Thursday Open Thread

Posted on January 7, 2016 by rikyrah

More 2015 Kennedy Center Honors highlights!

Gina’s moving tribute to Ms. Rita Moreno

2FB107DC00000578-0-image-a-24_1451521580276

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53 Responses to Thursday Open Thread

  2. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 9:29 pm

    Maine Governor: Drug Dealers Impregnate ‘Young White’ Girls

    By david sharp, associated press
    PORTLAND, Maine — Jan 7, 2016, 8:29 PM ET

    Blunt-spoken Republican Gov. Paul LePage said out-of-state drug dealers are impregnating “young white” girls, and his remarks were quickly denounced by critics on Thursday as racial fearmongering.

    LePage, talking about Maine’s heroin epidemic, described out-of-state drug dealers as “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” and said “half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave.”

    LePage, who’s white, didn’t describe the races of the drug dealers on Wednesday during a town meeting in Bridgton, and a spokesman said Thursday he wasn’t making a comment about race.

    But moderate Republican and LePage critic Lance Dutson, who called attention to the remark, said the governor was playing to people’s racial fears.

    “This is one of the most blatantly racist statements he’s ever made,” said Dutson, a former CEO of the conservative Maine Heritage Policy Center who helped create the GOP group Get Right Maine to combat extremism. “One of the things that’s offensive about it is that it’s reminiscent of this fearmongering in American history that people would like to think is long gone.”

    The president of the NAACP’s Bangor chapter, Michael Alpert, said the governor’s comments were “sad” and “foolish.”

    LePage’s chief of communications, Peter Steele, insisted the governor wasn’t talking about race when he made the comment.

    http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/maine-governor-drug-dealers-impregnate-young-white-girls-36152559

    Reply
  3. eliihass says:
    January 7, 2016 at 7:06 pm

    Hey Rikyrah, here’s a video from the same day the ‘boomerang selfie’ with Cosmopolitan was taken..

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGKKuaF-78s

    “…This is what an effective and true Feminist looks like…” said the old Cambridge professor after he heard the First Lady speak at the WISE conference in Doha, Qatar…

    He was an Englishman of a certain age and ‘pedigree’…and he looked and sounded surprised…another one of those who never gave much thought to black women – especially as unpretentiously and unaffectedly compelling and effortlessly powerful figures in their own right – who weren’t looking to be validated or approved of by anyone – and especially not by the likes of him or the (differently but much alike) staunchly patriarchal Arab men in the audience..

    Reply
  5. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 4:01 pm

    Brain Damage: Children Suffer the Consequences of Anti-Regulation in Michigan
    Thursday, 07 January 2016 00:00
    By Brian Moench, Truthout | Op-Ed

    Antipathy to environmental protection and disdain for the government’s role in protecting the public’s well-being have been prominent themes of the Republican Party in the era of the Tea Party. The scandal of toxic levels of lead in Flint, Michigan’s municipal water supply reveals how dangerous these ideas become when put into practice. Thousands of children in Flint are now facing the lifelong and largely irreversible consequences of lead poisoning due to state and local leaders’ criminal disregard for their health.

    Two employees from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) have resigned over the scandal, and more are expected to follow. Michigan Republican Gov. Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency in Genesee County on January 5, because of the water contamination. But Flint residents have taken to social media calling for the arrest of Governor Snyder (using hashtags such as #InvestigateGovSnyder, #IndictGovSnyder, ‪#ArrestGovSnyder, #PureMichigan) who appointed the Flint emergency manager directly responsible for the tragedy. Meanwhile, according to Democracy Now!, “Michigan activists are planning to hold a tribunal on Flint water poisoning and the continued shutoffs of drinking water in Detroit, in the coming weeks.” Federal prosecutors are now investigating the saga.

    How Flint’s Leaders Poisoned Their Own Constituents

    In April 2014, to save money, the unelected emergency manager of Flint, Michigan (the same one who had shut off the water of residents too poor to pay their water bills), who had been appointed by Snyder, switched the city’s water source from Detroit, which gets its supply from Lake Huron, to the Flint River, well known to be severely polluted. This occurred despite the fact that avoiding Flint water had long been considered an essential ritual of living in Flint.

