Sunday, April 10, 2016

Arrested in May 1970 with shoe boxes full of marijuana, Indiana establishment Republicans want their governor to be president, not Trump

Mitch Daniels

Poster Boy for Bush-era establishment Republicanism, Speaker of the House Hastert 1999-2007, was a child molester

But he won't be going to prison for that.

Story here.

If you felt molested politically by Republicans during the Bush era, there were good reasons for that which eerily echo in nature.

If you want that to continue, by all means vote for Kasich, or Cruz or for the hand-picked candidate of a contested Republican convention.

If you don't, vote for Trump.

Corrupt anti-Trump Indiana GOP requires convention delegation applicants to cough up $2,000 to participate, filters out supporters of The Donald

Reported by Politico, here:

Local GOP district leaders have picked slates of favored candidates from among the applicants that will be considered at Saturday’s caucuses — tiny meetings of county leaders that typically ratify the names with which they’re presented. Applicants must promise to furnish $2,000 to participate after they’re selected, a requirement that tilts the process away from newcomers and outsiders. Among the delegate applicants who made it on to recommended slates: several district GOP leaders, State Treasurer Kelly Mitchell, Secretary of State Connie Lawson, Congresswoman Susan Brooks, Carmel, Indiana, Mayor James Brainard and Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder.

“One of my criteria for filtering out folks was whether or not they support Donald Trump,” said one district GOP leader. “I didn’t care whether they supported Ted Cruz or John Kasich.”

Indiana may vote for Trump on May 3rd, but most of the 57 delegates are already anti-Trump

So reports Politico, here:

Republican Party insiders in the state will select 27 delegates to the national convention on Saturday, and Trump is assured to be nearly shut out of support, according to interviews with a dozen party leaders and officials involved in the delegate selection process. Anti-Trump sentiment runs hot among GOP leadership in Indiana, and it’s driving a virulent rejection of the mogul among likely delegates. ... Pete Seat, an Indiana GOP consultant whose firm was recently retained by the Kasich campaign, said he would be “shocked” if there were more than a handful of Trump supporters in Indiana’s delegation.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump should be the candidates for president: The rest are tools for outside interests

Ranked from biggest tool to outside interests to smallest, based on percentage of PAC money to the total raised through February 2016, reported here:

Rick Perry: 91%
Jeb Bush: 78%
George Pataki: 71%
Chris Christie: 69%
Scott Walker: 61%
Carly Fiorina: 54%
Mike Huckabee: 53%
Marco Rubio: 50%
*Ted Cruz: 46%
Lindsey Graham: 44%
Rand Paul: 42%
Bobby Jindal: 41%
*John Kasich: 30.2%
Rick Santorum: 30%
*Hillary Clinton: 28%
Martin O'Malley: 15%
Ben Carson: 14%
Jim Webb: 13%
*Donald Trump: 5%
*Bernie Sanders: 0.1%


*still in the race


















(watch the gif here)

Rigged party system is leaving both Trump and Sanders supporters feeling voiceless: What's the point of voting if delegates are going to do what they want?

Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box
From the story here:

[T]he sense of futility is building among supporters of Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders, both of whom have strong appeal with people who already believe that a rigged political system leaves them voiceless and disenfranchised. ...

“It’s people who are in charge keeping their friends in power,” said Tom Carroll, 32, a union plumber who lives in Bethpage, N.Y., summing up how he viewed the electoral system. Mr. Carroll, who was at Mr. Trump’s rally on Long Island on Wednesday, expressed irritation at a system that does not always abide by the one person, one vote concept. “In other countries, we pay to fix their election systems and they get their fingers colored with fingerprint ink when they vote,” he added. “What’s the point of everyone voting if the delegates are going to do what they want?”

Colorado GOP establishment systematically de-credentialed Trump voters at convention: "Removed and replaced because I voted for Trump"

Saturday, April 9, 2016

I dunno, I just work here


Mark Levin is a hot-headed radical who doesn't have the temperament to host a radio show let alone lead an Article V convention

"We are rapidly approaching a moment of truth for the life of our nation!"
He goes from ripping #NeverTrump on April 7 here to joining it on April 9 here.

Just think what he might do at a convention. He's proposed only eleven amendments to the constitution. That's not exactly the slow, incremental change usually supported by genuine conservatives. Can you imagine him suddenly changing his mind and proposing twenty-two? forty-four? Well, I exaggerate, but now we see how quickly it could get out of control with someone like him at the helm, or advising it. He reminds me of General Buck Turgidson more and more everyday.

Forget nuking the Russkies, Levin wants to nuke the constitution!

A constitutional convention would be a disaster in the age of Obama. Unfortunately, Mark Levin also has no check upon his appetites, including for vengeance.

