Month: December 2015

Looks like they didn’t read the autopsy

by digby

Just as a reminder, here’s a passage from the RNC’s 2012 “autopsy” on immigration:

The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position
has become. America is changing demographically, and unless Republicans are able to grow our appeal the way GOP governors have done, the changes tilt the playing field even more in the Democratic direction.

In 1980, exit polls tell us that the electorate was 88 percent white. In 2012, it was 72 percent white. Hispanics made up 7 percent of the electorate in 2000, 8 percent in 2004, 9 percent in 2008 and 10 percent in 2012. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the country while Hispanics will grow to 29 percent and Asians to 9 percent.

If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them and show
our sincerity. President George W. Bush used to say, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande and a hungry mother is going to try to feed her child.” When Hispanics heard that, they knew he cared and were willing to listen to his policies on education, jobs, spending, etc. Because his first sentence struck a chord, Hispanic Americans were willing to listen to his second sentence. We heard this from other demographic groups as well. President Bush got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, a modern-day record for a Republican presidential candidate.

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

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

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

Younger voters are increasingly put off by the GOP. A post-election survey of voters ages 18-29
in the battleground states of Virginia, Ohio, Florida, and Colorado found that Republicans have
an almost 1:2 favorable/unfavorable rating. Democrats have an almost 2:1 favorable rating.

For the GOP to appeal to younger voters, we do not have to agree on every issue, but we do need
to make sure young people do not see the Party as totally intolerant of alternative points of view. Already, there is a generational difference within the conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays — and for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be.

How’s that working out for them?

American Bridge is releasing a year-end report called “The Year Trump Took Over” and the Part I talks about what they’ve done on immigration. Let’s just say they’ve decided to go in a different direction:

He may not have won “Person of the Year,” but as far as the Republican Party is concerned,
Donald Trump is the center of the universe. The Summer of Trump turned to autumn, then
winter, and he’s continued to thrive through pundit-predicted fall, after fall, after fall — becausethe GOP base loves him and everything he stands for.

To commemorate the year Trump took over — his dominance and uncanny ability to influence
the rhetoric and policy positions of the rest of the GOP field — American Bridge is closing out
2015 with a five-day countdown of the extreme, far-right policies that Donald Trump has
reinforced and left as his legacy.

Donald Trump was late to the party when he called Mexicans “rapists.” Trump’s campaign kickoff
might have crystallized the GOP’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, but he’s definitely not the first one
to espouse far-right conservative policies against immigrants.

If anything, Trump was playing catch up in June to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to compete for
out-of-touch immigration stances. Jeb Bush even got in on the action by going after “anchor
babies,” which forced Trump to match Bush’s rhetoric.

But now that it’s December 2015, it’s the rest of the field trying to match Trump — and causing
further damage to the GOP in the process. Building the yugest, classiest wall with a giant door
and making the Mexican government pay for it is now the de facto position of the Republican
party.

No Republican candidate supports a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants now that
Lindsey Graham is out. Conservative Tea Partiers have such a stranglehold on the Republican
Party that Donald Trump has become their chief spokesperson on anti-immigration policy and
everything else.

Here’s where they stand on immigration:

• Ted Cruz opposes legal status for undocumented immigrants in addition to a path to
citizenship, might support self-deportation, definitely opposes DACA and the DREAM
Act, and supported Arizona’s “papers please” law.

• Marco Rubio opposes a path to citizenship, comprehensive immigration
reform, DACA, the DREAM Act, and supported Arizona’s “papers please” law.

• Jeb Bush opposes a path to citizenship, DACA, and spent a week in August denigrating
American citizens as “anchor babies” — kickstarting the conversation on ending birthright
citizenship.

• Ben Carson opposes a path to citizenship, supports ending birthright citizenship,
and would “be willing to listen” to ideas about deporting 11 million undocumented
immigrants.

• Chris Christie opposes a path to citizenship and DACA.

• John Kasich opposes a path to citizenship, DACA, sanctuary cities, and wants to build
the wall. When he thinks of Latinos, he thinks of reasons “why in the hotel you leave a
little tip.”

• Carly Fiorina opposes comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to
citizenship, which she calls “amnesty.

