Month: July 2016

For those of you who thought “Please clap” was rock bottom for the depths of sadness plumbed by Jeb Bush this election cycle, I present to you his interview this week with Nicole Wallace. 

Poor Jeb. There he was, looking natty in a collared shirt and sport coat, relaxing in a wicker chair on the lawn of the family compound in Kennebunkport with a wide-angle view of the Atlantic, a fantastically wealthy man taking a breather at his oceanside vacation home in Maine. 

Yet his soul was troubled. 

I can’t vote for Donald Trump, and I can’t vote for Hillary Clinton. It breaks my heart. This is my first time in my adult life I’m confronted with this dilemma. 

Jeb Bush can find no reason to vote for either of the two major party presidential candidates. A former governor of a large state, a man whose father and brother both served as president, whose grandfather was a senator from Connecticut, whose family has been involved in America’s politics at the highest levels for decades, is having a crisis of the soul because his party nominated a callow xenophobe and the other party nominated Hillary Clinton, and they are basically the same in terms of fitness to hold office. 

Gosh darn it, if a man who loves his country so much can’t bring himself to fulfill his civic responsibility and vote, then what has even become of America?

Legum points out that Jebbers doesn’t seem to have a clue about what’s happened or his own role in it.  And neither does he care about his fellow Americans who will be well and truly screwed if a nutcase like Trump actually wins the presidency.

Bush knows very well that Clinton is the only choice. But he won’t say that because he’s decided to clutch his pearls and lay out rather than step up to save the country and the world from disaster. Florida, as he knows very well is a swing state. His vote would matter there. His leadership might matter there. But instead he’s pretending that the dumpster fire he and his fellows lit in the Republican Party is no worse than Clinton the mainstream Democrat who at least knows what the Articles of the constitution are.

Cowards. All of them. It’s not enough to simply say you can’t vote for someone and it gives you a big sad. If you lie and suggest that the normal mainstream candidate is the same as [insert Godwins Law] then you are complicit and you might as well start campaigning for him. You don’t get a pass by throwing up your hands and saying there’s no difference between the two.

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More piggish remarks from you-know-who

by digby

Like I’ve been saying, this guy is a throwback. His hair-do says everything:

The newly discovered Trump clips, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, are from “Trumped!”, a series of 60-second commentary clips from Trump that aired on syndicated radio from 2004 to 2008. In one, he suggested presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would “make a good president”– but he also spoke frequently and extensively about other women, and in ways that will do nothing to further endear him to female voters.

In one clip, Trump said he was surprised that most women disapproved of having one-night stands.

“I thought today’s women were independent and had a lot of sexual freedom,” he said in a 2006 clip. “Well, I guess they fooled me.”

Another clip focuses on a man in Saudi Arabia who divorced his wife because his wife had been alone with a man — referring to a presenter she’d only ever watched on TV.

“There are a lot of male chauvinists in this country who really agree with what’s going on over there,” Trump said. “Men in Saudi Arabia have the authority to divorce their wives without going to the courts. I guess that would also mean they don’t need prenuptial agreements.”

He continued: “Saudi Arabia sounds like a very good place to get a divorce.”

In one 2006 episode of “Trumped!”, the GOP pol rated multiple female celebrities based on their physical attractiveness. He described Keira Knightley, for example, as “unbelievable,” and athlete Maria Sharapova as “truly unbelievable.”

Britney Spears, however, he said in 2005 had become less attractive shortly after getting married. “She has gone down, there’s no question about it,” he said. “That’s what a marriage can do for you.”

He has not evolved even the tiniest bit since about 1974. And not just his attitudes about women, but in anything including his geo-political worldview. It’s like his brain just froze.

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So the UK is getting their second woman Prime Minister

by digby

The home secretary Theresa May, is to succeed Cameron on Wednesday, just two days after she won the Conservative Party’s leadership contest.

Above, she walked past the only member of the household remaining behind: Larry the Cat, also known as chief mouser to the cabinet office.

Larry the cat is to keep his job – and home – in Downing Street after it was confirmed he would be spared eviction when David Cameron leaves on Wednesday. 

The furry feline has been a familiar face on the steps outside Number 10’s black door since he moved in, in 2011. 

And the “chief mouser” will stay when Theresa May replaces Mr Cameron as UK prime minister. 

“It’s a civil servant’s cat and does not belong to the Camerons – he will be staying,” a government spokesman said.

He looks like he knows what he’s doing. But I don’t think he cares for those shoes …

Unfortunately May is a Tory like the only other woman PM.

Update:

People seem to be making quite a big fuss about me replacing my butler…

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) July 13, 2016

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Trump is losing college educated Republicans


by digby

I wrote about the latest poll numbers for Clinton and Trump among white college educated people for Salon today. It’s bad news for the Republicans:

Democratic strategists have worried for years about their party’s decades long erosion among members of the white working class. What was once the backbone of the party has shifted over many decades to the GOP, causing a lot of soul searching among people whose ideology has generally favored the concerns of working families.  This was first characterized as a problem related to the loss of white southerners, famously illustrated by a comment attributed to President Lyndon Johnson upon signing the Civil Rights Act: ” we have lost the South for a generation.” But Ronald Reagan’s victory proved that the shift was not confined to the southern states as many members of the white working class elsewhere also moved to the GOP to vote for Reagan and stayed there.

There have been many articles and books written about this phenomenon and I don’t want to get into them here. Suffice to say that some combination of culture war issues, racial resentment and economic decline has pushed these former Democrats into the Republican column over time. But there has been less attention paid to the parallel shift of white college educated voters to the Democratic Party during the same period.

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein has been calling this the “class inversion” in which the two parties have exchanged the two white voting factions. He describes it this way:

This generation-long resorting has profoundly reshaped the balance of power both between and within the two parties. Combined with the growth in the minority population, the Democrats’ improving position among college-educated whites has allowed them to win the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, despite consistently large deficits among the non-college white voters who constituted the bedrock of their coalition from Franklin Roosevelt through Jimmy Carter. Conversely, the Democratic decline among blue-collar whites has been key to the recent Republican dominance in the House of Representatives.

He points out that the primary electorates of the two parties have also undergone the same change which explains why Trump’s crude right wing populism has been successful and why Clinton’s multi-cultural, college educated and older voter coalition won her the Democratic nomination. Trump carried 47% of the Republican white working class and only 35% of college educated voters. Clinton won college educated whites in 17 of the 26 states with exit polls and lost roughly the same numbers of the white working class. According to Brownstein, with Trump’s base of blue collar white men and Clinton’s base of college educated white women (as well as people of color)  these two candidates are uniquely positioned to finally complete this class inversion.

This is a very bad sign for Trump.  First he has not a snowball’s chance in hell of capturing more than a handful of minorities to make up for the loss of college educated whites. His racism, religious intolerance and xenophobia almost guarantee that the Democrats will maintain, and probably expand, on their dominance among this growing group of Americans.

All classes of white voters are shrinking as a percentage of the electorate, but within that demographic the number of college educated whites, especially college educated women, is expanding.  White men without a college degree constituted 28 percent of all voters in 2004 and by 2012 they were just 17%.  Meanwhile college-educated white women were just 11 percent of the vote when Reagan was re-elected in 84 and had grown to to 19 percent in 2012. There are more of them than blue-collar white men. Meanwhile, non-college-educated whites have shrunk from 65 percent of the white electorate when Reagan was sworn in to 36 percent in 2012.

So as much as the Republicans may have blown their chances with the rapidly growing Hispanic population with their foolish selection of Trump,  the loss of these college educated whites could be even more devastating to their future prospects. The party has been losing some of these voters over the years but they have carried a majority in every election since 1952 when they first began tracking the category, even in the 1964 Johnson landslide against Barry Goldwater. Mitt Romney won college educated whites by 14 points in 2012. If the trend accelerates in this cycle so that Clinton wins a majority, they’re unlikely to go back to the GOP.  Just as the Reagan Democrats turned into Republicans, so too will these Republicans become Democrats.

The latest Bloomberg poll of college educated voters has some very bad news for the Republicans:

Among all college-educated likely voters, including those with post-graduate degrees, Clinton leads 54 percent to 32 percent, a much bigger margin than President Barack Obama’s 2-point advantage with a group that represented 47 percent of the electorate in 2012. Among voters with just a college degree and no post-graduate degree, another subgroup Romney won in 2012, Clinton is ahead 48 percent to 37 percent. 

“It’s extremely hard for any presidential candidate to win an election conceding double-digit deficits among segments of the electorate that their party has competed for and won in the past,” said pollster Doug Usher, who led the survey. “This poll indicates that Trump might be doing just that.”

Meanwhile, in the South China Sea
by Tom Sullivan

China’s reclamation in the South China Sea, the “Great Wall of Sand”
U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters.

We’ve been following this since Gaius Publius raised it at Down With Tyranny over a year ago. A quarter of the world’s shipping goes through the South China Sea. So when the Chinese started building islands in waters disputed by six countries, pay attention. (Reuters has a map of disputed reefs and shoals.) While America is playing Pokemon Go, The Great Game is still a being played on the other side of the planet.

CNN reports:

An international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines in a maritime dispute Tuesday, concluding China has no legal basis to claim historic rights to the bulk of the South China Sea.

Chinese President Xi Jinping rejected the decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which is likely to have lasting implications for the resource-rich hot spot, which sees $5 trillion worth of shipborne trade pass through each year.

Reuters reports:

China vowed to take all necessary measures to protect its sovereignty over the South China Sea and said it had the right to set up an air defence zone, after rejecting an international tribunal’s ruling denying its claims to the energy-rich waters.

Chinese state media called the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague a “puppet” of external forces, after it ruled that China had breached the Philippines’ sovereign rights by endangering its ships and fishing and oil projects.

Beijing has repeatedly blamed the United States for stirring up trouble in the South China Sea, where its territorial claims overlap in parts with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) told the Guardian the ruling would not invalidate all Chinese “nine-dash line” claims in the area (green line above), but “would really limit the amount of water that the Chinese could have any legal sovereignty claim to.” China might at this point try to avoid “destabilising actions” ahead of hosting the G20 meeting in September:

“[But] there is the potential that things go the other direction and that is that the Chinese think that they are being bullied, they are being victimised and that the party must defend China’s sovereignty and every inch of China’s territory. In which case we could see some rather provocative moves.

“The notion that they might start landing fighters … would really escalate tensions between the US and China and make the region very nervous.”

Ashley Townshend, a fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, said he believed Beijing would seek a “middle path: a way to not capitulate but also a way to not escalate”.

That would probably involve continuing to conduct military exercises in the region as a way of showing strength without further inflaming tensions.

While the U.S. has continued to assert its right to navigate in the area, China points out that the United States is not a signatory to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea ratified by 160 other countries. So kindly butt out.

Donald Trump may dislike our trade deals with the Chinese, but its “Great Wall of Sand” probably sounds good to him. That is (as with Brexit), he even knows what it is.

The world has changed since 68


by digby

I mentioned in my piece earlier today that Trump is stuck in a time warp with his “law and order” rhetoric.

Shot:

Crime is out of control, and rapidly getting worse. Look what is going on in Chicago and our inner cities. Not good!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2016

Chaser:

The year Donald Trump was born in Queens, 1946, New York City experienced 350 murders — a rate of 4.5 murders for every 100,000 people in the city. When “The Art of the Deal” was published in 1987, affirming Trump’s position as a bona fide celebrity, the city saw 1,672 murders, 23 for every 100,000 people in New York. The city was nearing the apex of its crime wave, which peaked in 1990, the year 2,245 people were murdered. (These historical data are from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data.)

On Monday, the New York Police Department made an announcement: The number of shootings in New York in the first half of the year had reached a historic low. Murders are down nearly 9 percent over 2015 citywide, and violent crime has dropped slightly. Compared to the first half of 1993, near the city’s crime peak, Donald Trump’s hometown has seen a 76.8 percent drop in violent crime and an 83 percent drop in murders. Murders are down slightly in Brooklyn over the first half of 2015 — and down substantially in Queens.

