Month: February 2016

Trump’s closing SC argument: kill ’em all

by digby

I have been writing Trump’s torture and summary execution endorsements constantly since he first said it last fall. He is crazed on the subject. The mainstream press noted it in passing but didn’t seem to see it as anything unusual.

They are taking note of it more lately since he is getting increasingly bloodthirsty and outrageous when he discusses it. But it’s nothing new. This is about his last rally in South Carolina:

Trump repeated – favorably – an apparent myth about how General John Pershing summarily executed dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines with tainted ammunition during a guerilla war against the occupying United States.

“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”

The story appears to be a hoax spread via e-mail forwards, according to rumor tracker Snopes.com, with no evidence it occurred.

The moral of the tale, according to Trump: “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”

Trump was unimpressed with waterboarding, a banned interrogation tactic that he has pledged to bring back against suspected terrorists, and supplement with far worse forms of abuse.

“Is it torture or not? It’s so borderline,” he said. “It’s like minimal, minimal, minimal torture.”

In a previous speech, Trump called his opponent Senator Ted Cruz, whose father was tortured as a young man in Cuba, a “pu**y” for not sharing his zeal for the practice.

Trump went on to boast how fears of terrorism had boosted him politically, including in South Carolina where he leads a number of polls by double-digit margins.

“When Paris happened, everyone started saying, ‘We want Trump!’” he said. “The polls came in, 60 percent, 70 percent, 72 percent. This is 72 percent with 17 people running. Now we’re down to 6, we got rid of all these people. It’s so great. It’s so great.”
[…]
Trump’s speech was a hit with the audience, which cheered throughout.

Trump supporter Eleanor Crume, 72, told MSNBC afterwards that she agreed with Trump’s stance on waterboarding because terrorists should not be “pampered.”

“We need someone who can lead the country because people are scared to death,” she said. “It’s only a matter of time before terrorists come and start chopping Christian heads off in the United States.”

South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Henry McMaster, Trump’s most prominent endorser in the state, set the tone for the event before Trump came on.

“How many of you feel real safe right now?”

“Nooooooooo!” the audience droned in response.

“We’re gonna change that,” he replied.

Here’s the Youtube o the speech last night. If you want to see the sick torture part, start at 29:00 in.

It’s not just the fact that Trump says this horrific, evil stuff that’s so awful.  It’s that his audience screams in ecstasy when he says it.

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QOTD: Trumpie

by digby

I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of Justice Scalia if it were held in a Mosque? Very sad that he did not go!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2016

Remember: he says what they’re thinking.

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Polls open in SC
by Tom Sullivan

Supporters from Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Indiana came
to upstate SC this week in support of Ted Cruz.

Marco Rubio (with Gov. Nikki Haley and U.S. Sen. Tim Scott in tow) stopped Thursday at the Beacon Drive-In in Spartanburg, SC, a regular campaigning venue. Candidates get their insides lubricated with the Beacon’s onion rings, washed down with iced tea sweet enough to double as pancake syrup. Glenn Beck stopped there a week ago to stump for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. But Rubio failed to draw much of a crowd. He still lags in polls behind businessman Donald Trump and Cruz. Trump avoids the mom-and-pop venues, preferring arena-style campaign events.

All three held rallies in Charleston yesterday, the site of last summer’s massacre of nine black citizens at a Bible study. The New York Times editorial board believes old times there not forgotten by segregationists will help Donald Trump in today’s South Carolina Republican primary:

This week, a survey released by Public Policy Polling suggests that South Carolina’s segregationist nostalgia has accrued to the benefit of Donald Trump, the race-baiting front-runner in Saturday’s primary. First, the poll found that 70 percent of likely Trump voters believe that the flag should still be flying over the state capitol. And a plurality of Mr. Trump’s supporters wish that the South had won the Civil War.

Mr. Trump’s nativist platform resonates strongly with these voters. Eighty percent support his proposal for banning Muslims from entering the country; 62 percent approve of creating a database on Muslims; 40 percent like the idea of shutting down all mosques in the country. When asked about confining Japanese-Americans to prison camps during World War II, nearly a third of Trump supporters responded that it was a good thing.

But with South Carolinians’ “distressfully high tolerance for negative campaigning,” Trump supporters aren’t the only ones wrapping themselves in the Confederate flag:

Late this week, residents told ABC News they were receiving more than a dozen “robo-calls” a night. A recent one, released Thursday night by the pro-Cruz Super PAC Courageous Conservative Political Action Committee, bashed Trump for encouraging the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house.

