Contributors

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Watch The Senate Slip Away

538 has a piece up about how Trump is dragging down GOP candidates for Senate in tossup states.

Check it out


AUG. 3 MARGINAUG. 15 MARGINCHANGE
STATETRUMPGOP SENATE CANDIDATETRUMPGOP SENATE CANDIDATETRUMPGOP SENATE CANDIDATE
N.H.-2+2-11-5-9-7
Illinois-18-1-20-7-2-6
Pennsylvania-6+2-10-2-4-4
N.C.-1+4-5+1-4-3
Wisconsin-9-8-12-11-3-3
Nevada-3+3-4+2-1-1
Florida-4+5-5+5-10
Ohio-4+4-6+6-2+2
Average-3.3-2.8
Trump may be dragging down Republican Senate candidates

At this point, it seems likely that the Dems will take back the Senate. But by how much?

Monday, August 15, 2016

Trump's Bold New Antiterrorism Plan Is a Questionnaire!

Donald Trump's immigration and anti-terrorism plans are dumb and getting dumber. 

His first plan involved simply banning all Muslim immigrants because they might be terrorists. How would he know they were Muslim? He'd ask them. Because terrorists would never think of lying!

His latest plan will be announced today:
In the speech, Mr. Trump will call for greater scrutiny in screening immigrants, particularly from countries he has described as “exporters” of terrorism. The plan would be to have people answer a questionnaire that could press them on their commitment to “our basic principles of tolerance and pluralism,” on issues ranging from gay rights to women’s rights, Mr. Miller said. If that is not effective, visas could be banned from certain areas of the world.
Yes! Defeating terrorists with paperwork! They will never be able to lie on a questionnaire!

The irony is that Trump's own supporters and the vast majority of conservative Republicans don't believe in "our basic principles of tolerance and pluralism!" Trump's new plan would prevent most Republicans from entering the country.

Trump supporters appararently want to ban all Muslims and think all Mexicans are rapists, based on how much they cheered when Trump spewed that bile. He won the Republican nomination based on those two intolerant and non-pluralistic sentiments.

Trump pays lip service to gay rights (he had to in order to get that campaign cash from Peter Thiel), but the vast majority of conservative Republicans don't believe in equal rights for gay and transgendered people. Witness all the whining about making cakes for gay weddings and all the preposterous bathroom bills flooding Republican statehouses. And of course they are dead-set against a woman's right to control her own body, many of them opposing even birth control.

When people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, proclaim their wholehearted support for Trump, you can be sure they don't believe Trump means any of this drivel he spouts about "tolerance and pluralism."

Trump refuses to acknowledge that we're already vetting immigrants from countries that are "exporters" of terrorism with far more stringent procedures than his ridiculous questionnaire. They're subjected to background checks that take months and years to complete. They're interviewed by people who are trained to spot terrorists. These interviewers ask follow-up questions when they sense evasion or mendacity. Something that a questionnaire simply can't do.

Yes, occasionally bad people get in -- or just as likely, they're born here, like the San Bernadino and Orlando shooters. That's the dilemma of a free and open society, and the risk you take when you're the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But Americans are supposed to tough. Should we cower and hide and let millions of innocent people be slaughtered by the likes of ISIS? The more we help oppressed people the more support we'll have in the future, which we need to beat terrorists and tyrants like ISIS, Assad and Putin, who has worsened the civil war in Syria, using it to destabilize Europe with millions of refugees.

Yet Trump talks about cutting deals with Putin to "defeat ISIS," which really means letting Assad stay in power. But it was Assad's crackdown on Arab Spring demonstrators demanding democracy and freedom that sparked the Syrian civil war, which is how ISIS gained so much territory in the first place. Last week Trump "sarcastically" called Obama the founder of ISIS, but the most effective recruiting tools for the terrorist organization have been the wars started by Bashar al-Assad and George W. Bush (Trump himself blamed Bush for 9/11 and ISIS when running against Jeb!(!)).


A questionnaire to fight terrorism? Sheesh! Who's running the Trump campaign? This latest plan sounds like something a lackey in H.R. thought up during lunch hour.

Trump Campaign Chairman Gets Millions from Putin Stooge

According to a secret ledger found in Ukraine, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's campaign chairman, received $12.7 million in cash payments:
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.
(The ledger is written in Russian, not Ukrainian, by the way.)

