Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Glad you finally got to the cage you've said you have long been pining for. Don't ever seriously doubt yourself again. We don't want to lose you and we do have a deal. Even if we have both forgotten exactly what it originally was we know it was always more honest, fairer and a better deal for both in the deal than any deal that guy you people elected president ever made ..
.
I'll be more careful in what i say and tonight run through this three times
Ahhh, so that's where B402 got his independent, non-partisan line from ..
Manchin to keep Energy gavel after dumping Democratic Party
By Timothy Cama | 05/31/2024 01:32 PM EDT
“I have never seen America through a partisan lens,” the West Viriginia senator said.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/manchin-to-keep-energy-gavel-after-dumping-democratic-party/
thanks for the update.
Guessing he will lose some due to the conviction earlier polls said he would. Hopefully even, am totally guessing now, up to 3-4% of his followers even if they don't say it out loud. Don't know if any loss will be enough to make a difference in states that count.
She is a woman. A Goddess. LOL Looks very heavy, talk about getting ahead.
Thanks for the intro - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali
The others must have been guilty of more serious felonies. His was according to heaps
of sources on the least felonious level, for him lowest in many more ways then one.
You're right he'll likely get a fine, though would be really good to see him in orange picking up trash.
First manchild to reach the presidency says much about those that put him there. Imagine being the
"First president in 152 years to boycott his successors inauguration.
First president to refuse to ensure the peaceful transfer of power."
How small could any president be. He really does have a well deserved place in history.
I like to see the Trump presidency as a case of infinite regression. His corrupted entourage goes toward that view. And when Trump is found guilty on the next one which gets to there that'll just be more infinite regress for the scum. BS all the way down. That's Trump.
Tired too of all those still suggesting the criminal brat could get jail time over that conviction. NO felon of that level who had a clean record before gets jail time for the first offence. In that one respect at least the asshole is gonna be treated like anyone else.
None of them are. Will ignore now.
Gawd. We dealt with that. It was only suggested to some researchers they use it in their research about a very small group of people working to rehabilitate themselves. You conservative assholes are as ignorant as a pigeon that shits on the food he's trying to pick up.
That's right, tired of seeing him make such an asshole of himself. He's gotta say it because his bitch is all he's got. Have you ever seen him make a positive post about anything? Are all Manchin people so caked in coal dust they are always so dark. 👺
You obviously believe that, but again, not nearly in so many things.
All felons. Like the flat earth old lady would say about Trump's people today,
"Felons all the way down".. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down .
ALDRADJKD123, Proof? Gawd. Sure glad we are rid of you.
B402, Don't you even yet know how stupid your thing against dems makes you. The partisan divide has always been there and now Trump and people like you are the ones making it so bad. It's not the fucking dems.
B402, Nope. Not right either. Greatest in some ways, not so great in other ways. Some just gotta be black and white in a complex, layered multi-colored world. I'll never understand why you, and so many other conservatives, seem to need that black and white.
conix, Fact is there are many who disagree with ... "Everyone here would be in agreement--that the US is the best country to grow up in..." I post this not to agree or disagree with the author, but just to make the point you should check your thinking ever more.
America, Stop Saying You’re the Greatest Country in the World
That goes for you too, Australia.
Claire J. Harris
The Carrier Pigeon
Published in
The Carrier Pigeon
·
Jul 6, 2019
Photo by Shari Sirotnak on Unsplash
While teaching English in Cairo, I noticed something that happened in my classes each time a discussion arose about the problems in Egypt. The student who brought up an issue was quickly shushed by others around them with the words “Ahsan min musr mafish.” I knew enough Arabic to understand what this meant:
“There is nothing better than Egypt.”
Egypt at that time was ruled by President Mubarek, and social unrest was becoming more apparent even a few years before the Arab Spring. I wonder whether my former students would say the same about Egypt now, after two military coups. They probably would.
What is it about countries — they can’t just like themselves, they have to be the BEST of everything? Yes, even despite all evidence to the contrary.
My Egyptian students made a distinction between the growing problems in the country and the concept of Egypt itself. It’s a strange and rather vague notion: that there exists a sort of Platonic idea of a country.
For what is a country if not everything that happens within it?
As July 4 rolls around, my social media feed has started to resemble my classes in Egypt. Some liberal Americans confess to feeling troubled about celebrating Independence Day while Trump is in office — but have no objections to a holiday which offers unrestrained fanfare for US militarism.
A few days ago, I watched Stephen Colbert, a progressive Democrat, tout American values as proof that “our great country is the last best hope for all mankind.”
I spat out my Fosters. Sorry, what?
(Just kidding, American friends. We don’t actually drink Fosters).
He went on to say that “what makes us great is what we believe in: all men are created equal, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
These lofty ideals are pulled from the Declaration of Independence. Colbert’s argument that America must continue to live up to these principles, was a means of criticising Trumpian policies such as the separation of immigrant families. It is a way of distinguishing between who America is and what America does. It is a denial of accountability.
What the late-night comedian failed to mention is that the US has NEVER lived up to these ideals. The Declaration of Independence did not extend to native Americans who were being systematically murdered and forced off their land.
When the document was created in 1776, African-Americans were still enslaved, and would continue to be for almost another century. On Independence Day in 1852, Frederick Douglass, leader of the Abolitionist movement, said:
“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn…”
Despite the endless chest-beating on both sides of US politics ..
, America fails its own citizens onAmerica is the greatest Country in the world and my job is to fight for ALL citizens, even those who have made mistakes. Congratulations to the Senate on the bi-partisan passing of a historic Criminal Justice Reform Bill....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018
Orbán doubles down on anti-EU rhetoric following latest slap on the wrist
"If elect Trump? -- How Viktor Orbán Wins"
The Hungarian government was undeterred by a European Parliament resolution that condemned
its antidemocratic policies and questioned whether it should lose its EU voting rights.
By Lili Rutai
Lili Rutai is a London-based freelance journalist from Budapest. She has reported
from central and eastern Europe for Al Jazeera, RFE/RL and Euronews
23 Jan 2024
The Hungarian government has remained defiant after the European Parliament last week adopted a non-binding resolution condemning the erosion of the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights in Hungary – and called on the European Council to determine whether the country should be stripped of its voting rights.
While Prime Minister Viktor Orbán did not directly address the resolution – which passed with 345 votes in favour, 104 against and 29 abstentions – he said Friday in an interview on state radio that his government would continue to take a strong line against LGBTQ rights and asylum seekers.
“They can’t blackmail us,” he said of the EU. Orbán again argued that LGBTQ activists would corrupt Hungary’s education system, while migrants would compromise the country’s national security.
Meanwhile, the ruling Fidesz party echoed Orbán’s sentiments in a Facebook post that went up Thursday, the same day the EP passed the resolution. “We will not let them turn Hungary into a migrant-country and we will protect our children from LGBTQ propaganda,” the post of the official party account read.
Balázs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director (no relation), went a step further and called for the abolishment of the European Parliament in a post on X following the vote.
The Orbán government’s aggressive rhetoric makes clear that Budapest is unconcerned with the EU’s condemnation. If anything, the resolution only provides fuel for the government’s fiery nationalist rhetoric.
This vote is more significant at the European level, according to Péter Krekó, the executive director of the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute. “It shows that the European Parliament is under pressure” ahead of the parliamentary elections in June, he said. And of equal concern for many lawmakers, Hungary is set to assume the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the EU just a month later.
“For Hungarian politics, it doesn’t matter if the EP is attacking Hungary or not, or how it’s doing so,” Krekó argued, adding that Orbán’s government “will say that it’s under fire from the LGBTQ lobby and pro-migration left.”
“And in the past years we’ve seen that with campaigns like this, Fidesz managed to mobilise its voters very well,” he said.
Related - 07 Jul MEPs lament ‘putinisation’ of Hungary as EU urged to take urgent action
https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/meps-lament-putinisation-of-hungary-as-eu-urged-to-take-urgent-action
by Lorna Hutchinson
Thursday’s vote came after members of the centre-right European People’s Party issued a formal petition calling for the invocation of Article 7 (2) of the Treaty on European Union – which allows for the potential suspension of membership rights – earlier this month. The final resolution urged the European Council to determine whether Hungary has committed “serious and persistent breaches of EU values” under the subclause.
The step was triggered in part by Orbán’s decision to veto EU funding for Ukraine in December. He has also insisted he would block Ukraine’s potential accession to the Union.
“This House shows that we are serious when it comes to defending the rule of law in our Union and that we are not afraid of Prime Minister Orbán’s blackmailing attempts,” said liberal Hungarian MEP Katalin Cseh, vice president of the Renew Europe group. “The Commission will now have to face the consequences for selling out our EU values,” she added in a statement on Thursday.
Cseh was referring to the Commission’s decision to release up to €10.2 billion in previously frozen funds to Hungary in December. Still, approximately €20 billion remains tied up “until Hungary fulfils all the necessary conditions,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last week, citing concerns over LGBTQ and refugee rights.
