Month: August 2016

Here I was doing a spectacular job of pretending that ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner doesn’t exist when, bam!, out of the blue he strikes again. He evidently cannot control his desire to electronically share his junk with strangers on the internet, and now he’s gone too far by doing it with his child by his side in bed.

JUST IN: Huma Abedin announces separation from husband Anthony Weiner: pic.twitter.com/hvd27CaHOb

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 29, 2016

If Weiner doesn’t care about how his nasty habits impact his wife and kid, he can hardly be expected to care how they impact the world by embarrassing his wife and Hillary Clinton. No, not a lot of people are going to change how they vote over this, but my first thought upon hearing it was that Abedin would have to leave him for political reasons if nothing else.

She’s the vice chairwoman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for chrissakes, and she can’t very well be tolerating this kind of parenting from her husband. Their relationship is otherwise their business, but I think she’s been exceedingly forgiving and tolerant and dedicated to making their marriage work. This would likely be the last straw even if she didn’t have the future of the world to think about.

I’m not going give Weiner the Bill First treatment and diagnose him from afar. I just hope this separation means that I’ve, at long last, heard the last of that wretched man.

In the 2014 midterms, only 36.7 percent of eligible voters turned out to vote. That compares to 58.6 percent of eligible voters who turned out for the presidential election in 2012 and 62.2 percent who turned out in 2008.

We can learn several things from just these numbers. First, obviously there can be some significant variation in presidential turnout depending on how interested and enthusiastic voters are and how well the campaigns do in dragging their supporters to the polls. The drop-off in turnout from 2008 to 2012 was probably attributable almost entirely to diminished enthusiasm on the left, although there are theories out there that Romney didn’t get out the Republican base as well as McCain had four years earlier. Maybe some people didn’t like the idea of a Mormon president, and others weren’t sold on a Bain Capital vulture capitalist.

Still, even a relatively low turnout presidential election dwarfs a midterm election where no president is on the top of the ticket. There’s a twenty-five point drop in the percentage of people who voted in 2014 compared to 2008. And, among that group of people, most are assuredly not going to show up to vote for a Republican congressman if they first determine that they can’t support Trump. They’ll show up to vote for the president. If they can’t support anyone for president, then they will not show up.

Of course, there’s another group of people who always show up to vote and always vote Republican. Among these folks, yes, there will be strategic ticket-splitting, with many voting for Clinton or Libertarian Gary Johnson, and then casting their support behind down-ticket Republicans as a check on Clinton’s power. For this reason, Clinton will probably outperform non-incumbent Democratic congressional candidates in swingy districts and states.

Yet, the Republicans are right to be concerned about preserving their House majority.

“Our biggest concern would be that they would choose to stay home because they are so disgusted with both people at the top of the ticket,” said Mike Shields, the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that backs Republicans. “If they show up, then I think we’re in very good shape.”

Mr. Shields’s group last week announced the first wave of a $10 million spending plan, emphasizing more diverse and affluent districts.

As you can see, Mr. Shields is in the uncomfortable position of wanting disgruntled Republicans to show up and cast a vote for Clinton rather than staying home in protest of Trump.

But here’s another not-too-secret fact. One of the best ways to suppress turnout is to wage an ugly, divisive campaign that makes people disgusted by and ashamed of our political system. When folks turn away from the campaign in horror, they’re much less likely to get involved or to cast their ballot. Clinton can try to take the high road, but whether you call that a run out the clock strategy or not, it’s a risky proposition to let vicious attacks go unanswered. If you doubt me, just ask John Kerry.

The uglier the Republicans get with Clinton, the fewer soft Republicans will turn out to vote for her and the more soft voters will decide to shield their children’s eyes from the teevee rather than use the campaign as a proud opportunity to teach them a civics lesson. Clinton will shed support in this process, but probably not enough to matter. And much of the support she loses will be lost votes for down-ticket Republican candidates, too.

For local, state, and federal Republicans, they want their people to show up, and if they won’t vote for Trump and they’ve been persuaded not to vote for Clinton, that’s simply not going to happen in the numbers they need.

