Month: August 2015

Welcome to the dark side

by digby

I wrote about the creepy authoritarianism at the heart of Trumpism this morning for Salon:

I want to talk about what we are seeing unfold here because I think what we are seeing is past the point of a clown show or a parody. I believe it is much more serious and much darker…You have someone now who is getting huge crowds, who is polling at the top of the GOP field, who polls show is beating Jeb Bush by 44 to 12 percent on the issue of immigration, going around the country calling little children, newborn babies, anchor babies saying that he’s going to use that term which I find a dehumanizing and disgusting term. Talking about giving the local police the ability to “do whatever they need to do to round up” the “illegals”. Building a wall, talking about basically chasing 11 million people out, talking about deporting American citizens to “keep families together”, talking about what would essentially be the largest most intrusive police state in the history of the American republic to go about this task, that is the person that is right now at the head of the Republican party’s presidential contest.

“We get a traitor like Berghdal, a dirty rotten traitor, who by the way when he deserted, six young beautiful people were killed trying to find him. And you don’t even  hear about him anymore.  Somebody said the other day, well, he had some psychological problems.

You know, in the old days ……bing – bong. When we were strong, when we were strong.”

There’s much more at the link. I went through his speech line by line and transcribed much of it to illustrate my point. The crowd was delirious, cheering on the most authoritarian lines — and there were many of them.

Today he’s appearing at a sold out football stadium in Alabama …

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Give me that old time Constitution
by Tom Sullivan

It was good for Samuel Adams. It’s good enough for me.

Donald Trump’s championing the elimination of birthright citizenshhip is a xenophobe’s dream. Trump is getting enough mileage out of hyping the “anchor baby” threat that many among the Republican presidential field are drafting off him, hoping to hang on long enough to pass him in the final laps. Talking Points Memo’s David Leopold debunks some of the nonsense, summing up Trump’s immigration reform plan in four words: They have to go.

When it comes down to it, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment has very little to do with immigration; it is fundamentally focused on the preservation of civil rights. Trump’s extremist proposal to end birthright citizenship — whether by elimination or reinterpretation of the Citizenship Clause — comes at the grave cost of abridging civil rights, even hearkening back to the days of Dred Scott, when people were viewed as commodities to be bought and sold.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you listen to conservative talk radio in Iowa. Media Matters reports:

Iowa radio host and influential conservative kingmaker Jan Mickelson unveiled an immigration plan that would make undocumented immigrants who don’t leave the country after an allotted time “property of the state,” asking, “What’s wrong with slavery?” when a caller criticized his plan.

Calling the Iowa state fair “the carnival of the damned,” Charlie Pierce wonders why any American politician would ever engage, not with Mickelson, but with the audience that tunes in for this sort of vulgarity.

Michael Keegan from People for the American Way condemns Republicans for entertaining the notion that we abandon the 14th Amendment:

The Republican presidential contenders’ rush to badmouth a basic constitutional right — in an apparent attempt to appeal to their supposedly Constitution-loving far-right base — speaks volumes about what they really mean when they talk about constitutionalism. They use their pocket Constitutions for the parts that come in handy. The rest of it? Not so much.

Besides, the Founders didn’t pass the 14th Amendment, so technically it’s not really the Constitution, is it? Give us that old time Constitution, back when we didn’t need the specter of voter fraud to justify keeping lesser-thans from the polls.

“Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once told a new staffer, Rick Perlstein wrote. Whether it’s the Constitution or the Bible, that flexibility is baked into the right’s anti-gay wedding cake.

They not only tolerate the relativism of which they accuse the left, they embrace it. Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast explains that far from being shunned by the GOP’s evangelical base, the religious right is embracing Trump in spite of his whatever faith, his string of marriages, and advocating “getting even” in his speech at Liberty University. After all, an eye for an eye is in the Bible, right?

Watch how often believers in nominally Christian America reference the Bible. Except when the Savior’s New Testament teachings about loving your neighbor, caring for the poor, rendering unto Caesar and turning the other cheek make them feel that Christ is too soft on personal responsibility or too left on social issues. Then they turn to the 39 pre-Christian books of the Bible filled with good, Old Testament-fashioned smiting and stoning and vengeance and wrath of God stuff – hoping to get a second opinion.

