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

all in the state-murder family

Death penalty is wrong on every level. Huge majority of americans support it. So of course hillary is for it.

The one level I'm not sure about is whether, in some cases, it's actually more cruel to keep somebody alive. Maybe that's how we should do it. If someone has confessed to a horrific crime and requests euthanasia, maybe we should consider that as something less cruel. I don't believe in any death penalty apart from that.

the whole being on death row for decades thing...um...they should look into that.

Josh Barro ‏@jbarro 2h2 hours ago Manhattan, NY
Sanders is out of his depth on foreign policy, but in fairness, there's no clear correlation between knowledge & good decision-making on FP.

can't be repeated enough

Death penalty is wrong on every level. Huge majority of americans support it. So of course hillary is for it.

― Οὖτις, Thursday, February 4, 2016 10:15 PM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not really a "huge" majority anymore, and it's a declining majority.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/1606/death-penalty.aspx

but i don't disagree about clinton-- this is her cynicism in a nutshell.

obama doesn't opposed the death penalty either, although he's never defended it per se.

Clintons approach in this debate was supremely wrong-headed (esp in the portion Karl Malone mentions upthread), almost bafflingly so.

Also, that death penalty thing was def a weird moment of pitching to the general, not the primaries, which is at least a minor misstep.

Bernie's response re: foreign policy experience needs a little more kick:

"Dick Cheney has more experience than both of us."

@pareene
Sanders should just say "I have no foreign policy but hers is terrifying."

Never say "I was flattered when Henry Kissinger said I..." unless the end of that sentence is "finally made him pay for his crimes."

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/chelsea-clinton-calls-bernie-president-sanders-in-awkward-slip/ar-BBp90d5?li=BBnb7Kz

even the NYT is calling Clintssinger's performance "defensive and angry," so i guess i gotta watch this

As pure performance it was tough and focused, actually. Both acquitted themselves well as performers.

the last 45 minutes they were agreeing so often that they reminded me of Bush-Gore Debates, Round Two.

well both those posts brought me crashing down to reality, so thx

just watch the first segment (particularly around 25 to 35 minutes in). things got relatively intense there, and then they both pulled back for the rest of the debate

i wonder if Screaming Caps Gal has heard of Henry Kissinger

poll funnies!

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/268362-sanders-tied-with-clinton-nationwide-poll

also i heard Carly Fiorina say on Marketplace Morning that the banks wrote the Dodd-Frank bill. Why didn't you guys tell me she's OTM once in awhile?

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/268362-sanders-tied-with-clinton-nationwide-poll

I know national polls are suspect but holy shit....nationwide, 30 point deficit gone. Bernie down by 2.

Oops, sorry Mobius xp

yeah, i don't believe it, but i like the thought of Blankfein and Katha Pollitt both shitting themselves.

I really hit a nerve with Pollitt on Twitter the other day, she wasn't a fan of my phrase "Boomer narcissism"

I really can't address my core feelings about her bcz i don't wish to be banned from the board just before baseball season.

Jezebel's got a pretty good article about Cruz's college days.

http://theslot.jezebel.com/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-and-track-down-a-ted-cr-1752337625

lmao just came here with that

a blatant fishing expedition comes back with the goods

disappointed there was no 'shitting on the floor' story

In naked but non-sexual news, multiple classmates who asked for anonymity recounted Cruz participating in the “Nude Olympics,” a (now defunct) Princeton tradition in which members of the sophomore class got drunk and ran around campus sans clothing during the first snow of the year. According to several classmates, none of whom were firsthand witnesses, Cruz was said to have run the wrong way and was later seen naked and banging against the window of a locked dorm in an attempt to gain entrance.

Numerous as the secondhand accounts were, we were unable to confirm the nude-lockout incident. However, we did establish that the following spring, Cruz, who was a member of the Campus Safety Committee, appeared in at least five separate issues of the Daily Princetonian as a staunch opponent of the concept of locked entryways.

I just came here to post that, too! More fodder for the "absolutely no one likes Cruz" trough, but this beautiful gem really needs to be highlighted:

In naked but non-sexual news, multiple classmates who asked for anonymity recounted Cruz participating in the “Nude Olympics,” a (now defunct) Princeton tradition in which members of the sophomore class got drunk and ran around campus sans clothing during the first snow of the year. According to several classmates, none of whom were firsthand witnesses, Cruz was said to have run the wrong way and was later seen naked and banging against the window of a locked dorm in an attempt to gain entrance.

