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US Election: 2016

Interesting take on how the Republican establishment is viewing Trump now. The idea Trump is going to be amiable to the usual crowd of lobbiests and the establishment isn't very surprising, although after the debacle of Paul Ryan and the budget I think the idea that *any* career politician is going to throw the money changers out of the temple is a bit out there. This is similar to the idea that Bernie Sanders will be fundamentally different from Hillary Clinton, his message is popular for the same reason that Trump's is (the idea that the Progressive establishment isn't listening to their constituents), but there is no reason to suspect that if he were in office there would be a great deal of difference.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2016/1/11/donald-trump-as-a-mirror-for-the-republican-soul/?singlepage=true

Why the Sudden Love Among Establishment Republicans for Trump?

It has been quite an experience -- half amusing, half alarming -- to behold the sudden transformation of Donald Trump from pariah to desperate hope of the Republican Party. As it happens, the moment of metanoia can be located with some precision.

Enlightenment, or perhaps it was only calculation of self-interest, came just a week ago on Monday, January 4. It was then that Donald Trump, responding to Hillary Clinton’s charge that he was “sexist,” said that Bill Clinton was “one of the great women abusers of all time” and, not-so-by-the-way, that Hillary was an “enabler” of his behavior.

Bang.

Overnight, Bill Clinton went from being one of Hillary’s biggest assets to being a liability of incalculable proportions, about as useful to her presidential ambitions as last year’s sloughed off skin is to a snake.

Who else could have accomplished that? It wasn’t what Trump said; it wasn't even how he said it, not really. It was who said it.

Donald Trump yesterday: an embarrassment, a “complete idiot” (Karl Rove), “offensive and outlandish” (Marco Rubio). “Every candidate for president,” wrote Lindsey Graham (remember him?) in a tweet, “needs to do the right thing & condemn” Trump.

But that was yesterday. Now we find many Republicans clustering round The Donald.

Phyllis Schlafly described Trump as “the last hope for America,” while Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican Party, recently said that Trump was among the “varsity” candidates. “Look at our debates. We’re blowing the doors off these debates,” Priebus crowed. “They’re becoming like World Series-type events that we could never have predicted.”

And why is that?

After Trump, in the aftermath of the Islamic terrorist slaughter in San Bernardino, called for a complete moratorium on Muslim immigration to the U.S., Jeb Bush tweeted that Trump was “unhinged.”

A clueless Bush supporter named Mike Murphy paid for a billboard that read “Donald Trump is unhinged. -- Jeb Bush". Hot Air called it “the saddest political ad ever.” It took about five minutes with Photoshop to show why. In two shakes of a comb-over the internet was abuzz with a version that read:


“Set all our donor money on fire.” -- Mike Murphy.


What’s going on? A large segment of the Republican political establishment, blindsided by Trump’s success, has decided -- cautiously, in a hedging-your-bets sort of way -- that Trump might just have what it takes to beat Hillary.

Three points. First, as I have argued in this space before (and here), the Trump phenomenon owes a great deal to the widespread, visceral impatience with the business-as-usual politically correct establishment, Republican every-bit-as-much as Democrat. Trump is not a conservative. As Kevin Williamson has shown in meticulous and hilarious detail, Trump “spent most of his life as a progressive Democrat, a patron of Charles Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Rodham Clinton”:


He is a lifelong crony capitalist who boasts of using his wealth to buy political favors to make himself wealthier still. He is a proponent of the thieving Kelo eminent-domain regime and has attempted to suborn local governments into using eminent domain to seize properties in order to clear the way for his casino developments. He was until the day before yesterday as absolutist a pro-abortion advocate as any you’ll find at an Emily’s List meeting. He has proposed daft, confiscatory wealth taxes and remains in accord with Warren Buffet and Elizabeth Warren on taxation. His views on trade and immigration are much more like those of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, than they are anything that might plausibly be described as “conservative” in the American context. He is apparently incapable of stringing together three complete English sentences, lies reflexively and instinctively, and contradicts his own pronouncements at every turn. On the verge of his seventieth birthday, his mind remains unsettled about the most elementary issues of our time.


True, all true. But it’s not clear that -- while we are still here listening to the warm-up bands waiting for the main event -- it matters.

And while we wait, Trump is excellent entertainment. That is point two, summed up with characteristic panache by Mark Steyn a few days ago in a column called “Notes on a Phenomenon.” Reflecting on Trump’s recent performance behind enemy lines, i.e., in Bernie Sander’s HQ, Burlington, People’s Republic of Vermont, Steyn noted:


Trump has no prompters. He walks out, pulls a couple of pieces of folded paper from his pocket, and then starts talking. Somewhere in there is the germ of a stump speech, but it would bore him to do the same poll-tested, focus-grouped thing night after night, so he basically riffs on whatever's on his mind. ... But in a strange way it all hangs together: It's both a political speech, and a simultaneous running commentary on his own campaign.


