More than that the London Authority initially denied the permit and it was only over-turned after protect/complaint because similar balloons have been allowed for protests and rallies previously, showing this was being treated unusually.

This could be a big international incident.

UK woman dies after being exposed to nerve agent novichok | UK news | The Guardian

The Russians said it wasn't them, and that's fine for Trump.

I doubt much will happen - going by what reports have been indicating most of the 'pro-Brexit' crowd have ties to the Russians (and had meetings at their embassy regularly) and are probably as pro-Russia as Mr. Trump is.

Found of Pro-Brexit Think Tank has link with Russian intelligence

Pro Brexit Businessman met with Russian Offiicials Multiple Times

Signs of Russian Meddling in Brexit Referrendum

As with the US, people who voted 'Leave' have no interest in acknowledging this any more than Trump supporters will consider Russian influence on the election.

(as to how much effect this influence had, its entirely debatable - but its incredibly visible now and shouldn't be swept under the rug, which appears to be the preferred approach by the people in power)

Yeah I know Russia kind of runs shit now and everyone is too pussy to confront them, but I still think the story is going to piss people off. Seems to be an innocent mother of 3 who came in contact with something and died. Can't remember the last time we had something like that take place.

Has there been any more information on how they came in contact with it? With how powerful this stuff is you'd think they'd be trying to locate the source.

Credit where it is due. I'm impressed with the ability to keep the SCOTUS pick under wraps. I had assumed that it would have leaked by early this morning.

U.K. folks: Is the government going to fall over the Brexit plan?

March this year was the last time - this is just fall out from an attempt on a Russian turncoat I expect, same as the last couple of similar events which Putin has obviously denied ever occurred ... obviously radioactive substances often end up in the soup course accidentally, people playing around at home with nuclear material and then forgetting to wash their hands before coming into work ;)

Alledged Former Russian Spy Fighting for life

Not seen much yet, generally they keep things under wraps until they've worked things through - at least that is what happened with the ones I remember previously (less scaremongering that way).

True, but the morning reporting was that he still hadn't made a decision.

While I agree that's bad, I also don't put the lady who just died on the same level. Spy games involve stuff like this even if it is out of bounds.

I guess Malaysia Flight 17 might fall under that realm although Russia does have enough separation to deny involvement.

How is he going to get ratings for SCOTUS Apprentice if we already know the winner beforehand?

A few years back when they poisoned an ex-spy in a restaurant there were lots of other people who got ill as bystanders .... I don't think any died, but the Russians have never respected borders or played fair and have a long history of this type of thing.

Long History of Russian deaths in the UK

I doubt it - simply put like most 'conversative' politicians they don't give a hoot about public opinion or how awful they look ... they've already been paid off and have their agenda to follow.

It'd be great if there was a vote of no-confidence and labor had the guts to stand up as a 'no-brexit' alternative for voters, but it'll never happen imho.

I've been away a few days and I recognize the conversation has moved on a bit but I have to come back to this.


I think you may want to travel around down south some more. Reading your post made me think, huh?



So I went and did some research starting with my home state of SC.
Current unemployment is at 4.4% a tick up from its 20 year low of 3.8 in January of 2018. The bottom of 3.5% in April of 1998. After not having been above 6% since 1993, SC unemployment rates stayed above 6% from May of 08 all the way to June of 2015. The trend certainly started to improve near the end of the Obama administration but it is at record lows currently.


A graph of GA's data reveals the same trends.
Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas...all show the same data. Unemployment markedly higher during the Obama administration than any other time in the last 30 years.



Link for reference

https://www.google.com/publicdata/ex...l=en&ind=false



The economy isnt "in the shitter" in the South. In fact manufacturing jobs are pouring into the economy.

A quick run down of the 25 fastest growing cities shows


TX has 6 of the top 25 (RED)

Fl has 5 (MIXED)


SC has 3 (RED)

AL has 2 (RED)

ND has 2 (RED)
UT has 2 (RED)

ID, AR, NC, OR and CO have 1 each (3 REDS and 2 Blues)
Source https://www.usatoday.com/story/money...ties/34813515/


So of the Top 25 growing markets in the country a solid 18 are in Red states. I know its fun to dismiss us as dumb gun toting Bible thumping bubbas...but the stats bear out that during a Republican Presidency the job market is much greater in Red states than during a Democratic Presidency. Are they dumb? Dont give a fuck? Or are you just mis-informed.





You are free to do the math real quick on fastest shrinking cities and you will find that over half of the shrinking failing economies are in the blue strong holds.


