democrats won big statewide victories in kentucky, louisiana and virginia like, three weeks ago https://t.co/u2vxnLTUqy
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) December 13, 2019
We let you in, Mr. Sullivan — however profitable you might find it, badmouthing immigration is a bad look.
It’s me, the politics knower, here to tell you that the UK election predicts what will happen in 2020 and the GOP losses of the last few years were holographic simulations
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 13, 2019
Dems can draw lessons from Labour’s collapse. Just not the ones most people are asserting.
Main lesson is Dems need keep doing what they’re doing rather than succumb to disunity, or being ambiguous about rule of law, our place in the world, & our national values & identity
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 13, 2019
Yes, I do expect this result to repeat: A widely unpopular leader who drags down his party's support from levels you would expect based on fundamentals, Donald Trump, will lose to a lovable, doofy insider politician with a history of making up weird stories, Joe Biden. https://t.co/inYfM8W0YR
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) December 13, 2019
If anyone is cooking up a take on what the UK election means for us, consider the ways that the post-Blair Tories moved left. One of their manifesto planks: Neto zero carbon emissions by 2050.
That is also Joe Biden's climate target.
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 12, 2019
The US left shared tactics with Labour/Momentum, so no spinning how bad this is for them. But the UK Tories make populist/environmental concessions that our GOP simply doesn't. Imagine if Susan Collins was the most conservative member of the GOP.
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 12, 2019
My takeway from #ukelection is that Dems shouldn't nominate Jeremy Corbyn
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) December 12, 2019
Corbyn is a lot more like Kucinich than either of those two. https://t.co/O731wajQ2d
— The Bringer of Jollity (@davidabenner) December 12, 2019
This is colorful but wrong. Corbyn’s personal favorability was -41% (21% positive vs 61% negative). Labour’s major planks: wealth tax (+44%), nationalization (+34), & corporate reform (+33) are all very popular. Stats @YouGov https://t.co/kftltozatG
— Ken Gude (@KenGude) December 12, 2019
It was not just about Brexit. pic.twitter.com/boVWLqX2Ki
— Steven Fielding (@PolProfSteve) December 12, 2019
There is a turnip somewhere in Croydon with a message of "NHS, Remain, and Antisemitism Is Bad, Actually" that would have beaten Johnson by 30 seats. https://t.co/fdwLtXReCR
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) December 13, 2019
For everyone who needs to read this, here you go. https://t.co/rzBm6S1v2y
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) December 12, 2019
The most annoying thing tonight isn’t the Trump fans; most of them don’t know where Britain is. What’s annoying is all the po-faced JustTheTip Trumpers using Labour to rehearse their excuses for voting for him in 2020. https://t.co/gLNsZsTegz
— Roy Edroso (@edroso) December 13, 2019
OzarkHillbilly
Been awake since midnight this time. Blech.
OzarkHillbilly
Democrat legalizes voter fraud. This is how they are going to steal the 2020 election from the chosen one.
Frankensteinbeck
I reiterate from an earlier thread: We’ve had three years of consistent, massive swings towards Democrats. Trump won by a hair-thin technicality. He’s fucked in 2020.
Keith P
The big lesson from the election is that the losing party must adopt positions closer to mine, or else they’ll experience greater losses.
Viva BrisVegas
@OzarkHillbilly: Did the murderers and child molesters that ex-Gov Bevin just pardoned on his way out the door also get their voting rights restored?
Mike J
Hillary Clinton was possibly the most honest, least corrupt person to ever run for any office anywhere ever. Every audit of her charity showed it was clean as a whistle. Republicans have tried for decades to find anything corrupt she ever did, and never once came up with anything.
For decades the media repeated everything Republicans spewed. And lots of people became convinced that she must be crooked because they heard those lies for decades, and because it was politically convenient to believe it at the time. Those people had the chance to say, “I disagree with her, but she is honorable.” They chose not to.
Now, many of those same people are surprised to learn that the media can tear down other people too.
I wish Corbyn had won. But it is amusing that many of those people who went on about what a horrible candidate Clinton was and why can’t she take the blame for her loss after they spent years lying about her, those people are now having an epiphany.
Not that I expect them to to actually learn anything from this except to reinforce their belief that they are uniquely persecuted by a worldwide cabal that personally targets them because they are super geniuses.
it would be nice if the left learned that we’ve got to stick together. Not counting on it though.
WereBear
@Frankensteinbeck: That’s my take as well.
No country has a corner on the 1/3 of the populace who are rabidly dysfunctional as adults and want a crowd of like-minded to lose themselves in.
David ??Booooooo?? Koch
As a long time Bernie cheerleader, Weigel is the one who should be looking in the mirror.
