Yes, The Real The New Awesome Primary Thread

Humphrey won his party's nomination back in 1968, so I had to think a minute and look up Humphrey before I could figure out the comparison you're drawing, and I'm still not sure. Is it that Trump's denial of the Republican nomination in a multi-candidate race would be like Humprey's denial of the presidency in a multi-candidate race?--Percy

The New York Times editorial page was particularly hard on both The Donald and the Republicans today. From No, Not Trump, Not Ever:

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Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.
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This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.

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His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources, they wrote.

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He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants.
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In some rare cases, political victors do not deserve our respect. George Wallace won elections, but to endorse those outcomes would be a moral failure.

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And so it is with Trump.

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History is a long record of men like him temporarily rising, stretching back to biblical times. Psalm 73 describes them: Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.

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And yet their success is fragile: Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly they are destroyed.

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The psalmist reminds us that the proper thing to do in the face of demagogy is to go the other way to make an extra effort to put on decency, graciousness, patience and humility, to seek a purity of heart that is stable and everlasting.
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He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.
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As the founders would have understood, he is a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government. He is precisely the kind of scapegoating, promise-making, fear-driving and deceiving demagogue they feared.

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And from Republican Elite’s Reign of Disdain:

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As an angry base rejects establishment candidates in favor of you-know-who, a significant part of the party’s elite blames not itself, but the moral and character failings of the voters.
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Last fall, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton attracted widespread attention with a paper showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans, which had been declining for generations, started rising again circa 2000.
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The question, however, is why this is happening. And the diagnosis preferred by the Republican elite is just wrong wrong in a way that helps us understand how that elite lost control of the nominating process.

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Stripped down to its essence, the G.O.P. elite view is that working-class America faces a crisis, not of opportunity, but of values. That is, for some mysterious reason many of our citizens have, as Mr. Ryan puts it, lost their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives. And this crisis of values, they suggest, has been aided and abetted by social programs that make life too easy on slackers.

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The problems with this diagnosis should be obvious. Tens of millions of people don’t suffer a collapse in values for no reason. Remember, several decades ago the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that the social ills of America’s black community didn’t come out of thin air, but were the result of disappearing economic opportunity. If he was right, you would have expected declining opportunity to have the same effect on whites, and sure enough, that’s exactly what we’re seeing.
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Meanwhile, the argument that the social safety net causes social decay by coddling slackers runs up against the hard truth that every other advanced country has a more generous social safety net than we do, yet the rise in mortality among middle-aged whites in America is unique: Everywhere else, it is continuing its historic decline.
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But at least [Trump is] acknowledging the real problems ordinary Americans face, not lecturing them on their moral failings. And that’s an important reason he’s winning.

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An aside: Given the decline in life expectancy among middle-aged whites in some regions of America, it's difficult to understand the hostile attitudes toward government subsidized health care in those same regions. Of course, it's equally difficult to understand their Republicanism in the first place, given that Republican constraints on government's ability to reign in big business are responsible for a lot of the economic mess we've been through in the last decade.--Percy

Oh, sure, I get what you were saying now, thanks for the explanation. I had interpreted what you said as comparing a Trump denial of the nomination to something Humphrey was denied, not something he denied someone else.--Percy

You could also blame the Supreme Court, who declared that money is speech.--Percy

Today's news reports that fracking has placed 7 million Americans at risk of man-made earthquakes, USGS says. Here's a nice USGS map from the article: Lot's of good information in that article, worth reading.There are no excellent candidates out there, only satisfactory ones, terrible ones, and unthinkable ones. Concerning fracking, a good deal of any country's wealth depends upon its natural resources and its ability to take advantage of them, but the fracking industry is pooping on the rug. If fracking were properly regulated to reduce its environmental impact to an acceptable level then it's cost would soar and we would no longer be energy independent, but such is life. If environmentally safe fracked oil and gas is prohibitively expensive at today's prices then let it sit in the ground until it's economical. We don't want to shit where we live, something the Republicans don't seem to care about.Bernie's, "No, I do not support fracking," is not a reasonable statement. Vermont banned fracking, as big a sacrifice as Tahiti banning snow - there have never been any producing wells in Vermont. Try banning fracking in Texas.Hillary's "more nuanced answer" is a good one, indicating a willingness for more regulation, but even that would likely face a big fight, first in Congress, and then later in court. Even if she takes an Obama-like regulatory route, that would likely be challenged in court, too. Did everyone already know that there are many exemptions for hydraulic fracturing under United States federal law? Fracking is exempt from from parts of the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and others.Attempts to increase oversight of the fracking industry would be a big fight, and with the Republicans in control of Congress there is no chance of reining it in, no matter who is elected. Let's hope that residents in the new earthquake zones take note and begin voting in their own best interests.--Percy

