The Many Faces of US Politics...

[manfromdelmonte]

The problem is Americans have been sold the dream of being wealthy since they were children.

It is an unachievable pipe dream for the majority.

[J70]

From the LA Times:

What a Donald Trump Presidency Might Look Like

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-trump-presidency-20160228-story.html

[J70]

FFS Trump. Its David Duke and the Klan. Just denounce him and his supporters!

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/28/donald-trump-declines-to-disavow-david-duke/

[Oraisteach]

The jerk reposts a tweet quoting Il Duce Mussolini, then disavows knowledge of white supremacy, and still thinks he's suitable to be President.

[Oraisteach]

Trump on CNN Sunday morning with Jake Tapper on the KKK and David Duke:

Trump: You wouldn't want me to condemn a group I know nothing about. I'd have to look. If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them, and certainly I would disavow if I thought that there was something wrong.

Tapper: The Ku Klux Klan ...

Trump: But you may have some groups in there that are totally fine, and it would be very unfair. So, give me a list of groups and I'll let you know.

Tapper: I'm just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here but ...

Trump: I don't know. Honestly I don't know anything about David Duke.

All the more strange since in 2000 Trump declined a presidential bid for the Reform Party because he didn't want to be associated with "a Klansman, Mr. Duke."

[deiseach]

I don't think Trump holds a candle for the KKK. But he thinks the people who vote for him, and have propelled him this far, hold a candle for the KKK. It's a sensible calculation on his part.

As we near the moment when he is crowned King Donald I of the GOP, let us pause to anticipate the contortions that the They Are Both As Bad As Each Other Brigade will go through to stay on the right (so to speak) side of the line. By the time they're done Hillary Clinton will have sunk the Lusitania and killed the Lindbergh baby.

[stew]

 Trump claims he doesn't know who David Duke is, fair enough, except he does,  this is a really interesting development, this life long liberal seems to self implode just as it looks like it is going to be the man who will be running against Clinton ( unless she is locked up that is )

The liberals have pulled of a masterstroke, they have bought the super delection.votes they need and they have their man causing complete disarray in the republican party.

Maybe a bus will take care of killory, if not and the FBI fail to do their job, Strapon will absolutely destroy her liberal colleague in the general election.

[J70]

Trump claims he doesn't know who David Duke is, fair enough, except he does,  this is a really interesting development, this life long liberal seems to self implode just as it looks like it is going to be the man who will be running against Clinton ( unless she is locked up that is )

The liberals have pulled of a masterstroke, they have bought the super delection.votes they need and they have their man causing complete disarray in the republican party.

Maybe a bus will take care of killory, if not and the FBI fail to do their job, Strapon will absolutely destroy her liberal colleague in the general election.

"Strapon"?? 

[J70]

I don't think Trump holds a candle for the KKK. But he thinks the people who vote for him, and have propelled him this far, hold a candle for the KKK. It's a sensible calculation on his part.

As we near the moment when he is crowned King Donald I of the GOP, let us pause to anticipate the contortions that the They Are Both As Bad As Each Other Brigade will go through to stay on the right (so to speak) side of the line. By the time they're done Hillary Clinton will have sunk the Lusitania and killed the Lindbergh baby.

To me, the thing this illustrates is that maybe Trump isn't quite as fast on his feet as he would claim. I mean, it should be bleeding obvious that Duke is someone to be disavowed, emphatically, every time, no matter what the forum, but he got in a muddle, trying to weigh the pros and cons. He did disavow him afterwards, presumably once his handlers got hold of him. That, together with his complete lack of policy detail (instead resorting, every time, to personal insults) during debates, does not bode well for him come debate time in the general election, although one would presume that he would have some level of detail down by then.

[AZOffaly]

Stew
the only way to get economic growth going again is to give blue collar workers serious pay rises. The ultra rich now earn one in every 4 dollars and it is slowly killing the economy. The Fed can't generate 2% inflation. Trump is picking up on blue collar frustration but he has no solutions. Neither do the other 2 clowns.

