The Un-Celebration Of Our Nation Happening Now

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio at Crooks & Liars for sharing this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Remember everyone, stay safe this 4th of July weekend, party with friends as best you can, and pray that DC gets hit with monsoons all Saturday long. (we need the rain)

It's heartbreaking to talk about this; but we're heading into the big week of the Fourth of July this Saturday, and on what should be celebrated as a joyous 250th birthday of the nation's independence is instead turning into a wet blanket.

Having an aggrandizing, self-serving, moronic person in charge like donald trump would do that.

Not only hijacking the Kennedy Center to put his name on it when he didn't earn it, not only desecrating the White House with his dirt hole of a ballroom, not only turning the National Mall's Reflecting Pool into an algae-filled swamp... trump also hijacked the planned 250th celebrations - something in the works for years originally overseen by the Smithsonian Institute as a nonpartisan event - and turned it all into, well, unwanted eyesores and worse.

Edith Olmstead at the New Republic documented how bad it looked at the start of this weekend:

Somehow President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair keeps getting worse.

As temperatures topped 80 degrees Thursday, the festival’s food hall lost power, causing all the ice cream to melt, according to Fox 5 DC reporter Homa Bash.

The food hall wasn’t the only attraction affected by power outages. The much-hyped Ferris Wheel temporarily stopped running Thursday due to generator issues.

Much like that ungodly UFC fight stage set up on the White House lawn, this was a poorly-planned, poorly-prepared carny event you tend to find in a Walmart parking lot on the outskirts of Ocala.

The Great American State Fair was already off to a rocky start Wednesday evening when dozens of attendees were seen flocking toward the exits in the middle of Trump’s address, which was meant to kick-start the two-week event.

The line for admission appeared to dwindle on the festival’s second day.

Also on Thursday, Pennsylvania joined nine other states to pull out of the Freedom 250 gala on the National Mall, including Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Vermont.

A stall celebrating Maine remained empty Thursday, as the state did not send a delegation to Trump’s festival. Connecticut, too, was just “chairs,” according to Bash.

In spite of Fox Not-News shilling for the event lying about "thousands showing up," almost nobody wants to attend this "state fair". Half the displays are poorly put together. The wooden mockup of trump's planned triumphal arch looks pitiful and reportedly falling apart. Granted, this is just a replica, but how bad does it echo all of the other grand trumpian architectural plans that also fall apart or turn into boondoggles?

It's pretty much a given that the DC locals will not turn out for ANY trump-led event, but it's not looking like a lot of other Americans across this nation are making vacation plans to go visit our capitol to partake in any of this. Not even the cultists among the MAGA crowds seem eager to show up, arguably because they've got families for the 4th holidays - other travel plans already set - to be with instead.

Still, you would think if this had been a more bipartisan, non-political affair; not designed to promote trumpian fantasies like what we're getting now... If this had been any other person in the White House - even another Republican - do you think our 4th of July would turn into something this tasteless, gaudy, and broken?

Things will get worse as we get closer to this Saturday the 4th. trump wants to turn the day into his own personal rally (again), and gods help us how ugly that is going to get.

I'd rather celebrate our 4th of July in other ways... Hopefully Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will get married in New York City and we can all celebrate that.

Addendum: A sense of what we lost.

I know the list is endless but I genuinely think trashing the legitimate congressionally chartered org for celebrating the 250th to instead hijack our national assets and taxpayer funds for his personality cult grifter crap should, in and of itself, be fully sufficient to merit removal from office.

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— Andy Craig (@andycraig.bsky.social) June 28, 2026 at 12:19 PM

The Race By a Corrupt Selfish Power To Evade The Inevitable

Social media was abuzz yesterday about a report from the STAT website about a special approval on an experimental drug that went to a secret recipient (via Lizzy Lawrence):

Millions of Americans with obesity are eagerly awaiting a powerful new drug from Eli Lilly called retatrutide, which has demonstrated bariatric-surgery levels of weight loss. Some aren’t even waiting for approval from the Food and Drug Administration, instead racing to acquire it through sketchy means.

But STAT has learned that Eli Lilly and the FDA have allowed one person to gain access to the drug through the FDA’s “compassionate use” program, a pathway that gives patients with serious and immediately life-threatening medical issues access to experimental treatments. 

That means they exempted the rules for someone facing near-death urgency.

This person was a 79-year-old man at the time the request was made in April, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Those sources, who requested anonymity due to fear of reprisals, said it drew the interest of top health officials, suggesting the person receiving this drug was well connected.

Just those two facts - the age of the person and the fear of reprisals - points to the likelihood trump was that person (he was 79 back in April and he will send his lackeys on a rampage if anyone leaks his real health status).

The speculation that trump is dying right here and now has been ongoing since his return to power back in 2025. The past few months of him being near-collapse - falling asleep, showing more signs of dementia, the recurrent doctors' visits - have fueled the rumors.

