funtax posted:

Apparently, I will need a time machine to get my book-throwin' on.

quote:

Bush later joked about the issue by talking about his leadership of the "Republic Party" the following month.[28] On February 4, 2007, Bush joked in a speech to House Democrats, stating "Now look, my diction isn't all that good. I have been accused of occasionally mangling the English language. And so I appreciate you inviting the head of the Republic Party."

Miltank posted:

So what are you saying exactly? The Finance Industry supports Hillary for every reason except that she is milquetoast on financial reform?

Nessus posted:

I think the suggestion here is that a fair number of the donations to Hilldogg are coming from people who work in the finance industry, who are not necessarily lobbying her to reduce regulations on the industry, but are instead more generally in favor of Hillary. What portion? I don't know, and it may not be knowable. But a donation from your uncle the establishment Democrat who works at Goldman Sachs probably does not share the same aura of evil that the official corporate donation from Goldman Sachs does.

Nintendo Kid posted:

So are you going to be pissed at bernie if hillary drops dead and he gets the nom by default, because they're not going to stop donating to the democrats?

Like seriously, that is exactly what is going to happen, the only thing preventing that would be the Democrats utterly collapsing.

Axolotl posted:

I have a lower opinion of evangelicals and the sincerity with which they hold their beliefs than you do.

I'd honestly say that I think a lot of evangelicals are more about "gently caress the gays, the muslims, liberals, etc" than about spreading the word of Jesus Christ, except when they're using it to poo poo on the above groups.

Skwirl posted:

I think if Ford hadn't loving pardoned Nixon, it might have caused future administrations to stop for a second and think "wait, what if we get caught?" But once that precedent was set we ended up with the current system.

Joementum posted:

Jon Bernstein has a good explanation of this phenomenon.


There was a NYT article yesterday that ended with the reporter asking an Iowan to name the candidates they'd heard of and they named only Jeb!, Hillary, and Trump. It's going to be very important to keep in mind that if you're reading this thread you have significantly more knowledge than the average poll respondent because you're a broken person with misaligned priorities and concerns.

NotWearingPants posted:

Carson is by far the smartest one on that stage, right? Head of neurosurgery at John Hopkins? I guess he's some kind of idiot savant though.

EXTREME INSERTION posted:

You think I'm joking when I say "chemo brain", but I'm convinced that the chemo hosed him up

quadrophrenic posted:

Trump starts Twitter slapfight with Megyn Kelly at 3am





America's classiest president

District Selectman posted:

Frank Luntz is kind of a slob, he's right about that. I was hypnotized by his ill fitting jacket sleeves, shirt collar, and half done tie. You're on national television guy, you look like a teenager who borrowed clothes from daddy's closet

PrBacterio posted:

So are there any post-debate poll results in yet? Watching the debate I honestly couldn't tell if it was going to help or hurt Trump in this world where nothing seems to faze his popularity. In a sane world this debate should have utterly sunk him but it's become pretty clear now that that's not the world we live in ...

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

These aren't just policy disagreements, the man has a fundamental misunderstanding of basic policy issues.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Is there a popularity cut-off for the DNC debates? Is it just going to be Bernie versus Hillary based on current data?

Idiot Kicker posted:

Someone's gotta have that collage of blonde women employed by or related to Fox News.
Here, got it:

a rowdy mullet posted:

Bernie's rally at Westlake park here in Seattle is currently getting disrupted by black lives matter protestors, they've taken over the mic and everything

Sheng-ji Yang posted:

"successful"

Sheng-ji Yang posted:

how is tanking two fortune 500 companies successful?

echronorian posted:

Black twitter is sharing the poo poo out of this story http://rhrealitycheck.org/ablc/2015/07/22/youre-white-marched-dr-king/

Miltank posted:

How are you gonna write an essay on political history and have no idea about political history?? Christ, I hardly know where to start with this.

Bob Ojeda posted:

the original quote was questioning whether Carly could be called 'successful', not Trump

echronorian posted:

Just wanna reinforce that Trump is well liked by many black people because guess what, they want that drat border secured.
https://youtu.be/hhQfUiDhjQg

There are a lot of issues the black community (especially the more religious wings) have that white Liberals are just not ready for. For example, a lot of black Christians are extremely anti gay, and disapprove of Obama's "love is love" statement. I know that to some of you Trumps plain statements like "black people are lazy" set off the white guilt racism alarm but a lot of black people think that shits funny.

Daynab posted:

I know, I didn't mean now as in now but it's the first time I see so called leftists be as dismissive as the right would be and it's really gross

Mrit posted:

This is awesome, stop going all since they went after your Lord and Savior Bernie.

