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May 11, 2016We choose the nominee, not the voters: Senior GOP official
March 16, 2016Political parties, not voters, choose their presidential nominees, a Republican convention rules member told CNBC, a day after GOP front-runner Donald Trump rolled up more big primary victories.
“The media has created the perception that the voters choose the nomination. That’s the conflict here,” Curly Haugland, an unbound GOP delegate from North Dakota, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. He even questioned why primaries and caucuses are held.
Haugland is one of 112 Republican delegates who are not required to cast their support for any one candidate because their states and territories don’t hold primaries or caucuses.
Even with Trump’s huge projected delegate haul in four state primaries Tuesday, the odds are increasing the billionaire businessman may not ultimately get the 1,237 delegates needed to claim the GOP nomination before the convention.
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Voting slip
Confused by this talk about delegates? Read this
Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump stands between his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski (L) and his son Eric (R) as he speaks about the results of the Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Illinois and Missouri primary elections.
Big wins for Trump but opposition clings to hope
CNBC’s John Harwood sat down with House Speaker Paul Ryan in a “Speakeasy” interview at the Capitol Building in Washington DC on March 15, 2016.
Ryan says he won’t accept GOP nod for president
Republican candidates Donald Trump and John Kasich and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton win big in primaries on March 15, 2016.
Big night for Trump and Clinton; Kasich takes Ohio
President Barack Obama
Obama slams ‘vulgar and divisive’ primaries campaign
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This could lead to a brokered convention, in which unbound delegates, like Haugland, could play a significant swing role on the first ballot to choose a nominee.
Most delegates bound by their state’s primary or caucus results are only committed on the first ballot. If subsequent ballots are needed, virtually all of the delegates can vote any way they want, said Gary Emineth, another unbound delegate from North Dakota.
“It could introduce Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, or it could be the other candidates that have already been in the race and are now out of the race [such as] Mike Huckabee [or] Rick Santorum. All those people could eventually become candidates on the floor,” Emineth said.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, who decided not to run for the White House this year, said in a CNBC interview Tuesday he won’t categorically rule out accepting the GOP nomination if a deadlocked convention were to turn to him. But on Wednesday, a Ryan spokeswoman said the speaker would not accept a Republican nomination for president at a divided convention.
Democrats experienced the last true brokered presidential convention to go beyond the first ballot in 1952. Republicans came close at their 1976 convention.
“The rules haven’t kept up,” Haugland said. “The rules are still designed to have a political party choose its nominee at a convention. That’s just the way it is. I can’t help it. Don’t hate me because I love the rules.”
Haugland said he sent a letter to each campaign alerting them to a rule change he’s proposing, which would allow any candidate who earns at least one delegate during the nominating process to submit his or her name to be nominated at this summer’s convention.
If the GOP race continues at the same pace, Trump would likely have a plurality of delegates. So far, he’s more than halfway to the 1,237 magic number.
Trump split Tuesday’s winner-take-all primaries in Florida and Ohio.
The real estate mogul dominated in Florida over Sen. Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the race after losing his home state.
But Trump lost Ohio to the state’s governor, John Kasich. Trump also won Illinois and North Carolina. He held a slim lead over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in Missouri early Wednesday.
Emineth, also a former chairman of the North Dakota Republican Party, told “Squawk Box” in the same interview that he’s concerned about party officials pulling “some shenanigan.”
“You have groups of people who are going to try to take over the rules committee,” he warned. “[That] could totally change everything, and mess things up with the delegates. And people across the country will be very frustrated.”
“It’s important that the Republican National Committee has transparency on what they’re doing [on the rules] going into the convention and what happens in the convention,” he continued. That’s because of “all the votes that have been cast in caucuses and primaries. Don’t disenfranchise those voters. Because at the end of the day, our goal is to beat Hillary Clinton or whoever their [Democratic] nominee is in November.”
Emineth said he’s worried that frustration would discourage Americans in the general election from voting Republican.
— CNBC’s Lori Ann LaRocco contributed to this report.
BACK TO THE FUTURE DAY
October 21, 2015Time travel is impossible you may say. To that I say boulder-dash.
I must disagree. You want proof? Okay. Just take a look at your calenders.
We have, all of us, just completed our trip to October 21,2015.
The future is here and it is now!!
Hey, someone just stole my hover-board.
