US Election: 2016

[Fishbone Jones]

She's been called a lot worse and she's never raised a stink, but this could well be her opponent so the politics are in play.

Just saying :dunno:

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

She's been called a lot worse and she's never raised a stink, but this could well be her opponent so the politics are in play.

Just saying :dunno:

If he's the opponent get used to president Clinton. Trump has no chance at the presidency.... particularly if the poll in the article is true and more than half those polled are EMBARRASSED by him

 

[Fishbone Jones]

If he's the opponent get used to president Clinton. Trump has no chance at the presidency.... particularly if the poll in the article is true and more than half those polled are EMBARRASSED by him

You should know by now that putting your faith in something like polls will often lead to surprise and disappointment. Never say never.

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

You should know by now that putting your faith in something like polls will often lead to surprise and disappointment. Never say never.

I agree and normally I don't put anything into polls this far out, but with Trump I will believe them. I think Trump being the Republican nominee results in a reagan-esque defeat in the autumn. Conservatives everywhere should be hoping/praying that he isn't the nominee. .. as a Canadian conservative I hope he isn't as I think the press he receives will put our CPC behind 4-8 years

 

[a_majoor]

Rex Murphy lays it out in straightforward terms. I suspect Trump will do very well indeed because of the disgust by the voters of the political class. If he actually wins, then the real fun will start, since "politics is a means of distributing scarce resources" (according to organizational theory), while "governing is the art of the possible". Trump will be on the horns of a very interesting dilemma:

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-dont-blame-trump-blame-america

Rex Murphy: Don’t blame Trump … blame America
Rex Murphy | July 24, 2015 | Last Updated: Jul 26 12:37 PM ET
More from Rex Murphy

The number one name in American politics today is Donald Trump. All that might derail him right now from his front-ranking position, and his takeover of American presidential politics, is a declaration that Krusty the Clown has a release agreement from The Simpsons and will throw his nose into the campaign.

His campaign is, by all wise people, deplored. Serious people weep in the public streets at the thought of it. Mature Americans are appalled by what it means for their country, and how the rest of the world must be looking on — awed and horrified — at how deep American politics has sunk. But all those who deplore it, and all those sobbing in public, might want to ask how the Trump inflammation came to be. Why he is getting the response he is. Post columnist Graeme Hamilton gave some answers a few days ago. I’d like to add a few more.

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I agree Trump is ridiculous — but he is an illustration of a problem and not its cause. Trump is not the swamp: he is the creature emerging from it. For however ridiculous and appalling his candidacy may be, it is no worse and no more ridiculous and appalling than the whole pattern of American politics at this time.

Is his candidacy more lunatic than the idea of a third President Bush or a second President Clinton? More despairing than the idea of an America so bereft of political talent that two families supply the major pool?

Is he more manipulative than President “you can keep you doctor, you can keep you plan” Obama? Is he less venal or arrogant than Hillary “it’s my server and it’s my State Department” Clinton?

Is his candidacy less perplexing than parts of the Democratic party’s fixations? Is it less lunatic that the spectacle of a former governor, Martin O’Malley — one of the few Democrats wandering the no-man’s land of opposition to the Hillary machine — apologizing, more than once, for asserting out loud that “all lives matter”? The Democrats have drilled so deep into the factionalism and demagoguery of identity politics — sexual and ethnic — that any appeal to universalism, any echo of the greatest phrase in the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — is now toxic? Donald Trump may be annoying, but he has said or done nothing that equals the fatuousness of a system in which the claim that all lives matter is seen as a troubling deviancy?

Is Trump less serious than trigger warnings? Is he less repellent than false and theatrical rape hoaxes that have beleaguered American campuses from Duke to Columbia? Less repellent than the supine American college administrations who bend with every breeze of the progressive mindset, and who supplant legal due process with their safe spaces and “victim”-buttressing hearings on campus misconduct?

Is Trump less theatrical than a congresswoman who takes Emma Sulkowitz, who strolled around her campus with a mattress on her head (or in place of it) for a whole year as an “art project” following her highly dubious and most likely false accusation of rape, to the State of the Union? Is anything, so far, that Trump has said more obviously silly than the often seriously reported claim that American universities, the very Bethlehem cradles of progressive thought and practice, are hotbeds of a “rape culture?”

On the issue that threw him into the frontrunner position in the Republican race the question may be raised: are his over-the-top, crude statements on immigration more unsettling, more out there, than the actual realities of the system he’s condemning?

Whatever Trump has said on immigration is not more dismaying than the fact that the U.S. has for decades paid no respect to its own borders. A nation that does not respect its own territorial integrity, and protect the idea and status of citizenship as its first value, cannot expect others to respect it. It is not Trump who is the outrage. Rather it is the political class of both U.S. parties, which have for decades temporized, dodged, euphemized and evaded the question of the country’s sovereignty and the impact of illegal immigration on it.

Is anything Trump has said more staggering or depressing than the idea that in egalitarian America, a couple of small-time business owners can get fined $135,000 for not baking a cake? Where deviation from any of the “progressive dogmas” lights Internet fires and Twitter outrage flash mobs? More absurd than banning American soldiers the right to bear arms on their own bases and their home soil? More absurd than Fort Hood’s slaughter of 13 by a self-professed jihadi being labelled “workplace violence”?

Donald Trump and his campaign have a lot of catching up to do before he can be seen as more ridiculous, more frustrating, more crazy than the reality of American politics as it was before he entered it, and which itself both fostered and enabled a candidate such as he to become the force he now is.

My own view on Trump is fairly plain — he is a boor and a hyper-egotist, a shallow and avaricious blowhard, whose candidacy can almost stand as a rebuke to the idea of a democracy. But it is not Trump who should bear the responsibility for his success. It is the practice of politics itself and the political class (which includes, more and more, the news media) that has for so long abandoned honest representation of ideas, facing difficult issues with real language, which has so professionalized campaigns and elections that the sound of a human voice saying something it actually means is so rare.

It is the toxic atmosphere of political correctness that suffocates so many voices that enables a Trump, when he rants with full stream-of-consciousness abandon, to be seen as a plain speaker, authentic and different.

How sad a world it is when what even those of us outside America see the campaign for what should be regarded as the sublime office of the presidency of the greatest democracy in the world brought down to a spectacle not much more dignified than the Housewives of  Beverly Hills, and of less class than the clammy gropings of The Bachelorette.

