It's nine thirty in the morning and I have got my cool paint splattered shirt and trousers on ready for a day of decorating. Already I can hear Mrs Pudding prowling - telling me non-verbally to get off my backside and get cracking. Okay! Okay! I'm coming!
No time to write a proper blogpost so on this politically significant day across the Atlantic Ocean, I just want to plead with American visitors to this blog to:-
It's not just about America, it's about the future direction of this planet.
What are we decorating? Something for the new baby?
ReplyDeleteNo, the dining room. I have just finished the ceiling and frieze above the picture rail. White on white is not easy.
DeleteFingers crossed!
ReplyDeleteCome on America! Do the right thing! Dump Trump!
DeleteOff to vote. I honestly had difficulty falling asleep last night. The idea that we will not know the outcome of this election for days is a jarring thought. I keep telling myself that he can't possibly win, but I remember vividly how sure I was of this in 2016.
ReplyDeleteAs you voted for Mr Biden you are allowed to visit this blog again Debby.
DeleteBiden all the way!! We're headed to the polls in a couple of hours and prepared to wait as long as it takes. Blue up and down the ballot!
ReplyDeleteShame that voting frequently takes a long time in America. Is that really democracy?
DeleteVoting usually doesn't take this long. The turnout for this election is going to be astronomical. The first year Obama was elected was a big turnout year and I ended up waiting about an hour and a half, I think. The numbers this year are going to blow that out of the water, I think.
DeleteBut we got lucky this morning: stood in line for 20-30 minutes, and we were done and out of there. What a relief!
Did it two weeks ago by mail. Got an email confirmation from my Board of Elections, first, that it had been received, and then a second email indicating that it has already been counted. The level of stress is pretty high. Fingers/toes crossed.
ReplyDeleteAs you are also a Biden voter you have a free pass to this blog Mary!
DeleteDecorating? Are you expecting someone? Better clean the bathroom as well.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how to do part (b)!
DeleteHere's hoping.
ReplyDeleteOne nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Delete*We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are born equal ...*
DeleteAmerican immigrants left behind the pogroms and corrupt aristocracy of Europe.
Jimmy Baldwin (YouTube) on the Dick Cavitt Show reminds us that black people are patriots too.
They only asked that Jefferson's *all* include them.
If he loses The Donald is going to build the biggest golfing park in the north of England. And it's on your doorstep, Yorky.
ReplyDeleteThe Sheffield Curlew Leisure Park will come with a Luxury Hotel, Casino, Spa, Sauna, and Eternal Youth Health Club. Finally your beloved meadowlands and moors will be put to a good purpose. There may even be a job for you, Yorky. As a caddy.
Any complaints (which will be dropped into the North Sea) should be addressed to The Donald's public relations agency: Hameldaeme, Donald Trump Avenue, Glasgow.
That's funny. I did not hear about that on BBC Radio Sheffield.
DeleteIf you have a strong back you will be a fine caddy.
DeleteWe'll give you time and quarter for working Sundays and Bank Holidays.
Always remember to say, *President Trump is the finest man I have ever known, and I would trust him with my 19-year-old Estonian au pair.*
That reminds me "Arina! Arina! Where are my carpet slippers?. Thanks Arina...What? Oh yes, my neck is feeling a little stiff. Yes, a gentle massage would be much appreciated my dear. Thank you!"
DeleteCarpet slippers ! Do they make them any more?
DeleteThere's a niche in the market.
*This product was not made in China but in the Sheffield Tread Softly Slipper Factory.*
YouTube.
ReplyDelete*Election 2020: What has President Trump done to America?*
October 31, 2020. The Economist.
I'm a reader of The Economist, The New Statesman, The Spectator, Time, Newsweek, and Standpoint, the centre-right monthly. I'll speak to anyone, from Trotskyites to British National Party guys, from Tommy Robinson to Tariq Ali.
One of my mates, a self-employed painter-decorator from Rutherglen, is a Trump admirer, who tells me that this election is the West's last chance to stop China from winning the global economic war.
As a political agnostic, all I'm saying is *Never fall out with people who hold different views.*
As the great atheist Stephen Hawking said, *As long as we can keep talking...*
As Alf Garnett said, "Rhubarb!"
DeleteAlf was a monster but he was our kind of monster.
