Everybody was wrong

Milliband, head of the communists,
 lost everything last night

It’s like the day after the party, and everybody has a headache.

In the newspapers today across the countries of Britain and America, there is mortification, hand wringing, and confusion. All the polls were wrong, very, very wrong. The elections for Prime Minister yesterday was predicted by every metric, every number, and every one either put the Labor and Tory parties at neck to neck, or Labor just a little bit ahead.

Well, as it turned out, the British people did trust their Prime minister, and were thankful that during his time in office he has created a thousand new jobs a day, and they liked the fact that he promises by 2017 to let them vote on whether they want to stay members of the European Union.

Labor lost so bad that the head of the party, Ed Milliband, resigned. The Liberal Democrats lost so bad that the head of their party, Nick Clegg, resigned. UKIP lost so bad, holding on to only one seat that the head of their party, Nigel Farrage, resigned. That guy didn’t even win his own seat.

The Tories beat everybody. They beat everyone so bad that they don’t even need to form an alliance with another party. They have more than the majority necessary, something no one thought they would get, to rule on their own, without having to care what any of the other parties thought.

Just yesterday people were heralding the end of the two party system in Britain. This morning they are wondering where they went wrong. It’s sort of like when Mayweather got in the ring with Pacman. All the hype and nothing happened, the guy on top stayed on top.

The good news is that this time, there is no one to arbitrarily decide that suddenly the contest never happened, and the Tories can get back to what they have been doing. Resorting a certain amount of freedom in Britain, moving the country more right of center, and fixing an economy damaged from 13 years under Labor.

Andrew C. Abbott

The British Elections Today: Too Close to Call

The candidates

“The traditional two-party system is breaking down in Britain, which makes the outcome more uncertain” That was the New York Times this morning, admitting that neither they nor anybody else knows who will be the next Prime Minister of Britain when the polls close at 10:00 PM London Time this evening.
          

And in Britain, they aren’t even guessing. In fact, in England, it is a crime that carries a hefty fine and up to six months in prison just to talk about anything, from economics to politics, that might in any way effect the election, on Election Day.     

At the moment, the tallies are just a little bit in favor, by 3 or 4%, of David Cameron holding on to power, and the Tories and their conservative ideals to be swept to another 5 years of power and majority rule in Britain. If that happens, the face of global politics could be changed drastically if David Cameron holds true to his promise to let the people of Great Britain vote on whether or not they would like to remain in the European Union.     

There are seven candidates for Prime Minister at the moment, and they are all running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to round up the last few votes here and there.     

It is going to be a long few hours for some, as coalitions are made and sweat pours down the suits of politicians. The reality is that even after this whole thing is over, after all the votes are cast, and everything is done, there is only a one in ten chance that we will have a winner. In reality it will probably be days or even weeks before someone, probably Cameron, or his arch rival Ed Milliband, the Labor shadow minister who is so hardball he unseated in own brother, who will stand in Buckingham Palace at the end of it, receiving instructions from the Queen, to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.           

The Election is so close, that even in Vegas, where over 100,000,000 dollars have been bet, there still has not been declared an official front runner.

Andrew C. Abbott

Writing from Ferguson: The Two Americas

I write this from Ferguson, Missouri, the place where all of the racially charged friction began.  I am here for a conference being held in a large convention center, attached to a massive Embassy Hotel, with beautiful inside waterfalls and wishing pools where you can throw coins in, and with well-dressed attendants.

But of course, that’s not why Ferguson is famous. It’s the protests, beginning with the tragic death of Mike Brown after an altercation with a police officer, and the looting and riots following.

I have travelled to 45 states in the nation in my 17 years of life with my preacher father, and in that time I have seen both Americas. I have been with multi-millionaires, and have walked streets where people were begging for food. In California, I once met a man, who was so poor he could not even afford a bar of soap, which he was walking the streets begging for. I recall, as I, after finding one and chasing him down to give it to him, and seeing the joy in his eyes, thinking about how this man, (who was a black gentleman) didn’t care or even probably know about political parties. He had no idea what great economic forces had forced him out work, all he was looking for was a bar of soap so he could take a bath.

In Kansas City, another man was playing a lute and sitting in a park, hoping for a dime. I asked him to play Concerning Hobbits. I then asked him if he had a home. He’d had one until 2008, when, he said, for some reason he didn’t understand, he’d lost it. After that he’d lost his job.

