Reflections on the Democratic debate

As usual, the Democratic debate was far more substantive and featured a lot less childish back-and-forth than the Republican one. (You can read the transcript here.) They quickly got past the whole data breach snafu that had exploded just the previous day, with Bernie Sanders giving his explanation for what happened and apologizing for what his campaign had done.
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Meanwhile, on the Democratic side …

… the Democratic party establishment is clumsily trying to undermine the Sanders campaign.

Today is the day of the third Democratic debate. (It will take place at 8:00pm Eastern Time and will be shown on ABC.) We have spoken about the struggle between the Republican party establishment and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and the difficulty the party has had in advancing the interests of its favorites Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Less attention has been paid to the fact that the Democratic party establishment has been doing something similar, supporting Hillary Clinton and trying to counter the strong appeal of Bernie Sanders, especially among the young.
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The conservative fight is now in the open

The Republican primary race picture is getting a little clearer. There are really only three players in the game: Donald Trump (the insurgent who represents those who are angry and fed up with pretty much the whole world but are incoherent), Ted Cruz (the religious and anti-party establishment conservative), and Marco Rubio (the neoconservative and backup party establishment conservative), with Jeb Bush as an asterisk.
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The auctioning of the presidency

Election observers will long remember the night of the 2012 election when Republican strategist Karl Rove on Fox News went completely off the rails and challenged the results from Ohio. The Republican propaganda TV channel Fox News had called the state for Obama and this pretty much sealed the election and Mitt Romney’s defeat. Rove’s insistence that something must be wrong resulted in the infamous walk by Megyn Kelly through the halls of the studio and down to the room where the statisticians were to ask them whether they were sure of their call, to which they replied that they were 99% sure and refused to budge.
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The once and future jerk

Have you been wondering what Bobby Jindal has been doing since his run for the Republican nomination fizzled out? Me neither. I was about to write that his campaign had gone up in flames but that would be inaccurate since it never even got off the ground and the words ‘fizzled out’ seemed more appropriate. But I came across this editorial from the state’s largest newspaper that shows that as his last days as governor of Louisiana approach, he remains a true jerk.
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Let the backroom deals commence!

A group of about 50 religious conservatives led by the odious Family Research Council and its equally odious leader Tony Perkins met in secret to see who they would collectively throw their support behind in the Republican race. They felt that Republicans lost in previous elections because the party’s establishment put forward candidates who were not conservative enough
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