That’s true. And it is also true, as Steyn points out, that it makes for great entertainment:


It's also hilarious. I've seen no end of really mediocre shows at the Flynn [in Burlington] in the last quarter-century, and I would have to account this the best night's entertainment I've had there with the exception of the great jazz singer Dianne Reeves a few years back. He's way funnier than half the stand-up acts I've seen at the Juste Pour Rires comedy festival a couple of hours north in Montreal. And I can guarantee that he was funnier than any of the guys trying their hand at Trump Improv night at the Vermont Comedy Club a couple of blocks away. He has a natural comic timing.


We should not underestimate the power of performance. A free variety show laced with a quota of unpredictable politically incorrect banter is a powerful draw, especially when the media can’t stop slobbering over the man. It doesn’t matter that they hate him: it matters that they cover him. And the tut-tutting by nearly all the other Republican candidates is just too schoolmarmish not to love. It’s all a bit like Ed Sullivan ordering the cameras off Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips, or insisting that The Rolling Stones sing “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” instead of “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”

That said, a variety act is one thing, running the United States of America is something else again. I believe a lot of people who have hitched a ride on the Trump Express understand this.

Exactly when they will hop off isn't yet clear. Sooner or later, I think, they will. But I am not at all convinced that the Republican establishment hasn’t bought a ticket to the very last stop. And this brings me to my final point.

The Republican establishment believes that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate. Digesting how Donald Trump just neutered Bill Clinton, many of that tribe are taking a second and third look at Marco Rubio and wondering: “Does he have what it takes? Could he have taken out Bill Clinton with a tossed-off remark as did Trump?”

As I have been saying for many months now, I am not at all convinced that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, or, if she is the nominee, that she would be elected. As the classified emails that rocketed about the world from her personal email server keep being leaked, I suspect she is edging closer to indictment, or at least popular, and therefore crippling, delegitimation.

Later this week, 13 Hours, a movie about what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, will hit theaters. The movie makers stress that it is “not political.” The names “Obama” and “Hillary Clinton” are never uttered. But the film is said to tell the truth about what happened in that consular outpost, which means that it will show how four Americans, including a U.S. ambassador, were slaughtered by Islamic terrorists because Washington, worried about political fallout in an election years, refused to send help that was just minutes away. The more popular that movie is, the poorer are Hillary Clinton’s chances.

But the real gravamen of my third point revolves around Ted Cruz, not Hillary Clinton. I suspect that an unstated but large consideration in the sudden shift towards Donald Trump on the part of the Republican Establishment is that its members are terrified of Ted Cruz.

They are right to be terrified of him, for were he to become president, the gravy train that is business-as-usual in Washington would make an abrupt stop, everyone off, please, and it would be as much of a shake-up for Republicans as Democrats.

What you hear people say is that “Donald Trump may have the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton.” But what does  that means? “Maybe Trump can beat Hillary, assuming she is the Democratic candidate, but anyway, despite his bluster, he really is deep down a pay-to-play kind of guy, just like us. Ted Cruz, on the contrary, really means all that stuff about ending the 'Washington Cartel' and restoring Constitutional restraints on government. It’s OK to say that in election years, but we don’t want to elect someone who will actually try to do it.”

Remember those old RCA advertisements? That’s the sound of His Master’s Voice talking. The thing is -- and here’s a prediction to cap off my three points -- the thing is that all those Trump supporters are just as allergic to the Washington Cartel as are Cruz supporters. And once the warm-up band is off stage and the main event begins, I suspect a lot of them will cluster round Ted Cruz as the one truly serious and accomplished candidate in the race.
 
Some food for thought before tonight's final State of the Union address by Obama:

CNN

Obama hopes to pave way for Clinton with farewell State of the Union

By Stephen Collinson, CNN

Updated 11:04 AM ET, Tue January 12, 2016

Washington (CNN)It's time for President Barack Obama to start letting go.

While aides say the commander in chief will argue in his final State of the Union address Tuesday that America's destiny depends on honoring progress made on his watch, he will be sketching a future in which he will play no major political role.

So his speech -- likely his last opportunity to grab an hour of uninterrupted prime time -- marks an important first step in a delicate and bittersweet yearlong process of handing over his legacy to the protective custody of his hoped-for successor, fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton.


(...SNIPPED)

Business Insider

TRUMP: Here's what I'd talk about if I were giving my State of the Union address today
By Maxwell Tani | Business Insider – Sun, 10 Jan, 2016 5:41 PM EST

With President Barack Obama's final State of the Union address coming on Tuesday, Donald Trump knows exactly what he'd say if he was in Obama's shoes this year.

