I'm glad to see Trump coming out with specifics concerning his stance on firearms. I agree 100%. His statement is more clear, more concise, & more pro-gun than any career Republican's that I've ever heard.

Cruz wont win because he keeps throwing GOD into the mix. Stop with the Religious Right, or you will likely not have a conservative in office again.
If you're a Christian, abortion, same-sex marriage, etc etc DOESNT concern you. Live your life, let others live theirs.

Matthew 7:5 - You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

Yeah, that.

of course he won't, as President, but he has significant value in some key role moving forward.

quote:

Originally posted by maximus_flavius:
I'm glad to see Trump coming out with specifics concerning his stance on firearms. I agree 100%. His statement is more clear, more concise, & more pro-gun than any career Republican's that I've ever heard.

No kidding. It figures he's the one with the balls to come out and state such a pro 2nd-A position. That's a MAJOR issue for me, and for all people that honor the constitution and bill of rights.

Keep it up, Mr. Trump.

quote:

Originally posted by maximus_flavius:
I'm glad to see Trump coming out with specifics concerning his stance on firearms. I agree 100%. His statement is more clear, more concise, & more pro-gun than any career Republican's that I've ever heard.

And Jeb, Chris, and Ben all lean more towards Hillary's take on the 2A.

I would say Trump's official stance is strong.

FWIW: Some Republican "leaders and strategists" are suggesting that with new rule changes no candidate might have the required number to become the nominee, and the selection might drag on-- all the way to the convention. Do you smell a rat?

Here's money quote from the NYT article: “You’ve got a set of unintended consequences that weren’t planned for,” said Richard F. Hohlt, a Republican donor and Washington lobbyist. “So it’s going to be harder for a candidate to get to the magic number, which could open up the process to a convention situation.”

"A convention situation." If such a thing were to happen, and if the fix were in to select Jeb, the Republican Party might just as well shoot itself in the head.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...lican-race.html?_r=0

there will be dire and perhaps irreversible consequences for the GOP's support if there is even a hint of some monkey business with the Convention or Nominee process.

frankly, it would take something like a miracle for me to ever believe there wasn't some sort of fix in if Jeb Bush manages to come out the Nominee. it's all but impossible otherwise, IMO.

If the GOP pulls underhanded shit it and goes against the will of it's voters it deserves to implode and never win another election.

If the GOPe pulls a bunch shit, & somebody like Jeb? wins the nomination at the convention, it's gonna be time to "burn this bitch down", as they say........

The establishment is getting nervous.

Good.

Trump has had an NYC CCW for a long time. I don't question his stance on it.

Fuck the establishment RINO lower than dirt scums.

If Trump whens, he should seriously direct NASA to get us back to the Moon before the end of his second term.

EmpireState,

Dream big! How about a manned mission to Mars? My generation wasn't alive for NASA's heyday. I would love to see our nation leading mankind in manned exploration again. Talk about a way to boost national pride!

quote:

Originally posted by EmpireState:
If Trump whens, he should seriously direct NASA to get us back to the Moon before the end of his second term.

What for?

Seriously, is there done purpose or objective to be gained, or merely so we can say we are doing it? Maybe a potential solution to the illegal alien problem?

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:

quote:

Originally posted by EmpireState:
If Trump whens, he should seriously direct NASA to get us back to the Moon before the end of his second term.

What for?

Seriously, is there done purpose or objective to be gained, or merely so we can say we are doing it? Maybe a potential solution to the illegal alien problem?

One of these days, we're going to have to leave the nest. The sooner we figure out how, the better.

justjoe posted a link to a NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...lican-race.html?_r=0

Here is what has some Rep establishment types worried:

In the starkest sign of how unsettled the situation is, what once seemed unthinkable — that Mr. Trump could win the Republican nomination — is being treated by many within the Republican establishment as a serious possibility.

And one reason his candidacy seems strong is a change by the party in hopes of ending the process earlier: making it possible for states to hold contests in which the winner receives all the delegates , rather than a share based on the vote, starting March 15, two weeks earlier than in the last cycle. Ten states have said they will do so.

If Mr. Trump draws one-third of the Republican primary vote, as recent polls suggest he will, that could be enough to win in a crowded field.

After March 15, he could begin amassing all the delegates in a given state even if he carried it with only a third of the vote.

And the later it gets, the harder it becomes for a lead in delegates to be overcome, with fewer state contests remaining in which trailing candidates can attempt comebacks.

“Somebody like Trump, who is operating in a crowded field, could put this contest away early if the crowd doesn’t thin out,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Romney.

It is time to thin the herd. Some of these guys just need to fade to black and let the people get on with things. Everyone is hanging on in the hopes that Trump implodes and they will garner some of his supporters.
Well gents, it ain't happening.
If you are 2% at this point step aside and let things take their course.
Trump has tried to implode but the peeps will have none of it. Obama had his race working for him and Trump has well, Trump working for him.

What Obama did was a more of a manipulated coercion of the voting populace. Trump is doing nothing other than being Trump. This has now become a genuine movement.

Another FWIW: The guy who asked Trump the Muslim question has been positively identified. He is Mickey Horne, a well-known Clinton supporter. Big surprise there....

http://www.businessinsider.com...ring-question-2015-9

Voters Turn To Trump Because They Have No Confidence In Government

Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Bernie Sanders have risen because voters are angry with the political establishment, and have been for decades.

By John Daniel Davidson

As we pick apart the candidates’ performances Wednesday night in the GOP primary debate, at least some Republicans must be wondering why, with so many experienced officeholders in the race, they cannot rid their party of Donald Trump.

