National

Hans Noel on why some conservatives want to stop Donald Trump at all costs:

Some conservative Republicans are meeting this week to talk about the possibility of fielding a conservative third-party candidate in the increasingly likely event that Donald Trump hijacks their party's nomination. Trump is not only not a conservative; he also embraces the most distasteful elements of right-wing populism. An independent candidate would give voters a "real" Republican to vote for. Such a move has an obvious downside: It likely leads to President Hillary Clinton. Trump and the "real" Republican will split the Republican vote, just as William H. Taft and Theodore Roosevelt split the GOP vote in 1912, giving us President Woodrow Wilson. Is blocking Trump worth the risk of electing Clinton? If you are a conservative, I think it is. Presidential elections are unpredictable, but there is one pretty common pattern. The longer the party has been in office, the less likely it is to win. One-term incumbents are reelected at a high rate, but after two terms the office often goes to the other party. After three terms, it's very hard to hold on to the White House. Assuming this pattern holds, if Trump wins the 2016 presidential election, he's likely to win reelection. But the Democrats would likely win in 2024 and again in 2028. You wouldn't see a "real" Republican in the White House until 2032, after a 24-year drought.

The obvious flaw in this logic is that Democrats, liberals and non-Trumpian conservatives will have been "final solution"-ed by 2019, and Dear Leader Trump will be running unopposed for his fifth term in 2032.

There are tons of giggles in this classic of the Celia Cohen genre. Here are a few samples:

"It's like asking you to choose between your three favorite children (Barney,Rochester, Short). They're not children. They're wonderful adults...."

..but, seriously, don't ever forget who's your daddy.

"Pull for the home team. We're all part of Carper town," Carper said.

I feel like Carper resisted throwing in a wink at EL Somnambulo here and when he said "Carper Town" instead of Carperdyne Industries, Inc.

"You know sometimes, like people try to vote more than once? I think in this case I'd like to vote at least three times. I'd get in trouble doing that," Carper said.

Stop. my sides.... As for me, I'm all about...

A Washington Post editorial calls on the Republican party to aim for a contested convention in order to stop Donald Trump.

“We do not take this position because we believe Mr. Trump is perilously wrong on the issues, although he is… No, Mr. Trump must be stopped because he presents a threat to American democracy. Mr. Trump resembles other strongmen throughout history who have achieved power by manipulating democratic processes.”

There is a lot of dumb head-scratching on the right about how Trump became the nominee. Most pundits are saying that the non-Trump opponents in the race "started too late"…

This is something of an upset, since Sri Srinivasan was the heavy favorite. There is a theory why....

When people act like MSNBC is some kind of liberal version of Fox News I want to throw up. Does Fox News have a morning show hosted by some liberal shill for Bernie Sanders in the same way MSNBC has a morning show hosted by a conservative who doesn't even try to disguise his love and admiration for Donald Trump? Of course not. Does Fox News have its own version of Chris Matthews, a man who said that Hillary Clinton should pick John Kasich to be her running mate....?

This is what Chris Matthews sounds like after he's been huffing way too much of that Tip and the Gipper, bipartisan, magical fairy dust during MSNBC's Super Tuesday election coverage. Apparently Matthews think the potential Democratic nominee for president of the United States needs to pick an anti-choice, anti-labor, trickle-down, gives tax cuts to the rich on the backs of the working class, former Lehman Brothers executive as a running mate in order to get elected.