Fascism In Cairo Cheered By The Americans Who Always Cheer Fascism

Fascists love those military strongmen

There's always been a big audience-- and cheering section-- for fascism in the United States, which explains the popularity of the Wall Street Journal, not to mention Fox News and Hate Talk Radio. The other day we looked at the 1933 fascist coup attempt against Franklin Roosevelt led by Republican industrialists and financiers Irénée du Pont, J.P. Morgan, Prescott Bush, Grayson Murphy, and other prominent Wall Street figures, as well as the pro-Nazi families behind Remington, Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodyear, and Maxwell House. Roosevelt could have-- should have-- hung all the plotter for high treason, but he preferred to allow the plot to be covered up in return for their quiescence as he worked to implement the New Deal.

America's wealthy fascist families did quiet down during World War II, of course, but they've been busy beavers since then. Today, the Koch family is preeminent among the leaders of American fascism... although they try to disguise it as a kind of "libertarianism." Predictably, the Wall Street Journal is cheering the fascist coup in Egypt last week and encouraging the Obama Administration to break the law by calling it something other than a "coup." (A coup jeopardizes the billion-plus dollars of non-Sequestered aid to Egypt in general and the Egyptian military in particular. The powerful Likud lobby insists the U.S. taxpayer continue underwriting that huge burden.) They Journal editorial page has their collective fingers crossed that military Islamist Abdul Fatah al-Sisi turns out to be "as good as" Chilean neo-Nazi hero Augusto Pinochet, up there with Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand and Ludwig con Mises in the pantheon of right-wing loons.

The Journal blames the popular protests against the democratically-elected Morsi on chronic gas and food shortages and a sinking economy without mentioning that these conditions were carefully orchestrated by the military. There are no long gas lines or shortages in Cairo today... convenient. They credit a powerful "secular business class" with saving Egypt from... democracy?

Yet a military coup riding mass protests carries its own risks to future stability. One danger is the reaction of the Brotherhood, which is still the strongest single political party. The secretive group renounced armed struggle in the 1970s. But that could change if its leaders conclude that democracy works for everyone except for them.

Adly Mansour, a judge and interim president sworn in Thursday, called the Brotherhood "part of the nation." But at the same time the military closed down pro-Brotherhood TV stations and put out warrants for the arrest of the party's senior leaders. The Brotherhood is unpopular now, but as memories fade it could return to power with a vengeance if Egypt's next rulers are also unable to fix the country's many problems.

A more hopeful sign is that General Sisi gathered prominent opposition and Coptic Christian and Muslim leaders to announce a new "roadmap" for Egypt's future. The roadmap proposes, among other steps, a broadly representative committee to rewrite the constitution and to form a technocratic government.

General Sisi is also promising new elections, albeit without a timetable. Mohamed ElBaradei, a prominent (and anti-American) secular leader, and the hardline Islamic Salafist Nour Party, a rival to the Brotherhood, have publicly backed the military plan.

The generals don't seem eager to govern directly, especially after they mismanaged the transition after Hosni Mubarak's 2011 ouster until Mr. Morsi's election. Civilians were tried in military courts and abused in custody. As crime worsened and the economy stalled, public ire turned against the generals.

It will do so again without more enlightened leadership that focuses on economic revival and a political transition to a system of checks and balances. Any transition government will no doubt seek money and oil from the Gulf states as well as an early deal with the International Monetary Fund to make up for Egypt's rapidly declining currency reserves.

America can also do more than it has. The Obama Administration has been caught trailing events at every turn, supporting Mr. Mubarak before abruptly throwing him over, and then embracing Mr. Morsi despite his authoritarian turn.

President Obama stayed quiet throughout the latest crisis, finally issuing an anodyne call Wednesday night for "a democratic political order with participation from all sides and all political parties—secular and religious, civilian and military."

Mr. Obama also requested a review of U.S. aid to Egypt, but cutting that off now would be a mistake. Unpopular as America is in Egypt, $1.3 billion in annual military aid buys access with the generals. U.S. support for Cairo is written into the Camp David peace accords with Israel. Washington can also do more to help Egypt gain access to markets, international loans and investment capital. The U.S. now has a second chance to use its leverage to shape a better outcome.

Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy. If General Sisi merely tries to restore the old Mubarak order, he will eventually suffer Mr. Morsi's fate.

