AMERICAN CLUSTERF**K

One Canadian’s View Of The Race To Be The Next US President

It has now been 9 months since the first debates were held in the US to decide who are going to be the nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties to run for the office of president of the United States.

The Democratic race has now been narrowed to two contestants from the original five then three and the Republican race has been narrowed to three contestants from eighteen.

The front runners, Donald Trump in the Republican Party and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party, both have unfavourable numbers when it comes to national popularity. 75% of American women voters in the US don’t like Trump and over 50% of American voters don’t trust Clinton.

A large part of both the Liberal and Conservative base in the US has little faith that the federal government can accomplish anything significant that would benefit the middle class or the poor. The US Congress has an approval level rating of about 11%. Congress is where new laws of the land are approved or disapproved.

9 months ago most political pundits predicted that the race for president would be between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. They picked Hillary because it seemed that she was going to have very little competition from within her own party and after all these years it looked like her turn. Jeb had gathered together brother George’s inner circle and managed to raze over a 150 million dollars for his campaign.

A lot has happened in the past 9 months including the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. It is interesting how things have unfolded for both parties. To get a clearer picture lets go back to August of 2015.

The Republicans

18 people are a lot of folks running for the presidential nomination of a political party. Some political pundits described it as “the clown car” making its appearance at a circus where one clown after another climbs out of a small car. Clearly some of the hopefuls didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming the Republican nominee but they had no hesitation about wasting their donor’s money or voter’s time.

 

The field was so crowded that they had a “kiddie’s table” where the least popular debated among themselves before the main TV debates. A few times someone from the kiddie’s table made it to the main debate and another contender was then demoted.

Here is list of those that fell by the wayside long the way in the past 9 months.

By the end of 2015, 5 candidates were history including former New York Governor George Pataki, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. All were polling less than 2%. Some thought that Perry ran just to prove that he wasn’t as dumb as he appeared when he ran in 2012.

By the end of February 2016, 7 more candidates had bitten the dust including former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina, New Jersey Governor Chis Christie, Virginia Governor Jim Gilmour, and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Out of the 7 Jeb Bush was the most notable. Trump totally destroyed him with his “low energy” comments and Bush never recovered. Christie had become unpopular in his home state and his pettiness was quite obvious when he blocked traffic on the busiest bridge in the world to pay back a mayor who didn’t back him in a previous election. Fiorina had been fired as CEO of Hewlett Packard and had lost in her run for the office of California senator. She also outsourced thousands of jobs overseas while CEO of Hewlett Packard.

March of this year saw the Republican field see 2 more candidates disappear. The first was Dr. Ben Carson who seemed half asleep when he talked and never made a lot of sense. Marco Rubio was the Republican Party’s establishment’s last hope. Before Chris Christie left the race he totally destroyed Rubio’s credibility by pointing out that Rubio always used a rehearsed script. Rubio’s response was to repeat that script. Having only won the State of Minnesota Rubio decided to go after Trump directly. He got pretty deep in the mud when he inferred that Trump had a small penis. And then he lost his home state of Florida.

As of the beginning of April there are 3 Republican candidates left with Trump having a big lead in states won. His competition is now Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich. Other than the Trump voters there is a concerted effort by most of the Republican Party to stop Trump from becoming the Republican nominee. Their general plan is that if Trump doesn’t have enough votes to automatically become the nominee there will be a vote at the Republican convention this coming summer in Cleveland and they plan to have Kasich, Cruz, or somebody like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, or Mitt Romney get the nomination.

John Kasich

 

 

John Kasich is the governor of Ohio. He has spent most of his working life representing his state in political office including being a senator. He took an 8 year break to work for FOX news and also worked for Lehman Brothers until they went bankrupt in 2009. He threw his hat in the ring  last year in the Republican race and at one point his polling was so low that he was restricted to the “kiddie’s table” at the debates.

Somehow he has managed to survive although he didn’t win any state primaries until his own state, Ohio, was contested. For decades no Republican hopeful has become president of the US without winning Ohio.

Unlike his counterparts running for president, Kasich tries to display a low key common sense approach to politics. He hasn’t gotten into the mud with Trump, Cruz, or Rubio. What also makes him a bit different is that he has a positive attitude towards America’s future.

Fundamentally Kasich believes that the private sector is the answer to almost everything. When he came into office, his state had a huge amount of debt. He eliminated the debt by shifting some costs away from the state to the cities and towns. He also sold off state run prisons to the private sector. Like most Republicans he is anti-union. In his first term in office he saw increased revenues from the oil industry that had expanded into fracking in his Ohio.

Unlike a number of other Republican governors, particularly southern ones, Kasich has not blocked Obamacare and his state has seen the expansion of Medicare.

The chances of Kasich becoming the Republican nominee are very limited. He is hoping for a brokered convention this summer based upon Trump not having enough delegates to be proclaimed the winner. Polls have shown that Kasich would have the best chance at beating Hillary Clinton.

Ted Cruz

 

Cruz is one of Texas’s two senators. His base comes mostly from the evangelical community in the US of which there are about 75 million people. Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta. His father, who is a preacher, was born in Cuba and his mother was born in the US. For decades it was pretty easy for Cubans to obtain American citizenship simply because Cuba is a Communist country. It is interesting to note that Cruz Sr. didn’t become a naturalized American citizen until 2005, 48 years after leaving Cuba.

Cruz believes in “Dominionism” where there is no separation of church and state even though it is written into the US Constitution that there should be a separation. Cruz claims that the Christian faith is under assault in the US even though there is no evidence of that being so.  He has threatened to carpet bomb countries where ISIS has fighters. “I’ll make the sands glow” he has been quoted as saying disregarding that carpet bombing would kill many civilians. Islam prohibits the consumption of pork and Cruz has posted a video of himself firing off a machine gun with bacon wrapped around the muzzle. These tactics will no doubt encourage some of the Islamic faith to join ISIS.

Cruz was elected as a Tea Partier. To him the federal government is a threat to decent Americans. A few years ago he managed to shut the government down which cost the US billions of dollars. He is easily the most unpopular senator in office today and that includes his own party. A while ago Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham described Cruz this way…..”If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the senate, and the trial was in the senate, nobody would convict you.”