Rather than force trump into retirement, rather than trigger the 25th Amendment clause to put trump on hiatus for three weeks until there's evidence he's healthier, rather than confront the reality of his mortality... his handlers are pumping trump full of every drug they can find to keep him upright until there's nothing left to do but call the morgue.

trump himself is deliriously hanging on to power: railing about conspiracies over the algae-infested Reflection Pool he blames on everyone else, saber-rattling (again) over seizing Greenland or Cuba (or Gods help us both, again), threatening to blow up Iran (again). he's eager to turn the upcoming 4th of July celebrations - meant to honor the 250th year of the Declaration of Independence and our nation's official birth - into his own trump rally; during which he could go off the rails on a rant towards the entire world, or worse collapse altogether.

These are dark days, and the corrupt powers in high places are racing to finish their works before their king trump can't cover for them anymore.

Coping With the Brexit Blues Ten Years On

I've been blogging long enough to honor 10-year anniversaries like Brexit. What I wrote back then:

It was supposed to be a throwaway moment: it was something Prime Minister Cameron promised to do last year during the Parliamentary elections as a way to keep voters from bolting to the anti-EU, anti-immigrant UKIP (aka British Trumpshirts) during a potentially tight run. The expectations - and the polling - kept pointing to a tough but clean win to Remain with the EU, because honestly most of the elites in politics and the media believed the voters wouldn't be stupid enough to commit economic suicide.

And then they counted the votes...

The British Pound dropped to a 30-year low compared to the US dollar. In about an hour it dropped faster than a blue whale without a parachute.

To say that the global markets went into panic mode AT THAT MOMENT and remained so well into today would be an understatement.

And so here I was, sitting at home watching all of this on an Internet I swore I wasn't going to pay attention to, and this was pretty much the one thought bouncing through my head:

YOU TOSSERS! YOU HAD ONE JOB!

You Brits could have retained some stability in all three major areas of public concern: your economy, your culture, your government. All three are now burning in the dumpster fire...

Prime Minister David Cameron went in one hour from being one of the most powerful men on the planet - Prime Minister ranks somewhere below President of the United States and slightly above t.e Actor Currently Playing The Doctor - to resigning from office in utter humiliation. Few Prime Ministers fell so low so fast. The resulting battle among Conservatives for the new leadership spot will likely spill over into a broken government, forcing a new round of elections sooner than the required five-year cycle...

Ten years on, we can see it got worse than that for the Tories: a revolving door of PMs - Teresa May who resigned in disgrace, to Boris Johnson who resigned in humiliating disgrace, to Liz Truss who resigned in utter humiliating disgrace, to Rishi Sunak who oversaw the Conservatives' worst electoral defeat since the 19th Century - as none of them could figure out a smooth exit from the European Union even if they wanted to (and in Boris' case, he eagerly pushed Britain out the airlock).

Brexit as an economic fiasco for the UK is so deep a problem that the Labour Party taking over in 2024 still hasn't figured out their own solutions for it, and became one of several factors in the recent resignation of their Prime Minister Keir Starmer just yesterday.

During my write-up for that article, I didn't have much to say about Brexit's effects as most of the coverage on Starmer's imminent departure focused on other woes. However, I did refer to an article from The Atlantic, a deep dive into the aftermath of Brexit and how it's sunk the UK's economy to the level of... well, the state of Mississippi (article by Idrees Kahloon):

Who broke Britain? Someone—or something—must have. The past 18 years, enough time for a whole lost generation to be born and brought up, have yielded nothing but stagnation and mass disillusionment. In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking.

But since then, Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London...

One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one...

Some in Britain blame rotten luck—the 2008 financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic, an energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine. But other countries endured these challenges too. What differentiated Britain was its self-sabotaging responses to these and other problems. Brexit is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. Bad choices, beginning just after the financial crisis, begot worse ones...

The country’s downward slide has been consistent in one respect: As Britain has become more and more aware of its diminishment, it has retreated ever more fully into a defensive crouch. Politics have become zero-sum, descending into fights over who has robbed whom. Suspicion has fallen, above all, on immigrants, whom both major parties have turned against. There is still an enduring strain of British exceptionalism, quieter and more understated than the American version, which suggests that by retreating inward, Britain can make itself great again. Astonishingly, or perhaps predictably, it is growing stronger as the country’s problems get worse.

In fairness, the 2008 financial crisis hit Britain especially hard. In the 1990s, both the Tories and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” Party made the same bet: Britain was to be a postindustrial, services-based economy, anchored in finance. Tax receipts from a booming London would be redistributed to lagging regions in the old industrial heartland, helping to renew them. Then came 2008, and London’s financial industry cratered.

But the government’s actions during and after the crisis compounded the damage. Rather than increase spending to revive depressed demand, as modern Keynesians would counsel, the government, then led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opted to slash budgets as revenue plunged. The theory was that fiscal discipline—cutting spending more sharply than Britain’s peer countries—would inspire confidence and spur growth. At the time, deficits and debt were seen as immoral; unlike profligate Greece, Britain would manage its affairs prudently.

The promised growth did not materialize, and austerity left scars that linger still...

Conservatives, if one looks back to moments like the Great Depression, do not buy into Keynesian policies. The problem is, even when their austerity measures clearly falter they refuse to change tactics, and instead double-down on the blame-shifting.

Austerity was felt most harshly by those who were already suffering after deindustrialization. The welfare state had partially compensated the losers from globalization. When it abruptly shrank—because the masters of the universe had miscalculated—anger erupted upward, at British elites, and also outward, at European migrants, who were competing for jobs and public services. It was because of this political pressure that Cameron made another fateful decision: to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. This was a gambit; Cameron expected the vote to fail. He did not want to leave the European Union, but he wanted to arrest the rise of figures such as Nigel Farage, the longtime gadfly of British politics, who had been campaigning for withdrawal from the EU for decades. Left-behind Britain, the places especially harmed by austerity cuts, voted overwhelmingly to leave. The morning after he lost the referendum, Cameron resigned, ushering in a period of political instability that has now lasted a decade, and shows no sign of ending...

I recommend you go and read Kahloon's article in full, because he goes into a lot more detail about the decline of industry in the more remote parts of England - everything outside of London - as well as the rise of Farage's latest political farce Reform (he abandoned UKIP when it got too overtly racist) even as much of the Brexit destruction is due to Farage's efforts.

So how does this all relate to Mississippi?

If you don't know, Mississippi is one of the poorest and most broken-down states in the Union. The roads and bridges are some of the worst in terms of safety and condition. Half the state suffers from sustained poverty for longer than 20 years. It's in the bottom five of worst states to live in.

A good example is the condition of the state's own capital Jackson, where infrastructure has broken down completely and there's no clean water (via Drew Costley and Emily Wagster Pettus with AP News, published through PBS Newshour):

But the crisis in the city of Jackson isn't over, even if its boil-water advisory was lifted on Thursday (in 2022). While the state plans to stop handing out free bottled water at sites around the city Saturday night, the city said water pressure still hasn't been fully restored, and state health officials said lead in some pipes remains so worrisome that pregnant women and young children should still use bottled water...

Other residents told The Associated Press on Friday that their water remains too discolored to count on, so now they'll have to rely on water distribution by community-run charities or buy water again themselves, adding insult to injury.

Jackson had already been under a state health department boil-water notice for a month when torrential rain fell in August, flooding the Pearl River and overwhelming the treatment system. Water pressure abruptly dropped, emptying faucets for days.

How did this happen? Residents, politicians, experts and activists say systemic racism is the root cause.

Jackson's population has declined since 1980, a decade after the city's schools began integrating. Many white families left for the suburbs, leaving less revenue to maintain the infrastructure. Middle class Black people then moved out to escape urban decay and rising crime. State and federal spending never made up the difference.

"The legacy of racial zoning, segregation, legalized redlining have ultimately led to the isolation, separation and sequestration of racial minorities into communities (with) diminished tax bases, which has had consequences for the built environment, including infrastructure," said Marccus Hendricks, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland.

Heather McTeer Toney worked to clean up discolored tap water as mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, before serving as the Environmental Protection Agency's southeast regional administrator from 2014 to 2017. Now she works on environmental justice issues nationwide for the Environmental Defense Fund. She said many majority-minority communities lack consistent access to clean water.

"Any community that is suffering from lack of infrastructure maintenance is dealing with the same problem, maybe just on a different scale," Toney said. "But across the nation, with .... poor communities that are often Black, brown, Indigenous and on the frontlines of the climate crisis, we see the same thing happening over and over again."

There have been studies over the decades highlighting how pervasive racism is when it comes to dealing with poverty, improving living standards, and community developments. I can't find it now, but one of my coworkers at the North Regional Library back in the 1990s showed me a survey where they polled white folks asking if they preferred taking a five percent pay increase if it meant blacks would get a two percent increase, or taking a two percent pay cut if it meant blacks would get a five percent pay cut... and a majority of whites went with the pay cut. I'd love to find the source for that again, because it highlights the viciousness and irrationality of racism: Under normal rules of economic theory, everyone would take the pay increase; but because of racism, whites will take the pay cut if it means blacks get it worse.

The racism holding down Mississippi is now the racism holding down the United Kingdom, and it was recognized even as the Brexit vote blew up everything (via Leah Donnella at NPR):

So why did the U.K. vote for something so politically and economically disruptive? Some say race has a lot to do with it — specifically, the racial tension that has resulted from the U.K.'s recently welcoming in record numbers of immigrants. In 2015, 630,000 foreign national migrants came to the U.K. from both inside and outside the EU. This year, the U.K. has ushered in an additional 333,000.

The campaign to get the U.K. to leave the EU (also known as the "Leave" campaign) was spearheaded by the right-wing, populist UK Independence Party, or UKIP. The party, led by Member in the European Parliament Nigel Farage, says that the EU "means the end of the UK as an independent, self-governing nation with its own government and its own borders."

For months, UKIP has fought for the United Kingdom's independence from the EU — some say by capitalizing on racially charged animus toward immigrants. In the Washington Post, writer Anyusha Rose points to the Leave campaign as evidence that in the U.K., "racism is no longer racism — it's legitimate opinion."

By 2019, the effects of racism in the Brexit decision were more clear (via the BBC):

Racism and race-related hate crime has increased since the 2016 Brexit referendum, with officers appointed to deal with resultant "tensions".

Three of the four Welsh police forces reported rises in the last five years, figures released to the BBC show.

Eryl Jones, from charity Show Racism the Red Card, said he believed Brexit had been a "major influence".

It comes as 24 community cohesion officers are being appointed by councils across Wales...

