The Many Faces of US Politics...

[Eamonnca1]

So, seafood, how do you think it's going to play out if both Cruz and Rubio stay in the contest until the bitter end?

They might have to leave it to the convention to decide who the nominee is!

[Declan]

Watched this last  night -Fascinating programme on the Black Panther movement in the 60s.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b071gr5h/storyville-20152016-17-the-black-panthers

[heganboy]

Clinton is on the right path to having the nomination sewn up.

What is not often discussed ( a bit like the electoral college system) is the delegate system for the nomination. The count there is 500:70 Clinton, she needs 2400(ish) to win it, and there's nearly 900 handed out march 1st. She could conceivably pull the rug out from under Sanders then, effectively ending the contest. At this point Bernie is going to need very surprising landslides in very surprising places...

From the NYTimes today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/us/politics/delegate-count-leaving-bernie-sanders-with-steep-climb.html

Senator Bernie Sanders vowed on Sunday to fight on after losing the Nevada caucuses, predicting that he would pull off a historic political upset by this summer's party convention.

But the often overlooked delegate count in the Democratic primary shows Mr. Sanders slipping significantly behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the nomination, and the odds of his overtaking her growing increasingly remote.

Mrs. Clinton has 502 delegates to Mr. Sanders's 70; 2,383 are needed to win the nomination. These numbers include delegates won in state contests and superdelegates, who can support any candidate. She is likely to win a delegate jackpot from the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic areas in the Southern-dominated Super Tuesday primaries on March 1, when 11 states will vote and about 880 delegates will be awarded.



Since delegates are awarded proportionally based on vote tallies in congressional districts and some other areas, only blowout victories yield large numbers of delegates. And Mrs. Clinton is better positioned than Mr. Sanders to win big in more delegate-rich districts, like those carved out to ensure minority Democrats in Congress, where she remains popular.

"She could effectively end the race in less than two weeks' time on Super Tuesday," said David Wasserman, a top analyst for The Cook Political Report, who has been closely tracking the delegate race.

Of course, politics is unpredictable, as this cycle's presidential campaign has demonstrated. Mrs. Clinton will face questions about her candidacy, including the outcome of an F.B.I. investigation into the use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. And Mr. Sanders has shown an ability to create grass-roots excitement in surprising places.

Still, while Mrs. Clinton is far from reaching 2,383 delegates, she is poised to create the sort of mathematical quandary for Mr. Sanders that she faced in 2008. That winter, Barack Obama used an 11-state winning streak to establish a lead of 100 delegates that Mrs. Clinton was never able to surmount. While a similar streak is unlikely this year, advisers to Mr. Sanders concede that Mrs. Clinton could generate a significant delegate lead now that she has momentum from her Nevada win. But they say they are not out of the running.

"The Clintons can get a delegate lead quicker than we can, and they have a way to gut out the delegate fight," said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders. "We have to turn victories in state after state into big momentum that can change the numbers."

Mrs. Clinton already has a huge lead over Mr. Sanders in support from superdelegates — elected officials and party elders who each count toward the magic number of 2,383. But superdelegates could switch candidates if Mr. Sanders is the overwhelming choice of regular voters.

For now, Mrs. Clinton is focused on building her lead among so-called pledged delegates — those awarded proportionally by congressional districts from primary and caucus results. Mr. Sanders is aiming to score wins in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota while holding Mrs. Clinton to narrow wins elsewhere. Small margins of victory keep delegate allocations roughly even. A New York Times analysis found that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are tied in the pledged delegate count, at 51 each.


David Plouffe, the architect of Mr. Obama's delegate strategy in 2008 and Mr. Obama's campaign manager, said Mr. Sanders would need "surprising landslides in surprising places" if Mrs. Clinton did well on Super Tuesday. If Mrs. Clinton builds a small but stable lead, Mr. Sanders would need to overwhelm her in major primaries later in the spring.

"It is likely Sanders would have to win by double digits, if not by 20 points, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California to begin to crawl out of what seems like a small but, in fact, is a deep and persistent hole" in the delegate count, said Mr. Plouffe, who is supporting Mrs. Clinton.

