Octopus Overlords

Defiant wrote:Amid Trump surge, nearly 20,000 Mass. voters quit Democratic party

As an aside, I'd be interested to know how new voter registrations of the two parties are doing compared to 'the last few elections. Well, without looking at every individual states registration statistics.

How panicked should we be about the rise of Donald Trump? A professor at Harvard, Danielle Allen, recently published a widely shared op-ed piece in the Washington Post likening his rise to that of Hitler in Germany.

She’s hardly the only one drawing that analogy. I did so myself back in September of 2015. Certainly, the last thing one wants to do is repeat the error of those who ignored or minimized the threat of Hitler until it was too late.

First of all, such Hitler hype has happened before, and been unwarranted. Steven Hayward, author of “The Age of Reagan,” recalls the rhetoric:

Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” The Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (later a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”...John Roth, a Holocaust scholar at Claremont College, wrote: “I could not help remembering how 40 years ago economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism—all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I​—to send the world reeling into catastrophe. . . . It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our postelection state with fear and trembling.”

Mr. Trump’s ability to generate panic in both pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant precincts, among pro-life and pro-choice voters, suggests that at least part of the opposition to him is rooted not in policy differences but in aesthetics. Mr. Trump’s opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, for example, is seen as intolerable nativism. But when Hillary Clinton takes the same position, people shrug it off as election-season pandering to labor.

Recent history, after all, has shown little connection between campaigns and governance. Bill Clinton campaigned on middle class tax cuts and gave us tax increases. George W. Bush campaigned on humility in foreign policy and gave us the Iraq War. Barack Obama campaigned against the individual mandate of Hillary Clinton’s health insurance plan, but ObamaCare wound up including precisely such a mandate. Mr. Obama campaigned as a uniter but wound up as a divisive president. Listen to Mr. Trump, and he’s pretty open about some of his more extreme positions being opening offers for deal-making negotiations.

I don’t expect to be voting for Mr. Trump. But I am not losing sleep over him, either.

hepcat wrote:Rip's still panicking over a potential Hillary win. He's whippin' out the Trump defense stuff at an ever increasing rate as the days pass.

tgb wrote:

hepcat wrote:Rip's still panicking over a potential Hillary win. He's whippin' out the Trump defense stuff at an ever increasing rate as the days pass.

If Trump does win, he's going to be feeling mighty lonely.

For the record, I'm calling dibs on Rumpy's rec room.

tru1cy wrote:Loius Farrakhan likes Trump. Cause you know ,"Jews are the great Satan" between NoI and the 5% Nation I don't know who I detest more

Shit. I know shit's bad right now, with all that starving bullshit, and the dust storms, and we are running out of french fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.

Smoove_B wrote:If you try and make sense of any of this, it all falls apart. Quite honestly, I just go with this:

Shit. I know shit's bad right now, with all that starving bullshit, and the dust storms, and we are running out of french fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.

The American people don’t give a fuck. Jesus Christ, Donald Trump literally has a chance at being president, which is basically the ground zero of running out of fucks to give. The fuck factory is closed. There’s a generation of children right now who won’t even know what a fuck is, let alone how to give one, thanks to their parents leaving a bucket of fucks at the curb and going, “You know what? Fuck these. I don’t even want them in the house.” (Am I still writing in English? Feel free to speak up.)

The Trump phenomenon is neither a disease nor a symptom – he is instead the beta-test of a cure that the American people are trying out. It won’t work. But this is where our politics are going: working and middle class Americans are reasserting themselves against a political and cultural establishment that has become completely discredited over time and due to their own actions.

“Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches. He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.”

This is madness, of course. Assuming he is the nominee, attacking Trump and embracing Hillary Clinton by extension will hurt you both with Trump supporters and with conventional conservatives. Instead, Republican Senators should run as principled conservatives who will keep President Trump honest.

If you had said a year ago that the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president was endorsed in the same weekend by Jeff Sessions and Chris Christie, it would sound like a big tent kind of candidate, wouldn’t it? Well, the Republican Party is a big tent party, and it is adapting to be a bigger tent – encompassing supporters of Paul Ryan and of Donald Trump.

This is not a temporary adjustment. It is a new reality, as Angelo Codevilla writes today. “America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.

“This class’s fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate.”

Holman wrote:So White Nationalism is a "big tent"?

Are you maybe thinking of a hood?

Rip wrote: I was on the fence but that is all the reason I need to vote for him.

“In every way that matters, Donald and I are on exactly the same page,” Obama said, pointing to a framed picture of the billionaire on his Oval Office desk.

Concluding his endorsement with an emphatic closing argument, Obama said, “If you love me, vote for Trump.”

