The Smarkets Exchange trend chart above reflects the end of the Trump era and the little betting spurt that he might be forced out early. This has effectively come to an end following the overnight events in Washington DC where the House has voted to impeach Trump again but Mitch McConnell has stated that there’ll be no pre-January 20th move for the Senate to come to its decision.
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And being honest given the time available it makes sense to delay things until after the 20th - then you have as long as necessary to do things and can slowly damage Trump's reputation further by releasing things bit by bit.
I can honestly see a situation where he is going to ask Congress to dump the impeachment as a "healing" process of bringing America together again, especially if Trump looks ever more pathetic once the apparels of office are removed.
The killer issue here is that no-one understood how bad the introduction of paperwork was going to be. And while in theory you can automate it away you can only do so if both teams co-operate and there is zero reason for EU countries to co-operate unless there is an incentive for them to do so.
And that incentive simply doesn't exist - they can drown us in paperwork by stating it's incomplete and there is nothing we can do about it.
I think you will find many people said, over and over again, tariffs were not the problem, non-tariff barriers would be key.
Small children in Dumbarton knew exactly how the fuck bad the introduction of paperwork was going to be.
Telegraph
That would do to remove him as a threat to democracy.
The Senate trial doesn't matter now. He has already be de facto removed from office and is facing an avalanche of legal problems next week. Federal investigation into sedition and incitement. Potentially federal investigation into treason (over Russia). New York State investigation into his dodgy finances. DC investigation into last week's failed coup.
His brand is trash. His lines of credit pulled with hundreds of millions of Dollars owed. A fire sale of assets at the very least. And Giuliani will sue him for non-payment of his legal fees.
And all because a Capitol Police shot Ashli Babbitt...
Yes 22
No 1.04
Free money Trump to leave in 2021 is 1.01 but beware the opportunity cost of tying your stake up. There is more than a million pounds to be staked and it will be interesting to see when the big hitters mop it up.
The government absolutely knew. To think otherwise is simply not credible.
1) proof he isn't fit for office - by finding him guilty
2) then bar him from standing again
Otherwise you are barring someone for no reason (yes there are reasons but you haven't backed them up).
I think this is tricky for both parties. I side with Biden in that this is an unwanted distraction and, to be honest, in a week's time Trump will already be yesterday's man.
It would have suited the Republicans more to have a swift kill. Now they are stuck with an albatross around their necks and I think they will tear themselves apart.
As I mentioned yesterday, they will not have sight of the White House for 8 years and the earliest they will regain electoral traction will be the 2026 midterms.
This will be like Labour in the 1980's, only worse.
My parents (78 and 72) are in Berkshire near Reading and they haven't been contacted yet about their vaccines. They have a friend who is closer to Reading who is 71 and has their vaccination scheduled for today. Meanwhile my 84 year old father in law in Buckinghamshire has not heard anything.
If this situation goes further out of line then I can see this becoming an issue. Particularly if some locations get through the top 4 priority groups and then start on the rest whilst some parts of the country are still well behind.
Make the most of it, lads...
He can say the right things. Hes just chosen not to until forced.
What should we be looking out for, tho?
https://twitter.com/Cleavon_MD/status/1349500266773585925
I would advise patience. If we have nationally vaccinated half of the over 80's, then half of them won't have been done, and quite a few will have heard nothing yet. It will come.
McConnell’s ability to be his usual obstructionist self isn’t what it has been.
As for “healing”, this is the response they merit:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/why-are-republicans-being-so-divisive/617648/
Vengeance may satisfy some, but at what cost to the many who are desperate to turn the page on this catastrophic Trump period
McConnell leaked he was considering supporting conviction, Trump releases calm message talking about values unity and condemning violence, senators like Graham say this shows conviction is vindictive. McConnell will probably follow, as his leak prompted the right response.
The question is, of course, whether they're SO stupid, incompetent and malign we'll never know, when we rejoin the Single Market, whether we really have rejoined or they're just lying about it.
He comes to power with - from the Democrat perspective - the swamp ready-drained.
"Sorry but that is the same BS logic that the Republican diehard Senators backing Trump saying that because people believe that there was fraud it needs to be investigated further.
Plant a story for partisan reasons despite knowing it to be nonsense.
Spread the story far and wide for partisan reasons getting people who want to believe it to share it further..
Amplify the story you planted as much as possible.
Then claim that because people are talking about the story, it really is a story, so needs to be investigated further.
Fools may swallow this nonsense, doesn't make it a genuine story it just makes it a conspiracy theory rubbish that should be repelled by anyone sensible who can comprehend the facts."
@Philip_Thompson said the above yesterday in reply to one of my posts. Firstly let me make clear that I agree 100% with what Philip posted. In fact I strongly agree with it.
