(July 27, 2016 at 12:21 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote:

(July 26, 2016 at 6:15 pm)wallym Wrote: Foreign policy is going to be an interesting one to see how Hillary navigates.  She hasn't even tried yet.  I'm curious to see how they spin the middle east to make it look like her time as Sec of State bodes well for her being commander in chief.  Not that Trump is any better.  But he isn't on the hook for any actual decisions, so he's just theoretically awful.

Overall though, it's going to be a shit show.  Both are obviously disasters willing to switch positions at any moment, and pander to any crowd if it gets them a few more votes.  With all the inconsistencies, I think it'll just be a lot of finger pointing and hollering.  The winner might be the one who makes less of their own supporters decide to stay home out of disgust.

Is he? He's said that he wants to defeat ISIS and then leave the middle east. That our constant involvement in the middle east is bad for America and the world. Honestly it's probably Trump's best position.

I agree his high level strategy is good.  I think the theoretically awful part may be how he's going to implement it, which I don't think anyone, including him has any idea.  So far, we've got "Make other people defeat ISIS."  But in general, the vague plan to pull back from the theater is still better than a clear hawk which is one of the reasons I'm voting for him over Hillary.

Gary Johnson isn't bad. But he is a consumption tax guy, and my eyeballs always threaten to fall out from rolling to hard whenever I hear that or flat tax.

CapnAwesome Wrote:

Tiberius Wrote:Well part of Gary Johnson's 2012 campaign was trying to get to the magic 5% number so they could secure funding. Here's an article discussing one of their adverts: http://ivn.us/2012/11/01/why-5-matters-to-gary-johnson/

Whilst it goes against Libertarian principles, I would expect the Libertarians would accept the money just so they have a fighting chance in an otherwise unfair race.

Meh. 10 million dollars in public funding isn't going to make a difference for the libertarians. They don't have a money shortage anyway, they raise lots of money. Ron Paul raised more money then almost all the other Republican candidates. Their problem is that there ideas are unpopular. Third parties only win in America if they are replacing one of the main parties. That's because of the winner takes all system. It's happened only a small handful of times in American history. Although I'm voting for Gary Johnson (He's anti-war, ceo of a marijuana company, a rock climber and I like the phrase 'Feel the Johnson') Libertarians don't win because their ideas are unpopular and out of the mainstream. If the conservative vote was split between Republicans and Libertarians, it would just mean the Democrats win every election.

Since someone like Gary Johnson knows that, he has to operate under the myth that there is some hidden libertarian majority, or that people are libertarians and just don't know it. Neither of those statements are backed up by anything other then fantasy. Sort of like a lot of Libertarian economic ideas.

He's not completely wrong about a hidden libertarian portion of the electorate. One of the problems the Libertarians have is that Libertarians have staked out some fairly extreme positions that aren't attractive to most libertarians, so they don't become Libertarians. Gary himself is more of a libertarian than a Libertarian.

There's a real untapped portion of the American public that is basically in favor of classic liberalism (socially inclusive, fiscally responsible) that a Libertarian Party should be representing, but the leadership of the LP seems all tied up with Misesian economics and resisting even the least bit of regulation on firearms.

(July 27, 2016 at 8:15 am)MrNoMorePropaganda Wrote:

(July 27, 2016 at 4:38 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Well, yes, it does matter. If one is being manipulated, it's best to know who's doing it.

I should think such a point would be obvious.

My point was more the media perhaps seems to be focusing more on who hacked who rather than talking about what hacks reveal. Right?

I get that point, but especially given her own email scandal, getting to the bottom of how those emails were obtained seems pertinent.

(July 27, 2016 at 8:15 am)MrNoMorePropaganda Wrote: Time Warner Cable gives millions to the Clintons so it's in CNNs interest not to make the Clintons look bad.

I'm not sure I follow your logic here. Giving money to a candidate make the candidate beholden to you, in American politics, not the other way 'round.

(July 27, 2016 at 8:15 am)MrNoMorePropaganda Wrote: Seems the Russians are getting blamed for everything these days.

Well, in this case the accusation seems justified:

Wired.com Wrote:News of the hack of the Democratic National Committee first broke in mid-June. That’s when Crowdstrike, a firm that analyzes threats to network security, revealed that the DNC had called it in to inspect the party’s servers, where it found “two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network.” Crowdstrike released a comprehensive report of its findings on June 14, which accompanied a Washington Post article detailing the attacks. One of the hacking groups, Crowdstrike found, had access to the DNC servers for almost a year.

