NATIONAL—Reuters: Trump 42, Cruz 14, Carson 11, Rubio 8, Bush 8, Christie 3, Paul 3, Huckabee 2, Kasich 1, Fiorina
Ed Kilgore says the GOP is gambling that Cruz will take out Trump and then be taken out himself:
At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver and his colleagues conducted a Slack chat Wednesday on this very subject, and they conclude Trump’s enemies are confident enough that he will stumble in Iowa and New Hampshire that they are willing to pause once again before panicking and going after Trump with tire irons. The one thing that’s still troublesome, however, is that the Establishment has yet to choose its own candidate to harvest the preordained victory in New Hampshire. Rubio seemed to be The Guy until recently, but now there’s a fresh buzz about Christie, and no one can talk Jeb Bush out of the race so long as he’s got $50 million or so in super-pac money left to burn. If the “wrong” Establishment candidate winds up finishing well in Iowa and gets the inevitable bounce in New Hampshire, it will probably be too late for the movers and shakers to recalibrate their strategy. And it would be something of a Pyrrhic victory for the Republican Establishment to block Trump at the price of giving Ted Cruz a path to the nomination as wide and straight as the Iowa stretch of I-80, which is what he’ll have if he wins the first two states and heads into the southern primaries like the second coming of Barry Goldwater.
Matt Yglesias says Hillary Clinton is actually confronting Bernie Sanders from the left on bank regulations:
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign did something a little unexpected early this week in advance of an expected Bernie Sanders speech on Wall Street reform — it tried to hit Sanders from the left by having campaign chief financial officer Gary Gensler accuse him of taking “a hands-off approach to some of the riskiest institutions and activities in our economy, which were among the biggest culprits during the 2008 crisis.” Sanders fired back through a spokesperson, Michael Briggs, who sniffed that the Vermont senator “won’t be taking advice on how to regulate Wall Street from a former Goldman Sachs partner.”
But while it’s certainly true that Gensler used to work at Goldman Sachs, he’s better known in policy circles for his more recent job chairing the Commodity Futures Regulatory Commission in the Obama administration, a vantage point from which he became a hero to many financial reformers by clashing with Tim Geithner and Larry Summers over a desire for stricter rules for Wall Street.
In a bit of a reversal of the usual political pattern, though, what began largely as an exercise in cynical gamesmanship and name-calling has evolved into a wonky policy dispute. It is one that touches on important aspects of financial regulation but that also more broadly speaks to a century-old divide in American thinking about how to deal with the problems of corporate power in sensitive segments of the economy. Is the most important thing to break up existing large companies and prevent the emergence of new large ones? Or is the most important thing to regulate and supervise companies, in which case having a market dominated by a finite number of small players might even be helpful?
The debate reflects the particular political circumstances of 2015 and the specific dynamics of the financial sector, but also essentially restages an argument between Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Go and read the whole thing.
Brian Beutler says Ted Cruz is exactly what the GOP needs:
Cruz would be the most unapologetically right-wing major-party nominee since Barry Goldwater, and would thus have an extremely difficult time appealing to the shrinking, but still-meaningful, pool of voters who are undecided between Democrats and Republicans. But he would also give the GOP something it desperately needs: an opportunity to purge its ranks of scores and scores of self-interested operatives and advisers who treat campaigns as opportunities to soak candidates and build networks of future clients. It would also provide a clarifying moment for the conservative movement and the rest of the country. For conservatives, it would be the first time since Ronald Reagan (or arguably Goldwater) that they’d see the Republican Party run a candidate who is a leader of the movement itself. For the broader public, a Cruz nomination would provide a referendum on the substantive aims of American conservatism, untempered for once by the unprincipled, election-driven impulse to tack to the center.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) made a racially charged comment during one of his regular town hall meetings about how he was tackling substance abuse in Maine, the Portland Press Herald reports.
Said LePage: “These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty… these types of guys… they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.”
Impeach his rather large ass already, Maine.
Among the good people in the autism community, there is a clear and sometimes bitter divide. Some advocates focus on research into prevention and cures. Others clamor for more adult services that allow autistic people to thrive and shine with their unique wiring.
Perhaps recognizing that it takes a village to advance the cause of people who think differently, Hillary Clinton on Tuesday proposed a sweeping autism agenda that addresses the concerns of both camps.
The Democratic presidential front-runner wants new services, rights protections, and employment opportunities for adults with autism, and called for a first-ever U.S. study of adult autism prevalence and needs—all at the urging of Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a nonprofit run by and for autistic people.
