Second Walker accuser speaks on camera

The second woman who accused Georgia Republican senate candidate Herschel Walker of pressurizing her to get an abortion in 1993 when they were having along affair has revealed herself on camera, though she has kept her name secret and wants to be known as just Jane Doe. You can see the interview in the above link. It is an explosive interview full of details that substantiate her charges against Walker.

Responding to the ABC News interview, Walker issued a statement Tuesday saying, “This was a lie a week ago and it is a lie today. Seven days before an election, the Democrats trot out Gloria Allred and some woman I do not know. My opponents will do and say anything to win this election. The entire Democrat machine is coming after me and the people of Georgia. I am not intimidated. Once again, they messed with the wrong Georgian.”

But the woman has produced copious documentation including photographs of them together as recently as in 2019 that clearly show that he is lying about not knowing her at all.
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Will Bolsonaro go quietly?

Jair Bolsonaro has still not conceded the election, more than 12 hours after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. was declared the winner of Brazil’s presidential election. While the election was fairly close, with Lula getting 50.9% of the vote (60.3 million) to Bolsonaro’s 49.10% (58.2 million), the margin is large enough to be conclusive. Bolsonaro had earlier vowed not to concede and he and his three sons remained silent in the presidential residence.

Meanwhile, many of his prominent supporters have conceded that he lost and many world leaders (including Joe Biden) were quick to congratulate Lula on his victory, suggesting that they were trying to send a message discouraging Bolsonaro from harboring any hopes of staying in power using the military. Biden’s words are especially important given that Brazil’s military in 1946 staged a US-backed coup and then ruled the country until 1985. Bolsonaro is a former member of the military and has close ties to them.

Another factor is how quickly the results were known, by close to midnight on election night, giving little time for conspiracy theories about the election being stolen to grow, the way that they did in the US where the final results were declared after some days.

Lula beats Bolsonaro in Brazil’s run-off election

In a close election, Lula defeated the right-wing extremist Trump ally by a margin of 50.8% to 49.1% with 99% of the votes counted.

Ecstatic and tearful supporters of Lula – who secured more than 59m votes to Bolsonaro’s 57m – hugged and threw cans of beer in the air.

“This means we are going to have someone in power who cares about those at the bottom. Right now we have a person who doesn’t care about the majority, about us, about LGBT people,” Soares said. “Bolsonaro … is a bad person. He doesn’t show a drop of empathy or solidarity for others. There is no way he can continue as president.”

There was celebration around the region too as leftist allies tweeted their congratulations. “Viva Lula,” said Colombia’s leader, Gustavo Petro.

Argentina’s president Alberto Fernández celebrated “a new era in Latin American history”. “An era of hope and of a future that starts right now.”

Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador commemorated what he called a victory for “equality and humanism.”.

There is no word as yet if Bolsonaro has accepted the result and conceded. Like Trump, he had been warning that he might not accept a loss because the election was ‘stolen’. Some of his followers are indeed making that claim in ways that should sound familiar to us in the US.

Outside Bolsonaro’s home in west Rio there was dejection and anger as the news sunk in. “I’m angry,” said Monique Almeido, a 36-year-old beautician. “I don’t even know what to say.”

João Reis, a 50-year-old electrician, said he was convinced the vote had been rigged.

“It’s fraud without a doubt, they manipulated the count. The Armed Forces must intervene,” demanded

And if they didn’t? “The population must take to the streets to demand military intervention so that we don’t hand power over to the communists.”

Things are going to be quite tense in the days to come.

Elon Musk and Twitter

I try to avoid reading anything about Elon Musk, even though my news sources constantly bombard me with headlines about something he has said or done. I find people who constantly promote themselves, and Musk is a particularly extreme example of this, to be really annoying. For some reason, the media seem to think that his pronouncements on anything, even world affairs, are to be taken seriously enough as to be relayed to us. Such is the power of money to bestow credibility to people on topics on which they have no expertise whatsoever.

But I was vaguely interested in the saga of his on-again, off-again effort to buy Twitter and the deal was finally completed on Friday. Musk uses Twitter as his main vehicle for drawing attention to himself and may have thought that owning Twitter would enable him to get even more exposure by being his own personal platform. He has plans to take the company private by buying up all its shares.
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Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg: Two useless people in high places

Liz Truss gave her farewell speech and seemed as clueless as ever. She advised her replacement Rishi Sunak of the need to ‘be bold’ although it was her very own boldness that led to one of the most spectacular downfalls in recent UK political history. She is is most likely to be remembered as the answer to two future trivia questions: Who had the shortest tenure as UK prime minister? And who was prime minister when Elizabeth Windsor died?