In an interview with NBC that aired on Sunday, "Meet The Press" host Chuck Todd asked Trump what he would say if he were to give his State of the Union address today.

"I want to build our military bigger and better and stronger than ever before," Trump said. "I want to take care of our veterans. I want to take care of them. They're being taken care of horribly."

Trump said that during his first address to the nation, he would reiterate his highly controversial opposition to birthright citizenship, which allows any children born in the US to receive American citizenship.

(...SNIPPED)
 
A summary of tonight's speech:

Defense News

Obama Highlights Security Successes in Final State of the Union
By Joe Gould, Staff writer 10:46 p.m. EST January 12, 2016

WASHINGTON — US President Barack Obama claimed a number of US national security successes during his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, reiterating a past theme that the US must work with global partners and not go it alone.

“American leadership in the 21st century is not a choice between ignoring the rest of the world — except when we kill terrorists — or occupying and rebuilding whatever society is unraveling," Obama said. "Leadership means a wise application of military power, and rallying the world behind causes that are right. It means seeing our foreign assistance as part of our national security, not charity.”

Republican lawmakers and analysts spent most of Tuesday attacking Obama’s foreign policies, arguing he has not responded aggressively enough to threats posed by the Islamic State group, North Korea and Iran — which earlier in the day took 10 US sailors into custody after two small US naval craft entered Iranian territorial waters

(...SNIPPED)
 
Sanders and Clinton as the poles of the Democrat party; "old left" vs "new left" (although strictly speaking the "new" left was new in 1968, its not quite so shiny anymore....). Since neither one has any realistic or workable solutions to the real issues plaguing America and the world (much like ERC reminds us the Republican establishment, as currently constituted is similarly out of ideas), this is really the debate between Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/12/sen-bernie-sanders-reactionary/

Sen. Bernie Sanders, Reactionary?

Senator Bernie Sanders has broken with the progressive orthodoxy on campus sexual assault, which holds that such accusations should be handled internally by colleges, under a kind of parallel justice system with different rules from the criminal courts. The Hill reports:

Decrying rape and sexual assault on campuses as an “epidemic,” [Sanders] said schools must not try to handle the issue internally.
“Rape and assault is rape or assault whether it takes place on a campus or a dark street,” he said Monday at the Black and Brown Presidential Forum in Iowa.

“If a student rapes another student it has got to be understood as a very serious crime, it has to get outside of the school and have a police investigation and that has to take place.”

These comments represent Sanders’ latest heresy on a hot-button cultural issue. He got burned by leftwing activists earlier in this campaign for declining to say “black lives matter,” and, after that, for suggesting that mass immigration could depress the wages of native workers. He is still taking heat from Clinton for his comparably more pro-gun record.

Taken together, these skirmishes highlight the fact that it’s too simple to describe the race between Clinton and Sanders as a fight between the “center-Left” and the “hard-Left.” In some ways, the race also represents the conflict between the “old Left” and the “new Left.” The old Left was organized around economic populism, believed strongly in civil liberties and due process of law, and cast a wider tent on social issues, like immigration and guns. The modern Democratic party, which is increasingly reliant for votes on minorities and single women, has instead organized its message around cultural issues and identity politics. That is Sanders’ weakness, as Clinton and her allies well know.

The fight over sexual assault is one of the remaining areas of controversy between the old-time liberals and the new social progressives. While the old-time liberals were protective of rights of the accused, and comfortable with the traditional definition of sexual assault, the new progressives are pushing a cultural revolution in rape law—one that has as its aim the creation of a whole new paradigm for how our society treats such accusations. The new standard should be “yes means yes” rather than “no means no” and the new presumption should be “guilty until proven innocent” rather than “innocent until proven guilty.”

Sanders’ view that campuses should be taken out of the business of adjudicating rape once again highlights the distance between his old-school economic populist liberalism and the new cultural left. To be sure, Sanders didn’t explicitly critique the campus tribunals on due process grounds—but by endorsing in these comments the criminal justice system as the proper place to handle campus assault, he implicitly repudiated the prevailing activist consensus that the courts provide too much due process for such crimes. This view is unlikely to win him too many supporters in the modern Democratic party. We wouldn’t be surprised if he starts backpedaling from it soon.
 
Thucydides said:
Sanders and Clinton as the poles of the Democrat party; "old left" vs "new left" (although strictly speaking the "new" left was new in 1968, its not quite so shiny anymore....). Since neither one has any realistic or workable solutions to the real issues plaguing America and the world (much like ERC reminds us the Republican establishment, as currently constituted is similarly out of ideas), this is really the debate between Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/12/sen-bernie-sanders-reactionary/

Except the debate will be about whether its tweedledee and tweedledum or tweedledum and tweedledee.
 