Minimum wage should be $15.00, the super rich should be taxed accordingly and companies that move joBS en  mass out of the country should be penalized heavily.

People who attain third level educations should be compensated as such and above all the middle class need to be taken care of in terms of growth and earnings.

You do realize the only people espousing policies such as you mention are Democrats? That would get you branded a Marxist commie in a GOP setting.

It makes no sense.

The first US Neo-Liberal was Ronald Reagan.

US politics is about shouting as loudly as possible, and making sure no one is listening.

I love this line!

[J70]

GOP establishment getting VERY worried...

Stuart Stevens, Romney's campaign manager, on Trump, in the aftermath of the David Duke issue:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/29/a-vote-for-donald-trump-is-a-vote-for-bigotry.html

A Vote for Donald Trump Is a Vote for Bigotry

There's winning. And then there's supporting a bigot. If the GOP lines up behind Trump, it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously anymore.
Political consulting and morality go together about as well as that famous fish and bicycle. Lawyers have constructed a neat paradigm obligating them to handle any and all clients, a very convenient way to maintain pretext of high road while taking any road possible. So it is with political consultants. For years when asked my positions on issues, my standard response has been, "I don't have positions, I have clients."
Along the way I've been accused of not believing in anything but winning, which I always took as a compliment. The only reason I or any political consultant should be hired is to help a client win. We're not there to remind a candidate of his deeply held positions or to solve the problems of the world. We are there for one purpose: to do everything possible to win an election. We're the hammer, votes are the nail.
But to my annoyance, I can't take that position in the 2016 election. I'd like to blame it on Donald Trump, but that would be like be blaming a dog for barking. No, honesty demands the admission that Trump would not be important if he were not winning. And he's winning.

For months when pressed on Trump and what he meant for the Republican Party, I've been giving a stock answer that struck me as both true and easy: If we agree that Trump winning the Republican nomination means something, we have to agree that his not winning means something. That worked well enough and had the added bonus of being a setup—I hoped—for an "I told you so moment" when Trump didn't win.
After Iowa, that answer was looking pretty good, and it seemed easy enough to defeat Trump when his image of "winner" had been damaged. But to my utter astonishment, none of the Republican campaigns focused on what was the screamingly obvious mandate of the moment: defeat Trump. Instead there was this mass hysteria of candidates fighting fiercely to determine what order the losers could finish behind Trump.

Jeb Bush took on Trump more than any candidate but he was, bizarrely, not backed with sufficient force by the huge weaponry of his Right to Rise super PAC. Instead of scrambling to put the best tanks into the field to face the enemy's armor, Right to Rise spent more than $100 million in the care and feeding of cavalry horses. Predictably, once the shooting started, they were slaughtered.
So now Trump has won three of the four latest contests and is poised to keep winning until he has enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination. There is still some hope that he can be stopped short of the 1,236 delegates needed to win on the first ballot, but realistically this requires the three major candidates facing Trump—Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich—to win their home states between now and March 16. It looks like Cruz will do so on Tuesday, but at the moment Rubio is considerably behind Trump in Florida, and Kasich and Trump are basically tied in Ohio.
Can it happen? Sure. Will it? Well, I hope so. (And anytime political consultants use phrases like "I hope so," it is like a doctor looking at an x-ray and saying, "That shadow might be an imaging error." Don't count on it.)

On Sunday, Feb. 28, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination was unable to answer a question about renouncing David Duke and white supremacists. "I don't know anything about David Duke," Trump said, which places the candidate in the unenviable position that his defenders could claim he wasn't a bigot but merely the dumbest man in America. Jake Tapper of CNN continued to push Trump, and he continued to refuse to denounce Duke and white supremacists. Only later in the day did Trump tweet out that, gee, he didn't really like Duke.
This latest is more than utterly disgusting. It really makes it impossible to pretend that Trump is not only an idiot but also a racist idiot. Yes, there were plenty of reasons to believe this before, with his rants about Mexican "rapists" and his prideful embrace of running for president in the Key of Hate. This is a man who attacked the pope. But even if Trump says he has never asked God for forgiveness—for his sake, let's hope that's another Trump lie—Americans are forgiving and there is always the tendency to give people another chance to correct mistakes.

