Do you really think Trump wanted to be president when he started out in the primaries? I have a feeling he wanted to just raise his profile and make a few points (whether valid or not), it then just snowballed, the more he said things to be controversial, the more popular he got. I don't think for 1 min he seriously thought he would be the nominee.
Its now at a point when he cant escape, so he is still saying even more wild things to make sure he doesn't get elected.
I think you credit him with far too much intelligence.
The lack of intelligence was actually my point, he never saw what could truly happen. I actually think he was trying to set it up for one of his children in 2020
I mentioned earlier Trump's failure to understand English and on a re-run of the clip heard him say 'bigly'. WTF?? He is so inarticulate it makes any sane person weep. Listen to him and he will say 'tremendous' several times (always about himself of course.) And don't think this is just him dumbing down for the electorate, he always spoke in words of one or two syllables and on rare occasions he might launch himself into one containing three ('tremendous') and repeats himself often within the same sentence. Go back to his comments on Mrs Khan and listen.
I agree with Thaid that he never contemplated winning the nomination (nor did the Republican Party.) What is interesting is that the people who voted for him in the primaries don't hold the purse strings and he frightens the life out of the money men with his wild promises. Still, promises have never been a problem for Donald, they are there to be broken.
Clinton has gone very quiet which I suspect is her team's way of letting Trump continue his foot in the mouth campaign.
I mentioned earlier Trump's failure to understand English and on a re-run of the clip heard him say 'bigly'. WTF?? He is so inarticulate it makes any sane person weep. Listen to him and he will say 'tremendous' several times (always about himself of course.) And don't think this is just him dumbing down for the electorate, he always spoke in words of one or two syllables and on rare occasions he might launch himself into one containing three.
I really think Gary Johnson had some sort of media coverage for him and the Libertarian Party this year of all years he could poll up to 10% with the amount of distaste felt towards Clinton and especially Trump.
I am not talking about the former Yeovil manager by the way.
Again, being a Marxist,
I've seen you mention this a couple of times SDA and am genuinely curious. It may sound like a stupid question, but what do you mean by this?
Do you believe in the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system? Do you believe this will happen as a natural evolutionary consequence of the contradictions of Capitalism (Marx) or will revolutionary leadership be required (Lenin/Trotsky).
Or do you mean like the "one nation" corruption of Communism in Stalinist USSR or Maoist China?
Or maybe just the "socialist", "fairer" distribution of wealth within the Capitalist system like the old British Labour Party.
Sorry, didn't mean to get sidetracked on this heavy shit. PM me if you don't want to elaborate on here (if you can be arsed)
So Trump's latest comment is that "Obama is the founder of ISIS. He founded ISIS. The co-founder is crooked Hilary Clinton"
The bloke is off his nut
I would agree with him to a point (wtf am I saying???).
The establishment and rise of IS is almost certainly an unintended consequence of US foreign policy - and not just the US. But nut-job's use of English lets him down again - to be a founder requires a conscious decision to establish something.
In continuance of the decades-old, specious "Clinton Body Bags" narrative, the deaths of four people with supposed links to Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016 (over a span of six weeks, not "less than a month") have been proffered as evidence (or at least a very strong suggestion) that those deaths are part of a nefarious plot to bump off anyone who might possess information that could bring down Clinton's campaign for the presidency.
However, as is typical of this form of conspiracy theory, those four people had only the most tenuous and indirect of connections to Hillary Clinton, and the putative reasons offered for why they would supposedly need to be killed (if any reasons were offered at all) ranged from non-credible to erroneous:
o On 11 July 2016, Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Conrad Rich was shot and killed just after 4 AM in Washington, D.C. There is zero evidence behind the conspiracy theory that Rich was gunned down while on his way to meet with the FBI (at 4:00 AM?) to discuss testifying against Hillary Clinton regarding election fraud in the 2016 primaries.
As noted by Rich's hometown newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, despite the lack of any substance to such rumors, WikiLeaks has since fanned the flames of speculation by offering a $20,000 reward for information about Rich's killer:
Fevered political conspiracy theories about the death of Seth Rich have been swirling through online comment sections and websites ever since the Omaha native was gunned down early on July 10 close to his home in northwest Washington, D.C.
All indications from police have been that Rich’s death was most likely the result of a botched robbery — a sadly too-common case of a promising young man cut down simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But that hasn’t stopped wild Internet speculation from going viral, based in part on the fact that Rich worked at the Democratic National Committee. Internet commenters have suggested that Rich was behind the disclosure of DNC emails to WikiLeaks that helped force the resignation of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida as chairwoman. The conspiracy theorists got new ammunition when WikiLeaks announced a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Rich’s death.
Never mind the evidence in favor of a robbery, the fact that the leaked emails were released well after his death or even that WikiLeaks itself stressed that the reward should not be taken as an implication that Rich was involved in the email leak.
Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson Alice Kim said "there is no indication that Seth Rich's death is connected to his employment at the DNC," and a spokesman for the Rich family said that people "attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy" are "causing more harm than good":
[S]ome are attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy, and in their attempts to do so, are actually causing more harm than good and impeding on the ability for law enforcement to properly do their job. For the sake of finding Seth's killer, and for the sake of giving the family the space they need at this terrible time, they are asking for the public to refrain from pushing unproven and harmful theories about Seth's murder.
o Former U.N. Diplomat John Ashe died in June 2016, and his death was quickly followed by conspiracy claims that he was about "to testify against Hillary Clinton in US District Court." Although Ashe's cause of death prompted some curious speculation (it was initially reported as a heart attack but subsequently attributed to a weightlifting accident), he was not about to testify against Hillary Clinton or the DNC at the time he died — he was set to begin pre-trial meetings related to corruption charges against himself.
o Writer Victor Thorn passed away in August 2016, by all accounts of a self-inflicted gunshot wound (i.e., suicide). Thorn wasn't anyone who had "exposed the Clintons," however — he was the author of conspiracy-mongering books contending that the Holocaust was a hoax and that Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His books on the Clintons were in the same vein: long on sensationalist rumor, speculation, hearsay, conspiracy theory, and "just asking questions"-style insinuation, but short on documentation. (Examples: "Was Bill and Hillary's much ballyhooed first meeting at Yale actually part of a much larger prearranged marriage engineered by shadowy New World Order figures whose ultimate plans led them to the White House?" and "Find out how during their academic careers, Bill and Hillary were recruited into the CIA under Operation CHAOS to subvert the anti-war movement.")
o Shawn Lucas, best known for a viral video capturing him serving the DNC with a lawsuit in July 2016, passed away suddenly the following month. (Lucas was reportedly found dead in a bathroom; although officials have disclosed no specific cause of death yet, neither have they indicated that foul play is suspected.)
Lucas was not, as subsequently portrayed in conspiracy memes, the "lead attorney in the anti-Clinton DNC fraud case"; he was just a process server who delivered papers to the DNC notifying them of a lawsuit charging the organization with "fraud" in favoring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary process. Killing a process server after the fact as a means of suppressing a lawsuit makes no sense, especially when all the principal parties involved in the lawsuit remain alive and capable of talking.
The great thing about Trump is it doesn't seem to matter how mad, offensive or just plain dumb he is it doesn't seem to detract from his popularity. I used to watch film of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco etc and wonder how anyone could take them seriously and this certainly goes for Trump.
I'm not really clear what people are voting for when they vote for him as the only thing he cares about is himself. He's bigoted, thin-skinned, irrational, has no policies and seems to despise a large part of the US population. He has no diplomacy skills and seems to admire some very dodgy world leaders.
I know that FiveThirtyEight has gotten UK elections wrong, but their predictions in the States are very, very good. This is a link to their "Polls Plus" model, which takes into account polling in each state, plus economic factors (like real wages). As Nate Silver points out in his latest post, there is still room for polls to shift, and really just about any other candidate than Hillary Clinton would have this wrapped up by now, but she is also still in with a shout of a pretty seismic victory. Note that when you hover over states, the % you see if % of winning the states, not polling percentages.
What I find very interesting in that, and this is mostly form a personal perspective, is that despite a 4.9% unemployment rate, when you take things like real wages into consideration, the economy is only judged to be doing ok, which I think is very telling at how skewed our employment metrics are (i.e. you can work a full time job and live at or below the poverty line).
Flipping Georgia and North Carolina (which went for Obama in 2008 and Romney in 2012) would be a pretty big deal. She also looks poised to take Iowa, which matters inasmuch as Iowa matters--which really depends on how much you like corn (i.e. not much).
It's noticeable that, if the election were held today, a lot of the country would be moving blue. That's not to say moving left though, as when it comes to economic and foreign policy Hillary Clinton is pretty centrist. She is more left leaning on cultural issues--equal rights, woman's right to choose, but those are increasingly popular stances on said issues (i.e. the neocons have lost the culture wars because they're dying out).
Donald Trump has mesmerized much of America — and the world — with his capacity to alienate one voting group after another. With his recent attacks on the Khan family, he managed to score a trifecta: angering veterans, Gold Star families, and the Republican leadership.
Yet he retains a core of supporters who applaud his attacks on the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and elites in general. For some who are unhappy with the hawkish direction of U.S. foreign policy, Trump has even appeared as a kind of peace candidate willing to take on NATO and the military-industrial complex.
Currently 10 points behind in the polls. I know that the good people of the USA are as daft as a box of frogs and as blinkered as a nervy colt, but even they can't get this wrong; can they?
