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Are the Dems really going to select an 80 year old to take on DeSantis? – politicalbetting.com
Are the Dems really going to select an 80 year old to take on DeSantis? – politicalbetting.com
Joe Biden and his party came out of the Mid Terms better than most predicted and this has reinforced the suggestions that he will seek a second term at the 2024 presidential election. To retain control of the Senate three weeks ago with possibly an increased majority was a huge achievement for the Dems but his name was not on the ballot as it would be in a White House race primary.
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I agree that if it's clear he'd be facing DeSantis instead of Trump then it's much more likely he'll retire but it that going to be clear in time? Once Trump drops out his people will stop sending him money. And if DeSantis is going to be running the traditional play of trying to defeat Trump without criticizing him then he's well short of certain to prevail, to put it mildly.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-joins-with-households-to-help-millions-reduce-their-energy-bills
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63776183
It was never very common and has become much rarer with the rise of professional politicians I think.
However, as I've pointed out to him before, this is a very Brit-centric view of ageing. Attitudes in the US are very different. 'Retirement' is not the golden fleece. The American Dream means staying fit and healthy and working on. The idea that in Britain a Senator could only retire at 100 is unthinkable, yet that's exactly what Senator Strom Thurmond did. Several Senators have sat into their 90's. You need a total mindset change at a Brit to comprehend the idea that MPs could run for Parliament in their 80's or 90's, but it happens in the US. (And don't make lazy comparisons to the House of Lords: the US Senate is an elected chamber and elections are full blown battles.)
Joe Biden is extremely physically fit. He has a young wife by his side. I have little doubt that he will run. And win.
When he steps down after his second term, having just turned 86, he would not even make the top 10 list of oldest senators.
https://www.oldest.org/politics/senators-us/
Matt Hancock’s interminable 21 days in the jungle is over – and he was intolerable to the last. Who was voting for this self-serving rodent?
Sound familiar?
Fwiw, according to the Betfair forum, Hancock was most popular on Facebook, and Jill on Instagram.
Tensions run into second day after vigil ends with clashes with police in Shanghai" (via G search)
https://www.ft.com/content/d8231c04-5d7f-468e-8547-77587546734e
Positively youthful for a sassy American lady.
It's a totally different mentality to the slippers and fire big long snooze of British retirement.
The problem that the Democrats have is who would replace Biden? For me, Gretchen Whitmer is the obvious choice. She is governor of a key swing state, she is 51 and she is articulate and moderate. Funnily enough the Times has come to the same view: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/who-gretchen-whitmer-democrats-party-michigan-hgq68xnv6
I very much doubt that the US as a whole is ready for an openly gay man, however articulate and capable he is, and Harris is clearly already over promoted.
So Biden's hopes turn on Trump. I think he, unlike the rest of us, will be disappointed. It is becoming much more common and less brave in the GOP to say that you want to vote for a winner: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3751624-2024-frontrunner-tussle-gets-interesting/
This age obsession is so un-American.
The bigger issue is whether Joe Biden keeps his marbles, which is not synonymous with age. He's physically fit. He'll run. He'll win.
He became so detached from things that there was a serious move to depose him and make Bush Acting President, although in the end it came to nothing.
And he was younger then then Biden is now.
Biden is old, but he's healthy. The administration appears to be functioning well.
In an ideal world you'd probably want someone like Whitmer running for the Democrats, but Biden is the incumbent, and frankly I think there's a high chance the Democrats end up with a younger candidate who is weaker than Biden.
I think this is all one of those examples where if you don't live in a place you can miss the groundswell.
https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2022/11/they-think-its-all-over-can-the-tories-turn-it-round
The best graphic is
Does he have the right to run? Yes, of course. Should he? I’m not convinced, unless it is vs Trump. And we should all pray to whatever god we have it’s not.
She is busy ALL the time.
What she is not doing is running a country.
With primaries kicking in in early 2024, decision time will be by next autumn at latest, on the facts on the ground at that point, both in terms of how Biden feels about running and what the Republican race is shaping up like. The Dems will not know which of the Republican nominees is likely and may not fully know Trump's prospects at the point Biden needs to announce.
The indications are he still wants the second term, so something has to change in the next 9 months with Biden's thinking, whilst over the months following that it would need a serious health event to change that course of his nomination.
If he wants it and doesn't have a specific health event, he gets it. That is the percentage to assess and I think it is probably higher than 45%.
And, I'll bring in my standard take on US presidents, that the uniting quality of pretty much every single US President post-Nixon, spanning many different characters and manifesting in different ways, was a certain affability, a whimsical quality, a perception of bar room agreeability. Biden's advancing age does little to dim that, perhaps the opposite.