It, nonetheless, remains highly unlikely that the Council will move forward on the EP’s resolution, and even less likely it would strip Hungary of its voting rights in a unanimous decision – one that would require the support of Hungary’s allies like Slovakia.
The vote is also unlikely to shift domestic politics in Hungary, where the ruling Fidesz party holds a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.
The country of 9.7 million has been sanctioned under the first subclause of Article 7 since 2018, due to a "clear risk of a serious breach" of the rule of law and respect for fundamental rights – both of which have been significantly curtailed since Orbán took power 14 years ago.
But the prime minister and his backers appear more emboldened than ever. As Fidesz politician and non-attached MEP Balázs Hídvégi wrote in a January 8 post on X: “By giving access to 10 billion euros, [the Commission] admitted that there is nothing wrong with #ruleoflaw.”
https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/orban-anti-eu-nationalist-rhetoric-following-parliaments-latest-slap-on-the-wrist
LOL Well done kids. And Dolly. Nice caring fun stuff, good for everyone.
B402, Widely accepted back then as legitimate campaign research, not at all even a little bit similar. Off the top, for one it was looking for info, not covering something up. And the money was paid to a research firm. That's without spending any time at all on it in going back and finding why no one ever suggested there was any law breaking in it.
The American Presidency With Bill Clinton, was on here about 3am. I didn't catch it's beginning, think the one on was Ep. 3
The American Presidency With Bill Clinton
History, American history
1 season English
Explores the history of the American presidency with a comprehensive look at a wide variety of presidential action that moved the United States forward.
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/the-american-presidency-with-bill-clinton
Maybe you/we can see it all there, haven't tried yet.
It was top-notch .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Presidency_with_Bill_Clinton_(TV_series) .
I'd agree with those who like her yet said the thing she got banged for could have been done better
so it was better understood, but also agree with all the criticism of the lousy treatment
she has suffered. And with her opinion of it as described in the article.
And with all you said there. A real trouper.
Like i said i understand better now exactly why your new signature photo.
ALDRADJKD123, Told you earlier enough was likely getting too much, just got to your latest, and well
what can we say, board management says your whole approach is better served somewhere else.
Your ignorance is frankly astounding. Goodbye.
brooklyn13, One of the articles i mentioned earlier i had seen. Just cleaning tabs up and figured it should be interesting, perhaps even worthwhile, for you to read. Notice in it there is no mention of fungal diseases:
" The diet to avoid onset of gout symptoms (instead of taking a medicine every day) is one that's low in purines:"
Oh, and i omitted to mention that i thought your comment just above re the medicine is good advice, though the directions on my gout prescription read one tablet each day, i tell anyone anytime gout comes up they are nuts to take it every day, it is not good for the gut. Most all sadly do take one a day as prescribed. I remember one guy out of many said he treats it as i always did. take a pill only on getting a hint gout may be coming on. Won't in future. Except, as mentioned, if traveling. Then, as i love those seafood lunches, IF gout come will take a gout tablet and skip the blood thinner one.
All links
08 November 2021 Medicine and health
The science and pseudoscience of food allergy and intolerance testing
If you’ve ever wondered if you have a food allergy or intolerance, you’re not alone. Adverse reactions to food are common, and estimated to affect around 20% of people in Western countries. And while potentially life-threatening, they’re increasingly “diagnosed” using unorthodox, scientifically unsound methods.
Adverse reactions to food can be divided into reactions with an immune basis (food allergies and coeliac disease), or those without an immune basis, known as food intolerances.
Food allergies
Food allergy is an adverse immune-mediated response, which occurs reproducibly on exposure to a given food, and is absent during avoidance.
Food allergies affect about 1-2% of adults and fewer than 10% of children. They typically arise in the first two years of life .. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24388012/ .. and prevalence appears to be rising in Western nations, particularly among children. In Australia for example, hospital admissions for food anaphylaxis rose fourfold between 1998-99 and 2011-12.
The most common food allergy triggers .. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33493695/ .. are egg, cow’s milk (dairy), peanut, tree nuts, sesame, soy, wheat, fish and other seafood, although almost any food can trigger an allergic reaction.
While some food allergies such as cow’s milk and egg are often outgrown, others such as fish, shellfish, peanut and tree nut allergies more often persist into adulthood.
Allergic reactions to food range in severity from mild to severe. While mild to moderate symptoms include swelling of face, lips and/or eyes, hives or welts on the skin, stomach (abdominal) pain and vomiting, severe allergic reactions (anaphylaxis) affect breathing and the heart, and can be life-threatening. Sensitivity to allergens varies, but for some people, exposure to even trace amounts can trigger a severe reaction.
Allergic reactions are, of course, preventable, but this requires careful avoidance of the food allergen (in people with a diagnosed food allergy) and in the case of a reaction, the immediate administration of adrenaline (epinephrine) via an auto-injector device (for example, EpiPen or Anapen).
In Australia, the Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy .. https://www.allergy.org.au/ (ASCIA) also advises that the likelihood of developing food allergies may increase if the introduction of solid foods is delayed until after 12 months of age. It’s therefore recommended that:
* a variety of solid foods are introduced to babies by six months, but not before four months, starting with iron-rich foods, and while continuing breastfeeding
* all infants (including those at high risk of allergy) should be given allergenic solid foods including peanut butter, cooked egg, dairy and wheat products in their first year
* hydrolysed infant formulas are not effective for the prevention of food allergies.
Diagnosis of food allergy requires a careful clinical examination, along with reliable, evidence-based testing. Recommended tests include:
* skin prick and blood tests to measure allergen-specific antibodies known as immunoglobulin
* food allergen challenges that involve the patient consuming the suspected allergen in a medically supervised environment using established protocols, to confirm or exclude food allergy.
At present, the only evidence-based treatments for food allergies are:
* identification and careful avoidance of the allergen
* adrenaline (epinephrine) for the treatment of life-threatening anaphylaxis.
While oral immunotherapy (OIT) shows promise as a treatment for food allergy, in Australia it’s not yet a routine therapy, but trials are underway to help determine its safety and effectiveness.
Oral immunotherapy involves exposing the patient to gradually-increasing amounts of the food allergen under medical supervision, followed by continued daily consumption. The goal is to achieve desensitisation, whereby there’s a temporary increase in the amount of allergen that the patient can consume before an allergic reaction is triggered.
Food intolerances
Food intolerance is distinct from food allergy, although distinguishing between the two is difficult and requires a detailed history by an allergist, investigations to exclude other diagnoses, and allergy testing to exclude food allergy.
Food intolerance describes a wide range of adverse reactions to food and/or food components that are not immune-mediated. They’re often dose-dependent, whereby a threshold level of exposure triggers symptoms, and these may worsen with increasing intake. Various physiological mechanisms drive food intolerances, including:
* pharmacological effects (for example, caffeine, tyramine, monosodium glutamate, salicylates and amines)
* enzyme deficiencies (lactase deficiency causing lactose intolerance)
* toxins (contamination of food such as fish with bacteria or their by-products)
* gastrointestinal dysfunction (visceral hypersensitivity in irritable bowel syndrome leading to FODMAP sensitivity).
ALDRADJKD123, Biden clearly said he. How many times do you have to prove you are nothing more than a nasty Trump jerk.
ALDRADJKD123, She makes a perfectly polite and noncontroversial observation about your reading material which i'd say every one else reading your posts here would see as evidence-based, fair and reasonable. You in return
"Just as you seem to struggle with common sense but then again you are old and no doubt in cognitive decline."
make an evidence-free and clearly hugely mistaken insult, and a further one which you obviously said with malice as again there is no justification for your saying it, at all.
Don't think i've seen any other of your posts for the last couple of days, but am reminded of an earlier observation of mine to you that i hadn't seen anything of any worth or value or anything from you.
We run out of tolerance after a while for trolls as you who contribute nothing but stupid.
Good you got rid of it. i didn't know who she was -- Kathy Griffin Is Trying to Get Back on the D-List
"Well, it was like a Bounty commercial. The quilted quicker picker upper. 🤪"
Ever since her Trump joke went wrong in 2017, Griffin has been seeking a professional rebirth, and wondering who among the canceled gets a second chance.
Kathy Griffin in her home in Malibu, Calif., where a portrait of her by Erik Menendez is prominently displayed. Chantal Anderson for The New York Times
By Katherine Rosman
Published Jan. 19, 2022Updated June 22, 2023
When Kathy Griffin met last summer with a surgeon to discuss the removal of the upper lobe of her left lung, and the cancer in it, she got right to the point. “Can this wait?” she asked. “Because I’ve got a gig.”
She was expected in New York, to film a four-episode role for “Search Party,” the HBO Max cult-hit dramedy about the bizarre travails of a group of 20-something friends, whose final season was released this month.
It wasn’t a run-of-the-mill opportunity. “Search Party” would be Griffin’s first TV role in five years that wasn’t based on the notoriety that enveloped her after she posed for a photograph holding a Halloween mask of President Donald J. Trump’s severed head doused in blood-like ketchup in May 2017.
Griffin — known for humor that is by turns bawdy and biting, abrasive and self-deprecating, but always skewering of celebrity culture — was never the biggest star on television. But for decades she was certainly ubiquitous.
