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Month: December 2015

A picture of the divide

A picture of the divide

by digby

After Roseburg:

After San Bernardino:

President Barack Obama’s visit to San Bernardino was inspiring – and healing, say some of the families of the people killed in the Dec. 2 San Bernardino mass shooting who met with the commander in chief.

Obama also met with the first responders who were on the scene of the attack.

“It was uplifting and we were inspired by the president just by his words,” said Robert Velasco, of Fontana, the father of 27-year-old shooting victim Yvette Velasco, a retired California Highway Patrol lieutenant. “He had words of comfort and reassurance.”

During the trip to Indian Springs High School, the president spent between five and 10 minutes with each family. The meetings lasted more than three hours.

Following the meeting, the president spoke briefly with reporters in a classroom.

The families of the victims “could not have been more inspiring,” he said, “and more insistent that something good come of this tragedy.”

Amy Wetzel, the former wife of Michael Wetzel and mother of his three oldest children,was impressed with the individual attention the president and the first lady gave to each of her kids: Andrew, 14; Kailee, 12; and Caden, 8.

“The kids love it. The kids were very excited,” Wetzel said. “And at the very end, we were able to do a photo opportunity (with the president and his wife).”

The presidential couple gave each of the children an oval coin with an image of the White House and the president’s signature.

“They were very accommodating and very kind,” Wetzel said. “They talked to the kids and told them they were very sorry for their loss.”

Each child had his or her own conversation.

“Kailee and the first lady were talking about their finger nail polish,” Wetzel said.

Karen Fagan, the ex-wife of San Bernardino shooting victim Harry “Hal” Bowman, 46, and mother of his two daughters, said the family is exhausted, but “in short – a wonderful experience. President and Mrs. Obama were very kind and sincerely interested in talking with us.”

The president reassured the families that authorities were working to prevent any such attack from happening again.

“He let everyone know the nation is mourning with us and they’re working so it won’t happen again,” said Ryan Reyes, the boyfriend of victim Daniel Kaufman.

“It was very nice and very special and it was an honor, despite the circumstances,” said Reyes, who was with Mark Sandefur, the uncle who raised Kaufman with his wife, Julie.

Velasco, of Fontana, said the president met with him and 11 other members of his family; family members told Obama they didn’t want loss of his daughter’s life to be in vain.

“He reassured us it would not be vain,” Velasco said. “The whole country is behind us, and he will do all he can to make sure this never happens again.”

James Godoy said he spoke with the president about gun control.

“He said its unfortunate that we’ve had to do this type of thing every three months lately,” and that improvements to gun control were in the works, Godoy said.

When they reached his group, Michelle Obama sat with James’ 23-month-old son and his niece. She put a coloring book in her lap and she colored with them while the president talked with the adults.

What impressed him most was the help the president offered to the families.

“He gave us a card and said to call if we need anything,” James Godoy said.

The meeting was a nice experience for him, but it did little to heal his wounds, Godoy said.

“Obviously, there was more closure with the funeral. But you’d never say no to meeting the president,” he said.

In fairness, the LA Times did report that there were some protesters on the route in San Bernardino:

A man in an American flag shirt hoisted his left fist in the air and held a sign reading “Defund ISIS,” and a woman had a sign that read, “No refugees in U.S.A.”

Of course, the Oregon shooting was not done by an American Muslim, just an American gun nut. That’s what really makes the difference.

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There’s more to life than politics

*This post will remain at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down for new material.


There’s more to life than politics

by digby

I write several posts seven days a week, usually about politics and current events. But I also have some wonderful writers contributing to this site for whom I am extremely grateful. Every week-end for the past nine years, Hullabaloo has featured a film review called Saturday Night at the Movies by Dennis Hartley, a comedian, radio personality and writer who lives in Seattle Washington. I have been friends with Dennis since we both went to high school in Fairbanks Alaska and wrote for the school paper and he remains the funniest person I have ever met in real life and that includes a lot of professional comedians whose paths I crossed in the entertainment business.

