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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.
R. Daneel Olivaw for President!
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Namely "Cruz for President"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Considering how he now has to lay off his entire campaign staff, picking Carly Fiorina as his running mate looks more and more like a brilliant decision!
Someone's God lied to them......
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
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.
Unlikely, or he would not have the lead he has.
I.e., around half of all Republicans motivated enough to participate in caucuses/primaries. Doesn't sound promising for the general election.
(Except for the fact that Clinton may have a substantial popularity problem on the Democratic/independent side.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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..
I'm not in the US so all I get are news paper reports.
Is it possible for trump to win the presidency? 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?
We had a similar muppet in Australia called Clive Palmer who managed to get elected to our house of reps despite all the press saying he didn't stand a chance.
As a political analyst its simple to understand why a ted cruz candidacy was untenable. We simply need to look at the facts.
.04%. now, while this number is rising at an alarming rate, is nowhere near the 34% required for Ted Cruz to survive outside his spacecraft. his inability to handle Nitrogen and Oxygen perhaps cost him valuable facetime with the american people. Any reasonable subterranean intergalactic cephalopod species could surely identify with the all too common problem of our atmosphere and its no reason to think Ted didnt understand this problem acutely.
1. total Co2 in the earths atmosphere is around
2. The mindgasm with Carly Fiorina was tentative, as the aetherial fluids clearly hadnt been administered yet and the nanites had no substrate on which to build the newmind. Carly lacked ambition, determination, and a plan. Most importantly, she lacked the void stare, obedient subservience, and slow speech and gait that are all classic telltale signs of "the syrum." Of course Ted could have used the mindworms, but its unlikely a true fiscal conservative would take to using them. Theyre just too costly in a campaign.
3. despite liberal restucturing in the identity chamber, teds human form was too precitable and beginning to arouse suspicion of his youthful, larval past as the zodiac killer. Had he simply taken the time to explain that humans are a complete nutritional delicacy for his species and that 4-5 are required to exit the larval stage and return to the hivemind, most conservatives would have viewed this as a good leadership quality.
so heres hoping the Yaylaka prince Don-Al of Ukador persei 9, commonly known as "Don-Al Trumph" does better. and before you bash the candidate, its worth remembering his speech seems to approximate normal english almost 60% of the time! Quite an achievement if youve never slid into a humanform that may or may not have been a long haul trucker from illinois whos been missing for 36 years and presumed dead. I think we can all agree when he says "hail Ji-Ban-Lau forever" he means it.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Yeah, what ARE we going to do with that Kasich guy?
Pretty much. Clinton is delusional if she thinks after all the insulting things she's said about the Bernie supporters and the various dirty campaigning practices that she's going to get all of us to toe the line. I for one will not vote for that woman. If that means President Trump, then so be it. We can survive 4 years of Trump, I'm not sure we can survive the precedent of letting somebody as pathologically dishonest as Clinton to win.
Just the other day it came out that she's been using the Hillary Clinton Victory fund to funnel donations well above and beyond the legal limit into her campaign coffers. Roughly 99% of the money that was donated, ostensibly for the party and other Democrats has been funneled back into her campaign.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/clinton-fundraising-leaves-little-for-state-parties-222670
Is that really better than what Trump can do for us? I doubt very much that he really believes most of the inflammatory rhetoric.
Wait a second...
Rafael Cruz AND Glen Beck both said Ted Cruz was "anointed by god" to be the next president. How could god have gotten it so wrong??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
He's not dead yet.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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
Trump will need 70% of the white male vote to win the election without votes from every other voting bloc that he so far had managed to alienate. Not happening.
The overwhelming fact about American general elections right now is that white male voters just aren't as powerful as they used to be. In 1980, when the electorate looked very different than it does today, Ronald Reagan cruised to an easy victory by winning 63 percent of white males, according to exit polls. In 1988, George H.W. Bush took 63 percent of that group in his rout of Michael Dukakis. By 2004, however, winning 62 percent of white men barely got George W. Bush past John Kerry in a squeaker. And eight years later, Romney won 62 percent of white men—and lost to Barack Obama by 3.5 million votes.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/donald-trump-needs-7-of-10-white-guys-213699
It doesn't help that 70% of women don't like him either.
Donald Trump's image among U.S. women tilts strongly negative, with 70% of women holding an unfavorable opinion and 23% a favorable opinion of the Republican front-runner in March. Trump's unfavorable rating among women has been high since Gallup began tracking it last July, but after rising slightly last fall, it has increased even further since January.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/190403/seven-women-unfavorable-opinion-trump.aspx
A vote for Reagan is a vote for war.
I suspect it won't matter. If the choice comes down to being between somewhat-disliked Clinton and outspoken-bigot Trump, a left-leaning voter will still pick Hillary, just to keep things from getting too bad.
