Pretty much everybody I know now believes Trump's special guest in Iowa tomorrow night is now going to be Sarah Palin.— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) January 19, 2016
Donald Trump has a big surprise and Twitter is all atwitter. From Hot Air:
Mark Halperin tweets, “Does anybody know where @SarahPalinUSA plans to be on Tuesday?” GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak is also guessing Palin. The Freepers at Free Republic? Mostly guessing Palin, although some of the anti-Trumpers there expect Bernie Sanders to drop out and back Trump instead. Realistically, assuming it’s an endorsement worthy of being promoted on Trump’s Facebook page, who else could it be?
It sure as hell won’t be Nikki Haley. No matter how much the mandarins at the RNC think they can mentor Trump into making the most electable choice, the Donald won’t have any woman as VP who won’t kiss his ass. Because apparently the Donald is a “textbook” narcissist:
In fact, he fits the profile so well that clinical psychologist George Simon told Vanity Fair, “He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops.”
For California kids of a certain age, these guys were a big, big deal:
I have come to understand in recent days that liking the Eagles is such a crime as to make you, like, totally unfit to sit at the cool table. Try to imagine how little I care …
RIP Glenn Frey. You meant a lot to me at one time in my life.
*By the way, the film from a couple of years ago called The History of the Eagles is fascinating music documentary, even if you don’t like the band.
Today the UK Parliament debated whether to ban Donald Trump from entering the country. Half a million people signed a petition demanding it. They are concerned that a man who makes such racist comments presents a danger to the British people.And they want to make a point.
You can watch it here. It is downright surreal:
And to think the GOP establishment thinks this guy could possibly be an acceptable president of the world’s only superpower.
If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing, there are some good highlights here. For instance:
Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative MP, says that it is right to have this debate, but that Trump shouldn’t be banned.
The MP says Trump is “crazy”, but that “I will not be the one to silence his voice”.
He adds: “Liberty is not something we can take in caution or in part”.
He says: “Although I may not like it, and I can be absolutely sure I wouldn’t support it, it is no place of me or this House to criticise a man running for elected office in a foreign country.
“I believe it is for the American people to judge him”.
That may be a slim reed on which to hang your hopes …
It all started, as most things do where Trump is concerned, with an unhinged twitter rant Saturday morning. In it, Trump abandoned his cowardly (but politically wise) tack of saying that he believes Cruz is eligible, it’s just that the evil Democrats are likely to make trouble for Cruz over it. He flat out started calling Cruz a “Natural Born Canadian” and furthermore peddling bizarre (and nonsensical) conspiracy theories about Cruz:
Based on the fact that Ted Cruz was born in Canada and is therefore a “natural born Canadian,” did he borrow unreported loans from C banks?
From there, Trump went to a rally in Myrtle Beach, SC, where he continued this line of attack and was booed by his own supporters:
Things went downhill from there as Trump made the rounds of the Sunday shows. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopolous, he made the bizarre claim that he’s “always known” Ted Cruz was a nasty guy, even though he’s had (by his own admission) a public “bromance” with Cruz for seven months.
Stephanopolous: On this issue of New York Values, he lumped you in yesterday with Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio and said he apologizes to the millions of New Yorkers who have been let down by liberal politicians.
Trump: Look, the truth is that he’s a nasty guy, he was so nice to me, I mean, I knew it, I was watching, I kept saying, “Come on, Ted, Let’s go, Ted,” but he’s a nasty guy, nobody likes him, nobody in Congress likes him, nobody likes him anywhere once they get to know him, a very, um, he’s got an edge that’s not good, you can’t make deals with people like that. And it’s not a good thing, it’s not a good thing for the country. Very nasty guy.
This particular rant was especially bizarre for two reasons. First, it was a transparent example of the “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” historical revisionism favored by totalitarians. Second, it relied for its factual support almost exclusively on the fact that “nobody in Congress likes him.” For a guy who started his campaign by running against the Republican leadership as being “very stupid,” Trump has now exposed himself as being coopted by the very establishment he once railed against.
