The Gaming Den

So how many of the current Republican candidates are being investigated for, or have been investigated for, indicted for, or charged with, corruption? Isn't it something like four or five?

Koumei wrote:So how many of the current Republican candidates are being investigated for, or have been investigated for, indicted for, or charged with, corruption? Isn't it something like four or five?

From the top to the bottom:

• Donald "The Donald Trump" Trump: Trump's wikipedia profile has a 14 section piece on Trump's legal affairs. It's pretty funny at times.
• Scott Walker: Paid almost a hundred thousand dollars to defense attorneys to protect himself from a corruption probe in 2013 alone.
• Jeb! Bush: Of course there's the thing where he obviously violated election law, but that hasn't actually gone to court because the FEC has officially thrown up their hands in abject despair about enforcing this shit. And there's the thing where he was the negotiating face for a criminal fraud scam in Nigeria. Also the whole thing where he flagrantly violated election law while governor of Florida.
• Marco Rubio: Has a well documented history of graft. He has funneled millions, maybe even hundreds of thousand of dollars to himself and his relatives in a series of really lazy and sleazy expense account deals.
• Huckabee: While he was an Arkansas politico, he racked up more than a dozen ethics complaints. Also there's that thing where he shills for fake diabetes treatments. And also too the thing where he mysteriously seems to be close associates with every pedophile in Arkansas.
• Carson: Speaking of people who grift by selling fake medical supplements, Dr. Ben Carson spent years selling fake "glyconutrients". Also he accepted "speaking fees" while running for president, which is illegal.
• Rand Paul: Also too in the fake medicine category, Rand Paul is not board certified, and printed himself up his own fake certification to practice medicine with. And he's part of his dad's political machine, which basically violates the law all the time[/i].
• Ted Cruz: Ted Cruz has thousands of dollars in [url=http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/18/ted-cruz-failed-to-disclose-ties-to-jamaican-holding-company]off shore accounts, and is on record as having violated ethics rules by failing to disclose some of them.
• John Kasich: John Kasich is under investigation by the FBI for a pay-to-play scheme and massive government kick backs to friends and supporters.
• Chris Christie: He's so massively corrupt that his scandals have nationally recognized names like "bridgegate."
• Rick Perry: He has his own mug shot because his corruption investigation has moved forward to the indictment stage.

And that's basically everyone who's likely to make the first debate cut. And they are all under investigation for corruption. Not one or two, not even half. Every single fucking one of them. They are all grifters, liars, bullies, and thieves.

-Username17

And hey, while he's lagging currently, Senator Frothy Mixture had notable ethics issues the last time he was in government:

http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.co ... 1/07/32863

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/atty ... -know.html

Remember, this is the guy who ended up second last time around, the Republicans have usually ended up nominating last time's second place finisher for my entire life.

Trying to stay relevant, Ted Cruz cooks bacon with a machine gun.

When do you expect to see some of the Republican candidates squeezed out of the running? I'm not familiar with the drop-out rate in these campaigns.

We might see a couple drop even before the actual primary voting begins, but generally the crazies stick it out for a good long while, while the saner candidates that don't perform in the first three or four rounds start dropping out of the race.

[moved from politics thread to appropriate thread]

So remember when Trump released Lindsey Graham's private cell number and encouraged supporters to call him? And Graham destroyed his cell phone?

Gawker has released Trump's private cell number.

Since Trump, in his considered political judgment, has decided that opening up a direct, personal channel of communications between his supporters and his primary opponents is a noble campaign tactic, we think it’s only fair and right that Republican primary voters be able to reach out to Trump himself. If it is the case—as Trump’s release of Graham’s number implicitly argues—that our political discourse improves when voters can ring up candidates on their private cell phones, then we are happy to add Trump’s cell phone number to the body of public knowledge. You can reach Donald Trump at [redacted by Maxus to save FBMF any potential nastygrams].