DeleteUna Stubbs I adored and still do.
It's a nice sentiment in theory H, but not always possible in practical application. Most of the tRUMPers that I live among (and I live in a red county) are loud and obnoxious. They are name callers. I was pushing the garbage bin to the curb and my neighbor who is a tRUMPer (and also quite a drinker) shouted out from his porch "I hear the tRUMP train!!!!!" and made train whistle sounds. I snapped back with, "Nope just the same garbage as last week, Dan-o." That was one of our politer exchanges. Usually he's pissing at our yard to show his disgust.
ReplyDeleteThis says it all, Debby. Thanks.
DeleteOh no! Debby! I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this comment. I did get a chuckle at the image of the "tRUMP TRAIN" reimagined as a garbage truck! Haha.
DeleteOur one and only neighbor who put up a political sign this year hung a huge banner from the front of his house that says: "TRUMP 2020 NO MORE BULLSHIT" It's like Trumpers just love to be as crude and rude and offensive as possible. A sweet little old lady lives directly across the street and has had to look at that for weeks.
The tensions that Trump has enflamed in the heartlands of America cannot make life easy - especially during a deadly pandemic.
DeleteThere are a fair number of trump flags and signs which read 'F___ your feelings'. Only there are no dashes. Not kidding. The city deemed that political signs are exempt from vulgarity rules.
DeleteAwful ! Someone needs to remind bitter Americans about Germany in the Twenties and Thirties. A society grows diseased when hooligans and thugs take over.
DeleteMania the goddess of confusion is everywhere.
It's such a beautiful morning here. Hard to believe that the fate of the planet is being decided but yes. It is.
ReplyDeleteGoing to be a long day. Probably a few long days.
The Orange Thing still has a few dirty tricks up his sleeve but surely by the end of today the people will have spoken loud and clear. They cannot be denied.
Delete*Pre-Election with Noam Chomsky.*
ReplyDeleteYouTube. The Laura Flanders Show. November 2, 2020.
A few years ago I quoted Chomsky in a blog called American Catholic.
The post was on the death of Fidel Castro.
Two Catholic men berated me in the strongest terms. They called me a Marxist because I said child mortality in Cuba was lower than the USA.
I am not a Marxist or even a socialist, but these angry white men condemned me as a loony. How did we get here?
Given his great age Noam Chomsky is a remarkable and clear-sighted fellow who understands the state of American politics very precisely.
DeleteThe Noamite lucidity is impressive. The subtitles are only there because his voice is not as distinctive any more.
DeleteI only saw him lose his temper once, and that was only slightly. He was discussing Nicaragua and El Salvador with a Reaganite right-winger.
Those are countries you never hear about now.
Do they still exist and whatever happened to The Gaza Strip? You don't hear about that either.
DeleteWhen the dust settles you might listen to the late Amos Oz, YouTube.
DeleteBorn in Jerusalem to parents who fled the Nazis, he always said there was room for everyone in Israel.
I recorded on video the interview with Amos on BBC 2 with Mr. Yentob: You might find it on YouTube. I hoped he would get the Nobel. Charming man.
*BBC One HD Amos Oz the Conscience of Israel (2005).*
DeleteYouTube. Di Marco Documentaries.
Amos would not have been one of Ariel Sharon's favourite people.
Do you remember the Israeli socialist MP who openly called Sharon a murderer in the Knesset?
I wish I remembered that man's name. I watched it on the BBC News years ago.
Look what happened on this side of the pond when the British electorate voted for Billy Bunter Johnson and his Brexit pals? I couldn't predict the American result.
ReplyDeleteBilly Bunter promised cream cakes and gave us cowpats. What a rotter Quelch!
DeleteQuelch ! Never thought I would hear that name again.
DeleteHow about Quiller, Quimper, Quigley, Quatermass?
Quiggin is a character in Anthony Powell's novels, A Dance to the Music of Time.
There was pathos in Bunter. There is nothing but sheer selfishness in Johnson and a desire to be adulated - all else is irrelevant.
DeleteGraham, Maybe there is a Peter Capaldi in Team Boris.
