Are you ready for the Tuesday night fights? The undercard begins at 7PM Eastern and will include Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Bobby Jindal. The main event at 9PM will include the above eight candidates: John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and Rand Paul.
The “undercard” debate will be moderated by Fox Business Network anchors Trish Regan and Sandra Smith and Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau Chief Gerald Seib.
The prime-time debate will be moderated by Fox Business Network anchors Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto and Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker.
Where to watch:
The Nov. 10 GOP debates — both the prime-time and “undercard” contests — will be broadcast live from the Milwaukee Theatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the Fox Business Network. They will also be streamed live over the Internet at Foxnews.com and Foxbusiness.com.
No cable subscription is required to watch the live stream.
Fox Business Network says it is working with cable and satellite providers to give access to the channel to as may subscribers as possible for tonight’s debates.
The debates will be broadcast on the Fox News Radio network with a live audio stream over the Internet at radio.foxnews.com.
What the media has been saying in the lead up to tonight’s action:
MILWAUKEE, Wisc. — The fourth GOP primary debate will feature fewer candidates than the first three, but likely just as many — if not more — fireworks.
Fewer candidates means more time to speak — and more opportunity to screw up, as the moderators have telegraphed plans to drill candidates on policy specifics and hold them tightly to time constraints.
And with just over 80 days to go until the first primary contest, in Iowa, candidates will be jockeying for that last burst of momentum
heading into the winter campaign season where voters start to tune in, and more candidates will likely drop out.But at the Milwaukee Theater, where the debate is set to take place, the atmosphere was was largely the calm before the storm. On the chilly but bright day, few reporters were seen outside doing live reports. It was similarly quiet in the sleepy press file, with a few dozen staffers and reporters milling about but most elsewhere.
Another Bush-vs.-Rubio fight sets the stage for tonight’s GOP debate: Tonight’s fourth Republican presidential debate picks up where the last one left off — with Jeb Bush in desperate need of a strong showing, and with his team (this time his Super PAC) picking a fight with Marco Rubio. The Right to Rise Super PAC “has filmed a provocative video casting his rival Marco Rubio as ultimately unelectable because of his hard-line stand against abortion,” the New York Times reported last night. “That group, which has raised more than $100 million, has asked voters in New Hampshire how they feel about Mr. Rubio’s skipping important votes in the Senate. And the group’s chief strategist has boasted of his willingness to spend as much as $20 million to damage Mr. Rubio’s reputation and halt his sudden ascent in the polls, according to three people told of the claim.” In response, the Rubio campaign has released a brand-new online ad in response to the New York Times article, and it’s full of instances where Bush has praised Rubio. “I’m a huge Marco fan,” Bush says at the ad’s end.
Is the Bush Super PAC telegraphing its attack on Rubio? Or is it internal sabotage? Why would the Right to Rise folks leak this story out, especially before tonight’s debate? It was our understanding that — after the last debate — Jeb World acknowledged that they couldn’t take Rubio on again until Bush had improved his poll position. Given that this New York Times story feels more damaging to Jeb than to Rubio, we wonder if there’s some internal sabotage going on. Did someone with knowledge of Right to Rise’s abortion video on Rubio give the story to the Times? Or did it come from pro-Rubio folks who knew about the video? Regardless of the source, that Times article only puts more pressure on Bush tonight.
More speculation and analysis of other possible candidate clashes at the link. A few more stories to check out:
The passengers in the GOP clown car have another date with destiny tonight. Yes, another Republican debate, this time hosted by Fox Business Network. It should be worth watching just to see if the rest of the other clowns beat up on Ben Carson after his first week of “serious” media scrutiny.
There will only be eight participants in the main debate tonight. Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee have been demoted to the kid’s table, so we won’t have to listen to their fulminating in prime time. Sad sacks Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore didn’t even make it into the kiddie debate. The participants in the main event are Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich and Rand Paul.
I’ll put up a live blog tonight for you to post your reactions if you’re watching. I plan to watch at least the first hour. If it’s entertaining I’ll try stick it out for the whole thing.
The debate will be streamed on the Fox Business Network and Wall Street Journal websites. Lindsey Graham still isn’t quitting, according to CBS News.
