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I don't get these "religious freedom" bills

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/north-carolina%E2%80%99s-terrible-anti-lgbt-law-even-worse-we-thought
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/04/08/civil-rights-groups-mobilize-against-mississippis-religious-freedom-law/82804786/

I am not an expert in the law, but when you open a business, I think there is the assumption that you will encounter undesirable/offensive patrons now and then. But most enterprises will still accept their money, because the bottom line is often more important than principle. Sure, if people are blatantly violating your code of conduct or basic decency, you can refuse the right to serve (and call the authorities on them). But $1 from Jack or Jill or Ahmed should be accepted equally, otherwise you are biased.

For equal opportunity employment, there are federal laws and it's pretty clear. If Jack is qualified to do the job, and you hire him, then you must give equal consideration if Jill (or a person with some sort of differentiating feature like age, sexual orientation, disability, etc.) has equivalent qualifications. And you can't retaliate against workers who complain about prejudicial treatment.

For a private business, I'm less clear. But if these MS and NC style laws spread, it sets a dangerous precedent. I know we give special protections for religion, and Christianity is the dominant faith in the US, but we all are entitled to equal protection under the law, even those without a faith. Anyone can come up with some sort of reason to refuse service to a patron because they disagree with some element of their behavior/persona (or are "offended" by it). But I'm sorry, in the US we have the right to offend, just not harm. You are guaranteed to life and liberty (tell that to poor urban black youth though), but not an offense free life.

The MS law narrowly states (according to USA Today): "The denial of certain services to the LGBT community based on any of three religious beliefs -- that marriage is between a man and a woman, that sex is proper only within such a marriage, and that people are male or female based on their genetics and anatomy at birth."

So are those the only considerations that matter? Why not expand it to Jews, who after all, rejected Jesus' teachings and condemned him? Would America be OK with that? Plenty of heterosexual (and Christian) couples engage in sodomy/anal sex. Do you need a questionnaire to screen those folks out of your establishment too? Would such a business be sustainable?

What if I am a Satanist and I am offended by Christians, so I refuse to serve and hire them? Supporters of the law have to be OK with that, right? Selective beliefs/outrage always tick me off; so John Q Baker doesn't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding (sinful abomination), but he is OK to sell pastries to a clearly obese person (gluttony, deadly sin)? And just because he refused to bake that wedding cake, did he stop those 2 men from getting hitched? Likely not. So what was the point, that he can go home with a clear conscience? Well he can tell St. Peter, and also admit that he refused to act with compassion and love that day. If Mr. Baker cares so much, why not take some time to talk to the gay couple and use your wits/morals to convince them to change their ways? Nope, it's just easier/lazier to discriminate. And even that is flawed - I am sure some gay customers slip through the cracks and still get service. So you let down your god! How can you live with yourself?

I am not too concerned about these laws because I think they are poorly thought out and destined to be struck down by a higher ruling. It's probably hasty backlash against the recent SCOTUS rulings about gay marriage, gay adoption, employer covered contraception, etc. Religious conservatives feel like their belief system (and "traditional American values") are under attack, yet I bet most of them never even encounter a gay couple in their daily affairs, so is their life so much worse now? Even if I was against Obamacare, I would have to admit that I don't feel its effects at all in my daily life, so I can't claim any harm, apart from "feeling offended."

Grow up. Sometime you don't get your way, and sometime you don't approve of what others are doing. That is compromise and living in a mixed society, and Christians are still the majority faith with the most sociopolitical power. We should strive to protect everyone's freedoms as much as possible, but not at the expense of discriminating another group. Because then who gets to decide who wins and loses in each case? I thought conservatives were opposed to the gov't picking winners and losers? Just another display of hypocrisy. I don't even know why I wasted 30 min of my life writing about this issue. It's so ludicrous it's almost comical.

News potpourri

• New bipedal robot from Boston Dynamics is amazing, terrifying, and pitiful all at once
• We already knew that tech workers can be immature and insensitive, but this suggests that elite wealth/education isn't doing a good enough job on race issues either (and living in the cosmo. Bay Area doesn't guarantee racial awareness either)
• BTW, MS-FB-Google are ~2% black, and Apple is super-diverse at 8%
• This Trump thing has evolved from a joke/curiosity to real national concern; if he wins the nomination, then ALL OF US seriously have to volunteer (and get our networks to do so, also) to help his main rival, if we care about America
• http://youtu.be/DRauXXz6t0Y
  
  
  It is understandable for some to oppose abortion, but this video describes the almost cruel/vindictive ways that some red state governments obstruct patients and providers. America is not even going after ISIS this passionately.
• More John Oliver recently vs. Trump: http://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132366/john-oliver-donald-trump-last-week-tonight
  
  As his GOP rivals said, the guy is a glorified watch salesman; all talk/image no substance. Maybe supporters are voting for the name, just like Clinton I guess (I assume most of her supporters can't really articulate her major career accomplishments and Senate voting record). We buy based on what we think the benefits of the brand are, and brand ultimately leads to happiness more than product features. But Oliver's point was that the "Trump" image has nothing to do with the candidate/man (he can understand why people like the mythical notion of a "Donald Trump" leading America, but that is not what we'll get on inaug. day). Actually his actions only merit the "Donald Drumpf" brand.
  
