Month: December 2015

He’s so vain

by digby

This description of Trump by Mark Bowden in Vanity Fair says it all:

Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?

The adolescent attitude, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated and consistently wrong characteristics are pretty widely shared by his voters. The wealth, ostentation and vanity are the things they admire about him: he’s a winner.

Republicans love this guy because he’s saying what they’re thinking.

As I’ve watched his improbable political rise, it is clear that he hasn’t changed. The very things that made him so unappealing apparently now translate into wide popular support. Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.

And they love him for it. He’s up to 41% in today’s Monmouth national poll. His closest rival is Ted Cruz at 13%.

"@ajodom60: @FoxNews and as far as that low-info voter base goes, I have an IQ of 132. So much for that theory. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain"— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2015

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I wonder if Trump thinks this fellow should have been profiled

by digby

Probably not. He was just protecting himself from “radical Islamic terrorists” I’m sure:

Authorities seized an arsenal of illegal guns, grenades and bomb-making materials from a southeastern Sioux Falls apartment Thursday, days after a bullet pierced a neighbor’s wall.

Officers executed a search warrant at 4901 E. 54th St. as part of an investigation into how a .22-caliber slug wound up inside a next door neighbor’s mattress.

Darren Kyle Zafft, 29, and Jennifer Marie Cash, 35, were arrested and charged with multiple counts of possession of controlled weapons and explosives with criminal intent.

Police found 114 guns, including more than a dozen illegally modified rifles and shotguns. They found two handmade silencers, multiple grenades, about 10,000 rounds of ammunition and $20,000 cash. The bomb squad also removed gunpowder, fuses, and other equipment for making explosive devices.

“This could have been a very dangerous situation,” police spokesman Sam Clemens said.

County prosecutor Aaron McGowan called Zafft a threat to law enforcement, citing a photo of a burning police car on Zafft’s Facebook page. Zafft’s bond was set at $1 million, cash only.

McGowan said Zafft is believed to be primarily responsible for the explosives and firearms in the home. Cash’s bond was set at $5,000, cash only. Both made their initial court appearance Friday afternoon and were being held in Minnehaha County Jail.

The investigation began Sunday with a call from a resident of the apartment building who noticed a hole in his wall and later found a slug in a mattress. The property manager told detectives they had been in the adjoining unit recently and noticed several guns, Clemens said. A search warrant was issued Thursday.

“We don’t have an answer to why they had them,” Clemens said. “Whether or not we’ll ever find out what his intent or purpose of having it, we may never know. I don’t think we’ve had any indication that there was any type of plans to use these devices, but at this point we just don’t know.”

The family said they are all gun “collectors” which is the word we use for white people with a huge arsenal.

Family members were at the apartment Friday morning. A man who identified himself as Zafft’s uncle but would not give his name expressed frustration about the charges.

“They aren’t going after criminals; they’re going after guns. I blame Obama for this,” the man said.

I don’t know if they can prove the bullet that came through the wall and lodged in the mattress came from one of these scary gun nuts’ firearms. But if it did, they should be prosecuted. It’s really frightening to think that you can be accidentally killed in your bed by your neighbor’s gun going off.

It happens all the time:

Family and friends of 28-year-old Jonathan Gardner are grieving.

They are wondering how the accidental shooting even happened just before 1 p.m. Sunday at the Wexford Lakes apartment complex off Burnham Drive in West Columbus.

At least one neighbor now says he’s scared for the safety of his family.

“I go outside and I’m looking around and I’m like, what’s going on?” said Zach Simpkins, who lives in the same apartment building where the shooting happened.

“Well, a woman comes up to me and says, my boyfriend’s been shot,” he continued.

Simpkins lives with his fiance, who’s expecting.

“Really, it was a shock kind of thing,” he said. “And I’m like ma’am, are you OK?”

Simpkins says the woman told him she was not hurt, but her boyfriend, Jonathan Gardner, had been shot.

Police say a man in a nearby apartment had accidentally fired a handgun.

The detective told 10TV the shot went through a wall, right into Gardner’s apartment, striking him in the chest.

Garnder was rushed to the hospital, where he later died.

