Month: October 2015

It’s getting hot in here

by digby

90 degrees here in Santa Monica today. Not unprecedented for this time of year, but rare —

But look what’s coming:

An El Niño that is among the strongest on record is gaining strength in the Pacific Ocean, and climate scientists say California is likely to face a wet winter.

“There’s no longer a possibility that El Niño wimps out at this point. It’s too big to fail,” said Bill Patzert, climatologist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

“And the winter over North America is definitely not going to be normal,” he said.

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Just three weeks ago, the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center raised the odds of California getting doused with a wetter-than-average winter. Southern California now has more than a 60% chance of a wet winter, a 33% chance of a normal winter and less than a 7% chance of a dry winter.

Not that we don’t need the rain. But:

Patzert issued a note of warning to Californians: Don’t think this El Niño spells the end of this state’s punishing four-year drought.

The last record El Niño that ended in 1998 was quickly followed by the arrival of El Niño’s dry sister, La Niña.

“Thinking ahead one year, could we be whiplashed from deluge back to drought again?” Patzert said. “Because remember, La Niña is the diva of drought.”

Patzert said that in the last 140 years in California, seven out of every 10 years are dry, so it would be foolish to declare an end to water conservation during this winter’s rains.

Sigh …

Let’s just hope we don’t get hit the way South Carolina got hit this past week. They’re still swimming through the streets down there.

There have always been extreme weather events. But it looks like we’d all better get used to having a whole lot more of them. Too bad half the people in the richest most powerful nation on earth are cretins or we might just be able to mitigate this. But hey, stuff happens, right?

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A wingnut email: Paul Ryan is Boehner-Lite

by digby

FWIW:

Conservatives: Don’t Get Suckered Into Backing A “Compromise” Speaker Who Is Boehner-Lite

The sudden implosion of the supposedly inevitable ascension of establishment Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to the office of Speaker of the House, now occupied by his mentor John Boehner, has shown the Capitol Hill Republican establishment to be a fragile edifice ready to collapse.

Conservatives should not be suckered into propping it up any longer by abandoning their battle to elect principled conservatives to run the House of Representatives.

But that is exactly what is going on in Washington right now as those establishment politicians who stand to lose out if new leadership is elected and cleans house scramble desperately to hang on to their corner offices and their power to divide up the spoils the welfare state extorts from producers.

A number of names have been floated as potential “compromise” Speakers: Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the candidate most often touted by the Washington political class as the ideal “compromise” Speaker, but Representatives Lyn Westmoreland, Mike Conaway, Jeff Miller, Tom Cole, Pete Sessions and Tom Price are also in the mix, according to our Capitol Hill sources.

Conservatives who fold and back a “compromise” Speaker will own the results of that Speaker’s policies and find that they are boxed-in and unable to effectively oppose a new anti-conservative leader they helped elect.

And this is particularly true of Paul Ryan, whom many conservatives once thought of as a rising conservative star, because of his image as being a pro-life family man and his “reform conservative” style budget ideas, but who has in reality abandoned conservative principles to push amnesty for illegal aliens, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, breaking the budget caps and many other anti-conservative policies.

As we explained in our article “Paul Ryan: Now the Ugly Face of the GOP Establishment,” the Paul Ryan of today is anything but a principled limited government constitutional conservative.

How Paul Ryan went from budget-balancing conservative wunderkind, to GOP vice presidential nominee, to channeling Nancy Pelosi when he snarled, “It’s declassified and made public once it’s agreed to,” as he tried to sell Obama’s Trade Promotion Authority and Trans-Pacific Partnership treaties to skeptical conservatives during a Rules Committee meeting is one of Washington’s saddest tales of how DC’s inside elite capture talent and bend it to their will.

As Ryan became more visible, first as Ranking Member and then as Chairman of the Budget Committee he became part of a group who styled themselves the “young guns” of the House Republican Conference.

Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan were visualized as a new generation of Republican leader who would challenge the older establishment-types.

Yet, after the 2010 Tea Party wave election that returned Republicans to the majority in the House, and vaulted Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy to leadership position in that new majority, what the conservative voters who turned-out to make that majority possible was a series of lies about the budget and spending, “me-too” Republicanism and not even a scaling back of the Democratic agenda.

Republicans, who had had promised $100 billion in real cuts during the campaign, compromised with the Democrats for $38.5 billion in future savings and claimed the deal would result in “the biggest annual spending cut in history,” as President Obama termed it.

