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Welcome to supposedly a better year than last year. Let's get the details done: The Liberal Party  A sad little king of a sad little hill. There are no good replacements and altogether too much time in the new term to prevent the contradictions of his leadership from slowly destroying him. The Labor Party  While it is not a bad strategy to let the Government become the story, Bill has to do much much better than the Beazley Small Target Strategy he's been employing for so long. He probably thinks he's doing well. He isn't. The National Party  Speaking of being slowly crushed in a vice. Their main goal is to take over the government, one department at a time. And it would have worked if it wasn't for those pesky seats they keep losing. The Greens  Other than being the ALP's GUARDIAN (see what i did there), what have the Greens ever done for us? One Nation  Other than being Vegemite's bane, what have One Nation ever done for us? NXP  Other than being a star vehicle, what will Nick do for anyone who isn't a South Australian? LDP  Apparently it is very naughty to display this picture because 18e paragraph eleventy-nine. Tee hee. The Cory Bernardi Really Truly Dinky-Di Liberals  That's Tony Abbott on the left, he thinks Cory's weird. Tony loving Abbott. A political slogan looking for someone else to start a party. --------------------------------------------------------//------------------------------------------------------------------------ Some political commentary just like reel journalisms!    Australia australia australia we love you amen. There is no future because you're not included. --------------------------------------------------------//------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ranty bit inserted later in a transparent attempt to look better in archives: Australian politics is a generalization of whatever is going on somewhere else, that somewhere else being either the US or the UK because we genuinely think they're the only politics worth understanding. We started out taking the good bits of both systems and actually improving on them slightly but after that we got a bit lost as to what we were supposed to do once we had a federation and a capital and a couple of wars. Such is our belief in bicameralism that we had to throw together a motely bunch of ALP-haters to get there and even then they didn't know what to do after that. By the time the 1980's came by we were governing for all Australians (except indigenous people even if they had the vote), when a couple of enterprising fellas decided we needed to kickstart our economy before other economies did it for us first. This wasn't a bad idea in itself but unfortunately we then made a couple of mistakes: we we didn't actually modernise the production side of the economy, and we decided to borrow the UK's idea of what a modern economy was. So instead of improving our chances of value-added production we simply slapped a parasitical finance market on top of whatever we had. And then we imported UK neoliberalism, itself a child of the US variety but more attuned to our cultural biases. Once both "sides" had grasped the implications they went on a policy spree that did not explain itself other than in trickle-down terms. The implications of course, was now that politicians governed only for a special selection of Australians, especially that selection who weren't keen to share the new parasitical bounty with the rest of society because as Thatcher observed, there wasn't one. That overview explains a lot about our current environment except for two things: demographics, and nationalism. The nationalism came in as a cultural war prop for the non-ALP side once it got its mitts on power in the mid-90s, as one of many distractions from the process of sewing up the goodies for rich friends and their general political class. This is why Anzac Day is a grotesque passion play now, like Australia Day. But it's in the negative forms of nationalism that we have really excelled, chiefly for locking up brown people at astonishing cost so we can claim we "stopped the boats" which is an obvious lie. It's so obvious a lie, we've created a raft of Acts and Regulations to hide it. We have a mile-wide strip of bastardry as applied to poor and indigenous people throughout our history so this is only a veneer-layer of progress on that. But the real kicker is what Australian governments are doing about population demographics. Again, its nothing original, the UK and US have been applying algorithms to demographics to justify doing all sorts of dumb and bad things to them for quite some time, but we're catching up. Being basically computer illiterate, the one thing our politicians understand is the absence of responsibility and standards modelling applied to actual people is a doozy for reduced guilt. So far it's only really been noticed with a variety of Centrelink horrors but most people are blissfully unaware of what's being done with their supperannuation for instance. The fix is in, whether it be by HR department, insurance, or education. The haves are determined to shut out the have-nots in a Darwinian belief that they'll outlive them, and the ageing boomer population is their cover for implementing it. If Millenials feel bad enough by being shut out of the property market, it is the least of their worries. Fighting systems is always much much harder than the humans running them. And all for what? Because Australians dislike thinking for themselves and avoiding the mistakes of other countries perhaps. Well, nothing original about that. ewe2 fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 1, 2017 18:59
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The really shocking thing about that coin-operated toilet was that it wasn't shocking at all. Almost as if landlords aren't making enough money.
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Jan 1, 2017 22:54
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:Also Tony Abbott has been on one of those free trips to Israel that all politicians get and now he wants Australia to stop sending aid to Palestine. Which means it will probably happen in like a week or two. Tony Abbott, in Israel, wishing you were here  Perhaps they're plotting Turnbull's downfall.
