Month: January 2016

Antics roadshow
by Tom Sullivan

The National Review’s “dump Trump” edition this week attracted plenty of commentary, including from Digby and Amanda Marcotte. The Republican National Committee, having raised a white flag to Donald Trump, disinvited the National Review from partnering on a February 25 candidate debate in Houston. There is feverish pearl clutching on the pundit circuit, especially in the pages of the Washington Post (being closer to political ground zero than the Times, one supposes).

“A xenophobic and bigoted showman is now the face of the Republican Party and of American conservatism,” writes Dana Milbank. He observes that the Wall Street Journal wrote last July, “If Donald Trump becomes the voice of conservatives, conservatism will implode along with him.” Now the Journal has changed its tune:

A week ago, the Journal reversed course. “Mr. Trump is a better politician than we ever imagined, and he is becoming a better candidate,” the editorialists wrote, speculating that “he might possibly be able to appeal to a larger set of voters than he has so far.”

The establishment Journal has decided to roll with it.

Kathleen Parker mocks the Trump-Palin antics road show, suggesting that once the Republican Party took Sarah Palin seriously as John McCain’s vice-presidential pick, “they opened a populist door that they’ll not easily shut.” And now?

… it looks as though Republicans may get what they deserve — a bombastic, bellicose, self-aggrandizing, mean-streaked, golf-cheating, bullying narcissist without plans or policies beyond his own, no doubt fickle, fantasies.

Having decided to bow and scrape to Trump, the play now for the Republicans’ Gríma Wormtongues is to somehow harness Trump’s lack of plans and policies to their own ends. The Washington Post Editorial Board writes:

Some in the GOP establishment now spin Mr. Trump’s policy emptiness as a feature, not a bug. When they describe him as someone who will “cut deals,” or turn to D.C. elder statesmen for advice, they sound like people who imagine themselves filling the void in Mr. Trump’s head with the agendas of their own lobbying clients.

In other words, the insiders’ upbeat new take on Mr. Trump is a bet on his corruptibility — and a confession of their own.

Milbank notes:

The Hill newspaper last week interviewed major donor Robert Bazyk, who decamped to Trump from Bush. The big spender objects to Trump’s positions on refugees and Muslims, and his “insults and name-calling.” And yet he is funding the man.

Proving again what Nixon the political mentor told his charges, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” The GOP’s elite will bend themselves into pretzels over Trump, and in the course of it give their erstwhile base all the more reason to despise them.

Stephen and the Material Girl

by digby

It’s a classic:

And … Marco Rubio’s an “anchor baby”

by digby

Well hell, why not?

Last week, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign invited radical pastor Carl Gallups to deliver the invocation at a rally in Florida. This week, Gallups joined Alaska radio host and former GOP politician Joe Miller to discuss the skepticism he shares with Trump about President Obama and Ted Cruz’s eligibility for the presidency, adding that he is also skeptical of Marco Rubio’s eligibility since the Florida senator is an “anchor baby” born to two immigrant parents.

“Let’s look at Marco Rubio,” Gallups told Miller. “Marco Rubio was born on American soil. He is an American citizen, a legal American citizen. However, both of his parents were citizens of Cuba at the time of his birth. Technically, that means Marco Rubio is an anchor baby. Okay, well, we know all the debates about anchor babies, and there’s a huge section of our nations and even lawmakers in Congress that are wanting to change the laws on anchor babies, whether or not they actually are legal citizens just because they happen to be born here, maybe by illegal parents. Now, I’m not saying that Rubio’s parents were illegal, but here’s the point: If we elect Marco Rubio, do we now say from now on that any anchor baby is eligible to become commander in chief of our military forces?”

So, was Cruz right that Trump is also ineligible since his mother was born in Scotland? I think it would irresponsible not to look into it …

Trump is literally promising to Make America White Again

by digby

I wrote about this for Salon today:

Few de­cisions may carry great­er con­sequences for the Re­pub­lic­an Party in 2016 than how it in­ter­prets these facts. The key ques­tion fa­cing the GOP is wheth­er Obama’s 2012 per­form­ance rep­res­ents a struc­tur­al Demo­crat­ic de­cline among whites that could deep­en even fur­ther in the years ahead — or a floor from which the next Demo­crat­ic nom­in­ee is likely to im­prove.

