Truth is not a necessary or required component of Donald Trump’s brand of politics.
In a video released on his Instagram account, the businessman turned professional politician and leader of the Republican party pushes the envelope even further, showing a laughing Hillary Clinton superimposed on another video of a burning Benghazi. Also featured in the video are three family members of the deceased, also casting blame on Hillary Clinton.
Republicans have longed blamed then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, for the Benghazi tragedy. And they all conveniently forgot their role in this tragedy when they refused allocate funds for embassy protections. Donald Trump, being he master politician that he is, has once again managed to ignore the real issues facing Americans. Again he has grabbed our attention with a shiny Republican talking point called BENGHAZI!
It was the weakest Donna Summers impersonation I had ever heard or seen. Watch as this Senator tried on Summers’ song, “She Works Hard for The Money” while trying to juice up the audience at a Hillary Clinton event.
Soon, well be calling him the little engine that could. Bernie Sanders have reduced an almost insurmountable national Clinton leading to just 2 points in the latest national poll.
Bernie Sanders has narrowed in on Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton in the latest national poll of the race as the pair battle ahead of Tuesday’s primary in New York.
Clinton holds a 2-point edge nationally over Sanders, 50 to 48 percent, among Democratic primary voters surveyed in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published Monday.
Clinton held a 9-point lead in the survey last month, besting the Independent Vermont senator, 53 to 44 percent. In January, she led by 25 points, 59 to 34 percent.
Now that we’ve got some room to breathe a bit until the New York primary hits with full force this week (that’s when the ads will start running), it’s worth looking at the present election season and asking, “Is this democracy?” I’m sure the rest of the world is following the elections and is wondering how the greatest democracy in the world can elect its political leader with such a long, messy, potentially divisive process.
As are many Americans.
The 2016 primaries will, I think, redefine the system we have for a few reasons. The first is the influence of social media. No longer can a candidate say one thing in Arizona, contradict themselves in Massachusetts and say a third idea in Florida and have nobody notice. We are too connected and communication is instantaneous.
The second reason is that many more people are taking part in the primaries, partially due to social media, but mostly due to the issues at stake and the bitter polarization between the parties.
Finally, Donald Trump, love him or not, has made this campaign into his own reality program and no news organization can resist him. But now that we have more voters participating, more citizens are questioning the process, and for good reason.
A look at the primary results so far suggests that both parties lack transparency, and the Republican Party is on course to actually thwart their own system in order to stop Donald Trump from becoming its nominee. On the Democratic side, although Hillary Clinton has a substantial delegate lead, the use of free-floating superdelegates is skewing her lead. These delegates are party elites who can essentially vote for whichever candidate they please, and most of them have pledged themselves to Hillary, although as in 2008, they can always switch their allegiance to Bernie Sanders should he upset her in New York and Pennsylvania. So even though thousands of Democrats have gone to the polls, they’re finding that their democratic will is not being honored.
On the Republican side, superdelegates are not really the problem, as they mostly have to vote as their state did during the primary. The real issue is that the candidate who wins a state primary’s popular vote does not necessarily get all, or even a representative portion of that state’s delegates. This has happened to Trump in Louisiana and Colorado, and threatens to derail his bid for a majority once the GOP Convention starts in July. This also affects Bernie, as Saturday’s Wyoming Caucuses show. He won the most votes, but he and Hillary will get the same number of delegates.
This is why many voters are feeling disenfranchised, despite their being able to cast a ballot. In effect, although the Supreme Court just ruled in favor of counting all voters in the latest “one person, one vote” case, we don’t seem to all have that vote. The Republican Party is risking more because they have come out in favor of doing all that they can to deny Trump the nomination, even if he comes close to having enough delegates. This would fracture the GOP and probably lead to Trump running as an independent, especially if Ted Cuz is the nominee despite not having anywhere near the required delegate majority after the primaries.
The Democrats won’t suffer the same fate, but it would help if Hillary won enough delegates independent of the superdelegate votes. That would at least convince Democrats that their votes had weight.
