Last Call For The Destiny Of Demography

This, by Daily Beast's Stuart Stevens, is why I'm not worried about Trump winning.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of white voters and won a landslide victory of 44 states. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59 percent of whites and lost with 24 states. But it’s a frequent talking point that white voter enthusiasm was higher for Reagan and turnout down for Romney. Not so. In 1980, 59 percent of whites voted and in 2012, 64 percent of whites voted.

But still the myth survives that there are these masses of untapped white voters just waiting for the right candidate. Call it the Lost Tribes of the Amazon theory: If only you paddle far enough up the river and bang the drum loud enough, these previously hidden voters will gather to the river’s edge. The simple truth is that there simply aren’t enough white voters in the America of 2016 to win a national election without also getting a substantial share of the non-white vote. Romney won 17 percent of the non-white vote. Depending on white voter turnout, a Republican needs between 25 percent and 35 percent of the non-white vote to win. RealClearPolitics has a handy tool so you can play with the percentages.

The Trump campaign talks about being able to reach out to Hispanics and African Americans but it’s not an overstatement to say he would be the most unpopular candidate with either group to ever lead a national ticket. Only 12 percent of Hispanics have a favorable view of Trump with 77 percent unfavorable. Even among Hispanic Republicans, he has a 60 percent unfavorable ranking. Among African Americans, 86 percent have an unfavorable view of Trump.

So let's play with that tool.  Here's the 2012 numbers for Obama-Romney:

If we keep turnout the same, and are SUPER generous to Trump and give him 5% of the black vote, 20% of the Hispanic vote, and 25% of the Asian vote, he still needs more than 64.5% of the white vote to squeak out a win, WAY more than Romney got.

And if we keep turnout the same by percentage, poor Donald would need more than 89% of the white vote to win.

Now let's try my best educated guess: non-white turnout is up, Trump gets a measly 4% of the black vote and 15% of the Hispanic and Asian vote, and turnout among white voters is down (because emoprogs stay home and whine or something) but the white voters who do show up, Trump gets 65% of them, a huge increase in white voter share.

Trump absolutely gets the crap kicked out of him and then some.

This is the scenario I see with Trump running.  You would have to see non-white voter turnout under 50% before the race gets close with the dismal percentages of non-white votes that I think Trump would get. Likewise, unless you think Trump is going to get 18% of all three non-white voting groups (yes, that includes getting 18% of the black vote) he's done.

He can't win, folks.  Marco Rubio? Rubio might have been able to get enough of the Hispanic vote to win, but he'd need something like 60% plus more white votes than Romney got.

So no, the GOP is screwed without black, Asian, and Hispanic votes.  Absolutely.  And this is why they are in full panic mode. 

Neocon Cruz Missiles

Everything you need to know about the whole "Would Ted Cruz actually be worse than Trump?" thing is summed up in this Eli Lake piece at Bloomberg View (Yes, the same Eli Lake that doesn't know foreign policy from fried okra and says Trump's foreign policy would somehow be indistinguishable from President Obama's) that details all the Bush-era neocon rejects that have wormed their way into Cruz's foreign policy "brain trust".

The first name on the advisory list that stands out is Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official who has emerged as a lightning rod in the Obama era, accused by the Southern Poverty Law Center of being one of the nation's leading Islamophobes. 

When Trump proposed a temporary ban on all Muslim immigration, he quoted from a 2015 survey of American Muslims commissioned by the think tank Gaffney founded, the Center for Security Policy. It concluded that a quarter of U.S. Muslims supported violent jihad against the U.S. This led to speculation in the Washington press that Gaffney was advising Trump. 

But Gaffney is a Cruz man. In an interview, he said that he met Cruz when he was running for Senate in 2012, and that he has briefed him on the FBI's investigation into a Muslim Brotherhood-linked charity known as the Holy Land Foundation and on how Sharia law is a threat to America. "I hope that some of that went into his decision to introduce legislation to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization," Gaffney said. 

Until this year, these views were considered radioactive by the Republican establishment. George W. Bush, after Sept. 11, famously appeared at a Washington mosque and declared that Islam was a religion of peace. Senator John McCain, when he was his party's presidential nominee in 2008, famously rebuked a talk-radio host for calling his challenger "Barack Hussein Obama," a dog whistle to the president's Arabic middle name. In 2012, the campaign of Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, spurned Gaffney and other conservatives who warned that Sharia was a domestic threat.

This time around it's a little different. As Cruz makes the case that he is the last, best chance to prevent Trump from winning his party's nomination, his foreign-policy advisers include not only Gaffney, but also three others who work for Gaffney's think tank: former CIA officers Fred Fleitz and Clare Lopez and former Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Jim Hanson. Also on the list is Andrew McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombing. McCarthy has been outspoken in his view that adherents at least to political Islam are seeking to impose Sharia law in the U.S.

Gaffney alone is bad enough. Gaffney's sidekicks make it worse. McCarthy on top of that is nitro and napalm...and then there are the "serious establishment" types that Cruz currently has who are there to "counter" these guys:

At the same time, Cruz's team includes former officials who reject Gaffney's broad view that any Muslim who believes in Sharia law by definition believes in a totalitarian and violent ideology at war with America. 

"We're at war with a coalition of radical Islamists and radical secularists. It's not all one thing, nor is Islam all one thing," Michael Ledeen, a former Reagan administration official and a Cruz campaign adviser, told me. 

