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Month: March 2016

P.T. Barnum was right

Published by digby on March 25, 2016

P.T. Barnum was right

by digby

This focus group of Trump and Cruz voters is pretty depressing:

On Tuesday night, a group of Republican and Republican-leaning voters here had a decision to make about Donald J. Trump.

They were asked: What campaign theme song would best capture his candidacy?

The voters, who were participating in a focus group, came up with a hit parade of rock anthems. “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” “Eye of the Tiger.” “We Are The Champions.”

“Hells Bells.”

Finally, someone suggested “Takin’ Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and the whole room began nodding.

I keep saying that his “business” experience is what these people like about him. They admire businessmen. If that’s populism it’s not the kind that takes on the Big Money Boyz. They worship Big Money Boyz.

“The people of the United States are disillusioned or fed up with the way government is being run,” said Gabrielle Ritter, 39, an independent who is a stay-at-home mother. “So I think that that could be why Trump is so appealing, is that he comes across as someone who is very decisive and just, ‘Anything you got, throw it at me, I can take care of it.’”

Yet, Ms. Ritter added, she has serious concerns about Mr. Trump if he is going to be the Republican nominee, let alone the next president. “Are you going to be able to do these things that you say you’re going to do, in a political environment?” she asked. “He comes across as hard-hitting, but can he play well with others?”

What she really means is, can he make good on his promise to force others to give him “the deal” he wants? And in the minds of conservatives that means — no compromise. They believe that Trump may have the magical ability to accomplish anything he sets out to do. The only question is whether he can make the Democrats go along and say “thank you sir may I have another.”

There were some people who questioned his temperament and a least one who said he is a bully and a misogynist. But apparently, most of them are willoing to consider him especially if he can temper his personality just a little bit.

The group was more or less split between backers of Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz. Those who said they were hesitant about Mr. Trump did not necessarily seem bothered by his views on Muslims or immigration or his absence of foreign policy experience, but said they thought his disposition would make it hard to work with Congress, as well as minorities like African-Americans and Hispanics.

His disposition? It’s not good. But neither are the policies. nobody would want to help him do any of that. Ever.

But not to worry. Despite their reservations about his personality, they’ll probably get over it soon enough:

“This is the base, and the base is totally divided,” Mr. Hart said of the voters. “The amount of distance Trump has to travel to bring together this coalition is a huge, huge territory.”

But, he added, pointing to those who were skeptical of Mr. Trump, “most of these voters are not rooting against him but are rooting for him, and if he gives them an opportunity to accept him, they will accept him.”

And what some voters saw as troubling, others saw as a virtue. “I believe in you,” Steve Berman, 59, an independent supporting Mr. Trump, began his postcard.

“You are a tremendous businessman,” wrote Mr. Berman, a screenwriter. “Please use your vast knowledge, toughness, brains, brawn in guiding this country. The fact that you are not a politician makes me like you even more. Best Steve.”

They want a strongman, it’s really that simple.

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RIP Garry Shandling

Published by digby on March 24, 2016

RIP Garry Shandling

by digby

I was sorry to hear that he died today.  He was one of the funniest comedians of his generation, truly hilarious and yet deep in that way the best comedians are.  The Larry Sanders show was the funniest show on cable in its day.  Here’s one of my favorite laugh out loud scenes from the series:

RIP…

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The woman problem

Published by digby on March 24, 2016

The woman problem

by digby

You’ve undoubtedly heard by now about Trump criticizing Heidi Cruz’s looks and Ted calling him a sniveling coward in return. If you haven’t, you can read about it here. My God.

In light of all that, this article by Franklin Foer about Trump’s one true philosophy of life, misogyny, is a must read. It points out that for all of Trump’s inconsistencies throughout time, the one thing’s that’s never changed is his primitive view of women. The stories of his mistreatment, crude comments and simple dominance have been part of his legend for decades. It seems to be one of the things people like most about him.

I urge you to read the whole thing. I’m sure there are episodes you haven’t heard about. I’ve read a lot about Trump but I’d never heard some of these stories. It covers all the various ways in which Trump’s alpha male persona is formed by misogyny and male competitiveness.

As Foer writes:

Trump wants us to know all about his sex life. He doesn’t regard sex as a private activity. It’s something he broadcasts to demonstrate his dominance, of both women and men. In his view, treating women like meat is a necessary precondition for winning, and winning is all that matters in his world. By winning, Trump means asserting superiority. And since life is a zero-sum game, superiority can only be achieved at someone else’s expense.

