2016 US Election

[BigNorseWolf]

thejeff wrote:

]Which is why it was a bad answer. He should know by now everything can and will be taken out of context and twisted.

Its 3 o clock on a friday afternoon before vacation. He's outi.

[NPC Dave]

Paul Watson wrote:

Ok. What? What, precisely, has Trump done that is objectively good runnign for President?

1) Genuine campaign finance reform

2) Starting a national discussion about immigration
3) Helping to start a national discussion about voter fraud and whether or not the system is rigged
4) Putting an end to the Bush dynasty
5) Showing that Mitt Romney can actually get angry over something. If Romney had gotten that angry at Obama, he might have won in 2012.
6) Making Hillary Clinton work harder than she ever has before.
7) Inspiring CNN to abandon its former brand and proudly adopt a new brand, that being a SuperPAC for the Democratic party
8) Driving a stake through the vampiric wing of the Republican party that kept insisting the Iraq War was a net positive.
9) Exposing Faux News as being Faux Conservative as well.
10) Inspiring Glen Beck to commit career suicide.
11) Inspiring Vicente Fox to let us know how the Mexican 1% really feel about Americans.
12) Showing just how many lying empty suits there are in the Republican Party. (Ok, this last one is padding, we all knew that already.)

Rednal wrote:

@NPCDave From what I can tell... Trump's good at talking in a way that makes people believe he's saying what they want to hear, even when he's giving no specifics and his 'plans' are wildly unlikely even at best. He doesn't tell you WHAT he'll do, just that it will be "great", the "best ever". He slams people with those kinds of unsupported positive words over and over until they start believing him, often because they imagine what 'great' is like and assume that's what he means. He projects onto others, and in turn, gets his supporters to project onto him.

I completely agree, he is big on talk and he won’t succeed as President if he just keeps talking. I didn’t throw my support to him until that tape came out and he didn’t back down but fought back harder. That was action, taking a stand and refusing to bow to unbelievably intense political pressure. That convinced me he would do the same in office. We shall see if he gets the chance to prove me right or wrong.

[NPC Dave]

Spastic Puma wrote:

You're right! You don't need a billion dollars! You just need a fleet of your own private jets and a hotel empire you can stay at. For free! Oh, wait -- not for free. For profit!

Yeah, I really don't see where you're going with this. If your point is, "Hilary has spent more" than yeah, that's apparent to anyone. But my issue with your posts is that you are ignoring the context of the way he has run his campaign (and more importantly) how he came to be a public figure in the first place. His "free" media coverage stemmed from his celebrity status (a trait that isn't something you can simply acquire on a political track)

He has shown how anyone can acquire it. By building up their name and brand through social media outlets. The cost of doing this is only going to decline. The difficulty of doing it is quite large, but those people who have a message that resonates with a large audience are going to be able to do it.

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and by continually shocking the public with how bigoted he could be (a trait NO politician should ever have). No matter how you look at it, Donald Trump IS NOT suitable poster child for grass roots campaigning on any level.

So if your point is that Trump has proven that you don't have to look to billionaires to fund your campaign (even though they did) anymore, that point comes with a major limitation: You just have to be one.

It wasn’t Trump flying in his own jets and staying in his own hotels for profit that won him the Republican primaries. Looking back, it is obvious he had this planned for a number of years. What enabled him to win started with the following words-

Make America Great Again

Anyone could have come up with that slogan. It didn’t take a billion dollars to come up with it. The right rhetoric and a big enough audience is what you need. But it just happened to be a billionaire who used it, and it touched a chord across America. Donald Trump making a profit when staying at his own hotel just shows he is smart. But that slogan…pure genius.

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Oh, and you probably won't win. Just like McCain in the 2008 election who only raised half as much money. So the status quo of "who raises the most money, wins" still continues.

You mean probably still continues right? McCain lost by almost 10 million votes in 2008, and McCain did not badly damage Obama’s ability to govern before the election was even over. I expect this election to be a lot closer, we will know more in another day.

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The only trail that Trump is blazing is a frightening and, frankly, embarrassing one that I hope is never followed in the future of US politics.

It is good that you feel strong emotions over the topics that Trump raised this election. That shows we are fighting about real issues this election, and that this election is about real choices. Uncomfortable topics and truths should be discussed in the open and it is expected that will make people uncomfortable. We deserve to have this every four years, instead of declaring a whole number of topics taboo and off-limits, thus turning the election into national kabuki theater.

[NPC Dave]

Drahliana Moonrunner wrote:

Like many, the poster seems to ignore the free advertising and constant publicity that the media empires showered upon, nay fawned upon Trump, was easily worth more than a billion dollars of advertising.

Not true, I addressed it in a post two Fridays ago when you raised that objection the first time…

Exactly, they do it because Trump means ratings. That is how Trump accomplished the impossible feat of campaign finance reform without passing a law. He built up his brand and built a political message into the entertainment he provided. The media had no choice but to give him that publicity, their ratings would dive if he wasn’t on the screen.
You don’t get people to watch and listen to you without earning their attention. Trump earned their attention, he earned those ratings, and he earned that publicity.

Drahliana Moonrunner wrote:

And yeah, he has his own billionaire backers too.

I already addressed that issue as well…

That Donald Trump is going to stick it to the billionaires after the election could very well be my hallucination. I could be wrong.
I will still support him, first and foremost, because, as you said, most of the other billionaires agree with me, whether it is a hallucination or not. If it is an illusion, it still makes Trump a thorn in their side for the duration of the election, and I like to see my enemies squirm. And, of course, Trump hitting the Bezos, Bush, and Koch families aren’t illusions, those hits are real, even if it will stop after the election.
For the record though, Peter Thiel is a billionaire who provides seed money to the company Legalist, which is an exciting idea that can help Ordinary Joe Schmoes fund their lawsuits when they have a legitimate claim against a big corp. Someone like Roger Kearns would have greatly benefited from Legalist. So Peter Thiel sees things my way, whether it is an illusion or not. I don’t know enough about the others to say, except that Adelson has always made Israel his top priority.

