Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
After the week that is, what relief to be absorbed into the fastidious sartorial guidelines of South-west London’s finest purveyors of sporting dignity.
Or not, as the case may be… viewers (and questions of taste) have already been sent spinning by the erm, fluidity of Nike’s 'Premier Slam’ dress: a sort of sporty, baby doll, thigh-skirting pleated mini dress worn by Czech Republic first round winner Lucie Safarova on Monday, which floated up perilously throughout play...
Even the staid NYT's getting into the action on this one:
Her name is Brianna Addolorato. I’ve never heard of her – but if the paparazzi are taking pictures of her – it’s safe to assume that she’s got a good scam going on, one that involves knowing who the paparrazzi who will take pictures of anyone in a bikini are – but more importantly, that she has been able to polarize her whore behavior, slutty pics, by calling herself a Fashion Blogger…which basically means zero, just that she tags the clothing she wears, or as she probably calls it “curates”…because justifying her whore for follower behavior, or packaging it as “fashion blogger” you know giving it a bigger purpose – makes brands happier to send money her way…it’s all fucking lies…
But at least she knows her place, gets topless one the beach and keeps the lie alive by reminding us she’s down to fuck, but she can make more money if she pretends she’s not...
Click through for the photos. She's a blond hottie.
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s busiest airport was rocked by a terrorist attack late Tuesday that killed at least 28 people and injured scores on the eve of a major holiday, the fourth major attack in Istanbul this year.
At least two blasts rocked the international terminal of Istanbul Ataturk Airport at about 10 p.m. local time, according to a Turkish official. Police fired on two suicide bombers who blew up themselves at the entrance to terminal, the official said.
Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said an attacker had sprayed the area with a Kalashnikov and then detonated explosives.
Sixty other people were wounded in the attack, with six in critical condition, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.
Ambulances and police rushed to the area. Telecasts from the area showed bodies splayed on the floor outside the arrivals area and travellers rushing out of the airport. Police cordoned off the area and started evacuating passengers.
Flights to and from Istanbul were halted after the attack. British British Airways rerouted an Istanbul-bound plane back to London and Lufthansa cancelled at least one flight.
Turkish television channels reported at least three explosions at multiple areas, but there was no immediate confirmation from officials.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim called Interior Minister Efkan Ala and established a crisis desk.
Turkey’s largest airport has a strict security regime, unlike the other airports that have suffered bombings in the recent past.
Passengers are required to send all luggage and personal items through security screenings at the entrance to the departure zone, long before reaching check-in areas, which are separated by glass partitions and walls. The Islamic State-affiliated bombers who attacked the Brussels airport this year faced no such security screenings, and security officials believe that contributed to the high number of casualties there.
No group had claimed responsibility immediately after Tuesday’s attack...
Nigel Farage, a member of the European Parliament and the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, spoke on the floor of the European Parliament on Tuesday morning.
It was a special session of the Parliament, called in the wake of the U.K.'s decision to leave the European Union. Farage — whose eurosceptic right-wing party was firmly in favor of the Brexit, and who personally campaigned quite passionately for it — was grinning.
And on a day marked with fiery speeches, his stood out...
We used to hear this argument all the time in California once Prop. 8 passed. Remember, "human rights shouldn't be up for a vote by the people."
Now, though, with Black Lives Matter, and all that, it's, "This is what democracy looks like!" You know, shutting down people and opinions with whom you disagree.
Interesting change WaPo made to this hed: "Some thing just shouldn't be decided by [the people => referendum]" pic.twitter.com/zSP6YkJmBI
Jeremy Corbyn is fighting for his political life today as more than 20 of his top team have lined up to knife him.
Disgruntled frontbench MPs cited his lack of leadership and inability to stop Brexit as reasons for their revolt – but die-hard Corbyn fans say they know better.
Hundreds of supporters who have the leader’s back claim the real reason for the revolt is a fruition of a Zionist conspiracy.
Truthers posted their thoughts publicly on social media, while MPs including rising star Jess Phillips say they are receiving far more accusations in private.
Please safeguard jeremy corbyn. He done nothing wrong. He is a righteous socialist. Zionists are targeting him. #KeepCorbyn
Jeremy Corbyn has lost a vote of no confidence in his leadership (172 votes to 40) but is expected to battle on to force a contest in which Angela Eagle or Tom Watson is likely to be the rival candidate.