WhatsMyNym
Well… nobody votes for the Prime Minister in the UK. You vote for your member of Parliament. Toss in multiple parties and it gets complex.
CaseyL
@WhatsMyNym: That is how it used to be, but I don’t think it is anymore. I think they elect PMs separately, a la a Presidential election. That’s how BoJo stayed PM even though his Party lost the majority a few months back.
OzarkHillbilly
@Viva BrisVegas: I don’t know the specifics of Kentucky law, but I think pardons restore all rights as the underlying crime is wiped away. Clemency would not necessarily restore voting rights as the conviction still stands, just the sentence is shortened, tho a governor certainly could restore voting rights too. I think.
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: DOH!!! “Clemency would not necessarily restore….” I meant a “commutation”. My bad.
Msb
@ Mike J
agree completely about Hillary.
unfortunately, Corbyn has been a disaster as a Labour leader, although he’s an honest man and apparently an excellent MP for his constituency. With Brexit, he embodies, “As you are neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth”: he tried to straddle Labour’s divide on the issue, and fudge his own hostility to the EU. Under his leadership, the party also has a serious anti-Semitism problem that he seems unable or unwilling to tackle. One could reply that the Tories are Islamophobes; they are, but their members and voters are fine with it. Labour members and voters, especially Jewish voters, are not fine with anti-Semitism. Outside Corbynistas, however, the party still has a lot of talent. Too bad that Boris Johnson is is charge of Brexit, and perhaps the break-up of the UK.
Nevertheless, I don’t take political advice from a man (Sullivan) who has a blind spot covering every woman in the world, except Margaret Thatcher, whom he’d like to canonize.
John Revolta
Labour tried to go all Brexit-Lite; Corbyn himself has been anti-Europe since before the EU even existed.
So Remainers stayed home. I guess this proves that Democrats need to adopt more centrist positions, to suck up to GOP voters. I guess it does, Idunno.
WereBear
THAT is the lesson. We don’t need Republican-Lite (more stupid and cruel! less filling!) since we have a considerable number of Red State Democrats who already do that.
As history records, the Republican party will die screaming, while the Democrats will split into two wings. Same as it ever was.
Just that none of us have lived through such interesting times, which are excruciating in practice.
Ascap_scab
As I understand it, Johnson was hard Brexit and Corbyn was soft Brexit.
The lesson is that when choosing between Republicans and Republican Lites, the people will always choose Republicans. If Labour wanted to win, they needed to be an anti-Republicans, not just a lesser version.
Sloane Ranger
@CaseyL: No, we still elect constituency MP’s. The leader of the Party which gains an overall majority in the House of Commons (or the Party able to form some sort of alliance with another Party to get an overall majority) becomes PM.
Johnson was able to hang on as PM despite losing his majority because of a recent change in the law which created a situation where elections were held every 5 years unless a super majority in the House of Commons voted to hold one earlier.
Johnson had been trying to get a super majority for an early election for weeks before finally succeeding.
Zzyzx
@Ascap_scab: I always have problems with that argument because:
1) “Republican light” invariably comes to mean “not agreeing with me on everything”
and
2) the Republicans use the same exact argument in reverse about their losses.
Basically we’re fighting over the same few number of swing seats/states so of course it’s the moderates of each party that lose when the pendulum swings. They’re the ones who were vulnerable.
?BillinGlendaleCA
OT: I found this interesting, the new Samsung phone coming out in February, the S11+, will have 5 cameras with one having a 108mp sensor. Most phone cameras are 12mp.
MJS
How abjectly disingenuous do you have to be to say, “Kentucky and Louisiana, where Trump literally begged for Republican wins? Meaningless. For a real example of what’s in store for 2020, you need to look at a different country, with a different system, and different issues THAT’S the apt comparison.”
David ??Booooooo?? Koch
@?BillinGlendaleCA: That interesting. that’s way higher than highest end DSLR
?BillinGlendaleCA
@David ??Booooooo?? Koch: There’s a Fujifilm camera that’s 100mp. The Sony AR4 is 61mp.
David ??Booooooo?? Koch
@?BillinGlendaleCA: That AR4 has a full frame sensor. how can a camera phone duplicate a sensor 36 millimeters in length?
WereBear
@MJS: What else they got? Lies, damned lies, and statistics which were made up and jotted on a napkin.
Kraux Pas
@Viva BrisVegas: From link:
Wait, isn’t this precisely the sort of behavior the Republicans routinely accuse the Democrats of enabling?
Re OP: Man, Sully’s always had a lot of blind spots but he used to have some good points too. He’s really gone off the deep end without a staff or readers to keep him in line.
