I had Santorum next.
What’s the over/under on the number of candidates still in the race come Iowa? Ten?
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.
It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.
Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.
Donald Trump, welcome to your everything, everywhere, all at once.
I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.
Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.
This blog will pay for itself.
Books are my comfort food!
Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?
Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.
Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.
Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.
“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!
Another missed opportunity for Jamie Dimon to just shut the fuck up.
Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.
Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.
GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.
We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.
The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.
Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.
Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.
If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.
Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!
Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.
You are here: Home / Exit stage right
dedc79
The race was preventing Graham from devoting his full efforts to ousting the Sandinistas
Oatler.
Quick! Get him on MSNBC! Chuck’s been looking for a new cohost for MTP!
Germy
As God is my witness, I actually thought Santorum was already out. Did I dream it?
FlipYrWhig
Lindsey Graham might have ended up being the only one of the whole assemblage who reliably demonstrated that he had basic cognitive processes. Not ones that resulted in good ideas, of course, but at least a capability of cogito ergo sum. The rest of them are at the spasming frog leg stage.
OzarkHillbilly
way to big foot Zandar!
Calouste
What’s the definition of “in the race”? Gilmore AFAIK hasn’t suspended his campaign, but he doesn’t get invited to debates and doesn’t raise enough money to show up in the FEC reports.
Santorum is a grafter, he’s not going to drop out unless the costs of “fundraising” exceeds the profits. I think Pataki is the only one who could drop out before Iowa, the rest are grifters or think they have an outside chance. Although it’s not like Pataki has anything better to do or a political career left to damage, so who knows.
dmsilev
Well, the “why are they doing this” caucus (polling at one percent or less) is currently Santorum, Pataki, and Jim “x-axis” Gillmore. The latter two don’t appear to actually be running campaigns, so yeah, probably Santorum.
Germy
Graham gave a few speeches at the end where he made valid points about tRumP and the direction of the GOP. That’s when I first understood he was shutting down. (He sang “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do” after one such speech)
Doug!
Sorry to bigfoot Zandar. I wrote mine a while ago but was having trouble getting it to publish!
Germy
comment of the day:
OzarkHillbilly
@Germy: he is, he just doesn’t know it yet.
Germy
@OzarkHillbilly: But here’s the weird thing: I seem to have a false memory of Santorum announcing the suspension of his run.
I must be reading too much balloon-juice if I’m dreaming about this stuff…
Eric U.
Is “Steve Harvey” going to enter the lexicon for someone that really screws things up?
FlyingToaster
@Germy: Four years ago. It happened. But it was RMoney at the top, not the xenophobic jackass with alien headgear*.
* Does anyone else think this thing is related to Trixie, Darth Truder’s hair alien from Zula Patrol?
OzarkHillbilly
@Germy: wishful thinking. Either that or it’s a flashback to 2012. How much acid did you say you used to do?
MobiusKlein
@OzarkHillbilly: Well, you know what they say about big feet…
Big shoes.
oldgold
“But here’s the weird thing: I seem to have a false memory of Santorum announcing the suspension of his run.”
I am not expecting that until the 2032 Presidential Election cycle.
MomSense
@OzarkHillbilly:
Graham got more attention on this blog today than from the voters in his own party.
schrodinger's cat
I think Cruz may ended up winning the nomination. He is the most vile and hateful among the establishment candidates, and the Republican primary electorate has gravitated to the meanest and nastiest so far.
In his latest anti-immigrant salvo, Cruz wants to get rid of the OPT program. Its a program that allows students on an F-1 visa to work in the US for any employer for a year or two depending on their major.
Germy
@Eric U.: Here’s what bugs me about Steve Harvey. He presents as someone with a supreme amount of confidence. He’s a Published Author.
And he gets the spelling wrong on two countries in his apology tweet.
Celebrity culture; the worship of television entertainers really bugs me. Because the majority of them are ignorant assholes, scientologists and idiots with a large staff of ghostwriters and gagwriters. The only talent or ability they possess is looking confident for the cameras.
Germy
@OzarkHillbilly: Never did acid.
Got any?
I’ll need it this election cycle.
WereBear
And yet, that is so rare and valued, they wind up Thought Leaders.
Q score, people.
Amir Khalid
@Germy:
That’s nothing. I was in hospital a few months ago. When I stared at the light fixture on the ceiling I was hallucinating that I was reading comment threads on Balloon Juice. And I wasn’t even on any drugs.
OzarkHillbilly
@Germy: Sorry, fresh out.
MomSense
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s so hard to predict which of the meanies will win the nomination especially when you cannot relate at all with the criteria they have for choosing.
The Republican candidates stopped being funny a long time ago. The only useful thing about them seems to be that they are revealing how much of the country has devolved into fascism.
Germy
@Amir Khalid: Was it an open thread, at least? I sometimes doze off in front of my laptop, and when I awaken, I see ten or more comments under my name. Either I’m dream writing or the cat is having fun with me.
Princess
A lot of Nate Silver’s “Ignore the early polls: Trump won’t win,” arguments are based on assuming this is a primary of individuals who hope to be the nominee and will drop out when it is clear they won’t be. He does not factor in the fact that most of these people are here for the grift, and as long as the grift is working (and grifting from 4% of Republicans constitutes as “working” as long as overhead is low enough) they have no reason at all to get out and release their votes.
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: Or Germy was confusing him with Jindal, Perry or Walker.
Amir Khalid
@Germy:
I’m pretty sure the threads I hallucinated were full of gibberish — and thus not necessarily distinguishable from actual Balloon Juice threads. ;)
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
Will really hurt science and engineering graduate departments in the U.S. Most of the advanced degrees in those fields are done by immigrants. If they can’t work here after college they’ll go elsewhere.
Or it could be part of the plan to continue to gut research universities, so the professors no longer need to do research and just lecture to undergrads.
JPL
Nationally he was under two percent, I wonder who he will support.
WereBear
Periods of great change do this to a predictable slice of the population.
