Trump Cards, Con't

Trump's new campaign slogan

Donald Trump remains the preferred candidate of the Confederacy by folks who really are sad that the South lost the war and all.

David Duke, a white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, is urging the listeners of his radio program to volunteer and vote for Donald Trump. 

“Voting for these people, voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage,” Duke said on the David Duke Radio Program Wednesday, referring to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. “I’m not saying I endorse everything about Trump, in fact I haven’t formally endorsed him. But I do support his candidacy, and I support voting for him as a strategic action. I hope he does everything we hope he will do.” 

Duke then urged his followers to call Trump’s campaign headquarters to volunteer. 

“And I am telling you that it is your job now to get active. Get off your duff. Get off your rear end that’s getting fatter and fatter for many of you everyday on your chairs. When this show’s over, go out, call the Republican Party, but call Donald Trump’s headquarters, volunteer. They’re screaming for volunteers. Go in there, you’re gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mindset that you have.”

At some point this stops being funny, and that point was roughly 1789 when out first President who owned slaves was elected.  Kinda like to think America has seen numerous advances since then (the internet, string cheese, indoor plumbing) but in a lot of ways we're the same Puritan screwups from 250 years ago.

When actual, avowed racists "support your candidacy" you go well past dog whistle territory and into the "bullhorns with tower stacks" area.  I have no sympathy for Republicans who enabled every step of Trump's journey so far and who are in a state of total panic as a result, but at least they are vowing to "save the country" from Trump by voting for Hillary.

We'll see what actually happens soon enough.

A Master Class In Supreme Trolling

President Obama is obviously yanking the GOP's chain with this trial balloon about his SCOTUS pick being Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada.

Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, a Republican and a former federal judge, is being considered by President Barack Obama for a possible appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a source close to the process said on Wednesday.

The source, who asked not to be identified, said Sandoval met on Monday in the U.S. Capitol with Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, at which time Reid asked the governor whether he would be interested in being considered for the high court job.

"He said he was interested," the source said, adding that "a number of people are being checked out" for the job.

Sandoval is certainly qualified, but so was Scalia from a technical standpoint. Sandoval is clearly not going to be named because he's a Republican, and as Governor of Nevada he has fundamental differences from the President.

The fact that Obama would consider naming Sandoval is surprising, given the governor’s past statements on the Affordable Care Act. In his first State of the State Address in 2011, Sandoval said that “many aspects of the law are unconstitutional” and he pledged to “continue to fight to have them overturned.” He later personally signed briefs filed in the Supreme Court arguing against the law’s constitutionality and claiming that the Supreme Court “should hold the ACA invalid in its entirety.”

It’s worth noting that, after losing this case, Sandoval did agree to implement provisions of the law, such as its Medicaid expansion. Nevertheless, if Sandoval’s position had prevailed in the Supreme Court, Obamacare would have completely ceased to exist.

Sandoval’s record also creates a fair amount of uncertainty regarding how he would rule on several landmark issues currently before the Supreme Court, including whether to defund public sector unions, and the fate of President Obama’s plans to fight climate change and temporarily permit undocumented immigrants to remain in the country.

The bottom line is that this is all a gigantic, obvious trap for the Republicans currently in the Senate.

They fell for it anyway.

However, if Obama's intent in floating Sandoval's name was to box Republicans in to looking even more unreasonable than they already have, then it seems his ploy is already working. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnellinstantly said his boss won't consider Sandoval, explaining, "The Leader didn't say the Senate would act 'if' it was a certain type of nominee." Presumably, that means McConnell wouldn't take action even if Obama nominated the ghost of William Rehnquist.

Sen. John Cornyn, the second highest-ranking Republican in the Senate, likewise immediately told Politico that his position on not allowing a nomination to proceed was unchanged. And anti-tax radical Grover Norquist opined, "Obama might nominate the guy who taxed Burning Man. Ugh." Not Burning Man! (Norquist did notoriously attend the counter-cultural desert festival a couple of years ago.) Freshman Sen. Deb Fischer may have summed it up best, though, when she declared, "It's not about the person."