‘America is a bomb waiting to explode’
October 20, 2015Well maybe not a literal explosion like a bomb. But an explosion of sorts. Make no mistake about it America is on the edge. If you were born well into (I won’t say how far) the last century you would see the dramatic changes this country has gone through.
I would’nt call my self a dooms day prepper but I do have a well stocked pantry and arsonal. I do incourage everyone to do the same. Three days supply of food and water won’t be near enough if the trucks stop running.
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/318986-america-bomb-society-crisis/
The United States is in decline. While not all major shocks to the system will be devastating, when the right one comes along, the outcome may be dramatic.
Not all explosives are the same. We all know you have to be careful with dynamite. Best to handle it gently and not smoke while you’re around it.
Semtex is different. You can drop it. You can throw it. You can put it in the fire. Nothing will happen. Nothing until you put the right detonator in it, that is.
To me, the US – and most of the supposedly free West – increasingly looks like a truck being systematically filled with Semtex.
But it’s easy to counter cries of alarm with the fact that the truck is stable – because it’s true: you can hurl more boxes into the back without any real danger. Absent the right detonator, it is no more dangerous than a truckload of mayonnaise.
But add the right detonator and you’re just one click away from complete devastation.
We can see how fragile the U.S. is now by considering just four tendencies.
1. Destruction of farms and reliable food source
The average American is a long way from food when the shops are closed.
The Washington Post reports that the number of farms in the country has fallen by some 4 million from more than 6 million in 1935 to roughly 2 million in 2012.
And according to the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, only about 2 percent of the US population live on farms.
That means that around 4.6 million people currently have the means to feed themselves.
Food supply logistics are extended, sometimes stretching thousands of miles. The shops have nothing more than a few days’ stock. A simple break in that supply line would clear the shops out in days.
2. Weak economic system
The American economic system is little more than froth.
The US currency came off the gold standard in 1933 and severed any link with gold in 1971. Since then, the currency has been essentially linked to oil, the value of which has been protected and held together by wars.
The whole world has had enough of the US and its hubris – not least the people of the US themselves, which the massive support currently for Putin’s decision to deal with ISIS demonstrates.
Since pro-active war is what keeps the US going, if it loses the monopoly on that front, its decline is inevitable.
Fiat economies always collapse. They last on average for 37 years. By that metric the US should have already run out of gas.
Once people wake up and smell the Yuan, the Exodus out of the dollar will be unstoppable.
3. Americans increasingly on mind-altering drugs
According to the Scientific American, use of antidepressants among the US population was up 400 percent in the late 2000s over the 1990s. Many of these drugs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
These are the type of FDA-approved narcotics lone gunmen are frequently associated with, and their psychoses often attributed to a forced or sudden withdrawal from such drugs.
Pharmaceuticals are produced at centralized points by companies which themselves rely on extended logistics systems both to produce and to deliver their output. If the logistics system fails, there’s no more supply.
4. Morals in decline
During the objective hardship of the 1930s, there was surprisingly little crime. People were brought up with a conception of morals and right and wrong. Frugality and prudence were prized virtues. Communities were generally fairly cohesive.
Relative to then, society today is undisciplined, unrealistic and selfish.
Around 250 million shoppers participated in the Black Friday sales in 2013 in which around USD 61 billion was spent on consumer items – up roughly 100 percent on 2006 figures.
Stampedes and even murders are not uncommon each year with people openly fighting each other over reduced-price items.
The goods bought in such sales tend to be non-essential and many of them are bought on credit cards which then have to be paid off at interest.
Part of the problem in what I have outlined above is that there is little explicit tension. Sure, it is depressing, vulgar and immoral. But it doesn’t look catastrophic. It looks normal.
My point is that just because US – and many other countries organised after the same template – do not look explosive, doesn’t mean they won’t blow up.
Whereas 80 years ago we could absorb major shocks, today we cannot.
Nowhere to run
In the past, people were in rural communities. They could grow food. They had real communities. They also had self-control and a conception of morality.
Today, if the supply lines go down, you are stuck in a house you can’t heat surrounded by millions of FDA-approved drug addicts who are going psycho because they have run out of juice and people who would murder their own grandmother to get a cut-price iPhone.
I would argue that the right shock event – or combination of shock events – will detonate the explosive.
Potential detonators happen all the time. Either they are contained or they are simply incompatible with the explosive or they don’t go off. But that doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen or that we are not sitting on a mountain of explosives.
