Donaldo Gigante continues to run The Show, and the rest of the kids are just hanging out on his playground.
PPP’s new Iowa poll finds Donald Trump continuing to lead in the state with 24% to 17% for Ben Carson, and 13% for Carly Fiorina. In single digits but getting decent levels of support are Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio at 8%, Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee at 6%, the now departed Scott Walker at 5%, and Bobby Jindal and Rand Paul at 4%. Rounding out the field are John Kasich at 2%, Chris Christie and Rick Santorum at 1%, and Lindsey Graham, Jim Gilmore, and George Pataki all at less than 1%.
That’s 54% for the people who have never held office and everyone else in single digits because they failed to destroy Obama. And PMURT! keeps leading because he understands the game better than anyone else.
Trump’s recent comments about President Obama waging a war on Christianity don’t hurt him much with the GOP base. 69% agree with the sentiment that the President has waged a war on Christianity, with only 17% disagreeing. Trump’s probably not hurting himself too much with his negativity toward Muslims either- only 49% of Republicans think the religion of Islam should even be legal in the United States with 30% saying it shouldn’t be and 21% not sure. Among Trump voters there is almost even division with 38% thinking Islam should be allowed and 36% that it should not.
Your modern GOP has three rules, folks:
- The First Amendment protects ‘Murican Christianity only
- The Second Amendment is for enforcing Rule 1 by whatever means necessary
- Everything else is cleek’s law
The current batch of single-digit polling politicians has made too many compromises with Evil Liberals(tm) on one or more of those rules to be trusted anymore. Obamacare and same-sex marriage are the laws of the land and President Obamalcolm Shabazz X is abortifying all the babies for parts and killing cops with bazookas and inviting Iran to come over next Thursday and eat some dog and Hillary and Joe and Bernie are waiting to take over and inchoate rage is lots of fun, really.
And in comes The People That Haven’t Failed Us Yet and they’re gonna Take Our Country Back (Pickup Truck Commercial) and that’ll show those libtards a thing of sixty youbetcha!
It’s all show, and We Shall Overcomb is the ringmaster, and it’s bread and circuses for the kids in the cheap seats and they love him for it and the poor, poor Village pundits are still trying to figure out why Scott Walker dropped out. The poor dears still think reason will decide this monster truck mudfest, and that will take hold any minute. Of all the groups out there, the Village was the least prepared to handle Hair Commissar. None of the old stuff applies anymore and that terrifies them.
So yeah, you gotta laugh to keep from crying, I suppose, before this mess crashes to the ground and takes out several states in the process.
Won’t that be fun?
EconWatcher
Kasich at 2%? I think he’s their only chance of beating Hillary, but that’s looking kinda moot.
srv
It’s great that at least some liberals are finally acceptiong the reality of the Trump Revolution.
RSA
For the past couple of months I’ve read political commentators speculate about the eventual Republican nominee once Trump crashes and burns. Is that event a sure thing? I don’t know enough to judge for myself.
BruceFromOhio
IOKIYAR. I recall how Bush & ilk got pass after pass. Bernie and Hillary still have to play by the old rules, whatever the hell those are.
Just watch the pile-on after the next email server or on-stage stumble or umpteenth Benghazi! hearing. “Clearly not fit to lead” comes so easily from the punditocracy… except when it comes to El Donaldo.
Gimlet
Off topic – Clinton adds details to plans on prescription drug costs (AP)
The Democratic presidential candidate’s proposal would place a monthly cap of $250 on covered out-of-pocket prescription drug costs to help patients with chronic or serious health conditions. It would also deny tax breaks for televised direct-to-consumer advertising and require drug companies that receive taxpayers’ support to invest in research and development.
The plan received a chilly reception from the pharmaceutical industry, which said it would restrict patients’ access to medicine.
“Secretary Clinton’s proposal would turn back the clock on medical innovation and halt progress against the diseases that patients fear most,” said John Castellani, head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America in a statement.
As she did during her 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton would seek to allow Medicare to use its large purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. Her plan also seeks to increase competition for traditional generic versions of specialty drugs to drive down prices and offer consumer choice.
The proposal would require health insurance plans to place a monthly and annual limit on covered out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for individuals. The campaign estimated up to 1 million Americans could benefit from the plan annually.
beltane
Since the 1st Amendment is no longer a thing, maybe we should also outlaw fundamentalist Christianity while we’re at it.
beltane
@RSA: The Republican base loves Trump. Even those Iowa Republicans politely pledging support to Carson and Fiorina secretly adore Trump more than their preferred candidate.
redshirt
Trump sure drives the libtards crazy! And that’s why he should be President.
– An Iowa Republican
different-church-lady
That tells me we’ve reached peak Trump, but not peak nuts.
different-church-lady
@redshirt: Well, like Z said, Cleek’s Law.
Tom
I wish the Archbishop of Beltway centrism and propriety David Broder was alive to see the Trump ascendancy so it could kill him all over again!
elmo
We Shall Overcomb
Hair Commissar
and the whole paragraph about Obamalcom Shabazz
make me not even want to write anymore, because I’m just not that damn clever.
I am, however, that damn shameless, and I am SO TOTALLY STEALING “We Shall Overcomb” to use in Facebook comments on my Trumpinista cousins’ “TAKE BACK AMURICA HELL YEAH” posts.
EconWatcher
By the way, this article in the NYT about our “allies” in Afghanistan has pretty much sucked the will to live out of me.
I don’t generally believe in trigger warnings, but don’t click unless you’re prepared to spend some time wondering what’s the point of life, with this sort of thing going on. Really, really sickening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html?_r=0
BruceFromOhio
@srv:
Anyone can become president. It’s what happens after getting elected that matters. Can anyone possibly vertically fornicate this country worse than 8 years of Turdblossom & Co? I can see a charlie-foxtrot Congress hating a Trump Ascendancy as much as another 4 or 8 years of a Democratic Prez. We did stoopid and managed to survive, we can do stoopid again if we must.
(As The Architect warned Neo in the second Matrix movie: “There are levels of existence we are prepared to accept.”)
Fester Addams
So 4% is a “decent level of support” here. I guess you’ve really got to grade on the curve what with the reality show acts sucking up all the oxygen.
catclub
@Gimlet: Wow. Why not call for everything on the progressive’s wish list. She is looking better and better.
No mention of repealing Taft Hartley, so I am still for Nader.
beltane
@Tom: Please. David Broder would just calmly explain how the Trump phenomenon has been eclipsed by the Bernie Sanders Khmer Rouge phenomenon. Both sides do it but the left always does it worse.
Alex
@EconWatcher: Kasich is polling well in New Hampshire. He might have a chance of being the reasonable one after the first two primaries and then pulls off a McCain style win.
The 2016 primary schedule probably won’t help him though — it goes Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, then Super Tuesday.
And if this election is decided by Super Tuesday, good luck on anyone figuring out that nonsense. Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming all in one day.
