It might not have worked. Look who won, for starters.

… and yet they could find trillions* to throw in that endless black hole that was Iraq and Afghanistan. It genuinely would have been cheaper to go in and rebuild the whole place and give it away free from houses down.

Michael Moore was writing that the Rust Belt was vulnerable back in July and he wasn't the only one. He said he didn't trust the polls and it looks like he was right.

I did my university around the mid to late 90s but even so, their policies haven't come to pass yet. We all know what happened to the last Prime Minister who tried to suggest a fee to attend an ER now, don't we? (for anyone who doesn't know Australian politics, suffice to say he hasn't got that job anymore and has…

Are you saying the United States of America is the Empire?

Is Corbyn really that left, though? I mean, suggesting that people be more equitable in the distribution of wealth and taxation should reflect that isn't that radical. I'm not being faecetious here when I say that maybe the electorate are the ones who are wrong here. Sure, if you want the floggings to continue under a…

But he knew that at the time he was running in the primaries. The hope was to also galvanize the people who voted for him to recapture seats in the Congress (Senate and Representatives) in 2016 and 2018 with the aim to control both in 2020 as well as win re-election himself.

Well, if he had won this year, wouldn't the expectation be that he'd be running again in 2020, though?

Well, relative to the general public Barack Obama seemed to appear from nowhere, so if there's someone out there in a similar position now with similar potential, either they better make themselves known or they should start looking for them (or someone who could be elevated to such potential), like as soon as…

I don't think we can speak in absolutes as we all know who "absolutely" could not win the nomination and then who "absolutely" could not win the election. These things are always a bit too uncertain to ever be "absolutely" anything.

If anything, Bloomberg running as a clearly obvious spoiler to Sanders and all he stood for might have made Sanders even *more* popular.

I wouldn't go so far as to say there's "no doubt" but he definitely would have picked up a different voting pattern and it's possible that different distribution would have been enough.

I think it'd had been already determined the Republicans were determined to stonewall any Democratic President like they did with Obama. Having said that, I think it would have been very hard to keep total obstruction for very long if Senator Sanders had won as a very harsh spotlight would have been cast on it…

Now this is something I just can't get my head around. His "avowed socialism" is nothing we haven't had in Australia since at least the 80s. He's not so much an off-the-wall radical as someone we'd just call "a politician".

Not straight away, but the hope would have been that over the next four years, inspired by his presence at the top, it would have been the engine to drive retaking the Congress by 2020 after clawbacks in 2016 and 2018.

That careful wording didn't escape my attention, which is what led to that train of thought in the first place. I did find this episode jarred with episode 5 for that reason, however. They spent so much time establishing the nature of the blade (with no escape clause) and now they seemed to be walking it back - though…

Any reason why he can't run again in 2020*? If he'd won the primary and then won the election, he'd have been running for re-election in 2020 anyway.

One thing that I actually felt a bit uncomfortable about was the fact that in episode 5, they made such a big thing about how if you were killed by this particular blade, you weren't just dead, you were annihilated and ceased to exist at all (since Illyria was mentioned …)

That's what I meant about his innate magnetic pull. Exactly what you said. Accent/personality and appearance, not actual magic. Like he said when they first met "I'm walking heroin."

Apparently, Kate Mulgrew's husband ran for some sort of public office, so she had to declare her salary publicly. If this figure is correct, the figure the website I was reading said the amount she declared was $30 million over the two years she did the last two seasons of Voyager.