If any state was going to cement Donald Trump's front-runner status in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, it's fitting that Nevada should be the one to do the job.

Las Vegas dominates the state's politics—more than 70 percent of the state population lives in the city or surrounding Clark County—and Trump is perfectly suited to the city's glitz and bombast. His giant Trump Tower gleams right off the Vegas strip, standing apart from the clustered pack of casino resorts, where everyone can see his name from far and wide. This is a place that forgives sin in the name of fun, gravitates toward the newest shiny object, and is willing to look the other way at uncouth behavior. It's a place where winning is everything.

And win he did. Trump was declared the victor of the Nevada Republican caucuses by TV networks shortly after caucus precincts began reporting results, with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz tussling over second place, just as they did three days ago in Trump's win in the South Carolina primary. Rubio didn't bother to stick around in the state to watch results, instead departing earlier Tuesday for the Super Tuesday states that will vote next week. John Kasich, who didn't even campaign in Nevada this week, and Ben Carson were an afterthought, even if their decisions to stay in the race are taking a toll on Rubio and Cruz.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/nevada-republican-caucus-donald-trump-marco-rubio-ted-cruz

Lindsey Graham Just Perfectly Summed Up the 2016 Race: "My Party Has Gone Batshit Crazy"
While Republican presidential candidates continued scream-debating in Houston last night, Sen. Lindsey Graham took a shot at his former challengers with a series of insults that capture the insanity that is the remaining GOP presidential field.

The South Carolina senator, who was speaking at the Washington Press Club Foundation Dinner, nailed it with the following jabs:

"My party has gone batshit crazy." -- Lindsey Graham #wpcfdinner pic.twitter.com/X8Qi3pet2F

Graham: Ben Carson is the nice guy in the race, and he tried to kill his cousin. #wpcfdinner

"If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, no one would convict you." -- Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

"A good Republican would defend Ted Cruz after tonight. That ain't happening." -- Lindsey Graham #wpcfdinner

At one point, Graham donned Donald Trump's trademark "Make America Great Again" cap and sarcastically endorsed the real estate magnate.

We'd say we miss you, Lindsey, but this is the party Republicans built.

read more: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2016/02/lindsey-graham-just-perfectly-summed-2016-race-“my-party-has-gone-batshit-crazy

Washington: Donald Trump's day began with two previous Republican presidential contenders hammering his lack of White House credentials and closed with the real estate mogul assuring a Detroit audience about the size of his penis.

"I guarantee you there's no problem," Trump said in the opening minutes of Thursday candidates' debate hosted by Fox News.

Responding to a joke about the size of Trump's hands, in the telling of which his opponent Marco Rubio said "You know what they say about men with small hands", Trump spread his hands for the audience and insisted any suggestion that "something else must be small" was false.

If this was a businessman simply blathering about his wares, Donald Trump might be excused.

But it wasn't, which is what makes Trump's performance so breathtaking. An artful sleight of hand, this was Trump's considered response to a savage attack days earlier, when GOP grandee and former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney denounced the New York billionaire  as a failed businessman – "a phoney ... a fraud".

Piles of bottled water, bloodied raw steaks, wine and magazines were displayed to refute Romney's claim that Trump Water, Trump Steaks, Trump Wine and Trump magazine were embarrassing failures for the candidate who claims to be a businessman with the Midas touch.

Trump's water company is defunct – what he brandished in Florida on Tuesday was water from a non-related Connecticut bottler, who specialises in personalised or private labels on bulk orders.

The meat? Trump Steaks last sold in Sharper Image outlets across the US in 2007. What Trump displayed was the produce of Bush Brothers, a non-Trump entity. The candidate didn't even have the manners or the smarts to remove the Bush Brothers labels from the slabs of meat.

And the wine? Trump's son, Eric, is named as the president of Trump Winery. But online, there is this terse disclaimer: "Trump Winery is a registered trade name of Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing LLC, which is not owned, managed, or affiliated with Donald J Trump, the Trump Organisation or any of their affiliates."

The magazine was a quarterly that folded in 2009. When Trump threw a magazine to someone in Tuesday's crowd, it was a copy of The Jewel of Palm Beach, which is offered to guests at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

You'd think Americans were blessed that Trump's assault on national politics coincides with the maturation of a relatively new journalistic pursuit – fact-checking. But that Trump surges onward in the primaries is proof that the US indeed might have entered a new political dimension, a parallel universe in which old political sensibilities and conventions, and notions of tradition and elites are becoming redundant.

