Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

i love krugman -- man unrelated to paul krugman, who also somehow does not have a gun pointed at his head by paul krugman

That latest Krug column is vile btw, even by his bootlicking standards

http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/sorry-bernie-bros-your-candidate-just-doesnt-have--4201

she seems like she might be better at convincing more moderate recalcitrant reps to sign onto legislation like obama had to end up doing passing ACA

wait wait wait wait. what?

On December 23, the Senate voted 60–39 to end debate on the bill: a cloture vote to end the filibuster. The bill then passed, also 60–39, on December 24, 2009, with all Democrats and two independents voting for it, and all Republicans against (except Jim Bunning, who did not vote).[119] (...) The House passed the Senate bill with a 219–212 vote on March 21, 2010, with 34 Democrats and all 178 Republicans voting against it.[135] The next day, Republicans introduced legislation to repeal the bill.[136] Obama signed the ACA into law on March 23, 2010.[137]

oh wait okay. you meant "reps" as in "representatives" so that could mean curmudgeonly conservative dems. okay, that makes mor sense.

yes sorry for easily avoidable ambiguity

Trying to clean up the mess everywhere.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/02/politics/donald-trump-heidi-cruz-tweet/index.html

Feels like everything's just come to a complete stop. The timing of all this stuff, during a long break between primaries, probably hurts as much as anything else.

i think that may be the first time i (or anyone) has heard him apologize.

daaaamn

http://predictwise.com/politics/2016-president-republican-nomination

I mean this doesn't really mean shit since we ain't had a primary in over a week and his supporters aren't likely to throw in the towel between now and the convention as he's still likely to be leading but am really interested in seeing how Wisconsin goes on Tuesday. if he gets 6 or less delegates as speculated, that will be huge because it will cement the likelihood of a contested convention given that even him winning 20 delegates there wouldn't have him on track. Trump's staff already minimizing expectations ("we knew we'd lose in Wisconsin").

tbh I'm hoping for pure circus spectacle at the RNC.

I don't think his administration would deal with failure well.

HRC would define success as "whatever happens"

also "i came, i saw, they died"
she is going to be the biggest Dem militarist since LBJ

Lol, Sanders apparently just stole the election in Nevada.

If Trump can get Dowd to stop shit-talking Hillary Clinton for even two sentences, he's in real trouble.

Chris Wallace just had Trump on. He's really digging in on his nonsensical explanation for the abortion comments: "It was a hypothetical, I was answering a hypothetical." What exactly is the difference between answering a hypothetical and expressing your actual thoughts?

I'm glad about one thing. I thought he might finally have been forced into coming across vaguely contrite and human. Nope, still the same. He's released Ted Cruz from his pledge to support Trump because he realizes it causes Cruz all sorts of stress, and (paraphrase) "Ted doesn't handle stress well. Have you seen him? He's a basket case."

Lol, Sanders apparently just stole the election in Nevada.

― Frederik B,

what's your problem, man?

yea stop harshing our mellow

yeah "stole" seems like not the right verb...? nevada awards its delegates in several phases and it seems sanders's people turned out more for this one, which was never obligated to match the popular-vote results in the state. no delegates were taken away from clinton. you could argue that nevada awards its delegates in a dumb and loopy way, but the thing is playing out according to the rules as far as i can tell?

relax guys, i'm sure he wasn't trying to insinuate bernie did anything underhanded. sheesh.

wait is freddy b. a mordy sock

Hilarious watching Kasich try to answer basically the same questions about abortion from Stephanopoulos this morning. He simply wouldn't answer them: "Send it back to the states, send it back to the states, send it back to the states." Okay, but if you think abortion is murder, shouldn't there be punishment for the woman or the doctor? "Send it back to the states--that's all I'm going to say." Okay, you're a governor--if it gets send back to Ohio, what will you do? "Huggleglumpf--and that's all I'm going to say right now."

i think clarifying positions on abortion is a good thing since like 65% of people believe it should be legal, no?

