Dream a little dream of DREAMers

The New Neo Posted on by

When in doubt, you can always run out the clock with some verbiage, and then promise to “look at it.” In the following clip I also could not help noticing the ever-increasing arrogant dismissiveness of Trump’s manner these days.

Note also that the subject matter about which he was actually queried is supposed to be in Trump’s wheelhouse: immigration. Has he not bothered to learn much about it?

And yes, I know, I know; his answer is a strategic and powerful appeal to the black vote, right? He really could answer the question perfectly if he so desired.

I apologize for the continuing Trump focus. But I’d love for that Trump video to go viral. I can DREAM too, can’t I?

[ADDENDUM: And the hits keep coming: Trump on his health care plan:

Here’s what I said. We’re going to have great plans. They’re going to be much less expensive and they’re going to be much better because the Obama plan is unaffordable and it’s a disaster. And by the way in ’17 it’s going to die unless the Republicans continue to fund money like ”” it’s not affordable by the country, not affordable by the people. But what I say is this, we’re going to have great plans. But there will be a group of people that is not doing well, that has no money. We cannot let them die in the streets…And we’ll work out either through Medicare which we’ll save or something. We will work out a plan where instead of having people dying in the streets. And I say to the Republicans all the time. And by the way I get standing ovations from Republicans, from Republican groups. I got one yesterday. I said we can’t let people die in the streets. We got to work out a deal with the hospital or with somebody in that community where if somebody is sick and really sick. And they don’t have housing and they don’t have …

SCARBOROUGH: So all Americans will get health care of some sort ””

TRUMP: We’re going to take care of them. We’re going to take care of them. We have to take care of them. Now, that’s not single payer. That’s not anything. That’s just human decency. And I’ll tell you what. Every single time I say that, I say to people in the audience ”” I say, “so what do you think?” They all stand up and give me a standing ovation, OK?

…what we’re going to have is we’re going to have private plans, we’re going to have maybe the health care savings plans which are very good. We’re going to get rid of the lines. You know what happens when you get rid of the lines? You have tremendous competition and the price goes way down.

I realize that Trump doesn’t drink, but then what is the explanation here for the incoherence? “And we’ll work out either through Medicare which we’ll save or something.” Is his tactic just to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks? Does Trump’s answer sound like a plan of any kind, other than repetition of a bunch of extremely general options? And notice the continual reminding us of his crowd approval, “And by the way I get standing ovations from Republicans, from Republican groups. I got one yesterday”; “Every single time I say that, I say to people in the audience ”” I say, ‘so what do you think?’ They all stand up and give me a standing ovation, OK?”

If that wasn’t enough, you can take a look at this, a stroll down memory lane.]

On being a blogger these days: truth, Trump, and a whole lot of other things

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m what you might call a mid-level blogger. I’ve been doing this for eleven years, and I’ve reached a certain level of readership that’s more than I ever thought it would be when I began but less than I later came to hope it would become in the early heady days of blogopsheric growth.

Sometimes I write for other, larger venues. In the past, that’s been Pajamas Media and the online Weekly Standard, as well as an occasional American Thinker piece. For the past two years or so, I’ve also written regularly at Legal Insurrection, a blog with significantly more traffic than mine.

And yet, and yet, it feels like a drop in the bucket compared to what I think needs to be said.

We all have our natures and our styles and our approaches. I’m not a sensationalist or a rabble-rouser. Those would not be my strength, and I don’t even think I could do either well if I tried. I leave that to others. No, what I like to do is think and delve into things and then write about them. For me, a large part of what drives me is the quest and the learning. Quite often I find something different than what I thought I would, and those surprises are often the best.

I suppose that makes me different from people who have a message they want to impart and everything that doesn’t conform with that message is shut out. Sometimes I’ve spent hours researching something and found that I was wrong in my original assumption, and then I abandon the post as unworkable. Or sometimes I write it with the new information. Sometimes the information I find is even more in accord with what I already thought, and then I write about that. But I believe that the willingness to let the research be my guide is part of the reason I ended up changing my political identity once confronted with both new information and new ways (to me, anyway) of looking at the worlds of government, policy, and history.

That doesn’t mean I am bias-free. I’m a human being, so naturally I have biases. But I try to be as bias-free as I can when doing this work, and let the facts and logic and my own observations and reasoning lead me to my own conclusions, rather than to parrot anyone else.

