Bernie Sanders won in both the West Virginia primary and the Nebraska Democratic caucus (Oops, over a month ago), while Trump crushed it in the West Virginia primary and the Nebraska Republican primary.
Sanders won by about 15% in both races.
And this just in, Francisco Franco the Ted Cruz campaign is still dead.
This time, I am referring to Ted Cruz, who is making noises about reentering the primary race:
Ever since Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential race last week, Glenn Beck and his co-hosts have been holding on to a sliver of hope that if Cruz could still somehow manage to win today’s Republican primary in Nebraska, that would convince the Texas senator to unsuspend his campaign and re-enter the race.
Today, Cruz called into Beck’s radio program and Beck’s co-host Pat Gray directly asked Cruz about this possibility.
“If Nebraska were to somehow miraculously choose you tonight,” Gray asked, “if that happened, would you consider getting back in the race?”
Cruz responded that he would certainly be open to that admittedly slight possibility.
Please.
Make.
Ir,
Stop.
H/t Charlie Pierce.
The Military Times conducted a survey which showed that members of the military support Trump by a large margin:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Spokane, Wash., on May 7, 2016.(Photo: Ted S. Warren/AP)
In a new survey of American military personnel, Donald Trump emerged as active-duty service members’ preference to become the next U.S. president, topping Hillary Clinton by more than a 2-to-1 margin. However, in the latest Military Times election survey, more than one in five troops said they’d rather not vote in November if they have to choose between just those two candidates.
But given only those choices, 21 percent of the service members surveyed said they would abstain from voting.More than 54 percent of the 951 troops Military Times surveyed said they would vote for Trump, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, over Clinton, the Democratic front-runner. Only about 25 percent said they would vote for Clinton in that matchup.
This is not surprising:
It’s unlikely that the military vote will be decisive, but I gotta figure that they are sick and tired of useless and meaningless losing wars.
Hillary is now actively courting Bush donors:
Hillary Clinton’s supporters in recent days have been making a furious round of calls to top Bush family donors to try to convince them that she represents their values better than Donald Trump, multiple sources in both parties told POLITICO.
The moves come as Clinton and the Democratic Party try to take advantage of deep unease among establishment Republicans on Wall Street and elsewhere with Trump’s emergence as the presumptive Republican nominee.
Top targets for the Clinton team include people like Woody Johnson, Jeb Bush’s former finance chair and the owner of the New York Jets. In recent days, Bush’s brother and father, former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, have said they plan to skip Trump’s nominating convention.
One person close to Clinton said supporters of the former secretary of state drew up a list of Wall Street donors who supported Jeb Bush and other unsuccessful Republican candidates months ago but wanted to wait until Trump locked down the nomination before beginning to make the calls.
Yeah, now THERE’S a staunch defender of the Democratic Party’s liberal traditions, campaigning as the best Republican in the race.
At the rate that this is going, Jill Stein is going to qualify for federal matching funds.
Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he recognizes that our foreign policy establishment is incompetent and corrupt: (And Yes, the source is suspect, but it’s a “Stopped Clock Being Right Twice a Day” thing.)
The National Interest, which is a (Possibly THE) seriously Neocon organization, is trying to explain why it hosted a Trump foreign policy speech, and is not endorsing Trump’s analysis:
………
As the hosts, we are ill suited to evaluate Mr. Trump’s speech; some may find criticism ungracious or, conversely, see praise as unpersuasive. That said, we heard enough from Mr. Trump to feel that while his approach to foreign and security policy is not yet fully developed and remains a work in progress, it is quite different from the existing semi-consensus among America’s foreign-policy elites. His remarks outlined a fundamental break with post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy and offered an alternative vision with considerable appeal to a frustrated public, if less to the elites who have defined, articulated and implemented policy through three administrations run by both major political parties.
I, however, do agree with Trump’s assessment regarding the general uselessness of our foreign establishment, even while eschewing his nonsensical solutions
………
For much of the post–Cold War era, experts both inside and outside the government have faced informal but powerful pressure to share in existing interventionist orthodoxies if they seek top positions requiring Senate confirmation or even regular appearances in mainstream media. From this perspective, it is predictable that an avowedly antiestablishment candidate should provoke ferocious rhetoric from not only the political establishment, but also the foreign-policy establishment (perhaps even more bitterly).
Pledging that he would not surround himself “with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war” has surely fueled establishment fear of Mr. Trump. This statement—the functional equivalent of his signature line “you’re fired” directed at a number of former senior and mid-level officials—ensured that not only many Democrats, but also a number of Republicans in Washington’s foreign-policy community would race to the barricades. Some self-serving Trump-haters may well see this as the greatest danger he poses; ending the dominance of today’s foreign policy nomenklatura could directly threaten their careers. He provokes similar reactions among the transnational Davos elites by insisting “the nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.”
