Saturday Open Thread [1.9.2016]

NATIONAL—Fox News: Clinton 54, Sanders 39, O’Malley 3
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Fox News: Sanders 50, Clinton 37, O’Malley 3
NATIONAL—FOX News: Trump 35, Cruz 20, Rubio 13, Carson 10, Bush 4, Christie 2,Paul 2, Fiorina 3, Kasich 2, Huckabee 1
NATIONAL—NH News 1: Trump 32, Bush 12, Kasich 12, Christie 11, Cruz 11, Rubio 10, Fiorina 5.
IOWA—FOX News: Cruz 27, Trump 23, Rubio 15, Carson 9, Bush 7, Paul 5, Christie 4, Huckabee 2,Fiorina 1, Kasich 1, Santorum 1
NEW HAMPSHIRE—FOX News: Trump 33, Rubio 15, Cruz 12, Bush 9, Kasich 7, Christie 5, Paul 5, Carson 4, Fiorina 3

Michael Gerson says that Trump would destroy the Republican Party: “Cruz’s nomination would represent the victory of the hard right — religious right and tea party factions — within the Republican coalition. After he loses, the ideological struggles within the GOP would go on. No, the worst outcome for the party would be the nomination of Donald Trump. It is impossible to predict where the political contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton would end up. Clinton has manifestly poor political skills [that’s not true at all], and Trump possesses a serious talent for the low blow. But Trump’s nomination would not be the temporary victory of one of the GOP’s ideological factions. It would involve the replacement of the humane ideal at the center of the party and its history. If Trump were the nominee, the GOP would cease to be.”

There is a humane ideal at the center of the Republican Party?? What, that the Party has not [yet] engaged in genocide? Well, on that note, I agree, electing Trump would remove that ideal, given Trump’s stated fascism and bigotry.

Time says the GOP may be too weak to stop Trump: “The GOP has awakened less than a month from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary to find itself in bed between a bombshell and a kamikaze. It’s a sobering dawn for a political party that seemed just a tweak or two away from glory. Republicans dominate America’s state legislatures and governors’ mansions. They control both houses of Congress.”

“The problem is that the party is weak at the national level, deeply divided into hostile camps, while Trump has the strength of a technological epoch at his back. … They won’t stop Trump because they can’t stop Trump.”

Nancy LaTourneau talks about the history of the North Korean nuclear program, and on exactly whose watch did it develop nuclear weapons:

For those of us in the reality-based community, an alternative would be to review the actual history of when/how/why North Korea developed a nuclear weapon. That is exactly what Fred Kaplan did in the May 2004 edition of the Washington Monthly.

The story starts back in 1994 when the Clinton administration learned that North Korea was preparing to move fuel rods from their storage site to a reprocessing facility, expel the international weapons inspectors, and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In response, President Clinton took actions signaling that the United States was willing to go to war to keep the fuel rods under international control and set up diplomatic connections to end the crisis peacefully. North Korea backed down and an Agreed Framework was developed for further negotiations. Those were not completed by the end of Clinton’s second term.

You might remember that it was in the fall of 2002 that we learned that North Korea had been acquiring centrifuges for enriching uranium since the late 1990s, most likely from Pakistan. As a result:

On Oct. 20, Bush announced that it was formally withdrawing from the 1994 Agreed Framework. It halted oil supplies to North Korea and urged other countries to cut off all economic relations with Pyongyang. The North Koreans, perhaps realizing that they had once again boxed themselves into a diplomatic corner, decided to replay the crisis of 1994: In late December, they expelled the international weapons inspectors, restarted the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, and unlocked the container holding the fuel rods.

Here is how Kaplan summarizes the Bush administration’s handling the situation with North Korea:

The pattern of decision making that led to this debacle–as described to me in recent interviews with key former administration officials who participated in the events–will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Bush and his cabinet in action. It is a pattern of wishful thinking, blinding moral outrage, willful ignorance of foreign cultures, a naive faith in American triumphalism, a contempt for the messy compromises of diplomacy, and a knee-jerk refusal to do anything the way the Clinton administration did it.

