You got what you deserve, Republican Party...

[A Black Falcon]

That's true, but the no-fly list is still incredibly problematic, with no due-process at all, or a way to challenge being put on it, or any way to ever be taken off of it. The no-fly list is, frankly, unconstitutional. At best, a bill to keep anyone on the list from being able to buy the gun at least makes it less hypocritical.

We need to do something to combat things like 9/11 or shootings like this, though...

Your argument for superdelegates seems to break down to: "Superdelegates: Don't you worry your pretty little heads, we know what's best for you."

Oh come on, that's not it at all. You REALLY think that it'd be good for this country if we had more insane, lie-driven hate campaigns like Trump's taking over both parties, instead of just one? I sure don't. And the Republican Party doesn't either, which is why many in that party are still talking about changing the convention rules to stop Trump even though he clearly won their nomination by the current rules.

But to defend superdelegates more directly, this is a representative democracy, you know. Representative, as in, we choose people who vote for us, instead of every citizen voting on every bill, classical Athenian-style. Superdelegates are mostly current for former state representatives, congresspeople, senators, governors, and the like -- the kinds of people who have been voted in to office to represent their party's supporters. I would expect them to know more about the system than random voter Q, yes. That doesn't mean they're always right of course, and that's why we have a primary s & caucus system now instead of the old smoke-filled back rooms where parties chose their candidates, but again, superdelegates have so far been a paper tiger, a threat to the primary vote that is never real because they haven't overturned the will of the voters. And they won't, unless there is an extraordinarily bad candidate. "Superdelegates: we're irrelevbant unless the party goes as insane as the Republicans have" would be a better way to sum them up, I would say. :)

And on Bernie not giving up, well, we'll see how the wind blows there (he is a politician after all, and ultimately I'm sure he'll fall in line), but is that really a reason to hate those who supported him? Sure, you'll pick candidates regardless of that, but you really seem to have a major bone to pick with Bernie on reasons of... well, "he's getting in the way". He attacked Hillary, yes, but he made some good points, and it's a political debate! What did you EXPECT? He's causing the democratic party problems, so you hate him. Well, parties SHOULD have problems, they SHOULD be challenged, and Bernie should serve, if nothing else, as a constant reminder that there's people who aren't happy with how things currently are, and how things really do seem to be controlled by a couple of warring factions, with the primary motivations being maintaining power, with actually serving the people secondary. Hillary is going to do more things for the people than Trump, that's a fact, but the reason I supported Bernie was that he actually seemed like he would do MORE of those things. I have little doubt that, push comes to serve, power will come first with both current candidates.

Your hate for all political parties is as usual very far off-base, but beyond that, there is a key thing here that you miss -- there is a HUGE difference between the things said during a campaign, and those said after it. If you look at 2008, the Obama-Clinton race was heated. Both said nasty things about the other, and indeed by some measures it was a more negative race than 2016 has been. There were negative TV ads in the Democratic primaries in '08 for example, while this year there were none; the attacks this time were in person, online, and such, but not in television ads. And Hillary did not concede until all of the states had voted, breaking the usual precedent of giving up once it's probable you are going to lose. Maybe you forget how negative 2008 was, but it got bad at times, just as things did this year.

But once all the votes were cast, Hillary conceded defeat, endorsed Obama, and went on to be his Secretary of State. She did not throw an absurd fit like Bernie has been by refusing to concede; she did not continue promising a contested convention, but instead, at the 2008 convention, called for a unanimous vote for Obama as a show of unity, and that is indeed what happened; and she campaigned hard for him for the rest of that year. This is what you do when you want your party to win an election: even if you lost the primary, you do everything possible to help your nominee win, because they're still way better than whoever the other party's candidate is.

But Bernie? Bernie's being a sore loser. He lost, but is refusing to concede or endorse. Instead, he throws demands at Hillary as conditions for his support, as if the winner must concede to the loser instead of the other way around! It's ridiculous. Hillary would never behave like this if she lost, as you see from what she did in '08. Bernie's not getting much press anymore, and has said that he is committed to defeating Donald Trump in November, but it's been weeks now since the final votes and months since it became obvious who would win based on votes cast so far, and he's still promising a floor fight at the convention. I've wondered for months now, who would get more votes at their convention, Hillary or Trump? If Bernie's delegates are as recalcitrant as Bernie is, it could go either way. All of this is exactly the kind of party infighting that helped make Reagan's 1980 victory much easier. The Republicans must be furious that instead of having a good chance they're stuck with an openly racist lunatic... but even so you can never take anything for granted, and Bernie IS now hurting the party by not conceding. We need to work to unite to win in November, not fight over minor issues which are pretty unimportant compared to the vast gulf between the two parties on almost every issue now.

Why hasn't he conceded? It's probably partially just not wanting to give up on a campaign that has brought him so much farther than anyone could have guessed at the beginning, yes. But also, Bernie's always been a purist, for good or ill. Ever since at least the early '90s, he's projected that aura of "if you disagree with me you're probably corrupt", as Barney Frank hit him for back in '91 (quote earlier in the thread). Or for a concrete example,. in 1993, Bernie opposed Hillary's health care bill, the great failed effort of Bill Clinton's first term in office, because it wasn't single payer. He chose to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and opposed a good bill because it wasn't perfect enough for him. When you're in congress you absolutely should push for the best bill you can get, but sometimes you need to support what results because it's as good a bill as can actually happen. His wasn't the deciding vote, but still, that attitude has negative consequences. It did in '93, and wee're seeing it again as he makes conditional demands for his support.