But we shouldn't be giving Trump any more room for doubt. He's proven he's a uniquely ugly figure to emerge in American political history. He's threatened citizens who oppose him, like his outburst against the Ricketts family, who have contributed to a super PAC opposing him. He ended the week ranting about rewriting libel laws and threatening Amazon because founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and it is covering Trump. Fortunately Bezos is vastly wealthier than Trump and can buy and sell him a dozen times over. In Trump's value system, Bezos is much the better man. Actually that's one thing Trump probably has right.

Across the spectrum, smart and troubled voices on the center-right spectrum are articulating why they will not support Trump and why Republicans must reject the menace. Former George W. Bush speechwriter Pete Wehner, one of the most eloquent voices, wrote in The New York Times: "Mr. Trump's virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe."
He's right, of course. Every Republican, from elected officials to super volunteers to leaders of the party, must ask themselves what it will mean for the GOP and, vastly more important, the country to play a role enabling this hateful man. Hillary Clinton will likely crush him, but that's really not the point. There is something at stake here larger than one election. To support Trump is to support the hate and racism he embodies. That is simply an intolerable moral position for any political party.

If Trump wins the nomination, politicians who support him will be acquiescing to, if not actively aiding, his hate. Donors, including the corporate donors, whom every convention depends on for support, cannot support a man with Trump's unbalanced, bigoted views. How can any corporation justify to its board that it donated funds to support a bigot?
If the Republican Party stands for nothing but winning elections, it deserves to lose. It will with Trump. But on the day after the election, the pain will not be just that the White House, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives are now in Democratic hands.
No, the greatest pain will be from the shame of pretending that an evil man was not evil and a hater really didn't mean what he said. We hold elections every two years, and there is always the chance to regain lost offices. But there is no mechanism to regain one's dignity and sense of decency once squandered.
That defeat is permanent. To support Trump is to support a bigot. It's really that simple.

[stew]

GOP establishment getting VERY worried...

Stuart Stevens, Romney's campaign manager, on Trump, in the aftermath of the David Duke issue:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/29/a-vote-for-donald-trump-is-a-vote-for-bigotry.html

A Vote for Donald Trump Is a Vote for Bigotry

There's winning. And then there's supporting a bigot. If the GOP lines up behind Trump, it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously anymore.
Political consulting and morality go together about as well as that famous fish and bicycle. Lawyers have constructed a neat paradigm obligating them to handle any and all clients, a very convenient way to maintain pretext of high road while taking any road possible. So it is with political consultants. For years when asked my positions on issues, my standard response has been, "I don't have positions, I have clients."
Along the way I've been accused of not believing in anything but winning, which I always took as a compliment. The only reason I or any political consultant should be hired is to help a client win. We're not there to remind a candidate of his deeply held positions or to solve the problems of the world. We are there for one purpose: to do everything possible to win an election. We're the hammer, votes are the nail.
But to my annoyance, I can't take that position in the 2016 election. I'd like to blame it on Donald Trump, but that would be like be blaming a dog for barking. No, honesty demands the admission that Trump would not be important if he were not winning. And he's winning.

For months when pressed on Trump and what he meant for the Republican Party, I've been giving a stock answer that struck me as both true and easy: If we agree that Trump winning the Republican nomination means something, we have to agree that his not winning means something. That worked well enough and had the added bonus of being a setup—I hoped—for an "I told you so moment" when Trump didn't win.
After Iowa, that answer was looking pretty good, and it seemed easy enough to defeat Trump when his image of "winner" had been damaged. But to my utter astonishment, none of the Republican campaigns focused on what was the screamingly obvious mandate of the moment: defeat Trump. Instead there was this mass hysteria of candidates fighting fiercely to determine what order the losers could finish behind Trump.

