Here's the Republican front runner...

[CCTAU]

You sure you can do that?

I am a registered Independent. I did this about 5 years ago specifically BECAUSE at the time, if I registered Libertarian, I couldn't vote in either the R or D primaries. Independent, at that time, allowed you to vote in either.

Just found out today that that has since changed and you have to be registered as an R to vote in the R primary and D to vote in the D primary. Tried to switch my registration to R to vote Rubio, but it was too late. Deadline was Feb. 3.

So I switched it to Libertarian since apparently there's no advantage to registering Independent anymore.

In GA. you just had to mark on your pre-vote card which party you were voting for.

Had to show my ID also. DAMN RACIST BASTAGES!

[Kaos]

In GA. you just had to mark on your pre-vote card which party you were voting for.

Had to show my ID also. DAMN RACIST BASTAGES!

Showed my ID and the lady asked "you want democrak or reprublicam?"

[CCTAU]

Showed my ID and the lady asked "you want democrak or reprublicam?"

You knew at that point it didn't matter. What was coming out of the machine would be the most democraktik choice!

[Kaos]

You know .... If all the people who threaten to leave the country if Trump is elected actually follow through and leave?  I'd vote for himlike I lived in Chicago -- 20 times.

Bye.

[AUChizad]

Such great business prowess tho!

http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/10/paris-hilton-is-better-at-business-than-donald-trump-is/

Paris Hilton Is Better At Business Than Donald Trump Is
Maybe we should look to Paris Hilton and not Donald Trump for guidance as we navigate one of the stupidest of stupid times to be alive.
 Rich Cromwell

DECEMBER 10, 2015

Let’s say we have an heir and an heiress. One of them inherited approximately $5 million and parlayed it into a net worth that’s conservatively estimated to be around $100 million. The other inherited around $200 million and is today worth around $4.5 billion.

Obviously, $4.5 billion is a much larger number than $100 million, so we can easily conclude that the billionaire Donald J. Trump is much savvier when it comes to business than mere millionaire Paris Hilton. Not so fast. While Trump does have billions of dollars, he’d have been better off if he’d invested into index funds than if he’d followed his own impulses.

Sure, he’d only be better off by a max of about $9 billion, but wait a second. That’s a lot of money. With that, he could build a pretty long section of border fence, if not the entire thing. On the other hand, given his connections, I’m betting Trump could build the entire thing for $9 billion. If he couldn’t, is he really the man he claims to be, the one to Make America Great Again?

Maybe, just maybe, the man vying to be businessman-in-chief isn’t quite so good at abusing eminent domain and taking advantage of Chapter 11 bankruptcy as he claims. Maybe a well-coiffed blond who went for ultra-reality video before settling into reality TV is better at making fat stacks of cash. Maybe it is she, and not he (who was honestly better at reality TV, but I digress), whom we should be looking toward for guidance as we navigate today, one of the stupidest of stupid times to be alive.

When the Market Beats You
This isn’t conjecture, but cold, hard fact. Hilton’s fragrances, for example, have brought in $1.3 billion in revenue since 2005. She also makes bank just for appearing here and there—from videos and birthday parties, seriously, to promotional outings—as well as for licensing her name and likeness.

Now, she is akin to Trump in that he is a brand unto himself. Unlike Trump, however, Hilton has never used eminent domain or Chapter 11 to her advantage, nor has she been removed from Macy’s. She’s all about making straight-up profits, baby, and her market presence is on the ascent. Advantage Paris.

And Hilton is only 34. She could certainly face some headwinds as she moves forward—Trump didn’t declare bankruptcy until much later in life when he was 45—but she’s also structured her wealth in such a way so as to avoid the risks that Trump loves exposing himself to via his debt.

Hilton’s 44 stores worldwide and the beach resort she designed are more about her name than her investment. She lends the brand in exchange for adding to her liquid assets. As such, who do you trust, the blonde with flowing locks who knows how to keep it liquid or the blond ginger with a dead animal perched atop his head who knows how to be beholden to banks?

In other words, while Trump was investing his inheritance to abuse eminent domain and come out worse than if he’d invested in an S&P index fund, Hilton was building a real empire. Advantage, again, Paris.