Yeah, they apparently called in their own experts: bigots and racists who know better how to win elections. There’s no going back on this by the way, not for a while. These commitment to their base are serious — and they won’t be forgotten by the rest of America any time soon.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

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Time to start working on Ted

by digby

For some reason I find myself on the email list of CNN contributor and GOPm strategist Alex Castellanos who sends out his thoughts on the current race from time to time. Anyway, I thought I’d share this one because I think it’s probably the next phase from the party establishment — the attack on Ted Cruz. And I think it’s incredibly lame. It assumes that the base who likes Trump and Cruz is loyal to the GOP “team”. They hate the team.

Anyway, here it is. (He doesn’t capitalize, I don’t know why.)

i once heard a politician described as “so slippery, he could slide under a closed door.”
with that in mind, please allow me to point you to a piece in politico about televangelism, narcissism and ted cruz.

it was written by a friend of mine, curt anderson. curt benefits from a wonderfully bright mind and is as solid a conservative as you can find.
over the years, i’ve learned a great deal about politics, and more important things from curt, too.
this morning, as you watch the sunday political shows noting cruz’s rise, it might be helpful to keep his piece in mind, especially where curt notes…

“Cruz has failed in every cause he has championed—and it is never his fault.”

“That is his senate career. Of course, all conservatives want these battles to be fought, even if we lose. But it’s not really the issue or the cause that Cruz is championing. No, he just wants to be the one leading the cause—and wants you to see him doing it. Cruz is a perpetual martyr.”

and that’s the sad truth about ted cruz.

being a good conservative does not mean you are a good leader or even a good man. we can look at the recent government funding deal to see cruz’s corrosive influence.

like many conservative radio talk show hosts, cruz is aflame w/ anger about speaker ryan’s government funding deal. cruz sets aside the inconvenient truth that “conservatives were aware the top-line funding levels had been set by the budget deal obama negotiated with boehner before ryan came on board.” 

as one republican, quoted in The Hill, admitted, “i think most freedom caucus members hated the omnibus product but acknowledge that speaker ryan could only do so much within the parameters that he had to work with.”

so who is to blame that the house passed a nearly two-trillion-dollar funding package that oozes slime and political favors?

who chose to travel down this road?

there are 247 republicans in the house, sworn in january 3rd, 2015. a simple majority is 218 of 435. republicans have 29 more votes than they need to pass anything they choose – if they can agree to do it. 

at some point, there is going to be a funding bill. every republican knows that some level of government will be funded.

the gop’s choice is this: will republicans get together, compromise amongst themselves and do that job? 

or will they refuse to work it out within the gop… and let the compromise occur between democrats and republicans, spawning another monstrous washington grotesquery like ryan’s inherited funding package?

ted cruz made his choice, as he always has. he selfishly inspires others to do the same.

he’s not against compromise. he just pushes it down the road.

ted cruz is the poster boy of the republican who won’t compromise within his party, and so hands funding power to nancy pelosi, harry reid and chuck schumer, to let them do his work for him.
and, unfortunately for the nation, they do.

why? as curt notes, cruz would rather be the martyred leader of a failed cause than a contributor to a successful team. he’s been an outsider in everything he’s done.

without irony, senator cruz titled his recent book, “a time for truth.” in it, he writes, “i refused to play sports as a child.”

as he grew older, cruz finally did engage in sports, he confesses, not to be part of a team, but in a conscious effort to make a ridiculed, lonely boy then called “Felito,” less ostracized.

cruz should have played. he could have learned what others who have led teams to success always figure out.

“I think, team first. It allows me to succeed, it allows my team to succeed.” LeBron James 

“I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.” Mia Hamm 

“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” Vince Lombardi.

politics is a team sport. skins and shirts. redskins v. cowboys. democrats v. republicans. that’s how we govern our nation.

and there is an R behind cruz’s name. that is the party he chose.

but ted cruz is still the sad kid on the sidelines, the solitary outsider, envying those on the field who joyously sacrifice for each other and celebrate each other and take each other to victory.

ted cruz will never be on a team, much less lead one.

They think he’s the captain of their team. (Trump voters think the same about him…) And the Republican team in Washington is their opposition. They want to beat them, not join them.

Hey, you run your candidates for decades against Washington pretty soon your voters are going to look at your team in Washington as part of the problem. In fact, it was the central message of Saint Reagan himself.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

by digby

Yes, he said this …

“I’m the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters,” the businessman said at a rally in South Carolina on Friday.

Trump said he exhibits tremendous grace under pressure when lambasting his political rivals on the social media network.

Imitating the sound of a typewriter, he noted that whenever someone says something bad about him, “bing bing bing — I say something really bad about them.”

