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Sunday, February 28, 2016

Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in South Carolina by a good deal more than I expected (73.5% to 26.0%). This has finally given the media carte blanche to harp on the viability of Sanders' campaign as opposed to his issues and the relative merits (and weaknesses) of the candidates. I expect that will be the rap from now to convention time, so it may be true that the fun part of the campaign is over. In theory, Super Tuesday could mark a turnaround, but that doesn't seem very likely. Nate Silver has a piece where he estimates the share Sanders would take in each state if he split the Democratic vote 50-50 with Clinton (see Bernie Sanders Doesn't Need Momentum -- He Needs to Win These States). The table compares Silver's estimates with actual results through Nevada and polling (where available) later on. Where figures are available, Clinton is consistently beating her estimates -- even in New Hampshire, where Sanders +22 win fell short of his +32 projection. Silver figures Sanders needs to win six (of eleven) Super Tuesday states: Vermont (a cinch), Minnesota-Colorado-Massachusetts (maybe but not much polling, and Mass. is very close), and Oklahoma-Tennessee (which seem pretty hopeless, although the Okla. polling isn't so bad -- Clinton +2). Later in next week, he also lists Sanders as Kansas +18, but polls here favor Clinton. There are some fishy things about the model -- I'd be surprised if Sanders ran the table in the Rocky Mountain and Upper Midwest states like Obama did, and I suspect Clinton has more support in the "white belt" from Oklahoma up through West Virginia than Silver's model suggests (Silver has West Virginia +17 for Sanders, but Bill Clinton won the state, and Obama lost it bad).

Still, it's been fun, and regardless of what happens on Tuesday, we'll probably go to the caucus on Mar. 5 and get counted for Sanders.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is increasingly viewed as the Republican winner. 538 has estimates on the following upcoming Republican primaries (some with very little polling data, and many states are still missing). Trump is projected to win all but Texas (Cruz), although his leads in Florida (Rubio) and Ohio (Kasich) aren't unassailable. I've tabled up the raw poll averages below (* indicates only a single poll was used).

They don't seem to have any Kansas polling. As I understand it, Trump is leading among Kansas Republicans, although Rubio has racked up most of the big endorsements (Brownback, Roberts, Pompeo, Dole). Tim Huelskamp has endorsed Cruz. Lynn Jenkins was the first Rep. to endorse Carly Fiorina, so I guess she's due for a do-over. Last two Republican caucuses went to the holy roller -- this year that's split between Carson, Cruz, and Trump (not an evangelical, but he tends to hate the same people evangelicals do, and that seems to be what counts with them).

Trump, by the way, has very few endorsements: two sitting governors (Christie and LaPage), one senator (Sessions), two reps; but he has done well among European fascists (Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders) and with some comparably shady Americans (David Duke, Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, Jerry Falwell).

More about Trump in this week's links, below. Didn't even get around to last week's mass shooting incident in Hesston, KS:

• Martin Longman: How Will Trump Unite the Party? Remember Ronald Reagan? He used to go around the country saying that the "11th commandment" was "never speak ill of a fellow Republican." The GOP was a much larger tent in those days, encompassing Mark Hatfield and John Chaffee as well as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms (and my own so-far-to-the-right-he's-left favorite, Iowa Rep. H.R. Gross -- younger folks can substitute Ron Paul, but you'll miss something). Reagan was himself pretty far gone on the right, but he never called anyone a RINO, much less any of the following, courtesy of Donald Trump:

  When it comes time to unite the party, he'll have to contend with having insulted all his opponents:

  • Kasich: "total dud"
  • Rubio: "a lightweight choker"
  • Carson: "Pyramids built for grain storage -- don't people get it?"
  • Cruz: "the worst liar, crazy or very dishonest"
  • Fiorina: "if you listen to Carly Fiorina for more than ten minutes straight, you develop a massive headache"
  • Graham: "dumb mouthpiece"
  • Walker: "not smart"
  • Pataki: "terrible governor of NY, one of the worst"
  • Jindal: "such a waste."
  • Paul: "reminds me of a spoiled brat without a properly functioning brain"
  • Perry: "should be forced to take an IQ test"

  And those are just the Twitter insults. Don't forget some of his other antics, like saying no one would vote for Fiorina's face and that Ben Carson is a pathological sociopath.

