Vladimir Putin Could Not be Happier as Turmoil Grips US and UK

In the wake of yesterday's vote in Parliament which rejected Theresa May's hideous Brexit plan, the United Kingdom is in the worse political crisis since the end of WWII and Britain faces an economic nightmare of its own creation.  Estimates are that at least $1 trillion has fled the British financial system and things may get far worse if the UK leaves the European Union.

Meanwhile, political chaos reigns in the USA as Trump refuses to strike a deal to reopen the federal government. 800,000 federal employees are going without pay and airports are slowly edging towards shutdowns as TSA workers and air traffic controllers prepare to seek new employment in order to save themselves and their families financially. 

Though separated by the Atlantic Ocean, the two crises share two common threads.  One is that the cause of the instability traces to rural white voters who hate urban and suburban populations and, in the final analysis are racists who long for a return of the "good old days."  The other common thread is that Russian cyber attacks and social media ploys helped drive what is in my view described as a "populist" movement. In both the USA and the UK the voters supporting Trump and Brexit are in reality most motivated by hatred of others and fear of modernity (and perhaps even thinking for themselves).  A piece at CNN looks at the phenomenon and the man smiling through it all, Russia's Vladimir Putin.  Here are highlights:

The news just keeps on getting better for Vladimir Putin.

On either side of the Atlantic, the United States and Britain, the two great English-speaking democracies that orchestrated Moscow's defeat in the Cold War, are undergoing simultaneous political breakdowns.  And the Russian leader may have had a hand in triggering the turmoil. In London, Theresa May on Tuesday suffered the worst defeat in the modern parliamentary era by a prime minister, as lawmakers shot down her Brexit deal with the European Union by a staggering 432 votes to 202. The United States, meanwhile, remains locked in its longest-ever government shutdown, which is now entering its 26th day, is nowhere near ending and is the culmination of two years of whirling political chaos sparked by President Donald Trump. It's hard to believe that two such robust democracies, long seen by the rest of the world as beacons of stability, have dissolved into such bitter civic dysfunction and seem unmoored from their previous governing realities. The political self-recrimination is a far cry from the days when President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher bonded to face down totalitarian threats to Western, liberal democracy. Now the threat to the political solidity of the West is coming partly from the inside, from a fractured political consensus that makes it impossible to address vital questions like Britain's relations with Europe and immigration in the US. Supporters of Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain see their revolts as uprisings against distant or unaccountable leaders who no longer represent them or share their values. . . . . The meltdown in Britain has some foreign investors wanting to know if Britain has "lost its mind," said Tina Fordham, chief global political analyst for Citigroup.
 [S]ome common factors combined to lay siege to what have long been two of the world's most resilient democracies. The allies are experiencing the reverberations of populist revolts that erupted in 2016 -- in the Brexit vote and the election of Trump -- and are now slamming into legislatures and breeding division and stasis. The result is that Britain and the United States are all but ungovernable on the most important questions that confront both nations. That's music to Putin's ears.
 The Russian leader has made disrupting liberal democracies a core principle of his near two-decade rule, as he seeks to avenge the fall of the Soviet empire, which he experienced as a heartbroken KGB agent in East Germany. In the last two years, Putin has had a witting, or unwitting, ally in Trump, whose attacks on NATO and US allies and decision to pull US troops out of Syria played into Russia's goals.

Whether the political distemper in the West was sown by a Russian intelligence operation masterminded by Putin may not matter because he is making a belated effort at winning the peace after the end of the Cold War. His success is adding urgency to the question that special counsel Robert Mueller has spent nearly two years investigating -- whether Trump's campaign cooperated with Moscow to influence the election in 2016. In another win for Putin, America is tying itself in knots in a surreal national debate over whether Trump -- who incidentally is a vocal supporter of Brexit -- is working on behalf of Russia, following a bombshell New York Times report. Trump's enlistment of rural, conservative voters against metropolitan elites echoes the arguments of leaders orchestrating Britain's exit from Europe. Now, in both nations, the unwillingness of rebels to dilute the purity of their goals is causing gridlock and resistance in Congress and in Parliament. Britain, meanwhile, is mired in the worst political crisis since World War II. While a slim majority voted to leave the EU, there is no consensus on how to do it, and about half the country still wants to stay in the bloc. Trump has been saying the same thing for days -- that Democrats are soft on the border and need to capitulate. But he's failed to rally a coalition of Americans behind his border wall. Effectively he's led the Republican Party into a political dead end. May repeatedly insists that her rejected deal is the only way to honor the 2016 referendum, right up until its massive defeat.  But she has failed to build public support for her approach. If anything, she's more locked into a failed political position than Trump is on the shutdown. And the deeper the trans-Atlantic dysfunction gets, the better it is for Putin.

