As I and many others said on every other occasion he has come back, "he's a busted flush... nobody cares any more".
One day, we'll be right. Maybe.
The last thing we need is Trump's tapeworm back over here cheering on the fascists and jackboots brigade, but I guess it is all part of the decline of Britain.
Split the vote on the right would be good news. Labour has consolidated the left wing vote now
Not when Corbyn and Len have set up a true socialist party.
It will be another CUK. If they can’t get people like me then how do they intend to win?
The reality is that Labour voters and members support Keir and think Corbyn was bad. There simply isn’t enough support for him.
My two brothers and all their friends would join, as would large numbers of the N London Labour Party, you fail to realize that true socialist control of the party is more important than winning elections.
So, the ultimate goal is total control of an unelectable party?
A friend of my daughter is a primary school teacher in a rough part of Edinburgh. She says that the last school lockdown had a devastating effect on some kids who regressed years of learning as a result of the lack of stimulation and interest and barely affected others whose parents took the time and effort to keep their learning going. Its by no means just about money but the kind of attitudes that put parents in the latter camp also tend to ensure that they have done well in their careers and maximised their potential.
The consequences for her are that whole class teaching is very, very difficult. These kids are literally years apart in skills and understanding and bridging that gap is a real challenge.
Well said @Pulpstar. Yes we need this to be not close. I don't think it will be but it's impossible not to be nervous and I am. For my larger than usual bets? For my cred as a PB pundit? Nope. Don't much care about either. What I care about is that a regime you accurately describe as wannabe fascist is not allowed to make further progress towards the real thing.
Two very conflicting polls just out from ABC/Wash Post:
FL - Trump +2 PA - Biden +7
Apparently Biden is spending all of Monday in PA - ultimately I think it all boils down to PA - whoever wins PA will win.
The way I'm viewing it is that Trump must hold both FL and PA to win but Biden only needs one of them. And Biden winning both means landslide.
I think that's it in a nutshell and at the moment I think Trump will hold Fl but lose Penn.
That's my view as well, so if nothing else, the pundits got it right saying PA would end up being the deciding swing state,,,
Also those polls (from a good pollster) are about where I think it sits, FL is going to stick with Trump and if it does this whole 'winning on the night' angle Trump is playing will be pushed very hard by him
Even I'm finding the Spitfire/1940 worship remarkably tedious and facile now.
Indeed. It was 80 years ago. When I was a schoolkid it was living memory, many of my friends' fathers served and mine had his house bombed. But 80 years previously? We certainly didn't fetishise the Boer War. It's time we moved on.
I wouldn't say move on, it's a proud part of our history and fine to celebrate it, but I agree on fetishisation.
I just think it's massively overdone - to be honest, I'm fed up of so many things being overdone these days: Pride (lasting nearly 2 months this year - it used to just be a weekend), Stoptober, BHM turned up to 11, Movember, Poppies in early October, Halloween lasting a month, Christmas starting in September, Spitfires all year round..
Just stop it. Jeez.
Movember is the only one of those I'd disagree with. Halloween can be done the final week of October it doesn't take a month but growing a moustache takes time, (most people at least) can't do that properly in a weekend.
Yeah, I know, it's just I get spammed with it on my work email and with ads on my social media feeds too.
There are far too many "days", "weeks" and "months" now that feel almost semi-compulsory to buy into.
Getting a bit fed up with it.
Oh sure but I just tune them out. I feel no compulsion to buy into them. Some of them like Dry January or Sober October go against my beliefs - I'm not a drunk but I find telling people to essentially avoid struggling hospitality businesses for a month as a form of fundraising to be despicable.
I did Movember about five years ago, my wife didn't like the moustache and asked me the following year not to do it again that's all the reason I've ever needed to never do it again.
I find it easy to tune out and ignore these pesterings.
This is part of my day job. The argument was over whether to bind the Government legally to protecting animal welfare standards in all trade deals. The concession is designed to enable the Government to get the Agriculture Bill through the Commons without conceding that, at the cost of having any specific trade deal voted on in the Commons, the argument being that if it did in fact undermine animal welfare standards then MPs would revolt at that point. I wouldn't say it's a big deal in itself, what is does is essentially kick the can down the road.
That's a weird thing to say. So-called "Liberals" like Trudeau have shown what side of the fence they are on. Biden Kamala would likely side with Trudeau, not Macron.
Macron is showing other Western leaders *precisely* how you crush populism from the centre.
...But none of the other Western leaders are classical liberals; they are various shades of progressives, who do not believe in liberalism. Ironically Trump is the closest of all the candidates in the US election to a classical liberal, that's why Macron doesn't get on that badly with him.
You make a good point.
Though hard to see the resemblance at the moment, between Trumpsky and, say, John Stuart Mill or William Ewart Gladstone .
William G WAS like The Donald in that he too was a party switcher (in his case from Tory to Liberal).
Plus echoes of the GOM's epic Midlothian Campaign in the current MAGA2 battle-ground tour by the Super-Spreader-in-Chief.
Blue states shift bluer. Red states shift blue (Montana fromc.20 Trump to c. 5 Trump, for example).
Biden retakes Michigan, Wisconsin.
Trump holds Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Arizona all with sub-1% leads after days of counting and possible shenanigans.
Trump loses by something like 51-45 in votes and wins 279-259 in EVs
I'm not sure where you get blue states shifting bluer from. Nevada, as I understand it, is in play. They are a couple of steps to the left of Michigan and Wisconsin.
I assume Andy is talking about Democrats stacking up big margins in Washington, California, New York etc.
Nevada isn't a "blue state" - it's purple as it's consistently pretty close. It's also a rare case where the polls were out in Trump's favour in 2016 - RCP had him winning it but he lost (by 2.5% so not massively close). Indeed, they seemed to understate the Democrats in 2018 too - RCP had Heller in a tied race (and two of three pollsters had him ahead) but he lost his re-election bid by a comfortable 5%.
It's not impossible Nevada could go for Trump this year, but pretty unlikely.
I don't agree with Andy's concern either, by the way. Polls suggest Biden is running level with or a little behind Clinton in 2016 in very blue states like California. That's not surprising - there are fewer GOP 2016 votes in play so fishing from a small pool of potential converts. Meanwhile, he's up more in states like Missouri where he starts from a low base, because he's got a large pool of potential converts and Trump hasn't. I strongly suspect the swing in the likely tipping point states (where there are roughly even numbers of Democrats and Republicans) will be broadly in line with the national picture, while red states will be better (in terms of swing) for Biden and blue states for Trump - because that's the maths of it where you start from a low or high base. But it won't matter as they aren't in play, and it evens out.
Two very conflicting polls just out from ABC/Wash Post:
FL - Trump +2 PA - Biden +7
Apparently Biden is spending all of Monday in PA - ultimately I think it all boils down to PA - whoever wins PA will win.
The way I'm viewing it is that Trump must hold both FL and PA to win but Biden only needs one of them. And Biden winning both means landslide.
I think that's it in a nutshell and at the moment I think Trump will hold Fl but lose Penn.
That's my view as well, so if nothing else, the pundits got it right saying PA would end up being the deciding swing state,,,
Also those polls (from a good pollster) are about where I think it sits, FL is going to stick with Trump and if it does this whole 'winning on the night' angle Trump is playing will be pushed very hard by him
Labour should try that, count the votes from the towns and then stop before the countryside votes come in.
As I and many others said on every other occasion he has come back, "he's a busted flush... nobody cares any more".
One day, we'll be right. Maybe.
The last thing we need is Trump's tapeworm back over here cheering on the fascists and jackboots brigade, but I guess it is all part of the decline of Britain.
Split the vote on the right would be good news. Labour has consolidated the left wing vote now
Not when Corbyn and Len have set up a true socialist party.
It will be another CUK. If they can’t get people like me then how do they intend to win?
The reality is that Labour voters and members support Keir and think Corbyn was bad. There simply isn’t enough support for him.
My two brothers and all their friends would join, as would large numbers of the N London Labour Party, you fail to realize that true socialist control of the party is more important than winning elections.
So, the ultimate goal is total control of an unelectable party?
Even I'm finding the Spitfire/1940 worship remarkably tedious and facile now.
Indeed. It was 80 years ago. When I was a schoolkid it was living memory, many of my friends' fathers served and mine had his house bombed. But 80 years previously? We certainly didn't fetishise the Boer War. It's time we moved on.
I wouldn't say move on, it's a proud part of our history and fine to celebrate it, but I agree on fetishisation.
I just think it's massively overdone - to be honest, I'm fed up of so many things being overdone these days: Pride (lasting nearly 2 months this year - it used to just be a weekend), Stoptober, BHM turned up to 11, Movember, Poppies in early October, Halloween lasting a month, Christmas starting in September, Spitfires all year round..
Just stop it. Jeez.
Movember is the only one of those I'd disagree with. Halloween can be done the final week of October it doesn't take a month but growing a moustache takes time, (most people at least) can't do that properly in a weekend.
Final week of October? Halloween isn't a season, it's a day.
If Halloween falls on a Wednesday it's entirely reasonable to have a Halloween Party on the Saturday beforehand. Nothing unreasonable about that whatsoever.
Some pointless bickering about partisan point scoring again - who bloody cares right now.
Never mind the all regions not national lockdown not lockdown. At some point in December Shagger will be faced with a harsh reality. If he unlocks the country back to Tier 1 to allow Christmas to take place, then the pox is going to run rampant again in January. If he doesn't unlock for Christmas then he faces mass disobedience of the law as people say "fuck this" and have what might be a last Christmas with elderly relatives before the pox runs rampant again in January.
And then we have the elephant in the room - students. University populations have been very effective pox incubators. And its increasingly clear that younger people may not suffer much from pox but can certainly spread it to people who do. And they all want home for Christmas. With Granny.
So, lock down the students? Who will enforce that? Let them home with the inevitable massive spike and deaths? Which negates the purpose of the coming Bonfire Month not lockdown lockdown.
Its very very easy to hurl rocks at these tossers in government - especially when they keep handing out rocks and painting targets on themselves. But we could have Tony Blair himself in office right now and this would still be a shit show because there are no right answers and a myriad of wrong ones.
Blue states shift bluer. Red states shift blue (Montana fromc.20 Trump to c. 5 Trump, for example).
Biden retakes Michigan, Wisconsin.
Trump holds Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Arizona all with sub-1% leads after days of counting and possible shenanigans.
Trump loses by something like 51-45 in votes and wins 279-259 in EVs
I'm not sure where you get blue states shifting bluer from. Nevada, as I understand it, is in play. They are a couple of steps to the left of Michigan and Wisconsin.
I assume Andy is talking about Democrats stacking up big margins in Washington, California, New York etc.
Nevada isn't a "blue state" - it's purple as it's consistently pretty close. It's also a rare case where the polls were out in Trump's favour in 2016 - RCP had him winning it but he lost (by 2.5% so not massively close). Indeed, they seemed to understate the Democrats in 2018 too - RCP had Heller in a tied race (and two of three pollsters had him ahead) but he lost his re-election bid by a comfortable 5%.
