emails: Digby:
thedigbyblog at gmail Dennis: satniteflix at gmail Gaius: publius.gaius at gmail Tom: tpostsully at gmail
Spocko:Spockosbrain at gmail
tristero: Richardein at me.com
A new study published this week in a prestigious medical journal helps debunks abortion opponents’ claim that women who become pregnant are becoming less likely to choose abortion.
As the national abortion rate declines, members of the anti-abortion community have argued it’s because more women are reconsidering the wisdom of ending a pregnancy. They say that laws designed to delay women’s access to abortion — such as requirements that women view an ultrasound before continuing with the procedure — are successfully changing the culture and helping convince women to choose life.
“This is a post-sonogram generation,” Charmaine Yoest, the president of Americans United for Life, a conservative group that helps write state-level abortion restrictions, told the Washington Post in 2014 in response to a study showing the national abortion rate had dropped. “There is increased awareness throughout our culture of the moral weight of the unborn baby. And that’s a good thing.”
But the evidence says otherwise. The abortion rate is declining because fewer women are accidentally getting pregnant, according to a new study from reproductive health researchers who tracked a sharp drop in unintended pregnancies in recent years.
The Guttmacher Institute, an organization that closely tracks the country’s pregnancy and abortion rates, found a striking 18 percent decline in unplanned pregnancies between 2008 and 2011. At the same time, they observed the rate of contraceptive use increasing. They also found evidence that more women are choosing the best forms of birth control. Use of the most effective contraception methods, like the IUD, more than tripled between 2007 and 2012.
“These findings provide significant new clarity for the U.S. abortion debate,” said Joerg Dreweke, a researcher at the organization who wrote a policy analysis accompanying the new study. “We now know that abortion declined primarily because of fewer unintended pregnancies, and not because fewer women decided to end an unwanted pregnancy.”
Tellingly, the proportion of unintended pregnancies that end in abortion has remained relatively constant — suggesting that, when faced with an unexpected decision about whether to become a parent, U.S. women are not shifting toward choosing parenthood over abortion.
What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. Can you imagine if you're her parents how proud of Sandra Fluke you would be? Your daughter goes up to a congressional hearing conducted by the Botox-filled Nancy Pelosi and testifies she's having so much sex she can't afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the Pop.
A big moment in the Republican presidential election. Of 2012.
Donald Trump:
It's my honor, real honor and privilege to endorse Mitt Romney.
(APPLAUSE)
I've gotten -- and by the way, this is a great couple. You look at this couple. But Mitt is tough. He's smart. He's sharp. He's not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country that we all love. So Governor Romney, go out and get 'em. You can do it.
ROMNEY: Thank you. Thank you.
There are some things that you just can't imagine happening in your life. This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump's magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight. I'm so honored and pleased to have his endorsement and of course, I'm looking for the endorsement of the people of Nevada.
(APPLAUSE)
Donald Trump has shown an extraordinary ability to understand how our economy, to create jobs for the American people. He's done it here in Nevada. He's done it across the country. He understands that our economy is facing threats from abroad. He's one of the few people who stood up and said you know what? China has been cheating. They've taken jobs from Americans. They haven't played fair. We have to have a president who will stand up to cheaters. We believe in free trade and free enterprise, but we don't believe in allowing people to cheat day in and day out.
And I'm going to work very, very hard to make sure that the people in this country have a brighter future than that is being projected by the CBO. Their analysis of what's going to happen and the future of America is driven by the policies they're seeing from a president who's failing.
He's frequently telling us that he did not cause the recession and that's true. But he made it worse. And he made the recovery long and tepid. The people here in Nevada are suffering. So many people have their homes underwater. It's extraordinary. And Nevada leads the nation in a very negative way, which is if you look at foreclosures of the last 90 days, Nevada is number one in the nation.
This is a very tough time for the people in Nevada. And I want to do everything in my power to get this economy going again so people can be in homes they can afford, so people can come here for tourism, so we can have the American people have rising incomes again, so we can make sure that America stands strong around the world.
We have a president who may be a nice guy, but he is way over his head. He does not understand what it takes to get America working again and I do. I spent my life in the private sector, not quite as successful as this guy, but successful, nonetheless, sufficiently successful to understand what it takes to get America to be the most attractive place in the world for innovators, entrepreneurs and job creators.
I want American to be the place people want to come and grow. And I will use all of my energy to get America working again, to help the people of this country have rising incomes, good jobs and homes that are worth something again.
So I want to say thank you to Donald Trump for his endorsement. It means a great deal to me to have the endorsement of Mr. Trump and people across this country who care about the future of America. I think it's time for us to recognize we can't keep going down the road we're on. We have to dramatically change course. We have to restructure the way government interacts with people. Our government is too big, it's too intrusive, it's placed too great burdens on our people in this country.
I will dramatically change the way this government is working. And I'll also stand up for our friends abroad and make sure America remains the shining city on the hill.
Thank you so much for your help and your endorsement today, and look forward to seeing you on the trail.
One might surmise from that total that the race for the Republican presidential nomination is now a race between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Their total was separated by only 23 delegates as compared to the 142 points that separates Trump from Marco Rubio. Trump has won ten contests. Ted Cruz has won four. Rubio has won one. Kasich and Carson are irrelevant. (The press is reporting that people are starting to lean on the former and it appears Carson has either seen the light or someone's made him an offer he can't refuse.)
The problem with all of this for the establishment is that they loathe both Trump and Cruz, the first and second choices of their voters. This should tell them something but it doesn't yet seem to have penetrated: their voters don't care what they think. Indeed, their voters are basically saying that if these people are for it, they're against it.
Still, the establishment rages against this reality, belatedly having recognized that Trump is a real threat, devising plans to thwart their two top candidates to install someone they see as both electable and palatable. There are massive ad campaigns in the works with the intention of "informing" Trump voters that their man is a hypocrite:
Those people simply don't understand Trump's appeal. He openly explains these apostasies away by saying that he is a businessman who had to play all sides because that's the cost of doing business. He doesn't hide it and his voters don't mind it. They think he's a smart guy who wins by any means necessary. After all, he's a billionaire!
Trump voters aren't hostile to a wealthy businessmen like Trump. In fact, his profession is very high on the list of the things they like best about him. They believe that the honest hardworking businessmen are just doing what they need to do to make a buck and if we could get the government to put America first they'd be able to keep the jobs here and everything would be fine.
On trade, he wants to revise existing deals and replace them with ones that the United States will "win."
On foreign policy, he is suspicious of idealistic ventures but willing to be maximally brutal and maximally avaricious when force does need to be used.