David Cameron is in Brussels for discussions with European leaders about Britain's exit from the EU. He has told journalists that "we must not turn our backs on Europe".
An earlier session of the European Parliament saw Ukip leader Nigel Farage booed and jeered by fellow MEPs...
There used to be some debate as to which professional athletes got the hottest tail. That debate ended when everybody admitted that soccer might be boring as shit, but playing professionally essentially guarantees you a slender brunette with big tits wearing screaming your name from the wives and girlfriend section of the stands.
You'd expect top scores of some South American country to have Victoria's Secret model shtupping...
It's perfectly reasonable to worry about what will happen after Britain's historic vote to break up with the European Union. Will Brexit provoke Scotland and Northern Ireland to secede from the United Kingdom, leading to its dissolution? Will it embolden other members of the EU to bolt? And will those secessionist movements empower unsavory characters who end up being seduced by Vladimir Putin and modeling themselves on his form of authoritarian populism? Will the dire short-term economic consequences of Brexit create chaos and recession in the long term, too?
As I said, lots of reasons to worry.
But what we've seen from a wide range of writers and analysts in the days since the Brexit vote is not necessarily worry. It is shock. Fury. Disgust. Despair. A faith has been shaken, illusions shattered, pieties punctured. This is what happens when a life-orienting system of belief gets smashed on the rocks of history.
The name of that shattered system of belief? Progressivism...
Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has set off a fresh round of currency pressures in the world’s largest economies, further complicating efforts by central banks to spur growth.
The pound hit a three-decade low on Monday, and both Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings cut their ratings on the U.K., saying that last week’s vote raises risks to the country’s economy.
Meanwhile, the Japanese yen, Swiss franc and U.S. dollar posted further gains, as market turmoil resumed after the weekend and sent investors in search of havens. Government bonds also benefited from the flight from risk, with the yield on the 10-year British bond falling below 1% for the first time, as the rout in U.S. and European stocks deepened.
The currency moves, in particular, pose risks for businesses and in turn for economies that have posted lackluster performance.
The resurgent yen and franc are putting renewed pressure on companies in Japan and Switzerland. Meanwhile, U.S. companies that had benefited from a weakening dollar this year face a bout of currency-related stress as the second-quarter earnings season looms.
Stronger currencies tend to make a country’s exporters less competitive as the effective price of their goods goes up. They also tamp down inflation as import prices fall, frustrating outcomes for central banks in Japan, Europe and the U.S. that are trying to calibrate policies to boost growth and inflation. The moves could tempt central banks to intervene or modify policies to limit the upward pressure.
“Policy makers are unlikely to sit idly by while their strengthening currency derails any economic progress that they’ve made,” said Omer Esiner, chief market analyst at international-payments firm Commonwealth Foreign Exchange. “Central banks would be justified in stepping in.”
The problem is currencies can’t all weaken at once. The Swiss have been trying to push the franc down against the euro. The European Central Bank has nodded to the benefits of a weaker currency as it lowers interest rates into negative territory and expands its bond-buying programs. Japan has tried to weaken the yen against the dollar. And Federal Reserve officials have cited the stronger dollar as an impediment to growth.
All are showing little success, and investors have raised concerns that central-bank tools for influencing currency values are losing their effectiveness...
According to the bland conventional wisdom, Americans frustrated by the failure of the establishment to address issues like immigration and economic inequality have turned to an unlikely pair of political outsiders, a New York developer-turned-reality-TV-star and a Vermont socialist, to set things right. This account is true as far as it goes, but it is also hopelessly parochial and inadequate to the scope of the changes afoot. Trumpism (and Bernie Sanders-ism) are but the American symptoms of a global phenomenon: the astonishing rise of illiberal movements of the far right and far left.
As an ideology and as a governing philosophy, liberalism is fast losing ground. “Liberalism” here is understood not as the American shorthand for those who vote Democratic in the United States, but as the philosophy of individual rights and (relatively) free markets that in theory is shared by the U.S. Republican Party and Scandinavian social democrats alike. As it fades, populism and identitarian politics of all kinds are gaining adherents nearly everywhere. Today’s illiberals are less likely to be organized around systematic philosophies like Fascism and Communism than was the case in the years between the two world wars—the last time liberalism appeared this vulnerable. In our time, illiberal forces are disparate, instinctual, inchoate, more likely to be local in focus, and internally divided. Often various illiberalisms are locked in combat against one another.
