I will keep doing, but not worth it! The 2016 Presidential Primary Voting Thread

on a different issue - has anyone (presumably on the left?) put forward the argument that Citizens' United has actually been pretty awesome in terms of how it has apparently completely undermined the power of the GOP establishment? It's hard to imagine that Kasich/Rubio/Bush would still all be running if they didn't have their Super PAC money coming in, and it's precisely this money that has diluted the GOP establishment's power to anoint a candidate, leading to the fracturing of the party and the increasingly likely scenario that they will end up with a candidate that will doom them to massive electoral losses on election day. I can't say I foresaw this outcome - maybe I assumed that big money donors would all quickly come to rich guy consensus rather than being a bunch of divisive, uncompromising, pet-candidate/issue-having prima donnas - but it's p funny.

http://theweek.com/articles/459008/how-citizens-united-backfired-gop
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_10/the_real_effect_of_citizens_un058289.php

it's difficult to say that citizens united has actually done anything /good/, but as a student of historical irony, i enjoy the playing out of unintended consequences.

thx for the links!

xp

20-25% of a population being fully into Trump or any rightwing authoritarian/social dominator type isn't a majority, but plenty of states only have like, what, 50% voter turnout rates? And less during midterms?

take it up with 'Nixon' whiners

Pope & Trump war dnr;tl

I don't think undermining the GOP establishment in favor of a more radical right wing is necessarily awesome, unless we feel confident that the split paralyzes the right.

i don't think that trump can win a general election but the republican party is so nutso and then you distill that into ppl who actually vote in primaries i don't think anything short of literally murdering someone on camera could sink his chances of the nomination, and that might even depend on who he killed

it's awesome if it makes them start losing elections. also awesome that the SuperPACs just waste all their money on increasingly irrelevant TV ads, while the other day-to-day costs of the campaign go underfunded, resulting in the SuperPACs making remarkably poor investments that don't deliver the desired electoral outcomes.

xp

then again i think i have a different sense of this being from Minnesota and watching Jesse the Body win a governor race, though Jesse at that point was a pretty dignified statesman compared to Trump now, feather boas and all

who is the buffalo guy?

http://images.radcity.net/5173/5157979.jpg

Something of a resemblance to your Buffalo guy, actually.

yeah i mean i don't think Trump will win but he's still terrifying

very modigliani

it funnels all this money from rich idiots into something that is no longer as critical - data-driven vote turnout stuff and social media is what really matters now, being finally allowed to dump unlimited money into something that doesn't pay dividends anymore is a beautiful irony. It's like Citizen's United happened a few election cycles too late.

xp

Citizens United and all that Koch $$ are probably still capable of pushing state legislatures rightward and spawning a raftload of crappy state laws. The Kochs are not all about Congress. They're big on state politics, too.

Steve Inskeep -- one of NPR's bigger CW-dick interviewers imho -- had a NYT op piece yesterday on Trump's "Jacksonian" appeal

by which he means trump would kill a man?

lots of furriners mebbe

or pirates and injuns

I heard Trump made the Britishers run like rabbits at the Battle of New Orleans

britishes sorry

Sounds like Innskeep's read Albion's Seed, but his analysis seems a bit lightweight. Would rather read Gabbneb on the particular resonance of Trump's Scotch-German appeal to various Appalachian and Midwestern ethnic strands.

Hatfields, McCoys, they all think he's a righteous dude

i thought trump's heritage was german...

According to Wikipedia, his mother, maiden name Mary Anne MacLeod, was born on the Scottish island of Lewis.

damn, he's going to be able to tap into that same german-american demographic that threw so much support to obama in 2008

@BillKristol
Next thing you know, the Pope's going to accuse the Chinese (the Great Wall of China) of not being Christian!

the Chinese (the Great Wall of China)

brings back memories of ilx joke threads of yore

c'mon, that's not real is it

we should definitely start thinking about who has supported the concept of walls over the last several thousand years and evaluate their christianity accordingly

I fully believe that Kristol is that stupid

i want a candidate who prioritizes "Sugar Walls"

Next thing you know, the Pope's going to accuse East Germans (communists) (the Berlin Wall) of not being Christian!

xp: but you hate Bill Clinton

What's next?! Pink Floyd (The Wall)?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV4QEM8u-ME

you know who hated Walls? Reagan.

Next thing you know, the Pope's going to accuse Steve Carell's wife (Nancy Walls) of not being Christian!

Belgium's Walloons: Christian or not? The world needs to know.

that Kristol tweet is real btw

xp

"WE MUST BUILD A WALLOGINA.JPEG"

off topic but i tried to do just that a few months ago (a new version, at least) and encountered all sorts of unexpected difficulties

omg i didn't see that the trump campaign said some of the 9/11 hijackers trained under jeb bush's watch in florida. so good.

off topic but i tried to do just that a few months ago (a new version, at least) and encountered all sorts of unexpected difficulties

I'd guess working with the models would be difficult

it's sad/funny to see some people (like, say, Lindsey Graham) conflating being a 9/11 truther with acknowledging that Bush lied/was wrong about invading Iraq, as if those things are at all related

xp

the original is no longer on the thread!
NSFW OR ANYTHING ELSE: the individual 'ginas of wallogina

it's realy sad, it was a wall of vaginas

don't you see?? it was about so much more than that.

Just catching up with the day's events. I'm anything but religious, but wow. There's literally no one left for Trump to pick a fight with except Reagan.

http://www.greatwallofvagina.co.uk/great-wall-vagina-panels