Brexit and Trump: Self inflicted Harm With Help From Russia

Separated by the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps the two greatest democracies in the world - the United Kingdom and the United States - are each suffering from self-inflicted harm.  There are parallels between the two scenarios of democratic suicide: (i) Russia employed cyber-space attacks fanning racial fears and bigotry and pushed for votes that would render harm both internally and externally, and (ii) in each case far less than a majority of voters (mostly rural), many fighting against modernity and others clinging to delusions of restoring a lost past, voted against the best interests of themselves and their nations.  The only true winners: Vladimir Putin and Russia. Now, Britain is at a true crisis point and it's economic future uncertain.  To anyone sane, the solution is a new referendum that could reverse the race towards the cliff.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the crisis.  America is not far behind the UK in terms of self-destruction. Here are article excerpts:

With Prime Minister Theresa May’s bill expected to lose, the question dominating British politics is: What comes next?

If the agreement is not approved, she would have until Monday to present a backup plan to Parliament. The range of possibilities is wide, unappealing and a bit bewildering.

If the deal loses by a narrow margin, she might be able to win a few concessions from Brussels and bring those revisions to Parliament for a second vote. But if the defeat is a crushing one, that option is likely to be unavailable.

As things now stand, Britain will leave the European Union on March 29. Neither Mrs. May’s government nor the European bloc wants that to happen without an agreement in place — most experts predict that a no-deal Brexit would be chaotic and do severe economic damage.

With little time left to negotiate anew with the European Union, the prime minister may be forced to ask Parliament to postpone Brexit.

She could also call a second referendum, an option favored by lawmakers who hope that British voters have changed their minds. But Mrs. May and the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have both rejected that idea.

Mr. Corbyn wants to force early elections, and seems likely to call for a vote of no confidence in the government, putting the prime minister on the brink.

The vote will provide little of the detail that businesses need to plan their operations, but it could at least narrow the options.

“The longer this Brexit political drama continues, the less and less attractive the U.K. is going to be” to investors, Iain Anderson, the executive chairman of the consulting firm Cicero Group, said last week.

Manufacturers remain concerned that a no-deal situation would wreak havoc on just-in-time manufacturing, which relies on goods crossing the British border, sometimes multiple times, and arriving within minutes of assembly. — Amie Tsang

Last week, a member of Parliament proposed an amendment requiring Prime Minister Theresa May to return within three days to announce what the government intended to do next if the original deal was rejected. She previously had 21 days to decide.

By Parliament’s arcane rules (it mostly hinged on the meaning of “forthwith”), Mr. Bercow should have rejected that amendment. But he didn’t. And Parliament passed it by a slim margin.

That decision single-handedly tipped the balance of power to Parliament from Mrs. May’s government. The episode made a no-deal exit less likely and will let lawmakers weigh in — quickly — with alternatives.

And Mr. Bercow may not be done yet. Commentators said it could end up being the most radical shift in relations between the government and Parliament since the speaker defied King Charles I in 1642. — Benjamin Mueller

Is Trump Unwittingly Undermining Putin and Helping Stop Brexit?

In 2016 Both the United States and the United Kingdom experienced election interference - cyber attacks, if you will - directed by Russia.  Both had similar long term goals: the destroy the western alliance that had held the Soviet Union/Russia at bay for 70 years and to induce self-destructive national behavior. In the case of the UK, the goal was to tilt the country to leave the European Union through the BREXIT vote, thereby weakening both the EU and the UK economically and perhaps breeding discord within NATO as well.  In the case of America, the goal was to see Donald Trump, Putin's the great destroyer, elected so that the western alliance could be further weakened, if not destroyed.  In both countries, the prime targets were more rural areas and less educated voters bearing hostility towards non-whites and "foreigners," where dreams of past glories blinded voters to the reality of a forever changed world. In the UK, Russia appealed to those with dreams of "Rule Britannia" and the era when the "sun never set on the British Empire." In America, the targeted population was white nationalists, xenophobes clinging to a false myth of American exceptionalism, and a past of unrivaled US dominance that will never be re-achieved.  In both nations, voters fell for the bait and Vladimir Putin/Russia was victorious.  Since then, the UK has been tearing itself apart and Trump has faithfully implemented the division and destruction so desired by his Russian handler/puppet master.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the irony of Trump - who is basically hated in the UK - perhaps setting in motion forces in the UK than may unwind Putin's Brexit victory.  Here are excerpts:

