Poor Bernie!

I can't help myself, I have to re-post this cartoon, it just cracks me up. Amazing how the party of PC and tolerance is starting to turn vicious on the honest old geezer who really believes all the socialism stuff.

Sorry, Bernie. As honest as you might be in your belief that it should work or could work, it never has and can't given the nature of mankind. Maybe your sincerity proves you to be an "intellectual"... according to Thomas Sowell,

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

Vote Your Conscience in November. But VOTE!

Dr. Randall McElwain wrote the following insightful post on his FB page.  To everyone who decides that they cannot in good conscience vote for Trump (and I may be one of them) there is something that is CRITICALLY important to remember, especially if you are making this decision on grounds of Christian conscience: 

You must not sit at home. You must go and vote! 

Every one who makes the conscious choice to cede the Presidential election to the Democrat must still cast their vote for the best available Congressional candidate, to provide a check against the liberal president. And, like it or not, we must go vote for the best state judicial candidates, school board members, city council members, state officeholders, and the like. Your vote has much higher weight there.

This is our Christian duty. We cannot complain about bathroom bills, or homosexual rights, or lack of restriction on abortions, or the sorry state of the public schools, or any of the innumerable other policy conditions in our country if we fail to exercise our right to vote for the people who enact such policies.

No excuses.

Now read Randy's excellent commentary which follows.

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Some thoughts on “Voting while holding your nose”

May 4 · Public

In this post, I am breaking two of my personal commandments:

1) Thou shalt not post on Facebook.

2) Thou shalt CERTAINLY not post about politics on Facebook.

However… now that it appears certain that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president, I am starting to hear the theme among many evangelicals: “Christians must not sit out the election. We have a duty to vote. Trump is better than the Democratic candidate. So, we must hold our nose and vote for the Republican candidate."

I beg to disagree. I have voted in every election since I reached voting age. But with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, I am convinced that it is my duty to sit out this presidential election.

Look at the arguments of those encouraging us to "hold your nose and vote."

We are told that “we are voting for a president, not for a pastor.” Donald Trump’s problem is not that he is unsuited to be my pastor; the problem is that he is unsuited to my president.

The first election that grabbed my interest in 1980. As the first American president to be divorced and remarried, and as a Hollywood actor with a rather checkered past, Ronald Reagan was not suited to be my pastor. However, he had a long record of support for conservative principles, and I was happy to have him as my president.

To my friends who point to Reagan as the model for a Trump presidency, let me break the bad news to you: Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan. He has no record of supporting conservative principles. To those who say, “Yes, Donald Trump was liberal in the past, but he may have changed,” he hasn’t changed. The “past” is as recent as Trump’s endorsement of Planned Parenthood during this campaign!

We are told that Hilary (or Bernie) will be worse than Trump. While this may be true, the longterm damage done by a Trump presidency may well be worse than either of the Democratic candidates. Consider:

1) For the past several elections, evangelicals have been taken for granted by the Republican party. “Moderate” candidates such as Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney have assumed that “Evangelicals have no other option; they can’t vote for the Democrat. So, we can ignore them and run to the center.”

I held my nose and voted for these. And the stench keeps getting worse. It is time for evangelicals to show that we are not puppets of the Republican Party. If we vote for Donald Trump, we can no longer claim to be guided by moral principles; we are just one more special interest group. In that case, we deserve to be ignored! When evangelical “leaders” such as Jerry Falwell, Jr endorse Donald Trump, they give our opponents good reason to scoff when we claim that evangelicals vote for moral principles, not a political party. This election is an opportunity for evangelicals to show that we vote conscience, not party.

2) It maybe better to have a liberal president who is identified as a Democrat than a liberal president who is identified as a Republican. If Hilary Clinton wins, she will support disastrous policies - but at least she will be opposed by Republicans. If Donald Trump wins, it is very unlikely that Republicans will stand up to him.

