Saturday, February 13, 2016

New Hampshire primary offered little surprise.......

 (1)>>New Hampshire primary offered little surprise in terms of who actually won: ...Trump .It’s the headline on every newspaper and website around the country: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders won a resounding victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in yesterday’s New Hampshire Democratic primary. But there’s another story the media has been much slower to pick up on.Because despite his 22-point victory, Sanders didn’t walk away with the most New Hampshire delegates.Clinton did. The other hand there is a narrowing downward spiral  for GOP contenders . It's again  no surprise that  Carly Fiorina is exiting the Republican presidential race after a seventh-place showing , and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has suspended his campaign for president.Although Christie faced the biggest challenge of his gubernatorial tenure that fall, when Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey, he would never again hold the popular appeal that he did with his party before 2012. He angered many Republicans by publicly embracing President Obama during a disaster tour days before the election. And one year later, Christie was dragged into what became known as "Bridgegate," when some of his top aides created several days of gridlock in the New York City suburb of Fort Lee, N.J., as an alleged act of political retribution. The next in line , Marco Rubio,Jeb Bush likely will follow in disappointment .Throughout the race, Christie stood out for his blunt statements and a seeming inability to sugarcoat his assessments of the competition -- and by February, (1.2)>>Marco Rubio was bearing the brunt of it.As the field moved from Iowa to New Hampshire, Rubio became the star following a breakout performance in the caucuses. But many candidates, including Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich had pinned their hopes on New Hampshire.Christie took to mocking Rubio's scripted style and work in Washington, calling him the "boy in the bubble" because, according to Christie, the Florida senator was too protected by staff.In the eighth Republican debate, just a few days before the New Hampshire primary, it was Christie who knocked the air out of Rubio -- and claimed his putdown as enough to earn a ticket out of New Hampshire. For Carly,  personally I think it was a waste of her time and money on a failed platform , starting in California she tried for the governorship after she ran  (2)>>HP to the ground . She basically had no experience as a elected official . Carly has to work on that .   She looked however good during the debates and made a lot of very good arguments. Too bad she couldn't generate enough buzz to get media attention.  No matter how many of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates stand on stage, in a given primary moment, Fiorina is the only one who isn’t in a suit and tie. The predictable, servile eye is drawn to this difference. Fiorina knows this, and on Wednesday took advantage. Fiorina shared failure with Sarah Palin , Palin has lost two elections in her political career - when running for Lieutenant Governor of Alaska and when running for VPOTUS. Palin has won every other election she entered by being herself and following deeply held political principles ... and often when all the consultants and pundits were critical of her open, honest no filters approach to delivering her political message. So Connecting the political dots , Palin’s rise to fame within the party—and then nationally, of course—concluding that it had a lot to do with her gender and little to do with her track record. (At that point, she had been governor for less than two years.) In 2010, writing in her New York Times opinion column, Maureen Dowd called Sarah Palin the GOP “Queen Bee,” a reference to her status among other women in the GOP.Five years later, it seems the GOP has finally found a new Queen: Carly Fiorina. In 1999, Fiorina became a household name—at least in a certain kind of household—when she was named CEO of Hewlett-Packard, making her the first female head of a Fortune 20 company. (She was fired in 2005 after a series of scandalous leaks.) In 2008, Fiorina was one of McCain’s chief economic advisors, and Palin and Fiorina supported one another over the years: Fiorina defended Palin against “sexist attacks” in 2008; later, in 2010, Palin endorsed Fiorina’s campaign for Barbara Boxer’s California Senate seat. Still, the (new) New Republic has developed a bizarre obsession with likening Fiorina to Palin. an article asked whether “Fiorina is the new Palin.” The evidence: that both Palin and Fiorina had at times criticized Hillary Clinton. Of course, by that standard, Ted Cruz, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders are all the new Sarah Palin.
rigged,and rigged.
Right now, nearly every state allocates 100 percent of its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state as a whole. (3)>>Lund’s proposal would change that calculation in the blue state of Michigan, however, while continuing to award each red state’s full slate of electoral votes to the Republican candidate for president. If this plan had been in effect in 2012, for example, Mitt Romney would have won a quarter of Michigan’s electoral votes despite losing the state to President Obama by nearly 10 points.  