I really cant understand your argument.

Isn't that a little harsh to state it that way, the economy at the start of Obama's term was basically the start of a huge recession, so yes unemployment was high but it wasn't really his fault and the subsequent recovery has been consistent since.

NB> Not all of the recession was the Republicans fault and not all of the recovery was down to Obama, but traditionally Republicans tend to relax regulations and lower taxes and to hell with the consequences ... then when Democrats get into office they cry about 'balancing budgets' ... without even looking embarrassed ...

Yeah, the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression isn't Obama's fault.

South Carolina is 37th in median household income. $5,000 less than the nation average. The unemployment rate is fine, it's just the jobs pay poorly.

They are also one of the biggest welfare states in the nation. Receiving $7.87 for every dollar they put in in federal income taxes. Without the generosity of the wealthier states, they'd be in rough shape.

The unemployment rate in South Carolina went from 10.5% when Obama took office to 4.5% when he left. I don't really think the President has much power to reduce unemployment rates like this but you seem to think so and those are the numbers.


Tends to happen when you take power in the middle of one of the greatest economic downturns in our nation's history.


Out of the bottom 25 states in median household income, 23 of them are red states.

This isn't new either. You can go back decades to see that those same states remain at the bottom in our country economically. I'm glad there are some cities growing. Perhaps in time they can pull themselves up and be competitive with the rest of the country.

But cost of living is lower as well. I live in ~4,500 sqft house on 15 acres that is less than $500k. (For example) In most parts of say IL that's a $1.5M house. I can stand to make half as much in those conditions...



"Starter homes" are still available sub $115k. You can make less and still have a better standard of living.



No argument here. Of course I'm anti government sponsored welfare almost in totality but that's another debate.


Check your facts. January of 08 SC was 5.6%. and had been flat for 6 months. Stayed flat for 3 more months through March. Between March 08 and Sept 08 it had jumped to 7.5%. Topping out at 11.8% in Feb 2010.







I want to be clear. I am not suggesting Obama is (solely or even largely) responsible for the down turn nor that Trump deserves (all or most) credit for the surge. I am simply disputing your assertion that red states are full of idiots who dont realize that voting for Republicans is bad for them. Going strictly from their experiences, and in a blue collar world

working=good

not working =bad

with minimal concern for the nuances of either.

That's not ideal but its the reality I've witnessed employing blue collar workers for 20 years now. Those workers look back at their work history and say "lots of work under republicans..not so under Dems..vote Rep. I see that logic daily fault though it may be.




Again you are looking at income without taking outflow into account. And sure its decades, even a century deep. Reconstruction took quite a toll and had a lasting impression on the South. Shocking I know.


Someone please tell Atlanta and Charlotte and Charleston and Raleigh (RTP) and Houston how cute it is that they a re growing and may one day compete with "real cities".


But keep walking around pious and thinking everyone else is an idiot. Its what cost the Dems the last election. Out of touch with their constituants base, that same base that is fleeing the NE (Blue states) and heading to Red States in droves.

Did you hear about the white supremacist GOP candidate?

No, not the one in IL.

Or the one in VA.

Or the one in CA.

The one from NJ that said,

Well I'm sure he has a black friend so it's alright

/sarcasm

CoL is based on demand. There is more demand to live near higher paying jobs, better schools, vibrant cities, etc.


Obama didn't take office till January 20, 2009. He was just a junior senator in 2008.


When a region puts it's energy toward race politics instead of making money, that does take a toll.


That's not my assertion. It's the opposite. I'm saying that I don't believe those voters care much about the economy. It's low on their list for why they vote for a particular individual or party. There's nothing wrong with that either. We all have different reasons for why we vote for someone.

Face it, the South didn't shift from solid Democrat to solid Republican overnight because of some economic policy in Washington. It did so because of the Civil Rights Act.

Also, I'm kind of lost on this argument. You point out a bunch of cities that are leading an economic surge that happen to overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

I feel there are many truths in both sides.

booradely's original statement was

There's plenty of evidence to support that voter's cared about the first two. The third is somewhat wide open to interpretation but its got something to do with it.

I do agree though that many in the red states just vote Republican and/or anti-Democrat e.g. anti-Hillary and some % voted anti-Obama (but to be fair, this happens for Democrats also). I don't see it as either or, its a combination.

At the end of the day, the economy and stock market are doing well and this will be a major factor in the next election. Its the non-hardcore Democrats or Republicans that will decide.