  
  Very entertaining, but the only downside is that it could help Rubio/Cruz (whose stated policies are not that different to those of Trump). However, I don't know which of these guys pose the greatest challenge to Hillary (I support Sanders, but I know the odds are against him).

TLDR campaign discussion 2

I'm referring to the ability of the electorate to alter the policies and behavior of the state through elections. If the system doesn't allow for that, I think it's failing the first and most essential test of popular government.

Our current system seems to be doing worse and worse on this criterion (partly due to Constitutional constraints such as checks and balances and the separation of powers, partly for other reasons), and I think it's creating a worsening democratic deficit in national government. This deficit makes the system more vulnerable to people like Trump by undermining the electorate's confidence in the ability of the political system to address political problems.

Fundamentally, the public needs to be to vote for something in one election; bring the people promising it into power; and then, next time around, if they're not happy with how things have gone, throw the government out and vote someone else into the chair sitting under the sword of Damocles. In our current system, we never get to hold any party responsible for failure because every part of the system is so interdependent with all the others. There's a smaller and smaller scope for actual policymaking, so, in lieu of democratic government, we're stuck with a permanent election campaign.

---

Yeah the irony is that we are in 24-7 campaign mode, yet the incumbents win 95% of the time, and occasionally we get the macro cycles of "boot the bums out" every decade or so (or every recession/fiasco: Iraq led to the Dem majority, financial crisis led to Obama, and then Obama - racism/panic over what Obama represents IMO - led to the TP and GOP resurgence).

As you said, what is the point of elections and representative gov't if they don't reflect the wants of the voters? When candidates are generally limited to the insider/oligarch class (incl. Trump), obviously that doesn't represent most voters. But with Citizens United and other structural realities of our system, how can that change? If anything, it will continue to change for the worse as you said. Good times.

Another problem is that voters get so fed up with the corrupt, apathetic elites that they want reform/revolution, but then opportunists like Trump, Le Pen, Hugo Chavez, etc. ride the angry populist wave, even though they are in it for themselves & may even make things worse.

---

As far as how to change it goes, I see it as a problem of institutions more than anything else. Our institutions don't provide clear signals to voters and this contributes to viciously perverse incentives for politicians.

To think of it as an analytical problem, election platforms are hypotheses and actions in office are experiments. Our problem is that our experiments are poorly controlled and rife with confounding factors, so we can never disprove any of our hypotheses. (Obviously, even under the best of circumstances, it's hard to identify intraterm success metrics for politicians, since many effects may lag their causes by years or even generations; but we're a very long way from this being our biggest problem.) The effect of this phenomenon is that we have a calcified set of hypotheses that become quasireligious totems ("lower taxes", "universal healthcare", "school choice", "gun control", etc.) and almost totally monopolize our political discourse, in large part because they can't be meaningfully tested.

To tip my hand a little bit, I'd point to the UK. Their system has a number of weaknesses, but it hasn't suffered much from this particular problem. Margaret Thatcher remains a deeply divisive figure in the UK, but no one is confused about what she did. Likewise Clement Attlee; you may love the NHS or you may hate it, but there's no question that Attlee's government is responsible for it. I want that kind of agency and clarity for American governments.

I'm personally not all that concerned by the fact that politicians disproportionately come from the upper classes. There's a long and (mostly) honorable tradition of aristrocrats who find a constituency outside the aristocracy, from Pericles to the Gracchi to Lafayette to Asquith to Kerensky to FDR to Stevenson to Trump. (Kerensky and Asquith weren't quite as aristocratic as the other names on the list, of course, but they both came from classes whose interests were not the main beneficiaries of their platforms.) As long as the people are the sole source of political power, anyone who wants to wield that power will have to cater to the interests of the electorate, even if it might go against the interests of the class into which they were born. History shows us that there are plenty of members of the upper classes who will cheerfully oblige.