Lood, I do like Berni. I admire his advocacy for the poor and middle class, I absolutely think we need single-payer health care, and yes, the big banks are too powerful. But he lost, and if he keeps this up it'll hurt as his remaining supporters continue to cling to Bernie instead of accepting the will of the voters. And many people HAVE done that switch -- as Bernie stubbornly stayed in the race, attacking Hillary in the later votes even though the end result was clear, more and more of his supporters have abandoned him. I read Daily Kos every day, and as you may know that site explicitly is a pro-Democratic Party site, and many Bernie supporters eventually left because of the tenor of the campaign and his refusal to quit. Of course many others online and off till stick to hitting Hillary from the left, but there has been a definite reaction against Bernie because of the nature of the later parts of his campaign, starting with the negative attacks on Clinton and ending with this. Bernie is a great advocate for his causes, but the best way to do that now is not still as a Presidential candidate for 2016.

THIS is where we are, and you can kick and scream and say it's all Bernie's fault for making Hillary seem untrustworthy, but that's myopic. People have distrusted Hillary right from the start.

Indeed, because as the evidence proves (the links I provided previously and more along those lines), too many people believe the Republican Party's 24-year-long sexism-based hate campaign Hillary has been subjected to. You absolutely cannot separate gender from this mythical "she's actually corrupt" falsehood, because if she were male she wouldn't be treated like this.

Yes, some of it is the sexist block,

More like most of it.

but a lot of it comes down purely to the thing you keep pretending doesn't exist, Hillary's connections to big money.

The ridiculous myth that Hillary is corrupt is an interesting one because when you ask anyone for examples, they don't have any. She's corrupt because... well, as Bernie says, because she's been given money by rich people, which means that maybe she'll vote the way those rich people want and not the way I, Bernie Sanders, would in that instance! But the problem is, he has no proof, because there is none. Hillary is not corrupt, and does not do anything that is not something all candidates do -- take money from the people willing to give it so that you can afford the insanely expensive process of running a modern political campaign. Hillary's counterpoint to Bernie's insinuations along this like in the debates, that Obama took a lot of money from bankers and then passed some pretty solid banking reforms regardless of what Wall Street thought, was a very good one in my view, and shows how wrong this line of thinking is. Yes, corruption is possible, and I'm sure there are corrupt Democrats. But do not accuse people of corruption with no proof, without even the suggestion of any actual corruption beyond normal campaign contributions and paid speechgiving! Come on, that's absolutely ridiculous. Hillary is as trustworthy as most any politician today, which means she mostly tells the truth. Not always of course, but mostly. Her truth-to-lie ratios (from links I gave previously) are good, and she was quite liberal as a US Senator from 2000-2008, one of the more liberal senators during that time.

Why did people trust Sanders? He's run the platform he's run entirely on campaign donations. Regardless of how much of that is just a stunt carefully engineered to make him look the part vs how much was him genuinely sticking to his beliefs, the end result is the same. He's not going to serve the interests of major companies. If he's going to betray us, it'll be purely out of his own heart, a genuine betrayal just like mother used to make, and none of that corporate factory produced betrayal. Hillary will do some good things, but it's all those things she won't do, the feet she's never going to dare step on (to make sure those funds come back in for her second term run) that terrify the Bernie supporter so much. It's the big problem with the parties as they stand. They're far more interested in winning than in the policies. The republicans don't hate Trump because he's a bigoted idiot, but because that bigotry and idiocy will lose him the general election.

You're far too cynical about how much we can get done. Do you think Obama got almost nothing done either? Hillary will be at least as liberal as Obama, maybe more so depending on the issue.

You're in a bad position here. There are a number of voters out there who, seeing two candidates they don't trust, are weary of being told "please just vote for the lesser of two evils one more time, NEXT time actual change will happen I promise!". A number are willing to watch the current political scene BURN TO THE GROUND so that we can just rebuild it from scratch, and I'm desperately trying to convince them just to keep things stable. You're dealing with a large number of liberal voters who think change can only now come when the current party system gets taken down, and Trump seems just the sort of natural disaster to make that happen.

Anyone who even vaguely pretends to be "liberal" would never, ever support Trump. Never. Neofascist autocracy is not the way to make America a better democracy, fairly obviously...

My only argument against them is that while Trump may very well implode the Republican party, the Democratic party will be completely unscathed and perhaps stronger after a Trump presidency. We would then have a de-facto one party system forever. I don't care how much you support the democrats "no matter what" (you can't seem to answer my question), you MUST admit that if the democrats were the only choice that could actually win elections, it would render democracy invalid and the democratic party would go full-corrupt within a few terms.

Of course you need two parties, yes. Look at China, even though its government now is not as awful as it once was, the one-party state is still very corrupt and not a good government. That's why the Republican Party's collapse has been so unfortunate -- you need competition to have a functioning democracy, and with their party descending into racist borderline fascism and absolute "give us 100% of what we want or we give you nothing" idiocy that goes vastly far beyond Bernies' predilections in the opposite direction, we're losing that. But indeed, you need competition to have a good government... so what do you do? Just continue hoping \that someday the Republicans come to their senses and decide to allow government to function again? Remember, "let's make sure nothing happens" has been the Republicans' primary governing principle throughout Obama's entire presidency. Here's hoping someday they become a normal party again, but beyond hope I don't know if there's anything much else that we can do, besides defeat Trump hopefully crushingly and try to squish the crazy-racist wing of their party in the fallout.