In America, this Soviet-style foreign-policy nomenklatura system has helped the post–Cold War foreign-policy elites in the Republican and Democratic parties to develop a sense of entitlement wholly disproportionate to their accomplishments. How difficult was it to run America’s foreign policy during an era of virtually unquestioned dominance? Why—with so many advantages—have our elites produced so many failed policies? And why do they feel no shame? No matter how many individual positions he changes, Mr. Trump will never satisfy the architects of these massive mistakes or, for that matter, their ardent supporters on editorial boards and television screens. To be clear, it is entirely appropriate to criticize Mr. Trump’s views or, for that matter, his temper. Both have long been important components in our electoral politics. What is not appropriate is to attempt to shut down public discussion of critical national issues.
Our current foreign policy establishment, what I refer to as the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, has squandered blood and treasure, all while making us less secure and insuring that our influence will be diminished in the future.
Heck of a job, Brownie.
Last night said that he had mixed emotions about Ted Cruz leaving the race, because it cleared the decks for Trump:
Is this a yay? I’m so conflicted. I mean, Ted Cruz lost, but it’s because Donald Trump won. It’s like finding out your herpes is gone but it’s because your dick fell off.
This is an almost perfect metaphor for the campaign season.
He just continued low interest rates and a weak dollar.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Thursday positioned himself on the far left of the political spectrum on fiscal issues, coming out for low interest rates, against a strong dollar and a more aggressive managing of U.S. debt.
………
“She [Fed Chair Yellen] is a low interest rate person, she’s always been a low-interest-rate person, and let’s be honest, I’m a low-interest-rate person,” Trump added.
Trump shifted to a discussion of the impact that higher rates has on the dollar, and on the impact a rising dollar has on U.S. business.
“If we raise interest rates and if the dollar starts getting too strong, we’ll have some very major problems.”
“I love the concept of a strong dollar, but when you look at the havoc that a strong dollar causes … it sounds better to have a strong dollar than it actually is.”
………
One thing Trump advocated that the U.S. Treasury has resisted is a more active management of the debt. The U.S. Treasury hasn’t taken advantage of current low interest rates to issue more longer-term debt.
“I think there are times for us to refinance debt with longer term, we owe so much money,” Trump said.
While at times Trump seemed to link a conversation of refinancing with a situation where “the bubble popped” — at one point even suggesting a buyback of U.S. debt — he also made clear that he wanted to refinance now, to rebuild infrastructure.
This is a coherent and thoughtful, if someone iconoclastic, view of the economy, budget, and monetary policy.
It is also a refreshing departure from the conventional fetish about deficits that tends to promulgate austerity.
The economy remains depressed, interest rates are at historical lows, and it’s time borrow cheap and long term and spend on decaying infrastructure and create jobs.
I’ve said before that Donald Trump was the best Republican in the race,* and this reinforces my initial impression.
*Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play.
Ted Cruz kept saying God wanted him to be President, and this is what happened. So either there is no God, or he reeeeally doesn’t like Ted.— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) May 3, 2016
Craig Mazin Ted Cruz’s roomate from his freshman year, who has made it know that he hates Cruz on a basic human level, and he is doing his happy dance.
H/t Raw Story.
Yesterday, Cruz dropped out, and today, Kasich threw in the towel:
Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, a moderate voice who tried to portray himself as the adult in the Republican primary field but failed to win any state but his own, ended his long-shot quest for the presidency on Wednesday, cementing Donald J. Trump’s grip on the presidential nomination.
Mr. Kasich’s departure, a day after Mr. Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary, leaves Mr. Trump as the only candidate remaining in the Republican race. His closest challenger, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, dropped out Tuesday night.
The Republicans have a nominee, and I am tremendously amused.
Then I remember who is leading in the Democratic primary, and I haz a sad.
The Results are in from the Hoosier state, and Bernie won, and Cruz got beat so badly that he dropped out of the race:
Businessman and reality-TV star Donald Trump became the Republican party’s presumptive presidential nominee on Tuesday night, after Trump’s closest rival – Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) – withdrew from the race, following a crushing victory by Trump in the Indiana primary.
The GOP’s chairman, Reince Priebus, called Trump the “presumtive [sic] GOP nominee” in a Twitter message about 9 p.m., and added a plea that “we all need to unite and focus on defeating” Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
In the Democratic race in Indiana, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) was projected as the winner, taking an upset victory over Clinton. That victory will not allow Sanders to make up much ground in the race for Democratic delegates, but it will ensure that their race continues on — creating a scenario few would have seen coming last summer, with Trump gaining a head start on the Democratic nominee.