The Clintons have a PR problem. Bill was friendly, and eventually that was a liability. Hillary has had mostly bad PR since becoming a controversial Secretary of State, and the Republican party has consistently amplified that controversy, exaggerating real problems and inventing conspiracies. However, Hillary's stated policy positions aren't too bad. Sure, she has ties to the right, and isn't as far to the left as Bernie Sanders, but if she gets the nomination, she's still a Democrat.
In the general election, though, that's exactly what would happen. It will become us-versus-them, and both sides will be sure to keep that in the public eye. If you're a Republican and you don't vote for Trump, the dirty Democrats will win. If you're a Democrat and you don't vote for Clinton, the rotten Republicans will win. I expect mud-slinging all around.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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
Trump is literally going to plaster the walls with Hillary, after the first debate that all become apparent even to you... I doubt Hillary will do more than one open debate, and then where will the reclusive sulking get her? Exactly nowhere.
"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.
Lesser of two weasels.
"Lesser of two evils"
That's funny as hell. Look at what you left yourselves after generations of picking the "Lesser of two evils". Who ever dreamed that Bush could make the suit look good?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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
The election will test the validity of that presumption.
Can you win the national election on pure PC virtue signaling? Because... Hillary has a lot of problems as a candidate as well.
She's a robotic speaker that is not especially charismatic. Not good in a president.
Just as Trump has problems with women, Hillary has problems with men... including Democrat men.
Just as Trump has a harder time with older voters that find his vulgarity off putting... hillary's corruption scandals have hurt her amongst younger voters which is why Bernie is trending as well as he is.
Very little you say against Trump is something you can't say against Hillary... the Flipflopping... the allegations of corruption... The being against one group or another. You can say Trump is an evil billionaire but then you have to admit that Hillary is getting most of the money from the other evil billionaires. So... sort of a wash really.
At the end of the day, the democrats are going to have to go positive on themselves. Say "we will do this good thing" whatever that is... with credibility. Because going negative on Trump and expecting to win the office on that alone is probably not enough to get elected at this point.
No one has a crystal ball into the future on this issue. But keep in mind that no one... means no one.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Meanwhile Ben Carson is still standing in the hallway waiting for the New Hampshire debate to begin.
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.
The great majority (if not all) of wars was caused by self-serving leaders, and never by incompetence. Psychopatic minds only interested in their own benefit, financial and political, have been the motive force behind practically all wars in recorded history.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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.
I suspect you will see his policies shift, but not in any way that allows for easy categorization. But there is one thing that Trump is very very good at which is he is a mainstream media prediction killer. From pretty much day one every prediction about him by the mainstream media has gone up in smoke. The initial prediction that I read about his campaign was that it would last just long enough for him to promote his show or a book.
Exactly. It's kindof scary that the most likely next president is hated by 75+% of the population. At least with Sanders or Kasich, the other side of the aisle tolerates them. I'm a republican/libertarian and disagree with most of what Sanders believes but I still think that he is a decent human being. I can't say the same about Hillary or Trump. If it was Kasich vs Hillary, I would vote for Kasich, if it was Trump vs Sanders, I would vote for Sanders, but Hillary vs Trump and I have no idea who to vote. We're either going to have one of the highest turnouts or lowest turnouts in voting history and most people are going to be voting *against* a candidate instead of for a candidate.
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.
You speak the truth.
This is going to be a scary election.
Decency is a lost value in the U.S.
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.
No....I'm not really a fan of Trump, but he pretty much seems to be an open book. How many politicians do you know of that will have reservation against a certain religious group and openly speak about it? With Trump, what you see is very much what you get. Obama can't claim that (compare his campaign promises vs what he actually did) and Hillary will make Obama look like a saint in that regard.
I don't think those problems are congruent, though. Trump has problems with women directly because of his sexism. In contrast, Clinton's problems with Democrat men aren't because of her feminism, but rather are because of all her other issues as a candidate, which men are less willing than women to give her a pass for.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In 40 years the major cities will be full of 80 year olds and people serving them coffee.
Except for SF which will be entirely populated by 20 year old billionaires. (all coffee shops staffed by robots there).
The future belongs to the people that show up, and the only people having babies in significant numbers are in rural areas.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Really? Hillary has had her hand in throwing lots of people to their deaths in conflicts launched or made worse on her watch. Or are you trying to ignore that part? Ask some Libyans how all that's going lately.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
To the contrary the "war on women" campaign backfired in the congressional elections and it is not polling well as a political concept. Look at the number of college age women that self identify as feminists as well. There is a preception whether real or not that the PC thing has gotten out of control. It has become "uncool". Whatever women believe, when queried they are openly less willing to associate with these things because they're seen as divisive.
