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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Iowa shock for Hillary Clinton as the state’s most accurate
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Iowa shock for Hillary Clinton as the state’s most accurate pollster has her caucus lead down to just 7%
In the next five months we are going to hear an awful lot from Iowa which traditionally, with its caucuses, is the first state to decide on choosing a contender for the White House race.
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"A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found this: “‘Liar’ is the first word that comes to mind more than others in an open-ended question when voters think of Clinton.”
"And 61 percent of respondents say Clinton “is not honest and trustworthy,” a record low for her."
In another report, I read that the FBI has it's A team on the email scandal now.
http://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-and-hillary-clinton-private-email-2015-8
To me, the comment that is most damaging in this article is that people think Hillary would be competent as President but can't square that with the impression that she feels she is above the law.
What do you mean, "if"?
Pardon my Volapük, but if Jeremy Corbyn is so high and mighty that he doesn't want to be a member of the Privy Council, he will have to fishing well learn that he's got to be one in order for the Constitution to function. If he becomes Leader of the Labour Party (which i don't think he will, but that's a different armadillo) then he should fishing well be appointed to the Privy Council whether he wants it or not, and if he doesn't like it he can go and fish himself. Sometimes tea, sometimes not tea? If he fails to turn up to the meetings of the Privy Council as required, then Her Majesty should send Prince Harry to drag him, kicking and squealing if necessary, into the room to do his duty. Otherwise Prince Philip might have to arrange for him to have an accident, as he did previously with John Smith and Robin Cook.
Many Corbyn supporters don't see Burnham/Cooper/Kendall as electable, nor do they see much practical difference between Burnham/Cooper/Kendall and the Conservatives.
From that perspective, is there any real reason for those people not to vote for Corbyn, even if he's totally unelectable?
And Blair, even the career politician, laser-focuses on electability and power above all else, ignoring that, for most people, a party in power is not the means to an end in of itself. The best argument that Blair can muster for getting Labour in power is that, essentially, they're the lesser of two evils. Inspiring stuff.
He also ignores his government's, and successive Labour leadership's, role in alienating those on the left of the party. There's a "vast wave of feeling" against the failures of the last Labour government, along with Labour's failure to defend their record, and their willingness to trade away their basic principles at the drop of the hat.
* Remembering it doesn't take much of a swing to make a Labour+SNP coalition viable if Labour can tackle the problems with that option over the next five years.
** 223 is what Labour won in 1983 adjusting for only one Scottish seat.
Even if she wins the Democratic nomination this time around, which is not guaranteed, then I think she is so damaged and divisive that any half-decent GOP candidate would beat her. If it was Hillary v McCain or Hillary v Romney then McCain/Romney would have won now. So long as its not Hillary v Donald of course, in which case I give up on America.
I'd be mildly amused if the 'inevitable' candidate failed again. But the Americans need to go some way to match the drama of a Labour leadership contest. Occupational fratricide last time, and possible election of a communist in 2015.
Never underestimate Labour’s ability to do six impossibly stupid things before breakfast.
You're 100% right, blame it on being up looking after a 1 year old at 6am while trying to write serious posts. I misread the "last election" line on Wiki (so the '79 results) as the seats won line. Of course that just reinforces my point that there is a long way further down that Labour under Corbyn can go. Corbyn could quite reasonably do worse than Foot, not just as bad as him.
I'm not familiar with the US election scene but I assumed it was like ours but ten years ahead. Is she not playing the gender card for all it's worth? Complaining of sexism at every opportunity? If not, why not?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-34093058
If Labour were to elect Jezza, they should change their name to 'The Monster Raving Labour Party' as clearly, they want to be a protest party only.
Are these parts of an international neo-con plot ?
I don't pretend to be an expert but what seemed to be required was genuine and deep enthusiasm, something that would get your supporters to hang around for hours until the counting was done, to get their friends to do the same and to peel off the supporters of the weaker candidates. It may be that Clinton just does not fire people up that much. Given she is the first woman to have a serious crack at the Presidency that seems odd but her centrist tendencies and policies as Secretary of State have maybe lost her the support she once had amongst the sisterhood.
