Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 11, 2025. It is the anniversary of the end of WWI, also celebrated as Veteran’s Day. The Armistice was signed in a railroad car in France, pictured below with the caption, ”
Photograph taken after reaching agreement for the armistice that ended World War I. This is Ferdinand Foch‘s own railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne. Foch’s chief of staff Maxime Weygand is second from left. Third from the left is the senior British representative, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss. Foch is second from the right. On the right is AdmiralSir George Hope.
Hitler demanded that when the French surrendered at the beginning of WWII, they did so in the same railroad car.
Here’s a sad tale from Wikipedia; the cease-fire took place at 11:00 a.m. on 11/11 Bolding is mine.
Henry Gunther, an American, is generally recognized as the last soldier killed in action in World War I. He was killed 60 seconds before the armistice came into force, while charging astonished German troops who were aware the armistice was nearly upon them. Gunther had been despondent over his recent reduction in rank and was apparently trying to redeem his reputation.
Here’s his gravestone in Baltimore:
There’s a Google doodle to celebrate Veteran’s Day: here’s the Doodle (click to see where it goes):
It’s also Origami Day (special shout-out to reader Robert Lang) and National Sundae Day. To celebrate Origami Day, reader, engineer, and origami Master Robert Lang sent a photo of one of his works, which, remember, is made from a single sheet of paper! His description:
This is my “Scaled Koi, Opus 425,” folded from an uncut square of Japanese paper. It took about 8 hours to fold all of the scales, which seemed like a lot when I created it 20-odd years ago. Nowadays, the most complex folds by the next generation of origami artists might take 40 hours of folding or more!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 11 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Big news in the UK: the BBC’s Director General and the chief executive of the BBC News have resigned, supposedly over misleading editing of a Trump speech, but reader Jez (h/t) thinks there’s more to the resignations than this. From the NYT:
Two of the top executives of the BBC resigned abruptly on Sunday following a report suggesting the public service broadcaster had misleadingly edited a speech by President Trump that preceded the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The surprise resignation of the director general, Tim Davie, and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, came several days after The Daily Telegraph published details of a leaked internal memo arguing that a BBC Panorama documentary had juxtaposed comments by Mr. Trump in a way that made it appear that he had explicitly encouraged the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Like all public organizations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent and accountable,” Mr. Davie said in a statement. “While not being the only reason, the current debate around BBC News has understandably contributed to my decision.”
Mr. Davie added: “Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
Ms. Turness, in her announcement, said, “The ongoing controversy around the Panorama on President Trump has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC — an institution that I love.”
She said that “the buck stops with me” and conceded that “mistakes have been made” but insisted that “recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
Mr. Trump welcomed the resignations in a post on his Truth Social account.
With about 21,000 employees, the BBC calls itself the world’s leading public service broadcaster, and is funded primarily from a license fee paid by Britons who watch TV, supplemented by commercial revenue. It produces a huge range of material, from news to entertainment, and has reach outside Britain through its international broadcasting operations.
Pressure had been building on Mr. Davie and senior management of the BBC after the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, reacting to the leaked memo, accused the broadcaster of being “purposefully dishonest” over its depiction of the Capitol Hill insurrection.
But reader Jez adds more:
I expect that you’ll have seen that the BBC’s director general Tim Davie has resigned along with the CEO of News, Deborah Turness. It’s being widely reported that this is over a misleadingly edited clip of Trump speaking on the day of the January 6th attack on the Capitol building. However, the concerns are much broader than that and include egregious bias against Israel (especially on the BBC Arabic radio station), misreporting on race issues, and on the sex/gender issue.
This has all blown up because of a report by Michael Prescott, who was the independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee until June this year. It was leaked earlier in the after and is quite the read – it’s reproduced in full in this Daily Telegraph article.
Some are trying to blame the furore on the BBC’s right-wing media rivals, but as this analogy on X shows, this is really all on the Beeb itself:
Imagine you’re the proprietor of a much loved local cafe and under attack from people who want you shut down. The haters keep reporting you for failing hygiene standards. Would you reassure your customers by:
a) maintaining scrupulous standards of cleanliness?
or
b) pissing… https://t.co/SJp4c4leue— Ellen ‘Nebulous Dogwhistle’ Highwater KPSS WRN (@HighwaterEllen) November 9, 2025
I hope that the new appointees can get rid of both the nasty anti-Semitism and the gender identity ideology nonsense, but I’m not holding my breath!
