2016 USA Presidential Elections

Maybe by the 2020 election they'll just hold public auction for politicians. That's probably all the transparency we can hope for.
 
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tigger said:
Maybe by the 2020 election they'll just hold public auction for politicians. That's probably all the transparency we can hope for.
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It doesn't matter how transparent the election process is when the Treaties can't even be talked about until they are in effect for four years. (see Trans Pacific Partnership)
 
GRtak said:
It doesn't matter how transparent the election process is when the Treaties can't even be talked about until they are in effect for four years. (see Trans Pacific Partnership)
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Now there's a horrible damned idea. You'd think after ten years of trying to iron it out in secret they'd call it quits. But I don't think we're that lucky.
 
Sen. Rand Paul Announces 2016 Presidential Run


Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced today that he will seek the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

"I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government," he said in a statement on his website.

The announcement comes ahead of a scheduled speech today at 11:30 a.m.

Paul also released a video with the opening line: "On April 7, a different kind of Republican will take on Washington."


We'll update this post with news from Paul's speech.

Paul faces what is likely to be a crowded Republican field for 2016. Although Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, his colleague in the Senate, is the only other Republican to have announced his intention to run for president, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, as well as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, are expected to join the fray.

Polls show Paul in a three-way tie for third place in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Bush and Walker lead the most recent average of polls.

Paul, the son of longtime libertarian Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010 in the Tea Party wave. An ophthalmologist by training, Paul is pitching himself as a "different kind of Republican." When he was first elected, he was seen as candidate whose libertarian ideas, in the words of The Washington Post, "could make him the most unusual and intriguing voice among the major contenders in the 2016 field.

"But now, as he prepares to make his formal announcement Tuesday, Paul is a candidate who has turned fuzzy, having trimmed his positions and rhetoric so much that it's unclear what kind of Republican he will present himself as when he takes the stage."
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As he prepared to announce his presidential ambitions, Paul adopted a more muscular defense policy and reached out to religious conservatives. (For more on the former, you can listen to Paul's interview with NPR's Robert Siegel last September.) Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV, told NPR's Scott Simon in a recent interview that Paul could be called "libertarian-ish."

"You know, I think he is talking what he believes," he said. "But I think he draws a lot of ideas from his father generally without some of the baggage, to be honest.

"And people are more interested, I think, now than even a few years ago of being allowed to make more choices that are important in their lives. And you see that reflected in things like the growth in pot legalization and gay marriage. Then at the same time they're very skeptical of government, whether it's a conservative Republican government under Bush or a liberal Democratic government under Obama."
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Following his rally today in Louisville, Ky., Rand travels to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada ? the four states where the presidential nominating contests begin.

You can follow more detailed coverage of this story on our It's All Politics blog here.
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Does the Republican party not have any non-clown president candidates?
 
ahpadt said:
Does the Republican party not have any non-clown president candidates?
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The nomination process is controlled by the Tea Party and Moral Majority crowd; this trims out the more rational candidates. This also dooms the party come general election.
 
argatoga said:
The nomination process is controlled by the Tea Party and Moral Majority crowd; this trims out the more rational candidates. This also dooms the party come general election.
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So are we meant to just congratulate Hillary already?
 
Two actually. One to help thin the herd, the other to elect the pres and other candidates running for lesser offices.

In key swing states, weed is polling better than all potential 2016 candidates

In three key swing states, marijuana legalization is more popular than any potential 2016 presidential contender. That's according to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted in March.

More than 80 percent of adults in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida support medical marijuana, according to the survey. Fifty one percent of Pennsylvanians, 52 percent of Ohioans and 55 percent of Floridians also support legalizing small amounts of marijuana for personal use.

Recreational weed is polling just a hair better than Hillary Clinton in all three states -- she's currently pulling favorability numbers in the high-40s, low-50s range. And marijuana is considerably more popular than any of the major Republican candidates. In Ohio, for instance, recreational marijuana outpolls Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz by more than two-to-one. In Pennsylvania, medical marijuana is more than three times more popular than Jeb Bush. Home-state favorites Bush and Rubio poll better in Florida, but they're still running 8 to 13 points behind recreational marijuana.

Granted, I'm employing some sleight-of-hand here. Marijuana legalization is an issue and candidates are people. You can't really compare them in an apples-to-apples way like this.

Still, though, the numbers illustrate two facts: the continued support for liberalizing marijuana laws, and the ambiguity around presidential candidates that you'd expect more than a year out from the election -- after all, Darth Vader was polling better than the 2016 field as of last year.

Another important point: on marijuana in particular, high polling numbers don't necessarily translate into election victories. In Florida, for instance, 88 percent of voters said they supported medical marijuana last July. But the state's constitutional amendment to allow medical marijuana failed to gather the 60 percent support it needed to become law last November .

Medical marijuana proponents are already working to put the issue back on the Florida ballot in 2016, when the electorate will likely be younger and more liberal -- perhaps just enough to push it over that 60 percent threshold. A group in Ohio wants to put full marijuana legalization before voters this November. And marijuana will likely show up on the ballot in at least six other states in 2016, including California, Nevada and Arizona.

All of which adds up to the fact that marijuana will be a mainstream election issue that 2016 candidates will need to grapple with, according to John Hudak of the Brookings Institution. Some Republicans are eager to frame the topic as a states-rights issue, while others, like Rand Paul, approach it from the standpoint of criminal justice reform and fiscal responsibility. Democrats can capitalize on the issue to reach out to their young voter base and engage them on questions of social and racial justice.

Overall, Hudak concludes that "in some ways marijuana policy is the perfect issue for a presidential campaign. It has far reaching consequences that both parties have reason to engage." While it won't rise to the level of a litmus test issue for most voters, candidates won't be able to avoid talking about it -- or they'll do so at their own peril.
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ahpadt said:
So are we meant to just congratulate Hillary already?
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Hopefully not! This is our chance to elect someone who is even remotely libertarian and might actually try and fix our economic, foreign policy, and governmental messes.
 
Vette Boss said:
He wants Magical Sky Daddy to replace certain elements of government. This automatically disqualifies him, in my eyes.
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that kinda sounds like hyperbole but do you really think that discontinuing some federal welfare programs that the poor would have to depend on god... i mean some will just die regardless
 
The only welfare I'm against is corporate welfare; tax breaks and such. I'm in the belief that globally, a society is judged by how they treat the least fortunate. Giving those people the cold shoulder, so that corporations and the super wealthy pay less taxes, is morally wrong.
 
I don't think anyone wants to cut off welfare programs altogether. I like what Maine just did: you have to at least volunteer a few hours a week to receive benefits. Otherwise it's too easy to just not work and live on the taxpayer's dime. Speaking of taxes, we could save a buttload of them by eliminating and/or combining a bunch of redundant and unnecessary federal programs and departments.
 
I think the individual level of mooching is actually quite low, much lower than many believe. Corporations are by far and away the biggest violators, refusing to pay for the harm their operation causes to the environment. Who ends up paying for their mess? The federal government does, and by extension, the common citizen. Do you want to pay for that? I fucking don't!
 
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