There was one such potential detonator – which presently has not gone off – in the UK just last week.
The UK’s Independent reported Friday that experts were ‘staggered’ after Pauline Cafferkey – who had been brought to London of all places – rapidly declined after being declared cured from Ebola.
This woman had been allowed out into the community – still sick with Ebola – and managed to visited Mossneuk Primary School in East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire, on Monday to thank children for their fund-raising efforts.
We will assume these events have their origins in incompetence; the fact is: we have a woman dying from Ebola in the UK’s largest population center.
What if there is more incompetence?
Boris Johnson, the current Mayor of London, primed the British public for the possibility of Ebola in London just last week.
Perhaps he knows something we don’t.
What do you think will happen if people start dying from Ebola in London or New York? The natural response will be to get out of the urban centre as quickly as possible.
During the Great Plague of London of 1665, for example, Defoe wrote “Nothing was to be seen but wagons and carts, with goods, women, servants, children, coaches filled with people of the better sort, and horsemen attending them, and all hurrying away”.
Once the better off city people reach the countryside there will be instant resistance from the host population, not least because they will not want potentially infected people entering their communities.
Meanwhile, the poor people who are left in the cities will run out of food in short order as suppliers refuse to enter the city.
Those who fled London in 1665 had somewhere to go: they were returning to the fields that fed them.
Today, the fields which feed us are largely in other countries, and the ones which are in our own are mainly owned by large corporations.
I am not predicting exactly this scenario for the US or for any other country. I am saying that all the ingredients are there for complete breakdown and large-scale deaths given the right initiating incident.
I am saying that volatility is baked into the cake – even into the cake of what today looks and feels normal.
I am saying that while it may be possible to keep loading box upon box of societal Semtex into the truck, given the right detonator the collapse will be swift, unstoppable and devastating.
WELL I AM BACK
October 16, 2015Sorry i have been absent for so long. I lost my internet for a while.
I will try to keep up with my daily posts again.
If anyone has questions or requests for posts on a particular subject
just put a comment on this post and i will do what ever i can to find out
your answer.
Thanks for your patience.
tommy49646
Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?
June 22, 2010By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 06/21/2010 06:13 PM ET
When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler’s rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions."Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union. Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive. In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it. The president’s poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies. that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere. And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP’s oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated. But our government is supposed to be "a government of laws and not of men."
If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion — or $50 billion or $100 billion — then so be it. But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without "due process of law." Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference. With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution. If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don’t believe in constitutional government.
19 June, 2010 17:09
June 19, 2010Pa School Spy case: defending the indefensivable
February 22, 2010India forms new climate change body
February 6, 2010The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.
Read entire article here
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
Published: 3:47PM GMT 04 Feb 2010
The move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.
The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.
In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.
Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalized the IPC chairman even further.
He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.
“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.
“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.
It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with international bodies and operate as a “sort of Indian IPCC,” he added.
The body, which he said will not rival the UN’s panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year, with reports on the Himalayas, India’s long coastline, the Western Ghat highlands and the north-eastern region close to the borders with Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal. “Through these we will demonstrate our commitment to climate science,” he said.
The UN panel’s claims of glacial meltdown by 2035 “was clearly out of place and didn’t have any scientific basis,” he said, while stressing the government remained concerned about the health of the Himalayan ice flows. “Most glaciers are melting, they are retreating, some glaciers, like the Siachen glacier, are advancing. But overall one can say incontrovertibly that the debris on our glaciers is very high the snow balance is very low. We have to be very cautious because of the water security particularly in north India which depends on the health of the Himalayan glaciers,” he added.
The new National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology will be based in Dehradun, in Uttarakhand, and will monitor glacial changes and compare results with those from glaciers in Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan.
Palin Wants Rahm Fired
February 5, 2010In a Facebook post, Sarah Palin calls on President Obama to fire Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for reportedly describing the strategy of Senate liberals as “fucking retarded.”
“Yes, Rahm is known for his caustic, crude references about those with whom he disagrees, but his recent tirade against participants in a strategy session was such a strong slap in many American faces that our president is doing himself a disservice by seeming to condone Rahm’s recent sick and offensive tactic.”
Meanwhile, an interesting new poll of Republicans finds that a majority think Palin is more qualified than Barack Obama to be president
Read entire article here
Justice Defends Ruling on Finance
February 5, 2010Justice Defends Ruling on Finance By ADAM LIPTAKPublished: February 3, 2010WASHINGTON — In expansive remarks at a law school in Florida, Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday vigorously defended the Supreme Court’s recent campaign finance decision.
Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesJustice Clarence Thomas said he had stopped attending State of the Union speeches.Blog
The CaucusThe latest on President Obama, his administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.More Politics NewsAnd Justice Thomas explained that he did not attend State of the Union addresses — he missed the dust-up when President Obama used the occasion last week to criticize the court’s decision — because the gatherings had turned so partisan.
Justice Thomas responded to several questions from students at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Fla., concerning the campaign finance case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. By a 5-to-4 vote, with Justice Thomas in the majority, the court ruled last month that corporations had a First Amendment right to spend money to support or oppose political candidates.
“I found it fascinating that the people who were editorializing against it were The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company,” Justice Thomas said. “These are corporations.”
The part of the McCain-Feingold law struck down in Citizens United contained an exemption for news reports, commentaries and editorials. But Justice Thomas said that reflected a legislative choice rather than a constitutional principle.
He added that the history of Congressional regulation of corporate involvement in politics had a dark side, pointing to the Tillman Act, which banned corporate contributions to federal candidates in 1907.
“Go back and read why Tillman introduced that legislation,” Justice Thomas said, referring to Senator Benjamin Tillman. “Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them.”
It is thus a mistake, the justice said, to applaud the regulation of corporate speech as “some sort of beatific action.”
Justice Thomas said the First Amendment’s protections applied regardless of how people chose to assemble to participate in the political process.
“If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group, you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association,” he said. “If you all then formed a partnership to speak, you’d say we still have that First Amendment right to speak and of association.”
“But what if you put yourself in a corporate form?” Justice Thomas asked, suggesting that the answer must be the same.
Asked about his attitude toward the two decisions overruled in Citizens United, he said, “If it’s wrong, the ultimate precedent is the Constitution.”
Justice Thomas would not directly address the controversy over Mr. Obama’s criticism of the Citizens United ruling or Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s mouthed “not true” in response. But he did say he had stopped attending the addresses.
“I don’t go because it has become so partisan and it’s very uncomfortable for a judge to sit there,” he said, adding that “there’s a lot that you don’t hear on TV — the catcalls, the whooping and hollering and under-the-breath comments.”
“One of the consequences,” he added in an apparent reference to last week’s address, “is now the court becomes part of the conversation, if you want to call it that, in the speeches. It’s just an example of why I don’t go.”
Climate-Gate Scandal Should Be Wake-Up Call For Press, Politicians
December 17, 2009By JOSEPH BASTPosted 11/25/2009 06:24 PM ET
Read entire article here
Last week, someone (probably a whistle-blower at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England) released e-mails and other documents written by Phil Jones, Michael Mann and other leading scientists who edit and control the content of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The e-mails appear to show a conspiracy to falsify data and suppress academic debate in order to exaggerate the possible threat of man-made global warming.
The misconduct exposed by the e-mails is so apparent that one scientist, Tim Ball, said it marked “the death blow to climate science.” Another, Patrick Michaels, told the New York Times: “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”
Although I am not a scientist, I know something about global warming, having written about the subject since 1993 and recently edited an 880-page comprehensive survey of the science and economics of global warming, titled “Climate Change Reconsidered,” written by a team of nearly 40 scientists for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.
The content of the e-mails doesn’t surprise me or other skeptics in the warming debate. We have been saying for many years that the leading alarmists have engaged in academic fraud, do not speak for the larger scientific community, and are exaggerating the scientific certainty of their claims.
Tens of thousands of scientists share our views, including many whose credentials are far superior to those of the dozen or so alarmists the media quote and promote.
The implications of these e-mails are enormous: They mean the IPCC is not a reliable source of science on global warming.
And since the global movement to “do something” about global warming rests almost entirely on the IPCC’s claim to represent the “consensus” of climate science, that entire movement stands discredited.
The release of these documents creates an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians and others who relied on the IPCC to form their opinion about global warming to stop and reconsider their position.
The experts they trusted and quoted in the past have been caught red-handed plotting to conceal data, hide temperature trends that contradict their predictions and keep critics from appearing in peer-reviewed journals. This is real evidence they should examine and then comment on publicly.
It’s possible that the e-mails and other documents aren’t as damning as they appear to be on first look. (I’ve read about two dozen of them myself and find them appalling, but others may not.)