THE CULT THAT VOTES

The good news in this report from Gallup is that, for all the right's propaganda efforts, only conservatives seem to believe climate-change nonsense:

Conservative Republicans Alone on Global Warming's Timing

While notable majorities of all other political party/ideology groups say the effects of global warming will happen within their lifetime, fewer than four in 10 conservative Republicans (37%) agree, a sign of that political identity's strident skepticism on this issue.

Conservative Republicans not only decisively reject the notion that the effects of global warming will happen in this lifetime -- a position in sharp contrast to all other political identities -- but another 40% say global warming will never happen. This is significantly higher than the percentages of moderate/liberal Republicans (16%), non-leaning independents (14%), conservative/moderate Democrats (5%) and liberal Democrats (3%) who say the same.

But you know the bad news: Congress and most of our state governments are controlled by the party in which climate-change denialism is rampant, and in which it's the position candidates are required to hold in order to obtain large amounts of campaign cash. And we're one presidential election away from possible total control of the federal government by the denialist party, despite the limited appeal of the denialist message, as seen in the poll results above.

But that's the nature of our politics.

Conservative Republicanism is a cult. Its adherents, like the adherents of all cults, have a belief system that's full of delusions. On the subject of global warming, this is obvious: Go to any right-wing media outlet and you'll be told that climate change is a massive hoax perpetrated for monetary profit (or in the pursuit of totalitarian control) by a sinister cabal of liberals and left-leaning scientists. On the right, this belief isn't even up for debate -- it's settled fact. As I said: the group delusion of a cult.

But the cult votes. The cultists are so fervent in this and other delusional beliefs that they turn out in elections when the rest of us don't. They have a mortal lock on many states and they seize control in contested states when we let our guard down, as they've done, for instance, in Wisconsin.

Will they vote in November 2016? Oh, hell yes. Will the rest of us? That's not clear. We may decide there's no difference between the cult's candidate and the major-party opposition, just as we did in 2000.

If that happens, the cult wins.

MAYBE GREG ABBOTT SHOWED SCOTT WALKER HIS FRAMED COLLECTION OF KOCH CHECKS

We were just hearing that the Koch brothers prefer Scott Walker in the 2016 presidential election -- though now it's reported that the Kochs are also looking at Bush, Rubio, Paul, and Cruz. Still, Walker seems to have the inside track. So what's this Walker move all about?

Republicans often rail about undocumented immigrants. But Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, an expected GOP presidential candidate, took it a step further Monday by sounding some critical notes about the number of those who immigrate to the U.S. legally.

"In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying -- the next president and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages. Because the more I’ve talked to folks, I’ve talked to [Alabama Sen. Jeff] Sessions and others out there -- but it is a fundamentally lost issue by many in elected positions today -- is what is this doing for American workers looking for jobs, what is this doing to wages. And we need to have that be at the forefront of our discussion going forward," Walker said in an interview with Glenn Beck, according to Breitbart News.

Walker's now talking about limiting legal immigration? Never mind how far to the right that is. Never mind how off-putting it would be in a general election campaign in a multi-ethnic America. Let's be cynical: Why is Scott Walker putting Koch support at risk?

The Wall Street Journal suggests that the Kochs find this sort of thing appalling:

Scott Walker won plaudits from David Koch at a New York fundraiser this week, but the Wisconsin governor now finds himself at odds with the leader of Mr. Koch’s Hispanic outreach organization....

[Walker's immigration] comments drew scorn from Daniel Garza, the executive director of the Libre Initiative, the Koch-backed organization that promotes free-market principles to Hispanic audiences.

“Any call, by anyone, to further restrict legal immigration is not a viable, nor an acceptable policy remedy,” Mr. Garza said Tuesday.

... Mr. Garza ... said Tuesday he is disappointed with Mr. Walker’s latest turn. Mr. Garza said Mr. Walker is in danger of marginalizing himself should he becoming the GOP’s presidential nominee....

“I don’t think that any candidate should really speak on the issue in a way that satisfies only one dimension of the American electorate,” Mr. Garza said. “You can’t just have a narrow slice of Americans and cater to a very narrow slice. We’ll continue to coordinate activities with folks who want to align with us on these kinds of remedies.”

So Walker just blew off the Kochs?

Well, maybe he doesn't believe that's the case. Here's something Walker told Fox's Megyn Kelly about how his immigration position evolved:

“... having talked to border state governors and having talked to other people, seeing how screwed up immigration has become under this president, it was clear to me talking to them and listening on this issue, traveling to the border actually going there with the governor of Texas Gov. Abbott, seeing the problems there, yeah from my standpoint going forward we need to secure the border, we need to enforce the laws that we currently have with an e-verify system,” Walker said.

(Emphasis added.)

Abbott is an immigration hard-liner. So, um, that must mean that Abbott never got a dime from the Kochs as he rose through the ranks in Texas politics -- right?

Wrong. This is from 2013, when Abbott was Texas's attorney general:

When Greg Abbott needed a little help flying around as his campaign for Texas governor gets underway, who did he call? The Koch brothers. Abbott’s latest campaign report shows that Koch Industries in Washington provided Abbott with the use of an airplane for $7,500 worth of travel. The report doesn’t offer details. And Abbott’s campaign did not return a call seeking clarification. But one thing’s clear: the Texas Republican attorney general is a favorite of the billionaire Koch brothers, who are big opponents of Obamacare and efforts to curb air and water pollution.

And, a year later, when Abbott was running for governor:

Money from Koch interests flows to governor candidate Greg Abbott

Five months after an ammonium nitrate explosion that killed 15 people in West, Attorney General Greg Abbott received a $25,000 contribution from a first-time donor to his political campaigns -- the head of Koch Industries’ fertilizer division.

The donor, Chase Koch, is the son of one of the billionaire brothers atop Koch Industries’ politically influential business empire.

Abbott, who has since been criticized for allowing Texas chemical facilities to keep secret the contents of their plants, received more than $75,000 from Koch interests after the April 2013 explosion at the West Fertilizer Co. storage and distribution facility, campaign finance records filed with the state showed....

Ahhh, I see. Parts of the Koch network express support for immigration -- but the Kochs have no problem whatsoever backing a hardcore immigration opponent if he does other things the brothers like.

So maybe Scott Walker assumes his extreme position on immigration will win him lots of primary votes (he's probably right) while not really alienating the apparent immigration moderates in the Koch family if he serves their interests in other, more bottom-line-oriented ways. We'll see if he's right.

AS IF 1993 NEVER HAPPENED

The headline of this New York Times story by Amy Chozick is "A Newcomer to Populism? Hillary Clinton Campaign Begs to Differ." The Clinton campaign made material available to Chozick that makes the case for Hillary as a longtime populist: Chozick offers the other side of the argument as well. It's a reasonably balanced story -- but how on earth did a sentence like the following make its way past Chozick's editors? Emphasis added:

In the years Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state and since she left the State Department in early 2013, she has become more associated with the centrist policies of the Bill Clinton years than with policies of raising taxes on the wealthy and increasing government services that have become widely adopted on the left.