The GOP primary front-runner added that he understands social media “maybe better than anybody, ever.”

Imitating the sound of a typewriter …

It occurs to me that we’re starting to get used to the idea that a puerile braggart like this is running for president. The shock is wearing off. It’s no longer unthinkable … Oh my God.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

Stop making senseby Tom Sullivan David Silbersweig, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, wrote to extol the virtues of liberal arts (and a degree in philosophy) in the Washington Post on Christmas Eve:

My father, uncles, and grandfathers were all physicians. As I studied existentialism in college, I thought that becoming a doctor would constitute a pre-determined lack of free will. Then I took a course, Philosophy in Medicine, and I discovered that a philosophical stance and approach could identify and inform core issues associated with everything from scientific advances to healing and biomedical ethics. My honors thesis was in philosophy of mind. I was captivated by the relationship between the mind and the brain, just as that nexus, both scientifically and philosophically, was taking off. In that context, I critiqued arguments for the irreducibility of psychology to neurobiology.

Silbersweig found that it was not possible to understand the body without the mind and vice versa, and that philosophical thought experiments “were unknowingly misguided by virtue of being under-informed by data.” He found that blending studies of both helped make better sense of each. Furthermore,

When evaluating applicants for student or faculty positions and evaluating candidates for tenure and promotion, I find that those with the broader set of academic experiences are generally the most able to deliver innovative and impactful solutions. In my various institutional administrative roles, and in my interactions with many non-academic industries, I see that those with a broader intellectual background are often best able to frame questions, and contribute at high levels in our organizations, which face ever-changing landscapes and challenges.

It is a shame that few appreciate that. We prefer story lines that resolve before the last commercial break. We prefer simple answers to complex questions and leaders who promise to deliver them. Writing for Salon, Dan Sinykin of Grinnell College attended rallies in Iowa. Ted Cruz: revival preacher. Marco Rubio: candidate for Republicans put off by extremist Republicans and Donald Trump. Donald Trump: the choice of those who have had their fill of “fucking intellectuals.” One button read, “Get Crazy Vote Trump.” Making sense is out of fashion this season.

"@Sir_Max: andreajmarkley: Rubio finally gets an endorsement – from #Benghazi loser Gowdy #Tcot #pjnet https://t.co/lJcHG0IHaM via dailyne— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2015

Politico reviews some of the crazier ideas from the GOP debates that mostly slipped under the radar:

Ted Cruz called for putting the United States back on the gold standard. Marco Rubio accused President Barack Obama of destroying the U.S. military. Huckabee said Bernie Madoff’s rip-offs weren’t as bad as what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare. Lindsey Graham said his administration would monitor all “Islamic websites,” not just jihadist ones. I had even forgotten Trump’s claim that vaccines caused autism in a 2-year-old girl he knew.

It all seems so bizarre that Villagers can’t keep from telling themselves that somehow people will come to their senses in the voting booth. There is another Washington Post piece this morning suggesting that for all the enthusiasm of Trump’s Iowa rallies many of his supporters will not likely show up for the caucuses. Iowans finally will let the air out of Trump’s big head. Not going to hold my breath on that.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

Saturday Night at the Movies

If you really must pry: Top 10 films of 2015

By Dennis Hartley

Happy Hollandaise everyone…

QOTD: A grieving American

by digby

“They’ll say it was justified, and then 14 days later no one will even be talking about it anymore,” Reynolds said. “Cuz by that time, it will have probably happened to someone else.”

Heartbreaking.

This horror story is what he’s talking about:

Bettie Jones, 55, was one of two people who died after being shot by police early Saturday morning. Around 4:25 a.m., officers were called to the two-flat apartment building in the 4700 block of West Erie Street, where they “were confronted by a combative subject resulting in the discharging of an officer’s weapon,” according to a statement released by police later Saturday morning. Police provided few other details about the incident.

It started, Jones’ family said, when the building’s landlord called the police saying his 19-year-old son, Quintonio LeGrier, was swinging a baseball bat in the building’s upstairs apartment.

LeGrier, who was studying engineering at Northern Illinois University, had been struggling with mental illness, according to ABC7.

When the police arrived, family members said, the landlord called down to Jones, his downstairs tenant, to answer the door. Having just been asleep, Jones answered the door in her nightgown.

Though no one witnessed the shooting, multiple family members said they thought police shot through the door, striking Bettie Jones three times. As evidence, family members pointed to a bullet hole in the door. There were other bullet holes in the home, including one in the daughter’s bedroom, behind the front door.