"Age is no guarantee of efficiency and youth is no guarantee of innovation."
Classic one liner from Skyfall.
Have a nice day folks.
xx
However DeSantis may not be the GOP nominee anyway, septugunarian Trump still leads several GOP primary polls
Older people are more visible in the American workplace, it is true, and America is more tolerant of really old politicians, but otherwise I’m not sure @Heathener’s thesis is true
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2019/10/30/most-democratic-voters-would-prefer-a-presidential-candidate-10-to-15-years-younger-than-the-current-primary-front-runners/
Lengthy (174 pages), but here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23316400/farrar-fauci-comms.pdf
For those of us genuinely interested in what happened, it's quite fascinating to watch as experts who were originally leaning towards lab escape came around to zoonosis.
There were three who were most Lab Leak (Edward Holmes (self-described as 70/30 in favour of lab), Farrar ("50/50") and Kristian Anderson ("60/40")). Rather interestingly, two of those were lead authors on the article they got published in February 2020, which seems a pretty fair way of doing it.
You get to see them all considering hypotheses, ruling out deliberate bioengineering (wherever it came about, it evolved in the presence of an immune system), then considering deliberate "pass through" in lab animals (which could reconcile that). However, they then concluded that was unlikely, but also insisted in including it as a potential consideration in the article, even if only to show it had been seriously considered (there was a discussion on whether they'd spark off conspiracy theorists by including it, but insisted they had to cover it).
All of the three who had been leaning lab-leak have ended up coming down very firmly on the zoonosis side. To the point where the lab-leakers of the present dismiss them immediately by ad hominem.
I personally find it encouraging that not only did they very seriously consider it (and have those who most believed it plausible to lead the papers on it), but that my belief it was initially plausible wasn't completely out there.
It does end up damaging a nice story (simple - even simplistic - with convenient baddies and a two minute hate), but on the flip side, it does forewarn us of potential future SARS-like viruses (especially with the recent uncovering of so many bat coronaviruses: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.23.517609v1 )
Does Trump run as an Independent? I wouldn't put it past him.
And then the Democrats could win at a canter with the mortal remains of William Henry Harrison.
Biden is already unpopular and will grow less popular as he heads for serious, crotchetty old age
Alsalem’s 4,500-word analysis characterised the legislation as rushed, vague and contradictory, while its consultation had been insufficiently fair and inclusive.…
Alsalem’s human rights work spans 22 years. At Thursday’s first minister’s questions Sturgeon brushed off her initial letter as “the comments from the person from the UN,” and said “many of these issues have been discussed and addressed already by parliament.” Critics contrasted her attitude to the praise lavished on Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who visited Scotland in 2018.
The first minister welcomed Alston, and when he published a report on poverty in Britain, he was lauded by Ian Blackford, the SNP’s Westminster leader, for exposing “Tory austerity cuts”. Joan McAlpine, the former SNP MSP, tweeted: “It’s a bad look when one [UN special rapporteur], who happened to be white and male, is praised & quoted . . . while another, a woman of colour, is ‘the person from the UN’ whose concerns are not valid.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/4eb795f6-6ea6-11ed-a188-d2cb771901d6
The GOP's great Trump reckoning begins at the state party level
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/27/gops-trump-state-party-level-00070833
If Biden doesn’t run, the decision would likely be quite late in the day, and the subsequent nomination battle would threaten the stability of the Democratic coalition.
Harris would run; she probably wouldn’t get it. And that might damage the chances of any of those likely to do so, who will have said things less than effusive about her during the contest, in several key marginal states.
If the economy improves, which is at least an evens chance, he’ll end his term more popular than he started it.
I find it detracts from the lab-leakers case to immediately dismiss their arguments by ad hominem. Don't you?
And that zoonosis could be compatible with lab leak has been looked at (you'd require multiple independent leaks to the same spot (in the wet market) only, with no leaks/super-spreader events at any of the many other more likely super-spreader locations in Wuhan).
Likewise, being a very youthful candidate would not guarantee so someone lacks wisdom or experience (one doesn't always come with age, the other irrelevant in terms of legal requirements) but it will make people more conscious of the possibility they are.
The 'Americans are more accepting of age' thing is a red herring, since it may well be true, but is still the case Presidents have not been of this age before, it's still new, and being a senator requires far less personal support.
In short, age won't determine this as much as the presence of Trump, but it's not nothing either.
No doubt Leon will give a précis of the Twitter mob line.
Yeah, he’s definitely the guy you’d go to for an authoritative and neutral opinion on lab leak
It's a gamble - and puts the Veep pick in sharper contrast.
