AROUND NEW HAMPSHIRE
1. This'n That
Scramble expected to slow drug deaths
State House Dome, by Garry Rayno, unionleader.com, November 21, 2015
NOW THE rubber meets the road.
The political talk is over and the work is about to begin as lawmakers try to sort through legislation to address the state's heroin/opioid crisis.
"We're staking our reputation on this," said Senate Majority Leader Jeb Bradley, R-Wolfeboro, last week.
Gov. Maggie Hassan sought Executive Council approval for last week's special session after Senate President Chuck Morse, R-Salem, and House Speaker Shawn Jasper, R-Hudson, declined to call lawmakers back to Concord, saying the issue could be addressed at the beginning of the upcoming session.
So instead of acting on Hassan's proposed legislation to deal with the substance abuse epidemic that has claimed nearly 600 lives in the last two years, GOP legislative leaders proposed the task force to fine tune or overhaul proposed legislation so bills are ready to go Jan. 6 when lawmakers begin the 2016 session.
The task force meets for the first time Tuesday at 9 a.m. to organize and then have a briefing on the issues and proposals the 26-member group faces.
The House and Senate majority and minority leaders are on the task force. So are key committee chairmen such as health and human services, executive department and administration, finance and judiciary as well as ranking minority members and major players in various areas, all legislators.
The pressure is on to produce legislation that can pass muster quickly without a great deal of tweaking so the governor can sign it in January.
Democrats were reluctant partners in the bipartisan effort to approve the resolution establishing the task force but have a vested interest in seeing that the governor's priorities are part of the legislation produced.
There is broad agreement on much of the proposed legislation, but the devil is in the details. For some of the issues -- new rules for writing opioid prescriptions and overhauling licensing and regulating pain clinics -- there are significant differences in philosophies and objectives.
And then there is the issue of money and some of what everyone wants to do will take money: adding drug courts, upgrading the state's prescription drug monitoring program and adding a prosecutor in the attorney general's office to deal with drug crimes.
The GOP leadership wants to wait until they know the state's audited surplus from the 2015 fiscal year. Before expending additional money, the leadership wants to see how much the state saved under the continuing resolution for the three months after Hassan vetoed the budget and if better-than- anticipated revenues this fiscal year continue.
Bradley is correct that legislators' reputations are on the line, and for their sake and Hassan's the next 2-1/2 months need to flow smoothly, yielding policies that will help to solve the drug abuse problem that has touched so many families and communities.
HHS commissioner
Longtime Health and Human Services Commissioner Nick Toumpas made official this week what has been speculated for some time: He will step down at the end of his term in January.
Toumpas has been making the rounds during the last month or so, traveling to agency offices around the state saying goodbye and thanking HHS workers for what they do.
Like some other commissioners before him, he did not come from a medical or social service background when he came to the department. But he became a big booster of the agency, its workers and what they do, and the people they serve.
"Leaving brings mixed emotions as there is so much more that needs to be done and so many new unforeseen challenges that lay ahead," Toumpas wrote in his resignation letter to Gov. Maggie Hassan. "I am excited about the many initiatives we have before us yet sad that I will not be part of the implementation of the many things we have started."
Hassan has appointed a search committee to find a new commissioner for the state's largest agency and the one most responsible for addressing the opioid epidemic.
The search committee is headed by former HHS acting commissioner and state Sen. Kathy Sgambati.
The political talk is over and the work is about to begin as lawmakers try to sort through legislation to address the state's heroin/opioid crisis.
"We're staking our reputation on this," said Senate Majority Leader Jeb Bradley, R-Wolfeboro, last week.
Gov. Maggie Hassan sought Executive Council approval for last week's special session after Senate President Chuck Morse, R-Salem, and House Speaker Shawn Jasper, R-Hudson, declined to call lawmakers back to Concord, saying the issue could be addressed at the beginning of the upcoming session.
So instead of acting on Hassan's proposed legislation to deal with the substance abuse epidemic that has claimed nearly 600 lives in the last two years, GOP legislative leaders proposed the task force to fine tune or overhaul proposed legislation so bills are ready to go Jan. 6 when lawmakers begin the 2016 session.
The task force meets for the first time Tuesday at 9 a.m. to organize and then have a briefing on the issues and proposals the 26-member group faces.
The House and Senate majority and minority leaders are on the task force. So are key committee chairmen such as health and human services, executive department and administration, finance and judiciary as well as ranking minority members and major players in various areas, all legislators.
The pressure is on to produce legislation that can pass muster quickly without a great deal of tweaking so the governor can sign it in January.
Democrats were reluctant partners in the bipartisan effort to approve the resolution establishing the task force but have a vested interest in seeing that the governor's priorities are part of the legislation produced.
There is broad agreement on much of the proposed legislation, but the devil is in the details. For some of the issues -- new rules for writing opioid prescriptions and overhauling licensing and regulating pain clinics -- there are significant differences in philosophies and objectives.
And then there is the issue of money and some of what everyone wants to do will take money: adding drug courts, upgrading the state's prescription drug monitoring program and adding a prosecutor in the attorney general's office to deal with drug crimes.
The GOP leadership wants to wait until they know the state's audited surplus from the 2015 fiscal year. Before expending additional money, the leadership wants to see how much the state saved under the continuing resolution for the three months after Hassan vetoed the budget and if better-than- anticipated revenues this fiscal year continue.
Bradley is correct that legislators' reputations are on the line, and for their sake and Hassan's the next 2-1/2 months need to flow smoothly, yielding policies that will help to solve the drug abuse problem that has touched so many families and communities.
HHS commissioner
Longtime Health and Human Services Commissioner Nick Toumpas made official this week what has been speculated for some time: He will step down at the end of his term in January.
Toumpas has been making the rounds during the last month or so, traveling to agency offices around the state saying goodbye and thanking HHS workers for what they do.
Like some other commissioners before him, he did not come from a medical or social service background when he came to the department. But he became a big booster of the agency, its workers and what they do, and the people they serve.
"Leaving brings mixed emotions as there is so much more that needs to be done and so many new unforeseen challenges that lay ahead," Toumpas wrote in his resignation letter to Gov. Maggie Hassan. "I am excited about the many initiatives we have before us yet sad that I will not be part of the implementation of the many things we have started."
