Dan Kaufman on one of those serious candidates who made this such a strong Republican field.
Shortly after his exit from an abbreviated presidential run last fall, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin returned to a more successful undertaking: dismantling what remains of his state’s century-old progressive legacy.
Last month, Mr. Walker signed a bill that allowed corporations to donate directly to political parties. On the same day, he signed a law that replaced the state’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, a body that is responsible for election oversight and enforcing ethics codes, with two commissions made up of partisan appointees. Now a new bill supported by Mr. Walker, which is expected to clear the Republican-dominated Legislature with a Senate vote soon, threatens to corrupt Wisconsin’s Civil Service.
… the bill highlights Wisconsin’s role as a laboratory for a national conservative strategy to destroy the labor movement. That experiment began in 2011 with the passage of Act 10, which all but ended collective bargaining for the state’s public employees and helped inspire more than a hundred bills across the country attacking public-sector unions.
I understand this “laboratories of democracy” thing. We have 50 states, so if someone like Kansas decides to go off and be crazy, then hey, everybody else can stand back and keep their metaphorical fingers in their ears. But Republicans blew up the South, and blew up Kansas, and blew up everywhere else they put their plan into effect, and still people are waving the smoke away from their noggins and saying “Damn the lab goggles, let’s do it again!”
By adding the Civil Service bill, Mr. Walker brings Wisconsin closer to the achievement of a long-sought goal of the libertarian right: universal “at-will employment.” Unlike union workers or state employees, whose collective bargaining agreements or Civil Service rules generally require employers to demonstrate “just cause” for them to be fired, at-will employees can be terminated at any time for any reason. At-will employment is promoted by the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council, which disseminates model bills to state legislators benefiting its corporate members and conservative private backers.
These states that follow ALEC’s perfect plan have it all! Lower wages! Lower quality of life! Lower education! Lower services! Lower employment! Lower Growth! and Lower Mobility! It’s a working man’s dream… Well it’s someone’s dream.
Of course, not everything is lower in states controlled by the GOP. No siree. You get your high levels of poverty, murder and suicide. That’s like sauce on the side.
You’d think even the worst lab in the world would stop running the same experiment after it blew up in their face every time. But nope. Right now Missouri, Indiana, and Wisconsin are all treating the disaster in Kansas like a role model. Voters in both Kentucky and Illinois just signed up governors with the explicit promise to blow up their states.
Serious question: why does the obvious, total, and repeated failure of conservative policies at the state level not turn into Republican losses in state government?
Okay, come on in. Let’s see how many pundits are back at work...
Frank Bruni rips off the “must we talk about Trump again?” Band-aide this week.
If your very candidacy and identity rest on your supposed talent for victory, can you survive a defeat?
Can you continue to call yourself a winner if you’ve been a loser — and if “loser” is your favorite way of closing the book on someone, your final word, the workhorse in your brimming lexicon of slurs, exiting your mouth so reflexively that it’s essentially your exhalation, your carbon dioxide: “loser,” “loser,” “loser.”
Donald Trump has a problem that the other candidates for the Republican nomination don’t…. Neither his image nor his ego leaves any room for a setback, any allowance for second place.
Hey, Donald Trump is not a loser if he loses! The people in Illi… Indi… Iowa? Was it Iowa? The people in that low rent corn camp are the losers! Their state was going to be great—gold-plated casinos wall-to-wall—but now they’ll have to build a wall around themselves to keep all the horrible, horrible people in. And they have to pay for it. Losers.
Ruth Marcus on how Carly Fiorina proved she can be as sexist as any man.
Carly Fiorina has dwindled to near- irrelevance in the Republican primary field, as illustrated by her demotion to the undercard debate. But Fiorina, piping up from the kiddie table Thursday, said something so calculatedly outrageous that it demands response: “Unlike another woman in this race, I actually love spending time with my husband.”
… In a campaign that has, so far, been blessedly free of sexism toward the Democratic front-runner, this was the most retro, sexist remark yet, at least where Clinton is concerned.
Sometimes, I think Marcus isn’t watching very closely.
Ross Douthat is… He’s… man, I’m starting to wish I’d listened to all those people who wanted to herd Douthat into the Will-Dowd We Don’t Miss You zone.
...while the mainstream press isn’t necessarily protective of public figures, neither is it rushing out to do National Enquirer-style digging whenever there’s a plausible rumor in the wind. For every Eliot Spitzer or Mark Sanford, there’s a scandalous story that flares and vanishes amid a lot of journalistic discomfort about touching it.
Wait. Don’t tell me. Is it, Jeb! It’s Jeb! right?
Which brings us to Bill Clinton…
Just kidding. I knew where we were going. Douthat says that if Bill Clinton is a rapist, then that’s going to be bad for Hillary… which seems pretty obvious. But Douthat does manage to say both “dalliances” and “tom-catting around,” in the continuation of his quest to make everyone think he’s actually 87, so there’s that.
And hey, speaking of George Will, I’m really tempted to link to his article predicting that Chris Christie has the “big momentum” in Iowa because, hilarious. But nope.
Kathleen Parker sees Nikki Haley as someone out to save the soul of the GOP. But she’ll have to find it first.
By broad consensus, the winner of Thursday night’s GOP debate was Donald Trump, followed by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, with most of the postgame commentary focused on “the fight” between Cruz and Trump.
