All Around The World The Same Song

Republicans are trying to repeal Obamacare yet again (attempt number 54, by my math) this time with a couple of differences: they are using budget reconciliation, and they are including cutting all funding for Planned Parenthood.

The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that defunding Planned Parenthood can be part of a special Republican package repealing parts of ObamaCare, The Hill has learned. 

The parliamentarian on Tuesday gave word that the provision passes muster under the Senate’s Byrd Rule, which means it can be attached to a reconciliation package that cannot be filibustered on the Senate floor.

Some Senate sources had raised questions over whether the reconciliation bill passed by the House — which strips funding from Planned Parenthood — was even eligible for the reconciliation process. 

That question is now settled, which means the Senate can begin debating the measure once GOP leaders round up enough votes to bring it to the floor. 

“The House of Representatives passed important legislation that ripped out the core pillars of ObamaCare and fully complies with the House’s budget rules. Today the Senate Parliamentarian advised us that their ObamaCare repeal bill can proceed under the rules of reconciliation,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 

“The Parliamentarian also confirmed that the restrictions on payments to certain health care providers in section 201 of the House bill can be accomplished consistent with the Byrd rule,” Stewart added, referring to language defunding Planned Parenthood.

So this is all great fun for the GOP, but it's going to run into a guaranteed veto by President Obama. The question is will this legislation get attached to must-pass legislation?  The budget deal has already been signed, so where does this bill go?

It's a definite boon to the four Senate Republicans running for President in 2016. If this does get past the Senate, these four can say "I proved the only thing keeping Obamacare and Planned Parenthood alive now is Obama, and once I win in 2016 we can and will end his legacy."

Of course, that goes for Trump, Carson, Fiorina, Jeb! and the rest of the pack too.

Short of a piping hot plate of red meat for the base, this accomplishes nothing.

That appears to be the point, however.

The Great Debate Debate, Con't

A couple of points raised in last night's GOP debate that I wanted to bring up, first Trump on the minimum wage:

But, taxes too high, wages too high, we're not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we can not do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can't do it.

Considering Trump inherited his millions from his dad, that's a hell of a thing to say.  The greatest capitalist country on earth has businesses that can't afford to pay taxes or to pay workers?  Ben Carson was even more nuts.

As far as the minimum wage is concerned, people need to be educated on the minimum wage. Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.

It's particularly a problem in the black community. Only 19.8 percent of black teenagers have a job, who are looking for one. You know, that -- and that's because of those high wages. If you lower those wages, that comes down.

What?  Black teenagers are making too much money?  People should be grateful for the experience, Carson said.  You don't need to be paid.  Does anybody actually agree with that?  Rubio weighed in too:

If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that's replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.

Here's the best way to raise wages. Make America the best place in the world to start a business or expand an existing business, tax reform and regulatory reform, bring our debt under control, fully utilize our energy resources so we can reinvigorate manufacturing, repeal and replace Obamacare, and make higher education faster and easier to access, especially vocational training. For the life of me, I don't know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.

You should be grateful for the experience, you don't need to be paid, and you should be lucky we don't replace you with a robot.  Amazing.

That's where Republicans are on the working poor.  You make too much money and you're ruining it for the rest of us.

StupidiNews!

• Multiple anonymous threats were made on social media against black University of Missouri students in the wake of the ouster of UM officials over failing to deal with incidents of racism.
• A new report by a California think tank finds half of the state's undocumented immigrants are poor enough to qualify for Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program.
• Libyan forces faced off in Benghazi against Islamic State fighters leaving 16 dead as Libya remains divided among two competing government armies and ISIS militants.
• New York AG Eric Schneiderman has classified daily fantasy sports illegal gambling under state law in the latest blow to DraftKings and FanDuel.
• A bipartisan House bill aims to increase business opportunities in space, allowing companies to claim asteroids for mining rights and indemnify commercial space launches through 2025.