Better: Compare Donald Trump to Barack Obama
This isn’t a new observation. Kevin Williamson compared the two and also found Hilton edges out Trump on leveraging personal brand for duckets, but he was wrong to compare the Donald to Paris. The more apt comparison is to our current commander in chief—one Barack Hussein.

Roll with me here. Obama wrote not one, but two, autobiographies before he really accomplished anything. In stark contrast, one of Trump’s first decisions upon claiming the family business was to rename it Trump Organization, although he waited a bit to write his autobiography.

Obama just got to it earlier. Maybe it was the lack of inherited wealth, but he understood he had to build the brand, and he did. Since writing those autobiographies, he’s leveraged that brand into various elected positions, most notably the presidency.

And he didn’t let that victory stop him. After moving into the White House, which Obama doesn’t even own, he won an award that doesn’t really jibe with his subsequent actions. He has also abused eminent domain. (I told you they were birds of a feather.)

Obama has presided over some other financial failures, just like Trump, though history hasn’t gone on enough to see if it was him who took us all the way to Chapter 11. There were the credit rating downgrades, but, much as Trump emerged, so has the nation thankfully emerged from those dings. Regardless, one has to ask if Hilton (remember, she does turn 35 before November 2016) would be so reckless with our national finances.

Paris All the Way, Baby
No, Hilton is all about growth. She gets that building the brand and the portfolio is about success, about numerical strength built on cashflow in, return on investment, and not getting overly leveraged in her business ventures.

By no measure is the Donald better at business than Paris. It’s time we recognize that and demand more from our candidates than ridiculous pandering, an embrace of too big to fail, and a history of mediocre financial growth. America used to be great, a shining city upon a hill. It can be great again, but not if we elect a third-rate trust-fund baby to manage our finances.

We deserve better—the best, really. We deserve a trust-fund baby who doesn’t have to abuse regulation or declare bankruptcy. One who understands how to build wealth and mitigate risk. One who is really great and can build the brand—that is, our national character—better than anyone else. One who would surround herself with the savviest thinkers available. Thankfully, the numbers don’t lie, and the numbers provide us with the best option.

We need Paris 2016.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-donald-trump-left-13-billion-on-table-2016-03-01

How Donald Trump left $13 billion on table

Published: Mar 1, 2016 9:56 a.m. ET

Even with limited information, it appears presidential candidate underperformed rivals

By
ELLIOT
BLAIR SMITH

Donald Trump’s doing great at the polls, but not versus other real-estate investors.

Donald Trump is the outperformer in most Republican presidential polls going into Super Tuesday, but he may be an underperformer in real estate after 40 years of dealmaking. Would he be a better president than property manager?

“Mr. Trump has underperformed the real estate market by approximately $13.2 billion, or 57%,” since 1976, says John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas, who compared Trump’s stated net worth with four decades of returns on the FTSE NAREIT All Equity REITS FNER, +2.06%   Index.

The NAREIT index, developed in the early 1970s by the Washington-based trade group the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, tracks the performance of publicly traded real estate investment companies that own commercial properties, such as offices, hotels and apartments.

Starting with Trump’s professed net worth of “more than $200 million” in an interview published by The New York Times in November 1976, Griffin says the FTSE NAREIT All Equity REITS Index-compounded return would have returned $23.2 billon at the end of 2015, “considerably above Mr. Trump’s recent self-reported net worth of approximately $10 billion.”

Rather than rely on Trump’s word alone, Griffin also calculated the developer’s returns based on two independent assessments of his wealth: A BusinessWeek estimate that he was worth $100 million in 1978, and Forbes magazine’s analysis that puts his current fortune at about $4.5 billion.

Starting with the BusinessWeek number, the NAREIT index would have returned $8.6 billion by the end of last year, which is nearly double the Forbes estimate and consistent with “an underperformance of 48%,” Griffin says.

One caveat is that the NAREIT index doesn’t take into account living expenses and taxes. It’s not possible to estimate Trump’s real-estate tax rate, as he has not released his personal income taxes. Real estate investors pay no income tax so long as they roll any asset sale into a like-kind real estate venture.

However, Griffin also points out that investing in a passive REIT also has a cost: At an average expense ratio of 1.03%, a $23 billion REIT position would cost the investor about $230 million a year in fees, an amount that would go a long way toward meeting living expenses.

