The 2016 Presidential Election Trainwreck

[Jeff Lebowski]

If trump wins Florida and Ohio on march 15 , he is the nominee. If he loses both, we won't know until convention.

Ohio. Stupid state let us down last time. Would be a good time to atone.

[YOhio]

Ohio. Stupid state let us down last time. Would be a good time to atone.

Yes. If it does I'll unlock the Thanks, Dayton thread for a probationary period. Pull any shit like last time and it's gone again.

[Jeff Lebowski]

[Commando]

Oh geez. The last thing we want is another Lyndon B. Johnson administration.

[BlueK]

I don't know. He may very well lose Kansas and Maine as you suggested, but another poll out today shows Trump running away with Michigan. I don't know how Kentucky will go.

These things can turn quickly. Rubio was like 20 points behind in Virginia not that many days before they voted and nearly pulled it off. It was proportional, so he still got a good number of delegates. I'm just saying Trump has had kind of a rough last few days and the states tomorrow are interesting for various reasons. By the way, in Kentucky the rules are that you can't participate unless you registered as a Republican by December of last year. That could keep out few Trump folks. The gap is tightening in Louisiana, and if Trump stumbles in Kansas, the voters in LA have about 4 hours to digest that. Also, KS, ME, and KY have low thresholds for gaining delegates, so Trump's lead isn't going to grow in the delegate count almost regardless of whether he wins or not.

[Uncle Ted]

Fewer Democrats Are Voting This Year In (Surprise!) States With Strict New Voter Laws


But Republicans don't appear to be hurt.

As voting rights advocates predicted loud and often, new voter ID laws seem to be hitting Democrats harder than Republicans.


GOP voter turnout in this year's presidential race is up 62 percent relative to 2008, the last time both parties had open contests. But Democratic voter turnout is down by 29 percent across all the primary and caucus states that have voted so far. In all but two states, fewer Democrats turned out to vote in 2016 than did in 2008.


Evidence suggests that new voting restrictions are at least a contributing factor.
[...]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0000de403f238




Or maybe Dems love the Drumpf

[BlueK]

More protesters and disturbances at a Trump rally tonight. Let's be honest. He encourages it just like any good fascist would.

[Uncle Ted]

If trump wins Florida and Ohio on march 15 , he is the nominee. If he loses both, we won't know until convention.

It doesn't look like Rubio can win his home state... he may be come in behind Kasich in delegates by convention time. Y'all need to fire your boy up.

[Uncle Ted]

[Uncle Ted]

Science wasn't Bernie's favorite subject, it seems...

Bernie Sanders Isn’t Pro-Science (and Neither Are Most Progressives)
[...]
Sanders does embrace the consensus of climate change scientists who say that climate change is a real and serious threat that is likely caused by human activities. His climate change plan is incredibly aggressive -- more aggressive than Clinton’s -- with a plan that aims to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 40%. The problem is that this very ambitious plan completely rejects nuclear energy, which pro-technology environmentalists like EcoModernist Co-Founder Michael Shellenberger say would actually result in a net increase in carbon emissions. Sanders wants the country to shift away from nuclear energy to low-tech sources like solar and wind, but Shellenberger and others argue that strategy is neither feasible nor optimal. Fear of and opposition to nuclear energy is prevalent amongst many environmentalists, but pro-technology ecomodernists see nuclear energyas absolutely indispensable to tackling climate change.