National Post

And of course, anyone who thinks that Canada is immune is smoking something exceptionally strong indeed....Our own political establishment is pretty far down the same road that is driving American voters into the arms of people like Trump, and when it happens here, I'm sure the same crowd will be "shocked, just shocked" to discover the same reaction by the voters.

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

Rex Murphy lays it out in straightforward terms. I suspect Trump will do very well indeed because of the disgust by the voters of the political class. If he actually wins, then the real fun will start, since "politics is a means of distributing scarce resources" (according to organizational theory), while "governing is the art of the possible". Trump will be on the horns of a very interesting dilemma:

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-dont-blame-trump-blame-america

And of course, anyone who thinks that Canada is immune is smoking something exceptionally strong indeed....Our own political establishment is pretty far down the same road that is driving American voters into the arms of people like Trump, and when it happens here, I'm sure the same crowd will be "shocked, just shocked" to discover the same reaction by the voters.

I understand the appeal, but will again disagree that Trump has any real chance of winning. He's a charicature: he says things solely for the reaction and has absolutely horrible ideas (unless you believe that he can actually make Mexico pay for a wall). Moreover, he's a clearly detestable person who goes out of his way to antagonize people. Like it or not, like ability is a requirement (read: harper).

Outside of that, conservatives ought to demand better than his ilk. Until "we" can find better candidates and stop defending garbage like Trump and trying to convince ourselves he's the best we can do than we will remain on the outside looking in. The problem then isn't the US (or Canada) it's conservatives. We're looking into Nietzches proverbial abyss and yelling irrationally into it.

 

[Kilo_302]

Chris Hedges is probably not everyone's flavour of the month, but it's hard to disagree with his take on where we are going unless things change fast. What's particularly interesting is this take on liberals selling out the "white underclass." He understands that liberals in our current iteration of capitalism serve Wall Street just like conservatives, and that we need a movement that is actually progressive, a movement that will address the structural issues embedded in our current system and once again grant the "white underclass" and the poor in general a greater say in how things are run.

His analysis of ISIS and the nature of the threat of "terrorism" is also refreshing, given the garbage we see in the mainstream media about Muslims merely hating "freedom."

http://www.alternet.org/culture/chris-hedges-creeping-villainy-american-politics

The threefold rise in hate crimes against Muslims since the Paris and San Bernardino attacks and the acceptance of hate speech as a legitimate form of political discourse signal the morbidity of our civil society. The body politic is coughing up blood. The daily amplification of this hate speech by a commercial media whose sole concern is ratings and advertising dollars rather than serving as a bulwark to protect society presages a descent into the protofascist nightmare of racism, indiscriminate violence against the marginalized, and a blind celebration of American chauvinism, militarism and bigotry.

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The mounting attacks on Muslims, which will become a contagion when there is another catastrophic terrorist attack, are only the beginning. There is a long list to be targeted, including undocumented workers, African-Americans, homosexuals, liberals, feminists, intellectuals and artists. We are entering a new dark age, an age of idiocy and blood. These hatreds, encoded in American DNA but understood as politically toxic by the liberal wing of the capitalist class, have been embraced by an enraged and disenfranchised white underclass. Our failure to curb this hate speech will haunt us. Once a civil society tolerates the intolerant, as Karl Popper wrote, “the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

The anti-Muslim virus begins slowly. Step by step the hate talk moves from insults, stereotyping and untruths to incendiary calls for vigilantes to attack women wearing the hijab, men wearing kufis, mosques, Islamic centers and schools, and Muslim-owned businesses. It makes sense to many in the white underclass—especially because they have been sold out by the liberals who preach tolerance—that the violent purging of a demonized group from U.S. society can cure the society’s malaise and restore safety and American “greatness.” But soon all marginalized groups will be at risk. Such a process is what happened in the Weimar Republic. It is what happened in Yugoslavia. It is what happened in Israel.

“What is dangerous about the creeping villainy is that it takes considerable imagination and considerable dialectical abilities to be able to detect it at the moment and see what it is,” the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his “Journals and Notebooks.” “Well, neither of these features [imagination and dialectical ability] are prominent in most people—and so the villainy creeps forward just a little bit each day, unnoticed.”

Glenn Beck’s best-selling book “It IsAbout Islam: Exposing the Truth About ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iran, and the Caliphate” posits that a quarter of American Muslims, 300,000 to 500,000 in his estimate, believe that violence should be used to overthrow the state and annul the Constitution in order to replace our judicial system with Sharia law. He says Islam keeps followers living in “the stone age.” His rant against Muslims parallels his rants against undocumented workers. He once, for example, said there are only three reasons Mexicans come to the United States: “One, they’re terrorists; two, they’re escaping the law; or three, they’re hungry. They can’t make a living in their own dirtbag country.” This extremism, expressed by Beck and many others, is moving with terrifying speed to the center of American political debate. And the mainstream press, which prizes sensationalism over news and truth, has abrogated its role as an arbiter of fact and rational discourse to peddle spectacle and sensationalism.

Kierkegaard was as scathing about the press as he was about the public. He noted:



The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control.

The ideological war began in earnest immediately after the attacks of 9/11. Hatemongers and racists, before then primarily relegated to the margins of society, laid the foundations for the collapse of civil discourse. 

“The Muslims sat aside for the last 15 years and allowed a complete reframing of this issue by highly funded groups such as the extreme Christian right or people like Glenn Beck,” said the Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf, whom I reached by phone in Berkeley, Calif. “Beck argues that the problem is Islam itself. But this is also true on programs such as the ‘700 Club.’ They attack Islam as a religion. They call it a demonic force. We have had 15 years of an incredible propaganda machine that has presented Muslims as a fifth column and Islam as an anti-Christian force, as the greatest threat to Western civilization. For too many people, Islam is now conflated with Nazism.”

Extremist groups, embodied by the Christian right and Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL), have distorted Christianity and Islam to sanctify their mutual hatreds and bloodlusts. These groups prey upon the legions of the disenfranchised, most of whom do not come out of religious households or religious communities, but who find in thin clichés and slogans a simplistic and self-aggrandizing worldview. New converts are catapulted from despair and hopelessness into a Manichean world of good and evil. They are told their rage and lust for violence are sanctified. They are authorized by demagogues and warlords to persecute and kill in the name of God. 

