Last Call For Worst Kasich Scenario, Con't

Someone please tell me once again how moderate and sensible a Republican Gov. John Kasich is so that I can laugh at them endlessly for being fools.

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich said today in his first major policy speech of the campaign that, as president, he would gut the U.S. transportation and education departments and would balance the budget within eight years. 

Kasich, the governor of Ohio, said downsizing the two federal agencies and returning much of their power and funding to individual states would send money and control away from Washington and back to the states, a centerpiece of his economic plan. 

He panned the federal gas tax in particular, saying he would return almost all of it to state coffers. He said he would limit the U.S. Department of Transportation’s role nearly entirely to providing research support to states. 

"You keep your money and you fix your roads the way you want to," Kasich said in Nashua, New Hampshire, today.

In the immoral words of Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown in "Back To The Future", where we're going, we don't need roads.  The Interstate Highway System?  Not our problem, your problem.

Over 100 programs run by the Department of Education, meanwhile, would be packaged into four state grants, transferring control over education to the state and local levels, according to his plan. 

A centerpiece of the roadmap Kasich laid out would involve balancing the federal budget within eight years of his assuming the presidency and his pushing for a constitutional amendment that would require a balanced budget annually. As a congressman, Kasich was a chief architect of balancing the federal budget in the 1990s, the last time it was balanced. 

Oh, so now it was Kasich who balanced the budget during the Clinton years.  Sure.  And then Kasich became George W. Bush's budget director during the "deficits don't matter" era of big government and war spending by credit card and ended up crashing the economy in the process.  That worked out well, didn't it?  Too bad we didn't spend that money on schools or roads instead of wars.

To rein in what he called unnecessary federal rules, he would enact a yearlong moratorium on new regulations “so we can catch our breath,” he said. "No more rules and regulations from Washington for one year." 

His plan also calls for cutting the top tax rate for individuals from 39.6 percent to 28 percent and lowering the number of tax brackets from seven to three. For businesses, the top rate would drop from 35 percent to 25 percent.

The Kasich Plan is simple: to take what most Republicans want to do with tax cuts for the rich and cuts to Medicaid with block grants and make massive austerity cuts everywhere. If anything Kasich's austerity plan is by far the worst of the GOP.

But he's the moderate, remember?

The Money Game

In the post-Citizens United world of campaign finance, whoever runs out of money first loses the race. Rick Perry and Scott Walker ran out of cash and closed shop, and with third quarter campaign fundraising figures now out, the candidates who have raised tens of millions will go on. It's the candidates who have raised only chump change in comparison who are on the way out, and top of that list of losers running out of money is Bobby Jindal.

Thursday could mark the beginning of the end for Bobby Jindal’s increasingly slim presidential hopes.

The Louisiana governor’s campaign reported having just $260,000 to spend at the end of September after raising a little over half a million dollars and spending significantly more than that in the third quarter. It’s a paltry sum compared to his rivals, and if Jindal can’t jumpstart his White House bid soon, he could be headed the way of Rick Perry and Scott Walker, who ended their campaigns when their coffers ran dry.

Jindal’s haul—or lack thereof—was the most ominous signal that came from the quarterly FEC filing deadline on Thursday, which showed that the top two Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, each raised more money between June and September than any of the 15 Republicans still in the race. (Donald Trump, of course, has access to more money than any of them through his own personal wealth.) Clinton raised $28 million and Sanders raised $26 million. Ben Carson’s rise to a close second in the polls was reflected in his fund-raising, as he led the GOP field by taking in $20 million in the third quarter. 

Perry ran out of cash, Walker is a million in debt now, and Jindal will soon join them. And it says the world that Ben Carson has gotten $20 million dollars from people. Fool and his money are soon parted, I guess.

Bitter Home Alabama, Con't

Alabama Republican Gov. Robert Bentley is upset that the real racists are accusing him of shutting down DMV offices in predominately black counties as a ploy to disenfranchise black voters who will need photo IDs in order to vote in 2016 and that you're crazy for thinking it has anything to do with race because it doesn't, and you're the real racist if you think so!

They are wrong on this issue," said Bentley. "Everyone can get a license and everyone can get a voter ID. They (critics) really don't have anything to talk about. It's politics at its worst. And it's race politics at its worst."

Bentley told the group that he had worked hard to help change the image of the state.

"Alabama is not George Wallace's state. I don't want it to be George Wallace's state." said Bentley. "I want us to be inclusive. I don't want us to look at the color of people's skin. I don't want us to look at whether they are male or female. We are all Alabamians and I'm their governor. I know most of them (blacks in the affected counties losing driver's license offices) are not going to vote Republican. But you are not going to win people over by not being inclusive."

