Trump to win?

[lektrode]

Re: Trump to win?

The pearl clutching and phony outrage is hilarious. ...

sho am glad i had most of me third one down when i scrolled into this one....
another masterpiece!, Sir!

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

...PS: I still love you, Woody!

Big smiles on the love! While I'm disappointed that the bastards seem to be bamboozling you I'm betting you'll think again once in the voting booth.

And for sure if ever the guy runs for Pope or Pastor I'll be right there on the barricades with you, Shiny! But as the political wreaking ball to the status quo, we couldn't ask for a better guy if we made one up from scratch.

The bastards are in a full-out panic. I say, lean into them. Now that Clinton has set the bar, it's time to take the gloves off and meet the attacks head on. So no more holding back because of Chelsea.

Oh and, before I forget...




MAGA! GO TRUMP! DEFEAT THE WAR WITCH OF GOLDMAN SACHS. GO TRUMP! MAGA!

[bpr]

Re: Trump to win?

If the majority of people who despise both candidates voted their conscience by writing in "None of the Above," we would win. What would happen if "None of the Above" got the majority of popular votes?

If nobody gets enough electoral votes, the House picks the "winner" from the three candidates who received the most electoral votes. All bets are off on who Ryan's House would select.

http://www.archives.gov/federal-regi...faq.html#no270

If you had that many friends in Congress no one would trust you anyway, VT.

[bpr]

Re: Trump to win?

But as the political wreaking ball to the status quo, we couldn't ask for a better guy if we made one up from scratch.

I have some friends who hold this view, but IMO our republic is strong enough to withstand four years of total stagnation (as I don't believe he would get much of anything other than tax cuts for the wealthy through congress).

There is one thing he'd be able to do: change the trajectory of the Supreme Court for the worse for a generation. You don't like Citizens United? Get used to far worse... Likely limits on the First Amendment like we've never seen before (or at least more $=speech decisions), given Trump's opinion of the media.

It would be the slowest wrecking ball in history.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

I have some friends who hold this view...

What you posit is in the realm of the possible, but other than the certainty of gridlock, who can say what will happen?

I don't believe either party is getting their Supremes through without cobbling together something near a super majority, not on the first or even third try. Barring some universally accepted unity nominee, I think we are going to have a 4/4 court for the foreseeable future. We haven't passed a constitutional budget in years and so the idea of us passing any sort of tax reform, never mind cut, in a post 2016 election is really doubtful to me.

I am more curious as to why you conflate political gridlock with "total stagnation?" Is government merely "doing something" synonymous to "progress" or "advancement." I think the history of the last 20 years has show otherwise. Given the circumstances, gridlock would be an improvement. And if it puts off Hillary's plans for WWIII with the Russians, all the better.





MAGA! GO TRUMP! DEFEAT THE WAR WITCH OF GOLDMAN SACHS. GO TRUMP! MAGA!

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Trump to win?

There was an interesting conversation today on a 4-4 supreme court if the election devolved into the bush gore hanging chad legal battle.

[bpr]

Re: Trump to win?

What you posit is in the realm of the possible, but other than the certainty of gridlock, who can say what will happen?

I don't believe either party is getting their Supremes through without cobbling together something near a super majority, not on the first or even third try. Barring some universally accepted unity nominee, I think we are going to have a 4/4 court for the foreseeable future. We haven't passed a constitutional budget in years and so the idea of us passing any sort of tax reform, never mind cut, in a post 2016 election is really doubtful to me.

I am more curious as to why you conflate political gridlock with "total stagnation?" Is government merely "doing something" synonymous to "progress" or "advancement." I think the history of the last 20 years has show otherwise. Given the circumstances, gridlock would be an improvement. And if it puts off Hillary's plans for WWIII with the Russians, all the better.

Well, maybe I'm just naive, but I don't believe that the extreme wing of the right is large enough to continue the gridlock on the court, and I don't think the moderates (left or right) would force such a gridlock. Not sure what you mean by a constitutional budget, but tax cuts have nothing to do with budgets anyway: they're gifts to benefactors, under the guise of economic growth (the persistent trickle-down myth). Plus, both sides have wealthy benefactors, so it's a bipartisan fleecing.

You make a good point, though, in that gridlock can be better than an administration that acts recklessly, though we likely differ on what that means... Certainly IMO GWB's reckless administrations were a regression, and we'd all be better off if the legislative and judicial branches grounded him to a halt. But that's not something we should aim for, IMO.

This country can be better than it is now, and we don't have to shut down offices and burn it to the ground to do it. It's been worse before and our grandparents' generations overcame it; what's so weak about us now that we can't do the same without totally destroying the framework?

