Well, of a sort.

Theresa May has once again been shot down by Parliament over Brexit, this time by a mere 149 votes instead of 230, so, umm… better?

MPs ignore May’s pleas and defeat her Brexit deal by 149 votes
by Heather Stewart, The Guardian
Tue 12 Mar 2019

Theresa May has suffered a second humiliating defeat on her Brexit deal, as MPs rejected the last-minute reassurances she won from the EU27 on Monday and voted it down by a crushing majority of 149.

With just 17 days to go until the UK is due to leave the EU, MPs ignored the prime minister’s pleas to “get the deal done”, after the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) said it could not support the agreement.

The prime minister immediately gave a statement, saying she was “profoundly disappointed” that her deal had been rejected again.

She said the government would table a motion, so that MPs can debate on Wednesday whether the UK should leave the EU without a deal on 29 March, and that she would offer her MPs a free vote on that decision.

There will then be another vote on Thursday, on whether to request an extension to article 50.

But May insisted: “Voting against leaving without a deal, and for an extension, does not solve the problems we face. The EU will want to know what use we want to make of that extension. The house will have to answer that question.”

With her voice cracked and fading, the prime minister had earlier pleaded with the House of Commons: “This is the moment and this is the time – time for us to come together, back this motion and get the deal done. Because only then can we can get on with what we need to do, what we were sent here to do.”

Some Conservatives who rejected the deal in January, when May lost by a record majority of 230, did switch sides; many feared Brexit would be delayed or reversed if they didn’t support the agreement.

But most Labour MPs trooped through the voting lobbies with the DUP, the pro-Brexit European Research Group (ERG), and remain-supporting Tories, to sink the deal.

Jeremy Corbyn said Labour would now press for a softer Brexit. “I believe there is a majority in this house for the sort of sensible, credible and negotiable deal that Labour has set out. I look forward to parliament taking back control so that we can succeed where this government has so blatantly failed,” he said.
…
Earlier, the attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, had called on his colleagues to treat the vote as a “political judgment”, after his much-anticipated legal advice offered little comfort to those concerned about the backstop.

In his statement, he suggested the changes reduced the risk of the UK being trapped indefinitely in the Northern Ireland backstop – but did not eliminate it.

Cox’s verdict was echoed in a statement published by a self-styled “star chamber” of leave-supporting lawyers, assembled by the ERG and including the DUP’s Nigel Dodds and the former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab.

They said the changes offered only “faint and remote prospects of escaping” from the backstop, and “do not materially change the position the UK would find itself in if it were to ratify the withdrawal agreement”.

Britain really needs to dump May, now, in almost the same way we need to dump our Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio. Her leadership and policies have demonstrably failed. This is supposed to be easier in a Parliamentary system yet she keeps hanging on because Tories are wary of the verdict of the voters and are seeking to delay it any way possible.

Throw the bums out. All of them.

Readers of my regular ruminations on Hessians perhaps think me ill disposed to those who foster and profit from Wars as professional murderers.

Mea culpa.

And there is no doubt Erik Prince falls in that category, death and destruction for a profit is what he sells and he is still trying to get Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio to privatize our misguided involvement in the Middle East for his financial benefit.

He has an inside track, he was an early and strong supporter of Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio and his sister, Betsy DeVos, currently serves as Education Secretary. They both subscribe to a particularly virulent and apocalyptic Evangelical Christianity that is far too common in Michigan which is one reason I’m eternally grateful to Richard and Emily for migrating East to saner climes. Don’t get me wrong, parts of the Mitten State are quite beautiful and provided you stay away from Religion and Politics, and the pervasive Racism doesn’t make you gag, it’s perfectly possible to have a pleasant conversation sitting on the Davenport sipping some Pop, but don’t drink the water! Lead and other Industrial Waste, they just don’t care (the roads are kind of odd too, straight as an arrow and a harsh concrete that makes your car oscillate between a thump and a howl).

Did I mention I was born there? Makes me eligible for French citizenship.