Yet, as then-Senator Jim DeMint later noted, there was no actual reduction in spending. Here’s what really happened when the fiscal year ended on September 30, 2011: the Congressional Budget Office found that the April deal to avoid a government shutdown resulted in an increase of more than $170 billion in federal spending from 2010 to 2011.

Hailed by leaders of both political parties (and the establishment media) as a historic compromise that produced the “largest spending cut in history,” the deal negotiated by Paul Ryan ended up being a spending increase.

No one on the outside seemed to notice the lie upon which the spending deal was founded, because everyone on the inside, and especially Paul Ryan, knew there would be no decrease in spending. And the historic “budget cuts” would actually result in the federal government spending $3.6 trillion — a 4.2 percent increase in outlays that also ballooned the annual deficit to $1.298 trillion.

Yet Paul Ryan’s star continued to rise and when Mitt Romney chose him as his running mate in 2012 many conservatives embraced the Ryan choice as an opportunity to place one of their own in line for the presidency and in the near term have a key spokesman for the conservative agenda in the inner circle of the decidedly non-conservative Romney campaign.

What conservatives got from vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan was pretty much the same as they got from Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan – someone who out of the camera’s eye told them he was a “young gun,” but who failed to move the Romney campaign to the right, or to even get it to embrace his own ideas, while he readily went along and got along with Romney’s listless content-free establishment Republican ideas and campaign.

Why would conservatives “compromise” and hand the Speaker’s gavel to a younger, more aggressive, more articulate, more arrogant version of John Boehner?

It is the House Republican establishment who are blocking the will of the people, not conservatives, such as the House Freedom Caucus members, who are fighting to elect a transformational leader, like Daniel Webster of Florida, as Speaker.

Those conservatives who saw Paul Ryan and his fellow “young guns” as the vanguard of a new conservative House, or who think some “compromise” candidate for Speaker is a viable alternative to continuing the fight to elect a principled limited government constitutional conservative as Speaker, might profit from recalling the ending of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Just saying …

Onward Christian Soldier

by digby

“I was asked what would you do if you were there and they were holding a gun to your head and asking you about your Christianity and I told them what I would do…  Ben Carson on Andrea Mitchell this morning

He seems to be hung up on his belief that the shooter targeted Christians.  He always mentions it as if that has some special significance. The facts are that this guy was hostile to religion while also being a big fan of the IRA, which was the very definition of a religious revolutionary force, so I don’t think we can glean a whole lot from that other than that he was a mentally ill person with deadly weapons who had some very confused ideas. Also, he shot people who didn’t answer and people who said they weren’t Christian so I don’t think this was an attack on Christianity as much as Carson clearly wants to believe it was.

But think about this. Carson’s views on Islam are very clear. He believes that suicide bombers are coming over the border and we need to defend ourselves against from the “radical extremist Islamic terrorists” whom President Obama doesn’t intend to fight.

“When they get here,we need to be able to fight them, particularly if we have an administration that won’t fight them, we need to be able to fight them ourselves.”

He condemns them for their religious fanaticism and nihilistic dedication to their beliefs.But it’s clear to me that Carson believes that Christians should also be willing to die to defend their faith. For him this event was all about  “that question”:

Ben Carson was among those proudly declaring their faith after Thursday’s massacre at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

The Republican presidential hopeful posted a photo of himself on Facebook that showed him holding a sign that read ‘I Am A Christian’ and featured a drawing of an ichthys.
He shared the photo – which has been liked close to 800,000 times – following reports that gunman Chris Harper-Mercer asked his victims if they were Christian before shooting them dead.

‘Today, many of your questions were in regards to the sorrowful event that took so many precious lives in Oregon yesterday. We don’t have all the details yet, but as time passes more are coming out,’ wrote Carson on Facebook.

‘Millions of people are posting pictures of themselves declaring they are Christians in support of the victims and their families. I did so on Facebook this afternoon. If you have a moment, please consider doing it as well.’

Harper-Mercer said on multiple sites that he was not religious and against organized religion. 

The motives for his attack are still uncertain, as are the faiths of many of his victims, though it is known that they were not all Christian and included at least one Jewish man – teacher Lawrence Levine.

It was the father of one of the victims Anastasia Boylan – who survived the horrific attack but remains in the hospital – who revealed that Harper-Mercer had been asking individuals if they were Christian.