In a sensible world, just the advances of women’s rights alone would let half the population rise up in a mighty wave and bring down the Hammer of Justice on the big toe of sexism.
And yet, it does not. Women who are still propagandized by their environment and religion, women who have been abused into silence, women who are not up to the responsibility of their own life… they are still working against those who seek to liberate them.
OzarkHillbilly
@Matt McIrvin: Who are they?
Chyron HR
Aha, see? We were promised that JEB! was about to initiate “Hammer Time” and systematically destroy his rivals in the GOP primary and now it has come to pass. I hope in the future you’ll think before scoffing at the awesome might of “Hammer Time”.
FlyingToaster
@Chyron HR: And where is RtR, anyway? He should have found a new proxy by now, surely.
dogwood
@FlipYrWhig:
I think you’re absolutely right. Graham isn’t stupid, and he doesn’t seem to be a pure grifter either. His foreign policy extemism simply doesn’t do it for the crazy primary voters in his party. Lindsay advocates massive war and troop deployment overseas. What the Trump crowd wants is permission to kill American Muslims. Graham doesn’t really offer that.
GregB
Senator Graham announced he’s ending his campaign to spend more time with John McCain’s family.
cleek
why is this site using https ?
Germy
@FlyingToaster:
Shell
Eeeh, if they can, the rest will probably try to hand on til New Hampshire. Then The Great Winnowing will begin. Hey, that’d be a good title for a slasher flick.
Gin & Tonic
@cleek: So our verbal meanderings can be secure, obvs.
Alain announced this several times, although I don’t really see the point.
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: It seem particularly mean spirited, I am wondering what is the political calculus behind it. Its a short term program and I would be surprised if most Americans even knew about its existence.
ETA: Most Universities will be against this measure, I suppose.
Punchy
Can we assume this is because TMZ now has video of Senator PittyPat in a toe-tapping bathroom stall incident?
PaulW
Graham was upset he didn’t win the Miss Universe pageant after Steve Harvey told him otherw…
Too soon?
FlyingToaster
@Germy
.
Since the Bush family’s idea of qualified involves being a Bush, I’m not particularly impressed. And I’m pretty sure that whoever called this fool “the smarter brother” has disappeared, never to be seen in public again.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
True Dat.
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat: What is Cruz’s ostensible reason for opposing OPT? Beyond “durrrrrr. Immigrants bad. durrrrrrr”, I mean?
Definitely agree with you that OPT is a valuable program.
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: Remember when Walker was the guy Democrats were really afraid of for 2016?
It’s possible that Trump will deflate around the beginning of primary time just like Rudy Giuliani in 2008. But at the moment, I don’t see the mechanism.
(If you look at the old plot on RCP, at this point in 2007 Giuliani was already on a slide; he and Fred Thompson were losing support mostly to Huckabee and Mitt Romney, and McCain was just about to surge again. None of them were doing as badly as, say, Jeb Bush, and nobody was as dominant and gaining as Trump.)
Eric S.
@JPL: I’m sure he will endorse the McCain / Lieberman ticket before the new year.
cleek
mmk….
pie filter (7.0.2!) is now working. yippee..
Brachiator
@Princess:
Some of this is uncharted territory. Big donor money is keeping candidates in who otherwise might drop out, and the Koch Brothers and others have not decided whether they are going to pull back on their favored puppets.
And of course, the other contenders are still hoping that Trump will drop out, flame out, wipe out, and give them room to move (Christie, for example, is betting big on this).
But all this noted, grift may not matter once actual primary voting happens. I can’t see even these dopes hanging around if the voters reject them.
It will be very interesting to see how Cruz does. After Trump, unfortunately, he is the one to watch. Jeb! on the other hand is done, but just don’t know it yet.
dmsilev
@Chyron HR:
Sorry, Hammer Time was last week. This week is (checks calendar) Hog Ring Pliers Week.
schrodinger's cat
@dmsilev: He is protecting preshus American jobs from ebil international studentses.
Chris
@Germy:
I am really rooting for this obscenely entitled fucking turd to be crushed by the primary process. Far more than I ever will be for Trump.
Germy
@PaulW: Too soon?
Not at all… Look at Cole’s tweet:
“Happy Friday! Wait, sorry it’s Monday” with Harvey’s grinning face.
Amir Khalid
@Gin & Tonic:
Will https really protect our verbal meanderings from The Man? I assume there’s some kind of secret trapdoor access granted to MI-6 and the CIA and other agencies of that ilk.
Germy
@Chris:
Very true. A mediocre college student, a mediocre politician… but he’s “qualified”
@FlyingToaster:
No shortage of self-esteem in that family.
OzarkHillbilly
@Matt McIrvin:
Yep, I was one of them, but then I saw him in some interview somewhere and realized that the majority of people in Wisconsin are batshit crazy.
Chris
@Germy:
Yeah, it’s not that he’s actually wrong about Trump. It’s just the fact that he considers himself any more qualified that’s ridiculous.
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat: Man, that’s stupid. Even by Ted Cruz’s standards.
Just for the record, Unemployment as a function of educational level. OPT is generally for people in the first three bars (Doctoral, professional, or Masters degrees), and for that cohort, unemployment is currently well below 3%.
Germy
@OzarkHillbilly:
Walker campaign
WereBear
I see him as a classic example of the closeted gay man who didn’t run away to the big city.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: Far easier just to issue a subpoena to Cole or his hosting company, or to hack the server where the BJ data rests. The question of whether SSL is really secure is a deep and interesting question in the infosec community. But the problem is that it only protects data in transit. Once our meanderings are at rest on the server, there are far more vectors for getting at the data.
Matt McIrvin
…looking at old charts from 2008 actually gives much stronger support for the idea that Bernie Sanders could come from behind and beat Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Sanders is ahead of where Obama was then.
Except that, again, I don’t see the mechanism, barring some new scandal or disaster: Hillary Clinton is also ahead of where she was then. At this point in 2007, there were far more undecideds and supporters of defunct candidates for Obama to snap up.
edited to add: The Obama model actually works better as a precedent for how Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio could beat Donald Trump…
cmorenc
Graham’s withdrawal from the Presidential race is NOT however any indication that Graham is withdrawing from being an aggressive cheerleader for pants-wetting or war-mongering.
