Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

THE KING OF SLEAZE

We all know how Trump loves to cover his walls with fake Time Magazine covers that promote his ego and tell his visitors how wonderful he is. He cheats reality itself, just like he reportedly cheats at golf. We all also know that he views himself as some sort of elected king. In his very sick head, he even thinks it would be great if he could be president, or king, for life. If that ever happens, the world (outside of his demented party) will pray that his remaining life is very, very short. Trump as a king would also mean that America had tragically come full circle and reverted to the pre-1776 days when we were under the rule of England's King George III who's decrees and actions fell into the category of what was then and still is known as "the madness of King George."

We already have the madness of President Donald, a morally bankrupt, squealing little pig of a man joyfully rolls around in reeking sleaze and daily scandals, and who dreams of being our king. He looks in the mirror, and sees that king, the king of his delusional dreams, the king who praises sleazebag and stark raving mad surrogates like Scott Pruitt, Rudy Giuliani, and his own daughter as they emulate him in multiple ways.

A year and a half into the Trump administration, things are bad enough that Time can publish their new cover and have it not be an exaggerated depiction of our reality but a restrained depiction of it.

Cockfighting Romanian Royalty In Oregon

The Pretenders; the royal cockfighter is on the left

Today everyone in Europe is complaining about the influx of Romanians into their countries. Since Romania joined the EU, there are no borders to keep them out and because there are a lot of poor Romanians, they are drawn to the wealthier countries like Germany, Britain, Holland, Italy, France. Europeans talk about them the way they used to talk about Moroccans and Algerians and the way Republican xenophobes and racists like Steve King and Dana Rohrabacher talk about Mexicans. Everything from "they're primitive and carry diseases" to "they're stealing our jobs" and "committing all the crimes."

Here in the U.S., I don't see much of a Romanian problem, although the food was so rich at Sammy's on Chrystie Street in the Lower East Side that I was sick. Ever see a restaurant that serves a bowl of schmaltz on the table like ketchup or mustard? A few days ago, however, I read about King Michael I of Romania-- or, more precisely, about the third of his and Queen Anne's 6 daughters, Princess Irina.

Her parents had been forced to abdicate-- for the second time-- before she was born (in Switzerland) in 1953. Her father had a bright future when he was born in Foișor Castle, grandson of King Ferdinand of Romania and Princess Elena of Greece. When his father, Carol II, eloped with his mistress, Michael became heir apparent and when King Ferdinand died in 1927, he was crowned king at the age of 6. His father came back 3 years later and became king. 10 years later, in 1940, the Romanian fascist leader and notorious anti-semite, Prime Minister Ion Anontescu staged a coup, claiming Carol II was anti-German, and declared the 18 year old Michael king again. Michael was just a figurehead for the fascist regime but he did get chummy with Hitler and Mussolini. In the summer of 1944 King Michael, deftly reading the handwriting on the wall, staged his own coup, had Antonescu arrested on August 23, 1944 (happy 69th anniversary!) and turned over to the Russians who then gave the Romanian communists the honor of trying and executing him.

The following year King Michael, ever the puppet, was forced to appoint a pro-Soviet Communist government, with which he constantly quarreled. In 1947 he was forced at gunpoint to abdicate and the monarchy was abolished the same day and Mike was exiled (with lots of gold, rubies and valuable art). He moved to London and then Switzerland where he became a commercial pilot. In 1976 he sold two of the El Greco paintings he had stolen when he left.

He tried coming back to Romania at the end of 1990 but was deported immediately. After the Communists were overthrown he was allowed to visit and in 1997 he was given a couple of the old royal palaces and now lives part time in Romania and part time in Switzerland. He and Anne attended the baptism of Princess Irina's daughter in Portland, Oregon in 1987. At the time, she and her first husband, John Kreuger, a Swede, were raising horses near the southern Oregon coast. The Swede and Irina were divorced in 2003 and she married John Wesley Walker, a Coos County deputy sheriff, on November 10, 2007 at the Heart of Reno Chapel in Reno. She and the former deputy sheriff were arrested last Thursday as federal agents swept through eastern Oregon and southcentral Washington to upend a suspected cockfighting ring. They are accused of having staged at least 10 cockfighting derbies at their ranch near Irrigon between April 1, 2012, and last May 19.

Thee royal mug shot

The accused cockfight hosts, with a supporting cast of 16 other suspects in Oregon and at least 10 in Washington, were charged in a conspiracy to violate the federal Animal Welfare Act.

