Master Blaster runs Bartertown

At the start of his career, not long after he helped Richard Nixon win the 1968 election, Roger Ailes boasted to a reporter that television would one day replace the political party as the most powerful force in American politics. If there is any doubt that the Fox News founder has largely made that prediction come true, it should be erased by the panic that next week’s Fox debate is stoking inside the GOP.

In a year that features the largest primary field in modern history — not to mention Donald Trump as a front-runner — campaign strategists worry that Ailes's debate, which is likely to attract the biggest audience in cable-news history, could define the race more than five months before the first votes are cast.

Ailes has now made the the circus free to all comers.

Fox News is opening its 5 p.m. debate to all the announced Republican candidates who fail to make the cut for the Aug. 6 prime-time event, removing a requirement that participants reach at least 1 percent in polling.

The change amounts to an insurance policy for candidates who were in danger of being disqualified from the vital first debate based on low polls – Carly Fiorina, former New York Gov. George Pataki and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

The announcement by Michael Clemente, Fox News Executive Vice President, News, means that all 16 announced candidates will qualify for Cleveland — either the 5 p.m. undercard, or the 9 p.m. main event.

The 9 p.m. debate will include the 10 candidates with the highest average in national polls, as determined by Fox News. The 5 p.m. forum will now include all the rest.

I'm already scheduled for a watch party next Thursday.  We're talking Super Bowl here, except nobody is waiting for the commercials.

Oh, and the people who run Fox News are geniuses. What did they get by instituting these caps (that they have now removed)? Not just constant appearances from the candidates themselves in their desperate quests for exposure, but now feedback in the form of actual money, too. Chris Christie is forking over 250-large to Fox News in ad revenue, for the purpose of securing a dais onstage during Donald Trump’s 90-minute monologue in Cleveland. He probably will not be the last candidate to make the last such purchase, and there will be more and more capped debates forthcoming.

More broadly, though, consider what’s happening here. A candidate who will not have that much official campaign money is having to make a national ad buy on Fox News in the middle of summer 2015. What are his other options? He could play with power tools like another oxygen-deprived candidate, Rand Paul, has been doing. He could subject himself to embarrassing questions with any media outlet who’ll take him, like Rick Santorum. He could deploy the famous campaign move of pretending to stop campaigning, as Bobby Jindal has done. He could pick a fight with Donald Trump, or make a point of not picking a fight with Donald Trump.

Live television at its most riveting.

Even inside Fox, some are awed that a presidential race is being influenced by a television channel. “Crazy stuff,” another personality told me, “you have a TV executive deciding who is in — and out — of a debate!”

A train wreck, crashing into a 17-car freeway pileup.  I hope we have plenty of snacks.

Did Nazi that coming

Is there any Republican anywhere that understands what Godwin's Law means?

The Iran nuclear deal does NOT portend 1930s Germany, and Obama is not Neville Chamberlain.  Mike Huckabee's "ovens" comment is, truly, both ridiculous and sad.  (Even the Israeli ambassador to the US says so.)  Planned Parenthood's health services for women are not like the Holocaust.  But it is accurate to say that the Republican primary voting electorate is torn between those who believe Obama is Hitler, and actual fans of Hitler.

WARNING: This is about to get really gross, really fast.

Genuine conservatives are fending off attacks from Trump’s very pro-white fans who label their opponents “cuckservatives,” which Buzzfeed‘s Joseph Bernstein describes as “portmanteau” of “cuckold,” a hard core porn genre in which “passive white husbands watch their wives have sex with black men,” and “conservative,” a soft core porn genre where people vote against their own interests.

I don't know if those links are SFW or not, because I did not click on them.  At all.

Republicans have long trafficked in color-blind tropes that seek to reverse the gains of the civil rights movements and label all government good as welfare that only helps “them.” Being confronted by the dredges of the Internet and the flies Trump’s sort of rhetoric attracts terrifies even them — especially because they see Trump as a leftist in disguise.

The Gross Old Patriarchs like to think they're turning the tables on Democrats when they say it was a Republican who freed the slaves, that Robert Byrd was a Klucker, and so on like that.  This indicates a misunderstanding and a conflation with what was acknowledged to be the party of conservatives and the party of liberals 150 years ago, and how they switched places over the decades.

Republicans like to point out that their representatives voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in larger percentages than Democrats, who delivered most of the votes along with the signature of president. This is because the vote was largely regional. Southerners generally opposed civil rights the way they opposed Reconstruction. And just as Republicans paid a cost for being identified as the party of black people in the late 19th century, Democrats saw the end of their national majority before the conclusion of the 20th century.

