On June 9, The New York Times ran a useful, detailed consideration of the finances of Marco Rubio. Publicly, the Florida senator describes his everyman’s struggle to “finally pay off his law school loans.” Privately, according to state records unearthed by the paper’s Steve Eder and Michael Barbaro, he spent “$80,000 for a luxury speedboat.”
The detail revealed a larger pattern: Rubio has been financially in the hole for nearly his entire adult life. The reason this mattered, noted the Times—whose work on Rubio has been a welcome exception to the rule of bad campaign reporting—was that it “has made him unusually reliant on a campaign donor, Norman Braman, a billionaire who has subsidized Mr. Rubio’s job as a college instructor, hired him as a lawyer, and continues to employ his wife.”
These details were explained in the Times a month earlier. The same two reporters described the 82-year-old Braman, an almost comically plutocratic figure who sells Rolls Royces and Bugattis for a living, and almost single-handedly recalled Miami’s mayor. Braman, who implored the Times reporters, “I don’t consider myself a fat cat. Don’t make me out to be a fat cat,” has been able to call the tune for the 44-year-old Rubio.
Then came Politico’s bubble-headed media reporter Dylan Byers with a scoop: Rubio’s “luxury speedboat” was “in fact, an offshore fishing boat.” Speedboats, you see, are for rich swells; fishing boats, even ones costing almost $100,000, are for jes’ folks.
Immediately, this supposed error became the shiny bouncing ball the political media decided to chase.
Politico covered Boatgate eight times over the next two weeks—Byers twice in two consecutive days. They didn’t mention Braman once.
The name of today’s game is TV commercials, not endorsements, door-knocking armies, and “walking around money.” TV is costly and it takes don’t-call-me-fat-cats like Norman Braman, Sheldon Adelson, and the Brothers Koch to pay those kinds of bills.
The bottom line is that the penumbras and emanations of Citizens United are changing the campaign game in ways that throw all previous understandings of how Republicans nominate presidents into a cocked hat. To see how it’s working on the ground, come with me to Southern California, where last year David and Charles Koch convened one of their dog-and-pony shows, where the aspirants lined up to stand on their hind legs to beg before their would-be masters. Politico spoke to two people who were there, and offered the following account of the performance of Ohio’s Governor John Kasich.
“Randy Kendrick, a major contributor and the wife of Ken Kendrick, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, rose to say she disagreed with Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid coverage, and questioned why he’d said it was ‘what God wanted.’” Kasich’s “fiery” response: “I don’t know about you, lady. But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have to answer what I’ve done for the poor.”
Other years, before other audiences, such public piety might have sounded banal. This year, it’s enough to kill a candidacy:
“About 20 audience members walked out of the room, and two governors also on the panel, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told Kasich they disagreed with him. The Ohio governor has not been invited back to a Koch seminar.”
Which is, of course, astonishing. But even more astonishing was the lesson the Politico drew from it—one, naturally, about personalities: “Kasich’s temper has made it harder to endear himself to the GOP’s wealth benefactors.” His temper. Not their temper. Not, say, “Kasich’s refusal to kowtow before the petulant whims of a couple of dozen greedy nonentities who despise the Gospel of Jesus Christ has foreclosed his access to the backroom cabals without which a Republican presidential candidacy is inconceivable.”
If the winnowing of front-runners from also-rans has traditionally been a financial process (when the money dries up, so do the campaigns) Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas and Macau began tearing up that paradigm in 2012 by shoveling money to Newt Gingrich; $20 million total, including $5 million dispensed on March 23, three days after Gingrich won 8 percent in Illinois’s primary to Mitt Romney’s 47 percent, keeping Gingrich officially in the race more than a week after the RNC declared Romney the presumptive nominee.
Now, four previously unheard of super-PACS supporting Ted Cruz, who has no support among the GOP’s “establishment,” raised $31 million “with virtually no warning over the course of several days beginning Monday.” The New York Times reported this shortly after reporting that “[t]he leader of the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with regulating the way political money is raised and spent, says she has largely given up hope of reigning in abuses in the 2016 presidential campaign, which could generate a record $10 billion in spending.”
The Koch Brothers, you can learn if you take a deep enough dive into the relatively obscure precincts of campaign coverage, are battling to take over a major functions of the Republicans National Committee.
And all this, admittedly, gets reported, in bits and pieces. But all this noise doesn’t amount to an ongoing story by which citizens can understand what is actually going on. Not just concerning who might be our next president, but what it all means for the republic. And not just concerning the candidates, but the behind-the-scenes string-pullers whose names, really, should be almost as familiar to us as Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio, and, God forbid, Dr. Carson.
