WHAT THE HELL KIND OF DEBATE QUESTION WAS THAT?

I missed last night's Democratic presidential debate, but I see that Bernie Sanders got a question from co-moderator David Muir that was based on unsubstantiated hearsay:

MUIR: ... Senator Sanders, I did want to ask you about a neighbor in San Bernardino who reportedly witnessed packages being delivered to that couple's home, that it set off red flags, but they didn't report it because they were afraid to profile. What would you say to Americans afraid to profile? Is it ever acceptable?

SANDERS: Well, the answer is, obviously, if you see suspicious activity, you report it. That's kind of a no-brainer. You know, somebody is loading guns and ammunition into a house, I think it's a good idea to call 911. Do it.

(LAUGHTER)

MUIR: But I'm asking about -- I'm asking about profiling. Because a lot of people are afraid of that.

One neighbor of Syed Farook's mother in Redlands, California, claims that another neighbor saw suspicious activity, but the second neighbor didn't say anything because she didn't want to engage in profiling. As far as I know, no reporter has spoken to the second neighbor to confirm this account, but the first neighbor's version of the story, repeated on a couple of local TV stations, has been accepted as fact.

Shortly after the San Bernardino massacre, the Daily Caller flagged a local news report that included this exchange:

REPORTER: In Redlands, police searched a home records indicate is owned by Farook's mother. Aaron Elswick says his nighbor noticed a lot of recent activity there.

ELSWICK: She had noticed that they had, I guess, been receiving packages, quite a few packages within a short amount of time, and they were actually doing a lot of work out in the garage, and she was kind of suspicious and wanted to report it but she said she didn’t want to profile.”

Elswick repeated this on another local news broadcast:

ELSWICK: They were receiving quite a number of packages, and they were also working a lot in their garage, and I guess she didn't do anything-- sounds like she didn't do anything about it. She didn't want to do any kind of racial profiling. She's like, "I didn't call it in, you know, because I just didn't want to-- maybe it was just me thinking something that's not there."

(Videos below.)

Did this woman really find the activity suspicious enough to want to call the authorities? Or was she just saying to her neighbor, in 20/20 hindsight, "I thought there was something odd about those people"?

When there's a mass shooting involving a regular-American white male, neighbors often tell the media that the guy seemed to have a screw loose and had a lot of guns. But do they say anything to the cops? Well, of course, it's not illegal in America to amass limitless numbers of guns if you have a screw loose. On the other hand, it's not illegal to get a lot of package deliveries and to do a lot of work in the garage -- no, Mr. Trump, not even if you're a Muslim.

Did we fail to prevent this attack because of "political correctness"? We don't know. We don't know if this woman would have said anything under any circumstances, and I'm sure she doesn't know herself. And do we want the alternative -- a country in which non-Muslims call the cops every time Muslims do anything the non-Muslims think is suspicious, even though a lot of that activity is likely to be perfectly harmless? I know what the typical Republican's answer to that would be. But what's the rational answer? And if we're going to do that to Muslims, shouldn't we also do it to white men?

This was a terrible question. But, well, Sanders responded by talking about income inequality, so maybe it doesn't matter.

CAN EVIL DEMAGOGUE TED CRUZ TURN HIMSELF INTO DORKY DAD/VAGUELY META JOKESTER TED CRUZ?

Ted Cruz is rising in the polls. We're happy about that, aren't we? Doesn't it mean that the two top Republicans in the presidential race are unlikable, offputting hate spewers who perform poorly in general-election matchups? Also, the two leaders like each other, which means there's the possibility of a Donald Trump/Ted Cruz ticket, even if Trump's ego makes a Cruz/Trump ticket unimaginable. That's terrific, no? And while most of the Very Smart People in politics insist that Trump can't really win the nomination, they think Cruz could succeed, and that's great for the Democrats, because no reasonable person could possibly see him as likable, or as anything other than a bile-spewing monster.

Right?

That's what I've been thinking. The problem is, Cruz is working hard to change his image -- and he's having some success.

Check this out:

Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz will air a Christmas-themed parody infomercial during the broadcast of this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live.”

... The ad, which features the Texas senator read Christmas classics like “Rudolph the Underemployed Reindeer” and “The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails,” will air in key Iowa markets Saturday night, campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told the Independent Journal.

“In the spirit of the upcoming holiday, we are excited to bring a Cruz family Christmas into the homes of SNL viewers in Iowa,” she told the website. “Ted is a long time fan of SNL, so the chance to film his own SNL-style commercial was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up!”

On one level, this is cringe-inducing. On another level, the ad -- which features Cruz's wife and two young, adorable daughters -- makes him seem like a harmless suburban dad you'd probably think of as a good family man if he were your neighbor, even if you hated his politics. (A lot of political observers think Mitt Romney hurt himself in 2012 by not doing a lot of dorky-dad ads, and Cruz seems determined not to make the same mistake.) The jokes are the usual tiresome right-wing attacks -- Lois Lerner! Obamacare! -- but done up this way, they seem almost gentle. And yet if, like Cruz, you're middle-aged, the comedy probably seems almost hip. Most humorous political ads are so wheezy and dated that this seems practically postmodern by comparison.

Cruz has been working hard to make himself seem human and relatable. A couple of weeks ago there was a wave of stories about the appearance on YouTube of Cruz "B-roll" -- unused raw footage from ads featuring the candidate and members of his family. The story was that the Cruz campaign and Cruz-affiliated super PACs can't actually work together on ads, but the campaign is allowed to post raw footage online, which the super PACs can then magically happen upon and use in ads of their own.

The real story, however, was that the Cruz campaign got media outlets, including many that aren't usually Cruz-friendly, to post highlight reels depicting Cruz as -- again -- a genial dork dad in a plaid shirt, and much less of a monster than many of us think he is. Here's Gawker's compilation:



This isn't funny. This is scary. Cruz could be the nominee, and much of the public really might fall for this sort of thing and imagine that he's not really a bad guy, and certainly not the dangerous extremist he actually is.

Let me remind you that in the Real Clear Politics averages, Cruz trails Hillary Clinton by only 2.6 points. (Trump trails Clinton by 6.6.) In the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Clinton beats Trump by 10, but she beats Cruz by only 3.

Because most people don't follow politics very closely, Cruz's awfulness is not self-evident to the broad public. He might be surprisingly good at softening his image. If so, be afraid.

MARTIN SHKRELI WAS ARRESTED. DID THAT HELP ALL THE OTHER MARTIN SHKRELIS?

In The New York Times, Andrew Pollack argues that the arrest of Martin Shkreli may have actually made life better for other pharmaceutical price gougers:

... in some ways, Mr. Shkreli, chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, has taken the heat off other drug companies.

Most drug companies do not increase prices fiftyfold overnight, as Mr. Shkreli did.

But they often increase prices 10 percent or more a year, far faster than inflation. And those 10 percent increases -- on drugs for common diseases like diabetes, high cholesterol and cancer -- have a far bigger impact on health care spending than the 5,000 percent increase on Turing’s drug, Daraprim, which might be used by about 2,000 people a year facing possible brain damage from a parasitic infection called toxoplasmosis.

“Because he played the part so well of the evil Wall Street hedge fund guy, Martin really drew attention away from the more serious issues with much bigger dollar impacts,” said John Rother, chief executive of the National Coalition on Health Care, a Washington organization concerned with drug prices.....

The arrest and indictment will buttress the efforts of more established pharmaceutical companies to distance themselves from the upstart Mr. Shkreli....

“He is not us,” Kenneth C. Frazier, chief executive of Merck and chairman of the pharmaceutical industry’s main trade group, said this month at the Forbes Healthcare Summit this month. Now, pharmaceutical executives can look at the federal indictment and say that Mr. Shkreli is an aberration, a rotten apple.

It would be nice to think that Shkreli's arrest will be followed by more scrutiny of the industry's rapacious pricing. But remember that Shkreli was arrested for securities-law violations, not drug-price gouging (which is perfectly legal in America). It's quite likely that, as a pharmaceutical executive, he'll be treated the way extreme Republicans are treated in the political world: He'll be deemed an outlier whose downfall is welcome but who certainly can't be treated as representative.

Shkreliism is just normal drug-company behavior taking to its logical extreme, just as Trumpism is modern conservatism taken to its logical extreme. But when Shkreli and Trump are one from the scene, we'll probably pretend they came out of nowhere and represented nothing other than themselves. That's what we usually do, isn't it?