Hassan has appointed a search committee to find a new commissioner for the state's largest agency and the one most responsible for addressing the opioid epidemic.
The search committee is headed by former HHS acting commissioner and state Sen. Kathy Sgambati.
2. Around the Capital
Hassan refugee stance could be 'smart politically'
Capital Beat, by Allie Morris, concordmonitor.com, November 22, 2015
For the last year, Gov. Maggie Hassan has been focused on crafting a state budget, advocating for medicaid expansion, and dealing with the state’s growing drug problem.
But last week, she turned her attention to fighting ISIS.
While Hassan angered local members of her own party with a call for the U.S. to temporarily stop taking Syrian refugees, the move was a smart one for her campaign for U.S. Senate.
Hassan is facing off against Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte, who over the last six years has positioned herself as a national voice on foreign policy matters.
And as that very issue took on a global spotlight last week following the Paris terror attacks, Hassan stepped into the fray and shot to national prominence by becoming the only Democratic governor in a sea of Republicans to call for the U.S. to stop resettling Syrian refugees until the vetting process is “as strong as possible.”
“What she’s done here is very smart politically, because it not only shows off her political chops on foreign policy, it’s in line with what most voters are thinking about,” said political science professor Wayne Lesperance, with New England College.
But some Democrats were not pleased with Hassan’s stance, saying it smelled too much of a campaign maneuver.
“What the hell was she thinking? What was this about, except frankly making every refugee in New Hampshire afraid?” said Democratic radio host Arnie Arnesen. “She is in the winning mode, not in the leading mode.”
While some Democrats may be miffed, the move is unlikely to cost Hassan votes in the election. It’s a point even Arneson acknowledges, begrudgingly.
“What is our choice? That’s what makes it so disgusting,” she said.
In the highly competitive contest, both Hassan and Ayotte are attempting to appeal to voters in the in the middle, an undecided group that will likely determine the election outcome.
Ayotte has gone that direction recently, breaking with her party to become the first Republican U.S. senator to back the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to cut carbon emissions. The move won praise from conservation groups, but drew the ire of local Republicans who are now considering putting up a primary candidate to take on Ayotte.
“This is the great race to the center,” said Dartmouth College government professor Linda Fowler. “It makes sense for both of them, because 48 percent of our electorate is independent.”
==
Speaking of the U.S. Senate race, it’s been off to a slow start.
Since Hassan announced her candidacy in a video posted to YouTube, she has made few public campaign appearance. She spoke at two county Democrat dinners on November 1, but has yet to hold a traditional campaign even as senate candidate Hassan.
Ayotte hasn’t done much by way of campaigning either. Nearly every weekend she participates in a different New Hampshire road race as part of her “series of fall charity races,
a campaign scheme that has her literally running for office.
For the most part both women are talking policy in their day jobs, whether it’s touring a substance abuse treatment center or speaking at a naturalization ceremony.
==
Republican Chris Sununu picked up some key endorsements last week from former governors Judd Gregg and Steve Merrill. Both backed the Newfields Executive Councilor’s bid for governor. So what does this mean for Sununu’s chances?
It’s almost a year until the election. And at a time when most voter’s attention is sucked up by the presidential race, it seems like these major endorsements are meant to ward off other Republicans from getting in the race.
===
National politics is coming to the New Hampshire State House this year in more ways than one.
Of course presidential candidates have paraded through the building in recent weeks to sign up for the state’s prized first-in-the-nation primary. But also issues in the national spotlight are also trickling down to the state level and showing up in bill proposals the Legislature will consider this session.
Rep. John Potucek, a Derry Republican, is seeking to ban so-called sanctuary cities in New Hampshire. It’s not the first time state lawmakers have tried to take that step, but a similar effort failed in 2008. So-called sanctuary cities generally shield people from federal immigration authorities. They popped up in the news recently after a San Francisco woman was fatally shot. The man charged had been in the country illegally, even though he had a lengthy criminal record and had been deported previously, according to the Associated Press.
The bill Potucek is filing has a number of sponsors already, and it would block municipalities from becoming sanctuary cities. And violators wouldn’t be able to collect federal aid from the state.
Potucek isn’t aware of any sanctuary cities in the state. “This is a proactive bill.”
3. Growing Inequality in NH
By one measure, wage disparity in NH has grown more than almost any other state
by David Brooks, concordmonitor.com, November 22, 2015
Wage inequality has grown more in New Hampshire over the past decade than in almost any other state, according to a new study that says wages for workers at the upper end of the scale has risen, while pay at the lower end of the scale has fallen when inflation is taken into account.
The report is based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data about overall wages in 2005 and 2014.
Headlight Data, a business analysis firm, looked at wages over the decade and said that New Hampshire residents with the highest pay – those in the 75th percentile of all wages – saw wages grow about 4 percent over the decade after inflation, a measure of purchasing power. But those making the lowest amount, in the 25th percentile, saw their wages fall by 6 percent.
That difference of 10 percentage points is the third highest disparity of any state. Only Maryland and Rhode Island had a larger spread over that time period; New York state also had a difference of 10 percentage points.
The national average was a spread of 6.9 percentage points, in which high-wage earners saw their purchasing power go up by 3.1 percent and low-wage earners saw their purchasing power go down by 3.8 percent.
The report does not detail the causes. If might be, for example, that salaries of existing jobs changed at different rates, or it might be that salaries didn’t change much but some occupations disappeared from the state while others showed up, altering the balance.
“There are so many different reasons why that inequality is changing,” said Olivia Stewart, data analyst for Headlight Data, the analysis arm of business consulting firm Avalanche. “It can be mobility of your labor force or some sort of skills change.”
The question of income inequality has come to the forefront of political debate in the United States in recent years, fueled by perception of a growing divide between the haves and have-nots. There is little agreement on ways to lessen this divide, however.
Parsing the Headlight Data report another way, New Hampshire appears roughly average in terms of income disparity among states.
In 2014 data the median salary for New Hampshire workers in the 25th percentile, the lowest quarter of all salaries, was $24,320, which was 16th best among all states. And the median salary for people in the 75th percentile, the highest quarter of all salaries, was $56,800, which was 18th-best among all states.
