Jerry Seinfeld has president Obama as his guest on his show Comedians in Cars getting Coffee. He usually picks his guests up in a vintage sports car and they go to a restaurant. In this episode, the first part went fine with Seinfeld driving a 1963 Corvette to the White House but the second part was thwarted because the security detail would not let them leave the grounds.
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As the first actual selection of delegates for the party nominations gets near with the Iowa caucuses on February 1 and the New Hampshire primary on February 9, the various candidates are moving their campaigns into top gear. On the Republican side, what seems to be shaping up are contests within two main subgroups, one claiming the outsider or insurgent mantle and the other the establishment mantle, though given the angry mood of the Republican electorate, even the establishment candidate has to wear at least a partial outsider veneer, to claim that they are not of the establishment even if they come from it.
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That is of course Donald Trump’s slogan though he does not say when he thinks it was great before. Below is a video that takes that slogan and parodies the Trump campaign. That such parodies exist is not surprising. But in this case, it was produced by a conservative Arizona group known as the Public Integrity Alliance that has also targeted other politicians whom they deemed were giving conservatism a bad name.
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Bernie Sanders has said that he could win the backing of Donald Trump supporters.
Sanders told CBS’s Face the Nation that many of Trump’s supporters have legitimate fears stemming from income inequality that Sanders is best positioned to address.
“What Trump has done with some success is taken that anger, taken those fears, which are legitimate, and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims,” Sanders said.
“In my view, that is the not way we are going to address the problems facing this country,” he said.
Instead, Sanders supports a platform of bringing citizens together to push Congress to pass laws that address income inequality. He said that many of Trump supporters are “working class people and they are angry” because they are losing their jobs to overseas firms, cannot afford to send their children to college and are working longer hours for lower ages.
Sanders also sent out a release on Sunday saying that Trump is “getting nervous” about working families getting a better understanding of his policies.
Almost exactly seven years ago, just after the 2008 election when Barack Obama surprised the nation and the word by becoming president, I wrote a series of posts that looked at the possible future of the Republican party. I felt that the party was at a watershed moment with a loss hastened by the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. I said then that there were four groups vying for control of the Republican party.
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If you visit Sri Lanka, you will find a society that, on the surface at least, is quite modern especially when it comes to the status of women. Women have access to education and occupy high levels of the government and private sectors and there are few restrictions on their movement. Women can and do go about alone, drive, and do pretty much anything that men do. You will see women everywhere, dressed in all manner of styles from the latest western fashions to traditional clothing.
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Michael Grunwald writes that the Republican debates were so off-the-wall that many things that would normally have caused a sensation were completely ignored because of all the attention paid to Donald Trump’s utterances and the sniping by the candidates at each other, and that the only reason he noticed them at all was because he read through the transcripts.
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Politics can be a dirty business and while I am not a fan of either Carly Fiorina or Hillary Clinton, there is no excuse for the gender-based insults that have been directed at them. A day or so ago Fiorina accused an Iowa radio host who acts as a surrogate for Ted Cruz of calling her, as Fiorina said, a ‘V-word’.
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Donald Trump is a strange man, hard to pigeonhole into a simple ideological box.
All of us tend to be more kindly disposed to those who are nice to us and less so to those we think are being unkind. What makes Trump different is that, like in most things, he carries this to extremes. He seems to place great value on what people say to him and about him and as long as those things are complimentary, he responds in kind, sometimes with even effusive praise. But attack him or insult him, and he lashes back angrily. He does not do half-measures.
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