Can Brexit still be stopped? I gave up on that possibility a long time ago, but politics is fickle, and contemporary politics is full of shocks. And I’d say that the odds of pulling back from the brink, still low, measurably improved this past week. I know that sounds unlikely given the political chaos in London, and Donald Trump’s explosive intervention in the Sun tabloid last night, but bear with me. It’s precisely the chaos and [Trump] the president that might offer hope.

In fact, last week was the first time I began, perhaps foolishly, to suspect some method in Theresa May’s blithering badness. To see why, it’s worth remembering that May was always a centrist Tory, devoid of ideas or inspiration, but diligent, earnest, competent and, ahem, persistent. She’s not an ideologue. She had a reputation for steeliness and a mastery of her brief in her long stint at the Home Office, which oversees immigration, policing, counterterrorism, and other domestic policy. And she was long pragmatically in favor of remaining in the European Union, indeed voted to remain, even if she kept relatively quiet about it. . . . she became prime minister by default to execute a policy she didn’t believe in.

The potential shift, if sudden and severe, could devastate Britain’s economy, at least in the short term, and arguably for much longer, as well as effectively end Britain’s status as a global power. Her own party had only a small majority in the Parliament, narrowing her space to maneuver even farther, and was itself deeply split over the form Brexit should take. And so she thought her best bet last year would be to throw the dice, call an election, and try to get a hefty mandate and a much bigger parliamentary majority that would give her the flexibility she needed at home, and the leverage she wanted with the E.U. This wasn’t a crazy idea. She was 20 points ahead in the polls, at the time.

But it wasn’t to be. As we all discovered, she was a crap campaigner and in the end, the Tories lost their majority altogether. It seems to me that a hard Brexit effectively died that day. May didn’t have the popular mandate or the parliamentary votes to get what the right of her party demanded.

With only nine months now to go until Article 50 kicks Britain out of the E.U., with the country still deeply divided, big business still terrified, and without any actual final negotiation with the E.U. at all, she finally pushed and shoved her cabinet into backing a very soft Brexit at Chequers, the prime minister’s country estate, last weekend.

They all signed up for it, including Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary. The “Chequers Deal” meant pursuing Brexit but effectively also remaining in the customs union, and in much of the single market. Brexit In Name Only — yes, it’s BRINO! — was suddenly the official government position. Britain would still abide by most E.U. regulations and laws, it would even be subject to the European Court in some respects, but, being outside the E.U. proper, would have no say in any of it.

The Tories’ momentary unity on the subject, painfully achieved only two years since Brexit, lasted two days. The hard Brexit faction in the House began making insurrectionary noises; Westminster went febrile; the chance of a Tory Party coup against May was on everyone’s mind; further resignations were expected. The Tory press went apeshit. The Telegraph asked: “Is Theresa May Guilty of Treason?” It seemed like another nadir for the unfortunate prime minister.

Within days, it was quite clear the hard-Brexiteers were far too divided to launch a putsch, and no one had the support or the guts to bring her down. Johnson’s reputation even among the Tories is far from what it was; Davis didn’t go in for the kill; and the other leading Brexiteer, Michael Gove, firmly backed May. Advantage Theresa.

The Brexiteers’ next gambit was nihilistically lashing out, by using Trump to piss all over May’s compromise, which he duly did, the day after behaving like someone on PCP at the NATO summit. . . . It was a brutal and unprecedented attack on a sitting prime minister as she was actually hosting the American president for a visit. It was a knee-capping.

It was also, in my immediate view, a serious Brexiteer blunder. Trump is despised in Britain, as he is across Europe. His endorsement of the Brexiteers at this critical moment is humiliating for May but potentially a boon for her as well. If Donald Trump is now the face of Brexit in Britain, Brexit is in trouble. And Brits will not take kindly to their own prime minister being dictated to and humiliated by an American president, as he lands on British soil.