In fact, Peter Thiel backed up everything I said about him less than 12 hours after I said it at the National Press Club.

[NPC Dave]

”BigNorseWolf” wrote:

There's the idea of it. You are not rules lawyering Donald Trump into a financial genius

That’s true. There is no need for me to claim he is a financial genius.

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or accusing others of bait and switch because you picked a definition that didn't have the EXACT term that someone else used

I am clearing up the confusion you guys have between what a businessman is and what an investor is. I am using standard English language definitions.

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even when YOUR OWN SOURCE has the idea there as plain as day.

Trump’s net worth has grown about 300% to an estimated $4 billion since 1987
Plugging that into a compound interest calculator shows that thats a 4% compound interest rate per year, which is terrible. Almost putting your money in the bank level bad.

Thank you for volunteering to do the math.

Now let’s try it again, but this time take into account the $916 million dollar loss suffered by Trump in 1995. So how about we calculate the compound interest rate per year for…

1) 1987-1994
2) 1995 (We know the negative compound interest rate for this year is going to be yuuuuuuuge).
3) 1996-2016

Those three rates should shed some light on how well Donald Trump does in a typical year.

Devon Northwood wrote:

Then what is a sucessful businessman for you? What are YOUR criteria?

Look, we can play the word-game all day long, but the fact of the matter is that everybody here knows what is meant. So since you do not accept my way of qualifying a good businessman, what is yours? Because it is your side that put the whole point on the agenda. Trump is the one who started the whole "sucessfull businessman"-meme.

What you refer to as word games is what Aristotle referred to as rhetoric. Dialectic argument is when we use logic and reason, facts and evidence, to come to conclusions. Rhetoric is when we use language and memes, if you will, to appeal to emotions to sway an audience one way or another. Arguing that Trump isn’t a good businessman because he should really have $9 billion instead of $4 billion is weak rhetoric. It is just a couple of steps above Irontruth’s kindergartner trolling comment.

The reason your argument is weak rhetoric is because well before you reach $1 billion you are talking about an absurd and unrealistic amount of money that most people can’t even wrap their heads around. Multiplying that absurd and unrealistic amount of money by 4 or 9 really doesn’t matter.

You may as well claim Tom Brady isn’t a great quarterback because he lost two Super Bowls.

If I had argued Donald Trump was a successful businessman, or a great businessman, or a terrific businessman, I would have already provided supporting arguments to that effect. I never claimed anything about how good or bad a businessman Donald Trump is. In contrast, Donald Trump does make such claims, because he loves rhetoric, and because when some 23 year old journalism major writing for a pittance claims Trump isn’t as rich as he should be, that journalist is only preaching to those who are already against Trump. All Trump has to do to counteract that rhetoric for his supporters and neutral parties is tweet a selfie from inside his personal jet.

I prefer dialectic argument myself, which is why, in the context of Donald Trump being a businessman, I stated that it is largely IRRELEVANT because the skill set for being President is different. Managing bureaucrats is a different skill set than managing people in private industry. Different outlook, different motivations, different perspective.

That is why I didn’t really respond to the initial reply about how terrible Donald Trump is at business other than to ask the question if it is Donald Trump’s fault he doesn’t have more money. And when you jumped in to say yes, I decided to fight the rhetorical fire with more rhetorical fire. All of your argument really just comes down to… Donald Trump could have had more money if he had been somebody else. Sure…and Eli Manning could have won more Super Bowls if he had been Tom Brady.

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The fact that you are talking about the financial side of the last few elections without talking about dark money and SUPER-PACs shows to me that you have not fully understood what the point of campaign finance reform is. See, you talk about Hillary Clinton being financed by Wall Street, and ... maybe she is. Maybe not. We. Don't. Know.

And the reason we don't know is Citizens United, something that Trump does not want to change. Indeed, as was pointed out before, his plattform is to double down on dark money and preventing transperancy in campain finances. How is that a good thing? How is the fact that social media helps you get elected, a trend starting with Obamas 2008 run, change the existence of dark money?

It reduces the influence of dark money by opening communication channels directly to the voter. Money is used to pay to get your message out. That cost is decreasing. Obama had the journalist class on his side as well as social media. Trump had the journalist class against him since he clinced the Republican nomination, and he is still close. That is how much more power social media has than it did eight years ago.

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”NPC Dave” wrote:

Donald Trump has permanently burned his bridges with the global elite and with the political establishment. They will never stop hating him for what he has done.

What does that even mean?

It means that if Trump gets elected, the people have an ally working for them in the Oval Office, instead of a billionaire flunky.

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So, he was a bully towards Jeb Bush. Does that change the fact that the Bush-family pays less taxes proportially then a cleaning lady? You might as well throw tomatoes at H.W. and tell yourself that he will never get the red stain out of his clothes, but that would not chance the SYSTEM. Tomorrow, there will be new rich men with new clothes.

Donald Trump has promised many things, but that is the entire point: He has not delivered. He wants to build a wall, yet he does not tell us how.

Not true, he already did.

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He wants to fight crime, but he does not let us see his "secret plan, from an anonymus police officer". What you are telling us is entirely what you WANT him to do. As Coriat already said: You tell us that he will pull money away from the military,

I did not tell you guys that. I will correct that misunderstanding in my next post.

