Senate 2016

Tuesday Paul Krugman was ruminating on how lucky the GOP establishment is that the noisy mess that is Herr Trumpf is keeping people from focusing on "the hard right turn even conventional Republican candidates have taken, a turn whose radicalism would have seemed implausible not long ago.

Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) is working overtime and largely behind the scenes, on behalf of a Finance Sector that has funded his political career to the tune of a cool $23,538,638, more than for any other politician in history who hasn't run for president-- and considerably more than several politicians who have run for president.

Will Herr Trumpf schlong the Republican Party?Herr Trumpf fired a warning shot-- a heavy calibre one-- over the bow of congressional Republicans. So far not a single member of the House or Senate has endorsed him. And some-- like Bob Dold (IL), David Jolly (FL) and Carlos Curbelo (FL)-- have actually said they won't vote for him if he's the party nominee. His opponents, however all have congressmen and senators coming out for them. Herr takes those endorsements as rebukes.

What could be a better holiday gift, to progressives who are giving their all to reverse catastrophic trends in our political system, economy and environment? This isn't some phony-baloney DCCC/DSCC or Marco Rubio offer. One of Blue America's most generous annual contributors over the course of many years is putting $2,000 on the table as a matching fund for one progressive candidate on this page. Here's how he describes the candidate:

Today I got another shameless fundraising email from a Senate Democrat doing Wall Street's bidding-- Barbara Boxer, disgracing herself as she hobbles out the door by referring to reactionary "ex"-Republican, Patrick Murphy, as a "bold progressive" and asking people who trust her to contribute to his right-wing campaign. Maybe "bold-faced liar" would have been more precise.

Last week when the Washington Post's Greg Sargent wrote that it was a good thing that the Republican presidential hopefuls are ignoring the Paris climate deal-- at their debates and at their campaign events-- it just highlighted further the GOP's inability and unwillingness to deal with reality. "[A] GOP president could do a great deal to undermine the climate deal. He could either declare that the U.S.

Wednesday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Fisher v. the University of Texas at Austin, a case challenging the right of state universities to use race-based affirmative action in their admissions policies. The most right-wing of the Justices, Antonin Scalia-- who will be 80 in March and has increasingly been having episodes of senility-- launched into a racist rant that was more in line with certain thinking back in the 1930s when he was growing up.

Neither Paul Ryan nor Miss McConnell could care less what Herr Trumpf or any other GOP candidates have to say about minority groups. When each one of them denounced his horribly bigoted remarks about Muslims yesterday each was tepid and unengaged.

At Trumpf's bund rally in South Carolina a few days ago, he Islamophobic remarks got most of the news. But did you miss that he also seems to be coming up with some kind of a plan to "do something" to the Internet? He told his audience of lo-info fans that "We're losing a lot of people because of the Internet. And we have to do something. We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening.

Why are so many cowardly Republican elected officials afraid to take on Trumpf as he leads their party into classic fascism? I mean have you heard a word about Trumpf from Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley? Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson? Missouri Senator Roy Blunt?