A Welcoming Community
This is roughly what happened with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina when he recently tried to criticize Donald Trump.
An East Texas man was hospitalized early Thursday morning after a bullet he fired at an armadillo ricocheted back at his head, KLTV reported.
The army should forget about buying body armor for our troops and just have them carry an armadillo into battle.
At least twice a month I try to head over to George Washington University’s National Security Archive site to see what fascinating new documents they have succeeded in getting declassified. This month, they have a nice collection. One cache is not ready to view, yet, but will be thanks to successful court fight: Court Rejects Chiquita’s Bid to Hide Terror Payment Records. For those of you who don’t know, Chiquita used to be called the United Fruit Company of Dulles Brothers fame. If I get the free time (somewhat unlikely), I will do a post about this.
The second cache is right up my alley. The documents focus on the Ford administration’s internal strategy for dealing with the congressional investigations (the Senate Church Committee and House Pike Committee) into the intelligence community beginning in 1975. It turns out that Deputy Chief of Staff (at the time) Dick Cheney was the point man for obstructing these investigations.
I’ve written about this before on more than one occasion…
I have developed a theory that Dick Cheney has made it a personal mission to eliminate every piece of legislation that was enacted post-Watergate to rein in the intelligence community. –Martin Longman, January 4th, 2007.
…but I never had this kind of documentary proof.
I wish we had been armed with more of this kind of information back in 2000 when Dick Cheney was still somewhat unknown and when memories of the fights of the 1970’s weren’t quite so stale. His behavior once in the vice-presidency struck many, including me, as a departure from what we expected. More familiarity with his role in the Ford administration would have prepared us better for what was to come. We might even have been able to raise enough doubt about Cheney’s judgment to swing the election.
Lord knows, it wouldn’t have taken much to do that.
What’s on your mind?
When the New York Times commissioned a cover for the January 24, 2014 issue of its Sunday Magazine, the result was an eye popping departure from the norm. Readers accustomed to covers of political powerhouses like those of Barack Obama looking presidential, a thoughtful Newt Gingrich with his chin resting on intertwined fingers or Sarah Palin flashing her toothy smile, were assaulted with an unflattering rendering of the head of a hairless Hillary Clinton embedded in a planet orbiting amidst an interstellar array of objects variously identified as the Chelsea Quasar, Friends of Bill Black Hole, Katzenberg’s Comet, and so on and so forth.
The cover by artist Jesse Lenz for an article by Amy Chozick titled “Planet Hillary” on Clinton’s influence on the people within her political universe, generated so much comment that Arem Duplessis, then the magazine’s design editor, wrote a story about its genesis, including an acknowledgement that earlier versions that presented Clinton in a more humorous and less grotesque light were rejected. Many readers were merely bemused, but some defaulted to an oft-peddled line: The Times had it in for Hillary Clinton and yet again had gone out of its way to portray her in a negative light. Indeed, when Clinton’s husband had last appeared on the magazine’s cover, he was flatteringly photographed in a dark suit with a hot pink necktie and relaxed demeanor. Indeed, the title of the article was “The Mellowing of William Jefferson Clinton.”
“This is a good study into how a merely bad idea turns into fullblown idiocy,” wrote one indignant reader. “What woman ever wants to be portrayed as a huge, round, bald blob of head, capable of gobbling up whole galaxies?” asked another.
The Times pleaded that no harm was meant by the cover, but Clinton’s defenders were back on the attack against The Gray Lady late last month after an extraordinary series of gaffes that began with an exclusive story published online and then in some print editions stating that the inspectors general for the State Department and intelligence agencies had sent a referral to the Justice Department requesting a “criminal investigation” into whether Clinton “mishandled sensitive government information” on a private email account when she was secretary of state. The account had become a controversy in its own right, the subject of Republican-led congressional investigations, relentlessly biased coverage on Fox News, and attacks by some of the Republicans who hope to face the presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2016 presidential election.