In re­cent months, a chor­us of con­ser­vat­ive ana­lysts has bet on the first op­tion. They in­sist that Re­pub­lic­ans, by im­prov­ing both turnout and already-gap­ing mar­gins among whites, can re­cap­ture the White House in 2016 without re­for­mu­lat­ing their agenda to at­tract more minor­ity voters — most prom­in­ently by passing im­mig­ra­tion-re­form le­gis­la­tion that in­cludes a path­way to cit­izen­ship for those here il­leg­ally.

On the oth­er side is an ar­ray of Re­pub­lic­an strategists who view minor­ity out­reach and im­mig­ra­tion re­form as crit­ic­al to restor­ing the party’s com­pet­it­ive­ness — and con­sider it sui­cid­al for the GOP to bet its fu­ture on the pro­spect that it can squeeze even lar­ger ad­vant­ages out of the di­min­ish­ing pool of white voters. Karl Rove, the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s two pres­id­en­tial vic­tor­ies, has noted that re­ly­ing en­tirely on whites would soon re­quire Re­pub­lic­ans to reg­u­larly match the tower­ing ad­vant­age Re­agan re­cor­ded among them when he lost only a single state in his 1984 reelec­tion. “It’s un­reas­on­able to ex­pect Re­pub­lic­ans to routinely pull num­bers that last oc­curred in a 49-state sweep,” Rove said at the As­pen Ideas Fest­iv­al this sum­mer.

Though Cruz led big among col­lege-edu­cated evan­gel­ic­als in the latest Quin­nipi­ac Iowa sur­vey, the poll placed Trump ahead of Cruz by 32 per­cent to 30 per­cent among evan­gel­ic­als without a col­lege de­gree. The NBC/WSJ/Mar­ist Poll in Iowa showed Cruz still lead­ing Trump among blue-col­lar evan­gel­ic­als, but with a much nar­row­er ad­vant­age (nine per­cent­age points) than among their col­lege-edu­cated coun­ter­parts (23 points).

Craig Robin­son, founder of The Iowa Re­pub­lic­an web­site and former polit­ic­al dir­ect­or for the state GOP, said Trump’s strength with these work­ing-class evan­gel­ic­als “doesn’t sur­prise me at all. He def­in­itely has this ap­peal to the hard-work­ing blue-col­lar little guy.” As for Cruz, Robin­son ad­ded, “I don’t think he’s a lock at all” for these voters.

Monthly church attendance by moderately educated whites – defined as those with high school diplomas and maybe some college – has declined to 37 percent from 50 percent, according to the study co-authored by sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University.Church attendance by the least educated whites – defined as those lacking high school diplomas – fell to 23 percent from 38 percent.

“My assumption going into this research was that Middle America was more religious and conservative than more educated America,” said Wilcox, in an interview with MSNBC. “But what is surprising about this is that, when it comes to religion as well as marriage, we find that the college-educated are more conventional in their lifestyle than Middle Americans.”

Read on.  He compiles a lot of evidence…

Across the board their obsessions show that they wish to return to a time that has passed. A time when white men ruled. They are simply not comfortable with a more multi-racial country and the fact that women, people of color and non-Christians have a say in how the nation is run and the culture in which we live. Trump is a man who’ is explicitly promising to “make America great again by promising to deport non-citizens of color, build walls, close borders and instill harsh law and order to make that happen. He is literally promising to make America white again.

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Cecile Richards, American hero

by digby

The American Prospect has published an excellent profile by Rachel Cohen of Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards on this anniversary of Roe vs Wade. She’s an amazing woman at the center of a maelstrom that would break down lesser humans. An excerpt:

In 2016, the battle over reproductive rights will almost surely grow more intense. The Supreme Court is set to rule on two major cases: one concerning contraception coverage, and the other on abortion access. The latter, both sides agree, may be the most consequential case for abortion rights since 1992, when the high court ruled that states could not impose an “undue burden” on women who wish to end a pregnancy. State legislatures, which enacted 288 abortion restrictions between 2011 and 2015, will no doubt continue to test the limits of what such “undue burdens” really mean.