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he says that he will give them more. Even if you believe that the rich don't pay taxes, why does he fight that problem by decreasing taxes for the rich? When people get away with crime, the answer is not "well, let's make crime legal".

What happened to George Bush 41 is not throwing tomatoes and ruining his suit, because he can just buy a new suit, whether he gets a tax cut or not. The historical legacy that Donald Trump deprived GB 41 from acquiring was unique and priceless.

But getting back to taxes, Trump is cutting taxes for everyone who pays taxes. What I have learned from these discussions is that a lot of you guys focus on the tax rate the 1% pay instead of looking at the bigger picture of just how much the 1% gain or lose if they no longer have access to the government trough. This is actually useful to know for the next guy who tries to do what Trump is doing. Should he offer a tax cut but leave the tax rate of the 1% alone, or raise it slightly, he might actually win some of you guys over.

[NPC Dave]

Coriat wrote:

Taxes): It seems we've mostly reached agreement that overall Trump is putting pro-rich stuff on the table here. I have a little more discussion about details, though.

Estate taxes - I think there's an error of fact here, about the upper middle class paying estate taxes. The estate tax cutoff is about $5 million individual or $10 million couple. Net worth by wealth percentile. "Top 1%" and "people rich enough to worry about estate taxes" don't exactly overlap (it might be top 1.5%?), and I'm not sure I totally understand the details, but it seems close enough for my lights.
Second, even if they currently have ways available to lessen or even dodge their estate tax liability, completely scrapping it is still a pro-rich move, and really nothing but a pro-rich move. Even the very article you linked about how the Waltons found ways around the estate tax also said that they were funding efforts to repeal it (I'm sure they would like to be free of the restrictions and trust limitations involved in getting around it).

Actually I argue the opposite. Estate taxes benefit the 1%. More specifically, it benefits the top 20% of the 1%, who use the estate tax to deprive those in the range of 1.01-1.5% of their source of wealth, along with any of the bottom 80% of the 1% who were dumb or unlucky enough to fail to protect themselves from the estate tax.

To explain, when someone has something of value, whether it is a brand or a business or a priceless collectible, and then estate tax has to be paid, the government gets half the value. So the item of value has to be sold so the tax can be paid. Why buys the item of value? The top 20% of the 1%...either directly, or through corporations. I have watched Warren Buffet accumulate many brands and businesses this way, no man has benefited from the estate tax more than Warren Buffet.

Corporations benefit immensely from estate taxes. They don’t die, so they never have to pay estate taxes. That means they have an enormous advantage over businesses with an owner who will die. The proprietorship has to lose half its value(assuming 50% estate tax) each time the owner dies. The equivalent to the estate tax in the National Football League would be the following rule:

In any cross-conference match up between an AFC team and an NFC team, at halftime the AFC team shall deduct half the points it has scored in the first half from its total, and of those points forfeited, half again shall be awarded to the NFC team and added to its total. Play out the rest of the game as normal.

How long would it take for an AFC team to win the Super Bowl under those rule conditions? A long time, maybe never.

So if you are going to insist cutting corporate taxes benefits the 1% because it benefits corporations, then you have to also insist that keeping the estate tax benefits the 1% because that also benefits corporations. Logically speaking, you can’t have it any other way.

So Donald Trump getting rid of the estate tax is not a pro-rich move, it is just the opposite. It is a pro-middle class move. The only way to change that is if you make corporations pay estate tax every forty to fifty years or so.

I have been against the estate tax my entire adult life, precisely because it benefits the 1%.

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2) Some Google research suggests you might be working off bad information re: Wall street giving numbers. I'm not sure what the source for your numbers is, but I think it'd be worth you giving it a second look.

Old news, but it's nowhere near the above numbers.
In fact, I found reporting on a single fundraising dinner for Trump from Wall Streeters that raised more than that.
I found a second (later) WSJ article that stated numbers in the low thousands despite the first article's much larger numbers. Since the amount of money he's raised can't go down over time, it makes me think that there may be some creative accounting going on here. For instance, funneling Wall Street donations to an affiliated organization (such as a super PAC) so that they don't show up direct on the campaign's books. Maybe the first article was reporting on total pro-Trump donations and the second is reporting on an organization-specific line item.
I'm not sure what to make of it, except to think that it may be a case of lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I'd be willing to accept that Clinton has an advantage (although not that it is necessarily tied to bailout support - I'd probably link it most of all to Wall Street fears of a trade war, which means it should fall under issue 1). But it doesn't seem like those numbers are plausible. Depending on where you got them, it might be a case of a bogus source. Or possibly a real source credulously reporting statistics that were massaged further up the chain.
God knows there's a lot of ways to hide where political money comes from these days.

My source is the article I linked to before. Here is the link again.

And here is the paragraph which appears at the bottom…
Securities and investment firms have poured nearly $65 million into her campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Goldman Sachs employees have donated $284,816 to Clinton and just $3,641 to Trump, who has received $716,407 from Wall Street.

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Subsequent closer reading indicates this is exactly what's happening.

Article from June that I linked earlier but didn't read closely enough until now wrote:
That is set to change. In recent weeks, Wall Street has emerged as a top source of cash to Mr. Trump’s campaign, donating at least $10 million this month to his joint fund with the Republican National Committee. Of that, a fraction will be transferred directly to his campaign because of federal donation limits.
In other words, Wall Street millions did head his way and were spent to elect him (even if not as many millions as Clinton, I'm not sure), but the source of the money can be obscured via accounting since one line item can be kept low (and pointed to) while the money actually flows into a different line item.

Now your article and mine are actually in agreement. Although $10 million was given to Trump, most of it went to the RNC.

And the RNC refuses to spend it on Trump.