That being said, I'm conceding in advance that my prediction "We won't be taking about Donald Trump after Super Tuesday" is not going to come true. I still wouldn't give him much better than even odds of winning the nomination right now, but, on my estimation, his odds have been much more improved than worsened in the last couple weeks, and the break in the party elites' refusal to support him seems a very significant move in his favor. Oh well.

---

 

I like that insight that political platforms = hypotheses and administrations = expts. Too bad that the folks in power always attribute "successes" to their actions/vision and failures to the opposition party / external events / people who hate the country. Maybe some of it is true, but that prevents a lot of useful learning and avoidance of repeated mistakes (e.g. Vietnam to Iraq to the inevitable next quagmire).

Well, you must have seen the S. Tues results. I suppose Kasich is holding on to try to win OH, but probably that helps Trump because his supporters would likely not shift to Trump's camp if he bowed out. A Brokered Conv. would be quite something, and in this case I'd say it's justified. But it is a slippery slope as Peter suggested. 

At least it's not like the smoky secret boardrooms where Cheney and Co. planned out how we would carve up the Middle East among Exxon, Boeing, and Halliburton. In this case, it's "how the fuck do we prevent calamity and save what shreds are left of the GOP's rep?" Maybe this is an unfair analogy, but it's kind of like the Turkish/Egyptian/Pakistani military stepping in (as a venerable institution guarding the national interest) and unseating the Muslim Brotherhood or some other leader. Call it a coup, but I guess sometime in a coup you can actually replace a bad guy with a less bad guy. 

Lastly to change gears a bit, I am pretty tired of Michael Hayden's PR tour re: his recent book to whitewash all his spycraft from the last decade. 

• The most misleading quote he had recently was that "if [Trump or the next president] wants to bring back waterboarding, they need to bring their own bucket." (slight paraphrase) Meaning that the CIA would refuse to participate. 
• It's not because the CIA has somehow found morals and now respects int'l laws, but that they felt "betrayed" by the Obama admin. and Congressional Dems who investigated the activity and alleged that it was criminal. 
• He said that the torturers acted in good faith and under the assumption that the (Bush) WH lawyers supported what they were trying to do, ostensibly to reduce threats and gather intel. 
• So that makes it all good, because the intent was noble and their boss said it was OK? You have a sworn duty to not follow unlawful orders. 
• He totally ignored the fact that our security apparatus has some real bad apples / sociopaths in it, and they welcome any opportunity to overstep bounds. 
• But we should probably blame the politicians/voters for this. We were all freaked out after 9/11 and just gave the security svcs. carte-blanche: "just protect us and we don't care how you do it, we'll look the other way." We shouldn't be surprised that some abuses occurred.
• Hayden said that Trump's proposal to go after terrorists' families "because they deserve it" is wrong; intel is about anticipating the future, not avenging the past. 
• While that is partly true in principle, there is no way that the CIA/NSA isn't deep in the vengeance and punishment game (hasn't he heard of Richard Nixon?). 

http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-29/ex-cia-director-trump-bring-your-own-bucket-if-you-want-waterboard

At least he's siding with Apple vs. the FBI. Anyone who thinks it's safer for the gov't to have exclusive keys to a backdoor into our most intimate personal devices, and nothing could possible go wrong with that, well I have a bridge to sell you.

---

I think it's humorous that if Trump wasn't running this year, we'd probably be mocking Rubio/Cruz/Carson as total joke candidates. But in comparison they are the safe/sane ones. Remember the "Teflon Don" John Gotti? Trump is the new "Teflon Donald" because as Eric said, no matter what terrible stuff he says/does, his support doesn't take a hit. Truly marketing & demagoguery at its worst. This is cold-water-to-the-face for US politics, but it should also be for US civics education. We might not have gotten to this point if secondary school (and parents/role models) did a better job to stress the seriousness & implications of civic engagement & vetting leaders.

Re: the CIA, yeah I think we can always find anecdotes where torture was "effective" or "ineffective." I suppose it also depends if they nabbed the right guy, as our thugs have rounded up & rendered to Gitmo (and Syria, when we actually paid Assad to torture folks for us) dozens of innocent/irrelevant people since 2001. The advocates of harsh security measures never consider this calculus:

• Either totally don't engage in torture/violation of due process/etc. on moral/principled grounds (because legal grounds will always have gray areas and loopholes)
• Or if you are considering it, think about: + benefit of the intel gained from true positives - cost of maintaining this global covert program - cost of type I/II errors - cost of true negatives (you tortured the wrong guy but didn't believe him until the end, thereby wasting resources/time) - blowback if/when your activities are made public
• I just don't see how that formula could be positive

TLDR campaign discussion 1

Shame on your guys, I'm discussing politics more at work now than with my friends and family. :) Just don't tell my boss please. I'm trying to limit it to 45 min/day haha, but Trump doesn't make it easy. Here are some snippets FYI:

• it seems like a lot of qualifications are negative this year: not-Trump vs. not-establishment; not-Clinton vs. not-"socialist."
• Like what some conservative voices are saying, the GOP needs to be about more than being against Obama and progressive programs. What are they going to do for Americans?
  So far I've heard:
  -get Mexico to build a border wall
  -defeat ISIS somehow 
  -bring back waterboarding 
  -get Putin to behave somehow 
  -de nuclearize Iran and NK somehow
  -lower taxes and fewer regs
  -tariffs on China
  -get China to stop hacking us somehow
• Yeah I think with the Republican complaints that Obama has been too weak/passive on foreign policy by the more hawkish candidates, it's hard to get support for more restraint/withdrawal, even when that is the soundest course of action for the US. Rand tried to reinvent himself as a "hawk libertarian" and he failed in both respects.
  So now it's a la mode to wave the big American phallus around and be the strong global cop again. I suppose it's been a sufficient number of years since the Bushie neocons left DC in shame, so their ideas are making a comeback with weak memory conservatives?
• Well, if you're compiling a list of Rubio's qualifications, you should probably include his stint in the Florida House of Representatives, including serving as speaker.
  
  
  And I'm hardly the first person to observe that his main resume line items of:
  • State legislature
  • Non-tenured teaching position at a university
  • First term US Senator

  do sound rather reminiscent of another recent presidential candidate. (Rubio did them in a different order, of course, and no amount of educational egalitarianism is going to make me treat FIU as being in the same league as the University of Chicago, but still.)
• To be a little tongue-in-cheek, I have not been that impressed with some of the speakers/majority leaders in the CA Legislature, so in comparison I am not sure how prestigious the SOTH of FL is. :)
  
  
  And at least Obama was also editor of the Harvard Law Review. 
  
  
  Maybe that is why Rubio repeated himself so much at the debate; from his FIU days he's used to rehashing the same basic facts to his distracted students until they get it? :)
• I clearly don't put Bush on the Obama/BillC intelligence level. However maybe he wasn't the bumbling moron that some critics painted. He was just really living in a bubble and surrounded by enablers, so based on the slanted info he was fed, he really believed that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators and Katrina wasn't a big deal. 
  
  
  But the fault's on him for not being more inquisitive/skeptical, and hiring a "team of rivals" to make sure that he was getting diverse viewpoints and info. Powell was the only non-Evangelical non-Neocon he had, and he seemed to get over-ruled a lot. Plus he didn't really make much of a stink/protest on key controversial decisions, I guess trying to be the good soldier and all. 

  
  

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haQzdW7hg4A
• Heh yeah - Jeb embodies "pathetic" at this point. I almost feel sorry for him, but then I remember Florida 2000 (and that he is the #1 fan of the Dubya foreign policy). Even his campaign logo looks juvenile and desperate. And yet he's raised as much $ as Clinton, driven by his family's network and establishment/pro-business cred I guess.
  
  
  Imagine what it must be like to be one of his grassroots supporters (they must need heroin too)! This Sam. Bee segment captures that. 
  
  
  His debate exchanges with his BFF Trump remind me of this sheltered rich kid, who always was the center of attn and got his way (which he is), now sent off to boarding school and has to deal with the big, bad bully from NYC.
• I haven't laughed this hard in a long time:
  http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/donald-trump-signs-a-baby-621618243755
  Maybe it was the cutaway to Talladega Nights?
• I think that you're grotesquely misrepresenting Nate's position, not just in that article but since Trump announced, which I read as "early polls don't tell you very much, so let's wait until something actually happens before going off the Trump end":
  1. Many voters aren't paying much attention yet.
  2. Even those voters who are paying attention have a high likelihood of changing their minds between, say, August, and whenever they actually participate in a primary or caucus.
  3. It's very hard to interpret polling results in a very crowded field. Sixteen candidates simply give you too many degrees of freedom.
  4. It's practically pointless to look at national polls early in the nomination process, because the early voting states play a massively disproportionate role in determining the outcome.

  The above are generic to all early polling for a nomination contest and they explain why it would have been foolish to expect, say, Herman Cain to win the nomination based on strong early polling when he was the 2012 not-Romney du jour.
  
  
  Add to all of the above the simple empirical fact that no one like Trump has ever won or come close to winning either party's nomination. The social scientist should at least be open to the possibility that that fact isn't an accident and that such candidates (or potential candidates) may face hurdles which aren't immediately obvious.
  