Regular readers of my blog have almost undoubtedly noticed that Trump’s candidacy has slowly—and with increasing force—been something I do not support and cannot support. This is not a prejudice I began with, because (as I’ve written before) I really didn’t have strong feelings about him at the start. It has grown, however, the more I have learned of his history, the more I hear from his own mouth, and the more I read from his followers and supporters (two different categories, by the way).

Lately I’ve noticed another phenomenon happening more often with me than it used to. Because a great many of the posts I write take a while to research and then compose, I’m often behind the other writers/pundits in terms of getting the piece out there. That’s been the case for a long time with me on the blog and even in the articles I submit to others, but that’s just the way it is because of the manner in which I write and the research I usually do (as well as the fact that occasionally I like to get away from this computer). But it’s a handicap in terms of getting the word out on what I have to say, as is the length of some of the things I write.

For example, in my post on what was really happening between Rubio and Christie in that debate where everyone thought Rubio had merely frozen and repeated himself—when I went back to the transcript, analyzed it, and found something rather different than what most (including me) had originally perceived—I thought I had something important to say. It certainly was something that surprised me when I discovered it, but it was also something that took a long time to get out there and took many words to express and then prove. By then the caravan had moved on, as it were, and in addition it’s not the sort of thing most people will read. It’s not exciting, it’s not sexy, it’s not short and punchy. So even if I’d written it right away, it might not have mattered at all.

But it’s frustrating nonetheless. I had even written some shorter posts on the subject earlier, when I was researching the other and everyone was talking about the subject of Christie/Rubio, but what I was saying just didn’t get much currency and was drowned out in the meme that was already winning the day, and that ended up prevailing, because it was based on people’s gut perceptions. That’s what often ends up mattering; I understand that. But my goal seems to be to counter a gut perception if that perception seems wrong—and yes, I realize that’s a difficult thing to do. Maybe even impossible.

So here we go again. This time, though, it’s not about a perception. This time, most people were actually correct in their original perception of what happened when Trump did his “Bush lied!” bit during last Saturday’s debate. It’s the revisionist “correction” theories of the Trump supporters that are wrong, and I can prove it, but that revision of the truth has gotten halfway around the world already. I have the piece nearly written, but every day I hear more people accept as a truth the idea that Trump’s move was a pre-planned strategic one to appeal to voters in the middle and on the left. In fact, recently it was Limbaugh saying it, and believe me, he’s got a bigger audience than I do (I bet you do believe me on that).

I will try to finish up on the longer piece on the subject, but for now I’ll do the bullet points:

(1) That Bush lied about WMDs (and should have been impeached for it, and is “evil”) is an old and apparently deeply-held belief belief of Trump’s, as I’ve written in numerous previous posts, with quotes and videos. Trump started saying such things in 2007, with seeming sincerity and vigor. We can assume he believes them because he was not running for any office then, much less in some primary and thinking about appealing to voters in a general election. “Bush lied” therefore appears to be one of his most strongly held beliefs, and if he believes it he also believes Bush is evil (which he also has explicitly stated in the past).

(2) Not only that, but this is not even the first time he has made the “9/11 happened during Bush’s reign” remark before in the 2016 campaign. This is not a sudden change or pivot; he said it in October.

(3) If you look at the transcript of Saturday’s debate, Trump did not even bring the topic up. It was John Dickerson who asked Trump to defend his 2008 Wolf Blitzer interview comment that Bush had lied about WMDs and should be impeached for it. Was Dickerson and the question a pre-arranged Trump plant? Don’t think so—although some of Trump’s admirers might ascribe that power to Trump, too.

(4) Also from the transcript, Trump at first dodged the question and said a bunch of other things instead. Check it out for yourself. If he was just waiting for an opportunity to say what he ultimately said about Bush, why did he dodge it at first, and why was his first response to the question to merely say that Bush had been mistaken? It’s more evidence that Trump had no previous intention to go Code Pink; at first he avoided it, when he had a golden opportunity afforded by Dickerson’s question. Or was this avoidance just another clever ploy of Trump’s to make us think he didn’t want to go there? How creative can you be to defend your “strategic move” theory?