Calouste
@Gimlet: In most European Socialist hellholes, a prescription costs about $10, and direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs is strictly verboten.
Cluttered Mind
@beltane: Yeah, if only we still had Broder to tell us how while Donald Trump may have called all Mexican migrant workers rapists and murderers, Bernie Sanders did say that rich people don’t pay enough taxes so both sides need to be more civil but especially Democrats because Sanders was being mean to American citizens.
Hawes
Well Shall Overcomb FTW
SRW1
You left out something rather significant from the PPP survey: If Trump is pitted head-to-head against the other GOP candidates, the only one he beats is JEB?. Even the reccently politically deceased Scott Walker beats Trump by double digits. I’d propose that suggests two things:
1. El Trumpo has a really hard ceiling way below the 50 percent mark.
2. JEB? is the suckiest of the suckers (suck that RtR)
TPM has some more details.
Grumpy Code Monkey
The Village created this monster and only the Village can destroy it, but they’re too busy manufacturing new scandals to pin on Hillary because that’s all they fucking know how to do anymore.
beltane
@Calouste: That’s awful. How on earth will marketing executives for Big Pharma be able to afford new Ferraris every month under such a system?
Mike J
@Gimlet:
That’s only going to make it more popular.
srv
@BruceFromOhio:
Trump has decades of success using the Bully Pulpit. The populist party he is fashioning has a much higher probability of success against Congress than a Clinton becrowning.
Betty Cracker
Trump is dead hair-wad walking, and his decline began the minute he started to take himself seriously enough to “tone it down” in the last debate. He gave up the one thing that appealed to his fan base — his willingness to say shit they think but are afraid of voicing. It’ll take awhile for the headless Nazgul to flop to earth, but it will happen.
Gimlet
@catclub:
Not sure it addresses the problem of gouging seen yesterday.
Capping out of pocket patient costs and increasing competition doesn’t do much for the gouging. Someone (the insurer) pays the remainder of the gouged price.
Medicare to use its large purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices.
Medicare doesn’t pay for very many medications, supplemental policies do. And non-Medicare age groups won’t benefit from it anyway.
Grumpy Code Monkey
The only reason I’m sorry Walker dropped out is that he isn’t wasting any more Koch dollars. Wanted them to drop at least a couple of more million down that particular money pit.
ThresherK (GPad)
Walker at 5%? Quite the bump from “rounding error”. Too bad he can’t drop out another 10 times.
Cacti
O/T
Volkswagen has issued a profit warning to shareholders, notifying them that $7.3 billion is being set aside in anticipation of legal claims/costs.
Honestly, $7.3 billion seems a bit low.
Betty Cracker
@EconWatcher: Can someone remind me why we’re still in Afghanistan?
Gindy51
@Gimlet: All they’d have to do is cut their advertising and doctor bribing budget to zero and use that for R & D. They spend more now on ads than they do there anyway.
jl
With the field divided so much, no one can beat Trump with the hard core lunatic GOP primary base. Just saw poll results that show that there does seem to be a ceiling to Trumps support, which also provides more evidence for the total loser status of Jeb?:
Poll: The Only GOP Candidate Trump Can Beat Head-To-Head In Iowa Is Jeb
” But when the Democratic-leaning PPP did head-to-head match-ups between Trump and other prominent GOP candidates, the real estate mogul found his only victory at 14 points over Bush. ”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/polltracker/public-policy-polling-iowa-september
Emerald
@redshirt:
Do the Repubs actually believe that? They don’t know we’re munching buttered popcorn and guffawing at them? They don’t see that were freakin’ crying with laughter?
Yeah, I knew they were clueless, but THAT clueless?
James E Powell
Donaldo Gigante continues to run The Show
Unpossible! Why I read just this morning, on the Huffington Post from Arianna Huffington herself, no less, that Trump is through, finished, washed up, done, so over.
Bobby Thomson
@RSA: no. It’s a perfect example of what begging the question actually means.
Mandalay
A nice sound bite, but completely false. His demise was has been widely predicted by the MSM for weeks, and intensified after the last debate. The only thing that surprised the pundits was that he chose to drop out yesterday rather than than last Friday evening. He was polling below 1% FFS, and nobody is “still trying to figure out why Scott Walker dropped out”.
There’s plenty of nonsense coming from the Villagers on a daily basis so you really don’t need to make stuff up. You only make yourself look absurd.
beltane
@jl: This just means that Jeb? is uniquely positioned to be a unifying figure among Republicans and Democrats. Everyone but his mother and his pet troll hate him.
jl
@SRW1: Sorry, I missed your comment. So, yeah, signs emerging of definite ceiling for Trump, one that he will bump his head against as the GOP field narrows down.
interesting question whether Trump is worried or relieved by this information.
Gimlet
Think about what makes an existing polled group of voters shift their votes around.
Gaffes, “debates”, fluff stories, propaganda blasts…
rdldot
@Gimlet: I think a lot more than one million people would benefit from those changes. Good for Hillary.
Gimlet
@Gindy51:
They usually let university spin-off groups develop the drug and then partner with them or buy them out, so no actual R & D.
Gimlet
@rdldot:
While it would take Bernie as President to get his policies in play, there is nothing to stop a “centrist” Obama from starting most of the policies Hillary advocates and then let Hillary continue an Obama “third term”.
srv
@Betty Cracker: I’m joyously bookmarking these predictions.
Iraq is dead. Syria is dead. Ukraine is dead. The RNC controlled cuckisphere is dead.
The populist movement that is rising from these ashes will transform your political realities.
schrodinger's cat
@EconWatcher: I read that yesterday. Sickening. Those poor kids.
Anoniminous
@Betty Cracker:
We are there because we’re there because we’re there because we’re there.
Calouste
@Fester Addams: The poll’s margin of error is 4.4%, so PPP is making a statistical boo-boo there. 4% could be 0%, so it is in no way a decent level of support.
SRW1
@jl:
No problem. The other interesting thing is whether El Trumpo’s poor showing adds to the calls for other candidates to drop out. If so, that would not bode well for JEB?. How could he justify staying in the race (and be supported in that insistance by the GOP establishment) if he crawls around in the third tier of candidates?
jl
@Gimlet:
“Secretary Clinton’s proposal would turn back the clock on medical innovation and halt progress against the diseases that patients fear most,” said John Castellani, head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America in a statement.
Have to say that there is little evidence in the data that the huge profit margins from the recent move in US to very historically extreme IP and patent policies have had much impact on development of new molecular entities, where dramatic innovation in therapy occurs. For every study that supports hypothesis that IP and patent policies are a big factor driving supposed booms or busts in drug innovation, there is a study that shows nothing seems to change it much.
Changes in FDA policy for making approval process cheaper and faster probably had more impact, but there is question whether it was a change in rate of innovation, or just catch up in backlog of applications when FDA process was streamlined and they had funding to increase resources. And even whether that process change was a net social benefit is controversial. The streamlined FDA process, and introduction of more funding of process by drug companies themselves was sold as increasing efficiency. Supposedly we could get more rapid innovation and more safety at the same time, the FDA was supposedly inefficient compared to other countries’ systems. But many researchers say what resulted was a move long an efficient innovation/safety frontier, we just traded more approvals for less safety.