The RNC is funneling the money to their Senate candidates and other races. They don’t want Trump to win. They want a wounded Hillary while they keep control of their own party. That is how $10 million went to Trump and the RNC but Trump was left with $716K.

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3) Hey, I thought you said you were going to try to take off the rose-tinted glasses! :p That list sure isn't!

I mean, you're saying stuff like "pulling money out of departments that have too much (like the Pentagon) and giving it to other departments."
Non-rose-tinted Trump isn't on the same page at all: Trump calls for massive military buildup.
Taking something that the candidate has said he wants to do, and replacing them with something very different that you'd want him to do, and proposing he could do that as a reason to support him... that's nothing but rose.

You misunderstood the final four paragraphs of my reply to you, so I am going to quote them again, this time emphasizing the conditionals in bold.

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So, to be fair, I need to come up with a substitute for what Trump can do to show he is on the side of Ordinary Joe Schmoes when he gets in office, and how he can get their input. What he has to do is keep his direct social media channels open with his voters, and keep them involved with his legislative initiatives. Now the President can’t legislate, he can only ask Congress to pass laws. So Trump will have to use his communication channels to get the people to lobby their congressional representatives for his legislative agenda. Those in Congress who give him a hard time will need to have their feet held to the fire. One thing true for all politicians, “when they feel the heat, they see the light.” First said by a very effective lobbyist.

And this also gives Trump feedback on what people really want. If he can’t get them pushing hard against their own congress rep, then that isn’t the law he should be pushing to have enacted. Congress can affect those entrenched bureaucrats, with budget cuts. Pulling money out of departments that have too much(like the Pentagon) and giving it to other departments will enable Trump to get the bureaucrats fighting for him instead of against him. If the Pentagon loses budget dollars to the National Park Service, those NPS bureaucrats will fight more savagely than Navy Seals to preserve their bigger budget even after Trump leaves office.

So that is what Trump has to set up and implement to show he is going to listen to Ordinary Joe Schmoes, if he wins. If he doesn’t do that, his presidency will likely end in failure. And if the voters lose interest, which is actually likely considering most Americans only like to get hyped up about politics once every four years, then Trump will still likely fail. He can’t succeed in office without the people who put him there continuing to help him succeed.

Is he going to actually do this? No idea, but that is how he can keep the promise he makes in that ad.

So to be clear,

1) This is my idea, not Trump’s. He has given no indication he would do this. It is entirely possible he doesn’t understand he has to do this.
2) This was my postulation in how Trump can actually realistically change the system if he wins. This was in contrast to your suggestion that the right cabinet appointees are how Trump can change the system.
3) The Pentagon losing budget dollars is purely a hypothetical example of how this postulation would work in practice. I used it because it has too much money IMO. I wasn’t coming up with anything else at the moment I wrote that so I went with it.
4) I thought my conditionals “like” and “if” would make it clear I was talking about hypotheticals, along with my disclaimer at the end that I had no idea if Trump would implement these hypotheticals.
5) I figured it would also be obvious this was an example since I included increasing the budget of the National Park Service, a department that almost never enters into a national election.

Does that make it clear I was in no way claiming that Trump wants to actually move money from the Pentagon to the National Park Service?

But lesson learned, I need to keep my hypothetical examples in line with Trump’s positions in order to avoid confusion. So let’s reverse it. Trump can’t realistically increase the size of the Pentagon’s budget, unless he follows a protocol like the one I suggested. He has to move money from one department budget to another. The ability of the government to increase revenue through taxation and borrowing is becoming more limited due to the size of the deficits and interest payments on the debt. So if he wants to take money from the NPS(example only) and move it to the Pentagon, he has to get Congress to work with him.

[NPC Dave]

Knight who says Meh wrote:

This is what he means.

No, this is what I mean.

With the election ending tomorrow(presumably), I am not planning on any more detailed replies going forward, since I won’t have time to answer it until later in the week when such questions and answers will lose urgency and relevancy. But I will keep my promise and post acknowledgements for anyone who wants to call me out with an end zone post-touchdown celebration that the NFL likes to penalize, and I promise to be a good sport about it even if Trump loses.

And for all you Trump supporters out there, be sure to thank Trump for working and competing so hard this election season. I will be sending my thank you tomorrow.

[Kobold Catgirl]

I just want to say: Just because Trump repeatedly claimed he "started" a conversation about immigration doesn't make it true. He just...said he did. A lot. Until people believed him. Trump didn't start the conversation, he just hijacked it into fairy tales about walls. :P

[BigNorseWolf]

NPC Dave wrote:

That’s true. There is no need for me to claim he is a financial genius.

And yet you keep "Accidentally" slipping in the implication but won't own up to doing so because actually saying that would put a burden of proof on you to deal with verifiable reality , which is kryptonite to the trump campaign or any of his supporters.

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I am clearing up the confusion you guys have between what a businessman is and what an investor is.

No one here is confused. Baseless ad homs are no less ad homs or insults because you think you're being witty and, like your first point, hiding it under a transparent veil of not plausible deniability.

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I am using standard English language definitions.

You are attempting to disingenuously cherry pick a definition and STILL had to waterboard the english language in order to get the answer you were looking for, all as a distraction from the basic fact that Donald Trump has absolutely no discernable skill, talent, or ability beyond having an int score so low he can bluff himself into believing his own BS.

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Now let’s try it again, but this time take into account the $916 million dollar loss suffered by Trump in 1995

Okay, calculating...

Oh look. the numbers are exactly the same because your information is completely irrelevant. Trump is slightly better at making money than someone putting money in the bank.

What point were you trying to make here? What do you think that information was supposed to change?

