US Election: 2016

[jollyjacktar]

I can well imagine even Lucifer would be offended at the thought.  What a low blow insult.

 

[Journeyman]

The religious right has lost many battles in the past few decades, bathrooms might be the last stand.

See? More misogyny!

Not everyone stands in the bathroom, ya know.  I'm personally very, very offended on behalf of....well, someone, I'm sure.



;D  <-- so even the dullards know I'm not serious.  :nod:

 

[Blackadder1916]

Just how bad does one have to be when Satanists are offended by comparison to Ted Cruz?

Satanists balk at Cruz comparison

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/278130-the-satanic-temple-dont-link-us-with-cruz

. . . . . The Satanic Temple seeks “to be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will,” according to its website. . . . . .

How can you take such Satanists seriously?  Whatever happened to the traditional virtues vices of debauchery, hedonism and sexual perversity that was their appeal?  These guys are trying to sound like Shriners without the funny hats and tiny cars.

 

[cupper]

A fairly good discussion on why Clinton could win, but things would not be any different.

Which makes a very interesting case for both parties to consider very carefully who they want to put up in 2020 if Clinton is coronated.

How Hillary Could Win the Election—and Lose the Country
She’d be a status-quo president at a time when both left and right are desperate for change.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/how-hillary-could-win-the-electionand-lose-the-country-213852

Hillary Clinton’s all-but-insurmountable delegate lead in the Democratic race, and her strong numbers against any probable Republican opponent in the fall, now pose a paradox: She might win the presidency but lose the country.

The reason is that Clinton lacks a big, new animating idea in a year when voters in both parties are so discontented they have embraced some pretty bad ones. Like them or loathe them, Donald Trump's and Bernie Sanders’ messages are crystal clear and call for dramatic change, while Clinton’s remains spread softly all over the map. And her agenda promises less change than continuation—of the centrist Democratic Party policies that her husband pursued and which Barack Obama has largely followed. It’s no surprise that one of Clinton’s biggest campaign themes is to praise both her predecessor Democratic presidents—the one she married and the one she went to work for—effusively.

In her New York primary victory speech recently, Clinton delivered a laundry list worthy of a State of the Union address, declaring her support for “civil rights, voting rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights, and rights for people with disabilities,” and pledging to fight for “places that have been left out and left behind, from inner cities to coal country to Indian country.”

The twist is that Clinton almost certainly has the best chance in the field to deliver such a speech as president, yet she might still face a hellish four or eight years in office without a crisper organizing theme that pledges fundamental change, because so many voters in the opposition party—and her own—will be nursing bitter disappointments from Day One. She’s already in danger of pre-alienating the Democratic base, with many Sanders supporters vowing never to support her.

Some agenda items of a second Clinton presidency would be obvious enough. Dogged preservation of Obama’s legacy (and her husband’s), including health care reform. Continuance of the Democrats’ agenda on immigration, including by executive actions where possible. Support for early childhood programs, affordable child care and debt-free college education. Pragmatically hawkish foreign policy around the world.

But such initiatives seem out of scale with the size of the problems the country faces, and the depth of the anger and distress that is driving the movements behind Sanders on the left and Trump on the right. Clinton contends that Trump’s and Sanders’ various protectionist prescriptions for rescuing the middle class range from unrealistic to unAmerican. But she has not made a compelling case for how she herself would address the dislocations and anxiety that are partially the byproduct of the economic globalization that Bill Clinton and Obama both embraced wholeheartedly.

“It is a real challenge, particularly on the economy,” says veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “In many places, her more pragmatic approach is very appealing, especially on national security and homeland security, where new ideas can be very dangerous. But on the economy, people—particularly blue-collar workers of all races—are looking for a more fundamental change. She’s going to have to articulate a bigger economic policy.”

Not surprisingly, the longtime Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway is blunter. “Her commanding rationale is what it’s always been: ‘It’s my time and the country is ready for a female president, and it ought to be me,’” Conway says. “And a combination of running for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s third terms. That in itself gives you a messaging headache, because those were two different presidencies and two different Democratic parties, but she can’t afford to alienate either one, because both of those presidencies were beloved by the Democratic base and acceptable to general election voters.”

