Yes, The Real The New Awesome Primary Thread

Well I tried asking questions and that didn't get me anywhere. Then I remembered that if you want to find the right answer on the internet, you just proclaim the wrong one and people will be sure to correct you.It worked, cause now I'm getting responses.I honestly don't know what you mean by "buying an election", and I don't understand how allowing people to spend their money how they want "perverts the democratic process".Wealthy people have always been in control of it, so how is this a perversion?I'm not being a dick, I'm genuinely curious what you are talking about. But I get that you can't be bothered to explain yourself, maybe that's cause you're too busy arguing the person and not the position

So what is Percy going on about Trump buying the election?According to your link, Jeb Bush spent the most money and that didn't help him. It makes more sense at a local level. But are we really to look at the voting public as a bunch of androids that pick the guy that threw the most money at promoting himself?God help us if that's what politics is...

This isn't really a reply to your post, it's just that since you've attempted to answer the question I think I should try to chime in with my own view, so here goes.Focusing just on legal and above board approaches, elections can only be effectively contested by those with sufficient money for advertising, events and organization. Money doesn't guarantee electoral success, but lack of money often assures defeat.Television advertising, which is very expensive, often plays a significant role in electoral success at the state and federal level. Local organizations can also be very influential, and when volunteers are lacking then money can help a great deal in creating a critical mass of local support.This is why money is so important. Apparently just putting ads on the air and feet on the ground can generate a great deal of support that would otherwise never happen. Political campaigns have become too much a battle of ads and doorbells, and since money is required to make this all possible it becomes more a battle of money than of ideas. We need to change that.--Percy

(this computer keeps "closing" my text. I've had this problem for the last week. Lost my original post. My post will have to be heavy on my quotes, and less on my own words - which keep getting lost. Sorry.)I was attempting to show that Lyndon Larouche was blacked out in the 2004 Democratic Primary coverage(as well as in 2000 when he beat Bill Bradley for the race for 2nd in Arkansas but was totally ignored by the media in name, vote totals, as well as complete absence of standard - in 2000 - 2nd place small pic when the "winner" got a large center screen pic at the moment of the network/AP call) even though his $8.4 million was 6th highest in individual fundraising amounts. The media commonly placed #7 as #6, #8 as #7, etc. while the 9/11 Truther Larouche was completely air brushed out of the medias (otherwise!) endlessly obsessive fundraising coverage.

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This article appears in the May 2, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
FEC Report: Presidential Candidate LaRouche Has the Broadest Support

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The following leaflet was released April 25 by LaRouche in 2004.

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The April 15 filings of the Democratic Presidential candidates with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), show that Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche is first among all the candidates in the number of individual contributions recorded by the FEC. LaRouche is also first in the dollar amount of "un-itemized contributions," which represents money given by persons whose cumulative contributions are less than $200.

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By official FEC figures, LaRouche had 7834 individual contributions, of those who have given cumulatively, $200 or more, as compared to 6257 for John Kerry, 5582 for John Edwards, 4090 for Howard Dean, and 2744 for Gephardt. As to the dollar amount of un-itemized contributions, LaRouche had $1,325,061 far above Kerry's $407,299, Edwards' $242,745, Dean's $786,237, and Gephardt's $179,046. (See Table 1.)

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TABLE 1
Funds Raised by Democratic Presidential Candidates
Up to March 31, 2003

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Candidate Individual Contributions Less Refunds Transfers
from
Previous Campaigns Other Total $
Raised
Kerry $7,501,390 $2,650,000 $4,477 $10,155,867
Edwards $7,398,836 $0 $0 $7,398,836
Gephardt $3,353,928 $2,403,521 $172,475 $5,929,925
LaRouche $3,704,005 $0 $2,082 $3,706,087
Lieberman $2,961,023 $0 $51,600 $3,012,623
Dean $2,932,262 $0 $12,100 $2,944,362
Graham $1,092,161 $0 $27,000 $1,119,161
Kucinich $172,695 $0 $0 $172,695
Moseley-Braun $72,451 $0 $0 $72,451
Sharpton n/a n/a n/a n/a
Source: Federal Election Commission
In addition, by FEC reports, LaRouche ranks fourth among the ten candidates in total money raised, with $3.7 million, behind Sen. John. Kerry (Mass.), Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), and Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.)all serving members of Congress. He has outraised Sen. Joe Liebermanthe Democratic Party's candidate for Vice President in 2000former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, and Sen. Bob Graham (Fla.), and dwarfed the fundraising of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), and former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (Ill.). New York Rev. Al Sharpton's report is not yet available. Note that a substantial amount of Kerry's and Gephardt's funds were transferred from previous campaigns. (See Table 2.)
FEC Report: Presidential Candidate LaRouche Has the Broadest Support

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The former leftist (who became a total neo-con) Sol Stern had an interesting article in the right-wing City Journal of New York a few years back.

