Last Call For The Master Plays Again

Chuck Pierce on President Obama's SCOTUS pick, Merrick Garland:

So it's a masterpiece of trolling from a guy who's become very, very good at that. I understand the frustration of the president's progressive supporters at the idea of a 60-ish white guy replacing a 70-ish dead white guy on the Supreme Court. (I would've preferred Jane Kelly from the Eighth Circuit, who already had heads exploding.) I'm sure there were several dozen more diverse, and clearly no-more-fcks-to-give, choices he could've made. But Garland's work as a supervising DOJ attorney in the Oklahoma City bombing case intrigues me, and it is likely to light up the far distant precincts of wingnuttia as well. At the very least, he's aware of the wildness loose in the country. He seems moderate and judicious and very unlikely to stray too far out of bounds from what this president and his supporters think a Supreme Court justice should be. His opinions on the appellate rights of criminal defendants could use some work, but he's not likely to join with the likes of Samuel Alito to take an ax to things like the Miranda decision. He's not a law'n'order guy. Tom Goldstein of the invaluable SCOTUSBlog put together a solid compendium of Garland's record the last time his name arose to fill a vacancy on the Court, when Garland was passed over in favor of Justice Elena Kagan. 

All of which is, for the moment, anyway, moot. This is a purely tactical move, and it's an awfully good one. Right now, Republican senators are saying that they won't even take one-on-one meetings with the guy, let alone give him a committee vote, let alone give him a confirmation vote in the Senate. This was precisely the reaction the president was hoping for, although he didn't exactly have to be Nostradamus to make this play. But I want to know more about this comic book collection.

As I keep saying, if you know your opponent's reaction to your moves, or better yet, leave them only one real path to take in response, you've won the game.  President Obama has done just that here, like he has time and again.

I was very worried in the past that this wouldn't work, but the selection of Garland, a jurist with impeccable credentials, highly regarded, and very smart, is exactly the person President Obama needed to both cement his legacy and to show the world that the GOP is fully responsible for obstructing.  There's no both sides here, this is all the GOP, and the world knows it.

There's no cover for the 22 GOP Senators up for re-election in 2016.  None.  They are about to be hung out to dry by the party of Trump, and they know it.

And now the fun truly begins.

The Orange-American Vote

Orange Julius is back, folks!

Former Speaker John Boehner said Paul Ryan should be the Republican nominee for president if the party fails to choose a candidate on the first ballot. 

"If we don't have a nominee who can win on the first ballot, I'm for none of the above," Boehner said at the Futures Industry Association conference here. "They all had a chance to win. None of them won. So I'm for none of the above. I'm for Paul Ryan to be our nominee."

The Republican Garbage Fire keeps getting worse. Ryan tried to "Aww, shucks!" his way into "Well, if I'm forced to be the nominee..."

Ryan will chair the Republican convention, and would become a leading prospect if delegates decided to turn to someone outside the current field.

"I don't see that happening," he said in the interview. "I'm not thinking about it. I'm happy where I am, so no."

But at a moment of increasing urgency for the efforts by Romney and other prominent Republicans to block Trump, Ryan declined to categorically rule it out.

In which case Ryan got his orders from the guy who really runs Bartertown, Trump.

Speaker Paul Ryan said in an interview there is "no situation" in which he will accept the Republican Party's presidential nomination this year, his firmest rejection of the fanciful notion that he'd be drafted during a contested GOP convention. 

"I've been really clear about this," Ryan told POLITICO Wednesday. "If you want to be president, you should run for president. We should select our nominee from among the people who are running for president. Clear and simple. So no, I am not going to be the president. I am not going to be the nominee."

And so it goes, as the GOP clown car now barrels down the road towards obliteration.