It is unlikely that Sunak will take her advice to be bold. He has probably learned that he needs to take things slow and at least give the appearance of being deliberative so as to remove the image that the Conservatives have now acquired for being reckless, even as he pushes the same right-wing policies that the Conservatives always push. Although he is cut from the same cloth as other Conservative leaders, coming from a wealthy and privileged background and went to the ‘right’ schools, I am sure that he is mindful that he is different in being an ethnic South Asian and Hindu. Being the first in any major category (gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion) to occupy a high position means that people are closely watching you. Failure will cause many to whisper that ‘people like them’ are simply not cut out to hold such positions. So Sunak’s first goal will be to not mess things up as much as Truss did and thus cautions is called for.
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Trump is unlikely to testify publicly to the January 6th committee

When the January 6th congressional committee voted to subpoena Trump to testify before it, I thought that there was a real possibility that he would because, despite the risks that he will say something incriminating, Trump loves to be on TV so much and the ratings for such a hearing, the only measure that he seems to really care about, would go through the roof. He could use the event to ignore the questions and instead rant about all his pet peeves.

It seems like the committee was well aware of this possibility and vice-chair Liz Cheney said that Trump’s testimony would not be live, in order to avoid the hearings becoming a circus.
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Let the next round of infighting begin!

The contest to see who becomes the next Conservative party leader and thus prime minister was remarkable for its swiftness. As this timeline of events shows, Liz Truss resigned on the afternoon of Thursday and by Monday morning the contest had been settled.

In the end Rishi Sunak managed to avoid a vote of the Conservative party membership (which he lost to Truss less than two months ago) when his rivals Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt withdrew their candidacies because they could not reach the high bar of 100 MP support that the party leaders had set for them to be nominated. The party leaders had clearly wanted to avoid putting it to a vote of the party membership, given how disastrous their selection of Truss had been and the likelihood of Johnson winning it this time, and their plan succeeded.

Sunak, apart from having South Asian ethnicity and being a Hindu, seems to be cut from the same cloth as other Conservative party leaders and prime ministers, being wealthy and privileged and having attended an elite private school (Winchester College) and Oxford University and has admitted in the past to socializing with only the wealthy and aristocratic and not having had any friends from outside that class. In addition he is married to a very wealthy woman, the daughter of an Indian billionaire. So he is, apart from his ethnic origins, just like the others in the British oligarchy. Although he is viewed as a safer set of hands to steward the economy than the pitiful Truss, he was once a supporter of Johnson and served as his Chancellor of the Exchequer until his resignation helped to topple Johnson.
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The Conservative party and Republican party have a lot in common

What they share is much more than a right-wing ideology. One commonality is that they both have former leaders (Boris Johnson and Donald Trump) who are lying, egotistical, narcissists. Another is that despite their manifest faults that should in a sane world disqualify them from any leadership position, both ex-leaders seem to be viewed favorably by a vociferous base of the party faithful (Conservative party members in the UK and Republican primary voters in the US). The third is that both party establishments seem to have lost their grip on the party and are now struggling to regain control. The final similarity is that both parties seem to have given up on having any specific agenda or party platform and now seem to be going with whatever the leader says. Recall that in 2020, the Republican party did not even bother to come up with a new platform for their convention, essentially saying that their platform was whatever their nominee Trump said.
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The fight for the UK Tory leadership could get very ugly

I have just been able to view the first season of the BBC TV satire The Thick of It that ran from 2005 through 2012. It purports to show the brutal backstabbing that goes on behind the scenes of UK politics and the media. Peter Capaldi is clearly having a great time playing Malcolm Tucker, the prime minister’s ruthless ‘enforcer’, who gets to do the PM’s dirty work such as getting ministers to take the blame for any mistakes even if they are not at fault, firing them, and then writing their ‘resignation’ letters. He is a domineering and aggressive person whose is constantly scheming and whose in-your-face belligerence cows everyone around him. His very appearance in their office makes their hearts sink. He wields tremendous power over even ministers of state, ordering them and their staff around. He is the PM’s spin doctor manipulating the media, This clip gives you a good sense of his character.
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And the winner is … the lettuce!

British prime minister Liz Truss resigned today, ending the constant speculation about how long she would last. On October 10th, a tabloid newspaper The Daily Star started running a live stream of a head of lettuce named Lizzie Lettuce with a blond wig above the question, “Will Liz Truss still be Prime Minister within the 10 day shelf-life of a lettuce?”. As it turns out, the contest was not even close, with the lettuce winning at a trot, with Truss having the dubious record of possibly being the shortest serving prime minister who did not die in office, just 45 days.

I must say that while I had been amazed at how quickly Truss had thoroughly botched things up since taking over as prime minister, and expected that she would not last long, her resignation today did surprise me. She had given a pretty vigorous defense in the weekly PMQ session yesterday, defiantly declaring “I am a fighter, not a quitter!” which I thought meant that she was going to try and salvage her premiership.
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