Nevertheless there are common patterns that range vastly different geographies and political contexts, suggesting that this illiberal ascendance will be a defining feature of the 21st century. Welcome to Planet Trump...
Man, this lady was just bringing it home yesterday. She video'd the black bloc anarchists throttling the so-called "neo-Nazis," and especially captured the one dude getting rung-up on the back of his head with a 2x4.
Frances Wang joined the ABC10 reporting team in October 2015. She was born in San Francisco but grew up in Sacramento, which she considers home.
Frances has dreamed of being a journalist since she was kid after being interviewed by Walt Gray.
She's always been the most talkative of her peers, so her former teachers and classmates aren't surprised she became a reporter.
After graduating from St. Francis High School, she went on to become a Trojan at the University of Southern California. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with Phi Beta Kappa honors. During her time there, she also earned a second Bachelor's degree in Business Administration.
Most recently, Frances worked as a morning news reporter for KREM2 in Spokane, Wash., where she would cover breaking news one day and zip line through the mountains on live TV the next. She's also had internships at KABC-TV, CNN and E! News.
Frances' favorite part of her job is getting to know people she may not have met otherwise. She loves to tell stories about the amazing things people do for their communities.
In her free time, you can find her catching up on shows, trying out new restaurants, and struggling to get to the gym.
Perception and reality are two different things in politics.
On paper, Republicans Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Rob Portman of Ohio should be losing in the polls in their U.S. Senate re-election races.
Both men have been hammered for a month over whether they will support their party's presumptive nominee, their opposition to voting on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee and their refusal to enact new gun legislation after the massacre in Orlando. Yet both are defying conventional political wisdom.
Toomey increased his lead over Democrat Katie McGinty by 8 percentage points in the latest Quinnipiac survey.
Portman's numbers improved by 9 points, placing him in a tie with Democrat Ted Strickland, a former governor who lost his re-election bid to John Kasich in 2010.
The two Republicans are competing in critical states that offer insight into whether Democrats can regain House and Senate majorities in November.
In short, if you want to know who will hold or retake the Senate majority, watch Toomey's battle with McGinty and Portman's with Strickland...
I don't shock easily, but the beginning of the video, when the black bloc anarchist, armed with a wooden club, smashes a protester in the side of the head, is mind-boggling.
Some of these activists from the Traditional Workers Party appeared indeed to be Nazis, as I found out after trolling around on Twitter yesterday. The only thing is, it was the leftists who started the violent attacks. Frankly, they set out to violently confront the so-called "white nationalists" and shut them down. So who's the extremist? Who's the real fascist?
• SMASH FASCISM! NO PLATFORM FOR ORGANIZING RACIST VIOLENCE, MURDER, AND GENOCIDE!
• No Racist Demagogy! No Anti-Muslim Bigotry! No National Chauvinism, Fear Mongering, or Immigrant Scapegoating!
• Latina/o, Black, Native American, Arab, Asian, and White, Immigrants With and Without Papers, We are ALL Californians!
• Open the Borders! Full Citizenship Rights for All Undocumented Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum-Seekers Now!
• Build the New Independent, Integrated, Mass Militant Youth-Led Civil Rights and Immigrant Rights Movement!
Yvette Felarca, from the activist group By Any Means Necessary in Oakland, says their violent reaction to a white supremacist rally at the California Capitol Sunday will help prevent violence against immigrant communities by dissuading other supremacist groups from holding events.
Jeremy Corbyn has lost more than half his Cabinet and seen more than 30 of his MPs revolt against his leadership over the last 48 hours.
Mr Corbyn has lost 20 of his 31 strong shadow cabinet and seen a further 13 shadow ministers resign this morning.
The rebels have criticised his performance in the EU referendum and he faces further resignations from the junior frontbench ranks amid fresh calls for him to stand down as leader.
Jeremy Corbyn's grip on the Labour leadership looked increasingly weak as Angela Eagle became the most senior member of his shadow cabinet to quit.
Shadow housing minister John Healey, shadow energy secretary Lisa Nandy and shadow work and pensions secretary Owen Smith have all resigned - adding to the 12 shadow cabinet members Mr Corbyn lost on Sunday.
Sources said that Mr Corbyn will refuse to step down and will instead try and make public a planned secret vote on his future so that voters can see which MPs are trying to unseat him.