On drug prices, he wants the US government to stop acting like the biggest sucker in the world by letting itself get ripped off by rootless multinational firms.
On immigration, what really needs to be said.
Trump's speeches these days also loudly and proudly invoke support for veterans and law enforcement, identifying his movement with the agents of the state.
Trump and his followers are authoritarian nationalists and they could not care less that he's been all over the map on other issues. What matters to them is that he wants America --- and by extension them --- to dominate. Until someone can find a way to make these people doubt his sincerity or competence in accomplishing that goal his people will not abandon him. According to Nate Cohn in the New York Times, the numbers show that it's not too late to stop him if the anti-Trump forces could get their act together. But they are running out of time:
He holds only 33 percent of the popular vote in the returns counted so far; 35 percent if you exclude Ted Cruz’s home state, Texas. It’s a low enough number to suggest he could still lose the nomination if the field ever narrowed to a one-on-one race[...]
By March 15, nearly 60 percent of all the delegates to the Republican nomination will have been awarded. Five large states will cast ballots, and several, including Florida and Ohio, are winner-take-all states. Illinois and Missouri award their delegates in a way that will most likely assure a lopsided margin for the victor.
If Mr. Trump isn’t defeated on that date, he will be in a strong position to amass a majority of delegates by the end of the primary season. If he had a big day on March 15 and then won by even a little afterward, say by a margin as small as three percentage points, he would probably have enough delegates to avoid a contested convention.
Yesterday, Fox officially gave up on Marco Rubio. Roger Ailes reportedly said, "we're finished with Rubio. We can't do the Rubio thing anymore." Sean Hannity knows how to follow orders and he immediately went ballistic on Rubio on his radio show yesterday:
What I suspect has happened is that Marco Rubio has sat in a room with a lot of establishment types. I guarantee you he has been promised millions and millions and millions of dollars for his campaign, I suspect deeply that this dramatic change -- this is not a subtle change that, you know -- listening to him go on and on about the con artist, the fraud, the scam artist. "He refuses to repudiate the KKK." "Hire illegal immigrants." Misspelled words. I suspect that this has all been coached. I suspect that this is a strategy that has been put together by all of these people that are angry really at you because they don't like the way you, the American people, are voting.
There's no mystery about where the Fox empire is heading. Rupert Murdoch himself tweeted,
"As predicted, Trump reaching out to make peace with Republican "establishment". If he becomes inevitable party would be mad not to unify."
It's unknown what Trump has done to "reach out" but if he's referring to his bizarre victory "press conference" on Super Tuesday, it's probably wishful thinking. Nonetheless, it's clear that Fox is reaching out to him. They seem to be gluttons for punishment. Trump has been playing them for fools for months.
But not everyone has accepted the inevitability of Trump. Some members of the GOP establishment are still raging at the dying of the Republican Party at his hands and are even willing to entertain the unthinkable. Senator Lindsay Graham who recently joined the ranks of potty mouthed public officials when he described his party as "batshit crazy" went on CBS yesterday, swallowed hard and said:
He's not my favorite but we may be in a position where we have to rally around Ted Cruz to stop Donald Trump.
It's a testament to just how loathsome his fellow elected Republicans find Cruz that this is the first, perhaps the only, time anyone has mentioned this as a possibility. (Well Cruz himself did, unctuously suggesting that all of his rivals "prayerfully consider" dropping out of the race. It's not hard to see why fellow officials think he's so repellent.)
Today Mitt Romney is scheduled to give a speech about the Republican race and is expected to say that Republicans should vote for either Rubio or Cruz. I think it's fair to say that such an entreaty coming from him will likely have the effect of clinching the nomination for Donald Trump. It's that kind of campaign.
350z33 at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons
The women on the U.S. Supreme Court had a bit of a field day when the Texas abortion case of Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt came before the court yesterday. The 2013 Texas law at issue requires clinics offering abortion services to meet standards set for ambulatory surgical centers. In addition, it requires doctors performing those abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Hannah Levintova at Mother Jonessets the stage:
The Texas health department argues that these provisions are necessary to protect women's health—a standard that was established in 1992 in Casey as a legitimate reason for states to pass abortion restrictions. Casey also established, however, that the state's interest in women's health has to be weighed against whether an abortion law would place an "undue burden" on women seeking abortion care. This is where the plaintiff's argument lies. Whole Woman's Health, which runs three abortion clinics in Texas, argues that the burdens on women created by HB 2—clinic closures across the state that have forced thousands of women to travel hundreds of miles for abortion care—far outweigh any interest in protection of women's health that Texas has. They point to many medical groups, including the American Medical Association, that have said ambulatory surgical facilities and admitting-privileges requirements are not necessary to provide safe abortion care.
Dahliah Lithwick takes up the narrative as Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor question Stephanie Toti who argued on behalf of the Texas clinics:
Roberts spends a good deal of Toti’s remaining time suggesting that the “undue burden” test after Casey has nothing to do with the state’s purpose in passing the law. Toti replies that the court looked carefully at the state’s intent when it assessed the abortion regulations in Casey. At around this point, Sotomayor decides that she has some things to say: “There’s two types of early abortion at play here. The medical abortion, that doesn't involve any hospital procedure. A doctor prescribes two pills, and the women take the pills at home, correct?” Toti explains that the woman has to take them at the abortion facility under Texas law.
Sotomayor is back: “I'm sorry. What? She has to come back two separate days to take them? ... When she could take it at home, it’s now she has to travel 200 miles or pay for a hotel to get those two days of treatment?”
Toti confirms that there is no reputable evidence that there is a medical benefit to having a medication abortion at “a multi-million-dollar surgical facility.”
Sotomayor asks for more time to finish her two-part question and the chief justice nods, resigned. Then Sotomayor asks why a dilation and curettage associated with a miscarriage can be performed in a doctor’s office whereas a basically identical D&C; must be performed in an ambulatory surgical center when it’s for an abortion. Toti replies, and Sotomayor keeps talking. The chief thanks Toti but Sotomayor forges on, wondering if any other medical procedures require taking pills in a hospital. No, says Toti. Sotomayor is finally content to rest her case.
Justices Sotomayor and Elena Kagan observed that more risky procedures such as dental surgery and colonoscopies are not similarly regulated in Texas. They are routinely performed in a doctor's office.
Seconds after Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller began to speak Wednesday morning, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg zeroed in on the “undue burden” question—quickly and mercilessly knocking Keller off balance and setting the tone for the rest of his nearly 40 minutes at the lectern. Ginsburg asked Keller how many women would live 100 miles or more from a clinic if the Texas law went into effect. About 25 percent, he responded—but that didn’t include the clinic in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, just over the border from El Paso. The existence of this clinic featured heavily in the 5th Circuit’s decision to uphold the Texas statute; it asserted that the law did not impose on “undue burden” on abortion-seeking El Paso women, because they could simply cross state lines for the procedure.
