Rigged Convention will lead to Revolt (1) Downward mobility behind Trump vote. The voters aren’t crazy; the GOP elite are crazy (2) Republican voters show contempt when GOP elite tells them to reject Trump (3) GOP hawks consider voting for Hillary (4) NYT editorial calls Trump "a shady, bombastic liar", intolerant and divisive (5) Democrat Superdelegates overrule Colorado voters (6) Wall St condemns Trump plan to tax Hedge Fund speculators (7) GOP chiefs will steal the Nomination from Trump, by rigging the Convention - Bloomberg (8) Trump wave will become a Tsunami. Rigged Convention will lead to Revolt (1) Downward mobility behind Trump vote. The voters aren’t crazy; the GOP elite are crazy http://atimes.com/2016/03/trump-triumphed-due-to-downward-mobility/  Trump triumphed due to downward mobility By David P. Goldman on March 1, 2016 It’s still a horse race, but only just: Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday victories in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas and Massachusetts outweigh the Ted Cruz victory in his home state of Texas and neighboring Oklahoma. The Republican Establishment will not close ranks around Cruz as the last candidate capable of beating Trump. Marco Rubio’s consolation price was the Minnesota caucuses with 37% of the vote, For the past six months my Republican friends and I have watched Donald Trump’s ascendancy and asked ourselves whether the voters had gone crazy. The voters aren’t crazy. We in the Republican elite were crazy: we thought we could allow the American economy to remain a rigged game indefinitely. The voters think otherwise. That’s why Trump is winning. That’s also why Bernie Sanders, the least likely presidential candidate in living memory, gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money. If you don’t give people capitalism, the late Jude Wanniski used to say, they’ll take socialism. Americans are shrewd. You can’t spit on them and tell them it’s raining. They know the game is rigged against them. They know it’s rigged the same way that they know a lottery is rigged: There aren’t any winners. They know that they are downwardly mobile because they aren’t upwardly mobile. Americans don’t mind playing against bad odds–they play the lottery all the time–but they think that they are playing against zero odds. Ordinary Americans had an outside chance to get rich until 2008. Now they have no chance at all. Upward mobility is America’s gauge of well-being. It’s not the decline of median family income that gets under Americans’ skin, but the perception that the elites have pulled the ladder up behind them. During the quarter-century after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, it was only a slight exaggeration to say that someone in every family got rich. They bought a cable television franchise, started a website, got some stock in a high-flying tech company, flipped real estate, or ran a small business that became a big business. Inequality didn’t bother Americans as long as they had a chance at a winning ticket–not necessarily a fair chance, but at least the kind of chance that paid off occasionally for ordinary people. As long they could see that people like them were becoming rich, they kept playing the game. Poor people buy overpriced lottery tickets and rich people buy overpriced insurance for the same reason: the poor overpay for the chance to become rich, and the rich overpay to make sure they won’t become poor. As the distinguished Canadian economists Reuven and Gabriele Brenner argue, social mobility is the secret of economic behavior. People don’t count the pennies in their pay packet: the poor look for a path to middle class security, and the affluent insure themselves against the slippery slope back to poverty. You can’t get rich any more in America. The dot.com bubble was a delusion, to be sure, but so many people made big money that even Mike Doonesbury briefly became a dot.com millionaire in the eponymous cartoon. Flipping houses with next-to-nothing down during the subprime bubble years of the George W. Bush administration enriched millions of households. Bubbles they were, but they were democratic bubbles. The markets provided leverage for the masses. The stock market bought companies run by 20-year olds in cutoff jeans and flip-flops, and the mortgage market financed housewives as if they were real-estate magnates. Capital, also known as other people’s money, is what makes capitalism capitalism. Nobody gets rich on IRA payroll deductions. The housewife flipping condos in Florida, to be sure, abused other people’s money as surely as the subprime structurers. That’s not what matters. It was an equal-opportunity scam. In 2008, the door shut on middle-class aspirations with a giant crash. More businesses closed than opened during the post-2008 "recovery" than opened, as I noted in a February 29 essay. And businesses with fewer than 50 employees accounted for only 1 in 6 jobs created since 2005. In the three decades preceding the 2008 crash, by contrast, In