  
  To his credit, as we've gotten closer to and further into the actual primaries and caucuses, he's started placing more weight on the polls, pretty much exactly as he said he would last summer.
• I'm honestly more scared of Trump than Cruz, on the grounds that the latter is a particularly loathsome manifestation of a disease from which American politics has long suffered. The former may be a wholely new ailment.
  My main hope of being right in my prediction may now rest on the avalanche of negative advertising that's coming Trump's way. So here's to the super PACs; may their aim not falter.
• Yeah, speaking of profitable - Trump claims that he has self-funded much of his campaign, but in actuality he's made loans to businesses that he controls. He barely buys ads (gets free pub from the media), and has contracted Trump enterprises for catering, merch, and facilities. I guess this fiasco did start out as a shameless cash grab + ego stroking, as Eric mentioned last year!
  
  
  http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/donald-trump-fec-fundraising-214838
  

  
  

  Wow, this is shaping up to be a really politically impactful year: https://www.yahoo.com/politics/what-does-justice-scalias-death-mean-for-pending-000410173.html

  
  

  Do you think Obama will be able to confirm a nominee before he vacates the WH, or will the GOP filibuster?
• Yeah, the GOP supposedly packed the SC debate audience with pro-establishment types who were obviously hostile to Trump and more friendly to Bush and Rubio (esp. Bush). Yet Trump still has a huge lead in the polls there. 
  
  
  Trump proclaimed the undeniable facts that:
  • 9/11 occurred while Bush was president
  • No WMDs were found in Iraq
  • Abortions aside, Planned Parenthood does have other positive impacts for its clients 
  • The Iraq War was a mistake, considering hindsight and alternative actions available at the time (some holdouts still disagree with this)

  So of course he got gang-tackled by his rivals and booed by the crowd.
• I guess that embodies the crisis in the GOP that x previously described. Those blindly loyal to the Establishment's record, and those who think the Establishment's led conservatism astray - and they need a fresh approach (even if it's xenophobic and unrealistic).
  A follow up to Trump's Bush criticisms. Maybe US memory is fairly short-term; it's been almost a decade since W was in the WH. Some folks forget (or don't want to acknowledge) what a truly historically disastrous presidency it was - almost across every important dimension of national leadership. AFAIK, Bush only really made noteworthy contributions to fighting AIDS; the rest of his job performance was lackluster at best or wildly inept/detrimental to the national interest at worst.
  He and the financial crisis (which his admin. failed to avoid even though there were warning signs) were the top reasons why an inexperienced half-black guy with a Muslim name succeeded him (not to take anything away from the great accomplishments of the Obama campaign, but conditions played a major role) - that is how fed up America was. Alas, in 2016 we're still fed up, but conservatives are mad about Obama "ruining everything" (even though conditions have greatly improved in many areas that conservatives supposedly care about: economic indicators, gov't spending, etc.). And progressives are mad about the rigged game and inability for supposedly liberal leaders to do anything about it (even Obama couldn't usher in a movement/revolution, hence the rise of Sanders).
  http://theweek.com/articles/606035/why-donald-trumps-vicious-attack-george-w-bush-brutally-effective--brilliant
  But Trump is not just running against Bushism. He's running against what it's a symptom of — the certain kind of insider sophistry that he says defines the political class. That's why he was onstage at all last night. That's why he's in first place now. And that's why he's more at home in the GOP than so many want to admit.
  To understand how that could possibly be, understand what he's not arguing.
  The typical critique of politics today is that the ruling class has been corrupted by privilege. There's too much money in politics; there's too much of a cult of access; the tropes go on and on. Trump's not saying that. Instead, he's saying, the ruling class has been corrupted by foolishness. The problem isn't that "the politicians" have vanished behind the velvet rope. It's that they've vanished up their own rear ends. Obsessed with themselves, they have forgotten who they are. They have lost their way — and ours.
  If Bush thinks he can win in 2016, he is COUNTING on America forgetting who he is ("Wah wah, I'm tired of that meanie Trump making fun of my family!" Well don't they deserve it, Jeb?). And that is not a very sound strategy. But hey, strategy is not exactly the Bushes' forte.
• Yeah the blame can't fall solely on Bush's shoulders; his cabinet/appointees was mostly comprised of Siths and/or imbeciles like Cheney, Rummy, Ridge, Condi (a smart academic but imbecile leader), etc. And remember that Bush wanted that unqualified quack Harriet Miers to be on the SCOTUS? That shows his judgment - everyone from TX is A-OK!
  