Orca wrote:When do you expect to see some of the Republican candidates squeezed out of the running? I'm not familiar with the drop-out rate in these campaigns.

Well, some of the really marginal ones might drop before it starts. Generally, though, people start dropping out as they do poorly in the first few primaries, because their fundraising dries up.

Orca wrote:When do you expect to see some of the Republican candidates squeezed out of the running? I'm not familiar with the drop-out rate in these campaigns.

People drop out of the race for one of two reasons. The first is because the money has dried up and their campaign can't meaningfully continue. And the second is that the candidate believes they can get something (such as a policy plank or a cabinet position) by joining the winning team. Both of those conditions are very weird in the current election cycle.

The money issue is rather unprecedented. Half the money in the campaign comes from less than four hundred families. Many of the candidates are being kept in it by a small group of rich backers or even a single mega-donor. Most of these candidates are getting over a million dollars from one guy, so they can stay in the race as long as they keep their patron happy and will fall out of the race when their patron loses confidence. That's not really the way things have ever gone before, and since we're talking about the actions of individual mega-rich insane narcissists, it's pretty hard to predict how they will act.

My guess is that some of the guys in the clown car are going to be thrown under the bus after the first debate. Either because they don't make the main event or they bomb in the event (or the JV event, if they miss the main circus by half a percent or whatever), their small cadre of donors could turn cold and they'd have noone to grift. The best bet for this kind of collapse would be someone like Perry. He's on the bubble, no one really likes him, and more than two thirds of his war chest is made from the donations of two rich assholes. Even if he still had ten million dollars to play with, if his two main contributors decided to cut their losses, Perry would be well advised to walk away and spend all that sweet PAC money on something else. Cruz and Huckabee are similarly getting more than half their money from a handful of crazy people (three mega donors for Cruz, one for Huckabee). But of course, since those assholes are bankrolling these fuckers to the tune of like a million dollars a month (or more), if they continue backing the candidate the campaign will lurch on in zombie form no matter how they perform in debates, polls, or even primary votes.

The "join the winning team" model is harder to imagine getting off the ground when the clown car has seventeen people in it trying to take the wheel. Jeb! is still the front runner in most important respects, but he has less actual support than Bernie Sanders and few endorsements worth mentioning. It's hard to imagine anyone being recognizable as a "winning" team before a few primaries have happened, so that isn't going to vote anyone off the island until early next year.

-Username17

538 has Scott "Boy Scout" Walker up on Jeb! by 2% first choice, 6% favorable, and -21% unfavorable.

Maj wrote:Trying to stay relevant, Ted Cruz cooks bacon with a machine gun.

Ur, how the hell does a Texan gun nut not actually know what a Machine Gun is?

He didn't even fire it on full auto, so that AR-15 does not qualify even by the loosest possible definition.

It gets worse, of course. I rather doubt we'll see any other major players try to enter the primary at this point, but I think you'll definitely start to see "sponsor sniping," where would-be-nominees try to appeal directly to their opposition's sponsors. Money alone won't buy the nomination, much less the election, but it doesn't hurt.

Maj wrote:Trying to stay relevant, Ted Cruz cooks bacon with a machine gun.

When I saw you guys talking about a Republican Clown Car, I thought it was just figurative language.

Josh_Kablack wrote:

Maj wrote:Trying to stay relevant, Ted Cruz cooks bacon with a machine gun.

Ur, how the hell does a Texan gun nut not actually know what a Machine Gun is?

He didn't even fire it on full auto, so that AR-15 does not qualify even by the loosest possible definition.

Yeah. Ess and I laughed about that this morning.

nockermensch wrote:

Maj wrote:Trying to stay relevant, Ted Cruz cooks bacon with a machine gun.

When I saw you guys talking about a Republican Clown Car, I thought it was just figurative language.

There is a substantial percentage of the GOP that doesn't even know what figurative means.