And so the real endgame comes into sight. Britain faces the prospect of the worst of all worlds Brexit — a staggering, chaotic, and catastrophic departure from the E.U. with massive collateral damage, an outcome now endorsed by a loathed American president.

Am I exaggerating? Among the immediate doomsday possibilities the government itself is worried about in a crash exit are the effective, immediate collapse of the port of Dover — grinding trade to a halt — and the dispatch of thousands of electricity generators on barges in the Irish Sea to keep Northern Ireland’s lights on, because the province’s ability to share a single electricity market with the whole island of Ireland would end with an E.U. exit. Northern Ireland itself could explode in sectarian violence again if a hard border is erected between north and south, as it would have to be. Scotland would move toward independence. Critical shortages of food, fuel, and medicine would open up within two weeks, by the government’s own estimation. The military would have to be deployed to ensure transportation of essentials. Stocks and the pound would plummet. A steep recession at home, and maybe also abroad, could follow. It would be one of the most harmful things a democratic country ever did to itself, or to its neighbors.

[W]ith parliament deadlocked and the E.U. implacable, a simple solution could present itself as the only way out for a Tory Party desperate to keep Labour out of power: The transition period could be extended, and a second referendum called. On the ballot this time would be the two actual, non-fantasy options: a brutal exit, or remaining in the E.U.

This wouldn’t be a referendum to undo the first one; it would be to clarify it, after the actual, tangible, non-fantasy options are available. People voted for Brexit with no one actually knowing what kind of Brexit, or any clear idea of what it would entail, and many voters were confused about the intricacies. Two years later, and the confusion is even deeper, and the divide greater.

I don’t know what the result of such a second referendum would be, but I know that it is the only way not to permanently divide and embitter the country, and to end the debate for good. I suspect that a doomsday Brexit would concentrate the mind; and that sticking with the status quo, after the last two chaotic years, might seem a little more enticing that it once did. In that scenario, Brexit may — just may — be reversed by the people. That’s my hope anyway. Some small part of me wonders whether it isn’t Theresa May’s hope as well.

One has to wonder if Trump will get his ass chewed out by Putin for perhaps setting the stage to undo Putin's Brexit victory.  No wonder Trump doesn't want any other American present when he faces his handler/puppet master.

United Kingdom to Ban Conversion Therapy

Every legitimate medical and mental health association in America and across the globe has condemned so-called gay "conversion therapy" as ineffectual if not outright dangerous.  Its practitioners are charlatans and frauds, often hiding behind the label of a church affiliated "ministry" in an effort to dodge regulations that increasingly ban licensed therapists from engaging in the fraudulent practice.  Twelve states in America ban it and now the United Kingdom is preparing to ban it nationwide, a huge defeat for Christofascists who use the "choice myth" for propaganda and to rake in money from the gullible.  A piece in The Guardian looks at the movement to ban conversion therapy and to end mistreatment of LGBT citizens.  Here are highlights: 

The government will appoint a national LGBT health adviser and take measures to end so-called conversion therapy as part of a plan to deliver what Theresa May has promised will be “real and lasting change”.

The proposals form part of an action plan published by the Equalities Office on Tuesday. It follows a UK-wide survey of LGBT people that had more than 108,000 responses, billed as the largest study of its kind.

The 30-page plan contains a series of pledges, including to improve the police response to LGBT hate incidents, more support for LGBT students and teachers and improvements to gender identity services for transgender adults.

The proposals, which will receive an initial £4.5m in funding, were welcomed by the campaign groups Stonewall and the LGBT Foundation.

The online poll, which ran from July to October last year, sought views from LGBT and intersex people about their personal experiences and interactions with public services. . . . 68% said they had avoided holding hands in public with a same-sex partner, while 70% said they had at times not been open about their sexual orientation.

In comments released with the plan, the prime minister said the survey had highlighted where more efforts were needed.

The survey found 5% of respondents had been offered and refused types of conversion therapy – discredited techniques often based around religious views that seek to change people’s sexual orientation. Another 2% had undergone such processes.

 The plan promises to end these practices, with the Equalities Office to look into various legislative or non-legislative ways to do so. . . . They are often modelled on mainstream methods of psychotherapy, and sometimes prayer, and are known to be harmful.

All the major UK regulatory bodies for counselling and psychotherapy have banned members from using such methods, as has the NHS. However, a 2015 study by Stonewall found 10% of health and care staff had heard colleagues express the belief that sexuality can be “cured”.