DeleteRight now he's saying, *Listen, Borry, you've got to take a long, hard look at yourself, pal. Right now I don't see any pathos in you. All I see is a weak dithering stammering farting salivating Boy Bunter. That wee Stalinist wanker Keir Stamner will dismember you limb by limb, like hounds savaging a sweaty wee fox in the hunting Counties. Plus, if Trump loses this election, where the fcuk is your ranting populist rhetoric Boris? The minute Joe Biden is sworn as the next President of the United States, populism's fcuking OVER. And so are you Boy Wonder, you're as OVER as Lenny the Lion, Sooty the Puppet, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Tintin and the Shooting Star, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport, SIMON FCUKING DEE!*
YouTube. The genius of Peter Capaldi.
Delete*The Thick of It - Malcom's Epic Rant.*
*Top 10 Peter Capaldi Performances.*
Lenny the Lion is alive and well and living in Cumbernauld where he is a bus driver. He is married to Little Weed of Bill & Ben fame.
DeleteOor Lenny, winging it in Cumbernauld, crappest shopping centre in Britain?
DeleteHe'll be needing the long johns when the winds blow aff the the Pentlands, the Hills of Hame for Robert Louis. Lennie a bussie, bussing hame the drunk Neds !
And Lennie married Weedie Wee, is that whit ye're telling me? Here's me, couldnae find a Wife, didnae write the Great Govan Novel. On the Blue Tins !
Ye'll be tellin me next Rolf Harris is hosting Songs of Praise wey Lulu whose got the full body tattoo, right up tae her lugs. Aye they get God, don't ye?
I'm in a strange place on a strange planet Yorky and I havenae even a box set of The Sullivans, de ye mind the Sullivans, happy family in Melbourne 1940s, there was a smashin public saloon, cheery barmaid?
Tasker'll mind it, he's even mair stuck in the past than me, and yon's saying something, ay? We wake up the morra and The Donald's back in business !
YouTube.
Delete*Remembering Bobby Ball 1944-2020.*
October 3o, 2020. TuffUpNorf.
The beloved Oldham comedian died after going down with Covid-19.
From X to Dee and Back Again - the Occult Beatles.
DeleteMarch 10, 2020.
Since I live beside the elephant it's very important that they do the right thing and vote Biden.
ReplyDeleteIf they don't you are going to find a lot of refugees from The States coming up into Alberta. You'd better build a big, beautiful wall.
DeleteLet’s hope the ginger arsehole is out
ReplyDeleteYuk! I hope we don't have to look at it!
DeleteWe did our part and voted this morning. I'm hoping for the change we need but it may be a while before we know the results.
ReplyDeleteAfter the vote it remains balanced on a knife edge. Fingers still crossed for Joe.
DeleteYouTube.
ReplyDelete*Grow Up ! Stop Being Fake News ! Piers Clashes with Nigel Farage over Trump's handling of COVID/GMB.*
Good Morning Britain. November 4, 2020.
Did ours beginning of October - dropped it off at the Town Hall signed, sealed. Shocking seeing the number of idiots who have voted for DT this time. Are they brain-vacant? Want to fly away if DT remains in the White House - that's how awful I feel.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this Regina. You are certainly not alone in your bewilderment.
Delete*Let me finish ! Johnny Rotten makes his views on Donald Trump heard/Good Morning.*
ReplyDeleteYouTube. Good Morning Britain. November 4, 2020.
Having won Florida (Hilary lost it) Donald Trump will become the next President of the United States, though it will be quite narrow.
We need to accept the will of the American people, and respect for the freest country in the world and its President.
I hope there is not a repeat of the anti-Trump demos.
In Britain we need President Trump on our side in the years ahead.
Really ? I thought, Biden was in , though it is close
DeleteHilary thought she was a shoo-in, remember? Time magazine printed its post-election issue with Hilary on the cover, even before Americans went to the polls.
ReplyDeleteThen the Trumpster took Florida, the state that usually predicts the big outcome.
Biden is left looking old, frail, and done-in. Joe is exhausted as well he might be, confined to his bunker while The Donald is so Out There. He knows he's IN.
*Donald Trump will win the election: Nigel Farage.*
ReplyDeleteYouTube. Sky Australia News. November 3, 2020.
The point Nigel makes is that the Chinese Communist Party poses the biggest danger to the free world (their Wuhan virus has brought the West to its knees and maybe it WAS deliberate on their part).
