Countdown to 2016

[1Centrist]

A U.S. public opinion survey shows Republican Senator Marco Rubio leading the group of hopefuls for the party's 2016 presidential nomination.

A poll released Thursday by Quinnipiac University has the first-term lawmaker from the southeastern state of Florida attracting 15 percent of registered Republican primary voters, followed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush with 13 percent and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker with 11 percent. Neither Bush nor Walker have formally entered the race for the White House.

The poll also shows Rubio doing better against likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in a potential general election matchup than the other Republican presidential hopefuls. But Rubio trails the former secretary of state by two percentage points, 45 to 43 percent.
http://www.voanews.com/content/rubio-clinton-early-favorites-for-2016-white-house-run/2731429.html

In a Clinton v. Rubio smackdown, my money's on Hillary. Latinas would be torn, but Hillary would have the edge since Rubio is both a Republican and a Cubano.

[Crux]

Clinton is drawing heavy fire. She is not well loved. She will look awful as compared to Rubio.
Rubio can definitely win. My money will be on Rubio in that match up. It would be on Walker.
It would be on Paul. It would be on Cruz too... I might luz, but 2016 is a brand new ballgame...

[1Centrist]

My wife got this table from her Facebook page; it appears to be put together from OpenSecrets data. I thought it was interesting, though the numbers are heavily skewed by the differences between the states and the campaigns of the candidates. Nevertheless, they show a clear distinction that will be lost to us as PACs expand and donors become more obscure.

(Table disappeared. I seem to be having a little problem with my TinyPic account. )

[fangz1956]

Pick your poison? It's a no-brainer when you pay attention to who the contributors are and the sums of money given. This list proves that HRC is a corporate whore.....no two ways about it. And since she has decided to further embrace Super-PAC money for this campaign, she lost many more folks in the Democratic base.

[1Centrist]

You're absolutely right, of course, fangz. But I just edited out the poison part in the interests of even-handedness. ;-) (And there was another point that needed to be made.)

[Coondog]

Sometimes one gets the feeling that the democratic base is just as clueless as the republican base. The Supine Court opened up the sack full of vipers with the Citizens United debacle. Decent people were against it. Republicans were all for it. It is now the reality that everyone must acknowledge.

Democrats can stand on their principles and refuse to operate according to the gleeful standards of the right.....and become as obscure as whoever is currently heading up the Whig Party.......and lose. Or, operate accordingly, take the money no matter how despicable they find the rules of the game, and hope to eventually get rid of the people who like graft and corruption so much and change the rules back to something honest and reasonable.

If it takes Super Pac money to defeat the evil effects of Super Pac money, well, that's politics. Liberals who cannot get their heads around that should stay out of politics and stick to poetry.

Coondog

[fangz1956]

Dawg.....Normally I can see eye to eye with you on a vast majority of issues. However, this is where we part ways. And don't tell me I should stay away from politics. They are a whole slew of us liberals and progressives that believe taking the Super PAC money is sending a bad message to the voters and it isn't earning anyone taking it major points amongst the vast majority of liberal and progressive voters. Sanders is running this current campaign without the use of Super PAC or dark money....so that shows it can be done.

Did somebody lace your kibble with LSD?????

[1Centrist]

To my mind, both your views are reasonable; you've gotta deal with what you've got while you work to make it better. To that end,

• Click the bill


• Buy a stamp

• Eat ⬅︎ Thank you, Stonewall.

If you've seen some of these around town already, guess who's the culprit.

Cheers

[1Centrist]

Even the consummate insider is getting on board:

BOB WOODWARD, in commencement address Sat. at Loyola University in New Orleans delivered in the Superdome: “There is a new governing crisis here and it is getting worse. It is about money in politics. It involves both political parties. I won’t name names. If you follow the news at all, you know. It is said that the media is sleeping, lost its investigative zeal and does not have the patience to dig. There is some truth to that. But that changes when there is a good story. And money in politics is a great story and important to democracy. It is important that the next president be able, unfettered and unbought, to find and move the country to the next stage of good.

“You should insist that the sleeping giant, which is both the country and the media, wake up. The result could be, if you are persistent, that we have a kind of ‘Unrestricted Investigative Warfare’ as the news organizations, the giants, the little people, left, right and center compete to follow the money and explain its corruptions and ramifications.”
http://www.politico.com/playbook/?hp=c3_3

[Wise One]

All three of you make great points even though they're not identical. (Where is Crux to disagree with everybody? We need him to balance good sense with, well, the opposite.)

My own inclinations vacillate somewhere between idealism and pragmatism. It's an arms race, enabled by cockamamie rulings by wacko members of the current rightist Supreme Court.

In an arms race, your alternatives are : 1) Surrender, 2) Go all out to out-arm yourself against your opponents and vanquish them, 3) Take the high road and fight with an inadequate arsenal, hoping against hope that goodness will prevail.

Try as I might, I don't see any practical alternative than to adopt some hybrid of 2) and 3).