The survey also found 26% of respondents had experienced verbal harassment or other insults in the past year, with many saying they did not report even more serious incidents to the police. New measures to improve the police’s response to such incidents will be proposed.

Penny Mordaunt, the minister for women and equalities, said: “Our action plan is a step towards everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity or sex characteristics, being able to live safe, happy and healthy lives where they can be themselves without fear of discrimination.”

May is to host the annual Downing Street LGBT Pride reception on Tuesday evening. Among the guests for the first time will be Peter Tatchell. The veteran campaigner said May had invited him after he was “banned” previously.

In a separate statement, Tatchell called the action plan a “welcome start”, but said it fell short on issues such as the deportation of LGBT refugees to countries where homophobia was widespread. The £4.5m budget was “derisory and insulting”, he added.

The efforts in the UK are the direct opposite of the agenda of the Trump/Pence regime which seeks to rescind LGBT protections, pander to Christofascists, and grant a license to discriminate against LGBT citizens.

The Fall of Theresa May — and Donald Trump?

Following up on the previous post, Andrew Sullivan has a piece in New York Magazine that ought to be cautionary to Republicans, especially those in Congress.  Brexit passed in the UK by a 52 to 48% margin in a low turn out election. Donald Trump lost the popular vote 46 to 48% in a low turn out election and only won the presidency because the Electors of the Electoral College refused to do their duty and vote against a dangerous, malignant, narcissistic demagogue.  As Theresa May found out on Thursday, when the real majority does get out to vote, things can change drastically.  For Republicans, especially amoral sleaze bags like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell need to grasp is that they have ZERO mandate.  Trump/Pence has no mandate despite the lies and braggadocio of Der Trumpenführer.  The true majority of Americans - which excludes evangelical Christians who have become a malignant cancer just as dangerous as Trump - needs to mobilize and  make it clear that our response to Trump's and the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda and bows to theocrats is a resounding "No!"  As Sullivan lays out, Trump is worthy of impeachment.  The British have shown us that we can re-correct the course of America.  To do so, Trump and the GOP must be defeated and thrown out of office.  We can start by electing Democrats in November, 2017, in Virginia and New Jersey.  Come, November, 2018, the Republicans need to suffer a bloodbath defeat.  Here are highlights from Sullivan's column:

Just a few months ago, it’s worth remembering, we seemed to be careening to a new and possibly long-lived right-populist era in Anglo-American politics. In the U.S., Donald Trump had stunned the world and his own party Establishment by seizing the nomination of the GOP, and then defeating the overwhelming favorite, Hillary Clinton, to win the presidency. In Britain, a referendum on Brexit had shocked and overturned the British and European Establishments, and dispatched Prime Minister David Cameron to the bucolic shires whence he came.

The uninspiring but dogged Theresa May emerged as Cameron’s successor, after her Tory male rivals had out-machoed and out-plotted each other into mutual destruction. And both Trump and May seemed to have captured a restless, rightist mood in the American and British publics, as Reagan and Thatcher had before them. Trump had endorsed Brexit and May, in turn, had been the first foreign visitor to the White House, desperate for a new U.S.-U.K. trade deal. Although many of us believed that Brexit was understandable but irrational and that Trump was a catastrophe just waiting to unfold, the people of the two countries begged to differ.

Except they didn’t entirely, did they? Trump, it’s always worth recalling, lost the popular vote 46–48 percent. Brexit passed only narrowly, 52–48 percent. Both countries, despite the top-line results, remained deeply divided — riven by the cleavages of globalization and its discontents. And now, it’s clear, the divisions have not evaporated and the opposition has revived, with increasingly robust energy.

