[Tubby Isaacs]

Ha ha ha.

[Spoonman]

Time for another round up of "'murica"...

First off, Tr*mp has announced that he's suing Facebook, Twitter et al...

...meanwhile more on the usual suspects and alleged certain foreign ties...

(for the record, Rudy has also had his licence to practice law in Washington DC suspended)

...finally, top it all off with typical batshittery!

[The Weeping Angel]

If only more states were more like California.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Republicans used to win lots of the wealthier states till Bill Clinton. Bush Snr won New Jersey by 13% and Maryland by 2% (despite one of the highest black populations). Biden got double Trump's vote in Maryland this time.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Virginia has been a remarkable shift too. Bush Jnr in 2004 beat Kerry by 8%. Biden beat Trump by 10%.

[The Weeping Angel]

Virginia has been a remarkable shift too. Bush Jnr in 2004 beat Kerry by 8%. Biden beat Trump by 10%.

I can see a couple of other southern states going the way of Virginia as well such as North Carolina and Georgia.

[Tubby Isaacs]

North Carolina keeps disappointing. I thought Biden and Cunningham would win. Georgia I didn't see coming.

Forget what I say, really.

[The Weeping Angel]

If Cunningham hadn't got caught up in a sexting scandal he would have won. North Carolina did see the Democrats gain two house seats and got the Democratic governor re-elected.

[Arrowhead]

Arizona and Texas are both experiencing enormous shifts in their underlying demographics, especially Arizona which is seeing a lot of people moving there from California and bringing their liberal voting habits with them. Both are at about the same stage that California was circa 1990. Texas may well turn blue by the end of this decade, hence the disgraceful voter suppression tactics being adopted there by the GOP.

Colorado and Virginia have both turned reliably Dem in the past ten years too, and Georgia looks to be going the same way now that the massive Atlanta metro area finally seems to have outnumbered the ultra-conservative rural populations.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Trump did surprisingly well with Hispanics this time. In Texas, Republican governors have had a Hispanic following because they get well known on Spanish language media. But not sure they'd properly gone after Hispanics in presidential elections because they hadn't needed them. This time they did.

Hopefully Democrats can address this and it's not part of a trend.

[Tubby Isaacs]

White with college degrees voters seem to be pretty equal, with probably Biden just ahead.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2 ... -religion/

Not all that much change from 2016 really. I'd be surprised if the Democrats were winning them in Texas or North Carolina. Bit of an opportunity there, I reckon.

[The Weeping Angel]

From the world's mayor to drunken uncle.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/ ... trump-book

A drunken Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged Donald Trump to “just say we won” on election night last November, according to a new book, even as key states started to slip away from the president and defeat by Joe Biden drew near.

The former mayor of New York was then acting as Trump’s personal attorney, a role in which he had fueled Trump’s first impeachment and would later lead hapless attempts to prove Trump’s lie that his defeat was the result of electoral fraud.

According to Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, authors of the forthcoming I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, Giuliani approached senior Trump aides early on election night at the White House.

“What’s happening in Michigan?” he asked.

The campaign manager, Bill Stepien, chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and senior adviser Jason Miller told him it was too early to know.

“Just say we won,” Giuliani said.

[Arrowhead]

I’m struggling to think of a politician whose reputation has collapsed furthest in recent years than Giuliani. From hard-but-fair Conservative sensiblehead to gibbering, incoherent imbecile inside just a few short years. A staggering decline.

[Andy McDandy]

His corporate approach to running New York (broken windows, clean up the centre, doughnut effect etc) was superficially fine, as long as you're not one of the groups he's decided are cluttering up his nice city centre. Bit like Trump in that regard. Not surprising that they got together.

[MisterMuncher]

His reputation was always built on sand. Broken windows was bullshit from top to bottom, the reduction in street level crime having rather more to do with an economic upturn (and sustained via gentrification) than any particular policing success. Post 9/11, all he had to do was look more decisive and resolute than Dubya.

It's not so much a fall from grace as reversion to type.

[Arrowhead]

This extraordinary tweet had me spilling the proverbial coffee over the keyboard this morning. For those who haven't been following, Senator Sinema is currently refusing to tweak the existing filibuster rules in the U.S. Senate, meaning that vital voter protection legislation is doomed to fail.............including the John Lewis Voting Rights Act

As others have pointed out, Senator Sinema appears to have succeeded in gaslighting herself.

The Labour equivalent would be somebody like Caroline Flint filling her 2019 Twitter feed with "It's Still Not Too Late To Prevent Brexit" memes whilst simultaneously voting repeatedly for Theresa May's wretched Brexit deal.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Manchin's stuff sort of makes sense given where he represents. But I don't get Sinema at all. Mark Kelly, also of Arizona, who faces re-election in 2022 hasn't gone there at all.

[Arrowhead]

Manchin's stuff sort of makes sense given where he represents. But I don't get Sinema at all. Mark Kelly, also of Arizona, who faces re-election in 2022 hasn't gone there at all.

I suspect Sinema fancies herself as the new McCain, which sort of makes sense given the Arizona connection i.e. straight-talking political maverick who often drives her own supporters around the bend whilst gaining the respect of the wider electorate. I'm sure I read somewhere that Sinema is currently polling very well in Arizona amongst independents and Conservatives (presumably Never Trumpers), so perhaps the approach is paying off. If it works, she could still be in the Senate thirty years from now.

I have a certain amount of sympathy for Manchin & Sinema in as much that the filibuster will have undoubtedly seen off some very scary Republican proposals over the years. But the apparent lack of a Plan B looks appalling right now, hence the widespread incredulous reaction to the Sinema tweet.

[The Weeping Angel]

[Bones McCoy]

I know little about the mechanics of American citizenship.
This one looks like "equality, but in a bad way".