"I wish I could designate myself as a 'foreign-policy Republican,' but there’s no such option, so I have to go whole hog."

"By registering as a Republican rather than an independent, maybe I can have some influence on moving some Republican policies toward the center. I have given up on trying to change the Democratic Party. My main goal is to send a message that many traditional Democratic voters can’t accept what it is becoming—a replica of left-wing European parties that are hurting their countries."

Writes Alan Dershowitz, in "Why I’m Becoming a Republican/I first registered as a Democrat in 1959. The party’s hostility to Israel is too much" (Wall Street Journal).

The RNC posted yesterday that "Democrats were told to be 'willing to get shot' to obstruct President Trump."

I do think this posting should say that this interview took place last July. Posting it relates to the shooting of Renee Good, but when Blitzer and Jeffries spoke, the incident had not yet occurred:

Democrats were told to be "willing to get shot" to obstruct President Trump, and instead of condemning it, they incited it further.

Democrats are held hostage by their violent and deranged far-left base.pic.twitter.com/Y3DQw2UG4z

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 8, 2026

Here's the Axios article Blitzer cites, "Democrats told to 'get shot' for the anti-Trump resistance" (published July 7, 2025). Excerpt:

"The survey of 1,019 American adults, which was conducted between September 19-21, found that the public trusts Republicans’ plan..."

"... to address crime to the Democrats’ by 20 points (40%-20%), on immigration by 18 points (40%-22%), on foreign conflicts by 12 points (35%-23%), on the economy by 10 points (34%-24%), and on gun control (32%-28%) and political extremism (30%-26%) by four points. Democrats, on the other hand, are better trusted on the environment (37%-23%), women’s rights (38%-25%), healthcare (34%-25%), and respect for democracy (31%-29%)."

From "Republicans Mop the Floor With Democrats on the Economy and Immigration in Stunning New Poll" (Mediaite).

Get off.

"What happens in Wisconsin doesn't stay in Wisconsin. It's the place where Republicans try out what they want to bring elsewhere. It is... the laboratory for autocracy."

Says the super-articulate Ben Wikler, Chair, Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is the laboratory for autocracy in America and we have to make sure that experiment fails. Watch full episode with ⁦@benwikler⁩ from ⁦@WisDems⁩ to find out what you can do to actively help save democracy in the next 6 weeks. pic.twitter.com/TiYzBsRhLX

— PoliticsGirl (@IAmPoliticsGirl) February 16, 2023

I try to stay neutral on Wisconsin politics, so don't read this as an endorsement of the Democratic Party. 

"It is hard to overstate just how much of a jolt to the political system Sarah Palin delivered when she defeated her first fellow Republican 16 years ago."

"He was Frank Murkowski, the sitting governor of Alaska and a towering figure in the 49th state. She was a 'hockey mom' and the former mayor of a small, working-class town who vowed to stick it to the 'good ol’ boys.'... Today, having lost her bid for Congress after years out of the spotlight, Ms. Palin is a much diminished force. She was, in many ways, undone by the same political currents she rode to national prominence.... Along the way, she helped redefine the outer limits of what a politician could say as she made dark insinuations about Barack Obama’s background and false claims about government 'death panels' that could deny health care to seniors and people with disabilities. Now, a generation of Republican stars follows the template she helped create.... But as the next generation rose up, Ms. Palin’s brand of politics no longer seemed as novel or as outrageous. Next to Mr. Trump’s lies about a huge conspiracy to deny him a second term, or Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s casual allusions to political violence, Ms. Palin’s provocations more than a decade ago can seem almost quaint...."

Writes Jeremy W. Peters, in "Sarah Palin Loses as the Party She Helped Transform Moves Past Her/The former Alaska governor, once the standard-bearer of the G.O.P.’s dog-whistling, no-apologies culture, was no match for the same forces she rode to national prominence" (NYT).

"The old Republican Party is dead. It has been wasting away for years now, and this month’s midterm results are the finishing blow...."

Writes Josh Hawley in an opinion piece in The Washington Post.

Republicans will only secure the generational victories they crave when they come to terms with this reality: They must persuade a critical mass of working class voters that the GOP truly represents their interests and protects their culture....