Graham will be weighing in during the debate on an app called Sidewire, which bills itself as a mobile-based social platform. The Wall Street Journal notes that posting on Sidewire “is limited to about 300 ‘newsmakers.'” App users will be able to see Graham’s running commentary, but only those newsmakers will be able to ask Graham questions.
A Bush-Cruz tag-team?
Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz are starkly different candidates – one an establishment favorite with a patrician pedigree, the other a tea party bomb-thrower who’s made a career out of antagonizing leaders of his own party.
Yet, on Tuesday night, they may end up being debate partners….
Trump vs. Carson
Those who’ve followed Donald Trump’s debate style closely have noticed a distinct pattern. Near the start of each debate, the real estate developer and television celebrity will open with a “big blast” against one of his rivals. In the first showdown, it was directed at Rand Paul. In the second, at Jeb Bush. And in the third go-round, at John Kasich.
This time, his target seems certain: Ben Carson….
Fox Business’s time to shine
Nearly two weeks after CNBC stumbled, Fox Business, a newer and less established business network with a smaller viewership, has an opportunity to prove itself as a debate host.
Those who have been briefed on the network’s plans say it wants its debate to be what CNBC’s wasn’t: Policy-focused and chaos-free….
The other two items are about whether Christie can make any impact in the undercard debate and whether the reduced number of candidates in the main event will mean more “fireworks” among the participants.
Televised presidential debates originated in the 1960s, during TV’s golden era. But back then, networks ran news divisions at a loss in exchange for being granted a licensed monopoly over public airways by the FCC. Candidates, in exchange for the publicity, answered hard questions posed by moderators.
Today, the rules of the debate game have shifted to reflect a new media reality, one in which broadcasters have a powerful financial interest in promoting debates centered on entertainment, rather than substantive discussions of policy issues.
In fact, today’s debates can be likened to World Wrestling Entertainment: there are heroes and villains, winners and losers, entrance themes and announcers, drama and intrigue (will Biden show?) — even an “undercard.”
Like it or not, the democratic process has been usurped by an endless, ratings-driven spectacle. And for networks — with the debates’ stripped-down production costs and high ratings — it’s like hitting the mother lode.
Recent attempts by some Republican presidential candidates to control the questions they are asked in televised debates has been likened to the behavior of Russian and Syrian presidents Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad by a senior adviser to rival GOP contender John Kasich.
With tension still running high between several of the top Republican hopefuls and mainstream media outlets ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, John Weaver, the chief strategist of the Kasich campaign, has accused rivals for the party’s nomination of in effect adopting dictatorial tactics. “I don’t think it’s for the candidates to dictate how the moderators frame questions – that would be comparable to Vladimir Putin or Assad,” he told the Guardian.
Weaver said that in his personal opinion some of the questions that had been put to candidates in previous Republican debates could have been worded differently. “But at the end of the day, candidates are competing to be president of the United States, not for a post in the Boy Scouts. If you can’t handle questions from moderators – whether they are easy or tough – then what are you doing here?”
Tuesday’s GOP debate at the Milwaukee Theatre will open at 8pm CST as the fallout of the last such debate hosted by CNBC last month continues to reverberate in conservative circles. Following on from feisty exchanges betweenMegyn Kelly of Fox News and Donald Trump in the first Republican TV debate in August, the CNBC event erupted into open hostility from several of the candidates in response to what were perceived as “gotcha” questions from the moderators.
Ted Cruz complained that the candidates were being treated as if they were in a “cage match”, and Marco Rubio dubbed the media “Hillary Clinton’s Super Pac.”
I think “cage match” is a pretty good characterization of what we’ve seen so far in the GOP debates.
I’m still fascinated by the Ben Carson phenomenon. The latest media focus has been on his tale of getting fooled by a parody article that appeared in a Yale humor newspaper when he was a student there. I really wish reporters would focus more on Carson’s cluelessness about government and policy, but I have to admit it’s interesting to see what a fabulist this brilliant brain surgeon is. Here are some of the links I’ve been saving.
Ben Carson doesn’t have a detailed foreign policy platform, but he does have a clear worldview: the evangelical precept that the greatest danger facing America is moral and spiritual decline at home — a decline he often compares to a Roman Empire collapsing under the weight of its own perfidy and corruption.