"Incidents of racism have gone up throughout the UK as well as in Wales since the campaign to leave the EU, " Mr Jones said.

"It's fairly obvious that Brexit has been a major influence..."

Home Office figures show hate crimes in England and Wales rising over the past five years - with a spike, it says, since 2016...

It's a simple equation: The racism spurs more poverty, and the poverty spurs more racism.

The only way the UK can break the cycle - to avoid the fate of Mississippi, which devolved into one of the poorest states as far back as the American Civil War, and which fought with gun and noose for decades to keep itself poor and racist - is to wake up to the horrors that anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence inflicts upon themselves, recognize where poverty is at its worst and spend like hell to undo the damage it leaves on families across the board, and look at rejoining their neighboring nations in an economic deal that would reinvigorate their dying industries at home.

Don't end up like Mississippi. Don't end up the trashy trailer park of nations on the European continent.

How To Lose A Kingdom Without Even Trying: UK 2026 Edition

And I thought American politics was a complete shitshow. What the hell, Great Britain? (via Lauren Frayer at NPR)

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has resigned as leader of the United Kingdom's governing Labour Party, clearing a path for the country's seventh prime minister in a decade.

Starmer said he will remain as caretaker prime minister until his party selects a new leader, asking his party to begin nominations on July 9.

Andy Burnham, the popular former mayor of Greater Manchester, England, confirmed on social media that he'll seek to succeed Starmer. Another potential contender, former U.K. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, posted a letter saying he would back Burnham's bid. So Burnham could run for the Labour Party leadership — and ultimately prime minister — uncontested, and enter office in late July.

The center-left Labour Party was elected two years ago with a landslide majority in the U.K. Parliament. Since then, Starmer's personal approval ratings have slumped to a historic low. Polls show voters believe he failed to deliver palpable change after austerity and budget cuts under 14 years of previous Conservative Party rule. He was also criticized for appointing Peter Mandelson, a close friend of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as British ambassador to Washington.

This is the seventh turnover at 10 Downing Street since David Cameron resigned ten years ago. At this point, just fucking promote Larry the Cat to PM.

At least Starmer lasted longer than Liz Truss, but considering it's less than two years since that huge electoral win in July 2024, this is not a great sign for Labour on how they're handling things in the UK.

I mean, look back at how things were that 4th of July:

I'm not sure how the Tories are going to convince themselves they know what they're doing after a massive shift in voter support like this. They had picked up a major victory in 2019 gaining an 80-seat majority, and by the next election are losing 170 seats. A comparable situation would be like the House Republicans getting their 6-seat majority in 2022 only to have the Democrats flip it to a 60 seat majority in 2024 (postscript: goddammit American voters)...

Next will be a question of how Labour is going to fix all the damage - the austerity economics getting out of the Great Recession, the various scandals over their tenure, and of course Brexit - this inept, corrupt Tory leadership has done since 2010.

And that was the thing: Starmer and the Labour Party had a huge mandate from their voters, a massive shift of control in Parliament that had to be an angry response from their nation over the decades-long failures of the Conservative Party. The mandate was obvious: Do Anything and Everything Opposite of What the Bloody Tories Did.

And then Starmer... kind of did nothing. Other than perform miscue after miscue, failing to push needed changes to the economy, and getting ensnared in scandals that were easily avoided (via Jill Lawless and Pan Pylas with AP News, but linked through PBS Newshour):

It's a precipitous downfall from July 4, 2024, when Starmer brought the center-left Labour Party back to power after 14 years, winning 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

Standing outside 10 Downing St. the next day, Starmer pledged to restore "respect to politics" and lead a government of "public service." After the chaos of the last years of Conservative rule, which saw a constant churn of scandal and the toppling of prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss in quick succession, Starmer promised to lower the temperature and make politics a little bit more boring.

Some of the problems that felled him were baked into his victory, which was built on a wide but shallow base of support. Labour won a huge majority in Parliament but was backed by only 34% of voters — and many of those appeared motivated by anger at the Conservatives rather than enthusiasm for Labour. It's been termed the "loveless landslide."

This lack of excitement for his government was compounded by missteps. An early furor over accepting valuable gifts, including designer spectacles and Taylor Swift concert tickets, was followed by a series of policy U-turns, especially clumsy attempts to cut welfare spending that stirred anger in Labour ranks.

What ultimately destroyed his credibility was his appointment of Peter Mandelson to the plum post of the United Kingdom's ambassador to the U.S. It was an error of judgment he couldn't shake off.

Mandelson, a Labour Party elder statesman nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness," was seen as someone who could help Britain navigate U.S. President Donald Trump's second term. His trade expertise and comfort around the ultra-rich were considered major assets.

But the choice of Mandelson — who in 2003 called himself Epstein's "best pal" — backfired spectacularly when documents came to light in September 2025 showing how close his ties to Epstein had been. Starmer fired Mandelson, but further revelations in the following months plunged his leadership into crisis...

First elected to Parliament in 2015, Starmer was picked to lead and rebuild Labour five years later after the party's worst election result since 1935. Starmer dragged Labour toward the political center after taking over from veteran socialist Jeremy Corbyn, who led Labour to election defeats in 2017 and 2019. Starmer ditched some of his predecessor's more left-wing policies and apologized for antisemitism that an internal investigation concluded had been allowed to spread under Corbyn.

