Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Monday nights caucus losers brought about a few changes. On the Democratic side, Martin O'Malley dropped out of the race leaving Hillary and Bernie to duke it out the rest of the way. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee called it quits. Rand Paul just announced that he is suspending his bid. With the New Hampshire primaries next Tuesday, I expect there to be more winnowing one week from today.

The Republicans have Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum and Jim Gilmore left. I'm not sure why Fiorina, Santorum and Gilmore are still in the race. What are their campaign people telling them?  Take a look at Fiorina's after party in Iowa.

No candidate. No people. Wow.

And, honestly, what are Bush, Kasich and Christie hoping for? I know they are sticking around for some sort of lift in New Hampshire but they need to face the facts. This is now a three horse race. 

Of course, Rubio now has his own problems.

Aw, snap!

Trump the Loser

After leading in the polls for months, Donald Trump came in second to Ted Cruz. He beat Rubio by a scant margin. He had polled as much as 10 points higher than Cruz, but in the end he lost by four.

In other words, Trump is a loser.

In 2013 Trump famously quoted Walter Hagen: "No one remembers who came in second." This time, though, will be different. People will remember that the big blowhard came in second to the man Trump said everyone hates.

Why did Trump lose? Chickening out of the last debate might have a lot to do with it. Caucus goers who decided at the last minute broker for Cruz and Rubio in a big way. Hearing Trump whine about how unfair it is to be asked questions by a girl may not have impressed a lot of voters.

But the two bigger reasons were organization and a misunderstanding of how political campaigns work. Trump thinks that running for office is like having a top-rated TV show: if your ratings are high, you'll win. But that's not how you get elected president.

Trump's campaign ridiculed other operations in Iowa for running their own polls. "Why do your own polls when the media does it for free?" one of his operatives said in a tweet.

The reason, as anyone who's mounted a serious campaign will tell you, is that by running your own polls you identify people who will support you. You can call them back and remind them to go vote. You can ask them for money later on. You can ask other questions that will help you refine your message. You can engage in "push polling," putting ideas in voters' heads that will make them reconsider their support for someone like Trump, and vote for Cruz instead.

Finally, winning the nomination isn't just about getting the most buzz on national TV. It's about recruiting delegates for the national conventions. These are the actual people who will show up at the nominating convention next summer. Some of these people are selected in a long drawn-out process through caucuses, primaries, district conventions and state conventions. But a lot of these people are "super delegates," party bosses and office holders who actually cast the votes on the floor of the convention. These people have a lot of sway over the other, less experienced delegates.

Ted Cruz knows how that system works. Donald Trump doesn't. He still thinks he's on a reality TV show.

In 2012 the Republican campaign had a different leading candidate every month: Cain, Gingrich, Santorum. But they all pooped out because Mitt Romney owned the political machines in the various states, and recruited the super delegates by contributing tons of cash to the reelection campaigns of office holders in critical states.

If Trump were to win outright majorities in the primaries, it would be hard for super delegates to support other candidates at the convention. But it doesn't look like that will happen. If Iowa is any indication, there will be three or four candidates in contention for the long haul. And because of the incredible amount of Super PAC money floating around from billionaires who want to own their own presidential candidates, some non-viable candidates (Bush, for example) may hang on for much longer than they might have had the Supreme Court not screwed up the American political system with their catastrophically stupid Citizens United decision.

If there's no winner on the first ballot at the Republican convention, a lot of the delegates who were committed to Trump because of primary results may be quick to desert him. They will have no allegiance to him, because he isn't a real Republican or even a real conservative. He's just a two-faced big-mouthed New Yorker who insults everyone.

The idea of a "brokered convention" is the slim hope that establishment Republicans have been holding out for someone like Rubio or Bush winning the nomination.

In the end, a huge part of politics is about loyalty. Trump does not inspire it, and he does not practice it. He will tell Megyn Kelly she is a fabulous interviewer one day and then whine that she's a bitch the next day. He will say Ted Cruz is a great guy one day, then contradict himself the next.

With Trump, it's clear that the only person he cares about is himself. Cruz suffers from the same problem, but at least he's been a real Republican for his entire career. Both Cruz and Trump have a history of screwing people whose support they could use in the future.