“If we continue our fiscally irresponsible ways, coupled with our arrogance, there exist no other possibility than self-ruination,’’ Carson wrote in a column last year. “As was the case with the Roman Empire, our fate is in our hands.”
In another discussing the re-emergence of Russia, he wrote: “While we Americans are giving a cold shoulder to our religious heritage, the Russians are warming to religion. The Russians seem to be gaining prestige and influence throughout the world as we are losing ours. I wonder whether there is a correlation.”
Just last month, during a rally in West Memphis, Arkansas, Carson again mentioned the Romans in warning against fiscal irresponsibility and running up the national debt.
Carson’s views may be simplistic — Rome did not fall in a day, after all, and its long decline was caused by a wide array of interlocking factors, including overexpansion, an East-West split and attacks by outside forces. Yet his explanations strike a chord with conservative Christians already attracted to the retired pediatric neurosurgeon for his compelling life story and opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Those same voters also appreciate other foreign policy mantras espoused by Carson: that the U.S. must hold fast to its Christian ideals, always lead on the world stage, and use overwhelming force against Islamists who threaten its way of life.
Read the rest at Politico.
I’m going to end there, because I’m really late today. This time it’s my car–the exhaust system has to be fixed/replaced. I had to take it to my mechanic this morning and I won’t get it back till tomorrow morning. Plus, I think I’m coming down with a cold. Ahhhhhhhhhhh!
I’ll have a live blog up before 8PM. Now, what stories are you following today?
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Autumn is really a wonderful time. Many folks look forward to spring with its colorful flowers and that hint of warmth. I personally am invigorated by the slight chill in the air, the earthy color of trees, and the promises of new school years and harvests. That’s why I really hate to see us rushed through the season. I also love the end of daylight savings time and the return of being able to actually wander urban streets in the magic of dusk. I miss jumping in the huge piles of leaves that my dad used to rake with the dog barking at his side but delight in finding kids repeating the ritual for me. The leaves from my banana trees just don’t have the same smell or crackle and my joints tell me that diving into anything that vigorously is well past me.
To some, this time of year heralds the war on Crassmas and really big sales and crowds at stores. That season makes me stay home to read books.
This is a story that typifies the rush past fall. Evidently Starbucks didn’t choose a cup design that’s christmasy enough. So, they’re getting shade from the hyper-religious. You know, those folks that don’t really understand how they’ve basically appropriated everything yule-related and monopolized it as their own. Personally, I think they should STFU and spend more time reading up on things related to the supposed Prince of Peace.
The 2015 cup that Starbucks describes as “a two-toned ombré design, with a bright poppy color on top that shades into a darker cranberry below” is rather plain compared to past versions that featured ornaments and reindeer.
As it turns out, the blank design irked some customers. On November 5, Joshua Feuerstein, an Arizona-based evangelist who describes himself as a “social media personality,” posted on his Facebook page that this year’s spartan red cup illustrated Starbucks’ dismissal of Christmas as a Christian holiday in favor of political correctness.
In the video attached to the post, Feuerstein says that Starbucks “wanted to take Christ and Christmas off of their brand new cups. That’s why they’re just plain red.” Feuerstein said that instead of boycotting the coffee chain, he wanted to start a “movement,” so he went into a Starbucks—with his gun, as Arizona has an open-carry law and Starbucks has not outright banned firearms—ordered a hot drink, and told the barista that his name was “Merry Christmas,” which was subsequently scribbled on his red cup.
“So guess what, Starbucks? I tricked you into putting Merry Christmas on your cup,” Feuerstein said in his video. He urged his Facebook followers to do the same. The video has been watched about 12 million times and nearly 500,000 people have shared it.
On Sunday, three days after Feuerstein posted his video,Starbucks released a statement explaining the design of this year’s red cup. The company said that it took a “cue from customers who have been doodling designs on cups for years”—Starbucks started its holiday cup tradition in 1997—so “this year’s design is another way Starbucks is inviting customers to create their own stories with a red cup that mimics a blank canvas.” It’s also worth noting previous Starbucks red cups lacked any outright Christian symbolism.