Last Call For The Christmas Taliban Strikes Again

It's that time of the year again where the Christian outrage police go after businesses for not being Christian enough when it comes to the holiday season, because as we all know any business that doesn't put Jesus on everything after Halloween must hate Christians and must be destroyed.

Starbucks, on Sunday, addressed criticism for removing symbols of the Christmas season from its cups, and making them just plain red with the company logo. Starbucks reportedly came under fire from a Christian group in the U.S. which accused the coffee company of waging a "war on Christmas." 

Starbucks removed the usual array of decorative images such as Christmas trees and snowflakes that adorned the cups in previous holidays with a simple red cup with their green and white logo. 

Starbucks reportedly said in a statement Sunday that it tries "to create a culture of belonging, inclusion and diversity," adding that the cup is meant to be a "blank canvas" that encourages "customers to tell their Christmas stories in their own way." 

Joshua Feuerstein -- a former pastor who calls himself a "social media personality" -- posted a video on Facebook last week, criticizing Starbucks for removing "Christmas from their cups because they hate Jesus." 

In an email to CNNMoney Sunday, Feuerstein noted that his video has had more than 10 million views. 

"I think Starbucks has gotten the message that the Christian majority in this country has awakened and are demanding that our voice be heard," Feuerstein reportedly wrote.

These of course are the same evangelical Christians who say they are being victimized by the evil gay mafia over same-sex marriage, victimized by schools for not teaching Bible classes, victimized by other religions for being allowed to exist in a "Christian country" even though the Constitution expressly forbids such things, and on and on.

We've gotten to the point now where a red coffee cup is "anti-Jesus"

If this is your Christianity, I want no part of it.

Welcome To Bevinstan, Con't

A whole bunch of Kentuckians didn't think Matt Bevin would ever take Medicaid away from people like them, but that's exactly who and what they voted for last week.  Now that Bevin plans to make good on his promises, they're pretty damn scared.

Dennis Blackburn has this splintered self-interest. The 56-year-old mechanic hasn’t worked in 18 months, since he lost his job at a tire company that supplies a diminishing number of local coal mines. “The old guy had to go home,” Blackburn says of his layoff. 

He has a hereditary liver disorder, numbness in his hands and legs, back pain from folding his 6-foot-1-inch frame into 29-inch mine shafts as a young man, plus an abnormal heart rhythm — the likely vestige of having been struck by lightning 15 years ago in his tin-roofed farmhouse. 

Blackburn was making small payments on an MRI he’d gotten at Pikeville Medical Center, the only hospital in a 150-mile radius, when he heard about Big Sandy’s Shelby Valley Clinic. There he met Fleming, who helped him sign up for one of the managed-care Medicaid plans available in Kentucky. 

On Election Day, Blackburn voted for Bevin because he is tired of career politicians and thought a businessman would be more apt to create the jobs that Pike County so needs. Yet when it comes to the state’s expansion of health insurance, “it doesn’t look to me as if he understands,” Blackburn said. “Without this little bit of help these people are giving me, I could probably die. . . . It’s not right to not understand something but want to stamp it out.”

Well sorry Dennis.  You voted for the guy who ran on taking health care away from you.  Steve Benen isn't exactly sorry for Dennis here either.

My point is not to be unsympathetic. It seems this man is facing serious health issues and I can only hope he, and others like him, receive the assistance they need. 

But Matt Bevin did not hide his intentions, and Kentucky will now try to live with the consequences of the voters’ decision. The state was a model for the nation; Kentuckians had an opportunity to keep that model in place; and now they’ve chosen to go in a very different direction. 

I should note that the future isn’t entirely clear. Bevin ran on an anti-healthcare platform, but he’s begun to hedge on some of the details, vowing to come up with a new, as-yet-unstated plan, which will likely cost more and cover less, but which may prevent hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians from losing their health security altogether. 

In the meantime, however, a lot of families are worried about just how much damage a Bevin administration will do, and by all appearances, those fears are well grounded.

