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

hey what a surprise

Former President Bill Clinton on Monday met in secret (no press allowed) with roughly 100 leaders of South Florida’s Jewish community and, as The Times of Israel reports, “he vowed that, if elected, Hillary Clinton would make it one of her top priorities to strengthen the US-Israel alliance.”

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/18/hillary-clinton-with-little-notice-vows-to-embrace-an-extremist-agenda-on-israel/

Trump makes it clear that roughly 20% of the population currently wants exactly this

The last time I checked, 20% wasn't a majority.

what other world leaders has trump openly battled with? there have probably been lots but i'm just forgetting?

i feel like part of the trump supporter mindset is believing trump when he makes vague references to how well he gets along with everyone, what a good dealmakers he is, how he's good at negotiating and all that. battling with the pope seems to undermine that. but then again, the pope is an evil socialist who probably wouldn't be a good businessman anyway, so fuck 'em (says the stereotypical trump supporter)

The last time I checked, 20% wasn't a majority.

right, still kinda alarming how many people actually *do* want that

there are a lot of conservatives who do not like pope francis at all, i think trump firing shots at him isn't going to necessarily go over as poorly as it would have with a previous pope.

what other world leaders has trump openly battled with?

Cher.

hey morbz, you know the pope remarks were: "A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the gospel," right? and you know that israel is not a Christian country? i imagine the pope knows that too.

lol i see hurting already covered this nevermind then

also

Former President Bill Clinton on Monday met in secret (no press allowed) with roughly 100 leaders of South Florida’s Jewish community and, as The Times of Israel reports, “he vowed that, if elected, Hillary Clinton would make it one of her top priorities to strengthen the US-Israel alliance.”

this isn't a secret ffs, morbz, you've linked to an article hillary actually wrote herself saying this very thing:
http://forward.com/opinion/national/324013/how-i-would-rebuild-ties-to-israel-and-benjamin-neta/

As nomar says, SoCon Catholics haven't cottoned to Francis anyways, they want Ex-Benedict back. Liberal Catholics aren't potential Trump voters anyways, so I don't see who he loses of his current support.

Trump is unlikely to say anything that turns off any of his current supporters. Most of them are voting with their middle fingers anyway, so the more unfiltered and outrageous, the better. He may be reinforcing his ceiling, though. Seems to me that the number to watch is not the 35% of Republicans he solidly owns, but the much larger percentage of the general electorate that doesn't support him, and never will. He seems perversely determined to give those folks more reasons not to get on board.

pope in sick "israelis are not christian" burn

what other world leaders has trump openly battled with? there have probably been lots but i'm just forgetting?

Cameron: 'I think his remarks are divisive, stupid and wrong. If he came to visit our country I think he would unite us all against him'

Johnson: "I think Donald Trump is clearly out of his mind if he thinks that's a sensible way to proceed, to ban people going to the United States in that way, or to any country," Boris said on Wednesday.

"What he's doing is playing the game of the terrorists and those who seek to divide us. That's exactly the kind of reaction they hope to produce.

"When Donald Trump says there are parts of London that are ‘no go’ areas, I think he’s betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of President of the United States.

“I would invite him to come and see the whole of London and take him round the city - except I wouldn’t want to expose any Londoners to any unnecessary risk of meeting Donald Trump."

Donald Trump, respected by conservatives everywhere

but has trump responded directly to either Cameron or Johnson?

only a matter of time before he insults Bibi

you'd think he would respect israel's approach to real estate

what – the Likud have never let them play in Jerusalem?

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!