Sisi and his puppet presidente were on the air calling for a free and open national discussion-- at the exact same time, his soldiers were shutting down all the TV stations they didn't control and rounding up Muslim Brotherhood leaders and arresting them for... whatever. Meanwhile, aren't New Yorkers lucky that they're not stuck having to read the reactionary Wall Street Journal! After all, they can read the NY Times instead and find out useful info, like how Egyptians seem "to lack even the basic mental ingredients" for a democratic transition.

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Marco Rubio To Give Keynote Speech For Koch Brothers' New John Birch Society

The Koch family spent a lot of money getting Marco Rubio into office and they're not about to throw it all away just because the teabaggers and Know Nothings they cultivate as their shock troops are upset over some issue-- immigration reform-- the Koch don't even care about. Papa Fred-- a gussied up, old line KKK redneck who struck it rich-- would have cared, but Charles and David only care about money. The Kochs are standing behind Rubio-- with a wall of cash funneled through all their high-flyin' front groups.

Fox News viewers in Florida will see a new commercial in the coming weeks urging them to call Senator Marco Rubio. “Thank him for keeping his promise, and fighting to secure the border,” a narrator says in the ad, which is paid for by the conservative American Action Network.

Another group, Americans for a Conservative Direction, led by former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and other top Republicans, has been running ads in Iowa lately that implore those watching to “stand with Marco Rubio to end de facto amnesty.”

And when the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Koch brothers’ political advocacy group, decided to move its signature annual conference outside Washington for the first time, it picked a spot right in Mr. Rubio’s political backyard: Orlando. The keynote speaker? Mr. Rubio. ... Rubio has been attacked at Tea Party rallies (his name elicits boos), on conservative radio (“a piece of garbage,” Glenn Beck called him) and in National Review (“Rubio’s Folly,” declared a recent cover).

Still, running interference on Mr. Rubio’s behalf is fraught with risk for conservative groups, who are going against many in their own base.

“We know that there’s a lot of folks on both sides,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “But I think the vast majority of people appreciate the fact that Senator Rubio is doing what he thinks is best for the country. And that he’s doing it in an open and honest way.”

Mr. Phillips declined to discuss any implications for Mr. Rubio and 2016, but said, “We think that he’s got a bright future within the movement, and in whatever he chooses to do down the road.”

And, the Koch family's obsession with transforming America into a John Bircher hellhole is intergeneration and will never end. Investigative journalist Lee Fang has written extensively about the Kochs and their insidious right-wing operations in his new book, The Machine: A field Guide To The Resurgent Right. This is just a tiny portion of a treasure trove of information about one vile plutocratic family working effectively to overthrown democracy in America.

Obama, unlike Roosevelt with Du Pont, waited years before confronting the Koch brothers in the public arena. Rather than taking them on directly, Obama, for a short period during the midterm elections, mocked the Koch-financed group called Americans for Prosperity, saying the name was misleading. The Koch brothers were accused of rampant oil speculation, driving the price of gasoline up for consumers, and their allies in the banking sector of crashing the economy. However, Obama and the Democrats were slow to recognize the political threat, and for some reason, were too timid to explicitly denounce the Koch brothers. The circumstances, of course, were also different. America suffered through a housing market collapse, a financial crisis, and perpetual unemployment as Obama took office, but not an earth-shattering event like the Great Depression. Backlash against the rich never materialized in the same way as it had under Roosevelt, and Obama suffered from the right-wing charge, amplified on Fox News and talk radio, that he was a “socialist.” Maybe Obama thought a confrontation with the Koch brothers would only lend credibility to the belief that he practiced left-wing “class warfare.” In any event, the calculation to largely ignore the Koch brothers only helped them lurk in the shadows, exercising even greater influence.

And the Koch brothers were prepared for battle with Obama unlike any plutocrats of the past. The Du Ponts stumbled awkwardly into forays with Roosevelt and never learned to avoid the press and public scrutiny into their lobbying. More profoundly, the Koch brothers had developed a political strategy perfected by generations of right-wing tycoons-- including their father, the founder of the Koch family conglomerate, Koch Industries. For fifty years, the Koch family plotted, experimented, and financed groups to advance a very right-wing form of conservatism. The tactics employed against Obama had been concocted for many years prior.