Old Testament Patriots approach America’s founding the same way. The Constitution is holy writ, yes, but when keeping to its laws and principles makes them feel soft on terror and people less American than they are, right-wingers turn to pre-ratification letters and speeches by the founders – particularly the ones whose ideas lost early arguments as the Constitution took shape – hoping to get a second opinion.

No 700 million foreigners are not coming to take over America

by digby

Rand Paul has been pushing the ban on birthright citizen for his entire political career and now he’s calling the rest of the pack Johnny-come-latelys. Dave Weigel caught up with him down in Haiti where he was donating his medical services to ask him about it. He said that if we sealed the border up tight it might not be necessary but otherwise we’re going to have to change the constitution because of something unintelligible about the DREAMers.

Anyway, this was what I found interesting:

The issue of citizenship as a birthright is especially volatile in Haiti. In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court ruled that anyone born in the country after 1929, who did not have at least one native-born Dominican parent, would be stripped of citizenship. The decision was largely seen as a way to get more than 250,000 Haitians to leave the country. An international outrage stalled action on the ruling for years, but deportations have begun — and were taking place on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border just 45 minutes from the city where Paul was performing eye surgeries on poor people this week.

The argument in the DR, and in the United States, boiled down to this: Who deserved to be a citizen? According to Paul, there had to be reasonable limits, and it was better in the long run for countries to be stabilized than for their people to leave in search of work.

“Pew did a poll a while back, interviewing people in like 50 countries, and they came up with an estimate that if anybody could come to America, 700 million people would come,” Paul said. “So we’d double, triple the population. You can’t probably exist with that kind of mass migration. For a country to be a country, it has to have borders. The answer isn’t to let Haiti to move to America. The answer is fixing Haiti. It’s the same for a lot of countries.”

That’s just babble. 700 million people are not coming to America and there aren’t very many people who are arguing for “open borders” in any case. Migration from Mexico and Central America to work has been happening since well … forever. It’s not an emergency. It’s just a bunch of wingnuts being duped and distracted from the fact that they’re being screwed by billionaires (like Trump and Koch.) A very old story in America.

But aside from that obvious point, surely Paul doesn’t think that “fixing Haiti” is something that can be done without any help from the rest of the world, does he? Because this is the guy who wants to end all foreign aid. So essentially he’s saying what Trump’s saying: build a wall, get them out, keep them out, to hell with the rest of the world.

That tends not to work out very well.

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How will campaigns use Ashley Madison data? How will media? 

by Spocko

Here is some interesting information compiled by @dadaviz taken from the illegally obtained Ashley Madison data dump. Link


34% of Ashley Madison Accounts are Fake

Yesterday I could have downloaded the 10 gigs of illegally obtained Ashley Madison customer data. The idea was kind of thrilling.  I could see which associates of politicians, lobbyists or corporate executives are on the list, prepare it for oppo research, political leverage and/or public shaming.

I didn’t do it but lots of people can and will.  Prepare for the onslaught. I’m trying to get ahead of the curve a bit. Partly to help people see who and how this might be handled. Partly to wonder how it might be used, abused or leverage by others. And finally, I’d like to reinforce the importance of figuring out how to maintain privacy in our current surveillance state.

 I keep thinking about two comments I’ve heard in the past around privacy, sex and cheating on a spouse.

“If you haven’t done anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about.” 

“It’s not about the sex, it’s about the lying.” 

I wrote about privacy and this breach back in July, Why I care when people with ‘something to hide’ are hacked. I recently did a podcast with blogger out of Ireland. It’s not up yet, but he asked me good questions about privacy, morality and transparency. I realized I didn’t have good answers and it led me to questions of my own.

1. How are media and political organizations going to deal with these revelations?
2. How might these be used against the left or right?
3. How will individuals use this personal information against people engaged in an act consider morally wrong by some?

But what if you don’t consider the act morally wrong, but others do? What if I don’t consider the act wrong, others don’t either but I would still rather not share that with the world? So for example, what if this was a data breach from a gay sex site like Grinder?

I look at things though an activist, political and technological lens, so here are a few other questions.

No, Mike Huckabee won’t be on the list, but what about his staff?

• How will the various political candidates and their campaigns deal with disclosure of Ashley Madison data?
• How will the candidate you hate deal with disclosures vs. the ones you like?
• What if your friends, co-workers and paymasters are on the list but not your political enemies? What if both are?

