Soy Adrián

...how?! I mean short of literally paying to subsidise imported good, I'm not sure how she gets around that 20% currency drop.

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.

Even if this DOES happen, I really don't think that's going to mean people want to rejoin the EU. They will quite possibly blame May and the government for "not doing what we told you" and might well be open to other parties promising to "negotiate a better Brexit deal", but for Jo(e) Public to actually say s/he doesn't want to leave the EU would be for him.her to admit to themselves they got the decision in the referendum wrong -- and, to the state the obvious, very few humanbeings like to willingly admit they were wrong about something. It's not even like Iraq, where people who were vaguely in favour of it in 2003 were later able to convince themselves that they were never really in favour of it, and thus avoid thinking "I got it wrong".

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.

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.

Anyone who has watched premier league football over the past 10 years know what he's like.

 

You're point on the Scottish league is ridiculous - although I fear the greed of the minority of clubs/leagues means it could go this way a lot sooner than you think. No harm to the premiership but they have money more than being a great league - when's the last time a premier league player won the World Pleyer of the year? 2008! When's the last time they made the champs league final? Was it 2014?

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.

Again, Clinton did not get as harsh treatment as Obama got, with the various taunts that he was a terrorist, a secret Muslim, a Nazi, not born in America, etc. Where Clinton had the e-mail scandal blown out of proportion by the Republicans, Obama had the Republicans constantly prattling on about his pastor and how he once had coffee with Bill Ayers. Where Clinton had her "basket of deplorables" comment taken out of context, Obama was clobbered over the head with "bitter whites clinging to guns" comments and over the lie about Michelle Obama going on a rant about "whities". Where Clinton had "lock her up" shouted at her, Obama had "kill him!" shouted at Republican rallies and mainstream news commentators

(after "accidentally" referring to him as "Osama").

 

The point being that there's nothing new about vitrolic opposition being thrown, and it's going to continue no matter what. But a good politician like Obama, with a good inspiring message, can get people to ignore the diatribes, including many of the "racist" white voters who switched from Obama in 2008/12 to Drumpf last week. Like it or not, Clinton just wasn't in his league, not to mention the dire "centrist" message and policies which were never going to be strong enough to even get people to pay attention to her.

Did Bernie ever actually say he would raise taxes by 10% for low-income people? (Serious question.)

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.