Comentando una forma de vivir creativa y pasional, la textura es de rabia y emotividad, hay desesperación y un poco de ansiedad. ¡¡BASTA YA¡¡.
Juan Pardo Navarro
As I write this, there are 183 days until Election Day. There are 15.8 million more seconds of tweets, fights, ads, calls, debates, conventions and other nonsense.
A lot of time, but time flies.
It's also 183 days during which the race can change. In recent contests, the day-to-day fluctuations of the contest haven't really made much difference toward the outcome, but there's one way in which a significant change over the next 16 million-odd seconds could be important: If Republicans finally embrace Donald Trump and, as a result, his favorability numbers increase.
There has been a lot of discussion over the two likely nominees' favorability ratings recently, for the simple reason that the numbers are terrible. Both Trump and Hillary Clinton are viewed negatively by more people than they are positively — in other words, the net favorability for each is negative. And since 1992, the candidate who has the strongest net favorability in the last Gallup poll before Election Day has won the popular vote five out of six times. (The sole exception was George W. Bush in 2004.)
Clinton is doing better on net favorability than is Trump right now, thanks to Trump's terrible numbers with women and non-white voters. (His numbers among Republicans are also lower than Clinton's are among Democrats, in part thanks to women viewing him negatively.) This suggests, based solely on this metric, that Clinton is better positioned than Trump.
But those numbers are not as static as they may seem. Plotting net favorability for the winning (green) and losing (yellow) candidates over time during those six elections using Gallup's data, it's clear that there's a lot of variability.
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More than half of the time in 2000 and 2004, the candidate who lost the popular vote had better net favorability ratings than the winner. In 1992, Bill Clinton had better net favorability ratings than George H.W. Bush only about two-thirds of the time. Even in 2008, Barack Obama's net favorability was often lower than John McCain's — until the end.
Those dots can be confusing. So here are the average net favorabilities for each winner and loser in 50-day chunks before the election. Here, you can see that George W. Bush's net favorability ratings in the last 50 days were, on average, higher than Al Gore's — and Bush, of course, went on to win the tiebreak in the election.
Trump's favorability has been compared to W.'s in 2004. Bush's unfavorability numbers that year were much worse than John Kerry's at this point. That contest was very different than this one for a lot of reasons, but Bush's unpopularity didn't cost him reelection.
Trump has about 16 million seconds to engineer a similar miracle.
La exgobernadora de Arizona, Jan Brewer, dijo estar abierta a la posibilidad de acompañar al presunto candidato presidencial republicano Donald Trump, y servir como su vicepresidenta.
Brewer, quien durante su mandato de seis años como gobernadora de Arizona (2009-2015) se convirtió en una célebre figura política de los conservadores al promulgar la ley antiinmigrante SB 1070, dijo también que no necesariamente cree que Trump deba escoger a una mujer para la vicepresidencia.
Durante una entrevista con la cadena de televisión CNN, se le mostró a Brewer una lista de los 10 posibles compañeros de fórmula de Trump, incluido el senador Marco Rubio, al exlíder de la Cámara de Representantes Newt Gingrich, y a la gobernadora de Oklahoma, Mary Fallin.
Brewer, quien otorgó su respaldo a Trump en febrero pasado, bromeó con el comentarista Jack Tapper acerca de no estar en la lista de los 10 posibles candidatos a la vicepresidencia, al cuestionar “¿Quién hizo esa lista? Ellos no me pusieron allí”.
“¿Usted estaría dispuesta a ser considerada?”, preguntó Tapper. “Por supuesto que me gustaría estar”, replicó Brewer.
“Yo estaría dispuesta a servir en cualquier capacidad en la que pudiera ser de ayuda con Donald. Pero se tiene una enorme lista de personas para elegir y todas son gente maravillosa, muy bien calificada”, dijo.
“Ciertamente creo que Newt (Gingrich), lo conozco desde hace mucho tiempo, todos hemos experimentado lo que puede hacer en Washington, DC, y Marco Rubio sería fenomenal. Mary Fallin sería fenomenal”, señaló la exgobernadora.
Tapper preguntó a Brewer si pensaba que Trump necesitaba escoger a una mujer para la vicepresidencia, dado que las encuestas han sugerido que es impopular entre las mujeres.