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So how about we calculate the compound interest rate per year for…

1) 1987-1994
2) 1995 (We know the negative compound interest rate for this year is going to be yuuuuuuuge).
3) 1996-2016

Those three rates should shed some light on how well Donald Trump does in a typical year.

.... NO

You cannot just randomly erase a year from history as an anomaly. If you have an investment strategy that occasionally costs you a billion dollars you REALLY need to take that into account when you figure out how much money you're making.

Yes, if we were in 1997 or 1998 taking 1996 as a fluke could be taken into account, but that was over 20 years ago. If he hasn't made up the loss by no he's never going to.

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Rhetoric is when we use language and memes, if you will, to appeal to emotions to sway an audience one way or another.

Let me refer you to my favorite Roman philosopher on the matter: Bea Arthur

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I prefer dialectic argument myself,

I'm going to use that to say that you dont. The facts are you don't use facts. The evidence is you're not using evidence. Reason would indicate that that statement isn't true.

And they wonder why I hate philosophy....

[Thomas Seitz]

Vidmaster7 wrote:

Thomas Seitz wrote:

48 hours left or so.

Thor help us.

OOh I guess its to late to endorse the Norse party eh? Plus he wasn't born in america so he can't be president. :(

Reminds me of the Odin for president meme.
Odin said he'd get rid of all the frost giants. do you see any frost giants around? vote Odin!

All I know is if Ragnarock is coming, I fully expect Marvel Thor to show up before Mythological Thor.

[BigNorseWolf]

Thomas Seitz wrote:

All I know is if Ragnarock is coming, I fully expect Marvel Thor to show up before Mythological Thor.

Yay! Walkies! CHOMP

[Thomas Seitz]

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Thomas Seitz wrote:

All I know is if Ragnarock is coming, I fully expect Marvel Thor to show up before Mythological Thor.

Yay! Walkies! CHOMP

There's that.

Also less than 24 hours to go! Praise Thor!

[thejeff]

NPC Dave wrote:

It wasn’t Trump flying in his own jets and staying in his own hotels for profit that won him the Republican primaries. Looking back, it is obvious he had this planned for a number of years. What enabled him to win started with the following words-

Make America Great Again

Anyone could have come up with that slogan. It didn’t take a billion dollars to come up with it. The right rhetoric and a big enough audience is what you need. But it just happened to be a billionaire who used it, and it touched a chord across America.

Bull. What enabled him to win started with birtherism to earn his conservative "I'm more against Obama than you" credentials. Then he won the primary on building a wall to keep out the Mexican rapists and criminals and banning the Muslims refugees that are all terrorists.

He got there by playing to the absolute worst in America.

But I'll ask you, since he won't answer and you like the slogan: When was America Great? What are we going back to?

[Coriat]

NPC Dave wrote:

Replies.

I'm writing a very brief reply to each point because of the time. I'm afraid I don't have time to do the research and stuff I did for earlier posts.

Taxes) I've long viewed Trump's campaign as factional struggle within the elite rather than broad struggle against the elite. To the extent that one accepts your argument that estate taxes is about one fraction of 1% against another fraction (which I do not have time to look into), I feel it supports this narrative and not the one where he crusades against the influence of the wealthy in general.

In any case, the corporate tax is much larger in terms of dollars at stake and one where we agreed his policy would be pro-wealthy.

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So if you are going to insist cutting corporate taxes benefits the 1% because it benefits corporations, then you have to also insist that keeping the estate tax benefits the 1% because that also benefits corporations. Logically speaking, you can’t have it any other way.

I don't have time to work through the logic, but I'm willing to accept your framing because in that case it seems we would agree that his overall tax policy - dominated by the corporate tax cut - is pro-rich. Take the estate tax into the other column if you must - we can debate whether that's really true another day, once I have time to read about it - but it's not the heavyweight and it's not going to balance the scales.

1) -
2) That's beside the point. The point of your post (as I took it) was to use the disparity in giving as a sign that Trump is an enemy of Wall Street. If Trump raised millions from Wall Street and then he got outmaneuvered by the RNC and lost access to the money (I have no idea, but for the sake of argument) then that's a sign of the RNC hating him, not a sign of Wall Street hating him.
3) My point is mostly that you started out the exercise saying that you'd try to take off the rose-tinted glasses, but didn't. I get the hypothetical nature of your scenarios, though I may have underestimated just how arbitrary they were.

Either way, though, an exercise in which you make up a bunch of things Trump could (but hasn't said he would) do pretty much cannot be anything but rose-tinted. Replacing the real candidate with your ideal candidate becomes part of the exercise. If you're looking to take off the rose-tinted glasses, or even to try to leave them on but turn down the rose, I think your approach was not well suited to doing so.

--------------------

Anyway. I know you were aware of, and even called out, your rose-tinted Trump view from the beginning of this exercise. I hope I've at least convinced you to see it as more heavily rose-tinted than you did before, and less based on the real Trump. Happy to continue this debate after the election, though I agree it will lose some of its immediacy.

See you at the polls.

(well, probably not literally... *glances sidelong at Kirth*)

[CBDunkerson]

NPC Dave wrote:

What enabled him to win started with the following words-

Make America Great Again

Anyone could have come up with that slogan.

Ahem

[Drahliana Moonrunner]

NPC Dave wrote:

Corporations benefit immensely from estate taxes. They don’t die, so they never have to pay estate taxes. That means they have an enormous advantage over businesses with an owner who will die. The proprietorship has to lose half its value(assuming 50% estate tax) each time the owner dies. The equivalent to the estate tax in the National Football League would be the following rule:

Proprietorships are your mom and pop stores, which incidentally are becoming rapidly extinct save for 99c outlets and delis. While Walmart may be owned by a family, the Waltons, it is still a corporation.