There is also no obvious connection between this measure of inequality and overall economic patterns.
For example, Louisiana was one of the best states for inequality, because wages at the lower end and upper end grew at almost exactly the same rate. Yet those wages are much less than in New Hampshire: The median low-wage figure in Louisiana was $19,962, one of the lowest levels in the county and about one-fifth less than New Hampshire’s figure.
The best state by the inequality measure was North Dakota, where a boom in oil-field development has driven up salaries at all levels by 10 percent or more.
4. Taking Back Democracy
Take the ‘We the People’ pledge
by Betty Tamposi, nashuatelegraph.com, November 22, 2015
When I served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in the 1980s, nobody gave much thought to money in politics. Few state representatives even bothered to raise money for their campaigns. State Senate races rarely cost more than a few thousand dollars. Our primary resource was time, which we had in equal measure and which we generally devoted to knocking on doors and talking with voters face-to-face.
Even New Hampshire's gubernatorial and congressional elections were small potatoes compared to today. When I sought the Republican nomination for Congress in 1988, challengers raised a measly $271,000 on average (adjusted for inflation). Our donations came from citizens in amounts of $1,000 or less, generally much less. Ideas mattered more than dollars.
It's a brave new world today.
As anyone who has a TV or mailbox can attest, it's not uncommon for gubernatorial and congressional candidates and their super PAC backers to spend millions or even tens of millions of dollars getting their message across.
To make the cut, members of Congress devote 30 to 70 percent of their time, by their own admission, dialing for dollars from wealthy donors - not representing their constituents. Those races, in turn, pale in comparison to the amount of special-interest money flooding the presidential campaigns, which are projected to reach into the billions of dollars in 2016.
Making matters worse, our elected leaders live in constant fear that a single vote of conscience might cause one billionaire super PAC or another to launch negative TV attacks that shade the truth and drive all but the most extreme voters away from the polls. Those ads are increasingly funded with secret, out-of-state money.
The result is government "solutions" to our nation's biggest problems that amount to little more than the sum of all lobbies. Take the national debt, for example, which grows bigger by the day as politicians grant special favors to special interests that fund their campaigns.
As the libertarian Cato Institute reports, America spends around $100 billion a year in corporate welfare subsidies that squelch small business and violate the basic principles of free-market competition. Closer to home, Northern Pass and Kinder Morgan are spending millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign donations for the right to access public lands for private gain.
That kind of crony capitalism and wasteful spending are enough to leave any small-government conservative - or any sensible American, for that matter - sick to their stomach. It is also enough to motivate the vast majority of Americans - 85 percent in a recent New York Times poll - to call for fundamental changes to the way we fund campaigns.
The devil is, of course, in the details. And while some are daunted by the sheer scope of the task, others here in New Hampshire have been working to create a bipartisan, citizen-driven package of reforms.
These six reforms, collectively called the We the People Agenda, demand that we expose secret donors and require full transparency; ban bribes from lobbyists and government contractors; ban super PACs and overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision; establish small-donor, citizen-funded elections; end gerrymandering and modernize voter registration; close loopholes and enforce campaign finance laws.
Between now and the primary, Granite Staters will be asked en masse to sign the We the People Pledge and take that same Pledge to the presidential candidates. These reforms will take us a long way to restoring our Founders' vision of a government "dependent upon the people alone."
Stopping big money in politics will not be easy. Washington special interests have too much at stake to relinquish their undue influence without a fight, and party insiders are only too happy to keep things the way they are. Only one thing will make them change: a grassroots, cross-partisan movement of citizens ready and willing to rebel against big money politics and walk the talk for reform.
That's why I'm proud to continue the work of my political mentor, New Hampshire's late Republican Sen. Warren Rudman, and walk alongside thousands of other Granite Staters from across the political spectrum as part of the New Hampshire Rebellion. I hope you will join me in signing the We the People pledge.
Betty Tamposi, a Nashua native, served as a New Hampshire state representative and as assistant secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush. She is an advisory board member of Open Democracy and the New Hampshire Rebellion.
5. Latest Republican Primary Polling
Trump remains on top in new NH poll, but Romney would dominate field if he ran; terrorism top issue on voters' minds
by Paul Steinhauser, nh1.com, November 22, 2015
CONCORD – Donald Trump remains the clear front runner in New Hampshire for the Republican presidential nomination, but a new poll suggests that if Mitt Romney changed his mind and decided to run for the White House again, he’d have a two to one lead over Trump.
And a new survey from Suffolk University and the Boston Globe also indicates that in the wake of the horrific attacks in Paris, terrorism is by far the most important issue on the minds of likely Republican primary voters in the Granite State.
According to the poll, which was released Saturday, Trump stands at 22% support in the first-in-the-nation primary, with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida at 11%, famed neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 10%, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich each at 9% and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 8%.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina are tied at 4%, with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky at 3%. The remaining candidates in the 14-person GOP field are at one percent or less, with 18% undecided with less than three months to go until the Feb. 9th primary.
“Donald Trump’s loyal 22 percent goes a long way in New Hampshire,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston. “As long as the remaining 78 percent is split relatively evenly among the six or seven major contenders, we’re getting close to ‘Trump-mate’ in the Granite State.”
The Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll is the third straight public opinion survey in New Hampshire conducted entirely after the fourth Republican presidential debate and after the Paris attacks to find Rubio in second place, following Fox News and WBUR polls. Rubio had the best favorable rating in the Suffolk University/Boston Globe survey (64%-22% favorable-unfavorable).
“The Rubio thread runs deep throughout the poll. If you look at who is in the top three when it comes to favorability, first choice, second choice, trust, or best chance of winning in the general election, Rubio is the only candidate who meets all of those tests,” Paleologos added.
With Trump remaining the front runner, some in the Republican establishment and donor class have pined for a third White House campaign from Romney. But the 2012 GOP presidential nominee and former Massachusetts governor has resisted such calls since announcing in late January that he would not make another bid for president.
When those questioned in the poll were asked if they would switch their first-choice commitments to Romney if he were added to the list of candidates, three-in-ten indicated they would switch, which would be enough for Romney (at 31%) to dominated the field of existing GOP presidential contenders.
