StupidiNews!

• Turkey is blaming Russia for the aerial bombing of two Syrian hospitals, killing 22 and leaving dozens wounded, in what Amnesty International is calling "war crimes".
• The Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs has reopened, three months after a shooting rampage at the abortion provider left three dead and nine wounded.
• Both Saudi Arabia and Russia will freeze oil output at current levels, dependent on the Iranians, who may or may not follow suit.
• Former President George W. Bush is taking to the campaign trail for his brother Jeb this week in South Carolina in an effort to boost the younger Bush's presidential primary prospects.
• Mattel is getting into the 3D printer business for kids as it plans to sell the $300 ThingMaker with software design kit allowing kids to print their own toys.

Last Call For Like A Kansas Tornado, Con't

What better way for the worst senator in the GOP to show he's all for deep austerity cuts than with the endorsement of the most despised governor in America?

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has become the first sitting governor to endorse Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for president. 

The Rubio campaign announced the endorsement Monday. “Just like Governor Brownback, Marco has consistently defended life, small government and free enterprise throughout his career in public service,” Rubio midwest spokesman Jeremy Adler said in a statement. 

Kansas Republicans will caucus Mar. 5. 

Brownback, a Republican who once ran for president, endorsed then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2011. Perry was a candidate for the 2016 GOP nomination but withdrew. 

“Marco Rubio has a proven track record of protecting life, defending religious liberty, and undoing Obamacare,” Brownback’s statement said. “He will be a wonderful president, and I am proud to offer him my full support.” 

Brownback’s decision is a mild surprise. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is a favorite of many religious conservatives like Brownback. Jeff Roe is the campaign manager for Cruz, and he has had some influence in Kansas. Kansas is a caucus state, like Iowa, where Cruz prevailed. 

He might have also endorsed fellow Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, or former Gov. Jeb Bush. Bush has appeared in Kansas with Brownback. 

It’s possible Brownback may consider Rubio the most electable Republican in the GOP field. Brownback will be looking for work after the 2018 election, and may have an interest in a position with the federal government. A Republican in the White House would be a prerequisite for a federal job.

Quite the job resume there, especially the part where Brownback drove Kansas into a hole. And Marco Rubio thinks that's going to help him in Kansas next month?

Sure thing, Marco.  Keep telling yourself that.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article60470866.html#storylink=cpy

The Mask Slips Again

...and again Republicans reveal their cards, accidentally telling the truth.  Today's contestant: Sen. Marco Rubio, who gets into an argument with the Sunday shows and gives the game away over Scalia's replacement on SCOTUS.

On Meet the Press, Rubio again insisted that there should be no nominations from a “president nearing the last few months of his administration.” 

“Do presidential terms end after three years?” NBC host Chuck Todd shot back at the candidate. 

“There comes a point in the last year of the president, especially in their second term, where you stop nominating,” Rubio said. “You basically say, at this point, with a few months left in your term, no accountability from the ballot box on the appointment you’re going to make — on a lifetime appointment.” 

“Eleven months!” Todd interrupted. 

Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Rubio if he believed no president should be able to make second term Supreme Court appointments. 

“I’m not saying it’s illegal,” Rubio replied. “I think we should wait until after November before we move forward on confirming any justice to the Supreme Court.” 

Wallace reminded Rubio that President Ronald Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court in his final year in office. 

“It doesn’t really matter what Reagan did back in ’87,” Rubio opined. “I think the president should allow the next president to appoint the justice to the Supreme Court, and if it’s me — and I anticipate that it will be — I’m going to look for someone in the mold of Justice Scalia, who while irreplaceable, I think is a model jurist and one of the great jurists in American history.”

Of course Marco Rubio is going to insist he gets the opportunity to nominate another Scalia in 2017. He working the refs here to make sure that this happens. Unfortunately, he and Ted Cruz are in position to make sure no confirmation vote happens, and there's little that Obama can do about it.

There is a lot, however, that voters can do about it in November.  The question is will they finally decided to punish the GOP?

I wouldn't hold your breath on that.

You Won't Have Ol' Gil To Kick Around Anymore

The Guardian's Ben Jacobs comes not to praise the Jim Gilmore GOP presidential campaign which ended last week in a cloud of pathos, but to rightfully bury it as a sloppy, embarrassing mess.