This week, Trump slumped to the lowest approval ratings of his term — in the upper-to-mid-30s — while being called a liar by the former head of the FBI. And May was humiliated — there is no other word for it — by the British voters in a snap election. In the wake of Brexit and Trump, the forces of reaction in Europe have also seemed to recede. The far right gained but didn’t triumph in the Netherlands; Le Pen, while winning a historic level of support, faded in the home stretch. And now the British have actually made it conceivable that Jeremy Corbyn — the most left-wing leader in the history of the Labour Party, a sympathizer with Hamas and the IRA, and an old-school “unelectable” hard-line socialist — could be prime minister in the not-so-distant future. There were some specific American parallels to May’s defeat that are worth noting. She ran an Establishment campaign shockingly like Hillary Clinton’s in an era when populism can swing in all sorts of unlikely directions. She began with the presumption that she would coast to victory because her opponent was simply unelectable, extremist, and obviously deplorable in every way. She decided to run a campaign about her, rather than about the country. She kept her public appearances to small, controlled settings, while Corbyn drew increasingly large crowds at outdoor rallies. She robotically repeated her core argument that she represented “strong, stable leadership,” with little else to motivate or inspire voters. She chose to run solely on Brexit — and the hardest of Brexits on offer — while Labour unveiled a whole set of big-spending, big-borrowing, big-government policies that drew a million new younger voters to the polls. And on the critical issue of Brexit, she underestimated the ambivalence in the country as a whole. She mistook 52 percent for a national consensus. In London and the Southeast in particular, those who voted Remain in the referendum — or who intended to but didn’t — came out in force to oppose a hard Brexit. The millennials actually turned up this time. In a student town like Cambridge, for example, the Labour majority went from 599 to more than 12,000 — a staggering leap. Labour, moreover, shrewdly didn’t run to reverse Brexit, and were thereby able to siphon off some pro-Brexit working-class voters from the swiftly collapsing UKIP.

What all this means now that Article 50 has been triggered to kick off the Brexit process is anyone’s guess. But among those celebrating last night were surely Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and the EU elite. This could put Brexit back in play, and certainly destroys May’s credibility in the looming negotiations. It’s therefore a near certainty now that she will be gone in short order.

A possible replacement: the young lesbian leader of the Tories in Scotland, Ruth Davidson, whose success north of the border may well have kept the Tories from an even worse result. And that, indeed, was another surprise: the parties in Scotland that favor keeping the union with England won twice as many votes as the Scottish Nationalist Party. This was a vote for keeping the entire country together and for less of a rush to get out of the EU (and even perhaps a second referendum). It was a populist wave … for the recent past.

The populism we’ve seen bolster the right, in other words, is a fickle beast. . . . . But what it has been able to do is to tip Britain into an unexpected political impasse, to give it a parliament where the Tories will not be able to sustain a reliably pro-Brexit majority for very long, and to make it all but certain that another election will at some point have to be called, possibly in the fall. What the result of that will be is something I will not safely predict until the morning after — except that Corbyn will be running, and May won’t.

And there was a lovely resonance, don’t you think, that this shocking reversal for right-populism came on the very same day that President Trump was definitively shown to be more than worthy of impeachment. I’ve long been a skeptic of some of the darkest claims about his campaign’s alleged involvement with the Russian government — and possible evidence thereof — but I’m not skeptical at all of the idea that he has clearly committed a categorical abuse of his presidential power in his attempt to cover it up.

This sobering reality was not advanced by the Comey hearings yesterday, riveting though they were. We have long known that Trump colluded with the Russian government to tilt the election against his opponent — because he did so on national television during the campaign, urging the Kremlin to release more hacked Clinton emails to help him win. We also know that he fired FBI Director James Comey in order to remove the cloud of the Russian investigation from his presidency — because Trump said so on national television himself and then boasted about it to two close Putin lackeys in the Oval Office!

What else do we really need to know?

Or look at it this way: We now have a witness of long public service, clear integrity, with contemporaneous memoranda and witnesses, who just testified under oath to the president’s clear attempt to obstruct justice. Any other president of any party who had been found guilty of these things would be impeached under any other circumstances. Lying under oath about sexual misconduct is trivial in comparison. So, for that matter, is covering up a domestic crime. Watergate did not, after all, involve covering up the attempt of the Kremlin to undermine and corrode the very core of our democratic system — free and fair elections.

[I]f this were a Democrat in power, almighty hell would have already been unleashed. We wouldn’t be mulling impeachment. It would already be well under way.

The “defenses” of the president are telling. . . . The Speaker of the House then tried this one on: “The president’s new at this. He’s new to government and so he probably wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI, and White Houses. He’s just new to this.” Excuse me? Someone who assumes the office of the presidency without knowing that we live under the rule of law, and who believes that the president can rig the legal and investigative system to his own benefit, has no business being president at all.

Imagine how many other functionaries, less established and far weaker and less pliable than Comey, will acquiesce to abuse of this kind, if it is ignored, enabled, or allowed to continue. . . . He [Trump]will say or do anything — and yes, lie through his teeth repeatedly — to obscure the reality in front of our eyes. But we need to be clear about something. If we let an abuse of power of this magnitude go unchallenged, we have begun the formal task of dismantling our system of government.

