Can The Economic Royalists Derail Bernie Next Saturday In South Carolina?

South Carolina's primary is in 5 days. Biden's mammoth, untouchable lead has been touched. The newest state poll, from CBS News. Status Quo Joe is still in the lead, but barely:

• Status Quo Joe- 28%
• Bernie- 23%
• Steyer- 18%
• Elizabeth- 12%
• Mayo Pete- 10%
• Klobuchar- 4%
• Tulsi- 1%

South Carolina is Biden's "firewall" and if he doesn't win there... it all falls apart fast. Yesterday, on Meet the Press, Democratic machine party boss Jim Clyburn announced he will endorse Status Quo Joe on Wednesday. I don't think political endorsements mean much... but Clyburn is an exception among South Carolina African American Dems. Clyburn, a conservative Democrat, was also on ABC’s This Week, where he took a poke at Bernie: "I do believe it will be an extra burden for us to have to carry. This is South Carolina, and South Carolinians are pretty leery about that title socialist."

Democratic establishment hack, Jim Clyburn (who'll be 80 in July and who presides over one of America's most gerrymandered districts) may be about to jump aboard the sinking SS Biden, but today South Carolina's Republican senator, Tim Scott, claimed on CBS' This Morning that Bernie is the Democrat Republicans fear most. Bernie, he said "brings that outside game in a similar fashion that President Trump did in 2016. Think about the similarities. In 2016, Republican leadership, Republican wisdom said that there is no way in the world out of the 17 candidates, Donald Trump will be the president. I think it's very similar... If he's on his game as he was at the State of the Union, I don't think there is a candidate in the country that can beat him. If there is a second choice other than himself, it would be Bernie Sanders... Bernie Sanders is doing something in 2020 that he could not do in 2016, which is getting African Americans and Hispanic voters to take a second look at his campaign. I think perhaps a primary reason is health care. If you look at what stands out the most in his campaign is he is undeniable a socialist, but he is strong and clear and competent on the issues he supports and the issue of health care is a big issue in the African-American community and I think it is the issue for why he ended up with 51% of the Hispanic vote in Nevada." The candidate who would be the easiest for Trump to beat? Scott points right at Mini-Mike.

Meanwhile, Axios reported that the anti-working class sewer money PAC, the Big Tent Project, has sent hundreds of thousands of mailers bashing Bernie Sanders to 215,000 black voters in South Carolina who voted in the state's 2016 primary.

The mailing, which cost around $100,000, charges-- without any proof-- Bernie platform is unrealistic and too expensive, exactly what the economic royalists (and the Republicans) said about FDR and the New Deal. They are also repeating the false claim that has become the Democratic establishment's mantra: "Trump will crush Bernie on taxes and spending... Nominating Bernie means we re-elect Trump."

Although-- like all sewer money groups-- they are hiding their donors from the public, they plan to spend another $700,000 smearing Bernie and his platform in South Carolina this week. Last week Big Tent dropped $200,000 attacking Bernie in Nevada, which seems to have made him more popular and drove up his numbers. Keep in mind that right-wing Democrat, Jonathan Kott, former press secretary for Joe Manchin, is running Big Tent, a pretty clear indication that all of their money will be wasted.

Kott, who was always consider a third rate Hill staffer, told Politico last week that "Despite over 50 years in public life, Bernie Sanders has never been fully vetted. The Big Tent Project will shed light on his record of politically toxic policy proposals starting in Nevada and South Carolina. Voters need to understand that his well-known plans to kick union employees off their health care plans and end all private insurance, raise middle-class taxes and double the size of the government, and his less well-known radical views, like his efforts to dump nuclear waste in Hispanic communities, will repel many general-election voters. Either this stuff is debated now, when Democrats have time to consider it fully, or it will come out in the fall, in a torrent of negative ads by the Trump team that would likely prove politically fatal. Democrats deserve the facts before they choose a nominee."

Want the facts? Check out Marianne Williamson's speech in Austin when she endorsed Bernie on Sunday:

A New Day Dawnin' In South Carolina? Not Likely

The only state that has both Senate seats up in November is South Carolina. That's because Lindsey Graham has served his 6 year term and is up for reelection for one seat and because Jim DeMint resigned and was replaced with a gubernatorial appointment, right-wing extremist Tim Scott, for the other seat. There will be a special election to fill out the rest of DeMint's term. We've been concentrating on the Graham seat since he makes such a flamboyant target out of himself-- and because 6 hilarious crackpot teabaggers are running against him, plus a Democrat, Jay Stamper, who has been endorsed by Blue America, and because he is also being opposed by Republican cocaine dealer and reality show star Tom Ravenel, running as an independent (see interview below).

