Discussing American politics as civil human beings

Plenty of Dem backing billionaires are even richer. Super rich and/or super powerful people battling for more power/cash has been a constant in human history.

Curious why so many think the Koch brothers are the most diabolical ever. Can you enlighten on this matter Sok.

I found a link or two:

4-21-2015

“We will support whoever the candidate is,” David Koch reportedly said at a fundraising event. “But it should be Scott Walker.”

Now, however, in an interview with USA Today, Charles Koch has said that their field of potential endorsees is larger than just one. He confirmed that they are actually looking at five candidates who they believe have “a good chance of getting elected: Walker, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/koch-brothers-reveal-list-of-5-potential-gop-candidates-to-support/


10-8-2015

To see the importance of the speaker to the party bottom line, take a look at how much money the departing (he hopes) Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) raised.

Since becoming the party’s minority leader in 2007, Boehner has raised and donated at least $57 million for the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to Federal Election Commission records. He also helped raise large amounts for individual candidates across the country.

Boehner also holds tight ties through his large network of former aides-turned-lobbyists to two outside groups spending big money to support House Republican candidates: the super PAC Congressional Leadership Fund, and the non-disclosing nonprofit American Action Network.

Both of the congressmen who at one point were in line to succeed Boehner -- former Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and McCarthy -- are (or were, in Cantor’s case) also substantial fundraisers with connections to Wall Street and the Washington lobbying scene. Cantor operated his own super PAC and dark money nonprofit group to raise large donations.

House Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Boehner’s predecessor as speaker, is an even more prolific fundraiser. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said Pelosi helped the party raise $100 million in 2014 elections.

The current crop of announced speaker candidates don’t exactly have the same fundraising pedigree. The four-term Webster has raised just $4.7 million over his career. Chaffetz raised just $3.2 over five terms. And Westmoreland has raised a little more than $7 million over 12 years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/republican-speaker-fundraising_5616e57ce4b0082030a1d9d9

Once again, the actual voters of the Right are kicking out the establishment types one after another after another. The insurgency will go after the Koch brothers too, if needed.

 

10-10-2015

NORCROSS, Ga. (AP) — Donald Trump is a brash New Yorker who knows the path to the Republican presidential nomination runs through a swath of Southern states where residents pride themselves on graciousness and gentility.

He leads many state polls in the region just as he does nationally. In the last few weeks he's hired aides in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia to go along with staff in South Carolina, which hosts the South's first primary.

Trump told reporters he's got several television ads ready to run "if I have to." He said he'd initially planned to spend $20 million on advertising by this point, but argued there has been no need; he pointed to free media attention and crowds like those Saturday and an August rally in Alabama that drew more than 30,000.

Indeed, political observers across the South say Trump shouldn't be taken lightly and that the region could give him a big boost next year, even if it may not seem like a natural fit.

"He may not sound like us," said David Mowery, an Alabama-based consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats in multiple states, "but he's saying the things that people in the Republican base — and even disaffected, frustrated voters outside that base — want to hear."

South Carolina is accustomed to its place immediately after Iowa and New Hampshire in the nominating process. But the rest of the South is enjoying newfound attention, driven by Georgia and others moving up for a March 1 Super Tuesday dubbed the "the SEC primary" after the college athletics league. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia will have 471 delegates at stake that day. Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Florida follow in the next two weeks with a combined 301 delegates.

...Roger Villere, Louisiana's longtime Republican Party chairman and a vice chairman of the national GOP. With so many states bunched close together, he said, it may be a campaign won largely on television and sweeping visits — just the scenario for a bombastic billionaire.

http://news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-brash-yorker-picks-southern-campaign-073104585--election.html

 

A spoonful of incorrect assertions, a dash of propaganda, a bit more propaganda for good measure, and topped off with bigotry. Nice dinner you cooked up.

 

But I didn't add naivety and chose to overwhelmingly go for realism as a base product.


He has been flipflopping every time possible in the most obscene ways to please whoever he's talking to. His whole run is one big marketing scheme, with the bonus if by some miracle he gets elected, he can play president for four years.

 

Trump would make a good african president:

 

anyone whose opinion about anything has changed as a result of these threads please state what opinion was changed.

For me, I used to think west coast liberals just kept their heads in the sand. Now I know that it doesn't matter if they can see the real world or not. As for the Europeans, I used to think anti American resentment had to do with dislike of tourists. Now I see that it's deeply rooted in missile envy.

 

I used to think the standard Rebuplican image was a huge overreaction.

Now I know it isn't if you're Ragic.

 

AND Americans are better in bed.

Look it isn't that hard to become American, just sneak across the southern border and promise to vote Democrat.

 

Ah, on the defensive now. It is definitely true what my friend told me after he went to Arkansas. "The people are very nice ... but politidcally a lot like children"

Just a baby nation in big boy pants. A flailing toddler with a lot of missile control buttons.

 

And Europe is like an old man with Alzheimer's since they don't seem to remember their own history.

 

As usual a factually incorrect statement. You got a lot of those, son

 

Pretty sure he never said he hates Mexicans. Not sure if he flip-flopped on illegal immigration or not, since I haven't bothered to keep up with him.

That said, I'm still more on your side of this than DJ's. On a related note, does anyone else think it's funny how quickly people seem to forget that Bill Clinton asked him to run for President as a Republican? I think I saw a news blurb a few weeks ago about how Bill was supposedly going to tear into Trump for his disparaging remarks about his wife's political career. It just seems like so much of a show.

 

it was my understanding that it was more of a rumor that clinton asked him to run, with clinton recently denying it on colbert's show iirc

 

Clinton denying that he did something? That'd be new...

Well, either way, someone's lying, probably both.

 

i'm simply saying that i am familiar with it as a denied rumor- whether or not it is true is another thing, but you stating it as if it were so is, ever so slightly, throwing me


i suppose the much, *much* shorter way of saying all of this would be- source?

 

Uhm.

Something something all mexians are rapist criminals and we should build a wall to stop them? Dunno.

 

I think maybe it's not racist because he has a mexican friend?

 

facts Boozha is a fringe nut even for a Belgian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium–United_States_relations

 

get ready to feel really stupid

 

Hee, hee, heeeeeeeeeee he

Ha ho ho ha