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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.
And to linking to an alternate source. Kudos to the editors.
I guess the question now is whether Trump will be willing to tone down the rhetoric, make some comprehensive, real-world arguments on important stuff like foreign policy, and basically be more presidential. Also, he'll have to pick an amazing VP candidate and show himself as open to selecting people who can fill in the experience gaps he has.
Like her or hate her, Clinton was the Secretary of State. Anyone actually watching the political side of this (debates, etc.) and not voting based on stump speeches and commercials can see there's an experience gap, and I think that'll be clear in a general election debate unless Trump does some serious studying between now and then.
All in all, a fun political season is coming. You've got the establishment that wants things as-is, angry workers who have no jobs because they've been offshored, outsourced or automated, angry conservatives who want smaller government, and angry liberals from the Sanders camp who want more. Personally, I'd be amazed if Trump could pull off a trade war with the rest of the world. Coming from the Rust Belt, it would be great to see factories running 3 shifts of thousands of workers again, but I doubt that can be pulled off.
He and Bernie Sanders are the only ones even CLAIMING they'll take on H1-B's, outsourcing, and big business. Is it likely that Trump will actually follow through with this? Nope. Is it likely that he's going to represent the same interests of his rich business friends just like ever other politician? Yep.
But is there any other choice that's even POSSIBLY going to stand up for the little guy? Not on the Republican side.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
You're our only hope.
Too bad his chances at this point aren't much bigger than a womp rat.
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.
Im a liberal/progressive/whateverTheyCallMeThisWeek. Im reluctantly supporting Hillary. Bernie "wins" only if he denies certain Democratic voters as illegitimate. The fact that the groups he needs to deny tend to be black should make you cringe a bit. Besides, his platform is too unclear, and depends on "and then a miracle happens" a bit too much (yeah, i'll get flamed for all that, but it's my opinion). Hillary doesn't promise the moon, but she's more likely to get her agenda done.
But Trump - no one really figured he'd get here. Im a bit wary. What people haven't realized up to now is it's not about Trump it's about the voters. The fact that we have a large number of people voting for Trump with no experience and no real plan (I bet Trump would hire a dude off the street with no experience but yuuuge hair for CEO in a second) just because of anger. It's making me rethink our electorate. Could he win? I thought there's no chance he'd be here. I thought that once we got away from Trump and the 16 dwarves where Trump dominated the headlines we'd back away from Trump. But no, he was strengthened once he got close. I really wonder.
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...
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.
Probably more because if they indicted everyone who ever mishandled classified information they'd put most of the govt and lots of private contractors in jail. They only indict when someone either:
* Tries to give classified data to someone they shouldn't
* Mishandles data so badly that someone else gets it
Clinton did neither. And this is all beside the point that most of the "classified data" was classified after it went through her server, or was classified by the State Dept so the Secretary of State can tell anyone she wants.
I'm always amazed how many people fall for the manufactured Clinton scandals from the right. "Oh, a Clinton is accused of something terrible. The last 10 turned out to be faked or overblown, but sure, I'll panic over this one too, because the right-wing is known for careful application of facts and logic!" Don't fall for these, please, or the next eight years will be terribly stressful for you.
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.
Email addresses on servers they did not control. The difference, which people like yourself want to minimize is that it was HER server (not AOL, Not Hotmail, not Yahoo!, and not Google. It was her private email server. And it was clearly designed to get around the Open Records requirements that were passed because of Republican versions of private email addresses that happened previously.
And, you're functionally saying "Two wrongs make it okay", rather than addressing the real concerns.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Seriously, picture the old Uncle Sam character — wearing tall head, the blue jacket and striped pants. Now try to imagine other contenders — from both major parties — in the outfit.
Trump is the only one, who can possibly fit.
So...Trump is a fictional caricature whose sole purpose is to appeal to people on an emotional level to earn their support and get money from them?
*Looks at Trump's campaign to date*
Yep, sounds about right actually
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
what if no one get's 270?
That's an extremely unlikely scenario based on the 2016 electoral map, which is identical to 2012 and 2008. Hillary needs 28 electoral votes to win. Trump will need 168 electoral votes to win.
And here's the underlying math. If Clinton wins the 19 states (and D.C.) that every Democratic nominee has won from 1992 to 2012, she has 242 electoral votes. Add Florida's 29 and you get 271. Game over.