Early on, the Clinton team identified the most advantageous congressional districts for winning more delegates — especially those that include large numbers of African-Americans and Hispanics. Some allies of Mrs. Clinton said a lead of 100 pledged delegates over Mr. Sanders would be enough to make it impossible for him to catch up, assuming Mrs. Clinton's candidacy does not collapse. If she finishes the race in June with a lead in pledged delegates, her superdelegates are all but certain to remain loyal and clinch the nomination for her.

Mr. Sanders has his own ambitious plan to rack up delegates, but it faces tougher odds than Mrs. Clinton's, even though only three states have voted.

The senator was counting on momentum from Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada to hobble Mrs. Clinton and energize his campaign through Super Tuesday, and then in Michigan and elsewhere in March. But he won only New Hampshire. His campaign is now spending heavily to win four of the Super Tuesday states — Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Oklahoma — while taking victory for granted in a fifth, his home state of Vermont.

Mr. Devine, a veteran of presidential campaigns and a longtime expert in delegate strategy, said that if Mr. Sanders could end up close to Mrs. Clinton in the pledged delegate count, the senator and his team would lobby superdelegates from the states he won to reflect the will of their voters, defect from her and give him a margin to win the nomination.


Several Sanders supporters said they were counting on the proportional system of allocating delegates to keep Mr. Sanders in the race for several more months. While many Republican primaries award delegates on a winner-take-all basis, the Democratic rules can mean a long race when there are two or more strong candidates.

"Now other factors come into play like her emails and transcripts," said State Senator Tick Segerblom of Nevada, a Sanders supporter, referring to controversies over Mrs. Clinton's private server and the unreleased transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street firms.

Some Democrats pointed to Mrs. Clinton's hiring of Jeffrey Berman, a consultant to the campaign and a leading Democratic thinker on delegate strategy, as a major advantage for her. Mr. Berman worked closely with Mr. Plouffe on the Obama campaign's strategy of competing hard in every congressional district. Mrs. Clinton's 2008 campaign focused instead on winning the most delegate-rich states.


"Hillary should have been the nominee in 2008, but Berman was an old-fashioned delegate counter who bested her campaign's approach," said Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studied the 2008 race for her 2015 book, "Primary Politics." "She is clearly not making that mistake again."

Mr. Berman said Mrs. Clinton had cleared some of the key hurdles in the delegate race, starting with a narrow win in the Iowa caucuses, where she proved she could prevail in the caucus format after losing 13 of 14 caucuses to Mr. Obama in 2008. Mr. Sanders was widely expected to win more delegates than Mrs. Clinton in caucuses because they are driven by the sort of energized voters he has inspired. Instead, she came out ahead.


"The Clinton campaign is built for the long haul, much as the Obama campaign was in 2008," Mr. Berman said.

Mr. Wasserman of The Cook Political Report said its analysis of the Nevada race bore out Mr. Berman's point.

"By our math, Bernie Sanders needed to win 19 of Nevada's 35 delegates to keep pace for the nomination nationally. Instead, Clinton won at least 19 delegates and possibly 20," Mr. Wasserman said. "This is the first contest that's provided real reassurance that she's still the front-runner, and it robs Sanders of the one thing he had going for him recently — momentum."

[seafoid]

So, seafood, how do you think it's going to play out if both Cruz and Rubio stay in the contest until the bitter end?

I think Trump will win the GOP because he is less narrow than either of the 2. Ad then he will e pasted in the election cos he can't get women or Latinos onside, as per Romney,but also because he will not address income inequality.

[LeoMc]

Clinton is on the right path to having the nomination sewn up.

What is not often discussed ( a bit like the electoral college system) is the delegate system for the nomination. The count there is 500:70 Clinton, she needs 2400(ish) to win it, and there's nearly 900 handed out march 1st. She could conceivably pull the rug out from under Sanders then, effectively ending the contest. At this point Bernie is going to need very surprising landslides in very surprising places...

From the NYTimes today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/us/politics/delegate-count-leaving-bernie-sanders-with-steep-climb.html

Senator Bernie Sanders vowed on Sunday to fight on after losing the Nevada caucuses, predicting that he would pull off a historic political upset by this summer's party convention.

But the often overlooked delegate count in the Democratic primary shows Mr. Sanders slipping significantly behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the nomination, and the odds of his overtaking her growing increasingly remote.