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Jan 2, 2017 02:20
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I have a feeling voters are going to be reminded of this winning attitude.
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Jan 2, 2017 10:31
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Leyonhjelm is still a hypocrite. A superannuation fund miraculously free from restrictions and paying a far higher rate than allocated to plebs, and also taxed less. What a brave brave little man.
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Jan 2, 2017 11:21
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They already check on people's criminal history, what Dutton wants is a test where applicants rule themselves out or can be caught in a lie to make rejecting them without review a simple rubber-stamp.
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Jan 3, 2017 05:49
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You can't really apply Western cultural values to Russia. They went from a feudal society straight into command economy communism, and the stamp of authoritarian control changed its name and methods but little else. Now its a virtual dictatorship with pseudo-market trappings. A few years ago there was a wave of nostalgia for the USSR, because the state just went away one day. It's hard to imagine what that would do to people, conservatism is probably the least violent reaction. Remember too, they had a very dicey situation with people who were no longer paid, eg the armed forces. They went through a decade or so of some fairly mad changes to get back to some kind of equilibrium and that's a former superpower. Take a smaller, weaker country like Iraq where even if the factory wasn't making money or even decent goods, the state made sure people were employed and the factory was productive. Despite a terrifying dictator, everything in Iraq worked along a fairly socialistic line. Then the US took that all away and sent in kids with no other qualification other than they voted Republican to run them. Result: basket-case. I doubt it will recover like Russia, they don't have any kind of institutional stability to fall back on.
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Jan 3, 2017 08:48
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QUACKTASTIC posted:They started in NSW Even easier, if you have some idea of when they came, go here and search. They're digitizing the microfiche from 1845 up to 1922 when NSW finally gave up their immigration powers to the Federal government. This is how I found my Scottish grandmother's immigration. It doesn't just cover NSW arrivals, the ships often stopped at other cities along the way in both directions, sometimes you can get clues from that. A much harder nut to crack is my great-great-great grandfather and his wife's story, in that wobbly period of the mid-19th century where gold rushes came and went, nobody kept good records and people moved to where the work was and began hiding their convict ancestry. I presume they were buried somewhere but haven't found them yet.
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Jan 4, 2017 00:40
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Nibbles! posted:It shows that they were certainly aware this was going to be an issue and didn't take steps to address it, instead putting the onus on whoever they've targeted. There's also the political calculation that it's popular with the base and any negative results will dissipate because it's early in the electoral cycle (ie people will forget by election time). They'll go "oops our bad", fix the "error" and will unveil a New Improved Snooper which will miraculously attach to ABNs and bingo you've got what you wanted in the first place and you've taken the political sting out of it. Not a very convincing story but I'm guessing this will be something like the explanation to little Chris Porter, because of course they didn't expect the reaction they're getting, being too arrogant and echo-chambered to give a poo poo in the first place.
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Jan 4, 2017 06:44
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Unfortunately this is all too common in any organization when they think they're on the way up. They'll probably get taxpayer money to just start a new site and wipe that one. Burning people like that won't help when they get into trouble, though.
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Jan 5, 2017 20:30
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Wissen Sie, wer Kaffee liebte?
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Jan 7, 2017 01:58
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Wikileaks can't play the middle man, they're in too deep and made too many enemies. There are many people not just in US politics but elsewhere who'd like to see them go away and I'm expecting some concerted efforts in that direction this year.
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Jan 7, 2017 05:59
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Andrew O'Hagan described his dealings with Assange while attempting to ghostwrite Assange's autobiography and his paranoid egotism and the slow stripping of support from others was already on display well before the US election. He's just batshit crazy now. He probably thinks he's puppetmastering Russia. The only people who will deal with him under the Wikileaks banner are pretty much either yesmen or equally deranged.
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Jan 7, 2017 07:43
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https://twitter.com/BernardKeane/status/817846156592115712 Classy as gently caress.
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Jan 7, 2017 22:42
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Sussan Ley's facebook is surprisingly popular right now.quote:So now we find out you made 5 trips to the God Coast prior to your "impulse buy" of $800 000 and that your partner owns a business on the Gold Coast! $10 000 a day trip to the States, and $12 000 for a private plane becasue you are poor time manager. We can't afford you Ms Ley, I'd rather that money was spent on Medicare, Pensioners, Disabled etc quote:$40,000 in flights, $21,000 in ground transport and $11,000 in accommodation and meals - $76,133 in total over seven days for your tax payer funded trip to the United States?! Are you kidding me Sussan Ley MP? Disgraceful that you lot continue to RORT the Australian public and the public purse! Shame on you! 