“That’s odd that you point to the New Mexico facility,” Ginsburg said, in a clear and firm voice. New Mexico, after all, doesn’t force abortion clinics to meet the same standards that Texas would—standards which, Texas claims, are absolutely critical to protect women.
“So if your argument is right,” Ginsburg continued, “then New Mexico is not an available way out for Texas, because Texas says: To protect our women, we need these things. But send them off to New Mexico,” to clinics with more lenient standards, “and that’s perfectly all right.”
“Well,” Ginsburg concluded, with just a hint of pique in her voice, “If that’s all right for the women in the El Paso area, why isn’t it right for the rest of the women in Texas?”
You gotta love Notorious RBG.
With this season's conservative Sturm und Drang over the supposed scourge of political correctness, you'd think the purveyors of this and similar laws would simply drop the subterfuge, cut the crap, and boldly state for the cameras that these laws are cynical attempts to kill off Roe by a thousand cuts. But no, that would take honesty and guts.
Why should this upset anyone? After all, the front runner for the presidential nomination is calling Ted Cruz a pussy on national TV.
The newly elected chair of the Republican Party in the county that includes the Texas Capitol spent most of election night tweeting about former Gov. Rick Perry’s sexual orientation and former President Bill Clinton’s penis, and insisting that members of the Bush family should be in jail.
He also found time to call Hillary Clinton an “angry bull dyke” and accuse his county vice chair of betraying the values of the Republican Party.
“The people have spoken,” Robert Morrow, who won the helm of the Travis County GOP with 54 percent of the vote, told The Texas Tribune. “My friends and neighbors and political supporters — they wanted Robert Morrow.”
Morrow’s election as Republican chair of the fifth-largest county in Texas left several members of the Travis County GOP, including vice chair Matt Mackowiak, apoplectic. Mackowiak, a Republican strategist, immediately announced over social media that he would do everything in his power to remove Morrow from office.
“We will explore every single option that exists, whether it be persuading him to resign, trying to force him to resign, constraining his power, removing his ability to spend money or resisting any attempt for him to access data or our social media account,” Mackowiak told the Tribune. “I’m treating this as a coup and as a hostile takeover.”
“Tell them they can go fuck themselves,” Morrow told the Tribune.
I'd guess he's angling for the job of Trump's press secretary. He is, unsurprisingly a big fan:
Morrow, who’s also tweeted that Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is “very likely a gayman who got married,” said he supports the brand of Republican politics he most closely associates with Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz.
“The Republican Party, I would hope, is about limited government with a libertarian perspective,” Morrow said. “But it’s a big tent, and there are many factions in it, and that’s okay with me.”
Morrow’s main complaint is with “establishment” Republicans, who he does not believe should hold elected office, he said. Last week, he tweeted that the Republican National Committee was just a “gay foam party.”
Morrow has a long history of critiquing prominent state Republicans in vulgar, and often sexually explicit, terms. For years, he has alleged that Perry is secretly bisexual; in 2010, he referred to him as “Gov. Skank Daddy” in an email.
“Perry is an epic hypocrite,” he told the Tribune on Wednesday. “I think he has been a rampaging bisexual adulterer for many decades.”
Though Morrow has tweeted often about sexually explicit acts involving Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and his last several Facebook profile pictures were of scantily clad women, he said he denies any charge that he is sexist.
“It’s derogatory toward Hillary Clinton because I hate Hillary Clinton," he told the Tribune. "But I’m not sexist. Why would you ask that? I’m not sexist.”
“I like beautiful women, I celebrate feminine beauty,” Morrow added. “I’m like Donald Trump — I love women.”
When the Tribune asked about the content of some of Morrow’s social media posts, without using the specific racial slur Morrow had employed, Morrow seized on the omission as an example of corruption within the media.
“You are a perfect example of what the Trump movement is revolting against because you can’t even pronounce the word n----- when you are talking about a Facebook post,” Morrow said. “What a pathetic excuse for a reporter you are.”
He's a perfect representative of "The Trump Movement." He sounds just like his leader.
Why do you suppose it is that these people listen to Trump and instantly feel such an affinity for him?
The host of an “unapologetically pro-White” radio program received press credentials from the Donald Trump campaign at a rally last weekend in Memphis, Tennessee, according to a blog post flagged by Little Green Footballs.
James Edwards, the host of the “Political Cesspool” show, wrote a glowing blog post describing his positive experience at the Millington Regional Airport event, where he recorded an episode of his show from within the press pen. Photos interspersed throughout the post show Edwards beaming with a Trump media badge pinned to his suit jacket, as well as other reporters in the cordoned-off press area who he describes as “the enforcers of political correctness.”
“I must admit that this rally lived up to my expectation,” Edwards wrote in the post.
“I’ve been saying for years on the radio that the majority of Americans fundamentally agree with us on the issues and that the neocons were generals of a phantom army," he continued. "I am being proven right. Our people just needed a viable candidate and they’ve identified Trump as that man. There is no doubt that Trump’s populism and nationalism is galvanizing our nation and may change the course of American history for the better right before our very eyes.”
Edwards also notes that he will air a previously recorded 20-minute interview with Donald Trump, Jr. on his show on Saturday.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond Wednesday to TPM's request for comment.
The Political Cesspool’s mission statement outlines a hard-right ideology that rejects “abortion, feminism, and homosexuality” and calls “to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races.” Archived blog posts celebrate Edwards’ efforts to preserve Confederate monuments in Memphis, Tennessee and refer to interracial sex as “white genocide.”
Either that or somebody offered him a bribe to drop out (which is entirely possible.)The rumor is that they are offering him money to run for the Senate in Florida. Presumably he'll endorse Rubio if that's so.
He seems to be shifting from the presidential campaign grift to the Sarah Palin-style post political cult of personality grift. He's got a hell of an email list.
He's all in on Trump and clearly believes his political future is so tied to him that he no longer needs to even pretend to be a Governor:
Six New Jersey newspapers issued a joint editorial Tuesday calling on Gov. Chris Christie to resign in the wake of his failed presidential campaign and his subsequent endorsement of rival Donald Trump.
The six newspapers including the Asbury Park Press, the Cherry Hill Courier-Post and the Morristown Daily Record — all Gannett-owned papers that are part of the USA TODAY NETWORK — were apparently spurred to editorial outrage by a Monday press conference in which Christie refused to answer questions about anything other than his nomination of a state Supreme Court judge. Asked why, Christie replied, "Because I don't want to."