2016 also marks the centennial anniversary of Planned Parenthood, an organization that has become the target of an anti-abortion movement that steadily grows more aggressive and violent. The FBI reported an increase in the number of arson attacks and vandalism incidents at abortion clinics in the wake of the Center for Medical Progress videos, and the president of the National Abortion Federation said abortion providers have seen “an unprecedented increase in hate speech and threats” since the videos were released. In late November, a man opened fire in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, injuring nine people, and killing three. After the shooting, the suspected gunman invoked the doctored videos, telling local authorities, “no more baby parts.”

Richards, who has spent a decade at Planned Parenthood’s helm, toils at ground zero of the culture wars being fought across the country. Every day she is flooded with hundreds of hateful messages on social media, calling her evil, a Nazi, a monster, a murderer. In 2006, Jim Sedlak, the vice president of American Life League and one of the nation’s most ardent Planned Parenthood critics, predicted she would never last more than a year or so as Planned Parenthood’s leader. (A mere “place holder” president, he dubbed her.)

Yet ten years later, Richards remains self-assured in her post, guiding the nation’s largest reproductive-rights organization through the most politically fraught period it’s ever faced. She comes well-suited for the challenge. Richards brings to her role decades of experience in political organizing, and a career as a premier coalition builder across liberal America. She brings as well a strategic and moral vision that has impelled her to push Planned Parenthood beyond where it’s been, to lead more forcefully in the broader cultural and economic battles for women’s autonomy and equality.

More about Richards at the link.

I realize that this is not at the top of every progressive’s list of important issues. But it probably ranks in the top ten for most. If that’s the case, they should all be happy that someone with Richards’ strategic intelligence, integrity, determination and backbone is at the helm of the institution that’s in the crosshairs of these zealots. I don’t think I could handle it and I doubt most people could.

She made Planned Parenthood an explicitly political institution because she was smart enough to see that if she didn’t it wouldn’t survive. There was, after all, a time not too long ago when some Democrats were saying that compromise on women’s rights was on the menu because they needed to attract the evangelical voters. That is no longer the case. And Richards is largely responsible because she understood that the Republicans had purged their pro-choice membership and this was going to be a partisan battle. And that battle is far from over.

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Look at what you’ve done …

by digby

Can I just say how hilarious the National Review editorial is? Seriously:

“Trump has gotten far in the GOP race on a brash manner, buffed over decades in New York tabloid culture. His refusal to back down from any gaffe, no matter how grotesque, suggests a healthy impertinence in the face of postmodern PC (although the insults he hurls at anyone who crosses him also speak to a pettiness and lack of basic civility).”

An unwillingness to back down from a “grotesque” gaffe suggests a “healthy impertinence in the face of postmodern PC.” Talk about an asshole’s get-out-of-jail-free card. But just in case someone thinks that being a total jerk does not reflect good Christian values they did put in a little disclaimer about basic civility. So that’s nice.

This article from today’s NY Times explains why they felt the need to do it:

Jeanne Cleveland, a retired teacher, pursed her lips sourly at the mention of his name and tried to summarize her distaste in diplomatic terms.

“I think he’s arrogant,” she said. “I think he’s rude. I think——”

She paused, reaching for the right words. “Let’s just say, I don’t like the way he represents us as a country.”

To avoid any confusion, Mrs. Cleveland put it plainly: “I don’t like Trump.”

In this, the retired teacher, 70, from Hollis, N.H., has ample, baffled and agonized company in New Hampshire as the presidential primary enters its final, frenzied weeks, with Donald J. Trump remaining atop poll after poll of the state’s Republican electorate.

Or is he? So deep is the dislike for him in some quarters that people like Mrs. Cleveland’s husband, Doug, question the accuracy of polls that so consistently identify Mr. Trump as leading the field with around 32 percent. “I’ve never met a single one of them,” Mr. Cleveland said about those said to be backing Mr. Trump. “Where are all these Trump supporters? Everyone we know is supporting somebody else.”

Joan and Ray Weaving, checking out a Bush campaign event in Hampton, N.H., on Thursday. They have real doubts about Jeb Bush’s rival, Donald J. Trump, despite Mr. Trump’s standing in the polls.