Running to fill the third term that Ronald Reagan was barred from seeking was enough to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, but not enough to sustain him when his lack of the “vision thing” left him vulnerable to Bill Clinton four years later. Hillary Clinton now faces a similar challenge.

But Clinton's advisers contend that her pragmatic message is bearing fruit, in repeated victories over Sanders in big, diverse states. "Hillary Clinton is winning because she’s offering real solutions to big challenges that will make a real difference in people’s lives so everyone can share in the promise of America," says her chief strategist, Joel Benenson. "And there’s so much cynicism about politics and Washington today, that the vast majority of voters know there aren’t easy or simple answers to our challenges. That’s why Hillary is connecting with people when she talks about breaking down all the barriers holding people back, from corporate greed to racism or sexism..."

At the very moment she’s come close to an insurmountable delegate advantage over Sanders, and is posting a steady 10-point average edge over Trump in general election polls, Clinton could be forgiven for wondering why such a significant slice of the pundit class and members of her own party view her the way her unforgiving father Hugh Rodham did more than 50 years ago, when she’d come home with a single B on her report card and he’d want to know why she hadn’t earned straight A’s.

True, she has the worst unfavorable ratings of any would-be Democratic nominee in modern times, hovering steadily around 55 percent. But Ted Cruz’s are just as bad—and Trump’s 10 or 15 percentage points worse. True, she has blown through millions of dollars and uncounted hours fending off Sanders’ primary challenge in states that she should have been able to ignore, so safe would they normally be for a Democrat in November. But she’ll still be able to count on the core support of Democratic donors and activists determined to hold on to the White House at almost any price.

“Somebody is going to get elected,” says Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who worked for Marco Rubio this cycle. “You could have pretty negative ratings, but if your opponent has more negative ratings, relatively, you’re the winner.”

But it is entirely possible to be the winner and still not get much of a mandate—to enter office as a kind of default president who gets in because no other candidate is electable but who doesn’t have the faith and loyalty of a large portion of the nation. Clinton is selling “realism” to a electorate that is, judging from the polls, deeply unhappy with its current reality. Her steady-as-she-goes brand of politics, and her “one from column A and two from column B” ideas are out of sync with the mood of the electorate in this three-sheets-to-the-wind age. To invert the columnist Murray Kempton’s famous maxim about Mayor John Lindsay of New York, she is tired and everyone else is fresh.

And Clinton’s all-things-to-all-people campaign message makes it harder to argue that she’d have a clear-cut agenda that would serve her and her party well in office. As George Washington advises the impatient Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash Broadway musical “Hamilton,” “Winning was easy, young man. Governing’s harder.”

That is basically Clinton’s contention as well. She has taken to arguing that her demonstrated deficiencies as a candidate pale beside her competence as an executive and administrator in office, and she did, in fact, win generally high approval ratings and praise for her effectiveness as secretary of state and as senator from New York.
But a president’s greatest power is persuasion—and successful persuasion first requires an inspirational vision. John Kennedy pledged to “begin anew,” saying “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” of which he was the exemplar. Ronald Reagan declared it was “morning in America” after the twilight years of the 1970s, a period of big government spending, stagflation and a draining hostage crisis, saying, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Bill Clinton vowed to embrace “change versus more of the same.” Barack Obama promised “change we can believe in,” and pledged to create an army of devotees to carry it out.

Nothing in what pollster Conway calls Clinton’s “knitting together of scattershot sound-bites” comes close to distilling her worldview so succinctly. Indeed, in her victory speech in Brooklyn, she even resorted to borrowing one of her husband’s less than compelling generalities, “There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be cured by what’s right with America.” Like Obama, she is calling for unity, "breaking down barriers" and compassion—but that seems less like her own personal vision than a stock, stump response to Trump.

“There is something going on out there, and nobody’s quite sure what it is, and what a principled leader can do about it,” says Jeff Shesol, who was a White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton. “What do you do to address it, because it’s something that needs to be addressed, and the next president ought to have something to say about it. The answers of Sanders I think are all too pat; they’re just sort of impulses. And I think Hillary Clinton holds herself to a higher standard. But when you do that, when you acknowledge the answers aren’t that easy, then what do you say? I don’t think she knows yet.”