  Trump is going to have some problems with Fox News, too. Here's a sample of what he's said about their personnel:

  • Brit Hume: "know nothing"
  • Megyn Kelly: "I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct"
  • Carl Cameron: "consistently fumbles & misrepresents poll results"
  • Charles Krauthammer: "should be fired"
  • Bill Kristol: "a sad case," "always wrong"
  • Frank Luntz: "a low-class snob"
  • George Will: "boring and totally biased," "should be thrown off Fox News"

  What about other organs of the right?

  Trump said "very few people read" the "dying" National Review, and their editor in chief, Rich Lowry, is "clueless," "incompetent," and "should not be allowed on TV."

  The Club for Growth is "crooked" and filled with "total frauds."

  Brent Bozell of the right-wing Media Research Center is "begging for money like a dog."

  Charles Koch is "looking for a new puppet."

  Most of these strike me as pretty accurate, perceptive even. Kristol, in particular, is wrong so often he makes stopped clocks seem brilliant. His judgments on Luntz, Will, Lowry, and Koch also get to the point, but he could stand to expand on Krauthammer. Still, one might note that no Republican candidate can claim Reagan's commandment as his (or her) own: they may admire the Gipper for lots of petty and vindictive shit, but not for the flexibility which made him seem much less the ogre than his record indicates. Even GW Bush was careful to sugar coat his conservatism, but to fight Obama the right-wing had to make sure that the ranks would hold, so they started a purge and everything turned nasty. Trump has taken that nastiness to a new level, but he didn't start it. He just took advantage of the seething hatefulness of the Republican masses -- ground tilled and sown by the right-wing propaganda mills. His only innovation was to turn that bile toward the Republicans' own puppet- and pundit-class -- the same people who had conned those masses into thinking that conservative economic orthodoxy was somehow in their interest (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

  Somewhat related: see Nancy LeTourneau: Unprecedented for a laundry list of things that Republicans have done to oppose Obama that no opposition party in US history has previously done.

  Longman also has an interesting post, The Conservative Movement Collapsed Before Trump. As you know, since Obama became president the Republicans haven't offered any alternative policies, because a policy might provide a starting point for compromise. They've focused on obstructing everything that Obama has wanted to do, with the sole exception of a couple issues where Obama broke with the Democratic base (e.g., TPP): they're OK because they both undercut Obama within his own party and undercut the Democratic Party in the nation at large. Twenty years ago the Republicans had a largely unearned reputation as "the party of ideas" -- that was mostly due to the well-funded right-wing think tanks. Since then, well, most of the ideas turned out to be duds, and once Obama and the Tea Party arrived thinking went out the window, replaced by narrow-minded fervor. Hence every Republican candidate this year tried to run on leadership character, and mostly what they tried to lead the party in was being an asshole. Ergo:

  What the Republicans failed to do is to adjust to losing in 2008 and 2012 and come up with a new kind of conservatism that could win where McCain and Romney had lost.

  And that left a giant opening for someone like Trump to walk right through and begin denouncing everyone on the right as dopes and idiots and ineffectual morons.

  One of the reasons that the Republican Establishment has no answer for Trump is that their alternatives (basically, now down to Marco Rubio at this point) have never had an answer for how they could make the modern brand of conservatism a winner on the presidential level.

  If you are definitely not electable, then you can't convince people to vote against Trump because he's unelectable.