More I hear the big players in US drug industry talk (including the hedge fund guy who bought the generic drug and hiked the price), the less sense it makes. They don’t make any sense and say whatever it takes to keep raking in as much dough as fast as possible.
Paul in KY
@BruceFromOhio: Devo seems to have been right again.
Gimlet
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/business/health-insurance-deductibles-outpacing-wage-increases-study-finds.html
the steady upward creep in health insurance deductibles has easily outpaced the average increase in a worker’s wages over the last five years, according to a new analysis released on Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Kaiser, a health policy research group that conducts a yearly survey of employer health benefits, calculates that deductibles have risen more than six times faster than workers’ earnings since 2010.
hitchhiker
Maybe someone has said this, but if so I’m gonna repeat it:
Carly Fiorina lit up the hearts of the base not because she pushed back at trump but because she called Hillary Clinton a LIAR in the most self-righteous way possible.
That’s what they want to hear.
shell
Phhhffft. they lose that much down the sofa cushions each month.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I’m hereby stealing “President Obamalcolm Shabazz X”.
I, too, am amazed at how fucking dumb so many of the people in the press are about this whole Trump thing. They’re still trying to work out how it is that this guy is somehow hoodwinking all these perfectly reasonable voters.
Shit. They’ve had months now to watch this fucking show, and they still haven’t worked it out that he’s leading because the fucking voters are buying what he’s selling. They think that, any day, now, hordes of Republican primary voters are going to wake up and understand that Trump has somehow taken them all in, and they’re going to vote for Bush instead.
I really can’t understand how these people have gotten to where they are (the press people). How can anybody look at the last 40 years in this country and still not see what’s going on? I mean, you know, there’s a reason that you don’t go out shopping and find racks of Lay’s New Weeping Sore Flavored Potato Chips–Now With Even More Pus! lining the on the shelves. It’s because nobody would buy it. You see barbecue and salt and vinegar and sour cream ‘n’ onion, et al., for the converse reason: People want to buy it.
Republicans are flocking to Trump because they want to buy what he’s selling. They want to buy what he’s selling. Until reporters wake up to this, they aren’t going to get anything right.
I’m not holding my breath. Just about the only people who do get it right are on MSNBC–only you can’t really trust them, since Rachel Maddow is a lezbo, and Chris Hayes writes for the Nation and Melissa Harris Lacewell is a Black woman, and you know how they are–shit they’re even worse than the men!–so you can’t really listen to anything those libtards say.
I don’t know. I keep thinking that sooner or later, the dam holding reality back from the press’s collective mind is going to break, and the truth will wash over them and they’ll see what the fuck is going on, but I don’t know what it’ll take. Maybe if Trump wins the nomination. But even that might not be enough…
Calouste
@jl: I think the ceiling for Trump is the percentage of GOP primary voters who are willing to vote for a candidate who has never held office, which is currently slightly above 50%, minus a few percent of evangelicals from Carson who will probably go to Huckabee or Cruz.
The question really is whether the politicians consolidate quicker behind a candidate then the non-politicians, and as I can’t see Cruz, Huckabee, or Paul dropping out early, it doesn’t look good for the politicians.
dedc79
The only two candidates left who frighten me at all are Kasich and Rubio, and thanks to Srv and his fellow xenophobic trumpopulists, we are unlikely to have to face either of them in the general. Thanks srv!!!!
SenyorDave
One thing I’m seeing is that the Village has some serious love for Fiorina. Makes sense, since she failed up like many of them did. Plus she’s as elitist as one gets (had to have her corporate jet when previous CEO’s of HP flew commercial). If I were the Donald, I would hammer the Iran connection as much as possible. Her defense that HP was selling printers to Iran was that it was subcontracted and she didn’t know? WTF? If she is the candidate (admittedly a long shot), there should be endless ads showing her saying she wasn’t aware of it. That and a continuous loop of what happened to HP’s stock price during her tenure, plus her eliminating 30,000 HP jobs in the US and shipping most of them offshore. She is a truly horrid person.
jl
@hitchhiker: And Carly Fiorina is moving up after showing that she can compete with the guys at the rapid fire bald faced lie contest at the last debate.
There was a local news report on CA GOP bigshots’ and primary base voters’ opinions of Fiorina. To put it mildly: THEY. ALL. HATE. HER. GUTS. They hate and fear her because they think she will be as a big a disaster for the GOP as Trump.
There was a common theme to the comments, and to put it delicately in Alexander Hamilton’s words, it concerned her habit of ‘not being overly careful about the truth’. Or, reality.
lowercase steve
@srv:
We should put you in a ring with Right to Rise and watch what happens.
Anoniminous
@Betty Cracker:
The GOP is a mockery of a political party and Conservatism is a mockery of a governing ideology. The GOP has fractured into small groups. With the Corporate and Establishment candidate in a deep, dark, polling hole and the rest of the field polling in the low single digits I don’t see how Trump will be knocked-off anytime soon.
Also, (too) I don’t see how any of these clowns get to 1,236 delegates with current polling numbers.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
That article is misleading. The $7.3 billion is being set aside just to handle the recalls and the marketing blitz to convince people to keep buying their cars. It doesn’t cover the money they might owe in fines and class action lawsuits. The really big news is that the 500K vehicles in the US were only the first ones we found out about. VW now says that as many as 11M vehicles worldwide may be affected.
Mandalay
@hitchhiker:
I think you are right, but it’s not only them. Consider the number of OPs here on BJ that that attack what Republicans are doing compared to those that describe positively what Democrats are doing. What would that ratio be? Five to one?….Ten to one?….Twenty to one?….
And the same is true for the evening pundits on MSNBC, who are mirror images of the pundits on Fox.
It’s sad but true that most of us get our rocks off far more from attacking and vilifying our opponents than supporting our allies.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@Mandalay:
I understood him to mean that they can’t understand why this nice, reasonable young fellow couldn’t keep himself in the running, not that they couldn’t understand why he dropped out when he dropped out.
dedc79
@lowercase steve: notice, though, that they never acknowledge each other (at least not that I’ve seen).
Haydnseek
@Betty Cracker: It might have something to do with the fact that as long as we’re there, defense contractors, private security firms, etc.etc.etc. make about elebenty fucktillion dollars per day.
jl
@SenyorDave: Well, Rubin said after his company imploded due to messing up exotic options and other derivative securities that he had no clue how exotic options and other derivative securities worked, he never bothered to learn about them.
For some reason, a lot of people give CEO’s a pass when they plead incompetence of a magnitude that would get an ordinary worker fired. I don’t understand it, but there it is.
Hungry Joe
All this is reminding me of William Goldman’s line about Hollywood and movie-making: “Nobody knows anything.”