Blair's central point is that you cannot buck the real world - whether you are a Corbynite, a Scottish nationalist or an FN supporter in France. As a result, Corbyn will never get Labour close to power in the UK, while if the SNP and FN get what they want they will not be able to deliver what they promise. That seems to me to be pretty inarguable.
And has this always been true (if so, how did Labour ever get started?) and if not, when, in your judgment, did it become true?
I suspect Thatcher might have been criticised along similar lines for not accepting the real world of the 1970s.
If Labour had not lost a single seat in Scotland, the Tories would still have won. Because they won 27 seats from the Lib Dems in England and Wales.
In fact, even the SNP winning 10 Lib Dem seats in Scotland did not make any difference to this equation.
What the 14% in aggregate Lib Dem votes fall did was rewind the tactical votes built up from several general elections. Many of those voters were not Lib Dem to begin with. The party managed to pi** off both tactical Labour supporters as well tactical Tory supporters.
Barring a miracle, Labour cannot win the next election simply due to the distribution of votes. No wonder, the Tories so badly wanted FPTP even when losing from it. No other system gives a majority government on just 37% of the votes.
The one saving grace for Labour is that the other parties don't look like they could organise a piss up in a brewery at the moment. But five years is an incredibly long time in politics.
Sentence 2. I wouldn’t rule it out either, but not on the scale of 1983. Yet!
Sentence 3. Could do the maths, but .........
For people like me it is like the Coalition has never gone away. And that is a good thing.
:chill-out-and-chill-on:
Therefore, Labour should take this opportunity to have a root and branch rethink about what they stand for, how they are organised and what role they feel England (& Wales) should have in the world. Electing Corbyn will enable this to happen. They should forget about Scotland, which is on its way out of the UK in the medium-term.
I look forward not only to an apology for the Iraq war, but also apologies for the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour declaration, for which the centenary anniversaries will occur in the next 3 years and which have both had such a disastrous impact on the Levant. The West doe not seem to learn, given the disastrous meddling in Syria and Libya in the last 5 years which has led to the swarm of immigration to Europe now.
Corbyn is not starting a new party.
Industrial unrest is down, and general contentment with local services (despite cuts in funding) is higher than it was.
Labour and some people might rile about the bedroom tax and the statistically difference between those who die while being defined as fit to work and the general population being identical, but they hoped otherwise,
Nothing is ever perfect, nothing can never not be made better. We have a whole series of issues in different parts of the economy etc. But whatever the problems we have, is Jeremy offering solutions?
They are questioning the accepted status quo and are finding it wanting.
The present political systems will be hoping that, even if Corbyn /Sanders do win, they will be absorbed and consumed into the very systems they are threatening to change. The problem is that the 2 of them have been in the systems for many years, know where the bodies are buried and which strings to pull.
However, returning to the US, Sanders will be too old to be a President. Something that both he and Clinton are probably well aware of, but he would make a good VP. It would be a brilliant counter to a Trump surgency on so many levels. Also I have noticed that neither Clinton or Sanders seem to have been hitting on each other.
As I've said before, anyone who isn't a Tory is a traitor. Just wait for Conference!
Who knows if we'd tackled ISIS when Obama and Cameron wanted to before Miliband led Parliamentary opposition to it in the way he did we might have nipped ISIS in the bud and prevented this entire crisis. Well done Ed.
EDIT - apologies: got mixed up. Compare and contrast the March and July budgets. If this government is a continuation of the last one, why have another one at all?
It was the post Banking crisis [ which happened all over the developing world ] and 22 out of the 24 OECD countries suffered fall in their GDP's. Surely, Labour was not that influential ! Britain had a deeper and longer recession was mainly because the financial segment of our GDP is bigger and this part suffered the most.
Countries with larger manufacturing sectors came out quicker thanks to China pouring vast sums into its economy and creating huge demand. Britain did rebound eventually and slowly thanks to the fall in sterling in December 2008 and historically low interest rates.