After being proven right about how the Iowa caucus is rigged, it is time to look at the New Hampshire primary.Did you know: New Hampshire allows undeclared voters to cast ballots in either the Democratic or Republican primary. The whole thing has been rigged ever since they altered the electoral system to give all a states electoral votes to the candidate that gets over 50% of the popular vote instead of as the founders had it where each vote was cast in accordance with the district (section of the state) they represented voted. Essentially giving three states the ability to decide who gets elected by ignoring at least 49.9% of the people within the states and giving their votes to the other candidate.Voting in this manner is reminiscent of corporate voting of shareholders: whoever has the most shares sways the vote accordingly. And clearly Mrs. Clinton is holding all the right cards to win the nomination. The reporting that New Hampshire was a crushing defeat for Mrs. Clinton is disingenuous. I suspect that it is being done for effect. Remember the "comeback kid?" This is right from the bag of Clinton's election strategy tricks. And when she wins South Carolina, the adulating press will be fawning over Mrs. Clinton and how she is on the comeback trail.Trump has already gotten conservative results just by running… first by partnering with conservative Jeff Sessions to co-write his immigration plan, then got more discussions going about the un-Constitutionality of anchor babies, and now wants to limit Muslim immigration! Did anyone else know before Trump came along and blasted the “limit Muslim immigration” that we have a law on the books that gives the President that power, that it already survived a Supreme Court challenge, passed by a Democrat Congress and used by a Democrat President to actually prevent Muslims from immigration?!?! Given that a substantial portion of the posters on this site seem to think that Obama somehow stole 2012 despite a crushing lack of evidence that he did any such thing (and consistent pre-election poling pointing to an Obama win), I can’t help but think that the deranged sub-set who support Trump will be quick to call jaws-of-defeat triumph by another candidate “theft.” Hillary, being the Queen Democratic Bigwig, has amassed quite a collection of these other bigwigs pledging to vote for her (355 to be exact). With some quick Excel work, Millennials figure out that Hillary already had 14.9 percent of the votes she needed to get the nomination before the first caucus was ever tallied in Iowa.In his Jan. 13 State of the Union address, Obama climbed on the bandwagon. He lamented that, over seven years, he and congressional Republicans hadn't been able to agree on "what role the government should play in making sure the system's not rigged in favor of the wealthiest and big corporations."  Republicans, who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of all this rigging, also see themselves as victims. The problem is that government interferes with free markets to benefit cronies, who in turn give them kickbacks. It's a nasty alliance that stifles innovation and results in a lower standard of living and less freedom for most, and increasing wealth and power for the elite few in the government-corporate alliance. In some ways, the tea party and the occupy people are shaking their fists at two heads of the same hydra.It just doesn't matter on who you vote; at the federal level the electoral college will do the bidding of the Reptilian Overlords and at the state and municipal levels the citizens will choose via their paycheck. Everyone is bought off in this country. 
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NOTES AND COMMENTS:
(1.2)>>Marco Rubio. President Obama's voodoo may have  slurred the speech of Rubio. This storyline became a prevailing theme of the 2016 campaign beginning with Saturday night's debate in Manchester, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie blasted Rubio as inexperienced and whose campaign was based on a "memorized 25-second speech." Rubio played into the attack as he repeatedly during the exchange said some variation on this line: "This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing."  It's voodoo.(2)>>HP to the ground .Even more striking, Mrs. Fiorina, the only former female chief executive among the candidates, continues to promote her business experience on the trail, yet she was fired by Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock dropped by half in 2005. She has long blamed her failings at running the technology giant on the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the deepening recession in Silicon Valley after the Sept. 11 .  (3)>>Lund’s proposal. State Rep. Pete Lund maintains that the many critics of his plan to revise the way Michigan elects presidents fail to understand the benefits of making the Mitten State more attractive to the candidates. In recent election cycles, he said, 40 of the 50 states have been largely ignored by the presidential candidates. Michigan, once a battleground state and a coveted prize, is now in the mostly-forgotten category. By giving both candidates a share of electoral votes, the lawmaker insists, Michigan will become a routine destination for those seeking the White House. A survey of Michigan voters showed 73% overall support for a national popular vote for President, that would make Michigan more important in presidential elections, and would force the candidates wanting to win to be concerned about Michigan The National Popular Vote bill would make every vote, everywhere, politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps of pre-determined outcomes. There would no longer be a handful of 'battleground' states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 80% of the states, like Michigan, that now are just 'spectators' and ignored after the conventions.National Popular Vote would guarantee the majority of Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency, to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by replacing state winner-take-all laws for awarding electoral votes. 

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