Odds on Truss leaving office before end of the year

It appears that schemes are afoot among the UK’s senior Conservative party leaders to try and find a way out of the mess that Liz Truss has created.

Senior Conservatives will this week hold talks on a “rescue mission” that would see the swift removal of Liz Truss as leader, after the new chancellor Jeremy Hunt dramatically tore up her economic package and signalled a new era of austerity.

A group of senior MPs will meet on Monday to discuss the prime minister’s future, with some wanting her to resign within days and others saying she is now “in office but not in control”. Some are threatening to publicly call on Truss to stand down after the implosion of her tax-cutting programme.

In a rearguard action to prop up the prime minister, her cabinet allies tonight warned MPs they would precipitate an election and ensure the Tories were “finished as a party” if they toppled a second leader in just a few months.

However, support for Truss is also evaporating inside the cabinet, with members keeping in close touch with her critics. “She is in the departure lounge now and she knows that,” said a former minister. “It is a case now of whether she takes part in the process and goes to some extent on her own terms, or whether she tries to resist and is forced out.”

It must be remembered that this was an entirely self-inflicted wound. Truss squandered the political capital any new leader comes in with by acting rashly. Truss still has her allies and she has options to try and preserve her position but that might lead to an ugly intra-party war fought in public.
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Keeping track of Herschel Walker’s lies

Daniel Strauss and Amanda Chen have compiled a list of Georgia senate candidate and Trump follower Herschel Walker’s “Nine Most Stupendous, Ridiculous, and Offensive Lies”.

The most recent is his claim that his grandmother is a Cherokee. He said his mother told him this recently but she herself has downplayed the claim.

At a little-noticed campaign event late last month, Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker announced with great fanfare that his grandmother was “full-blood Cherokee” and that it means he is Native American.

“My mom just told me that my mom, grandmother, was full-blood Cherokee,” Walker said at the Sept. 28 event in Forsyth, Georgia. “So I’m Native American!”
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Truss in trouble

The spectacular implosion of the Liz Truss premiership continues in the UK. Given that she came into the premiership on September 5th with just a little over two years before she had to face a general election, she seemed to have decided to make her mark quickly and start out with a bang, introducing major changes in the country’s finances almost immediately. The mini-budget she introduced along with her treasury secretary Kwasi Kwarteng on September 23, less than three weeks after taking office (about ten days of which were consumed with the death and funeral of the Queen), was a supply-sider’s wish list with cuts in corporate taxes and the top rate for individuals that would benefit the wealthy, along with cuts in benefits and services that would adversely affect those in the lower income brackets.
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And now … The Trump Show?

The Congressional committee investigating the events of January 6th, 2021 yesterday held what seems likely to be its last public hearing, though it will continue to meet in order to wrap things up and issue its final report by the end of the year. The hearing was intended to wrap up the case that Trump knew that he had lost the election and yet lied that he had won and tried to steal it in many ways, by trying to coerce state officials to manipulate votes and, when that failed, to try to use the courts to overturn results, and when that too failed, to use a mob to prevent the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

The hearing ended with the committee holding a vote on whether to subpoena Trump to testify before it under oath and the vote was unanimous in favor of doing so. The subpoena will be issued shortly. The immediate media reaction was that there was no way that Trump would agree to appear since he has resisted all efforts in other cases to make depositions or otherwise testify.

But I was not so sure. Trump loves to be the center of attention and TV ratings are what turns him on. And you can be sure that the ratings for such testimony will go through the roof. While he still speaks before adoring fans at his rallies, Trump is a person who loves to be on TV, that is the world he values. This would be a big event and the allure to be the center of it would be tremendous.
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Alex Jones ordered to pay $965 million

That pitiful excuse for a human being who benefits from the suffering imposed on the bereaved families of slain children has been ordered by a jury to pay $965 million to some of those families. Twenty six children and six adults were massacred in the 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary school.

The verdict is the second big judgment against the Infowars host over his relentless promotion of the lie that the 2012 massacre never happened, and that the grieving families seen in news coverage were actors hired as part of a plot to take away people’s guns.
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The Connecticut trial featured tearful testimony from parents and siblings of the victims, who told how they were threatened and harassed for years by people who believed the lies told on Jones’s show.

Strangers showed up at their homes to record them. People hurled abusive comments on social media. Erica Lafferty, the daughter of the slain Sandy Hook principal, Dawn Hochsprung, testified that people mailed rape threats to her house. Mark Barden told how conspiracy theorists had urinated on the grave of his seven-year-old son, Daniel, and threatened to dig up the coffin.
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The lawsuit accused Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, of using the mass killing to build his audience and make millions of dollars. Experts testified that Jones’s audience swelled when he made Sandy Hook a topic on the show, as did his revenue from product sales.

Jones’s motivation to do this thing can be put down to the desire to make money. But what makes Jones’s followers do these despicable things to the families? Even if you think the whole thing is a hoax, what motivates you to go to such elaborate lengths to make your point? Don’t these people have lives?

The arcane language of UK politics

UK prime minister Liz Truss is said to have “withdrawn the whip” of a cabinet minister named Conor Burns.

A senior Conservative minister, Conor Burns, has been sacked from the government after an allegation of “serious misconduct” relating to his behaviour at this week’s party conference.

Truss asked him to step down from his role as a minister of state in the trade department and he had the Conservative whip withdrawn pending an investigation.

Burns is the sixth Conservative MP to have had the whip withdrawn or quit politics in the past 18 months over allegations of misconduct.

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The problems with crime reporting in the US

I have written many times before about the serious problems with the (in)justice system in the US in the way that police department and prosecutors tend to value getting convictions more than justice, with the result that many members of poor and minority communities tend to get disproportionately arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned.

But there is another problem and that is the way that crime is covered in the media which, in addition to giving the distorted impression that the level of crime in the country (people who watch the news tend to think that crime is rising each year when it is in fact dropping) adds to the biases in the system.

In another excellent episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looks at the problems with the media coverage and what can be done.

Desi Lydic on why she still supports Herschel Walker

After denying that he paid for a woman’s abortion in 2009 and saying that he did not even know the woman, that same woman says that she again became pregnant by him two years later. He asked her to get an abortion again and when she did not, he terminated the relationship. That child is now ten years old.

However, all this has not shaken Desi Lydic’s faith in Walker, as she explains.

Reducing incarceration rates in the US

In a welcome move, President Biden has ordered the release of thousands of prisoners who were being held just for marijuana possession or consumption.

Biden on Thursday pardoned all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession, a move that senior administration officials said would affect thousands of Americans charged with that crime.

As part of the announcement, Biden also encouraged governors to take similar steps to pardon state simple marijuana possession charges, a move that would potentially affect many thousands more Americans.

And the President will task the Department of Health and Human Services and Attorney General Merrick Garland to “expeditiously” review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law, the first step toward potentially easing a federal classification that currently places marijuana in the same category as heroin and LSD.

“No one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana,” Biden said in a video announcing his executive actions. “It’s legal in many states, and criminal records for marijuana possession have led to needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities. And that’s before you address the racial disparities around who suffers the consequences. While white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people are arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates.”

“Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It’s time that we right these wrongs,” the President said.

The moves Biden announced Thursday stop short of full decriminalization, which has enjoyed growing support among both political parties. But they are the first significant steps taken by a US president toward removing criminal penalties for possessing marijuana.

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