“No creo que necesariamente tiene que escoger a una mujer”, respondió Brewer. “Esta cosa de la mujer se ha salido de control, creo. Y creo que ha sido impulsada por la izquierda”
Meet Rodrigo Duterte, the man likely to be the next president of the long-suffering Philippines. As the election day Monday draws to a close, polls are showing that the 71-year-old longtime mayor of Davao City, in the southern island of Mindanao, will almost certainly win. And he will do so with all the grace of a priapic figure of the commedia dell'arte, or a goonish security guard in a telenovela. Duterte "The Punisher," also known in pun-happy Philippines as Duterte Harry — after the Clint Eastwood vigilante — has taken this island nation of roughly 100 million people by storm. His meteoric rise, coupled with his fascist appeal and anti-establishment persona, bears similarities to the surprisingly successful candidacy of Donald Trump.
But Duterte's rise is not surprising. It's symptomatic of a traumatized citizenry — an irrational response to a rational rage.
Just look at the news that featured prominently in April, according to Pulse Asia, a Filipino polling company. A rice shortage in the south of the country led to the deaths of three farmers, in clashes between protesters and police. Bail was granted to notorious businesswoman Janet Napoles, imprisoned on plunder charges for bribing senators in a billion-peso pork barrel scam. Police chief and presidential crony Alan Purisima may have violated the Anti-Graft and Corruption Practices Act, a 1960s law prominent in post-Marcos scandals of government malfeasance. And U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced joint patrols with the Philippine military, after which China landed a military aircraft on a disputed reef - a further sign of the country's terminally weak military defenses.
Since Filipinos drove Marcos out of office in 1986, citizens have witnessed land reform fail, corruption scandals erupt (two presidents, Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, have gone to jail), infrastructure decay, and responses to natural disasters bungled. Citizens have seen journalists massacred, peace treaties upended, and state harassment or outright murders of farmers, student activists, and labor leaders. They have weathered violent military action in indigenous, resource-rich lands. It is as if Marcos never left.
Meanwhile, the hold of the very rich over the poor remains criminal: In 2012, Forbes Asiareported that the collective wealth of the 40 richest Filipino families grew $13 billion in 2010-2011, equivalent to 76.5 percent of the country's overall increase in GDP during that period. And while annual per capita income has steadily risen since 2006, it is still under $3,000 — on par with the West Bank and Gaza. No wonder Filipinos continue to seek jobs overseas in droves — 2.32 million workers left the country in 2015.
Duterte paints himself a populist, an outsider who will fix all ills. Indeed, the other candidates all come from Manila or the historical elite. They are Grace Poe, the adopted child of an action star; Mar Roxas, the favored candidate of embattled President Benigno Aquino III; Miriam Santiago, a tough-talking senator fighting lung cancer; and Jejomar Binay, the current vice president, who is under investigation for corruption.
Instead, the public has turned to Duterte, a strongman with a joker's smile. But although Duterte affects humble roots, he is actually one of the many nephews of the Duranos of Danao City in the province of Cebu, a Marcos-era warlord family whose rise to power using the three G's of Philippine politics — guns, goons, and gold — was notorious. Duterte's father governed the province of Davao, south of Cebu, from 1959 to 1965, raising Duterte in an atmosphere of privilege.
Trained as a lawyer, Duterte was elected mayor of Davao City in 1988. He quickly became known for his anti-crime policies. During his seven four-year terms as mayor, he allegedly turned a city mired in crime into what he brags is the world's ninth-safest city. Indeed, his most salient political platform today is that he will be tough on crime. In 2009, while serving as the peace and order advisor of then-president Arroyo, Duterte explained to her how Davao City fights crime. "The best practices in the city, ma'am, are the killings [of criminals]," he said. It's an idea he's repeated in various forms throughout the election campaign: To reduce crime, kill the criminals.
No one doubts he will follow through on his threats. The international NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) has chronicled the rise of "death squads" in Davao City: groups of men on the government payroll who kill petty criminals, street children, and drug dealers. For Duterte, HRW writes, "The brutal death squads that have claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people during his tenure as mayor of Davao City ... are not a problem. They're a political platform." (How does Duterte respond to HRW's claims? "All the bleeding hearts of U.S.-based crime watch: You want a taste of justice, my style?," he asked. "Come to Davao City, Philippines, and do drugs in my city. I will execute you in public.")