  
  Maybe you saw this interview of FNC's Megyn Kelly tearing into Cheney on his record as VP, and why should anyone listen to him now when he was so wrong so often while in office? I think FNC/Ailes has also reflected the GOP schism we've been discussing - on one hand they are part of the establishment, but on the business side, they need to embrace the TP/Trump sentiment that the old-GOP is the problem. FNC is hilarious because a lot of their programming insinuates that the MSM is the problem, yet they are also representatives of the MSM.
  
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-MeX4CbgGo
• I'm curious to know where you got that impression, since it's at odds with what I'd thought and what I believe is the conventional wisdom (i.e., that Bush has been, until the past week, primarily focused on attacking Rubio). There's a link in the 538 piece you liked which shows Right to Rise spending about half again as much on attack ads against Rubio as against Trump (and about as much on attacking Kasich as on attacking Trump). If you have a very strong stomach, you can watch the ads for yourself at the Political TV Ad Archive. The recent ones are very anti-Trump, now that Bush has decided that he needs to take Trump seriously, but, if you look at the ads that Right to Rise was running in the run up to Iowa and New Hampshire, you could be forgiven for thinking that Marco Rubio was the Republican front-runner.
  In general, I'd say that a big part of the stamina shown by the Trump phenomenon is the fact that the non-Trump candidates have been individually rational but collectively irrational in attacking him. I think that they're each averse to doing the dirty work (and suffering the attendant backlash) and are still hoping to attract the largest share of the current Trump supporters once Donald drops out. (This is obviously Cruz's strategy; note little ill he's said of Trump throughout, even as Trump actually started to attack him; he sees each Trump voter as a potential Cruz voter and is doing everything in his power to keep from alienating them.)
  This is, of course, one of the things that can happen in a very crowded field and its why this sort of contest is very unpredictable. In its own amusing and ironic way, it's a market failure, as each candidate tries to free-ride on the attack ads that they hope the other guy's Super PAC is going to take out on Trump. (As a side note, I'd be curious to see what new regulations the RNC tries to impose on the nomination process in 2020, to correct the perceived failures of 2016. The free market may be good enough for me to buy my health insurance and my ground beef in, but it's clearly not good enough for choosing a GOP presidential nominee.)
• I'm curious to know where you got that impression, since it's at odds with what I'd thought and what I believe is the conventional wisdom (i.e., that Bush has been, until the past week, primarily focused on attacking Rubio). There's a link in the 538 piece you liked which shows Right to Rise spending about half again as much on attack ads against Rubio as against Trump (and about as much on attacking Kasich as on attacking Trump). If you have a very strong stomach, you can watch the ads for yourself at the Political TV Ad Archive. The recent ones are very anti-Trump, now that Bush has decided that he needs to take Trump seriously, but, if you look at the ads that Right to Rise was running in the run up to Iowa and New Hampshire, you could be forgiven for thinking that Marco Rubio was the Republican front-runner.
  In general, I'd say that a big part of the stamina shown by the Trump phenomenon is the fact that the non-Trump candidates have been individually rational but collectively irrational in attacking him. I think that they're each averse to doing the dirty work (and suffering the attendant backlash) and are still hoping to attract the largest share of the current Trump supporters once Donald drops out. (This is obviously Cruz's strategy; note little ill he's said of Trump throughout, even as Trump actually started to attack him; he sees each Trump voter as a potential Cruz voter and is doing everything in his power to keep from alienating them.)
  This is, of course, one of the things that can happen in a very crowded field and its why this sort of contest is very unpredictable. In its own amusing and ironic way, it's a market failure, as each candidate tries to free-ride on the attack ads that they hope the other guy's Super PAC is going to take out on Trump. (As a side note, I'd be curious to see what new regulations the RNC tries to impose on the nomination process in 2020, to correct the perceived failures of 2016. The free market may be good enough for me to buy my health insurance and my ground beef in, but it's clearly not good enough for choosing a GOP presidential nominee.)
• Yeah it's also ironic that the democratic systems we established in Iraq and Afghanistan are a lot more purely democratic than ours, and the legislatures in those nations have diversity requirements so they get a higher % of women/minorities than the US Congress (there are pros and cons to quotas of course). Yes, it's easier to create a "fair/pure" system when you build it from scratch and don't have 200 years of biases/inertia/baggage, and by no means are Iraq and Afghanistan's gov'ts the envy of the world, but just to make a point. :)
  
  
  I am not sure if it's more or less comforting that Congressmen make up the majority of superdelegates. They are assumed to be more informed re: political-gov't affairs, but they already wield disproportionate power as legislators - doesn't that violate the separation of powers that they can affect who sits in the exec. branch too?
• Yeah it's also ironic that the democratic systems we established in Iraq and Afghanistan are a lot more purely democratic than ours, and the legislatures in those nations have diversity requirements so they get a higher % of women/minorities than the US Congress (there are pros and cons to quotas of course). Yes, it's easier to create a "fair/pure" system when you build it from scratch and don't have 200 years of biases/inertia/baggage, and by no means are Iraq and Afghanistan's gov'ts the envy of the world, but just to make a point. :)
  