(5) Dickerson pressed Trump again by asking him about his statement that Bush should be impeached: does he still believe it? Trump dodges that question again, and it was only then (in anger at being pressed about impeachment) that he said “Bush lied.” He never does answer whether he still favors impeachment, but to avoid having to answer on that content question, as usual he went to process and tried to create a distracting flurry “Bush lied!” (something Dickerson had already quoted him as having said in 2008). And create a distraction Trump did, as well as motivating his followers to explain away the whole thing by calling it a clever strategic move, which it obviously was not.

But that meme has now gotten halfway around the world, as these things often do.

I have not seen one other person writing about this in terms of the transcript and what it reveals, or even about Trump’s prior history of such statements. Perhaps someone has (I certainly hope someone has), but I sure haven’t seen it. Why am I the only one? Why are the others content to spin and make up whatever theories they want, untethered by reality and actual events? I think I know the answer: because it works.

As I said, I’m not an activist or a spinner. I don’t know how to do other than what I do, or be other than what I am. I leave the spinning to others. I try to tell the truth as I see it.


In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII:

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final end of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last – far off – at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

Fortunately, very fortunately, we have much more than a cry. We have thought, logic, learning—and some activists, too, who will do the shouting.

The mystery bracelet

The New Neo Posted on by

This bracelet fragment is surpassingly strange, although it may not be clear why on first viewing:

bracelet2

Here’s a reconstruction of what it probably looked like when worn:

bracelet

Here’s the explanation:

It is intricately made with polished green stone and is thought to have adorned a very important woman or child on only special occasions. Yet this is no modern-day fashion accessory and is instead believed to be the oldest stone bracelet in the world, dating to as long ago as 40,000 years.

Unearthed in the Altai region of Siberia in 2008, after detailed analysis Russian experts now accept its remarkable age as correct…

The bracelet was found inside the famous Denisova Cave, in the Altai Mountains, which is renowned for its palaeontological finds dating back to the Denisovans, who were known as homo altaiensis, an extinct species of humans genetically distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans.

Made of chlorite, the bracelet was found in the same layer as the remains of some of the prehistoric people and is thought to belong to them.

What made the discovery especially striking was that the manufacturing technology is more common to a much later period, such as the Neolithic era. Indeed, it is not clear yet how the Denisovans could have made the bracelet with such skill…

The ancient master was skilled in techniques previously considered not characteristic for the Palaeolithic era, such as drilling with an implement, boring tool type rasp, grinding and polishing with a leather and skins of varying degrees of tanning.

Chlorite was not found in the vicinity of the cave and is thought to have come from a distance of at least 200km, showing how valued the material was at the time.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

In all the tumult, I forgot about this probable lie of Trump’s

The New Neo Posted on by

I heard Trump say during the debate that he had lost “hundreds of friends” on 9/11, and I immediately thought, “Really? That’s an awful lot of friends. I wonder if anyone’s ever challenged him on that.” And then I promptly forgot about it, since so much else was happening.

Well, The Daily Beast didn’t forget, and so they challenged him, and quelle surprise:

Two days after Donald Trump claimed that he “lost hundreds of friends” at the World Trade Center as a result of the 9/11 attack, his campaign continued to ignore a Daily Beast request that he name even one.

With silence comes the possibility that Trump told the most reprehensible lie of the campaign, just a few breaths from when he called both Sen. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush liars.

By his math, Trump is trying to tell us that at least one in 10 of the 2,983 who died on 9/11 were his friends.

“If he has hundreds of friends, he should be able to tell us about them,” said a Port Authority police officer who never talks about how many comrades he lost. “If he can tell us about the hundreds of friends he lost, who they were, what kind of person they were, I might have some respect for him.”

So far he hasn’t been been able to tell the names of ten—or of one.

The cop also wonders why nobody seems to recall seeing Trump at the seemingly endless funerals that followed the attack…

…Trump was also on record saying that none of his properties were damaged in the attack.

But, as the New York Daily News has reported, Trump accepted a $150,000 federal grant that was part of a program meant to assist small businesses affected by 9/11.

That becomes all the more disgraceful if the news site The Smoking Gun is right in suggesting that in the four years after the attack, Trump did not make a single contribution to assist the victims of 9/11, hundreds of friends or no.

The Smoking Gun reports that the records of the Donald J. Trump Foundation show a single donation in 2006 of $1,000 to a “detox” Scientology program of uncertain value for first responders.

Trump did pledge $10,000 to the Twin Tower fund while calling into The Howard Stern Show, but an online search produces no record of him actually making it. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks has told the Daily Mail that Trump “has donated close to half a million dollars to organizations as a result of the 9/11 tragedy including the American Red Cross and the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Fund.”