Sanders’s anti-nuclear stance isn’t particularly surprising when you consider what’s driving Sanders’ policies. The Sanders campaign isn’t about science advocacy; it’s a throwback to 1960s counter-culture. And just like 1960s counterculture, Sanders’ policies include hard-hitting political activism as well as dreamy hippie idealism. Sanders may have the fiery intensity of an urban political activist, but his views of agriculture and health care are much more in line with the late 60s rural hippies of Vermont. Sanders moved to Vermont in 1968 -- at the height of the Vermont “hippie migration” -- because he found himself “captivated by rural life.” His agricultural policy reflects the anti-corporate philosophy most people associate with Sanders, but it also relies heavily on a regressive view of farming that ignores science and technology almost entirely.
[...]
When it comes to the safety of biotechnology and transgenic crops, Sanders rejects scientific consensus completely. He supports labeling GMO foods, even if it means a patchwork of state laws, and continues to validate fears about GMOs without acknowledging the extensive testing to which these crops are subjected. Even though the scientific consensus on GMO safety is equivalent to the consensus on climate change, Sanders and many other progressives have no problem ignoring it. The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Science, the U.S.Department of Agriculture and the American Association for the Advancement of Science all agree that genetically modified crops are no more or less riskier than their conventional counterparts.
[...]
Sanders is also a longtime supporter of alternative medicine, despite the strong body of evidence that shows these treatments aren’t more effective than conventional medicine. In the past, Sanders has worked to include alternative medical treatments like chiropractic visits in health care for veterans. On several occasions, he has praised alternative medical treatments like Chinese medicine and other non-pharmaceutical options that simply don’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. On the other hand, he isn’t the only presidential contender to praise alternative medicine. Clinton has also praised integrative medicine and the Clinton family is closely connected to Dr. Mark Hyman, a longtime purveyor of pseudoscience. At least, unlike many other Vermont residents, Sanders does support childhood immunizations and has spoken out about the importance of protecting immunocompromised kids. Thankfully, that’s one aspect of anti-science hippie culture that Sanders wholeheartedly rejects.

http://www.science20.com/jenny_split...essives-167253

Progressives are just a bunch of damn, anti-science hippies.

[Northwestcoug]

I am starting to like the cut of Gillespie's jib, though I'm still not sure I could ever be libertarian. You should read the whole thing, but here's a couple of excerpts:

What both sides—conservatives who say they will NEVER vote for Trump under any circumstances and conservatives who will grudgingly fall in line—misunderstand is that Trump isn't a fraud perpetrated on the Republican Party, nor on the throngs of Republican primary voters who have propelled him to victory all over the place.

Put simply, Trump is the distillation of conservative Republican politics for all of the 21st century. He's not the cause of a GOP implosion, but the final effect of an intellectual and political hollowing-out of any semblance of commitment to limited government, individual rights, and free markets. He is what happens when you fail to live up to your rhetoric and aspirations again and again.

So bailouts and stimulus spending are good or at least defensible when George Bush wants them but bad if Barack Obama wants them. The state shouldn't discriminate, except against gays, or weed, or whatever. As Ted Cruz can tell you, federal officials should enforce ALL THE LAWS against immigrants, but Kim Davis is a hero for refusing to do her job. Mitt Romney was for abortion before he was against it, so fuck you Donald Trump, you're no conservative (we know this because you used to be very into abortion). Don't you realize that Donald Trump presents a unique threat to the Constitution when he denounces birthright citizenship but it's OK when Ted Cruz says exactly the same thing, or suggests that Supreme Court justices should face "retention elections"? Do I contradict myself, asked the famously gay (and racist) poet Walt Whitman. Verily, indeed. What's the problem?

People—even or especially Trump supporters—aren't idiots. They know political grandstanding when they see it, and they fully understand that conservatives and Republicans don't really believe in the things they talk about. Or, same thing, that everything can and will change in the blink of the eye or in ways that just don't make sense. Didn't Mitt Romney beg Donald Trump for an endorsement a few years ago? Romney, whom every conservative news org endorsed and approved, ran for president by attacking Obamacare and the incumbent for spending too much money. He also promised to keep the parts of Obamacare "he liked" and refused to name a single big-ticket spending program he would cut or even trim. Upon becoming Speaker of the House after a million years in waiting, John Boehner was incapable of naming a single program or department he would get rid of.

To the extent that conservatives and Republicans are mostly complaining that Trump isn't a real Republican or a real conservative, they are simply acknowledging that his policy positions (such as they are) are mostly in line with whatever Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich are selling (and whatever Mitt Romney offered up in 2012). Nobody is pretending that Trump would be doing as well in the Democratic primaries, are they? And to the extent that Republican critics say he's a "contradictory thing" who changes his position from one day to the next, well, they're just admitting that maybe he is a real conservative after all.

https://reason.com/blog/2016/03/03/h...-wrong-about-d

[BlueK]

Trump getting destroyed in Kansas so far.

[YOhio]

This is the guy SU secretly likes.

https://twitter.com/wpjenna/status/706227458777993216

[Moliere]

Trump getting destroyed in Kansas so far.

Not surprising since it's closer in ideology to Oklahoma and northern Texas.

Trump is an asshole

[Pelado]

This is the guy SU secretly likes.

https://twitter.com/wpjenna/status/706227458777993216

When did Trump convert?