OzarkHillbilly
@Germy: Heh. Very accurate.
feebog
@Brachiator:
Also, too, all the early states will award delegates proportionally. Even if Trump wins some of the early states it is not going to translate into huge numbers of delegates. If Trump is still standing when they get into the winner-take-all phase, look out.
schrodinger's cat
If the Republicans are successful in creating an inward looking Christian theocracy that abhors science, no one will want to come here any more. All the real and perceived immigration problems solved, so may be there is a method to their madness.
Sherparick
Nate is very good at reading polls, but his arguments about particular Presidential races have two major flaws. First is simply “small sample sizes.” There has simply not been enough Presidential election cycles with long massive primary campaigns by an out party. (Arguably, the first one was 1976 Democratic campaign and Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan), so we are talking at most about 11 campaigns (14 if you count the three campaigns where the in party was picking a replacement for an incumbent President 1988, 2000, and 2008). Second flaw, related to the first, the samples are changing with every campaign both due to national demographics and media environment.)
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
And if they succeed in bringing us back to a fourth-world-country level in terms of wages, worker protection, job opportunities, etc, that’ll hold doubly true.
Sherparick
@schrodinger’s cat: Actually, there will be a problem of out migration, or emigration, especially of STEM, educated elites, and minorities. Of course for the Conservative Movement a nation becoming older, whiter, and dumber may offset the fact they are becoming poorer.
liberal
@Gin & Tonic:
Why? (That’s a query, not a challenge.)
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Doug!: I still enjoy (and agree with) your prediction that Gilmore will be the last to go, because he, like everyone else, has forgotten he’s still running and will forget to withdraw.
debbie
I was running errands when I heard the news. According to NPR, Graham said his campaign had succeeded at steering the debates in the right direction. (Toward the cliff’s edge?)
FlyingToaster
@dmsilev:
And per LGM, most of the unemployed at this level seem to be lawyers.
Note: this doesn’t include underemployment in the tech sector, which is rampant.
OTOH, back in the day, I worked with several foreign nationals who came out of MIT and went straight to work (on this visa) in Kendall Square for a year; they either got a green card or went back home for a more lucrative salary.
Matt McIrvin
@feebog: Hmm, that’s more the “Obama 2008 model” that I was just thinking about. Trump doesn’t flame out like Giuliani, but he does get out-gamed by, maybe, Ted Cruz in a long war for delegates in which his opponent does better at getting undecideds, and pays closer attention to the mechanics of how you grab every seat.
WereBear
@Sherparick: The elites will drain the money from every human who has some and decamp for Dubai.
That has to be their long-term plan. Because they are not building the country at all; letting the infrastructure go to rubble, not educating the citizens, encouraging lawless police and rioting citizenry, and undermining the government.
Nothing else makes sense. Though I am open to the “too stupid to live” category.
Amir Khalid
@Gin & Tonic:
What really freaks me out is the idea of James Bond sat before a laptop, closely examining the words of certain of our not-so-reality-based commenters.
Sherparick
@Matt McIrvin: President Obama’s 2008 campaign basically was to win Iowa, after he became a credible candidate for the nomination, Black votes left Clinton and went to Obama who already had the progressive and anti-war ol’Howard Dean Democrats backing him. This allowed him to sweep majorities in the Southern primaries and the Obama campaign strategy of organizing in the caucus states allowed him to beat Hilary in those states. Hilary came on strong from behind in Industrial Eastern and Mid-Western States, but not able to make up ground. It was a pretty close delegate count in the end. I don’t see Bernie repeating this strategy, particularly in the South and with Blacks and Hispanics.
Matt McIrvin
@FlyingToaster: Me too!
I think Massachusetts tech is a little different from Silicon Valley: you’re less likely to become a millionaire but it’s maybe easier to make a comfortable living, in part because the cost of living is not so obscene. It seems to me that underemployment was rampant for about three years after the 2008 crash, but it’s much better now.
Amir Khalid
@debbie:
From the kiddie table? Yeah, right.
J R in WV
@Gin & Tonic:
Not only that, once they’re on a server that Cole rents, they are proudly served up to the general public via sophisticated software designed to make information available to the general public. AKA anyone including the government investigators… or former KGB, or…
Which is why I use a nym at all. No point in scaring the neighbors!
Matt McIrvin
@Sherparick: Yeah, I’m thinking something like that might be more likely on the Republican side this time. Trump isn’t going to evaporate all by himself, but somebody might out-game him.
But the question is just who could assemble the broad coalition of more than one Republican constituency. In a more normal year I’d say it was Rubio, but Cruz is doing better at the moment. I suppose he could collect the Republicans who are primarily anti-Trump to add to the religious conservatives.
OzarkHillbilly
I wonder if Raven caught this on Moanin’ Ho: Brzezinski To Santorum: ‘Why Aren’t You Working On White Men With Guns?’
Brachiator
@Sherparick:
I don’t think that this is as much an issue as you suggest. Nor is the second problem. Nate has actually been fairly conservative in his statements. People who don’t understand polling have been misusing this early data to try to read tea leaves and make absolute declarations about winners and losers.
Small sample size is never as much of a problem as a good representative sample.
One thing I haven’t seen much about is whether Trump or any other GOP contender is causing more people to register to vote, or whether Trump’s noise is simply whipping up the same old crowd.
cmorenc
@Chris:
The problem with the GOP field is: so many turds to choose from – it’s like being at a gourmet deli that specializes in offering a rich variety of shit sandwiches.
JPL
After the NH primary, I think the field narrows to Cruz, Trump, Bush and Christie.
