Monday Open Thread [12.28.2015]

This video came out in 2012. Donald Trump is basically nothing more than a blinding sphere of rage, anger and racism. The Onion is the Oracle of our times.

President Bill Clinton’s childhood home in Hope, Arkansas has been burned in a case of arson.

An early morning fire at former President Bill Clinton’s childhood home in Hope, Arkansas, is being investigated as arson, according to officials. Fire broke out at the William J. Clinton Birthplace, designated as a National Historic Site, around 3:20 a.m. Friday, according to police.
Hope Fire Department Chief Dale Glanton said his department will investigate the incident as arson, rather than an accident.

It would be terrible if Ronald Reagan’s birthplace in Tampico, Illinois were to suffer a similar fate.

The New York Times says there is a rift developing in the GOP over Medicaid and Obamacare: “In state after state, a gulf is opening between Republican governors willing to expand Medicaid coverage through the Affordable Care Act and Republican members of Congress convinced the law is collapsing and determined to help it fail. In recent months, insurers have increased premiums and deductibles for many policies sold online, and a dozen nonprofit insurance co-ops are shutting down, forcing consumers to seek other coverage.”

“But in Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, Nevada and Ohio, Republican governors have expanded Medicaid under the health care law or defended past expansions. In South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah, Republican governors are pressing for wider Medicaid coverage. And Republican governors in a few other states, including Alabama, have indicated that they are looking anew at their options after rejecting the idea in the past.”

I touched on this last week, and it is a huge question heading into the GOP, and to a lesser extent, Democratic primaries. From the Washington Post:

“Trump’s unexpected and sustained popularity has, at least in part, been fueled by his appeal to a voting bloc that seems to be emerging: blue-collar workers without college degrees who are slightly younger than the traditional Republican voter. Many say they haven’t cared about politics until now, as they flock to Trump rallies like groupies to a rock concert, read his books, buy his products, quote his jokes and follow his social-media accounts.”

“But is their devotion to Trump deep enough to vote? For those who don’t regularly vote in primaries, doing so for the first time is a hurdle — especially in Iowa, which uses a caucus system that can intimidate first-timers.”

A quote in the piece was symbolic of a large number of responses about the Trump voter’s commitment to vote and caucus:

“We’re going to see … With kids and grandkids and all this, it’s kind of hectic … We’ll look into it. If our time is available, then yeah, maybe we’ll do it. Maybe. We’ll have to see,” said Randy Reynolds, a diehard Donald Trump supporter who’s just not sure if he’ll show up to vote. The Washington Post reports that many of Trump’s supporters, unsurprisingly, say the same thing.

I would not be surprised if Trump loses Iowa by a significant margin. He may not even finish in second place.

Politico on the state of the race, which is fuel for GOP nightmares: “Forget Iowa, which Cruz appears to be locking up. It’s New Hampshire that will cull this field. And with Christie, Bush and John Kasich making this first primary state the singular focus of their campaigns, and Rubio, should he lose Iowa, needing a top-tier finish, the fight to be the mainstream alternative to Cruz or Trump could end here.”

“If Trump wins the Feb. 9 primary a week after Cruz wins Iowa, only one or two candidates finishing behind him will likely have the momentum to carry on. If four or even five candidates split the vote of an establishment electorate that never coalesces behind one standard bearer, there may be only hollow victories to declare on primary night because none will have the firepower to challenge Cruz or Trump in South Carolina.”

Shaun Mullen says 2015 was the year the ref swallowed the whislte:

The biggest political story of 2015 was not the emergence of the Vladimir Putin-hugging Donald Trump as a contender. He’s a sloppy second. The biggest story — perhaps of many years and not just this year — is that the Republican Party went into the colorectal system known as the presidential election campaign dumber than a box of hammers at the start of the year and has come out the other end dumber still and threatened with national political irrelevance.

It actually would be comforting to say that the Democrats, as well as the entire American body politic, are stuck on stupid. But the Democrats and their supporters are doing a pretty good job of playing it smart, keeping it civil and understanding the needs of ordinary folk, while the Republicans and a good many of their supporters have devolved into xenophobic racists and name calling and blatant lying are de rigueur as the party’s chances of recapturing the White House slip slide away even as it strengthens its hold on statehouses.

Consider that in January, the three leading Republican presidential candidates in most polls were Scott Walker, Rand Paul and Jeb Bush, and that at the end of the year they are Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, three caricatures who each in their own way are truly scary as well as hugely unqualified to be president.

How could this have happened? Because the Republican Party worked very hard to make it happen. Thinking like a box of hammers will do that. […]

And hasn’t the mainstream media been doing a craptastic job of covering it all?

According to the media mavens, Hillary Clinton continued to stumble badly although she has had the nomination locked up after the first Democratic debate, while Trump was a flash in the pan long after it became obvious he was the smirking new face of the Republican Party. And, as always, there was an allergy to calling out even the most blatant of liars.

Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine on Karl Rove’s latest bit of comedy and/or projection:

The typical leitmotif of a Karl Rove column weaves together some combination of delusional optimism about Republican prospects in the next election with hilariously amnesiac attacks on President Obama for allegedly doing things that were in fact done by the president under which Rove served. Today’s column features plenty of the latter, calling Obama “anti-empirical,” accusing him of ignoring the long-term debt and having the insensitivity to take a vacation when the world is not a safe place. But it also refreshingly departs from the formula to lambaste Obama for doing something that George W. Bush never did: maintain calm in the face of terrorism.

Patricia J. Williams at The Nation asks what do we laugh at when we are laughing at Trump?