Hicks said this was “in addition to a total of $102 million donated to hundreds of charitable foundations over a relatively short period of time, many of which helped people affected by 9/11.”

That $102 million may include land Trump donated to New York state after he abandoned plans to build a golf course. Trump enjoyed a considerable tax deduction…

Meanwhile, Trump offered to the press his opinions about the kind of memorial that should be built at Ground Zero, but seems to have contributed not a dime to building it.

He kicked in not even the price of admission to the 9/11 museum.

He does not appear to have attended any of the anniversary observances or to have participated in the reading of names…

If he has been to see the names inscribed at the memorial pools, he has been uncharacteristically inconspicuous.

Hey, if Trump can come up with these “hundreds,” I’ll take what I’m about to say back. But I highly doubt it will happen.

Con man. Liar. Exploiter of a terrorist attack. A man so secure in his sense that he is immune to exposure of his lies or consequences from lying that he will lie shamelessly and obviously when millions are watching and the spotlight is directly on him. Why anyone would still trust a single statement or promise he has made is utterly beyond me, except to say that a mind is a difficult thing to change.

Limbaugh and Levin, and campaign 2016

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh—or to any talk shows, actually—often. But I’ve listened now and then, often enough—to Limbaugh and also to Mark Levin—to get a basic feel for both of them. For example, I’ve noticed that for about a decade (that’s probably the first time I’d ever listened) Limbaugh has talked with growing rancor about the GOP establishment and how bad it is. I’ve only heard Levin for a few years, but he’s been even more vociferous on that topic.

I’m not saying there isn’t a reason to talk about the GOP’s failures and perceived betrayals—there is—but what I’ve heard has had the effect of fanning the flames of anti-GOP hatred higher and higher. It’s fun for listeners, it draws an audience and fits their mood, and gets the juices flowing. It seems a lot more exciting than talking about dry policy or law or the limitations of what Congress can actually do and all that jazz (which are certainly sometimes talked about as well on these shows). Such discussions feed into an already-existing discontent as well as giving it focus and growing it.

I believe that both Limbaugh and Levin are conservatives. I believe they both thought and still think they were creating a groundswell of popular demand for small government conservatism and respect for the Constitution. I believe they were and are sincere in the desire to do that. But the phenomenon they were instrumental in helping create, or at least to grow, has gone in a very different direction than they probably expected with the Trump phenomenon, and lately they’ve shown signs that they’re not sure how to handle it.

Neither Limbaugh nor Levin is in the habit—it’s against their policy—to formally endorse a candidate. Besides, since their listeners support a variety of candidates, it would alienate some of their listeners and shrink their audience were they to do so. So they won’t say “Yes” or “No” to one or the other candidates; what they do is more subtle. But I think that recently both of them (Levin much more than Limbaugh at this point) have become somewhat frightened by what they see happening, and its threat to the small government they hold dear. The situation is like some famous lines from Goethe, “Die ich rief, die Geister,/Werd ich nun nicht los.” “The spirits which I have summoned/I now cannot banish.”

Levin, who dissed Trump in 2011 but was very genial for a while towards him in 2015, began to get angry recently when Trump started attacking Cruz in Iowa, and then even angrier after Saturday’s debate. Limbaugh seems to be more newly upset about Trump’s anti-Bush remarks last Saturday. But unlike Levin, who is very clear in his disapproval of Trump at this point, Limbaugh tiptoes very gently around the subject.

But the spirits they have summoned they now cannot banish.

Is free speech dead in Scotland? And what about privacy here?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is potentially disturbing:

Following a report of a series of alleged offensive online posts relating to Syrian refugees living in Rothesay on Bute, Police Scotland confirmed on Tuesday that a 40-year-old man, understood to be from the Inverclyde area, had been arrested under the Communications Act…

Following the arrest, Insp Ewan Wilson from Dunoon police office said: “I hope that the arrest of this individual sends a clear message that Police Scotland will not tolerate any form of activity which could incite hatred and provoke offensive comments on social media.”

The only—and I mean the only—way this sort of arrest might be justified is if the social media postings were used to specifically plan an imminent act of violence against refugees. That would be tantamount to enforcing our own very limited “incitement to riot” exceptions to our free speech laws.

