Last night’s primary results produced a shock win for Bernie Sanders in Michigan where polls had had him trailing Hillary Clinton by about 20 points almost right up to the election. On the morning of the election yesterday, the poll guru Nate Silver had predicted a greater than 99% probability of a Clinton victory. Harry Enten says that “Sanders’s win in Michigan was one of the greatest upsets in modern political history.”
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Last Thursday’s over-the-top (or should I say below-the-waist) Republican debate happened too late in the week for many comedians to take shots at it but now they have weighed in.
On the latest episode of her show Full Frontal, Samantha Bee looks at what happened over the last week and how the last Republican debate went down. She gives a eulogy for the party and wonders if we can really trust the nation’s future in the hands of men who seem to be far too emotional.
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The Republican primaries would seem to be a fertile ground for game theorists. For example, you have the current situation where Donald Trump is leading in the polls and in winning states and delegates. He does not have an overall majority in each category but is heading for a plurality. Ignoring John Kasich for the moment, the question is what is the best strategy for the two challengers Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio to adopt in order to try and win.
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After the Alabama state supreme court threw in the towel last Friday and ended their opposition to the US Supreme Court decision banning same-sex marriage, yesterday saw the state supreme court suffer another setback, this time being directly rebuked by the US Supreme Court in an adoption case involving a lesbian couple.
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Sports Illustrated has included a ‘plus-size’ woman in its latest swimsuit edition and toy maker Mattel has introduced a diverse array of new Barbie dolls that feature them having them more realistic body shapes than the physiologically impossible ones that have been the standard so far. Does this signify a new acceptance of women in all their variety rather than giving the illusion that there is an ideal form?
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Last night featured a Democratic debate that took place in Flint, Michigan, the town that is currently at the center of the crisis about lead in the water and for long has been emblematic of the decay of America’s cities and its manufacturing base. I could not watch it but this report from The Guardian summarizes what happened and describes it as a ‘fierce debate’, with sharp exchanges between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over actual issues but with no personal attacks or mudslinging. In short, the opposite of what happens in Republican debates. Tessa Stuart provides some of the choice quotes.
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Although I am not in general a fan of the disaster/survivor genre of films, I enjoyed The Martian though I think that at 2 hours and 20 minutes it was a tad too long. The film deals with a NASA mission to Mars in which the six-member crew finds itself suddenly hit by a massive dust storm that not only seems to have killed one of them (played by Matt Damon) by being impaled by an antenna and buried under dust, but also threatens to wreck their return vehicle.
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In my post from two days ago expressing my puzzlement about the Washington and Republican establishment’s strategy against Donald Trump, I concluded with the following prediction.
Trump will be the Republican nominee and be selected on the first ballot. Most of the anti-Trump forces who are now screaming loudly will eventually give in and support him because they do not want a Democrat to win. You can seen the equivocation already taking place, with some in the party suggesting that maybe Trump is not so bad after all and laying the groundwork for eventual total capitulation. At the last debate, after calling Trump a conman and fraud and clown and suggesting he has a small penis, Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich all said that they would support Trump if he were the nominee. That shows that all this anti-Trump rhetoric is mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing.
While I said that ‘most’ of the anti-Trump forces will eventually come around to supporting him, I did not specify those who would not and this post will elaborate.
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The big puzzle is whether Donald Trump’s supporters will be swayed by the relentless attacks on him by the party and Washington establishment. Will Trump succeed even without the full support of right-wing power brokers like Rush Limbaugh (who prefers Ted Cruz) and the active opposition of Glenn Beck and the motley crowd of conservative extremists that attended the annual CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) that met this weekend and which Trump canceled on at the last minute?
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