From Reagan Democrats to Republicans to the Tea Party, all in one generation.  If you take it in context, it's a remarkably swift transformation.

Trump’s rhetoric only differs from most Republicans in degrees. While he suggests all undocumented immigrants are criminals, Rick Perry offers a more conservative 80 percent. And the party at large now backs mass deportations of 11 million people, because nothing says smaller government like round-ups and trains filled with human cargo.

The Confederate flag, the swastika, and now even the Gadsden flag and the Holy Bible are the symbols of the continuing devolution of predominantly Southern white -- and, let's tell the truth, some black -- conservatives.  When a wealthy African American pastor aligns himself with the meanest homophobes he can find while running to be the mayor of the nation's fourth largest city, it's difficult to believe he's got any love in his heart for strangers in a strange land, or the poor.  In case you need a refresher course, this article at Media Matters details what we're in for over the next 90 or so days, and the national implications.

This isn't going to be mitigated, or smoothed over, or negotiated away any time soon.  Either compassion, justice, and tolerance will win, or they will lose.  The battle happens every first Tuesday in November, every single year.

Gird up.

Update: On and on it goes.

Those Planned Parenthood videos

Their purpose is to gross you out.

Many people get sickened and disgusted when they sneeze out a blood clot, or when the doctor pulls a hairy orange pebble from their ear, or when the orthopedist starts explaining the process by which he will attach a cadaver's ligament to your knee to replace the one you snapped.  Forget a vivid description of removing a tumor from your bowel or the cardiac surgeon's process of tearing out a blood vessel from your thigh to reroute the clogged ones around your heart.

For years, abortion opponents have relied on graphic descriptions and bloody imagery to make their case against legal abortion. By focusing on the fetuses, rather than on the women who seek to end a pregnancy for their own personal or financial reasons, the anti-choice movement can successfully stoke outrage over the moral implications of a medical procedure that falls squarely in a gray area for most Americans.

[...]

It makes sense that this works. Despite the anti-choice movement’s characterization of abortion as a black-and-white issue, it’s quite possible to both support legal abortion rights and believe that pregnant women are carrying unborn children. Even Americans who believe that abortion should be legal may be squeamish about the nature of the medical procedure, and feel uncomfortable with graphic depictions of fetal tissue.  

As far as I am concerned, this is the only news being made.

On Monday evening, Planned Parenthood announced that they had notified, separately, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of a recent hack into their information systems by an allegedly separate pro-life activist group has announced the hack and its intention to post internal email from the non-profit women’s healthcare provider.

On Friday, California state attorney general, and senatorial candidate, Kamala Harris also announced her preliminary investigation into whether the Center for Medical Progress has broken any state laws in its work against Planned Parenthood.

The Center for Medical Progress has yet to release its tax filings, so details remain unclear as to from where and whom the Center for Medical Progress, which has non-profit status, has received its funding and the way in which it has allocated those funds. 

New polling released today from Hart Research Associates on behalf of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF) found that 64 percent of voters — and 72 percent of Independents — do not agree with Congressional action to immediately end all government funding for Planned Parenthood. Furthermore, 58 percent of voters say that they would support a candidate who favors continued funding for Planned Parenthood over one who wishes to defund the women’s healthcare provider and 57 percent of voters say they are skeptical of Republican motivations behind the Congressional investigations of Planned Parenthood, believing the investigations are being used to further a specific political agenda.

In a statement, Cecile Richards, President, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said, “Today’s poll shows much of what we already knew: that defunding Planned Parenthood is a losing proposition not just for the millions of men and women who come through Planned Parenthood’s doors every day, but also with voters who don’t want to see their politicians focused on restricting lifesaving care….The anti-abortion extremists behind these videos don’t have any credibility with the American people, and neither do the politicians behind these political attacks against women’s health and the care Planned Parenthood provides.”

And then there's Texas.

Buoyed by the release of undercover Planned Parenthood videos, a few dozen anti-abortion activists gathered Tuesday at the Texas Capitol called on Texas lawmakers to defund Planned Parenthood.

Dubbed the #WomenBetrayed rally, supporters cheered as Joe Pojman, executive director of Texas Alliance for Life, read statements from Texas officials, including Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, who have called for an investigation into Planned Parenthood. The rally preceded a Senate Health and Human Services Committee meeting on Wednesday, which Republican lawmakers called to investigate the fetal donation practices of the group’s Texas abortion facilities.

