And here’s the video of Donald Trump bragging that his penis is really big. Because that already happened in the first ten minutes of the debate. After the jump …
9:03 PM: Feel like crowd is more Trumpy this time.
9:06 PM: Rubes: Donald did it first!!!!
9:07 PM: Seven minutes in and we’ve got dick jokes. Makes me confident Rubes physically attack before the night is out. Only question in my mind is whether Secret Service gives Rubes the protestor treatment if Rubes actually attacks.
9:10 PM: Rubio’s afraid to say “con man” in person.
9:13 PM: Trump’s ‘I haven’t started on her yet’ always gets the crowds going in a fairly gruesome way.
9:14 PM: Kasich: You keep writing me off and I keep losing and then you write me off again.
9:17 PM: I think Rubio lost the thread of that answer at some point.
So many things are happening right now – mostly with the actors in question having no clear plan for what they’re doing – that it’s very hard to know where our politics will be a week from now let alone in six months. But there’s one thing we can see clearly and it’s worth noting: top Republican stakeholders are breaking a lot of china right now that will be very, very hard to unbreak. What seems most relevant to me is that almost all of this is being done with no clear sense of an end-game or even a clear plan.
Chris Christie just a few moments ago: “No, I wasn’t being held hostage.”
TPM’s Lauren Fox is at CPAC today and found a lonely presentation by a GOP strategist which approached self-parody (emphasis added) …
“We make it so easy for them to make villains out of us,” Madrid said. “We just fall into the trap over and over and over.”
“Do you have suggestions about what we should say,” one CPAC attendee asked in the hall after the official presentation.
“Don’t talk to people the way you wouldn’t talk to your family,” Madrid responded. “I am not going to give you silver bullet words. I am just going to say don’t say bad things. Don’t offend people.”
Trump campaign official arrested by FBI on charges tied to Bundy Ranch standoff.
In some ways Mitt Romney’s emergence as Twitter elder snarksman of the Republican party is stranger than Donald Trump’s emergence as frontrunner. His speech today is obviously meant to be a weightier affair, a graver denunciation of Trump and Trumpism. But here’s video from 2012 where a gushing Mitt accepted Trump’s endorsement and praised him to the stars.
Yes, I know, politician’s are hypocrites. Big surprise. But still. Watch the video – after the jump. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of it.
Many of you will remember this. Back in 2013 there was a disruption at a CPAC panel on race. Not surprisingly, the panel topic was a version of ‘the Democrats are the real racists.’ The actual panel was entitled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” But there was a sort of audience revolt in which attendees got up and started saying, ‘No, wait, we’re the racists.’ It basically went downhill from there. Here’s Benjy Sarlin’s write up from 2013 (he was there in the audience as it happened.) One of the ringleaders was a guy named Matthew Heimbach. And he’s now one of the guys who’s attacking black protestors at Trump rallies. Specifically, he was the one attacking that woman at the event Tuesday in Kentucky.
In his heart of hearts, would Chief Justice John Roberts prefer a conservative successor to Antonin Scalia even if that means the court is hobbled with eight justices until 2017? We talked to experts on Roberts and the court to find out.
Every human system has both formal and informal rules. US presidential nominating processes are no different. But it’s often not clear what the informal rules are until a dramatic change of circumstances leads to their being violated. One of those is coming up now in the GOP nominating process. There was a very interesting AP piece today showing that while Donald Trump is in a commanding position he’s not yet winning a high enough percentage of delegates to win the nomination. As Stephen Ohlemacher and Steve Peoples explain, Trump is currently winning only 46 percent of the available delegates, a big plurality but not a majority.