2016 Presidential Horse Race

[ACamp1900]

Bloviate is one of my fav words, live it.

 

[kmoose]

I will try by just using simple words:

Bloviate

Fustian

Heedlessness

Biggity

Benightedness

Ok, so you covered Hillary, now what about Trump?



seriously, though.......... you could make an argument that this is common to probably 90+% of politicians.

 

[phgreek]

Just got back from a Trump rally here....LMAO

I'm all about hearing the opposition and everything...but thats a little extreme. Is there a word the man utters that isn't on TV anyway? Were they giving away some high end micro brew?

 

[Cackalacky]

I'm all about hearing the opposition and everything...but thats a little extreme. Is there a word the man utters that isn't on TV anyway? Were they giving away some high end micro brew?

Had the time and the opportunity. Carpe diem!

 

[phgreek]

Had the time and the opportunity. Carpe diem!

...sometimes you can't unsee shit. Changes a man...just sayin'

Hope it was entertaining and enlightening...or at least interesting.

 

[Cackalacky]

...sometimes you can't unsee shit. Changes a man...just sayin'

Hope it was entertaining and enlightening...or at least interesting.

Objective reinforcement of my existing cognitive bias.

 

[connor_in]

<iframe src="https://vine.co/v/ivA55hrQgPE/embed/simple" width="600" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe><script src="https://platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.js"></script>

 

[connor_in]

A collection of more Vine HRC barking mashups:


Here are some of the funnier Hillary barking like a dog mashup Vines we've seen twitchy.com

 

[IrishLax]

This Viral Rant About Hillary Clinton is the Most Savage Takedown Ever

Kind of funny, POLITICO actually deleted the original comment after it got upvoted, and so now people have been reposting it to their Facebook page. It's kind of funny, because it's 100% true... Hillary Clinton's past is worse than anything Donald Trump has said in terms of racism/discrimination/sexism.

 

[BleedBlueGold]

This Viral Rant About Hillary Clinton is the Most Savage Takedown Ever

Kind of funny, POLITICO actually deleted the original comment after it got upvoted, and so now people have been reposting it to their Facebook page. It's kind of funny, because it's 100% true... Hillary Clinton's past is worse than anything Donald Trump has said in terms of racism/discrimination/sexism.

She's a horrible person and if social media was around back when those things happened, she'd absolutely be crucified for it in a manner that Trump has been for his comments. (This is yet another example of the power of the internet/social media. The more of this type of shit that gets out, the more informed the voters become.)

 

[IrishLax]

She's a horrible person and if social media was around back when those things happened, she'd absolutely be crucified for it in a manner that Trump has been for his comments. (This is yet another example of the power of the internet/social media. The more of this type of shit that gets out, the more informed the voters become.)

Totally agree. Her timing and control of the political machine keeps a lot of this suppressed in traditional media. Traditional media is also corporate and beholden to Clinton because Sanders threatens their existence in a roundabout way.

If voting strictly on who is probably the most "good" or "noble" person, I don't see how anyone can make a case against Sanders at this point.

 

[Cackalacky]

Bernie is having a town hall downtown today. Gonna try and make it.

 

[BleedBlueGold]

Totally agree. Her timing and control of the political machine keeps a lot of this suppressed in traditional media. Traditional media is also corporate and beholden to Clinton because Sanders threatens their existence in a roundabout way.

If voting strictly on who is probably the most "good" or "noble" person, I don't see how anyone can make a case against Sanders at this point.

Yup. Tried to make that point the other day about the establishment media supporting HRC but being scared of a Sanders presidency.

Recent SC poll showed 100% of 18-29 yr olds thought Bernie was honest and trustworthy compared to only 43% feeling that way towards HRC. Small sample size, but still...100% is a strong showing for anyone in politics to be considered trustworthy. Unfortunately, that age range has the lowest voter turnout. Perhaps Bernie changes that this election. We shall see. He's certainly going to need their support (and in big numbers) to overtake HRC, imo. I don't think it's impossible though.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Week's Michael Brendan Dougherty just published an article titled "Conservatives have failed Donald Trump's supporters":

"Get a job, you racists, and stop playing the victim! Don't you remember the '80s?"

Does that sound like a successful political program to you? Does it sound like an adequate response when perhaps one-fourth or more of your party's voters are staging a minor revolt? Of course not. And yet, that is effectively the message the Republican elite is delivering to Donald Trump's disaffected white working-class supporters.