There followed a series of clarifications, changes and corrections that raised more questions — about The Times coverage and motivation — than they answered. Then came a tough column by Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan in which she took issue with the paper’s seemingly laissez faire use of the “multiple high-level” confidential government sources who “confirmed” the investigation and faulted it for a lack of transparency, and finally an unsigned Editors’ Note, certainly written by or at the behest of Dean Baquet, who as executive editor holds the highest ranking position in The Times‘ newsroom, that obliquely apologized for missteps “that may have left readers with a confused picture.”
It turns out that the “criminal investigation” was merely a procedural step in a bureaucratic dance to determine whether sensitive government information was mishandled, rather than whether Clinton herself mishandled information, but the damage had been done and the impression further cemented that the most influential media outlet on the planet — that is Planet Earth, not Planet Hillary — had again gone out of its way to portray her in an unflattering light.
I reach a somewhat different conclusion about the email story and The Times‘ coverage of Clinton overall, although one not particularly more favorable to the paper. As a career journalist who sat through hundreds of story meetings, vetted dozens of potentially controversial political stories, and directed the campaign coverage of a major metropolitan newspaper for no fewer than four presidential elections while being involved in 12 presidential elections in all, I believe that The Times made two fundamental errors of judgment that resulted in what Public Editor Sullivan termed “was, to put it mildly, a mess”:
* Reporting a less sensational version of the story would have been smart. Waiting another day to publish the story would have been smarter, but that’s not how the news business works in a hyper-competitive 24/7 world when fairness, accuracy and transparency take a back seat to being first.
* Lurking behind those shadowy confidential sources are people who want to embarrass Clinton, almost certainly including Representative Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House’s so-called Benghazi Committee and previously the source of intentionally misleading leaks concerning Clinton.
My review of The Times‘ last 50 Hillary Clinton stories betrays no particular bias, only a pretty damned good paper with a richness of resources that is devoting a fair number of them to covering a person who in great likelihood will be the next president. But as the most influential media outlet, The Times is going to be second guessed as well as be gamed by people with less than pure motives like Gowdy. The former comes with the territory; succumbing to the latter in unacceptable.
It’s gotten to the point that it appears almost like a nervous tic. Pundits and political scientists feel like it’s absolutely necessary to preface anything they have to say about Donald Trump with a caveat that “of course I know that Trump will never win the nomination.”
Here’s an example from Hans Noel over at Mischiefs of Faction:
Everyone knows the polls are wrong. We just don’t all agree on why. I don’t know anyone who thinks Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president, any more than Kang or Kodos were going to be. National parties don’t nominate cartoon characters for president. So what are we to make of his leading in early polls?
I have no intention of singling out or picking on Noel here. It seems like everyone is making the same disclaimer. And I think there are several motivations for it. One is simple sheepishness. People feel somewhat guilty to be writing about Trump because it lends him a credibility that they don’t think he deserves. They also don’t want to appear gullible or foolish. If they don’t rule out the possibility that Trump might win, their colleagues might think they’re drinking the hard stuff before lunch.
Additionally, I think most longtime political observers are personally offended by Trump and Trump’s success, which is why we see a lot of ad hominem attacks (e.g., he’s a “cartoon character”) that are not normally included in dispassionate political analyses.
But the most important parts of that excerpt above are not the prediction and the personal attack. The most important parts are “we don’t all agree on why” Trump is doing so well and “what are we to make of his leading in the early polls?”
Because I am not seeing too many people who have arrived at solid, confident answers to that question.
Now, I have been insisting that it’s a big mistake to look for the answer in Trump, but I need to backtrack on that just a little bit. Trump has some attributes that make it possible for him to be the messenger here. Not just anyone can demonize 11% of the population as “rapists,” call John McCain a fraud, and get a boost in the polls by calling members of his own party a bunch of stupid losers.
It’s a big asset for Trump that he can respond to attacks from Senator Lindsey Graham by giving out his cell phone number. It’s key for him that his competitors have coveted his money and his endorsement over the years. And it’s also crucial that he can point to his personal fortune to argue that he knows what he’s doing. A lot of people are willing to listen to him for no other reason than that he’s a billionaire.
