July 22, 2016

Couldn't be happier!

Cruz won a solid 25% of the hardest-core, formerly-sure-to-vote Republicans in the Primaries this year, 7,800,000 votes. Trump won only 45% of all Republican primary voters, 14,000,000. A further 7 million voted for someone else entirely. The need to unify the base was never stronger.

With the renewal of his attacks, and thanks to his childishly thin skin, Trump went a long way toward alienating one quarter to one half of his most ardent supporters. Who knows how many millions in donations that represents.

It was a clever move on Cruz's part, too, and one sure to work for us in the long run. He also is hated and feared by Republican managers, yet he just went a long way toward losing the election for the GOP this time and placed himself as an automatic front-runner in the next election, which he will also lose.

It's as close as we will get to a guaranteed eight-year term for Hillary Clinton. Because the politics of division never adds up!

July 19, 2016

I think is was a guarantee of payment

Trump is notorious for not paying, and I think the ghostwriter deliberately poisoned and rickrolled the document as a first draft, with the final to be delivered on payment. The Trumps liked the first draft, stiffed the writer, and NOW they're paying for it, for sure.

July 19, 2016

It took the Visigoths 3 days to finish the Sack of Rome...

... While the Sack of Shit has four.

Please feel free to post your deep thoughts on the Republican Convention here for our amusement.

Are you not entertained?

July 17, 2016

What?! Holy CRAP!

From that one move, several early guesses can be made:

* Removing a speaker from the list is about as big a tell as you can show in the VP guessing game (unless you're Republican and Tim Tebow backs out on you). Furthermore, the timing of this move suggests that it is intentional, designed to tip off the press and tealeaf-readers so that pollsters can run their hypothetical matchup scenarios. It injects enthusiasm into Democrats and shows the general lack of finesse in the Republican pick, and keeps people looking ahead to the Democratic Convention while the dumpster fire burns. Warren can easily be added back to the speaker list if this is a head-fake, but it risks upsetting those of us who would consider the pick of Warren to be an excellent one.

* As best I can tell, Mass. election law now allows for an interim gubernatorial appointment, for up to 160 days, at which point a special election must be held. The current governor is Republican, and his appointment will have a leg up in the next regular election, and he may be able to run in the special election as well. Picking Warren would concede a large but not insurmountable advantage to the Massachusetts Republicans. Democrats must feel confident that Warren's position can be refilled by another Democrat in mid-2017.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vacancies-in-the-united-states-senate.aspx

* Assuming a win, the move would also promote the highly competent Ed Markey to the position of senior Senator from Massachusetts, which certainly puts him in a position for higher office or future cabinet posts. Markey got his current post through a clever double-move by the Obama Administration after the death of Ted Kennedy, in which they moved John Kerry to Secretary of State and created two new powerhouse Senators (Warren and Markey) with the move.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=263986

* Democrats cannot make a move like this without conceding territory in the Senate, temporarily. That, in turn, could dramatically influence the course of events that President Clinton can follow in her first five months... UNLESS your internal polling suggests that Democrats are going to wind up holding somewhere around 53-59 seats in the Senate. That range is enough to control business in the Senate, but not enough to override a filibuster. It provides some padding to give a seat away, temporarily. The Warren hand-tip suggests that Democrats are now very confident about regaining a strong majority in the Senate.

* In retrospect it appears as if Mrs. Clinton has been carefully judging the reactions of voters as she appeared with or dangled potential running mates, including Tim Kaine just last week. I recall a hypothetical scenario poll from much earlier in the year that suggested that a Clinton/Warren ticket could defeat any combination of Republicans.

* Democrats must also have noted something about the "misogyny vector" which works in our favor. My current assumption is that the racists are the misogynists, so that doubling down on a female ticket doesn't change any minds on the Republican side, but it must have a net positive effect on Democratic and undecided voters. That squares well with my own personal bias, though, so it's not a solid guess like some of the above.

The Senate will sorely miss Mrs. Warren, if she accepts the nomination as running-mate. But Ed Markey is a superb replacement as senior Senator and Massachusetts has a deep bag of competent leadership which can replace Warren. Democrats must feel considerably more confident about the upcoming elections than I suspected, for Warren is an intrepid and potentially risky choice in several ways. Wonderful!

July 15, 2016

Heh, it WAS a head-fake!

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-midnight-calls-pence-change-mind

What I failed to account for is Trump's incompetence. One must never underestimate the power of stupid.

July 12, 2016

Interesting. A "neutralizing dangle."