Do we Americans have sufficient integrity to do this, and to reverse the drastic error we all so recently made? Maybe the British have just showed us that, yes, we can.

Are the British Rethinking BREXIT?

Before Donald Trump won the presidency through a flaw in America's Electoral College system that ignored Trump's significant loss of the popular vote, we witnessed a campaign similar to that of Trump which emphasized xenophobia and bigotry in the United Kingdom for that nation's exit from the European Union.  As in America, many British were shocked that the forces of hatred and isolation won the day in the BREXIT vote.  Based on the results of yesterdays elections in the UK, perhaps many voters are having second thoughts.  Prime Minister Theresa May’s had called elections in what some see as remarkable gamble on a snap election to increase her party's power.  It backfired and now Conservatives no longer hold a majority of seats in the House of Commons.  As in America where urban areas oppose the Trump/GOP agenda, in the UK urban areas rejected the policies of the Conservatives and, by extension, Brexit.  A piece in the New York Times looks at how the election results may put Brexit in danger.  Here are highlights:

In a global economy amply stocked with anxiety-provoking variables, Britain just added another.

An election designed to bolster the government’s mandate instead yielded fundamental confusion over who is in charge as the nation prepares for fraught negotiations in its pending divorce from the European Union.

Prime Minister Theresa May had called the election on the assumption that her Conservative Party would emerge stronger, solidifying her negotiating position. Instead, the electorate’s stunning rebuke of her leadership all but guarantees a period of unpredictable political jockeying, intensifying uncertainty about future commercial dealings across the English Channel.

Investors took the latest turmoil in Britain as a prompt to unload the British pound. As European markets began trading on Friday, the currency slipped about 2 percent against the dollar.

And yet the shocking electoral outcome also has the potential to diminish the looming economic costs of Britain’s exit from the European Union, commonly known as Brexit.

It enhanced the possibility that a chastened government led by Mrs. May, or perhaps an administration led by someone else, would now strike a less confrontational approach with Europe while seeking a way to keep Britain within the bloc’s large single marketplace.

As Britain prepared for its face-off with Europe, the prime minister had been adamant that her country would impose strict limits on immigration, a posture seemingly enhanced by recent terrorist attacks. Yet limiting immigration appeared certain to cost Britain inclusion in the European single market, a swath of the globe stretching from Ireland to Greece and holding some 500 million relatively affluent consumers.

The European authorities have consistently emphasized that Britain’s continued inclusion in the single market requires that it abide by the bloc’s rules — not least, a provision that people be allowed to move freely within its confines.

This redrawing of the basic geography of European commerce was playing out just as President Trump was disavowing regional trade deals across the Atlantic and Pacific, while variously threatening trade hostilities with Canada, China, Germany and Mexico.
This election could change that trajectory.

Whoever will be in charge — a government led by a weakened Mrs. May, another member of her Conservative Party, or a coalition spearheaded by the Labour Party — might well construe a mandate to pursue a softer Brexit. The unexpected new political configuration might compel Britain to relinquish its pursuit of immigration limits in an effort to keep itself within the single market.

In short, the election has complicated the assumption that Britain is headed irretrievably toward the exits, producing a moment in which seemingly everything may be up for reconsideration.

Those who have favored Britain remaining within Europe, or at least softening the terms of its exit, now have “an expectation, or at least a hope, that cooler heads will prevail,” said Jeremy Cook, chief economist at World First, a company based in London that manages foreign exchange transactions. “It may be that hard Brexit has been rejected by the electorate.”

Worries about the economic impact of Brexit have been weighing heavily on the pound, which plunged after the referendum last June that unleashed Brexit. With Britain at risk of suffering barriers to trade, it has lost some of its considerable luster as a place for companies to invest, making its money a less desirable currency to hold.

A weakened pound has, in turn, translated into rising prices in Britain — on food, gasoline and imported components used by domestic factories. All of this has reinforced concerns about the fate of the economy. 

Would that America could hold a snap election.  With Trumps approval levels at new lows, perhaps Americans could rid themselves of the foul and dangerous occupant of the White House.  Meanwhile the Trump/GOP border tax could similarly impact prices in the USA and make goods more expensive for Trump's knuckle dragging supporters.