Based on his history, it is fair to assume that Donald Trump will appoint liberal Supreme court justices. Those appointments will be supported by Democrats and will not be vigorously opposed by establishment Republicans since he will be “one of ours.” (Republican senators have no decent record of standing up to Republican presidents who propose liberal justices - see David Souter, appointed by George H.W. Bush and Anthony Kennedy, appointed by Ronald Reagan).

We are told that if we lose this election, evangelicals will lose our influence in American politics. Again, I beg to disagree. Sometimes you must lose a battle in order to win a war. Donald Trump will very probably lose this election. He consistently polls below both Clinton and Sanders. In the general election, his extreme rhetoric, vulgar language, questionable business deals, and self-indulgent lifestyle will become huge liabilities. If I were Hilary Clinton, I would be secretly begging for a Trump nomination; the attack ads write themselves.

So, why should evangelicals share the blame for his loss? Instead, we should lose strategically. If a big majority of evangelicals openly boycott the election, it will give a message to the Republican Party: “If you continue to ignore our concerns, you will never win another presidential election.” We will suffer a short term loss for a long term gain.

There is a fairly recent precedent (from the other side): the 1984 campaign of Jesse Jackson. Jackson ran a campaign to protest the Democratic party’s tendency to take black voters for granted. Many commentators blame Walter Mondale’s landslide loss to Ronald Reagan on Jesse Jackson’s split of the party. However, this loss is credited with laying the groundwork for Obama’s win in 2008.

If we can use a 2016 loss to lay the foundation for a genuine conservative win in 2020, it will be a “good loss."

If Mr. Trump is nominated, I believe there is a very good argument for evangelicals sitting out the presidential vote en masse. This should be done not quietly, but publicly and vocally. Evangelical pastors should encourage their members not to vote in the presidential election, while encouraging 100% participation in state and congressional elections. This will do two things:

1) It may help preserve a Republican Senate to oppose Hilary’s agenda.

2) An unprecedented disparity between the lack of evangelical participation in the presidential vote and in congressional/state votes will highlight the impact of evangelicals on an election. Perhaps we can regain an evangelical voice in the Republican party.

A final thought. God is not a Republican; God is not a Democrat; God is not even an American. Regardless of who wins the election, God’s Kingdom will not be defeated. As Chuck Colson reminded us years ago, “The Kingdom of God does not fly Air Force One."

Is it possible that the church in America will face difficult times and even suffering? Yes.

Is it possible that evil will triumph in the short term? Yes.

Is it possible that God’s Kingdom will be defeated? Absolutely not!

As evangelicals, we may be short-range pessimists - 2017 may be difficult. However, we must be long-range optimists - God will triumph!

Disaster Looming: Take a Principled Position

Goldberg hits the nail on the head:




I would add: in the unlikely event that Trump is elected (he won't win, running against the person whom he has so often supported, and who has the entire MSM as her campaign team...but if by chance he did win the general) we will have set the conservative movement back by decades. The "middle" and "independent" voters will be easily persuaded after a Trump term that conservative principles don't work when in fact, they will not have been tried (much like they were convinced after George W. Bush's moderate leadership).

We must elect a true conservative in order for our country to make progress. I believe that if the GOP will nominate Cruz, and if Trump shows the slightest integrity for the good of the country (genuinely urges his voters to support the party nominee..."I’m a unifier. I unify people. We’re going to have such unity."...and doesn't have a tantrum and take his marbles home) Cruz can and will be elected like Reagan was in 1980.

The Deal Maker Doesn't Like Rules

A great cartoon! Captures "The Donald Principle" perfectly.

FDR's New Way of Doing Business

The following is a fantastic, and possibly for many eye-opening, peek into how politicians say one thing and do another. How they get away with it because they propose policies based on one stated and plausible-sounding objective, while the actual result of the policy is different.

This particular piece has implications for the 2016 election, of course. But look at the deeper issues Goodman illuminates in this column from The Patriot Post.

Curt
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Putting the Democratic Party on the Couch

John C. Goodman · Apr. 10, 2016

Bernie Sanders is beside himself. How can Hillary Clinton take $15 million in contributions from Wall Street and at the same time claim to represent working families? How can she take millions in contributions from the oil and gas industry and claim to be for the environment? How can she take $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and claim that she will be tough on the big banks?