Jeffrey Fields, Starbucks vice president of design and content, said in the release that in the past the holiday cups have told stories. This year, Starbucks “wanted to usher in the holidays with a purity of design that welcomes all of our stories,” Fields wrote. He said that the coffee chain “has become a place of sanctuary during the holidays,” so it’s “embracing the simplicity and the quietness of it.”
With more adults shedding their religious affiliations, as evidenced in the latest from the Pew Research Center, the country is becoming more secular. In the past seven years, using the new Pew data, Americans who identify with a religion declined six percentage points. Overall, belief in God, praying daily and religious service attendance have all dropped since 2007.
Today’s America is losing much of the general religious ethos that dominated the U.S. for hundreds of years.
However, the religious, in some ways, are becoming more religious. While fewer people said religion was somewhat important to their lives, there was a jump in those who said religion was very important. Of those who identify with a religion, Pew found an increase in reading Scripture at least weekly, participating in a small group and sharing their faith at least weekly. Church attendance numbers were relatively steady.
The article goes on to explain how this is affecting the culture and is probably living a lot of the zealous feeling disequilibrium with life in America. The problem is that the zealous are sure making the rest of the religion looks pretty dismal in a similar light that it’s hard to appreciate the beauty of the Sufi way of understanding Islam with ISIS running around. Let ISIS and Pat Robertson fight the war on christmas.
Thankfully, there are still stores like Nordstroms that let families appreciate the celebration of harvest and diversity that is American Thanksgiving. Employees stay home and customers don’t shove and push each other through the aisles to grab up some electrical gadget that will be broken or forgotten a year from now. Some times, modern America abuses some of the best things we can offer.
It’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,” The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2012 piece examining Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something.
Since the incident, I’ve felt isolated by the burden of this story and my sense of obligation to go public with it, but with an unclear aim. Am I “raising awareness,” in the familiar path of the victim speaking out? And if so, to what end? What will sharing my story really mean for Airbnb? Could the company, with its reportedly $24 billion valuation and plans to go public, do more to ensure the safety of the properties where millions of guests stay each year? As Airbnb rises into a global hospitality behemoth — reinventing not just how we travel but how we value private space — what responsibility does the company have to those who have given it their dollars and trust?
Startups that redefine social and economic relations pop up in an instant. Lawsuits and regulations lag behind. While my family may be the first guests to speak out about a wrongful death at an Airbnb rental, it shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. Staying with a stranger or inviting one into your home is an inherently dicey proposition. Hotel rooms are standardized for safety, monitored by staff, and often quite expensive. Airbnb rentals, on the other hand, are unregulated, eclectic, and affordable, and the safety standards are only slowly materializing.
Paul Krugman’s Op Ed today is a bit glum. He’s been reading the study that shows that mortality among Middle Aged-White people is on the rise. What does it say about a country where the what should be a relatively privileged population appears to be killing itself with excesses and forays into depression? We’ve known for some time that mortality for the poor and for minorities is bad relative to other developed countries, but not it appears its spreading to what’s usually been our healthy middle class.
There has been a lot of comment, and rightly so, over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999. This deterioration took place while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries and among other groups in our own nation
Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.
Yet the Deaton-Case findings fit into a well-established pattern. There have been a number of studies showing that life expectancy for less-educated whites is falling across much of the nation. Rising suicides and overuse of opioids are known problems. And while popular culture may focus more on meth than on prescription painkillers or good old alcohol, it’s not really news that there’s a drug problem in the heartland.
I always find this time of year to be a bit like American in general. Instead, of enjoying the beautiful scenery, the fruits of harvest, and the things offered by Autumn, many of us–including the masters of the economy–are rushing forward into the season where coffee cups are controversial, employees are ripped from rest, holidays, family, and basic sanity and manners, and money buys nothing but crap that falls apart and probably is bad for you.
We’re even basically at a point in society where all fall seems to represent to some people is screaming, yelling, and drinking over a gladiator sport that endangers and coddles its gladiators and doesn’t really encourage time together in a manner that includes conversation and good cheer. Even there, it’s all about the winter play offs and ultimate game. It’s not about the feel of the stadiums, the warmth of a good sweater, and the realization that your time at school is going to be short so you might as well dig into the campus life with gusto. The number of autumn semesters and hope for that new school year is limited, you know unless you join the ranks of the academic which is getting increasingly harder to do these days.