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Jan 8, 2017 00:56
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Higsian posted:If Australia was a heist movie and the LNP was the bankrobbing outfit this would be the moment Turnbull angrily shout-whispers at Ley that they're there for the vault so stop stealing the customer's wallets and do her job. You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!
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Jan 8, 2017 10:48
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This is a fun read. I'm going to use blunderfucked a lot this year.quote:There were obvious points of failure, now well documented. The data matching program was engineered to poo poo lipids as output because of the bad assumptions written into the code. The Tax Office computers were perfectly capable of mistaking one employer for a dozen or more. And the Mygov website was a torture porn dungeon built atop an accursed graveyard, in a city of the damned, which sank its foundations into a Hell Dimension.
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Jan 8, 2017 12:30
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They might want to do what the US Congress is about to do: change the rules so that they can't be investigated. There is a news vacuum, and it's being filled with government greed and bastardry and it's clearly damaging, but they're not doing a good job of media management.
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Jan 8, 2017 22:53
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The ramification that really endangers Ley is that you can't exactly impulse-buy an auction. Because knowing the seller and arranging finances doesn't exactly scream auction either. It screams deal.
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Jan 8, 2017 23:54
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Ley has done a presser. She's standing aside while an investigation runs, by the secretary of the PM's department. Arthur Sinodinos will take over the job in the meantime. You can't make this poo poo up. Just wow.
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Jan 9, 2017 00:33
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https://twitter.com/BiggieStef/status/818243262876004353 Just a quick reminder: Sinodinos is the guy another LNP donor gifted a house to. And couldn't explain a large donation from a donor. While he was Treasurer of the Party and Treasurer of the Government. Yeah, that guy.
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Jan 9, 2017 00:58
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Saving it for the next reshuffle? He's a moderate. Sinodinos is NSW hard right (an old mate of Abbotts). It's about winning Cabinet seats, literally that small-minded. The whole question of entitlements is nuclear for everyone in the Libs but the right are also fighting for relevancy and they'll happily bump off a moderate in the process.
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Jan 9, 2017 02:29
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I thought Sinodinos was one of the main people behind the push for Turnbull, because he felt Abbott hadn't supported him enough? That's not altogether clear, but this guy used to be chief of staff for Howard, and a former state president; he knows about jockying for power and when to pick his moment.
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Jan 9, 2017 02:42
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Synthbuttrange posted:East Timor will abandon the multi-billion dollar oil and gas treaty at the centre of sensational spying claims by Australia. Oh noes we're running out of tawdry scandals to divert attention! You can just imagine the "negotiations" the current lot are up to. This should frighten the poo poo out of them.
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Jan 9, 2017 04:49
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SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:What does "shits lipids" in the context of centrelink mean anyway? A convoluted way of saying "garbage in, garbage out". Lipid excretion can be analysed for heart disease, cholesterol etc, so that gives you an idea of Birmingham's contempt for the malware.
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Jan 9, 2017 07:22
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the helicopter story was the end result of a leak from one of Bronwyn's enemies in the Liberal party. Do you think the same thought of thing could be going on with Ley? It's obvious to me that it is. The guns have been out for her for a while, though. That list of her trips comes from the beginning of last year. This is a right faction stitch-up, it could be any of them and likely to be a combination.
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Jan 9, 2017 10:42
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Re #notmydebt my Canadian doctor told me today that Centerlink sent him a demand for $14k before Christmas, and he'd never gotten payments from them, so how he was even on their system is a question mark. He rang them back, they admitted they had no idea how this had happened and he told them they'd be billed for wasting his time 
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Jan 10, 2017 05:40
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:How does a doctor find the spare 2 hours to call Centrelink? That's why he's billing them.
