Polls are open til 9 across the state, Clinton and Trump leading with a 99% chance of a win, prediction by fivethirtyeight.

Discuss as you wish.

Curious to see some opinions and discussions on this topic. No set questions or topics, just kinda want to talk about it.

Have fun.

I've got to do some studying for my politics class and really don't want to. So, ask me shit about the 2016 election and I'll try to answer it.

What's up, bitches?

Hows your weekend?

(Making this thread early cause fuck it, I can do it)

Super Tuesday - for those who don't know, it's the first real test of the Presidential nomination cycle, as more than 13 states and regions will be voting or caucusing at once. Depending on the results, this one day could essentially decide the nominee.

Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia will hold contests for both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans in Alaska will hold caucuses. Democrats in Colorado will hold their caucuses as well. Finally, Democrats in American Samoa are also holding their nominating contest.

On the GOP side, Trump is the favorite in nearly all the states, though Cruz is making a stand in his home state of Texas. Rubio is fighting in the metropolitan areas of many states, while Kasich and Carson....do some stuff.

On the Democratic side, Clinton is expected to win the southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. Sanders will carry Vermont, and is likely to carry Oklahoma and Colorado. Virginia and Minnesota are toss ups.

Ted Cruz - 17
Marco Rubio - 16
Donald Trump - 82
Ben Carson - 4
John Kasich - 6

Hilary Clinton - 91 Pledged, 453 Super
Bernie Sanders - 65 Pledged, 20 Super

Discuss

Ask me shit before I kill myself over my choices then.

Story

Another one bites the dust

Interesting Story Ahead of Nevada

WASHINGTON — With his expansive plans to increase the size and role of government, Senator Bernie Sanders has provoked a debate not only with his Democratic rival for president, Hillary Clinton, but also with liberal-leaning economists who share his goals but question his numbers and political realism.

The reviews of some of these economists, especially on Mr. Sanders’s health care plans, suggest that Mrs. Clinton could have been too conservative in their debate last week when she said his agenda in total would increase the size of the federal government by 40 percent. That level would surpass any government expansion since the buildup in World War II.

The increase could exceed 50 percent, some experts suggest, based on an analysis by a respected health economist that Mr. Sanders’s single-payer health plan could cost twice what the senator, who represents Vermont, asserts, and on critics’ belief that his economic assumptions are overly optimistic.

His campaign strongly contests both critiques, defending its numbers and attacking prominent critics as Clinton sympathizers and industry consultants.

Mr. Sanders on “Fox News Sunday” defended his comment in a debate Thursday that critics have assailed: “A family right in the middle of the economy would pay $500 more in taxes and get a reduction in their health costs of $5,000.”

By the reckoning of the left-of-center economists, none of whom are working for Mrs. Clinton, the proposals would add $2 trillion to $3 trillion a year on average to federal spending; by comparison, total federal spending is projected to be above $4 trillion in the next president’s first year. “The numbers don’t remotely add up,” said Austan Goolsbee, formerly chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, now at the University of Chicago.

Alluding to one progressive analyst’s criticism of the Sanders agenda as “puppies and rainbows,” Mr. Goolsbee said that after his and others’ further study, “they’ve evolved into magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars.”

Unlike Republican presidential candidates who have proposed trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses without offsetting savings — Donald J. Trump’s plans could add $15 trillion to the debt over 10 years, the centrist Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates — Mr. Sanders has proposed higher taxes on the wealthy and businesses to pay for his plans, besides the health care savings he counts on.

Mrs. Clinton has also proposed tax increases on the rich and corporations to pay for her agenda, which she estimates would cost an additional $100 billion a year, or $1.2 trillion over 10 years.

Mr. Sanders’s plan includes a new, across-the-board 2.2 percent income tax to help pay for his single-payer, government-run health plan for all. But progressive economists and business groups say middle-class taxpayers would pay more for the European-style social welfare state that Mr. Sanders envisions.

They dispute his contention that all but the richest Americans would be better off, on balance, with higher wages and benefits like expanded Social Security, free public colleges and, most of all, free health care. His policy director, Warren Gunnels, dismissed the critics in an interview, saying, “They’ve picked sides with Hillary Clinton.” The campaign has a list of 130 endorsees, including some economists.

