Pidesco

You seem to forget that this is Ted Cruz that you're talking about. Few people display such dishonest character traits such as he does. Which is why I included the word "appear".

It certainly is a calculated move. After Trump crashes and burns, the GOP will double down and say that Trump just wasn't conservative enough. Cruz will take the opportunity to point to this moment and say "look how conservative and morally principled I am!" However it still was kind of the moral thing to do and I that strikes me as completely against character for a guy like Cruz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuGd-N1aBkc Trump made Ted Cruz appear to take a moral stand. Is this an accurate measure of how vile Trump is?

The bit that seems to be plagiarized appears to be too big of a train of thought and with too many of the same the words to be a "speech template" or a sound byte like "world peace". In any case, the point isn't that this woman stole the other woman. The question is rather one of competence regarding the Trump campaign. Why would they let something like this through any kind of vetting process? Again, it appears that everything in the campaign is being run off the cuff.

I always proofread what I write and always miss a bunch of things anyway. I'm pretty damn good at proofreading other people's writing, though.

The Republican "strategy" has been to double down on everything for a long time. "This thing we did didn't work? We'll do it again like children throwing a tantrum, then." See Benghazi, for example.

Given the rickroll I can only assume Trump's campaign managers are taking the opportunity to troll everyone.

What the speech wasn't missing was plagiarizing of a speech by Michelle Obama. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/19/melania-trump-republican-convention-plagiarism-michelle-obama Also, they took care to include a Rickroll.

Doesn't matter. By your philosophy you could simply turn even $1000 into more than a million, just by investing in an index fund. I assume any index fund will do, as you don't need to be intelligent or successful to realize which one of those you'd even need. As WoD said a page or two back: Successful people are not afraid to fail. I'll go one further and say that successful people also don't make up BS excuses for why they weren't successful before they are. Either put your money where you mouth is, or realize you're full of it. Or, continue to bask in your willful ignorance, thinking things that are patently untrue and ignoring the realities all around you that prove such. It's not a philosophy, it's a fact. If you start life rich enough to live off interest, getting richer is easy.

Unfortunately, I don't have 100 million dollars to invest. https://www.ifa.com/calculator/?i=sp500&g=100000000&s=1/1/1978&e=6/30/2016&gy=true&af=true&aorw=false&perc=false

Lots of people inherit a million or two dollars. Lots of people get fronted similar amounts of money by their parents when they start out. Extremely few turn that money into billions as Trump has. You are uninformed or a fool if you don't see that. He didn't inherit 1 or 2 million dollars, he inherited a lot more. The money Trump got from his dad was enough to net him billions of dollars as long as he invested it in some index fund back in the 70s.

The idea that Clinton is more corrupt than any other politician is hopelessly naive. Seems to me like Barnes is a guy with an agenda if he singles out Clinton for corruption. She is a politician in a major party, of course she is corrupt. Stating that she is more corrupt than any other politician is either stupidity or a deliberate attack. Given that her opposition is a textbook example of corruption, I also don't see a point in singling out Clinton for corruption.

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/2/9248963/donald-trump-index-fund http://www.alternet.org/story/156234/exposing_how_donald_trump_really_made_his_fortune%3A_inheritance_from_dad_and_the_government's_protection_mostly_did_the_trick Here ya go.

Trump isn't particularly successful. He was just born really rich.

Ubisoft killed the Rainbow Six style tactical shooter, and no one cared.

Trump seems to me like someone who has demonstrated the power of winging it when you have billions of dollars behind you. I don't know if he is intelligent or not but his success in business doesn't seem to corroborate his intelligence. I also don't think the way he behaves is an act he has been performing for the past 30 years.

Was Trump/Pence's logo commissioned by Cornholio?

A Trump victory could make everywhere a very interesting place. As in "may you live in interesting times" special kind of interesting.

Revolting to whom? “I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." "If Hillary Clinton can't satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?" “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." “Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, right? He was a bad guy. Really bad guy,” Trump begins. “But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights, they didn’t talk. They were a terrorists - it was over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.” "The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families” Fun stuff.

Must mean every white guy born in the US is technically a Native American. Those tricky definitions. They're hard for everyone to nail down just right, even the left. That's a gigantic fallacy if I ever saw one. Native Americans are, these days, a specific ethnic group with the USA. Unless you are actually arguing that almost the entire population of the USA is not "home grown".