PS . I like the stamped currency idea, but I fear for you. Even though B&J say it's OK.
PPS. Your second "Eat" image is either blocked by its owner, or has been removed.

[Coondog]

Retract those canines, Fangz.

Practical reality may be absent from most ideological constructs, but Coondog was weaned on it. As much as Bernie is a wonderful and articulate fellow, it's unlikely that, with or without the backing of Super Wealth, he is going to have sufficient constituency to win the nomination, much less the White House. As it stands now, unless Jesus comes back (and why would he?) it's Hillary and her Super Pac or nothing.

The alternative, again, is to stand on principle, lose, and allow republicans to turn the country into a corporate theocracy where old people actually ARE turned into Soilent Green at the pleasure of a 9-0 conservative majority on the Serpentine Court.

Unfortunately, what you advocate is tantamount to sending people opposed to killing unarmed into combat against bloodthirsty Huns.

If you want to get rid of all the ridiculous latitude in political funding and all the evil influences involved, first you have to get rid of the Huns on their own terms.

Coondog

What's in my Kibbles is nobody's business. Oh, look! A baby wolf!

[fangz1956]

OK.....I can see why you follow the trail of reasoning that you do. Too much MSM!!

Here is an interesting read on how the media works (overtime apparently) to mold public opinion and keep our overlords happy.

Bernie who?

This year (as always) my vote won't be wasted by voting strategically in order to maintain the status quo. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in this nation will change as long as we the people continue to play the game by their rules. If you can't vote your conscience, then you might as well paint a yellow stripe down your back and run for the hills.

[1Centrist]

WO, I believe TinyPic removed the image of Ben & Jerry's trademark. (It had one of these ®, but I didn't think Ben or Jerry would care.) The stamping campaign seems okay since there used to be pictures on the website of Pelosi and a few other pols endorsing it. Anyway, it's been around for a while and the black Pave Lows haven't swooped in yet.


Wait! What's that deafening noise outside my house?????

Oh, it's only the Carilion copter over at the hospital.

[Wise One]

This year (as always) my vote won't be wasted by voting strategically in order to maintain the status quo.

As always, I admire your steadfast devotion to reform.

My own position is that we almost never get a chance to make BIG reforms. On those rare occasions when they have been made, history tells us that things turn out very badly ... the actual results bear little resemblance to supporters' prior wishes and assumptions. Think Soviet Union.

Our best, and usually only, opportunity for progress is by making lots of small steps. Yes, I know it's unsatisfyingly short of what we want, but its the only way that seems to work.

So that's why I go to the polls and vote for the one who seems best, sadly never perfect, in a flock of mostly turkeys.



PS. And sometimes we get surprised. My favorite example is the turnabout we are seeing on gay marriage. No politicians, including the President who finally upset the applecart and caused MAJOR change in our Nation, was willing to offer the whole apple early on. The best we ever got, even from Obama, was a hint of small differences. In this case, they grew and magnified, and are resulting in genuine major reform.

[1Centrist]

Interesting article, fangz. It goes hand-in-hand with the "Princeton Study" I mentioned a while back (link).

For a number of years now my only realtime TV news services have been those streamed by Roku; mostly foreign (e.g., BBC World News, Al-Jazeera, France 24), but including CNNi and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. (I like Amy, but at my age her show often acts as a sedative.) One gets a very different perspective from the typical U.S. MSM fare. Obama was right on the mark in taking the piss out of the news media at the recent White House Correspondents' Association dinner, though he surely had different reasons.

On a related note, I just got back from a week in DC. After every trip I become more and more convinced The Hunger Games are just around the corner.

[Coondog]

We might also remember that it was not Florida Republicans or the Syphilitic Court that saddled us with George W. Bush.

It was Ralph Nader!

Or, shall we say, those who voted their druthers instead of voting strategically. That sort of played into someone else's strategy, eh?

We are seldom offered the choice of choices, but winning is so very much better than losing.....particularly when one considers who it is you're losing to.

Until they give us a box next to the (R) that says NO, that cancels out somebody else's YES, then the next best thing will have to do.

Coondog

[1Centrist]

Money in politics has become more and more important because it buys the barrage of TV advertising that accompanies our campaigns right up until we enter the voting booth. Why should this be? Well,

TORONTO, May 15 (UPI) -- A small study by researchers at Microsoft has found the human attention span is shortening. At just 8 seconds, they say it is now shorter than the attention span of the average goldfish.
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2015/05/15/Microsoft-Humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-a-goldfish/1441431717012/?spt=hs&or=sn

Are we doomed or what?

[Crux]

Until they give us a box next to the (R) that says NO, that cancels out somebody else's YES, then the next best thing will have to do.

Reduced to a boxed vote
in a rigged system
that cancels out liberty
for our political opposition?



Slave. Oppressor. Coondog. Proudly voting NO!

[Crux]

I just got back from a week in DC. After every trip I become more and more convinced The Hunger Games are just around the corner.

What? D.C. is a hunger games in and of itself we could say.

So 2016 you holding firm against Hill?

Rubio, Walker and Cruz are a better choice and you will vote?

[fangz1956]