The Easiest Way to Get on TV Is to Say You're an Undecided Voter in New Hampshire
MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE-Let's have a little political history for breakfast because there really is nothing going on until the sun goes down Tuesday night. (The re-re-programming of Marco Rubio will take place in a clean room at Pease Airfield and it will be closed to the press.) Anyway, here's a little polemic on the subject of Not Going Too Far.
Where the money is to come from which will defray this enormous annual expense … and all those other debts, I know not; unless…some other ingenious projector, can discover the Philosopher's Stone, by which iron and other base metals may be transmuted into gold. Certain I am that our commerce and agriculture, the two principal sources of our wealth, will not support such an expense.
How you gonna pay for it, huh? HUH?
Anyway, that was the argument proposed by one Charles Inglis of Philadelphia against that awful leap in the dark taken by some radical bastards in that city in 1776. Inglis was a progressive who could get things done.
The single most overlooked element in the last GOP debate was that both Chris Christie and Jeb (!) essentially told their party that its intransigence on reproductive freedom-as personified by, alas, Marco Rubio-is a vote-killer. The most amazing development is the sudden emergence of Jeb (!), Campaign Finance Reform Guy (!). However, there is a raccoon in the copier.
Bush's solution, however, is not to cut off unlimited funds from wealthy donors, it's simply to allow them to give directly to candidates. As Bush told CNN, he would take the current system of unregulated donations to outside groups and regulated donations to campaigns and "turn that on its head if I could." Even the five justice majority in Citizens United understood what could go wrong in the world Bush describes. In the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court held that campaign finance could be regulated "to limit the actuality and appearance of corruption resulting from large individual financial contributions." Citizens United defined the world "corruption" very narrowly to only include "quid pro quo corruption," that is, an exchange of "dollars for political favors." Thus, under the Citizens United framework, direct contributions to candidates may be regulated because of the high risk that a big spender will trade their donation for a political favor if they can donate directly to the candidate's campaign. By contrast, the Citizens United majority felt that donations to outside groups would not lead to corruption because the recipient of the money was removed from the actual candidate.
I am unfathomably disillusioned by this.
There are a couple of reasons to cheer for John Kasich, even though he is an advocate of The Worst Idea In American Politics. First, almost alone among the Republican candidates, he doesn't believe that, at the moment, the country is a smoking dystopic ruin of dried blood and zombies. Second, the guy seriously has worked his ass off up here. You have to like to see hard work rewarded. Also, a second-place finish by Kasich is very likely to clean out at least the back seat of the clown car.
The billionaire also issued his most damning indictment of the current campaigns to date. "I find the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters," Bloomberg told the Financial Times, adding that the public deserved "a lot better."
Yeah, I look at this wonderful, wacky vigorous campaign and I think, "Yeah, what this needs is the electrifying presence of Mike Freaking Bloomberg." And I am sure that the energized Democratic base is looking forward to hearing from the plutocratic king of stop and search, and I am equally sure that the energized Republican base is looking forward to hearing from a gun-grabbing Mayor of New York. Unless somebody figures out a way to clone Evan Bayh into infinity, this is a mere vanity exercise with potentially awful consequences. Go count your money, Sparky.
There was some Twitterburble on Monday night in regard to my running mate's post concerning Victoria Coates, the art historian who, as his National Security Adviser, probably is the person who explained to Tailgunner Ted Cruz how "saturation carpet bombing" will somehow not saturate the carpet, or whatever the hell it is he keeps talking about. I was directed several times to this biography of Ms. Coates. It seems that she worked for Donald Rumsfeld for a while, and then she got a sinecure at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, one of the dingier policy shops financed by the wingnut welfare crowd. She made her students read that awful Jeane Kirkpatrick essay that was all the rage in 1981 and that got almost everything that happened in the ensuing decade wrong. She herself contributed to Red State, and to Butcher Bill Kristol's startlingly advertising-free little magazine. She also wrote a glowing review of a book written by one of the extended Kagan family. And did I mention she worked for Rumsfeld? I felt better when I thought she was just an art historian.
This requires you to wander into Breitbart's Mausoleum For The Chronically Unemployable, but there's a bit of historical resonance to how Jeb (!) Bush described what he thinks might happen to Young Marco Rubio in the general election campaign.
To beat Hillary Clinton, we need someone that has a proven record. We're not going to beat her with an untested person. She will scrape the bark off a candidate that has never done anything.
That happens to be almost precisely the phrase used by the late Lee Atwater as regards to what he planned to do-and did-to Michael Dukakis on behalf of Jeb (!)'s Pappy in 1988, and for which Atwater offered a deathbed apology. This is just to remind you, should you start feeling sorry for Jeb (!) as he is afflicted by the insults of a vulgar talking yam, that the Bush family's M.O. is to outsource the viciousness to The Help. Jeb (!) is the first one of them to fail to find a proper ratfcker.
The easiest way to get on television is to say that you're an Undecided Voter in New Hampshire. Pro tip: most of these people are just such terrible liars.
And, as a kind of antidote to all the treacly TV features about how flinty old New Hampshire preserves American democracy every four years, we have the latest developments from the newly insane state of North Carolina, where a federal court gagged on the most recent attempt by the Republican state legislature to rig the state's congressional elections until the Rapture takes us all to glory.
"There is strong evidence that race was the only nonnegotiable criterion and that traditional redistricting principles were subordinated to race," 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Roger Gregory wrote for the court. "In fact, the overwhelming evidence in this case shows that a (black voting-age population) percentage floor, or a racial quota, was established in both CD 1 and CD 12. And, that floor could not be compromised." Lawmakers have maintained that the maps were drawn for Republican advantage and that race wasn't a driving factor, but the judges didn't buy that argument. Evidence showed that the partisan claim "was more of an afterthought than a clear objective," Gregory wrote. "Elections should be decided through a contest of issues, not skillful mapmaking," U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn wrote in a concurring opinion. "Today, modern computer mapping allows for gerrymandering on steroids, as political mapmakers can easily identify individual registrations on a house-by-house basis, mapping their way to victory."
You'd almost think this was About Race, but it can't be, because nothing ever is About Race. Ni shagu nazad. They never stop.
Anyway, people are voting in New Hampshire now. Pancakes!