  Curiously enough, neocon godfather Robert Kagan is saying pretty much the same thing: Trump is the GOP's Frankenstein monster. Now he's strong enough to destroy the party. Kagan's so alarmed by Trump he's already endorsed Hillary Clinton as the best hope for Washington's war mongers. Personally, I find this as disturbing as David Duke's embrace of Trump. And I'm reminded that when Antiwar.com was doing a fundraiser a few weeks back, they included Clinton along with Trump, Cruz, and Rubio under the headline "are you scared yet?"

• DR Tucker: The Sum of All Fears: This is the most over-the-top paranoid rant I've heard to date regarding Donald Trump. It's worth quoting, partly for entertainment value, partly to show how sensible fears can sometimes run amok:

  I'm scared for my friends' children. They will be of an impressionable age over the next four years. When they see President Donald Trump on the TV screen, what warped values will penetrate their minds? What flawed lessons will they carry with them for the rest of their lives? Will I have to tell my friends not to let their kids watch President Trump, for the same reason one doesn't let children watch movies with explicit sex, violence and profanity?

  What kind of world will those kids inherit? A Trump victory would be far more devastating for our climate than the Keystone XL pipeline would have been. I guarantee that within 24 hours of a Trump victory, China, India and other major polluters will abandon the Paris climate agreement, reasoning that by electing an unrepentant climate-change denier, America cannot possibly be trusted to hold up its end of the deal. Without that deal, you can say goodbye to a livable future -- and say hello to more fires, more floods, more disease, more death. [ . . . ]

  Think about what's at stake. This country is only so resilient. In 1992, America could have survived four more years of Poppy Bush. In 1996, America could have survived four years of President Bob Dole. In 2008, America could have survived four years of President John McCain. In 2012, America could have even survived four years of President Mitt Romney.

  Does anyone think this country could survive four days, much less four years, of President Donald Trump?

  I certainly agree that there are some pretty unsavory aspects to a prospective Trump presidency, but I wouldn't put our prospects under four years of Trump any lower than McCain or Romney. The one most inordinate power US presidents have is their ability to start wars, and McCain would easily have been (even without the legacy of GW Bush) en the most trigger-happy US president since Jackson. You should never forget that McCain was eager to push the US into war with Russia over Abkhazia. Romney has less history to review, but he ran for president in 2012 as an unreconstructed neocon -- an ideology also embraced by Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich. (I briefly turned on a recent GOP debate only to find Kasich answer another question by demanding that the US send arms to the Ukraine. That was, for me at least, the scariest single moment of the campaign I've witnessed thus far.) It's not unlikely that Trump, who has on purpose remained vague about most of his policy intentions, will turn out to be as bad as any of the above, but Tucker isn't reacting to Trump's agenda so much as to the aesthetics of his whole campaign. My own take is that Trump is significantly the least objectionable of the remaining Republican candidates. Also, my intuition is that once elected, Trump will (more readily than most) adjust to the confines of business-as-normal. (He will, for instance, have a much easier time learning to go with the flow in DC than a president Bernie Sanders would.)

  I also want to note that during his business career, Trump has actually built a few things. That's a pretty stark contrast to Romney, whose business career mostly consists of buying up companies and raping and pillaging them. I'm not saying that Trump has done mankind many favors, but he's not a pure predator like Romney.

  I'm not saying that Trump won't go bonkers over immigration: that is, after all, his signature issue. And sure, he'll do lots of other horrible things. Tucker tried enumerating some of those in another post, Mad World: Part I, although he does get carried away with the hyperbole:

  I doubt your pro-Trump friends or family members will acknowledge that the Republican frontrunner's mendacious mutterings about minorities are what really attracts them to the former pro wrestling personality, so it will be up to you to bring that issue up. Ask them if they are bothered by the bigots in Boston who pledged allegiance to Trump after beating up a homeless Latino man. Ask them if they are troubled by the violent assault on an African-American man at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama. Ask them to put themselves in the shoes of Muslim Republicans who are horrified by Trump's religious intolerance. [ . . . ]

  As I write this, I think of my own fears about a Trump presidency, fears that quite literally keep me awake some nights. I'm troubled by the thought of young and impressionable men and women thinking that Trump's behavior is something that should be emulated. I fear that a President who makes jokes about Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle will escalate the level of misogynist microaggression American women have to put up with on a daily basis. I'm scared that President Trump's Supreme Court nominees will make Antonin Scalia look like William Brennan. I worry that during a Trump administration, we will see the worst racial violence since the pre-civil rights era, with story after story of innocent Mexicans and Muslims being lynched in the night.

