OK - IMHO, I would NOT vote for Hillary Clinton because I feel she is just a figurehead for the Big Democratic Machine besides the recent scrutiny re:hidden emails... I DON'T want another BUSH in the Whitehouse, they've done enough personal politics & filled their already wealthy pockets already deceiving John Q public.. I like Carly but with her inexperience I am not sure she wouldn't be a pawn for the Big Republican machine... Trump is a great businessman but I am not sure about whether he would be a War Hawk or not (diplomacy questionable). The deceptive Christian past Senate Republican from Western PA. Oh yeah, Rick Santorum - NEVER!!! Who else ?? I haven't been following it too closely as I am having my own wonderful apartment inspection crisis ( see new post!) Please list the newly declared & unofficially undeclared candidates for our consideration for discussion!
Thank you!
NDY

My hands might fall off from typing the full list if my memory doesn't give out first... but I'll see what I can do:

On the Democratic side (I'll start there because it's shorter) there's Hilary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley, Lincoln Chafee, and Jim Webb. Joe Biden still is undecided about entering the race but still may do so.

On the Republican side there's Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Mike Kasich, George Pataki, Rick Perry, Jim Gilmore, Rick Santorum. That's it as far as I know as of right now...

CNN has a page that lists all the candidates where you can click on any name and read a short bio on the individual including their time in politics and the previous offices they've held. Unfortunately it doesn't delve into how they feel about certain hot button issues or what particular platform they might be running on (at least it isn't showing that thus far, but then again, I don't think any one candidate has really offered up much in terms of what they would want to accomplish as President anyway so that may well explain the lack of that info there). You can find that page at the following link: http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/05/politics/2016-election-candidates/

I hope that helps anyone who isn't sure of who any of those people are that I mentioned who at this point could possibly wind up being the next President. If I (or anyone else for that matter) come across any other links that give more context to what the candidates are for or against, then it will definitely get posted here as well.

Just thought I'd give a head's up to anyone interested - the CNN GOP Debate is 6 days away. 11 of the higher polling Republican candidates will be involved (I don't know if they are planning a secondary debate for the lower polling candidates the way Fox News did though).

Also, the candidates are now hitting the talk shows - Jeb Bush did the first episode of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert", Hillary Clinton was on "Ellen" and will also be doing "The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon", and Donald Trump called in to "The View" this morning.

Trump's "View" interview was the only one I saw a significant portion on to comment about and I can say this with absolute certainty - the man doesn't answer a single question with an actual pointed response nor does he bother to gather proper facts to back his statements. What he does is talks around the question throwing around at least one word arbitrarily through his whole response to make you think he's saying something substantial (for example, in response to Trump's recent Tea Party rally protesting the Iran Nuclear Deal, Whoopi asked him what he would do differently if he is against the current deal plan - Trump's reply never mentioned any sort of actual other plan or option for dealing with Iran but just strung the words "Iran" Nuclear" and "Deal" together in several different ways to make it seem like he knew what he was talking about. On that one question alone you could have a drinking game based around his use of the word "Deal" and be drunk before they ask a second question of him. I kid you not.). His lack of real answers and solutions to the things he thinks are bad (merely labeling something as bad isn't enough to "make America great again" as his campaign slogan suggests he will do) is a real problem and when he doesn't have answers he either talks around the question or throws his poll numbers out as his answer. Right now I'm convinced the only reason anyone tells a pollster they'd vote for Trump is because they are punking the polls or they don't even know any other candidates because Trump is the only one the media is bothering to cover because his antics are somehow deemed "fun and entertaining". We should never vote for a President based on "fun and entertaining". We should vote for someone who isn't going to put their foot in their mouths and possibly get us all killed for it. We should vote for someone who has a better vocabulary than a third grader. We should vote for someone who is not using distractions and worrying about issues that are of lesser concern to and for the greater good of the public rather than dealing with serious issues... and someone who actually knows how the government works (or at least how it should when people aren't turning themselves into human shields to keep the government from running properly by forcing a shutdown). If we all really looked at this candidate list and just removed the people who don't fit at least that much in criteria, then we could really narrow this field fast because Trump wouldn't be the only one who would have to take a seat then....

Hey i haven't been on here for a few years. Hope ya'll are doing good.

Dr. Ben Carson has my vote. I have been following him since the movie came out 'Gifted Hands' about his life. I don't want to write too much, but I would encourage everyone to research his background, books, website and even his Facebook page where he posts nightly answers to questions that people send in. Although, I would not recommend News media outlets for research purposes due to them clipping and taking his words out of context. His new book just came out today and I have downloaded it and started reading it. It's called, "A More Perfect Union". Very good so far. I would recommend all Americans read it.

Blessings, Debra

Nice to see you around again, Debra!