Cruz’s platform in running for the nomination includes repealing Obamacare on the 1^st day he is in office, abolishing Planned Parenthood, wants to downsize the federal government, doesn’t want to increase the minimum wage, and is against same-sex marriage, abortion, legalization of marijuana, net neutrality, and immigration reform. He’d like to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service. He is opposed to the scientific consensus on climate change and The Water Resources Development Act. He also believes in the death penalty.

He is for The Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement that would give international corporations power over individual country’s governments. He believes in lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

So far Cruz has won 9 states but lags far behind Donald Trump. He would dearly like to get Kasich out of the race so he can go one on one with Trump but Kasich isn’t going to bow out. The Republican establishment hates Trump but they don’t care for Cruz either.

Donald Trump

 

Trump has said and done so many provocative things in the past 9 months that it is almost impossible to keep track of them all. Just when it seems he couldn’t be more obnoxious he ups the ante.

There are a number of Americans who are dazzled by wealth and fame and feel that those that have lots of money must be a lot brighter than those that don’t have lots of money. It is a pretty shallow way of looking at things but Trump has convinced a number of people that he is going to improve their lives even though history has shown that Trump has little interest in anyone other than himself and his family. He isn’t the sharing type.

His followers mostly seem to be blue collar workers, some who are very afraid that they could turn up for work one day and find that their jobs no longer exist. If that is their inevitable fate why not blow everything up some of them think. They feel that other politicians has betrayed them in the past. If they could get Trump elected at least they could see some other asses get kicked other than their own.

 

Trump has been in the public eye for most of his adult life but up until about 10 years ago it was mostly in the New York City area. His TV programs, The Apprentice and later The Celebrity Apprentice, gave him national exposure. It was quite clear to any discerning viewer that Trump was and is a narcissist with a very inflated ego. Pretty well all the celebrities on his show were has-beens but many TV watchers were curious to see them up close, to find out what they were really like.

It turned out that most of the so called celebrities were pretty petty people. Some were on the deranged side including Gary Busey, Dennis Rodman, Daryl Strawberry, and Stephen Baldwin. None of the contestants were allowed to address Trump by his first name and their fates were decided by Trump often with his daughter and oldest son on either side of him in the boardroom like they were the prince and princess on either side of the king. The whole performance made it seem that the contestants were peons compared to the Trumps.

Even the most popular of TV shows have a shelf life. The Celebrity Apprentice wasn’t going to run for another 5 or 10 years and watching people with faded fame hawking hot dogs for 50 bucks apiece near Times Square could make viewers start to yawn.

Trump and the Media

It was 2015 and Trump was about to turn 69 years of age. He had teased the media about running for president before but had backed off. This time he signed the needed papers and became a candidate. The question is why? Probably because it was his last chance at his age. Other than having his name on tall buildings almost all of his branding ventures had failed. TV viewers were tiring of his show. He also had his kids to look after his business enterprises. His skirt chasing days were over but not his desperate need for attention. Win or lose he was going to make all of America remember his name and who he was for years to come.

Trump may be an idiot but he isn’t a total idiot. More than any of his political competitors he knew how to manipulate the media, particularly the TV news sector. He also understood who his market was and he enjoyed throwing bombs that would excite them. Every political show on the tube wanted Trump as a guest. It made for great ratings. He didn’t even have to turn up at the TV studio.  Often he would just make a phone call from Trump Tower in NYC to FOX News or Morning Joe on MSNBC even though he was just blocks away.

Trump knows that it the sizzle that sells the steak. He couldn’t just kick off his campaign by saying he was just another contender who wanted to fix the ills in America. He needed to throw out some red meat and did just that by stating his views on illegal immigrants. He referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and promised to build a huge wall on the Mexican/American border.

Being outlandish gets attention and Trump came up with one thing after another to keep that attention. He shocked a lot of people when he stated that ex Viet Nam POW John McCain who was imprisoned for 5-1/2 years, wasn’t a war hero. “I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump said. Getting into verbal fights with a wide variety of people gave him the spotlight for months and months.

Trump was well aware of his power over the media and would often blame them, including right wing FOX News, if he felt he was being unfairly treated. His sense of fairness was quite different than most other people. At speeches he made to large crowds he would often tell the TV networks to turn their cameras on the crowds so those at home could see how many people he had drawn to a venue. He became fixated on polls and never missed a chance to tell people how popular he was.

Reporters were always penned off from the crowds. Sometimes they weren’t even allowed to go to the washroom. One reporter took a few steps out of the pen and had his head slammed into a table by one of the security people protecting Trump.

Trump and Obama

Not long after Obama was elected in 2008, Trump started questioning Obama’s birth certificate. It was a dog whistle for racists in the US, a questioning of the legitimacy of the country’s first black president. The fact that there were birth announcements in 2 different Hawaii newspapers wasn’t going to dissuade Trump. Eventually Obama’s long form birth certificate was revealed. This still didn’t satisfy Trump and he made the claim that he had investigators on the ground in Hawaii and that “they had found out things that you wouldn’t believe”. You can bet that if his people had discovered things about Obama it would have made front page news. The birther stuff was probably the first big indication that Trump was quite willing to create lies almost at will.

It is quite possible that one of Trump’s biggest motivations to run for president was because of his being humiliated by Obama at a White House correspondent’s dinner in 2011. Trump was seething that night.

Trump on Making America Great Again

He has also talked about “making America great again”. At one point Trump was asked at what time was America greater than it is now and he replied that he thought it was in the 1950s. He couldn’t say the 1960s because for most of that decade there was a Democrat president. During the 1950s The Cold War with the USSR was going on. Kids were taught how to hide under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack. Racism and Jim Crow laws were very evident in the US South. There was no such thing as Medicare. Maybe Trump was referring to a time when unions were strong and working class people could afford to buy a home?

Trump and Women

Trump has always been sexist when it comes to women. To him, their biggest asset is often their appearance. He has now had 3 trophy wives. When he was married to his first wife, Ivana, he publicly claimed that she did everything he told her to do. What the US media stays completely away from is the fact that Ivana, when her and Trump were going through their divorce, once claimed in a deposition that Trump had raped her. She later recanted. The story goes that Trump had visited a plastic surgeon that Ivana was familiar with and was unhappy with the results of a hair transplant. In a rage he attacked and raped Ivana and tore out some of her hair. According to her they hadn’t had sex in 16 months at the time. If this story wasn’t true you can bet Trump would have sued the writer’s ass off. He didn’t.