More on the latest Cruz vs Trump clash:

Canadian Press/Associated Press

Trump, Cruz clash in first Republican debate of the year
Julie Pace And Bill Barrow, The Associated Press
The Canadian Press
January 14, 2016

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. - Ending months of civility between two fiery contenders, billionaire businessman Donald Trump doubled down on his questions about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility to serve as president, telling his rival that his birth in Canada leaves "a big question mark on your head."

Thursday's Republican Party debate — the first of the year — came less than three weeks before the Iowa caucuses kick off this year's voting. Trump has led the Republican field for months, confounding Republican leaders and many of his rivals.

"You can't do that to the party," he said.

(...SNIPPED)
 
More on the Republican debate. While Trump Haters are going to hate, this seems to indicate that he is growing into the role and will be a formidable opponent if nominated for the election:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/224052/

SHOWING OTHER FACETS: Bloomberg political reporters Michael Bender and Kevin Cirilli pen their post-debate takeaway,”Trump Bolsters Closing Argument With Most Solid Debate Yet.”

The candidate who faced doubts for months over the true strength of his commanding poll numbers is proving doubters wrong on another count: With about two weeks until the presidential nominating process starts in Iowa, Donald Trump just delivered his most complete performance of the Republican primary season.

Instead of melting under the bright lights of the debate stage, as many Republicans predicted when the former reality TV show host first rose to the top of the polls, Trump has not just survived six debates in a series that began way back in August, but started to shine. On Thursday, the billionaire added substance to his trademark charisma to defend his own attacks on China, embrace criticism that he’s appealing to voters’ anger, and fend off incoming fire from rivals across the debate stage.

Trump’s highlight of the night—and perhaps of the debate season—was an impassioned defense of New York City, his hometown. The moment came in response to an attack from U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Trump’s closest rival in the polls, that the real estate developer isn’t a conservative because he embodies “New York values.”

“When the World Trade Centers came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely, than New York,” Trump said. “We rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched. And everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.” . . .

Peter Wehner, a veteran of the past three Republican administrations and author of a recent op-ed column titled “Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump,” said the candidate was “emotional and moving.”

“This was Trump’s best moment, and this is his best debate,” Wehner said in an e-mail exchange with Bloomberg Politics. “People will remember the Trump answer, with even Cruz applauding his answer.” . . .

Trump seemed more prepared than he had in other debates and “blew it out of the park” with his answer on New York, said Reed Galen, a Republican strategist who was deputy campaign manager for John McCain’s presidential bid.

“I never thought I’d say this, but I think I’d give him most improved,” Galen said in an interview. “Hoping that he was going to im
 
A lot has to happen before Trump could be considered a formidable opponent. I have yet to see anything of substance regarding policies.

UNtil he can put substance into his campaign, he is simply pandering to the angry masses. He will be like the dog that chases cars. The day he catches on, he just won't know what to do with it.
 
Yup, pandering to angry voters is a Republican ploy all right. Good thing Democrat voters are not swayed by or indulge in eliminationist rhetoric.
 
Thucydides said:
Yup, pandering to angry voters is a Republican ploy all right. Good thing Democrat voters are not swayed by or indulge in eliminationist rhetoric.

Yep. Politics is the same no matter how you cut it.
 
cupper said:
A lot has to happen before Trump could be considered a formidable opponent. I have yet to see anything of substance regarding policies.

.... he is simply pandering to the angry masses.

Déjà vu....circa Canada, 19 October 2015? 

Careful dismissing vacuous policies and angry masses;  they may be angry enough to actually show up at the polling stations.
 
Economics comes back to bite them. Considering this is a Democrat initiative from top to bottom, the Republicans *could* try to point out how counterproductive economic intervention by the State always is, but I somehow doubt they will. Of course the lapdog media will continue to try to spin it as some sort of evil plot, rather than looking at the facts. Labour needs to be both scarce and/or add high value (i.e. skilled workers) to be able to command high wages, and finding people for stocking shelves isn't either.

For people who always want to cite Henry Ford, economic historians know the main reason for Ford to raise wages wasn't "purchasing power", but to fight the high levels of absenteeism and employee turnover plaguing the plant.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/224162/

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: “Can D.C. afford a $15/hour minimum wage?”, the left-leaning Brookings Institute asked in July.

Yesterday’s Washington Post article headlined “District leaders furious Walmart breaking promise to build stores in poor neighborhoods” is a succinct response:

Evans said that, behind closed doors, Walmart officials were more frank about the reasons the company was downsizing. He said the company cited the District’s rising minimum wage, now at $11.50 an hour and possibly going to $15 an hour if a proposed ballot measure is successful in November. He also said a proposal for legislation requiring D.C. employers to pay into a fund for family and medical leave for employees, and another effort to require a minimum amount of hours for hourly workers were compounding costs and concerns for the retailer.

