#conservative conference

[generalelectionmusings]

[guilty-feminist]

[crypitd]

Here's a Hooded Merganser Duck I drew for the 7th International Sea Duck Conference Art Exhibition and Contest!

A Souvenir: A Hooded Merganser floating away with a sketch of himself (feasting on a fish), a souvenir by the artist. This implies the human connection, during the sketch and after, including the artist's visual interpretation of the Hooded Merganser translated onto paper.

Congrats to the winner and runner up!

»   Etsy  •  Various Links   «

© Harlen Chen

[ghoulaxyart]

My favorite reactions to Disney taking a stand against the fascist governor of Florida and winning. They took back control of WDW and announced they’re hosting the largest LGTBQ+ conference. Power move.

They’re cleaning house this week

[breakingfirst]

Biden says he'll "Get in TROUBLE" if he starts the questions 🤔⬆️

[nando161mando]

Q. if you are unable to legally strike, how close have we come to some #publicsector workers being press-ganged into service?

If you are forced to work (given that having no job/being sacked would under current benefit arrangements be severely detrimental to wellbeing) then its no wonder it might be against those aspects of #internationallaw related to #workersrights.

But I guess the #Tories will see this as breaking Int.Law in a 'limited & specific way'!

[sspookyspoonss]

Shout out to Rishi Sunak who hosted his party conference in Manchester, a city he knew he would be announcing he was fucking over.

[conservethis]

Small scenes from the American Institute for Conservation Annual Meeting happening right now in Jacksonville Florida.

Yet again the NCPTT is knocking it out of the park with their buttons this year.

[soweli-musi]

gggrrrrRRRRRAAAAAUUUUGGGHHHH

[generalelectionmusings]

[scavengedluxury]

This is the crowd at the Tory party conference during Therese Coffey’s speech. She’s more effective than Diazepam.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) recently announced that in April, she would become a 36-year-old grandmother after the birth of her teen son’s baby. Boebert has been blasting “comprehensive sex education” as inappropriate for kids and is now being ruthlessly mocked for her family’s continued inability to stave off teen pregnancy.

Boebert, herself, dropped out of high school when she got pregnant as a teen, and now her son is following in her footsteps.

Boebert’s announcement about her grandchild also included a dig at trans people.

“We are raising our four boys to be men before liberals teach them to be women,” she said before announcing that “not only am I a mom of four boys, but come April, I will be a Gigi to a brand new grandson.”

She then talked about how her son, Tyler, who is almost 18, joked it was “hereditary” since Boebert made her mother a 36-year-old grandma as well.

On top of it all, while speaking at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Boebert (R-CO) stated that public school students should be banned from learning sex-ed and about how LGBTQ+ people have sex.

“There are schools that are teaching worse than just gender ideology,” she said. “I mean they have comprehensive sex-ed. They’re teaching kids how to have and enjoy sex – and even same-sex sex.”

Boebert said no public school students should be learning these things and that schools that teach it should have their funding cut. She also claimed elementary school students were learning these things, though she offered no proof.

Twitter users ruthlessly mocked Boebert for her stance, considering she dropped out of high school when she became a teen mom. Now they are at it again, pointing out Boebert’s inability to notice the irony of her so-called conservative beliefs as she bragged about her growing family.

[if-you-love-polls]

it's so stupid how he's just saying buzzwords to get his voters attention- and it's WORKING. how have you just forgotten everything??? how have you forgotten how they were letting people die in care homes? how have you forgotten how much "eat out to help out" was costing, while they told us it was helping and was a service to the community??? how do you idiots forget so fast?? do you remember when they had a giant fucking party while people couldn't see their families?? it's astonishing how quickly you just forget how many people they've let die for literally no reason. they haven't apologised for any of it either. we're just collateral to them. they only care about us when we start to not vote for them.

reblog if you think the tories should go out. I'm fucking tired of these twats.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

[hjohn3]

