I'm probably one of the few people that in this election cycle, I wouldn't really mind someone else jumping in the ring (like Paul Ryan). Nonetheless I'll back the nominee.

I don't fault Cruz for the strategy. I'm not a fan of Cruz, but it's just good strategy. To be honest, he has better-understood how the game is won than Trump until now. We don't live in a democracy, we are in a Constitutional Republic, we elect delegates/electors/representatives that ultimately vote on our laws or our candidates or our elections. Understanding that there is a strategy to 'who' those delegates are, is a part of winning an American election.

Trump got shellacked, he went and hired better help. He's NEEDED better help for quite a while, as some of his comments seem like he grew up on the dark side of the moon. He really didn't correct himself at potentially using nukes in the Middle East.. Where? Against Syria, 20 miles from our NATO ally Turkey? In Gaza, which is all of 5 miles wide and would wipe out Israel? And the idiocy of going on Chris Matthews in the first place and not think that it would go badly was just that (idiocy). CM worked for Tip O'Neill, he's not going to suddenly embrace the Republican cause.

The latest Trump 'oops' is his kids just realized that as registered independents (or democrats) they can't vote for their dad in New York.

I don't think he's a bad guy, or a bad candidate, but his campaign-on-the-cheap approach is starting to show where the wheels are coming off the wagon. He's not getting the show-prep he should, he's not getting the advisory services from the adults in the room that he should, Congress is not going to let him undo 50 years of US foreign policy because he feels like it, so that smack-down would happen very instantly in the form of impeachment. If he doesn't open up the checkbook and open his mind up to the fact that he's a great land developer, but others are great political advisors, and respect their knowledge and help, he has probably gone as far as he will.

The US system has circuit-breakers in it for these reasons. The primaries are not something subscribed by law, they are a focus group for the political parties. The party can nominate whoever it wants to, he seems to finally be understanding that, but may be too late.

Well, I agree no matter what the "rules". If Trump and Kasich don't even go to the state, why are they whining now?

Slightly different topic, but one news source (can't remember the link, can't assure accuracy) that Trump has very much benefited from the "winner-take-all" rules of the GOP in some States. Simple arithmetic, it seems to me. Without which, he wouldn't have nearly the delegates he has, and certainly makes Colorado's 34 delegates not even worth talking about. Kind of puts perspective on Trump's whining about "the process".

I have probably written it a hundred times here, the GOP will only nominate a candidate that the insiders control. The voters have not had a role in selecting the candidate for president in decades. (Not that the other statist party is any better. Voters who want a voice should be voting Libertarian in the tens of millions.)

The outrage is due to perception, not reality. The reality is that Colorado's Republican Party, as every state's party does, established its own rules (Colorado's published last August) for how they would apportion delegates. Colorado's rules were that those who attended precinct caucuses would decide, and everyone was invited to attend those. Nobody was disenfranchised. (In Washington state, we have precinct caucuses that select delegates to county caucuses that select delegates to state, then to national conventions).
Trump has chosen to be a victim and score points from his own campaign not doing its homework.

The true origins of the Party system start with the Twelfth Amendment. It did two major things which had repercussions I don't think they really understood at the time:

A. It made the Electoral College voters who select the President beholden to the public rather than the State Executive Branches.
B. It created the two-party system we have today by creating the "ticket system" of President and Vice-President being from the same party, rather than having the Vice President be the second-highest vote getter among the Presidential candidates. (As a corollary, it also made a Presidential Impeachment/Conviction more pointless as power would not change hands politically.)

Fast forward a few more decades and we have the Seventeenth Amendment, where the Senators (another portion of Government who was supposed to represent the States - not the People) moved to popular election and you have the shift of power to mob rule where it has effectively been ever since. You are seeing the last vestiges of the Constitution with our current President, as he has accelerated the shift of power away from the Legislative Branch toward the Executive. We also saw where the President attempted to install judges and such during recess periods - even when the Legislature wasn't in recess - in an attempt to stack the courts in favor of the Executive.


Now regarding Colorado, the Establishment Republicans changed the rules for their Primaries last year in response to Santorum's victory over Romney a few years back. They wanted to make it harder for non-insiders to be able to rally the electors to their sides. What they never imagined was a Republican race where neither of the primary candidates was in insider! But Cruz' campaign spent the time courting the electors because that was how Colorado chose to conduct its primary this year, while Trump ignored the rules and just counted on a popular victory.

If Trump wants to get upset about Colorado, he has only himself to blame at this point. The rules were set before the Primary season kicked off. Are they "fair" rules? Insofar as every State gets to create their own rules, yes. Insofar as the Republican Electors are the ones who select the Republican nominee, yes. The problem is that Trump voters assumed that the Primaries are a popularity contest and they are not! Primaries are all about courting Electors from that particular political party. Some States Party rules designate that the popular vote coincides with the Party's electoral votes. Some States have open primaries meaning that one can vote for any single candidate of any party - much like the General Election. Some States have closed primaries meaning that one can only vote for a candidate from one's registered political party. Some States don't even force the Electors to abide by the popular vote at all (Pennsylvania)!