Another eyewitness, Kortney Moore, said that the gunman asked if they were religious before shooting, but did not mention anything specifically about Christianity.

Harper-Mercer had also voiced his contempt for the Black Lives Matter movement, complained about women and the fact that he was a virgin and applauded the actions of Vester Flanagan, the Virginia man who murder his former colleagues while they were on camera doing a news segment.

The facts don’t matter to Carson on any subject. And on this one, Carson is convinced this was a hate crime against Christian.  And he believes that one should die for one’s faith. Just like those Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers.

Here’s Carson at that NRA convention last spring. Yikes:

Note that he doesn’t seem to know that when the nation was founded there was no “military” and it wasn’t anticipated that there would be one, hence the first part of the Second Amendment that was evidently written in invisible ink to wingnuts: A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state… They really hate that “well-regulated part.”

Carson is one scary dude and he scares me more each day. I get trump — he’s a brash egomaniac clown who speaks for the bros and the yahoos. Carson is something else again. He’s a crazed right wing fanatic who sounds like a reasonable person. I suspect that’s far more dangerous.

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Authenticity over a beer

by digby

Michael Tomasky speak, you listen. He points out something that should make the beltway gasbags and kewl kidz think a little bit: all the politicians they code as authentic are nuttier than a Payday bar. Also too:

I can’t tell you the number of straight-news reporters who’ve said to me over the years something like: Yes, okay, Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham or whoever may be a little out there, but you know what? At least he really means it. What you see with him is what you get. To which I would rejoin, well, that’s fine, but so what; all that means to me is that when he starts World War III or resegregates our school system via his court appointments or gives the 1 percent another whopping-big tax cut, he’ll be doing so sincerely. But this (as I knew going in) was always a loser of an argument to an objective reporter, because they divorce themselves emotionally from the whole idea of outcomes.

And this is how political journalists end up assessing politicians with such a preponderant emphasis on their authenticity. They aren’t allowed to make subjective ideological judgments, so they make them on the basis of personality. It’s why they dwell excessively on matters like explaining to you which candidate you’d rather have a beer with. That was one great scam, by the way, back in 2000—persuading the American public that they’d all rather have a beer with the candidate (Dubya) who didn’t drink beer!

This is the important point:

… I don’t care whether any of them is authentic. I just care what they do. I’d much rather have a president who inauthentically raises the minimum wage and passes paid family leave than one who authentically eliminates the federal minimum wage and does what the Chamber of Commerce tells him to do on all such matters.

Agreed.  Moreover, we simply cannot know if these people are “authentic” anyway.  They probably don’t know if they’re “authentic.” We’re all acting in public in certain ways, and politicians do it more than most.  Politics is, by definition, an artificial act — nobody’s being “real”. What these Villagers think is authentic is really good acting.

Now people do use heuristics to assess these politicians and there’s no arguing with that. It’s a fundamental feature of human communication and it’s pretty sophisticated. But it’s also colored by others’ interpretations, which is where this “authentic” stuff has an effect. There are many ways to look at certain behaviors but when the press decides that it represents something specific about the person’s character, many people will go along. Life is short, most are too busy to go too far into the weeds.

Anyway, it’s a good piece as is this one by Elias Isquith at Salon which looks at this from a slightly different angle: politicians gonna politic.

Here’s a definition for you:

Politics: the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.

Everything about that is maneuvering, negotiating, positioning, posturing and persuading. Being “authentic” is about as important as having curly hair is to being successful at that.

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Kevin McCarthy, GOP extremism & the Village’s asinine false equivalence between left and right

by digby

I wrote about the crazy right and the media who just won’t believe what they’re seeing for Salon today:

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), the leader of the House Tea Party Caucus, asked McCarthy to publicly oppose efforts by establishment groups — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others — to run radio and TV ads criticizing conservatives who defied their own leaders.

Read on about Paul Ryan and their dream of him as a savior.

More evidence we’ve reached “peak water” in California

by Gaius Publius

It may be a see-saw course, but it’s riding an uphill train.