BREAKING: Coming To A-Merrick-A

President Obama's choice for SCOTUS to replace Justice Scalia? DC Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland, widely seen as a moderate choice. MoJo's Stephanie Mencimer:

Garland has been a Supreme Court short-lister for many years, but he has never made the cut during the Obama years. His qualifications for the post have never been questioned. First appointed to the DC Circuit in 1997 by President Bill Clinton, Garland has served as the chief judge since 2013. (The Senate confirmed Garland originally on a 76-to-23 vote, with 32 Republicans supporting him.) He's a double Harvard grad—Harvard College and Harvard Law—and clerked for Supreme Court's famous liberal lion, Justice William Brennan. He spent many years in the Justice Department as a prosecutor and oversaw the prosecutions of Unabomber Ted Kaczynsky and Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. He spent some time as a litigator in the private sector as a partner at the white-shoe firm of Arnold & Porter. 

Garland has been married to Lynn Garland for 29 years. She worked for a defense contractor at the time she married Garland, but has a long legal background. Her grandfather was a justice on the New York State Supreme Court. 

Garland is a fairly conservative choice for Obama, but opponents are already pointing to his rulings in a major gun control case in 2007 as a sign that he's a left-wing radical. In that case, Garland voted to reconsider the Hellercase, in which a three-judge panel struck down the District of Columbia's strict ban on handgun possession. Garland didn't succeed, and the case went to the US Supreme Court. The highest court then upheld the ruling in a controversial 5-4 decision in 2008, finding that the Constitution guarantees an individual right to bear arms. 

If the game is to show that not even a widely-praised moderate can be confirmed by this GOP, then Garland is the perfect pick, and that's the point.

If that's the worst critics can find, Garland would typically still be confirmed. But this isn't an ordinary confirmation process. Senate Republicans, including the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), have vowed to deny Obama's Supreme Court nominee a hearing—and forget about a vote. (Severino's outfit is spending heavily on ads to put pressure on the committee not to waver from that position.) That may be one reason why Obama chose Garland, who doesn't meet any of the demands of liberal and civil rights groups for an Obama nominee who would add diversity to the court. Garland is a political sacrificial lamb for the White House. 

At 63, Garland is more than a decade older than Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. was when he was nominated to the court in 2005. In a normal year, Garland would never have been picked because of his age and demographic profile. But he seems like a logical choice at a time when whomever Obama nominates isn't likely to get confirmed. Fortunately for Garland, he will probably come away from this brutal nomination process largely unscathed, and he will get to keep his lifetime appointment on the DC Circuit. So he is taking one for the team. That will leave other potential candidates, such as DC Circuit Judge Sri Srinvasan, unblemished and ready for a real nomination if the presidency remains in Democratic hands, when the political climate isn't so toxic and Republicans are not hell-bent on obstruction.

And that only happens after a Clinton win, and the damage from blocking Garland for 8 months flips the Senate back to the Democrats.  Then we get someone like Srinivasan on the court as one of her appointees.

I'm cool with this plan.

Please proceed, GOP Senate.

Primary Motivations, Con't

So now what?

Clinton has taken 4 of 5 primaries last night, with Missouri still counting votes this morning. She now has a more than 750 delegate lead over Sanders, a larger lead than Barack Obama ever had over her in 2008.

CNN's exit poll in Ohio found Clinton winning the white vote by 6 points and the black vote by 42. She won union households by 8 points.  More importantly, she won Democrats who believe free trade hurts US jobs by 10 points. Overall, Clinton won by 16 points, 57-43%.

It was a similar situation in Florida, Clinton won the white vote 52-44%, the black vote 79-20%, and the Latino vote 72-28%. She had an even larger win in Florida overall, winning 65-33%.

Illinois was much closer, where Clinton edged out Sanders 51-49%.  There, Sanders won the white vote by 16 points and split the Latino vote evenly, but black voters overwhelmingly voted for Clinton 70-29% and that was the difference.  Clinton also won people making less than $50,000 by 12 points.

NC just wasn't close at all.  Sanders won the white vote by 8 points, but lost the black vote by a staggering 65 points, and black voters made up 31% of the primary votes.  Overall, Sanders lost the non-white vote by 52 points. Clinton won the state 55-41%.