This piggy-backs on Trump’s announcement Monday that he is the “law and order candidate,” drawing a direct comparison between his campaign and that of Richard Nixon in 1968. Crime is spiking, Trump argues, and he is the guy to guide our national ship through this storm.

But crime isn’t out of control — particularly when you compare the country to 1968. Violent crime rates are higher now than they were then, but in the late 1960s, the country was seeing a sudden and dramatic surge in violent crime and murder. Between 1964 and 1968, the violent crime rate jumped from 190.6 incidents per 100,000 Americans to 298.4, an increase of over 50 percent. Between 2010 and 2014, the most recent period for which we have FBI data, the rate sank from 404.5 to 375.7.

We know that Trump doesn’t need no stinking numbers. Still, it’s important for normal people to have the facts.

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Still an oddball

by digby

This happened:

Gosh I love George Bush! pic.twitter.com/CuBjsGdyFa

— Leighton Forshee (@LeightonF12) July 12, 2016

The “cancer or heart attack” meme is dangerous and it’s not an accident

by digby

Republicans (and certain members of the media) are trying to “Trumpize” Clinton:

Major GOP donor Charles Koch is dead set on not choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the presidential election. 

“But if I had to vote for cancer or heart attack, why would I vote for either?” Koch told Fortune in an interview Monday.

Koch knows what he’s doing. He realizes Trump is probably going to lose and is just setting the table for Clinton’s win to be opposed as if she is an equally appalling threat to America, “Hitlery” made real.

Reality check: Clinton is a mainstream Democratic politician and not particularly dishonest or corrupt by mainstream politician standards.  Compared to Trump she is a saint.  He is literally a conman. She is smart, experienced and knowledgeable and he is … not. She’s also imperfect and will probably screw up in ways that will make us very unhappy. They all do, some more than others and she may end up being one of the bad ones. But she is not a mentally unbalanced, nationalist, authoritarian demagogue.

Just saying.

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Boo hoo hoo

by digby

Telling it like it is:

“I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president. For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.”

Princess Trumpie called for the smelling salts:

“I think it’s highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly,” Mr. Trump said. “I think it’s a disgrace to the court and I think she should apologize to the court. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”

He’s quite a stickler for protocol.

Seriously, I think the thing that exposes Mr Politically Incorrect’s insanity (or stupidity)  as much as anything is the fact that he believes he can criticize others for behaving inappropriately even as he behaves like a barbarian on a daily basis.

But it does mark him as a perfect wingnut. Their pearl clutching over their rivals doing things they constantly do themselves is one of their fundamental characteristics. It’s also the way small children think before they grow out of their narcissism.

Update: And predictably the media and establishment Democrats are calling for the smelling salts a la ACORN and General Betrayus. Apparently it means that Ginsburg is disqualified from the case if the election comes before the Supreme Court.

The election is not supposed to come before the Supreme Court!  It shouldn’t have in 2000 when Justice Scalia’s son was working for the Bush campaign and when Sandra Day O’Connor told people it “was terrible” that the Gore campaign was contesting the election and these same people told us we had to “get over it.”

Please …

QOTD: Hannity

by digby

I am still thinking Trump’s going to choose Newt. And Trump’s biggest fan is all in:

HANNITY: Who would be best at prosecuting the case against Hillary Clinton in terms of the list that he has?

Who would be best in terms of making the case and articulating the case for Donald Trump with a positive voice like you have? Who would be the person that would pretty much be assured a win in any presidential/vice presidential debate? I think you’ve checked that corner. Who has balanced the budget and given us a surplus? Who has the ability to work with Congress? I check all the boxes, and you’re right there at the top, and I think you’d be the right choice. What is your response to that?”

“I’m speaking objectively here. I think you would prosecute the case against Hillary better than anybody, strategize and help them win, and help him govern, which, with a hostile speaker and majority leader, would be difficult.”

Later he said:

“I wouldn’t be happy with anyone but Newt. But that’s my opinion.”

Yeah, me neither. I’ll enjoy watching him be destroyed by yet another Clinton.

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