Manafort has acknowledged working for Viktor F. Yanukovych, the corrupt Ukrainian strongman who was ousted by pro-Western parties two years ago. Manafort did the same think for Yanukovych that he's doing for Trump:
Before he fled to Russia two years ago, Mr. Yanukovych and his Party of Regions relied heavily on the advice of Mr. Manafort and his firm, who helped them win several elections. During that period, Mr. Manafort never registered as a foreign agent with the United States Justice Department — as required of those seeking to influence American policy on behalf of foreign clients — although one of his subcontractors did.

It is unclear if Mr. Manafort’s activities necessitated registering. If they were limited to advising the Party of Regions in Ukraine, he probably would not have had to. But he also worked to burnish his client’s image in the West and helped Mr. Yanukovych’s administration draft a report defending its prosecution of his chief rival, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, in 2012. 
Manafort has a long history of selling foreign warlords, tyrants and regimes that abuse human rights to the U.S. government, including Phillipine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Angolan guerilla Jonas Savimbi, Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Pakistan's ISI agency, and on and on.

Manafort also has ties to offshore shell corporations in the Cayman and Seychelles Islands that laundered money stolen by Ukrainian government cronies.

Trump has raised the ire of many in the Republican Party by praising Vladimir Putin and parroting Putin's Crimean claims. Trump's cronies removed language from the party platform against Russia's actions in Ukraine, though Trump claims he didn't know what they were doing (and foolishly I thought candidates and presidents were supposed to be in charge of these things).

Trump's coddling of Putin's designs in Ukraine and his intimations that he would do nothing if Russia invaded NATO countries are anathema to Republicans: they have built an entire mythology around Ronald Reagan standing up to the Soviet Union.

It makes absolutely no sense for Trump to back away from that history. He sounds like a Russian apologist and a Putin puppet, not the heir to Reagan. Granted, the fall of the Soviet Union had much more to do with Gorbachov's policy of glasnost, the fallout from the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the weakness of the Russian economic system, but at least Reagan was on the side of democracy and freedom. Trump cares nothing about justice and liberty; his only interest seems to be the exercise of naked power.

To all appearances, Trump's strings are being pulled by Manafort, who has long-standing financial and political ties to Russian oligarchs. The Times reports that Manafort's company was still active earlier this year helping the Russian-backed Ukrainian opposition. That would mean Manafort is working on two political campaigns at the same time: Trump's and the enemies of Ukrainian democracy.

Trump himself has connections to Russian mobster and convicted felon Felix Sater. Trump, who says he has such a fabulous memory, claimed in court not to know Sater. Yet here Trump is with him (on the right) at the unveiling of the Trump SoHo in 2007.

The other guy in the photo, Tevfik Arif, was also involved in the Trump SoHo deal. He was recently arrested in Turkey for running a high-priced prostitution ring, in which Eastern European models (the sort of woman Trump favors, like Ivana and Melania) had trysts with wealthy businessmen aboard Kemal Ataturk's yacht.

These are the sort of people that Trump associates with. Trump's history of praising dictators and murders (like the Chinese government that engineered the Tiananmen Square Massacre) show exactly why he should never be president.

Amnesty!

Native American Council offers amnesty to 220 million undocumented whites

Yay!

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Losing Their Minds


Most Talented Presidential Candidate Ever?

I can't think of a better clip that demonstrates the media's Sybil like relationship with Donald Trump.



Now, of course, Halperin thinks Trump is a buffoon. Sheesh...

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Are They Persuadable?

Nate Silver has a piece up about what a Clinton landslide would look like. Given the latest polls, this is indeed an interesting possibility to explore. With all this talk, Republicans are trying to find a way to cut themselves loose from Trump, especially given that the Senate is really, really bad for them right now.

Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Mark Kirk are toast. Pat Toomey and Kelly Ayotte are looking pretty much the same. Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina are all within striking distance. A big turnout by the Dems to stop Trump will flip at least 2 out of those three states.

Donald Trump continues to be a horrible candidate for the GOP but what other choice do they have? This is who the majority of the people in their party voted for and he represents a common sentiment among conservative, non educated whites who feel as though they are being left behind by the progress in the world. I've written previously about this and think that we ought to just leave them behind given their anger, hate and fear. I mean, they are assholes, no?

Check out this recent discussion on Morning Joe (aka the best political talk show on TV).


 I'm definitely going to be picking up Vance's book and checking it out. And I have to admit that their optimism about the Trump folks being persuadable is infectious. Can they be persuaded?

Friday, August 12, 2016

Obama is the Founder of...ISIL?