These are the lamentations of the 68 Percent — the significant majority of Republican voters here who are immune to Mr. Trump’s charms and entreaties, according to a battery of voter interviews on Thursday at campaign events for his rivals.

For months, great quantities of ink, political-science brain power and polling resources have been expended trying to dissect, if not exactly diagnose, the Trump phenomenon — precisely who supports him and why. Far less energy has been devoted to sounding out a much larger segment of the electorate: those who reject him.

From Brookline to Laconia, these voters call Mr. Trump “unhinged.” They object to his “temperament.” They doubt his motives.

Their disapproval runs strikingly deep. Several spoke of changing the channel whenever his face (or, more frequently, his New York-accented voice, via telephone) turned up on television.

“I really try not to watch him,” one resident, Paul Brennan, said as he walked out of an appearance by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida in a factory in Brookline, along New Hampshire’s southern border. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”
[…]
But for the 68 Percent, no single attribute rankles as much as Mr. Trump’s instinctive proclivity to insult — everyone, over everything, no matter how big or small the issue, from Mexicans to the Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly.

“His behavior — I can’t do it,” complained Joan Weaving, 72, from Hampton, N.H., as she sat on a folding chair next to her husband at a Jeb Bush campaign event on Thursday night. “Belittling people. Just seeing the bad parts of things.”

They may share his impatience with ordinary political speak, with the hypersensitivity that has crept into American public life. And they admire his attempts to crack and peel away that veneer of politesse.

But they have limits.

Barbara Henry, 63, wants a president with a filter. Any filter. “He has no filter,” she said, leaning forward to make her point.

“I understand people say, ‘I’m sick of this political correctness.’ I get that,” she said. “But there’s also an argument for some measure of civility. I mean, he’s just not somebody who you can say, ‘I’m proud he’s our president.’”

Most Trump supporters are the white, non-college educated Republicans who really don’t give a damn about civility. They want someone who will kick ass and take names. I guess these nice Republicans don’t know any of those folks.

But can I just take a moment to ask where these people have been all these years as the right wing media turned into a cesspool of disgusting insults? It’s not as if Trump just created this phenomenon out of whole cloth. I don’t think I need to repeat the litany of sins perpetrated by the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Loesch, Coulter etc. They’ve been making billions at the insult racket for decades.

Jeet Heer at the New Republic took a look at the venerable National Review’s own checkered history:

Too much time is spent trying to prove that Trump is not a real conservative, while ignoring the fact that the racist nationalism he is espousing has its origins on the right. Trump, the editors argue, is “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.” There’s much that can be questioned here: After all, National Review didn’t have a problem with “free-floating populism” in 2008 when it celebrated Sarah Palin (now an enthusiastic Trump cheerleader), and historically the magazine has loved strongmen dictators like Mussolini and Franco.

The symposium gets off to a rocky start by beginning, admittedly for alphabetical reasons, with a contribution from Glenn Beck. With his long history of racism and conspiracy-mongering, Beck has all the flaws of Trump many times over. To get Glenn Beck to denounce Donald Trump as an unsound thinker makes about as much sense as hiring Larry Flynt to write about how Hugh Hefner demeans women. Nor is Beck the only extremist in the symposium, which also includes contributions from Erick Erickson (known for his boorish sexism) and Thomas Sowell, who in 2007 wrote in National Review: “When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.”

In the “Against Trump” symposium, Sowell makes this outlandish comparison: “The actual track record of crowd pleasers, whether Juan Perón in Argentina, Obama in America, or Hitler in Germany, is very sobering, if not painfully depressing.” Is there any rhetorical overkill Trump has been guilty of that is worse than this?

Sowell’s belief that a coup could be good for America and that Obama can be fairly compared to Hitler gives lie to the argument, made repeatedly by writers in the National Review symposium, that Trump is not a true conservative. For there is very little that Trump has said or done that can’t find prior sanction in National Review, be it racism, anti-immigrant nativism, or sexism. In the last debate, in response to an attack on his “New York values,” Trump noted that conservatives do come from New York and cited William F. Buckley. It is fair to see Trump’s version of white identity politics as firmly in the tradition of Buckley and his magazine.