Missouri is very very close, with Clinton having about a 1,500 vote edge, but again while Sanders won the white vote by 9 points, Clinton won the black vote by 35 points, and it looks like it will be just enough to give her the win. Also, Sanders won white men by 23 points, but Clinton edged him out with white women by 3.  If her lead holds, she won because of women, black voters, and especially black women, whom she won by 40 points and made up 12% of primary voters alone.

We need to put the rest the notion that Clinton can't win outside the South, and we really need to put to rest Bernie Sanders' campaign.

Unless you think Sanders will win 99% of California and New York voters, this ballgame is over.

StupidiNews!

• North Korea has sentenced an American student to 15 year hard labor after admitting he tried to steal a political banner from his hotel room.
• A new study finds the average cost of name-brand drugs has doubled in just five years, while generic drug prices have fallen sharply over the same period.
• Senate lawmakers in Washington are calling for national rules of the road for self-driving cars in order to avoid a "patchwork" of state regulations.
• Peabody Energy, the nation's largest private-sector coal company, is reportedly close to seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
• Disney will be reuniting Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg for one more Indiana Jones movie in 2019.

Last Call For The Snobs Versus The Slobs

The best evidence that I have of Trump truly splitting the GOP in 2016 is from of all places, the National Review.  Last month the magazine endorsed Trump, or most of the writers did...but not all. Kevin Williamson and David French have finally said what the country club Republicans have been wanting to say for years: the immoral FOX News masses with their Trump worship need to get the hell out.

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.   

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. 

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.  

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Now, Williamson is being ripped to shreds for saying this, mainly because it's partially true, and mainly because the "outside forces" Williamson is hand-waving away are the same County Club Republicans who screwed these poor white communities over in the first place in pursuit of globalization and profits, and everyone damn well knows it.  But the thing is, everyone knows the corporate wing of the GOP has always hated the plebs at the bottom of the pile and have been getting them to vote against their self-interests for decades.  It worked for Reagan, Nixon, and two Bushes.

No longer.

Note that the arguments Williamson (and French, in defending him) make are the ones white conservative pundits usually throw at people of color: that they're lazy, on welfare, they have too many kids, and that they alone are responsible for their own failure in being billionaires.  To have this be used by Williamson against rock-ribbed conservative "salt-of-the-earth" types is pure anathema. No wonder Trump supporters are furious at him. These are the same dog whistle attacks used against those people, and they know exactly what Williamson means by them.

The message is clear: the FOX News, talk radio, and comment section trailer trash rank and file want Trump, not the Country Club Republican-approved boys like Jeb or Rubio (or even Kasich at this point) and the civil war is now in the open.  It's Caddyshack writ large, Al Czervik versus the Judge, and Trump is Carl Spackler wiring the course with plastic explosives. The snobs against the slobs indeed. As Judge Smails will tell you:

"I've sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn't want to do it. I felt I owed it to them."

Time to watch the fireworks when Carl blows up the course going for that damn gopher.

The Non-Violent Approach To Violence

As I mentioned, my parents peacefully protested outside Trump's rally in North Carolina on Monday morning along with a couple hundred other folks, mostly from the area's interfaith council (my family is Catholic).  Chuck Pierce agrees with that, as feeding the Trump monster inside his rallies only makes him more powerful.

Stay out of the buildings.

Stop being played for such suckers. Stop enlisting yourself in his bloody vaudeville. Stop giving him stuff to lie about at all the rallies that actually do end up happening. Stop making yourselves part of the show, because it's not working. It doesn't affect him at all. In fact, his campaign gains strength from it, like some science-fiction monster that absorbs the energy of whatever attacks it and then uses it to destroy. It doesn't gain you any allies; as should be clear by most of the meeping responses from the elite political press, the best it can get you is lectures about how Both Sides in our politics should settle down and let cooler heads ponder impotently about How We Got To This Point. That discussion never quite comes around to the simple, obvious fact that the Republican Party ate the monkeybrains 30 years ago and that the prion disease it thereby acquired is now cascading through its higher functions. That there is even one allegedly serious person taking seriously the allegedly serious argument that the president is somehow at fault for how the Republican madness is acting out in public is a measure of how far the disease has progressed, and of the spavined state of our institutional immunity to it.