Really? Has Chozick forgotten that, before NAFTA and so-called welfare reform and Wall Street deregulation (and, also, an economy recovery more broad-based than any since), there was this?

The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 ... was a federal law that was enacted by the 103rd United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton....

* Previously the top individual tax rate of 31% applied to all income over $51,900. The Act created a new bracket of 36% for income above $115,000, and 39.6% for income above $250,000....

* Previously, corporate income above $335,000 was taxed at 34%. The Act created new brackets of 35% for income from $10 million to $15 million, 38% for income from $15 million to $18.33 million, and 35% for income above $18.33 million....

* The 2.9% Medicare tax previously was capped to only apply to the first $135,000 of income. This cap was removed....

Right-wingers still whine about that tax increase. But to Chozick, I guess, it never happened.

JOURNALISM! THE HILL REPORTS CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORIST'S CLINTON ATTACK, IGNORES CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORIES

I don't have a problem with the Daily Beast doing a feature story on Roseanne Barr -- after all, the Beast is a general-interest site, and Barr is the subject of a new documentary focusing on her attempt to win the 2012 Green Party presidential nomination, as well as her subsequent campaign as the head of the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The documentary could be fascinating. There's no doubt that Barr is an interesting subject.

However, she's totally nuts.

Here's a 2010 post from her blog:

PEOPLE ARE SAYING THAT 9-11 WAS AN INSIDE BUSH JOB

that was done to destroy the enron and anderson books/records(bush’s friends) that were kept inside the buildings. Right after that our economy was gutted.

Two days after posting that, she put up a link to a lengthy 9/11 truther essay, which she called a "brilliant analysis."

She also believes that the Boston Marathon bombing was a "false flag" attack by the Obama administration intended "to remove the 2nd amendment," and she's approvingly cited the work of conspiratorialist Wayne Masden, including an article titled "Obama’s gay trysts confirmed again by senior congressional source" and another claiming "that the Mossad has gay pictures of Lindsey Graham."

The Daily Beast should have mentioned some of this -- but the Beast is not covering Barr as a political figure. The Hill, on the other hand, has no such excuse -- it's strictly a political journal. So why is this showing up at Ballot Box, "The Hill's campaign blog"? And why do we learn nothing from it about Barr's insane beliefs?

Roseanne: Hillary is 'the same old s---'

Comedian Roseanne Barr dismissed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential bid in an interview Monday, saying she offered "the same old shit."

“I think she’s a Democrat just like they all are,” Barr, who herself ran as an independent candidate in 2012, told The Daily Beast. “She seems like every other Democrat. I would not like to see her win. She’s the same old shit. I’d like to see me win...."

Barr said that she was not swayed to become a Clinton supporter by the prospect of electing America’s first female president.

“I think that a party that was woman-friendly would be revolutionary, and that party could be headed by a male or female,” she said. “It’s what the party itself stands for that matters. She is standing as a Democrat so she’s a Democrat, and I don’t see much difference between them and the Republicans. They both get paid by the same guys...."

I've edited the Hill post, but there's nothing to indicate that Barr is out of her mind.

And, well, of course there isn't -- this is clickbait for right-wingers, intended to advance the meme that Hillary's being attacked from the left by a left-leaning feminist icon! Oooh! Oooh! Catfight! Catfight! Libs in disarray!

Yes, the lefty media likes to cover crazies such as Victoria Jackson, Nick Searcy, and Ted Nugent -- but we always tell you these people are crazy. In fact, we're delighted to give you examples of how crazy these people are.

But if a mainstream outlet reported on a Victoria Jackson rant while describing Jackson as nothing more than a "former Saturday Night Live star," omitting her history of insane political pronouncements, that would be a journalistic embarrassment -- just like this.

RUBIO ROCKS OUR WORLD! (IN THEORY.)

In The New York Times today, David Brooks looks at Marco Rubio and sees starbursts:

... it’s probably right to see Rubio as the second most likely nominee, slightly behind Jeb Bush and slightly ahead of Walker.

He is, for starters, the most talented politician in the race....

Rubio gives a very good speech. He has an upbeat and pleasant demeanor. He has a great personal story. His policy agenda is more detailed and creative than any of his rivals. He has an overarching argument -- that it is time for a new generation to reform and replace archaic structures.

Here's my favorite passage from the Brooks column:

So there is beginning to be a certain charisma to his presidential campaign. It is not necessarily showing up in outright support. The first-term senator still shows up only with 8.3 percent support on the Real Clear Politics average of 2016 Republican presidential nomination polls, leaving him tied for 5th in the field. But primary voters are open to him; the upside is large.

Did you follow that? Rubio has charisma -- apparently! The polls don't actually show that he has charisma, but it sure seems as if he really has it!

Sorry, David, that's not how it works. Either the voters are feeling the Rubio magic or they aren't. You can't have hypothetical charisma. Voters can't be sort of electrified.

I'm seeing a similar misunderstanding of charisma in this Bloomberg article by Tim Alberta titled "Marco Rubio Is the Rock Star They Feared He Would Be." At first, you get the sense from Alberta that Rubio was really killing it in New Hampshire last week, especially in the eyes of one emblematic voter:

The speech had ended and the room was clearing out, but Barry Devine lingered near the podium, gazing at the stage. The 73-year-old Republican activist, in a suit and Vietnam veteran cap, had just heard a young senator deliver the dinner address at the New Hampshire GOP's spring kickoff event. And it left him mesmerized -- even a bit emotional....

"I'll just say this: We've got to bring this country back. I didn't fight in Vietnam for nothing," Devine said. Nodding to Rubio, he added, "And I think he could do it."

Everything about Rubio -- his policy prescriptions, his family history, his "youthful energy" -- resonated with Devine. But what made Rubio his favorite speaker in a day of appearances from Republican 2016 contenders was something less tangible. "The most important thing," Devine said, "is that he really loves his country."

And yet, several paragraphs later, we learn this:

Even the veteran activist Rubio wowed with his Friday speech, wouldn't commit. "I like Rand. I like Scott Walker. I even like, believe it or not, Rick Perry -- he's really done his homework," said Devine, who, after making 7,000 calls for Scott Brown's 2014 Senate campaign, will be a sought-after volunteer for any of the presidential hopefuls. "I don't want to close the door on anyone yet."

You see:

... there is a palpable sense that none of the buzz around Rubio -- his talent, his upside, his emotional appeal -- may wind up translating into concrete support. He has for months been polling in the single digits both nationally and in early nominating states. He has made no known staff hires in Iowa. And in New Hampshire, despite his sparkling debut, even those people singing his praises were quick to emphasize that they aren't prepared to pick a side.

Rubio isn't a "rock star." He's a contestant on American Idol or The Voice who's talented and pitch-perfect and undoubtedly appealing while he's on stage, but who's utterly lacking in the edge that actually make someone a "rock star." He generates enthusiasm, but no one's quite ready to get a Rubio tattoo yet.