“Honestly, after it happened, it scared the crap out of us, and we honestly went online and looked for other apartments, because we didn’t want our kid being brought up where guns would be going off,” Simpkins said.

If we only had a brain
by Tom Sullivan

At Foreign Policy, Stephan Walt considers what America might be doing if we were really serious about addressing terrorism. For some reason, he doesn’t think we are.

Jumping around here.

I’m positive organizations like Fox News and CNN do not intend to help al Qaeda or the Islamic State, but that is in fact precisely what they are doing.

[snip]

One of the best ways to discredit extremist movements is to make them look ridiculous, so that joining or backing them is seen as stupid, uncool, or embarrassing. Instead of constantly portraying the Islamic State and its ilk as cruel, cunning, fanatical, dedicated, dangerous, etc., we should spend at least as much time depicting them as ignorant, backward, inept, misguided, and absurd.

Neutralize the fear? What a concept. Walt offers a couple of examples. Apparently this is how it is done in Middle Eastern countries.

Walt also thinks we should have a serious discussion of how U.S. foreign policy contributes to the problem:

Even now, there is a widespread tendency to believe extremist violence comes out of nowhere or that it occurs because some unfortunate individuals are frustrated by their inability to find meaningful lives and thus vulnerable to fantasies of various sorts. To be sure, people alienated from the societies in which they dwell are sometimes drawn to acts of mass violence, but that fact hardly means U.S. foreign policy is irrelevant. As I pointed out back in 2009, the United States is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims over the past three decades, a sum vastly greater than the number of Americans killed by Muslims. It would be remarkable indeed if our actions had not led a small fraction of their co-religionists to want to retaliate in some way.

To say this does not justify the slaughter of innocents or suggest even remotely that what groups like the Islamic State are doing is justified. Nor does this imply that U.S. policy is solely responsible for this problem. Rather, my point is that any serious effort to address this problem has to begin by understanding its origins. If we ignore any of the key underlying causes, we are likely to keep doing things that nurture and sustain the very behavior we are trying to prevent.

Learning from the past is not allowed. Walt quotes here Ernst May of the 9/11 Commission:

“[T]he report skirts the question of whether American policies and actions fed the anger that manifested itself on September 11…. [it] is weak in laying out evidence for the alternative argument that the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol might not have been targeted absent America’s identification with Israel, support for regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, and insensitivity to Muslims’ feelings about their holy places. The commissioners believed that American foreign policy was too controversial to be discussed except in recommendations written in the future tense. Here we compromised our commitment to set forth the full story.”

We don’t do nuance. We never do nuance. Nuance is for losers. If Trump hasn’t said it yet, give him time.

Does Ted Cruz have a sense of humor?

by digby

Maybe. Or, at least, someone on his staff does:

In honor of my friend @realDonaldTrump and good-hearted #Maniacs everywhere:  https://t.co/KOPIi4XTVt

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 13, 2015

*In case you’re wondering, Trump called him a maniac this morning.

I’ll bet you didn’t know this, which makes the song a perfect choice:

Now it may strike you as odd that the lead single from a movie about a dancer should be called “Maniac” and not “Dancer” or something like that. That’s because songwriters Dennis Matkosky and Michael Sembello originally wrote the song about an actual maniac — as in, a person who murders other people for terifyingly little reason.

You see, Matkosky and Sembello had been hired to pen songs for Flashdance, but sat down to watch television instead, because it’s hard to write dance music when you just aren’t in the mood. Matkosky happened to catch a news report about a guy who had killed a bunch of people and buried them in his yard, and was suddenly struck with a lightning bolt of divine inspiration. He quickly whipped up some lyrics that would eventually become “Maniac,” although this early draft was noticeably different:

Flashdance Version:

She’s a maniac, maniac on the floor
And she’s dancing like she’s never danced before

Original Version:

He’s a maniac, maniac, he just moved next door
He’ll kill your cat and nail it to the floor

He showed his work to Sembello, and the two wrote the entire song right there as a goof, virtually identical to the version we all know, except of course for the lyrics about haunting madness and gleeful animal cruelty. Even the music was written with a crazy person in mind, with Sembello and Matkosky crafting the bridge to sound like “how an insane person would play ‘Chopsticks.'”

Unfortunately for all of us, they never recorded this version of the song, as record company honcho Phil Ramone declared he liked the song but wanted them to change the lyrics to be more Flashdancey so it could be used in the movie. So they rewrote the lyrics, because jokes are fine but money is money.

If you think Trump just cannot win the nomination …

by digby

Think again. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but check this out:

So, on the surface it looks like Americans in general haven’t completely lost their minds. But look at the GOP. Only 36% of them reject this proposal on its face.

Only a little over a third of one of the major parties in the United States automatically understands that banning people who observe one of the three major world religions from coming into the country is a daft proposal. What makes people think that the two thirds who like it or “don’t know” won’t vote for Trump?

This is, by the way, not unusual in today’s GOP. They’ve shown their true stripes for some time:

Sixty-three percent of Republican voters would support deporting the population of 11 million undocumented immigrants, according to a new CNN/ORC poll taken in the days following Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s controversial remarks about Mexican immigrants being drug dealers and rapists.

Look at these numbers on the combination of deportation and opposition to Syrian refugees which until Trump put it on the menu was mostly confined to the fetid corners of the right wing fever swamp:

Nearly half of GOP-leaning respondents in the poll — 47 percent — both support the deportation of undocumented immigrants and oppose accepting refugees from Syria and other Mideast conflicts. If a GOP-leaning voter supports deportation, there is a 79 percent chance she or he also opposes Syrian refugees, compared with 54 percent if they oppose deportation.

For nihilistic wingnuts who think democracy is a sham and America is supposed to dominated by white men, Trump is their “hope and change” candidate. Don’t underestimate his ability to get them out to vote. I don’t know how many of them there are but it seems to me that it’s foolish to assume he can’t win the GOP nomination. Why not?

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The new litmus test

by digby

For decades all Supreme Court justices appointed by Republicans had to be committed to reversing Roe vs Wade. Now, they often say they’re just “calling balls and strikes” but everyone knows that this is a bottom line requirement. Indeed, it’s very hard to get a more liberal justice confirmed if he or she has a record of supporting abortion rights although it’s possible as long as some Senate Old Bulls are still around who stand up for the idea that a president has a right to nominate someone of their own philosophy. I’m going to take a wild guess that this is yet another of those old “traditions” we have probably seen the last of at least as it applied to a Democrat. If the Democratic president doesn’t have a Senate majority I think it’s going to be very hard for him or her to get anyone confirmed.

But now there are going to be some new litmus tests I’m sure. One will be the reversal of Obamacare, at least for a while. They just have to say it even if it makes no sense. But this one could be more lasting:

CHUCK TODD: Are you going to work to overturn the same sex marriage?

MARCO RUBIO: I disagree with it on constitutional grounds. As I have said–

CHUCK TODD: But are you going to work to overturn this?

MARCO RUBIO: I think it’s bad law. And for the following reason. If you want to change the definition of marriage, then you need to go to state legislatures and get them to change it. Because states have always defined marriage. And that’s why some people get married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator. And in Florida, you have to wait a couple days when you get your permit. Every state has different marriage laws. But I do not believe that the court system was the right way to do it because I don’t believe–

CHUCK TODD: But it’s done now. Are you going to work to overturn it?

MARCO RUBIO: You can’t work to overturn it. What you–

CHUCK TODD: Sure. You can do a constitutional amendment.

MARCO RUBIO: As I’ve said, that would be conceding that the current Constitution is somehow wrong and needs to be fixed. I don’t think the current Constitution gives the federal government the power to regulate marriage. That belongs at the state and local level. And that’s why if you want to change the definition of marriage, which is what this argument is about.

It’s not about discrimination. It is about the definition of a very specific, traditional, and age-old institution. If you want to change it, you have a right to petition your state legislature and your elected representatives to do it. What is wrong is that the Supreme Court has found this hidden constitutional right that 200 years of jurisprudence had not discovered and basically overturn the will of voters in Florida where over 60% passed a constitutional amendment that defined marriage in the state constitution as the union of one man and one woman.