The indictment alleges that the derbies featured dozens of cockfights in a ring, much like a fight card in a night of boxing. But the combatants were roosters, each with knives, gaffs or other cutting instruments attached to their legs, fighting to their deaths in a blood sport now outlawed in all 50 states.

"Besides being a barbaric practice, cockfighting jeopardizes public health and safety and facilitates the commission of other criminal acts," said U.S. Attorney Amanda Marshall, Oregon's top federal prosecutor. The "fairly large-scale cockfighting venture" also supported illegal gambling, she said.

A referee supervised the fights as concessionaires sold beer and food, and those managing the action took a 10 percent "house" cut, prosecutors allege.

John and Irina Walker-- along with Irrigon neighbors David Sanchez, 29, and Aurelia Garcia Mendoza, 33, and Hermiston friends Mario "El Cuba" Perez, 62, and Jose Luis Virgen Ramirez, 48-- were charged with operating an illegal gambling business and unlawful animal fighting ventures at the Walkers' Morrow County ranch.

Each of the charges carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

...Top purses in the earlier cockfighting case sometimes reached into the tens of thousands of dollars, authorities said.

The government alleges that the Walkers' horse ranch, on a flat patch of irrigation circles about two miles south of Irrigon, is subject to federal forfeiture because it was used in a criminal enterprise. The ranch's dwellings were valued at $170,360 in 2011, according to public records.

John Walker, 67, served as a sergeant in the Myrtle Point Police Department before going to work on Aug. 1, 1998, with the Coos County Sheriff's Office. He left that job in June 30, 2003, according to the county's Department of Human Resources. It's unclear what kind of work Walker might have performed in the last 10 years.

Walker in 2007 married the former Irina Kreuger, the middle of five daughters born to King Michael I and Queen Anne of Romania. A published account says the Walkers married in the Heart of Reno Chapel, in Reno, Nev.

Princess Irina, 60, is fifth in line to the throne, following her older sisters, Margareta and Elena, and Elena's two children, Nicholas and Elisabeta Karina. She was born and raised in Switzerland and moved to Oregon in 1983.

Irina Walker has never been a visible member of the royal family, which owns four castles in Romania. She has visited the European nation only a handful of times, said historian Filip-Lucian Iorga. Her biography is largely unknown to the Romanian public, he said. The royal family is popular, but largely uninvolved in local politics.

So, should all "royals" who refuse to wholeheartedly renounce their pretensions meet the same fate as Louis XVI? Yeah, of course. They never give up hope of taking over again and subjugating "their" people and stealing all the wealth for themselves. And cockfighting.

Of Monarchies, Unions And Plunder

I was in London for New Years Eve and Buckingham Palace was between our hotel and the Tate Gallery and its Francis Bacon collection, our destination one day. We decided to walk the 2-3 miles to the Tate but the Palace area was packed, thousands of people who wanted to get a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth II say a few words about the New Year or the old year or whatever she was going to say. We had no intention of hearing it. And neither did any Englishmen. There was virtually no one there except Russian and French tourists. Knowing how anti-royalist I am, Roland said, "See, the royal family is good for tourism." It was then that I realized the tourists came from the two countries wise enough to have done away, respectively in 1793 (Louis XVI) and 1918 (Nicholas II)-- albeit rather violently (since "royal" families rarely give up their prerogatives peacefully)-- with their own "royal" families.

I don't think the tyrannical monarchy/kleptocracy in Bahrain, a brutal sectarian one, is especially good for tourism. As you can see from Nick Kristof's tweets, King Hamid's actions aren't doing anything for tourism in his country today.


And yet for conservatives, this is the natural state of man... to live under an authoritarian, "benevolent" ruler or strongman imbued with powers through Divine Right. To challenge the right of a king, no matter what he does, is to challenge God. Americans rejected this concept early on, although conservatives in America fought hard to keep the king and thousands of them fled to England, Canada and the West Indies when the American Revolution was successful. Conservatives have been fighting to bring back the same rotten premise of governance ever since, even if by other names. Today at Salon Stephanie Taylor outlines what an authoritarian, anti-liberté/égalité/fraternité governor in Wisconsin is doing to strike a blow against democracy.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has declared war on state workers, almost literally.

First, he proposed a state budget that would cut retirement and healthcare for workers like teachers and nurses, and strip away nearly all of their collective bargaining rights. But even more significantly, he announced last Friday that he had alerted the National Guard to be ready for state workers to strike or protest, an unprecedented step in modern times.