“They were saying, ‘How are we going to run the three stores we have, let alone build two more?’ ” Evans said.

“The optics of this are horrible; they are not going to build the stores east of the river, in largely African American neighborhoods? That’s horrible; you can’t do that,” Evans said. “A deal’s a deal.”

As Tim Worstall responds at Forbes,“Obviously, the people who brokered the deal aren’t happy about this. Yet those same people are the very people that passed the laws that Walmart, informally at least, is saying have led to the change of mind. It is, obviously, always nice to see the biter bit, someone hoist on their own petard. But the people who will lose out from this are the consumers of those poorer areas of the capital. And the reason they’ll lose out is because the politicians have been loading costs onto Walmart by insisting upon higher wages in several different ways.”Additionally, Worstall notes that “Higher minimum wages mean fewer jobs as companies that would have expanded do not. And note again that not only do the workers not gain those higher wages the consumers also lose out on their benefits.”

Plus a reminder that “The correct minimum wage is, as it always has been, $0 per hour, as once even the New York Times knew.”

Why, it’s as if minimum wage laws were designed by the original “Progressives” to hurt low-skilled workers, not help them.

Related: Early evidence suggests that DC’s minimum wage law is also having a negative effect on the city’s restaurant employment.
 
More on who supports Donald Trump. The resurrection of the Reagan Democrats is an interesting take on topic, and I'm hardly surprised that former Democrats are feeling their party has moved too far to the left for them, leaving them looking for a new home.



Republicans Have Overestimated the Conservatism of the Base
by DAVID FRENCH
January 15, 2016 2:35 PM

I live in Donald Trump country. Maury County, Tenn. — like much of the South — was dominated by the Democratic party until just a few short years ago. Tennessee’s legislature didn’t flip red until 2008, and my own legislative district in my own “conservative” county was blue until 2010. Tennessee didn’t change dramatically between 2004 (when Democrats were in total control of state government) and 2011 (when control flipped to Republicans), but national politics changed. And — as Donald Trump is proving — they can change again.

If there is a consistent refrain among former Democrats (and there are lots in the South), it echoes Ronald Reagan: They didn’t leave the Democratic party; the Democratic party left them. That means many things, but it does not mean that they’re small government, constitutional conservatives. It means that while they may have been attitudinally “Tea Party,” they were never on board with the core substance of the movement.

So, what do my Trump-supporting neighbors prioritize? It’s a reasonable approximation of the “three-legged stool” of Reagan Republicanism, but with important philosophical distinctions from true movement conservatives.

First, there’s patriotism, but it’s not a patriotism that implies or mandates a particular foreign policy or national-security philosophy. It’s embodied in a deep love for this country and a desire to defeat its enemies, but no particular commitment either to intervention or isolationism. They’re repulsed by the Left’s mindless multiculturalism and elite’s disdain for America, but they’re foreign-policy pragmatists. Fight when it’s smart, and don’t let political correctness get in the way of national defense.

As the New York Times noted, a significant portion of Trump’s support comes from “a certain kind of Democrat.” Next, there’s cultural conservatism, but it’s not the cultural conservatism of the evangelical Right. In other words, they don’t really care what anyone else does with their lives, but they’re unwilling to join the sexual revolution either personally or politically. They’re not crusaders in either direction, but they perceive the Left as attempting to draft them into a movement they find personally distasteful. When Bill Clinton said abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” he was tapping into this mindset — speaking to those who dislike abortion but aren’t willing to place it at the centerpiece of their politics.

Finally, there’s a commitment to economic opportunity, but it’s not embodied by intellectual devotion either to free markets or to small government. You won’t hear former Democrats crying out for social-security reform or changes to Medicare — unless those changes make the system more stable and reliable. And southern voters have proven that they’re more than willing to hand out generous, targeted tax breaks and subsidies to pull manufacturing out of the North or to welcome Japanese automakers to their new, union-free homes in Dixie. Call it “corporate welfare” all you want, but these new Republicans simply don’t care

Immigration is a potent political issue because it hits each of these concerns. The patriot worries about the impact on national security. The cultural conservative is concerned about assimilation and contemptuous of the Left’s reassuring multicultural platitudes. And a flood of low-skill workers depresses wages and limits economic opportunity and stability. Combine these concerns with the South’s (and industrial North’s) longstanding willingness to embrace colorful, larger-than-life political figures, and it’s easy to see why Trump’s support map looks like this:

New York Times Trump Support Map

Indeed, as the New York Times noted, a significant portion of Trump’s support comes from “a certain kind of Democrat,” and he currently stands ready to pull up to 20 percent of Democratic support from Hillary Clinton.

