National

Andrew Prokop of Vox says the nomination of Donald Trump [or Ted Cruz] would likely be an utter disaster for the GOP.

It's a debacle for Republicans that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of this year. Yet it's happened so slowly, and so gradually, that the reaction from GOP elites still appears oddly muted. Even as summer stretched into fall, they kept comforting themselves by saying that it's still early — accurately pointing to the fact that early polls have frequently been wrong in the past, and that outsider candidates like Trump have lost in the past. Yet Tuesday night's debate was the final GOP debate of 2015 and could well be the year's last major campaign event. Before you know it, Christmas will be here, and New Year's will follow soon afterward. And then we're in January, and there's just one month before voting begins in Iowa on February 1. So it's definitely time for the Republican establishment to hit the panic button.

It has been a hell of a year. Wingnut reactions to things have ranged from predicable to entirely predicable. But “worst to best” doesn’t really fit. This list, is more ranked from "worst" to “even worse still”. 10) “The liberal media..(anything)” All of wingnut bluster about how liberal the media is goes back to a 1986 study that found that a majority of journalists at national media outlets such as The New York Times, and WaPo were Democratic voters. As if reporters had some kind of say in the political leanings of “the media.” It is laughable and you’d really have to have your head up your ass to observe that we have a “liberal media” while you watch your “One America News” (on a TV implanted in your descending colon) because Fox has gone soft.

I sometimes check in to Red State for some Schadenfreude. After Tuesday's debate, Leon Wolf, a Cruz and then Rubio supporter, was very displeased.

…people who realize that Trump represents an existential threat to the credibility and future existence of the conservative movement as a political force have been forced to grind our teeth as Cruz - who really has been a champion for our causes - held fire on this charlatan for months. Now we are treated to the spectacle of Cruz treating Rubio in the same way many of us wish he had treated Trump from day one? It’s frankly galling.

A existential threat to the future EXISTENCE of the conservative movement. LOL. I agree. Go Trump!

UPDATE: Congressional Candidate, Bryon Sort has called for Congress to lift the ban on gun violence research, and "to start supporting a data-driven and scientific approach to a solution." No word yet from Coons or Carney.

Dylan Matthews reveals the real winner of the GOP Debate last night: Hillary Clinton.

If you asked Hillary Clinton to rank her preferred general election opponents in order, odds are that Cruz and Trump would top the list. Trump is a candidate almost tailor-made to energize Latino turnout and turn the demographic even more strongly pro-Democratic. And Cruz has most of Trump's substantive liabilities plus has proposed a massive 16 percent sales tax on everything. Both of them are extremely potent boogeymen to get base Democrats enraged/energized. And none of them have the ability to make inroads with young and Latino voters that Marco Rubio has. And so when Trump and Cruz win a debate, Clinton implicitly wins the debate as well. She's getting exactly the Republican primary she wants, and it shows no signs of getting worse for her anytime soon.

The issue of Obama’s legacy will come into sharper focus in the months and years to come, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows noted over the weekend “three big things that have happened during his presidency that in all probability would not have happened without him”:

* The climate deal itself, as explained in a NYT piece just now, and in unbelievable contrast to the utter collapse of the Copenhagen negotiations early in Obama’s term; * The rapprochement with Cuba, marking the beginning of the end of the single stupidest (but hardest to change) aberration in modern U.S. foreign policy; and * The international agreement with Iran, which in the short term offers (as I have argued at length) the best prospects for keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and in the long run has the potential of beginning to end Iran’s destructive estrangement from the international order.

Given the reaction of some in the media, namely Ben Smith and Tom Brokaw, last week during the brewhaha that was the Republican presidential frontrunner calling for the banning of a religion and its adherents, it seems that it is finally starting to sink into some in the self-beloved media that, perhaps, just perhaps, Donald Trump was saying things that were really not so entertaining. That perhaps, just perhaps, caring solely about ratings was not the Fourth Estate's job. As Matt Taibbi so wonderously phrases....

Essentially, TV news producers are wondering: "How do we keep getting the great ratings without helping elect the Fourth Reich?"