Libertarian candidates falter

Gary Johnson seems to be having a personal crisis.  AKA meltdown.

In an interview on CNN early yesterday [...] Johnson explains why if "crossing 'i's and dotting 't's" on international political leaders and geography is more important than the policy itself and than admitting mistakes, he’s not meant to be president (but if honesty and peace are what voters want, then he is).

Jeremy Binckes at Salon told Johnson he looked 'jittery' and 'in need of sleep'.

If it makes you feel any better, your excuse makes sense, even the way you phrased it on CNN: “OK so I point out an elected leader that I admire, and then all of a sudden I have to defend them against things that I’m not even aware of,” Johnson said. “If that’s a disqualifier to run for president, so be it.”

I hate to break it to you, but that’s sort of what international politics is about. The U.S. has allies, and they sometimes come for dinner. It’s really not good if you insult them on their special day.

... (Y)ou also tried to explain away your gaffes by saying that you have “never been in politics before.” Are you forgetting that you were a two-term governor of New Mexico, and that you actually ran for president in 2012 (as a Republican first, then as a Libertarian after you couldn’t get in the debates)?

You’re starting to see the truth here, though, when you say, “I guess I wasn’t meant to be president.”

It’s understandable. Running for president is hard, even if you’re running as the candidate for the “we want to vote for a Republican, but not that Republican” crowd — and especially if it seems that you haven’t done your international relations homework.

But back to how you’re feeling. You look jittery. You need sleep. If only there were something you could take to make you nice and sleepy, and, ya know, mellow out a bit.

This comes alongside Bill Weld's odd capitulation.

Gary Johnson’s hapless running mate, William Weld, is essentially giving up on the presidential race and wants to spend its last few weeks attacking Donald Trump.

The same day Johnson admitted he’s not keeping up with world affairs, Weld told The Boston Globe Trump is his only priority from now until November 8.

[...]

The Globe said Weld also hinted that he might abandon the Libertarian Party altogether, although he said he’s “certainly not going to drop them this year.”

Still, he said his priority after the election could be working with Republicans like Mitt Romney to rebuild the GOP.

When Weld, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, joined Johnson on the Libertarian ticket, he said he would be a Libertarian for life and fight to make sure his running mate became the next President of the United States.

But Weld apparently wised up after Johnson’s month of stunning gaffes, with the third-party contender consistently failing to know anything about current events or foreign affairs. When Johnson couldn’t name a single world leader he admired during an MSNBC town hall, Weld stepped in as his hype man, reminding him of a couple names.

Johnson spent his Tuesday morning arguing on national TV that his ignorance about the world could be a virtue, because it would prevent him from sending soldiers to dangerous countries.

Weld last week told MSNBC he’s “not sure anybody is more qualified than Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States.”

Kind of a humiliating way to wind down a presidential campaign, isn't it?

No winners

Pence 'won' on style -- he didn't sniffle or vomit on the table -- and Kaine 'won' on substance, but he was unpleasantly aggressive and interrupted far too much.

(I)t was as if two different Donald Trumps showed up at Longwood University on Tuesday night.

There was the Trump to whom Kaine kept pivoting in every answer, and eagerly interrupting Pence to prosecute: the Trump who called Mexican immigrants “rapists”; the Trump who spent years perpetuating the “outrageous and bigoted lie that President Obama is not an American citizen”; the Trump who has “again and again praised Vladimir Putin” as a “great leader”; the Trump who “believes that the world will be safer if more nations have nuclear weapons”; the Trump who has “claim[ed] that NATO is obsolete”; the Trump who “went after John McCain, a POW, and said he was not a hero because he had been captured”; the Trump who has “called women ‘dogs,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘disgusting.’”

This Trump, Kaine argued, “demeans every group he talks about” and is the kind of “fool or maniac” who “could trigger a catastrophic [nuclear] event.”

Then there was the Trump that Pence kept evoking every time he responded to Kaine’s parries with a sad shake of his head or rueful chuckle: the Trump who “didn’t say” this or “never said” that; the Trump who doesn’t consider Mexicans rapists, but rather sees the current immigration system as a “heartbreaking tragedy”; the Trump who isn’t bigoted, but rather “fully support[s]” community policing; the Trump who might misspeak every once in awhile, but only because “he is a businessman” and “not a polished politician.”

In short: a kinder, gentler Trump.

As usual, the zero-sum Beltway pundits will declare one vice presidential wannabe the winner of Tuesday’s debate. But ultimately, it’s up to voters to decide which of the two Trumps on display better aligns with reality, at least as they see it — and that more than anything else will determine the effect, if any, of Kaine and Pence’s performances.

In truth, both candidates did well, because they both did what they came to Farmville to do.

The very fact that the debate was more of a referendum on Trump than Clinton should count as a win for Kaine. With his constant interruptions and clockwork attacks, Kaine forced Pence to talk about Trump a lot more than Pence forced Kaine to talk about Clinton. That was the point. In a battle between two historically unpopular presidential candidates, the one the election becomes about is the one who’s more likely to lose. Consider that nearly every unflattering Trump quote that Kaine cited was factually accurate — despite Pence’s dodges and more-in-sorrow-than-anger objections — and you have plenty of fodder for a few more “Yes, Trump really said X” news cycles. And that, in turn, could be enough to convince a few more swing voters that Trump is temperamentally unfit to serve as president — which is, of course, the Clinton campaign’s ultimate goal.

A key example of Kaine’s executing this strategy came early in the debate. After the Democrat rattled off a list of Trump’s various offenses — McCain, Judge Curiel, rapists, “‘dogs,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘disgusting'” — Pence countered that Trump’s insults were “small potatoes compared to Hillary Clinton,” who called “half of Donald Trump supporters a ‘basket of deplorables.’”

Kaine was ready with his rebuttal.

“And she said, ‘I should not have said that,’” Kaine replied. Then he seized on the fact that Trump has never expressed similar regrets as an opportunity to run through Trump’s greatest hits yet again.

“Did Donald Trump apologize to Sen. John McCain? Did Donald Trump apologize for calling women ‘slobs,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘disgusting’? Did Donald Trump apologize for taking after somebody in a Twitter war and making fun of her weight? Did he apologize for saying that President Obama was not a citizen of the United States?

“You will look in vain to see Donald Trump ever taking responsibility for anything and apologizing,” Kaine concluded.

Here's another place where the two talked past each other.

Thanks to his running mate’s long history of divisive remarks — and Kaine’s incessant reminders of them — Pence had the harder task Tuesday: making Trump seem tolerable (and tolerant) to voters who still haven’t made up their minds about him.

So rather than defending the indefensible, Pence simply decided to pretend that it didn’t exist.

One exchange — about ISIS and foreign policy in general — stood out. After Kaine battered Trump relentlessly on the subject — “He does not have a plan. He trash-talks the military, ‘John McCain is no hero,’ ‘The generals need to be fired,’ ‘I know more than them,’ ‘NATO is obsolete’” — Pence tried to brush it off.

And here's another of Pence's disarmingly condescending putdowns.  "Did you work on that one for a long time?", before ...

“That had a lot of creative lines in it,” he laughed.

“See if you can defend any of it?” Kaine snapped.

But Pence refused to take the bait. Instead, he gave “this president credit for bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” then pivoted to a generic conservative attack on Obama’s foreign policy ...

Kaine had the far easier case to prosecute, and did so well.  Pence just dodged.  But the governor looked "presidential" while doing so, and that's what stood out to the talking heads afterward. (Update: More debate viewers thought they'd rather have a beer with Pence.  And so it goes.)

It is a credit to Pence’s skill as a political communicator — he worked for several years in the 1990s as a conservative radio and television host — that he was able to pull off this sort of 180-degree turn without inducing whiplash. He was polished, disciplined and steady. He seemed calmer than Kaine, and considerably more polite. He sounded empathetic. He spoke in talking points, but delivered them as if they were thoughts that had just occurred to him. And most important, Pence realized that the best way to defend Trump was not with words — which he rarely offered up — but rather by leaving viewers with the impression that Mike Pence is everything they fear that Donald Trump is not: decent, grounded, consistent. If that guy’s also going to be in the White House, how crazy could things really get?

Vice presidential debates rarely, if ever, affect the outcome of an election. The most they can do is “change the narrative” until the presidential candidates debate again.

It may be, then, that while Kaine won on points, Pence won on style — and both, in the end, conjured up the Trump they intended to conjure up. The story of those two Trumps will be the story of the rest of this race.

I had forgotten that Pence made his bones by being a Rush Limbaugh wannabe before entering politics.  And there were a few "I wish Pence was the nominee" Tweets from regretful conservative #NeverTrumpers.  Been there, seen that (Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin; and also from Democrats in the past: Joe Biden -- yes indeed, and in this cycle too -- and Lloyd Bentsen).  On policy, Pence is Trump without the swagger and bombast, and this was his audition for 2020.  Mark it; he'll be in the thick of the GOP scrum in four years.  (Update: No More Mister has an insightful rebuttal to my -- and Chris Matthews', whom I don't watch any more -- prediction about Pence.)

Ajamu Baraka's debate performance was more thoughtful, IMHO.  Alas, the only candidate of color, the only veteran, the only person willing or able to discuss or even acknowledge American hegemony was -- just as Kaine and Pence -- preaching to his choir.  And frankly it's a shame that the Libertarians have gone into hiding for these affairs; William Weld could have made things interesting by joining Baraka in Democracy Now's after-debate, instead of doing his solo bit.  I barely saw any Libs participating in the Twitter feed.

All four veep prospects represented well enough to make the case for their running mates, but the needle won't be moving over the remaining thirty-four days.  These, even more than the presidential faceoffs, are just pep rallies for red and blue cheerleaders.  During the course of the evening on Twitter, the #HipHopAwards broadcast on BET trended higher than the #VPdebate.  That alone should tell the full tale about the optics of two old white men quarreling about women's reproductive freedoms, or improving police tactics and making significant reforms to criminal justice without mentioning the words 'Black Lives Matter' in seeking a solution to the nation's most compelling social crisis.

Yeah, the system isn't rigged; it's broken.

Veep debate scattershooting

-- Snoozefest or something substantive?  You decide.  I'll be live-Tweeting it so you don't have to watch; just check the Twitter feed, top right, if you're inclined.  If you're as intelligent as you have demonstrated just by reading here, you should stop watching teevee news about the presidential election.  I am not kidding.  You'll be less scared, more calm, and better able to enjoy the cool weather, your pumpkin spice whatever, the MLB playoffs or the fall festivals or just life in general if you do.  Seriously.

-- The insiders are saying that the Trumpbatross around Pence's neck is too heavy a lift.  Democracy Now! will feature the Green Party's Ajamu Baraka participating in the debate, as Jill Stein did with Clinton and Trump last week.

-- Voting is already under way -- always two words, please; it's not your underwater underwear, after all -- in 20 states plus the D. of C.  Mail ballots are going out and being returned in Harris County and throughout Texas (the deadline to register to vote is fast approaching; visit your nearest taco truck.  Hopefully there'll be one on every block next election).  These ballots are important tools for the Democrats and Republicans, as most of these voters are seniors, strongly partisan -- which is to say they vote straight-ticket -- and very reliable.  The Ds have upped their game statewide and erased the R's advantage in recent cycles due to the workhorse efforts of people like Glen Maxey.

-- This is, by a long distance, the worst thing I have read in the entire 2016 cycle.  After reading all of it -- turgid, ponderous, uses every single logical fallacy in the book -- I must say that I certainly hope I read nothing worse.  And then he doubled down on it today.

Here's Fred Rogers with some advice to that guy.

And here's Ted Rall speaking for me.

To my many friends and readers who plan to vote for Hillary Clinton: please stop bullying me.

Also please lay off other people, progressives and liberals and traditional Democrats and socialists and communists, citizens who identify with the political left, who plan to vote for Dr. Jill Stein or stay home.

I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump. I agree with the mainstream liberal consensus that he should never hold political power, much less control over nuclear launch codes. He’s dangerous and scary. But that doesn’t mean I have to vote for Hillary Clinton. ...

1. The main reason that I’m not going to vote for Hillary Clinton is the same exact main reason that I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump: I don’t vote Republican. Being age 53, Nixon was the first president I remember. Hillary Clinton’s politics (and her paranoia and insularity) remind me of Richard Nixon’s. I can’t bring myself to think of a Democrat as someone who solicits millions of dollars from Wall Street or votes with crazy Republicans (like George W. Bush, whose stupid wars she aggressively supported) to invade foreign countries just for fun. She plays a Democrat on TV, but we know the truth: she’s a Republican.

[...]

3. There’s a big difference between an impressive resume and a list of accomplishments. Hillary has the former, not the latter. I hold her resume against her: she has held tremendous power, yet has never reached out to grab the brass ring. As senator, her record was undistinguished. As Secretary of State, she barely lifted a finger on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, contributed to the expansion of the Syrian civil war, and is more responsible than almost anyone else for destroying Libya. What she did well she did small; when she went big she performed badly.

[...]

5. She still hasn’t made an affirmative case for herself. By clinging to President Obama, she’s running as his third term. The standard way to pull this off is to present yourself as new and improved: the old product was great, the new one will be even better. Her campaign boils down to “I’m not Donald Trump.” No matter how bad he is, and he is awful, that’s not enough. Watching her in the first presidential debate, at the beginning when Trump was besting her over trade, I kept asking myself: why doesn’t she admit that the recovery is good but has left too many Americans behind? Why hasn’t she proposed a welfare and retraining program for people who lose their jobs to globalization? A week later, the only answer I can come up with is that she has no imagination, no vision thing.
6. She has made no significant concessions to the political left. Frankly, this makes me wonder about her intelligence. Current polling shows that the biggest threat to her candidacy is losing millennial, working class, and Bernie Sanders supporters to the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson. She would not have this problem if she’d picked Sanders as her vice presidential running mate. Even now, she could bag the millennial vote by promising the Vermont senator a cabinet post. Why doesn’t she? For the same reason that she won’t embrace the $15-an-hour minimum wage (she gets $225,000 for an hour-long speech but wants you to settle for $12) — she’s a creature of the corporations and therefore the political right. She’s not one of us. She doesn’t care about us.
7. My vote is worth no less than the vote of someone who supports a major party nominee. So what if the polls say that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be elected president? Why, based on those polls, should I strategically vote for someone whose politics and personality I deplore? By that logic, why shouldn’t they change their votes to conform to mine? I have my vote, you have your vote, let Diebold add them up.

I don’t have a problem with you if you plan to vote for Hillary. This year is the best argument ever for lesser evilism. But the fact that we are selecting between two equally unpopular major party presidential standardbearers indicates that the two-party system is in crisis, if not broken. We need and deserve more and better options. The only way to get them is to start building viable third parties — voting for them, contributing money to them. What better time to start than now?

Anyway, there’s absolutely no way that my refusal to vote for Hillary will put Donald Trump into the White House.

That is game, set, and match.  But here's your memory jogger, just in case.

It is indeed a very strange presidential election this year

Dr. No has quasi-endorsed Jill Stein.

Ron Paul, whose 1988 Libertarian presidential bid and two Republican bids made him the "liberty movement's" best-known figure, told MSNBC today that he couldn't support Gary Johnson for president and saw reasons to back the Green Party's Jill Stein.

"If you tend to lean toward progressivism, you can lean toward the Green Party," Paul said. "She's probably the best on foreign policy."

