Posted: January 12, 2016 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics |
Good Morning!!
Tonight at 9:00 President Obama will give his final State of the Union Address. We’ll have a live blog to discuss what he says. Here’s what ABC News thinks we should expect from tonight’s speech.
Experts predict that rather than trying to cajole a Republican-controlled Congress to cooperate with him in 2016, the president will be asking viewers around the country to remember his legacy items and consider the future in an attempt to set the tone for the next (he hopes, Democratic) president.
“It’s not going to be a laundry list of things on the agenda” like most State of the Union addresses, said Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
That’s how the president himself framed it in a video message sent to supporters 
we’ve made, not just what I want to get done in the year ahead, but what we all need to do together in the years to come,” he said.
Read more projections about the speech at the link.
The LA Times says Obama’s speech will be about “staying relevant.”
Speaking to Democratic donors recently in his hometown of Chicago, President Obama took some delight in recalling how long it had been since someone reminded him he was a “lame duck” president.
“We’ve been flapping our wings a lot,” he said, noting a Pacific Rim trade agreement, a deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear program, positive economic trends and new actions on climate change.
In that spirit, White House officials have said for weeks that Obama’s final State of the Union address Tuesday will be a “non-traditional speech.” That’s a well-worn line from second-term administrations entering their final year as they try to stay relevant in the national debate.
The relatively early date for the president’s annual address to Congress is indicative of the need to avoid being overshadowed by the campaign to succeed Obama, with the Iowa caucuses less than three weeks away. But Obama and his team nonetheless see a rare opportunity for the president to not just be part of the 2016 debate, but to set its terms.
“This one moment where the country sort of acknowledges that the president gets an hour to assess the condition of the country and to offer up a prescription for confronting the challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities is as important as ever,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.
The article goes on to discuss how the White House will use social media, YouTube, and other digital methods to engage the home audience.
This week we’re also going to have two debates–a GOP debate on Thursday and a Democratic one on Sunday. Of course we’ll have live blogs each both nights. On the Republican side, Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina have been excluded from the main stage.
We’re approaching the dates of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, so things are heating up on the campaign trail. Last night ABC News and Univision held a Democratic Forum and the three Democratic Candidates were there.
The annual Black and Brown Forum, hosted by Fusion, a joint venture between ABC News andUnivision, touched on issues ranging from the Obama administration’s deportation policy to sexuality in America and the White House as “public housing.” ….
During a rapid-fire question round, Sanders was asked if it would be “off-brand” for a DemocraticSocialistto live “in a mansion like the White House?” The Vermont Senator, who lives modestly on the campaign trail and jokes about how few suits he owns, outwitted the questioner, drawing laughs as he retorted: “I would think of it more like public housing.” ….
With new polls showing them neck-and-neck in Iowa, Clinton and Sanders both agreed the race was up in the air. “Anyone can win!” Clinton said. “Who would have thought Donald Trump would be leading in national polls? I mean for those who ever thought about running for president, take heart.”
Hillary got in a couple more good digs at Trump:
ABC News: Hillary Clinton Says She Got Donald Trump ‘Nothing’ For His Wedding.
During the Fusion network’s Brown & Black Democratic forum on Monday night in Des Moines, Clinton was asked what she got the Republican frontrunner when she attended his 2005 wedding to model Melania Knauss.
“Nothing, nothing,” she said.
“He was basically a Democrat before he was a Republican,” Clinton explained. “He was, you know, somebody we all knew in New York, and he was supportive of Democrats and supportive of a lot of causes I care about and people I knew cared about.”
“Now he seems to have taken another road,” she added.
Hahahahahahahahahaha!!
Bernie Sanders has been going around claiming that he is the most electable Democratic candidate. At the Washington Post, Philip Bump points out some points out some problems with that argument.
On Sunday, Bernie Sanders’s campaign put out a press release titled, “Electability Matters.”
“A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll,” it read, “found that Sanders does better than Clinton against the leading Republican candidates by an average of 6 points in Iowa and a stunning 21 points in New Hampshire. Specifically, the poll put Sanders 13 points ahead of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump here in Iowa.”
A fine point was put on it: “Bernie’s substantial advantage over Republicans in the general election versus Secretary Clinton is another important reason that Democratic primary voters should choose him as our nominee,” the campaign’s Jeff Weaver wrote….
The only problem is that the argument isn’t a great one.
We can start with those numbers from Iowa and New Hampshire. When it comes to state match-ups, the extent to which the Democrat wins New Hampshire — a state that’s gone for the Democrats in five of the last six elections and which is worth less than 1 percent of the country’s electoral votes — doesn’t amount to a whole lot. Iowa is slightly different, with a few more electoral votes and somewhat closer recent elections (although still a tilt toward the Dems). Sanders does do better against the leading Republicans in those states, but Clinton still beats Trump in both.
