4702

Let us not forget that Trump praised Megyn Kelly in 2011,Great job. I could never beat you.

Kelly asked, “Do you really think you’re a better moderator than I am?”

Trump responded, “No, I could never beat you. That wouldn’t even be close. That would be no contest. You have done a great job, by the way, and I mean it.”

4703

… these are demeaning and denigrating phrases. They seem frankly gross, with an emotional tenor we’d expect from street toughs or frat boys trash talking each other. It’s raw and primal and all about dominating by denigrating.

But this driving force of Republican politics has only become more salient and central as the GOP has become increasingly dominated by core constituencies animated by anger and resentment that things to which they believe they are entitled are being taken away from them.

This is absolutely true. You would think that from reading RWM them there are only two possible positions in politics: Strong or weak. Nothing else matters.

4704

Microsoft releases predictions of the voting in the first few primaries: https://blogs.bing.com/search/2016/01/26/bing-elections-2016-who-will-win-iowa-and-new-hampshire/


Iowa (February 1)
DEMOCRATS			REPUBLICANS	
Hillary Clinton	50.1%		Donald Trump	39.8%
Bernie Sanders	46.8%		Ted Cruz	30.5%
Martin O’Malley	3.1%		Marco Rubio	12.9%


New Hampshire (February 9)
DEMOCRATS			REPUBLICANS	
Bernie Sanders	58.4%		Donald Trump	40.2%
Hillary Clinton	40.5%		Ted Cruz	13.1%
Martin O’Malley	1.1%		Marco Rubio	12.6%
				John Kasich	11.9%


South Carolina (February 20 and 27)
DEMOCRATS			REPUBLICANS	
Hillary Clinton	63.5%		Donald Trump	44.3%
Bernie Sanders	36.4%		Ted Cruz	22.6%
Martin O’Malley	0.1%		Marco Rubio	14.7%


Nevada (February 20 and 23)
DEMOCRATS			REPUBLICANS	
Hillary Clinton	91.2%		Donald Trump	39.6%
Bernie Sanders	8.7%		Ted Cruz	20.8%
Martin O’Malley	0.1%		Ben Carson	18.4%
				Marco Rubio	12.4%
4705

He’s teaching people to go easy on him, or suffer the consequences.

And that works because he’s willing to be the bully.

I really liked this bit.

4706

Interesting. While I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump ends up sweeping, I will be if it’s by those margins. I do not expect him to hit 40% in NH - I’m not basing that off anything other than a hunch. I also think Kasich will end up doing much better than expected in NH - at a guess somewhere around 20%.

On the Dem side of the ledger, that looks about what I expect (except NV.)

4707

I keep expecting Trump to pull a Brewster’s Millions and pull out of the race with a “I wasn’t running to win. Why the heck are you all voting for me”.

I haven’t been able to find any polls of what the undecided/independent voters think of Trump. If he captures the Republican nomination somehow (I’m still hoping not…but I do prefer him over Cruz), does his crazy sink him or do we end up with a nut-job reality star in the White House?

4708

You can dig down into a lot of polls to find the “Independent” lines. For instance this CNN Poll from about a week ago of NH voters, which shows 43% of Independent voters going for Trump and only 34% going for Hillary in a theoretical match-up.

The problem is that “Independents” are a weird beast. A LARGE proportion of them vote consistently Republican but don’t self-identify as such, so the numbers for Indies skew fairly Red – they’re not the same thing as “Undecided” voters. Also, there are not as many of them as you’d think. Even though the “Independents” skew in favor of Trump in the example above, Hillary still beats him by 9 points.

4709

This was actually seriously suggested by a guy on POTUS last night, which is amazingly not hard to believe at this point. That Trump doesn’t actually WANT to be President at all, and that all of this is just a case of him building his brand up. And so he keeps doing increasingly outrageous things, but people keep supporting him anyway, because they are dumber than rocks.

I must admit, if at some point he just comes out and says, “For fuck’s sake people, I’m out of the race. I did this just to point out how incredibly stupid the republican base has become. I acted like a fascist imbecile, and you guys supported me more than anyone. You are all terrible people,” my head will explode.

He will have orchestrated the most epic troll of all time. A true masterstroke.

The more likely explanation is that he’s just a narcissistic megalomaniac though.

For instance this CNN Poll from about a week ago of NH voters, which shows 43% of Independent voters going for Trump and only 34% going for Hillary in a theoretical match-up.

An interesting thing about that poll that is often left out, is that when you go into things like republicans, only 29% are actually decided… So those polls about who they’re gonna vote for, where Trump is leading? Almost insignificant. The vast majority of voters don’t know who they’re gonna vote for in the primary.

4710

I would expect the undecideds to break in Trumps favor. One, voters prefer to vote for winners. Two, many voters are unwilling to say they support Trump (publically at least).

4711

I have, perhaps erroneously, a greater faith in humanity.

4712

Plus, it’s still a PRIMARY. You’d hope that fewer than a third would be utterly committed to a single candidate at this point.

