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John Kasich To Drop Out, Leaving Trump as GOP Nominee (vox.com)
Multiple outlets are reporting that Ohio Gov. John Kasich plans to suspend his run to be the GOP presidential nominee. The move, if happens, would make Donald Trump the presumptive nominee for the GOP. The report comes hours after Kasich abruptly cancelled a planned press conference (could be paywalled; alternate source) in Virginia on Wednesday morning. LA Times reports: Kasich, the Ohio governor, had pledged to continue campaigning as a Trump alternative who could deny the billionaire needed delegates. But on Wednesday, he canceled a news conference in Washington and planned an announcement for later in the day in Columbus, Ohio, to drop out. Vox has more details.
Cruz dropping out handed the race over.
Kasich could have won every delegate from Tuesday night to convention time and still would not have caught Trump. How he could have gotten any at all much less all of them, when he has no cash and won only his home state is a great question. Other than symbolically not causing a ruckus up to the convention, it means nothing to the race.
I hope they do so that Bernie Sanders would run against Trump. Both are party outsiders and I'd be more satisfied with either of them than anyone else either party put forward this election cycle.
But they're not going to do anything to Hillary. Not because she's not guilty or there isn't a case to be made, but because having that on her gives them control over her. She's just a puppet for the wealthy and powerful.
ANATOMY OF FASCISM - Robert Paxton
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
The Five Stages of Fascism
1) Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
2) Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage
3) Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite the movement to share power
4) Exercise of power, where the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.
5) Radicalization or entropy, where the state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did Fascist Italy.
You can read the full thing here
https://libcom.org/files/Rober...
Hillary is a terrible candidate. She just lost another primary state. Bernie supporters hate her and after the DNC finally squeezes him out they'll hate her even more.
The thing about Trump is that your conventional wisdom doesn't work. He fights. He uses the ammo provided and makes more. And there is a huge supply of ammo to use against Hillary. By November "Crooked Hillary" will be a meme your children will know. Every turd the Clintons have ever made will be top-of-mind with every voter in the US. Bernie tried to expose her over the transcripts. Trump will pummel her daily for that, the email crimes, Bengazi, cattlegate, NAFTA, gender pandering, her establishment donors, the Clinton Foundation foreign slush fund and every other slimy aspect of her history and campaign, and he will make it stick. This is the guy that made Obama cough up a birth certificate.
Every coughing fit punctuated campaign event Clinton choreographs will see Trump fill three stadiums with rabid supporters. By November Hillary will be a quivering mass of regret.
Trump has never served in the armed forces or in any sort of elected capacity. He seems to think government consists of two people at a table dealmaking all day. He'll be very surprised how the world works if elected (that last part made me shudder)
Hillary was also a Senator. She was not just appointed, but ran an election and ran an office.
Even China is shrinking their manufacturing worker rolls. Anyone that wants to use manufacturing jobs as a step to a great economy is delusional at this point. The jobs were great, and it's a great idea, if the world would just comply and shift back to the 1970s. You're seeking a rise to greatness for buggy whips and horse collar manufacturers.
Bernie supporters don't "hate" Hillary, we just think Bernie is a better choice. I voted for Bernie in our state caucus (Hillary and Bernie supporters got along very well there, thank you), now I will vote for Hillary in the general election because I have accepted the inevitable -- barring a death before November 8th, it is going to be Clinton vs. Trump in the general election and Clinton is going to win. The only surprise now will be who they choose as running mates. And the real payoff will be when Democrats regain the majority in the Senate, and Hillary submits her far-left nominee for the SCOTUS. I'd just love to see the look on McConnell's face when that happens!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Her lawyer had a copy of the emails on a thumb drive, and I don't seem to recall hearing news that he was cleared to have access to the emails.
It continues to amaze me that people keep repeating this easily proven false talking point. The date/time something is stamped 'classified' is irrelevant! Plenty of content was 'born' classified or so obvious that it was regardless of marking. Should we also ignore her asking a subordinate to strip the classified header from a document for sending?
There were things so sensitive in her email that the DoJ Inspector General investigating initially lacked a high enough clearance to read some of the content.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Some don't, but others do. As someone who supports Sanders because of the anti-Wall-Street, anti-corruption, and anti-DC-establishment facets of his platform, Hillary has nothing to offer me (except in cases where she's flip-flopped in response to Sanders, such as for the TPP -- but I don't believe for a second that she'll remain opposed to the TPP after the election).
I don't think I could vote for Trump, but going for Jill Stein (or maybe even the Libertarian candidate), or writing in Sanders, is a distinct possibility.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It's hard to keep taking these claims seriously when panel after panel of people who REALLY want to hang Hillary for the slightest infraction can't find a single thing to even complain about.
I have a lot of problems with the Clintons, but the constant witch hunt is just crazy.
In addition, government officials form both parties have used private email addresses as well
There is no comparison. Nobody at her level of authority (fourth in line to the presidency, the nation's top diplomat, someone who handled highly classified material as a regular part of her job) has previously completely skipped using secure email services for official business, electing instead to handle ALL of her official email through a personal account served up on a computer in her residential home. Really, try to find another example of that. Then take into account the fact that inspectors general from multiple intelligence agencies have said that she trafficked in classified (even way-above-top-secret) material on her unsecured home computer ... and never turned over ANY of it as she left office, as required to. And when hounded by FOIA requests and subpoenas - which she dragged out for YEARS - she deleted tens of thousands of those messages before grudgingly handing over some of it as printed-out hardcopies stripped of all header information.
Cite another top government official who has even approached that level of deliberately hiding ALL OF THEIR OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE from scrutiny.
there is no upside for either side to drag this into court.
Sure there is. People who worked under her were subject to losing their careers and even their liberty for doing FAR less than she did. The "upside" to indicting her is to demonstrate that despite the long history of her and her husband's abuses of power, she's not above the law.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
We've known since at least the 1700s that first-past-the-post plurality voting is a totally broken system. It's irresponsible to conduct any election with more than two alternatives in this fashion.
In many places, especially early in the election cycle, Trump would have lost any single head-to-head matchup. But his opponents were always split, and plurality voting is tremendously vulnerable to this kind of problem.
Process matters. If our elections were conducted using a Condorcet method like Ranked Pairs, Maximum Majority, or Schulze, we would have had less irrationality and extremism from both parties throughout the years, and the existing parties would not have become so entrenched.
Here's a popular-audience explanation by a couple of Nobel winners.
The party collapsed around him. Donald Trump is like a polar bear on an ice floe that's been set adrift.
Look man, you want the truth? Donald won't be president. I don't really have anything against him. He's a little bit like an uncle of mine. A sweet guy with some issues, but always entertaining at Thanksgiving. Wears a little too much cologne, jewelry and dates a Russian girl the same age as his daughter. I dig the whole scene, you know? Calls black people "schvoogies" and always has an extra cuban cigar for me. I was 40 before he stopped slipping me a C-note when he saw me, "to take out my girl someplace nice" (even though I'd been married for years). Moved to Las Vegas and is now working on his short game and a case of skin cancer.
But Donald Trump won't be president. Forget what's been said. And the only ones who have been predicting Trump's demise have been other Republicans, and they've never really been the brightest bulbs. They're the same people who predicted Romney would win in a landslide. Democrats have been expecting Trump to win all along, because that's how bad the GOP has become. No Democrat or Leftist is surprised that the GOP voters rejected constitutional conservatism and voted for the reality TV guy. You look like a big man when everyone around you has fallen, you know?
You are welcome on my lawn.