Usa Thread

[Flashermac]

It just happens that this time both parties have nominated people that are so easy to hate. Look at how many Republicans are distancing themselves at Trump, while Bernie's people have every right to stay home on election day. The DNC acted like the mafia. Even Harry Reid says Bernie was screwed.

 

p.s. I've always been a registered Democrat, vote independent. This time I don't think I'll even bother to vote. (Not that it would make any difference, since my district has turned Teabag Republican, even electing an absolute far right douchebag to Congress.)

[dean]

Even though it doesn't look like he will be included in the debates, I'm leaning toward voting for Johnson. It would be the second time I voted outside the two major parties for President. I voted for John Anderson in 1980.

[Coss]

Despite the accurate and scientifically thorough poll above, it looks like that vicious bitch will win, but as they say, week is a long time in politics...

[Flashermac]

She might not last her term ...

 

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtdA1w7AAQ

[Flashermac]

Native Americans plan to make history in the US election

 

 

More Native Americans are participating in the 2016 election than ever before.

 

Eight indigenous candidates are running for Congress, up from two in 2014. Over 90 are running for state legislatures, again exceeding previous years.

 

Hillary Clinton ran campaign ads in Navajo and met with tribal leaders in Iowa, Washington, Arizona and California during the presidential primaries. Bernie Sanders met with 90 leaders in total, a political record.

 

"This is the best campaign ever in Indian Country," says Nicole Willis, member of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla and former advisor to Bernie Sanders. "There's no question about that."

 

Native Americans, who make up approximately 1.7% of the US population, are unlikely to determine a presidential election.

 

But they do play an important role in shaping local politics and swinging votes for seats in Congress.

 

Almost 15% of Alaska's population is indigenous, which played an important part in bringing Senator Lisa Murkowski to victory in 2010. Local districts of North Dakota, New Mexico and other Western states have large and in some cases majority Native American populations.

 

"Tribes are organised entities that tend to vote as a group," says John Dossett, General Counsel within the National Congress of American Indians. "When they turn up and vote in one block, they can have a huge impact at a state level."

 

Mark Trahant, former president of the Native American Journalists Association, believes indigenous votes could strip Republicans of as many as six Congressional seats come election time in November.

 

"Montana is one of the most important states," he says. Denise Juneau, a member of the Mandan Hidatsa Tribes, is running for Congress. "She's raised a lot of money. It could be tight race with [Republican] Ryan Zinke."

 

But why is 2016 proving to be such a vibrant year for indigenous politics?

 

Many Native American commentators point to President Barack Obama's efforts to improve relations with the country's tribal nations.

 

In the course of his two terms in office, he has settled hundreds of legal disputes with indigenous communities, passed favourable legislation, like the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, and established an annual conference for tribal leaders to meet at the White House.

 

Ties between the federal government and many Native American communities, some of whom were denied the vote until the 1950s, have never been better.

 

"Obama's commitment to young natives in particular has had a tremendous impact," says Erik Stegman, executive director of the Center for Native American Youth. "We've seen a lot of interest in this election and a large number campaigning for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders."

 

Close to 32% of Native Americans are under the age of 18. Government-funded programmes, like Generation Indigenous, which seeks to empower native millennials, have been battling to inspire this age group for years.

 

"The US political system was not designed for us," says Jaynie Parrish, an original member of the Native Vote Initiative, which seeks to encourage indigenous political participation. "Getting young people involved is incredibly difficult. But we are learning to play the game."

 

Except for pockets of Republican support in Arizona, Nevada and a significant following in Oklahoma, Native Americans are overwhelmingly Democrats. Close to 70% voted for Barack Obama in 2012.

 

Of the 94 indigenous candidates running for office this year, 75 are Democrats, 14 are Republicans and four are independent.

 

The Democratic party has almost 150 native delegates, who have stake in electing presidential nominees during the primary voting stage.

 

During the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, these individuals played a visible role in proceedings, calling out state votes in the nomination process and speaking on the opening day of the ceremony.

 

At the Republican Convention in Cleveland, only one Native American delegate represented the party.

 

Among native communities, Republican nominee Donald Trump is widely regarded as a threatening figure.

 

While speaking on a radio show in 1993, he said "I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians," referring to native people he was competing with in the casino industry at the time.

 

In February 2000, Trump paid over $1m (£774,000) for negative advertisements depicting the St Regis Mohawk people in New York State as "criminals."

 

During this year's presidential campaign, he has repeatedly referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas," mocking her unverified claim to have distant Native American ancestry.

 

'We have a lot of fear as to what he might do," says Arlan Melendez, member of the National Congress of American Indians and Chairman of the Reno Sparks Indian Colony. "I haven't met one tribe out of all 567 that has said they will support Trump."

 

Despite the increased enthusiasm of native voters, challenges remain.

 

Communities living in remote areas, like the Goshute reservation in Utah, will have to travel as far as 140 miles to reach their nearest polling station on election day on 8 November.

