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2016 American Presidential Campaign

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After the disappointing primaries, looks like the 2 most hated and destructive candidates are going to be running against each other. It is mind boggling, but baby boomers overwhelming support Clinton. She speaks to them but is destructive to nearly every other demographic. Maybe they don't realize who is going to be choosing their nursing homes in a few years.

The president has a lot of power when it comes to trade agreements and foreign policy. In those areas Trump is less destructive than Clinton. For example, during her co-presidency she supported nafta, h1b visa abuse, and now wants tpp. And for years she made China the most favored trading partner. These trade agreements of hers are what have directly been driving jobs overseas. She has had a direct role in destroying America's middle class since the 1990s. Trump actually opposes these things.

Same goes for war policy. She is a warlord with a track record more hawkish than the Bushes. Trump is more isolationist. She voted to invade Iraq, had a leading role in supporting isis in Syria, and messed up Libya. She will not be content to let the largest army in the world sit idly. With her in the Whitehouse, except more of her meddling and renewed war in those countries. Add to that a possible war with Iran, North Korea, and Somalia or something similar and pointless.

What is even worse about Clinton than Trump is that she will likely be in there 8 years. Trump would not be reelected and the Democrats would have a chance to propose a reasonable candidate in 4 years.
 
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Seriously, fuck this country. If it wants to openly deny its one chance at salvation, I say let it burn. (They should have let it bern instead of letting it burn).

I know its still technically possible for him to win, but after tonight the medias narrative will be that Hillary has it wrapped up. The voter turnout will diminish in the remaining states. Those still on the fence will reluctantly go with Clinton. Bernie will still win several states but the margins won't be big enough.

We're all gonna get what we have coming to us. We're all gonna get what we deserve.
 
socko said:
The president has a lot of power when it comes to trade agreements and foreign policy. In those areas Trump is less destructive than Clinton. For example, during her co-presidency she supported nafta, h1b visa abuse, and now wants tpp. And for years she made China the most favored trading partner. These trade agreements of hers are what have directly been driving jobs overseas. She has had a direct role in destroying America's middle class since the 1990s. Trump actually opposes these things.

Same goes for war policy. She is a warlord with a track record more hawkish than the Bushes. Trump is more isolationist. She voted to invade Iraq, had a leading role in supporting isis in Syria, and messed up Libya. She will not be content to let the largest army in the world sit idly. With her in the Whitehouse, except more of her meddling and renewed war in those countries. Add to that a possible war with Iran, North Korea, and Somalia or something similar and pointless.
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do we really have any reason to say those things about Trump?
He is the epitome of a loose cannon.
Has no regard for sincerity or honesty. No respect for convention - and seems to be completely hostile to the very notion of diplomacy.
His campaign strategy has consisted of using bluster and hyperbole to basically say what certain parts of the population wants to hear - which might be effective advertising (he's a professional self-promoter) but in reality, none of it has any substance whatsoever.

As much as I am not a Clinton fan, I don't think we have anywhere near enough information to make such assessments.
Trump's credentials as a statesman are absolutely zero - he is so parochial and openly racist that i can't imagine him being in any way effective in terms of international relations.
As you'd be well aware, socko, politicians around the world are nervous about the prospect of him being elected President.

As much as it may not figure in most Americans' list of priorities, a Trump win could have serious consequences for the USA.

Politics is about negotiation and compromise more often than not.
Clinton, for all her flaws, has proven to be capable of behaving in a manner befitting an elected representative or a world leader.
I'm not saying I like her - but in pragmatic terms, she's a better prospect than Trump.

He is not the kind of person that should be in charge of the largest miltary in the world. The words "world leader" and "Donald Trump" do not sit well together.

To me, Clinton's worst attributes seem to be her pandering to the poltical agendas of the corporate elite.
It seems naive to suspect that Trump would - when it comes to it - act in any other way.

He's looking for power, he's looking to win - but what plans or vision does he have if he actually concedes?
That's an unknown, and saying Hillary that would be worse would seem a very presumptuous claim.
I suspect Trump would be a very ineffective President, but that's not to say he is incapable of causing a lot of damage to the country and the Republican party generally.
 
SJ, you know enough about the candidates and I don't disagree with anything you said. Trump has no political ltrack record, but those I listed are things I have read about his campaign. They are probably all lies. But it's like you said before. Anger has been building up for decades. Some reasons are the class divide and the generational wealth and employment gap have been building since she was first in power as co-president. Clinton stirs up so much disgust in younger people because she has harmed nearly everyone who is not a baby boomer. She is the symbol of the Corporatist Democratic leadership. If elected, it will be 8 more years of the slow downward spiral. BAby boomers will re-elect her in 4 years.

