While major anti-choice activists and politicians are rushing to microphones to disingenuously declare, contra Donald Trump, that they would never try to punish women for abortions, their true punitive and frankly creepy side is coming out in Missouri. State legislators there are threatening to arrest Mary Kogut, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, because she won’t turn over a list of names of women who got abortions to them. Kogut’s lawyers are citing federal law protecting patient privacy to keep this list out of the hands of Republican legislators.
As the five states that held primaries on Tuesday were still voting, Politico reported on yet one more group of conservatives meeting to brainstorm a way to stop Donald Trump from winning the GOP nomination; which at this point — even after John Kasich’s campaign-extending win in Ohio, which renewed talk of a contested convention — feels like closing the barn door after the horses are out.
The brain trust organizing this meet-up in Washington consists of former George W. Bush advisor Bill Wichterman, South Dakota businessman and Republican backer Bob Fischer, and Erick Erickson, who, in what is probably his life’s greatest achievement, once coined the term “goat-fucking child molester” to refer to a retiring Supreme Court justice. The invitation from the three men announced that attendees of the meeting will discuss not only stopping Trump from securing the Republican nomination, but running a third-party “true conservative candidate” in this fall’s general election.
Kasich's Ohio win has everybody talking about a contested convention. And if that doesn't work? Pray, basically
Source: salon.com
All megalomaniacs have in common a desire to be seen. A raging ego is weak in that way – it needs to be recognized, celebrated. Donald Trump is the Platonic ideal of a megalomaniac, and so it comes as no surprise that his presidential aspirations became deadly serious the moment he was humiliated in public.
As it turns out, the country has President Obama to thank (kind of) for the orange-tinted spectacle that is the Donald Trump campaign. According a New York Times report, it was at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner that Trump’s political fire was officially born. Obama delivered a banal speech that night, during which he took a few blithe jabs at the notoriously thin-skinned Donald. Things got — shall we say — serious after Obama’s performance, with Trump leaving in a fit of childlike petulance.
Source: salon.com
It is not a certainty to say that Donald Trump will win the Republican presidential nomination. He’s not insanely far ahead in the crucial delegate count. Marco Rubio finally (finally, finally, finally!) won a state. There’s a lot of time to go.
And yet. If Trump is not a lock, the prospect of him somehow failing to win the nomination is narrowing to an increasingly tiny point. He was by far the dominant force on Super Tuesday, racking up victories from the Northeast to the Deep South. Rubio and, to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz were left picking up the pieces. Cruz insisted that Rubio needed to get out of the race and get behind him, since he was winning more. Rubio waspishly noted that if it weren’t for everyone else who was running, he would be beating Trump. Both narratives felt less than convincing.
After another big night, Trump is close to a lock for the nomination. Everyone should be nervous about the general
Source: salon.com
You are the captains of American industry, the titans of Wall Street, and the billionaires who for decades have been the backbone of the Republican Party.
You’ve invested your millions in the GOP in order to get lower taxes, wider tax loopholes, bigger subsidies, more generous bailouts, less regulation, lengthier patents and copyrights and stronger market power allowing you to raise prices, weaker unions and bigger trade deals allowing you outsource abroad to reduce wages, easier bankruptcy for you but harder bankruptcy for homeowners and student debtors, and judges who will let you to engage in insider trading and who won’t prosecute you for white-collar crimes.
All of which have made you enormously wealthy. Congratulations.
But I have some disturbing news for you. You’re paying a big price – and about to pay far more.
Source: salon.com
What happens if nothing stops Donald Trump? He’s ahead in the polls just about everywhere, he has three wins to his name and a commanding lead in the delegate race, and there seems to be no gaffe that is powerful enough to halt him. He went on national TV this weekend and begged off the opportunity to disavow the endorsement of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. For any other politician that would be the ballgame, but for Trump you can’t assume that those same rules apply. So what’s the game plan if, as the polling data indicate, Trump romps through Super Tuesday tomorrow?
Right now the hopes of the Republican establishment rest on the increasingly shaky shoulders of Marco Rubio, whose preferred late-stage strategy for halting Trump’s momentum involves dick jokes and open-mic-night-caliber zingers about Trump’s spray tan. What Rubio’s strategy doesn’t involve, apparently, is getting the required number of delegates to win the nomination from Trump outright. His campaign is apparently briefing donors on their plans to take the fight all the way to the nominating convention and, if necessary, pull off some negotiated upset that will install Rubio as the Republican candidate for the White House.
