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Ted Cruz Drops Out Of The Republican Presidential Race (washingtonpost.com)
rmdingler writes: Ted Cruz drops out of the presidential race after losing in Indiana. Donald Trump has become the presumptive nominee before Hillary has locked things up versus Bernie. This is huge. Cruz's decision to drop out came after losing significantly to Trump in the Indiana primary. "I said I would continue on as long as there is a viable path to victory. Tonight I'm sorry to say, it appears that path has been foreclosed," Cruz told a small group of supporters Tuesday night. "Together we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it everything we got, but the voters chose another path." He said he would "continue to fight for liberty," but did not say whether or not he would support Trump as the nominee. The exit comes soon after he announced former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his running mate in a desperate move to keep his candidacy afloat.
I wouldn't say "Huge". I'd say a %$%^$ nightmare. Except that it may have done some good in showing the Republican party and their deep-pocket funders like the Koch brothers where a race to the bottom eventually gets them.
Where does this take us? Trump is going to score well in conservative White districts, and Clinton (yes, I like Sanders, but he doesn't have the delegates) is going to score well enough to beat him with less conservative Whites and everyone else. I don't know if enough people would have voted for Clinton without someone who inspires people to vote against him like Trump. But even people who would in another situation never have voted for Clinton will cast votes against Trump. Clinton just got handed the White House. Game over.
What really troubles me is what happens after the election. 40 years of anti-intellectualism and pandering to prejudice and we got a significant part of the country voting for someone who really would not have been good for the country. The historical parallels are obvious. What do we do now?
Bruce Perens.
So, you are convinced that yours is the lesser of two evils? Are you sure?
There appears to be a choice between someone who is conniving and self serving, and someone who is nasty and under handed.
Can you tell which is which?
Will be interesting to watch from a distance, but is there enough distance? hmmm..
Is it possible for trump to win the presidency?
From this site (which summarizes a bunch of national polls), 5 out of 6 polls have Hillary beating the Donald. And it is 6 out of 6 for Sanders beating him So it looks like he most likely won't win.
From the outside he looks incredibly divisive even in his own party, but are there enough disenfranchised people that would jump on his band wagon to get over the line?
There is going to be some really weird dynamics going on for the election. Everything from how much Trump and Cruz have divided the GOP, through to how much of the GOP see Hillary as an extension of Obama and Dem voters staying home because they think they have it in the bag.
You also have to remember that voting isn't compulsory and that for every Federal election since 1972 less than 60% of eligible voters have turned out.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
All that really needs to be said is Hillary is powerless to stop Trump among just about ALL voting groups, read :
Looking back: How Trump Beat Hillary
Unless the Democrats are smart enough to actually nominate Sanders, which they are not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been following Scott Adams' blog, and he has some insightful things to say about Trump and how he manages to win.
Scroll back a few entries in the blog and they're pretty interesting.
With that background, I've just this morning figured out how Trump managed to pull it off: he's been using "sad" as a verbal kill-shot.
Check out any image of Ted Cruz, and the most notable feature is his sloping eyebrows. He's definitely got that "sad puppy-dog" look.
Trump has been using "sad" in his speeches for months, and associating it with all sorts of slightly pejorative things. He's never made it specific that he's doing this as an association to Cruz, and "sad" is not extreme rhetoric so it escapes peoples' notice. (He sometimes calls Ted sad, but I'm talking about all the other "sad"s over the past few months.)
Furthermore, he masks it by giving people a more transparent and direct kill-shot: "lying Ted Cruz". People are distracted by the extreme moniker and reject it, and all the while they don't notice that they are slowly building an association between "sad" and a wide range of slightly bad things.
So when they see Ted on stage or in the media, that association is what they feel.
I think it's a case of priming, and Trump has masterfully arm-wrestled Ted's reputation to the floor without him realizing it.
Pundits are quick to point out that Trump's unfavorability is at 70%, and all polls show that Hillary would beat Trump in an election.
What they *don't* say is that Hillary herself is only 12 points lower (56% unfavorability), and that's bound to change over the next 6 months.
In fact, Hillary's unfavorability seems to be creeping up of late, and Trump's is falling.
It's starting to look like he might win.
And that he's winning on purpose.
Who'd of think it?
Trump has a lot of negatives, yes.
And that might matter - if he were not running against Clinton.