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from the magazine

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The Ramparts I Watched

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Our storied radical magazine did transform the nationfor the worse.

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Sol Stern
Winter 2010
The Social Order

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In 1965, I was a Berkeley graduate student, on track to become a tenured radical. Instead, I dropped out and joined an obscure, liberal Catholic magazine called Ramparts, headquartered in the sleepy Bay Area suburb of Menlo Park. A little more than a year later, I wrote a story exposing the CIA’s secret penetration and financing of the National Student Association (NSA). The article helped catapult our now-radical, San Francisco—based monthly to national attention and to a catalytic role in the protest movements of the time. The mainstream press celebrated my leftist colleagues and me as heroes of American journalism. Ramparts’ rise to celebrity status seemed to herald a new era of the media’s speaking truth to power. The reality was far less luminous, and Ramparts’ legacy, which a new book celebrates, was not a positive one for the country.

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I still remember the phone call I received one evening in February 1967 from an old classmate at the City College of New York. He had just picked up the next day’s New York Times at a Manhattan newsstand and noticed a front-page picture of me and fellow Ramparts editors Warren Hinckle and Robert Scheer. It’s above the fold, my friend exulted, and then read out the headline on the accompanying article: ramparts: gadfly to the establishment. The photograph, taken in Ramparts’ San Francisco office, was captioned planning the next expose.

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There would be no more Ramparts exposs of CIA front groups. The media heavyweights now pursued the story far more effectively than our monthly magazine could have. Tom Wicker, the Times’s prizewinning D.C. bureau chief, assembled a team of experienced reporters to follow the money trail from the CIA-connected foundations named in my Ramparts article. The Washington Post jumped in with its own reporting team. Turning up new connections almost every day, the newspapers described how legitimate tax-exempt foundations laundered millions of dollars from the CIA and passed the funds to an agency-designated list of civic and cultural groups, labor unions, magazines, and book publishers.

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It soon became clear that the CIA/NSA relationship was just one thread in an elaborate web of citizen front groups secretly supported, and sometimes even created, by the spy agency in the early days of the Cold War. Other beneficiaries of CIA largesse were highbrow magazines like The New Leader and Encounter; the international operations arm of the American Federation of Labor; and the American and European sections of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the anti-Communist organization founded in 1949 by public intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The top-secret project had been approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

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Until the Ramparts story broke, the government could count on the mandarins of Washington journalism to protect national-security secrets. But as details of the front groups spilled out, editorials in the Times and the Post skewered the secret funding arrangement and compared it with the methods used by America’s Cold War enemies. CBS News broadcast a program narrated by Mike Wallace, In the Pay of the CIA: An American Dilemma, which described the maze of CIA-connected foundations and civic groups that had received agency money. Wallace interviewed apologetic American liberals who had been active in the funded organizations, including feminist stalwart Gloria Steinem and socialist leader Norman Thomas. According to one CIA operative, the Ramparts scoop led to the biggest security leak of the Cold War.

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The Ramparts I Watched: Our storied radical magazine did transform the nationfor the worse. | City Journal

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He is very very sorry. I don't care (about his about face) really.I care about the more important funding issues though.Dollars and Sense and Power and Blackouts and Stuff.

I cannot answer for Percy. He has his reasons. Ask him. Money can only keep you in the game if enough people buy what you're selling. Without it, though, you cannot even compete. In Jeb's case, for all the money he spent, he came across as a wimp-assed psudo-conservative the Republican right did not like. You already cited Jeb Bush, so not totally. But keep in mind that advertising does work in this society else Madison Avenue would not exist.On a national presidential level there is plenty of $$$ to go around. What are required are a candidate with some appeal to the party faithful and the effective use of that money to buy attention.Trump has appeal to the lowest dregs of the Republican right, which turns out to be quite a larger share of the Republican base than anyone expected, while his bombast, posturing and inflammatory rhetoric have generated the attention of the national news media as a surrogate for paid Ads. Well, that's what politics is so...Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