So the Fox prime debate line-up is: Trump, Jeb!, Walker, Huckabee, Carson, Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Christie, and Kasich.

I think what's most notable is how the metric for making the cut was a) specifically designed to sell ad time on Fox, and b) a sham, because Fox turns out to have put their thumb on the scale anyway. The appropriate response would be to have called out their obvious corruption and boycotted the event, but that's not really possible for the busclowns; Fox runs their world of truthiness, and the base will take Fox's side every time.

Honestly, I'm surprised they didn't find a way to cheat Fiorina in, if only to have a token female candidate on stage. She's ultimately irrelevant, sure, but then so are most of those clowns.

MisterDee wrote:Honestly, I'm surprised they didn't find a way to cheat Fiorina in, if only to have a token female candidate on stage. She's ultimately irrelevant, sure, but then so are most of those clowns.

She'll get a spot at the loser's bracket kiddie table alternate debate they're hosting for the ones' who didn't make the top ten.

Is there a place I can stream the debate? It looks like Fox is only letting people with cable subscriptions get it.

Maj wrote:Trying to stay relevant, Ted Cruz cooks bacon with a machine gun.

Ted appears to be wearing his earplugs incorrectly. They need to be inserted deeply into the ear canal, past the bend, or else they won't provide any real protection, even if they seem to edge the edge off of high-pitched sounds. The ends should be barely visible, not sticking all the way out like that.

The most amusing thing about last night's GOP 'debate' was how blatantly Fox News went after Donald Trump. Frank Luntz's post-debate glee at how a focus group turned on Trump (which makes me think that he's losing his touch) and the fact that he got several more minutes than every other candidate clinches it. Hell, he got almost twice the amount of time Rand Paul did. Unfortunately, the online polls at Breitbart and Time et al. painted Trump as the runaway winner, getting more votes than the second and third and sometimes even fourth place person combined.

It's obvious that the VSP wing of the corporate whore mainstream media is completely clueless as to what makes Trump popular with his buttpicking fans. Trying to take him down via accusations that he's a buffoon and insufficiently pleasing to the party apparatchik is like trying to take down Patch Adams with appeals to professionalism and decorum. For all of the work that Victor Frankenstein put into his project it's clear he doesn't have the first clue as to what actually makes his monster tick.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The most amusing thing about last night's GOP 'debate' was how blatantly Fox News went after Donald Trump. Frank Luntz's post-debate glee at how a focus group turned on Trump (which makes me think that he's losing his touch) and the fact that he got several more minutes than every other candidate clinches it. Hell, he got almost twice the amount of time Rand Paul did. Unfortunately, the online polls at Breitbart and Time et al. painted Trump as the runaway winner, getting more votes than the second and third and sometimes even fourth place person combined.

It's obvious that the VSP wing of the corporate whore mainstream media is completely clueless as to what makes Trump popular with his buttpicking fans. Trying to take him down via accusations that he's a buffoon and insufficiently pleasing to the party apparatchik is like trying to take down Patch Adams with appeals to professionalism and decorum. For all of the work that Victor Frankenstein put into his project it's clear he doesn't have the first clue as to what actually makes his monster tick.

I hate to say it, but Trump was the most coherent candidate at the debate aside from Kasich. Damning with faint praise, but he is 10000x better than the other shitheels at public speaking, especially to an audience that wants his vitriol.

Rand Paul was a mess. I don't know what I expected from him, but wow.

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:Rand Paul was a mess. I don't know what I expected from him, but wow.

I'm not surprised. The moderators gave him the least amount of time and he spent much of it getting in a dust-up with Chris Christie. Here's a ProTip for you, Paul: the law-and-order, pseudo-authoritarian, 'Here's my rights and money and fealty, just protect me from the terrorists and thugs!' types will always vastly outnumber the number of libertarians, even fake libertarians.

Krugman being articulate about Trump's popularity.

The sad part is, there are going to be more of these things. Many more.