And that doesn't matter if you make it so difficult for them to vote that they can't vote at all, in a state that doesn't have any public transportation, so that they can't get to the driver's license office and get an ID in the first place.  No, everyone can't get a license, and that's the whole point.

StupidiNews!

• Flash flooding in drought-stricken Southern California caused mudslides and hail damage in Los Angeles as parts of Interstate 5 were closed due to mud covering the highway.
• Volkswagen's woes continue as the automaker says it will recall 8.5 million vehicles across the EU starting in January after police raids on its Italian HQ of Lamborghini.
• California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom wants to put stricter firearms background checks and banning large capacity magazines on the November 2016 ballot as an initiative for voters.
• Russia has agreed to build a natural gas pipeline in Pakistan in order to increase its influence in the Middle East, connecting Pakistan's north and south and is expected to be online by 2020.
• Researchers have revealed an artificial skin material for prosthetics that could be used to duplicate the sense of touch in recipients in the future.

Last Call For The 14-Year Rule

Jon Rauch, now at The Atlantic, discusses the 14-Year Rule that he's been known for and how it applies to the 2016 presidential campaign.

At the time of this year’s second Republican debate, five Democrats and 16 Republicans were running for president. But if you ruled out people who had zero elective experience and therefore were too fresh (goodbye, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Donald Trump), and if you ruled out people who were more than 14 years from their first election as governor or senator and therefore were stale (goodbye, Jeb Bush, Lincoln Chafee, Hillary Clinton, Jim Gilmore, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum), the field diminished to three Democrats and eight Republicans.

Yes, both Bush (elected governor of Florida in 1998) and Clinton (elected to the Senate in 2000) have passed their sell-by dates, a fact reflected in the palpable boredom that has greeted their campaigns. Nonetheless, conventional wisdom regards them as the most likely nominees. If that wisdom turns out to be right, we will have an election pitting two stale political dynasts against each other—something we have reason to hope will be rare in American political life. In this scenario, one of the stale political dynasts will win the general election, and the 14-Year Rule will fail at last.

Indeed, the 14-Year Rule has held up astonishingly well over the years, and while it would indicate that Hillary and Jeb won't be President (and neither would Joe Biden) it does lead to a Bernie Sanders (he's only been a Senator for eight years) versus Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz (four years each) matchup.

In the past two open presidential elections (that is, elections in which no incumbent was running), freshness has ruled the day. The voters, not satisfied with a merely moderate level of inexperience, chose the least experienced governor or senator in the field: George W. Bush (only six years of experience) in 2000, and Barack Obama (a shockingly skimpy four) in 2008. If voters were to stay true to form in 2016, the next president would be—drum roll—Senator Ted Cruz. Elected to the Senate in 2012, having previously attained the speed-bump-high office of Texas solicitor general, Cruz is the only politician in the race who can match Obama’s exalted standard of unpreparedness.

It's an interesting theory, and if both sides of it hold up, Cruz would be the winner.  It would also be a complete disaster for the country, so I'm hoping that the 14-Year Rule is broken and decisively so.  Of course, a Trump/Carson/Fiorina win would certainly do that too...

A Different Kind Of War

NATO is still dealing with Russia's invasion of the Crimea region of Ukraine, and while the bullets aren't flying so much in Europe (yet), over in cyberspace, the Russians are causing all kinds of EU chaos.

Russian computer attacks have become more brazen and more destructive as the country grows increasingly at odds with the U.S. and European nations over military goals first in Ukraine and now Syria. 

Along with reported computer breaches of a French TV network and the White House, a number of attacks now being attributed to Russian hackers and some not previously disclosed have riveted intelligence officials as relations with Russia have deteriorated. These targets include the Polish stock market, the U.S. House of Representatives, a German steel plant that suffered severe damage and The New York Times. 

U.S. officials worry that any attempt by the Russian government to use vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure like global stock exchanges, power grids and airports as pressure points against the West could lead to a broader conflict, according to two people familiar with the debate inside government and who asked to not to be named when discussing intelligence matters. When NATO officials met last week, they voiced alarm about Russia’s rapid involvement in Syria, including the firing of cruise missiles, and vowed the biggest reinforcement of their collective defense since the end of the Cold War. 

The Warsaw Stock Exchange is but one example of the heightened cyber-activity. Hackers who rifled the exchange last October, in a breach that set off alarms among Western intelligence agencies, proclaimed they were Muslim militants angry over Poland’s support for a bombing campaign against the Islamic State. 