MAYBE THE WRONG GUY IS THREATENING TO RUN THIRD PARTY

So why exactly is this Washington Post story such a big deal?

Officials with the Democratic National Committee have accused the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of improperly accessing confidential voter information gathered by the rival campaign of Hillary Clinton, according to several party officials.

Jeff Weaver, the Vermont senator’s campaign manager, acknowledged that a staffer had viewed the information but blamed a software vendor hired by the DNC for a glitch that allowed access. Weaver said one Sanders staffer was fired over the incident.

The discovery sparked alarm at the DNC, which promptly shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to the strategically crucial list of likely Democratic voters.

Charlie Pierce is right:

Let us stipulate a few things. First, the DNC, under the barely perceptible leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has greased the skids for Hillary Rodham Clinton. (A debate on the Saturday night before Christmas, when half the country's on an airplane going to visit the other half? Please.)

... This is still just a cock-up by a technology company that evidently should be selling lawn sprinklers instead of data access.

... what admittedly sends my thoughts up a grassy knoll is how this relatively minor blip made it to The Washington Post in the first place. After all, the bungling was with the vendor, and with the DNC for hiring the vendor, so wouldn't the smart play have been to keep this whole thing in-house? Also, if this story survives through the Saturday night debate, let alone becomes an issue therein, and if the Sanders campaign is shut out from the national party data for longer than this weekend, I'm going to be very, very suspicious. Devious and clumsy are, after all, the hallmarks of the DWS era.

The Democratic Establishment is certainly trying to hobble Sanders, and even many of us who are generally supportive of Hillary Clinton agree that Wasserman-Schulz has truied to rig the contest in an absurd and anti-democratic way on Clinton's behalf. This may be the only time in the Murdoch era that I've ever agreed with even part of a New York Post editorial, but the first few paragraphs of this are hard to rebut:

Busy Saturday night? Probably, what with the NCAA bowl games, the Jets’ must-win battle in Dallas and opening weekend for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” So you’ll skip the Democratic presidential debate -- just as Hillary Clinton hoped.

Long, long ago, Clinton set out to ensure she wouldn’t be robbed of the nomination by some interloper, the way she lost to Barack Obama in 2008.

The party’s power-brokers played along, handing the Democratic National Committee to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a co-chair of Clinton’s ’08 campaign. Fix, in.

And so the DNC did its best to see nobody would watch the debates, lest voters dare think for themselves. Tomorrow’s is the second in a row on a Saturday night -- easily the worst evening for TV viewership.

This isn't just bad for the Democrats -- as it turns out, it's bad for Clinton. Did you notice her, earlier in the week, telling a supporter with a Trump-loving father that Dad should be told Hillary doesn't "have horns"? Well, maybe more people would realize that Clinton doesn't "have horns" if they watched her talk about issues -- y'know, like in a debate. She can seem awkward in isolated soundbites, stiff and singsongy in speeches, forced-sounding when she's trying to seem casual and relaxed -- but when you get her talking about issues without a teleprompter, she's sharp, on point. Also, she's not at all the scary, power-mad extremist/harridan of right-wing (and mainstream) caricature.

And the notion that Clinton's record is a serious vulnerability has been overtaken quite a bit by events. No, she's not a dove, and yes, she's long had ties to Wall Street. But economic inequities aren't the only issue in the Democratic primaries now. We're talking about terrorism -- and whether progressives like it or not, the Clinton approach to foreign policy might resonate at this moment for a lot of moderate Democrats. For those voters, Clinton certainly passes the "commander in chief test," while Bernie Sanders always seems to want to change the subject when talk turns to overseas affairs. And this is also the Black Lives Matter era, and while Clinton might not be the most stalwart ally of the movement, she has much greater support among African-Americans than Sanders.

I'd like to see more Democratic debates. I'd like them to be scheduled when viewers would watch. No matter who does best, debates would be good for selling and promoting the party as an alternative to the current insane Republicanism. I think the result would be a platform for the Sanders economic message, much of which Clinton is trying to co-opt in any case, and a platform for Clinton's other strengths, as well as a demonstration of her general reasonableness. What's not to like?

Instead, the party wants to conceal Clinton and shut out Sanders. It's bad for the party and bad for Clinton.

Sanders has leverage in this situation, though he clearly won't use it. He could be making threats to run third party just the way Donald Trump has. Given his passionate fan base, a Sanders third-party run would all but guarantee a Clinton loss.

I'll go to my grave hating Ralph Nader for his third-party run in 2000. But Sanders would be justified in using the threat of a third-party bid to demand more debates and better treatment. That kind of hardball isn't his style -- the fact that he lacks a taste for the jugular is part of the reason I'd rather have Clinton running against the thugs of the GOP in November -- but it's too bad. A threat to the party could be good for him, for Clinton, and for the country.

FOR DEMOCRATS, DEMOGRAPHY MAY NOT BE DESTINY

Martin Longman thinks Republicans are going to have a struggle in 2016, because electoral trends are in the Democrats' favor:

One of the fundamental errors of analysis that Republican strategists made in 2012 was their presumption that African-American voters would be less enthusiastic about reelecting Barack Obama than they had been about electing him in the first place. This presumption was relied upon heavily by everyone from Dick Morris to Karl Rove to Mitt Romney. It was basically wrong. While Romney got a slightly higher percentage of the black vote than John McCain, turnout was extremely strong. And it was enough to help Obama win Ohio and prevent a nail-biter on election night.

Their analysts seem to be going down the same path now, assuming that without Obama on the ballot, black turnout will nosedive. I’m going to warn then now that this is a dangerous hypothesis. The president will be lobbying African-Americans heavily to turn out and protect his accomplishments, and it is a message that will deeply resonate. Any electoral strategy that relies on blacks sitting out the 2016 election is grasping at straws.

I agree that black voters will show strong support for Hillary Clinton. I think Hispanic voters will turn out as well.

It's the rest of the Democratic coalition I'm worried about.

Longman quotes this Wall Street Journal story, titled "How Democrats Could Win the White House Again in 2016":

“Ohio went Democratic (in 2012) because Republican support was tepid among whites and [Democratic support] full-throttled among minorities,” [Demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution] said. “Republicans will have to push as many older whites out [to vote] as possible in the Northern states where they may have a shot.”

Um, yeah, that's right. But have you seen what white people have done at the ballot box in non-presidential elections, not just in Ohio but in other Midwestern states Obama won twice?

There are Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa -- all elected since Barack Obama's first victory, and all of whom replaced Democrats. Republicans also hold the governors' mansions in the deep-blue presidential states of Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Maine, and New Mexico.

But is Hillary Clinton really in trouble in states Obama won handily? Well, consider the latest Public Policy Polling survey of Iowa:

PPP's new general election poll in Iowa finds mixed results for Hillary Clinton. She leads 3 of the Republicans we tested against her- 46/41 over Jeb Bush, 45/42 over Carly Fiorina, and 45/43 over Donald Trump. And she also ties Ben Carson at 45. But she trails Ted Cruz 47/44 and has a larger deficit against Marco Rubio at 48/41.

She loses to Cruz by 7 points. And even Ted Cruz beats her. And she barely beats Donald Trump. (Recall that Obama beat Mitt Romney by 6 in Iowa in 2012, and beat John McCain by 10 in 2008.)

And please note this, from Greg Sargent:

There is a striking finding in the new NBC/Wall Street Journal [national] poll: Marco Rubio is tied with Hillary Clinton among young voters. Given the importance of Barack Obama’s overwhelming margins among young voters to his two victories -- and, more broadly, given that Democrats are betting the future of the party on their rising coalition of young voters and minorities -- this is something Democrats should probably start paying attention to right now.

That's an exact tie, 45%-45%.

And on a key issue Clinton is emphasizing, young people really don't seem to be on the same page as the Democrats. Did you see that recent ABC/Washington Post poll in which a plurality of Americans, for the first time in the history of the survey, said they opposed an assault weapons ban? Here's a key finding:

Seniors are most likely to favor banning assault weapons, while -- despite their greater liberalism on many other issues -- nearly six in 10 young adults oppose it.

Yes, check the numbers: 18-29-year-olds oppose an assault weapons ban 59%-39%. Whites oppose a ban 56%-42%. Males oppose a ban 62%-35%. Zandar sees this as a harbinger of future voting, and he may be right:

... Democrats shouldn't count on Millennials, particularly white ones, as a source of voters in the future. They've made their bed, especially white men.