However as an analogy it was flawed because the media should be reporting this stuff about Trump's supporters and what they are up to and the arguments they are putting no matter how irrational and mendacious (Philip is confusing the media with the dishonest people asking for an investigation in his analogy). We have to do our best to expose it as such. I assume Philip was not calling for press censorship even though Trump's supporters were making up evidence, convincing people it was real and then calling for an investigation (classic conspiracy stuff).
The reason it is a poor analogy is that in fact the Trump story 100% should be reported whereas the Boris story really had very little merit and comes into the classic 'non-story' category of 'dog bites man' which the media whips up it to something greater. So it wasn't a good analogy of why Boris's story wasn't a story. However because the media has been full of 'what are the rules' stories and are going after anyone in power who transgresses then it should not come as a surprise that the media made it a story and boy did they drone on about it.
I am not going to defend the media for doing this, but it is what I expect them to do. Boris should also have expected that.
He needs to decide what he wants to do with his first few weeks in office, and whether ‘dealing’ with Trump is more important than getting his Cabinet appointed and approved.
I think he might leave Trump to fester for a few months.
Put forward by the same House Republicans who voted not to recognise the election votes.
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1349464134539214850
Make sure he cannot go anywhere near office and move on
The US has a mountain of healing to do following the disaster that is Trump
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-55593308
Told to turn up with a short sleeve shirt so I don’t have to waste time uncovering top of my arm.
From memory Southampton University Hospital is a hub so moving that vaccine around Southampton is so much easier than say South Cumbria where the nearest hub is Carlisle.
Obviously the base of whackos may attached itself to Ivanka or some other family member but it wont have same traction I am hoping.
EU small businesses exporting to the UK are impacted in a similar way to UK small businesses exporting to the EU
EU firms refuse UK deliveries over Brexit tax changes
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55530721
...The moves follow changes in VAT rules brought in by HM Revenue and Customs on 1 January.
VAT is now being collected at the point of sale rather than at the point of importation.
This essentially means that overseas retailers sending goods to the UK are expected to register for UK VAT and account for it to HMRC if the sale value is less than €150 (£135)...
Yes, some people have been very "self-starting" on this. While others have taken the approach of "It's a bit tricky. What I need to do is complain until someone comes to do it for me".
I believe that GPs are getting £40+ a head for vaccinating the over 80s - up to the 17th Jan, I read.
Impeachment is not ‘vengeance’; it is a constitutional remedy to his behaviour, which cannot be ignored.
What is wrong with you people who are suggesting he walks free, in the interests of "peace". to continue as a shadow President, a President in waiting who can spew his seditious propaganda to the angry and disenchanted?
Donald Trump makes the angry, angrier. The louder his voice, the greater the division.
Lock him up to shut him up!
Paradoxically, for those House Republicans who resorted to arguing that a vote against impeachment was a vote for reconciliation, and notably did not defend Trump's conduct, Trump's video yesterday blows that out of the water. Trump would never have resorted to issuing a video that renounced everything he had called for a week earlier if he was not intensely worried about where impeachment may lead. If impeachment had been rejected, we would just have got more of the same. Bullies never back down unless you stand up to them.
We utterly failed to understand that the rules we dislike aren't made up to piss us off, they are there as the structure for how their market works. They aren't imposing paperwork and checks specifically on us, those are there for everyone outside the zone. That was always clear, except for in the skulls of exceptionalists who thought the rules would be changed for us.
More entertaining is an almost pathological lack of grasp of how trade works. It isn't what we do that matters its what BOTH parties do. "There won't be any problems, we will wave the trucks through" isn't a solution when the other side enforces the rules that we have demanded they reinstate.
I know they said "fuck business" but I don't think they mean it. They genuinely believe that imagined EU red tape was the problem and that imposition of very real red tape wouldn't happen or be a problem if it did because its the same for everywhere.
From a trade and logistics point of view the EEA was no different to England as Wales was. A borderless, frictionless part of us. With stuff endlessly flowing across the invisible for trade purposes border. "How did we cope pre-EEA" I was asked yesterday. We hadn't integrated into the pan-european market back then so we didn't. We have now, and what we have just done is severed ourselves from our own arm and then wondered why we are bleeding out.
This cannot be fixed without renegotiation or the collapse of our industrial and manufacturing base. "Go sell to someone else" is a laughable ignorant non-solution, as are comments about new equilibriums or a reconfiguring of the supply chain. It will reconfigure to a new equilibrium alright, we'll just chop trade to the current 20% of normal and go back to blaming the newly unemployed for being feckless.