other words, startups created 2.9 million jobs a year while established firms lost 1.5 million jobs a year. Asset prices recovered, but there was no way that ordinary folk could get in on the gravy train. Private equity firms raised billions to buy foreclosed homes and rent them to people who used to own their own homes at much higher total cost. The national homeownership rate has fallen from 69% to 64% since the crisis, and rents are rising at 4% a year, much faster than incomes. Americans tolerate a wealthy elite if and only if they can get in on the action, too. The cartelized, corrupted, closed wealth-creating mechanism of the past eight years shuts them out. The Republican base is out for blood. They want revenge on the elites that have shut them out of wealth creation. Pace Peggy Noonan, it has nothing to do with "protected" vs. "unprotected." It’s about wannabe’s vs. be’s. And pace Bret Stephens, it has nothing to do with what Stephens calls "a new political wave sweeping the globe—leaders coming to power through democratic means while avowing illiberal ends" including Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Americans have different demands than Turks and Magyars. I’ve made no secret of my preference for Ted Cruz, and still hope that he can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He fielded an intelligent and disciplined campaign strategy which hasn’t worked out. Cruz counted on evangelical Protestants to buoy him South Carolina, but most evangelicals voted for Trump instead. The evangelicals always have had a split personality, balancing a passion for social conservatism with the boosterism of the prosperity gospel. Evidently the evangelicals aren’t voting on conservative principles, as Cruz exhorted them to do. Trump leapfrogged Cruz on immigration and security, offering sound-bites–build a wall on the Mexican border and stop Muslims from entering the country–that drowned out Cruz’ more nuanced positions. Cruz took stands against the Republican Establishment; Trump gave them a nonstop insult-comedy routine. Downward mobility is the decisive issue in the 2016 elections. Unless Trump’s rivals can capture the imagination of the electorate with a vision of renewed upward mobility, Trump will take the nomination. A Clinton-Trump general election would be the dirtiest, nastiest, sleaziest and most divisive since the Civil War. In that case, God help the United States of America. (2) Republican voters show contempt when GOP elite tells them to reject Trump http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/05/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-party.html Rank and File Republicans Tell Party Elites: We’re Sticking With Donald Trump  From Michigan to Louisiana to California on Friday, rank-and-file Republicans expressed mystification, dismissal and contempt regarding the instructions that their party’s most high-profile leaders were urgently handing down to them: Reject and defeat Donald J. Trump. Their angry reactions, in the 24 hours since Mitt Romney and John McCain urged millions of voters to cooperate in a grand strategy to undermine Mr. Trump’s candidacy, have captured the seemingly inexorable force of a movement that still puzzles the Republican elite and now threatens to unravel the party they hold dear. In interviews, even lifelong Republicans who cast a ballot for Mr. Romney four years ago rebelled against his message and plan. "I personally am disgusted by it — I think it’s disgraceful," said Lola Butler, 71, a retiree from Mandeville, La., who voted for Mr. Romney in 2012. "You’re telling me who to vote for and who not to vote for? Please." "There’s nothing short of Trump shooting my daughter in the street and my grandchildren — there is nothing and nobody that’s going to dissuade me from voting for Trump," Ms. Butler said. A fellow Louisiana Republican, Mindy Nettles, 33, accused the party of "using Romney as a puppet" to protect itself from Mr. Trump because its leaders could not control him. "He has a mind of his own," she said. "He can think." The furious campaign now underway to stop Mr. Trump and the equally forceful rebellion against it captured the essence of the party’s breakdown over the past several weeks: Its most prominent guardians, misunderstanding their own voters, antagonize them as they try to reason with them, driving them even more energetically to Mr. Trump’s side. As Mr. Romney amplified his pleas on Friday, Mr. Trump snubbed a major meeting of Republican activists and leaders after rumblings that protesters were prepared to demonstrate against him there, in the latest sign of Mr. Trump’s break from the apparatus of the party whose nomination he is marching toward.Continue reading the main story As polls showed Mr. Trump likely to capture the Louisiana primary on Saturday, the biggest prize among states holding contests this weekend, the party establishment in Washington seemed seized by anxiety and despair. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, a long-running gathering of traditional conservatives, attendees feared that they were witnessing an event that has not occurred in more than a century: the breaking apart of a major American political party. They spoke ruefully of "fidelity" lost and "values" forgone. They conceded a strange new feeling of powerlessness in the face of Mr. Trump’s ascendance. And they mourned for a 162-year-old party that is starting to seem unrecognizable to them. Robert Walker, a former Pennsylvania congressman, lamented that the nomination of Mr. Trump, with his profane style and ideological flexibility, "would rebrand the party in ways that would take us a long time to recover from." Rick Santorum, a former Republican presidential candidate, warned of the "Republican Party potentially being torn up," and Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska groused about what would "actually make America great again." (It was not Mr. Trump.) (3) GOP hawks consider voting for Hillary From: John Cameron <blackheathbooks@internode.on.net> Subject: U.S PRESIDENCY. Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2016 13:05:47 +1100 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/trump-clinton-neoconservatives-220151 GOP hawks declare war on Trump Prominent Republican hawks are debating whether to hold their noses and vote for Clinton instead. By Michael Crowley 03/02/16 05:55 PM EST Updated 03/03/16 03:10 PM EST Donald Trump calls the Iraq War a lie-fueled fiasco, admires Vladimir Putin and says he would be a "neutral" arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians. When it comes to America’s global role he asks, "Why are we always at the forefront of everything?" Even more than his economic positions, Trump's foreign policy views challenge GOP orthodoxy in fundamental ways. But while parts of the party establishment are resigning themselves or even backing Trump's runaway train, one group is bitterly digging in against him: the hawkish foreign policy elites, including many of those known as neoconservatives. In interviews with POLITICO, leading GOP foreign-policy hands — many of whom promoted the Iraq War, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable — said Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy and vowed never to support him. So deep is their revulsion that several even say they could vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November. "Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin," said Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department official under George W. Bush and a strategic theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad. Trump's election would be "an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy," Cohen said, adding that "he has already damaged it considerably." Cohen, an Iraq war backer who is often called a neoconservative but said he does not identify himself that way, said he would "strongly prefer a third party candidate" to Trump, but added: "Probably if absolutely no alternative: Hillary." In a March 1 interview with Vox, Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations who backed the Iraq War and often advocates a hawkish foreign policy, said that he, too, would vote for Clinton over Trump. "I'm literally losing sleep over Donald Trump," he said. "She would be vastly preferable to Trump." Cohen helped to organize an open letter signed by several dozen GOP foreign policy insiders — many of whom are not considered neocons — that was published Wednesday night by War on the Rocks, a defense and foreign policy website . "[W]e are unable to support a Party ticket with Mr. Trump at its head," the letter declared. It cited everything from Trump’s "admiration for foreign dictators" to his "inexcusable" support for "the expansive use of torture." The letter was signed by dozens of Republican foreign policy experts, including Boot; Peter Feaver, a former senior national security aide in George W. Bush's White House; Robert Zoellick, a former deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; and Dov Zakheim, a former Bush Pentagon official; and Kori Schake, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a former Bush State Department official. Several other neocons said they find themselves in an impossible position, constitutionally incapable of voting for Clinton but repelled by a Republican whose foreign policy views they consider somewhere between nonexistent and dangerous — and disconnected from their views about American power and values abroad. "1972 was the first time I was old enough to vote for president, and I did not vote. Couldn't vote for McGovern for foreign policy reasons, nor for Nixon because of Watergate," said Elliott Abrams, a former national security council aide to George W. Bush who specializes in democracy and the Middle East. "I may be in the same boat in 2016, unable to vote for Trump or Clinton." Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, something of a dean of Washington neoconservatives, said he would seek out a third option before choosing between Trump and Clinton. "If it's Trump-Clinton, I'd work with others to recruit a strong conservative third party candidate, and do my best to help him win (which by the way would be more possible than people think, especially when people — finally — realize Trump shouldn't be president and Hillary is indicted)," Kristol wrote in an email. Kristol and Abrams have advised Florida senator Marco Rubio, the preferred choice of several neoconservatives, who admire his call for "moral clarity" in foreign policy and strong emphasis on human rights and democracy. Alarm brewing for months in GOP foreign policy circles burst into public view last week, when Robert Kagan, a key backer of the Iraq War and American global might, wrote in the Washington Post that a Trump nomination would force him to cross party lines. "The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton," Kagan warned. "The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be." In an interview, Kagan said his opposition to Trump "has nothing to do with foreign policy." From: "Come Carpentier comecarpentier@gmail.com [shamireaders]" Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2016 16:23:22 +0530 Has the worm turned in the US? Obama seems to have turned against the traditional conservative Sunni US allies and the Israelis who share essential interests with the Gulf monarchies. Unsurprisingly, the Saudis and Israelis are livid. Interestingly Trump may be closer to Obama in his foreign policy views than Hillary Clinton who harks back to G W Bush and Cheney (4) NYT editorial calls Trump "a shady, bombastic liar", intolerant and divisive http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/opinion/the-party-of-trump-and-the-path-forward-for-democrats.html The Party of Trump, and the Path Forward for Democrats By THE EDITORIAL BOARD MARCH 1, 2016 The strength of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the Super Tuesday primary contests, evident before the first votes were cast, brings the 2016 presidential race to a point of reckoning. Not enough delegates were at stake to give either candidate a mathematical lock on a nomination, but voters can see the shape of the choice facing them in the general election. The Republicans seem to be reeling, unable or unwilling to comprehend that a shady, bombastic liar is hardening the image of their party as a symbol of intolerance and division. Last summer, as Mr. Trump began to rise in the polls, party leaders took umbrage at the idea that they’d have to do something to keep the nomination from the likes of him. They stood aside and said, let voters decide. Now voters are deciding. They are leaning, in unbelievable numbers, toward a man whose quest for the presidency revolves around targeting religious and racial minorities and people with disabilities, who flirts with white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, who ridicules and slanders those who disagree with him. His opponents, meanwhile, have rushed to adopt his anger-filled message. It’s small wonder that Republican leaders don’t seem to know quite what to say. "If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games," House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Tuesday, after months of such games. He sounded naïvely unaware of the darker elements within the Republican Party, present for decades, and now holding sway: "This party does not prey on people’s prejudices. We appeal to their highest ideals. This is the party of Lincoln." The Republican Party is taking a big step toward becoming the party of Trump. Those who could challenge Mr. Trump — Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — are not only to the right of Mr. Trump on many issues, but are embracing the same game of exclusion, bigotry and character assassination. That Mr. Rubio would make double entendres about the size of Mr. Trump’s hands and talk about Mr. Trump wetting his pants shows how much his influence has permeated this race and how willingly his rivals are copying his tactics. (5) Democrat Superdelegates overrule Colorado voters http://mycatbirdseat.com/2016/03/colorado-delegates-split-evenly-after-bernie-sanders-defeats-hillary-clinton/ Colorado delegates split evenly after Bernie Sanders defeats Hillary Clinton Along with Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Vermont, Sanders won Colorado on Super Tuesday. By My Catbird Seat Mar 7, 2016 Winning a Super Tuesday state by 19 points seems like it would matter, but Sen. Bernie Sanders’ victory in Colorado didn’t earn him more delegates than Hillary Clinton. In fact, she may end up with an even greater amount, despite a big loss at the polls. Of the 78 delegates up for grabs in Colorado, Sanders won 38. And so did Clinton. How can that be? It’s not that 59 to 40 percent is counted as a tie in The Centennial State, but rather, has something to do with something called a superdelegate. Only 66 of the 78 state delegates in Colorado are actually delegates in the most specific