And I haven't even mentioned the GOP's incessant efforts to suppress the vote among blacks and Hispanics.

Am I saying the Democrats are doomed in 2016? No. I just don't believe that the 2008/2012 map is set in concrete. If Democrats are running against someone other than Trump -- and possibly even if they're running against Trump -- they're going to have to go out and work to win a lot of Obama states. And it's not going to be easy.

THE RUBIO CAMPAIGN'S IMMIGRATION ATTACK ON CRUZ COULD BE A MURDER-SUICIDE

I've been trying to figure out a way to explain the immigration battle currently taking place between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio that won't make your eyes glaze over. Okay, here goes: Cruz, during this week's presidential debate, said, in response to a challenge from Rubio, that he's "never supported legalization" of undocumented immigrants. But in 2013, he proposed an amendment to the bill that would allow undocumented immigrants to stay here legally, though they couldn't seek citizenship. He said at the time that, under his amendment, the undocumented could become legal permanent residents, and therefore could "come out of the shadows and be legalized." On the other hand, the bill itself, crafted by the Senate's so-called Gang of Eight, which included Marco Rubio, contained a path to citizenship, not just legal status.

Given how Republican voters feel about the undocumented, Rubio's attack in the debate could be paraphrased thus: Hey, my position on immigration a couple of years ago was full of that horrible amnesty, but your position was nearly as bad, Ted. Which is why I don't understand Rubio's reasons for pressing the attack this hard. Nor do I understand why Fox's Bret Baier, essentially acting as an agent for the Republican Establishment and the Rubio campaign, thinks his grilling of Cruz on Fox was a win for Rubio and the Establishment.



Yes, every time this is brought up, doubts about Cruz form in the minds of immigrant-hating Republican voters. But those same immigrant-hating Republican voters are also reminded anew that Marco Rubio helped write an "amnesty" bill. Every time this is discussed, Rubio is linked to a moment in his career you'd think he'd want brought up as little as possible.

Now, Cruz might survive this. He says his amendment was intended as a poison pill -- a way of showing that Democrats wouldn't vote for a bill that reformed other aspects of U.S. immigration policy if a path to citizenship wasn't offered. Many observers, such as Greg Sargent of The Washington Post, say that's accurate -- although Tierney Sneed of Talking Points Memo says that people who worked on the bill at the time insist that Cruz is misrepresenting what he was doing. Nevertheless, his fans might accept his explanation.

But even if this line of attack hurts Cruz, it's not going to help Rubio, because any day we're talking about the Gang of Eight is a bad day for Rubio's campaign, given the anti-immigrant feeling in the GOP. So Rubio's campaign might be killing Cruz's and fatally wounding his own.

The New Republic's Brian Beutler knows who really stands to benefit from this battle:

Normally Cruz could blow all of this off by returning to the fault line. You supported the Rubio-Schumer-Obama amnesty bill and I tried to kill it. But Trump spoils that dichotomy. To the extent that there’s any grey area here at all, anti-immigration voters don’t have to choose between Rubio and Cruz. They can defect to Trump, whose mass deportation agenda is crystal clear.

As Beutler's headline puts it:

The Rubio-Cruz Clash Has Donald Trump Laughing All the Way to the Bank

If immigrant-hating voters become disillusioned with Cruz, they have a clear alternative -- and it sure as hell isn't Rubio.

IS SHELDON ADELSON PLANNING TO TURN HIS NEW ACQUISITION INTO THE RUBIO REVIEW-JOURNAL?

Reporters from the Las Vegas Review-Journal have confirmed that billionaire wingnut Sheldon Adelson just bought their paper:

The son-in-law of billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson arranged the $140 million purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Adelson's behalf, sources confirmed Wednesday....

Fortune magazine on Wednesday cited "multiple sources familiar with the situation" in reporting Adelson was the newspaper's "primary buyer."

The Atlantic's Molly Ball reminds us why that's worrisome:

Adelson’s ownership ... provokes understandable fears that he’s going to turn a politically important state’s most prominent media property into a right-wing propaganda sheet.... He has a track record in this regard: In Israel, he founded a free daily named Israel Hayom that has become popular and influential with a combination of a populist-tabloid sensibility and a hard-right political line. It’s been called the Fox News of Israel; locals have nicknamed it “Bibiton” for its ardent support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here's more from a March 2015 column by Tom Friedman (I know, I know, but keep reading):

... when it came to showering ... cash on Republican presidential hopefuls and right-wing PACs trying to defeat President Obama (reportedly $150 million in 2012), and on keeping Netanyahu and his Likud party in office, no single billionaire-donor is more influential than Sheldon.

... Israel has much stricter laws on individuals donating to political campaigns [than the U.S.], so Adelson got around that in 2007 by founding a free, giveaway newspaper in Israel -- Israel Hayom -- whose sole purpose is to back Netanyahu, attack his enemies in politics and the media, and enforce a far-right political agenda to prevent any Israeli territorial compromise on the West Bank.... Graphically attractive, Israel Hayom is now the biggest-circulation daily in Israel. Precisely because it is free, it is putting a heavy strain on competitors, like Yediot and Haaretz, which both charge and are not pro-Netanyahu.

Adelson then bought the most important newspaper of the religious-nationalist right in Israel, Makor Rishon, long considered the main backer of Netanyahu’s biggest right-wing rival, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett. Last March, in an interview with Israel Army Radio after the Makor Rishon sale, Bennett said: “It saddens me. Israel Hayom is not a newspaper. It is Pravda. It’s the mouthpiece of one person, the prime minister. At every junction point, every point of friction between the national interest and the interest of the prime minister, they chose the side of the prime minister.”

There's no question in my mind that Adelson bought the paper in order to advance his political goals; as Friedman notes, last fall, according to The Washington Post, Adelson "joked in a public discussion with a wealthy Israeli: 'Why don’t you and I go after The New York Times?' Told it was family owned, Adelson quipped, 'There is only one way to fight it: money.'"

But does he have any idea how to leverage the power of a newspaper far outside America power centers to influence national politics? It can be done -- the Internet can theoretically make any content go national -- but he'll have to invest enough money to get the job done and hire people with the skills to accomplish his aims. Adelson hasn't always had the greatest judgment -- how much money did he give four years ago to the futile campaign of Newt Gingrich?

But maybe this time he's going to back a somewhat more promising candidate. Marco Rubio is certainly trying to win his favor:

[Rubio] has avidly courted casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, sitting down with him privately numerous times, including a dinner in Washington weeks before launching his campaign in April, and checking in regularly by phone to talk about Israel and the campaign.

In October, Rubio held a campaign meeting at Adelson’s Venetian hotel, site of the debate.

And Rubio has consistently championed Israel in speeches on the Senate floor while also pushing legislation aimed at supporting the cause....

Rubio has benefited from an outside group that has run TV ads featuring his hawkish foreign policy views, including a vow to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, which Adelson loathes. Rubio is also backing legislation Adelson is pushing to crush an expansion of online gambling, which threatens his global casino empire....

“Rubio calls and says, 'Hey, did you see this speech? Did you see my floor statement on Iran? What do you think I should do about this issue?’ ” a September New York magazine story quoted an unnamed Adelson friend as saying. “It’s impressive. Rubio is persistent.”

Although:

That scenario, however, has run into resistance from a surprising source: Miriam Adelson, the megadonor’s strong-willed and equally hawkish wife. An Israeli-born physician, Miriam Adelson has become enamored of late with Ted Cruz, according to four Republican sources close to the couple. The Texas senator has impressed her with his unwavering toughness on national security issues, especially his support for Israel, the issue that the couple cares most passionately about.

“He really likes Marco, but she really likes Cruz -- and it’s a standoff,” said one well-placed Republican fundraiser familiar with Adelson family dynamics.

However:

One candidate unlikely to win Adelson’s support is Donald Trump. “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet,” Trump wrote recently on Twitter.

Still, Trump made his own attempts to curry favor with Adelson, including phone calls in which he talked about living in a city with a large Jewish population and, according to The New York Times, noting that his daughter converted to Judaism.

In any case, Adelson going to try to use this acquisition to elect a president. But he tried to elect a president four years ago. We'll see if he fails again.

SCREW ANYONE YOU WANT -- AS LONG AS IT'S NOT THE INVESTOR CLASS

No, I'm not going to going to call this pissant "the bad boy of pharmaceuticals," because calling him "bad boy" glorifies him. And yes, I'm happy that he's under arrest:

A boyish drug company entrepreneur, who rocketed to infamy by jacking up the price of a life-saving pill from $13.50 to $750, was arrested by federal agents at his Manhattan home early Thursday morning on securities fraud related to a firm he founded.