I don’t know about co-opted. Basically Trump will say anything and use anyone to make his argument and this is just on of many examples of his inconsistency.
(I have no idea what he’s talking about with the Oceania Eurasia reference in this passage.)
Not for nothing, but another piece of potentially bad news for Trump this weekend is that news of a meeting between the Trump camp and the GOP donor class that Trump spent two solid months criticizing leaked to the media.
The coup de grâce, however, was Trump’s appearance with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Nation. As my colleague streiff noted, this was the third time Trump was asked whether he has ever asked God for forgiveness, because his the previous two times he has answered this question, he gave answers that were almost too bizarre to be believed.
This time, not only did he repeat the fact that he’s never even felt it necessary to ask God for forgiveness, but he seemed to bizarrely claim that his poll numbers validate this approach:
It is a beaut:
TAPPER: Do you regret making that remark (about not asking God for forgiveness)?
TRUMP: No. I have a great relationship with God. I have a great relationship with the Evangelicals. In fact, nationwide, I’m up by a lot, I’m leading everybody. But I like to be good. I don’t like to have to ask for forgiveness. And I am good. I don’t do a lot of things that are bad. I try to do nothing that is bad. I live a very different life than probably a lot of people would think. And I have…
TAPPER: Always? Or just now?
TRUMP: …a very great relationship with God and I have a very great relationship with Evangelicals. I think that’s why I’m doing so well with Iowa.
TAPPER: The life you have now, when you say you try to do good, that sounds very different from decades of tabloid, media coverage, in New York, in which some of your wilder escapades were…
TRUMP: I’m talking about over the last number of years. I’m leading a very good life. I try to lead a good life. And I have. And, frankly, the reason I’m doing so well in Iowa, and leading the polls, including the CNN poll where I’m 33 to 20 in Iowa….
He goes on to say that Trump’s megalomania has become alarming. You don’t say …
Also this:
Trump: The legal scholars that say, as an example, that Cruz has a real problem with his place of birth, and there are many people that are saying that right now. And in fact, since I spoke to you the last time, he’s been sued. And I told you he would get sued.
Stephanopolous: But, you know, the person who sued him probably does not have standing [crosstalk]
Stephanopolous: You have standing, why don’t you file a suit?
Trump: That’s an interesting case… well, that sounds like a very good case. I’d do the public a big favor.
Stephanopolous: So are you going to do it?
Trump: You know, so interesting with Ted, he was so nice to me, and I kept saying, he’s not a nice guy, you know… so I said, when is it going to happen? So it happened during the debate, because he lied about the polls, in fact, I was going up [incomprehensible gibberish]… let me just say, I don’t think he’s going to do very well.
Stephanopolous: … You should put your money where your mouth is, if you really believe in this, you should file the suit.
Trump: Well, it’s a good idea, maybe I’ll talk to them about it, I’d like to talk to Ted about that, see how he’d feel about that, because you know, when I file suits, I file REAL suits.
I have thought the GOP establishment would reconcile themselves to Cruz simply because I thought, apparently erroneously, that they had not also lost their minds. They have. They apparently believe they can “control” Trump because he doesn’t know what he’s doing and he’ll need Paul Ryan and the boys to hold his hand. Cruz, has a serious agenda and they do not like him.
“If you look at Trump’s actual policies, they’re pretty thin. There’s not a lot of meat there,” says one Republican member in Ryan’s inner circle, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the two front-runners as leadership has carefully avoided doing all week. If Trump were to get the nomination, he would “be looking to answer the question: ‘Where’s the beef?’ And we will have that for him,” says the member.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds
You’ll notice he didn’t add “as long as you have the right paperwork.”
This will not come as any surprise to the activists among us or the party establishments, but the general public might find it surprising:
One of the more compelling arguments for campaign finance reform has long been that it would undermine partisanship. After all, a great deal of money goes to political parties. Cut off the money to them, and you undermine their influence over candidates and elected officials, right?
