U.S. Electile Dysfunction 2016

[kladner]

In the 5m44s video associated with this article, (which I can't embed because it is on Vimeo), Sanders refuses to take the baiting by reporters, and returns repeatedly to his call for debating substantive issues. I think it is a great lesson on how to handle media trolling: patiently and persistently returning to the issues. He does refer to positions and votes known to be different from Clinton's, but insists that she is a long-time colleague whom he likes, but with whom he has differences of opinion.

The mostly irresponsible corporate media keeps creating stories about Bernie Sanders going negative. Let me give you an example: Jonathan Martin of The New York Times pressured Bernie Sanders with repeated questions about Hillary Clinton’s donations from employees of Goldman Sachs. More than once, Sanders said, “You will have to ask her,” but Martin pressed on. In the end, the title of his article was “Bernie Sanders Presses Hillary Clinton on Her Views on Banks.” It was Martin who did all the pressuring to create the story he may as well have already written.

The exchange took place during a press availability in Cedar Rapids in July. It was clear that Martin had his story in mind, and he pressed and pressed until Bernie said enough that he could write a story claiming that Bernie was pressuring Hillary. Maybe I shouldn’t have called Martin out individually, but I was embarrassed to be a reporter as I watched Martin act like a vulture.

[kladner]

Reuters:
Comparisons between Sen. Sanders and previous progressive candidates, and discussion of the entrenched two-party system.

At the Iowa Democratic Party’s celebrated Jefferson-Jackson dinner, Sanders urged citizen activists not to “turn [their] backs on the political process.” He reiterated, “You are not on the sidelines of these struggles; you are in the middle, and that is what our campaign is about.”


This is Sanders’ effective message for his supporters outside the political orthodoxy: We need to operate within the Democratic Party in order to achieve a progressive agenda.


History demonstrates that alternative party candidates – including Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose platform in 1912, Ross Perrot’s two independent bids in 1992 and 1996, and Ralph Nader’s green presidential campaigns — are destined to reinforce the status quo rather than upset it.

[kladner]

In a potential stumbling block for his Presidential ambitions, a new study indicates that the average American can stand only four seconds of exposure to Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican.

[ewmayer]

Carson’s comeback to Trump’s insults: ‘Pray for him’ | Reuters

LOL, I do love a good down-and-dirty shitfight. But if you read what The Donald said, he did not actually liken Carson to a child molester, he simply analogized the alleged incurability of pathological-liarhood with that of child-molester-hood. Clearly said analogy was not accidentally chosen, but still.

[davar55]

The Donald Show will not run a full season.
He fired himself with his first speech on entry into the political arena.

[ewmayer]

Hillary Clinton Appeal to 9/11 to Defend Wall Street Donations Was Bad, But This Was Worse | naked capitalism

On Saturday night the Democrats held a successful debate – and by successful I mean that the party successfully hid it from public view, getting half the rating of the weekday version. Ceding all kinds of eyeballs to Republicans in a bid to protect your front-runner seems to me like the opposite of a political party’s job, but I guess that’s why they pay Debbie Wasserman-Schultz the big bucks.

That front-runner, Hillary Clinton, is taking some heat for oddly deciding to relate her campaign donations from Wall Street to aiding Lower Manhattan after 9/11. Depressingly, the crowd cheered, clearly conditioned to react to any invocation of September 11 like trained seals (obviously the overlay of the Paris attacks played a role). Only when mentioned by a Twitter user later in the debate did the full recognition of the strangeness of that comment shine through. Here’s some commentary by the establishment organ The Economist:

Mrs Clinton’s reply combined indignation, an irrelevant appeal to feminist pride, and a bizarre riff about the September 11th attacks, by which she seemed to imply that taking money from big banks was her way of making sure that the terrorists behind that 2001 atrocity did not win… Readers with furrowed brows may be assured that it made no more sense when Mrs Clinton said it.

Main thrust of the NC piece is on Hillary's bogus narrative of the global financial crisis, which nixes any 'comprehensive plan' she may have for dealing with the out-of-control financial-fraud sector as a non-starter. Of course actually dealing with said fraud would put her at odds with many of her mega-campaign donors, hence the need to peddle a straw-man narrative.

[Xyzzy]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...e-wrong-place/

"The United States lags behind the rest of the world in both the quality and quantity of every aspect of geography education," National Geographic writes in its Geography Awareness Week materials.

[only_human]

People's efforts to figure out the meaning of Trump's campaign are beginning to resemble the fervent and provocative efforts to explain David Lynch's movie Lost Horizon.

Here's one that caught my eye today:
Donald Trump just turned it up to 11. Here’s proof.

b) Trump is engaging in an elaborate self-sabotage, saying ever more outlandish things in hopes that he provokes such an angry reaction at some point that he is provided with an escape hatch from the race. Many of the adherents to this theory believe that Trump never imagined he would get as far as he has in the race, and now that his bluff has been called, he is desperately trying to find a way out. Of course, he hasn't been able to find one because it seems as though no matter what he says, his support grows.

[Xyzzy]

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireS...-cost-35461786

"They've now latched onto Muslims as an easy target with no consequences," Mogahed said. "We've really moved the threshold of what is socially acceptable."

[Xyzzy]

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-w...omb-egypt-says

Grain storage rooms!

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-w...omb-egypt-says

Grain storage rooms!

And since they go back nearly 5000 years, them thar fancy silos are nearly as old as the earth!

=======================

Donald Trump: Evidence of Our Degeneracy | American Prospect

NC reader 'DJG' does a nice taking-to-task of this thesis:

It isn’t clear to me why Adele Stan has decided that Trump is a peculiar emanation of U.S. degeneracy. The other candidates include the professional ignoramuses Carson and Huckabee, who somehow are not signals of degeneracy? What we are witnessing is that the Romney and McCain wing, the “reasonable” Republicans who want only to destroy the welfare state, “reform entitlements” (and dip into any related trust funds), and engage in a “muscular” foreign policy of endless war and endless war profiteering, have lost control of the message in the run-up to the Republican primaries. Donald Trump is saying in public what the polite crowd has said in private, although, according to Stan, Rubio and Jeb Bush the Twelfth are not signs of degeneracy.

And that is only the Republicans. Hillary “Libya!” Clinton and her dynastic politics and slush-fund foundation are not signs of degeneracy, of course, nor are the photos being republished regularly of the gang in the situation room offing bin Laden, the head of a competing gang, by remote control.

And degeneracy implies that there was once a higher position that one has fallen from. What would that be? [I suppose we can now trot out some “Greatest Generation” footage…]