So we have multiple Republican senators now, on record, saying that there is no nominee whatsoever that would be acceptable under any reason, because the nation's first black President no longer has the Constitutional right to name a successor to Scala.

Not even a Republican is acceptable.

Please proceed, GOP Senate.

StupidiNews!

• Both the US and China have agreed to a UN Security Council draft resolution detailing new sanctions on North Korea after Pyongyang's nuclear test earlier this year.
• President Obama has named Baltimore library system head Carla Hayden to the post of Librarian of Congress, the first woman and African-American appointed to the position.
• UN peace talks in Syria will resume after negotiations broke down February 3rd, a new date for talks will be announced on Friday.
• New York City's requirement to have restaurants post high-sodium warnings on menu items has survived its first major legal challenge from the restaurant industry.
• Facebook's like button will now allow you to finally display a range of reactions from love to anger on posts.

Last Call For Flagging Support

And in the end, after all the attention and embarrassment to Southern states still choosing to fly the flags of traitors, they still choose to fly the flag of traitors.

Mississippi’s state flag will include the Confederate battle emblem for the foreseeable future, after state lawmakers on Tuesday said they didn’t have enough support to remove the controversial symbol. 

There were 12 different bills in the Mississippi Legislature to either redesign, change, or remove the Confederate symbol from the state’s 122-year-old flag. But they all died on Tuesday, which was the deadline for lawmakers to act on bills that were stuck in legislative committees. 

The bills offered numerous different options for Mississippi’s flag. One bill would have changed it to include a magnolia tree, just like the state’s flag did from 1861 until 1865. A few bills would have provided for new design submissions, either from state universities or from a newly-created commission to find new design options. One would have even changed the flag back to the Bonnie Blue Flag, which is also a Confederate-related banner, but less recognizable. 

But none of those bills had majority support from lawmakers in either the state House or Senate, Republican Rep. Jason White told the Associated Press. “I’m not saying that all of them are necessarily bad ideas, but we don’t have a consensus on any of them,” he said. 

The speaker of Mississippi’s House of Representatives, Republican Rep. Philip Gunn, had previously expressed support for removing the Confederate symbol from the state flag. On Tuesday, he said in a statement that he had “not wavered” on that viewpoint, and has been trying to convince other lawmakers “to adopt my view.” 

“I have explored every option from taking legislative action to change the flag to adopting two official flags, but we cannot get a consensus on how to address the issue,” he said. “I will continue to stand by my view that changing the flag is the right thing to do. The flag is going to change.”

No, it's not.  You've had 150 years to do it.  You've yet to actually do it.  There's no reason for us to believe you on this.  You're racist trash, your fathers were racist trash, grandfathers, right on up the line, Phil.

Change the goddamn flag.

Flipping The Script On SCOTUS, Con't

President Obama took to the excellent SCOTUSBlog today to make his case as both president and as a constitutional law scholar as to why he will nominate a successor to the late Justice Scalia.

The Constitution vests in the President the power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court. It’s a duty that I take seriously, and one that I will fulfill in the weeks ahead. 

It’s also one of the most important decisions that a President will make. Rulings handed down by the Supreme Court directly affect our economy, our security, our rights, and our daily lives. 

Needless to say, this isn’t something I take lightly. It’s a decision to which I devote considerable time, deep reflection, careful deliberation, and serious consultation with legal experts, members of both political parties, and people across the political spectrum. And with thanks to SCOTUSblog for allowing me to guest post today, I thought I’d share some spoiler-free insights into what I think about before appointing the person who will be our next Supreme Court Justice. 

First and foremost, the person I appoint will be eminently qualified. He or she will have an independent mind, rigorous intellect, impeccable credentials, and a record of excellence and integrity. I’m looking for a mastery of the law, with an ability to hone in on the key issues before the Court, and provide clear answers to complex legal questions. 

Second, the person I appoint will be someone who recognizes the limits of the judiciary’s role; who understands that a judge’s job is to interpret the law, not make the law. I seek judges who approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda, but rather a commitment to impartial justice, a respect for precedent, and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand. 