20 years ago Trump and his 2^nd wife Marla Maples had a baby girl. Robin Leach (remember him) asked Trump who the baby looked like and Trump said that the baby had Marla’s legs but it was too early to know how big her breasts were going to be. What a pig!

With wife #3 Melania.

Most people didn’t care very much when Trump had a battle with talk show host Rosie O’Donnell years ago when he called her “a fat pig”. Rosie was brash in her own right and not someone a lot of people felt sympathy for.

Since deciding to run for office Trump has added a litany of disparaging things about women.

 -“If Hillary can’t satisfy her husband, how is she going to satisfy America?”

-“Ariana Huffington is unattractive and I fully understand why her husband left her for a man.”

-“Look at that face, would anybody vote for her?” on fellow candidate Carly Fiorina.

 

-“You could see blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her….whatever”. on FOX TV host Megyn Kelly.

Recently when Trump was talking about abortion he suggested that women who do have an abortion should be punished in some way. The next day he pulled back on his statement.

Trump on Immigration and the Wall

It is estimated that there are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. Trump wants to deport all of them. His followers agree. What they don’t seem to understand is that many of these people are paid under the table and no taxes are deducted from their pay which is often in cash. Almost no businesses get fined for paying people under the table. Being anti-government and anti-taxation is mostly a Republican thing. Every person born in the US is issued a Social Security number at one year of age. E-verify would stop illegal immigrants from stealing other people’s SS numbers but a Republican congress would never pass a bill that included E-verify.

The whole agriculture industry would collapse tomorrow without foreign born illegal immigrants.

Building a wall between Mexico and the US is nothing more than a joke. People would just dig under it for starters. Trump says a wall works in Israel. He doesn’t mention that Arabs slipping into Israel through a tunnel have nowhere to go because Israel is a small country and strangers just can’t melt into communities. Millions of vehicles pass between Mexico and the US each year. All of those vehicles can’t be inspected thoroughly. This is how many illegals and drugs get across the US border never mind those that come on “vacation” and never return home.

Trump himself has employed illegal immigrants including a number from Poland that worked on construction on one of his towers. They actually slept at night on the job site. He has also employed a number of Hispanic illegals at his Mara Lago estate in Florida.

Trump on Bringing Jobs Back to the US

The Republican Party makes no bones about their support for major corporations and the very wealthy. Every financial plan they present, including Trump’s, includes more tax cuts for the rich. Being rich often comes from having products made for cheaper wages in foreign countries. Does Apple ring a bell? Almost all Republicans supported NAFTA which cost America millions of jobs, many of which paid quite well. They also support the new Transpacific Trade Agreement which would see the loss of more jobs.

Trump has zero chance of swaying American businessmen to bring back jobs to the US. It is pretty simple really. There is nothing in it for them and they won’t accept lower profits.

He also never mentions where his clothing line is made. Here’s a hint. It isn’t in the US.

Trump on Being A Business Genius

Trump claims to be worth over 10 billion dollars. Forbes Magazine says his personal wealth may be around 2-4 billion.

He has filed for bankruptcy 4 times, all involving casinos he has owned in Atlantic City. Owning a casino is an unsavory way of making a living. Basically it suckers people by taking their hard earned money and giving them nothing in return.

Trump would be broke today if he didn’t use lawyers to leverage deals with those he owed money to. Lawyers can tie things up in the court system for a long time. Trump’s deal has been to give his creditors back a small % of what he owes them. Their choice has been to get back a little bit or nothing at all.

Casinos are like a license to print money. Somehow Trump managed to mess that up. Casinos weren’t his only failures in business. Other failures include Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Magazine, Trump Steaks, Trump Mortgage, GoTrump.com, Trump The Game, and Trump University. There are currently 3 lawsuits against Trump and Trump University.

It would probably surprise a lot of Trump’s followers that a lot of the buildings he has his name on aren’t owned by him. It is just a branding thing that he gets a royalty from and in some cases he hasn’t received any money.

There are some that have said that Trump would have as much money as he has today if he had just put his inheritance into a trust fund.

Trump’s Political Beliefs

He obviously doesn’t know much about foreign affairs. He claims to have been against the war in Iraq but he was for it when the war started. The other day he said it might be a good idea if Japan and South Korea had nuclear arms when most world leaders want to reduce those arms. He claims to admire Vladimir Putin and has quoted Mussolini, the former dictator of Italy. He thinks the US should withdraw from the UN.

At 60 years of age he was a registered Democrat. He used to be pro-choice on abortion. He is not above waving a bible around if he feels it will help him politically although he rarely goes to church. He said he was unaware who the Ku Klux Klan are and what they stand for. (His father Fred was once arrested at a Klan rally in the early 1920s.)

 

He would kill Obamacare if elected but doesn’t have a plan to replace it. He says he would like to see more competition from the insurance companies. Maybe he doesn’t know that cartels don’t like competition.

He says he wants to rebuild the US armed forces to a point that “nobody would mess with us”. The US currently spends 4 times more than China on the military and 12 times more than Russia. With all the money the US has spent on defense over the years since WW2 they still have managed to lose wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Trump the Leader of the Free World?

Aside with being all over the map with his views he doesn’t display any tact. Most politicians keep foul language away from the public. His name calling and picking away at opponents by calling them ugly or liars and more is far beneath someone who would be the US president. His constant bragging clearly indicates his desperate need for attention and his insecurity about himself.

Luckily for America he has zero chance of being elected president. More than half of his own party dislikes him as do most women, most Blacks, most Hispanics, most young people, almost all Muslim Americans, and pretty well all Democrats. He has no crossover appeal in a general election.

The Democrats

As things stand right now Hillary Clinton will most likely be the next president of The United States. There is no way Bernie Sanders can catch her. She sewed up the southern states early which gave her an insurmountable lead even though most of those states will never vote for a Democrat in a general election. The only thing that could get in Hillary’s way is the possibility that she gets indicted for using her private e-mail to conduct government business while she was Secretary of State.

Bill and Hillary Clinton

 

It is highly unlikely that most Americans would have ever heard of Hillary if she wasn’t married to Bill. She has ridden his coattails since the time he was governor of Arkansas.