The Koch brothers surpassed the influence of any other single wealthy individual or business group because of their holistic approach to, as Charles would say, “advancing liberty.” Organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would fund advertisements and pay insider lobbyists. The Coors family funded conservative think tanks and cultural institutions. John Allison, former CEO of BB&T bank, single-handedly financed an array of professors dedicated to the beliefs of Ayn Rand at major universities. Conservative activists like Grover Norquist convened regular meetings for ideological peers to collaborate. The Koch brothers incorporated all of these tactics, and more. They funded talent to come up with even better strategies and offered to lend money to anything-- movies, internships, ad campaigns, books, social networking websites-- that would “create value” to further the cause.

...As Obama prepared for his inauguration, the Koch family declared political war. In January after the presidential election, Charles proclaimed in a newsletter to his fifty thousand employees that America was quickly arriving at the “greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.” The somber warning noted what he saw as the parallels between Roosevelt’s Keynesian response to the Great Depression and Obama’s calls for fiscal stimulus in light of the financial crisis. He warned against “piling on even more regulations” and new “make-work” government programs modeled after the Roosevelt administration. Charles lectured, “it is markets, not government that can provide the strongest engine for growth, lifting us out of these troubling times.” Many of the programs Roosevelt had started in reaction to the Great Depression persisted for generations, Charles warned. In challenging the new president, Charles appeared to be anointing himself the heir to Irénée Du Pont’s crusade against Franklin Roosevelt, or his own father’s fight against John Kennedy and moderate Republicans. Only this time, Charles hoped to succeed.



And inflaming Charles’s worst fears, Obama gave a bold, progressive speech at his inauguration, making clear his intention to transition to a clean energy economy, to reform the nation’s health care system, and to remake the country’s sagging infrastructure. The financial crisis, Obama said, “reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control.” “The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” he added. Billionaires like the Koch brothers took note.

As Obama announced his promise to change America, it seems doubtful that he could have known that among the many entrenched business interests gearing up to lobby against reform, a single ultra-rich family was preparing to fight him across the board. He didn’t even have to look far from where he stood to see their reach. Ironically, INVISTA, a Koch Industries subsidiary, had won the government contract to provide the imperial blue and red carpeting for the inauguration ceremony. The second Obama became president, he was standing atop a Koch product.

Within two days of Obama’s swearing his oath of office, the Koch network sprung into action. A website called NoStimulus.com launched, along with a television advertising campaign, a petition, and a series of media events designed to defeat Obama’s first signature accomplishment, the $800 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as simply the stimulus. In what later blossomed into the Tea Party movement, Koch-funded organizers fanned across the country organizing “Porkulus” rallies decrying government spending and regulations. Koch-supported groups, for instance the Competitive Enterprise Institute and state-based think tanks like the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy, fired off a volley of anti-stimulus press releases, op-eds, and joint events with Republican lawmakers. Koch operatives staged media events with the most vitriolic opponents of the stimulus, like Governor Mark Sanford and Senator Jim DeMint, both from South Carolina.

By early February, as the vote neared, Americans for Prosperity, one of the main Koch-financed front groups, sent a letter to congressional Republicans instructing them to oppose the stimulus, regardless of any amendments or adjustments made to the bill. Indeed, in a bid for bipartisanship, Democrats offered a slimmed-down version of Obama’s proposed stimulus. In order to gain the vote of three Senate Republicans, tax cuts comprised a third of the stimulus.

While the stimulus ultimately passed, the anti-stimulus hysteria helped conservatives shift the national debate from the causes of the financial crisis to issues like the national debt and government waste. More importantly, the right-wing echo chamber, comprised in no small part of dozens of Koch-funded nonprofits, provided cover for every Republican in the House and nearly every Republican in the Senate to vote against the bill.

Sporadic advertising from Koch groups attempted to spark populist outrage. One television spot, which began soon after Obama took office, featured a middle-aged man exclaiming loudly: “Congress should stop wasting our money and start focusing on real problems!” As the disheveled-looking man yelled about the government, text decrying global warming as a “hoax” flashed across the bottom of the screen. The ad didn’t propose an alternative or any solution for that matter; rather it seemed to be crafted simply to stir general outrage. Another Koch ad, which began airing around the same time, showed an actor who said his name was “Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite.” The ad was not a large buy, but the script was a perfect specimen of Koch-funded fake populist outrage:

Hey there, I’m Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite. I inherited my money and attended fancy schools. I own three homes and five cars, but always talk with my rich friends about saving the planet. And I want Congress to spend billions on programs in the name of global warming and green energy. Even if it causes massive unemployment, higher energy bills, and digs people like you even deeper into the recession. Who knows, maybe I’ll even make money off of it!