It's not impossible Nevada could go for Trump this year, but pretty unlikely.
I don't agree with Andy's concern either, by the way. Polls suggest Biden is running level with or a little behind Clinton in 2016 in very blue states like California. That's not surprising - there are fewer GOP 2016 votes in play so fishing from a small pool of potential converts. Meanwhile, he's up more in states like Missouri where he starts from a low base, because he's got a large pool of potential converts and Trump hasn't. I strongly suspect the swing in the likely tipping point states (where there are roughly even numbers of Democrats and Republicans) will be broadly in line with the national picture, while red states will be better (in terms of swing) for Biden and blue states for Trump - because that's the maths of it where you start from a low or high base. But it won't matter as they aren't in play, and it evens out.
Nevada underestimated the Clinton total on average in 2016 though, Minnesota underestimated the Trump total there so I think Minnesota is more likely to be a Trump gain than Nevada if he gains any state.
Like 2016 I expect Biden to outperform the polls in the West as Clinton did, the West has a particular loathing for Trump and I think he has a reasonable chance to gain Arizona therefore but I think Trump will again outperform his polling in the Midwest and rustbelt swing states where he has his highest amount of personal support in the US
I've noticed a lot more bleating about Trump stealing the election in the last day or so, does this mean there are some polls that show him doing better recently?
I don't think so, there was the Seltzer poll but that's just one poll in a state Biden doesn't need, the rest has been more of the same, and 538 is still showing a 90/10 race assuming no new shenanigans.
The stuff about Trump stealing the election is coming up again because: 1) A lawsuit was just filed in Texas with a notoriously partisan judge aiming to throw out over 100,000 ballots 2) Trump's been making comments that the count should be decided on the night, while at the PA GOP's insistence the mail-in ballots can't possibly be counted on the night, so he's obviously intending for them not to be counted 3) Three conservatives on the Supreme Court signed onto an opinion to the effect that their court should overrule the state court, to prevent ballots which the state court (and the instructions sent out with the ballot) said should be counted from being counted. This wasn't a majority because the (also conservative) head of the court didn't agree 4) They just rushed another conservative justice onto the court, and plan to resubmit the issue from (3)
So it's definitely a serious issue. IMHO they'll only put their thumbs on the scale if it's otherwise a coin-flip, but if you're betting you should consider the possibility that I'm wrong.
Agree with all of this and its more evidence that Trump knows how much trouble he's in so is preparing the ground for disputing any 'change' in projected vote share coming in after the actual count on tues night. The fact he's also bunkering down at the WH on the night tells me his plan would be to declare victory on the night, most likely based on FL being pretty much his, and that he's in the WH ant its business as usual for the next 4 years. Sounds crazy but this is Trump we are talking about, he's already clearly marking out his intentions.
I believe in the next year it is entirely possible Labour sees a double digit lead and Keir leads Johnson/his successor by Blair margins.
I hope he wins.
It will be fascinating and hilarious to see labour inherit an economic basket case from the tories, when it is so often the other way around
I'm particularly looking forward to Starmer's solemn address to the nation when the IMF's conditions for a hard currency bailout loan include hundreds of thousands of public sector job cuts.
That will be brilliant.
In the last 50 years Labour have come to power twice.
One of those times the UK was an economic basket case.
HYUFD: you miss my point, really the Trumps are not worried by the Constitution, it is power they want. Everything else can go to ........
So what, they cannot overturn the US constitution without a 2/3 majority in Congress and the states and the armed forces and the police and the SC and the FBI etc affirm an oath of loyalty to defend the constitution above all else
It's rather amusing watching all the Democrat bed wetters clutching their pearls, pulling up their skirts and running for the hills at any point of divergence from the narrative of a Biden win. It rather reminds me of Labour supporters prior to the 1997 GE. Scared by the the polling miss and the shock victory of John Major in 1992 they didn't believe the evidence of their own eyes until the landslide started to filter through on election night.
My view is that Biden is heading for a comfortable EC win - 322 - 216 - Biden sweeps the rust belt and flips AZ, NC NE 2, ME 2 and edges GA for the historic surprise of the night. Trump holds the battlegrounds of FL, TX, OH and IA :
But there is always the possibility of a major polling miss, remote though it is, and I don’t think it bedwetting to be concerned about the danger of Republicans stealing an election even halfway close in Pennsylvania.
The Selzer poll in Iowa is the first one that has given me real concern.
Very good A+ pollster that gives Trump a 7 point lead. Sienna (another A4) pollster gave Biden a 3 point lead but was taken a good week earlier.
If Selzer is accurate there has been a significant swing back to Trump over the last week and it would not bode well for Biden in other parts of the midwest. If other polls begin to show any sort of late swing I will be nervous.
Having said that the Selzer poll still has sufficient swing against Trump from 2016 to see him lose if it were replicated in every state.
Even the best pollster, and Selzer, is one, has an outlier. Look at the Biden Wisconsin +17. And I never hang my hat on one poll. The 30 point swing to Trump with independents from the last Selzer poll looks "interesting".
Even I'm finding the Spitfire/1940 worship remarkably tedious and facile now.
Indeed. It was 80 years ago. When I was a schoolkid it was living memory, many of my friends' fathers served and mine had his house bombed. But 80 years previously? We certainly didn't fetishise the Boer War. It's time we moved on.
I wouldn't say move on, it's a proud part of our history and fine to celebrate it, but I agree on fetishisation.
I just think it's massively overdone - to be honest, I'm fed up of so many things being overdone these days: Pride (lasting nearly 2 months this year - it used to just be a weekend), Stoptober, BHM turned up to 11, Movember, Poppies in early October, Halloween lasting a month, Christmas starting in September, Spitfires all year round..
Just stop it. Jeez.
Movember is the only one of those I'd disagree with. Halloween can be done the final week of October it doesn't take a month but growing a moustache takes time, (most people at least) can't do that properly in a weekend.
Final week of October? Halloween isn't a season, it's a day.
If Halloween falls on a Wednesday it's entirely reasonable to have a Halloween Party on the Saturday beforehand. Nothing unreasonable about that whatsoever.
I'm not a Halloween supporter but would you say the same about Christmas?
The Selzer poll in Iowa is the first one that has given me real concern.
Very good A+ pollster that gives Trump a 7 point lead. Sienna (another A4) pollster gave Biden a 3 point lead but was taken a good week earlier.
If Selzer is accurate there has been a significant swing back to Trump over the last week and it would not bode well for Biden in other parts of the midwest. If other polls begin to show any sort of late swing I will be nervous.
Having said that the Selzer poll still has sufficient swing against Trump from 2016 to see him lose if it were replicated in every state.
As I and many others said on every other occasion he has come back, "he's a busted flush... nobody cares any more".
One day, we'll be right. Maybe.
The last thing we need is Trump's tapeworm back over here cheering on the fascists and jackboots brigade, but I guess it is all part of the decline of Britain.
Split the vote on the right would be good news. Labour has consolidated the left wing vote now
Not when Corbyn and Len have set up a true socialist party.
It will be another CUK. If they can’t get people like me then how do they intend to win?
The reality is that Labour voters and members support Keir and think Corbyn was bad. There simply isn’t enough support for him.
My two brothers and all their friends would join, as would large numbers of the N London Labour Party, you fail to realize that true socialist control of the party is more important than winning elections.
So, the ultimate goal is total control of an unelectable party?
They don't care about electability. Being smug and self-righteous will do.
I believe in the next year it is entirely possible Labour sees a double digit lead and Keir leads Johnson/his successor by Blair margins.
I would certainly expect that.
After all, Ed Miliband recorded double digit leads over the Coalition.
All the same, it is a brexit party fired up by a Trump win and promising freedom, hope and prosperity that the conservative MPs really fear.
Labour leads they can live with. The BP eating their core vote, this time for keeps? not so much.
If that is really the fear of Tory MPs, they can sleep easy (they probably do anyhow -- I don't think they a gnawing conscience keeps many MPs awake at night)
1. I don't think Trump will win, I think he will lose badly. 2. I don't think TBP promising freedom, hope & prosperity is at all likely or credible.
To look at how to implement referendums, look at Jacinda. Admittedly, the referendums were not on so serious constitutional matters, but one of them went against her. She just said, fine, the verdict of the people is what matters, we'll implement the results. TBP achieved its remarkable temporary popularity on the back of misguided & badly misjudged attempts to thwart the referendum result -- the Soubrys and their fellow travellers have driven us to a worse, harder Brexit than would have happened otherwise.
The one "good" thing the Tories can take from the pandemic is it happened so quickly after a resounding election win. They are in a better position than many incumbent Governments. The next election will be fought on the economic response to the pandemic, rather than the pandemic itself, which is better territory for them.
But, the pandemic has destroyed Boris. I might feel sorry for him, if he wasn't a complete sh1t.
This is the Twitter post of a party that knows it has lost the argument and is losing to Labour badly.
He means "worse than the donkeys in the Tory party leadership expected". Of course he has to pretend that no one else expected it either, but everyone knows it's not true.
The Selzer poll in Iowa is the first one that has given me real concern.
Very good A+ pollster that gives Trump a 7 point lead. Sienna (another A4) pollster gave Biden a 3 point lead but was taken a good week earlier.
If Selzer is accurate there has been a significant swing back to Trump over the last week and it would not bode well for Biden in other parts of the midwest. If other polls begin to show any sort of late swing I will be nervous.
Having said that the Selzer poll still has sufficient swing against Trump from 2016 to see him lose if it were replicated in every state.
I think Emerson (an A Rated pollster) are doing a super sunday poll release today of a mass of states, so will be very interesting to see, as their last national poll a few days ago had Biden up by only 5%, so IF there is some swing back I would expect these polls to show it. They are releasing them in batches of 3 states I think, first 3 are Michigan, Iowa and Ohio at 9am EST (2pm UK time) so if there are swings to Trump in those states, (Iowa already mentioned above) then HYUFD and Mr Ed might be smiling more.
Belgium 1,002 deaths/1m on worldometer, joining Peru and San Marino.
I’m glad I read that twice. I was appalled at San Marino’s death rate until I realised the figure was per capita.
Does anyone know why Belgium is doing so badly? Heck, they’re even doing worse than we are and that must take some effort.
I'm not sure they're doing enough testing - the positivity rate in Liege is 41% - across England its 6-7%, with "hot spots" in the teens.
what exactly is testing achieving? Hospitalisations and death I get to some extent although deaths are being inflated due to the dying with covid not of it , however testing generally is achieving nothing in controlling the illlness is it?
If its leading to isolation and contact tracing then it may be helping to slow the spread - especially if its picking up asymptomatic carriers via contacts. Guernsey now has 10 known cases - all in quarantine, all identified via test, track & trace, except for the initial case (which is a worry).
