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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Said Locker: Maybe I should run for President...
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pyro
Big Wall climber
Calabasas
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DONALD J. TRUMP ENDORSED BY NASCAR CEO AND DRIVERS
(Valdosta, GA) February 29th, 2016 – Today Donald J. Trump was endorsed by Brian France, Chairman & CEO of NASCAR, popular retired driver Bill Elliott, and active drivers Chase Elliott, Ryan Newman, and David Lee Regan. France, Elliott, and the drivers endorsed Mr. Trump at a rally attended by thousands in Valdosta, Georgia just one day before the Super Tuesday primary.
Mr. Trump said, “I am proud to receive the endorsement of such an iconic brand and a quality person such as Brian. Brian has a wonderful family and is an incredibly successful business person. I have great respect for Brian and I am grateful for his support and that of Bill Elliott, one of the best drivers in history, and active stock car racers, including his son Chase Elliott, Ryan Newman and David Lee Regan.”
Brian France added, “Mr. Trump is changing American politics forever and his leadership and strength are desperately needed. He has had an incredible career and achieved tremendous success. This is what we need for our country.”
Bill Elliott said, “It is my great honor to endorse Mr. Trump for President of the United States. He is a leader representing strength and common sense solutions.”
These influential endorsements come just days after former Presidential candidate and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Senator Jeff Sessions, recognized by many as the conservative soul of the U.S. Senate, offered their endorsements of the republican frontrunner.
Mr. Trump continues to dominate in state and national polls with the most recent survey from CNN showing Mr. Trump with 49% support nationwide.
Donald Trump
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Curt
climber
Gold Canyon, AZ
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Mr. Trump continues to dominate in state and national polls with the most recent survey from CNN showing Mr. Trump with 49% support nationwide.
1) That's 49% of Republicans only for that one poll.
2) National polls are meaningless.
Curt
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
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They're not meaningless, they just aren't that helpful for understanding the primary outcomes.
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nita
Social climber
chica de chico, I don't claim to be a daisy.
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*
Couchmaster,
IMO, I think Miss Noonan missed the whole component of people being influenced by talk radio, hate radio, Fox news, and the internet ....
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Time for a little music break and back to work for me....Muscle Shoals is a great little documentary.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
edit: JEleazarian, for below.... you are missing the point of the clip.. That movie was made in 2011..
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dirtbag
climber
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Long and fascinating (that's what she said) look at authoritarianism in today's political parties (with data!). Authoritarian tendencies in some Americans goes a long way towards explaining the differences between the parties and Trump's ascendancy. Most of Trump's supporters exhibit such tendencies, which we often see in this thread.
Worth a read if you have half an hour so.
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism
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Curt
climber
Gold Canyon, AZ
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They're not meaningless, they just aren't that helpful for understanding the primary outcomes.
Or presidential election outcomes. Nate Silver has explained quite well why this is the case.
Curt
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Winemaker
Sport climber
Yakima, WA
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A very interesting article from Money Magazine as to why the Trump keeps on ticking:
With 12 states choosing delegates, seven of them in the Republican’s southern core, Super Tuesday was supposed to be a dream date for the GOP establishment. One big day to wrap up the intra-party discussion and focus on defeating the Democrats.
Instead, it’s almost certain that the vote will cement Donald Trump’s status as the Republican front runner, and increasingly possible that it will pretty much seal off Marco Rubio’s path to the nomination. So what happened?
Here’s one answer: Hurricanes don’t come out of nowhere. Trump may feel like a freak storm for the GOP. But it’s taken years—actually, decades—of economic dislocation for the Republican’s core Super Tuesday constituency to get here.
There are many ways to measure the health of a society: income, accumulated wealth, overall feelings of happiness. One number, though, that nicely summarizes most of them is life expectancy. It’s really one of the most direct ways of calculating how much better off we are.
For most of the country the answer that we get from looking at changes in life expectancy over two decades is “a fair amount.” From 1990 to 2010 the average lifespan of white women in the U.S. increased by about 1 year and 11 months (you can see detailed data for 2010 from the Social Science Research Council here, and historical data from the Census Bureau here); for men it was close to four years.
But that doesn’t hold true for white voters in many of the Super Tuesday states. Five of the states holding primaries tomorrow fall in the bottom 10 of the country for life expectancy. In several Super Tuesday states, life expectancy for white women barely budged. In two—Alabama and Oklahoma—white women's lifespans actually declined.
That kind of turnabout is almost unprecedented in peacetime economies. Nobody has a definitive answer about what’s causing this but we do have a really good clue: Lifespans aren’t falling across the board. Instead, they’re dropping dramatically for those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
When S. Jay Olshansky, a public health researcher at the University of Illinois-Chicago, probed deeper into the numbers, it turned out that life expectancy for white women without high school degrees is overwhelmingly driving the mortality epidemic. That has everything to do with where folks stand in the economic pecking order. “Education,” says Olshansky, “is a proxy for access to jobs and access to health care.”
The poor, in other words, are less likely to finish school, less likely to get jobs, and less likely to be able to afford (or seek out) medical treatment. That downward spiral has been accelerating dramatically. "The harmful effects of being poor and less educated are more harmful than they were several years ago," says Olshansky.
The trend now seems to be playing out in an extreme way in the Super Tuesday states. In a word, the life expectancy data implies that poor whites are now experiencing the kinds of cascading crises (job loss, eviction, lack of health care) that have afflicted poor blacks—whose life expectancy remains lower, but at least is rising—for many years. This may not have affected you directly, especially if you are online reading a personal finance site, but if you live in the South it is almost certain that you have seen this play out among people you've known and grown up with.