Joementum posted:

Except they didn't.

Here To Help posted:

Sometimes people identify a problem and begin to make honest attempts to enact change. These people can become angry or frustrated when they feel they are not being heard. This can result in a loss of social control which makes them appear spiteful, hypocritical & mean spirited. At large this may harm the movement they identify with which is why being a leader is so difficult (it requires endless patience).

Brannock posted:

the best way to piss off sheltered whites is to prevent them from participating in their god-given right to drive around in our horrible car culture

blue squares posted:

Oh my god. This is on the front page of reddit:



I love Bernie but this is an offensive comparison to make

Pohl posted:

Patter Song posted:

So...according to Nate Silver, the guy who is leading the GOP primary in national polls by double digits, has leads in early states and later states in polls, has infinite money to draw on, and is running against a field of drooling inbreds has a 2% chance at his nomination.

A guy who is behind by 20% nationally, down by a similar margin in Iowa and maybe sort of tied in New Hampshire depending on the poll you listen to, has no support in later states besides maybe his home state of Vermont and a few others, has a low budget campaign and is running against a former First Lady/Senator/Secretary of State has a 5% chance at his nomination.

I don't understand Nate Silver these days.

Spatula City posted:

It's going to be, like, 30 years before self-checkout is a practical replacement for cashiers. The industry has to wait on a bunch of old people who are totally confused by the machines to die off, and for the technology to improve significantly. It's one of those jobs only people can do reliably because the tech isn't there yet.

Joementum posted:

One possibility:

Hodgepodge posted:

It would be ironic, but sort of quixotically charming, if Carson gains support to some degree because Republicans may have hosed up ideas about race, but they really really don't like to think of themselves as racist.

I could totally see, oh, 10-15% of Republicans choosing a Black man who they see as honestly sharing their worldview over someone who is rapidly attracting the vocally racist wing of the party. Especially if there's some repressed guilt about the rhetoric about Obama (who I imagine they can't wait to fondly remember) from the same parties. Carson could easily fill the role of Jimmy Carter (who believe it or not was elected on the strength of his religious appeal to the Evangelical vote) meets the person they like to remember Martin Luther King Jr as. He's already got a firm base among the evangelicals, and once they've decided someone is one of them, they're basically voting for Jesus and not the candidate anyhow.

Shageletic posted:

Why Trump won't win:



http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/22/donald-trump-wont-win-republican-presidential-nomination

The unfavorability numbers are dated, but there's still some good stuff there, especially the Guiliani comparisons, and the endorsement factor.

Patter Song posted:

The Giuliani comparison is absurd. Giuliani pulled completely out of the critical first two contests and moved his entire campaign infrastructure to Florida. When Huckabee won IA, McCain won NH, and Romney got second in each everyone forgot Giuliani existed.

Trump is going all in on the first two contests and, in particular, is dominating New Hampshire. There also isn't an establishment candidate with strong preexisting ties to New Hampshire, unlike McCain, who won the state in 2000, or Romney, who had been governor of adjacent Massachusetts.

William Bear posted:

I just got a degree in political science. If Trump gets the nomination, thus rendering it obsolete and proving that everything political scientists know is wrong, I hope I can get a refund.

Montasque posted:

For me this is the most important bit:


I will change my mind about Trump if he starts getting endorsements... Until then it tells me that he party has out right rejected him.

DrProsek posted:

What did Walker do in April other than "what he has always been doing"? I thought it was just Trump devouring his support but Trump's surges only properly overlap with Walker's plummet in New Hampshire and South Carolina, while in Iowa and nationwide Trump's surge only happened after Walker's fall.

OctoberBlues posted:

This prompted me to look up the 2012 New Hampshire primary, where I discovered that Barack Obama got more votes in the Republican contest than Herman Cain did. (Cain had suspended his campaign a month earlier, but still...)

Did the 285 people who voted for Obama think it would be a funny joke? Were they confused? We may never know...

Montasque posted:

The nomination process isn't about who's the most popular, it's about who has the most powerful friends in the party.

Jewel Repetition posted:

He didn't even spell Abu Bakr Al-Bahgdadi right after presumably looking him up.

Joementum posted:

Except that Hillary Clinton is the most popular candidate among Democrats, both those elected to office and Democratic voters.