This would be the first time in nearly 80 years that the National Guard would be used to break a strike by Wisconsin workers, and the first time in over 40 years that the National Guard would be used against public workers anywhere in the country. The last time was the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968, just before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

...During the late 1800s and early 1900s, governors often mobilized the National Guard during strikes.  Sometimes the Guard was genuinely neutral, assigned to buffer the dangerous zone between strikers and their employers. Other times, the Guard was explicitly charged with breaking the strike. During these instances, violence often erupted between strikers and soldiers with terrible, bloody results.

...The use of the National Guard against workers is supposed to be a relic of the past, nearly unimaginable to us. That's because of an uneasy understanding, evolved over time, between citizens and the state over the use of state force against civilians. In her excellent book Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980, historian Joan Jensen argued that this understanding "maintained restraint, sometimes precariously, in using the army to defend the government from the domestic population."

In other words, Jensen argues that the concept of voluntary restraint by the executive branch-- as opposed to codified legal restraint-- is still largely the governing principle at work when deciding whether to mobilize a domestic military force. So Gov. Walker's action is significant because it is an expanded interpretation of the power of the executive office. This would introduce once again the idea that a governor could use the military to impose his personal, political will on a state.

The cultural and historical significance of Gov. Walker's action can't be ignored. When he proposes using the National Guard to break a strike, he conjures a period of American history in which labor and capital were locked in violent, terrible struggle, when income inequality had reached epic heights, and workers had to bleed to organize. This is a step backward, not forward, in the march of American progress.

Up top there's a matter of fact CNN clip you should take a look at, airheads-- rattling off statistics about the biggest gap between rich and poor since statistics were kept and about more people living in poverty here in America since 1948-- interviewing the Senate's most dedicated tribune of working families, Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Let's stop for a minute so you can watch it if you missed it when you started reading about royal families. OK, now, with Bernie in mind, let's look at a report this morning from economist Dean Baker, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

You have to give Gov. Walker and his wealthy patrons credit. Here we have a situation where Wall Street fat cats wrecked the economy-- people like Richard Fuld, Robert Rubin, and Angelo Mozilo-- and they've somehow managed to blame schoolteachers and the highway patrol. 

Now we have a situation where the villains are sitting on their hundreds of millions of dollars, while tough guys like Gov. Walker are beating up school teachers to take away their $2,000 a month pension. And, the best part of the story is the Walkers are being heralded as statesmen for their efforts. 

This situation speaks to the incredible corruption of U.S. politics. There have been numerous studies done by serious economists that all show the same thing, public sector employees are not paid on average more than their private sector counterparts.

The right has been very effective in highlighting the few cases of overpaid workers or excessive pensions and convincing large sectors of the public that their problems are due to overpaid government employees. Of course it helps to have a news media that show about as much independence as Pravda did back in the days of the Soviet Union.

The reality that no honest person can dispute is that state budget crises are almost entirely due to the economic downturn, not out of control spending. This in turn was the result of Wall Street fraud and greed and the incredible incompetence of people like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, who failed to rein in the housing bubble before it grew to such dangerous levels. 

However, politicians like Gov. Walker have managed to instead focus public anger on public sector employees who have the audacity to want to maintain a middle class life style. It would be great if the events in Wisconsin can be a turning point. If our economy was being managed by competent people we would have no problem assuring the whole population of the same sort of pension and health care benefits that most workers used to have and public employees still enjoy. We just have to stop handing over all of our money to Wall Street.

How much different from Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" remark, was John Boehner's retort about hundreds of thousands of American's losing their jobs because of the Republican Party's selfish, conservative agenda, "So be it?" They are pretty much meant to convey the same heartless disregard and disinterest in the problems of ordinary people-- the only difference being that Marie Antoinette probably never even said the statement attributed to her, while Boehner...



The most important question anyone asked this week was Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: Why isn't Wall Street in jail?. Add the politicians who conspired with them-- like Boehner-- to defraud the world out of billions of dollars and you get an even more poignant one. Robert Reich wasn't advocating throwing anyone in prison this week but he was pumping for some distinctly anti-royalist notions: raising taxes on the super rich and lowering them for the middle class.

Would a Democratic president be insane to propose such a thing? Not at all. In fact, polls show an increasing portion of the electorate angry with an insider “establishment”-- on Wall Street, in corporate suites, and in Washington-- that’s been feathering its nest at the public’s expense. The Tea Party is but one manifestation of a widening perception that the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

More importantly, it will soon become evident to most Americans that the only way to reduce the budget deficit, preserve programs deemed essential by the middle class, and not raise taxes on the middle, is to tax the top.