That made me think of this 2011 video we’ve all seen more than a few times:

When I first saw that I assumed Trump was under the impression that Kelly was quite “fond” of him. The flirty look on his face said he found her very fetching and he let her know it. He thought they had “a thing.” When she criticized him later he took it as a betrayal and lashed out like a spurned lover. Now he stalks her like an angry ex-husband.

And then there’s this other side:

Women labor under a cloud of Trump’s distrust. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. Working moms are particularly lacking in loyalty, he believes, and thus do not make for good employees. “She’s not giving me 100 percent. She’s giving me 84 percent, and 16 percent is going towards taking care of children,” he told Mika Brzezinski. (Further evidence of his dim view of working moms: Trump once notoriously blurted that the pumping of breast milk in the office is “disgusting.”)

This is one reason that evangelicals, both men and women, gravitate to Trump, despite his obvious lack of interest in religion and blatantly loose morals. He represents the possibility of a return to patriarchy, to a time when men were men, and didn’t have to apologize for it. While he celebrates his own sexuality, he believes that female sexuality has spun out of control and needs to be contained. The best example of this view is a reality show called Lady or a Tramp, which Trump developed for Fox but never aired. The premise of the show was that Trump would take “girls in love with the party life” and send them off for a “stern course” on manners. “We are all sick and tired of the glamorization of these out-of-control young women,” he told Variety, “so I have taken it upon myself to do something about it.”

He is one sick cookie.

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Part Two of the conservative movement’s dilemma

Published by digby on March 24, 2016

Part Two of the conservative movement’s dilemma

by digby

Yesterday I featured the first in a series from OG wingnut Richard Viguerie’s shop aimed at helping conservative movement stalwarts figure out what to do about the prospect of Donald Trump becoming the GOP nominee. Today they published Part II:

As things stand now Trump has 739 delegates, Senator Ted Cruz has 465, Marco Rubio who has suspended his campaign has 166, Governor John Kasich has 143 and the other candidates who have suspended their campaigns hold the remaining 15, with 6 uncommitted. (These numbers can and will shift due to varying state rules on how delegates must vote if their pledged candidate suspends his campaign.)

While the math of delegate accumulation does not make a Trump outright victory inevitable, the math is on his side.

Trump won Arizona handily with a near-majority of 47 percent and his current cache of over 700 delegates Donald Trumppretty much seals the math against any other candidate approaching a majority of 1237 delegates going into the Republican National Convention.

Senator Cruz’s attempt to form an alliance with the establishment to stop Trump has not produced the votes he needs to win a pre-convention majority.

While the western primaries should be good for Senator Ted Cruz, it appears that he is not picking-up the public boost from elected officials and establishment political figures that would indicate a real honest “unity movement” that brings conservative-leaning elements of the Republican establishment together with movement conservatives to actually deliver delegates to Cruz.

What I see on the part of Senator Cruz’s erstwhile establishment Republican allies is not an effort to deliver the nomination to him, but an effort to create a chaotic situation in which no outsider has a majority, thereby delivering to the Washington Cartel’s powerbrokers and insiders the ability to choose the nominee at the Convention.

If that indeed happens, then conservatives will have to face the reality of working with Donald Trump or opposing him at the GOP Convention.

So what should conservatives do if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee?

We see four convention and post-convention scenarios and today review scenario number 2; sitting out the election as some 4 million conservatives were alleged to have done in 2006.

Scenario #2: Pursue the “Benedict Option.” Let the establishment GOP stew in their own juices by refusing to support Trump and sitting out the election as a way of demonstrating principled opposition to Trump and the failed Republican establishment.

This option, while appealing to some individuals, should be dismissed out of hand because it guarantees victory for Hillary Clinton.

In 2006 many conservatives voiced the opinion that it was worth the risk of sitting out the election to get rid of the corrupt Capitol Hill leaders of the Republican Party.

History has shown that while getting rid of the corrupt Dennis Hastert was absolutely necessary, his removal came at a terrible price. What’s more, Hastert’s removal did not advanced conservative governance. To the contrary it put the malleable dealmaker John Boehner in the Speaker’s chair and set in motion a series of deals and cave-ins that set the stage for the rise of Donald Trump and the problems conservatives now face as Trump’s support builds.

Clinton has said she would appoint radical pro-abortion, anti-First Amendment, anti-Second Amendment, and anti-Tenth Amendment judges to the Supreme Court and the federal District and Appeals Courts.

Setting aside the fact that during a campaign stop in Deocorah, Iowa Mrs. Clinton said she likes the idea of Barack Obama sitting on the Supreme Court, conservatives considering sitting out the election if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee must understand what a Hillary Clinton presidency would look like and recognize that however distasteful Donald Trump’s lifestyle and obnoxious rants may be to cultural conservatives they are nothing compared to the threat to constitutional liberty offered by Hillary Clinton.

On the First Amendment Clinton said:

The Citizens United ruling should be reversed “once and for all, even if it takes a constitutional amendment,” according to MSNBC’s Ari Melber.

In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects unlimited independent political expenditures by nonprofit groups. The case famously arose when Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation that produces documentaries, made a movie attacking Clinton and released advertisements promoting the movie during her presidential campaign in 2008.

A federal court ruled that the regnant campaign laws banned the airing of those ads and the movie in the 30 days prior to the Democratic primaries. When the Supreme Court heard the case in 2009, President Obama’s attorneys argued that the ban was constitutional — even going to far as to say that the government could ban certain books that were to be published close to an election.

As Joel Gehrke writing for National Review observed Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked, for instance, whether a campaign biography in book form could be banned. The New York Times reported at the time that “[The Obama government’s lawyer] said yes, so long as it was paid for with a corporation’s general treasury money, as opposed to its political action committee.”

Instead of accepting Clinton’s stultifying statist view of the First Amendment, the court ruled that the government cannot deprive people of the right to engage in political speech simply because they have formed a corporation. “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. The Clinton – Obama argument “would permit government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form… This troubling assertion of brooding governmental power cannot be reconciled with the confidence and stability in civic discourse that the First Amendment must secure.”

On the Second Amendment Clinton said:

American gun owners are terrorists. “We cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.” Note that for good measure Mrs. Clinton made it clear that it is she who intends to police the “viewpoint” of the American people.

“We’ve got to go after this,” Clinton said at a 2015 private fundraiser. “And here again, the Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment. And I am going to make that case every chance I get.”

The Supreme Court’s Heller ruling, authored by the late Justice Antonin Scalia is considered the most sweeping Second Amendment decision made by the nation’s highest court in recent years.

In Heller the Supreme Court affirmed that the Second Amendment affirmed the inherent right of individuals to keep and bear arms whether or not they were members of an organized government militia in 2008. That ruling overturned the District of Columbia’s total ban on ownership of handguns and other strict forms of gun control.

On the Tenth Amendment Clinton said:

“I would support states and localities that are experimenting with this [legalizing marijuana],” but regarding the States’ reserved powers on matters of regulating abortion and same-sex “marriage,” Mrs. Clinton’s view of the Tenth Amendment is not so expansive.

While most people do not want Congress involved in financing the murder of children. Hillary Clinton is not among those people.

Clinton’s idea of a “reasonable restriction” is something at “the very end of the third trimester.” But after she received Planned Parenthood’s endorsement Clinton “really got the abortion groupies going,” as National Review’s Ian Tuttle put it, by calling for an end to the Hyde Amendment.

In other words, said Tuttle, not only does Hillary Clinton want abortion on demand up until the moment you can shake Junior’s hand; she also wants to force taxpayers, abortion opponents included, to pay for it. This is more than coercion; it’s public policy as vindictiveness, a taxpayer-funded middle finger at every person of goodwill with whom she disagrees.

Clinton’s idea of the outer limits of when an abortion may legally be performed is eerily reminiscent of convicted abortion murderer Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s remark about one of his victims that, “This baby is big enough to walk around with me or walk me to the bus stop.”

But abortion isn’t the only Tenth Amendment issue that Hillary Clinton has attacked conservatives and threatens their values.

In 2008, Clinton explicitly opposed same-sex marriage, saying that she favored civil unions but that decisions about the legality of marriage should be left to the states.

But, contemplating her 2016 run for the White House, she did a sudden about face and announced that “gay rights are human rights.’’

“I believe America is at its best when we champion the freedom and dignity of every human being,’’ Mrs. Clinton said in a video posted by the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual “rights” advocacy group. Her announcement came unsurprisingly just as the Supreme Court was about to hear two landmark homosexual “rights” cases that shredded the Tenth Amendment and mandated same-sex “marriage” in all 50 states.