Media – Sex sells, duh. What’s your media’s angle?

• How will the left, right and MSM cover this differently?  

We are already seeing a few stories. The first I saw was about a religious conservative spokesperson on Gawker. Next, a story in Salon reminding people of the criminal act behind the story.

Josh Duggar’s Ashley Madison account: Celebrity infidelity doesn’t justify the outing of hacked clientsEnjoy the schadenfreude and gossip, if you must — it’s still powered by a despicable vigilante act by MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

The main stream media will be all over this story. They will be using the data in their standard, “Both sides do it” format.

The media will need to appear “fair and balanced” and for every famous right wing person on the list the MSM will put a democrat or liberal person in for balance. Even if the ratio is 100,000 to 1 they will do a fifty-fifty split. (Remember anti-war protests? Hundreds of thousands against the war but the TV made sure to give equal air time to tiny pro-war groups “for balance.”

Look for this. The data is going to be very skewed for multiple reasons, but  like the faked emails,the media won’t be pointing this out.

When this happens it often pushes people to defend people or acts that they disagree with but need to defend on principle.

In the olden days I called it the “But Clinton!” rule because every time you brought up a horrible thing from the right you got a story about Clinton showing equal horribleness.

“It’s not about the sex.”

You could have a real problem with people cheating on their spouse, but what you don’t have a problem with is consenting adults having sex. You could believe that people should have the right to privacy, but not in cases that violate laws that are a violation of constitutional protections.

You might believe that people who violate international laws involving torturing humans don’t deserve privacy, yet they get it. However, when someone breaks the law to reveal these acts of torture, you consider them heroes.

“It’s about the lying.”

I don’t expect any high-level politicians to be on the list.  I don’t want to underestimate sneaky politicians but I also shouldn’t overestimate their ability to protect their privacy when it comes to computer technology.

Some of the coverage will be based on espoused values (no pun intended, but…) Yes you can say, “We aren’t the ones pushing ‘family values'” but that still doesn’t mean that this can’t be used against someone in another different way, Remember this? “It’s not about the sex it’s about the lying–under oath.”

You might think that the right wing religious conservatives will suffer more from this than the left, but I’m not so sure. As my friend Sarah pointed out, the religious right have all sorts of public apology and Christian forgiveness mechanisms in place. Even if you aren’t a serious Christian you can still put out the “Forgive me Jesus, I’m a sinner.” card. Or quote the “He is who is without sin cast the first stone.” line and boom! Your soul slate is wiped clean.

The bright side? It might remove some blackmail opportunities

As Jay Ackroyd pointed out during our Virtually Speaking podcast, The agency that is responsible for helping protect Americans from cyber crime is the NSA. That’s right, the NSA. They are also the ones who are out there looking into other countries’ data. This kind of digging up data is happening all the time. In this case it was not a state actor, but it could have been.

But the defensive side of the NSA is not the focus. As mentioned in this podcast:

“The NSA is not earning their money unless they’re trying to do the exact same thing to the Chinese, the Russians and everyone else,” says Vincent Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, referring to America’s electronic-spy agency, the National Security Agency.  

Why It’s OK to Hack for Spying: Audio Blog: Security Experts See Nation-State Snooping as Norm

Nation states (or political operatives!) could sit on this data and use it for leverage when they want to get a deal done, a bill passed or a contract signed.

It could be used to pressure someone close to a powerful official to do almost anything.

Does the NSA have the equivalent of this info about the Germans, French, British and Chinese? You bet. You don’t think they just tapped Merkel’s phone?

This information will be used for leverage in multiple ways. Negotiations on the TPP, TIPP, major arms deals and corporate contracts.

Remember last week where I suggested that we get the GOP billionaires to go after each other? What if we encouraged the right wing media to dig into this data to get Trump? Or to get the Trump supporters to dig into this to go after Huckabee?  Will that happen? No.

The right will use this to figure out a way to go after the people on the left. And the MSM will go along with it because “both sides do it” and they need balance.

One reason that we push for privacy at times and transparency at others is because some things aren’t anyone’s business but your own. Other times it is because it IS other people’s business and so we set up rules and laws to make that information available. Those rules sometimes change.  Last night I was watching an episode of New Tricks from 2010 when this line came up.

“If you haven’t done anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about.” 

The response was interesting, especially when you found out the truth at the end.