Jeb Bush took on Trump more than any candidate but he was, bizarrely, not backed with sufficient force by the huge weaponry of his Right to Rise super PAC. Instead of scrambling to put the best tanks into the field to face the enemy's armor, Right to Rise spent more than $100 million in the care and feeding of cavalry horses. Predictably, once the shooting started, they were slaughtered.
So now Trump has won three of the four latest contests and is poised to keep winning until he has enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination. There is still some hope that he can be stopped short of the 1,236 delegates needed to win on the first ballot, but realistically this requires the three major candidates facing Trump—Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich—to win their home states between now and March 16. It looks like Cruz will do so on Tuesday, but at the moment Rubio is considerably behind Trump in Florida, and Kasich and Trump are basically tied in Ohio.
Can it happen? Sure. Will it? Well, I hope so. (And anytime political consultants use phrases like "I hope so," it is like a doctor looking at an x-ray and saying, "That shadow might be an imaging error." Don't count on it.)

On Sunday, Feb. 28, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination was unable to answer a question about renouncing David Duke and white supremacists. "I don't know anything about David Duke," Trump said, which places the candidate in the unenviable position that his defenders could claim he wasn't a bigot but merely the dumbest man in America. Jake Tapper of CNN continued to push Trump, and he continued to refuse to denounce Duke and white supremacists. Only later in the day did Trump tweet out that, gee, he didn't really like Duke.
This latest is more than utterly disgusting. It really makes it impossible to pretend that Trump is not only an idiot but also a racist idiot. Yes, there were plenty of reasons to believe this before, with his rants about Mexican "rapists" and his prideful embrace of running for president in the Key of Hate. This is a man who attacked the pope. But even if Trump says he has never asked God for forgiveness—for his sake, let's hope that's another Trump lie—Americans are forgiving and there is always the tendency to give people another chance to correct mistakes.

But we shouldn't be giving Trump any more room for doubt. He's proven he's a uniquely ugly figure to emerge in American political history. He's threatened citizens who oppose him, like his outburst against the Ricketts family, who have contributed to a super PAC opposing him. He ended the week ranting about rewriting libel laws and threatening Amazon because founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and it is covering Trump. Fortunately Bezos is vastly wealthier than Trump and can buy and sell him a dozen times over. In Trump's value system, Bezos is much the better man. Actually that's one thing Trump probably has right.

Across the spectrum, smart and troubled voices on the center-right spectrum are articulating why they will not support Trump and why Republicans must reject the menace. Former George W. Bush speechwriter Pete Wehner, one of the most eloquent voices, wrote in The New York Times: "Mr. Trump's virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe."
He's right, of course. Every Republican, from elected officials to super volunteers to leaders of the party, must ask themselves what it will mean for the GOP and, vastly more important, the country to play a role enabling this hateful man. Hillary Clinton will likely crush him, but that's really not the point. There is something at stake here larger than one election. To support Trump is to support the hate and racism he embodies. That is simply an intolerable moral position for any political party.

If Trump wins the nomination, politicians who support him will be acquiescing to, if not actively aiding, his hate. Donors, including the corporate donors, whom every convention depends on for support, cannot support a man with Trump's unbalanced, bigoted views. How can any corporation justify to its board that it donated funds to support a bigot?
If the Republican Party stands for nothing but winning elections, it deserves to lose. It will with Trump. But on the day after the election, the pain will not be just that the White House, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives are now in Democratic hands.
No, the greatest pain will be from the shame of pretending that an evil man was not evil and a hater really didn't mean what he said. We hold elections every two years, and there is always the chance to regain lost offices. But there is no mechanism to regain one's dignity and sense of decency once squandered.
That defeat is permanent. To support Trump is to support a bigot. It's really that simple.

What does a vote for Clinton mean then?

I dont give a shite what Rooney or his lackey think of Trump, why do they not give their opinion on killory?

I couldn't vote for either of them if I had a vote to be honest, both are despicable in their own ways and both are unfit for the role of President.

