Category Archives: Election

Makin America Great Again

Last night, PBS NewsHour ran a story on the Tilly family of Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Tillys do not have a history of being active in politics, but various members of the family—both old and young—are being motivated to vote or work for a campaign for the first time by Donald Trump.

If you can put aside the fact that the Tillys are rallying behind Trump, this is a small but almost heartwarming story of a family choosing to engage with democracy. That’s also if you can put aside the fact that Grace, one of the central characters in the story, has large white power tattoos on each of her hands.

All Praise To Trump!

Volunteering for Trump requires lifelong devotion:

2. No Disparagement. During the term of your service and at all times thereafter you hereby promise and agree not to demean or disparage publicly the Company, Mr. Trump, any Trump Company, any Family Member, or any Family Member Company or any asset any of the foregoing own, or product or service any of the foregoing offer, in each case by or in any of the Restricted Means and Contexts and to prevent your employees from doing so.

Whence "Caucus"?

Current political events in the USA have again brought this word to the forefront of newspaper reporting. Its accidental similarity to Caucasus and Caucasian, the only other words in English that look anything like it, has sometimes led people up a false trail. The true origin of caucus has puzzled people almost from the moment it first appeared in the middle of the eighteenth century and attempts to solve the mystery have been notable for confusion, disagreement and misinterpretation.

The only fact that everybody agrees on is that its birthplace is the New England city of Boston.

...

Demographics

When the Census Bureau asks Americans about their ancestors, some respondents don’t give a standard answer like “English” or “German.” Instead, they simply answer “American.”

The places with high concentrations of these self-described Americans turn out to be the places Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has performed the strongest.

...

Mr. Trump has his share of support from the affluent and the well educated, but in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.

I Declare!

"After seven years of the cool, weak and endlessly nuanced 'no drama Obama,' voters are looking for a strong leader who speaks in short, declarative sentences,"

Bobby Jindal is a moron with a micropenis.

Can I be President now?

What’s it like to host a presidential candidate debate?

AV Club:

AVC: Were you aware if either one of the campaigns had requirements different from the other campaign?

RTH: For the most part they wanted the same things. But there are, in the DNC rules, requirements that each candidate be given the same thing or at least the opportunity to have the same thing. So every time the Clinton campaign would request something, you’d have to offer it to the Sanders campaign and vice-versa. That was an interesting little nuance that I learned about this whole process.

AVC: Did any of that kind of stuff come up?

RTH: Yeah. The Sanders campaign came at the beginning of this week and said they wanted some rooms in the Union and so we reached out—or, our external relations manager reached out to the Clinton campaign, and again, the Clinton campaign doesn’t know if they’re going to use it or not, but they went ahead and picked up the rooms just in case.

AVC: What were they using the rooms in the Union for?

RTH: The Sanders campaign was using it for what they call their rapid response team, which is the group that basically sits in a room, watches the debate, writes down every talking point, spinning points they can think of during it, and then the rapid response team then meets with the surrogates who are going to do the spinning, and so one of the rooms was for this rapid response team; the other room was for their surrogates.

Your Liberal Media

"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," he said of the presidential race.

Moonves called the campaign for president a "circus" full of "bomb throwing," and he hopes it continues.

"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," he said.

"Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," he said.

"I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going," said Moonves.

Trump is entirely a media creation. They've given him all the free airtime and uncritical attention that anyone could want. So giddy about the spectacle, they've completely failed to treat him as an actual candidate. And they continue to play dumb about their own role. And here we are.

Fuck you, Mr Moonves.

#NeverTrump

Conservatives are freaking out.

Awww... I'm almost sad for them. Who coulda knowd that decades of culturing racist/xenophobic/nationalist ignorance would create a place where a racist/xenophobic/nationalist ignoramus would thrive?

Not Really A Terrible Situation

Last week, I wrote this about the Supreme Court's vacancy:

assuming Kennedy swings the same way, decisions that would've swung liberal will still swing liberal. decisions that would've swing conservative will go back to the lower court; but that is not necessarily a conservative victory - that depends on what the lower court said in the first place. sometimes conservatives challenge lower court rulings, after all.

and, since conservatives have one fewer solid vote, the likelihood of conservative-friendly cases even being accepted to be heard is reduced (takes 4 votes to hear a case)

Today,
TPM wrote this:

The Supreme Court has only been in session without Justice Antonin Scalia for a week. But already, his death is affecting cases, and particularly decisions not to take certain cases to the Supreme Court without the guarantee of his vote. Last week, Dow Chemical made headlines by opting for a $835 million settlement in a class action lawsuit rather than risk having the case heard by a Scalia-less Supreme Court. A lower court had already ruled against the company for allegedly conspiring to fix prices for industrial chemicals, and prior to the settlement, Dow had appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.

...

But it's not just corporate interests that are quickly recalibrating their legal strategy with the loss of Scalia. A guns right groups decided to forgo a Supreme Court petition last week because the court had lost its conservative tilt.

What the GOP is fighting against is having a 5-3-1 situation in favor of liberal judges, instead of the 4-4-1 situation that existed before Scalia died. But a 4-3-1 situation in favor of liberals isn't such a great place for the GOP to be, either.

Not that this excuses the GOP's latest tantrum.