The Republican map — whether with Trump, Cruz or the ideal Republican nominee (Paul Ryan?) as the standard-bearer — is decidedly less friendly. There are 13 states that have gone for the GOP presidential nominee in each of the last six elections. But they only total 102 electorate votes. That means the eventual nominee has to find, at least, 168 more electoral votes to get to 270. Which is a hell of a lot harder than finding 28 electoral votes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/02/republicans-have-a-massive-electoral-map-problem-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-donald-trump/
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.
You don't understand. A pardon is irrelevant for the campaign. It could even be worse than an indictment. It's not about whether she goes to jail or not, it's whether she can get elected with her credibility broken by an indictment which would then have been nullified by a pardon, without answering the actual charge.
And it would prove the charge that she will have gotten away with something that nobody who worked for her could have gotten away with, just because she is who she is. A pardon would be as close to political suicide as she could get without actually going to jail.
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
It would be hard to levy charges when there were two separate oversight processes, one in State one in the White House, based on an explicit memorandum specifying the ethical rubric to which Clinton signed.
If only she thinks it's okay, that's questionable, but not evidence of wrongdoing. If she thinks it's okay and an appointed overseer thinks it's okay, that's covered. If she thinks it's okay and an appointed overseer thinks it's okay and a second appointed overseer also thinks it's okay, that's responsible management of conflicts of interest.
I bet you read an article in International Business Times. Go read it again and pay attention to the part where they talked about these multiple layers of oversight.
It is crazy I know, but would you put it past Trump?
You don't seem to know how pardons work. She doesn't have to plead guilty; Nixon for example was pardoned without ever having been charged. Accepting a pardon, however, is an admission of guilt. There would be no faster way to lose an election. Republicans would be calling for her head on a plate before the ink on the signature dried.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Man, y'all been trying to pin some nefarious shit on her since she was back in Little Rock, and all it's ever done is make you look silly. You've bounced around from Whitewater to the assassination of Vince Foster right up to Benghazi and now ServerGate. There have been more congressional investigations into Hillary Clinton than any human being in history. I mean, seventy-two weeks worth of investigations into Benghazi alone, with millions flushed down the crapper. All to prove...nothing.
Now I have no interest in seeing Hillary Clinton become president, but got damn she's made your ilk look like Wile E Coyote falling off a cliff onto a wood chipper for decades now. You might want to think about getting a hobby.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
Fun fact: Hilary is pro-net neutrality.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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.
Not being a lawyer I'm not going to go into which offenses committed by her is the 'most clearly illegal', but it does represent another consciously negligent act for which she can be charged.
Your attempts at mockery say otherwise.
Don't you ever get tired of "But... Bush!!!" ?
Except there was a whole bunch of classified info in there, which is why the FBI came asking for the thumb drive later and why so many emails released have had some level of redaction.
That's a mighty big stretch, doubly so when Trump hasn't been authorized to receive classified information.
Exactly what have I made up?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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.
Cruz and Kasich (and the others while they were still in) were playing iterative rounds of something resembling the Prisoner's Dilemma. Choosing to stay in the race increased their odds of being the nominee by a large factor _if_ there was a contested convention. However staying in the race, and thus dividing the non-Trump votes, also increased the odds that Trump would win outright and there _wouldn't_ be a contested convention.
If one of them had decided to drop out much earlier the other one might have been able to stop Trump from getting enough votes to lock in the nomination and steal it away from him at the convention. (This makes it slightly different from regular Prisoner's Dilemma in that cooperating involves the two players choosing different actions.) Given that going by the number of delegates the one who probably should have dropped out early was Kasich, it's kind of pathetic that he drug his heels long enough to quit _right_ after Cruz. Good job you two! Your arrogant electoral mutual suicide pact has all but guaranteed a Trump nomination!
(I wonder if there were any backroom negotiations going on to try and convince Kasich to drop out in exchange for a vice presidential slot? That's not something that's usually done but this was a pretty unusual case.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The Beginning Of The End.
I'm going to make a comment and my comment will be so great, unlike those other comments which are awful. When you see my comment you'll know how great it is, it'll be so great that you'll actually get tired of how great it is. And my comment will win. It'll win and win and win. It'll win so much you'll get tired of it winning, that's how much it'll win and how great it will be. And no one else will have comments as great as my, I guarantee it, there is no problem with my comments, everyone knows that and they agree that my comments are great. I'll build a wall around my comments and I'll make Slashdot pay for it, you'll see. And it'll be a great comment, a beautiful comment, a comment like no other comment before it. And there will be a Reply button in my comment, a big, beautiful Reply button. And those who want to reply can do so after they've been vetted. Nobody builds Reply buttons like me. Trust me, my comment will be great and it will win.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.