The Trump voters

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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End of the Alabama’s stand against same-sex marriage

The state of Alabama has been one of the holdouts against same-sex marriage despite the US Supreme Court ruling in June 2015 nullifying all state bans against it. The state’s chief justice Roy Moore has been adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage and on March 3, 2015, before the US Supreme Court’s ruling, the state’s supreme court (with only one justice in dissent) had barred all the state probate court judges from issuing such licenses.
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The puzzling strategy being adopted against Trump

The Republican party and the Washington establishment have clearly decided that they are deeply worried by the idea of Donald Trump being the party nominee and have finally declared all out war on him. The last debate saw Fox News tag team with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to attack him with all they had. The Washington Post has editorialized against him. Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell has said that the party will not support him. And the party’s 2012 nominee Mitt Romney gave a blistering speech against him. All kinds of SuperPACS funded by wealthy donors are now running ads against him in the upcoming primary states.
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The torture issue exposes more hypocrisy of Trump opponents

The rise of Donald Trump has seen a whole lot of people in the Republican party and conservative movement suddenly realizing that divisive rhetoric and xenophobic attitudes and bigotry are bad things, even though they were advocating those very same things for decades except using coded language. They seem outraged that he is openly saying what they were covertly advocating.
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The Republican debate was even more ridiculous than previous ones

Last night’s Republican debate followed the familiar pattern, and even more so, of insults and endless crosstalk with the candidates and moderators talking over each other so much that often it was hard to figure out who was saying what. It resembled nothing so much as siblings arguing, with repeated “No, I’m not” “Yes, you are” types of exchanges. Adding to the cacophony was that the audience was even more rowdy, whooping it up even before the candidates were introduced, maintaining a constant background chatter accompanied by boos and cheers and repeated calling out of things that I could not make out. The event can only be described as an embarrassment.
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Donald Trump sows confusion all over the place

Super Tuesday on March 1 was supposed to be the day when the primary races were largely settled with a clear winner emerging, with all the other candidates acknowledging reality and dropping out of the race and throwing their weight behind the party nominee, enabling that person to focus for the next eight months on uniting the party and crafting a message that would win the general election in November.
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Not a Super Tuesday for the two party establishments

The two party establishments must have been wishing for different results than what they got last night. On the Democratic side, no doubt they were clearly hoping that Hillary Clinton would crush Bernie Sanders and force him out of the race quickly so that then Clinton and the party could go back to their familiar and comfortable space of oligarchy-friendly, Wall Street-friendly, and war-friendly policies without the pesky Sanders forcing her to address the issues of inequality, war, and the corrupt political system that have been the cornerstones of his candidacy.
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