The last line of defense for the anti-Trump GOP is a brokered nominating convention, and it wouldn't be pretty
Source: salon.com
Last week, just before the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, the state’s Indian-American governor, Nikki Haley, joined Tim Scott, the state’s African-American senator, to endorse one of the two Hispanic Republican candidates for president, Marco Rubio.
Judging from that political theater, you may think that the GOP is as diverse as America is in 2016, and that today’s Republican Party was a modern party that reflects our new multicultural reality in America.
That “diversity” isn’t what it appears. The truth is that there’s really not much diversity culturally. The Republican Party has lots of examples of people of a variety of genetic lineages in important positions but they have all conformed to the cultural perspective of straight, white, American Christians.
Republicans reject cultural diversity of any kind. It explains Trump, and why I can't be a gay GOP activist anymore
Source: salon.com
In the 2012 election, 89 percent of Republican voters were white. While the Republican Party routinely anoints a professional “best black friend” (Herman Cain in 2012; Ben Carson in 2016; Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele in 2009) who serves in the role as human chaff to deflect charges of racism, non-whites are a minuscule part of the GOP’s electoral coalition and base. This is reflected by how Republican voters are much more likely to be racially resentful toward black Americans and also manifest what is known as “modern” or “symbolic racism.”
Even more troubling, research by Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler demonstrates that “old-fashioned racism” has actually increased among Republican voters since the election of Barack Obama. Once thought to be a relative non-factor in contemporary politics, this, the more primitive and retrograde racism of Jim and Jane Crow America, is now such a potent force that it is directly correlated with party identification: individuals who are “old-fashioned racists” are more likely to support the Republican Party.
Post-civil rights GOP is our largest white identity group. Maybe we should thank Trump for making it so obvious
Source: salon.com
While most morning news programs devoted much of their Monday coverage to tonight’s highly anticipated Iowa caucuses, Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” took some time to examine the importance of the African American vote on this first day of Black History Month, only to blast black voters for “slavish support” of the Democratic Party.
Guest and conservative pundit Crystal Wright (aka GOPBlackChick) began by arguing that Donald Trump is the only Republican presidential candidate credibly suited to compete for the African American vote, citing his plans for mass deportation as a boon to blacks and applauding the billionaire frontrunner for not “pander[ing]” to Black Lives Matter.
Source: salon.com
Among Republicans and conservatives, it’s a matter of settled fact at this point that Planned Parenthood is a criminal organization that illegally harvests the organs from aborted fetuses to sell them for a profit. And not only did the act of fetal organ trafficking happen, the proof of it is so overwhelming that the full weight of the U.S. justice system deserves to be brought down upon the organization as soon as possible. “We need to prosecute Planned Parenthood,” Ted Cruz announced in July. He said Planned Parenthood officials had tacitly confessed to “multiple felonies” and called the group an “ongoing criminal enterprise.” Mike Huckabee said that he, as president, would sic DOJ on Planned Parenthood “for violating federal law and selling body parts.” The case is airtight, the verdict is preordained, and there is no punishment that is too harsh for the depraved criminals at the nation’s leading provider of women’s health services.
Still no evidence Planned Parenthood committed any crimes, but Republicans are too invested at this point to quit
Source: salon.com
Renowned scholar and activist Noam Chomsky declared this week that the GOP and its far-right front-runners are “literally a serious danger to decent human survival.”
Speaking with The Huffington Post on Monday, Chomsky cited the Republican Party’s refusal to tackle—or even acknowledge—the “looming environmental catastrophe” of climate change, thereby “dooming our grandchildren.”
Source: salon.com
The conservative braintrust published a symposium in National Review last week outlining why Donald Trump isn’t a real conservative, and, more important, why he’s bad for the Republican Party. This is the kind of thing you expect the National Review to do: Trump isn’t conservative in any coherent way and he is destroying the GOP from within. And so there are plenty of reasons for conservative intellectuals to attack him.
Quite a bit of commentary followed National Review’s symposium, some of which pointed out the irony of conservative media personalities attacking a celebrity candidate whose existence they helped make possible. I did so briefly in a post last Friday. And I imagine this conversation will continue well into 2016, as the Trump circus rolls unimpeded through the Republican primaries.
Source: salon.com
We’re going to start hearing about the deficit again, after a long absence from the political stage. That’s in part because a Democrat might get elected president again – perhaps even on a platform endorsing substantial new federal spending. In the face of that potentially harrowing scenario, government’s willing saboteurs must devise a way to persuade voters to reject those proposals, by spinning terrifying tales of out-of-control debt and intractable burdens for children and grandchildren. For them, deficit fearmongering admirably serves this goal.
Incidentally, while you were busy not hearing about it, the deficit has fallen for the past six years...
Source: salon.com