Marlene Ricketts of Chicago Cubs/TD Ameritrade fame is funding #NeverTrumper Erick Erickson, spending nearly $15 million so far against Trump

Reported here with FEC documentation here:

So it perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise to find out that Erick Erickson’s media venture “The Resurgent“, is taking Super-PAC money from the (formerly Scott Walker advocates and financial backers) Ricketts family of Wisconsin who fund OUR PRINCIPLES PAC to the tune of $3,000,000 in February alone.

OpenSecrets reports here that Our Principles Pac, organized to oppose Donald Trump, has spent $14.8 million so far in the 2016 election cycle.

Last I checked Joe and Marlene Ricketts live in Wyoming, not Wisconsin.

Diana West concludes that wankers Rick Wilson and Kevin Williamson far exceed the Roger Stone standard for offensive rhetoric set by the sanctimonious Brent Bozell


What it is with these two men and masturbation is not, Glory Be, our concern; rather, it is their hellish level of discourse. I am wondering whether [L. Brent Bozo] will be issuing another righteous statement, as [he] did regarding Roger Stone, calling for "the media to shun" this noxious pair (and others, as you will see) and "denounce [them] in no uncertain terms"?

Repeat after me: Building a wall is impossible, building a wall is impossible, building . . .


Friday, April 8, 2016

And the right is paranoid, too, this week: Michigan's Steve Gruber repeats hysterical Yellowstone supervolcano story

Yesterday on his show Michigan's Steve Gruber uncritically read from this dark story, which has several iterations on the internet featuring a lurid "sea of red" map of earthquakes in Yellowstone, from which this claim:

So why are the public seismographs from the US Geological Survey (USGS) OFFLINE (to the public) today?  No one is providing any answers.

Even more peculiar, the privately-funded seismographs from the University of Utah . . . are also OFFLINE (to the public) right now.  No one is providing any explanation for this either.

The USGS page here showing earthquakes as recent as yesterday in Yellowstone features this box, with dead links to the University of Utah Seismograph Stations page here:















So what's up with that?

Well, just click "home" and the University of Utah Seismograph Stations page tells you:

UUSS has launched a redesigned website! Please visit us at http://www.seis.utah.edu  (http://quake.utah.edu ) to check out the new features.

Obviously, the government page at USGS hasn't been updated yet. Government moves slowly, and often incompetently. No news there.

Also at the Univ. of Utah home page you'll see this map of reality:





















Not this scary beast, which appears to be an historical map of all events over a long period of time:





















Paranoia will destroy ya.

Salon post on Michael Savage fizzles at the end

The piece by Robert Hennelly does a fair job of laying out the Savage oeuvre, only to show exhaustion at the end and descend into dark speculation that Savage wants part of the country to secede.

Paranoia will destroy ya.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Rush Limbaugh seriously wants you to believe Obama is trying to help Trump by attacking him


Call it the Claire McCaskill strategy: Make sure Hillary's got someone to run against that she can beat, like Claire beat Todd Akin.

That, folks, is how much Rush Limbaugh wants Ted Cruz to be the candidate, not Trump.


Marist poll finds 53% think the middle class is dead

Here and here:

[A] majority of Americans, 53%, believe the middle class is dead. There are now only those who are struggling and those who are not. 44% disagree and believe a strong middle class remains in the United States. Racial differences are seen here, as well. When it comes to the state of the nation’s middle class, a majority of non-whites, 52%, think the middle class is still strong while only 40% of whites agree.





Hey Ted, a dinosaur communist beat you in Wisconsin!

Bernie Sanders: 567,936
Ted Cruz:           531,129

Cheating Trump of the nomination and discriminating against his supporters is Republican suicide

So says Conrad Black, here.

Trump support mirrored by the growth of the 1099 worker as corporate greed turns the Buchanan Brigades into Trump's FU Army

From David Dayen in The New Republic here:

But The New York Times’s Neil Irwin might have found an answer [to the anger out there] last week, when he pointed to eye-opening new research from Princeton’s Alan Krueger and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz on Americans in alternative work arrangements, which they defined as “temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers.” This cohort of the workforce grew from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent at the end of 2015, representing an increase of 9.4 million workers. That’s all of the growth in the labor market over the past decade. ...  “Angry” voters may simply be angry workers tossed into the Darwinian world of the modern economy, operating without any fallback support from their employers or their government. This was bound to find its way into our politics, but though solutions for these workers exist, nobody is talking about them.


At 8.2 million after 32 contests, the popular vote for Trump alone with 16 states yet to vote is set to surpass 12 million.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Rush makes a ring composition of today's lyin' show, featuring at the end Ted Cruz lying about the last four contests

Claiming Trump has lost them all.

If Cruz can't count to four, he's not qualified to be president.

North Dakota doesn't count because delegates are unbound with 18 uncommitted, and Trump won Arizona.