Duterte advocates federalism — breaking the Philippines into autonomous regions to focus on regional economic development. But ask him about concrete plans for governance that don't involve fighting crime, and he falls back on his bluster. "If you say Roxas's proposals are good, then I will copy them. Give me his speech, also Poe's, I'll consolidate them and copy them," he said, referring to two of the other candidates.
But scant policies combined with bravado seem enough for Filipino voters. The latest Pulse Asia survey reports that Duterte leads the other four candidates among every socioeconomic class, with an especially strong showing among the country's middle class.
To his fans, his air of a corner drunk — brazen, vulgar, and happily shameless — makes him a truth-teller, not a disaster. In some ways, the people see him as their protection — from meddlesome foreign governments, from overweening institutions, and of course from criminals. He told the U.S. and Australian ambassadors to "shut your mouth" after they criticized his joke about gang rape. He called the pope "the son of a whore" — seemingly for worsening Manila's traffic during his official visit. And he told criminals to "watch out": If I become president, he said, "The fish in Manila Bay will get fat. That is where I will dump you!"
In short, his rise is a people's revenge. His cursing mouth is the proxy spokesman for the people's own cursed lives. He will establish law and order. He will destroy the elite. He will kill the bad guys. Rodrigo Duterte is a screen and a projection. He is a symptom, rather than the disease, of governance that never stanched the cancer of strongman rule. And on May 9, the joke will be on the country, when citizens wake up to find themselves in the nightmare they have chosen — the same nightmare they have been living all along.
The phenomenon begs the question: Is it inevitable that in a grotesque society of injustice, impunity, plunder, and inequality, citizens will make awful choices?
Im «Blick» konnte man heute erfahren, dass SRF-Chefredaktor Tristan Brenn und der Leiter der SRF-«Rundschau», Mario Poletti, einen Brief an den Armeechef André Blattmann geschickt und von diesem eine Entschuldigung gefordert hatten. Blattmann hatte aus Ärger über eine Indiskretion und einen entsprechenden Bericht in der «Rundschau» ein unappetitliches Wortspiel mit dem Namen des Moderators, Sandro Brotz, gemacht. Ferner sagte er, man müsse den «Verräter auf die Schlachtbank» führen. Es zeuge von wenig Demokratieverständnis, schreiben die beiden SRF-Chefs, wenn ein Armeechef «Medienschaffende mit billigen Wortspielen herabsetzen» wolle. Und: «In einem Land, in dem seit jeher die Kraft der Argumente zählt, sind solche Entgleisungen nicht zu dulden.» Wer die Überbringer einer Botschaft unter der Gürtellinie massregle, trete die freiheitliche Ordnung mit Füssen, heisst es weiter im Brief.
Wer einen billigen Witz mit dem Namen eines Missliebigen versucht, hat sich eigentlich bereits degradiert – umso mehr, wenn die verbale Verunstaltung aus dem Mund eines Armeechefs kommt. SRF hat allerdings allzu empfindsam darauf reagiert. Ein dummes Wortspiel sollte einen Journalisten nicht erschüttern, zumal wenn dieses keinen Realitätsbezug zu seiner Person herzustellen vermag. Hätte Blattmann das Schweizer Fernsehen unberechtigt einer Lüge oder einer Fälschung bezichtigt oder sonst wie die Berufsehre der Journalisten gekränkt, wäre die Forderung nach einer Satisfaktion verständlich gewesen. Nun hat SRF angesichts eines ohnehin scheidenden Armeechefs etwas viel staatspolitisches Pathos bemüht.
Trent Zimmerman, the newest member of Federal Parliament, astutely observed in his maiden speech last week that three-year parliamentary terms come with a miserable cost to voters.
Zimmerman, Joe Hockey’s Liberal successor in North Sydney, lamented that since federation as many as 33 years of good governance had been wasted because every third year becomes “consumed with the posturing that is part of every election year”.
