Two pieces of breaking news on the Oregon standoff: The local sheriff has ruled that the police shooting of standoff leader Lavoy Finicum was justified, but five FBI agents are under investigation for allegedly either lying about or covering up two shots that one of them fired at Finicum, but which apparently missed.
One measure of how far-fetched Mitt Romney’s plan for strategic voting to deny Donald Trump a majority of delegates before the convention is: It may not survive the March 15 Florida primary, where a Marco Rubio defeat could prove fatal to the whole plan.
We’ve had some good emails to date on the Trump Attack Haiku. And if you follow my Twitter feed you’ll know I’ve been experimenting with the form myself. But now we’re really getting somewhere. TPM Reader KC is a Chaucer scholar and medievalist who wrote her dissertation on Middle English Alliterative meter (yes, that’s a thing!) and she’s done a close analysis of the Trump Attack Haiku, which is fascinating, hilarious and incisive in equal parts. (Yes, I’m basically in love. She had me at ‘scansion’.) KC’s analysis after the jump …
Rubio campaign goes off on Wolf Blitzer over CNN report that Rubio may not last until next week’s Florida primary. Watch.
Like Christie and Trump, desperate Senators prepare to become Ted Cruz’s butler.
There’s a point I wanted to address about the GOP primaries and the Trump phenomenon that connects up with my piece this morning (“Lust for Destruction“) and an earlier post on the GOP implosion and the concept of ‘technical debt’. I was listening to a CPAC roundtable late last week (televised, I wasn’t there) where the panelists, including The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes, discussed the basic division in the GOP today: between people who feel the party establishment has betrayed them and those who do not.
When people try to make sense of this topsy-turvy, norm-busting election year, one of the key mistakes they make is to assume that the dynamics that operate for Donald Trump in the Republican primary will operate in a general election. They won’t. I’m not saying Trump can’t win a national election. In a Clinton v Trump match-up I think anything from a shattering Trump defeat to a narrow Trump victory is possible. But many people now believe that Trump can defy political gravity – flouting conventions of propriety, embracing extremist positions, casually changing positions, all with no penalty. That won’t work in a general election.
Donald Trump has attendees at Tampa rally pledge to vote for him on March 15th.
The big takeaway from Donald Trump’s press conference tonight was his push for Marco Rubio to get out of the race. But the most interesting part of the night was when CNN’s Jim Acosta asked him if was going to take responsibility for or do something about the recurrent outbreaks of (so far low-level) violence at his rallies.
It got kind of a hairy few a few moments. And I thought it was 50-50 whether Trump would have security toss Acosta from the event or maybe have one of the guys from Duck Dynasty knock him around a bit. But I don’t think either ended up happening.
It was a classic Trump answer, with several digressions and laugh lines – along with a few side points that were completely incomprehensible (see the reference to ten years ago). My favorite part was when he seemed to suggest that on a percentage basis barely anyone gets beaten up at his events. But I wanted to quote the whole exchange at length. So here it is after the jump …
Trump wins in Louisiana and Kentucky – but only by middle single digit margins over Ted Cruz. So two wins each for Cruz and Trump, though the caucus factor helped Cruz a lot. The big takeaway from Trump’s speech is repeatedly saying he thinks Rubio should drop out.