But until I learn that’s what was involved here, I’m going to assume that the man was committing acts that were much less actionable than that. After all, the police officer is quoted as saying that authorities [emphasis mine] “will not tolerate any form of activity which could incite hatred and provoke offensive comments on social media.” Sounds like he’s talking about language that might invoke a feeling (hatred) and incite more speech.

I first learned about a decade ago that Europe’s protections for freedom of speech are far less strong than our own. Back then, I was studying libel laws in France and Britain. This recent incident is not about libel, it’s about something called the “Communications Act,” which has the following provisions:

Section 127 of the act makes it an offence to send a message that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character over a public electronic communications network. The section replaced section 43 of the Telecommunications Act 1984 and is drafted as widely as its predecessor.

That’s awfully broad. But later there were interim guidelines which tempered it (however, they’re only “interim” and “guidelines”; the statute itself appears to have remained broad):

On 19 December 2012, to strike a balance between freedom of speech and criminality, the Director of Public Prosecutions issued interim guidelines, clarifying when social messaging is eligible for criminal prosecution under UK law. Only communications that are credible threats of violence, harassment, or stalking (such as aggressive Internet trolling) which specifically targets an individual or individuals, or breaches a court order designed to protect someone (such as those protecting the identity of a victim of a sexual offence) will be prosecuted. Communications that express an “unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, or banter or humor, even if distasteful to some and painful to those subjected to it” will not.

Better. But wait:

Communications that are merely “grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false” will be prosecuted only when it can be shown to be necessary and proportionate.

Leaves an opening for prosecuting almost anyone, doesn’t it? What’s more:

Revisions to the interim guidelines were issued on 20 June 2013 following a public consultation. The revisions specified that prosecutors should consider:

—whether messages were aggravated by references to race, religion or other minorities…

So there you have it. A bunch of unclear guidelines that can be used to prosecute real incitements or to prosecute whatever you think is “hate speech,” if that prosecution is “necessary and proportionate.”

Again, it’s possible that this particular arrest was a proper one for something very egregious that amounts to incitement to riot. But I doubt it.

Meanwhile, in the US, Apple is resisting the FBI’s request that it help in the de-encryption of San Bernadino mass murderer terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. But the situation is even more complicated than that makes it sound:

At issue is a court order issued Tuesday by Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California ordering Apple to, in the words of The Associated Press, “supply highly specialized software the FBI can load onto the phone to cripple a security encryption feature that erases data after too many unsuccessful unlocking attempts.” Wired adds that Apple’s compliance would allow the FBI to attempt to unlock the phone using multiple password attempts””a method known as bruteforcing. But Apple declined, calling for a public discussion, so its customers and citizens “understand what is at stake.”…

“Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software ”” which does not exist today ”” would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

“The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.”

Is the issue that no such technology exists at the moment? Because really, unless that’s the basis of the argument, couldn’t the same argument be made against any cooperation with authorities that compromised privacy, because anything could be demanded and misused by a tyrannical government? If the government has become that tyrannical, iPhone de-encryption may be the least of our worries (perhaps that’s already true). Likewise, if iPhone has created a technology that’s impervious even to police investigation in a case as clear-cut as this, isn’t that very dangerous as well, and should they be allowed to protect it when it was in the possession of a confirmed terrorist jihadi (now deceased) who had murdered fourteen people in cold blood?

It is still another case of needing to strike the proper balance between individual liberty and societal protection, between government as helper and as enemy.

The Ratcatcher

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to keep posting this now and then, just as a reminder. This is not about Trump-fever in particular—it’s about what’s led to it, and where such feelings can lead in the very worst-case scenario. Trump, Sanders, or a person unknown can channel the feeling described here and ride it to power.

The following is an excerpt from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free. The book, first published in 1955, is an exploration of Germans’ attitudes in the period leading up to WWII and including the war and its immediate aftermath. It features interviews with ten “typical” Germans, conducted a couple of years after the war’s end, and offers extraordinary and often relevant insights into how it was that Hitler came to power and stayed there so long.