“It depends on who’s deciding what’s right or wrong, doesn’t it?”

Were they wearing brown by any chance?

by digby

He can’t help it if his followers are thugs — they just want to make America great again:

Republican front-runner Donald Trump said last night it “would be a shame” if two South Boston brothers who allegedly beat up a homeless man were encouraged by the real-estate mogul’s crusade against illegal immigration.

“I haven’t heard about that,” Trump said of the attack when asked if he was concerned about his campaign speeches inciting violence. “I think that would be a shame.”

He added: “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that.”

Yeah, they’re “passionate”

State police said the brothers were leaving a Red Sox game when they came across the 58-year-old victim sleeping at a metro stop, according to the newspaper.

A police report obtained by the Globe stated that the victim was woken up by two men urinating on his face and was then punched several times and hit with a metal pole. The victim suffered a broken nose and several bruises to his head and chest, according to the police report.

Police said Scott Leader, who was previously convicted of a hate crime for attacking a Moroccan man in the days after the 9/11 attacks, told them he targeted the victim because the man was Hispanic and homeless.

“Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” Leader allegedly told police, as quoted by the Globe.

Obviously these are bigots just looking for an excuse to beat people. But “movements” like the one Trump thinks he’s building tend to attract people like that, don’t they?

There is a very dark and dangerous side to Trump’s appeal. Yesterday he reiterated his earlier inisistence that we have to “give power back to the police.” In his earlier comments he was referring to BVlack Lives Matter. Yesterday he was saying that the cops had to be given the ability to round up Latinos “very quickly” and deport them.

I know that nobody thinks this creep has a chance. But doesn’t it worry anyone that millions of Republicans think this stuff is just great? And that the rest of the GOP is following along behind him like he’s the Pied Piper?

I’m not the only one who is beginning to see something sinister in all this. Chris Hayes mentioned it last night at the top of his show as well. It’s fun to make fun of him and all but maybe it’s time to start seriously thinking about what this means.

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Ignore California’s example at your peril, GOPers

by digby

John Harwood interviewed Marco Rubio for CNBC today and asked him whether or not all this Latino bashing, including the use of derogatory terms like “anchor baby” were dragging down the Republican Party:

Rubio: It’s not the Republican Party. It’s individual candidates who are responsible for their own rhetoric and …

Harwood: It’s the face of the Republican Party to the whole country right now

Rubio: Well, the face of the Republican Party is going to be our nominee

Ok. Tell it Mitt Romney. Or the California Republican Party.

I wrote about it for Salon today:

There were obviously many factors that contributed to California’s evolution into the deep-blue state it is today, from demographics to the culture war. But none of those things come close to the damage that then-Governor Pete Wilson did to the longterm interest of the California Republican Party in 1994, when he scapegoated Latino immigrants as the cause of all the state’s woes.

Wilson was running for re-election, and as part of his campaign to distract from the economic failure of his first term and increase turnout among his base, he ran on a platform promising to crack down on undocumented workers, and enthusiastically supported the infamous Prop 187, which set up a statewide system designed to deny any kind of benefits to undocumented workers, including K-12 education and all forms of health care.

(He also supported a constitutional amendment to repeal birthright citizenship, currently guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.)

Here’s the famous “they keep coming” ad the Wilson campaign ran that year:

Unfortunately, they apparently didn’t know how to count. They failed to recognize that Latinos were the fastest growing ethnic minority in the state, and knew very well that all this “concern” about undocumented immigration stemmed from a nativist impulse that had little to do with economics and everything to do with bigotry.

The reaction was swift:

The Rev. Jon Pedigo remembers he was so angry that he instantly started planning a march from his parish in Morgan Hill to St. Joseph’s Cathedral in San Jose.

“I said, ‘I’m going to take that frickin’ cross from the church and I’m gonna walk to the downtown cathedral and demand that something be done,’” said Pedigo, now pastor of East San Jose’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. The next morning he led 250 people on the 21-mile walk.

“We filled the cathedral. We filled the park. It was amazing,” he said. “We said, ‘We will not put up with this, and we want God on our side.’”

I don’t know if God was on their side, but Latinos certainly did not put up with it. The Republicans lost the Hispanic vote in California and have almost zero chance of getting it back. The Hispanic population saw the ethnic hatred on display during that period, hatred which was enthusiastically stoked by the Republican Party of California.

