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 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

Seaward wrote:
I'm just hoping for more sad-sack college kids taking webcam selfies while holding signs saying, "Sorry world, I didn't vote for him," again. I loved that gak.

Instead, we'll probably have a bunch selfies of angry white dudes hold their guns with a Confederate flag hanging from wall in the background hold sings saying, "feth you Muslims, we voted for him!"

We'll have to see. I'd be seriously worried about Clinton's chances in the general if I were a Democrat.

And now Trump has threatened to send his supporters to Sanders rallies, because of course he did.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
No-one was particularly against Bush in 2000, but we found him pretty horrifying by 2004. He had got us involved in Afghanistan and let that go to gak, and then started the hugely unpopular Iraq campaign.

I'm pretty sure that the UK had a say in that, and that your own leadership was more than ready and willing to follow the US into those conflicts.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
No-one was particularly against Bush in 2000, but we found him pretty horrifying by 2004. He had got us involved in Afghanistan and let that go to gak, and then started the hugely unpopular Iraq campaign.

I'm pretty sure that the UK had a say in that, and that your own leadership was more than ready and willing to follow the US into those conflicts.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
No-one was particularly against Bush in 2000, but we found him pretty horrifying by 2004. He had got us involved in Afghanistan and let that go to gak, and then started the hugely unpopular Iraq campaign.

This pissed away all the sympathy and support generated by the 911 attacks. The US's world PR rating plummeted during Bush's presidency.

To be fair, our own government (UK) was wholly to blame for supporting Bush. He probably wouldn't have gone into Iraq, or stayed in Afghanistan, without Blair's enthusiastic help.

More trouble at another Trump rally, which is obviously a bad thing.

On a newspaper forum, somebody posted a message that blamed Hilary Clinton for the trouble!

The theory being that fake Sanders supporters causing trouble at a Trump rally would obviously benefit Clinton.

Now, this particular poster is infamous for bizarre conspiracy theories...

BUT

American political history is full of dirty tricks at election time. I look at my bookcase, see a biography of FDR and remember reading about the controversy surrounding the death of the Kingfisher during one presidential election in the 1930s. There is also Richard Nixon, which needs no explanation!

To sum up, I don't know what to believe anymore!

We're all adults here in the US. A few gets roughed up over stupid things. Now when we have riots like those in Europe between a rival Soccer (Football) teams. I pay serious attention. Its like watching NASCAR but only for the wrecks

 Jihadin wrote:
We're all adults here in the US. A few gets roughed up over stupid things. Now when we have riots like those in Europe between a rival Soccer (Football) teams. I pay serious attention. Its like watching NASCAR but only for the wrecks

Hey, don't blame Europe for this. Our soccer teams haven't rioted since 1939!

Seriously, football riots are rare in Europe.

On another note, I'm not suggesting for a minute that America is heading back to 1960s levels of violence, but I find this increasing levl of demonising Trump with protest scuffles, to be disturbing.

IMO, Trump is a buffoon and an idiot, and is more than capable of providing the rope to 'hang' himself. These protestors are only going to increase support for Trump. Let the man damage his own campaign through his own actions.

 Ouze wrote:

This really bothers me. Donald Trump is a dumpster fire of a human being, but the answer to terrible speech shouldn't be trying to suppress him, or attack him, or deport him (as much as I enjoy the petition for NASA to fly him into space and leave him there).

More to the point, this sort of stuff helps to feed into his narrative; that he's expressing a popular viewpoint and various elites are trying to suppress him. It's better to just let him say whatever he wants because someone as willing to say terrible things as he is will eventually burn off his own supporters unassisted*.

What he says is bad, attempts to prevent him from saying it is worse... in my opinion.

*said the mainstream GOP for 6 months running, I know

Trump is expressing a popular viewpoint. Various elites are trying to suppress him. If these things were not the case then he wouldn't have popular support and he would've already been gladly accepted as the GOP nomination and would enjoy the full support of the establishment. Trump is notoriously difficult to stump and it certainly will not be possible to do so by pointing out something he said because his supporters either agree with him or plain don't care if he said one thing they disagree with because they like him mostly for not being yet more neoliberal consensus.