He's got a point.  Trump came to power because our media wants to feed him.  Trump sells because violence sells.  Don't give him the fuel for the fire. Chicago was playing right into his hands.

All that having been said, what happened in Chicago over the weekend was tactically stupid. Yes, the rally was "shut down." Hurrah. Yes, it prompted an orgy of thumb-sucking and chin-stroking in which some people, like kindly Doc Maddow, actually pointed out the obvious truth that a madman now has more delegates to the Republican National Convention than does anyone else. And, yes, it scared the piss out of the big bag of feathers that is Marco Rubio, but he stopped quaking long enough to blame the president for "dividing Americans," which is plainly idiotic. And let's all stipulate that chanting for Bernie Sanders while you're shutting down a Trump rally is just about as stupid a political move as there is.

In terms of tangible political gain, the disruption of Trump's rally was a failure, which was obvious if you watched the coverage of his subsequent rallies in Missouri and Ohio. He feeds on this stuff, and so do his crowds.

My suggestion? Create a wave of non-violent protest outside the arenas. Close the streets. Fill the jails, if you must. Force the media coverage, which shouldn't be all that hard at this point. But stay out of the buildings because you can do no good in there. It gives aid and comfort to the forces you are trying to defeat, and it gives a timorous elite political press an excuse to look the other way, and it gives the other candidates from a party that long ago descended into madness one more hallucination to justify why it's eating bugs in public.

Stay out of the buildings. Decline to audition for a part in the freak show. Silent witness can be the most powerful kind there is.

To an extent, that's what happened in NC Monday morning.  The interfaith protesters, including my parents, stayed outside Trump's reach and Trump's crowds and protested peacefully outside.   There needs to be more of that, much more, with much larger crowds.  We know the way to deal with Trump, the Civil Rights movement showed us the way 50 years ago. The Village wants it to be "Bernie's hippies versus Trump's hardhats." Don't give it to them.

I hope more people heed that advice.

Hillary Gets The Coaled Shoulder

So let's talk about this video, which was posted in the comments over the weekend.

Hillary's message for middle class Americans in coal country. pic.twitter.com/CruAKhBHLz

— Jimmy (@JimmyPrinceton) March 14, 2016

And in grand fashion, let's talk about the Democrats heading for the exit here in coal country over it.

"I was very disappointed to hear the comments that came out of the debate," said Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky's secretary of state and a close friend of the Clinton family who received their endorsement during her unsuccessful challenge to McConnell in 2014. "My hope is she'll have a chance to clarify those comments, comments that as I said were completely out of line with personal conversations that I have had with her."

In West Virginia, where Democrats are trying to hang to the governor's mansion after losing the state legislature following the 2014 elections, two of the three Democratic candidates criticized Clinton's comments. Booth Goodwin, the former U.S. Attorney who prosecuted former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, said he "absolutely disagreed" with Clinton. And Democrat Jim Justice, an Appalachian coal magnate, declared: "I will not support anyone who does not support coal."

Jeff Kessler, a progressive candidate supporting Bernie Sanders, echoed Clinton's message about providing new coalfield opportunities, but said he would've worded it differently.

Brian Fallon, Clinton's national press secretary, said Republicans were trying to twist Clinton's words. But later in the day, the Clinton campaign released a statement that appeared to walk back her comments that she would put coal miners and coal companies out of business.

"Coal will remain a part of the energy mix for years to come, and we have a shared responsibility to ensure that coal communities receive the benefits they have earned-and can build the future they deserve," she said.

Ahh yes, Alison Grimes couldn't move quickly enough to throw Hill under the bus.  You guys from outside Kentucky, you don't get it.  Nothing makes Dems here into spineless wimps faster than being mean to King Coal, and that's why Dems are doomed in Kentucky.  They have been for some time.

