The Daily Parker

If I lived in the UK, I would probably not only support, but run for office, as a Liberal-Democratic candidate. The LDP has always seemed to me the right compromise: labo[u]r is what made this nation great, and we need to keep our commitments to the people who built our great nation; but we're 40 years past coal strikes, come on, let's keep up. Also, wealth is great, but let's not get carried away, come on, it's bad for the country to have billionaires.

So I am quite bothered to report that the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, Jo Swinson, someone I like on paper but have never met in person, lost her seat to the Scottish National Party.

Only, it turns out, people really only liked her on paper.

It gets worse:

It looked set to be the third worst performance in the party’s 31-year modern history, following its disastrous fall from 57 to eight seats in 2015 after the coalition government with the Conservatives and 2017’s modest improvement to 12 elected MPs.

Swinson’s loss follows that of former leader Nick Clegg, who was booted out by voters in 2017. She was defending a 5,339 majority, but lost by just 149 votes to the SNP.

So, from the cheap seats across the Atlantic, I have a couple of questions for British voters:

1. As an outsider, it looks to me like the Lib Dems had a really solid compromise platform that everyone could have gotten around with minimal whinging. Are y'all that...what's the word?...irrational that you couldn't compromise?
2. Why are the leaders of the major parties such wankers? I mean, you've got Boris Johnson, who hasn't spoken a true word since that day in 1965 when he told his mum "I really have to wee," and you've got Jeremy Corbyn who practically ran on the slogan "work makes you free" and wondered why people couldn't see the logic of nationalizing cupcake stores, and you've got Jo Swinson who I haven't personally met but who almost every person who has met her in the last six months walked away not wanting to vote for her...
3.  Which makes me wonder, as someone who thinks about causes, effects, and influence: doesn't it worry you that the biggest beneficiary of yesterday's UK election and the imminent impeachment of President Trump is Vladimir Putin?

This isn't conspiratorial thinking. Just game it out, folks. There's no secret kabal; there's a bunch of assholes acting this out in real time, on camera, and in some cases in the Well of the US Senate.

Look, it's been a trying day. Those of us who are frustrated with the UK election and angry that the Republican Party refuses to take the impeachment seriously have spent the last three years being disappointed in humanity. Not because our champion lost; but because people think it's about whose champion wins.

I've left you with this a few times, and it's no less relevant today:

Polls in the UK closed a few minutes ago, and Ipsos-Mori are reporting a likely Conservative majority of 86 over a crippled Labour Party:

Conservatives: 368 - up 51

Labour: 191 - down 71

SNP: 55 - up 20

Liberal Democrats: 13 - up 1

Plaid Cymru: 3 - down 1

Greens: 1 - no change

Brexit party: 0

Others: 22 (18 of these will be Northern Ireland MPs)

If the numbers hold into the night, Boris Johnson will have scored the largest Conservative majority, and Jeremy Corbyn the worst Labour numbers, in 40 years. At least this means Corbyn might finally be shown the door. And Scotland may be heading for the exit as well, judging by those SNP numbers.

A British friend tells me "it's the racists in the North who found a new home in the Tory Party that done it." Wonderful. It may also have something to do with Corbyn's tin ear and the first-past-the-post system that denied smaller parties seats commensurate with their popular vote counts.

Updates as events warrant. This page will have results as they come in.

Voting in the UK general election started at 1am Chicago time (7am GMT) last night and goes until 4pm Chicago time (10pm GMT) this afternoon. Because we have regular readers in the UK, the Daily Parker will observe UK law and precedent against reporting or commenting on the election while the polls are open.

Instead, I'd like to call attention to an article in yesterday's Times outlining the problems with the FBI's wiretap on Carter Page. While the inspector general found that the investigation started from genuine criminal suspicion rather than politics, he also unearthed many abuses of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rules in the investigation's early stages:

The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

To give just three examples:

First, when agents initially sought permission for the wiretap, F.B.I. officials scoured information from confidential informants and selectively presented portions that supported their suspicions that Mr. Page might be a conduit between Russia and the Trump campaign’s onetime chairman, Paul Manafort.

But officials did not disclose information that undercut that allegation — such as the fact that Mr. Page had told an informant in August 2016 that he “never met” or “said one word” to Mr. Manafort, who had never returned Mr. Page’s emails. Even if the investigators did not necessarily believe Mr. Page, the court should have been told what he had said.

Second, as the initial court order was nearing its expiration and law-enforcement officials prepared to ask the surveillance court to renew it, the F.B.I. had uncovered information that cast doubt on some of its original assertions. But law enforcement officials never reported that new information to the court.

Finally, the report stressed Mr. Page’s long history of meeting with Russian intelligence officials. But he had also said that he had a relationship with the C.I.A., and it turns out that he had for years told the agency about those meetings — including one that was cited in the wiretap application as a reason to be suspicious of him.

On the other hand, the FBI had credible suspicions that a hostile foreign power had begun to intervene in our election.

On the third hand, civil libertarians (and The Daily Parker) have criticized FISA for years, both in law and application, because it makes abuses like these far too easy.

We'll be back after 4pm with the latest news from Britain.

Let me first acknowledge that the biggest news story today today came from the House Judiciary Committee, which has drawn up two articles of impeachment against President Trump. This comes after committee chair Jerry Nadler nearly lost control of yesterday's meeting.

As Josh Marshall points out, no one expects the Senate to remove the president from office. So the Democratic Party's job is just to demonstrate how much malfeasance and illegality the Republican Party will tolerate from their guy.

If only that were the only story today.