One thing is clear. Bernie Sanders doesn’t understand the Democratic Party. That’s not surprising. He doesn’t even call himself a Democrat.

Hillary Clinton’s behavior as a candidate is really no different than candidate Barack Obama or candidate Bill Clinton or every other successful Democratic candidate going back to Franklin Roosevelt. If she reaches the Oval Office, President Hillary Clinton will govern in a way that isn’t all that different from her predecessors (with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter).

There are three things you need to understand about Democratic politics:

1. The typical Democratic voter is different from the typical Republican voter.
2. The typical Democratic candidate campaigns in a way that is different from the typical Republican.
3. Democrats rarely ever govern the way they campaign.

A new study by Matt Grossmann (Michigan State University) and David Hopkins (Boston College), based on five years of polling data, comes to this interesting conclusion: 
Democrats and Republicans are not the same. Republicans, the scholars say, are “chiefly defined by a common ideological commitment,” while Democrats are a “coalition of social groups.”

This difference is evident on TV talk shows, where Republican guests tend to talk about principles and Democrats tend to refer to specific groups they want to help. Why do the guest always seem to be talking past each other? Because they are. They are talking about different subjects for the benefit of different audiences.

It is also evident in elections. When Democratic candidates campaign, they tend to be the party of division, despite what they may say about “unity.” They seek the votes of people who see themselves as victims. Wherever people envision themselves as oppressed, they are likely to envision others as oppressors. During the Roosevelt years, Democrats went out of their way to pit labor against business, Main Street against Wall Street, everyday Americans against the rich. Roosevelt himself made class warfare the cornerstone of his election campaigns, despite the fact that he was very rich himself.

These days, Democratic candidates have added more victim groups — pitting blacks against whites, Hispanics against non-Hispanics, women against men, etc. As I noted in a previous column, in the last four presidential campaigns, Democrats have engaged in shameless race baiting – for no other apparent purpose than to increase black voter turnout. Barack Obama has been the worst practitioner of that in our presidential history.

What happens when Democrats govern? You might think that after all the class baiting, race baiting, gender baiting, etc., that Democrats in office would actually do things that help the “victims” against their “oppressors.” But this is not what mainly happens.

What has Barack Obama done for African Americans? Almost nothing. In fact when you consider how his economic policies have affected the back community, you might be inclined to call him the most anti-black president since Woodrow Wilson. Inequality has gotten worse, not better. Regulation at the state and local level has priced low-income Americans out of the market for housing, transportation, education, medical care and other essential services. And surprising as it may seem, there is no statistical evidence that civil rights laws have had any effect on the wages of women or blacks or other minorities.

This brings us back to Hillary’s campaign contributions. If she makes it to the Oval Office, she is not going to be anti-Wall Street or anti-oil or anti-New York bank. Nor were any of her predecessors.

Given his rhetoric, you might suppose that Franklin Roosevelt was an anti-business president. In fact, he was the most pro-business president ever – but in a bad sense of the word. Roosevelt tried to give businesses what every company in the world would most like — the ability to combine with their rivals, form a cartel and gouge consumers with monopoly prices. (There are very few businesses that enjoy dog-eat-dog competition; most would much rather have monopoly.) Except unlike OPEC, which has to rely on voluntary compliance among the member countries and is often undermined by cheating, Roosevelt tried to enforce these cartel agreements with the force of criminal law!

Why was that? What Roosevelt discovered and what every politician today understands very well is that most people are producers and consumers. They produce things and they buy things. But they are far more focused and better informed about the effects of public policy in their role as producers than in their role as consumers.

So the Roosevelt approach to public policy followed the Italian fascist model: let every industry and every trade form a cartel – setting wages and prices and controlling output. All of this helped people in their role as producers (seeming to give them more income), but it hurt them in their role as consumers (since everything cost more). The average voter could be counted on to overestimate his gains and underestimate his losses.