The pound was = to EUR 1.06 in 2008/9 and now close to 1.38 having touched 1.41. The devalued pound and huge amounts of QE helped Britain recover.
The proof how badly hurt the British and other countries' economies were from the banking crisis is that even 7 years later, the central banks cannot increase rates from virtually zero.
And, Labour just said they shared the blame. Why ? Most Labour leaders do not understand economics because frankly they hate it !
It wasn't your fault, stupid !
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/30/david-cameron-lacked-balls-to-head-off-the-rise-of-isis-says-former-defence-chief
Corbyn and Farage (and arguably the SNP) have created a third type. A nostalgic group with no new ideas, but who want to change the world by turning the clock back.
That could either have removed a power which has helped arrest ISIS' spread in Syria, or enabled the democrat rebels to win and establish something approaching a decent regime [although it's worth recalling no side had clean hands in that war].
I believe the vote was some months pre-ISIS.
And we shouldn't pretend Miliband's rejection of action was calculated on military grounds. It was the case both sides wanted to intervene but danced on the head of a pin regarding specifics and ended up doing nothing (after Miliband had privately given the nod that he'd approve Cameron's proposal).
We also have a chronic trade/ balance of payments problem. This is partly driven by the stimulus of deficit spending but our assets are increasingly foreign owned with future profits belonging to someone else.
We have an increasing housing problem with house building not keeping up with the increase in population.
Corbyn would undoubtedly aggravate all of these problems except the last one and the way he would address that would also cause problems for the others (as would his views on immigration). The man is simply not relevant to the problems we face.
Cameron did go to Parliament to authorise military strikes after chemical weapons were used in 2013. Ed decided even the use of chemical weapons on the public wasn't sufficient to see the west interfere in Syria - and ISIS rose up in the vacuum.
Labour were in charge of regulation.
Labour caused the depth of recession by falling asleep on bank regulation and allowing other sectors such as manufacturing to fall off a cliff..
Edited extra bit: quite, Mr. Foxinsox. I remember seeing, early on (before the war really kicked off) a piece with a Christian priest in Syria, who was deeply worried Assad might fall not because he was super, but because Christians had a relatively better lot in Syria under him than they did elsewhere.
On that score, at least, the priest was proved right.
ISIS was always there biding its time. They would have been the largest beneficiary amongst the anti-Assad outfits simply because they were and are the most organised.
The rest could not organise a party in an Orange juice factory ! It is difficult to do so sitting on leather arm chairs in five star hotels !
Blimey what happened there?
The real world is the one in which we live. The one in which the British electorate will - quite rightly - not hand power to a party led by someone who has spent 40 years sharing platforms with people who advocate and celebrate the killing of British citizens.
No boom or bust.etc.
This thread just shows our Labourites still can't accept they have any responsibility for the huge mess they left behind.
Claiming ludicrously that Labour wasn't running major deficits prior to the crisis is just not true either. Labour was running major deficits at the limits of what is acceptable over the long term from 2002-'07, this was not caused by the events of 07 and 08 unless those events had a Tardis. Pre-2002 Labour's record was indeed better but by 2007 that was history. From 2002-07 there was no economic crisis but major deficits were ran as Labour hubristically believed they had "eliminated boom and bust". Taking pre-crisis figures and comparing them to long-term figures over an entire economic cycle just shows economic ignorance.
You can't simply write an alternate history and present it as a certainty. We don't know what would've happened.
Edited extra bit: Mr. Observer, that's a nice correction
The facts are thus: We are slowly reducing our deficit but also addressing the underlying structural-deficit. Yes; things could have been achieved quicker but with social costs (and less migration) that the Coalition was unwilling to bear. And, yet, we are where we are: A 'Tory' government with a fragmented opposition.
Things are far from great but they are better then the mess inherited in 2010. Most people - at least those with more than two brain-cells - accept this. We have accepted mild austerity but created a functioning economy. We should expect a down-turn between now and 2020 but we are in a - slightly - better position than we where two Parliaments ago.