"It’s beginning," the group posted online in a file-sharing site called Pastebin, heavily used by the cyberunderground. "To be continued! Allahu Akbar!" 

While stealing some data, the attackers also made dozens of client logins public, opening the exchange’s systems to additional chaos from cybercriminals of all stripes. It was sabotage by crowd-sourcing. 

Except the infiltrators weren’t Islamic militants at all. Behind the smokescreen was a group of hackers with ties to the Russian government, according to three people familiar with the Polish investigation. The incident was viewed by Polish investigators as a stark warning to the country, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization intent on driving a strong alliance response to Russia’s moves in eastern Ukraine.

It hardly needs to be said but I'll remind people anyway that Putin is absolutely the product of the old Soviet intelligence services and Russia conducts clandestine ops with the best of them.  The Russian hackers unleashed by the fall of the USSR in the 90's who became the new rich mobsters of the 00's are now happily taking Putin's coin in this decade, and they're doing a hell of a job shaking down governments from Warsaw to Washington.

Gotta hand it to the guy, he knows how to party. And if the music gets too loud, well, somebody might call the cops on him.

The Carson Show, Con't

Is anyone in the audience still wondering why Ben Carson is vomiting out racist, vile sentiment while running for president in 2016?  You play Peoria to Peoria, as they say.

For a long time, Ben Carson’s campaign team feared that his habit of inflammatory remarks would sink his presidential hopes. They sent him to media training in Texas. The candidate pledged to police his words. 

But ever since Mr. Carson said on Sept. 20 that he did not think a Muslimshould be president, then refused to retract the statement amid a furious reaction, his campaign has watched grass-roots support grow and donations pour in — and advisers have backtracked, deciding, in the words of one, to “let Carson be Carson.” 

Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon seeking the Republican nomination, has seemed lately to be a candidate unbound. He has uttered remarks on policy and national events, some divisive and some seemingly uninformed, that have led commentators on the right as well as on the left to question his fitness for the presidency. 

And yet none of this has deterred elements of the Republican base, which in making 2015 the year of the political outsider see in Mr. Carson’s provocative comments a more palatable variation on the bombastic insults of Donald J. Trump. Both accuse critics of “political correctness.” Now Mr. Carson is edging up behind Mr. Trump in many polls, with Carly Fiorina, a third outsider candidate, close behind.

We're getting to the point where overt racism, Islamophobia, and sexism are what a majority of Republicans want if you combine Trump and Carson's numbers in the poll. Surprise! They are who we always thought them to be.

StupidiNews!

• A Missouri judge has struck down a St. Louis city ordinance that would have raised the city's minimum wage to $11 an hour, saying the law conflicted with the state's minimum wage law.
• Facing a mandatory recall of 2.4 million vehicles, Volkswagen says it will attempt to recover the cost of fines from its diesel cheating scandal by cutting billions in sales from parts makers.
• President Obama is expected to announce today that he is leaving as many as 5,500 troops in Afghanistan after he departs the White House and the current 9,800 troops through 2016.
• Vice President Joe Biden remains undecided on a possible White House run even after the first Democratic debate, telling reporters that the current candidates "all did well".
• California Attorney General Kamala Harris is pressing the state's legislature to pass stricter laws against "revenge porn" and other exploitation of women online.

Last Call For Numbers Games

Remember, Donald Trump is getting a lot of attention for a guy at 21% or so.  More people support Bernie Sanders, but you wouldn't know it from our media. The Fix's Philip Bump to his credit does the math.

For all of the attention paid to the Republican primary -- thanks in large part to the classy marquee name of Donald Trump -- it's worth pointing something out: More Americans currently support Hillary Clinton than Trump, which you probably already knew. But it's safe to assume that more Americans alsosupport Bernie Sanders. 

We looked at this a bit back in May, when the Sanders phenomenon was first emerging. But it's worth revisiting now that he has surged. 

If you extrapolate Census turnout estimates into 2016, we can figure that some 137 million will turn out to vote next year. That's maybe a bit high, but it doesn't really matter. It gives us a figure to work with. 

In September, Gallup did its regular assessment of how Americans identify politically. The number who said they were Democrats or Republicans was the same, 27 percent. The rest were "independents," though a number of those independents leaned toward one party or the other. (This is not uncommon at all.) 