Is this opening paragraph from the article incorrect:

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Earthquakes are a natural hazard except when they're man-made. The oil and gas industry has aggressively adopted the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to shatter subsurface shale rock and liberate the oil and gas lurking there. But the process results in tremendous amounts of chemical-laden wastewater. Horizontal drilling for oil can also produce massive amount of natural, unwanted salt water. The industry disposes of this wastewater by pumping it into deep wells.

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So if I understand you correctly, your point is that the article is incorrect to say that frackers pump salt wastewater deep underground? I have maps of the underground aquifers in our neighborhood from the local water management board, but I don't understand the relevancy. There's no oil drilling in New Hampshire, and certainly no fracking. No one around here, including those who had the misfortune of needing deep wells (at 330 feet mine's a baby) has ever had a problem with salt. Around here it's iron and manganese. Aren't the people at USGS also geologists? Then tell us what it really means.--Percy

Taking what Petrophysics said in Message 95: So doing the math (actually, DollarTimes did the math), $1.45 in 1981 dollars would be worth $3.97 today.According to Weekly Denver, CO Regular Conventional Retail Gasoline Prices, last week the average price of regular in Denver was $1.93/gallon, and a month ago $1.52/gallon. If Petrophysics brother really purchased gas at $1.29/gallon anytime within the past month or two then he found a real bargain.I'm not sure what point Petro was trying to make, but his comparisons would be more meaningful if made with average rather than bargain prices.--Percy

Pardon my ignorance, but can someone describe or point me to the message that describes the war crimes Hillary committed?--Percy

Okay, I've gone and read the USGS's Induced Earthquakes Raise Chances of Damaging Shaking in 2016. The only difference I can see is that the USGS article doesn't say that the wastewater injected into the ground contains salt. Is that the difference your concerned about? Because if so it's a minor point. The main point is that millions of gallons of wastewater injected into the ground is causing earthquakes. Whether there's salt in that wastewater is beside the point when it comes to earthquakes.--Percy

People are already questioning how anything you describe Hillary Clinton doing in Message 76 represents war crimes, and you're just being evasive. War crimes *does* have a definition, why don't you use it?You have a bunch of reasons why Hillary Clinton shouldn't be president - they're better discussed than misrepresented.--Percy

3751 words, of which only a third were your own. I only had one point, and that was that war crimes *does* have a definition, and you're not using it. You ignored that point and have since indicated you're not backing away from your allegation. Before your points about Hillary Clinton can be discussed I think you have to stop misrepresenting them as war crimes.--Percy

A recent article in Politico (Donald Trump cracks open his wallet) reports that Donald Trump loaned his campaign an additional $11.5 million in March. It adds that Trump has received a total of $12.2 million in mostly small donations, and has loaned his campaign a total of $36 million. Of course a loan is not a donation, but I'm curious to what extent Trump's money has made possible his run for the Republican nomination. Could he have gotten those loans from elsewhere if he weren't wealthy and couldn't provide the loans himself? I don't think so. In my opinion the Trump run wouldn't be possible without Trump money.We need campaign reform all over the place, and not the kind of campaign sabotage committed by the Supreme Court when they decided money was speech.--Percy

Having laws that allow the wealthy to use as much money as they wish to fund a political campaign, whether their own or someone else's, distorts, even perverts, the democratic process.--Percy

The problematic principle established by the Supreme Court is that money is speech. I don't know the law or the constitution the way you do, but my understanding is that you can trace the roots way back before the Citizen's United ruling. Doing a quick Google I found mentions of a Buckley v Valeo decision - I never heard of it, but maybe you have? Anyway, it's the Supreme Court's position that money is speech that I was referring to, not a specific decision like Citizen's United. As I said to Cat Sci, allowing money to be speech distorts and perverts the democratic process. I only object when you accuse without asking. I don't believe the wealthy should be allowed to pour as much money as they want into a political campaign, whether their own or someone else's.--Percy

Because it allows the wealthy to buy elections.--Percy