I understand that the 10 cases were related on one individual who came back from the mainland having tested positive, and then visited her (I think) relations on the Island before the end of the quarantine period.
Given there will be more cows than people there it is absolutely useless as a measure for countries.
Out by a factor of over 20 (what is it with Nats & Numbers?)
Also population density is around 3 times Belgium's so we must be doing something right.
It's not difficult. The virus doesn't "blow on the wind" - it moves with people. So control the movement of people, control the virus. Something the UK has failed to do, but successful countries like NZ, Australia, Singapore, Japan & South Korea (and Guernsey) have all done.
Hi Carlotta. Do you know if Sark is allowing visitors at the moment?
Same quarantine rules as Guernsey - test on arrival, then 14 days self quarantine, robustly policed with fines up to £10,000 for breaches.
I guess the hotels are open then but I wonder how you quarantine in a hotel there?
I love Sark. It used to be my favourite place.
But aren't folks there a bit, well - sarky?
It used to be full of seasonal workers who drive the horse and carts and work in the local bars and hotels. The locals are invariably very rich indeed. It's a tax haven. So the locals use their houses as accommodation addresses. The owner of the local bike shop was director of several hundred businesses and also ran one of the local cafes and was the Island constable. It's like a cross between Whisky Galore and Local Hero. But the real attraction is that there are no cars. Everyone uses bicycles or walks and the hotels use tractors to pick up their guests. Oh and the government is feudal
Some pointless bickering about partisan point scoring again - who bloody cares right now.
Never mind the all regions not national lockdown not lockdown. At some point in December Shagger will be faced with a harsh reality. If he unlocks the country back to Tier 1 to allow Christmas to take place, then the pox is going to run rampant again in January. If he doesn't unlock for Christmas then he faces mass disobedience of the law as people say "fuck this" and have what might be a last Christmas with elderly relatives before the pox runs rampant again in January.
And then we have the elephant in the room - students. University populations have been very effective pox incubators. And its increasingly clear that younger people may not suffer much from pox but can certainly spread it to people who do. And they all want home for Christmas. With Granny.
So, lock down the students? Who will enforce that? Let them home with the inevitable massive spike and deaths? Which negates the purpose of the coming Bonfire Month not lockdown lockdown.
Its very very easy to hurl rocks at these tossers in government - especially when they keep handing out rocks and painting targets on themselves. But we could have Tony Blair himself in office right now and this would still be a shit show because there are no right answers and a myriad of wrong ones.
I beg to differ on your last point. Any other PM in my living memory (so right back to Wilson) would have handled this bettter than the current buffoon IHMO.
Blair (managing the message), Thatcher (determination) and then May (eye for detail) would be my top choices; each would have worked themselves to a standstill to manage this. Of course they each have shortcomings and the situation is very difficult but Johnson lacks on all necessary fronts: clarity of communication, decisiveness, graft, detail and determination.
It's rather amusing watching all the Democrat bed wetters clutching their pearls, pulling up their skirts and running for the hills at any point of divergence from the narrative of a Biden win. It rather reminds me of Labour supporters prior to the 1997 GE. Scared by the the polling miss and the shock victory of John Major in 1992 they didn't believe the evidence of their own eyes until the landslide started to filter through on election night.
My view is that Biden is heading for a comfortable EC win - 322 - 216 - Biden sweeps the rust belt and flips AZ, NC NE 2, ME 2 and edges GA for the historic surprise of the night. Trump holds the battlegrounds of FL, TX, OH and IA :
But there is always the possibility of a major polling miss, remote though it is, and I don’t think it bedwetting to be concerned about the danger of Republicans stealing an election even halfway close in Pennsylvania.
I don't bet and I'm not American so there is comedy to be had in every scenario from a Biden landslide through a contested Trump win to a shock Trump win. What is absolutely clear is that both sides see the future of the country on the line. The GOP are the NSDAP in 1932 trying to load the system to permanently exclude their opponents. The Democrats are appealing to the humanity and self-respect that has long departed so many American voters.
Whatever. Even if its a Biden landslide we can enjoy Trump trying to nuke someone in his closing weeks in office.
Even I'm finding the Spitfire/1940 worship remarkably tedious and facile now.
Indeed. It was 80 years ago. When I was a schoolkid it was living memory, many of my friends' fathers served and mine had his house bombed. But 80 years previously? We certainly didn't fetishise the Boer War. It's time we moved on.
I wouldn't say move on, it's a proud part of our history and fine to celebrate it, but I agree on fetishisation.
I just think it's massively overdone - to be honest, I'm fed up of so many things being overdone these days: Pride (lasting nearly 2 months this year - it used to just be a weekend), Stoptober, BHM turned up to 11, Movember, Poppies in early October, Halloween lasting a month, Christmas starting in September, Spitfires all year round..
Just stop it. Jeez.
Movember is the only one of those I'd disagree with. Halloween can be done the final week of October it doesn't take a month but growing a moustache takes time, (most people at least) can't do that properly in a weekend.
Final week of October? Halloween isn't a season, it's a day.
If Halloween falls on a Wednesday it's entirely reasonable to have a Halloween Party on the Saturday beforehand. Nothing unreasonable about that whatsoever.
In my neighhood (pre-Covid) the local business district has a "Halloween" during the day on Saturday closest to H-Day for little kids with their parents to go trick-or-treating.
Every year, I complain bitterly to the authorities re: this invasion by hordes of semi-ruly rug-rats, but to no avail.
Some pointless bickering about partisan point scoring again - who bloody cares right now.
Never mind the all regions not national lockdown not lockdown. At some point in December Shagger will be faced with a harsh reality. If he unlocks the country back to Tier 1 to allow Christmas to take place, then the pox is going to run rampant again in January. If he doesn't unlock for Christmas then he faces mass disobedience of the law as people say "fuck this" and have what might be a last Christmas with elderly relatives before the pox runs rampant again in January.
And then we have the elephant in the room - students. University populations have been very effective pox incubators. And its increasingly clear that younger people may not suffer much from pox but can certainly spread it to people who do. And they all want home for Christmas. With Granny.
So, lock down the students? Who will enforce that? Let them home with the inevitable massive spike and deaths? Which negates the purpose of the coming Bonfire Month not lockdown lockdown.
Its very very easy to hurl rocks at these tossers in government - especially when they keep handing out rocks and painting targets on themselves. But we could have Tony Blair himself in office right now and this would still be a shit show because there are no right answers and a myriad of wrong ones.
I beg to differ on your last point. Any other PM in my living memory (so right back to Wilson) would have handled this bettter than the current buffoon IHMO.
Blair (managing the message), Thatcher (determination) and then May (eye for detail) would be my top choices; each would have worked themselves to a standstill to manage this. Of course they each have shortcomings and the situation is very difficult but Johnson lacks on all necessary fronts: clarity of communication, decisiveness, graft, detail and determination.
I agree that almost anyone would have handled it better - and we'd have fewer deaths and fewer cases - but we'd still be in the same place of not being able to function properly as a society and an economy without massive infection rates.
It can be done. Blair killed it on asylum in the early noughties (note: not on large-scale legal migration, but he did on asylum & it bought him a few years) and Macron is doing it on Islamism now. Also, see Denmark and Austria on co-opting. The EU has also become more hawkish in general.
.
One comment which Blair made at a private PLP meeting has stuck with me. People in general accept a reasonably orderly immigration system; almost nobody believes that all immigration should be banned. But they recoil from chaos - people smuggled in lorries, hanging on to the underside of Eurostar trains, struggling in on dinghies. Any Government, including one that is liberal on immgration, has to crack down on that in order to get a hearing at all.
It's a bit like criminal justice in that way. You can adopt a more or less strict system for locking people up, but people need to feel it's applied consistently and not cunningly evaded at every turn. The same applies to taxation - people pay up, but don't want to see Amazon and McDonalds paying fourpence halfpenny. Starmer's pitch is going to be partly about getting a grip with serious government, and I think a lot of surprising people will find that quite welcome.
This is the Twitter post of a party that knows it has lost the argument and is losing to Labour badly.
He means "worse than the donkeys in the Tory party leadership expected". Of course he has to pretend that no one else expected it either, but everyone knows it's not true.
Nobody expected it to be like this. Apart from the leader of the opposition and the government’s own scientists, obviously.
I've noticed a lot more bleating about Trump stealing the election in the last day or so, does this mean there are some polls that show him doing better recently?
No, it's because there have been more examples of the GOP using the Courts to try and steal the election.
Yep - would also suggest that if the polls were narrowing worryingly the tone of the comments would be concern about Trump winning legitimately not illegitimately.
Increasing fears of stealing the election are inversely proportional to Trump's position in the polls. People are terrified he's going to win, so express their fears based on the most realistic route to it actually happening.
Belgium 1,002 deaths/1m on worldometer, joining Peru and San Marino.
I’m glad I read that twice. I was appalled at San Marino’s death rate until I realised the figure was per capita.
Does anyone know why Belgium is doing so badly? Heck, they’re even doing worse than we are and that must take some effort.
I'm not sure they're doing enough testing - the positivity rate in Liege is 41% - across England its 6-7%, with "hot spots" in the teens.
what exactly is testing achieving? Hospitalisations and death I get to some extent although deaths are being inflated due to the dying with covid not of it , however testing generally is achieving nothing in controlling the illlness is it?
If its leading to isolation and contact tracing then it may be helping to slow the spread - especially if its picking up asymptomatic carriers via contacts. Guernsey now has 10 known cases - all in quarantine, all identified via test, track & trace, except for the initial case (which is a worry).
I understand that the 10 cases were related on one individual who came back from the mainland having tested positive, and then visited her (I think) relations on the Island before the end of the quarantine period.
Given there will be more cows than people there it is absolutely useless as a measure for countries.
Out by a factor of over 20 (what is it with Nats & Numbers?)
Also population density is around 3 times Belgium's so we must be doing something right.
It's not difficult. The virus doesn't "blow on the wind" - it moves with people. So control the movement of people, control the virus. Something the UK has failed to do, but successful countries like NZ, Australia, Singapore, Japan & South Korea (and Guernsey) have all done.
Hi Carlotta. Do you know if Sark is allowing visitors at the moment?
Same quarantine rules as Guernsey - test on arrival, then 14 days self quarantine, robustly policed with fines up to £10,000 for breaches.
I guess the hotels are open then but I wonder how you quarantine in a hotel there?
I love Sark. It used to be my favourite place.
But aren't folks there a bit, well - sarky?
It used to be full of seasonal workers who drive the horse and carts and work in the local bars and hotels. The locals are invariably very rich indeed. It's a tax haven. So the locals use their houses as accommodation addresses. The owner of the local bike shop was director of several hundred businesses and also ran one of the local cafes and was the Island constable. It's like a cross between Whisky Galore and Local Hero. But the real attraction is that there are no cars. Everyone uses bicycles or walks and the hotels use tractors to pick up their guests. Oh and the government is feudal
Somewhere around here (in Seattle) I've got a diary written by a woman on Sark (a local I think) during the German occupation in WW2. Very interesting to say the least.