Sanders won by about 5 points, and Trump by about 17 points.
This makes it a pretty good night.
Over at Medium, Steve Five notes that, “If These Two Win, This is Going To Be The Sh%$tiest Election in US History,” with the charming sub hed of, “Dear God When Will It Be Over Please Make It Stop.”
He’s right:
After last night’s sweeping wins by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it appears even more likely that the two will become their respective party’s nominees. But according to multiple different polls and recent data, these are the sh%$tiest candidates in recorded history and this election will be a total mess.
A recent CBS poll has Clinton at 52% unfavorable rating, with Trump at 57% unfavorable. These are the lowest favorability ratings of presumptive nominees since CBS began polling, and other polls show similar findings. Clinton’s sh%$tiness has been seen as a major problem for the Democratic party, while the only consolation to the Democrats is that Donald Trump is statistically sh%$tier, to the point that he is potentially starting a civil war within the Republican party. If either of these two are elected, they will be the least favored nominee to become president in the history of polling.
………
If Clinton and Trump win their party nominations, we’re in for six months of peak sh$%tiness. Trump saving $2 Billion on ad revenue means he can outspend a cash-strapped Clinton after the primaries, and his sh$%ty rhetoric and fistfuls of money will force a hawkish Clinton to at turns go tough on him and differentiate herself with a market-tested party unification approach.
………
One thing is certain, if Clinton and Trump become their party’s nominees, it will be a race to the bottom. With Trump’s schoolyard rhetoric and Clinton’s distrustfulness, a heated general election fight will turn off an already election-fatigued American populace. According to the data, no matter who wins, a majority of Americans will lose.
I think that the assessment is fundamentally accurate.
It’s a f%$#ing mess, but Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are two different phenomena.
Donald Trump is the proverbial black swan. The Republican party could not have predicted him, or what he would be, or his ascendance. No one could have predicted this.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has been a known quantity for decades, and she record of failure that would make Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld blush, whether it is Iraq, NAFTA, Hillary Care, crime bill, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, or any other signature of her issues.
But the Democratic Party establishment, following the script to Blazing Saddles, has decided that, “”We’ve gotta protect our phoney baloney jobs, gentlemen!”
It is the Iron Law of Organizations Institutions, where power WITHIN an organization is pursued at the expense of the power OF that organization.
The Democratic Party establishment has consciously chosen its course for the most venal of reasons, and the rest of us will pay for this.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
I mean John Boehner, who is most assuredly not a fan of Ted Cruz:
“Lucifer in the flesh,” the former Speaker said. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
That’s my sense of Ted Cruz as well.
I have never in my life seen someone as widely loathed as Ted Cruz in public life.
But Ted Cruz proved me wrong when he announced the wildly premature choice of Carly Fiorina as his running mate:
Ted Cruz just suffered one of the worst drubbings of his presidential campaign, losing badly in five states, falling further behind Donald Trump and watching his dim hopes of capturing the Republican nomination fade further.
Yet less than 24 hours later, the senator from Texas did something normally reserved for presumptive nominees rather than struggling underdogs: He announced a vice presidential running mate.
In choosing Carly Fiorina for that spot here Wednesday, Cruz reached for a political lifeline at a time when he is running out of them. Facing a must-win situation against Trump in next Tuesday’s Indiana primary, Cruz is trying one unorthodox maneuver after another in hopes of extending the race and forcing a contested Republican convention in Cleveland — his only hope for becoming the nominee.
The announcement was designed in part to sharpen the contrast with Trump that Cruz is trying to draw. Introducing Fiorina at an afternoon rally in downtown Indianapolis, Cruz highlighted the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive’s fierce exchanges with Trump and her refusal to back down from him when she was a candidate.
The juxtaposition of the two of them is way worse than either one of them alone.
This is like watching a dog vomit, and then eat its own barf.
In Rhode Island, there is a Cat running for President:
………
Take Denise Rachiele, who was surprised to see a presidential campaign office — Mr. Trump’s — pop up a few doors down from her pet store, All About Pets. Now, her windows are decorated with fake campaign posters for her cat, Stump.
“He felt he was more qualified, or at least as qualified, as Mr. Trump,” joked Ms. Rachiele, who said she had not decided whom she would support on Tuesday.
What? You don’t know who Incitatus was?
Read a f%$#ing book!