Martin Shkreli, 32, ignited a firestorm over drug prices in September and became a symbol of defiant greed. The federal case against him has nothing to do with pharmaceutical costs, however. Prosecutors in Brooklyn charged him with illegally taking stock from Retrophin Inc., a biotechnology firm he started in 2011, and using it to pay off debts from unrelated business dealings. He was later ousted from the company, where he’d been chief executive officer, and sued by its board....

Retrophin sued Shkreli in August for misuse of company funds, claiming he engineered numerous transactions between investors in MSMB and the biotechnology firm. Similar allegations are laid out in the company's regulatory filings.

The company alleged in a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court that, through a disastrous trade with Merrill Lynch in 2011, Shkreli cost MSMB more than $7 million, leaving it virtually bankrupt.

Nothing terrible happens to you in this country if you shaft ordinary people. We saw that after the financial collapse. Shaft members of the investor class, however, and you really might face the law's wrath. Ordinary schmucks aren't full citizens. Want justice? Buy financial instruments. If you can't, tough luck -- the law doesn't care what happens to you.

Shrkeli screwed the wrong people, so I suppose he really could go to prison. However, I expect him to play the "troubled white guy" card, in court and possibly in the media. All the "bad boy" nonsense -- the incessant boasting, the taunting tweets, the $2 million purchase of that one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan CD, the claim that he seeks to bail out imprisoned rapper Bobby Shmurda and also might pursue a rap career of his own -- I predict is going to be presented in court as a textbook case of bipolar disorder, or some condition on the autistic spectrum, that impairs Shkreli's judgment and renders him less than fully liable for his own acts.

We know that blacks arrested for violent crimes are always "thugs" and Muslims are always "terrorists," whereas even white guys who commit mass murder are "loners," "troubled" and "misunderstood." Will Shrkeli try to play the "troubled" card? It might not work, but that's what I'm betting on.

REPUBLICAN INSIDERS ARE STILL COMPLETELY OUT OF TOUCH WITH THE PARTY'S CRAZY VOTERS

Judging from this Politico story and this one from The Des Moines Register, Republican insiders are finally coming to the conclusion that they should unify behind Marco Rubio.

From Politico:

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally went toe-to-toe Tuesday night in Las Vegas -- and Rubio came out on top.

That’s according to Republicans in the POLITICO Caucus, our panel of the top activists, strategists and operatives in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

More than 40 percent of Republicans picked Rubio, the first-term Florida senator, as the winner of the debate in a survey taken immediately following Tuesday night’s gathering....

GOP insiders were more equivocal when asked which candidate lost the debate, with 26 percent picking Cruz.

And from the Register:

Almost all of the Republicans offering commentary for The Des Moines Register said Marco Rubio shined, and that Jeb Bush earned the most-improved award during the fifth GOP debate....

Rubio, a Florida U.S. senator, was smooth and polished, which made it easy to envision him debating Hillary Clinton, the Iowans said.

The quoted Iowa insiders include a former state senator who's now a local talk radio host and a minister who's been plugged into conservative politics for decades. They were impressed with Rubio and Bush.

The problem is, rank-and-file Republican voters in a Frank Luntz focus group had a completely different reaction:

... Frank Luntz spoke to a focus group of voters who revealed that Ted Cruz and Chris Christie were their big winners on the night.

... Multiple members of the focus group applauded Cruz for his strong stance on terrorism and for explicitly stating that, if elected, he will "hunt down and kill the terrorists."

... The New Jersey governor got extremely high numbers when he criticized the endless debates and inaction of the U.S. Senate....

And they hated Jeb Bush, while their reaction to Rubio was clearly "Meh."

Christie was their GOP daddy, the guy they think can chase the monsters from under the bed.



Verbatim quotes about Christie: "He's absolutely on point and he makes me feel safe." "Highly confident, direct, to the point." "Tells it like he sees it." "The right man for these times." "He connects what we the American people are feeling with his laser focus on how to get-- to fix it." "He looked me right in the eye and told me exactly what the problem was." "... he's on point on the issues that really matter." "... I can trust him as my president."

What impressed these voters the most was Christie's response after a surprisingly nuanced Cruz-Rubio-Paul discussion of whether it's good for the United States to overthrow dictators in the Middle East. Christie said, Listen to all this "thoughtfulness." Can you believe this crap? I'm a frickin' governor. I used to be a U.S. attorney. In my jobs, I haven't have time for all this "weighing the pros and cons" nonsense. I just do stuff. So who's with me? Let's go kill some people! U-S-A! U-S-A! Nine-eleven! Nine-eleven!

Okay, that's not an exact quote. But Christie has dumbed down his message at just the right time. Ban refugee widows and orphans! And in last night's debate: Hell yeah I'd shoot down Russian jets and risk World War III! Suck it, Vladimir!

Christie might get a poll bounce, especially in New Hampshire, though post-debate bounces can be evanescent -- hey, whatever happened to the brief moment of Fiorinamania after Carly attacked Planned Parenthood in a debate in September? But whatever happens in the long run, for now it seems as if the insiders think Rubio and Bush are back in the game, and maybe Christie to a lesser extent (he was the #2 winner among Politico's insiders, though he finished well behind Rubio), while the rank-and-file are warming to Christie and (especially) Cruz.

Oh, but Luntz's focus group didn't like other candidates' attacks on Trump, as you'll see in the video. So as establishment types sustain their indecision, Trump and Cruz will probably remain on top.

MORE MUSH FROM THE WIMP

Politico's Alex Isenstadt and Shane Goldmacher were impressed with Jeb Bush's debate performance last night:

Jeb Bush came at Donald Trump with everything he had, turning in his strongest debate performance to date just as much of the party was threatening to tune out his flagging candidacy entirely.

And they also seem to be impressed by this:

... And, two campaign sources say, Bush may be willing to go even further than he did on stage.

Prior to the debate, senior Bush aides began looking into the possibility of making a clear break with Trump -- potentially with the candidate stating that, if Trump were the nominee, Bush would not support him.

The former Florida governor didn’t go that far but the option may still be on the table. The Bush campaign has already examined whether such a statement would disqualify him from certain state primary ballots, some of which demand that candidates sign a loyalty pledge declaring that they will support the eventual Republican Party nominee.

(Emphasis added.)

What a sad, pathetic weakling Jeb Bush is.

Look, if you're going to do this, just do it. Don't dispatch a couple of lackeys to Politico to try to get you a Purple Heart for saying you might do it. Or, if you're afraid it might cost you a ballot line or two, then just drop the idea and shut up about it. Or do it anyway and dare the states to exclude you. Threaten to campaign as a write-in candidate if you're dropped. Rally your voters, assuming you have any. Stick your neck out.

Whatever you do, don't pretend you're brave because you've pondered taking a risk. Just take the damn risk, or don't.

JEB'S IDEA OF A SICK BURN: HEY, REMEMBER THAT OBSCURE THING DONALD TRUMP SAID FOUR MONTHS AGO?

Bloomberg singles out a moment from last night's debate:

The back-and-forth between [Jeb Bush and Donald Trump] ... at times took on a a so's-your-mother quality.

"I won't get my information from the shows. I don't know if that's Saturday morning or Sunday morning," Bush said, in an apparent suggestion that Trump has been watching too many cartoons.

There's a similar explanation at the Daily Caller:

GOP hopefull and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush attacked frontrunner Donald Trump for getting his foreign policy advice from “the shows.”

“I won’t get my information from ‘the shows,'” Bush said. “I don’t know if that’s Saturday morning or Sunday morning. I don’t know which one.”

To reiterate the point, Jeb’s official Twitter account sent out the following tweet:

Donald gets his military advice from "the shows" #GOPDebate pic.twitter.com/CZ1em8jwJv

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) December 16, 2015

How many debate viewers do you suppose had any idea what Jeb was talking about? Most people remember Trump's insults of John McCain and Megyn Kelly. Most people know that he's proposed banning entry of all Muslims into the U.S. and promised to "bomb the shit out of" ISIS. A lot of Trump's pronouncements and bloviations are memorable, sometimes months after the fact. But apart from appalled lefty bloggers (and blog readers) and Jeb Bush's research team, who remembers this moment from four months ago?

From this Sunday's Meet the Press:

[CHUCK] TODD: Who do you talk to for military advice right now?

