More Brexit drama

[UPDATE: All eight indicative votes were defeated, all but one of them (a pro-Remain one) by hefty margins, so we seem to be back to square one. I have been watching the livestream of the parliament with great interest. MPs are struggling to figure out what to do next, given the Friday deadline. Pressure is being put on the speaker to allow a third vote on May’s plan but he seems unmoved.]

British prime minister Theresa May has said that she will step down as leader before the next phase of Brexit negotiations, presumably as a last-ditch effort to get recalcitrant Conservative MPs and the DUP to back her plan.

“I have heard very clearly the mood of the parliamentary party. I know there is a desire for a new approach – and new leadership – in the second phase of the Brexit negotiations and I won’t stand in the way of that,” May said, according to a transcript released afterwards.

“I know some people are worried that if you vote for the withdrawal agreement, I will take that as a mandate to rush on into phase two without the debate we need to have. I won’t; I hear what you are saying. But we need to get the deal through and deliver Brexit.

“I am prepared to leave this job earlier than I intended in order to do what is right for our country and our party.”

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Jesus, just give it a rest, will you?

Via Frances Langum, I came across this extraordinary prayer given at the opening of a session of the Pennsylvania state legislature. Langum counted 12 times that the name of Jesus was inserted, seemingly randomly, as if the more she used it, the more likely she would get to heaven.

I am sure it was just a coincidence that the first item on the agenda was the swearing in of the first even Muslim woman in the Pennsylvania state house.

Marcus suggests a solution to something that has also puzzled me

Like pretty much everyone in the US (is this a problem in other countries too?) I am so plagued with robocalls that I have stopped answering the phone and wait to see if I know the person who is leaving a message before picking up. But very often, the phone rings, the answering message picks up, but then the call is immediately cut with no message left. That puzzled me because I assumed that these calls were entirely automated and a computer would leave a recorded message. Was the computer able to distinguish between an answering machine message and a real person in a matter of a second or two? That seemed pretty sophisticated. Sometimes I do get a recorded message but that is rare.
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Theresa May continues to lose control of Brexit

In the latest maneuvering over Brexit in the British parliament, the MPs voted by a margin of 329 to 302 to seize control of the agenda and vote on a series of ‘indicative’ measures on Wednesday that would tell the government what are the things that it can support. This measure was in direct defiance of the government which normally controls the parliamentary agenda and 29 Conservative MPS voted for this measure, defying the government whip.
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The Democratic party establishment tries once again to crush insurgents

As we have seen, the Democratic party establishment is solidly neoliberal and Republican-lite and wants to keep the party that way, even if it means supporting incumbents like Dan Lipinski who often vote along Republican lines. The fact that they supported him over a much better candidate Marie Newman even though it is a safe Democratic seat shows that they really want people like him.
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Media reckoning following the Mueller report

I have not been following the details reported in the media of the Mueller investigation, finding it to be largely speculative and short of facts. Matt Taibbi has an exhaustive analysis of how the media got the Trump-Russia story so horribly wrong that it ended up enabling Trump to take a victory lap that will last forever. The fact that all we have seen is the summary provided by the attorney general that said that Mueller could not completely exonerate Trump will be ignored, and the fact that no further indictments were issued will be highlighted by Trump. By hyping the Russia collusion angle so heavily on the basis of so little hard evidence, Taibbi says that this is the biggest US media debacle since the Iraq WMD story, though that had far worse human costs.
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The myths about ‘meritocracy’

The recent scandal about how rich people were bribing and cheating on tests to get their children into the colleges of their choice has created a discussion about meritocracy. On the radio program On The Media, host Bob Garfield had an interesting interview about the origins of the word and that there are two myths about meritocracy.

The word was actually coined as satire in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, who was criticizing the role that the UK’s elite education system had in shaping the hierarchy of British society. This week, Bob speaks with John Patrick Leary about the satirical origins of the word and what it has come to mean in the US. He says there are actually two myths: “the myth that there is such a thing, and the myth that the United States is committed to that imaginary thing.”

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The ‘deep story’ white conservatives tell themselves

One of the questions that many people ask themselves is how it is that so many people buy into what the conman Donald Trump is selling them even when it seems that he is working against their own interests. University of California, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild says that it is clear that Trump is the culmination of a process that first came to the forefront with the Tea Party. She had earlier decided to try to set aside her preconceptions and explore the Tea Party phenomenon and spent five years having in-depth interviews with people in the heart of Tea party country and Trump’s election came during her research.

She has produced a book Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right where she sets out her findings.
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Mercenaries as proxies for direct US military involvement

That the US is overtly involved in so many wars and military actions around the world is well known, though many people might be surprised at the large numbers of bases and small scale military operations that are going on. Less well known are the covert operations run by the CIA and the more covert branches of the military. Even less well known are those where the US employs mercenaries, usually former US military personnel, to achieve its goals of propping up unsavory leaders or deposing those whom the US dislikes. Matthew Cole and Kim Ives write about a botched mercenary operation to funnel money and arms in support of embattled Haitian president Jovenel Moïse.
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