Year: 2015

Stephanie Hansen, environmental and land use attorney and the President of New Castle County Council from 1996 to 2001, will primary Tom Gordon according to unconfirmed reports.

Paul Krugman says the Republican Party made Donald Trump.

The GOP “hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s ‘southern strategy,’ and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes.” “But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.” “Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel — especially because these days much of the party’s leadership seems inbred and out of touch. They seem, for example, to imagine that the base supports cuts to Social Security and Medicare, an elite priority that has nothing to do with the reasons working-class whites vote Republican.”

Former New Castle County Chief Administrative Officer David Grimaldi is suing New Castle County Executive Tom Gordon and the County for violations of the New Castle County Employee Protection Act, the Delaware Employee Protection Act, for violations of his civil rights (namely Freedom of Speech) under 42 U.S.C Section 1983, for Stigma-Plus Defamation under 42 U.S.C 1988, and for a declaratory judgment regarding violations of the Freedom of Information Act. The complaint, included below and filed yesterday, is an interesting read on several levels.

As much as I hate the Democratic Party for its pusillanimousness, at least it isn't the Republican Party.

A group of GOP leaders held a hush-hush meeting at a Washington, DC, restaurant to discuss the possibility of having a brokered convention next year so that they could find an alternative to Donald Trump, according to a report. Republican National Committee Chairman ­Reince Priebus held the meeting with establishment GOP honchos, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Washington Post reported. They listened to other GOP bigwigs talk about how, if the billionaire New York developer scored a large number of delegates in the primaries, they could mount a floor fight and get the party to back some other candidate, the report said.

Tom Carper really is a piece of work.

Democrats, ironically, are seeking to carve out new subsidies for oil refineries in an omnibus spending bill being negotiated in Congress, amid horse-trading with the GOP for an extension of valuable tax subsidies for the wind industry. The move, led by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del...

Go figure.

Senator Majority Leader David McBride announced on Facebook yesterday that he has been diagnosed with colorectal cancer and is set to begin six months of chemotherapy treatment after surgery to remove a tumor last month. His entire letter is republished below, and I commend the Senator for being so open and honest about his diagnosis and treatment, as it most assuredly raises awareness of the importance of preventative medicine in getting regular screenings (which is how the Senator's cancer was detected) and the importance of all of us being open about the illnesses we face. For we all, at some point in our lives, will be diagnosed with something. And the bravery and the humility that we see in others when faced with a scary diagnosis is inspirational. We have nothing but the best wishes for the Senator as he undergoes treatment, and we hope to see him back at work after he beats cancer.

Matt Bai on the GOP v. Trump: “The interesting question is what happens from here, because the way I see it, the cold war between Trump and the Republican governing establishment, which everyone hoped throughout the summer and fall might just resolve itself, has now become a zero-sum contest. And Republicans find themselves faced with an existential threat that has no parallel for either party in my lifetime.” “Either Trump or the Republican Party as we’ve known it can come out of this election without having been politically destroyed — but almost certainly not both.”