    Almost immediately, residents began complaining about the water; it was visibly cloudy, tasted terrible and reeked of a foul odor. Stop me if you’ve heard this scenario before, but city and state officials’ response for several months was to deny that there was a problem. In the fierce winter cold of January 2015, protesters marched to city hall to challenge “plummeting water quality, soaring water rates” and police that were arresting citizens for “water theft.” Well more than a year after the problem began, Brad Wurfel, spokesman for MDEQ and one of those forced to resign, told a reporter: “Let me start here – anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax.”

    http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34307-brain-damage-children-suffer-the-consequences-of-anti-regulation-in-michigan

    Reply
    • eliihass says:
      January 7, 2016 at 5:49 pm

      Hard to believe that Rick Snyder and his Emergency Manager are still walking around calling the shots…

      If even one child got sick in any affluent city in this country as a direct result of actions taken by any government representative – and even worse, the government officials are found to have conspired to cover up their malicious actions – and pooh-poohed and dismissed public concerns and complaints, they’d be out of a job, and awaiting court dates – and their employer(s) out of a whole lot of money paid out to the victim and family…

      Reply
  7. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 3:42 pm

    What Goes Through Your Mind: On Nice Parties and Casual Racism

    The night after Christmas finds me seated with relatives and friends at my in-laws’ crowded dinner table, enjoying a delicious meal and happily chatting about television — one of few topics that’s nearly always safe to discuss in mixed company. Of the fourteen people laughing and passing laden platters around, only one is new to me. Someone mentions my interview with Constance Wu of Fresh Off the Boat, and this, apparently, is her cue to look up and address me for the first time since we exchanged our initial his and nice to meet yous.

    “Do people ever tell you that you look just like everyone on that show?” she asks.

    This question strikes me as so bizarre, so beside the point, that at first I think I’ve misheard. “Excuse me?” I wait for her to clarify, change course.

    She repeats her question. She appears to be perfectly serious: “You must get this a lot,” she adds, when I don’t immediately respond.

    Oh? Oh. Yes, people often tell me that I look just like everyone on a television show, even though most of them aren’t women. Or my age. Sure. That happens all the time.

    http://the-toast.net/2016/01/05/what-goes-through-your-mind-casual-racism/

    Reply
  10. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 1:59 pm

    The Big Lie in the War Against Drugs
    Tuesday, 29 December 2015

    ………………………………………….

    No, the war on drugs, since its very beginning, has been about
    controlling political power – by breaking up Black communities and the dissident left.

    And we know that because the people who have been involved, the
    architects and the leaders in the war on drugs, have admitted it – even bragged about it!

    Before he died, Nixon counsel and former assistant to the president, John Ehrlichman, told author Dan Baum that:

    “The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

    Reply
  11. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 1:53 pm

    PHUCK.OUTTA.HERE!!!!

    All the time they point fingers at the poor and say

    ” Pull yourself up by your bootstraps’

    for folks THAT DON’T EVEN HAVE A PAIR OF BOOTS IN THE ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD…

    while, we’re supposed to feel for those who have EVERYTHING?

    phuck.that.

    Sometimes ‘poor little rich kids’ really are poor little rich kids
    Reuters – Tue, 5 Jan 2016 09:06

    Jan 5 (Reuters) – The “affluenza” defense of Ethan Couch, a 16-year-old Texas boy who killed four pedestrians while driving drunk, has received a great deal of ridicule, much of it justified. That said, it would be foolish to allow an absurd effort to minimize one teenager’s responsibility for a horrific tragedy to obscure growing evidence that we have a significant and growing crisis on our hands. The children of the affluent are becoming increasingly troubled, reckless, and self-destructive. Perhaps we needn’t feel sorry for these “poor little rich kids.” But if we don’t do something about their problems, they will become everyone’s problems.

    One of us has spent about 20 years studying and documenting the growth of dysfunction among affluent youth, and the other has written about one large source of the problem. High-risk behavior, including extreme substance abuse and promiscuous sex, is growing fast among young people from communities dominated by white-collar, well-educated parents. These kids attend schools distinguished by rich academic curricula, high standardized test scores, and diverse extracurricular opportunities. Their parents’ annual income, at $150,000 and more, is well over twice the national average. And yet they show serious levels of maladjustment as teens, displaying problems that tend to begin as they enter adolescence and get worse as they approach college.