She played the snarky second banana to Brooke Shields on the NBC sitcom “Suddenly Susan” from 1996 to 2000 and was the star and an executive producer of “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List .. https://www.bravotv.com/kathy-griffin-my-life-on-the-d-list ,” which aired on Bravo from 2005 to 2010. She was a regular on late night talk shows with David Letterman .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuygmUYalhU .. and Jimmy Kimmel .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl_cn3VahOM , and performed in 20 comedy specials on HBO, Comedy Central and Bravo.
As a comedian whose job is to push boundaries, Griffin had courted controversy before. While accepting a best-reality-series Emmy in 2007 for “D-List,” she said from the stage, “Suck it, Jesus, this award is my god now.” In 2013, while hosting CNN’s New Year’s Eve program from Times Square with Anderson Cooper, she mimicked a sex act on Cooper.
But the Trump photo landed her in a different kind of trouble.
There was fury from the right, including from the president himself, who tweeted that Griffin “should be ashamed of herself,” while Donald Trump Jr. told “Good Morning America,” “She deserves everything that’s coming to her.”
In the aftermath of posing with a Halloween mask of President Trump’s severed head doused in blood-like ketchup, CNN fired her from its
New Year’s Eve show, which she cohosted with Anderson Cooper (right). Ray Tamarra/Getty Images
For others, here was an opportunity to show that they wouldn’t always disagree with the new president. She was rebuked by figures like Chelsea Clinton (“this is vile and wrong”) and her (now-former) close friend Cooper (“I am appalled by the photo shoot Kathy Griffin took part in”).
Griffin received thousands of death threats, including dozens left on her aging mother’s answering machine and others called into the hospital room of her sister, Joyce, who was dying of cancer. Griffin was investigated and interrogated by the Secret Service, and her lawyer heard from officials at the Department of Justice.
“I wasn’t canceled,” Griffin said, in her Malibu, Calif., home a few days after she “hate-watched” Cooper and Andy Cohen, the new co-host of the New Year’s Eve show that she was fired from amid the 2017 brouhaha. “I was erased.”
Griffin, now 61, has been trying to make her way back since then, brushing up against a litany of obstacles: partisan rage, sexism, Hollywood’s fear of getting pulped-by-association, the pandemic, pill addiction, lung cancer and her own reputation.
All the while she has tried to puzzle out who among the culturally damned gets a second chance in our society, who doesn’t and why. She feels cast out in an extended Hollywood exile and believes it’s because she is a middle-aged woman who doesn’t have a big agency, film studio or television network financially invested in her professional rebirth.
She does not lack for money — she says her net worth is $50 million — but she craves the one thing that has driven her for decades: work.
“I just want to get back to making people laugh,” she said. “More than anything else, that’s what has been robbed from me.”
Since the Trump mask incident, Griffin has been trying to make her way back, brushing up against obstacles like partisan rage, sexism, pill addiction, lung cancer and her own reputation. Chantal Anderson for The New York Times
No Shortage of Enemies
Griffin’s house is a modern, boxy white structure of 8,200 square feet sitting on 1.8 acres in the hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She bought it in 2020 for $8.8 million, which I know because Griffin sent me the Zillow listing before I visited. It is all windows and clean surfaces, and is decorated in homage to its owner.
On the entry table are her two Emmys (for outstanding reality program) and her Grammy Award (“Calm Down Gurrl” won for best comedy album). Magazine covers and promotional posters adorn the walls in the front entrance and around the house, including one for “Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a Story .. https://www.instagram.com/p/CKW8Arpg1eH/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link ,” the 2019 documentary she produced and financed in the aftermath of the Trump photo. And prominently displayed by the powder room on the main floor, there is a portrait of Griffin painted by Erik Menendez in prison.
At the kitchen table, eating chocolate chip banana bread made by her husband, Randy Bick, Griffin was biting and regretful, irreverent and chastened, angry and vulnerable. Her voice was soft and breathy after lung surgery. But her words were crisp, those of a woman who has hustled for every bit of her good luck since she moved from Oak Park, Ill., when she was 19.
Before the Trump photo she was on the road an average of 100 days a year, performing standup shows that made her a favorite of L.G.B.T. fans, among others — transforming herself from the daughter of parents raised during the Depression into a rich businesswoman.
To become a success in Hollywood, she said, she had to be a tough and demanding minder of her own career. But her willingness to assert herself, sometimes loudly, could be a double-edged sword, and she has alienated plenty of entertainment industry executives. (In her home office sits a framed transcript of a conference call led by her erstwhile CAA agent, in which he told her “This is why your career isn’t more successful” and that he hopes she will “go back and die at William Morris.”)
“??I honestly never had a desire to make enemies,” said Griffin, dressed in a blue pajama set and sneakers, her four dogs (Olivia Benson, Elliot Stabler, Maggie and Mary) scurrying about. “But I keep making enemies.”
“I wasn’t canceled,” Griffin said. “I was erased.” Chantal Anderson for The New York Times
She learned to “four-wall” her live shows, meaning she cuts out promoters as much as possible. She refuses to audition, because people should know her humor and her affect by now. And she only takes meetings at home, because that’s how she can tell whether agents, producers or directors are serious about making a deal.
She had a long relationship with a stand-up agent but otherwise tries to avoid hiring handlers who take a chunk of her money but don’t have the same incentive to fight for her as she does for herself.
The battles she has chosen to wage, however, can backfire. In 2016, 10 days before the New Year’s Eve show, Griffin contacted Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN. She told him that she was carrying more of the prep work than Cooper and felt she deserved more than the $80,000 her contract called for.
Zucker “got very offended,” Griffin said. “He started yelling at me and he literally said something like, ‘Who do you think you are calling here demanding a raise?’ And then something came over me. And I just lost it. I just started screaming. I’m Kathy [beep!] Griffin, Jeff, that’s who I am.” She then said to him, “I would really feel a lot more comfortable showing up if I got paid what I deserve.” Zucker took that as a threat to bail on the show, and in a call to Griffin’s lawyer, fired her.
Griffin called Zucker again, begging him to take her back. Zucker rehired her, but she said he cut her pay by 20 percent.
Zucker said this month that he had supported Griffin’s career for years, especially as the former president and chief executive of NBCUniversal, the parent company of Bravo, where he gave the greenlight to “My Life on the D-List.”
He called her demand for a raise so close to New Year’s Eve “completely out of line.”
“It sounds like she is acknowledging that, insofar as Kathy Griffin acknowledges she has ever done anything wrong,” he said.
Griffin with her husband, Randy Bick. Together for 11 years, they were married by Lily Tomlin two years ago. Chantal Anderson for The New York Times
A Joke Gone Wrong
In late May 2017, Griffin was at home, on a break from a stand-up tour. Most everything Griffin does is in service of booking the next gig, and her plans to spend a day posing for the photographer Tyler Shields (known for provocative images .. https://www.tylershields.com/series-x-5 .. like one of a Black man tying a hooded Klansman to a tree with a noose) were no different. Maybe a photo could gin up attention and lead to a business opportunity.
Shields took pictures of her dressed in latex, posing like a Kardashian. For the last setup, they decided to satirize Trump’s dismissive comment about Megyn Kelly, then a Fox News anchor, made after she moderated one of the presidential debates in 2016. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” he said, a comment taken by many as a sexist reference to menstruation.
Griffin’s assistant procured a Trump mask from a costume shop, and they put it on one of Griffin’s wig holders to give it shape and then drizzled ketchup on it. About a week later, Griffin gave Shields the OK publish the picture. Within 30 minutes of it being posted on Twitter, it appeared on TMZ, the website founded by Harvey Levin, by then a known favorite of Trump’s .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/business/media/tmz-trump-meets-with-harvey-levin.html .
The headline read, “Kathy Griffin Beheads President Trump .. https://www.tmz.com/2017/05/30/kathy-griffin-beheads-donald-trump-photo-tyler-shields/ .”
“Once TMZ had the picture, it was out of all of our control,” Shields said.
The reaction was swift.
CNN fired her the next day. Twenty-five theaters announced they were calling off her upcoming shows. And Griffin’s mother, a devotee of Fox News, told her she didn’t support what she had done.
She also had to deal with law enforcement, as the Secret Service began an inquiry and asked to question her under oath. Her lawyer, Alan L. Isaacman, said he knew that the photo was considered protected speech under the First Amendment, but nonetheless he and Griffin approached the situation as if there were a real threat she could be charged with conspiracy to assassinate the president.
“The idea that he might be able to induce the Justice Department into bringing a charge was not beyond belief as a possibility,” Isaacman said. (Press officers for the Secret Service and the Department of Justice declined to comment.)
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in security and legal fees later, Griffin was exonerated.
Some who work in comedy said they saw Griffin’s situation as not dissimilar to their own experiences, though without the widespread censure fueled by social media.
Griffin “tried to tell a joke, but the joke wasn’t clear and it bombed,” said Bill Prady, the co-creator and an executive producer of “The Big Bang Theory.” “It has happened to me a million times — the joke was a misfire, because unless you knew the reference she was making, you were looking at an image that was hard to interpret.”