The Clintons are a packaged deal. Both have been surrogates for each other when either ran for office. They never disagree with one another politically in public.

Bill’s stepfather was an abusive alcoholic but somehow he managed to excel at school. Like Hillary he joined in on a lot of school activities. Both of them became involved with politics while still teenagers. Bill was a fraternity brother in college and Hillary was a sorority sister. They knew very early the value of having important contacts with influence. Bill was also a Rhodes Scholar. Both Clintons went on to get their law degrees. They both graduated from Yale in 1973.

 

In a lot of ways both Clintons have lived their lives after their teen years cocooned away from the way most other people live. They never really lived the hippie lifestyle that was quite common when they were students. After graduating from law school Bill married Hillary and he taught law in Arkansas until his first run for office a few years later. He would become the youngest governor in the US at the age of 32, a position he held 10 years.

He was 41 years of age when he decided to run for the office of president of the US. One of the first times he received national attention was an appearance on the Arsenio Hall TV talk show. He walked out onto the stage wearing sunglasses and started blowing away on his saxophone. A lot of younger Americans in particular were impressed by this politician who seemed to have a side to him that was just plain cool.

In conversations with political pundits he came across as “a good ole boy”. It wasn’t the first or last time that a lot of Americans have been sucked in by southern charm. Elvis had it and years later so did presidential hopeful John Edwards. Edwards’s presidential aspirations went in the tank when it was discovered he was having an affair with a women who gave birth to his child. His wife was undergoing cancer treatment at the time and died a few years later.The media ate up a lot of what he was selling too. (So did I.)

At the time there were rumours of Bill cheating on his wife while governor of Arkansas but it was still an era to some extent where reporters didn’t pry too much into politician’s private lives.  Bill and Hillary went on the TV program 60 Minutes in January of 1992 to rebuff the charges that he was an adulterer. He pussyfooted around the subject and didn’t admit to having a 12 year affair with Genifer Flowers in Arkansas. He suggested that some women had been offered money to tell their stories about their involvement with him which in turn according to him made their stories highly doubtful. Hillary said she wasn’t a “Stand By Your Man” type as in the lyrics to country singer Tammy Wynette’s song. In fact she was just like the song. The 60 Minutes interview was just the first episode of many to come where both Clintons could be very “fuzzy” with the truth.

Genifer Flowers

When asked whether or not he had ever smoked pot he said he had tried it a few times while at school in England, didn’t like it, and never inhaled. Not many people believed him. He knew that there was a possibility that someone had seen him with a joint back then so he figured out a way to say he was never stoned.

1^st Term as President

In 1993 he became the 42^nd president.

He easily won the White House but the race would have been a lot closer if the right winger Ross Perot hadn’t run as a third party candidate.

Bill Clinton was never a “Progressive Liberal” although he did believe in reform on some social issues. In his first 2 years in office he introduced and made into law bills like The Family and Medical Leave Act that mostly applied to large businesses. He reversed some of the restrictions that Reagan and Bush Sr. had placed on Family Planning. He cut taxes on low-income families and small businesses and raised taxes on the wealthy by 1.2%. He signed The Brady Bill into law which created a 5 day waiting period on the purchase of handguns.

Towards the end of his first year he was up to his eyeballs in two scandals that the Republicans were eager to expose. One was a shady real estate deal called Whitewater that he and Hillary had invested in in Arkansas. Some close friends of theirs went to jail because of Whitewater. There was also something called “Troopergate” where 2 Arkansas state troopers claimed they had arranged sexual encounters for Bill. Somehow Bill managed to skate by both issues.

Bill implemented a Department of Defense directive called “Don’t ask, don’t tell” whereas gays could be in the military as long as they never openly stated their sexual preferences. They could die for their country but nobody was supposed to know what their sexual preference was.

In January of 1994 Bill Clinton signed The North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) into law. Several years later this law would prove to be a disaster with millions of manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas from the US.

In 1994 he also introduced the Omnibus Crime Bill. It expanded the death penalty to include major drug traffickers. At the time violent crime was rampant in many poorer areas of America’s major cities. To counteract the rise in violent crime the “3 Strikes Law” was introduced. Initially the law was meant to imprison felons for more than 20 years who had committed 3 violent crimes. It then started to include mostly blacks who were convicted 3 times of any drug crime. The end result was that that the number of blacks being imprisoned increased 3 fold. Many courts didn’t recognize crack cocaine and powder cocaine as the same drug. White people were more prone to using powder cocaine and often avoided spending time in prison by going to rehab.

Two years into his first term Clinton and the Democrats lost their majority in The House of Representatives. They had controlled the House for 40 years. In order to get any bills passed Bill was going to have to compromise with the Republicans.

In 1996 Clinton signed into law The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which recognized marriage as only being between one man and one woman. It is thought by some that his choice to enact this law was his way of appeasing the Christian far right Republicans. His administration did hire some openly gay people.

2^nd Term as President

Clinton was re-elected president at the end of 1996 with just a little over 40% of the national vote. Once again Ross Perot ran as a third party candidate.

In 1996 Hillary claimed that she survived sniper fire while on a visit to Bosnia. It was a story she just made up and she later apologized for it claiming she was confused due to lack of sleep.

In 1997 Hillary made an attempt at reforming health care in the US. It was a disaster. Republicans controlled The Senate and The House and wanted no part of health care reform. She did manage to get some laws passed like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. No other president’s wife has ever been as politically active as Hillary was.

He also negotiated with Republicans the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Part of the act was removing millions of people, many who were black, from the welfare rolls. Other social programs were also cut. The end result was that the US saw the federal government have a balanced budget for the first time in years mostly due to pressure from the Republicans.

In 1999 Clinton passed into law the Financial Services Modernization Act which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act which had been in effect since 1933. The Glass-Steagall act prohibited banks from offering a full range of investment, commercial banking, and insurance services. There is a direct connection between the Financial Services Modernization Act and the bailout of the major banks in 2008 along with the deep recession and mass unemployment that followed.

Shortly after the 1998 election the Republican House decided to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice relating to an affair Bill had had with a 22 year old intern named Monica Lewinsky. The perjury part of the impeachment related to a sworn statement Bill had made denying having had an affair with another woman named Paula Jones when he was governor of Arkansas. Clinton paid Jones $850,000.00 in an out of court settlement. She claimed Bill propositioned  and exposed himself to her.