A bit ago I wrote, regarding climate and tipping points:

The concept of “tipping point” — a change beyond which there’s no turning back — comes up a lot in climate discussions. An obvious tipping point involves polar ice. If the earth keeps warming — both in the atmosphere and in the ocean — at some point a full and permanent melt of Arctic and Antarctic ice is inevitable. Permanent ice first started forming in the Antarctic about 35 million years ago, thanks to global cooling which crossed a tipping point for ice formation. That’s not very long ago. During the 200 million years before that, the earth was too warm for permanent ice to form, at least as far as we know.

We’re now going the other direction, rewarming the earth, and permanent ice is increasingly disappearing, as you’d expect. At some point, permanent ice will be gone. At some point before that, its loss will be inevitable. Like the passengers in the car above, its end may not have come — yet — but there’s no turning back….

I think the American Southwest is beyond a tipping point for available fresh water. I’ve written several times — for example, here — that California and the Southwest have passed “peak water,” that the most water available to the region is what’s available now. We can mitigate the severity of decline in supply (i.e., arrest the decline at a less-bad place by arresting its cause), and we can adapt to whatever consequences can’t be mitigated.

But we can no longer go back to plentiful fresh water from the Colorado River watershed. That day is gone, and in fact, I suspect most in the region know it, even though it’s not yet reflected in real estate prices.

Two of the three takeaways from the above paragraphs are these: “California and the Southwest have passed ‘peak water'” and “most in the region know it.” (The third takeaway from the above is discussed at the end of this piece.)

“For the first time in 120 years, winter average minimum temperature in the Sierra Nevada was above freezing”

My comment, that “most in the region know it,” is anecdotal. What you’re about to read below isn’t. Hunter Cutting, writing at Huffington Post, notes (my emphasis):

With Californians crossing their fingers in hopes of a super El Niño to help end the state’s historic drought, California’s water agency just delivered some startling news: for the first time in 120 years of record keeping, the winter average minimum temperature in the Sierra Nevada was above freezing. And across the state, the last 12 months were the warmest on record. This explains why the Sierra Nevada snow pack that provides nearly 30% of the state’s water stood at its lowest level in at least 500 years this last winter despite precipitation levels that, while low, still came in above recent record lows. The few winter storms of the past two years were warmer than average and tended to produce rain, not snow. And what snow fell melted away almost immediately.

Thresholds matter when it comes to climate change. A small increase in temperature can have a huge impact on natural systems and human infrastructure designed to cope with current weather patterns and extremes. Only a few inches of extra rain can top a levee protecting against flood. Only a degree of warming can be the difference between ice-up and navigable water, between snow pack and bare ground.

Climate change has intensified the California drought by fueling record-breaking temperatures that evaporate critically important snowpack, convert snowfall into rain, and dry out soils. This last winter in California was the warmest in 119 years of record keeping, smashing the prior record by an unprecedented margin. Weather records tend to be broken when a temporary trend driven by natural variability runs in the same direction as the long-term trend driven by climate change, in this case towards warmer temperatures. Drought in California has increased significantly over the past 100 years due to rising temperatures. A recent paleoclimate study found that the current drought stands out as the worst to hit the state in 1,200 years largely due the remarkable, record-high temperatures.

The rest of Cutting’s good piece deals with what the coming El Niño will do. Please read if that interests you.

There’s an easy way to think about this. Imagine the thermostat in your home freezer is broken and the temperature inside goes from 31 degrees to 33 degrees overnight, just above freezing, with no way to turn it down. Now imagine the Koch Bros (and “friends of carbon” Democrats) have emptied your town of repair people — every last one of them is gone. It’s over, right? Everything in the freezer is going to thaw. Then the inside is going to dry out. And everyone in your house who doesn’t already know this will figure it out. All because of a two-degree change in temperature that can’t be reversed.

When it comes to climate, two non-obvious rules apply:

• Change won’t be linear; there will be sudden bursts at tipping points.
   
• Pessimistic predictions are more likely to be right than optimistic ones.

Most people get this already, even if they haven’t internalized it. Which is why most people already know, or strongly suspect, that California and the American Southwest have already crossed a line from which there will be no return. This revelation, from the state’s water agency, just adds numbers. Time to act decisively? Do enough people think so?

Negative and Positive Takeaways

I said that two of the three takeaways about California, from the text I quoted at the beginning, were these: “California and the Southwest have passed ‘peak water'” and “most in the region know it.” The third is from the same sentence: “though it’s not yet reflected in real estate prices”  — meaning farm land as well as urban property.