I recently suggested that the Republican Party, and the conservative movement, offer next to nothing to working-class Trump supporters. There are no obvious conservative policies that will generate the sort of growth needed to raise the standard of living for these working-class voters. Instead, the GOP's Powers That Be make a great show of obedience and deference to the center-right donor class, even when that donor class' preferred policies — endless war, unlimited immigration, and slashing tax burdens on the wealthy — have almost no relation to conservative ideas or even popular opinion.

Several columnists have responded critically to my original piece. They claimed to argue with me. Instead, they confirmed my thesis.

My friend Kevin Williamson implies in National Review Online that I am indulging in "racial identity politics to help poor whites feel better about dependency." Tom Nichols writes in The Federalist that I want to play the "bitter card of victimhood and entitlement that liberals use."

Williamson says that he'd rather poor whites "took the necessary steps to improve their condition in life." Nichols outlines some of these necessary steps, saying these men need "to stop fleecing the disability system, to kick their addiction, to be fathers to their children, to get a job no matter how low or unappealing it is, and to stick with it until you get a better one." He implies that I'm against this kind of virtue. That's wrong.

In fact, this is all great life advice. I would happily repeat it to anyone. But it illustrates rather than rebuts the problem I described. Issuing godly financial advice is the job of parents and pastors and personal-finance gurus. It is not a substitute for politics or government. It is not the conservative movement's nor the Republican Party's job to tell voters to keep their fingernails trimmed and to proofread their resumes, wise as those things may be. And it should be plain as day that such tut-tutting is certainly not going to win the loyalty of the party's down-on-their-luck base.

It is not enough to say, "Stop bothering us with your economic problems, and be more virtuous; we're too busy addressing the complicated problems of our rich patrons, and using the levers of the state to make it easier for them to invest in foreign work forces instead of the whiny entitled American worker." Which, is, of course, the message that has come through to Trump voters over the last two decades.

The conservative movement can no longer repeat its old formulas as if they were a magisterium given divine authority to guard the deposit of faith in 19th century's economic liberalism. "Get a job!" is an insufficient response to the problems faced by poor Americans.

I presume that most of the working-class whites who support Trump do want jobs. I doubt that, like Williamson, they see hard work in industries that are ringed by some tariff protections as the same kind of "dependency" as a straight welfare payment. (Do Lockheed employees suffer some stigma and self-doubt from this kind of dependency on government, I wonder?) But I am not yet even arguing for protective tariffs.

Despite a natural desire to work and to create, we've seen working-age men dropping out of the workforce at alarming rates for decades. Many of these men do some work, but remain underemployed in the service industries. And the overall picture of the decline of this once-middle class is not one of living high and happy on the dole; it's far more depressing than that. Some of them do stay on Social Security Disability, and some of them abuse it, because it is competitive with some of the low-paid service work that is relatively easy to find but hard for formerly proud men to take.

At the same time as this decline of work, the returns are starting to come in on the post-Cold War policies that elite conservatives have championed, namely free trade and liberal-to-uncontrolled low-skill immigration.

The results of these policies look like a major transfer of wealth and, more crucially, wealth-generating power, away from workers and to capital. Researchers David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hansen found that globalization hammered workers while providing them with completely inadequate compensation in cheaper consumables or government assistance:

As a result, the authors found in a 2013 paper, competition from Chinese imports explains 44 percent of the decline in employment in manufacturing in America between 1990 and 2007. For any given industry, an increase in Chinese imports of $1,000 per worker per year led to a total reduction in annual income of about $500 per worker in the places where that industry was concentrated. The offsetting rise in government benefits was only $58 per worker. In a paper from 2014, co-written with Daron Acemoglu and Brendan Price, of MIT, and focusing on America's "employment sag" in the 2000s, the authors calculate that Chinese import competition reduced employment across the American economy as a whole by 2.4 million jobs relative to the level it otherwise would have enjoyed. [The Economist]

Reihan Salam recently noted that the American political class seemed blind to the effects of globalization on its working population

Ryan Avent, drawing on the work of economists Doug Campbell and Ju Hyun Pyun, has observed that between 1990 and 2002, the dollar had an effective appreciation of 49 percent, which in turn led to a spike in relative unit labor costs in the U.S. This spike alone accounts for much of the decline in manufacturing employment. Where were the voices calling on the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department to intervene in foreign-exchange markets to protect the interests of America's manufacturing sector? They were presumably drowned out by the voices calling for policies that would protect the interests of the financial services and real estate sectors. [Slate]

We also see better now than before that mass immigration of low-skilled workers does actually interact with the laws of supply and demand as you would expect; it lowers the wages of low-skilled American workers. Yes, technology has played a role in displacing workers. And yes, some forms of trade liberalization were obviously coming after the fall of the Iron Curtain. But economists did not expect the costs of these policies to be this concentrated.