I understand that Labour supporters wish to regain power so as to engineer society in a fashion to which the party thinks (and not as the electorate chooses): It is basic 101 Leninism-Marxism. Shame that they cannot adapt for a new paradigm and build an alternative to a midly successful Conservative administration (not that I would ever likely vote for the upper-middle-class, champagne-socialists [MODERATED]) and promote a positive alternative for the 2020s...!
Anarchy can be worse than dictatorship.
So, it is all Ed's fault !
He now needs to appease the Tory right, not the LD centre. That's why he is protecting the Tory voter base - pensioners - while squeezing the poorest, who - as we all know - bear the heaviest burden under what is planned.
https://twitter.com/theifs/status/619132389139292160
Osborne has promised everyone a pay rise and a living wage. Had Labour elected anyone but Corbyn those promises may well have come back to haunt him.
The Tories in opposition (rightly or wrongly) accepted the need for invasion in 2003 based on the threat of chemical weapons.
Labour in opposition rejected the need for military intervention at all (not even invasion) in 2013 based on the actual use of chemical weapons. ISIS filled the vacuum created.
Ed-Mili*****'s greatest success of the last Parliament. How the knuckledraggers are ignoring it now says more about them then his own misguided politics....
"No"
Then he fell off the stage.
Richards plan was to train and equip a Syrian rebel army of 100,000 to overthrow Assad. The plans were rejected by the National Security Council as too ambitious. Given our success at things like this elsewhere in the middle east some people might consider that opinion plausible. Even then when the govt proposed supporting the rebels by air strikes we see that parliament refused. They are even going screaming bananas at UK pilots on secondment to the USAF. Thats some of your precious right wing tory MPs who ''did not have the balls'' !
So what chance of them supporting direct boots on the ground?
Labour LDs and right wing nutjob tory backbenchers let in ISIS. But what do you care Mr Onetrackmind.
People are looking at the situation now and using that as an excuse for Miliband's treachery. The problem is that the situation was very different when the vote was held.
Osborne has promised everyone a pay rise and a living wage. Had Labour elected anyone but Corbyn those promises may well have come back to haunt him.
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In a few years I will be a pensioner too ! But, I can tell you now, this "triple lock" whilst a great vote winner, will destroy this country. It is bloody expensive !
We need more immigrants to pay the taxes to keep feeding these pensioners !
https://twitter.com/theifs/status/619132389139292160
Osborne has promised everyone a pay rise and a living wage. Had Labour elected anyone but Corbyn those promises may well have come back to haunt him.
The Coalition also protected pensioners with the Lib Dems fully on board. I won't defend it, it is absurd. But tax benefits through pensions for the highly paid were once again restricted in the budget as were BTL benefits which many of that generation gain from. Once again there was, if anything, something of a rebalancing.
Interesting chart but it assumes that there is no change in peoples' behaviour, that those working 16 hours a week for WTC won't chose to work more when it becomes more clearly advantageous to do so, for example.
And it was a lie. A total, and utter misrepresentation of what Ed Miliband did, and did not do, over the Syria vote. He knows it’s a lie, the shadow cabinet know it’s a lie, Labour MPs know it’s a lie......
......At the same time, Miliband was being warned by a number of senior advisers that he risked a reaction from Labour supporters, in particular, former Lib Dems who had recently switched allegiance.
It was on that basis, and that basis alone, that Ed Miliband decided to vote against the Government. It was not an act of principle. It was not an act of strength. It was an act of political calculation and opportunism born out of political weakness. Stand up to Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin? Ed Miliband wouldn’t stand up to Diane Abbott.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11499438/Ed-Miliband-is-peddling-a-lie-about-his-volte-face-on-Syria.html
In a few years I will be a pensioner too ! But, I can tell you now, this "triple lock" whilst a great vote winner, will destroy this country. It is bloody expensive !
We need more immigrants to pay the taxes to keep feeding these pensioners !
No we need greater productivity off our existing workforce.
In fact look what it would have been like if we hadn't meddled anywhere in the ME or Africa.. .The Whole Middle East is a now mess as a direct result and the migrant crisis is a direct result too..
What's your point? ISIS doesn't exist since people have phones?