Month: October 2015

Fiorina Paid Herself First, Campaign Bills Last

Buck Banks

$500,000

Amount left unpaid from Carly Fiorina’s failed 2010 U.S. Senate bid “— even as Fiorina reimbursed herself nearly $1.3 million she lent the campaign. She finally cleared most of the balance in January, a few months before announcing her run for president,” the Washington Post reports. Said Fiorina’s former campaign manager Martin Wilson: “Occasionally, I’d call and tell her she should pay them. She just wouldn’t.”

Sanders Draws Another Big Crowd

Buck Banks

20,000M

Crowd that Sen. Bernie Sanders drew “in Massachusetts on Saturday as he sought to attract donors and build a political infrastructure that will boost his campaign a month after the first two states vote,” the Boston Globe reports. “It was the third-largest rally Sanders has held this year, smaller only than events in Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles in August. To put it in context, the number of people who showed up to see Sanders at the convention center was nearly three times the population of Montpelier, the capital of the US senator’s home state of Vermont.”

When Massacres Become Normal

Buck Banks

The regularity of mass killings breeds familiarity. The rhythms of grief and outrage that accompany them become — for those not directly affected by tragedy — ritualised and then blend into the background noise. That normalisation makes it ever less likely that America’s political system will groan into action to take steps to reduce their frequency or deadliness. Those who live in America, or visit it, might do best to regard them the way one regards air pollution in China: an endemic local health hazard which, for deep-rooted cultural, social, economic and political reasons, the country is incapable of addressing. This may, however, be a bit unfair. China seems to be making progress on pollution.

— The Economist, in June

GOP Leader’s Gaffe Confirms That the Mission of the House Benghazi Hearings Is to Make Clinton’s Poll Numbers Drop

Jon Ponder
On Fox, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted that the purpose of the GOP's eighth Benghazi investigation is to bring down Hillary Clinton's poll numbers
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Fox this week

“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”
— Michael Kinsley

In an interview on Fox earlier this week, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the current House majority leader and presumptive next speaker, tacitly admitted that the true mission of the current (and eighth or ninth) Benghazi investigation is to bring down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.

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