The one-term governor of Virginia ran a narcissistic, quasi-delusional campaign, under the premise that a virtual unknown last elected to state office in 1997 could somehow be elevated to the presidency.

Being a quasi-delusional narcissist is not a necessarily a flaw in American politics. No entirely normal person can devote years of their lives to the proposition that they are the most qualified person in more than 300 million to lead the free world. The odds are always long.

After all, what could have seemed more narcissistic than Rick Santorum running for the White House in 2012 after a blowout defeat for re-election to the US Senate? Or, this cycle, what could have appeared more delusional in early 2015 than Bernie Sanders’ belief that a septuagenarian socialist who had never been a Democrat could seriously challenge Hillary Clinton for that party’s nomination.

Gilmore’s sin was not an excess of ego. It was a total lack of a work ethic. He barely campaigned, he did not raise money and he had no political organization. As the Washington Post noted in September, for more than a month after declaring his candidacy he did not hold a single campaign event.

In state after state after state, his campaign missed ballot deadlines. The most press coverage he generated outside of debate appearances was when bored political reporters spearheaded a drive to get him verified on Twitter.

And yet the former governor could not be accused of being a political neophyte. He had also been Virginia attorney general and chair of the Republican National Committee. He had already mounted a presidential campaign, in 2008, a year in which Mark Warner dealt him a crushing defeat for the US Senate. He knew what he was getting himself into.

What he wasn’t doing was running for president.

It's nearly impossible to view it as anything else other than a small man with grand dreams and no real chance.  At least Ben Carson has a book to sell. Gilmore didn't even have that. I'm not sure how much money he wasted, but I feel sorry for anyone who donated to the guy.

Having said that, it's the other Republicans still in the race who represent a real threat to the country.

StupidiNews!

• Saudi Arabia and troops from 20 Arab and Muslim countries are conducting military exercises dubbed Operation North Thunder as Russian forces close in on the Syrian town of Aleppo.
• The Mexican border wall that Donald Trump proposes to build if elected President would cost the US nearly a half a billion yearly in lost wildlife tourism.
• The foreclosure crisis in Nevada has had a direct effect on the 2016 primary races, as keeping track of voters through the mess has led to out of date voter information for the campaigns.
• The US is signaling increasing concern with China using non-naval ships to stake its claims to the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
• A new app aims to crowdsource using smartphones as a network of earthquake detection devices that could detect quakes in real time and notify first responders.

Last Call For Syria's Business Indeed

If the Russians and Iranians "liberate" Aleppo, Bashar al-Assad gets Syria back, and the alternative is Turkey stepping in along with the Saudis and Gulf States and essentially precipitating a shooting war between NATO and Russia.

Which outcome is worse?

This week, the Syrian army, backed by Russian air strikes and Iranian-supported militias including Hezbollah, launched a major offensive to encircle rebel strongholds in the northern city of Aleppo, choking off one of the last two secure routes connecting the city to Turkey and closing in on the second. This would cut supplies not only to a core of the rebellion against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but also to the city’s 300,000 remaining civilians, who may soon find themselves besieged like hundreds of thousands of others in the country. In response, 50,000 civilians have fled Aleppo for the Turkish border, where the border crossing is currently closed. An unnamed U.S. defense official told The Daily Beast’s Nancy Youssef that “the war is essentially over” if Assad manages to seize and hold Aleppo.

The city, formerly Syria’s largest and its commercial and industrial hub, hasproven pivotal to the civil war in the past. As Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy explained to me, the rebels’ push to take Aleppo in 2012—following a year in which the city had seen relatively little of the protests and violence that had been escalating elsewhere in the country—“was one of the first real major offensives of the armed opposition in Syria.” The hope was to set up an alternative capital there to rival Damascus, and from that base to gradually expand opposition control. The city has been roughly divided between the regime and the rebels ever since, with Assad’s forces mainly in the west and opposition forces mainly in the east, and “with some parts of the city changing hands on a daily basis,” according to the BBC.

Critically, the rebels have controlled major roads to Turkey, which has allowed them to transport supplies into their half of the city and to their other strongholds in northern Syria. Government forces in western Aleppo, meanwhile, have been cut off from those ground routes and forced to rely on airplanes and helicopters to get supplies. As Aleppo became the site of a bloody urban war of attrition—in late 2013, Assad’s forces barrel-bombed the city for a month straight, and they have repeatedly tried to encircle it—the rebels have held on.