Iowa and New Hampshire both have a distinction which has been to Sanders’s benefit in the primaries there, too: They’re very white. Clinton has much more support among non-white voters than Sanders, which is why she’s up big in South Carolina. Once we start talking about states like Missouri or Georgia, we can expect the calculus to shift.
Read much more at the WaPo link.
I’m going to have to add more links in the comment thread, because WordPress is behaving badly this morning. What stories are you following today? See you down below, and have a great Tuesday!
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Posted: January 9, 2016 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics |
Good Afternoon!!
There’s quite a bit of news today for a weekend, I have a cold, and I’m very late; so this is going to be a link dump post. There’s so much to talk about, I hardly know where to begin.
Even though national polls are essentially meaningless at this point, this one is still disturbing.
AP via US News: Trump Could Win It All. A new survey shows a sizable number of Democrats ready to defect from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.
So if Donald Trump proved the political universe wrong and won the Republican presidential nomination, he would be creamed by Hillary Clinton, correct?
A new survey of likely voters might at least raise momentary dyspepsia for Democrats since it suggests why it wouldn’t be a cakewalk.
The survey by Washington-based Mercury Analytics is a combination online questionnaire and “dial-test” of Trump’s first big campaign ad among 916 self-proclaimed “likely voters” (this video shows the ad and the dial test results). It took place primarily Wednesday and Thursday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.
Nearly 20 percent of likely Democratic voters say they’d cross sides and vote for Trump, while a small number, or 14 percent, of Republicans claim they’d vote for Clinton. When those groups were further broken down, a far higher percentage of the crossover Democrats contend they are “100 percent sure” of switching than the Republicans.
Read about the survey at the link. Fortunately, that isn’t how we elect presidents. We do it state by state, and you have to actually leave the house and vote at your local polling place.
For some rational discussion of the Trump phenomenon, here’s Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: Three Theories Of Donald Trump’s Rise. The three possible explanations are:
Theory 1: Trump’s support reflects a Republican populist revolt.In a nutshell: Trump is extremely popular among Republican voters, who are attracted to his combination of populism, nativism and anti-elite resentment….
Theory 2: Trump’s support reflects a Republican Party power vacuum. In a nutshell: Party elites and insiders usually have a tremendous amount of influence on the identity of the nominee, with Republican voters eventually falling in line behind one of their preferred choices. The fact that Trump is leading now reflects a lack of consensus among those party elites. However, these elites will rally behind whichever establishment-approved choice performs best in Iowa and New Hampshire, elevating that candidate to the frontrunner’s position….
Theory 3: Trump’s support reflects a media bubble. In a nutshell: Trump’s standing in the polls substantially reflects the disproportionate amount of media coverage he’s receiving; it’s not that remarkable for a candidate to poll at 35 percent when he’s recently been getting 70 percent of the media coverage of the Republican race. That makes Trump’s position vulnerable if media coverage eventually evens out, or as the election approaches in each state as voters learn more about the candidates on their own and less through the lens of the national media.
Read the detailed discussion at the link.
Here’s a must-read on a dramatic change in the way the media as reacted to Trump’s outrageous lies and extreme proposals: “Influential news outlets have set aside traditional notions of balance…” by Jay Rosen. Be sure to check it out.
Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium is convinced that Trump can win the Republican nomination, based on the current state of Republican polls.
Since actual election results will deviate from current polls by many points, parametric approaches (i.e. calculating means, medians, standard deviations, regressions, and so on) may be of limited use. Let me take a look at the data to ask a simpler question: what does current polling rank predict about the nominee?
Although Donald Trump’s support might be higher or lower than the numbers indicate, nobody seriously questions the observation that he is in first place nationally. But what does that predict for the nomination?
Wang looks at past election cycles and shows that by this time the man who became the GOP nominee was in first or second place in most polls. Read more at the link.
Ted Cruz is also in the news–for the latest birther controversy and an incredibly stupid remark about his children and Hillary Clinton.
From TPM: Ted Cruz’s Mother Was On Official List Of Canadian Citizens Eligible To Vote.
For years, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) has been dogged by a backburner controversy about whether he is eligible to serve as President since he was born in Calgary, Alberta Canada in 1970. But since Cruz’s mother was an American citizen, the place of his birth actually is irrelevant to his eligibility.
Yet Cruz’s mother’s name appears on a Canadian government document, obtained by TPM in 2013, that lists Canadian citizens eligible to vote in 1974.
TPM shared an electronic copy of the document with Sen. Cruz’s office when it originally obtained the document in 2013. Cruz’s then-communications director, Sean Rushton, emphasized that the document is not a record of people who actually voted in any election. He further pointed out that the document itself provides notice that “applications for corrections,” “deletions from,” and “additions to” the list may have been necessary.