The other race, however, just got a tiny bit interesting. What was supposed to be a straight march to coronation for Scott-- he's facing Richland County Councilwoman Joyce Dickerson who was picked entirely for her ability to turn out Democratic base voters for Vincent Sheheen's plausible gubernatorial race-- took an unexpected twist this week. Unlike Graham, Scott has no primary opponent. Teabaggers are perfectly happy with his lockstep adherence to their reactionary agenda. He's good at that; he's been doing it for his entire political career. And Dickerson isn't a real threat. Now, however, he has a third opponent, Jill Bossi, a mainstream conservative running as an independent on the American Party, a bunch of centrist refugees from the GOP and a gaggle of far right Democrats.

The grandmotherly Bossi held down minor executive positions with Experian and Verizon and with the criminal bankster operation, Bank of America and worked for the American Red Cross as well. She announced her campaign in an e-mail Monday: “Enough is enough, it’s time to put an end to the political extremism and gridlock in Washington."

A political newcomer, Bossi told The State that she read about the American Party’s formation in South Carolina and was inspired by its platform promoting term limits, governing from the center, “stopping the growth of the political class,” holding candidates accountable and promoting global economic competitiveness.

Bossi said she chose to run for Scott’s seat in part because he was appointed to the Senate seat, has never run for statewide office, and has attracted few challengers. Bossi plans to file for the seat Friday.

The platform sounds a lot like what you would expect, inoffensive pablum from the disaffected Establishment wings of both Beltway parties… very reasonable sounding, like their stand on gun control:

Provide strong, unequivocal support for the Second Amendment-- coupled with responsible, reasonable regulations and programs. (e.g. strong, universal background check system and better mental health diagnosis and treatment.)

So who defines responsible and reasonable? Or how about their "stand" on tax policy?

Initiate comprehensive tax reform to acquire a simpler, fairer tax system that supports economic growth and encourages work, savings and investment.

Again, who defines "fairer?" The Koch brothers would define "fair" in a way that precludes billionaires from paying anything more than the change the tax collector finds stuck between the cushions of their couches. I would define fair as a progressive system that precludes the existence of billionaires, the way it was when Eisenhower was president. And where would Jill Bossi stand on that? We'll probably never find out.

I Bet The New York Times Article Made Rocket Tube Crash Yesterday

Sunday's NY Times posed an impossible question: How Man American Men Are Gay? First of all, what does that even mean? I've been straight, bisexual, gay and celibate. So how do you count me? (Until reading the Times story I had never been on any gay internet sites either. Porno never did much for me. And I never even knew Match.com is for gay people too.)

Using, among other indicators, Facebook, "pornographic searches and dating sites," Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who recently received a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, estimates that "[a]t least 5 percent of American men are predominantly attracted to men, and millions of gay men still live, to some degree, in the closet… The evidence also suggests that a large number of gay men are married to women."

[R]oughly 5 percent of pornographic searches are looking for depictions of gay men in all states. This again suggests that there are just about as many gay men in less tolerant states as there are anywhere else.

Since less tolerant states have similar percentages of gay men but far fewer openly gay men, there is a clear relationship between tolerance and openness. My preliminary research indicates that for every 20 percentage points of support for gay marriage about one-and-a-half times as many men from that state will identify openly as gay on Facebook.

In a perfectly tolerant world, my model estimates that about 5 percent of men in the United States would say they were interested in men. Note that this matches nicely with the evidence from pornographic search data.

These results suggest that the closet remains a major factor in American life. For comparison, about 3.6 percent of American men tell anonymous surveys they are attracted to men and a tenth of gay men say that they do not tell most of the important people in their lives. In states where the stigma against homosexuality remains strong, many more gay men are in the closet than are out.

How deep in the closet are these men? Obviously, it is possible for a gay man not to acknowledge his sexuality to Facebook or surveys but to still have healthy, open same-sex relationships.

But data from Match.com, one of the country’s largest dating sites, which has high rates of membership for both straight and gay men, reveals a similarly large number of missing gay men in less tolerant states. This suggests that these men are not only not telling Facebook they are gay but are also not looking for relationships online.

Additional evidence that suggests that many gay men in intolerant states are deeply in the closet comes from a surprising source: the Google searches of married women. It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. In the United States, of all Google searches that begin “Is my husband...,” the most common word to follow is “gay.” “Gay” is 10 percent more common in such searches than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is 8 times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed.”

Searches questioning a husband’s sexuality are far more common in the least tolerant states. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average.