Well there is a an address in Delaware that is the “Headquarters” of the tax avoidance activities of Donald Trump, the Clintons, and 285,000 other shell corporations:
There aren’t many things upon which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump agree, especially as they court very different Delaware voters ahead of a primary on Tuesday. But the candidates for president share an affinity for the same nondescript two-storey office building in Wilmington. A building that has become famous for helping tens of thousands of companies avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in tax through the so-called “Delaware loophole”.
The receptionist at 1209 North Orange Street isn’t surprised that a journalist has turned up unannounced on a sunny weekday afternoon.
“You know I can’t speak to you,” she says. A yellow post-it note on her computer screen reads “MEDIA: Chuck Miller” with the phone number of the company’s director of corporate communications. Miller can’t answer many questions either, except to say that the company does not advise clients on their tax affairs.
The Guardian is not the first media organisation to turn up at the offices of Corporation Trust Centre, and it’s unlikely to be the last.
The term tax haven may evoke images of exotic locales, but Panama actually ranks as the 13th most attractive spot for hiding assets, while the US lies third.
This squat, yellow brick office building just north of Wilmington’s rundown downtown is the registered address of more than 285,000 companies. That’s more than any other known address in the world, and 15 times more than the 18,000 registered in Ugland House, a five-storey building in the Cayman Islands that Barack Obama called “either the biggest building in the world, or the biggest tax scam on record”.
Officially, 1209 North Orange is home to Apple, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, Walmart and dozens of other companies in the Fortune 500 list of America’s biggest companies. Being registered in Delaware lets companies take advantage of strict corporate secrecy rules, business-friendly courts and the “Delaware loophole”, which can allow companies to legally shift earnings from other states to Delaware, where they are not taxed on non-physical incomes generated outside of the state.
………
Both the leading candidates for president – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have companies registered at 1209 North Orange, and have refused to explain why.
Clinton, who has repeatedly promised that as president she will crack down on “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere”, collected more than $16m in public speaking fees and book royalties in 2014 through the doors of 1209, according to the Clintons’ tax return.
The routine corruption in the United States is mind buggering.
In what is a clear desperation move, Ted Cruz and John Kasich have divided up at least three upcoming primaries:
Donald Trump’s two remaining Republican presidential opponents campaigned Monday after striking an agreement on a strategy to divvy up three states holding primaries in the coming weeks — an unusual and urgent arrangement aimed at stopping the mogul from clinching the GOP nomination.
The campaigns of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich released written statements within minutes of each other Sunday night calling for Kasich to stop competing in Indiana and for Cruz to clear the way for Kasich in New Mexico and Oregon. They called on allied third-party groups to do the same.
Speaking to reporters here in Borden before a Monday morning rally, Cruz said it was “big news today that John Kasich has decided to pull out of Indiana to give us a head-to-head contest with Donald Trump.” He said the division of resources in key primary states “made sense from both campaigns.”
As Charlie Pierce notes, “With conspirators like these, Caesar would have spent March 15 in a brothel, avoided the Senate for a month, and died of old age in his summer place in Gaul.”
The level of incompetence here buggers the mind.
Charles Koch just said that Hillary Clinton might make a better President than the potential Republican nominees:
Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, a key source of financing for conservative Republican causes along with his brother, said Democrat Hillary Clinton might make a better president than the candidates in the Republican field.
Koch, in an interview to air on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” program, said that in some respects Bill Clinton had been a better president than George W. Bush, who Koch said had increased government spending. Then when asked if Hillary Clinton would be a better president than the Republicans currently running, he said, “It’s possible, it’s possible.”
Not a big surprise.
After all, Hillary is arguably the best Republican in the race.
In an interview with the New York Times, Biden makes a very trenchant point:
………
“I like the idea of saying, ‘We can do much more,’ because we can,” Mr. Biden said in an interview on the Washington-to-Wilmington, Del., Amtrak train he has ridden throughout four decades in national politics.
“I don’t think any Democrat’s ever won saying, ‘We can’t think that big — we ought to really downsize here because it’s not realistic,’ ” he said in a mocking tone. “C’mon man, this is the Democratic Party! I’m not part of the party that says, ‘Well, we can’t do it.’”
It puts something about Hillary’s campaign for President in perspective.
Much like a dog chasing a car, she has no idea what to do if she catches the Presidency.
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Phillip Bump of the Washington Post, who wrote that Bernie Sanders wasn’t telling the truth about his average donation being $27, because the current average is actually $27.88, and some months, it has gone as high as $29.14.
Much pearl clutching ensues.
When most of the internet called him a ……… well ……… “Useless Meatbag”, he whined about it the next day
QED.