Donald Trump actually defended Bernie Sanders as a fellow outsider against the ‘corrupt’ establishment
This is a calculated move on trumps part because he doesn’t think sanders will get the nomination. This lead up to the election has been all about vilifying clinton, on all sides.
there is a documented trend of sanders supporters who don’t like clinton saying they will vote for trump instead if she gets nominated. This is the demographic trump is counting on, because they are historically voters and will spite vote to keep another candidate they dislike out of office. My mom voted for sanders in the primary but REFUSES to vote for clinton.
The other thing trump hopes to accomplish by saying these things is to make young voters feel disenfranchised if bernie doesn’t get nominated. He wants them to feel like hillary took that from them. This will keep them home; unlike the demographic people like my mom fit into, young, disenfranchised voters just won’t vote instead of spite voting. Any vote that is not AGAINST trump is a vote for trump.
This isn’t about how even a cartoon villain like trump recognizes bernie sanders’ purity. This is a mind game aimed at young voters.
They know they’re killing us. They have the numbers, they know we’re dying because of their cuts to disability spending.
They can say whatever they want, but they can’t claim they didn’t know.
They are killing us. They’re looking at the numbers of us dying because of their cuts, and they are introducing further cuts and further gatekeeping to prevent new applications from going through.
Don’t let anyone make you forget. They know they’re spilling our blood, and their response is to drive the knife in deeper.
“The UK has become the first country in the world to be placed under investigation by the United Nations for violating the human rights of people with disabilities amid fears that thousands may have died as a consequence of controversial welfare reforms and austerity-driven cuts to benefits and care budgets. – x
Thanks for adding a source!
If anyone has any other information on this, I’d love to see it. It’s something I plan to point out during my evaluations for work assistance, just in case they think I’m exaggerating when I tell them trying to hold a job would kill me.
Give me about an hour to get onto desktop and I’ll get stuff. What sort of stuff do you want? People’s stories + the shitty things the Tories are doing?
Definitely people’s stories. Knowing more in depth who’s being turned away would likely help. These people are seriously going to reevaluate me after last year deciding I’d last been fit for work in 1996, and I just don’t trust them at all. (I was 10 in 1996, btw.)
Sadly a lot of it will be bad. Another thing that happened was the much loathed “bedroom tax” which ended up hitting a lot of people with special requirements badly -I.e. one woman lost the reinforced panic room she got because her ex was violently stalking her and another lost their room of medical equipment because neither could afford the extra tax.
And that’s just scratching the surface. 20 minutes research got me all that stuff.
You know there’s probably a party staffer who’s said the words “Thankfully posts about the US election’s all that’s really coming up on tumblr” so I dunno fuck that hypothetical person HERE’S WHAT’S UP WITH US!
like…… a lot of the people who need bernie to win are people who literally cannot afford to take a day off of work or school on some random fucking tuesday midday to vote….. it’s a system specifically made with the rich upper class in mind to keep people in power who serve their interests…
this reminds me, anyone in high school: request your administration to allow 18 (or 17 if your state allows it) year olds to get out of school early on primary voting day! somebody did this at my school and not only did administration agree, they held a meeting with seniors to educate them about primary voting and help them register!
For all there is to hate about Trump, I’m much more scared of a President Cruz than a President Trump.
Why? Just curious.
Bottom line is that Trump wants attention. Cruz wants power. Trump is an entertainer. Cruz is a master politician who believes petulance is a political ideology. Of every Republican in the field, Cruz is most steadfast in his ultra-conservative beliefs and will never bend or meet for compromise.
Trump craves attention and will always put himself above policies. Cruz is incredibly methodical and is always playing the long game to accomplish his policy goals. Yes, Trump is far more likely to accidentally set off an international incident, but Cruz in power will strangle this country and bring it to its knees before he allows it to become something he doesn’t agree with.
I cannot stress how evangelical Ted Cruz is. If he wins this election, it will be on the backs of the religious right.
He wants constitutional amendment to make SCOTUS judges have retention elections so he can boot off justices like Kennedy who become more liberal over time.
He’s willing to shut down the federal government instead of allowing any funding of Planned Parenthood.
He wants to ban birth control including IUD and morning after pill
He did actually shutdown the federal government because he doesn’t like Obamacare.