So, no, Joe the Plumber couldn’t pull this off. It’s doubtful that a normal politician could pull it off.
Overall, however, people are not really responding to Trump as a guy they like personally. He’s a colossal narcissist and blowhard with manners that are horrible even by New York City standards. What they’re responding to is really two things. First, Trump’s primary message is about Latino immigration. People who don’t like Latinos are falling all over themselves to support Trump.
And, second, people have noticed that our political system is broken and that the Republican leaders, in particular, are the worst of the lot. The more you insult John McCain, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the better you are likely to do. And it doesn’t really matter who you ask. Virtually everyone outside of the Beltway genuinely loathes these people and enjoys seeing them insulted. The other candidates are stuck on insulting Democrats, but there’s nothing original or exciting in a Republican candidate for office insulting Hillary Clinton.
Simply by championing white nativism and waging war on the Republican leadership, Trump has doubled his support even as the Beltway narrators clutch their pearls and act appalled.
And that gets to this idea that political parties do not nominate cartoon characters. I think that’s a tough sell after the Republican Party did just that seven years ago with Sarah Palin.
I think the experts are just reluctant to come to terms with the current state of the Republican Party. Without going into everything that is going wrong with the GOP, it’s a party that is coming apart at the seams. And it’s deeply unpopular with its own base. Just this week we saw the Senate Majority Leader called a liar by a colleague on the Senate floor and a tepid challenge to Speaker Boehner’s gavel by a North Carolina backbencher in the House of Representatives.
It’s against this backdrop that Trump is moving rapidly up the polls even as the party and the media move to marginalize him.
What needs to be understood, first and foremost, is that we’re nearing the logical conclusion of a sequence of decisions that the right has made over the last several decades to delegitimize our core institutions. In this I include most obviously the political chattering class, but also the federal government (the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court), the Republican leadership, academia, and more recently even the scientific community. The result is that a huge swath of the right-leaning electorate can no longer be reached. The only messengers who still have credibility with these folks are the ones who are willing to call bullshit on the whole enchilada.
Keep a couple of important concepts in mind. First, the right hasn’t just been sold a bill of goods on things like voter fraud and Benghazi and Obamacare. They’ve also been promised a bunch of things that the Republican politicians either had no ability or no intention to fulfill. The Republican bigwigs don’t want to ban abortion. This isn’t Falangist Spain or Paraguay or Saudi Arabia. This isn’t Greece, either, and the GOP leaders have no desire to abolish the IRS. When the Republicans last had a man in the Oval Office, he vastly increased the power of the Department of Education and created a huge new prescription drug entitlement program for the elderly. This wasn’t some aberration. The Republicans who hold federal office aren’t nearly as opposed to federal power as they’d like their base of supporters to believe. They also have the ability to jettison their own bullshit when the bullshit hits the fan, which is why they pay our debts and why they gave the banks a huge bailout despite it contradicting their previously declared ideology. What we’re seeing now is a growing realization that nominating another Bush and expecting these promises to be kept is Einstein’s definition of insanity.
The second thing to keep in mind is that the right has been enduring a string of brutal defeats which have only been mitigated somewhat by their successes in the last two midterm elections. The Supreme Court just legalized gay marriage in all 50 states, which wasn’t what the right had in mind when they went to polls in droves in 2004 to pass anti-gay marriage initiatives and referendums. We just normalized relations with Cuba and are talking about making an historic agreement with Iran. The Confederate Flag just lost its last semblance of official respectability. The Affordable Care Act survived its last serious legal challenge and is here to stay.
And they’ve been badly discredited, too. Iraq didn’t go as planned. Gitmo didn’t go as planned. Torturing folks didn’t go as planned. Massive tax cuts and deregulation didn’t go as planned.
So, when you add all of this up, you have a movement that is completely lost at sea with terrible morale.
And their prospects are even dimmer as the younger generations do not share their values or mourn the America that we’re leaving behind. Demographic changes make it harder for conservatives to win each successive presidential election, which is another reason beyond pure race-hatred why the Latino issue touches such a nerve with these folks.
