Not getting your drift there. I merely asked if he would care more about rural whites? From what I read he is a Sanders style man. I guess Sanders will be too old soon. Will he take the direction of the Democrats away from the centre liberals backed by Buffet and Soros? The article I read said he wants to move toward a party that gets its donations from grass roots and not special interests to have more of a connection with normal folks. Sounds very similar to Corbyn to me. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...upport-behind-keith-ellison-for-dnc-chairman/
Imps, do you think Corbyn is electable? Will, for example, relatively affluent homeowners in the Shires vote for him?
No and that is my point. I have said it for a long time. Labour have a massive problem on their hands just as the Democrats do. They have for a long time lurched into the liberal ground in their words yet are seen to look after profits and support them and that has alienated their largest voterbase who are now very suspicious of any talk of representing them. On the other side no-one in that voterbase is crazy enough to fall for Corbyn's slant on things. Yes there is some appeal there but Corbyn is backed by rich people and groups like Momentum are full of middle classes that don't really understand the poor or "non educated." Labour does not have the middle ground in their party anymore and even if they did their largest voterbase is so wary of them that they have jumped to UKIP and Tory and will see even more of that in 2020. The Democrats from what I can see at the moment echo exactly where Labour were in 2010 and 2015. They have a big problem with being seen to be doing lots of talk without action and being part of the rich system. The talk I have seen on a couple of websites (washington post, new york times etc) is of moving away from wealthy donor support and to a grassroots effort. This has echoes of Corbyn's rise all over it with a severe over correction that actually makes things worse for the party at least in the short term. It is necessary in a way because if your problem is the perception of being at the mercy of special interests then you have to move a long way from that perception before that perception is broken at which point you can move back towards something sensible. The problem isn't so much Hillary herself, it is what she represents. The political elite backed by the uber rich (Soros, Buffet) and the suspicion (especially now with the DC Leaks, Wikileaks) that they are bought. If you ignore Iraq Blair and the Blairite/Moderates are seen in the same way. Talk of looking after the poor while they see big business importing cheaper labour, moving away to cheaper labour, the rich getting richer and all the time the talk from the political machine was of tackling it without ever doing any tackling. Its a "They said they would do something about this but didn't." From a normal person's view of it they said to us they understood our concern and would do something about it but then turned their back, winked at their mates in a "they bought it" and then went and reassured their cartel at the top that their profits were safe and continue. Business as usual. Are the Tory party any different? You can answer that. They love that Blair's Labour introduced all this stuff, pushed zero hours, pushed freedom of movement, pushed the whole profits at the expense of people. They love it because Labour can't accuse the Tories of changing the previous government's stance because they didn't. They just continued with it. As to why the Tories were gaining under Cameron. Why vote for Tories (Blairite Labour) that pretend they aren;t Tories when you may as well just vote for the actual Tories and then you know where you are. May might be different. She is sounding different but as above.......words does not mean action. All our parties should wake up and see what happened at Brexit and in the US. People are not buying the slick, professional sales pitch anymore. They don't believe it. It isn't authentic. A bit different to the old way we used to say politicians just lie and never answer questions. Corbyn will struggle to hit 150 seats at the next election. Where that vote goes between the Tories and UKIP will be decided on whether Brexit is seen as a fudge. I suspect that it would be better in terms of seats for the Tories to have a GE now because I suspect that Brexit might end up being watered down not from pressure from the opposition but from pressure from within. The Tories are bankrolled by the same people that loved Blair. They were still donating to Tories while Blair was in but Blair gave them exactly what they wanted. Access to cheap labour and support whenever they needed it to move out of the country or make money in property or banking etc. Labour's real problem is the Blair era where they played the Tory game without the Tory backing and by doing so lost their voterbase. There aren't enough metros, liberals, neo-liberals and luvvies with a vote to get a Blairite Labour in and there certainly aren't enough SWP, UAF, Momementum types to get Corbyn in. All of Labour's votes on both sides are not at lower class level. Corbyn's support is mainly middle class. You are looking at a period of 8-12 years in the wilderness trying to wipe away the smell of Blairism before a realistic fightback can come. Corbyn will be gone in 2020 and I suspect there will be all out war between the far left and the moderates for a long time meaning it will take 2 or 3 leadership changes before someone between the 2 camps can get the top job. Will relatively affluent voters in the shires vote for him? Why would they? Relevantly affluent voters in the shires are closer to Tory than you would imagine. They would probably be Ed's voters and closer to Blairism. They most definitely aren't going to vote for Corbyn's style of communism socialism. They will do in University cities and large metro bases. Will be an echo of the Brexit success for Corbyn Labour. They seem to buy that kind of thing.