Guys like Bush and Rubio have burned fewer bridges, and in the end that may mean the difference between being a winner and being a loser.

Batting 1000

Looks like the Hilz took it for the Dems and Ted for the GOP. I guess I'm batting 1000 so far.

I wonder how much New Hampshire is going to change in the next 8 days.

Iowa Predictions

With little more than 24 hours to go before the Iowa caucuses of 2016, it's time for some predictions and prognostications. 

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton will win, besting Bernie Sanders 50% to 43%. I base my prediction on two pieces of data. The first is the last five polls which show her ahead of Sanders. The second is Nate Silver's polls plus model which gives her an 80% chance of winning. Bernie may have surged late last week and earlier into this week but he appears to be dropping a bit right before the voting.

The Republican side is a little trickier. Even though Trump has been ahead in the last few polls and Silver has him with a better chance of winning than Cruz, I still say it's going to be Cruz. The evangelical vote in Iowa is very strong and most of them are supporting Cruz. Cruz has all the makings of an Iowa winner...staunchly conservative, as far right as the 1 yard line on the right side of the field, deeply religious, direct appeal to old, white values voters. In addition, the unaffiliated will flock to him over Trump when their caucuses are too small to be viable. 

Hillary Clinton. Ted Cruz. 

Shot In The Head!

Unanswered Questions Regarding Hillary Clinton's emails.

Yesterday, the Obama administration confirmed that 22 of Hillary Clinton's emails contained information that was highly classified. State Department spokesman John Kirby said the documents, totaling 37 pages, were not marked classified at the time they were sent, but are being upgraded at the request of the Intelligence Community because they contain sensitive information.

This statement leads me to wonder why, again, we must go through more hyper ventilating about Hillary's emails. In fact, I have several questions that still remained unanswered or vague.

Why were these documents not marked classified at the time they were sent?

Why are these documents being upgraded now?

Why does retro classification occur?

Were these emails available publicly in any way? Via the recipients of the emails who used .gov emails?

What was the email policy regarding personal servers when Hillary took over as Secretary of State? What did other Secretaries of State do?

Have Hillary's critics read any of the emails that have been released?

For those of you out there who are convinced that Hillary Clinton is a criminal because of these emails, failure to adequately answer these questions means your accusations are purely emotional.

Occupying A Federal Facility

Little Boy Takes Ball, Goes Home

In yet another shining example of the maturity level of Republicans these days, their leading contender for the nominee in the 2016 presidential race has thrown his self a little temper tantrum and decided that Megyn Kelly is too much to handle. Thus, he will not be participating in the Fox News debate tonight.

After this latest outburst, one has to wonder...if he can't handle Kelly, how is he going to handle Putin? Or any leader for that matter? He's really coming off here like a spoiled, rich brat which is kinda what he's always been and no one has seemed to notice.

I didn't think he was going to win Iowa anyway and this incident hurts him. The Iowa Republican voter is more a Cruz type than a Trump type (hard right, evangelical). I say Cruz is now firmly in line to win this caucus. Not that it really matters much because the Iowa winner in the past couple of elections has gone nowhere.

Here's a great quote from Fox News (which I can't believe I just said...)

“We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.”

Ouch.

All of this school yard stuff makes the Democrats, who are certainly having their own issues right now, come off like the adults in the room.

How To Beat Donald Trump

Ross Douthat has the best idea I have seen so far on how to stop Donald Trump. Now apply that model to the Inevitable Nominee.

Calling Mr. Trump a creep and jerk and self-promoter clearly doesn’t work, because his voters have decided that someone with his business chops and middle-finger-first attitude is exactly what they need. To attack him effectively, you have to go after the things that people like about him. You have to flip his brand.

And what is his brand? Why, it's being a self made rich guy who is a great deal maker.

Tell people that he isn’t the incredible self-made genius that he plays on TV. Tell them about all the money he inherited from his daddy. Tell them about the bailouts that saved him from ruin. Tell them about all his cratered companies. Then find people who suffered from those fiascos — workers laid off following his bankruptcies, homeowners who bought through Trump Mortgage, people who ponied up for sham degrees from Trump University.

Yep.

Sounds like a good tactic for the Democrats!