If these issues concern you, I strongly encourage you to read Ray La Raja and Brian Schaffner’s new book Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail. Their approach has been to examine the American states that have been experimenting with campaign finance restrictions on parties over the past few decades. What they have found is not that the reforms have been ineffective—rather, they’ve achieved the opposite of their goal. Those states with campaign finance restrictions on parties have seen more rapid polarization of their state legislatures than states without such rules.
Why might this be the case? The authors break down a lot of important data on campaign donation patterns. As they note, there are several types of donors to campaigns. Parties (and here we’re talking about formal party groups like the Republican National Committee or the Democratic National Committee) are only one type of donor. There are also business groups, labor unions, issue activists, and small individual donors.
Employees of MoveOn and Planned Parenthood will make different decisions with their money than the formal Democratic Party will.
Parties, it turns out, tend to support relatively moderate candidates. They do so because, as the authors note, “parties are the sole political organization whose primary goal is to win elections.” This is a key point. Issue activists, individual donors, and others tend to back relatively extreme candidates precisely because they want those candidates to move the government in one direction or another. They have a set of issues they care about—abortion, corporate tax rates, minimum wage levels, etc.—and they fiercely want to change the direction of government on those issues. They may end up giving to candidates to reward them for their past stances on issues and to encourage them to remain steadfast to their agenda.
The formal parties, by contrast, are chiefly concerned with winning and holding majorities in Washington, D.C., and in the state capitols. They send their money where it is most needed—usually to competitive districts where relatively moderate candidates are in close races.
So what happens when you cut party funding out of the equation? That’s what a lot of states have done in recent decades, placing limits on what individuals can give to parties and what parties can contribute to candidate coffers. Basically, this hurts the more moderate candidates. The money still in the system comes disproportionately from more ideologically extreme donors and goes to more polarized candidates.
Conceptually, there’s an important question in here about the nature of political parties. Unlike La Raja and Schaffner, I tend to view parties more as networks. The formal party groups are only parts of these networks, as are the unions, business groups, issue activists, and others. In this view, there really shouldn’t be much of a change if parties are hampered in their ability to fund campaigns. Donors will still donate, and the money will still find a way through the networks to the candidates who need it.
Imagine a pre-reform state where liberal donors want to help Democratic candidates but don’t know too much about the individual candidate races. So the donors give thousands of dollars to the state Democratic Party and trust them to identify the candidates who could best benefit from it. And the party uses some of that money to hire staff to help out campaigns and decide where the money is most needed.
But then the state passes a reform that puts low limits on what parties can take in from donors or hand out to candidates. So the liberal staffers who worked for the party leave and find jobs at a Super PAC or an interest group. Donors who used to give to the party now give to those other groups, trusting them to make the right call. In some sense, that shouldn’t make a difference—those funding groups are still part of the party, and they’re the same sort of people who would otherwise be working at the formal party and making the same sorts of decisions.
La Raja and Schaffner’s research, however, suggests that the path the money takes does make a difference. The employees of MoveOn and Planned Parenthood and the Service Employees International Union will make different decisions with their money than the formal Democratic Party will, and that has a big impact on who gets elected and how legislatures end up being run.
Those who want to depolarize our government and drive money out of politics need to come to terms with the fact that working toward one of those goals likely undermines the other.
I’m not sure that the people who want to drive money out of politics want to “depolarize” it. I’m pretty sure they just want small “d” democracy which means basically, “let the people decide.” If the people choose polarization, so be it.
Sadly, our system of government is really bad at functioning when the two parties are so polarized. It’s designed for compromise. But then again, it’s possible that if the people begin to have some faith that their leaders aren’t corrupt they might be more amenable to compromise. I don’t think anyone knows how that’s going to go.
Also, we’ve always been “polarized” in some ways. It’s just that the parties tended not to be, at least in the modern era. Maybe we’re working out a new way to deal with it.