The demographic trends in the state guarantee that the GOP will be in the minority in California for a very long time to come. And needless to say, if anyone thought that after 20 years a younger generation might forget why their parents rejected the Republicans and give them another look, the primal scream we are currently witnessing in the 2016 presidential primary is giving them quite a refresher course.

This story is almost a political cliche, repeated so constantly in the media that it has the taint of a moldy morality play rather than a true political lesson. Certainly it’s been an article of faith that the Republican Party simply cannot win nationally if they don’t find a way to attract some Latinos. This is what they themselves wrote in their post 2012 “autopsy” report:

If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In the last election, Governor Romney received just 27 percentof the Hispanic vote. Other minority communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander Americans,also view the Party as unwelcoming. President Bush got 44 percent of the Asian vote in 2004; our presidential nominee received only 26 percent in 2012.

As one conservative, Tea-Party leader, Dick Armey, told us, “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you. We’ve chased the Hispanic voter out of his natural home.”

We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic communityand beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not,our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only. We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, their base doesn’t care about their models and their projections; they are convinced that immigrants are the source of all their troubles. And that’s a huge problem. A recent analysis by Latino Decisions shows that Republicans need to get at least 47 percent of the Latino vote in order to win in 2016. (For reference, Mitt Romney won 23 percent.)

I’m going to take a wild guess that Donald Trump and the cowardly clown car that’s chasing him have just made achieving that 47 percent figure impossible.

There’s lots more at the link.

The GOP political establishment that wrote that “autopsy” can’t control their base or their candidates even though they know very well that they are signing the party’s death warrant as a national party. It will catch up with them congressionally as well — it did in California. These candidates are political suicide bombers, even Jeb! who is obviously getting so nervous that he’s out there saying “anchor babies.”

It’s mind boggling.

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Biden’s boomlet

by digby

I took some serious shit recently for writing this piece in which I speculated that the Biden boomlet indicated that the political establishment was starting to get wobbly over Clinton.The headline was misleading and since most people don’t read past them, there was quite a bit of misunderstanding of what I was saying. But even some who did read the article thought my thesis was nonsense — the establishment is completely in the tank for Clinton and any thought to the contrary says that I’m a lazy sod who fails to do the deep reporting that would prove what an idiot I am.

Here’s Chuck Todd this morning on MSNBC. I don’t know who he’s talking to, but it’s the same feeling I was getting from various sources. The new Q poll shows that Biden matches Clinton in favorability and matches up better against some Republicans in the general than Clinton does right now. Todd says:

Why does this matter? Because Biden is talking to donors. Donors care about this right now. And as donors contemplate whether either to leave Clinton or to jump in with Biden, maybe they were on the fence, that evidence matters to them and it will help Biden put together a campaign even faster.

That’s Chuck Todd, so take it for what it’s worth. But I continue to get a strong sense that the Democratic establishment is nervous and that they increasingly believe they need a fallback. Clinton has a ton of endorsements and is clearly in the drivers seat. But going back to the 90s the Democratic elite have always been ready to abandon Clinton at the first sign of trouble. The pseudo-scandals turn them into nervous nellies every single time.

Do I think it will make a difference? No. If Clinton has a real rival it’s Sanders, who has captured the imagination of the large liberal faction of the Party. Biden could jump in and it would be a thrilling story for the media, but I having the support of a bunch of rich guys and timorous political types won’t get the job done.

But it is a genuine phenomenon within Party circles. This is how they roll.

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“They’re called babies”

by digby

Via CNN

Seeking to tie Jeb Bush to Donald Trump, the Clinton campaign published a bilingual video on immigration Thursday morning that tied the two Republican candidates together.

The campaign hits Trump, the Republican front-runner, and Bush, the Clinton campaign’s most common GOP target, on comments both made about “anchor babies,” a term some used for children of undocumented immigrants who gain U.S. citizenship by being born in the country.

Maybe they could start using the term “wetback” again too. “Spic” is good too. You know, in order to show their solidarity with the bigots. It’s a good thing they don’t need any Latino votes.

Update:

Jeb Bush on Thursday said he doesn’t think the term “anchor babies” is offensive, wading further into the controversial debate over birthright citizenship that was sparked by Donald Trump.

“Give me another word” than “anchor babies,” he challenged while speaking at a press conference in Keene, New Hampshire Thursday.