“At least one other error is evident on its face: the name of Sen. Cruz’s father is misspelled,” Rushton told TPM in his 2013 statement. “Regardless, Mrs. Cruz has never been a Canadian citizen, and she has never voted in any Canadian election.”
TPM eventually decided not to publish an article based on the document at the time, in part because Cruz was not yet a candidate for president. TPM decided to revisit the story earlier this week as rival Donald Trump renewed his skepticism about Cruz’s eligibility, moving the story to the center of the campaign, and was prepared to publish this evening….
Jason Johnson, Cruz’s chief campaign strategist, said in the statement that candidate’s mother “was never a citizen of Canada.” He added that she could not have been a Canadian citizen at the time her son was born because of residency requirements. Eleanor Cruz was born in Delaware, while her ex-husband, Rafael Cruz, was born in Cuba, obtained Canadian citizenship while living in Calgary and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in the mid-2000s.
The document in question is a voter list of individuals who lived in the southern district of the city of Calgary, were over the age of 18 and were Canadian citizens, thus eligible to vote.
It still sounds like a non-issue to me, but read much more about it at TPM if you’re interested.
Now for Cruz’s creepy remark about Hillary Clinton.
NBC News: Cruz Suggests Voters Give Clinton ‘Spanking’ Over Benghazi.
Ted Cruz suggested on Friday that Hillary Clinton should be given a “spanking” by voters to hold her accountable for the Benghazi attack in 2011 when she served as secretary of state.
Cruz compared it to how he punishes one of his daughters for lying.
“In my house, if my daughter, Catherine, the 5-year-old, says something that she knows to be false, she gets a spanking,” Cruz told the attendees at a crowded coffee shop here.
He continued, “Well, in America, the voters have a way of administering a spanking.”
A supporter in the crowd prompted Cruz’s response after asking how, as president, he would hold individuals accountable for the attack that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
I wonder if Cruz would suggest “spanking” a man running for the presidency? So now we know that Ted Cruz is a virulent sexist (not really a surprise) and that he believes in spanking very young children. In my opinion, that is child abuse.
Ben Carson, who is supposedly still running for president also did something awful to a child yesterday. Vanity Fair reports: Ben Carson Humiliated a Fifth Grader in Public.
Carson reportedly asked a group of fifth graders at a campaign rally Thursday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to identify the laggard among them. “Who’s the worst student?” he asked, according to The Des Moines Register. The kids, of course, being kids and not knowing better than say, someone gunning to be the leader of the free world, quickly pointed to one student….
Carson’s question wasn’t intended to humiliate and scar a child for life (though he now has someone to write about for his college-admissions essay). The onetime G.O.P. front-runner was simply trying to make a point about how he himself was a “horrible student” who would easily have been the one chosen as the worst in the class if some political candidate had the horrible idea to single him out in public. It was meant to be an inspirational story, that even 10-year-olds thought of as the dumbest in class can rise to be a renowned neurosurgeon and public figure who could then embarrass and put down children.
He tried to make good backstage, according to the Register, patting the boy on the back and forcing a copy of his book on him. Surely, that made up for it.
Ugh.
More interesting reads:
CNN: Silently protesting Muslim woman ejected from Trump rally.
I really liked this one. Washington Post: Mom: What do I expect from my children’s elementary school? Certainly not this.
Washington Post: Man in alleged plot to kidnap Obama’s dog arrested on weapons charge.
Classic Esquire: The Candidate We Love to Hate and Hate to Love (spoiler: it’s Hillary, but it’s actually quite positive).
Barack Obama’s op-ed in the New York Times: Guns Are Our Shared Responsibility. (Interesting note: Obama writes that he will not support any candidate who votes to exempt gun owners from being sued (i.e. Bernie Sanders).
NYT: What Donald Trump Owes Geo(rge Wallace.
A deep dive on why people vote Republican and specifically why they like Donald Trump from the NYT: Purity, Disgust, and Donald Trump, by Thomas B. Edsall.
Two views on the sexual assaults in Germany: NYT: German’s Post-Cologne Hysteria and Daily Mail: Why Germany can’t face the truth about migrant sex attacks: SUE REID finds a nation in denial as a wave of horrific attacks is reported across Europe.
Village Voice: Donald Trump and the Joys of Toy Fascism (h/t Dakinikat).
Yahoo News: Jeb Bush races to salvage presidential campaign.
Boston Globe: Bernie Sanders in Clinton Territory (Massachusetts).
NBC News: Hillary Clinton Slams Bernie Sanders on Guns.
What stories are you following today?
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Posted: January 7, 2016 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics |
Good Morning!!
Donald Trump has succeeded in making an issue out of Ted Cruz’s Canadian birth, and it only took him a about a week. Another Republican are now questioning whether Cruz is eligible to be POTUS. Ironically, that Republican is John McCain who was also born outside the U.S. He was born on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone.
CBS News: John McCain Says Ted Cruz’s citizenship is “worth looking into.”
In an interview Wednesday on Phoenix radio station 550 KFYI’s Chris Merill Show, McCain said he “doesn’t know” whether Cruz’s birth in Canada makes him eligible to be president. Cruz, whose father was born in Cuba, asserts that he is a U.S. citizen because his mother was an American.
“I know that came up in my race because I was born in Panama, but I was born in the Canal Zone which is a territory. Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona when it was territory when he ran in 1964,” McCain said.
McCain added that he was born on a U.S. military base, which he said is not the same as being born in Canada.
“That’s different from being born on foreign soil. I think there is a question. I’m not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into. I don’t think it’s illegitimate to look into it.”
Asked if the Supreme Court might have to weigh in on the “natural born citizen” issue, McCain said, “It may be, that may be the case.”
I don’t think so. After all George Romney was born in Mexico and he was deemed eligible to run for the presidency in 1968. But John McCain hates Ted Cruz’s guts and so do most of his other Senate colleagues. It will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.
What I find really frightening is Trump’s ability to gin up bogus issues so easily. How is this going to affect Hillary’s campaign?
From ABC News, here’s the latest on the birther “issue” from Trump: Donald Trump Wants Ted Cruz to ‘Go Before a Judge’ About His Citizenship.
Donald Trump wants Ted Cruz to go before a judge to “immediately, like tomorrow” to determine whether or not he is a “natural born citizen” and therefore eligible to run for president.
Trump made the request for Cruz to seek a declaratory judgment from federal court on the issue during an interview with CNN on Wednesday.
Trump cast such a move as “for the good of Ted.”
“You go in seeking the decision of the court without a court case. You go right in. You go before a judge, you do it quickly. Declaratory judgment. It’s very good,” Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “So when there’s a doubt — because there’s a doubt. You want the court to rule.”
LOWELL, MA – JANUARY 4: Republican candidate for President Donald Trump speaks to thousands of spectators at a rally in Lowell, Massachusetts on Monday evening January 4, 2016. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Donald Trump held a rally in Lowell, Massachusetts on Monday. Lowell is a 15 minute drive from the New Hampshire border. Anyway Charlie Pierce was in attendance at the rally. Here’s his report: My Monday Night in Massachusetts with He, Trump. Pierce begins by noting the irony of Trump appearing in the building named after the late Senator Paul Tsongas.
The late Senator Paul Tsongas was a brilliant, mild man of substance and ideas. I didn’t agree with all of the latter; Tsongas was an early neoliberal deficit hawk, about which we amiably argued for a number of years. As a political person, he was as far from He, Trump as a chamber quartet is from an industrial shop floor. The greatest monument to his dogged, determined approach is the city of Lowell itself. The Lowell National Historical Site, a monument to the city’s legacy as an industrial center, was Tsongas’s dream. He worked night and day to make it a reality and it revitalized the city, which is why the arena in which He, Trump brought his monkey show was named after him.
Former U.S. Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, D-Mass., who rebounded from cancer to briefly become the Democratic frontrunner for president in 1992, died Saturday, Jan. 18, 1997, of pneumonia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was 55. Tsongas is shown in this Feb. 2, 1992 photo when he spoke at a town meeting in Nasua, N.H. (AP Photo/Greg Gibson)
A little more:
The primary policy prescription is to elect He, Trump, because he knows everything, including enough smart, top guys who will help him in the unlikely event that he comes up against a problem about which he doesn’t know everything. (He once again cites Carl Icahn and the rest of his proposed junk-bond Cabinet.) I would analyze the ideas presented to the loving audience, but the only idea presented was electing He, Trump, who knows everything. For example, he proposes that, to defeat ISIS, we should “take the oil.” Taking the oil is the beginning and the end of the policy, the alpha and the omega of the idea.“We should be unpredictable,” he says, and I don’t really know what that means, but everyone cheered….
He does not deliver speeches. He delivers remarks. He recites his poll numbers. He explains his long fight against the odds that has resulted in said poll numbers. He mocks Jeb Bush and he sucks up to Tom Brady. He cracks that Hillary Clinton “has the biggest teleprompters,” and everybody laughs a laugh straight out of a frathouse smoker, and he’s rambling on to another topic, usually involving He, Trump.
Pierce doesn’t get the appeal of this narcissistic display, and neither do I. Nevertheless there are apparently quite a few Americans who lap it up, and that is truly scary. Please go read the rest at the link above.
Another “issue” that came up on the Republican side yesterday was about Marco Rubio’s new shoes with fancy Cuban heels. From NY Magazine’s The Cut: A Vote for Marco Rubio Is a Vote for Men’s High-Heeled Booties.
