The Many Faces of US Politics...

[seafoid]

And to think Irish politicians thought about banning Donald Trump from visiting earlier this year

Plámás and a reverse ferret

[muppet]

And to think Irish politicians thought about banning Donald Trump from visiting earlier this year

That was the UK. And it was because of a petition to ban him.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/18/europe/uk-parliament-debates-trump-ban/

[Declan]

The poor little lambs!

Mealey mouthed liberals worrying because big bad Donald is coming to town is laughable, these sheep deserve what they think is coming

Thanks for the considered response stew. Said lawyer in my message is of middle eastern parentage and in the last 3 weeks has been followed on numerous occasions on a public road in Boston and called a sand jockey and nigger bitch and go back home we don't want you here. Has reported it to the police but guess what - no response.
A friend's mexican restaurant in Mass was picketed by trump supporters saying we don't want you here and chanting you're going to pay for the wall and again the police authorities refused to act on their complaints. 
So I think they have good reason to be concerned don't you?

[seafoid]

The poor little lambs!

Mealey mouthed liberals worrying because big bad Donald is coming to town is laughable, these sheep deserve what they think is coming

Thanks for the considered response stew. Said lawyer in my message is of middle eastern parentage and in the last 3 weeks has been followed on numerous occasions on a public road in Boston and called a sand jockey and nigger bitch and go back home we don't want you here. Has reported it to the police but guess what - no response.
A friend's mexican restaurant in Mass was picketed by trump supporters saying we don't want you here and chanting you're going to pay for the wall and again the police authorities refused to act on their complaints. 
So I think they have good reason to be concerned don't you?

Jews are getting a lot of abuse too. #charming

[screenexile]

The poor little lambs!

Mealey mouthed liberals worrying because big bad Donald is coming to town is laughable, these sheep deserve what they think is coming

Thanks for the considered response stew. Said lawyer in my message is of middle eastern parentage and in the last 3 weeks has been followed on numerous occasions on a public road in Boston and called a sand jockey and nigger bitch and go back home we don't want you here. Has reported it to the police but guess what - no response.
A friend's mexican restaurant in Mass was picketed by trump supporters saying we don't want you here and chanting you're going to pay for the wall and again the police authorities refused to act on their complaints. 
So I think they have good reason to be concerned don't you?

Jews are getting a lot of abuse too. #charming

Just like the UK Hate Crimes will sky rocket... but she's not in so it's all OK we'll have our Country back.

[foxcommander]

And to think Irish politicians thought about banning Donald Trump from visiting earlier this year

That was the UK. And it was because of a petition to ban him.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/18/europe/uk-parliament-debates-trump-ban/

It was Richard Boyd Barrett who was making noises about a ban.
Whats also worse is that Fine Gael and Fianna Fail publically backed Hillary's campaign and snubbed Trump. Not a good policy.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/tnaiste-tds-to-fly-to-us-for-democrats-convention-34908788.html

[screenexile]

A great line there... "The Divided States of America" very true!

[muppet]

And to think Irish politicians thought about banning Donald Trump from visiting earlier this year

That was the UK. And it was because of a petition to ban him.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/18/europe/uk-parliament-debates-trump-ban/

It was Richard Boyd Barrett who was making noises about a ban.
Whats also worse is that Fine Gael and Fianna Fail publically backed Hillary's campaign and snubbed Trump. Not a good policy.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/tnaiste-tds-to-fly-to-us-for-democrats-convention-34908788.html

Show us where 'Irish politicians thought about banning Donald Trump'.

One clown making 'noises' is hardly the same thing.

[Harold Disgracey]

Mexican newspaper headline of the day.

[Syferus]

Watching the uber liberals shit themselves is almost worth the uncertainty.

[foxcommander]

And to think Irish politicians thought about banning Donald Trump from visiting earlier this year

That was the UK. And it was because of a petition to ban him.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/18/europe/uk-parliament-debates-trump-ban/

It was Richard Boyd Barrett who was making noises about a ban.
Whats also worse is that Fine Gael and Fianna Fail publically backed Hillary's campaign and snubbed Trump. Not a good policy.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/tnaiste-tds-to-fly-to-us-for-democrats-convention-34908788.html

Show us where 'Irish politicians thought about banning Donald Trump'.

