What Are Sex Addicts Doing Now? Is Promiscuous Sex Still A Thing During The Pandemic?

Mike Huckabee's 10,000 square feet $6 million McMansion looks out over Walton County's Gulf Coast. Mother Jones reported that he's been complaining about people walking on his beach-- and says he once "saw a young couple strip naked and have sex on a YOLO board there at two in the afternoon. But now that the county has finally closed the beach and kicked out all the spring breakers as part of its pandemic response, Huckabee has sued the county because he can’t go out there either. I wonder if Huckabee wants to have sex on a YOLO board. Are people still having promiscuous sex with strangers? Dan Savage says NO-- No, No, No! "We're not supposed to come within six feet of anyone we don't live with, NR, which means you can't invite this guy over to play cribbage and/or fuck you senseless. If you wanted to invite this guy over to stay, you could shack up and wait out the lockdown together. But you can't invite him over just to play."

Brothels and prostitution are basically legal in Europe-- but not during the pandemic. Sex workers in countries like Holland and Germany-- most of them foreign-- are now unemployed and many also now homeless-- and unable to get home through closed borders. There were between 100,000 and 200,000 prostitutes-- 80% of them foreign, mainly from Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine-- working in Germany before the brothels were shut down in March along with other non-essential businesses like restaurants and nightclubs. Some of these sex workers are now are soliciting for clients on the streets to survive meet until brothels reopen.

Nevada has a similar story-- legal prostitution and, as of March 19, closed down brothels and strip clubs. Nevada's brothel industry brought in between $35 million and $50 million that year, and served about 400,000 clients. But there are sex workers everywhere across America. Are some of them disregarding social distancing and working now? Are some of their regular clients been driven by whatever drives them under non-pandemic circumstances?

On Tuesday, L.A.'s David Kordansky Gallery opens a month-long Tom of Finland exhibition-- online. They represent the Tom of Finland-- Touko Laaksonen-- estate and emphasize that the artist "has long been recognized as one of the 20th century’s great visual innovators. As he confronted the stigmas and stereotypes that long burdened homosexual desire, his depictions of empowered gay men fully enjoying their sexuality proved liberating on social and aesthetic levels alike. The sheer range of his influence on the culture at large is immeasurable. His work assumes a key role in the art historical discourse (Tom’s drawings are in the collections of institutions like The Museum of Modern Art, New York and regularly appear in museum shows throughout the world), while also occupying a place in every corner of the popular imagination."

Can an online exhibition of his erotic work serve as a substitute for sex? Or a provocation to go out and look for the real thing? I don't know. I asked the gallery's publicist. She didn't know either. I also asked a young friend of mine who is sexually active with strangers-- or was. He no longer uses Grindr and is strict about social distancing. But... he knows of underground parties in L.A. "Some people wear masks and gloves," he said.

Writing last week for the New Yorker Masha Gessen asked about lessons from the AIDS crisis that can be helpful today. Gessen-- who prefers the pronoun "they"-- wrote that "Over the past month, those of us who lived through the aids epidemic have searched for ways in which that experience can inform the covid-19 crisis. Do we know something that can be useful now? Can this knowledge help us survive?

Even in the middle of a nearly nationwide lockdown, at no level do we think of the pandemic as our problem. That allows the Supreme Court to rule that Wisconsin cannot extend its deadline for absentee ballots, deciding, in effect, that it’s the voters’ problem if they would not risk their health to go to the polls and the state didn’t have enough ballots for them. This is a problem not only on the right of the political spectrum-- back in March, Joe Biden’s campaign was encouraging voters to go to the polls, when he should have been imploring them to self-isolate.

Before it’s over, the pandemic will get much worse, and so will we. Then it will end. And, unless we start the work of noticing and remembering now, we will forget how low we went. We will assimilate the ways in which the virus has changed our perceptions. We will romanticize the heroism and ingenuity of people who were betrayed by their government, rather than confront the people responsible for the betrayal.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

So that inbred twit Mike Huckabee says CNN pays people to hate Trump. Have any of you readers out there received your check? I haven't been paid a dime to hate Trump. I come by it naturally because my parents raised me right. I do it out of the goodness of my heart. Not only that but I haven't watched CNN for 15 years, since they were so in the tank for Bush in 2004 and so gung-ho about the Iraq war. I mean, Wolf Blitzer? C'mon! That guy's got major turd factor.

There are other things to consider, too. For instance, if all the people who hate Trump were paid to do so by CNN, CNN would have gone bankrupt many, many moons ago. Poor Mike Huckabee. He can't do the math. That's what happens when you think your lord will provide all the answers.

So, I'm left with this: Who at CNN should get my invoice? Or, do we all band together an initiate a class action suit for back wages? Plus interest!

PS. Mike Huckabee, I also hate you and your whole deviant, devil-worshiping family for free. In fact, I consider hating all Huckabees and Trumps, and expressing my hate publicly, a community service.

No Stopping Herr Trumpf Now-- Who's To Blame?

Remember the bright red "Keep Calm It Won't Be Trump" memes floating around the internet as recently as two weeks ago? No more. Geoff Garin, head of Hart Research polled 160 political insiders about who they expected to see win the Republican nomination. Way back in October, 8% had chosen Herr Trumpf. Now 59% say the GOP nominee will be Herr. 18% say Rubio-- who has fallen to slipping under the waves in all the new polls of New Hampshire Republicans-- and 16% say Cruz.

Our own informal poll of DWT readers show the majority are hoping for a deadlocked-- brokered-- GOP convention in Cleveland in July, in which no candidate has the 1,237 delegates to win on the first ballot. It isn't so much that they want to see Paul Ryan emerge as the nominee-- a likely outcome, and one GOP billionaires are financing right now-- as it is the expectation of a gun battle inside the convention hall when the Trumpf fans figure out the establishment is stealing the nomination from the only man who can make America great again. (Yes, Ohio has a concealed carry law and guns will be allowed into the Republican convention.)

This week, Reid Epstein, writing for the Wall Street Journal outlined the scenario that will lead to the gun battle likely to wipe out the Republican Party once and for all. Epstein sees several dynamics at play:

• the crowded field, formerly known as the "deep bench"
• Herr Trumpf's ability to energize unaffiliated fascist voters looking for a fuehrer
• the take over of the GOP by the Old Confederacy and the redrawn primary map that gives more sway to Southern states that back nominees who aren’t acceptable to normal people
• the GOP's new way of counting delegates in early contests that will spread them out among the competitors, preventing anyone from separating from the pack

Remember of the 1,237 delegates needed to win, only 133 are being chosen in the 4 early states the media (and the candidates) are obsessing over. The March 1 Confederate Super Tuesday counts for around 600 delegates, "awarded proportinally based on the percentage of the votes the candidates receive, making it likely that one candidate won’t be able to build an insurmountable lead over a crowded field in which several contestants are accruing delegates."

Even if one candidate wins 40% of the delegates awarded by March 15, he or she would have less than one-half of the necessary delegates to win the nomination.