So, go ahead if you want to sing “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”. I’m going to wallow in Autumn Leaves for awhile.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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It appears I’m back on line after five days of utility hell! Katrina taught me how to camp out efficiently in my own home and endlessly harass “service” providers. However, it’s a skill I’d rather never use again. The last hurricane was bad enough. This 1 day outage of electricity and 5 day outage of tv/internet was made worse by me having to stick around the house waiting, calling, and watching. I watched the forum last night and Z Nation on my old college TV which finally brought me back in to the world at large. The new TV in the front took a hit from the power surge so all is not completely well. I’m still waiting for the carpenter to fix the faschia board on the gable. So, let me see what’s going on in the world before I try to go back and catch up with lost work.
I’ve noticed that one thing about living in the information age with plenty of ways to chase down information and plenty of ways to document and spread information, we’ve got a lot of opportunities to catch up with big fat liars and their lies. Most of the public seems to not avail itself of the tools necessary to fact check. Indeed, they appear to chase straight for the sites and people that peddle lies. But, we’re seeing an entirely new reality when the actual reality burbles its way through the web and media.
No where is this more noticeable than when officer’s invent stories that are not backed up by the material evidence collected at the scene. Thank goodness for police body cams and dash cams! We’re beginning to see more and more examples of police using unnecessary deadly force and then being caught creating absolute lies to cover up their actions. There are two recent examples worth noting. The first comes from N.J. where a dash cam shows that a suspect did, indeed, have his hands up which conflicts with officer accounts.
Two police officers who accused a motorist of trying to grab one of their guns were convicted Thursday of misconduct in part because a dashcam video showed the motorist holding his hands up.
Bloomfield Officers Sean Courter and Orlando Trinidad were found guilty by an Essex County jury of conspiracy, official misconduct, tampering with and falsifying public records and lying to authorities. Courter, 35, and Trinidad, 34, face mandatory minimum prison sentences of five years when they’re sentenced in January.
Courter, of Englishtown, and Trinidad, of Bloomfield, initially said motorist Marcus Jeter tried to grab Courter’s gun and struck Trinidad during a traffic stop on the Garden State Parkway in 2012. Jeter was charged with resisting arrest, aggravated assault and other offenses based on video from one of the officers’ dashboard cameras.
But Jeter acquired a second police dashcam video through an open records request. Combined, the videos showed him with his hands in the air for virtually the entire encounter.
Prosecutors dropped charges against Jeter and charged Trinidad, Courter and a third officer.
“They accused Mr. Jeter of criminal acts that led to him being charged and indicted,” assistant prosecutor Berta Rodriguez, who tried the case, said Thursday. “He was facing five years in prison. But for the dash camera in the second police vehicle, he might be in prison today.”
The third officer, Albert Sutterlin, pleaded guilty in 2013 to falsifying and tampering with records.
This next example had a tragic result. A six year old boy was killed as city marshals in a small Louisiana Town near Texas used deadly force on his unarmed father. The two were seated in a car. Two city marshals now face second degree murder charges.
Two city marshals in the central Louisiana town of Marksville will be charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of a six-year-old autistic boyfollowing a car chase involving his father, authorities announced late Friday.
Norris Greenhouse Jr., 23, a reserve officer, and Lt. Derrick Stafford, 32, were arrested Friday night by the Louisiana State Police, which is leading the investigation, CBS affiliate WAFB reported.
Jeremy Mardis was shot and killed Tuesday after his father, Christopher Few, led law enforcement officers on a chase. Few was wounded in the incident and is hospitalized in critical condition.
The marshals will also be charged with attempted second-degree murder of the father, Louisiana State Police Col. Michael Edmonson said at a news conference late Friday night.
Lt. Jason Brouillette and Sgt. Kenneth Purnell were also involved in the chase but have not been charged. All four officers were placed on administrative leave.
One of the officers was wearing a body camera which recorded the chase, the shooting and its aftermath.
“It is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen, and I’ll leave it at that,” Edmonson said, adding that the footage, witness interviews and forensic evidence led police to file charges.
