Monthly Archive: June 2016

From 2013: There is much talk of the London problem and the need to ‘rebalance’. Last year Neil O’Brien, now chief policy adviser to George Osborne, warned in these pages about London’s ‘overwhelming gravitational...

Portraying himself as an experienced CPA and small business owner has always been critical to the political persona created for his campaigns. They conveyed a sense of seriousness and stability which he otherwise lacked....

In the two weeks since Hillary Clinton wrapped up the Democratic presidential primary, runner-up Bernie Sanders has promised to work hard to defeat Donald Trump — but he’s given no sign he’ll soon embrace Clinton, his party’s presumptive nominee. Neither have many of Sanders’s supporters. A June 14th Bloomberg Politics national poll of likely voters in November’s election found that barely half of those who favored Sanders — 55 percent — plan to vote for Clinton. Instead, 22 percent say they’ll vote for Trump, while 18 percent favor Libertarian Gary Johnson. “I’m a registered Democrat, but I cannot bring myself to vote for another establishment politician like Hillary,” says Laura Armes, a 43-year-old homemaker from Beeville, Texas, who participated in the Bloomberg poll and plans to vote for Trump. “I don’t agree with a lot of what Trump says. But he won’t owe anybody. What you see is what you get.”

Conversations with two dozen Sanders supporters revealed a lingering distrust of Clinton as too establishment-friendly, hawkish or untrustworthy. As some Sanders fans see it, the primary was not a simple preference for purity over pragmatism, but a moral choice between an honest figure and someone whom they consider fundamentally corrupted by the ways of Washington. Sanders has fed these perceptions throughout his campaign, which is one reason he’s having a hard time coming around to an endorsement.

From: Nearly Half of Sanders Supporters Won’t Support Clinton – Bloomberg Politics

On Tuesday, June 14, 2016, I woke up to a hell that even I could not have predicted.

I always check my phone when I wake up, a lazy exercise that has me checking site analytics, Facebook, texts, email, and then, if I’m feeling really lazy, Twitter.

That day, I checked Twitter, and my world as I knew it was changed forever.

Hundreds of people were tweeting at me, the vitriol, hatred and fury in their messages each worse than the last one. I scrambled to figure out the source: a petty blogger from a right-wing conservative site wrote a piece called “Syrian Immigrant Who Said 9/11 ‘Changed The World For Good’ Is A Homeland Security Adviser ” had done a Twitter search of my account, looking for anything remotely incriminating.

From: This is what happened when racist America made me Enemy #1 – The Tempest