“Groups such as ISIS, especially in the West, draw from uneducated, disenfranchised, alienated and very often oppressed minority groups,” said Yusuf, who is the president and co-founder of Zaytuna College, in Berkeley. “When you see pictures of converts, you often see tattoos on their necks. Many have had run-ins with the law or have prison records. They have a lot of anger towards the society, much of it justified.”

The indiscriminate violence unleashed by the United States against Muslim communities in the Middle East has at the same time radicalized whole populations, which are bombed and otherwise terrorized daily.


“Obama talks about the hateful, vengeful ideology we are up against,” Yusuf said, “but he is not addressing the hate that hate produced. The current presentation of the conflict is irrational—as if Muslims hate us for our freedoms and our way of life. Undeniably, envy and resentment have their parts to play, but that is not the major factor. It is a small variable. The problem is the violence and brutalization that has occurred in the Muslim world. Pakistani children in areas under drone attacks hate sunny days because of the drones, which don’t function in cloudy weather. The only days they feel comfortable playing in northern Pakistan is on cloudy days because the drones can’t see them. This terror has consequences.”

Yusuf argues that the radical ideology of Islamic State, much like that of many in the Christian right, is far more a product of modernity than antiquity.

“ISIS promotes a hybridization of Salafi-Takfiri ideology with political Islamism, along with a smattering of Baathist brutality,” he said. “Old leaders in the Iraqi government joined the movement, similar to the way the old Marxist PLO transitioned into Hamas. In the 1980s and 1990s, with the Iranian revolution and the renaissance of Islam as a political response, people brought previous beliefs and experiences into these movements. They gave older modernist ideologies the veneer of Islam. ISIS adheres to more of a Marxist—the ends justify the means—ideology. It is anything but Islamic. In Islamic law there are strict rules of engagement. The Koran has several verses about treating prisoners well. ISIS is not a manifestation of anything Islamic. The essence of Islam is mercy and compassion.” [Definitions: Salafi. Takfiri. Baathist.]

The lust for brutality, Yusuf points out, is not limited to groups such as Islamic State. It is more than matched by numerous voices in the West. He cited the author Sam Harris’ call in his best-selling book “The End of Faith” for the West to consider carrying out a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world. Harris writes in his book:

Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.

“There are a lot of uneducated people out there, and this tripe appears nutritious to them,” Yusuf said. “I did not see anyone up in arms about Harris’ statement. Yet they are constantly going on about the brutality of Muslims. Meanwhile, we [Americans] talk daily about carpet-bombing the Middle East and killing ISIS family members.”

If there is another major terrorist event on American soil, Yusuf said, the response will not be like the one that followed 9/11. “It won’t be flowers at the mosque. The response will be retaliatory. There will be a desire for revenge. I am not surprised we are where we are. I am surprised it took us this long to get here given the forces at work.”

The backlash against the settling of thousands of Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees, he said, also plays into the hands of Islamic State. ISIS condemns the West as unfit for Muslims. It holds up its self-proclaimed Caliphate as a sanctuary and refuge for Sunni Muslims. If Western nations accept large numbers of refugees—many fleeing ISIS-controlled territory—they shatter this belief. By turning refugees away they legitimate the bifurcation of the world into Muslim and non-Muslim.

“If you read Dabiq, ISIS’ journal in English, it constantly says that what it calls the ‘gray zone’ will be eliminated,” Yusuf said. “ISIS tells American Muslims and Western European Muslims that their mosques will be attacked, Muslim women will be assaulted, they will not feel safe in their homes. ISIS says make the hegira now before it is too late. The elimination of the gray zone is central to their strategy. Our living together is the thing that disgusts them most. They seek to destroy multicultural, multifaith civilizations, although that is what the Muslim world was in the past. Hence, [the ISIS] destruction of Melkite and Assyrian churches, which have existed for centuries and which were protected by Muslims. This destruction is one of the greatest crimes in the history of Islam. These religious communities, considered heretical or heterodox, were not safe in Orthodox and Catholic Europe, but were safe to flourish in the pluralistic societies Muslims created. The worst nightmare for ISIS, like the demagogues in the West, is that we reject their call to create a wedge between religious communities.”

 

[a_majoor]

More on the war between the "establishment" Republicans and the voters. I agree that the idea that the Republicans should be Democrat-Lite is a non starter (remember how in Canada, the "me-too" PC party was in the political wilderness for decades, until the criminal behaviours and arrogance of the LPC finally reached a tipping point for most Canadians). Remember that Trump is the symptom, not the disease, and until the GOP establishment either cleans house or is replaced via TEA Party movement primary challenges, I suspect there will be little change in the short run. As Bernie Sanders shows, a similar dynamic is playing out in the Democrat party, although since it isn't part of the narrative the media is going to ignore it as long as possible:

https://ricochet.com/david-frum-and-the-great-republican-revolt/

David Frum and “The Great Republican Revolt”
Jon Gabriel, Ed.C
December 22, 2015

The GOP plotted to restore the Bush dynasty, but instead triggered a class war. That’s the thesis of David Frum’s latest piece for The Atlantic, “The Great Republican Revolt,” which is really worth reading:

The angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how white male became an accusation rather than a description.

You can measure their pessimism in polls that ask about their expectations for their lives—and for those of their children. On both counts, whites without a college degree express the bleakest view. You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age.

White Middle Americans express heavy mistrust of every institution in American society: not only government, but corporations, unions, even the political party they typically vote for—the Republican Party of Romney, Ryan, and McConnell, which they despise as a sad crew of weaklings and sellouts. They are pissed off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, “That’s my guy.”

They aren’t necessarily superconservative. They often don’t think in ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this country used to be better for people like them—and they want that older country back.

I don’t read a lot of Frum since I disagree with him so strongly on gun control and other left-leaning views, but he correctly identifies the divide between the donor class and the party rank-and-file. After discussing the long history of GOP compromises and sell-outs, he offers several alternatives to help the party heal the rift:

Double down on comprehensive immigration reform to hopefully win over Latino and Asian American voters.
Make a tactical concession on immigration enforcement to win back the party base.
Reform the entire GOP agenda. I’ll let Frum explain:

Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuition. Remember that Republican voters care more about aligning government with their values of work and family than they care about cutting the size of government as an end in itself.