Those partisanship figures change a lot, but let's use them as-is. If we apply those percentages to the 137 million people that vote, assuming (unfairly) that partisans vote at even rates, we get about 37 million people in each party, about 25 million Republican-leaning independents and about 23 million Democratic-leaning ones. 

If we then apply polling averages to those numbers, we get a look at how many people (generally) support each candidate. Note that the ratios below don't change even if the numbers of voters change; it's a percent of a percent. But the upshot is this: More Americans support Sanders than Trump.

Both demographics and electoral college politics favor the Democrats in 2016, and the GOP knows it.

If only our liberal media would do a better job of remembering that.

Would Anyone Else Like To "Negotiate"?

With the House GOP in chaos, it's up to Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, to conduct serious talks with Democrats and the White House on preventing a debt default in November and a shutdown in December.

Just kidding!  McConnell wants to hold the country hostage or destroy America's economy too. Probably both.

Mitch McConnell privately wants the White House to pay this price to enact a major budget deal: Significant changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for raising the debt ceiling and funding the government. 

Several people familiar with the high-stakes fiscal negotiations said the Senate majority leader's staff is trying to drive a hard bargain in the private talks with the White House and Democratic leaders. 

McConnell is seeking a reduction in cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security recipients and new restrictions on Medicare, including limiting benefits to the rich and raising the eligibility age, several sources said. In addition, the Kentucky Republican is eager to see new policy riders enacted, including reining in the Environmental Protection Agency's clean water regulations. 

White House officials are already rejecting such entitlement changes. But the demand by McConnell showcases the major gulf that exists between the two sides as they try to avoid a potential fiscal calamity if the United States fails to raise the national debt ceiling by Nov. 5 or stumbles into a government shutdown by mid-December.

And this is McConnell's opening bid: cuts to Social Security and Medicare, raising the eligibility age, and destroying the EPA, or he collapses the economy.

Sound familiar?  It's what they wanted last time.  Obama said go to hell and they lost, but voters gave them the Senate anyway.  I guess the plan is to destroy the economy so badly that America just gives up and stops voting.

The Great Debate Debate

My thoughts on last night's Democratic party debate:

Hillary Clinton stuck and moved, nobody really landed anything on her, but her answers on her obvious flip-flops were (necessarily) evasive. She's not going to win over any Sanders voters, but she didn't lose any either because she managed to judo flip several crapass questions from Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper into attacks on the GOP.  Nobody does that better, she's a fighter and she looked very solid and will remain the frontrunner.

Bernie Sanders looked feisty, if not outright salty on a couple of things, but gave some really goofy answers on guns, immigration, and foreign policy. Sticking up for Hillary against the Village's "Hillary's e-mail server" question was a class, class act, however.  He did well enough for himself. Note he finally got the memo on Black Lives Matter.  He'll pick up a few points in the polls.

Martin O'Malley had a decent showing, but nowhere near what he needed to climb into serious contention.  He had some good responses on gun control as Governor of Maryland, but the rest was sloppy.

Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, why are you even in the race?  Stop it.

And Joe Biden?  Anybody know where Joe Biden is?  Stop taunting us, Joe.  Run or bow out, but make up your mind already.

Winners: Clinton as clear frontrunner, Sanders as scrappy rival keeping her honest, O'Malley as the plausible dark horse. Democratic party as group of adults in the room rather than the GOP clown show.

Losers: Lincoln "Block of Granite" Chafee, Jim "Neck Frill" Webb, Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper, Joe Biden not making the hard decision, GOP clown show livetweeting the debate (Trump and especially Huckabee looked like complete assholes.), and the idea that we need more than six debates. For once, DWS was actually right.

StupidiNews!

• Israeli forces are moving to crack down on Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem as part of increased security measured aimed at countering ongoing violence.
• Although legal under the law, Planned Parenthood says it will stop taking reimbursements for fetal tissue for research in order to defuse attacks against the organization from the GOP.
• The US says it will bring up the issue of Iranian missile tests over last weekend to the United Nations as a violation of standing UN Security Council resolutions.
• Unemployment in the UK has dropped to its lowest level since 2008 as incomes are picking up despite global pressures from China's faltering economy and the Syrian refugee crisis.
• A new study from Cambridge University finds 87% of Android devices have security vulnerabilities, with Google's own Nexus devices suffering from  the slowest rollouts of fixes.

Last Call For Stopped In Their Tracks

Gov. John Kasich's plan to leave Cincinnati without a single surgical abortion provider has run into the court system and the last two clinics in southwestern Ohio will stay open for now.

A federal judge banned Ohio health officials from enforcing a strict new abortion law on Tuesday, until a lawsuit challenging it goes to trial next year.