Numerous as the secondhand accounts were, we were unable to confirm the nude-lockout incident. However, we did establish that the following spring, Cruz, who was a member of the Campus Safety Committee, appeared in at least five separate issues of the Daily Princetonian as a staunch opponent of the concept of locked entryways.

xpost OMG!

Yeah, that's the fucking highlight right there.

hahahaha wow.

honestly though the hardest thing to picture is that we now have presidential candidates born young enough that they had video games in their college dorm rooms, for people to drop by and play.

I'd like to think that all of his subsequent political platforms have been in opposition to something that inconvenienced him personally or caused him embarrassment.

just realized i should have just quoted the article alongside a certain image dear to all our hearts

xxpost Yeah, I was really thrown when I realized that Cruz is less than a decade older than me.

my fave part of that debate was bernie's *even on our WORST days we're a hundred times better than the republican candidates*.

cuz it was true. even if you hate everybody.

little bonding moment there.

still, older lunch xp

if he's elected Oliver Stone has his political Porky's movie in development.

rubio is my school year : /

it's funny how rubio has gotten the tag of "oh he'll be our obama, with the youthin' and the energy" and cruz is basically the exact same age. both a few years younger than obama when he started, actually; the only presidents inaugurated at a younger age were jfk and teddy roosevelt, maybe bill clinton (not doing the math to bring cruz up to inauguration day).

yeah but did Teddy, JFK, and Clinton smear petroleum jelly on their faces like Cruz

Yeah, Cruz just seems like an oily old dude. Like, I'll bet his medicine cabinet is indistinguishable from that of an incontinent septuagenarian.

Much as i'm allergic to JFK worship (being an Irish Catholic child from the '60s), Pierce had a good line about Marco tryin' it on:

(Brief Historical Note—when Marco Rubio was 26, he was about to take a job on the Miami City Commission. When JFK was 26, he was towing an injured shipmate between enemy-held islands with his teeth. Just sayin'.)

well he certainly had the teeth to do it.

i was gonna say obama was the first black president of the harvard law review at 26 but i looked and he was 28...slacker.

Yeah, there's a weird sobering/horrifying effect of when ("serious") presidential start gettin' _uncomfortably_ close to one's age. Like, "oh shit, Cruz was a freshman only 6 years before me. Oh God."

I'm reminded of Dave Barry of all people writing about the shock of realization of his own age when he first saw an airline pilot younger than himself.

Random video game side-note:

Which feels more accurate: Cruz as an froshling Princeton student be playing an NES, a Sega Master System, or the Atari they all still had?

Or was he the kinda dude who would brag about his new Amiga to everyone? "Look at these graphics!"

obama is 7 years older than me. he's my brother and sister's generation. the foghat generation. tail-end boomers technically. whereas i am of the X. he seems way older than me though. i mean, he's an adult and all that.

Was at HLS the same time as Cruz (he gpt his JD the year I started); his reputation as a creep was well-established.

now that we're quoting Pierce:

he rest of the debate rocked back and forth. HRC pretty clearly won a long section on foreign policy, which actually is her wheelhouse and not ground on which Sanders can truly compete, except to remind America that HRC voted for the Iraq war in 2002. But this previous interchange—over who is a progressive and why, and about what is discreet influence peddling and what is not—would have been impossible had Sanders not jumped into the race and if he had not caught fire the way he has. It is simply not credible to believe that the debate would have been this sharply joined if it were HRC and, say, vice-president Biden were running against each other. Without Bernie Sanders, it is hard to imagine HRC fighting as hard as she has to defend her progressive bona fides. Gone is the DLC spouse who talked about "super-predators" and jailing incorrigible juveniles—mainly, African-American ones—before trying to help them.

This one small slice of the debate demonstrates that, at least for a moment, Hillary Rodham Clinton is being forced to campaign in a way that would have been unthinkable for her a year ago. Without the Sanders campaign, the Clinton campaign likely would have been an endless chorus of banality about "families" and "helping the middle class." It certainly wouldn't have been about defending her as a woman of the progressive left. This is quite the damnedest thing.

xxpost Yeah, I was really thrown when I realized that Cruz is less than a decade older than me.

Cruz is five days shy of being exactly one year older than me.