This perception is largely the result of males generally seeing modern feminism as hostile to men. Whether that is true or not is not really the issue here because we're talking about politics and politics is about perceptions. Those are the perceptions.
So it is a wash. The numbers were so bad that the Hillary Campaign or their proxies went so far as to claim male democrats voting for Bernie were merely doing so because they don't like women in power. THAT sort of behavior has consequences.
The Attraction of playing the woman card is that you want to get 50 percent of the voters on your side. The risk however is that you may turn off half the voters in the process. What is more, women have very interesting voting patterns depending on whether they're single or not. Single women tend to vote very differently from married women. To a large extent... Hillary is going after single women... that is the demographic that responds to this sort of thing. But the risk is that she can turn off men and even married women in the process which could easily be fatal.
The ultimate fallout here is unknown to either of us. Its all speculation. We won't know what happened or why until after it happened.
Various groups on the internet are over represented and under represented. Judging things based on activity in social media is unreliable.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
Couldn't you at least have waited until an article came along about how people were using 3D printers to replicate model Trump hair to wear in support or something?
Hey, we did get the story about how Trump's hair shorted out the LHC.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Trump can ask all he wants, Sanders knows better.
Sanders has already permanently changed the way elections are run, and he's shoved the Democratic party farther to the left, forcing Clinton there whether she wants it or not.
Bruce Perens.
What in the world? Hillary Clinton's two biggest "controversies" are Benghazi, which is about as much of a controversy as global warming, and this whole email scandal where she used a private server instead of the State Department one. Given how many government servers have been hacked in the last ten years, the emails were probably safer there than they were on the government system anyway.
Pretending that Hillary Clinton is anywhere in the same zip code as despicable a person as Trump is to ignore basic facts about the two people and their history. The only reason people even think stupid things like this is because we've been taught by the 24-hour news cycle to look at the constantly-updating horse race statistics rather than the actual policies and histories of the candidates.
It's funny that the American version of "extreme leftist" looks somewhat centrist from a European/Australian perspective.
Good thing is that US geopolitically is as good as ever. Europe as usual is in trouble...
Please elaborate? There is UK voting on EU membership (ironically the politicians there is probably learning the same lesson as the GOP: don't produce fear mongering using opinions you don't really share)...
Then there is some ongoing financial trouble in Greece... Economic growth isn't completely back yet (but that the same case for 99% of the Americans).
But these are likely solved given time and luck, things are definitely being addressed.
The whole refugee crisis, is not a crisis, just an under-investment in refuges... The European countries can fix that anytime. It's mostly a superficial issue, not actual trouble in any sense.
So I'm curious how do you see a Europe in crisis?
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's also pretty centrist from an American historical perspective, and from a policies-the-general-American-populace-actually-support perspective.
It's only "extreme leftist" from a myopic, mainstream-media-manufactured view of the political spectrum.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Yeah, as a European, the whole cold war just seems to have increasingly polarized the former USSR to the extreme left and the USA to the extreme right.
In the US, any mention of the word "social" seems to be interpreted as "communist" to the point where "anti-social" has become a positive.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The president's powers are so limited without a cooperative congress that none of this matters anyway. As much as I detest Clinton, she will probably win. The house and senate will probably remain very Republican and nothing will get done. Unless she screws up royally, Hillary will probably be re-elected which will again push congress more Republican in the mid-terms.
Get ready for 8 more years of nothing getting accomplished. I would be surprised if the supreme court seat is ever filled. Maybe 2024 will offer something different.
"Almost everyone in the country" can't afford a house payment in the first place, and THEIR taxes won't be going up. "Lower middle class" is already better-off than almost everyone in the goddamn country.
You realize ~50% of Americans make under ~$25k a year, and ~75% of them make under ~$50k?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Vote Trump.
If it comes down to Hillary or The Donald, I think the lessor of two evils is The Donald, simply because his unfiltered rants are preferable to the shrill non-answers given by the consummate politician.
In truth, the results will be pretty much the same either way, so for me it comes down to who's press conferences I'd rather hear for the next 4 years. (Or less, Hillary could stroke out at any time, and Trump could just say "fuck it", so it will be interesting to see who the veeps are...)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If those that dislike Hillary and Trump voted for a single 3rd party candidate, they'd probably win. I'm a Bernie supporter that has decided to vote 3rd party. I've heard "you're wasting your vote" every time I've mentioned it. I don't care at this point. It's the only way we'll ever buck the current two party system.
Hillary has no real accomplishments short of getting her husband and herself elected to numerous offices and then using those offices to make as much money as they possibly can. How much do they charge the secret service rent? Is it really enough to pay their mortgages? I bet it is enough to pay the average American's mortgage. Probably the average 10 Americans. How much do they charge to speak? How many foreign governments and companies have they taken money from? What exactly does their non-profit do besides pay for their travel expenses to speaking engagements?
