Month: September 2015

Michelle Obama’s good deed

by digby

I wrote about Michelle Obama’s school lunch program for Salon today. Another funding and regulation fight is about to take place as the Republicans try to ensure that American kids are the unhealthiest children in the first world. An excerpt:

LIMBAUGH: Michelle My Belle, minus the husband, took the kids out to Vail on a ski vacation, and they were spotted eating and they were feasting on ribs, ribs that were 1,575 calories per serving with 141 grams of fat per serving. Now I’m sure some of you members of the new castrati: “This is typical of what you do Mr. Limbaugh, you take an isolated, once in a lifetime experience, and try to say that she’s a hypocrite.” She is a hypocrite. Leaders are supposed to be leaders. If we’re supposed to go out and eat nothing — if we’re supposed to eat roots, and berries and tree bark and so show us how. And if it’s supposed to make us fit, if it’s supposed to make us healthier, show us how.

The problem is — and dare I say this — it doesn’t look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice. And then we hear that she’s out eating ribs at 1,500 calories a serving with 141 grams of fat per serving, yeah it does — what do you mean, what do I mean?

What is it – no, I’m trying to say that our First Lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, or of a woman Alex Rodriguez might date every six months or what have you. I mean, women are under constant pressure to look lithe, and Michelle My Belle is out there saying if you eat the roots and tree bark and the berries and all this cardboard stuff you will live longer, be healthier and you won’t be obese. Okay, fine, show us.

Read on for the latest…

All American Lone Wolves

by digby

If only we could close the borders this sort of thing could be avoided:

Three north Georgia men pleaded guilty in federal court this week to conspiring to begin a revolution against the U.S. government.

Brian Cannon, Terry Peace and Cory Williamson met in an Internet chat room in January 2014 and bonded over their anti-government views, according to prosecutors. Within a month of meeting, Cannon and Williamson moved into Peace’s Rome home and began planning an attack, to be carried out no later than Feb. 15, 2014.

“This case is a startling example of militia activists reaching true extremes,” Acting U.S. Attorney John Horn said in a release. “While this level of extremism is fortunately rare, this case illustrates the threats to all our safety that arise from people who turn their hatred into actions.”

According to information presented in court, the defendants discussed bombing infrastructure supporting certain government agencies, including the TSA, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. They chose infrastructure targets “because they believed this would reduce the amount of unnecessary casualties and make it difficult for the government to respond to their attack,” prosecutors said.

Another person in the chat rooms reported the defendants to the FBI and agreed to assist in the investigation.

The informant made plans to give Peace 12 pipe bombs and two thermite devices. On Feb. 15, 2014, the defendants met the informant in Cartersville to pick up the items. They were arrested instead. Investigators said the three planned to use the thermite devices at a local police department.

I hadn’t heard anything about this had you? But then they aren’t Muslim.

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ISIS, Climate Change & Mass Migration of Peoples

by Gaius Publius

I’ve said a number of times that climate chaos won’t involve just drought, famine and a destroyed environment — all physical stresses and dangers to human life. Climate chaos will start with some of those physical stresses, but be coupled with human anticipation, which will result in social and political chaos first, and if we’re really unfortunate, eventually with collapse.

The two sets of problems — physical stress on the one hand, social and political stress on the other — are intertwined, but because humans are an anticipating species, I think the social chaos will ramp up first, ramp to a greater degree in the initial stages, ultimately producing political collapse prior to full-on physical collapse of our support systems, like food production.

In fact, I think the social chaos is ramping up first, in front of our eyes. Let’s connect a few dots.

ISIS and Climate Change

From Joe Romm, editor of ClimateProgress, the climate site at ThinkProgress:

The Link Between Climate Change And ISIS Is Real

… For three years now, leading security and climate experts — and Syrians themselves — have made the connection between climate change and the Syrian civil war. Indeed, when a major peer-reviewed study came out on in March making this very case, retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley said it identifies “a pretty convincing climate fingerprint” for the Syrian drought.