Sounds like you got to know the place fairly well yourself.
HYUFD: you miss my point, really the Trumps are not worried by the Constitution, it is power they want. Everything else can go to ........
So what, they cannot overturn the US constitution without a 2/3 majority in Congress and the states and the armed forces and the police and the SC and the FBI etc affirm an oath of loyalty to defend the constitution above all else
And we now have a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees in a 6-3 conservative majority to tell us what the constitution means.
HYUFD: you miss my point, really the Trumps are not worried by the Constitution, it is power they want. Everything else can go to ........
So what, they cannot overturn the US constitution without a 2/3 majority in Congress and the states and the armed forces and the police and the SC and the FBI etc affirm an oath of loyalty to defend the constitution above all else
It doesn't matter if they can't overturn the constitution if they can ignore it and get corrupt Judges to help with that.
As I and many others said on every other occasion he has come back, "he's a busted flush... nobody cares any more".
One day, we'll be right. Maybe.
The last thing we need is Trump's tapeworm back over here cheering on the fascists and jackboots brigade, but I guess it is all part of the decline of Britain.
Split the vote on the right would be good news. Labour has consolidated the left wing vote now
Not when Corbyn and Len have set up a true socialist party.
It will be another CUK. If they can’t get people like me then how do they intend to win?
The reality is that Labour voters and members support Keir and think Corbyn was bad. There simply isn’t enough support for him.
My two brothers and all their friends would join, as would large numbers of the N London Labour Party, you fail to realize that true socialist control of the party is more important than winning elections.
So, the ultimate goal is total control of an unelectable party?
They don't care about electability. Being smug and self-righteous will do.
The self-regarding orgy of Corbyn tribute tweets post-defeat last year was instructive and deeply depressing. It was all about how Corbyn made the tweeter feel about themselves. This didn't just include the ground troops (who often react in that sort of way in all parties in truth) but a lot of newer MPs and so on.
There was very little sense that there are a group of people in whose interest the Labour Party was formed to act, and who they'd let down.
I know there are a lot of Labour members who were Corbyn supporters but quietly feel that way and accept the point - and the election of Starmer suggests there may be quite a few. But the sheer volume of voices of people who didn't give a damn as long as they personally felt righteous was a bit dismal.
The Selzer poll in Iowa is the first one that has given me real concern.
Very good A+ pollster that gives Trump a 7 point lead. Sienna (another A4) pollster gave Biden a 3 point lead but was taken a good week earlier.
If Selzer is accurate there has been a significant swing back to Trump over the last week and it would not bode well for Biden in other parts of the midwest. If other polls begin to show any sort of late swing I will be nervous.
Having said that the Selzer poll still has sufficient swing against Trump from 2016 to see him lose if it were replicated in every state.
Even the best pollster, and Selzer, is one, has an outlier. Look at the Biden Wisconsin +17. And I never hang my hat on one poll. The 30 point swing to Trump with independents from the last Selzer poll looks "interesting".
I agree but it has given me pause for thought. What I want to see is whether there is any sign of a significant shift over the final days from other pollsters. If nothing much appears then it looks more than likely that Selzer is an outlier (or Iowa is behaving differently to the rest of the country). I need some more recently taken polls to steady my nerves! Very nice to see you back by the way.
The Selzer poll in Iowa is the first one that has given me real concern.
Very good A+ pollster that gives Trump a 7 point lead. Sienna (another A4) pollster gave Biden a 3 point lead but was taken a good week earlier.
If Selzer is accurate there has been a significant swing back to Trump over the last week and it would not bode well for Biden in other parts of the midwest. If other polls begin to show any sort of late swing I will be nervous.
Having said that the Selzer poll still has sufficient swing against Trump from 2016 to see him lose if it were replicated in every state.
I think Emerson (an A Rated pollster) are doing a super sunday poll release today of a mass of states, so will be very interesting to see, as their last national poll a few days ago had Biden up by only 5%, so IF there is some swing back I would expect these polls to show it. They are releasing them in batches of 3 states I think, first 3 are Michigan, Iowa and Ohio at 9am EST (2pm UK time) so if there are swings to Trump in those states, (Iowa already mentioned above) then HYUFD and Mr Ed might be smiling more.
I wonder what Keir's favoured immigration policy will be.
His natural political match in the world - Jacinda - was pro strictly controlled migration. For now he has backed Johnson's original deal which allows for that to occur.
I wonder if we end up with Starmer 2024 as 2017 Labour with immigration controls but pitched in a new way. Jacinda pitched is as resource issue. Surely a few votes in that, to go above the 40% mark and to bring back some of the voters lost to UKIP/BXP.
It's rather amusing watching all the Democrat bed wetters clutching their pearls, pulling up their skirts and running for the hills at any point of divergence from the narrative of a Biden win. It rather reminds me of Labour supporters prior to the 1997 GE. Scared by the the polling miss and the shock victory of John Major in 1992 they didn't believe the evidence of their own eyes until the landslide started to filter through on election night.
My view is that Biden is heading for a comfortable EC win - 322 - 216 - Biden sweeps the rust belt and flips AZ, NC NE 2, ME 2 and edges GA for the historic surprise of the night. Trump holds the battlegrounds of FL, TX, OH and IA :
But there is always the possibility of a major polling miss, remote though it is, and I don’t think it bedwetting to be concerned about the danger of Republicans stealing an election even halfway close in Pennsylvania.
Indeed. However the scale of the polling miss this time would be of such epic proportions that it would make Herod being overwhelming favourite as Greatest Infant Protector in History look like a minor hiccup at the margin. Most pollsters have adjusted their methodology to account for sampling errors last time.
Even I'm finding the Spitfire/1940 worship remarkably tedious and facile now.
Indeed. It was 80 years ago. When I was a schoolkid it was living memory, many of my friends' fathers served and mine had his house bombed. But 80 years previously? We certainly didn't fetishise the Boer War. It's time we moved on.
I wouldn't say move on, it's a proud part of our history and fine to celebrate it, but I agree on fetishisation.
I just think it's massively overdone - to be honest, I'm fed up of so many things being overdone these days: Pride (lasting nearly 2 months this year - it used to just be a weekend), Stoptober, BHM turned up to 11, Movember, Poppies in early October, Halloween lasting a month, Christmas starting in September, Spitfires all year round..
Just stop it. Jeez.
Movember is the only one of those I'd disagree with. Halloween can be done the final week of October it doesn't take a month but growing a moustache takes time, (most people at least) can't do that properly in a weekend.
Final week of October? Halloween isn't a season, it's a day.
If Halloween falls on a Wednesday it's entirely reasonable to have a Halloween Party on the Saturday beforehand. Nothing unreasonable about that whatsoever.
I'm not a Halloween supporter but would you say the same about Christmas?
That it's reasonable to have Christmas Parties the weekend before Christmas?
Belgium 1,002 deaths/1m on worldometer, joining Peru and San Marino.
I’m glad I read that twice. I was appalled at San Marino’s death rate until I realised the figure was per capita.
Does anyone know why Belgium is doing so badly? Heck, they’re even doing worse than we are and that must take some effort.
I'm not sure they're doing enough testing - the positivity rate in Liege is 41% - across England its 6-7%, with "hot spots" in the teens.
what exactly is testing achieving? Hospitalisations and death I get to some extent although deaths are being inflated due to the dying with covid not of it , however testing generally is achieving nothing in controlling the illlness is it?
If its leading to isolation and contact tracing then it may be helping to slow the spread - especially if its picking up asymptomatic carriers via contacts. Guernsey now has 10 known cases - all in quarantine, all identified via test, track & trace, except for the initial case (which is a worry).
I understand that the 10 cases were related on one individual who came back from the mainland having tested positive, and then visited her (I think) relations on the Island before the end of the quarantine period.
Given there will be more cows than people there it is absolutely useless as a measure for countries.
Out by a factor of over 20 (what is it with Nats & Numbers?)
Also population density is around 3 times Belgium's so we must be doing something right.
It's not difficult. The virus doesn't "blow on the wind" - it moves with people. So control the movement of people, control the virus. Something the UK has failed to do, but successful countries like NZ, Australia, Singapore, Japan & South Korea (and Guernsey) have all done.
The entire population is a little bigger than Ayr , a small town. It is an island, a tiny one. It bears no resemblance to a country with borders, large cities or airports etc and so cannot be used in any way as a comparison.
And yet its followed the same strategies as other, much larger, countries which have also proved successful. New Zealand big enough for you?
Once again in the arsehole of nowhere and totally different to UK, very rural , and isolated, nothing at all like UK. Remote isolated islands can get away with it , just a little bit harder in heavily populated developed countries in Europe.
This is the Twitter post of a party that knows it has lost the argument and is losing to Labour badly.
He means "worse than the donkeys in the Tory party leadership expected". Of course he has to pretend that no one else expected it either, but everyone knows it's not true.
Every single one of the graphs that were shown yesterday could have been drawn showing exactly the same thing two weeks ago. The only exception would have been the "R" rates, and some of the up-to-date figures on case numbers, both of which actually work against the lockdown narratives.
As I and many others said on every other occasion he has come back, "he's a busted flush... nobody cares any more".
One day, we'll be right. Maybe.
The last thing we need is Trump's tapeworm back over here cheering on the fascists and jackboots brigade, but I guess it is all part of the decline of Britain.
Split the vote on the right would be good news. Labour has consolidated the left wing vote now
Not when Corbyn and Len have set up a true socialist party.
It will be another CUK. If they can’t get people like me then how do they intend to win?
The reality is that Labour voters and members support Keir and think Corbyn was bad. There simply isn’t enough support for him.
My two brothers and all their friends would join, as would large numbers of the N London Labour Party, you fail to realize that true socialist control of the party is more important than winning elections.
So, the ultimate goal is total control of an unelectable party?
They don't care about electability. Being smug and self-righteous will do.
The self-regarding orgy of Corbyn tribute tweets post-defeat last year was instructive and deeply depressing. It was all about how Corbyn made the tweeter feel about themselves. This didn't just include the ground troops (who often react in that sort of way in all parties in truth) but a lot of newer MPs and so on.
There was very little sense that there are a group of people in whose interest the Labour Party was formed to act, and who they'd let down.
I know there are a lot of Labour members who were Corbyn supporters but quietly feel that way and accept the point - and the election of Starmer suggests there may be quite a few. But the sheer volume of voices of people who didn't give a damn as long as they personally felt righteous was a bit dismal.
Thats just politics though. On the fringes you always get "fruitcakes and loonies" who smell their own farts and think its flowers. They are correct. Therefore everyone else is wrong. And as they are so clever to be right everyone else must be stupid. Its the same with the Daily Mail set who insist anyone on benefits is on crack.