It’s just a matter of time, though. Prices will fall as awareness hits, awareness that future prices can only fall. Note that prices in bear markets tend to be decidedly non-linear. And when that awareness does hit, when land is cheap, insurance expensive and the population in decline, nothing coming out of the mouths of the Kochs — or methane-promoting politicians in the Democratic Party — will change a single mind. (In terms of our playful freezer metaphor, you know the thing’s going to end up in the yard, right? It just hasn’t been carted out yet.)

But that’s just the negative takeaway. There’s a positive takeaway as well. It’s not over everywhere, not yet. From the same piece quoted at the top, referring to the tipping point of extreme weather:

This [incidence of extreme weather] is “a” tipping point, not “the” tipping point. We have slid into a “new normal” for weather, but please note:

• We’re talking only about the weather, not a host of other effects, like extreme sea level rise. I don’t think we’ve passed that tipping point yet.
   
• We can stop this process whenever we want to — or rather, we can force the “carbon bosses” and their minions in government to stop whenever we want to stop them. They have only the power we collectively allow them to have.

It really is up to us, and it really is not too late in any absolute sense. For my playfully named (but effective) “Easter Island solution,” see here. For a look at one sure way out, see here.

Will it take a decidedly non-linear, noticeably dramatic, event to create critical mass for a real solution? If so, we could use it soon, because the clock is ticking. It may be a see-saw course, but it’s riding an uphill train. (Again, the real solution, expressed metaphorically, is here. Expressed directly, it’s here. Everything less is a delaying tactic.)

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

GP

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Entitled to having their way
by Tom Sullivan

We haven’t heard that much about “entitlements” in the press lately. There’s been too much extremist lunacy to cover on Capitol Hill, on the campaign trail, in state capitols, and in Idaho, of course.

Speaking of Idaho, Mother Jones celebrates victory in court in a defamation lawsuit brought against the pulication by [“He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”], a billionaire Republican political donor from Idaho:

Litigation like this, Bergman said, is “being used to tame the press, to cause publishers and broadcasters to decide whether to stand up or stand down, to self-censor.”

You really should read the whole thing. It is a Byzantine tale with a touch of Spanish Inquisition. Like some other billionaires we know, “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” apparently feels entitled to be free from examination by the press and goes to some extreme lengths to punish transgressors. At least those who might be easily subjugated by the prospect of a mountain of legal fees.

It reminds one of the tantrums thrown on Wall Street after the financial meltdown, of the “pathological” environment and “sense of impunity” the rich feel, and of thin-skinned, short-fingered vulgarians who never forget a slight even after a quarter of a century. Do the peasants still not realize they must kowtow before their long suffering betters?

It is an awfully entitled viewpoint from royalists who grouse about everyone else’s entitlements.

Stumpy Trumpie

by digby

This is just so perfect. It’s from Graydon Carter editor of Vanity Fair:

Like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer. He thinks nothing of saying the most hurtful thing about someone else, but when he hears a whisper that runs counter to his own vainglorious self-image, he coils like a caged ferret. Just to drive him a little bit crazy, I took to referring to him as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the pages of Spy magazine. That was more than a quarter of a century ago. To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby. The most recent offering arrived earlier this year, before his decision to go after the Republican presidential nomination. Like the other packages, this one included a circled hand and the words, also written in gold Sharpie: “See, not so short!” I sent the picture back by return mail with a note attached, saying, “Actually, quite short.” Which I can only assume gave him fits.

Who would have imagined that Trump is literally overcompensating for a stubby appendage?

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Religious liberty for me …

by digby

… but not for thee:

The latest anti-Muslim event is scheduled for this Friday and Saturday and promises to feature protesters, many of them reportedly likely to be armed, outside 20-plus mosques in various states across the country. These anti-Muslim rallies are part of what right-wing organizers have dubbed a “Global Rally for Humanity” to encourage “fellow patriots” to unite in protest against the presence of Muslims in America.

Jon Ritzheimer, the guy who led the armed protest outside a Phoenix mosque in May, is apparently one of the leaders of these events. For those who have luckily forgotten about Ritzheimer, he had gone into hiding after the May protest, but not before reportedly creating a GoFundMe campaign hoping to raise $10 million off his anti-Muslim antics. However, after he failed to raise any money, Ritzheimer channeled his inner Anthony Weiner, claiming that he was victim of hackers, although media reports were very skeptical of this claim.

