In presidential primaries, endorsements have been among the best predictors of which candidates will succeed and which will fail.

Before any votes are cast, presidential candidates compete for the support of influential members of their party, especially elected officials like U.S. representatives, senators and governors. During the period known as the “invisible primary,” these “party elites” seek to coalesce around the candidates they find most acceptable as their party’s nominee. Over the past few decades, when these elites have reached a consensus on the best candidate, rank-and-file voters have usually followed.

I think a lot about the Department of Energy, because energy is my baby: oil and gas and minerals, those things that God has dumped on this part of the Earth for mankind’s use instead of us relying on unfriendly foreign nations,

Conservative fears of nonexistent or overblown boogeymen — Saddam’s WMD, Shariah law, voter fraud, Obama’s radical anti-colonial mind-set, Benghazi, etc. — make it hard not to see conservatism’s prudent risk avoidance as having morphed into a state of near permanent paranoia, especially fueled by recurrent “moral panics,” a sociological phenomenon in which a group of “social entrepreneurs” whips up hysterical fears over a group of relatively powerless “folk devils” who are supposedly threatening the whole social order. Given that conservatism seems to be part of human nature — just as liberalism is — we’re going to need all the help we can get in figuring out how to live with it, without being dominated, controlled and crippled by it.

Consider the recent wave of hysteria over Central American children turning themselves in at the border. There were the hordes of angry demonstrators protesting busloads of children, like it was Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. There was the congressman/doctor Phil Gingrey’s warning letter to the CDC, claiming that the children might be carrying the Ebola virus — a disease unknown outside Sub-Saharan Africa. There was the ludicrous myth of the “$50 million illegal alien resort spa.” But above all there was the most basic, fundamental fact that the children were turning themselves in at the border — there was no failure of border protection, although that’s what the right-wing hysteria portrayed it as.

But yes, he has touched that nerve and made it scream a loud, ugly scream.

I don't discount the pain these mostly older and mostly white angry people feel. It is real. They do believe they are losing or have lost their country, and they do want to "take it back" and "make America great again." But take it back from whom? Who has actually "taken" their country?

I don't doubt they are hurting. They may feel they have lost jobs or opportunities to the immigrant population, or that their children or grandchildren will.

Those are hard facts to accept. But that is the new reality, and yelling at people to go back to where they came from or hatching absurd schemes to send 11 million people packing won't change that.

Craig Fry

Trad climber
So Cal.

Republicans don't fix things, they rig things.

Lincoln was a liberal

At Galesburg, Douglas explicitly declared that the Declaration of Independence was not meant to apply to non-whites. He said, "This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis ... made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever"

Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower were LIBERAL Republicans, FACT

Craig Fry

Trad climber
So Cal.

Sep 7, 2015 - 08:25am PT

Do you have to include insults in every post?

Oh these poor little fearful cowards, controlled by fear to vote for corrupt conservatives that promote more fear and claim they will do something to coddle their fears. And most all of it is based on lies, propaganda and paranoia...

Based on what? The word of a lunatic Cactus Juice snorter... Craig Fried?

Craig Fry

Trad climber
So Cal.

Sep 7, 2015 - 07:53am PT


The Republicans destroy the American Government..... Sounds like hiring pedophiles to take care of your children, because preschools have been known to have abuse problems. Completely stupid.