According to the Marksville Police Department, Few led the law enforcement officers on a short pursuit Tuesday night and stopped on a dead-end road.
“The initial statement to my investigators was that the vehicle was backing up, they feared for their lives and they started firing,” Edmonson told CBS News correspondent David Begnaud Friday morning.
“There were a lot of shots fired that night and they were coming in one direction. There’s nothing for us that indicates that any fire came from that SUV,” Edmonson said. “There was no weapon found in that SUV.”
You can read more about this case on the NYT. We are clearly doing many things wrong in our criminal justice system. I hate to disturb you on a weekend morning, but reading about this small victim and his unnecessary death is vital to realizing we need reform and we need it now.
BB wrote quite a bit about the fanciful tales spun by Republican candidate Ben Carson yesterday. More and more media outlets are finding and checking out his tall tales. The WSJ has found more examples of completely untrue anecdotes that show up in Carson’s book and speeches. Carson’s poll numbers have started to fall. WTF is wrong with Republicans that they blindly accept all of their jerks at face value? Are they completely incapable of critical thinking and fact checking? Brian Beutler discusses this in an article in the Republic.
Ben Carson’s popularity among conservatives has been marked by their imperviousness to questions about his honesty and fitness. Carson has made dozens of statements about federal policy that have transcended garden-variety conservative over-promising and reached the realm of Chauncey Gardner-esque absurdity. He has also faced serious questions about the veracity of stories he tells about his youth and young manhood. Through it all, conservatives have not only stuck by his side, but actually become more taken with him. They’ve brushed off scrutiny with glib mockery, accusing white liberals of “othering” a black man for having the temerity to leave the “thought plantation.”
That all likely changes now that Carson has confessed to fabricating a seminal story about having declined admission to West Point in his youth. When you’ve lost Breitbart, it stands to reason that you will also lose talk-radio fawning, viral email forwards, and all the other mysterious sources of conservative cult status.
But there is room for genuine doubt here: Could Carson’s supporters prove so uninterested in his genuine merits and demerits that they might look past this transgression? The very fact that this doubt exists incriminates both the conservative-entertainment complex and the nature of the Republican electorate.
I always cringe at the representation of these Republicans as “conservative” because they are anything but conservative. Many tend to be outright theocratic and most really support insurgency and radical change. There’s nothing conservative about the stories they invent to justify insurrection. Kevin Drum at Mojo has made a short list of some of his most egregious fabrications.
Because we have synchronous and widespread sources of news, it’s really difficult for politicians to get away with these tall tells. Carson gave an absolutely unhinged presser yesterday where he tried to blame the media for all these misunderstandings. Blaming the “liberal” media has been staple of Republican pols since Nixon. The entire last Republican debate was an exercise in blaming the media for gotcha questions when mostly what was happen was good old fashion fact checking and holding to account.
Again, we have an excellent example of this in Louisiana in the David Vitter race. Vitter ran an absolutely blistering set of ads against his two Republican opponents in the election. They were so bad, that our Republican LT. Governor has now endorsed the Blue Dog Democrat who faces Vitter in the run-off. Many of the the supporters of the other Republican who came in a very close third have also put their support behind John Bel Edwards. Now, the Republican party is coming after LT. Governor Jay Dardenne with machetes and stating that JBE latest ad has brought the race to a new low. Oh, really? Where were you a few weeks ago when Vitter was attacking fellow Republicans? Lies can be told but it takes very little effort these days to unearth the truth.
On the evening of Monday, Feb. 25, 1991, only five hours before Baghdad Radio would tell Iraqi troops to begin withdrawing from Kuwait, all hell rained down on a U.S. Army barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It was, as the New York Times described it the next day, “the most devastating Iraqi stroke of the Persian Gulf war.” An Iraqi Scud missile struck the barracks, killing 28 Americans and wounding 100 more.
The barracks had been home to the 475th Quartermaster Group, an Army Reserve unit from the small western Pennsylvania town of Farrell.
Reading the grisly details of that night’s events still evokes horror and grief. Here is how New York Times reporter R.W. Apple, Jr., described the aftermath in his Feb. 26, 1991, story, “This morning, under the pitiless glare of portable floodlights, excavating equipment began plowing through the blackened remains of the building. Servicemen joined in the search for the missing, using picks and shovels, as some of the survivors milled about. Many wept.”
