.@lamblock Texas ranked in AP Poll for 1st time with Coach Charlie Strong: https://t.co/xeWXYd8e7a cc. @PatriarchTree #Dawgs #RollTide
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) September 7, 2016
As college football teams rise and fall in polls, don't discount those preseason opinions https://t.co/jmgjGm3GcZ
— L.A. Times Sports (@latimessports) September 6, 2016
Journalists have dispensed with fake neutrality when reporting on Trump. But they shouldn't ignore Clinton's flaws. https://t.co/HZlv9pzJcE— The Intercept (@theintercept) September 6, 2016
From my Facebook page pic.twitter.com/9kZdRVjViZ— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) September 6, 2016
Greta Van Susteren abruptly leaves Fox Newshttps://t.co/sjJyLydqTw— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) September 6, 2016
The rise of the right-wing populist AfD party in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is a problem for Merkel and Germany: https://t.co/JSae52FwfS— SPIEGEL English (@SPIEGEL_English) September 5, 2016
From a national political perspective, the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, with its sparse population of 1.6 million, is a lightweight and largely meaningless. Usually. But this time around, following state parliament elections held there on Sunday, the situation is different. This vote, after all, was essentially a referendum on Chancellor Angela Merkel and her policies, which makes it quite meaningful indeed.I expect her to double down, and she may well decide not to seek reelection, leaving office satisfied that her administration did the humanitarian thing. She'll leave to her successors to clean up the mess. Fortunately, Germany's wealthy and prosperous. It'll work out for them. Perhaps not so much for all the other European countries who were brought along for the refugee ride, largely against their interests.
The results of that referendum don't look good for Merkel. Her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) lost four percentage points relative to the last time the state's voters went to the polls in 2011 for a result of just 19 percent -- while the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) brought in fully 20.8 percent of the vote. The party didn't even exist five years ago.
To be sure, the CDU hasn't done particularly well in the state for 20 years, but it is home to the chancellor's own parliamentary constituency, which means that the AfD has essentially staged a revolution in Merkel's backyard. And it did so by turning the elections into a single-issue vote: Merkel's refugee policies.
The strategy was so successful that the CDU has been relegated to being just the third-strongest party in the state, behind the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the AfD. It marks the first time in Germany that the anti-Merkel party has come out ahead of Merkel's party -- and in some parts of the German leader's electoral district, AfD was the strongest party of all.
For the chancellor, it is a political debacle. Merkel must now come to terms with a challenge at least as monumental as the one which faced her predecessor Gerhard Schröder back in the mid-2000s. Back then, the SPD chancellor found himself trapped between, on the one hand, having to explain his cuts to social welfare benefits and, on the other, the rise of the Left Party, a political movement to the left of the SPD that was fueled by exactly those cuts. In the end, he failed on both counts.
The parallels to Merkel's situation -- a CDU that has been divided by her approach to the refugee crisis combined with the rise of a right-wing protest party -- are significant. But the end doesn't have to be the same. The Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania vote, after all, is only symbolically a debacle for Merkel. Her position as chancellor isn't (yet) at stake.
Emotions over Reason
But the returns on Sunday made clear that an increasing number of voters, at least in Germany's east, are turning their backs on the established, democratic party system. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to matter much if the economy is improving, cities are being renewed and the tourist sector is doing well, all of which are the case in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, which has been structurally weak since German reunification in 1990. And it is possible for a party to campaign on fears of refugees even in a state that very few foreigners call home.
In short, emotions would seem to have triumphed over reason. Facts took a back seat.
It is precisely here that the challenge lies for Merkel, a politician who has always staked her political success on clear arguments based on facts and figures. She will have to do more explaining and more communicating -- and she will have to embed her policies within an approachable, meaningful framework in order to keep her party behind her. She may also have to take a few rhetorical steps toward the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which has been sharply critical of her stance on the refugee issue. That could include admitting that she has made some missteps...
Phyllis Schlafly, whose efforts against Communism and abortion energized conservatives, has died at 92https://t.co/nzvaJJ0REO
— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 5, 2016
Phyllis Schlafly, whose grass-roots campaigns against Communism, abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment galvanized conservatives for almost two generations and helped reshape American politics, died on Monday. She was 92.RTWT.
Her death was confirmed by the Eagle Forum, the conservative organization she founded in 1975.
In her time, Mrs. Schlafly was one of the most polarizing figures in American public life, a self-described housewife who displayed a moral ferocity reminiscent of the ax-wielding prohibitionist Carry Nation. Richard Viguerie, who masterminded the use of direct mail to finance right-wing causes, called her “the first lady of the conservative movement.”