Anyway, I hope we’re beyond the point where merely referring to Al Jezzera at all puts me on a ‘No Fly’ list (not that I want to- 737 Max anyone?) because they’re Qatari, who are supposed to be our Arab friends, based and funded and on certain subjects they’re fairly reliable (as you could say about Russia Today).

Still, I’ve shied from using them for years (YouTube even warns you) because of the stigma but sometimes they come up with a story too big to ignore.

Yeah, that’s the interview, all of it, officially.

Demolishing Erik Prince: One TV interview shows how to deal with Trump’s allies
by Bob Cesca, Salon
March 12, 2019

Erik Prince, the former Blackwater CEO, Trump lackey and brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, made the wonderful mistake of appearing on Hasan’s show. I’m sure he regrets the hell out of it now. Here’s why.

In little more than two minutes, (Mehdi) Hasan not only illustrated how the press should be confronting the Trump crime family, he also worked his way through Prince’s series of excuses, the likes of which the rest of us commonly refer to as “gaslighting,” the tactic most often employed by Trump and his loyalists to make us feel like up is down, black is white, and we’re losing our minds.

Every observable indicator proves their collective guilt, including and especially Trump’s tweets, yet these ghouls continuously deny it, using childishly flimsy “who me?” excuses that only serve to worsen the appearance of guilt. Again, they can’t keep getting away with it.

Hasan began by quizzing Prince about his November 2017 congressional testimony in which he denied having any contacts with the Trump campaign — no “official or unofficial” role in the Trump campaign save for posting some yard signs and writing “papers.”

It turns out, however, that among other behind-the-scenes schemes — including an alleged meeting in the Seychelles to establish back-channel communications with the Russians — Prince attended an August 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which reps from an Israeli firm, the Psy Group, briefed Prince, Donald Trump Jr., Stephen Miller and George Nader about using social media to manipulate voters.

Hasan asked Prince why he didn’t disclose that meeting in his congressional testimony. Prince replied point-blank, “I did.” Without flinching, Hasan directly quoted the transcript of Prince’s testimony in which Prince flat out said other than the usual yard-sign crap, no, he played no role in the campaign.

This is where the gaslighting gets brutally thick. Prince, apparently taken off guard by the questioning, grinned and said, “We were there to talk about Iran policy.” Hasan asked if perhaps he should have disclosed that to the House Intelligence Committee. Prince: “I did.” Hasan hit back: The testimony doesn’t show any mention of Iran. So Prince scrambled for another preposterous excuse, saying with a grin, “I don’t know if they got the transcript wrong.”

I don’t know if they got the transcript wrong. Seriously. We’re supposed to believe the then-Republican controlled House Intelligence Committee accidentally omitted some BS line about Iran? Sorry, no. Understandably, the “Head to Head” audience laughed out loud at this stupid, crap-on-a-stick excuse by a conspirator whose motives are clear and whose collusion has been independently verified by numerous publications (here, here and here, for example). I mean, Prince himself admitted to Hasan on video that the meeting was real. We know people from the Psy Group were there, too, and we know the purpose had nothing to do with Iran policy.

Erik Prince was entirely cornered. His only recourse should have been to simply confess: he attended the meeting and then lied about it to Devin Nunes’ committee. Instead, we got the flimsiest of all answers: The transcript is wrong. It’s not unlike the president’s and Don Jr.’s experimentation with the so-obviously-guilty-it’s-ludicrous idea of putting the investigators on trial. All told, these are alibis torn from the same playbook as the dog ate my homework.

As Deep Throat says in “All the President’s Men,” “These aren’t very bright guys and things got out of hand.” Because the Trump gang are all such obvious nincompoops, it ought to be easier for American journalists to corner the Trumps with the kind of laser-like focus Hasan deployed against Erik Prince. While it’s almost hilariously easy to ensnare them in their own lies, every single one of these entitled, privileged, wealthy white guys still believes he can, in fact, keep getting away with it.