But I’m also mindful that there will be cases that reach the Supreme Court in which the law is not clear. There will be cases in which a judge’s analysis necessarily will be shaped by his or her own perspective, ethics, and judgment. That’s why the third quality I seek in a judge is a keen understanding that justice is not about abstract legal theory, nor some footnote in a dusty casebook. It’s the kind of life experience earned outside the classroom and the courtroom; experience that suggests he or she views the law not only as an intellectual exercise, but also grasps the way it affects the daily reality of people’s lives in a big, complicated democracy, and in rapidly changing times. That, I believe, is an essential element for arriving at just decisions and fair outcomes. 

A sterling record. A deep respect for the judiciary’s role. An understanding of the way the world really works. That’s what I’m considering as I fulfill my constitutional duty to appoint a judge to our highest court. And as Senators prepare to fulfill their constitutional responsibility to consider the person I appoint, I hope they’ll move quickly to debate and then confirm this nominee so that the Court can continue to serve the American people at full strength.

It's a relatively short argument and a very strong one.  It's also an example of the President going around the usual media channels to make his case to the people directly, and no president has been as effective at this as our current one. I certainly don't blame him for not depending on our awful media to get his message out, the same media tacitly enabling the unprecedented blockade now before him.

President Obama, the law professor, is definitely a subscriber to the legal theory of a "living Constitution" and is letting the largest community of Supreme Court aficionados and legal minds know that his nominee will also be such a person.

How that affects this battle with the GOP Senate remains to be seen.

The Rough Beast '16 US Tour

Donald Trump has metastasized the body politic's lingering infection of racism and bigotry into a force that's giving him the GOP nomination...and possibly the country.

Mr. Trump’s support among those who say they support a temporary ban on Muslim entry into the United States — a notion Mr. Trump first advanced in early December — is significant. He won more than twice as many supporters of the ban in South Carolina as any other candidate. Voters often echo the things candidates say on the campaign trail, so that level may not be revelatory.

Possibly more surprising are the attitudes of Mr. Trump’s supporters on things that he has not talked very much about on the campaign trail. He has said nothing about a ban on gays in the United States, the outcome of the Civil War or white supremacy. Yet on all of these topics, Mr. Trump’s supporters appear to stand out from the rest of Republican primary voters.

Data from Public Policy Polling show that a third of Mr. Trump’s backers in South Carolina support barring gays and lesbians from entering the country. This is nearly twice the support for this idea (17 percent) among Ted Cruz’s and Marco Rubio’s voters and nearly five times the support of John Kasich’s and Ben Carson’s supporters (7 percent).

Similarly, YouGov data reveal that a third of Mr. Trump’s (and Mr. Cruz’s) backers believe that Japanese internment during World War II was a good idea, while roughly 10 percent of Mr. Rubio’s and Mr. Kasich’s supporters do. Mr. Trump’s coalition is also more likely to disagree with the desegregation of the military (which was ordered in 1948 by Harry Truman) than other candidates’ supporters are.

The P.P.P. poll asked voters if they thought whites were a superior race. Most Republican primary voters in South Carolina — 78 percent — disagreed with this idea (10 percent agreed and 11 percent weren’t sure). But among Mr. Trump’s supporters, only 69 percent disagreed. Mr. Carson’s voters were the most opposed to the notion (99 percent), followed by Mr. Kasich and Mr. Cruz’s supporters at 92 and 89 percent. Mr. Rubio’s backers were close to the average level of disagreement (76 percent).

According to P.P.P., 70 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters in South Carolina wish the Confederate battle flag were still flying on their statehouse grounds. (It was removed last summer less than a month after a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston.) The polling firm says that 38 percent of them wish the South had won the Civil War. Only a quarter of Mr. Rubio’s supporters share that wish, and even fewer of Mr. Kasich’s and Mr. Carson’s do.

Nationally, the YouGov data show a similar trend: Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with the freeing of slaves in Southern states after the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view.

Mr. Trump’s popularity with white, working-class voters who are more likely than other Republicans to believe that whites are a supreme race and who long for the Confederacy may make him unpopular among leaders in his party. But it’s worth noting that he isn’t persuading voters to hold these beliefs. The beliefs were there — and have been for some time.