America's elites, however, have won astounding gains during these decades with their ability to more easily invest in the development of foreign workforces, and to hire recent immigrants who don't share the typical American's democratic revulsion at entering into low-status service jobs at their great homes. The stock market proved resilient in the face of an economic crash, recovering and surpassing its previous value, even as real median household income is still almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level. Williamson says the answer is growth driven by investment. Growth is here, but it is captured at the top. Investors are getting gains. Why aren't others?

Without trying to hand working-class Americans a permanent victim card, we should allow ourselves to notice that following some of the bootstrapping advice that Williamson and Nichols offer as a substitute for political reflection is more difficult now than in the past. Why? The bootstrapping solution also requires resources — spiritual, social, habitual, familial, and cultural. These resources sometimes well forth from a man who has hit rock bottom in life; many callers into Dave Ramsey's radio show will testify to that. But for others these resources are usually "loaned," so to speak, from what conservatives used to treasure as the mediating institutions of our society — namely, families, churches, ethnic clubs, paternalistic employers, schools, and even unions. Collectively we might refer to these institutions as a kind of treasury of resources. My intuition, confirmed faintly by statistics on declining church attendance, rising divorce and cohabitation and illegitimacy, and the shortening terms of employment, suggest that these institutions have abandoned their paternalistic roles, or partly disintegrated, especially among working-class Americans. In other words, this treasury of resources is close to bankruptcy.

By their nature, the networking, emotional support, and loyalty traditionally delivered by these institutions to working people is almost invisible to policy wonks. These institutions push and pull. Men are much more urgent job-seekers and better job-keepers when they are living with a wife and children. Americans have slowed their pace of internal migration to find work, perhaps because moving to find work is more difficult when you are divorced and would leave children behind. Perhaps it is more difficult when you tried participating in George W. Bush's ownership society and over-invested in an inflated home that you can no longer afford to sell. Or perhaps it is more difficult because the institutions that you would seek out for social stimulation and solidarity in new places, like your denomination's local church or an Italian-America club, mean little to you now or have ceased to exist. That societal treasury, if it were full, could supply people with motivation, resources, and unofficial patronage networks to make difficult changes in life, like moving for work.

This state of affairs should be a frightening thing for any civic-minded American, particularly those who call themselves conservative. Long before American conservatives pledged themselves to the free-market tenets of Manchester liberalism in economics, the people defined by a conservative political persuasion dedicated themselves to protecting and defending those mediating institutions. If these institutions are in as much disrepair as I see, do conservatives have any idea how to regenerate them?

The foremost task of conservative political forces is to maintain legitimacy for the state and to carefully guard the surplus within that great invisible treasury of goodwill in their societies. That means finding ways of balancing the interests of different actors, classes, and types in society, whose unchecked actions would otherwise tear the nation apart. The tenets of Manchester liberalism were adopted by conservatives in America because they found them well-suited to an Anglo-Protestant people with a wide distribution of property and a continent of resources. They are not divine writ, though I happily admit that they have been successful because they align with something in our nature and history. Still, we may need to make different exceptions to them than we have in the past.

But if the libertarian prophecies of an American society without a middle class comes true, and 80 percent of resources will ineluctably accrue to the top 20 percent, then the American polity will find itself in danger very quickly of something much worse than Trumpism. The combination of an anti-statist ideology inherited from the Cold War, and a natural inclination to be responsive to an ever-more-rich donor class, puts the conservative movement in danger of rationalizing all the work the movement and the government does in the economic interests of their elite clients, and de-rationalizing any work it might do in the economic interests of workers. Such a course is a sure way of delegitimizing the state and the American political class.

It is true that I manifestly do not have the answers yet, nor do I believe Donald Trump has them. My aim in trying to understand and explain Trumpism and generate sympathy for the people who find themselves supporting Donald Trump is not to ratify dependency or a sense of victimhood in working-class people; it's to slap conservatives out of a torpor, to tell them that they are not victims of this Trump-led populist revolt, but the authors of it. And to warn them that they make Trumpism inevitable by enabling the American elite and the political class in its cultural and economic secession from the rest of the American nation. And ultimately, my aim it is to recruit men like Kevin Williamson and Tom Nichols into the incredibly inconvenient work of stripping away the policy ideas and political formulas that have grown stale over the last 20 years, and to revivify the American right, and the bonds that hold our nation together.

