Suddenly the betting money goes on Michelle Obama – politicalbetting.com
Suddenly the betting money goes on Michelle Obama – politicalbetting.com
One of the big developments in the WH2024 race is the growing interest in Michelle Obama being the Democratic nominee.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-02-11/what-would-america-look-like-if-it-lost-world-war-iii?leadSource=uverify wall
https://twitter.com/atlas_intel/status/1756113410427687180
I can not think, offhand, of any time, in recent months, that I have seen any of them mention Michelle Obama as a candidate for president. And that, I supppose, is because she has no interest in taking on such a thankless job, though she clearly enjoys being a celebrity.
I suppose part of the difference between the views on Michelle here and there in the UK is that more people here understand that Barack Obama was not an outstanding success as president (or, in any of the other offices he has held).
(It's been a while since I have paid attention to such matters, but I believe her father had a low-level patronage job in the old Daley machine.)
A week before the convention, Biden suffers a stroke. He is - clearly - not going to be running for President, and he's incapable of nominating a successor.
Normally, Harris - as VP - would be a shoo in, but the polling is horrendous. She's going to lose by ten points to Trump.
Michelle Obama, by contrast, leads Trump by five points.
After a fractious convention, Obama (M) becomes nominee.
I'd want more than 11-1, mind. Probably more like 111-1.
I have a much, much better idea.
Trump is obsessed with Obama. He wants to beat Obama.
There's time to repeal the 22nd Amendment, and then the world can have a Trump-Obama showdown.
I'd have taken the field goal.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/11/review-of-mods-diversity-policies-ordered-by-furious-grant-shapps
Grant Shapps has ordered an inquiry to find out which party has run the MoD since 2010.
No, Michelle Obama is not going to be the nominee.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/09/republicans-joe-biden-nominee-swap-00140209
Republicans are pushing these stories because they make Joe Biden look weak and Kamala Harris look useless. Biden should just come out and make it clear that if he had a medical emergency his delegates would back Kamala Harris. That's almost definitely what would happen, and if he doesn't say it the media will be chasing various shiny things all the way up to the convention.
If I were feeling ungenerous, I would say they should be forced to listen to Trump’s speeches on a loop for 24 hours first.
Schools in budget crisis as PFI charges soar
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-68207051
And he could bullshit endlessly on TV, looking like he meant it, at least when his teleprompter was working.
Surely that makes him the greatest President ever, even though he achieved basically nothing?
The number of things included in the contract is another.
The poor quality of the buildings which mean half of them are already falling down is a third.
The penalty clauses for exiting with the lack of penalty clauses for a company failing to honour its obligations is a fourth.
The original prices which were far too high are a fifth.
Using a measure of inflation the government didn’t use elsewhere is a sixth.
So - using somebody who was clearly not a trained lawyer or possessed of a functioning brain to negotiate them was insanity.
Just because you think it is a bad deal doesn’t mean the negotiation was bad of the objectives were achieved.
It means the objectoves were bad - and that is the fault of politicians not negotiators
Let’s go over again who came up with penalty clauses which only work one way, and using the wrong measure of inflation…
The reasoning was partly to avoid government borrowing but more than that, a magical belief in the power of the private sector.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68271340
Good news, albeit tempered by ongoing deaths and injuries.
There is already legislation in place to deal with unfair contract terms.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/50
It’s a no from me.
RFKJ apologizes to his family for a super PAC ad that is his pinned tweet
https://twitter.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1756903979475161550
What is the wording of them ?
Would be interesting to see.
https://www.itv.com/news/2024-02-12/at-least-50-killed-in-gaza-airstrikes-as-israeli-rescues-two-hostages
The brutal calculus of war, or whatever this is.
And that was because - and you may not believe this, and frankly I wouldn’t blame you, but it’s true - one of the things the company was supposed to provide was toilet paper. And they were not doing so. Which as you can imagine was causing colossal amounts of trouble.
It also explained why lights were not being fixed, the heating was constantly failing and the computer system was such a mess.
£26 million of public money had been paid for that building. And nothing worked while the company concerned was making a fortune.
@Foxy - any thoughts?
Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party faces a collapse of support in the “rural wall” akin to Labour’s rout in its heartlands in 2019, according to a group of farmers, landowners and businesses.
Three cabinet ministers would be among those to lose their seats, according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 26,000 farmers, landowners and businesses across rural England and Wales...