The director and producer Judd Apatow said that if America is still mad at Griffin, its priorities are messed up.
It is “seriously out of whack,” he said, “that she is struggling to get things back on the rails because something went too far in a photo” meant to satirize a polarizing politician who was making life-or-death policy decisions.
Chantal Anderson for The New York Times
Griffin spies a double standard in the whole situation, noting that other rebuked figures, like Dave Chappelle and Jeffrey Toobin, have seen their careers relatively unaffected or have regained their professional footing more easily. Or maybe it’s the patriarchy, which Griffin frequently invokes, amid expletives.
Earlier this month, she was scrolling through tweets about the actor Jeremy Strong, the subject of a profile in The New Yorker .. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/on-succession-jeremy-strong-doesnt-get-the-joke? .. that portrayed the “Succession” star as taking his job, and himself, a bit too seriously. The article generated a lot of chatter and rebuttals from Hollywood insiders who felt it unfair.
“When you’re an artist known for being ‘difficult’ and you’re a man, they write New Yorker profiles about you and then Aaron Sorkin writes an open letter in support .. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/aaron-sorkin-defends-jeremy-strong-new-yorker-succession-profile-1235061341/ ,” she said.
“But when you’re ‘difficult’ and you’re a woman, they call you a pain in the (expletive).”
The day I spent with Griffin in early January, social media was filled with chatter about CNN’s New Year’s Eve show and Andy Cohen’s comment about Bill DeBlasio .. https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/andy-cohen-new-years-eve-drunk-bill-de-blasio-1235145780/ , who was serving his final day as mayor of New York. Cohen said De Blasio did the “crappiest job,” before adding a “sayonara, sucka” for good measure.
CNN stood by its man. “Andy said something he shouldn’t have on live TV,” read the network statement. “We’ve addressed it with him and look forward to having him back again next year.”
Griffin found this galling, but not surprising. “Apples to apples,” she said, explaining that Cohen made a political statement just as she had.
This example exercised her more than most. Griffin and Cohen have been feuding for years since their days overlapping at Bravo. In October 2017, after being named to co-host the New Year’s Eve gig with Cooper, Cohen was asked by TMZ if he had talked to Griffin about taking the job.
“Who?” Cohen asked .. https://www.tmz.com/videos/0-fwu40z9r/ , repeatedly.
Griffin is still angry. “This is a guy that I think kind of wanted to be me,” she said, likening Cohen to Eve Harrington from the movie “All About Eve.” “And now he’s halfway there.”
Cohen declined to comment, but a Bravo publicist pointed to an interview he gave to Howard Stern in 2018 in which he said of Griffin, “I got the job that she had on CNN, I’m on Bravo all these hours, I get it.”
To Prady, comparisons between Griffin’s photo and Cohen’s rant are imprecise. Cohen, he said, “made a mistake. In Kathy’s case, the world made a mistake.”
Griffin with three of her four dogs — from left, Maggie, Elliot Stabler and Mary. Not pictured is Olivia Benson. Chantal Anderson for The New York Times
On the Comeback Trail
One of the comedians who reached out to Griffin in the early days of her crisis was Jim Carrey. His advice: What she was living through was material, important material, and that when she was ready, she needed to make it funny, and share it with audiences.
As the death threats and vitriol continued in the U.S., in late 2017, she headed out on a 17-country tour. In front of large crowds at venues like the Sydney Opera House, Griffin performed three-hour-plus shows detailing her experience at the intersection of free speech and partisan rage. When not onstage, she washed laundry in her bathtub and cried through panic attacks at night, all of which is captured in the documentary.
By the end of the year, Griffin and Bick were back home. She got her first bite from a network, booking a role on Comedy Central’s Trump spoof “The President Show .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/arts/television/kathy-griffin-trump-the-president-show.html ” (she was cast as the president’s aide Kellyanne Conway). Spending hundreds of thousands on security and fronting all the production costs, she played 24 cities from May to November 2018, including shows at Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall .. https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1011448717034115072 .
Griffin captured her tour, on stage and off, in “Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a Story,” a documentary she produced and financed herself.
Tanne Willow
But the physical and emotional strain further eroded her well-being. She and Bick began to fight, even temporarily separating, and Griffin said that a dependence on pills turned into a full-blown addiction.
Though she said she has never taken a sip of alcohol in her life, by the time she left for the international tour, pills like Provigil, Ativan, Klonopin, Vicodin, Xanax and Adderall had became one of her primary food groups. Borrowing from recovery adages, Griffin said pills went from “magic to medicine to misery.”
She continued to hustle, trying for a distribution deal for the documentary (on which she spent $1 million) and pitching television show ideas. No one bit. Then in March 2020, her mother died.
On June 25, “I wrote a note to Randy and then I took a bunch of pills, and I just thought I would go to sleep,” she said. “I really thought he’d be better off without me, that the world would be.” She was hospitalized and in July, began an at-home rehab program where sober counselors came to her house daily.
Without the pills to mask her body aches, her back pain became so persistent that she saw a doctor. Last July, she was diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer .. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/why-are-more-nonsmoking-women-getting-lung-cancer . (Griffin said her lung surgery was a success and no further treatment has been recommended by her doctors.)
The diagnosis was terrifying news, but a more promising harbinger arrived in an out-of-the-blue phone call from Charles Rogers, a creator and showrunner of “Search Party.” Rogers had seen Griffin on her “Hell of a Story” tour and had been mesmerized. And he thought she would be perfect as Liquorice Montague .. https://www.thewrap.com/kathy-griffin-joins-season-5-of-search-party/ , an unhinged Svengali who takes under her wing one of the show’s characters. “She is very grounded, sensitive, smart and thoughtful in her approach,” he said of Griffin. “It didn’t feel like we had a diva on the set, at all.”
Griffin didn’t tell Rogers about the lung cancer, or that an operation was scheduled. “I was just afraid they would say I couldn’t do it if they knew,” Griffin said.
As she recuperated from surgery this fall, she got other nibbles too, appearing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” this past November. (Kimmel — who was supported by ABC amid criticism .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/arts/television/jimmy-kimmel-apologizes-blackface.html .. in 2020 for performing in blackface earlier in this career, for which he apologized — introduced Griffin as “an incredibly resilient human being.”)
In the new season of “Search Party,” Griffin plays Liquorice Montague, an unhinged Svengali who takes under her wing one of the show’s
main characters. Jon Pack/HBO Max
Through the tumult Griffin has made new friends, including women who have fought publicly with Trump, like E. Jean Carroll, a journalist who is suing him for defamation .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/nyregion/jean-caroll-donald-trump-lawsuit-rape.html .
She has also grown close to Sia ..https://www.siamusic.net/ , the Australian pop singer-songwriter, who landed at the center of her own media storm .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/movies/sia-music-autism-backlash.html .. in early 2021. “Music,” the movie which Sia wrote and directed, was criticized by disability rights activists for its depiction of autistic people and for casting someone not on the autism spectrum. Sia was the target of hostile comments on social media; online petitioners called for the movie’s release to be canceled.
“I was suicidal and relapsed and went to rehab,” Sia said. Griffin helped her get through the experience. “She saved my life.”
A few months ago, Griffin confided in Sia about one of her most shameful memories, something you wouldn’t have been surprised to see on “My Life on the D-List.” Back in 2017, she told Sia, she had asked Apatow if he would go with her to Craig’s, a West Hollywood restaurant that is a favorite of paparazzi.
“I just need one good picture out there besides those that say, ‘Kathy Griffin is a jihadist,’” she said she told him. (Apatow said he does not recall Griffin’s request.)
Sia told Griffin she would go to Craig’s with her. So last November, they drove together to the restaurant, strategically timing their arrival to be “caught” by photographers.
“We were joking that we were on ‘Survivor: Hollywood,’” Sia said. The photos ran in the The Daily Mail .. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10155723/Kathy-Griffin-Sia-great-spirits-share-warm-hug-dinner-together.html .
Prady has kept in touch, too. On New Year’s Day, he texted Griffin to say they should create a New Year’s Eve show for this Dec. 31.
She replied enthusiastically, but Griffin — always looking to turn any opportunity into a bigger one — let him know that a one-off appearance wasn’t exactly what she was looking for.
“Hey, NYE is fun,” she wrote, “but if I’m calling in a Bill Prady favor, make it a cast member of something.”
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Chantal Anderson for The New York Times
Katie Rosman is a reporter for the Metro desk, contributing narratives and profiles aboutpeople,
events and dynamics in New York City and its outer reaches. More about Katherine Rosman
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/arts/television/kathy-griffin.html
OK, NOW i understand your signature photo much more. 🤨
If elect Trump? -- How Viktor Orbán Wins
"[b]Experts react: Iran just unleashed a major attack on Israel. What’s next?
"Why do Europe’s strongmen love Trump?"