On the left, Betty Friedan, the feminist leader and author, compared her to a religious heretic, telling her in a debate that she should burn at the stake for opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. Ms. Friedan called Mrs. Schlafly an “Aunt Tom.”
Mrs. Schlafly became a forceful conservative voice in the 1950s, when she joined the right-wing crusade against international Communism. In the 1960s, with her popular self-published book “A Choice, Not an Echo” (it sold more than three million copies) and a growing legion of followers, she gave critical support to the presidential ambitions of Senator Barry Goldwater, the hard-right Arizonan who went on to lead the Republican Party to electoral disaster in 1964, but who planted the seeds of a conservative revival that would flower with the rise of Ronald Reagan.
And in the 1970s, Mrs. Schlafly’s campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment played a large part in its undoing. The amendment would have expanded women’s rights by barring any gender-based distinctions in federal and state laws, and it was within hailing distance of becoming the law of the land: Both houses of Congress had passed it by a vote of more than 90 percent, and 35 state legislatures — only three shy of the number required for adoption — had approved it.
But the amendment lost steam in the late 1970s under pressure from Mrs. Schlafly’s volunteer brigades — mainly women, most of them churchgoing Christians (Mrs. Schlafly was Roman Catholic) and not a few of them lugging apple pies to cajole legislators. Despite an extension of the deadline, the amendment died, on June 30, 1982...
"I will get you": How a PTA mom became the target of an OC power couple’s revenge plot https://t.co/6XsV9RbTQ3 pic.twitter.com/n4zTXiypAV
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) September 4, 2016
Oh deer!
Surfers at Salt Creek in Dana Point got a shock on Thursday morning, when a deer rushed into the ocean during the Dana Hills surf team tryouts -- barely missing a collision with one of the surfers taking a wave.
Sheri Crummer, a judge for the tryouts and San Clemente resident, said people on the sand early morning were in disbelief when a deer suddenly ran past everyone on the sand and jolted into the water.
A surfer wearing a red jersey was pumping down the line and about to go for his final turn on a wave when the deer suddenly appeared in front of him, prompting him to kick his board out and bail out of the wave.
“We have no idea where he came from,” Crummer said. “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Marie Jeffries has a very firm view of Donald Trump, and she says it won’t change in the nine weeks before election day.Actually, that's a pretty good analysis. I'm convinced it's going to come down to voter turnout among all those Trump supporters in flyover country. I mean it. They've seriously got to put a dent in those turnout numbers if the Manhattan mogul's going to have a chance in the battlegrounds like the Keystone State.
“He’s a wild man. I think he might put us into a war,” said Jeffries, who was among hundreds sauntering down Main Street in this southeastern Pennsylvania town on the balmy evening that opened Labor Day weekend.
She once was intrigued by Trump, she said, but “then he started the shenanigans, and opened his trap.”
“He’s a bully,” she said. “We’re trying to get away from it in schools. Why have a bully as president?”
Her views matter. Jeffries is a 66-year-old woman who lives in the suburbs, in her case Philadelphia’s. Right now, voters like her stand to cost Trump the presidential contests in key battleground states, starting with Pennsylvania.
Trump is caught in a powerful vise of his own making, between those who find him offensive, like Jeffries, and those who find him entrancing. The things he does and says that appeal to that latter group, which is dominated by white men, often alienate the suburban voters, particularly women, he needs if he is to broaden his base enough to win.
Mark Shimp is one of those Trump voters. He owns a plumbing company in Newtown, Pa., and calls Hillary Clinton “terrible”—the only printable description he can offer, he says.
“If there is a definition in the dictionary of what is wrong in politics, Hillary Clinton is it,” he said, standing on his front porch, a Trump campaign sign on the lawn and American and Marine Corps flags flying from a pole nearby.
“How does she feel the pain of the middle class?”
In broad strokes, Trump and Clinton supporters are seldom near each other in much of the country. The Republican dominates rural, white America; the Democrat overwhelmingly wins the cities with their higher minority populations. But in this slice of Pennsylvania north and west of Philadelphia, where the suburbs meet the exurbs, the two sides collide.
Already, the campaign has left many voters wary...
Obama likes "active citizenry" unless you are a Tea Party group applying for 501(C)3 status w/ the IRS. https://t.co/UhRS4rZhjx
— Debra Burlingame (@DebraBurlingame) September 5, 2016