My advice is for the GOP to combine options 2 and 3, but my “reform” is very different from the swing to the left noted above. Frum has long advocated accepting Obamacare and other progressive programs, much like Eisenhower made peace with the New Deal. If you want to turn the Republican internal cold war into a full-blown civil war, option 3 is excellent advice.

Instead, the party elite should do something far more radical: Admit that it completely failed on comprehensive immigration reform, repeatedly lied about it to the base, and apologize with contrite words and concrete action. This is not the grudging “tactical concession” offered by Frum, but a full repudiation of amnesty and anything that smacks of open borders.

I don’t think illegal immigration is the biggest issue facing the country and I live in Arizona of all places. But it has become a proxy for the chasm that divides the elite from everyone else. Until the GOP proves its honorable intentions on immigration, forget trying to persuade the base on anything else. Even with this about-face, it will take a few election cycles before Republican voters trust their party on the issue. Nevertheless, confession must precede forgiveness.

Then begins the reform of the party agenda. Contra Frum, it cannot be a list of Democratic-lite policies; DC Republicans’ slouch toward progressivism is the reason the base is so furious.

The party can “open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class” by ending the self-serving racket that is the DC/Wall Street/Chamber of Commerce power structure. End idiocies like the Ex-Im Bank which exist only to serve big business. Instead of worrying about the tax rates of the highest earners, eliminate loopholes and lobbyist-written rules that advantage the monied class. Cut through red tape that interferes with charities, non-profits, religious organizations, and small businesses. Stop trying to slow the growth of the government and shrink it outright.

A large part of the GOP base doesn’t want government to do a better job of taking care of them; They want to take care of themselves. If Washington stops meddling in the inconsequential, it can focus on those few things that only the federal government can do, such as protecting the country.

My recommendations are far less “congenial” than Frum’s, because the elites would have to place their fellow Americans’ welfare above their own vanity, power, and quarterly dividend statements. I’m not advocating a temporary pose to trick the yahoos, but a change in heart, mind, and direction. The party bosses must admit that much of the work they do in Washington is either useless or counter-productive.

Even worse, they need to admit that, at least on a few issues, the “yahoos” were right.

 

[cupper]

I can see Trump being the GOP nominee. For the same reason that most have stated, the backlash from the GOP electorate at the GOP establishment and their perceived lack of concern for their views.

This is an internal revolt that the GOP needs to go through in order to get it's house in order. And if Trump becomes the nominee, (although it will be a very contentious fight right up to the convention if he does win it) it may just be the wake-up call the party needs to actually do something to get back to being a viable right of center party.

Unfortunately if Trump does take the GOP nomination, the Dem alternative is just as poor a candidate, for different reasons. And I cam see the Dems going through the same hard times through the next 4 year cycle, although it will likely be less in the mainstream public view than we've seen over the last 4 years. 

 

[a_majoor]

Makes you wonder just what sort of contortions the GOP establishment will have to undertake if Donald Trump really wins the nomination?

http://nypost.com/2015/12/26/elites-and-media-really-hate-donald-trumps-voters/

Elites and media really hate Donald Trump’s voters
By Michael Walsh December 26, 2015 | 2:55pm

To hear the patronizing wise men of the Republican Party tell it, anyone who would vote for Donald Trump for president must be deranged. “Trumpkins,” they call them, mental midgets and xenophobic troglodytes who’ve crawled out from their survivalist caves in order to destroy the Beltway Establishment.

How their resentful attitude galls the crack cadres of campaign consultants who brought conservatives halfhearted standard-bearers like John McCain and Mitt Romney to do sham battle against Barack Obama in 2008 and ’12, then return to the safety of the US Senate and a beachfront mansion in La Jolla.

The peasants are revolting!

“[Trump] would be an “embarrassment” to half the country. That the “short-fingered vulgarian” — as the old Spy magazine famously dubbed him — is neither a real Republican nor a real conservative”

And all on behalf of a bloviating billionaire whose conservatism and party loyalty are suspect.

Now, after months of whistling past the graveyard of Trump’s seemingly inexorable rise and assuring themselves that his candidacy will collapse as voters come to their senses, a CNN poll released Wednesday showing Trump now lapping the field has the GOP establishment in full meltdown mode. The survey shows Trump with nearly 40% of the primary vote, trailed by Ted Cruz at 18%, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio tied at 10%, and the also-rans (including great GOP hope Jeb Bush) limping along far behind.

Their panic was best articulated last week in The Daily Beast by GOP consultant Rick Wilson, who wrote that Trump supporters “put the entire conservative movement at risk of being hijacked and destroyed by a bellowing billionaire with poor impulse control and a profoundly superficial understanding of the world . . . walking, talking comments sections of the fever swamp sites.”

Some might take that as a backhanded compliment. Can the GOP really be so out of touch with the legions of out-of-work Americans — many of whom don’t show up in the “official” unemployment rate because they’ve given up looking for work in the Obama economy? With the returning military vets frustrated with lawyer-driven, politically correct rules of engagement that have tied their hands in a fight against a mortal enemy? With those who, in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino massacres by Muslims, reasonably fear an influx of culturally alien “refugees” and “migrants” from the Middle East?

With those who fear for their own families’ futures and the future of the country as founded?

In other words, has the junior wing of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, ably embodied by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, forsaken even token opposition to the “progressive” ethos? Can it be true that everybody’s fondest wish for Campaign ’16 is the dynastic-restoration battle of Clinton vs. Bush?

Jeb Bush seems to think so, suggesting recently that he might rethink the pledge he signed vowing to support the eventual Republican nominee. To which The Donald characteristically responded: Who cares? “He is a low-energy person, and he does not represent strength, power and stamina, which are qualities our country desperately needs.”

Others have suggested, half in jest, that should Trump win the nomination, the GOP might have to go third party — against its own nominee.

Even lame-duck Obama has waded in, cheekily blaming “economic stresses” and flatlining wages for Trump’s groundswell. “Particularly, blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck . . . Somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that.”

Remember when Obama apologized for saying that voters who disagreed with him “cling to guns or religion”? Yeah, guess he wasn’t really sorry.