Mr. Trump has reinvigorated explicit appeals to ethnocentrism, and some voters are responding.

After eight years of a media that has relentless demonized the nation's first black president as everything from a traitor to the actual Antichrist, the racist backlash of Trump was absolutely inevitable. It's now on full grisly display for all to see, and there's nothing that the Republican party can do at this point to stop him. The big money learned their lesson after foisting Romney on the party four years ago and would rather have Trump than any Democrat.  There will be no help from the Koch or Rove machines to stop The Donald.

As Donald Trump picks up momentum, the chances of a well-funded assault to block him from the Republican presidential nomination are dramatically dwindling, according to interviews with about a dozen donors and operatives who are appalled by the billionaire real estate showman's campaign.

The party’s elite donor class has mostly closed its checkbooks to groups dedicated to stopping Trump, while the outfits that have built massive reserves are increasingly deciding to forgo anti-Trump campaigns, despite widespread fears that he is making a mockery of conservatism and could undermine Republicans up and down the ballot.

The deepest-pocketed operation on the right, the network helmed by the billionaires Charles and David Koch, had seriously debated launching an aggressive assault on Trump, but sources familiar with the network's planning tell POLITICO that’s now highly unlikely. And the Karl Rove-conceived Crossroads outfits also are sitting out the party’s bitter primary, instead spending their cash attacking Democrats.

Republican operatives have told major donors it would require an eight-figure advertising campaign or campaigns to make any kind of dent in Trump’s surprisingly durable popularity. While many of the donors have privately voiced support for the cause, most have begged off writing big checks.

Nevada had Trump at 46%, and after a slate of Super Tuesday wins next week, including in Ted Cruz's home state of Texas, and Marco Rubio's Florida on March 15th, the game will all be over.

The rough beast is slouching its way to Cleveland, folks...its hour come 'round at last.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump easily won last night's Nevada GOP caucuses, taking 46% of the vote to Marco Rubio's 24% and Ted Cruz at 21%.
• A new World Health Organization report finds one in five African children are unvaccinated, a substantial decrease from just 15 years ago, but still lagging behind the rest of the world.
• The CDC says it is tracking 14 cases of the Zika virus in the US transmitted sexually, enough to cause US health officials to reevaluate how the disease spreads.
• US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew says that the Group of 20 nations are not yet in crisis mode ahead of this week's global finance meeting on China and volatile markets.
• Researchers are working with an enzyme that may cut HIV infections out of cells as a method to completely treat the 37 million current HIV patients who have not yet developed AIDS.

Last Call For League Of Their Own (Hell)

Just a reminder that the National Football League management and ownership are all repugnant, hyper-rich assholes who destroy lives on a daily basis.

The National Football League has been ordered to return what its union calculates is more than $100 million to the pool of revenue that it shares with its players.

The ruling, handed down last week by arbitrator Stephen Burbank, found that the NFL owners had mischaracterized what Players Association officials say is roughly $120 million of ticket revenue during the past three years by creating an exemption that had the effect of keeping about $50 million in salary out of players’ pockets. The NFL Players Association, which discovered the discrepancy during an ongoing audit of league finances, filed a grievance on the matter in January.

“They created an exemption out of a fiction and they got caught,” saidDeMaurice Smith,executive director of the NFLPA.

NFL officials would not confirm the figure. In an email, Brian McCarthy, a spokesman for the NFL, referred to the ruling as the resolution of a “technical accounting issue under the CBA involving the funding of stadium construction and renovation projects.” He stated that the main effect was one of timing.

The ruling is the latest in a series of legal victories for the NFLPA over the league, including last year’s U.S. District Court ruling that overturned Tom Brady’s four-game suspension in the controversy known as “Deflate-gate.”

This dispute stemmed from provisions of the collective bargaining agreement that allow NFL teams to exclude certain money from the pool that determines its players’ share of revenues. Players receive 40% of local revenues, which mainly come from tickets sales, 45% of sponsorship money, revenues from the post-season and NFL Ventures, such as NFL.com and the NFL Network, and 55% of the revenues from media deals.