Nominating contests have traditionally not been expressions of democracy, but now much of the country is paying attention at this early stage. 2020 will look different.
Bernie Sanders will face a lot of criticisms for saying that Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, is not qualified to be president. But taken in context with his belief that any politician who takes money from special interests cannot truly represent the will of the people over the will of those special interests, I see his point and I totally understand where he is coming from.
“Secretary Clinton appears to be getting a little bit nervous,” he told a crowd in Philadelphia. “And she has been saying lately that she thinks that I am ‘not qualified’ to be president. Well, let me, let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton: I don’t believe that she is qualified, if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds. I don’t think that you are qualified if you get $15 million from Wall Street through your super PAC.”
CNN has reached out to the Clinton campaign for comment, and its surrogates responded quickly on Twitter.
“Hillary Clinton did not say Bernie Sanders was ‘not qualified.’ But he has now – absurdly – said it about her. This is a new low,” campaign spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted.
A petition is circulating asking the Superdelegates in the Democratic race for president to listen to the will of the people in their states and support the candidate the voters selected.
The race for the Democratic Party nomination should be decided by who gets the most votes, and not who has the most support from party insiders.
That’s why we’re calling on all the Democratic superdelegates to pledge to back the will of the voters at the Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia.
Bernie Sanders is proud of the over 6 million donors who have contributed to his campaign. And he is not afraid to hit his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, for taking big dollars from big donors. According to Sanders, when you are funded by big money, it is easy for big money to dictate your policies.
A visibly angry Hillary Clinton lashed out at an environmental activist Thursday while accusing the Bernie Sanders campaign of “lying” about donations sent from the fossil fuel industry to her campaign.
“I am so sick, I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me. I’m sick of it,” Clinton told Eva Resnick-Day of Greenpeace, who confronted the Democratic presidential front-runner on the rope-line after a campaign stop in New York. Clinton acknowledged that some of her donors work for fossil fuel companies.
Greenpeace released video of the encounter, which showed Clinton jabbing her finger at the activist. The former New York senator also appeared frustrated earlier in the day when Sanders supporters interrupted her speech, shouting “she wins, we lose” in unison before being escorted out of the event at SUNY Purchase.
A new Quinnipiac University poll finds that in a general election match up, Senator Bernie Sanders has a better chance of beating any of the Republican candidates than Secretary Hillary Clinton.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton would beat Trump by a 53 to 33 percent margin, pollsters found. She would also top Cruz by a 21 points and edge Kasich by 5 points.
Bernie Sanders’s victory margin over Trump, meantime, would be 24 points, 56 to 32 percent. He would beat Cruz by 28 points and Kasich by 10 points.
The telephone survey was conducted from March 22 through March 29, ending as Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was charged with battery. It was completed before the businessman’s comments on abortion sparked a firestorm.
Bernie Sanders was the big winner in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington state on March 26, but you could sum up the media coverage in one sentence: “Bernie Sanders won three states on Saturday but he didn’t make a dent in Hillary Clinton’s lead among delegates.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. When will the lame-stream media stop merely regurgitating spin from the Clinton campaign and start doing its job?
The truth is, there’s something profoundly significant happening in the Democratic primary — one might even say there’s a “political revolution” underway — and most political reporters are missing it entirely.
Have you noticed? All they talk about is “the math.” You know the drill. We hear it over and over: It’s mathematically impossible for Sanders to catch up. Clinton has an insurmountable lead. He can never win by big enough margins to make a difference. Even if he gets close, superdelegates will deny him the nomination. So he might as well just get out of the way and let Clinton start to focus on November.
There’s only one thing wrong with that theory: Sanders keeps winning, and Clinton keeps losing.
Why? Because politics is about a lot more than math. It’s also about message, ideas and policies. It’s also about excitement, enthusiasm and energy. And, no doubt about it, the ideas and message that are generating all the excitement, enthusiasm and energy at this moment in the primary are with Bernie Sanders.