TRUMP: Well, I watch the shows. I mean, I really see a lot of great... you know, when you watch your show, and all of the other shows, and you have the generals, and you have certain people you like.

No ordinary Republican voter in December remembers that Trump said that in August.

Jeb is like the guy who thinks of the perfect comeback to an insult two days later and actually confronts the insulter in order to deliver the comeback, except this is four months later, and the target of the comeback probably doesn't even remember what he said -- and the supposedly clever twist in the comeback is so obscure that it has to be explained.

Jeb, give it up.

THEY'LL BE SLAMMED FOR IT, BUT BRATTON AND DE BLASIO MADE THE RIGHT CALL

I suppose it wasn't a bad decision to close every public school in Los Angeles today -- overabundance of caution and all that -- but from what I'm reading about the similar threat received in New York, the decision to keep schools open here was the right one, even though it will be attacked by frightened civilians and opportunistic right-wing haters of Mayor Bill de Blasio.

First, L.A.:

All Los Angeles Unified School District campuses were closed Tuesday until further notice after LAUSD received a "credible" threat to all schools, according to district officials and police.

The threat against the nation's second largest school district was sent via email to a school board member Monday evening and was traced back to an IP address in Frankfurt, Germany, according to spokeswoman Ellen Morgan....

The implied threat was "explosive devices," "assault rifles" and "machine pistols," according to Beck.

Mayor Eric Garcetti, speaking at the same news conference as the police chief, added that the message included a number of forms of violence and weapons, and stated that "things were already in place to bring that violence about."

But now let's look at what officials in New York are saying:

A threatening email sent to the New York City school superintendent warned that every school in the city would be attacked with pressure cooker bombs, nerve gas agents, machine pistols and machine guns.

The email was sent early Tuesday and said the writer and "138 comrades" would carry out the attack. It said, "The students at every school in the New York City school district will be massacred, mercilessly. And there is nothing you can do to stop it."

The anonymous writer claimed to be a student at a district high school who had been bullied.

The writer and "138 comrades" would attack every school in the system? The New York public school system has more than 1,800 schools. Given the slowness of traffic here and the frequent creakiness of public transit, I think 139 people would have trouble even visiting all 1,800-plus schools in one day, much less attacking every one.

And de Blasio and police commissioner Bill Bratton say that the threat in New York was all but identical to the one in L.A.:

The threat to New York schools was sent via email to an Education Department official around 5 a.m. on Tuesday, said a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the threat. The official said that the emails appeared to have been routed through the same country, Germany, and come from the same person.

Stephen Davis, the top spokesman for the New York Police Department, said: “After an analysis, we have determined that the emails were the exact same wording with the exception of putting in the cities’ names and changing the number of people who were supposed to be participating in it,” meaning the threatened attack on schools. “Other than that,” he said, “it was a cut and paste job.”

If it was "the exact same wording," then the writer (who also mentioned jihad) was claiming to have been a bullied ex-student from L.A. as well as a bullied ex-student from New York.

What's more, it's been reported that the letter went to other cities as well:

New York City officials say they and many cities across the country received the same threat that closed the Los Angeles school system.

Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters Tuesday that the threat came in the form of a “generic” email and that New York officials quickly concluded that it wasn’t credible.

New York City has 1,800 schools. L.A. has 900, plus 187 charter schools.

I've watched a lot of Hollywood movies and I know that terrorists in movies are capable of mind-boggling levels of coordination. But real terrorists aren't Heath Ledger as the Joker. They aren't Kevin Spacey in Seven or Dennis Hopper in Speed.

Real terrorists can attack multiple targets at once -- see 9/11 or the recent Paris attacks -- but not hundreds. And they don't have superpowers, so 139 people can't attack 1,800 schools at once.

And if they're going to do it, why telegraph it? That's never been the ISIS-era M.O. Right-wingers will say, "Why not telegraph it? New York and L.A. are gun-free zones, aren't they?" Except that New York has 34,500 cops. Why give the cops here a head start?

The right choice was made in New York. A lot of people will never believe that, but I give Bratton and de Blasio credit for a well-reasoned decision.

****

Update from Gawker: "Bicoastal School Bomb Threats Were Sent From an 8Chan-Linked 'Cockmail' Service."

TED CRUZ, FUTURE RINO?

The Washington Post's James Downie thinks America would benefit from a Ted Cruz victory in the Republican nomination fight, followed by a Cruz defeat in the general election:

If [Cruz] were to be the nominee, it would be good news for the Democrats in the short term and the country in the long term. His ideologically extreme positions would hand Hillary Clinton an edge in what the fundamentals still suggest is otherwise likely to be a close election. And a Cruz loss would be most likely to end the myth on the far right that “Republicans lose presidential elections when they don’t run far enough to the right.” If Trump were nominated and (inevitably) lost, his backers would, as they did with George W. Bush toward the end of his administration, suddenly start declaring him a moderate or even a liberal. Such rewriting of history would be next to impossible with Cruz.

Nope. If Downie believes that Cruz couldn't be retroactively declared a RINO squish, he's naive.

Among the party's elites, the neocons already think Cruz is a squish. Here's Bret Stevens on The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page:

At this point, readers may sense that Mr. Cruz is closer to President Obama when it comes to fighting terrorism than he lets on. His views on metadata collection are identical to those of James Clapper, the incompetent and dishonest Director of National Intelligence whom Mr. Cruz cites approvingly in his [recent foreign policy] speech [at the Heritage Foundation]. He excoriates the Obama administration for hollowing out the military but fails to note that he was one of just two Republican votes (the other was Rand Paul) against the latest National Defense Authorization Act, opposition he justifies on obscure civil-liberty grounds. He cites Libya as a case study in why not to intervene in a Middle Eastern civil war. But he may also have noted that his anti-interventionist instincts precisely track those of Mr. Obama, who was reluctantly dragged into a war he led from behind.

As for Syria, Mr. Cruz insists “we do not have a side in the Syrian civil war” and endorses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view that nonintervention allows two evil sides to exhaust themselves in the fighting. But this is indistinguishable from Mr. Obama’s hands-off approach to the conflict, notwithstanding the administration’s flaccid efforts to arm a credible opposition and bomb ISIS.

If your aim is to bomb ISIS until the “sand glows in the dark,” you are taking a side in the conflict. Mr. Cruz knows this. If you want to destroy ISIS without strengthening the Assad regime and its backers in Tehran, you have to target the regime, too. The truth about Syria isn’t that we have no dog in the fight. It’s that we’ve got to fight two dogs. The alternative is the endless chaos in which ISIS incubates and desperate refugees come knocking on our doors.

Again, Mr. Cruz knows this. Again, he’s too smart not to. Intelligence is never in question when it comes to the junior senator from Texas. Character is.

(As an aside, please note that opposition to maximal intervention can't be a simply policy disagreement -- if you don't approve, that's a failure of character. Also note that even agreeing with Netanyahu on Syria isn't good enough.)

And see Max Boot in Commentary:

Ted Cruz inveighs against “these crazy neo-cons” who want to “invade-every-country-on-earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East.” Ronald Reagan proudly filled his administration with neocons like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. In many ways, Reagan himself was a “neocon,” having left the Democratic Party and embraced an open and idealistic form of conservatism....

Cruz’s suggestion that the U.S. back Assad is particularly egregious.... Backing Assad is not Reaganesque; it is more Obamaesque, since the current president has reached out to anti-American dictators in Moscow, Havana, and Tehran, among other places. Indeed, Obama has tacitly agreed to allow Assad to continue in power. So Cruz, by backing an alliance with Assad, is endorsing the de facto policy of the current administration.

So, yes, if Cruz wins the nomination and loses in November, the conservative opinion elite will absolutely argue that he lost because his foreign policy was insufficiently muscular, no matter how many times he may have argued that ISIS should be carpet-bombed into oblivion.

And rank-and-file voters? If Cruz is the nominee and he's defeated in November, they'll say he lost for the simple reason that he's not Trump.

Downie is certainly correct when he says that Trump, if he's nominated and then loses a general election, will be retroactively deemed a RINO by Republican voters -- but if Trump fails to win the nomination, the same voters will say he was the one true conservative, the candidate who could have won the general election, if only RINO treachery hadn't stolen the nomination from him.

Conservatism can't fail -- it can only be failed. If the GOP loses the presidential election next November, the right will say that it was because conservatism was failed. We just don't know how it was failed yet.