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Jan 10, 2017 06:05
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I knew she was a pilot but I thought that was within her electorate and assumed it was to reach regional centres. But this, this is just stealing because you like flying. Now extrapolate this to other MP's. But someone has to be backgrounding the media with this. This is long-term stuff, designed to shut the door on Ley's career just like Bishops. I'm in no way sympathetic to either, but there's more to this grubby bonanza. edit: oh re disability. I finally twigged today why DSP and JCA's have been basically stopped up here in the last year because my doctor filled me in on what's been going on with NDIS. It was supposed to drop in this area in November and they keep putting it back for various excuses and we're now being told it won't get off the ground until March. So Centrelink have just sat on requests for processing because they want to offload the lot on NDIS the minute it becomes operational. I expect that to become news across the country as that filters through. Also Higsian that's really loving awful but nothing surprises me about those bastards any more. ewe2 fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 08:10
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Anidav posted:In his first comments about the controversy, Mr Tudge stressed debt notices were only issued after recipients had clarified any possible discrepancy or ignored an initial notice. Liar. People logging on to mygov get an update notice and the moment they click on it they get slugged with a debt notice. quote:He said recipients had three opportunities to correct inaccurate information. Liar. They are threatened with debt collectors and it's not their job to correct anything. quote:"Labor is demanding we cease a process that has successfully recovered over $300 million of incorrectly paid taxpayers' money since July and, frankly, I don't think many taxpayers would support that call," Mr Tudge said. Liar. It's already been admitted that the percentage of debts is miniscule compared to the demands for payment. quote:"Centrelink is simply doing what has been done for years: cross-checking Tax Office income information against what welfare recipients have self-reported to Centrelink. Bullshit. It's obvious it's rigged to be unfair. Who decided to avoid using ABN's, the most obvious thing to cross-check with? quote:"People who work hard and pay taxes to assist those in need expect there to be integrity in the welfare system, and that is exactly what we are ensuring." Scumbag. Lies and smugness. And demanding indefinite evidence, when you legislated for banks to destroy their records after 7 years? Scumbag.
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Jan 10, 2017 09:32
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DancingShade posted:When you say "scumbag" or "liar" to which LNP member are you referring?  It's not class war, it's a faulty regex.
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Jan 10, 2017 09:39
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7 years is the statuary limit for most documentation. Banks routinely destroy records older than that. Tudge is not only embarking on illegal predatory invoicing, he's also breaking the statue of limitations.
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Jan 11, 2017 02:09
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Jfc I've never seen a Senator actually lose his mind. I don't count Roberts, he was crazy already.
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Jan 11, 2017 08:30
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Andrew Elder's blog pointed to some fairly doom-laden pronouncements on Ley from backgrounders:quote:While well-liked within the party, Ms Ley is not factionally aligned to either of the Liberal Party's moderate or conservative wings, meaning she does not have a strong internal support base. She has described herself as something of a "free spirit" in the party. So even the moderates aren't defending her. As Elder points out, this is massively stupid given what Ley could do to the Governments majority should she decide her career is over, particularly if that's made clear to her by colleagues. It's such a bad look, she's done whatever the outcome of the investigation. A smart whip might want to give her something nice to look forward to, to keep her onside before the next election, because if she feels a sense of injustice, this could get very hilarious.
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Jan 12, 2017 01:01
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Anidav posted:So is RDN the good guy or the bad guy here? He's the living in a bubble guy trying to stop reality from getting in. Seriously, he's the kind of pragmatic technocrat idiot that got us into the mess we're in in the first place and he thinks he's playing the middle ground when in fact he's only just to the left of the ALP personally. I'm not a fan, anyway but his attitude to this is just lol.
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Jan 12, 2017 02:39
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Rowan Dean in the Terrorgraph has multiple orgasms as he considers the triumph of Trump and the return of Abbott:paywalled but transparently bypassable posted:Rowan Dean: Why axing Abbott was a big mistake
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Jan 12, 2017 03:09
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No, he thinks he's funny as well as insightful.
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Jan 12, 2017 03:26
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I love the whole snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory feel about it, as if it wasn't plain that Turnbull only just managed to save them from oblivion by boring the electorate to death. But really this idiotic poo poo is generated by their fear that One Nation will erode their base (no poo poo, it already has) and somehow Abbott will claw it back. Just forgetting that the rest of the country will not countenance his return in any fashion. There's no real question of what is worse for the country, its bad as it could be anyway. Tudge is getting away with utter lies about centrelink while they stonewall the entitlements scam. But Ley could have the last laugh there. Please please please go to the crossbench, it would be so much fun.
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Jan 12, 2017 03:50
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Whatever faults she has, she's got strong support in her electorate, the Nats didn't even bother putting up a candidate against her. The ALP candidate only mustered 30% to her 70%. If she wanted to go independent, she could from a position of strength. But as you say, maybe she's not brave enough.
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Jan 12, 2017 04:03
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 07:09 |
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Wow. Now call me a cynic, but would they be taking care to target electorates that might not be a problem in an election? Because lol if they aren't. 1.7 million people are going to change their vote based on this.
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Jan 12, 2017 05:20
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