You nailed it. I was flabbergasted (always wanted to use that word) when all the available TV media started broadcasting his rallies as news. What a deal for him. Early on, I guess he was getting as much free air time as the other GOPs combined. These days Ferret-Face gets quite a bit of free coverage also.I am disappointed that NPR and the PBS Newshour spend as much time on what the candidates said today as they do. I don't know if Trump is trying to buy the election, but there are entities trying to buy the 2016 elections. In some cases in past elections, the results have been influenced by how much money was spent on a cause or candidate.Sometimes, we know who the wealthy individuals are that are supplying monetary support, but there are all these political action committees that have secret donors; could be corporations, foreign countries, people with scary agendas and the citizens and voters of the U.S. don't know who they are.These committees often use the tactic of running negative ads that contain outright lies about causes or candidates they oppose. There do not seem to be any limits what so ever on how much money they collect or spend and what they spend it on.There a lot of state elections that have candidates who are for sale and who are hoping to convince someone with money to buy the election for them. Carly Fiorina tried to buy her way into the U.S. Senate 2010, but it didn't work for her. It seems to be building to a crescendo this year, but Faith has already told us we're doomed, so.....

Yes but what are the alternatives? Cruz is a Bush operative (that would make a fourth term for the Bushes) and for the democrats you have Clinton who is totally fake. Sanders is a ringer for Clinton. You notice how even though he keeps winning he is happy for Clinton to take all of his delegates.

Trump staff alleges the real fake in this campaign has been The Donald himself, that he's really not the bigoted buffoon he purposefully has portrayed to the public. He's been selling snake oil to the Republican dupes all this time and now they are going to change his persona to better fit a general election campaign. sourceReally?Bullshit!If he's that much of a weasel then he doesn't belong anywhere near the Oval Office.

Wow, I can't believe I didn't see it all before this.

I saw David Brooks comment on this on PBS Newshour. He said that we all know Trump, he has been this guy since we first heard of him. His ignorance of how the Presidency works and how the government and military function was not an act, he really does not know about these things.So while he may have been pretending to be a typical Republican and embracing their fucked up philosophy, he can't change the ignorant boob that we all know he is.

AZPaul3 writes: And here is the devastating indictment of homo sapiens. Advertising works. Maybe all political advertising should be prohibited. Candidates would post position papers on some electionYYYY.gov page for every one to read.
But this would then be a literacy test all over again....

The Mexican government has announced they have agreed to Donald Trump's proposal that they pay for a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. Construction will begin in Oregon.

I am calling you out for this post because it is either the result of woeful ignorance or deliberate lies. It is so transparently false rebutting is a simple matter of common sense. Last I looked Jeb Bush ran for the nomination. Are you actually suggesting they would support Cruz over their own? Right now, I figure they are scheming on a way to deny either Trump or Cruz the nomination as befits their sense of entitlement. Perhaps the only part of your post grounded in an element of truth. After all, she affects a Southern accent in the traitor states just as little Bush pretended to be a bumpkin before his bumpkin audience, I assure you they speak differently to their rich donors and masters. How uninformed can one be? You must get all your information from Fox News.Sanders supports single-payer health care, Clinton, wallowing in all those donations from big pharma and other parasites involved in the process, does not.Sanders supports a $15 minimum wage, Clinton reluctantly supports $12, a promise likely unkept after the Walton family reminds her of who is the master and who is the slave.Sanders supports free college tuition, Clinton does not.Sanders generally does not support wars of choice, Clinton wants ground troops in Lybia (to cover her mistakes), Syria (to make more), Afghanistan, and God knows where else until she suddenly discovers she ran out of soldiers. Which of course will result in a recession, and another opportunity to screw over the 99% in favor of the 1%.After all she lobbied on support of overthrowing the elected government of Honduras in favor of turning that nation into 'the murder capital of the world.'And that just scratches the surface. Unbelievable - how is it even possible to come to that conclusion??I would advise you to contact a reputable academic librarian immediately to cure you of either abject ignorance or willful dishonesty. Study the difference between shit and shineola under their tutelage and get back to us after a year or so when you have learned, lest you embarrass yourself any further in this forum.

Alternative media.

Ok I get it, I get it. You guys have been watching the same alternative media that I have but you want to conceal this fact by constantly claiming otherwise and repeatedly asking me what my sources are. Wow, you really have got bogged down in detail, haven't you. Are you trying to look intelligent by focusing on policy? Big mistake.Sanders will soon be 75 years old. By the time he finishes a term in office he will be 79 or 80 years old. Who knows alzheimers might have kicked in by then. I suppose it's not impossible for him to serve but he probably just wants to retire with a blanket over his legs. More importantly, why would anyone care about policy when we are fast learning that the election is so rigged. The cabal can just go ahead with any policy they want.