Delaware Dem

Wednesday Open Thread [9.23.2015]

In a speech delivered in 2012, Ben Carson said the big bang theory was part of the “fairy tales” pushed by “high-faluting scientists” as a story of creation, BuzzFeed News reports.

He also said he believed the theory of evolution was encouraged by the devil. Said Carson: “I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary, and it has become what is scientifically, politically correct. Amazingly, there are a significant number of scientists who do not believe it but they’re afraid to say anything.”

Can we revoke his medical license? If I were a former patient of his, I would be worried about his work on my brain. I mean, either Dr. Ben Carson is the most cynical bastard ever to run for President, since as a neurosurgeon has cannot possibly believe what he is saying, or… he is dumb as fucking shit.

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The Pope’s Opening Remarks in America

Certain to explode some right wing heads. In the Welcoming Ceremony at the White House, Pope Francis introduced himself as “the son of an immigrant family,” and noting that America “was largely built by such families.” But he focused more on climate issues:

Mr. President, I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution. Accepting the urgency, it seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation. When it comes to the care of our “common home”, we are living at a critical moment of history. We still have time to make the changes needed to bring about “a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change” (Laudato Si’, 13). Such change demands on our part a serious and responsible recognition not only of the kind of world we may be leaving to our children, but also to the millions of people living under a system which has overlooked them. Our common home has been part of this group of the excluded which cries out to heaven and which today powerfully strikes our homes, our cities and our societies. To use a telling phrase of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note and now is the time to honor it.

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Tuesday Open Thread [9.22.2015]

Ed Kilgore thinks this will be a very perilous week for Republicans.

There’s really only one way to say it: the week of September 21, 2015 could be unpleasant for a Republican Party struggling to find its way in the runup to a big, high-stakes election. […]
Over the weekend Trump batted away criticism over his silence in the face of a supporter who loudly insisted in the candidate’s presence that the president is a Muslim born outside the United States (an assertion an alarming percentage of Republicans believe against all evidence). Trump says it’s not his job to defend the hated Obama. Carson is in the spotlight for insisting against the rather explicit language of the U.S. Constitution that there should in fact be a “religious test” for the presidency, barring Muslims. Meanwhile, Fiorina is being besieged by the facts she ignored in her debate presentation—especially with respect to the Planned Parenthood videos she discussed to the delight of Christian Right voters—and by the long-overdue MSM scrutiny of her arguably catastrophic record as CEO of HP, her primary credential for high office (see Jeffrey Sonnenberg’s refutation of her debate remarks about him and her HP tenure).

But even as the three zero-experience front-runners lose friends and alienate people, it’s not like the rest of the field is moving on up. One early favorite, Scott Walker, is by all accounts in desperate condition, and having decided to drop everything else to go try to shore up his horrendous standing in Iowa, made a poor impression on his first post-CNN-debate public appearance there.

Off the campaign trail, congressional Republicans are snarled in separate yet equally dangerous internal disputes over the extent to which they will court a government shutdown to express unhappiness with the Iran Nuclear Deal—which they strangely consider a big political winner for themselves—and to cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Budget wizard Stan Collender has now raised his estimate of the odds of a government shutdown to 75%. It’s a particularly bad sign that Republicans are already resorting to the tired and notably ineffective tactic ofarguing that it’s Obama who would be shutting down the government by rejecting GOP demands.

If that’s not enough for you, keep in mind the Pope is coming to town this week, and whatever comfort conservatives take from his inevitable condemnation of legalized abortion, he is certain to bring a message on climate change and corporate greed that will make conservative Catholics go a little crazy.

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Monday Open Thread [9.21.2015]

David Atkins on why the press gets Donald Trump and the GOP base wrong. It is willful, not ignorance.

As long as Trump leads, it’s impossible to maintain the fiction of equally extreme “both sides do it” partisanship. As long as Trump rules (and, to a lesser extent, that Bernie Sanders continues to rise on the left) It’s also increasingly difficult to pretend that “moderates” in either party are actually the center of public opinion, rather than caterers to a unique brand of corporate-friendly upper-class comfort that labels itself as moderate without holding any legitimate claim to the title.

Acknowledging those realities would force the press to start reporting the fundamentals of American politics as they stand today:

First, that the Republican base wants a rebel leader to take their country back from the inconvenience of being nice to women, gays and minorities;

Second, that the wealthy Republican establishment and its center-right Third Way Democratic counterparts don’t actually have a legitimate base of voters, but rather illegitimate institutional capture of government via legalized bribery; and

Third, that the rest of the country wants liberal public policies that would resemble a Scandinavian government, but most of them are so turned off by the futility of the American political process that not enough of them turn out to vote to make a real difference outside of the bluest states.

Those would be very uncomfortable admissions for the establishment press, so they settle instead for hoping that Donald Trump will go away and lose support organically so things can return to “normal.” That’s not going to happen.

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Saturday Open Thread [9.19.2015]

The National Journal has a good story about the opportunity that has opened up for down the ladder Democrats now that John Carney is running for Governor. Some new potential candidates are mentioned….

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Friday Open Thread [9.18.2015]

Joe Biden “may have more time to make up his mind about running for president than most people assume,” Politico reports.

“Various deadlines have been floated: End of summer, Oct. 1, the first Democratic debate on Oct. 13, the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner Oct. 24. But none of these is looking like a hard deadline. Neither are any of the cutoff dates for getting his name on state ballots. … It turns out that instead of simply deciding yes or no on a presidential run, Biden may have a third option — make no announcement at all, wait until December (or longer) and hope Clinton gets out of the race or is pushed to the sidelines without him having to get in.”

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