Now, finally, add in the changing economy and the shrinking middle class, which are stressing people out regardless of their ideology.
It shouldn’t be a shock to people that the right in this country is in a mood.
And right about now a “cartoon character” looks better than the real thing.
So, what’s driving Trump up in the polls is mostly not about Trump at all. I think a better way of asking this question is try to get at what is driving everyone else down.
Even without new campaign finance laws that make it impossible for the Republican Party leadership to control the nominating process, we’d still be seeing mayhem in their ranks. They’ve been led on and lied to, told to trust no one, taught to disrespect everything, and their reward is defeat and hopelessness.
Until you understand what a massive fraud has been perpetrated on the right by the right, you will not begin to understand Trump’s success.
Before he could begin to be plausible, they first had to prepare the ground so that Birtherism would strike these people as plausible. Donald Trump didn’t do that; he just exploited it once it was done.
And he’s still exploiting it.
So, when no one you know thinks that Trump will be the nominee, maybe they’re correct. But maybe they just haven’t thought this through because the consequences are too frightening and depressing to contemplate.
Do I think Trump will be the nominee?
No, not really.
But I don’t preface everything I have to say about him with some assurance that it will never happen.
The GOP is truly, finally, totally fucked up. And it’s the biggest national disaster I’ve ever witnessed.
The only thing I’m confident about is that this will not end well.
The Intel and DoD establishment has been coming out
against the FBI’s campaign to weaken or backdoor encryption programs. We
can speculate why but the inside fighting first became public at a corporate
forum and now has reached the Editorial page of the govt. “hometown” paper.
Once its been accepted there, then the decisions have been made at the head
office and its just an announcement to the factory floor. Sure there will
still be hearings and “think” pieces and long winded interviews but Money
Talks, Bullshit Walks. And there is MONEY to be made if the fact (or
illusion) of program integrity is maintained. And those who are the white
knights fighting on the side of good? They left the secret part of the govt
to become “consultants” in technology and security. Other words, they are
recognized “experts” who have gravitas with the inhabitants of official
Washington from being”in the trenches”.. “If only I could tell you what I
know but I can’t, so just believe me.” Well, they are now the mouthpieces
of the software giants and sell both the big programs and grease the way for
the public/private intelligence services. All of which could be much less
profitable if the FBI proposal gets its big, flat, policeman’s shoes in
game. No thanks.
Or another cynical take could be that that openly creating the hole would push
suspect individuals or organizations away from public applications and create private ones
which would not have the backdoors or strenghtened in other ways.
Otherwords, shut up about backdoors and let us carry one with what we are
doing.
R
————excerpt—————-
“Why the fear over ubiquitous data encryption is overblown “
By Mike McConnell, Michael Chertoff and William Lynn July 28
Mike McConnell is a former director of the National Security Agency and
director of national intelligence. Michael Chertoff is a former homeland
security secretary and is executive chairman of the Chertoff Group, a
security and risk management advisory firm with clients in the technology
sector. William Lynn is a former deputy defense secretary and is chief
executive of Finmeccanica North America and DRS Technologies.
“…..We recognize the importance our officials attach to being able to
decrypt a coded communication under a warrant or similar legal authority.
But the issue that has not been addressed is the competing priorities that
support the companies’ resistance to building in a back door or duplicated
key for decryption. We believe that the greater public good is a secure
communications infrastructure protected by ubiquitous encryption at the
device, server and enterprise level without building in means for government
monitoring.
First, such an encryption system would protect individual privacy and
business information from exploitation at a much higher level than exists
today. As a recent MIT paper explains, requiring duplicate keys introduces
vulnerabilities in encryption that raise the risk of compromise and theft by
bad actors. If third-party key holders have less than perfect security, they
may be hacked and the duplicate key exposed. This is no theoretical
possibility, as evidenced by major cyberintrusions into supposedly secure
government databases and the successful compromise of security tokens held
by a major information security firm. Furthermore, requiring a duplicate key
rules out security techniques, such as one-time-only private keys.
