Getting half, 1,237, to get the nomination is entirely arbitrary.
The primary/caucus system is messy, inconsistent and hardly a level playing field in some respects.
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Trump's dim view of gridlock isn't encouraging
Gridlock is built in: It's called the separation of powers.
Ted Cruz is a disgusting liar about Trump rally pledges
Trump doesn't ask people to pledge "to him" but "to vote for him" at the primary.
CNN's asking softball Cuba questions to help boost Rubio
Rubio has the right attitude toward Cuba.
The Miami audience ate it up.
So Ted Cruz is for boots on the ground in Syria against ISIS, too
So the only one of the four who hasn't been for this is Donald Trump, but now he says he will send them in.
Very disappointing.
Previously he was for letting the Russians carry the load.
Ted Cruz is a doctrinaire free-trader who won't punish trade malefactors
He has no solution for the mercantilist war on America waged by China et alia. Meanwhile America will continue to bleed jobs.
John Kasich is in the black in Ohio because he gets an extra $2.5 billion a year in Medicaid from the feds
Because he signed up for Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, contrary to what his legislature wanted.
John Kasich just said he wants to legalize people here illegally
This is unfair to everyone who came here legally, people who obeyed our law.
Trump is right. They have to go.
Cruz has momentum? He needs 61% of remaining delegates, up from 59% on Monday
Trump needs 54% of remaining delegates, unchanged from Monday (the difference is a rounding error).
Cruz' momentum has slowed by 3.4%.
Conservatives don't realize how much Ted Cruz owes to George W. Bush because talk radio never mentions it
How is it that Rush Limbaugh's closest thing to Reagan is a Bushie, hm?
Reported here:
The Bush-Cruz connection is clear. Ted was George W.’s brain when he ran for president. A top policy adviser, Ted maneuvered for Solicitor General in Bush World but settled for a plum at the Federal Trade Commission. Ted’s a Bush man with deep ties to the political and financial establishment. Ted and wife Heidi brag about being the first “Bush marriage” – they met as Bush staffers. Cruz was an adviser on legal affairs while Heidi was an adviser on economic policy and eventually director for the Western Hemisphere on the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. Condi helped give us the phony war in Iraq. Heidi then went to the Bush U.S. Trade Representative as a top deputy to U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Zoellick, who wired Heidi’s membership in the Council on Foreign Relations and job at Goldman Sachs. The bailed-out bank then loaned Cruz $1 million secretly to finance his Senate race. Cruz would also borrow an undisclosed $1 million loan from Citicorp.
Camille Paglia likes Trump's swaggering retro machismo, is repelled by Cruz' weirdly womanish face
Here:
Cruz’s lugubrious, weirdly womanish face, with its prim, tight smile and mawkishly appealing puppy-dog eyebrows, is like a waxen mask, always on the verge of melting.
Carly Fiorina, call your office.
Ted Cruz is a numbskull: He should try to co-opt Trump's voters, not insult them
Ted Cruz, quoted here:
“Donald does well with voters who have relatively low information, who are not that engaged and who are angry and they see him as an angry voice," Cruz told The Brody File on Wednesday.
Trump now needs 54% of the remaining delegates to get to 1237
That's 779 delegates needed.
901 of the remaining 1442 delegates available are in 17 "winner take all" contests.
But Colorado (37) and Wyoming (29) delegates, still unallocated, are still in play at their respective state conventions, to be concluded by mid-April.
Plus delegates for Carson (8) are in play because he withdrew.
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Ohio surplus due to Medicaid expansion, not to John Kasich's special skills
The Toledo Blade reported here . . . a year ago:
COLUMBUS — The infusion of billions in federal funds to pay for expanded Medicaid coverage in Ohio has had the side effect of dramatically increasing the state’s ability to put away money for a rainy day, as well as its power to borrow.
Ohio expects to finish the current fiscal year with a surplus of $970.4 million. It will transfer more than half of that amount at the last minute to help pay for proposed income tax cuts, unemployment compensation interest payments to the federal government, a proposed student debt reduction program, and other items.
But the remaining $374 million would be transferred to the state’s so-called rainy-day fund, budgetary reserves capped by law at no more than 5 percent of the general revenue fund. That would bring the balance in the fund to just under $1.9 billion, well above the current balance of roughly $1.5 billion.