While terrorism/national security has been a key issue in the 2016 race for the White House, it has dominated discussion on the campaign trail since the attacks in Paris over a week ago. According to the poll 42% of likely New Hampshire GOP primary voters said it was their top issue, followed by jobs and the economy at 18% and illegal immigration at 12%.
The Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll was conducted Nov. 17-19, with 500 likely Republican primary voters in the Granite State questioned by telephone. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
AND NATIONALLY
6. The GOP's Straw Man
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The wingnut myth that refuses to die: The one simple reason why there’s no “liberal media conspiracy”
by Conor Lynch, salon.com, November 2, 2015
During the third Republican debate, the winning strategy was not in attacking Hillary Clinton or calling out the absurd policy plans of Donald Trump and Ben Carson, but in slamming the mainstream media as a left wing mouthpiece of the Democratic party. And since the debate, the GOP has gone berserk over CNBC — a business channel, mind you — and it’s supposed liberal bias. The Republican National Committee has even suspended its partnership with NBC News for its February debate, because, as RNC Chairman Reince Priebus writes, “CNBC’s moderators engaged in a series of “gotcha” questions, petty and mean-spirited in tone, and designed to embarrass our candidates.”
Of course, the GOP candidates who were most vocal about the supposed media bias were really just using it to dodge substantive questions and get easy applauses from the partisan crowd. As Charles Pierce puts it in Esquire:
I have come to the conclusion that it is very easy to be a Republican presidential candidate. First of all, to paraphrase J.R. Ewing, once you give up truth, the rest is a piece of cake. Second, and most important, you really only have to memorize one answer.” (i.e it’s the Liberal media!).
When confronted about his voting record in the Senate, Marco Rubio (R-FL) was quick to call out the media bias, after mentioning that President Obama had an abysmal voting record during his campaign as well. “This is another example of the double standard that exists in this country between the mainstream media and the conservatives,” he said, to a crowd of cheering conservatives. He even went on to say that Clinton has her very own super PAC in the mainstream media, a point that may have very well won the debate for the young conservative.
Seeing the advantage in attacking the much-loathed media, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) responded to a question on whether his opposition to compromise on the debt limit shows he is not a “problem solver.”
“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” said Cruz, who would use his time to trash the moderators instead of answering the question, “This is not a cage match.” He went on to mock the Democratic debate as a battle between the “Mensheviks and Bolsheviks,” which seems to imply that the media is not only liberal, but communist.
So, is the mainstream media really left-wing, or even liberal, as those on the right love to claim?
First of all, it should be noted that the real world tends to have a liberal bias — at least what Cruz considers a liberal bias. Take climate change, for example. The fact that the climate is warming because of human activity is a completely uncontroversial notion; it is happening, and the vast majority of scientists agree that it will be catastrophic for humanity if nothing is done very soon. That the mainstream media does not contest the issue of climate change, or claim that it is some giant left-wing conspiracy, does not prove it is liberal, but that it is operating in reality. Cruz does not operate in reality, and believes climate change (i.e. science) is a “religion.” But just because Cruz believes this, or his deranged father, Rafael, believes that evolution is a communist lie, does not mean that evolutionary biologists are communists or that climate scientists are religious fanatics — it means that Rafael Cruz and his son are delusional.
Now, before considering whether the mainstream media is really left-wing, one should look at who owns the media. Consider this: In 1983, 90 percent of American media was owned by 50 companies, and by 2011, that number had fallen to six companies: CBS, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp, Disney and GE, which subsequently sold its media holding, NBC Universal, to cable giant Comcast (which would, in turn, later try to merge with Time Warner Cable, although that deal eventually fell apart).
Thus, the media at large has one crucial goal: to make a profit. Not to serve the public, but to make money by selling advertisement spots to other corporations, whether they are selling new cars or tech products or pointless new drugs. All of this profit-making hardly sounds like the socialist media that Republicans would have everyone believe.
One has to look no further than the coverage of Donald Trump to see this strategy in action. The Donald and the media have been feeding off of each other over the past few months. Trump loves the attention, and the media loves the “Yooge” ratings that he brings. (The higher the ratings, the more the network can charge for advertising or subscriptions.) CNN, for example, has covered Trump as if he were a natural disaster, and even bumped a 1oth anniversary special for Hurricane Katrina to cover one of Trump’s rambling campaign events.
Now consider the media coverage of the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who has drawn massive crowds to his campaign events and last month broke a fundraising record. The media largely ignored Sanders, and when it finally came around, after his popularity and poll numbers were too big to ignore, the coverage was full of bias and mischaracterization. As Rima Regas writes in Alternet:
“The most harmful way anti-Sanders media bias has been manifested is by omission. In this respect, the New York Times is joined by the vast majority of the mainstream media in not typically reporting on Sanders, especially on policy. Overall there is a version of a “wall of silence” built by the media when it comes to serious reporting and analysis of his policies; or when analyzing or reporting on the policies of his opponents, a failure to mention Sanders’ in contrast, especially when his is the more progressive position.”
Why would the media, if it were so left-wing, be so active in its coverage of a right-wing populist like Trump, and so quiet in its coverage of Sanders? The reality is, of course, that the corporate media (a much more appropriate term than mainstream media) is not left-wing. Now, many conservatives argue that the majority of journalists support the Democratic party, which is true. But what does this prove? As Noam Chomsky (a real leftist) has previously pointed out:
“You could find that 99% of the journalists are members of the Socialist Workers Party, or some Maoist group, and that in itself would prove nothing about the media output. The issue is whether the media are free; are the media by their institutional structure free, to allow expression of opinion from whatever source, looking at any topic. If it turned out that 80% of the journalists were from one faction of the business party rather than another faction of the business party, would that tell you anything?”
Anyone who knows the history of left-wing politics understands that the media at large is not at all left-wing, but centrist at best. Again, just because the media lives in reality and does not dispute climate change, doesn’t mean that it is liberal, but that the conservative faction of the GOP has become increasingly delusional in its extremism.
The corporate media runs for a profit, and wouldn’t dare advocate any true socialist policies that woulds inflict pain on its business model. Sure, the media at large supports issues like gay marriage — but again, what does this prove? Is it a plot to destroy America, as Ted Cruz’s cheerful father believes, or is it because America at large is becoming more socially tolerant?