Mrs. Clinton has 502 delegates to Mr. Sanders's 70; 2,383 are needed to win the nomination. These numbers include delegates won in state contests and superdelegates, who can support any candidate. She is likely to win a delegate jackpot from the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic areas in the Southern-dominated Super Tuesday primaries on March 1, when 11 states will vote and about 880 delegates will be awarded.



Since delegates are awarded proportionally based on vote tallies in congressional districts and some other areas, only blowout victories yield large numbers of delegates. And Mrs. Clinton is better positioned than Mr. Sanders to win big in more delegate-rich districts, like those carved out to ensure minority Democrats in Congress, where she remains popular.

"She could effectively end the race in less than two weeks' time on Super Tuesday," said David Wasserman, a top analyst for The Cook Political Report, who has been closely tracking the delegate race.

Of course, politics is unpredictable, as this cycle's presidential campaign has demonstrated. Mrs. Clinton will face questions about her candidacy, including the outcome of an F.B.I. investigation into the use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. And Mr. Sanders has shown an ability to create grass-roots excitement in surprising places.

Still, while Mrs. Clinton is far from reaching 2,383 delegates, she is poised to create the sort of mathematical quandary for Mr. Sanders that she faced in 2008. That winter, Barack Obama used an 11-state winning streak to establish a lead of 100 delegates that Mrs. Clinton was never able to surmount. While a similar streak is unlikely this year, advisers to Mr. Sanders concede that Mrs. Clinton could generate a significant delegate lead now that she has momentum from her Nevada win. But they say they are not out of the running.

"The Clintons can get a delegate lead quicker than we can, and they have a way to gut out the delegate fight," said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders. "We have to turn victories in state after state into big momentum that can change the numbers."

Mrs. Clinton already has a huge lead over Mr. Sanders in support from superdelegates — elected officials and party elders who each count toward the magic number of 2,383. But superdelegates could switch candidates if Mr. Sanders is the overwhelming choice of regular voters.

For now, Mrs. Clinton is focused on building her lead among so-called pledged delegates — those awarded proportionally by congressional districts from primary and caucus results. Mr. Sanders is aiming to score wins in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota while holding Mrs. Clinton to narrow wins elsewhere. Small margins of victory keep delegate allocations roughly even. A New York Times analysis found that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are tied in the pledged delegate count, at 51 each.


David Plouffe, the architect of Mr. Obama's delegate strategy in 2008 and Mr. Obama's campaign manager, said Mr. Sanders would need "surprising landslides in surprising places" if Mrs. Clinton did well on Super Tuesday. If Mrs. Clinton builds a small but stable lead, Mr. Sanders would need to overwhelm her in major primaries later in the spring.

"It is likely Sanders would have to win by double digits, if not by 20 points, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California to begin to crawl out of what seems like a small but, in fact, is a deep and persistent hole" in the delegate count, said Mr. Plouffe, who is supporting Mrs. Clinton.

Early on, the Clinton team identified the most advantageous congressional districts for winning more delegates — especially those that include large numbers of African-Americans and Hispanics. Some allies of Mrs. Clinton said a lead of 100 pledged delegates over Mr. Sanders would be enough to make it impossible for him to catch up, assuming Mrs. Clinton's candidacy does not collapse. If she finishes the race in June with a lead in pledged delegates, her superdelegates are all but certain to remain loyal and clinch the nomination for her.

Mr. Sanders has his own ambitious plan to rack up delegates, but it faces tougher odds than Mrs. Clinton's, even though only three states have voted.

The senator was counting on momentum from Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada to hobble Mrs. Clinton and energize his campaign through Super Tuesday, and then in Michigan and elsewhere in March. But he won only New Hampshire. His campaign is now spending heavily to win four of the Super Tuesday states — Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Oklahoma — while taking victory for granted in a fifth, his home state of Vermont.

Mr. Devine, a veteran of presidential campaigns and a longtime expert in delegate strategy, said that if Mr. Sanders could end up close to Mrs. Clinton in the pledged delegate count, the senator and his team would lobby superdelegates from the states he won to reflect the will of their voters, defect from her and give him a margin to win the nomination.


Several Sanders supporters said they were counting on the proportional system of allocating delegates to keep Mr. Sanders in the race for several more months. While many Republican primaries award delegates on a winner-take-all basis, the Democratic rules can mean a long race when there are two or more strong candidates.