Sherparick
@WereBear: You give them to much credit. There is no plan, simply a desire and impulse to enrich themselves and defend the Ol’ Order. Employees properly obedient to their employers, women properly obedient to men, all people in their proper sex roles (at least publicly), racial minorities properly obedient to a white elite, and the property holder free to dispose and lord over his property, employees, and family as he sees fit,all of it blessed by a God who ordained this order. When things are not just the way they want them to be, when the results of their policies are huge calamities, the response is befuddlement followed by rage and the pursuit of scapegoats..
Frankensteinbeck
@Matt McIrvin:
A whole lot of people who really don’t want to admit the Republican Party is driven by racism are hoping for that.
EDIT – @Sherparick:
I would throw in ‘hate’. Along with selfishness and specific hates like racism, the Republican Party has catered to simple spite for a long time. Honestly, all of these things promote each other, so they’re hard to separate. It’s the Party of Assholes.
Sherparick
@Brachiator: He has been pretty declarative that Trump will not be the nominee of the Republican Party.
Botsplainer
@WereBear:
One of Roosevelt’s stated goals in Depression era programs was to stymie financial elites from buying everything due to deflated prices. That took some redistribution via higher tax rates. I posit that a side benefit is to ALSO diffuse the ability to control economic, social and fiscal policy via political control, as the centralization of decision making to benefit elites inevitably leads to the magnification of poor results.
If you tax them more, you mitigate control via funding and donations, and get authentic review and analysis. We’re at the end of a very long cycle of tax cuts, and the level of control over decisionmakers by elites is at an extremely high level. My position is that 2000-2006 represented the apex, the crash lagging lightly.
Amir Khalid
@Sherparick:
I wonder how he can be so sure. With Trump’s candidacy, the Republican party is in previously uncharted waters.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: The thing is, even in a scenario like that, Trump doesn’t lose because it’s inevitable, he loses because somebody outplayed him at the game (including hate).
Hillary Clinton wasn’t crushed in 2008, or destroyed by hubris; she was beaten in a difficult stand-up fight. Even with the mistakes in her campaign organization, against any lesser candidate than Obama she’d have won.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Is he really? I don’t see that Sanders will be able to build the same level of support that Obama did.
Anoniminous
If Cruz or Rubio are going to knock Trump out of the lead their national poll numbers need to sharply rise in January. Using HuffPo Poll-of-Poll figures, both of them need to double their support to get only within striking distance of the lead. It is possible to do, as McCain did in 2008. But McCain had the support of the GOP Establishment and Corporate Wings and it was before Citizens United made running for president a profitable business.
At the moment, there’s no one seriously challenging Trump for the GOP nomination. There’s still a question about his ability to turn support into votes which can only be answered by holding primaries and look at the results.
Matt McIrvin
@Sherparick: …Though I think Sanders is likely to win New Hampshire, and get the resultant “credible candidate for the nomination” buzz.
What’s different is that there isn’t some big undecided constituency waiting to jump to him. I think he’s hoping that the old Rust Belt labor Democrats could be that.
Botsplainer
I’d love for a Sanders partisan to explain to me how Bernie picks up Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Nevada in a general election, and please go beyond the scowling mouth pics and Lenin-like action shot memes – I’m all ears.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: In pure support numbers, yes, he’s ahead of where Obama was at the end of 2007. But his position may actually be weaker because Clinton is doing better too; there’s less undecided support that is gettable.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
There are only a few tens of thousands of OPT’s issued annually. Figure some percentage manage to make it to get an employment based GC, which has a helluva backlog for Indians and a slightly less bad back log for Chinese. After that only a smaller percentage make stick around for five years and become U.S. Citizens.
You are showing how tough you are on immigrants, while affecting a relatively small pool of potential voters.
The Indian-American and Chinese-American communities, in the U;S., are relatively small compared to African-Americans and Latinos, so again, the damage is minimal, in terms of offending would be voting blocs.
I’m focusing on Indians and Chinese because, from what I’ve seen, the people who qualify for OPT’s are largely from these countries. My anecdotal experience could be wrong however.
FlipYrWhig
@JPL: No Rubio? I can’t imagine that the GOP wouldn’t do everything in its power to keep the youngest, blankest-slate candidate aloft for a good long while.
Chris
@WereBear:
I think your second choice is right. They firmly believe that what works best for them will work best for all, plus they have no real idea what negative consequences look like (their business failures only bring golden parachutes), and they’re surroynded by half a nation of sycophants telling them they can do no wrong. Throw in a heavy side dish of “I don’t really care, I’m just here to make a buck in time for the next quarter, if there’s trouble someone else will fix it.”
They fundamentally have no idea how nations or economies work, and aren’t too interested in finding out.
Brachiator
@Botsplainer:
But FDR inherited the 1930s tax program of Hoover. Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1932 five months before Franklin Roosevelt won the presidential election. And FDR retained a host of regressive consumption taxes that stuck it to lower income Americans far more than it got money from the rich.
FDR was also focused on the issue of tax avoidance, more than on the redistributive power of taxation.
There was an undistributed profits tax, but Republicans and conservative Democrats managed to get this abolished in 1938.
Bobby Thomson
Conflating Snagglepuss and Huckleberry Hound.
Anoniminous
@Matt McIrvin:
In December of 2007 Obama and Clinton were within shouting distance of each other. When averaged out Clinton had a slight edge she kept all the way through the primaries and the final vote totals. She got 272,809 more votes than Obama out of 35,442,195 cast.
WereBear
@Sherparick: Yes. You are right. I tend to attribute too much to actual thinking, just because that’s how I manage to get through the day.
WereBear
Have you seen the stadiums he’s filling?
I mention this, and people hrrr hrr that the stadiums don’t have the right kind of people, blah blah.
I mean, the man is filling stadiums. In a democracy, that does count for something.
Matt McIrvin
@Bobby Thomson: I heard someone recently liken Lindsey Graham to Tree Trunks, the little green elephant on Adventure Time who has a tendency to state forebodings of doom in a gravelly Southern drawl. She bakes good pies, though.
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: In addition to the Chinese and Indian international students that you speak of, I also know a lot of people from the former Soviet bloc and Russia itself who used the OPT option.
