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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Here's an interesting trend: People crossing party lines to vote against Trump.
Whatever it takes, I guess...
Technically, there are not enough Establishment voters to be a viable voting block compared to the New Dixiecrats and the Religious Right.
Wizard Needs Food BadlyWell as I said, "Establishment republican" would make a third bloc out of the republicans, with the Religious Right and the Trump supporters as the other two.
I do not think anyone even cares about who would come out as the winner in that triumvirate, but I just think it too mindboggingly stupid for even the GOP to do that third split. Arent they rallying behind Cruz as the establishment candidate?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesSome are putting up with that because they think Kasich is too moderate or has too little support (in the primary, that is).
edited 15th Mar '16 1:14:37 PM by SeptimusHeap
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanTed is competing with Trump for the same votes, plus Ted is all about the hardcore religious fanatics. Ted Cruz isn't very different from Trump, he's essentially the pre-Trump who worked his way through the Republican party.
I think this election has shown that libertarians continue to be a small fringe. A noisy one, especially online and sometimes in Silicon Valley, but a fringe. It doesn't hep either that they have a thousand different subdivisions and range from Y'all Queda types to slick corporate sociopaths to sorts that practically sound like hippies, except they don't want to pay taxes for anything and are under the delusion that if there was no government, they could keep trillion dollar multinational corporations at bay by suing them in court. (Exactly why they expect that 1) courts will be impartial and not corrupted by the corporations and/or won't have rules created by the corporations, or 2) the court could enforce anything on the corporations in such a scenario is beyond me. I mean, research the behavior of foreign corporations in Africa, Asia, or South America and the way they've laughed at or run roughshod over courts there to see how that situation plays out.)
Because of those subdivisions and their preference to vote based on a candidate's libertarian purity, (with all of them defining a true libertarian differently) they don't make for a very cohesive voting block to build around.
edited 15th Mar '16 1:21:35 PM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |But...even if you gather the Jeb, Rubio and Kasich votes together they could maybe stand up against Cruz but not against Drumpf...arent they better off trying to stick to Cruz, awful as he is, to have a chance at stopping Drumpf?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes- The Northeast
- New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont)
- The Mid-Atlantic (New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania)
- The Midwest
- The Great Lakes states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin)
- The Great Plains states (Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota)
- The South
- The South Atlantic (Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington D.C., and West Virginia)
- The Deep South (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee)
- The South Central states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas)
- The West
- The Mountain states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming)
- The West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii)
Those are the four/nine official areas, though I used the common names for them rather than the official ones (which are dry and boring, like "East North Central Region" instead of "Great Lakes states"). You can see the whole list and all the official names here
. There are other regions that get grouped together for various reasons, of course (eg, the "Gulf states" are all the states that border the Gulf of Mexico — Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida), and there are various "belt" areas (the Bible belt, the rust belt, etc) that are less about specific states and more about culture/attitude.
And that concludes today's geography lesson.
(tldr: no, the midwest is never really considered part of the east coast.)
edited 15th Mar '16 1:30:25 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Sometimes I think the U.S population at large fail to realize they are small town minded people in a huge sprawling nation. Hundreds of thousands are absolutely nothing in comparative numbers to the rest of the nation, but the numbers are taken as if they were hundreds of millions.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesCarson super-PAC morphs into VP vehicle
Sousa elaborated on his plans in a telephone interview Tuesday with The Hill.
"One of the reasons we called our group 'The 2016 Committee' was to give it inordinate flexibility," Sousa said.
"The 2016 Committee will now kind of morph itself into the objective of having Dr. Carson be Donald Trump's running mate."
Sousa says the super-PAC has been in a holding pattern since Carson quit the presidential race, but he is now ready to launch a new campaign — powered by an extensive list of donors — to convince Trump to pick Carson as his running mate.
"Honestly, I am not a Donald Trump guy," Sousa told his super-PAC donors via email.
"But, I’ve learned to deal with reality ... If the Donald is going to be our nominee, who else would you like to have his ear and give him advice than Dr. Ben Carson?
"Perhaps, with the Donald’s nomination looming as inevitable, it was very wise of Dr. Carson to endorse Mr. Trump so that he can exert a positive influence upon him," Sousa added.
The idea isn't to beat Trump in the General.
It's to make sure he loses to the Democrat.
:V
(Krugman) Return of the Undeserving Poor
There's something vaguely cathartic that the GOP is melting down.
I do not care about the establishment nor worried about what the poor Bush famil will do once their political onnections run out. Those idiots will be, sadly, fine
I am more concerned about the impoverished uneducated masses drunk on the GOP kool aid and what they will do if they see it crumble.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesThose stories really show the Republican establishment/elites who were the true believers now openly spitting on the working poor that they duped into voting for them and then talked about behind their back. Hell, the second link I have quoted is basically following right on the heels of the "Father Fuhrer" story I posted about the other day. A different National Review writer, but a very similar tone and argument.
Yet millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying. As I’ve related before, my church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, and it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor. And always — always — there was a sense of entitlement.
And that’s where disability or other government programs kicked in. They were there, beckoning, giving men and women alternatives to gainful employment. You don’t have to do any work (your disability lawyer does all the heavy lifting), you make money, and you get drugs. At our local regional hospital, it’s become a bitter joke the extent to which the community is hooked on "Xanatab" — the Xanax and Lortab prescriptions that lead to drug dependence.
I saw it posted on another board before I saw it posted here, and over there I compared it to someone who has spent decades refusing to do any maintenance or upgrades on their house, let it turn into a firetrap, and when they wake up one night to find a fire, pour gasoline all over out of the spite that their house has "betrayed" them.
I mean, just wow. The Republican party's meltdown could hardly be more official at this point.
edited 15th Mar '16 1:42:20 PM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
x9 I noticed the South has 3 sections while the other regions only have 2. I know the South has half of the original colonies (The other half are in the Northeast), most of the important government and military facilities are there, it's the biggest region of the US (Though if you count Alaska and Hawaii, the American West might actually be bigger) and most of the population of the US lives there, but I still find it kinda odd.
edited 15th Mar '16 1:44:11 PM by Bat178
This bit. If I had a penny for every time I heard right-wingers put the whole weight of personal decisions on Free Will. It flies in the face of everything we know about human psychology. Responsibility calculus is such a pain the ass.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

If Kasich is trying to make himself the GOP establishment candidate, what will it be about Ted?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes