2016 US Presidential Elections | Trump Wins

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Grinner said:
So American Sniper was a liberal film? Independence Day sequel? All those guns in movies, uber-violence, few major roles for minority actors, sexism, OTT patriotism?
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To be fair, I should have said those involved in Hollywood have a liberal bias and I don't think it's a bad thing either since to quote Colbert reality has a liberal bias. It's no surprise that the best the RNC could do is Scott Baio. It's main bias though is towards making money which is why OTT Patriotic films generally do well.
 
FlawlessThaw said:
To be fair, I should have said those involved in Hollywood have a liberal bias and I don't think it's a bad thing either since to quote Colbert reality has a liberal bias. It's no surprise that the best the RNC could do is Scott Baio. It's main bias though is towards making money which is why OTT Patriotic films generally do well.
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Hollywood is only interested in making films that make money. if the popular films are about black lesbian flag-burners then those will be made. It's only about what sells. Now, the things like The Oscars are liberal back-slapping fests, but who really gives much of a feck about those kinds of things.
 
Grinner said:
Hollywood is only interested in making films that make money. if the popular films are about black lesbian flag-burners then those will be made. It's only about what sells. Now, the things like The Oscars are liberal back-slapping fests, but who really gives much of a feck about those kinds of things.
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I'm not really talking about the institutions but the actors or writers involved. Most are either high profile democrats like Clooney and Affleck or very quiet on Politics.

But yeah I agree Hollywood is a capitalist first organisation.
 
FlawlessThaw said:
To be fair, I should have said those involved in Hollywood have a liberal bias and I don't think it's a bad thing either since to quote Colbert reality has a liberal bias. It's no surprise that the best the RNC could do is Scott Baio. It's main bias though is towards making money which is why OTT Patriotic films generally do well.
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Great quote and so true. Easy to bleat about liberal bias when you perceive most essentially reasonable and rational opinions to be liberal.
 
I think it's only right-wingers who get frothy about Hollywood libs. I don't give a feck what George Clooney reckons about anything.
 
Yeah that's true. It's a few years old but I think I read that only 6% of Scientists are Republicans, so I guess Science also has a liberal bias.
 
What did you think of Trump’s press conference? You’ve gone after people who you thought were smearing those denying a Trump-Russia connection, and you’ve used the word McCarthyite to describe them. But now Trump has encouraged the Russians to find or release more Hillary Clinton emails.

OK, so, I am glad you asked about that because this is the conflict that I am currently having: The U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president. I don’t have an actual problem with that because I share the premises on which it is based about why he poses such extreme dangers. But that doesn’t mean that as a journalist, or even just as a citizen, that I am willing to go along with any claim, no matter how fact-free, no matter how irrational, no matter how dangerous it could be, in order to bring Trump down.

So, literally, the lead story in the New York Times today suggests, and other people have similarly suggested it, that Trump was literally putting in a request to Putin for the Russians to cyberattack the FBI, the United States government, or get Hillary Clinton’s emails. That is such unmitigated bullshit. What that was was an offhanded, trolling comment designed to make some kind of snide reference to the need to find Hillary’s emails. He wasn’t directing the Russians, in some genuine, literal way, to go on some cybermission to find Hillary’s emails. If he wanted to request the Russians to do that, why would he do it in some offhanded way in a press conference? It was a stupid, reckless comment that he made elevated into treason.

You interviewed Chris [Hayes] about Brexit and I just want to submit to you that the mistake the U.K. media and U.K. elites made with Brexit is the exact same one that the U.S. media and U.S. elites are making about Trump. U.K. elites were uniform, uniform, in their contempt for the Brexit case, other than the right-wing Murdochian tabloids. They all sat on Twitter all day long, from the left to the right, and all reinforced each other about how smart and how sophisticated they were in scorning and [being snide] about UKIP and Boris Johnson and all of the Brexit leaders, and they were convinced that they had made their case. Everyone they were talking to—which is themselves—agreed with them. It was constant reinforcement, and anyone who raised even a peep of dissent or questioned the claims they were making was instantly castigated as somebody who was endangering the future of the U.K. because they were endorsing—or at least impeding—the effort to stop Brexit. This is what’s happening now.