But here's the thing, Hillary was never going to win KY.  Neither was Bernie.  Trump will win here by double digits.  So Hillary can and should tell the truth about coal like she did Sunday.

It's dying.  We need new industries here in Kentucky. 

Even if the politicians here don't want to admit it.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article66017282.html#storylink=cpy

StupidiNews!

• Russian President Vladimir Putin says Russian military forces will withdraw from Syria and that airstrikes will wind down, saying Russia has "achieved its goal" there.
• A suspended UN diplomat from the Dominican Republic will reportedly plead guilty to charges of attempting to bribe former UN general assembly president John Ashe.
• Two years after the White House announced a federal clemency program for drug offenders, the Justice Department is struggling with the load of thousands of cases.
• The World Health Organization says nearly a quarter of deaths worldwide are caused by preventable environmental risks like hazardous water, air and work conditions.
• The Michigan man accused of murdering six people while driving for ride-sharing service Uber claims the company's driving app made him go on a killing spree.

Last Call For What's Good For The Goose...

...is long, long overdue for the gander.  Hey fellow menfolk, now soon you can participate in birth control too like a responsible adult!

Scientists from the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy have announced that they are making headway in developing a birth control pill for men. 

The contraceptive pill has been available to women since the 1960s, but nothing exists on the market for men as of yet. Now, scientists claim to have made a breakthrough, modifying compounds to develop a product that works for men with no side effects. 

Gunda Georg, leader of the research team, told The Times that the aim is to develop a pill just as effective and convenient as the female version. 

“It would have to be soluble so it could be taken by mouth. It would start working fairly quickly and it wouldn’t diminish libido. It would be safe even if taken for decades,” she said. 

“And because some users would eventually want to have children, its impact on fertility would be reversible, with no lingering ill effects on sperm or embryos.” 

The Minnesota scientists have built on progress that was made last June, when experts at the University of Virginia discovered a specific enzyme, ESP1, a protein that forms in the head of a man’s sperm. 

“Understanding at the molecular level exactly how the sperm is able to bind with and enter the egg opens opportunities to identify molecules that can disrupt or block the fertilization event,” said John Herr, a professor of cell biology working on the University of Virginia’s study, The Evening Standard reports.

Good work, science.  Let's keep up on this thing here.

A Lousy Mea Culpa On Trump

Coming off of Matthew Yglesias admitting that the "liberal contrarian case for Trump" was untenable nonsense, we have Jonathan Chait realizing much the same and apologizing a bit too late for it.

Last month, I made the case that a Donald Trump nomination would be better for America than the nomination of one of his Republican rivals. I no longer believe that. I began to change my mind when a report circulated highlighting his 1990 interview with Playboy in which he praised the brutality of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. This is not the first time I had seen Trump praise dictators. (He has effused over Vladimir Putin.) But Trump’s admiration for Putin seemed to spring from a more ordinary Republican partisan contempt for President Obama, and closely echoed pro-Putin comments made by fellow Republicans like Rudy Giuliani. Trump’s quarter-century-old endorsement of Chinese Communist Party repression went well beyond the familiar derangement of the modern GOP. This was not hatred of Obama, or some obnoxious drive to stick it to his supporters; it was evidence of an authentic and longstanding ideology. Trump has changed his mind about many things, but a through-line can be drawn from the comments Trump made and 1990 and the message of his campaign now: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.” 

My previous view of Trump was as a kind of vaccine. The Republican Party relies on the covert mobilization of racial resentment and nationalism. Trump, as I saw it, was bringing into the open that which had been intentionally submerged. It seemed like a containable dose of disease, too small to take over its host, but large enough to set off a counter-reaction of healthy blood cells. But the outbreak of violence this weekend suggests the disease may be spreading far wider than I believed, and infecting healthy elements of the body politic. 