Mr Corbyn has been forced to promote a number of key allies as the revolt against his leadership intesnifies.
A number of the 2015 intake have joined the new shadow cabinet with just a year's experience on the job.
Late on Sunday evening Mr Corbyn issued a bullish statement and vowed to continue as leader despite the resignations. He said: "I am not going to betray the trust of those who voted for me – or the millions of supporters across the country who need Labour to represent them.
“Those who want to change Labour’s leadership will have to stand in a democratic election, in which I will be a candidate.
“Over the next 24 hours I will reshape my shadow cabinet and announce a new leadership team to take forward Labour’s campaign for a fairer Britain - and to get the best deal with Europe for our people.”
The Supreme Court, in a victory for abortion-rights advocates, has limited the power of Texas and other states to restrict or effectively shut down clinics that offer the procedure.
The justices, by a 5-3 vote, said Monday that Texas lawmakers went too far by imposing unnecessary regulations that had forced most of the state’s abortion clinics to go out of business.
The decision is the court's clearest pronouncement since 1992 on abortion, and it makes clear that states may not impose health regulations that severely restrict the right to abortion...
America, too, is experiencing a populist upheaval, of which Donald Trump’s candidacy is more of a symptom than a cause.
So the post-Brexit number-crunching is over and it turns out that the decisive support for Britain’s leaving the EU came not from right-wing nationalists but from working-class Labour voters. This offers some lessons for British and European politicians — and for us in America, too.
Much of Britain’s prosperity in recent years has centered on London, which has done very well and become very pleased with itself. As Peter Mandler writes in Dissent, this turned out to be a problem. London occupies a huge place in British society — as if Washington, D.C., New York, Hollywood, and perhaps Silicon Valley were all in the same place. But that leaves the rest of the country feeling somewhat left out, and deeply suspicious of the people running things, especially as the people running things seem to hold the rest of the country in contempt, openly mocking the traditional, the middle-class, the non-Metropolitan.
Mandler writes, “London, a young, thriving, creative, cosmopolitan city, seems the model multicultural community, a great European capital. But it is also the home of all of Britain’s elites—the economic elites of “the City” (London’s Wall Street, international rather than European), a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”
The result, Mandler writes, is that “For the rest of the country has felt more and more excluded, not only from participation in the creativity and prosperity of London, but more crucially from power. . . . A majority of people around the United Kingdom are feeling like non-people, un-citizens, their lives jerked about like marionettes by wire-pullers far away. In those circumstances, very bad things indeed can be expected.”
Given a chance, these people seized an opportunity to give the wires a yank of their own. A lot of people felt powerless, and the political system not only didn’t address that, but seemed to glory in it.
But will leaders learn the lesson? It seems doubtful. As Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle observed about the post-Brexit reaction, they mostly seemed to double down. “The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment has been on full display on social media. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. Given how badly this strategy had just failed, this seemed a strange time to be doubling down. . . . Or perhaps they were just unable to grasp what I noted in a column last week: that nationalism and place still matter, and that elites forget this at their peril. A lot people do not view their country the way some elites do: as though the nation were something like a rental apartment — a nice place to live, but if there are problems, or you just fancy a change, you’ll happily swap it for a new one. In many ways, members of the global professional class have started to identify more with each other than they have with the fellow residents of their own countries. Witness the emotional meltdown many American journalists have been having over Brexit.”
This game was a couple of weeks ago, but the Cleveland Indians' "Vote Tribe" Twitter feed just posted a photo of the man with some gold training shoes and a cigar.
CBS News Elections Director Anthony Salvanto breaks down the numbers and sees some pretty amazing disadvantages for Hillary Clinton, particularly on those things I mentioned in my last post, "on the issues of immigration and the corrupt political class," not to mention terrorism and political change.
This is an amazing video, especially in how Mr. Salvanto completely avoids taking leftist spin positions on the numbers. A breath of fresh air, frankly (particularly in that John Dickerson's a fairly hard-left political operative himself).
To gather from all the buzz at Memeorandum, you'd think Hillary Clinton had pulled out an insurmountable double-digit lead in the wake of Donald Trump's "horrible" couple of weeks following the Curiel comments and Orlando.
That's because WaPo has a sensational new poll out with Clinton expanding her lead over the bombastic Manhattan mogul, 51-39 percent. See Politico for the summary, "Clinton surges to 12-point lead in WaPo poll":
Hillary Clinton currently holds a double-digit lead over Donald Trump nationally, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday.