Of course, the Koch brothers inherited their money, attended elite private schools, and own an array of private jets and vacation homes. Their opposition to addressing global warming had nothing to do with energy prices. In fact, many of the serious plans from Democrats to tackle global warming would have lowered energy prices for the vast majority of Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Denying the threat of global warming only permits the Koch brothers to make vast amounts of money from their pollution-based empire. But the Koch brothers weren’t interested in an honest debate. They wanted to kill attempts to regulate their pollution, and were willing to say or do anything to provoke middle- and lower-income voters to turn against Obama.

Still... Rubio wanted to burnish his credentials with the far, far right before the Koch confab. So he announced this morning that he'd offer the same anti-Choice legislation nationally-- knowing full well it would never get out of committee-- that is tearing Texas, North Carolina and Ohio apart this week. Divisiveness is a win-win for the far right, since those people don't want anything to ever work anyway. Their strategy on the bill-- despite polls showing how unpopular it is-- is that it "might strengthen GOP candidates in the 2014 midterm election."

Rubio’s decision to play a major role in the abortion debate is bound to stir political speculation. He is viewed as a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

But he’s recently prompted serious criticism by Republicans over his support for the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate last week. His front-and-center role on a key anti-abortion measure is likely to ease concerns about him among GOP voters.

Here are part 2 and 3 of that BBC look at the Wall Plot fascist plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt that people fear Koch is emulating:

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Rightists Have Always Been Obsessed With Homosexuality

Rightists through history-- always looking for easy scapegoats for a policy of divisiveness-- have been obsessed with homosexuality. This week we saw Florida's Tea Party junior senator, Marco Rubio, shrilly threatening to scuttle his own immigration bill if it includes protections for LGBT families.

While discussing Senator Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) proposed amendment to the immigration bill-- which would grant same-sex couples the same protections as heterosexual couples by making the law recognize “any marriage entered into full compliance with the laws of the State or foreign country within which such marriage was performed”-- Rubio insisted that he could not abide by such a rule.

“If this bill has something in it that gives gay couples immigration rights and so forth, it kills the bill. I’m done,” Rubio said, according to Yahoo! News.“I’m off it, and I’ve said that repeatedly. I don’t think that’s going to happen and it shouldn’t happen. This is already a difficult enough issue as it is.”

Leahy introduced the amendment on Tuesday, after previously withdrawing it under pressure from Republicans while the Senate Judiciary Committee was reviewing the bill.

“Seeking equal protection under our laws for the LGBT community is the right thing to do,” Leahy said. “I withheld my anti-discrimination amendment during the Senate Judiciary Committee markup. As the entire Senate turns to debate the immigration bill, the fight for equality must go on.”

Despite Rubio’s past rhetoric painting immigration reform as an urgent humanitarian issue, it’s hardly surprising to learn that he’s happy to scrap the whole thing unless it discriminates against LGBT couples. After all, if Rubio does indeed pursue the presidency in 2016, he will need to significantly shore up his right flank to survive a Republican primary.

Halfway round the world-- and two thousand years ago-- a very uptight Emperor Augustus exiled his granddaughter, Julia the Younger, to Isole Tremiti, a tiny archipelago off the coast of southeastern Italy in he Adriatic Sea. She had committed adultery and she died there. Later, in the early 1900s, when Italy embarked on rebuilding an empire, they used the Tremiti Islands as a prison for dissidents from the conquered province of Libya. When Mussolini took over he decided to use one of the islands, San Domino (the only one with a sandy beach and, today something of a tourist mecca) as an internment camp for gays. As obsessed with homosexuality as Rubio or any other right-wing loon, Mussolini claimed Italy had no homosexuals-- "In Italy there are only real men."

Seventy-five years ago in Fascist Italy, a group of gay men were labeled "degenerate," expelled from their homes and interned on an island. They were held under a prison regime-- but some found life in the country's first openly gay community a liberating experience.

...Back in the late 1930s the archipelago played a part in the effort by Benito Mussolini's Fascists to suppress homosexuality.

Gay men undermined the image that the dictator wanted to project of Italian manhood. "Fascism is a virile regime. So the Italians are strong, masculine, and it's impossible that homosexuality can exist in a Fascist regime," says professor of history at the University of Bergamo, Lorenzo Benadusi.