Fact checkers struggle to keep up. Marvelling at Trump's economy with the truth, Politico.com sought to correct Trump's own self-portrait: 

• Trump didn't write the "No. 1 selling business book of all time". As best can be estimated, Trump's The Art of the Deal sold maybe 1 million; Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People sold more than 25 million.

• Trump is of German descent, not Swedish.

• He's probably not worth the $US10 billion he claims – more likely the $US4 billion estimated by Forbes; or even the $US2.9 billion estimated by Bloomberg.

Central to Trump's lies is how they are told.

Attempting to get to the bottom of one of his most outrageous utterances – that "thousands and thousands" of Arabs held rooftop parties in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from the World Trade Centre, to cheer the September 11 attacks – Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler threw up his hands while writing of efforts by a TV reporter to nail the lie while interviewing Trump. "This exchange demonstrated the folly of trying to fact-check Donald Trump," Kessler wrote.

After 12 years in the business of winnowing truth from falsehood, Factchecker.org claims that Trump is utterly in a league of his own – "he stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong".

Trump had the nerve to demand an apology from the fact checkers who debunked the "US Muslims celebrate 9/11" lie.

Usually, Factchecker.org honours the lie of the year. But such was Trump's performance in 2015 that, for the first time, they recognised the liar above any particularly egregious untruth, bestowing on Trump the title King of Whoppers.

One of the more memorable descriptions of the Trump style of political speech came from commentator George Will – "think of a drunk with a bullhorn, reading aloud James Joyce's Finnegans Wake underwater".

In the Lingua Franca column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lucy Ferriss also resorts to Irish literature for her reference point: "As with the claim that Molly Bloom's soliloquy is the longest sentence in the English language, calling Donald Trump's explosion of language a sentence, stretched the meaning of the word 'sentence'."

An analysis commissioned by The Boston Globe found that Trump speaks to voters as if they are fourth-graders. A dissection of candidate speeches by Professor Mark Yoffe Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania, for Thinkprogress.org, found that Trump's favourite word is "I"; his fourth most favoured word is "Trump", and when he ventures beyond one-syllable favourite words, he opts for simple two-syllable words, like "very" and "China" – "his only three-syllable favourite word is 'Mexico'".

Taking up a challenge by Slate.com to diagram a 285-word sentence uttered by Trump, Ferriss describes just a portion of it as carrying "a compound noun clause modified by an adverbial clause as its predicate; moreover, it drags along an adjectival clause that has no fewer than five sub-clauses hanging from it, just one of them carrying two noun clauses in the object position, followed by a whole architecture of complex adverbial clauses".

Ferriss concludes: "This is not fancy syntactical footwork on Trump's part. It's just bad rhetoric."

But where Ferriss sees madness in Trump's method, Professor Stanley Fish, of Florida International University, detects the language of the 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who he describes as "one of the smartest men who ever lived".

Acknowledging that Trump does everything that a politician ought not do – disparage war heroes, ridicule the disabled, demean women, flaunt his wealth – Fish describes the Trump style: "There are no formal preambles; he just jumps in with a topic, that he then abandons within seconds. He never quite manages to make a point because on the way to it something else had occurred to him. He offers asides [often jibes at his rivals] that become the main path, but only till another aside diverts the path again. He interrupts himself to say something about his hair, or his hotels, or his apartment houses. He tells you that he went to [prestigious American business school] Wharton School. He reads from the polls. He recalls conversations with friends. He beats up on the press. And he does all these things in no particular order and with an apparent unconcern with either the coherence or relevance of what he's saying."

But if Trump is not Forrest Gump, who is he and what's his game?

Describing what Montaigne called as his "minute-to-minute" method, Fish explains the philosopher's objective in the Huffington Post: "The idea is to enter into a relationship of fellowship, not mastery, with your audience. You're not a superior intelligence leading your auditors by the nose; you're testifying to a shared experience; you're telling it like it is just as you see it."

When the Census Bureau asks Americans about their ancestors, some respondents don’t give a standard answer like “English” or “German.” Instead, they simply answer “American.”

The places with high concentrations of these self-described Americans turn out to be the places Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has performed the strongest.