It has always been a choice between a pre-selected corporatist Democrat and a pre-selected corporatist Republican. I've been disgusted long enough with the status quo that I left the country. I didn't think it could get worse until now. Sometimes it's better to call your losses, tear every thing down, and start over. IN this case, it is best to rebuild the political landscape. Both the parties need to reset their priorities. Only someone as destructive, impulsive, selfish, and hateful as Trump break things badly enough for this to happen. I hope America gets the president it deserves. Let it burn.

On the bright side, if elected, he will only be in power for 4 years. Afterwards, maybe we will have a real choice.
 
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effingcustie said:
Damn, rough night for Bernie. It's not over though - this is the widest margin Clinton will lead by, it's just a question of if Bernie can close the gap or not. It will be tough, but it's possible. The rest of the primaries will be more favorable to Sanders geographically, especially the next few weeks. I think this could end up working especially well for him as one of his appealing qualities is the underdog narrative, and I think he is likely to win most of the next several primaries after taking a big hit tonight. The momentum has been with Sanders this whole campaign, it's just a race against the clock. But he's made it through the toughest part and and has the wind at his feed now. He'll have a big advantage with fund-raising as well. To keep up Clinton will likely have to court corporate donors which she would probably then face scrutiny for.
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I don't know, it's depressing but I think he's done. If you go over to Reddit lots of people losing hope and that's where a lot of his major funding comes from. It's only a matter of time before he runs out of money and Hillary has already started accepting large Superpac money from corporate interests after Debbie suspended the rule. They limited the debates on purpose too where the republicans started months in advanced. I hope it comes back to bite them in the ass.

I'm going to vote for Jill Stein in the general, let the people that came out to vote against Bernie get it, obviously Hillary doesn't need my vote. I'll still vote for Bernie in the primary but I doubt it will come of anything.
 
socko said:
After the disappointing primaries, looks like the 2 most hated and destructive candidates are going to be running against each other. It is mind boggling, but baby boomers overwhelming support Clinton. She speaks to them but is destructive to nearly every other demographic. Maybe they don't realize who is going to be choosing their nursing homes in a few years.
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It's crazy how much of a generational divide there is in this election. In most primaries Bernie is getting over eighty percent of the under 30 vote. The electorate of this country and what they value is going to be so different 10 years from now.


It's not time to give up hope though. Hillary's lead is not insurmountable. The media will tell us it is over and over and over and over but it's only the truth if Bernie's supporters believe it. It's going to be a very close race.
 
GenericMind said:
Bernie did better than projected last night....

Basically every state from here on forward is favored for Bernie whereas almost every state prior to now was favored for Hillary.

Please read:

http://usuncut.com/politics/bernie-sanders-worst-states-behind/

and

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-alan-grayson/democratic-presidential-primary-2_b_9459766.html
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I see lots of different data bandied about. If he does come back it would be the biggest upset in decades. I can't see him winning states like Maryland and New York and California has huge swathes of minorities and conservative rich people who will never vote for him he needs more than to eke out wins he needs huge blowouts.

Like I said I'll still vote for him but as far as corporate msm media is concerned it's done and over. They'll keep telling him he needs to quit and stop hurting Hillary by using Trump. I'm not a conspiracy theorists but if I was I'd see the pictures of Trump with the Clintons and the huge amounts he donated to her and Bill and start to wonder...
 
Bernie already said he's not dropping out and will campaign until the June convention no matter what. If they think they're going to convince him to drop out for the sake of the Democratic party they're in for a rude awakening.
 
I haven't done the math but the remaining States are very Bernie friendly, and there's still a chance that he can catch up in delegate counts (especially if the superdelegates change their votes). This literally is going to be a huge fork in the road for america: will we progress, or regress?
 
mal3volent said:
Funny thats all it used to take to derail a campaign. Ah, the good ole days.
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yea, when Clinton started barking like a dog I instantly thought 'well that was a Howard Dean moment'

The 'Quayle potatoe' and 'Dukakis on the tank' are two others that come to mind.
 
I am so incredibly angry with how our country is going.

A half century ago, America's largest private sector employer was General Motors, whose full time workers (of which the majority were) earned an average hourly income (which also included health and pension benefits) around $50 per hour in today's money. This is without education, and without experience. Today America's largest employer is Wal-mart whose typical employee earns betwen $8-$9 dollars an hour without pension or health insurance. In a short fifty years we have gone from having a nearly ideal lifestyle to living paycheck to paycheck and having next to no say in how the country is run.

Our politicians, republican or democratic, have basically made it nearly impossible for the average american to live any sort of decent life, or expect to retire at a decent age due to the continued use of MSM to divert our attention from what really matters. It isn't immigrants that are causing this problem, it isn't global warming. It is stupidity plain and simple. The stupidity of the average voter (of which most don't even turn out to take part in elections).

