Trump to win?

[shiny!]

Re: Sauce for the goose (Soros-stopheles at work BooogaaboogaBOO!)

What's more interesting shiny! is that they're wrong. Independents can vote in AZ however they want to vote. I happen to be working in Tucson this week and several people mentioned that they were independent and had voted early. So it's true you can't vote independent but you can use a ballot from one of the three recognized parties. After talking to people in this office it wouldn't surprise me to find out that independent is the largest voting block in AZ.

All I know is that people who were not registered as Repubs, Dems or Greens showed up to vote in the primary and were turned away.

'Democratic' voters got party wrong: county elections chief
Mark Phillips and Brahm Resnik, KPNX 11:23 PM. MST March 22, 2016

PHOENIX - Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell said Tuesday that several voters who told the Arizona Democratic Party they were incorrectly identified at the polls as independents are in fact registered as independent voters.

The party had said earlier in the day it was investigating why the voters, who said they were registered Democrats, were misidentified.

Registered independents weren't eligible to vote in Arizona's closed primary.

A party spokesman said more than 20 voters had called about the error with their registration.

Poll workers are offering those voters provisional ballots, according to the party and some voters who've contacted 12 News.

A Democratic Party attorney sent the names of seven of the voters to Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne for a check of their party registration, according to a party spokeswoman.

Purcell told 12 News later in the day that the spot check showed the voters were registered as independents.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Sauce for the goose (Soros-stopheles at work BooogaaboogaBOO!)

...The polls closed at 7:00pm but when the projected winners were being announced on the 10:00 pm news there were still hundreds of people in lines waiting to vote. At 11:00 pm there were still people waiting in lines.

A lot of people couldn't wait in line so long and left.

Channel 15 interviewed the head of the county recorder and elections office to ask who was at fault for the long lines. She blamed the voters for showing up and standing in line!

Such things has always been true in the poorest communities, both inner city and rural.
Most of us never thought much about it.

Now we are all becoming "people who don't matter" and find ourselves shocked at how crass and heavy-handed the authorities can be.
Pastor Martin Niemöller said it well with his poem that begins "First they came for the..."

[shiny!]

Re: Sauce for the goose (Soros-stopheles at work BooogaaboogaBOO!)

Such things has always been true in the poorest communities, both inner city and rural.
Most of us never thought much about it.

Now we are all becoming "people who don't matter" and find ourselves shocked at how crass and heavy-handed the authorities can be.
Pastor Martin Niemöller said it well with his poem that begins "First they came for the..."

You're right.

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre." - Frank Zappa (2007)

[kriden]

Re: Sauce for the goose (Soros-stopheles at work BooogaaboogaBOO!)

Hacking Democracy HBO DOCUMENTARY 2016

[santafe2]

Re: Sauce for the goose (Soros-stopheles at work BooogaaboogaBOO!)

All I know is that people who were not registered as Repubs, Dems or Greens showed up to vote in the primary and were turned away.

Thanks shiny! So I did a little more investigating and it turns out they all voted via absentee ballot more than a month ago. And, here's the trick, when you requested a Dem. or Repub. ballot, they changed your registration from independent to the party associated with your ballot. Almost everyone thinks they're still independent but it can't be true or they could not have voted. It's a law Jan Brewer promoted when she was governor that changed your system from an open primary system to a closed primary system. Who does it hurt the most? Libertarians, their party is not recognized.

I would imagine that in a generally conservative state, it's OK for the Green party to syphon off votes from the Dems but not for the Libertarians to syphon votes from Republicans. You've got to love politics.

[shiny!]

Re: Sauce for the goose (Soros-stopheles at work BooogaaboogaBOO!)

Thanks shiny! So I did a little more investigating and it turns out they all voted via absentee ballot more than a month ago. And, here's the trick, when you requested a Dem. or Repub. ballot, they changed your registration from independent to the party associated with your ballot. Almost everyone thinks they're still independent but it can't be true or they could not have voted. It's a law Jan Brewer promoted when she was governor that changed your system from an open primary system to a closed primary system. Who does it hurt the most? Libertarians, their party is not recognized.

I would imagine that in a generally conservative state, it's OK for the Green party to syphon off votes from the Dems but not for the Libertarians to syphon votes from Republicans. You've got to love politics.

That's it. you have to change your party affiliation to one of the three accepted parties in order to vote in the primary. Being a registered libertarian I can't vote in the primary. When I was an independent I went to vote and was turned away. Elections are funded through tax dollars, but taxpayers who aren't affiliated with one of the three parties must essentially commit perjury and register in one of those parties in order to vote.

