That wouldn't be a fair variant, because no one can stop the Trump

there are plenty of variants that aren't fair. Have you played FUBAR?

Yay, reading!!!!

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-17/how-republicans-rebuild-after-the-trump-disaster

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/01/28/cruz_trump_and_the_missing_white_voters_129465.html

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/01/29/why_trump_why_now_129486.html

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/17/entertainment/simpsons-trump-presidency-thr-feat/index.html

Trump's presidency was predicted back in 2000 on The Simpsons.

Trump gave interviews at the time talking about running under Perot's banner of the Reform Party. The Simpsons were more joking about events in the news.

@Randomizer - I saw the year 2000 prediction of President Trump and remember the episode from the time, amazing! Assuming gopher's background is correct, its still amazing that things are heading that direction.

Incidentally my son tried buying online a red "Make Donald Drumpf Again!" cap but they've sold out of stock. Bummed.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/23/a-world-war-has-begun-break-the-silence/

Wow, kaner, just wow. Do you regularly consume such pablum? There are too many howlers in there to even bother trying to systematically refute them.

Nope, actually mostly I read print journals generally and read sci-fi via audio book while traveling to and from work. That article was sent to me by a colleague, and since it mentioned Trump I thought I would share the love.

Wow Pilger is all over the joint, one minute I think he's a Drumpf lackey, next he's more socialist than Bernie. Oh well, good to get other perspectives in Australia other than Rupert's view of the world.

I thought your government's version of Pravda and the Packer dynasty offered y'all competing views of the world?

what's that supposed to mean? Are you saying that there is a wealth of easily accessed information freely available to the public in the US?

That the media in the US is free of corporate interests? Come on gopher, surely you see further than that.

I meant what I said namely that News Corp is not a monopoly in Australia but is opposed by a government controlled broadcaster and a competing family of oligarchs. I said nothing about the US and certainly nothing about corporate interests.

If you wish me to address the US, then fine. Of course, there is a wealth of easily accessed information freely available to the public in the US and presumably in Australia as well. The question is what people are willing to pay for or to sit through advertising to support in order to have the information actively brought to them. But to you comment about corporate interests, I grew up in a fairly major city where the largest circulation newspaper was owned by a "charitable" trust, and you would have difficulty imagining how horrible that was. I mean literally you would have difficulty believing how the paper behaved under non-profit ownership. While the paper is horrible today, it is horrible in totally different, less horrible ways after an act of Congress in the 1980s targeted directly at the paper forced the foundation to sell to corporate interests. The competing paper, the local news radio station and the TV station with the highest rated local news were owned by the family of a former governor and his more politically active progeny.

The major city I live in now has a local "non-profit" virtual newspaper online that people regularly send me articles from; reading information posted on the site, I learned that their coverage on specific issue categories is funded by a series of local foundations. The foundation that subsidizes all of the coverage of education is The Bush Foundation, which was originally funded by 3M and is now run almost exclusively by former administrators from the local state university at which I work. The Bush Foundation was run several years ago by a recently retired university President who did some shady things on his way out the door funneling money to a research center run by one of his protégées who then hired him to a virtual no-show job that caused a minor scandal. Please give me coverage funded by corporate advertising, if this is the alternative. The idea that corporate-ness is the central problem of media seems bizarre to me.

Somewhat ironically, the corporation that bought my local paper from a foundation had a wonderfully interesting conversation with President Obama's high school many years ago. When called for comment regarding a news story about the fiduciary behavior of the board of trustees of this incredibly rich high school, the board responded by calling the corporate headquarters of the media company and offering to buy (for I think $600,000,000) the local newspaper in order to shut down any public examination of how a small group of people handled what had grown into a multi-billion dollar endowment for a high school with very few students.

When I worked in finance, I personally sent all of my direct managers at my employer to federal prison. I also later got drawn into the implosion and prosecution of a mid-sized financial firm that I did business with, which had some interesting ties to the Clinton family. Even with this experience, I am still regularly stunned by how horribly the bureaucracy and administration of a large public university behave on a day-to-day basis. Let's just say that everything I have read about the Catholic Church's response to child molestation makes perfect sense; I can assure that no coordinated conspiracy is necessary in such an institution to yield such consistent responses. At some point, I will sit down and try to use the tools of my trade to formally understand the hows and the whys of individual behavior within bureaucratic institutions. But I have witnessed first hand "organizations" that overtly and vocally eschew both capitalism and the profit motive behave more atrociously than I ever saw in the private sector, and as I said I worked in finance and closely observed criminality that was actually successfully prosecuted. The manner in which bureaucracy allow individuals to dissociate their behavior from outcomes and the failure to maintain compatible incentives are far more determinate of dysfunction.