You’ll want to read the whole Kaplan article to get the specifics. But it is a thorough review of how the Bush administration talked tough but basically did nothing at a moment when North Korea’s march towards nuclear weapons might have been stopped. Playing a large role in the lack of response was the fact that most of the administration’s time and attention was being devoted to invading a country that actually didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Of course this kind of thorough review is not for the faint at heart. In other words, it is way too historical for those who prefer the knee-jerk reaction of blaming the two-headed monster known as Obama/Clinton.

Vox’s Max Fisher has a very interesting theory that this whole incident was provoked by China shunning North Korea’s state run all girl pop music band. Seriously. And Zach Beaukamp has a very detailed look at the history that LaTourneau and Kaplan refer to above.

“Marco Rubio has missed so much time in the Senate that he’s been forced to defend himself by saying he’s too busy running for president to show up for votes that ‘don’t count’ in hopelessly ‘broken’ Washington. But on the campaign trail, Rubio isn’t exactly a workaholic either,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“Rubio’s strategy is built on a preference for made-for-TV rallies and cable news appearances rather than the endless handshaking and baby-kissing that tradition suggests paves the way to the White House. His approach has GOP strategists questioning whether Rubio is willing to do the grinding work of retail politics required to win the early-nominating states.”

So Ben Carson asked a class of 5th graders who was the dumbest student. “The question, in a crowd of about 500 people at a Thursday campaign rally, prompted immediate finger-pointing toward one student from more than half a dozen classmates at Isaac Newton Christian Academy… The targeted 10-year-old, who initially turned red in the face, ultimately shrugged off the exchange with a sense of humor.”

What an asshole Ben Carson is.

Jonathan Chait says Obamacare opponents have never been in worse shape, despite their latest repeal vote that will finally require a Presidential veto:

It is and always has been true that those who oppose the Affordable Care Act on principle — they philosophically disagree that government has a proper role regulating the insurance market and subsidizing access to health care through taxes and spending — have no reason to support it. But conservatives have never been willing to lean on the ideological case against the law. Instead, they have insisted fervently that the law will fail, (or is failing, or is about to fail) on its own terms. They have refused to give up this claim even in the face of an ever-higher mountain of evidence. […]

First of all, the notion that the law is failing on its non-coverage goals is false. Aside from expanding coverage, Obamacare set out to finance the cost of coverage expansion with taxes and spending cuts, and hold down the long-term rise in the cost of of medical care. On all these measures, it is clearly succeeding. Health-insurance premiums remain far below initial forecasts, and the law is expected to cost the federal government more than $100 billion less than initially projected. National health-care spending is rising at its slowest rate in five decades. Just this week, two new studies confirm the law’s success. One of them finds that people in states that participated in the law’s Medicaid expansion enjoyed increased access to medical care and lower medical bills, confounding skeptics who claimed Medicaid would not help its beneficiaries. Another concludes that employers have not shunted their workers into part-time employment to skirt the law’s coverage requirement, confounding another frequent prediction from critics. […]

Republicans understand that the status quo ante is too unpopular for them to formally endorse. On the other hand, actually voting for a single plan for which all Republicans can be held accountable — as opposed to a variety of half-written plans that they can gesture to as evidence that plans exist, without having to own the details — is political kryptonite. The GOP’s best and only asset in the health-care fight is dissatisfaction with the status quo. But any Republican plan would disrupt the status quo more than Obamacare did.

Michael Cooper in the New Republic says the new Democratic Party in the South has changed for good from its old conservative ways.