I was talking about the fact that McConnell is such an awful person is that he spent years attacking Obama's "War on Coal" for his state's problems while destroying legislation that could have helped addressed their issues. None of that has anything to do with Keith Ellison. And as a black Muslim, Ellison would have zero chance of winning Kentucky if he ran there. I suspect Ashley Judd couldn't win Kentucky even if she ran in the nude. As for rural whites, I don't care. My position is similar to Schad's. Nothing you can do for them, so you have to write them off. And... contrary to the post-election analysis, you really don't need them. It is dangerous to assume that in four years the same issues will be in play that they are now. Or to randomly assign one group as the difference maker. We hear that rural whites were the reason why Trump won. But then, we also hear that lack of support among minorities is why Clinton lost. Remember-- Clinton actually won the popular vote. She lost several states by the tiniest of margins and those states would have given her the win. If that had happened, then people would be talking about how the GOP is finished because they got all the white vote but couldn't get anyone else. But when you look at the big picture in terms of who voted and for what issues, it wouldn't be any different at all. In the history of US Presidential elections in my lifetime, maybe only Bush in 1988 has ever won on a platform of "I'm just gonna keep doing the same ****!" Everyone else is always running on some kind of anti-establishment platform that is not at all anti-establishment. And after every election, people say that there's been some kind of seachange but there hasn't been. That includes Obama. His big policy position was Obamacare. His theme was "Hope and Change" because he would cut out the partisanship in Congress. What happened? Everyone hates Obamacare really for no reason. And the nastiness of the Bush era actually looks rather quaint in retrospect as Congress spent the entire time making sure nothing got done. With the support of most of the voters. Ellison is a good choice for DNC because obviously liberals are not very enamored of the DNC right now. He appeases the liberals. And tbf, he seems like a good guy. But he's fairly far left. So this is a position where they can test the waters and see how he does and also appease the Sanders-wing of the party. My feeling is that Ellison would have lost in a landslide if he'd run. And Sanders would have as well. I think the far left is deluding themselves a bit there. My early favorite for 2020 is still Cory Booker who is centrist. But the Democrats really need to unite themselves first, and Ellison helps them do that.
This is what I mean though. If a party's problem is that they are seen to be too far too close to something and they suffer a defeat like this** then they can't just drift slightly away, they have to make some distance to break that perception and then wait for time to be able to drift back to a more central position. **by a defeat like this I don't mean the numbers. I mean that this will be seen as much more than a narrow defeat because the outsider with zero experience got the win. If it was a narrow defeat to Ted Cruz then it isn't a problem. To lose to the outsider, inexperienced man will be seen as a huge defeat and inevitably lead to huge internal introspection which I think will have the same effect we have had here. The over correction that puts the far left position in place too break the perception of being to close to the right. On the Sanders thing. I have heard some republicans saying they thought that Sanders would have won it. With the small differences you see in Hillary winning and losing don't you think Sanders could have bridged that gap?
Well no one can say for sure. But IMO, those people are over-focusing on the white rust belt states they think changed the election at the expense of everything else. Sanders polled much less well with minorities than Clinton. Not that he doesn't care about minorities, because probably no one has a better track record on fighting for civil rights than he does. But he was talking about free college and stuff, and that appeals to young, white millennials. The other thing is that the college-educated white vote that typically skews Republican went for Clinton because they couldn't stomach Trump. But that group would have been more prone to vote Johnson or sit it out because Sanders is too far left for them. And he was railing on "elites" which is what they are. So he would have won some more votes in some demographics, and less votes in others. Sanders is more pro-environment than Clinton is. He would have the advantage of not being tied to Obama, but would that be enough? I think Democrats in coal country would have come out for Sanders. But there aren't that many Democrats in coal country anymore so he could have lost anyway. You have to look at the larger demographics, I think. Those areas that went to Trump have been skewing more conservative for quite some time now. Similarly Clinton flipped some states that have been going liberal. The major problem for her was she turned some red states purple, but not enough to win them. The Republicans still have a major problem on their hands. Which is that their party still isn't totally united. And their base is still an older white crowd that is dying out. Which is why you see this push to prevent minorities from voting, to prevent immigration, and to make the US as unpleasant to live in as possible for non-natives and hope they leave. Basically just trying to preserve the stronghold by any means fair or foul. OTOH, if you are a Democrat you are looking at the problem that minorities and young people are really unreliable. They don't always show up to vote. The actual voting population is trending conservative and has been for some time. And the baby boomers have some years left in them still. There's just so many of them. Plus the