Come on, seriously — did anyone, ANYONE (other than The Donald Himself) predict the continuing Trump phenomenon? The early Walker skidoo? Jeb’s basement apartment? Well, someone might have, but if so it was like the financial wizards who nail the market perfectly five years in a row: There are so many of them out there that a random few will always be lucky over a set period of time — and then they’re crowned “wizards.”
I’ve already been so wrong so many times about how I thought the GOP Vaudeville circuit would be playing out that I’m officially making the Goldman Declaration: I don’t know anything. And, to extrapolate, I don’t think anyone else does, either. It’s a total crap shoot, and the dice are loaded with … crap.
Germy Shoemangler
@dedc79: They had a brief tussle a few weeks ago, and then (like the calico cat and gingham dog) both disappeared from the thread.
gene108
@Betty Cracker:
Why are we still in South Korea?
Figured keeping some troops back in Afghanistan would’ve been similar to what we’ve done in places like Japan or South Korea, where we have a base and generally society functions all on its own.
I did not realize how fucked up Afghanistan still is.
Calouste
@SenyorDave: Trump should hammer Fiorina on what she has done in life since she got booted from HP 10 years ago. And to really stick the knife in, he should add “besides losing a Senate race to Barbara Boxer”.
Anoniminous
@Hungry Joe:
To this jaded observer it looks like the GOP faction fight is upon us. Most of the GOP candidates, including Trump, shouldn’t be in the running for the local school board. Which is the telling condition.
catclub
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
I agree with most of what you wrote, but so far there have not actually been any votes.
I would adjust this to: “The crazy people who respond to polls are buying what he’s selling.”
Calouste
@gene108: Technically, North Korea and South Korea are still at war. There is an armistice, but no peace treaty.
Roger Moore
@Gimlet:
That’s a little bit of an exaggeration. They also make copycat drugs, which they frequently develop in-house. The big picture is correct, though; the big drug companies are more and more about manufacturing and marketing and less and less about R&D.
I think the big companies are also heavily invested in the testing stage. Most drug startups don’t have the chops to take a drug all the way through clinical trials, and they don’t necessarily have the expertise to run the trials, either. So the small companies are forced to partner with bigger ones to get the drug to market, and the agreement usually involved the big company either having exclusive distribution rights to the drug or the ability to buy the small company outright.
Elie
It just occurred to me what the situation is with Dr. Carson. This would explain the incredible and inexplicable differences between his scientific knowledge and thinking and the voodoo comments that come out of his mouth.
This is the neurosurgeon who made his reputation in separating conjoined twins with linked brains. I believe that he is also a conjoined twin and that there is another brain with a vestigial twin body somewhere up in his skull. Dr. Carson has two brains — one rational and scientific and the other a distorted brain that has been deprived of oxygen and blood flow as can happen in the organs of conjoined twins. As with conjoined twins, there is shared circulation and sometimes functionality among the shared organs.
This explains how an exquisitely educated and prepared neurosurgeon can have eruptions of ignorance on vaccination and paranoid ideations about muslims, etc.
There is no cure. Separating the brains at this point would result in death of both. However, we at least now know where the mystifying pathology comes from…
catclub
@Anoniminous:
And yet, someone (or Mitt) will. The polling numbers will obviously change.
Mandalay
@SenyorDave:
I’m seeing that as well. A golden example is that on Sunday the NYT reported in detail about Fiorina’s boast during the debate that “The man that led my firing, Tom Perkins, just took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to say he was wrong, I was right. I was a terrific CEO, the board was dysfunctional. And he thinks I will make a magnificent president of the United States”.
Well that boast sounded a little odd at the time, but it turns out that the ad in the NYT was actually paid for by Fiorina’s PAC, and Perkins was a donor to that PAC. I thought that fraudulence would become front page news and send her campaign into free fall, but the media is barely discussing it. The Village’s love for Carly is very real.
Gimlet
@Roger Moore:
Hillary hints at getting concessions of some kind because the university spin-off group used federal funds for the basic research or salary support before they went on their own.
The university also tries to get a piece of the action on later commercial products.
Patrick
@SenyorDave:
It wouldn’t be all that difficult to come up with a commercial of a scary looking ayatollah next to Fiorina selling printers to Iran. And interviews with HP people being laid off and then show Fiorina getting fired with a package worth millions and millions.
Calouste
@catclub: At least 1,130 delegates will be assigned on or after March 15, when primaries are allowed to be winner-takes-all, and most primaries will be.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
OT: More on WV and VW (heh). IEEE Spectrum:
Cheers,
Scott.
scav
I am seriously enjoying the sheer scale of the Volkswagon Volks-immolation. And that’s despite their being probably the most continuously purchased car of my family.
RSA
@beltane, @Bobby Thomson: So I’m guessing that people have already gamed out Trump v. Clinton in the general election. That’ll be interesting if it happens.
Anoniminous
@catclub:
Yup. They will, eventually, end-up with a nominee. It’s the path to getting one I can’t see. Right now, to me, it looks like a brokered convention is a distinct possibility. But I’m not going to put any money on it.
Bobby Thomson
@Calouste: isn’t part of the snswer, “undergoing chemo”? Seems like a rake.
Tom Q
@Hungry Joe: It’d be refreshing if more public voices articulated this, since it’s clearly the truth. But they won’t, because of what someone dubbed The Cult of the Savvy — DC press insiders have to keep telling us they know exactly how things are going to turn out, because they think no one will listen to them, otherwise. Thus, Chuck Todd (among the worst) confidently said at the end of last week that it was the week we’d look back on as the end of Trump. Because…you know…it has to be.
It’d be nice if reporters could do their stated job — report — rather than trying to make emerging facts fit into a pre-determined narrative. Especially when, as you note, the facts are so widely at odds with that narrative.
Hey, I started the year thinking Walker might be the guy to be crazy enough for the crazies but presentable enough to get the nomination. I’d have bet at least half a dozen others would have dropped out before him. But i’m not sitting here whining that reality failed to conform to my prediction; I’m moving on, waiting to see what happens next. No one in the press corps would dare do the same.
Mark B.
Jindal got his wish, he’s out of the kiddie table debates. It’s a Festival of Ganesh Miracle!
srv
What else is Obama keeping from us?
Kay
@Elie:
I can’t figure out why conservatives think he’s so nice. I was out with a bunch of (mostly) GOP women last night and they think he’s kind and “reasonable”.
He says horrible things about other people nearly every day. I don’t know how he got this reputation with them.
Paul in KY
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Nice rant, I must say. However, I tend to think they know, but don’t/can’t say that, so they ‘puzzle’ about it.
Matt McIrvin
Trump’s numbers are actually off his peak in the latest polls. Carly Fiorina seems to have captured some of the attention of the “run the government like a business” crowd, and jumped ahead of Ben Carson, who is also declining. There are also some suggestions that Marco Rubio’s support is coming back, but it’s unclear.