The Beeb has been “progressive” in the worst ways, and one can hope that a change of leadership might make it saner.
*As I predicted (you heard it here first!), it looks as if the government shutdown may end this week, though first we need a Senate vote, But the filibuster may be broken today:
The Senate took the first step toward ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history late Sunday, as a group of Democrats broke their party’s blockade and voted with Republicans to advance legislation to reopen the government and fund most federal agencies through January.
Ending the shutdown and reopening the government will still take some time. The 60-to-40 Senate vote paved the way for a short-term spending agreement to begin making its way through Congress. It will not become law until it is debated and passed by the Senate, approved in the House and signed by President Trump.
Members of the House were told late Sunday that they should expect votes on a funding measure as soon as this week.
Several top Democrats in the House, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, have already said they would not back the deal. But because Republicans have a slim majority in the House, Democrats in the chamber would have no chance of defeating it if Republicans held together in support.
Eight senators in the Democratic caucus voted to advance the measure on Sunday. That suggested there were enough votes to end the gridlock that has shuttered the government for weeks, leaving hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed, millions of Americans at risk of losing food assistance and millions more facing air travel disruptions.
The compromise measure includes a spending package that would fund the government through January, as well as three separate spending bills to cover programs related to agriculture, military construction and legislative agencies for most of 2026. The package also includes a provision that would reverse layoffs of federal workers made during the shutdown and ensure retroactive pay.
The deal won over key Democrats. Other Democrats were livid that their colleagues had backed down from the party’s central demand in the shutdown fight: the extension of health insurance subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of the year.
Here are the Democrats who voted to end the filibuster:
- Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV)
- Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)
- Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)
- Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH)
- Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA)
- Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV)
- Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
- Sen Angus King (I-ME)
And last night, the compromise passed the Senate. It then will go to the House, where it will pass narrowly. Then Trump will sign it and the gub’mint will be open for business.
*Some skinny on the deal from the NYT:
For 40 days, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, kept his Democratic caucus unified as a government shutdown stretched into record-breaking territory.
But that discipline couldn’t hold forever, and it broke without Democrats’ achieving what they insisted was their chief demand in the fight: the extension of health insurance subsidies that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year.
The group of moderate senators who broke from their party said they could no longer hold out on a deal while Americans suffered the consequences of a shuttered government. And they cited a commitment from Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican leader, that they would at least receive a vote on the tax credits sometime in December.
“This bill is not perfect, but it takes important steps to reduce their shutdown’s hurt,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, said in a statement explaining why he backed the deal.
Still, the promise of a vote does not guarantee that legislation will be passed. In fact, any measure to address health care subsidies faces long odds in a Republican-controlled Congress and given President Trump’s frequent broadsides against the Affordable Care Act.
As a result, the deal put bitter Democratic divisions on display. Mr. Schumer tersely told reporters that he would not vote for the bill because it lacked health care provisions, and he voiced objections on the Senate floor.
House Democrats, including the minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, blasted the deal as insufficient.
The fight involves an extension of tax credits for health insurance, credits that were set to expire at the end of this year. Presumably that was written into the law at some point, and if that’s the case then it would have had to receive Congressional approval. What I don’t understand, and something that readers might enlighten me about, is why a measure presumably passed by the Congress, which would then have to renew it, causes a government shutdown if it isn’t automatically renewed. Help me out here. . .
*Some good news from the Supreme Court: they aren’t going to revisit the 2015 Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage, even though some scared Democrats were sure it would.
Legal experts had said for months that there was little chance of the current high court reconsidering the Obergefell ruling, but even the slim possibility had created considerable anxiety among many same-sex couples.
Since the marriage case was decided, the court has moved significantly to the right. Three of the five justices who ruled in favor of same-sex marriage rights — Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer — are no longer on the court, and their replacements are each more conservative.