Work, family and culture are the touchstones of meaning for working people across the country.... A reborn Republican Party must look very different. It must offer good jobs and good lives.... And it must place working Americans at its heart and take them as they are, rather than treating them as resources to be exploited or engineered away....

From the comments over there: "He doesn't give a rat's behind about working people"/"He's too deeply masculine, and real men don't give a damn"/"No new thinking here. Platitudes about working families but no policies. Protecting our culture - how, exactly, and from what?"/"The GOP is dead because you and your fellow moronic cretins under its tent killed it, you abject loser and coward."

"Sorry, but no. This essay wants to sell the notion that students are to blame for rejecting a party that has..."

"... embraced election lies, rejection of science and public health, vaccine hysteria, and an attitude towards the public that is so mendacious, you cannot get most republican members of Congress to simply say that it is wrong for someone to remove classified documents from the White House and treat them as personal property. There aren't two equal parties now. repubicans [sic] have become secular creationists. There isn't a good reason to normalize their propaganda."

The top-rated comment on a WaPo op-ed by Joshua Park, "College students hate our broken politics. But we’re partly to blame." Park is "a junior studying history at Harvard University," who observes that students won't attend events presented by Republicans.

"Unfortunately, many of the very people responsible for losing the Senate last cycle are now trying to stop us from winning the majority this time by trash-talking our Republican candidates...."

"[W]hen you complain and lament that we have 'bad candidates,' what you are really saying is that you have contempt for the voters who chose them....  Much of Washington's chattering class disrespects and secretly (or not so secretly) loathes Republican voters. These self-appointed 'smart guys' in Washington think they (not the voters) should be able to choose our candidates.... While the media and Washington want to try and tear down our candidates, voters put forward incredible people to serve in the Senate: a world-renowned doctor, a Heisman trophy winner and successful businessman, a small businessman and congressman from a farming community, a bestselling author who has shown the struggles in America from drug addiction, a successful tech entrepreneur, an Iraq War veteran who served two terms as state attorney general, a successful construction company entrepreneur, and a nurse who has fought for change at the VA so our heroes get the care they deserve.... [W]e will take control of the Senate this fall.... And when we do, we will be in a position to stop this confused and ridiculous president from further damaging our great country...."

Writes Senator Rick Scott in "Washington versus Republican voters" (Washington Examiner).

"Republicans and Democrats Don’t Just Disagree About Politics. They Have Different Sexual Fantasies."

Writes Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute (at Politico). I'll just read this and see if it can help me decide once and for all if I'm really a Republican or a Democrat.

I surveyed 4,175 adult Americans from all 50 states about what turns them on and published the findings in a book entitled Tell Me What You Want....

While self-identified Republicans and self-identified Democrats reported fantasizing with the same average frequency—several times per week—I found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to fantasize about a range of activities that involve sex outside of marriage. Think things like infidelity, orgies and partner swapping, from 1970s-style “key parties” to modern-day forms of swinging. Republicans also reported more fantasies with voyeuristic themes, including visiting strip clubs and practicing something known as “cuckolding,” which involves watching one’s partner have sex with someone else.

By contrast, self-identified Democrats were more likely than Republicans to fantasize about almost the entire spectrum of BDSM activities, from bondage to spanking to dominance-submission play. The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism, which involves deriving pleasure from the experience of pain....

What connects Republicans and Democrats, I believe, is that their fantasies are at least partly driven by what they can’t have... Nothing makes us want to try something like being told you can’t do it. This is why taboos, no matter what they are, often become turn-ons...

Oh, he's coming at this from a completely different angle than I wanted! He's assuming that first, you commit to some values, like monogamy or equality, and then, after you've decided how you're supposed to be, you know what is transgressive, and that's what feels sexy so you go there with your fantasy. I thought the eroticism would come first, and you'd begin with some mysterious, bodily feeling for cuckolding or dominance, and your being that sort of person would explain what you found attractive in the Republican or Democratic party.

In that view, you could analyze the results to mean that people who get excited by a great variety of choices are also attuned to the Republican message of a free market and individual responsibility, and people who get excited by bondage and domination respond the the Democrats' offer of greater regulation and impositions from above about what you ought to be doing. I could see how, intellectually, you might say the Republicans have the better set of values but still find yourself getting excited by what the Democrats say they will do to you.

I've said enough!