“These numbers,” Griffin adds, “do not take into account leverage. The REIT equity funds have current leverage rations around 36%, while Trump is documented to have been levered to 69%. If one were to lever the REIT returns at Trump’s rate, then the index’s performance would be considerably higher.”

So “not only is the $13.2 billion a potential understatement of Trump’s underperformance,” Griffin concludes, “but also it seems he needed to take on a market-exceeding amount of risk in order to achieve his performance.”

[Kaos]

Those are two REALLY stupid articles and they clearly emphasize just how pee-their-pants frightened of Trump the ivory tower bobble heads really are. 

Their outright panic makes me wonder what they are truly scared of.

[bottomfeeder]

You know .... If all the people who threaten to leave the country if Trump is elected actually follow through and leave?  I'd vote for himlike I lived in Chicago -- 20 times.

Bye.

I'll help them pack.

[CCTAU]

Those are two REALLY stupid articles and they clearly emphasize just how pee-their-pants frightened of Trump the ivory tower bobble heads really are. 

Their outright panic makes me wonder what they are truly scared of.

Maybe if the Don were to show his cooch in a privately leaked video, he would make more money...

[AUChizad]

Those are two REALLY stupid articles and they clearly emphasize just how pee-their-pants frightened of Trump the ivory tower bobble heads really are. 

Their outright panic makes me wonder what they are truly scared of.

Yeah! Verifiable, indesputable facts and numbers are for faggots!

[CCTAU]

Yeah! Verifiable, indesputable facts and numbers are for faggots!

Kinda. The fact still remains that there are those of you running around stating that you know for certain he will be a terrible president. Yet there is no real measure of that. He is the only one left that has no political track record. Yet you claim to have facts and numbers to prove otherwise...

[AUChizad]

Kinda. The fact still remains that there are those of you running around stating that you know for certain he will be a terrible president. Yet there is no real measure of that. He is the only one left that has no political track record. Yet you claim to have facts and numbers to prove otherwise...

Same applies to the retarded guy that cleans the toilets at the Boobie Bungalow. Let's vote for that guy for leader of the free world.
 

[dallaswareagle]

Same applies to the retarded guy that cleans the toilets at the Boobie Bungalow. Let's vote for that guy for leader of the free world.

His 8 years are up. 

[Kaos]

Yeah! Verifiable, indesputable facts and numbers are for faggots!

They're not "verifiable, indisputable facts." 

They are suppositions based on projections in hindsight. 

It's just more scare tactics from the shellshocked media.  The constant drumbeat of negativity from all corners just makes me more determined that Trump might be the right guy to destroy the mush-headed left. 

al.com has resorted to infantile tirades and predictions of apocalypse.  They even had some guy on there rhapsodizing about the magnificence of Obama's ascent and how it was such a wonderful event for America while simultaneously calling the rise of Trump a horror show.  What he fails to realize is that the empty suit, empty rhetoric of Obama and his ilk is precisely what begat Trump.  Were there no weak-willed Hussein, there would be no groundswell of support for a candidate like Donald. 

I'm not worried about a country that would fall in line behind Trump's tough guy bluster.  I AM concerned however at the legion of absolute morons who followed Obama's shallow nonsense the first time, more concerned that the fools voted for him a second time when he was such an abject and total failure in his first term, and even more concerned that there are apparently millions of dullards so stupid that they would vote for the false promise of Hellary or Sanders.

[jmar]

Good read highlighting three scenarios of a Trump win.


http://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2015/12/7/9861008/what-if-trump-becomes-president   

[CCTAU]

Really VOX?
That ahithole hasn't had an objective article YET!

[jmar]

Really VOX?
That ahithole hasn't had an objective article YET!

Then this was the first.

[Kaos]

Then this was the first.

No.  No it wasn't. 

[jmar]

No.  No it wasn't.

In short,  Trump and both parties have to be willing to compromise to get things done.

[Kaos]

In short,  Trump and both parties have to be willing to compromise to get things done.

See: Every year for the last 150.

[The Prowler]

His 8 years are up.

He'd still be a better candidate than any of the Republicans...Drumpf is the best y'all can offer, LMAO...sad really.