Sanders’ liberal insurgency—and Trump’s nativist challenge from the right—have posed challenges for Clinton because at a time when two-thirds of voters are dissatisfied with the economy, both candidates have “an economic narrative,” as Celinda Lake puts it. “They have an origins story. They tell us how we got here, and who’s to blame—in Sanders’ case, Wall Street; in Trump’s, immigrants. If you can’t tell us how we got here, and who the villains are, how are we going to get out of it?”
Lake says she believes Clinton resists pat answers both because she’s wary of making false promises, and also because she “has a mixed economic view—she doesn’t see things in black and white.”

That may well be an admirable trait in a president, but more than seven years of Obama’s resolutely rationalist leadership may have also shown the limits of its political effectiveness—which is why the electorate seems in the mood for such a different approach today.

There is also every reason to expect a President Hillary Clinton would face intransigence from congressional Republicans equal to or greater than that Obama has faced since taking office, especially if they were licking their wounds in the aftermath of a massive Trump defeat. She would be all but guaranteed to face a bruising Supreme Court confirmation battle right out of the box—whether over Obama’s centrist nominee Merrick Garland or a more reliably liberal choice her supporters might impel her to nominate. And she would face the wrath of the dead-end supporters of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who would see her as selling out Democratic values.

“Sanders is posting Kim Jong Il-like numbers among young people,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, “and those are people with no connection or loyalty to the Clintons whatsoever.”

Far from all Democrats are pessimistic about the prospects for success of a Clinton presidency. “It’s just one of the disjunctions of American politics that the skills required to be a great candidate are not necessarily related to the skills of a great president,” Mellman says. Presidents as different as Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush may well be cases in point.

Democratic media strategist Steve McMahon says Clinton’s campaign contention that she’s a pragmatist who can get things done “is not a very powerful message in the Democratic primary. Democrats are ideologues.” But, he adds, “In a general election, and especially in a presidency, that quality becomes very important. At the end of the day, it’s probably the case that only a pragmatist can get anything done in the current climate.”

Yet there is a reason Clinton has twice struggled to win her own party’s nomination, first against a charismatic young African-American who promised a historic breakthrough that she herself could have bid fair to match, and now against a rumpled septuagenarian who has emerged as the unlikely avatar of the millennial generation. The reason goes well beyond whether she’s a warm and cuddly campaigner, or as effective a speechmaker as her husband at his best.

At the heart of the problem is her enduring difficulty in explaining—clearly and cleanly—what she actually aspires to do as president. And that’s a problem that seems likely to get worse before it gets better.

 

[cavalryman]

Ted Cruz is out.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/live-updates-republican-primary-in-indiana/

 

[cupper]

But before it was over, it went into a different universe:

Trump accuses Cruz's father of helping JFK's assassin

http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/05/trump-ted-cruz-father-222730

Donald Trump on Tuesday alleged that Ted Cruz’s father was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin shortly before he murdered the president, parroting a National Enquirer story claiming that Rafael Cruz was pictured with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963.

A Cruz campaign spokesperson told the Miami Herald, which pointed out numerous flaws in the Enquirer story, that it was “another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage.”
“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said Tuesday during a phone interview with Fox News. “What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don't even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”

“I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?” Trump continued. “It’s horrible.”
Trump’s tangent followed his rebuke of Rafael Cruz using the pulpit to court evangelicals for his son.

“I implore, I exhort every member of the body of Christ to vote according to the word of God and vote for the candidate that stands on the word of God and on the Constitution of the United States of America,” Rafael Cruz said in a video clip aired by Fox News. “And I am convinced that man is my son, Ted Cruz. The alternative could be the destruction of America.”

Asked to respond, Trump called it a disgrace. “I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to do it. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to say it,” he said, before touting his support from Jerry Falwell Jr. and other evangelical leaders.

“You look at so many of the ministers that are backing me, and they’re backing me more so than they’re backing Cruz, and I’m winning the evangelical vote,” Trump continued. “It's disgraceful that his father can go out and do that. And just — and so many people are angry about it. And the evangelicals are angry about it, the way he does that.”