Objections to Trump include that he has no clue that politics is, as the saying goes, the art of the possible. That his reality-show candidacy — as a recent Quinnipiac poll purportedly found — would be an “embarrassment” to half the country. That the “short-fingered vulgarian” — as the old Spy magazine famously dubbed him — is neither a real Republican nor a real conservative.

To which his supporters, to whom he is an anger-directed guided missile heading straight for Washington, retort: So what? The irrepressible Trump is already ignoring his rivals and gleefully taking the fight to the presumptive (if she doesn’t get indicted) Democrat nominee, noted prevaricator Hillary Clinton.

In the movie business, there’s something called the “cheer moment,” when the long-suffering hero finally decks his tormentor with a satisfying right cross. What the Beltway Republicans fail to understand is that their conservative base — which gave them stunning congressional victories in 2010 and 2014 and has nothing to show for it — has been longing for precisely that moment since Reagan crushed Mondale 49-1 in 1984.

The Trumpkins are sick of winning and having nothing to show for it, and their vengeance will be terrible. Maybe the Establishment should stop belittling them and listen instead.

And Instapundit comments:

See also: past hatred of establishment GOP and DNC-MSM for libertarians, Tea Party voters, Perot voters, and any group whose goal is the most radical of all: for government to leave you the hell alone. I’m not at all sure that’s Trump’s goal for government, but then, as Glenn has noted, “Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest. As Angelo Codevilla wrote in an influential essay in 2010, today’s ruling class is a monoculture that has little in common with the rest of the nation.”

 

[cupper]

Trump may have poll numbers now, but will he have the voters when it really counts?

Trump’s fans are excited to rally — but they’re not sure they’ll show up to vote

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-fans-are-excited-to-rally--but-theyre-not-sure-theyll-show-up-to-vote/2015/12/26/3c29bbb6-a5c3-11e5-ad3f-991ce3374e23_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_vatrump-725pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

DES MOINES — When Donald Trump held one of his boisterous rallies at the state fairgrounds this month, Bonnie and Randy Reynolds arrived two hours early to make sure they could snag seats. They bought “Make America Great Again” hats, put on campaign T-shirts and passed through a security checkpoint.

The West Des Moines couple, who have two grown children, had never been to a political event before. Bonnie works in a mailroom; Randy is a press operator. They don’t live paycheck to paycheck, but it would take just one small catastrophe to push them there.

“In the end, everything that he’s saying might not happen if he is elected — but I’m willing to give it a shot,” said Randy Reynolds, 49, who used to vote for Democrats but switched to Republicans a decade ago. “I will give him 100 percent. . . . It would be amazing if the majority of things that he said would actually happen. That would be amazing.”

So, obviously, the couple plan to caucus for Trump on Feb. 1?

“We’re going to see,” Reynolds said. “With kids and grandkids and all this, it’s kind of hectic. . . . We’ll look into it. If our time is available, then yeah, maybe we’ll do it. Maybe. We’ll have to see.”

Trump’s unexpected and sustained popularity has, at least in part, been fueled by his appeal to a voting bloc that seems to be emerging: blue-collar workers without college degrees who are slightly younger than the traditional Republican voter. Many say they haven’t cared about politics until now, as they flock to Trump rallies like groupies to a rock concert, read his books, buy his products, quote his jokes and follow his social-media accounts.

But is their devotion to Trump deep enough to vote?

For those who don’t regularly vote in primaries, doing so for the first time is a hurdle — especially in Iowa, which uses a caucus system that can intimidate first-timers.

In states with early primary contests, Trump’s staffers are trying to teach their supporters how to vote and get a commitment that they actually will. Before each rally here, Trump’s state co-chairs walk the crowd through how the caucuses work and urge them to attend. But they are also hoping word will spread through social media and in conversations after church, at the school bus stop, during coffee breaks and over holiday dinners.

Bonnie Reynolds, 47, said she didn’t know much about caucusing until her co-worker explained it to her and encouraged her to get involved. When the couple showed up at Trump’s rally on Dec. 11, a campaign volunteer asked them to sign a sheet committing to caucusing. Reynolds signed them up, although she’s not sure whether she will follow through.

In the past few weeks, Trump himself has started talking about the importance of voting in early states. At a rally in western Iowa in early December, Trump said there’s no excuse not to vote.

“You’ve got to get there,” he said. “Even if you’re not feeling good, if you’re feeling horrible, if you had a horrible fight with your wife or your husband. . . . If you caught your husband cheating the night before, you’ve got to go to the caucus.”

Trump’s campaign strategy is far from traditional, although his ground game in early voting states has followed a relatively standard playbook in some respects. Over the summer, he hired 10 staffers in Iowa, who traveled around the state in a Trump-branded bus to hand out T-shirts, bumper stickers and hats in exchange for contact information.

But just as Trump doesn’t spend money on pollsters or focus groups, the campaign has yet to purchase databases of potential voters, a key organizing tool used by most campaigns. Instead of buying such a tool from a private contractor, the campaign has compiled its own database using contact information from every rally attendee, either when they registered online or showed up at the door.

With just five weeks until the Iowa caucuses, other Republican candidates have started to flood the state with more staffers and volunteers. Trump’s campaign now has an Iowa staff of 15, who organize at least one large rally per week in addition to continuing to recruit “caucus leaders” who can be the voice of the campaign at caucus locations.

Trump’s Iowa team remains confident that his rally crowds will serendipitously translate into caucus support. Sam Clovis, Trump’s Iowa co-chair, pointed to a rally Trump held in Clay County in northwest Iowa in early December. Only 16,500 people live in the county, but 1,500 showed up at the rally in Spencer, and Clovis said he asked the crowd how many had never caucused before.

“Twenty percent of the hands went up,” Clovis said. “And I said: How many of you are going to caucus this time? Same 20 percent of hands went up, because he has done something. This is something that’s not reflected in the polls. It’s not reflected in any of the ways that you go out and count things.”

There are few gauges right now to measure which candidate might do better in Iowa among the most likely voters. Nationally, a Washington Post-ABC News poll released this month found that 38 percent of registered Republicans support Trump. Among those who said they are certain to vote, 41 percent said they would pick Trump.

Unlike a general election or traditional primary, only a small fraction of Iowans attend the caucuses. In 2012 and 2008, roughly 20 percent of registered Republicans caucused. In low-turnout elections like this, voters tend to be older people who vote regularly and are more likely to have a college degree — not necessarily the group Trump seems to have fired up.