Yeah, Trump is riding the anti-Establishment wave hard. He is appealing to a large segment of the population dissatisfied with the legacy of internationalism and his populist militant isolationism planks don't seem particularly rooted in any form of conservatism nor Republican positions (which have been much more pro international trade and international activism). He is has caused an interesting shift in the Republican narrative, with the candidates now doing a 180 on free trade and sounding a lot more like the anti-NAFTA Democrats! Likewise, his strong nationalism is in direct contrast to the Bush pro labor view, as is his strong anti-Iraq statements.

He is swiping a lot of HRC's message out from underneath her and that could draw from traditional crossover union voters etc. and forces HRC to double down on her support of Obama's positions and experience, which could very much be a liability in this environment.

Trump has not pulled hard right at all in the primaries, and has a very mixed (arguably often contradictory) message that nonetheless seems to be lining him up for the Repub nomination. Meanwhile, the Republican leaders seem to be doing everything they can to prevent that. It's a very unusual election year....

Trump is strong in the bible belt where anti-establishment sentiment is strong. He's much weaker west of the Mississippi river. Even so, he doesn't have a majority of the delegates awarded so far. He simply has the largest minority.

I think this may very well go to the convention. My crystal ball is actually fairly muddy regarding who may actually come out on top when all the voting is done.

 Breotan wrote:
Trump is strong in the bible belt where anti-establishment sentiment is strong. He's much weaker west of the Mississippi river. Even so, he doesn't have a majority of the delegates awarded so far. He simply has the largest minority.

I think this may very well go to the convention. My crystal ball is actually fairly muddy regarding who may actually come out on top when all the voting is done.

Depends on the exact politics of the delegates. Trump is almost certainly not going to win a contested convention, but I can't see Cruz winning either given how much the establishment hates him. We might actually see a Kasich run if it comes down to it.

Kasich? As the Republican nominee? Not a chance in hell. Trump is far too popular with the masses and Cruz has spent way too much money to walk away.

That's the fun part about brokered conventions: Neither of those things matter. All that matters is how well you can convince each delegation that you're the right man for the job. Trump has spent his entire campaign pissing off the establishment, and Cruz has spent his entire CAREER doing so. Assuming they don't bring in a new candidate (which is admittedly possible), Rubio and Kasich are the only remaining options.

Rosebuddy wrote:
That isn't witty at all. It's actually very stupid because it's based on the lie that socialism means taking your individual stuff.

You're confusing a well told joke, with a joke that you happen to share political assumptions with.

I happen to know perfectly well what socialism is. There's an outside chance I've spent more hours on dakka explaining socialism to people than you've spent hours on this earth. But a good joke is a good joke.

You want another example - "For sale - French rifles. Only dropped once." It's funny. It's also trading on a completely inaccurate stereotype of the French military, based on a single disastrous campaign in WWII, which was the product of a whole range of factors and individual soldier's cowardice was not one of them.


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 whembly wrote:
hint: it's not the people... but those in power.

I notice you're increasingly relying on this notion of 'the people', as a separate and distinct group. I don't think it's that useful, for the simple reason that 'the people' as a whole can't govern. When you need to determine next year's budget for housing subsidies, you don't get 300 million people around to discuss it, and hope you can hammer out a consensus by dinner time. You have to assign that decision making role to someone, those people in turn become 'the people in power' or 'the elite'. There's no way around that.

No matter what system of government, there will be people given vast levels of power and responsibility. This isn't a good thing, but it's a nonsense to call it a bug in any specific system, because it's common to every form of government.


