US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2246

Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner, hit the 40 percent marker in a recent Gravis Marketing poll. According to a report, this is the first time a candidate has reached above the 30 percent mark.

Since the previous survey done by Gravis Marketing on July 31, Trump increased almost 10 points. Dr. Ben Carson increased 7 points and was named the winner in a Post GOP Debate Poll.

Trump, Carson, and Fiorina three of the top five GOP presidential candidates, have never held office.

The Gravis results were as follows:

Donald Trump – 40.1%

Ben Carson – 13%

Jeb Bush – 10%

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)
96%
– 7 %

Carly Fiorina – 5.2%

John Kasich – 4.8%

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
80%
– 4.7%

Mike Huckabee – 3.7%

Scott Walker – 3.5%

Rick Perry – 1.5%

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)
93%
– 1.5%

Chris Christie – 1.4%

George Pataki – 1.1%

Rick Santorum – 1%

Bobby Jindal – 0.9%

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
47%
– 0.6%

The poll surveyed 3,567 voters randomly across the United States. It had a margin of error of plus or minus two percent and was conducted August 21-22.

Trump, Carson, and Fiorina three of the top five GOP presidential candidates, have never held office.

Gravis Marketing, a nonpartisan research firm, conducted a random survey of 3,567 registered voters across the U.S. regarding the presidential election. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 2%. The total may not equal exactly 100% due to rounding. The polls were conducted on August 21-22 using interactive voice response, IVR, technology and weighted separately for each population in the question presented.

REPORT: LGBT RAINBOW HATE-FLAG FOUND IN WDBJ KILLER’S VIRGINIA APARTMENT
[...]
The gay pride rainbow flag reportedly found in Flanagan’s apartment is seen by many as a symbol of anti-Christian hate.
[...]

On August 28 2015 02:25 Toadesstern wrote:
lol, what kind of site is that :D
On the sidebar:

wat

Earlier this month, I outlined Donald Trump’s “Six Stages of Doom” — the hurdles he’ll have to clear to win the Republican nomination. The first obstacle: Could Trump keep his polling numbers up when another storyline emerged that prevented him from monopolizing the news cycle? “For a variety of reasons, Trump isn’t affected much by negative media coverage — it may even help him,” I wrote. “But a lack of media coverage might be a different story.”

It’s too soon to say whether Trump has passed this first test. Partly because it’s August — almost half a year before Iowa and New Hampshire and way too early to read much into the polls — but also because the Trump show hasn’t stopped. He’s dominating coverage as much as ever.

The chart above shows the share of news coverage and Google search traffic that Trump has received among all Republican candidates. (See here for the methodology.) The share of news coverage devoted to Trump has been fairly steady over the past month. Steady and very high, at 50 percent to 60 percent of all coverage received by the GOP field. In other words, Trump is getting as much coverage as the rest of the Republican field combined. But Trump’s Google search traffic is often just as high, or higher.

There’s one anomaly, though, which is the week of Aug. 2. That was the week of the first Republican debate, in Cleveland. That week, Trump received a comparatively low share of Google search traffic — “only” 41 percent. People weren’t any less interested in Trump after the debate, but they were more interested than usual in some of the other Republican candidates, especially Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich, each of whom had among their best weeks of the year from a search traffic standpoint. So Trump’s share of search traffic fell in proportion to the rest of the field. Media interest in Trump was as high as ever, however: He represented 59 percent of the press coverage that week. Since then, search traffic for Carson, Fiorina and Cruz is a bit higher than before the debate but has reverted mostly back to the mean.

What’s interesting is how Trump seemed to go out of his way after the debate to ensure that he’d remain the center of attention, with his tirade against Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly (a feud that he’s since resurrected). That tended to drown out most of the coverage of whether, say, Fiorina or Kasich had gained momentum after the debate, perhaps preventing them from having the sort of feedback loop of favorable attention that can sometimes trigger surges in the polls.

I don’t know whether this was a deliberate strategy on Trump’s behalf. But if so, it’s pretty brilliant. Trump is perhaps the world’s greatest troll, someone who is amazingly skilled at disrupting the conversation by any means necessary, including by drawing negative, tsk-tsking attention to himself. In the current, “free-for-all” phase of the campaign — when there are 17 candidates and you need only 20 percent or so of the vote to have the plurality in GOP polls — this may be a smart approach. If your goal is to stay at the center of attention rather than necessarily to win the nomination, it’s worth making one friend for every three enemies, provided that those friends tell some pollster that they’d hypothetically vote for you.