In fact, a Democratic president should propose a major permanent tax reduction on the middle class and working class. I suspect most of the public would find this attractive. But here again, the only way to accomplish this without busting the bank is to raise taxes on the rich.

Republicans have done a masterful job over the last thirty years convincing the public that any tax increase on the top is equivalent to a tax increase on everyone-- selling the snake oil of “trickle down economics” and the patent lie that most middle-class people will eventually become millionaires. A Democratic president would do well to rebut these falsehoods by proposing a truly progressive tax.

Will the rich avoid it? Other critics of my proposal say there’s no way to have a truly progressive tax because the rich will always find ways to avoid it by means of clever accountants and tax attorneys. But this argument proves too much. Regardless of where the highest marginal tax rate is set, the rich will always manage to reduce what they owe. During the 1950s, when it was 91 percent, they exploited loopholes and deductions that as a practical matter reduced the effective top rate 50 to 60 percent. Yet that’s still substantial by today’s standards. The lesson is government should aim high, expecting that well-paid accountants will reduce whatever the rich owe.

Besides, the argument that the nation shouldn’t impose an obligation on the rich because they can wiggle out of it is an odd one. Taken to its logical extreme it would suggest we allow them to do whatever antisocial act they wish-- grand larceny, homicide, or plunder-- because they can always manage to avoid responsibility for it.

Some critics worry that if the marginal tax is raised too high, the very rich will simply take their money to a more hospitable jurisdiction. That’s surely possible. Some already do. But paying taxes is a central obligation of citizenship. Those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.

Finally, there are some who say my proposal doesn’t stand a chance because the rich have too much political power. It’s true that as income and wealth have moved to the top, political clout has risen to the top as well.

But to succumb to cynicism about the possibility of progressive change because of the power of those at the top is to give up the battle before it’s even started. Haven’t we had enough of that?

And enough of right-wing ideologues like Scott Walker, John Kassich and Rick Scott, who are no better than Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Bahrain's Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa... or, for that matter, Louis XVI or Nicholas II; all enemies of ordinary working families.

Does The Nature Of Power Make Monarchs Untenable Now? Take Mohammed VI Of Morocco, And What We Learned From WikiLeaks

Last week our next-door neighbor in Marrakech moved back into his place. He has homes all over Morocco and goes from one set of digs to another; there seem to be two or three just in Marrakech. He was here a couple weeks ago for the Marrakech Film Festival. I'm not sure why he's back so soon. I don't expect to see him-- other than on TV-- and I only knew he was back because of the huge number of heavily armed troops on every street and alleyway in Sidi Mimoun, our quiet little neighborhood. I had just been reading about him, thanks to WikiLeaks.

You probably know me as a critic of conservatives, but if you want to see me really get going, just start talking about monarchy. One of the highlights of the month was the video I saw of British students attacking the limousine of Queen Elizabeth's reactionary son-- purportedly the next so-called "king" of England-- and the ho he's shacking up with. The students were chanting "off with their heads," music to my ears.

But these immensely wealthy and powerful royal families are extremely committed to holding on to their positions at the tip-top of society-- and they're extremely dangerous. My friend Toon arrived in Marrakech a few days ago and happened to tell me about how the journalists involved in the exposure of Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld as a Nazi were ruined and professionally destroyed. Bernhard, like England's weak-minded King Edward VIII, was a Nazi who conspired-- in Edward's case, at the urging of his American Nazi wife, Wallis Simpson-- with Hitler to bring fascism to his country.

[W]ith a belligerent new leader in Berlin threatening to rip up the Treaty of Versailles, those [Nazi] sympathies posed a serious problem-- particularly when King George V died in January 1936. Edward inherited the throne as a hugely popular new king-- and set about meddling in government policy. This was in defiance of all convention but that didn’t stop Edward. He took to calling the ­German ambassador directly-- a clear breach of constitutional protocol and one with serious practical consequences.

When Hitler made it clear he meant to send his forces back into the demilitarised Rhineland the government expressed its opposition. Edward should have stepped back. Instead he threatened to abdicate if Hitler’s advance was stopped, compounding the harm by phoning the German ambassador to tell him he had done so.

“The reassurances from Edward that Britain wasn’t going to fight were crucial,” says Professor Jonathan Petropoulos, author of Royals And The Reich. “Hitler had an ace in the hole, as we would say in American poker, knowing what he did from Edward at the time.”

In that context the abdication at the end of 1936 came as a godsend to the government. But even off the throne the Duke of Windsor posed an ongoing problem.