It is abundantly clear now that we have entered that period of zombie politics where you’re asked to leave your brain at the door.
Peter Dutton told us that Labor’s negative gearing policy would bring the economy to a “shuddering halt” and crash the stock market. It’ll be pestilence and plague next.
For months, Malcolm Turnbull played Moses, holding back the tide of old, dirty politics. But he dropped his staff and we’ve been swamped again.
Zombie politics and negative smearing is back.
How appropriate that Barnaby Joyce — the man who infamously warned of “$100 roasts” under Labor’s carbon tax — perhaps the ultimate zombie political line, should be under karmic attack from the undead.
(Tony Windsor does not have an unkind face but he looks at Joyce with the cold stare of a farmer with a shotgun whose old working dog has gone lame.)
Tony Abbott has shown how an election victory could be achieved, formulating “Labor’s five new taxes”: the carbon tax; housing tax (negative gearing); wealth tax (lower capital gains tax); seniors tax (superannuation) and the workers tax (tobacco).
Dutton became the first to embrace Abbott’s “housing tax” descriptor for Labor’s wind-back of property investor concessions.
Turnbull has recently proved he’s not shy of also accentuating the negative but does he go the full Abbott? And if he doesn’t, what will he put up instead?
This has become a pressing issue inside the Government. And more than you’d think.
As we trudge inexorably towards a July 2 double dissolution election — and surely, that is where Turnbull is now leading us — what’s going to fill the seven-and-a-half campaign?
Both sides will have war-gamed a standard 33-day campaign but a long, drawn-out campaign of 52-plus days demands more material than either side’s got.
The coalition especially has a crisis of content, given Turnbull’s delay in defining the Government’s economic agenda and his trouble in settling on a tax package.
“There’ll be weeks of waffle from Malcolm,” shadow treasurer Chris Bowen told ABC radio yesterday.
“And if he think he can fill a seven or eight week campaign with his normal discursive and expansive approach, we would certainly welcome that because I think Australian people are over his talk, over his lack of vision and his waffle and a seven week campaign will expose that.”
An election campaign for a double-D election on July 2, necessarily called on or before May 11, would have to be a different kind of campaign.
Neither the Liberals nor the ALP organisations have much money to splurge on a long campaign. Nor are the budgetary circumstances suitable for big-spending promises.
Rather than having the leaders flitting madly about the country, as has been the case in recent election campaigns, we would more likely see the leaders spending chunks of time in certain parts of the country.
If a July 2 election isn’t Turnbull’s plan, he’s doing nothing to dispel it.
Bringing on the Senate reforms for debate to next week has triggered such momentum that if Turnbull does not to go to a poll it would appear weak and confusing.
In this sense, we could end up with the “accidental” double dissolution election where serial indecision and the weight of public expectation allow Turnbull no alternative.
Talk of bringing forward the Budget by one week to accommodate passage of the supply bills and the pursuit of a more credible double-D trigger with the reinstatement of the Australian Building Construction Commission feeds this perception.
At the moment the reason for a double dissolution election appears to be little more than wiping out the Senate’s crossbenchers and using his political capital before it runs out.
Beyond the “vibe” and the innovation package, a blancmange of hip catch phrases, trying to work out what Turnbull and his Government stand for is becoming a real problem for voters.
Former Victorian Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, who never left his voters any doubt over what he stood for, offered an unflattering appraisal of Turnbull mid-week.
“I don’t see any need for a double dissolution, again except for self-interest and that to me is not governing,” he told Sydney radio.
“I had hoped that Malcolm, whom I will support at the election, had taken over the leadership of the Liberal Party and the prime ministership because he had a plan.
“What is quite clear now, he did not have any plan at all, he took over the leadership for one reason only, and one reason above all else and that was his own self-interest.
And this: “Malcolm was given the opportunity of a lifetime and in 5 to 6 months it appears he has blown it.”
Kennett’s comment were typically flavoursome but Turnbull cannot let the perception of purposeless waffler take hold.
The Prime Minister’s supporters say he’s got plenty of ideas to share and John Howard last night urged for Turnbull to be given more time.
Voters will give Turnbull the benefit of the doubt for a bit longer, but they will be rightly peeved if their patience is rewarded with even more zombie politics.