The difference of course is around how left and right organise. The left are happy to infinitely split and argue about which splinter group is pure and how the rest are all traitors. The right are just as happy to go at each other but can usually pull it back together when it comes to elections.
But it's alarming that you can have a mainline TV station running what is effectively a 7 minute infomercial for a politician
Have you not seen CNN, MSNBC, NBC etc etc?
I have but I've never seen them run a seven minute unpaid for infomercial. In fact I can't think of any mainline TV station anywhere where I've seen that. This is QVC
The uncertainty of FL can be best highlighted by two A+ polls today , NYT have Biden +3, ABC have Trump +2. Both within MOE ofc but its clear signs its going to be very close but to me that favours Trump which is why like many on here , I feel Trump will squeeze out a win. Which again brings me back to PA. The polls only need to be badly out in this state and within MOE on one or two others for Biden to narrowly lose, or win but be in Trump 'fraud' territory
Some pointless bickering about partisan point scoring again - who bloody cares right now.
Never mind the all regions not national lockdown not lockdown. At some point in December Shagger will be faced with a harsh reality. If he unlocks the country back to Tier 1 to allow Christmas to take place, then the pox is going to run rampant again in January. If he doesn't unlock for Christmas then he faces mass disobedience of the law as people say "fuck this" and have what might be a last Christmas with elderly relatives before the pox runs rampant again in January.
And then we have the elephant in the room - students. University populations have been very effective pox incubators. And its increasingly clear that younger people may not suffer much from pox but can certainly spread it to people who do. And they all want home for Christmas. With Granny.
So, lock down the students? Who will enforce that? Let them home with the inevitable massive spike and deaths? Which negates the purpose of the coming Bonfire Month not lockdown lockdown.
Its very very easy to hurl rocks at these tossers in government - especially when they keep handing out rocks and painting targets on themselves. But we could have Tony Blair himself in office right now and this would still be a shit show because there are no right answers and a myriad of wrong ones.
There's a really good question here: how does the US get unfucked (politically)?
"Populism seems to be in decline everywhere, its appeal is mostly proportional to the length of time since it was last tried."
A typical liberal globalist response which views it as an aberration. It's just as I predicted: those that say this have learned nothing.
You will get populism again (be it of the far-left or far-right variety) unless mainstream parties address the root concerns that drive it - namely, concerns about economic stagnation, intergenerational inequality and mass migration.
I didn't say it had gone for good, it's always been there and it comes and goes. However I think you'd better predict which it will do based on the correlation "length of time since last time it was tried, and intensity with which you tried it" than based on "economic stagnation, intergenerational inequality and mass migration".
Populism never "works" because it proposes simple solutions to complex problems. However, voters vote them in when they're talking about the complex problems that other moderate politicians are ignoring.
So, the correct response is to both give them enough rope *and* to then park your tanks on their lawn.
Far too many seem to think the answer is just the former.
People switch to populists when they see the existing elites as self-serving (and let's face it, many Western elites are).
And, they then patronise or insult voters who share those concerns on top (bigots, racists, idiots etc.) which makes some want to burn their house down.
We are currently governed by an elite where appointment to any post seems to depend on who you went to school with or who you are married to or your loyalty to the leader, rather than any competence or expertise.
It is an elite which has prioritised giving its friends and relations and those who donate to it lucrative posts and contracts.
It is an elite which seems to think that insulting those who do their job is good governance.
It is an elite which has done everything it can to avoid any sort of Parliamentary scrutiny.
It is an elite which seems to think that anyone opposing it is some sort of traitor or enemy and its outriders in the press are very free with such accusations, on the basis of no evidence.
Beams and motes, beams and motes ......
This righteous indignation stuff is really rather tedious. Yes, the Government is crap, Boris is awful etc. and you know I agree.
So, what is the point in continually reposting it with this "beams and motes" stuff as if I somehow don't get it?
It's just not very interesting and it adds little to the debate.
I'm interested in the future of Western democracy and civilisation here and how we defend and fix it.
Insightful posts please.
The point you are missing is that in your berating of the liberal elites you fail to notice that those who claim to be fixing the problems those liberal elites have ignored are behaving in much the same way. So they are not fixing anything, they are making matters much worse and will help damage Western democracy and civilisation further. See for instance the concerns being expressed about the young losing faith in democracy.
My concern with the current government is that they appear to me to have little real attachment to democracy or the practices and principles which underpin and sustain it. So their continuation in power will likely, IMO, harm rather than help repair Western democracy and civilisation.
In your continuing attacks on liberal elites you are missing this important point, it seems to me, and the very real danger that Western democracy faces from those who are now in power who are using discontent with those liberal elites and their failings to aggrandise themselves rather than solve those problems.
One small anecdote: a good friend voted for Brexit because he felt that it was time for a shake up. It was a 51/49 decision for him. He now regrets it largely because of the way it has been handled since. But what has really turned him against this government is its cronyism and Cummings. It really pisses him off.
Don’t underestimate the effect of slow-burning anger at stuff like this. You may think of it as simply “righteous indignation”. For others it can determine their vote.
He's right. If one has to choose between bad options, then disrupting children's education is a worse outcome than accepting a higher level of COVID infection.
A couple of examples of lockdown breaking, there are more violent ones as well as idiots use it as an excuse for violence
In Madrid, the Municipal Police intervened last Halloween night in 81 private parties at homes, in 18 bottles and in 10 entertainment venues open after closing time, according to municipal sources informed Europa Press. In some of them there were a number of people higher than allowed and no masks or other security measures were used against COVID-19. 11:45 On the Balearic island of Ibiza, the Civil Guard has dismantled this morning a party with 120 people in a house in Can Furnet, town of Jesús, municipality of Santa Eulària in which they celebrated Halloween, as reported by the Office Communication Peripheral of the Balearic Command
It's rather amusing watching all the Democrat bed wetters clutching their pearls, pulling up their skirts and running for the hills at any point of divergence from the narrative of a Biden win. It rather reminds me of Labour supporters prior to the 1997 GE. Scared by the the polling miss and the shock victory of John Major in 1992 they didn't believe the evidence of their own eyes until the landslide started to filter through on election night.
My view is that Biden is heading for a comfortable EC win - 322 - 216 - Biden sweeps the rust belt and flips AZ, NC NE 2, ME 2 and edges GA for the historic surprise of the night. Trump holds the battlegrounds of FL, TX, OH and IA :
But there is always the possibility of a major polling miss, remote though it is, and I don’t think it bedwetting to be concerned about the danger of Republicans stealing an election even halfway close in Pennsylvania.
Indeed. However the scale of the polling miss this time would be of such epic proportions that it would make Herod being overwhelming favourite as Greatest Infant Protector in History look like a minor hiccup at the margin. Most pollsters have adjusted their methodology to account for sampling errors last time.
Biden wins, only the scale is in doubt.
That would be true if the people paying for the polls did not have a visceral and all-encompassing hatred of one candidate.
But the fact is, they do. For them, no poll lead for Biden is too great. And good polls for trump are genuinely almost impossible to stomach.
As I and many others said on every other occasion he has come back, "he's a busted flush... nobody cares any more".
One day, we'll be right. Maybe.
The last thing we need is Trump's tapeworm back over here cheering on the fascists and jackboots brigade, but I guess it is all part of the decline of Britain.
Split the vote on the right would be good news. Labour has consolidated the left wing vote now
Not when Corbyn and Len have set up a true socialist party.
It will be another CUK. If they can’t get people like me then how do they intend to win?
The reality is that Labour voters and members support Keir and think Corbyn was bad. There simply isn’t enough support for him.
My two brothers and all their friends would join, as would large numbers of the N London Labour Party, you fail to realize that true socialist control of the party is more important than winning elections.
So, the ultimate goal is total control of an unelectable party?
They don't care about electability. Being smug and self-righteous will do.
It sounds like the perfect place for them. If Labour can clear them out and the Tories retake their party and expel the Bluekippers then perhaps the country can return to something like politics instead of Reality TV
This is the Twitter post of a party that knows it has lost the argument and is losing to Labour badly.
He means "worse than the donkeys in the Tory party leadership expected". Of course he has to pretend that no one else expected it either, but everyone knows it's not true.
Every single one of the graphs that were shown yesterday could have been drawn showing exactly the same thing two weeks ago. The only exception would have been the "R" rates, and some of the up-to-date figures on case numbers, both of which actually work against the lockdown narratives.
A couple of weeks ago it wasn't known of the Tier system etc would be sufficient to bring R back down and stop an increasing spread from the young to the old.
If the Federal Judge rules that the drive-thru votes in Texas are invalid, where does the case go from there?
Does his Judgement over-rule the Texas Supreme Court?
And if it does, can his Judgement be appealed to a Federal Appeals Court?
And after that would it ultimately go to the US Supreme Court?
IANAL but IIUC: 1) Yes, it can go to a Federal Appeals Court 2) After that either side could appeal it to SCOTUS, but it's up to SCOTUS whether or not to take it
It I was a ratfucking partisan judge I think what I'd do would be to just tell them to make sure they had a separate count for the ballots cast in the disputed way, then tell everybody to come back in a week. In all probability it will turn out not to be important in which case you can make some reasonable-sounding judge-like ruling, but if an important race turns out to turn on these ballots you can turn the ratfucking up to 11, and also start the clock ticking later, reducing the time for appeals.
I wish EiT would join the leader-writing team on PB - his posts are such good value.
In Louisiana in 1991, the race for Governor came down to two choices:
>> Edwin Edwards "the Cajun Fox" former Democratic Congressman & former 3-term governor with a checked reputation (to put it mildly) for questionable financial dealings ("It was illegal for him to give me the money, but it was not illegal for me to take it") and a fondness for gambling and women (not necessarily in that order).
>> David Duke, notorious, first in Louisiana and then nationally, as a neo-Nazi (as a teenager he used to parade around Baton Rouge in a storm-trooper uniform) turned Klu Klux Klansman, who was eager to break into electoral politics (running as a Democrat) by appealing to both hard core racists & fascists, but (like a proto-Trumpsky) to much broader audience of conservatives turned of by corrupt politics and wary of Edwards' appeal to & for Blacks.
Interestingly, Duke shared his rival's love of high stakes and hot women (and visa versa). Both men were frequent visitors as Las Vegas, both high-rollers flown in by casinos & given free lodging, dining, etc., etc. With respect to sex, honors were about even: Duke had published (anonymously) a pornographic novel, while Edwards was (at that time) on wife #2 who was about 30 years younger than wife #1 (he is today with wife #3 who is about 50 years his junior; they met as pen-pals when he was serving time at Angola State Prison).
Or as Edwin Edwards himself said during the campaign, "David Duke and me are both a lot alike - we're both wizards under the sheets."
AND that year many cars in the Pelican State displayed this bumper-sticker:
HYUFD: you miss my point, really the Trumps are not worried by the Constitution, it is power they want. Everything else can go to ........