“If, at the end of the day, people don’t believe that we can achieve the same savings as Canada, Britain, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia are achieving on health care, then we have a fundamental disagreement,” Mr. Gunnels said, naming countries with single-payer systems.

It is not just Mr. Sanders’s assumptions for health savings that critics contest. Jared Bernstein, the former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is now at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, examined a paper by the economist advising Mr. Sanders, Gerald Friedman of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, that is circulating on the left.

While calling Mr. Friedman’s work a good effort, Mr. Bernstein cited several assumptions as “wishful thinking.” Among them were minimal health-cost inflation, economic growth reaching 5.3 percent and, in that heated-up economy, no action from the Federal Reserve to apply brakes.

“We need a deep investment in infrastructure, more efficient health care and less student debt,” Mr. Bernstein said. “But when you put it all together, government’s role in the economy goes well beyond anything we’ve ever considered.” He said protecting the Affordable Care Act against Republican opposition should be a higher priority — a critique echoed by Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Sanders has described his health care plan as “Medicare for All,” but it would be more generous, giving Americans broader coverage without premiums, deductibles or co-payments. It would replace not only Medicare but also Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. A table in his economic adviser’s analysis shows that all public spending currently going to military, veterans’, American Indian and other health programs would be part of the financing for his single-payer plan, yet Mr. Gunnels said veterans’ and American Indian health programs would remain intact. That suggests double-counting, or financing the existing programs while claiming the sums to offset the single-payer plan. He did not address military benefits in an email exchange.

The critics — many of whom support the concept of single-payer plans, including Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times — note the difficulty that Mr. Obama has had in winning and putting into effect his less-ambitious law, which keeps the private insurance and health care sectors in place. They worry that Mr. Sanders, as president, would exhaust his political capital on what they call a fool’s errand, at the expense of other initiatives on education, infrastructure, climate change, worker benefits — and the Affordable Care Act itself.

“The single-payer idea has enormous appeal: coverage for everyone, some effort to use the government’s bargaining power to hold down overall costs, clean out the godawful administrative mess that the U.S. health care system is and save money there,” said Henry J. Aaron, a longtime health economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

But he called it a “fairy tale” in this political climate. Along with other economists in a “lefty chat group” he joins online, Mr. Aaron said, he believes that if Mr. Sanders were elected and fought for a single-payer plan, it “would rapidly destroy his administration by using up every ounce of political capital he’s got.”

On his campaign website, Mr. Sanders proposes more than $18 trillion in new spending over 10 years; he does not account for some ideas he favors, like universal prekindergarten and child care, that could put the total above $20 trillion. About $14 trillion of the total is for health care; the rest is chiefly for infrastructure, free college, Social Security, paid family leave and clean-energy initiatives.

Adding $20 trillion to projected federal spending would mean about a 37 percent increase in spending through the 2026 fiscal year — close to the 40 percent that Mrs. Clinton suggested. But Kenneth E. Thorpe, a prominent health policy economist at Emory University who advised the Clintons in the 1990s, recently concluded that Mr. Sanders’s health plan would cost $27 trillion, not $14 trillion, which would put total spending for all of his initiatives above $30 trillion through 2026.

Mr. Thorpe and Sanders aides and allies have been battling online. Their trillion-dollar disputes involve the amount of savings that would be achieved by reducing red tape and bargaining for lower-cost brand-name drugs, and whether states would pay what they currently do toward programs that would cease in a single-payer system.

Mr. Thorpe in recent years helped Gov. Peter Shumlin in Mr. Sanders’s home state of Vermont design a single-payer plan there. It was unsuccessful.

“The problem was that the price tag and the amount of disruption and redistribution was just so enormous,” Mr. Thorpe said of Mr. Shumlin’s efforts, “that he just had to drop it.”

Someone get Meta in here to put in simple terms.

I was originally going to post this in Anarchy as an anonymous thread, but I figured that a forum with no rules likely wasn't the greatest place to share something like this. So, it's now 2:30 in the morning and I'm typing this thread up with no clear idea or direction as to where it's going to go. If you want to ask stuff or offer advice, I'll take whatever at this point.

Details are in spoilers in case you honestly don't want to read it.

Like I said, not really sure where this thread is/was going. Might add more to it as other stuff happens, but yeah.

Hope I don't die.

