Of course he was. I know the kind of people who think Obama was something special and I have no respect for them.
I think I'm going to enjoy getting to know you, Pixie... and although we will surely have some very different views of some topics, once again, for the moment, I'll simply observe that neither of us wants Trump to return to the presidency here, in the 'States'. And yes, the Colorado Rockies are lovely... I can look out my windows at snow-clad peaks that are greater than 4,300 meters in height! Ah, but the Alps are truly breathtaking, too... especially when viewed in a panorama from the top of Germany's highest peak, the Zugspitze... nicht war?
I am happy to spend time with anyone who speaks politely, honestly and directly, even if we disagree. Obviously the view of politicians in the USA is heavily tinted by the bipartisan choice one makes and adheres to by a raft of reasons including tribalism, choice of media you absorb and personal profit. That is the same in every country and in general, the voting public concerns itself only with domestic matters. Most of the time it doesn't matter what Lithuania does when you live in the US. However it DOES matter what the POTUS does when he/she is dealing with global issues which inevitably affect everyone else. It would be a blessing if more Americans understood this. But I realise the moon is not made of cheese. Just one more thing...the ROW is uneasy with the raw bipartisan animosity evident in the USA, resulting in an instability that is being both generated and exploited by IMO Trump. It could affect anywhere in the world if he were reelected. It feels like living next to a fautly boiler...it keeps rumbling and wheezing but you never can be sure it isn't going to explode.
Trump should be in jail for a very long time. Your question is like asking if John Gotti should be President
He may well be so the OP is moot. This is one reason why the Prime Minister of the UK is sometimes referred to as the British Trump. The clear idea that a national leader has special privileges and is above the law became indelibly printed on Trump's forehead and Boris Johnson found it very easy to adopt it as a new clause in the "How to be a National Leader" handbook...Happily it is now falling apart spectacularly. And another reason why IMO any national leader should be VERY aware of how s/he conducts him/herself. As a rule the West doesn't approve of foreign leaders displaying special privileges...yet Trump did just that. IMO he is a test of western values against which the people must decide what they define as a western, historically moral culture. Because if he is found to have been dishonest in his financial affairs, and successful in regaining power, the USA can no longer criticise other nations for corruption.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid that your observation about how utterly oblivious so many of we Americans are is an accurate one. Most Americans probably couldn't even find Lithuania on a map, let alone understand anything about the country. I blame a lot of this on our public "education" system, which is sadly inferior to those in a number of other countries -- specifically, Germany (I admit to knowing nothing of substance, however, about public education in France). In an earlier post, I alluded to the idea that a lot of Trump's popularity was/is rooted in a yearning many of us over here have to recapture our 'glory days' -- roughly, that period from the end of WWII up to the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. What we Americans refuse to countenance, though, is the rather obvious fact that we lost those 'glory days' ourselves -- we threw away one opportunity after another to "make America great, and, KEEP AMERICA GREAT!" Donald Trump couldn't bring back the 'glory days' -- especially not after eight self-destructive years in a row under Barack Obama, coming in addition to eight continuous years of 'Idiot' "W". Bush! We Conservative Americans were pining for something in 2016 which I realize now, in retrospect, that we will never have again, and putting Trump back in the White House in 2024 won't substantially change that, anymore than electing him in 2016 did.... This is all the more true considering that by 2024, we will be in even far, FAR worse condition after having had our 'flirtation' with 'Geriatric Joe' and 'Comrade Kamala' (and their coterie of radical, America-hating insiders) for four long, dismal years.... But, please, tell me... in your opinion, viewing our American political situation from France, who among us do you think Europeans would favor as the best candidate for our office of President?
Interesting that your 2016 election was the same year as the UK Brexit vote and that both were sold under the banner of "recovering and reliving the day when we were great". It is an easy sell because the past is always remembered in its best clothes and we all know how it ended...which is why we want to "do it again". IMO this rush to renaissance in the US is a deep fear of the rumblings of China nad the growing realisation that such a different and so alien a country can actually knock the USA off its "top spot" of global wealth, influence and power. It is as seriously communist as Americans can fear, and its core tenet is heavily centralised control of the individual. It counters the entire cultural history of the Christian west and such a divided, absolutist USA will find it difficult to learn to live with it. So they retreat and hunker down in the soft memories a snakeoil salesman offers them as a potential future. That is of course natural. Except that time stops for no man or country and solutions must match the problems of now. Not the triumphs of then. Brexit is a huge issue and not really one for this thread. I can't comment on your previous Presidents and their terms in office. I have not ever seen a coherent list of reasons to disapprove of Obama and from what I heard, he always made good sense and above all, listened to others. Your new health plans seem to be an improvement on what went before but again I have no details. Who would Europeans favour as the next POTUS? TBH I have not seen or heard any discussion on the subject. There are an unusually large number of GE's in Europe this year and discussion tends to turn around those...Germany has just changed chancellors, France is interesting in that the right, usually a solid counter to the left, has been split by Eric Zemmour, a throwback to the 1950's, Europe hopes Hungary will vote Orban out, and Poland is changing as its economy grows and but it is still on th Eastern border of the EU and the Ukraine. So in fact I can't answer your question other than thank goodness the US is internationally stable for a change.
I think the US should go back to no primaries and the parties hold state conventions and then the national convention to select their party candidates. Then the general election all else remaining the same.