Not all drugs have to be injected, ingested or inhaled. Yesterday, I drew parallels between the man-made crisis on Wall Street and the man-made water crisis in Flint Michigan. The reason is that the amoral pursuit of personal gain is an addiction that goes far beyond Wall Street. The Big Short made a big impression, can you tell?
The Guardian’s Tim Adams spoke with “The Big Short” author Michael Lewis about the film’s protagonists:
The idea that the madness was going to get worse did not occur to him. “In fact, it got worse and worse to the point where people were paid unbelievable fortunes just to do stupid things with money. Even the movie can’t really get this across. The movie gets across that there was a bet and these smart guys were on the right side of the bet. And those smart guys made hundreds of millions of dollars. That inevitably leaves you thinking that the people on the other side of the bet lost. Of course, the banks went down. But the real story is the actual people on the other side of the bet also got very rich despite the banks collapsing. If no matter what side of the bet you are on things are still going to work out for you, the world is upside down.”
In a pivotal scene, two cocky, Florida mortgage brokers explain to hedge fund traders how they are getting rich selling subprime, adjustable rate loans to immigrants and strippers. Flabbergasted, the hedge fund boys step out of earshot to consult:
Mark Baum: I don’t get it. Why are they confessing? Danny Moses: They’re not confessing. Porter Collins: They’re bragging.
The street-level brolers were simply the bottom feeders supplying Wall Street with the raw material for more and more mortgage-backed securities. They mirrored the upstate New York broker, Glen, from Planet Money’s May 2008 “The Giant Pool of Money“:
Alex Blumberg: Glen had five cars, a $1.5 million vacation house in Connecticut, and a penthouse that he rented in Manhattan. And he made all this money making very large loans to very poor people with bad credit.
Glen Pizzolorusso: We looked at loans, these people didn’t have a pot to piss in. I mean, they could barely make the car payment, and now we’re giving them a $300,000 to $400,000 house.
Alex Blumberg: But Glen didn’t worry about whether these loans were good either. That was someone else’s problem. And this way of thinking thrived at every step of this mortgage security chain. A guy like Mike Francis from Morgan Stanley, he told me he bought loans, lots of loans, from Glen’s company. And he knew in his gut that they were bad loans, like these NINA loans.
He just didn’t care. Everybody else was doing it. And they were all getting rich doing it.
The gravitational attraction of the kind of personal wealth being accumulated not just on Wall Street but in the metastasized global economy is a kind of moral and financial black hole from which few escape. The traders Lewis found to profile are not heroes. They themselves profited from the financial corruption by betting against the banks peddling the fraudulent loans. What made them open up to Lewis was that he had worked at Salomon Brothers left to make a name for himself by exposing Wall Street’s excesses in “Liar’s Poker.” Lewis left Salomon Brothers to write his book after receiving a $200,000 bonus. His father urged him to stay another 10 years, then write his book:
Lewis was 27 at the time. He looked around at colleagues at the bank who were 37, the men who might 10 years ago have said the same thing. He saw nothing left in them that suggested they could leave. They had been so transformed by the rates of pay and the needs it had created in them, they couldn’t escape from it.
Malcolm Harris writes at Al Jazeera about how that concentrates rather than distributes power in what is still nominally a democratic republic. So much so that the emerging oligarchy is becoming open about it:
Democracy isn’t supposed to be a vehicle for wealthy people to hedge their bets, but the open secret is that capitalism is more than just an economic regime. It’s a total social system, and it’s ruled by a small class of people, not elected representatives as such. The practices that we think of as making up democracy — like voting, volunteerings, protesting, writing op-eds — are just part of what determines the structure of American social reality, and not a very big part when it comes down to it. Between “money is power” and “all power to the people,” we know which one describes life in the United States.
That imbalance threatens to shift the world’s axis. Oxfam UK released a report in which it finds “62 of the world’s richest people own as much as the poorest half of humanity combined.”