If the election were held today, 51 percent of respondents said they would vote for Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and 39 percent said they would vote for Trump...
There's clearly something wrong with the poll, and without digging through the internals (the folks at Hot Air usually do quite a thorough job of that), I'll bet they oversampled Democrats.
The fact is, there's been little change in the underlying structure of the horse race. If anything, Donald Trump's probably about tied with Clinton, since on the issues of immigration and the corrupt political class, the Brexit revolt in Britain tells us a whole lot about the electoral environment Clinton and the Democrats are facing. (An interesting hypothesis is whether there was some kind of Bradley Effect in the British voting. Recall with the Bradley Effect voters hide their true preferences from pollsters, to conceal more racialist sentiments and avoid the potential appearance of "bigotry").
Republican Donald Trump emerged relatively unscathed from one of the rockiest phases of his campaign, lagging rival Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points but essentially tied when third-party candidates are included, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
The survey of 1,000 registered voters showed Mrs. Clinton leading 46% to 41% in a head-to-head matchup. Mrs. Clinton’s number held steady over the past month, while Mr. Trump’s standing dropped by 2 points since May. The survey was conducted June 19-23, a period of tumult within his campaign.
Mr. Trump over the past week fired his campaign manager and faced criticism from within his own party over weak fundraising numbers and lack of organization. Earlier in the month, he was the target of bipartisan ire for his focus on a federal judge’s ethnicity and his reaction to the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla.
“Donald Trump has had the worst month one can imagine, but Clinton’s negatives are so high the net impact on the ballot is almost invisible,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Fred Yang.
In a worrying sign for the former secretary of state, her advantage largely vanished when voters also get a choice of third-party candidates.
Mrs. Clinton’s lead fell to one point, at 39% to Mr. Trump’s 38%, when Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are part of the mix. With both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump saddled with low approval ratings, voters seem to be looking for alternatives. Together, Mr. Johnson and Ms. Stein were the choice of 16% of those who took part in the survey.
A spokesman for Mr. Johnson said the Libertarian ticket expects to be on the ballot in all 50 states. A Green Party spokesman said the party expects to do at least as well as 2012, when Ms. Stein was on the ballot in 37 states.
Politicon is unique not only in its approach to politics, but who’s in the lineup. Conservative icons like Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck will share the same buildings and sometimes the same stage as outspoken liberals like Cenk Uygur and Democratic talking heads like James Carville and Paul Begala.
Throw in high-profile politicians -- California Sen. Barbara Boxer, former Mexican President Vicente Fox and a possible Hillary Clinton running mate are scheduled to attend -- artwork displays, live podcast tapings, comedic performances, film screenings and book signings and you get a non-partisan event intended to be a political junkie’s nirvana...
Dana Loesch hosts her award-winning, nationally syndicated daily radio show, The Dana Show: The Conservative Alternative from Dallas, Texas where she also hosts “Dana” on The Blaze television network. Dana appears regularly on Fox News, ABC, CNN, among others, and has co-hosted on “The View.” She describes herself as a “conservatarian.”
Dana’s original brand of young, punk-rock, conservative irreverence has found a fast-growing audience in multiple mediums. Dana is listed in the top 40 of Talkers Magazine‘s top 100 “heavy hitters” and was named Missouri’s #1 Radio Personality in 2014. A former award-winning newspaper columnist (and notable blogger since 2001), Dana was ranked as one of the top 16 most powerful mothers online by Neilsen and one of the top 30 Under 30 according to the St. Louis Business Journal. Dana was the 2012 winner of Accuracy In Media’s Grassroots Journalism award as well as the inaugural Breitbart Spirit Award. Dana was one of the original Breitbart editors selected by her late friend and mentor, Andrew Breitbart, to head what was BigJournalism.com and helped break the Anthony Weiner scandal before departing in 2012. Her Best Selling book on gun control, Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America is on shelves now and is turning the tide in the gun debate. Mark Levin wrote of her book that it, “Obliterates every baseless argument made against the Second Amendment.” Sean Hannity quipped, “Buy this book before someone tries to ban it.” Michelle Malkin states, “WARNING: This book is explosive! Mother, wife, New Media warrior and political sharpshooter Dana Loesch confronts the ultimate war on women: gun control.”
Dana co-founded the tea party movement in St. Louis and speaks regularly on the subject of new media, gun control, anti-feminism, and grassroots.