...Polling on behalf of the CLA by Survation found that Labour has regained its foothold in the countryside — with 37 per cent of adults in the 100 most rural seats saying they plan to vote Labour, a rise of 17 per cent compared with the 2019 election result.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have slipped 25 per cent and are narrowly behind in second place, with 34 per cent of support. The Liberal Democrats are on 14 per cent, trailed by Reform on 9 per cent, the Green party on 4 per cent and 9 per cent of voters backing other parties.
Of the most rural seats, Labour is poised to take 51 with the Tories falling back to 43.
MPs who face being ousted at the next election include three cabinet ministers, Jeremy Hunt, Mel Stride and Mark Harper, and six others, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox and Bill Cash, the polling suggests.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tories-face-collapse-in-rural-areas-warn-farmers-jwgx32dqc
Michael Gove: It’s time for Britons to come first for housing
The housing secretary is lobbying for a tax on homes bought by foreigners and has promised to ban no-fault evictions by the next election
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/michael-gove-tax-foreign-buyers-housing-secretary-nnlsvxt6c
Voters think Rishi Sunak cares less than the rest of the Tories
Even Conservative MPs are uncomfortable about the prime minister’s ability to relate to voters
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/voters-think-rishi-sunak-cares-less-than-the-rest-of-the-tories-k7w76kf96
Oh, wait...
'What do you think Rishi Sunak feels about people like you?'
'Who cares?'
The "politics of envy" accusation is essentially that you, too, would love to have stepped on a few throats to make millions, and you'd be clinging on to it just as fiercely.
The idea of people who just seek the dignity of a modest living, but a useful one, doesn't even compute.
It still has application to commercial contracts, and there is other law available too.
So what do we do, as Nigel proposes, the govt enables a law to allow them to set aside contracts they willingly entered into but now regret ?
How are these PFI contracts, many which have been in place for many years, now "unfair" exactly ?
When mobile phone frequencies were being auctioned, he demanded the maximum possible price. He was warned that negotiating for price only was a mistake.
When this caused phone companies to drop out of the bidding, the government was reduced to threatening to back shareholder lawsuits.
For Israel’s sake, Netanyahu must go now
The Gaza war is the fault of Hamas, but the innocent are dying and it is beyond time for the killing to end
n January 29, the Palestinian emergency services received a call from a six-year old girl called Hind Rajab, who said she was trapped in a car with her family and a tank was rolling towards them. “Will you come and get me?” she asked. “I’m so scared.”
It took nearly two weeks for officials to reach the area, sealed off as an active combat zone, to find Hind dead along with several members of her family. Their car was riddled with bullets. Nearby were the burnt-out remains of an ambulance sent to help.
When Israel was attacked on October 7, all people of sanity and compassion condemned it as a modern-day pogrom. Israel had to restore its security and get its hostages back.
But the conflict is now in its fifth month; the outcome is desperately uncertain. The mortality figures from the Hamas-run authority might be disputed, but when you invade a territory of 2.3 million people crowded into 139 square miles, it’s easy to believe that around 25,000 will die – and what journalists can’t report because we’re mostly barred from entry, we can see on footage uploaded on the internet. Houses, shops, mosques flattened; bodies crushed beneath rubble.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/11/for-israels-sake-netanyahu-must-go-now/
There are risks on both sides as there are with any contracts, as there are obligations on both sides.
-"It looks like the rich are running the country in the interests of the rich"
-"That's the politics of envy"
The scale for modest amounts is calibrated against @TSE’s modesty.
To be fair, I don’t know about his grandparents!
And good morning to everybody!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E985ukCaIRs
Extraordinary by product of ministerial churn: the immigration minister - back when he was solicitor general - raised concerns the Rwanda plan would break international law
https://x.com/aljwhite/status/1756955947031761029?s=20
And Biden and Trump are trouncing him.
Shocking
The scenario of China making a move (itself or by proxy) and the US backing down and retreating into isolationism is certainly credible. But the final leap in his article, to some foreign (Russian, is implied) occupation of the US is neither credible nor explained. More likely, assuming the series of events he posits came to pass, is that the US falls into the same sort of position that the UK found itself during WWII. The question then being whether it gives up on the rest of the world, as fortress America, or seeks to rescue it (us).
He said that a future chancellor, probably now in Primary school, would have to face the horrendously bad terms that Major and Blair had negotiated.
Reeves wasn't in Primary school in the late 1990s, early 00s, but Marr wasn't wrong.
PFI contracts were being warned about when they being signed, but of course with 25-30 year shelf lifes, the two things you can guarantee about them is:
1. They're going to go wrong for someone (probably the government); and
2. The current political class at the time of signing them will be long gone.
Probably hence why the government agreed to them.
