Recent quotes:

GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is an 'unaffiliated' voter, records show

He's said he voted for a Libertarian in the 2004 presidential election, but did not vote in 2008, 2012 or 2016, according to Reuters, and has contributed to both Republican and Democratic candidates. He brushed past a question about his sparse voting history during Wednesday's GOP presidential debate. Ramaswamy said he went on to become a "hardcore" Trump supporter and voted for him in 2020.

This is why white evangelicals still support Donald Trump. (It’s not economic anxiety.) - The Washington Post

Rank-and-file white evangelicals have the most negative attitudes toward immigrants of all U.S. religious groups. That’s true despite the fact that conservative white evangelical leaders strongly favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. My research indicates white evangelical conservatism correlates strongly with their perceptions anti-white discrimination, even after taking into account economic status, party, age and region. Fully 50 percent of white evangelical respondents to our 2016 survey reported feeling they face discrimination that’s comparable to, or even higher than, the discrimination they believe Muslim Americans face. Those who hold this perception are more likely to hold conservative attitudes on issues as wide-ranging as climate change, tax policy and health-care reform.

How Doug Jones Destroyed Roy Moore’s Whole Shtick with One Well-Chosen Verb

Look at the word choice in that sentence. Not “walking” or “marching,” but “prancing.” Not at a rally, but “on a stage.” Not dressed like a cowboy, but “in a cowboy suit.” These were precise, cutting words. They didn’t just make fun of his opponent. They went straight at the central conceit of his public persona – his toughness. Words like “prancing” and “cowboy suit” suggest the opposite of masculinity. Where Roy Moore presented himself as an alpha male, Doug Jones exposed him as a kind of right-wing cabaret act.

This French Philosopher Is The Only One Who Can Explain The Donald Trump Phenomenon | ThinkProgress

Others in the Republican field are concerned with the rules and constructing a strategy that, under those rules, will lead to the nomination. But Trump isn’t concerned with those things. Instead, Trump is focused on each moment and eliciting the maximum amount of passion in that moment. His supporters love it. The key to generating passion, Barthes notes, is to position yourself to deliver justice against evil forces by whatever means necessary. “Wrestlers know very well how to play up to the capacity for indignation of the public by presenting the very limit of the concept of Justice,” Barthes writes. Trump knows how to define his opponent — China, “illegals,” hedge fund managers — and pledges to go after them with unbridled aggression. If, in making his case, he crosses over a line or two, all the better.

Cheney's Iran lie exposed in dramatic fashion | MSNBC

As Marc Champion explained several months ago, “at the start of Bush’s presidency, Iran had no operational centrifuge cascades and no stocks of enriched fuel, so it had no means of making a nuclear weapon.” Then things got bad: “By the time Bush left office in January 2009, Iran had just under 4,000 working centrifuges and an additional 1,600 installed. These had, to that point, produced 171 kilos of low-enriched uranium. Oh, and Iran had covertly built a new enrichment facility under a mountain at Qom.”   Measured by results, rather than sound bites, Cheney was the greatest thing that happened to the radical regime in Iran since it took power.

Trump may say misogynist things, but other Republican candidates do them | Jessica Valenti | Comment is free | The Guardian

RedState editor-in-chief Erick Erickson disinvited Trump from the influential RedState gathering because of Trump’s remarks against Megyn Kelly by saying, “I don’t want my daughter in the room with Donald Trump.” But Erickson has argued that men are meant to be the dominant sex; tweeted that only men should work; said that women aren’t as funny as men; and stated that feminists are ugly and should “return to their kitchens”. By his own standards, Erick Erickson’s daughter probably shouldn’t be in the room with her father, either. `

Frances Oldham Kelsey, F.D.A. Stickler Who Saved U.S. Babies From Thalidomide, Dies at 101 - The New York Times

Merrell stood to make millions and was anxious to get moving. It had tons of Kevadon in warehouses, ready for marketing, and 1,000 American doctors had already been given samples for “investigational” research. The company supplied more data, but also mounted a campaign to pressure Dr. Kelsey. Letters, calls and visits from Merrell executives ensued. She was called a fussy, stubborn, unreasonable bureaucrat.

Top Conservative Magazine Calls Bernie Sanders A Nazi

He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics. The incessant reliance on xenophobic (and largely untrue) tropes holding that the current economic woes of the United States are the result of scheming foreigners, especially the wicked Chinese, “stealing our jobs” and victimizing his class allies is nothing more than an updated version of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “yellow peril” rhetoric, and though the kaiser had a more poetical imagination — he said he had a vision of the Buddha riding a dragon across Europe, laying waste to all — Bernie’s take is substantially similar. He describes the normalization of trade relations with China as “catastrophic” — Sanders and Jesse Helms both voted against the Clinton-backed China-trade legislation — and heaps scorn on every other trade-liberalization pact.

What Donald Trump was up to while John McCain was a prisoner of war

“One of the first things I did was join Le Club, which at the time was the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive–like Studio 54 at its height,” he wrote. “Its membership included some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden. “It turned out to be a great move for me, socially and professionally. I met a lot of beautiful young single women, and I went out almost every night,” he added. “Actually, I never got involved with any of them very seriously. These were beautiful women, but many of them couldn’t carry on a normal conversation.”

Trump is a joke

After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won't report on Trump's campaign as part of The Huffington Post's political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump's campaign is a sideshow. We won't take the bait.

GOP Senator: Don't Force Employees To Wash Their Hands After Using Toilet

“I was having a discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like ‘maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,'" the senator said. Tillis said his interlocutor was in disbelief, and asked whether he thought businesses should be allowed to "opt out" of requiring employees to wash their hands after using the restroom. The senator said he'd be fine with it, so long as businesses made this clear in "advertising" and "employment literature." “I said: ‘I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says “We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,” Tillis said.

How Did America’s Craziest Governor Get Reelected? - Colin Woodard - POLITICO Magazine

Then there’s the unusually high turnout yesterday—perhaps as high as 60 percent—which benefited the governor. This may have been prompted by a pressing public policy issue: whether Mainers should be prevented from feeding donuts to bears. A campaign to ban the practice of baiting bears with pastries and other garbage—and then letting hunters shoot them—may have mobilized large numbers of rural voters who tend to appreciate hunting and the “plain spoken” LePage. (The ballot measure was defeated, by the way, by some five points—about the same as LePage’s margin of victory.)

Cross check program goes after (minority) voters with common names

The three states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week’s electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate — and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.
Since the beginning of last year, Mr. Cantor’s campaign had spent about $168,637 at steakhouses compared with the $200,000 his challenger, David Brat, had spent on his entire campaign.
“In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia and leading Republicans didn’t blame the Bush administration for Russia’s invasion of a neighbor, so it’s complete hypocrisy for them to attack the Obama administration now.”
In 2002, the last year without public financing, 73 percent of campaign funds for judicial candidates came from attorneys and special interest groups. After public financing was introduced in 2004, that number dropped to 14 percent. Last year, every single candidate for the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals opted to receive public financing.