Here is my general discussion of the book and its author, who was a man of the left. To understand the following excerpt, it is helpful to know that for the purposes of the book, Mayer refers to the ten interviewees as his “friends”:

National Socialism was a repulsion of my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of “the rascals.” Its motif was “throw them all out.” My friends, in the 1920’s, were like spectators at a wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and the sweat, the match is “fixed,” that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal “exposed” another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends…

My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption…Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,” against all the parliamentary parties, my friends evoked Hitlerism, and Hitlerism overthrew them all…

This was the Bewegung, the movement, that restored my friends and bewitched them. Those Germans who saw it all at the beginning—there were not very many; there never are, I suppose, anywhere—called Hitler the Rattenfé¤nger, the “ratcatcher.” Every American child has read The Pied-Piper of Hamlin. Every German child has read it, too. In German its title is Der Rattenfé¤nger von Hameln

That’s why for me the single most important attribute in a candidate is his/her devotion to the principle of preserving individual liberty, the foundation on which this country was built.

Taking advantage of the twisted primary design

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I asked this question in an earlier post, but I’m going to highlight it and expand on it here.]

I wonder what’s to prevent a candidate who is against a party—and possibly out to destroy it—from using that party’s primary process to harm it? And what makes any political outsider who’s never held office, and switched back and forth between parties many times, a member of a certain party? Is it just because that person says he/she is at the moment, and gets enough signatures to enter the race? I don’t think the situation I’ve described in this paragraph has ever come up before, so I don’t think party leaders ever envisioned it.

Then there are the primaries themselves. For example, South Carolina is a state (one of many) with a completely open primary, which has always seemed insane to me. Why allow Democrats to choose the Republican nominee, and vice versa? Makes no sense. It’s somewhat difficult to think of a good remedy for that, though, because you want people to be able to switch if they really are independents. Or do you? Should only the party regulars be allowed to vote in their party’s primaries?

Usually the official candidates in a primary have been fairly conventional, although different from each other in terms of policies and political leanings. The ones who are not tend to be members of fringe parties with very little following. I cannot recall ever having had a candidate who was out to destroy a party run for office within that party. But many people are thinking that might be the case with Trump—although I don’t really think so; I think his main motivation is narcissism combined with the drive for power. However, there is no doubt in my mind that many (perhaps even a majority) of his supporters are determined to back him in order to destroy the GOP. Some of them are from the left, and some from the right, but they have that in common, and in open primary states they all can vote in the GOP primary for him.

The only thing I can think of stopping the ones on the left is their possible desire to vote in the contested Democratic primary—because you can’t vote in both, at least not legally. I find it astounding, however, that there is no protection from voters using either party’s own primary to destroy it, and that the parties seem to have no way of dealing with this.

And the Grammy Awards fashion winner is…

The New Neo Posted on by

I looked at a lot of fashions from last night’s Grammy Awards in order to choose either the most beautiful and/or the most bizarre. I decided to go with the latter, and although I usually focus on the female fashion, this time I could not resist the following mesmerizingly dreadful male outfit sported by someone named Shawn Everett (apparently it was to promote something called “Save the Arctic”). Feast your eyes:

shawneverett

Looking at those worst-dressed photos from last night, I have come to the conclusion that Fellini was merely fashion-forward. Who knew?:

Picking a single image to represent Satyricon is like trying to single out one scene that captures the essence of a sprawling carnival. The film is a nonstop parade of extreme imagery, grotesque tableaux and freakish costuming. No one scene sticks out as more bizarre than another, and nothing is supposed to; everything inside the borders of the known world of Satyricon is as weird as everything else, from the whorehouse at the center of the empire to the blank spot at the edge of the map where monsters be. Forced to select something, we went with the image appearing five minutes into the film of the actor Vernaccio, dressed in a porcine pink helmet with a fin on top, carefully placing a tiny pill-like object on his outstretched tongue.

fellini_satyricon

I wonder if Trump is feeling insecure about SC, because he’s threatening to sue Cruz AND perhaps to go 3rd party

The New Neo Posted on by

What a guy, what a guy. In a press release, Trump writes:

One of the ways I can fight back is to bring a lawsuit against [Cruz] relative to the fact that he was born in Canada and therefore cannot be President. If he doesn’t take down his false ads and retract his lies, I will do so immediately. Additionally, the RNC should intervene and if they don’t they are in default of their pledge to me.

Lawsuit as retaliation for campaign ads. And say, if Trump is so great at making deals, why is his deal with the RNC falling through? And why hasn’t he sued Cruz already, if he can (I don’t believe he can, as I wrote about a month ago here)?