With Perry and Walker out, we may be seeing the beginnings of the shakeout.
jl
@Roger Moore: The types of trials are divided up into stages, and I’ll have to look them up since I will get the specific numbers mixed up. After a certain stage of development, research funding must be done by the organization that is applying to the FDA for approval of the drug , and this is when research moves from small safety and efficacy trials to large scale clinical effectiveness trials.
A lot more research by big drug companies is done be mergers and acquisition and contractors than in the past, but the applicant has to pay for the large scale trials needed after initial smaller scale research established that the drug is safe and a potential clinical benefit is demonstrated.
beltane
@Kay: The whole rightwing Christian schtick is to say horrible, awful things about people in a calm, faux-humble voice. These are the people whom Ben Carson appeals to.
Mark B.
@Kay: I think it’s his tone of voice. He probably learned to do it as a doctor. “I’m sorry, you have brain cancer, and it’s inoperable.” “Why thank you, Dr,. Carson, you’re such a nice young man!”
NotMax
@Kay
Simple. They don’t listen to the words, they listen to the tone and cadence in which they’re said.
Anoniminous
@srv:
Where in the world did you dig that bullshit up?
He speculated aliens, like us, would encrypt their communications so …
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Calouste:
Well, Walker’s support was certainly inadequate, but it isn’t correct to say that his support could be 0%. A confidence interval starts to do funny things once you’re close to either 0% or 100%. Specifically, it becomes asymmetric. (Technically, it does that as soon as the mean isn’t exactly 50%, but the difference is negligible until you get towards the extremes.)
This becomes easy to see in the cases where you have a confidence interval greater than the mean; if someone polls 3% with a 4% margin of error, it should be obvious that they can’t have negative support. If you graphed the density function of Walker’s support, you’d see that it doesn’t look much like a normal curve at all; it’s better described by the log-normal distribution.
Mark B.
@Matt McIrvin: I like the fact that the field isn’t narrowing, if anything, it’s becoming more level for the top 8 or so candidates. Increases the chances of an extended bloodbath as they attempt to tear each other to pieces.
Matt McIrvin
@srv: If this article’s summary is correct
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/21/9363863/edward-snowden-alien-encryption
then Snowden was saying no such thing about “proof that they exist,” he was just pointing out that there could be a reason we don’t detect their communications if they do.
rdldot
@Kay: Buts he says his mean things in a nice soft voice so that makes him nice, don’t you see?
jl
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: F-distribution is used to approximate it, in this case, may look approximately lognormal
Patrick
@Matt McIrvin:
Which is funny considering she ran HP into the ground…
Brachiator
@redshirt:
Really? The people I see wailing and gnashing teeth are Republicans, worried that none of the well-funded mainstream choices can gain any traction on the Trump Krazy Machine.
Mark B.
@Patrick: That’s pretty much the R plan for running the government. She seems pretty qualified to execute it.
Matt McIrvin
The speculation about encryption is a bit moot, because it’s not clear we could hear unintentional leakage from aliens’ communication networks anyway. Our TV and radio broadcasts aren’t actually easy to distinguish from general noise very far out, even if they’re analog and unencrypted. And, of course, our long-range communication increasingly happens by optical cable rather than by radio in any event. The most powerful radio transmissions are from military radars, which aren’t sending any kind of information, they’re just making pings.
SETI researchers who listen for radio signals are generally assuming that what they’re looking for is an intentional transmission, meant to be heard and understood by other civilizations. These wouldn’t be encrypted.
Elie
@Kay:
He’s soft spoken, never seems to gets angry and has this incredible career history. They don’t see the monster behind the façade – yet. My personal belief is that he probably was quite nasty even as a doctor and someone just has to hit the right button at the wrong time and he will show you the other “brain”. The man is quite ill in my opinion. There is a story somewhere about why he really retired and what it was like working with him.. sooner or later it will come out. Someone has the story….
gene108
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
The MSM dares not admit that the reasonable very serious grown up Republicans have been hoodwinking voters for decades now, with wishful thinking, at best, and out right lies at worst from tax cuts pay for themselves to the need to invade Iraq to stop the threat of Saddam Hussein destroying America.
Maybe the Trump ascendancy will finally convince the MSM the GOP jumped the shark and they’ll treat them like the loons that they are.
Mandalay
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Well that’s a very charitable interpretation since there is a qualitative difference between “trying to figure out why Scott Walker dropped out” and “trying to figure out why Scott Walker is polling under 1%”.
Zandar’s heart is certainly in the right place, and the passion and enthusiasm is great, but I’m just tired of him/her making stuff up.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
To me, the interesting question going forward, which the TPM piece kind of addresses, is just how disparate the support for the three novice candidates is. Trump, Carson, and Fiorina all have very divergent appeals and it’s unclear where that support will go if/when those candidates start to drop out, or the surveyed population starts to get bored with them. Each of them potentially has a hard cap on the support they can get and where that cap is depends upon how many supporters of each would go to another of the outsiders, go to the establishment candidate, or go home in that event.
My guess is that Fiorina is the only one of the three that has any potential to gain the favor of the establishment. On the other hand, she is going to have to run an even more attack oriented campaign to win over the troglodyte wing.
Patricia Kayden
@srv: We liberals welcome the Trump Revolution. He is exactly what racist Republicans deserve. He won’t win in a general election which makes it easier for our man (Bernie Sanders) or woman (Hilary Clinton) to win the White House next November.
Fingers and toes are tightly crossed in the hope that Trump is the Republican Presidential candidate. Please please please!!! Let It Be.
Patricia Kayden
@Brachiator: Let stupid Republicans think that Liberals are fearful of a Trump candidacy. That’s absolutely perfect.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@jl: I just like the way the word “log-normal” sounds. And “F distribution” is so easily misinterpreted.
Cermet
@jl: And recently it was shown that over 70% of the “potential clinical benefit is demonstrated” results could not be reproduced. Also, the average cost to show both the safety and benifit costs less than $10 million dollars – not the $300 – 400 million claimed by big pharm. These monsters are the worst of the worst when it comes to lying. Of course, they do spend many tens of millions of dollars “selling” the new drug to doctors with free vacations and so forth. That is the real cost of any “block buster” drug. In fact, the only major cost for any drug sold by big pharm.
gene108
@Calouste:
True.
Just sayin’ we’re in a lot of places and have been for decades. We’ve had a navy base in Cuba for over 100 years now.
Having bases around the world isn’t the issue.
Those societies seem to manage without too much interference from us.
Afghanistan seems to be a deeper cesspool than I ever could have imagined, per the NYT article from Sunday.
jl
@Matt McIrvin: And its my understanding that when SETI researchers get a possible signal, their standard protocol is to look for earthly human created transmissions that only seem to be coming from intelligent space aliens. So, seems to me that people have thought about how to spot all kinds of transmissions, encrypted or not.
Anoniminous
@Cermet:
The Generally Accepted Standards of Hollywood Accounting is not limited to the Film Industry.
