There were a few hiccups at the GOP Debate last night….

The beginning of the Republican primary debate in New Hampshire Thursday night may go down as the most awkward in memory. It all started when Ben Carson failed to walk onstage when his name was called, causing a bottleneck in the wings that the other candidates had to walk around. Then Donald Trump apparently didn't hear his name and stood by Carson while other candidates walked by the two of them. On top of it all, the ABC News moderators forgot about John Kasich, leaving an empty podium on stage and one Ohio governor hovering off to the side. Then Marcodyne Rubicon Systems Model T100 faltered last night, getting stuck on repeat.

In Which the Western Sussex Republican Club Gets Its Comeuppance

It's definitely political season and it's time to watch some of the local GOP dust off and exercise their resentments. They do this, of course, because they can't figure out how to connect with enough voters to actually govern. They also do it because they think that their resentments and bigotries are somehow supposed to entitle them to run the world. The latest local exercise in GOP bigotry was directed at Sarah McBride, who recently endorsed Bryon Short for the US House seat being vacated byJohn Carney. The Western Sussex Republican Club responded to Sarah's Facebook announcement by reposting it with a snide and hateful comment, with a screen shot shown below. Sarah had losts of people supporting her after this stupid bit of business was posted, including a quick (but deleted) comment from John Fluharty who observed that stuff like this is why the GOP can't win. The Western Sussex Republican Club has deleted its post, so the comments opposing them are gone. But both Sean Barney and Bryan Townsend took to Twitter to stand with Sarah and to denounce this hateful business. Note to the GOP -- this stuff may speak to somebody, but this is not the stuff of electoral coalitions. Not in Delaware, it isn't.
Saturday Open Thread [2.6.2016]

Saturday Open Thread [2.6.2016]

Booman says we are in for a long primary, even if Clinton becomes the inevitable nominee in March:
Even if Clinton rips off a bunch of big victories in a row and seems like the inevitable nominee, it’s pretty unlikely that Sanders will concede because he’ll have all the money he needs to keep campaigning. And I don’t think he really set out to win this thing at the beginning, so he’s not quitting just because he realizes that he won’t be nominated. He’ll want to keep hammering home his points and gathering delegates for the convention. A long campaign will be painful, but 2008 showed there can be important upsides. The more states the two campaigns organize, the more work they’ll have done in advance of the general election. The more the country is focused on the differences between Clinton and Sanders, the more they’ll be focused on their messaging and values and the less they’ll be focused on the messaging and values of the Republicans. It’s true that some feelings will get hurt and some bitterness will result. It’s not cost-free to have an extended contested nomination, and the eventual nominee will get wounded. But, even here, some of Obama’s worst vulnerabilities were old news by November precisely because they’d been hashed out in the winter and spring. As long as the process doesn’t leave the nominee underfunded, it’s probably not a problem to have a long primary season.

The Weekly Addresses

In this week’s address, the President discussed climate change and how the most ambitious climate agreement in history is creating private sector partnerships that are advancing the latest technologies in clean power. In his weekly message, Governor Markell celebrated the groundbreaking of the new US Route 301 and its positive impact on the surrounding economy.
Friday Open Thread [2.5.2016]

Friday Open Thread [2.5.2016]

Dylan Matthews has his winners and losers. Winner: Bernie and Hillary. Losers: Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Wall Street.
On some level, the Democratic primary process is now zero-sum, with any gains to Sanders hurting Clinton and vice versa. And that's true in a narrow sense. But both candidates gave very strong performances that emphasized their respective strengths. Regardless of who won in relative terms, both clearly succeeded in making the most compelling case for their respective candidacies. For Clinton, that meant giving her strongest performance to date on foreign policy. She's still well to the right of the Democratic Party as a whole on these questions. But she also is actually well-versed in them, whereas Sanders's comments on foreign policy appear limited to a) praising the foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration, and b) hammering Clinton for her vote for the Iraq War. [...] Sanders clearly won on domestic policy. Clinton clearly won on foreign policy. And both gave excellent performances that offered compelling substantive grounds for supporting them. It feels perverse to label either a loser.