(Go: >> BACK << -|- >> HOME <<)
May 17, 2016
“[A]n existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul”

From the June 2016 issue, Dan P. McAdams, a psychologist, analyzes how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency in The Mind of Trump:

More than even Ronald Reagan, Trump seems supremely cognizant of the fact that he is always acting. He moves through life like a man who knows he is always being observed. If all human beings are, by their very nature, social actors, then Donald Trump seems to be more so—superhuman, in this one primal sense.

Many questions have arisen about Trump during this campaign season—about his platform, his knowledge of issues, his inflammatory language, his level of comfort with political violence. This article touches on some of that. But its central aim is to create a psychological portrait of the man. Who is he, really? How does his mind work? How might he go about making decisions in office, were he to become president? And what does all that suggest about the sort of president he’d be?

Read the entire cover story here.

11:04am
(Notes: 30)
  
Filed under: donald trump the atlantic psychology gop election 2016 the apprentice 
March 23, 2015
The Paranoid Style of Ted Cruz

image

“After less than two years in the Senate, Cruz has positioned himself to make waves on a Republican debate stage in 2016  and to compete as a more conservative alternative to Jeb Bush or Scott Walker. What’s more, it’s likely that Cruz’s popularity among the conservative base in Texas will ensure his re-election should he decide to run for a second term in the Senate in 2018. Although media pundits and the Washington establishment may assume that Cruz’s apocalyptic rhetoric is alienating to audiences, his success would suggest that it is having the opposite effect. By creating a world that deals in black and white, the Texas freshman provides his supporters with a comforting degree of clarity amid the bewildering complexities of reality.”

Read more here 

11:34am
(Notes: 58)
  
Filed under: ted cruz cruz cruz 2016 liberty university texas republican primary gop gop presidential hopefuls gop primary gop presidential candidates 
April 3, 2014
How McCutcheon Could Come Back to Haunt the Republican Party “ Just as liberal judges trapped 1970s Democrats in a “soft on crime” paradigm, conservatives on the Court will make it harder for the GOP to shake a reputation as the party of plutocrats....

How McCutcheon Could Come Back to Haunt the Republican Party

Just as liberal judges trapped 1970s Democrats in a “soft on crime” paradigm, conservatives on the Court will make it harder for the GOP to shake a reputation as the party of plutocrats.

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

10:25am
(Notes: 150)
  
Filed under: Politics McCutcheon McCutcheon v. fEC SCOTUS Campaign Finance GOP Republicans Plutocrats 
March 10, 2014
Marco Rubio’s Warped World View “ Marco Rubio is back. After a laudable, but politically disastrous, bid last year to convince his fellow Republicans to support citizenship for illegal immigrants, he’s now trying a new route to 2016: Foreign policy....

Marco Rubio’s Warped World View

Marco Rubio is back.

After a laudable, but politically disastrous, bid last year to convince his fellow Republicans to support citizenship for illegal immigrants, he’s now trying a new route to 2016: Foreign policy. Rubio made America’s role in the world the centerpiece of his speech last week to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). And among journalists, he’s getting good reviews. Rubio, reported Jonathan Martin in The New York Times, is “trying to become the leading voice for a muscular brand of foreign policy.” On Sunday, Times columnist Ross Douthat noted that “events in Venezuela and Crimea may be making [Rubio’s] hawkish foreign policy vision more appealing to conservatives.”

It’s too early to judge Rubio’s new foreign-policy focus politically. But intellectually, this much is already clear: If this is what passes for serious in today’s GOP, I’d hate to see unserious.

Read more.[Image: Reuters/Toby Melville]

12:25pm
(Notes: 133)
  
Filed under: Politics Foreign Policy Marco Rubio GOP Republicans 
March 7, 2014
The Republican Party’s Pot Dilemma “ Most Americans favor legalizing marijuana, but most in the GOP do not. Can the party avoid being on the losing side of another culture war? Read more. [Image: Reuters] ”

The Republican Party’s Pot Dilemma

Most Americans favor legalizing marijuana, but most in the GOP do not. Can the party avoid being on the losing side of another culture war?

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

12:55pm
(Notes: 210)
  
Filed under: Politics Pot Marijuana legalization Republicans GOP Culture War 
March 5, 2014
Is the Tea Party Waning? Looking at the Republican Primary Season in Texas “ When Texas Representative Steve Stockman announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, back in December, pundits girded for a doozy of a fight. The senator who Stockman was...

Is the Tea Party Waning? Looking at the Republican Primary Season in Texas

When Texas Representative Steve Stockman announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, back in December, pundits girded for a doozy of a fight. The senator who Stockman was challenging in the Republican primary, John Cornyn, had a Tea Party target on his back for his lack of enthusiasm for last fall’s government shutdown and for failing to embrace the Tea Party as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee back in 2010. Stockman’s public persona has long been more Internet troll than public servant—he had campaign bumper stickers that read, “If babies had guns they wouldn’t be aborted”; recently, his spokesman responded to Karl Rove’s support for Cornyn by observing, “Karl Rove looks like an elderly baby.” Yet, as a two-term member of Congress, Stockman was more qualified on paper than the Tea Party Senate nominees of yore (remember semi-professional Bill Maher guest Christine O'Donnell?). 