Of course, I knew what had happened in 2008, about the Subprime Mortgage Crises, but all he knew was he had lost his home. It’s hard to rationalize about the rise and fall of markets when the market falls on you.

There really are two Americas. And from Colorado to Main I have seen them well defined. One of rich to middle class that understands what is happening, but since life is basically good, food is on the table, and the kids can go to college, they don’t have to worry too much.

But there is the Other America that is so infamous; those that just barely live from paycheck to paycheck or the ones that don’t even have one.

Riots, like we have seen in Ferguson, and are seeing in Baltimore, although horrible and inexcusable, are understandable some ways, if we look at them through the view of those at the bottom, through the lens of those who don’t know why, only what. They don’t know why the jobs and schooling and safety aren’t there, but they know it’s not, and to their eyes no one is doing anything about it. And when, at least in appearance, and sometimes in fact, the very ones who are supposed to protect them resort to excessive violence, the anger wells up.

As we have seen in Baltimore and Ferguson, protests began peacefully, but like so many movements, it is not far from discontent and anger to violence, and it only takes a few exploitative thugs to set things off.

It’s not a racial issue; it’s an issue of the Other America. The America that is beneath the radar, the ones without special interest groups in Washington, the ones for whom few people stand up.

I’m a high school kid. I don’t have the answers to poverty; I don’t know how we’ll fix all of this. But I do know that the problems are real, we can’t push them aside. And I do know that a house divided against itself cannot stand. America is divided into two parts; and the divide is getting bigger, and often times neither side understands the other. Until we can unite, and make it no longer us and them, but just us, until we realize that it’s just us Americans here and we’re all in this together, that one group’s problems are all of our problems, we can’t fix this. But when we do realize it, we can start to.

Andrew C. Abbott

 

Uncle Bernie from Brooklyn

Bernie Sanders

Kansas City, KA – Some people call him the people’s senator, some people call him Uncle Bernie from Brooklyn. I just call him nuts.

Bernie Sanders, four time mayor of Burlington Vermont, and eight term member of the House of Representatives, and now the Jr. Senator from Vermont in his second term, the boy born in Brooklyn New York is now running for the nomination of the Democratic Party.

Bernie Sanders said not long ago on NBC’s Meet the Press that if he announced he was running, as he did yesterday, it would be because he thinks he can win. That fact alone betrays him to some as being out of touch with reality.  Sanders problems are so many that I do not have time for them all.

For one thing, he is only at 4% in the polls, consistently polling behind Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Nomination by 40 to 60 percentage points. Another one of his many problems is that he isn’t actually a Democrat. He is a self-described Socialist, and independent, in fact he is the longest serving Independent in the history of congress, although he does sit on the Democratic side of the chamber, and caucus with them, he is registered with neither party.

Sanders, at 73 would not only be the oldest man in history ever elected to the Oval Office, he would also certainly be the worst President the United States of America has ever had.

In recent weeks the Democratic Party has been staunchly positioning itself as the party of the past, with the likes of Hillary Clinton. As if her ideas were not old enough, they brought in Sanders, a socialist.

I have heard it said that the college kid Hillary Clinton would not like the candidate Hillary Clinton, because she has become too moderate. Well Bernie Sanders is like the college kid who nobody ever told it was time to grow up in his views about politics. He is still an ideological child.

He has said in the past that it is immoral for people to make a lot of money. (How much he believes is too much, as far as I know, has never been specified.)

Sanders is against Wall Street, saying the middle class needs to come first. He has attacked Hillary Clinton’s recent money problems, saying it will not be an issue for him because nobody on Wall Street likes him, which is true, and for good reason. Socialists are not friendly to businesses, they tend to see them, for some reason, as the bad guys. At a time when our economy's growth has been tenuous at best, we need a friend of Wall Street and Main Street, not one who hates the one and is a dubious friend, at best, of the other.

Socialists, (and Sanders has self-described himself as such) are also antithetical to basic American Principles, like freedom and liberty. They are people screaming loudly into the void against injustices that are real, but offering solutions that only make things that much worse.

His only criticism of Obamacare is that it didn’t go far enough. He wants the government to pay for all healthcare in this nation.

If Bernie Sanders were to become president, (relax, he has a better chance of landing a ride in the TARDIS with Dr. Who), then he would make Barak Obama look like another Ronald Reagan.

 

Andrew C. Abbott