Delaware Liberal

Joe Biden's sister, Valerie Biden Owens, who has managed all of his prior campaigns for the Senate and the Presidency, said today that she has not had a "single conversation with him about it,” with "it" being running for President in 2016. If she is telling the truth, then that means that Joe Biden is not running for President. So that little boomlet was fun.

New York Times: “After weeks of preparing for a smash-mouth debate with Donald J. Trump, 14 Republican candidates found themselves instead Trump-less but sandwiched into a constricting format on Monday night, delivering strikingly uneven performances just days before the first big test of the presidential primary contest.” “Rather than making the other contenders look more presidential, however, the event, at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., seemed to shrink the candidates. Assembled in the front row, the Republicans gawked as each rival took his or her turn on stage, looking at times as if they were being forced to sit through a tedious school assembly.”

The GOP is going all in to turn Planned Parenthood into the next ACORN. In response to completely debunked and discredited videos that conservatives collectively pretend show Planned Parenthood officials…

Former Maryland governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. told the Boston Globe that he's not running for president, making him the only Republican in the country not running for President. This means nothing to the universe of political punditry - except to one person, AQC, who is going into the second phase, the drop phase, of DLGOPFP a three legged chair. (scroll down for updated standings) Don't cry for AQC though. He (she?) has Jeb Bush, so points will be accumulated while candidates like Newton's Rand Paul will fall to the ground like overripe and unwanted apples in an abandoned orchard. It is still anybody's game, and other sports related cliches. [An aside... I wonder if all this attention to the Buffoon Bus (tm) is helping the GOP in some perverse way? They do get to claim that they have an "embarrassment of riches" and while you and I certainly agree that these candidates are embarrassing, they are all getting a lot of earned media, and pushing the Dem candidates into the shadows. Also - since they all agree on all the issues, they get to continue to spout their utter bullshit unchallenged. Certainly the media is not going to call them on their floating of fact impaired fucktardy. ]

Nice job Bushie. (also, nice job Obama keeping it rolling).

While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State. “This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” said one former senior American official, who was working closely on Syria issues until recently, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments. The Nusra Front said in a statement on Friday that its aim was to eliminate Division 30 before it could gain a deeper foothold in Syria. The Nusra Front did much the same last year when it smashed the main groups that had been trained and equipped in a different American effort, one run covertly by the C.I.A.

h/t eschaton

I thought I knew how screwed up the GOP is. Turns out...I had no idea how mightily screwed up the GOP is right now.

“Cuckservative,” you see, is short for a cuckolded conservative. It’s not about a Republican whose wife is cheating on him, but one whose country is being taken away from him, and who’s too cowardly to do anything about it. OK, that’s gross and sexist enough already, but there’s more. It apparently comes from a kind of pornography known as “cuck,” in which a white husband, either in shame or lust, watches his wife be taken by a black man. Lewis explains it this way: “A cuckservative is, therefore, a race traitor. This is not merely a new way to shout “RINO.” It’s a call to make the GOP an explicitly racist party, devoted to the defense of whites…. ”

John Harwood:

Donald Trump makes mainstream Republicans angry, understandably. His inflammatory rhetoric and sudden rise toward the top of 2016 presidential polls threaten their careers. Yet Republican political leaders themselves bear some responsibility for Mr. Trump’s ascent. In dealing with the dyspeptic constituency that has empowered them, they’ve repeatedly failed at anger management. Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, the Republican Party has been a hothouse of grievance: against his health care law, his immigration policy, even his citizenship. The ire of conservatives helped Republican candidates wrest control from the Democrats of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. But the inability of party leaders to control that intensity has often backfired. In primary campaigns, it has toppled effective Republican lawmakers.

More on this when I update the Fantasy standings, but it looks like we are transitioning to the drop phase.