Roger Moore
@Calouste:
That’s not actually the way margins of error work. The reported margin of error is only correct for things with a roughly 50% support. The margin of error gets smaller as you get close to 0% or 100%. IIRC, the formula is σ = sqrt(p*(1-p)/n), where p is the reported fraction of people giving an answer and n is the polled population size. PPP appears to be reporting their margin of error as 2σ (95% confidence interval) for a question with p = 0.5. For something with p = 0.04, the margin of error would only be about 40% as large and one with p = 0.5.
The key thing, though, is that there’s really no such thing as “statistically indistinguishable from 0”. The presence of even one person who is in favor of Walker would be enough to prove that he has some support. In practice, it’s vanishingly unlikely that you’d randomly get 4% support for him among that many respondents if his actual level of support were much closer to 0 than to 4%.
Calouste
@Matt McIrvin: There might be fewer candidates in the race, but I don’t think it will make much of a difference. Graham, Jindal, Santorum, Pataki, and Gilmore are all polling at 1% or less, if they drop it will be a rounding error. Of the other 10 candidates, Trump, Carson, and Fiorina are doing too well at the moment to drop. Bush, Cruz, Rubio, and probably Kasich are running to become the establishment candidate, and are too close together for one of them to drop out (although Kasich is not really getting much traction). Paul and Huckabee are purely in it for the grift, so they are not going to drop until well into the primaries. So the only one left is Christie, but he’s only polling at about 3%, and I would think most of his supporters would move to that other loudmouthed East Coast asshole in the race.
catclub
@Mark B.: This. It is the reverse of Mitt’s run to the nom. No single ‘respectable’ candidate to counter Trump is bad news for ALL the ‘respectable’ candidates.
Also, Cruz is lying in wait to get Trump’s voters if/when Trump exits. I thought that Cruz was going to round up all the crazies early.
gene108
@Kay:
He has a very measured and neutral tone of voice when he talks. It’s rather soothing, if you do not listen to the actual words he says;
Seanly
@Mandalay:
I don’t know, that lady on NPR Morning Edition who adds an extra syllable TO EVERY F’KING WORD, Renee Montagne, seemed kinda mystified that Walker dropped out. I need to stop listening to NPR… they’ve devoted themselves to be the purveyors of the most inane & vapid conventional wisdom.
jl
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Lots of ways to approximate the underlying binomial or or multinomial distributions. I like the F distribution approach because it is so simple.
But you might actually be correct, if you want to use all the information in the poll. Depending on how the question is asked, a poll often gives shares of support for each candidate that have to add up to 100 percent, which puts a constraint on all the candidates’ proportions. One easy to way to handle that constraint involves taking the log of proportions for each candidate, and a lognormal is an easy way to model each share, though the joint distribution is different.
But if a negative proportion turns out to be possible after all, some of these GOP primary candidates could be the key to discovery! Despite themselves.
catclub
@jl: There are spread spectrum techniques, but narrow band encrypted data would not look like background noise, due to narrow band. Even in spread spectrum, the band is fairly narrow.
Brachiator
@Anoniminous:
Could be worse.
It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.
— Bananas
Mandalay
@Elie: Without meaning to denigrate his faith, Carson’s religious beliefs as a 7th Day Adventist may explain (though not justify) his apparently bizarre views on some scientific issues.
Here is what Carson says about the age of the earth:
Once you start thinking that way, where God calls all the shots, and anything becomes possible, and everything else is secondary, scientific rigor goes out the window. Calvinball rules.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@Mandalay:
Well, come one, now. I don’t think anybody has a hard time understanding why somebody pulling in 1% might drop out. Anybody can understand that. It just makes no sense to say, “Jeez, the press just can’t understand why somebody who has 1% in the polls would drop out.” Maybe Zandar didn’t spell everything out in enough detail for you, but I think anybody who reads what he (or she) wrote reasonably would see what the meaning was.
Matt McIrvin
@jl: One of the key things they try to detect is the frequency “chirp” that would come from the source’s varying Doppler shift, if it’s on a planet or orbiting another star. That’s a good way to rule out many terrestrial sources, and it’s independent of what’s encoded in the signal.
Roger Moore
@Gimlet:
In a lot of cases, the basic patents belong to the academic institution where the basic research was done, which means the institution is set to make a lot of royalty money if the research turns into a blockbuster drug. I’m well aware of this because my employer has been unusually successful at getting blockbuster patents. But if that research is government funded, there’s no particular reason why the institution should be the one getting the patent rights rather than the government. At the very least, the government should be getting some share of the proceeds, which could be rolled back into funding more basic research or covering the costs of drugs for the indigent.
catclub
@Mandalay: But just don’t ask the question: “Why did God create a world that convinces all the scientists it is billions of years old? Just to troll them?”
Also: “Why create scientist with brains to discover that the world looks like it is billions of years old?”
jl
@Roger Moore: You are using large sample normal approximation for a proportion. I interpreted what the commenters were saying that the normal approximation breaks down close to 0 and 1 unless the sample size is very large, which is correct.
For small samples other approximations can be used. The exact distribution is known, it is binomial or multinomial, depending on how the question is asked. Just those are clumsy to work with when sample size is not very small. And depending on how questions are asked, the proportions for the candidates may have to add up to one, which puts a constraint on the sum of the proportions, which gets complicated for more than one yes-no choice.
the Conster
@SenyorDave: She has no children and is for de-funding Planned Parenthood. As much as I’m a woman of a certain age and a naturally born feminist, I can’t help but think her opposition to Planned Parenthood is spite against women who have a regular and healthy sex life.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@jl: Sometimes it takes a while to figure out where the signals are coming from:
Cheers,
Scott.
RSA
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Thanks for that excellent story.
jl
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Sounds like absurdly strict and complicated kitchen rules will be coming to observatories soon.
Calouste
@Mandalay: I agree with Carson there, you don’t need a Ph.D. to listen to the voices in your head.
Mark B.
@jl: Or simply banning Microwave ovens near the site. When I visited Arecibo observatory, we had to turn off cell phone before entering the area near the telescope.
Roger Moore
@jl:
Stage I is testing on healthy controls to establish safe dosing. Stage II is preliminary safety and efficacy testing. Stage III is large-scale testing to prove safety and efficacy and establish likely side effects. Small companies can often get through Stage II by themselves, but Stage III requires a lot of resources and is often done by one of the big players. There are also substantial differences in how strict the FDA is in regulating the manufacturing of drugs for testing in early vs. late stages. Drugs for Stage III trials are treated essentially the same as commercial products, so the standards are very strict and the FDA inspects manufacturers who are producing for Stage III trials. Stage I and Stage II manufacturing is given much less scrutiny; companies that only make drugs for early stage testing may not be inspected at all.
jl
@Roger Moore: Thanks. I believe that in most cases, the organization filing the approval application with the FDA must fund the Stage III trials. But I’ll have to look up the details.