“It is simply unacceptable that the poorest half of the world population owns no more than a small group of the global super-rich – so few, you could fit them all on a single coach,” he said.
“World leaders’ concern about the escalating inequality crisis has so far not translated into concrete action to ensure that those at the bottom get their fair share of economic growth. In a world where one in nine people go to bed hungry every night we cannot afford to carry on giving the richest an ever bigger slice of the cake.
“We need to end the era of tax havens which has allowed rich individuals and multinational companies to avoid their responsibilities to society by hiding ever increasing amounts of money offshore.
Wall Street is only the most visible tip of the iceberg.
On Saturday, Trump drew boos from a grassroots conservative crowd during remarks at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention for his attack on Cruz’s previously undisclosed loans.
“You give a campaign contribution to Ted Cruz, you get whatever the hell you want,” he said, before boos erupted from the crowd.
Trump went on as the boos grew louder: “Say whatever you want, it’s okay, he didn’t report his bank loans. He’s got bank loans from Goldman Sachs, he’s got bank loans from Citibank, folks, and then he acts like Robin Hood?”
One man in the crowd, 71-year-old Air Force veteran Joe Bates, stood up and shouted angrily, wagging his finger at the candidate.
Trump continued: “You know, say whatever you want, but it doesn’t work that way.”
[…]
Some at Saturday’s event said Trump’s attacks on Cruz had turned them off from him.
Kathy Hughes, a 68-year-old retired teacher from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, said she was “so excited” to see Trump until he trained his fire on Cruz, and now she’s sitting his speech out.
“He has degraded himself now to me,” she said.
Hughes said she felt like Trump had done away with his commitment to telling it like it is in part because he took Cruz’s attacks on New York personally.
“I was pleased that he has put issues forward that many of the candidates did not want to talk about and they’ve been forced to talk about. He has kicked political correctness to the curb — until Ted said something about New Yorkers — and then suddenly Mr. Trump became very sensitive,” she said.
It is kind of hilarious watching the insult dog Trump get all delicate about New York being insulted. If anyone can get away with it, I suppose he can, but some people are noticing.
They all told the reporter that these attacks wouldn’t necessarily make them not vote for Trump. But they’re suddenly sick of all the insults coming from “everybody.” It’s one thing to insult Mexicans and Muslims and Democrats and African Americans and women and the media and well … pretty much the whole world. That is until you insult a doctrinaire wingnut. Then “everyone” should stop all the insults.
One of the women quoted did say that she was going to go home and look into Trump’s accusations about Cruz’s loans though. One wonders if she’ll “research” Trump’s business dealings with equal vigor. I doubt it.
Presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that he bought a gun on Christmas Eve and will use it to protect his family — and America — against ISIS.
“I’m a strong supporter of the second amendment. I have a right to protect my family if someone were to come after us. In fact, if ISIS were to visit us, or our communities, at any moment, the last line of defense between ISIS and my family is the ability that I have to protect my family from them, or from a criminal, or anyone else who seeks to do us harm. Millions of Americans feel that way.”
He left out protecting his family from the jack-booted government thugs which is the main reason, according to the NRA, that everyone should own guns. I guess he’s less interested in that since he’s running to be Jack-boot-thug in chief.
Seriously, this new line about “fighting ISIS” with your personal weapon is not just idiotic, it’s downright dangerous. It’s pushing the idea that average citizens are at war with ISIS in our own country and that we must arm ourselves to fight the battle. That’s crazy talk. We have cops and national guard and FBI to do that job and adding a bunch of arm-chair warriors into the mix is bad news.
It’s dumb enough that everyone thinks that arming themselves will somehow prevent gun violence. But arming themselves to literally fight a war with terrorists on American soil is irrational on a whole other level.
When so-called “establishment” presidential candidates start saying their arming their own families to fight ISIS in America, we have gone so far down the rabbit hole it’s hard to see how we can crawl back out.