Paula Jones

In 1998 Bill Clinton went on national TV and said the following …..”I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time-never. These allegations are false and I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.”

Monica and Bill

He was lying his ass off.

A Republican named Kenneth Starr was appointed to lead the hearings on Clinton’s impeachment. He got pretty deep in the weeds going so far as talking about semen stains on Monica Lewinsky’s dress. The American public was split on what to think about Clinton.  Women in particular thought he was a bit of a pig while others thought the Republicans had gone too far in prying into a politician’s private life. In the end Clinton had his law license suspended for 5 years.

Many Americans look back at Clinton’s time as president as an era when the US economy soared and unemployment was low. It was also a time when America wasn’t engaged in major foreign wars. Some forget that it was also a time of Wall Street recklessness and the bursting of “the Dot.com” bubble. Financial oversight by the federal government was so flimsy that an energy company called Enron with very limited assets managed to trade on the stock market at 55 times its real value. These were the wild and wooly days that later led to the major financial meltdown of 2008.

Hillary Clinton

 

Hillary Clinton claims that when she and Bill left the White House they were totally broke. They weren’t only broke, they were in debt. “We struggled to piece together resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education”. At this point Bill had served as governor of Arkansas for 10 years and president of the US for 8 years. For 18 years they didn’t have pay for a place to live and most of their expenses were taken care of.  Where did all of their money go and why did Hillary and Bill need 2 houses? The answers are that it cost Bill a ton of money to pay lawyers and a big stack of money to settle with Paula Jones and they didn’t desperately need two houses but they had become accustomed to a rich lifestyle. The two houses they bought, one in Chappaqua, NY and the other in Washington, DC cost them a total of 4.5 million dollars.

Clinton's Washington, DC home

Clinton's Chappaqua, NY home

Back when Bill was governor of Arkansas Bill and Hillary were keen to become wealthy. That’s why they got involved in the Whitewater development. Hillary once made $100,000.00 on a $1,000.00 investment in a cattle futures investment. You don’t often see someone making 100 times the money they have invested. Not very often at all.

1^st Term as NY Senator

After leaving the White House Hillary decided to run for the office of one of the senators of New York State. She had never lived in the state before. Initially it was thought that she would be running against New York mayor and Republican Rudy Giuliani but he begged off when it was discovered that he had prostate cancer. She won the election with 55% of the vote.

After becoming senator she immediately formed relationships with senators from both parties. She also joined a breakfast prayer group of religious senators. She served on 5 senate committees including the Committee on Budget, the Committee on Armed Services, The Committee on Environment and Public Works, the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and a Special Committee on Aging. She was also a member of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

There is little doubt that Hillary has always been an ambitious person. Politically she thought a lot like her husband. During her husband’s 8 years in office it was more than obvious that the Republicans didn’t want him to accomplish anything and would go to any length to dig up dirt on him. It seems that she felt that she could convince Republicans that although she was a Democrat she also had conservative ideals.

9 months into her first term 9/11 occurred. Hillary fought for funding for the rebuilding the World Trade Towers and benefits for the first responders, firefighters, and police who had risked their lives on 9/11.

In October of 2001 Hillary voted yes to The Patriot Act which allowed government agencies like the FBI to investigate anyone they wished to without a court order.

She strongly supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and believed that it was a chance to combat terrorism and improve the lives of Afghani women. She ignored the fact that the empire that was the USSR had crumbled due to their long war with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In October of 2002 she voted yes on the invasion of Iraq. She simply got sucked in by Bush and his VP Dick Cheney. She wasn’t interested in listening to any arguments against invading Iraq including not talking to a WMD expert who sat in her outer senate office for days trying to get a chance to talk to her. He never did.

Years later Hillary said her vote on Iraq was a mistake. It was a mistake that resulted in over a 100 thousand lost civilian lives, scores of dead and wounded American soldiers, and billions of dollars in increased US debt. She was well aware at the time that a US ambassador named Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, had been outed by Bush and Cheney because Wilson  had publicly stated that it was unlikely that “yellow cake” used in making WMDs had been shipped from  an African country to Iraq.

 

Hillary wasn’t the only Democrat to vote for the war in Iraq. Joe Biden and John Kerry also made the same vote but 126 Democrats in the House and 21 Democrats in the Senate voted against the war.

She still supported the Iraq war even after no WMDs were found. In 2005 she co-introduced a bill to increase troops in Iraq.

2^nd Term as NY Senator and Hillary’s 1^st Run for President

By 2007 Hillary had changed her tune on Iraq and supported a bill that called for the withdrawal of US troops from that country. Her decision was a long time coming.

In 2008 she supported the bailout of the US financial system. Over the ensuing years a number of banks paid billions in fines for illegal financial activities. She never insisted that any banking or brokerage firm executives be prosecuted for criminal activity. Within a year of the financial collapse bonuses were again being handing out by financial corporations and in some cases it looked like they were mocking a gullible American public.

Hillary’s 1^st Run for President

In 2008 Hillary decided to run for the Democratic nomination to be the next president. In the beginning of her run it looked like a sure thing. By this time the Clintons had amassed a fortune of about 50 million dollars from Bill’s books and speeches.

Initially she had competition on 2 fronts, from former North Carolina Senator John Edwards who could give Bill a run for his money when it came to Southern charm, and a junior senator from Illinois named Barak Obama.

 

She lost the first caucus in Iowa finishing behind Obama and Edwards but won New Hampshire. Bill wasn’t helping her case by occasionally shooting his mouth off though.

Edwards dropped out when he was exposed for having an affair. It was now a 2 way race between who might be the first woman president or the first black president.

Obama won South Carolina primary by a 2 to 1 margin. Hillary no longer had the black vote that had helped her husband for many years. Bill was becoming a real pain in the ass to many Democrats. To some it seemed like he himself was running for office again.

Perhaps Hillary’s biggest fault on her resume was that she had voted for the war in Iraq. Obama hadn’t. In television debates her irritation that she was being challenged by an upstart junior senator who hadn’t completed his first term was pretty obvious. After all she had all the contacts within the Democrat Party. What she didn’t have was Obama’s ground game and his ability to use the internet.