It helps, too, when journalists like Maggie Haberman of the New York Times grant them completely undeserved benefit of the doubt or when jurists like Judge T.S. Ellis sentence them to a wrist-slap cushioned by a gushing series of compliments, in the face of the most corrupt campaign and administration in U.S. history.

They think they can get away with it because the press and most of the Republican Party has allowed them to — from day one. And while a majority of American voters believe Trump and his men are guilty, and while we’re always hearing about Robert Mueller’s Herculean prosecutorial chops while the Southern District of New York is supposedly gearing up to outflank the White House, I’m not convinced the currently unindicted conspirators will ever face the accountability they so thoroughly deserve.

Money, influence and a compliant press are formidable roadblocks in the pursuit of justice, but not if the diligence of law enforcement and the stonewall fortitude of journalists like Mehdi Hasan continue to establish a benchmark for challenging them. No, they can’t keep getting away with it, and here’s to the men and women of strong will and clear eyes who will make sure of it.

No Collusion Pelosi? No Impeachment?

They are convicted by their own public statements! Is Impeachment now reserved only for Consensual (with creepy power dynamics) Blow Jobs? Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is unidicted for the crime of paying hush money to a Porn Star!

New ‘Dead On Arrival’ Budget today. It’s an aspirational document at best.

Ok, so it makes Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio a liar but I’ve already got 6 cords of wood from chopping off his nose not to spite his face but just so it will fit through doors.

What, hmm… amuses me more is how pure an expression of raw, rank, Republicanism it is. In short the tl;dr is that if you’re old, or sick, or poor, out on the ice flow you ingrate so we can give your taxes to Billionaires or spend it on planes that won’t fly in the damp and Vanity Project Penis Walls O’ Racism.

The new Trump budget is a horror show
By Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent, Washington Post
March 11, 2019

You may remember that when he ran for president in 2016, Donald Trump said lots of unusual things, among which were regular pledges that unlike his Republican primary opponents and others in his party, he’d protect the safety net. In the speech announcing his candidacy, he said, “Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts. Have to do it.”

Trump liked to emphasize how this position distinguished him. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” he said in an interview not long before that announcement. His campaign liked this promise so much they later published it on their web site. In fact, as early as 2011, when Trump was turning himself into a Republican political celebrity with Roger Ailes’ help with a regular gig on “Fox & Friends,” he attacked Paul Ryan for the congressman’s plan to cut entitlements, calling it an electoral “death wish.”

Yet the budget that the Trump administration just released contains enormous cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention domestic programs. In a word, it is positively savage. Some of the highlights:

• The Trump budget cuts $846 billion from Medicare over 10 years
• It cuts $241 billion from Medicaid
• It turns Medicaid into block grants, capping the amount each state receives, which when the money runs out would result in pared-back benefits, recipients being tossed off the program, or both
• It cuts $26 billion from Social Security
• It imposes work requirements on recipients of food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance, forcing them to navigate a bureaucratic maze or lose their benefits
• It cuts $220 billion from food stamps
• It cuts $1.1 trillion from domestic discretionary programs, which does not include Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security
• It cuts the Department of Housing and Urban Development by 16 percent and the Department of Education by 12 percent
• It cuts the EPA by 31 percent

In short, it’s Paul Ryan’s dream come true.
…
(T)here may be no president in modern history who has worked so hard for those at the top, combining tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations with an agenda of ruthless regulatory rollback whose targets are any regulations that protect consumers, workers, or people who enjoy breathing air and drinking water. If anything, since becoming president, Trump has only proven that he’s a different kind of Republican in ways that are damaging — going even further than most Republicans are willing to go on immigration and destructively upending our trade relationships, while going all in with the very worst aspects of the Republican philosophy of government on taxes and spending.

What makes this all the (more) remarkable, however, is that it comes right after Paul Ryan and Republicans lost control of the House, in a referendum on all the ways in which Trump has implemented his own version of Republican rule.

