2016 Presidential Election Thread

@gturner, how many tours have you done?

Well, right now it looks like he's in the UK, next week he'll be in Italy.....

From his writings, Khan does not come from any liberal school of Islamic jurisprudence, those who try to interpret the law in ways more compatible with modern concepts of human rights and human dignity. He belongs to the very conservative schools of Muslim law, such as you'd find in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, he was writing one of those articles from Saudi Arabia.

Harvard's Republican club denounces Trump

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/harvard-republicans-donald-trump_us_57a3987fe4b056bad214e643

Which is exactly the point all the Trump supporters keep making, along with some of the better pundits who can see past their Harvard Law degree and who have talked to someone who isn't a member of their country club.

This is a rebellion against the Ivy League insiders who maintain the status quo, which benefits them but not the people they always count on to vote for them.

It's a rebellion of the mullets. Red neck republicans. And 20 years of conservative talk radio dumbing people down.

Or is it? As Kurt Schlicter wrote the other day. A snippet:

Did we ever actually listen to our people? I mean all our people, not just the people who went to the same colleges as us and who hang with us at the same awesome restaurants and read National Review. I mean the actual voters out there in wherever actual GOP voters live. Did we pay attention to them and their concerns? Did we listen to them about illegal immigration, about the impact of free trade, about the wars we supported? And did we fight? I don’t mean just give lip service to how bad and unwashed liberals are, but really get in there and stand up to these flag-hating, gender-inventing, God-booing jerks? Or did we look down on the very people we were depending on at election time?

In short, did we completely screw up? Nah, it’s clearly everyone else who’s wrong. They’re just too stupid to understand that they need to obediently fall in line. After all, their real interests are actually – and super conveniently – our interests.

Seriously – is that where we are at? Because I’m hearing a lot of such nonsense from people horrified at Trump and, by extension, the GOP voters who nominated him fair and square. Can we really blame them for voting for the one guy who actually paid attention to what they were saying?

Did we listen about illegal immigration? Heck, illegal immigration is just wonderful for us. We get cheaper restaurant food, cheaper houses, cheaper maids, and if we own companies we get cheaper workers. So what’s not to love, right? Except maybe you didn’t go to a university and wanted to work with your hands and found that you can’t get a job because all the companies are hiring cheap illegal alien workers. Or your truck got hit by an uninsured illegal. Or your daughter got killed by an illegal who should have been deported. Well, if you have concerns about these things, clearly you’re a racist.​

The Democrats have had the same problem for a long long time, though their voters remain much more oblivious to it. Democrat policies benefit Ivy League graduates and social justice majors (community organizers) to the detriment of the people they claim to help. All their lovely trade agreements helped destroy the union jobs they claim to defend. Their complete control of academia has resulted in more than a generation of students that are going to spend most of their working lives paying off their college debts - for degrees that are essentially worthless.

But Republican voters have notice many of the same disturbing trends, trends which people in big liberal cities, whether Republican or Democrat, remain largely blind to.

The problem is boiling down to one of class and attitudes. Elite Republicans and elite Democrats went to the same schools, hung out at the same parties, and will both find lucrative but otherwise non-productive jobs in New York or inside the beltway, collecting funds and "managing" various think tanks, activist organizations, or charitable causes. They are more likely to marry each other than marry someone from the outside, people they wouldn't even be caught rubbing elbows with. They are becoming an aristocracy, based on entitlement and privilege, and few Americans outside the pundit class and their mindless lackeys re going to support them if offered an alternative.

You're agreeing with me?

Cruz was bullshitting during a campaign. Come on. Use some of those brain cells you supposedly have.

Khazr Khan? Why are you still talking about him @gturner ?

First it was a trap for Trump that Trump walked right into. Trump can not let any slight, real or imagined, against him go by without a response. He basically got trolled and fell for it. Instead of immediately backing off he went full Dayton3 mode and kept going for the troll. You never go full Dayton3.

There is no way that anyone can win a political argument against a family whose not running for office and that has lost someone in a war. NONE. Even if Trump is right, and I think he is on the issue of Islamic immigrants, he still will not win the argument against a man and woman standing in front of the whole country talking about their dead son.

It was stupid of Trump to respond the way he did. It's stupid of him and you and others to keep harping on Khan. You're making Hillary's road to the White House easier you stupid fuck.

