Election 2016

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Jul 16, 2016 4:08 pm

erik wrote:

http://www.npr.org/2016/07/15/486177667 ... -something

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat Jul 16, 2016 5:23 pm

I'm usually pretty slow on the uptake when it comes to this stuff but even I can tell that was begging for jokes about the ol' in-and-out.

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Sat Jul 16, 2016 7:17 pm

erik wrote:

http://www.npr.org/2016/07/15/486177667 ... -something

[/spoiler]

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Jul 19, 2016 1:20 am

http://www.viralwomen.com/nobody-showed ... ump-event/

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jul 19, 2016 5:17 am

Remember the Nevada state democratic convention, where Bernie delegates tried to do a roll call vote for revoking the rules when they didn't have enough delegates on the floor to win a roll call vote anyway and then got all saucy when the chair said the voice vote had won and the normal convention rules would go forward? That sure was dumb!

Well, exactly that happened at the Republican National Convention. Complete with delegates shouting for a roll call after the chair recognized the larger number of delegates as having won the voice vote rather than the people yelling louder. No word as to whether chairs got thrown this time. What the fuck is up with people not understanding parliamentary procedure at political conventions? I mean, I can kind of understand it in a small state convention, because that is small time and bullshit to begin with, but this is the national convention of a major party of the most powerful empire in the world. Why are these assholes such a bunch of dumb assholes?

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Jul 19, 2016 5:20 am

Because it filters smarter people out to begin with?

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Tue Jul 19, 2016 11:43 am

It's called decadence/entropy. The dumb assholes eventually reach the positions of power somebody else organized and then they're more interested in keeping said power for themselves than anything close to supporting said organizations.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Tue Jul 19, 2016 7:26 pm

I'm tired of Republicans pretending to be morally conflicted voting for Trump, like it's some deep soul-searching they have to do...no it isn't. Trump's policies are the Republican Party's policies. Policies that work against the poor, the old, the young, the sick, women, minorities, LGBT persons...pretty much anybody that isn't a billionaire or a large corporation. This was never a case of needing great internal moral re-evaluation to determine if your opposition to Hillary Clinton was strong enough to vote for somebody that can't keep his lies consistent from tweet to tweet, this was the case of deciding that instead of the guy that lies almost all the time, you were going to vote for the guy that lies all the the time. I know it's all the GOP has left, but let's cut the pretense and bullshit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opini ... ncoln.html

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jul 19, 2016 10:50 pm

I found it particularly ironic when Giuliani asked what happened to the time when we were "one America."

Fucking Republican ideologies, that's what.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed Jul 20, 2016 10:48 pm

Yeah Republicans who are saying" I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find racism going on in their presidential candidates" are really pissing me off too.

Reagan had the decency to just rail against 'welfare queens" and let his listeners fill in the race themselves -- but it was a pretty clear dog whistle.

Bush Senior is the one who ran the Willie Horton attack ad. Which was more sledgehammer than dog whistle.

Despite Kanye's offscript moment, it's a bit harder to point the finger of Racism at Bush Junior, as Dubya did appoint Colin Powel and Condelleza Rice to high-level positions. But it is worth remembering that Junior was working on daddy's campaign when the Willie Horton ad ran and that during his time as Texas Governer, Texas executed a large number of death-row inmates....but those are a bit more indirect and I would feel hypocritical to try to tar Dubya as a racist for those if I didn't also mention the harmful-in-hindsight effect Clinton's welfare "reform" had on minorities.

Heck, even just last time around we had:

Mitt Romney wrote:All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement.

Did anyone really think that 47% is talking about Military Discretionary Spending or Grandma on Social Security -- you know the actual large outlays of the Federal Budget ? This is just a rephrasing and amplification Reagan's Dog Whistle to the point that it's not even a dog whistle anymore and is instead "Vote fer me if y'all wud like the gumment in Worshintun ta stop takin so much a yer money and given it to those folks, since we know thems are all lazy." The only way this point could have been more clear would be if he had put on blackface and danced to the tune of "dem watermelons"

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 1:11 am

I think Romney was more worried about 'class' than race. I don't think that even 'he' believes minorities represent 47% of the US. Not that it's a defense or anything. While Bush senior's 'welfare queen' was most likely targeted at minorities (and people to this day typically use it to refer to minorities) I believe that the likes of Romney is far, far more concerned with economic status. Racism where racism is due. I also don't think young Bush was particularly racist.

If there's anything I'm insulted about the treatment of Trump is that despite other people being openly just as bad, especially Ted Cruz, no one demonized him quite the same way despite this guy heading the shut down of government, being openly homophobic, etc. Not to say he didn't get hate but not hate on an international level like Trump.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 3:13 am

The Melania's plagiarized speech thing is like a train wreck in slow motion and the train is full of puppies. Leaving aside peripheral bizarre defenses involving Michelle Obama time-traveling to steal from My Little Pony; first the campaign said 'Melania did too write the speech,' then they said she didn't write it and threw a speechwriter under the bus, and now it looks like the speechwriter was never employed by the campaign at all, and was at best a corporate employee of Trump's, illegally providing services to the campaign off the books.