Like an adolescent who desperately needs attention, Donald Trump is now at the point where he will say pretty much anything to keep the media spotlight upon him. His latest statement, repeated over and over again yesterday, posits that Barack Hussein Obama is the founder of ISIL.

The BBC has a great piece up about the origin of ISIL. Skip past the Trump drivel for the solid and insightful reporting on who the real founders of ISIL are and how exactly they were allowed to flourish.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Beach Volleyball's Bum Rap

Elghobashy and Walkenhorst
Every time the Olympics comes around, a lot of attention is paid to the beach volleyball competition, usually directed at the women's attire.

The image on the right has sparked a barrage of opinion pieces (like this one, and this one) about beach volleyball, sexism, Islam, body image, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

In this photo Doaa Elghobashy of Egypt is trying to knuckle the ball over Kira Walkenhorst of Germany. The Germans won easily.

I've been playing doubles in the sand for almost 30 years now, so I watch it because I'm interested in the sport. But lots of people seem to think it's just a gimmick to show off women's bodies. The sport has long been a punchline, viewed as some sort of soft-core porn.

Elsa and Liliana
But when the Spanish team of Elsa and Liliana beat the Brazilian team of Agatha and Barbara, they dressed nearly identically to Elghobashy. The Brazilians, whose country is synonymous with bikini waxing, wore the same thing.

No one wrote any editorials about this. No one talked about sexism, or religious strictures, or body shaming or any of that crap.

No, these women were covering their entire bodies because it was cold and raining. They wore clothing appropriate to the conditions. If they were to wear this during more typical Brazilian beach volleyball weather -- 95 degrees, sun beating down, high humidity -- they could collapse from heat stroke.

Wearing a bikini in hot weather isn't pandering, it's wearing attire appropriate to the conditions, just like the full body spandex is when it's cold.

Beach volleyball isn't the only sport in which this is true. Google women's marathon images, you'll find a lot of women are essentially wearing bikinis.

I've played thousands of hours of volleyball alongside women in bikinis, t-shirts and shorts, long-sleeved shirts and bunhuggers, in sweat shirts and sweat pants. I've asked women (including my wife) why they prefer skimpy clothing. Universally the reason is that they're more comfortable. They don't like heavy, loose, sweat-soaked clothing weighing them down, making them hot or tangling them up.

The last is a real danger: I've torn my shorts by catching my thumb in the pocket when jumping to hit; thumb dislocations are surprisingly common in basketball (which is why NBA uniforms have no pockets). Rugby players regularly break fingers when they get caught in jerseys.

Yes, it was bogus when the marketing guys who run the FIVB (the international beach volleyball tour) dictated the maximum size of the bikini that women can wear (seven centimeters on the side), while allowing men to wear t-shirts and shorts down to their knees.

Female players should be able to wear any sort of uniform they want, even if they disadvantage themselves like the Egyptians. The matter of individual choice is complicated by competition rules that require team mates to wear identical uniforms, but that's up to the team to decide.

The simple fact is, though, the vast majority of women beach volleyball players wear bikinis not to titillate spectators, but because that's they need to wear to play their best. They would wear the same bikinis even if the FIVB dickheads didn't tell them to.

I'm sure the programming execs at NBC consider the sex appeal of beach volleyball when they put it in prime time. But there's more to it than that: Americans invented the sport and have dominated it since the beginning.

In 1996 Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes won the first Olympic beach volleyball gold medal in Atlanta. Dain Blanton and Eric Fonoimoana took the gold in 2000. Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers won gold in 2008. Misty May and Kerri Walsh did it in 2004, 2008 and 2012. And this year Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross (a 2012 silver medalist) have a very good shot at winning again.

Beach volleyball is more than scantily clad bodies. In addition to the action on the court, there's the home-town narrative, the struggles of having kids while competing in the Olympics every four years, balancing injuries and age (Walsh Jennings has three kids and is 37), the soap-opera quality of doubles partnerships breaking up and coming together, and the quest to get just one more medal.

All that makes beach volleyball a lot more compelling than watching Michael Phelps swim up and down and up and down the length of a pool doing some other weird kind of swimming stroke for his hundredth gold medal...

The Party of Booth


Wednesday, August 10, 2016

The Worm Turns

Eight years ago, after Hillary Clinton had run against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, and John McCain had selected Sarah Palin as his running mate, I had a discussion with a woman who is reliably conservative. She wasn't having any of this female empowerment nonsense. "Women are too emotional to be president," she told me. 

