Anne Laurie

BREAKING: Senate Republicans blocked a domestic terrorism bill that would have opened debate on gun measures after the deadly Texas school shooting. https://t.co/hMdW0iNItZ

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 26, 2022

… Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tried to nudge Republicans into taking up a domestic terrorism bill that had cleared the House quickly last week after mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and a church in Southern California targeting people of color. He said it could become the basis for negotiation.

But the vote failed along party lines, raising fresh doubts about the possibility of robust debate, let alone eventual compromise, on gun safety measures. The final vote was 47-47, short of the 60 needed to take up the bill. All Republicans voted against it.

“We’re disappointed,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

She said it’s “shameful” that the National Rifle Association and others have stood in the way of advancing such measures but encouraged Congress to press ahead.

“The president has been very clear that’s it’s time to act,” she said…

Continue reading…

More of the latest Letter from Brexitannia:

… So, last week, there were elections.

We don’t have Midterms over here, but what we do have are a series of staggered local elections for constituencies all over the country, and last week 200 local councils were up for the first time since 2018. Tory MPs have been muttering for months that they’d wait to see what happened in May before coming to any firm conclusions about Flobalob’s future accommodations, which is understandable when you remember that the average Tory MP is so spineless and venal they make Ted Cruz look like Steve Rodgers. As is typical of the breed, they’ve utilised every bullshit excuse imaginable to put off having to take a stand one way or another. “We have to wait for the results of the Sue Grey inquiry” they whined. “We have to wait for the results of the Police investigation” they moaned. “We have to wait for the results of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine” they didn’t actually say, but definitely implied. Behind the bullshit what they’ve really been saying is “We have to wait for the results of actual elections to see if he’s still box-office gold or a leaden drag on our chances of staying on the Westminster gravy-train” Corruption and dishonesty and treason are all just par for the course, but don’t you threaten my seat, you big bastard!

As the elections drew nearer the polls were so bad that the Tory Press was soon floating ‘exclusives’ claiming that the Party was worried about losing a whopping 800 seats, which was obviously a ridiculous number chosen because it gave plenty of scope to pivot to “It would have been worse without Boris!” headlines if losses, as expected, were under that. Wiser heads were talking about 200 to 300 losses being a bad night, with 400 losses being catastrophic for Flobalob’s chances of avoiding a vote of no confidence. One strong indication of what was expected to happen, and why, came from the constituency Tories who had to actually venture forth into the towns and cities of Lesser Brexitannia to campaign for votes. Their literature had no pictures of Flobalob, many of them didn’t even have the word ‘Conservative’ on them, and those that did often changed it to ‘Local Conservative’, which apart from the very apt League of Gentlemen connotations (“We didn’t burn him!”) sent a signal loud and clear across the land. Flobalob had become toxic on many doorsteps, and any losses would be blamed 100% on him.

They lost 485 seats. 63 of those in Scotland, 86 in Wales, which by my math means they lost 331 in England. That’s really, really bad.

They lost Westminster FFS. Westminster! Rendering Flobalob the first Prime Minister in history to live in a Labour run constituency. Scotland and Wales gave the Blue Rosettes as comprehensive a two-fingered salute as you could want to see. They did pick up a few new councillors in parts of London, some spots in the northwest and rural Scotland, but they were pitiful compared to the tsunami of Fuck Yous pouring in from everywhere else. The BBC’s outgoing Political Editor Laura ‘Luv U BoJo’ Kuenssberg was almost inconsolable and had to be dragged away from a digital map of constituencies lost and gained on the night because she kept on trying to ‘provide balance’ by colouring them in with a blue sharpie.

Continue reading…

The latest Letter from Brexitannia:

It’s been a good long while since I last graced these august premises with a doggerel dump on the state of British politics, and it’s not because there’s been a dearth of things taking place over here for me to get angry and rant about. Au contraire, Mes Amis, this is, after all, late-stage Tory Britain we’re talking about, where on any given Tuesday you can always peek your peepers above the parapet to witness at least half a dozen examples of something heartbreakingly awful being inflicted on society’s most vulnerable by immensely privileged garbage who have never had to suffer a moment’s insecurity in their cossetted, buttersmooth lives, all soundtracked by media vandals (who would themselves benefit immensely from being volleyed repeatedly in the wormsack by a drunken kangaroo) being allowed to bray something imbecilic and horrible about it through a publicly funded megaphone.

The problem that I’ve had recently is that the above is basically the sum total of what Britain’s national political culture consists of these days; it’s just one endless, out-of-focus conveyor belt of soul-crushingly banal atrocity winding its way past the dead eyes and distorted faces of a million haggard proles like a sushi-bar in a Marilyn Manson video, except the fish are all rotted black, half of the plates have puppies nailed to them, and the other courses seem to consist mainly of boneless mice squirming about in bowls of cracked glass. Who in their right mind would ever want to write about that?

Hello. Pleased to meet you.

You may or may not recall from previous ranting episodes that the Anglosphere’s (current) least favourite KulturKrieging Kick-back machine has been drowning in disaster since pretty much the moment it installed a Russian-owned ethical void as its leader. They may have coasted to Absolute Power on the back of intense Media fluffing and a grinding, half-decade long, bipartisan campaign to paint the only alternative as some kind of folk devil on a par with Hitler, Stalin or Gwyneth Paltrow, but from there on it’s been the very definition of Downfall. From the insanity of its Brexit policy to the inhumanity of its Covid response and everything in between, when it comes to fucking up the country in the most corrupt and incompetent way imaginable the Tory Party of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has gone above and beyond mere human rapacity to achieve something touching on the infernal. It’s been a tour de force of open larceny that I could compare to something like Alaric’s Visigoths sacking late-Imperial Rome, except that would be a grievous insult to both Alaric (who was by all accounts a popular and capable leader) and the Visigothic nation (who at least had the decency to move to Spain and invent tapas). It’s simply unparalleled.

This isn’t a Government, it’s an Occupation, and there ain’t no one coming from over there to liberate us because we did it to ourselves.

The laundry list of Tory shit-the-beds is so long it would tax the Magdalene Sisters, so I won’t even bother trying to detail all of them again. Suffice to say that on top of everything else there’s now a cost of living crisis eating away at the bank accounts of every non-millionaire in the UK, with energy bills, food bills, fuel bills, and every other bill you can think of accelerating to escape velocity so quickly it’s driven Elon Musk into a full-blown jealous breakdown, while at the same time the wages of everyone but the cutthroats of Pirate Capitalism Island lag in real terms and the much-touted promises of ‘levelling up’ funds for the most benighted (by consecutive Tory and Tory-lite regimes) areas have evaporated faster than a widow’s tears in a cremation oven. The only parts of the 2019 election manifesto that Tories haven’t abandoned are the ones cribbed from Labour’s offering, which says far more about the relative seriousness of each party’s policy ideas three years ago than anyone in the British Establishment is willing to admit.

And in all this race to the bottom of the barrel and beyond, the one constant is an echoing silence about a major driver in the UK’s plunge into failed state mode, namely Brexit. The national auto-asphyxiation episode masquerading as a policy debate that decided the 2019 Election and gave Flobalob the keys to the kingdom simply doesn’t get mentioned anymore in the world of capital N ‘News’.

Continue reading…