My biggest issue with Carson, personally, is that he seems way too laid back - like the man is a Neurosurgeon and he looks half asleep all the time. I mean, it's one thing to be really chilled out but another thing to wonder if someone even has a pulse! That and, for as much as it can be irksome to see career politicians who seem to be in it for so long they are a bit out of touch with the middle and lower class and the real issues that face us daily, I would still rather the President of this country be someone who has a working knowledge of how the government is meant to work rather than someone who has never held one government office, not even on the local level. I mean, we wouldn't accept a politician suddenly trying their hand at being a neurosurgeon because we expect anyone who is going to be any type of doctor to go to med school and learn about the body and various illnesses and how to treat them and such... so shouldn't we expect a politician to have some working knowledge of how the government works (preferably at the Federal level, but any experience in government seems better than none at all) in order to vote for them? It just seems silly to consider someone with absolutely no concept of how to deal with Congress, international affairs, handling the military, etc... To me, when talking about the highest office in the land, we should actually want someone who has held a lesser government office for it so at least we know they will have some concept of all the minutiae the job entails and those who don't shouldn't get considered - which would rule out the top 3 in the GOP right now, for me - Trump, Carson, and Fiorina.

By the by, it should be noted that since the time I had posted all the names of those running we have seen two drop out - Scott Walker and Rick Perry are no longer in so if anyone was favoring them early on you will need to keep researching and find someone new to back... I'm sure more will drop out before we ever get to the primaries too it's just a matter of who runs out of money before then and surely the ones polling really low will be hitting that point sooner than later (though Walker wasn't that low when he ran out of money so you never know...). It is a long slog to Primary season 2016, that is for sure...

Anyone catch the Democratic debate at all?

Nope why Hillary is the presumptive winner with no competition.

Did watch the snarky CNBC debate last Wednesday. The moderators had no control and were out to cause trouble among the candidates. It showed by the behavior of the moderators how bias the main stream media is towards Democrats.

But if I must add the FOX debate had some gottcha type questions also, and even the CNN debate.

For the replubicans have too many candidates for debate, and now they look like whiners.

After last Wednesday I was impressed with Marco Rubio and Chris Christy. I did like Caryl Fiona but she seems to be saying the same answers to things and I don't like or hear very good things about her HP CEO from some people that worked for her.

I don't get Fox Business News so I can't watch the next debate.

Would not it be nice to see the democratic candidates debate on Fox with their moderators?????

I'm going to take a wild guess and say Democrats would see no need in doing a debate on Fox News because no Democrats watch Fox News and only Democrats can vote in the Democratic primaries, so what would be the point?

I personally don't get why any debate on any channel with either party would want to waste time on nonsense questions rather than ask open-ended questions about topics relevant to the Presidency and government in general as well as the candidates ideas on policy, their voting records assuming they are politicians or some explanation on how they plan to parlay non-government experience into how they'd handle the job - that is all far more important than asking about their fantasy football teams and whether they think it's okay to do "SNL". But I disagree about the notion that the media as a whole has a pro-Democrat bias - as you noted boomer, even Fox News threw out some "gotcha" questions and that channel is the exact opposite of pro-Democrat, and you can't just call them some exception to a rule. CNN is generally seen as a neutral/moderate news channel and even MSNBC is scaling back their Liberal lean. I don't think the whole "gotcha" questions issue has anything to do with the media having a bias one way or another so much as they just want to make what is otherwise generally seen as a snoozefest something entertaining to keep watching for 2 hours. That's why they ask silly, short-answer type questions and such, they want quick sound bites that play well in the Twitter-sphere and not lengthy drawn out boring questions on policy. At least that's how it's going to be so long as there are so many people still in the race.

There was a big difference in the way the first Democratic debate went versus the Republican ones that have been held and it had nothing to do with the political party itself and everything to do with the number of candidates there were to discuss matters. The Dems are already down to 2. The GOP still have so many they are still doing that kid's table debate ahead of the bigger ones and the bigger ones frankly are more of a circus because there are so many still in them (it may have actually been the worst thing for Fiorina to "graduate" to the bigger debate because she owned the first pre-debate do because she had a lot of time to talk about real matters, while the bigger debates still look like pissing matches and she's getting little time in them other than to make awkward faces and rant about videos that don't actually exist. Frankly, the party should sit all the candidates down in a room together and insist that some of them need to come to terms with the fact that they're polling so low they have no chance of winning and should just drop out so the party can get down to brass tacks and be taken more seriously.

And if anyone is calling Hillary the presumptive winner it's because she's polling much higher than her now only Democratic competition for the nomination (Bernie Sanders) and in most all polls she tops all the higher polling GOP candidates, plus right now the GOP look a bit inept because all they are doing is whining, as boomer noted. Unless someone in the GOP actually starts looking like a legit contender, Hillary will continue to look like our future President. I know that's not a popular opinion here, but I for one have absolutely no problem with it.. But then again, I've rarely found a Republican politician worthy of supporting. At this point I even favor Bernie Sanders over any of the Republicans running.