“But I think it's horrible,” he added. “I think it's absolutely horrible that a man can go and do that, what he's saying there.”

And Cruz went ballistic:

Cruz on JFK assassination theory: 'This is nuts'
The Texas senator laces into Trump for insinuating his dad may have somehow been involved in JFK's murder.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/ted-cruz-jfk-assassination-trump-222736

Donald Trump is a pathological liar, Ted Cruz said Tuesday in a forceful and passionate rebuke of the Republican presidential front-runner.

Phoning into Fox News on Tuesday, the real-estate mogul parroted a National Enquirer report alleging that Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, suggesting that the elder Cruz was somehow involved in JFK’s murder.

“This morning, Donald Trump went on national television and attacked my father. Donald Trump alleges that my dad was involved in assassinating JFK,” Cruz told reporters during a news conference in Evansville, Indiana. “Now, let’s be clear, this is nuts. This is not a reasonable position. This is just kooky.”

“And while I’m at it, I guess I should go ahead and admit, yes, my dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard,” Cruz continued sarcastically.

Cruz defended his father, recalling the story of how came to America with just $100, and slammed the National Enquirer as “tabloid trash” that published an “idiotic story.”

Cruz said the tabloid, which recently published a story alleging that the Texas senator has had multiple extramarital affairs, has become Trump’s hit piece to smear his targets.

“I’m gonna tell you what I really think of Donald Trump: This man is a pathological liar,” Cruz said. “He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth, and in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”

Trump floated the conspiracy between the Cuban immigrant and Oswald in retaliation for Rafael Cruz using his pulpit to encourage evangelicals to support Cruz. “I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?” Trump said on Fox News. “It’s horrible.”

The Texas senator’s outburst in response, which came as Indiana primary voters headed to the polls, is the latest sign that his campaign is flailing. Cruz hasn’t won a single delegate since New York’s April 19 primary and has finished third in all but one of the last six states to vote.

Indiana is a critical state for Cruz to win. Not only does he have Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s endorsement in a state that John Kasich agreed to pull out of, but a victory could aid his effort to deny Trump the nomination and he also faces pressure from donors to win — though polls suggest Trump will prevail by double digits Tuesday.

More than a half-dozen Republicans involved in the pro-Cruz and anti-Trump efforts told POLITICO that Indiana is a must-win if he wants support from donors who have grown weary after his string of losses.

Citing a campaign aide, The Associated Press reported earlier Tuesday that Cruz’s camp is bracing for staff cuts “at minimum” if he loses Indiana. Cruz's campaign manager Jeff Roe, however, tweeted that the AP report is “dead wrong.”

The billionaire issued a response Tuesday afternoon, suggesting Cruz is becoming “more unhinged” as he continues to rack up losses.

“Ted Cruz is a desperate candidate trying to save his failing campaign. It is no surprise he has resorted to his usual tactics of over-the-top rhetoric that nobody believes,” Trump said in a statement. “Today’s ridiculous outburst only proves what I have been saying for a long time, that Ted Cruz does not have the temperament to be President of the United States.”

Before Trump spoke out again, Donald Trump Jr. credited Cruz for “an impressive meltdown.” “Desperate but impressive,” he tweeted. “Reminded me of my 3 year old coming off a sugar high.”

Trump campaign senior adviser Barry Bennett told CNN that Cruz’s explosion was “a truly sad display” coming from a campaign that knows it won’t win Indiana.

“I know he’s tired. I feel for he and his family, but that was reprehensible,” Bennett said. “I mean, no one should do this. I don’t know who thought this was a great idea. But, you know, we’re watching his campaign implode. We’re watching his reputation just being torn to shreds.”

Cruz stressed that Trump is incapable of being honest. “But he combines it with being a narcissist, a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen,” Cruz said. “Donald Trump is such a narcissist that Barack Obama looks at him and says, ‘Dude, what’s your problem?’’’

Cruz continued his broadside, insisting during his nine-minute diatribe that Trump is the center of his own world but combines that with being a pathological liar.