Titley, a meteorologist who led the U.S. Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change when he was at the Pentagon, also said, “You can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”

From the Abstract of that study (my emphasis throughout):

Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend. Precipitation changes in Syria are linked to rising mean sea-level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean, which also shows a long-term trend. There has been also a long-term warming trend in the Eastern Mediterranean, adding to the drawdown of soil moisture. No natural cause is apparent for these trends, whereas the observed drying and warming are consistent with model studies of the response to increases in greenhouse gases. Furthermore, model studies show an increasingly drier and hotter future mean climate for the Eastern Mediterranean. Analyses of observations and model simulations indicate that a drought of the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought, which is implicated in the current conflict, has become more than twice as likely as a consequence of human interference in the climate system.

More from Romm, in lay terms:

We know that the Syrian civil war that helped drive the rise of the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) was itself spawned in large part by what one expert called perhaps “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent,” from 2006 to 2010.

That drought destroyed the livelihood of 800,000 people according to the U.N. and sent vastly more into poverty. The poor and displaced fled to cities, “where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011,” as the study’s news release explains.

The March 2015 study, “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought,” found that global warming made Syria’s 2006 to 2010 drought two to three times more likely. “While we’re not saying the drought caused the war,” lead author Dr. Colin Kelley explained. “We are saying that it certainly contributed to other factors — agricultural collapse and mass migration among them — that caused the uprising.”

Here’s a timeline from Romm’s article:

So the journey, from dot to dot, starts here — climate change in Syria
and the “greater fertile crescent” helps produce “political unrest” and the movement of refugees and “internally displaced persons” (IDPs).

Mass Migration — African and Asians Fleeing to Europe

It’s not just Syria and Iraq, though those crises are currently foremost. There is political, social and climatological crisis all throughout Africa, the Middle East and south Asia. From a Huffington Post report on the “immigrant crisis” in Europe:

In the last few years, fleeing from conflict has become the main cause of migration to Europe, says Brulc: “We have had the conflict in Syria going for years now, the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq is still not secure: people feel under threat. Then we have the situation in Eritrea.”

What is happening in Calais is just one manifestation of these Middle Eastern and African crises, says Andrej Mahecic, a spokesperson for UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. 59.5 million people are currently displaced around the world, a phenomenon he describes as “global displacement unprecedented since the World War II era.”

Migrants at Calais are no longer likely to be seeing a ‘better life’, in the UK, he says, but to be escaping violence and abuse.

“In the years before, it could have been characterised mostly as a migratory movement driven by other reasons, such as ambitions to improve somebody’s life, and get opportunities. But clearly [migrants are coming from] the countries where there is a situation of conflict, where the push is incredibly strong. This is not a crisis driven by smugglers, it is driven by these massive push factors in the Middle East and Africa.”

Of the 100,000 refugees who have arrived in Greece this year, 61% are Syrian and 21% are Afghans, Mahecic says. “These two nationalities make up 82% of all arrivals, which speaks of the changed nature of the movement.”

The map at the top shows what that migration looks like. There’s another map, produced by Europol, here:

Europol explains:

The influx of migrants via the Mediterranean Sea has been exponentially rising, with 220 000 migrants crossing in 2014. Apart from putting intense immigration pressure on countries such as Greece and Italy, before the migrants arrive they have often taken very risky journeys across the Mediterranean to get there.

Intelligence shows that organised criminal groups are actively facilitating the transport of these irregular migrants across the Mediterranean, and these groups have also been linked to human trafficking, drugs, firearms and terrorism. The migrants are exploited by the criminal groups who give them false promises and set them out to sea on vessels that jeopardise their lives. More than 3000 people drowned in the Mediterranean en route to Europe in 2014 and there have been 1000 deaths in 2015 alone. This problem features high on the agenda of Europol, the European Commission and concerned EU Member States, who recognise that a more balanced strategy is required to combat this irregular migration as well as the refocusing of law enforcement resources to disrupt the organised crime groups involved. Shifts in volumes using different routes demonstrate how organised criminal groups are very apt at responding to law enforcement initiatives.

The intelligence-led, European response to this problem is the establishment of the Joint Operational Team (JOT) Mare, which launches today. Hosted at Europol headquarters in The Hague, JOT Mare will tackle the organised criminal groups who are facilitating the journeys of migrants by ship across the Mediterranean Sea to the EU.

First, note that this is a strategy to “combat this irregular migration,” already defined in defensive terms. Also, don’t let the “organised criminal groups” aspect distract you. These groups are just exploiting the crisis; they’re a “free market solution,” if you will, to a market need. And of course, an increase in crime is always a consequence of social chaos as well as a cause of it (American cities, take note).

