Run If You Must, but Don't Run Down Fellow Democrats

We can't fight among ourselves this time around.

www.cajunscomments.com/run-if-you-must-but-dont-run-down-other-democrats/

The Denier-in-Chief

Somehow I naively believed that Donald Trump would become a more serious politician once he began making preparations to move into the White House – that he would restrain himself and issue fewer and more dignified tweets, that he would force himself to be less narcissistic, at least in his public statements, that he would at least pretend to put the country’s welfare before the needs of his massive ego, and most of all that he would quit lying to the American people on a daily basis. I was of two minds about this anticipated transformation. It would certainly be best for our country if he had become a more grown up version of himself, but deep down I wanted him to remain exactly as he was throughout his campaign. This I believed would make him less successful in attempting to implement the promises he made which would disrupt our society and damage our nation’s leadership in the world.

I should have put more faith in the political commentators who said that a 70 year old man was not going to suddenly morph into a totally different person just because he has been hired to do a new job. Indeed Trump has proven that even in the Oval Office he will continue to be a narcissistic egotist who places his needs above all else and who tells the truth only on the rare occasions when it serves his needs.

As you recall, early on Trump repeatedly questioned published reports from intelligence sources which indicated the hacking into our election system was carried out by Russian spy agencies under direct orders from Putin himself with the intention of helping him win the election. However, recently as more evidence has been officially released, Trump has been relatively quiet on the subject. It appeared that he had at last decided that the evidence was so overwhelming that to continue to deny the truth would not serve him well. Again, we should have known better.

Last night at a New Year’s Eve celebration at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump was again asked by reporters about the role the Russian hacking might have played in his victory. His answer was classic Trump, “I think it’s unfair if we don’t know. It could be somebody else. I also know things that other people don’t know so we cannot be sure,” Again the future President adopts the tactic of a known criminal accused of committing a crime – despite all of the evidence to the contrary, deny, deny, deny.

Well Donald, we know you have been fully briefed by our intelligence agencies and they have provided you with uncontested evidence of who attempted to wage war on our democracy and why. Except for you and your Trump-splainers, every one in Washington, including both Republican and Democratic members of Congress, know and have acknowledged the truth about the Russian hacking. Either you are lying to us again or you are too stupid to understand what you have been told. Now we know it can’t be the second alternative because you have told us repeatedly how smart you are.

Donald, you are like a child who continues to claim to he believes in Santa Claus despite knowing otherwise because he is afraid that he will stop getting Christmas presents. And it is time to break off your very public bromance with Vladimir because that relationship can lead to nothing but embarrassment for you and our country.


Original article published on my blog - CajunsComments.com

The Denier-in-Chief

Are Ultra Progressives Responsible for Trumps Victory?

You know the type – after the Democratic primary they were the ultra progressive Bernie Sanders supporters who vowed never to vote for Hillary Clinton. That boisterous group that loudly claimed that they would either vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or, since their conscious would not let them vote for either Clinton or Trump, they would simply stay at home election day. While their numbers shrank, especially in battle ground states, as the polls tightened near election day, they still had a major effect on the election results and may well have cost Hillary the White House.

In each battleground state there were several third party candidates, the most prominent being Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. It is difficult to analyze the votes which went to Gary Johnson because no one knows which of the major party candidates his supporters might have voted for had the Libertarian Party not had a candidate, or if they would have voted at all. The same is true for most of the other 3rd Party candidates. However, we are reasonably sure that those individuals who voted for Jill Stein are very progressive so their choices were probably limited to Stein and Hillary Clinton or not voting. I think it would be interesting to investigate if the results of the election would have been affected if the Stein voters in three of the largest swing states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (all parts of the former Blue Wall) had they voted for Clinton instead.

However, let me first point out that Hillary won the popular vote and given her strong support in California, when the millions of uncounted votes in that state are added in, her victory in the popular vote will be substantial. According to the New York Times: “By the time all the ballots are counted, she seems likely to be ahead by more than 2 million votes and more than 1.5 percentage points, according to my Times colleague Nate Cohn. She will have won by a wider percentage margin than not only Al Gore in 2000, but also Richard Nixon in 1968 and John F. Kennedy in 1960.” And while Trump electoral vote margin appears to be significant – 306 to 232 - it was possible only because of his very narrow victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

You might think that because Jill Stein receive less than 1% of the vote in each of those three states, her votes could not have affected the results, but you would be wrong. Let’s take a close look at the state by state results:

Wisconsin – 10 electoral votes:

Trump: 1,409,467

Clinton: 1,382,210

Difference: 27,257

Stein: 30,980

Obviously if the Stein voters had voted for Hillary Clinton, Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes would have been added to Hillary’s column and subtracted from Trump’s. In addition, this is not taking into consideration those progressives who were turned off by all of their choices and decided not to vote.

Rest of article with analysis of Michigan, and Pennsylvania here:

Are Ultra Progressives Responsible for Trump’s Victory?

Poll - Pick Hillary's margin of victory in the Electoral College

Pick the range which includes your final prediction for a Hillary victory.

(Sorry the poll set up only gave me ten choice options, so I had to improvise.)

I didn't say I thought Trump will win

Only that his chances of winning have been increasing steady since the Democratic Convention and Hillary's have been steadily decreasing.

What the author sees as "Trump is at a high, Hillary at a low, and she is still ahead", others see a trend that could continue.

Regardless, this election cycle is at a turning point and I see three major factors which could affect the outcome:

1) Hillary has more funding as big contributors have been hesitant to invest in Trump given the campaign he has waged. Hillary has a much better ground game, especially in swing states.

