How close is this maniac to becoming President? :nervous:
I watch channel 4 news about it but so much else seems to be going on there(re. election)it seems to easily go off-topic?
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How close is this maniac to becoming President? :nervous:
I watch channel 4 news about it but so much else seems to be going on there(re. election)it seems to easily go off-topic?
Don't know. Everyone has a different estimation of his chances. It's close enough that I can't bare to look. (I'm the kind of girl who turns her eyes from the screen when the story's about to go badly awry.)Quote:
How close is this maniac to becoming President?
Ladbrokes is giving Hillary close to a 70% chance of winning in November.
These are the same folks who made Remain a similar likelihood in the BREXIT referendum...they're paid to make odds, not to be correct
trish, your fear is warranted
I think the polls at the moment reflect the way the campaigns have been managed, and that means that in both cases the two candidates have been in control of their agenda, as will be the case until the Democrat Convention is over. The 'head to head' confrontations between Mrs Clinton and Donald Trump will I think be the most compelling since these tv debates began, assuming that the US tv networks arrange them. In the UK it is being predicted that this will be the dirtiest election in US history.
Of the two, Trump is the most likely to 'go rogue' and say something he later regrets, but Mrs Clinton has the problem of not being much liked and she is not a great public speaker. I think in the Brexit case many voters had made up their mind without reference to any of the tv debates, and I suspect Trump's supporters are not going to worry too much if he makes a fool of himself. Statistically I think that means 30% on both sides is already a done deal. Nevertheless, when weighted, identifiable segments of the voting population suggest Mrs Clinton has the edge over Trump with regard to women, and 'non-white Anglo-Saxon' Americans many of whom live in the most populous states, and ultimately the Electoral College decides.
We also have to factor in the 'unknown unknowns' from a terrorist incident, an 'October Surprise' or something that both candidates have to respond to immediately. Finally, from what I have read, Melania Trump admires Michelle Obama (and why not? and not just as they chose the same designer's frocks as Convention clobber) -and re-wrote parts of her speech herself (this evening's news on the BBC might contradict this). But the Trump children don't like her, and as they allegedly chose Governor Pence she snubbed him not appearing on the same platform as him, though that will have to happen in due course.
And yet, however sloppy and badly managed the Trump campaign might be, and whatever the impact might be of Roger Ailes leaving Fox News, Trump's entire campaign is run like a tv advert and nothing else.
Lastly, in the UK both the Financial Times and the Telegraph have been relying on the RealClear Politics poll tracker, which is found here-
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epo...lls/elections/
Trump will make a big splash tonight.
Ivanka, not Donald.
There is a story in the New York Magazine which claims Donald Trump has no interest in the daily decision making that Presidents must make -it claims that John Kasich was offered the Vice-Presidency on the basis that he would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy. The report continues:
Given that domestic policy and foreign policy together comprise, well, all policy, what (the Kasich adviser inquired) would Mr Trump be doing with his time, exactly? “Making America great again,” Donald Jr replied-
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7147291.html
Kasich declined the offer, but last night the candidate Trump did select said this:
I'm a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.
-A curious thing to admit to a party convention where he is being selected for the second-best job in the country that the party ranks third in importance; whatever, the segment that caught my attention was this:
Elect Hillary Clinton and you better get used to being subject to unelected judges using unaccountable power to take unconstitutional actions. So let me say, for the sake of the rule of law, for the sake of the sanctity of life, for the sake of our Second Amendment and for the sake of all our other God-given liberties, we must ensure that the next president appointing justices to the Supreme Court is Donald Trump.
-Apart from the astonishing claim that the liberties of US citizens have been granted by God (as opposed to the mere mortals who have run the country since 1776), lies the suggestion that Supreme Court justices are 'unelected' and 'unaccountable' when the President is a Democrat, but if a Republican those appointments are not...maybe Trump has god-given powers we do not know about, or maybe the fate of the Supreme Court should become a matter of public debate?
The Pence speech transcript is here-
http://www.bustle.com/articles/17395...s-here-to-stay
I think the whole wide world should be worried, not just Americans. This man is a psychopath!: hide-1:
I stayed up to watch the Trump speech live, but was not expecting it to go on and on and on and on. Once the speech passed 25 minutes it was torture. There are some aspects of the speech which may generate some concern among Republicans, as well as Americans and the wider world, but the speech was of interest for what Trump did not say as for what he did.