So dots one and two, social chaos and mass migration. Now for the third dot — the climate component of that migration is only getting worse.

Climate-Induced Chaos Won’t go Away Until We Make It Go Away

This is just the beginning, this mass migration. There’s a climate component, as we’ve seen, and — until and unless we’re completely off of carbon as an energy source — that component is going to get stronger. The Washington Post:

July was the hottest month in Earth’s hottest year on record so far

NOAA, NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) have published data that show that it was the hottest July on record. Since July is on average the planet’s hottest month, temperatures this past month likely* reached their highest point in the history of instrumental records. NOAA calculates that July’s average global temperature of 61.86 degrees was 0.14 degrees warmer than the previous warmest month on record, July 1988.

NASA’s map of July temperatures shows the planet lit up in orange and red, signifying vast areas covered by above-normal warmth.

“The average temperature for Africa was the second highest for July on record, behind only 2002, with regional record warmth across much of eastern Africa into central areas of the continent. Record warmth was also observed across much of northern South America, parts of southern Europe and central Asia, and the far western United States,” NOAA reports. …

* For a technical discussion of why July was likely the hottest month in recorded history, see this post by blogger Tamino: “Hottest Month“

That has global implications, not just European ones. For example, in California:

California can blame about a fifth of the state’s record drought on climate change, scientists say.

Underground water supplies have been evaporating faster than they would have without the higher temperatures caused by greenhouse-gas emissions, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

And in Bangladesh, among many other places:

The sixth annual release of Maplecroft’s Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas reveals that 31% of global economic output will be based in countries facing ‘high’ or ‘extreme risks’ from the impacts of climate change by the year 2025 – a 50% increase on current levels and more than double since the company began researching the issue in 2008.

According to the Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI), which forms a central part of the Atlas, this includes 67 countries whose estimated combined output of $44 trillion will come under increasing threat from the physical impacts of more frequent and extreme climate-related events, such as severe storms, flooding or drought.

The economic impacts of climate change will be most keenly felt by Bangladesh (1st and most at risk), Guinea-Bissau (2nd), Sierra Leone (3rd), Haiti (4th), South Sudan (5th), Nigeria (6th), DR Congo (7th), Cambodia (8th), Philippines (9th) and Ethiopia (10th), which make up the 10 most at risk countries out of the 193 rated by the CCVI. However, other important growth markets at risk include: India (20th), Pakistan (24th) and Viet Nam (26th) in the ‘extreme risk’ category, in addition to Indonesia (38th), Thailand (45th), Kenya (56th) and, most significantly, China (61st), all classified at ‘high risk.’

Again, that’s “31% of global economic output,” so the crisis will spread from manufacturing and producing countries to consuming countries. There’s a region-by-region map and table at the source.

Mass Migrations and Political Collapse

Which brings me to my last dot — this is not the first time Europe has endured mass migration of peoples. Look at the map in the middle of this piece (here it is again; click to open in a new tab). Then look at the map below:

The ancient migrations accelerated after the Roman loss at Adrianople in 376 CE, but they occurred throughout the specified 400-year period.

Thus ended the long civilization of antiquity, the more than 1500-year-old civilization of the Greek and Roman world, stretching from Homeric times to the symbolic deposition of Romulus Augustulus (ironic name) in 476 CE. Imagine that migration happening, not in 400 years, but compressed into 50. Now imagine it happening worldwide. I don’t think “collapse” is too strong a word for what happens if this plays out to the end.

Bottom Line — “Stop Now” Is the Only Solution

This is why we need to end the burning of carbon now, and not by using “free market solutions.” Why not the free market? Because “free market solutions” aren’t free (markets are always controlled), carbon-emissions “markets” aren’t markets (they’re government-enabled monopolies), and “free market solutions” to emissions aren’t solutions at all, just delays while our billionaires pad their already overstuffed nests.

This is what a real solution looks like.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Refugee crisis deepens
by Tom Sullivan

Terrible images from Europe this morning as the refugee crisis deepens:

The full horror of the human tragedy unfolding on the shores of Europe was brought home on Wednesday as images of the lifeless body of a young boy – one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos – encapsulated the extraordinary risks refugees are taking to reach the west.

The picture, taken on Wednesday morning, depicted the dark-haired toddler, wearing a bright-red T-shirt and shorts, washed up on a beach, lying face down in the surf not far from Turkey’s fashionable resort town of Bodrum.