Rubio and Cruz did well for themselves in bashing the abhorred media, but what does CNBC care, the ratings were great (though significantly lower than the first two debates), and the network made $250,000 for each 30 second commercial. And this, my fellow comrades, is what the corporate media is all about.
7. Send In the Clowns [long read]
The GOP Clown Car Rolls On
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, readersupportednews.com, November 18, 2015
Not one of them can win, but one must. That's the paradox of the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, fast becoming the signature event in the history of black comedy.
Conventional wisdom says that with the primaries and caucuses rapidly approaching, front-running nuts Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson must soon give way to the "real" candidates. But behind Trump and Carson is just more abyss. As I found out on a recent trip to New Hampshire, the rest of the field is either just as crazy or as dangerous as the current poll leaders, or too bumbling to win.
Disaster could be averted if Americans on both the left and the right suddenly decide to be more mature about this, neither backing obvious mental incompetents, nor snickering about those who do. But that doesn't seem probable.
Instead, HashtagClownCar will almost certainly continue to be the most darkly ridiculous political story since Henry II of Champagne, the 12th-century king of Jerusalem, plunged to his death after falling out of a window with a dwarf.
Just after noon, Wednesday, November 4th. I'm in Hollis, New Hampshire, a little town not far from the Massachusetts border.
The Hollis pharmacy is owned by Vahrij Manoukian, a Lebanese immigrant who is the former chairman of the Hillsborough County Republican Committee. If you come into his establishment looking for aspirin, you have to first survive dozens of pictures of the cannonball-shape businessman glad-handing past and present GOP hopefuls like Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Rudy Giuliani.
Primary season is about who most successfully kisses the asses of such local burghers, and the big test in Hollis today is going to be taken by onetime presumptive front-runner Jeb Bush.
Despite its ideological decorative scheme, the Manoukian pharmacy has some charming small-town quirks you wouldn't find in a CVS. There's a section of beautiful handmade wooden toys, for instance. There's also a pair of talkative parrots named Buddy and Willy perched near the cash registers.
While waiting for the candidate to arrive, I try to make conversation.
"Who are you voting for this year?"
"Hello," says Willy.
"Is Jeb Bush going to win?"
"Rooowk!" the bird screeches, recoiling a little.
It seems like a "no." Bush comes in a moment later and immediately hears the birds squawking. A tall man, he smiles and cranes his head over the crowd in their direction.
"Whose dog is that?" he cracks.
Technically, that is the correct comic response, but the room barely hears him. For Bush, Campaign 2016 has been a very tough crowd.
It's hard to recall now, but a year ago, it appeared likely that Bush would be the Republican nominee. He had a lead in polls, and some Beltway geniuses believed Republican voters would favor "more moderate choices" in 2016, pushing names like Mitt Romney, Chris Christie and this reportedly "smarter" Bush brother to the top of the list.
Moreover, the Bush campaign was supposed to be a milestone in the history of post-Citizens United aristocratic scale-tipping. The infamous 2010 Supreme Court case that deregulated political fundraising birthed a monster called the Super PAC, also known as the "independent-expenditure-only committee." This new form of slush fund could receive unlimited sums from corporations, billionaires and whomever else, provided it didn't coordinate with an active presidential campaign.
Decrying the "no-suspense primary" and insisting, "It's nobody's turn," Bush announced his candidacy on June 15th. But he and his Super PAC, Right to Rise, had been raising money all year long.
Fifteen days after his announcement, on July 1st, the books closed on the first six months of Right to Rise's backroom cash-hoovering. Bush was already sitting atop an astonishing $103 million. That was about 10 times the amount of the next-biggest GOP Super PAC, Christie's America Leads fund.
A hundred million bucks, a name that is American royalty, and the apparent backing of the smoke-filled room. What could go wrong?
Only everything! Before his official announcement even, Bush iceberged his candidacy when he crisscrossed the country in mid-May tying his face in knots in a desperate attempt to lay out a cogent position on his brother's invasion of Iraq.
During a remarkable five days of grasping and incoherent answers, in which Bush was both for and against the invasion multiple times, it became clear that this candidate: (a) doesn't understand the meaning of the phrase "knowing what we know now," and (b) doesn't know how to cut his losses and shut up when things go bad. People began to wonder out loud if he really was the smarter brother.
The real disaster was the second debate, when he decided to go after the other "plausible" establishment candidate, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and ended up getting beaten to gristle onstage. He was reduced after that episode to admitting, "I'm not a performer." He headed into his New Hampshire trip with reporters pronouncing his campaign "on life support."
The operating theory of the Bush campaign is that there's still a massive pot of donor cash, endorsements and support the Republican Party elders must throw to someone. But can Bush remake his candidacy in time to re-establish himself as a plausible vessel for all of that largesse?
In Hollis, there is little evidence of a remade Bush candidacy. His stump presentation is surprisingly half-assed. He tries to get over with lines like, "We've had a divider-in-chief – we need a commander-in-chief," which are so plainly canned that they barely register, even with a crowd jacked up for any put-down of Obama.
Worse, he issues one of the odder descriptions of the American dream you'll ever hear from a Republican.
"We need to create a society," he says, "where we create a safety net for people, and then we say, 'Go dream the biggest possible dreams.'"
I look around. Did a Republican candidate just try to sell a crowd full of New Hampshire conservatives on a government safety net?
He has one near-excellent moment, when answering a question about Syria and Russia. "I don't want to sound bellicose," he says. (Why not? This is the Republican race.) "But my personal opinion is, we're the United States of f— of America. They should be more worried about us than we are about them."
Bush could have become an instant YouTube sensation if he'd completed his thought and said, "We're the United States of Fucking America," but he couldn't do it. That's just not who he is.
Who is he? Minus the family imperative, Bush is easily imagined as a laid-back commercial lawyer in some Florida exurb, the kind of guy who can crack dirty jokes while he runs a meeting about a new mixed-use development outside Tallahassee.
He doesn't seem at all like a power-crazed, delusionally self-worshipping lunatic, and that's basically his problem. He doesn't want this badly enough to be the kind of effortless sociopathic liar you need to be to make it through this part of the process.
Toward the end of his speech, for instance, the pharmacist Manoukian puts the Jebster on the spot. The local apothecary has a proposal he's been trying to make state law that would give drug dealers special status.