But the chances of the justices taking another look at same-sex marriage were considered especially slim given the legal context of the current case. The request to reconsider the ruling came from a county clerk in Kentucky, Kim Davis, who stopped issuing marriage licenses shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Among the couples she refused licenses to were David Moore and David Ermold. Davis told them she was acting “under God’s authority.”
Lambda Legal, a group that advocates for LGBTQ+ people, praised the high court for rejecting the case. Kevin Jennings, the group’s chief executive, said the decision not to hear the “frivolous case” was a victory “for everyone who believes in our constitution and the rule of law.”
“The court’s decision reaffirms a simple fact: Equal protection of the law applies to all, not just some,” Jennings said in a statement.
Jennings also signaled that he did not believe the court’s rejection of Davis’s case would put an end to efforts to challenge same-sex marriage.
“Our opponents are well-resourced and determined” and will “keep trying to undo the progress we’ve made,” he said.
On that point, Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, the legal group representing Davis, agreed with Jennings, vowing to “continue to work to overturn Obergefell.”
This is a pretty constitutionally solid decision, and if a court this conservative won’t overturn gay marriage, I doubt that any court will. Further, most Americans have no beef with gay marriage. Here’s a Wikipedia graph from lst year showing the degree of support by state:
And a Gallup poll from this year, showing approval/disapproval as being 68% vs. 29%. The temporal change in these sentiments is truly the case of a moral arc bending upwards:
*The world’s largest pumpkin, grown this year, weighed 2,819 lb 4 oz (1278.8 kg), and was grown by a pair of twin brothers in the UK. That’s nearly a ton and a half! The WSJ describes the methods–and the joys–of growing one of these behemoths. And now they’re using genetics, though they haven’t yet gotten to gene manipulation (they will):
Andy Corbin runs an ancestry website—for gigantic pumpkins.
The IT worker started growing pumpkins 15 years ago. To help figure out which seeds to use, he built a database that now traces the family trees of thousands of gargantuan gourds back generations.
His pumpkin genetics tool is considered a necessity among growers of the world’s heaviest fruit. Because before they compete at weigh-offs, these hobbyists vie at auction for seeds with lineages of largeness.
“It’s like breeding racehorses,” said Ron Wallace, the first grower to break one ton in 2012.
The race to grow ever-larger gourds has unleashed a blitz of one-upsmanship at contests around the globe. The world record for heaviest pumpkin has been broken 21 times since 1993, including a record 2,819-pounder this year.
The prize for winning a weigh-off is typically a couple thousand dollars, but the horticultural bragging rights are endless. Plus, watching a pumpkin balloon from seed to giant in a few months is a prize all its own for these proud pumpkin parents.
All this means that giant pumpkin seeds are more crucial to the hobby—and more in demand—than ever.
Enthusiasts have been known to spend hundreds of dollars on a single seed. The most expensive are “proven” seeds, meaning people wait years to see how they perform with other growers before agreeing to spend a pretty penny.
Breeding two big pumpkins often yields a bigger pumpkin, but not always. “Genetics are funny,” said Wallace, who sells Wallace’s Whoppers. “It’s a roll of the dice.”
A seed from Andy Wolf’s 2,365 pound pumpkin, grown in 2021, sold for over $1,000 last year. The seed had already spawned Travis Gienger’s world record pumpkin in 2023, a 2,749-pounder nicknamed “Michael Jordan,” among others.
. . .The genetic pool has been whittled down, and these pumpkins are “super inbred” now, he said. The current giants are all likely from the same genetic pool. Howard Dill, a Canadian pumpkin breeder, crossed and then certified the Dill’s Atlantic Giant pumpkin variety about 40 years ago.
Hernandez expected the limit to be around 2,000 pounds—but growers have blown past that. They’re now on the brink of a 3,000 pound pumpkin.
That’s going to make judges’ jobs even harder. They’re required to check the underside of the pumpkin for defects, a task Hernandez jokes could land him in the news.
Go have a look at that website and check out the prices of the seeds. Clearly people do this for bragging rights, not for money, and I’m betting that all the serious growers are men, the pumpkin being a surrogate for other indices of masculinity. Next: genetic engineering of pumpkins, which should be banned.
Here’s the record pumpkin mentioned at the top. It’s HUGE!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is looking at the primitive wooden figure standing in the house’s back yard:
Hili: Are all the saints made of wood?