"We’re fed up with Gov. Chris Christie’s arrogance," the papers wrote. "We’re fed up with his opportunism. We’re fed up with his hypocrisy."
The joint editorial notes that Christie spent part of 261 days out of state last year and traveled out of state to endorse Trump and campaign with him after he quit the race Feb. 10.
"For the good of the state, it’s time for Christie to do his long-neglected constituents a favor and resign as governor. If he refuses, citizens should initiate a recall effort," the editorial said.
They are calling for him to resign or be recalled. This was a man who just a couple of years ago was said to be a shoo-in for the GOP nomination for president. Now he is nothing more than Donald Trump's major-domo.
Super Tuesday was a very good night for Donald Trump. He didn’t completely run the table but he cemented his status as the frontrunner. And the GOP establishment is now in full-fledged panic mode. Some of us tried to warn them. And I hate to admit it but one of the foremost purveyors of beltway conventional wisdom had it right as well. As I noted back in June when Trump announced, the only one to take Trump seriously was Bloomberg News’ Mark Halperin, whose first impression was quite a bit less derisive than anyone else’s:
Best moment: Protracted run-up to formal declaration of candidacy was spirited and engaging.
Worst moment: Lost his rhythm a bit whenever cheerful supporters in the crowd tossed out helpful prompts or encouraging chants.
Overall: A madcap production–garrulous, grandiose, and intense—that displayed his abundant strengths and acute weaknesses. For the first time in decades, Trump is a true underdog, but his ability to shape the contours of the nomination fight should not be ignored. On the debate stage, through TV advertising (positive and negative), in earned media, and by drawing crowds, Trump has the potential to be a big 2016 player. He staged an announcement event like no other, and now he will deliver a candidacy the likes of which the country has never seen.
Substance: Made a concerted and admirable effort to laundry-list his presidential plans before the speech was finished, calling for the replacement of Obamacare, cautioning foreign adversaries about messing with the U.S., expressing opposition to the current trade bill, promising to build a southern border wall and sticking Mexico with the bill, terminating Obama’s executive order on immigration, supporting the Second Amendment, ending Common Core, rebuilding infrastructure, resisting cuts in entitlement programs. Still, left open too many questions about the hows and wherefores, given that he has never run for nor held office.
That’s still pretty much the Trump agenda, isn’t it? So let’s give Halperin his due. He couldn’t have known at the time how popular Trump’s calls for torture, war crimes and summary execution would be, but he had a good sense of the Republican electorate’s thirst for what he was offering from the very beginning. And there are very few mainstream media analysts about whom you can say the same thing.
Yesterday, Politico did a rundown on the media’s dismissal of Trump as an impossibility or a simple joke over the past few months:
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, told his readers last summer that Donald Trump was running for president to promote his own brand and that the “whole con might end well before the first snows in Sioux City and Manchester.”
That was quite measured compared to James Fallows, the national correspondent of more than three decades for The Atlantic, who wrote confidently — and with his own bold for emphasis — “Donald Trump will not be the 45th president of the United States. Nor the 46th, nor any other number you might name. The chance of his winning the nomination and election is exactly zero.”
Those two mandarins weren’t alone in dismissing Trump’s chances.
Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza wrote in July that “Donald Trump is not going to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016.” And numbers guru Nate Silver told readers as recently as November to “stop freaking out” about Trump’s poll numbers.
Now all these journalists, and more, are coming to grips with their mistaken assessments.
A “super PAC” that was formed by members of the Ricketts family is boosting its staff and planning a full-fledged campaign against Donald J. Trump — and his surrogates — in an effort to thwart his rise, including hiring the former communications director to Jeb Bush and creating an opposition research wing.
Tim Miller, who was Mr. Bush’s top spokesman during his presidential run, will now work for Our Principles PAC, the group founded in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses to try to prevent Mr. Trump from winning the nomination, according to officials with the group.
With additional funding from sources other than Marlene Ricketts, the group is planning to focus on daily opposition research attacks on Mr. Trump, particularly in March 8 andMarch 15 states, officials with the group said.
Democratic operative Paul Begala quipped on CNN last night that it seems these people are determined to help Trump rather than hurt him. By announcing this project to the world, they are almost guaranteeing that his popularity will grow: His followers loathe the “establishment” and see all attacks by them on their hero to be signs that he is on the right track.
And even under the best of circumstances, this belated recognition of the threat of Trump would likely be too little too late. The process is now well established: Whatever you throw at him only makes his supporters like him more. He’s called John McCain’s POW status into question; he’s acted as if he’s not sure if he should disavow the support of the KKK; he’s even gotten into a fight with the Pope. And despite all that and much, much more, he could, as he says, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any voters. By waiting so long to acknowledge the problem, they’ve created a dynamic in which any critiques or attacks on Trump are dismissed as lies or manipulations by his enemies in the media and the political establishment.
It’s unseemly I know, to quote one’s own words but this is an occasion that calls for it. Way back in June when he first announced, I observed right here on Salon that Trump was a force to be reckoned with. He was very rich, which meant he could forgot the “invisible primary” that requires candidates to go begging at the feet of privileged plutocrats. But that wasn’t his greatest asset:
There is something else he has that may be even more valuable than money: stardom. I don’t think it’s possible to place a political value on the fact that Trump has had a prime-time network TV show for over 10 years with “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.”
“The Apprentice” averaged 6 to 7 million viewers a show with finales sometimes getting between 10 and 20 million viewers. Last year’s “Celebrity Apprentice” averaged 7.6 million a show. Fox News’ highest rated shows rarely get more than a couple of million viewers and they are all elderly hardcore Republicans. The Donald has a wider reach and might even appeal to the most sought-after people in the land: non-voters.
It’s impossible to know if that’s a serious possibility. But it’s fair to say that many more people in the country know the name of Donald Trump than know anyone else in the race (with the possible exception of Jeb Bush). It’s hard to quantify that kind of name recognition but it’s certainly not worthless in our celebrity-obsessed culture. And remember, Trump would not be the first show business celebrity who everyone assumed was too way out there to ever make a successful run for president. The other guy’s name was Ronald Reagan.
It was obvious from the beginning that no matter how clownish or silly this man seems to the elite, he was someone millions of Americans already knew and loved and whose message reflected the right wing’s primary obsessions.
Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere. Almost exactly one year before Donald Trump descended on that elevator, his ascendance as the frontrunner of the Republican presidential race was foreshadowed by another earthquake in the Republican Party which everyone in the media also seemed to misread: the defeat of House majority leader Eric Cantor by a political neophyte named David Brat. The beltway political mavens blithely declared this race turned on Cantor’s alleged lack of concern for his district’s pothole and stop light issues but they were wrong. The race was about undocumented immigrants. Trump, having a well honed sense of the wing-nut zeitgeist, understood this far better than the media and predicated his presidential campaign on that issue as well.