("of people" in this context = of americans)

kasich probably believes doctors who perform abortions illegally should be punished, which is a different thing imo than saying the woman should be punished. still a bad position, but he is a pro-life republican

lots of Repubs like Kasich probably moved more towards pro-choice positions eons ago but have to maintain the pro-life stance for their idiot constituents. tho I do think people like Cruz are genuinely (and creepily) pro-life. "send it back to the states" the popular way to avoid responsibility for a terrible fuckin' opinion.

the fuckin' states-rights bullshit is always bullshit. what's the point of being a country if everything is left up to the states and the rights afforded to you change drastically the moment your car goes over an imaginary line? obv some things should be left to states like whether to have income tax, or whether certain counties are dry/whether you can get a haircut after 9 pm....abortion? nah. I don't care if Roe v Wade was a 'bad legal decision' as many, including Ginsberg, have opined (and is not an invalid position). regardless, abortion is legal now, federally, and sending it back to the states or making it federally illegal again would be an immense disaster. though not sure if I prefer the new method of states coming up with barriers that make it effectively impossible to get one. :/

(I don't know what Kasich personally believes, to be clear, just that I think far less Republican politicians are vehemently pro-life than claim to be these days)

no way, kasich is pro-life

(xposts) I imagine that is what he thinks--or what he thinks is politically viable, anyway--but he wouldn't even make that much clear. There's a landmine there, he just saw what happened to Trump, so he won't go anywhere near the question. Really can't stand Kasich.

xpost I don't know what Kasich personally believes, to be clear,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk532lLn5zw&feature=youtu.be

"send it back to the states" is actually an appeasing answer for Libertarians tho so in some ways it's not even dodging

I agree with Neanderthal: I imagine Kasich and many Republicans are pro-choice but can't say so. And I realize Obama and Clinton and many Democrats had the same hypocrisy for many years re gay marriage--what they believed and what they felt they could say.

Obama went from pro-gay marriage in the 90s to anti-gay marriage/pro-civil union in 2008 pres campaign, then back to pro-gay marriage again iirc (I may have left out a few waffles though)

what's the point of being a country if everything is left up to the states and the rights afforded to you change drastically the moment your car goes over an imaginary line?

there were a few arguments about this among men in knee highs, powdered wigs, and beaver skin tricorne hats back in the day. those men were my fathers, and everything is normal

lol. kasich is either a true-blue anti-choice republican or doing a darn good impression of one. see: his whole track record as governor of ohio. if he secretly has pro-choice views what difference would it make?

neanderthal, not sure i follow how income tax should be up to the states...? that would kinda radically change our whole government; are you advocating the repeal of the 16th amendment or am i misreading you?

I meant state income tax, not fed (didn't specify so that's on me)

Yeah, there is literally zero evidence that John Kasich's views on abortion are even a half inch to the left of Randall Terry's.

(I don't know what Kasich personally believes, to be clear, just that I think far less Republican politicians are vehemently pro-life than claim to be these days)

re: income tax: gotcha gotcha.

re: Kasich etc: sure, sure, I see that - I'm just not sure why it matters! I mean it's sorta like saying Clinton might secretly be in favor of a 90% marginal tax rate and amnesty for most of the prison population, but if she's never going to act even remotely like that's her position, aren't we just writing fanfic?

pro choice is much more mainstream an opinion than 90% marginal tax rate and amnesty for most of the prison population. it's more like saying she's secretly pro-legaliziing recreational marijuana (something with a lot of mainstream approval) which i would not be surprised if she were.

Guys, John Kasich is an active and effective vanguard in the fight to obliterate women's reproductive rights. He's done a lot of evil work in Ohio. He's just smart enough to know that doing so contradicts his "I'm the middle of the road adult" image so he's spectacularly tight-lipped about it.

^^^^

please watch the video i posted. he pushed forward a provision in ohio that prevents rape crisis centers from sharing information about where women could obtain an abortion.