"They would be like child molesters, always being registered," he says. He wheezes excitedly as he details his plan to strip dealers of all social services. I don't think the plan involves using hot irons to brand them with neck tattoos, but that's the spirit.
The reporters all flash bored looks at one another. People like Manoukian are recurring figures on the campaign trail, particularly on the Republican side. There's always some local Junior Anti-Sex League chief who asks the candidate in a town hall to endorse a plan for summary executions of atheists or foreigners or whoever happens to be on the outs that election cycle.
Bush absorbs the pharmacist's question and immediately launches into a speech about the dangers of addiction – to prescription drugs! Through the din of screeching parrots, Bush talks, movingly, I think, about his "precious daughter" Noelle's problems with prescription pills.
"There are some bad actors," he says. "You have people who overprescribe, people who are pharmacy shopping, doctor shopping..."
Everything he just said is true, but Manoukian, as he listens to this diatribe, looks like someone has hit him with a halibut. Does Bush know he's talking to a pharmacist?
Trump would have killed a moment like this, delivering some dog-whistle-ready line about gathering up all the dealers by their hoodies and shooting them into space with all of the child molesters. Who cares if it makes sense? This is the Clown Car.
But Bush has no feel for audience. He doesn't know how to play down to a mob. Nor does he realize how absurd he sounds when a Lucky Spermer scion like himself tries to talk about his "small-business" experience (his past three "jobs" were all lucrative gigs with giant companies that had done business with Florida when he was governor). Despite all this, Bush doesn't seem crazy, nor even like a particularly disgusting person by presidential-campaign standards, which probably disqualifies him from this race.
Lynn Cowan, a Hollis resident, agrees. She thinks Bush comes across as a reasonable guy, but she also thinks his reasonableness is probably crippling in the current political environment.
"It's to his detriment," she says. "And it's sad that we've reached a point where these politicians can't even be on the level."
A few hours later, Nashua, New Hampshire. Rubio strides onstage to a roaring young crowd at the Dion Center of Rivier University. He is like a cross of Joel Osteen and Bobby Kennedy, jacketless with a red tie and shirtsleeves. He is short but prickishly good-looking, all hair and teeth and self-confidence. He's the kind of guy that no group of men wants to go to a bar with, both because he spoils the odds and because he seems like kind of an asshole generally.
There are young women in the crowd looking up at him adoringly, like a Beatle. It's a sight one doesn't often see in presidential politics, but even more seldom on the Republican side, where most candidates are either 500 years old or belong to religions barring nonprocreative use of the wiener. Rubio plainly enjoys being an exception to the rule.
His speech is a total nothingburger, full of worn clichés about America being an "exceptional country," where people are nonetheless living "paycheck to paycheck" and wondering if "achieving [the American dream] is still possible."
But he's so slick, he could probably sell a handful of cars at every speech. His main pitch is his Inspirational Personal Tale™. As he's told it, he's the son of refugees from Fidel Castro's Cuba (actually, they left Cuba before Castro, but whatever) who rose from nothing to reach the U.S. Senate, where he was eventually able to draw a $170,000 paycheck despite a brilliant Office Space-style decision to not quit, exactly, but simply not go to work anymore. Which is pretty sweet.
Actually, that last bit isn't openly part of his stump speech. But if you listen hard enough, you can hear it. Rubio has announced that he isn't going to run for re-election to the Senate, where he recently cast his first vote in 26 days and spoke for the first time in 41. He said he didn't hate the work but was "frustrated" ("He hates it," a friend more bluntly told The Washington Post).
In addition to the stories about laying down in the Senate, old tales about Rubio's use of an American Express card given to him by the Republican Party when he was in the Florida House began swirling again. The stories are complex, but the upshot is that Rubio once used party credit cards to spend $10,000 on a family vacation, $3,800 on home flooring, $1,700 on a Vegas vacation and thousands more on countless other absurdities.
Couple those tales with the troubling stories about his financial problems – the Times learned that he cashed in a retirement account and blew $80,000 on a speedboat he probably couldn't afford – and the subtext with Rubio is that he is probably both remaining in the Senate and running for president, at least partly, for the money.
A debt addict with a burgeoning Imelda Marcos shopping complex was pretty much the only thing missing from the top of this GOP field. Yet he looks like the party's next attempt at an Inevitable Candidate.
It's easy to see why. Rubio storms through his stump speech in Nashua, blasting our outdated infrastructure with perfect timing and waves of soaring rhetoric. We have outdated policies in this country, he says. "We have a retirement system designed in the 1930s. We have an immigration and higher-education system designed in the 1950s. Anti-poverty programs designed in the 1960s. Energy policies designed from the 1970s. Tax policies from the Eighties and Nineties..."
The punchline is something about needing to burn it all to the ground and remake everything into a new conservative Eden for the 21st century. "An economic renaissance, unlike anything that's ever happened," he gushes.
I raise an eyebrow. Any vet of this process will feel, upon seeing Rubio in person, a disturbance in the campaign-trail force. He checks all the boxes of what the Beltway kingmakers look for in a political marketing phenomenon: young, ethnic, good-looking, capable of working a room like a pro and able to lean hard on an inspirational bio while eschewing policy specifics.
A bitter Bush recently pegged Rubio as a Republican version of Obama, a comparison neither Rubio nor many Democrats will like, but it has a lot of truth to it. The main difference, apart from the policy inverses, is in tone. 2008 Obama sold tolerance and genial intellectualism, perfect for roping in armchair liberals. Rubio sells a kind of strident, bright-eyed dickishness that in any other year would seem tailor-made for roping in conservatives.
But this isn't any year. It isn't just our energy, education and anti-poverty systems that are outdated. So is our tradition of campaign journalism, which, going back to the days of Nixon, trains reporters to imagine that the winner is probably the slickest Washington-crafted liar, not some loon with a reality show.
But in 2016, who voters like and who the punditocracy thinks they'll swallow are continuing to be two very different things. In the Clown Car era, if reporters think you're hot stuff, that's probably a red flag.
Concord, New Hampshire, the Secretary of State's office, morning of November 6th. I'm waiting to see Ohio Gov. John Kasich officially register as a candidate for the New Hampshire primary.