Consider: The midterm elections were all about Trump’s immigration agenda, the Trump/GOP effort to repeal Obamacare, and the massive GOP tax giveaway to corporations that Trump signed. And Democrats won the House in their largest victory since Watergate.
…
Trump is seeking an additional $8.6 billion for his border wall — after making the election all about the border (he even sent in the military as a campaign prop), and after losing a government shutdown battle over this same topic, one in which majorities firmly sided with Democrats.

Trump is seeking to block-grant Medicaid and impose work requirements — after an election in which Democrats routed Republicans in districts across the country by campaigning on a vow to protect Obamacare, which of course includes an open-ended expansion of Medicaid in states that have opted in.

And the Trump budget would make the tax cuts he signed permanent — after Republicans suffered a dramatic repudiation at the polls, despite their effort to sell those tax cuts as their primary accomplishment of the Trump era. Those tax cuts, of course, have led to an explosion of the deficit, repudiating GOP economic theory. Yet this budget only doubles down on that thinking and the broader set of priorities embedded in them, deeply cutting spending to help fund tax cuts and his border wall, even as his budget would produce trillion-dollar deficits in coming years.

“His budget doesn’t adapt to new political realities,” Joel Friedman, vice president for federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told us. “It adheres to the same structure that we’ve seen from Congressional Republican budgets dating back to Paul Ryan — tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts in programs that provide core public services, and cuts to the safety net that are assisting the most vulnerable.”

This budget appears to enshrine the notion that the 2018 elections never happened. Which may be exactly the point.

As I’ve pointed out before, it’s not the deficits I disagree with. It’s that we’re spending our money on stupid things that everyone hates.

“Scotland the Brave” by the Isle of Cumbrae Pipe Band as they march out of Braemar

Aye, ’tis exactly what you think.

But the truth is you’re not limited to Scotland the Brave or Amazing Grace, you can play any tune you want on the Pipes.

Here, for instance, is Purple Haze–

Though technically it’s played by a Bulgarian on a Gaida. There are other horrible and annoying instruments you can play Purple Haze on. An Accordion-

Electric Bassoon-

Cello-

My point is not that Pipes are horrible and annoying, they don’t have to be-

Megawatt – Celtica

And it isn’t as complicated as it looks. There’s a Bladder you fill with air and some Drones usually tuned to A (440 – 485 Mhz-ish) and a Chanter for the Melody that’s fingered similarly to a Recorder, so basically if you can play a Whistle you can play the Pipes, no Embouchure involved. The mouth part isn’t any more difficult than blowing up a balloon.

Not that I’m encouraging it mind you, the neighbors will soon tire of Flowers of the Forest and The Barren Rocks of Aden (most of the tunes are really, really sad), and Pipes are not PianoFortes- there is no volume control.

No, my point is that they’re greatly misunderstood and even were they not calculated to set your cats conspiring to smother you in your sleep, the repetitive nature of the fresh new Hell John Oliver has unleashed on the FCC is appropriate punishment.

I take a great deal of care to preserve my pseudonymity not because I delude myself it protects me from Spooks. I know Spooks, they laugh at me, tell me I’m paranoid, and it doesn’t thwart them at all.

No, I do it to shield myself from the onslaught of friends, acquaintances, spam, and those trolls who wish me a compliant “pragmatist” instead of my Lefty firebrand self (didn’t think I had enough influence to be noticed). It certainly applies to Robocalls too. My landline rolls into my Caller ID and voice mail and if you’re not my pharmacy, one of my doctors, or a friend or relative I can’t ignore it’s the same as my email policy-

Yeah, when I get around to it.

My Cell is more strictly guarded, basically outgoing only and a record of incoming numbers. I am so far fortunate that my obnoxiousness is sparing me from more than 2 or 3 spams a week, those I know who are less aggressive in discouraging contact report they are frequently inundated with more than that an hour.

You know, I like Pipes just fine, I just don’t want to listen to them all the time.

ps. Winter Is Here!