And before anyone starts thinking Bevin is the one who is going to burn for this, let's understand that all Bevin has to do is say that Medicaid expansion was always going to go away because Obamacare was always broken, and to blame Obama and the Democrats.

And Dennis here?  That's exactly what he'll do.

He will continue to vote against his self-interests.  He wanted his Medicaid, but he wasn't going to admit that the ni-CLANG! president was helping him.  So he voted for the other guy and thought he would be able to tell Obama to go to hell and keep his Medicaid.

A lot of people did.

Guess what?

Welcome to Bevinstan.

University Of Hard Knocks, Con't

Well it turns out University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe stepped down over an insufficient response to a number of racist incidents on campus this year, and now the bullseye is on university Chancellor Bowen Loftin.

The same day University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe announced his resignation, the deans of nine different MU colleges requested the dismissal of Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin.

In a letter sent Monday to Wolfe and the UM Board of Curators, the deans said they wanted to express "our deep concern about the multitude of crises on our flagship campus" and call for Loftin's dismissal.

The nine deans met with Wolfe on Oct. 9 and on Oct. 13 met with Wolfe, Loftin and Provost Garnett Stokes to express their concerns, according to the letter.

"The issues we raised in those meetings have continued to deteriorate into a campus crisis that demands immediate and decisive action," they wrote. "It is the Chancellor’s responsibility as the Chief Executive Officer of the campus to effectively address these campus issues."

Loftin, the former president of Texas A&M University, has been chancellor at MU since February 2014.

The letter is signed by Daniel Clay, dean of the College of Education; Kristofer Hagglund, dean of the School of Health Professions; David Kurpius, dean of the School of Journalism; Judith Miller, dean of the Sinclair School of Nursing; Gary Myers, dean of the School of Law; Neil Olson, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine; Michael O'Brien, dean of the College of Arts and Science; Thomas Payne, dean of the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources; and Barton Wechsler, dean of the Truman School of Public Affairs.

The deans said Loftin has shown failed leadership through a number of instances, including the elimination and eventual reinstatement of graduate assistant health insurance and the elimination of the vice chancellor for health sciences position. The deans claim Loftin created a "toxic environment through threat, fear and intimidation."

"It is imperative to take immediate action to begin the process of resolving the issues and improving the environment," they wrote.

On Sunday, faculty members of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures sent a letter to the Curators saying they had no confidence in Loftin's leadership. The letter said 28 faculty members in the department expressed no confidence in Loftin; two abstained from the vote.

The faculty members said Loftin's leadership has created a "climate of mistrust, miscommunication, chaos, despair, and anger."

"The demoralizing campus climate under his lack of leadership is no longer conducive to our fundamental duties of teaching, research and service," the letter said. "We believe that the only way out of this impasse is to find a new Chancellor who … will find the resources needed to increase rather than dismantle the excellence of our institution."

So it turns out that yes, the problems at the University of Missouri have been ongoing for some time now, enough for multiple college deans to call for a chancellor's ouster.

But the backlash from the dregs of the Confederacy is pretty vocal.

This controversy, as with the current upheaval at Yale, suggests aggrieved students most desperately want administrators to acknowledge their pain and tell them they have a right to live free of emotional turmoil. But no competent administrator can provide them with this false sense of security, since the proper role of a university education is to help students overcome (rather than sidestep) challenges. 

In any case, Wolfe’s resignation also means that hyper-offended students are not as powerless as skeptics of the campus speech wars claim they are. I'm often told by these skeptics that the actions of outraged students are harmless because they never amount to anything, but this development at Missouri is a significant contrary example. 

I would be disheartened, but not at all surprised, to see more professors and administrators driven from campus for the crime of failing to erect suitable safe spaces.

How ridiculous, according to the right, that colleges and universities should work to actually do something about racism, sexual assault, and abuse on campus, when America, the greatest nation on earth, is full of racism, sexual assault, and abuse.

StupidiNews!