Sh*t Show at the F**k Factory*

Sunak Loses his Party and the Plot

Source: conservatives.com

By Honest John

WHEREAS NO Conservative Party Conference in recent years can be described as entirely sane, the gathering in Manchester this month, if it is actually remembered at all, will surely go down as one of the most weird. On display we had open leadership bids by swivel eyed partisans of various right wing persuasions; performative politics by Ministers taking place in a world that seems to exist entirely in the fevered imagination of the Tory faithful and GB News, and probably one of the most bizarre conference speeches ever heard (and by one of the alleged Conservative “grown ups” to boot). And, oh yes, we had Rishi Sunak gamely, if wanly, smiling throughout a barely concealed car-crash of a conference, attempting to wield authority no one believes he actually possesses and presiding over one of the biggest political unforced errors in recent years (and that’s saying something). Welcome to the F**k Factory.

Perhaps there was a clue that all might not be going according to plan when one of the most feted politicians at Conference turned out not to be a member of the Conservative Party at all. Like a reanimated Ghost of Brexits Past, Nigel Farage hove into view, allegedly as a GB News anchor. In typical Farage style, the newsman swiftly became the story, with Tory delegates queuing up for selfies and journos interviewing the architect of Britain’s singular act of self harm, seemingly for the job of Conservative Party leader. Just about disguising the twinkle in his eye, the predatory populist opined he would be very happy to lead the Tories if only they could become a little bit more right wing, thereby putting forward his candidature for a vacancy that doesn’t exist. The excruciatingly embarrassing video footage of Farage later bopping with a breathless Priti Patel to Robbie Williams’ Angels will have been small comfort to Sunak, seemingly upstaged on day one.

Altogether more serious were the ideological challenges thrown down at Conference by a curiously unrepentant Liz Truss and an entirely repellent Suella Braverman. Truss, seemingly unaware that she and Kwasi Kwarteng permanently crashed the British economy as well as the Conservative brand during their disastrous tenure as Prime Minister and Chancellor this time last year, swaggered into Manchester Central to address a packed fringe meeting of the “Great British Growth Rally”, which sounded like a cross like Brands Hatch and Nuremberg. Her speech was peppered with the same hubristic nonsense that brought the bond markets crashing down around her ears last autumn and which saw her ludicrous premiership end after just 49 days. Without insight, contrition or political intelligence, Truss nonetheless signalled that the Chicago Economics wing of free market Leninism remains in contention for the post election battle for the soul of the Conservative Party and Truss herself clearly believes her tax-cutting zealotry will find an audience in a party that has almost entirely lost its way. Truss 2.0 cannot be ruled out - at least in opposition.

If Truss’ ego trip had an element of the comic about it, the Home Secretary’s speech entered altogether more sinister territory. One of the many catastrophes of Brexit was the infiltration of the Conservative Party, once the political expression of bourgeois civic values and British business, by rank English nationalism as Boris Johnson purged the party of its Macmillanite liberal wing in order to force through the hardest Brexit deal he could. What Braverman’s speech revealed was that tendency on full display - paranoid, dishonest, divisive, racist and filled with fear and hatred, made all the more ironic by the fact its standard bearer is a woman of colour and the daughter of immigrants. It would take a panel of psychiatrists to truly get inside Suella Braverman’s head, but what her speech articulated, with its talk of a ‘hurricane’ of immigrants heading to the U.K., was the essence of English fascism, now safely ensconced in the formerly respectable colours of Tory blue, but as intolerant, nativist, authoritarian and hate-filled as it has ever been. This, I fear, is the rising tide within Toryism, and Braverman, with her nasty following congregating within the National Conservatives, is likely to be the coming woman.