The next president will probably nominate 4 justices to the Supreme Court. (1 Conservative, 2 Liberals, 1 Swing) Cruz will not consider any nominees who have a hint of moderate in them. This could easily lead to a 7-2 Supreme Court decision outlawing abortion, ending Obamacare, or abolishing affirmative action or civil rights protections.
The reason Trump will never scare me as much as Cruz is that Ted Cruz is brilliant, he is a true political organizer and mastermind. He’s skillfuly united faith circles all over the US and will ride a wave all the way into South Carolina.
And just to prove my point. Look at the Tea Party. It’s a tiny segment of American politics, but the power it carries is because of Ted Fucking Cruz. When met with something he didn’t like, he SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT as a freshman Senator! A FRESHMAN! Imagine him with real executive power.
okay jesus fuck this conversation has gone far enough so:
hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!
what are you going to do if he loses?
because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:
bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton
the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed
while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)
the republican party wins the presidential election.
(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)
so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?
i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you to not put all your hopes in one basket.
you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game?
they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.
i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.
because i honest-to-god believe this country will not survive another four, eight, twelve years of a republican administration.
my hand to god i have seen so many posts on my dash that have been both heartbreakingly optimistic and absolutely mind-bogglingly uninformed (and naive, but that comes with time; information comes with googling the way the government of your own country works. fun fact: not all primaries are open primaries! i know! this is inconsistent! it is also the world that we live in and i don’t think we’re going to get around to redesigning the electoral system before november 2016. just saying) and, like every election year, i have sat down and thought, albeit briefly, about this possibility:
the republican party wins the presidential election.
that is not a possibility that i can or will accept. i know we like to mythologize our figures here and put them on can-do-no-wrong pedestals, but, for god’s sake, to paraphrase: can we live in the real fucking world here, please? by all means, know that we can do better. by all means, know that we should. but here are some facts:
the us electoral system is not going to change by november 2016.
the notes on your tumblr post about bernie sanders’ ideology are not going to translate to votes.
those votes are not as big a percentage of the voting population as you think they are.
even if they were, bernie sanders is not going to be able to wave a magic wand and:
turn those ideas into policies
get those policies signed into law
get those laws implemented
they aren’t going to be perfect anyway.
can you imagine the reactionary voting in the election immediately following that anyway.
this is not how politics works. you don’t vote a politician into office and then stand back and watch the world fix itself! you don’t get to do that. it takes work and it takes time and it takes, sometimes, the willingness to accept and keep pushing through lowered expectations. i’m happy for your optimism and i’m happy for your energy. we need those! don’t lose them. do, however, remember that there is context to this, because we live, again, in the real fucking world.
And this has an embarrassingly low number of notes.
I know how a lot of people here feel about Hilary. If I had my druthers, I would MUCH rather have Bernie Sanders as president because his politics so closely align with my own. Like, stunningly close. A-breath-of-fresh-air close.
But consider these words from an ancient, jaded, 34 year old fuck who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000…
NONE OF US agreed with Gore. I mean, not really, at least. He was Republican-lite. First off, his wife Tipper was a friggin’ censorship Nazi, Gore was a Southern Baptist who was mum on gay rights, and while he gave lip service to climate change, please note that An Inconvenient Truth had not been produced or filmed, and there wasn’t much in the way of supporting the Kyoto protocols in his platform. He supported the limited military action in Iraq, supported NAFTA, and supported driving our production overseas. There wasn’t much to his platform other than “less scary alternative to Bush”. In other words, he was problematic as hell.
Then there was Ralph Nader, a consumer rights advocate, a proponent of gay marriage before it became a mainstream cause to champion, against NAFTA, spoke out against the military industrial complex, was pro-union, and anti-corporate.
And I voted for him. Proudly. In the general election. My reasoning was that nearly everyone I knew was voting for him (and everyone I knew were fellow college age leftists) so if enough of us got together and enough of us wanted that change to happen, then it would, right?
“Well, we’re talking about the primaries,” I can already hear you say. And yes, we are. But consider this: if Bernie ends up not winning the primaries, and no one turns out to the polls to vote for Hilary so they can “make a statement” or because she’s “problematic”, or turns out and votes Green or some other third Party for those same reasons, then history will repeat itself with disastrous consequences.