The officer then shot LeGrier five times, witnesses told DNAinfo Chicago. The circumstances of the shooting were unclear; the Tribune reported that according to LeGrier’s family, he was shot while coming out the front door. Tribune reporters observed evidence markers placed on the sidewalk leading to the porch.

[…]

“She was the kind of person who would come home after a 16-hour shift and then ask you if you needed anything,” Andrews said. “She was always trying to help, sharing whatever little food she had in her fridge. She was one of a kind like that.”

Jones’ other brother, James Reynolds, said he was furious with the way police had handled the 911 call.

“We’re talking about a kid here with a baseball bat. How are you then justified in coming in here, raining down bullets like it’s the wild west?” Reynolds said. “This is about discipline — when you go to a job, you’ve got to do the job right. They didn’t, and now a life has been lost.”

To the best of our knowledge the only guns in the vicinity were in the hands of police.

It’s not hard to imagine a different scenario in which the potential victim of the baseball bat, the mother, didn’t end up getting shot 3 times. I suppose the cops figure she was just collateral damage in the war against African Americans and the mentally ill.

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Oh, and by the way, it really is getting hot in here

by digby

Last month was Earth’s warmest November on record by a huge margin https://t.co/zL8fg2CjIH pic.twitter.com/ZO00OM3zep

— Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) December 15, 2015

Also:

Record warmth for Christmas Day across the East Coast. Many more record high temperatures set or tied today. pic.twitter.com/Dr0WDdSdna

— NWS Eastern Region (@NWSEastern) December 25, 2015

And here in the west we simultaneously have record snow in the mountains and wildfires in the winter:

Wind-whipped fire moves along PCH north of Ventura. https://t.co/9eUlMtQUq4 pic.twitter.com/MYFLX8Bjk5

— Ventura County Star (@vcstar) December 26, 2015

They’ve closed two main freeways in LA because of this.

Meanwhile in the midwest and south, tornadoes and epic deluge:

Think Progress:

Thanks to a combination of an intense El Niño weather pattern, marked by a burst of warming in the Pacific, and long-term human-caused climate change, 2015 is poised to be the hottest year on record by a significant margin.

The Pacific Ocean wasn’t the only region experiencing uncharacteristically high temperatures in November, however. As ClimateProgress’ Joe Romm recently wrote, “It was so warm that… parts of the Arctic and Siberian permafrost were a staggering 10.2 degrees C (18 degrees F!) warmer than normal. That is particularly troubling since the permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, and as it defrosts, it releases that carbon in the form of either CO2 or methane (CH4), which is 84 more times more potent at trapping heat than CO2 over a 20-year period.”

While one of the strongest El Niños on record is driving up temperatures this winter, a recent analysis by Climate Central found that carbon pollution emitted by human activity is by far the biggest driver of warming, while natural factors like El Niño account for a much smaller percentage.

Thirteen of the 14 hottest years on record took place in the 21st century …

I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about …

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

The new presidential model

by digby

I wrote about how the wingnuts love Vladimir Putin for his manly virtues thus explaining why Trump was so happy to have his endorsement. They are similar in more ways than one:

A huge hall filled with almost a thousand journalists, his formal “year-ender” December 17 news conference, broadcast live on all the major Russian TV networks and websites.

A question about Turkey, and why it shot down a Russian warplane in November.

President Putin was still furious. With a sneer and a snort, he let loose a volley of trash-talk.

“If anyone in the Turkish leadership decided to lick the Americans in a certain place — I don’t know if they acted correctly or not — I don’t know whether the Americans need that.”

Laughs, and even applause from some of the Russian reporters. Foreign journalists looked stunned.

What Putin left out was the real ending of that Russian expression: “lick someone’s a*s.” But every Russian in the room knew what he meant.

The public first heard it in September 1999, when Putin was an unknown prime minister. Russia was hit with several deadly terrorist bombings of apartment buildings. Vowing revenge, Putin didn’t hold back: “We’re going to pursue the terrorists everywhere,” he said. “That means, you’ll excuse me, we’ll catch them in the toilet, we’ll wipe them out in the sh*t house, finally.”

That tough talk shocked many Russians. They’d never heard anything like that from a leader before. But it also boosted their spirits; a tough, vigorous leader had their back and would fight to protect them.

A few months later, the ailing president, Boris Yeltsin, stepped aside and Vladimir Putin took the reins as Russian president.