EDIT: I also don't believe that HRC is aiming for war (especially not with Russia), though much of our electorate is, even if they're not willing to admit it. While she's no dove, we haven't had a dove since Carter, and I don't believe we will in the foreseeable future. I don't see her jumping into major actions like, say, GWB, though.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

I don't believe either party is getting their Supremes through without cobbling together something near a super majority, not on the first or even third try. Barring some universally accepted unity nominee, I think we are going to have a 4/4 court for the foreseeable future.

i think it may be a long time before ANY supreme court nominee is approved. we should start an over/under on how low court membership will go. 7? 6? 5?? i think 5 is actually a possibility. the oldest members are ginsberg 83, kennedy 80, breyer 78.

in the natural course of events, we will likely have a 3 to 2, conservative majority 5 member court. however, since it takes 4 votes to grant cert, that court might not have much to do.

this problem is already manifest in the non-supreme federal courts, as the republican senate has refused to consider nominations. there are now 97 vacant non-supreme court federal judgeships. i expect the federal court system to continue to gradually depopulate at all levels.

what a country!

[Ellen Z]

Re: Trump to win?

i, too, oppose trump but i do think there is a "trump phenomenon." it is the rebellion of those who have lost out from globalization, technological advancement and cultural change.... and i think it is to our shame that globalization was sold as an unalloyed good while all its benefits went to the upper few percent, and all its costs were paid by those in the lowest socio-economic strata.

I also think there is a real Trump phenomenon. Regardless of the results of this election, we’ll deal with versions of this phenomenon going forward.

At the start of 2016, John Michael Greer posted an essay, "Donald Trump and the Politics of Resentment." JMG looks at the United States electorate in terms of four groups: those whose income is based on investment returns, monthly salary, hourly wages, or a government welfare check. "It’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class," he writes.

After a couple of paragraphs on economic history, he says "and the wage class? Over the last half century, the wage class has been destroyed....The catastrophic impoverishment and immiseration of the American wage class is one of the most massive political facts of our time—and it’s also one of the most unmentionable. Next to nobody is willing to talk about it, or even admit that it happened."

He continues: "attempts by people in the wage class to mount any kind of effective challenge to the changes that have gutted their economic prospects and consigned them to a third-rate future have done very little so far. To some extent, that’s a function of the GOP’s sustained effort to lure wage class voters into backing Republican candidates on religious and moral grounds."

Then he adds Donald Trump to this picture:
"The man is brilliant. I mean that without the smallest trace of mockery. He’s figured out that the most effective way to get the wage class to rally to his banner is to get himself attacked, with the usual sort of shrill mockery, by the salary class."

Greer’s conclusion:
"It’s by no means certain that Trump will ride that resentment straight to the White House, though at this moment it does seem like the most likely outcome. Still, I trust none of my readers are naive enough to think that a Trump defeat will mean the end of the phenomenon that’s lifted him to front runner status in the teeth of everything the political establishment can throw at him. I see the Trump candidacy as a major watershed in American political life, the point at which the wage class—the largest class of American voters, please note—has begun to wake up to its potential power and begin pushing back against the ascendancy of the salary class."

That’s how I see it also.

The complete essay is available here: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.c...esentment.html

At the start of the year Greer said it was likely Trump would be elected. I don’t know whether he still thinks that. For myself, I thought this was a competitive race until the first debate. During the week after that debate, Trump voluntarily acted in ways that made his election much less likely. Since he’s a smart person, and he did this consistently, now I think he probably doesn’t really want to be president.

I’ve been reading John Michael Greer regularly since 2009. (All of his blog posts since 2006 are available on his website.) I don’t agree with everything he says, but he has certainly shaped my view of where we are now and what might happen over the next 50 years.

There’s an experience we’ve all had, when you read someone and you suddenly understand something for the first time. You say to yourself "how did come I never noticed that before?" I have that experience more often when reading John Michael Greer then anyone else.

He covers a lot of subjects. He likes to generalize, and I suspect he sometimes gets details wrong, or puts an emphasis wrong. He predicts a dark future, so I often read him and hope he’s mistaken! But if those quotes interest you, you might want to browse around his website and see what else he has to say.

[Ellen Z]

Re: Trump to win?

The costs may be paid by the ‘lowest socio-economic strata’ in the US but for the most part, those folks in the US are not white. Almost all Trump voters are white and are not in the ‘lowest socio-economic strata’. You can’t conflate economic position with Trump voters.

Trump’s voters may or may not include the "lowest economic strata" but it seems to me many of his voters are people whose economic status declined dramatically over the past 30 years. People whose families used to be comfortable, and now are barely scraping by.