"The possible marginal tax rate of more than 100% results from the combination of tax policies designed to provide benefits to businesses and families but then deny them to the richest people."

"As income climbs and those breaks phase out, each dollar of income faces regular tax rates and a hidden marginal rate on top of that, in the form of vanishing tax breaks. That structure, if maintained in a final law, would create some of the disincentives to working and to earning business profit that Republicans have long complained about, while opening lucrative avenues for tax avoidance. As a taxpayer’s income gets much higher and moves out of those phaseout ranges, the marginal tax rates would go down. Consider, for example, a married, self-employed New Jersey lawyer with three children and earnings of about $615,000. Getting $100 more in business income would force the lawyer to pay $105.45 in federal and state taxes, according to calculations by the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation. That is more than double the marginal tax rate that household faces today. If the New Jersey lawyer’s stay-at-home spouse wanted a job, the first $100 of the spouse’s wages would require $107.79 in taxes....."

From "The Taxman Cometh: Senate Bill’s Marginal Rates Could Top 100% for Some/Certain high-income business owners would face backwards incentives; lawmakers work to bridge gap" in The Wall Street Journal (which you can get into without a subscription if start at Drudge, where it's the top story right now).

So the rich are fighting back. The effort to make the tax bill politically palatable with these phaseouts at the high end created what is either a terrible problem or the raw material to frame an argument that the phaseouts are unfair. So the rich have got the Wall Street Journal drumming up sympathy for the group that was getting less than zero sympathy. These people who needed to be deprived of a tax cut now need to be saved from radical unfairness. Or so this article says.

I don't know if this is enough to leverage the GOP in Congress to help the rich (but I've heard that's what the GOP really always wants to do). It needs a lot of political cover. The WSJ paints a vivid picture of unfairness — even for a New Jersey lawyer who makes $615,000, normally one of the least sympathetic characters on the face of the earth.

If this article is wrong, somebody better get on the task of showing why it's wrong. Who's motivated to disprove what this article says? I don't think it it would be the Democrats, who hate the tax bill and want to see the whole thing fail. And it won't be the GOP people who actually want to help the rich and don't like the phaseouts. It might be someone who wants the big tax cut and also wants to make sure the rich don't get it — which could be someone who simply believes that for GOP to prevail in the next 2 elections, it must deliver a tax cut that does not hand the Democrats the argument that the GOP gave a big tax cut to the rich.

Trump "has boasted of his friendships with many gay people, saying 'I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay.'"

"He has supported AIDS charities for years, and welcomed gay couples at his Palm Beach club when doing so was considered remarkable. And he has recently started insisting that he would be a better friend to the gay community than Mrs. Clinton, even though he opposes legal rights like marriage. But as he tries to convince social conservatives that he is not acting as a moderate, Mr. Trump has been largely hands-off with the platform.... The Republican platform committee has long been dominated by some of the party’s most stalwart activists. And some of them have hardly been shy about their views. There is Cynthia Dunbar of Virginia, who has compared the gay rights movement to Nazism. Hardy Billington, a committee member from Missouri, placed an ad in a local paper asserting that homosexuality kills people at two to three times the rate of smoking. And Mary Frances Forrester of North Carolina has claimed that the 'homosexual agenda is trying to change the course of Western civilization.'"

From "Donald Trump Keeps Distance in G.O.P. Platform Fight on Gay Rights," by Jeremy W. Peters in the NYT.

It's usually Donald Trump who's portrayed as weird and out of the mainstream and, for this reason, does not really belong in the Republican Party. With this issue, he's the one who's normal and mainstream, and it's the party that looks embarrassingly out of it.

Goodbye to Nancy Reagan.

The woman who called President Reagan "Ronnie" has passed away. She was 94.

"So let me close with Ronnie's words, not mine..."



Here's the text of Nancy's beautiful speech at the 1996 GOP convention:

But Ronnie's spirit, his optimism, his never failing belief in the strength and goodness of America is still very strong.... I can tell you with certainty that he still sees the shining city on the hill, a place of full of hope and promise for us all.

As you all know, I am not the speechmaker in the family, so let me close with Ronnie's words, not mine. In that last speech four years ago, he said, "Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will report that I appeal to your best hopes not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts, and may all of you as Americans never forget your heroic origins, never fail to seek divine guidance, and never, never lose your natural, god-given optimism."

