Adam Ramsay at Open Democracy guesses people might want to know more about the DUP along about now.

The Democratic Unionist Party now look like the Tories preferred coalition partners. The DUP, which is the biggest Unionist (ie pro-UK) party in Northern Ireland, are often treated as though they are just the same as the other Unionist party they have essentially replaced – the Ulster Unionists. But while the UUP have a long running relationship with the Tories, and are a centre right party, the DUP are another thing entirely. The idea that they are near power in Westminster should worry us all. Here are some things you need to know.

Theresa May’s new partners in government have strong historical links with Loyalist paramilitary groups. Specifically, the terrorist group Ulster Resistancewas founded by a collection of people who went on to be prominent DUP politicians. Peter Robinson, for example, who was DUP leader and Northern Ireland’s first minister until last year, was an active member of Ulster Resistance. The group’s activities included collaborating with other terrorist groups including the Ulster Volunteer Force, to smuggle arms into the UK, such as RPG rocket launchers.

Of course, Northern Ireland has moved towards peace, and the DUP, like their opponents in Sinn Fein, have rescinded violence. As part of that normalisation, the fact that parties which include people who have rescinded violence can be brought into the democratic process is a good thing. But for the Tories to end an election campaign which they spent attacking Corbyn for his alleged links to former Northern Irish terrorists by going into coalition with a party founded by former Northern Irish terrorists would be a deep irony.

Kind of the presence of Steve Bannon in the White House.

Meanwhile the House Republicans have done their bit to take us back to the fun roller coaster ride of 2008.

The House approved legislation on Thursday to erase a number of core financial regulations put in place by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, as Republicans moved a step closer to delivering on their promises to eliminate rules that they claim have strangled small businesses and stagnated the economy.

Because everything was so much better in 2008.

Apparently it’s not likely to pass the Senate though.

Yet the bill’s passage in the House, by 233 to 186, keeps alive the Republican Party’s dream of unwinding one of President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishments. The vote quickly drew the ire of Democrats who argued that Republicans were giving a handout to Wall Street while putting everyday investors at risk.

The bill has maintained a low profile compared with Republican plans on health care and taxes, but rolling back Dodd-Frank represents a major part of the Republican agenda. The Trump administration hopes that by unshackling businesses from burdensome regulations, renegotiating trade deals and cutting tax rates, it can help the economy grow faster and well-paying jobs will become more plentiful.

Because that worked so well in the years just before the crash. If we can do that and then jump off just before the crash – we’ll survive and everything will be awesome.

“Ultimately the Financial Choice Act is a jobs bill,” Speaker Paul D. Ryan said on the House floor on Thursday.

Or you could say it’s a bankruptcies bill,  a good bye life savings bill, a wow look at all these derelict houses bill. It’s a bill for people who look forward to paying off a mortgage on a house that is worth far less than the mortgage because the bottom dropped out.

In addition, the legislation would weaken the powers of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Under the proposed law, the president could fire the agency’s director at will and its oversight powers would be curbed.

The bill would also eliminate the Labor Department’s fiduciary rule, which requires brokers to act in the best interest of their clients when providing investment advice about retirement. The first parts of the rule are scheduled to go into effect on Friday. The rule was completed last spring under Mr. Obama after years of development.

Awesome. Less protection for consumers, more freedom for people who want to take all their cash. Why should brokers have to work in the best interest of their clients instead of stuffing their own pockets with cash? This is America!

On the floor of the House on Thursday, as Democrats in lock step expressed their opposition to the bill they have nicknamed the Wrong Choice, they argued that Republicans had forgotten the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis.

“These are not the choices that the American people want,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, the minority leader. “House Republicans are feeding American families to the wolves on Wall Street.”

Oh well. The next crash is probably ten years off, so why worry about it?

Oh look, the Tories may lose their majority.

Following a tumultuous, unpredictable snap election, Prime Minister Theresa May, a Conservative, appeared on the verge of losing her overall parliamentary majority, according to a national exit poll released just after voting ended on Thursday night.

If confirmed by the actual vote count, the result would be a major setback for Mrs. May. She called this election three years early, expecting to cruise to a smashing victory that would win her a mandate to see Britain through the long and difficult negotiations with the European Union about withdrawing from the bloc.

According to the exit poll, Mrs. May may have lost the extraordinary gamble she made in calling the election — and Britain may be headed for a hung Parliament, in which no party has a majority.