She talks about giving the average American the same chances she had. How is she going to do that? Seminars on trading in cattle futures? Maybe how to setup a large scale chicken farm with her moneyed friends?
Her term as secretary of state was a disaster. She chose to intervene in Libya and not to confront ISIS. She made a big deal out of pressing a big red reset button with Vladimir Putin, who reset Russian expansionism.
As far as her policies, it would be better to look at whatever Bernie Sanders said two weeks ago. That's assuming she really means what she says and what the definition of is is.
Not just Sanders, both Sanders *and* Trump have permanently changed how election campaigns are run...
As for Sanders "knowing better" I think what he knows is he could do a lot as VP and would get nothing via a third party run against Clinton.
There's no way the Democratic establishment will let Sanders have the nomination no matter how many delegates he manages to get (and I think he will do quite well in the rest of the primaries). Too bad for Democrats as that is their only chance to win the main election.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Richard Nixon was so far to the left that he would have made Hillary look like a Republican!
I wish it was a joke but with the EPA, his health care proposals and a few other things he would be called a Communist by some Republicans if he was pushing such things today. That was of course before Koch and other similar donors made the demands that shaped current politics.
I know you people think the place is Mad Max with sharks, but WTF? We fucking INVENTED high quality home-schooling with School of the Air via radio in 1951. Governments in Australia have been supporting home schooling for generations - desert, city, wherever.
No....I'm not really a fan of Trump, but he pretty much seems to be an open book....With Trump, what you see is very much what you get.
Except you see a different Trump pretty much every day. He is the very definition of pandering to an audience. You seriously think he wants to build and make Mexico pay for (or actually afford to do so) a wall, or ban all Muslims from traveling to the US? What is scariest about Trump is that he doesn't even try to hide the fact that he is clearly only telling people what they want to hear and people are eating it up. His entire voter base is sitting there playing a lute watching the city of the Republican Party burn. On the bright side, now that we have 2 candidates that a majority of people can't stand maybe third parties will have a better showing.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
So I guess the time has finally come that the US might admit their two-party political system isn't such a great democracy after all?
Although it wouldn't directly affect the presidential race, I think we should move to having members of the house elected at large. Physical districts don't make any sense in today's world where you can drive across a state in a couple hours. It would be much better if the top X candidates of each state became the house of representatives. This would allow someone to run as a libertarian, a representative of chicago, a representative of rural america, but it would also allow people to run as a representative of old people, hispanics, blacks, etc... Basically, in a state with 12 representatives, any group that could get more than 1/12 of the votes for their representative would get a voice. It would be much better than the gerrymandering system we have today where 49% of most districts are unrepresented.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/zeifman.asp
I would point out that the gullible trump supporters are somewhat more complex than that. They believe that Trump means the things he says that they agree with, and they believe that he does not really mean the things he says that they disagree with. They are absolutely convinced of his dishonesty, yet they somehow think he's on their side.
NPR's This American Life did a segment about Alex Chalgren, an african-american, gay Trump supporter. In the segment, Alex explained that he supported Trump because Trump supported gay rights. Later when confronted by a statement from Trump saying that he would try to appoint judges to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage, he continued to defend Trump. He said that Trump only made the statement to get votes.
Trump rejected the one issue that Alex chose him for, and Alex continued to support him.
http://www.thisamericanlife.or...
I wonder how he is going to do it.
Trump has barely spend any money at all by today's standards. To air dirty laundry you need to convince a lot of media sources to give you air time to pour through that dirty laundry.
Media sources are really torn. Trump generates a lot of viewership and extraordinary ratings, which means money to the media sources. However most mass media pundits clearly dislike Donald.
I am putting my money that Media will go after the ratings and money. People will be entertained. The show must go on. This is America!
I for one will not vote for that woman. If that means President Trump, then so be it. We can survive 4 years of Trump,
*You* can survive four years of Trump. Not everyone is so lucky. Carry on you high-horse.
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
A lot of Trump supporters are more than happy with the current economy. They're middle class and a enjoy good life and want that life to continue. They don't care about giant corporations. They don't need to be saved by socialism. It's curious, however, that you think the Democratic candidate wouldn't kowtow to the money. Your boy Obama hasn't done anything to shrink giant corporations. They're bigger now than they ever were. Also curious that you think only republicans are gullible and ignorant, when your democrat brethren are equally as gullible to believe that Bernie Sanders would deliver upon to them a utopian socialist society. Your disdain and dismissive attitude towards these rubes is the very reason they're rallying behind a candidate you hate so much. Instead of working together, you're forcing their hand, and, as you probably forgot, they have the same "right" to vote as you.