These excruciating conundrums are playing out in weird ways all over the country. For example, John McCain was mocked by Trump for getting captured by the North Vietnamese, a fact that is still haunting him. McCain knows that he’ll lose if Trump’s supporters consider him the enemy, so he’s doing everything he can to avoid provoking them. But his tepid support of Trump is so emasculating and unconvincing that it’s destroying his unearned reputation for honesty as well as the credit he gets for his well-known courage. Now try to imagine how he can do that dance while simultaneously trying to tap out a tune for disenchanted Republican base Clinton voters!

Thus, Republican candidates are getting whip-sawed by conflicting and irreconcilable imperatives.

Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, which has already undermined the party’s grip on the Senate, now threatens to imperil Republican lawmakers even in traditionally conservative districts, according to strategists and officials in both parties involved in the fight for control of the House.

Democrats are particularly enticed by Mr. Trump’s dwindling support in affluent suburban areas — including those near Kansas City, Kan.; San Diego; Orlando, Fla.; and Minneapolis — where Republicans ordinarily win with ease. Mr. Trump is so disliked among college-educated voters, especially white women, that he is at risk of losing by double digits in several districts that the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, carried comfortably.

You can add a lot of other places to that list, like Northern Virginia, the Philly suburbs, and perhaps to a lesser degree the suburbs around key cities like Atlanta and Cleveland. In North Carolina, the unpopular governor and Republican state legislature are only adding to the woes.

It’s too early to tell how things will shake-out, but I’ll tell you one thing. The day before the 2014 midterms, no one was predicting that Republican Larry Hogan would be elected as governor of Maryland, and few foresaw that Charlie Baker would become the governor of Massachusetts. When a wave hits, it’s very hard to predict how for up the shore it will go and much beach erosion it will cause. The warning signs are already here for the Republican House. The lack of any professional organizing from the Trump campaign assures that Republican votes will get left on the table, and the GOP can’t figure out how to attack Clinton without inadvertently dropping an anvil on their own feet.

There are no answers for this. The only solution was to not nominate Trump in the first place.

I should be back to more active blogging this week. I’ve been busy getting the new Washington Monthly College Guide digitized, and we’ve got a great new issue to go along with the rankings.

Also, I just put my son on the school bus for the first time. He’s starting first grade today. I’m not sure who’s more excited and apprehensive.

John McCain will probably win his primary easily on Tuesday but I don’t think there is a senator who has more richly deserved to lose in the general since Joe Lieberman went up against Ned Lamont. Do you disagree?

It’s not surprising that Catholics don’t like Donald Trump. If you want Catholic support, it’s generally a bad idea to get in a pissing match with the Pope. But, probably more than that, the tremendous enthusiasm white nationalists and Klansmen are showing for the Trump campaign is a bit of a warning sign to Catholics. It was actually Irish immigration that first aroused the Know-Nothings back in the 19th-Century.

Trump is getting slaughtered among white Catholics and it’s going to cost him dearly in the Midwestern states he’s hoping to carry.

San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepaernick chose not to stand during the national anthem during a preseason game today.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told the NFL Network’s Steve Wyche. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

So far, this seems to have stirred a great debate over whether players have the right to sit during the national anthem (according to the NFL, they do have that right), but it has not caused very many people to talk about the reason he chose to sit.

As long as the focus remains on Kaepaernick and not on the issue he’s trying to highlight, I guess his protest will be a failure.

Personally, I think he’s bound to get wounded by this. For one thing, when does he decide that he can end this protest? It’s not like he’s going to get some kind of victory out of it that will provide an excuse to stand for the national anthem again.

More specifically to his career, he’s a quarterback who’s had some success in the past, but he’s not been playing well of late, and he’s really fighting for his football career right now. He isn’t a guy who has a guaranteed place in the league, so this could really finish him off if management has to make a tough call.

That makes his move more courageous, but also a little reckless as far as his future is concerned.

But he knows all this and he’s doing it anyway. So, it might be nice if people focused a little more on what he said and a little less on his right to say it.