Andrzej: No, marble, clay, and even cement are used too.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy wszyscy święci są z drewna?
Ja: Nie, marmur, glina, a nawet cement też są używane.
*******************
From Catitude Daily:
From The 2025 Darwin Awards!!/Epic Fails!!:
From CinEmma:
Masih is busy at the World Liberty Congress, JKR is quiescent, but Emma Hilton has some news: the International Olympic Committee is likely to ban all trans-identified men from competing in women’s sporting events in the upcoming Olympics. And Emma’s efforts surely contributed to that. Be sure to read her whole tweet:
It only took:
Eight years of notebooks of tracking stats.
Six years after presenting my findings for the first time. @fairplaywomen @sharrond62
Five years after writing the first peer-reviewed paper that established an evidence base for policy making. @TLexercise @Scienceofsport… https://t.co/2DEdjWsQxN— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) November 10, 2025
Speaking of which, this comes from Luana:
Penis. The word you’re looking for is penis, @DailyMail.
A predatory MALE went into the women’s locker room where children were and exposed himself, not because that’s where HE felt comfortable, but because HE wanted to violate them. pic.twitter.com/jZQCHdRkxB
— Gays Against Groomers (@againstgrmrs) November 7, 2025
From Malcolm: watch to the end.
Tom and Jerry didn’t lie, cats really do run like that pic.twitter.com/z6d6R5q2Ti
— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) June 2, 2024
Two from my feed. I picked one from Bluehair and one from Twitter, but you gotta sort through the wokeness at the former site.
Doomwatch! #c4news
— Stephanie Migot (MsMigot) (@msmigot.bsky.social) 2025-11-10T19:00:00.755Z
Animal rescue via Science Girl:
Elephant saving a Gazelle
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) November 9, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was fourteen. https://t.co/A07uhec0Xo
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 11, 2025
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, he’s getting in a holiday mood:
Xmas shop display of Bethlehem in Coronation Street at The Curious Fox, Beech Rd, Chorlton. All made by Stewart, the co-owner. Zoom in for the details.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-11-10T13:31:01.164Z
. . . and a fourth century Roman mosaic showing a duck:
For #MosaicMonday a charming duck.Found in Trier, dating 4th century AD📷 meOn display at Museum am Dom, Trier🏺 #archaeology
— Nina Willburger (@drnwillburger.bsky.social) 2025-11-10T13:14:08.510Z
It is good to hear from Robert and see his Scaled Koi and comment regarding the complexity of today’s efforts in origami. I hope that the rebuilding of their home and studio on their plot of paradise in the foothills of Altadena is progressing.
Thanks to Jezgrove for additional background on the BBC business. I had just read this morning’s Times of Israel piece on it which gets into the antisemitism issues toward the bottom. ToI article at
https://www.timesofisrael.com/bbc-says-trump-threatening-to-sue-for-1-billion-over-edit-of-jan-6-speech/
The BBC’s egregious failings over the Israel/Gaza issue are unforgivable, especially at BBC Arabic. Supposedly there has been a clear out at the radio station, but I’m not holding my breath over how effective it will be.
Thanks Jez, for the free link to the Telegraph article with the complete Rayner Memo. It is absolutely devastating! I was aware of many of the issues, but had no idea of the extent of bias in the BBC news service, very clearly laid out there.
I hope they bring in someone from outside the BBC to take over and reform it.
Completely agree. Every day meant another errant anti-Israel headline. I’m hoping that fewer will pay attention to the BBC now that some of their content is paywalled.
SEEN in Journalism (SEEN stands for Sex Equality & Equity Network – essentially, sex -realist/gender-critical networks that are being set up in various sectors and organisations as a balance to the LGBTQ+ networks in them) have just released their latest episode in which they discuss the BBC resignations, particularly with regard to the BBC’s longstanding failings on reporting on sex and gender. The participants all have very many years of experience working within the BBC: https://seeninjournalism.substack.com/p/seen-in-journalism-the-bbc-bias-and
I read that many people are cancelling their tv licenses over this, so much so that BBC funding is in dire straits? Is this true or just hyperbole?
Another fine example of go woke go broke I guess.