After he announced his candidacy, Rubio got a bounce in the CNN poll and is now in a virtual tie with Scott Walker and Rand Paul for second place. (CNN has Jeb Bush still leading with 18%, then Walker with 12% and Rubio and Paul with 11%.) Now, remember: Walker hasn't had his official announcement yet. Nor does he have Jeb Bush's name recognition, or the family ties of Jeb or Rand Paul. He's still near the front based on a two-month-old speech at CPAC.

Why? Because Republican voters expect him to kick liberal ass. As for Jeb, the GOP voters in this poll who like him presumably think he's just another kid from a dynasty, but it's their party's dynasty -- being a Bush, he'll have the muscle to move the country in a Republican direction.

Do Republican voters think Rubio has the juice to do what they want him to do and kick the asses they want him to kick? Because if he never gives off that sense of power, then he's probably peaking right now.

THE NEW STATUS ACCESSORY: YOUR OWN PERSONAL PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

You haven't really made it in this country until you personally own a Republican presidential candidate. Ask Norman Braman:

Braman, a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles football franchise, is poised to occupy the sugar-daddy role for [Marco] Rubio....

The Miami businessman, Braman’s friends say, is considering spending anywhere from $10 million to $25 million -- and possibly even more -- on Rubio’s behalf, a cash stake that could potentially alter the course of the Republican race by enabling the Florida senator to wage a protracted fight for the nomination.

Braman doesn't like Jeb Bush because Bush, as governor, vetoed $2 million in state funding for the Braman Breast Cancer Institute. So he bought Marco, and Marco loves being owned:

Braman is both a benefactor and a friend to Rubio, and their close relationship dates back to when the now-presidential candidate was ascending the ranks of the state Legislature.... He employs Rubio’s wife, Jeannette, part time through his charity, the Braman Family Foundation. After Rubio was elected to the Senate in 2010 -- a race that Braman and his wife Irma poured nearly $10,000 into -- the two families traveled together to Israel.

In his recently published memoir, Rubio dedicated an entire paragraph of the acknowledgments to Braman and suggested that he’d become a father-like figure to him.

Ted Cruz is similarly owned:

... Robert Mercer, a Wall Street hedge-fund magnate ... who started at I.B.M. and made his fortune using computer patterns to outsmart the stock market, emerged this week as a key early bankroller of Mr. Cruz’s surprisingly fast campaign start. He is believed to be the main donor behind a network of four “super PACs” supporting Mr. Cruz that reported raising $31 million just a few weeks into his campaign.

But the Koch brothers are still the alpha dogs at this, because they've just declared ownership of a presidential candidate and they haven't put up a cent:

On Monday, at a fund-raising event in Manhattan for the New York State Republican Party, David Koch told donors that he and his brother, who oversee one of the biggest private political organizations in the country, believed that Mr. Walker would be the Republican nominee....

Two people who attended the event said they heard Mr. Koch go even further, indicating that Mr. Walker should be the Republican nominee.

... Mr. Koch’s remark left little doubt among attendees of where his heart is, and could effectively end one of the most closely watched contests in the “invisible primary,” a period where candidates crisscross the country seeking not the support of voters but the blessing of their party’s biggest donors and fund-raisers.

But:

Mr. Koch’s remarks suggested that the political organizations they oversee -- which include Americans for Prosperity, a grass-roots organization, and Freedom Partners, a donor trade group with an affiliated super PAC -- would not intervene in the Republican primary process on behalf of a single candidate.

So (even though a Koch spokesman denied this report) here were the Kochs declaring Walker their boy without promising a dime to him -- but because they have so much money they could give him, he's owned.

And if he falters in the primaries, others will line up to be owned by the Kochs, even though they'll know that the Kochs would have preferred to own someone else.

Hey, I guess you could call this the Ownership Society.

ARE WE TAKING DICK MORRIS SERIOUSLY?

There's a Fred Dicker story in the New York Post right now that's being taken very, very seriously. Did I say in the headline that Dicker's source for this story is Dick Morris? Actually, I have no idea who the source is. I just made the headline up -- which is appropriate, because Dicker, or his source, almost certainly made the story up:

De Blasio in secret bid to be Dems’ 2016 pick

Despite repeated claims to the contrary, Mayor Bill de Blasio is positioning himself to be the leftist “progressive” alternative to Wall Street-friendly Hillary Rodham Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president, a national party operative told The Post.

De Blasio’s hope, the operative said, is a “Draft de Blasio" movement will develop among progressive activists over the next several months that will lead to the mayor being able to defeat Clinton in the primary elections next year in much the same way leftist Sen. George McGovern successfully challenged the initially front-running establishment Democratic candidate, Sen. Edmund Muskie, more than 40 years ago.

Why is this ridiculous? Let Ed Kilgore count the ways:

... you have to wonder exactly why anyone would think Bill de Blasio has a legitimate shot at displacing Hillary Clinton and becoming president, especially via a “draft,” which hasn’t really happened since 1952 if even then. The number of mayors of New York who have gone from Gracie Mansion to the White House, directly or indirectly, is exactly zero. The McGovern analogy Dicker offers is flawed by the fact that it’s, well, wrong; McGovern wasn’t some late entry who upset Ed Muskie; he carefully built a grass-roots organization while Muskie collected endorsements, and Muskie started falling apart the minute voters became involved.

(And Dicker is old enough to know that.)

It's true that de Blasio visited the key primary state of Iowa last week. But that was at the invitation of a fellow progressive, former senator Tom Harkin. At the urging of another progressive friend, de Blasio also visited Nebraska, which -- to put it mildly -- is not a key primary state, and he also plans to visit Wisconsin (again, not a key primary state) later in the month.

This is not the itinerary of a guy who's running for president in this cycle, though it's possibly the itinerary of someone who wants to build a national progressive movement (and wants to influence the eventual Democratic nominee's platform). Republicans do this kind of thing all the time. My first thought when I heard that de Blasio was in Iowa was that he's trying to be a Democratic Steve King -- a guy who uses a high profile and clout within his party in order to try to keep prominent members from drifting to the center.

I guessed that Dick Morris was the "national party operative" in Dicker's story because he's made it his life's work to stir up trouble for Democrats. But the "operative" could be anybody -- or nobody.

The story is phony, but here's New York magazine taking it seriously, and here's The Week doing the same.

And that's because most of the media doesn't grasp what's self-evident to Josh Marshall:

... 100 to 1 it's another consciously made up New York Post story. Because this is what the Post does. For those outside New York, remember, the Post isn't a real newspaper in the sense of publishing accurate stories. And I say that as someone who used to write columns for them.

If there's a group that really needs to be told that the Post "isn't a real newspaper in the sense of publishing accurate stories," it's not "those outside New York," it's those inside the rest of the media. The rest of the media think the Post is a paper that tries at all times to present facts and opinions the same way other papers do, albeit with a more conservative slant and a greater taste for the lurid. But the Post is perfectly willing to just publish fairytales -- the same is true, of course, for Fox News -- as long as the fairytales come with some deniability.