And that, of course, makes tremendous sense. Lindsey Graham isn't the only closeted homophobe from South Carolina. In fact, the other senator from the Dum Spiro Spero state, Tim Scott is probably gay as well, if even deeper in the closet. As FITSNews, a South Carolina GOP website put it, "Both of South Carolina’s U.S. Senators-- the 47-year-old Scott and the 57-year-old Lindsey Graham-- are bachelors who have never been married, and both have faced rumors regarding their sexual orientation."

Scott has never addressed those rumors, but Graham has.

“I know it’s really gonna upset a lot of gay men-- I’m sure hundreds of ’em are gonna be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge-- but I ain’t available,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2010. “I ain’t gay. Sorry.”

Obviously we don’t care if politicians are gay, straight, bisexual, transgender or whatever floats their boat. All we care about is how they vote. Of course if they go after other politicians for their personal failings (as Graham did with Bill Clinton in the late 1990s) or if they sanctimoniously proclaim Christian values (as Scott has), then their sexuality becomes fair game as far as we’re concerned.

And the other state, Louisiana… well, that was the state that was the base of operations for notorious boy-chaser and closet case Jim McCrery. Being gay in an intolerant state certainly pushes men into the closet. And probably more so if you're a public figure like a Member of Congress. Still the statistics don't lie and if Stephens-Davidowitz's numbers are right and 5% of American men are gay, there are a lot more closet cases in the House than just Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Aaron Schock (R-IL), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Adrian Smith (R-NE) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL). Stephens-Davidowitz points a finger at Kentucky, Louisiana and Alabama as the states with the most furtive gays looking for quick anonymous sex on Craig's List (and I thought that was just for buying used tires and stuff!)

Sometimes even I get tired of looking at aggregate data, so I asked a psychiatrist in Mississippi who specializes in helping closeted gay men if any of his patients might want to talk to me. One man contacted me. He told me he was a retired professor, in his 60s, married to the same woman for more than 40 years.

About 10 years ago, overwhelmed with stress, he saw the therapist and finally acknowledged his sexuality. He has always known he was attracted to men, he says, but thought that that was normal and something that men hid. Shortly after beginning therapy, he had his first, and only, gay sexual encounter, with a student of his in his late 20s, an experience he describes as “wonderful.”

He and his wife do not have sex. He says that he would feel guilty ever ending his marriage or openly dating a man. He regrets virtually every one of his major life decisions.

The retired professor and his wife will go another night without romantic love, without sex. Despite enormous progress, the persistence of intolerance will cause millions of other Americans to do the same.

Endorsements: South Carolina, Wyoming, California's Inland Empire

Here in Southern California, there's a little bit of controversy in CA-31 (San Bernardino and the 'burbs between Upland and Redlands) over the "unanimous" and coordinated endorsements by 4 Democratic Clubs of DCCC empty suit Pete Aguilar over three better-qualified Democratic candidates. One DCCC operative told me these kinds of phony club endorsements are standard procedure for the DCCC to help prop up weak candidates like Aguilar. Former Congressman Joe Baca, running for his old seat despite a vicious and determined campaign against him led by Steve Israel, told me this week that 2 of the clubs are in other districts and that the other two have 4 members each-- and that the 4 members don't even go to the "meetings." These were faked endorsements to try to stampede the California Democratic Party to go along with Steve Israel's terrible decision to endorse Aguilar, who already lost the very blue (D+5) district to TWO Republicans in 2012.

Normal people don't necessarily care about endorsements, but some endorsements-- though not from these fakes clubs-- come with resources. Certainly a California Democratic Party endorsement has immense value in a Democratic primary. Baca told me that Aguilar doesn't have the brains to manipulate the system that way but that Steve Israel sure does. And then there's Eric Bauman, the would-be Jesse Unruh of California's Democratic Party, who has also been working behind the scenes on behalf of Aguilar.

There are good reasons the Democratic Party has worked up rules about not interfering in viable primaries. Political careerists who undermine those rules should be fired. Then people will think twice about doing it again.

Nationally, though there are other stories in the endorsement game this week, namely South Carolina's junior appointed senator, Tim Scott going on CNN's Crossfire and pointedly refusing to endorse South Carolina's senior senator, Lindsay Graham, who's struggling for political survival against a bevy of blood-thirsty teabaggers. (See video up top.)