• A new report accuses Russian track & field athletes of cheating heavily at the 2012 London games and beyond and recommends banning Russia from the 2016 Rio Olympics.
• A federal appeals court has upheld the injunction against the Obama administration's executive orders on immigration, leaving a final judgment in the hands of the Supreme Court. 
• Results from Myanmar's elections show opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will be able to form a new democratic government as the ruling military junta was crushed.
• Strikes at German airline Lufthansa continue as pilots and cabin crews have rejected the airline's latest offer as the strike now enters its second month.
• The EPA plans a much more rigorous testing schedule for diesel cars in 2016 in the wake of Volkswagen's cheating scandal.

Last Call For Chartering A Course

I don't think enough has been said about Democrats losing black votes because of their refusal to support charter schools.  I know that they are a scam to take even more money away from broken urban schools and then close them in droves the way Rahm Emmanuel did in Chicago, which was a disaster that resulted in the conviction of the CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

But that hasn't stopped inner-city black voters with broken schools from wanting to try something radically different. And one of the reasons Matt Bevin won here in Kentucky was because of his charter school plan for Louisville and Lexington in a state that has held firmly against charter schools for years.  Conway didn't get the votes he needed to win from those areas because Bevin and his running mate Janean Hampton pushed charter schools for black neighborhoods.

Democrats haven't done a good enough job of stopping charter schools, and a big chunk of that is that the Obama administration has supported charter schools across the board.  Only now has that changed with the planned exit of Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

And that leads us to Hillary Clinton in South Carolina over the weekend at a town hall meeting with black voters at Claflin University.

Education and training programs came to dominate the hour-long meeting at the historically black university. 

Clinton said education would be a top priority in her administration, pointing to the education reform she spearheaded when her husband occupied the governor’s mansion in Arkansas. 

But she also refused to endorse plans to build more charter schools and expand school choice for parents through voucher programs, despite the overwhelming popularity of such policies among African-American voters. 

“I have for many years now, about 30 years, supported the idea of charter schools, but not as a substitute for the public schools, but as a supplement for the public schools," Clinton said. 

She said charter schools can have a “purpose,” but added that “there are good charter schools and there are bad charter schools,” and charter schools often aren’t willing to take the students who pose the biggest problem to educators.

That last distinction is what we have to make as Democrats, but we're not doing a very good job of it. Too many Dems have gotten on board the charter school train, and Republicans are selling the idea that Democrats don't really care about education because if they did, they would allow charter schools.

The problem is of course that with school choice, there are winners and losers.  And in this game, the losing schools get shut down so there's nowhere to go but the charter schools that are making a profit and leaving poor black kids in the cold.

Welcome To Bevinstan, Con't

The Matt Bevin Screw The Ni-CLANG! President tour continues, as Bevin tells Glenn Beck that the government agencies like the EPA have no authority here because of the Tenth Amendment.

Bevin, a Tea Party favorite who became only the second Republican in four decades to win Kentucky’s governorship Tuesday, vowed to stand against the EPA when it comes to protecting his state’s large coal industry.

“Why it is that we in Kentucky — that sit on two extraordinary basins, the Illinois basin and the Central basin, an abundance of this — how are we not participating in something that the world wants more of than they ever have?” Bevin asked. “And so, from my way of thinking, we will tell the EPA and other unelected officials who have no legal authority over us as a state, to pound sand.”

Bevin, a self-described “staunch conservative,” told Beck he believes the 10th Amendment is “one of the most powerful tools” and that power not expressly given to the federal government is the responsibility of the states.

The incoming Kentucky governor said the EPA has “no authority” and that its only recourse would be to “take us to court.” Bevin said that, in the past, the agency has “bribed us with our own money,” but he insisted that will not happen anymore under his leadership.

“The EPA, for example, they don’t have an enforcement arm,” Bevin said. “They use federal dollars. They use our own money. They bribe us with our own money to stick it to ourselves. And we will not do that anymore in the state of Kentucky.”