Donald Trump is the undisputed leader in this race and there seems to be little anyone can do to stop him. There is a lot of talk that if worse comes to worst the party elders will try to wrest the nomination from him at the convention in Cleveland this summer through some manipulation of the rules. One cannot help but wonder if they’ve ever met any Trump voters. They don’t seem like the kind of people who will meekly accept such an outcome.
And they would have a point. This is a democratic process and Trump is winning it fair and square. It’s not his voters’ fault that the GOP establishment and the mainstream media were too dense to see that his campaign was serious from the start. By being so obtuse, they inadvertently proved the central argument of his campaign: Washington elites are out of touch. And that’s yet another example of how Trump always seems to be one step ahead of everyone else.
I'm going to guess that ads like this are going to be running a whole lot over the next few weeks. It will be very interesting to see if they have any effect:
I think the people who like Trump are so disaffected from ordinary politics that they refuse to believe any criticism of him even when it's presented in his own words. They'll discount this, saying the clips have been doctored or are out of context. (And they would be right in some respects.)
And he's covered himself with the explanation that he's a businessman who had to say and do things for the sake of his business. Republicans respect this about him.
I don't think people really understand what right wing populism is --- sure they blame banks and corporations for their loss of economic security but they don't blame the people who run them for being greedy and avaricious. That's natural. They blame the government for failing to "compete" properly with foreigners and letting those foreigner make a "better deal" with our virtuous businessmen.
Trump was forced to be completely without integrity because that's how you do business, amirite? Not his fault. He needed to kiss up to all politicians.
There will be a lot of words but this is it in a nutshell:
"We have a big problem at this point, because I agree with you a lot. I agree that we have taken [Trump] not seriously, we have not respected his voters, but there is a dark underside here, and S.E. is right," Jones began.
"He is whipping up and tapping into and punching buttons that are very, very frightening to me and frightening to a lot of people. Number one, when he is playing funny with the Klan, that is not cool."
Jones continued, "I know this man when he gets passionate about terrorism. I know how he talks about terrorism. The Klan is a terrorist organization that has killed --"
"-- A leftist organization," Lord interrupted.
He answered, "You can put any label on it you want. That's your game to play."
He then put an exclamation point on it, saying, "No, you need to take a serious look at the fact that this man has been playing fast and loose and footsie -- when you talk about terrorism, he gets passionate. He's says no, this is wrong. But when you talk about the Klan, oh, I don't know, I don't know. That's wrong."
Pointing at Lord, he continued, "And then you came on the air and you said this is just like when Reverend Wright was speaking. Reverend Wright never lynched anybody. Reverend Wright never killed anybody. Reverend Wright never put anybody on a post and you guys play these word games. And it is wrong to do in America."
Lord replied, "It is wrong to understand that these are not leftists."
"What difference does it make what you call them? Call them chipmunks, they killed people. And don't play games with that!," Jones shouted.
Lord taunted, "Don't hide and say that's not part of the base of the Democratic party. They were the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic party according to historians"
Jones answered, "I don't care how they voted 50 years ago. I care who they killed."
After another back and forth, Jones brought up Trump's smear of the black kids in the Central Park jogger case, pointing out that after Trump got the entire city stirred up over it and after the kids were proven innocent, he never apologized for what he did.
Jones also raised the things Trump has said about Native Americans and others, to which Lord chided him. "Van, what you're doing is dividing people. This is what liberals do. You're dividing people by race."
Orwell would be nodding approvingly at that one, wouldn't he?
Jones replied, "The Klan divided people by race. The Klan killed people by race. And he had the opportunity."
"They did it to further the progressive agenda, hello," Lord answered.
Jones countered, "That is first of all, so absurd. The Democratic Party of the South in the old days was a racist party. You are correct, sir. They were a violent party. But that's not the Democratic party of today, so what are you talking about that for? You play these games --"
"That is the Democratic party of today. The Democratic Party of today divides by race," interrupted Lord.
Jones then related a story about his 7-year old child, saying that he wants him to watch the news but whenever his son watches, he hears such hateful things he doesn't even know how to explain it to him.
"Tell Donald Trump he needs to, for my children's sake, if he's going to lead this country he needs to be as passionate about what is happening to my kid as anybody else's."
"We have to be passionate about, as Robert Kennedy used to say, that this country is colorblind," Lord countered. "Race has no place in American life, or law," he added. "We have lost that totally because the Democratic Party insists on dividing people by race," Lord concluded.
This is a common fatuous "I know you are but what am I" argument these wingnuts use to deny their racism. Lord had used it earlier on CNN.
"Donald Trump isn't playing the game, although he certainly denounced him," Lord declared. "I mean, David Duke is a hardcore leftist. He's an anti-Semite."
"Yes, Margaret, the Ku Klux Klan is a function of the left. It was the military arm of the Democratic Party," he added.
This is the recycled garbage about Southern Democrats who actually left the Democratic Party 50 years ago as part of the Republican Party's Southern Strategy. The KKK hasn't voted Democrat in decades, but "analysts" like Lord really do take their viewers for fools.
Margaret Hoover called him out on it, too, reminding him that the KKK is a hate group, not a "leftist group," but to no avail.
Lord insisted, "Margaret, it is a racist hate group from the left. And that counts. That is important to understand. It is not conservative. It has nothing to do with conservatism. All of these Klan members who have been elected to Congress and U.S. Senate and governorships over the years, supporting Franklin Roosevelt because they like Social Security. Let's get our history straight."
I don't know if he believes this drivel but it doesn't matter. He is prepared to go on CNN and argue with a straight face that President Obama is aligned with the KKK, a notorious left wing organization.
And CNN is prepared to let him. That's where this election is going.
Junk bonds are in worse shape than before the Lehman collapse
by Gaius Publius
Percentage of S&P junk bonds and leveraged loans considered "distressed" (click to enlarge)
We know that there will be another economic "big one" like the crisis of 2008. All of the pieces are in place — Wall Street greed and literal pathology, the even greater size of too-big-to-fail institutions, a literal get-out-of-jail free card that almost blesses continued financial fraud, and the like. We just don't know when it will occur, or what will trigger it. Last time it was triggered by the collapse of the bubble-sized home mortgage market. The time before that, it was the bubble-sized tech stock valuations. Where's the bubble now, or the inverse bubble, the market hole that may be forming somewhere?