sense. The other 12 are superdelegates, elected Democratic Party officials who are not bound by a state’s poll or election results. So, after the 66 was divvied up proportionally according to the state party’s caucus rules, 38 to Sanders and 28 to Clinton, the superdelegates were free to choose which candidate to support. Ten of Colorado’s superdelegates chose Clinton, while two remain uncommitted, hence the 38 to 38 current share of the state’s delegates between the two presidential candidates. That is bad news for the Sanders supporters in Colorado who helped the democratic socialist win in nearly 80 percent of the state’s 64 counties and turn out more Democratic voters than even those who voted in the 2008 primary that featured the rising political rock star of the day, then-Senator Barack Obama. Things could still possibly get worse for those "feeling the Bern" in Colorado. Distribution of the state’s 66 delegates could still change, because as they’re selected at party meetings in the run-up to the state party convention in April, the delegates at county conventions are unbound, according to the Denver Post. Only at the state party convention will the delegate count be finalized. The 12 superdelegates are under pressure to move to Sanders out of respect for the caucus voting results from Super Tuesday, but there’s no sign of them doing so. "I appreciate the intense attraction that Senator Sanders has for many, but my support for Secretary Clinton has never wavered," Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is also a superdelegate, told the Denver Post on Wednesday through a spokesperson. [...] (6) Wall St condemns Trump plan to tax Hedge Fund speculators http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-markets-idUSMTZSAPEC31DOUFF1 Wall Street's big short: President Donald J. Trump NEW YORK | By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss and David Randall Add the juggernaut that is Donald J. Trump to the list of what-ifs that is worrying Wall Street. A growing realization that the unpredictable New York real estate developer is in a position to win the Republican nomination and then battle Hillary Clinton for the White House in November's election has caused some investors to sell U.S. stocks. They fear having such a wild-card president could trigger trade wars, hurt the economy and add a lot of market volatility. "As the market rarely feasts on lack of predictability - Trump represents a nightmare for investors this year," said hedge fund manager Douglas Kass of Seabreeze Partners Management Inc, who said last week that he was adding to his existing short bet on the U.S. stock market in part because of Trump's increasingly strong position in the race. Trump's statements on business and Wall Street don't neatly fit into one ideological worldview, but if anything, they are seen as isolationist in a globally connected world. He can also suddenly pick on businesses over various issues, such as his call for a boycott of Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) products after the tech giant refused to help the FBI unlock the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.     "The election this year is the height of uncertainty," said Phil Orlando, a senior portfolio manager and chief equity strategist at Federated Investors in New York, which manages $351 billion. He said political concerns - personified by Trump's emergence as a frontrunner - are one of the main reasons why he began reducing equity exposure in mid-January. There are, of course, plenty of other factors having an impact on U.S. financial markets. U.S. stocks rallied on Tuesday after strong U.S. factory and construction data suggested the economy was regaining momentum. That was even as investors contemplated expectations that Trump would do very well in 11 states holding Republican primary or caucus elections on this Super Tuesday. LITTLE POLICY SUBSTANCE     Trump’s rhetoric mixes populist criticism of immigration policy, Wall Street behavior, and other countries' trade policies, while also citing support for business-friendly efforts such as lower taxation. The lack of detail from Trump about his policies and how he would implement them is a particular worry for investors.     "Trump has been light on policy substance so it’s very difficult for the markets to handicap," said Dave Lafferty, chief market strategist at Natixis Global Asset Management, which manages $870.3 billion in assets. He expects market volatility to rise if Trump extends his lead in Tuesday’s elections.     