Here’s what happened on election night, November 7, 2000:
We waited. We watched Gore lose in battleground state after battleground state by just about the same number of votes that went to Ralph fucking Nader. Bush took all the dip shits who thought he’d be a swell feller to have a beer with. And then Florida and the recount and the Republican Party-led coup that stormed the voting recount, triggered the Supreme Court ruling and handed George W. Bush control of the country.
The first thing Bush did was reverse each and every executive order Clinton had put in place over the protestations of a crybaby Republican Congress, and most of those executive orders were designed to protect the middle class from corporate America and protect our budget surplus from the military industrial complex. Then Bush instituted legalized class warfare: the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and still do to this day.
Then 9/11 happened.
If you’re 22 right now, then in 2001 you were 8 years old. In 2001, I was 20. I watched friends of mine who had joined the military because there were few other opportunities for them after high school get shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan and get their limbs blown off by IUDs. There are people I knew, people I ate lunch with every day, who are FUCKING DEAD right now.
Torture. Suppression of the press. Siphoning the nation’s wealth to the upper 1%, creating our current aristocracy. Investments made by principle members of the Bush regime in for-profit military-industrial corporations that were tasked with murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Sunsetting the assault weapons ban. The Defense of Marriage Act. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The loss of an entire city and fucking nothing done about it as people were drowning and starving to death in New Orleans. No Child Left UnTested Behind. A color coded number system on every day of the news telling Americans how frightened they needed to be that day that hilariously enough coincided with how far Bush dipped in the polls that week. He dipped, we went up to terror threat: orange. His poll numbers went back up. Like clockwork.
Between 2001 and 2005 us leftists who thought that there was no different than center-left Democrats and right wing Republicans got hit by a giant clue by four and watched the fucking Republicans dismantle our safety, economic security, and our entire way of life. No, the centrists are not the same. THE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ARE NOT THE SAME. One faction sort of listens to us. The other doesn’t give a shit about us and actively promotes policies designed to kill and silence us.
So please Support Bernie Sanders. Support him because if enough leftists make their voices known through his candidacy, then NO MATTER WHAT it will influence the DNC platform next summer. Support him because we’re all passionate about returning America to a thriving, working democracy and flushing out the corporate lobbyist corruption that has held our entire government hostage for a decade.
But if he doesn’t win the primaries then you need to support Hilary Clinton. And I’m not kidding, I’m not being hyperbolic. If the Republicans win, then you need to start preparing yourself for life under a fascist state.
Hint: it will help if you’re fundamentalist Christian, wealthy, white, straight, male, and cisgender.
Otherwise, you’re fucked.
All of this. Read it. I also lived through the Nader debacle. Vote for Bernie in the primaries if you agree with him. I like a lot of his politics too. But then you MUST SHOW UP FOR HILLARY IN THE GENERAL ELECTION OR WE WILL END UP WITH A THIRD PRESIDENT BUSH.
Three Supreme Court Justices are very old and may die in the next Presidential term.
Some Republicans dislike Trump and Cruz as much as everybody else does
The republican establishment made a deliberate, conscious decision to court the ‘racist white asshole’ vote that the democratic party establishment lost after a democratic president signed off on the Civil Rights Act
The republican establishment embraced and promoted ‘prosperity theology’ to let the super-rich claim divine right to excuse the even increasing inequality that resulted from their policies, to put a ‘Christian’ stamp on their most un-christ-like behavior and economic philsophy, and to encourage their base to seal their right-leaning political affiliations behind an unthinking unreasoning shell of faith that would allow neither self criticism nor compromise.
The republican party establishment specifically rejected, and encouraged its voters to reject, rationality and science when those things proved to be at odds to the profit interests of their corporate sponsors or the fundamentalist dogma of their prosperity theology spokesmen.
And now, the Republican establishment is shocked to find their voting base utterly overrun with unthinking racist assholes who cannot be reasoned with, desperate to hand the reigns of power over to a super-rich megalomaniac.
Yeah, I wonder how that happened, too.
Fucking this.
Like good job idiots you cultivated a base of people who want to back the biggest asshole and never thought there could be an asshole bigger than yourselves.
myblog 