    Reply
  12. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 1:51 pm

    Dash-cam video: Woman lay in Florida hospital parking lot 18 minutes, later died

    A woman who collapsed and later died after being forcibly removed from a Florida hospital lay in the parking lot beside a police officer’s car for nearly 18 minutes before a doctor readmitted her, according to police dash-cam audio and video released Wednesday by lawyers for her family who charge the hospital and police were negligent in her death.
    […]
    On the roughly 2 ½-hour recording, an officer drives up to the hospital, enters Dawson’s hospital room and tries to persuade her to leave. He says she must either go with him or go to jail, but Dawson replies that she can’t breathe and she’s in a panic. The officer informs Dawson that she can either receive health care elsewhere or will be arrested for disorderly conduct and trespassing.

    The oxygen hose is disconnected and Dawson is led to the police car. The officer walks the 270-pound woman out, holding her by the arm, nudging her along.

    Dawson fell to the ground 1 to 2 feet from the patrol car while the officer reached for his keys. Dawson cut her feet and knees.

    The Blountstown police officer who arrested Dawson is heard saying that he thought Dawson “was being non-complaint by not trying to get in my car and faking it.”

    For 18 minutes she lay propped against the police cruiser as the officer and nurses made multiple attempts to get her into the car. The nurses also checked her pulse. Finally a doctor came out, said her condition appeared to have changed and readmitted her.

    http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article53376830.html

    Reply
    • Liza says:
      January 7, 2016 at 10:21 pm

      “Her condition appeared to have changed…” Sorry, too late to cover your a$$, Doc. That hospital is gonna pay a settlement with the family. Probably the PD will settle as well.

      Reply
    • eliihass says:
      January 7, 2016 at 6:28 pm

      Isn’t it utterly mind-boggling how a completely independent team who’ve never worked with FLOTUS somehow managed to capture her gorgeous, fun, dignified, wise, playful yet serious essence – and so beautifully too…in between brilliant speeches, roundtables, meet and greets with students and dignitaries – on her very first visit to the tricky, staunchly patriarchal Middle East…

      But many still don’t even know that she went to Qatar, and if they do, they don’t know why she was there or what she did there…

      Her fantastic and incredibly effective and well-received speech in Qatar which without wagging fingers or taking a self-righteous, scolding tone, brilliantly left many guilty and preemptively skeptical, hostile and defensive men in the audience feeling ashamed…

      But by the end, she even had them – the cynical and the skeptics alike – applauding..

      She had indeed won them over as potential allies, or at the very least, given them food for thought – when this genuine, unpretentious, unaffected, confident, independent, powerfully present woman, wove a biographical story about the life-changing impact of education in her own life – and the important role of men in every society…It was interesting and very instructive to see what got her the loudest applause…But you could see that she also knew exactly what she was doing…

      At the end, an older British male professor from Cambridge University who was in the audience gushed “…this is what an effective and true Feminist looks like…”

      But, hey, there’s the First Lady taking her first boomerang selfie…

      Reply
  21. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 10:47 am

    phuck.outta.here.

    don’t have time for this foolishness.

    https://twitter.com/watchLOUD/status/685125566270451714?s=09

    Reply
  22. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 10:46 am

    THE CHICAGO WAY01.06.1611:10 PM ET
    Exclusive: Lawyers Went to Rahm Emanuel, Then Quashed the Laquan McDonald Video
    The mayor’s men demanded that dashcam video be kept confidential for at least several years as part of a $5 million settlement with the teenager’s family.
    CHICAGO — City of Chicago lawyers, after meeting with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, demanded the Laquan McDonald family bury the video showing the killing of their son by a police officer.

    Emanuel said last month that Stephen Patton, Chicago’s corporation counsel, briefed him “towards the end of March” about what the dashcam video showed and about the proposed $5 million settlement with McDonald’s estate. After that briefing, Patton’s second-in-command, Thomas Platt, drafted settlement language to keep the dashcam video hidden for at least several years, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast (PDF).

    Michael Robbins, an attorney for the McDonald estate, balked at the demand.

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/06/exclusive-lawyers-went-to-rahm-then-quashed-the-laquan-mcdonald-video.html

    Reply
  24. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 10:44 am

    WEDNESDAY, JAN 6, 2016 06:58 AM CST
    No one’s talking about land use: Regardless of what the Bundys think, we still need the feds controlling public lands
    The Malheur standoff is the latest in a long-running battle over Western land use. Here’s why we all should care
    REBECCA WORBY

    Since I first heard about the takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a group of militiamen against federal land management, I have been reading and stewing. The occupation of the refuge has gotten people talking about a range of interconnected issues: increasing right-wing extremism, what we do or don’t define as terrorism, racial double standards, and the eyebrow-raising legal process behind the resentencing of the Hammonds for the arson they are accused of committing. All of this is important and worthy of discussion. But far fewer people seem to be talking about the concrete issues underlying the situation, the deep-rooted land use battle of which the Malheur standoff is only the latest iteration.