One clown making 'noises' is hardly the same thing.

Here: http://fusion.net/story/255400/ireland-trump-ban-petition/


Enda said he'd meet him but give him an earful about his stances. Like Enda can take someone down with his quick wit...

[sid waddell]

While no fan of Trump, the left-wing, pc media over here made little attempt to be objective.
There wasn't much delving into why people were supporting Trump, apart from them being uneducated, rednecks and racists.

If you looked a little bit, which you obviously didn't, there was a ton of coverage about what was motivating voters across the US, and none more so than about what was happening in places like Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia than anywhere else.

Incorrect. The majority of British and Irish media coverage painted Trump supporters in an unflattering light.
Far more vox pops with nut jobs at rallies than discussions with real voters.
Stuff like rust belt and blue collar were  namechecked but rarely quantified.

There's a huge difference between objective fact and bias.

It's an objective fact that Trump, along with a significant proportion of his support, are racist, xenophobic, misogynist, certainly those three, and then whatever you're having yourself.

Reporting objective fact is not bias, it's reporting objective fact.

Trump. Brexiteers and the whole populist far-right movement worldwide pride themselves on "telling it like it is" (their words).

Yet when it is genuinely "told as it is", they're the first to complain, hiding behind a sort of straw man version of the political correctness that they claim to hate to try and protect themselves from these objective facts.

Those that delight in giving offence in such a proudly "politically incorrect" manner are often the very same people that take offence most easily.

Other non-racial issues such as trade which motivated Trump's support were comprehensively covered. This is also objective fact. In an utter shit show of a campaign, light on policy discussion, this was the policy issue that was discussed and covered by the media the most.

[an léirmheastóir]

So I don't pretend to know a lot about American politics especially now after the last 18 months goings on but I can't understand why so many people state side are horrified at the thought of trump getting the president gig and equally horrified at the thought of Hillary getting it. There were 12 republican candidates at the start and 2 democrats so obviously the candidate with the highest approval rating within each camp got chosen. I guess my question is there were 5 candidates on the ballot paper yesterday why if so many people were disillusioned with either of the big two did they not pick one of the other 3 as a protest vote. They still had their other candidates to vote for in the senate and I guess that's the more important vote. Maybe it's not possible to vote for say a democratic senator and say the lady who stood for the greens in the presidential race. Someone enlighten me please 🙈

[seafoid]

Globalisation is dead, and white supremacy has triumphed
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/globalisation-dead-white-supremacy-trump-neoliberal
Paul Mason
Trump's victory is a betrayal of ethnic minorities and women. Progressives must direct their energies to building an alternative to the failed neoliberal model

'Before we agonise about the racial betrayal white America committed last night, we must understand the gender betrayal runs deeper.' Wednesday 9 November 2016 14.17 GMT


"I
sit in one of the dives ... uncertain and afraid," wrote WH Auden, in the days before war broke out in 1939. Tonight it's the entire leftwing, humanist and liberal world's turn to sit in its modern dives – coffee bars staffed by global, precarious, young people – and face it. Globalisation is dead. The American superpower will die.

Donald Trump has won the presidency – not because of the "white working class", but because millions of middle-class and educated US citizens reached into their soul and found there, after all its conceits were stripped away, a grinning white supremacist. Plus untapped reserves of misogyny.

The academic debate about what's driving the ultra-right surge in liberal democracies – migration or economic hardship – was always sterile in the case of the US. High recent migration into an economy where growth provides only low-paid jobs, in the absence of a strong and progressive labour movement, is always going to fuel the right. But that's not the US.
The US "won" the global recovery after 2008. It stabilised its banks and opted strong and early for monetary expansion. Real wage growth has wavered around the 4% line for the past five years.

And that was not the only source justifying confidence for Hillary Clinton. Her pollsters noted the inexorable demographic surge supporting liberalism: huge numbers of single-female households, rising black and Hispanic populations, gay marriages, historically high numbers of college graduates.