Starmer's forensic and prosecutorial skills were on display in Parliament, where he tormented the three Conservative prime ministers he faced. He was especially scathing in attacks on Boris Johnson, who allowed parties inside Downing Street during the COVID-19 pandemic, in violation of the country's lockdown rules.

But being prime minister required a different skill set and Starmer often fell short, lacking the flexibility and political instincts that the job requires — at least on the domestic front.

He attracted a level of vitriol from some voters out of step with his managerial demeanor. Hard-right activists shouted crude abuse at protests, he alienated retirees and working-class families with attempts to cut welfare benefits and angered pro-Palestinian voters with a perceived reluctance to criticize Israel during the Gaza war...

A number of other things happened - and didn't happen - which condemned the Labour leadership. The overt attempts to pander to a "centrist" position alienated the left-leaning base and did nothing to draw the right-leaning voters away from the extremism of Farage. Above all, what ruined Starmer was inaction resolving the major political issue of the United Kingdom - Brexit - that politicians didn't even want to discuss while a growing majority of Brits hate it and want it gone.

For any deeper insight on Brexit, I read Chris Grey's Brexit blog: His observations a week back - during the theatrics of by-elections leading up to Starmer's resignation - are thorough.

After all, assuming that, as polls increasingly suggest is likely, Andy Burnham wins in Makerfield that seems likely to herald several weeks of a Labour leadership contest ending, potentially, with yet another new Prime Minister. That seems all the more possible with the resignation of the Defence Secretary yesterday, followed by that of the Armed Forces Minister, adding to the existing sense that Keir Starmer’s leadership is in crisis and its days are numbered. Perhaps a Burnham premiership would bring some fresh momentum to politics, and some impression of direction, but it’s hard to be optimistic about that, if only because not only are Britain’s problems deeper than its leader but they also tend to militate against any leader being effective...

That is frankly pitiful given that the reset was Labour’s central policy on what has been the defining political issue of the last decade, and that David Lammy, the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, said in 2023 that it would be Labour’s “number one” foreign policy priority if they came to power. It is all the more pitiful given the profound changes and dangers in international relations since then. And if it is true (which seems highly plausible) that it is agreeing a YMS which is holding things up then that is not just pitiful but shameful, in two ways. First because it shows a lack of realism, given that this was always the key EU requirement if there was to be a deal on the UK’s priorities. And secondly because it shows another of the ways that the government has chosen to be driven by the anti-immigration agenda of Reform.

The latter connects with the much deeper reason why the present moment is not just wearisome but one of despair and, even, fear. It is apparently now inevitable that every time there is a serious crime which has any connection with immigration it will be followed by street violence accompanied by a vicious, frenzied ‘debate’ conducted in terms framed by Nigel Farage and others on the far right, not least because major broadcasters, most importantly the BBC, are prone to adopt that framing. This is not simply an opinion on my part, or an evidence-free jibe: it flows directly from the plans the BBC drew up last year to win over Reform voters, who it feared were losing trust in its output, by changing both its news “story selection” and drama offerings so as to appeal to them...

This is part of why Starmer and Labour are struggling: They're fighting a Far Right fearmongering Narrative that their nation's own media deploys to the detriment of everyone, which drives the party to tack to a centrist spot that's not even centrist (it's racist. I digress). Regarding a murder case where "reverse racism" was tossed about creating disinfo and distrust, Grey noted:

In short, this case does not demonstrate the “two-tier policing” or the “anti-white prejudice” Farage claimed, in a preposterously self-important “emergency address” to the nation. Yet such claims had the unsurprising consequence of significant public disorder in Southampton, just as the furore after the Southport murders did (and, as in that case, the treatment of the rioters was treated as further evidence of two-tier policing). Equally unsurprisingly, it turned out that, far from being ‘ordinary decent people’ expressing their ‘legitimate concerns’, many of the Southampton ‘protestors’ were neo-Nazi activists, whilst one of the first to appear in court was a thug with a string of previous convictions for violence.

It has been suggested, not implausibly, that Farage was motivated to stir up, in his words, “pure, cold rage” partly as a distraction from the questions he has sought to avoid about his £5 million gift and partly to respond to the electoral threat from Rupert Lowe’s Restore party in the Makerfield by-election and the more general competition between the two men and their parties. Perhaps, but it is surely the case that, even without those incentives, he would have done the same thing since he routinely does so...

This highly febrile moment was the worst imaginable time for the news that a grotesque attempted murder had been allegedly committed by a Sudanese refugee in Belfast. The case was very different in its details, but the familiar patterns of social media outrage quickly led to far more extreme violence in Belfast than had occurred in Southampton. In Belfast, gangs of masked men sought out individuals and families who were refugees, or simply ‘foreign’, to attack them and burn their homes, along with wider violence against the police and other targets. Evidence is now emerging that a ‘target list’ of immigrants’ addresses had been drawn up months ago, well before this week’s stabbing, suggesting that this was merely a pretext.

These were not, as the Telegraph described them, “protests”. A more accurate term was that used by the Times: it was a “pogrom”. That term, more often associated with anti-Semitic violence, has a particular, and controversial, historical association in Northern Ireland, dating back to the 1920s and in that and other ways the meaning of this week’s violence in Northern Ireland is somewhat different to that in mainland Britain...