They come to Europe from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia. The flood of refugee/immigrants has governments scrambling to cope and resentments building. On the rural border between Hungary and Serbia, refugees are numerous where outsiders were once considered exotic:

As Europe’s leaders argue over how to tackle its worst refugee crisis since the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s and perhaps since World War II, Bajtai and his neighbors find themselves on what he calls the continent’s new front line, where, he said, the fields and orchards they rely on are being ravaged by the hungry travelers.

The rail track running through Horgos has become the main path to the EU for refugees — more than 150,000 so far this year — taking the Balkan route from the Middle East to what they hope will be a safe and prosperous future in Europe.

On the edge of the fields that surround the village and along its entire 109-mile border with Serbia, Hungary has unfurled three layers of razor wire and intends to construct a 13-foot-high steel security fence in the coming months.

In Germany, neo-Nazis are suspected of burning hostels for refugees and distributing “No Asylum Shelter in My Neighborhood” pamphlets, even as thoughtful Germans attempt to come to grips with the crisis:

Just how great the challenge is doesn’t become clear until one speaks directly with the refugees and the helpers. I learned that we have talked too long only in technical and administrative terms about coping with the flood of refugees. And yet much more is at issue here; it is what defines our society, what defines Europe, namely the concept of freedom, justice and solidarity. Or, simply put, human brotherhood.

The people coming to us are seeking freedom and security. They are hoping for a better society in which justice and solidarity are real. For all of what we in Germany have agreed upon with our European neighbors, after many wars and battles, to be the foundation of living together. Given our relatively high degree of prosperity, we Germans, in particular, occasionally tend to take peace and security for granted. The refugees remind us of the treasure we possess. We should learn to share it.

Here we are in America, safely buffered by an ocean (for now), and hanging on Donald Trump’s every insult and pronouncement about deporting millions like them, only dimly aware of the humanitarian crisis our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan unleashed on Europe. Even as George W. Bush paints bad pictures and Dick Cheney tries to rehabilitate the image he can’t see reflected in a mirror. And for comic relief, former CIA director, General David Petraeus, one of the architects of that disaster proposes throwing more gasoline on the fire we set. To fight ISIS, he proposes “arming members of the al-Nusra Front in Syria, an offshoot of al-Qaida and a designated terrorist organization.” Trevor Tim writes in the Guardian:

History could not matter less to war planners, as the dangerous cycle of arming dangerous factions in the Middle East and escalating US involvement is about to start anew. The CIA armed the Mujahideen in the 1980s in their guerilla fight against the Soviets, many members of the Mujahideen would end up forming the core of al-Qaida in the 1990s.

Isis, which was originated inside squalid US prison camps from George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and which also has billions of dollars in US weapons and armored vehicles thanks to a series of embarrassing mistakes and battlefield routes of all the foreign militaries we arm, eventually turned on al-Qaida. So now an ex-CIA director is suggesting that we also arm a part of al-Qaida directly, since they are now the enemy of our (larger) enemy.

I’m reminded of an old Three Stooges short in which
Curly attempts to fix a bathroom leak by threading on more pipe.

Meanwhile, ISIS is funding itself by looting antiquities and blowing up archaeological sites to cover its tracks, according to one account.

And hundreds of refugees remain stuck in a Bupapest train station, resisting attempts to relocate them to migrant camps. Trains to western Europe have been suspended.

Not our problem, right?

International Trumpism

by digby

This analysis of the Trump phenomenon by Thomas Edsall in the NY Times very deftly synthesizes all the polling and other studies that explain just what in the hell is going on with this.  Basically a bunch of white people are getting very nervous now that their majority and the privileges that come with it is slipping away. They believe that everything’s going to hell in a handbasket (although that’s not really true) and it’s all because of the “others” who are taking over.

Edsall’s piece thoroughly and accurately surveys these attitudes and the hay the Republican Party has been making of them for the past 50 years but doesn’t really delve into whether or not it’s actually true that these people are losing something they had to immigrants and other people of color or whether it’s just a perception. And he also doesn’t ponder whether some of these people might be afraid that this imminent change in our racial and cultural make-up might result in a little “pay-back” for centuries of white mistreatment of people of color, which I doubt it at the forefront of these people’s minds but is undoubtedly in the sub-conscious of many of them.