Neurolimal posted:

I'm not sure why Nintendo Kid is so hostile to these questions. Is he always like this? It doesn't seem like a productive way of persuading people to your side.

tsa posted:

Still going to lose to the Trump unfortunately : (


mental disorder. we're talking about a person who posted here for months without realizing that only he could see his posts. Unfortunately due to terrible coding in the forums that cannot happen again.

Nintendo Kid posted:

You're asking My First Politics questions at the same time you try to act like you know politics. You're really stupid and there's no need to be touchy-feely in this forum. I saw people pulling your poo poo, mostly about Ron Paul, in the 2008 and 2012 election cycles.

Montasque posted:

Speaking of the MINORITY vote...

SHOCK POLL: Trump Receives 25% of Black Vote in General Election Matchup

This story is blowing up in all hard-right circles right now as proof that Trump is going to take them to the promised land.

I guess that Labor-day reset will have to be postponed....

JT Jag posted:

There are just so many reasons why this poll is hosed up. I'd like to see their methodology.

Joementum posted:

Correct. I was trying to make a distinction between candidates like Mitt Romney and Herman Cain. Rick Santorum will never win the nomination of the Republican party, but that doesn't make him a joke candidate like Cain, Bachmann, Carson, or Trump.

Mirthless posted:

State universities are wasting money on rock walls, lavish facilities and underperforming football teams as well. They "have to" waste money to "remain competitive with private universities"

On college sports:

Just an assistant coach for a low ranked, woefully underfunded football team in the NCAA takes in a six figure salary. If you have a lovely team you're spending two million dollars on coaches and their support staff alone. If your team isn't huge, there is no way in hell it's paying for itself. That's a huge amount of money to spend every year to play an amateur sport.

The big universities have millionaire coaches, assistant coaches and coordinators, but supposedly those pay for themselves and also only pay for themselves as long as their operating costs are high? I don't really get that one, I'm sure some NCAA apologist will trip over himself to Um, Actually me with the details. Anyway, some NCAA coaches are making more than NFL coaches now! Taxpayer, student and alumni dollars at work here, guys!

Just remember the next time you make a student loan payment, the school could have given out 10-100++ scholarships this year or proportionally reduced tuition for their students but instead of that they spent that money paying the assistant to the guy who tells college students how to move a ball around a football field

Jazerus posted:

Operations and construction are two separate pools of money in most colleges and construction money cannot be spent on operations. Starfleet Academy dorms, climbing walls, etc., beyond their maintenance costs, can't actually impact the operations budget - and state support for operations has fallen dramatically basically everywhere.

Mirthless posted:

If the media and the public are tired of hearing about Benghazi, and they're not concerned about Hillary's email server (which, I think this "scandal" has shown, they're not) I don't know what makes you think they're going to care about a six year old scandal about that one time Hillary fibbed about a sniper at an airport she had visited more than a decade before.

quote:

At this point, Hillary has been attacked from the inside at every angle possible and they have all failed to gain traction. Unless somebody gets a 47% out of her, or some Nixon era criminality, they're not bringing her down with a scandal. After a decade of heir apparent Hillary weathering scandal after scandal, the American public just aren't interested in entertaining them anymore.

Hillary Clinton is the Brangelina of politicians. Nobody is interested in the drama or particulars anymore, unless it's blowing up we don't want to hear about it, and god help you if you run the divorce story when it isn't happening you sons of bitches

JT Jag posted:

This might be worth discussing.

JT Jag posted:

And that's why John McCain is president of the United States now.

Neurolimal posted:

This is a pretty interesring poll, it at least slightly suggests that democrat-favoring women aren't likely to resist negative trends just due to the gender of the candidate or percieved Historic Moment.

I wonder if theres a poll to gauge how many female democrats respond well to economically left policies compared to male democrats?

MaxxBot posted:

I have conflicted thoughts about the rise of Ben Carson in the polls.

I originally thought he would flame out quickly but he's already managed to make some missteps without it having any effect on his poll numbers. On one hand he has no political experience and on paper you wouldn't think he would be able to make it far but on the other hand he's basically a nice, soft-spoken, polite man who's every bit as ideologically extreme as Ted Cruz. He kind of has the Walker effect going where if you don't pay attention to politics you're not going to have any idea just how odious his ideology is, compared to someone like Cruz who won't go 2 seconds without reminding you.

Boosted_C5 posted:

I can't wait for him to publish his economic/tax policy paper next. I'm hoping for some BIG cuts to marginal income tax rates balanced out by making taxation fairer and ending preferential treatment for wall-street, the same treatment Obama and the democrats have defended in order to hike our marginal income tax rates up again.

Montasque posted:

Jeb! is going to Budd Dwyer it one of these days.