I fear we're all underestimating the rapidly growing discontent of the western middle class with the status quo.. To the point that I fear both Trump and Le Pen have a very real chance to win in their respective elections. Immediately after the Brexit vote I thought that there was that risk, but Trump seems to be intent on staying within his primary talking points, which appeal to the Republican base and almost literally no one else in the US. His VP pick appears to be dire, and has already been lambasted even before it has been officially announced.

Well the LP used to be a fringe with a capital "F" group. It still has a lot of 40 year old adolescents in it. But in the 80s & 90s we had a Republican and Democrat parties that were two different and relatively sane groups. Throw out Trump for a moment. He is an aberration. Suppose Jeb Bush was the nominee. Could you even make a list of meaningful differences between him and Hillary Clinton? Now the Dems & Repubs are practically the same thing from an aspect of governing positions. And this despite all the sniping they do at each other. So now there is a real need for a "third way". Well, staring a political party is hard. It's expensive. It's better to join one that already exists and already has an infrastructure. The Libertarian Party has that. It's been around since 1971 and is only recently beginning to have any electoral success to speak of. So it's only now beginning to become a viable thing. In 2004 there were 1300+ Libertarians in elected office around the country. In 2014 there were 3300+. It was just a party in the literal sense in the 80's and 90's when there was no real need or demand for a 3rd option. Now there IS a need and it's time for it to "grow up" and become what the founder David Nolan envisioned when he was horrified at the machiavellian big governments of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. We don't need to win the Presidency. All we need to move forward is just 5% of the vote and to see at least one or two libertarians win congressional seats. Then maybe a few more and a few more. 10 Libertarian representatives in Congress forms a caucus. That means things they do, positions they take will make news because suddenly there are enough to swing a vote one way or the other. And we need to continue seeing LP candidates get elected at the state level. This is already well underway. Jeb Bush crashed from the Republican Primary faster than you could say "oh, wait, he's gone." Trump is an insane aberration but, in the context of the Republican party's evolution and the rise of the Tea Party, he's not that weird. Cruz, his biggest rival in the end, was kind of worse than Trump. That insane surgeon guy said horrible crap as well. Kasich was not terrible I guess, but I have to wonder how much of that came from standing next to stupid. Rubio was emptier than Eastwood's chair. All this to say that, unfortunately, Trump is not a tumor unfortunately growing on the side of the Republican Party structure. He's a direct consequence of their overarching strategy, and depends directly on the core Republican base that the party has been cultivating for over 40 years. It's going to be the Democrats. The Republicans screwed themselves years ago aligning with the family values folk and it's biting them in the ass hard. A lot of businesses are going to support democrats, and a lot already do, because they'll act in their interests without pissing off the growing swathes of people. So we'll see more democrats like Cory Booker(who had Ivanka Trump and her husband run a fundraiser for him) while the last of the Bernie Sanders die out. If it's the Democrats, I'd guess that a Party to the left of the Democrats would have to rise out of nowhere. I'm curious to see what a party to the left of the Democrats with a chance of winning elections would look like.

Is everyone missing how Trump takes every opportunity to say revolting xenophobic, extremist crap? Unless a video comes out of Clinton clubbing baby seals while screaming "I love gun control" at the top of her lungs and stealing food directly from the mouths of starving babies, Trump isn't going to win in November. The Republican Party drove itself into a horrible corner, that depends on the votes of the aging white men demographic to win anything. They'll have to do a complete about-face if they want to stay relevant in the future. If the election goes as badly for Trump as it currently seems like, perhaps Republicans will get a grip and start doing something to change their insane outlook. Or perhaps they'll double down on the crazy again. If they do, FSM help America. Perhaps if the Republican party collapses, a non insane conservative party option will appear to take its place, somehow. After seeing that Samantha Bee video on the Libertarian convention, I don't think the Libertarians will be that option. The US has a two party system by design, by the way. As long as you don't move away from first-past-the-post (impossible, I think), voting for a third party will always be a waste.

I don't know whether he believes it or not, but I do think that, up to a certain point it doesn't matter. His xenophobic speech is still inciting hatred and extremism right here and now, indelibly associating the Republican base with it. Additionally, if the snowball happens to have its day in hell and Trump ends up winning, it will be seen by many racists and xenophobes as open confirmation that their views are accepted in the US, at large. Given the relationship Americans have with violence in general and guns in particular, I can't help but see that as a potent recipe for disaster.