    Western publications like High Country News have had excellent coverage (and HCN has been covering the Sagebrush Rebellion thoroughly for decades). But these publications don’t necessarily take the time to explain why we should care about land use issues in the first place because they would be preaching to the choir. Meanwhile, knowing that these issues don’t matter much to the majority of their audience, the mainstream media barely covers them at all, focusing instead on the more sensational aspects of the news at hand.

    I mentioned this gap to a friend, who, like me, lives in New York City. In the process of working on a book about the land surrounding Moab, Utah, I’ve spent a lot of time both enjoying the public lands of the West and learning about the conflicts surrounding their use, and I have become inordinately invested in answering the question of what balanced use would look like. Why, I asked my friend, was no one talking about land use?

    “Most people don’t care as much about land use as you do,” she gently reminded me.

    “Well, they should,” I replied, “because it matters.” Here’s why.

    The Bundys have been up in arms about where their cattle can and can’t roam, and their father, Cliven, owes more than $1 million in grazing fees. And the Hammonds are being punished for setting fire to public land. If you live in some other part of the country—in, say, a bustling East Coast city—what do ranching restrictions and arson have to do with you? The short answer: The land use regulations that the occupiers of the Malheur Refuge are fighting go far beyond where cattle can roam. How we use our land determines what comes out of it in the form of extracted resources, which then affects so much else, from what kind of air we breathe to how many earthquakes we experience–not to mention our changing climate. It would not be a stretch to say that caring about land use means caring about the fate of our planet.

    Reply
  25. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 10:41 am

    Couldn’t happen to a more loathesome group.

    …………..

    Uber fail: Why the start-up giant stumbled in Europe — and how it could happen in the U.S.
    Wall Street’s favorite “disruptor” thought its usual strategy would work in Germany. It got walloped instead
    ELIAS ISQUITH
    WEDNESDAY, JAN 6, 2016 06:59 AM CST

    So here’s a story you don’t read very often anymore, certainly not in the United States.

    A red-hot and impossibly well-funded corporation — one with extensive ties to the powers that be not only on Wall Street but also in Silicon Valley — recently tried to strong-arm its way into a major market. It did so despite the fact that its business model was, in many respects, incompatible with that market’s predominant government regulations and social norms. The plan, I guess, was to “disrupt.”

    If you’re someone who pays attention to the business press, or lives in a big city, then you’ve probably already guessed that I’m talking about Uber. You’re probably already aware of its market valuation — currently a gobsmacking $62.5 billion — and you’re probably already familiar with the company’s preferred means of market penetration. You’ve probably heard tales before of its smash-and-grab ethos, its fondness for ignoring the law and daring overmatched regulators to do something about it.

    Remember, though, that I said this is a story you don’t hear very often. This one hasn’t ended like all the others (at least not yet). Because in this example, Uber did something different. Yes, it swooped in, it broke the rules, it ignored local customs and traditions. But then it did what it had almost never done before, what many people on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley thought it couldn’t do. It picked a fight — and it lost.

    There’s no other way to describe the company’s recent decision to all but give up on getting a foothold in Germany, at least for the time being. It’s hard to imagine Uber permanently giving up on Europe’s biggest economy, of course. But according to a report in The New York Times, Uber’s problem goes well beyond Germany’s borders. Deutschland is just one of many places where Uber’s struggling — and it’s almost always for the same reason.

    Reply
  26. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 10:39 am

    David Brooks is so very afraid: Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and the New York Times sadistically exploit anxiety over Islamic terrorism to grab votes
    The threat of terrorism in Iowa is minute, but GOPers continue to exaggerate the danger there — and everywhere else
    AMANDA MARCOTTE
    WEDNESDAY, JAN 6, 2016 10:05 AM CST

    For 21st century conservatives, “fear” is not an authentic feeling of actual concern for your safety, but an ideological pose struck to justify the darker, more sadistic urges that motivate the Republican base.

    In our day and age, declaring you want war for the pleasure of conquest or that you support racist policies out of unvarnished bigotry is socially unacceptable. So fear is donned as a costume to conceal the hate. The shivering coward is a more sympathetic figure than the snarling bigot, and so no matter how laughably implausible their posture of fear is, conservatives will strike it.

