Politics | 2016 | This thread is insulting to life

By reilo Go To PostYou know you can edit your own thread, right? Including the title :P

He contended that Democratic leaders on the left see America as a flawed country in need of reform and believe government is needed to make decisions because individuals can’t be trusted to think for themselves. Those same people, he added, view the U.S. as “an arrogant global power” and believe that people who support traditional marriage are bigots, while favoring more money for government programs that often help people who refuse to work.

By Fenderputty Go To PostI think I dislike Rubio as much as Cruz because for some reason people think he's not insane while most people think Cruz is. Rubio sneaks by somehow.

By IWMTB19 Go To PostYeah, Rubio might be the most anti LGBT candidate in the entire race other than Santorum and Fuckabee and he is the purest neocon to ever run for office.

By Dark PhaZe Go To Postgood writeup--hopefully Hillary will be less hawkish as president than she's appeared previously

Eighty-two percent said religious liberty protections were important for Christians, compared with 61 percent who said the same for Muslims. About seven in 10 said preserving Jews' religious freedom was important, while 67 percent said so of Mormons. People who identified with no religion were ranked about even with Muslims in needing support to live out their beliefs.

By BertramCooper Go To PostDonald Trump Again Hits Ted Cruz Over His Cuban Heritage In Iowa

I expect Trump to escalate bigoted rhetoric toward Cruz as the caucuses get closer. Might be his best shot at winning Iowa.

By IWMTB19 Go To PostI'm honestly shocked there hasn't been an attack ad against Cruz where it shows Cruz talking about the things his father did in Cuba, some crimes by Cuban Communists, and then shows Cruz talking about how his father is a major influence in his life.

By Dark PhaZe Go To Postis it bad that I might consider voting Mitt over Hillary

srs

Roger Stone, who founded anti-Hillary group “CUNT,” on using “rape culture” against her https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/30/as-trump-attacks-conservatives-hope-to-turn-women-against-clinton/ …

By Fenderputty Go To Posthttps://twitter.com/ryanbeckwith/status/682210180088508416

By BertramCooper Go To PostI generally like Yglesias, but he goes overboard with the hyperbole on this stuff. The Republican Party is not in "great shape." Neither is the Democratic Party, of course. Both parties are pretty fucked right now in their own unique ways. The GOP can't win presidential elections, and Democrats can't win statehouses.

By Fenderputty Go To Posthttps://twitter.com/ryanbeckwith/status/682210180088508416

By reilo Go To PostMight be a 2008 level beating.

“I got a chuckle out of all the moralists in Congress and in the media who expressed public outrage at the president’s immoral behavior,” wrote Trump in The America We Deserve . “I happen to know that one U.S. senator leading the pack of attackers spent more than a few nights with his twenty-something girlfriend at a hotel I own. There’s also a conservative columnist, married, who was particularly rough on Clinton in this regard. He also brought his girlfriend to my resorts for the weekend. Their hypocrisy is amazing.”

Trump also wrote that Clinton should have refused to talk about his personal life.

“When confronted with the Lewinsky matter, Clinton should have stoutly refused to discuss his private life,” wrote Trump. “He should also have declined to answer, rather than perjure himself. If the Clinton affair proves anything it is that the American people don’t care about the private lives and personal of our political leaders so long as they are doing the job.”

For example, Trump disapproves of President Clinton’s behavior in the White House over the past four years, though he suggested that he was bothered less by what Clinton did, than by whom he did it with.

“It was his choice,” Trump said. “It was Monica! I mean, terrible choice.” Trump, who showed off fashion magazines displaying cover-art of the latest in a line of models he has dated, suggested that if Clinton had confessed an improper relationship ( Trump offered a more earthy phrase to get the idea across) with a supermodel, as a opposed to a White House intern, “he would have been everybody’s hero.”

“I’m not making any justification for cheating on your wife,” added Trump, whose own extracurricular marital activities have been a tabloid staple.

By IWMTB19 Go To Postsome crimes by Cuban Communists

Donald Trump holds a dominant position in national polls in the Republican race in no small part because he is extremely strong among people on the periphery of the G.O.P. coalition.

He is strongest among Republicans who are less affluent, less educated and less likely to turn out to vote. His very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats. It’s a coalition that’s concentrated in the South, Appalachia and the industrial North, according to data provided to The Upshot by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm.


