2016 elections - because it's never too early

[Legbiter]

And I really don't think a woman (Wellesley, '69) who has been involved in politics since Roe v Wade and the Equal Rights Amendment is actually "pandering" when it comes to gender politics. 

Ok, then maybe not pandering but a little bit retarded. She does seem to play to the safety space/privileges crowd. Sanders always tries to move back to Wall Street and the division of resources.

Clinton: Women Women Women Women Women

Trump: America America America America America

[Martinus]

I sorta like how, given that America has one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world (definitely compared to most of Europe) people are acting as if the pro-life side was effectively one step away from a total victory of theocratic Handmaid's Tale nightmare.

[alfred russel]

If Operation Wetback was intended to deport every single hispanic, legal or not, why did they do such a shitty job?

I never said it was intended to deport every single Hispanic. But it wasn't concered with deporting only illegals and any program by Trump will be much more explicitly so.

You said it was ethnic cleansing.

Tim's apparent (incomplete) list of ethnic cleansers in history:
Adolf Hitler
The Young Turks
Slobodan Milosevic
Dwight David Eisenhower

Don't think Ike objected to the mass population transfers at the end of WWII.

Thank you for proving the point.

[Capetan Mihali]

Operation Wetback was done in conjunction with the Mexican Government of the time, not in defiance of it -- Mexico wanted its surplus labor paisanos back home to work the export crop fields.  Really, it was the unprecedented expulsion of an unprecedented immigration of Mexicans to the US; there was nothing wrong with the wrapping-up of the bracero program, as such.

The days of 1954-55 are a long, long time a way, in every sense, including the presence, on a mass scale and of 35+ years duration, of undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans in the US -- something unimaginable during the Eisenhower administration.

Another expansion (one that became more and more foreseeable during the two Eisenhower terms) has been in the constitutional restriction on police practices.  There was no Brignoni-Ponce (who was, ironically, a Puerto Rican, IIRC) back then, and the police have to get by on sleazy tactics like the roadblocks and airport checks mentioned above, which are actually optional, and which every good American (not in possession of contraband) has a patriotic duty to refuse to provide identification at.  I've done it; they don't like it and will get pissy, but ultimately they can't do shit.

[Phillip V]

Trump releases ominous video of Bill Clinton, cigar, and Hillary's war on women:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFwTioiGhQj/

[Legbiter]

Trump releases ominous video of Bill Clinton, cigar, and Hillary's war on women:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFwTioiGhQj/

That will leave a mark. 

*Edit*

Trump just took away her woman card and made it his own.   

[citizen k]

This article is pretty doom and gloom but it has some funny lines so I'm sharing it with good humored languishites.

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/lower-away/


I hope you're enjoying these horse latitudes of the political year, when the seas suddenly turn glassy and the Berning sun begins to roast all the diverse and inclusive hands on Hillary's deck, who wait in anxiety for the first sign of a fresh breeze to push them toward landfall. Meanwhile, full fathom five below the dead calm waters the leviathan Trump waits in his comfortable darkness, circling forward, circling back, solitary, malevolent, content in his bulking grievances, patiently awaiting his moment to rise and smash his rival.

Things go eerily quiet and still before the California primaries. At this stage, the two major parties have discredited themselves so thoroughly that a necrotic stink wafts around the election of '16. Who put that road-kill possum in Hillary's podium? Why does Donald look every week more and more like a lurching Golem? The parties are rudderless. Their leaders range the decks like wailing revenants. It's as if the mortal remains of Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan have come from the grave to eat the brains of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Reince Priebus. The rectified essence of every zombie fantasy churned out of Hollywood seeps through the capillaries of the dying political establishment, as it stews and ferments and waits to be loaded on the garbage barge of history.

Hillary threw a "hail Mary" after the Oregon debacle, proposing that husband Bill would become some kind of economic czar in her inevitable "turn" at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That's when you knew her crusade was doomed. It raised such a snickering in the media that the sick tropes of HBO's Veep show looked like press releases from Proctor & Gamble's PR office in comparison. Bill did such a great job at repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, maybe this dynamic duo of lawyers ("two for the price of one!") can work on eliminating the anti-trust laws, the First Amendment, and the writ of habeas corpus — and then America can become a fullblown banana republic.

Trump has evidently been working on that smile of his: the slitty eyes, the weird horizontal lip stretch under that baleen of head-gear, the perfect expression of his white whale-hood. The crew from the ghostly GOP Pequod still doesn't know what the heck to do about him. They rock above the depths in their flimsy dinghies, harpoons drooping, waiting for the sea to boil below them and their boats to splinter.

That will precede a more general splintering to come of the republic, first by demographics, then by territory. The most exceptional thing about the US has been the rapidity of its rise and now fall in the roll-call of empires. We barely had time to put together a coherent culture that historians of the future (enjoying ratatouille with fresh rat by firelight) could identify, and now it's all percolating into a dreadful maelstrom in which one catches glimpses of the Kardashians, PT Barnum, Betsy Ross, Davey Crockett, and Eleanor Roosevelt amid the detritus of broken Tupperware and flapping pages of the Affordable Care Act. What a goddamned mess we've left to posterity.

Something is in the air that tells me Hillary will be dumped by the convention in Philadelphia in favor of Uncle Joe Biden, biding his time practically next door in Wilmington. Speaking of turns, isn't it Delaware's turn for a president? He'll be a respectable place-holder, and he might even get elected, though the party will dissolve before he's done, just in time for Texas to secede from the Union and set the tone for California, Oregon, and Washington State. Before you know it, the political map will look like 1861 again.

Donald Trump will be forgotten before Thanksgiving. He will leave a bizarre mental imprint on the life of the nation-that-was, something like a bad acid trip. And then the people of North America may actually have to start grappling with the problems induced by a failed banking system, population overshoot, climate instability, and the lost boundaries of social behavior.

[CountDeMoney]

LOL GOP Pequod, love it

[Valmy]

What is "population overshoot"?

[CountDeMoney]

Not enough Baby Boomers dying off fast enough.
Once we hit Woodstock50, American society is going to collapse upon itself, from the sheer gravitational nostalgia singularity.

[CountDeMoney]

I sorta like how, given that America has one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world (definitely compared to most of Europe) people are acting as if the pro-life side was effectively one step away from a total victory of theocratic Handmaid's Tale nightmare.

It was one veto away from it in Oklahoma last week.

[derspiess]

Chilling.

[CountDeMoney]

I know that breaks your heart, fetusfucker.

[derspiess]

Prolly will have trouble sleeping tonight.

[CountDeMoney]

Nothing a warm glass of uterine lining can't cure.