The answer to the first question is that if the deal with the RNC does fall through it’s because Trump decided that he doesn’t need or want them anymore, not because they failed to fulfill their side of the bargain. The answer to the second is that Trump’s lawyers have probably told him he doesn’t have standing, but he wants to continue the charade that he does have standing in order to whip his supporters up against Cruz and make people think Cruz isn’t eligible to be president. Trump sees Cruz as his biggest threat.

Allahpundit writes:

It sure does seem suddenly like Trump is eager to make the case that he’s no longer bound by his promise not to run third-party…

Trump’s image depends on him being seen as the consummate winner; if he loses to Cruz, he’ll need to explain how that possibly could have happened. The only tolerable excuse is that he was cheated ”” Cruz is ineligible, Cruz is lying about his record, Cruz gamed the vote in Iowa with dirty tricks, and so on. Maybe Trump’s even reached the point where, if it’s too late to go third-party, he can at least advise his supporters to stay home in November rather than support dirty cheater Ted Cruz as nominee. I remember Trump (or maybe one of his advisors) saying somewhere many months ago, maybe as earlier as last summer, that if he was destined to lose the nomination, he was going to take Jeb Bush down with him. The same logic may apply now to Cruz. That’s a bad deal for Trumpism in that Trump will have more leverage over the nominee if his endorsement is in play than if he’s rejected the GOP, but maybe Trump’s ego is now sufficiently bruised that revenge is the only option.

It occur to me that what we really need in a president is someone who constantly threatens but doesn’t back up his threats with action. That’s a person you can really trust.

I would like to give the topic of Trump a rest, but the temptations keep presenting themselves, don’t they?

[ADDENDUM: Here’s an interesting comment at Legal Insurrection:

Trump is exactly where he wants to be. He has a rabid base built that will vote for him even if he shoots someone. If he wins the nomination he loses the general to the Democrats and if he loses the nomination he runs third party, splits the Republican vote and the Democrats win. If Trump wants a Clinton presidency he is well placed to deliver.

And here’s a relevant comment from “The Other Chuck” on an earlier thread at this blog:

If Trump supporters are convinced that he is genuine in his now stated beliefs, and further that he has only the best interests of America at heart, then they MUST also know that he cannot fulfill that vision and win the nomination let alone the general election without the 2/3 of the Republican Party electorate currently aligned against him. Why would he consistently alienate them if he truly intends to go on to win? Why wouldn’t he be trying his best to bring them around so that his vision of restoring American greatness gets a national hearing?

The only answer and one that his followers refuse to consider, is that he has no intention of compromising with the right because his purpose is to disrupt and destroy it. This position is openly stated on many websites as reason to support his candidacy. One of those websites is ConservativeTreeHouse, but there are several others with the same goal. Trumps credentials with these people is the fact that he is challenging not just the Republican Party establishment, but also conservatism itself through his populist ideas of trade protectionism and his living example of crony capitalism.

He blackmailed the Republican Party to gain access to the primary process at the start by threatening a 3rd party run. Now he openly attacks its nominal leader, the last sitting Republican president, as a lying warmonger directly responsible for 4,000 plus dead and thousands more wounded American heroes. Please tell me you avid Trump supporters what he would be doing differently if he were a Michael Moore Democrat?

I wonder what’s to prevent a candidate who is against a party and out to destroy it from using that party’s primary process to harm it? What makes Trump a Republican eligible to run in the primary? Because he says he is? I don’t think the situation has ever come up before, so I don’t think party leaders ever envisioned it.]

How Justice Scalia’s death is likely to affect pending Court decisions

The New Neo Posted on by

From William Jacobson.

Oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas and even more more so Friedrichs v. California Teachers’ Association suggested the Court would decide for the conservative position in both.

Now those cases are thrown into turmoil. The traditional response when a Justice dies after oral arguments but before a written decision has been to either affirm the lower court without setting precedent, or to order. Either option is at least a temporary setback for conservatives…

…Justice Scalia…was not merely a member of the conservative wing, he was its intellectual champion, and we will only be able to assess the implications of his death for the Court and country when we know who will replace him. A liberal taking Scalia’s seat could be transformative in a way President Obama only dreams of. A conservative replacement would maintain the status quo.

The Senate leadership has accordingly already asserted that it would not confirm any Obama nominee. If the Senate perseveres, this puts Scalia’s replacement and the fate of the Court in the hands of the 2016 presidential election winner. The Senate should not confirm any nominee that would change the balance of the Court, and GOP voters should nominate a candidate with deep and reliable conservative bona fides.