Decades from now, when historians try to figure out the genealogy of Trumpism, they will have to pay careful attention to the pages of National Review in the 1980s and 1990s, when a crucial debate was being played out between neo-conservatives and paleo-conservatives. Although National Review ultimately sided with the neo-conservatives, it gave ample room to such paleo-conservative voices as Joseph Sobran, Peter Brimelow, John O’Sullivan, and Samuel T. Francis. Even after these writers were purged from the magazine, the white identity politics they argued for was taken up by other National Review writers, albeit in more muted and coded form. This paleo-con tradition created the idea of a politics centered around immigration restriction and a more robustly nationalist foreign policy (including trade policy). Many of these writers seeded the ideas that helped form the alt-right, which is the faction on the right that is most enthusiastic for Trump.

One of the NR essayists, Erick Erickson, is best known for his comment that Justice David Souter was a “goat-fucking child molester.” I don’t think even Donald Trump has said anything quite that “un-civil.”

They created the monster and the Republican rank and file went right along and never said a word. Sorry folks, you only have yourself to blame for the cesspool your party has become.

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Donald Trump: destroyer of worlds

by digby

This has to be the trainwreck of all trainwrecks:

National Review disinvited from GOP debate after anti-Trump issue

The Republican National Committee has disinvited National Review from participating in the Feb. 25 GOP debate because of its outspoken opposition to Donald Trump.

The decision was announced just hours after the conservative magazine published a special anti-Trump issue that included a scathing editorial about the Republican frontrunner and critical contributions from 22 conservative pundits and thought leaders.

“Tonight, a top official with the RNC called me to say that National Review was being disinvited,” Jack Fowler, the publisher of National Review, wrote in a statement. “The reason: Our ‘Against Trump’ editorial and symposium.”

“We expected this was coming,” Fowler continued. “Small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald.”

The RNC’s decision, which was confirmed by a committee spokesperson, was made after the committee concluded that National Review was no longer an impartial participant.

In its editorial, National Review states that Trump “is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist” and “a menace to American conservatism.” Such sentiments, echoed in contributions from the likes of Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson, reflect a widespread frustration among establishment conservatives over the GOP’s unwillingness to take a bold stand against the former reality television star.

Not to be outdone, Trump responded to National Review in a series of tweets late Thursday night — and even claimed that the magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, would have been ashamed. 

“National Review is a failing publication that has lost it’s way. It’s circulation is way down w its influence being at an all time low. Sad!” he wrote. “Very few people read the National Review because it only knows how to criticize, but not how to lead.”

The flagship magazine of the conservative movement has been banned by the Republican Party because they refuse to back a certain candidate in a primary. You understand how unusual this is right? Magazines often refuse to back certain candidates and give their reasons for doing it. They often do the opposite and endorse them. They don’t usually get barred from participating in party forums because of it.

After all, there are still more than 874 candidates running for president. Why should this one candidate be immune from criticism?

Well, I’m going to guess it’s two things. The first of course is that Trump scares the hell out of them because they think he’s going to run third party if he doesn’t get his way. The pother is that their antipathy toward that big meanie Ted Cruz is so strong they’ll give Trump anything he wants. Either way, it’s a pathetic tableau.

The good news is that Trump really seems to be consolidating that white supremacist vote. Look who he’s quoting now:

“@WhiteGenocideTM: @realDonaldTrump Poor Jeb. I could’ve sworn I saw him outside Trump Tower the other day! pic.twitter.com/e5uLRubqla“

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2016

If you have a chance to look at Trump’s twitter stream do it. You will not be believe this is a man who is running to be president of the most powerful nation on earth. He’s got the emotional maturity of an 8 year old and I’m not exaggerating.

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The counter attack. Lol.

by digby

The conservative writer who organized the big anti-Donald Trump manifesto out tonight, along with three of the writers who signed on, to explain why they do not want Trump as president and do not think he is a great vessel for conservative values.