[jk]

Re: Sauce for the goose (Soros-stopheles at work BooogaaboogaBOO!)

pankaj mishra on trump


Trump is a very European strongman
March 28, 2016 | 4:50 PM by Pankaj Mishra










Trump is a very European strongman




US politics today presents, to this foreign observer at least, a very un-American spectacle. A country originally built on immigration is awash with popular hatred against immigrants. A candidate of the right rails against free trade and foreigners, while that of the left proclaims his faith in socialism. Xenophobia is rife. Class war seems perilously close to the surface.


The US has gone through economic slumps and protectionist phases in the past. However, the New World has been relatively immune to the political dysfunction, class and ethnic hatreds, and mass craving for authoritarianism that have frequently been manifest in the Old. Today, more than at any other time in its history, the crisis in the US resembles one that we've seen innumerable times in Europe and Russia.mobileAd


The demographic data that correlate support for Donald Trump to middle-aged whites, who are suffering dramatically rising death rates, remind one of the economic devastation (and sudden spike in mortality rates) in Russia that helped lift Vladimir Putin to power. The sweeping hatred of metropolitan elites evokes the "politics of cultural despair" -- the title of Fritz Stern’s classic account of the rise of nativist passions in 19th century Germany. The explosion of trash talk on the campaign trail recalls Ortega y Gasset’s warning in "The Revolt of the Masses" (1930) against a "raving, frenetic, exorbitant politics that claims to replace all knowledge."


A whole class of pundits has been caught unawares by the revolt of the American masses. Mea culpas now come fast from the truly chastened. The unrepentant, on the other hand, have chosen to declare war on the rebellious masses.


A writer in the National Review charges that "the white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles." His own suggested therapy is "U-Haul," or migration to the parts of the country where US-style opportunity is still bountiful.


The inhabitants of de-industrialised towns are likely to see such a panacea as more proof that metropolitan elites are intolerably snooty. In any case, human labour, rooted in region and family, cannot be as mobile or flexible as global capital. Distressed beyond a point, working populations have been known historically to lash out at all those -- bankers, economic liberals, cosmopolitan intellectuals -- who seem indifferent to their plight.


Donald Trump seems to have grasped this better than the pundits as he accuses China of stealing US jobs, and trumpets a nativism built around lost American glory and grandeur. And for all his talk of reconstituting US exceptionalism, Trump’s proposed solution has a clear European pedigree.


The problem itself dates back to the earliest days of what Adam Smith called the commercial society: Essentially, a society built around modern trade and finance, and grounded in property rights.


From the beginning, theorists and policymakers found it hard to strike a balance between the freedom and dignity of property-owning citizens, and the inevitable inequalities created by an internationally competitive commercial society that requires a complex division of labour.


Attempts to square this circle in Europe produced the seductive recipes for economic nationalism that some US.politicians are now vending. Take, for example, the apparently oxymoronic title of the book "The Closed Commercial State" (1800), by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the most influential German thinkers of the modern era.


According to Fichte, the state should act to prevent the insecurities of modern economic life from cramping the liberty and autonomy of property-owning individuals. He argued that the state should be a radically monetarist one and guarantee a right to work. But this in turn depended on closing the economy off from international competition and interdependence. Fichte then went on to theorise an us-versus-them nationalism, which contained plenty of animus against foreigners.


It's easy for us to dismiss Fichte as a forerunner of xenophobic continental ideologies that were eventually vanquished by the Anglo-American liberal empire of free trade. But, in a 1933 article entitled “National Self-Sufficiency,” no less than John Maynard Keynes argued that “let goods be homespun” and “let finance be primarily national.” He feared that an excess of economic interdependence was “likely or certain in the long run to set up strains and enmities which will bring to nought the financial calculation.”


The popular hatred of globalisation in general and China, immigrants and foreigners in particular shows that those strains and enmities have indeed triumphed over financial calculation -- even in America. The US could avoid them only so long as the benefits from globalisation appeared to be trickling down.


The shattering of that illusion has brought forth European-style class conflict and ignited a distinctively un-American passion on both the left and the right against free trade and for economic nationalism. This is why Trump ought to be seen as a European radical in disguise, blithely shredding rather than reconstructing the claims of American exceptionalism. - Bloomberg View

[jk]

Re: Sauce for the goose (Soros-stopheles at work BooogaaboogaBOO!)

pankaj mishra on trump


Trump is a very European strongman
March 28, 2016 | 4:50 PM by Pankaj Mishra


Trump is a very European strongman




US politics today presents, to this foreign observer at least, a very un-American spectacle. A country originally built on immigration is awash with popular hatred against immigrants. A candidate of the right rails against free trade and foreigners, while that of the left proclaims his faith in socialism. Xenophobia is rife. Class war seems perilously close to the surface.