ENERGY FOOD otm. and i'm not sure why it matters how mainstream the opinion is. the point is it's an opinion that runs contradictory to everything they actually advocate for and work on so it's totally irrelevant to hypothesize that secretly they like the idea. i guess it would matter if they saw public opinion changing and followed the winds to their 'true belief,' but then a) their track record as an opponent of these things would presumably be a problem with this same public and b) if they're inclined to just turn with the wind, then them having inner beliefs doesn't enter into it anyway.

I'm just pointing out how amusing it is to see him ducking the very same questions Trump got nailed for. You would think, whatever his personal belief, that by now, after 30 or 40 years of doing this, he'd have an answer formulated (with regards to the punishment question) that he could trot out in his sleep. But he didn't.

not only that, he/they slipped it into a really crucial budget bill iirc xp to treesh

It jibes with why I can't stand him. He's trying to thread the needle beyond reason and beyond fairness--he's won virtually nothing to this point, he's been gingerly stepping around everything for months, and his only rationale for hanging around are the polls he keeps citing that he runs ahead of Clinton. I compared him to a vulture, and someone pointed out I must really hate vultures.

i guess you could argue that a politician who "secretly" is pro-choice would eagerly adopt that position if the tides were to turn politically, like obama did with gay marriage. also, perhaps it wouldn't be as big a priority to him as others when it came to appointing supreme court justices or whatever. all of this is irrelevant with kasich of course because he is a dyed in the wool anti-choicer

xp to doctor casino

I don't get why anyone would think Kasich was secretly soft on abortion unless it was because the narrative requires that there be a "moderate" in the race. There used to be a moderate in the race -- Chris Christie, and nobody liked him. Now there isn't. Kasich is basically the same guy as Scott Walker -- equally hostile to unions, probably slightly MORE sincerely devoted to keeping women from getting abortions, seemingly smarter and more politically skilled.

the fuckin' states-rights bullshit is always bullshit. what's the point of being a country if everything is left up to the states and the rights afforded to you change drastically the moment your car goes over an imaginary line?

Patrick Henry to thread

I think his problem with actually answering the question stems from the gap between his right-wing track record, and the friendly MOR Republican he's running as - and more generally, between the answers and rationalizations favored by the right-wing constituents, and those adopted by the "don't like abortions as such but don't want them to be illegal" crowd. The stuff about abortion being murder - but that the real criminals are the conspiracy of sadistic murder-loving abortion-providers who are the ones who have to be stopped cause we LOVE the mothers - plays on the right-wing because it papers over the anti-choice position's misogyny and basic untenability... but this isn't how most Americans actually see the situation I think, and the same rhetoric won't work there.

I think it's also the case that frankly this question doesn't get asked as much as it should. Roe v. Wade has been the law for decades, so really getting into the hypothetical of "wait, so how would this work if abortions were outlawed?" doesn't happen as much as it should. I like the question being asked though; it exposes a lot of uncomfortable lapses in anti-choice agitation. These are pertinent in the present-day world since these assholes have been so effective, at the state level, at implementing draconian schemes to chip away at Roe, or remove abortion as an option, in ways that to less boneheaded Supreme Courts would be flagrantly underhanded schemes to circumvent the law. They're creating huge sectors of the country where illegal abortion has to be coming back in a big way, so they need to have answers.

Kasich does have a unique selling point in the race though: not that he's a "moderate" (though I think he's happy to coast on this impression), but that he's a generic Republican. That comes with some perception of "electability" which dovetails with the "moderate" thing, but the main point is that if you still would like to cast your vote for someone who is not Donald Fucking Trump or Ted Fucking Cruz, you can do that.

That's absolutely how he's framing it, I just hate the idea of "You've resoundingly rejected me in every primary except a couple"--he even finished behind Rubio in one of them, after Rubio had dropped out--"but you should hand the nomination to me because I poll really well in a hypothetical match-up." I mean, if what he wants to happen actually were to happen, there'd be so much outrage within his party that his hypothetical poll numbers would plummet, even if he were able to draw well from independents who don't like Clinton.