Also, not everyone who uses the OPT becomes an immigrant. Working for a year or more for a major US corporation or university looks pretty good on your resume even if you are heading back.
ETA: FWIW its not just Ted Cruz, this asinine idea also has some institutional support in the Republican party. Cruz is co-sponsoring a bill to get rid of the OPT with Sessions.
Germy
@Matt McIrvin: good god, you’re right
JPL
@FlipYrWhig: He’ll run again but it’s not his time! imo
Anoniminous
@WereBear:
Should, in some strange circumstances, Sanders gets the nomination he will be facing the same Democratic Party Establishment neutrality-to-hostility Sinclair faced in his loosing 1934 governor bid in California. However, the EPIC people without Sinclair managed to hold their Movement together and later went on to win.
(Here’s a potted history.)
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: Think that means you’ve been doing too much Balloon Juice!
Calouste
@Matt McIrvin: The 2008 Democratic primaries were a three way race going in, with Edwards polling in the high teens to low twenties IIRC. The current primaries are a two way race and there isn’t that roughly twenty percent of Edwards voters to pick up for the two main candidates. As long as Clinton stays above 50%, all that talk about Sanders being ahead of where Obama was eight years ago is daydreaming.
Poopyman
Just read Charlie Pierce’s piece on how climate change was addressed at the debate Saturday night (spoiler alert: it wasn’t), and came across this:
I lolololed
Calouste
@Amir Khalid: I think Silver has caught a serious, maybe even lethal, case of Villagitis.
redshirt
@WereBear: Another factor is quarterly profits. Public businesses are driven by the need to meet whatever expectation has been set for their quarterly numbers, and they’ll do anything to meet them. Thus, only seeing the trees and not the forest, for the most part.
Poopyman
@Calouste: Well it is highly contagious. Sad that the only cure seems to be the one advocated by our own VDE.
Patricia Kayden
@schrodinger’s cat: Cruz would be a great opponent for Secretary Clinton (or Sanders) to run against. He’s so vile that I cannot imagine him getting much of the independent vote. Go Cruz! Go Trump! Either one of you are beatable.
schrodinger's cat
@Patricia Kayden: True but both of them are way scarier than the likes of Romney Bot of the last cycle.
JPL
@Patricia Kayden: What if they aren’t?
sparrow
@Botsplainer: I think the only way is for the ex-republicans and indies to become Sanders primary voters. And/or the youth to come out in droves. I wouldn’t bet money on either being enough, but I wouldn’t give it like a 0% probability I guess. It depends on if there are any “scandals” attached to Hillary in the next few weeks. Sorry if I don’t fulfill your fantasy of a screechy Berniebot or berniebro or whatever I’m supposed to be. Some Sanders supporters just, you know, like him a bit better than Hillary.
Calouste
@Poopyman: “We must destroy the Village to save it”.
Brachiator
@WereBear:
Fair point. And I think he is doing well with respect to fund raising. But he is just doing OK in the polls. I get the impression that his support is enthusiastic, but thin.
And I missed the last debate. Work and other demands. I may try to catch it if it is available on YouTube, maybe even read a transcript. A couple of Sanders soundbites I heard on Meet The Press did not seem very impressive. Did he do well?
Botsplainer
@sparrow:
Not talking primary – I’m talking general. How he manages to get Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada? Or spoken another way, how do you perceive him racking up anything more than George McGovern’s EV totals?
WereBear
@Brachiator: Online polls made him the winner. Again.
I’m just saying whatever else the R’s have, they get enthusiasm. People turn out. And that is important for turnout.
I’ve love to be thrilled and enthused about HRC. And I’m not. Oh, I’ll be happy to vote for her in the general. But I also think the ability to get people stirred up has its good side, and we often, as Democrats, seem to reflexively denigrate that.
HRC is a wonk, and I do like that about her. But not everyone can or does.
Calouste
@Anoniminous: One of the things that makes the comparison of the 2008 and 2016 GOP primaries complicated is that Giuliani was leading nationwide until a few weeks before Iowa, but never took the lead in Iowa or New Hampshire. Giuliani’s strategy of avoiding the first two states allowed someone else to pick up momentum there and carry it to a win. Trump on the other hand has been in the lead very consistently in New Hampshire and in about half the polls in Iowa. It seems far less likely that he will be undercut in the early primaries. Of course a significantly lower than expected result in Iowa could still be disastrous for Trump, specially now that the likely winner there is Cruz, who has the potential of wider support than Carson, who was just the religious nutters favorite like Santorum and Huckabee in years gone by.
Frankensteinbeck
@Anoniminous:
So much this. He seems to have mastered pouring on more hate speech to cover any gaffes. Now he has to get bored or turn out to have no real campaign organization.
@sparrow:
Personally, I think your side is just awkwardly saddled with the Naderites, a loud, demented, hostile, and tiny fringe that are not at all representative of Bernie’s base. This is entirely unlike the GOP, where a plurality has demonstrated they absolutely love insanity, and want more. I support Hillary, but I’m cool with Sanders. He says things that should be said.
schrodinger's cat
From the National Law Review, here is what they say about Cruz-Session bill and the OPT (optional practical training)
redshirt
I saw another Trump sign in front of a convenience store, this time in NH.
Would you go to that store if you had a choice, or would you skip it and go to another?
schrodinger's cat
After refugees and students, I believe the No-nothings in GOP will go after legal immigrants next.
Bill Arnold
@Gin & Tonic:
Subpoenas from non-US governments? And server hacking can be made pretty hard, with only a moderate amount of applied paranoia.
I appreciate the https gesture, though it should probably be made optional somehow.
Tracy Ratcliff
Polls may actually underestimate Trump’s support, study finds
More stress that I don’t need.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Turned on LVPD press conference on woman who drove her car on the sidewalk at I believe 30-40 mph
at least one reporter really wanted the sheriff to say it’s terrorism
FlipYrWhig
@WereBear: How many enthusiasm-generating presidential candidates have there ever been, though? Enthusiasm doesn’t have much to do with outcomes, I don’t think. I think all that’s happening is that the same people who always want a liberal alternative are excited about this cycle’s liberal alternative. They were excited about Bradley ’00 and Dean ’04 and Edwards ’04. And Obama ’08, when the liberal alternative got to use his evocative life story and rhetorical gifts to rouse Hope — and still might not have won if not for the financial crisis hitting when it did.