The endorsement/non-endorsement story that's captured the public's mind though is, of course, the ugly controversy roiling the Cheney family. Liz Cheney, an ambitious extremist, is trying to unseat very conservative senator Mike Enzi in Wyoming and has relocated there from her home in Virginia. Her polling numbers are dreadful-- 69-17% in the latest poll-- so she decided to brutally throw her sister's family under the bus to get some attention. People who don't even follow politics are sickened by Liz Cheney's ogre-like behavior, worse than anything one would ever even expect from her father!

Politico reported that Mary Cheney has now publicly asserted that she won't be endorsing the evil sister's campaign. Liz Cheney blames the whole mess on Enzi, of course.

Unbeknownst even to some of her closest friends and advisers, her newly announced opposition to gay marriage had caused a major rift in the famously close Cheney family, and she and Mary were no longer on speaking terms. Days after we talked it all became public, when, in a series of Facebook posts as devastating as they were surprising, Mary blasted her sister’s stance against marriage equality. “Liz’s position is to treat my family as second class citizens,” Mary wrote. “This isn't like a disagreement over grazing fees or what to do about Iran.” The public rebuke was the first communication between the sisters since August, and soon their parents, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, found themselves dragged into the imbroglio, issuing a statement defending Liz.

But Mary wasn’t done speaking out. In a series of emails to me this week, as the news of her break with her sister spread, Mary wrote, “I’m not supporting Liz’s candidacy.” She later clarified: “By supporting, I mean not working, not contributing, and not voting for (I’m registered in Virginia not Wyoming).” The best she could say of the sister who was once her close friend and confidante was a final postscript: “I am not saying I hope she loses to Enzi.”

For a family renowned for its togetherness and discipline-- “It’s very un-Cheney-like for one arm of the family to do something the other part doesn’t know about in the political sphere and cause any degree of heartburn,” says one former adviser to Dick Cheney—the public squabbling has been a shock. And what began as a race that seemed certain to tear apart the Republican Party in Wyoming has been transformed into something that once seemed unfathomable: the race that’s torn apart the Cheney family.

…Until this week’s very public disagreement, the Cheneys had succeeded for years in keeping the political and the personal in delicate balance when it came to the issue of Mary’s sexuality. Granted, that wasn’t always easy. When she came out to her parents as a high school junior, as she tells the story in Now It’s My Turn, her mother burst into tears and said, “Your life will be so hard.” (Dick, for his part, told her, “You’re my daughter and I love you and I just want you to be happy.”) By the time Bush offered Dick the vice presidency in 2000, one of his biggest hesitations, Mary writes, was about what such a move would mean for her. “Personally, I’d rather not be known as the vice president’s lesbian daughter,” Mary told him. “But, if you’re going to run, I think the country would be lucky to have you. I want to do whatever I can to help out on the campaign.” Help she did, along with Liz, and over the next eight years of the Bush administration, the two sisters, who were already close, grew even closer. To the extent Mary’s sexuality intruded into the world of politics, it only seemed to draw the sisters tighter together.

Never more so than in 2004. That year began with Mary contemplating quitting her job on the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign because of the president’s support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which proposed to ban same-sex marriage. As Mary recalls in her memoir, when she asked to discuss the matter with her father at the White House, Lynne and Liz joined them, and all three urged her to remain on the campaign-- noting that they themselves disagreed with Bush on the issue. But they also told her they would understand and support her decision if she did resign. Mary chose to stay on and, later in that campaign, when Democratic nominee John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, each separately raised the issue of her sexuality during the debates, the Cheneys were furious. Lynne declared Kerry was “not a good man” and denounced his “cheap and tawdry political trick.” When Edwards debated their father, Liz and Lynne went so far as to stick their tongues out at him, while Mary glared at the Democrat and, borrowing one of her father’s famous expressions, silently mouthed the words “Go fuck yourself.”

By the time Dick left office, it seemed clear that the Cheneys had navigated a complicated issue with no negative political consequences-- and family solidarity intact. And, in the years since, it appeared the family's balancing act would only get easier: While the Republican Party remained solidly against gay marriage, public opinion-- even inside the GOP-- was shifting rapidly toward more friendly views about homosexuality. The rest of the country looked like it was catching up with the Cheneys.

But living in Washington is different from living in Wyoming, a fact that Liz Cheney may not have fully reckoned with when she announced in July that she would take on Enzi in next year’s Republican primary. When Cheney jumped into the race, the assumption among the political cognoscenti was that the incumbent was in trouble. The low-key, at times lumbering 69-year-old former CPA-- a politician so square and old-fashioned that he carries a briefcase onto the Senate floor, where he seldom utters a word-- was presumed to be no match for the young, media-savvy, slashing-and-burning daughter of the former vice president. It was an impression Enzi himself reinforced when, upon hearing the news of Cheney’s entrance into the race, he lamented to reporters, “I thought we were friends.”