 

Language barriers, polling closures and voting identification requirements hinder Native American election participation in many other areas.

 

"We are having to deal with a colonial legacy that was intended to exclude us," said Chase Iron Eyes, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe running for the House of Representatives in North Dakota.

 

"A lot of people think we were all killed, that the Americans and Europeans wiped us out. But we are still here."

 

 

http://www.bbc.com/n...canada-36979321

[Flashermac]

US election: Has Donald Trump already blown it?

 

 

The summer of 2015 saw Trump generate so much early momentum behind his candidacy that he became almost unstoppable in his march towards the Republican presidential nomination. By Labor Day in early September, he had established a lead in the polls that rarely he relinquished.

 

The summer of 2016, by contrast, may well have made him unelectable as he pursues the presidency itself. By Labor Day, he could be so far behind that Hillary Clinton, hardly a popular candidate herself, would have to trip badly for him to stage a comeback.

 

Already, the polls point towards the first Democratic hat-trick of three consecutive victories in presidential elections since the 1940s. As Politico reported last week: "No candidate in Donald Trump's position at this stage of the campaign has gone on to win the popular vote in November in the modern polling era."

 

The personal insults, the rollicking rhetoric, the Twitter rants, the blatant falsehoods that originally powered his candidacy have more recently become acts of self-harm, whether it has been inviting "Second Amendment people" to stop Hillary Clinton or quarrelling with the Khan family. The words "Clinton landslide" have been uttered for the first time. Republicans, fearful of a Goldwater-style rout, have even explored ways of firing him as their candidate.

 

A key difference between last year's summer of Trumpian love and the dog days of the past few weeks is that the electorate he is seeking to woo has changed, but the billionaire continues to rely on his old seductive tricks.

 

Campaigning for the presidency is not the same campaigning for the presidential nomination. The demographics are vastly different - in most primary states, more than 90% of GOP voters were white. Wild statements come under greater scrutiny when voters are choosing a commander in chief as opposed to be a party nominee. Temperament looms larger. With so much more at stake, voters are more mindful that the finger punching out those ill-tempered Tweets could soon be hovering above the nuclear button.

 

For all that, Trump has failed to make the transition.

 

After seeing off his Republican rivals in the primaries in the spring, Donald Trump needed to perform two pivots as the election entered its next season: first to appeal more to the broader American electorate, and second to heal the wounds from a bloody primary campaign by reaching out to the 55% of Republican voters who opted for rival candidates. Part of the explanation for his dismal polling - remember the days when Trump's stump speech was essentially a recitation of positive polls numbers? - is that he is running as if the nomination was still his goal rather than the presidency.

 

In this ever-more polarised electorate, the pivot towards swing voters, a staple of campaigns past, is not as important as it once was. As Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur noted recently, "floating voters" are thought to comprise only 5% of the electorate compared to 15% in the 1960s. Kapur also reminded us that Mitt Romney won 50% of independent voters - those who do not register as either Democrats or Republicans - compared to Obama's 45%, but still lost the election.

 

Trump's larger problem, at a time when elections are increasingly decided by which party can maximise its turnout, has been his failure to unify the Republican base. All but one of the five living Republican presidential candidates - Bob Dole - boycotted the GOP convention in Cleveland.

 

So, too, did the host governor, Trump's former rival John Kasich, which is doubly problematic since no Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio. Six Republican Senators have refused to back him, along with eight House lawmakers and two GOP governors. Then there are the 50 Republican national security experts who have openly voiced opposition, including the former NSA director Michael Hayden and former UN ambassador John Negroponte.

 

Of the two party conventions, the Democratic gathering in Philadelphia may have looked and sounded the more raucous because divisions between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters were on nightly display. But it was the absentees in Cleveland, and those who have come out against Trump since, who were more electorally significant. For all the fractiousness of Philadelphia, polls repeatedly show that Democrats are more loyal to Hillary Clinton than Republicans are to Donald Trump.

 

The property tycoon continues to poll strongly with non-college educated whites, but a big education gap is opening up. As Ron Brownstein recently reported, Trump could become the first Republican in 60 years not to win a majority of college-educated whites.

 

Trump also has a gender problem. Whereas Mitt Romney won more than 90% of Republican women in 2012, polls have suggested that only around 70% of Republican women are prepared to vote for Trump.

 

All this helps explain why some of the Republican states do not now look such a lustrous shade of red as they did on Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summertime. Georgia, which hasn't voted for a Democrat since Bill Clinton carried the state in 1992, is now thought to be competitive. Utah has become an improbable target state for Hillary Clinton because of the antipathy towards Trump from Mormons. Lyndon Johnson was the last Democrat to take it in 1964, in that landslide win over Barry Goldwater.

 

Even at a basic organisational level, Trump is failing, hence the description of him as a candidate without a campaign. For all his much-vaunted business smarts, he made a slow start in raising much-needed funds and has not constructed the sort of national organisation ordinarily required to win a presidential election. As late as June, for instance, Trump has no state director in the must-win state of Ohio.