Read Looking back: How Trump Beat Hillary
It's pretty amusing how much your posts parallels all of the people claiming Trump had no chance of winning the Republican nomination... The fact is you simply do not understand the vast majority of voters, women and men, white and black, hispanic or any other racial groups.
You've not even factored in how much more strongly Trump is against big banks than Clinton is (not hard to do since the Democrats have for some time been deeply intertwined with the likes of Goldman Sachs, which Trump has taken very little money from banks and has a natural animosity towards them having had to go through them in dealing with business ventures).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're ignoring the fact that now that he has the nomination, he's free to move to the center and make nice with women, blacks and mexicans. Anything can still happen.
I have some things to say about Carly that didn't really get said because she wasn't ever a serious enough candidate. A few words got out on the Christian Science Monitor here. Sorry about the survey they put you through before you can read the article.
Bruce Perens.
I'm hoping this election cycle results in the GOP splitting in two.
How does that not happen without the Democrats splitting similarly?
I have a number of strongly Democratic friends on Facebook. I have NEVER seen such a massive dislike of the front-runner (Hillary) and support for the candidates being shafted (Sanders). I would be surprised if even half of the Democrats I know will vote for Hillary ever.
The same is true on the Conservative side of course, with (again) probably about half not willing to vote for Trump either...
So to me that means the end of BOTH parties as we know them, and some very large percentage of hugely disenfranchised swing voters. Trump gets most of those this round but it doesn't seem like all of those people can stay registered as Republican or Democrat, and no way will they identify with libertarians... so it effectively means a large unaligned block of simply Independent voters.
I don't know what happens after this but moth parties are in for a major overhaul, and if neither can do it both will lose big-time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Out of the two which one was inept enough to use a private email server potentially exposing national secrets.
She won't need to get us into WW3. They will blow us up with out own nukes by stealing nuclear launch codes from her iPhone.
You say that the billionaire thing is a wash, but one thing that plays very well is when he says that Hillary is bought and paid for because he bought and paid for her in the past.
I think that this election will boil down to one of two things. First is if the Bernie voters vote for anyone let alone Hillary. The other is if one of these skeletons pops out of her closet and says BOO!!! Not just the DOJ investigation but there could be others that just brew up into a storm over the next 6 months. Either of those could hand him the election on a platter.
Someone like Bernie, who has never been a strong party supporter, could encourage his voters to either sit this out, or not very likely, vote for Trump because he is at least a proponent of campaign finance reform. He might be sore over Hillary's abuses.
Regardless of how self serving or fraudulent you may think she is, the odds of Hilary accidentally plunging the whole planet into world War three due to ineptitude seems significantly lower than with Trump.
Yep, Clinton is the status quo. If she gets elected then things will likely be exactly the same 4 years from now as it is now. The problem with this is that the majority of the population is not happy with the status quo which is why Trump, Cruz, and Sanders have been getting so many votes. I know many die-hard democrats that voted for Sanders in the primaries but if Sanders doesn't get the nomination they plan to vote for Trump. People want change and Trump/Sanders are campaigning on change. Clinton is campaigning on keeping things the same and I'm not sure that's a winning strategy in this election year. Trump is a loose cannon and unpredictable but he is promising to shake things up and to create new jobs both things that appeal to a large part of the population on both sides of the aisle.
Can't say I like Hillary that much, but there is one major aspect I do like: She has excellent taste in enemies. Not saying that the enemy of my enemy is automatically my friend, but her loudest and most prominent enemies are on the scale from "despicable" to totally "despicable". I'm liking her more and more just for the nasty things the flagrant bastards say about her.
The second thing I rather like about her candidacy is that she is obviously vastly more qualified and competent than Trump (or Cruz) and significantly better than any of the other prominent candidates the so-called Republicans were considering. If they had found a candidate like Abe Lincoln, Teddy, or Ike, today's fake Republicans would have booed him out of the first debate.
The main reason I still prefer Bernie is that his primary personal identity is "idealist", and I think they are basically harmless compared to most of the alternatives. Hillary's #1 identity is probably "corporate lawyer" and "idealist" probably isn't in her top 10. I'm not sure "politician" is in the top 5, but she has Bill on her side, and his clear #1 is "politician", so I think she's covered there. (President Obama is also a primary politician, if you ask me, and I regard that as a bad (but evidently almost absolute) requirement for the office these years. I think Carter and Ford were the last exceptions.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
There appears to be a choice between someone who is conniving and self serving, and someone who is nasty and under handed. Can you tell which is which?