In another election, Kasich might be a serious contender, being as he is from Ohio, a former Lehman Brothers stooge and a haranguing bore with the face of a dogcatcher. He exactly fits the profile of what party insiders used to call an "exciting" candidate.
At the moment, though, he's a grumpy sideshow to Trump and Carson whose main accomplishment is that he hogged the most time in the fourth debate (and also became the first non-Trump candidate to be booed). Kasich in person seems like a man ready to physically implode from bitterness at the thought that his carefully laid scheme for power might be undone by a flatulent novelty act like Trump.
Surrounded by reporters in the Concord state offices, Kasich seethes again about the tenor of the race. "I think there are some really goofy ideas out there," he says.
I've driven to Concord specifically for this moment. I want to ask Kasich if maybe this is the wrong time in American history for someone pushing cold realism as a platform. It's a softball – I think he might enjoy expounding upon the issue of America's newfound fascination with "goofy" politicians.
"The people with the goofiest ideas are at the top of the polls," I say. "Do you think maybe being the sane candidate in this race is disqualifying?"
Kasich doesn't smile. Instead, he shoots me a look like I'd just dented his Mercedes.
"No," he hisses.
The candidacy of Carly Fiorina, with its wild highs and lows, has exposed the bizarre nature of this primary season. She was in Nowheresville until midsummer, when she attracted the notice of Trump. At the time, reveling atop the polls in full pig glory, Trump told Rolling Stone that America wouldn't be able to take looking at Fiorina's face for a whole presidency. In the second debate, Fiorina responded, "I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said."
Fiorina in the same debate implored Hillary Clinton and Obama to watch Planned Parenthood at work. "Watch these tapes," she said, staring hypnotically into the screen like a Kreskin or a Kashpirovsky. "Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.' "
It was a brilliantly macabre performance, and, according to some, it won her the debate. Even by this race's standards, a tale of evil liberal women's-health workers ripping out the brains of live babies rated a few very good days of what they call "earned media," i.e., press you don't have to pay for.
Of course, Fiorina's claim that she had actually seen a video of someone trying to harvest the brain of a fetus with its legs kicking turned out to be false. Her story matched up vaguely with one video that included a description of a fetus having its brain removed, but no such footage existed, as fact-checkers immediately determined.
Called on her fib by Fox's Chris Wallace, Fiorina doubled down.
"I've seen the footage," she insisted. "And I find it amazing, actually, that all these supposed fact-checkers in the mainstream media claim this doesn't exist."
The week after that appearance with Wallace on Fox News Sunday was her best week in the polls, as she reached as high as 11 percent in some, tying for third with Rubio. She'd clued in to the same insight that drove the early success of Trump: that in the reality-show format of the 2016 race, all press attention is positive, and nobody particularly cares if you lie, so long as you're entertaining.
America dug Fiorina when she was a John Carpenter movie about bloodthirsty feminists harvesting baby brains. But when she talked about anything else, they were bored stiff.
On a Thursday night in Newport, New Hampshire, Fiorina is laboring through her monotone life story of corporate promotions and "solving problems." It's like watching a thermometer move. "Wouldn't it be helpful," she asks, "to reduce the 73,000-page tax code to three pages?"
I chuckle. Even by Clown Car standards, a three-page federal tax code is a hilarious ploy, right up there with Carson's 10-percent biblical tithe and a giant wall across the Central American isthmus. On the way out of the event, a few reporters are joking about it. "Three pages is good," one deadpans. "But I'd like to see her fit it on the label of a really nice local IPA."
Polls have suggested that Fiorina, Carson and Trump were all fighting over the same finite slice of Lunatic Pie (the Beltway press euphemistically calls it the "outsider vote"), a demographic that by late September comprised just north of half of expected Republican voters. That means that for Fiorina to rise, Trump or Carson must fall.
The problem is that after a late-summer swoon, Trump's support has stabilized. And Carson has taken campaign lunacy to places that a three-page tax code couldn't dent. Forget about winning a primary: Carson won the Internet.
Traditionally, we in the political media have always been able to finish off candidates once they start bleeding. The pol caught sending dick pics to strangers, lying about nannies, snuggling models on powerboats, concealing secret treatments for "exhaustion," or doing anything else unforgivably weird is harangued until he or she disintegrates. The bullying is considered a sacred tribal rite among the Beltway press, and it's never not worked.
Until this year. Trump should have been finished off half a dozen times – after the John-McCain-was-a-wuss-for-
But we don't finish them off anymore. We just keep the cameras rolling. The ratings stay high, and the voters don't abandon their candidates – they just tune in to hate us media smartasses more.
Enter Ben Carson. Reporters early on in the summer thought he was a Jerzy Kosiński character, a nutty doctor who had maybe gotten lost on the way to a surgical convention and accidentally entered a presidential race. In the first debate, he looked like an amnesiac who might at any moment reach into his pocket, find a talisman reminding him of his true identity, and walk offstage.
Then he started saying stuff. First there was that thing about using drones on immigrants crossing the border. Then people began picking apart old stories he'd told, like that a Yale professor in a psych class called "Perceptions 301" had once given him $10 for being honest (nobody remembers that class), or that he'd helped hide frightened white high school students in a lab in Detroit during race riots (nobody remembers that, either).
Everyone who's ever been to an American megachurch recognizes the guy who overdoes the "before" portion of his evangelical testimony, telling tall tales about running with biker gangs or participating in coke orgies (this is always taking place somewhere like Lubbock or suburban Topeka) before discovering Jesus.
As some ex-evangelicals have pointed out, Carson fits this model. He claims in his autobiography, Gifted Hands, that he once tried to stab someone named "Bob," failing only because he accidentally hit a belt buckle. Also, he told reporters decades ago that as a youth he attacked people with "bats and bricks" and hammers. The hammer victim was apparently his mother.
In Gifted Hands, none of this stuff seems any more real than the book's other inspirational passages, like the one where as a college student he prays to God about being broke and gets immediate relief as he walks across campus. "A $10 bill lay crumpled on the ground in front of me," he wrote (the magical $10 bill is a recurring character in Carsonia).