There is no such scenario where the repeal of the estate tax is anything but a boon to the one percenters.

[Thomas Seitz]

I'd rather repeal the tax on mental health caused by rich people.

[Spastic Puma]

It's painful seeing individuals claim that Trump came up with that slogan.

Also, NPC Dave, having a message that resonates with the people has always been important to winning elections. Trump hasn't changed anything about that... other than, you know, touching the tender souls of hate groups like the KKK. He's honestly capitalizing on the extinction bursts of (slowly) crumbling bigoted attitudes in our nation.

[Thomas Seitz]

I think he just capitalized on the slogans that any good con man uses, even in this day and age, Puma.

[bugleyman]

Latest Clinton conspiracy: The Clintons had Janet Reno killed.

[Hitdice]

bugleyman wrote:

Latest Clinton conspiracy: The Clintons had Janet Reno killed.

Gotta get as many November Surprise assassinations in as you can in the last 72 hours of the election! :P

[Thomas Seitz]

No I killed Janet Reno. She was stupid.

[CrystalSeas]

Thomas Seitz wrote:

No I killed Janet Reno. She was stupid.

That doesn't sound like a very good way to make friends, Thomas.

[Irontruth]

thejeff wrote:

KingOfAnything wrote:

Squeakmaan wrote:

I mean, he literally said the words "Latino citizens," I don't see how a person can then claim he's talking about non-citizens without the most deliberate of misinterpretation.

The interviewer offered a creative definition of 'citizen' that includes non-citizens. I can understand the misinterpretation on a surface level, but in full context his meaning is clear.

Which is why it was a bad answer. He should know by now everything can and will be taken out of context and twisted.

A simple "Well obviously you need to legally be a citizen to vote..." and then go into the rest of the answer would avoid any legitimate confusion and require more editing to get to the illegitimate kind.

Yeah, bad question coupled with a bad answer. He should have started off by either clarifying her question, or adding the caveat. Confusing question led to confusing answer.

It's no where near Trump's advocating voting in multiple states.

[bugleyman]

Irontruth wrote:

It's no where near Trump's advocating voting in multiple states.

But as we know, when Trump says crazy @#$% he was obviously "joking."

Can't you take a joke? ;-)

[Thomas Seitz]

Crystal,

I prefer to make friends that don't end up in South Park.

[Pillbug Toenibbler]

Fergie wrote:

CrusaderWolf wrote:

Even going to wake up at 3am so I don't miss anything :)

Honestly, don't bother. This election is close enough that we probably won't know who won for at least a few days, if not weeks.

Florida is not capable of competently holding an election, and they are basically going to decided this thing. Everyone knows what happened in 2000, but FL has been a total mess in other elections as well.

We are in for a long, crappy slog.

EDIT: Based on past and current trends, I'm going to make a prediction that Trump wins Florida.
wipes vomit from corners of mouth
May god have mercy on our souls.

Actually, as a native Floridian, I'm pretty confident that women and Hispanics/Latinx voters will nail Florida for Clinton. Her GotV in the state is a smooth, well-organized, well-planned, well-oiled machine. In the last couple days, in more than a few districts, there's actually been too many canvassers and phone-bankers with too little to do. Trump has pushed away/repulsed many women voters and nearly all Latinx in the state, and even Cuban Americans (who loyally lockstep vote Repub) are breaking away. The icing on the cake is that Puerto Ricans, who watched the Repubs in the House ignore their home's financial crisis, have been immigrating into Florida for better jobs and stability; as soon as they stepped foot on Florida soil, they could register to vote (before the usual deadline). The early voting in the state was above average, and minority early voting broke all records. And none of the media pollsters calculated on so many thousands of first time Latinx voters in their predictions.

I don't know if they'll vote out experienced, do-little liar (and Trump endorser) Senator Rubio (R) for inexperienced, padded-resume Repub-lite Murphy (D), but I'm confident Clinton will take Florida.

If Trump also loses Pennsylvania or North Carloina (or both), he's likely done. Finite. The Biglyest Loser. The real nail biter tonight is if the Dems retake the Senate or not.

[Steve Geddes]

I've always been puzzled that the senate, congress and president don't generally go together (or do they 'usually', just not at the moment?)

Does that mean that it's common to vote for different parties for those three 'positions'? Or that there's a large number of people who vote for president but don't vote for congress/senate positions? (Or the other way around?) Or something else..?

[Orfamay Quest]

Steve Geddes wrote:

I've always been puzzled that the senate, congress and president don't generally go together (or do they 'usually', just not at the moment?)

Does that mean that it's common to vote for different parties for those three 'positions'? Or that there's a large number of people who vote for president but don't vote for congress/senate positions? (Or the other way around?) Or something else..?

Different constituencies. Congressmen are elected by "districts," which are arbitrary subdivisions of states chosen to have roughly three-quarters of a million people each. It's an intensely political task to draw these districts because, by a careful slicing of the pie, you can make your party win or lose more seats in Congress. But, for example, southern Illinois is very strongly conservative (Republican, generally), but also sparsely populated. So depending upon how you draw the map, you can make a very large area that's safely Republican, or you can attach part of that area to the much more populated (and liberal/Democratic) Chicago area and make the seat more competitive.

Senators are elected by state, so there's no way to re-draw lines. Illinois is almost always represented by Democratic senators because there are more Democrats in the Chicago area than there are Republicans down south.

The president is elected by national vote.

As a result, you could have a situation (as we did in 2012) where more people voted for a Democratic candidate, but more states and districts voted for Republicans.

[CBDunkerson]

Senators also serve six year terms which are not all up for re-election at the same time... potentially shielding them from presidential 'coat tails'.