MAYBE TRUMP WOULD LOSE IF WE'D STOP BEING AGHAST

Another excellent poll for Donald Trump:

Donald Trump has hit his highest level of support yet in a new Washington Post/ABC News poll of registered Republicans out Tuesday: 38 percent....

Trump's support is two-and-a-half times that of his nearest rival Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (15 percent)....

The Post's Dan Balz and Scott Clement write:

The results are the latest sign that Trump’s outspoken comments on immigration and terrorism continue to find an audience among rank-and-file Republicans in spite of sharp condemnation from Democrats, GOP leaders, some of Trump’s rivals and a chorus of world leaders.

"In spite of"? Try "because of." Maybe the favorable response of GOP voters to Trump's proposals isn't exclusively because the rest of us are so shocked by them, but our outrage is certainly a huge contributing factor.

I once thought that the mainstream press was going to warm to Trump and start portraying him as just a cuddly eccentric. It actually seemed to be happening for a while in the fall -- back in October, I wrote an angry post about favorable media coverage of Trump's daughter Ivanka and other women who work with him. It was clear that the Trump campaign was spoon-feeding these stories to the press in an effort to soften Trump's image.



But it didn't help Trump. October was when Ben Carson started seriously challenging him for the lead in Republican polls.

Maybe if everyone had decided to start treating Trump as a harmless flake he'd be struggling in the polls now.

Trump clearly recognized, or at least intuited, that he needed to go back to being an angry man whose words shock people if he wanted to stay at the top. So he's saying outrageous things again, and nearly all of us rise to the bait. Maybe his rivals in the race for the Republican nomination don't respond with any passion or force, but it's obvious that he's driving them nuts.

Who's the only rival who seems to be thriving? In Iowa at least, it's Ted Cruz -- the one guy who until recently wouldn't criticize Trump, and who even when criticizing him refers to him as "my friend." I had doubts about Cruz's be-nice-to-Trump strategy, but it's certainly working better than anyone else's strategy.

As for the rest of us? Maybe the way to deprive Trump of oxygen is not to stop covering him, but to cover even his outrageous statements the way the boring pronouncements and policy documents of the other candidates are covered. Trump declares that he wants to restrict Muslim entry into the U.S.? Put it on the equivalent of page A18, right next to the dull article about Jeb Bush's latest position paper on global trade. Write every story with no emotion. Ignore the outraged demonstrators. Ignore the chilling policy implications and the intimations of fascism.

But wouldn't that be burying important information on serious matters? Yes, but the press does that all the time. Doesn't every Republican candidate have a tax plan that's outrageously skewed in favor of the wealthy and that's guaranteed to add trillions to the national debt? Where do those get covered? Bury Trump's outrageous statements where you bury those stories. Those tax plans would hurt a lot of ordinary people too, but the press coverage of them is minimal and bloodless. Treat Trump's outrages the same way. When he tosses out bait, record the facts and move on. Keep it all as boring as the rest of your issue coverage.

Maybe that'll work.

Am I seriously proposing this? No, not really. But it might be the only approach that could bring Trump down.

SARAH PALIN AND THE PROBABLY IRREVERSIBLE FASCISM OF THE GOP

If the Republican Party can rid itself of Donald Trump soon, the entire Beltway will declare that the GOP has solved its fascism problem, which, we'll be told, was exclusively a Donald Trump problem.

I don't think it's going to be quite so easy.

For a large number of regular Republican voters, Sarah Palin is still an inspiration and a guiding light -- and she's gone fascist as well:

Sarah Palin has confessed to having a “political crush” on far right French politician Marion Marechal-Le Pen, whom she likened to Joan of Arc.

The former Republican vice presidential candidate heaped praise on the young National Front deputy Sunday as her anti-immigrant party went down in defeat in the second round of regional elections in France, after dominating in the first round.

“I have a political crush, but one I couldn’t vote for today -- because she ran for office in France,” Palin wrote in the conservative Breitbart news website....

“As Marion faces the political battles ahead, I wouldn’t be surprised if she says a prayer to France’s Patron Saint, for Marion is a reminder of her -- Joan of Arc,” Palin wrote.

The Breitbart piece, if you really want to read it, is here.

Marion Marechal-Le Pen is the niece of Marine Le Pen, now the head of France's National Front party. Marine is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, cofounder of the party and its head from its inception in 1972 until 2011. Marine Le Pen has tried to moderate the views of the Front somewhat, but Marion is kicking it old school, the way her grandfather did:

Even more rightwing and socially conservative than her aunt, Marine Le Pen, who heads the party, she is closer in many of her beliefs to her grandfather, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

... Maréchal-Le Pen has stood out for adopting socially conservative stances that are more extreme than her aunt, Marine. She was a key figure in France’s anti-gay marriage demonstrations of 2013, leading one Paris cortege at which the British National Party’s then leader, Nick Griffin, was also present, while her aunt deliberately stayed away. She later publicly opposed the arrival in Marine Le Pen’s entourage of a defector from the traditional right who had founded a centre-right gay thinktank and campaign group, GayLib. She has opposed the French state providing free abortions, saying some women should pay for them.

Earlier this year, she retweeted a controversial video by a Front National MEP warning of the dangers of different types of Islam, while Marine Le Pen, trying to “detoxify” the party’s image, had ordered the video not to be promoted. Economically, she adheres less to her aunt’s state interventionism, and more to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s brand of free-market, free-enterprise capitalism.

More:

The younger Le Pen appeals to both Catholic traditionalists and to the radical identity movement thriving in the south that is trying to keep France French. Dishing out that message, she has vowed that as head of her southern region, she would cut funds to planned parenthood groups and associations representing Muslims.

"We are not a land of Islam," she said at a rally in Toulon. Muslims can be French citizens "only on condition that they bend to the customs and the way of life that Greek, Roman and 16 centuries of Christianity fashioned."

She walked that stance back a bit this week on iTele TV, stressing that all immigrants are expected to exchange their customs for the French way of life.

The French model "has been abandoned in favor of the multicultural ideal, a kind of right to be different that I profoundly believe contributes to the French fracture," she said.

Marechal-Le Pen gets extra love from some National Front supporters because she quietly nurtures the themes of party co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, her grandfather, who holds a seat in the southern regional council. He has been ostracized by daughter Marine in a family feud that at one point risked fracturing the party.

Marechal-Le Pen makes it clear she opposes her grandfather's anti-Semitic remarks, which triggered the feud, but embraces his overall message, including the fear that Islam will overtake French civilization.

A lot of this is precisely what appeals to Palin, as she notes:

... I’m especially impressed with the courage of her young niece who is a devout Catholic and unapologetically pro-life --not an easy thing for a politician to be in a country that’s aggressively secular.

... young Marion Maréchal-Le Pen is unashamed to champion France’s Judeo-Christian identity and heritage as something worth preserving and fighting for. She publicly proclaims it, setting an example for even American politicians to be so bold.

... Marion Maréchal-Le Pen declares that France is not an Islamic land, but Muslims are welcome to become French citizens “only on condition that they bend to the customs and the way of life that Greek, Roman and 16 centuries of Christianity fashioned.”

What she’s saying should not be controversial. It’s common sense....

The Left wraps itself in political correctness and multiculturalism like a suicide vest. They’d rather blow up the whole country than admit the stupidity of thinking a nation can remain the same after inviting in millions of people who despise its values.

Well, Palin had already endorsed Trump's Muslim ban, so I guess this was a logical next step.

It's now becoming the conventional wisdom, based on a couple of Iowa polls, that Ted Cruz is going to beat Trump for the GOP nomination -- this despite the fact that Trump still has an extraordinarily passionate following in the GOP. (In a new national Monmouth poll of Republicans, Trump is at 41%, with Cruz a distant second at 14%.) Talk of a possible Trump loss leads a lot of observers to speculate that he'll quit the GOP and run third party. New York magazine's Jonathan Chait thinks Republicans should let Trump go, one reason being that "A Trump defection would give Republicans an opportunity to escape the ideological and demographic tar pit into which they have sunk." (Chait also thinks the GOP has nothing to lose because Republicans are doomed to lose in 2016, an idea that isn't borne out by recent polls showing Hillary Clinton losing to Marco Rubio and Ben Carson, and barely beating other Republicans, including Cruz.)

But purging just Trump won't get that job done -- the tar is too deep and it's spreading too fast. Calls for fascism and white nationalism, stripped of all euphemism and dog whistles, are now what Republicans mean when they say they refuse to be "politically correct." This is what the GOP is rapidly becoming: a National Front.