“People like Donald Trump are always butting their noses into other people’s business,” a grave voice intones. “Trump talks about our flag like it’s a social disease.”

Polls are already open today as South Carolina Republicans head to the polls in their presidential primary. Official closing time is 7 p.m. EST. News sources predict a record turnout:

As of midday Thursday, about 38,000 absentee ballots had been cast in the GOP contest. That exceeds the 35,595 absentee ballots cast in 2008 — a record total that included both the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries.

The turnout record for the GOP primary was set in 2012 — at 583,000 votes. However, voters who want to cast ballots for or against GOP front-runner Donald Trump are expected to exceed that total.

Elections officials in Lexington County, a Republican bellwether, expect 20,000 more votes to be cast Saturday than during the 2012 primary.

In part, that is because there are 230,000 more voters in South Carolina than in 2012.

Steve Benen cites last-minute polls from South Carolina conducted after last Saturday’s debate in Greenville. The first is from Fox News:

1. Donald Trump: 32% (down from 35% in December)

2. Ted Cruz: 19% (up from 14%)

3. Marco Rubio: 15% (up from 14%)

4. Jeb Bush: 9% (up from 5%)

4. Ben Carson: 9% (down from 15%)

6. John Kasich: 6% (up from 1%)

And while these results are roughly in line with the other available data, the results of a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll feature a surprise.

1. Donald Trump: 28% (down from 36% in January)

2. Ted Cruz: 23% (up from 20%)

3. Marco Rubio: 15% (up from 14%)

4. Jeb Bush: 13% (up from 9%)

5. Ben Carson: 9% (up from 8%)

5. John Kasich: 9% (up from 1%)

Trump’s five-point advantage in this poll is the smallest lead for the frontrunner since the fall, when Carson pulled to within single digits.

Benen added that South Carolina’s modified winner-take-all primary makes the contest much different from Iowa and New Hampshire:

A total of 50 delegates are available in tomorrow’s primary: 29 go to the candidate who wins, and then three delegates are awarded for each of state’s seven congressional districts. Mathematically, it’s almost impossible to win the primary without winning a few of the districts, so it’s safe to say Saturday’s winner will end up with somewhere between 38 and 50 delegates, just from this one contest.

And that would pack a significant electoral punch: Iowa and New Hampshire combined offered the candidates about 50 delegates.

Danielle Vinson, political science professor at Furman University, cautioned that if Cruz does not do well in South Carolina against Trump, he could lose support quickly among the anti-establishment crowd.

Democrats compete later today in the Nevada caucuses.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

This is how I feel at the end of this long week:

Lion cub napoleon shows off his mighty roar pic.twitter.com/XHnObZupAU

— Cute Emergency (@CuteEmergency) February 17, 2016

A powerful, powerful symbol of progress

by digby

That will be one of the most iconic pictures of this era. That little boy will grow up knowing that someone who looks like him can have the most powerful, important job in the world. That’s a beautiful thing.

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by digby

Somebody’s having a little tantrum for being so obviously in the tank for Donald Trump that he can hardly catch his breath:

“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Friday morning escalated what’s largely been a behind-the-scenes ratings battle between MSNBC and CNN by bashing the rival network’s town hall coverage of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. 

Scarborough asserted that his show’s coverage has been fair to Trump while asking “tough questions.” He also issued a challenge to media reporters to compare the coverage of Trump’s presidential campaign on “Morning Joe” to that of its competitors. 

“I challenge media reporters that aren’t employed by our competitors,” he said in a thinly veiled reference to CNN Money’s Dylan Byers, who recently wrote an article calling Scarborough’s relationship with Donald Trump into question.

“I challenge media reporters to look at our town hall two nights ago and look at CNN’s town hall meeting with Anderson Cooper last week and just compare the questions,” Scarborough continued, presumably referring to CNN’s Thursday night town hall. “And guess what? This is what I love. We live in an era of transcripts. The transcripts don’t lie, the words are on the pages. Now if you want to lie, you can keep making up your own narrative that’s disconnected from reality. It’s okay because the truth is in the transcripts. Why don’t you read them?” 

Scarborough then invoked his mother, giving a Southern twist to the old adage “He among us without sin cast the first stone.” 

“You know my mom always told me in the swamps of northwest Florida, ‘When ya point a finger at someone, you got four fingers pointing back at ya,'” he said. 

Scarborough also took umbrage with the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple criticizing him and co-host Mika Brzezinski for not asking Trump tough questions without subjecting CNN to the same scrutiny. 

“I think it was Eric Wemple of the Washington Post who said, ‘Well, how dare you have a town hall meeting where you don’t ask about his racist comments and his thing on Muslims and all these terrible comments?'” Scarborough said. “By the way, CNN, he didn’t write that article after CNN was asking what (Trump’s) favorite flavor of ice cream was and how he slept and what does he order when he goes through McDonald’s.” 

“We asked tough questions and it wasn’t the first time that we ever interviewed him. And that’s the frustration,” he added. “We’ve asked the tough questions about Muslims. We’ve asked the tough questions about Mexicans. We’ve asked the tough questions on John McCain.

That Town Hall was an embarrassment to journalism. Joe Scarborough is obviously a Trump supporter. He shouldn’t even be interviewing him on his own show much less hosting a Town Hall meeting in prime time.

It’s likely that he and Trump sold it to the MSNBC brass as a big ratings grabber and the brass, being without any standards, agreed to go for it. It was a ratings disaster. But then why wouldn’t it be? If you are a right winger you didn’t even know it was on. If you wanted a Town Hall without a personal political agenda you could have tuned in to CNN and watched Anderson Cooper interview Marco Rubio and Ben Carson. Why in the world did anyone think that MSNBCs audience would have been interested in seeing a Republican partisan in a lovefest with a white nationalist? What were they thinking?

It looks like these two Morning Joe hosts have been stung by their reviews. As well they should be.

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Cruzin’ on the Appalachian trail

by digby

Big catch for Cruz today:

South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford endorsed Ted Cruz at a Charleston rally Friday afternoon, boosting the Texas senator in the final hours before the first-in-the-South primary.

Polls here largely show a close race between Cruz and Marco Rubio for second place, with Donald Trump well outpacing both of them. Sanford’s endorsement of Cruz helps him notch some credibility in the southern part of the state, where Sanford’s district is, even as Cruz has been mostly concentrated on the more conservative upstate region.

Proving once more that even the most pious conservatives can be flexible when they need to be.

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Thank God he’s no longer on the Judiciary Committee

by digby

It was almost 25 years ago when Joe Biden, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee presided over the Clarence Thomas hearings.  He was so deferential to him and so obtuse that it required a group of women marching over from the House of Representatives to force him to hold a real hearing. Everyone knows the result — 25 years of the most conservative court in American history, a court which has Biden’s fingerpints all over it. Let’s just say his judgment about these matters isn’t exactly stellar.

So hopefully President Obama will weigh his advice very carefully and listen to others as well:

Echoing some recent Republican arguments about judicial nominations, Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday suggested that President Barack Obama will not nominate a staunch liberal to replace Justice Antonin Scalia at a time when the ideological balance of the Supreme Court is up in the air.

In the wide-ranging interview that often turned provocative, especially when he complained about the Democratic presidential race he decided to skip, the vice president flatly said an Obama nominee in the outspoken progressive mold of former Justice William Brennan is “not going to happen.” Biden, who fiercely defended legislative prerogatives as the longtime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also volunteered that “it was never intended for the president to pick whoever he wants and that’s it.” And he suggested the Senate has the right to consider not only a nominee’s philosophy, but how much the nomination would change the court, a common GOP talking point these days.

“This is a potentially gigantic game-changer,” Biden told a POLITICO reporter and a Washington Post reporter during a sitdown on Air Force Two. “My advice is the only way we get someone on the Court now or even later is to do what was done in the past.”
Biden mentioned two examples of Republican nominees who were confirmed in times of flux because they weren’t overtly ideological conservatives — current swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, “who wasn’t a conservative’s conservative,” and former Justice David Souter, who often ended up voting with the Court’s liberal wing. He said Obama also intends to nominate “someone who has demonstrated they have an open mind, someone who doesn’t have a specific agenda,” even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he shouldn’t bother nominating anyone in his last year.

Biden said he hasn’t met with Obama to discuss the nomination yet, and he refused to discuss specific candidates like D.C. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan, who was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2013. But he said there are plenty of available candidates without reputations as liberal advocates.

“There are a whole hell of a lot of people who Republicans have already voted for who fall into that category, and also people they haven’t voted for yet,” said Biden, who noted that he has presided over more judicial nominations than anyone in history other than the late Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi.

This is the same guy who went behind Harry Reid’s back to make the 2011 budget deal even worse than it already was and who continuously advised the president to keep chasing the wingnuts over the cliff. Let’s hope the President has learned from that mistake.

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He can say anything as long as it isn’t politically correct


by digby

I wrote about Trump’s GOP again for Salon this morning. It’s coming more and more into focus:

Alan Grayson is a Superdelegate. Help him decide — Clinton or Sanders?

by Gaius Publius

Ah, democracy; it creeps in through the cracks, even through the cracks of the deliberately undemocratic use of superdelegates by the king- and queenmakers in the Democratic Party. (Ironic name, that.)

Here’s what I mean by “undemocratic” — Debbie Wasserman Schultz explains it to Jake Tapper (h/t Daily Kos diarist Th0rn; my emphasis):

TAPPER: Hillary Clinton lost to Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire by 22 percentage points, the biggest victory in a contested Democratic primary there since John F. Kennedy. But it looks as though Sanders and Clinton are leaving the Granite State with the same number of delegates in their pockets because Clinton has the support of New Hampshire’s superdelegates, these party insiders.

What do you tell voters who are new to the process who say this makes them feel like it’s all rigged?

WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ: Let me just make sure I can clarify what was available during the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. The unpledged delegates [superdelegates] are a separate category. … Unpledged delegates exist, really, to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists.

… which, of course, is exactly what they are doing, running against the grassroots. She means: “They exist so Party leaders won’t have to compete with grassroots activists for control.” Tapper replies:

TAPPER: I’m not sure that that answer would satisfy an anxious, young voter but let’s move on.

Clinton and Sanders are competing against each other for regular (pledged) delegates. The superdelegates are competing against the grassroots for control of the process.

Alan Grayson is a Superdelegate. Help him decide whom to endorse.

Which brings us to Alan Grayson. He unDemocratically wants to put democracy back in the process, by asking you to help him decide. Should he support Clinton or Sanders? Read on, or just click this link to help him decide.

Grayson writes:

Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. Talk to me about it.

I’m a “superdelegate”; I want to listen to you. You decide: Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. The choice is, literally, yours. Go vote now.

Bernie or Hillary? You tell me.

I’m a “superdelegate.” In July, at the Democratic Convention, I will be voting for one or the other. I’d like to know which one you think I should vote for, and why.

Unlike “some people,” I will not be making this decision based on who can host the best fundraiser for me. I will not be making this decision based on what my fat-cat donors tell me, in part because I don’t have any.

I’ll be making this decision based on what you and your friends tell me. I’m inviting you to vote on this, and give your reasons. Democracy – what a concept!

Click here to tell me whom you support for President – and invite your friends to do the same

Look, I’d be perfectly happy if our nominee were chosen exclusively in the primaries. But 15% of the delegates to the Democratic Convention are chosen because of who they are, not whom they support. And I happen to be one of them. I wrestled with that responsibility for a while, until I realized that I don’t have to decide – I can let you decide.

My official title is “Representative.” Isn’t that sort of what “Representatives” are supposed to do? Represent the wishes of others?

So tell me: Bernie or Hillary? And why:

GO VOTE

If you want me to endorse Bernie Sanders, then you can vote for me to support Bernie. If you want me to endorse Hillary Clinton, then you can vote for me to support Hillary. If you want me to switch to the Republican party and vote for one of those lunatics, then why are you even reading this? You can expect that to happen when the Atlantic Ocean freezes over. Oh, and Hell, too.

Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton? The choice is yours. Go here to vote right now, and get lots of others to do the same.

Don’t wait too long on this one. The Florida Presidential Primary is just four weeks away, and I’m going to make my decision – excuse me, our decision – long before that. If this works, then maybe other “superdelegates” will follow suit, and netroots activism can turn one of the least democratic elements of the UnDemocratic Party into something really special – a decision Of the People, By the People and For the People.

So what are you waiting for? Go vote. Like now. Stop reading this, and go vote.

Courage,

Rep. Alan Grayson

What do you mean, “I couldn’t be the president of the United States of America”?
Tell me something, it’s still “We the people”, right?
—Megadeth, “Peace Sells” (1986).

And if you feel like making a contribution to help Grayson fight for real progressive values in the U.S. Senate, you can do that too.

GP
 

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