Jim Talent, a former Missouri Republican senator who was a key adviser to Romney in 2008 and 2012, is signed up for the Cruz team. So is Mary Habeck, a former staffer on George W. Bush's national security council, who is an expert on jihadi organizations and has warned against demonizing the entire religion of Islam. 

Another Cruz adviser, Elliott Abrams, helped craft Bush's policy to empower moderate Muslims in the Middle East against radicals. He told me he feels much the same way as Habeck. "It's now 15 years since 9/11, and I think it's obvious that Muslim citizens in the U.S. and Muslim leaders abroad have an absolutely critical role to play in fighting jihadis and other Muslim extremists," Abrams said. "This is partly a battle within Islam that they are going to have fight and win. Alienating these potential allies is the kind of foolish policy that the Obama administration has engaged in when it comes to Arab states that are our allies." 

Victoria Coates, who has been Cruz's main adviser on national security since he came to the Senate, told me this tension on the policy team "is by design and not an accident." She added: "Both Frank and Elliott are people I went out of my way to set up meetings with the Senator. He has met with both of them individually for years."

Let's get this straight, Cruz's foreign policy team is an absolute nightmare.  If Donald Trump was president, I'd say there was a good chance we'd end up in a global war by accident. If Ted Cruz is president, we'll end up in a global war on purpose.

So yeah, in at least this aspect, Cruz would be worse than Trump, if that's something you could possibly imagine. The guys that Dick Cheney found too awful all working for Cruz?  We'd be in World War III before dinnertime on Inauguration Day.

That scares me more than Trump, which should tell you something.

The Sedition Edition Of The GOP

Turns out Republican lawmakers played a role in keeping the FBI from rounding up Ammon Bundy and his merry band of armed seditionists in Oregon for weeks while they interfered with the proceedings and allowed the mess to drag on. The story from Oregon Public Broadcasting:

On a cold January morning, a posse led by a former Army company commander named Matt Shea rolled into the Harney County Courthouse and wanted to speak to the sheriff.

But this wasn’t a group of militants, or outlaws. They were state lawmakers from four western states, including Oregon. Most of them were members of a group called the Coalition of Western States, or COWS.

They were hoping to talk directly with Sheriff David Ward and convince him to support the armed militants at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Instead, COWS members would meet that day with a Harney County deputy and a sheriff from another county, an FBI agent and other local officials.

The out-of-town visitors presented themselves as wanting to help understand and, if possible, end the armed occupation at the refuge.

“I’m just looking at peaceful resolve,” said Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, a COWS member who was patched into the meeting by phone.

“That’s our intent,” agreed Shea, a state representative from Washington. “If there’s any opportunity to save life and prevent any further escalation of anything, I think we all agree we should take those opportunities.”

Oregon Republican State Rep. Dallas Heard also attended the meeting, however he says he is not a member of COWS.

The 90-minute conversation was recorded by participants at the Jan. 9 meeting and given to OPB.

On the recording, Harney County Judge Steve Grasty thanks the group for their concern, but asks them to stay away from the refuge. Grasty said the militants were showing signs of fatigue and defeat, and worried that a visit from lawmakers would reinvigorate Ammon Bundy and the rest of the occupiers.

“If we’re getting close (to a resolution), and you embolden Bundy by your presence, and this runs on for weeks and months, it will be awful in this community,” Grasty said.

The FBI agent also asked the lawmakers not to visit the refuge.

Those pleas fell on deaf ears. And Grasty’s prediction came true.

COWS representatives visited the refuge, which was closed to the public. The lawmakers acknowledge they fed the militants information gathered from that meeting, and militant leaders talked openly about what they learned from those disclosures.

“These lawmakers have shown great courage to support us,” said Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, who would later die after being shot by state police. “Much more than others who refused to come and look us in the eye.”

The visit was the latest step in an ongoing and organized campaign by these lawmakers, essentially the political arm of the militant movement, to make a once-radical political cause part of the mainstream.

In other words, Fiore and Shea and other Republican state lawmakers belonging to COWS gave material support to domestic terrorists.  There's not really room for too much debate here, these lawmakers gave Bundy's thugs information and support to avoid federal law enforcement, and then Bundy's crew bragged openly about how these lawmakers helped them.

Seems to me some Republicans need to be answering some very uncomfortable questions about high crimes against the federal government committed while in office.

But for some odd reason, I'm betting Fiore and Shea and the others won't have to face consequences of their actions.  Perhaps voters would see reason, but this is a party that wants to see Donald Trump as president.

Time to start busting down office doors, I suspect.  You make yourself an enemy of the state like that, maybe the state should treat you like one.

StupidiNews!

• Entertainer Frank Sinatra Jr., the son of the legendary singer and brother to Nancy, has died at age 72 of cardiac arrest while on tour in Florida.
• The White House continues to relax tourism restrictions on Americans visiting Cuba ahead of President Obama's historic visit later this month.
• Warning of "riots" if he is not nominated for President by the GOP, Donald Trump has pulled out of next week's GOP debate in Salt Lake City, leading to the debate's cancellation.
• Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen has kept interest rates unchanged, hinting broadly that the Fed's earlier forecast of multiple interest rate hikes in 2016 may be limited to two or fewer.
• With tech company Segway winning its International Trade Court case, America could be seeing a lot fewer "hoverboards" in the future.

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.