Teams can exclude money from the sale of personal seat licenses, premium seating, and from mega-deals with corporations to put their names on stadiums. The NFLPA agreed to these exclusions because teams often use these funds to help finance renovations and the construction of new stadiums, which significantly increase revenue and the amount of money that gets shared with the players.

Say what you will about the NFL players all being millionaire scumbags, and for the most part they are spoiled, rich hyperbros who wreck everything in their paths in the name of fleeting glory and fame.

But they will never hold a candle next to the burning sun that is the hell of billionaire NFL owners, arguably among the most rancid human excrement on earth.  Not content with their own billions, they sought to steal even more from their employees, tens of millions of dollars.

And in the end we pay them all to light up our televisions and tablets with glorified violence at the costs of cities, bodies, and souls.

They can all burn in hell, frankly.

Flipping The Script On SCOTUS, Con't

Well, ol' Mitch the Turtle is certainly playing to form as the villain of our little show.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday morning reiterated that Senate Republicans will block President Obama's nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, regardless of who the president puts forward. 

"Presidents have a right to nominate just as the Senate has its constitutional right to provide or withhold consent. In this case, the Senate will withhold it," McConnell said on the Senate floor. "The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter after the American people finish making in November the decision they've already started making today."

In his speech on the Senate floor, McConnell said that the confirmation process for the next Supreme Court justice should wait until after the 2016 election. He argued that voters should be able to select the next president to nominate a justice to the Supreme Court. He said that senators have a choice. 

"Will we allow the people to continue deciding who will nominate the next justice or will we empower a lame duck president to make that decision on his way out the door instead?" he asked.

Your move, Mr. President.

Seriously, this is unprecedented obstruction...but is there anything President Obama can honestly do until voters decide to punish the GOP?

Post-Racial America Update

It's a good thing overt racism is a thing of the past, as Chief Justice Roberts keeps telling us. Things like "getting lynched after a country music concert in Pittsburgh" are relics of America's barbarous past and in no way represent the America of 2016.

Right?

Outside, people were streaming into the nearby subway station. Among them was Kevin Lockett, an African American man who walked along the platform pulling a cooler in one hand. 

That’s the last thing he can remember with absolute certainty. The rest, according to court testimony reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, only comes back to him in bits, pieces and violent flashes. 

He thought he heard a racial slur from a group of men, and the next thing he knew, he was being thrown onto the train tracks. 

After Lockett lifted himself back onto the platform, surveillance footage shows, 21-year-old Ryan Kyle started beating him. Another 21-year-old, Matthew Laplace, pulled his cooler away. 

“I knew we’d find this [n-word],” he recalled someone saying. Then an onlooker called the police. 

The attack was brief, but its impact has stayed with Lockett. According toWTAE Pittsburgh, he has undergone four costly reconstructive surgeries since the assault, but still suffers from impaired vision. More therapy awaits. 

Four men involved in the incident — Laplace, 22, Kenneth Gault, 22, David Depretis, 21, and Christopher Laplace, 23 — were variously charged with aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation, theft, reckless endangerment and criminal conspiracy. 

All four are white, as is Kyle. He is the only one who touched Lockett and the only one who could face prison time, as a result of plea deals. 

Gault and Depretis pleaded no contest and were sentenced to six months probation, WTAE reported; Matthew LaPlace pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months probation. All are required to perform 100 hours of community service to benefit a minority community. 

Christopher LaPlace, Matthew’s brother, will be sentenced on Thursday. 

“There’s no punishment,” Lockett told WTAE with a shake of the head, calling the sentences “slaps on the wrist.”

Surely this is all President Obama's fault, we all know that black people can't be anywhere near Kenny Chesney concerts.  It's in the same place in the Constitution as "Black presidents can't nominate Supreme Court justices in their final year of office."

StupidiNews!