I disagreed: men can be just as emotional; they are particularly vulnerable to the emotions of lust, anger and the thirst for vengeance, especially when their masculinity is threatened.

Now the worm has turned. And that worm is Donald Trump:
In a striking series of defections, high-profile Republican women are abandoning decades of party loyalty and vowing to oppose Mr. Trump, calling him emotionally unfit for the presidency and a menace to national security.
In this election, there's absolutely no question that Hillary Clinton is more emotionally stable than Donald Trump.

Throughout his candidacy Trump has persisted in throwing out petty insults in debates. He is always angry, peevish, jealous and prideful. He constantly brags about nonexistent accomplishments, like some insecure teenaged boy trying to impress a girl.

He constantly insulted the appearance of other candidates, including Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie. This is particularly ironic, since he's a fat old man with orange skin, tiny porcine eyes and a ridiculous-looking hairpiece that he still insists is his real hair -- which, if true, is even crazier than if it were a toupee: he actually wants his hair to look like a clown's fright wig?

He tweets outrageous nonsense at all hours of the night or day, like a catty thirteen-year-old girl with ADD. He pouts and whines about how unfair everyone has been to him, how they keep saying such mean things about him.

Trump is so emotionally needy and unstable that he insults the parents of a man who sacrificed his life to save the lives of the men in his unit.

Why is Trump so emotional and flighty? Is it his incipient senile dementia? His psychopathy? His overprivileged upbringing? Has an excess of testosterone curdled his 70-year-old brain?
Lots of Republicans, especially Republican women, are increasingly turned off by Trump's antics. He was funny in the beginning. Now the act is wearing thin.

Many conservative women were especially turned off when Trump told them that they should just suck it when they're sexually harassed at work. He defended Roger Ailes, a pervert who ogled and pinched and touched and patted and petted and grabbed and slobbered over his female subordinates.

They were disgusted when Trump said women should be forced to quit their jobs to escape men who abuse their positions of power to extort sexual favors from female employees who have husbands they love and families they have to support.

They were shocked when Trump said that he would have his own daughter, Ivanka, just quit her job if her boss treated her the way Ailes treated his employees, instead of fighting back against what in the final analysis is attempted rape.

Apparently Trump believes that CEOs should enjoy a modern form of prima nocta, a medieval practice which feudal lords could have sex with female subjects on their wedding nights. Only in Trump's mind all female employees are fair game all the time.

You have to wonder how many of Trump's employees he treated this way: sadly, we can't find out because he makes everyone sign non-disclosure agreements.

Or maybe they were turned off when they heard draft-dodging Trump's interview with Howard Stern in which he compared his sleeping around to the dangers soldiers face in war:
“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
How can any conservative evangelical Christian woman possibly vote for such an emotionally self-involved twit? The man is bragging about countless acts of fornication and adultery, while dismissing all the women he's slept with as diseased sex toys, comparing them to torture in Viet Cong prisons, land mines, Agent Orange and ceaseless machine-gun fire.

In Trump's mind John McCain is no hero for getting captured in Vietnam: Trump was the real deal, spending the Vietnam War banging busty bimbos in New York, while McCain lazed about as a prisoner of war in the posh Hanoi Hilton.

This was all fine and dandy when Trump was just some dorky fat guy in a phony reality show. But when he's president he'll have real power. He's already promised to change the laws to allow an orgy of lawsuits against news outlets who he thinks have insulted him.

Is eliminating laws against sexual harassment is on his agenda as well?

It's The Media's Fault!!

For years, conservatives have foamed at the mouth about victims. They caterwaul about how too few Americans don't take responsibility for their individual actions. Even the Gun Cult will tell you that if someone shoots someone else, it's not their fault. We have to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the individual.

Yet when it comes to their candidates for office or even their pundits, they are not responsible for their words or actions. It's the liberal media, twisting their words and making it seem like they said something they didn't. Rather than own it, they wriggle away with scapegoating an institution that merely calls them on their bullshit.

Take the latest call from Donald Trump to commit violence in the name of liberty. I say "latest" because he's done this before with protesters at his events. Yesterday, he said the following.

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.

Conservatives have tried to spin this as Trump talking about taking political action to prevent Hillary from getting into office but let's keep in mind that his phrasing suggests that she has already won. That's when the Second Amendment people can step in and it will be horrible. It's pretty clear as to what he is referring. Check out this guy's reaction in the audience.