Kim Lane Scheppele
Issue Date July 2022
Volume 33 Issue 3
Page Numbers 45–61
Download from Project MUSE
On 3 April 2022, Viktor Orbán won his fourth straight election with his fourth straight supermajority in parliament that allows him to amend the constitution at will. This essay traces how he managed to do that. Orbán’s skillful use of the war in Ukraine and his major expansion of social benefits right before the election were important in that victory. But even more crucial were the rules of the game that Orbán established after his election victory in 2010, rules that have been constantly modified as the opposition has tried to work around the barriers that those rules erected. Hungary has already been demoted from democracy to autocracy by all democracy raters. This essay shows precisely why those rankings are right. As long as Orbán retains complete control over the rules that govern elections, he can remain in power indefinitely.
In the run-up to Hungary’s 3 April 2022 parliamentary election, the race looked too close to call. But insiders knew that the structural bias in the electoral system meant that the six-party opposition coalition, United for Hungary, was fighting an uphill battle. The opposition had done everything it could to unpick the lock on power that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of the Fidesz party had installed with his revision of Hungary’s electoral system ten years earlier. By giving up their individual party ambitions to run a single coalition candidate against Fidesz’s candidate in each district, the opposition maximized its chances of winning.
Days before the election, even the most Fidesz-favorable poll predicted that Orbán would lose his two-thirds grip on the 199-member unicameral parliament even if he managed to scrape out a majority.1 It takes just a single two-thirds vote of parliament to amend Hungary’s constitution. Thus having a supermajority, as Orbán’s Fidesz has had for all but a short time since coming to power in 2010, means that a party can put itself above the law by changing the constitution at will. So even if the opposition failed to win, taking away Orbán’s two-thirds majority would have been a victory.
In 2022, victory seemed not only possible but probable. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz had won parliamentary supermajorities with less than half the vote. Orbán’s victories could be chalked up partly to social-benefits giveaways before each election and partly to campaigns of fear against migrants and cosmopolitans. But much of Orbán’s electoral success results from an election system crafted to ensure that any division in the opposition automatically generates supermajorities for the ruling party. In 2022, with the opposition united across the political spectrum and running neck and neck with Fidesz in the polls for more than a year, it finally seemed that Orbán could actually lose.
About the Author
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
at Princeton University. She has worked on Hungarian constitutional law since the 1990s
and is coauthor (with Miklós Bánkuti and Gábor Halmai) of the 2012 Journal of
Democracy essay “Hungary’s Illiberal Turn: Disabling the Constitution ..
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/480981 .”
View all work by Kim Lane Scheppele .. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/authors/kim-lane-scheppele/
Against all predictions, however, Orbán had his biggest election triumph yet. On the eve of the election, polls had put Fidesz at about 5 percentage points ahead of the opposition, within the margin of error. Yet Orbán came out 20 points ahead on election day, winning 83 percent of the single-member districts and 54 percent of the party-list vote. Orbán did not just retain his two-thirds majority in parliament—he now has a comfortable cushion with 68 percent of the seats. With the worst opposition showing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, United for Hungary members are trying to figure out what path might lie ahead given that four more years of autocracy are in store.
How did the contest go from being too close to call to a blowout? Elections can be organized to turn a plurality party into a supermajority winner. While the Hungarian case has distinctive features, it demonstrates more generally how autocrats can rig elections legally, using their parliamentary majorities to change the law to neutralize whatever strategy the opposition adopts. Understanding how Orbán won his latest supermajority shows defenders of democracy what they are up against when autocrats lock in their power by law.
The 2022 Campaign
In free and fair elections, commentators focus on the candidates, the campaigns, and the issues. In structurally rigged elections whose outcomes are foreordained, these things matter far less. Still, even autocrats cannot win elections without votes. To understand the outcome of Hungary’s 2022 election we must understand why Hungarian voters voted as they did.
For most of his twelve-year rule, Orbán’s base of support has hovered around a third of the electorate. Orbán has not had majority support at any point in his tenure if one includes survey respondents who answer “don’t know,” a group that sometimes comprises the majority of those polled. At election time, Orbán’s government typically rolls out massive benefits to potential supporters, and 2022 was no exception. This year, he paid a “thirteenth-month” pension to seniors, exempted people under 25 years of age from income tax, and buffered Hungarians from inflation by freezing fuel and food prices. In prior election years, such handouts have won many people over.
Orbán has also used make-work public-sector jobs to leverage support from those who cannot afford to lose their benefits. The National Public Employment Program that Orbán introduced in 2011 replaced social-welfare and unemployment benefits with public-sector employment. By 2016, this public-employment scheme employed 5 percent of the entire labor force, with about 223,000 people dependent on local (Fidesz) mayors for discretionarily awarded jobs. In the 2014 election, Isabel Mares and Lauren Young found that these precarious workers were threatened with termination if they did not vote for Fidesz.2 “Chain voting” ensures that people vote the right way. Voter 1 goes into the polling station, appears to vote by depositing an empty envelope into the ballot box, but comes out with a blank ballot. Voter 2 is then sent in with that ballot—now marked by a Fidesz operative—and told to put it in the ballot box and exit with another blank ballot in hand. Carried on down the line, the Fidesz party boss in the town can ensure that all have voted the proper way while the election workers find that they are short only one unaccounted-for vote, which would hardly raise eyebrows. In 2022, the investigative news site Átlátszó captured the scheme on video.3
Voters who were not susceptible to such overt threats were nonetheless swimming in a media environment in which the government’s message was the only one they heard. As Orbán has consolidated his grip on Hungary, his control of the media is now nearly absolute. In 2010, he cut all state advertising funds to critical news outlets and threatened to sever contracts with private advertisers that continued to support targeted media. The following year, he established a Fidesz-controlled media council with the power to levy bankrupting fines against news outlets that did not favor the Fidesz worldview. Hit on all sides by financial attacks, independent and opposition media began to fail just as news media across the globe were struggling financially to adapt to the online world. It was therefore not obvious outside Hungary that the country’s media companies were failing for different reasons. Once they were sufficiently weakened, however, these starved outlets could be bought for cheap. Orbán’s close friends snapped up many of them at the Fidesz fire sale—at which point state advertising resumed to sustain them. Rather than jailing journalists, engaging in blatant censorship, or simply shuttering hostile media, Orbán let economic pressure do the work.
A crack in the system emerged after the 2014 election, however, when one of Orbán’s most loyal oligarchs, Lajos Simicska, defected and briefly led his media outlets in an anti-Orbán campaign ahead of the 2018 election. Threatened with assassination, Simicska turned over his companies to Orbán loyalists and fled the country. After the 2018 election, Orbán established the Central European Press and Media Foundation, a foundation to which loyal oligarchs “donated” more than five-hundred media outlets to form a right-wing news conglomerate reliably loyal to Orbán.4
Having a pluralistic media landscape matters immensely to democratic health, especially at election time. In 2022, every broadcasting outlet and almost all print media regularly repeated government campaign slogans. The opposition, by contrast, had a hard time getting its message out through the few online news sites, handful of limited-circulation print media, one streaming radio station, and part of a Budapest-only cable-television outlet that covered its campaign. The opposition’s leader, Péter Márki-Zay, got all of five minutes on public television to present his program—on a Wednesday morning. If Hungarian voters wanted to understand what the opposition coalition stood for, they had to hunt to find out. It did not help that the opposition struggled to present a united front. Fidesz also spent ten times more on political ads than did the combined opposition. The ruling party broadcast a loud and clear message that drowned out the opposition’s fuzzy and muted one. And yet, during most of the campaign the united opposition matched Fidesz’s popularity, albeit with polls registering a large “undecided” vote.
Just over a month before the election, Russia attacked Ukraine, and the war became the top issue of the campaign. Orbán is a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin and had visited Moscow just two weeks before the war. This might well have backfired on the prime minister as the campaign heated up, but he cleverly pivoted to capitalize on his ties to Russia. Portraying himself as the candidate of “peace and security,” Orbán promised to keep Hungary neutral and out of NATO’s war effort, refusing to allow weapons to transit Hungary on the way to Ukraine and vowing to put Hungary first in his foreign policy.
[Insert: As we increasingly here from all our leaders. Is natural and fair, still we
gotta see what's happening behind the 'my country first' as much as possible.]
He argued that Hungary should keep an open line to Moscow so that he could broker peace and ensure an endless supply of cheap energy for Hungarians at the same time. Orbán baselessly accused the opposition of wanting to take the country to war and making (unspecified but suspicious) secret deals with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.5 Orbán’s lock on the media prevented the opposition from effectively refuting his lies.
Orbán’s media dominance also ensured that his “peace and security” message was everywhere. It was immensely popular. Most analysts believe that Orbán’s response to the war boosted Fidesz’s lead dramatically. His skillful reaction to a crisis that could have sunk him revealed a master politician who understands Hungarian voters. Even autocrats can have genuine political talent, and Orbán’s ability to reframe a liability as a strength would have made him hard to beat even in a free and fair election.