It takes a higher level of commitment to caucus. In traditional primaries, voters have most of the day to show up at the polls. To caucus, Iowans have to be in line at their local precinct by 7 p.m. and will spend most of their evening there, listening to speeches and casting their vote.

Feb. 1 is a Monday night, likely to be cold, perhaps snowy or icy. The caucuses have to compete with the logistics of everyday life: evening work shifts, children who have after-school activities or need help with their homework, making dinner and preparing for the week ahead. And campaigns only have one shot at getting supporters through the door — there’s no early voting and a limited time to monitor who has yet to show up.

“This is a struggle for all of the candidates, because a caucus is different from voting. . . . A caucus is very inconvenient,” said Craig Robinson, a former Iowa GOP official who now runs the blog TheIowaRepublican.com. “It takes a commitment of time.”

But Robinson noted that it also takes a commitment of time to attend a Trump rally, and thousands of Iowans have already done that, while other campaigns struggle to attract a couple hundred. He attended a Trump rally in eastern Iowa this fall and was surprised to see so many fans show up already wearing campaign T-shirts, suggesting a level of planning that could translate into the willingness to caucus.

“There is a committed base of support that no doubt will caucus for him,” Robinson said.

At Trump’s rally in Des Moines on Dec. 11, a couple in their early 30s said they have no plans to caucus, even though they hope Trump will be president and wanted their two young sons to see the candidate speak. A 25-year-old graduate student said he would probably caucus for Trump, but he just moved to the state and has no idea how to do so. A group of high school students said they won’t be old enough to vote. A retiree who said he’s “not a political sort of guy” is still surveying his options.

Linda Stuver, 61, said Trump is her top pick, although she also likes Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. During the last election cycle, she went to a rally for Mitt Romney, her first political event. The Trump rally was her second.

“This is only my second time I’ve ever been to one of these — that’s how annoyed I am with what’s happening to our country,” said Stuver, who lives in Des Moines and says she raised four children by cleaning houses and working other low-level jobs. “I can’t even have Obama be on TV anymore — I have to shut it off, that’s how irritated I am. Us old folks have seen a lot, and what’s happening in our country is not right.”

Is she annoyed and irritated enough to caucus?

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I never have.”

As Stuver waited for the rally to start, Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” blared and a Trump staffer with a clipboard stopped by the small section of bleachers where she was sitting.

“Is there anybody up here that’s 100 percent sure that you’re caucusing on February 1 for Trump?” the staffer asked, then waited, holding the clipboard over his head. “Anybody? No?”

With no takers, the staffer moved on to the next section of cheering fans eagerly awaiting Trump’s arrival.

 

[PuckChaser]

They said that about Obama voters too, and they showed up, twice.

 

[a_majoor]

Another potential spoiler arises:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429025/jim-webb-independent-run-could-harm-democrats-gop

Jim Webb Attacks Hillary for Her Foreign-Policy Failures: First Step of His Third-Party Run?
by JOHN FUND December 27, 2015 7:08 PM @JOHNFUND

When Jim Webb, the former Virginia senator and Navy secretary, left the Democratic primary race in October, he hinted that he might mount an independent run for president. That looks more likely now that Webb has blasted his party’s front-runner for her “inept leadership” as secretary of state.

“Hillary Clinton should be called to account for her inept leadership that brought about the chaos in Libya, and the power vacuums that resulted in the rest of the region,” Webb wrote in a Facebook post Saturday. “While she held that office, the U.S. spent about $2 billion backing the Libyan uprising against Qaddafi. The uprising, which was part of the Arab Spring, led directly to Qaddafi being removed. . . . Now some 2,000 ISIS terrorists have established a foothold in Libya. Who is taking her to task for this?”

Political observers can be excused for shaking their heads at a Webb race as an independent. A mercurial candidate and poor fundraiser, he never garnered more than 1 percent support among Democrats before dropping out. But Webb knows that people underestimated the impact of Green-party candidate Ralph Nader on the 2000 race. Nader raised only $8 million and was ignored by major-network TV-news coverage. But he managed to win 2.7 percent of the national vote, clearing 5 percent in ten states. Democrats still blame his presence on Florida’s ballot for costing Al Gore Florida’s electoral votes and handing the presidency to George W. Bush.

It’s unclear whether Webb would hurt one major-party candidate more than the other. Conservatives laud his service as a decorated Vietnam War veteran and secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. But while he was in the Senate, Webb was a reliable vote for Democratic initiatives, including Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation bill. An economic populist, he says that both parties are too close to Wall Street and are responsible for the drop in the median income of middle-class families – it’s fallen four percentage points since 2000.

Webb, who has written several history books, compared the U.S. to the declining Roman Empire in his 2008 book A Time to Fight:

The whole body of government, Emperor and Senate alike, turns its eyes away from the forces that are bankrolling its tenure while selling off the Empire for personal profit. The citizens, alternating between disgust, apathy, and fear, know that their way of life is unraveling before their eyes and see that their leaders are either powerless or disinclined to act.

Webb’s candidacy might appeal to two constituencies that provided key support for past independent races. His military background and his disgust for the Obama foreign policy that Hillary Clinton is obliged to defend could attract pro-military voters in both parties, like those who backed Ross Perot in the 1990s. His reputation as an incorruptible straight shooter might attract the kind of voters who fueled John Anderson’s 1980 independent run for president (which won 7 percent of the vote). Alienated voters see Hillary Clinton as an unethical shape-shifter, and many of the Republican candidates as feckless or extreme — these people would be another potential source of votes. In October, political analyst Michael Barone noted that in his 2006 Senate race in Virginia, “Webb ran strongest in high-education Northern Virginia and ran behind in most of rural Virginia.” In other words, he might appeal most to voters who are disgusted with the system but who disdain the slippery nature of Hillary Clinton or the bombast of Donald Trump.

But could Webb get on the ballot in enough states to make a difference? Craig Crawford, a former columnist who is a key Webb adviser, says that the logistics of promoting an independent candidate are much easier than when Nader ran in 2000. Social media and voter-targeting software give alternative candidates better access to target audiences.