The point is that no individual State is exactly like any other, and any serious candidate is going to take a look at the rules of that individual State to see about qualification and voting. What should be noted among Trump's supporters is that he's already lost Washington State as well for the same reason: Trump's campaign didn't know the rules.

Trump needs to stop whining about whether or not it's "fair". It's completely fair in that everyone had the chance up front to know the rules and the rules applied to everyone. Trump just doesn't like the rules because they didn't favor him in this race. So he can either whine about it, or fix his campaign. It's unlikely that we will avoid a brokered convention at this point. What Trump needs to do is make sure that when it goes to convention his electoral votes don't change, or he's going to lose out there as well to a much more organized campaign - that of Ted Cruz.

Now there is the outside chance that the Republican Party will attempt to hijack the Convention in order to put in their own person (Kasich has admitted betting on just such a thing). If they do that and pick someone other than Cruz or Trump, we will be watching the implosion of the Republican Party.

@ Olduglycarl - Thank you for making note of the way Trump has used the bankruptcy laws. I hadn't thought of that, and it's a brilliant point to bring up to any of the crybaby Trump supporters out there. He'll use his high dollar lawyers to bend any rule in the bankruptcy chapter laws to cheat investors and vendors out of hundreds of millions of dollars, but he can't be bothered to read the Colorado GOP's state rules for apportioning delegates when he is trying to run for president.

Another example of Trump's camp not bothering with the rules for anyone who is not aware, Trump's own kids won't be able to vote for him in the New York primaries, because they didn't read the rules either that have been in place for months. They are A) not Republicans and B) not typically voters anyway, yet somehow, we're supposed to believe that this 70 year old candidate who has proudly bragged about how he has personally bought and sold politicians is going to clean up D.C. He has proudly proclaimed himself a pro-choicer for 69 years, yet somehow now, he's staunchly pro-life. He's said hundreds of times in the past that the government should do this and do that to fix everything in the world, and now he's supposed to be a Constitutionally minded fiscal conservative? Really? If anything, he says to turn the reins over to him, and suddenly things will be great when he has his beak in the treasury's coffers to piss away our tax dollars by the hundreds of billions. The point is that Donald Trump is not a Republican, and he never has been. I could just as easily slap a Mercedes logo on a 1977 AMC Pacer, but that doesn't make it so. The point is that Trump and his whole family are neither fiscally conservative or socially conservative as you'd expect (I do realize how untrue that expectation really is) of a GOP candidate for president. If anything, he's just another lying crybaby New Yorker who believes in big government, and we already have one of those running in the Democrat Party.

If Donald Trump who routinely brags about hiring only the very best, smartest people can't be bothered to even read the rules, then why she we listen when he throws yet another temper tantrum when he gets his butt kicked. My understanding is that anybody (that's ANYBODY for all you moronic Trump supporters out there) who wanted to participate in the Colorado caucuses was welcome to participate. All they had to do was to show up and make their voices heard. Cruz got the word out to his supporters. Trump did not. Cruz won and Trump lost, fair and square. Nobody was railroaded, nobody got cheated, nobody used (in Trump's own words) Gestapo tactics. The rules for Colorado were made plain as day for all to see all the way back to August of last year, and Trump's camp didn't bother to even read them.

How does the saying go? Oh yeah...

Now, non-fiction.

The GOP is finished. It's over for these checkpants, blueblood, beltway, $16/plate for our troops in Afghanistan, country club, mush butt, statist losers. It's sad, because there really will be no opposition to Hillary (as the Dems are going to do the same thing to Bernie).

Really stupid of Colorado GOP leaders to disenfranchise their rank and file voters. Probably due to THC intoxication.

you got it right, Carl. . DT hired Manafort to begin
to make up for it. -- j
.

In this case, Trump is full of pre-digested frijoles. Trump would have lost Colorado with the way he neglected that state no matter what their election of delegates system was.

No matter who is elected - The Political parties control the government. They pick the candidates, and if someone.who isn't a made man of the political mafia sneaks in like Ron Paul or Trump, they use the law, which they control, to disenfranchise them by every little immoral trick in the book. Just saying that Cruz capitalized on election law ignores who makes the law. Corrupt people make corrupt laws. Yes it is unfair but not to the ones who believe the ends justify the means.

Trump isn't stupid. He is completely honest and had trouble winding through the rat maze of corruption. Cruz and the rest of the lying rats already know how to steal the cheese.

The party system was known to be what corrupts a government and should have been banned in the Constitution not just warned against by George Washington and James Madison.

The only way to restore a government of the people not a government of 2 parties OVER the people is this: http://www.TheSocietyProject.org

How many times I have mentioned this source! Has anyone bothered to read through the material there? Is this just a forum to complain and commiserate? what good does that do if it doesn't lead to solutions and action? Do any of you want to be John Galt and do something about the corrupt system? Then read the above and educate others.

Cruz is a sneaky bastard. I would NEVER vote for him, EVER. I am tired of even listening to him prattling on and preaching. Foreign governments would laugh at him, as they do Obama. Our only hope is a terribly divided government so nothing happens.