For example, the TEA Party radicals and the Evangelical core of the Republican Party believe that the nuclear, Christian family is the base on which American society is built and without which America has no meaning, no purpose and no values. Other than admitting to personal failings on which he did not elaborate (three wives?) he made no mention of God and the Bible (evidently not important to his father either), and had nothing to say on abortion and planned parenthood which have been high priority issues for the TEA Party and other Republicans, but he he did defend the rights of the LGBTQ communities across the USA. Where other Republicans would link crime, drug and alcohol abuse to welfare and decades of liberal dominance in social policy, Trump simply ignored it all, other than implying that if drugs were not being illegally imported into the US from Mexico there would not be a drug problem, and this from someone whose speech was modelled in part on the 1968 convention speech of Richard Nixon, who began the 'war on drugs' in 1973, a war that appears to have no end.
Trump had nothing to say on the environment or climate change, even though the continental USA notably in the south from southern California across to Texas has long-term problems of water resources and land management. With the exception of Mexico there was no mention of the USA's neighbours in the Caribbean or Central and Southern America, even though many illegal immigrants in the USA are from Central America rather than Mexico, and Mrs Clinton is blamed by some of her opponents for creating the chaos in Honduras which has led many to flee the country and end up crossing the border into the USA.
For a man so determined to make America rich again, Trump had nothing to say on anti-trust legislation to break up huge conglomerates like Exxon, IBM, Apple, and the Trump Organisation, and give 'the little guy' a chance; nothing to say at all about banks, in fact I don't think he used the word 'bank' or 'bankers' once in the speech, but did mention Bernie Sanders. And other than implying that the deficit will be drawn down from the fabulous sums of money the USA makes on his watch, Trump offered no practical guide to deficit reduction and like most critics of the Obama administration did not explain how it was the fault of the Federal government that wages have stagnated.
Indeed, if I am hearing Trump correctly, he is opposed to free markets -because the US economy in his terms is 'rigged' and competitors like China are 'cheats'- and he believes it is the job of the Federal government to determine the wages of every American in work. But it is also clear to me that Trump either has no idea what is happening in the world of work, or simply ignores the role technology is playing in extending automation in industry and other areas of work to the detriment of humans, or is creating jobs but not in the volume of heavy industry in the past, and not generating tax revenues for the state that those industries did.
Finally it is by now simply tiresome to hear Mrs Clinton being held responsible for the growth of Daesh in the Middle East and every other problem in the region. Deash or ISIS or ISIL is itself a fusion of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the remnants of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party and those Sunni officers and soldiers sacked from the armed forces by Paul Bremer III, so you could just as well argue that Daesh would not exist without al-Qaeda which would not exist without the war against the USSR in Afghanistan but that would mean linking the support of the Reagan administration for the Mujahideen out of which al-Qaeda was born. Mrs Clinton, whose support for Israel should be an embarrassment to anyone who believes in freedom, cannot be blamed for Middle Eastern terrorism or the Arab Spring and its consequences, but Trump bases his views on general ignorance, just as he finds it convenient to accuse Iran of being at the centre of global terrorism but never once in his speech mentioned Saudi Arabia, a significant problem state he will have to deal with if he becomes President.
In sum, the speech I think most of us expected, and not enough to win the White House, but a lot will now depend on how the Democrats approach the election -one hopes by not mentioning Trump but talking about their policy proposals instead -and how Trump performs with Mrs Clinton if they debate on tv.
Nicely done Stavros. I would add that even though Trump (somewhat awkwardly) supports LGBT, says nothing about abortion, Planned Parenthood, nor dwells on God and the Bible, 'his choice' of running mate - Mike Pence- is the evangelical counter-weight on all those and related issues. Indeed, if Trump really does intend to delegate to his VP his power to determine details of domestic and foreign policies (as reported in the New York Magazine) and spend his own time playing golf and making America great again, then one might expect Mike Pence to have quite a bit more say in these matters than VP's usually do. I worry this promise to delegate, makes Trump more palatable to those who find him too rash and inexperienced but have swallowed all the Hate Hillary nonsense.
On the Democratic side we're very close to getting a tweet on Tim Kaine being officially chosen as veep.
As politicians go, he's spectacularly ordinary. The exact opposite of an Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker. But Hillary craves boring right about now. Why fuck things up when oddsmakers say you'll win?
And most importantly, Kaine was said to be Bill's choice