that it was implemented without discussion by a Tory government that was vibing anti-immigrant. It's poisoned public discourse badly, and politicians can't discuss it without being dragged down racist rabbitholes by Reform

Part of their problem is that neither they nor anyone to the left of Farage has found a good way of talking about the 'Boriswave' - the large increase in legal migration 2021 -24, managed by a government that by 2022 was pretending to be very anti-immigrant (officially anti-illegal immigrant, ofc)

One of the more literal uses of this one I've seen.

Glad to see that Badenoch, like Braverman & Patel before her, still can't see the one teeny problem preventing her leading the racist & xenophobic movement in Britain.
That failure is most ringing endorsement of British integration I know.

Sorry, you don't think it's acceptable that the people charged with turning the impossible demands of the electorate into reality should enjoy a perk (an offsite in pleasant circumstances) routinely afforded to middle management in most corporates? Even at zero cost to taxpayers?

Farage implosion (35% likely), left very divided (50% likely), she has a bit of a skilks/effort improvement (50% likely) and debates move to favour her approach (bond crisis? Trans moral panic?) (20% likely?).
Assuming those things are quite independent of each other, that gives her a 2% chance...

Thing about Jessica R is, she was drawn by artists and voiced by Kathleen Turner to be hot in every frame and second of that film. I reckon she can therefore be hot in a way that an algorithm can't...

This is one of those online guys isn't it?

That guy has that Prigozhin energy of one who will not be dying old & happy in bed

For reference this was the proposition of the storied Dutch Labour Party in 2017.
They got 6%, lacking any assistance from FPTP. (They’ve since got a jazzier leader and allied with the Greens, it’s going better now)

There’s a kind of honesty in that I suppose. Also fantastic news for the LibDems, because the number of people who will consistently vote for the proposition ‘dull bunch of professionals whose only interest is in a small shrinking group who hate them’ is very small indeed.