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio and One Direction bandmember Harry Styles have something in common. Well, two things, actually: an appreciation for the 1D song “What Makes You Beautiful,” and a love of heeled booties.
At a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday, Rubio appeared wearing incredibly fashionable, incredibly well-heeled black leather ankle boots that are sure to feed those rumors about his extravagant spending habits. The boots — which we think are eitherthese Giorgio Brutini boots or these Margiela ones — look a lot like a pair favored by Styles, albeit with slightly less pilgrim flair.
The shoes got a surprising amount of attention from the media and other GOP presidential candidates.
From Slate: Serious Adult Presidential Candidates Make Fun of Marco Rubio’s Fancy Shoes.
It is January of a presidential year. Voting begins in a few weeks. It is time that voters stop dabbling with silly clowns like Donald Trump and his childish insults and consider serious candidates. Political leaders, like Jeb Bush, who will soberly discuss complex issues of great import including trade, budgeting, diplomacy, war …
… and Sen. Marco Rubio’s girly little girl boots.
The Republican side this week is consumed with chatter about Marco Rubio’s choice of footwear during a recent visit to New Hampshire. The problem, in short, is that Rubio’s may well be fancy, made of the choicest leathers and featuring a disconcerting rise in the heel region. To the naked eye, they look suspiciously Eye-talian. In this country, the common, conservative man is expected to wear a bunch of greasy McDonald’s wrappers on his feet, tied together by the intestines of a freshly murdered grizzly bear.
But what about those high heeled cowboy boots lots of conservative guys wear? How is that any different? Oh well, I just don’t get Republican thinking period. A few more links on this:
Policy Mic: Marco Rubio’s Shiny High-Heeled Black Boots Dominated Social Media for No Reason At All.
Vanity Fair: How Much Do Marco Rubio’s Boots Cost?
The Guardian: Devilish history of Cuban heels proves they’re too sexy for Rubio’s God squad.
USA Today: Marco Rubio unamused about ‘high-heeled booties’ scrutiny.
On the Democratic side, the Clinton scandal-mongers are at it again. I’m not going to link to a lot of stories, but you can find some on Memeorandum.com. Here’s Karen Tumulty at the Washington Post:
The ghosts of the 1990s have returned to confront Hillary Clinton, released from the vault by Donald Trump and revved up by a 21st-century version of the scandal machine that almost destroyed her husband’s presidency.
This is a moment that her campaign has long expected. What remains to be seen is whether a reminder of allegations of sexual impropriety against Bill Clinton — which were deemed to have varying levels of credibility when they were first aired — can gain new traction in a different context.
The fresher case being made is that Hillary Clinton has been, at a minimum, hypocritical about her husband’s treatment of women, and possibly even complicit in discrediting his accusers.
And it is being pressed at a time when there is a new sensitivity toward victims of unwanted sexual contact, and when one of the biggest news stories is the prosecution of once-beloved comedian Bill Cosby on charges that he drugged and assaulted a woman 12 years ago — one of dozens who have accused him of similar behavior.
I’m not aware that Bill Clinton has been accused on drugging women, but I suppose Hillary is going to have to deal with this somehow.
On the positive side, here’s a great article on Hillary’s campaign at Fast Company: How the Hillary Clinton Campaign Built A Campaign Staff as Diverse as America. You really need to go read the whole thing, so I’m not going to post excerpts.
What else is happening? Please let us know in the comment thread.
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Posted: January 5, 2016 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Barack Obama, morning reads, U.S. Politics |
Good Morning!!
President Obama has announced executive actions he will take in an effort to “reduce gun violence.” The previous link will take you to the White House website where you can read the details. The goals are to increase the efficiency of background checks, encourage effective enforcement of gun laws, invest in mental health treatment and facilitate reporting of people who are prohibited from having guns, encourage the use of gun safety technology as well as funding research on “improving gun safety.”
The Boston Globe reports: Obama moves to require background checks for more gun sales.
The president approved a series of long-awaited executive steps aimed at curbing gun violence despite opposition in Congress to new gun laws.
The Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives will issue updated guidance that says the government can consider someone a gun dealer regardless of where the guns are sold. The guidance aims to narrow the loophole that exempts weapons sold at gun shows, online, and other informal settings from required background checks. Under the previous rules, only federally licensed gun dealers must conduct checks on buyers.
The White House said the FBI will hire 230 more examiners to process background checks. It is an attempt to speed up the process so buyers don’t neglect the requirement….
‘‘This is not going to solve every violent crime in this country,’’ Obama said, tempering expectations for gun control advocates calling for far-reaching executive action. ‘‘It’s not going to prevent every mass shooting; it’s not going to keep every gun out of the hands of a criminal. It will potentially save lives and spare families the pain of these extraordinary losses.’