If the leader at that point is a social conservative like Mr. Cruz, the road to Cleveland will be difficult: No Southern states vote after March 15, making a comeback possible in the Midwest and Northeast for an establishment candidate, should one survive. March 15 also brings the first winner-take-all states: Florida (99 delegates) and Ohio (66).

The last real chance for candidates to become the presumptive nominee comes in late April, when New York and five other Northeastern states hold primaries. There are few chances after that to run up large delegate numbers. The biggest prize on the calendar comes at the end, when California votes June 7. But that state, like New York earlier, will award its 172 delegates proportionally by congressional district, forcing candidates competing there to plan strategy based on how many votes they can win in areas like Los Angeles, with comparatively few Republican voters but many delegates, that haven’t seen a contested presidential primary contest in generations.

Delegates won during the primary season are obligated to vote for their candidate only on the party’s first ballot at the July convention. If no candidate wins a majority in that tally, the delegates would be free to vote for whomever they like, creating the possibility of a free-for-all when GOP delegates gather at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland starting on July 18.

They stole the GOP away from the establishment

And that's where the guns start blazing. Except the scenario is all wrong. Despite the best efforts of the GOP establishment, Herr Trumpf is going to walk into the Quicken Loans Arena with the 1,237 delegates he needs because he will be unstoppable-- as Ted Cruz predicted glumly-- after he sweeps Iowa (once Cruz country), New Hampshire (once Jeb or Rubio or Christie or Kasich country), South Carolina (once Cruz or Bush country) and Nevada (once Rubio or Bush country).

At Politico Alex Isenstadt looked at the finger-pointing inside the Republican establishment as they all blame the rise of Herr Trumpf on each other and as they see control of their little racket-- the Republican Party-- slip through their fingers. "The chiding," he wrote, "once limited to private conversations, is now erupting in public view-- with campaigns, operatives, donors, party officials and conservative intellectuals arguing over why something hasn’t been done to stop the man who has been leading nearly every state and national poll since August. Trump, many in the GOP’s upper ranks are convinced, would lead the Republican Party to an epic defeat in November, with consequences all the way down the ballot." They all agree on one thing: "This whole thing is a disaster." Many people blame Jeb whose SuperPAC hasn't deployed effectively against Trumpf but used millions of dollars attacking the hapless Rubio and the other hopeless also-rans. There's a lot of insider hate being directed towards Jeb's selfish, greed-obsessed, incompetent hatchet man, Mike Murphy.

Yet others say it’s unfair to solely blame Bush-- and that Rubio is just as culpable. Despite winning the support of an array of deep-pocketed donors, including hedge fund manager Paul Singer and tech titan Larry Ellison, Rubio has and his allies have done little to attack Trump. Of the $33 million that Rubio and the super PACs supporting him have spent on television ads, none of it has been against Trump. He rarely tweets about Trump, and when asked about him in interviews, Rubio tends to dodge the question.

“He has been afraid to criticize Trump for fear of being attacked unless directly put on the spot by a reporter,” said Tim Miller, a Bush spokesman.

Still others fault Ted Cruz, who spent months cuddling up to Trump in hopes of scooping up his supporters. Only this week, as he saw his lead slipping away in Iowa, did Cruz and several of his super PACs launch hard-hitting TV ads castigating the Manhattan billionaire as a New York liberal who couldn’t be trusted on hot-button social issues like abortion.

The anti-Trump barrage may be too little, too late, many Republicans fear.

“Cruz's crew should’ve done it. It was incredibly shortsighted. The longer [Trump] goes, the harder he is to kill,” said Brad Todd, a veteran Republican strategist who until recently worked for a super PAC that supported Bobby Jindal’s presidential campaign. “Now they are locked in a death match with a short clock, and their money is worth less than it would be when the air was clear and Trump's fans were just flirting.”

But it’s not just campaigns that are coming under fire-- it’s also donors, many of whom were presented with the opportunity to go after Trump but didn’t pull the trigger. Among those pushing to launch a serious anti-Trump campaign was Alex Castellanos, a veteran GOP strategist who was a top adviser to Mitt Romney. Last year, Castellanos visited a number of top GOP donors, operatives and lobbyists in an attempt to find financial support for a proposed TV ad campaign that was to cost in the eight-figure range.

Often a carrying a personal laptop into meetings, Castellanos laid out a detailed plan for a negative ad blitz against Trump, casting him as a flawed strongman. Yet those familiar with the effort say Castellanos, who spent hours venturing into New York and Washington offices, was met with disinterest from donors, who gave a variety of reasons for not wanting to open their checkbooks. Some predicted that Trump would collapse by the sheer weight of political gravity. Others said they had business interests with the front-runner, or expressed fear of retribution.

“Some donors are wonderful, but others have been saps during this entire process,” said Anderson. “If you want to know how to lose elections, the first people who you should talk to are the Republican Party’s major donors.”

Much frustration has been directed at the RNC, which some believe has been pushed around by the party’s surprise poll-leader. Last year, many cringed when RNC Chairman Reince Priebus traveled to New York City to meet with Trump when he signed a pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee. And when the RNC dropped National Review last week as a sponsor for a forthcoming debate, fans of the magazine’s anti-Trump special issue saw fear at work.

“My sense is that most rational RNC members hope Trump is not our nominee but do not want to upset him in case he is the GOP nominee,” said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party and American Conservative Union chairman who supports Bush. “The challenge is that while the RNC and others play this strategy out, the odds improve that Trump will be the nominee without an organized opposition to his candidacy beyond his rivals in the primary.”

...Sally Bradshaw, a longtime top Bush adviser who helped write the report, blamed a "lack of courage in our party" for the failure to take on Trump, as Bush has. She called Trump a “bigot” and said he “couldn’t unite our party and bring women, Hispanics and independent voters into the fold.”

“We won’t beat Hillary Clinton with Donald Trump as the nominee,” she added. “It doesn’t take a whiz-bang political data scientist to figure that out."

They're still sitting around with their fingers up their asses as their party has been hijacked. Jeb's newest theme is that Trumpf isn't a true Christian, the same ugly accusation Huckabee's SuperPAC (funded by Ronald Cameron, a rich chicken processor from Little Rock and Sharon Herschend owner/operator of Dollywood, Silver Dollar City in Branson, Wild Adventures in Valdosta, Georgia, the Harlem Globetrotters brand, Ride the Ducks, and Stone Mountain, the Confederate Mount Rushmore and a birthplace of the KKK) is making about Ted Cruz. Watch this hideous ad running in Iowa and you'll understand why it was so easy for a hustler from New York to take the Republican Party right out of their hands without breaking a sweat:



Right-wing nut Jonah Goldberg, writing in the L.A. Times was weeping bitterly over the conservative crackup-- the loss of the right's philosophical coherence and its s imminent demise-- he sees roiling his dark horrible world. He blames Herr Trumpf-- and the "fierce internecine battle over whether to oppose Trump's run, passively accept his popularity, or zealously support his bid."