The Obama presidency in one sense has been a political disaster for southern Democrats, who lost control of West Virginia and saw North Carolina take a hard right turn after the state went for Obama in 2008. But overlooked in this story of defeat is how Obama accelerated the transformation of southern Democrats into “a party of young people, minorities, and educated people, especially educated women,” says Frey. […]

Before Obama, there was a clear distinction between the Democratic politics of the North and the Midwest and the Democratic politics of the South. But outside of Deep South, that too has changed. “Southern Democrats are catching up with their national brethren as their base becomes more urban,” says Dr. Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at North Carolina’s Catawba College.

As the party becomes more educated and urban, and as, Bitzer says, “the new guard brings a more socially liberal philosophy,” Democrats in the rural South will either abandon the modern party, as former Virginia Senator (and short-lived presidential candidate) Jim Webb did in October, or they will change with their party as Andy Griffith, a native of North Carolina’s foothills, did by endorsing Obama in 2008.

David Corn on why this is the most unpredictable race for the Republican nomination in generations:

The reason for the chaos, though, is obvious. The party elite has become unmoored from the party’s base—and that base has veered further into extreme territory. After years of being fed Obama hatred—death panels, gun-grabs, and secret socialism imported from Kenya by a terrorist-loving covert Muslim!—many die-hard GOP voters are alienated from elected Republicans who haven’t been able to repeal Obamacare, impeach the president, or, better yet, lock him in shackles. Consequently, the wise men of the party can no longer easily direct its voters toward a preferred candidate. At least, not when self-financing, say-anything Donald Trump is in the race, brazenly exploiting the anger and frustration the party’s leaders had previously fueled for their own purposes. So the GOP is in for weeks, if not months, of disorder, in what will likely be a historic break from its usually orderly past. For a party that has encouraged fear and loathing, this is what democracy looks like.

Perhaps if the GOP Establishment had not been so blinded by racism, and if they had not decided on a strategy of opposition that employed complete and total obstruction, and instead worked on compromises with the President and the Democrats, their base would been kept in line. But then again, plenty of GOP incumbents still lost to tea party crazies despite this total obstruction strategy (remember Mike Castle!). No, it is likely that this is all the end result of the base been more aligned with talk radio and Fox News that it is with the Party itself. If Rush Limbaugh et al stoking fear and loathing 24/7 since 1993, this was eventually bound to happen. And it could not happen to a better party.

Jonathan Chait reminds us that Marco Rubio is no moderate.

On foreign policy, he has embraced full-scale neoconservatism, winning enthusiastic plaudits from figures in the right-wing intelligentsia, like William Kristol. While much of the Republican Party has recoiled from the excesses of the Bush administration’s wild-eyed response to the 9/11 attacks, Rubio has not. He was one of 32 senators to oppose the USA Freedom Act, which restrained the federal government’s ability to conduct surveillance. He was one of just 21 senators opposing a prohibition on torture, insisting, “I do not support telegraphing to the enemy what interrogation techniques we will or won’t use.” Indeed, Rubio now delights his audiences by promising to torture suspected terrorists, who will “get a one-way ticket to Guantánamo, where we’re going to find out everything they know.”

On social issues, Rubio has endorsed a complete ban on abortions, even in cases of rape and incest (a stance locating Rubio to the right of George W. Bush). He has promised to reverse executive orders protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination and to appoint justices who would reverse same-sex marriage. The centerpiece of Rubio’s domestic policy is a massive tax cut — more than three times the size of the Bush tax cut, and nearly half of which would go to the highest-earning 5 percent of taxpayers. By reducing federal revenue by more than a quarter, Rubio’s plan would dominate all facets of his domestic program, which is otherwise a mix of conventional Republican proposals to eliminate Obamacare, jack up defense spending, and protect retirement benefits for everybody 55 and up. Rubio has voted for the Paul Ryan budget (“by and large, it’s exactly the direction we should be headed”). He has proposed to deregulate the financial system, thrilling Wall Street. (Richard Bove, author of Guardians of Prosperity: Why America Needs Big Banks, wrote a grateful op-ed headlined, “Thank you, Marco Rubio.”)