The GOP underestimated Trump in part because it overestimated the conservatism of its own southern, rural northern, and Midwestern base. It underestimated the extent to which many of its voters hadn’t so much embraced the corporate conservatism of the Chamber of Commerce or the constitutional conservatism of the Tea Party as much as they had rejected the extremism of the increasingly shrill and politically correct Left. And, yes, the size of this population calls into question the very process of building a national Republican electoral majority, but it also threatens Democrats who seem intent on drumming every blue-collar white male straight out of the party.

At present, Donald Trump’s greatest electoral danger (at least in the GOP primary) is that his supporters are so alienated from both parties that they disproportionately choose to stay home. But if they turn out, and he can escape with a win in Iowa, the early primary calendar is largely a march through Trump country. America may end up with three distinct ideological movements: the progressive Left, the constitutional Right, and populist core that will now say of both political parties: I didn’t leave you. You left me. — David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429853/donald-trump-voters-conservatism
[/qiuote]
 
So will Trump confront Kim face to face and say "You're FIRED!" ?  ;D

Diplomat

US Presidential Candidates Aren't Quite Ready to Handle North Korea

Candidates for the U.S. presidency are worryingly ill-prepared to deal with North Korea’s provocations.

By Denny Roy
January 13, 2016


North Korea’s claim of a successful H-bomb test provided an opportunity for the U.S. presidential candidates to demonstrate their expertise on a major policy issue about which they all should have been well-briefed by their handlers. Unfortunately for the country they aspire to lead, their initial comments were less than impressive.

Two points were common to many of the Republican Party candidates. The first was the familiar characterization of the North Korean government as irrational. Billionaire reality show star Donald Trump called DPRK paramount leader Kim Jong-un a “madman.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Kim is a “megalomanic.” To Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Kim is a “lunatic.” Perhaps former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee wins the prize for the strongest personal epithet against Kim, referring to him as “North Korea’s mega-maniac dictator with the funny haircut.” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was relatively restrained, noting that “There doesn’t seem to be the same rationality in North Korea” as in other nuclear states such as China and Russia. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democrat, had a more nuanced view, describing the DPRK as “a paranoid, isolated nation.”

(...SNIPPED)
 
While the analysis is correct so far as it goes, the conclusion isn't very comforting:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-18/worse-1860

Worse Than 1860?
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/18/2016 14:30 -0500

Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The lost story-line amid the food-fights and boasting contests that the “debates” have turned into is the destruction being wreaked on the two major parties themselves. I don’t see how either the Republicans or Democrats get out of this thing alive. The primary season now upon us is the event horizon that sucks these two purposeless clubs into the bottomless hole of historical bad memories. Both parties have failed so fundamentally to represent or even apprehend the interests of the nation that they are now merely obstacles to any sort of plausible future, two infernal machines blocking the road, shaking themselves to death.

The Republican Party may be closer to outright blowup since the rank and file will never accept Donald Trump as their legitimate candidate, and Trump has nothing but contempt for the rank and file. If Trump manages to win enough primaries and collect a big mass of delegate votes, the July convention in Cleveland will be the site of a mass political suicide. The party brass, including governors, congressmen, senators and their donor cronies will find some device to deprive Trump of his prize, and the Trump groundlings will revolt against that move, and the whole nomination process will be turned over to the courts, and the result will be a broken organization. The Federal Election Commission may then have to appeal to Capital Hill to postpone the general election. The obvious further result will be a constitutional crisis. Political legitimacy is shattered. Enter, some Pentagon general on a white horse.

Parallel events could rock the Democratic side. I expect Hillary to exit the race one way or another before April. She comes off the shelf like a defective product that never should have made it through quality control. Nobody really likes her. Nobody trusts her. Nobody besides Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Huma Abedin believe that it’s her turn to run the country. Factions at the FBI who have had a good look at her old State Department emails want to see her indicted for using the office to gin up global grift for the Clinton Foundation. These FBI personnel may be setting up another constitutional crisis by forcing Attorney General Loretta Lynch either to begin proceedings against Clinton or resign. Rumors about her health (complications from a concussion suffered in a fall ) won’t go away. And finally, of course, Senator Bernie Sanders is embarrassing her badly at the polls.

The Democrats could feasibly end up having to nominate Bernie on a TKO, but in doing so would instantly render themselves a rump party peddling the “socialist” brand — about the worst product-placement imaginable, given our history and national mythos. In theory, the country might benefit from a partial dose of socialism such as single-payer Medicare-for-all — just to bust up the odious matrix of rackets that medicine has become — but mega-bureaucracy on the grand scale is past its sell-by date for an emergent post-centralized world that needs its regions to get more local and autonomous.