The level of distrust among many of the different factions of the conservative coalition has never been higher, at least not in my experience. Arguments don't seem to matter, only motives do... [T]he GOP establishment has become so corrupted, its members would knowingly reject a savior just to protect their comfortable way of life... There's no shortage of reasons for why the right is at war over whether or not to take a flier on Trump. All of the various establishments and the counter-establishments over-promised and under-delivered in recent years. Cruz and his supporters accused his fellow politicians of being corrupt sell-outs and so many people believed him, they'd now rather take a gamble on Trump than back Cruz, a mere politician.

Eric Boehlert has been more than happy to explain how the Republican Party is getting burned by the implosion of the right-wing noise machine. "What's inescapable about the mounting GOP hand wringing," he wrote, "is that Trump is a right-wing media creation. He's flourishing on the fertile playing field of bigotry and resentment that National Review, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a litany of others, have helped seed for many years. There's little doubt that during President Obama's two terms they cultivated an anti-intellectual movement that now appears poised to seize control of the Republican Party." And their civil war is getting bloodier by the way.

On one side, Trump's denounced as a "vicious demagogue," a "con man," a "glib egomaniac," and "the very epitome of vulgarity." On the other side, Trump's army has derided National Review as out of touch, and accused the magazine of cozying up to "open border zealots," a cardinal sin on the right.

None of that disguises the fact that Trump is the monster the Noise Machine created by encouraging bigoted and dishonest forces within the conservative movement; by giving credence to the three year Benghazi cover-up charade, the two year IRS witch hunt, by fueling ugly passions about Obama wanting to take away everyone's guns, and by arguing he's uninterested in defending America's national security.

For years, lots of conservative pundits and talkers cashed large, and in some cases very large, paychecks feeding this ugly beast. Now the beast is beyond their control and they're going to whine all the way to New Hampshire?

Call it the perils of Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Conservative John Ziegler saw this media-enable crack-up coming months ago:

Thanks to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Sarah Palin, a website named "Breitbart," and certain elements of Fox News (all of whom have both pushed and ridden the Trump bandwagon for selfish commercial purposes), the conservative base is living under several important delusions which has allowed for "Trumpsanity" to foster and grow.

The Right Wing Noise Machine was revved up to 11 during the Obama years in an effort to destroy his presidency. In the end, the Noise Machine's lasting contribution, in the form of a Trump nominee, may be assuring that Obama hands the White House over to another Democrat.

There Are Two Teds

Yesterday, Fox News Sunday was unable to book the serious candidates so they got stuck with Long Island neocon Peter King and the Rev. Huckabee, who's on the verge of dropping out of the race. Huck says he won't drop out if he can do well in Iowa though. And he's gone on the attack against Iowa frontrunner, Ted Cruz, the candidate in the race further to the right politically than even he is. The ad above, from Huckabee's SuperPAC, Pursuing America's Greatness, is a case to conservatives-- albeit a poorly executed one-- that Cruz is not to be trusted because he's just another two-faced phony who will sell them out, no better than Paul Ryan.

On Fox, Huckabee defended the highly edited ad claiming there is "nothing deceptive" to it. "The point is that in Iowa he’s made a major point, and he’s pitched to evangelicals as a person who is utterly authentic; he’s going to fight for religious liberty [right-wing code for intense homophobia]; he’s going to protect the right of people to disagree with decisions on same-sex marriage. But that’s not what you heard in that Manhattan fundraiser and that's the only thing that I have pointed out." He slipped when he said "I," giving away the fact that he's legally coordinating with the SuperPAC, just like all the crooked politicians do (and never get punished for). He even went out of his way to further lie about it by saying "I had nothing to do with the ad... So there is no coordination or communication there."

The ad was basically paid for by two Huckabee supporters, Ronald Cameron, a rich chicken processor from Little Rock who inherited the company his grandfather started in 1914, Mountaire Corp, and who gave $3,000,000 to Huckabee for the SuperPAC-- that's $3,000,000 out of the total of $3,604,987 the Huckster has raised for it. Cameron, a major Tom Cotton backer, normally gives money through Club for Growth and the Koch Brothers' Freedom Partners Action Fund (to which he gave a million dollars last year).

The other person who chipped in to pay for the ad is Sharon Herschend of Herschend Family Entertainment, owners and/or operators of Dollywood, Silver Dollar City in Branson, Wild Adventures in Valdosta, Georgia, the Harlem Globetrotters brand, Ride the Ducks, and Stone Mountain, (the Confederate Mount Rushmore and a birthplace of the KKK). Sharon gave Huckabee $500,000 for his poisonous little SuperPAC.

Meanwhile this is the emotionally charged ad Cruz has been running all week in Iowa, red meat obviously aimed at evangelicals and right-wing ideologues. He's taken a a bit of a beating lately-- the right-wing New Hampshire Union-Leader refers to him as "Pander Cruz"-- about being a two-faced politician-- even before Huck hammered it home on Fox yesterday, and the whole "Trust Ted/Trusted" thing should help him come out with a solid win in the caucuses there.

Has Ted Cruz Already Joined Speaker Ryan's War Against Evangelical Christians?

Early Wednesday Sarah Palin tweeted a Neil Munro post at Breitbart about the Republicans (Paul Ryan) giving away the store in the Omnibus. Paul Ryan has been trying to cover his ass for compromising and not shutting down the government in his first month as Speaker, primarily by serially tweeting about how the repeal of the Oil Export ban is "like having 100 Keystone pipelines" and how there will be no "new funding" for Obamacare. What a message!

And still not good enough for the right-wing extremists who feel they didn't just lose their country but have now lost their party. In fact, Billy Graham's son, the far more right-wing and satanic Franklin Graham, best known, aside from who his daddy is, as an Islamophobic maniac, announced to his flock, via Facebook, that he's leaving the Republican Party. He's angry the Ayn-Rand devotee from Janesville didn't shut down the government to get even with all the myriad sins of Planned Parenthood colliding inside his brain. "After all of the appalling facts revealed this year about Planned Parenthood, our representatives in Washington had a chance to put a stop to this, but they didn’t... murder in God’s eyes," he howled.

I don't know if that means this is the end of his backing for the Trumpf candidacy or not but as Betsy Woodruff wrote at the DailyBeast, Graham's "growing frustration highlights growing (and sometimes paradoxical) anger that pro-life and evangelical Christian leaders have for Republican Party leadership... [E]vangelical leaders say he’s channeling a sentiment that’s increasingly widespread in their community."

After the House voted to pass the omnibus spending bill that kept federal dollars in place for Planned Parenthood, many conservative Christians-- evangelical and Catholic-- were furious.

Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, said the uproar isn’t surprising.

“This Planned Parenthood sponsorship in this bill further confirms what many evangelical Christians believe about the Republican Party establishment, and that is, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment,” he said.

“And I believe that disenchantment that many evangelical Christians have explains the rise of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump,” he added.