The Guardian’s live update:

Labour is starting to feel more confident about the exit poll. It has just put out this statement, from a spokesperson.

If this poll turns out to be anywhere near accurate, it would be an extraordinary result. Labour would have come from a long way back to dash the hopes of a Tory landslide.

There’s never been such a turnaround in a course of a campaign. It looks like the Tories have been punished for taking the British people for granted.

Labour has run a positive and honest campaign – we haven’t engaged in smears or personal attacks.

Labour’s poll standing and Jeremy Corbyn’s standing surged as people were able to hear our message, policies and Jeremy directly.

Labour poured energy and resources into voter registration – and an extra 3 million people registered in the five weeks between the election being called and the deadline.

It looks like their voice has been heard.

Can an “I hope” statement be obstruction of justice? Why yes, yes it can.

For instance: Eighth Circuit affirmed an obstruction of justice enhancement based partly on an “I hope” statement https://t.co/85F2d7A8A4 pic.twitter.com/EbQHsCphL7

— Adam Liptak (@adamliptak) June 8, 2017

Also

https://twitter.com/victoriakwan_/status/872852857132916736

Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare Blog:

consider one of French’s* best points about what the Comey statement reveals:

Overall, one gets the impression that the president views himself less as the president of a constitutional republic and more as the dictatorial CEO of a private company. This is understandable, given his long experience in the private sector, but it’s unsustainable. President Trump has to better understand not just the separation of powers but also the constitutional and legal obligations of governance, or the turmoil surrounding Comey’s termination will be but the first of a series of controversies that could well shake his presidency to its foundation.

This analysis echoes points that Bob Bauer has made on this site.  And it is right.  Trump does not remotely understand his role, status, and duties as President and Chief Executive, and this failure infects or undermines just about everything he does.   It is an amazing state of affairs: A President of the United States who does not at all grasp the Office he occupies, and who thus entirely lacks the proper situation sense, or contextual knowledge, in which a President should exercise judgment or act.

This is what I keep saying. He has no idea, and he has never bothered to find out. It’s horrifying. David French is right in a way that it’s “understandable,” in the sense that we can see how stupid and obstinate and intellectually lazy Trump is, but it’s not understandable in the colloquial sense of “and thus forgivable.” It’s outrageous and appalling and not forgivable at all. As I also keep saying, this is not a game, it’s not A Fun Project for Donnie, it’s the god damn country and to a large extent the world.

*David French at National Review

Michelle Goldberg suggests why the four intel officials refused to answer Senators’ questions about Trump’s attempts to mess with the Russia inquiry yesterday.

Officially, the hearing was about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But all the Democratic senators, and some of the Republican ones, used the opportunity to question the men under oath about whether Donald Trump had tried to quash the investigation into his administration’s Russia ties, as the Washington Post and others have reported.

To the senators’ mounting frustration, the intelligence officials repeatedly refused to answer their questions. Those refusals, however, tell us a lot. It appears they couldn’t defend Trump without committing perjury. Nor could they tell the truth without dramatically undermining Trump’s administration. So, in a series of increasingly contentious exchanges, they simply defied the lawmakers tasked with overseeing their agencies.

Yes but it’s my understanding that the fact that the truth would undermine Trump’s administration is in no way a valid reason for their refusing to answer Senators’ questions. Those refusals look to me like what people call a Constitutional Crisis – a situation in which one branch of the government defies another branch. I don’t think Trump’s people get to just say “No, don’t want to.”

Tuesday night, the Post reported that Coats told associates that Trump had asked him to intervene with then–FBI Director James Comey to get the bureau to back off its investigation of fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. (The Post had previously reported that Trump asked both Coats and Rogers to publicly deny that there was any evidence of collusion between the president’s campaign and Russia.) Grilled about these conversations with Trump, both men simply refused to answer, over and over again.

Instead they talked about their fee-fees.

In his opening statement, Coats said that he had “never felt pressure to intervene or interfere in any way with shaping intelligence in a political way.” But the senators weren’t interested in how Coats felt—they wanted to know what, if anything, Trump had asked him to do.

What they “felt” is subjective. What Trump actually said is factual. Dodging the factual question by talking about subjective feelings is not what they’re supposed to be doing.

The legal basis for these demurrals was unclear. The White House has not invoked executive privilege, and the information at issue doesn’t appear to be classified—these officials initially described them as “confidential” conversations with the president, then seemed to switch to characterizing them as “classified” midway through the hearing. Several senators seemed infuriated at their stonewalling. “Why are you not answering these questions?” asked Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine.