2) Usually as elections get closer, people who early on say they will vote for 3rd party candidates began to see the futility of that course of action and come back to one of the major party candidates. Will that happen this time? Probably, but to what extent and which candidate will benefit is hard to predict. I suspect it will vary from state to state.

3) The debates - if Hillary were much further ahead, I would be less concerned. I am sure that Hillary will be very well prepared, but when someone lies as often as Trump does, he is difficult to manage. It like a team that plays hands on defense in basketball on the theory that the refs can't call every foul committed. In those games the refs have to call enough fouls to keep the game fair. Following that analogy the moderator in the debates has to be on his/her game and call out Trump on his lies. If the moderator doesn't keep in check Hillary will certainly challenge his lies, but with much of the audience across the nation that hasn't been paying close attention, it will be one candidates word against the other. I really don't know who will win at that game.

In an election this close any and all of these three factors can tip the race to one candidate or the other. We must do everything possible to GOTV.

Election 2016 – Too Close for Comfort

Lyin’ Donald Trump

(cross posted from GD-2016

I forced myself to watch Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, not because I am a masochist, but because I believe that you must confront and understand evil if you are to be successful in defeating it. I will admit that I had to turn the volume down a bit; I couldn’t stand The Donald shouting at me as he robotically read his lines, and maybe I did a little multi-tasking. However, I did watch the entire hour and 15 minutes of the most dreary and depressing speech I have ever seen or heard. There were no rays of hope to break up the doom and gloom, no “but we are Americans and we have overcome far worse”. There on only the Trump pledge to fix everything that is wrong with this country, and that inspired no hope what so ever.

Hopefully those suffering from severe depression had enough sense to not watch the speech; apparently they didn’t because I heard nothing of the suicide rate spiking Thursday night. Or perhaps, like me, they couldn’t reconcile what is happening in their lives with the situation that Donald Trump was describing.

As Trump droned on indeterminately with statistic after depressing statistic I started recognizing familiar topics, subjects I knew something about. I found myself mumbling under my breath again and again, “Wait a minute, that can’t be right” And then, “That SOB is lying to the American public while giving the most important speech of his life.” However, looking back, given the way he has handled his entire campaign, I don’t know why I should have been the least bit surprised.

After the speech I started researching public records for the points from Trump’s speech that I could remember. I found that while some his statements might have been technically true, if you closed one eye and held your mouth just right, they were misleading a hell. They were based on information cherry picked to present the data in the most damning light possible. The Trump campaign staff members who wrote that speech made those in the Bush administration who distorted the facts to convince the country to go to war in Iraq look like amateurs.

To me this is the worst kind of lie. For instance, to manufacture that kind of lie you have to sort through reams of data which indicates that violent crime in this country has been decreasing for many years in order to find that kernel of information which, when taken out of context, seems to indicate that violent crime is instead increasing, and that we should be very afraid.

In another misrepresentation of the facts, Trump tried to convince us ......

Rest of article here:

Lyin’ Donald Trump (includes links to fact checking articles)

Evidently There Are Ignorant People in Britain as Well

Recently I have been embarrassed that one of the two major political parties in this country actually chose a grandstanding reality show star as its Presidential nominee. It is difficult to believe that anyone other than our most ignorant citizens would vote for the likes of Donald Trump to be President of the United States. To even contemplate that Trump actually received 10.8 Million votes in the Republican primaries, the most for any Republican candidate in history, is mind blowing for people like me.

During the last few months I paid particular attention whenever one our British cousins expressed utter disdain for Trump. British Prime Minister David Cameron called Trumps proposed Muslim travel ban “divisive, stupid and wrong,” and “…I think if he came to this country it would unite us all against him.” Several other high visibility British politicians made similar comments. More than 570,000 Britons signed an online petition demanding that Trump be banned from entering from the United Kingdom and the British Parliament actually seriously considered the question. My thought at the time was, “The British are bright people.”

Well, evidently I formed my opinion prematurely based on insufficient evidence. British politicians may have their thinking caps on straight, but the same cannot be said of the majority of the British people. ....

http://www.cajunscomments.com/evidently-there-are-ignorant-people-in-britain-as-well/

I feel sorry for Sanders' "true believers"

By "true believers" I am referring to the real zealots in the Bernie Sanders' fan club. They are the ones who spend hours trying to manipulate internet polls, harass people on line, try to shut down the expression of opinions contrary to their sainted candidate, and attempt terrorize super delegates. They are the ones who lurk in the shadows of the Hillary group ready to alert on anything not complementary of Sanders or his supporters (or at least they used to until Skinner put his foot down, though one of them may be alerting on this OP right now).

I truly feel sorry for them. Sure they tick me off just as they do every one else in the Hillary group, but how can one not feel sorry of people who are so unhappy and distrustful of our political system.

Many of Sanders' most obnoxious fans are true believers of the far left and they exhibit many of the inherent symptoms:

- They feel ideologically pure

- They won't compromise

- They are not into reality if it disagrees with their objectives or their view of the world

- They are all or nothing people so they are disdainful of incremental progress.

- They are never happy with the political system because they can't change it without compromise and they disavow incremental progress so their efforts almost always fail.

- They are into conspiracy theories because they continue to fail so there must be someone or some thing that is conspiring to block their efforts.

They are driven by a revolutionary zeal for dramatic change which they can never bring about so they are never content, so they are never truly happy. While their behavior drives me up a wall, I feel sorry for anyone who chooses to live that way.