Jeffress said this disenchantment has been growing for more than a decade, especially since George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign. During that race, Bush pushed for a federal Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage as part of a strategy to get evangelical Christians to the polls. It worked, and he got reelected thanks to their strong showing. But in his second term, the president and his team abandoned their promise to try to write a gay-marriage ban into the Constitution. And that left many evangelicals feeling used and betrayed.

Brent Bozell, a prominent conservative activist who founded the Media Research Center, said Graham’s split from the Republican Party is especially devastating because of his role as a faith leader, rather than a political one... “He’s not taking a political position,” said Bozell. “He’s taking a moral position, which is far more serious in the evangelical world.”

That means Graham’s excoriation of party leaders carries special significance.

“When they’re funding the murder of children, this is where the evangelicals say, enough is enough,” Bozell said.

Ed Martin, the president of Eagle Forum-- a conservative activism organization that Phyllis Schlafly started-- called the inclusion of Planned Parenthood in the spending bill “an extraordinary betrayal.”

“When Franklin Graham and others say, ‘Hey don’t put all your hope in a party because that’s not the ultimate hope and should not be the focus of this earthly realm,’ we recognize that,” he said. “So there’s a tension that you want to further the values informing your heart and life through politics, through policy. But you also want to say, don’t make a political party a false god. Any false god will fail you. There’s only one true God”... And Graham’s comments will fuel that anger.

Schlafly has already endorsed Trumpf (not Cruz). Pastor Huckabee, who, still hasn't ended his embarrassing, aborted presidential campaign, seemed to agree when they humored him on Morning Joe Wednesday. "I do know that voters are very angry. You sense it on the campaign trail. One of the things you see is a seething rage. This budget vote last week… it put a lot of people over the top because they just feel like the whole purpose of working hard to get Republican majorities in the House and the Senate was to make some significant policy changes. The Republicans folded... They were given four aces, and they laid their cards down before they even anted up for the game... [A]ll the Republicans got was export of oil. What does that say about Republicans? That the only thing they care about is exporting oil? They don’t care a hoot about rank-and-file Republicans? That’s why people in the Republican Party are just bolting for the door." Yep... GOP priorities are always about their rich contributors, like the Koch brothers who only cared about this one point and made that completely clear to Ryan.

Now, back to Palin's suggestion that all good little right-wing robots read Munro's nonsense at Breitbart: "Beltway-insider publications Politico and The Hill are hiding House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)’s 2016’s disastrous report card, even days after the Dec. 18 passage of his $1.1-plus trillion 2016 spending-and-tax plan. Ryan and his top aides 'really gave away the store,' Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared Dec. 18.  Her report-card phrase-- 'they really gave away the store'-- doesn’t appear in Politico or The Hill, even by Dec. 22. Instead, Politico suggested that Ryan came out roughly even. 'The four leaders-- Ryan, Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)-- were all able to tout wins. There were complaints from the right about high levels of spending and gripes from the left about aiding Big Oil, but each side got enough in return to pass the deal in overwhelming fashion.'"

Oh, no wonder Palin was pushing this post. Munro ends with a plus for her: "'The GOP establishment in Congress is our abuser,' she added. 'We can’t hide the black eyes any more. The whole neighborhood knows. The Democrats are gloating. Obama thanked Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) effusively-- and why shouldn’t he?'"

And that brings us to a very dishonest Texas neo-fascist senator, who tells every audience a different story. Remember when he was raising money among right-wing gays with flamboyant Fire Island entrepreneurs Mati Weiderpass and Ian Reisner at their Central Park den of inequity. When he got called out in the press for cavorting with unsavory types, he quickly introduced two symbolic anti-LGBT bills in the Senate, knowing full well neither had any chance to even get out of committee. Cruz also solicits money from Peter Thiel, a crackpot libertarian gay billionaire, who have given him thousands of dollars directly and thru the pro-Cruz Endorse Liberty PAC to which Thiel has given around $3 million.

But all that was nothing when the psychotically insane and gay-obsessed Wilks brothers gave a Cruz SuperPAC $15,000,000 premised on one issue: ugly, militant homophobia (one fancies himself a preacher). So now Cruz goes back and forth from pandering to lunatics who want to kill gays to reassuring more mainstream wing nuts that he just says that to keep the idiots from all deserting him and running off to Herr Trumpf or-- God forbid-- the even more anti-gay candidate, Marco Rubio. This is all blowing up in Cruz's face now because Mike Allen wrote about it a couple days ago at Politico, making Cruz sound just like... an untrustworthy politician who tells everyone what they want to hear. How do you think the lunatic fringe reads this-- and you can count on Rubio to make sure they do read it?

In June, Ted Cruz promised on NPR that opposition to gay marriage would be “front and center” in his 2016 campaign.

In July, he said the Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriage was the “very definition of tyranny” and urged states to ignore the ruling.

But in December, behind closed doors at a big-dollar Manhattan fundraiser, the quickly ascending presidential candidate assured a Republican gay-rights supporter that a Cruz administration would not make fighting same-sex marriage a top priority.

In a recording provided to Politico, Cruz answers a flat “No” when asked whether fighting gay marriage is a “top-three priority,” an answer that pleased his socially moderate hosts but could surprise some of his evangelical backers.

While Cruz’s private comments to a more moderate GOP audience do not contradict what the Republican Texas senator has said elsewhere, they demonstrate an adeptness at nuance in tone and emphasis that befits his Ivy League background. Indeed, the wording looks jarring when compared with the conservative, evangelical rhetoric he serves at his rallies, which have ballooned in size and excitement as he has moved to the front of the pack in Iowa.

...A well-known Republican operative not affiliated with a 2016 campaign said by email when sent Cruz's quote: "Wow. Does this not undermine all of his positions? Abortion, Common Core-- all to the states? ... Worse, he sounds like a slick D.C. politician-- says one thing on the campaign trail and trims his sails with NYC elites. Not supposed to be like that."

Among the hardcore anti-gay fanatics who have endorsed Cruz because they assumed he would be as anti-gay as they are, are David Barton, Cynthia Dunbar, Ron Baity, a final solution maniac from hate group Reclaim America, notorious hate-monger Matt Barber, Flip Benham of Operation Save America and American Family Association lobbyist and Hate Talk Radio host Sandy Rios. Will they all skip over to Rubio's side now that Cruz has been exposed as a two-faced hack?

The Year In Gay Bashing: It’s Republican World, 2015 In Review, Chapter Six

-By Noah

When Republicans find a group of people they consider “different” or can paint as “different”, they pounce. Skin tone, nationality, religion, gender, and gender preference are all are fair game in Republican World. Anything they can use to rile up the emotions and unfounded fears of their base is, in their view, fair game. They take it and put it into their schoolyard bully approach to “debate”. It’s the art of meanness and it gets them where they want to go. It’s also a useful tool of distraction form far more important issues. It can get naïve voters to vote against their own interests, time and time again. They won’t even know they’re being played.

