Boris Johnson is a true Donald Trump acolyte

Just four weeks after his party convincingly won the UK general election, prime minister Boris Johnson has sacked nine cabinet members including Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid (their equivalent of the U S treasury secretary) and replaced them with people whom Johnson thinks will be more loyal to him. Javid’s replacement Rishi Sunak only entered parliament in 2015 and was until recently a hedge fund manager. Javid himself had an 18-year career in banking ending as managing director of Deutsche Bank. Johnson’s dedication to serving the interests of the financial sector is clearly in view.
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Matt Taibbi and Mehdi Hasan tear into mainstream media analysis

Matt Taibbi writes that the dynamics of the 2016 Republican primaries are playing out again in the 2020 Democratic primaries and that it favors Bernie Sanders.

In reality, the results for Sanders cut both ways. On one hand, it’s amazing he can win any state after years of propaganda depicting him as a half-dead cross of Hitler and Stalin (MSNBC before New Hampshire outdid itself with Looney Tunes commentary about “executions in Central Park” and a “digital brownshirt brigade”).

On the other hand, there are signs after New Hampshire that some of the relentless corporate messaging against Sanders is landing. This will inspire orgies of excitement – it’s already happening – as pundits revel in every storyline suggesting Democratic voters are scrambling to find an “electable” alternative.
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DOJ career officials resign after Stone reversal

Four career prosecutors have resigned from the case following a direct intervention by the attorney general Bill Barr overruling their judgment in the case of Donald Trump’s friend, the shady Roger Stone. It is clear that Barr was obeying the dictates of Trump.

Four lawyers who prosecuted political operative Roger Stone have resigned in protest after their sentencing recommendation was overruled and slashed by Donald Trump’s justice department.

Aaron Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed and Michael Marando quit the case while Democrats demanded an independent investigation into what they described as a dangerously politicised and corrupt justice department.

The growing crisis raised fresh questions over the role of William Barr, the attorney general who has been criticised as a partisan Trump loyalist.
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Bernie Sanders wins the New Hampshire primary

Bernie Sanders has been declared the winner of the New Hampshire primary but his margin of victory over second-place finisher Pete Buttigieg was small 25.70% to 24.45%. While the turnout in the earlier Iowa primary narrowly beat the 2016 numbers but was disappointingly smaller than the record 2008 levels, this year’s New Hampshire turnout will beat 2008 and set a new record.

However Sanders won 51% of the youth vote aged 18-29, showing that his ideas resonate with future generations of voters. He alsowon nearly half the voters under 30 in Iowa.

To me the big surprise is that Amy Klobuchar did so well, winning close to 20% of the vote and beating out Elizabeth Warren who finished fourth with less than 10% and Joe Biden who finished fifth with about 8%. I read earlier that Klobuchar polls showed she had won a large share of the women’s vote and that her increase came at the expense of Warren and Biden but cannot find that link now. Since you need 15% of the vote to be awarded any delegates, the latter two will leave New Hampshire empty-handed.
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Rebuffing phony critiques of the Sanders program

Today is the New Hampshire primary and one can sense a panic in the political establishment and the corporate media that Bernie Sanders will do well there. Hence they are going into overdrive to make the case that he is an ‘extremist’ and an ‘ideologue’ and that his ideas are not ‘practical’. In this effort they are aided by the Democratic party establishment and its party hacks like James Carville who has made a good career out of talking like your average Joe while promoting the interests of the oligarchy. They are clearly hoping that most of the party voters will coalesce around Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg or with the late addition of Amy Klobuchar to the mix, as the person to stop Sanders and are clearly promoting this view.
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Why is Lipinski still supported by the Democratic party?

I have railed before about congressman Dan Lipinski who since 2004 has represented a very safe Democratic seat in the 3rd district of Illinois that he ‘inherited’ from his father. i.e., his father held it for a long time and stepped aside for his son to take it. Lipinski has had the support of the Democratic party despite the fact that his views are pretty much close to Republican positions on key issues. He is anti-LGBT and anti-women and he gets funding from the petroleum industry and big corporations.
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NOW argues against full decriminalization of sex work

I have written before about how I felt that sex work should be decriminalized. Although there had been concern in feminists circles in days gone by that legalizing sex work would lead to greater exploitation of women’s bodies, I thought that the issue had been settled and that decriminalizing sex work was now a fairly uncontroversial position on the part of people who would consider themselves on the liberal and progressive end of the political spectrum. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a new survey that gave welcome news that public opinion about sex work had moved in a positive direction.
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Speech pathologist argues that Donald Trump has aphasia

It is clear that when Donald Trump speaks extemporaneously, he goes off at weird tangents and finds it hard to sustain a coherent train of thought, meandering all over the place, laced with non-sequiturs. A retired speech pathologist says that when you analyze his speeches and compare them with the way he spoke long ago, that it is clear that he has a serious language disorder called aphasia.
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Yesterday’s Democratic debate

I watched most of the debate yesterday and there was little there to change my mind about my support for Bernie Sanders as my #1 choice followed by Elizabeth Warren as #2. The rest were pretty much a wash, though I thought that Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer had a pretty good night. Elizabeth Warren got relatively little speaking time and while she made use of her time to make her points, did not seem aggressive enough in injecting herself more into the exchanges.
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