She won the larger states like New York and California but Obama was winning more other states. At one point he won 11 straight primaries. In June of 2008 Obama had won enough state primaries to become the presumptive nominee and Hillary ended up endorsing him. In the primaries they had both secured almost the same amount of votes, 17 million. Obama and his team just outfoxed her campaign.

The loss was a pretty bitter pill for Hillary to swallow. She had spent 13 million dollars of her own money trying to get the nomination. As bitter as she was she still campaigned for Obama in his run for president.

Hillary as Secretary of State

In November of 2008 Obama discussed the possibility of Hillary being his Secretary of State. At first she was reluctant as she enjoyed being a senator but within a month she had accepted the job. Why she decided to take the job is open to conjecture. She might have seen the opportunity as a stepping stone for another run for president in 2016 if Obama won a 2^nd term. Most likely she thought that she could solve a lot of the world’s problems including improving women’s rights in third world countries. She was confirmed in the senate by a vote 92 to 2.

She visited 112 different countries during her tenure as Secretary of State. She talked to Obama about once a week unlike some previous Secretaries of State who talked to their president almost on a daily basis and she stood behind any political decisions Obama made. One of her first decisions was to agree with Obama about sending more troops (21,000) to Afghanistan.

She gave a “reset button” to the Russian foreign minister hoping to rebuild a relationship with Russia. It worked for a while until Vladimir Putin got back into power. She helped save the Turkish/Armenian Accord. She helped organize diplomatic sanctions and trade embargos against Iran which was in the early stages of developing nuclear arms.

She assessed the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak as stable before the Arab Spring revolt. She supported US military intervention in Libya after long-time dictator Gaddafi was murdered. She claimed that she offered advice to Obama when Bin Laden was shot and killed in Pakistan although it doesn’t appear that Obama needed any advice from her on the matter.

On September 11^th of 2012 a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya was attacked and 4 US citizens were killed including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Initially the attack was thought to be a response to a right wing video produced in the US that depicted the prophet Muhammad as a whoremonger and thief.

The 4 Americans who were killed were far away from any immediate American forces help. There were a number of uncertainties as to what was transpiring at the time. Some have called it “the fog of war”.

Immediately back home in the US the Republicans pounced on the situation and what they claimed was Hillary’s lack of correctly responding to the tragedy. They knew then that Hillary might very well run for president once Obama’s 2^nd term was up. They dearly wanted to destroy her credibility.

The Republicans completely ignored the fact that a number of American citizens had been killed on multiple occasions in foreign countries while Bush Jr. was in office. Something like 15 different hearings were held by the Republicans on Benghazi. They never managed to trip Hillary up but to this day they still claim that she was derelict in her duties. The hearings did add to many Americans distrusting her. She did admit to some errors that occurred and came up with a list of improvements should the same situation happen again.

 

On February 1^st, 2013 she went back to private life and John Kerry became the new Secretary of State.

Out of Government from 2013-2015

The consensus is that Hillary wanted to rest up for a while and enjoy her new grandchild before turning her attention to running for the Democratic nominee for president. She wasn’t getting any younger but she had that last major goal that she wanted to accomplish.

She joined her husband and daughter in the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Foundation. She worked on a number of women oriented projects including early childhood development, and a 600 million dollar initiative to enroll girls worldwide in secondary schools. She wrote a book and joined a speakers group and was paid as much as 200 thousand dollars for  speeches that lasted usually about an hour.

There is little doubt that she has worked on a lot of women’s issues over the years but on the other hand she had no problem accepting large amounts of money from major corporations that went straight to her own bank account. She justified doing this because   other politicians were doing the same thing including her husband. It was never a question of her being underpaid when she was in political office.

She claims that she was never influenced by the corporations she gave speeches to. 12 of her speeches were to big banks, a number of which had been fined for corrupt activities. Some of the banks have paid over a billion dollars in fines. Nobody from any of those banks was ever charged with a criminal offense and Hillary has never suggested that they should have been. Together Hillary and Bill made 153 million dollars giving speeches between 2001 and 2015.  

 

Running for President the Second Time Around

Shortly after Hillary decided to run for president she rounded up a number of women Democratic senators and all but Progressive Democrat Elizabeth Warren endorsed her. Former Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, suggested that any woman who didn’t vote for Hillary should roast in hell. Feminist Gloria Steinem joined in by rebuking young women who had decided to back Bernie Sanders.

Older women probably vote more than any other demographic. Many of them have experienced what they would consider unfairness in politics and business. Equal pay for women is certainly one of their issues. What some of them don’t seem to get, particularly when it comes to younger women, is that women only issues aren’t the only things they care about. Many younger women who are backing Bernie would have quite willingly backed progressive Elizabeth Warren but she chose not to run for president.

 

Nobody in the Democrat Party who is a “progressive” considers Hillary to be progressive too although Hillary claims she is. It took her a long time to come around on gay marriage and LBGT rights for instance. She tends to encourage only partial changes when it comes to things like raising the minimum wage or financial reform on Wall Street.

Many Democrats think of Hillary as an opportunist and an elitist because she often pals around with the very wealthy. Progressives don’t spend 50,000 dollars a week to rent a summer place on Long Island like the Clintons have. Progressives didn’t get invited to Donald Trump’s last wedding. Many of them simply don’t trust her and her political style.

Every so often she exposes herself as someone who thinks she knows more than she does. She attended Nancy Reagan’s funeral which was an OK thing to do. What wasn’t OK was her praise of Mrs. Reagan as being one of the first to organize the fight against the AIDS epidemic when Ronald Reagan’s administration did everything they could to avoid dealing with the AIDS crisis.

Her platform for running for president is basically a continuation of Obama’s policies. She doesn’t seem to understand what universal health care means to most people. To her it is when 100% of Americans are covered by insurance companies or Medicare. In all other countries universal health care is considered to be health coverage for everyone without insurance companies being involved at all.

Many Republicans and Democrats consider Hillary to be a war hawk based on her record when she was a senator and Secretary of State.

She talks about student loan debt like it is a natural thing that students just have to put up with. It is pretty common for college graduates to be still be paying off their student loans 20 years after leaving school.

Most Democrats including the progressives know that Bernie Sanders doesn’t have much of a chance of overtaking her. She has the Democratic establishment in her back pocket including Debbie Wasserman Shultz who is the party chair and was once one of Hillary’s campaign managers.