I think it's the most complete shambles I've ever seen including the #RomeyShambles tour. Trump can't even manage to get nominated without dropping the ball, then tripping over the ball, then lying about it.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 3:17 am

Melania's speech is a sideshow distraction from how fucking awful the actual Republican platform is, and how absolutely post-factual the whole convention is. Day One was officially dedicated to fearmongerings, Day Two is when the last hope of a different candidate was snuffed out, and Day Three was dedicated to hating Hillary Clinton. Fear and hate are all the GOP has left and they think they can work with that.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 3:31 am

Oh, all three days have been devoted to hating Hillary. Like, day two was supposed to be about the economy and it was like 80% Benghazi derp. The plagiarism thing is amazing because it was just a simple fluff speech and it became a microcosm of the campaign's laziness, thieviness, and corruption.

In other developments: check this out.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 12:42 pm

Ancient History wrote:Fear and hate are all the GOP has left and they think they can work with that.

Throw in some voter disenfranchisement, and they can.

Luckily, it's getting hard for this to work on a national level. Demographics are changing faster than they can handle with that strategy, and they're starting to lose much harder on social issues. I'm curious what direction the party takes (if it survives with the same name) over the next ten to twenty years.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 2:31 pm

Prince Bush basically won his 2nd term with fear and hate alone.

But then he couldn't get any shit done, followed by Obama killing the old geezer that prince Bush had been blaming for everything in his 1st term.

If there was a big "terrorist attack" in the USA in the next months Trump's popularity would skyrocket.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 5:42 pm

maglag wrote:If there was a big "terrorist attack" in the USA in the next months Trump's popularity would skyrocket.

Fortunately for all of us, this is probably false.

Hillary is actually polling higher on national security issues -- so an attack would probably benefit her -- although undoubtedly it would open new attack lines during the campaign and any benefit would be a heckuvajob brownie less notable for Hillary in the middle of an election campaign than the approval boost than the 2001 non-election year attacks provided Dubya.

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 7:05 pm

Trump would benefit from a very specific kind of terrorist attack. Specifically, if a Muslim illegal immigrant or refugee were to commit a major terrorist attack it would benefit Trump because it would match his fearmongering. Likewise I think these mass shooting of law enforcement officers - even though only the Dallas attack could even potentially be considered terrorism - do benefit Trump because they increase white fear.

In order to win Trump needs to mobilize White voters without a college degree in unprecedented numbers while at the same time Hillary fails to mobilize college-educated whites and also suffers reduction in minority support (perhaps among Asian Americans for example). In that sense I think hating on Hillary is a surprisingly strong strategy if, and it's a big if, you don't create a backlash among women while doing so.

Ultimately though, Trump's road to success really hinges on the economy. If the US economy plummets voter dissatisfaction will skyrocket and trump's support will rise considerably. Right now that seems unlikely, and if things remain decent through September, we're probably in the clear (simply because economic catastrophe generally unfolds slowly), but a major economic shock remains Trump's most likely path to victory.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 7:10 pm

https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynsk ... otection-a

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 9:07 pm

http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/07/20/ ... ke-person/

She's real! Ess found mention of her before yesterday: https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... a.citynews

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 9:44 pm

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Jul 21, 2016 10:34 pm

Ancient History wrote:https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynsk ... otection-a

Well, he's sort of right. Male condoms provide limited protectionagainst genital herpes and HPV. For those diseases you're probably better off dipping your crotch in liquid latex to provide a barrier over the whole area.

That being said, they're certainly the best protection against HIV, other than just never having sex with anyone ever, which is why Pence is an idiot.

angelfromanotherpin · Sat Jul 23, 2016 12:39 am

I noticed that in Trump's acceptance speech he made a number of references to how things would improve the moment he took the oath of office, as if by the magic of his personal magnificence. I thought it was just his narcissism on display, but the Rude Pundit thinks it's part of the big con. The idea is that Trump pushes his bizarro reality where America is on fire or something, and then as soon as he takes office, he starts reporting the actually pretty good real reality, and then takes credit for the difference, thereby creating the illusion of instant results from the magic of his personal magnificence.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jul 23, 2016 4:39 am

Certainly, Fox News would immediately switch from a half empty to a half full reporting style the moment a Republican took office. For people in the Fox News media bubble, Donald Trump being elected would be morning in America. Suddenly they'd stop hearing about how crime was out of control and the national debt was an unpayable burden on our grandkids and start hearing about how violent crime is objectively lower than in any previous decade on record and the government's low borrowing costs mean that deficits don't matter.

-Username17

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jul 23, 2016 5:38 am

Oh, and Clinton's choice for VP is unexciting centrist Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. He's the 41st most liberal senator, cementing Hillary's embrace of the Obama strategy by running with a Biden Democrat. He gets 100% rating from the Brady campaign, Planned Parenthood, the HRC, and the AFL-CIO. But, and you know there's a but, he's in the pro column for financial deregulation and letting corporations write trade treaties.

That's pretty much where we are: a strong advocate for human rights for gays and women and a decent advocate for labor and sanity in gun safety laws. But he's not the guy to tell the one percenters that they need to pay up. Also he speaks Spanish well.

This is Clinton playing it safe. She responded to Trump picking pro-tobacco hate lizard Pence by nominating an unexciting pol who doesn't have any extreme positions that Hillary doesn't already have and thus won't produce any new lines of attack in the media. Disappointing, but unsurprising.

-Username17