Today officially kicks off the primary season for the 2016 Presidential campaign, with the caucusing in Iowa set to begin in just under 12 hours (Roughly 7pm CST, 8PM EST).

In one of the final polls this week, both races were extremely close - Trump leads Cruz by 5%, while for the Democrats, Clinton is leading by 3%. Rubio is at 15% for the Republicans, O'Malley is at 4% for the Democrats.

O'Malley is going to become crucial in the end for one of the other two candidates - if he does not meet the threshold of support (15%, I believe?), then his supporters are strongly urged to re-caucus and pick one of the other two candidates. If this were to happen, it will strongly impact the final polling numbers for Clinton and Sanders.

So yeah. I'll keep this thread updated as much as I can throughout the day with predictions, entry data, etc.

Welcome to the start of a very long 9 months.

WaPO

NEW BLOOMINGTON, Ohio — On the phone, the boy was frantic. After traveling hundreds of miles from a village in Guatemala, he had made it across the U.S. border and into a government-funded shelter for unaccompanied minors.

But then something went terribly wrong.

Instead of sending him to his uncle, Carlos Enrique Pascual, a landscape worker in Florida, authorities said the shelter released the teenager to traffickers who took him to central Ohio, held him captive in a roach-infested trailer and threatened to kill him if he tried to leave.

“Please, how can I get out of this?” Pascual’s nephew begged him during a stolen moment with a telephone. “I’m hungry, and my heart is bursting with fear.”

Pascual called police and, in December 2014, authorities found his nephew, then 17, and seven other boys living in cramped, dirty trailers about an hour outside of Columbus. Authorities said they were working at Trillium Farms, one of the country’s largest egg producers, debeaking hens and cleaning cages nearly 12 hours a day, six days a week, for as little as $2 a day.

The boys were part of a surge of children flowing across the U.S.-Mexico border over the past four years, overwhelming federal officials responsible for their safekeeping, child advocates say. Since 2011, more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America have been stopped at the border, many placed in shelters funded by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) has demanded a response from the Obama administration to whistleblower claims that thousands of those children have been released to sponsors with criminal records that include homicide, child molestation and human trafficking. Legal advocates for the children say many have wound up in abusive situations, where they have been forced to work to repay debts or living expenses. Some children simply stop showing up for immigration hearings and vanish.

“We have a large percentage of these kids that disappear, and I don’t know what happens to them,” said Jessica Ramos, a lawyer with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, an Ohio nonprofit group that represents children in immigration proceedings.

Andrea Helling, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said the inspector general is investigating the whistleblower allegations. She acknowledged that the agency briefly relaxed identity requirements for family members collecting children at the height of the surge in May 2014 to help place children more quickly.

Since then, she said, the agency has strengthened its protection efforts by reinstituting a fingerprint requirement for many people who claim children from federally funded shelters, expanding a hotline to report abuse, and requiring caseworkers to call and check up on children within 30 days of their release.

“We are committed to placement of unaccompanied children with appropriate sponsors that serve the best interest of the child,” Bob Carey, the agency’s director, said in a statement.

Still, the agency conducted post-release checks on only about 6,500 children in fiscal 2014, Helling said. Once the children are settled with sponsors, she added, state and local child protection agencies are responsible for their well-being.

“Once a child is placed with a sponsor,” she said, “the local community becomes very important.”

Helling declined to discuss the agency’s handling of individual children, including Pascual’s nephew. Federal prosecutors indicted six people in connection with the trafficking scheme; five have plead guilty.

No legal action has been taken against Trillium Farms, whose executives say they were unaware that a subcontractor hired to provide manual labor was engaged in human trafficking.

“Our employment guidelines are strict, and we participate in all federal programs to verify employment,” chief operating officer Doug Mack said in a statement. “While we have the same requirements for our contractors, it is clear in this case we were misled by the contracting company, which intended to act illegally.”

Alarmed by the case, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, opened an inquiry into the government’s system for processing unaccompanied minors. The results are scheduled to be made public Thursday, when Portman plans to chair a hearing on the matter.

“Based on what I have learned to date, I am concerned that the child placement process failures that contributed to the [egg farm] trafficking case are part of a systemic problem rather than a one-off incident,” Portman said in a statement.

The article goes much longer and in depth, so check the link if you wish to read more.

What do?