But it [Trump's pattern of support] is still a familiar pattern. It is similar to a map of the tendency toward racism by region, according to measures like the prevalence of Google searches for racial slurs and racist jokes, or scores on implicit association tests.


That Mr. Trump’s support is strong in similar areas does not prove that most or even many of his supporters are motivated by racial animus. But it is consistent with the possibility that at least some are. The same areas where racial animus is highest in the Google data also tend to have older and less educated people, and Mr. Trump tends to fare better among those groups — though the effect of Google data remains just as strong after controlling for these other factors.

By IWMTB19 Go To Post"Centrist" "Unbiased" political scientists are embarrassing fuckheads with zero courage. Basically, this New York Times writer discovered that almost all Trump supporters are Dixiecrats (which everyone could have told you, but it's still good to confirm, sure), a group that only joined the GOP because they hate people of color, but he refuses to commit to the possibility that Trump's supporters are racist. So much courage!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/donald-trumps-strongest-supporters-a-certain-kind-of-democrat.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1

Plunging oil prices are threatening disaster in Libya, where civil war has left the population depending on fast-dwindling oil revenues to survive.

Libya has Africa’s largest oil reserves and in normal times this provides 95% of the country’s export revenues, keeping the economy afloat. But civil war between rival governments at either end of the country has shattered the economy, leaving the population almost wholly dependent on revenue generated overseas.

The crash in oil prices has halved revenues, and shortages of foodstuffs and medicines – even petrol – are starting to be felt.

This cash squeeze has triggered a three-way battle for control of what remains of the country’s oil wealth. Much of Libya’s largest group of oil fields, the Sirte Basin, is now held by Islamic State, which has interposed itself between forces of the rival governments. Most of what remains is in eastern Libya, held by the elected parliament based in Tobruk.

The strongest NAFTA advocates point that out in the small print. My colleague at MIT, Paul Krugman, is a specialist in international trade and, interestingly, one of the economists who’s done some of the theoretical work showing why free trade doesn’t work. He was nevertheless an enthusiastic advocate of NAFTA-which is, I should stress, not a free trade agreement.

“I take the Iranian condemnation with a huge grain of salt,” Fiorina told CNN’s "State of the Union" on Sunday. “This is a regime that tortures citizens routinely, that thinks nothing of executions, that still holds four Americans in jail.”

“Saudi Arabia is our ally, despite the fact that they don’t always behave in a way that we condone,” Fiorina continued, in her only reference to Riyadh’s mass executions. “Iran is a real and present threat.”


“The Saudis have been one of our strongest allies in the Middle East, and I think it’s unfortunate that we put them in the position we have by showing the support to Iran that we have with this foolish deal,” Carson told ABC’s “This Week."

“There’s no reason for the Saudis to believe that we’re really on their side when we do things like that.”

When pushed to specifically address Riyadh’s mass executions, Carson added a disclaimer but stuck to his previous notion that American support of the nuclear deal is partly to blame: “Of course we don’t condone that kind of thing. But I’m just saying we need to stop doing silly things that promote these kinds of activities.”

NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s ad begins with a shot of President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Then comes a U.S. battleship launching a cruise-missile strike. From there it moves swiftly through an explosive montage: The suspects in the recent California terrorist attack. Shadowy figures racing across the U.S.-Mexico border. Islamic State militants.

The narrator, a deep-voiced man, speaks ominously: “That’s why he’s calling for a temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, until we can figure out what’s going on. He’ll quickly cut the head off ISIS and take their oil. And he’ll stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for.”

The spot closes with the image of Trump thundering at one of his rallies, “We will make America great again!”

By KingGondo Go To PostWish I could laugh at Trump.

It's scary that there are tens of millions of people out there who respond to that kind of fearmongering nonsense.

By Fenderputty Go To PostThe "black people are lazy" point in the graph doesn't really work well with the bootstraps points that came earlier. Some confused fucking people.

LOWELL, Mass. — Donald Trump said in an interview that rival Ted Cruz’s Canadian birthplace was a “very precarious” issue that could make the senator from Texas vulnerable if he became the Republican presidential nominee.

“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem,” Trump said when asked about the topic. “It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head.”

Trump added: “I’d hate to see something like that get in his way. But a lot of people are talking about it and I know that even some states are looking at it very strongly, the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”

By KingGondo Go To PostWish I could laugh at Trump.

It's scary that there are tens of millions of people out there who respond to that kind of fearmongering nonsense.