This story isn't a big deal in the long run. It'll be obvious soon enough that it's ridiculous, and it won't have any effect the presidential race. But the rest of the press needs to start noticing that the Murdoch empire flouts the rules other media outlets play by. In bigger things, that matters. Murdoch should be a pariah and all his properties should be under a cloud of suspicion whenever they publish. But we're not even close to that yet.

SO, HOW OFTEN DO WE REALLY VOTE AGAINST POLS BECAUSE OF CORRUPTION?

If pollsters ask, Americans say they don't like money in politics. But name me some recent politicians who've been turned out of office by voters because they engaged in quid pro quos in exchange for cash. No, I don't mean Scott Brown, who lost to a candidate angry about corruption in general but who wasn't defeated specifically because of his dirty deeds. And no, I don't mean pols who've been brought up on charges. Who gets in trouble with voters for this sort of thing?

There ought to be a point at which doing the bidding of your donors raises such a stink of corruption that it's counterproductive at the polls -- but I don't see that, for members of either party. Which is why I think this New York Times story could just be breathless hype:

... “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” by Peter Schweizer -- a 186-page investigation of donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities -- is proving the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy.

The book, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return.

“We will see a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds,” Mr. Schweizer writes.

His examples include a free-trade agreement in Colombia that benefited a major foundation donor’s natural resource investments in the South American nation, development projects in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, and more than $1 million in payments to Mr. Clinton by a Canadian bank and major shareholder in the Keystone XL oil pipeline around the time the project was being debated in the State Department....

And in the general election Hillary's opponent will be ... who? Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? No. Her opponent will be a Republican who's very much bought and paid for. (Here, for instance, is a new Politico story about Norman Braman, a self-made billionaire who's prepared to give Marco Rubio $10 million to $25 million -- surely out of pure altruism, right?)

Oh, but this is foreign. Well, that will inspire voter outrage if it goes beyond the usual bounds, with foreigners we consider truly hostile, not merely unsavory. Remember, we had a president not long ago who literally held hands with a Saudi prince. And the guy behind Iran-contra a few decades ago is spoken of with religious reverence by every Republican in America. So we have a high tolerance for deals with foreigners as well. (Remember, it was Reagan's vice president who succeeded in winning a third presidential term for their party, so we obviously didn't hold an Iran-contra grudge for very long.)

Of course, the press can treat the Clinton revelations as so unspeakably awful that they're shocking even by our usual standards, even if they're not particularly remarkable, and the public may buy that narrative. Ask Brian Williams and Bill O'Reilly about how press double standards can tailor public perceptions. We can see from the Times story that the plan is to make this seem worse than the usual run of mutual back-scratching:

But “Clinton Cash” is potentially more unsettling, both because of its focused reporting and because major news organizations including The Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have exclusive agreements with the author to pursue the story lines found in the book.

We need to clean house politically -- but we haven't done it up to now, and we routinely reelect pols who take a lot of money from a lot of sources for a lot of favors, so this should just be more of the same.

Here's the thing: We will elect a corrupt president in 2016. That's simply a fact. The question is whether we'll elect a corrupt president who'll take a wrecking ball to what's left of the social safety apparatus, to voting rights, to reproductive rights, to progressive taxation, and so on.

I say: Vote for the left-centrist crook, as opposed to one of the other crooks. It's important.

CAN RUBIO GET AWAY WITH SAYING (IN SPANISH!) THAT HE'LL RETAIN DACA AS PRESIDENT (EVEN TEMPORARILY)?

The GOP Establishment's alterna-Jeb, Marco Rubio, will let the DREAMers stay in America as president, at least for a while, says Breitbart. Can a guy win the Republican nomination if he says that and lacks Jeb Bush's money and connections?

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a 2016 GOP presidential candidate, said he believes that President Barack Obama’s first executive amnesty for so-called DREAMers -- the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) -- is “important” and he won’t reverse it himself if elected president. He delivered these remarks in a Spanish-language interview he gave to Univision’s Jorge Ramos.

“I believe DACA is important. It can’t be terminated from one moment to the next, because there are already people benefiting from it,” Rubio said in Spanish on Ramos’s television program, according to an English translation provided by the media service Grabien. “But yes, it is going to have to end. It can’t be the permanent policy of the United States, and I don’t think that’s what they’re asking either. I think everyone prefers immigration reform.”

Ramos followed up, according to the translation, by asking: “But then, to clarify, you would put an end to DACA once immigration reform is approved, but what would happen, Senator, if there is no immigration reform; would you cancel DACA anyway?”

What Rubio said, according to the Grabien translation, is that no one should worry because he'll get immigration reform done as president, on a piece-by-piece basis.

Well, at some point it is going to have to end, that is to say, it can’t continue being the permanent policy of the United States. I believe, if I become President, it is going to be possible to achieve immigration reform. It is not going to be comprehensive, that is to say, it is not going to all be in one massive bill.

Really? That's the message that's going to get Rubio the nomination -- We'll keep the Obama status quo in place until we achieve our goal of immigration refor slowly and incrementally, passing bill after bill? Every right-winger thinks every immigration proposal is "amnesty." Why would the base support him on this? Can he even be a running mate after saying this?

And he said it in Spanish:



Maybe I'm wrong to think there's an audience for this in the GOP electorate. I just don't see it. I think this clip is toxic for him.

NO, CHRIS CHRISTIE IS NOT GOING TO MAKE A COMEBACK

Byron York has been watching the latest GOP cattle call in New Hampshire, and he thinks Chris Christie is poised for a comeback:

Chris Christie is poised to re-emerge after a number of early death pronouncements. There is a reason people liked the New Jersey governor before he became mired in the bridge scandal. Once a favorite of a lot of establishment GOP poobahs, Christie went down, down, down after problems at home and his decision (hesitation?) to hold off on campaigning while rivals got the jump on him. But Christie has an undeniable appeal to voters on the stump, and now that he is finally out on the stump, they're getting a chance to see it. Look for his stock to rise.

I've told you why I think Christie is toast -- primarily the embrace of President Obama after Sandy, and, beyond that, not so much Bridgegate itself as the fact that Bridgegate made him a laughingstock in "the liberal media" rather than a guy who verbally slapped down liberal critics and thwarted unions. But if all that's not enough to sink him in the Republican primaries, there's this:

Chris Christie took a centrist tone on guns Wednesday, calling for the “right balance” between gun control and the Second Amendment.

“We’ve got to make sure we have public safety, but on the other hand we have to protect people’s rights both as sportsmen and hunters and for self protection too, find the right balance,” Christie told a group of New Hampshire voters at Chez Vachon in Manchester, according to New Jersey newspaper The Record.

The comments came just over a week after news broke that the New Jersey Republican governor was not invited to address the NRA’s annual conference in Nashville last weekend.

As Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air:

Christie hasn’t been a simple bystander. He signed a raft of gun bills in 2013, one of which required the state to turn over New Jersey mental health records to the feds. Others were just as disturbing. If he felt that this is what he had to do in order to “go along to get along” in the Garden State, that was his choice, but that’s something he’ll be held accountable for in the national race he’s pondering now. And when he answers questions like this when discussing gun control on the national stage, well... I wouldn’t expect his NRA “C” rating to be going up any time soon.