Rather than apologize for what he suggested and own it, Trump has blamed the media and its bias. Let me make this very, very simple.

No, Donald (and Cult members), it's YOUR fault because YOU said it.

Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Trump Calls For Second Amendment People To Deal With Clinton



I've said many, many times that the biggest danger to our country is the fucking Gun Cult. Their nominee just confirmed it. A not so thinly veiled call to assassinate the Democratic nominee...wow...

If Hillary ever does start taking away peoples' guns, she should start with every gun blogger and commenter. And then put them in Gitmo since we can't seem to close it:)

An Epidemic of Pinheads

The epidemic has started. A few days after Marco Rubio declared that women who are pregnant with Zika-infected babies should not be allowed to have abortions, one such baby was born to a woman in Texas. The infant died:
The girl, born in Harris County, Texas, had several Zika-related birth defects, including microcephaly, which leaves the head and brain underdeveloped. Unlike the recent cases of Zika in Florida, where local mosquitoes are spreading the virus, the mother in Texas likely contracted it in Latin America, according to a statement from Harris County health officials.
Meanwhile, Zika is starting to take hold in the United States
Four cases of Zika infection in Florida are very likely to have been caused by mosquitoes there, the State Department of Health said Friday — the first documented instances of local transmission in the continental United States.

“Zika is now here,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing.
Republicans in Congress torpedoed attempts to stop the spread of the disease by littering legislation with special-interest gimmicks and divisive policy changes that invited a Democratic filibuster and a veto threat from the White House:
Democrats said they blocked the bill because Republicans were using the must-pass legislation to score political points, jam through unpalatable policy changes and cut money from other programs, including provisions that would hinder access to contraception for women [emphasis added] and weaken environmental restrictions on pesticide use.

Republicans, in turn, accused Democrats of manufacturing excuses for blocking the bill, but they did not dispute that some of the provisions favored Republican policy positions.

Democrats and the White House have been pushing since February for the Republican majorities in Congress to approve $1.9 billion in emergency financing to fight Zika, which can cause brain damage and other serious defects in infants born to infected mothers.
Republican religious zealots are intentionally increasing the likelihood that women will become pregnant and infected with Zika and be forced to bear microcephalic infants to term.

It's kind of ironic that Republicans are doing everything possible to increase the number of microcephalic infants, commonly called "pinheads." Pinhead is a derogatory term favored by Republican blowhard Bill O'Reilly. But the epidemic of pinheads we're suffering right now isn't caused by Zika -- it's caused by intolerant conservative racist and religious rhetoric spewed by the likes of Trump, Hannity, O'Reilly, Rubio and Limbaugh.

Rubio's stand is typically hypocritical:
"I understand a lot of people disagree with my view – but I believe that all human life is worthy of protection of our laws. And when you present it in the context of Zika or any prenatal condition, it’s a difficult question and a hard one," Rubio told POLITICO.

"But if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life."
Republicans like Rubio talk a big game about being "on the side of life," but he, like the vast majority of Republicans, favors the death penalty and complains that we're not killing people fast enough. They demand death even in cases of offenders who are mentally disabled or were juveniles when they committed their crimes. They favor starting unilateral wars of convenience that kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians (as well as American soldiers). Republicans like Trump even favor assassinating the wives and children of suspected terrorists. So much for the sanctity of human life.

But this really begs the question: what is human life?

The courts have decided that a brain-dead person can be taken off life support, though many Republicans still oppose this. In 2005 Republicans fought to prevent Terry Schiavo's husband from removing her feeding tube, although she had been stuck in an irreversible persistent vegetative state for 15 years. When she was autopsied the pathologist found she literally had only half a brain.

Republicans bitch about welfare queens not pulling their own weight: why -- in their own terms -- do they want society to support a bunch of pinheads who will never amount to anything, and can't even feed themselves or use the toilet?
This is the kind of "human life" Marco Rubio wants to prolong. Infants born with severe microcephaly will never be normal. They will never laugh, talk, or play, or go to kindergarten. They will never be able to feed themselves, or walk or take care of their own basic physical needs. They often suffer seizures. Many cannot swallow, see or hear. Most of them will never be able to recognize their own parents. Many will die after a few short months or years.

In other words, such children will suffer interminable torture until their disability ultimately kills them.

Yes, there are people with severe disabilities who still have lives and contribute to society: Stephen Hawking cannot walk or feed himself. Yet, because he has a functioning human brain, he has been able to communicate and accomplish amazing things.