This loudmouth, bullying approach to public discourse may be best exemplified by people with names like Trumpf, Christie, Issa, Gowdy, Walker, or any one of the knuckle-dragging Hate Radio talkers and FOX “News” personalities.

In recent election cycles, Republicans, most notably led by strategist Karl Rove, have used the Republican dislike for gay people to drive their haters to the polls. All sorts of anti-LGBT propositions have been placed on ballots in numerous states while cartoonish phony Christians bitch about cartoon characters that they either think or wish to be gay. Who knows what psychology is at play when some jackass of a preacher starts screaming from the rooftops that Teletubbies are gay, that Spongebob Squarepants is really Spongebob Gaypants, and most recently, that Dumbledore from Harry Potter is gay.

The latter example, from the Harry Potter stories, is the most interesting in that it was confirmed by the creator of the stories back in late 2007 and that confirmation was met with a comparative ho-hum. Anti-gay stances by hateful southern-based companies like Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A aside, the hate the gays thing just isn’t working for Republicans quite as well as it used to. They’ll have to go on to something else like they always have.

Too many people know, like, love, work with, and respect LGBT people and, in a Republican worst nightmare kind of way, it’s all just fine. This is especially true of young voters, even the Republican ones. What’s a party to do?

Well, if you are an old fart Republican you can always double and triple down, even quadruple down on your hate for all Muslims and hope that that works. But, some Republicans are going to go down fighting on about “The Gay.” Here are a couple of the way, way too many examples from 2015:

1. The Marriage Equality Battle- The United States Supreme Court ruled in June that it was perfectly OK for two people of the same sex to marry. Sure, there are still plenty of republicans bellowing about the threat of people marrying sheep but I suspect that that is just the stuff of their hidden desires and dreams. I’m talkin’ ‘bout you, Louis Gohmert.

There’s also the tired cliché of marriage equality being a threat to “normal marriage” or what is euphemistically called “the sanctity of marriage”. Personally, my wife and I have been married for over 33 years and neither of us feel that our marriage is threatened by any of the gay couples we know. Sorry, Reince.

But, try telling that to Rev. Mike Huckabee of FOX “News” and, currently a candidate for his party’s nomination for President. He thinks we should ignore the laws of the land. The Supreme Court has no authority in his miniscule Republican World mind.

Here’s he is. Gotta be the 2015 Award winner for sheer idiocy in gay hate. Here he is, attaching himself to Kim Davis and her 15 minutes of “fame” like the political huckstering parasite that he is.



Damn. Gonna need some big straightjackets. Huckabee is willing to go to jail for his insanity. Make. My. Day.

2. Indiana Governor Mike Pence- Republicans like to talk about preserving freedoms; you know, like the freedom to discriminate, the right to refuse service, however you want to word it. Putting citizens in little boxes so it can be made easier to discriminate just makes a repug happy.

The new law in this instance was SB101, the grandly named “Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)” as if such freedoms had once existed but had been taken away. Nope, it’s a law designed to expand the freedom of bigots to be bigots. The law reflects the kind of attitude Lester Maddox had back in 1960s Georgia when he refused to serve African-Americans at his restaurant.

Think of the RFRA as an anti-political correctness law. For Republicans, bitching about PC has become all the rage. It’s like they all have some sort of mind virus. Well, just as their incessant bitching about PC is due to the fact that they want to feel free to shout the n-word every 30 seconds, laws like the RFRA are designed to not just allow them to say what they want without consequence, laws like this are designed to allow Republicans to do whatever they want to our neighbors, our friends, our co-workers, whomever they damn well please.

So, there was Indiana Governor Mike Pence, for instance, back in June. There he sat at his big manly desk, surrounded by a bevy of top virulent homophobes as he signed the RFRA, his state’s pro-discrimination “religious liberty” law. The hate-filled anti-gay lunatics that literally had Pence’s back included Curt Smith who equates being gay with bestiality, which says more about him, really. The great Micah Clark was there. He still says, now well into the 21st century, that homosexuality is a treatable mental disorder. Then there’s Eric Miller who falsely claimed that if same-sex marriage passed, anti-gay preachers might be arrested.

When Republicans use the phrase “religious liberty”, it’s like a get out of jail free card. They talk about society being too permissive yet, there they are, trying to use “religious liberty” as permission to hurt others. It comes from the same republican mindset that gave us “stand your ground” laws. “I have a right to shoot you if I perceive you as a threat, even if I have to run after you” or “I have a right to deny you equal treatment under the law if I don’t agree with who you are.” Laws like these enable people to take action and then just say the magic words.

The now infamous Pastor Kevin Swanson, who recently welcomed leading homophobes “Ted” Cruz, Bobby Jindal (You really do have to wonder if Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, has ever been to Mardi Gras), and Rev. Mike Huckabee (once and future Fox “News” host) to his stage at his “religious liberty” convention, even manages to actually combine the concepts of “religious liberty” and “stand your ground”. He thinks, out loud, no less, that gay people should be executed. He preaches this as he waves his bible and prances from one side of his stage to the other, sounding more like a Muslim terrorist than anything else.

Howie and I both posted about this Indiana fiasco back in June. Back then, I noted that Republicans from “Jeb” Bush to “Ted” Cruz to Marco Rubio all joined hands in claiming that Indiana’s pro-discrimination law has nothing to do with republican attitudes towards our fellow LGBT citizens. Nope. No hate here! Who, us?

By the way, until the hell broke loose over the Indiana law, Mike Pence was so sure that he had a good chance to be the Vice Presidential nominee of his party next year. Maybe he does, in Republican World. After all, he’s got the bigot box checked.

3. Would you attend a gay wedding?- In 2015, we heard a lot of sad, tiny-minded denizens of Republican World say they wouldn’t attend a gay wedding and certainly wouldn’t bake a cake for a gay wedding. One day, back in April, Marco Rubio was asked if he would attend a gay wedding. Surprisingly, he magnanimously said that, yes, he would. This admission, sadly, made big news. It was a shocker. Will it cost him his chance at the nomination? It will certainly cost him some votes. In Republican World, what Rubio said was one of those profiles in courage moments. At least, he didn’t say he’d bake the cake. That would have ended his career right there.

This whole thing makes me wonder how other Republikooks might try to one-up Rubio. I’m making a few predictions of headlines we can expect to see. Here they are, fresh from Noah’s World. It’s only fair, and I’m always fair.

1. “Ted” Cruz- I would attend a gay wedding as long as the couple aren’t the same sex and it doesn’t lead to a guy marrying his dog or goat. You know how it goes.

2. Steve King- What if both guys have calves the size of cantaloupes? What if they are Muslims? The whole idea is preposterous!

3. Rand Paul- I would smoke tons of pot but only for medical purposes and go but only after I write myself a prescription. Oh, wait, isn’t a prescription a regulation? Also, the couple would have to have a license. Oh crap, that’s a regulation, too. Can I get there without using an Interstate? Can I fly there without my flight being subject to FAA regulating? Maybe it’s best if I just stay home and lock myself in a padded cell. But what about my personal freedom? What’s this jacket with the buckles in the back. Hey, these buckles are regulating me!