She also called for a “significant increase” in government funding for research into autism, the primary focus of some advocates. Autism Speaks has launched a groundbreaking genome sequencing program in hopes of improving diagnosis and treatment of autism. The group also offers tool kits that help autistic people live independently, and has built a website (created by a person with autism) that matches employers with potential employees on the spectrum.
I'm worried that if Trump wins the presidency, he'll just wind up leaving us for a younger European nation.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) January 6, 2016
Charlie Cook says Cruz will emerge as the viable anti-establishment choice: “I remain convinced that between now and the March 1 Super Tuesday/SEC primaries, and particularly the March 15 set of primaries and some contests after, those angry and profoundly anti-establishment voters will have finished venting their spleens. They will have sent their angry messages to the political establishment and will turn to the serious business of selecting a president, taking into account such things as temperament and judgment, marking the beginning of the end of their affair with Trump. They will coalesce behind a more plausible vehicle for their anger and anti-establishment views. That candidate is likely to be Cruz.”
Trita Parsi has a fascinating take on the rising tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
History teaches us that it is not rising states that tend to be reckless, but declining powers. Rising states have time on their side. They can afford to be patient: They know that they will be stronger tomorrow and, as a result, will be better off postponing any potential confrontation with rivals.
Declining states suffer from the opposite condition: Growing weaker over time, they know that time is not on their side; their power and influence is slipping out of their hands…
Saudi Arabia is exhibiting the psychology of a state that risks losing its dominant position and whose losing hand is growing weaker and weaker…
Iran, on the other hand, is by all accounts a rising power. Ironically, much of Iran’s rise is not due to its own actions, but must be credited to the reckless mistakes of its adversaries.
If you are one of those people who isn’t buying the Republican fear mongering about how this country is going to hell in a hand basket and the world is on fire, you’ll want to read Michael Grunwald’s piece titled: Everything Is (Even More) Awesome!
America is already great, and it’s getting greater. Not everything is awesome, but in general, things are even more awesome than they were a year ago. The rest of the world can only wish it had our problems.
Start with the economy, which, if you listen to Sanders or the Republicans, is a garbage dump of existential despair. Actually, it’s doing quite well. Unemployment has dropped from 10 percent during the worst of the Great Recession to 5 percent today, thanks to a record 69 consecutive months of private-sector employment growth that has produced 13.7 million new jobs. The past two years have been the best two years for job creation in the 21st century. After a near-death experience during the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. auto industry enjoyed record sales in 2015. The housing market has also rebounded from the crisis, and after-tax corporate profits are at an all-time high. It can sound partisan to mention those facts when a Democrat is in the White House, but they’re facts; it ought to be possible to acknowledge them without necessarily giving President Obama too much credit for them. […]
Growth is modest but steady. Inflation is low. Interest rates are very low, although the Fed felt confident enough about the recovery to raise them last month for the first time since the global financial meltdown. Gas is barely $2 (€1.86) a gallon. About 17 million uninsured Americans have gotten coverage in the past few years. The federal deficit has plunged from $1.4 trillion (€1.3 trillion) in 2009 to under $500 billion (€465.10 billion), while the dollar has gained strength against foreign currencies. […]
The most widespread criticism is that wages have been stagnant for decades, a legitimate problem, but wages actually grew 2 percent faster than inflation over the past year. Meanwhile, other recent developments — cheaper gas, free birth control and preventive care, the elimination of annual and lifetime caps on health insurance, expanded tax credits for the working poor, increased efficiency measures that lower energy bills, and much more — have put more money in the pockets of American families, even though their incomes have grown slowly. Health care prices have risen at their lowest rate in half a century since the passage of Obamacare, increasing just 1.3 percent over the past year. Tuition costs are still soaring and Americans now hold more than $1.2 trillion (€1.12 trillion) in student debt, but the Obama administration has quietly changed the rules to let borrowers cut their payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income and get their loans forgiven after 20 years. Savings rates have almost doubled since the crisis, and family debt burdens have dropped to 2002 levels.
In non-economic news, despite a year of furor over mass shootings and urban unrest, crime in big cities dropped about 5 percent in 2015, and has been cut in half since 1990. The teen birth rate is down more than 60 percent since 1990, and that’s not because of increasing abortions, because they’ve fallen by more than a third. U.S. oil imports are at their lowest level in nearly three decades, while wind generation is up more than threefold and solar generation is up 25-fold since 2008. Carbon emissions have dropped 10 percent from 2005 levels. High school graduation rates are at an all-time high, with the most striking gains for minorities and the poor. The financial sector is much safer, with much more capital to absorb banking losses, much less of the risky overnight funding that fuels panics, and much broader regulation of Wall Street institutions that once operated in the shadows. And despite all the rhetoric about border crises and wall-building, America’s population of undocumented immigrants has remained stable for the past five years.