Ronnie's optimism, like America's, still shines very brightly. May God bless him, and from both of us, God bless America.

"Hillary Clinton's Lead Over Sanders Nearly Vanishes."

A new IBD/TIPP has Hillary "falling eight points to 43%" and Sanders "climb[ing] six points to 39%." That's a shift from an 18 point lead to a 4 point lead." The earlier poll was done from 11/30 - 12/4 and this one is a little over a month later, 1/4 - 1/8.

Donald Trump is at 34%, up from 27%, with Cruz in second at 18%. Rubio is losing ground, falling from 14% to 9%.

There's also a new Gallup poll showing Democrats losing ground:



Obviously, Americans don't feel too connected to the horrible 2 parties we're stuck with. That's what that graph means, and that's what it means that Trump and Sanders are doing so well. And I think there are a lot of people who like both Sanders and Trump. They/we like the disruption.

ADDED: Mickey Kaus: "Dems 29%, GOPS 26%, Indies 42%. So what are other 3%? That looks like the fastest-growing category."

"Republican strategists have long theorized about the possibility of the brokered convention, which hasn't happened in decades..."

"... but the dinner meeting [of top Republican Party officials] appears to be the first active planning taken by the GOP to prepare for it," CNN reports.

A brokered convention occurs when no candidate gets enough of the delegates to secure the nomination on the first vote tally. After that, delegates can be given up to other candidates, shifting the balance.... 

[A] new Republican National Committee rule that requires any GOP nominee win a majority of delegates from eight different states....

It had "nothing, zero, nada to do with Trump except he may be one of the candidates standing at the end," said the source. "It was not aimed at anyone."

Sean Spicer, RNC chief strategist and communications director, downplayed the significance of the dinner on Friday. "It was a dinner where the subject was how the delegate selection process works.... At the end of that dinner, there were a lot of questions asked.... It's great cocktail conversation... This is really, to be honest, with you quite silly."

(Strange comma placement in that last sentence.)

Do you know "Who were the last two presidential nominees lacking a majority at the end of the first roll call at their party conventions?" The reason that question asks for two is that it happened in the same year. It was longer ago than 1976, but in 1976, Ronald Reagan got pretty close to getting a brokered convention. (Give up? It was 1952.)

[N]omination by way of a contested convention was a respectable strategy from the 1830s, when conventions became the standard way of nominating candidates, until at least the 1960s. Democratic front runners Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and John Kennedy in 1960 knew that their support might dissipate unless they won quickly. Their chief rivals, Al Smith and Lyndon Johnson respectively, hoped that it would. In both cases effective floor managers kept wavering delegates in line. Kennedy won on the first ballot but not until the alphabetical roll call reached Wyoming; Roosevelt won on the fourth when the Democrats still required a two-thirds majority....

[C]onventions were, are, and probably should be about more than nominations. Senator Richard Russell, the genteel face of racial segregation, accumulated large numbers of delegates at the 1948 and 1952 Democratic conventions in order to demonstrate the power of the white South. Jesse Jackson used the same tactic on behalf of racial equality and a "rainbow coalition" in 1984 and 1988. Whether or not Senator Edward Kennedy actually thought he could shake loose Jimmy Carter's delegates at an "open convention" in 1980, he wanted to make a vivid case for liberalism....

No one can predict whether or not the Republicans will have a contested convention this year, either because Mitt Romney's more conservative rivals might have a chance in combination to deny him the nomination or because they want to make a vivid ideological statement... 

That was, obviously, written in 2012. The odd thing this year is that GOP insiders seem to be looking at a convention where the dominant candidate would be challenged by insurgents making a "vivid case" for... moderation.

Rich Lowry on Donald Trump: "Well, it's clear that he's not going to disappear in a cloud of pixie dust, as many people thought."

"And I don't think there's any clever way for the establishment to take him down. It's very simple. Another candidate is going to have to find a way either to out-maneuver him, or to just frankly beat him in the argument. And if no one can do that, yeah, he better man the lifeboats, because there's some significant chance he'll win the nomination."

That was on "Meet the Press" yesterday. I never got around to watching my recording of it — only got to "Face the Nation" and "Fox News Sunday" before maxing out and letting the television do what it wanted to do: display football games. So I'm just reading the transcript this morning, which is easier to scroll through and easier to blog.