So what, they cannot overturn the US constitution without a 2/3 majority in Congress and the states and the armed forces and the police and the SC and the FBI etc affirm an oath of loyalty to defend the constitution above all else
And we now have a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees in a 6-3 conservative majority to tell us what the constitution means.
So what they are all justices and legal scholars, none of them are going to read into the Constitution what is not there on any interpretation ie Trump cannot just dismiss and suspend Congress on a whim, we have an unwritten Constitution based on the sovereignty of Crown in parliament, the US constitution however is written down and sacrosanct and even the most conservative judges like Clarence Thomas will not ignore what is clearly written down in it
Even I'm finding the Spitfire/1940 worship remarkably tedious and facile now.
Indeed. It was 80 years ago. When I was a schoolkid it was living memory, many of my friends' fathers served and mine had his house bombed. But 80 years previously? We certainly didn't fetishise the Boer War. It's time we moved on.
We did fetishise the Boer War for a long time. Indeed I am old enough to remember a few elderly Boer War veterans at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.
There are multiple terraces named for Boer War battles and Generals in Leicester, ironically now full of Imperial immigrants. Perhaps the most subtle is nearly all football grounds having a Kop. This is derived from the Afrikaans word for small hill on the veldt, and thereby the place with the best view.
If you're going to go on a murderous rampage in a costume then Halloween seems like a depressingly clever day to do it. People could see the killer and not even think twice about it.
It's rather amusing watching all the Democrat bed wetters clutching their pearls, pulling up their skirts and running for the hills at any point of divergence from the narrative of a Biden win. It rather reminds me of Labour supporters prior to the 1997 GE. Scared by the the polling miss and the shock victory of John Major in 1992 they didn't believe the evidence of their own eyes until the landslide started to filter through on election night.
My view is that Biden is heading for a comfortable EC win - 322 - 216 - Biden sweeps the rust belt and flips AZ, NC NE 2, ME 2 and edges GA for the historic surprise of the night. Trump holds the battlegrounds of FL, TX, OH and IA :
But there is always the possibility of a major polling miss, remote though it is, and I don’t think it bedwetting to be concerned about the danger of Republicans stealing an election even halfway close in Pennsylvania.
Indeed. However the scale of the polling miss this time would be of such epic proportions that it would make Herod being overwhelming favourite as Greatest Infant Protector in History look like a minor hiccup at the margin. Most pollsters have adjusted their methodology to account for sampling errors last time.
Biden wins, only the scale is in doubt.
That would be true if the people paying for the polls did not have a visceral and all-encompassing hatred of one candidate.
But the fact is, they do. For them, no poll lead for Biden is too great. And good polls for trump are genuinely almost impossible to stomach.
Pollsters are people.
Forgive me but that's twaddle. It's not who pays for the poll but the integrity of the pollster that matters. Fox News is hardly pro Biden but it employs Beacon Research (D) and Shaw and Co Research (R) to provide their polling and is A rated. The polls are widely reported on Fox News despite most showing Biden leads.
Belgium 1,002 deaths/1m on worldometer, joining Peru and San Marino.
I’m glad I read that twice. I was appalled at San Marino’s death rate until I realised the figure was per capita.
Does anyone know why Belgium is doing so badly? Heck, they’re even doing worse than we are and that must take some effort.
I'm not sure they're doing enough testing - the positivity rate in Liege is 41% - across England its 6-7%, with "hot spots" in the teens.
what exactly is testing achieving? Hospitalisations and death I get to some extent although deaths are being inflated due to the dying with covid not of it , however testing generally is achieving nothing in controlling the illlness is it?
If its leading to isolation and contact tracing then it may be helping to slow the spread - especially if its picking up asymptomatic carriers via contacts. Guernsey now has 10 known cases - all in quarantine, all identified via test, track & trace, except for the initial case (which is a worry).
I understand that the 10 cases were related on one individual who came back from the mainland having tested positive, and then visited her (I think) relations on the Island before the end of the quarantine period.
Given there will be more cows than people there it is absolutely useless as a measure for countries.
Out by a factor of over 20 (what is it with Nats & Numbers?)
Also population density is around 3 times Belgium's so we must be doing something right.
It's not difficult. The virus doesn't "blow on the wind" - it moves with people. So control the movement of people, control the virus. Something the UK has failed to do, but successful countries like NZ, Australia, Singapore, Japan & South Korea (and Guernsey) have all done.
Hi Carlotta. Do you know if Sark is allowing visitors at the moment?
Same quarantine rules as Guernsey - test on arrival, then 14 days self quarantine, robustly policed with fines up to £10,000 for breaches.
I guess the hotels are open then but I wonder how you quarantine in a hotel there?
I love Sark. It used to be my favourite place.
But aren't folks there a bit, well - sarky?
It used to be full of seasonal workers who drive the horse and carts and work in the local bars and hotels. The locals are invariably very rich indeed. It's a tax haven. So the locals use their houses as accommodation addresses. The owner of the local bike shop was director of several hundred businesses and also ran one of the local cafes and was the Island constable. It's like a cross between Whisky Galore and Local Hero. But the real attraction is that there are no cars. Everyone uses bicycles or walks and the hotels use tractors to pick up their guests. Oh and the government is feudal
All the local tax haven islands are similar , there for the Tories and the silver spoon mob to plank all their ill gotten gains before filtering it to their far off tax havens.
Even I'm finding the Spitfire/1940 worship remarkably tedious and facile now.
Indeed. It was 80 years ago. When I was a schoolkid it was living memory, many of my friends' fathers served and mine had his house bombed. But 80 years previously? We certainly didn't fetishise the Boer War. It's time we moved on.
We did fetishise the Boer War for a long time. Indeed I am old enough to remember a few elderly Boer War veterans at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.
There are multiple terraces named for Boer War battles and Generals in Leicester, ironically now full of Imperial immigrants. Perhaps the most subtle is nearly all football grounds having a Kop. This is derived from the Afrikaans word for small hill on the veldt, and thereby the place with the best view.
Memorials, street names etc of course last a long time, long after the events they commemorate have faded from common memory. Until recently you could claim that Aldershot memorialised the Indian Mutiny, as there was a pub called the Heroes of Lucknow
The Selzer poll in Iowa is the first one that has given me real concern.
Very good A+ pollster that gives Trump a 7 point lead. Sienna (another A4) pollster gave Biden a 3 point lead but was taken a good week earlier.
If Selzer is accurate there has been a significant swing back to Trump over the last week and it would not bode well for Biden in other parts of the midwest. If other polls begin to show any sort of late swing I will be nervous.
Having said that the Selzer poll still has sufficient swing against Trump from 2016 to see him lose if it were replicated in every state.
I think Emerson (an A Rated pollster) are doing a super sunday poll release today of a mass of states, so will be very interesting to see, as their last national poll a few days ago had Biden up by only 5%, so IF there is some swing back I would expect these polls to show it. They are releasing them in batches of 3 states I think, first 3 are Michigan, Iowa and Ohio at 9am EST (2pm UK time) so if there are swings to Trump in those states, (Iowa already mentioned above) then HYUFD and Mr Ed might be smiling more.
The Selzer poll in Iowa is the first one that has given me real concern.
Very good A+ pollster that gives Trump a 7 point lead. Sienna (another A4) pollster gave Biden a 3 point lead but was taken a good week earlier.
If Selzer is accurate there has been a significant swing back to Trump over the last week and it would not bode well for Biden in other parts of the midwest. If other polls begin to show any sort of late swing I will be nervous.
Having said that the Selzer poll still has sufficient swing against Trump from 2016 to see him lose if it were replicated in every state.
I think Emerson (an A Rated pollster) are doing a super sunday poll release today of a mass of states, so will be very interesting to see, as their last national poll a few days ago had Biden up by only 5%, so IF there is some swing back I would expect these polls to show it. They are releasing them in batches of 3 states I think, first 3 are Michigan, Iowa and Ohio at 9am EST (2pm UK time) so if there are swings to Trump in those states, (Iowa already mentioned above) then HYUFD and Mr Ed might be smiling more.
Even if there is a late swing (and there is very little evidence of it) most of the votes in this election have already been cast.
He's right. If one has to choose between bad options, then disrupting children's education is a worse outcome than accepting a higher level of COVID infection.
Doesn't that depend on how much disruption and how much infection?
In the same way that Lockdown 2 was never unthinkable- it was just how much pressure from infection rates was needed to overcome understandable reluctance to impose it.
Yes, the Republican Party legitimizes hate. Never more so than under Trump. Even if he can’t get himself re-elected, there will remain many would-be senators, representatives, governors, mayors, happy that their appeal to electors should be based on shared hatred.
HYUFD: you miss my point, really the Trumps are not worried by the Constitution, it is power they want. Everything else can go to ........
So what, they cannot overturn the US constitution without a 2/3 majority in Congress and the states and the armed forces and the police and the SC and the FBI etc affirm an oath of loyalty to defend the constitution above all else
And we now have a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees in a 6-3 conservative majority to tell us what the constitution means.
So what they are all justices and legal scholars, none of them are going to read into the Constitution what is not there on any interpretation ie Trump cannot just dismiss and suspend Congress on a whim, we have an unwritten Constitution based on the sovereignty of Crown in parliament, the US constitution however is written down and sacrosanct and even the most conservative judges like Clarence Thomas will not ignore what is clearly written down in it
Have you seen the 3 vote dissent in the Pennslyvania case? 3 SCOTUS justices saying that ballots posted by election day but received after should be separated out, counted, and then possibly binned if they would 'change the result'. When judges think votes should be counted or not based on who will win if they are, to say nothing of considering the result to exist separately from the ballots, they aren't acting as legal scholars they are acting as partisan actors. There's no reason to believe they wouldn't be willing to be overtly partisan in other way.
We used to start a new year on Lady Day, in the spring. I'd like to suggest that we move the start of the new year again, this time a month earlier to December 1st.
This will have the advantage of aligning the Western calendar year to the Meteorological year. And it would end 2020 a month early.
The Selzer poll in Iowa is the first one that has given me real concern.
Very good A+ pollster that gives Trump a 7 point lead. Sienna (another A4) pollster gave Biden a 3 point lead but was taken a good week earlier.
If Selzer is accurate there has been a significant swing back to Trump over the last week and it would not bode well for Biden in other parts of the midwest. If other polls begin to show any sort of late swing I will be nervous.
Having said that the Selzer poll still has sufficient swing against Trump from 2016 to see him lose if it were replicated in every state.
I think Emerson (an A Rated pollster) are doing a super sunday poll release today of a mass of states, so will be very interesting to see, as their last national poll a few days ago had Biden up by only 5%, so IF there is some swing back I would expect these polls to show it. They are releasing them in batches of 3 states I think, first 3 are Michigan, Iowa and Ohio at 9am EST (2pm UK time) so if there are swings to Trump in those states, (Iowa already mentioned above) then HYUFD and Mr Ed might be smiling more.
The Selzer poll in Iowa is the first one that has given me real concern.