So why do so many people dislike her and not trust her aside from the above? One reason is that she often comes across as fake. At rallies she often points to one of her admirers and acknowledges that person with a big grin. When she does this it is like showing the public that she indeed does have friends and is popular. Sometimes she gets angry and forceful when she talks about inequality but after her performance a lot of people know she is going home to a mansion and servants. The “I made a mistake” on major issues just doesn’t cut it for some.

Hillary and Her Paid Speeches

Many Democrats suspect that Hillary tells different stories to different groups of people. She reasons that she is not willing to release the transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street firms, major corporations, and large institutions, because other speakers don’t release that type of information. It is pretty obvious her speeches are not about dry stuff like foreign affairs. Most likely she gives pep talks on the possibilities of the free enterprise system and the bright future ahead for America. At as much as $200,000.00 for an hour’s speech she was being paid mostly to motivate.

Hillary and Her E-mails

It is no secret that China and other countries have been hacking into American computers for years including one’s used by the US federal government. Unlike some other things like Benghazi that she has been accused of mishandling, Hillary’s use of a non-governmental e-mail account to do government business in her position as Secretary of State is a very serious matter. She admits now that it was a mistake in not having both a government and private e-mail account. She also claims her actions were no different than other former Secretary of State’s.

To some it is quite clear that she felt that she was above what had been established as protocol when using e-mails to conduct government business. Her service provider didn’t have government authorization to start with. He was some guy who operated out of an apartment in Denver, Colorado.

In all Hillary sent or received about 62,000 e-mails on her private server during her time as Secretary of State. When she left that office she had about 30,000 e-mails professionally “scrubbed” as private communications. The scrubbing was done by a private firm in New Jersey.

Hillary has appeared at a number of hearings regarding her e-mails. She tries to make it sound that she has been quite forthcoming in providing information but some think that she wouldn’t have provided the information had she not been caught.

She also set up an e-mail account for her assistant Huma Abedin who is married to former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner quit politics when it was revealed that he was sending pictures of himself to women on the internet of his penis showing through his underwear. Hillary and Abedin both had husbands they couldn’t trust but stayed married to them.

In 2009 Abedin was appointed as Hillary’s chief of staff in the State Department. While working for Hillary she also had 3 other jobs. She was a consultant for The Clinton Foundation, she created a consulting company called Zain Endeavors, and she worked as a consultant for a worldwide company called Teneo whose clients included Coca-Cola and MF Global. MF Global was a big player in the financial derivatives business and went bankrupt in 2011.

The Clinton’s background can get quite complicated. For some Democratic voters it isn’t just what they know that makes them distrust her it is the unknown entanglements both of them have with others with financial wealth and political influence.

Bernie Sanders

 

There was a time in America, back in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a lot of enthusiasm by young people to alter the status quo on a number of social issues. College campuses throughout the US were hotbeds for protests against a variety of social injustices. College was more affordable back then and many parents had saved their money so that their kids could get a step up in life.

It was a time when marches and other displays of discontent were common. It was like a sea change in some ways. A lot of young men were very concerned about being drafted into participating in the Viet Nam War that many wanted no part of. Racial inequality was an issue as were environmental concerns. It was a time of increased sexual freedom and the introduction of “the pill”. Popular music at the time reflected the youthful rebelliousness. A lot of young men let their hair grow long, fashion changed dramatically, and a lot of people were smoking pot.

Feminist groups were started. There was more concern for the poor and the less fortunate in life. Some looked to spiritualism or Eastern religions instead of Christianity. There was a lot of idealism going on.

 

Not all of America felt this way. Close to 50% of Americans were conservative and many of them loathed the idea of changes to the social structure. By the 1980s many of the people who were active in various causes were now in their thirties. A lot of those that had marched and protested years before had changed their focus. Writer Thomas Wolfe labelled it “The Me Generation”. Living on a commune, for instance, had become a futile effort and a thing of the past.

Idealism was put on the back burner. Some sort of job was needed to support their families. Delivering the mail for example wasn’t that bad an idea. It paid reasonably well and long walks were a healthy thing. Some started their own businesses including selling food that was more natural and without chemical additives. Being financially secure was no longer something to be scoffed at.

Bernie Sanders grew up in Brooklyn, New York in a Jewish family. His father was an immigrant from Poland. Bernie spent a bit of time as a teenager working on a kibbutz in Israel. He studied at Brooklyn College for 1 year (1959-60) before transferring to The University of Chicago where he was very active in student politics and joined The Young People’s Socialist League. In 1963 he took part in The March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech. In the summer of 1963 Sanders was arrested in Chicago during a demonstration against segregation in Chicago schools. He was also active in the peace and anti-war movements.

After college Sanders moved back to the New York area where he held a number of jobs including being a carpenter, a Head Start teacher, and a psychiatric aide. In 1968 he decided to move to Vermont and bought 85 acres of land there after seeing some posters in a window touting Vermont as a great place to live. He managed to scrape by in his first few years in Vermont by working as a film maker, writer, and once again as a carpenter.

 

At the time (1968) Vermont had a total population of 430,000 people and its biggest city, Burlington, had 35,000 people. Less than 8,000 people lived in the state capital, Montpelier. Dating back to the 19^th century Vermont was one of the 1^st states to be against slavery and one of the first that allowed women to vote.

If you drive around rural Vermont you would think that agriculture, including of course maple syrup, is a big part of the state’s economy. It isn’t and has been in decline for decades. Still it is often viewed by outsiders as a laid back state where nothing much of significance hardly ever happens.

As a member of the Liberty Union Party, a radical left wing group, Sanders ran for the office of governor in 1972 and 1974 and lost badly both times. In 1980 he was elected as mayor of the city of Burlington and won his first term by a mere 10 votes. He identified himself as a socialist.

Sanders served 3 terms as mayor of Burlington. The city became the first to fund community-trust housing. His administration balanced the budget and drew a minor league baseball team to the city. Perhaps his biggest accomplishment was halting a hotel and condo development on the city’s waterfront on Lake Champlain where the rail yards used to be located. Instead the area was redeveloped with a mix of housing, parks, and public space, including miles of beaches, a boathouse, bike paths, and a science center.