Many people are looking at collapsing oil prices and soaring supplies, which is causing the collapse of over-leveraged carbon companies of all types (coal, oil and methane), as a potential cause of the next crash. Others say that the collapsing price of oil is "contained" — unique and isolated — and is not contaminating other markets.
The following piece by Wolf Richter argues the opposite point — that the collapse in the carbon market is not contained at all, and that collapse is in danger of spreading via the increasing price of junk bonds. Is this a precursor to the next "big one"? See what you think.
Now It’s Even Worse Than it Was When Lehman Collapsed, But It’s “Contained”
“Distress” in Bonds Spirals into Financial Crisis Conditions
The pile of toxic corporate bonds in the US, euphemistically called “distressed” debt, ballooned 15% in the single month of February to $327.8 billion, up 265% from a year ago, according to S&P Capital IQ. The number of S&P rated US companies with distressed debt rose 9% in February to 353, up 128% from a year ago.
The last time the pile of distressed debt had soared to this level was in November 2008, and the last time the number of distressed issuers had shot up to these levels was in October 2008; Lehman had declared bankruptcy in September.
These “distressed” junk bonds sport yields that are at least 10 percentage points above US Treasury yields, according to S&P Capital IQ’s Distressed Debt Monitor.
Note the definition in the final paragraph above. Bonds are considered "distressed" if they have to offer 10 points or more greater yield than U.S. Treasuries in order to attract buyers. Obviously, any company whose financing depends largely on these bonds is at risk of bankruptcy.
As a chart, the above data looks like this. Take a minute to study it.
The Y-axis is both number of issuers (bar graph) and billions of dollars issued (line graph). Click to enlarge.
Richter adds this about the S&P "distress ratio" for junk bonds and leveraged loans (see chart at the top):
The ratio hit the highest level since July 2009, when it was coming down from the Financial Crisis. But this is the spine-chilling part: Back in September 2008, before the Lehman bankruptcy had fully registered in the ratio, but when the Financial Crisis was already gaining a good amount of momentum, and when stocks were crashing left and right and prudent people were wearing hardhats while out on the sidewalk, the distress ratio was “only” 28.9[.]
Richter quotes the report he cites as saying that a rising ratio is “typically a precursor to more defaults.” If he's right, we could be headed into the same soup we took years getting out of. And this time, it will be a political soup as well, since the country, both left and right, is in zero mood for another massive government bailout.
Not Confined to Oil and Gas
Nor is the damage in these markets confined to the carbon sector. Richter again:
And it’s not just the oil-and-gas and the minerals-and-mining sectors that are getting crushed. Of the 607 distressed bond issues in the ratio, 172, or 28%, are oil-and-gas related and 80 bond issues, or 13%, are minerals-and-mining related. The remaining 59% are spread across other the spectrum.
“Spillover effect,” is what S&P Capital IQ calls this. It has contaminated “the speculative-grade spectrum as a whole.”
The article has more along these lines, including a list of sectors affected, how many billions of dollars in debt are distressed in those sectors, and the main companies affected in each sector. It's quite eye-opening.
Will Commodity Prices Cause the Next Collapse?
I've been personally watching all of this with interest. There is a bubble in commodities — especially those things that the very very wealthy are interested in (for example, Manhattan real estate and high-end art) — but really, in commodities in general. There's also a major crack in the commodities bubble connected to carbon products (coal, oil and methane). I've wondered before if collapsing oil prices would spark a collapse in other commodities (stocks, for example) via the highly leveraged, and therefore highly vulnerable, nature of many fracking companies in the U.S.
It's possible we'll get an answer soon ... or not. Still, this is worth watching. If you're interested, Richter's website, Wolfstreet.com, is worth checking on a regular basis.
"What does not kill me, makes me stronger." - Friedrich Nietzsche (By Hartmann, Basel. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
Much digital ink has been spread about how Republicans created Donald Trump and now are paying the price for it. But Trump is not the only nemesis they helped create.
First, writing yesterday from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Charlie Pierce spoke of the Super Tuesday reckoning facing the Republican party:
The facts are as stark as the slopes of Lookout Mountain in the early morning light. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished, especially by those of us who see the Republicans as having been cruising for this particular bruising ever since it so greedily ate the monkeybrains in the 1980s. But, from the people who make their living at being Republicans, we are seeing the kind of existential panic that you only see once or twice in a century. It's Watership Down, with Super PACs and Mitch McConnell.
Indeed, this morning's online headline at the Washington Post described it as a "nightmarish Super Tuesday" for the GOP establishment. Trump won seven of the states in play. Hillary Clinton also won seven Super Tuesday states.
In engineering this autoimmune disease, the Machiavellis of the vast right-wing conspiracy forgot their Nietzsche. Twenty-five years of near-constant political assault was not potent enough to destroy Hillary Clinton. Now, not only is the Republican Party facing a Trump of its own creation, but a stronger Hillary Clinton as well.
Clinton spoke last month with Anderson Cooper about the years of attacks:
"It is a brutal experience and when it first started happening to me ... I was just stunned. I could not understand how they got away with it.
"So now that I've been through this for so many years," the former first lady continued, "my understanding of the political tactics that the other side uses is pretty well versed. They play to keep. They play to destroy.
"I know I have to keep defending against them," Clinton added. "But I'm the one who has the experience to do that.
Like a punching clown, you can knock Hillary Clinton down, but she just will not stay down. Which is why they fear her.
I don't know what to say about this except ... yikes:
The 29-year-old Mandel, who writes for The Federalist, a conservative/libertarian web site that often inveighs against Trump, is a pugnacious online presence who frequently crosses swords with self-avowed acolytes of the Republican presidential frontrunner.
She has especially tangled with Breitbart News, the rabble-rousing, Trump-friendly Web site—named for its late founder, culture warrior Andrew Breitbart—that regularly savages the GOP establishment, the media elite, the Washington consultant class, and the Fox News Channel, which it likes to portray as the willing enabler of all these sinister forces.
“When I went to my local police department and applied for the gun permit, they said, ‘Maybe you should stop writing things that make people angry,’” Mandel recounts. “And I said, ‘OK, I’ll give that some consideration.’
‘You have kids. Why would you do that?’
‘Because I want to leave them a world that is worth living in.’”
Yet one can hardly fault Mandel’s feelings of vulnerability. Typical online insults (screenshots of which she provided to The Daily Beast) included “you deserve the oven,” complete with the image of a Domino’s Pizza oven—this from an apparent Trump fan who goes by the Twitter handle @dinguscout.
After Mandel observed: “Another night blocking all the anti-Semites who are helping Trump make American[sic] great again,” a second apparent Trump supporter, @unusr1, tweeted at her: “Missed one, you slimy Jewess.”