U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett issued a preliminary injunction against Ohio's abortion law, and allowed a clinic in Cincinnati and one in Dayton to stay open.

The clinics sued the state in September, after they feared closure by new abortion laws. If that happened, Cincinnati would have been the largest metropolitan area in the nation without a surgical abortion provider.

In his ruling, Barrett wrote the abortion clinics had “likelihood of success” moving forward with the case.

“An emergency is now stopped and now we can take a deep breath,” said Jennifer Branch, a civil rights lawyer for Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio’s Mount Auburn clinic and Women’s Med Group’s Kettering clinic.

“Today, the court ruled in favor of Ohio women, ensuring access to safe and legal abortion,” said Jerry Lawson, CEO of Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio. “This sends an important message to Ohio politicians that their unconstitutional attempts to restrict access to abortion will not stand. Patient safety is our top priority.”

Judge Barrett had issued a two-week restraining order against the Ohio GOP's abortion law on September 30th, otherwise the clinics would have closed on October 1. He said that he needed the time to investigate the merits of the case and whether or not closing the clinics would cause irreparable harm to Cincinnati and Dayton.  Now he's made his decision and the clinics in Dayton and Cincy can stay open.

This is a pretty huge win, frankly.   And the loser is Gov. John Kasich. Big time.

Nice, Boring Policy Discussions

The first Democratic candidate debate gets underway tonight as as Brian Beutler reminds us, compared to the GOP circus and all the clowns, the Democratic party affair is going to be almost boring by comparison. 

Relative to the two Republican presidential primary debates already behind us, Tuesday night's Democratic primary debate is expected to draw a modest TV audience. Back on January 31, 2008, when candidate Barack Obama was still a political phenom, CNN logged the most-watched presidential primary debate in its history to date, drawing an average of 8.3 million viewers. With the second Republican primary debate last month, the network nearly tripled that.

We surely have Donald Trump to thank for the disparity. Had he sat out the race this year, he would have deprived Fox News and CNN of his singular combination of fame, media savvy, insensitivity, and cringe-inducing combativeness. But even absent Trump, Republican primary debates would probably draw bigger audiences than their Democratic counterparts. It isn’t wrong or biased to say that Democrats make comparatively boring television. But that isn’t a strike against Democrats, either. It’s a reflection of the fact that the Republican Party, unlike the Democratic Party, is dominated by reactionary voters, which makes its candidates prone to saying or doing outrageous things out of a sense of necessity.
A similar dynamic prevailed in 2012, even absent a uniquely incorrigible figure like Trump on stage to channel the modern right-wing Id. The GOP primary debates back then teemed with anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and homophobic sentiment. On different occasions, conservative audience members booed a gay soldier and cheered the proposition that the uninsured poor should be left to die.

Many observers blamed the toxicity of those debates for dragging Mitt Romney into adopting unsupportable positions—including, most infamously, the view that U.S. policy should be made so inhospitable to immigrants that they’d voluntarily “self-deport.” But in hindsight it’s actually striking how little of the craziness stuck to him.

The contrast on display this week is an occasion to remember that the eventual Republican nominee will be the candidate representing the portion of the electorate that elicited these moments.

As Beutler says, the adults will be taking the stage tonight.  I'll be tuning in to see what they have to say.

Run Joe Run

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds half the nation's Democrats want Joe Biden in the race, but it doesn't mean they'd vote for him.

The results come as speculation surrounding Biden’s intentions has intensified, with reports having him close to a decision. The declared Democratic presidential candidates, including Clinton and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her closest rival, will take the stage Tuesday night in Las Vegas for the first party debate.

Biden will not be there, but 48 percent of Democrats surveyed in the Reuters poll wish he were a candidate, compared with 30 percent who said he should stay out. Independents were split on the question, with 36 percent saying Biden should stay in and an equal share believing otherwise.

But support for Biden’s entry into the race does not translate into equal passion for his candidacy. Just 17 percent of those surveyed said Biden would be their first choice, while 46 percent would back Clinton. Biden would also run behind Sanders, who remains the favorite of one fourth of Democrats surveyed.

Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist in Florida with Draft Biden, a political action committee established to lay the groundwork for a Biden run, said more voters would be likely to support Biden once he has officially launched a campaign.

“There’s an element of people – they know they like him, but they’re not willing to give him their vote yet,” Schale said.

I'm still undecided, frankly.  There are policy positions, past present, and future, that I like and dislike about all three candidates.  But count me in the group that wants Joe Biden in the race.