So the strategy was to cover up the issue as much as possible.

No discriminatory laws were passed. But a climate was created in which open manifestations of homosexuality could be vigorously suppressed.

...The whole episode has been largely forgotten.

It's thought that nobody who endured this punishment is still alive today, and there are few detailed accounts of what went on there.

But in their book, The Island and the City, researchers Gianfranco Goretti and Tommaso Giartosi talk of dozens of men, most but not all from Catania, enduring harsh conditions on San Domino.

They would arrive handcuffed, and then be housed in large, spartan dormitories with no electricity or running water.

"We were curious because they were called 'the girls'," says Carmela Santoro, an islander who was just a child when the gay exiles began to arrive.

"We would go and watch them get off the boat... all dressed up in the summer with white pants-- with hats.

"And we would watch in awe-- 'Look at that one, how she moves!' But we had no contact with them."

Another islander, Attilio Carducci, remembers how a bell would ring out at 8pm every day, when the men were no longer allowed outside.

"They would be locked inside the dormitories, and they were under the supervision of the police," he says.

"My father always spoke well of them. He never had anything bad to say about them-- and he was the local Fascist representative."

...[S]ome of the few accounts given by former exiles make clear that life was not all bad on San Domino.

It seems that the day-to-day prison regime was comparatively relaxed.

Unwittingly, the Fascists had created a corner of Italy where you were expected to be openly gay.

For the first time in their lives, the men were in a place where they could be themselves-- free of the stigma that normally surrounded them in devoutly Catholic 1930s Italy.

What this meant to the exiles was explained in a rare interview with a San Domino veteran, named only as Giuseppe B-- published many years ago in the gay magazine, Babilonia-- who said that in a way the men were better off on the island.

"In those days if you were a femminella [a slang Italian word for a gay man] you couldn't even leave your home, or make yourself noticed-- the police would arrest you," he said of his home town near Naples.

"On the island, on the other hand, we would celebrate our Saint's days or the arrival of someone new... We did theatre, and we could dress as women there and no-one would say anything."

And he said that of course, there was romance, and even fights over lovers.

...It is deeply ironic that in the Italy of that time, they could find a degree of freedom only on a prison island.

The party of gay and lesbian rights activists who gathered on the archipelago the other day put down a plaque in memory of the exiles.

It will be a permanent reminder of Mussolini's persecution of homosexuals.

"This is necessary, because nobody speaks of what happened in those years," said one of the activists, Ivan Scalfarotto, a Member of Parliament.

And the suffering hasn't ended for Italy's gay community, he says. They are no longer shackled and shipped off to islands-- but even now they are not regarded as "class A" citizens.

There is still no real social stigma attached to homophobia in Italy, Scalfarotto says, and the state doesn't extend legal rights of any kind to gay or lesbian couples.

Their struggle for equality goes on.

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UK Elections-- A Bad Day For The Conservatives, The Establishment And Austerity But A Swell Result For British Fascism

British Tea Party makes huge gains across England

The U.K. had 35 council elections-- like state legislatures-- across England (plus one in Wales) yesterday, as well as a parliamentary by-election in South Shields, a traditionally Labour area, to fill the seat for David Miliband, who held it since 2001 and resigned to take a job based in NYC. The seat has been in Labour hands since 1929. Going into the elections, the Conservative/Liberal-Dem coalition was expecting to get its ass kicked. And it did. Pollsters predicted that the Conservatives could lose more than 300 seats and the Lib-Dems another 100 or more. It was predicted that Labour would romp the field and that the far right neo-fascist party, UKIP, would make very significant gains at the Conservatives' expense. As it turned out, it was a spectacular night for British resurgent fascism, the UKIP winning more than 100 seats over what anyone predicted! Votes are still be tallied but, overall, it looks like in the council races Labour took around 29%, the Conservatives 25% (losing control of at least 10 councils), UKIP 23% and the Lib-Dems 14%.

As voting began, junior coalition partner Nick Clegg, was bitching that it's become increasingly hard to work with Cameron and the Conservatives as they desperately try to hold onto their far right (and racist) flank. Clegg told the media Cameron is no longer appealing to the political center.

Interviewed on the eve of the local elections, and facing the prospect of coming fourth in terms of share of the vote behind Ukip, the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister vowed to "dig in my heels and make sure the centre of gravity of the government as a whole does not get pulled rightwards due to the internal dynamics of the Conservative party."