But he didn’t change his locker room talk.

At a summit meeting in 2002, a foreign journalist asked the president whether Russia was repressing human rights in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, where most people are Muslim.

“If you’re really ready to become an Islamic radical and you’re ready to have yourself circumcised, I invite you to Moscow,” he shot back. “We have a multi-faith country and we have experts in that. I’ll recommend doing the operation so that nothing grows back.”

Male circumcision is practiced more by Muslims than any other religious group.

The first translator was left speechless and sputtered an attempt at explaining what Putin had in mind. “Uh…uh…uh, uh come to Moscow…” Another translator jumped in: “If you want to do a circumcision….You are welcome…and everyone is tolerated in Moscow.” No translation was provided regarding anything not growing back.

Putin’s sense of humor often has an ironic twist to it. “If a grandmother had certain sexual indicators, she would be a grandfather,” he said in June of 2006, answering a question about sanctions against Iran.

Michele Berdy, who writes a column on the Russian language for The Moscow Times newspaper, has followed Putin’s rhetorical style for years. She thinks “it’s a way of being like the guy next door.”

It appears that Russia has so far won the profane authoritarian clown race up until now. But I’d say we’re closing fast.

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2014

And now he’s talking about schlongs. He’s got a way to go before he’s in Putin’s league but I think he can do it. We need some victories, goddamnit!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

The most under-covered story of the month

by digby

… is the fury at Paul Ryan from the right wing. It’s pretty much all they can talk about. This was one of the many angry emails sent around in the last few days:

The leading figures of the Washington Cartel, President Barack Obama, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and the Senate’s Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took a victory lap after the passage of the Omnibus spending bill this past Friday.

In a press release, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell touted provisions tucked into the bill that he says will benefit Kentucky – including $200 million for cleanup at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, $10 million for broadband development in Central Appalachia, and the permanent extension of tax credits for Kentucky Paul Ryanbusinesses and farmers. But as WKUY’s Josh James reported, absent from the bill were any measures restricting the Syrian refugee program or defunding Planned Parenthood.

Speaker Ryan, whose scruffy beard now makes him look more like a frat boy after a kegger than the third ranking constitutional officer of the United States, tweeted “Lots of good results in my first 7 weeks as speaker…”, but the Speaker failed to mention exactly what those “good results” might be, largely because, other than increased spending and pork, Republicans could identify few “good results” in Ryan’s tenure or the Omnibus that marked the conclusion of the First Session of the 114th Congress.

But conservatives had plenty to say about the first seven weeks of Ryan’s tenure – and none of it was good.

In our article “Paul Ryan = John Boehner” we told you about the broad opposition to the Omnibus expressed by conservative leaders and organizations. In his great article “Paul Ryan’s 11 Christmas Gifts to Obama” our friend Daniel Horowitz of Conservative Review cited 11 items that in a rational world would have caused even the most liberal Republicans to vote “NO” on the bill.

And a few principled Republican on Capitol Hill did vote “NO.”

In the House our friends Jim Bridentstine (OK-1), Louie Gohmert (TX-1), Mo Brooks (AL-5), Curt Clawson (FL-19) and Steve King (IA-4) all voted “NO.”

“It was over a trillion dollars, it was all lumped together, 2,242 pages, nobody read it, so frankly my biggest complaint is that I have no idea what kind of things they stuck in that bill in the middle of the night,” Senator Paul, R-Ky., said.

Senator Ted Cruz said, he was not just “NO,” but Hell No: “Typically in the Senate you have two votes, you can vote either yes or no. On this particular matter, my vote I intend to be hell no,” Senator Cruz told “The John Fredericks Show.” “This is what’s wrong with the Washington Cartel.”

“Republican leadership has proven to be the most Democratic leaders we have ever seen,” Cruz observed on Thursday. “[This] does not honor the promises we made to the men and women who elected us.”

And Senator Marco Rubio, well he skipped the vote.

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York summarized the death of democratic government this way in his victory lap celebrating his defeat of America’s conservative majority:

“Well if you would’ve told me this year that we’d be standing here celebrating the passage of an omnibus bill, with no poison pill riders, at higher levels above sequesters than even the president requested, I wouldn’t have believed it, but here we are.

This bill is a great victory for the principles Democrats stand for.

The results of this bill and this vote makes us wonder if any of the so-called conservatives who are members of House Freedom Caucus are regretting their support for Paul Ryan and their contemptible abandonment of Daniel Webster’s bid for the Speaker’s gavel now that they’ve seen conservatives outside Congress were right in urging them stand fast against Ryan.