Anti-Muslim bullshit has truly been off the charts lately. In the last few weeks alone we have seen Ben Carson declare that Islam is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution. Also, we saw Donald Trump refuse to challenge a person at his event who announced, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims.”

A 14-year-old Muslim student, Ahmed Mohamed, was arrested a few weeks ago for bringing a homemade clock to school. And we have seen a spike in attacks on mosques, the latest being hateful graffiti sprayed on the walls of a mosque in Louisville, Kentucky.

Despite these incidents, just last Friday Bill Maher declared on his HBO show that the concept of Islamophobia was “silly.”

It may just end up being another fringey failure. They keep trying these things and they don’t get a lot of traction. Still, you never know. With the kind of rhetoric coming from Republican presidential candidates and gun nuts hanging on their every word …

This made me sad:

I must say that you really get a sense of the ignorance of the organizers when you realize that one of the mosques targeted, Masjid Muhammad in Washington, D.C., is headed by Talib Shareef, a man who is a retired chief master sergeant who served 30 years in the United States Air Force. I wonder if Shareef ever thought he would be called to defend his own freedom of religion on U.S. soil.

A lot of these people would say it isn’t his soil.

Rewriting Village history

by digby

MSNBC’s Luke Russert went on the 700 Club the day after David Brat defeated Eric Cantor and told Pat Robertson:

It was a shocking upset last night in Eric Cantor’s home district. And while a lot of people are making this out to be a sort of Tea Party vs establishment and there is an element of that but I look at South Carolina with Lindsay Graham facing a lot of Tea Party challengers and he was able to beat them back, Mitch McConnell was able to do that a few weeks ago and now you see there’s a runoff in Mississippi between Chris McDaniel and Thad Cochran, McDaniel the tea party backed candidate. I think in Cantor’s district specifically it’s the age-old thing which often happens — a politician goes to Washington, they become big, they have a national profile, they go around the world, they’re always on television. Some people feel that they begin to lose touch with the voters in their district. Eric Cantor is a fascinating example. He’s somebody that out-spent his opponent 15 to 1, he spent $168,000 on steak dinners for his campaign. His opponent spent 200,000 for his entire campaign. So when you look at this you see he lose 56-44 there is a lot of folks who were disenchanted with Eric Cantor, the power of incumbency.

In fairness, Russert wasn’t alone in this. The aftermath of the Cantor defeat had all the Villagers blandly waving away any suggestion that this was due to right wing craziness instead insisting that Cantor just wasn’t filling the proverbial potholes, “all politics is local” blah, blah blah.

Today Russert said this in the wake of McCarthy withdrawing his candidacy for Speaker:

I honestly think this all goes back to when David Brat beat Eric Cantor last year in 2014. Anything is possible now with House Republicans. Anything is possible in the Republican party. There’s a fight for the soul of the party. It’s happening today on Capitol Hill, it’s going to happen next year out there in those primaries and no one knows who’s going to emerge from this but I’ll tell you one thing, we’re seeing right now the chaos that’s happening between these two divergent schools of thought, the establishment and the conservatives. It is playing out in full force and it is very ugly for Republicans who like to keep this stuff behind closed doors. They hate this playing out, this is not the way they like to do things, Kate.

I don’t know who “they” are — the wingnuts are having the time of their lives.

What Russert just discovered today has been true for a very long time. And yet the Villagers all seem to discover it every few months after which they rush to discount what they’ve learned and go back to the assumption that the “grown-ups” are in charge.

They aren’t in charge and haven’t been for a couple of decades. Look at the record: endless partisan witch hunts, impeachment, stolen election, war with Iraq, defense of torture,more partisan witch hunts, immigration lunacy, Ben Carson and Donald fucking Trump. And that’s just for starters.

It’s not as if this is any surprise. They just keep doubling down. At some point the political media is going to have to wrap their minds around this.

Unfortunately, it isn’t happening today. Just as this chaos was reigning on Capitol Hill this morning, Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell were explaining that Hillary Clinton’s opposition to the TPP is a sign that the Democrats are just as in thrall to the “far left” as the Republicans are to the far right and that both parties are equally off the rails with their extreme policies and cutthroat politics. Why, Bernie Sanders is a socialist who refuses to become a Democrat and the liberals are all making Clinton “bow to the extreme.”

So, if anyone thinks they are in any way wised up to the reality of American politics, think again. It’s the same old, same old.