Illustration of Flying Saucer over London
No it won’t, because what we really need to do is get guns off the streets and ban assault rifles completely. Still, it’s a step in the right direction. Of course the gun nuts are all rushing to the stores to buy more guns before the new regulations take effect. WaPo:
New federal data shows 2015 was a record-smashing year for the American firearms industry, with gun sales appearing to hit the highest level on record. Background checks for gun purchases and permits jumped 10 percent last year to 23.1 million, the largest number since the federal background check system began operating in 1998.
Black Friday 2015 was the single biggest gun-purchasing day ever, with more than 185,000 checks processed, according to background check figures from the FBI. December saw the highest number of background checks processed in any month. The last five weeks of the year all ranked among the 10 biggest weeks ever for firearm background checks.
The year-end surge happened partly in response to the mass shooting in San Bernardino, followed by calls by President Obama for more restrictions on gun sales. On Monday, Obama unveiled a package of executive actions that seek to curb gun violence, including conducting more background checks.
This matches a pattern we’ve seen plenty of times in the past: tragedy, followed by calls for gun control, followed by surging firearm sales. Interest in concealed carry permits has generally followed a similar pattern.
Speaking of gun nuts, the wacko hillbillies are still camped out in Oregon. Here’s the latest from Oregonlive.com: Oregon militants: What you need to know Tuesday morning.
1. Dave Ward, sheriff of Harney County, where the militants have set up shop,asked them to go home.
“You said you were here to help the citizens of Harney County,” Ward said in a message aimed at the occupiers. “That help ended when a peaceful protest became an armed and unlawful protest.”
2. There is not likely to be an aggressive showdown between federal law enforcement agents and the militants. Experts say federal officials have learned from sieges at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho. They expect federal officialswill take a wait-them-out approach.
3. Meanwhile, the two ranchers whose arson case prompted all of this, Dwight Hammond Jr. 73, and Steven Hammond, 46, quietly surrendered at a Southern California federal prison and their attorneys announced that both men will see a presidential pardon.
And there’s this from Mother Jones: How the Leader of the Oregon Armed Protest Benefited From a Federal Loan Program.
Ammon Bundy runs a Phoenix-based company called Valet Fleet Services LLC, which specializes in repairing and maintaining fleets of semitrucks throughout Arizona. On April 15, 2010—Tax Day, as it happens—Bundy’s business borrowed $530,000 through a Small Business Administration loan guarantee program. The available public record does not indicate what the loan was used for or whether it was repaid. The SBA website notes that this loan guarantee was issued under a program “to aid small businesses which are unable to obtain financing in the private credit marketplace.” The government estimated that this subsidy could cost taxpayers $22,419. Bundy did not respond to an email request for comment about the SBA loan.
Read more at the link.
Esquire reports on survey research they did with NBC News. The article is titled “American Rage.” You can peruse the findings at the link, but I found this notable about women:
When we take a close look at our respondents by gender, women report a greater rise in anger than men over the past year. (See question two.) One possible explanation: Although they share many of the same frustrations with respect to dashed expectations, they are more likely than men to be angry about the treatment of others. (See question 14.) That perception of unfairness has a way of rubbing people the wrong way.
Maybe, just maybe, women are angry about the way so many states are treating women like breeders with no individual rights? Nahhhhh . . . although the survey did find that 48% of women are angry about “the way they are treated. (The question of specifically why individual women are so angry doesn’t even seem to have been asked.)
Check it out at Esquire.
I suppose the Berniebots will beat up on Hillary for this. She talked about UFOs recently in response to a question. At least CNN understood she was speaking tongue in cheek: Hillary Clinton (jokingly) pledges UFO probe.
During a meeting with The Conway Daily Sun, Hillary Clinton jokingly pledged to look into UFO’s, an article from the New Hampshire paper says.
“Yes, I’m going to get to the bottom of it,” Clinton said, tongue-in-cheek, in response to a question from reporter Daymond Steer on UFOs.
This was far from the first time someone in the former secretary of state’s orbit addressed the topic of intelligent life on other planets.
Former President Bill Clinton spoke about the topic at length in a 2007 interview with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. At the time, the former president said that he had reviewed government information on Roswell and Area 51, locations at the heart of some alien conspiracies. He claimed at the time that he had seen no evidence of visitors to Earth from another planet.
“If we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Bill Clinton said. “I just hope that it’s not like ‘Independence Day.'”
Steer wrote that when he asked the Democratic front-runner about her husband’s comments, she claimed that aliens may have already visited our planet.
“We don’t know for sure,” Clinton said.
And there’s this from Mother Jones:
Clinton’s comments are among the rare public statements she’s made on UFOs and possible government cover-ups—a familiar subject for both Hillary and Bill Clinton. AsMother Joneshas reported, the couple’sinterest in extraterrestrial activityreaches as far back as the 1990s, when Laurence Rockefeller began lobbying the Clinton administration for the release of government documents relating to UFOs—documents that many say reveal the extent of government research into the phenomena.