A native Missourian, she and her family now live in Texas.
I'm almost half way done with her new book, Flyover Nation. I just started reading it on Thursday, and I've been busy running around this last couple of days too. It's a quick read. Dana's a fabulous writer!
In any case, more blogging tonight or in the morning.
When I'm in the car listening to the Sound L.A., I keep hearing one of those "stop the I.R.S." ads promising to stave off some huge tax lien or wage garnishment. But the funny part that always trips me out is where the guy talks about "our current economic downturn." I mean, how many people buy that idea that we're in an "economic downturn"?
A lot, probably. But we're not.
We've been out of recession since June 2009, but super obviously, the country's economic prospects have not improved for untold millions of people. (Just ask all those white working class voters who've been swarming to Donald Trump's banner of "Make America Great Again.")
One of the books there is by Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, which I've had my eye on for some time. But you know the story: I've got a lot on my plate, heh.
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are preparing a “dream team” bid to take control of the leadership of the Conservative Party in the wake of the most dramatic week in modern British political history.
David Cameron resigned as Prime Minister yesterday morning after Britain voted to leave the European Union sparking a major political, economic and constitutional crisis.
Within hours of the surprise vote, Mr Cameron had resigned, the Bank of England intervened in the financial markets to prevent a crash and the Scottish government threatened to hold another referendum on splitting from the rest of the United Kingdom.
In a statesmanlike address from the Vote Leave headquarters, Mr Johnson positioned himself as a Prime Minister in waiting by urging unity in the nation and speaking of the bright future that now awaits an outward-looking Britain.
“I want to speak to the millions of people who did not vote for this outcome especially young people who may feel that this decision in some way involves pulling up the drawbridge or any kind of isolationism. I think the very opposite is true.
“To those who may be anxious at home or abroad this does not mean that that he UK will be in anyway less united nor indeed does it mean that it will be any less European.”
He added: “We cannot turn our backs on Europe. We are part of Europe. Our children and grandchildren will continue to have a wonderful future as Europeans travelling to the continent, understanding the languages and cultures that make up of common European civilisation.”
It is now expected that Mr Johnson will stand as leader, with Mr Gove, the Justice Secretary, becoming the Chancellor in a “Brexit Government”, sources claimed...
— (((Mark Krikorian))) (@MarkSKrikorian) June 24, 2016
LONDON — British voters didn’t just shock the world and the financial markets by voting to leave the European Union hours ago: They also ignored President Barack Obama, handed Hillary Clinton a potential economic burden and injected new energy into the populist currents roiling politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
The surprise 52 percent - 48 percent result in favor of leaving the European Union — which British networks projected just before 5 a.m. local time — came after a tense night of vote-counting throughout the United Kingdom. British Prime Minister David Cameron later announced he's resigning, citing a need for "fresh leadership." The British pound rose and fell rapidly as the anti-EU “Leave” movement piled up big margins in the northeast, swamping wins by the “Remain” camp in London, Birmingham and Scotland.
In addition to driving down the pound by nearly 10 percent, the vote slammed global markets, with shares in Asia down well over 3 percent in early trading. Futures markets also indicated a big swoon coming on Wall Street early Friday morning with shares expected to drop more than 3 percent. That would amount to a Dow drop of close to 600 points, a plunge frighteningly reminiscent of the 2008 financial crisis.
Market analysts struggled overnight to reckon with the potential global impact of the Brexit vote. "Massive institutional uncertainty is now being superimposed on economic fragility and financial fluidity," said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz.
Central bankers and heads of state around the world sought to calm the financial markets and limit the damage from the vote on Friday morning.
But make no mistake: A Brexit represents nothing less than the partial splintering of the world’s largest political union and trading bloc — an $18 trillion economy. Many fear that other European countries will now hold their own exit referendums, leading to a chain reaction that will reverberate across the Atlantic. The Brexit vote could also break apart the UK, scramble transatlantic political unity amid growing tensions with Russia, and complicate U.S. trade ties.
It will almost certainly hit the U.S. economy, warned Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.
"The economy is more fragile to a negative shock than at anytime since the second World War," Summers told POLITICO. "Always before when had a downturn there was room for monetary policy action to counteract that. Today there is essentially no such room."
In addition to volatility hitting U.S. markets, the surprise win for the Leave side is likely to ripple through the 2016 presidential campaign....