The FBI files show that at a party in Vienna in June 1937-- the month he married Mrs Simpson-- the loose-tongued Duke told an Italian ­diplomat that the Americans had cracked Italy’s intelligence codes.Four months later the Duke and Duchess paid a high-profile visit to Germany where the Nazi regime fawned on him. They met Hitler, who saw the value of ­cultivating an ally once so intimately involved with British affairs. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels wrote of the Duke: “It’s a shame he is no longer king. With him we would have entered into an alliance.”

Even the declaration of war was not enough to make the Duke sever his Nazi connections. He was made a major-general and stationed in France but he continued to ­communicate with the enemy. In January 1940 the German minister in The Hague wrote that he had established a direct line of contact to the Duke.

This line of contact proved crucial to the tragic fate of France. From the Duke the Germans learned that their plans for the invasion of France had fallen into Allied hands. This intelligence allowed Hitler to change his plans and catch the Allies by surprise. France fell.

The FBI papers also reveal that the Duchess of Windsor was in ­regular contact with the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, whom the Americans suspected of being her former lover. After the fall of Paris she and the Duke hopped from Biarritz to Madrid to Lisbon, shamelessly consorting with wealthy fascist sympathisers.

In Portugal Edward committed what may have been the worst act of his shabby career. In July 1940 the German ambassador in Lisbon passed a message to Berlin saying: “The Duke believes with certainty that continued heavy bombing would make England ready for peace.”

The former king was urging the bombardment of his own people.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill understood the danger he posed and was desperate to get him back to Britain, at one stage threatening him with court martial if he refused. In the end sending him to govern the Bahamas-- a humiliating posting which both the Duke and Duchess detested-- proved the most viable option.

But as Fulton Oursler was to discover the former king continued to plot from the governor’s mansion in Nassau, driven by a combination of his own Nazi sympathies and his belief that a strong Hitler could help him back to the British throne.

Shortly after he took up the post the Duke told one confidant: “After the war is over and Hitler has crushed the Americans we’ll take over. The British don’t want me as king but I’ll be back as their leader.”

Bernhard's P.R. machine always went to great lengths to portray him as a war hero and anti-Nazi fighter. But it was long whispered in Holland that this husband of one queen and father of another was a filthy Nazi traitor, a member of the SS and a member of the Nazi Party just before he married Crown Princess Juliana.

Back to my neighbor, King Mohammed VI. He wasn't even born until 1963, long after Hitler killed himself. He became king in 1999 when his father, Hassan II, died, and everyone says he's far more popular than his father. He inherited at least $2 billion, and is said to have a piece of almost everything in the country. I have no way of knowing if that's true, but I did notice another WikiLeaks document that tarnishes Mohammed's patina pretty disastrously. Seems one of the things he has "a piece" of is his country's narcotics trafficking.

For the first time a U.S. official document speaks of the involvement of Morocco in matters of drug trafficking, citing officials of the Moroccan police working at Casablanca airport, who have been sanctioned in mid-August 2009 after they had arrested the son of the Senegalese president and the son of a Minister of the same country for drug possession.

• According to the report, King Mohammed VI had not appreciated the arrest of president's son and a Senegalese minister’s son without his knowledge and without prior consultation. The two Senegalese were released later and the police officers punished.

• The report also quotes an official of the Moroccan police in Casablanca, who was mutilated in the occupied city of Laayoune after he had implicitly accused the regime of being behind the drug mafia.

• Another report published by Wikileaks dated 2008 talks about the corruption that plagues the Moroccan army, especially among senior officials of the military institution. It says "the Moroccan army suffers from corruption, bureaucracy, lower educational level of officers and the continued threat of extremism of some elements." It added that "the head of the gendarmerie, General Hasni Ben Slimane "allegedly involved in corruption cases."

• Corruption, the report said, plagues the top military hierarchy in Morocco and General Benani turned into "a Baron of milk." the latter, taking advantage of his position as army chief in the occupied Western Sahara, manipulated markets to supply the army in milk, thereby making a fortune in billions of dollars, in addition to his involvement with other generals in doubtful markets of fishing permits on the coast of Western Sahara. He managed well, the report said, to build a palace for his family with money of corruption.

• Corruption also affects the officers who, to qualify for promotions, pay bribes to their leaders.

The Guardian reported earlier this month that the king's holding company, Omnium Nord Africain (ONA), "extracts bribes and concessions from real estate developers," something that no one familiar with Morocco would be surprised to hear.