“And I say pathological because I actually think Donald, if you hooked him up to a lie detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon and one thing in the evening, all contradictory and he’d pass the lie detector test each time,” he said. “Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it, but the man is utterly amoral.”

Cruz invoked Trump’s other familial attack, when the billionaire retweeted an unflattering image of his wife next to a glamorous picture of Melania Trump, as he continued blasting the businessman as he made his final plea to voters in Indiana to think carefully before they cast their votes for the GOP nominee.

Cruz argued that Trump is a bully who will betray his supporters, who are angry at the status quo in Washington. “I share that anger, and Donald is cynically exploiting that anger. And he is lying to his supporters,” Cruz said. “He will betray his supporters on every issue.”

“Donald Trump is serial philanderer, and he boasts about it. This is not a secret,” he continued. “He’s proud of being a serial philanderer.”

Cruz added that Trump is proud “serial philanderer” as he implored voters to think about the impact a President Trump would have on their children.

“The president of the United States talks about how great it is to commit adultery, how proud he is, describes his battles with venereal disease as his own personal Vietnam,” Cruz said. “That’s a quote, by the way, on the ‘Howard Stern Show.’ Do you want to spend the next five years with your kids bragging about infidelity? Now what does he do? He does the same projection. Just like a pathological liar, he accuses everyone of lying.”

Yet after all of that, when questioned by reporters whether he would still support Trump as the GOP nominee, he still refused to say whether he would or wouldn't.

All we know for sure is that Rafael Cruz needs to be stopped. JFK, Elvis and Hoffa. Who else is on the list?  anic:

 

[jollyjacktar]

Ted Cruz is out.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/live-updates-republican-primary-in-indiana/

Huzzah.  I'm relieved that religious nutbar won't have a shot.

 

[a_majoor]

And so it begins, the marshalling of the "Progressive" forces to reinforce and control the "narrative". While FaceBook is hardly a surprise, given the open support the company's founder has given to the Democrats, it is interesting to contemplate what other avenues and information channels are being compromised, and who is paying for all this? Expect to see a lot more as the election comes closer.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/232969

IT’S LIKE IT’S SOCIAL-MANIPULATION MEDIA OR SOMETHING: Surprise! Facebook Blacklists Trending Topics And Conservative News Outlets.

Related: Could Facebook Swing An Election?

 

[cupper]

I suspect this is going to be a scene that is repeated millions of times over come November 8th.

https://youtu.be/ETqPXudGYgI

 

[tomahawk6]

I can see Trump offering the VP job to Cruz.

 

[GAP]

Trump does not want the competition...Cruz will always want the attention for his next run

 

[cupper]

A good discussion on Clinton's (and the Dem's) problem on messaging, specifically the economic. Trump, for all his faults has messaging down to a science.

Unlike Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton Lacks A Simple, Clear Economic Message

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/07/477034130/unlike-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-lacks-a-simple-clear-economic-message

Hillary Cinton isn't over the finish line yet, but as she continues to battle Bernie Sanders she's also turning her attention to a general election matchup with Donald Trump.

A lot of Democrats say that in order to beat Trump, she needs to be developing a clearer message on the economy.

That's not Donald Trump's problem.

Not only does he have a simple, clear message — he often says so himself.

"Our theme is very simple," Trump reminded voters last week after winning the Indiana primary. "Make America great again. We will make America great again. We will start winning again."

Behind that simple message, there are a host of equally simple sounding policies — policies aimed right at Americans' economic insecurities. Build a wall, dump the bad trade deals, deport 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. Love those ideas or loathe them, it's crystal clear what Trump wants to do.

Not so much with Clinton.

Asked what, in one sentence, Clinton wants to do, here's what David Axelrod, President Obama's former strategist, said:

"I don't think Hillary Clinton wants to do anything in one sentence," said Axelrod. "That's the problem, right? She wants to do things in paragraphs and pages. This has always been a problem in that she is incredibly fluent in policy, she embraces good policy ideas, but she has a hard time weaving them into a coherent narrative that cuts through."

This isn't the first time Clinton has run against an opponent with a big dramatic message. In 2008, it was "hope" and "change."