A day after that report, someone calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 (an allusion to notorious hacker Guccifer) claimed claimed responsibility for the hack in a blog post. Through the blog and an accompanying Twitter account, Guccifer 2.0 refuted Crowdstrike’s claims that this was a Russian operation, instead calling himself a “lone hacker.” He also claimed to have handed much of the DNC bounty to Wikileaks.

The following week, two cybersecurity firms, Fidelis Cybersecurity and Mandiant, independently corroborated Crowdstrike’s assessment that Russian hackers infiltrated DNC networks, having found that the two groups that hacked into the DNC used malware and methods identical to those used in other attacks attributed to the same Russian hacking groups.

But some of the most compelling evidence linking the DNC breach to Russia was found at the beginning of July by Thomas Rid, a professor at King’s College in London, who discovered an identical command-and-control address hardcoded into the DNC malware that was also found on malware used to hack the German Parliament in 2015. According to German security officials, the malware originated from Russian military intelligence. An identical SSL certificate was also found in both breaches.

https://www.wired.com/2016/07/heres-know...-dnc-hack/

No doubt Russia would prefer a Trump Presidency, given his diffidence about our NATO commitments.

(July 27, 2016 at 8:18 am)MrNoMorePropaganda Wrote:

(July 27, 2016 at 6:14 am)SteelCurtain Wrote: That's why she needs to pull an FDR and swing way left after the primaries.

Trouble is, she's trying to appeal to these phantom crentrists. The Clinton name is so toxic that pretty much only Repurchase who will vote for her are Washington insiders. She thinks Republican elites are representative of large enough sections of the Base to win her millions more votes. They're not and that's why Donald won the primaries.

She's setting herself up to fail. She really needed to appeal to the Bernie people instead she sticks her middle finger up at them at every opportunity. She's too arrogant. When she finally wakes up it'll be too late. It may already be too late to save her campaign. Tim Kaine is a terrible pick.

Those centrists aren't "phantom", and she is not trying to appeal to Republican crossover votes.

I personally think she needs to start hammering on her own ideas ... but it's pretty hard to do so with the two email issues getting the most coverage. I don't think her problem is where she sits on the spectrum or who she appeals to -- her problem is that she is not setting the tone and topic of conversation, but rather is having to follow along and answer for this or that negative. That's a bad place for a politician to be, on the defensive.

(July 27, 2016 at 12:47 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: Meh. 10 million dollars in public funding isn't going to make a difference for the libertarians. They don't have a money shortage anyway, they raise lots of money. Ron Paul raised more money then almost all the other Republican candidates. Their problem is that their ideas are unpopular.

[...]

Since someone like Gary Johnson knows that, he has to operate under the myth that there is some hidden libertarian majority, or that people are libertarians and just don't know it.

Another possibility is that Americans are so politically ignorant that most have no real idea what libertarianism is about.

I think getting on the debate stage is more important than federal funding, for third parties.

(July 27, 2016 at 1:18 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: I personally think she needs to start hammering on her own ideas ... but it's pretty hard to do so with the two email issues getting the most coverage. I don't think her problem is where she sits on the spectrum or who she appeals to -- her problem is that she is not setting the tone and topic of conversation, but rather is having to follow along and answer for this or that negative. That's a bad place for a politician to be, on the defensive.

I agree. But one of her problems is that she's such a policy wonk that her discussing her ideas often comes across as a laundry list of policy proposals, which I gather leaves a lot of people cold, rather than an overarching narrative in which voters can place themselves. She has a bad habit in her public appearances of seeming to speak at her audience rather than to and with them.

And if one has to fight a defensive political campaign, Trump is probably the guy to fight against. He leads with his chin. He can't seem to help himself.

(July 27, 2016 at 1:12 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:

CapnAwesome Wrote:Meh. 10 million dollars in public funding isn't going to make a difference for the libertarians. They don't have a money shortage anyway, they raise lots of money. Ron Paul raised more money then almost all the other Republican candidates. Their problem is that there ideas are unpopular. Third parties only win in America if they are replacing one of the main parties. That's because of the winner takes all system. It's happened only a small handful of times in American history. Although I'm voting for Gary Johnson (He's anti-war, ceo of a marijuana company, a rock climber and I like the phrase 'Feel the Johnson') Libertarians don't win because their ideas are unpopular and out of the mainstream. If the conservative vote was split between Republicans and Libertarians, it would just mean the Democrats win every election.