Republicans are dominating at the state level and will continue to do so because they will stack the courts and have gerrymandered the hell out of their districts. Voters liked Obama as a person/President, but they really weren't that keen on the policies or Democrats in general. The Democrats effectively have not held power for years. It was just a one-man Obama wall stopping a GOP tidal wave and now Obama is gone. Throwing any morals or policy considerations out the window, if I'm a Democratic pollster I am looking at this election and seeing a very favorable long-term trend. The formula that won it for Obama is still out there. Maybe now more than ever. If you can get out the black, hispanic and millennial votes, then you win. I wouldn't go like, all Black Panther and totally alienate the white vote obviously. I'm just saying that I think rural whites will end up being let down by Trump so just by attacking him you can pick off some of that demo. You won't win it, but the point isn't to win it, just to get enough so you don't get CRUSHED a la Clinton. If I am a Republican pollster, I'm saying yeah we managed to steal the election but we have major issues. Long-term things are not going our way. We can only suppress the minority votes by so much. If the Dems run a black guy or hispanic we might be in trouble right away. And we did lose much of our moderate base and I'm not sure how much is coming back. Did we really win on the issues, or did we ride an "anti-establishment" wave that will be more difficult to do now that we are the establishment? I'm also looking at this election like did we won BECAUSE of Trump, or did we really win IN SPITE of Trump? Also, Trump is not as much of an outsider as it seems. To the voting population, yeah. But inside the beltway one of the reasons why Trump continued to get the lukewarm support he did despite massively pooping the bed every couple of days with silly tweets is because Cruz is probably the most hated man in DC. I'm not talking about liberals. The GOP strongly dislikes him as well. Even the religious right of the GOP can just barely tolerate him. If there had been someone other than Cruz in the picture a lot of the NeverTrumps and wafflers would have backed another candidate instead of just not backing Trump. I don't believe there was a clear mandate here. If anything, the country is more divided than ever. Which means everything is up for grabs. The issue for both sides right now is to unify their parties. As the losing side, Democrats have a tougher task seeing as how they lost and tempers are high. But, they also have a much clearer mandate to do so. The GOP should be able to have a nice Kumbaya session while everyone is happy. But the winning side usually gets too cocky. And power-hungry. Ryan and McConnell are both snakes in the grass who can never be fully trusted, just like Reid and Pelosi before them. And there are still some prominent Republicans who Trump attacked viciously who will be looking to dish revenge and who think he is incompetent/bad so would be somewhat against him anyway.
Seriously. It's so strange. Did you read his other tweets? He does not thank a single person who called him. It's more like a running tally. Just be like "Thank you to the Bushes for their kind call after my win." "John Kasich reached out to me today to offer his support. It is much appreciated." It's not that hard. Instead it's "X called me! Very Nice!" Which is why I hope they don't take away his twitter account. I want him tweeting day and night.
Breaking... Donald Trump has said he will deport two to three million undocumented immigrants “immediately” upon taking office. “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably two million – it could be even three million – we are getting them out of the country or we are going to incarcerate,” Mr Trump said in an interview with 60 Minutes that will air later on Sunday. “Be we’re getting them out of the country, they’re here illegally.”
There is no way he can do this, unless he goes through the DACA applications and boots the students out. Which would be both an amazingly stupid and bastardly thing to do. However, I do expect him to do this. You have kids who have been in the US since they were 3, doing well in school, going to college. They have planned out their lives and they will be productive ones for the US. Now you will send them to Mexico or Columbia where they have no money, no idea what's going on, they may not even speak the language. And they will get kicked out precisely because it is easy. They reported themselves to the US government and now that will be used against them. For no purpose at all. They are not the slightest bit interested in taking jobs in West Virginia coal mines or working in a paper factory. That's why they went to college. They are also not eligible for Financial Aid, so it's not like they even cost anything.
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said comparisons between himself and US President-elect Donald Trump are "obvious" Now why didn't I think of that.?
I think that is only a matter of time before Trump ends up like Nixon, the temptation for him to do something dodgy will be too great.
please log in to view this image This. Trump, Brexit etc is futile. We are all earthlings. I look at us as dogs; We all (nearly) love dogs. There are small, dogs, large dogs, medium dogs. Black dogs, white dogs even lying ginger dogs. We all class them as dogs. When there is a dog on TV etc all dog lovers go awww, even if they have a large/small/medium/black/white/long haired/short haired dog. The same with humans. It'a a big old universe out there and at the moment we are the only life we know about. Why destroy it with lies, religion and religion. And trump. And Brexit
I really don't give a **** about Farage, the man is a hate breeding merchant and isn't an MP. So why do the BBC waste so much time interviewing and giving the guy column inches on his website. **** off Nigel Farage. Please!