John Kasich's Ohio miracle is totally phony and depended entirely on federal money through Medicaid expansion under Obamacare
No wonder John Kasich took the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.
John Kasich has been bad for Ohioans, is already poison for the presidential race, and will be terrible for the country if allowed anywhere near the Oval.
From the story here:
Wal-Mart is a perennial leader, and at the time had nearly 18,000 Ohio employees covered by Medicaid, followed by McDonald’s with over 14,000 jobs. Next in line, respectively, came Kroger, Wendy’s and Bob Evans with a combined 17,000 plus workers using Medicaid.
So when Gov. Kasich went around his very right-wing legislature, which didn’t want to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, he was thinking about more than the normal people “living in the shadows.” He saw $2.5 billion a year in federal money and knew he could both shed state expenses and give aid and support to a few of Ohio’s biggest corporations, which are too cheap to pay their workers a living wage, defined by enough income to pay their expenses without being “dependent” on government safety net programs like Medicaid. John Kasich loves to talk about personal responsibility for individuals, but has nothing to say about the same responsibility to the biggest, richest corporations.
This observation on what Gov. Kasich was doing came from a progressive economic think tank that gets little attention at the legislature. Zach Schiller, a spokesman for Policy Matters Ohio, said Ohio’s safety-net services, including Medicaid, food stamps and cash assistance, “shouldn’t have to be used in significant ways by multimillion-dollar companies getting tax breaks. They should be able to adequately pay their employees.”
Carly Fiorina endorses Cruz in incoherent rant against Trump, ineffectively equating him with Hillary Clinton
Here:
"The truth is that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are two sides of the same coin," Fiorina said Wednesday, ripping the GOP front-runner. "They aren't going to reform the system. They are the system."
Fiorina noted that many in the Republican Party are "horrified by Donald Trump. I'm one of them," she added, describing Cruz as "the only guy who can beat Donald Trump."
"Ted Cruz has always been a constitutional conservative," Fiorina said, adding that he "didn’t care if he got invited to the cocktail parties in D.C. ... It is time now to unite behind the one man who can beat Donald Trump, who can beat Hillary Clinton, who can beat the D.C. cartel. It is time to unite behind Ted Cruz," Fiorina said to roaring cheers.
I thought everybody in "the system" hated Trump, indeed is "horrified by" him to the extent of the #NeverTrump movement among Republicans, unlike Clinton who is the darling of her political party, the host of the cocktail parties, and the queen of Wall Street cash.
Carly should check out the concept of synonyms: The system = the cartel = The Establishment.
It's hard to imagine two things more deadly to "the system" than enforcing immigration laws and rewriting "free-trade" agreements to benefit American workers instead of American corporations.
You know. Like Hewlett-Packard.
Democrat turnout in Michigan's presidential primary was up 97% over 2008, so how is Donald Trump's big win here caused by Democrat cross-over votes?
The big story in Michigan is that Democrats turned out in force in the closely fought race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. It was a two point race that went down to the wire, won by Bernie by 20,000 votes out of 1.18 million cast.
But the conventional wisdom among Republicans is we're supposed to believe that there were enough large numbers of Democrats left who were energized to cross over and vote for Donald Trump to take him to victory over "real" Republicans like Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Marco Rubio.
This has to be the kookiest theory yet promoted by The Stupid Party.
I think Trump was chosen here by heretofore inactive Republican-leaning voters, not by Democrats.
God knows there's millions out there who never participate in elections. In Michigan we typically have trouble getting turnout to 20% of the voting age population. In presidential election years it averages 18.32%.
Turnout yesterday broke records going back before 1980, at 34%.
Republican turnout was up over 30% from 2012, and over 50% from 2008, but Democrat turnout was up a whopping 97% over 2008 when Hillary and Obama famously duked it out.
A total of 601,219 votes were cast in the 2008 Democrat Primary, but in 2016 1.18 million. (There was no Democrat primary here in 2012. It was a pro-forma caucus in which 195,058 votes were cast, the vast majority for the incumbent president Barack Obama.)
Democrats were too preoccupied yesterday fighting over Hillary and Bernie to care much about Donald Trump.
That's the good news for Trump supporters, and the bad news for his Republican opponents. Donald Trump is remaking the Republican Party with support from people who appreciate his issues and strong leadership instead of theirs: manufacturing jobs, illegal immigration and trade.
Yesterday they came out of the woodwork to vote for him.
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