Hmm do you really think no democrats watch FOX News do you ever look at their ratings????? If you would look at the polls right now she scores lows with independents. And most people view her as dishonest or untrustworthy.

Sorry the democratic debate questions were a lot different. Why did they not question her on her e-mails or Bengozi (sp). Why did they not questions on ISIS???

There are still a lot of problems health care exchanges which in many states are folding and the heath care costs are raising higher than promised.

Hillary has been around too long too much baggage and I have yet not heard of any real accomplishments as secretary of state. She panders and flips too much,

Yes I agree the Republicans have way too many candidates and so many good ones to choose from versus the Democrats who have as right now Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton.

Main stream media not biased. Do you really think if Hillary was a republican she would be treated the same. Look what a brew ha ha the media made out Chris Christy and the "quiet car" paste and cutting the story. I could go on and on and that is why FOX beats all the news cable stations. Not perfect but at least they present both sides of a story and both opinions (that is if any democrats would show up).

Sorry getting snarky here I be bad but politics seems to bring out the worse in people to debate.

Most Democrats cannot stand Fox News because it is so Conservatively biased, so no, I don't believe that the average Democrat would tune in to that network unless they want to have a laugh or get their blood boiling. Yes they have the highest ratings among the cable 24-hour news channels, but their demographics skew older than any of the other networks and their viewers overwhelmingly not only identify as Republican but Conservative. It'd be like thinking a Democrat would ever tune in to listen to Rush Limbaugh - only if they want to have a laugh or let their blood boil.

Hillary may score lower with Independents than with her own party but they still generally side with her when given the option between her and most all the Republican choices at the moment. And I think saying "most" people view her as anything is a misnomer based on polls that only take a small segment of the population and make them a representation of the majority when any random selection of people can produce an anomaly. People only would be led to believe her to be dishonest or untrustworthy due to that supposedly Liberally biased media painting her to be that way. She was my senator for 2 terms and did nothing to make me think of her as dishonest or untrustworthy. And I'm including the recent non-issues that were her emails (frankly the fact is her personal server was never hacked while government servers have been multiple times - which way do you really think was safer really? Not to mention the fact that things can look worse after the fact all the time, but at the time that those emails were going around things that would be deemed classified now weren't. And at that time that it happened she was doing nothing wrong. Frankly it's more of a problem that they've felt the need to release those emails like there would be something scandalous found within them - which certainly releasing such info to the public due to all this faux outrage over something people didn't even know about would be worse than anything that never even happened when she was in the process of using her personal email for work... but I digress).

For what it's worth, they did bring up the emails in the Democratic debate and Bernie Sanders stepped in to chide the moderator about it saying that no one really cares about her stupid emails. What has been uncovered from the release of her emails anyway? That she helped make sure there was enough supply of kosher items in Israel for certain Jewish Holy days?! And why bring up Benghazi when she sat through an 11 hour Congressional hearing about it in which they found nothing new or different nor could they manage any sort of "gotcha" moments against her from it. It's a non-story that Fox News and the like wish had more to it and so they keep trying to make it something more than an unfortunate tragedy. The desperation for Benghazi and the emails to amount to something to take down Hillary reminds me of how hard they tried to find something on Bill Clinton when he was in office that Ken Starr did that whole report that was suppose to investigate that silly Whitewater deal but ended up being all about Monica Lewinsky's dress. Sometimes you just have to admit there's nothing there and just move on...

What questions would you have liked the Dems to have been asked about ISIS? And surely you'd like the same questions to be asked of the GOP candidates as well....?

Jim Webb is no longer running... at least not as a Democrat. He may decide to run as an Independent but his time running for the Democratic ticket is over; he announced that after the Democratic debate.

I think Hillary is treated worse than any of the other candidates running on either side - she is not favored like you think she is, in fact, she is scrutinized much more than any others. I would argue that if she was a Republican she'd be getting as little respect as Carly Fiorina, because it seems the GOP doesn't care much for female politicians as a general rule unless they're pretty like Sarah Palin (you do know the story about how John McCain was debating between picking Palin or Fiorina for his running mate but ultimately went with Palin because she was "more palatable" than Fiorina, right?!). As for Chris Christie's quiet car situation, that story was covered the day after it happened on the tri-state regional news programs (NYC-based channels often cover New Jersey more than they even do anything in New York above the city) and then the story was dropped after that. I wouldn't know how much that got covered elsewhere but it wasn't really a big deal. Certainly was less of an issue around here than the whole Bridge-gate fiasco. Before that I would've argued Christie would've been the best GOP choice. I might still say that because he's a little more moderate plus he's a Met fan so for personal reasons I can support him for that since we have a shared sense of loss this week.