Russia’s military intervention in Syria, which began last fall, may change that. Unlike the U.S. coalition’s air strikes in the country, which have targeted ISIS-controlled areas in eastern Syria, Russia’s are targeting rebel groups, some of them backed by the United States, in the country’s west, including near Aleppo. “[T]he bombing over the last four months has significantly softened up the opposition, and decimated them in many areas,” Tabler said. Against that backdrop, and barring an unlikely breakthrough at international peace talks scheduled to resume this week (after they were called off following the Syrian army’s advance on Aleppo), the regime offensive to recapture the city may ultimately succeed, even if it takes starving its inhabitants into submission.

The frank analysis of author Kathy Gilsinan and Andrew Tabler is stark:

Gilsinan: And then what happens to the regional balance of power within that war?

Tabler: It would be a tremendous loss for the U.S. and its traditional allies: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan. It’s already been extremely costly for most of those allies, but it would be a defeat [in the face of] the Russian-Iranian intervention in Syria. This would also be a huge loss for the United States vis-à-vis Russia in its Middle East policy, certainly. And because of the flow of refugees as a result of this, if they go northward to Europe, then you would see a migrant crisis in Europe that could lead to far-right governments coming to power which are much more friendly to Russia than they are to the United States. I think that is likely to happen.

Gilsinan: So it changes the entire orientation, not just of the Middle East, but of Europe as well.

Tabler: It will soften up American power in Europe, yeah. And put into jeopardy a lot of the advances in the NATO-accession countries, which are adjacent to Russia, as well.

Gilsinan: That’s a staggeringly significant outcome for relatively cheap [expenditures] on Russia’s part.

Tabler: It is, isn’t it? I don’t think most people get how much of a blowout this really is. I don’t think most people understand: This defeat of the United States by Russia in Syria, it’s not just about Syria. It’s about our presence in Europe.

And if Aleppo falls, that's basically the ball game for NATO.  Putin got the better of us here, and he knows it. If we had intervened 3 years ago, maybe things would have been different, but Republicans (and Democrats) said no.

This is the result.

The Clown Car Crashes

The wheels came off the clown car last night in the GOP debate in South Carolina, and it happened at this point here.

During the second hour of the GOP debate in South Carolina on Saturday, the conversation went beyond anything ever seen in a Republican debate.

After the six men hurled insults back and forth, the debate took a steep dive into chaos around when Cruz hit Trump for previously supporting liberal policies.

“The next president is going appoint one, two, three, four Supreme Court Justices,” Cruz said. “If Donald Trump is president, he will appoint liberals. If Donald Trump is president… your Second Amendment will go away. You know how I know that?”

CBS moderator John Dickerson cut him off.

“Hold on gentlemen. I’m going to turn this car around,” Dickerson said.

When Trump continued talking and questioning Cruz’s conservative credentials, Dickerson again attempted to control the stage.

“All right, gentlemen… We’re in danger of driving this into the dirt.”

I mean, at some point voters have to realize that these guys are absolutely bonkers, right?

Right?

Sunday Long Read: The Long Climb Out

Recently, Charlotte, North Carolina was named the most difficult large city in the US for people to break the cycle of poverty in. I grew up in North Carolina and left for a reason, and as the state has become increasingly controlled by Republicans, I'm increasingly glad I did. Especially when I read stories like this about people working three jobs and still being poor.

WHEN SHE COMES home from work tonight, Toreasera “Kisha” Dawkins knows two things will happen: Her three daughters will be waiting for her, and her husband will call from prison.

She knows this as she finishes her nine-hour shift behind the cash register at the Mighty Midget Mart gas station on Albermarle Road. She knows this as she walks outside, wearing jeans and a red Shell T-shirt, her long, dark hair streaked with blond and pulled into a side ponytail. She knows this as she pops the hood of her faded green 2003 Dodge Grand Caravan.

It’s rush hour on a hot day in early July, and her radiator’s shot. Kisha, 37, pours in cold water to keep the engine from overheating. She can’t afford her rent, much less a new car, so for now, this will have to do.

She drives east past strip malls, Walmart, Goodwill—landmarks of life at the bottom rung of Charlotte’s economic ladder. As she pulls into her driveway, her daughters crowd around the front steps. “Hi, Mommy!” they shout, all bright eyes and round cheeks. But she is already on the phone, talking to their father.