This is the time of year when both campaigns are trying hard to throw reporters off the path, so that the impact of the running mate's announcement is maximized. It's called a "dangle."

Here, however, I detect a clever double-move on the part of the Clinton camp.

Trump is a terrible candidate in every way and often, especially when the candidate is a cowardly and ignorant chickenhawk, handlers try to bolster the ticket with a strong military figure. W had former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney; Nixon got Bronze Star winner Spiro Agnew; Perot chose Admiral Stockdale, and so on.

Trump desperately needs someone who knows a thing or two about defense, since he clearly does not know anything at all about it. No brass, no ass.

Mrs. Clinton herself needs no such assistance. Her record as Secretary of State stands on its own. But she has a chance to further erode Trump's support by also appearing receptive to the idea of a defense-specialist running-mate.

So in this case, Mrs. Clinton almost certainly IS NOT considering Admiral Stavridis as her primary choice. Instead, this leak is almost certainly designed to neutralize Trump-camp leaks about former DIA chief General Michael Flynn. The Clinton-camp disclosure keeps the press chasing its tail for a day or two and also reduces any potential gain the Trump people might get for putting Flynn on the ticket.

One might further make some guesses about the overall competence of the Trump campaign's management, and Flynn's sudden and public reversal on being pro-choice, and suspect that perhaps Flynn in fact IS Trump's choice for running mate. In that case the Clinton campaign's leak is potentially even more effective, providing the press with the hypothetical matchups they so dearly love going through the upcoming Cleveland convention disaster, while also preserving the secrecy of their actual choice.

Pretty cool, if that's the case. We'll know for sure in only a few weeks.

July 11, 2016

Still think Pam Bondi is in it.

It looks like she may have to run to escape indictment for protecting Trump in Florida, and she has the Fox-bimbo routine down pat. Florida itself is shaping up to be among the worst of the electoral disasters Republicans are now facing, and putting her on the ticket would help that.

She's also far enough down the totem pole that she might prove to be a loyal Vice President instead of a dangerous plotting rival, as Gingrich or Cruz (or Romney, or Christie) would be.

Bondi is also considerably more competent than the "dangles" Trump has been casting this week, in an attempt to throw off the press before the convention. The smart play is to offer red herrings to the press so that the choice can be a surprise.

But then again, we have yet to see a smart play from Trump or the GOP this year, so who knows?

July 7, 2016

I see only one Gingrich VP play.

Trump would be absolutely crazy to allow a plotting sociopath like Gingrich to be one knife away from his own job. Trump is a lot of things, but he's not suicidal. So it makes no sense....

...UNLESS Trump really does plan to bail out after winning the job. Then he can run off, start his TV network with President Gingrich as an exclusive guest every week, and profit from the sell-off of America.

July 6, 2016

An actual trickle-down process.

As Trump keeps talking and thus adding to Mrs. Clinton's near-insurmountable lead, the Democratic Party is for once able to divert funds and effort to the undercard races in the Senate and House.

Add to that the fact that President Obama is going to be running directly against Republican Senators for their refusal to hold hearings on his Supreme Court nominee, and the fact that a couple hundred Democrats see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a good crack at established Republican House Members, and the fact that Republican gerrymandering across dozens of states has watered down their dominance in many districts, and the fact that the Trump campaign is sucking Republican money from the bottom up, and all of a sudden it's looking like a possible clean sweep of all three branches of government.

July 6, 2016

Told ya.

As I explained long ago, the Clinton email scandal is all about protecting the hundreds of former Bush Administration criminals who used private email servers to discuss actual crimes, then feloniously destroyed the emails.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1614952


The next President is going to have the responsibility of either prosecuting or not prosecuting the Bush Administration for its grand-scale felonious violation of the Presidential Records Act, in which millions of official government emails were illegally sent through the RNC email servers for years, then destroyed. To this day it is claimed that the emails are "lost," but I guarantee you that NSA, the Russians, and the Chinese all have 'em, because the RNC didn't protect those emails as well as they should have.

We are talking about a conspiracy conducted at every level of the executive branch for years, involving thousands of people, all of whom are looking at seven years in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for failing to document their work as our public servants....

To the above I would add that it has since emerged that Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice both did the exact same thing. That suggests still another exonerating factor for Mrs. Clinton, which is that the backdoor communications channel is an accepted method of American diplomacy. But whatever, the point here is to threaten Mrs. Clinton so that she does not render an entire generation of Republican administrators unfit for future public service. I hope that she burns it all to the ground as President and takes the risk that she too will someday face prosecution.