Fast-forward ten years to February 27, 2001: On the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives members were preparing to host President George W. Bush, who would deliver his State of the Union address that evening.
Before hearing from Bush, however, the House had some business to conclude – considering a resolution “honoring the ultimate sacrifice” made by those killed and wounded that horrible day 10 years earlier. When the votes were tallied at 5:27 p.m., the resolution passed overwhelmingly, 395-0.
Thirty-five members, however, did not vote that afternoon. Among them was U.S. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from suburban New Orleans serving his second term.
Vitter may have missed this vote because he waiting on a return call from an escort service based in California that sold the services of women in the Washington, D.C., area. As his colleagues and constituents would later learn, Vitter was a regular customer of the escort service.
Saying “David Vitter’s governorship will further” damage a Republican brand “damaged by the failed leadership of Bobby Jindal during this last term,” Dardenne threw his support behind Edwards at an event on the LSU campus.
Fine, be angry or disappointed with Dardenne, who has faithfully carried the Republican banner since childhood when he handed out push cards for Barry Goldwater, for his decision to break a promise not to endorse in the runoff. It is also OK to criticize the Republican for endorsing a Democrat even though this particular Republican has a long history of being a) independent and b) shunned by the very party officials who now brand him a traitor.
But to rank Dardenne on the hate meter with Satan, Alabama football coach Nick Saban, “the socialist” Barack Obama or a jilted husband taking violent revenge on his ex-wife goes well beyond the pale — even in this day of nasty, hyperbolic political discourse.
The worst, by far, is the despicable letter fired off by Peter Egan, chairman of the St. Tammany Republican Parish Executive Committee. In the unique worldview of Egan, Dardenne endorsing a Democrat — rather than toe the party line and endorse Vitter, or at least stay silent — is “a vehement act of retribution” for being knocked out of the race in the open primary.
Mr. Egan goes on pontificating, declaring “the behavior of endorsing Edwards is akin to that of a jilted man firing indiscriminately at his ex-wife’s car, mindless of the collateral harm and injury to many innocent people.”
I’m all for hyperbole to make a point, but exactly who are these innocent people Dardenne has harmed?
No individual who answers the call of public service deserves hate-speech like this, and especially a man who has done an impeccable job of serving the state he loves.
Where were all these “Republican or die” people when Vitter, a fellow Republican, was assailing Dardenne’s character and GOP service to Louisiana? Is the message that vicious Republican-on-Republican attacks — whether they come from Vitter or Egan — are fair game, but endorsing a man who did not eviscerate your character is a crime punishable by political death?
FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly has a heated argument with network contributor George Will over his latest columnwhich accuses the O’Reilly Factor host of slandering former President Ronald Reagan in his latest book,Killing Reagan.
“It is not a laudatory book,” Will said about O’Reilly’s Killing Reagan. “It is doing the work of the left which knows in order to discredit conservatism it must destroy Reagan’s reputation as president. Your book does the work of the American left with its extreme recklessness.”
“You’re a hack,” O’Reilly said to Will. “You are in with the cabal of the Reagan loyalists who don’t want the truth to be told.”
Conservative columnist George Will attacked Bill O’Reilly’s new book, “Killing Reagan, in the Washington Post on Thursday — calling it “a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions” that “will distort public understanding of Ronald Reagan’s presidency more than hostile but conscientious scholars could” — and to the surprise of absolutely no one, O’Reilly shot back last night.
Will’s criticism was admittedly harsh. He warned readers of O’Reilly’s book to beware, as they were “about to enter a no-facts zone,” and referred to the book as “nonsensical history and execrable citizenship,” so it’s not as O’Reilly wasn’t within his rights to be offended.
And offended he was. He began by noting the difference between “slander” and “libel,” which Will misused in his column — because, of course, noting one error in an otherwise sound review of a book invalidates all of the other valid criticisms contained therein.
You should go watch the video if you can stomach it.
So, the deal is that we can in fact ferret out the truth in many many ways these days and we can rely on some media sources and fact checkers to do so. The deal is this. The lie tends to resonant louder than then the correction. It’s usually buried deep and less accessible.