Instead, we get the same old hackneyed horse race—like, did you know that Rick Santorum is in trouble? Only one voter showed up at his June 8 event in Hamlin, Iowa. The Des Moines Register reported that. Politico made sure that tout Washington knew it. Though neither mentioned that Santorum is still doing just fine with the one voter that matters: Foster Friess, the Wyoming financier who gave his super-PAC $6.7 million in 2012, and promises something similar this year. “He has the best chance of winning,” Friess said. “I can’t imagine why anybody would not vote for him.’’ Which, considering only 2 percent of New Hampshirites and Iowans agree with him, is kind of crazy. And you’d think having people like that picking the people who govern us would all be rather newsworthy.
I had these stereotypical alien abduction experiences when I was a kid,” Guy Malone tells me. “Little creatures with big black eyes were raping me and trying to eat me and trying to operate on me.”
We’re standing in the Roswell [New Mexico] mall’s CosmiCon—a space-themed collection of comics, costumes and other oddities presented in collaboration with Roswell’s 20th annual UFO festival, a kind of alien enthusiasts’ TED conference and county fair. Malone, an effusive storyteller with an easy laugh and a slight Tennessee twang, is here to hawk his memoir and pick up a few new believers while he’s at it.
“There were multiple dreams and memories spread across years. I didn’t want to believe it, but once I read books on the subject I thought, ‘yep, that’s me.’”
Malone’s a Christian now, and he no longer believes aliens abducted him—he thinks demons are responsible for the terrifying recurring visions of his childhood and adolescence. After finding Christianity, Malone says he received a calling from God in 1999 to move to Roswell, where he would spread the word of Jesus as a means of stopping alien abductions.
It’s a microcosmic culture war in which competing believers—of extraterrestrial identity, of Christian theology, of the holy church of the American dollar—proselytize their own mutually exclusive notions of reality.
Three young adults were arrested in the early hours of Saturday morning after mistakenly knocking on the door of a New Jersey State Trooper and fleeing the scene.
... According to people close to the investigation, three young adults, after leaving a graduation party, attempted to go to a friend’s house nearby.
A source said, they mistakenly went to the next door neighbor’s home. After repeatedly ringing the doorbell and loudly knocking on the door, the homeowner, a state trooper, came to the door. When he opened the door and shouted at them, the three men ran away.
The three got into a vehicle and the officer fired three gun shots as they attempted to flee.
The dissent argued that the Court's ruling "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution." He wrote: "A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold."
An ex-Congressional candidate who allegedly plotted to massacre a Muslim community in upstate New York was allowed to go free this week as his case proceeded, due to a federal judge's order.
Meanwhile, another federal judge cast doubt on whether the defendant Robert Doggart – who is accused of planning to enlist a heavily-armed militia armed with assault rifles and machetes to attack a Muslim school and mosque – was a "true threat," effectively torpedoing a plea agreement that could have put Doggart behind bars for up to five years.
Federal marshals arrested Doggart on April 10, after intercepting a call in which Doggart – who in 2014 ran an unsuccessful U.S. congressional campaign in Tennessee – allegedly threatened to attack a Muslim community in Hancock, N.Y. His lawyers and prosecutors came to an agreement where he would have pleaded guilty to a single charge of interstate communication of a threat, a charge that carries up to five years in prison. ...
An unsealed criminal complaint showed Doggart discussing how many men armed with assault rifles, Molotov cocktails, and even machetes would be necessary to burn down a school and mosque, and kill residents outside of the New York hamlet, nicknamed “Islamberg” by its residents. The complaint suggested Doggart tried to recruit participants through Facebook, referring to the community as “Target 3.”
“Target 3 is vulnerable...and must be utterly destroyed in order to get the attention of the American People," Doggart wrote. He also told an FBI source that he’d set a April 15 deadline to carry out the armed attack, according to the plea agreement, which he said was “gonna start a civil war.”
A criminal complaint and arrest warrant were issued Thursday suggesting that the man, 55-year-old Brian D. Dutcher from Tomah, Wisconsin, told a security guard a La Crosse library that if he had the chance he would "take him out," referring to Obama, and "take the shot."
Dutcher confirmed to the Secret Service that he had made the remarks, the warrant said, and told La Crosse detectives he was serious about the threat. According the warrant, Dutcher had also posted to Facebook earlier this week, "that's it! Thursday I will be in La Crosse. Hopefully I will get a clear shot at the pretend president. Killing him is our CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY!"
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
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