It's Mental Health

Solving Problems With Guns (Ground Stood Edition)

So, this guy named Marvin Lee done got his car stuck in a ditch in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jefferson Deavner stopped to help him push it out. Lee turned into a dick after this and when the police were called to help him out of the ditch, he shot Deavner and killed him.

Ground stood!

This story is a great example of what happens when you allow the fever dream of gun rights activists to take over a country. A person like Lee should never be allowed to own a weapon but he does because of his 2nd amendment rights.

How many thousands of Lees are out there being supported by the Gun Cult?

Shootout At...A Gun Shop?

The Gun Cult wails away about gun free zones, mouth foaming to anyone who will listen that bad guys will think twice if there are guns at an establishment.

So, it is shocking, I tell you, SHOCKING, that there was a shooting at a gun shop in Mississippi.

Mississippi authorities say a gun shop owner and his 17-year-old son died in a shootout over a $25 service charge. Another man and his 29-year-old son are hospitalized.

I simply can't believe that the Gun Cult was wrong...again.

How To Derail A Conversation in a Comments Section

Useful information for blog commenting.

It's always prudent to understand your adversary!

Martyrs Without A Cause

It will never cease to amaze me how similar the far left and the the far right are in their reasoning process...

One Long Right Wing Blog Comment

If you want a great example of what exchanging ideas is like with right wing blog commenters, check out the analysis here by Colbert of Palin's endorement speech. My only minor critique is that Palin is funny enough on here own without the added commentary. And then there is this view...

At this point, I may be leaning towards this second video. Can you please just leave us the fuck alone?

The Party of Chickenhawks

Cash or Charge

The Donald Gets An Endorsement!

Donald Trump has received his first official endorsement.

Sarah Palin endorses Trump for president

Whew...thank goodness...I was worried he wouldn't get any endorsements:)

Another Man-Made Katrina, Courtesy of a Republican Governor

During the 2012 election campaign Republican hit men produced a video about how the United States would fare under Obama, and how it would look in 2016. It depicted America as a dystopian wasteland where no one had jobs, which were destroyed by Obamacare and environmental regulation.

Of course, that didn't happen. The economy has been steadily adding jobs, despite dire predictions that increased access to health care would trash the economy. The stock market has been flat, but that's mostly due to plummeting oil prices, which is mostly due to reduced Chinese demand and overproduction by greedy oil barons who were too blind to foresee that their mad rush to frack every damned hole in the ground till it bled crude would lead to excess supply, bankrupt themselves.

On the other hand, we have some indications of what would have happened if Mitt Romney had been elected president and carried through on Republican promises to slash environmental and clean water regulations. Because such an experiment was carried out by a Republican governor in Michigan in 2013.

Back then Flint, Michigan was going broke. It was in such bad financial shape that the state took over and Governor Rick Snyder appointed Michael Brown as Emergency Manager to run the city. To save a hundred bucks a day, the water supply was switched from Detroit's system (which gets water from from Lake Huron), to the Flint River. The water from the river was four times more corrosive, and Snyder's Department of Environmental Quality did not take measures to mitigate the corrosion.

Immediately the people of Flint complained that the water smelled and tasted terrible. It was brown and disgusting. Flint's mayor, Brown and Gov Snyder insisted there was nothing wrong with the water.

Further testing showed that the acidic river water was eating away at lead pipes in the city's water system, increasing lead levels in the water. Lead and other heavy metals are highly toxic, and causes permanent brain damage in children. For months the governor denied the evidence, stonewalling long after it was obvious children in Flint were suffering mental retardation from lead in the water.
Last week Snyder finally admitted that he had poisoned Flint's water. He asked President Obama to declare a federal disaster, begging the federal government to bail him out.

The damage Snyder's penny-pinching caused to the Flint water system will cost $5 billion to repair.

For years now the Republican Party has been calling for eliminating most of the EPA's clean water and clean air regulations. They describe these regulations as job killers. Some GOP presidential candidates have called for the EPA to be abolished completely.

Some of these "job-killing" regulations that the EPA put in place include the ban on lead paint and leaded gasoline. These sources of lead in the environment were more insidious that Flint's toxic water, because you can't see or taste the lead in the air.

Other regulations Republicans want to eliminate require coal power plants to reduce emissions of heavy metals like lead and mercury, as well as sulfur dioxide and CO2, which cause acid rain (killing forests and fish) and climate change.