Hey, serious Southern nullification had to start somewhere, and it looks like in 2016 Bevin will be leading that charge.  I wonder how much of my state taxpayer dollars he'll give to mining companies and power companies that violate EPA regs here, since the feds will happily fine them millions.

It's the people of Kentucky who are going to lose this battle, and Bevin knows it.  And he can blame Obama for another year at least.

University Of Hard Knocks

A rash of racist incidents has plagued the University of Missouri campus so far this year, and University President Tom Wolfe's response to the incidents has not been enough to satisfy students on campus.  Things have gotten so bad that the unheard of has happened: the school's black college football players have gone on strike until Wolfe is removed.

More than 30 football players at the University of Missouri will not participate in any practices or games until Missouri System president Tim Wolfe resigns or is terminated. Several black team members announced their decision to strike on social media Saturday night and Missouri's Legion of Black Collegians posted a statement on behalf of the team with a picture of players unified in support of the boycott.

Wolfe's response to a series of racist incidents has been considered inadequate by many students who believe racism has poisoned the campus. A graduate student, Jonathan Butler, announced earlier in the week he was going on a hunger strike until Wolfe was removed. The most recent racist incident came Oct. 24 when a swastika was drawn with human feces on a college dorm's white wall. 

Sophomore defensive back Anthony Sherrils tweeted: "The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe "Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere" We will no longer participate in any football related activities until president Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students' experiences. WE ARE UNITED!!!!!!"

Several more African-American players, including senior running back and team captain Russell Hansbrough, followed with a series of passionate tweets. Missouri’s student body is 77% white and 7% black, while 58 of the school’s 84 scholarship football players are African-American.

The students have the support of their coaches and fellow white players, and it's powerful to see this happen in the middle of the season like this., but let's be honest about what's going on here:

In the 15 months since African-American teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., universities around the country have become home to protests. Missouri's campus in Columbia sits about two hours west of Ferguson.

And considering that we have problems with black church burnings in the area, it's good that these students are taking the incidents and drawing attention to the University of Missouri.

Good for them.

StupidiNews!

• A pair of new reports on the impact of climate change suggests it could impoverish 100 million people worldwide by 2030 and leave half a billion homeless through coastal flooding.
• Despite protests and boycotts by Latino activists, Donald Trump's appearance on Saturday Night Live over the weekend received the best ratings in years as millions tuned in.
• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with President Barack Obama at the White House today, the first meeting between the two since the Iranian nuclear deal was passed by Congress.
• At least five are dead after two female suicide-bombers attacked a village in western Chad, officials suspect Boko Haram as Chad withdraws 5,000 troops from neighboring Cameroon.
• A new Senate bill would provide financial incentive for federal agencies to give up unused frequency spectrum space to the mobile industry, hungry for more capacity for smartphones.

Last Call For Conversion Formula

American Jewish voters side with Democrats for the most part, while there are definitely some hard-liners who side with the GOP and claim they have both common cause with evangelical Christians and the mandate of Israeli Jews.  Kinda weird then when Republicans come to Israel and announce that they want to convert as many Jews to Christianity as possible.

Former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann called for an intensified effort to convert Jews to Christianity.

Bachmann, a former congresswoman from Minnesota who ran for the Republican presidential nod in 2012, was in Israel last week on a tour organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group.

Toward the end of the week, she spoke on FRC President Tony Perkins’ radio program, Washington Watch, and discussed the meaning of the recent intensification of violence in Israel and the West Bank. She cast the violence as a signal of the return of Jesus, which would necessitate mass conversions.

“We recognize the shortness of the hour,” Bachmann said, “and that’s why we as a remnant want to be faithful in these days and do what it is that the Holy Spirit is speaking to each one of us, to be faithful in the Kingdom and to help bring in as many as we can — even among the Jews — share Jesus Christ with everyone that we possibly can because, again, He’s coming soon.”

I mean I knew Bachmann was a zealot, but I didn't think she was "Go to Israel to bring Christ to Israeli Jews" bonkers.