Children born with severe microcephaly will never do that, because they are not, in the most important sense, human beings.

Our brains are what make us human. It's not opposable thumbs, or upright bipedal locomotion, or (mostly) hairless bodies. With today's technology children born without feet can become Olympic caliber runners like Oscar Pistorius (that technology, sadly, will not necessarily make them decent people, however).

But children born with severe microcephaly do not have human brains: they will never really be human.

Microcephaly can be detected in utero with ultrasound, and there's no mistaking the symptoms. If a woman wants to accept the burden of caring for a severely disabled infant until its disease finally kills it, that's fine. That should be her choice. But such children require constant medical attention for a condition that will never be cured.

Now multiply this by the potential for thousands and thousands of microcephalic infants if the Zika epidemic becomes widespread, and you have a recipe for a tsunami of medical bankruptcies and escalating health insurance costs, all to keep tiny-brained children alive for a few short years.

Republicans constantly bitch about the tyranny of political correctness. Forcing women to bear severely disabled babies whose lives will consist of unending agony is the height of conservative political correctness and religious orthodoxy carried to preposterous lengths.

So I'll be politically incorrect and call a spade a spade. Fetuses with such severe mental handicaps are not really human: they have not been born yet, they have no experiences, or emotional attachments. Nor will they ever be able to form them. They cannot survive on their own and most would die without extensive and expensive medical intervention.

Mothers have to consider the consequences of carrying a deformed Zika baby to term and make their own decisions. Bearing such a child will be an expensive, time-consuming and thankless task that will steal the love and attention from their other children and their spouses, as well as drain their financial resources, and ultimately the resources of American society. Does it make any sense to have thousands of microcephalic infants on life support who are only going to die in a few years, at a cost of billions of dollars?

When the precepts behind the religious absolutism on contraception and abortion were forged centuries ago, these were all moot points. Women died in childbirth all the time, miscarriages were extremely common, and child mortality was extremely high. Birth defects were thought to be the result of sin or curse. Infants with severe birth defects would die within hours or days. Those that didn't die were frequently abandoned in the wild.

It is our advanced technology that has made these questions of birth control and abortion such controversial topics. Absent our advanced health care system we wouldn't be having this discussion -- our Christian forebears just let deformed infants die.

This country should be doing everything it can to prevent the spread of Zika in the first place. We should be doing everything to ensure that women don't get pregnant in areas where Zika is prevalent. Birth control should be freely available everywhere, but most especially when women are at risk of bearing children with birth defects.

And we should never prevent a woman from terminating a pregnancy that will ultimately result in only misery and death.

Dressing More Conservatively


Monday, August 08, 2016

Will They Even Listen To One Of Their Own?

If GOP strategist Rick Wilson and I sat down for a beer to discuss ideology, we'd like find very little with which to agree upon. He's a conservative which means he pushes policies that, for the most part, simply don't work in reality.

But his recent column on Donald Trump and how he has to be beaten badly in November in order to save the party is completely accurate. Let's take a look at a few choice cuts, shall we?

A growing number of Americans are coming to the realization that Trump is more than just a political train wreck; he's a real threat to the nation, what with the fear of nuclear weapons and the sweeping power of the federal government in his tiny paws.

I've seen this from the beginning and it's certainly a reflection of where the party has gone. It gives me a great deal of hope for this country that the adults, regardless of their political stripe, see this too.

Those of us who believe, who know, that Trump is dangerous can't just settle for him being beaten in November. We need to ensure that he is on the business end of a decisive, humiliating defeat — so that the terribly divisive forces he has unleashed are delivered a death blow.

Those divisive forces can be defined specifically as the right wing blogger/commenter crowd, formerly the short wave radio folks followed by the email forward peeps. These are the moonbats that honestly define the party today and begin their "expert" analysis with the words, "I'm hearing some things from some people..."

Wilson correctly identifies the key to this election's results. Let's bury these fuckers forever. They are a danger to our country and its progress.

The second reason Trump needs to fall hard in November is that the Party of Lincoln needs a complete, top-to-bottom reset — one that completely purges the Trumpkins who believe racial animus is a governing philosophy and that their ignorant and angry primal screams can ever build a Republican majority. After a pretty decisive loss to Obama in 2012, the Republican Party produced an exhaustive, detailed post-mortem pointing the way forward, focused largely on how to better connect with the growing Latino vote. None of the lessons were actually learned. All the recommendations about fixing the posture of the party have been treated as though they had been printed on toilet paper.