There have been many calls for Snyder to resign. In an interview Snyder admitted that the Flint water debacle was his Katrina.

Republicans claim to be pro-life, but every time there's a choice between the health and welfare of living, breathing human beings, and the profits of the oil, gas and coal industries, Republicans side with King Coal and the oil barons.

The EPA isn't entirely blameless in this. An EPA official learned about the high lead levels in February, 2015, but it wasn't announced to the public immediately. Was EPA waiting for further testing to confirm the finding, afraid of causing public panic before they were sure? Or did they want to cover their asses because of Republican criticism of their entire clean water program?

What this episode shows is that -- far from the Republican assertion that the EPA is overstepping its bounds -- the EPA isn't acting aggressively enough protect the American public from the hazards of tainted air and water.

The Republican Lack of Foreign Policy Savvy

Iran released five American prisoners over the weekend. This was the result of years of negotiations, conducted mostly by John Kerry, but made possible by the nuclear deal that finally reached the final "implementation" stage.

True to form, Republican candidates for president proved they have no talent for foreign policy. Marco Rubio said it set a "dangerous precedent," and put Ronald Reagan forth as an example of how to negotiate for hostages. Ted Cruz said we released nuclear terrorists. At his most ridiculous, Donald Trump claimed credit for the release, implying that miraculous things just spontaneously happen every time he opens his yap.

The release of the prisoners on implementation day was predictable. The Iranians like to link releases to significant dates. After they took US embassy personnel hostage in 1979, they released them on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981.

It's not clear what Rubio was talking about when he used Reagan as an example. If Rubio was saying that Reagan negotiated with the Iranians before he was inaugurated, then Rubio was admitting that the rumors are true about Reagan's future CIA director cutting a deal with the Iranians to delay releasing the hostages until after the 1980 presidential election was over and Reagan was president (the October Surprise). This theory contends that Reagan rewarded Iran for the hostage release by selling Iran hundreds of missiles in 1985, during the Iran-Iraq war.

Or was Rubio referring to Reagan's negotiations for the release of hostages in Lebanon?

[U]nder the Reagan administration, White House officials later tried to arrange the sale of arms to Iran in the hope of winning the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon. The profits from the sales were then illegally diverted to the Contra rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Discovery of the arms-for-hostages deal led to several congressional investigations. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was convicted, but his sentence was overturned on appeal. Reagan publicly denied knowing about the operation by his staff. 

Reagan repeatedly negotiated with terrorists, often with the assistance of Israel, the darling of the Republicans in all things terrorist. Yet Israel has performed dozens of prisoner swaps with Hezbollah and Hamas over the years, even giving up prisoners accused of terrorism in exchange for the corpses of Israeli soldiers.

Cruz says that the prisoners released to Iran in exchange for the American were "nuclear terrorists." The fact is that they were charged with violating economic sanctions against Iran. Those sanctions have now been dropped, in exchange for Iran turning over 98% of its nuclear material and destroying a huge number of centrifuges used to refine uranium.

Since those sanctions have been dropped, the Iranians being held were accused of activities that are not illegal now. Does it make any sense for our government to waste money prosecuting something is no longer a crime?

Also, the men Iran took prisoner were well aware of the danger they faced visiting Iran. All are of Iranian extraction. They all knew Iran has no freedom of the press or of religion, and has equated journalism with espionage for decades. While these men seem like innocent victims and pawns to most Americans, they knew going in that the Iranian government perceives their activities to be dangerous and subversive. But they accepted the risk because they believed in what they were doing.

Trump's self-congratulations for the hostage release are absolutely preposterous. He looks like a two-year-old pointing into a potty chair, proudly crowing, "I made a poo-poo!"

It's not just the Republican presidential candidates who are clueless. The Republican Party as a whole condemned the president when the Iran deal was made months ago and Jason Rezaian wasn't released. To anyone familiar with the way the Iranians work, it was clear that the journalists were being held as bargaining chips -- an extra incentive to the United States, to be cashed in when we made good on our part of the nuclear deal.


The behavior of the Republican Party indicates that they are either completely ignorant of foreign relations, or in their thirst for partisan advantage they don't give a damn about hurting the interests of the United States and its citizens.

Either way, they've shown yet again that they're not competent to run the country.