What’s a voter to do?
So, that’s it for me today. What’s on your reading and blogging list?
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MSNBC host Rachel Maddow is set to moderate the network’s only event in the Presidential primary season, a forum from Winthrop University in South Carolina. Deemed the “First in the South Presidential Forum”, tonight’s event will feature frontrunner Hillary Clinton, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.
The event in Rock Hill, SC is scheduled to air from 8-10 p.m. EST on MSNBC. Although the event is primarily sponsored by the South Carolina Democratic Party, the event is also being co-sponsored by twelve other southern states.
Maddow was careful to make the distinction that tonight’s event is a “forum” and not a formal DNC-sanctioned “debate”. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has continued to be under fire for limiting the official number of debates to only six.
The debate is being held in Rock Hill, South Carolina. There are many questions that loom. Will Bernie go negative? Will any one notice Martin O’Malley? Another question Alex-Seid Waltz wants to know is can Hillary maintain her monopoly on the black vote?
Clinton is likely to use the forum to focus on reaching out to people of color, who make up the majority of South Carolina’s Democratic primary electorate. In an op-ed published in Ebony magazine Friday morning, Clinton called for “a new and comprehensive commitment to equity and opportunity for communities of color,” that includes better investment in under-served communities.
The former secretary of state has a huge advantage among nonwhite voters over Sanders, capturing support from 8 out of 10 black voters in the Palmetto State. She lost the state handily to Barack Obama in 2008 in a bitter and racially charged primary.
Rep. James Clyburn, the most powerful Democrat in the state, said that’s been forgiven. “I have talked to a lot of people and they are not holding any of that against Hillary today,” he told MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki.
But Sanders will have a big chance to introduce himself for the first time to South Carolina black Democrats for the first time Friday night, and he’ll roll out a campaign leadership team in the state that includes Black Lives Matter activists and others.
Join us to watch the forum and get answers to these and more questions!!
The event from Rock Hill, SC will air live on MSNBC at 8 p.m. For viewers who are eager to watch the forum through their computers, the option to use the MSNBC TV app is available as well. The app is a free download from NBC News Digital. Additionally, a cable or satellite subscription with an active log-in account can access the content through http://www.msnbc.com/now as it airs.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Good Morning!
The article goes on to explain how this is affecting the culture and is probably living a lot of the zealous feeling disequilibrium with life in America. The problem is that the zealous are sure making the rest of the religion looks pretty dismal in a similar light that it’s hard to appreciate the beauty of the Sufi way of understanding Islam with ISIS running around. Let ISIS and Pat Robertson fight the war on christmas.
Paul Krugman’s Op Ed today is a bit glum. He’s been reading the study that shows that mortality among Middle Aged-White people is on the rise. What does it say about a country where the what should be a relatively privileged population appears to be killing itself with excesses and forays into depression? We’ve known for some time that mortality for the poor and for minorities is bad relative to other developed countries, but not it appears its spreading to what’s usually been our healthy middle class.
It appears I’m back on line after five days of utility hell! Katrina taught me how to camp out efficiently in my own home and endlessly harass “service” providers. However, it’s a skill I’d rather never use again. The last hurricane was bad enough. This 1 day outage of electricity and 5 day outage of tv/internet was made worse by me having to stick around the house waiting, calling, and watching. I watched the forum last night and Z Nation on my old college TV which finally brought me back in to the world at large. The new TV in the front took a hit from the power surge so all is not completely well. I’m still waiting for the carpenter to fix the faschia board on the gable. So, let me see what’s going on in the world before I try to go back and catch up with lost work.
This next example had a tragic result. A six year old boy was killed as city marshals in a small Louisiana Town near Texas used deadly force on his unarmed father. The two were seated in a car. Two city marshals now face second degree murder charges. 
completely untrue anecdotes that show up in Carson’s book and speeches. Carson’s poll numbers have started to fall. WTF is wrong with Republicans that they blindly accept all of their jerks at face value? Are they completely incapable of critical thinking and fact checking? Brian Beutler discusses this in an article in the Republic. 
The JBE ad is a must see. Bobb Mann writes about it for Salon,
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