Clegg cited Conservative policies on welfare, Europe and climate change as the three pre-eminent examples of Cameron being pulled right, and conceded that his coalition partner was no longer the same political animal as presented before the 2010 general election.

He admitted that Cameron's positioning "makes it more complex to make progress in areas where initially we thought it would easy to make progress," disclosing he has recently had to spend more time to secure agreements on the green agenda in government than on any other issue.

...Expressing some pretty strong personal disillusionment with the dynamics of Tory politics, the deputy prime minister argued that "the Conservative emphasis before 2010 was to be centrist, compassionate, green party, but it is returning to some pretty traditional Conservative signature tunes that I totally understand they think are necessary to strengthen Conservative defences against Ukip. There is a real struggle on the right of British politics."

Yesterday was UKIP's real national coming out, the first time they really campaigned as a national party across the country, or at least across England; there was no voting in Scotland or Northern Ireland yesterday. During the campaign, they embarrassed themselves because of lunatic fringe candidates who went unvetted... and wound up unmasked. Conventional wisdom had it that if the Conservatives lost more than 350 seats (of 1,477 they went into the election defending), the party's goose was well and truly cooked-- perhaps to the point of a backbencher rebellion against Cameron from his party's right-wing.

The first votes to come in last night were for the parliamentary by-election in South Shields and, as expected, Labour held on with ease. UKIP pushed the Conservatives out of second place though. UKIP pulled almost a quarter of the vote, pretty much what they were doing on average everywhere. The Labour candidate, Emma Lewell-Buck had a margin of 6,505 down from over 11,000 in the 2010 general election. The Conservatives were badly mauled and the Lib-Dems were nearly obliterated.

• Labour- 12,493
• UKIP- 5,988
• Conservatives- 2,857
• Lib-Dems- 352

Although the Lib-Dems finished seventh, they did beat the Official Monster Raving Loony Party's 197 votes. The Independent Socialist Party almost doubled their share-- 750 votes.

In a sign that Labour is increasingly anxious about the long-term threat posed by Ukip, as much as the Conservatives, Harriet Harman, the Labour deputy leader, warned: "People are feeling disaffected and disenchanted. It is a challenge to us and a wake up call for us to actually listen to people who feel times are hard and wonder whether any of us have actually got the answers."

...The Conservatives' fear is that they will be squeezed by a resurgent Labour across the north and the Midlands, and by Ukip in the south and south west. Cameron has tried to protect himself from questions about his leadership with a revamp of the Downing Street policy unit and the promise of tough measures to restrict the benefits of EU migrants in the Queen's speech. Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, said: "It's going to be a tough fight for my party in mid-term: that is inevitable."

Votes are still being tallied in the council races-- only about half the results are in-- but there's no doubting that the UKIP had an even better day than anyone expected.

Compared with 2009, when these seats were last fought, the Conservative share of the vote is down by 9% and the Lib Dems are down by 12%. The Labour share is up by 7%, but it is still five points lower than it was in 2005. UKIP has seen the biggest boost, with its vote share up by 13%.

...Of the 19 councils to declare so far, the Tories retained control of traditional council strongholds like West Sussex, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Dorset, Hampshire and Hertfordshire, as well as Somerset and Devon.

But they lost their majorities on Gloucestershire, Lincolnshire, Warwickshire, Norfolk and East Sussex councils, which moved to no overall control, as both Labour and UKIP made gains.

...Labour is expected to claw back ground in the north of England and make some progress in the south.

It has taken control of Derbyshire county council, which it lost in 2009, and made double digit gains in Cumbria, Warwickshire and Hertfordshire.

The most eye-catching performance so far has been from UKIP, which is riding high in the opinion polls and fielded 1,700 candidates, three times the number that stood in 2009, when the party won just seven council seats.

So far, the party has won 16 seats in Lincolnshire-- where it is now the official opposition. The party, which campaigns for the UK to leave the European Union, has been polling 12 points higher, on average, than in wards where it stood in 2009.

UKIP's Nigel Farage told the BBC Radio 4's Today Programme that "the people who vote for us are rejecting the establishment and quite right too."

"Three parties, three fronts benches who look the same and sound the same and made up of people who basically have never had a job in the real world," he said.

