One more? Hardy is a very prominent British comedian and a Corbyn supporter, which is why his comments somewhat surprised me. The News Quiz is Radio Four's top comedy show. (from a thread which I think has some other possible additions for your list) https://twitter.com/pauloCanning/status/1004020090822684673

One more to add to your second list. https://nobsrussia.com/2018/05/31/babchenko-voskres-babchenko-has-risen/ Great job recording all this, Catherine.

Lots more where that came from! > http://paulocanning.blogspot.com/2015/08/corbyn-and-ukraine-its-not-pretty.html

Excellent job Catherine. Very useful.

That's me told! Well I did ask! Miliband actually did call himself a socialist just the other week. But no Labour person has done that since Tony Blair in 1993. Was Blair a socialist do you think? On every point of division you cite (business, capitalism etc) I wouldn't think he was but that's through our lens. Of course I think Labour is socialist - I think the real division in politics is to do with redistribution - but you're right to think the party shies from the label. In our terms the socialist left is fairly small but obviously that looks different from NYC! On Python, each to their own on what makes us laugh but a point. Python was upper class rebellion. All the people from that era came out of Oxford/Cambridge with few exceptions (Michael Palin). They were rebelling against their stiff parents, the hangover of wartime austerity and greyness, that's what lots of their sketches are about. Same with Life Of Brian. There was a rebellion against what you're identifying as 'Pythonism' in the 80s with what was known as 'alternative comedy', which followed on from punk rebelling against people like the Rolling Stones. Python the TV show now, of course, looks dated although the films still work very well. The irony (?!) now is that comedy is a huge business and very little is political in the slightest. "There's always the feeling from Brits of this type that they are culturally more sophisticated than Americans and smarter too," Maybe, but Brits have always sucked in American culture and, famously, projected back black American culture at white America. I can remember growing up and being glued to the American Chart show on BBC radio and, later, scouring record shops for the latest US imports and reading US magazines, mainly from your town. That's a common experience. We've for as long as I can remeber always gushed over any Brits who've 'made it' in America and taken a while to stop aping Americans and develop our own styles (I know this from rap music for example). So don't go thinking that the notion that someone else, in another country, is 'culturally more sophisticated' is entirely one way.

Reading you from across the pond. Any 'socialist' tag which encompasses John Oliver and, whadafaq, Monty Python must include almost every Brit and certainly every political party, including the Conservatives, given the NHS. Am I right? We're all 'socialists'? In Brit terms (and having listened to Oliver's great podcasts with Andy Zaltman for Murdoch's Times), Oliver is actually a bog-standard social democrat, a Labour Party supporter I would guess. Which, from New York translates as 'socialist'. Is that right? I'd love to hear more on what you've got against Monty Python itself, and not just those you're pointing out are its fans. MP was part of the great anti-establishment satire boom in the Sixties which produced other institutions like David Frost and the satirical magazine Private Eye. Is it that movement which you dislike or just Monty Python? Do you also dislike Fawlty Towers? Genuinely intrigued!

I think you are right here Catherine. You're not the only one BTW. Luke Harding agrees that Putin could have done it. The last part of VICE's investigation of Russian soldier deaths has an amazing scene where the reporter gets in a tazi after visiting a military hospital. Within a minute the taxi driver gets a call asking him questions about his fare. Of course Nemtsov was monitored.

'550 square meters'? I think you're entirely right about Syria (the consequences of inaction), although we have been here before. I'm thinking of Darfur, which, unlike Rwanda or the Congo, is another brutal war in which some application of outside force could have saved a lot of lives. One thing I'd point out, which I think a lot of American commentators may be missing, is that there has been a detectable change in tone towards Putin in at least some bits of Europe. In the UK, where I'm from, Cameron has been heavily criticised for his absence from Minsk II. He's been very defensive against that criticism. I've noticed a distinct shift in places like the BBC and The Guardian - see the latter's editorials for example. I have read of a shift in the German press too. And I notice that even Syriza are laying off the pro-Putin rhetoric.

This is especially bizarre because my post puts her effort in a global perspective, it doesn't single her out. Plus I probably have a different approach and argument to most others writing on this. It's reprehensible that US journalists still take Wakefield seriously. I doubt think any here in UK do, thank g*d.