In the past, these ingredients—a right-wing gadfly without portfolio plus an incumbent who toed the Washington line—were all that was needed for an incumbent-rousting Tea Party win. But that’s not how the Texas primary went down. Stockman ran a bizarre campaign, barely raising money or making public appearances. His strategy seemed to consist of his weird tweets and a bunch of possibly illegal newspaper-style campaign mailers. It was enough to make one wonder if perhaps his whole “political” “career” was an Andy Kaufman-style performance-art piece, a meditation on the nature of representation and the ontology of assault rifles. Cornyn, meanwhile, tacked hard to the right, straining to emulate his junior partner in the Texas delegation, Senator Ted Cruz, winner of the hardest-fought Tea Party-vs.-Establishment battle of 2012. (Cruz, despite being an official of the senatorial committee, refused to endorse Cornyn.) 

Most national and Texas Tea Party groups steered clear of Stockman’s off-the-rails crazy train. And on Tuesday night, in the first installment of 2014’s Republican-on-Republican series, Cornyn trounced him. Cornyn took almost 60 percent of the vote to Stockman’s less than 20 percent.

Read more. [Image: Associated Press]

12:25pm
(Notes: 55)
  
Filed under: Politics Texas Tea Party GOP Republicans Steve Stockman John Cornyn 
February 24, 2014
Why Black Democratic Mayors and GOP Governors are BFFs “ The alliance between Georgia’s Nathan Deal and Atlanta’s Kasim Reed—like the Chris Christie-Cory Booker detente—makes more sense than it might initially appear. Read more. [Image: Mel...

Why Black Democratic Mayors and GOP Governors are BFFs

The alliance between Georgia’s Nathan Deal and Atlanta’s Kasim Reed—like the Chris Christie-Cory Booker detente—makes more sense than it might initially appear.

Read more. [Image: Mel Evans/Associated Press]

10:55am
(Notes: 75)
  
Filed under: Politics Cities GOP Kasim Reed Nathan Deal Chris Christie Corey Booker BFFs 
February 20, 2014
The Elephant Trainer “ As Christine Toretti tells it, her housekeeper was the one who staged the intervention. After logging tens of thousands of miles and helping raise hundreds of millions of dollars as a finance co-chair for the Republican...

The Elephant Trainer

As Christine Toretti tells it, her housekeeper was the one who staged the intervention. After logging tens of thousands of miles and helping raise hundreds of millions of dollars as a finance co-chair for the Republican National Committee leading up to the 2012 elections, Toretti was so depressed by Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid that she retreated to her home in the tiny town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, to nurse her wounds. “Finally, the cleaning lady came in one day and said, ‘I’d like to fumigate the sofa that you’ve been on for two weeks. Would you please get off?’ ”

Toretti obliged, then spent the next two months coming to terms with what had befallen her beloved GOP, and deciding what to do about it. Especially painful for her was how abysmally Romney, and Republicans generally, had fared with women. Back in 1997, she had been appointed to the RNC by then–Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, who specifically tasked Toretti, then a young oil-and-gas executive, with bringing other women into the fold. Seventeen years later, Toretti cannot believe that she’s still on the same Sisyphean mission. “It’s like pushing a rope versus pulling it,” she told me during a late-September lunch near Capitol Hill.

Read more. [Image: John Cuneo]

5:55pm
(Notes: 59)
  
Filed under: Politics Voting Women GOP Republicans Christine Toretti 
February 13, 2014
Why the Republican Push for Black Voters Is (Mostly) Doomed to Fail “ The GOP has a new strategy for turning African Americans into Republicans. Mostly, it focuses on proving that some African Americans already are Republicans. In Michigan, the GOP...

Why the Republican Push for Black Voters Is (Mostly) Doomed to Fail

The GOP has a new strategy for turning African Americans into Republicans. Mostly, it focuses on proving that some African Americans already are Republicans. In Michigan, the GOP recently hired an African-American talk-show host to serve as “director of African-American engagement.” For Black History Month, the RNC is airing commercials that “share the remarkable stories of black Republicans.” Last March, in its “autopsy” examining why Mitt Romney lost, the RNC presented a 10-point plan for winning more black votes. None of the 10 involved policy. Five of them involved recruiting more African-American staffers, spokespeople, and candidates.

There’s an irony here. When bashing Democrats, Republicans often decry identity politics. They deride liberals for treating people as members of racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual groups rather as individuals. “I am sick and tired of hyphenated Americans,” declared Rush Limbaugh a few years ago. “It’s bullshit. We all want the same things.” But when it comes to winning the votes of African Americans, that goes out the window and the GOP decides that what really matters to black people is not the ideas Republicans espouse but the skin color of the Republicans espousing them.

Read more. [Image: Gerry Broome/Associated Press]

5:26pm
(Notes: 193)
  
Filed under: Politics GOP Republicans Voting Voter ID Laws African Americans 
January 27, 2014
NSA Surveillance Divides the Republican Party “ A Republican Party resolution that renounces NSA spying is an extraordinary document. For over a decade, the GOP dismissed civil-libertarian complaints about the War on Terror. The RNC stood behind Team...

NSA Surveillance Divides the Republican Party

A Republican Party resolution that renounces NSA spying is an extraordinary document. For over a decade, the GOP dismissed civil-libertarian complaints about the War on Terror. The RNC stood behind Team Bush through the war crime of torture and a secret, illegal program of warrantless surveillance on U.S. citizens. Circa 2009, the Tea Party began vying for control of the Republican Party. But even then, mass surveillance on innocents wasn’t among its complaints.

President Obama’s first term would play out with the GOP opposing him on virtually every issue except his embrace of his predecessor’s War on Terror approach. 

But Obama’s second term has been different.
Read more. [Image: Jourand/Flickr]

12:25pm
(Notes: 60)
  
Filed under: Politics Obama NSA NSA Spying GOP Republicans Congress 
Liked posts on Tumblr: More liked posts »