  
  I am not sure if it's more or less comforting that Congressmen make up the majority of superdelegates. They are assumed to be more informed re: political-gov't affairs, but they already wield disproportionate power as legislators - doesn't that violate the separation of powers that they can affect who sits in the exec. branch too?
• Don't get me wrong, Cruz scares me, too. But he scares me in the he'd-be-a-terrible-president way, whereas Trump scares me in the him-being-president-would-have-terrible-effects-for-the-entire-political-system way.
  
  
  In other words, we could be rid of Cruz in 4 to 8 years; hopefully, he wouldn't have done much more permanent damage in that time than George W. Bush did. If Trump wins, though, I feel like that, ipso facto, would be permanently damaging, almost irrespective of what he did as president.
• While I love the fact that we're getting articles about delegate allocation rules and imagining a race that continues until the last primary is over, I can't help but feel like Cillizza is assuming his hypothesis and then declaring it true. I agree that, if Donald Trump wins every state where he is currently leading in the polls and gets 30% of all the proportionally allocated delegates, then he will win the nomination. But whether he's able to do that is precisely the question; dressing it up with discussion about the delegate allocation rules doesn't change the fact that the article is essentially saying that, if circumstances don't change, they'll remain the same.
• 
  
  Yeah I suppose Cruz is a known quantity (basically W but smarter and meaner, and at least Congress generally hates him so they wouldn't let him steamroll his agenda).
  
  
  But with Trump, lord knows WTF will happen to US culture and politics overall, as Eric said. I think already he's kicked off huge alarms within the media and GOP, and they are likely reconsidering their standard modes of operation. The GOP establishment partly created the current angry conservative anti-gov't ultra-nationalist Tea Party movement (like an attack dog to do its bidding that broke free of its leash), so now their choice is either to (a) join/embrace/encourage them or (b) set up campaign rules/safeguards to avoid a repeat of 2016 (similar to the Dems' superdelegates I guess?). Clearly (b) is not very democratic, but it's preferable to (a) at the moment.
  
  
  However, do we know what % of America truly support Trump/Cruz/Tea Party agenda? They only have like ~40 Reps and ~4 Senators, right? That's why they are extremists, they have limited numbers. Maybe 20% of voters at best? But then how many moderate GOPs or independents would side with them vs. Hillary?
• One man's opportunist is another man's demagogue.
  That said, my feeling is that the classic win-the-nomination-at-the-extremes-then-move-to-the-center formula is going to get less and less useful as more and more pervasive and universally available media combines with the modern obsession with authenticity to prevent candidates from making such a move. It's already much harder than it used to be to tell every group of voters exactly what they want to hear, because what you say to any one of them has a high likelihood of making it to all of them (e.g., Mitt Romney and the 47%).
  Obama did a reasonably successful job of threading this needle in 2008, emphasizing his opposition to the Iraq War in the primaries, then leaning toward the center against McCain; but he was an unusually disciplined candidate, who kept his options for the general election open even in the difficult slog of the 2008 campaign for the nomination. To say that Trump is not as disciplined as Obama seems inadequate to the magnitude of the difference.
  But then again, I've been making a habit of underestimating Trump's appeal ever since August. This may just be the latest repetition of that same refrain.
• I agree that that's the consensus, but, at this point, we need to at least give a hearing to x's previously articulated hypothesis that Trump may have succeeded (perhaps inadvertently) in bringing a new and ugly element into the GOP coalition.
  Technically, I suppose that it's an element which had already existed, but he's proved capable of tapping it for many more votes than had previously been thought possible and has really brought it to the forefront. It may even turn out that this group (whom I'm thinking of as the alienated and embittered, but who might well think of themselves in less pejorative terms) takes over the dominant role in the GOP coalition, previously the province of the Chamber of Commerce/libertarian light/establishment wing of the party, which occasionally shared the reins with the social conservative/evangelical wing. We already saw a foretaste of this with the Tea Party, but the Tea Party never actually managed to take over the party or set the agenda in anything other than amped up distaste for Obama and all his works.
  This (i.e., Trump voters setting the GOP agenda) is my nightmare, in a nutshell, and it's why I see Trump as potentially worse than Cruz. Fully realized, it could lead the GOP to become a slightly less well behaved version of the French Front National, which I'd see as a disaster.
  I still think that the above is a very low likelihood event, but I'm thinking about it now, having dismissed it out of hand four months ago.
• maybe Trump is a flu that the US just has to get out of our system; we learn our lesson and then we get immunity for a while. Nationalism/fundamentalism is a chronic issue that revisits societies now and then due to various factors. What's strange to me is that I can understand why extremists rise in shattered economies like Greece, but things are going pretty well in the US now (based on many macro indicators - though obviously we still have employment/affordability/econ. security issues in many places). Is it all media hype or the irrational frustration that some white men feel that they are "losing America"? When the zealots harm the economy, that is usually when the mainstream kicks them out. At least Trump doesn't hear the word of god in his ear, unlike Cruz. Already the Chamber-of-Commerce type GOP has declared war on the TP/Trump/Cruz, but I wonder if they would back a Dem over the TP (Lindsey Graham mentioned this). 
  