"Now other factors come into play like her emails and transcripts," said State Senator Tick Segerblom of Nevada, a Sanders supporter, referring to controversies over Mrs. Clinton's private server and the unreleased transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street firms.

Some Democrats pointed to Mrs. Clinton's hiring of Jeffrey Berman, a consultant to the campaign and a leading Democratic thinker on delegate strategy, as a major advantage for her. Mr. Berman worked closely with Mr. Plouffe on the Obama campaign's strategy of competing hard in every congressional district. Mrs. Clinton's 2008 campaign focused instead on winning the most delegate-rich states.


"Hillary should have been the nominee in 2008, but Berman was an old-fashioned delegate counter who bested her campaign's approach," said Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studied the 2008 race for her 2015 book, "Primary Politics." "She is clearly not making that mistake again."

Mr. Berman said Mrs. Clinton had cleared some of the key hurdles in the delegate race, starting with a narrow win in the Iowa caucuses, where she proved she could prevail in the caucus format after losing 13 of 14 caucuses to Mr. Obama in 2008. Mr. Sanders was widely expected to win more delegates than Mrs. Clinton in caucuses because they are driven by the sort of energized voters he has inspired. Instead, she came out ahead.


"The Clinton campaign is built for the long haul, much as the Obama campaign was in 2008," Mr. Berman said.

Mr. Wasserman of The Cook Political Report said its analysis of the Nevada race bore out Mr. Berman's point.

"By our math, Bernie Sanders needed to win 19 of Nevada's 35 delegates to keep pace for the nomination nationally. Instead, Clinton won at least 19 delegates and possibly 20," Mr. Wasserman said. "This is the first contest that's provided real reassurance that she's still the front-runner, and it robs Sanders of the one thing he had going for him recently — momentum."

Maybe I am reading that wrong but is the NYT referencing Gerrymandering as a simple fact of political life?

[deiseach]

Maybe I am reading that wrong but is the NYT referencing Gerrymandering as a simple fact of political life?

You are not reading it wrong.

[LeoMc]

Maybe I am reading that wrong but is the NYT referencing Gerrymandering as a simple fact of political life?

You are not reading it wrong.

No equivalent of the electoral commision or are both sides happy with the status quo?

[deiseach]

No equivalent of the electoral commision or are both sides happy with the status quo?

Both. If there's anything a political party loves more than a rotten borough, I've yet to encounter it.

[seafoid]

This would make you sick

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/30/clinton-system-donor-machine-2016-election/

[J70]

This would make you sick

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/30/clinton-system-donor-machine-2016-election/

I guess Mr. Head is in the Bernie column!

Pretty damning stuff.

Unfortunately for the GOP, there's not a lot there for them to look into and perhaps attack her on when it comes to the general election, given that they are also bought and paid for by Wall Street and big business.

I wonder how much Trump himself has contributed over the years?! 

[stew]

This would make you sick

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/30/clinton-system-donor-machine-2016-election/

I guess Mr. Head is in the Bernie column!

Pretty damning stuff.

Unfortunately for the GOP, there's not a lot there for them to look into and perhaps attack her on when it comes to the general election, given that they are also bought and paid for by Wall Street and big business.

I wonder how much Trump himself has contributed over the years?! 

The majority of his money went to the liberals, he himself is a liberal, always has been and always will be.

[seafoid]