What they underestimated was the fragility of their own ideology and the deep reserves – even among educated men in crisp, white shirts – of fear and hatred.
If it is a sudden change in status to a once dominant group that drives electorates to the far right, as political scientist Roger Petersen has argued – then we have to start with the biggest change in status of all time. That is the reproductive shock that began 50 years ago, with the pill, which has put women into boardrooms, frontline combat roles and, more relevantly, control over who they have sex with, and when, and how.

The mass issuance of rape and death threats against women in public life, led by key figures on the alt-right media, is only the froth on the deep lake of bile nurtured by some men. You do not overturn 40,000 years of biologically rigged social control without a backlash. Before we agonise about the racial betrayal white America committed last night, we must understand the gender betrayal runs deeper.

When Trump explained his boasts about grabbing women "by the pussy" as "locker room talk", anti-sexist sports stars went on air to say, "Not in my locker room." But Trump was right. In the locker rooms of the developed world there is harboured – not among all men but enough – a deep fear about the economic and sexual liberation of women.

Leave aside the Wall Street dinners, the email servers and the pneumonia: it was ultimately Hillary Clinton's gender – symbolised by the "pant suit" – that was too much for some male voters, college-educated or not.

As to ethnicity and migration, the dynamics of what drove Trump to power are pretty simple once you understand the right's genius for subtext. Every time he said, "We'll build a wall to stop Mexicans", people understood the unstated second clause: and we'll reimpose segregation on black America. The first victims of the now-unleashed fury of white supremacism will be those heroic, thoughtful black college graduates who've made "Black Lives Matter" a household phrase.
So this is not some two-dimensional revolt against poverty and wage stagnation. It is a three-dimensional revolt against the impacts of neoliberalism – both positive and negative.
Freemarket economics unleashed two forces that have now collided: the rapid rise in inequality, and a route to the top percentile for the talented female, black or gay person. As long as it delivered not just growth but a growth story, a foreseeable better future, those disempowered by neoliberalism could stand it.

But neoliberalism no longer works. It is broken. If it survived it would have delivered at best zombie growth fuelled by central bank money and at worst stagnation. But it will not survive. Last summer I predicted that if we do not break with the economics of high inequality, high debt and low productivity, populations will vote to dismantle the global order. With Brexit and Trump that process is inexorable – and the next wave of the tsunami will hit Italy and Austria in their plebiscites on 4 December.

In the next weeks, our denial reflexes will be in full swing. Like Auden's generation we will "cling to our average day". But one set of people now faces a moment where only honesty will suffice. It is the economists, journalists, civil servants, bankers and policy wonks who have rubbished the idea of the existential threat.
They claimed the capitalism of the past 30 years was merely the inner essence of the system revealed, unimprovable unless by the privatisation of the last hospital and the decline of union density to zero. They were wrong; they need to place their intellectual firepower and resources – as their counterparts did in the era of Keynes and Roosevelt – in the service of designing an alternative system.



You're going to hear a lot of wailing from the left about our "disconnection" with the values of "ordinary working-class people". It is bullshit – both as a fact and an explanation of what's happened. In every state in America there are working-class people staffing beleaguered abortion clinics, organising unions among migrant cleaners and Walmart workers.

Those who tell you the left has to somehow "reconnect" with people whose minds are full of white supremacy and misogyny must finish the sentence. By what means? By throwing our black brothers and sisters under a bus? Eighty years ago the poets and miners of the International Brigades did not march into battle saying: "Mind you, the fascists have got a point."

It's not about reconnection. As in the UK, the racist right in America is a minority that can and must be defeated. It's about re-forming the political coalition that won both the New Deal and the second world war. The left, the unions, the ethnic minorities; the liberal middle class; and that section of Wall Street and the US boardroom that is unprepared to lie supine as wannabe-Trumps put their "locker room talk" into practice.
It will not be hard for a common story to emerge that puts the defence of global interconnection, racial tolerance and gender equality at its heart.
But we have to tell it convincingly. And to do so Democrats in America must find the courage to learn what British Labour – in a huge and unfinished effort – has learned. Stop putting discredited representatives of the elite at the top of the ballot paper.

[seafoid]

Watching the uber liberals shit themselves is almost worth the uncertainty.

It's hilarious
http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.ch/2014/05/fascism-i-sometimes-fear.html