It’s very hard to tell – certainly I’ve seen a lot of people online saying they won’t pay the licence fee. It’s tricky not to, as you need to have a TV licence if you watch ANY live television – including online streaming and on channels owned by other broadcasters! (You also need a TV licence to watch anything on the BBC iPlayer, live or not.)
How do they check if you are watching t.v. without a license.
Thanks Jim; we broke ground on the home a month ago, waiting for the foundation pour. Progress!
Great news, Robert. Wonderful to be in LA where you do not have to get foundation work done before a winter freeze.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need. -William L. McKnight, businessman and philanthropist (11 Nov 1887-1978)
Unfortunately some people need to be corralled. The room they want is mine. Would that they would become as docile as sheep!
I’ve had the good fortune of never having to obtain health insurance on the open market or via Obamacare, but as a result my understanding of the system is abysmal. With that caveat, here’s a piece that appeared in my inbox this morning. I don’t know the publication, so can’t vouch for their leanings or anything, but this rings true to me. And my health care policy friend tells me that the pharma lobby is the biggest in DC in terms of spending, and that they also get huge financial wins from Obamacare. https://justthenews.com/government/congress/obamacare-secret-heart-shutdown-insurers-got-rich-taxpayer-expense?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter#article
The twist you should keep in mind is that the ACA did not lower the COST of medical care — it lowered the PRICE that many people pay for medical insurance, whether directly or through tax breaks. Any difference is then made up by the federal government. So with more people having medical insurance, there is more income for the insurance companies that are selling that insurance.
There is nothing deceptive or dire about this, and it was a feature of the ACA from the start.
Yes, but premiums are going up (“skyrocketing” as CNN put it this week).
Unless the insurance companies are harvesting rents from monopolistic practices, which needs to be proven, not just asserted, rising premiums can mean only:
Both can be operating at the same time. Additionally, doctors and hospitals, less so retail drug stores, try to recover their losses from uncompensated care to the uninsured by charging higher prices to insured patients. Insurance companies try to foil them by demanding steep discounts off their list prices to be deemed eligible “network” providers, and by what must sometimes seem capricious denial of reimbursement outright.
If you want to say yes to everything for everybody at service prices that keep everybody happy, it’s going to cost you.
Premiums are going up because the U.S. Congress is allowing various forms of subsidies to expire. Those higher premiums will be a reflection of the actual cost of medical insurance. It should come as no surprise that many people will be unable to afford to buy medical insurance if they have to pay the full freight for it.
Premiums are increasing no matter what Congress does. That such premiums reflect the actual cost of medical “insurance” is because we no longer have an insurance market.
Consider that the actual cost of medical insurance is not limited to the actual cost of medical care plus some reasonable admin overheads and risk premiums. Medical care is, and must be, rationed, everywhere and always. In the US most of the rationing is via market forces, and most of the players use the necessarily limited supply to take full price-advantage of their rationing opportunities, often with a clear conscience because somebody has to collect the rationing price so why not them? A whole lot of egregious ticket-clipping goes on.
In free-to-the-patient medical systems the rationing is done by waiting lists, various explicit and implicit triage activities, etc.
And yet the R-word is largely taboo. A clearer-eyed view would allow for a more humane and effective rationing / triage system, but that’s not the world we live in.
“Consider that the actual cost of medical insurance is not limited to the actual cost of medical care plus some reasonable admin overheads and risk premiums.”
Yes, but my point was that, broadly speaking, there are two options for most ACA patients: buy medical insurance at the going market rate; or buy medical insurance at the subsidized rate through the ACA. How the going market rate is established was not the issue — the point was that if the ACA rate suddenly jumps up to the market rate, it’s largely because the subsidies have ended for that group of people.
So here’s the way I understand it. Dems passed the Obamacare subsidies during Covid with an expiration date. When the government ran out of money, the Dems tried to use that as leverage to get Republicans to make them permanent. When the GOP declined, the Dems filibustered to prevent government funding, and caused the shutdown. It’s not clear if they Dems in the Senate thought this would work. It is likely, though, that they saw this as a great way to get their base fired up just before the election. Once they did that, they had to hold on until after the election. Given the reactions to the Senate Dems “caving”, can you imagine what that would have done to voter turn-out if it had happened before election day?