I remain convinced that Trump cannot win the presidency. But what I failed to account for was the possibility that his authoritarian style could degrade American politics even in defeat. There is a whiff in the air of the notion that the election will be settled in the streets — a poisonous idea that is unsafe in even the smallest doses.

But (and with Chait there's always a "but") Chait can't help himself, going back to blaming the left's political correctness for Trump's rise a few paragraphs later and scolding them for trying to stop him.

But Rubio is not wrong to draw a connection between political correctness and elements of the left’s response to Trump. Donald Trump may or may not have been forthright about citing safety fears in cancelling his speech Friday night in Chicago, and disrupting the speech may or may not have been the protesters’ goal. But it is clear that protesters views the cancellation of the speech as a victory, breaking out in cheers of “We stopped Trump!” 

Preventing speakers one finds offensive from delivering public remarks is commonplace on campuses. Indeed, more than 300 faculty members at the University of Illinois-Chicago signed a letter asking the University administration not to allow Trump to speak. I polled my Twitter followers whether they consider disrupting Trump’s speeches an acceptable response to his racism. Two-thirds replied that it is. Obviously, this is not a scientific poll, but it indicates a far broader acceptance than I expected. 

Because Trump is so grotesque, and because he has violated liberal norms himself so repeatedly, the full horror of the goal of stopping Trump from campaigning (as opposed to merely counter-demonstrating against him) has not come across. But the whole premise of democracy is that rules need to be applied in every case without regard to the merit of the underlying cause to which it is attached. If you defend the morality of a tactic against Trump, then you should be prepared to defend its morality against any candidate. Now imagine that right-wing protesters had set out to disrupt Barack Obama’s speeches in 2008. If you’re not okay with that scenario, you should not be okay with protesters doing it to Trump.

As usual, Chait's apologies are pretty terrible.  He starts out saying he was wrong on Trump...and then comes in with "but you're all just as wrong trying to stop him!"

Le sigh, le groan.

Flipping The Script On SCOTUS

It looks like the Obama administration is ready to move on a Supreme Court nominee as early as this week as part of a coordinated campaign effort for Democrats in the Senate.

As soon as President Barack Obama announces a Supreme Court nominee from his short list — which is now set — the White House and its allies will unleash a coordinated media and political blitz aimed at weakening GOP resistance to confirming the president's pick.

Administration allies have already started putting a ground game in place. Obama campaign veterans have been contracted in six states — New Hampshire, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where GOP incumbents are most vulnerable, plus Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley's Iowa.

With Republicans flatly refusing even courtesy meetings with a nominee, let alone confirmation hearings, they’re also looking into photo ops with Senate Democrats, and could pursue mock hearings or other events meant to highlight GOP intransigence, according to sources familiar with the planning.

Still, the West Wing is trying to strike a balance between pushing the nominee forward to create pressure and the danger of seeming to politicize the fight or accidentally straying into hypothetical discussions of future court decisions.

Obama is expected to announce a nominee as early as this week. Many believe that the choice will be one of three federal appeals court judges: Sri Srinivasan, Merrick Garland or Paul Watford.

I heartily approve of this. President Obama is playing to win here and he knows the issue is Senate control by the GOP.  He's operating under the assumption that the GOP will fold as they have time and again, and he's doing so by going on offense.

I've had my doubts that President Obama could actually accomplish anything here, and this still may not work out, but it won't be for lack of trying.  If it's a fight the GOP wants, it's a fight they will get.

Vox has a good rundown of the potential nominees here.

StupidiNews!

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is vowing to find those responsible for yet another suicide bombing in Ankara, with Sunday's blast in Ankara killing 37 and injuring dozens.
• One Maryland police officer is dead after a suspect opened fire in a Prince George's County police station, the gunman and a second suspect were both taken into custody.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling party was dealt a major blow in state elections Sunday as the far-right Alternative for Germany party made major gains over migrant policy.
• Al-Qaeda militants are claiming responsibility for an attack on a beach resort in Ivory Coast that killed 22, the third resort attack in West Africa in five months.
• After his year-long trip on the International Space Station, astronaut Mark Kelly is retiring from NASA in April after 20 years with the space agency.