Surprised to learn that Trump isn't the favourite for Republican nomination.
He's announced he is standing, obviously has incredible name recognition, RCP has him ahead in the polls for the nomination and he is currently trading at about 2/1 on betfair. I think he's a buy at those odds.
I think it's worse than being 'driven
back to their core vote': I think the centre of gravity of their core vote has shifted rightward. While the core was more centrist, it was easier to pick up votes around the fringe because, frankly, there was more fringe. Some of the old Core vote has been lost, quite possibly, forever.
The biggest question remains how the Dems can drop both Biden and Harris, with the VP polling even worse than the President.
Excited for the @FLFusion pulsed power workshop this morning. Fingers crossed @TfL Elizabeth Line doesn’t completely break and I can actually get to the thing!
https://twitter.com/_Jack_Halliday/status/1597147174407503873
The plant would generate 60MW of electricity and produce 2kg of excess tritium, enabling the rapid roll out of fusion power!
https://twitter.com/FLFusion/status/1597146210930143232
https://twitter.com/paullewismoney/status/1597122408384974849
If so, where is it?
Maybe Jeremy woke up on, say, February 13th and thought “Shit, I’ve been believing in a baseless conspiracy theory for a fortnight, I’d better warn the world not to believe in this, because it’s racist”
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1597122367775457280
Because if you are genuinely interested, read it all. Or you could just wave your hands around and ask what they said to each other when it’s right there.
Remember, he's only a Republican because he, quite astutely, judged the average member was stupider than the average Democrat and therefore easier to manipulate.
The Russians are going to be back to Crimea by the end of the year. They’re already digging trenches there, and they are totally out of equipment.
Just think about that for a minute, the entire Russian army is out of equipment they can deploy in Ukraine. In only nine months. They have no more tanks, no more missiles, no more winter clothes, and no more proper soldiers willing to occupy their neighbour.
Between Feb 1, 2020 and Feb 19, 2020 Jeremy Farrar went from thinking lab leak is 50/50 to thinking “lab leak” is an “evil conspiracy theory aimed at China”
How? What? Wtf? If you believe this is credible you’re an idiot
What happened is obvious. The scientists got together and realised Wow it really could have come from these Wild West labs, this could be really bad for science and scientists, we will get the blame - so let’s lie and pretend a lab leak is impossible, and talking about is Trumpite and racist. And for a year that worked
I am also musing over whether Russia has learned any lessons from the Winter War with Finland, fought in temperatures below -40C. Finnish dead (military and civilian) were around 20,000.
Russian numbers remain contentious. The Supreme Soviet was informed on 26 March 1940, of 48,475 dead and 158,863 sick and wounded. In 2013, the Russian State Military Archive held a database confirming 167,976 killed or missing along with the soldiers' names, dates of birth and ranks.
It did ultimately lead to territorial gains, but at a very heavy cost. Could Putin survive similar losses in a Ukrainian winter campaign?
Would LBJ have won the nomination at the end of a Kennedy second term ?
RFK would very likely have been the nominee had he not been shot, etc.
There’s just not enough data, and particularly from the modern era, to draw general conclusions about VP’s chances.
It’s an advantage, certainly, but more important is the quality of the candidates, IMO.
LOL.
They’re digging trenches, in an era when their enemy has real-time satellite photography and precision guided missiles - guess how that plays out…
At some point, Putin will need to speak to actual mothers - not the actors and party officials he’s been talking to so far.
Giving VVP something he can market as a win (probably the Donetsk/Luhansk oblasts and a land bridge to Crimea) is the only way this ends short of the extremely unlikely Kremlin palace coup. The alternative is the total and probably permanent destruction of Ukraine."
lol
"How did you get multiple independent releases into the wet market and only the wet market and none of the other more likely super-spreader sites in Wuhan?" doesn't really get answered by ad hominems. Or provide much illumination to those who want to know what really happened.
Red code in China means you need to do your time in a quarantine camp and pay for it.
If you try to enter public place with a red QR code...immediately an alarm goes off.
Chinese govt can easily cut you off from society by remotely switch your health passport to code yellow or red.
A green QR code needed to access to transport, food...even residential complex.
https://twitter.com/songpinganq/status/1596942800964067328
Here's a tweet you linked to (approvingly) a couple of days ago
"It makes clear that the defeatist, knee-jerk, or gaslighting reactions surrounding this pandemic have to stop (& that includes very much the #lableak conspiracy myth)."
Don't know about you but I make that six content-free ad hominems in one sentence. And the guy is not even making the point you want him,to make. Pathetically, he does not even try to refute a lab leak. All he is saying is Yebbut a naturally evolved virus might be really really bad too.