I stand with Planned Parenthood.  Join me.  Tell your Senators and Congressmen AND your state representatives as well to stop the witchhunt.  After all, birth control and sex education prevents many more abortions than smear campaigns and gotcha videos.

More from Andrea Grimes at RH Reality Check.

Update:

An investigative hearing that many Capitol observers described as bizarre ended with a bang Wednesday when members of the Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee called state officials back to the witness stand to ask whether they’d lied during testimony given just hours before.

Specifically, Department of State Health Services assistant commissioner Kathy Perkins was asked to respond to Abby Johnson, a former employee of Planned Parenthood and current full-time anti-abortion activist who claimed under oath that HHSC always gave abortion clinics advance notice of inspections, which would be a felony.

The answer was “no.”

It was perhaps a fittingly strange close to the tense and wandering four-and-a-half hour hearing which had a specific goal that remained unclear throughout.

Hillary Clinton's climate goals

They're getting raked over the coals.

Brad Friedman:

"It's so polarized between the parties that Hillary can say anything she wants," (environmental journalist David) Roberts tells me about her plan to add half a billion solar panels to the nation's grid by 2021. "But, as long as the House is in Republican hands they are foursquare against any of this --- any clean energy, any efficiency, anything that restrains fossil fuel in any way...If we're being honest with ourselves, what she's capable of doing is what the Presidency can do without legislative help."

CAF:

If you want a presidential candidate who supports a carbon tax and vociferously opposes the Keystone pipeline, you should vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

If you want a presidential candidate who has thought through how to best communicate to swing voters how a clean energy-fueled America will help, not hurt, economic growth, Hillary Clinton is probably your best bet.

In conjunction with an announcement of her renewable energy strategy, Clinton released the three-minute climate ad “Stand for Reality.”

We can’t fully analyze her program because what she has unveiled so far is only a portion of her overall plan. Vox’s Brad Plumer says, “We’ll need to see more detail” before knowing if her policies are sufficient to meet her goals. The New Republic’s Rebecca Leber notes Clinton still avoids taking clear stands on matters that have divided Democrats: “Keystone XL pipeline, tar sands oil extraction, natural gas, fracking, and Arctic drilling.”

Those who dislike the evasion and want firm pledges to keep as much fossil fuel in the ground as possible will naturally gravitate toward Sanders. Those who don’t mind clever politicking when navigating sticky subjects will be more partial to Clinton.

Among my many issues with the future Madam President is that she will simply not ever be the change we need to have in order to save us from ourselves.  Hers will be a caretaker administration, not a transforming one.  This was among the reasons she was defeated for the nomination seven years ago. (The difference -- and the problem -- is that Barack Obama turned out to be a minimalist transformer himself.)

But her refusal to abnegate KXL, her Wall Street coziness, her perpetual dissembling on her e-mail, and even the botched NYT story about her e-mail are together not as objectionable as one of the very few things she is unequivocal about: her stated preference for war on Iran.

As a presidential candidate you simply do not use the words "if I am president, we will attack Iran" in 2008, and in 2015 soften your rhetoric with words like "existential threat", and not be forced to back those words up at some point.  I say that point will occur sometime in 2017.

And if you think that's progressive, I have a used dictionary to give you.  Post your mailing address in the comments.

Scattershooting mayoral and controller candidates

I took some days off around the weekend so blogging time is short.  Go read some of these.

-- Via Charles, David Ortez was at the the Houston mayorals' get-together with TOP and SEIU last Saturday and things got lively.  Ben Hall was missing again, for fairly obvious reasons this time, and Chris Bell was not there, so that left Adrian Garcia, Bill King, Marty McVey, and Sylvester Turner.  Demetria Smith, the only woman in the race, was added after some opening outbursts.  Essentially she is not going to let Hall corner the black anti-HERO vote.

Smith took the opportunity to be a demagogue when she claimed that HERO would allow grown men to go into the bathroom behind your little girl. A small minority of the audience cheered for her response. McVey gave the best response when he said, “I am not black, but I will stand for black rights. I am not gay, but I will stand for gay rights. I am not an immigrant, but I will stand for immigrant rights.” The crowd applauded his response. 

Read Smith's FB page, linked at her name above, for complaints about how she has been excluded from some participation.

-- Also via Charles, a controller candidates' finance report summary.  Kuff is sussing out the details, spending a lot of time on this reporting.  I've snarked on him in the past, but this is really the data those few of us who care are interested in.  It just confirms to me that Carroll Robinson is a jerk.

More later.