Great to hear, will eagerly await the public announcement.

Don’t forget our northern neighbors, who also need to be liberated.

Wait and see what I’m doing about our head of state. It;s not time for a public announcement yet. And I’ve written that I don’t think that Jacinda should be PM based on her poll numbers and that our system should change. Most NZers agree on that. No one is pretending that she is anything other than she is though, unlike Trump, who still hands out maps with the counties coloured in to interviewers etc FFS!

Thanks.

Ayn Rand was an atheist who (unfortunately) took her atheism very seriously.

If Medicare is a “contract”, then you’re the one who’s in breach, because you haven’t “contributed” enough to cover your benefits on an actuarial basis.

If the management and board of a company honestly can’t figure out how to make productive use of increased profits resulting from the reformed tax code, then yes, those profits will flow back into the capital markets via dividends and buybacks to fund other ventures. The point is that more capital will be put to work in the productive economy, rather than handed over to politicians.

Needless to say, the claim that Scott Pruitt has allowed polluters to “pollute at will” (much less that he has the authority to do so) is a ridiculous distortion. At most he’s dialed back some of Obama’s illegal and ideologically-driven excess.

Correction: There was no such challenge in 2016 because there were *no such* grounds.

@nicky: I’m afraid you are repeating yourself. Your implicit assumption is that the losing party lacks the political will or financial wherewithal to mount a challenge where there are factual and legal grounds for doing so. If you really believe that is the case, I invite you to Google “hanging chad”. There was no such challenge in 2016 because there were grounds. (I know, I know, that does not mean that UFO sightings are not real.)

Respectfully, your faith in exit polls is just naive. You underestimate the logistical and statistical complexity of designing and executing them at the scale of a U.S. presidential election.

“Imo, a president should be elected by popular vote.”

If that is your considered opinion, then wouldn’t it make sense to start your campaign with your own country? Your current head of state was appointed for life by God, solely based on heredity, before most of her royal subjects were born. The current prime minister received less than 37% of the popular vote (way less than Trump’s popular vote share, in case the point is lost on anyone).

Thanks for this Nicky, I’ll delete the other one. 🙂

Joy called Mr Putin a communist, and got a lot of flak for that. I think that is what j.a.m. is referring to.
Well, although Russia is officially not communist anymore, and even less in practice, she actually has some pillars to stand on:
– Mr Putin was a KGB chief. That’s where he ‘learned the trade’.
– Mr Putin officially says he’s communist, and that he never wavered in his communist ideals.
– He has kept his membership card of the Communist Party.
– He regrets the demise of the USSR, and the loss of it’s influence in the World.
– His style of authoritarian government is close to the old soviet one (big statism, military, surveillance grid, state run corporations and idolising the Leader).
– The USSR was arguably not really more ‘Communist’ than the present regime.

That being said, I do not think it was very clever to call Russia a Communist state. It is an old-fashioned right wing dictatorship.

For our interest, I checked the presidents of the US and popular vote. It happened exactly five times that the candidate winning the popular vote did not become president since the popular vote is counted (1824). Three of those were in the 19th Century, and the other two in the 21st Century (never in the 20th Century). Once in 2000 where Mr Bush lost the popular vote by 0,51% against Mr Gore, and in 2016, when Mr Trump lost the popular vote by 2,10% against Ms Clinton. In absolute numbers the latter discrepancy is the largest ever (2.864.974 votes).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin