Posted: August 6, 2015 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: Donald Trump, GOP debate in Cleveland |
Good Morning!!
Today is the day the GOP clown car empties out onto a stage in Cleveland for the 2016 first debate of the 2016 presidential election season. Will it be a hoot to watch or will the pain of watching and listening to a bunch of loonies outweigh the pleasure of mocking their insane ideas? We’ll find out tonight.
Judging by the stories highlighted on Google news and Memeorandum, Donald Trump will eclipse every other candidate. It’s ridiculous, but the Republicans brought it on themselves.
Politico lists “Five things to watch” in the clown show tonight. Here are the highlights of their scouting report.
Trump
Advisers to several candidates said they’ve been closely examining Trump’s caustic statements and have concluded his bomb-throwing fits a pattern: He’s at his most inflammatory — for example, giving out Lindsey Graham’s cellphone number, making fun of Rick Perry’s glasses or criticizing John McCain’s past as a prisoner of war — when he’s responding to an attack against him. Graham, Perry and McCain had all gone after Trump aggressively before he had turned his fire on them.
If he’s not put on the defensive, Trump — who recently said that he hopes the debate stays “on a high level” — could be far less belligerent.
That’s assuming the rest of candidates, e.g. bomb throwers Ted Cruz and Chris Christie stay “on a high level.” Highly unlikely.
Jeb Bush
While Bush is typically more at ease with himself than many of his opponents, he can be awkward and uncomfortable when put on the spot. In recent days, advisers to one rival candidate examined a 2013 interview Bush gave to NBC’s “Meet the Press” and concluded that one way to get under the former governor’s skin is to compare him to his Florida protégé Marco Rubio.
Then there’s the rust factor. While many of Bush’s rivals — nearly all of whom are sitting governors or senators — have recent experience on debate stages, he doesn’t: Bush hasn’t faced an election since 2002. Bush aides say they recognize the problem and have taken steps to fix it. They recently brought on Beth Myers and Peter Flaherty, both of whom helped Mitt Romney prepare for the 2012 debates, to assist.
Watch for Jeb to commit another “unforced error” like his recent comment about women’s health not being an important issue.
Scott Walker
During a trip to New York City last week, the Wisconsin governor spent much of the day in debate prep with a group of advisers that included Mari Will, the wife of conservative columnist George Will, and campaign manager Rick Wiley. Walker has been criticized for being overly scripted and lacking policy expertise — he bobbled several times when discussing foreign policy and national security issues early in the campaign — and is under pressure to show that he can go toe-to-toe with his rivals.
There’s much more worth reading at the Politico link, including possible conflicts between Rand Paul and Chris Christie and what to expect from the Fox moderators.
Also from Politico, Jack Shafer writes: The GOP Pre-Season Begins. The candidates in Thursday’s debate would do well to remember it’s a long campaign.
Try thinking of Thursday’s presidential debates on Fox as tryouts for the next round of GOP presidential debates, which CNN will stage in September, and CNN’s presidential debates as tryouts for CNBC’s debates in October, and CNBC’s debates as tryouts for the Fox Business Channel’s debates in November, and so on and so on, until you reach the state of attentiveness that you apply to the MLB Cactus and Grapefruit league matches or NFL exhibition games.
It’s not that the early debates—and pre-season games—don’t matter. They do, but mostly to weed the real prospects from the position fillers and to help the veterans refresh their skills for the big season. But the crests and troughs produced in pre-season recede in importance as the days pass and the next contest is joined.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks during the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, on Aug. 10.
The Cleveland 10 candidates—who will appear on Fox at 9 p.m., after the undercard event featuring the seven junior varsity candidates going through the motions at 5 p.m.—will have little time to talk, says Fox co-moderator Bret Baier. Each of the 10 candidates will get 10 to 11 minutes of speaking time over the two-hour event, which is the baseball equivalent of playing less than an inning. Baier says he hopes to elicit something “interesting, but illuminating” from the candidates and to shove them off of their talking points. This will require interruption, as each candidate has filled his (and, in JV candidate Carly Fiorina’s case, her) brain with canned responses. The 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney set some sort of modern interruption record, as moderator Candy Crowley short-stopped on Romney 23 times and Obama 15 times to get the debate on track. (The candidates also interrupted one another repeatedly, making for a total average of 1.4 interruptions per minute.)
Another interesting article, well worth reading.
Naturally, most pundits are writing about Donald Trump. Joshua Green has two good pieces at Bloomberg.
1. It’s Wrong to Call Donald Trump a ‘Fringe’ Candidate.
Donald Trump’s rise to a position of total dominance in the Republican presidential field has been accompanied by a dismissive snort from Beltway mandarins that Trump is merely a “fringe” candidate. The idea, in essence, is that Trump has a strong but narrow appeal to a group of mouth-breathing xenophobes and practically nobody else.
But a new Bloomberg Politics poll of Republican and Republican-leaning voters demolishes this claim. Trump not only laps the competition—he has twice the support of the second-place candidate, Jeb Bush (21 percent to 10 percent)—but he also leads among every demographic subgroup, but one (self-identified “moderates”).
Let’s break it down. Trump leads with male voters (Trump 24 percent, Bush 11 percent, Walker 10 percent) and female voters (Trump 18 percent, Bush 10 percent, Huckabee 10 percent). He leads with voters younger than 45 (Trump 15 percent, Bush 10 percent, Rubio and Paul at 9 percent) and voters older than 45 (Trump 25 percent, Bush 11 percent, Walker 9 percent) and seniors (Trump 23 percent, Bush 14 percent, Walker 9 percent).
Trump wins voters with no more than a high school degree (Trump 27 percent, Huckabee 13 percent, Bush 11 percent) and voters with a college degree (Trump 19 percent, Walker 12 percent, Bush 11 percent). He leads among affluent voters who earn $100,000 or more annually (Trump 18 percent, Bush 14 percent, Walker 13 percent) and those who make less than $50,000 a year (Trump 19 percent, Bush 11 percent, Walker 9 percent).
The thrice-married Trump, who recently told a Christian forum that he “never” asks God for forgiveness, wins “born-again” voters (Trump 16 percent, Huckabee 14 percent), as well as Catholics (Trump 27 percent, Rubio 9 percent) and Protestants (Trump 18 percent, Bush 12 percent). And he also wins “Tea Party” conservatives (Trump 24 percent, Walker 11 percent).
2. The GOP Is About to Become the Party of Trump.
When Donald Trump takes center stage at Thursday’s Fox News debate in Cleveland, it will be a critical moment for the Republican Party. Until recently, Americans mentally categorized Trump as a celebrity entertainer and interpreted his madcap antics and controversial pronouncements accordingly. But on Thursday, voters will experience Trump in a much different context: as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, who not only leads the presidential field by a wide margin but, asa new Bloomberg Politics poll shows, has a powerful appeal to every segment of the Republican electorate.
That’s great news for Trump. But if voters start associating his demagogic rantingsabout Mexican “rapists” not with Trump alone but with the broader Republican Party, his presence in the field could doom the GOP’s efforts to extend its appeal to new voters. “If he got the nomination talking like that, it would be a big problem,” says Grover Norquist, the conservative anti-tax stalwart. Even Trump’s current standing could tarnish the Republican brand, says Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee: “It’s something very scary for the party establishment.”
Before Trump formally declared his candidacy in June, the American public held a firm opinion of him that has been remarkably consistent through the years. The deepest examination of Trump measured steadily over time is probably his Q Score—the entertainment industry’s popular measure of celebrity, television, and brand appeal. “Trump has consistently been in the category of celebrities that people love to hate, love to criticize,” says Henry Schafer, executive vice president of The Q Scores Company. “With the success of his TV show, he’s very controversial, intentionally marketing himself in a waRewas 7 and negative Q Score was 45 when last measured in January-February. The average celebrity, says Schafer, is about 15/26.)
There’s more good stuff at both of those links.
Paul Krugman points out that Donald Trump is not the only GOP candidate who is completely nuts:
Just about the entire political commentariat has been caught completely flatfooted by Donald Trump’s durable front-runner status; he was supposed to collapse after being nasty to St. John McCain, but nothing of the sort happened.
So now the conventional wisdom is that we’re witnessing a temporary triumph of style over substance; Republican voters like Trump’s bluster, and haven’t (yet) realized that he isn’t making sense.
But if you ask me, the people who are really mistaking style for substance are the pundits. It’s true that Trump isn’t making sense — but neither are the mainstream contenders for the GOP nomination.
Read the rest at the NYT.
More useful stories, links only:
Washington Post: Donald Trump talked politics with Bill Clinton weeks before launching 2016 bid.
Politico: How Jeb and the GOP Got Trumped.
Ezra Klein at Vox: The media’s 5 stages of grief over Donald Trump.
Time: How to Watch Tonight’s Republican Debate Online.
Business Insider: Republicans outside Washington are urging the party to take Trump’s campaign seriously.
Bill Schneider at Reuters: Why Donald Trump’s hostile takeover bid for the Republican Party is a loser.
American Prospect: Why Jeb Bush’s Pitch to the Koch Brothers Should Scare You.
Norm Ornstein at The Atlantic: The Republican Road Block Ahead.
Remember this is an open thread. Post your thoughts and links on any topic in the comment thread, and please come back later this evening for live blogs on the second tier and first tier GOP candidates debates. The first one starts at 5PM and the main event will be at 9PM. I hope you’ll join us!
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Posted: August 4, 2015 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2016 GOP nomination race, Donald Trump, Fox News Debate, New Hampshire |
Good Day!!
I’m getting a slow start today, and I think it’s because anticipating the upcoming Republican debate is giving me the willies. It could be good for a laugh, but I think the pain of watching and listening 10 freaky a-holes responding to questions from Fox News personalities will probably be much greater than any pleasure I get from watching Republicans make fools of themselves.
Like the other Republican candidates, I’m particularly not looking forward to watching and listening to Donald Trump throw his weight around onstage. I can’t figure out why Trump is still increasing his lead in the polls. The latest Fox News poll, which will determine who gets into the debate and who is left out, has Trump at 26% –16 points ahead of Jeb Bush at 15%.
New Fox News polls out today just a few days before the first GOP debate. Donald Trump finds his highest support yet getting 26% support. Those are the highest numbers for any Republican candidate since Fox began polling for the 2016 race. Jeb Bush gets a solid #2 with 15%. His numbers haven’t dropped even as Trump’s have risen. Dana Blanton writes on FoxNews.com,
“Behind Trump and Bush, it’s Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at 9 percent, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 7 percent, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 6 percent each, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul at 5 percent a piece, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich get 3 percent each. That group is followed by businesswoman Carly Fiorina and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum tied at 2 percent, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal tied at 1 percent and former New York Gov. George Pataki, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore receive less than 1 percent support.”
So it looks like the debaters will be Trump, Bush, Walker, Carson, Cruz, Huckabee, Rubio, Paul, Christie, and Kasich. There’s going to a whole lot of crazy on that stage.
A local New Hampshire poll also showed Trump with a significant lead.
WMUR poll: Donald Trump surges to top of GOP primary field in NH.
The latest WMUR Granite State Poll, released Monday, says Trump is the top choice of 24 percent of likely GOP primary voters, doubling the support of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is backed by 12 percent. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, at 11 percent, is the only other candidate in double digits.
Not only has Trump surged to the head of the pack in New Hampshire, but also for the first time, he is now viewed favorably by more likely GOP primary voters than unfavorably. And, he is named as the candidate best able to handle key issues facing the nation, from the economy to terrorism, and from immigration to health care policy.
Yet likely voters are unsure if Trump will actually win the primary in February….
The poll sets up Trump, Bush and Walker as New Hampshire’s top tier with six months remaining until the voting, which is likely to be held on Feb. 9, 2016.
According to CNN, Fox will give the lower level candidates some token airtime on Thursday before the official debate:
Fox News will host a 5 p.m. debate for the bottom seven candidates, giving them a chance to debate the big issues despite failing to crack into the top ranks of national polling. That debate, given its airtime and the crop of lesser-known candidates, is expected to tout significantly lower viewership.
But voters will be able to see nearly all candidates on one stage this week before the Thursday debates.
The elephant in the room
Last night there was a candidate’s forum in New Hampshire that Trump didn’t bother to attend. Politico reports that Trump’s name was never mentioned at this event.
Politico: New Hampshire Voters First Forum: 5 takeaways.
Thursday night, however, will be much different. Trump will be positioned in the middle of the stage, and chances are the candidates flanking him on both sides won’t make it through a two-hour debate playing patty-cake as they did tonight. The candidate most eager to tangle with him, Rick Perry, now appears unlikely to make the prime-time debate at all due to his anemic showing in the polls. That’ll leave an array of more nervous rivals, hoping to make their case to voters but on guard against any potential Trump broadsides. And that alone will offer political observers and debate watchers more drama than they got Monday night.
Hillary Clinton was a prominent topic though:
Hillary Clinton, the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination, is a target for all the Republicans seeking the nomination. But on Monday night, the candidates who went after Clinton hammer and tongs were those at the bottom of the polls.
“Give Bernie Sanders credit, at least he is honest enough to call himself a socialist,” Bobby Jindal said. “Obama, Hillary Clinton are no better, they are just not honest enough to call themselves socialist..”
Carly Fiorina, the only woman in the GOP field, argued that she would be uniquely able to take the fight to Clinton in a general election. On Monday night, she attacked Hillary for lying about Benghazi and about her email server. “These go to the core of her character,” Fiorina said. “In order to beat Hillary Clinton, we have to have a nominee on our side who is willing to throw every punch.”
Lindsey Graham demonstrated his desperation for attention by bringing up Monica Lewinsky, as if that somehow reflects on Hillary. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio appeared by satellite, because they were busy in DC voting to defend Planned Parenthood. Of the three, Cruz apparently made the best on-screen impression.
The former Princeton debate champion fired away in a hohum, folksy twang. “I believe this Obama-Iran nuclear deal is the gravest threat facing America,” he said. And he defended his rhetoric, which some have panned for being “overheated” in just as a calm a tone. “Let me tell you something,” he said quietly. “Speaking the truth is not rhetoric.”
At the outset of the official debate season, it’s clear that Cruz is head and shoulders above his rivals as a communicator, promising the audience, “We’ll win by painting in bold colors and we’ll reignite the promise of America” and blasting “the Washington cartel.” He promises “to make 2016 a referendum on Obamacare.”
This election season promises to be one of the scariest in history for anyone who wants to live in a civilized country.
At FiveThirtyEight Politics, Harry Enten has a piece about Fox’s use of national vs. local polls in determining the make-up of the first debate.
There’s No Perfect Way To Sort The Candidates For A Primary Debate. But some methods are better than others.
Does the use of national polls in an important debate make sense? That’s just one of several big questions about understanding each candidate’s actual chance of winning the nomination. Gov. Scott Walker, for example, currently leads Iowa surveys — how much does that matter? Does Walker’s lead in Iowa mean more than Donald Trump’s short tenure atop nationaland New Hampshire polls? How about former Gov. Jeb Bush’s barrels of money and Gov. Chris Christie’s early endorsements?
None of these measurements is a perfect predictor, and we don’t have a very large sample size when it comes to open primary elections in the modern era. But that doesn’t mean there’s no signal in these early metrics, and some have been more predictive than others.
Chart by Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight Politics
It’s a fairly long read (and quite interesting), but here’s what Enten has to say about the New Hampshire situation specifically:
Like Iowa voters, New Hampshire voters tune into the contest much earlier than most voters nationally. Unlike Iowa, New Hampshire holds a primary vote, not a caucus. That means the primary and the polling for the primary is open to a wider array of voters. Most of the later contests that determine nominees are primaries, not caucuses.
This year, the early New Hampshire polling basically shows what all the indicators do on the Republican side. Yes, Trump is ahead in the New Hampshire surveys right now, but over the last six months the leader is Jeb Bush with 15.1 percent of the vote. Scott Walker is in second with 13.7 percent, Rand Paul is in third with 9.9 percent, Trump is in fourth with 9.7 percent, and Marco Rubio is in fifth with 7.4 percent. Only 1992 featured a race in which the leader in the New Hampshire surveys polled weaker than this year.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton leads in the six-month average 51 percent to 19 percent over Sen. Bernie Sanders. As in the Republican race, the short-term average probably gives too much credit to the surging candidate (Sanders). The longer-term average fits with most other pieces of data: Clinton is far and away the front-runner.
This year the endorsements and the New Hampshire polling generally are showing the same thing. The potential exceptions on the Republican side include Chris Christie, who barely leads the endorsement primary, but has gone nowhere in the New Hampshire polling. Also, Trump has shown no sign of any support from the party actors, even though he is polling fairly decently in New Hampshire over the past six months.
The upshot is that, while national polling tends to be less accurate for predicting primary winners, for now,
Overall, I can’t find too much fault with Fox News (or any other network) using national polling to determine who will eventually be competitive in a primary. There is a good argument to be made that the networks should take a longer-term average. There’s also a good argument to be made that using any of these metrics this early to sort the field by competitiveness is inexact and risky. But if a network is trying to determine a cut-off point so that the debate stage isn’t overfilled, then a national polling average is as good as looking at endorsements or fundraising at this point in the campaign. Adding New Hampshire polls, though, may be even better.
Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump greets supporters at a South Carolina campaign rally in Bluffton, S.C., Tuesday, July 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Stephen B. Morton)
Finally, for those of us who shudder at the thought of Trump actually getting the GOP nomination, here’s Josh Marshall’s frightening assessment:
Forget Everything Else. Look at Trump’s Net Favorables.
We’ve assumed that Donald Trump is not only capped in a national race but also likely capped about where he is now in a GOP primary race because his negatives are so high and there are so many people who not only do not support him, but who would never support him under any circumstance.
But check out this number from the latest Monmoth poll. Monmouth has polled the evolving GOP primary in April, June and July. And over that period Donald Trump’s favorable ratings have gone from 28% to 52%, while his unfavorables have gone from 56% to 35%. To put that a different way he’s gone from a -28% net approval to a +17% net approval . In other words, that’s a 45 point shift in three months….
…this is a massive, massive shift, especially for someone who is extremely well-known to the public and must have very high name recognition numbers. One might also add that it is a remarkable move over the course of a period in which Trump has marching around like a clown leveling racial slurs at whole nationalities. But that’s a more subjective judgment.
At least according to these Monmouth numbers, Republican voters’ perceptions of Trump are roughly on par with one time frontrunner Jeb Bush.
Yikes!! Could it actually happen? Marshall thinks Trump is going to in it for the long term.
Don’t get me wrong. I still think it is exceedingly unlikely that Trump will win the nomination. But these numbers really upend any idea that Trump is already maxed out – that he’s leading at 20% or more but can never go higher. And it’s hard to come up with a scenario where he leaves the race any time soon or really at any time before someone clearly beats him with actual delegates. He can easily self-fund. He has a massive ego which much be firing on insane amounts of dopamine with all this attention and adulation.
It’s a long time until the first primary, but I’m getting worried about Trump. So is Chris Cillizza at the WaPo: Boy, was I wrong about Donald Trump. Here’s why.
Donald Trump is now doubling the rest of the Republican field in the average of the last five national polls. And polling out of early states like New Hampshire puts him in the pole position in those places too.
All of which makes having written a piece on June 17 headlined, “Why no one should take Donald Trump seriously, in one very simple chart” that argued why, well, no one should take Donald Trump seriously, pretty embarrassing. Not to mention wrong….
Why did I miss Trump’s appeal so badly? Simply put: I had NEVER EVER seen a reversal in how people perceive a candidate who is as well known as Trump — much less a reversal in such a short period of time. I based my conclusion that Trump would never be a relevant player in the Republican primary fight on the ideas that once people 1) know you and 2) don’t like you, you can’t change those twin realities much.
That was 100 percent true. Until Donald Trump proved it (and me) wrong.
What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links on any topic in the comment thread and enjoy your Tuesday.
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Posted: August 3, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: morning reads |
Good Afternoon!
The heat is just unbearable around here. I’m not sure I can take another couple of months of this but there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it other than keep the shades drawn and send good thoughts to my functional but struggling central air unit. I’m definitely wearing as little as possible around the house. I thought I’d take the opportunity to feature crazy and strategically placed fruit today.
There’s a lot of craziness out there along with the crazy heat. This first appalling story is from Indiana about a second grade teacher who punished a child for not believing in gawd.
A Lawsuit recently filed against a teacher at Forest Park Elementary School in Indiana alleged that a 7-year-old student was “banished” from sitting with other students at lunch after he revealed that he did not believe in God.
According to the lawsuit obtained by The Washington Post, second grade teacher Michelle Myer interrogated the student, who was identified with the initials A.B., about his religious beliefs after he told his classmates on the playground that he did not go to church because he did not believe in God.
As a result, the child was ordered to sit by himself during lunch for a three-day period.
“The defendant’s actions caused great distress to A.B. and resulted in the child being ostracized by his peers past the three-day ‘banishment.’”
“Ms. Meyer asked A.B. if he had told the girl that he did not believe in God and A.B. said he had and asked what he had done wrong,” the lawsuit explained. “Ms. Meyer asked A.B. if he went to church, whether his family went to church, and whether his mother knew how he felt about God… She also asked A.B. if he believed that maybe God exists.”
Several days later, Meyer sent A.B. to talk to another adult at the school, who “reinforced his feeling that he had done something very wrong,” the lawsuit said.
“On the day of the incident and for an additional two days thereafter, Ms. Meyer required that A.B. sit by himself during lunch and told him he should not talk to the other students and stated that this was because he had offended them. This served to reinforce A.B.’s feeling that he had committed some transgression that justified his exclusion.”
“A.B. came home from school on multiple occasions crying saying that he knows that everyone at school – teachers and students – hate him,” the suit continued. “Even now A.B. remains anxious and fearful about school, which is completely contrary to how he felt before this incident.”
I’ve been writing about the AirBnB Crazy GreedFest being perpetrated on our historic neighborhoods by out of towners. Here’s a first hand look at what this is doing to affordable housing in the famous Treme 
neighborhood. The author of this is Deborah Cotton who was a blogger of note post-Katrina. Cotton was shot when some one fired into a celebratory second line parade. She nearly died and is now disabled. This link goes to the listing for her former home owned now by a carpetbagging lawbreaker from Austin.
“AIRBNB is a serious problem people. This lovely apartment was my home in Treme for ten years until it was bought by Carrie Altemus who owns and runs bed and breakfasts around the city. I was still recovering from being shot when she bought it and told me I had to leave, that she needed the apartment for her elderly father. I asked for a few extra months because I was on a list to get subsidized housing due to my disability and was waiting for an affordable apt to come available but they told me ‘NO’. I was rushed out so they could renovate it and then rent it for $150 p/night – $4,500 p/m, def more than I was paying in rent. Another affordable apartment turned over to tourists and this Austin ‘entrepreneur’. Pretty soon the whole city will be rented to tourists and the rest of us residents will have to move to the West Bank and drive in to serve them.”
The NRA and whack-a-doo politicians like Bobby Jindal always want more guns and armed citizens out there looking for the OK corral moments. Well, here’s some experimental research that shows that’s a really bad idea.
The notion that more guns are always the solution to gun crime is taken seriously in this country. But the research shows that more guns lead to more gun homicides — not less. And that guns are rarely used in self-defense.
Now a new study from researchers at Mount St. Mary’s University sheds some light on why people don’t use guns in self-defense very often. As it turns out, knowing when and how to apply lethal force in a potentially life-or-death situation is really difficult.
The study was commissioned by the National Gun Victims Action Council, an advocacy group devoted to enacting “sensible gun laws” that “find common ground between legal gun owners and non-gun owners that minimizes gun violence in our culture.” The study found that proper training and education are key to successfully using a firearm in self-defense: “carrying a gun in public does not provide self-defense unless the carrier is properly trained and maintains their skill level,” the authors wrote in a statement.
They recruited 77 volunteers with varying levels of firearm experience and training, and had each of them participate in simulations of three different scenarios using the firearms training simulator at the Prince George’s County Police Department in Maryland. The first scenario involved a carjacking, the second an armed robbery in a convenience store, and the third a case of suspected larceny.
They found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, people without firearms training performed poorly in the scenarios. They didn’t take cover. They didn’t attempt to issue commands to their assailants. Their trigger fingers were either too itchy — they shot innocent bystanders or unarmed people, or not itchy enough — they didn’t shoot armed assailants until they were already being shot at.
A government shutdown is looming once again. Taking our economy and our federal agencies to the brink appears to be a ritual of summer and fall these days.
The chance of a federal government shutdown increased dramatically and precipitously last week from 40 percent to 60 percent. It’s now more likely than not that a shutdown will result from the craziness going on in Washington.
With the House already in recess until after Labor Day and the Senate about to leave town this week, all of the components that had led to my previous 40 percent estimate got worse. There’s now even less time – Congress will be in session only a handful of days before the fiscal year begins on October 1 – for the House and Senate to devote to appropriations.
The leadership has already admitted that nothing has been decided about how to deal with this situation. In other words, this will be the kind of last minute, ad hoc decision that in the past has repeatedly failed and led to unwanted consequences…like a shutdown. In budget technical terms, the House and Senate leadership will be flying by the seat of its pants.
With the House having passed only six of the fiscal 2016 apropriations and the full Senate having considered none, few of the major program decisions have yet to be made and there won’t be time in September for Congress to make many (or even any) of them,
Thursday night we will have an live blog of the Republican Rumble of the Really Unhumble.
With just more than half the declared candidates on stage, the event will give voters a chance to see whether the debate gets into policy differences or ends up being a slug-fest.
Recent primary debates have produced a share of race-defining moments: Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet over whether the former Massachusetts governor was for individual health insurance mandates; then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s “oops” moment when he forgot one of the federal agencies he would eliminate as president; and then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s quip that Hillary Clinton is “nice enough.”
But this debate includes one major factor not seen in past debates: Donald Trump.
The boisterous real estate magnate, who has been a walking headline since he jumped into the race in June, has exceeded expectations, rising to the top of polls for the last couple of weeks.
That will likely give him the right to stand center stage at the debates based on plans reported by Bloomberg last week. But what happens then is anybody’s guess: Will Trump draw a peppering of questions from moderators, attacks from other candidates or be ignored? What will he say?
“The expectation is that he is going to be a bull in a china shop, perhaps a lack of specifics on policy, perhaps flouting the debate rules, getting too personal on stage,” said Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst with the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
“He needs to confound those expectations by having some substantive policy points on issues that are important to him, perhaps acting in a less abrasive manner than he’s well known for.”
Political junkies and experts believe Trump will bring his typical braggadocio to the debate stage despite their sentiment among Republicans that it makes him unelectable in a general election. Trump has been mum about his debate prep, telling CNN he doesn’t have a coach.
I’m thinking this should be a slugfest. Trump is definitely not going to be the only crazy one on the stage but he will definitely be the loudest.
So, that’s it for me. I have to get some grading done. What’s on your reading and blogging list today? And mind the strategically placed fruit!!!
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Posted: August 1, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: 2016 elections, Hillary Clinton, open thread |
This is going to be a rather short post. Last Saturday, BostonBoomer wrote about the New York Times and its seemingly endless need to write completely unhinged things about Hillary Clinton. We’ve also written about MoDo before and her strange fixation on the former Secretary of State and presidential candidate. Peter Daou and Tom Watson have completely dissected MoDo’s screeds in a must-read blog post. I want to make sure y’all read it. Daou traces the memes and name calling back to Karl Rove and has a rather complete list of misogynist adjectives frequently assigned to Hillary.
• POLARIZING
• CALCULATING
• SECRETIVE
• OVER AMBITIOUS
• WILL DO ANYTHING TO WIN
• DISINGENUOUS/INSINCERE
• MACHINE-LIKE/INHUMAN
• INEVITABLE/OVER-CONFIDENT
• OLD/OUT OF TOUCH
• DEFIANT/UNCARING
Just about any woman with grit, ambition, and a talent for assertiveness has worn those labels at one time or another. Why on earth is Maureen Dowd and the NYT allowing Karl Rove to control their narratives on the former Secretary of State? I’m always first in line to attribute the nonsense to the Dudebro culture where all white men with coveted college educations believe that only they can be the masters of the universe. See what you think.
In The Great American Brainwash: Half a Billion Dollars to Turn the Public against Hillary, Peter explains how these memes work and where they originate:
From a revealing report on Karl Rove’s Crossroads:
“An expensive and sophisticated effort is underway to test and refine the most potent lines of attack against Mrs. Clinton, and, ultimately, to persuade Americans that she does not deserve their votes. Republican groups are eager to begin building a powerful case against the woman they believe will be the Democratic nominee, and to infuse the public consciousness with those messages. The effort to vilify Mrs. Clinton could ultimately cost several hundred million dollars, given the variety and volume of political organizations involved.”
Crossroads’ goal is to indoctrinate the public with anti-Hillary narratives, to insert carefully tested negative memes into the public debate.
Voters need to understand that what they think they know about Hillary is often the result of sophisticated propaganda techniques, where tightly-crafted talking points are focus-grouped and deployed by shadowy GOP groups then magnified by the mainstream media and pundits.
This is the subtext to Maureen Dowd’s new, vicious attack against Hillary. Dowd’s words are chosen meticulously: they fit perfectly into the narratives and frames that have been developed for over two decades to smear Hillary. Each of these terms is taken from Dowd’s new op-ed – many are verbatim matches with our compendium of anti-Hillary memes:
“Acting all innocent, disingenuous, egregious transgressions, militant fans, craving a championship, surreptitious, wanting to win at all costs, calculating, history of subterfuge, crafty, sketchy value system, seamy, Faustian bargain, sheen of inevitability, robotic, queenly attitude, suspicious mind-set, unsavory.”
Delivering such excessive negativity in one piece is not opinion writing. It is not journalism. It is a personal vendetta aided and abetted by the New York Times, with the intention of spreading potent sexist frames crafted by conservative opposition researchers.
Dowd’s history of Hillary-bashing is notable:
Dowd has written more than 200 columns on Hillary, most of them negative. A detailed analysis by Oliver Willis and Hannah Groch-Begley published last summer found that “Dowd has repeatedly accused Clinton of being an enemy to or betraying feminism (35 columns, 18 percent of those studied), power-hungry (51 columns, 26 percent), unlikable (9 columns, 5 percent), or phony (34 columns, 17 percent). She’s also attacked the Clintons as a couple in 43 columns (22 percent), many of which included Dowd’s ham-handed attempts at psychoanalysis.”
The abuse continues. Just this past April, Dowd wrote that Hillary is a “granny” who “can’t figure out how to campaign as a woman” after she “scrubbed out the femininity, vulnerability, and heart” required to do so during her 2008 presidential run. Claiming Hillary is now trying to shift her image after she “saw the foolishness of acting like a masculine woman,” Dowd asserted that the candidate “always overcorrects,” and is now “basking in estrogen.” Dowd concluded, saying hopefully Hillary will “teach her Republican rivals…that bitch is still the new black” instead.
At #HillaryMen, we’ve dubbed this endless invective directed at Hillary in the media the “wall of words” and we’ve argued that it is the single biggest obstacle on her path to becoming America’s first woman president. Although Dowd is the master of anti-Hillary memes, she is hardly alone.
