Monthly Archives: March 2020

Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept mercilessly charts Joe Biden’s mental decline and the Democratic Party’s hypocritcal handling of an issue that could hand Donald Trump a second term:

The Coronavirus crisis will destroy any chance Donald Trump has of retaining the US presidency this November, for one very simple reason.

Driven by Trump’s ultra nationalist political world view, the US rejected an international plan for a COVID test kit proposed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and decided to plough its own furrow.

Not a great deal wrong with that on first view except the Trump-dominated bureaucracy proved incapable of putting that wish into action and so there are not enough US-made test kits to meet the predicted demand. Elsewhere in the world, by sharp contrast, there is no shortage of WHO testing kits, a tribute to the power of international co-operation.

The consequence of that will be a huge spike in undiagnosed Coronavirus victims in the USA who will not be treated or even put into quarantine and the numbers of those stricken with the virus, and the deaths that will follow will be proportionately higher. The US, thanks to Trump, will not come out of the Covid crisis unscarred.

Expect the death rate to climb during the summer months and to then dominate the closing weeks of the presidential election campaign in the autumn when the crows come home to roost with a vengeance for Donald Trump.

That is all good news for Joe Biden who now seems unassailable in the contest for the Democratic Party White House nomination, which is not good news either.

Donald Trump did not come out of the mystic. He was product of white, working class anger and frustration at years of neoliberal economic policies propounded by Clinton and Obama and during which Biden was either a cheerleader or a participant.

Those policies devastated and angered the areas which gave Trump his unexpected victory four years ago. What reason do we have to think that Biden will not return to that disastrous playbook? After all he knows no other.

This is a lengthy piece from the editor of Current Affairs magazine, Nathan Robinson, which was recorded for YouTube, but it should be the handbook for all those who believe it would be disastrous to have Joe Biden in the White House:

Thanks to CM for the tip:

What I want to know is why the guy by the door is holding his nose?

This is the poll, commissioned and analysed by academics at Liverpool University, that Sinn Fein and most of the media are strenuously ignoring, possibly because it shows a clear majority of people in Northern Ireland opting to stay within the UK in the event of a Border poll.

(Thanks to DR for posting it on Facebook)

That part of the survey conflicts rather sharply with the more popular narrative, fueled by unfounded  predictions of the effects of Brexit (remember the customs posts on the Border which would reignite the Troubles?) and peddled by assorted instant experts in media land, each feeding off the others’ misunderstood wisdoms.

You can locate the survey here. The relevant section is Chapter Five.

Now that Joe Biden is the favourite to win the Democratic presidential nomination, expect to see his failing mental powers – his increasingly hard-to-ignore senility to be blunt – assume centre stage.

Democrat bosses would not be human if they were not concerned about how he will fare against Trump in the back and forth of debates. Biden’s mental confusion is now so obvious and embarrassing, even if much of the US media don’t want to go there, that it is enough to make you wonder whether the Ukrainian scandal was really staged to make it appear that Trump was scared of Biden when in fact he wanted him to be his opponent.

This piece in Commonweal magazine mercilessly examines Biden’s mental problem.

According to The New York Times, the Democratic Party establishment spent months discussing who to run for the White House to stop Bernie Sanders. That was their priority, not ousting Trump. What you see below is the best they could come up with; the video below shows part of a speech given in the recent presidential primary in South Carolina by the guy they chose. And that’s before you get to all the lies he has told about his political life and his past. Trump will chew him up and spit him out. He just introduced his family at a victory rally late on Super Tuesday night and mixed up his sister and his wife. Well, it was past his bedtime. If Biden gets the nomination, Trump’s home in a boat.

A long-simmering scandal involving allegations of bullying by an executive at BBCNI Television’s highly regarded investigations department is threatening to become public, with all the attendant damage and embarrassment such exposure inevitably brings.

Sterling efforts by the mandarins at Ormeau Ave to keep the spotlight (excuse the pun) off the affair could now all come to nought following the awards ceremony at last week’s prestigious annual TV jamboree in London, hosted by the Royal Television Society (RTS). A scandal which so far had been successfully kept under wraps could now burst into the open.

A deep and revealing probe of loyalist killings in Mid Ulster, made as part of the BBC’s 50th anniversary of the Troubles series, won the RTS’ prestigious current affairs programme of the year. But strangely, the editor of the department which made the show, the guy who would normally accept the RTS’ plaudits with the appropriate degree of pride and modesty before basking in the more welcome praise of his bosses back home in Ormeau Avenue, failed to appear. Needless to say this went not unnoticed, as they say.

So why the no show?

Perhaps it was because he had just heard that he was facing a disciplinary hearing over the bullying and intimidation of people working for him that has, his accusers say, a history going back an astonishing 20 years.

The award was instead accepted by a freelance producer from the team who profusely thanked the editor under investigation. The speech raised eyebrows among BBCNI colleagues because it is understood that at least 15 of them have made statements alleging a pattern of bullying characterized by regular angry outbursts at the hands of the executive under scrutiny.

The investigation was undertaken by a BBC Human Resources team from London who interviewed staff over 10 months.

The staff are keen to know what happens next and in particular where Peter Johnston, the controller of BBCNI, stands on the matter.

This all comes at a time when the same department is fighting a libel action brought by Gerry Adams, over a programme greenlighted by the same executive.  See the latest: (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/high-court/gerry-adams-seeks-more-information-for-defamation-action-against-bbc-1.4164551)

If the action does come to trial, and Mr Adams’ legal advisers are worth their doubtless hefty fee, they will choose a jury trial on the grounds that any Dublin jury is bound to contain a significant number of people who voted for Adams’ party at the recent general election in the 26 Cos. As the bard wrote: ‘When sorrows come, they come not (in) single spies, but in battalions.’