Do you think the people voting for Donald Trump because they feel their economic future has been destroyed, or because they are racist, or because they feel fear of immigrants and hate the U.S. elite structure and want Trump to go and blow it up, give the slightest shit about Ukraine, that Trump is some kind of agent of Putin? They don’t! Just like the Brexit supporters. The U.K. media tried the same thing, telling the Brexit advocates that they were playing into Putin’s hands, that Putin wanted the U.K. out of the EU to weaken both. They didn’t care about that. That didn’t drive them. Nobody who listened to Trump could think that was genuinely a treasonous request for the Russians to go and cyberattack the U.S. government.

I get that, but I am not sure what you would recommend the media do. Shouldn’t the media cover the fact that this guy is a blowhard who says often crazy, frequently racist things, and things that could put national security at risk.

I totally agree with that, as far as it goes. So for example, people make the argument that fact-checking Trump doesn’t have any effect on his supporters because they don’t listen to the media and they don’t care. If your response is, That may be or that may not be, but our job is to find out when Trump is lying, whether it has an effect or not, I completely agree with you. Just like I don’t try and decide what my journalism is based on how much it is going to resonate with people or how much people are going to agree. I try to cover the things I think are important and need to be covered.

What I’m saying is that I think a media climate has been created. Part of journalism is communicating with a large number of people: finding ways to get information into their hands in a way that they do care about and that does inform them. There is a conversation going on in America among a group of people who are socioeconomically very far removed from the New York/Washington/Los Angeles/San Francisco media circles. And what I also think is that, look at the Russia stuff: the history of linking your political opponents to Russia is a really dangerous and ugly one in the U.S.. That’s basically how, for a decade, the right demonized the left, but also liberals. This is the rhetoric that has been resurrected in order to demonize Trump, and I do find it disturbing because, what has he said about Russia? The platform change that he wanted said that he didn’t think the U.S. should be funding factions in the Ukraine in order to defend themselves against Russia because he didn’t think we had a vital interest in Russia’s neighborhood. Let’s leave that to them. You can argue with that and say it’s an irresponsible thing to do. But that’s been a standard liberal view for decades.

I think the concern there was less about the content than the fact that it’s one of the very few issues where it seems like he has an opinion. And the NATO comments: NATO collective security does seem like it has worked and it does seem like he wants to undermine that.

OK that’s true, but questioning NATO and the value and purpose of NATO with the fall of the Soviet Union is a totally legitimate policy debate to have. Whether NATO brings us into ill-advised conflicts such as Libya, and whether it has this ongoing value and whether the U.S. should be expending the resources it is expending on NATO when we have massive income inequality and our working class is being deprived in ways previously unimaginable, those are perfectly legitimate questions to ask. NATO is not a religion.

The media has used Trump as this kind of once in a lifetime threat, like Hitler, and there is this kind of moral exercise that you engage in when you say, “If I were a German in the 1930s, what would I want history to have recorded that I did? I would want history to record that I did everything I possibly could to stop Hitler.” I think that is now translating into everything and anything goes when it comes to stopping Trump. I think journalists are now of the mindset where they are saying, “Anything we can use against Trump, we can.” And I think that in and of itself is pretty dangerous, and I am just not comfortable with that, notwithstanding how much I share the view that Trump is this sort of unique evil.

You can make rational arguments about things like how much we spend on NATO, but at the same time, Trump doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t want to take money from NATO and spend it on working Americans. He wants a $10 trillion tax cut.

Right, but that’s the proper critique of Trump, not that Trump is this traitor agent of Putin. I worry when we start to implement the rhetorical foundations against any questioning of NATO, or any advocacy of reducing our belligerence towards Russia.