Very good A+ pollster that gives Trump a 7 point lead. Sienna (another A4) pollster gave Biden a 3 point lead but was taken a good week earlier.
If Selzer is accurate there has been a significant swing back to Trump over the last week and it would not bode well for Biden in other parts of the midwest. If other polls begin to show any sort of late swing I will be nervous.
Having said that the Selzer poll still has sufficient swing against Trump from 2016 to see him lose if it were replicated in every state.
I think Emerson (an A Rated pollster) are doing a super sunday poll release today of a mass of states, so will be very interesting to see, as their last national poll a few days ago had Biden up by only 5%, so IF there is some swing back I would expect these polls to show it. They are releasing them in batches of 3 states I think, first 3 are Michigan, Iowa and Ohio at 9am EST (2pm UK time) so if there are swings to Trump in those states, (Iowa already mentioned above) then HYUFD and Mr Ed might be smiling more.
Even if there is a late swing (and there is very little evidence of it) most of the votes in this election have already been cast.
Most Democrats have already voted, most Trump 2016 voters though will still vote on the day
It's rather amusing watching all the Democrat bed wetters clutching their pearls, pulling up their skirts and running for the hills at any point of divergence from the narrative of a Biden win. It rather reminds me of Labour supporters prior to the 1997 GE. Scared by the the polling miss and the shock victory of John Major in 1992 they didn't believe the evidence of their own eyes until the landslide started to filter through on election night.
My view is that Biden is heading for a comfortable EC win - 322 - 216 - Biden sweeps the rust belt and flips AZ, NC NE 2, ME 2 and edges GA for the historic surprise of the night. Trump holds the battlegrounds of FL, TX, OH and IA :
But there is always the possibility of a major polling miss, remote though it is, and I don’t think it bedwetting to be concerned about the danger of Republicans stealing an election even halfway close in Pennsylvania.
Indeed. However the scale of the polling miss this time would be of such epic proportions that it would make Herod being overwhelming favourite as Greatest Infant Protector in History look like a minor hiccup at the margin. Most pollsters have adjusted their methodology to account for sampling errors last time.
Biden wins, only the scale is in doubt.
That would be true if the people paying for the polls did not have a visceral and all-encompassing hatred of one candidate.
But the fact is, they do. For them, no poll lead for Biden is too great. And good polls for trump are genuinely almost impossible to stomach.
Pollsters are people.
But if they are using proper polling techniques and are ethical it doesn't matter a jot what their personal bias is. Several of the high profile pollsters in the UK were established by very politically motivated individuals but we trust they are unbiased and we can check what they have done.
The ones in the States are a mixture of genuine and voodoo polls and it is harder to tell which is which, but you can have a pretty good go at doing so.
In terms of your last sentence that may well be true but that does not impact the validity of a genuine poll (much as we may like to love or hate it)
The problem with a complete lockdown that doesn't include proper risk assessment to allow social activities that represent so serious risk to the effect on the progression of the virus (particularly outdoor activities - such as theme parks, zoos, botanical gardens(!) - as well as some more marginal ones) is that you increase the amount of risky social activities that occur. The reason? Because people who wish to get round the rules will concentrate on those with little chances of being caught. And that means socialising indoors in private residences. And so you actually increase the cost to the government and economy whilst potentially increasing health risk.
HYUFD: you miss my point, really the Trumps are not worried by the Constitution, it is power they want. Everything else can go to ........
So what, they cannot overturn the US constitution without a 2/3 majority in Congress and the states and the armed forces and the police and the SC and the FBI etc affirm an oath of loyalty to defend the constitution above all else
And we now have a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees in a 6-3 conservative majority to tell us what the constitution means.
So what they are all justices and legal scholars, none of them are going to read into the Constitution what is not there on any interpretation ie Trump cannot just dismiss and suspend Congress on a whim, we have an unwritten Constitution based on the sovereignty of Crown in parliament, the US constitution however is written down and sacrosanct and even the most conservative judges like Clarence Thomas will not ignore what is clearly written down in it
Have you seen the 3 vote dissent in the Pennslyvania case? 3 SCOTUS justices saying that ballots posted by election day but received after should be separated out, counted, and then possibly binned if they would 'change the result'. When judges think votes should be counted or not based on who will win if they are, to say nothing of considering the result to exist separately from the ballots, they aren't acting as legal scholars they are acting as partisan actors. There's no reason to believe they wouldn't be willing to be overtly partisan in other way.
There is nothing in the constitution specifically about ballot counting so where the constitution is vague then justices will interpret the law based on their ideological view.
However the constitution is specific under Article 1 that "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives" and that cannot be interpreted any other way. The Article also makes clear the powers of Congress to raise tax, provide for defence, regulate internal affairs and the military and that also cannot be interpreted any other way.
Article II sets out the powers of the President. The US constitution may prevent major change being achieved easily but it was also set up by the Founding Fathers precisely to ensure it would never allow for a dictatorship.
Some pointless bickering about partisan point scoring again - who bloody cares right now.
Never mind the all regions not national lockdown not lockdown. At some point in December Shagger will be faced with a harsh reality. If he unlocks the country back to Tier 1 to allow Christmas to take place, then the pox is going to run rampant again in January. If he doesn't unlock for Christmas then he faces mass disobedience of the law as people say "fuck this" and have what might be a last Christmas with elderly relatives before the pox runs rampant again in January.
And then we have the elephant in the room - students. University populations have been very effective pox incubators. And its increasingly clear that younger people may not suffer much from pox but can certainly spread it to people who do. And they all want home for Christmas. With Granny.
So, lock down the students? Who will enforce that? Let them home with the inevitable massive spike and deaths? Which negates the purpose of the coming Bonfire Month not lockdown lockdown.
Its very very easy to hurl rocks at these tossers in government - especially when they keep handing out rocks and painting targets on themselves. But we could have Tony Blair himself in office right now and this would still be a shit show because there are no right answers and a myriad of wrong ones.
I think this is a tempting conclusion for people trying to be fair and recognise nuance, but I don't think it is true. Here are some of the countries with a rolling average of under 100 positive tests per day:
Australia Cameroon Haiti New Zealand Taiwan Vietnam Thailand Ghana Jamaica Senegal Singapore Uruguay
Different levels of wealth, some islands and some not, some big and some small, all on different continents. COVID can be beaten, and once it is the economic cost of keeping it beaten is far lower than the price we are about to pay. Failure isn't inevitable.
There's a really good question here: how does the US get unfucked (politically)?
Generally this kind of thing happens gradually. There's a lot of attention on voter suppression and legal ratfuckery in this cycle, but that's not because it's new, it's mainly because Trump says the quiet part out loud. Voting access is gradually getting better, and what used to be shockingly bad voting machines and audit trails are getting gradually better.
Trump loses, judges who were appointed for their hackishness at that precise moment get more into the whole judge thing and less into the hack thing, others retire and get replaced, Dems add some new states, EC-related demographic trends come and go. Populism seems to be in decline everywhere, its appeal is mostly proportional to the length of time since it was last tried.
Currently Trumpism appears nasty and dangerous but also *powerful*. If Trump loses comprehensively it will look increasingly *ridiculous*, as Brexit already does. The GOP will still have a Trumpist element but for all its faults the US system can correct very quickly; You're only a single primary from a quite different GOP - or rather, the same GOP, but with different strains in the ascendant.
"Populism seems to be in decline everywhere, its appeal is mostly proportional to the length of time since it was last tried."
A typical liberal globalist response which views it as an aberration. It's just as I predicted: those that say this have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
You will get populism again (be it of the far-left or far-right variety) unless mainstream parties address the root concerns that drive it - namely, concerns about economic stagnation, intergenerational inequality and mass migration.
Well, under this current populist government we are getting economic stagnation and intergenerational inequality. Plus their immigration policy is to let in people from all around the world and keep out Europeans.
Populists are rarely any better, but the centrists need to put their own house in order to beat them. OTOH, perhaps the rest of the century will be so grim for Western peoples (compared to what we were used to) that no one can hope to get elected without selling snake oil.
As I and many others said on every other occasion he has come back, "he's a busted flush... nobody cares any more".
One day, we'll be right. Maybe.
The last thing we need is Trump's tapeworm back over here cheering on the fascists and jackboots brigade, but I guess it is all part of the decline of Britain.
Split the vote on the right would be good news. Labour has consolidated the left wing vote now
Not when Corbyn and Len have set up a true socialist party.
It will be another CUK. If they can’t get people like me then how do they intend to win?
The reality is that Labour voters and members support Keir and think Corbyn was bad. There simply isn’t enough support for him.
My two brothers and all their friends would join, as would large numbers of the N London Labour Party, you fail to realize that true socialist control of the party is more important than winning elections.
So, the ultimate goal is total control of an unelectable party?
They don't care about electability. Being smug and self-righteous will do.
The self-regarding orgy of Corbyn tribute tweets post-defeat last year was instructive and deeply depressing. It was all about how Corbyn made the tweeter feel about themselves. This didn't just include the ground troops (who often react in that sort of way in all parties in truth) but a lot of newer MPs and so on.
There was very little sense that there are a group of people in whose interest the Labour Party was formed to act, and who they'd let down.
I know there are a lot of Labour members who were Corbyn supporters but quietly feel that way and accept the point - and the election of Starmer suggests there may be quite a few. But the sheer volume of voices of people who didn't give a damn as long as they personally felt righteous was a bit dismal.
HYUFD: you miss my point, really the Trumps are not worried by the Constitution, it is power they want. Everything else can go to ........
So what, they cannot overturn the US constitution without a 2/3 majority in Congress and the states and the armed forces and the police and the SC and the FBI etc affirm an oath of loyalty to defend the constitution above all else
And we now have a Supreme Court with three Trump appointees in a 6-3 conservative majority to tell us what the constitution means.
So what they are all justices and legal scholars, none of them are going to read into the Constitution what is not there on any interpretation ie Trump cannot just dismiss and suspend Congress on a whim, we have an unwritten Constitution based on the sovereignty of Crown in parliament, the US constitution however is written down and sacrosanct and even the most conservative judges like Clarence Thomas will not ignore what is clearly written down in it
Have you seen the 3 vote dissent in the Pennslyvania case? 3 SCOTUS justices saying that ballots posted by election day but received after should be separated out, counted, and then possibly binned if they would 'change the result'. When judges think votes should be counted or not based on who will win if they are, to say nothing of considering the result to exist separately from the ballots, they aren't acting as legal scholars they are acting as partisan actors. There's no reason to believe they wouldn't be willing to be overtly partisan in other way.
There is nothing in the constitution specifically about ballot counting so where the constitution is vague then justices will interpret it based on their ideological view.
However the constitution is specific under Article 1 that "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives" and that cannot be interpreted any other way.