This connection and others emerged in an analysis of the geography of Trumpism. To see what conditions prime a place to support Mr. Trump for the presidency, we compared hundreds of demographic and economic variables from census data, along with results from past elections, with this year’s results in the 23 states that have held primaries and caucuses. We examined what factors predict a high level of Trump support relative to the total number of registered voters.

The analysis shows that Trump counties are places where white identity mixes with long-simmering economic dysfunctions.

The places where Trump has done well cut across many of the usual fault lines of American politics — North and South, liberal and conservative, rural and suburban. What they have in common is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world.

“It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/upshot/the-geography-of-trumpism.html?h

See toon at top...

...

After Reed argued that many evangelical voters don't vote on "identity politics," Montagne pointed out that many Evangelicals and social conservatives like to pride themselves on being "values voters."

"Well, under that rubric they would not have voted for Ronald Reagan, the first divorced man who ever ran for president, who was ever elected president, over [Democrat] Jimmy Carter, who was a very pious Southern Baptist. He was a member of their denomination, many of them, yet they voted for Reagan," Reed said. "They voted for Mitt Romney, who was a Mormon, a denomination whose theology many find anathema over [Democrat] Barack Obama, who was a self-professed Christian. Why?"

"Because they are like all voters. They're driven by issues," Reed continued. "And on the social and moral issues — marriage, abortion, religious liberty, support for Israel. Trump not only checks all those boxes, Renee, but if you go to one of his rallies, as I did, it's surprising how much of his stump speech speaks to those issues."

Reed added that evangelicals are also driven by "economic anxiety," which Trump eases by talking about making America stronger on the world stage.

Although Trump has said in the past that he is "very pro-choice" and that he would not ban partial-birth abortions, he now proclaims that he is pro-life and that he "hates the concept of abortion."

In an interview in late February, Reed reasoned that Evangelicals are forgiving of past political positions and personal transgressions, stating that many Evangelicals supported Romney even though he said he supported abortion rights during his campaign for Massachusetts governor.

The Orwellian headline over that editorial: “To defend our democracy, the GOP must aim for a brokered convention.” Beautiful. Defending democracy requires Republicans to cancel the democratic decision of the largest voter turnout of any primaries in American history. And this is now a moral imperative for Republicans.

Like the Third World leaders it lectures, the Post celebrates democracy—so long as the voters get it right. Whatever one may think of the Donald, he has exposed not only how far out of touch our political elites are, but how insular is the audience that listens to our media elite.

Understandably, Trump’s rivals were hesitant to take him on, seeing the number he did on “little Marco,” “low energy” Jeb, and “Lyin’ Ted.” But the Big Media—thePost, Wall Street Journal, New York Times—have been relentless and ruthless.

Yet Trump’s strength with voters seemed to grow, pari passu, with the savagery of their attacks. As for National Review, The Weekly Standard and the accredited conservative columnists of the big op-ed pages, their hostility to Trump seems to rise, commensurate with Trump’s rising polls.

As the Wizard of Oz was exposed as a little man behind a curtain with a big megaphone, our media establishment is unlikely ever again to be seen as formidable as it once was.

And the GOP? Those Republicans who assert that a Trump nomination would be a moral stain, a scarlet letter, the death of the party, they are most likely describing what a Trump nomination would mean to their own ideologies and interests.

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Hey, Pat, no-one is mentioning our own Uncle Rupe in this syrup... I can already see the late fall 2016 headlines of the New York Post (not "that horrible" Washington Post) "YOU NEED TRUMP" "TRUMP IS YOU" "TRUMP IS A WINNER" "USA FOR TRUMP" "TRUMP. TRUMP. TRUMP" "TRUMP IS THE REAL DEAL" "TRUMP ON DECK" and "TRUMPET FOR TRUMP". I am sure the boffins at headline headquarters at the NY Post can think of better ones, but these will do for a start to make sure Uncle Rupe is happy... Meanwhile in order to appear balanced, the FOX Network will have about 32 per cent of its views against trump and the rest will be in favour... You know the trick..

That "little man behind a curtain with a big megaphone" is actually a big man with a big stage amplifier system: his name is Uncle Rupe... Though Trump really does not need Uncle Rupe... But Uncle Rupe could destroy Trump, should he choose to.