I'm just saying that under Obama, unemployment dropped dramatically. Corporate profits soared. The stock market had historic gains. Median household income rose. And the poverty rate fell.

So if those voters truly cared about "jobs and money" as you said, they should love the direction things were going. The fact they didn't would seem to support that those issues are not as important as they seem.

And now Trump can also boast on the most/all of them also.


How about the third booradley variable? I don't know how to define it and I'm sure it means different things to different people. This variable probably brought out alot of people to vote for the Trump "vision" (even with all his BS and lies).


Did some googling. Its Forbes so take it with a pinch of salt but I do think there is some validity here.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timwors.../#eefd9201d60d

They also seem to be areas which are much more susceptible to downturn. If farming, or the specific local industry goes belly-up, it’s much more catastrophic. Which I guess is why there’s more concern regarding change.

dola - not that cities can’t fail to diversify (looking at you, Detroit)

There's a lot more to look at than just housing costs.

True, there is also that third booradley factor.

For right or wrong, the red states didn't think that Hillary gave them "a feeling of hope for a strong, wealthy nation that they are actively a part of."

I'll state again, I don't really know how to define it and it will mean different things to different people. For the sake of brevity, let's call it the MAGA vision.

Bottom line - Trump won the electoral and Hillary the popular. But Trump did win, and not only did he win, he surprised everyone. This should worry the Democrats because I don't see much that they have done to account for that MAGA factor ... and the economy is humming along, stock market doing well, unemployment is down etc.

Goddammit I'm so pissed at the people and their protest votes last fall, right now. FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! all day and all night. FUCK YOU for your shortsighted vision and 'morals'. FUCK YOU for fucking this all up for the rest of my fucking life. You're all fucking fucks to me.

It's all relative to what you want. The saying "you get what you pay for" applies when it comes to CoL. Sure there are the occasional parts of the country that can offer a lot for a lesser cost (or vice versa), but those inefficiencies in the market tend to get corrected quickly (see Austin).

Massachusetts has a high CoL and higher taxes. They also have the best public schools in the country. They have a ridiculously low homicide rate. They have a major city that has everything you could want from an entertainment or cultural standpoint. Lots of social services available to their people. If I was raising a bunch of kids and my goal was to give them the best possible opportunity for success in life, that would be worth the high cost in my opinion.

Hilarious.

Yep sure is.
I made a mistake. I was quick data pulling while hip deep in other stuff and just screwed up. Shoot me.

Trump is stuck at @40% approval, so I'm not going to worry today about the 2020 election.

A lot of white voters chose Trump because they believe, not incorrectly, that the country is changing. The power structure that kept whites on top really is diminishing, and they believed Trump when he said he'd reverse the trends. He won't, he can't, but his message, especially combined with a Dem message that offered those same voters very little, was appealing.

:nono:

Since its the popular view, no consequences. If it was the opposite someone would definitely get a week or more vacation.

I agree with this. I think the term "white anxiety" has been used. Also seems to encompass men who are seeing some changes in society as well. So someone who does proclaim they'll stop that is attractive. It's why the white nationalism stuff has played so well.

There's also a segment who get tied into the tribalism of politics. The issues don't really matter. It's just making sure your side wins and the other side loses. The tariffs are a good example of that. It's a far-left policy (farther to the left of even Bernie Sanders) yet being supported on the right because it's their team doing it. Similar to how the left stopped caring about the Patriot Act and the war the minute Obama took control.

Somewhat related to our conversation about red vs blue states. Below link shows how the states changed.

CA was interesting. Didn't know and never really thought about it but it was red from 1968 to 1988 but has been blue since 1992.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/u...-and-blue.html

The conclusion was

Postscript is quoted below.

I think the federal taxes input vs output stat cannot be overstated. A state basically only needs money for social programs.

My frustration/confusion is then how can “red” state voters put people in charge that essentially cut social programs but then expect the fed bail them out? My guess is the people voting do not feel they need the social programs they think are being cut. (Add military industrial complex and I’m simply gobsmacked).

Anyways, here’s a good article with graphs and maps. It shows how the red states are much more dependent on federal government.
2018’s Most & Least Federally Dependent States

For me it was never a protest vote. It was 'voting for someone that I wouldn't be absolutely embarrassed to have as my president'. Neither 'major' candidate qualified.