Few, if any of the early accounts of Cheney’s candidacy even mentioned the matter of her sister, and at first it seemed her biggest problem would be dismissing the carpetbagger label. Although Cheney claims to be a fourth-generation Wyomingite, she did not live in the state-- save for two years as a young girl-- until 2012, when she moved her family from northern Virginia into a $1.6 million home in the tony resort town of Jackson Hole.

Last Night's Primary Runoffs

North Carolina Secretary of State, Elaine Marshall, yesterday's big winner

The first election to end last night was in South Carolina (7pm), where it was easy to predict the outcomes: in every single runoff in the state a dangerous conservative sociopath would win. I was right. South Carolina, where teabagger= secessionist, is one of the places where being a far right extremist of any stripe appeals to the anger, bigotry, willful ignorance and confusion of so much of the population-- and the vast majority of the Republican base. And as repulsive as a political Palin-- rather than a reality TV show Palin-- is to most Americans, in South Carolina Republican politics, she's a serious political figure. Couple that with the explosion of anger towards GOP Establishment politicos Gresham Barrett and Bob Inglis, and there was no room for surprises last night. Inglis, though a conservative kook by any standards, once publicly berated Glenn Beck-- saying nothing that 80-90% of House Republicans would agree with-- off the record. That was his undoing.

A.P. called the gubernatorial race early. Less than 90 minutes after the polls closed, and with just 36% of the precincts counted, they stuck a fork in Barrett, who wound up with 35%. Palin's candidate beat the Establishment guy. In the two important House runoffs, Tim Scott, an African-American teabagger-- also endorsed by Palin-- beat Establishment fave Paul Thurmond, son of Strom, 68.4-31.6%. And in the very conservative 4th CD, the spawning ground of Jim DeMint, Inglis got trounced by Trey Gowdy 70.6-29.4%, a horrible repudiation for an incumbent.

Conservatives and teabaggers also had their fratricidal spats going in Mississippi's 2nd congressional district (where Bill Marcy won and will face popular incumbent Bennie Thompson in the state's most powerfully Democratic district), in a couple of North Carolina House races and in Utah's Senate race.
The only discernible difference between most of the Republican candidates were like those between a mere sociopath and a full-on psychopath. In NC-08, where worthless and cowardly freshman Dem is among the most vulnerable incumbents, the sociopath, Harold Johnson, beat the psychopath, Tim D'Annunzio, handily, 61.2% to 38.8%. William Randall, another bizarre kook-- who insisted that the Gulf Oil spill was part of an Obama plot, took 58.9% of the vote and will be thoroughly beaten by Democrat Brad Miller in November.

What I was more concerned with, of course, were two important Democratic races. The biggie, for the Democratic nomination to face extremist Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), was won-- and very decisively, by Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, the grassroots populist heavily backed by... well, basically by everyone but the DSCC. Bob Menendez, continuing his losing record, personally recruited some guy named Cal Cunningham-- idea being that North Carolina isn't "ready" for two women senators. North Carolinians didn't agree and the $300,000 plus massive support from DC insiders didn't save Cunningham from an electoral thrashing. He was trounced 60- 40% in a runoff that saw Ken Lewis' primary voters follow Lewis straight into Marshall's camp. Score one-- one big one-- for the good guys. Menendez, who forced this divisive and costly primary on North Carolina Democrats sounded on the inauthentic side last night when he managed to croak out, "Tomorrow, we begin the general election and the choice for North Carolinians could not be any starker. Voters will face a choice between a Democrat who has focused on creating jobs and the needs of North Carolina's middle class and a Republican who puts partisanship ahead of doing what's right." He should resign from the DSCC before its too late. Blue America has been urging progressives to contribute to Marshall from the day that Menendez blatantly inserted himself into the race. And we still are-- let's beat Burr!

And then there was the longshot grassroots primary pitting Claudia Wright, an ex-Mormon, openly lesbian, openly progressive, great great granddaughter of Brigham Young, challenging a rolling in corporate cash Establishment Blue Dog, Jim Matheson. Claudia's feisty challenge saw Matheson voting with Democrats on issues-- like abolishing DADT-- that would have been unthinkable without a vigorous primary. We consider the ads Blue America ran this past week in the St. George area to be the least we could do for a stalwart Democrat taking on such a thankless and odious task. Her first try for public office, Claudia wound up with around a third of the vote. Matheson spent $46.00 for every vote her received; Claudia spent $2.91/vote. Thanks to everyone who stood with her!