• Pope Francis is calling for a one-year global moratorium on the death penalty, ushering in what the Catholic Church has deemed the Holy Year of Mercy.
• Pentagon officials will present an official plan today to Congress to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and to deal with the 91 detainees still there.
• The government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has agreed to the joint US-Russian cease fire starting Friday, but several terrorist groups are vowing to continue operations in Syria.
• Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates says the world needs a "miracle" on climate change in order to deal with its effects, in a letter to the world's young people asking them to help.
• Microsoft has quietly ended Skype Qik, the messaging service that even the company admits it never needed to roll out in the first place.

Last Call For Obstruction Construction

While the early primary states are in full swing right now, the real battle is for Scalia's replacement on the Supreme Court, and conservative pundits are pretty confident that there's nothing Obama can do to beat them on this.

Taking action on a Supreme Court nominee — even through the Judiciary Committee — when Obama has less than a year left in his term would be a cardinal sin, conservative activists say.

They argue the ideological balance of the court is so important that it’s not worth playing political games to take the pressure off vulnerable Republican incumbents.

“I would rank having a conservative justice as more important than having the majority in the Senate,” said David Bozell, president of For America, a conservative advocacy group. “God knows this Republican majority in the Senate hasn’t done much anyway for conservatism, period."

“If you look at some of the conservative movement’s successes, it’s in large part due to the court doing some decent things and making some good decisions,” he added.

Two of the biggest court decisions in recent years, the District of Columbia v. Heller and Citizens United v. FEC, did far more to lift restrictions on gun ownership and political spending by outside groups — two conservative priorities — than anything passed by Republicans in Congress.

“The Senate isn’t as important on a great number of issues as the Supreme Court. The Senate is not going to determine whether or not we have Second Amendment rights, the Supreme Court is. The Senate is not going to determine marriage, the Supreme Court did. The Supreme Court, not the Senate, determined abortion,” said Mike Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association.

“The issues that are of great concern to the conservative movement have all been decided by the Supreme Court,” he added.

They're correct on the stakes, at least.  A fifth liberal justice would change the face of America, and they know it.  And should the next (Democratic!) president be able to replace a retiring Ginsburg and Breyer with jurists in their 50's like Justice Kagan, on top of filling Scalia's seat, it would be a quarter-century of dominance.

And that, more than anything else, would terrify the right.

But it would begin with filling Scalia's seat, and as long as the GOP controls the Senate, they can block an appointment or simply refuse to hold hearings.

The voters would have to do something about that before this situation gets resolved.

Will they in November?

PS, for those of you worried that Clinton versus Trump wouldn't motivate voters, if winning the Supreme Court for a generation doesn't motivate them, then we deserve Trump appointing Justices.

The Pucker Factor Is Setting In

Republicans, the ones that actually see Trump as an unelectable albatross anyway, are deep into the "oh God we're screwed" stage of the race after Trump's SC win, and indications that there's no good way out.

Mainstream Republicans arose on Sunday reeling from Donald J. Trump’s sweeping victory in South Carolina, with some refusing to accept that he could be the eventual nominee and others acknowledging that his insurgent candidacy might soon be unstoppable.

With their sights set on upcoming caucuses in Nevada on Tuesday and “Super Tuesday” a week later, the Republican candidates scattered across the country to regroup and prepare to take their messages to a wider audience.

The magnitude of the implications of the results in South Carolina for Republicans had only just begun to set in on Sunday morning, as the party firmly closed the door on 25 years of Bush family primacy and turned toward a New York real estate mogul as its plurality victor.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton appeared relieved that she had won in Nevada, fending off Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and dealing a blow to his momentum with their own South Carolina showdown coming on Saturday.

But the biggest questions remain in a reshuffled Republican race that saw Jeb Bush suddenly drop out and left Mr. Trump’s remaining rivals struggling to gain momentum.  

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who finished nearly tied behind Mr. Trump in South Carolina, urged the rest of the party to coalesce around their campaigns on Sunday and tried to make the case that the nominating fight was still at an early stage.

“Last night was truly the beginning of the real Republican primary,” Mr. Rubio said on CNN. “I think the race last night was reset.”

Last night the GOP party was reset, forever set on the course of racist bigots and hate-filled rhetoric. That's always good enough for 45% of the vote and they know it, but they're unable to hide it anymore.  The beast is truly loose, and there's no way to contain it any longer. Unless you think Rubio is going to save the party.