Oxford vaccine this week (were using Pfizer last week). Much quicker, no need for the 15 minute wait. I reckon they'll do twice as many without the seating bottleneck.
https://twitter.com/leepirie/status/1349631205784879105?s=21
That will make things nice and fair but result in lockdown until Christmas and tens of thousands of extra deaths.
In the same way as there's a common travel area for the British Isles, it seems logical to me that there should be a common sanitary and phytosanitary area too - i.e. free movement of plants and animals, as well as people - with common LPF standards to protect human, animal or plant health; measures agreed bilaterally between Eire and the UK. We all buy British and Irish beef, for example. This is logical as the British Isles are an integrated ecosystem removed from the European mainland, and it's rather unlikely that food products going from Ireland to GB supermarkets and from GB to NI supermarkets are "at risk" of entering the broader continental single market, as 99%+ of them will be bought and consumed locally, unless someone from Ireland tries to sneak in a ham sandwich. This could be subject to review in future if the UK wanted to change its standards or do a very open FTA with the USA - for example, admitting agricultural products of a different standard - but otherwise remain extant.
But, the remorseless logic is that because Eire is an EU member state they mustn't make any adjustment for Brexit whatsoever due to the UK's decision, nor suffer any SPS checks of their own produce when exporting to other EU member states, therefore the border must be down the Irish Sea between GB and Ireland.
I understand that perspective but I think this misjudges several things, not least of which the economic and political reality. Firstly, Eire already does - it hasn't joined Schengen because that would threaten the CTA, so is following the UK there despite the fact it would otherwise join. Secondly, Eire and NI already have island of Ireland alignment on a number of things, and joint governance, even pre-Brexit. Thirdly, most of Eire's exports on meat and dairy do go to the UK, and it's just made life much more difficult for itself there and, finally, as far as the peace process is concerned it would be far easier to sell to both sides if the nationalists knew there was a NI/GB border for manufactured goods, and similar products genuinely at risk of sneaking into the broader EU single market, but also to unionists with a common British Isles SPS area as well, so the solution was politically equitable and reflected economic reality.
We haven't heard the end of the NI story yet. It's a very difficult and unique situation and neither the EU, UK or Eire have been creative enough in finding solutions to make it work for a province that in all other areas (including even citizenship) is the biggest fudge of fudges on the planet within a much broader British Isles grey area - by design.
It needs designing some more.
I would bet those surgeries with the vaccine were pro-active; those without were/are still waiting to be contacted.
Otherwise, to keep the cult going, he would almost certainly start a third party. If nothing else, this would allow him to keep "campaigning" aka bilking his followers for money.
Which would split the right vote enough in the US to give the Democrats the House, Senate & Presidency by a serious margin - the Dems might well end up with 2/3rds of the Senate.
Mind you, Trump being Trump, be might try and run anyway. Complete with demanding his name on the ballot, being denied, getting his followers to write his name on the ballot etc etc...
I am flagging that this could become a headline worthy event if some locations are vaccinating the under 70s whilst others are still working on the over 80s.
I am fairly patient about it and understand why there may be regional differences. I am not sure all the newspapers will handle it in such a measured way.
Considering where Labour were last year, off the back of an 80 seat commons defeat, their almost level pegging with the Conservatives is quite remarkable.
The polls go one of two ways. The Conservatives, on the back of Johnson's Churchillian victory over Covid go stratospheric. The alternative being, when the economic reality bites as the support packages peter out and the economy struggles, that 40% gets chipped away, and if and when it happens at a growing pace.
I expect the latter, but Johnson being Johnson, haven't dismissed the former out of hand.
I suspect that Trump has no personal interest in that as a philosophy. The biggest reason we're confused is because the word "fascist" has been de-based so often, and against anyone pursuing right-wing policies for no long, that we now forget what it really means.
He's clearly a demagogue. A nationalistic narcissistic demagogue, with hardly any morals or scruples whatsoever, and obsessed with winning or being seen to win (at any cost) - and even with quasi-fascist methods at time on social media - but not a Fascist.
This started off with exporting and importing to / from the rest of the EU
https://twitter.com/JAHeale/status/1349654544037376000
However, he has millions of armed and idiotic supporters and continuing a feud with him will only embolden them
A friend had a treatable bone cancer but turned up in a bit of a state due to a calcium imbalance. She was given a week or so by the first doctor and effectively consigned to the bin. Once her daughter turned up and pointed out that, no, this wasn't her normal state someone actually looked and found the problem. She is still going 2 years later, as once the treatment started the service was fine.
A similar thing happened to my Dad when he had an infection (which often causes dementia-like symptoms). I had to be there to say - no, this isn't normal, look again.
Not everywhere is like that, but...
https://twitter.com/JohnJHarwood/status/1349536516964548610