It is entirely predictable that, among other news outlets—including The Drudge Report, The New York Times and The Washington Post—the Twitter feeds of Mandel’s Trump-fan assailants often include links to stories on Breitbart News, and even to audio clips from Breitbart News Daily, the SiriusXM satellite radio program hosted by Breitbart executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon and Breitbart News editor in chief Alex Marlow.
Nick-named “Trumpbart” by detractors, the outlet claims 17 million readers, and is widely seen as a credulous purveyor of Trump’s angry populist, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim message, and as an enthusiastic booster of the reality show billionaire’s candidacy.
Thus Mandel—who prefers Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or, as a desperate last resort, even Hillary Clinton to Trump—recently engaged in an online skirmish with Breitbart’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle.
The night of last Thursday’s raucous Republican debate in Houston—which the mainstream media reported as the frontrunner’s defensive attempts to fend off sharp attacks by Rubio and Cruz—the 28-year-old Boyle tweeted: “The story of the night: @realDonaldTrump: ‘WE ARE BUILDING A NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY.’”
Mandel retorted: “A dispatch from Trump headquarters, delivered via their secretly paid surrogate.”
“I wish I got paid,” Boyle replied to Mandel, rejecting an oft-denied but persistent rumor that Trump allegedly helps finance the news site. “I don’t [get paid] by anyone other than Breitbart & Breitbart is completely independent of any candidates.”
Mandel has disregarded the recent warning of a Trump fan with the Twitter handle @johnny-nimble.
“Never fuck with Breitbart. Ever,” @johnny-nimble cautioned.
This pseudonymous tweeter had earlier answered Mandel’s observation—“I never received so many anti-Semitic tweets since Trump’s rise. Not even when I tweeted about Israel during wars”—with the vow: “Ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Both Bannon and Marlow disown such malevolence.
“It has nothing to do with Breitbart—we don’t direct people on social media,” Marlow tells The Daily Beast. “I think this is more about what it’s like in the Twitterverse. It’s toxic the way we talk to one another in that place.”
Bannon, meanwhile, calls the notion that his news site is stoking the ugliness “absurd.”
But, he adds, “If a guy comes after our audience—starts calling working-class people vulgarians and brownshirts and Nazis and post-literate—we’re going to leave a mark. We’re not shy about it at all. We’ve got some lads that like to mix it up.”
Trump naysayer and Breitbart critic John Podhoretz, editor of the neoconservative journal Commentary, received the Breitbart treatment in an article that derided him as a “boorish” establishment pundit who “likes to throw hissy fits” and “believes the ‘unwashed masses’ should not know about the cozy and incestuous relationships in the permanent political and media class that Trump is exposing.”
Podhoretz compares Breitbart News to a fanzine. “They’re like a Tiger Beat for Trump, a Sixteen magazine for Trump. It’s kind of a nonsense fan site,” he says.
Without asserting a cause-and-effect relationship, Podhoretz says that in the months since being featured on Breitbart he’s traded Twitter insults daily with “literally neo-Nazi White supremacists, all anonymous… and there is some overlap here [with Breitbart and Trump]. Something happened in 2015 with the emergence of Trump—who I’m loath to admit has millions of people who are going to end up voting for him, and it looks like he’ll be the Republican nominee for president.
“I don’t think I can attribute being a supporter of Trump to being a validator or an expresser of these opinions,” Podhoretz continues, “but something was let loose by him. This code language—‘It’s time to stop being politically correct’—is something he never defines. One can presume what he meant by it is that before you were not allowed to say Mexicans should be deported, Muslims should be arrested or to talk about the terrorism problem or the Muslim problem. It’s liberating, but there’s no limiting factor, and somehow he has let loose this dark force and turned over these rocks.”
Podhoretz adds: “I feel no compunction about insulting and making fun of these anti-Semites on Twitter, which makes my wife nervous. She thinks I should stop it.”
Radio host and conservative activist Erick Erickson, another prominent Trump detractor, has been the target of unpleasant and occasionally threatening communications from anonymous Trump enthusiasts.
Erickson says that in the wake of Breitbart News stories concerning his anti-Trump statements and actions, he and his family have been victimized by a torrent of abuse from anonymous strangers—not only online, but via letters in his mail box, phone calls to his home, and worse, prompting the occasional complaint to law enforcement authorities.
“There have been a couple of staff-reporter pieces on Breitbart, and Trump himself has come after me on Twitter,” says the Georgia-based Erickson, the former chief executive of the conservative site RedState, who famously disinvited Trump from a RedState gathering last August after the candidate attacked Fox News’s Megyn Kelly with an apparently misogynistic reference to her menstrual cycle. (Erickson is a Fox News contributor.)
Shortly after Erickson issued his condemnation of the candidate, he was featured in an Aug. 11 Breitbart story that led with Trump’s tweet calling him “a major sleaze and buffoon who has saved me time and money.”
“The Donald may be on to something,” opined Breitbart News’s Kevin Scholla, adding that Erickson is a hypocrite and a “RINO on steroids.”
“Somehow or other, our address got out there,” Erickson says, “and for awhile, my wife and I have had to have our mail screened and won’t let the kids get the mail. It’s pretty nasty, angry mail, more unhinged than I expected, with vulgarities written on the outside of the envelope. ‘Fuck you,’ ‘Go to hell,’ that kind of thing.”
Erickson says that as a result of his dustup with Trump, “some of my advertisers on my radio show were harassed by clearly organized phone calls to get them to ditch me as an advertiser. All of them very graciously stood by me.”
Florida Republican political consultant Rick Wilson, an ardent supporter of Rubio—whom Breitbart’s writers continually portray as a liar who favors amnesty for illegals—has become a favorite Breitbart target since Trump’s rise in public opinion polls.
During a confrontational CNN appearance opposite Breitbart’s Marlow in August, Wilson derided the news site as Trump’s “Pravda” and referred to Trump fans as “low-information supporters.”
The next day, Bannon used his radio show to essentially declare war on the Rubio backer. He referred to Wilson as “a Republican paid consultant [who] viciously attacked the grass roots.”
The bald, bespectacled Wilson, who has written for The Daily Beast, quickly became a Breitbart whipping boy in a series of articles that variously described him as “Republican establishment cheerleader” and “Gollum-in-glasses” (Breitbart columnist John Nolte’s epithet is a reference to the slimy, power-mad character in Lord of the Rings.).
“It was a planned deployment,” Wilson says. “After I criticized Breitbart and criticized Trump, they decided they were going to weaponize themselves and go after me.”
Around the same time, Wilson says, strange and alarming incidents began befalling him and members of his family.