But in the end, there was another reason why Orbán’s party list won 54 percent of the vote while the opposition list won just 34 percent. The opposition coalition linked five center-to-left parties with a formerly far-right party, Jobbik. Over the years, Orbán had stolen most of Jobbik’s issues and the party had lost its way, splitting after the 2018 election. Jobbik’s small extremist faction formed the new, even-farther-right party Mi Hazánk, while its centrists kept the Jobbik name and joined the other opposition parties, believing that ousting Orbán was more important than staying true to far-right principles.
On election day, however, Jobbik supporters did not follow their leaders. The united coalition fell a million votes shy of its members’ combined 2018 result because most former Jobbik voters switched to Fidesz—which, after all, had campaigned against immigration, gay rights, and “liberal” values while defending ethnic nationalism with antisemitic dog whistles, just as Jobbik once had. Jobbik’s more extremist fringe voted for Mi Hazánk, which received 6 percent of the vote on election day and got six seats in parliament.6
Jobbik voters might also have been lured away from United for Hungary by Orbán’s skillful deployment of a wedge issue before the war came to dominate the campaign. In 2021, parliament passed a law that “protected” children from exposure to any LGBTIQ messages, equating gender flexibility with pornography. The law broadly banned such materials in schools, on television, in bookstores, and elsewhere. The EU reacted strongly and swiftly, with the European Commission filing an infringement action against Hungary for violating EU law. Orbán then doubled down, calling for a referendum to be held concurrently with the 2022 parliamentary election, at which time the Hungarian people could tell the EU what they thought about its meddling.
Since the law had already been enacted, the referendum would do nothing other than stoke public outrage. But another law stood in the way: The law on referendums banned holding them with general elections. So Orbán changed it. Jobbik voted with Fidesz to amend the law, while all other parties in the opposition coalition either voted against the change or boycotted the vote. Attacking gay rights may have been Orbán’s strategy to separate Jobbik voters from the united opposition. The referendum campaign ensured that this issue was prominent even if the war overshadowed it in the end.
The center-left parties urged voters to spoil their ballots to defeat the referendum. Their efforts worked; the referendum did not pass because there were not enough valid votes. But Jobbik voters did vote en masse for Fidesz. So far, no postelection analysis has measured the effect of the referendum campaign on Jobbik voters, but Orbán’s political sixth sense of how to split the coalition may have done the trick.
Before Jobbik voters deserted the united opposition on election day, however, the party’s leaders had secured many places on the joint party list. Coming into the coalition with what looked like the largest single bloc of voters, Jobbik was able to gain a disproportionate share of spots on the party list. When the election dust settled, Jobbik held 10 of the opposition’s 57 seats despite its voters having deserted the coalition. With Fidesz’s 135 seats, plus Jobbik’s 10, Mi Hazánk’s 6, and one from a German ethnic list, Orbán can now potentially count on three-quarters of the parliament for his culture-war campaigns.
At the request of Hungarian NGOs and others who were expecting dirty tricks, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) sent a full mission of hundreds of observers to Hungary. Limited observation missions had monitored the previous two Hungarian elections and deemed them free but not fair. The 2022 mission reported even more persistent violations of OSCE standards and found that Hungary had not run a fair election—because the government’s message was the only one that voters could hear and because vast government resources had benefited the Fidesz campaign.7
How did Hungary go from being a regional democratic leader in the 1990s to running an election in which all the main opposition parties united against an autocrat and still could not win? In Hungary, elections hinge less on party platforms, campaigns, and attractive candidates than on election laws—laws that Orbán intentionally shapes to disadvantage the opposition. To see how this happened, we must go back to 1989, when the seeds of the present illiberal electoral system were sown.
The Genesis of an Illiberal Electoral System
In 1989, even before the Berlin Wall fell, the Hungarian Roundtable gave birth to a new constitution and new election law.8 Yet, because multiparty elections had not been held in nearly fifty years, none of the political leaders drafting the election law knew precisely how their parties would fare at the ballot box. Some insisted on party lists to compensate for their parties’ lack of candidates with national name recognition. Others wanted local constituencies, believing their individual candidates to be viewed more favorably than their parties. All agreed that tiny parties should be kept out of parliament for the sake of orderly governance.9
The end result was an election law that lacked any mechanism to ensure that parliamentary-seat distribution would match the distribution of party votes. Hungarians would cast two votes—one for a constituency representative and the other for a party list. Parties had to reach a 4 percent threshold to enter parliament. The law was immensely complicated, producing a system that “average voters would not be able to comprehend.”10
The system’s extreme disproportionality became clear in 1990 with Hungary’s first election under this new law. Although 28 parties ran, only six cleared the threshold to enter parliament. The largest vote-getter, the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum, won 25 percent of the vote but received 43 percent of the seats. The second-highest vote getter, the center-left Free Democrats, won 21 percent of the vote but only 24 percent of the seats. The system worked to favor the plurality party because of the dominance of first-past-the-post seats, which were not balanced with adjustments on the party-list side of the ledger, where dominant parties’ leads were extended by the complicated way in which the shares of party-list seats were calculated.
Having achieved a broad and stable six-party representation in parliament, the threshold to enter was raised to 5 percent after 1994. The disproportionality of the voting system became even more evident that year, when the largest vote-getter, the Socialist Party, won 33 percent of the vote and 54 percent of the seats in parliament. Although they did not need a partner to stand up a majority government, the Socialists went into coalition with the Alliance of Free Democrats (hereafter, the “Liberals”), a move that generated relief among those who were worried that the ex-communists could not be trusted to run a government only five years after the “system change.” But the coalition generated a different concern: The two parties together had 72 percent of the seats, enough to change the constitution.
To allay fears that the 1989 changes would be undone by this constitutional supermajority, the Socialist-Liberal government amended the constitution to include a new clause that limited its supermajority power: The constitution could not be entirely redrafted unless four-fifths of parliament approved.
Even with the disproportionality of the election system, power switched hands at each election. Voters consistently rejected incumbent parties: The victorious 1990 center-right coalition headed by the Democratic Forum lost in 1994 to the Socialist-Liberal coalition, which in turn lost in 1998 to a new center-right coalition headed by Fidesz, which lost in 2002 to the Socialist-Liberal coalition. Only in 2006 was an incumbent reelected, when the Socialist-Liberal partnership won with 50 percent of the vote over Fidesz’s 46 percent.
After financial mismanagement compounded by the global financial crisis bankrupted Hungary in 2008, the government was forced to step aside in favor of a caretaker government under a harsh IMF austerity program. Demoralized and unpopular going into the 2010 election, the Liberals failed to run a party list at all, and the Socialists prepared for defeat. The Socialists had not only bankrupted the country but were beset by scandal when a media leak revealed that the party’s leader had lied to voters about the country’s finances during the 2006 campaign. The global financial collapse energized the newly formed neo-Nazi Jobbik party, which was eager to blame Jewish bankers and “cosmopolitan” elites in the governing coalition. A small, youthful, and vague new liberal party, Politics Can Be Different (LMP), contested the election, but few knew what it stood for. In 2010, then, with the Socialists discredited, liberals represented by an untested new party, and a far-right alternative on the ballot, a reasonable observer might have been relieved when Fidesz won. At the time, a victory for the center-right did not seem particularly dangerous. Fidesz had, after all, led a coalition government only a few years before.
Orbán won the 2010 election—Hungary’s last free and fair balloting—with 53 percent of the vote. But under Hungary’s disproportionate election law, that translated into 68 percent of the seats. For the first time, the easy constitutional-amendment rule and the disproportionate election law had teamed up to hand unconstrained power to one party. Fidesz, which had no internal mechanisms to rotate leadership, had by that time become simply a platform for Orbán—the party’s only leader in more than twenty years. Since 2010, Orbán has personally approved every single MP allowed to run under the Fidesz banner, and he reportedly keeps a signed resignation letter from each minister at the ready in case any misbehaves. Although Fidesz technically governs in coalition with the Christian Democratic Party, the Christian Democrats have no independent base of support. They are just the Christian face of Fidesz to create the appearance of power sharing.
Gerrymandering
[Gerrymandering is a curse. In Australia independent commissions draw political boundaries, state and federal.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174342097]
The 2010 election effectively put Orbán above the law: He could amend the constitution at will, which he did twelve times during his first year in office—including removing, early on, the four-fifths hurdle for rewriting the constitution. Less than a year into his first term, Orbán unveiled a new constitution drafted behind closed doors, debated before parliament for only nine days, and passed on a party-line vote.11 The new constitution was accompanied by hundreds of new laws, many affecting elections.
The 2011 Constitution cut the size of parliament in half, something broadly welcomed, as the old 394-member parliament was widely considered unwieldy and expensive. But the change required redistricting the whole country, and the constitution said nothing about how to do it.
Rather than draw the map in a transparent process, the government drew the new constituencies behind closed doors. The resulting Law CCIII/2011 contained the literal boundaries of each district and was passed in a flash as a “cardinal law” that could only be amended by a subsequent two-thirds vote of parliament. Law CCIII/2011 created districts that varied immensely in size, with the smallest containing sixty-thousand voters and the largest, around ninety thousand. Not surprisingly, the large districts were in the left-opposition strongholds, while the smaller districts were in Fidesz country. Disparities in district sizes grew over time to exceed even Hungary’s fairly relaxed standard, but the 2018 redistricting required under Hungarian law to correct these deviations never occurred. By the 2022 election, 25 of the 106 districts exceeded the ODIHR standard that election districts vary in size by no more than 10 percent.