But there you are.  Your Republican allies certainly seem to respect you, Likud Israel.

In Which I Disagree With BooMan

Martin Longman takes a look at white, working class America and what Democrats need to do in order to win them back.

Now, it's been frustrating to watch white and black progressives argue about priorities in this election, and both sides need to learn. White progressives need to better understand that these class issues are so ingrained in our minority communities that they simply don't seem all that pressing. It's like complaining that there are too many alien invaders on Level 12 of your video game. It's like complaining about potholes or bad schools or things that never change. Those things are always a concern, but they're different in type from being denied the right to vote or getting gunned down by the police. Basic civil rights are what's on the minds of minority voters, and white progressives need to respect that.

Black progressives, however, need to understand that something is changing. Where once they had few natural allies on class issues and structural biases in the system, they now have a cohort of working class whites who should be welcomed into the tent.

That's not easy when a lot of those working class whites are still kicking and screaming and acting out their frustration with racist acts and statements. But, with your eyes open, you can see that whites are having their own crack epidemic with heroin and oxycontins. They're beginning to support sentencing and prison reform. They're as fed up with the post-Citizen's United campaign finance system as anyone. They're pissed off at Wall Street.

I don't don't know if Hillary can bring these whites into the fold and I don't know if Bernie can bring blacks into his fold, but between them they have the basic idea right.

Perhaps what's needed here is for blacks and whites to give permission to their politicians to go after each other's votes. And this is just a suggestion, but I'm guessing that the folks who've been playing the game of life on the harder difficulty setting will need to be the folks who offer the first olive branch.

It should surprise no one if the minority community figures this out first.

No.

I categorically reject the notion that once again, black America has to make the first move when we're the ones being goddamn murdered in the streets by police for the crime of being goddamn black.

And secondly, when Democrats reached out in Kentucky to help working class white voters in a 92% white state get insurance for 400,000, those same voters told Democrats to go to hell.

The only thing the minority community has figured out is that racism still runs the show.  And changing that is not on us.

A New Level Of Terror

Egyptian investigators of the crash of a Russian flight out of Sharm al-Sheikh are very confident that it was a bomb on board that brought the plane down, and for that to happen in this day and age signifies just how compromised Egypt is, whether the culprit is ISIS or some other group looking to cause chaos.

The Airbus A321 crashed 23 minutes after taking off from the Sharm al-Sheikh tourist resort eight days ago, killing all 224 passengers and crew. Islamic State militants fighting Egyptian security forces in Sinai said they brought it down.

"The indications and analysis so far of the sound on the black box indicate it was a bomb," said the Egyptian investigation team member, who asked not to be named due to sensitivities. "We are 90 percent sure it was a bomb."

His comments reflect a higher degree of certainty about the cause of the crash than the investigation committee has so far declared in public.

Lead investigator Ayman al-Muqaddam announced on Saturday that the plane appeared to have broken up in mid-air while it was being flown on auto-pilot, and that a noise had been heard in the last second of the cockpit recording. But he said it was too soon to draw conclusions about why the plane crashed.

Confirmation that militants brought down the airliner could have a devastating impact on Egypt's lucrative tourist industry, which has suffered from years of political turmoil and was hit last week when Russia, Turkey and several European countries suspended flights to Sharm al-Sheikh and other destinations.

It could also mark a new strategy by the hardline Islamic State group which holds large parts of Syria and Iraq.

Asked to explain the remaining 10 percent margin of doubt, the investigator declined to elaborate, but Muqaddam cited other possibilities on Saturday including a fuel explosion, metal fatigue in the plane or lithium batteries overheating.

He said debris was scattered over a 13-km (8-mile) area "which is consistent with an in-flight break-up".

The Russians got involved in Syria and now a Russian plane has been destroyed.  Odds are pretty good now that Putin will step up military action in the region and may even expand into Egypt. Vlad's not the kind of guy to let 224 dead go.

