I continue my almost unbroken record of being wrong when it comes to predicting the results of elections but in this case I am really pleased by it. Theresa May and the Conservatives were expected to increase their majority to between 50 and 100 seats. Instead, they have lost their majority altogether and now have just 318 seats, which while eight short of a majority still makes itthe single largest party. Jeremy Corbyn has surprised the pollsters and pundits by hugely increasing his party’s vote. The Conservatives now have 318 seats, while Labour has 261 seats, the Scottish National Party has 35 seats, the Liberal democrats have 12, and others have 23 seats with one still undecided (In 2015, the Conservatives won 331 seats with just 36.9% of the vote, while Labour won 232 seats with 30.4% and the Scottish National Party won 56 seats with 4.7%. The remaining 28% of the vote garnered just 31 seats spread over nine other parties.)
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The hearings before the US Senate Intelligence Committee with former FBI director James Comey have ended. The Republicans on the committee tended to try to find ways to minimize the damage to Donald Trump. What was surprising to me was that Comey flatly said that Trump was lying when he described the conditions at the FBI as deplorable and morale low as the justification for his firing.
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Seth Meyers explains the background to the testimony that will be given today before a senate committee where Comey will be asked about his conversations with Donald Trump. Comey released a seven-page document yesterday that described five of the nine conversations he had with Trump and that seemed to suggest that Trump was leaning on him to stop the investigations into Trump and his associates.
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Today, the British go to the polls. Despite some hopeful signs for Labour early on, the latest poll commissioned by The Independent newspaper predicts a landslide win for Theresa May and the Conservatives, winning possibly 362 seats, well above the 326 she needs for a majority, and 31 more that the party currently has. Other polls too predict a Conservative win.
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That the Trumps are shameless and greedy is already well-established. Now comes yet another expose of their sleaziness, this time using big-name charities for personal gain. Forbes magazine has an articleabout how the Trumps used their own so-called charitable foundations and so-called charitable fund raisers to siphon money to Donald Trump’s business enterprises.
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When we hear of the country Nicaragua, many of us will associate it with the vicious war that Ronald Reagan waged against that country, using the CIA-supported Contra mercenaries an terrorist proxies to destabilize that country by killing people and inflicting damage on schools and hospitals and other soft targets, simply because the Reagan administration did not approve of the Sandinista government led by Daniel Ortega.
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Brent Larkin used to be the director of the editorial page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer before he retired and now has a weekly column that appears on Sundays. He is someone whom I consider to be a conservative and during his tenure the editorials tended to favor conservative causes and endorse conservative candidates. In last Sunday’s column, he reflected on what he had learned on a recent overseas trip about how other countries view the US and Donald Trump, and that they, unlike his supporters in the US, see him as the “mean, small man he really is”.
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Some of you may have seen this item about a girls soccer team being disqualified from the finals of a tournament because Mili Hernandez, an 8-year old girl with short hair, was suspected to be a boy even though she was not.
The Springfield club told WOWT that a misprint in the team’s roster identified Mili as a boy. Her family brought several forms of identification, including her insurance card and a doctor’s physical form, to prove she’s a girl, but the team was still disqualified.
Teach coach Mario Torres told KMTV in Omaha that tournament officials did not handle a clerical mistake properly.
“Even if it was a mistake, they did not need to humiliate her or kick the entire team off the field,” Torres said.