Some investors are particularly concerned about Trump's nationalist rhetoric, saying it is potentially destructive to a global economy that is already struggling. If it reduces trade flows then it could also hamper U.S. and global growth and hurt U.S. company profits. The real estate investor proposes labeling China a currency manipulator and ending what he calls China's illegal export subsidies and theft of U.S. intellectual property. He also wants to penalize companies who move jobs from the U.S. to Mexico by hitting them with high tariffs if they want to export back to the U.S., as well as build a wall at the Mexican border to prevent the flow of illegal immigrants. "In areas of trade policy and foreign affairs lies the greatest uncertainty," Kass said. "Trump is not likely to be market-friendly in any of these policy areas." In response, Trump’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in an email to Reuters that the same crowd criticizing the Republican Party's top candidate had been responsible for causing the last worldwide recession and economic meltdown in 2007-2008.     "They have zero credibility," said Hicks. "Mr. Trump will restore confidence to the global markets by ending runaway spending and borrowing, restoring trade balance and fairness, and bringing wealth to America's middle class." CARRIED INTEREST Investors had, for some time, been concerned about the strength of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' insurgent campaign for the Democratic nomination against former Secretary of State Clinton, given he declares himself to be a democratic socialist and has said Wall Street's business model is fraudulent. With recent losses to Clinton in Democratic contests in South Carolina and Nevada, he is now seen as less likely to win the nomination. Trump's plans include ideas that traditionally come from Republican candidates, such as lowering the corporate tax rate, simplifying the tax code, and as his web site puts it, cutting the deficit through "eliminating waste, fraud and abuse" and "growing the economy to increase tax revenues."     "I think markets will like Trump on the taxes issue since he favors lower rates and a permanent change in repatriation rules," said David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors in Sarasota, Florida, which manages $2 billion in assets. Still, financial advisers say that Trump's plans to do away with the so-called carried interest tax loophole - which gives hedge fund and private equity managers preferential tax treatment on much of their income - would prompt more selling if he begins to climb in national polls against Clinton.     Jeffrey Gundlach, the co-founder and CEO of bond investing and trading powerhouse DoubleLine Capital, said that Trump has a history of being "comfortable with a lot of debt and leverage," and that won't impede him from spending heavily. He said he believes Trump’s pledge to spend heavily on the military makes defense stocks a good investment play.     Others see such spendthrift tendencies more darkly.     David Ader, chief government bond strategist at CRT Capital Group in Stamford, Connecticut, said Trump's history raises questions about his ability to run an organization as unwieldy and complex as the government. The businessman has in the past filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the Trump Taj Mahal casino and Trump Plaza Hotel. Ader says the uncertainty would cause investors to flock to safe-haven U.S. Treasuries should Trump take office. "It's one thing to run casinos that have gone bankrupt, it's another to run a country and its foreign policy," he said.     Whether he would enjoy the support of the Senate and House of Representatives is a critical question, and will determine how many of his policy pronouncements can be turned into legislation. Congress could act as a brake if Trump gets the presidency and behaves as wildly as Trump the candidate. He clearly does not have the full support of a number of key Republican senators and would be unlikely to get much Democratic support for many measures.     Todd Morgan, senior managing partner at wealth management firm Bel Air Investments Advisors in Los Angeles, said that the increasing likelihood that Trump will be the Republican nominee is one reason why he has raised cash in some client portfolios over the past four months. He would likely sell more if it looks like Trump will win the general election, he said.     "It's like a scale and you keep dropping more weights on the balance everyday, and the political uncertainty is becoming a bigger and bigger weight," he said.     For more on the 2016 presidential race, see the Reuters blog, "Tales from the Trail" (here). (Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss and David Randall, with additional reporting by Jennifer Ablan.; Editing by David Gaffen, Linda Stern and Martin Howell) This article was funded in part by SAP. It was independently created by the Reuters editorial staff. SAP had no editorial involvement in its creation or production. (7) GOP chiefs will steal the Nomination from Trump, by rigging the Convention - Bloomberg http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-14/heres-how-establishment-will-steal-gop-nomination-trump Here's How The Establishment Will Steal The GOP Nomination From Trump Tyler Durden's picture Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/14/2016 14:01 -0400 The political establishment in America is terrified. Donald Trump gets