Voters eh? – politicalbetting.com
Voters eh? – politicalbetting.com
How would the public prefer the government help on the cost of living – by cutting bills/taxes or giving them money?Prefer for themselvesCost reductions: 47%Cash transfers: 46%Think would be best nationallyCost reductions: 64%Cash transfers: 27%yougov.co.uk/politics/art…
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Any and all for me.
Actually investigate hard and prosecute it, unless you want to see Nigel win a landslide.
Fraud is going to be the single biggest story in the US Mid-Terms.
We can't afford to do any of the above.
They have the power to lift the 5% VAT on fuel, should they wish. But finding money to spend is their pressing problem, so giving away sources of revenue simply makes another Reeves' tax hike more likely down the road.
The new US government appears to be making more progress on the same subject.
And readers, while Dictator is a very rudimentary game in coding terms and came out more than 40 years ago, it actually painted a pretty accurate picture in 1982 and nothing much has changed since. Countries still run at a loss, and you can never please everyone. It’s a fundamentally impossible job, you have to sacrifice every principle very early on, the public are ungrateful bastards even if you try to be nice, and if you try to crush them they’ll eventually shoot you.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/governing-for-beginners/
Without Iran and without Venezuala participating in Putin's shadow oil fleet schemes it will be much more difficult to sell Ural oil at anything close to break even and sooner rather than later the cost of extraction will exceed revenue. At which point how does Russia continue to fund the war?
(Fairly emotive, from a Youtube channel called he Humanist Report.)
They are calling it Soft Martial Law.
https://youtu.be/Imhq3ktTwwY?t=235
Yes, there’s also a concerted effort to get primary challenges against the Republican Senators who didn’t want to codify a lot of Musk’s spending cuts the other night.
https://x.com/nedryun/status/2011044812741562475
It worked so well during austerity.
#Toriesknowthecostofeverythingandthevalueofnothing
Every Ford dealer replaced by a Chery dealer, every VW dealer replaced by a BYD dealer. Much like South Wales.
There’s already been dozens of convictions.
https://minnesotanow.net/50-convictions-feeding-our-food-scandal/
Not that any scandals are a good look but your team have exhumed this one.
Not at board level so far but looking at some rather stormy recent AGMs I suspect that will be coming too.
And about bloody time. You look at some of these managers and wonder how they can breathe and walk at the same time.
It’s not just the one Minnesotan NGO that was defrauding US federal taxpayers, there’s quite literally hundreds of them.
Tim Walz, who was VP candidate not much more than a year ago, didn’t stand aside within a week of the story for no reason.
But you need to work on the legendary modesty bit.
The quid pro quo on the income side is freezing tax thresholds to increase tax take, which both the last administration and this one are doing.
There's the Trump Organisation as well, billing federal taxpayers millions for people staying in hotels at Trump's order. It's one reason why he was so desperate to get back into office.
It is significant that they are going after Walz and Newsom. It's not just about money, it's because those two had the temerity to criticise (in this case) Vance and Trump, merely because they are crooks and pseuds.
Noem has been falsifying records for years as a governor and now as SecHS and yet mysteriously there seems little appetite for an investigation into her.
Sandpit doesn't mention that.
Their grasp of reality has always been quite limited.
Even apart from hand sanitiser, wipes, masks etc in schools, which were mostly bungled at an academy chain rather than national level, I would still like a proper investigation into the amount of drunkenness at the DfE.
Apart from anything else, judging by their recent pronouncements on SEND that's a problem that is only getting worse.
For example, if competition rules were changed so that increased competition led to lower costs in a sector which currently has monopolistic profits. Or if rents were reduced as a result of increases in housing supply.
https://share.google/nqqvrYWADwR5BUQ7S
And most of those convictions were prosecuted under the Biden administration.
The Covid fraud task force was pursuing about $200bn I believe.
Trump shut it down. And is now making great play of setting up another one.
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/2010812969588769094
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-unbearable-stupidity-of-nick
Mind you I am gravely disappointed that the current lot think it was all fair game.
Daycare centres with no kids, food banks with no food…
Oh, and $750m in *reported* cash declared outbound through Minneapolis airport in the past two years.
https://totalnews.com/officials-discovered-millions-in-cash-in-somali-travelers-luggage-at-minneapolis-airport/
Farage as Toad and Zahawi as a weasel would work really well.
I can see why they maybe would think before casting Badenoch as Mole, Badger or Rat, but they didn't need to.
If the Conservatives had made fundamental changes on the State stopping to do stuff, or laid off huge arms of it, and Labour in turn jacked up headline rates of tax, rather than do tax threshold freezes, then that'd be more honest but you'd still get a popular revolt.
Oh, and incidentally:
https://www.minnpost.com/fact-briefs/2025/09/does-minnesota-generate-more-federal-revenue-than-it-gets-in-return/
..The federal government collected about $119 billion in tax revenue from Minnesota residents and businesses in 2023. The state, in return, received about $75 billion to support health care, nutrition, Social Security and other programs, according to USAFacts, a not-for-profit organization that analyzes government data. ..