I'm cherry-picking that Rich Lowry quote because it exemplifies the tedium. We've had months of this almost perfectly empty staring at the blunt fact of Trump's existence. It's progressed from he's not really there to he won't go away to he'll have to go away soon to we need to recognize that he's not going away like we thought he would to — newly emerging — he's (probably) going to get the nomination and then what will we do?

Lowry's rhetoric — which perhaps he said with the simulacrum of a pleasant smile on his face — has an edge of violence. Trump should just "disappear." (We'd use sorcery to disappear him if we could.) We needed to "take him down." And if we can't, "he better man the lifeboats." Did he say "he"? Why should Trump man the lifeboats if Trump wins the nomination? Ah, do I have to check the transcriptions? Dammit. But the violence is there, you see? A shipwreck. Oh, I get it, I think. The whole big Republican Party is the sinking ship, and Trump will have to proceed by lifeboat, because he will have lost the party, the establishment. But was Trump even ever on that ship? And if you look at the polls, is the ship even big? I don't know, but perhaps Mr. Lowry has some ideas about whether the deck chairs would look better rearranged.

ADDED: Meade IMs an image with the caption "Trump’s lifeboat will be HUGE"...



AND: I checked the recording, and on first listen, it did sound like: "And if no one can do that, yeah, he better man the lifeboats...." But by the 4th listen, it was absolutely clear that he said: "And if no one can do that, yeah, you better man the lifeboats...." Does this ship still sink?

"Just when you thought the Republican Party was destined to take a turn toward the ugly..."

"... two boyishly handsome young stars have emerged."

Is it bad that "Conservative PACs Attack Republicans, and It Pays"?

Eric Lipton and Jennifer Steinhauer write in the NYT about petitions like "Boot Boehner,” “Dump McConnell,” “Drop a Truth-Bomb on Kevin McCarthy,” and “Fire Paul Ryan” that come from "conservative websites and bloggers who have helped stoke a grass-roots rebellion to make Congress more conservative" and who use the petitions to raise money for their own on-going effort.

“This is clearly an organized effort and an attempt by these groups to raise money for themselves,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who added that she was the target of a similar attack during the 2013 Senate debate over gun safety legislation. “They hurt our party, they hurt our Congress and they hurt our country.”...

Campaign finance documents examined by The New York Times show that the PACs and other groups running many of these petition drives have a history of spending most of the money they raise on consulting firms, as opposed to using it to support political candidates, a stark contrast to how most PACs function.

The efforts employ similar tactics. Conservative outlets like Breitbart or The Washington Examiner are given “exclusive” advance notice of a new effort, like the “Remove John Boehner” campaign started early last year by the Tea Party Leadership Fund....

I'm puzzling over what's supposed to be bad here. What's wrong with political activity in support of an ideology and what's wrong with trying to take down politicians you oppose instead of looking for politicians to boost? Is it that the political group is able to raise funds for itself and keep its operation going rather than to use the money to get people elected? Isn't this kind of ideological activity done on both the left and the right? The only problem I can detect — and this isn't in the article — is that it works best at the political extremes: moderates and realists can't use it.

"Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble."

Matt Yglesias marshals the facts, mostly about strongly rooted GOP power in state government and in Congress. Also:

Liberals accustomed to chuckling over the ideological rigor of the House GOP caucus won't want to hear this, but one of the foundations of the GOP's broad national success is a reasonable degree of ideological flexibility.

Essentially every state on the map contains overlapping circles of rich people who don't want to pay taxes and business owners who don't want to comply with labor, public health, and environmental regulations. In states like Texas or South Carolina, where this agenda nicely complements a robust social conservatism, the GOP offers that up and wins with it. But in a Maryland or a New Jersey, the party of business manages to throw up candidates who either lack hard-edged socially conservative views or else successfully downplay them as irrelevant in the context of blue-state governance.

"Politically speaking, Wisconsin and Minnesota are practically twins."

"They have voted the same way in the last seven presidential contests. They gave President Obama almost identical victory margins last fall. They share a common border, a common heritage, and the highest election turnouts in America. Yet based on how they are being governed, you would think they were two different planets...."