    No where is this more obvious than in the Republican town halls and rallies that have taken over Iowa in the run-up to the primary. Jeremy Peters of the New York Times paints a picture of candidates and voters gathering together to act like they’re huddled in a bunker while the Germans blitzkrieg London.

    “This despairing tone was on display Monday as Republicans crisscrossed the country on the first full day of campaigning in the new year,” he writes, “and began airing commercials that had a singular and sometimes fearsome focus on national security.”

    Reply
  27. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 10:35 am

    Bernie, Hillary go to war over Wall Street: Sanders gets upper hand as he pitches fix for financial industry
    Sanders says Clinton lacks “courage” to stand up to Wall Street as he outlines plan to shape up financial industry
    SEAN ILLING
    WEDNESDAY, JAN 6, 2016 10:32 AM CST

    If you’ve seen the new film “The Big Short,” you know it was the greed of Wall Street, combined with the lack of regulatory control, that produced the 2008 economic crisis. You also know that nothing has changed. We still haven’t had serious financial reform and, even more disturbing, most of the banks are now bigger than they were before the crash. In fact, as the Washington Post noted, “three of the four largest financial institutions are nearly 80 percent larger” than they were in 2008.

    Of all the candidates, Bernie Sanders has been the most consistent when it comes to regulating the vultures on Wall Street. He’s also the most credible, given his record and his refusal (in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton) to accept corporate funding for his campaign.

    This week Sanders doubled down on his economic populism. In a speech on Tuesday, just a few miles away from Wall Street, the Vermont senator clarified his views on financial reform. “To those on Wall Street who may be listening today,” Sanders said, “let me be very clear…Greed is not good. Wall Street and corporate greed is destroying the fabric of our nation. And, here is a New Year’s Resolution that we will keep: If you do not end your greed we will end it for you.”

    Responding to Clinton’s accusation that his proposals are too vague and simplistic, Sanders was especially clear about his intentions as president:

    Reply
  41. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 8:52 am

    We have been saying this for forever. Not President Obama’s Problem….it’s those who cling to the Whiteness….

    …………………………

    How White America’s fear of Barack Obama has made us all worse off

    A shockingly large segment of the population only hates a policy once our president’s name is on it

    MATTHEW PULVER

    WEDNESDAY, JAN 6, 2016 12:47 PM CST

    Once again, President Obama is resorting to executive action to effect some small degree of change he and his counsel feel to be within his presidential purview, this time on gun control. Fourth-quarter Obama has been impatient and bold, circumventing congressional roadblocks with executive orders to use what federal latitude he has to lead the way on immigration, the environment and economic inequality. The executive actions have elicited calls of “tyranny” from the right, but a unilateral move on guns, however marginal and constricted by executive elbow room, is the sort of thing to convince some conservatives that the trap they’ve imagined is finally snapping shut: Obama is coming for our guns. America is over. It was nice while it lasted.

    Plus, it’s election year and just weeks ahead of the first caucus, so the rhetoric will no doubt be ratcheted further and further toward alarmism and offense. And it’s not just any election cycle, but one in which Donald Trump’s success forces ambitious Republican candidates to appeal to primary voters with far-right-wing rhetoric that might have disqualified contenders in a different political season. And it’s not just any sort of right-wing demagoguery that Trump’s political pace car has determined for the race but one of extraordinary otherization: A lexicon of fear and hatred of Mexican immigrants, Arab immigrants, the Chinese, black Americans and even women is what has established Trump’s shocking success. Before he was the surprise Republican front-runner, Trump was the nation’s most prominent birther, claiming that the nation’s first black president was a foreign interloper, the dark central character in the greatest conspiracy in American history: the theft of the presidency by a foreigner.

    ……………………

    The furor surrounding gun control might become the most pronounced instance of this phenomenon. During the Obama era, the right has increasingly celebrated the armed (usually white) defender of “American values,” whether it be George Zimmerman-type vigilantes or Bundy Ranch-style insurrectionists. Fox News exhaustively covered both the Bundy ranch and Oregon standoffs, offering seemingly countless friendly interviews to the armed lawbreakers. Guns are, for many white conservatives, the last defense against the specter of the black criminal, the oppressive government, the immigrant, the Muslim, or the combination of all four: Barack Hussein Obama. And now Obama–who is not really an American, according to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee; who is a Muslim, according to perhaps half of Republican voters; who doesn’t love, and thus seeks to harm, America, according to a staggering number of Republicans–is now committing his most dangerous, lawless act yet: taking away the good (read: white) Americans’ guns, leaving them defenseless against him.