Trump
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/trump/
Two qualities more than any others have driven conservatism in our time. The first is cultural and racial resentment, felt by the mostly older and very white population the GOP increasingly represents—resentment against a fast-changing, more openly sexual America, as well as against dark-skinned immigrants, and White House occupants, and gay people and political correctness and the "moocher class" and all the rest. The second is what we might call spectacle—the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged (and outrageous), driven initially by talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and now reproduced on websites, podcasts, and Twitter feeds too numerous to mention. There is a strong tendency, perfected over the years by Fox News, to cover and discuss domestic politics as a combination of war, sport, and entertainment all at once.
Well, Trump is conservative resentment and spectacle made flesh.
Certain assumptions about what a Republican politician could and could not get away with doing, assumptions shared by the entire political establishment—that you couldn't attack a war hero, say, or that a GOP candidate would never dare pick a fight with Fox—have been shattered. When he speaks, the media will listen and, given the ratings he ensures, will give him as much coverage as traffic numbers suggest they ought to.
Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus is clearly terrified of him. Even Fox News head Roger Ailes—the effective cochairman of the Republican Party for a number of years now—treats him gingerly. Karl Rove wants desperately for the party establishment to block him. They all wish he would go away, even while they must know that they are responsible for Trump because they have spent many years creating an audience that was just waiting for someone like him to come along.
The three major nearer-term explanations for his success are pretty straightforward. The first is his celebrity. Trump hosts a network prime-time show, NBC's The Celebrity Apprentice, which has run for fourteen seasons (as The Apprentice for eight of those seasons). That is a long time to be on prime-time television. Seinfeld, one of the most popular television shows in history, lasted nine seasons.
The second reason is the surprising weakness of the rest of the GOP field.
The final cause of Trump's rise has been the intense attention given to him by the political media.
In the real, complicated world, solving one problem generally means creating another. But Trump's moral universe has no space for such disorder. All it takes is some resolve, titanium again being the key element:
I do deals—big deals—all the time. I know and work with all the toughest operators in the world of high-stakes global finance. These are hard-driving, vicious cutthroat financial killers, the kind of people who leave blood all over the boardroom table and fight to the bitter end to gain maximum advantage. And guess what? Those are exactly the kind of negotiators the United States needs, not these cream puff "diplomats" Obama sends around the globe to play patty cake with foreign governments. No, we need smart people with titanium spines and big brains who love America enough to fight fiercely for our interests.
That's the essence of it. His supporters seem to believe that he can do these things; or, even if they don't quite believe, they long for someone who can—who can tame OPEC and China and Iran as if world affairs could be made to be like a reality TV show. This is an understandable yearning to some extent, in an age in which the United States' ability to call the global shots is so much reduced from what it was fifty years ago. But it has a more sinister aspect, this wish for a strong man who can just fix everything. And surely it's also the case for some Trump supporters that after eight years of Obama, a bullying white man is exactly what is needed to restore things to their natural order. It is these qualities that lend Trumpism its faintly disturbing Face in the Crowd odor.
On domestic issues, his book is rather dull. Every chapter—on taxes, entitlements, health care, the social safety net—starts out with a few broadsides flung at Obama for being either incompetent, weak, or too left-wing and then moves on to policy prescriptions that have been standard conservative points for years. There would be four marginal tax rates under President Trump, the highest at just 15 percent, and that only on dollars earned above $1 million. On top of this he would reduce the corporate tax rate to zero. The national treasury would be depleted. But not to worry—working people would get to keep more of their hard-earned money, and they'd get to spend more years earning it, since Trump proposes raising the retirement age.

If Trump wins the nomination he will be among the least informed candidates for the presidency in a long time. He blusters his way through the (relatively few) substantive questions put to him in interviews and debates: he knows how to get things done; he has "lots of friends" among the (fill-in-the-blank, be it a nationality, such as Mexicans, or other groups, such as Muslims or members of Congress). And he's been subjected to little follow-up questioning: so far, to my knowledge, when Trump says, as he has frequently, about his fuzzy health care plan, that we won't leave people "dying in the streets," no one has pointed out that those are the people whom Medicaid and emergency rooms are designed to take care of

[J70]

This would make you sick

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/30/clinton-system-donor-machine-2016-election/

I guess Mr. Head is in the Bernie column!

Pretty damning stuff.

Unfortunately for the GOP, there's not a lot there for them to look into and perhaps attack her on when it comes to the general election, given that they are also bought and paid for by Wall Street and big business.

I wonder how much Trump himself has contributed over the years?! 

The majority of his money went to the liberals, he himself is a liberal, always has been and always will be.

Purely on the money issue, I'd say it's more a case of paying off whoever the powers-that-be were to gain access and favours. In the NE and Chicago, mostly Democrats. Other places, Republican.

[seafoid]

Trump wins Nevada with a high Latino vote.
The GOP hierarchy want Rubio to get the nomination. It's mad, Ted.