In addition to volatility hitting U.S. markets, the surprise win for the Leave side is likely to ripple through the 2016 presidential campaign. The Brexit vote became largely a referendum on elites and immigration, the same themes likely Republican nominee Donald Trump has put at the center of his bid for the White House.
Trump, who spoke favorably of Brexit, applauded the U.K.'s decision to leave the EU Friday.
The result could also suggest that polls showing a lead for Clinton are underestimating the extent to which voters across Western democracies are fed up with career politicians and concerned about Islamic terrorism and immigration. UK polls and online betting markets heading into the Brexit vote appeared to show a small but solid leave for Remain, similar to the leads Clinton holds in most U.S. surveys.
"Polls consistently underestimating right-wing support," Weekly Standard editor BIll Kristol tweeted. "Cameron & Bibi, now Brexit. So if polls show Clinton up 5, could Trump be even?"
The larger issue for the Clinton campaign will be potential economic fallout from the UK's decision to leave the EU. Indeed, if the apocalytpic economic predictions leading up to Thursday’s vote turn out to be accurate, get ready for a Brexit-fueled economic slowdown that could bleed into the presidential race...
A prime minister is gone, but that is of nothing compared to the fallout for the economy, our union and Europe. It will all have to be grappled with, and so too will the economic neglect and the social alienation which have driven Britain to the exit door.
The British people have spoken. The prime minister has resigned. Already, the consequences of what the voters said and why they said it have begun to reshape Britain’s future in profound and potentially dangerous ways. The country has embarked on a perilous journey in which our politics and our economy must be transformed. The vote to leave the EU will challenge not only the government and politicians but all of us whose opinions have been rejected.
Britain’s place in the world must now be rethought. That will demand the kind of debate about our alliances that we have not had since the Suez crisis forced a post-imperial reality on Britain. Once again, the country’s very idea of itself will have to be reimagined too. The deep strains on the nation’s fabric that are partly expressed as a pro-European Scotland, Northern Ireland – and London – and an anti-European England and Wales must be urgently addressed. And a new relationship with a Europe that is in no mood to be generous must be negotiated. As a gleeful Nigel Farage pointed out early on Friday, there are also already voices from the populist right in Denmark, France and the Netherlands arguing for their own definitive vote. And while the Bank of England successfully steadied the City after dramatic early falls in the value of shares and a tumbling pound, these things will take careful management if they are not to translate into a new crunch on the banks, a recession or even – as George Soros warned earlier in the week – a sudden inability to finance the balance of payments.
David Cameron – instantly, utterly and forever broken by his defeat on Thursday – grasped that he could not lead the country through the coming turmoil. In a graceful little speech in Downing Street he accepted failure and announced that his successor would be in place by the time of the party conference in October. No speech, however, could have salvaged his standing in the history books. Mr Cameron will go down as the man who gambled the country’s future as a way out of a party difficulty. His original folly was compounded by his refusal to stand firm against his internal enemies on the detailed plans for the plebiscite, despite the authority of last year’s newly won mandate. And then the campaign itself, on which he kept tight control, failed. Project Fear’s fundamental mistake was that it did not understand that far too many Britons, already living insecure and uncertain lives, felt they had little to lose. By focusing on the City and big business, the campaign had nothing to say about the victims of the myriad failures of so many local economies. Mr Cameron won the party leadership by outflanking his rival on Euroscepticism, and in his decade at the top he did nothing to promote a positive vision of the EU. He followed rather than led; and in this sour atmosphere he bet his shirt on the notoriously fickle vehicle of a referendum, and lost.
Now the vote is in, the overriding sense is of surprise and uncertainty. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the two generals of the leave campaign, tried to instil some authority. There was “no haste” to start exit negotiations, they declared. But within the hour, the Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon declared that in these “materially different” circumstances she would set in process the machinery for a second independence referendum. She and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, are demanding that they be treated as parties to any negotiations. Moves for a Scottish independence vote will add to the demand for a border poll in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin has already called for such a vote. As campaigners, the leave politicians were sometimes shambolic and often contradictory; now they have been handed victory, they have unleashed forces well beyond their control.
The immediate outlook for progressive and even humanitarian values in the UK is not encouraging...
Oh brother.
The "outlook for progressive and even humanitarian values"?
It's like the world is coming to an end.
