You act like Trump is already elected president. If it comes to that, I'll join you on the ledge and bring the booze. But we're not even remotely close to that point yet.
I think this is an important link for some of you guys: Asylum and refugee protection - Federal Office for Migration and Refugees
Isn't it bad enough that a major political party commanding 40+% of the vote is on the verge of crowning him?
Have you been paying attention to the devolution of the GOP since the 1990s? Because this Trump affliction isn't some sudden thing. The cancer has been growing since the 1990s. Maybe that's why I'm not so shocked by all this. To me it's just the natural extension of the GOP's trend over the last 20-some years.
I never thought it would go this far, get this bad. EDIT: Honestly, I thought the GOP would move towards greater inclusiveness and more of a libertarian bent. That they would soften on immigration and soften on foreign policy in order to attract a bigger tent than they had in 2012. Someone like Rubio or Rand Paul would be solid choices in that respect. Instead the Trump movement decided to double down on immigration and double down on foreign policy, double down on racism, double down on everything that has narrowed their appeal. Its unbelievably damaging to the party and its unbelievably damaging to the conservative movement, allowing them to drown in their own excesses .
They've been deranged for a long time. As Norm Ornstein describes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html But you know what I'm thinking about today? This article: http://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con Read that. I mean, really read it. It's a very important article for understanding today's GOP. Then think about Trump. The GOP and the conservative movement have been cultivating easy marks for a long time. Trump's just a better huckster than them. Trump isn't out of the blue. Trump's been coming for a long, long time. If you didn't see that, then you weren't paying attention, or you weren't watching the right thing.
Alaska went for Ted... Cruz - 36.4% Trump - 33.5% Rubio - 15.1% Carson - 10.9% Kasich - 4.1% 100% reporting
Read it four years ago. Re: the point about lying, that is in fact more relevant than ever with Drumpf, but he's hardly alone in this field. Oh, I doubt @superdave will object, but you're on his turf when you recommend something by Rick Perlstein. He was telling us to read Nixonland before it was cool.
I'm still cautiously optimistic that this coordination game resolves itself. Rubio's utter failure last night means the race to stop Drumpf could boil down to Kasich-Cruz-Carson (because that dude's never gonna quit).
There's a blog I read, eschaton, that chronicles right wing grift. So I was already aware of this stuff. I just want to ironically add, both sides do it.
I dunno.... The egos at play are just awfully... oversized. One article that I read last night claimed that it was widely reported that just before Christie endorsed Drumpf, he was called by Rubio. Rubio apparently started out nice and complementary, praising Christie's race and claiming that he had bright future ahead of him in politics. Christie apparently thought Rubio was condescending and blew him off and within 10 minutes called Drumpf to tell him he was endorsing him. I only bring this up, because if true, it shows just how craven Rubio is. How could anyone possibly go groveling to Christie, a man who took great glee in destroying him on stage in one of those once-in-a-lifetime debate moments, for an endorsement? Do you see anything in Marco Rubio's personality that would have him consider stepping down for the "good of the party"? Especially when he sees himself as the last "establishment" Republican. I don't.
That is what the 2012 primaries suggested, with the success of Ron Paul. But the apparent fondness for libertarianism was faux. Ron did well because he was anti-Obama and anti-GOP establishment. Not because of his beliefs. Oh sure, most of his voters at the time convinced themselves that civil liberties mattered and all that stuff. But the real issues were that Obama/Hillary/Dems suck, and the GOP establishment suck. So when Trump came around banging that drum, the Ron Paulites of 2012 (I mean the newbies, not the lifetime libertarians) became the Trumpers of 2016. Not that I understood that at the time. I, too, thought there was some hope that the GOP was developing a greater libertarian strain. Nope. Not even close.
I heard a Cruz speech last night. But for the xenophic racism and the possibility that said racism will likely embolden his followers to acts of intimidation and violence, I'd rather have Drumpf as president than Cruz.
GOP Statisticians Develop New Branch Of Math To Formulate Scenarios In Which Trump Doesn’t Win Nomination http://www.theonion.com/article/gop-statisticians-develop-new-branch-math-formulat-52463
I told my wife that going to the game was still better than staying home and watching election coverage - but not by much.
"At press time, Larson announced the team had devised a new method of abstraction and mathematical induction in which lower numbers have a greater numerical value than their higher counterparts." That is pretty much the entire thought process of the Right Wing right there. Or, as the great, late 20th Century philosophers Beavis and Butthead once said, "The problem with numbers is that there are so many of them."
Caucus state. At my caucus, which went 2-to-1 for Bernie, there were a lot of college-aged Berniebros, while the Hillary supporters tended to be my age and older. And when you get into line at 6:30 PM for a caucus that starts at 7:00 and doesn't end until 9:00, you can start to understand why caucuses favor a candidate whose support is largely drawn from the demographic with a bit more free time. Well, and the fact that delegates are proportionately allocated. If you change a state from a 55-45 Hillary win to a 55-45 Bernie win, it doesn't make THAT much of a difference.
Cruz becoming President has been the worst possible outcome from Day 1 (possible exception of Scott Walker).
They did. Well, the party leaders did, or tried to. A good portion of the party's rank-and-file didn't. That's why the party leaders are so panicked right now. They've completely lost control of things.