My favorite British political pundit:

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Does Anyone Think The Republican Party Is The Same As A Garden Variety Fascist Party? Consider North Carolina

Just how the GOP, financed by wealthy fascist Art Pope, took over the entire North Carolina state government and immediately turned to subverting democracy and cementing their own power, is a well-known story, at least in circles where people care about such things. And barely a day passes without the Republican extremists in the legislature and the Republican extremist governor working their asses off-- on behalf of consolidating and retaining power. This week, for example, the House, largely along party-lines, passed a controversial voter ID law meant to disenfranchise African-Americans, poor people and students. Most North Carolina voters oppose it, but ALEC and Pope insist. In fact, ALEC and Pope insist on a lot of things-- and the North Carolina Republican Party is delivering for them:

With no remaining checks to Republican rule in North Carolina, the state has now become a haven for some of the most ideological-- and ill-considered-- tea party fantasies dressed up as legislation. Here are just a few of the bills being pushed in the house (and the senate) that Art Pope built:

• Voter Suppression : It’s a sad commentary on the state of American politics that once Republicans take over a state, they almost immediately begin enacting laws to make it harder for Democratic-leaning groups to cast a ballot. North Carolina Republicans, however, have embraced voter suppression with unusual enthusiasm. They’ve introduced voter ID, a common GOP method of reducing turnout among minorities, low-income voters and students. They’ve introduced Florida-like restrictions on early voting, cutting early voting hours and eliminating voting the Sunday before election day in order to thwart voting drives at African-American churches. And they want to punish parents whose children vote from their college addresses.

• Reverse Robin Hood: A GOP bill in the North Carolina Senate would eliminate all individual and corporate income taxes, and largely replace it with higher sales taxes. Sales taxes disproportionately burden lower-income taxpayers, because they spend a larger percentage of their income on basic needs. It is also far more difficult to create a progressive sales tax than to enact a progressive income tax code that places a lesser tax burden on those who can least afford it. As a result, a similar tax plan in Louisiana would raise taxes on 80 percent of residents, while giving Louisianans in the top 1 percent of income earners an average tax cut of $25,423.

• Shutting Down Abortion Clinics: Another bill in the state senate would add new restrictions to abortion clinics in an attempt to force them to close their doors. Among other things, the bill requires doctors to have admitting privileges in a hospital located within 30 miles of the clinic, an unnecessary restriction that serves little purpose other than to limit the pool of doctors available to clinics.

• Anti-Worker Constitutional Amendment: A so-called “right-to-work” law, which depresses worker wages by cutting back unions’ ability to collectively bargain for wages and benefits, is already the law in North Carolina, effectively cutting both union and non-union wages by $1,500 a year. Nevertheless, 34 Republican lawmakers (and one Democrat) sponsored a state constitutional amendment that would lock this anti-worker policy into the state Constitution. The same amendment would strip public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain, and lock in policies making it easier for companies to pressure their workers against unionizing to boot.

• Subsidizing Home Schooling: Eight Republican lawmakers sponsored a bill giving families a $1,250 per semester tax subsidy if they home school their children.

• Judges For Sale: A pair of bills in the state senate would eliminate the state’s successful public financing system for judicial elections. Prior to this system’s enactment in 2004, “73 percent of campaign funds for judicial candidates came from attorneys and special interest groups,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Alicia Bannon. Now, it’s 14 percent. So public financing was successful in rolling back moneyed interest groups’ ability to buy and sell judges through campaign donations, and these GOP bills would throw judicial elections back to the old ways.

• State Sponsored Religion: Eleven Republicans, including the state’s House Majority Leader, backed a resolution proclaiming that the Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional,” and then decreeing that North Carolina could establish its own state religion. On the bright side, state house Speaker Thom Tillis announced that he would not advance this resolution after it was widely panned.

Back to that polling for a moment, though:

• Only 6% of voters support allowing legislators to start receiving gifts from lobbyists again, while 88% are opposed. There's pretty strong bipartisan agreement that that's a bad idea with independents (4/93), Democrats (5/87), and Republicans (8/86) all firmly against it.

• Only 25% of voters support a proposal to forbid parents from claiming college students registered to vote away from home as dependents on their state taxes, compared to 57% who are opposed. This is another one where the Republican legislators supporting the measure are out of touch with actual Republican voters- only 26% support it with 56% opposed, not that different from the numbers among Democrats which are 22% supportive and 61% opposed.