Ballot access for an independent isn’t nearly as hard as it used to be, thanks to favorable court rulings in many states. Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News, estimates that a total of 590,000 signatures would guarantee an independent a spot on every state ballot. “Paying top dollar to signature collectors and submitting twice the required amount of signatures as a cushion would cost only about $3 million nationwide,” he tells me. North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas have the toughest signature requirements and Webb might be forced to skip them. Georgia’s signature threshold is also high but may well be overturned as part of a pending federal court case challenging signature requirements.

We don’t yet know whether Webb will run as an independent. He played a game of cat and mouse with reporters before his presidential race, choosing to announce in early July of this year and then dropping out in October. Most states don’t require signatures for ballot access to be turned in until August, so Webb could delay any final decision for months.

But friends of his are more and more convinced that he is ready for one last mission (he turns 70 in February). “He is personally offended at Hillary Clinton’s e-mail-server scandal and poor choices as secretary of state,” a close friend of Webb’s tells me. “As for the Republicans, Donald Trump’s foreign-policy zigzags and the inexperience of the others appall him.” Jim Webb isn’t going to be president, but if the 2016 general election is as close as the current polls suggest, he could easily be a spoiler. In any event, his experience and gravitas would add to the political debate — that is, if the entertainment-obsessed media would deign to cover him.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429025/jim-webb-independent-run-could-harm-democrats-gop

 

[cupper]

And the Party might go Tony Saprano on New Hampshire if they give Trump a win.

In New Hampshire, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie Add Guilt Trips to Campaign Stops

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/us/politics/jeb-bush-chris-christie-new-hampshire-campaign.html?_r=1

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. — The two leading Republican candidates not named Donald J. Trump who most need a victory in the New Hampshire primary have wooed voters here by promoting their experience, their tough-mindedness and their seriousness.

Now, as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Jeb Bush grasp for some way to dissuade the proud New Hampshire electorate from supporting Mr. Trump, they are turning to a new, blunter instrument: guilt.

“America is counting on you,” Mr. Christie said Sunday night in the century-old town hall here, his 40th question-and-answer session in the state. He repeated himself a few sentences later, in case the voters had missed the barely veiled warning.

“There’s 14 of us today,” Mr. Christie said of the Republican field. “You all will take us from 14 to four or five. And those four or five are the only ones Americans are going to have to choose from other than Hillary Rodham Clinton. You have enormous responsibility.”

On Monday night, speaking at the Christmas-bedecked American Legion hall in Alton, Mr. Bush picked up where Mr. Christie left off.

Jeb Bush, in Contoocook, N.H., on Saturday. "New Hampshire has a special place in our democracy,” he has told voters, while suggesting that if they were to select Donald J. Trump, that reputation would be tarnished. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times
“New Hampshire has a special place in our democracy,” Mr. Bush said at his 27th town-hall-style meeting, alluding to its tradition of holding the first primaries, shortly after Iowa’s caucuses. “I, for one, will entrust the voters of New Hampshire to make this decision disproportionately more than any other place. I’m totally confident that you all will maintain your position as first in the nation, that you will be discerning about this.”

Drenching New Hampshire voters with praise has long been a staple of campaigns for the White House, with candidates holding up the image of civic-minded voters as paragons of democracy in hopes that some of it will pay off on Election Day.

But in an unusual campaign in which the leading candidate lacks either of the qualities New Hampshire voters are said to demand — a command of policy details and commitment to one-on-one campaigning — his rivals are repurposing their paeans to play on the vanity and insecurities of the New Hampshire political-industrial complex.

The don’t-screw-this-up pleadings to honor what many here see as their civic birthright reflect how anxious Mr. Bush and Mr. Christie are to find some way to bring down Mr. Trump, who leads his nearest competitor in New Hampshire by double digits in polls.

There is a dash of Tony Soprano — nice little primary franchise you got there, be a shame if something happened to it — and a heap of Jewish mother. Or, perhaps, Italian mother.

“Are you trying to imply that an Italian from New Jersey would use guilt?” Mr. Christie said with faux incredulity in an interview on Monday aboard his bus in Nashua. “I think what I’m saying to them is, it would be a shame for the country if New Hampshire makes the wrong choices. Guilt was a frequently used weapon of my mother. So some of it just comes out naturally.”

But Mr. Christie did not deny that he was in effect telling New Hampshire voters not to send their reputation for discriminating tastes in candidates down the drain.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” he said, again invoking how much the “country is counting on them” and noting their “huge responsibility.”

Mr. Bush can be just as blunt. Asked Saturday in Exeter how he planned to beat Mr. Trump, he aimed straight at Granite State privilege.

“You’re the answer,” said Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, to the attendees. “The question is will New Hampshire want to support a guy who might tarnish this extraordinary reputation that you have, which is first-in-nation status, where you make people walk through the hot coals each and every time they come, where you challenge people, where you help them learn how to get better at doing this.

“New Hampshire is an extraordinary part of this process and I don’t think Donald Trump’s going to survive New Hampshire to be honest with you, because I have too much confidence in you all.”

There are differences in the subtle shaming Mr. Bush and Mr. Christie employ. Mr. Bush is far more explicit about targeting Mr. Trump, while Mr. Christie, who would like to win some Trump voters, tends not to mention him directly. (“I’m not as judgmental about it as Jeb is,” Mr. Christie said.)

Some of the state’s political pillars speak just as assuredly of Mr. Trump’s inevitable fall. This is partly a verse in the same hymnal from which Mr. Bush and Mr. Christie are reading.

“They’re not going to throw away their vote,” predicted former Senator Judd Gregg, whose father was governor of New Hampshire and literally wrote the book on the state’s primary.

Dismissing the polls showing Mr. Trump leading, Mr. Gregg, a Bush supporter, even said, “I’m willing to bet on Trump not winning here.”

With renewed chatter from national party figures about whether Iowa and New Hampshire should be allowed to retain their first-to-vote privileges, the prospect of Mr. Trump’s winning here, and doing so without doing the sort of policy-heavy, on-the-ground campaigning the state prides itself on, is unnerving for leaders in both parties.

“There will be people who say, ‘See, that’s why New Hampshire shouldn’t have the first primary,’” said Terry Shumaker, a longtime Democratic leader in the state, of how critics would seize on a Trump win. “It will be used.”

In Peterborough, though, Mr. Christie said it did not have to come to that. He recalled a New Hampshire voter he had encountered who complained of being powerless over a turbulent election.

“I looked at him, I said, ‘Stop it, powerless,’ ” Mr. Christie recounted, all but spitting out any suggestion of impotence. “You’re a voter in New Hampshire. You’re among the most powerful people in the world right now.”

 

[a_majoor]

Who are the Trump supporters?

http://althouse.blogspot.ca/2015/12/perhaps-above-all-else-data-shows-that.html

"Perhaps above all else, the data shows that Mr. Trump has broad support in the G.O.P., spanning all major demographic groups."

Nate Cohn reports in a piece — somewhat misleadingly titled "Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat" — based on interviews with 11,000  Republican-leaning respondents (done by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm).
[Trump] leads among Republican women and among people in well-educated and affluent areas. He even holds a nominal lead among Republican respondents that Civis estimated are Hispanic, based on their names and where they live.

But Mr. Trump’s lead is not equal among all G.O.P. groups, or across all parts of the country. His support follows a clear geographic pattern. He fares best in a broad swath of the country stretching from the Gulf Coast, up the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, to upstate New York....

His geographic pattern of support is not just about demographics — educational attainment, for example. It is not necessarily the typical pattern for a populist, either. In fact, it’s almost the exact opposite of Ross Perot’s support in 1992, which was strongest in the West and New England, and weakest in the South and industrial North....

Much of this article strains to find racial material, dragging in evidence of the Google searches in various areas. Maybe you can tell where the racists are by where people search for racial epithets, and then maybe Trump supporters in the same area are the same people who did the searches. Cohn concedes that this evidence is weak, but it's not so weak that he doesn't bother with it.

What stands out to me after reading the whole article, however, is that Trump obviously has a lot of support among a wide range of people, including many that you wouldn't expect if you've been relying on mainstream media for information: women, well-educated people, Hispanics. There needs to be much more serious analysis of what is going on. American politics is outrunning the pundit class, which has lost a lot of ground tripped up on the delusion that this can't be serious.

 

[CougarKing]

A Vietnamese man suspected of supporting Al-Qaeda?

Associated Press

Lawyer in terrorism case says finding unbiased jurors will be hard because of Trump's comments

Michael Balsamo, The Associated Press
The Canadian Press
December 30, 2015

NEW YORK, N.Y. - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's call for a ban on Muslim immigration into the United States will make it difficult to find unbiased jurors for the trial of a man accused of supporting al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the man's lawyer is arguing in court papers.

Minh Quang Pham is expected to go on trial in federal court in Manhattan in February. The Vietnamese man has pleaded not guilty to supporting al-Qaida.

But Pham's attorney is asking a judge to allow additional questioning of potential jurors, arguing that recent terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Paris and Trump's statements calling for a ban on Muslim immigration into the U.S. will make it difficult to find unbiased prospects

(...SNIPPED)

 

[Kilo_302]

Paul Krugman's latest on the what could have been had Romney won the last election, and what the potential implications of this election are:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/opinion/elections-have-consequences.html

..I’m a big geek... I was eagerly awaiting the I.R.S.’s tax tables for 2013... And what these tables show is that elections really do have consequences.
You might think that this is obvious. But on the left, in particular, there are some people who, disappointed by the limits of what President Obama has accomplished, minimize the differences between the parties. Whoever the next president is, they assert — or at least ... if it’s not Bernie Sanders — things will remain pretty much the same, with the wealthy continuing to dominate the scene. ...
But the truth is that Mr. Obama’s election ... had some real, quantifiable consequences. ...
If Mitt Romney had won, we can be sure that Republicans would have found a way to prevent these tax hikes. ...
Mr. Obama has effectively rolled back not just the Bush tax cuts but Ronald Reagan’s as well..., about $70 billion a year in revenue. This happens to be in the same ballpark as both food stamps and ... this year’s net outlays on Obamacare. So we’re not talking about something trivial.
Speaking of Obamacare, that’s another thing Republicans would surely have killed if 2012 had gone the other way. ... And the effect on health care has been huge...
Now, to be fair, some widely predicted consequences of Mr. Obama’s re-election — predicted by his opponents — didn’t happen. Gasoline prices didn’t soar. Stocks didn’t plunge. The economy didn’t collapse..., and the unemployment rate is a full point lower than the rate Mr. Romney promised to achieve by the end of 2016.
In other words, the 2012 election didn’t just allow progressives to achieve some important goals. It also gave them an opportunity to show that achieving these goals is feasible. No, asking the rich to pay somewhat more in taxes while helping the less fortunate won’t destroy the economy.
So now we’re heading for another presidential election. And once again the stakes are high. Whoever the Republicans nominate will be committed to destroying Obamacare and slashing taxes on the wealthy — in fact, the current G.O.P. tax-cut plans make the Bush cuts look puny. Whoever the Democrats nominate will, first and foremost, be committed to defending the achievements of the past seven years.
The bottom line is that presidential elections matter, a lot, even if the people on the ballot aren’t as fiery as you might like. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

 

[CougarKing]

Trump and Jeb Bush air new political ads/ commercials.

Here's Trump's ad:

http://youtu.be/AEAJrT8PeOo

 

[Kilo_302]

An interview with Noam Chomsky about the current state of politics in the US. I understand he's not everyone's cup of tea, but what he says about the political spectrum is particularly interesting, and I think, spot on:

"The spectrum is broad but in an odd sense. The spectrum is basically centre to extreme right. Extreme right. Way off the spectrum. The Republican Party about 20 years ago basically abandoned any pretense of being a normal political party. In fact, the distinguished, respected conservative commentators, from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, like Norman Ornstein, described the Republican Party as a radical insurgency which has abandoned parliamentary politics. They just don’t want anything to happen. Their only policies are “don’t do anything” or bomb. That’s not a political party."

It's well worth reading the full interview:

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/noam-chomsky-electing-president-empire

 

[a_majoor]

Reading speeches from Bernie Sanders or even Hillary Clinton certainly does not give me a sense of them being "centrists". The Democrat initiatives across Blue cities and states in everything from regulation to taxation to mandating minimum wages at $15/hr also are not "center", unless you are extremely off axis.

Refer to Pournlle's two axis theory of political alignment to map where everyone really is and you will be surprised:

http://www.baen.com/chapters/axes.htm for an explanation