Not a shake up according to Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson ( yet another horror story when she talks ). I can see Trump being told to reign in the mouthing off and keep to the program from here until November. Trouble is I can't see Trump keeping his big mouth shut and struggles to convince using the teleprompter. Haha just watched that clip from Trump lawyer. For someone with so much money you would think he could buy people with a bit more intellect. But they along with Trump keep shooting themselves in the foot.
Indeed! However, Trump. Really? She's the best of a pretty grim bunch of 2 (can 2 make a bunch or is it merely a pair?) which is a sad indictment on the USA in all honesty.
I mean, how the hell did he get this far? Celebrity Apprentice to Republican nomination for the presidency. You truly couldn't write this sort of comedy and get away with it!!
Joe Biden, your time has come. America, indeed the whole of the free world, need you to step up and do your duty and prevent the planet being consumed by a conflict between Red Neck Christian Zombies and Muslim fanatics.
Apparently it is "walking pneumonia." Which is not to be confused with "walking dead" which is whole lot more serious and suggests a zombie apocalypse is upon us. If that happens,Trump will walk it, in more ways than one.
Joe Biden, your time has come. America, indeed the whole of the free world, need you to step up and do your duty and prevent the planet being consumed by a conflict between Red Neck Christian Zombies and Muslim fanatics.
Reading around this I have come to the conclusion that you might not be wrong.
Comments
I mentioned earlier Trump's failure to understand English and on a re-run of the clip heard him say 'bigly'. WTF?? He is so inarticulate it makes any sane person weep. Listen to him and he will say 'tremendous' several times (always about himself of course.) And don't think this is just him dumbing down for the electorate, he always spoke in words of one or two syllables and on rare occasions he might launch himself into one containing three ('tremendous') and repeats himself often within the same sentence. Go back to his comments on Mrs Khan and listen.
I agree with Thaid that he never contemplated winning the nomination (nor did the Republican Party.) What is interesting is that the people who voted for him in the primaries don't hold the purse strings and he frightens the life out of the money men with his wild promises. Still, promises have never been a problem for Donald, they are there to be broken.
Clinton has gone very quiet which I suspect is her team's way of letting Trump continue his foot in the mouth campaign.
It may sound like a stupid question, but what do you mean by this?
Do you believe in the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system?
Do you believe this will happen as a natural evolutionary consequence of the contradictions of Capitalism (Marx) or will revolutionary leadership be required (Lenin/Trotsky).
Or do you mean like the "one nation" corruption of Communism in Stalinist USSR or Maoist China?
Or maybe just the "socialist", "fairer" distribution of wealth within the Capitalist system like the old British Labour Party.
Sorry, didn't mean to get sidetracked on this heavy shit.
PM me if you don't want to elaborate on here (if you can be arsed)
What chance a Labor (sic) party in the USA?
The bloke is off his nut
The establishment and rise of IS is almost certainly an unintended consequence of US foreign policy - and not just the US. But nut-job's use of English lets him down again - to be a founder requires a conscious decision to establish something.
However, as is typical of this form of conspiracy theory, those four people had only the most tenuous and indirect of connections to Hillary Clinton, and the putative reasons offered for why they would supposedly need to be killed (if any reasons were offered at all) ranged from non-credible to erroneous:
o On 11 July 2016, Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Conrad Rich was shot and killed just after 4 AM in Washington, D.C. There is zero evidence behind the conspiracy theory that Rich was gunned down while on his way to meet with the FBI (at 4:00 AM?) to discuss testifying against Hillary Clinton regarding election fraud in the 2016 primaries.
As noted by Rich's hometown newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, despite the lack of any substance to such rumors, WikiLeaks has since fanned the flames of speculation by offering a $20,000 reward for information about Rich's killer:
Fevered political conspiracy theories about the death of Seth Rich have been swirling through online comment sections and websites ever since the Omaha native was gunned down early on July 10 close to his home in northwest Washington, D.C.
All indications from police have been that Rich’s death was most likely the result of a botched robbery — a sadly too-common case of a promising young man cut down simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But that hasn’t stopped wild Internet speculation from going viral, based in part on the fact that Rich worked at the Democratic National Committee. Internet commenters have suggested that Rich was behind the disclosure of DNC emails to WikiLeaks that helped force the resignation of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida as chairwoman. The conspiracy theorists got new ammunition when WikiLeaks announced a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Rich’s death.
Never mind the evidence in favor of a robbery, the fact that the leaked emails were released well after his death or even that WikiLeaks itself stressed that the reward should not be taken as an implication that Rich was involved in the email leak.
Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson Alice Kim said "there is no indication that Seth Rich's death is connected to his employment at the DNC," and a spokesman for the Rich family said that people "attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy" are "causing more harm than good":
[S]ome are attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy, and in their attempts to do so, are actually causing more harm than good and impeding on the ability for law enforcement to properly do their job. For the sake of finding Seth's killer, and for the sake of giving the family the space they need at this terrible time, they are asking for the public to refrain from pushing unproven and harmful theories about Seth's murder.
o Former U.N. Diplomat John Ashe died in June 2016, and his death was quickly followed by conspiracy claims that he was about "to testify against Hillary Clinton in US District Court." Although Ashe's cause of death prompted some curious speculation (it was initially reported as a heart attack but subsequently attributed to a weightlifting accident), he was not about to testify against Hillary Clinton or the DNC at the time he died — he was set to begin pre-trial meetings related to corruption charges against himself.
o Writer Victor Thorn passed away in August 2016, by all accounts of a self-inflicted gunshot wound (i.e., suicide). Thorn wasn't anyone who had "exposed the Clintons," however — he was the author of conspiracy-mongering books contending that the Holocaust was a hoax and that Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His books on the Clintons were in the same vein: long on sensationalist rumor, speculation, hearsay, conspiracy theory, and "just asking questions"-style insinuation, but short on documentation. (Examples: "Was Bill and Hillary's much ballyhooed first meeting at Yale actually part of a much larger prearranged marriage engineered by shadowy New World Order figures whose ultimate plans led them to the White House?" and "Find out how during their academic careers, Bill and Hillary were recruited into the CIA under Operation CHAOS to subvert the anti-war movement.")
o Shawn Lucas, best known for a viral video capturing him serving the DNC with a lawsuit in July 2016, passed away suddenly the following month. (Lucas was reportedly found dead in a bathroom; although officials have disclosed no specific cause of death yet, neither have they indicated that foul play is suspected.)
Lucas was not, as subsequently portrayed in conspiracy memes, the "lead attorney in the anti-Clinton DNC fraud case"; he was just a process server who delivered papers to the DNC notifying them of a lawsuit charging the organization with "fraud" in favoring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary process. Killing a process server after the fact as a means of suppressing a lawsuit makes no sense, especially when all the principal parties involved in the lawsuit remain alive and capable of talking.
I'm not really clear what people are voting for when they vote for him as the only thing he cares about is himself. He's bigoted, thin-skinned, irrational, has no policies and seems to despise a large part of the US population. He has no diplomacy skills and seems to admire some very dodgy world leaders.
I think he will be a Grade A disaster if he wins.
I know that FiveThirtyEight has gotten UK elections wrong, but their predictions in the States are very, very good. This is a link to their "Polls Plus" model, which takes into account polling in each state, plus economic factors (like real wages). As Nate Silver points out in his latest post, there is still room for polls to shift, and really just about any other candidate than Hillary Clinton would have this wrapped up by now, but she is also still in with a shout of a pretty seismic victory. Note that when you hover over states, the % you see if % of winning the states, not polling percentages.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-clinton-doesnt-have-this-race-locked-up/?ex_cid=538fb
What I find very interesting in that, and this is mostly form a personal perspective, is that despite a 4.9% unemployment rate, when you take things like real wages into consideration, the economy is only judged to be doing ok, which I think is very telling at how skewed our employment metrics are (i.e. you can work a full time job and live at or below the poverty line).
Flipping Georgia and North Carolina (which went for Obama in 2008 and Romney in 2012) would be a pretty big deal. She also looks poised to take Iowa, which matters inasmuch as Iowa matters--which really depends on how much you like corn (i.e. not much).
It's noticeable that, if the election were held today, a lot of the country would be moving blue. That's not to say moving left though, as when it comes to economic and foreign policy Hillary Clinton is pretty centrist. She is more left leaning on cultural issues--equal rights, woman's right to choose, but those are increasingly popular stances on said issues (i.e. the neocons have lost the culture wars because they're dying out).
Yet he retains a core of supporters who applaud his attacks on the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and elites in general. For some who are unhappy with the hawkish direction of U.S. foreign policy, Trump has even appeared as a kind of peace candidate willing to take on NATO and the military-industrial complex.
The next 3 months should be interesting.
nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html?_r=1
She's the best of a pretty grim bunch of 2 (can 2 make a bunch or is it merely a pair?) which is a sad indictment on the USA in all honesty.
I mean, how the hell did he get this far? Celebrity Apprentice to Republican nomination for the presidency. You truly couldn't write this sort of comedy and get away with it!!
Embarrassing for the country quite frankly.
The footage really doesn't look good. Hillary's health just became as big an issue as Trump's mouth.
Which is not to be confused with "walking dead" which is whole lot more serious and suggests a zombie apocalypse is upon us.
If that happens,Trump will walk it, in more ways than one.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/07/27/joe-biden-could-secret-weapon-hillary-clinton/87619296/
Be interested to hear what our resident Yanks think.