CHUCK TODD: So are you accepting the idea of same sex marriage in perpetuity?

MARCO RUBIO: It is the current law. I don’t believe any case law is settled law. Any future Supreme Court can change it.

And ultimately, I will appoint Supreme Court justices that will interpret the Constitution as originally constructed.

Now it’s true that support for marriage equality continues to grow in popularity and it’s always possible that a large majority of Republicans will come around and this will cease to be an applause line. I certainly hope so. But the history of Roe suggests that the religious right can keep the fires burning on culture war issues for a very long time if they choose. I certainly don’t think those of us who care about equality under the law should let down out guard.

Also, Marco Rubio is a smarmy little creep.

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QOTD: from the “Ya Think?” files

by digby

Ted Koppell:

The irony is they think they’re being tough on ISIS. And Trump thinks he is being tough on ISIS. Senator Rubio in his interview with you touched on it very, very lightly. Donald Trump is in effect the recruiter-in-chief for ISIS. ISIS wants nothing more right now than to have the world divided into Judeo-Christian on one side, and the Islamic world on the other. That’s exactly what Trump is doing for them. I think it’s time we started thinking about what ISIS wants and then not doing it.

The fact that Rubio touched on this blindingly obvious fact which everyone over the age of 12 can see is simple common sense “very, very lightly” tells you everything you need to know about him and anyone else in the GOP who is too chicken to admit reality.

Donald Trump was interviewed by Jake Tappen on State of the Union this morning. He railed against “certain people” also known as “Muslims” over and over again, saying that we have to keep them out of the country until we “solve the problem”. But he insisted that this would only be temporary until we can “figure out what the hell is going on”. When Tapper pressed him on what that meant he said we need to find out “why all the hatred? Why do they hate us so much?”

Seriously.

I’m going to guess that this symbolizes everything they loathe:

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A radicalizer by any other name …

by digby

Watch Carly Fiorina get very upset when a reporter asks her if she might feel some responsibility for rhetoric that inspired a radical anti-abortion activist to shoot up a Planned Parenthood clinic:

There’s a lot of talk this cycle, for obvious reasons, about whether certain candidates have the right temperament to be president. I think we can put Fiorina in the “no” column.

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Sunday funnies

by digby

Ok, not funny. But good:

Every time there’s a mass shooting the gun nuts shriek that people need even more guns and gun sales soar. Every. Time.

What a sweet racket.

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And so it begins

by digby

Guess who said this?

That’s right. It’s Trumpie.

It’s on:

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump had a new target on Sunday, calling fellow White House contender Ted Cruz a “a little bit of a maniac” as the U.S. senator surpassed him in an Iowa presidential poll.

Cruz’s dogged pursuit of conservative Iowa voters has paid off in the form of a 10-point lead over Trump in the state with one of the earliest presidential contests.

Unlike the other Republicans in the 2016 White House race, the U.S. senator from Texas has embraced Trump and avoided public criticism of the popular candidate.

But last week he questioned Trump’s judgment at a private fundraiser, according to the New York Times, after the billionaire businessman advocated temporarily banning Muslims from entering the United States.

That got Trump’s attention.

“I don’t think he is qualified to be president,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday”.

“I don’t think he has the right temperament. I don’t think he’s got the right judgment. When you look at the way he has dealt with the Senate, where he goes in there like a, you know, frankly, like a little bit of a maniac – You are never going to get things done that way.”

Trump touted his ability to get along with liberals and conservatives and said that was the hallmark of the “world-class businessman” he is.

The incendiary front-runner, whose comments on Muslims drew widespread criticism but may not dent his lead in several national public opinion polls, made a sarcastic reference to Cruz’s respectful treatment of him.

“He’s been so nice to me. I mean I could be saying anything and he’d say, I agree I agree.” Trump said on CNN’s “State of the Union”.

On the Fox program, he also criticized Cruz for talking about him behind his back.

Cruz rose to a 31 percent lead over Trump’s 21 percent in an Iowa poll released on Saturday by the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg News, a 21-point jump from October.