4. Chris Christie- I would bake a very large cake but it might not make it to the reception.

5. Ben Carson- I’ll attend a gay wedding if and when Chick-fil-A caters it. I’ll bring some rice from the pyramids.

6. Mike Huckabee- If the voices I hear in my head that I mistake for Jesus, tell me to go, I will go.

7. Lindsay Graham- I’ll attend a gay wedding if my pal McCain ever gets the nerve to propose to me.

8. Michele Bachmann- I kinda already did attend a gay wedding.

9. Bill-O- As long as the couple are both white, right, male, and over 70, I would consider it. I will be fair. I will be fair. We are always fair on The Factor.

10. Scott Walker- I guess I would go to a gay wedding if the Koch brothers gave me permission, but, I sure hope it’s not in my state. Also, rest assured, I will make it extremely difficult for them to vote!

Fasten your seatbelts, buckos -- it's going to be a banner election season for the madly whirling Candidate Shuffle

I just love this headline, which shows us that the Candidate Shuffle season is in full whirl. You can see the full article below.

by Ken

It's hardly a new-for-2016, the Candidate Shuffle. One of the reasons God created political "handlers" is to help candidates figure out what potential voters want to hear them say. It's a pretty astonishing thing at the presidential level, where you figure the parties are trotting out their most seasoned and mature candidates, who will be standing on their history of principle and accomplishment. But sometimes a candidate might want to know what little bits of emphasis and deemphasis to apply to his/her record to suit the present mood of the electorate.

Ex-Shuffle champ McCranky

Who am I kidding? By and large candidates are willing to say or do anything their consultants say will give them an edge. Still, you'd have thought that nobody could top the whirligig that was the 2008 presidential campaign of Young Johnny McCranky, who managed to stake out a minimum of three positions -- all of them nuts -- on just about every interest he mentioned in the campaign.

But it looks like the 2016 fun and games are going to make Young Johnny look like a steadfast man of principle, hilarious as that idea is. With the country, and the party, in a mood like they're in, and a field as crazy as the 2016 GOP presidential field, it's hardly surprising that we're going to see posturing and pandering at record levels. The joker in 2016 is the combination of the whacked-out mood of the GOP base and the so-far-successful demonstration that you can get record levels of attention by saying crazier stuff than anyone is accustomed to saying or hearing outside the walls of a mental institution.

Which is why I love that headline on Dave Weigel's washingtonpost.com piece: "In a shift, Mike Huckabee is open to ending 'birthright citizenship.' " The key phrase there is "is open to." I can barely imagine what we're going to see candidates "open to."

The spinning is going to come in two forms: stuff that these, er, people have always in fact believed but though they didn't dare say publicly, and wackiness they don't believe but now feel empowered, or even obliged, to say.

It's not entirely clear which category Minister Mike Hucksterbee's whirling dervish act on birth citizenship fits into, and his history with the issue only makes it murkier. I guess the key thing is just to sit back and watch him whirl. (Find lotsa links for the following article onsite.)

Post Politics

In a shift, Mike Huckabee is open to ending ‘birthright citizenship’

By David Weigel


Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said Friday he is open to ending "birthright citizenship" for children of immigrants born in the United States.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said Friday that he was open to laws that would end the "birthright" citizenship granted to children by the 14th Amendment, joining several other GOP candidates in endorsing the idea.

The comments came in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who asked the question twice to be clear that Huckabee really would "abrogate" that right.

"I would," said Huckabee, "because I think that when we see advertisements in China, advertising essentially ‘birth tourism,’ where people are able to purchase packages so they fly to the U.S., have their baby in the U.S. so it has dual citizenship – these aren’t people who are impoverished, looking for a Medicaid payment. These are very wealthy people who are coming here so their child will in essence be put a foot down and say ‘I have American citizenship.’”

The "birthright" issue has bedeviled Huckabee since his first campaign for the presidency. In 2007, he told Washington Times reporter Stephen Dinan that he would support changing the policy that grants citizenship "just because a person, through sheer chance of geography, happened to be physically here at the point of birth." Early in 2008, Minutemen Project founder Jim Gilchrist claimed that Huckabee favored a new amendment to the Constitution to codify that.

A day later -- as he was riding high from a victory in the Iowa caucuses -- Huckabee walked back Gilchrist's comment. Two years later, Huckabee told NPR's Tom Ashbrook that he opposed major changes to the 14th Amendment. "I don't even think that's possible," he said.

But in the new interview, Huckabee seemed to rediscover his enthusiasm for reforming the "birthright" process.

"It has been the practice that we’ve had for over 100 years," he told Hewitt. "I think if we’re going to change that, then we need to be able to declare why we’re going to change it. I know that there’s the language about jurisdiction, there have been questions about it. The diplomat's child was born here -- does that make that person a citizen? I don't think that it's an ironclad-type decision, but it would be helpful for there to be legislation defining what the jurisdiction clause means. I don't think a constitutional amendment is likely to happen, but it would be helpful to have a constitutional amendment."

Earlier this month, at the first televised Republican presidential debate, Huckabee said that the 14th Amendment could and should be used to treat the unborn as American citizens. "This notion that we just continue to ignore the personhood of the individual is a violation of that unborn child’s Fifth and 14th Amendment rights for due process and equal protection under the law," he said.

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It's bad enough that racist whitefolk lie about "Black Lives Matter" -- but to drag MLK Jr. into their lies?

Seriously, "Minister Mike" Hucksterbee imagines himself as a custodian of the teachings of "the moral leader of our nation," as he's described aptly in the clip above, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? Friggin' unbelievable.

by Ken

I can't be the only one who has been taken aback by the widespread frenzy with which race-baiting whitefolk have responded to the Black Lives Matter phenomenon. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, but for cripes' sake, it's a frenzy that is 100 percent without foundation, and while surely scads of people have pointed this out, the race-baiting whitefolk continue to screech -- to whitefolk susceptible to race-baiting, of course -- that the phrase "black lives matter" means that black lives matter more than other lives, when no such thing is said, implied, or hinted at, except in the warped minds of race-baiting whitefolk.

Here, for example, is "Minister Mike" Hucksterbee, the preacher-turned-pol-turned-pundit :

When I hear people scream 'Black Lives Matter,' I'm thinking, of course they do. All lives matter. It is not that any life matters more than another. That's the whole message Dr. King tried to present.

I confess that I'm not intimately familiar with every in and out of the ravings of Minister Mike, and so it's possible that somewhere along the line the Arkansas Huckster has said something that might be considered vaguely in line with, or at least not entirely antithetical to, the beliefs and teachings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But man, I have to say, the effrontery of him appointing himself the custodian of Dr. King's message boggles my mind.