Travis Dawkins is serving four to six years in a Gaston County prison for breaking and entering, and this is month eight. For several years, until he was arrested, he stayed home to raise the girls while their mom was at work. Now he’s a disembodied voice on the other end of the line, calling to make sure they remember him.

His daughters push open the screen door into their run-down ranch house, where a blanket-turned-curtain covers the front window. They race around the playroom, jumping on bare mattresses on the floor. Kisha holds out the phone and puts it on speaker so they can talk to their father. “Hey, Daddy, I love you, Daddy,” sings Ja’Mya, the four-year-old.

Kisha asks the girls to clean up their toys. Ja’Mya obeys, but her two-year-old sister, Zyauna, doesn’t, so her father tries to discipline her by speakerphone. “ZaZa, Daddy need you to put your listening ears on,” he says.

“OK, Daddy!” ZaZa shouts back.

She and Ja’Mya and their one-year-old sister, Tyasia, scramble around, putting away dolls and games. “Daddy say he love you,” their mother announces. “Tell Daddy bye.”

All three shout back in unison: “We love you, Daddy. Bye!”

This is Kisha’s family. It’s not the one she planned, and it’s not the one many social scientists would choose for her—a black woman raising three young children below the poverty line while her husband is in prison. Her family embodies many of the reasons it’s so difficult to escape poverty in Charlotte: segregated housing, unstable families, the growing distance between her paycheck and the one-fifth of Mecklenburg County households that earn more than $115,000 annually. Kisha works an average of 45 to 50 hours a week and earns $12,000 to $15,000 a year. Some would blame her choices, others her lot in life. As she sees it, her only option is to move forward, to keep working and juggling bills and treating ear infections and praying, until by some miracle, by some mysterious force she cannot understand, she can give her daughters a life better than her own.

And NC Republicans will shake their heads and tell you, while defunding Planned Parenthood, wanting to get rid of Obamacare, cutting school funding, refusing to raise the state's minimum wage, and making abortion all but impossible to access, is that Kisha Dawkins should never have had children she couldn't afford, and that the state of North Carolina can't afford to help her either.

The $12,000 a year she makes is too much money for Medicaid.  Republicans saw to that. She has to depend on church help and non-profit organizations just to put food on the table. She is working hard for her family and is sacrificing everything she has just to stay above water.

And Republicans do not give a good god damn about her and her three kids and never, ever will.

Remember that.

Eight Is Apparently Enough

I agree with WaPo's Amber Phillips that there's no reason, given the behavior of the GOP over the last seven years, to believe that Mitch McConnell will even allow a vote on confirming his Supreme Court nominee to replace Scalia. 

Come January 2017, Republicans have a chance at controlling the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House.

So it stands to reason that Republicans have very little incentive to even consider President Obama's suggestion for who should replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday.

There's some historical precedent for them to do just that. A hazy rule dating back decades that congressional experts say is really more of a tradition suggests senators of the opposition party of the White House can oppose some judicial nominations in the months before a presidential election.

It's known as the "Thurmond Rule," for reasons we'll get into, but there is widespread disagreement on what it even means and when it can be invoked.

"It's not a rule," said Russell Wheeler, a judicial expert with the Brookings Institution. "It's just sort of a pie-in-the-sky flexibility that both parties try to disown when it's convenient for them and try to say it means something when it's not."

Whether rule or tradition, it pops up throughout history in times like these, when a high-stakes judicial nomination collides with a presidential election.

But Wheeler and other congressional experts think the rule is less in-play now than in the past. Republicans have control of the Senate and can simply sit on the nomination if they want -- no matter how much the other side cries foul.

If the very real prospect of someone like Donald Trump appointing a Supreme Court Justice doesn't scare the crap out of the "Not a dime's worth of difference between the parties" voters turned off by Hillary or Bernie, then we deserve what we get.

But considering voters haven't bothered to punish the GOP Congress at all and in fact have rewarded them at every turn, there's no reason to believe that a President Sanders or Clinton would be able to get anyone confirmed either.

Don't expect this vacancy to be filled.  Hell, I half expect calls from the GOP and the Broderites to either appoint a right-wing nut like Scalia or for Justice Ginsberg to retire to make a seven-justice SCOTUS "fair".

This is the entire ball game for the GOP if Scalia is replace by a liberal justice, and they damn well know it.  They will resist by any and every means necessary.  You thought they hated Obama before?