I think it is important for journalists to stand up and say: “With all this groupthink, we should slow down a little bit. Some of what you are saying is not supported by the evidence, a lot of it is kind of hysterical”—without having your own loyalty being questioned. Do you see that being created, this kind of stampede, journalistic stampede, that feels almost like 2002, where not very much dissent is permitted?
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/07/glenn_greenwald_on_donald_trump_the_dnc_hack_and_a_new_mccarthyism.html
 
fishfingers15 said:
Do I get a hint of you subtly defending Trump in most of the articles you post? I'm just curious because you didn't sound like Bernie or bust guy before.
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I'm defending him against this whole Russia business. There's a much better case against Trump and this reminds me of "Pakistan will celebrate if Nitish Kumar wins".

I am "Bernie or bust" in non-swing states - Jill Stein! - but in Ohio, Fl, NC, PA - Hillary.
 
Election-Region.png


How states have voted since 1789
 
Looking at the New England block, really feels like NH shouldn't be counted as a swing state. Bush's 2000 victory there was due to a large number of votes siphoned off by Nader.
 
Raoul said:
Interesting, although a wee bit misleading given that parties inverted their platforms during the civil rights era.
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I think it's quite interesting to view in that context, given it shows the Dem's foothold in the South was beginning to slip quite a way prior to civil rights.
 
Raoul said:
He obliterated Mondale that year. Won all but Minnesota which was Mondale's home state.
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Mondale threw what little chance he had out the window when he named Ferraro his VP running mate. He thought he would get the female vote on his side with that move and it failed him. Mostly because everyone could see his only reason for picking her, was her gender. An earlier version of McCain picking Palin, except Ferraro was at least more intelligent than Sarah.
 
Ubik said:
I think it's quite interesting to view in that context, given it shows the Dem's foothold in the South was beginning to slip quite a way prior to civil rights.
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The inflection point was 1928. Hoover was the first Republican president to embrace the small government claptrap. The GOP were the party in favor of federalism prior.
 
Rasmussen just released a poll with Hillary up by 1 over Trump. :eek:

The GOP obviously need to pay them a bit more for a higher rating.
 
Statement just released by the Trump Campaign
JULY 28, 2016
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DONALD J. TRUMP STATEMENT ON AMERICA’S FUTURE
At Hillary Clinton’s convention this week, Democrats have been speaking about a world that doesn’t exist. A world where America has full employment, where there’s no such thing as radical Islamic terrorism, where the border is totally secured, and where thousands of innocent Americans have not suffered from rising crime in cities like Baltimore and Chicago.

In the Democrats’ fantasy world, there is no problem with Hillary Clinton maintaining an illegal, exposed server full of classified information that could have been hacked by any foreign enemy, and in which Hillary Clinton risked prison time to delete 33,000 emails that were simply about yoga and wedding planning. In this world, there is no Hillary Clinton disaster in Syria, Libya and Egypt, ISIS doesn’t merit a mention, Iran isn’t on the path to nukes, convention stages don’t need American flags, and our great men and women of law enforcement, our police, do not need to be honored.

I propose a different vision for America, one where we can break up Washington’s rigged system, and empower all Americans to achieve their dreams. In our vision, we will put America First.

If we deliver this change, the future is limitless and we will Make America Great Again for everyone.
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https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-...ump-statement-on-the-future-vision-of-america
 
Dwazza von Moosesteiger said:
Disagree. The world is markedly different without the constant threat of mutually assured destruction hanging over our heads.
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Have we ever stopped pointing nukes at one another though?

I just don't see a big difference in policy between the US and Russia before or after 1991... Especially on the Russian front in the last decade. The name changed, but the stances didn't.
 
Blodssvik said:
Just looking at policies, Bernie Sanders would be considered conservative in many European countries (esp in the north). Republicans would be considered right wing extremists.
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Yes. It has interested me for quite some time that those called "left wing liberals" and "socialists" in America are to the centre-right in the European spectrum.
 
VERY interested to hear Gen. John Allen's speech tonight. Marine 4 star who led men in Afghanistan, Iraq, and coordinated the fight against ISIS.
 
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