It is time the conservative voters outside the Beltway took a hard look at their member of Congress – if your Representative or Senator engages in “show votes” in which they vote for the Rule to bring a bill to the Floor and then vote “NO” on the bill it is time to take a long hard look at their overall record.

Any Republican member of Congress who has an established pattern of engaging in “show votes” deserves a primary challenge.

Establishment Republicans now facing serious primary challenges, such as incumbent establishment Republican Martha Roby in Alabama-2, who is being challenged by Becky Gerritson, incumbent Renee Ellmers in NC-2, who is being challenged by Frank Roche and Jim Duncan, and incumbent Pete Sessions in TX-32, who is being challenged by Russell Ramsland are now trying desperately to run away from the Syrian refugee jihadi threat because they repeatedly voted to fund it, they are trying to run away from their complicity in the murder of millions because they continue to fund Planned Parenthood, as they did once again in the Omnibus, and they are trying to run away from their complicity in the bankrupting of America because, even though tax collections are at record levels, they continue to pass spending bills with huge deficits, like the Omnibus.

There’s only one way to fix this problem and restore constitutional liberty to America, and in announcing her “White Flag Congress” town hall meeting series Eagle Forum Founder Phyllis Schlafly said it better than we can:

At this pivotal moment in U.S. history, when our leaders ought to be standing stronger and fighting harder than ever for us – they’ve chosen to wave a white flag in the face of government overreach and overspending. The only thing that gets their attention is a primary! Every one of them is guilty until proven innocent! Primary Them!

Schlafly just endorsed Trump.

The mainstream media, for the most part, isn’t paying attention because of the holidays and the Trump and Cruz show, but it’s big. The talk radio haters are apoplectic.

It’s hard to say where this all ends up but it’s safe to assume they are not going to forgive and forget. Ryan got over in this flurry at the end of the year when Boehner cleared the decks for him. But unless this election defangs the Tea Party wing in a very substantial way, it’s unlikely he’ll ever be able to do it again.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

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So Trump’s already president

by digby

Like most of you I’d guess, I’m more than a little bit stunned by the announcement last week that ICE was going to be deporting some of the Central American refugees back to their dangerous countries.There’s so much wrong with it, it’s hard to wrap your mind around it,  first and foremost is the hideous immorality of it, of course. These people are not a burden on American, there aren’t that many of them in the big scheme of things. We can afford to be generous to these children and anyone who says otherwise is a misanthrope. (I’m looking at you Laura Ingraham.)

And it’s as politically obtuse as anything I’ve ever seen. Two days before Christmas announce a draconian deportation  just as the Democratic presidential candidates are criticizing Trump and the GOP for a draconian deportation scheme. Brilliant timing.

Here’s what the Democrats had to say about it:

Democratic presidential candidates on Thursday criticized the Obama administration’s plans to begin deporting potentially hundreds of families that arrived in the United States illegally since last year.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday night that federal immigration officials are preparing raids that would target the families and could begin as soon as January. A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to confirm the plans, nor dispute the details of the Post report.

The news, arriving on the eve of the holidays, sparked concerns and outrage from Democrats and immigration advocates. They argued that the effort would target largely women and children fleeing violence from Central America, whom critics say should be treated as refugees.
“Hillary Clinton has real concerns about these reports, especially as families are coming together during this holiday season,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “She believes it is critical that everyone has a full and fair hearing, and that our country provides refuge to those that need it. And we should be guided by a spirit of humanity and generosity as we approach these issues.”

Her chief rival for the nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said he was “very disturbed” by the reports, adding: “As we spend time with our families this holiday season, we who are parents should ask ourselves what we would do if our children faced the danger and violence these children do? How far would we go to protect them?”

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, another Democratic presidential candidate, called for an end to “mindless deportations.”

“DHS’ Christmas Eve announcement that they are planning to launch mass holiday raids and deport families who risked their lives to flee violence in Central America is completely at odds with our character as a nation,” O’Malley said in a statement.

Here’s what the Republican frontrunner said about it:

Does everyone see that the Democrats and President Obama are now, because of me, starting to deport people who are here illegally. Politics!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 25, 2015

Isn’t that great? Trump gets to say that he’s so all-powerful that he’s forcing the Democratic president to enact his agenda. Imagine what he’ll do when he’s God  er, president.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

And cruel, cruel, cruel.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.