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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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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The Daily Show reviews the present situation, starting with Marco Rubio’s evolution from stating that he wanted to take the high road in politics and avoid making personal attacks to ending up in a down and dirty insult fest with Donald Trump.
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First up is The Daily Show where I like the way that Noah exposes speaker Paul Ryan’s hypocritical statements that the Republican party should not be a home for prejudice, when in reality appealing to people’s prejudices is what the party has long been about.
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She rightly points out that while we pay a lot of attention to presidential election years, we pay far too little attention to mid-term elections and local and state elections, although these can have very significant consequences. The low voter turnout at such elections tends to result in horrible people getting elected to office.
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The Daily Show compares the records of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on civil rights issues.
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Tomorrow is the Democratic primary in South Carolina that polls predict Hillary Clinton will win handily. What has been extraordinary is how Bernie Sanders has made the word socialism and socialist ideas so acceptable, especially among the young, so that they view it as a more compassionate system than capitalism. This is certainly true but the mainstream media in the US has been relentlessly extolling the virtues of a particular form of capitalism that leads to vast inequalities, and they cannot believe that their sustained propaganda has been upended by a hitherto obscure senator from Vermont.
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Ben Carson is weird. Ok, I know that is not news since he keeps adding to that impression, like his ‘fruit salad’ comment at the last debate. But he outdid himself by claiming that president Obama cannot speak to the black experience because his life growing up was not genuinely black, whatever the hell that means.
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There is something sweet about poetic justice. Jessica Williams of The Daily Show returns to a church with a virulently anti-gay pastor. The building is under foreclosure because he has not been paying his water bills among other debts and now owes about a million dollars. The pastor seems to think that having tax-exempt status (itself an indefensible boondoggle) means he is entitled to free water as well. Why stop there? Why not free electricity too? And internet? And cable TV?
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Today there will be another Republican debate at 9:00pm ET in Houston, Texas and aired on CNN. It will be the last debate before a slew of contests to be held on Tuesday, March 1 and there is no doubt that Donald Trump hopes to run the table of 12 primaries and three caucuses. Trump leads in the polls everywhere except Texas and Arkansas where Ted Cruz has leads. Texas is the big prize because if Trump can defeat Cruz in his home state, that will be a crushing blow and likely force the latter’s exit from the race.
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