A couple of years ago I heard Robert Putnam talk about his research, now a book "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis." Putnam went back to his high school (Port Clinton, Ohio, graduated in 1959) to see what had happened to his classmates and their children. Generally speaking his classmates’ lives were better than their parents. However, their children and grandchildren have led hard lives, with diminishing prospects, broken families, no community support. "The factories shut down."

Since hearing that talk, I see things in a different way. When I hear stories now about the meth epidemic, or statistics on obesity, I see connections. "It’s because the factories shut down. For a while there were good-paying jobs, and then there weren’t."

There are a lot of people in that position. I don't know how many. To my mind, they are one of the largest groups fueling the Trump rallies.

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

Originally Posted by santafe2
"The costs may be paid by the ‘lowest socio-economic strata’ in the US but for the most part, those folks in the US are not white."

Unfortunately Santa Fe's facts are incorrect.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf

24.8 million are white

11.34 million are African American

11,62 are Hispanic

So there are more whites than African American and Hispanics together. All of these numbers are unacceptable but in the 44 years since I was a Vista Volunteer and over $1 trillion spent we have not made progress. Federal and state government and education has not done it's job.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

I also think there is a real Trump phenomenon...

If you like JMG, the you just HAVE to read Morris Berman, author of The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire and Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. I read both Greer's and Berman's blogs. You'll find that Berman's readers are pretty much convinced Greer has lifted whole parts of Berman's work and used it unattributed. I'm not interested in the kerfuffle (and neither is Berman, apparently) but I did come to Berman before finding Greer and noticed the similarities myself. I think it's too bad JMG and Berman couldn't work together, as Berman has all the intellectual rigor Greer doesn't and none of Greer's marketing hustle. Anyway, I hope you check him out.

[bpr]

Re: Trump to win?

Originally Posted by santafe2
"The costs may be paid by the ‘lowest socio-economic strata’ in the US but for the most part, those folks in the US are not white."

Unfortunately Santa Fe's facts are incorrect.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf

24.8 million are white

11.34 million are African American

11,62 are Hispanic

So there are more whites than African American and Hispanics together. All of these numbers are unacceptable but in the 44 years since I was a Vista Volunteer and over $1 trillion spent we have not made progress. Federal and state government and education has not done it's job.

That line of Santa's stuck out to me, too... I'm surprised the concentration of whites in the lowest is actually that low; I'd expect it to be more like 60-63%.

Seems to me a symptom of our sort of demographic pigeonholing that we forget that, yeah, statistically, when we break people up into age groups, income groups, gender groups... the majority of all of them still are white (except for the upper income strata / more privileged situations where you have a higher concentration of whites). And then we break that out into the greater generalization that All whites are going to vote this way... and we just lose all credibility, because those numbers are based on polls of no more than a couple thousand likely voters.

It all gets looney pretty fast, and it's best to remember Bernie's "shocking" win in the Michigan Primary...

[lektrode]

Re: Trump to win?

That line of Santa's stuck out to me, too... I'm surprised the concentration of whites in the lowest is actually that low; I'd expect it to be more like 60-63%.

Seems to me a symptom of our sort of demographic pigeonholing that we forget that, yeah, statistically, when we break people up into age groups, income groups, gender groups... the majority of all of them still are white (except for the upper income strata / more privileged situations where you have a higher concentration of whites). And then we break that out into the greater generalization that All whites are going to vote this way... and we just lose all credibility, because those numbers are based on polls of no more than a couple thousand likely voters.

It all gets looney pretty fast, and it's best to remember Bernie's "shocking" win in the Michigan Primary...

yeah but "....at this point, what difference does it make..."
what THE TRUTH is, anyway.
the hillamonster wouldnt know what 'truth' is if hit slapped her the face
and 'she only lies' when her mouth opens...

[gwynedd1]

Re: Trump to win?

Big smiles on the love! While I'm disappointed that the bastards seem to be bamboozling you I'm betting you'll think again once in the voting booth.

And for sure if ever the guy runs for Pope or Pastor I'll be right there on the barricades with you, Shiny! But as the political wreaking ball to the status quo, we couldn't ask for a better guy if we made one up from scratch.

If Trump were any worse, he be just like the DC sewer . If he were any better, Snidely Whiplash would send him to the bottom of it. I don't want Billy Graham giving a sermon to a flock gone astray.
I want a ruthless hitman that takes on his own while sparing the civilians. Congress is full of scumbags. Didn't we want someone to tell them they are?

No wife , no kids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcQtUdZ5Afs