[thejeff]

And people may well not vote strict party lines. Someone who generally leans Republican, but is turned off by Trump's particular nastiness may vote for Clinton, but also for their local known and familiar Republican Representative.

[Pillbug Toenibbler]

And here's something for Doodlebug and Fergie: ITT: "I think Hillary Clinton's politics are terrible. I'm voting for her so we can grow the Left."

(Disclaimer: I disagree with the author that "Clinton's politics as terrible," but I think it makes a good case otherwise.)

[Marc Radle]

thejeff wrote:

And people may well not vote strict party lines. Someone who generally leans Republican, but is turned off by Trump's particular nastiness may vote for Clinton, but also for their local known and familiar Republican Representative.

Unfortunately, in today's "block everything the other party tries to do, no questions asked" political climate, doing this all but guaruntees more gridlock. No matter what party you align with, voting for a presidential candidate, and then sending folks from the opposing party to congress all but insures that little can be accomplished.

I can't stress this enough - if you vote Hillary Clinton, *please* be sure to also vote for all Democratic Congressmen and women!

[thejeff]

Marc Radle wrote:

thejeff wrote:

And people may well not vote strict party lines. Someone who generally leans Republican, but is turned off by Trump's particular nastiness may vote for Clinton, but also for their local known and familiar Republican Representative.

Unfortunately, in today's "block everything the other party tries to do, no questions asked" political climate, doing this all but guaruntees more gridlock. No matter what party you align with, voting for a presidential candidate, and then sending folks from the opposing party to congress all but insures that little can be accomplished.

I can't stress this enough - if you vote Hillary Clinton, *please* be sure to also vote for all Democratic Congressmen and women!

I agree, but if someone really is a Romney/Cruz/Rubio kind of Republican who's been turned off by Trump's more obvious antics, I could see splitting the ticket. You'd actually want the gridlock.

More commonly people voter "person, not party". They like their local rep, they know him, he's done good things for the district, so they vote for him on that basis, not on the effect on larger politics.

[Set]

Just voted. The New Hampshire ballot was typically funny. There were about a dozen men and dozen women on the ballot. Dan Weeks was the token male Democrat and Kelly Ayotte was the token female Republican. Almost everyone else fell into the usual categories of 'ladies = democrats' and 'gents = republicans.'

Granted, this is the first time the *top* of the ticket had a lady democrat, so that was new.

[Steve Geddes]

Orfamay Quest wrote:

Steve Geddes wrote:

I've always been puzzled that the senate, congress and president don't generally go together (or do they 'usually', just not at the moment?)

Does that mean that it's common to vote for different parties for those three 'positions'? Or that there's a large number of people who vote for president but don't vote for congress/senate positions? (Or the other way around?) Or something else..?

Different constituencies. Congressmen are elected by "districts," which are arbitrary subdivisions of states chosen to have roughly three-quarters of a million people each. It's an intensely political task to draw these districts because, by a careful slicing of the pie, you can make your party win or lose more seats in Congress. But, for example, southern Illinois is very strongly conservative (Republican, generally), but also sparsely populated. So depending upon how you draw the map, you can make a very large area that's safely Republican, or you can attach part of that area to the much more populated (and liberal/Democratic) Chicago area and make the seat more competitive.

Senators are elected by state, so there's no way to re-draw lines. Illinois is almost always represented by Democratic senators because there are more Democrats in the Chicago area than there are Republicans down south.

The president is elected by national vote.

As a result, you could have a situation (as we did in 2012) where more people voted for a Democratic candidate, but more states and districts voted for Republicans.

CBDunkerson wrote:

Senators also serve six year terms which are not all up for re-election at the same time... potentially shielding them from presidential 'coat tails'.

Cheers. We have a similar situation here, so I can understand the results being different. I would still have expected a correlation though (as in big presidential victory would occur alongside a better result in the other two houses). My possibly erroneous impression is that they're almost negatively correlated. That may just be overemphasising recent results and/or focussing on what makes the news.

Appreciate the explanations.

[CBDunkerson]

Steve Geddes wrote:

I would still have expected a correlation though (as in big presidential victory would occur alongside a better result in the other two houses). My possibly erroneous impression is that they're almost negatively correlated. That may just be overemphasising recent results and/or focussing on what makes the news.

In presidential election years there tends to be a correlation... more congresspeople of the same party are 'swept in on the president's coat tails'. This is particularly easy to see when the president wins big, such as Reagan in 1980 or Obama in 2008. The factors discussed above are what generally keep this effect from being significant except in major 'wave' elections.

In 'off cycle' election years there are trends towards lower Democratic turnout AND negative correlation with whatever party currently has the presidency. Thus, Democrat presidents usually lose congressional support in off cycle elections. For Republican presidents the off cycle results are more mixed due to the competing trends.

[BigNorseWolf]

the 90s show Dinosaurs predicted the trump campaign, and where it would lead

[Steve Geddes]

Thanks. Really appreciate that. Both those things make sense.

[1d4 Goblin Babies]

BigNorseWolf wrote:

the 90s show Dinosaurs predicted the trump campaign, and where it would lead

"Not the Mama!"

[Rednal]

...That's frighteningly accurate.

[Comrade Anklebiter]

Pillbug Toenibbler wrote:

And here's something for Doodlebug and Fergie: ITT: "I think Hillary Clinton's politics are terrible. I'm voting for her so we can grow the Left."

(Disclaimer: I disagree with the author that "Clinton's politics as terrible," but I think it makes a good case otherwise.)

Same site:

THE LEFT IS UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO SUPPORT HILLARY CLINTON
Breaking the cycle of lesser evilism

BY 74 MEMBERS OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA
NOVEMBER 4, 2016

(I know two of these dudes.)

[Snorter]

I take a break, and there's 1000 posts.
oh, well, here goes...