Christie has a "C" rating from the NRA? And, unlike, say, John Kasich, who once backed an assault weapons ban but now does what the NRA wants him to do, Christie hasn't become significantly more conservative on guns over the years? Then why have we ever talked about him as a potential Republican presidential nominee?

RANDREW DICE CLAY?

Every Republican in the presidential race is going to say unkind things about Hillary Clinton, but is it a surprise that the nastiest zinger of the race so far came from the guy with a (deserved) reputation for snapping at journalists, particularly those who are women?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) dinged Hillary Clinton during a speech in New Hampshire on Saturday, suggesting the Democratic presidential candidate could face a serious primary challenge.

"I'm starting to worry that when Hillary Clinton travels, there's gonna need to be two planes – one for her and her entourage, and one for her baggage," Paul, himself a presidential candidate, said to laughs and applause at the Republican Leadership Summit.

"I'm concerned that the plane with the baggage is really getting heavy and teetering," Paul added.

I get the feeling Paul is just getting warmed up. His confrontations with reporters suggest that he's not just running a tough campaign -- he viscerally has a mean streak, and we're going to see more of it as the months progress. I think that's really going to help him in the primary race, although I think there are too many hawks with too much money for him to actually to actually win the nomination. If he does somehow emerge victorious, I think most Americans are going to think he's too nasty to be president. But meanwhile, his party will cheer, which will only encourage him. So expect a lot more of this, and expect the insults to get a lot uglier.

DEATH PANELS! DID JEB JUST LOSE THE PRIMARIES?

I can't tell what the reaction in the GOP base is going to be to this:

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Jeb Bush, defending his efforts to keep alive Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman, when he was governor of Florida, suggested on Friday that patients on Medicare should be required to sign advance directives dictating their care if they become incapacitated.

A similar proposal by President Obama -- that doctors should be paid to advise patients on end-of-life decisions -- became a political firestorm in 2009, when Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate, claimed that the legislation would give bureaucrats the power to decide if some frail or disabled people were deserving of medical care. The assertion was shown to be false.

In 2010, Medicare tried to add a regulation that would permit “voluntary advance care planning” during yearly checkups. But after an uproar, President Obama’s administration pushed to drop that provision....

Well, Republicans won't let Obama get away with anything in this area, and if Hillary Clinton is elected president she'll undoubtedly get the same treatment. But what about Jeb? GOP base voters don't trust him. Won't they attack him for this?

I can't tell. The Big Lie that Republicans originally spread about this started with Betsey McCaughey, with Sarah Palin weighing in later, as PolitiFact noted in 2009:

On July 16, Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York and a conservative health care commentator, suggested that the Democratic plan included a measure requiring seniors be told how to end their lives. "Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require -- that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner," she said on a radio show hosted by conservative Fred Thompson.

PolitiFact gave McCaughey a Pants on Fire rating for that statement. There were no mandatory sessions proposed. Instead, for the first time, Medicare would pay for doctors' appointments for patients to discuss living wills, health care directives and other end-of-life issues. The appointments were optional, and the AARP supported the measure.

Palin wrote later on Facebook:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

So Republicans think there used to be (or still are!) mandatory "death panels" in Obamacare, in which people in life-or-death situations have to beg for their lives before heartless experts in a scene that could have come out of The Hunger Games. Many Democrats probably believe this, too.

Will the GOP base decide that Jeb's proposal is similar because it's mandatory? Or will the base conclude that, since no one from the evil government will tell you what to write on your end-of-life directive, it's freedom?

So far, I'm not seeing much noise on the right about this. Maybe Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee is saving it up as a later attack line to use on Jeb. But maybe not. Maybe there's a sense that Jeb's version of an end-of-life mandate is totally different.

Jeb did say this while talking about Terri Schiavo. I think the crazies probably admire what Jeb did in the Schiavo case, because (a) it's "pro-life" and (b) he scored a few momentary victories against us evil lefties for a while. This is one of the few area in which his record gives him an advantage over all the other candidates in wingnut voters' eyes -- he's squandering some of that, but he has some to squander.

If Jeb is the general election candidate, supporters of what he did in the Schiavo case will probably remember what he did (because conservatives have long memories). The rest of, alas, probably won't (we have shot memories). I'd love to think the Schiavo case would hurt him in a general election -- but it probably won't.

STOP TRYING TO MAKE JOHN KASICH HAPPEN. HE'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Here comes Kasichmania?

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Gov. John Kasich is about to launch a national political committee that would allow him to raise money and his profile as he considers a run for president in 2016, sources close to the Republican said Thursday.

The effort, first reported on cleveland.com, has been in the works since Kasich's well-received visit last month to New Hampshire, which holds the first primary....

I think a lot of non-conservatives feel this way:

Honestly, Kasich is the one potential candidate who I think has a great chance at winning a general. http://t.co/BRb2qlQDtK

— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) April 17, 2015

And there may be some truth to that. But I don't think he'll get that far. If he runs, plenty of people in the base are going to react the way Mofo Politics reacted when he put forth a plan to expand Medicaid in Ohio under Obamacare:

Kasich justifies his “very conservative” decision to expand Medicaid and implement Obamacare...

I mean, that’s what we’re supposed to do in life, right? Help our neighbor. Help people…that’s my whole philosophy in the state.

Medicaid is another one we did…making sure that people could get health care.

...

There’s a, kind of a big faith-based component of the conservative movement...so, to me, that’s very conservative.

On issue after issue, Kasich is severely conservative.

Guns

Kasich received an “F” rating from the NRA after voting for Bill Clinton’s 1994 Assault Weapons Ban (AWB).

Taxes

Kasich claims to be for lower taxes, but as Governor, he proposed “fee increases” on bank service, overnight trailer parks, bowling alleys, billiard parlors, hunting and fishing guides, racing events, and admission to museums, amusement parks, circuses, fairs, concerts, and sporting events.

Amnesty

On the topic of Obama’s Executive Amnesty, Kasich conceded that his immigration stance has “evolved” because he is “a little smarter now”...

The country needs healing...I wouldn’t ever be one to tell you that I don’t change my mind or that my thinking doesn’t evolve... I’m also a different guy than I was years ago.

This was accompanied by a subtle bit of Photoshop:



And here are a few skeptical Free Republic threads, in case you think that Mofo post is anomalous.

Meanwhile, as Joan Walsh has noted, many of the big-money boys don't like him either:

... why is [Scott] Walker still considered Bush’s top primary challenger, especially for the donor class, while Kasich can’t get started?

There’s an important glimpse of an answer in this dispatch from a Kasich meeting with big New York donors.

... Kasich left the crowd unwowed ... says the National Review’s Eliana Johnson....

Apparently Kasich turned them off with his “prickly” answer to a question from conservative intellectual powerhouse Avik Roy, about whether he wants to repeal Obamacare yet maintain its expansion of Medicaid. When pushed, Kasich defended Medicaid recipients: “Maybe you think we should put them in prison. I don’t. I don’t think that’s a conservative position. Because the reality is, if you don’t treat the drug addicted and the mentally ill and the working poor, you’re gonna have them and they’re gonna be a big cost to society.”