(UK) You might already know, we just have a general election for parliament. Conservative, Labour, Lib Dems, Ukip etc.. often run a candidate in each constituency (the UK is split up into constituencies). There are some 650. After the vote, the candidate in each constituency with the most votes wins. Each one is then called an MP. The political party with 326 or more MP's form the government. If you get below that, the largest majority goes into coalition with another party to get over the 326 barrier. So the MP's go to parliament and form the commons. So in the last election, conservatives had the majority vote and formed a government. Due to Theresa May making a bollocks of Brexit, the conservatives called a no vote, she won the first but not the second call. So the party chose a new leader, Boris, and thus Prime Minister. Winston Churchill was elected Prime Minister by his party when Neville Chamberlain resigned. So the whole point is, no wasted primaries and if the party gets fed up of it's Prime Minister, you can call a vote of no confidence and ultimately replace them, yet the party stays in government. That way, if your president is tanking, call a vote, boot him out and the party elect a new presidents. Just means it may save their bacon come election time. Why tolerate the same president for four years.
My wife is a gifted Pentecostal / Charismatic Catholic who has proven to me over and over and over again since the year 2000 that there are Christians who receive a level of guidance that is beyond my own comprehension or Security Clearance Level with Jesus! MarkTaylor has similar gifts.. he was shown this back on April twenty eighth twenty eleven...... https://sordrescue.com https://sordrescue.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/04-28-11_commander_in_chief.pdf Once Donald J. Trump got to know Jeffrey Epstein a little bit.... he banned him from his Florida resorts..... and perhaps from all of his resorts..... that is when certain people knew that they did not want Mr. Donald J. Trump to be President.... or to be reelected..... because they knew he might just indict Epstein's clients.......
I think what you really are looking for is men who were alive when freedom was threatened by Japan and Germany. They understood that we have no guarantee of life, liberty, or happiness. Over all they were out to enrich the country and the people in it rather than themselves. Think back how the media savaged Mitt Romney of all people. The most Milquetoast, inoffensive, married to the same woman, middle of the road person out there. They brought up high school, a dog in a car carrier, “binders full of women”, a lie by a moderator in a debate, and the Speaker of the House lying about his taxes. It will be a miracle if American is not cut to size by 2030. We cannot do squat right anymore. BTW, the 5G telecom geniuses forgot about airplanes and interference. Yes. Today’s FAA is that stupid. China and Russia are going to start helping themselves to US interests. Joe has got to go, and if Hillary has to take it, then do it before the whole place burns down. We can deal with her in 2024.
The primaries here are for the convenience of the party. They are NOT required by the Constitution AT ALL. They really came into being after the Democrat party convention in 1968 in Chicago. Slowly the parties have lost their ability to choose the candidate the PARTY would prefer as the primaries changed from actual members of the party to anyone can vote in a primary as long as they are registered.. Two important points The elections are STATE matters not FEDERAL matters. In spite of the current attempts by the Dem Congress to usurp that STATE authority with their phony voting bills. In some states you register to a party and in a primary vote you go to the polls and you are listed as to a party and they give you a ballot. In my state we don't register to a part but when you go to the poll they ask you which ballot you want to cast a Dem or a Rep. The smaller parties like the Libertarians do not have primaries. ONE state, Louisiana where I lived back in the 70's, has an open primary where ALL the candidates run against each other and in fact there have been cases where two Dem's or two Rep's came out on top but neither with a major so there is a runoff between two candidates of the same party. If I vote Rep in my state and there is a runoff in the Dem primary I can't vote in that runoff. Off course in the general election there is only one ballot everyone votes on. We are a federal republic. We have three independent branches of the government. Co-equal branches. The Legislative, the Executive and the Judicial. The President does not work for nor report to the Congress, he is co-equal with them. The STATES elect the President not the PEOPLE, contrary to what many including in this country seem to believe. The Constitution does not even stipulate that each STATE hold an election for their slate of Electoral College electors. In fact in the first few elections there were no state votes the state legislatures choose their slate of electors. But that changed to where every state now holds an election. So we are not a parliamentary system like the UK. Our founding fathers knew full well the UK system and rejected it.
Hence why America has the most expensive election system in the world. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19052054 Not too sure what America thinks of it's founding fathers, but not everything they did was sensible. Take the Democrats, I bet they wish they had a Parliamentary system to replace old Joe. What an epic fail that guy is
With the most people and the most free speech. ""You could say we've gotten into a crazy world, where the cost of elections has sky-rocketed, and that we are in a wacko world of crazy spending," says Michael Franz, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads. But, he says, "it all depends what apples and oranges you want to compare". Franz argues that US elections are "relatively cheap" when compared with spending on, for example, the US military operation in Afghanistan. Michael Toner has his own favourite analogy: "Americans last year spent over $7bn [£4.5bn] on potato chips - isn't the leader of the free world worth at least that?" It was/is a beautiful plan for the uniqueness of the US. Take the Democrats, repeatedly choosing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House and Chuck Schumer as President of the Senate. I'd rather have the President not a function of the Congress but an independent President elected by the States. If I have my druthers we would repeal the 17th Amendment which change the Senate into a Political body instead of the State legislatures appointing the two Senators which are supposed to represent the States while the House represents the citizens.
Dear All Have YOU been to the grocery store lately? Let's get real! Please. My grocery bill is up by at least 15% but, probably more. Beef Steak. GWTW. Coffee And milk too. Eggs. Social Security cost of living Not counting the costs of MediCare supplemental insurance Get It Or Not The Biden Economy screws us we the people Moi Y'gotta Believe
Don't forget that most boards such as this lean to the liberal side. I would like a less combative Trump which DeSantis is not. You can't be raised in the swamp and cut the throats of useless grifters pulling a paycheck which is around 70% of the government's top tier employees.
this one is about 50\50, may even lean a bit to the right, just not far right, even though we have some of those too
You are unaware therefore of the global issues that make this happen. Neither Biden or Johnson or Macron or any other national leader can change this. The problems are in the global transport system, not Biden's top drawer. Perhaps it would help to read wider.
Sure! Also, remember, Trump did nothing It was Obama who loosened those jar lids Face it! This Is The Biden Economy! Moi