Second, a requirement that U.S. technology providers create a duplicate key
will not prevent malicious actors from finding other technology providers
who will furnish ubiquitous encryption. The smart bad guys will find ways
and technologies to avoid access, and we can be sure that the “dark Web”
marketplace will offer myriad such capabilities. This could lead to a
perverse outcome in which law-abiding organizations and individuals lack
protected communications but malicious actors have them.
Finally, and most significantly, if the United States can demand that
companies make available a duplicate key, other nations such as China will
insist on the same. There will be no principled basis to resist that legal
demand. The result will be to expose business, political and personal
communications to a wide spectrum of governmental access regimes with
varying degrees of due process.
Strategically, the interests of U.S. businesses are essential to protecting
U.S. national security interests. After all, political power and military
power are derived from economic strength. If the United States is to
maintain its global role and influence, protecting business interests from
massive economic espionage is essential. And that imperative may outweigh
the tactical benefit of making encrypted communications more easily
accessible to Western authorities. ….
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-need-for-ubiquitous-data-encryption/2015/07/28/3d145952-
324e-11e5-8353-1215475949f4_story.html
A lot of people seem really disturbed that polls are going to be used to determine who will and will not be on the stage for the first couple of Republican debates. I’ll admit that there are a number of problems with this approach, but the only other viable solution I can think of would be to have several debates and randomize which candidates will appear in each one.
Let’s start with a basic premise. It’s not worth having a debate at all if no one has more than a few minutes to talk. I think ten people is already too big, and I actually think five participants is pushing the edge of pointlessness. So, it’s completely justifiable to create some arbitrary cutoff.
Then you need some criteria that you can use to justify excluding folks. And once you’ve vetted the candidates to make sure that they’ve filed the paperwork to run and submitted financial statements that prove that they’re taking steps in that direction, there isn’t any better objective measure than an average of polls.
Honestly, what else could you use? How much money they’ve raised? How many elected officials have endorsed their campaigns?
No matter what you do, it will be somewhat unfair and it will create some kind of perverse incentive.
Now, if I had to devise a fair system, I’d count up how many people have met the basic requirements and divide by four. If there are twelve candidates, I’ll throw their names in a hat and create three separate debates with four candidates each. If they are 16 candidates, then I’ll have four debates. If they are nineteen, then I’ll have five and the last one only have three participants.
If you want, you can do the same thing but instead of dividing by four, you could divide by five, six, or seven.
Anything more than seven strikes me as clearly a waste of everyone’s time. At eight candidates, a two-hour debate would leave each candidate less than 15 minutes of total time, owing to the time wasted on introductions, questions, cross-talk, and a commercial break or two. At ten candidates, they’re fighting to get close to twelve minutes of total time. And that’s if the debate is a full two hours. I think historically a lot of debates have been only 90 minutes long.
With my solution of limiting each debate to four participants, they’d have close to a half-hour each in a two-hour debate and still more than 20 minutes each in a ninety-minute debate.
Obviously, there are some practicalities that I’m discounting a bit. Most obviously, there’s the problem with having moderators available for up to five debates, and then there’s the need for an audience and the issue with broadcasting them in near-equal near-contemporaneous primetime slots.
I’m not saying that the logistics here are easy but, where possible, simple randomness is a better introduction of unfairness than the design they’ve gone with, and randomness is hard to game and doesn’t create perverse incentives to act like a clown or a loudmouth or the biggest fire-breathing partisan of the bunch.
So, let me do this. Let me put the candidates’ names in a hat and create the debates.
For our purposes, I am going with 17 candidates, so, three debates of four and one debate of five.
I think it turned out pretty well considering it was random.
At our first debate, we’ll have five participants. It’s going to have a bit of a Mid-Atlantic flavor and the headliner is going to be New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who is grateful for the spotlight. He’ll have to contend with culture warriors Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Ben Carson of Maryland, and he’ll need to out-hawk Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The last participant is former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore who will be able to discuss Christie’s actual record as an executive. This is the only debate without a frontrunner, but that could make it interesting for precisely that reason.