With that in mind, I have a lot of respect for the role Senator Bernie Sanders has played in the U.S. Senate even though he’s never been very influential or effective in getting anything passed. He at least is one notable voice from a point of view we rarely get to hear in this country. I also admire that–unlike Donald Trump or Ralph Nader–Sanders has said he would never run as an independent to try to unrail any other Democratic nominee. However, the same group of dudebros from 2008 have been popping up trolling women supporters of Hillary. There still seems to be an incredible discomfort among white male elites with the idea of a woman in charge.
On my side of the aisle, it’s all about Bernie. Well, Bernie vs. Hillary. And that’s where the rub is getting… rubbier.
I like Bernie; I’ve always liked Bernie. I’ve shared his memes and quotes over the years, I’ve appreciated his unvarnished views on issues of the economy and fiscal equity, and I believe he’s a passionate, powerful idealist who has a lot to say that bears hearing. I’m thrilled he’s running; I think he’s energized many on the left who’ve felt Hillary wasn’t left enough but didn’t have another candidate to support. He makes the Democratic ticket a true race, one that’s vibrant and competitive, and that’s a good thing.
The rub is in the way too many of his supporters are comporting themselves in their effort to promote the cause. I don’t mind the enthusiastic postings about big crowds, electrifying speeches, or hope-inducing polls. The ideas he’s touting, the kind of government he’s visualizing, the core principals of his platform are all admirable, and it’s easy to see why people are excited. That’s how it should go in campaigns, certainly at this point in the process. I don’t even mind the countless invitations I’ve received to join this “Bernie group” on Facebook, or come to that Bernie event in Hollywood. Invite away; I’m a big girl and I have no problem being gracious in my responses.
But lately I’m seeing too many threads on the topic turn into sadly-typical spitting contests, with those supporting Bernie flinging epithets at Hillary supporters, breathlessly listing all her purported transgressions and foibles, denigrating her accomplishments, insulting her personal decisions, and acting as though anyone who supports her is an idiot who doesn’t grasp the folly of their ways. I’ve had Bernie supporters get snarly with me, bait me to answer questions about why I might support Hillary, push me to defend her record, explain her business decisions, even parse her choice to stay with her husband. As a woman I find it appalling, but frankly, many of those most zealous on this topic are women… Hillary has always had the capacity to trip the wire with some on that side of the gender aisle!
My moment came when I posted this and said wtf was he thinking on Facebook. In 1972, I was a kid in high school working as a volunteer in the origination of what’s now one of the most successful rape crisis lines and centers in the country. I was like all of 16 and I can tell you that rape is a woman’s nightmare and one likely to happen. It’s not a damned fantasy. Well, this was evidently a satire piece but hell, the immodest proposal of eating Irish Children was good satire because it was such an over the top unlikely scenario. Being raped or held down against your will by men is something most of us will experience and by that time I’d been held down by upperclassmen and yelled at for not being humble like Jesus. I just considered myself fortunate to not get the rape part of it but I have many many friends that have. So, my question is what was he thinking then and what has he said now. (RAPE TRIGGER FOR THAT LINK)
So, one of the responses I got was from a friend of a friend “Looks like the Hillary supporters are dredging for straws to grasp.”. Uh, we’ve got no straws to grasp. Being a self-proclaimed socialist in today’s USA is about all it takes to sink a candidate outside of a few states. I’m fine with him being in the race. It’ll make for interesting debates.
I also “like” being mansplained about a piece being a critique of entrenched gender roles. My response was as follows.
No one thinks it’s his own sexual preferences nor was the critique of gender roles lost on me. It’s the idea of using a rape fantasy for a woman that’s appalling period. But the dudebros back then were as misogynist as they are today. I just want to read something explaining what on earth he was thinking back then. When you write satire you assign outrageous scenarios but you don’t make ever woman’s nightmare–and a likely one at that–a fantasy. I don’t think this will impact any election. It’s just appalling no matter when it was written and no matter by who
You can read more on the Bernie Swoon and the way the press is encouraging him to Hillary bash by reading this example at The Atlantic. They should debate and establish contrasts but there’s no need for anyone to be combative.
I just absolutely hate to think that we’re going to have to go through another one of these political seasons where we get dick-thwapped just because a woman wants to be president. I especially don’t want to hear a rehash of all that Rove crap coming from the New York Times. We’re going to be treated to the Republican Primary Debates shortly. I hope they just stuck to trashing each other. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long, stressful, misogynistic political season.
The original MoDO screed is here at today’s NYT where she compare’s Clinton to Tom Brady and says they have an attitude of “win at all costs” with a history of “subterfuge.” She even quotes a Wall Street Journal article. Wow, the NYT really needs to reassess their relationship with her if that’s the stuff she reads and cites.
Anyway, you can consider this an open thread. I slept late today and took a huge long nap this afternoon. I’m exhausted.
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