If you view the policies of establishment politicians you can see that they owe their allegiance to their corporate donors. These donors are the ones that want to continue to drive down the american worker in order to benefit their already wealthy shareholders. The fact that so many people think there is a difference between republican and democratic nominees is astounding. Both parties are actively creating legislation that is ruining our lives. The real problem is that the american people are so blind to it and choose to focus on the most inane things.

It doesn't matter who we nominate. What needs to be done is a revolution, violent or otherwise in which people demand to be represented. We need to start standing up and saying I don't want the nominees you are forcing down our throats. We want someone that isn't some wealthy shill that has never had to struggle. We want a nominee that has lived paycheck to paycheck. We want a nominee that had to ride the bus because their job won't pay them a living wage. We want a nominee that has chosen to deal with sickness rather than be saddled with debt for the rest of their lives. Basically we want a real american as president. We need to throw out the career politicians in congress and force them to do their jobs. We need people that will actually view the citizens as people and not as commodities.

Create jobs? Bullshit. The jobs being created aren't worth working. It doesn't matter if you create a hundred part time minimum wage jobs, when in reality it should be thirty full time jobs that pay a decent wage.

If I want someone to piss on my leg and tell me its raining I'll vote for hillary. If I want somene to make america look like an even bigger joke than it already is I will vote for Trump. If I want a stupid person using mysticism to create policy I will vote for Cruz. If I want someone to take my money and just reiterate partisan rhetoric, and try to return to the era of Reagan I will vote for Rubio. The only person that I think will actually even take a stab at helping all the american people (not just the wealthy elite) is Sanders, but it truly doesn't matter who we elect because our judicial and legislative branch is so full of people that have no idea what truly matters to the average american.

If you want to help our country start killing lobbyists. They are the true culprits in why we have an idiot wearing a hat that says "make america great again". America was great, now its a joke. It is a joke and I would be laughing if not for crying.

Sorry about the rant. I live in florida and I hear extremely poor people complaining about "those democrats" constantly when truly it doesn't matter who is elected.
 
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GenericMind said:
A lot of people don't realize presidential candidates have people on the payroll whose only job is to teach them how to speak, what tone to use, what colors in their wardrobe project certain emotions, etc.
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Body language experts, PR teams, etc. Presidential politics is a stage show, lest we forget. What they say, how they walk, what jokes they make, it's all rehearsed. Every step of their gait is choreographed. When they're on the road, shaking hands and answering questions, ever notice how they simple ignore the guy asking the uncomfortable question and continue smiling like he's not even there? It's because it's not in the script. We can't be going off script, now. Candidates don't want to hear what's on your minds, they want to tell you what's on their minds.

GenericMind said:
Hillary Clinton sounds COMPLETELY different tonight than she did a couple days ago in the last town hall. Go Youtube it and then listen to this one and you'll laugh.
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Remember the fake southern accent in 2008? Classic.

Also worth a chuckle on Youtube.



nuttynutskin said:
Trump said he doesn’t condone violence but asserted that the punch might have been justified because the victim flipped off the crowd before the punch was thrown.
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Except that's kind of not how the law works. If you're going to run for the highest office in the country you should have at least an 11th grade civics understanding on how the law works. And I call bull shit that Trump is a sudden pacifist. America has a short attention span but it hasn't forgotten his demands to sick his mob on a protester and "kick his ass". Or the incident when it was well below freezing outside and his response to a pretty benign dissenter was "Confiscate her jacket and throw her into the cold!"

Enough was enough when he started gathering a brown shirt militia. Now he's providing them with legal council.

Making America great indeed. And to those voting for the prick, let's see how far into his presidency we get before you realize you've made a terrible mistake after we invade a very sensitive country that has global power implications. Personally, if I were to pick a tv game show host to run for president it would would Alex Trebek. But that's just me.

“He was dragging a flag along the ground and he was playing a certain type of music. And supposedly, there was chatter about ISIS,” Trump said. “Now, I don’t know. What do I know about it? All I know is what’s on the Internet.”
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Our intelligence tells us that we're looking for this guy, who has claimed responsibility for the latest attack:

Jokerlaugh.gif
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nuttynutskin said:
Really wish Rand Paul would've stood a chance. Still I may vote for Bernie for the sole reason of keeping Clitorally and Chump out.
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Bernie vs Rand would have been great, and I actually would've felt optimistic about the future.

Hilary vs Donald is about as bad as it gets, and will have me thinking that we're all fucked.
 
quiet roar said:
Bernie vs Rand would have been great, and I actually would've felt optimistic about the future.