In 2008 and 2012 some analysts looked at the numbers and concluded that some 4 million otherwise engaged conservatives failed to vote and that their votes distributed in the right states could have prevented the election of Barack Obama.

The same numbers that are at work in yesterday’s Third Party campaign scenario would come into play if conservatives choose principle over politics and sit out the election.

Given that Obama won by some 5 million popular votes what kind of a landslide in favor of Hillary Clinton would voters deliver if conservatives make an active choice to sit out the 2016 election? Such a decision could elect Hillary Clinton, handover control of the Senate to Democrats and perhaps even remove all hindrance to Mrs. Clinton’s war on constitutional liberty by costing Republicans the majority in the House.

The “Benedict Option” or sitting out the 2016 election might be a choice for a few individuals who live in an Ivory Tower, and can afford to stick to their own idiosyncratic principles; it is not a serious or rational choice for a conservative movement that aspires to lead America in the 21st century.

On Monday join us for Part 3 of the series: Scenario #3: Should conservatives join the establishment Republican insiders to manipulate the Convention to deprive Trump of the nomination?

Golly, where do you think they’re going with this? If Trump has the nomination, a third party will split the right and Hillary Clinton is the spawn of Satan I’m going to guess these guys are coming around to The Donald!

But maybe not. Maybe they have some magical solution aside from being intelligent enough to understand that Trump is going to blow up everything they’ve built for the last 40 years unless they oppose his candidacy one way or the other.

Stay tuned.

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It’s going to take more than etiquette lessons to fix the GOP

Published by digby on March 24, 2016

It’s going to take more than etiquette lessons to fix the GOP

by digby

I wrote about Paul Ryan’s little speech to House interns about being kinder and nicer for Salon today:

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan gave a nice speech about treating people decently to a group of young House interns yesterday. Despite the fact that he never mentioned his name, it was nonetheless seen as a rebuke to a 60-year-old adolescent named Donald Trump.
Ryan’s not the first, of course. Just two weeks ago, the man with whom he once shared a presidential ticket said much the same thing although as a private citizen, he could be much more explicit. Mitt Romney called Trump out, saying, “He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.” Make no mistake, the 2012 Republican presidential ticket thinks that Mr. Donald Trump has very bad manners.
Ryan had earlier issued some mild criticisms of Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the country and his refusal to disavow the KKK, which is what passes for responsible Republican leadership these days. After all, he’s second in line for the presidency. It’s literally the least he can do.
But yesterday he got more personal. Ryan talked about his time as an intern with Jack Kemp, a Republican who was known for his empathy and portrayed that era as being a time when our government was serious and responsible. And he reminisced fondly about the good old days on the Ways and Means Committee during, his first years in Congress in the early 2000s, recalling that everyone treated one another with respect and behaved with decorum back then.
That does sound like an oasis of civility in a body that had just spent eight years obsessed with witchhunts, scandalmongering and impeachment, and where committee chairmen would publicly call the president a “scumbag.”  And he didn’t mention that at the same time he was learning from Kemp about the plight of those less fortunate, the party to which he belonged was dominated by a malevolent figure by the name of Newt Gingrich, a man who has done far more to degrade our politics than anyone who’s running for president today. Indeed, Donald Trump wouldn’t be where he is if Gingrich hadn’t built the modern GOP in his image.
Gingrich and his crew were the original “Freedom Caucus” back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, right-wing firebrands who believed that the party needed to upend the establishment to create a new congressional majority. When George Bush Sr. made a compromise deal with Democrats to raise taxes and cut spending to reduce the deficits run up during the Reagan years, the Gingrich rebellion was instrumental in his defeat two years later. And two years after that, largely in reaction to the election of Bill Clinton whom they considered to be an illegitimate president, they won 54 seats in the House, turning it Republican for the first time in four decades.
Gingrich became Speaker and initiated an era of brutal slash-and-burn politics. And although it wasn’t characterized by the anarchistic obstructionism of Ted Cruz and company more recently, the demeaning rhetoric and grotesque character attacks we see in the current campaign come right out of the Gingrich playbook. And that’s literally true — he had an actual playbook that was called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which he distributed to Republican candidates all over the country under the auspices of his “educational” PAC, called GOPAC.
It gave these candidates a list of positive words to use to describe themselves and negative words to describe their “enemy,” the Democrats. Here are just a few examples: decay, failure, collapse, deeper, crisis, destructive, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal. That’s just for starters.
And like Donald Trump, Gingrich was a master manipulator of the media. He complained incessantly about bad coverage from the liberal media even as he spent more time in front of the cameras than anyone in politics. He said outright that he was “reshaping politics through the news media.” And he realized that “fights make news” and made sure to provide plenty of them.
That’s the party to which Paul Ryan belonged in the late ’90s, when he decided to run for Congress. He knew what he was getting into. It was anything but a genteel gentleman’s club.
Yesterday he expressed some regrets for being harsh in his own rhetoric, citing as an example when he characterized people who needed government benefits as “takers” compared to the noble “makers” of the 1 percent. He explained:
“But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong. ‘Takers’ wasn’t how to refer to a single mom stuck in a poverty trap, just trying to take care of her family. Most people don’t want to be dependent. And to label a whole group of Americans that way was wrong. I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point.”
It was wrong. But he shouldn’t be too hard on himself. He had been marinated in Republican dogma for years which held that people who depended on government to survive were nothing more than lazy sods who refused to work for an honest dollar. That attitude has pervaded the conservative movement at least since the 1970s, when that shining light of compassionate conservatism, Ronald Reagan, popularized the myth of the “Welfare Queen.” The GOP’s small government philosophy has always been, to some degree, about the government taxing the hard working Real Americans to subsidize the undeserving.
But there was another influence on Paul Ryan who also has a lot to answer for if we are assessing the harsh, degrading rhetoric of modern conservatism: Ayn Rand. It wasn’t all that long ago that Ryan wasn’t giving sensitive speeches about empathy and caring, but was instead giving his interns his personal guidebook, “Atlas Shrugged,” for Christmas. He was such a devotee that he gave a speech at the Atlas Society, testifying to its great influence on his life. As recently as 2009, he was singing the praises of Rand “moral teachings”:
 The issue that is under assault, the attack on democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America, is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this to me is what matters most.
It is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big, the health-care plan doesn’t work for this or that policy reason, it is the morality of what is occurring right now and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack. And it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on, and we need that kind of comment more and more than ever.
Many teen-agers get caught up in Ayn Rand’s philosophy, extolling as it does the selfishness and puerile sexuality of the adolescent psyche. Ryan was 39 when he made that speech, so he has no excuse. Neither did this famous man, who explained the Randian way of thinking that captured so many impressionable young people who later formed the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement. A letter to the New York Times in 1958 complaining about a review of “Atlas Shrugged”:
To the editor:
Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should,
Alan Greenspan
New York
That is probably the most succinct definition of Rand’s philosophy and one that exposes the heartless cruelty underlying so much of the conservative creed.  Sure, it sounds more civilized than the dreck Donald Trump is spewing, but it does explain why so many Republicans are starry-eyed over a pompadoured billionaire promising to make the country rich, rich, rich. He’s a comic book version of the book’s heroic “producer,” John Galt.
Paul Ryan’s budgets have always been the product of his Randian education. As Jonathan Chait pointed out, when he issues his inevitable dire warnings of collapse, he isn’t really referring to deficits (which he has had no problem supporting); he’s “invoking Rand’s almost theological certainty that when a government punishes the strong to reward the weak, it must invariably collapse. That is the crisis his Path to Prosperity seeks to avert.” There is little evidence that he’s changed his mind about any of that. He just thinks it would be better not to be rude about it.
So while he may be softly chastising Donald Trump for his rudeness and bad manners, it’s highly unlikely that anything fundamental in the GOP has changed. All these modern Republicans, whether Rand-loving “intellectuals” like Ryan, power-mad hawks like Dick Cheney, anarchic nihilists like Cruz or vulgarians like Trump come from the same toxic ideological swamp.
It’s a positive step that Ryan thinks it’s a good idea to be more respectful of our fellow citizens. But he’s going to have to dig a lot more deeply if he wants to cure what ails his party. Its problems can’t be fixed with etiquette lessons.

A peek inside his twist mind

Published by digby on March 24, 2016

A peek inside his twisted mind

 by digby

Trump’s twitter feed is a fascinating look at the way his mind works.  These are a few random tweets which all took place over the course of a few hours:

Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican nominee for president.

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“A legislature led by extremists” #WeAreNotThis @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 24, 2016

“A legislature led by extremists”
by Tom Sullivan

Republicans in the swing state of North Carolina must feel heavily gerrymandering the state hasn’t given them enough of an election-year edge. Nor implementing perhaps the most radical voter restrictions in the country. In the chaos caused by the new voter ID law during last week’s record primary turnout, voters cast over 40,000 provisional ballots. The highest concentrations were on college campuses.

But there is nothing quite like a hot-button, social issue to bring out the GOP faithful and distract them from thinking about the condition of the state’s schools, or their jobs, or how screwed up their state Republican party is.

Yesterday, the GOP-controlled legislature convened a special session to overturn a Charlotte ordinance allowing transgender people to use the bathroom that matches their identities. But that was just the warm-up. “The bill also prevents local governments from passing ordinances that prohibit discrimination beyond a state standard based on race, religion, color, national origin and biological sex,” according to the Charlotte Observer. Gov. Pat McCrory signed the measure last night. But not before state Senate Democrats walked out in protest.

NC State Senator Jeff Jackson (D-District 37) posted the graphic above on his Facebook page with the hashtag #WeAreNotThis . Senate Minority Whip Terry Van Duyn (D-District 49) posted a statement to her web site:

WHY I WALKED OUT

MARCH 23, 2016

Raleigh, NC – This Wednesday evening the entire Senate Democratic Caucus walked off the Senate floor as the General Assembly passed HB2, one of the most sweeping anti-LGTB bills in the nation. Here is the statement that Senate Democratic Whip Terry Van Duyn gave during this walk-out:

“And sexual orientation and gender identity”.

Those six words in the city of Charlotte’s ordinance changed the face of equality for every person in the state of North Carolina.

Charlotte’s effort to extend protection of discrimination to one group of people has, in turn, resulted in the Republican Party’s attempt to punish millions of people across the state.

Decades of progress have been undone at the hands of this immoral bill – more than 50 years of civil rights efforts are being erased.

While I stand in support of equality for LGBT community, we must understand that the creation of this bill goes far deeper than that.

And the Republican Party was thorough and deliberate in exploiting this local act to show their true colors.

This bill is a direct assault on living wage standards, paid leave benefits, working conditions and even state and local protection from racial and religious persecution.

This is a blatant abuse of power. We were elected to protect the people of this state. Instead, we have violated the people’s trust and endangered their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

How can republican leaders of the General Assembly, as public servants, claim to act on behalf of the people when they are actively assaulting the people’s rights.

We want the nation to know that this is not what North Carolina stands for, and that is why, every single Senate Democrat present today, walked off the floor of the senate, rather than participate in this atrocity.

The Raleigh News and Observer was just as harsh, calling it “a legislature led by extremists”:

Republicans who control the General Assembly went to great lengths – probably beyond even the U.S. Constitution – to secure their majority through gerrymandering. But in walling themselves into power, they overlooked the real threat to their keeping it – their own extremism.

I can’t decide whether Charlotte City Council was naive in handing opponents this election-year wedge issue or diabolically clever in getting Republicans to double down on the legislative incompetence that has kept the state busy in court since taking control. Charlotteans may simply have wanted to do the right thing.

But Charlotte opened the door and the NCGOP rushed through. Never mind that their constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage passed in 2012 would not stand even until the next presidential election. Another rallying cry must be found to inflame conservative voters in 2016. (No Dread When I Pee? And the flag looks like…?)

Besides, the “government is best which is closest to the people” people are at war against cities. Cities are where the largest blocks of blue votes are. And whether in Michigan or North Carolina, Democratic voters must be stopped, democratically or otherwise.

What’s a good movement conservative to do?

Published by digby on March 24, 2016

What’s a good movement conservative to do?

by digby

This should be interesting. Richard Viguerie’s group, hardcore Cruz supporters, are having to face the grim reality of a Trump nomination. And they don’t know what to do.

Here’s the first of four article exploring their next move:

The results of the March 22 Republican presidential primary elections should focus the mind of every movement conservative leader and activist on the very real possibility that Donald Trump will hold a near-majority, or perhaps even an outright majority, of delegates when the Republican National Convention convenes in Cleveland on July 18.

As things stand now Trump has 739 delegates, Senator Ted Cruz has 465, Marco Rubio who has suspended his campaign has 166, Governor John Kasich has 143 and the other candidates who have suspended their Donald Trumpcampaigns hold the remaining 15, with 6 uncommitted. (These numbers can and will shift due to varying state rules on how delegates must vote if their pledged candidate suspends his campaign.)

While the math of delegate accumulation does not make a Trump outright victory inevitable, the math is on his side.

And, contrary to the conventional wisdom, Trump has yet to hit a ceiling of support making his victory all the more likely.

Trump won every county in Florida except Rubio’s home turf of Miami – Dade County. Despite the unprecedented efforts on behalf of favorite son Governor John Kasich by the Republican Party of Ohio, Trump also won the Appalachian periphery of Ohio where one might look for populist Republicans and Reagan Democrats.

Furthermore, Senator Cruz’s attempt to form an alliance with the establishment to stop Trump has not produced the votes he needs to win a pre-convention majority.

While the western primaries should be good for Senator Ted Cruz, it appears that he is not picking-up the public boost from elected officials and establishment political figures that would indicate a real honest “unity movement” that brings conservative-leaning elements of the Republican establishment together with movement conservatives to actually deliver delegates to Cruz.

What I see on the part of Senator Cruz’s erstwhile establishment Republican allies is not an effort to deliver the nomination to him, but an effort to create a chaotic situation in which no outsider has a majority, thereby delivering to the Washington Cartel’s powerbrokers and insiders the ability to choose the nominee at the Convention.

What’s more, the apparent end of the Republican debates has deprived Cruz of almost all of the traditional means to change the dynamics of the campaign.

On the other hand, Trump’s increasing level of acceptance among Republican elected officials, and conservative leaders, puts him in a position of growing strength going into the upcoming primaries.

This was especially true in the make or break state of Arizona.

While Ted Cruz was endorsed by the highly respected Congressman Trent Franks and Arizona House Majority Leader Steve Montenegro and Arizona House Majority Whip David Livingston, as well as a dozen or more state legislators, these endorsements were for the most part the usual suspects from the cultural conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Much as we wish it to be different, Senator Cruz has shown little growth beyond his anticipated cultural conservative base and that anticipated base has underperformed in state after state.

Trump on the other hand has relentlessly pursued his immigration and “make America great” message. Trump’s support in Arizona grew rapidly on the strength of the endorsements of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and former Governor Jan Brewer, as well as Jeff DeWit, State Treasurer of Arizona, Bob Corbin, former Arizona Attorney General, Carol Springer, former State Treasurer of Arizona, and former Arizona State Senators Lori Klein, Robert Blendu and Thayer Verschoor.

Trump won Arizona handily with a near-majority of 47 percent and his current cache of over 700 delegates pretty much seals the math against any other candidate approaching a majority of 1237 delegates going into the Republican National Convention.

If that indeed happens, then conservatives will have to face the reality of working with Donald Trump or opposing him at the GOP Convention.

So what should conservatives do if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee?

We see four convention and post-convention scenarios and today review the one that has received the most media attention; forming a Third Party and running a culturally conservative candidate against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Scenario #1: Oppose Trump and mount a Third Party campaign on behalf of a cultural conservative candidate.

In 1975, Ronald Reagan was approached by a number of leading conservatives, including ConservativeHQ Chairman Richard A. Viguerie, who wanted to launch a Third Party campaign with Reagan as the candidate.

As Mr. Viguerie recounted in his book TAKEOVER, Reagan heard them out and then told them they were nuts because most of America’s conservative voters were Republicans and he did not believe enough of them were likely to abandon the GOP to allow him to win a general election.

A lot has changed in the 40 years since Ronald Reagan came to that conclusion.

Today, when Republican primary voters were asked in an exit poll if they felt betrayed by their Party leaders, in New Hampshire 47 percent of voters answered yes; in South Carolina it was 52 percent; in Florida 60 percent of Republicans felt betrayed; in Ohio 54 percent; North Carolina 57 percent; Illinois 50 percent, and in Missouri the number of Republicans who felt betrayed by their Party leaders was 58 percent.

But those huge percentages of Republican voters don’t come anywhere near to accounting for a majority of the General Election electorate, nor is it clear that any credible conservative candidate, such as Ted Cruz, would come to a conclusion different from Ronald Reagan’s 1975 analysis.

Setting aside the obvious challenge of funding a competitive campaign in an environment where the Democratic and Republican Party opponents would likely spend a combined total of over $2 billion, as they did in 2012, when Obama spent $1.123 billion and Romney spent $1.019 billion, the numbers just don’t add up for a candidate whose sole base is movement and especially cultural conservatives.

In 2012 about 117 million Americans voted in the presidential election, in 2008 about 125 million voted.

In 2008, white, born-again, Evangelical Christians represented 26 percent of the total vote for president, according to the exit polls. In 2012, white, born-again, Evangelical Christians represented 26 percent of the total vote for president, again according to the exit polls.

After four years of Obama’s disastrous anti-religious policies we saw no change at all in the percentage of the electorate accounted for by Evangelical Christians; no net gain, certainly no surge, and no record Evangelical turnout, despite the vast effort expended on contacting and turning out faith-first voters.

What’s more, when you zoom in a bit, according to Joel C. Rosenberg, you find that 21 percent of self-identified, white, born-again, Evangelical Christians voted for President Obama in 2012 – that means more than 6 million self-described “Evangelicals” voted for Obama.

It should also be noted that, despite his war on the Catholic Church, 50 percent of the Catholic vote went for Obama in 2012. This was down from the 54 percent that Obama won in 2008.

Apropos of today’s political environment; 42 percent of the Evangelical votes in heavily Evangelical North Carolina went to Donald Trump, in Ohio, 39 percent of Evangelicals voted for Trump.

The chief political correspondent for CBN News, David Brody, commented on what he calls Trump’s “staying power” with evangelicals. In examining the March 15 “Super Tuesday II” results in Missouri – where Trump and Cruz battled to a virtual tie – Brody compared the votes of “cultural Christians” and “church-going die-hards.”

“Trump’s evangelical appeal is NOT just with casual cultural Christians,” the Christian journalist concluded. “Yes, it’s his main portion; but by winning 31 percent of the ‘church-going die-hards,’ he [Trump] makes Missouri a competitive state rather than a simple Cruz victory.”

“You see, Cruz has to pull a better number than 57 percent among the devoutly faithful crowd,” Brody observed. “It’s a solid number, but Trump beats Cruz solidly with the cultural Christian crowd … so the only way for Cruz to win evangelical-heavy states is to run up the number among the ‘more religious crowd.’ He’s really not doing that, and that’s made a HUGE difference.”

The final issue to be dealt with in this scenario is the myth of the 17 million (or 10 or 5 million) missing Christian voters.

The argument is made every election that, if only we had a cultural conservative candidate, millions of hitherto absent Christian voters would show up and sweep a cultural conservative into the White House, but history has proven the idea that there are millions of “missing” Christian voters to be a myth.

Putting principled cultural conservative Rick Santorum on the primary ballot didn’t draw them to the polls in 2012, running Baptist minister Mike Huckabee didn’t draw them to the polls in 2008 or 2016, neither did putting high profile TV evangelist Pat Robertson on the ballot in 1988.

The reality is the millions of “missing” Christian voters are not missing.

After thirty-six years, millions of dollars spent on Christian voter guides, hours spent leafleting churches and intense telephone, mail and social media campaigns it is time to recognize that these voters are not “missing,” they are simply Christians who do not vote.

Counting on such people to power a Third Party campaign to victory is not merely the triumph of hope over experience, it is a fool’s errand that would have disastrous consequences for the preservation of constitutional liberty.

Setting aside the fundraising challenge of competing in a $2 billion campaign, the numbers prove that there are simply not enough committed cultural conservative voters to guarantee defeat of Trump in the Republican Primaries, let alone defeat Trump and Hillary Clinton in a general election campaign.

A Third Party presidential campaign led by cultural conservatives would most assuredly put Hillary Clinton in the White House, destroy the already shaky right-of-center coalition and seriously up the tempo of the Left’s war on constitutional government, religious liberty and traditional values.

Tomorrow’s scenario: The “Benedict Option.” Should movement conservatives let the Republican establishment deal on its own with the Trump phenomenon it created and sit out the 2016 election?

A statement of intent

Published by digby on March 23, 2016

A statement of intent

by digby

ISIS has sent out a statement explaining their actions in Brussels yesterday.  An excerpt:

Why does this sound so familiar?  Oh I know:

“We’re fighting a very politically correct war. And the thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families.” 

“Look, I think we have to change our laws on the waterboarding thing where they can chop off heads and they can drown people in cages and heavy steel cages and we can’t waterboard. So we have to change our laws and we have to be able to fight at least on an almost equal basis.” 


“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works. And if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.

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