This year, both Bernie Sanders and Trump have big plans for change: build a wall, break up the banks, make a political revolution. This is what political professionals call an origin story — a clear rationale for how we got here, and who is to blame for it.

Does Clinton Need An 'Origin Story'?

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says Clinton needs her own origin story. She needs to tell voters why they are struggling.

"Why are we not competitive? Why do we not have manufacturing jobs?" said Lake. "We're Americans after all. We're supposed to be able to ensure the next generation has a better chance. That's why all of our families or most of our families came here. That's why all of our families stayed here."

Clinton has a lot of programs to address the economic worries of what she's called everyday Americans — paid family leave, debt free college, affordable child care. But she rarely sums it all up.

She has been experimenting with one big theme, which she calls "Breaking Down Barriers." It's a message aimed at women, Hispanics and African-Americans.

But she does it in her own policy-wonkish way.

"She's someone who always starts from what you can get done," said her campaign chairman, John Podesta. "What's holding people back? What are the barriers people are facing? Whether that's institutional racism or an economy that's rigged for the people at the top. And what can I do about it? That's where she is not only most comfortable, but I think she thinks that's how change happens."

Clinton's Problem Is Democrats' Problem, Too

Coming up with a clear economic message isn't just a problem for Hillary Clinton. It's a problem for Democrats in general. In Celinda Lake's polls, Democrats are consistently behind Republicans on the issue of the economy. In recent general election polls, where Clinton beats Trump handily in the horse race, the economy is the only issue where he beats her. And the economy is THE No. 1 issue. Democrats have never won a presidential election when they're losing on the economy.

"We're starting from a deficit in that," said Lake.

"So it makes it really, really important to articulate a powerful economic origin story and a plan that sums up to the scale of the problems we have. People love her individual policies, but they want to make sure they add up to something big enough to deal with the incredibly entrenched economic problems we have."

What could be Clinton's big idea?

Debt-free college? A major infrastructure program? She hasn't decided yet.

And she has some challenges. In the fall, she'll be running against an unpredictable populist, with positions that are to her left and to her right.

And she has a gender problem.

Trump beats Clinton on the economy not just because he's a businessman — candidates from the business world get an automatic advantage on creating jobs — but because she's a woman. Lake's polling shows that female candidates from both parties are rated behind men on the economy and jobs. Maybe, Lake suggests, because women are too responsible to go for the big sweeping narrative. Clinton has done a little self-analysis on this problem.

In a podcast with Politico's Glenn Thrush, Clinton said, "sometimes I get criticized for 'Oh my gosh there she goes with another plan.' ... I mean, I have said, in this campaign, 'Look, I'm not a natural politician.'"

"I'm not somebody who, like my husband or Barack Obama, just — it's music, right?"

Clinton often says it's easy to diagnose the problem. It's harder to actually do something about the problem. Coming up with the big aspirational message is her problem and she seems to know that. Clinton has shown she's comfortable with the lyrics. The question is, can she write the music, too?

 

[cupper]

P J O'Rourke came out and endorsed Hillary Clinton on today's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

His reasoning explains the thing that is wrong with the choices faced by Republican voters in November.

Trump is wrong on everything he says and believes. And so is Hillary. But Hillary is wrong within normal parameters.

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

There was another Republican with a clear economic message a few years back: "Read my lips: No new taxes"

A clear message;
Followed by clear action to the contrary;
Meant he clearly was not gonna get a second term.  ;D

 

[cupper]

I'm looking forward to the day that the "Lamestream" media finally decides that Palin has no relevant purpose in politics and she finally gets relegated to the fringe media.

Sarah Palin says Paul Ryan will soon be ‘Cantored’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05/08/sarah-palin-says-paul-ryan-will-soon-be-cantored/?hpid=hp_special-topic-chain_pp-palin-935am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Sarah Palin said in a television interview broadcast Sunday that she will support Speaker Paul Ryan's primary challenger, and she compared Ryan to former House majority leader Eric Cantor (Va.), who was stunningly defeated in a 2014 primary.

"I think Paul Ryan is soon to be 'Cantored,'" Palin said on CNN's "State of the Union." Cantor lost his primary to now-Rep. Dave Brat.