Another turn-off for the big New York money guys? “He also talked about the need for a renewed bipartisan spirit on both sides of the aisle, citing Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, and Jack Kemp and Charlie Rangel, as models for contemporary lawmakers to emulate,” Johnson reports. She concludes: “At the dinner’s close, there was little appetite for a Kasich presidency among those who’d assembled to hear him.”

Bipartisanship? Can't have that!

I don't know what's going on in the GOP. The fat cats cleared Mitt Romney out to make way for Jeb Bush, but now it looks as if Rubio, Christie, and Kasich will all run; they won't be able to dominate, but they will pick off votes from Jeb, thus possibly clearing the way for ... who? Walker? Cruz? Paul?

I know the thinking is that Kasich is running for VP because he's from electoral-vote-rich Ohio. But I think Jeb and Marco will be afraid to run with someone deemed a RINO, and, ideologically, Walker, Cruz, and Paul won't want to.

So I'm not seeing much upside for Kasich -- even though, yeah, he might win a general election, among non-crazy voters. (Though he does support the craziest idea ever, a balanced budget amendment, which would have made the New Deal illegal. So I'll be very happy if he's not on the ticket.)

JUST GIVE HER RICHARD COHEN'S JOB AND GET IT OVER WITH

Liz Mair was a Republican operative who was hired to be Scott Walker's digital strategist, but she had to resign after it was revealed that she'd posted a couple of Iowaphobic tweets:

“Morons across America are astounded to learn that people from *IOWA* grow up rather government-dependent. #agsubsidies #ethanol #brainless,” she tweeted on Jan. 22.

Two days later, she fired another missive against the Hawkeye State’s political status.

“The sooner we remove Iowa’s frontrunning status, the better off American politics and policy will be,” Mair tweeted on Jan. 24.

A visit to the "fact sheet" about herself on her website suggests that she regards herself as a young free-thinker with an attitude:

6. You hate gay people.

I'm actually a long-time gay rights supporter. I am on the board of the Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry. I was on the board of GOProud. I've been on the record as supporting same-sex marriage for far longer than the vast majority of Democrats or liberals....

9. You're a racist/xenophobe.

This is true, actually. I am not a fan of Belgium and have met very few Belgians I like. I have a bias against Belgium and Belgians.

But I do like people of Latino, African and Asian extraction, as well as White people -- except if they're from Belgium.

10. You're a lesbian.

No, but I get that some people think any woman with short hair is a lesbian. I'm actually married to the guy I've been with since I was 18 and we have a kid. And yes, my husband was born a man with all the relevant bits, and still lives as a man with all the relevant bits.

So why, now that she's parlayed her fifteen minutes of hired-then-fired fame into a writing gig for the Daily Beast, does this seemingly edgy young conservative come off at the Beast like an old, tired sixtysomething op-ed writer?

[Hillary Clinton's campaign is] all so dull, so bland, so scripted, so planned, so typically political. And perhaps, just perhaps, it’s what American voters deserve.

Americans want to believe that we’re a nation of risk-takers, pioneers, people willing to cast comfort and safety aside to achieve a dream, tell the truth, and change the world. Some of us still are those things, too. But in reality, a lot of us have become something else in recent years: narcissistic, overly-cautious, superficial, reality-disconnected, and above all, very, very boring.

Even among those of us who loathe the former Madam Secretary, we have become in so many ways just like her campaign promises to be. We are, in effect, Ready for Hillary.

We have fallen in love with so-called “reality television,” which -- surprise! -- is often scripted and directed. We freak out about allowing 10-year-olds to play in the park unsupervised. We are obsessed with social media, posting selfies, and racking up followers, friends, and fans.

We frequently reject fully experiencing events and occasions in favor of documenting them, or more accurately documenting ourselves looking hot or cool at or during them. We veer toward what is comfortable and easy, just like Hillary and the Chipotle visit.

We avoid expressing any opinions that could be deemed “controversial” because it could impede our quest for popularity and acceptance. When someone ruffles feathers even just a little, our tendency is toward outrage, boycotts (or buy-ins), public humiliation, and pushing for firings.

We reject substance, preferring to focus on things like the optics of taking a sip of water, or being photographed looking at a smartphone. We wear modern versions of girdles and package-accentuating underwear so we can show off our “best selves.”

Many of us are concerned less with actual learning than just getting a good grade or diploma that we can show off. We think we deserve automatic promotions just for having been around or putting up with some nonsense or other...

Please! Enough! For the love of God, turn it off! I'll talk!

If you puréed the gray matter of Richard Cohen, Maureen Dowd, and David Brooks, threw in the preserved cerebellum of Andy Rooney, then formed the slurry into a new brain, it would write precisely this passage. I'm really amazed that she managed to leave out complaints about Kim 'n' Kanye, or "everybody gets a trophy" days.

Now, do you want an alternate theory for why the Hillary Clinton campaign is trying to be low-key? Maybe it's because Hillry's spent nearly a quarter of a century in the national spotlight being accused of murder, totalitarianism, fomenting jihad with her clandestine lesbian lover, and a host of other high crimes. Um, Liz, maybe she decided to let your side engage in all the nostril-flaring excess for a while.

WAIT -- WHY IS THIS SUCH GREAT NEWS FOR MARCO RUBIO?

The political press is reporting this breathlessly:

Sen. Marco Rubio’s splashy presidential-campaign announcement and his subsequent media blitz has likely helped him catch up with friend and former mentor Jeb Bush in their home state of Florida, according to a new poll of 400 registered Republican voters.

Rubio garnered 31 percent support from Republicans and essentially tied Bush’s 30 percent, according to a Mason-Dixon Polling & Research survey conducted Tuesday through Thursday and shared exclusively with POLITICO.

At The American Spectator, which has a gushy feature story on Rubio ("Ignore the low poll numbers. Rubio has seen worse. He is an effective candidate, with a strong campaign team around him, and will almost certainly exceed expectations once again"), there are hosannas on the house blog:

RUBIO ROLLS

It didn’t take long. Mere days after Marco Rubio announced he would seek the Republican nomination for president with a right-populist message, a Mason-Dixon poll shows him slightly ahead of Jeb Bush in Florida.

Rubio’s 31 to 30 Florida lead is within the margin of error. But these numbers, as well as Bush’s sinking polls in New Hampshire, are blows to the conventional view that Bush III is the inevitable Republican nominee.

How is this poll a blow to the conventional wisdom? Rubio had a splashy candidate announcement and garnered a lot of positive press, which gave him a post-rollout bounce -- and that bounce still didn't give him more than parity in Florida with Jeb, who still hasn't made his formal announcement (and hasn't started spending much of the bajillion-dollar war chest he's likely to amass). What's going to happen to Rubio after this bounce dissipates and he's just one more guy with a rubber nose in the clown car?

Yes, Rubio was way behind Bush for quite a while in Florida, so this is an improvement -- but he actually was even with Bush in Florida early in 2014, according to several polls. So he's just making up lost ground. He actually has to win Florida (and a few other states) to be the nominee, no?