And, hell, if Terry Freakin’ MacAuliffe can win an election when the opponent is a conservative freakazoid, the much more appealing package of Hillary Clinton can do it too, and without “running right” to pull it off.
Brachiator
@Sherparick:
And his reasons for making this pronouncement were reasonable. I don’t read his stuff regularly, but I listened to a couple of his podcasts where he discussed Trump. He also noted that GOP voters seemed to be further to the right of the main GOP contenders, and this sentiment has held throughout this campaign.
But the bottom line is that we don’t know if people polled actually represent likely voters. In the past, voters make up their mind about primary voting very close to the actual voting day. And so, Silver’s view is, and has to be, conditional. Polling is not as strongly predictive this early out. It can’t be. Here is Silver in late November.
WereBear
Generally… the winners.
Gore’s stiff-as-a-starched-suit let W’s “have a beer with me” edge him out. Reagan vs. Mondale was a blowout partly because Mondale was the second banana to Reagan’s leading man. Clinton charmed the socks off the electorate, both times.
Name me when the boring candidate won.
trollhattan
@OzarkHillbilly:
Whoa, Ho didn’t cut her short?
Matt McIrvin
@Tracy Ratcliff: Morning Consult just showed up for the first time this cycle and has been occasionally running polls showing all of the Republicans smashing Hillary Clinton by huge margins. They’re often also the high outliers for Trump in primary polling. It’s possible that their methodology is the right one and everyone else is wrong, but I don’t regard them as terribly credible.
Mary G
@debbie: Graham was the only guy at the first debates who said that we need “boots on the ground” in Syria, etc. Now most of the Republican candidates agree or imply that they agree. So he did open that can of worms.
Brachiator
@WereBear:
Wow. I see that he did outstanding in “who won the debate polls.”
But he seems to still be trailing in the general campaign:
From a CBS poll:
liberal
Number of MSM outlets that will label this a terror plot (lone wolf division): Approximately zero.
FlipYrWhig
@WereBear:
Johnson was boring. Nixon was boring. Carter was boring. Bush ’88 is about the most boring human being alive.
I think you’re lumping “enthusiasm” with “likeability.” Bush ’00 didn’t make people enthusiastic; he was just amiable. I’d say the same for Clinton ’92.
IMHO the only modern candidates who inspired “enthusiasm” per se have been JFK ’60, RFK ’68, Reagan ’80, and Obama ’08.
sparrow
@Botsplainer: Ah, sorry, misunderstood. For the general, I think the order of those states easiest-to-hardest for Bernie would go Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina. He needs to pick up a good chunk of the white working class in addition to the women, youth, and minorities that Obama got. It’s hard to imagine him doing substantially worse among minorities given how horrific the GOP has been this cycle. So I’m not seeing most of those states (esp the first three) as completely undoable but it depends a lot on how the media portrayal goes and it will be harsh. Right now it is undoubtedly true that he has not received but a small fraction of the negative coverage he would get as the nominee (Hillary on the other hand gets plenty). I’m encouraged that the polls show Bernie and Hillary doing about equally well (maybe Bernie slightly ahead but let’s call it a draw) against all the republican frontrunners, but I wonder how that would change if Bernie were getting Hillary-level coverage with unfair portrayals of “socialism” and “crazy old white guy yells things” etc. Anyway, I’m not one of those super political junkies who gets down into the nitty gritty data to analyze which populations will vote one way or the other. But I do see a lot of vocal support for Bernie in articles about him which come from former republicans and working-class whites.
Iowa Old Lady
This morning I heard a local reporter interviewing people at a Trump rally. Most of them had never been to a caucus. So that could mean new voters will turn out, or it could mean that come Feb 1, they don’t figure out where to go (not their regular voting place) and go for at least two hours at 7pm. Theoretically the caucuses are closed too, but the D ones always have a table at the door where you can change your party registration and/or register to vote, so I assume the R ones do too. Who knows?
Is the NH primary open or closed? If it’s closed, is it easy to change your party registration?
Germy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: She’s a black woman who suffered from sleep deprivation:
Mike J
@Matt McIrvin:
Sanders can not “win” New Hampshire. He’ll probably get more votes there, but since he’s from Vermont, winning NH isn’t going to be thought to mean anything. If he loses NH, he’s toast.
beltane
@Iowa Old Lady: NH has an open primary and lot of “Independent” wingnuts.
Calouste
@Brachiator:
Reagan wasn’t remotely unlike Trump. About the same age, well known for a career outside politics, made white America feel comfortable with their racism, simple but wrong answers to complex questions, not particularly bright or knowledgeable, non-establishment candidate. The main difference is that Reagan had been governor for 8 years and Trump hasn’t.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
Of course that only works if the server actually keeps the data for any length of time. Cole said something about configuring the blog not to keep that kind of information. Information that’s never logged can’t be recovered by accessing the logs, by hack or subpoena. If the database doesn’t contain anything beyond what’s needed to generate the visible pages, everything useful in it could be accessed just by spidering the site.
WereBear
@Brachiator: This topic just tweaked my brain at a time when I’m on vacation and not using it for other things ;)
Mr WereBear is retired on disability and is mostly a shut-in. So he is plugged into the fact that the social media set, the Millenials, and a lot of other folks are wild about Bernie, and I wonder if it is part of the media fragmentation that so many other segments are highly unaware of that, or the fact that he seems to be leading in both NH and IL.
He is setting folks brains on fire about this income inequality issue, and he’s right about it, isn’t he? Why can’t that be the Big Deal Dems run on in 2016?
It’s a big deal to ME. Just as Regan got elected, I got a dream job in NYC, big firm with incredible bennies who predicted a bright future for me. Three years later I was watching a video of a frothy-mouthed preacher explaining to me why management was freezing my wages and doubling my workload.
