We begin today's roundup with
Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post who explains Carly Fiorina's latest strategy:
How angry is Carly Fiorina? So angry she can’t see straight. That’s the only explanation for the yawning gulf between what she says and the plainly visible facts.
Fiorina stands out among the Republican presidential candidates not just because she is a woman but also because she has adopted a strategy of breathing fire. She presents herself as mad about everything, and she never gives an inch on anything she says, no matter how demonstrably untrue. Unhappily for our democracy, this approach has vaulted her into the upper tier of the multitudinous GOP field. [...]
“That scene absolutely does exist,” she said. When Todd pointed out that the antiabortion activists who made the videos admit that what Fiorina saw was stock footage, she ignored him: “Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. Do you think this is not happening?” [...]
I try not to question the sincerity of anyone’s views on abortion. But however passionate Fiorina’s convictions may be, she doesn’t get to make stuff up.
Eric Alterman at The Nation:
This shouldn't come as a surprise:
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina says in a new interview the interrogation technique of waterboarding employed by the United States in the early days of the war on terror was appropriate.
Also, from
Sam Gustin at VICE:
Fiorina acknowledged providing the HP servers to the NSA during an interview with Michael Isikoff in which she defended the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance programs and framed her collaboration with the NSA in patriotic terms.
“I felt it was my duty to help, and so we did,” Fiorina said. “They were ramping up a whole set of programs and needed a lot of data crunching capability to try and monitor a whole set of threats... What I knew at the time was our nation had been attacked.”
The Stellar Wind program was a precursor to other secret NSA surveillance efforts that would eventually include initiatives designed to collect the call records of millions of Americans, and monitor internet and data traffic at critical telecommunications infrastructure points, including, perhaps most notoriously, at the now-legendary Room 641A inside an AT&T facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco.
At The New York Times Magazine,
Mark Leibovich says Donald Trump isn' going anywhere anytime soon:
Trump makes no attempt to cloak his love of fame and, admirably, will not traffic in that tiresome politicians’ notion that his campaign is ‘‘not about me, it’s about you.’’ The ease with which Trump exhibits, and inhabits, his self-regard is not only central to his ‘‘brand’’ but also highlights a kind of honesty about him. He can even seem hostile to any notion of himself as humble servant — that example of modesty that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln strove for. [...]
There’s very little difference between Trump when he’s not running for president and Trump now that he is running for president, except that he makes more public appearances. Trump is the same boorish, brash and grandiose showman we’ve known across many realms. And for some reason, that character has proved an incendiary match with this political moment. It was a repeat of what I saw that night of the first debate, when the whole room abandoned the professional campaign surrogates in favor of the blazing chaos of Trump himself. Was Trump the logical byproduct of a cancerous system in which American democracy has mutated into a gold rush of cheap celebrity, wealth creation and narcissistic branding madness? Or has he merely wielded the tools of this transformation — his money, celebrity and dominance of the media — against the forces that have engendered this disgust in the system to begin with?
At The New Yorker,
Lawrence Krauss, Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, takes on Ben Carson's scientific ignorance:
When Carson says that scientists rely on “probability theory” to explain how multiple Big Bangs, taking place over “billions of years,” have resulted in our “perfectly ordered” universe, he’s profoundly misstating the theory of the Big Bang. (In fact, he seems to have gotten his ignorant arguments confused—his metaphor about a hurricane creating a 747 in a junkyard is often used to deride evolution, to which it is equally inapplicable.) No one suggests that other Big Bangs have happened or are happening in our universe. Instead, all evidence implies that our universe originated from a single Big Bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago. [...]
It is one thing to simply assert that you don’t choose to believe the science, in spite of a mountain of data supporting it. It’s another to mask your ignorance in such a disingenuous way, by using pseudo-scientific, emotion-laden arguments and trading on your professional credentials. Surely this quality, which reflects either self-delusion or, worse still, a willingness to intentionally deceive others, is of great concern when someone is vying for control of the nuclear red button.
On a final note,
Jonathan Capehart analyzes a potential Keven McCarthy speakership:
That House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) could become the chamber’s next speaker should give everyone pause. Neither he nor the nation will be freed from the passions of the far-right whose incessant revolts and “unrealistic” expectations forced Speaker John Boehner to gleefully choose to spend more time with his family. [...] As I’ve said before, that there have been so many legislative failures should call into question not only McCarthy’s ability to count, but also whether he had Boehner’s best interests at heart.