A study of the initial districts showed that if Fidesz and the left-opposition won equal numbers of votes under this new map, Fidesz would come out ten seats ahead. The study also showed that, had the 2006 election been run with those districts, Fidesz would have won the election that it had lost under the old rules.12 All could see that Fidesz had gerrymandered the entire country in its own favor. The bias has persisted through 2022, when election monitors noted that “there is a significantly unequal distribution of registered voters amongst the constituencies, with up to 33 per cent deviation, at odds with the principle of equal suffrage.”13
Dividing to Conquer
Orbán’s new election framework also changed how individual constituency elections are run. Under the old system, individual constituencies were decided in two rounds. If no candidate won more than 50 percent in the first round, the top two vote-getters would vie for the seat in a second round, a system that benefits broad coalitions over single parties.
Orbán eliminated the runoff so that a candidate winning far fewer than half the votes can now prevail. This became even easier to accomplish when the law loosened the rules for creating new parties. Financial incentives for creating “fake parties” ensured that voters would always be confronted with a myriad of choices at election time, further splintering the vote. In 2014, a hundred new parties sprang to life, and in 2018, at least 250 did. Such parties had no real program behind them but often had names surprisingly similar to those of real opposition parties.14 In 2022, for example, a Fidesz-friendly oligarch’s new party was called MEMO (short for Megoldás Mozgalom), which could have been confused with the MOMENTUM party (Momentum Mozgalom) that was part of the united opposition and therefore did not appear separately on the ballot.
The elimination of the second-round runoff meant that the real opposition parties had little chance of winning unless they joined together before the election to put up one candidate against Fidesz. But other features of Orbán’s new election system made it hard for opposition parties to unite. Under a 2013 election law, all parties offering a national party list were required to run candidates in at least 27 individual constituencies in at least nine of the nineteen counties and in Budapest. With 106 of the new seats in parliament decided through individual constituencies and 93 decided through party lists, the smaller parties of the center and left had to compete with one another in the individual constituencies if they wanted to maintain separate party lists. Orbán’s plurality candidates were assured of winning in such a system.
The only way that the opposition could beat the system was to join forces. But doing so meant taking another risk. Under the new law, combined parties faced higher hurdles to enter parliament. A single party running alone needed 5 percent of the national vote to win party-list seats. Two parties needed 10 percent under the new law, and three or more parties had to meet a 15 percent threshold.
Nonetheless, in 2014, five center-left parties formed the Unity Alliance. One center-left party (LMP) refused to join, splitting the center-left opposition vote. This cut in half the number of constituencies that the opposition would have won that year, allowing Fidesz to capture 91 percent of the constituencies with just 45 percent of the vote. Still plagued by infighting, the opposition remained fragmented in 2018, even as it gained strength in Budapest. With 49 percent of the vote in 2018, Orbán won 86 percent of the constituencies, losing in Budapest but winning almost everywhere else. The 2014 and 2018 results showed that only a unified opposition that spanned the political spectrum could defeat Orbán’s system.
Anticipating the danger, Orbán changed the rules again to guarantee that the 2022 vote would split even if the opposition united. In 2020, he modified the election law to require that all parties running a party list also run candidates in at least 71 of the 106 constituencies, up from the previous threshold of 27 constituencies. Even if fewer parties ran against him, there would still be plenty of candidates to divide the vote and hand Fidesz candidates a victory.
Again the opposition faced a tough choice. If left and right fielded separate party lists, competition in the constituencies would mean that they would all lose. But if they ran joint candidates across the districts to maximize their chances of winning, they would have to merge onto one party list despite substantively agreeing on very little. Deeming continued autocracy to be a bigger danger than the loss of party identity, six parties—five from the center-left plus Jobbik—agreed to a common list under the name United for Hungary. Their individual party names thus disappeared from the party-list ballot. Given how the system was designed, only such an alliance of strange bedfellows could have any hope of ousting Orbán.
The coalition ran primaries across the country in late 2021 to determine which candidate from among the parties had the best chance against Fidesz in each constituency. A national primary to pick the candidate who would stand against Orbán at the head of the joint party list resulted in the surprising selection of Péter Márki-Zay, a conservative small-town mayor. Having road-tested its candidates, United for Hungary looked ready to topple Orbán. But on 3 April 2022, Fidesz still won 83 percent of the constituencies. The opposition’s plan had loosened Orbán’s grip on his gerrymandered districts only slightly. Why did the opposition lose badly?
Choosing the Voters
As the 2022 election neared and the unity of the opposition coalition became clear, Orbán adapted again: He changed the voters without changing the districts. He did this by means of a November 2021 law that legalized “voter tourism.” Suddenly, voters could register to vote anywhere in the country even if they did not live in their new district.15 The Hungarian Helsinki Committee cautioned that the voter-tourism law “created the risk that multiple voters will re-register in single constituencies where a very close race is expected, with the intention to tilt the election outcome.”16
With this new law, Orbán could move his voters from safe Fidesz seats or seats that the opposition was clearly going to win to districts where these voters could ensure Fidesz victories in close contests. According to the election office, some 157,551 voters registered in 2022 to vote in places other than their legal residences. When the votes were tallied, however, the ballots of Fidesz-supporting voter tourists were counted together with the absentee ballots of opposition-supporting expatriates, so it is impossible to accurately assess what difference voter tourism made. At a minimum, the fact that Péter Márki-Zay lost his own constituency in a surprise upset suggests that voter tourism may have targeted specific opposition candidates.
Fidesz has detailed knowledge of its supporters through a voter database that it has been compiling while in power.17 The opposition does not have access to this data, making it impossible to leverage the voter-tourism law in the way that the ruling party can. With more than 150,000 votes available to be inserted into districts that were too close to call, this one legal change alone may have been responsible for keeping many districts in Fidesz hands in 2022.
This was not the first time that Orbán had gained additional seats by manipulating who could vote—and where. A set of laws put in place before the 2014 election offered citizenship and the right to vote in domestic elections to Hungarians who had never lived within the current borders of Hungary. Many Hungarians in neighboring states took advantage of this option. When these “near-abroad” Hungarians vote from outside the country, they are allowed to vote only for the party lists. But in an electorate where about eight-million people are eligible to vote and between five and five and a half million actually do, a group of more than 450,000 registered near-abroad voters can make a significant difference.
Near-abroad voters voting from outside the country are allowed to vote by unsecured mail ballots that are often returned by party bundlers and other partisan intermediaries. These ballots are completely unmonitored by election officials and observers.18 In addition, because some neighboring states bar dual citizenship, the Hungarian government keeps these voter lists secret so as not to expose illegal second passports. As a result, the opposition does not even know who these voters are and therefore has no opportunity to try to coax them away from Fidesz.
The near-abroad voters have voted overwhelmingly for Orbán. In 2014, Fidesz won 95 percent of this group, giving the party 1.4 more party-list seats than it would have otherwise received. In 2018, Fidesz won 96 percent of the near-abroad vote, for one extra seat. In 2022, Fidesz received 94 percent of a much larger pool, enough for 2.5 party-list seats. Taken alone, in both 2014 and 2018, the near-abroad vote secured Orbán the last mandate that he needed for a two-thirds majority. In 2022, it accounted for nearly his entire three-seat buffer.
With the new voter-tourism rules, the opposition suspected that Orbán would move some of his near-abroad voters into Hungary, where they could vote not only for the party lists but also in the constituencies, particularly where the elections were close. Fidesz had been documented doing this already in 2018, before Orbán’s changes to the election rules made the practice legal.19 On election day in 2022, investigative journalists recorded minibuses full of voters pulling up to polling places, sending the passengers to vote in predictable ways, and attacking journalists who were recording what was happening.20
Since Orbán came to power in 2010, educated Hungarians who oppose him have left the country in droves. While the Hungarian government does not disclose emigration figures, upwards of five-hundred thousand of Hungary’s ten-million citizens have left since 2010. With home addresses back in Hungary, these expatriates can vote for both party lists and individual constituencies. But the Hungarian government requires them to travel to embassies and consulates to vote in person. Unlike the near-abroad voters who can vote by mail without certification, expat voters must run a gauntlet of checks.21 The expat vote flipped no seats in 2014 or 2018. It is unclear whether it made a difference in 2022, as the election office lumped the expat votes together with those of the voter tourists. But the expat vote did apparently switch one district in Budapest from Fidesz to the united opposition in 2022. Had it been as easy for expat voters to vote as it was for near-abroad voters, perhaps more seats would have flipped.
Winning the Party-List Vote
When Orbán changed the electoral system ahead of the 2014 election, he also changed how party-list votes were calculated. Since then, the opposition has had no way to counter Fidesz’s built-in advantages. Under the pre-Orbán system, the votes that went to losing candidates in the constituencies were added to the party-list votes in a (flawed) attempt to balance the number of votes for particular parties with their share of parliamentary seats. For example, if the candidate for Party X won 400 votes in a particular district and the candidate for Party Y won 200 votes, the votes that were “lost”—that is, the 200 votes cast for the Party Y candidate—would be added to Party Y’s party-list votes to compensate the loser. “Loser compensation” is a common feature of mixed-system elections in which voters cast separate votes for candidates and for parties.