I can tell which candidate is constantly appealing to bigotry and hate, implicitly (and not-so-implicitly) condoning violence and torture, and blaming all of the nation's problems on minorities and foreigners.
I can tell which candidate has actual experience in government, and which one seems to have learned everything he thinks he knows about government from watching "24".
I can tell which candidate has actual considered positions on issues, and which candidate is just making it up as he goes along (because hey, how hard can running a country be?)
I can tell which candidate is willing to engage in reasoned argument, and which one thinks that merely flinging childish personal insults is a sufficient form of debate.
I can tell which candidate is able to withstand criticism and adversity without getting thin-skinned and emotional, and which candidate can't go 30 minutes without responding to each and every criticism individually by lashing out wildly on Twitter.
I can tell which candidate the KKK and other hate groups are getting themselves excited over.
I don't think Hillary's an ideal candidate by any stretch of the imagination, but at least she's in the right ballpark. I'd expect her tenure as President to be much like Obama's, except with less panache, and that's fine with me. The idea of electing Trump to be president, OTOH, is about as appealing as the idea of hiring Twisty the Clown to entertain at my kids' birthday party.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Now watch Trump air Hillary's dirty laundry 24x7 all the way until the election. I would not be that she would win, especially if he starts acting more "presidential" so to speak. There are a shit ton of very bad skeletons in her closet, some of them chucked there by her husband.
It will be interesting to see what the rest of the GOP do now. After a year of trashing Trump, calling him all sorts of things, they are either going to have to eat several courses of humble pie or rip the party apart by continuing to oppose their official candidate.
The polls suggest that Trump will find it hard to beat Hillary, because despite some popularity he also has a higher disapproval rating than anyone in the history of politics. Then again you can never rule anyone out in a two horse race. For me a Trump win would be a nightmare scenario, but I'm also kind of curious to see how the rest of the world would react.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Dear FlyHelicoptors,
I've posted against you on a number of topics, and even go so far as to insult you and tell you that I wouldn't like you if I met you in real life. I do still think you may be overly fond of Microsoft products, or even get some kind of kickback for your postings in that regard.
But, your post here is the most insightful and interesting thing I've ever seen you write, and I agree with you 100%.
I'll stop giving you a hard time from now on, have a nice day.
Unless you live in a swing state, voting for either major party is the real waste of your vote.
Let's say you live in California. No matter how you vote, California's electors are voting Democrat, and you and everyone you know voting one way or another isn't going to amount to a drop in the bucket in that matter.
So say you're liberal and you vote Democrat: you didn't actually help get a liberal into office and keep a conservative out, you just confirmed for the Democrats that they're doing the right thing to keep liberals voting for them, so they're going to be less likely to change because of your vote.
Now say you're a conservative and you vote Republican: you didn't actually get a conservative into office or keep the liberal out, but you confirmed for the Republicans that they're doing the right thing to get conservatives voting for them, so they're going to be less likely to change because of your vote.
But say you're liberal and you like the Greens' policies better than the Democrats, so you vote Green. You didn't keep a liberal out of office or let a conservative in; the Democrats still won. But when they look at the polling numbers, if enough liberals felt like you did, they will see that they lost some small percentage to the Greens, and start adopting Green policies to court those voters.
Likewise, say you're a conservative and you like the Libertarians' policies better than the Republicans, so you vote Republican. You didn't let a liberal into office or cost a conservative their chance; the Democrat was going to win anyway. But when the Republicans look at the polling numbers, if enough conservatives felt like you did, they will see that the lost some small percentage to the Libertarians, and start adopting Libertarian policies to court those voters.
If you live in a state where the margins are so close that your vote might actually make a difference, then by all means, vote strategically for the lesser of two evils. If you live anywhere else, a vote for either major party is wasted; it makes no difference in who gets elected in your state, and it makes no difference in the policies of the major parties. A third party vote also makes no difference in who gets elected in your state, but at lest it makes a difference in party policy. And if enough people realize this and start voting that way, then not only will third the major parties align more to voters' true wishes (instead of just thinking they're going the right way as they are), and not only will third parties actually get more support and possibly come closer to being real contenders, but more states will become swing states, and then your vote will actually make a real difference... and the major parties will really have to make sure to adopt the policies of the third parties encroaching on their demographics or they (e.g. California Democrats) might actually lose / they (e.g. California Republicans) might actually have a chance to win.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."