  From this you'd think that Trump is planning on relaunching the Brown Shirts and Hitler Youth. No doubt there are elements of fascism in Trump and his followers, but Trump spent much of his life working in a medium where you snarl and gruff a lot but always pull your punches. No doubt some of his admirers are more prone to violence, but we have that now. Groups like Black Lives Matter aren't going away if Trump wins. They're going to become more vigilant than ever.

  Finally, it's hard to let the hyperbole about Scalia and Brennan pass by without comment. I'm not much of an optimist, but I can't imagine a supreme court justice worse than Scalia. Ok, if you credit his brains there's Alito, or take away his wit and you get Thomas -- where do they get these guys? Well, they get them from central casting at the right-wing think tanks, and they keep them in line by keeping them on the conservative gravy train (otherwise justices have been known to take the constitution too seriously -- Brennan being something of the gold standard there). Ok, maybe Trump can find someone a shade more corrupt and venal and flat-out evil than Scalia, but if anything he's less likely to rubber stamp the next movement crony in line.

  Still, here's something real to worry about: Trump: We'll Prune Back 1st Amendment. Trump wants to make it easier for rich people to sue the media for "libel." While this could cut both ways, in America civil suits favor those with deep pockets, as those without can hardly afford to defend themselves, while the rich can sue to harass even if their cases have no merit.

  More Trump links:

  • Nate Cohn: Donald Trump's Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat
  • Matt Taibbi: How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable
  • Susanne Craig/David W Chen: Donald Trump in New York: Deep Roots, but Little Influence

• Conor Lynch: Charles Koch's deceptive Sanders ploy: How the right-wing oligarch cloaks his dangerous agenda: Koch wrote an op-ed which appeared in the Washington Post, the Wichita Eagle, and presumably elsewhere, where he suggested that he shares at least one common cause with Bernie Sanders: ending "corporate welfare." The op-ed still fell far short of an endorsement: evidently ending "corporate welfare" is actually less important to Koch than preventing government from providing a wide range of services, including more affordable education and health care, to the middle class, let alone taxing the rich to pay for it all. The Kochs like to claim their opposition to "government picking winners and losers" is based on sound economic principles, but the case examples that they most care about are subsidies that make "green energy" more cost-competitive with the fossil fuels the Kochs are so invested in. On the other hand, what makes fossil fuels attractive economically is that a large portion of the real costs of their use, especially air and water pollution -- what economists call "externalities" -- is never factored into the market price of coal and oil products. A simple way to correct for these market distortions would be a carbon tax, which is something else the Kochs are dead set against.

  Growing up in Wichita, I've occasionally wondered whether it would be possible to tempt the Kochs to support, even if only through their professed libertarian lens, some progressive issues. (Disclosure: in the 1970s I worked in a Wichita typesetting shop where one of my jobs was to retype several books by Murray Rothbard, which the Kochs were reprinting as part of their missionary work. So I do have some insight into the philosophy they espouse as opposed to the corruption they actually practice.) In particular, anyone concerned about the size and reach of the federal government should be very critical about the military-industrial complex and the dozens of federal spy agencies. They should also be extremely concerned about "the war on drugs" and similar excuses for building up a police state. The Kochs have spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting their narrow political views, yet have never -- at least to the best of my knowledge -- contributed a dime to the Peace & Social Justice Center of South Central Kansas, which is very active on those very issues. Rather, they've spent a ton of money buying a congressional seat for Mike Pompeo, who has turned into one of the worst neocons in Congress. And they have thus far failed to kill off subsidies for windmills in Kansas -- turns out too many (Republican) farmers depend on "corporate welfare."