The answer has less to do with Trump than with Americans’ trust in government, which has been on a half-century-long slide and has reached its nadir in the Obama administration. Support for outsider GOP candidates like Trump or Ben Carson, who now polls in second place behind Trump, or the rise of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders among Democrats disillusioned with Hillary Clinton, is less of an endorsement of a particular candidate than a general rejection of—even rage against—the political establishment.

As Michael Barone recently noted, voters are “willfully suspending disbelief in challengers who would have been considered laughable in earlier years.” Barone cites the deep unpopularity of the Obama administration’s major policy initiatives like Obamacare and the Iran deal, coupled with the perception that Republicans in Congress have been unable or unwilling to fight the White House on these things, as evidence that for many voters experience doesn’t count for much anymore.
The Decline and Fall of Public Trust

Barone is right. Witness the exit last week of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the candidate with the most experience and arguably the strongest résumé in the GOP field. But the problem goes back further than just the past seven years of the Obama administration. One can trace the erosion of trust in government back nearly 50 years, to its high point in 1964 when 77 percent of those polled expressed trust in government to its record low of 19 percent in 2013.

Pew Research Center compiled polling data on public trust in government from 1958 to 2014 in a handy interactive chart that everyone should spend a lot of time staring at this election cycle. Aside from brief spikes in trust following the First Gulf War in 1991 and the attacks of September 11, trust in government has been declining steadily since the first years of the Johnson administration.

Davidson1

Notice the only two spans during which public trust in government actually grew: the Reagan and Clinton years—eras marked by bipartisan cooperation between the White House and Congress. Although Ronald Reagan was always a staunch conservative, he worked with Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill to pass a major tax reform in his first term and comprehensive immigration reform in his second. During Bill Clinton’s first term, the 1994 midterm elections put Republicans in charge of the House for the first time since 1952, and Clinton responded by working with Speaker Newt Gingrich to pass welfare reform and a balanced budget, among other initiatives.

This cooperation was possible only because Reagan and Clinton were able to fracture coalitions within the opposing party. They couldn’t just ram through White House policies with one-party supermajorities, as Obama has done. Voters saw Republicans and Democrats (at least some of them) working together to pass major legislation, and that helped build Americans’ confidence in government throughout these two administrations.

When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he was riding a wave of rising confidence in government. Historic polling data from Gallup corroborates Pew’s research on this point: trust in government crested in the aftermath of 9/11 then fell sharply with the invasion of Iraq, from which it hasn’t recovered.



9/11 Temporarily Broke the Decline

For a brief moment after 9/11, some predicted a renaissance of New Deal-style liberalism among American voters from across the political spectrum. The trauma of the attacks would usher in a resurgence of faith in the competency of government to accomplish difficult things—the kind of confidence Americans had during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.
The result of all this ambitious government action was an administration whose policies today are almost universally denounced by conservatives.

That November, a Gallup poll found 89 percent of respondents approved of how Bush was handling the war on terrorism, and 77 percent approved of Congress. The national mood about the federal government was very mid-twentieth century. “Had not government won the war, ended the Depression, built the highways, brought electricity to the farmlands, vanquished the economic terror of old age?” wrote the late Michael Kelly in January 2002. “Government did great things for all of us.”

Sure enough, the Bush administration tried to do great things—tried to vanquish al-Qaeda and rebuild Iraq, tried to pass immigration reform, tried and succeeded in expanding Medicare, bailing out the banks, passing No Child Left Behind. After 9/11, compassionate conservatism met the War on Terror.

But the result of all this ambitious government action was an administration whose policies today are almost universally denounced by conservatives. Back in 2002, Kelly, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, described Bush’s domestic philosophy as “activist, desirous of progress in addressing social ills. Liberal, you might say.” Today, it’s hard to find a self-identifying conservative who will endorse Bush’s domestic record. While many conservatives, including the more serious GOP candidates, want to address social ills, they’re deeply suspicious of the federal government’s ability to accomplish what it sets out to do.
One Government Failure After Another

It’s not hard to see why. The end of the Bush era brought what many considered to be one major government failure after another—the subprime mortgage crisis, the financial crisis, the great recession. The government’s failure to prevent these things, combined with responses that hampered a full economic recovery, damaged government credibility among Republicans and Democrats alike. It’s one of the reasons Obama got elected.
The Bush-Obama years have given both conservatives and liberals plenty of reasons to distrust the government and doubt its competency.

But the failures, and the perception of dishonesty, continued under Obama. In its efforts to sell the Affordable Care Act, the Obama White House made promises that simply weren’t true—if you like your plan you can keep it, families will save $2,500 a year on premiums, and so on. Five years later, the healthcare law is still deeply unpopular with most Americans.

On foreign policy, Obama has prized a nuclear deal with Iran above all else, leaving his administration with no viable response to the Syrian civil war, ISIS, the disintegration of Iraq, and the refugee crisis now enveloping Europe. The Iran deal, like Obamacare, is being rammed through Congress on strict party lines. Many Americans understandably feel Washington DC is more partisan and dysfunctional than ever.

Taken together, the Bush-Obama years have given both conservatives and liberals plenty of reasons to distrust the government and doubt its competency. As recent Pew polls show, dissatisfaction with the political establishment predates the rise of outsiders like Trump and Ben Carson.

For now, the feeling is stronger among Republicans than Democrats, but the trend is bipartisan. Lawrence Lessig, the Progressive, bespectacled Harvard Law professor who announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination last week, flatly summed up the mood: “There is no connection between what the average voter wants and what our government does.”

It’s a line Trump himself might have delivered.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/...dence-in-government/