• Scientists warn that Greenland is losing ice 7 times faster now than in the 1990s.
• The Conservative Party has maintained a clear lead over Labour and the Liberal Democrats going into the final 36 hours of the campaign.
• A collection of 3,900 rare whiskies could sell for $10m at auction.
• American Airlines appears to be reconsidering its hub-and-spoke strategy.

And tonight, I get to preside over a condo-board meeting that will be at least as fun as yesterday's Judiciary Committee meeting.

Sullivan, who attended Oxford with the British Prime Minister, takes a nuanced view:

It’s hard to take the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, completely seriously. Just look at him: a chubby, permanently disheveled toff with an accent that comes off as a parody of an upper-class twit, topped off by that trademark mop of silver-blond hair he deliberately musses up before venturing into the public eye. Then there are those photo-op moments in his long career that seem designed to make him look supremely silly — stuck dangling in midair on a zip line with little Union Jacks waving in his hands; rugby-tackling a 10-year-old in Japan; playing tug-of-war in a publicity stunt and collapsing, suited, onto the grass; or declaring at one point that he was more likely to be “reincarnated as an olive,” “locked in a disused fridge,” or “decapitated by a flying Frisbee” than to become prime minister.

And yet he has. And more than that: This comic figure has somehow managed to find himself at the center of the populist storms sweeping Britain and the West — first by becoming the most senior politician in Britain to back Brexit in 2016, and now by plotting a course that might actually bring the United Kingdom out of the epic, years-long, once-impossible-looking mess he helped make. Just over four months into office as PM, he appears poised to win an election he called and, if the polls are anywhere near correct, score a clear victory and take Britain out of the E.U. by the end of January.

Shallow, lazy, incompetent, and bigoted, this clown has somehow leveraged the fears of the many to advance the only thing he has ever genuinely believed in: his own destiny.

But there is another story to be told about him: that he has been serious all along, using his humor and ridiculousness to camouflage political instincts that have, in fact, been sharper than his peers’. He sensed the shifting populist tides of the 2010s before most other leading politicians did and grasped the Brexit issue as a path to power.

I can't quite tell where Sullivan comes down on Johnson, but as a lifelong liberal Tory, Sullivan seems to see Johnson as the right person for the job right now. He has no love of Johnson's mendacity or narcissism, and thinks he'd sell his sister for ten votes. But Sullivan sees Johnson as a strong politician who managed to neuter the far right by co-opting it.

Next week will be interesting. The UK election is in six days.

I hate taking sick days, I really do. Fortunately, the Internet never takes one:

• Mother Jones looks at how NOAA is doing under the current administration.
• Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page gave an interview to the Daily Beast.
• Roll Call reports that a dozen House races have shifted towards the Democratic candidates.
• The Times: "In Prince Andrew scandal, Prince Charles emerges as monarch-in-waiting."
• Sesame Street is 50.
• Pastoral, a long-time wine and cheese shop in Chicago, is closing.
• The former owners of Outcome Health have been indicted on multiple charges that could lead to 30 years in jail.
• The Nielsen/Norman group, pioneers of user experience research, have a Usability 101 handout for non-technical folks.

I'm now going to try to do a couple of hours of work, but really, I just want to go back to sleep.

The first debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn last night probably didn't sway anyone:

In a testy live debate on ITV, during which the prime minister repeatedly returned to the claim that he would “get Brexit done”, both men lavished praise on the NHS, but Corbyn said Johnson would put it up for sale.

Throughout the debate, Johnson continually tried to bring the focus back to Brexit, on which Corbyn repeatedly declined to say how he would campaign in a second EU referendum, while the Labour leader attacked the prime minister over the NHS and public services.

At one point, the audience openly laughed at Johnson when he agreed that the truth mattered in the election. The Conservatives came under fire during the debate when it rebranded its CCHQ Twitter account as “factcheckUK” and used it to pump out a series of pro-Tory messages.

Barry Gardiner, a shadow cabinet minister, emphasised the audience scorn for Johnson’s truthfulness, saying: “People looked at the prime minister and thought: how can we believe a word he said? How can we believe the manifesto when it comes out? He promised we would come out on 31 October and he would die in a ditch if we didn’t. It’s just lie after lie after lie.”

Polling still shows neither party getting 50% of the vote, but the Conservatives have pulled ahead a bit. The election is three weeks from tomorrow.

Today's crop of articles:

• James Comey says the only law that matters in the impeachment proceedings is the one establishing the oath of office.
• Peter Osnos recounts the time when he edited one of Donald Trump's books.
• President Trump continues the American tradition, unknown in most democracies, of inciting vigilantes in support of formal political institutions.
• An anonymous British writer wrote a singular description of Trump.
• Speaking of blond-haired windbags, the UK election campaign has begun with Boris Johnson comparing Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin, plus a few Tory gaffes that raised eyebrows from Penzance to Orkney. The next six weeks will be so much fun, no doubt.
• Richard Florida says American suburbs have undergone profound changes, in just a short time.
• Writing in Gen, Sady Doyle calls the 1979 movie Alien an allegory about abortion.
• The Atlantic has a collection of 28 photos of animals interrupting sporting events.

And now, back to coding.

Remember, remember the 5th of November
Gunpowder and treason and plot.
Now Johnson and Tories will rend and will sunder
What Fawkes in his madness could not.

After a few rounds of voting, (now former) Labour MP the Rt Hon Sir Lindsay Hoyle has been elected the 158th Speaker of the House of Commons. As Harriet Harmon said in her speech just before the first round of voting, of the 158, only one was female.

In other news, Voyager 2 has become the second human spacecraft to check in from the other side of the heliosheath separating the solar system from interstellar space.

One of these stories is probably a lot more important than the other...