4713

Kenneth Thorpe: Sander’s health care plan is $1.1 trillion short of the mark.

Sanders’s camp is, naturally, skeptical. Sanders’s policy director Warren Gunnels told me Thorpe’s analysis is a “total hatchet job.” The disagreement ultimately comes down to a question of how optimistic you are about single-payer’s ability to reduce health care spending.

Sanders’s plan is very optimistic, assuming huge reductions in per-person health care spending that bring the US much closer to existing countries with single-payer like Canada (which spends nearly 48 percent less per person) or Australia (more than 56 percent less). “If you look at every other country that has adopted a universal single-payer health care system, their costs per capita are far lower than they are in the United States,” Gunnels told me.

Thorpe is less rosy. He assumes the US can reduce the cost of prescription drugs by a fifth, that it can pay providers much less than private insurers currently do, that it can significantly slow down how fast health care spending grows, and that it can gain some substantial savings from simpler administration. But that still isn’t enough to make the plan affordable without a massive tax increase.

4714

Thorpe is less rosy. He assumes the US can reduce the cost of prescription drugs by a fifth, that it can pay providers much less than private insurers currently do, that it can significantly slow down how fast health care spending grows, and that it can gain some substantial savings from simpler administration. But that still isn’t enough to make the plan affordable without a massive tax increase.

This is the thing that gets me… that the “less rosy” estimate still assumes pretty massive cost reductions. So the predictions by Sanders really seem totally unrealistic to me.

4715

He assumes the US can reduce the cost of prescription drugs by a fifth

Many EU countries cut costs by more than that as a result of the Eurozone crisis, and they came from a far lower starting cost than the US.

Also doesn’t seem to account for the reduction in unnecessary procedures e.g. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/why-do-other-rich-nations-spend-so-much-less-on-healthcare/374576/

I don’t really understand why medicaid and medicare costs will increase, can someone here explain it?

4716

Also, just to kill any attempt at the argument that pharma companies need those high prices in order to continue to develop new drugs:

yTU7jm6.png612×525

4717

“Need” is subjective, of course. You’re using need in the purely strict sense that they don’t need every single cent of profit to cycle back into the company for operation. Since they’re public companies, they would argue that they need every cent of profit to keep their shareholders and survive.

4718

Also, just to kill any attempt at the argument that pharma companies need those high prices in order to continue to develop new drugs

You realize that chart demonstrates that pharma companies are some of the largest spenders on R&D of any organizations in the world, right?

4719

Does the Sanders plan assume the junior doctors won’t strike, or is that already factored in?

4720

CNN talks to 150 Trump supporters to find out why they favor Trump. No surprises. Most of them are fearful idiots.

Paul Weber of Appleton, Iowa, describing himself as “kind of a redneck” at an October Trump rally in Waterloo, said he was tired of the so-called “new Americans” flooding the country.

“The people that are coming in here from China, Indonesia and all of them countries, they’re getting pregnant and coming here and having babies,” Weber said, telling an Asian reporter that he meant no offense. “They get everything and the people that were born here can’t get everything.”

A woman named Deena from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, attending a Trump rally there in late November made the following analogy about illegal immigration.

“I come home and someone’s occupying my house and they’re eating my food and then they’re taking the kids from my bed; they’re taking the money out of my pocket,” said Deena, who said she was still undecided on Trump. “Why should we have to support someone else and then make our kids suffer, our families suffer?”

“Islam is traced patrilineally. I am a Muslim if my father is Muslim. In that sense, it is undeniable that Barack Obama was born a Muslim,” Michael Rooney said at a Trump event in Worcester, Massachusetts, in November. (Obama is a Christian. He has said his father was born a Muslim and later became an atheist.)

Rooney, a respiratory therapist in his late 40s, likened Obama’s Christian faith to Caitlyn Jenner’s recent gender transition: “It is true that he now identifies as a Christian in the same sense that Bruce Jenner identifies as a woman.”

Rhett Benhoff, a middle-aged white man at a December Trump campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina, said discrimination against whites is “absolutely” real.

“I mean, it seems like we really go overboard to make sure all these other nationalities nowadays and colors have their fair shake of it, but no one’s looking out for the white guy anymore,” he said.

“Islam is not a religion. It’s a violent blood cult. OK?” said Hoyt Wood, a 68-year-old military veteran waiting to hear Trump speak aboard the U.S.S. Yorktown in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. “All they know is violence, that’s all they know.”

At the same rally, 55-year-old Susan Kemmelin said, “We can’t look at a Muslim and tell if they’re a terrorist or friendly.”

Robert Engelkes, a 45-year-old corn and soybean farmer from Dike, Iowa, pointed out that there is historical precedent for targeting one group.

“What did we do in World War II? We put all the Japanese in internment camps,” said Engelkes, who was standing outside a Trump event in Des Moines. “We had to do something with them.”

4721

So 81 Billion total, a bit higher than Apple $71 billion earned in the last 12 months, and if you want to see some crazy profit margins take a look at game companies like Activision/Blizzard and EA.