Scott Walker blew past Bush in a number of polls after his big CPAC speech, and he's still leading in a lot of polls (like the national Fox poll released two weeks ago). That's been a blow to the Bush-is-inevitable conventional wisdom. Wake me when Rubio is beating Bush anywhere.

RIGHT-WING GRIEVANCE HOARDERS ADD TO THEIR COLLECTION

Oh dear ... what has Hitlery KlintOOOOOOn, wannabe dictator of the United States of America, said now?

Hillary: education is a “non-family enterprise.” Wow. The family shouldn’t be involved in education? #tcot

— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) April 16, 2015

Really? She said the family shouldn't be involved in education?

Well, no, of course not, though you'd think so from stories like this one, from the Federalist:

During her first official campaign event in Iowa earlier this week, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton praised Common Core and referred to children’s education as a “non-family enterprise.” ...

And what exactly did she say? Here's the Federalist's transcript, from a C-SPAN video clip:

Hillary Clinton: You know, what I think about the really unfortunate argument that has been going on around Common Core, it’s very painful because the Common Core started off as a bipartisan effort. It was actually nonpartisan. It wasn’t politicized. It was to try to come up with a core of learning that we might expect students to achieve across our country, no matter what kind of school district they were in, no matter how poor their family was, that there wouldn’t be two tiers of education. Everybody would be looking at what would be learned doing their best to achieve that

I think part of the reason Iowa may be more understanding of this is you have had the Iowa core for years. The U.S. had a system plus the Iowa Assessment Test. I think I’m right in saying that I took those when I was in elementary school. The Iowa tests. So that Iowa has had a testing system based on a core curriculum for a really long time. You see the value of it. You understand why that helps you organize your whole education system.

And a lot of states, unfortunately, haven’t had that. They do not understand the value of a core in the sense, a Common Core, yes, of course, you can figure out the best way in your community to try to reach -- but your question is a larger one. How do we end up at a point where we are so negative about the most important non-family enterprise in the raising of the next generation which is how our kids are educated?

Yes, she's sticking up for national or statewide standards worked out under the aegis of the Evil Government. But did you catch the bit near the end of that transcript about how "you can figure out the best way in your community" to implement standards? Aren't parents part of the "community"?

And is her reference to school as a "non-family enterprise" really confusing? Isn't it obvious to anyone who's not an insane right-wing zealot that what she means is that the mot important things in a child's upbringing happen within the family, except school, which takes place in school buildings that aren't the home, at the hands of people who aren't family members? Is this really that difficult to grasp?

Well, yes, on the right it is -- or at least the right-wing media wants its target audience to misconstrue this. So, at PJ Media, we get this:

Just a reminder that Hillary’s “It Takes a Village” theme from the 1990s is her polite and folksy way of saying that in her socialist worldview, your children belong to the state, not to you.

A Red State blogger writes this:

Parents who send their children to school and expecting the school to “fix” them are the ones who do the most harm to their children and the education system in general. Why are we so negative about education, Mrs. Clinton? Because we see the results of where education has brought us since the movement began to make them do everything in place of parents.

Bizpac Review finds John Stossel stirring up outrage on Twitter:

@FBNStossel Who knew when @HillaryClinton said "we're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good" she meant our kids!!

— AmericanMom (@_Americanmom) April 15, 2015

See also National Review, the Medkia Research Council, Caffeinated Thoughts, Twitchy ...

You can criticize Hillary Clinton or endorsing Common Core if you don't like Common Core. But that's not what's going on here. These folks are trying to turn "non-family enterprise" into "you didn't build that" or "what difference, at this point, does it make?" -- phrases ripped from their original context so they mean, to conservatives, what they were never intended to mean.

And so the rage increases and the grievances pile up on the right.

MARCO RUBIO FAILS TO GRASP THE IMPLICATIONS

I'm told that this is Marco Rubio trying to "find the middle ground on same-sex marriage":

When it comes to same-sex marriage, Marco Rubio is trying to stake out a position somewhere between Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz.

A day after being called the “candidate of yesterday” by CNN's Jake Tapper over his opposition to same-sex marriage during a CNN interview, Rubio told Fusion’s Jorge Ramos on Wednesday that he would participate in a gay wedding involving someone he loves. At the same time, he ... compared a gay wedding to a divorcee’s second marriage

“I’m a member of the Catholic faith,” the Florida senator said. “It teaches that marriages -- after you get married the first time, if you’ve been divorced you can’t be remarried, and yet people attend second marriages all the time.”

Right, Marco. So why not take that a step further? Because I've noticed an interesting thing: Even though you think they're immoral, you and your fellow Catholics aren't trying to make divorce and remarriage illegal. You folks live with reasonable level of contentment in a world in which all sorts of things that are forbidden in your faith are legal: contraception (yes, some religious conservatives want to ban that, but you don't seem to be one of them, Marco), premarital sex, in vitro fertilization, divorce. You guys are free not to indulge in any of these things -- but they're legal, and somehow you tolerate that. So why not same-sex marriage as well, even for people you don't love?

By the way, I'm wondering how many Catholic bakers and florists refuse to provide services for remarriages. Are there any? Maybe there are. I'd like to know.

I'M NOT SURE I HAVE MY FOREBEARS' STORIES STRAIGHT, EITHER

This is today's Hillary scandal:

Hillary Clinton’s statements that all her grandparents immigrated to the U.S. are in conflict with public records, a report says.

According to Buzzfeed, Clinton spoke in Norwalk, Iowa, on Wednesday about her family’s arrival in the country. “All my grandparents, you know, came over here,” she said.

Only her paternal grandfather, Hugh Rodham Sr., immigrated to the United States, according to Buzzfeed. Her paternal grandmother, Hanna Jones Rodham, was born in Pennsylvania, records show.

Clinton’s maternal grandparents, Della Howell and Edwin Howell, were both born in Illinois, according to records.

Clinton gave similar comments in a speech in Louisville, Ky., last April, saying her paternal grandmother “immigrated with her family as a young girl to Scranton and went to work -- very young -- in a silk mill.”

I think I understand this. I'm a dozen years younger than Hillary Clinton, but I'm of similar ancestry -- my grandparents are a mix of immigrants and children of immigrants. My maternal grandfather (who died before I was born) and grandmother were both born in America, the children of immigrants. My father's parents were immigrants -- or so I've been told. I'm not 100% sure I have their story straight. My father died when I was nine. These grandparents moved down to Florida in my childhood, and my mother's relationship with my father's family was never very good, so I lost touch with them. I never discussed this with them, or with any cousins. (I lost touch with them as well.) And my mother, while still sharp in her late eighties, has never been focused on nailing down the specifics.

I'm not sure what Hillary Clinton knew about her maternal grandparents from family lore. Hillary's mother's father died before Hillary was born. Hillary's mother's mother "essentially abandoned" the family when Hillary's mother was young, according to Hillary's memoir Living History. Hillary's mother spent several years of her childhood being raised by her grandparents. It doesn't sound like a cozy extended-family situation in which Little Hillary would say, "Grandma, tell me about the Old Country."