He has an encyclopedic knowledge of film — and a movie collection — that would make most libraries envious. His taste is eclectic, both mainstream and esoteric, with interests in everything from obscure documentaries to Japanese anime to James Bond and early black and white classics. If you are looking for a specific kind of movie to watch on Netflix there’s a good chance Dennis will have reviewed something that will fit the bill. (Conveniently, Dennis has put up a beautiful new searchable website with all of his reviews and some musings about life and politics called DenOfCinema. Be sure to check it out.)

When I asked him to write a film review column for Saturday nights way back when I couldn’t have imagined that we’d still be doing it after all these years. But here we are and I’m still thrilled to host his reviews once a week here at Hullabaloo.

Politics and government are important. Keeping up with current events is essential. You cannot be a good citizen if you don’t do it.  I like to think that what we do here helps people sort thought it all. But there is more to life. That’s why I regularly put up videos and stories about animals. (Believe me I don’t get any extra traffic for it so it’s not click-bait.) I put it up so that I, and maybe others, can have a little break, something get us our of our heads for a moment and touch our humanity and our hearts. And that’s why I asked Dennis to come on board all those years ago and share his special knowledge of film and music and he’s come through with flying colors. Every Saturday night you’ll find a film review or a best-of list or a revisit of a classic and it’s always informative, insightful and often very funny.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Somewhere beyond the sea by @BloggersRUs

Somewhere beyond the sea
by Tom Sullivan

Somewhere beyond the sea
Somewhere waiting for me
My lover stands on golden sands
And watches the ships that go sailin’

– from “Beyond the Sea” by Bobby Darin

The Chinese continue their efforts to colonize the South China Sea. Dump sand and concrete atop reefs and atolls in and around the Spratly Islands and — voila! — the 12 miles around their man-made islands magically become sovereign Chinese territory. (Or do they?) Smack dab in the middle of sea lanes that according to reports carry “more than $5 trillion of world trade ships every year, a fifth of it heading to and from U.S. ports.”

All of it effectively out of view of the eyes of the world, by the way.

In late October, the United States dispatched the USS Lassen to conduct a “freedom of navigation” cruise in the area to assert that the waters around the new islands are international waters. Foreign Policy reports:

Initially, officials insisted the Lassen carried out a freedom of navigation operation, which could mean the vessel operated sonar, had its helicopters take off from the deck, or lingered in the area. But other officials said they could not confirm it was a freedom of navigation mission and that the ship may have refrained from any helicopter flights or intelligence gathering — and instead simply sailed through without loitering or circumnavigating the area.

Further adding to the confusion, the P-8 surveillance plane accompanying the Lassen appears to have stayed outside the 12-mile range of the man-made island, a boundary that delimits territorial seas and airspace.

The administration’s mixed messaging has played out publicly in recent days on both sides of the Pacific. U.S. officials told Defense News over the weekend that the Lassen had merely made an “innocent passage” close to the artificial island at Subi Reef — a phrase with a specific meaning under maritime law that applies to sailing through other countries’ territorial waters. On Monday, officials repeated the same claim to U.S. Naval Institute News, saying the ship and an accompanying surveillance plane took steps that would signal acquiescence to Beijing’s claims.

Sen. John McCain wants the Pentagon to clarify “the legal intent behind this operation and any future operations of a similar nature.” He wants the U.S. to send an unambiguous message.

Just days ago, BBC reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes chartered a Cessna 206 out of the Philippine to have close-up look at China’s new outposts. Five people and cameras crammed into a single-engine plane. Here is some of what happened:

Soon, in the distance, a huge yellow crescent appeared below us, the unmistakable shape of Mischief Reef (Meiji in Chinese). The pilots descended to 5,000ft. At 12 nautical miles the warnings began again.

“Foreign military aircraft in north-west of Meiji Reef, this is the Chinese Navy, you are threatening the security of our station!”

Calmly our captain responded: “Chinese Navy, this is Philippine civilian aircraft en route to Palawan, carrying civilian passengers. We are not a military aircraft, we are a civilian single-engine aircraft.”
It made no difference.

“Foreign military aircraft in north of Meiji Reef, this is the Chinese Navy!”

On and on the warnings continued.

But this time our pilots held their nerve. At 12 miles we skirted the north of the huge new island.
Below us we could see the lagoon teeming with ships, large and small. On the new land, cement plants and the foundations of new buildings.

Then, as we rounded a cloud, we got the first clear view of the new runway China is building here, just 140 nautical miles from the Philippine coast. I did a quick calculation. A Chinese fighter jet taking off from here could be over the Philippine coast in as little as eight or nine minutes.

Oddly, as the Cessna completed its run, another voice came over the radio, this time from a military aircraft. Just not China’s:

“China navy, China navy,” the voice said.

“We are an Australian aircraft exercising international freedom of navigation rights in international airspace in accordance with the international civil aviation convention and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea — over.”

The BBC said it recorded the audio from a RAAF AP-3C Orion aircraft on Nov. 25. It said the message was repeated several times but no response was heard from the Chinese.

Various sections of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea are at the heart of this controversy. Not only territorial boundary matters, but environmental ones as well (UNCLOS articles 192 and 123). From a June 2015 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

This island construction has so far created over eight million square metres of real estate in the open sea, outstripping other countries’ reclamation activities by far, and shows no sign of abating. Hundreds of millions of tons of sand and coral have been dredged from the seabed and dumped atop fragile coral reefs that are vital components of the maritime ecology. Marine experts expect that the work has already caused disastrous and essentially irreversible environmental impacts.

The newly created and enlarged islands will be infrastructure that facilitates China’s projection of force and assertion of control not just in the disputed Spratlys area but also over most of the South China Sea, deep into the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) that by any reasonable interpretation of international laws on maritime delimitation would rightfully belong to other countries. Although conflicting claims have existed over the islands and these EEZs for decades, a precarious balance has endured until now partly because China’s nearest military infrastructure is hundreds of miles further to the north. Defence planners in other claimant countries now have to face a future without this protection by distance.

Another concern is whether China will to use the newly created or enlarged islands to attempt to make new maritime claims. First, China might well claim a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea, or some sort of vague “military alert zone”, around each of Mischief Reef and Subi Reef, which would infringe on the international community’s the freedom of navigation and overflight that currently exists these areas. Second, China might assert territorial seas around other newly created or enlarged islands that are close to islands being garrisoned by other countries, which would bring it into direct conflicts with the other claimants. Third, the creation and enlarging of the islands may embolden China in its claim for EEZ for the entire Spratly archipelago, exacerbating the maritime disputes in the region.

By the UNCLOS treaty, artificial structures are entitled only to “safety zones” that “shall not exceed a distance of 500 metres around them.” That is how it is supposed to work, anyway. China seems to be challenging that regime. U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Scott Swift warned this week of a possible arms race in the South China Sea:

“My concern is that after many decades of peace and prosperity, we may be seeing the leading edge of a return of “might makes it right” to the region,” Swift said on Monday in a speech in Hawaii, according to a copy seen by Reuters.

“Claimants and non-claimants alike are transferring larger shares of national wealth to develop more capable naval forces beyond what is needed merely for self defense,” Swift said.

It is the sort of thing that in the 20th century sometimes led to unpleasantness, I wrote back in June. And again at the end of October. Access to commodities and trade routes have provoked wars for centuries. Yet having staked out its claim in what it claims as its historic territory, the Middle Kingdom can be patient. As with commercial and political interests elsewhere, the game in the South China Sea is to step over accepted boundaries and dare anyone to push back. While we fix our gaze on ISIS, the GOP clown show, and the Bernie vs. Hillary contest, somewhere beyond the sea the future is waiting.

Happy Hollandaise everyone. If you care to donate to the holiday fundraiser you can use the buttons provided below or send a donation via the snail mail address in the left sidebar.

And to all those who have signed up for subscriptions or who donate at various time throughout the year, I appreciate this support from the bottom of my heart.

Fasten your seatbelts folks

Fasten your seatbelts folks

by digby

One of the more enjoyable aspects of being a political blogger is the relationship one develops with readers over time. Having done this for 13 years now, I can say that some people I have met online have become among my closest friends and colleagues. Blogging is a unique form of writing. It’s an intimate, informal conversation that develops  into a community with its own language, tics and habits.

That’s what we’ve got here at Hullabaloo. Year after year, readers come by to sample our wares and share, these days, on Facebook and twitter. It’s thrilling to me that what I started all those years ago is still going strong with people reading every day  and supporting my writing voluntarily with donations and subscriptions. I do run ads, obviously, but unfortunately they don’t pay much. The collapse of ad revenue is one of the big internet stories of the year. So your support is more important than ever and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.

If you care to donate or subscribe, you can send a donation via the snail mail address in the left sidebar or use the buttons provided there and at the bottom of this post.

One of the most fun times I have ever had as a political writer was the 2012 GOP primary campaign. Who can forget Michele Bachmann pouring water for the boys as if she were a servant at the Last Supper or Herman Cain and his 9-9-9 plan? I never dreamed that anything could beat that. I clearly don’t have enough of an imagination. This one is a doozy.

I’ve been chronicling it every day, seven days a week here at Hullabaloo and at Salon and it’s a story to beat all stories for a political junkie like me. I realize there are those who don’t really care about this and would prefer to talk about issues and substance and I do try to mix it up. Certainly in a few months this will all be over and we won’t have most of these people to kick around anymore.

But right now, it’s a fascinating story and an important one. The right wing has officially taken over one of America’s two major political parties. And it’s terrifying.

I read and watch political media obsessively and follow these stories in great detail. Every day I try to analyze the political zeitgeist for you as best I can. My regular contributors Tom, Gaius and Dennis do the same.

And I can tell you that you’d better fasten your seatbelts. 2016 is going to be a wild ride.

I hope you’ll stop by regularly and check out our perspective. And if you feel that it has value for you I hope you’ll drop a buck or two in the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Because you need this

Because you need this

by digby

As regular readers know, on Friday nights after a long week of depressing politics I often post an animal video in a series I call “because you need this.”

It’s been a very long week and I think we all need this:

Happy Hollandaise everyone and doggie kisses all around!

If you care to donate to the holiday fundraiser, you can use the buttons provided below or send a donation via the snail mail address in the left sidebar.

And to all those who have signed up for subscriptions or who donate at various time throughout the year, I appreciate this support from the bottom of my heart.


More bad sourcing at the NY Times

More bad sourcing at the NY Times

by digby

What should the New York Times do when it’s clear that their sources are feeding them mis-information on stories of great national importance? You’d think they would have figured this out after the Judith Miller WMD stories of the past decade. But apparently they haven’t. There have been two recent stories from anonymous  sources in the Justice department which have turned out to be dramatically wrong but have nonetheless had huge impact on the political debate and the understanding of a major national story.

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times ombudsman addressed the problem in her column today:

Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others.

What I’ll lay out here was a bad one. It involved a failure of sufficient skepticism at every level of the reporting and editing process — especially since the story in question relied on anonymous government sources, as too many Times articles do.

Here’s the background: A Times article Sunday reported that the U.S. government had missed something that was right out there in the open: the jihadist social-media posts by one of the San Bernardino killers. Its initial paragraphs read as follows:

Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration officials as she moved to the United States from Pakistan. None uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad.

She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.

It was certainly damning – and it was wrong. On Wednesday, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, referred to such reporting as “a garble.” And, as it turns out from his statements and from further reporting, Ms. Malik had not posted “openly” on social media. She had written emails; she had written private messages on a social-media app, not visible to the public; and she had written on a dating site.

In other words, the story’s clear implication that those who vetted Ms. Malik’s visa had missed the boat – a clearly visible ocean liner – was based on a false premise.

[…]

I have two major and rather simple questions: How did this happen? And how can The Times guard against its happening again? (As many readers have noted, some very critically, two of the authors of this article, Matt Apuzzo and Michael S. Schmidt, also wrote the flawed story in July that reported that Hillary Clinton would be the target of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department because of her email practices while secretary of state. Reporting by the third reporter on the current article, Julia Preston, who covers immigration, was restricted to the visa-vetting process.)

I talked on Friday to the executive editor, Dean Baquet; to one of his chief deputies, Matt Purdy; and to the Washington editor, Bill Hamilton, who edited the article. All described what happened as deeply troubling. Mr. Baquet said that some new procedures need to be put in place, especially for dealing with anonymous sources, and he said he would begin working on that immediately.

“This was a really big mistake,” Mr. Baquet said, “and more than anything since I’ve become editor it does make me think we need to do something about how we handle anonymous sources.”

He added: “This was a system failure that we have to fix.” However, Mr. Baquet said it would not be realistic or advisable to ban anonymous sources entirely from The Times.

How did this specific mistake happen?

“Our sources misunderstood how social media works and we didn’t push hard enough,” said Mr. Baquet, who read the article before publication. He said those sources apparently did not know the difference between public and private messages on social-media platforms.

I asked him why reporters or editors had not insisted on seeing or reading the social media posts in question, or even having them read aloud to them; he told me he thought that this would have been unrealistic under the circumstances, but that without that kind of direct knowledge, more caution was required.

Mr. Purdy said “we need to have a red flag” on such stories. He said he believed The Times has an “overreliance” on anonymous sources. Mr. Hamilton sees another lesson, too. “When we don’t know the details, as we didn’t here, there’s probably a reason for that,” he said. He added: “We didn’t see the dangers.”

All the editors said that slowing down, despite the highly competitive nature of a hot news story, is a necessary measure.

Mr. Baquet staunchly defended Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Apuzzo (who, he noted, won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting at The Associated Press on the New York police’s surveillance of Muslims), calling them “really fine reporters who have broken a lot of great stories” in recent months. Mr. Hamilton agreed, and noted that Mr. Apuzzo and Mr. Schmidt cover two of the most sensitive beats in Washington — national security and law enforcement, respectively, including the F.B.I.

Mr. Baquet rejected the idea that the sources had a political agenda that caused them to plant falsehoods. “There’s no reason to think that’s the case,” he said.

There’s more to it but that last part is just absurd. There is every reason to think that law enforcement sources who consistently leak erroneous information that is politically harmful to one party might have a political agenda. It’s certainly happened before.

I don’t know that the sources for these two stories written by the same people are the same sources. Maybe these two reporters just have a number of lousy sources.  But I would be skeptical after this. Very skeptical.

Happy Hollandaise everyone. If you care to donate to the holiday fundraiser you can use the buttons provided below or send a donation via the snail mail address in the left sidebar.

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How many people are on the crazy train anyway?

How many people are on the crazy train anyway?

by digby

PPP is out with a new national poll that should answer that question for you:

No matter how you look at it the “anti-establishment” track is well over 60% of the party.

At one time everyone assumed that once the large group of alleged “establishment” candidates was winnowed the person left standing would be able to muster a majority against the remaining loons (or loon). I don’t think that’s clear at all. It’s looking more and more like the loons have the majority any way you look at it.  If they don’t “winnow” then this brokered convention fantasy starts to look possible. If they do winnow, the loon left standing looks pretty good for the nomination.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

If you care to donate to the annual fundraiser , you can use the buttons provided below or send a donation via the snail mail address in the left sidebar.  And to all those who have signed up for subscriptions or who donate at various time throughout the year, I appreciate this support from the bottom of my heart.

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Rubio’s just not very good at this

Rubio’s just not very good at this 

by digby

As we head into the stretch before the first primary elections are held in just a few weeks, a lot of people have been wondering what’s going on with Marco Rubio’s campaign. He doesn’t seem to be spending his money wisely, there’s a lack of personal engagement with voters, and nobody can see what his strategy is if he fails to close the deal in the early states.

Reports have it that his plan is to go on Fox News, which is presumed to be all it will take to cut the voters’ current ties with Trump, Cruz and Carson and make them into Rubio fans. It’s not working all that well so far, but they seem to believe that ads like his latest will start to make some converts. In it, Rubio declares his solidarity with “the essence of America” which is apparently white people who are sick of being called bigots when they complain about people of color ruining everything. Putin and Iran are bad too. And there should be jobs! He ends it with one of the most awkward lines ever uttered by a candidate:

“I approve this message, because this is about the greatest country in the world and acting like it.”

Yes, it sounds just as weird in the ad as it scans in print.

Bottom line: Rubio is the establishment choice at the moment but he’s getting nowhere fast because he’s running a lethargic campaign that just isn’t very good. And it’s not getting any better. Apparently he’s decided that the best way to make people forget his immigration apostasy, when he joined with Democrats on the notorious Gang of 8 to hammer out a Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, is to draw as much attention to it as possible by picking a losing fight with Ted Cruz. He seems to think that aggressively accusing his rival of abandoning his conservative principles in the same way he did will somehow make his own betrayal go away. All it’s accomplished is to make every conservative in the land think even less of him than they did before.

Perhaps his strategists believed some moldy old tropes about how Karl Rove and the Bush gang always won elections by going after his opponent’s strengths rather than his weaknesses, but even aside from the fact that putting Rubio’s own weakness center stage was daft, attacking Ted Cruz for not being conservative enough simply doesn’t track. You can say a lot of things about him but it’s not believable that he was secretly in favor of “amnesty.”

What is believable is that Ted Cruz was doing exactly what he admits to doing: pulling a legislative maneuver to grandstand and posture, achieving nothing and getting no results. That is where his expertise lies.

The facts of this argument are not in dispute. Marco Rubio worked with Democrats and Republicans to come up with a comprehensive Immigration reform bill that included a path to citizenship. When it became obvious that the Republican majority in the House would never pass it, he backed away and eventually repudiated his own work. It is widely considered to be his greatest liability with the conservative base of the party, which considers immigration a litmus test issue.

During the debate on the Senate bill, Cruz had offered an amendment to the bill which stripped out a path to citizenship but included “legalization” for undocumented immigrants. Cruz claims his amendment was a poison pill designed to smoke out the Democrats and get them to vote against it, thereby exposing them and proving that they what they really cared about was “amnesty.” There is plenty of evidence for this, including testimony from the Senate’s chief anti-immigration tactician Senator Jeff Sessions, who backed Cruz’s version of events.

Yes, Cruz made lugubrious floor speeches about how the bill would allow immigrants to come “out of the shadows” but there was nobody who believed that Cruz actually meant it. After all, both Sessions and Senator Mike Lee voted for his amendment, and their hostility to immigrants is indisputable. Sahil Kapur at Bloomberg reported that Sessions’ spokesman explained it this way:

“Numerous conservatives offered amendments to the progressive Gang of Eight bill that were designed to improve enforcement or combat amnesty.That does not mean these Senators supported the bill with those changes. That would be an extremely untenable interpretation.”

It was clearly legislative kabuki. It wasn’t particularly successful, but then Cruz’s tactics rarely are. Indeed, this one seems to have been too clever by half, since it has caused him to have to try to explain to people who don’t follow congressional gamesmanship (and Fox News anchors) that he really didn’t mean what he said he meant.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that Cruz is true blue when it comes to opposing “amnesty.” And Rubio is not. The big question is why these people are so adamant about opposing a path to citizenship in the first place. Sure, many of their voters are xenophobes and nativists and would give them hell for allowing all these “foreigners” to continue to destroy our way of life. But there is something much more cynical at play. It is an article of faith among conservatives that any path to citizenship will result in millions of new Democratic voters. Ted Cruz is no exception.

Now it is true that Cruz has criticized Rubio for his work with the Gang of 8, although he’s hardly alone in that, and Rubio has been on the defensive. But the result of Rubio’s counter-attack is that he’s made himself look worse and Cruz look better at least to the conservative validators that will make the case to the voters on their various media outlets. Here’s a sample of how they are reacting:

Rush Limbaugh said the same thing:

“Marco Rubio was part of the Gang of Eight trying to secure amnesty and wishes he wasn’t. Ted Cruz never was and they’re trying to make it out like he was. At the end of the day when people go vote, people are gonna remember of the two it was Marco Rubio that was a member of the Gang of Eight and Ted Cruz that wasn’t.”

As hard as it is to believe, the fact that the fringy Cruz used the time-honored maneuvers of the Senate in a creative way in that episode may make him look more like a serious candidate in the eyes of average people than he was before. And Rubio, the establishment favorite allegedly endowed with gravitas and intelligence, is diminished by his attempt to make Cruz look bad for doing it. If he has learned one thing from this it should be that trying to make people think Ted Cruz isn’t a true conservative isn’t a very smart strategy.

Update: Uhm. Yeah

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QOTD: A Republican

QOTD: A Republican

by digby

That’s where we are folks.

How long until this happens?

It’s holiday fundraiser time! If you care to donate, you can use the buttons provided below or send a donation via the snail mail address in the left sidebar.

And to all those who have signed up for subscriptions or who donate at various time throughout the year, I appreciate this support from the bottom of my heart.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!