The US has gone through economic slumps and protectionist phases in the past. However, the New World has been relatively immune to the political dysfunction, class and ethnic hatreds, and mass craving for authoritarianism that have frequently been manifest in the Old. Today, more than at any other time in its history, the crisis in the US resembles one that we've seen innumerable times in Europe and Russia.mobileAd


The demographic data that correlate support for Donald Trump to middle-aged whites, who are suffering dramatically rising death rates, remind one of the economic devastation (and sudden spike in mortality rates) in Russia that helped lift Vladimir Putin to power. The sweeping hatred of metropolitan elites evokes the "politics of cultural despair" -- the title of Fritz Stern’s classic account of the rise of nativist passions in 19th century Germany. The explosion of trash talk on the campaign trail recalls Ortega y Gasset’s warning in "The Revolt of the Masses" (1930) against a "raving, frenetic, exorbitant politics that claims to replace all knowledge."


A whole class of pundits has been caught unawares by the revolt of the American masses. Mea culpas now come fast from the truly chastened. The unrepentant, on the other hand, have chosen to declare war on the rebellious masses.


A writer in the National Review charges that "the white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles." His own suggested therapy is "U-Haul," or migration to the parts of the country where US-style opportunity is still bountiful.


The inhabitants of de-industrialised towns are likely to see such a panacea as more proof that metropolitan elites are intolerably snooty. In any case, human labour, rooted in region and family, cannot be as mobile or flexible as global capital. Distressed beyond a point, working populations have been known historically to lash out at all those -- bankers, economic liberals, cosmopolitan intellectuals -- who seem indifferent to their plight.


Donald Trump seems to have grasped this better than the pundits as he accuses China of stealing US jobs, and trumpets a nativism built around lost American glory and grandeur. And for all his talk of reconstituting US exceptionalism, Trump’s proposed solution has a clear European pedigree.


The problem itself dates back to the earliest days of what Adam Smith called the commercial society: Essentially, a society built around modern trade and finance, and grounded in property rights.


From the beginning, theorists and policymakers found it hard to strike a balance between the freedom and dignity of property-owning citizens, and the inevitable inequalities created by an internationally competitive commercial society that requires a complex division of labour.


Attempts to square this circle in Europe produced the seductive recipes for economic nationalism that some US.politicians are now vending. Take, for example, the apparently oxymoronic title of the book "The Closed Commercial State" (1800), by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the most influential German thinkers of the modern era.


According to Fichte, the state should act to prevent the insecurities of modern economic life from cramping the liberty and autonomy of property-owning individuals. He argued that the state should be a radically monetarist one and guarantee a right to work. But this in turn depended on closing the economy off from international competition and interdependence. Fichte then went on to theorise an us-versus-them nationalism, which contained plenty of animus against foreigners.


It's easy for us to dismiss Fichte as a forerunner of xenophobic continental ideologies that were eventually vanquished by the Anglo-American liberal empire of free trade. But, in a 1933 article entitled “National Self-Sufficiency,” no less than John Maynard Keynes argued that “let goods be homespun” and “let finance be primarily national.” He feared that an excess of economic interdependence was “likely or certain in the long run to set up strains and enmities which will bring to nought the financial calculation.”


The popular hatred of globalisation in general and China, immigrants and foreigners in particular shows that those strains and enmities have indeed triumphed over financial calculation -- even in America. The US could avoid them only so long as the benefits from globalisation appeared to be trickling down.


The shattering of that illusion has brought forth European-style class conflict and ignited a distinctively un-American passion on both the left and the right against free trade and for economic nationalism. This is why Trump ought to be seen as a European radical in disguise, blithely shredding rather than reconstructing the claims of American exceptionalism. - Bloomberg View

[santafe2]

Re: Sauce for the goose (Soros-stopheles at work BooogaaboogaBOO!)

Here's my current assessment of Trump. He's apparently going to have the most delegates at the convention but he's beginning to unwind as the professionals go after him. I don't think he'll have the 1,237 gold ticket delegates. Karl Rove hates him and if you're a Republican you don't want the evil genius working against you. Actually, as Al Gore can attest, no one wants the evil genius working against them.

And then there's the abortion issue. I find Chris Matthews annoying but Trump may lose in Wisconsin next week because Matthews used his aggressive machine gun interview style with Trump to trip him up. Matthews is smarter than Trump and Trump is so used to running over people he forgot who he was dueling with. In the end Matthews got Trump to say that women should be punished for an abortion. I live in a great Catholic town and have Catholic friends who I'm sure have the same point of view but they're all smart enough to never say something like that outside a very close knit circle of friends. Apparently, Trump isn't that smart.