It happened that fast and that ugly and I have never recovered. Lots of people are worse off.
So yeah. I’m wondering.
Paul in KY
@WereBear: Nixon in 68. VP Humphrey was much more fun/enthusiastic than Tricky Dick.
Calouste
@Iowa Old Lady: I remember reading somewhere a while back that Trump had a bus driving around Iowa that, amongst other things, handed out information packages that would explain people how to vote in caucuses and become caucus captains etc.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
The anti-illegal alien crowd hates all immigration into America. The fact this country’s demographics have changed substantially over the last 50 years due to immigration drives them crazy.
Ending legal immigration is a goal, but they do not want to say it out loud.
And I figured the people in power would moderate the knuckle-draggers, but it seems the knuckle-draggers are now calling the shots in the GOP.
Paul in KY
@Calouste: Reagan projected a lot more ‘geniality’ than Der Trump has (so far).
gene108
@WereBear:
I don’t see any Democrat running away from income inequality as an issue.
I just think there isn’t a consensus on how best to handle it.
Davebo
@cleek: Because the cost of SSL certificates has plummeted over the past 5 years or so and now everybody seems to want to use it.
PurpleGirl
@gene108:
Or it could be part of the plan to continue to gut research universities, so the professors no longer need to do research and just lecture to undergrads.
Nope, if these professors don’t have research to do, they can’t lecture to undergrads. There aren’t enough undergrads for them to lecture to. The universities will just let these people go.
Annecdata but true: In the 1970s, NYU’s Physics Department had more than 30 tenured professors, most were doing research and had grant funding. There was all of, maybe a dozen physics undergrad majors. (I was was dating one of them.) Very few non-physics students took any physics classes. The Political Science Department had over 300 majors, I don’t remember how many tenured professors. (I was a Political Science major after my Chemistry major died.) The political Science professors complained and protested that by the numbers they should have more tenured professors and the Physics Department should lose some of theirs. The Physics Department was told to develop courses that non-science people would to take, in order to justify the number of professors it had. (I ended up taking enough of the Astronomy courses to build a minor.)
Roger Moore
@gene108:
And the Indian-American and Chinese-American communities are already leaning Democratic, so there are fewer potential Republican votes there to lose. Of course, in a close election every vote matters, so pissing anyone off has risks.
Fair Economist
@Matt McIrvin: From a political (not policy) point of view, it’s *Trump* who is closest to Obama’s situation. He’s the outsider a large group of people who feel shut out of the system think speaks for them. Rubio and the other “conventional” candidates are like Hillary, not Obama, except that their campaigns are weak-to-failing, unlike either Hillary or Obama in 2008. The difference is that Trump’s affinity coalition is already supporting him – they’re not waiting to see him succeed in an early primary.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mary G: Gonna be interesting to watch if Christie starts to get mouthier about active involvement in each of the MCain-Graham endorsement
debbie
@Botsplainer:
Sanders won’t get anywhere in Ohio. The mere mention of the word “socialist” in this state makes heads explode and lapel pins spin. But if Bernie can get Hillary to be less status quo on banks (for instance), he’ll have performed a larger service.
WereBear
@Paul in KY: Not to that Silent Majority. I could never understand it, but people were incredibly enthused about Nixon, and to me he had one of the most untrustworthy face on the planet at the time…
People were falling all over themselves to vote for Nixon, and stick it to those McGovern people.
And, sadly, there were more of them.
Patricia Kayden
@debbie: I assume moving the Democratic race to the Left is a huge accomplishment for Senator Sanders. He’s a great guy.
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: Anti immigration folks in the GOP are loud and proud about it. I see the likes of Mike Krikorian writing at outlets like NR and even Washington Post and making appearances on Snooze Hour. That their goal is to end all immigration is obvious to anyone except the ones who deliberately want to close their eyes, like the MSM bots.
Roger Moore
@Bill Arnold:
Why? There was a time when SSL/TLS was considered optional because it was too computationally intensive, but those days are long gone. Since that was the only real reason not to encrypt by default, I don’t see any real reason to continue with regular http. To the contrary, routinely encrypting everything has the benefit of burying snoops in so much encrypted traffic that they can’t figure out who’s worth hacking because they’re trying to be secretive.
Matt McIrvin
@Fair Economist: Personally, if I had to bet, on my saner days, I’d say that the polls are just being predictive in the most straightforward way: it’s going to be Hillary vs. The Donald, and nothing dramatic is going to happen to change that. The second most likely scenario being Hillary vs. Ted Cruz.
But so many people have been insisting on scenarios in which the polls aren’t predictive and something else happens that I’ve been trying to think of how that could be. In the past few cycles, the polls at the end of the previous year are not very predictive of contested primary races at all… but the past few cycles are just not like this one.
dogwood
I think Bernie will ultimately be derailed in the primaries by a failure to attract enough minority voters. Losing the Black vote by huge margins is ultimately what ended Clinton’s run in ’08. The emphasis on economic equality is all well and good, but minority voters understand that economic equality doesn’t necessarily translate into political and social equality. The majority of Black voters aren’t significantly different class-wise from their white counterparts. Voting is a class based activity. Tell a middle class or upper-middle class minority voter that wealth redistribution will solve racial inequality in America, and I think they would laugh.
debbie
@Patricia Kayden:
I still think Elizabeth Warren would have been more effective, but you take what you can get.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
I assume they would love to strip immigrants of their citizenship if they could; they certainly want to deny citizenship to children of immigrants born here.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
Maybe the MSM hates recent immigrants to the USA? Maybe they are not blind, but are tacitly supporting the GOP?
dogwood
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t think the crowd that is excited about Sanders this cycle is the same as Obama’s crowd in ’08. I’m sure there’s some overlap, but it was John Edwards who had the majority of this group in ’08.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: They would love to intern all the undesirables. Their list is fairly long.