Braverman’s speech perhaps indicates a dark future for British Conservatism, but there were other Ministers to remind us what a literal joke the Tories have become under Rishi Sunak. In his desperate attempt to win a General Election on culture wars issues alone, his cabinet were encouraged to excoriate “policies” (implemented by whom was not always clear, seeing as the Tories are allegedly the government) that don’t exist or “crack down” on situations that, equally, don’t exist, turning the conference into even more of a theatre of the absurd than it was already. We had Steve Barclay bizarrely assuring a British public, infuriated by lengthening elective waiting lists, despairing of ever getting to see a GP and terrified at the non-arrival of ambulances, that there would be no admission of trans women to female wards. We watched bemused as Jeremy Hunt promised that benefits claimants who turned down a job offer would have their benefits reduced (they already do, Chancellor), and Transport Secretary Mark Harper promise to save us from the controlling malevolence of “fifteen minute cities” (an urban planning idea to place city centre facilities within in walking distance of each other) despite the fact that, as yet, they don’t exist anywhere in the world. Perhaps the most idiotic contribution was by the unfailingly unimpressive Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary, Claire Coutinho, who told us to much hearty Tory laughter, that Labour was keen to introduce taxes on meat. Coutinho was later ridiculed into silence by the conference press pack who repeatedly and gleefully demonstrated to her that she had made her meat story up. Finally, the most unintentionally hilarious contribution to this sh*t show of ridiculous posturing, was the toe-curling speech of Penny Mordaunt who stood on the stage, waving her fist heroically and urged the assembled Tories to “stand up and fight” - continually. Quite who the Blue Army was intended to come to blows with, Penny didn’t make particularly clear apart from some vague exhortation to “freedom”. It is hard to believe Mordaunt is considered the great centrist hope of Toryism and the potential future leader Labour allegedly fear. On the evidence of that speech, Mordaunt seemed not only to lose Conference, but most of her marbles too.

But perhaps the best was saved for last. With probably little more than twelve months to go before a General Election, this conference speech, his first as Tory leader, was Rishi Sunak’s opportunity to provide some direction, principle and purpose to what has seemed like an exhausted and rudderless government, out of ideas. Instead what we got was a bizarre concoction of unrelated intentions that seemed to owe more to Sunak’s own personal wish list than any re-launch of Conservative philosophy. There was a promise to scrap A-Levels and replace them with a Baccalaureate, for what reason, Rishi never got round to telling us; he wants to ban children from smoking; he loves his family and the last 30 years (eighteen of them under the Conservatives) have been a political failure. He sounded much of the time like a really cross parish councillor. But the denouement of this plotless speech was Sunak finally confirming the scrapping of the northern branch of HS2. This was announced in the city it was designed to benefit most, a short sighted decision of monumental proportions that neutralises any further network expansion in the north and turns high speed to low speed once the trains get north of Birmingham. If Labour needed any further proof of the systematic Tory failure to deliver “levelling up” to the Red Wall, Sunak provided it to them in Technicolor. The whole sorry saga is political naivety and weakness at its most miserable - an announcement that was meant to show the public the Prime Minister can make “tough” financial decisions in the national interest has pleased virtually nobody. Sunak’s keynote moment was to tell the country what he was not going to do. Nothing sums up Sunak’s failed premiership better than the dog’s dinner of the cancellation HS2 for the north.

Sunak’s speech was weak and vision-free, but to be fair, what else could it be? There is a reason why Rishi’s showpiece was an embarrassing combination of personal dislikes, tired populism and broken promises. The British people are paying the highest personal taxes for seventy years because Hunt’s budget is trying to fill a £40bn hole in the public finances recklessly inflicted by Liz Truss, the context also to the HS2 decision; Britain’s public services are now collapsing as the consequences of a decade of needless and destructive austerity under David Cameron are finally felt, and the inflation-wracked British economy barely grows, fatally and permanently held back thanks to folly of Boris Johnson’s Brexit. That is the real story of over 13 years of Tory rule, but Sunak’s problem in Manchester was that he couldn’t possibly tell it.

*With acknowledgements to Series 1 of the HBO TV drama Succession

7th October 2023

[breakingfirst]

FLASHBACK: Remember when President Bush had Shoes THROWN at him? 🥴