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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The mid-term elections are coming up on November 8th. California allows for early voting and I have already received my ballot along with a thick booklet from the state describing the many ways to vote and also information about all the candidates and the ballot issues, of which there are many. I received another thick booklet about all the issues the pertain to elections in just Monterey County. The second booklet has a sample ballot that I use to check off all my choices before entering them into the actual ballot prior to dropping it off. It is all very efficient and well-organized.

There are helpful guides to get information on the people and ballot issues. One is from the League of Women Voters. Another is from a self-described progressive who lives in Monterey giving his recommendations.

I live in the tiny town of Del Rey Oaks that is adjacent to the town of Monterey. It has a population of just around 1700 and the number of registered voters is about 1300. As a result, politics is very personalized. Both candidates for mayor have come to my home and talked with me. Two of the three candidates running for the two vacant seats in the city council have already come to my house. In fact the current mayor who is running for re-election sat down in my living room and we chatted for about half an hour about local issues. The next day she emailed me with some information about things that we had talked about.

There is something really quaint about small town politics. While I am sure that the people living here span the range of national politics, those highly charged national issues are out of sight. At least for now.

I have been following coverage of UK politics in the wake of the recent shambles and have been struck by how prime minister Liz Truss seems to have been completely sidelined and that the latest Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt is the person that people are looking to for authoritative answers to government policy questions. In today’s UQ (Urgent Questions) session in parliament, she was mostly absent and it was Hunt who took center stage. Even though one of the questions concerned her sacking of her previous chancellor, it was Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the commons, who had to respond to the question, raising speculations that she was auditioning for Truss’s role. Mordaunt said that Truss could not there due to other urgent commitments, which resulted in raucous laughter.

Truss seems to be so shell-shocked by the strong negative reactions to the policies that she and the previous chancellor Kwasi Kwerteng rushed through, and the strong calls for her to quit, that she seems to have decided to keep as low a profile as possible, making Hunt appear to be the de facto prime minister. Hunt has tried twice before and failed miserably to become party leader and thus prime minister, and now seems to be relishing the power that he has unexpectedly acquired, confidently reversing some of Truss’s policies.

It reminds me of the politics in Sri Lanka where Ranil Wickremesinghe tried on two occasions to become president and lost both times and then lost even his parliamentary seat, along with every member of his party. But then the disgraced outgoing President Rajapaksa and his family maneuvered to get him into the presidency through the back door and now he acts as if he received a sweeping mandate, protecting the Rajapaksa family from any consequences and using draconian anti-terrorist laws to harshly crack down on the leaders of the protests that ousted them.

On Wednesday, the UK parliament has the session known as PMQs (prime minister’s questions) and if Truss is to retain any shred of credibility whatsoever she must attend and put on a strong showing, though she will face a very boisterous crowd.

The British system is one with a strong executive prime minister and so the secondary role that Truss seems to have been reduced to so quickly is quite astonishing.

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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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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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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