Last Call For Dilma's Brazil

There were massive protests across Brazil's major cities on Sunday calling for the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff. Things just got real in Rio.

Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians gathered on Sunday to protest political corruption, a weak economy, and to call for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff on a day that could build momentum for efforts to oust her.

Demonstrators wearing shirts with the green and yellow colors of Brazil’s flag and carrying banners calling for Rousseff’s ouster filled the streets of cities across the country. They marched beside Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach, toward Congress in the capital Brasilia, and down Sao Paulo’s Avenida Paulista. The atmosphere in most cities was festive, though, and free of the violence that some feared if there were confrontations between opposing political groups.

Initial estimates indicated turnout was higher than in similar demonstrations in December, when about 100,000 took to the streets nationwide. On Sunday, about 100,000 people marched in Brasilia alone, according to the Military Police, with several thousand participating in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

Ronaldo Cappellesso, a 45-year-old store owner in Brasilia, said it feels like the country has reached a tipping point, with many of his friends protesting for the first time. “Finally I feel that impeachment is actually going to happen,” he said. “Anything is better than what we have now.”

Many Brazilians say they have had enough after enduring the worst recession in decades and a rolling corruption scandal known as Lava Jato, or Carwash in English, that has ensnared multiple politicians and business executives. The outpouring of public sentiment may be decisive for legislators debating whether to remain loyal to the president or join a swelling opposition seeking her ouster, as former allies begin to discuss political solutions for a post-Rousseff Brazil.

The political spectacle is playing out less than five months before the 2016 Olympic Games, the first awarded to a South American country, are due to start in Rio de Janeiro.

I honestly don't know if the Games will go on and I don't think they should, but that's another matter. Rouseff's government is thoroughly corrupt, Brazil's economy is in freefall and the cries for her ouster will only get louder.  Several administration officials are turning states' evidence and it looks like Rouseff will be gone sooner rather than later.

We'll see where this goes.

Zandar's Hometown Blues

To my everlasting shame, The Donald will be holding a rally in the city where I grew up tomorrow, and I'd like to think the people there would run him out of Hickory on a rail.  No such luck.

Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a campaign event at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory on Monday.

Trump’s campaign on Friday requested to use the university’s P.E. Monroe Auditorium at 10 a.m. Monday, the university said in a statement on its website.

The campaign added the appearance to its website on Saturday afternoon and said doors will open at 7 a.m to Monday’s event.Tickets are available online at www.donaldjtrump.com.

“Given appropriate assurances of security, LR will honor this request,” the university said.

“LR in no way endorses this or any other candidate,” Lenoir-Rhyne President Wayne Powell said in the statement. “However, as part of our commitment to the American political process, we welcome the event and hope it will inspire people to engage in dialog about the values that are so important to our nation. We also hope it will help inspire everyone to vote.”

Sure.  Look, if I'm Trump, I couldn't think of a better North Carolina rally location than Hickory. We make furniture and fiber optic cable, because the big GE electrical transformer plant moved to Mexico 15 years ago and the textile mills went to China before that.  The Germans moved in with tool and die gears and abrasives a while back, so the city has manufacturing, but unemployment here went from under two percent during the boom years in the late 90's to 15% ten years later.  It's gotten down to 6% now but things haven't been the same since.  People remember those times and then it got tough.

And they blame Obama.

Even though it's North Carolina, the place is 85% white.  These are exactly the voters Trump wants to reach, so I can't blame him for coming here.  The big tech industries went right on past here to Charlotte or Research Triangle Park.  We made number 5 in the most miserable cities in America last year.  Hell, I saw the writing on the wall and left ten years ago. The economy here is awful. Only one in six people in the area has a college degree.

These are Trump's people.  It just depresses me to be so starkly reminded of it.  They will love him here.

And I hate it.  Zandardad says he'll be there protesting.

Stay safe, pop.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article65686422.html#storylink=cpy