Bold emphasis mine.  There are two videos at the link well worth watching for context if you're open-minded, as in not subsumed by binary logic.  It's hard to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing; it probably doesn't impact much either way, as with most endorsements these days.  Paul is most certainly correct that actual progressives (not the Hillary Clinton kind) should not be considering voting for Johnson, but that might be a blind hog/acorn kind of correct.

Anyway... can someone get this for me as a mask for Halloween?

Who leaked Trump's tax returns?

Bonddad first:

Here's the really important point:  The key to this news story is a single piece of information among literally thousands of numbers and individual data points.  Whoever leaked this information knew enough about taxes to know what to leak and no more.  

If I was going to make a guess: someone really close to Trump who was intimately familiar with Trump's finances and who also didn't have a professional code of confidentiality.

If You Only News initially suspected it was Trump's daughter, Tiffany.  Then they got a little more plausible with Hair Furor's ex, Marla Maples.  Josh Marshall didn't offer any names but provided background, quasi-legal and personal, and No More Mister expanded on that.

It really doesn't matter who leaked them; Trump is over.  Finished.  Kaput.  Stop being afraid he's going to win.  He isn't.  He can't.  He has eliminated every single pathway to an Electoral College victory, almost all of them by his own hand.

The Russians are not going to hack the election.  (They are simply unable to do so.  This is Democratic propaganda.)  Women and Latin@s and squishy Democrats who only vote every four years will turn out in droves to vote against him.  Every voter living in a non-battleground state -- there are at least forty of them, and their number will increase as this election turns into a landslide for Clinton -- is hereby emancipated from the scare tactics of every Jackass from Obama on down to vote their principles in order to make sure Madam President gets the message: use the next four years to achieve real progress on the issues you say we can't, or else get primaried from the left and be a one-termer.

Clinton won't have an opponent so weak, so awful, and so self-destructive next time.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is anticipating a more reality-based debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence tomorrow night as it presents the best of the left of Texas from last week.

Off the Kuff looks at the sharp increase in voter registration numbers around the state.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos is thrilled to learn that Houston-area taco truck owners are registering voters: Houston taco trucks serve up Tex-Mex and voter activism.

Back to Ohio for PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, along with some words from Hillary Clinton about Sandernistas from behind closed doors, and a few voting provisos for those in Harris County.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is sick of Republicans siding with the rich and powerful over the health and well being of Texas citizens. Look to the Texas Legislature to be the great corrupt fixer.

Socratic Gadfly tackles the claim that third-party voters assert there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats, and finds it wanting.

Egberto Willies passes along the Annie's List endorsements of Democrats running for Harris County's DA, Kim Ogg, tax assessor/collector Ann Harris Bennett, and the Dallas County incumbent sheriff, Lupe Valdez.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston took note of the Harris County clerk's taunting of the Fifth Circuit's ruling on voter ID.

Texas Leftist feels encouraged about the Astrodome's long-term prospects after the Harris County commissioners voted to construct a two-level parking garage in the underground portion.

Neil at All People Have Value offered his artist's statement as public artist in Houston and America. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

=================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Grits for Breakfast asks what we should teach ninth-graders so that police won't shoot them, a subject John Oliver finds thoroughly depressing.

The Texas Election Law Blog writes about the travails of voting by mail.

The Houston Press catalogs Ken Paxton's obsession with LGBT issues.

Politifact Texas checked Hillary Clinton's statement linking tax cuts and the Great Recession of 2008, and found it 'mostly false'.

Popular Resistance profiles the Texas activists that fought KXL who are now girding up to stop the Trans-Pecos pipeline in West Texas.

Lone Star Ma focuses on the 13th of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.

Better Texas Blog calls for a renovation, not a complete teardown, of Texas' school finance system.

BOR interviews Stephanie Chiarello Noppenberg, the creator of the political satire variety show Over the Lege.

Eileen Smith watched the debate so you didn't have to.

And Space City Weather declares Texas' hurricane season (probably) over.

Sunday Funnies