Is it sustainable? In the long run, probably not. There are lots of interesting candidates in the GOP field, whether you’re concerned with the horse race, their policy positions or simply just entertainment value. Sooner or later, the media will find another candidate’s story interesting. Cruz has a lot of upside potential in the troll department, for instance, along with better favorability ratings than Trump and a slightly more plausible chance of being the Republican nominee.

But there’s not a lot of hard campaign news to dissect in August. Fend off the occasional threat by throwing a stink bomb whenever another story risks upstaging you, and you can remain at the center of the conversation, and atop the polls, for weeks at a time.

The first two states to legalize recreational marijuana have collectively raked in at least $200 million in marijuana tax revenue, according to the latest tax data -- and they're putting those dollars to good use.

In Colorado, after about a year and a half of legal recreational marijuana sales, the state has collected more than $117 million in excise taxes from both the recreational and medical marijuana markets, according to the most recent data from the Colorado Department of Revenue.

Washington state got a slower start. Its retail shops didn't begin selling recreational marijuana until July of last year, but they are keeping pace with Colorado's. About $83 million in excise taxes have already been collected in the year since sales first began, according to the most recent tax data from the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board.

And the total haul for both states is several million higher if all additional revenue from marijuana -- such as sales taxes, jurisdictional taxes, fees and licensing costs -- is included.

That marijuana revenue is, of course, just a drop in the bucket of the states' respective multi-billion dollar annual budgets, but it's real revenue nonetheless, revenue that helps pay for the very regulation that supports the legal marijuana market.

"Our philosophy has been that marijuana pays its own way," J. Skyler McKinley, deputy director of Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper's (D) Office of Marijuana Coordination, told the Huffington Post. "Every dime we bring in from legalization is dedicated to the cost of legalization. That's regulatory framework first, then public education campaigns about safe and responsible use and then prevention and treatment programs."

But the tax revenue from legal marijuana won't solve a state's budget problems all by itself, he added.

"The big lesson we tell other states is you probably shouldn't legalize marijuana if you want to make money -- that's not why you do it," McKinley said. "You do it because you think that a regulated marketplace might be safer than an unregulated marketplace or you believe that the war on drugs didn't work."

Jaime Smith, deputy communications director for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), echoed those sentiments.

"The legalization initiative was not driven by a desire for a revenue, but it has provided a small assist for our state budget," Smith said. "When you’re looking for billions of dollars, tens of millions doesn’t solve the problem but it certainly doesn’t hurt."

Those taxes and fees don't just support the regulation of marijuana: both states have flagged some of the revenue for public schools and expansive research.

Hillary Clinton on Thursday compared her Republican opponents to terrorist organizations when it comes to their views on women, telling an audience her potential rivals were pushing outdated policies.

“Now extreme views about women? We expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world,” the Democratic presidential frontrunner said.

“But it’s a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States, yet they espouse out of date and out of touch policies,” she added at a rally in Cleveland. “They are dead wrong for 21st-century America.”

Clinton did not mention any specific terrorist or militant groups, such as the Islamic State, which has held women as sex slaves in Iraq and Syria.

Republicans swiftly accused her of directly equating the Republican presidential field with terrorists.

“For Hillary Clinton to equate her political opponents to terrorists is a new low for her flailing campaign,” said Republican National Committee spokeswoman Allison Moore. “She should apologize immediately for her inflammatory rhetoric.”

Clinton, seeking to become the first woman to win the White House, said she took it “a little personal when they go after women”, pointing to Republican efforts to cut access to women’s health centers and opposition to abortion rights.

She specifically cited Senator Marco Rubio, saying he “brags about wanting to deny victims of rape and incest access to healthcare and abortion”, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s opposition to funding for Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit abortion provider.

On August 28 2015 05:55 whatisthisasheep wrote:
I hope someone asks Hillary about how much Bill respects women during a debate.

Libruls are degrading women by eroding their purity as wives and mothers that we tried so hard to preserve by keeping them in the kitchen and the home. Look at women these days, some of them have jobs, liberties, even opinions. And do you think any of that makes them happy? Libruls have turned the great women of this nation into human garbage with their propaganda about the female orgasm. I never satisfied a woman and I'm proud of it. The sight of a woman showing her ankles, being out of the house without her husband or father or voicing an opinion on a public matter sickens me. The radical left have distorted and corrupted feminine purity and now there is nothing of value in the entire gender.

On August 28 2015 06:19 Sermokala wrote:
Calling your opponents terrorists for not agreeing with (in their view) murder is fucking shameless. At least have the dignity to respect people's views you don't agree with.

On August 28 2015 06:19 Sermokala wrote:
Calling your opponents terrorists for not agreeing with (in their view) murder is fucking shameless. At least have the dignity to respect people's views you don't agree with.