You have no idea.

BREAKING: Justice Antonin Scalia Dead At 79

America just got real interesting.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a leading conservative voice on the high court, has died at the age of 79, a government source and a family friend told CNN on Saturday.

Scalia died in his sleep during a visit to Texas.

A government official said Scalia went to bed Friday night and told friends he wasn't feeling well. Saturday morning, he didn't get up for breakfast. And the group he was with for a hunting trip left without him.

Someone at the ranch went in to check on him and found him unresponsive.

First of all, as wrong and as awful as Scalia's politics were as a jurist, he was a human being who had a family, a wife and nine children who lost a husband and father. "Great and terrible things, but great nonetheless" as they say.

Second of all, having said that, there is no way Republicans are going to let Obama nominate anyone to replace him. GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell's statement today:

"Today our country lost an unwavering champion of a timeless document that unites each of us as Americans. Justice Scalia's fidelity to the Constitution was rivaled only by the love of his family: his wife Maureen his nine children, and his many grandchildren. Through the sheer force of his intellect and his legendary wit, this giant of American jurisprudence almost singlehandedly revived an approach to constitutional interpretation that prioritized the text and original meaning of the Constitution. Elaine and I send our deepest condolences to the entire Scalia family.

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

No matter what you believe about Scalia, or Obama, think about the last time a Senate leader said that a sitting President had no right to name a replacement justice to the Supreme Court.

You're up, Mr. President.

Never A Given

I'm still not sold on Bernie Sanders, not by any stretch of the imagination, and I doubt any of the regulars here at ZVTS are truly sold on the man. But as Joy-Ann Reid reminds us, Hillary Clinton isn't a given now any more than she was in 2008 and she has a lot of work to do to.

Even before Sen. Bernie Sanders began surging in early state and national polls, the Hillary Clinton campaign viewed South Carolina as her firewall, mainly due to her much higher standing and name recognition with black voters. But there are signs that the Clinton team may be falling behind the Sanders campaign, both in terms of organizing on the ground and exciting black voters, even as former Secretary Clinton maintains a large lead in the polls and prognosticators like FiveThirtyEight.com give her overwhelming odds of winning the state’s primary in two weeks.

As of last week, the Clinton campaign had only two campaign offices in South Carolina: one in Charleston and another in the capital, Columbia, with just 14 full-time staffers including state director Clay Middleton. The campaign also has nine “get out the vote” sites – smaller-scale sites devoted to turnout – across the state.

The Sanders campaign, meanwhile, had 240 staffers on the ground as of last week – 80 percent of them African-American – spread across 10 offices statewide.

“That’s real infrastructure,” said one veteran South Carolina political consultant who was involved in the 2008 effort to elect Barack Obama and who spoke on background. “[Donald] Trump lost Iowa because his campaign didn’t have infrastructure and Ted Cruz did. That’s what gets people to the polls. And Hillary is the very person who should know about infrastructure, because that’s how she lost to Obama in 2008 in the first place.”

The Sanders campaign is using both traditional and innovative strategies to reach voters, including “Bernie Bingo” for seniors who get a ride to the polls after enjoying the board game with the youthful canvassers. Voters in South Carolina have been able to vote early, absentee or in person since January 1, and the Sanders campaign is taking full advantage before the end of early voting for Democrats on February 26.

Primary voting days for Republicans and Democrats are February 20 and 27 respectively.

Don't get me wrong, in the general I think Hillary is far better equipped to withstand the rigors of next fall. Bernie's thin-skinned and cranky and frankly he's just as pragmatic as Hillary when it comes to politics, because he's been in politics for four decades, 25 years at the federal level and only became a freaking Democrat like last Tuesday. But at some point Bernie Sanders decided, much like Barack Obama did in early 2008, that he can win this thing, and he's proceeding to do what he needs to do to win.

Good or bad, Hillary Clinton now has a race on her hands.  That is what both sides said they wanted, so here we go.

Be careful what you wish for.

Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't

This week Gov. Matt Bevin, champion of smaller government, paragon individual responsibility, and destroyer of onoerous regulatory burdens, signed into law the "Kentucky Women Are Too Stupid To Be Allowed Reproductive Choices" Act.

The signing of Bevin's "Informed and Consent" abortion bill started with a five-minute-long prayer, which received a loud applause from supporters of the new legislation. 