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 whembly wrote:
Aaaaaaaand the anti-Trumpers are getting their ducks in a row:

BREAKING: @marcorubio communications director @AlexConant tells us Rubio supporters in Ohio should vote for @JohnKasich.@ThisHour
— John Berman (@JohnBerman) March 11, 2016

What makes this very interesting is Cruz putting campaign offices in Florida. Not because he thinks he has a hope in hell of winning, but because he's positioning his offices in strong Rubio areas, and is expecting to draw more votes off Rubio than he draws off Trump. Ie He's increasing the chance of Rubio losing his home state and most important state, expecting it'll push Rubio out of the race and give Cruz his one on one with Trump. (well, there's Kasich, but that's effectively one v one)


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Rosebuddy wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, many of Trump's supporters aren't rednecks. They're right-wingers from places other than the South who are unhappy with the Republican Party being essentially a Southern party.

It's actually kind of the opposite of that. The Republican party has often used social and racial issues as a bridge to woo voters who might not be particularly excited by the strong right wing economics embraced by the party.

This has been especially true in the South, which has been a strong Republican base despite being indifferent to many Republican platforms, especially their commitment to shrinking social safety nets. Trump is the first Republican candidate in a long time to reject many parts of the standard Republican platform, he is not just unlike the other candidates in that he wants to keep the safety net, he's actually promised to expand parts of it.

When we look back, this has kind of been a long time coming. The Republican party has applied stricter and stricter criteria on any elected official, which reached it's height in the Tea Party. While that movement was quite inconsistent in what it actually wanted, there was a consistent tone of officials being deemed true conservatives or not. Diversity of opinion was increasingly shut out in favour of a kind of purity test. A large portion of the base, who might not share the Tea Party or the general leadership of the party's commitment to far right economics was shut out. Trump has captured those voters, and they have been especially strong in the South.


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 whembly wrote:
The US Electoral college simply protects the mid-to-small states from the tyranny of the larger states.

That's the senate's job, and it does that job very well. The electoral college basically removes most states from having any real impact on the election of the president, and instead makes it determined by a handful of swing states. If you live in California, Texas or one of about 40 other states then your vote will never have any impact on the election of the President. That's not very good.


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 whembly wrote:
It'd be the same story with straight line votes d...

Big cities only matters then.

No, every vote would matter. You cast a vote, your vote would matter just as much as any other vote. It wouldn't matter whether you lived in a city, or a town, your vote would count just as much as any other person's vote.

And sure, you might point out that there's more votes in cities and in big states, so they'd matter more... but shouldn't they. Shouldn't the opinions of a million people in a city be more important than the opinions of a thousand people in a town? And even then, the weighting is to the people in the city, but each vote is still worth the same.

And hey, people would ignore any smaller group at their peril. Look at the current Democratic race, black voters are a much smaller group than white voters, so by your argument they'd be irrelevant. But they've come out so strongly in favour of Clinton that they've tipped the contest strongly in her favour, despite Clinton losing among the more numerous white voters. That's how it works when every vote is equal.


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 whembly wrote:
That's not what I'm asking.

We are 'The United States of America'.

Thats 50 mini-countries.

Yes, you have a federal system, but you're way over-stating it with 50 mini-countries. You have 50 states with some constitutionally recognised areas of independence.

Full straight elections means the candidates only need to focus on tiny regions of the US, such as:

Focusing on big areas and winning 55% of the vote is a losing game, if that means by completely ignoring the rest of the country you only win 20% of the vote there. That means you'd lose, and lose bad. Instead you'd focus on every single vote. A place with 5% of the population would get 5% of your attention, a place with 2% of the population would get 2% of your attention. Because every single vote mattered equally.

Hence why we're a Republic and not a direct democracy.

How many times do we have to go over these terms, dakka?! Do we need a sticky?

Anyhow, Republican means you don't have hereditary head of state, ie a king. That's all it means. You could determine the president by who could throw a standard poodle the furthest, and you'd be a Republic. Similarly here in Australia we don't elect our prime minister directly, instead he is chosen by the majority party in the House of Reps, but we aren't a Republican because technically our head of state is the Queen.

Direct democracy means voters don't appoint officials, but vote directly on issues. The US is actually more a direct democracy than most, propositions and referendums are far more common and typically far more powerful in the US than in most other democracies, where such things are exceedingly rare and typically limited to social issues.