Just when it looked like we were going to spend the spring being subjected to the GOP food fight about wives and Supreme Court blockades and keeping swarthy people out of the country, along comes a cold sweat, fear-inducing, terror-in-the-night event in Belgium to focus us on what’s really at stake in this election.
So let me be clear: Hillary Clinton is far and away the best, most knowledgeable, temperamentally suited candidate to lead this country through our foreign policy challenges. The Republicans will talk about Benghazi and e-mails, but when push comes to shove, and it already has, Clinton has the smarts and the cold-eyed sense of reality that befits a Commander-in-Chief.
I’m not sure if Ted Cruz’s policies are worse, but they certainly aren’t better than Trump’s. Cruz’s default strategy is to carpet bomb a group that has embedded itself into the fabric of a community it was once devoted to. This would result in a huge number of civilian casualties and the deaths of thousands of innocent people. He now wants to add a totalitarian element to his policy that would enable law enforcement officials to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods in the United States.
I understand patrol, as bad as that is, but what does secure mean? Since most Americans who are radicalized are done so over the Internet, does that mean an extra layer of surveillance? Wiretapping? Issuing subpoenas to service providers to give up Internet browsing histories? Other chillingly McCarthyistic ideas?
The world is a very dangerous place and made more dangerous by people who talk tough with little thought behind their words. Defeating ISIS and other radicals will take time and it will require that the United States have a clear, sober, realistic strategy to carry out. Neither of the GOP front-runners has such a strategy.
Have you heard? Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are effectively tied among Democratic voters, according to the results of a Bloomberg Politics poll released Thursday.
Of the 311 people who indicated that they have voted or will vote in their state’s Democratic primary or caucus, 49 percent said they support Sanders, while 48 percent indicated that they prefer Clinton and the remaining 3 percent said they are not sure.
In terms of the candidates’ individual qualities and positions, Clinton generally outdrew Sanders on issues related to foreign policy, Congress, effectiveness and temperament, while majorities gave the Vermont senator higher marks for fighting hard for the middle class, honesty and trustworthiness and reining in Wall Street institutions.
I think I understand why more than a third of Republican voters are fed up with the Republican Party and are supporting Donald Trump for president (including this list of august personalities who have endorsed the man). The GOP has played lip service to the small government, socially conservative crowd for decades without really committing serious national resources to break the grip that the wealthy have on the party. These voters want someone who won’t compromise and who will follow through on the time-tested xenophobia and intolerance that’s a hallmark of this country’s past. What a message.
It’s been 35 years since Ronald Reagan’s election ushered in the great conservative reaction to almost 50 years of Democratic-liberal rule. As the country, and certainly the GOP, moved harder to the right and the tax cuts moved more swiftly into the hands of the already wealthy, social conservatives wanted more action.
What they got was the old country club Republican brushoff. Now the guy that built all of the country clubs wants to be president. The irony is ironic.
But the nomination is not Trump’s yet. Ted Cruz is running a solid campaign and is now most likely the candidate best positioned to challenge Trump. The latest polls in Florida show that Marco Rubio’s best presidential opportunities lie in 2020 or beyond. Once he loses his home state next week, I expect him to drop out. Likewise John Kasich, who will get a taste of backyard defeat in Michigan and follow Rubio out the door by March 16. At that point, Trump will have 165 more delegates from those winner-take-all states, but his lead will not be insurmountable if Republicans rally around Cruz. The party wants Rubio and sees both Trump and Cruz as losers in November. So the question will come down to which guy you dislike least.
Again, quite a choice.
Of course, the Democrats are feeling similarly frisky after enduring 35 years of right-leaning government programs, which is why Bernie’s take-down-the-banks rhetoric is so powerful. Hillary looks downright boring by comparison, but she’ll still be the nominee. I’m sure she’ll add some of Sanders’ best lines to her campaign repertoire to appeal to the new, young voters that are now part of the political landscape.
We might have reached a crisis point in the campaign last week, with the seventh grade debate and Chris Christie cannon-balling into the race, then looking miserable about it. But despite the backlash against Romney’s jeremiad, there might be enough GOPers willing to search their souls and questions whether they really want Trump as their nominee.
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