[stew]

Trump
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/trump/
Two qualities more than any others have driven conservatism in our time. The first is cultural and racial resentment, felt by the mostly older and very white population the GOP increasingly represents—resentment against a fast-changing, more openly sexual America, as well as against dark-skinned immigrants, and White House occupants, and gay people and political correctness and the "moocher class" and all the rest. The second is what we might call spectacle—the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged (and outrageous), driven initially by talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and now reproduced on websites, podcasts, and Twitter feeds too numerous to mention. There is a strong tendency, perfected over the years by Fox News, to cover and discuss domestic politics as a combination of war, sport, and entertainment all at once.
Well, Trump is conservative resentment and spectacle made flesh.
Certain assumptions about what a Republican politician could and could not get away with doing, assumptions shared by the entire political establishment—that you couldn't attack a war hero, say, or that a GOP candidate would never dare pick a fight with Fox—have been shattered. When he speaks, the media will listen and, given the ratings he ensures, will give him as much coverage as traffic numbers suggest they ought to.
Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus is clearly terrified of him. Even Fox News head Roger Ailes—the effective cochairman of the Republican Party for a number of years now—treats him gingerly. Karl Rove wants desperately for the party establishment to block him. They all wish he would go away, even while they must know that they are responsible for Trump because they have spent many years creating an audience that was just waiting for someone like him to come along.
The three major nearer-term explanations for his success are pretty straightforward. The first is his celebrity. Trump hosts a network prime-time show, NBC's The Celebrity Apprentice, which has run for fourteen seasons (as The Apprentice for eight of those seasons). That is a long time to be on prime-time television. Seinfeld, one of the most popular television shows in history, lasted nine seasons.
The second reason is the surprising weakness of the rest of the GOP field.
The final cause of Trump's rise has been the intense attention given to him by the political media.
In the real, complicated world, solving one problem generally means creating another. But Trump's moral universe has no space for such disorder. All it takes is some resolve, titanium again being the key element:
I do deals—big deals—all the time. I know and work with all the toughest operators in the world of high-stakes global finance. These are hard-driving, vicious cutthroat financial killers, the kind of people who leave blood all over the boardroom table and fight to the bitter end to gain maximum advantage. And guess what? Those are exactly the kind of negotiators the United States needs, not these cream puff "diplomats" Obama sends around the globe to play patty cake with foreign governments. No, we need smart people with titanium spines and big brains who love America enough to fight fiercely for our interests.
That's the essence of it. His supporters seem to believe that he can do these things; or, even if they don't quite believe, they long for someone who can—who can tame OPEC and China and Iran as if world affairs could be made to be like a reality TV show. This is an understandable yearning to some extent, in an age in which the United States' ability to call the global shots is so much reduced from what it was fifty years ago. But it has a more sinister aspect, this wish for a strong man who can just fix everything. And surely it's also the case for some Trump supporters that after eight years of Obama, a bullying white man is exactly what is needed to restore things to their natural order. It is these qualities that lend Trumpism its faintly disturbing Face in the Crowd odor.
On domestic issues, his book is rather dull. Every chapter—on taxes, entitlements, health care, the social safety net—starts out with a few broadsides flung at Obama for being either incompetent, weak, or too left-wing and then moves on to policy prescriptions that have been standard conservative points for years. There would be four marginal tax rates under President Trump, the highest at just 15 percent, and that only on dollars earned above $1 million. On top of this he would reduce the corporate tax rate to zero. The national treasury would be depleted. But not to worry—working people would get to keep more of their hard-earned money, and they'd get to spend more years earning it, since Trump proposes raising the retirement age.

If Trump wins the nomination he will be among the least informed candidates for the presidency in a long time. He blusters his way through the (relatively few) substantive questions put to him in interviews and debates: he knows how to get things done; he has "lots of friends" among the (fill-in-the-blank, be it a nationality, such as Mexicans, or other groups, such as Muslims or members of Congress). And he's been subjected to little follow-up questioning: so far, to my knowledge, when Trump says, as he has frequently, about his fuzzy health care plan, that we won't leave people "dying in the streets," no one has pointedcomfirtabose aree the people whom Medicaid and emergency rooms are designed to tMedicaid

Liberal bullshit at its nastiest, God I hate the left, the far left, you know, the morons who believe bile like Whst is written above, keep working on making sure transgender people are comfortable in any bathroom, that will get the job done you fcukwits!