The bill, signed last week, requires women seeking abortions to have a face-to-face consultation -- in person or by live video chat -- at least 24 hours before an abortion. 

The previous bill allowed women to listen to a recorded message about risks and benefits. 

"Many have fought for a long, long time to see meaningful prolife legislation come out of this legislature and be signed into law. This is the first of any significance in 12 years,” Bevin said. 

"We know that abortion is wrong at its core. It's evil. So we're never going to go away,” Susan Kenney said. 

And there are some who don’t agree. 

"Planned Parenthood is the most effective abortion reducing, abortion preventing organization that exists," Geoff Young said. 

"We are going to celebrate and appreciate the importance of human life and the sanctity of every human life,” Bevin said.

Sure, unless that life needs Medicaid, in which case it can go screw itself.  Needless to say, Bevin's getting burnt online.

Women in Kentucky are taking to social media to ask Governor MattBevin questions about their vaginas in protest at a new anti-abortion bill signed by the Republican governor. Twitter users have been using thehashtag #askbevinaboutmyvag to direct gynaecological questions at the first-term politician.

The bill requires women to have a face-to-face consultation - either over live video chat or in person - at least 24 hours before receiving an abortion. Previously, women were required to only listen to a recorded message about the risks and benefits of undergoing the procedure. Bevinis also supporting a bill that has passed the Kentucky senate, requiring any woman seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound - if the bill becomes law, doctors who do not comply could face fines between $100,000 and $250,000 (£69,000 and £172,000). 

Derek Selznick, director of the Kentucky ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, told the Lexington Herald-Leader: "This is not informed consent. This is about politicians trying to bully, shame and humiliate women who have already made the personal, informed and heart-wrenching decision to terminate a pregnancy."

Which is exactly what Bevin and his holy rollers are doing.

But you voted for him, Kentucky.  You get what you pay for, right?

That Big Grayson Area

It's been a while since we've checked in with Rep. Alan Grayson, back in the House and running for Marco Rubio's seat in the Senate.  As the New York Times notes, Grayson has an interesting day job outside of being in Congress: that of hedge fund manager. And the House Ethics Committee apparently has a few questions for him.

This highly unusual dual role — a sitting House lawmaker running a hedge fund, which until recently had operations in the Cayman Islands — has led to an investigation of Mr. Grayson by the House Committee on Ethics.

The inquiry has become public, but emails and marketing documents obtained by The New York Times show the extent to which Mr. Grayson’s roles as a hedge fund manager and a member of Congress were intertwined, and how he promoted his international travels, some with congressional delegations, to solicit business.

Interviews and the documents show that Mr. Grayson told potential investors in his hedge fund that they should contribute money to the fund to capitalize on the unrest he observed around the world, and to take particular advantage when there was “blood in the streets.” 

The emails also show how Mr. Grayson’s work for the hedge fund, which had $16.4 million in assets as of October, at times interfered with his other duties. In August 2015, after Mr. Grayson introduced legislation calling for larger annual increases in Social Security benefits, he signed off on a plan to highlight the proposal at an event in Tampa, Fla., emails obtained by The Times show. But the plan was scuttled, two former aides said, when economic turmoil in China sent stock markets tumbling globally and Mr. Grayson had to turn his attention to the fund. 

Ken Scudder, a spokesman for Mr. Grayson, disputed that account. “There has never been any time when Representative Grayson’s investment activities have disrupted any of his work, whether official or campaign-related,” he said. 

Mr. Grayson says he has done nothing wrong. “Here is something that is not true: that I somehow traded on my membership as a U.S. congressman to get clients for this fund,” Mr. Grayson said in an interview. He added that in the last year he had refunded the full original investments put in by his two outside investors in a fund that had faced steep losses — leaving only Mr. Grayson and a family trust invested in the fund.

Look, Grayson would make an infinitely better US Senator than Marco Rubio and I hope he wins, but...the guy is literally a Wall Street hedge fund manager.  Let's not pretend he's some sort of scrappy outsider here who doesn't play the game.  There's a reason Congress is filled by the rich elite in both parties, and Grayson's one of them.

He has a spine.  He also has a hedge fund.  They are not mutually exclusive.