Ted Mills
Question: Will the riled up Trump supporters–whether or not he’s the nominee–also help turf out some Beltway GOP Senators and Reps during the election?
gene108
@Patrick:
GWB ran every business he ever touched into the ground, but in 2000 he was being promoted as the “CEO President”.
Roger Moore
@jl:
Or Faraday cages around their kitchens.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
That’s a vile canard. He most assuredly did not run the Texas Rangers into the ground when he was running the team, though the construction of a taxpayer funded stadium for the team undoubtedly had something to do with their success.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
He’s lost a lot of arm strength, but this seems like undue panic.
WJS
The polls don’t matter. A big slice of current Trump voters will not vote if he’s not on the ballot; these are the same clowns who elected Tea Party candidates whenever they were motivated to go out and actually vote in low turnout primaries and elections.
jl
@Roger Moore: Actually, if you want to get super pedantic, the real information for many decisions is the order of the candidates, not their exact degree of support, or the chance of any one of them ever getting the most support (being ranked first). That is a whole different filed, called ranking and selection statistics, and MOE can be a very poor guide to measuring uncertainty in the ranking or selection relevant to a decision (like getting some delegates or getting nomination). Look up work by Olkin on how to do them, and how standard error is used when that info is relevant.
Brachiator
@the Conster:
Some people might say that if you want to have the best sex life, don’t have children.
Boning and babies are not necessarily connected anymore. Some reporter should ask what her objections to Planned Parenthood are, no real point in speculating.
Kay
@Elie:
Only one of these women is a winger- she goes to state GOP conventions so she’s an activist winger- and she has that weird Right wing-women-hatred-of-Clinton that I haven’t heard since Bill was President. I thought “oh, that’s back!”
It’s so familiar.
Bill Arnold
@srv:
There is a Clark’s Law variation on this; “Sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable from noise.”
gex
@Elie: Plus they are highly incentivized to say really nice things to and about him so that they can sling the nastiest slurs at Obama and claim that race has nothing to do with it.
Elie
@Kay:
I hear you… Oh the mysteries of modern mass psychology!
Poor Hillary! At once admired and hated for being like what we want to be and yet hate. Some women hate her ambition and her carefulness in how she protects it — even as they know its essential and would do the same. How dare she be ruthless or manipulative! How dare she not reveal everything she knows! How dare she make less than perfect decisions or be just human — figuring things out…”
Why do we hate these things? Why can total assholes and clowns get a pass or be unquestioned?
I.Have.No.Idea. I just have no idea.
I feel that our nation, that the world in fact, is like one of those people who get into freak accidents where they have a metal rod impaled in their head but can seemingly talk and communicate with little or no pain. Still, their brain is run through with a metal rod that somehow has to be taken out before it actually does kill him.
I am running out of analogies for our massive insanity….
Applejinx
I don’t buy that Trump is blowing it by ‘toning it down’. He has to do that, to play the system, otherwise he’ll just flame out in a big ugly ball of… ugly. He really is not that much of a bozo deal-wise, and this is a very necessary correction to keep the deal on track. He’ll amp it up again at the proper time but this is not the proper time.
Think he doesn’t know these other bozos are vulnerable? He’d love to see Carly Fiorina surge up and then implode. The correct path for Trump doesn’t involve always doubling down on the bluster. Unlike seemingly all the other bozos, he can modulate his nonsense.
Still won’t win the general, but I remain convinced he’s going to be the Republican nominee.
NotMax
@EconWatcher
This is nothing new. There have been any number of stories or reports over many years of a longstanding cultural tradition among certain Pashtun tribes of having (or hiring) boys to put on make-up and dance (at times in drag) and sometimes otherwise “entertain.”
Not in any sense giving it a stamp of approval (recognizing its existence does not do that), just saying that it is not something that has suddenly cropped up (nor is the practice limited to just Pashtuns, or to just Afghanistan for that matter – see, for example, some stories about the history of camel jockeys in the Arabian peninsula). What may be new is that decades of war has made the practice more and more cruel, harsh and coarse, as living under protracted war does most everything else in life.
sm*t cl*de
Rule 4 — for as long as Carson remains a possible presidential candidate, inveighing against sinister outsider religions, 7th-Day Adventism shall be considered “Mainstream Christianity” rather than “weird millennialist cult”.
The Whackyweedia tells me that 7th-Day Adventism is keen to
Perhaps Carson didn’t learn that part of his religion’s belief system.
Elie
@Applejinx:
I think that Trump is tiring of the whole thing, but got in deeper and faster than he realized and does not have an exit strategy that still protects his ego. I believe all his effort now is in trying to figure out then set up that exit approach. Ideally, to his way of thinking, some event will allow him to make the other person or persons the issue while he steps down on some lofty principle?
He is in kind of a pickle because his mouth has sold a ticket that he really can’t back away from for any reason short of illness or death. His ego will not allow him to be beaten by anyone else, even if its a fake take down.
Nope, his only choices have to do with illness or death. I still think he is a medical “set-up” for a cardiac or neurological event, but dunno if that will happen. The last thing this man wants is to be President and the next to last thing is to be humiliated in an exit from his candidacy. That, is by definition, stuck.
Roger Moore
@jl:
And then there’s the whole mess of what happens if some candidate gets pledged delegates and then drops out of the race. I suspect that the most important thing to look at right now is the favorable/unfavorable rating. That will at least give you a clue of how the candidates would do with some kind of ordering, and it’s a question that PPP actually asked, unlike any kind of complex ranking. That’s where Trump looks like he’s in trouble; his net favorability was low compared to the other high-ranking candidates, which means he has a low ceiling.
boatboy_srq
Best. Wingnut. Litany. Of. Woe. Evah.
Mustn’t forget that DFH PINO (Pope In Name Only) Francis is coming to beat the Righteous Job-Creatin’ Elect over the heads with their own Hummers and declare Welfare a sacrament. That’s a yooge spike in the Wingnut Crown’o’Thorns.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
You won’t get a very informative answer that way. She’ll repeat the political talking points about how they’re vivisecting babies for profit.
Elie
@sm*t cl*de:
He’s not an Adventist and he has been repudiated by Adventist leadership.
He is just a freestyler doing his own auto-erotic thing that needed some sort of protective label. He’s making it up as he goes along and his conjoined twin sociopath brain is getting all the circulation at the expense of the surgeon and educated brain. I can promise you, there are people who have a more complete story on this guy and sooner or later all the real story will emerge. The guy is sick sick sick and those who were previously constrained by his success and fame as a neurosurgeon are going to give it up as they see deepening evidence that ties to their experience — and they loose the fear of talking about it — Dude is whacked…
Elie
@Elie:
Let me correct that: Carson has not been repudiated by the Seventh Day Adventist, but here is their statement:
http://www.adventistreview.org/church-news/story2602-adventist-church-in-north-america-issues-statement-on-ben-carsons-u.s.-presidential-bid
Elizabelle
@jl:
Linky? Would love to see it.
