Delaware Liberal

Sunday Open Thread [5.29.2016]

Delaware Dem

Susia Cagle looks at the big problem with the story of Peter Thiel’s secret day in court and how the 0.1% are redefining the rules.

Last week Mr. Thiel revealed that he had funneled “in the ballpark” of $10 million to legal support for plaintiffs suing Gawker Media, most notably Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hulk Hogan, who recently won a $140 million judgment against the company for defamation. Mr. Thiel made no secret of his grudge against Gawker, since the company’s Valleywag blog revealed his homosexuality in a 2007 post that lampooned the straight male culture of Silicon Valley more than Mr. Thiel himself. (Mr. Thiel is, notably, an investor in the tech site Pando, a media property that regularly insults him in more direct terms.) …

Portraying a $10 million investment in crushing one’s enemy as a charitable act of justice that will make the world a better place is galling. But students of history can hardly be shocked. Tech’s elite, lauded for their originality, are influencing media, politics and society at large with a kind of venture philanthropy, much as their industrial predecessors did more than 100 years ago.

Donald Trump claimed that California is not facing a drought, USA Today reports. “Trump said state officials were simply denying water to Central Valley farmers to prioritize the Delta smelt, a native California fish nearing extinction — or as Trump called it, ‘a certain kind of three-inch fish.’”

Said Trump: “If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water.”

Open up the water. From where?

“In one of his most personal attacks against an apolitical figure since becoming the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump delivered an extended tirade about the federal judge overseeing the civil litigation against his defunct education program,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Mr. Trump’s attack on U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was extraordinary not just in its scope and intensity but for its location: Before a crowd packed into a convention center here that had been primed for the New York billionaire with a warm-up speech from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.”

After the audience chanted the Republican standard-bearer’s signature ‘build that wall’ mantra, Trump told them that Judge Curiel is “Mexican.”

“For the past two months, Donald Trump has presided over a political team riddled with turf wars, staff reshuffling and dueling power centers,” the Washington Post reports.

“But the tensions are more than typical campaign chaos: They illustrate how Trump likes to run an organization, whether it’s a real estate venture or his presidential bid. Interviews with current and former Trump associates reveal an executive who is fond of promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major decisions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him.”

Greg Sargent:

Trade and immigration are, in a way, exceptions to all these things. Trump appears to legitimately favor protective tariffs. But while Trump is speaking to legitimate grievances in this area, his promises are empty ones. He does not talk about spending money to retrain workers or mitigate the pain of globalization. What he’s really vowing to do is kick the asses of other countries, especially China, in order to make trade deals better for America, even if it risks trade wars. As Trump put it: “Who the hell cares about a trade war?” He is offering attitude more than anything else.

Meanwhile, Trump launched his candidacy while vowing mass deportations and a Great Trumpian Wall on the southern border, all the while telling American workers that elites were screwing them by helping give their jobs to parasites and criminals. But here, too, he is offering American workers a scapegoat, not real solutions, since mass deportations and forcing Mexico to pay for that wall are fantasies.

It appears that Hillary Clinton is on solid political ground in calling for stricter gun control. “A New York Times/CBS News poll in January found that 57 percent of respondents wanted stricter laws governing gun sales, and 88 percent favored background checks for all purchases.”

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