Orfamay Quest wrote:

With that said, I don't see anything particularly objectionable about KG's "Hard Work Party," except by omission. One of the key points that distinguish modern Democrats from modern Republicans is the issue of protecting people's rights, particular the rights of vulnerable populations....

Kirth Gersen wrote:

Ideally, they'd be selling (and basing their platform on) the idea that anyone can succeed through hard work. To make that even remotely convincing, you'd need fairly-funded schools, equal treatment by police, no disenfranchisement of voters (except maybe if they're unemployed? I'm obviously spitballing here.) You could actually sell this even to the borderline racist contingent by explaining that you therefore favor and encourage "hard-working" minorities who "believe in the American way" (as opposed, in their tiny minds, to "thugs"), and of course you'd have no problem selling most of it (except maybe the no welfare votes) to Democrats.

One of the surprising news items of recent days has been Glenn Beck's apparent change of heart. Among the previous positions he's abandoned, was an apology to Obama, for calling him racist, and an admission that he had a better understanding and sympathy for the BLM movement.

Once we'd all checked our calendars, that it wasn't April 1st, and he might actually mean it; I wonder if this is the effect Kirth was talking about?

When you live in a bubble where virtually everyone you work with or come into contact with is white, it's easy to see the protests on TV, and assume that everyone taking part is a thug, a looter, a lowlife, all complaining that the police are doing their jobs. And it becomes easy to rationalise every police-related death, injury, or harassment complaint, with excuses that the victim must have been doing something wrong, to have been treated that way.
"If they acted like civilised people, they wouldn't draw attention from the police!"

In their mind, there's a two-tier POC society; of 'respectable' POC, who never have trouble with the authorities, and the rest, who get what they ask for.

And I bet Beck went out looking for material for a show on that theme, and instead of getting footage of 'respectable blacks' denouncing 'BLM thugs' for making them look bad, he got hour after hour of smart, educated, suited, God-fearing, well-spoken people telling him and his team that they too were victims of police harassment.

At some point the cognitive dissonance outweighs the accumulated 'common wisdom', and something has to give. And Beck has had his Damascus moment, when he has to admit he didn't realise these incidents were affecting the hardworking, well-integrated, law-abiding minorities, as well.

[Drahliana Moonrunner]

Pillbug Toenibbler wrote:

Fergie wrote:

CrusaderWolf wrote:

Even going to wake up at 3am so I don't miss anything :)

Honestly, don't bother. This election is close enough that we probably won't know who won for at least a few days, if not weeks.

Florida is not capable of competently holding an election, and they are basically going to decided this thing. Everyone knows what happened in 2000, but FL has been a total mess in other elections as well.

We are in for a long, crappy slog.

EDIT: Based on past and current trends, I'm going to make a prediction that Trump wins Florida.
wipes vomit from corners of mouth
May god have mercy on our souls.

Actually, as a native Floridian, I'm pretty confident that women and Hispanics/Latinx voters will nail Florida for Clinton. Her GotV in the state is a smooth, well-organized, well-planned, well-oiled machine. In the last couple days, in more than a few districts, there's actually been too many canvassers and phone-bankers with too little to do. Trump has pushed away/repulsed many women voters and nearly all Latinx in the state, and even Cuban Americans (who loyally lockstep vote Repub) are breaking away. The icing on the cake is that Puerto Ricans, who watched the Repubs in the House ignore their home's financial crisis, have been immigrating into Florida for better jobs and stability; as soon as they stepped foot on Florida soil, they could register to vote (before the usual deadline). The early voting in the state was above average, and minority early voting broke all records. And none of the media pollsters calculated on so many thousands of first time Latinx voters in their predictions.

I don't know if they'll vote out experienced, do-little liar (and Trump endorser) Senator Rubio (R) for inexperienced, padded-resume Repub-lite Murphy (D), but...

Personal friend of mine is working for one of those canvassers in the state.

[MMCJawa]

Given Glenn Beck's past it's hard for me to think it's an earnest heartfelt turn. Not impossible, people do get life changing revelations that make them rethink their positions.

But he could also be reading the tea leaves for the Republican Party, and thinking long-term for his career. The current republican path just isn't viable long-term, so he might be trying to outreach more to moderates and come up with a different message. Especially if he see's folks like Breitbart as competition and just isn't willing to sink to there level to capture the same demographic.

[CBDunkerson]

MMCJawa wrote:

Especially if he see's folks like Breitbart as competition and just isn't willing to sink to there level to capture the same demographic.

Too low for Glenn Beck's scruples?

That's some scary s#*%.

[BigNorseWolf]

Kirth Gersen wrote:

Ideally, they'd be selling (and basing their platform on) the idea that anyone can succeed through hard work. To make that even remotely convincing, you'd need fairly-funded schools, equal treatment by police, no disenfranchisement of voters (except maybe if they're unemployed?

What you need to make that convincing is merely people who either are or think they're succeeding , often by having one catagory of people so low that it looks like you've ascended to the heights on your own

[Comrade Anklebiter]

Made my one and only concession to lesser evilism:

My mother asked me to bring my retired father to the polls, but I've heard him talking on the phone with his gun club buddies about voting for Trump, so I left him home.

#VoterSuppression2016

[Abraham spalding]

And my duty is discharged. Now to wait.

[RainyDayNinja]

Comrade Anklebiter wrote:

Made my one and only concession to lesser evilism:

My mother asked me to bring my retired father to the polls, but I've heard him talking on the phone with his gun club buddies about voting for Trump, so I left him home.

#VoterSuppression2016

To balance it out, I'm going to the parking lot here at work and slashing the tires of the first car I see with a Hillary bumper sticker.