On a related note, I took a long drive today on backroads through several counties of rural and exurban Pennsylvania. I was in Chester, Montgomery, Berks, Bucks, Lehigh, and Northampton counties. I kept an eye out for any political signs on cars or lawns or anywhere else to see if I could discover any evidence to back up the August 22nd story in the New York Post by Salena Zito that claimed that:

If you drive anywhere in Pennsylvania, from the turnpike to the old US routes to the dirt roads connecting small towns like Hooversville with “bigger” small towns like Somerset, you might conclude that Donald Trump is ahead in this state by double digits.

Large signs, small signs, homemade signs, signs that wrap around barns, signs that go from one end of a fence to another dot the landscape with such frequency that, if you were playing the old-fashioned road-trip game of counting cows, you would hit 100 in just one small town like this one.

In Ruffsdale, I am pretty sure I saw more than 100 Trump signs.

Now, Ruffs Dale (the proper spelling of the town) and Somerset and Hooversville are in the mountainous western part of the state, and I can’t tell you what it’s like out there, but in the eastern part of the state (which qualifies as “anywhere in Pennsylvania”), I only encountered one Trump lawn sign on a trip from Exton to Bethlehem and no bumper stickers. That sign was on the property of a pretty fancy looking farm near Quakertown with numerous outbuildings.

On the way back, I took a different route and I saw three yard signs on modestly nice properties. One was near Delphi, north of Schwenksville, I remember, and another was near Spinnerstown not far from the northern spur of the Blue Route. Again, no bumper stickers on any cars and no “homemade signs, signs that wrap around barns, signs that go from one end of a fence to another.”

Of the four total signs I saw in a nearly 100 mile round-trip through the backroads of Pennsylvania, three were for Trump and one was for Trump/Pence. There were no Hillary signs or bumper stickers at all.

What there were, however, were well more than a dozen signs that said “I support our police,” or some variation on that. Not all the signs were the same. What I suspect is that more than one local police department along my route is giving out these signs to people who answer their solicitations to donate.

If I didn’t know that an election was occurring in a couple of months, my trip would not have tipped me off, but I would have wondered why there was so much energy going into expressing support for law enforcement.

Now, the areas I was traveling along are Republican areas. Some of these counties are competitive but the Democratic votes come mainly from college towns and cities, which aside from skips through Collegeville and Bethlehem, were not the places I was visiting.

Eight years ago, these areas were already dotted with McCain signs long before Labor Day. I remember this, because I recall being several notches more offended when they started to get replaced by McCain/Palin signs after she was announced as his running mate on August 29th, 2008.

I don’t have anything in my memory banks from four years ago that helps identify exactly when the Romney and Romney/Ryan signs went up, but the pattern of the first being replaced by the second definitely repeated itself.

What I’m saying is that there were way more signs four and eight years ago at this time in these Republican areas.

However, there were also a lot of Obama signs four and eight years ago, and plenty of Clinton signs, too, in the primaries. They have not been in evidence this time around.

So, it’s not just that no one is visually supporting Trump. People seem unwilling to advertise their support for anyone right now, including even the previously ubiquitous Ron Paul stickers and signs.

But quite a few people are proudly supporting the police.

Meanwhile, an NFL quarterback is refusing to stand for the national anthem because he’s tired of the police unjustly shooting and killing black people and then getting paid leave instead of
any accountability.

I imagine that isn’t going to play well along the route I traveled today.

I’m not a believer that political lawn signs are a good barometer of how people will vote, but the utter lack of them seems to indicate something is different about this election season. For a country so plainly polarized, it’s weird not to see more people taking a stand.

So, that’s my dispatch from red country in the East. Maybe out in the West there is some kind of Trumpmania, but that’s an utter myth here.

So is the architect of bringing “democracy” to the Middle East, Paul Wolfowitz! Senator Clinton voted FOR the Iraq War.