Yeah, what happened to that all improved and reflecting GOP? Well, they realized their base is made of racist assholes who don't want to change. As I have stated previously, it's time to leave them behind. Wilson has a different idea...sort of....

Well, Trump voters, it's your turn. Go get a switch. I'm not going to coddle you and say you're really smart and good people and this is just a misunderstanding. That's just what the PC crowd does on the left. Trumpkins don't deserve a participation trophy for wrecking the party and saddling the nation with Hillary. They made the crazy the enemy of the good, and centered an entire campaign on rage, fear and an eternally shrinking spiral of cult-worship and fanaticism.

I laughed out loud when I saw the PC reference. And "rage, fear?" Hmm...where have I heard that before?:)

So when it's over, Trumpkins, remember: You're not purging us. We're purging you. No more hate and reckless group blame. No more fact-free fearmongering. No more feeding the obese ego of a man who's transparently unfit for the job.

Can they actually do it? Given this...

While Donald Trump was retweeting "White Genocide 1488 Ovenmaster," Clinton's campaign was building data files and contacting swing voters. While Trump was tweeting about "Crooked Hillary," she was having precisely targeted television ads aimed at swing voters in the suburbs of key cities in battleground states appearing at just the right moments. While Trump was depending on red hats and WWE rallies, her people have been going door-to-door by the thousands, knocking, talking, winning hearts and winning votes.

...I'm not sure it's possible.


Sunday, August 07, 2016

Really Fucking Bad

Remember a few months back when some pundits were hand wringing over how Hillary Clinton could get Donald Trump? After all, the guy was impervious, right? He bested a "strong" GOP field of 16 other candidates and was all set to take down the Hilz in similar fashion. There was no earthly way she could stop him.

Except she did.

And it was magnificent.

We're still three months away from the election and a lot could happen. In fact, I'm expecting a few bad things to happen to Hillary along the way. Maybe even a really bad one or two. That's politics and no doubt her team is expecting it now that we have the revelation that Julian Assange wants to be the teenager who burns the house down just for kicks. But one thing has became very clear in the last week.

Like any right wing blogger or commenter, it's mere child's play to get to a guy like Trump.

The trap she laid for him with Khans was beautiful. It totally threw him off his game and he spent the week pitching a fit that has now put Georgia, Arizona and possibly Missouri in play for the Dems. Down ballot, GOP candidates are scrambling to saw themselves loose of the dead hooker (Trump) to which they are handcuffed. Consider this handy checklist of Trump's behavior as a result of being pwned by the Khans.

-Foamed at the mouth about fire marshals from Colorado to Ohio.

-Kicked a baby out of an event after saying the baby was OK to stay.

-Took a purple heart from a veteran that he said was real but wasn't and made jokes about it.

-Said that if a woman was being sexually harassed in the workplace, she should get a different job.

-Refused to endorse Paul Ryan or John McCain and then grudgingly did so.

-Called Hillary Clinton the devil (ah, that ol' chesnut..:))

-Called the election rigged (see also: taking ball, going home after ass whupping)

-Claimed that a video existed of the US paying off Iran. He later retracted this statement.

-Claimed that the NFL sent him a letter complaining of the debate schedule. The NFL said they never did so.

Given all of this, here's my latest map...


Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com


Now that we have all seen how easy it is to get a guy like Trump, Hillary's debate strategy should be pretty clear. The guy can't resist taking the bait and then making shit up based on the insanity in his head. So, give him the bait.

More importantly, though, I think we are finally seeing just how well the mentality, emotional balance and ideology of right wing bloggers and commenters would do under the spotlight.

Really fucking bad.

Saturday, August 06, 2016

Buddies!


Friday, August 05, 2016

Thursday, August 04, 2016

Does Trump's Draft Dodging Disqualify Him?

As Donald Trump continues his insane tirades against the parents of a soldier who was killed in Iraq, the question of Trump's draft dodging has come up again. It surfaced a while back, when Trump criticized John McCain for having been a POW in Vietnam.

Trump received five deferments to avoid the draft in the 1960s. Four were for college, and one was for "bone spurs" in his heels. This was clearly bogus, but Trump was not alone in buying his way out of the draft. A lot of politicians of Trump's age took advantage of their social station to avoid serving in war: Dan Quayle, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

Should avoiding the draft disqualify you from serving as president? It depends: people like Bush, Cheney and Rove were all gung-ho for the war, but weaseled their way out of Vietnam.