All I'm sure of is more blood will be spilled.

Sunday Long Read: Rushing To Iowa

Rush Limbaugh isn't as powerful as he once was, but all that means is that a new, hungrier generation of talk radio ringmasters are ready to adapt to the new, younger Pretty Hate Machine in the age of social media and lightning fast responses, and given the outsized power of the Hawkeye State in presidential primary politics, nobody's better positioned at running the "outsider outrage" game right now than Iowa's Steve Deace.

Such is the mood on the far right these days, where a two- or three-hour radio show can leave Democrats virtually unscathed in favor of attacking Republicans — the damned party ‘‘establishment,’’ in particular. The relationship between the party and much of conservative media has been flipped since the ’90s, when House Republican leaders, including the future speaker, John Boehner, made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their caucus. Over time, conservatism has veered rightward, and Deace — capitalizing on his place in Iowa, with its first-in-the-nation presidential nominating contest — has emerged as one of the top voices of the political moment. Deace and others like him boast of being more conservative than Limbaugh or Fox News; like much of their audience, they consider themselves conservatives first and Republicans second (if only because being a Democrat is unthinkable). This strain of conservative media, and its take-no-prisoners ideology, have proliferated on websites, podcasts and video outlets, greatly complicating the Republican Party’s ability to govern and to pick presidential candidates with broad appeal.

Like his peers, Deace has nudged himself continuously to the right just to keep up with his audience. He once supported George W. Bush’s plans for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, before being persuaded otherwise by his listeners; ‘‘Steve has grown,’’ says Maxwell, his producer. Bob Vander Plaats, a regular on Deace’s show and one of Iowa’s most politically influential conservatives as head of the evangelical group the Family Leader, says Deace has told him more than once, ‘‘You know, we’re at a point today where my listeners are more upset than I am.’’ Maxwell echoes that: ‘‘It’s like nobody’s conservative enough!’’ Deace and his audience have lately been gripped by a single issue: demanding that the Republican-controlled Congress shut down the government rather than fund Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest network of abortion providers. Boehner’s refusal to lead that fight, knowing Republicans would lose to President Obama’s veto and in the general public’s opinion, was the proximate cause of his surprise announcement in September that he would resign as speaker, the third-highest office in the nation. Rather than be fired by militant Republicans, Boehner quit.

Presidential candidates are trying to manage this anger and rebelliousness, in part by courting the messengers. By Deace’s own accounting, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul and Bobby Jindal have been on his show ‘‘a ton’’ in the past year. Ben Carson, another repeat guest, sent a photo in which he is reading Deace’s 2014 book, ‘‘Rules for Patriots,’’ on a flight. ‘‘I know Donald Trump on a first-name basis, which is crazy for a kid from Iowa,’’ Deace says. He and Cruz also were ‘‘on a first-name basis’’ long before Deace endorsed Cruz this summer.

For many longtime Republicans, this bottom-up tumult from the party base in both the presidential and the legislative arenas is deeply unnerving. How can it be, they ask, that Republicans, traditionally so hierarchical and relatively disciplined — relative, that is, to Democrats — have become so divided and dysfunctional that serious people speculate about the collapse of a 161-year-old political party? Yet whether evolution or revolution, the rise of anti-establishment conservatives is in fact easy to understand when listening to the ‘‘Steve Deace Show.’’

Deace is surfing the same wave that is propelling Trump and Carson, and to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz, to influence in the GOP.  Remember, it's not just Republican politicians that have failed to "stop" President Obama, but FOX News and Rush Limbaugh too.

The GOP establishment includes the Right Wing Noise Machine, and it's falling out of favor.  The GOP has lost control of the monster it has unleashed, and Steve Deace is riding this bronco from hell over everyone in his path. Virulently racist, nationalist, and theocratic, Deace is downright dangerous, a Father Coughlin for the Twitter and Snapchat age.

He's the perfect representative of the GOP of Trump, Carson and hate.