Since someone like Gary Johnson knows that, he has to operate under the myth that there is some hidden libertarian majority, or that people are libertarians and just don't know it. Neither of those statements are backed up by anything other then fantasy. Sort of like a lot of Libertarian economic ideas.

He's not completely wrong about a hidden libertarian portion of the electorate. One of the problems the Libertarians have is that Libertarians have staked out some fairly extreme positions that aren't attractive to most libertarians, so they don't become Libertarians. Gary himself is more of a libertarian than a Libertarian.

There's a real untapped portion of the American public that is basically in favor of classic liberalism (socially inclusive, fiscally responsible) that a Libertarian Party should be representing, but the leadership of the LP seems all tied up with Misesian economics and resisting even the least bit of regulation on firearms.

I think more then likely what you are describing in the future of the Republican party, rather then the Libertarian one. The Libertarians have some very extreme and unpopular things in their platform and it would be a daunting task to replace the Republican party. Social and religious conservatives are almost all old people with disproportionate power because old people turn out to vote and young Republicans do tend more towards soft L libertarian like you described. Fiscally conservative but socially moderate. Libertarians, or rather the libertarian party aren't fiscally conservative. They are fiscally Libertarian, which is very different. I don't think people in large will ever be on board with things like :

Abolishing the Department of Education
Abolishing the EPA
Abolishing all public health
Abolishing the Federal Reserve
Legalizing hard drugs
etc etc etc

(July 27, 2016 at 1:28 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: I agree. But one of her problems is that she's such a policy wonk that her discussing her ideas often comes across as a laundry list of policy proposals, which I gather leaves a lot of people cold, rather than an overarching narrative in which voters can place themselves. She has a bad habit in her public appearances of seeming to speak at her audience rather than to and with them.

Indeed, she has the integrity of Nixon and the charm of Gore.

(July 27, 2016 at 1:28 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: And if one has to fight a defensive political campaign, Trump is probably the guy to fight against. He leads with his chin. He can't seem to help himself.

No doubt. I think this is Hillary's big opportunity -- let him run his mouth and wait for the inevitable bigoted statement/idiotic claim to come out. Trump will probably be good for two a week, y'know? If she can refocus the media onto those, she'll see her numbers rise again.

(July 27, 2016 at 1:37 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(July 27, 2016 at 1:28 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: I agree. But one of her problems is that she's such a policy wonk that her discussing her ideas often comes across as a laundry list of policy proposals, which I gather leaves a lot of people cold, rather than an overarching narrative in which voters can place themselves. She has a bad habit in her public appearances of seeming to speak at her audience rather than to and with them.

Indeed, she has the integrity of Nixon and the charm of Gore.

(July 27, 2016 at 1:28 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: And if one has to fight a defensive political campaign, Trump is probably the guy to fight against. He leads with his chin. He can't seem to help himself.

No doubt. I think this is Hillary's big opportunity -- let him run his mouth and wait for the inevitable bigoted statement/idiotic claim to come out. Trump will probably be good for two a week, y'know? If she can refocus the media onto those, she'll see her numbers rise again.

He's already given her a big opportunity today, with his statement to the Russian government that he hopes they've hacked Clinton's State Department emails, so we can see the deleted messages (I'm paraphrasing here).

Of course, she's the last person who can make hay with that one, which is a shame because it's shockingly stupid and practically begs for a public smack-down. I can only imagine the alarm and disbelief that must be rippling through the intelligence community right now. Perhaps Obama will address that remark tonight.

I'm racking my brain to see if I can remember another presidential race in which both candidates were their own worst enemies. This campaign season has been unbelievable, and it just gets worse.

The left can't capitalize on Trumps screwups, because they can't resist hyperbolizing.

For months during the primaries, everybody was saying "Trumps just like Hitler" on the facebook. But a reasonable person doesn't think Trump is ever going to try to invade Canada and Mexico, and then kill 20 million people. That's why Hitler was Hitler. Not because of an immigration proposal rooted lightly in a combination of stereotyping and common sense.

My intuition says making people reasonably side with Trump by exaggerating his positions that you could probably get people to disagree with without exaggerating has been a pretty big mistake.