Republicans Against Trump: Bush Advisor Wolfowitz Says He’ll Likely Vote for Clinton

SPIEGEL: Mr. Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary of defense under President George W. Bush, you supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Today, many people regard this war as a key factor behind the instability in the Middle East as well as the rise of the Islamic State (IS). Do you feel personally responsible?

Wolfowitz: No, because Islamic State is mainly a direct result of the failure in Syria. That’s where IS has grown. That’s where IS spread from. The Western alliance should have supported the Sunni opposition against the Assad regime from the beginning. As far as Iraq is concerned, if it had stayed stable the way it was in 2008, IS would not have been able to expand in Iraq the way they did. The mistake was that Barack Obama withdrew the armed forces from Iraq too fast.

SPIEGEL: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump criticized the war in Iraq, too. He has announced he wants to stop “current policies of nation-building and regime change” — precisely the policy you backed.

Wolfowitz: It would be a huge mistake to abandon democracy promotion. Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia. However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. After a regime is removed, however, it is dangerous to leave a security vacuum. This is where we failed in Libya and in Iraq.

…
SPIEGEL: Paris, Brussels, Orlando, Nice — is the West threatened even more today by terrorists than it was 15 years ago?

Wolfowitz: Fifteen years ago, we had 3,000 people killed in a single day. We had a very real concern that terrorists were going to get their hands on anthrax [traced to US Army lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland] or sarin. The fact that that hasn’t happened is itself an achievement. But, obviously, these so-called smaller attacks are a problem. People change their habits. I know Americans who don’t go to Paris because they think it is too dangerous. I think that is an overreaction. Countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh have been living with this level of terrorism for a long time. But life goes on.

Wolfowitz: We are already seeing a degree of instability in the world because Obama seems to have consciously wanted to step back. Trump is going to be “Obama squared,” a more extreme version of the same thing.

…
SPIEGEL: Who are you going to vote for in November?

Wolfowitz: I wish there were somebody I could be comfortable voting for. I might have to vote for Hillary Clinton, even though I have big reservations about her.

h/t Arthur Gilroy. It’s a complicated world led by a single superpower, isn’t it!?

My focus is foreign policy and the reach of the US across the globe. As I have written months ago when Bernie Sanders was an option for Democrats …

○ Neocons Jumping Ship, Will Likely Vote for Hillary Clinton
○ Humanity – Today’s Syrian Refugees Rejected as Jews in 1930s

Confirmed this week, IS leader Abu Baghdadi was not only imprisoned by U.S. Occupational Forces in Camp Bucca but also in Abu Ghraib. A stain on the United States for generations to come.

I live in a town that will be hard to win.  But today a person knocked on my door and told me he was running for the NH State House.

Never ran for office before.  Went door to door for Bernie.

Now he and 2 other Sanders people are running for the State House, and going door to door.

The best news of this entire election cycle.

I am thrilled.  Yes I want Clinton to win, but no I have no expectations for her beyond the Scalia seat.

This. This gives me hope that the Sanders people are not like the Dean people.  That they intend to stay involved.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Second Empire Victorian.  I am using the photo seen directly below.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

My revisions continue this week.  Above, the sky is now darker and more consistent with the other blues in the painting.  It seems to work much better.  On the house itself, I’ve turned down the wattage just a bit.  I’ve overpainted most sections other than the roof.  I used a thin watery brown.  I’m happier with it now.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have an entirely new painting to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

  

I’m not entirely comfortable airing people’s marital dirty laundry, especially when it’s twenty years old or comes from contentious divorce proceedings. It’s even worse if we only know the details because the police erroneously released the report to the media. This case is unusual, however, because it involves the “CEO” of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and because that man makes a living out of peddling lies and smears.

So, despite feeling queasy about any appearance that I’m sinking to his level, I’ll go ahead and discuss some of what we’ve learned. Most of the focus is on an incident of domestic violence. The episode happened in Stephen Bannon and his wife’s driveway when they began to argue over their finances. She spat at or on Bannon as he was seated in the driver’s seat of his car and he reacted violently by grabbing her arm and attempting to drag her into the car over the door. At some point he caused some minor injuries to her neck. When she attempted to use a cell phone to call the police, he forcibly took the phone from her, threw it across the room, and broke it. These are obviously her allegations and her side of the story, but the police believed her and since they could see her injuries, they arrested Bannon and charged him with misdemeanor domestic violence, battery and dissuading a witness.