As for Farage, if he had indeed felt any sense of shame the previous week there was no sign of it in his response to the Belfast violence as he gloatingly ‘warned’ that “things will continue to kick off” and will continue to do so “over the course of the summer”, whilst claiming that “the vast majority” involved in the disorder are not “bad actors” but (he implied but did not say) just ordinary decent people with legitimate concerns. He could hardly conceal his glee, any more than could those recycling the now-popular predictions of imminent civil war.

It's in that kind of social media environment - a Far Right mob one match away from starting an inferno - similar to the conditions here in the United States over the past 20-30 years, where Culture War upstarts, thence Tea Party protestors, thence MAGA insurrectionists skew the public discourse towards racism, anti-immigration outrage, and threats (and acts) of violence towards those liberals they deem "enemies". As much as we've seen the likes of Obama and Biden try to placate the other side of the aisle with bipartisan appeals, none of it ever worked. And it's in that kind of environment Starmer offered similar appeals and failed.

Starmer has been quite robust, ever since the asylum hostel riots shortly after he first came to power, in condemning far-right violence. Yet he and his government have done nothing to counter the general proposition that immigration and asylum seekers are a ‘problem’ requiring draconian restrictions. Indeed, as regards Brexit, specifically, there can be no doubt that the main reason for the ‘red lines’ is to forestall the return of freedom of movement of people. The most charitable reading of Labour’s approach to immigration is that it is a tactic to de-fang the far right: if so, it is abundantly clear that it has failed.

Not mentioned in Grey's article was the speech Starmer offered back in 2025 that could highlight the moment Starmer lost his own party base: the "Island of Strangers" anti-immigrant screed that immediately backfired on him (via Rajeev Syal at the Guardian):

The rhetoric was likened by some critics to the language of Enoch Powell, and the prime minister was accused of pandering to the populist right by insisting he intended to “take back control of our borders” and end a “squalid chapter” of rising inward migration.

Some politicians claimed that his words had echoed Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech, which imagined a future multicultural Britain where the white population “found themselves made strangers in their own country”.

When asked to respond to accusations he had adopted Powell’s rhetoric, Starmer told the Guardian: “Migrants make a massive contribution to the UK, and I would never denigrate that.”

But in words that could further enrage his critics, Starmer insisted that new migrants must “learn the language and integrate” once in the UK. He said: “Britain is an inclusive and tolerant country, but the public expect that people who come here should be expected to learn the language and integrate.”

Several Labour MPs questioned whether Starmer’s policies were fuelling racism. Sarah Owen, the Labour chair of the women and equalities committee, who is of Malaysian-Chinese heritage, said: “Chasing the tail of the right risks taking our country down a very dark path.

“The best way to avoid becoming an ‘island of strangers’ is investing in communities to thrive – not pitting people against each other.”

Rose Judson over at Balloon Juice - the resident UK resident for that site - shared a few snippets of Starmer's failure including a Bluesky skeet that showed how that "island of strangers" speech angered the Labour base and did nothing to appeal to the racist Right:

Then came a new flashpoint: the "islands of strangers" speech. Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters reacted strongly against it, with Starmer losing net positive favourability among 2024 Labour voters for the first time, while receiving absolutely no credit from voters on the right.

[image or embed]

— Dylan Difford (@dylandifford.bsky.social) June 21, 2026 at 1:20 PM

Just in case the skeet disappears or the embed fails...

Pandering Never Works, case study no. 9876543210.

Judson has to live with this mess, and she's not thrilled about how it's staging to be the same old same old:

And there isn’t a woman or non-white person in the frame anywhere, which tells you a lot about the state of this party. It’s a depressing brew made from the dregs of Blairism, which was the dregs of Thatcherism, and all of it poisoned by Brexit.

Will an ambitious metropolitan mayor bring change at Number 10? For reasons, I have my doubts, especially since Burnham’s recent public statements include a bit of tacking to the center. We’ll see what happens in the coming months. Fingers crossed it won’t be same shit, different hair.

The best that the people of the United Kingdom can hope for is that the incoming PM - Burnham until further notice (or scandal) - makes a strong plan to undo Brexit and restart their struggling economy (which is now performing worse than Mississippi, one of the poorest states we've got), that he confronts the likes of Farage and hold him accountable for his incitements to race riots, and that he gets on the BBC's case and brings Doctor Who back out of hiatus, preferably with Emilia Jones as the new Doctor.

...I'm not joking.

The Neverending Cycle of trumpian Failure: War With Algae Edition

This all for the record started back in April of this year when trump - high on his own narcissism regarding the desecration of the East Wing, and decades believing his own architectural tastes were above reproach - decided out of nowhere to have the great Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial get its surface painted blue.

As Collin Binkley reported for AP News back then: 

President Donald Trump is having the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool coated in a swimming pool surface hued in “American flag blue,” covering up a decades-old granite surface that he said was “leaking like a sieve” and would take years to replace.

The president announced the renovation at an Oval Office event Thursday, saying the coating had already begun. He was inspired to tackle the project after a friend visited from Germany and lamented that the water was filthy and looked disgusting, Trump said.