Palin, a former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, backs Donald Trump for president. Ryan said this week that he is not ready to support Trump — even though he is the presumptive GOP nominee. Trump and Ryan are slated to meet this week.

Speaker Paul Ryan has backed away from his pledge to support whoever becomes the nominee, saying he's "not ready" to endorse Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Other GOP heavyweights, including the Bushes, are also not giving endorsements.

"His political career is over but for a miracle, because he has so disrespected the will of the people ... and for him to already come out and say who he will not support was not a wise decision of his," Palin added of Ryan.

Businessman Paul Nehlen is challenging Ryan in the Aug. 9 Republican primary. Nehlen has criticized Ryan's refusal to back Trump and has issued a statement saying, “If Mr. Trump is the nominee, I will support that decision."

In her interview, Palin said, "I will do whatever I can for Paul Nehlen."

 

[tomahawk6]

Ryan is a huge disapointment and the sooner he is out of the Speakership the better.

 

[a_majoor]

How FaceBook (and other social media) will attempt to swing the election:

http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
Michael Nunez
Today 9:10am

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.

“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

Depending on whom you ask, Facebook is either the savior or destroyer of journalism in our time. An …

Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.

“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter.”

In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his support for the movement in an internal memo chastising Facebook employees for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans on the company’s internal “signature wall.”)

When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”

(The curators interviewed for this story worked for Facebook across a timespan ranging from mid-2014 to December 2015.)

“We were always cautious about covering Facebook,” said another former curator. “We would always wait to get second level approval before trending something to Facebook. Usually we had the authority to trend anything on our own [but] if it was something involving Facebook, the copy editor would call their manager, and that manager might even call their manager before approving a topic involving Facebook.”

Gizmodo reached out to Facebook for comment about each of these specific claims via email and phone, but did not receive a response.

Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.

Rather, Facebook’s efforts to play the news game reveal the company to be much like the news outlets it is rapidly driving toward irrelevancy: a select group of professionals with vaguely center-left sensibilities. It just happens to be one that poses as a neutral reflection of the vox populi, has the power to influence what billions of users see, and openly discusses whether it should use that power to influence presidential elections.

“It wasn’t trending news at all,” said the former curator who logged conservative news omissions. “It was an opinion.”


[Disclosure: Facebook has launched a program that pays publishers, including the New York Times and Buzzfeed, to produce videos for its Facebook Live tool. Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent company, recently joined that program.]

 

[CougarKing]

:facepalm:

International Business Times

Trump Floats Radical Idea To Back Out Of US Debt Obligations; Economists Aren’t Thrilled
By Owen Davis @odavis_ On 05/07/16 AT 6:00 PM

Asked about the state of the U.S. fiscal situation last week, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump floated a novel idea: Stiff bondholders. If the economy tanks again, Trump said he may consider throwing U.S. debt obligations out the window.

But experts have warned that such an idea would roil both the international financial system and America’s economic footing. “Defaulting on our debt would cause creditors to rightly question the 'full faith' commitment we make," Tony Fratto, former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Treasury Department, told ABC News. "It's an insane idea.”

“That would be an outrageous thing to do,” Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Post. “It could introduce chaos.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[a_majoor]

The US National Debt in 2007 was @ 5 trillion dollars. Today it is over 19 trillion. Unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare/Medicade could be as high as 100 trillion dollars. Many US States have proportionally vast debts and unfunded liabilities related to their employee pensions and benefits. Any guesses as to how that could ever be paid off?

Trump is only saying openly what people have been suspecting for a while now (and we should remember the Great Depression was also caused by the massive debt overhangs created by the Great War). While a default of this odious debt isn't going to be pretty, we have pretty much passed the point of no return quite some time ago. Most Western nations have debt GDP ratios that are far above any sort of safe level, with Japan having the highest with 229% debt/GDP. Nations like China with highly opaque metrics could be in equal trouble as well.

GlennReynolds (Instapundit) sums this up with the simple statement:

Things that can't go on forever, won't. Debt that can't be repaid, won't be. Promises that can't be kept, won't be.

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

Bull!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/infographics/us-national-debt
http://www.smartvoters.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/us-federal-debt-by-president-political-party.jpg