    Reply
  42. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 8:36 am

    I will continue to say this.

    THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRUMP AND THE REST OF THE GOP FIELD..

    with the exception that he doesn’t speak in dogwhistles.

    ………………………………………..

    Now you can worry: Trump’s in it to win it, so it’s time to drop fantasy that his campaign is all for show

    With two bold new moves, Trump’s campaign shows once and for all that it is no joke. The Donald wants to win.

    ELIAS ISQUITH

    For most of the second-half of 2015, whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is “serious” (definition: unclear) was arguably the question of American politics.

    It was asked after his launch speech, which was rambling, incoherent, demagogic, and way too long; it was asked after he criticized Sen. John McCain for being captured by the Vietcong; it was asked after he proposed “rounding up” and deporting some 11 million undocumented immigrants; it was asked after he attacked Fox News darling Megyn Kelly; it was asked after he proposed banning Muslims from entering the U.S.; it was asked again, and again, and again.

    Slowly but surely, more and more commentators began to realize that the answer was yes. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was “serious” — at least in so far as “serious” was equivalent to “capable of winning.” The national polls showed it, the state-level polls showed it, the issue-based polling showed it. By the holiday season, elite endorsements, pricey ad buys, and an expensive big data/GOTV apparatus were the only usual components of a “serious” campaign that Trump 2016 lacked.

    ……………………

    You probably have heard about the first one, which is the release of Trump’s first bona fide campaign commercial. It wasn’t the first video the Trump campaign put out — they spent much of 2015 getting attention with cheeky Instagram clips — but it was the campaign’s first television ad. Even more importantly, Trump announced he was going to actually spend millions of dollars to ensure voters in Iowa and New Hampshire saw it. ($2 million per week, if Trump is to be believed, which he isn’t.)

    The second and far more important development, meanwhile, was made public by a recent Politico report, which claimed that Trump was not only spending money on a big data/GOTV apparatus — but that he’d been doing so for months already. The details about the program were admittedly fuzzy; none of the major operators involved agreed to speak on-the-record. But as Politico rightly noted in its report, the implications of Trump’s investment were clear:

    Reply
  43. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 8:25 am

    I went to a Ted Cruz rally — and saw James Dobson, Steve King, white evangelical fervor and the scariest family band of all time
    Now I understand why Cruz is winning Iowa. You would too if you saw this band sing “I Wish Kids Prayed in School”
    QUINT FORGEY
    WEDNESDAY, JAN 6, 2016 03:15 PM CST
    WINTERSET, Iowa — Those in the overwhelmingly white, senior audience at Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s rally here left with little doubt as to why the Texas senator is dominating the state’s much-sought-after evangelical constituency.

    Standing alongside conservative-values author and commentator James Dobson, Cruz swapped out his usual stump for an exchange that blended scripted sermonizing with red-meat fighting words against Democrats he said are fixated on abolishing religious liberty.

    “If we allow non-believers to elect our leaders, we shouldn’t be surprised when our government doesn’t reflect our values,” Cruz said to widespread applause.

    Cruz called for increased voter turnout among evangelical caucus-goers, using the type of overtly religious rhetoric that has galvanized support from social conservatives and propelled family-values candidates such as Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum to first-place Iowa finishes in 2008 and 2012.

    Cruz asked that attendees pray for him by asking for peace for his campaign, for the wisdom granted to the Biblical Solomon and for the well-being of his daughters, Caroline and Catherine.

    “That they know at every moment that they’re loved by their mom and dad and they are loved by their father in heaven, and that they maintain a spirit of joy and peace, as well,” Cruz said.

    Cruz currently leads all other Republicans in Iowa and has cracked the 30 point level in most poll averages – more than three points ahead than second-place finisher Donald Trump.

    Reply
  44. Ametia says:
    January 7, 2016 at 8:24 am

    Saturday’s Powerball drawing will be the biggest in U.S. history with an estimated $675 million jackpot after no one won last night’s drawing. (ABC News)

    Reply
  45. rikyrah says:
    January 7, 2016 at 7:59 am

    Good Morning, Everyone :)

    Reply
  46. Ametia says:
    January 7, 2016 at 7:36 am

    Good Morning, Everyone.

    Reply

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