Gopher - generally speaking Murdoch controls all papers in Australia with the exception of the more "high brow" Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age. The Packers got out of channel 9 ages ago to get into gambling although I think they may have bought an interest in channel 10 recently. Kerry Stokes controls 7. The ABC while the more liberal of all media (& as you point out still under government ownership) isn't watched by many except for the odd comedy program and old fogeys wanting BBC programming. Don't forget the SBS (also owned by the government) which when I was at university was known for its soft porn style French films late after dark and was colloquially known as the Soccer Broadcasting Station.

So Cruz and Kasich have dropped out. Apparently you better get with the program people: http://bit.ly/1XaOkpH

Trump will probably get destroyed by the Democrat nominee.

I wonder who he will choose as his running mate? Rubio would probably refuse if given the invitation, since Trump has been calling him "little Marco". Chris Christie?

I forget the ladies name but she is a former secretary of state and African american. If trump makes her his VP he has it sealed.

The lady's name is Condy Rice. And she would be a disaster for Trump. A former provost of Stanford University closely connected with Iraq? She has also never run for any office or really engaged with the media except as a policy person. Plus she clearly dislikes the game of politics and is very stiff in person. (I had to defend her against being "no platformed" a few years ago....she refused to take questions under any circumstances) A fact you may not be aware of, Dr. Rice's PhD advisor was Madeleine Albright's father.

My suggested running mate for Trump would be Jim Webb, who tried unsuccessfully to run as a Democrat against Hillary and was supposedly Obama's first choice over Biden. Webb was Reagan's Secretary of the Navy and left the Republican Party over Iraq and economic policy to get elected to the Senate in 2006. And he clearly hates Hillary with a burning passion. Webb would hammer Hillary over Libya even more relentlessly than over Iraq for compounding her lack of judgment by refusing to learn. What was Churchill's quip about "re-ratting"?

“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat”

We're pretty good at re-rating folk here gopher!

How many Aussie politicians have switched parties and remained in the leadership class? How many then switched back? Teddy Roosevelt nearly ran again as a Republican in 1920 before he died, but I cannot think of an American who pulled that off. John Connally had regrets and clearly wished that he could have come back to the Democrats during the Reagan era.

Jim Webb is different from those kinds of people as he has always been a relative maverick within each party.

Apologies I had rerating, not reratting which is what I meant.

And when I say "we're pretty good here" I meant vDip players ratting alliances out, and then later on ratting the next alliance and switching back.

Aussies politicians have ratted their parties (we have one in our own state parliament at the moment) but they generally go off to be an independent. The closest rat federally like that would be Senator Fields in 1975 who publicly declared himself a "Labor man", was appointed to fill a Labor senate vacancy by a conservative premier (Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen... man gopher you should look him up... very similar to many a gerrymandering Southern governor), and then promptly voted with the conservative opposition in a deadlocked senate that became hostile, caused government to grind to a halt, and then saw the Prime Minister (Gough Whitlam) dismissed by the Governor-General and a conservative PM put in place.

I am vaguely aware of him. I had thought of him more along the lines of Duplessis, but that may be a function of Anglophone "foreign"-ness. Gerrymandering is hardly a "Southern" trait in the US and is driven by state legislatures themselves not Governors.

The Baker vs. Carr principle of "one man, one vote" probably dwarfs the impact of anything else the US Supreme Court did in the last hundred years. In the 1950s, around half of the Texas state legislature was elected by roughly 800,000 residents; the other half by roughly 10,000,000. While such long frozen apportionment in face of urbanization was associated with Southern states in general, Minnesota and Wisconsin were equally guilty.

Billy Hughes. Prime Minister of Australia at the head of *three* different political parties. Yes, really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Hughes

I think he's the only one though. :-)

Pretty much its a decision on who will screw america over less now. Trump or clinton

But was Mr. Hughes able to rat back into the leadership of the party he ratted out of in the first place?

I'm actually more hopeful about Trump as President than I have ever been. I arrived in Academia in 2008 and have been having conversations with brick walls of tribalized defenders of anything and everything that Obama has ever done. Now all of my principal antagonists are reciting my arguments about separations of powers and executive authority chapter and verse. I have never feared Hitler or even Julius Caesar. It is the von Papen and Gaius Marius types who destroy Republics without ever intending to do so. I'm also feeling pretty smug after the NY Times article about Ben Rhodes.

@gopher27 Nope. Not unless you consider "bringing your own large faction with you to a new political party" to be that, which seems a dubious stretch.