Idiocracy

[WhatIfGodWasALeaf]

The thing is there are other politicians and celebrities endorsing the guy.  It's really scaring me that he could be elected.

He could get the Rupublican nomination, but even that's looking like it's going to be a problem.  The party is looking like their going to submarine him.

Hillary Clinton would absolutely love to go up against Trump, and I think he'd get trounced by her.

Remember, right now the only people that are actually doing any "voting" are just the delegates of the parties.  Put it to a popular vote, and I think he gets smoked.   

Up until 24 hours ago polls had Hillary losing to Trump in the General.

Sanders has had a close to double-digit lead over him.

[Peter D.]

I have no clue how U.S. elections work with primaries and whatever else.

But when I see on the news any of these candidates speak, I can't help but wonder how one of those flakes will be leading the most powerful country in the world. 

[WhatIfGodWasALeaf]

It's interesting watching this election cycle, it just speaks to how completely broken the political system is. Corporations that own the media dictate the media narrative. These same corporations decide which candidate is in their best interest.

There is one candidate talking about the only meaningful issue there is, campaign finance reform and he has been written off from day one as a socialist/communist nut.

In the words of George Carlin, it's all bull#$#% folks and it's bad for you.

[herman]

I have no clue how U.S. elections work with primaries and whatever else.

But when I see on the news any of these candidates speak, I can't help but wonder how one of those flakes will be leading the most powerful country in the world. 

Each party has its members vote for which candidate they want to nominate to run for the Presidential election during the run-up year.

So right now, each state's party delegates are voting on which candidate to back. Super Tuesday is the first major chunk of delegate voting; historically, the candidates who claim the most wins on Super Tuesday go on to represent their parties at the Presidential election.

[L K]

The thing is there are other politicians and celebrities endorsing the guy.  It's really scaring me that he could be elected.

Christie backed him entirely for selfish reasons.  He's unpopular in New Jersey now and he's angling for the Attorney General position with a Republican President.  There really isn't an awesome candidate among the Democrats/Republicans this year.  But the bottom line is their broken political system is going to make whoever is in charge largely irrelevant if they dont' have a majority in the house and senate.  Disastrous from an international relations standpoint but domestic policy will be stagnant.  Unfortunately we are going to suffer for those poor decisions too.

[Rick Couchman]

The Donald show kinda reminds me how Rob Ford still is in City of Toronto politics.  The guy is a train wreck, but everyone likes to watch a train wreck.

[bustaheims]

Yeah I feel like there's going to be a decent amount of current Cruz/Rubio supporters who would be ok with voting for Clinton/against Trump in the general election. Whereas if Trump didn't get the Republican nomination their votes would 100% stay on the Republican side, because heaven forbid they have a female president.

It could be very interesting to see what happens to the Republicans if Trump is their nominee. They've been a fractured party for a while now, and Trump winning their nomination could be enough to really drive the wedge into those cracks, and drive the more moderate "establishment" Republicans away from the party in this election. In the short-term, it could be really damaging, but in the long-run, it could be exactly what they need to bring the party back to a place where they're united and on the same page.

[herman]

I lol'd.

This is from 2012.
http://www.theonion.com/video/after-obama-victory-shrieking-white-hot-sphere-of--30284

[CarltonTheBear]

[Nik]

Watching this election is like watching your neighbour try to install his own below-ground pool. Sure there's a chance he hits a gas line and takes out the whole neighbourhood but it's still too funny to look away.

[hockeyfan1]

It's interesting watching this election cycle, it just speaks to how completely broken the political system is. Corporations that own the media dictate the media narrative. These same corporations decide which candidate is in their best interest.

There is one candidate talking about the only meaningful issue there is, campaign finance reform and he has been written off from day one as a socialist/communist nut.

In the words of George Carlin, it's all bull#$#% folks and it's bad for you.

You couldn't have said it better.  Spot on!

[WhatIfGodWasALeaf]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfjaQe_7T1Q

[hockeyfan1]

Bigotry and racism aside, the reason Donald Trump resonates with a segment of the U.S. populace:

Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic powerbrokers, what they call "free trade" is something so obviously good and noble it doesn't require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.

To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There's a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico, and that they're all going to lose their jobs.

As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we've had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.

Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to "stay competitive" and "the extremely price-sensitive marketplace". A worker shouts (edited)"F*#" you!" at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can "share" his "information". His information about all of them losing their jobs.

                                      -----------

A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington's free-market consensus have brought the rest of America...

...a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.

Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his "attitude", the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, "immigration" placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: "good jobs / the economy".

"People are much more frightened than they are bigoted," is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey "confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don't have a future" and that "there still hasn't been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another."

Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. "These people aren't racist, not any more than anybody else is," he says of Trump supporters he knows. "When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs."

"They look at that, and here's Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he's representing emotionally. We've had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we've had to fight them to get them to represent us. As Trump says, "we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart ... Our airports are, like, Third World."

Trump's words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself..."

Read the rest here:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support

[Highlander]

When Bernie loses they are giving him a consolation job as Mayor of Havana

[Boston Leaf]

as an American Donald Trump sickens me to the core