Last Call For More And More

The cottage industry of black intellectuals scolding President Obama for "not doing enough for the black community" will continue as long as they can make money off selling books, and the most recent entry in the genre is Michael Eric Dyson's "The Black Presidency" and this Salon interview with David Daley is indicative of the game.

You’re saying, for example, he hadn’t been pulled over in Ferguson time and again and given tickets that got him jailed and unable to get to work. 

That’s right. Some of that, but not a bunch of it. Enough to be sensitive to it, but not enough to be angered by it. 

Would he have been able to be angered by it, though? If he was the kind of person who was angered by it, would that have threatened the same kind of multiracial coalition that put him in office? 

You’re absolutely right. If Obama had been a different kind of black man, he never would have been a different kind of president, because he couldn’t have been president. In many ways, the things that he felt, saw and believed, permitted him a kind of racial innocence and racial optimism that many white Americans were able to tap into. This is somebody we know, this man is familiar with our mores and folkways, our intuitions, our rhythms, our timbre, our tone, the echo of our voice. This is a man who intuits it. As a result of that, Obama was put into office because he didn’t bring precisely, when we see him, this baggage. Obama did not guilt white America, and as a result of that, they repaid him with the benefit of becoming the president of the United States of America. And that’s an understandable exchange, but in that exchange there have been some costly negotiations, one of which is the assault upon black identity and being. Another of which is that Obama did not champion those people as citizens of the state that he ran. It’s not simply that because you’re black and they’re black you’ve got to hook them up. No, it’s because they are citizens of the state that you preside over. 

When Obama said repeatedly, “I am not the president of black America.” True, but you are president of black Americans, and they are citizens as well. So caught in the troubled nexus of political idealism and racial innocence, or at least racial optimism, was the progress of black people. And that was sacrificed on the altar of Obama’s elevation. 

And here we are in year eight of this administration and something as elemental as Black Lives Matter is a flashpoint of controversy and debate. 

So true. The irony, of course, is that Black Lives Matter emerges under Obama. The first black presidency has elicited all of these horrible, racist sentiments and, equally powerful, a movement of black peoples, of a younger generation in particular, who are not only combating the structural flaws of a state that disallows or discourages the flourishing of black people, but [are] attacking as well the aesthetics and the representation of blackness. The animus toward blackness as an ideal, they’re fighting on both levels. On a cultural level and a political level. This is a peculiar mark of a black presidency, because of its deep and profound symbolism. They therefore are fighting symbol with symbol, as well as substance against substance. It’s a remarkable movement in that way.

And if this sounds familiar, it's the same damn argument that Cornel West and Tavis Smiley keep making: Obama wasn't black enough to scare white people until after he decided to actually try to change things for the better. Once that happened, he was too black for Fox News and not black enough for people like West, Dyson, and the rest.

Nobody sets up black America for failure like black America, I'm telling you.

This Is Spartanburg!

The battle for South Carolina's primary votes are heating up for both parties, but for Hillary Clinton the state is something of a must win (the way New Hampshire was for Bernie).  Matthew Yglesias actually nails it here when he says Clinton needs to get moving if she wants to win.

In the states ahead, Clinton needs exactly what she didn't have in Iowa and New Hampshire: a clear winning argument against Sanders. Right now, though, she has four arguments, many of which are in tension with each other:

1. Clinton and Sanders largely agree on goals, but Clinton has a more realistic plan for achieving those goals.
2. Sanders's left-wing policies on taxes, health care, and higher education are in facttoo left-wing and should be rejected in favor of more moderate ones.
3. Sanders is not in fact as left-wing as he seems, as you can see from his stance on gun control and his votes on the 2007 immigration reform bill.
4. Whether or not you prefer Sanders on the merits, you should vote Clinton, because Sanders is easier for the Republicans to beat.

All four of these arguments have some merit, but there's no particular reason to think that any of them are naturally more appealing in the big March states or to minority voters than they were to white voters in the early states. If she's able to get more persuasive on point 4, and do a better job of clarifying which of 1 through 3 she actually wants to argue, then there's every reason to believe she'll win the nomination. But if she continues to muddle through buoyed by a vague sense of inevitable minority support, then she's in trouble.

I'll throw in a fifth reason: turnout compared to 2008.  It's down big time for the Democrats in both Iowa and New Hampshire so far.  The argument that Bernie and Hillary have to work to earn votes makes much more sense when you realize that turnout is worse than 8 years ago, and significantly so.

Let's hope that happens.