ONLINE RADICALIZATION (WHITE NATIONALIST VERSION)

A fw days ago, this giddy report appeared at the right-wing site CNSnews.com, which is a project of Brent Bozell's Media Research Center:

Young Priest Electrifies Huge Crowd in Poland: 'Gospel Not Koran! Gospel Not Koran!'

A video of a young Catholic priest giving a speech critical of liberalism and Islam has received over 100,000 views on YouTube.

In November Fr. Jacek Miedlar addressed a crowd of 25,000 in Warsaw, Poland. The march was in recognition of Poland's Independence Day....

Much of the focus of the rally was on Poland's Catholicism and national pride, and the threat of radical Islam.

... he called out, "The gospel not Koran!" The crowd then repeated the phrase over and over.

Yes, "The gospel not Koran," and also "God, honor, and homeland" -- all while waving the flag of Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski, or NOP, the National Rebirth of Poland party, which the ADL calls "a Nazi-like right-wing extremist group," adding that "Some Polish-American racist skinheads have tattoos featuring the group's logo." NOP members have also confronted pro-Israeli demonstrators in Poland, some of them chanting, “I won't apologize for Jedwabne,” a reference to a World War II-era pogrom.

Here's a partial translation of what Father Miedlar says in the clip above, from CNSNews:

“Dearly beloved, the enemies of the homeland and the enemies of the Church are furious today because they see a huge, enormous army of patriots, army of nationalists, and army of supporters who have ‘God, Honor, and Fatherland’ in their hearts and are ready to give their lives for them. But I am more than convinced that leftist propaganda is trying its best to destroy us, to destroy the Church, to destroy the Polish nation. We cannot let them do it. We are the Church Militant. We are the warriors of Great Poland. They aren’t even aware that the more they attack us, the more our pride grows!”

“Dearly beloved, we’re not afraid of the peaceful Muslims, but they’re a minority. We’re afraid of fundamentalism. We do not want violence, we do not want aggression in the name of Allah.... We must oppose it. We do not want the hatred that is in the Koran, in Surah 5 [expressed for Jews and Christians], but we want the love and truth of the gospel. We want to fight with the sword of love and truth, to which Saint Paul the Apostle calls us in the sixth chapter [of the Epistle] to the Ephesians [6:14-17]. The Gospel, and not the Koran!"

“Leftist and Islamic aggression aimed at everything Christian and national makes us very afraid. ... But we’re also afraid that our fear will turn into hatred. And we, as Christians, cannot let this happen. That’s why we, the Christians, want dialogue. But no one wants to talk to us, instead calling us fascists, racists, xenophobes, and infidel dogs. We can never allow this. We don’t want to fight with the hammer of hate they want to push in our hands....We want to fight with the sword of truth. With the sword of love! With the word of the gospel! With the sword that is Jesus Christ, our living Lord and Savior.”

Father Miedlar insists that the demonstrated aren't interested in hatred, but I'm not sure the global array of commenters at YouTube would agree. A presumably American commenter named TheJarhead94 writes:

looks like Slavs will save the white race and god bless them.

some may say they are not white well then good for them because whites are too weak to save themselves they would rather be culturally enriched then preserve their way of life. i'll wish you luck slavbros in your fight against the surge of human garbage invading Europe. Deus vult!

From a Croatian (or maybe Croatian-American):

Wow! Such unity and love for your country and people...it brings tears to my eyes knowing my homeland Croatia is ruined by leftist etno-masochists who force anti Croatian, anti European and anti white polithics in Croatia. Atleast I can admire the Poles! Go Hussars! Once Croatia was the Vanguard od Europe, sadly we have fallen, it is up to you my brothers to defend Europa. Za Polskę! Za wolność Waszą i naszą !

Another comment:

that's beautiful , greetings from sweden

hope we will someday do something similar

Also: "Love and respect from Norway!" And: "Amazing" (from a commenter named The Fuhrer).

I found this via a Free Republic thread, where the comments are equally enthusiastic:

The start of a new Crusade! First win back Europe for Christ then start the re-convestion of the east. Win Islamic Hearts to Christ until they cast aside their Korans to embrace the word of the True God. “God Wills It!”

****

Lock and load.

****

Good on him.

We need that to happen here in the US.


****

Brave men like this give me hope. In today’s world anything as positive as this makes me want to stand and cheer. Thanks for posting.

****

We need that to happen here in the US.
I think Franklin Graham is doing that, but thousands more like him, need to shout it from the roof tops. TO HELL WITH PC.

****

Reagan, Lech Walesa, and John Paul II brought down the evil empire communist USSR.

Will/can Fr. Jacek Miedlar and Trump? and ? bring down the evil empire of satanically misguided islam?

Victory through economic, ideological, and military supremacy.

Online radicalization? It's not always what you think it is.

MARCO RUBIO IS PHONING IT IN

Clinton-hater turned pro-Clinton operative David Brock says he's not devoting much thought to Marco Rubio, and Matt Yglesias is puzzled:

... according to Politico's Annie Karnie [Brock] said something really weird on Friday about Marco Rubio.

Brock said he doesn't dismiss what he characterized as an outside chance that Donald Trump could win his party’s nomination -- "You never discount a demagogue" -- but said he is not prepared to pour resources into planning for the rise of Sen. Marco Rubio.

"I just don’t see it," he said of the young Florida senator. "He has some critical weaknesses, his absenteeism, weird listlessness on the campaign trail, all the mess with his personal finances -- there’s a lot. He hasn’t been vetted."

"I think Cruz will end up as the nominee," Brock added, "and I think Trump will support him and have a big platform. We’ll be hearing from him at the convention and on the campaign trail."

(Emphasis added by Yglesias.)

Brock isn't the only person in Hillaryland who thinks Cruz will win -- Hillary's campaign chairman, John Podesta, also thinks it'll be Cruz.

Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta handicapped the GOP race for 90 Democratic donors assembled at a private fundraising event in Berkeley, California, on Thursday night, according to a Clinton backer who was in the room, telling the crowd that he viewed Cruz as the likeliest nominee, followed by Trump, and then Marco Rubio.

Are these guys trying to downplay Rubio strength because they don't want him to be able to go to Republican voters and say, "I'm the one Hillary Clinton fears"? Maybe. Or maybe -- as Yglesias's Vox colleague Andrew Prokop argues -- Rubio is running a terrible campaign:

There's something odd about Marco Rubio's presidential campaign: He hasn't been doing all that much, er, campaigning in the early states.

Unlike most recent presidential nomination winners, who have invested serious time and effort into campaigning and building organizations in at least one of either Iowa or New Hampshire, Rubio has taken a positively relaxed approach to both. He doesn't show up very often, doesn't do much campaigning when he is around, and doesn't seem to be building very impressive field operations.

And it's raising eyebrows. James Pindell of the Boston Globe wrote last week that Rubio's New Hampshire surge was "riddled with doubts," and that GOP insiders are bemoaning his "lack of staff" and "activity." National Review's Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson reported Wednesday that Rubio's "weak ground game" was angering Iowa Republicans. And the New Hampshire Union Leader wrote an editorial headlined, "Marco? Marco? Where's Rubio?"

Rubio, according to Prokop, thinks he's running a forward-thinking 21st-century campaign -- he doesn't need to campaign face to face in Iowa and New Hampshire as much as successful candidates have in the past, he believes, because voters will see him on Fox News, and that's all that matters. He thinks he doesn't need to make frequent appearances in the two states, build up campaign staff there, travel outside Des Moines when he's in Iowa, or rack up local endorsements. But if he really has this figured out, you'd think he'd be the one making moves in Iowa polls right now, not Cruz.

Maybe Rubio knows something about modern campaigning that the rest of us don't. But I think Iowa and New Hampshire voters still feel entitled to endless stroking and coddling, and he refuses to pamper them as they're accustomed to being pampered.

FUNDAMENTALS UNCHANGED: THE GOP IS STILL CRAZY

On one level, this is a huge change in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. On another level, it's the same old thing:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has surged ahead to become the latest front-runner in the campaign for the Iowa caucuses, dislodging Ben Carson and opening an impressive lead over a stalled Donald Trump, a Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll shows.

The firebrand junior senator from Texas is backed by 31 percent of those likely to attend the Republican caucuses that start the presidential nomination season on Feb. 1. Trump is a distant second at 21 percent, up slightly from 19 percent in October, but below his peak of 23 percent in August.