• Sean Illing: Delusional David Brooks: His blind spot for Republican nihilism has become pathological: Could have filed this under Trump as this is yet another explanation how the Republican Party has succumbed to its intellectual and moral rot, but I figured it's worth quoting at some length:

  The Republican Party no longer aspires to governance. The Tea Party, an offspring of Republican politics, is a nihilistic political movement. Everyone one they've sent to Congress they sent for one reason: negation. Under the guise of some nebulous goal to "take the country back," they've done nothing but undermine Obama and destroy the possibility of compromise. And this delirium has spread throughout the party. Recall that Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said explicitly that the GOP's "top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term."

  Only one party insists America is in perpetual decline. Only one party puts the culture wars at the center of its agenda. Only one party cultivates anti-intellectualism in its ranks. Only one party sold its soul to religious fanatics. Only one party refuses to accept the legitimacy of a democratically elected president.

  It was Republicans who abandoned conservatism as a serious governing philosophy. It was Republicans who repeatedly defied custom with radical non-filibuster filibusters. It was Republicans who used the nation's credit rating to blackmail the opposing party. It was Republicans who threatened to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood funding. And yet Brooks says our problem isn't "exclusive to the right"?

  Well, Brooks would say that, wouldn't he? He knows that his bread is buttered on the right. He understands that being a "conservative" pundit is more of a career decision than a philosophical option. Once you agree to carry water for the reactionary rich, you have to expect to get wet now and then. It's not like he doesn't make a tidy living abandoning any pretense of principles. As a bought man he'll always make excuses for his proprietors, even when he can't understand them himself.

  Illing continues:

  Bernie Sanders may be an outsider, but only in an ideological sense. The man has served in public office for more than three decades. Trump is a political arsonist with no ideas, no experience, no plan -- and he's the most popular candidate in the party. With a grenade in one hand and a half-articulated list of platitudes in the other, he's brought the Republican Party to its knees. And that's because he's a perfect distillation of the Republican zeitgeist. The establishment doesn't approve, but Trump didn't emerge from a whirlwind -- he's an unintended consequence of their cynicism.

  Brooks is right: There is a metastasizing cancer in our body politic, of which Trump is a symptom. But the disease flows from the compromises of the Republican Party, a party increasingly of ideological troglodytes with no interest in policy or compromise.

  The Republican fringe has become the Republican mainstream, and the country is the worse for it. Brooks is wise to lament that, but he discredits himself by pretending this is a bipartisan problem with bipartisan roots. This is a Republican problem -- and he knows it.

• Martha Rosenberg: The FDA now officially belongs to Big Pharma: I complained above about how Republican obstructionism against Obama is only briefly lifted on occasions when Obama does something that actively harms the Democratic Party base. The Senate's confirmation of Obama appointee Robert Califf to head the FDA is a good case in point. The vote for Califf was 89-4, with three Democrats (Markey, Manchin, and Blumenthal) and one Republican (Ayotte) opposed. (Sanders didn't vote, but spoke against Califf.) Nor is this the first Obama favor to Big Pharma, as the ACA was written to their specifications.

  Califf, chancellor of clinical and translational research at Duke University until recently, received money from 23 drug companies including the giants like Johnson & Johnson, Lilly, Merck, Schering Plough and GSK according to a disclosure statement on the website of Duke Clinical Research Institute.

  Not merely receiving research funds, Califf also served as a high level Pharma officer, say press reports. Medscape, the medical website, discloses that Califf "served as a director, officer, partner, employee, advisor, consultant or trustee for Genentech." Portola Pharmaceuticals says Califf served on its board of directors until leaving for the FDA.