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: MSM reaction to Obama has showed their racist slip, I believe. If Obama is not “American” enough for them, what chance do recent immigrants (once who came here in the last 50 to 60 years) have to be considered “real Americans”.
Paul in KY
@gene108: The only way to handle it is to jack up the tax rate on investment income.
Paul in KY
@WereBear: I was talking about 1968. Sen. McGovern was purely a senator at that time. Our candidate was the ‘Happy Warrior’ Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Brachiator
@Calouste:
The last sentence says it all. Reagan was part of the GOP political establishment. Trump isn’t. This makes Trump more of a wild card, especially in the Tea Party era.
liberal
@Paul in KY:
That certainly has to be one of the fundamental changes required to get a handle on it.
WereBear
@Paul in KY: Corrected.
Of course, that’s not the only thing.
FlipYrWhig
@WereBear: I think you’ve created a circular argument, though: the winning candidate won because of enthusiasm, and the proof is that said candidate won. Republicans were happy that George H.W. Bush won, but it had nothing to do with enthusiasm for Bush the human being.
It’s a little before my time but was anyone ever excited about Nixon? My sense is that they may have been excited to stick it to the Nixon-haters, the freaks and hippies and weirdos and so forth, but they weren’t affirmatively pro-Nixon.
I would also guess that more people were “enthusiastic” about Goldwater than about Johnson. How many people would say, “You know who I like? Lyndon Johnson. He seems like a hell of a guy!”? Residual affection for JFK and abhorrence at what Goldwater stood for still carried Johnson to an overwhelming victory. A smaller number of enthusiasts loses to a larger number of dutiful loyalists. I think that’s going to be true this time as well.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s the last 50 years quite specifically, i.e. the whole period since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended explicit quotas and the complete exclusion of East Asians.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: Yes you are right. Ted Kennedy earned the undying hate of nativists for shepherding that into law.
ETA: People like Numbers-USA, CIS etc., want a complete moratorium on immigration. period.
Matt McIrvin
@dogwood:
There are a whole lot of baby Marxist white bros out on the Internet who do tell them this, and they do laugh.
Anoniminous
@Calouste:
I’m thinking Cruz or Carson will win Iowa because together they out poll Trump and the dynamics of caucuses. After that, I’m thinking Trump needs to take New Hampshire or his campaign is pretty much over. If he can’t win either South Carolina or NH his campaign is over. Should that happen the GOP nomination is up in the air with 1/3 of the GOP up for grabs.
Brachiator
@WereBear:
I don’t think that Sanders is right about income inequality at all. And this is not a Sanders vs Clinton criticism. That is, he understands that income inequality is a problem, but I don’t see that he offers any real solutions. I hear him talk about going after Wall Street and the Bankers and corporations, but I don’t see how this will improve the economy, or increase jobs or wages.
Bernie Sanders reminds me a lot of the current UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, an honest and honorable man whose ideas are stuck in the 1920s. His honesty and integrity make him superior to all the GOP dopes, and if he somehow became the nominee, I would of course vote for him. But I don’t share the enthusiasm that others have for him or see him as a breath of fresh air.
Anoniminous
@Frankensteinbeck:
I support Sanders but will work for Hillary. The next President will fill at least one and maybe more SCOTUS positions and I’m not about to let a Republican have the chance without a fight.
WereBear
@FlipYrWhig: True. And such is in the eye of the beholder.
Perhaps it’s not in the candidate so much as the whole campaign. Republicans do just as well with their “agin it!” Philosophy.
Anoniminous
@Brachiator:
This x 1,000.
First, with the move to mobile phone polling the 35 and younger crowd is becoming impossible. Second, people have started to lie more often, saying they are “likely” when it would really take a $10,000 free shopping spree at Nordstrom’s to get them into the voting booth. The result is over the past 3 years the disconnect between polling and voting is widening.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: Right, the thing that makes me a bit nervous about Sanders is that he has a righteous sense of what’s gone wrong, an honorable list of things he’d like to do to improve them… and a theory of how to get from today’s wrongness to tomorrow’s rightness that involves a “political revolution” that sounds a lot like bully pulpit-ism. He says that we the people need to make what want impossible for politicians to ignore. But that’s what Republicans do: ignore all sorts of things that the people say they want, and dare us to vote them out for it. And Republicans keep voting for Republican bullshit anyway, and there are a hell of a lot of them, and they rally behind any douchebag with an (R) after his name. I don’t see how the “political revolution” is going to bring anything to pass. YMMV.
Calouste
@Anoniminous: The campaign is pretty much over for anyone, not just Trump, who doesn’t win either Iowa or New Hampshire. All that’s left for people who are 0/2 is running for VP or the grift. Trump is leading fairly comfortable, by about 14%, in the polls in New Hampshire though, and has done so since he got into the race. We would need to see some fairly major movement in the NH polls in January for Trump not to win there.
Brachiator
@Anoniminous:
Trump doesn’t care about NH and hasn’t done much campaigning there. Christie has been all over NH, has received some key endorsements, but it won’t much matter in the long run.
Trump has dissed Iowa. He seems to look at national numbers, but doesn’t seem to have much of a state level strategy.
F
@Calouste: Trump could lose in NH if some of the establishment candidates drop out and their supporters rally around the remaining one. The problem is all of them know that, so they’re all staying in, and splitting their prospective voters.
pseudonymous in nc
Nice Polite Republicans said that Graham was “polling in the single figures”, which makes me wonder if there’s a style guide note for “single figures” that includes values between 0 and 1.
pseudonymous in nc
@Roger Moore:
Right now, the site’s getting a C from SSL Labs, which isn’t ideal. Doing SSL/TLS support properly now means TLSv1 at bare minimum and probably TLSv1.2 soon, but that in turn rules out older clients, such as old IE and the many, many old Android phones still in use. The site admins will have a better sense of what clients people are using, and will need to choose a SSL config that best fits.
catclub
@MomSense:
This. Republican primary voters are incomprehensible.
schrodinger's cat
@catclub: They want the exact opposite of what we would want. So not that hard to predict where they will gravitate.