Rand's Clock Is Running Out

The clock is ticking on Rand Paul's presidential run.  Erick Erickson over at Red State is calling on him to withdraw from the race, and as a result Paul has gone the full Trump in order to stay in it.

In what may be close to the most over-the-top claims made by Republicans about potential Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said Sanders’ election could lead to “mass genocide.”

Sanders is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, an economic model normally associated with Scandinavian countries that boast high quality of life. But Paul, like Texas state Rep. Jason Villalba, fear mongered by comparing Sanders to historical monsters who used the word “socialist” in their party names, Right Wing Watch reports.

Paul linked Sanders to murderous dictators like of Pol Pot and Josef Stalin.

“It amazes me and it actually kind of scares me,” Paul told South Carolina radio host Vince Coakley. “I think it’s not an accident of history that most of the times when socialism has been tried that attendant with that has been mass genocide of people or any of those who object to it. Stalin killed tens of millions of people. Mao killed tens of millions of people. Pol Pot killed tens of millions of people.”

Paul went on to ignore the “democratic” in democratic socialist when he said,” When you have a command economy, when everything is dictated from one authority, that’s socialism, but it doesn’t come easily to those who resist it.”

And so Bernie Sanders will kill tens of millions of people too! Duh!

Paul doesn't get that as a Republican in office who hasn't stopped Obama, and hasn't repealed Obamacare or impeached the President or deported tens of millions of brown people, who hasn't outlawed same-sex marriage everywhere, who hasn't declared all Democrats ineligible to vote forevermore, that he's the Enemy now of the GOP primary nutjob voter.  There is nothing he can say or that he can do to save his campaign at this point.

But he sure is trying.

Republicans are exactly who we thought they were, folks.

Who Can Trump Trump? Not Rubio

The Village expected Donald Trump to have been dispatched by now, and for the Very Serious People in the GOP to now be leading comfortably.  They of course are not, a full-scale open revolt is underway with Trump, Carson, and Fiorina leading a mob of GOP primary voters that want to destroy the party and replace it with Tea Party fantasy where "illegals" are rounded up and deported, and Democrats are just rounded up.

These are the same GOP primary voters that despise Sen. Marco Rubio because he's too weak on immigration, and the only acceptable immigration to the new Trumpian GOP is none at all. The Village is running out of patience and starting to blame the candidates.  Jeb Bush was first earlier this month, and now it's Rubio's turn for "Why haven't you stopped Trump yet?"

The hype surrounding Marco Rubio's presidential campaign just smashed into the wall of reality.

First, the Florida senator's team insisted it had stashed more campaign cash in the bank than fellow Floridian Jeb Bush -- only it hadn't. The campaign also told reporters it had raised $6 million in the last fundraising quarter -- also not true. That turned out to be an overly generous rounding of the underwhelming real figure: $5.7 million.

Yet those aren't even the most troublesome parts of the Florida senator's most recent campaign finance report. Rubio may be slowly rising in the polls, but his third quarter filing revealed a campaign that's also out-manned by many of its rivals in the early-voting states. His staff is largely concentrated in Washington, with just a small umbrella of on-the-ground, early-state operatives -- and he's already at a disadvantage because he hasn't invested the time in early-state visits that some of his opponents have.

For all the recent buzz surrounding his candidacy -- fueled by strong debate performances -- Rubio isn't raising enough money to keep pace with his rivals in the top tier and he's running out of time to assemble a robust field organization.

"If Trump-mania subsides, you’ve got to have a mechanism and a structure," said Chip Felkel, a South Carolina Republican strategist who isn't affiliated with any campaign. "I think you’re being risky if you don’t put a structure in place."

The smart money has been on Rubio for some time now as the dynamic Latino Republican who would solve immigration and knock the crazy out of the GOP, the charismatic Obama of the right. Remember this TIME cover from February 2013?

 

The Village has invested quite a lot in the myth of Rubio as the party's "savior" in 2016. Instead, Trump and Carson are crapping all over the bed.  Christie has failed.  Rand Paul has failed.  Jeb has failed.  Jindal has failed. Rubio isn't their last shot (that would be Ted Cruz) but he's the one they prefer.  And he's in the middle of failing.  The Summer of Trump is now the Fall of the GOP Establishment, and they are terrified that Trump or Carson will win the nomination and get crushed next year.

Rubio is their last hope.  And he's fading.

Handsome Jack For Governor, Sorta Kinda

You know things are bad for the GOP when the Enquirer endorses a Democrat for anything, let alone governor of the Commonwealth.

Republican Matt Bevin was the strongest contender from a weak GOP field of four candidates, but he hasn’t shown he knows how to unite his own party, much less bridge the partisan divide. Bevin won the Republican primary by 83 votes. That’s not much of a mandate, but Bevin has treated his win as a coronation, telling Kentuckians he’s vetting hires for his administration because the odds are he’ll be governor. Yet the most recent polling shows Bevin lagging Conway by 5 percentage points, with a plus or minus 3.8-point margin of error. 

Bevin needs to listen before he can lead, and must lead before he can govern. Northern Kentucky Republicans have expressed concern they may not have Bevin’s ear if he is elected, and they’re not alone. Bevin touts his experience as a businessman, but being a CEO is very different than being a governor. Conway may be a Democrat in a state that usually votes red nationally, but by trial of experience and proof of accomplishments, it is clear he knows a leader without followers is just a guy taking a walk. 

Conway’s proposals reflect his thoughtful approach to Kentucky’s pressing issues. 

He has diligently worked to curb drug abuse in Kentucky as attorney general and has the right approach to the heroin epidemic. He sees the scourge of addiction as a treatment problem, and directed $32 million from a settlement with drug companies toward juvenile treatment programs and care centers. He was a strong advocate of a critical heroin aid bill that squeaked through the legislature earlier this year. 

Northern Kentucky needs a solution for the aging Brent Spence Bridge, and neither Conway nor Bevin has a convincing answer. But of the two men, Conway’s approach is realistically cautious and hopeful. He is wisely opposed to the Eastern Bypass proposal, while Bevin thinks it holds some merit. Conway is open to the idea of public-private partnerships, and while he says he won’t go against Northern Kentuckians if they oppose tolls, we’re encouraged by his vow to make the Brent Spence problem a priority. His willingness to work with Ohio Gov. John Kasich on the bridge also bodes well. Both Kentucky and Ohio will benefit from partnering to solve regional problems.

"We hate them both, but at least Jack Conway is sane and not a complete asshole, so meh." Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but one that Handsome Jack will take.  With the election just two and a half weeks out, Conway will take all the "whatever, man" votes he can get.

What the hell, I'm feeling confident.  Even Bevin's own polling shows him down by 3. New tag: Handsome Jack.

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.