And well, frankly, it is for the global left, for which the E.U. is the Promised Land of the Marxist collectivist ideological project. The absolute shock among the Guardianistas that their vision of Utopia was decisively repudiated at the polls recalls nothing short of the horror at the realization of one's imminent if not immediate mortality. It's hard to take, so cognitive coping seeks to blame and ridicule the reactionary, racist, and so-called xenophobic people who're allegedly taking Britain back to the Stone Age.
It's so freakin' glorious to watch I'm beside myself with glee.
Trolling through the Guardian's Twitter feed is like a crystal ball Rorschach test into the global left's psychological torment. There's so much contempt and hatred, combined with lingering disbelief at the audacity of the rubes, that it's too much to link up here at the post. But here's a taste of this deep, dark leftist hate and recimination:
I expect that markets will stabilize as the political and economic ramifications of the vote become clearer. Of course, good leadership couldn't hurt. Prime Minister Cameron's resignation is obviously a stark move, but meetings between U.K. and E.U. representatives are supposed to start right away. From reading around on Twitter, a good scenario would be for Britain to negotiate membership without voting rights in the European Free Trade Association (and perhaps the European Economic Area as well, which is problematic, since that would entail the "free movement of persons" among member states, and that's probably the main reason the British voted to leave).
Britain’s surprise vote to leave the European Union battered the British pound by more than 11%, sent global stocks tumbling and broke records in government-bond yields as the world’s financial markets braced for an uncertain future for the politics and economies of Europe.
It was a historic drubbing for investors who had stacked up bets that the U.K. would choose to stay. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who had campaigned for Britain to remain in the EU, said Friday he would step down.
Stocks in Asia, Europe and the U.S. fell sharply, along with oil prices, as investors sought safety in gold and government bonds.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 611.21 points, or 3.4%, to 17399.86, wiping out its year-to-date gains. The S&P 500 index fell 3.6%, dragged lower by bank stocks, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite shed 4.1%.
“We haven’t had what I would say is a crash, but we’ve given back gains we’d taken months to make,” said Chris Semenuk, manager of the TIAA-CREF International Equity Fund.
European stocks closed with steep losses. The pan-European Stoxx 600 index fell 7%, its steepest drop since 2008. Goldman Sachs sent out a note Friday predicting the index’s losses related to a British exit from the EU, or “Brexit,” could total 19%.
The drop in sterling helped keep London’s export-heavy FTSE 100 somewhat insulated from the turmoil in the U.K. The index fell 3.15%. The FTSE 250 index, which tends to be more geared toward the U.K. economy, fell 7.2%, its steepest drop since 1988.
European bank shares posted especially sharp losses, with British bank Barclays PLC down 18% and Spanish lender Banco Santander SA down 20%.
Rosa Maria Soto ached to visit her dying mother in Sonora, Mexico, one final time. But family members worried that the immigrant rights activist who lacks legal status would not make it back across the border to her Phoenix home. A phone call from her brother — the only one of her nine siblings still in Mexico — was strung with tears.
“He said to stay here, keep fighting,” Soto, 62, recalled. So she did.
But Thursday, Soto felt defeated when she learned that the Supreme Court deadlocked on the legality of President Obama’s immigration plan that would have given deportation relief and work permits to 5 million people who came into the country illegally.
The mother of three children and six grandchildren in the United States, Soto would have potentially been protected under the program, known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents.
Still, she, along with other activists and families facing uncertain futures, have vowed to continue the push for reform. Some took to rallies to insist that the deadlock had stopped nothing.
"Obama, escucha, estamos en la lucha," protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Phoenix chanted. Obama, listen, we are in the fight.
“The war has not been lost,” insisted Apolonio Morales, political director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.
Marielena Hincapié, executive director at the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center, said the group will push for the case to be reheard by the high court, and for the Justice Department to seek a stay while the court decides whether to rehear it.
“This is a case of national importance and it deserves a full and fair day in court,” Hincapié said. “We will also be looking at other ways to minimize the harm from the nationwide injunction.”
The children of immigrants without legal status say the recent news has only deepened the anxiety they feel about being deprived of the people who sought to provide them with a richer life.
“We live every day with an overwhelming fear of losing our parents to deportation,” said Zaira Garcia, 23, who has three sisters. The Austin, Texas, resident — an organizer with the immigrant rights group FWD.us — has parents who would have been eligible for Obama’s plan. She cried when she learned of the deadlock...
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