  In disclosure information for a 2013 article in Circulation, Califf also lists financial links to Gambro, Regeneron, Gilead, AstraZeneca, Roche and other companies and equity positions in four medical companies. Gilead is the maker of the $1000-a-pill hepatitis C drug AlterNet recently wrote about. This is FDA commissioner material?

• Richard Silverstein: Another Mossad Assassination, This Time in Bulgaria:

  There are only a few things the Mossad is "good" at. And killing is the primary one. They don't do much that's constructive. They don't make the world better or safer for Israel. They don't bring peace. They don't persuade people to compromise.

  They kill. They cheat. They steal. They're good at all those things. But how do those things do anything to help Israel in the long-term? They don't.

  Yeah, they take out an enemy. But only to see a stronger, more formidable enemy replace the one they murdered. Often, as in tonight's case, they get revenge on someone who last posed any danger to any Israeli decades ago. So what benefit is it to Israel to murder an unarmed man (story in Telegraph and Ynet) who left militancy long ago and was eking out a life as a shop owner in a foreign country to which he'd fled so long ago?

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

• Celebrating Allen Ginsberg 50 years after 'Wichita Vortex Sutra': I was surprised to see this long feature piece in the Wichita Eagle. After I dropped out of high school in 1967 I read a lot of poetry, and Ginsberg was very important to me. I assembled a poetry notebook for my younger brother when he was in ninth grade -- I had had a similar assignment and by then I felt embarrassed at my own pathetic notebook -- and picked out over a hundred poems, typing up over 300 pages. I don't recall whether I included "Wichita Vortex Sutra" -- if so it would have been the longest thing in the notebook -- but I am pretty sure that the first poem was Ginsberg's "Howl." By then I had a large poster of a bushy-bearded Ginsberg, which I attached to the ceiling over the stairs to my room with wallpaper paste. (My mother hated it. Unable to tear it down she painted over it as soon as I left home.) My brother got kicked out of school for that notebook -- the vice principal, who had been my ninth grade science teacher (the one that turned me from a future in science to never taking another science class) was especially livid. We were both sent off to see a shrink, who found the whole episode rather amusing. What I find amusing is that it only took fifty years for upright Wichita citizens to honor the greatest piece of literature ever situated in our fine burg.

• Barbara Ehrenreich: Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City: Book review. Many stories. For example:

  The landlord who evicts Lamar, Larraine and so many others is rich enough to vacation in the Caribbean while her tenants shiver in Milwaukee. The owner of the trailer park takes in over $400,000 a year. These incomes are made possible by the extreme poverty of the tenants, who are afraid to complain and lack any form of legal representation. Desmond mentions payday loans and for-profit colleges as additional exploiters of the poor -- a list to which could be added credit card companies, loan sharks, pay-to-own furniture purveyors and many others who have found a way to spin gold out of human sweat and tears. Poverty in America has become a lucrative business, with appalling results: "No moral code or ethical principle," he writes, "no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become."

• Tom Engelhardt: The Disappointments of War in a World of Unintended Consequences: I agree that Edwin Starr answered the key question with his 1970 hit song. Still, Engelhardt's litany of the sheer waste that is devoured by America's war machine took me aback. On the other hand, when he asks "has war outlived its usefulness?" I start to wonder whether he's really going far enough.

• Alfred McCoy: Washington's Twenty-First-Century Opium Wars: Author wrote a book about the CIA's role in the heroin trade in and around the Vietnam War, but that was so 20th-century. Since 2001 the world's heroin trade has moved to another American war front: Afghanistan. The CIA's interest in heroin in war zones seems to have been how handy the business was for producing cash and corruption, but that works both ways as the Taliban has turned itself into one of the world's leading drug cartels -- its own potent source of cash and corruption.

• Bill McKibben: It's Not Just What Exxon Did, It's What It's Doing: We now know that Exxon had internal documents as early as 1982 that acknowledged that global warming is a real (and possibly irreversible) threat and is caused by burning fossil fuels. Exxon buried the report, and hasn't become any more conscientious since.

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