“Because I feel it is inappropriate,” replied Rogers.

“What you feel isn’t relevant, admiral,” King shot back, reminding Rogers that when he was confirmed, he’d taken an oath before the Armed Services Committee to give the committee the full truth. Rogers still wouldn’t budge.

Then King turned to Coats, who started to echo Rogers’ answer about appropriateness. King cut him off. “I’m not satisfied with, ‘I do not believe it is appropriate’ or ‘I do not feel I should answer,’ ” he said. “I want to understand the legal basis. You swore that oath, to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And today you’re refusing to do so. What is the legal basis for your refusal to testify to this committee?”

In an extraordinary moment, a stumbling Coats replied, “I’m not sure I have a legal basis.”

Helen Lewis notes how regularly it turns out that the latest mass murderer got his training by beating up the nearest women.

But if we don’t care to talk about the role that maleness and masculinity has in such cases, then we definitely don’t want to talk about them in relation to Islamic terrorism. But yesterday – Day Three – here it was, a story about one of the London Bridge killers’ history of wife-beating and manipulation.

Rachid Redouane kicked and slapped his wife, tried to make her wear the hijab, prevented her from drinking and smoking. He got her pregnant even though it appears that, for him, the marriage was more about getting residency in the UK than love. His control took the form of trying to make her more devout – whereas someone like Lance Hart, with a different set of cultural values behind him, controlled his wife by withholding money and refusing to let her see her friends.

It’s the bullying and control of women that’s the real point, and the reward; the ideology behind it is just superstructure.

Redouane is far from the only Islamist terrorist to have a background like this. Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck into crowds in Nice, had a criminal record for domestic violence. After Omar Mateen killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, his ex-wife said: “He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.”

Like Mateen, the Westminster Bridge attacker Khalid Masood does not seem to have any formal contact with Islamic State or other terror groups. His attack was “inspired” rather than “directed” by jihadi groups such as IS. Masood was also a convert to Islam (as many Islamic terrorists are), appears to have been radicalised in prison, and – surprise, surprise – he also had a history of domestic violence and coercive control. “He was very violent towards her, controlling in every aspect of her life – what she wore, where she went, everything,” a friend told the Mirror.

The connection is not even a little bit surprising. Religious hatred of women is ferocious and entrenched. It’s not a side issue, not a coincidence, not an accident: it’s central.

Despite this, talking about male violence in the context of terrorism is treated like derailing – like you’ve mounted your feminist hobby horse when the grown-ups were talking. The people who control the discussion of Islamist terrorism don’t want to talk about this stuff. They see discussion of foreign policy, religion and “our values” like old-fashioned teachers saw Maths and English: proper, respectable subjects. Talking about male violence is a bit . . . film studies. Sociology. You know. Softer, girly, less rational, all the ways we dismiss anything associated with women. And of course elevating it in our discourse would mean ceding some ground in the conversation to the experts in the field – who are largely women.

Good, let’s do that then.

Drawn & Quarterly posts an apology:

This past spring, our editorial department accepted a submission from the cartoonist Berliac. The graphic novel was Sadbøi, which was seen as a statement on the treatment of immigrants—the challenge of being expected to conform to a society’s ideals in a world that prematurely condemns outsiders.

We neglected to research the author beyond the submitted book, which we now realize to be a disservice to both the public and the author. We were not familiar with Berliac’s body of work, both written and drawn, including a previously published essay comparing cultural appropriation and transgender people and the consequent public discussion about it in 2015. We do not agree with the essay, its defense, nor the tone and aggression he displayed in this and subsequent debates.

In the past 48 hours, we have received tweets and emails, and read posts telling us we are wrong to publish this book. Not everyone discussing Berliac and his work had the same opinions, but each of them made us reflect, and conduct the research we should have conducted when considering the submission. We asked ourselves if we would have acquired this book knowing what we know now, and we would not have. An author deserves the full support of their publisher. We can no longer provide that full support. Therefore, we have decided that D+Q will not be publishing Sadbøi.

We do not expect everyone to like or agree with everything we publish—this is an important part of a vibrant publishing landscape—but we are revising our acquisition practices so that we can ensure we better support our public, our authors, and our staff going forward.

We apologize for not doing our due diligence and for our mistakes. We are sorry. Thank you to everyone who has reached out to us: we value your input.

Peggy Burns on Friday, June 2, 2017 – 3:55pm.

They received all those tweets and emails, you see.