In the coming week, the campaign plans to start rolling out a parade of new endorsements as Republican leaders make a show of coalescing around the fresh-faced Florida senator.

The backstage maneuvering to boost Rubio was described to BuzzFeed News by half a dozen GOP sources — some with official ties to the candidate, others without — who requested anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

A Rubio spokesman declined to comment Saturday night on these efforts, and the sources interviewed stressed that no one expects Rubio to become the frontrunner overnight. Last week, Rubio’s campaign manager began openly discussing the possibility that they would have to fight all the way to a brokered convention in Cleveland.

But already, Rubio’s path to the mantle of establishment savior is remarkable for its lack of modern precedent. This is a candidate who placed third in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire; who lags a mile behind the the leading candidate, and has yet to win a single primary. In fact, the closest Rubio has come so far to winning a contest was here in South Carolina, where he beat out Ted Cruz for second place by a microscopic margin — and proceed to celebrate this triumph with perhaps the loftiest victory speech ever given by a non-victor.

“If it is God’s will that we should win this election, then history will say that on this night in South Carolina,” Rubio told supporters on Saturday night.

But while he has been mocked lately for his habit of unearned end-zone dancing, Rubio had a real accomplishment to celebrate Saturday night. In an historically crowded and competitive field of contenders, he has outlasted every other viable candidate deemed acceptable by the Republican establishment. He may have gotten this far by process of elimination — but when the process is as brutal as it’s been in this race, Rubio’s team counts survival as a win.

They also know, however, that Washington Republicans’ rush to crown an establishment champion now is a direct response to Donald Trump, whose double-digit domination of the primary field in South Carolina inflamed the growing sense of panic among party elders. After two blowout victories in a row, the billionaire has revealed frighteningly few electoral vulnerabilities — winning moderates in New Hampshire, and evangelicals in South Carolina — and unless something dramatically changes soon, Trump appears poised to coast to the nomination. Impatient party leaders have determined they can’t wait for Rubio to fully prove himself, or for John Kasich and Ben Carson to drop out — they need an anti-Trump gladiator now.

Terror is setting in with Jeb out.  Absolute terror.  And their only hope is a guy who literally can't win.

The "Moderate" John Kasich

Ohio Gov. John Kasich has closed half of the state's abortion clinics and Cincinnati is in serious danger of becoming the largest metro area in the country without abortion access at all. And now Kasich wants to finish the job.

Gov. John Kasich has signed legislation to strip government money from Planned Parenthood in Ohio.

The move from the Republican presidential candidate was expected, but he made it official Sunday. It comes a day after Kasich’s weak performance in South Carolina’s GOP presidential primary and a day before he heads to Virginia to campaign.

The bill targets roughly $1.3 million in funding that Planned Parenthood receives through Ohio’s health department. The money, which is mostly federal, supports initiatives for HIV testing, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and prevention of violence against women. The legislation prohibits such funds from going to entities that perform or promote abortions.

While the measure does not specifically name Planned Parenthood, that’s who backers say would be most affected.

Never mind that similar bills in Alabama and Mississippi were overturned, but hey, he's the great moderate hope who would beat that evil Clinton bitch, right?

And yet that's what the polls show, Kasich would have by far the best shot at beating Clinton.

Go figure.

StupidiNews!

• Police are still searching for a motive in the shooting rampage by an Uber driver who apparently randomly gunned down six people in Kalamazoo, Michigan over the weekend.
• A private service was held Saturday for "To Kill A Mockingbird" author Harper Lee in her Alabama hometown, she died in her sleep on Friday at the age of 89.
• London Mayor Boris Johnson is backing the UK's exit from the EU in an upcoming referendum, becoming the highest-profile British politician to call for the "brexit".
• The death toll in Fiji is rising from super cyclone Winston as at least 20 are confirmed dead from the storm's high surf and nearly 140 MPH winds.
• Samsung is offering its Gear VR headset free with a pre-order of its new Galaxy S7 Android phone starting this week, the phone is due out March 11.