Burlington, Vermont

In 1988 Sanders ran for congress as an Independent and lost by a small margin. 2 years later he ran again and won. He was the first “independent” to be elected to congress in 40 years. He served as a representative for 16 years.

Bernie has been pretty steady about his political beliefs over the years but differs with most progressives on one particular issue and that is gun rights. He claims that because he is from a more rural state where hunting is common he doesn’t want to restrict hunters from possessing guns. It’s a pretty weak argument but it is possible he feels he wouldn’t get elected without standing with gun owners.

In 2007 Sanders was elected as the junior senator from Vermont. Even though he ran as an Independent he was endorsed by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Barak Obama and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean campaigned for Sanders. He caucused with the Democrats and gave them a majority 51-49 in the senate in 2007-2008.

His deal with the Democrats is that he will vote yes on most things that party wants to do. In return he gets to be on a number of committees including The Budget, Environment and Public Works, Energy and Natural Resources, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Veterans’ Affairs. In his tenure as senator he was the 3^rd most popular person in the US to hold that position.

Many Americans, particularly right wingers, consider anyone who has socialist leanings to be similar to a communist. Sanders admires the type of socialism that is part of the fabric of a number of Northern European countries including Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands. Every one of these countries has universal health care and provides their people with a number of  other social benefits like daycare.. Unions have a place in their societies. On the other hand free enterprise also thrives with companies like Ikea, Royal Dutch Shell, Volkswagen, BMW, Fiat, Siemens, Nestle, Bosch, Unilever, Maersk, doing business internationally.

In 2015 Sanders decided to run for president for the Democratic Party. Initially there were 5 contenders but 2 dropped out right away. Martin O’Malley, a former governor of Maryland dropped out a few months later. He seemed like a very reasonable guy but he never could get any traction. Most Democrats knew that this was Hillary Clinton’s turn.

Sanders started off slow and it took a while for him to attract big crowds, many who were younger voters. Nothing is going to get college students more on a politician’s side than telling them that you want to see free college tuition and that was exactly what Bernie was offering.

Bernie talks like an old hippie but more and more people were becoming aware of what he stands for. The truth is a plurality of Americans believe in most things he stands for but they aren’t savvy when it comes to being politically organized and are not connected to those in the US with influence financially and politically. Here’s a brief list of some things in Bernie’s platform.

-Raising the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour nationally.

-Free community college tuition.

-Getting big money out of politics.

-Combating climate change.

-A fair and humane immigration policy.

-More affordable social housing.

-Legalizing pot.

-Racial justice.

-Government investment in rebuilding the US’s infrastructure.

-Equal pay for women.

-Medicare for all.

-Reforming Wall Street.

-Making the wealthy and major corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

-Putting an end to oil fracking.

-Reducing America’s military involvement with other countries.

Sanders often talks about the financial inequality in the US. 70% of the countries in the world have a more equal distribution of wealth than the US. The gap between the rich and the poor in the US has grown wider and wider over the past several decades. A number of major corporations don’t pay any taxes at all although they benefit from a lot of things paid by other taxpayers like roads, bridges airports, police and fire departments, and the military.

 

Political Pundits

Most Americans still get their TV news from the 3 major US TV networks NBC, CBS, and ABC followed by FOX News which is 100% right wing Republican.

A common claim that Republicans make is that the media has a right wing bias. The reality is that Republicans are most of the guests on Sunday morning news talk shows like Meet The Press and Face The Nation.  Republican Senator John McCain has been on Meet The Press 69 times in the last number of years. Donald Trump is on TV almost every day.

Liberals often tend to watch MSNBC that has Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Lawrence O’Donnell as hosts who are to the left politically. They are counterbalanced by Morning Joe that runs for 3 hours every morning and is hosted by Republican Joe Scarborough. Chris Mathews has a program on MSNBC called Hardball and although he is a Democrat he’s usually more of a centrist. He often talks over his guests.

Politicians on political TV programs are often allowed to get away with bold faced lies. They are mostly Republicans. There are 2 reasons at least for this. One is the time restraint. It takes a while to point out a politician’s lies and the next commercial is coming up. Calling someone a liar has consequences. They may never come back on the show and they may be good for ratings and calling them out may alienate both advertisers and viewers.

 

There is something very unique on American political TV. Religion is often a part of discussions but it kind of slides by under the radar. No host ever questions a politician who makes claims that “god” has directed him or her to make political decisions, even when some of those decisions hurt the weaker in American society.

Rarely is someone without a high income given a voice on political TV shows. “Experts” offer their second hand opinions instead. People who are struggling from paycheck to paycheck could give a damn about polls and statistics. A lot of this stuff is just a game to pundits. They can’t hide their excitement when some new shit hits the fan.

The internet allows for open season on political views and a lot of what is written involves insults. Facts are quite often ignored. Rarely is there ever any bending in peoples’ opinions.

Talk radio is a big deal in the US and mostly it is right wing. A lot of listeners enjoy being pissed off and angry. Hysteria often rules and radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, and Glenn Beck egg them on. The theme is always the same, someone is plotting to take away some of their rights.

 

Summation

At this point Trump looks like he has the Republican nomination in the bag. If he is slightly short of votes when the Republican convention happens in Cleveland this summer, he could be contested but if the Republican Party chose someone else there would be anarchy and many of his supporters simply wouldn’t vote.

Trump’s inner circle is now claiming that his bombast over the past 9 months are so has all been an act and that he is now prepared to take the higher road and act more presidential. This won’t last.

If Trump gets the nomination he could very well harm other Republicans down ticket and both The Senate and The House could be up for grabs.

The Clintons at Trump's last wedding

The only thing stopping Hillary Clinton from being the next US president at this point is the chance that she gets criminally charged for her use of her private e-mails in ways that jeopardized her position as Secretary of State.

Bernie Sanders vows to stay in the run for the Democratic nomination until their convention. He has zero chance of winning but doesn’t want to let Hillary off the hook on his and his follower’s progressive ideals.

The most likely scenario is that most Democrats, including Sander’s supporters, a lot of Independents, and some Republicans, will bite the bullet and vote for Hillary.  

Many are concerned that if a Republican became president the Supreme Court would be controlled by right wing idealists for the next decade at least.

To many Hillary is simply the lesser of 2 evils.

Some people will get what they want. Most people won’t. What else is new?