Additionally, Clinton’s current campaign chairman, John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and anX-Filesfan, has long expressed interest in the topic.
But these statements are Clinton’s first remarks on the subject during this campaign. They will likely strengthen her support among voters who happen to be UFO enthusiasts and are not supporting any extraterrestrial candidates in the Republican field.
Have you heard? Donald Trump is “one of the great advocates for women” and he “100 percent believes in equality of gender.” That’s according Trump’s daughter Ivanka who appears on the cover of the February issue of Town and Country Magazine.
So that settles that then.
Finally, Mitt Romney emerges from the shadows again to dump on Jeb Bush. From the WaPo:
“A Bush-versus-Clinton head-to-head would be too easy for the Democrats,”he told my colleagues Dan Balz and Philip Rucker during an interview last week in Boston fora broader storyabout the political events of 2015.
The 2012 GOP nominee recalled thinking, “I like Jeb a lot, I think he’d be a great president, but felt he was unfairly butseverely burdened by the W. years— and when I say the W. years, it’s not only what happened to the economy, but the tragedy in Iraq.”
Mitt says he expressed this point to Bush’s face during a private sit-down in Utah last Jan. 22.“Jeb, to be very honest, I think it’s very hard for you to post up against Hillary Clinton and to separate yourself from the difficulty of the W. years and compare them with the Clinton years,” Romney recalls telling the former Florida governor when they met at his house in a Salt Lake City suburb. Romney says Bush responded by saying “he was going to make his campaign about the future, not about the past.”
“I didn’t say anything at that point,” Romney recalled. “But as he left, I said to myself,‘Gosh, in my opinion, it’s not going to be as easy to make that separation as I think he gives the impression it will be.’One of the few things I predicted that turned out to be true.”
Gee Golly Gosh. Good one, Mitt.
What stories are you following today?
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Posted: January 2, 2016 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: agism, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Sexism |
Good Morning!
In the past week or two Donald Trump has begun directing his crude and crass public attacks at Hillary Clinton rather than his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination.
Trump claimed that it was “disgusting” that Hillary went to the ladies room during a break the last Democratic debate. He said that Obama “schlonged” Hillary in the 2008 presidential primaries. He announced that it was “fair game” for him to use Bill Clinton’s infidelities in the 1990s against Hillary. Will it work?
From the NYT: Poll Show Attacks on Bill Clinton May Only Help Hillary Clinton.
Survey data from the Pew Research Center show’s [sic] Mrs. Clinton’s favorability rating jumping to 63 percent in August of 1998, four months before Mr. Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives. In December of that year, as controversy about their marriage continued to swirl, her popularity climbed higher, reaching 66 percent.
“In contrast to her husband, Hillary Clinton continues to draw high marks from the public,” Pew found at the time. “Two-thirds of Americans say they admire Hillary Clinton’s decision to stand by her husband and nearly as many have a favorable opinion of the first lady.”
Figures from Gallup also showed Mrs. Clinton’s favorability rating rising as accounts of Mr. Clinton cheating dominated headlines. That rating, which was at 39 percent in 1992, remained high through 1999 before leveling off. It hovered from 40 percent to 50 percent in the 2000s and topped 60 percent again when she joined President Obama’s cabinet.
Shawn J. Parry-Giles, a communications professor at the University of Maryland, explained in her 2014 book about the role of gender in American politics that Mrs. Clinton was seen as more sympathetic and authentic as she endured the fallout from her husband’s affair.
“As she showed a clear sense of marital fortitude by staying with her cheating husband, her poll numbers would rise,” Ms. Parry-Giles wrote. “As the scorned and sad woman attracting sympathy from others, Clinton would more closely resemble the traditional ideals of authentic womanhood.”
Paul Waldman at The Week: Bill Clinton’s sexual history is fair game for Donald Trump. But it’s bad politics.
…since Hillary Clinton often mentions her husband’s presidency as an example of the kind of successful approach she would bring, that presidency — warts and all — is certainly relevant. But if Republicans want to re-litigate the Monica Lewinsky matter, they probably shouldn’t hope that things will turn out differently this time. You may recall that they were unable to remove Clinton from the presidency, and two years after being impeached he left office with approval ratings in the high 60s. In the end, the public decided that though his private behavior was deplorable, they were happy with the job he was doing as president. They also concluded that a bunch of prurient Republicans had become positively obsessed with Clinton’s sexual life and dragged the country through a needless impeachment crisis.
It’s fair game to talk about all that again (which, I must point out, members of the media would absolutely love to do). What’s much harder to figure out is why Bill Clinton’s behavior provides a reason to vote against his wife. That’s the substance of the question, which still awaits an explanation.
Obviously for Trump and the dudebro media, a wife is simply an appendage, not a person in her own right.