Here's one surprising factoid: Fifty years ago (yes, a long way back), whites in Southern states had some of the highest life expectancies in the country. For white women, Arkansas was at no. 4, Oklahoma was at no. 6, and Georgia was at no. 13 among U.S. states. In two generations, these states have gone from the longest lifespans to the shortest.
You can argue about who's to blame, but there's certainly plenty of anger and blame to go around. It's just that no one seems to have figured out how to capitalize on that anger for electoral gain like Donald Trump.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Nita, I'm not sure it's brainwashing just by the right-wing media. The mainstream media has spent more coverage time on Trump than every other Republican candidate put together -- and almost none of that Trump coverage deals with either his record as a businessman, his record as an alleged evangelical Christian, his record as an alleged winner, or any real policy pronouncements. Are you surprised that people believe his implicit appeal that he's not a politician? I suspect that a susbtantial amount of voters, if not a majority of them, are so disgusted with "politicas as usual" that they've decided that politicians are the problem, rather than bad policies.
Meanwhile, I keep watching the reaction of Trump supporters when confronted by the truth of the Trump record, and the vacuity of his policies. It reminds me of a scene in Moliere's play Tartuffe. In the play, Tartuffe is a charlatan who has managed to ingratiate himself with a widow. In the middle of the play, the real friends of the widow confront her with all the misdeeds Tartuffe has pulled off, and how he is exploiting her. Her reaction is "Le pauvre homme!," meaning "The poor man! [for having to deal with all of these allegations]. She's so enamored of him, she won't let facts get in the way of her affection.
Objectively, Trump is currently the only major Republican candidate that polls show will certainly lose to Hillary Clinton. While this will likely change over time, that fact alone should give Trump supporters pause, but they remain willfully igonorant of the fact that half of Republicans, and about 99.99% of non-Republicans (except some angry white males) despise him. They also ignore his record of failure as a businessman, and lack of humility as a person. When Republicans not affected by his spell catalog his negatives - which are enormous and politically insurmountable in a general election - their reaction is "Le pauvre homme!"
John
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dirtbag
climber
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John, the msm just can't get past the shock of the daily "oh sh#t, did he really say that!?!?" to scrutinize him properly. By the time folks started to wrap their heads around what he had just said, he'd say something else equally shocking. That was maybe somewhat kinda sorta defensible when he was a joke, but that era passed sometime last fall.
"Oh sh#t, did he really say that?!?!" is not something we want to hear daily regarding a nominee.
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Social climber
SLO, Ca
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Donald has had plenty of scrutiny. What people can't accept is that he represents everything the GOP stands for, which is racist fear mongering and protection of the wealthy.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Long and fascinating (that's what she said) look at authoritarianism in today's political parties (with data!).
The correlation of authoritarian preferences with right wing populism seems self-evident to me, but so does the correlation of authoritarian preferences with left-wing populism. The only differences are who they want to exercise authority over whom, and over what.
Sad to say, the idea that authoritarian preferences exist among people supporting populism at either extreme seems lost on those commenting on the link. With all due, and some undue, respect for the author, she seems so focused on the link on the right that she can't see the link on the left. Meanwhile, ironically enough, in today's Daily Signal (the e-newsletter of the Ted-Cruz-conservative Heritage Foundation), there is a link to a blurb by the author of The Closing of the Liberal Mind about how left-wing populism and authoritarianism go hand-in-hand. It never occurs to him that they fit together in right-wing populism as well.
Since so much of this sort of thing depends on definition, I'll promulgate mine: An authoritarian preference exists with respect to an area where the individual prefers to have a person or group with authority over everyone in the society deciding appropriate conduct. In effect, it's "let the experts decide what's best for us." The opposite of that is, in effect, "I don't care what the (usually self-appointed) experts say, I'm deciding what I'm going to do."
The Trumpians support Trump, they usually say, because "He's not a politician, he says what he thinks, and he'll run things right in Washington, to turn around the mess we have now." In other words, they're letting the "expert" (Trump) decide what to do. Clearly an authoritarian preference by my definition. The Trumpians, of course, don't see it that way. They think that they're breaking free of the "tyranny" of the "politically correct."
By the same token, though, letting the government spend my money for me is simply another "let the experts do it" preference, but this time by the left. They see it as breaking the "tyranny" of the "rich," rather than surrendering their freedom for how to spend their money.
Tough times always breed more desires for authoritarian solutions. Tough times are to authoritarian preferences (and consequently a rise in populism) as standing water is to mosquitos. I really don't like the choices I see facing us in this election.
John
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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8 weeks now from having a titanium rod and screws put in my spine.
While it's probably unrealistic, I hope you're as good as new when you heal from the surgery, Norton.
John
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Just another thing Trump did not hear, nor could he even understand.
He gave expression to truths of everlasting value and advanced the ethics not of India alone but of humanity. Buddha was one of the greatest ethical men of genius ever bestowed upon the world.
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Norton
Social climber
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8 weeks now from having a titanium rod and screws put in my spine.
While it's probably unrealistic, I hope you're as good as new when you heal from the surgery, Norton.
John
Hi John, very kind of you!
Actually, this was my third spine surgery and the first to put stuff in place, the others
were to remove bone and disc pushing on nerves.
I am doing so much better, the pain is like 85% less now, I go to therapy four times a week and am slowly getting some strength and balance back, have moved off the walker to two canes and now back to my single trusty cain of 13 years.
here is the Xray showing how nicely twisted my spine and the new stuff
Donald would have fun mimicking me trying to walk
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Escopeta
Trad climber
Idaho
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Tough times always breed more desires for authoritarian solutions. Tough times are to authoritarian preferences (and consequently a rise in populism) as standing water is to mosquitoes.
Truth.
And every time someone trades safety for freedom, God smashes a kitten with a sledgehammer.
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Norton
Social climber
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Cool, thanks Cosmic and Fatty too!
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