Delaware Dem

Sunday Open Thread [5.8.16]

The Nazis are happy with Trump. “White men in America and across the planet are partying like it’s 1999 following Trump’s decisive victory over the evil enemies of our race,” exulted Andrew Anglin at the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. “He is getting white people excited for the first time in my memory,” said a Stormfront participant. “Look at the crowds when he gets the cameras to pan out. They’re huge (or should I say YUGE?) and almost 100% white. It is fantastic to see.”

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Saturday Open Thread [5.7.16]

New York Times: “Hoping for a moment of party unity, Mr. Trump had scarcely declared victory in Indiana when the cascade of rejection began, starting with the announcement by George Bush and his son George W. Bush, the only former Republican presidents still living, that they would not back his candidacy. And on Thursday night, Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 nominee, said he intended to hold to his earlier pledge not to vote for Mr. Trump, according to an audio recording of his remarks.”

“Mr. Romney’s remarks came just hours after House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the nation’s highest-ranking Republican elected official, delivered an embarrassing blow to Mr. Trump, declaring that he had not yet proven himself worthy of an endorsement.”

And now Jeb Bush and Lindsay Graham say they won’t vote for Trump. Trump reacted as maturely as you’d expect. And he has now turned against his top fellater Joe Scarborough because Joe said he wouldn’t vote for Trump unless he dropped his Muslim ban.

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Friday Open Thread [5.6.16]

So, a lot happened yesterday. Speaker Paul Ryan, the highest ranking elected Republican in the country, broke with his party’s presidential nominee and said he could not support Trump. It is not surprising, but it is shocking when you stop to think about that. Trump responded as you would expect, childishly and petulantly, shooting himself in the foot in the process. He said “Oh yeah, well I don’t think I can support Speaker Ryan’s agenda.” Speaker Ryan’s agenda, such that it is, is the conservative agenda. That was a fucking bullhorn signal to conservatives that Trump is not on their side. That might have devastating consequences, all because Trump is an immature child who always has to respond insultingly. And I am somehow supposed to fear this man? Yeah, no.

We also got a lot of leakage in the Hillary Clinton/FBI story, which always tells you that the investigation is wrapping up and a conclusion has been reached on the nature of it. CNN reported that “some of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, including her longtime adviser Huma Abedin, have provided interviews to federal investigators, as the FBI probe into the security of her private email server nears completion[.]” While the investigation is still ongoing and will conclude after a final interview of Hillary herself, “so far investigators haven’t found evidence to prove that Clinton willfully violated the law.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post is reporting that “[p]rosecutors and FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server have so far found scant evidence that the leading Democratic presidential candidate intended to break classification rules[.] This was always going to be a Republican non-scandal, just like Whitewater, just like Benghazi. The most disappointing thing about the Democratic primary this year was seeing just how many supposed progressives gleefully repeated Republican talking points about Benghazi and her emails.

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Thursday Open Thread [5.5.16]

Markos says no, the superdelegates will not be bailing Bernie out.

Hillary Clinton will end the contest with the most pledged delegates, and it won’t even be close. It was closer in 2008—and it wasn’t close back then, either. Best case scenario for Sanders at this point is that he splits the delegates through the end of the contest, but he’ll likely lose even more ground. So whether Clinton needs the superdelegates to get her a majority of all delegates is irrelevant. Obama needed the supers to get him a majority, too, and no one called it a “contested convention” because that would’ve been stupid and asinine.

[…] It’s undemocratic for a party elite to ignore the will of the voters and substitute their preferences for that of the party base. It was bullshit when Clinton made these arguments in 2008, and it’s bullshit today [when Sanders makes them]. You can rail against the establishment all cycle and sue the Democratic Party. It was good politics! It won him lots of votes! But then don’t expect that very same establishment to bail you out. If you go to war against them, you must beat them on the electoral battlefield. And it can be done! Because Barack Obama did it in 2008. And if the supers wouldn’t bail out Clinton that year, when Clinton was on the losing end, why would they turn on her this year, when she’s on the winning end?

Bernie’s insistence that the process is “rigged” and that he expects a contested convention are exasperating, especially when you consider, and Bernie admits himself, he will need the “rigged” super-delegates to make the convention contested. And it is all the more exasperating because it would be overwhelmingly anti-democratic.

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