Internal emails obtained by The Daily Beast indicate that Bannon and Breitbart’s Boyle worked to obtain a comprehensive list of Wilson’s political clients (with the intention of making them feel uncomfortable about hiring him, Wilson believes).
Around the same time, Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh “made repeated calls to the press office of my U.S. Senate candidate [Rubio ally Carlos Lopez Cantera], asking, ‘When will you fire Rick Wilson?’” he says.
A list of questions emailed by a Breitbart reporter to the Cantera campaign cited Wilson’s retweeting of blog post in which Breitbart News was criticized as “racist,” and demanded, “Why are you employing someone who is calling conservatives racists?’” (Breitbart editor in chief Marlow defended the tone of the inquiry. “When a staffer/consultant voluntarily puts opinions into the public domain,” he emailed, “it is absolutely appropriate to ask the people he represents if that viewpoint is a reflection of how they feel as well. If they don’t like that, maybe they should instruct their consultants to be more guarded about their personal opinions. We will aggressively pursue stories like this in the future.”)
Meanwhile, Wilson says he learned that his credit report had been ordered by an unknown third party, and anonymous trolls—some apparently active on an online forum associated with white supremacists—posted photoshopped sexual images of his college-age daughter, claimed she’d had a child with an African American, threatened gang-rape, and claimed Wilson’s teenage son was a pimp.
When Wilson tweeted complaints about the online abuse, Breitbart’s Nolte accused him of “us[ing] a threat of rape against his own daughter as a political talking point to attack Breitbart News.” The situation got even more heated when Trump backer Ann Coulter tweeted: “Hilarious public meltdown: THEY’RE THREATENING TO RAPE MY DAUGHTER! #RickWilsonIsAGirlInAPinkPartyDress”—and Wilson replied to Coulter, “Does Trump pay you more for anal?”
Prompted by his wife Molly, who was less than thrilled with her spouse’s crude riposte, Wilson deleted the offending tweet and apologized, but not to Coulter.
“My comment was shocking to many of you,” he tweeted to his followers, “and for that I offer a sincere apology. I’m more sorry for the people this impacted in my family, and my circle of friends.” (Breitbart News, of course, covered Wilson’s angry outburst in excruciating detail.)
Meanwhile, according to Molly Wilson, an art gallery owner, the “targeted harassment” against her family, as she calls it, has included deliveries of unordered pizzas, packing boxes, Qurans and various religious tracts, incessant prank phone calls and, earlier this month, a bogus Craigslist ad for a yard sale at their home.
“It said we were selling and giving away the entire contents of our house because we were going to Africa for mission work,” she says. “People were coming up to the house and driving into our yard.”
Early one morning, Rick, an avid gun enthusiast, “almost killed a guy on the back porch who was looking in with a flashlight,” Molly Wilson says.
“If there’s one guy on earth I wouldn’t fuck with, it’s a guy who builds AR-15’s as a hobby,” says Wilson’s close friend, fellow Rubio backer and Republican consultant Jacob Perry (also a Breitbart target, who says he sustained a sore thumb from the repetitive stress of blocking hundreds of nasty tweeters, and also fielded half a dozen abusive phone calls and voicemail messages from anonymous apparent Trump supporters, after the news site profiled him as a member of “The Consultant Class” experiencing a “serial-meltdown over the rise of Donald Trump”).
Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks didn’t respond to a detailed email requesting comment, though Trump acolyte Roger Stone, a longtime operative famous for his hardball tactics, speculates that whatever trouble Wilson has experienced “is probably the handiwork of overzealous and misguided supporters of Trump. The idea that Trump himself or his people would do this is absurd. They have bigger fish to fry. When you go on social media and say controversial things, you’re going to have consequences. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
In an interview, Bannon claimed zero knowledge of the misery allegedly being visited upon Wilson and his family, but Breitbart’s publicist, Kurt Bardella, wrote in a follow-up email: “Bannon wanted to make sure you knew and had in the story that the direction on Rick Wilson came from him specifically.”
Bannon revels in what he likes to call a Fight Club ethos. A Breitbart insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says that “they’re the kind of people who, if you accidentally brushed against their shopping cart in the supermarket, their response is to burn down your house.”
Asked about this characterization, Bannon didn’t deny it. Quite the opposite, he laughed uproariously.
This never-back-down philosophy was reflected in the way top editor Marlow responded when presented with a series of tweets by Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh that many people would find highly offensive. Among them: “It’s important to keep families together. We must deport anchor babies along with their illegal alien parents”; “Mexicans wrecked Mexico & think invading the USA will magically cure them of their retarded dysfunction. LOL”; and “Indian tribes never bothered to build any kind of civilization. They killed each other and chased bison. Yawn~”.
Marlow’s reaction: “Neither Steve nor I are big fans of Twitter, but after reviewing these tweets, we’re considering giving Katie a weekly column.”
Perhaps such a column could elaborate on a McHugh tweet from last September: “British settlers built the USA. “Slaves” built the country much as cows “built” McDonald’s. Amateur…”
The site has been especially disparaging of Florida Sen. Rubio, the reality show billionaire’s most persistent antagonist in the recent days, and a declared enemy of Breitbart during an appearance a week ago Saturday on the Fox News Channel.
Rubio condemned the news site, claiming “they’re basically conspiracy theories and oftentimes manipulated.” He added, “We don’t even credential them for our events.”
Breitbart.com fired back a few hours later with a story by Washington political editor Boyle under the headline: “Full Panic Mode: Rubio Caught Lying…” and pointing out that Rubio had given an interview only a few days earlier to Breitbart reporter Charlie Spierling.
“We’re going to be relentless on Rubio,” Bannon promises. “Every time he opens his mouth he virtually has a misrepresentation, and if Fox is not going to hold him accountable, and the rest of the Republican media establishment who depends on Fox, if they’re not going to correct him, then we’re going to be guardians of truth. We’ve never had to retract one thing we’ve written about Rubio. They’ve never asked for a correction. Trust me, brother, we’re coming. We’re not backing off.”
“I don’t have anything to add to what Marco said on FOX,” Rubio campaign spokesman Alex Conant emailed The Daily Beast.
As for Matthew Boyle, jaws dropped during a recent dinner attended by political journalists—around the time of the Iowa caucuses, according to a witness—when he was heard boasting that he will be named White House press secretary in the incoming Trump administration.
It wasn’t clear if Boyle was joking, says the witness, when he announced that one of his first acts on behalf of President Trump will be to ban Fox News from the White House press room. “I talk a lot of trash at private dinners over beers—just like any guy from Boston,” Boyle emailed The Daily Beast when asked about these comments. “Deal with it.”