And elderly exhausted Joe isn't up to the fight, which many working-class Americans, who felt ignored by the Democrats (as English working-class voters felt ignored by Labour) recognised all along.
Five years ago Kissinger said Trump was a *phenomenon* and he still is.
Remember Trump is not a professional politician, in a way he isn't even a normal Republican.
As Nietzsche said, it takes a monster to fight a monster.
Trump is a monster but he spoke about the danger posed by monstrous China before many did.
I read what you write but I don’t always understand what point you are trying to make
DeleteWhich of the two men possesses the capability and the honesty to confront the danger China poses?
ReplyDeleteWe might wish the two men running for the presidency were different men, just as we might wish for a different British prime minister.
But there is only a straight choice between Trump and Biden.
Trump behaves as no president ever has unless we count Theodore Roosevelt.
But he speaks directly to his admirers in a way they understand and in a way the Democrat elite and the Republican elite never have.
I think that the American journalist H.L. Mencken would have recognised Trump's savage honesty while not overlooking his outrageous behaviour at times.
"Savage honesty"????!!!! The man hasn't an honest bone in his body.
DeleteJordan Peterson said Trump speaks his mind, doesn't rely on speechwriters to the same degree as machine politicians. There is a weird honesty there. He plays by no one's rules but his own.
DeleteIn trying to understand the Trump revolution, I had to suspend my personal dislike. I wish the whole world was run by politicians like that nice lady in New Zealand, but the world is full of cunning people like Putin, and those men in Chinese government, who would not have thought twice about releasing a deadly virus in the West. If this is viral warfare, it suits them fine.
Trump is not stupid in spite of what the intellectuals say. Peterson thinks his IQ is very high. He won his first campaign without spending a huge amount of money like the others.
He has a populist narrative which appeals to many people. Catholics say he is the most pro-Life President ever. His success came through a reaction against political correctness. The liberal elite are too P.C.
Trump did not harbour deep ambitions to be President as did Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and just about anybody you can name.
As a businessman he saw how inefficient government can be, and wants to see it shrunk, like the Jeffersonian right-winger of my youth, Senator Barry Goldwater. Small government was Goldwater's ideal, but he saw it grow.
As a boy I hated Goldwater, and Nixon was Tricky Dick. With maturity I can understand and respect them. Goldwater and Nixon would have been very worried by Trump, but they might have said to the liberal elite, *Your sins and your arrogance have created Donald Trump. Trump is your nemesis.*
Online:
Delete*Barry Goldwater's Family is Against Trump* by Tony Dokoupil. 2016 Election.
The late senator's widow and son said (in 2016) that they intended to vote for Hilary Clinton.
Mrs Goldwater said Republican voters had gone haywire, and that her husband would have been appalled by the rise of the extreme right. She described Trump as a *cowboy* and said his mental state was *unhinged*.
YouTube.
ReplyDelete1) Jordan Peterson on Donald Trump's Intelligence.
2) Donald Trump will win the election - Jordan Peterson.
Peterson has been a clinical psychologist for many years and is challenging many progressive and feminist sacred cows.
Trump has done nothing that will not benefit him personally. He is not fit to lead a democracy, having attacked the very process that got him that power to begin with. You can think what you want, and you are welcome to it, but there were plenty of people who were perfectly able (and willing) to justify Adolf Hitler. It has nothing to do with being able to set aside our immature perspectives and everything to do with being able to distinguish between right and wrong.
ReplyDeleteHe is not *fit* to take part in any democratic political discourse, never mind the Presidency.
ReplyDeleteOn that we agree. Note that I quoted Barry Goldwater's widow, an anti-Trump Republican who changed allegiances to the Democrats and voted for Hilary. My sister-in-law in Los Angeles is a Democrat but refused to vote for Hilary whom she loathes.
Your comparisons with Hitler may well be valid. Hitler always said that he had no time for democracy. He said that the will of the German people was embodied in his (evil) party. Hitler was a globalist dictator, Trump is anti-globalist, and blames globalism for low wages and lack of jobs. Interestingly so do some English economists.
Some online reading for Debby and anyone else:
ReplyDelete*What did we all do? Why women who voted for Trump could decide the 2020 Election.*
The Guardian. Amanda Holpuch. October 23, 2020.
*Sick to my stomach: White women who voted for Trump turn on him.*
Laura-Whitney Gottbrach. October 22, 2020.