The last time the major political parties disintegrated, back in the 1850s, the nation had to go through a bloody convulsion to reconstitute itself. The festering issue of slavery so dominated politics that nothing else is remembered about the dynamics of the period. Today, the festering issue is corruption and racketeering, but none of the candidates uses those precise terms to describe what has happened to us, though Sanders inveighs against the banker class to some effect. Trump gets at it only obliquely by raging against the “incompetence” of the current leadership, but he expresses himself so poorly in half-finished sentences and quasi-thoughts that he seems to embody that same mental incapacity as the people he rails against. Corruption and racketeering go unobserved and unchallenged. Even the amazing effrontery of Ted Cruz failing to report his Goldman Sachs campaign contributions to the FEC (with his wife employed as a managing director of that company!) hardly made an impression on public opinion last week.

Political uncertainty has never been so dangerously high in this country since the election year of 1860. Even the Watergate years pale against today’s sick scene because for all of Richard Nixon’s turpitudes and evasions in the White House, the institutions of democracy elsewhere were sound and worked impressively well. The senate committee steadfastly and systematically uncovered the crimes of Nixon and his cohorts over two years of hearings, and the House judiciary committee chugged efficiently through the preparatory work of impeachment — and then, old Tricky Dick boarded his helicopter to San Clemente with a ragged smile and a wave.

Nobody knows where the shit show of 2016 is leading. The uncertainty around it is helping to sink what remains of the old economy, and one can easily discern a very dangerous set of feedbacks creeping into place.
 
Follow the money is always good advice:

http://www.redstate.com/diary/jonhenke/2016/01/19/foundations-behind-left/

[qute]
The Foundations behind the Left
By: Jon Henke (Diary)  |  January 19th, 2016 at 06:00 PM  |  7

Over a decade ago, the New York Post’s Ryan Sager published a blockbuster story, showing that “campaign finance reform has been an immense scam perpetrated…by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a “mass movement.” Based on the astonishing testimony of Sean Treglia, who ran the campaign finance reform effort for Pew Trusts, Sager reported that…

…Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of “experts” all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.

“The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington,” Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. “The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.” …

From 1994 to 2004, almost $140 million was spent to lobby for changes to our country’s campaign-finance laws. … The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent of the total — came from just eight liberal foundations.

These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros’ Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).

Perhaps most (or least?) surprisingly, Treglia said the good news for the Foundations was that “Journalists didn’t care. They didn’t know. They didn’t care … so no one followed up on the story.” Treglia said, “if any reporter wanted to know, they could have sat down and connected the dots. But they didn’t…”

As a result, we got the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, which has only succeeded in, as opponents predicted, making politics less transparent and more expensive.

Unfortunately, after this story broke, the media continued to not know and not care. News reports overflow with stories about the Koch brothers or corporate donations, but the far more massive and highly political left wing Foundations operate almost entirely without scrutiny.

Consider this: in 2013, the left wing Center for Public Integrity reported that “Four foundations run by [the Koch brothers] hold a combined $310 million in assets…” By contrast, the Ford Foundation’s endowment is more than $12 billion — about 38x larger than the Koch Foundations.

On a list of the top 100 US Foundations (by asset size), the Ford Foundation is #2. The various Koch Foundations don’t make the list, nor do they make the list of top 100 Foundations by annual giving.

Yet, the news media and transparency groups constantly harp on the Koch’s massive organization and its “insidious,” “dark money” influence on American politics, while almost completely ignoring the far larger left-wing political Foundations.

In part, this is due to the perception in the media that money from conservative/libertarian/free market leaning organizations must be tainted, while funding from left-wing Foundations is free of such bias. It may also be due to the fact that the left wing Foundations fund many media organizations — I’m looking at you, NPR, PBS, Washington Post, LA Times and others — sometimes even funding them to cover “[other people’s] money in politics.” 

But that doesn’t explain all of the media apathy. Even right-of-center media is generally uninterested in these behind-the-scenes details about the left-wing Foundation money machine.

Sager’s 2005 story was a revelation to me at the time and it has continued to inform my understanding of how the left-wing political machine operates, domestically and internationally, up to the highest levels. Indeed, President Obama himself was a part of this, spending 8 years funding gun control and anti-2nd amendment research and advocacy as a Director of the Joyce Foundation.

After the passage of McCain-Feingold, the people and Foundations behind campaign finance reform mostly moved on to other areas, particularly media and technology policy, and they have replicated this Foundation driven campaign strategy over and over again. Some have drifted back towards campaign finance reform in recent years — unsurprising, given the appeal of being able to marginalize opponents and outlaw opposition speech — but most have realized that they can do far more to control the information and political environment by tinkering with the information inputs of policy and media rather than the information outputs of speech.

Whether it is energy, campaign finance reform, technology policy (especially internet regulation) or half a dozen other areas, the pattern is the same. Massive left wing Foundations — often in collaboration with corporate, investment and government organizations — are putting tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars into research, advocacy, organizing, media and lobbying operations.

They are succeeding, in large part, because nobody has been watching.