NotMax
@Elie
No wonder Carson is so laconic. Seventh Day Adventists shun coffee.
boatboy_srq
@jl:
Not merely that, but what is being accomplished seems tailored to rebuilding existing molecular entities just sufficiently to merit new patents. The Pr!l0sec/N3x!um situation is classic: we have a new, “better” version of the old drug (which was a moneymaker for years and is still worth a bundle on the OTC market) which differs from its predecessor in a single new twist and a couple different atoms – JUST enough to merit a new patent and just enough like the old one that R&D could be accomplished for pennies. If there were a smidge of truth in “huge profit margins yield huge new successful meds” then this wouldn’t be a thing and AstraZeneca would have invested the research hours and dollars in something entirely different.
catclub
@Elie:
There was the guy in the “Restaurant at the End of the Universe” who spent a year dead for tax purposes.
Morzer
I wonder about the Trump collapse theory. Santorum and Gingrich are just as crazy and with just as much baggage – and yet they lasted surprisingly well. What Trump does that the others can’t is put on a show – and he has the cash to keep the show running, especially against a field of divided, dull hacks trying desperately to sell the same overripe schtick. The difference between this group of gibbering kooks and the last group is that so far the Unifier! has fluffed his lines miserably – and there’s no sign of anyone else who can do the job. I could see the other candidates all ripping each other apart without getting close to Trump, provided he just sticks at around 27% in the polls. Strange times indeed.
Morzer
@Elizabelle:
Snarly Fakerina did spend an awful lot of time trashing other California Republicans in her Senate shamble.
Elie
The one way that Trump could exit is if one of the opponents got strong fast and he decided it was best “for the good of the party”, to support his/her candidacy. Problem is that one of them has to get strong and no one is even close. The other problem is that to get close, they would have to attack him — and they are all wimps, including Fiorina who came closest.
Nope, looks like he is stuck for now.
redoubt
@NotMax: Or Coke/Pepsi/anything with caffeine. (I’m lapsed SDA and a grad of an SDA college; there was a Coke machine in my dorm full of Caffeine-Free Diet Coke.) It’s why Postum exists.
boatboy_srq
@Grumpy Code Monkey: I always thought that was the glaring bright spot (for progressives) in Walker’s campaign: its potential for expending Koch largesse. Still, if the antiTrump is their ideal, there are plenty more
idjits to waste their money oncandidates they can choose to support.Elie
@Morzer:
I think that the media is starting to be bored. Trouble ahead for Trump as this is when all the stories that make him look bad come out “for entertainment” as well as to goad a notoriously thin-skinned egotist.
That is when all the fun will really start… Once there is some blood, it will be the attack of the leeches. Trump knows he has to avoid that but I don’t see how even in the medium term. He is a deeply flawed person who is walking on the thinnest of egg shells. You won’t have to throw him a piano to make the whole thing collapse…
Its just a matter of time and I think, not a whole lot of time. Neither Santorum or Gingrich hogged the mike and center stage like Trump. He is going to burn hot and fast…
Patricia Kayden
@sm*t cl*de: I would argue that Carson is a Christianist moreso than an Adventist. Adventists are pretty strong on the separation of church and state. Carson appears to want the U.S. to run as a theocracy with Christianists at the helm.
Morzer
@Elie:
But the thing is that negative stories about Trump – his boorishness, racism, crooked business dealings, sexism, ignorance etc have been dripping into the public mind since the 1990s. I am not sure that there is much new that’s going to make a dent in the image of Trump as the happy warrior Master Businessman that he plays on TV.
Roger Moore
@Bill Arnold:
And insufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable from gibberish, as anyone listening to bottom feeding Republicans could tell you.
Elie
@Morzer:
Well, its not negative stories per se. It is the taunts, the laughter such as he received at the Washington news correspondent’s dinner from Obama a few years ago. He just seethed…Its stories that make him look weak and foolish — not boorish — in his world, boorish and bullying are strengths. Its being weak and vulnerable…a “mark” for wiseguys
Frank Bolton
@Elie: Here’s the thing, though: authoritarian followers want their leaders to be buffoons. They want their leaders to be at the center of a persecution complex. Trump getting disrespected by the mainstream media, an inherently elitist organization, is not a bad thing in their eyes. In fact it’s a positive. As long as Trump doesn’t back down from his positions or isn’t seen as knuckling under to curry favor with the enemy, he won’t dip much in support.
He can still lose the nomination and there are ways for him to lose his followers, but I can’t see a scenario where the media chops him down short of painting him as an insincere culture warrior or him doing something really unforgivable or stupid. Like picking his nose on the debate stage and eating his boogers or walking back his Mexican comments. Or if someone else manages to do Trump’s schtick better than Trump.
But expecting people to get tired of Trump’s racist agitprop and tune him out in the face of a hostile media? Have you ever known committed bigots to get tired of having their bigotry legitimized? George Wallace was an even bigger clown than Trump and look how far he took it.
Elie
@Frank Bolton:
No — he will not be cut down by the media. The media is just red meat to him..
It will be to be made weak and powerless looking by someone else.– someone he considers inferior. That was why Obama lit him up — he was humiliated by a black guy.
Brachiator
@Morzer:
The GOP base doesn’t care about these supposed negatives.
If he can no longer convince voters that he has the answers, he will lose their support. Too often in the most recent debate, he had to back down and admit ignorance and that he would have to learn about domestic and foreign policy. This gets old.
Selling a wall is easy. People think they know what this would be. But he is starting to sputter in other areas, and also looking more crazy than presidential. Not all of the GOP base believes in crazy crap like Muslim camps.
I still predict that Trump will eventually offer the excuse of a yooooge business deal that demands his personal attention, and exit the campaign. Otherwise, as voters take a closer look at him as a political leader, they will finally decide that he comes up short.
Morzer
@Elie:
I think it’s interesting that Trump recently went after Megyn Kelly again – and that Fiorina was the one who so flummoxed him when she punched back. If I were Snarly, I would be really tempted to let him get into full-on bloviation and then just say “Shut the fuck up, Donny”. I reckon the results would be memorable.
Morzer
@Brachiator:
In recent years the GOP base has shown a huge, if not classy, appetite for bloviating ignorance. Facts don’t matter to them in the least – what matters is that candidates hate and despise the right people/groups. If anything, that appetite has only increased, to the point where anything resembling an education might just be a negative for them.
sm*t cl*de
@Patricia Kayden:
From the perspective of the bootlicker voters, it’s possibly an advantage for Carson that his theocracy platform violates the basic tenets of his nominal religion. It proves the authenticity of his authoritarian-opportunist-grifter status, making him more appealing than Cruz, who was merely born into his authoritarian-opportunist-grifter position.
Sounds most of the Fundamentalist Christian-Identity Values-voters have rallied behind Trump, who makes no effort to present himself as christian and has no discernable values at all, but he does Authoritarian and Grifting better than either Carson or Cruz.
jl
@Elizabelle: It was a radio report with interviews. It might be on the KCBS news radio website.