• Just 33% of voters support cutting the early voting period by a week, while 59% are opposed. Republicans do narrowly support this idea (51/42), but Democrats (22/70) and independents (28/62) are heavily opposed to it.

• Only 22% of voters support eliminating the state's renewable energy standards, while 39% are against that idea. Republican voters (29/25) only narrowly support eliminating the standard while Democrats (13/47) and independents (28/41) are pretty firmly against it.

• Only 28% of voters support a proposal to make it a crime for law enforcement officers to enforce federal gun laws on North Carolina manufactured fire arms, while 42% are opposed. Democrats (33/41), Republicans (24/41), and independents (26/46) all think that one's a bad idea.

• The only high profile Republican initiative we polled that has much traction with voters is the one to make Christianity the official state religion. 42% support that to 45% who are opposed and while much of that support is because a majority of Republicans favor it (53/33) it actually has 41% support from Democrats too, much more appeal across party lines than any of these other proposals. Despite the decent level of support for Christianity as the state religion, only 16% of voters agree with the state legislator who labeled a prayer to Allah as an act of terrorism last week, although that does go up to 25% among Republicans.

The GOP is becoming increasingly unpopular as a governing party in the state. The Democratic Party is in complete turmoil, riven with dissension, and nearly moribund as a functional organization-- which allows McCrory to keep goin' for the gold. Friday evening, just as the State Board of Elections was investigating how he and other Republicans were able to subvert democracy to seize power last year, he announced he had fired the whole Board and his replacements-- 3 Republicans and 2 Democrats-- would take over this week.

The move puts the progress of the board’s investigation into campaign contributions from an indicted sweepstakes software company owner in question.

Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, last week asked the board to investigate more than 60 campaign contributions totaling more than $230,000. Some of the contributions went to McCrory, House Speaker Thom Tillis and Senate leader Phil Berger.

A majority of sitting board members said they were interested in investigating, according to an Associated Press story. But on Friday night, Chairman Larry Leake said it would be inappropriate for members on their last day in office to talk about the investigation or give staff any direction. The board has a meeting scheduled for Tuesday.

“It might be presumptuous for us to attempt to do anything with a new board coming on May 1,” Leake said. “It makes no sense for our board to attempt to direct the conduct of our office when we are in fact exiting out the door.”

...Two of the governor’s GOP appointees said they didn’t know how the board would proceed with the sweepstakes inquiry.

...Charles Winfree, a Republican who has served on the board for 12 years, said he would encourage the new members to pursue the investigation. “Based on what I’ve been told by the staff, it appears to me that there is enough to warrant an investigation,” he said. “Certainly the practice of the contributors needs to be examined.”

Hall said he was “nervous” about the 100 percent turnover on the elections board, but hoped the new members would approach the questions objectively.

“I think there were veterans, both Republicans and Democrats, on the Board of Elections that have been objective in reviewing complaints against both parties and I’ve admired their ability to get the facts even when they don’t agree with my personal opinions,” he said. “I hope the new group will also be very professional and fulfill the responsibilities to be above partisan biases and search for the truth.”

Hall asked the board to investigate three issues related to contributions from Chase Burns, the Oklahoma-based owner of International Internet Technologies, as well as other donations connected to the sweepstakes industry. Burns’ company supplies the software that Internet sweepstakes cafes use to run their games.

Checks for Burns’ contributions were written from a trust account that Florida investigators said received millions in illegal proceeds from Burns’ business customers. Hall wants to know whether Burns used a business account or an account that was part of an illegal business operation to make campaign contributions.

Campaign disclosure reports erroneously list Burns as an attorney with Moore & Van Allen, according to Hall’s complaint. Moore & Van Allen is a legal and lobbying firm that represented Burns’ company and also employed McCrory until days before he took office.

The five-member State Board of Elections, which for years has had three Democrats and two Republicans, has been aggressive in recent years in investigating campaign finance law violations. It investigated former House Speaker Jim Black, and former state Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps, among others. Both were Democrats who ended up sentenced to federal prison. But Republicans were critical of the board for limiting the inquiry into Perdue’s undisclosed campaign flights.

The North Carolina Pope

SUNDAY CLASSICS SCHEDULE NOTE FROM KEN

Today's post, "My dark history with the rollicking opening of Act II of Donizetti's Elixir of Love," follows at 5pm ET/2pm PT.

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