Oh and as for the healthcare stuff - I think that's a separate issue altogether. I do think everyone should have the right to healthcare but there are still kinks that need to be ironed out and I don't think it is remotely fair to bully people into buying plans they can barely afford or else pay a fine they can't afford either. My Medicare payments are going up next year but there's no SSD raise to balance it, so where am I supposed to make up the difference? That's something you won't hear any candidate discuss. Doing away with healthcare options isn't the answer but unless someone's going to get in deep and reform all of the medical industry as a whole, nothing will change one way or another. But the GOP always scares me with their talks about cutting spending by cutting programs like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and other necessary social programs - taking money out of the programs that are helping so many people barely stay afloat will only lead us to having more people in poverty. Until I hear a smart answer on the Republican side with regard to balancing the budget without threatening social programs people need in order to live (I'm going to include Planned Parenthood in that because many women rely on them for gynecological health services and abortions are such a small part of what they do and those are funded by private donors not through government funds), I cannot trust that voting for a Republican won't put us in a worse position than we already are in right now.

bernie sanders

I don't hear any discussions about any noteworthy Independents...? I am convinced Hillary Clinton is a dishonest figurehead for the worst side of the Democratic Party. We need a new face in Washington, one eho is savvy in global affairs and a diplomat when it comes to international political agenda. I don't see that in any major party. Hillary Clinton is Old News/ Dirty Old Politics/ with a tired, eroded political reputation. Fire up a fresh air dynamic seasoned politician. One the whole nation can back up. One who unites our country not further divides it. That's who I'll bac. That's who the whole country can get behind! Is there anyone interesting in the GOP Senate?

i have also heard that bernie sanders may run WITH elizabeth warren. if he does, they should definitely win, if the american public has any sense. i lovvvvve elizabeth warren. check out their memes on facebook.

I think there's a tremendous respect on both sides for Elizabeth Warren, but I would be surprised if she were to be a VP candidate given she didn't want to run for President because she feels she can do more good in Congress. Bernie may want her to run with him (assuming he were to get the nom) but that doesn't mean she'd say yes.

NDY, I'm convinced you probably watch a lot of Fox News and that's where you've formed your opinion on Hillary. She was my senator and I voted for her twice and she served New York very well while she held the post. I'd even say she'd still be our junior senator had she not been called upon by Obama to be Secretary of State in his first term. Our state has had its share of shady politicians, but she's someone who was never called into question when she was one of our elected officials. The only time anyone questions her or calls her shady is when she's running for President and the 24-hour news cycle media need something to talk about. The whole email controversy... have you seen the whole lack of anything found there?! They spent a day discussing her emails asking her staff if anyone knew what the channel number was for Showtime in the DC area so she could watch "Homeland". So not the great scandal they really wish it was.

Truth of the matter is that the majority of the people running are either long time Washington insiders or people so far outside of Washington they can't locate it on a map and have no real business being President because they lack the fundamental knowledge of how the government works. Frankly, I'd rather a Washington Insider who knows how things work than someone who had no clue and thus promises things they cannot deliver on any day of the week, but that's me.

You want to know about independents.... well, there are no third-party candidates to speak of just yet though there have been a few "threats" if you will of some throwing their hats into the ring. Former Democratic candidate Jim Webb claims he might make an independent run and Trump of course keeps straddling the fence should he not get the Republican nomination outright. Also, former Republican NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg is weighing a run as an independent. He seems more inclined to do so should the two parties settle with a Trump vs Sanders showdown, since he would actually wind up then being the moderate in the race. Frankly, if it were down to Trump and Sanders and Bloomberg did run, I'd seriously consider him.

The sad truth though is that there is no candidate that is going to unite the country. That fresh air dynamic seasoned politician was Barack Obama in 2008. The country united behind him, albeit briefly since Congress took to a mission of sabotaging him in a way no party has ever gone after a President from the opposite party before and now a lot of people blame him for every little thing wrong in the world rather than see it as a complex place where one person can only do so much even when they wish they could do more. There is no one who is going to unite us because there will always be some group unhappy with the outcome. But if you want someone who will do less to purposely divide us, then I'd suggest giving up on the majority of the GOP candidates. They have a tendency to speak before they think and what they say is often offensive to swaths of people in this country and abroad. Last thing we need is our very own Hitler.

I want y'all's to know I literally labored on this site yesterday to "birth out a diatribe worthy of Tess's lengthy verbosity only to accidently hit "Cancel" instead of "Submit Reply"!! OH, I was SO BURNED!!

Believe me, I will be back again when I have a bit more time as I don't like to do ANYTHING half-ask-me-no ques....!! Ya KNOW what I mean, Jelly Bean??!!

NDY