That’s exactly what Trump said yesterday:

“You know what? Give me a different term.”

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Modern Times, old economy
by Tom Sullivan

I am a glorified temp. White collar Manpower. A contractor. I have worked for national and international corporations for years. I never trusted them. Not the people, necessarily, but the machine. To the machine, I am not a person. I am the hired help. A “human resource.” Consumable. Disposable. If work gets slack and I have to move on, it’s not as if anyone is breaking any promises to me I knew they wouldn’t keep. I never let them make them. Like Chaplin’s tramp, just a cog in the machine.

Ah, but “Modern Times” was 80 years ago. And now? The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy observes that this weekend’s New York Times article about Darwinian workplace conditions for white-collar workers at Amazon under Jeff Bezos has drawn more comments to the Times’ website than any other it has published. Cassidy writes:

Perhaps Times readers, who tend to be well educated and reasonably well off, like reading about bad things happening to people like themselves. But I think it goes deeper than that. As the “New Economy” celebrates its twentieth anniversary—on August 9, 1995, Netscape’s initial public offering took place—it is becoming harder to ignore some of its negative aspects. Behind all the technological advances and product innovation, there is a good deal of old-fashioned labor discipline, wage repression, and exertion of management power.

Behind the websites of the New Economy are a lot of old-economy infrastructure: people, trucks and warehouses. In them, Amazon is not competing against Apple or other tech firms, but against Walmart and other low-wage, no security employers. Unions organized to oppose oppressive pay and workplace conditions a century or more ago. Will they come back now?

Amazon, for its part, has long resisted efforts to unionize its workforce, both in the U.S. and abroad. This battle is still ongoing. After the Times article came out, an official at a big British labor union, the G.M.B., which is seeking to recruit some of the roughly seven thousand people who work at Amazon’s U.K. distribution centers, accused the company of treating its staff like “robots” and imposing work conditions that often lead to physical and mental illness. A petition authored by the G.M.B. cites a survey of Amazon staff, which found that seventy-one per cent of them reported walking more than ten miles a day at work, seventy per cent felt they were given disciplinary points unfairly, and eighty-nine per cent felt exploited.

I don’t recall the word “exploited” being bandied about much in the dot-com era. Today, though, it crops up quite a lot. In a stinging response to the Times article, Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor, reminded his readers that American private-sector unions “were originally formed as a response to exploitation by 19th century mill owners.” He added that, by “keeping a cowed workforce under the lash with non-stop pressure, bullying and psychological warfare, Bezos is the 21st century equivalent.”

Amazon is getting some unwelcome spotlighting here, but it is hardly unique. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Look who’s tanking

by digby

Nate Cohn at the Upshot:

The Aug. 6 debate marked the beginning of a new and more volatile phase of the contest: a wave of boomlets. The candidates who can surge — and stay at the top — could define the race. It represents a big test for the candidates who led the polls for much of the first half of the year, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. Already, it’s one Mr. Walker is struggling to pass.

Carly Fiorina has made the largest leap in national polls, and Marco Rubio, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz appear to have made gains as well. But where the story really matters is in Iowa and New Hampshire, and in the so-called invisible primary for elite support. These three contests nearly amount to separate campaigns, with Iowa and New Hampshire something like two brackets in a tournament, and with the invisible primary bestowing the resources and credibility that help candidates reach the finals.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Walker appear to have lost ground in all of them.

I can’t tell the future and there’s plenty of time for both to recover. But I will say this: I’ve been writing for many months that both of these guys, beloved by the beltway press and all the political pundits as exceptional political talents and shoo-ins, are tremendously over-rated. (You can look it up.) They just aren’t that great.

One hasn’t been in politics since his failure of a brother was busy destroying Iraq and the other’s main claim to fame is that he survived a recall election two years into his first term.
These guys simply are not the best talent in the busload of candidates they have out there. I have also written from the beginning that Mr Everybody’s Second Choice, Rubio, looked the best on paper to run in the general and was becoming the billionaire’s “it-boy.”

As I said, this is waaaaay to early to be able to even see the outlines of how it’s going to go. Trump is the big pile of offal in the middle of the tiramisu so who knows what’s going to happen? But I, for one, am not surprised that neither Walker or Bush are catching fire anywhere. And I think Rubio’s still positioned to be the GOP’s best anti-Hillary. Stay tuned …

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