Do/did you in your career settle for "the dignity of a modest living"?
I don't support either side, and like the rest of humanity am 100% on the side of 6 year old girls with no exceptions. Would it not have been a good idea, rather before this happened, for Hamas to surrender, and for Palestinians to allow a group of reasonably honest brokers (all politics is relative) - Saudis, EU, Turkey, USA, Norway, Jordan, Egypt for example, to assist in a comprehensive negotiation.
I cannot see what the non surrender of Hamas is now achieving for Palestinians. It would be different if their allies had fully joined in - they have plenty - but critically they have not.
But the sort of jobs that we normally class as vocations, in the grey area from charities to public services, have traditionally worked on the assumption that there are people willing to work for less money and more meaning.
And a lot of those are rather collapsing right now. Partly because "less money" has morphed intro "taking the piss money". And partly because of changes in the cost of living (just build more bloody houses, beyond the point where it's commercially wise to do so) mean that it's harder to have a good life with less money.
But there is also a values thing. The older model acknowledged something of a trade-off between cash and worth. (There's a genuinely poignant bit in PJ O'Rourke's book 'Eat the Rich' where anonymous Wall St types admit that no, there's no real justification for their enormous pay and bonuses.)
If the attitude to the teacher, the preacher, the social worker, the nurse, the doctor becomes "serves you right for not becoming a hotshot lawyer of financier", then don't be surprised that you can't find enough people to do those things.
See also the recently binned attempt to introduce Performance Pay in education. Many reasons it didn't work. But an important, unremarked one is that many teachers weren't really motivated by that. They valued stability and not having to think about it more.
If you asked 100 people across all occupations if they are happy with their salary I'm guessing upwards of 98% would say no.
The original quote assumed that there is a cohort of people out there who happily get on with their lives on their "modest livings" and want for nothing more.
I dispute this.
The fact that Bibi has decided to play by their rules of engagement to the detriment of tens of thousands of people including a 6 year old Palestinian girl suggests HE (Bibi) is no better than Hamas.
At this moment there is a uniquely strong world wide sense that the Palestinians deserve better than either Hamas or Israel can offer alone. Negotiation, back by USA, EU and others is the best next step to take in support of other 6 year old girls.
Part of his appeal with the primary voters was probably that they thought he'd be good at attracting the elderly white people they needed to beat Trump, but the party could have coalesced around any other of the moderate candidates if they'd managed to get clearly out in front of the pack.
But there's a different effect, which is the one I'm thinking of. There are lots of sectors - education is the one I know about, but broadly anything that has "vocation" attached to it applies- where it's not financially rational for anyone to do it. Every maths teacher could make more in finance. Every TA could make more and experience less hassle, in a supermarket.
Such people used to be considered good, valuable people. It's not entirely selfless, it's also how individuals balance the tangible and intangible rewards of work. But a combination of a decade plus pay squeeze and broader cultural stuff means that balance isn't working any more.
Hamas "officials" except perhaps those living in luxury condominiums in Doha (they are living the life of Riley) don't give a f*** about how many Gazans die, including themselves. Israel's Prime Minister has an instinctive hatred of all Arabs (see Max Hastings's analysis) which is why he also couldn't care less how many Gazans die. That situation from both perspectives is unsustainable, but quite what the world grandees can do when neither Hamas, nor Bibi are listening means that chaos continues.
BTW huge numbers of people do not want or seek to be promoted beyond a certain level, even though that is where the money is. Watch human behaviour; it's all obvious if you look.
A younger candidate would have been better as a stop Trump candidate. A candidate who offered a clearcut contrast to Trump's nepotism would have made a better stop Trump candidate.
The government passing a law that allowed it to set aside or alter contracts it had willingly entered into would undermine the whole basis of contract law. Even if such a law survived legal challenge, it would dramatically increase the cost of the government - commercial entities will want greater rewards to compensate for the possibility that the government might unilaterally change or void the contract.
For so many people in so many decently paid and well respected jobs, it doesn't matter how hard they work. Money remains a concern. For most of the people in the jobs we claim are vital for society (lets take TAs as one example), wages and conditions are genuinely insulting.
We then conflate multiple issues together. Wages are low and the cost of living high, so we need women to go back to work after having a child. But childcare costs too much. After much complaining the government announces free childcare, but refuses to pay for it.
Thats the majority of people in the middle. At the bottom, that 10% is truly screwed. They pay a poverty tax - everything costs more (rent, electricity) with a very steep marginal tax rate to get through if they are able to try and work they way out of that decile.