Which is fraud, of course, but doesn't seem to exercise the administration very much.
Brace brace
https://x.com/osint613/status/2011129851349254293?s=61
Another take is that he is, in a Trumpy way, giving the hawkish element in his Party and country some wins because he's preparing a big accommodation with Russia. He's appeased them before - they loved it when he started lobbing missiles at Assad for a while in his first term.
Both are plausible theories.
https://www.minnpost.com/other-nonprofit-media/2026/01/heres-whats-really-happening-with-child-care-fraud-in-minnesota-explained/
Short version - there is a problem, but it's not a major one and the original source for the 'billions' claim is from a disgruntled and disgraced former state attorney via a well known forger and liar with a deep loathing of Somalis.
We probably don't need MoTs on new cars until they are 5 years old now, not 3 years old.
Looking for logic in the mind of Mr Trump is a not an especially rewarding exercise.
The NH... Oh
The Po... hmm
Ok, this is more difficult than it seemed.
a) Iraq?
b) Minnesota?
c) The BBC? or
d) France (just on general principles. It's been a while)
Plus, you forgot Greenland, Canada and California.
Interesting to see how Sam Coates reported the YouGov numbers this morning. It was almost as though he was trying to convince people the Conservatives were leading a poll by listing them first. The Reform share is the lowest since last May's local elections.
Once again, the glaring differences between pollsters are obvious - the Freshwater poll in the field at or around the same time has very different numbers for Reform, the LDs and Greens for example.
As for fraud, let's not call a spade a garden implement. Fraud exists even in the best of societies - in the worst, it's endemic and usually perpetuated by the regime and its allies/friends on the rest of the population. Running a country as your personal bank and business is nothing unusual and utilising the resources for the advantage of such allies also hardly without precedent.
Even in democratic societies, allegations and accusations of fraud by opponents of the Government or in areas controlled by the Opposition occur as a way of undermining support for said Opposition and especially so when the reporting of such allegations comes from a source politically supportive of the Government. That's why there has to be scrupulous impartiality and thorough evidence gathering before fraud can be alleged rather than a politically motivated scare.
Auditing where and how and by whom public money is spent is or should be a serious business - too often, the mechanisms for measuring such accountability are the first thing to be compromised if a Government or regime starts to move away from democratic norms including scrutiny to a less balanced regimen.
To play the devil’s advocate, as someone who gives the. US president more credit than most on this forum, could the Iran situation be one in which a totally crazy and unpredictable Trump might actually be a positive?
The ayatollas have no idea what may or may not be coming their way, and it’s already been demonstrated that they can hit Iran hard without them noticing until boom.
First check at 40,000 miles or 4 years, whichever comes first.
I think the biggest source of our current predicament is we have been largely protected during recent crises - e.g. household savings were 5x higher than normal during COVID, £80 billion on energy cost support during Ukraine. These kinds of events should hurt and yet we've just borrowed to support it all. Our fiscal position doesn't actually look so bad if you strip those two out.
(MOTs are a weird one because very few collisions are caused by mechanical faults, yet they must cost drivers billions in costs each year. Compared with something like a 20mph limit the cost-benefit is completely out of whack.)
But do they care?
And also, I think it unlikely Trump will be shooting at them directly for all his bluster. He may greenlight Israel to strike instead.
But then, as I said, logic and Mr Trump parted company many years ago.
https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2026-01-13/plaid-cymru-surges-ahead-of-reform-as-labour-in-fourth-place-in-latest-itv-poll
https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2026-01-13/plaid-cymru-surges-ahead-of-reform-as-labour-in-fourth-place-in-latest-itv-poll
Dreadful poll for Reform and Labour with the numbers suggesting Plaid are very close to taking majority control of the Senedd.
The Westminster numbers are (changes on the July 2024 GE):
Plaid 29 (+14)
Reform 25 (+8)
Lab 13 (-24)
Con 12 (-6)
Green 12 (+7)
Lib Dem 6 (-0.5)
Other 2 (-0.5)
Astonishing numbers...
What's more likely is that he'll agree a deal where "Trump resources" have a 50% share in all oil sales, and that the new government represents a transition. Until.. (when does the oil run out, Pete?). Ah yes until 2049. It's been the best deal for the Iranians, the best, like never before, for everyone really.
I watch loads of Dem and Reagan-era Republican YouTube channels and they are pretty much all very ineffective. The clickbait thumbnails inevitably disappoint. They sell a breaking story as the end of Trump, or Vance, or Noem, or Hegseth and they are no such thing. The production values of the right wing offering is Disney quality whilst the Dem offering is like something by S4C from circa 1990.
Part of the inefficiency of spend but also part of the reason why there was little or no fraud was the fact the budgets were so widely spread - a lot of people had a little money and as I always told senior people "it's easy to give someone a budget but try taking it away from them and see how far you get". This meant getting financial co-ordination for large scale projects often took a lot of time and required a lot of budget approval even for small amounts.