National Review is running a huge anti-Trump manifesto available online later tonight, organized by editor Rich Lowry. The writers include Glenn Beck, conservative media watchdog Brent Bozell, Erick Erickson, Bill Kristol, Dana Loesch, Michael Medved, evangelical leader Russell Moore, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Katie Pavlich, John Podhoretz, and others––for a grand total of 22 major anti-Trump conservatives.

Lowry told Megyn Kelly this isn’t the establishment turning on Trump, because now it appears the establishment is starting to warm up to him. He declared that Trump “doesn’t truly understand the ideas and principles that make this country great,” and rejected Trump comparing himself to Ronald Reagan on the grounds that Reagan “didn’t just show up one day” and suddenly say he was a Republican.

Loesch, Bozell, and Pavlich then joined Kelly, and they all were equally harsh on Trump. Loesch said this is about “principles over popularity,” Bozell said Trump has done pretty much nothing for the conservative movement, and Pavlich said Trump continues to “espouse liberal ideas” on the campaign trail.

Watch the video here.

Oh my God, this is so good.

Heads up: Drone protester jailed as drones drop from the sky
by Tom Sullivan

Graphic from Remotely Operated Aircraft Operations
in the National Airspace System, FAA website

Bill Moyers reports that Grady Flores, a 59-year-old peace activist in New York state, has begun serving a six-month prison sentence:

And what exactly did Grady Flores do to warrant spending the next six months in jail? She photographed a peaceful protest outside Hancock Field Air National Guard Base near Syracuse, New York. The base is where the US trains pilots to launch drone strikes in the Middle East, particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. It wasn’t a crime for her to be taking pictures of the demonstration, but when she briefly and unintentionally — yes, unintentionally — stepped onto a road that belongs to the base, she violated what authorities called “an order of protection,” which had been issued in 2012 to forbid protesters from approaching the home or workplace of Col. Earl Evans, a commander of the 174th Attack Wing of the Air National Guard. She had never met Evans, never threatened him, never showed any intention of harming him.

Nonetheless, a town justice, David Gideon, issued the order to “protect” the Colonel from the activists. That’s right — the commander of a major military operation, piloting drones on lethal missions half-way around the world, requested a court order of protection against a group of mostly gray-haired demonstrators whom he had never met. In stepping briefly on the roadway at the base, Grady Flores violated that order, despite the fact that, as she says, “We weren’t at the security gate. We were out at the roadway.”

Now get this: The order issued by Judge Gideon was of the sort commonly used against victims of sexual or domestic abuse. “The legal terms ‘victim’ and ‘witness’ have been expanded in this case in a way that’s new and unique in the state of New York,” said attorney Lance Salisbury at a press conference yesterday before Grady Flores was hauled off to jail.

It was not Flores’ first protest. The Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars has been protesting the drone program since 2010.

President Obama and the Pentagon insist that using drones in pursuit of terrorists causes minimal civilian casualties and protects American troops, but Grady Flores takes issue with that justification. She told us she had been moved, in particular, by reports of the staggering numbers of civilians killed by US drones, and she says her fears were confirmed by documents recently leaked to journalists at The Intercept revealing that during one five-month stretch, 90 percent of those killed in one part of Northeastern Afghanistan were not the intended target.

Begone, before somebody drops a house on you, too!

Sad to say, but accidentally dropping ordnance on foreigners is not liable to get the attention of most Americans. If a woman picking okra in North Waziristan looks like a terrorist to a drone flying at 20,000 feet as seen on a computer monitor half a world away, lobbing a Hellfire missile at her is no big deal to many Americans. Better safe than sorry. They felt the same way about abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

But what if those same drones started dropping like Dorothy’s house into American neighborhoods? To meet “a virtually insatiable appetite” for new drones and new drone pilots, the military is looking to expand training operations in U.S. airspace, like the missions flown out of Hancock Field, or Grand Forks Air Force Base, ND, or Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. They are even hiring private contractors to meet the demand. What could go worng?

Coincidentally, drone crashes were back in the news this week:

A record number of Air Force drones crashed in major accidents last year, documents show, straining the U.S. military’s fleet of robotic aircraft when it is in more demand than ever for counterterrorism missions in an expanding array of war zones.