Hilary vs Donald is about as bad as it gets, and will have me thinking that we're all fucked.
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Yeah, I agree. I think Rand's personality is his downfall. I know it shouldn't matter, but it does.

Rand v Sanders would've been great. I could work with either one. Trump v Hillary...lord help us all. getting nauseated thinking about it.
 
jammin83 said:
Yeah, I agree. I think Rand's personality is his downfall. I know it shouldn't matter, but it does.

Rand v Sanders would've been great. I could work with either one. Trump v Hillary...lord help us all. getting nauseated thinking about it.
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Its like asking which foot would you like to shoot yourself in?
 
I can't envisage Trump winning, but even if he does surely he'll just be another Reagan? His financial backers / business interests will be calling the shots behind the scenes and the more insane things he's proposing will be blocked by the senate, surely? I don't think even Donald Trump is stupid enough to really believe that he can do everything he says or even wants too; he's an experienced showman and salesman and that's what his campaign is about. I'm more concerned about a Clinton presidency not just because she's a despicable, pathological liar, but because we all know it will be Bill & Hillary, not just Hillary.
 
The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana
In 2010, the tea-party wave put Sam Brownback into the Sunflower State’s governor’s mansion and Republican majorities in both houses of its legislature. Together, they implemented the conservative movement’s blueprint for Utopia: They passed massive tax breaks for the wealthy and repealed all income taxes on more than 100,000 businesses. They tightened welfare requirements, privatized the delivery of Medicaid, cut $200 million from the education budget, eliminated four state agencies and 2,000 government employees. In 2012, Brownback helped replace the few remaining moderate Republicans in the legislature with conservative true believers. The following January, after signing the largest tax cut in Kansas history, Brownback told the Wall Street Journal, “My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, 'See, we've got a different way, and it works.' "

As you’ve probably guessed, that model collapsed. Like the budget plans of every Republican presidential candidate, Brownback’s “real live experiment” proceeded from the hypothesis that tax cuts for the wealthy are such a boon to economic growth, they actually end up paying for themselves (so long as you kick the undeserving poor out of their welfare hammocks). The Koch-backed Kansas Policy Institute predicted that Brownback’s 2013 tax plan would generate $323 million in new revenue. During its first full year in operation, the plan produced a $688 million loss. Meanwhile, Kansas’s job growth actually trailed that of its neighboring states. With that nearly $700 million deficit, the state had bought itself a 1.1 percent increase in jobs, just below Missouri’s 1.5 percent and Colorado’s 3.3.

Those numbers have hardly improved in the intervening years. In 2015, job growth in Kansas was a mere 0.1 percent, even as the nation’s economy grew 1.9 percent. Brownback pledged to bring 100,000* new jobs to the state in his second term; as of January, he has brought 700. What’s more, personal income growth slowed dramatically since the tax cuts went into effect. Between 2010 and 2012, Kansas saw income growth of 6.1 percent, good for 12th in the nation; from 2013 to 2015, that rate was 3.6 percent, good for 41st.

Meanwhile, revenue shortfalls have devastated the state’s public sector along with its most vulnerable citizens. Since Brownback’s inauguration, 1,414 Kansans with disabilities have been thrown off Medicaid. In 2015, six school districts in the state were forced to end their years early for lack of funding. Cuts to health and human services are expected to cause 65 preventable deaths this year in Sedgwick County alone. In February, tax receipts came in $53 million below estimates; Brownback immediately cut $17 million from the state’s university system. This data is not lost on the people of Kansas — as of November, Brownback’s approval rating was 26 percent, the lowest of any governor in the United States.

Louisiana has replicated these results. When Bobby Jindal moved into the governor’s mansion in 2008, he inherited a $1 billion surplus. When he moved out last year, Louisiana faced a $1.6 billion projected deficit. Part of that budgetary collapse can be put on the past year's plummeting oil prices. The rest should be placed on Jindal passing the largest tax cut in the state's history and then refusing to reverse course when the state's biggest industry started tanking. Jindal's giveaway to the wealthiest citizens in the country's second-poorest state cost Louisiana roughly $800 million every year. To make up that gap, Jindal slashed social services, raided the state’s rainy-day funds, and papered over the rest with reckless borrowing. Today, the state is scrambling to resolve a $940 million budget gap for this fiscal year, with a $2 billion shortfall projected for 2017. Like Bizarro Vermont, Louisiana can no longer afford to provide public defenders for all its criminal defendants. Its Department of Children and Family Services may soon be unable to investigate every reported instance of child abuse. Education funding is down 44 percent since Jindal took office. The state’s hospitals are likely to see at least $64 million in funding cuts this year.

What has happened to these states should be a national story
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(my emphasis)

trickle down? we can't afford to see this disaster replicated on a national scale...

alasdair
 
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