J R in WV
@David ??Booooooo?? Koch:
Yeah, that’s a really great sensor. But a phone doesn’t have much of a lens, can’t have a good lens if you still want it to be the common flat rectangle shape of a cell phone.
The new Sony full-frame mirrorless cameras are pretty small bodies, but you can use a big telephoto lens, or a Macro close up lens, with great light gathering ability. I have a Nikon DSLR, an Olympic pocket camera, and a Panasonic superzoom fixed lens similar to a DSLR but without the ability to change lenses.
I think the Panasonic is far and away the best of those three, although they do make a model one big step improved over the one I have.
It has probably one of the best zoom lenses, designed by Leica, and I believe the glass is more than half of the quality of a camera.
droog
I disagree with these statements rather strongly. Boris’ rise could be seen for years and nobody could do anything to stop it. The sort of blessed, charmed guy who doesn’t lose popularity no matter how badly he perfoms at his job.
-He was reckless with money as London Mayor but people call it a success.
-He failed to keep his promises as an MP (which, fair enough, many politicians do) but did not lose his strength.
-His time as Foreign Secretary was empty and an embarrassment, but it didn’t put people off.
-His short stint as PM before this election was a joke, but his numbers swelled.
Anybody who thinks that Gordon Brown, Ed Milliband, Tom Watson, Chuka Umunna or Andy Burham can stop that freight train is just doing Monday night quarterbacking.
The Johnson government will be a right mess.The inside of Johnson’s car will look like like a lab compared to Parliament in two months’ time, or the UK in two years’ time. And it may not matter to his standing. Johnson will leave when he gets tired of dealing with real work or when his party stabs him in the back.
Mowgli
@David ??Booooooo?? Koch: I used to work for a company in Denmark that makes some of highest resolution still image cameras in the world. Their lead engineer was plucked by Apple to move to Cupertino about five years ago to work on cell phone camera tech.
As someone else pointed out, resolution is just one component of image quality. Sensor size, lens quality, etc. are also key factors.
That said, the phone manufacturers are clearly trying to compete with mirrorless and (ultimately) DSLRs and have largely killed the “prosumer” camera business already.
Another Scott
‘morning all.
In Fielding’s tweet, “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
BBCNews – John Curtic seems to give an even-handed analysis:
Lots of things were going on. Brexit, Labour not turning out (maybe because of Corbyn, maybe not).
Still hoping to see Tony Jay’s take.
Cheers,
Scott.
kindness
I really don’t get why folks act like Joe Biden has a shot at this. Polls. Polls mean squat right now. Iowa & New Hampshire mean bullshit. They have a combined what, 1.5% of the US population?
Joe isn’t going to win this and which ever Democrat (that means you won’t win it either Bernie) does will win the election unless Russia is able to hack all our voting machines….which isn’t such a far stretch and MoscowMitch is doing everything he can to further.
mapaghimagsik
Interesting that the lone Scottish person I actually chat with was surprisingly pro Brexit, voting something vague about corporate influence that was from an EU statement. I asked for a reference to the statement but they said they couldn’t find it.
I’ve only spoken to them online through gaming so o can’t vouch for their situation. The
L85NJGT
A redux of mid twentieth century militant trade unionism – not the vote getter that was promised.
Go figure…. Labour heartland! mining towns! They haven’t pulled coal out of those holes in a generation and the Liverpool docks are a Po-Mo playground. Labor has a constituency, too bad those corbynites are lost in an old fools fantasyland.
Chris Johnson
Oh, come the fuck on. Jimmy Carter is still alive. I get how you’re feeling, but do you not get that the Dems have more of a bench than that? Especially in terms of good historical Dems.
Hell, there have been more decent Republicans than that, though you have to go waaay back in history for them.
patroclus
The list of Labour’s screw-ups in this election is long and any one of them could have been the main reason for their worst showing since 1935. Take your pick.
1. Brexit. The official position on the most important issue was ambiguous. Corbyn, a long-time Leaver, whipped the whole party to trigger Article 50 and then continued to say he favored a Brexit (albeit presumably softer than the Conservatives) but then backtracked because most of Labour are/were Remainers and said he would negotiate a Brexit withdrawal agreement but then would submit it to the voters in a referendum on which he would not officially take a position. Leavers considered this inadequate; Remainers were horrified.
2. Anti-semitism. Corbyn and Labour are not anti-semitic but, like Clinton’s e-mails, it was alleged that they were and there were some embarrassing statements/incidents that needed to be apologized for and otherwise dealt with. This never happened. So, the charge just continued and morphed into an ongoing “thing” which Corbyn never effectively dealt with.