The Constitution is specific about almost nothing, purely by virtue of it being fairly short. The Second Amendment is a great example, and all the cases about the First Amendment. There are a dozen ways to interpret:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
For example, the Court's ruling that that sentence meant restrictions on corporate funding of political campaigns/adverts were unconstitutional that had a huge impact on American politics. Here's another example, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
The Court ruled that this didn't mean gerrymanders which were intended to dilute the voting power of certain races were unconstitutional. There is literally nothing which cannot be interpreted in way which allows Trump or someone else to do what they want. Good faith is required in any system of rules and interpretation, if it leaves then no system can survive.
Comments
The poll has a split of 55/45 voted for Trump over Clinton in 2016, but the actual 2016 AZ split was 52/48 (ignoring others in both cases).
(I'm not criticising the poll - it's impossible to weight all these things perfectly.)
The consequences for her are that whole class teaching is very, very difficult. These kids are literally years apart in skills and understanding and bridging that gap is a real challenge.
Labour leads they can live with. The BP eating their core vote, this time for keeps? not so much.
I did Movember about five years ago, my wife didn't like the moustache and asked me the following year not to do it again that's all the reason I've ever needed to never do it again.
I find it easy to tune out and ignore these pesterings.
Though hard to see the resemblance at the moment, between Trumpsky and, say, John Stuart Mill or William Ewart Gladstone .
William G WAS like The Donald in that he too was a party switcher (in his case from Tory to Liberal).
Plus echoes of the GOM's epic Midlothian Campaign in the current MAGA2 battle-ground tour by the Super-Spreader-in-Chief.
Nevada isn't a "blue state" - it's purple as it's consistently pretty close. It's also a rare case where the polls were out in Trump's favour in 2016 - RCP had him winning it but he lost (by 2.5% so not massively close). Indeed, they seemed to understate the Democrats in 2018 too - RCP had Heller in a tied race (and two of three pollsters had him ahead) but he lost his re-election bid by a comfortable 5%.
It's not impossible Nevada could go for Trump this year, but pretty unlikely.
I don't agree with Andy's concern either, by the way. Polls suggest Biden is running level with or a little behind Clinton in 2016 in very blue states like California. That's not surprising - there are fewer GOP 2016 votes in play so fishing from a small pool of potential converts. Meanwhile, he's up more in states like Missouri where he starts from a low base, because he's got a large pool of potential converts and Trump hasn't. I strongly suspect the swing in the likely tipping point states (where there are roughly even numbers of Democrats and Republicans) will be broadly in line with the national picture, while red states will be better (in terms of swing) for Biden and blue states for Trump - because that's the maths of it where you start from a low or high base. But it won't matter as they aren't in play, and it evens out.
Never mind the all regions not national lockdown not lockdown. At some point in December Shagger will be faced with a harsh reality. If he unlocks the country back to Tier 1 to allow Christmas to take place, then the pox is going to run rampant again in January. If he doesn't unlock for Christmas then he faces mass disobedience of the law as people say "fuck this" and have what might be a last Christmas with elderly relatives before the pox runs rampant again in January.
And then we have the elephant in the room - students. University populations have been very effective pox incubators. And its increasingly clear that younger people may not suffer much from pox but can certainly spread it to people who do. And they all want home for Christmas. With Granny.
So, lock down the students? Who will enforce that? Let them home with the inevitable massive spike and deaths? Which negates the purpose of the coming Bonfire Month not lockdown lockdown.
Its very very easy to hurl rocks at these tossers in government - especially when they keep handing out rocks and painting targets on themselves. But we could have Tony Blair himself in office right now and this would still be a shit show because there are no right answers and a myriad of wrong ones.
Like 2016 I expect Biden to outperform the polls in the West as Clinton did, the West has a particular loathing for Trump and I think he has a reasonable chance to gain Arizona therefore but I think Trump will again outperform his polling in the Midwest and rustbelt swing states where he has his highest amount of personal support in the US
One of those times the UK was an economic basket case.
But there is always the possibility of a major polling miss, remote though it is, and I don’t think it bedwetting to be concerned about the danger of Republicans stealing an election even halfway close in Pennsylvania.
https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2016/11/05/iowa-poll-trump-opens-7-point-lead-over-clinton/93347134/
1. I don't think Trump will win, I think he will lose badly.
2. I don't think TBP promising freedom, hope & prosperity is at all likely or credible.
To look at how to implement referendums, look at Jacinda. Admittedly, the referendums were not on so serious constitutional matters, but one of them went against her. She just said, fine, the verdict of the people is what matters, we'll implement the results. TBP achieved its remarkable temporary popularity on the back of misguided & badly misjudged attempts to thwart the referendum result -- the Soubrys and their fellow travellers have driven us to a worse, harder Brexit than would have happened otherwise.
The one "good" thing the Tories can take from the pandemic is it happened so quickly after a resounding election win.
They are in a better position than many incumbent Governments. The next election will be fought on the economic response to the pandemic, rather than the pandemic itself, which is better territory for them.
But, the pandemic has destroyed Boris. I might feel sorry for him, if he wasn't a complete sh1t.
I beg to differ on your last point. Any other PM in my living memory (so right back to Wilson) would have handled this bettter than the current buffoon IHMO.
Blair (managing the message), Thatcher (determination) and then May (eye for detail) would be my top choices; each would have worked themselves to a standstill to manage this. Of course they each have shortcomings and the situation is very difficult but Johnson lacks on all necessary fronts: clarity of communication, decisiveness, graft, detail and determination.
Whatever. Even if its a Biden landslide we can enjoy Trump trying to nuke someone in his closing weeks in office.
Every year, I complain bitterly to the authorities re: this invasion by hordes of semi-ruly rug-rats, but to no avail.
It's a bit like criminal justice in that way. You can adopt a more or less strict system for locking people up, but people need to feel it's applied consistently and not cunningly evaded at every turn. The same applies to taxation - people pay up, but don't want to see Amazon and McDonalds paying fourpence halfpenny. Starmer's pitch is going to be partly about getting a grip with serious government, and I think a lot of surprising people will find that quite welcome.
Apart from the leader of the opposition and the government’s own scientists, obviously.
Increasing fears of stealing the election are inversely proportional to Trump's position in the polls. People are terrified he's going to win, so express their fears based on the most realistic route to it actually happening.
Sounds like you got to know the place fairly well yourself.
There was very little sense that there are a group of people in whose interest the Labour Party was formed to act, and who they'd let down.
I know there are a lot of Labour members who were Corbyn supporters but quietly feel that way and accept the point - and the election of Starmer suggests there may be quite a few. But the sheer volume of voices of people who didn't give a damn as long as they personally felt righteous was a bit dismal.
You wouldn;t be saying that if Biden got crowds like that. Or any crowds at all.
Kalama gets crowds though. Of republicans laughing....
His natural political match in the world - Jacinda - was pro strictly controlled migration. For now he has backed Johnson's original deal which allows for that to occur.
I wonder if we end up with Starmer 2024 as 2017 Labour with immigration controls but pitched in a new way. Jacinda pitched is as resource issue. Surely a few votes in that, to go above the 40% mark and to bring back some of the voters lost to UKIP/BXP.
Biden wins, only the scale is in doubt.
Yes of course I would.
The difference of course is around how left and right organise. The left are happy to infinitely split and argue about which splinter group is pure and how the rest are all traitors. The right are just as happy to go at each other but can usually pull it back together when it comes to elections.
My concern with the current government is that they appear to me to have little real attachment to democracy or the practices and principles which underpin and sustain it. So their continuation in power will likely, IMO, harm rather than help repair Western democracy and civilisation.
In your continuing attacks on liberal elites you are missing this important point, it seems to me, and the very real danger that Western democracy faces from those who are now in power who are using discontent with those liberal elites and their failings to aggrandise themselves rather than solve those problems.
One small anecdote: a good friend voted for Brexit because he felt that it was time for a shake up. It was a 51/49 decision for him. He now regrets it largely because of the way it has been handled since. But what has really turned him against this government is its cronyism and Cummings. It really pisses him off.
Don’t underestimate the effect of slow-burning anger at stuff like this. You may think of it as simply “righteous indignation”. For others it can determine their vote.
In Madrid, the Municipal Police intervened last Halloween night in 81 private parties at homes, in 18 bottles and in 10 entertainment venues open after closing time, according to municipal sources informed Europa Press. In some of them there were a number of people higher than allowed and no masks or other security measures were used against COVID-19.
11:45 On the Balearic island of Ibiza, the Civil Guard has dismantled this morning a party with 120 people in a house in Can Furnet, town of Jesús, municipality of Santa Eulària in which they celebrated Halloween, as reported by the Office Communication Peripheral of the Balearic Command
But the fact is, they do. For them, no poll lead for Biden is too great. And good polls for trump are genuinely almost impossible to stomach.
Pollsters are people.
Now we seem to have the answer.
Doesn't look like a wrong un in the least.
There are multiple terraces named for Boer War battles and Generals in Leicester, ironically now full of Imperial immigrants. Perhaps the most subtle is nearly all football grounds having a Kop. This is derived from the Afrikaans word for small hill on the veldt, and thereby the place with the best view.
The witches in the Scottish play, as they are otherwise known...
In the same way that Lockdown 2 was never unthinkable- it was just how much pressure from infection rates was needed to overcome understandable reluctance to impose it.
This will have the advantage of aligning the Western calendar year to the Meteorological year. And it would end 2020 a month early.
The ones in the States are a mixture of genuine and voodoo polls and it is harder to tell which is which, but you can have a pretty good go at doing so.
In terms of your last sentence that may well be true but that does not impact the validity of a genuine poll (much as we may like to love or hate it)
However the constitution is specific under Article 1 that "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives" and that cannot be interpreted any other way. The Article also makes clear the powers of Congress to raise tax, provide for defence, regulate internal affairs and the military and that also cannot be interpreted any other way.
Article II sets out the powers of the President. The US constitution may prevent major change being achieved easily but it was also set up by the Founding Fathers precisely to ensure it would never allow for a dictatorship.
Australia
Cameroon
Haiti
New Zealand
Taiwan
Vietnam
Thailand
Ghana
Jamaica
Senegal
Singapore
Uruguay
Different levels of wealth, some islands and some not, some big and some small, all on different continents. COVID can be beaten, and once it is the economic cost of keeping it beaten is far lower than the price we are about to pay. Failure isn't inevitable.
Knock him over.
Simples.
OTOH, perhaps the rest of the century will be so grim for Western peoples (compared to what we were used to) that no one can hope to get elected without selling snake oil.
How UNITE, who represent support staff, will react is more important.
A lot of us would be tempted to "fast forward" through 2020 were it possible to do so.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
For example, the Court's ruling that that sentence meant restrictions on corporate funding of political campaigns/adverts were unconstitutional that had a huge impact on American politics. Here's another example, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
The Court ruled that this didn't mean gerrymanders which were intended to dilute the voting power of certain races were unconstitutional. There is literally nothing which cannot be interpreted in way which allows Trump or someone else to do what they want. Good faith is required in any system of rules and interpretation, if it leaves then no system can survive.