  
  Haha we sure have put all our hopes with that bumbling man-child Rubio (he kinda reminds me of Quayle, and W)!
• It's funny how likability/trustworthiness is such an important decision factor for many folks. As a lifelong "progressive", I might agree with half of Clinton's platform or more, but I just can't stand her personally (for reasons that I can only partially articulate). I don't think this is sexism (I love Warren, Gillebrand, Waters, etc.), but it's just her, and her manner of politicking. Maybe it's also cuz Hillary is rather hawkish, like Feinstein who I also dislike. But sure, I'll vote for her over any of the GOP, unless she does something really dirty to sink Sanders.
  
  
  You're likable enough, Hillary. https://youtu.be/Mx_Uk_VffcY?t=37 
  
  
  Well, Hillary was inevitable in 2008 also, so nothing is for sure. I think her campaign realizes that this time though, and the close calls with Sanders in IA and NV should be further evidence to not get complacent.
• To be very narrow-mindedly specific, that's net favorability, meaning that Germans have a slightly more positive than negative view of the US. (And meaning that the average German's view of the United States is a bit more favorable than the average view expressed on this thread.) The source for Tim's data, BTW, is the research that that Pew does on international attitudes, and I think it's generally thought to be the best source for how the US is perceived by the outside world. They've got a number of other interesting questions, too.
  
  For his part, Taibbi is typically hysterical and hyperbolic, but I don't find his contempt all that interesting or instructive. It beggars belief that he actually thinks that the US political class (a group which has pretty cheerfully welcomed Jesse Ventura, Sonny Bono, and Barack Obama) is somehow the "most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised". If he really thinks that, he needs to get out of the house and visit a real oligarchy.
  
  On the other hand, once I got about two thirds of the way through the article, he started talking about something that I did find interesting (not least because it agrees with what I already think and is therefore, ipso facto, very well thought out and persuasive. The choice quote from the article, from my perspective, is
  
  

  Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame.

  
  

  This observation (which I think aligns neatly with my favorite concept of dirigibility as an essential element of democratic government) and the surrounding paragraphs hit the nail precisely on the head about the degree to which the post-Nixon Republican Party has relied on the not at all obvious coalition between business elites (the Chamber of Commerce wing) and frustrated and anxiety-filled White Middle America, in both their religious and nativist flavors (these are the Reagan Democrats that Ted Cruz says he'll win away from Hillary Clinton, as if they hadn't been voting Republican for a generation). In a lot of ways, this is an alliance between the people who are scared by the modern world (and especially the globalized, post-rich world manual labor economy) and some of the people who are most conspicuously profiting from it. That coalition has profited the Republicans well over the past 40 years, but has left them talking out of both sides of their collective mouth on a whole host of issues. This seems like something that can't go on forever and we may be witnessing one of the threads unravel, with Trump gleefully tugging on the thread.
• Yeah exactly! What frustrates me about the rank-and-file GOP is that the things that bother them are partly/mostly driven by the capitalistic conservative elites of their own party:
  • Globalization (which can be/is a net good, but not when it concentrates the benefits to a select few)
  • And by extension, immigration (again, a net good but there always some losers, and businesses want/need cheap foreign labor)
  • Increasing economic pressures on the middle class
  • Also a deterioration of gov't institutions & the social safety net to pay for tax cuts to the rich
  • An unstable world with many ambiguous security threats
  • Including our hostile, trigger-happy society 
  And then the propagandists shift the blame to the War on Christmas, War on Cops, War on X, global-warming-is-a-hoax, abortion, and other crap so the rank-and-file blame liberals instead. I appreciate that Trump (and Paul) were at least calling out this hypocrisy re: war on drugs, Iraq, and wealth inequality - even if they wouldn't really do much about it as presidents (well maybe Paul would try to reduce our military footprint and reform the justice system and drug laws).