Jeb Bush

Although I loved the Rand Paul/Trumpy junior high exchange and Rand Paul's line that "there will always be a Bush or a Clinton for you if you want to go back to Iraq," probably the most memorable bits from CNN's long, mostly boring debate Wednesday night were when Jeb defended the honor of his brother's failed presidency by making the absurd statement that "he kept us safe," forgetting, apparently, the worst disaster to have happened on American soil in over a century;

Francis Carr Begbie | September 13, 2015http://bit.ly/1MmvVF4 With an Afterword by Michael Hoffman“What was not so long ago unthinkable has come to pass.” Thus the Jewish Chronicle‘s verdict on the election of hard-left pro-Palestinian Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Britain’s Labor Party.

Yesterday we looked at how the unicorn-like "reform conservatives" are trying to rationalize what is coming to look like Trumpian inevitability.

Trump has shot to the top of the GOP polls without spending much money. He hasn't done a single broadcast or cable ad-- not nationally, not in Iowa, not in New Hampshire, not in South Carolina-- but he's #1 nationally, #1 in Iowa, #1 in New Hampshire and #1 in South Carolina, and by a lot. Jeb Bush, on the other hand, has seen his approval among Republican voters sink lower and lower and lower.

Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment was, at least superficially, sacrosanct among Republicans... until Trump took over the party. Reagan, from his 1990 book An American Life:

With Loretta Sanchez running for the U.S. Senate, Orange County's 46th Congressional District is be an open seat in 2016. It's a solidly blue district (D+9), and Obama won it with 59% in 2008 and with 61% in 2012. The district includes Santa Ana, Anaheim and Orange, and the voters are overwhelmingly Hispanic-American and Asian-American.

The last thing the Republican Party Establishment wanted was a raucous racist primary that highlights the disdain with which Republican candidates view minorities. But the party's angry, confused base had their own ideas-- and plenty of power-mad candidates to pander to them, one of whom is a celebrity TV reality star who knows how to command an audience and daily headlines.It doesn't matter what Reince Priebus wants, or what the GOP's 2012 autopsy mandated, or even-- perhaps (we'll see)-- what the billionaire insurgent Koch family wants.

Texas fascist Ted Cruz is counting on Jeb Bush and Donald Trump to destroy each other so that the nomination falls into his own lap.

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 KenI 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.

Yesterday, on the 80th anniversary of the enactment of the Social Security Act-- which had been vilified as "socialism" by conservatives-- we took a look at the NY-24 congressional campaign of Social Security Works co-founder Eric Kingson. Kingston, of course, is only one of many progressive Democrats who are militant about preserving and expanding Social Security.