For an impressive expose of the Republicans’ disinformation complex, check out “They Don’t Gove a Damn About Governing: Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party” by Jackie Calmes at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Here’s the real reason why Republicans so strongly advocate tightening up voter i.d. laws.
Trump’s support is stable in new NBC poll taken after the debates. “The big gainers were Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson,” reports Kevin Drum at Mother Jones..
At the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein explains why “Trump’s Shaky Electoral Foundation” is not likely to prevail, as suggested by the historical record.
Jonathan Chait has a perceptive summation the Trump threat to the GOP’s 2016 prospects: “…The significance of his performance lies in his deadly serious threat to run a third-party campaign, siphoning off the immigrant-haters and amorphously angry blue-collar whites the actual nominee will need for himself. The intense barrage of pointed questions displayed how seriously Roger Ailes takes Trump’s threat to hijack the GOP for his own end. It failed to reckon with the other threat: that the Republican plan to drive Trump from their party might instead work all too well.”
Yet, as NYT columnist Paul Krugman explains, “…While it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.” Krugman provides examples to back up his assertion.
“Pro-business” New Democratic Coalition is preparing new initiatives to cut deals with Republicans, reports Lauren French at Politico.
Yes, it’s early, but if anyone needed another reason why Dems should not relax their efforts in the wake of the Trump follies distraction, here’s one: “We predict that the Democratic nominee for president will win the election by the slimmest of margins with precisely 270 electoral votes. The Republican nominee will fall just short with 268 votes,” says Mark Zandi, writing at the Street about the prediction off Moody’s Analytics presidential election model, which “is constructed based on presidential election results since the 1980 Reagan-Carter contest, and captures the impact on voting decisions of the health of state economies in the lead-up to the election as well as the party affiliation and political realities in each state.”
Shell quits ALEC. That’s one gas brand you can put in your car that doesn’t subsidize Republican legislation through ALEC with your money every few days. Same for BP. However, ExxonMobil still funds ALEC, as does AMOCO and Chevron, Texaco and Marathon.