And remember that, in those generations of immigrants and children of immigrants, it was common not to talk about the past. (The story in my wife's family is that her father and his siblings literally didn't know which Mitteleuropean country their immigrant grandfather came from or what his first language was.) So some of us whose ancestors immigrated to America in that era don't necessarily have their stories straight.

I find this in a Mediaite story:

Now, second generation experiences are a fairly legitimate subject to discuss in America, but they’re wildly different from the first generation -- a.k.a. “the immigrant” -- experience.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Culturally, there didn't seem to be much difference between my immigrant paternal grandparents and my non-immigrant grandmother. They all spoke English without an Italian accent, because they'd all been speaking English since childhood (the immigrant grandparents came here when they were young) -- yet they were all children of immigrants, which meant they experienced their parents' sense of being outsiders.

Hillary Clinton has only occasionally talked about her grandparents, and she could have told the stories she's told with accurate information without really losing the point of the anecdotes. Her grandparents grew up as both Americans and outsiders -- that's true for the one born in Wales and for the ones who were born here as children of recent immigrants, just as it's true of my U.S.-born grandparents and the grandparents who came here from Italy as children. So I give her a pass on this.

CAN THESE SECRETIVE RIGHT-WING CREEPS THWART THE OTHER SECRETIVE RIGHT-WING CREEPS? (A: PROBABLY NOT.)

This National Journal story suggests that there could be a punishing intraconservative war in the 2016 campaign, though I'm not going to cook up too much popcorn in anticipation:

A secretive group that serves as the umbrella operation for leaders and activists within the conservative movement will host two meetings in the coming months, National Journal has learned, the first to vet Republican presidential candidates and the second to discuss coalescing behind one of them.

The Council for National Policy, a shadowy organization of several hundred dues-paying members, typically meets three times a year in various locations around the country. But with the 2016 cycle accelerating, and many conservative leaders intent on rallying behind a single candidate, CNP's leadership is taking extraordinary measures -- scheduling two top-priority meetings outside of Washington -- and inviting a large number of nonmembers to both....

This sequence of events will be the manifestation of a year's worth of private meetings around the country ... in which leaders from the faith and tea-party communities have agreed on the importance of rallying their followers behind a single conservative candidate who might stand a chance of defeating the "establishment" favorite in the GOP primary....

So who are these folks?

CNP is known to represent all three legs of the conservative "stool" -- social, fiscal, and national security -- but there has always been a special emphasis on the first. CNP is currently led by Tony Perkins, who also serves in a much more visible role as president of the Family Research Council in Washington.

See, I want to believe that these people can gum up the works for Jeb Bush, and for the Establishmentarians who want to force him on the GOP base. I want to believe that they can get an unelectable religious-right zealot nominated. But I don't think they have the juice.

If it were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, I'd say a group like this would have real clout:

CNP was conceived in 1981 by at least five fathers, including the Rev. Tim LaHaye, an evangelical preacher who was then the head of the Moral Majority. (LaHaye is the co-author of the popular Left Behind series that predicts and subsequently depicts the Apocalypse). Nelson Baker Hunt, billionaire son of billionaire oilman H.L. Hunt (connected to both the John Birch Society and to Ronald Reagan's political network), businessman and one-time murder suspect T. Cullen Davis, and wealthy John Bircher William Cies provided the seed money.

... Christian activist Paul Weyrich took responsibility for bringing together the best minds of conservatism, and his imprint on the group's mission is unmistakable....

... the CNP has functioned as a sausage factory for conservative ideas of a particular goût: strong affirmations of military power, Christian heritage, traditional values, and leave-us-alone-get-off-our-backs legislation.

The group has (or used to have) a kingmaker reputation, primarily for this reason:

In 1999, candidate George W. Bush spoke before a closed-press CNP session in San Antonio. His speech, contemporaneously described as a typical mid-campaign ministration to conservatives, was recorded on audio tape.

(Depending on whose account you believe, Bush promised to appoint only anti-abortion-rights judges to the Supreme Court, or he stuck to his campaign "strict constructionist" phrase. Or he took a tough stance against gays and lesbians, or maybe he didn't).

... Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership.

The two events might not be connected. But since none of the participants would say what Bush said, the CNP's kingmaking role mushroomed in the mind's eye, at least to the Democratic National Committee....

More recently, the CNP gained notoriety for putting up fierce resistance to Rudy Giuliani in his pursuit of the 2008 nomination, and for opposing Mitt Romney in that same campaign.

But John McCain wasn't a favorite in this crowd, and he won the '08 nomination. Then Romney won it four years later, even though the group helped raise $1.8 million for Rick Santorum (late in the process, which probably helps explain why there's an effort under way by the group to pick a candidate early this time).

It's been widely reported that Sarah Palin was vetted by CNP before John McCain put her on his ticket in 2008. But I don't see anything similar about Paul Ryan in 2012, although you can find praise for him on CNP's website (here's David Limbaugh saying "thank God for Paul Ryan" in a 2012 speech to CNP).

I suspect you can't challenge these guys too forcefully if you want to be on the GOP ticket, but I think Jeb and the fillers of his war chest can probably roll right over them. The most I'll say is that if he wins the nomination he'll probably have to mollify them with his VP choice, and since they're also defense hard-liners, he's not going to pick Rand Paul as his running mate. But I would be delighted to be wrong about this. I hope these folks make a lot of mischief.

ANN COULTER: SO DESPERATE FOR MATERIAL SHE'S CANNIBALIZING HER OLD RANTS

Talking Points Memo reports:

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter advocated for the administration of literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting on Wednesday during an appearance on "Fox & Friends."

During a segment on how poorly informed American voters are, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked Coulter whether it bothered her that her vote counted just as much as someone who knew nothing about politics.

"More than I can say," Coulter said. "I just think it should be, well for one thing, a little more difficult to vote. There's nothing unconstitutional about literacy tests."

Hmm, let's see: On August 17, 1999, Coulter said this on Fox's Hannity & Colmes:

I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote.

On September 29, 2006, again on Fox, she told Neil Cavuto:

Way too many people vote. We should have fewer people voting. There ought to be a poll tax to take the literacy test before voting.

New material, Ann: try writing some.

In the Fox & Friends appearance today, there was also this:

Throughout the discussion, Coulter maintained that voting was too easy.

"We have ballots being given in 124 different languages," Coulter said. "And I'm pretty sure Senate debates will not be taking place in Urdu. So what are they voting on?"

I'd love to know where she got that number. The Voting Rights Act requires ballots to be printed in languages other than English when a certain percentage of voters in a voting subdivision are insufficiently fluent in English but fluent in another language -- but the number of other languages in which ballots are required to be printed isn't 124, according to this 2011 notice from the Federal Register -- it's only 21. And 12 of those 21 languages are Native American languages.

Maybe Coulter has a source for that 124 figure that I don't know about. I'll stand corrected if so. But I'm skeptical.

Oh, and let me note for the record that this bilingual ballot requirement was expanded by Congress in 1992, and the expansion was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. It was a different country then.