The Roosevelt plan for the entire economy, encapsulated in the National Industrial Recovery Act, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. We can be thankful for that. Every significant Roosevelt policy that tried to increase wages (including the NIRA), prolonged the Great Depression and extended the suffering that people at the time had to endure. (See Scott Sumner’s book on the subject.)

But much of the Roosevelt approach to public policy survived in the form of regulatory agencies. In agriculture, transportation, communication, oil and gas, electric power generation and dozens of other fields, the Democratic Party came to be seen as the party of regulation and the main job of the regulators was to protect the interests of the regulated.
Of course, Republicans did these things too. But Democrats seemed to do them with more regularity and more enthusiasm, in a manner completely inconsistent with their campaign rhetoric.

For many decades, the CAB functioned as a cartel agent for the airlines. The ICC functioned as a cartel agent for the railroads and the trucking companies. The FCC functioned as a cartel agent for the communications industry. To this day, agriculture policy artificially raises the price of food at the expense of consumers — and poor families are the worst victims.

Economists are convinced that these attempts to get monopoly rents for the producers are bad policy overall. The losses to consumers far exceed the gains for the producers. Despite that fact, these polices tend to work politically.

None of that will be lost on Secretary Clinton.

Trump + Kasich = Trump vs. Hilary

In my lifetime I’ve done a lot of wrong things. Sometimes in willful defiance of what I knew was right. Other times I’ve done the wrong thing while sincerely believing that I was doing what was right…only to find out later that my choice was based on incorrect assumptions, a lack of knowledge, or faulty information. I am glad that God judges the heart—the honest intentions—and not the correctness of the action.

Still, acting in ignorance can cause a lot of damage, both to myself and to others around me who are affected by my action.

I suspect that there are a lot of people who have acted in ignorance during this primary season. For instance, many people cast their votes early (mail, absentee, etc.) for someone who, by the time of their actual primary, had dropped out of the race. In such cases, your vote became a mere statistic, serving only to demonstrate how that ultimate privilege in a democracy—your right to vote—can be rendered absolutely meaningless.

No condemnation from me for having done the wrong thing up to today, voting your conscience, etc., with good intentions. But going forward…the primaries yet to take place…let’s not act in ignorance! There is too much at stake.

I think there are a lot of people casting votes for Donald Trump who are doing so based on faulty information. Trump is carefully selling his personality …“we’re gonna make it all great”…and you are buying it. Donald has one principle which guides his life, and it isn’t about helping the country.  You have bought into the idea that he will fix the problem represented by sold-out-to-the-highest-bidder politicians…as though Trump is not literally the personification and root of that problem. You keep ignoring the fact that all head-to-head matchups for the general election show that Trump would lose to either Clinton or Sanders, meaning your man will never even have the opportunity to do all the things he promises!

Other voters have principles that won’t allow you to vote for a sleazy, adulterous man like Trump. So you thoughtfully considered what candidate is a man who shares your principles: Christian care for the less fortunate, protector of religious liberty, avid devotee to the constitution. Unfortunately, in a way, there have been several candidates who could arguably qualify for the best version of that.

Unfortunately, because it made it difficult to choose among them: Carson, Rubio, Kasich, Cruz, and Bush could all make their case…so “our” votes, the votes of Christian conservatives who should easily be able to select the Republican candidate, got split among those worthy candidates. As of two weeks ago, we still could have.

At this point, however, there are only two candidates who have a chance to get the nomination. Trump and Cruz. There is no possibility of any other candidate getting the 1237 delegates, or going into the convention with close to that many and being able to argue forcefully that they are “most chosen” by the voters. Cruz is a true crusader against the status quo and the Establishment; he's been in there proving it.

Kasich recently falsely asserted that Cruz would have to get something like 80% of the vote in order to get the nomination; truth is, Cruz only needs just over 50% in the right places, and polls show he would get that if Kasich would bow out.