If this were all there were to this story it wouldn’t be very interesting. But there’s more.

The charges were dropped because the prosecutors could not find Bannon’s ex-wife and she did not show up in court. In a post-divorce proceeding the next year, she explained why she never showed up to testify against her husband:

The couple divorced in 1997. In a court filing after the divorce, Bannon’s ex recounted the alleged domestic violence incident, saying that Bannon “became physical with me and grabbed me by the throat and arm.”

“I took the phone to call the police and he grabbed the phone away from me throwing it across the room, and breaking it as he screamed that I was a ‘crazy f—–g c—t.”

According to Bannon’s ex-wife, police arrived and photographed her neck and arm “and took a police report.”

She claimed that Bannon and his defense attorney then told her to leave town so she couldn’t testify against him.

“Respondent told me I had to leave town. That if I wasn’t in town they couldn’t serve me and I wouldn’t have to go to court. He also told me that if I went to court, he and his attorney would make sure that I would be the one who was guilty.”

Ten years later, she elaborated in another court filing:

In the 2007 filing, which involved a modification to their divorce agreement, she said she left town with their two children and didn’t return until “the attorney phoned me and told me I could come back.”

“Because I was not present at the trial, the case was dismissed.”

Reporters have contacted this lawyer, Steve Mandell, who denies he told her to do anything of the kind. Of course, I assume he would be disbarred or worse if he admitted it.

But this is still not the end of the story because in that same 2007 divorce settlement modification, she made another alarming allegation:

Bannon’s ex-wife also claimed in that filing that that Bannon objected to his daughters attending a prestigious West Los Angeles prep school because, she said, “he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.”

Now, through spokespeople, Bannon has denied all of this and even claimed that “Mr. Bannon and his ex-wife and his children have a great relationship.”

And, I guess that that is possible. After all, another nine years have elapsed since she volunteered to a court that her husband is an anti-Semite. Maybe she isn’t feeling so uncharitable these days.

I’m also aware that people and their lawyers make all kinds of statements in divorce proceedings, especially when there are money and custody issues at play. Just because something is alleged doesn’t make it true.

What I know for certain is that this is all now out in the public square and the Trump campaign will take a hit for putting a guy in charge who appears to have committed some rather serious crimes to avoid being held accountable for fighting and injuring his wife. They will have the mark of anti-Semitism attached to a campaign that was already struggling with a reputation for every other form of bigotry known to man.

As for Donald Trump, the allegations his ex-wife Ivana has made against him in court filings and privately are extremely troubling.

Ivana Trump’s assertion of “rape” came in a deposition—part of the early ’90s divorce case between the Trumps, and revealed in the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.

The book, by former Texas Monthly and Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III, described a harrowing scene. After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon.

“Your fucking doctor has ruined me!” Trump cried.

What followed was a “violent assault,” according to Lost Tycoon. Donald held back Ivana’s arms and began to pull out fistfuls of hair from her scalp, as if to mirror the pain he felt from his own operation. He tore off her clothes and unzipped his pants.

“Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified… It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’”

Following the incident, Ivana ran upstairs, hid behind a locked door, and remained there “crying for the rest of night.” When she returned to the master bedroom in the morning, he was there.

“As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, he glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: ‘Does it hurt?’” Hurt writes.

Donald Trump has previously denied the allegation. In the book, he denies having had the scalp reduction surgery.

Trump’s lawyer said simply, “…by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse…It is true, you cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”

So, whatever else you can see about Donald Trump and his campaign CEO Stephen Bannon, they share the ability to make their ex-wives say some really horrible things about them.

I can’t say these incidents happened the exact way they have been portrayed, but let’s just ask ourselves what it means if they’re both basically accurate depictions of how these men will treat women, including women that they love or have loved?

I think we can see why these two men get along and want to work together.