3. Corbyn. Far worse than even Wilmer, Corbyn has a history of pro-IRA-like statements, anti-NATO statements and positions; anti-U.S. sentiments as well as his more well-known anti-EU positions. Woefully ineffective for years at PMQT and in his speaking style, he’s gotten better recently but not all that much. His supporters seemed far more concerned with dominating the Labour party than in winning elections – an attitude that probably stemmed from the top. Rather than operating in a consensus style (as alleged by some of our British visitors), he and his supporters hounded all potential Labour competitors out of politics (e.g. Tom Watson) with a “my way or the highway” style that just went on and on and on. Simply put, a terrible “leader.”
4. Far left policies (Sullivan’s point). Massive nationalization; militant trade unionism; socialist rhetoric; free stuff for everyone with no mention of how it would be paid for other than wealth taxes and soaking the rich; punishing banks and bankers regardless of wrongdoing. All of it created the very caricature of a far left purity pony. Taken individually, some of all these might have been appropriate and were based on good ideas, but collectively, easy to stigmatize.
5. The campaign itself. As reflected here, much of the venom was aimed at the Lib Dems; not the Tories. Also the media. And other Labour figures. And Remainers. And Leavers. And the EU. And America. And anyone who rightly pointed out the ridiculously ambiguous position on Brexit.
6. The media. Like with Fox, the U.K. extreme right media has shifted the Overton Window, leaving the “mainstream” outlets playing at bothsiderism (at best). Yes, it’s sort of a Hobbseian choice to either spend all your time whining about it (see 5) or to just deal with it as is, but Labour is right that this is a huge issue.
7. Boris. Like Trump, he’s an absurd figure, but he’s got a Teflon-like quality and the U.K. media seems fascinated rather than appalled by it.
I’m usually a Labour fan (from the U.S.) and was hopeful way back in 2017 that Corbyn would get better and actually oppose Brexit, which will likely have inimical consequences for the entire world. He never got better. Only worse. I truly hope that the next leader will be far better and will actually attempt to win elections. Corbyn was an utter disaster.
L85NJGT
@patroclus:
I expect he and his followers will squeeze even harder in regards to maintaining control of the party, leading it to complete irrelevance.
patroclus
@L85NJGT: We’ll see. The Official Opposition is never “completely” irrelevant in the U.K. and the new leadership will have ample time to plot a comeback over the next 5 years. They will be helped by (1) events and (2) their successful attacks against the Lib Dems. Brexit is unlikely to be the utopia its proponents claim it will be and after the Withdrawal Agreement is railroaded through in January, the really difficult step of negotiating new trade agreements with the entire world will commence. Currently, they’ll have until the end of 2020 to do one with the EU. Will Johnson jettison the ERG and move to a softer Brexit? Will he try to unite the country or just mouth off about it?
In the long run, destroying the Lib Dems chances probably will help Labour (which is probably why they directed such a massive barrage against them despite its limited effect against the Tories). Corbyn did worse than even Benn and Foote did in 1983, but back then the SDP and Liberals were arguably stronger than the Lib Dems are now. And the rise of the SNP masks some of Labour’s strengths – they lost all but one of their Scottish seats, but it’s not like they lost them to the Tories.
It’s hard to imagine anyone doing worse then Corbyn. But they need to stop the circular firing squad and the shooting downward if they want to appeal to a mass electorate. Johnson is the target.
Calouste
The take away is to not make an old backbencher who’s never held a position of importance in the party your leader. There’s a reason Corbyn never made it to the (shadow) cabinet, he just doesn’t play well with others. Same of course goes for Wilmer.
topclimber
Hey I am a certified OK boomer (OK as in mostly on the bright side of the force for 40+ years) so forgive me my limited social media skills. I can’t seem to find John Cole’s email. I blame Watergirl/s.
If I had the master’s ear I would say he needs to set up a “thank you Tony” thread. It should offer support to Tony Jay and those of his fellow Brits who are also on the bright side. They have just been smacked by their Mother of a Country’s stiff upper crust. If they are suffering even half what the BJ world went through after 11/16 then they need our support.
My personal offering would be: Tony, we have your back. He was a flobajob in many ways but Churchill fought the fascists at the key point that kept them from winning WWII. We owe you… and we pay our debts. We are going to beat Trump’s rump because we need it , you need it, and anyone who does not want the kleptocrats to run the world needs it.
It is sad to see that the UK, wholly owned subsidiary of London banks, looks to be going the Singapore route. But much as Boris, Donald and Vlad are united in making the world safe for fascism, everyone from headless Charles I to little old me knows they are on the wrong side of history. One side or the other is right, and I would not be commenting on this site if I thought it wasn’t mine.
Wait, you say someone already suggested this? Well, like I said, just an OK boomer, far from the best.