But what he does say in his dry, analytical way is chilling:

The current prominence of an anti-immigrant wing of the Republican Party is part of an international phenomenon. The Trump campaign represents the American iteration of hostility to third world immigration now visible across Europe, where overwhelmingly white right-wing parties are flourishing from Greece to Britain. European opposition to immigration, and the strength of this opposition on the political right, was demonstrated in a Pew Research Center study of voters in seven countries — Italy, France, Britain, Spain, Poland, Greece and Germany – that showed that voters on the right were 18 points more likely than voters on the left to agree that “immigrants are a burden because they take jobs and social benefits.”

Donald Trump, in other words, is part of a movement gaining momentum among whites across the Northern Hemisphere. The Trump campaign will serve as a measure of the strength of this movement in the United States.

Trump’s vitriol expresses the degree to which the American debate over immigration has grown ugly, even hideous. At the same time, Trump’s followers are motivated, and enraged, by what they see as a breakdown of law and order and the erosion of norms and standards they believe should be upheld. They are frustrated by the poor performance of the public schools their children attend, by cities and suburbs they believe to be under siege, by a criminal justice system they perceive as dysfunctional, and by a government they view as incompetent.

Earlier this week Trump added a new campaign commercial. It begins: “JEB BUSH’S THOUGHTS ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS” and displays a film clip of Bush saying “Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love.” Interspersed are three mug shots: “Francisco Sanchez: Charged with Murder,” “Santana Gaona: Convicted of Murder,” and “Brian Omar Hyde: Charged with Murdering Three People.”

“LOVE?” the next screen reads. “Forget Love. It’s Time to Get Tough!”

To voters who see the world this way, Trump offers the promise that he can restore a vanished America, that he can “make America great again,” as his campaign puts it. Trump clearly finds this endeavor personally gratifying, even as his odds of winning the nomination remain slim. To his followers, the letdown of defeat could be brutal, leaving them stranded, without a candidate who can successfully capture the intensity of their beliefs.

Good lord.

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Idiocracy, the reality show

by digby

Sigh:

They think Donald Trump’s ideas are “disgusting.” They think he is making a mockery of the American political system and that even he doesn’t take his own candidacy seriously. And that is exactly why they say they plan to vote for him.

Meet Trump’s protest voters.

People who in the past might have gone to the polls only to register their disdain for politicians by writing in “Mickey Mouse” — or perhaps even “Donald Trump” — now have a Republican front-runner to rally around.

Like many sincere Trump supporters, they believe the system is totally screwed up. But instead of viewing Trump as the solution, they view him as the embodiment of the problem. And they say they’re prepared to vote for him to prove it.

“This is the candidate America deserves,” said Jeff DeFlavio, 29, a small-business owner registered as an independent in the nearby town of Lebanon. He said he plans to vote for Trump in the primary, but adds, “His immigration policy is disgusting to me. It’s absolutely revolting … I really don’t want him to become president ever. Ever. He would destroy the world, which is what’s so wonderful about him.”

DeFlavio said he has enjoyed watching Trump exploit a presidential-selection process that rewards celebrity more than substance. “There is this kind of wonderful irony in it, which I feel myself wanting to partake in,” he said.
[…]
And not just in New Hampshire. “I don’t think there necessarily is a best candidate for president,” said David Portnoy, an independent and the Boston-based founder of the popular sports blog Barstool Sports. He endorsed Trump in a post last week in which he wrote, “I don’t care if he’s a joke. I don’t care if he’s racist. I don’t care if he’s sexist. I don’t care about any of it.”

“I think politics is kind of a joke in this country. I don’t think it matters who will get elected president,” said Portnoy, who described Trump’s candidacy as “a real-life political mock-umentary.”

“Everything Trump says I don’t agree with, like building a wall around the country, but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he said. “But I don’t think anything anybody else says is going to happen, and I’d rather have the guy who brings entertainment value.”

Portnoy said he has heard from readers across New England who feel the same way.

I’d be tempted to dismiss this as a small, irrelevant group of immature pranksters and nihilists except for one thing. Remember this guy?

The only time I ever stood in line to vote in my precinct was the day he won the election for Governor. And many of the people in the line were laughing and having a great time that day talking about how it was great joke to vote for The Terminator.