Finally, I think the term you're looking for is Federal, or Federated. That's what it means when states join together, but still have formalised, constitutionally recognised areas of independence.


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 Ouze wrote:
This really bothers me. Donald Trump is a dumpster fire of a human being, but the answer to terrible speech shouldn't be trying to suppress him, or attack him, or deport him (as much as I enjoy the petition for NASA to fly him into space and leave him there).

Yeah, between the Trump ralliers and the counter-protestors, I'm not going to say who was more disruptive, quicker to violence and confrontation, because I don't know. I suspect both groups were probably pretty crappy.

But I've been very disappointed at the number of people who've shown pride in having Trump cancel rallies. That's not cool. Anyone should be able to stand on stage and say their piece to their supporters, no matter what horrible things they might say.

You beat them by making strong arguments about why they're wrong, and why people should vote for someone else. And ultimately you trust that the majority of the people won't vote for the crazy guy. That's really how democracy has to work.


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Seaward wrote:
European reaction to Trump's success so far in the '16 primaries reminds me an awful lot of European reaction to Bush's success in the '04 election, right down to the same sort of "Who could possibly be voting for him?!" rhetoric.

Well, 12 years on and we're still no closer to who could possibly have been silly enough to vote for Bush in '04...


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Seaward wrote:
We'll have to see. I'd be seriously worried about Clinton's chances in the general if I were a Democrat.

I'd be seriously worried about Clinton's chances in the general if I was a human being who lived on this Earth, and therefore benefited from having sensible people running the United States. Which I am. Which makes fairly terrified that there's a decent chance that Trump or Cruz could end up leading your country. Rubio was about as worrying, but with recent results at least there's one less crazy who might be running the country.

 sebster wrote:
You could determine the president by who could throw a standard poodle the furthest, and you'd be a Republic.

Trump would win for sure. No one could throw a poodle further then he can, he's just amazing at throwing poodle.. Some of these guys, I don't want to say their names, but let me tell you about these guys, Jeb Bush comes to mind, they can't really throw poodles very well. They just don't have very strong arms, they have low energy, just small potatoes. Look at Ted Cruz! Smart man, I respect him, but can he throw a poodle? Not very well, people say. I wouldn't say that, but that's what people say. However, you look at Trump, when it comes to throwing poodles, he always does very well, just a huge performance every time - and very classy, just the best.

 Ouze wrote:
Trump would win for sure. No one could throw a poodle further then he can, he's just amazing at throwing poodle.. Some of these guys, I don't want to say their names, but let me tell you about these guys, Jeb Bush comes to mind, they can't really throw poodles very well. They just don't have very strong arms, they have low energy, just small potatoes. Look at Ted Cruz! Smart man, I respect him, but can he throw a poodle? Not very well, people say. I wouldn't say that, but that's what people say. However, you look at Trump, when it comes to throwing poodles, he always does very well, just a huge performance every time - and very classy, just the best.

332 pages in, and you just made this whole thread worthwhile.

One thing I never understood about US elections is that the votes are counted per state, not per person. So if a state votes 100% blue and 0% red, it's still counted as one state, just as if it had been 51% blue and 49% red.

It just seems too imprecise.

Edit: Assuming it is still done that way? It struck me that I have not read a lot on the subject for a while, and I may be (and I hope I am) mistaken.

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/florida/2016/03/8593476/gop-donors-pushing-condoleezza-rice-run-independent-campaign


probably a bit too late in the day.

Stranger things etc etc perhaps though eh ?

I don't think anyone irrevocably tied to the disastrous Iraq invasion has much of a chance.

Yet more fallout from the Bush-Blair years.

Rice seems pretty good and capable, frankly. If the objective is to stop Trump, perhaps Rpublicans will have to hold their noses about the Iraq War thing and hope that her other good qualities win the day.

However it does seem a bit late in the race to join. Perhaps the way forwards is to let Trump be president in the expectation he will be a collosal disaster. Then Rice will be like a shining angel of redemption in another four years.

 sebster wrote:
You're confusing a well told joke, with a joke that you happen to share political assumptions with.