I thought “Master Debater Cruz” was the winner, since loudness, vileness, and ability to not come within ten miles of the question asked seemed to be the scoring system of Republican debates.
But the real fight was revealed a couple of nights earlier when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley gave the Republican Party’s response to President Obama’s State of the Union address. She pulled no punches and brought the fight to her own party. Nice and pretty-like.
Rather than exclusively critiquing Obama’s presidency, as many expected, Haley turned her sights on the angry tenor of GOP politics and our dysfunctional government, for which she said Republicans are partly responsible.
Even though Haley did follow the Republican line in making incorrect statements about the president’s programs, and forget every racist law from 4/5ths through Jim Crow, I suppose she does deserve credit for noticing that the new emperor of her party is an asshat.
Dana Milbank has Trump’s rebuttal to Haley’s unacceptable call for civility.
“I will gladly accept the mantle of anger.”
Thus did Donald Trump react to South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who in her Republican response to the State of the Union address bravely called on Americans to resist the temptation “to follow the siren call of the angriest voices.”
Wait a sec. Wasn’t “angry” one of the charges opponents made against Barack Obama? Oh. That was “angry black man” which is a three word phrase meaning “black man.” Apparently “angry” without the modifier of “black” is just fine.
Republicans like to blame Trump for hijacking the party, but equally to blame are the others in the race for letting it happen — and continuing to do so, now just two weeks from the Iowa caucuses. Thursday night’s debate was another depressing development: Any of four men on the stage — Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie or John Kasich — could have been a viable alternative to the fear and demagoguery offered by Trump and Ted Cruz. Instead, they cluttered the stage and quarreled among themselves, offering little beyond faint echoes of Trump’s rage.
Fear is all that Republicans have offered in any election since… maybe Gerald Ford. And the simple rule is that the candidate hip-deep in fear-mongering first, wins. But don’t worry. No matter how much extraordinary vitriol a Republican slings while campaigning he can still claim the mantle of bringing back the good times. You can ask Jeb!’s dad about that voodoo.
Leonard Pitts reacts to the other part of Haley’s night out in public.
Nikki Haley’s 44th birthday is this week. You would think her a little old for fairy tales.
But a bizarre, little-reported remark the South Carolina governor made last week suggests that, age notwithstanding, Haley lives in Fantasyland, at least insofar as American history is concerned. The comment in question came the day after her Tuesday night speech in response to President Obama’s State of the Union address, in which she cuffed Donald Trump for his strident anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant bigotry.
Haley told reporters, “When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion.”
Some observers found that an astonishing thing for her to say as chief executive of the first state to secede from the Union in defense of slavery, a state that embraced segregation until forced to change by the federal government. Others observed that any fair reading of Haley’s quote makes it pretty clear she was speaking only in the context of legal immigration.
Thank you, Leonard. Go read the whole thing for the definitive Haley take down.
The New York Times wonders if we’re moving toward a new day—the last day for the death penalty.
How does the death penalty in America end?
For decades that has been an abstract question. Now there may be an answer in the case of Shonda Walter, a 36-year-old black woman on Pennsylvania’s death row. On Friday, the Supreme Court met to discuss whether to hear a petition from Ms. Walter, who is asking the justices to rule that in all cases, including hers, the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments.
... there is no question that the national trend is moving away from capital punishment. Since the late 1990s, almost every year has seen fewer executions, fewer new death sentences and fewer states involved in the repugnant business of killing their citizens.
I live in Missouri. We’ve killed 85 people since 1990, and there are a lot of people in our legislature who seem determined to overtake Texas. If I proposed “Missouri: the state-sponsored murder state!” as the new license plate motto, it would probably pass.
So maybe I’m having a hard time believing we’re near the end of this one. Plus Alito, Scalia and Thomas believe in execution. By lethal injection. Firing squad. Duly-administered barrage of rocks from angry neighbors. Dentist’s drill. Sem-trained rabbit. If it looks like the others are about to vote against the death-penalty, don’t be surprised if something fewer than nine justices stagger out of the discussion chamber. Honestly, considering what the court did just a few months ago in Glossip v. Gross, it’s hard to believe they’d turn around and eliminate the practice.
Daniel Cooper says one of the founders thinks that Bitcoin is a bit done.
A prominent voice in the Bitcoin community has announced that he is abandoning the cryptocurrency that he helped to popularize. Mike Hearn has revealed that deep divisions within the platform's "leadership" and a looming technical apocalypse threatens the system's entire existence. The creator of bitcoin has explained his position in a lengthy Medium post, saying that he has sold his coins and is washing his hands of Bitcoin. As far as he is concerned, the "Bitcoin experiment" has "failed." …
One of Bitcoin's main selling points was the idea that there was security in mass volume, since it's hard to get millions of people to comply in a fraud at the same time. The platform was built in such a way that it would require someone to hold upwards of 49 percent of all the world's Bitcoin computing power to control it. As impossible as that would have sounded a few years back, Hearn says that just two Chinese miners control "more than 50 percent" of that "hash power."
So, you have a government-free currency, and within a few years more than half of it is in the control of people who are using their advantage like monopoly power. Private business—screwing over other people since Ug’s Used Rock Emporium.