Our nation is on the line. Instead of acting in ignorance, the intelligent person takes counsel from those who are experts on the matter. There is no more thoughtful, conscientious analyst than Michael Barone. Please listen to him, as he explains:

A Vote for Kasich Is a Vote for Trump

By Michael Barone

Perhaps the most important results of the March 22 Republican primary in Arizona and caucus in Utah were numbers that didn’t appear on your television screen, no matter how late you stayed up for the poll closing times. Those were the numbers of votes cast for Marco Rubio in Arizona — 70,587 of them at this writing.

That was 17,595 more than the 52,992 votes cast there for John Kasich, even though Kasich was an active candidate on March 22 and Rubio had “suspended” his campaign after his defeat in Florida seven days before.

One lesson from this is that it is wacky for Arizona and many other states to allow so much early voting in presidential primaries. The field of candidates can change rapidly, and many voters will be recorded for a candidate they wouldn’t have voted for on election day.

The other lesson is relevant to those planning to vote in the 18 Republican primaries and one caucus between now and June 7. And that is that a vote for John Kasich is a vote for Donald Trump.

It’s true that if all the Rubio and Kasich voters in Arizona had opted for their second choice, Donald Trump would probably still have come out ahead, since he got 47 percent in his own right and thus would still have won Arizona’s 58 winner-take-all delegates.

And it’s true that Kasich’s 17 percent in the Utah caucuses did not prevent Ted Cruz from exceeding Utah’s 50 percent threshold (by a lot: 69 percent) and winning that state’s 40 winner-take-all delegates.

But Trump is not polling at anything like the 47 percent level in most states yet to vote. In Wisconsin, which votes April 5, he hasn’t topped 30 percent. Yet with the anti-Trump vote split, he could win the lion’s share of its delegates, awarded statewide and winner-take-all by congressional district.

That’s exactly what happened in Missouri and Illinois on March 15. Trump won 53 of Illinois' 69 delegates with 39 percent, to 30 percent for Cruz, 19 percent for Kasich and 8 percent for Rubio. If Kasich weren’t running or if Rubio had urged his voters to vote Cruz, as he urged them to vote Kasich in the latter’s Ohio, the totals and the delegate count would have looked very different.

Missouri was even closer, with Trump edging Cruz 40.8 to 40.6 percent. Cruz can be faulted for campaigning elsewhere in the last days, and he did end up with 15 delegates by carrying three of eight congressional districts. But Trump won 37 delegates.

The key here is that Trump must win 1,237 delegates — which is a majority at the convention, not some arbitrary number as he has suggested — in order to be nominated. If he falls visibly short of 1,237 it is highly unlikely that he can pick up the delegates necessary to win.

Current delegate counts have Trump at 739, Cruz at 465 and Kasich at 143, with 839 to be selected in states not yet voting. Trump needs about 59 percent of these to win. With divided opposition, he has an excellent chance; many remaining states select delegates winner-take-all statewide or by congressional district. Against Ted Cruz, he has a greater chance of falling short.

Trump has massive unfavorable ratings among general election voters and runs well behind Hillary Clinton in general election polls — his and his supporters' delusional denials notwithstanding. Cruz runs about even against Clinton. He’s not many Republican strategists' idea of an ideal candidate. But he’s in competitive territory against a Democrat with major weaknesses of her own.

Kasich supporters point to general election polls showing him running visibly ahead of Clinton. Similarly, supporters of Bernie Sanders point to polls that show him running better than Clinton against each Republican.

But few analysts of any stripe think Sanders' numbers would stand up under the scrutiny, not given to him so far, inevitably brought to a candidate who could actually be nominated. There’s reason for similar doubts about the durability of Kasich, who has had no significant scrutiny yet.

Kasich has won only one primary, in his home state, and finished second in three more, all in New England. The chances are vanishingly minimal that a convention, once Trump falls short of 1,237, would nominate him for president. But vice president? Maybe — if, despite Kasich’s recent claim that he would never be a running mate, his 143 delegates put Trump over the top. A vote for Kasich is a vote for Trump.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Original published here: http://patriotpost.us/opinion/41538