I don't think trump ever mentioned who the friend was - one of the many faceless "brave strong types" who come up with tears in their eyes calling trump "sir" in eternal gratitude - and I don't believe trump ever pointed to any official study into the pool's condition as justification for getting this done. I am firmly convinced trump decided to get the reflecting pool painted because he got it confused with "swimming pool," which is a different type of pool altogether.

The project is one more makeover refashioning the nation’s capital to Trump’s liking, following others such as the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make room for a new ballroom...

In Trump’s telling, the reflection pool project is a case study in business acumen. The president said he scrapped plans to have the granite replaced, which he said was estimated to cost $301 million and would take at least three years.

Instead, Trump said he called a few pool contractors he knows from past real estate projects — “I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools up the road,” Trump said.

The guy in question turned out to have gotten a no-bid contract for $1.7 million or so (and cost overruns no surprise ballooned to $13 million), and that the guy once bribed Democratic congresscritter James Traficant Jr. back in the day. You can't make this shit up.

trump bulldozed ahead on this project in spite of people warning him that painting the pool surface would cause rapid algae growth. Because it turned out, yes it did (via Jenna Lee at Washingtonian):

The Trump administration’s renovations of the Reflecting Pool on DC’s National Mall held up for about a week.

Construction crews spent weeks painting the more-than-2,000-foot-long pool “American Flag Blue” at Donald Trump’s request, ahead of the country’s 250th birthday. Although the shallow Reflecting Pool has long been plagued by algae growth, a pool renovation expert told Washingtonian that the color of the paint could be exacerbating the problem.

On Wednesday, a day after the basin was refilled, workers were seen cleaning out clumps of algae—which have transformed the pool’s signature reflection to a mossy green. The algae resurfaced by Friday morning...

Steve Goodale, a Canadian swimming pool specialist who goes by “Swimming Pool Steve,” said the darker blue of the renovated pool may worsen the pool’s existing algae problem absent other mitigation efforts, because the darker color will absorb more sunlight and increase the water temperature, making the pool ripe for more algae blooms. 

“If we change nothing else except the color, and we go from a lighter color to a darker color, absolutely you’re going to have more prolific algae growth,” Goodale said. “It’s a foregone conclusion.” 

This wasn't a case study in business acumen. This was a case study in self-aggrandizing stupidity, driven by an ignorant asshole who thinks he's smart and classy and nowhere near either.

The locals have seen algae in the reflecting pool before, but by most accounts on social media they've never seen it bloom as quickly or thoroughly as it has with the painted surface.

Making things worse is that the paint isn't working: it's peeling away in chunks highlighting how cheap and ill-done the whole job had been (via Sahil Kapur and Sophie Ziedalski at NBC News):

President Donald Trump’s makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations is not going according to plan...

Then, the new Trump-branded “American flag blue” color was short-lived as algae turned the pool green, causing the administration to send crews to dump hydrogen peroxide into the expansive pool to deal with the problem.

In recent days, NBC News spotted some blue paint chipping off the surface, with strips of it peeling away and floating atop the pool for visitors and passers-by to see as the busy summer tourist season in the nation’s capital gets underway.

Not a good look at all for trump, is it?

Which is why trump's response isn't so shocking: Rather than admit a screwup, trump is blaming everyone else as "vandals" and having police - some of them from other states??? I need verification on that report - go around the pool arresting people. For example, this former Olympian (via Bailey Richards at People (yes, they've actually been doing solid reporting on trump's failures)):

Former Olympic canoeist David Carter "Davey" Hearn was arrested for destruction of government property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hours before President Donald Trump claimed it was vandalized following its recent renovation. Hearn claims he was just touching a piece of detached liner.

United States Park Police officers arrested the 67-year-old — who competed in the canoe slalom in three Summer Olympics — on Friday, June 19, after he stopped to look at the newly renovated Washington, D.C., pool in the midst of a 52-mile bike ride, according to The Washington Post.

Hearn told The Post that after noticing a piece of liner that was partially detached from the pool, which was painted "American Flag Blue” as part of its more than $14 million renovation, he reached into the water to see what the piece felt like — and just moments later, he was being arrested.

While preparing to leave and continue his bike ride, the U.S. Park Police officers arrested and detained the former Olympian on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property, per The Post. Hearn claimed to the newspaper that his detainment at a Park Police facility lasted for nearly five hours, and he was allowed to leave at around 9 p.m. local time.

If the police are going around arresting people for "destruction of government property," they need to go arrest trump for how he fucked up the reflecting pool in the first place (as well as what he'd done to the East Wing of the White House).

And Hearn is not the only one: Social media is displaying other arrests going on around the poolside over the weekend. Given how trump is using the Justice Department to go after his enemies, I wouldn't be surprised of any escalation of arrests so that trump can shift blame onto any locals and tourists his thugs can grab along the Mall.

trump is desperate to have everything "look perfect" for his glorified attempt to hijack the 250th birthday of the nation this 4th of July, even if it means putting National Guard troops - they're still stuck in DC on trump's orders - around the Mall to prevent anyone getting close enough to see how algae-clogged our national landmark is. Never mind the physical damage left behind by trump's bloated and unpopular UFC staging on the White House lawn - NOW it looks like a landfill, thanks trump! - which will cost millions to landscape: Just add that to the ugliness of the pit trump has dug into the ground for his ballroom vanity project.