Orbán’s new election system added “winner compensation.” Now, any vote not strictly needed to elect a candidate in a constituency is deemed “lost” even if that vote were cast for the winning candidate. So in that same election between the X and Y candidates with the 400-to-200 vote result, 200 votes would be transferred to the Y party list, as before, but now 199 votes would also be transferred to X party list, because the candidate for Party X only needed 201 votes to win but got 199 surplus votes. Winner compensation allows parties that win big to win even bigger, making the system even more disproportionate.
Winner compensation has handed Orbán his two-thirds supermajority in three elections. It brought him six additional parliamentary seats in 2014, five in 2018, and six again in 2022. Given that Fidesz received precisely enough seats for a two-thirds majority in 2014 and 2018, but in 2022 won a three-seat buffer beyond that, the winner-compensation seats alone catapulted Fidesz from a simple majority to a constitutional majority in each election.
Orbán’s 2014 reset of the election framework made another trick on the party-list side available for his use. Hungary’s 1989 election law guaranteed minority ethnic representation in parliament with reserved seats. Orbán’s new election framework changed how minorities are represented. Any one of twelve listed minority ethnic groups can opt to offer a “minority list.” Voters who intend to vote “minority” must register as such before the election and also give up their party-list vote in exchange for the minority-representative vote. Minority voters get a bonus, however. Their designated representative can be elected to parliament with a mere twenty-thousand votes while party-list seats typically require around sixty-thousand votes. In 2014, the Roma list won one seat in parliament, and in 2018 and 2022, the German list cleared the hurdle. In fact, all three of those representatives were Fidesz MPs running under a minority banner and taking advantage of the vote discount to gain a seat on the cheap. The Hungarian government has received praise from election monitors for building minority representation into the election rules, but Fidesz has in fact used minority rights to install its own MPs in parliament with fewer votes than they would have otherwise needed to win.
The Future of the Opposition in Hungary
After the 2022 election, the Hungarian opposition is battered. It had taken the one narrow path through Orbán’s thicket of election barriers that might have led to victory—banding together ahead of the 2022 contest, holding primaries to divvy up districts, and mounting a fairly united campaign under adverse conditions. Because the opposition figured out the only strategy that could have defeated Orbán, he adjusted his system yet again in response by moving new voters into the close districts and deploying his old tricks in an even more concerted way. Orbán’s massive victory, which has put center-left opposition parties in their worst position yet, shows that he knows precisely how to tweak laws and retool his political message to fend off challenges. With his comfortable two-thirds majority, no legal change is beyond Orbán’s reach. Thus he can keep modifying the electoral playing field to wrong-foot the opposition regardless of the strategy it adopts.
The united opposition must now wrestle with the mass defection of Jobbik voters to Fidesz. Clearly Jobbik’s move to the center was a losing strategy for the party. Rather than following their leaders, Jobbik voters have shown that they will vote for a right-leaning party—even an autocratic one—over any coalition that includes the left. This lesson will not be lost on the Jobbik MPs who now sit in a parliament where the united opposition has no common whip. Jobbik MPs will have to turn right to recover their voters if the party wants to remain viable in 2026.
The left-leaning parties may also have lost some voters who found it hard to support a coalition that included Jobbik. While the statistics do not show a mass defection, some on the left apparently voted for the Two-Tailed Dog Party, a party that mocks politics. Two-Tailed Dog won nearly 3.5 percent of the domestic vote—not enough to change the overall result, but enough to sound a warning bell about future collaborations between left and right.
The united opposition parties shared a commitment to dislodge Orbán and restore Hungary to a constitutional-democratic state. But Hungary is a conservative-majority country without real competition in the center-right part of the political spectrum. The 2022 election showed that conservatives will vote for parties of the right instead of voting for democratic renewal if this renewal might mean a return of the left. While most educated urban voters were so eager to get rid of Orbán that they were willing to vote for a coalition that included a party that they despise, the less-educated, poorer voters in the countryside were not—perhaps because they believed the narratives that the government-friendly media spun, perhaps because they saw no acceptable alternative to Orbán, or perhaps because they were pressured to vote for Fidesz on pain of losing their public-works jobs. The reasons may have been multiple, but presented with a united opposition that could have ousted an autocrat, most conservative voters took a pass.
Since the election, the opposition has not collapsed. Péter Márki-Zay gave up his seat in parliament to continue as mayor of his hometown, but remains visible in the limited-reach opposition media. Several other well-known opposition figures also decided not to enter a parliament in which they will have no say, given that the rules are rigged against them there as well: Opposition MPs are allowed little time to speak, cannot introduce bills or amendments, and have no realistic possibility of even slowing things down. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights judged Hungary’s practice of fining the opposition for attempting to speak in parliament to be a violation of freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights.22 Years later, nothing has changed; there is no sign that opposition MPs will be permitted more opportunities to speak in the new parliament.
So far, opposition figures continue to generate ideas, including one for an alternative parliament in which opposition politicians can model what parliamentary debate should look like. Others have proposed boycotting parliament altogether. Several established party leaders are stepping down from their frontline positions, pushing the next generation into the leadership for 2026, but it is too soon to tell if the new crop will have transformative ideas. The center and left parties will probably regroup and try again in four years, but there is no sign that Orbán will let them anywhere near the halls of power or that conservative voters will ever vote for a coalition that includes parties on the left.
If Hungarians cannot change their government through elections because Hungary is no longer a democracy, then other ends to Orbán’s rule become more likely. Orbán’s 2022 election giveaways were so expensive that they put the state budget deeply in the red. He has already spent much of the money that the EU had allocated to Hungary in the current budget cycle, but the European Commission notified Hungary the day after the election that it would start the procedure to cut Hungary’s EU funds. While Russia has come to Hungary’s aid in the past, sanctions for the Ukraine war will limit Russia’s largesse. China has also been a big funder of Hungarian projects, but a coming global slowdown may limit China’s willingness to foot Orbán’s bills.
With funds dwindling, Orbán’s system of supporting the oligarchs so that they in turn support him may crack. If that were to happen, Hungary might spin into the sort of democratic death spiral that we have seen in Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela, where slipping political support has led to increasing political repression, which in turn has pushed investors to flee and bring down the economy. Being in the EU might moderate the effects of economic implosion in Hungary—though at a tremendous cost to the EU—but even a less dramatic crash would be a painful ending. It may be the only one, however, that Orbán cannot prevent.
NOTES
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/how-viktor-orban-wins/
LOL That's one practice i never considered. When necessary i always took
the trouble to wipe it with clean toilet paper. Yep, new stuff not used already.
That's a long time to get rid of it, but guess you did all you could at the time.
I have a faint memory of maybe asking dad at the time if iodine might have been better used earlier and that he said no,
that it was only good to be used where there was moisture from fluid. Maybe. If i ever had it again i would try it earlier.
Just out of interest, to see if it worked.
Yep. good good. The only real constant maintenance hassle is the necessity of having to lotion regularly, to ward off any sign of the dry skin flaking which came before i realized, hey, you are getting old so you gotta start looking after that body of yours. Especially that skin which you never did anything about for the first 70 years of your life. Except for eating healthily, taking care of myself has never been a strong suit.
No bump, 99% sure. A bit of sensitivity on the top of the foot, and the
vessels a tiny bit bulged. No sensitivity at all in any of the dark place.
It was that tiny soreness on the top which had me taking the gout tablet i shouldn't have. A good reminder.
LOL When i asked the dr. if he could give me a prescription for the other gout stuff now so i wouldn't have
to come see him if/when i ever got it again he said no, i'd have to see you then. Well done, doc., i thought.
Carole King, a long term favorite. The movie Wild Rose brought tiny tears at the end. Many wouldn't enjoy it as much as you would ..
Jessie Buckley - Glasgow (No Place Like Home) (From "Wild Rose")Glasgow There’s No Place Like Home
Doc said it would take some time to go away, so every time i put on a sock...
The Economic Club, it's probably not live but Pelosi on my tv now is really good.
Love her spirit. Bright eyes, would be my nickname for her.
It's just finishing.
Lol, no way the son of God, or one with God would be any of that. God is all good. God is love, you know. hehaw
Key is they can look away from all of Trump's shortcomings, simply because Saul and Solomon and all those other
Chosen Ones were all imperfect too. LOL It's probably as fanciful a rationalization as there is in the marketplace.
Little tiny blisters. With the fungi-filled fluid inside them.
It's tight up there. LOL Tom Kim is another who has MC for me, for others too, for sure. GL, you doing well.
Agree. It's a top article. Have one coming up today on Orban. How he has slowly gained control over virtually all power structures in Hungary. I see it as a much of what you would get with another round of Trump, though Trump couldn't get as many years as Orban has manged.