And none of the Democrats who crossed the aisle are up for reelection in 2026. Make of that what you will–and much could be made of it!
And in our Virginia microcosm, the two senators split according to re-election date…sen Mark Warner is up next election and held the closure ground, while Sen Tim Kaine who just got re-elected in 2024 was one of the so-called caving dems. Just correlation, not necessarily causality, and I am happy that Tim did it. Keeping gov’t closed is a bit like destroying the village in order to save it. As Pres Obama, among others, said in a heady moment: “Elections have consequences”. My woke cult acquaintances (formerly friends who now shun me) now say they will never vote for Tim Kaine again. What bullshit after seeing the dems run the table in Virginia’s elections last week. Get out and vote, woke cult, and you can likely have the consequences YOU want.
There was no filibuster — that involves holding the floor for speech. The bill required 60 votes. It is, for good or ill, the normal requirement for passage in the Senate.
Yes, we all know it was the threat of a filibuster, which if put into place would derail the bill.
The procedural obstacle was not filibuster or threat of filibuster. The CR would pass if it got 60 votes. The CR was put up for vote multiple times over the last 40 days including several times in the last couple of weeks, gathering over 50 votes each time. It passed the Senate today when it got 60+ votes. It takes 66 votes to break a filibuster, and a bare majority to alter the rules of the Senate. There were requests from Pres. Trump to alter both the 60 vote requirement to pass legislation and to remove filibuster.
Given that the modern filibuster does not require anyone to hold the floor, I am curious what you mean. There are many ways to derail a vote coming to the Senate floor, each of which can be overcome only by cloture, which is why such tactics have for the last 50 years been termed filibusters. Rather than engage in political polemic about whether one is “filibustering,” the proper question is whether a Senator has enacted procedural tactics that demand a motion to invoke cloture for legislation to advance.
A motion to invoke cloture and break a filibuster of legislation—be it the modern type or a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” variety—requires 60 votes. (The 2/3rds requirement to which you refer was established in 1917 but changed to 60 in 1975. A 2/3rds majority, which would be 67 votes in a full Senate, is still required if the motion is about changing the Senate rules; the “nuclear option” can bypass this requirement by using other rules to circumvent the rules.) The reason the Senate had to vote twice to “pass” the continuing resolution is because it first needed to attain 60 votes for the “motion to invoke cloture” (and break the “filibuster,” which was in play because the Democrats were objecting to unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to consideration of the continuing resolution). Then another vote was required to pass the bill and send it back to the House. The bill itself, once cloture had been invoked, could have passed with a simple majority.
Here is a link to the history and the Senate rules. Please let me know whether I am misunderstanding something.
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/filibusters-cloture.htm
I think Doug got it right and I had it wrong. Thanks for the correction.
The John Simpson/Nick Robinson comment is correct. Of course these are genuine self-inflicted wounds by the BBC, but of course the Tories and the Tory press are piling in for their own benefit.
The Tories et al have always disliked the BBC, not because it is biased against them but because they are not allowed to own it.
Yet.
The Tories may dislike the BBC, but in this case, they are absolutely right to pile in – BBC News is shockingly biased in many areas and needs to be fixed. This needn’t be a party political matter – the government should have piled in too.
And for BBC journalists to point out that there is a political campaign against them is a childish excuse for doing nothing. Of course there’s political campaign against them, and when BBC News is that biased and incompetent, there jolly well should be.
For any BBC bias completists, here is a link to the Asserson Report, 200 pages of documentation of BBC dereliction of duty wrt its coverage of the 2024 Gaza war:
https://asserson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/asserson-report.pdf
Accusations of anti-Israel bias by the BBC have a more than 20-year history. An internal 2004 report, known as the Balen Report, supposedly found bias but was suppressed by the BBC, which spent more than 500,000 British pounds of public money successfully fighting its disclosure in court.
I can only imagine what Emma Hilton’s work environment has been like at her university. Even in that summary twitter thread, she gets abusive whataboutery from a middle-aged “trans” male who plays field hockey with girls.
Mathew’s Xmas window. I zoomed in.
I’m glad the donkey is stable LOL!