[This is the first in a series]
[/quote]
 
Just when you thought that the TV reality show political circus that is the Trump campaign could not get anymore bizarre - Sarah Palin joins him in Iowa to give his campaign her endorsement.  When I watched the video of both of them on stage at the event in Ames, Iowa, as she, in her very "Sarah Palin way", made her speech, I was struck by the image of Mr Trump quietly standing to one side, with a sheepish grin on his face.  I wondered if he was thinking that "this lady makes me sound sensible".

Granted, I do not have much respect for either of these individuals, however, Governor Palin is still a powerful voice in the right wing of the GOP and the Tea Party movement.

As I combed through numerous news articles that could provide an adequate explanation of this move and its ramifications, I found most took an easy approach with the obvious discussion of her brief and (gaffe laden) memorable stint as a VP candidate and possible consideration as Trump's running mate or at least a significant Cabinet post if the Apocalypse happened and he was elected.  In the end, I found this from The Christian Science Monitor (they are usually measured, well researched and moderate in their approach).

Why Sarah Palin's endorsement of Donald Trump makes sense
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2016/0120/Why-Sarah-Palin-s-endorsement-of-Donald-Trump-makes-sense
Shifts in political thought There are good reasons, in terms of ideology and style, that Sarah Palin has sided with Donald Trump.

The rumors were true: Sarah Palin endorsed Donald Trump Tuesday in a joint appearance at Iowa State University in Ames. And now that we’ve seen the Maverick Duo onstage, and heard Ms. Palin’s harsh critique of the Republican establishment, their political relationship perhaps makes more sense than it did at first news flash.

Indeed, there are good reasons why Palin ended up with Mr. Trump, as opposed to tea party favorite Ted Cruz.

The first is that they appear to be ideologically in sync. As frustrated Cruz supporters pointed out all afternoon, Trump does not have a history of committed conservative positions. Yes, he wants a wall on the Southern border, but he’s also said kind things about single-payer health care and mused about higher taxes on the rich. He used to be a Democrat.

So why would the self-declared Mama Grizzly of the GOP pick him?

Because she is not that conservative herself, that’s why. Her address in support of Trump was not a list of right-leaning positions taken and liberal bills opposed in the manner of a Cruz stump speech. It was an expression of populist anger, à la Trump. In the past, Palin has called herself a feminist and even supported a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, points out political expert Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight. In terms of actual policy positions, she’s no Senator Cruz, or even a Marco Rubio. She’s a moderate conservative.

“Palin is more interested in outsider credentials than conservative bona fides,” Mr. Enten writes.

Second, Palin and Trump focus a lot of their ire on a common enemy: the GOP establishment. The party’s Powers That Be have acquiesced to President Obama, in their view, and simply allowed Obamacare and other “outrages” to occur, despite their House and Senate majorities. They are bought and paid for by donors, and then do the donors’ bidding, Palin said in her remarks Tuesday.

Trump’s “been able to tear the veil off this idea of the system – the way that the system really works,” she said.

Yes, Cruz targets the establishment, too, but he is an elected senator, and thus can’t be a true outsider in Palin and Trump’s terms. Plus, Palin and Trump reject the notion that party leaders have a right to lecture anyone about what it means to be conservative, or even a Republican.

Cruz and Senator Rubio are trying to win the nomination board game by playing within the existing rules and manipulating existing ideological pieces. Trump – endorsed by Palin – is just tossing the board aside and making up new rules and his own political philosophy as he goes along.

“They’re concerned about this ideological purity? Give me a break!” said Palin at one point in Ames.

Even if Trump loses, there’s probably no return to the old, predictable definition of what it means to be “conservative.”

Finally, Trump and Palin have the same style. Both are walking streaks of bluster. They express anger and disillusionment onstage in a sort of looping speaking style that relies on moving from prepared one-liner to prepared one-liner via extemporaneous paragraphs that don’t always make sense.

To see them onstage together is to recognize a professional couple in the making, like seeing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance for the first time, or Jennifer Lawrence meet Bradley Cooper at the beginning of the movie.

Not everyone thinks this is a good thing, of course. At the National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke judges Palin’s endorsement of Trump to be a melding of personality cults.

The pair has “convinced a significant portion of the American population that their personal advancement is the key to the country’s success. Together, just think how great America can be!” Mr. Cooke writes.


By Peter Grier, Staff writer  January 20, 2016

 
Anyone left supporting Trump after this $#@#show needs to reappraise their sanity. Let's not forget the son of this paragon of moral virtue was arrested on weapons and assault charges this week. Palin herself has blamed his transgressions on PSTD stemming from his service in Iraq, and of course blames Obama for not supporting veterans. All the while she wants the US to get further involved in wars around the world.


[urlhttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/sarah-palin-endorsed-donald-trump-it-is-bonkers-video][/url]
 
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