[The Iceman]

I can't point to anyone right now who would do a better job than Obama. And I have no allegiance to the man at all - I dislike him a lot!

Trump is the worst candidate I've ever seen  - I think he is a democrat plant but either way he is a bigot and is horrible for any country
Clinton is a disaster - her flaws and faults have been pointed out and I don't need to repeat them - bad news for America if she is in office
Bernie brings a whole new mess and set of problems with his ideologies on socialism
and there is nobody left on the Republican side I could really vote for.... the place is couped

[J70]

GOP establishment getting VERY worried...

Stuart Stevens, Romney's campaign manager, on Trump, in the aftermath of the David Duke issue:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/29/a-vote-for-donald-trump-is-a-vote-for-bigotry.html

A Vote for Donald Trump Is a Vote for Bigotry

There's winning. And then there's supporting a bigot. If the GOP lines up behind Trump, it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously anymore.
Political consulting and morality go together about as well as that famous fish and bicycle. Lawyers have constructed a neat paradigm obligating them to handle any and all clients, a very convenient way to maintain pretext of high road while taking any road possible. So it is with political consultants. For years when asked my positions on issues, my standard response has been, "I don't have positions, I have clients."
Along the way I've been accused of not believing in anything but winning, which I always took as a compliment. The only reason I or any political consultant should be hired is to help a client win. We're not there to remind a candidate of his deeply held positions or to solve the problems of the world. We are there for one purpose: to do everything possible to win an election. We're the hammer, votes are the nail.
But to my annoyance, I can't take that position in the 2016 election. I'd like to blame it on Donald Trump, but that would be like be blaming a dog for barking. No, honesty demands the admission that Trump would not be important if he were not winning. And he's winning.

For months when pressed on Trump and what he meant for the Republican Party, I've been giving a stock answer that struck me as both true and easy: If we agree that Trump winning the Republican nomination means something, we have to agree that his not winning means something. That worked well enough and had the added bonus of being a setup—I hoped—for an "I told you so moment" when Trump didn't win.
After Iowa, that answer was looking pretty good, and it seemed easy enough to defeat Trump when his image of "winner" had been damaged. But to my utter astonishment, none of the Republican campaigns focused on what was the screamingly obvious mandate of the moment: defeat Trump. Instead there was this mass hysteria of candidates fighting fiercely to determine what order the losers could finish behind Trump.

Jeb Bush took on Trump more than any candidate but he was, bizarrely, not backed with sufficient force by the huge weaponry of his Right to Rise super PAC. Instead of scrambling to put the best tanks into the field to face the enemy's armor, Right to Rise spent more than $100 million in the care and feeding of cavalry horses. Predictably, once the shooting started, they were slaughtered.
So now Trump has won three of the four latest contests and is poised to keep winning until he has enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination. There is still some hope that he can be stopped short of the 1,236 delegates needed to win on the first ballot, but realistically this requires the three major candidates facing Trump—Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich—to win their home states between now and March 16. It looks like Cruz will do so on Tuesday, but at the moment Rubio is considerably behind Trump in Florida, and Kasich and Trump are basically tied in Ohio.
Can it happen? Sure. Will it? Well, I hope so. (And anytime political consultants use phrases like "I hope so," it is like a doctor looking at an x-ray and saying, "That shadow might be an imaging error." Don't count on it.)

On Sunday, Feb. 28, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination was unable to answer a question about renouncing David Duke and white supremacists. "I don't know anything about David Duke," Trump said, which places the candidate in the unenviable position that his defenders could claim he wasn't a bigot but merely the dumbest man in America. Jake Tapper of CNN continued to push Trump, and he continued to refuse to denounce Duke and white supremacists. Only later in the day did Trump tweet out that, gee, he didn't really like Duke.
This latest is more than utterly disgusting. It really makes it impossible to pretend that Trump is not only an idiot but also a racist idiot. Yes, there were plenty of reasons to believe this before, with his rants about Mexican "rapists" and his prideful embrace of running for president in the Key of Hate. This is a man who attacked the pope. But even if Trump says he has never asked God for forgiveness—for his sake, let's hope that's another Trump lie—Americans are forgiving and there is always the tendency to give people another chance to correct mistakes.