 

[wizards8507]

Personal crackpot theory: Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz work out a backroom deal wherein Cruz drops out of the race and endorses Rubio. Rubio then promises to appoint Cruz to SCOTUS.

 

[RDU Irish]

After doing volunteer tax work this weekend, I can say the ACA tax rules are a royal PIA. Because taxes weren't fun enough to begin with.

 

[RDU Irish]

Personal crackpot theory: Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz work out a backroom deal wherein Cruz drops out of the race and endorses Rubio. Rubio then promises to appoint Cruz to SCOTUS.

Cruz on the SCOTUS would be interesting to me. Almost worth it to get him out of politics too. His evolution of thought would be fascinating to watch as he would no longer have to pander to voters.

I was joking with the wife saying we need someone like me or Trump on the SCOTUS - half page dissenting opinion calling people idiots and everything a disaster or catastrophe. Screw the law, just go from your gut. I mean isn't that what half those geniuses are doing anyway?

 

[wizards8507]

After doing volunteer tax work this weekend, I can say the ACA tax rules are a royal PIA. Because taxes weren't fun enough to begin with.

It's also illustrative preparing tax returns because it becomes painfully clear that taxation of health benefits are right around the corner. It's all right there in Box 12, code DD. The groundwork is being laid.

 

[NorthDakota]

Cruz on the SCOTUS would be interesting to me. Almost worth it to get him out of politics too. His evolution of thought would be fascinating to watch as he would no longer have to pander to voters.

I was joking with the wife saying we need someone like me or Trump on the SCOTUS - half page dissenting opinion calling people idiots and everything a disaster or catastrophe. Screw the law, just go from your gut. I mean isn't that what half those geniuses are doing anyway?

The non Catholics plus Kennedy yeah

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The non Catholics plus Kennedy yeah

Sotomayor also identifies as Catholic.

 

[ACamp1900]

Sotomayor also identifies as Catholic.

he said 'identifies'....

 

[RDU Irish]

It's also illustrative preparing tax returns because it becomes painfully clear that taxation of health benefits are right around the corner. It's all right there in Box 12, code DD. The groundwork is being laid.

Exactly! Also hilarious to say it isn't a tax to have to pay your penalty part and parcel with your income tax.

Elections should be on April 15th.

 

[NDRock]

Personal crackpot theory: Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz work out a backroom deal wherein Cruz drops out of the race and endorses Rubio. Rubio then promises to appoint Cruz to SCOTUS.

I thought even the Republican Senators hate Cruz. Can't see that nomination getting through.

 

[pkt77242]

I thought even the Republican Senators hate Cruz. Can't see that nomination getting through.

Maybe they would approve him just to get him out of the Senate.

 

[NorthDakota]

I thought even the Republican Senators hate Cruz. Can't see that nomination getting through.

They'd never have to worry about him voting liberal though eh?

 

[ACamp1900]

I thought even the Republican Senators hate Cruz. Can't see that nomination getting through.

So then there are choices the Republicans WOULD let through....??

 

[pkt77242]

Ted Cruz would radically reform taxes but also explode the debt - Feb. 16, 2016

 

[phgreek]

Personal crackpot theory: Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz work out a backroom deal wherein Cruz drops out of the race and endorses Rubio. Rubio then promises to appoint Cruz to SCOTUS.

...Dude that would cause insurrection as sure as I'm sitting here...Democrats would seriously start shooting people...ISIS would indeed finally be the JV team...I would not advise that unless you are looking for broad democrat support of the second amendment....

 

[connor_in]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Will Sharpton endorse Clinton? Her response. <a href="https://t.co/mNKHkOAgf9">pic.twitter.com/mNKHkOAgf9</a></p>— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) <a href="https://twitter.com/anniekarni/status/699641451597033472">February 16, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[IrishLax]

Ted Cruz would radically reform taxes but also explode the debt - Feb. 16, 2016

They're talking about $8.6 trillion over a decade as "exploding" the debt when Obama has seen the debt go from $10.6 trillion to probably over $20 trillion by the time he is done with his 8 year term. Cute.

Obviously, a large chunk of the debt increase is not Obama's fault at all. But during his reign the rate of increase for the debt -- before, during, and after the financial crisis -- is basically static. Obama and Bush (and Congress) have all been incredibly lavish with their spending over the past 2 decades-ish... so I don't really understand throwing a fit about a tax proposal that has a number of obviously smart qualities to it (to go along with some pretty stupid ones).