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

Professor analyzes candidates facial expressions:

http://www.washingtonian.com/2016/03...ernie-sanders/

[shiny!]

Re: Trump to win?

A little historical perspective (maybe worth nothing at all), plus something I did not know!

Cruz Defeats Trump in Wisconsin - Is This 1828-1832 All Over Again?

... If Trump does not get the Republican nomination, then if he is smart, he could get on the ballot as a Libertarian since they have already done the heavy lifting. Alternatively, Trump could get on the ballot in a few states and win those but not the general election. This could prevent either the Republicans or Democrats from winning enough votes for the Electoral College whom really votes for president.

If no one wins enough Electoral College votes, it will be the ultimate demonstration that we do not live in a democracy by any measure. A failure for any candidate to win the required votes at the Electoral College means the current establishment on Capitol Hill gets to select the next president.

The election of 1828 is an example of how the establishment can do as they like. Andrew Jackson won 642,806 popular votes of 55.93%; John Quincy Adams won 501,967 popular votes 43.68%. Neither won the Electoral College so Congress picked the president and Jackson lost. When Jackson finally became president in the 1832 election, he did two major things that were against the establishment. First, he actually paid down the national debt. President Andrew Jackson reported that the United States would be debt-free as of January 1, 1835. This marked the first and only time that the United States, or any other major nation in history, had ever been free from debt.

Jackson declared: "Let us commemorate the payment of the public debt as an event that gives us increased power as a nation and reflects luster on our Federal Union."

In the course of this objective, Jackson generally opposed bills that allocated taxpayer money for "internal improvements" or what we call "pork barrel spending" today. In the 1863 popular story "The Children of the Public," Edward Everett Hale used the term "pork barrel" as a homely metaphor for any form of public spending to the citizenry. However, after the American Civil War, the term’s usage turned derogatory.

Andrew Jackson despised the Second Bank of the United States, not because it held too much power over the economy, but because his political enemies controlled it. Jackson set out to destroy the bank for it had provided loans to his political rivals. The bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844), routinely used lending practices for political gain, including using bank funds to publish newspaper attacks on opponents as some money-center trading banks in NY engage in to this day. Biddle openly favored the National Republicans (later to become the Whig Party), many of whom benefited financially from Biddle’s favor. Prominent National Republicans were Congressmen Daniel Webster (who was on the bank’s payroll as a legal counsel) and of course Jackson’s archenemy, Henry Clay, who was his opponent in the 1832 presidential election.

It is ironic that New York bankers today own Cruz and Hillary. Both engage in methods to fund their elections that are not much different from the actions of Biddle. Those who want to see the Federal Reserve eliminated, citing what Jackson had done, fail to understand what really took place. The destruction of the Second Bank of the United States resulted in the Panic of 1837, the sovereign debt defaults of states in the 1840s, and a severe economic decline that set the stage for the Civil War. The parallel to today is not the Federal Reserve with political power, but the New York bankers.

Our models are starting to highlight Panic Cycles hitting in August. This will start just after the Republican Convention. If we go to the extreme in this collapse of confidence in government, then we may see a repeat of the 1828 election. However, we are also in a battle against the establishment and Trump is closer to Andrew Jackson than anyone else running for office. So the future looks like a political war ahead that is going to turn everything upside down. The establishment is focused on defeating Trump; they think everyone will go back to watching soap operas and sports and they can rob us and our children blind as always.

What are the odds that Congress will select the president, and will it be the old Congress or the newly elected one doing the selecting?

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

A little historical perspective (maybe worth nothing at all), plus something I did not know!



What are the odds that Congress will select the president, and will it be the old Congress or the newly elected one doing the selecting?

in this scenario the congress, btw, votes by state iirc. each state has 1 vote,

[shiny!]

Re: Trump to win?

in this scenario the congress, btw, votes by state iirc. each state has 1 vote,

Thank you. Would it be the current congress or the newly elected one doing the voting?

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

I believe it would be the current Congress.

A similar question arose in 2000 when Bus and Gore were deadlocked in Florida. The then current Congress would have decided if the Supreme court would not have acted.

[shiny!]

Re: Trump to win?

I believe it would be the current Congress.

A similar question arose in 2000 when Bus and Gore were deadlocked in Florida. The then current Congress would have decided if the Supreme court would not have acted.

Thanks, vt. We are living in interesting times.