As I said before, facts don’t seem to matter anymore in the Republican primary race and fact-checkers must feel that they are crying in the wind because the candidates now just flat out lie, not bothering to provide even a veneer of plausibility. But even within that fog of lies, Chris Christie stands out for his brazenness, giving even Carly Fiorina, whose supreme disregard for facts was a wonder to behold, a run for her money.
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It looks like the authorities have made their first move against the militants occupying the wildlife refuge in Oregon, arresting one of them who had used to government vehicle to drive to a supermarket 30 miles away.
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Given the large number of candidates for the Republican nomination and the fact that even the top candidate Donald Trump is currently only scoring around 30%, there has been considerable speculation that the convention might arrive with no candidate getting a majority of the delegates necessary to win on the first ballot. The media in particular have been salivating at this prospect of a brokered convention full of wheeling and dealing and knock-down, drag-out, slugfests because usually these conventions are boring, tightly-staged, ceremonial affairs.
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Here’s Stephen Colbert speaking before the debate about Jeb Bush, turtles, the Trump-Cruz feud, and the Republican race in general.
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A city official in the town of Cranston, RI thought that she needed an elderly lady as a prop when she gave a press conference at a senior center. You would think that a senior center would have no shortage of such people. But for some reason, there was no one of that description either available or willing. Undeterred, she persuaded a male employee of the center, a bus driver, to don a wig, ear rings, pink lipstick and play the role.
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While I gave my impressions of last night’s debate, I did not evaluate the truth of the statements made by the candidates. This is partly because ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ seem to have become quaint outdated concepts that do not matter anymore within the Republican party and partly because other people usually do a much more thorough job.
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Yesterday was the 174th Republican primary debate (or so it seemed though it was just the 6th) and going into the expectations were clear. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz would slug it out for primacy among the anti-party establishment wing, with Trump issuing his patented passive-aggressive attacks along the lines of “Ted Cruz is a very nice guy and I like him a lot but he really needs to clear up doubts about his citizenship by going to the courts and getting a ruling.” How Cruz would respond was the main interest.
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The death of the actor from cancer was announced today. He played a lot of villains in his career, but he was a very versatile actor and could do deft comedy, as in the film Galaxy Quest (2000) where he played a Shakespearean trained actor frustrated by being mainly identified with a popular Star Trek like TV series character.
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Howard Dean, who was once a supporter of the single-payer health care system, has now come out and criticized Bernie Sanders’s plans to implement it via a Medicare for All program. Back in 2009 he called the idea of single-payer “by far the most economically efficient system.” So what changed? It’s the same old story. Dean now works for a lobbying firm that has as its clients major players in the heath care industry.
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The stakes are rising in the standoff in the Oregon wildlife refuge. Seemingly emboldened by the lack of response by the authorities, the militants have used heavy equipment belonging to the federal government to remove fences, no doubt to free the land from the tyranny of government, and even though such removal is against the wishes of the ranchers who actually live in the area. They are also using government computers in the offices to create websites promoting their cause. These are clearly violations of the law.
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