But we shouldn't be giving Trump any more room for doubt. He's proven he's a uniquely ugly figure to emerge in American political history. He's threatened citizens who oppose him, like his outburst against the Ricketts family, who have contributed to a super PAC opposing him. He ended the week ranting about rewriting libel laws and threatening Amazon because founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and it is covering Trump. Fortunately Bezos is vastly wealthier than Trump and can buy and sell him a dozen times over. In Trump's value system, Bezos is much the better man. Actually that's one thing Trump probably has right.

Across the spectrum, smart and troubled voices on the center-right spectrum are articulating why they will not support Trump and why Republicans must reject the menace. Former George W. Bush speechwriter Pete Wehner, one of the most eloquent voices, wrote in The New York Times: "Mr. Trump's virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe."
He's right, of course. Every Republican, from elected officials to super volunteers to leaders of the party, must ask themselves what it will mean for the GOP and, vastly more important, the country to play a role enabling this hateful man. Hillary Clinton will likely crush him, but that's really not the point. There is something at stake here larger than one election. To support Trump is to support the hate and racism he embodies. That is simply an intolerable moral position for any political party.

If Trump wins the nomination, politicians who support him will be acquiescing to, if not actively aiding, his hate. Donors, including the corporate donors, whom every convention depends on for support, cannot support a man with Trump's unbalanced, bigoted views. How can any corporation justify to its board that it donated funds to support a bigot?
If the Republican Party stands for nothing but winning elections, it deserves to lose. It will with Trump. But on the day after the election, the pain will not be just that the White House, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives are now in Democratic hands.
No, the greatest pain will be from the shame of pretending that an evil man was not evil and a hater really didn't mean what he said. We hold elections every two years, and there is always the chance to regain lost offices. But there is no mechanism to regain one's dignity and sense of decency once squandered.
That defeat is permanent. To support Trump is to support a bigot. It's really that simple.

What does a vote for Clinton mean then?

I dont give a shite what Rooney or his lackey think of Trump, why do they not give their opinion on killory?

I couldn't vote for either of them if I had a vote to be honest, both are despicable in their own ways and both are unfit for the role of President.

Well, no one is accusing Clinton of either being a bigot or indulging bigoted views he doesn't hold for political reasons.

And I'm sure it goes without saying that Stevens and the rest of the GOP are vehemently opposed to Clinton for policy reasons, NOT out of fear of what handing a nomination to a person would do to their own party.

That aside, you, above all people on this board, are an illustration of the long term GOP project to bring down "Killory" Clinton. It may be out of the headlines at the moment, but who do you think is responsible for your antipathy towards her? You didn't just lick the "Clinton hung four people out to dry in Benghazi" or killed Vince Foster and lots of other people stuff off the ground. How many Benghazi "investigations" have we had now? The latest one will, I'm sure, time its findings, assuming there are any, to come out in the autumn.

So don't worry, the GOP is ALWAYS hard at work on Hillary. Its just that they're also worried that all that "work" might be in vain if Trump gets the nomination.

[J70]

I can't point to anyone right now who would do a better job than Obama. And I have no allegiance to the man at all - I dislike him a lot!

Trump is the worst candidate I've ever seen  - I think he is a democrat plant but either way he is a bigot and is horrible for any country
Clinton is a disaster - her flaws and faults have been pointed out and I don't need to repeat them - bad news for America if she is in office
Bernie brings a whole new mess and set of problems with his ideologies on socialism
and there is nobody left on the Republican side I could really vote for.... the place is couped

Obama could literally sleepwalk into a third term, if it was allowed.

As a presidential candidate, he is head and shoulders above any of the people currently running. Which is not to say he is without flaws. Just that this must be the poorest presidential field in decades.