Soon, reporters were interviewing childhood friends, who were revealing what is clear if you read between the lines of Carson's book, which is that he was probably never anything but a nerd with an overheated imagination. "He was skinny and unremarkable," a classmate named Robert Collier told CNN. "I remember him having a pocket saver."
Carson lashed out at reporters for doubting his inspirational tale of a homicidal, knife-wielding madman turned convivial brain surgeon. "I would say to the people of America: Do you think I'm a pathological liar like CNN does?" he said.
This bizarre state of affairs led to stories in the straight press that were indistinguishable fromOnion fare. "Ben Carson Defends Himself Against Allegations That He Never Attempted to Murder a Child," wrote New York magazine, in perhaps the single funniest headline presidential politics has ever seen.
Next, BuzzFeed reporters unearthed an old speech of Carson's in which he outlined a gorgeously demented theory about the Egyptian pyramids: They were not tombs for Pharaohs, but rather had been built by the biblical Joseph to store grain. The latter idea he accepted after discarding the obvious space-aliens explanation.
"Various scientists have said, 'Well, you know there were alien beings that came down and they have special knowledge,'" he said. "[But] it doesn't require an alien being when God is with you."
Scientists were quick to point out all sorts of issues, like the pyramids not really being hollow and therefore really sucky places to store grain. Then there was the fact that the Egyptians wrote down what the pyramids were for in, well, writing.
The pyramid story sent the Internet, which specializes in nothing if not instant mockery, into overdrive. Carson quickly became perhaps the single funniest thing on Earth. The Wrap ran a piece about Carson being "mocked mercilessly" on social media, where other "Carson theories" quickly developed: that the Eiffel Tower was for storing French bread, brains were actually a fruit, and peanut butter can be used as spermicide, etc. The whole world was in on it. It was epic.
Poor Trump now had to concede that someone else in the race was even more ridiculous and unhinged than he was. The campaign's previously unrivaled carnival expert/circus Hitler was reduced to sounding like George Will as he complained somberly – and ungrammatically – about the attention the mad doctor was stealing away from him.
"With Ben Carson wanting to hit his mother on head with a hammer, stabb [sic] a friend and Pyramids built for grain storage," Trump tweeted sadly, "don't people get it?"
By the end of the first week of November, Carson did not experience, upon close scrutiny, an instant plunge in the polls, as previous front-runners-for-a-day like Rick Perry or Herman Cain had in years past. Instead, he remained atop the polls with Trump, having successfully convinced his followers that the media flaps were just liberal hazing of a black man who threatened leftist stereotypes. And so the beginning of the long-awaited "real race" stalled still another week.
Trump commented during a rally in Illinois: "You can say anything about anybody, and their poll numbers go up. This is the only election in history where it's better off if you stabbed somebody. What are we coming to?"
We are coming to the moment when Trump is the voice of reason, that's what.
8. Barnum & Bailey Politics
The Perils of Circus Politics
by Robert Reich, robertreich.org, November 17, 2015
The next president of the United States will confront a virulent jihadist threat, mounting effects of climate change, and an economy becoming ever more unequal.
We’re going to need an especially wise and able leader.
Yet our process for choosing that person is a circus, and several leading candidates are clowns.
How have we come to this?
First, anyone with enough ego and money can now run for president.
This wasn’t always the case. Political parties used to sift through possible candidates and winnow the field.
Now the parties play almost no role. Anyone with some very wealthy friends can set up a Super PAC. According to a recent New York Times investigation, half the money to finance the 2016 election so far has come from just 158 families.
Or if you’re a billionaire, you can finance your own campaign.
And if you’re sufficiently outlandish, outrageous, and outspoken, a lot of your publicity will be free. Since he announced his candidacy last June, Trump hasn’t spent any money at all on television advertising.
Second, candidates can now get away with saying just about anything about their qualifications or personal history, even if it’s a boldface lie.
This wasn’t always the case, either. The media used to scrutinize what candidates told the public about themselves.
A media expose could bring a candidacy to a sudden halt (as it did in 1988 for Gary Hart, who had urged reporters to follow him if they didn’t believe his claims of monogamy).
But when today’s media expose a candidates lies, there seems to be no consequence. Carson’s poll numbers didn’t budge after revelations he had made up his admission to West Point.
The media also used to evaluate candidates’ policy proposals, and those evaluations influenced voters.
Now the media’s judgments are largely shrugged off. Trump says he’d “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, round up all undocumented immigrants in the United States and send them home, and erect a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexican border.
Editors and columnists find these proposals ludicrous but that doesn’t seem to matter.
Fiorina says she’ll stop Planned Parenthood from “harvesting” the brains of fully formed fetuses. She insists she saw an undercover video of the organization about to do so.
Third and finally, candidates can now use hatred and bigotry to gain support.
Years ago respected opinion leaders stood up to this sort of demagoguery and brought down the bigots.
In the 1950s, the eminent commentator Edward R. Murrow revealed Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy to be a dangerous incendiary, thereby helping put an end to McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.
In the 1960s, religious leaders and university presidents condemned Alabama Governor George C. Wallace and other segregationist zealots – thereby moving the rest of America toward integration, civil rights, and voting rights.
But when today’s presidential candidates say Muslim refugees shouldn’t be allowed into America, no Muslim should ever be president, and undocumented workers from Mexico are murderers, they get away with it.
Paradoxically, at a time when the stakes are especially high for who becomes the next president, we have a free-for-all politics in which anyone can become a candidate, put together as much funding as they need, claim anything about themselves no matter how truthful, advance any proposal no matter how absurd, and get away bigotry without being held accountable.
Why? Americans have stopped trusting the mediating institutions that used to filter and scrutinize potential leaders on behalf of the rest of us.
And no opinion leader any longer commands enough broad-based respect to influence a majority of the public.
A growing number of Americans have become convinced the entire system is rigged – including the major parties, the media, and anyone honored by the establishment.
So now it’s just the candidates and the public, without anything in between.
Which means electoral success depends mainly on showmanship and self-promotion.
Telling the truth and advancing sound policies are less important than trending on social media.
Being reasonable is less useful than gaining attention.
Offering rational argument is less advantageous than racking up ratings.
Such circus politics may be fun to watch, but it’s profoundly dangerous for America and the world.
We might, after all, elect one of the clowns.
FINALLY
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