Soy Adrián

Would McCain and Graham really defect to the Libertarians in response to the Republican president being too isolationist? Surely they'd have nowhere to go.

Optimism will not be tolerated.

I'll open up a 2017 thread shortly. Expect it to be big on the French and German elections, and for Michael to suddenly be really big on Die Linke.

They do this a lot. Kneejerk decision to get rid of Laudrup paid off with Monk. Kneejerk decision to get rid of Monk didn't go disastrously with Guidolin, who shouldn't have been sacked after a hard run of fixtures at the start of the season. No recruitment strategy, no clue.

Empire doesn't really have the same untold story leading up to it - the natural successor would be following the Bothan spies stealing the plans for the second Death Star from ROTJ, but I don't really see the point now. Can't see how an Obi Wan film set between III and IV would be interesting, as good as Ewan McGregor was. Hyped for solo Han Solo in 2019.

Travesty as usual.

Arsenal have a better chance than they have done before, Bayern haven't really got going this year.

This is neither news nor politics.

Obviously in this case it's easier said than done - it was more of a general point about the strategy that she'll take. That and letting Crosby loose on Corbyn.

My biggest wonder with all this is how much the average person will actually be aware of it when we inevitably get a bad deal. May will do pretty much anything to make sure people don't feel the effects in obvious ways like prices going up, even if it means tanking the economy in ways they won't notice. It's the same problem that Labour has in pointing out that the Tories have failed to reach every deficit reduction target they've set themselves - the figures themselves are entirely abstract and the message doesn't cut through unless people are prepared to listen. Basically you can see how the era of spin led pretty much seamlessly to post-truth politics.

Thought Jones was alright today actually, although he's never going to fulfill his potential and shouldn't be first choice when everyone's fit. Mourinho isn't anywhere near as effective a manager when he doesn't have a defence he can trust to see out a 1-0.

Does that make me the only Corbyn-sceptic Labourite left? Oh goody.

The Croydon Cat Killer will now have a lot more time for killing cats.

http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2016/12/01/th...g-labour-party/ This is interesting. Every Labour shadow chancellor winds up with the same policy, one way or another. At least Balls actually believed it.

There's restrictions on the number of athletes per country in the Worlds as well I think. From memory it's three, and the reigning champion of the event can go as a fourth.

Still closer to the action than Mourinho!

Well we were absolute dogshit. Still, looking forward to United breaking the world transfer record for Ashley Fletcher in a few years.

Should be Mo but it looks like he's destined never to win it. At least there aren't any other athletes in it this time, so he may well come second.

I could make yet another point about the wealth and (relatively) even distribution of it is what makes the PL so competitive and makes it so hard for our top teams to get to the very top in Europe at the moment, but I somehow doubt the message will get through. No coincidence that we dominated the CL in the "big four" era when the league as a whole was a bit less competitive.

It must be incredibly frustrating for polling companies to explain that their work doesn't mainly consist of reading tea leaves. Even the fact that the results of the referendum and the US election were so close to the edge of the margin of error was mainly because they undersampled angry white people. Doesn't bode well for France, that.

Closing this topic unless we can move onto something that doesn't put me in a coma.

I like the fact you're referring to them as the SS. Apt.

This is good on the wider picture: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11...-iowa-race.html I would never argue that Clinton as a candidate is in the same league as Obama (as a politician it's certainly debatable) but there's a reason that a party winning three presidential elections in a row is rare. If you're going as the continuity candidate, which Clinton clearly had to do, you're hamstrung by what people have thought of the last eight years. Obama may be going out with higher approval ratings that most, but not on Reagan's level (who's the only post-war POTUS to effectively pick their successor). You need the right timing and the right candidate to manage it, and the Dems probably didn't have either.

I thought speaking but not saying anything was her opponent's thing.

I don't want to be predictable and say Elizabeth Warren but honestly at this point it's her or a fictional character played by Kevin Spacey.