In the meantime, the algae keeps growing back, thanks to trump's deluded beliefs he alone can make things better.

Gods help this nation. 77 million of us elected a vain moron, and the damage is becoming more clear even without a reflective pool to show us.

The Neverending Cycle of trumpian Failure: War With Iran Edition

I kept thinking of when and how to respond to this recent (as of June 14th) cycle of trump trying to bully, buy, and bluff his way out of his Iranian fuckup of a war; but kept stalling because new developments involving this latest "treaty" - which is actually a Memorandum Of Understanding, more of a handshake to agree on further handshakes - got worse as the week went on.

Well, it's Saturday and I've got nothing else to but laundry and waiting for afternoon thunderstorms - if any comes - so let's just go to Graeme Wood at the Atlantic to summarize how bad it is:

The Iran deal has been described as a “humiliation” for the United States, since the upshot is that America gets little that it didn’t already have before the war, and Iran gets security guarantees and a big pile of money. Donald Trump’s agreement leaves Iran a theocratic state free to arm itself with ballistic missiles and drones and to murder its own citizens. Its terms suggest that this much-despised state will, after a 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, have the ability to regulate maritime traffic...

Humiliation, however, is distinct from defeat. Only the United States was humiliated; both countries have experienced a catastrophic loss. The defeat for the United States is the more obvious of the two: a loss of standing and the confirmation that even a rich country cannot force its will on a poor but determined one. For Iran, the defeat is subtler. Bordering countries once considered it a problem neighbor and now know it to be an outright threat. They are arming themselves accordingly and seeking ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s economy has been a disaster for about 15 years and is now a total wreck. Sanctions relief will help, but who exactly will want to invest in a country whose government is sustained by brutality and ruled according to the whims of a junta led by a mangled religious fanatic...?

The humiliation is the point. Iran got the United States to sign a document that even Americans described as degrading, mortifying, a total capitulation. Who cares if the deal never really happens, or if each part turns out to be a little less sweet than it first appears? Iran has never before won a war, and even the blows it has struck against the United States, Israel, and its own citizens have up to now been pathetic and furtive, taking the form of terror attacks and indirect action through proxies. The existence of an understanding, with humiliating terms for America, is a heap of symbolic and emotional capital that no Iranian regime has enjoyed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

The optics of the whole deal even as trump shouted how great it was got more humiliating - or funny depending on your sense of humor and awareness of history - when trump made a big deal of signing the MOU while he attended the G7 conference of the major economic powers while it was being held in France at Versailles.

...Yes. He really signed a terrible "treaty" at Versailles. trump never DID have a firm understanding of world history, and none of his lackeys seemed to see the problems of recreating one of the more disparaged peace treaties in European history. The only way trump and his handlers could have screwed this up more would have been signing the deal in Munich.

One of the reasons I didn't want to say anything about trump's "victory" in getting that napkin signed was because I knew - and I know many other more versed experts on foreign policy knew - this peace deal wasn't going to last, no different than all the other times trump crowed he'd gotten the Strait of Hormuz reopened or forced Iran to give up their missiles and nukes (in progress).

And, to no one's surprise except Lindsey Graham's, the Iranian government declared this morning that the Strait is closed (again) because Israel under Netanyahu - WHY did you let him back into power, Israel??? - is still bombing Lebanon as part of Netanyahu's big plan to keep warring and stay in office.

The only way this war ends is if Iran makes the demand that the US government hands over trump (and his other pro-war advisors) to them for war crimes, and the Republicans in Congress finally decide to cave on that. One hopes.

Update: the PolandBall guys on YouTube understand perfectly what this meant.

Things Are Flying Everywhere Over Moscow Tonight

You were discussing, uh, air supremacy, Sir Arthur?
-- from the movie Patton, as the characters are hiding under a table during a German air raid

If you wanna know how Putin's war on Ukraine is going, just look to how Moscow is blowing up (via Peter Beaumont, Pjotr Sauer, and Jennifer Rankin for the Guardian):

Ukrainian drones have hit several locations across Moscow in Kyiv’s biggest air raid on the city since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, setting a major ⁠oil refinery on fire and forcing evacuations at the country’s largest airport.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the attack as a response to Russia’s strike on a historic Kyiv monastery complex earlier this week.

“We do not want this war and never did,” the Ukrainian president said in a voice message to journalists. “But if Ukraine is going to burn, your Moscow will burn too … it is time to end the aggression, time to end this war.”

Heavy smoke has been covering Moscow for days now, with reports of soldiers running around in public with shoulder-mounted anti-air rockets trying to shoot down the drones that civilians cannot ignore.

One of those attempted shoot-downs ended up as a own-goal, when one of those missiles failed to target and slammed into a large refinery tank, leading to this explosion:

UFO jokes flew faster than that tank lid:

As an X-Phile,
I love this poster

Putin can try to gaslight his own people about all this, but he can't hide all that smoke and all that flame. He's been promising Russians a huge victory over Ukraine for years now, and it's becoming clearer he and his country aren't winning.