It’s widely said that Donald Trump is a clown. As he sits atop the polls, I’m intrigued by the perverse power of that clowning in shaping his success. Part of his popularity seems grounded in the ritual practices of the culture wars—for Donald Trump is not just a joke, he’s the embodiment of the politically incorrect joke, for which the customary response to umbrage is: “Don’t you have a sense of humor?” If the debate goes further, it usually becomes snagged upon First Amendment absolutism, proceeding in endless circles about one’s right to speak. […]

Public insults shaped as jokes do at least two things. First, they evade intentionality (including culpability for violations like invasion of privacy, harassment, or defamation): “I didn’t mean it!” goes the cry. Second, they disguise provocation and threat in the bubble wrap of not-meaning. In that allowance, we ritualize very old hierarchies: revulsions about blood, class, status, lineage, bodily emissions, aesthetics, and just deserts. Take a fraternity holding slave auctions in blackface and then shrugging off criticism as the whining of coddled, effete, elitist, wussy crybabies. Cruelty sheathed in glee and presented ironically is imposed more efficiently than cruelty alone.

Maxwell Tani demonstrates just how steep a challenge winning in 2016 is for the GOP, or conversely, how badly would the Dems have to screw up to lose.

Indeed, an extensive new report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP) lays out just how steep a climb the Republican nominee will face next November.

The report notes that even by modest standards, Democrats have a significant, though not unbeatable, advantage heading into the 2016 election, primarily because of the growth of a diverse coalition of voters that backed President Barack Obama in 2012 — millennials, Latinos, and single women.

White voters remain a solidly Republican bloc, though Democrats have gained with white single women and college-educated white voters. Married and working-class white voters continue to gravitate toward the Republican Party, according to the report.

While the share of white voters is expected to shrink two percentage points lower than its level in 2012, the share of young and minority voters will likely be two points higher that it was in 2012. CAP suggested that the number may be even higher in key swing states.

“The eventual Democratic nominee is therefore likely to have significantly more voters from communities of color to work with in 2016 than in 2012,” said the report, which was authored by Ruy Teixeira, John Halpin, and Rob Griffin. “But can she or he plausibly hope to replicate the 81% support among these minority voters President Obama received in his 2008 and 2012 election victories?”

If the eventual Democratic nominee maintains 2012 levels of support among three key groups — an “11-point deficit among white college graduates, a 22-point deficit among white working-class voters, and a 64-point advantage among minority voters” — the Democratic candidate will overwhelmingly win the popular vote, and will almost certainly win the election, the report’s authors concluded.

And even though minority voters, who are expected to make up 30% of the electorate in 2016, are key to Democrats’ election strategy, the nominee could actually afford to lose some support within those blocs.

CAP estimated that even if minority groups’ support for the Democratic nominee fell to 78%, and if opposition among white working-class supporters stood at the levels of the 2014 midterm elections, in which Democrats were crushed, Democrats could still win if the party maintained its 2012 support from white college graduates.

Donald Trump is just another tax cut and borrow Republican, a man more interested in taxing the poor so he can cut his own taxes. From the New York Times:

Donald J. Trump’s tax plan would benefit the wealthiest Americans the most while saddling the economy with trillions of dollars in new debt, according to an analysis released on Tuesday by the Tax Policy Center. […] The proposal would cut the top tax rate to 25 percent from 39.6 percent, and bring down the corporate tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent. […] Despite the populist tone of his campaign, Mr. Trump’s plan appears to open new loopholes that would allow the well-off to shave their tax bills and could debilitate the economy as lawmakers look for requisite spending cuts. According to analysts at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the cuts would mean nearly $25 trillion in lost government revenue over the next 20 years, and swell the ratio of debt to gross domestic product from about 74 percent to 180 percent.

“The revenue losses from this plan are really enormous,” Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, said on a conference call before releasing the report. “Basically it would negate all the economic benefits if we were running deficits anywhere near as large as we’re projecting here.”

[…] While Mr. Trump said that billionaires like himself would be hit the hardest under his plan, the Tax Policy Center disagrees. It calculates that high income taxpayers get the biggest cuts in dollar terms and as a share of their income. The richest 0.1 percent would receive an average tax cut of $1.3 million in 2017, or 19 percent of their after-tax income, while the average cut for everyone would be about $5,100, or 7 percent of their pay.

Paul Krugman on the success of Obamacare.

So the program is achieving its goals, albeit with a somewhat different mix of kinds of insurance than predicted, and doing so more cheaply than expected. That’s a big success story — and remember, the critics scoffed at those expectations and predicted utter disaster.

Let’s check in on the political betting markets, since we don’t have any polls today:

At the betting market site PredictIt, Florida Senator Marco Rubio has been favored to win the Republican nomination since early October. Or he was, until yesterday, when Cruz shot out ahead of him. As of 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Cruz was trading at 36 cents per share on PredictIt, Rubio at 34 cents. The party’s polling favorite, Donald Trump, has a comfortable hold on third place at 27 cents, more than double the price of his closest competitor, some guy named “Jeb!”

Still, betting-market-aggregator Predictwise considers Rubio significantly more likely to win the nod, giving him a 35 percent chance to Cruz’s 27 and Trump’s 22. But even a second-place showing in the betting markets is impressive. The markets have long treated both Cruz and Trump with marked skepticism. After September’s GOP debate, Jeb Bush held a commanding lead over both candidates in such markets, despite far worse poll numbers. Back then, gamblers trusted that the Republican Establishment’s clear preference for a Bush victory would prove decisive.

Now, even money says this is a different kind of election – one in which “the party” doesn’t decide.