One might even ask what relevance Donald Trump’s obvious sexism has for the presidency. Unlike with some of the other large groups he has alienated, it’s less clear what the connection would be between Trump’s sexism and his actual policy positions. Yes, he finds women’s bodily functions “disgusting,” in the word he repeatedly uses (see here or here), and has a history of dumping his wives when they hit their 40s so he can get himself a younger model. But his positions on issues of particular concern to women are little different from those of most Republicans, even those who are perfectly polite and respectful to everyone (you can argue that things like opposing abortion rights are inherently sexist, but that doesn’t tell us anything about Trump specifically).
But it would be “fair game” now, right? Please go read the rest of the piece at the link. It’s good.
Mary Sanchez at the Chicago Tribune: Donald Trump should think twice about taking on Bill Clinton.
Donald Trump might be picking the wrong schoolyard fight. His modus operandi is to bully. And it’s proved to be an ideal strategy for tying his Republican rivals in knots. But now he’s trying it on someone whose powers of political legerdemain are legendary: Bill Clinton.
The 69-year-old former president is wilier than Trump could ever dream of being. This is the man who hung the 1995-1996 government shutdown around the neck of his chief political adversary, House Speaker Newt Gingrich. A formidable huckster in his own right, Gingrich was the It Boy of conservatism and the leader of an ascendant “Republican Revolution,” but after losing his budget showdown with Clinton, his career went into permanent eclipse.
Gingrich’s oafish understudies then mounted an ill-advised impeachment campaign against Clinton, which only burnished the president’s credentials as a victim of partisan fanaticism.
Trump, by contrast, is a cad whose vulgarity and brutishness are given cover by the fact that those very qualities are cheered by a large portion of the Republican base. He’s making the P.T. Barnum bet on the Republican electorate, and so far it’s paying off.
In recent days, Trump has pounced on Hillary Clinton’s husband, in particular his record of cheating, as a new stratagem to upend her campaign. On Twitter, he asserted: “If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!”
But this only underscores another difference between Bill Clinton and Donald Trump: The former president’s record on so-called women’s issues is stellar. He appointed the first women to become U.S. attorney general and secretary of state, added Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court and signed the Violence Against Women Act, along with other measures that benefited women.
Most recently Trump has been claiming that Hillary is “weak” and “low energy” and that she “lacks .”
From the Washington Post:
For as long as Hillary Clinton has been in the public eye, she has answered questions — and sometimes volunteered information — about how much and how hard she works to get it all done.
Few, even her political enemies, have questioned her work ethic or staying power — until Donald Trump.
“She’ll do a couple of minutes in Iowa, meaning a short period of time. And then she goes home,” the GOP presidential front-runner said in Davenport, Iowa, a few weeks ago, as his attention turned to those areas. “You don’t see her for five or six days. She goes home, goes to sleep. I’m telling you. She doesn’t have the strength. She doesn’t have the stamina.”
Ever since — and increasingly in recent days — the magnate has lobbed a barrage of insults at Clinton from onstage at his campaign rallies, on television and online. The former secretary of state is “low-energy,” Trump says. She lacks stamina. She’s physically weak.
The attacks — often coded, always personal — seem to be aimed at raising questions in voters’ minds about a factor that has long been whispered in some GOP circles: how Clinton’s age could affect her ability to serve.
Trump is older than Clinton, but I guess he thinks he’s not affected by aging. Or maybe he thinks only women are?
“I think that my words represent toughness and strength. Hillary’s not strong. Hillary’s weak, frankly. She’s got no stamina; she’s got nothing,” the billionaire said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “She couldn’t even get back on the stage last night.”
Her energy level, he has said, should disqualify her from the presidency. “Hillary is a person who doesn’t have the strength or the stamina, in my opinion, to be president,” Trump told ABC’s “This Week.” “She doesn’t have strength or stamina. She’s not a strong enough person to be president.”
Trump, who often takes credit for saddling former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) with a “low-energy” label, has lately used the same line on Clinton.
“She’s even lower-energy than Jeb Bush,” he told a South Carolina crowd on Wednesday.
Trump has looked tired by the end of every GOP debate. I’d love to see him sit through 11 hours of hostile questioning at a Congressional hearing as Hillary did not too long ago. Who know what’s in Trump’s fevered brain, but I think these are all sexist attacks designed to make people believe a woman couldn’t handle the presidency. I don’t think this line of attack is going to work for Trump either.
A few more reactions to Trump’s attacks on Hillary and Bill Clinton:
Joe Conason at The National Memo: Below Par: Donald Trump’s Ardent Courtship Of Bill And Hillary Clinton.
Janelle Ross at the WaPo: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and how sexism is now partisan.
Lanny Davis at The Hill: Thank you, Mr. Trump — keep attacking the Clintons.
What do you think? What stories are you following today?
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