Morocco's royal family is using the institutions of the state to "coerce and solicit bribes" in the country's lucrative real estate sector, according to a leaked report from American diplomats.

Information about high-level corruption involving the rulers of Washington's closest ally in north Africa was brought to the attention of the US consulate in Casablanca, Morocco's commercial capital, by a businessman in 2009, leading diplomats to describe "the appalling greed" of those close to King Mohammed VI.

According to the US report, decisions involving Omnium Nord Africain (ONA), a holding company owned by the king, are made only by the king and two of his powerful associates. "To have discussions with anyone else would be a waste of time," the head of the company is quoted as saying.

Royal involvement in business is a hot topic in Morocco but public discussion of it is sensitive. The US embassy in Rabat reported to Washington in a separate cable that "corruption is prevalent at all levels of Moroccan society."

Mohammed, who succeeded his father, Hassan, in 1999, is said to have cleaned up the royal family's act, but it appears he has not done enough.

"While corrupt practices existed during the reign of King Hassan II … they have become much more institutionalised with King Mohammed VI," one cable quotes a businessman as saying. Institutions such as ONA-- Morocco's largest conglomerate, which clears most large development projects-– regularly coerced developers into granting beneficial rights to ONA, the businessman was quoted as saying.

I should add that almost every Moroccan I've spoken to says not only that Mohammed VI is way better than his father but that he's doing a lot for Morocco, even if he's also doing a lot for the family business. One guy I met even told me he can't blame the king for undermining Morocco's educational system-- illiteracy is still gigantic-- because how would anyone expect a monarchy to hold on to power if the populace was well-educated?

Streams Of Consciousness: TORY SCUM! TORY SCUM!

Tonight I arrived from London at a riad-- a traditional Moroccan town home-- that I'm renting in Marrakech for the month with some friends. At Heathrow passengers had been clustered around the TV sets watching the demonstrations against the move by the right-wing Conservative/Lib-Dem government to raise the cost of university tuition in the name of "austerity," the term the servants of the wealthy use instead of "concentrating the nation's wealth in fewer and fewer hands." I kept hoping the students would really go for it and spark a worldwide uprising against the international ruling elites. By the time we had to board our plane, they hadn't.

The property manager manager brought us up to the third floor to marvel at our beautiful rooftop terrace. On one side was a magnificent unobstructed view of the peaks of the Haute Atlas Mountains. On the other side was the king's palace. He was in town for the 10th Annual Marrakech Film Festival. She asked us to please not point any cameras in the direction of the palace.

I noticed in the news that an irate British student, recognizing that the Conservative and Lib-Dem politicians are merely window dressing-- a veneer of "democracy"-- for the monarchy and the other rich cocksuckers who own the U.K., didn't point a camera at so-called "Prince" Charles and the whore he runs around with, but a stick instead, right through the window of their Rolls.

With Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders into his sixth hour of filibustering the Obama-McConnell tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, perhaps America can count on pissed-off drag queens to have the balls more Americans don't have when it comes to standing up against the authorities, the way they did at Stonewall, not over taxes for the rich but because of attendant tyranny by the elites who most benefit by social discord among the masses.

While the British royals were being shaken up and discomfited a bit as the tuition fees are heading for implementation, complacent Missouri and Illinois students... scratched their asses in bewilderment.

And... Rep. Raúl Grijalva called for a significant increase in government regulators’ ability to levy financial and other penalties against oil companies that violate safety and environmental standards in the wake of a Wall Street Journal article highlighting numerous “close calls” at rigs that barely avoided disasters. An Interior Department oversight board found in September that current penalties are not sufficient to change industry behavior. According to a recent CNBC article headlined “Offshore Drilling Penalties Are Toothless, Panel Says”:

In an environment where many companies pay between $500,000 and $1 million daily to run an offshore facility a potential fine of no more than $35,000, even in the case of a worker’s death, is not an effective tool to enforce safety regulations, the panel said.

For all of last year, the Interior Department collected a total of $919,000 in civil penalties for offshore drilling violations, which is equal to the cost of shutting down a large drilling facility for just one day.

Higher penalties was one of more than 50 recommendations Salazar said he would consider to improve how offshore drilling is regulated.

“If thirty-five thousand dollars a day is pocket change, then why would a company make the decision to improve its behavior?” Grijalva said. “The Interior Department should review these rules and make a decision as soon as possible how to better protect coastal communities and the wider economy from another catastrophe.”
But the media seems more hopped up over the temerity of students who discomforted the British royals, than over what the ruling elites are doing to the rest of us.