Our second debate will have some real fireworks. Through the luck of the draw, Jeb Bush has been matched up with The Donald, and The Donald has been matched up against his newfound nemesis, former Texas Governor Rick Perry. Perry, of course, is currently under a first-degree felony indictment, which should make for a lively topic of conversation. Also, Perry recently called Trump a cancer on conservatism. In the middle of this madness, milquetoast former New York Governor George Pataki will try to be earnest and serious. Ha! Good luck with that! The big question here is whether Jeb can escape without getting all kind of ick stuck to him.
In the third debate our headliner will be Marco Rubio, but we can call this the “Cuban debate” because it will also feature Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Something tells me that both men are disappointed by this draw. These two senators will have to scrap it out with Ohio Governor John “I Hate Hip-Hop” Kasich and former Arkansas Governor Mike “Everything is the Holocaust” Huckabee. What this will really be is an opportunity for Kasich and Rubio to square off for the gravitas prize. But it won’t be easy with Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee squealing about the imminent death of everyone from Iranian Electromagnetic Pulse space weapons.
Our last debate will be headlined by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. He’ll be the one to defend orthodox movement conservatism against the pseudo-libertarian stylings of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Which one is the “authentic” conservative? While those two gentleman square off, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal will take time off from his exorcisms to talk about how he’s the most Christian man in America. And business woman and former CEO Carly Fiorina will wonder how she ended up down the rabbit hole and on the wrong side of the looking glass.
Say what you want about these hypothetical debates, but we’d learn more from them than we’ll ever learn from ten-people debates. And it’s a fair system to start things out. You know, there would be winners and losers and poll movement resulting from these debates, and eventually the polling data might be more meaningful and a better way of excluding some folks.
Which debate would you want to watch?
[Cross-posted at Progress Pond]
Bloomberg Politics held a focus group of supporters of Donald Trump in New Hampshire and let me tell you that the resulting article is dangerous because nearly ever word threatens to leap off the page and taser you with Stupid.
But before I get into all that let me just clear something up. What have I been saying about these folks? Well, I am right.
Trump’s remarks about whether McCain, the Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee, should be described as a war hero rubbed some in the group the wrong way.
“I thought that was disrespectful,” said Jean, a banker. “Regardless of whether he [McCain] was technically a war hero or not, it was disrespectful.”
As for Trump’s characterization of undocumented immigrants as “rapists,” however, many in the room said it didn’t bother them.
Trump’s racism is no obstacle for these people, which they freely admit. What they’re less willing to say is that his racism is his primary appeal.
And if you think the McCain thing bothered them, well, it bothered some of them a little bit, but others not so much.
“I haven’t heard a lot of positions,” Andy said. “But one thing is when he takes a position, and I’ll use the John McCain thing, he didn’t turn around two days later and say ‘Oh no, that’s not what I’m supposed to say.’ He stayed with what he believed in, and that’s, to me, what I’m looking for.”
This is a guy who went around the country for a year telling people that the president was a fraud who was born in Kenya and faked his birth-certificate. And that’s what this guy Andy is looking for.
Now, take a look at this (emphasis mine):
“Donald Trump is strong,” Nick, a home inspector, said. “He carries a sentiment and frustrations that I think a lot of Americans are going through and feeling right now. He’s the one that’s able to articulate that, and bring those frustrations to light. I believe him when he talks.”
“He says it like it is,” said Jessica, a data analyst, during the focus group in the first-in-the-nation primary state, conducted by Purple Strategies at St. Anselm College in Manchester. “He speaks the truth.”
Saying whatever damn thing pops into you head isn’t the same thing as being “strong” or being believable or speaking the truth. But for some people, simply being obnoxious is a precious virtue. This guy thinks he’d be a great president:
“I think he’d be calling out everybody,” John, a construction worker, said. “I think it’d be pretty good.”
This guy can’t wait for the insane press conferences:
“I think it would be exciting,” Roger said. “I really do. I look forward to it. It’ll be an interesting thing every day.”
When asked what a Trump presidency would be like, this woman revealed that she’s never been to Atlantic City:
“Classy,” said Cheryl, a real estate agent.