And:

On election day, 61% of registered voters cast ballots. The figure surpassed turnout in every nonpresidential statewide election since 1982 and was 10 points higher than in the 2002 gubernatorial contest… Using data from the statewide voter file, we find that the recall brought younger, less partisan, and less politically experienced voters to the polls.

Just saying ..

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Iowa made men

by digby

Ed Kilgore says Iowans don’t really care about the corruption of their process:

Remember that bizarre scene in Season 3 of The Sopranos, where a psychopathic hood who murdered his pregnant girlfriend in the parking lot of Tony’s gangster retreat the “Bada Bing!” strip joint, comes hat in hand to Tony to apologize? He apologizes not for the murder, but for “disrespecting the Bing.”

That’s what Iowa commentary on Sam Clovis’ high-profile defection from the Perry to the Trump campaign last week reminded me of.

In the Iowa Daily Democrat, veteran political reporter Mike Glover made it clear in the lede that what concerned him about Clovis’ action is that it might make outsiders doubt the pristine integrity of the Iowa Caucuses. He even uses the word “pristine:”

There’s yet another episode which could dent the pristine nature of Iowa’s precinct caucuses and could be used by critics to launch a new assault on Iowa’s treasured leadoff status in the presidential primary season.

“States around the country do not like the position of Iowa and they give a lot of reasons,” said Drake University political science professor Dennis Goldford. “This would be just one more issue.”

Priorities, people. It’s vitally important that lily white Iowa be the first state to (sort of) vote for president because well, there’s a lot of money and prestige at stake. The corruption of the whole thing is fine, but nobody gets away with disrespecting the bling.

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He’s not just a jerk, he’s a liar as well. #notTrump

by digby

During an August 4 meet and greet in Manchester, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was filmed telling Granite State voters that “breathing” contributed to climate change. This weekend when a NextGen Climate volunteer asked Christie whether he stood by those comments, Christie called the statement “ridiculous,” denied ever making the comments, and then touted his record of supporting solar energy in New Jersey.

he didn’t just tout his record, he touted “public-private” investment in solar energy.

And here I thought those were all supposed to be boondoggles …

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Trump cheats at golf. Stop the presses.

by digby

Oy Vey. He cheats but he’s a lot of fun so it’s all good. Whatever. I can’t think of anything I care about less than anybody’s golf game. But following up on my piece below, check this out:

Trump has shown that his candidacy is immune to the types of attacks that can bring down normal Republican candidates. He’s on record mocking a war hero and praising Nancy Pelosi, he’s advocated for higher taxes, donated to Democrats and called for single-payer health care. None of that has mattered. But does his golf history provide opponents with the opening they need?

They have totally accepted the fact that calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, proposing to deport millions of people (including American children), talking about women like dirt, starting trade wars and real wars isn’t something that would bring down “normal” Republican candidates. That’s just par for the course these days. Praising nancy Pelosi, however, would “normally” bring down any candidate.

Can we see how weird this is getting?

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Villagers reassure us that the Republican Party isn’t extreme

by digby

One of the scary aspects of the Trump candidacy is the fact that he’s moving the goalposts so far to the right that the beltway media, in their unending quest to portray the Republican Party as Real Americans who represent the great middle of the country, is redefining GOP “moderate” to mean people who don’t think we should start a mass deportation program:

Newly released numbers from the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll reveal not only the very clear differences between Iowans who back Donald Trump and those who support any of the other 16 GOP presidential candidates, but also how the real estate mogul’s call for a hard-line immigration policy has resonated with a certain sector of the electorate.

Asked whether rounding up the 11 million people in the country illegally and deporting them is a good or a bad idea, almost three in four Trump backers said it was a good idea. By contrast, just four in 10 Republicans who are supporting another candidate said the same.

See? Only 40% of Republicans who don’t back Trump think we should be deporting millions of people! Huzzah! Sanity reigns!

Here’s some more moderation from the PPP poll this week:

Republicans who say they’re with the real-estate kingpin and former reality show star were also substantially more supportive of changing the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all American-born children regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

About half of GOP voters told the survey they would support amending the Constitution to bar the children of undocumented immigrants from claiming “birthright” citizenship.

Only half of Republicans think the nation is threatened by babies born in America being citizens. It’s all good.

It’s just Trump, the crazy kooky guy whose entertaining everybody. It’s not serious. No need to worry that the party itself is becoming a far-right extremist political faction. Nothing to see here.

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