I agree that it's a rebellion, but I don't think it's due to 20 years of talk radio dumbing people down. I think it's more a reflection of 20 years of the Republican and Democrat establishments forming a bubble and letting political correctness take over. Very few of them say anything that won't be popular either on the cocktail circuit or at the country club.

Conservatives really started to notice, and get more and more frustrated, when McConnell and Bohner made their play-fight strategy breathtakingly obvious. They weren't really going to oppose anything Obama did. They were just going to rig it so they can pretend to oppose it while letting it pass, thinking this will keep the base fired up. It's much like the way Democrat establishment used the Republicans as a bogeyman to keep black people pulling the D lever to keep the establishment in power - and doing absolutely nothing that will help any of their voters. When it became obvious that the Republican establishment was doing the same thing, the voters looked to provide new Guards for their future security, ones who will actually do something, and fight fight instead of play fight.

And often the feelings of the great masses of voters are wildly divergent from their government establishment's views. For example:

Torrentz.eu Domain Suspended After UK Police Request​

Torrentz.eu, the largest torrent search engine on the Internet, has had its domain name suspended following a request from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit in the UK. ​

Over the past few months City of London Police have been working together with copyright holders to topple sites that provide or link to pirated content.​

The government has been working closely with copyright holders, but not working at all with the citizenry, and it's the citizenry that has all the votes. Too much of that and the citizenry starts feeling that the elites in government are working for other elites, not the ordinary people. So when one ordinary person steps up and starts screaming, expressing what ordinary folks are feeling, the citizens will flock to his banner while the stunned aristocracy gapes in horror and outrage. "How dare the peasants think for themselves! We know what's best for them, and they must listen!"




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The difference in the reactions was so predictably true that I'm not even sure this qualifies as a social experiment.

Why are you even responding to this drooling idiot??

You're right. They didn't need dumbing down.

If that bullshit is popular enough to get him elected, it's still a problem, even if he meant it or not.

Temperment and trustworthiness aren't measured in polls like this.I'm sure I'd be closer to the Donald on most issues but there's no chance in hell of me voting for him.

Donald Trump is the epitome of silver spoon and ivy league. Jesus republicans are morons but I guess that's to be expected from people who take pride in rejecting science and education.

There are a ton of hypocrites supporting Donald Trump. The religous right is probably the biggest. A foul mouthed candidate who broke his marriage vows multiple times with multiple women? This is your guy? Really? You lose all credibility with that choice.

It's the Supreme Court. The leaders know that the culture wars have been lost. At the national level they can no longer win at the ballot box. Their only option is to retreat to their deep red states and dig in (look for them to push state level constitutional amendments while they have the supermajority in these states). However for that to work they need a right leaning court.

If they lose this election, political Christianity is done.

So they have to hold their nose and go all in on Trump.

@gturner, you never served in the military? Then shut the fuck up. It's despicable what you said about someone who died for this country. I would have never seen it if @Ten Lubak hadn't quoted it, but fuck you. I don't care if you disagree with Khan politically, I don't, but don't go after his dead son who died for this country. It's despicable.

Yeah, but this is nothing new and yet they still have credibility among their "flock" (a term used because they're woolly, smell of shit and are easily fucked by bored farmers). Practically every "Conservative Christian" you see is - if he's not fucking choirboys - silently cursing the fact that Mormonism and Islam got in there with the "multiple wives" idea whilst Jesus fucked up on that score.

You moron. I've never once mention Khan's son, other than noting that a picture of his grave was in Dabiq magazine. The issue is Khazr Khan's legal views on sharia and his law practice.

Perhaps you didn't notice that Cpt. Khan and Khazr Khan happen to have the same last name. It probably confused you.

Holy fuck. New AJC poll has Hillary over Trump in GA.

http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2016/0...n-has-slim-lead-over-donald-trump-in-georgia/

Obviously just one poll, and there are 3 months left in this, but WERE GA to go to Hillary then she would almost certainly have the 270 EC votes needed to win before we left the Central Time Zone.

That is the kind of shellacking that could actually put the House in play.

You're assuming Assange isn't going to keep releasing horrifying e-mails. He's already taken out the leadership of the DNC.