Rip wrote:
So the Republican Party=White Nationalist Party in you political dictionary?

tgb wrote:

Rip wrote: I was on the fence but that is all the reason I need to vote for him.

Now what are you going to do?

“In every way that matters, Donald and I are on exactly the same page,” Obama said, pointing to a framed picture of the billionaire on his Oval Office desk.

Concluding his endorsement with an emphatic closing argument, Obama said, “If you love me, vote for Trump.”

Rip wrote:

tgb wrote:

Rip wrote: I was on the fence but that is all the reason I need to vote for him.

Now what are you going to do?

“In every way that matters, Donald and I are on exactly the same page,” Obama said, pointing to a framed picture of the billionaire on his Oval Office desk.

Concluding his endorsement with an emphatic closing argument, Obama said, “If you love me, vote for Trump.”

Put the New Yorker on my list of people that wouldn't know humor if they were drowning in a sea of it.

Kurth wrote:Here's an about-face for you: An Editorial - Joseph W. McQuaid, Publisher: Christie was our bad choice - See more at:].

Rip wrote:

Holman wrote:So White Nationalism is a "big tent"?

Are you maybe thinking of a hood?

So the Republican Party=White Nationalist Party in you political dictionary?

The Republican Party is the tent and the White Nationalists are just a table inside of it.

Rip wrote:

tgb wrote:

Rip wrote: I was on the fence but that is all the reason I need to vote for him.

Now what are you going to do?

“In every way that matters, Donald and I are on exactly the same page,” Obama said, pointing to a framed picture of the billionaire on his Oval Office desk.

Concluding his endorsement with an emphatic closing argument, Obama said, “If you love me, vote for Trump.”

Put the New Yorker on my list of people that wouldn't know humor if they were drowning in a sea of it.

Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Venkman: Why?
Spengler: It would be bad.
Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

Rip wrote: He will do for illegal immigration what he has done for NJ traffic. Slow it to a crawl!

Defiant wrote:Poor Chris Christie

Chris Christie wants out of New Jersey so badly he was willing to sell the remains of his soul to a short-fingered, racist buffoon for the outside chance of being his vice president. The fall from grace is complete.

Last night the governor stood behind Donald Trump, a man completely unqualified to be president, as he gave another incoherent victory speech. The governor's eyes, however, are the ones doing the talking. And they speak volumes. They're saying, "How did this happen? How did I wind up here giving my endorsement to this sack of moldy clown wigs? How?"

Kurth wrote:The end of Chris Christie as we know him | Sheneman cartoon

Chris Christie wants out of New Jersey so badly he was willing to sell the remains of his soul to a short-fingered, racist buffoon for the outside chance of being his vice president. The fall from grace is complete.

Last night the governor stood behind Donald Trump, a man completely unqualified to be president, as he gave another incoherent victory speech. The governor's eyes, however, are the ones doing the talking. And they speak volumes. They're saying, "How did this happen? How did I wind up here giving my endorsement to this sack of moldy clown wigs? How?"

And the cartoon accompanying the story is perfect.

Then came Bridgegate, a disasterous campaign and the realization that his home state is a mess...

Daveman wrote:I forget where I saw it, but the caption "Christie, blink twice if you need help" had me rolling this morning.

GreenGoo wrote:

Daveman wrote:I forget where I saw it, but the caption "Christie, blink twice if you need help" had me rolling this morning.

I read an article (I think it was yesterday) that did the numbers on Trump's inheritance and suggested that if he had just put all of his inheritance into an index tracking fund, he would be worth almost a billion dollars more than he is today.

So while he has grown his wealth, it has been much slower than the market as a whole. Which I admit I found some amusement in.

Has anyone else read that? Is there any truth to it? It was just a bunch of words on paper so I have no idea as to the veracity of it. I know I want it to be true.

Smoove_B wrote:It's disgraceful - even for a NJ governor.

GreenGoo wrote:

Daveman wrote:I forget where I saw it, but the caption "Christie, blink twice if you need help" had me rolling this morning.

I read an article (I think it was yesterday) that did the numbers on Trump's inheritance and suggested that if he had just put all of his inheritance into an index tracking fund, he would be worth almost a billion dollars more than he is today.

So while he has grown his wealth, it has been much slower than the market as a whole. Which I admit I found some amusement in.

Has anyone else read that? Is there any truth to it? It was just a bunch of words on paper so I have no idea as to the veracity of it. I know I want it to be true.

Moliere wrote:

Smoove_B wrote:It's disgraceful - even for a NJ governor.

Imagine if he was governor of Illinois. Staying out of jail is considered a success.