[…]

The Reaper has been bedeviled by a rash of sudden electrical failures that have caused the 2 1/2-ton drone to lose power and drop from the sky, according to accident-investigation documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Investigators have traced the problem to a faulty starter-generator, but have been unable to pinpoint why it goes haywire or devise a permanent fix.

The Washington Post reports this week that “all but one of the 20 Air Force drone accidents last year occurred overseas.” These included the Reaper operated from Corpus Christi by U.S. Customs and Border Protection that went haywire and had to ditch off the coast of California. Then there was that Global Hawk flown out of Naval Air Station Patuxent River that crashed in Maryland in 2012. The reported cause was mechanical failure. “We have reliability challenges with this block of aircraft,” Capt. James B. Hoke told reporters.

And the Predator out of Hancock Air Base that crashed into Lake Ontario in November 2014. And the Predator that crashed near Creech Air Force Base in 2013. It was just one of 12 that crashed in Nevada between 2002 and 2013. Another crashed there last April due to pilot error … and wind.

So maybe it is a good thing that the FAA seems to have missed its Dec. 31, 2015 date for issuing rules for commingling military drones with your Aunt Millie’s flight to Cleveland.

SEC. 334. PUBLIC UNMANNED AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS.

(b) STANDARDS FOR OPERATION AND CERTIFICATION.—Not later than December 31, 2015, the Administrator shall develop and implement operational and certification requirements for the operation of public unmanned aircraft systems in the national airspace system.

“Public” in this context means government/police/military (civil aviation is covered under Section 332). The Air Force and Air National Guard plan to operate a fleet of large UAVs out of 144 or more locations nationwide. Just for reference, the Air Force’s Global Hawk has a wingspan exceeding that of a Boeing 737.

But just so you know it’s safety first in Washington, the FAA announced a record $1.9 million fine in October against aerial photography firm SkyPan for allegedly conducting 65 flights of its small drones around New York City and Chicago without the required authorization, thus “endangering the safety of our airspace.” SkyPan now boasts a Section 333 UAS exemption.

The establishment devil recoils from the Ted Cruz holy water

by digby

I want to laugh over this stuff and would really enjoy it if the alternative wasn’t that messianic Pompadoured Bond Villain:

“I think we’ll lose if he’s [Cruz] our nominee,” said Orrin Hatch, the most senior Republican in the Senate.

“There’s a lot of people who don’t feel he can appeal to people across the board,” Hatch said. “For us to win, we have to appeal to the moderates and independents. We can’t just act like that only one point of view is the only way to go. That’s where Ted is going to have some trouble.”

It’s not just Jeb Bush supporters like Hatch who are speaking out more aggressively. A large number of GOP senators say Cruz’s divisive tactics, which have included describing his colleagues as part of a corrupt “Washington cartel,” will make it hard — if not impossible — to get behind him if he’s the nominee.

“It would be a major challenge because of the wounds that are deep,” said Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, who is neutral in the race so far.

“An awful lot of us really didn’t like to be targeted as corrupt, establishment bought by the lobby establishment,” Coats added. “It sure looks like someone was using it as a way to gain notoriety as the only true conservative in Washington.”

What a bunch of whiners.

 But man, they are making some people really, really mad. Get a load of this from Red State:

Their dislike of Cruz is simply personal. They expected him to arrive in the Senate as an empty receptacle into which they could pour their Failure Theater and stupidity. Instead, they found that Texas has actually elected a man who believed what his constituents did and took seriously his duty to represent them.

While Donald Trump is a member of the establishment, our self-anointed ruling class, and the establishment is warming to his candidacy, the same is not true for Ted Cruz.

Indeed, some in the party establishment do believe that Trump would have cross-over appeal, despite his incendiary comments.

“I’ve come around a little bit on Trump,” Hatch said Thursday. “I’m not so sure we’d lose if he’s our nominee because he’s appealing to people who a lot of the Republican candidates have not appealed to in the past.”

The establishment reacts to Cruz like the Devil to Holy Water. He is the clear anti-establishment choice in this race.

Hatch has a point though. Trump is appealing to some new potential voters out there. Stormfront Nazis weren’t all that keen on Romney and Mccain but they’re doing robocalls for Trump. Could be big.

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