*These 3 White Women Voted for Trump in 2016 - Here's Why They've Flipped.*
Vogue. Michelle Ruiz. October 14, 2020.
So far I cannot determine whether Anne Coulter is still with Trump.
I confess to a certain admiration for Anne Coulter though I have never voted centre-right and regard myself as very against neo-liberal economics and pro-trades union.
I was surprised at the hostility shown to Anne Coulter when she was interviewed on BBC's Newsnight by Jeremy Paxman. It may still be on YouTube.
*Paxman v Ann Coulter: BBC Newsnight Archives (2006).*
ReplyDeleteYouTube.
Ann Coulter is an acid tongued bitch who says incrediblty horrible things.Right and wrong, sir. You reap what you sow. You ever hear of the 'doctine of clean hands'? She hasn't got them.
ReplyDeleteYou know what is really happening Debby, I do not. I have watched two or three interviews with Ann Coulter on YouTube, aware that she is on the Right, and shocked that she was pro-Trump, considering the vicious and unmanly things Trump said about women. I saw only her wit and courtesy. In a weird way she is the counter culture.
ReplyDeleteI remember the words of a friend who was a British parliamentary correspondent:
*My job is to understand the political passions that move men and women, never to take sides. I only have a political opinion on polling day when I cast my vote, and I have voted at times for all three British parties. Then it's back to work.*
I never worked as a correspondent, and I do have political opinions, but I try to see people I disagree with as clearly as I can, as though they are characters in a great sprawling novel by Balzac or Theodore Dreiser. How to get in their heads?
I learned this from two books by the American independent journalist, I.P. Stone, *The Truman Years* and another called *The Haunted Fifties*.
His introduction to the first book is worth the price, for he is sitting alone in a progressive newspaper office which has closed permanently: the last man to leave the building, pondering the fate of independent journalism, the fate of dissenting thought in America.
Izzie Stone pored over tons of Congressional records, looking for the buried fact, the clue that would lead him to a story about secret government.
He wrote that no small part of the American Constitution was written out of fear of the poor, and the need to keep power in the hands of those with property.
He was among the first to champion Solzhenitsyn and he survived the McCarthy era which he called *the haunted 1950s*.
I don't know what he would have written about Ann Coulter, but he would have seen her as a player in a much bigger story, which we we only see fitfully as it unfolds before our eyes. There's a wonderful short book about Mexican immigrants called *Tell Me How It Ends*: and that is just what we cannot see about history.
YouTube.
ReplyDelete*America's Great Divide: Ann Coulter interview.*
January 13, 2020. Frontline PBS.
She rails against Wall Street, and said construction workers in California are poorer than they were 15 years ago. She pays tribute to Obama for his wit and natural style wile disagreeing with his policies.
Erratum.
ReplyDeleteI should have written I.F. Stone (1907-1989).
There are YouTube videos on him.
HAPPY TO BE ABLE TO SAY THANK YOU TO ALL OF THOSE WHO WISHED WELL FOR BIDEN'S ELECTION. WE ARE ENORMOUSLY THRILLED THAT THIS ELECTION BROKE RECORDS IN TERMS OF THE NUMBERS WHO VOTED. I KNOW THAT WE HAVE A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF DAMAGE TO REPAIR BUT THERE ALSO WILL BE MORE ATTENTION TO REVAMPING, SHAPING WHAT CAN BE IMPROVED. THIS WAS TOO CLOSE & WE NEED TO PAY BETTER ATTENTION.
ReplyDeleteYes, we in Scotland are thrilled too, Regina. Now President Biden has to unify the greatest democracy in the world.
ReplyDeleteAs an American commenter said, this means healing the wounds in the Republican Party and working with Republicans. Joe will do this.
I have just caught up with Channel 4's report (YouTube) ...
*Revealed: Trump Strategy to deter millions of black Americans from voting in 2016.* Channel 4 News.
It is one thing to target people to vote for you, using massive data bases.
It is quite another to poison people's minds so they would NOT vote for Hilary.
The final judgment on Team Trump will be that they were so very un-American.
Let's hope Donald departs and does so like a man.
*Our enemy is apathy.*
ReplyDeleteChuck Schumer, today.
It looks like Biden is going to win and you will all get the President you deserve.
ReplyDelete