And most of those white voters don't, consciously, realize that's what drove their choice. If you push them, really push them, on their vote, they'll offer up a jumble of inarticulate confusion. He "tells it like it is" about crime in minority population centers, or he'll bring back the blue collar manufacturing jobs where you could retire with a good pension after 30 years, or he'll Build That Wall. The racial anxiety stuff permeates that, but don't you dare call them out on it. They're Not Racist, Dammit, They Have Black Friends.

But that's really the crux. Democratic policy, fundamentally, is about dismantling the barriers white society has put in the path of minority populations for the last two hundred years. Reasonable people can disagree about the efficacy of existing policies, or whether their policy goals moving forward move that needle at all, but that's the aim.

That's not to say that Democratic policies don't or can't benefit working- and middle-class whites, but they haven't been good at articulating to those groups how their policy goals advance the interests of anybody but minority populations.

So you have huge swaths of rural America nicely primed for dog-whistle rhetoric (and, in the case of Trump, not even necessarily as subtle as a dog whistle).

Like, none of what you said is wrong. I'm just not sure it's as simple as "they believed he'd reverse the trends." I think a pretty hefty chunk of his base is split between people who don't have sufficient self-introspection to realize that, and people who'd never admit to it. The rest, of course, are the overt "white power" types Trump keeps getting called on to disavow.


I dunno that the left "stopped caring" about the Patriot Act so much. I think that when Obama got sworn in, there was a certain amount of political capital available to be spent, the economy was in meltdown, and they had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to try to do something on health care.

Look at how much shit Obama took for wanting to close Guantanamo and put the accused on trial. Now imagine he (or Pelosi, or Reid) had come forth in 2008 and said "You know, Russ Feingold was right, and the USA PATRIOT Act is lousy legislation that played on post-9/11 fears to give the government powers it neither needs nor can be trusted with." By the time the Republican machine got through with that, what the public would have heard would have been something like "Obama wants to repeal the PATRIOT Act; doesn't his dislike for a bill with such a wholesome name prove he's a secret Muslim who wants to destroy America?"

I mean, there are numerous examples of more or less that exact phenomenon happening with respect to other issues over the ensuing eight years, so that's not exactly far-fetched.

But, yeah. He had the cooperation of the House for all of two years, because he spent his political capital on trying to keep the recession from becoming a depression, and on trying to make health care reform happen. By the time he COULD have turned to the PATRIOT Act, Congress was already dealing with the rumblings of a red wave in the midterms, and there wouldn't have been any appetite for tackling something that controversial on the heels of ACA.


Proposition 187 killed the Republican Party dead in California. 187 drove turnout in CA to save an embattled Pete Wilson as governor and not-quite-split the CA Congressional delegation between Republicans and Democrats.

The aftermath led to increasing Latino turnout at the polls, and Republican Congressional representation has fallen by half in the 20+ years since. Republicans will point to Schwarzenegger getting almost 40% of the Latino vote as proof that their falling fortunes in the state weren't about 187, but about nebulous "other things" that just happened to coincide with the passage of the Proposition. Correlation is not causation etc. They'll blithely ignore his popularity with the demographic because of the Terminator franchise; they'll ignore how unpopular Davis was in the aftermath of the Enron power crisis, and how Schwarzenegger's name recognition drowned out essentially every non-Davis candidate in the race.

He'll get called a RINO if you talk to them about Schwarzenegger for long enough, but in the moment, the fact that he won an election or two in California will be enough for them to assert that 187 and comparable anti-immigrant initiatives aren't what doomed the GOP brand in the state. It was "other things."

People have a remarkable tendency to see the governmental assistance they receive as their right (if they notice it at all), and to see the assistance that other's receive as horrible welfare run amok.

WAH!

How many times over the years has Jon told people to die in a fire or worse? For better or worse the rule around here has generally been that only direct attacks on other board members get you in trouble.

Wasnt he just boxed for something similar?
(I remember him getting the smack, dont remember the reasoning)


And if our standard is more civil than Jon, well....

No it wouldn't. But thanks again for playing guess the moderating decision!

Again, no. The post which got Jon a suspension had nothing to do with politics, other than the subject being a former political figure.

So in the future I am allowed to tell those I disagree with 'Fuck You - You are a Fucking Fuck to me' without consequence.



Good to know.

That's been the case for a while (well most people don't call others a "Fucking Fuck").

You're being willfully obtuse.

Yes, you can say, group X should all die.

No, you can't say, board member X should die.

That's the way it's been for as long as I've been here. I don't agree with it, but that principle has been applied pretty consistently.

Can't say that Trump isn't using the pardon as a tool for his supporters now.



https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ase/771054002/