closer to securing the GOP nomination with each passing month and his rivals on both sides of the aisle are in disbelief. Worse - or "better" if you enjoy entertainment - Trump has seemingly given up any attempt to be anything other than... well... than Donald Trump. He recently offered to pay the legal fees of a supporter who punched a protester, shouted almost maniacally about "Bernie guys" at a recent rally, and frankly seems to have gone punchdrunk with his newfound political clout. That’s not necessarily a criticism. Heaven knows it’s funny and obviously there’s something highly satisfying about watching the establishment squirm. All the same, no one - not even Trump’s staunchest supporters - really know what to expect from a Trump presidency. And virtually no Washington veterans want to find out. In fact, as we reported last week, a group of GOP and tech execs recently made stopping Trump the topic of the American Enterprise Institute's annual World Forum, a secretive affair held on Sea Island, Georgia. And although everyone now jokes about just how unstoppable the Trump "juggernaut" has become, the establishment isn’t called "the establishment," for nothing. Trump may have proven remarkably adept at whipping certain sectors of the electorate into a veritable frenzy, but he himself will tell you that he’s no politician. In fact, he prides himself on being "outside the political fold," so to speak. He may know quite a few tricks in the boardroom, but he doesn’t know all of the tricks of the political trade, and as Bloomberg outlines below, he could still have the nomination "stolen" from him, if the party pulls out all of the stops. Below, find excerpts from "How To Steal A Nomination From Donald Trump". http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2016-03-14/how-to-steal-a-nomination-from-donald-trump The Fix Is In How to Steal a Nomination From Donald Trump Mar 14, 2016 7:00 PM DDUT [...] All three of Trump’s Republican opponents are now convinced (even if some are loath to concede it publicly) that the current front-runner is the only candidate in the field who still has the chance to win the 1,237 delegates that would ensure his nomination in Cleveland. But if Trump is unable in the remaining primaries and caucuses to line up the necessary delegates, the convention will be deadlocked on its first ballot and then have to vote again—and possibly again and again—until a majority emerges. That could offer mainstream conservatives and party regulars the opening they would need to take the nomination from a candidate who almost certainly will have accumulated more delegates and possibly millions more popular votes than his rivals. Of the other candidates, only Ted Cruz is focused on trying to finish ahead of Trump in the delegate count, even if neither gets the majority; Marco Rubio and John Kasich are resigned to the reality that they will be playing from behind. [...] Though the real action will take place on the convention floor in June, the machinations to take the nomination from Trump are already fully in progress. If the primary season thus far can be understood as a triumph for the candidate who defies the norms of politics, the shadow campaign now underway will reflect the primacy of rules, including some that can be wantonly rewritten to serve the interests of those in charge. While there’s not a single Republican establishment with the power to dictate outcomes, there are many interlocking ones dispersed among the states. The key to winning at a contested convention is to get them working in concert, and the age-old practices of favor-trading and influence-peddling will become the new norms. Here’s what non-Trump forces are doing—and will find themselves soon scheming to do—to pull off one of the biggest, perfectly legal, heists in American memory. MARCH The Hunt for Double Agents [...] In many states, primaries and caucuses are just the most public face-off in a multi-step process to select the individual delegates who will choose the party’s nominee. Only a small share of the 2,472 total convention delegates are free to pick the candidate of their choice, regardless of the election’s outcome, on the first ballot, while about three-quarters of them are gradually freed to do so on subsequent votes. That means there is a small pool of so-called unbound delegates who are pure free agents, but a much larger number who can be recruited throughout the spring as double agents—delegates who arrive in Cleveland pledged to Trump, all the while working in cahoots with one of his opponents and confessing their true allegiances once it is safe to do so. APRIL [...] Party bosses stand ready to gut some of Trump’s greatest primary-season successes. He won every one of South Carolina’s 50 delegates, by finishing first statewide and in each congressional district, but Trump is powerless to fill that slate with his own people.  "Whoever is chosen for national delegate will have allegiance to the party establishment, and the party establishment is never going to be fond of Donald Trump," says a South Carolina Republican insider. MAY The Art of the Deal [...] There is nothing in the RNC’s rules that prohibits delegates from cutting a deal for their votes, and lawyers say it is unlikely that federal anti-corruption laws would apply to convention horse-trading. (It is not clear that even explicitly selling one’s vote for cash would be illegal.) [...] Every delegate and alternate is already paying for individual travel costs to get to Cleveland. Most state parties tell delegates to expect to spend $3,000 out of pocket on airfare, hotel and meals, and for some it could prove an unexpected hardship. (Delegates are assigned hotels by state; some could end up paying for the La Quinta Inn, others stuck with a bill from the Ritz-Carlton.) As blogger Chris Ladd has noted, Trump’s slate in Illinois contains "a food service manager from a juvenile detention center, a daycare worker from a Christian School, an unemployed paralegal, a grocery store warehouse manager, one brave advocate for urban chicken farming, a dog breeder, and a guy who runs a bait shop." Could some of them be tempted to flip their votes if a generous campaign, super-PAC, or individual donor picked up the costs of their week in Cleveland? JUNE The Disqualifying Round [...] If the primary calendar ends without any candidate emerging as its presumptive nominee, all those responsibilities will remain with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. Thus far, Priebus has been docile toward Trump, who early on made being treated equitably by the national party a precondition for promising not to run as an independent in the general election. But if Trump doesn’t finish with a clear majority of delegates, Priebus will face immense pressure from party officials and donors to undermine him. == * * * And there’s much, more in the full article at Bloomberg including how the party could take the nomination at the convention in a series of procedural maneuvers. But perhaps Ted Cruz put it best when he said the following in Maine: "If the Washington deal-makers try to steal the nomination from the people, I think it would be a disaster. It would cause a revolt." It sure would. And make no mistake, Trump would be more than happy to lead it. (8) Trump wave will become a Tsunami. Rigged Convention will lead to Revolt http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-13/much-more-just-trump Much More Than Just Trump Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/13/2016 19:00 -0500 Authored by StraightLineLogic's Robert Gore via The Burning Platform blog, [...] Elite sons and daughters have not been in the ranks of front line military that have fought the elite’s disastrous wars. The top and bottom of the service economy swell—lobbyists, political operatives, debt merchants, Internet wizards, lawyers, bureaucrats, waiters, bartenders, nurses, orderlies, sales clerks—while what used to be the heart of the economy—manufacturing—shrinks. The bailouts from the last financial crisis went to Wall Street, not the homeowners with underwater mortgages facing foreclosure. Whose pockets were picked to fund those bailouts? And whose pockets were picked to pay the higher insurance premiums necessary to fund the Obamacare disaster? It doesn’t take an Ivy League degree to know that the national debt, $19 trillion and counting, is a big, scary number, and that the unfunded Social Security and medical care liabilities coming due are even bigger, scarier numbers. It does, apparently, take an Ivy League degree to believe that more debt is the answer to our economic problems, or that microscopic or negative interest rates will do anything but fund carry-trade speculators and screw those trying to fund their own postponed retirements, or that the limping economy since the financial crisis has "recovered." Idiotic blather fills the elite, mainstream media, while much truth is suppressed and debate stifled in the name of political correctness. Not much has changed since Vietnam. The decent besieged are taking fire from all sides, valiantly fighting their way through it, while preening, posturing, spoiled idiots congratulate themselves for running a once great country into the ground. It is a mark of the decent besieged’s decency that they are turning to the ballot box, the politically correct way to change a democratic government. The idiot class should be grateful for their forbearance. Instead, it resorts to means fair and foul to subvert them and maintain its power. Whether Trump does or does not make it all the way to the White House, the wave he’s riding will only grow stronger, tsunami-strength when the economy collapses and the world descends into war. If the idiot class and its rabble subvert him, a quote from John F. Kennedy, recently featured on SLL, will surely come back to haunt them.     Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- Peter Myers Australia website: http://mailstar.net/index.html |
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