The text I'm working from here is from ThinkProgress's Kay Steiger:

Huckabee Says Civil Rights Icon Dr. King Would Be ‘Appalled’ By Black Lives Matter Movement

By Kay Steiger | Aug. 19, 2015

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said on Tuesday that the civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be “appalled” at the Black Lives Matter movement, saying it was wrong to “elevate” some lives above others.

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, the Republican presidential candidate commented on the ongoing civil rights movement, which tries to bring attention to police shootings and racial disparities in policing, as well as greater racial inequalities. The CNN host asked about Clinton’s private meeting with the activists, and what he thought about her remarks that laws needed to change.

Huckabee said it was more of “a sin problem than a skin problem” in his experience dealing with racial issues. Huckabee went on to say, “I’ve dealt with race issues my whole life … as a governor and before that, as a pastor when I integrated an all-white church and did so against death threats. I understand how people have great passions,” he said. “But I understand the way you begin to resolve them is you do it by loving people and treating people with dignity and respect and you don’t do it by magnifying the problems.”

“When I hear people scream ‘Black Lives Matter,’ I’m thinking, of course they do. All lives matter,” Huckabee concluded. “It is not that any life matters more than another. That’s the whole message Dr. King tried to present.”

Civil rights icon was certainly an advocate for nonviolence, but Huckabee’s remarks may be a deliberate misreading of Martin Luther King Jr.’s work. In fact, the reverend received numerous hate threats that closely resemble the kinds of criticism that the Black Lives Matter movement receives today.

Other presidential candidates have received criticism for saying “all lives matter,” including former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), who later apologized for the remarks. Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said that O’Malley shouldn’t have apologized, and that such criticism against him was ridiculous. “We’re so uptight and so politically correct now that we apologize for saying lives matter?” Bush said.

The movement has begun disrupting political events and directly confronting presidential candidates as a means of making their concerns a national issue.

THERE'S A SIMPLE EXPLANATION: WHITE RACISM

You could argue that it's not racism but a stupefying level of ignorance that has clouded Huckster Mike's mind. Ignorance so encompassing that he has apparently never in his life experienced a moment of actual sentience, and so he is unaware that at no second in the history of this country has it been accepted that all lives matter. For much of our history, of course, the fact that black lives do not matter was a foundation of both the politics and the slave-based economy of the United States. And since then, there hasn't been any time when black people in America did not have rights exclusively at the sufferance of whitefolks. I would be gratified to have Minister Mike share some of his apparently extensive ministry in support of the proposition that all lives matter.

In particular, the Hucksterman has apparently been in a coma in the year-plus since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, during which we have been treated to an almost daily demonstration that as far as white America is concerned, it's a simple matter of fact that black lives don't matter -- except under precise conditions set out by whitefolks in which black people may grudgingly be allowed to live their lives. Still, if Minister Mike's problem is a stunning degree of ignorance, then its ignorance in the service of his racism, and racism in the service of his ignorance. Either way, it's nothing to brag about -- and certainly no cause to open your filthy lying piehole.

My goodness, the gall to invoke of all names that of Dr. King! Is it humanly possible to not know that the most crucial part of his mission, from the violence of his movement's beginning to savagery of his own end, was establishing in the minds of black people first and then of whitefolks that black lives matter. There's no point asking the Hucksterbee, "Have you no shame?" If he had, he could never have made such an utterance.

This is profanation, pure and simple. Yet I wonder if it isn't still more offensive to have a loathsome toad like Jeb! Bush prattling on about all lives mattering. This is a malignant life form whose entire existence, every breath he has ever drawn, has been a staging ground for the most exclusive form of white privilege. Sorry, folks, but I truly have no words.

Instead, by way of a parting word, let me offer Jelani Cobb's "Comment" piece from the current (August 24) New Yorker, which argues that at an even deeper level than many of us properly considered, and in an assortment of ways, race is the first defining factor in American society -- and the definition includes the reality that black lives don't matter.

In April, 1927, after spring thaws and weeks of heavy rain, dozens of swollen tributaries poured into the Mississippi River, pushing it beyond its boundaries and initiating the twenty-seven-thousand-square-mile catastrophe that came to be known as the Great Flood. The river breached levees, funnelling as much as thirty feet of water into the surrounding areas; swept away homes; and wrought devastation unfathomable even in a region long accustomed to cyclical flooding. Bessie Smith etched the memory of the disaster into popular culture with “Backwater Blues,” a song written during the turbulent season that led up to the flood: “When it thunders and lightnin’ / and the wind begins to blow, There’s thousands of people / ain’t got no place to go.”

The waters wound through a South that was still defined by agricultural labor and debt peonage. Like the Mississippi itself, tumbling along a route constructed for it by a primitive levee system, the disaster followed a path that had been engineered beforehand, disproportionately affecting the poor, mostly black laborers who were anchored to the land by sharecropping contracts. In some instances, Red Cross supplies were disbursed to landlords, who sold them to tenant farmers. Tent encampments (then known as concentration camps) allowed entry to blacks fleeing the storm but required that they obtain special passes in order to leave. The black labor force was already diminished by the Great Migration, and the main concern was to insure that blacks would not use the flood as an opportunity to flee North. Herbert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce, was appointed to head the recovery effort. In response to allegations of racism and mistreatment, he appointed a commission led by Robert Moton, a protégé of Booker T. Washington’s, and his successor at the Tuskegee Institute, to examine the charges. That report was not issued until 1929, safely after the 1928 election, in which Hoover had feared losing the traditionally Republican black vote, but the damage was inescapable. In 1932, African-Americans deserted the G.O.P. to support Franklin Roosevelt, beginning a major realignment in American politics, and Hoover’s handling of the catastrophe was part of the reason for the shift.

As Richard Mizelle writes, in his history of the flood (also titled “Backwater Blues”), what happened in 1927 is “part of a much longer narrative of how race, class, gender, and questions of social worth are framed through an environmental disaster.” That pattern has grown only more apparent. History, social science, and common sense have made it increasingly difficult not to consider the term “natural disaster” as a linguistic diversion, one that carries a hint of absolution. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are natural phenomena; disasters, however, are often the work of humankind. The earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 was two orders of magnitude weaker than the one that struck off the coast of Japan in 2011, yet it resulted in fifteen times more fatalities. The disparity was largely due to the relative geopolitical and economic standings of the two nations, and the corresponding standards of housing.

A decade after Hurricane Katrina, the images that it produced remain fresh in memory: bodies floating by major thoroughfares, the horrorscape of the Superdome, people stranded on rooftops like urban castaways. Official estimates hold that eighteen hundred and thirty-three people died as a result of the hurricane and the subsequent breaches of the levees. There is a temptation to say that the storm also swept away a particular kind of innocence about American poverty, but, in the days afterward, polls showed stark disparities in how blacks and whites viewed the federal government’s tardy response to the crisis and the role that race played in it. Sixty per cent of blacks said that the response was slow because of the race of the storm’s primary victims; only about twelve per cent of whites concurred. Sixty-three per cent of blacks felt that the response was slow because the victims were poor, a sentiment shared by just twenty-one per cent of whites.