War is hell, the old saying goes. But some wars are "better" than others. US involvement in the two world wars was inescapable. The Korean and Persian Gulf Wars were waged to assist allies against aggressors.  The Afghan war, while justified, was completely screwed up: it should have been a police action targeted specifically to destroy bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but Bush turned it into a unwinnable war against an entire country.

The Vietnam and Iraq wars were wrong from the get-go. Both were ginned up to gain political advantage. Opposition to both these wars was justified, and draft evasion during the Vietnam War for moral and political reasons was justified to "starve the beast." It is completely moral to avoid participating in the killing in an elective war of aggression like those in Vietnam and Iraq, waged to bolster the reelection chances of a sitting president.

But avoiding service in Vietnam while clamoring for other Americans to be sent off to die in the jungle was the height of hypocrisy. Dozens of Republican chickenhawks in Congress and the Bush administration (I'm looking at you, Dick Cheney) were guilty of this when they invaded Iraq on false pretenses. At the same time they demonized Democrats like John Kerry who actually served in Vietnam.

Some people think that military service should be a prerequisite to be commander in chief. These people are wrong. Some people in the military (I'm looking at you, John McCain) think of military action as the answer to every problem. McCain has called for war against more than a dozen different countries, and had he been president it's completely possible we would be at war with Russia at this moment over the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and Crimea.

What is required to serve as commander in chief, however, is the ability to understand what the consequences of your actions will be, and what the effects of those actions will be on the people who serve, their families, and the country as a whole. That requires knowledge, foresight and empathy.

Donald Trump has none of these. He has no idea what's going on the world: last week he didn't know that Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014. He doesn't know the difference between Iran's Quds force and the Kurds in Iraq.

Trump's lack of foresight is even worse: he has said that the United States should let South Korea and Japan should go hang, and develop their own nuclear weapons. He has said that the US should stand by and do nothing if Russia invades NATO allies that don't spend enough on their military.

It's no wonder that North Korea, Russia and China are all rooting for Trump to be president.

Trump's total lack of empathy has been amply displayed time and again, most recently in his attacks on the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan. And lest we forget, his snarky demand that a crying baby be ejected from his rally.

Besides, Trump's bone spurs prevent him from being commander in chief.

What he's saying and what he's thinking...

Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Good Words

As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising. Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

---Jill Abramson, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.

And here's another piece which explains why the Hillary pile on continues to happen.

Tuesday, August 02, 2016

The Continued Adolescent Tantrum

Over the last few months of this campaign, I've note how Donald Trump is exactly the candidate that conservatives deserve. They have gone from the party of Reagan and his shining city on the hill to the party of anger, hate, fear, and darkness. As clearly reflected by their politicians, pundits and supporters (especially the right wing bloggers/commenters), their behavior is that of an adolescent having a temper tantrum, stomping down the hall, slamming the door, and shouting, "You can't make me!!! I don't wanna!!!!"

Witness this latest tantrum from their candidate.


And this wasn't the first time he's called those fat headed fire marshals with all their poopey headed rules and stuff...



So, now we can add fire marshals to the list of people who are against Donald Trump...this on top of Gold Star families.

All of this ranting, raving, and lunacy sure does remind me of many a blog discussion...:)

Monday, August 01, 2016

The Real Email Scandal

Hillary Clinton gave an interview on Fox News on Sunday in which she once again apologized and admitted fault for using a personal email server during her tenure as Secretary of State. The media went ballistic today (natch) over her "lying" about classified material being sent on this server. It's been explained so many times now that I really don't get why everyone is still talking about her emails.

What they should be talking about is the real scandal. Hillary Clinton doesn't understand basic technology and clearly has trouble on the line with the computer machine. Sure, it's not as sexy as her lying and going to jail (nothing gives a conservative a boner like imagining a Clinton in jail), but it is a fact. She set up the private server because she didn't have the multi-tasking capability to toggle between two different emails on her Blackberry. When she was asked about her hard drive being scrubbed, she said, "What do you mean, with a cloth?" She seemed to not understand reading the code on three emails that had a "c" classification.

All of this tells me that she doesn't understand something the leader of the free world should get. I have several emails accounts on my phone along with a variety of apps that I use all the time. Granted, I may be a bit ahead of the game in terms of tech but the president should have basic level knowledge of this stuff.

I highly doubt the media, particularly the conservative media, will go after on this but they should. It's a valid criticism and it should be concerning to voters.