And this guy wins the award for being a moron:
“Specifically, he said he’ll put a wall on the southern border,” Roger, who works with the elderly, said. “When you talk about common sense, that’s a common-sense thing to do.”
But, for my money, this woman has my favorite quote:
“He’s like one of us. He may be a millionaire, which separates him from everybody else, but besides the money issue, he’s still in tune with what everybody is wanting,” Janet, a former dog breeder, said.
He’s actually a billionaire. You’re a former dog breeder. And he’s in tune with what you’re wanting because he called Mexicans a bunch of rapists and suggested building a 2,000-mile wall to keep the out? Because he called a bunch of people “losers”?
Maybe the next time Janet is clipping coupons she’ll find a discount on a brain.
Back in 2006, John Kasich released a book called Stand for Something. The title seems pretty self-explanatory but I haven’t read this book so I can’t really say for sure. It just seems like he probably wanted people to know that he has some strong feelings about a few things and that’s willing to fight for them. One thing, however, that he obviously doesn’t give a shit about is littering. I know this because he brags about littering. He thinks telling people all about the time he threw a plastic CD-case out of the window of his car will convince them that he is a man of the utmost moral character.
While working at Lehman Brothers, Kasich took a risk and bought a hip-hop CD, in this case by The Roots. He found the lyrics so vulgar he said he pulled over to the side of the road and tossed the CD out of the car. No need for what he considered “offensive drivel,” he wrote.
We’ve all been disappointed in a musical album that we thought we’d enjoy, but only complete assholes deal with this disappointment by chucking the CD out of the window of their car. Why should we all suffer just because you don’t like hip-hop?
But Kasich also brags in this book about being so offended by the wood-chipper scene in Fargo that he attempted to get his local Blockbuster to take it off its shelves.
So, this seem to be a habit with the Ohio governor. He consumes some piece of art, doesn’t like it, and decides to punish everyone else to help himself feel better about it.
This is not in the same league as strapping your dog onto the roof of your car and going for a road trip, but it reveals a similar character flaw.
In this case, the flaw is an inability to see that your stupid story doesn’t make you look virtuous or good in a crisis. Your stupid story makes you look like some kind of freak.
Bernie Sanders attracting a crowd 5,000 in Louisiana … seen as a threat to US corporate establishment.
RT Politics Panel discusses Bernie Sanders’ large crowds in the deep south, why the DNC chair isn’t scheduling more debates, and Huckabee comparing the Iran deal to the holocaust. On panel Sarah Badawi of Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC).
Rachel Maddow Show covers the Sanders campaign – July 27, 2015 plus video
So, people first started realizing something was going on with his candidacy with these unusually large crowds, outsized crowds compared to the rest of the presidential field in either party, people that were turning out to see Bernie in liberal strongholds.
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Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks in Dallas, Texas. ( Photo credit: Mike Stone/Reuters)But then that script got flipped on its head, because Bernie Sanders wasn`t just going to liberal strongholds. He went to, let`s say, Phoenix, Arizona. Red state Phoenix, Arizona. Bernie Sanders turned out 11,000 people to see him in conservative Phoenix, Arizona.
He then went to Houston, Texas. And 5,000 people turned out to see him in Houston. And then he went to Dallas, Texas. Another 8,000 people turned out to see him in Dallas. Nobody is ever going to call Dallas, Texas, a liberal stronghold, right?
But now, Bernie Sanders iced the cake, because last night, Bernie Sanders went to Louisiana. He went to the Pontchartrain Center, in Kenner, Louisiana, and nobody knew whether he would be able to turn out another one of his Bernie-sized giant crowds in the Deep South, right? Not just the deep red state but in the deepest Deep South.
But hours before Bernie Sanders was due to speak in Louisiana people started lining up. By the time he was ready to start speaking in this state where President Obama lost to Mitt Romney by 18 points. By the time he was ready to start speaking, there were between 4,000 and 5,000 people turned out in Louisiana, to see this liberal 73-year-old independent socialist from Vermont. They were there to cheer their guts out for him.