 

Evidently, he continues to believe that he can triumph in this election with his smart phone, the free airtime he gets from television interviews, his personal magnetism, and a small team, centred largely on family members, operating out of Trump Tower. His shake-up this week has sidelined advisers, like Paul Manafort, who were trying to normalise his candidacy and to bring more message discipline to his freewheeling campaign. Again, it underscores how Trump has flunked the transition from being the figurehead of his highly personalised insurgent campaign to his new role as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party.

 

This summer has also produced the kind of pivotal moment that can decide elections. In 1960, it was Nixon sweating profusely during his first televised debate with Kennedy. In 1988, it was Michael Dukakis in a tank. In 2012, it was the release of the film showing Mitt Romney talking about the "47%." In 2016, it appears to have been the moment on the final night of the Democratic convention, when Khizr Khan stood with his wife, Ghazala, waving a pocket-sized copy of the US Constitution accusingly at Donald Trump, and declaring: "You have sacrificed nothing and no one.

 

Up until then, many of Donald Trump's nativist attacks on Mexicans and Muslims have, to many voters I suspect, seemed rather abstract. The Khans gave them a face, a backstory and a human dimension: two Gold Star parents and their son, Captain Humayan Khan, a decorated war hero who loved to read books about Thomas Jefferson.

 

Travelling through the American south last week, I repeatedly came across Republican-leaning voters who thought that this time, finally, Trump had gone too far - that he had crossed a behavioural threshold, that his candidacy had become too crazed. For all that, the most common refrain I heard was that voters are deeply unhappy with the choice before them, which is why this race is not yet over. Dismay at Donald Trump has not grown into fervour for Hillary Clinton, and never will.

 

That Khan moment highlighted another difference between this summer and last. Back then, controversy generated attention and attention generated support.

 

For Donald Trump, that calculus that worked for him in the GOP primaries no longer seems to work.

 

 

http://www.bbc.com/n...canada-37102763

[unit731]

“On a radio show this week, Dr. Drew Pinsky of Celebrity Rehab fame added his name to the long list of conspiracy theorists who believe that Hillary Clinton’s health could be failing—a list that so far includes the National Enquirer, Fox News host Sean Hannity, InfoWars writer Paul Joseph Watson, Tucson-based nonprofit leader Dr. Jane Orient, Donald Trump, and seemingly anyone on the “alt-right†with a Twitter account.

 

 

If that’s not a dream team of medical experts, what is?â€

 

Source: The Daily Beast

[Flashermac]

They're all out to get her!

 

Hillary Clinton Has Parkinson’s Disease, Physician Confirms

 

 

http://www.dangerandplay.com/2016/08/12/hillary-clinton-has-parkinsons-disease-physician-confirms/

 

 

p.s. Trump has foot in mouth disease.

[Flashermac]

Why many veterans are sticking with Donald Trump

 

 

...

 

"Most veterans . . . they see their country lost to the corrupt," he said. "And Trump comes along all of a sudden and calls out the corrupt on both sides of the aisle."

 

Trump can seem an unlikely candidate to be embraced by veterans. He received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War. Last summer, he attacked Sen. John McCain, saying the Arizona Republican was "not a war hero" because he had been captured in Vietnam. More recently, Trump attacked the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, a U.S. soldier and Muslim who was killed in Iraq, after Khan's father spoke at the Democratic National Convention with his wife standing by his side.

 

...

 

But among many of the people who have actually fought in this country's wars, particularly on the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump offers a refreshing alternative to 15 years of seemingly endless conflict marked by uncertain goals, fleeting victories and constant personal sacrifice, according to interviews with dozens of veterans who remain unfazed by the Republican candidate's recent behavior or falling poll numbers.

 

On Monday, Trump vowed in a speech to end "our current strategy of nation-building and regime change," a reference to policies pursued by the Bush and Obama administrations in the Middle East.

 

"I think there's a pretty sour taste in a lot of guys' mouths about Iraq and about what happened there," said Jim Webb Jr., a Marine veteran, Trump supporter, son of former U.S. senator Jim Webb, D-Va., and one of McAllister's platoon mates. "You pour time and effort and blood into something, and you see it p--- away, and you think, 'How did I spend my twenties?' "

 

"There's a mentality that they don't want to see more of that," he said, adding that he worried that a Hillary Clinton presidency would result in "continued adventurism," given her record supporting interventions in Iraq and Libya.

 

...

 

http://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/why-many-veterans-are-sticking-with-donald-trump-1.425030

[unit731]

“Typically, Republicans do well among military households, and past presidential elections have shown the Republican candidate winning veterans by double digits. Mitt Romney won the veterans vote by 20 points in 2012, according to a American National Election Studies post-election survey. John McCain carried vets by 10 points in 2008, and George W. Bush won veterans by 16 points in 2004 according to network exit polls.â€

 

LINK