I am not confusing anything at all. It is a dull joke. There is no unexpected turn. The punchline is simply "socialism is about taking your things so I took your thing". There is no wit to it.

I'm starting to think humor is subjective.

 Ouze wrote:

 curran12 wrote:
So now we've had someone try to rush the stage at a Trump rally, I'm officially convinced that this level of aggression and violence is only going to escalate.

This really bothers me. Donald Trump is a dumpster fire of a human being, but the answer to terrible speech shouldn't be trying to suppress him, or attack him, or deport him (as much as I enjoy the petition for NASA to fly him into space and leave him there).

More to the point, this sort of stuff helps to feed into his narrative; that he's expressing a popular viewpoint and various elites are trying to suppress him. It's better to just let him say whatever he wants because someone as willing to say terrible things as he is will eventually burn off his own supporters unassisted*.

What he says is bad, attempts to prevent him from saying it is worse... in my opinion.

*said the mainstream GOP for 6 months running, I know

1. Democrats trying a Heckler's veto doesn't nothing but strengthen his position. Illinois is a sinch to go his way now.
2. I'd love to Trumpists (TM) start crashing Bernie and HRC meetings. I must be entertained!
3. In case our European friends hadn't noticed he's just the US version. European right wing parties across the continent, in central, Eastern, and Western countries are winning seats and offices. Right wing parties just gained in Germany.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35796831

 Frazzled wrote:

1. Democrats trying a Heckler's veto doesn't nothing but strengthen his position. Illinois is a sinch to go his way now.

A Heckler's veto doesn't mean that if someone doesn't agree with you that you assault them. The violence is a result of the Trump supporters, not the people protesting him.

 Ouze wrote:

 sebster wrote:
You could determine the president by who could throw a standard poodle the furthest, and you'd be a Republic.

Trump would win for sure. No one could throw a poodle further then he can, he's just amazing at throwing poodle.. Some of these guys, I don't want to say their names, but let me tell you about these guys, Jeb Bush comes to mind, they can't really throw poodles very well. They just don't have very strong arms, they have low energy, just small potatoes. Look at Ted Cruz! Smart man, I respect him, but can he throw a poodle? Not very well, people say. I wouldn't say that, but that's what people say. However, you look at Trump, when it comes to throwing poodles, he always does very well, just a huge performance every time - and very classy, just the best.

Glorious. Simply glorious. It even read in his voice in my mind!

 skyth wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

1. Democrats trying a Heckler's veto doesn't nothing but strengthen his position. Illinois is a sinch to go his way now.

A Heckler's veto doesn't mean that if someone doesn't agree with you that you assault them. The violence is a result of the Trump supporters, not the people protesting him.

BLAME THE VICTIM!
If you crash a party and start yelling, expect to get thrown out on your keister.
But I am very onside with Trumpskiites doing the exact same thing to Democratic gatherings. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Just have the cameras around and give me time to get my popcorn.

 skyth wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

1. Democrats trying a Heckler's veto doesn't nothing but strengthen his position. Illinois is a sinch to go his way now.

A Heckler's veto doesn't mean that if someone doesn't agree with you that you assault them. The violence is a result of the Trump supporters, not the people protesting him.

Did you miss the coverage of the Chicago event being canceled? That was not due to Trump supporters...

I only sort of tangentially heard about that, and don't know the details... some reported got arrested or something, right?

 Ouze wrote:
I only sort of tangentially heard about that, and don't know the details... some reported got arrested or something, right?

From what I've gathered, there were thousands of people who showed up to protest Trump. Law Enforcement felt that continuing with the rally would lead to safety issues, and Trump agreed to push it back to a later time. Violence did occur, a couple of police officers were injured, lots of people left there because they said they didn't feel safe.

 Ouze wrote:
I only sort of tangentially heard about that, and don't know the details... some reported got arrested or something, right?

Evidently the perennial "which is better NY or Chicago style" pizza debate got out of hand. Trump supporters were all "NY is da Bombz" and Chicago went Al Capone on them over the greatness of deep dish or something.