Katrina didn’t usher in a new narrative about race in America as much as it confirmed an old one. In 2006, Lil Wayne, a New Orleans native, released “Georgia . . . Bush,” an indignant screed in which he claimed that the hurricane should have been named for the President who had presided over the mismanagement of the calamity. In the song, Wayne repeated a commonly held belief that the levees in the Lower Ninth Ward didn’t fail but were detonated, so that the more valuable white neighborhoods would be spared—a rumor that also spread about the flood that engulfed the city after Hurricane Betsy, in 1965. The past haunts at the peripheries. For one set of people, Katrina was a tragedy compounded by ineptitude; for another, it was a recasting of a drama that stretched back at least eight decades and suggested that, if the past is prologue, the disaster was not just predictable but possibly inevitable.

Residents of St. Bernard Parish, who blocked the roads in order to keep black residents leaving the city from coming through their community, were playing a part similar to that of those who, nearly eighty years ago, refused to allow blacks to leave the relief camps. In 2013, the Parish paid $2.5 million to settle lawsuits, one filed by the Department of Justice, alleging that it had contrived ordinances to prevent African-Americans from moving there after the storm. The population of New Orleans went from being sixty-seven per cent black, in 2005, to fifty-nine per cent, in 2013, which literally changed the color of the electoral politics in the city.

The ghosts of the past remain discernible in at least one other way. Media reports often referred to New Orleanians displaced by Katrina as “refugees,” a word that, in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, seventy-seven per cent of blacks, and just thirty-seven per cent of whites, took exception to. The term, with its connotations of foreigners crossing borders to seek asylum, cut closer to the bone in a population whose citizenship has so frequently been challenged. Katrina can be viewed as the first of a series of crises that seem to have become a referendum on black citizenship. The poll respondents were asked if they were “bothered” by the word “refugee.” The presumption was that many took issue with a loaded term being applied inaccurately. A decade later, it’s worth wondering whether they were “bothered” by a fear that “refugee,” not “citizen,” had been the most apt description all along.

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Yes, Multimillionaire Jeb Bush Wants To Raise The Retirement Age For Working People To "68 Or 70"

New York's 24th Congressional District-- basically Syracuse plus a chunk of central New York from Oswego to the Finger Lakes to Rochester's eastern suburbs-- turned blue in the '90s. The PVI is D+5 and Obama beat McCain 56-42% and then beat Romney by an even greater margin, 57-41%. The Democratic congressman, Dan Maffei, was a wishy-washy New Dem who never embraced core progressive values and tended to vote with the GOP on crucial roll calls too frequently for grassroots Dems to countenance. After electing him in 2008, they abandoned him in 2010, allowing a crackpot teabagger to win the seat, and then reelected him against the crackpot teabagger in 2012 and abandoned him again in 2014, this time for a self-described (but dubious) moderate Republican, John Katko. Katko beat him 112,979 (59.9%) to 75,690 (40.1%), a symbol of both DCCC incompetence and New Dem unsuitability.

Yesterday's Syracuse Post-Standard scooped the Beltway "journalists" who get all their information spoon-fed to them by the DCCC, announcing the likelihood of a run by Social Security Work co-founder Eric Kingson, a professor at Syracuse University. Kingston is a brilliant, values-driven progressive, not a mealy-mouthed Wall Street-owned New Dem. "I'm thinking about it very, very seriously," Kingson said in an interview Monday with syracuse.com. "I'm not a professional politician, so I hope that's an advantage."

I can't think of a better-equipped or more ardent defender of Social Security than Kingson. After viewing the Jeb Bush video above, advocating raising the retirement age for Social Security recipients, Kingson told us: "A one-year increase in Social Security's full retirement age translates into a 6-7 percent benefit cut. Jeb Bush just told every American worker that he thinks the Social Security benefits they are earning should be cut by as much as 20%.  He doesn't get that two-thirds of today's working Americans will not be able to maintain their standard of living in retirement. He should be talking about expanding benefits, not taking money out of the pockets of future retirees." The Post-Standard lauded his activism on behalf of working families.

He co-founded the national group Social Security Works, and started the Strengthen Social Security Coalition, a coalition of more than 300 national and state organizations that want to strengthen and expand Social Security.

"I have spent a lot of time working to protect our Social Security system," Kingson said. "And I'm both frustrated and concerned about the lack of balance in our economy today. I'm angry that people can work hard and they can't get a fair shake in our economy."

He said it's alarming that two-thirds of working Americans are heading into retirement unable to maintain their standard of living.

Kingson, a professor of social work at SU for 17 years, is a widely published author of books and journal articles about the politics and economics of population aging, Social Security policy, cross-generational obligations and retirement income security.

The DCCC and EMILY's List are actively trying to recruit a more conservative, Big Business-oriented Democrat to run against Kingson. It's what they do.

As Social Security Works pointed out this morning, "America is facing a $7.7 trillion retirement income deficit." 


What does that mean? For the first time in our country’s history, Americans are preparing for a lower standard of living in retirement than their parents. As a result, retirement insecurity has quickly become a pressing issue in American politics.

Traditional pension plans have all-but disappeared, and with Social Security Cost of Living Adjustments not keeping up with retirees’ actual expenses, it is time for a solution that ensures a decent standard of living for all retirees.


...In order to maintain one’s standard of living and dignity in retirement, we need a decent guaranteed monthly retirement income. This means an expanded Social Security system that asks the very wealthy to pay their fair share. This means an adequate and secure pension system to supplement their Social Security benefits.

This means that Congress must act NOW to ensure that no one in America retires into poverty after a lifetime of hard work.

Call on Congress to address the retirement security crisis by expanding Social Security and ensuring adequate and secure pensions for workers.

With 15% of seniors living in poverty, we need to move away from risky 401ks that bet secure retirements on the stock market to enrich Wall Street millionaires. We need real retirement protections that we know we can count on-- an expanded Social Security system.

If the DCCC wants to screw around and kick progressive and populist ideas to the curb on behalf of their Wall Street patrons, there are at least some Republicans who recognize an opportunity. Here's a presidential candidate who has changed his tune in a way the DCCC types better not ignore:




UPDATE: Bernie Responds To Jeb

"At a time," said Senator Sanders, "when more than half of the American people have less than $10,000 in savings, it would be a disaster to cut Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age. It is unacceptable to ask construction workers, truck drivers, nurses and other working-class Americans to work until they are 68 to 70 years old before qualifying for full Social Security benefits. Jeb Bush's plan to raise the retirement age is just a continuation of the war that is being waged by the Republicans against working-class Americans in order to reward billionaires on Wall Street. When the average Social Security benefit is just $1,328 a month, and more than one-third of our senior citizens rely on Social Security for virtually all of their income, our job must be to expand benefits, not cut them. The way to do that is to eliminate the cap on all income above $250,000 so that millionaires and billionaires pay the same percentage of their income into Social Security as middle-class Americans. I have introduced legislation to do just that."