... The senator’s great leap forward comes largely at the expense of Carson, as Iowa’s evangelicals appear to have picked the candidate they want to get behind. The retired neurosurgeon, now barely in third-place, is supported by 13 percent, down from the first-place showing he posted in October, when he was at 28 percent.

Notice who's not surging? Marco Rubio (fourth place, 10%). Jeb Bush (fifth place, 6%). Chris Christie (tied for sixth place, 3%). John Kasich (ninth place, 2%). If only one of these guys were in the race, maybe that one establishmentarian would be competitive, at 21%. But we still have no reason to believe that any Establishment candidate is going to emerge from Iowa in a position to be truly competitive. It's still the case that the only candidates who've led any polls since summer are Trump, Cruz, and Carson. The Republican race is still dominated by candidates no sane person would want within a mile of the nuclear trigger.

Trump still seems to be leading everywhere else, which suggests either that Iowa is going to be an outlier (as it often is) or that states with Republican electorates that are just as Christian-conservative as Iowa's will gravitate to Cruz. It's my impression that Southern Republicans think religion is a big driver of their vote, but what their religion tells them is that the world is starkly divided into the pure good and the pure evil, and the kind of candidate they're really looking for is someone who sees life on earth the same way, with the intention of bringing vengeance to the evil. On that score, Trump still has a considerable edge on Cruz (and on the rest of the field). Iowa Republicans seem to care more about religious conservatism in and of itself than even Southern Republicans do. What do they love in the South? College football. Every Saturday in the fall, in every contest, there's one winner and one loser. Trump is still the candidate whose most inclined to talk about everything in that way, and to turn campaign appearances into rah-rah tailgate parties.

So I think this is a two-candidate race now. Maybe one or two good debates could give Rubio a poll bump -- I assume that's what the party was hoping for when it added a debate a couple of weeks before Iowa -- but Jeb Bush's refusal to withdraw and the media's tendency to hype any signs of life in Chris Christie's campaign will probably prevent Rubio from getting real traction in the early states. My guess is that Rubio will be a distant third in Iowa, Bush and Christie will do just well enough in New Hampshire to spoil any chance Rubio has to shine there, and none of these guys will drop out before South Carolina and Nevada. And Trump and Cruz will win all of the first four contests, with every other candidate looking weak and second-rate. After that, it might be Trump or it might be Cruz, but I don't think it will be anyone presentable -- or, let's hope, electable.

****

New Fox poll of Iowa: Cruz 28%, Trump 26%, everyone else way behind (Rubio 13%, Carson 10%, Bush and Paul 5%, everyone else 2% of less).

AND BY "WELL-REGULATED" WE MEAN "OPEN TO PRETTY MUCH ANYONE WITH A PULSE"

Texas is now allowing permit holders to carry concealed firearms in college campuses. Zachary Stone, a gun-control advocate at the University of Texas at Austin, tells us in a The New York Times op-ed that he was able to get a permit, even after demonstrating that he's completely unqualified to carry a gun:

"WHAT are you doing?”

I had just shot a gun for the first time. The instructor was yelling at me because he couldn’t understand how a 22-year-old missed a target some four feet tall and two feet wide, standing only nine feet away. But he was completely at ease when, 10 minutes later, he certified me for a concealed handgun license application.

... When I arrived at the gun shop to get my license, I didn’t know what to expect, except that there would be training and assessment. The course included no instruction about how to neutralize an active shooter, deal with moving targets, avoid innocent people or manage adrenaline and anxiety.

... The class was six hours long, but the instructor told us exactly what we needed for the exam in the final five minutes. Then, we got the test: 25 questions, multiple choice -- mostly about where you can lawfully carry your gun. City Hall? University buildings? Elementary school parking lots? All of the above. Everyone passed. I got 100.

Asked to demonstrate shooting proficiency, Stone struggles to load his weapon, struggles to hit the target, struggles with recoil, struggles with a stuck magazine. Eventually, with some on-the-fly coaching, he shoots with enough accuracy to pass:

So we went through this, at slightly farther distances, until we had each fired 50 rounds. My bullet holes were all over the place. You get five points for hitting the inner circles, four for the outer circle, and three for hitting anywhere else on the silhouette. To pass, you need 175 out of 250 points. If you fail, you get two more chances. I did pretty well in the end -- I got 216 points.

He gets his license, despite his instructor's skepticism:

As the instructor signed my certificate of shooting proficiency, he asked a legitimate question: “You’ve never fired a gun before today. Why do you want to carry one around?” I had to pause and think, but I replied calmly. “It’s my right.”

But hell, nearly everyone passes:

After almost zero training and a 10-minute test, the State of Texas considers me responsible to carry a gun. Once my background check clears, I’ll have the license. I am not an outlier. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, 99.7 percent of applicants in 2014 received their license.

Of course, no self-respecting gun absolutist would ever acknowledge that Texas's absurdly lax standards are a problem. Over at Right Wing News, William Teach, denounces Stone's op-ed. to give him his due, Teach does demonstrate excellent reading comprehension:

Stone’s idea here was to prove how darned easy it is to get a permit to carry on campus. And, he has zero knowledge of guns, didn’t bother to read the instructions that came with the gun, and the instructors supposedly made it super duper easy for him to pass. They had to sit through a six hour class, but the instructor gave them the answers for the test right before the test, making sure the attendees understood what is right and what is wrong.

Teach then adds:

That was apparently Bad in Stone’s world.

Yeah, you could say that.

But to Teach it's only apparently bad that Texas would let Stone legally pack heat in a college classroom. To Teach, Texas has done nothing wrong at all:

What’s missing is the notion of personal responsibility. The class is there to help people pass and use their Constitutional and legal rights. It’s expected that gun owners will continue exercising personal responsibility through the use of firing ranges, and keeping up with the law regarding where it is legal to use the concealed carry permit. Liberals, unfortunately, have little in the way of personal responsibility, instead relying almost solely on Government dominance.

Oh, gee, sorry, I forgot. It's not the government's role to intervene here (despite the Second Amendment's reference to "a well-regulated militia"). If people misuse dangerous objects in public in predictable ways with bloody or even deadly consequences, the government's conscious abdication of its legal right to intervene is utterly irrelevant! It's all on the individual!

So let's say you've had a dozen drunk-driving citations. You drive up to the DMV reeking of alcohol in order to renew your license. The government rubber-stamps your application and lets you keep driving -- then you kill a few people while totally blitzed. I guess, according to Teach, that's not even partly the government's fault -- it's 100% on you! You should have a sense of personal responsibility! The government should issue licenses to 99.7 percent of applicants, no matter what their driving history and no matter how poorly they do on driving tests! We should lower the standards until only 0.3 percent of people are rejected, because FREEDOM!

(I know the gunner response to this: There's no right to drive in the Constitution. But I'm old enough to remember being told by conservatives during the Cold War that the right to travel freely is one of the main things that distinguished us from the commies.)

Teach adds:

Stone obviously learned to use the weapon. He has a legal right to carry it on campus. And, if he’s sitting next to me and freezes during a situation where he should pull it, I’ll take it and use it properly.

William Teach watches a lot of movies, doesn't he? And believes them, don't you think?

Seriously? If a permit holder freezes in an active-shooter situation, Teach is going to grab his gun away from him and be a hero? Hey, William, don't stop there! Tell us you're going to grab two guns from reluctant shooters, one for each hand! And you're going to fire them while flying through the air sideways! And the bullets are going to travel in Dopplerized super-slow-motion before hitting every target you aim at!

No, even better -- you're going to curve the bullets!



Oh, it's just so tiresome. Every gun nut is an action-movie star in his own mind. At least Zachary Stone knows his own limitations.

MY NARRATIVE! MY PRECIOUS NARRATIVE!

Political junkies seem to dissect every poll that's released, but, funny thing, I haven't seen a certain set of results in this new Economist/YouGov poll dissected, even though the poll has been out there since early this morning. In the poll, respondents are asked about presidential candidates and foreign policy:



On the second question, yes, when thinking of Hillary, more people express unease than confidence -- but that's true of all the listed candidates, including Very Serious Jeb and Generalissimo Trump, and with much greater ratios of unease to confidence. The fact is, on both of these questions, Hillary Clinton laps the field. And the same was true in the previous Economist/YouGov poll, which was conducted just after the Paris attacks.

Now, why do you suppose these results haven't been widely discussed? Not consistent with the Hillary's-struggling narrative, perhaps?