Author Archives: DaniloPoirier

Rubio, Fiorina Declared Winners of Last Night’s Media Bowl

by DaniloPoirier Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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I didn’t get a chance to hear any of the post-game commentary after last night’s debate. After blogging continuously since 2 pm (Pacific time) I just collapsed in the living room with the pizza Marian had gotten and watched whatever it was she had on TV. So I never got a chance to see who had been anointed the winner.

This morning I see that apparently the answer is Marco Rubio, which makes Marian two for two picking winners. Maybe she should be the one writing this blog. Ed Kilgore had about the same reaction to this that I did:

As for the “winners” and “losers” bit, there’s no question Carly Fiorina is being deliberately promoted to the Big Stage where GOPers wanted her all along to supply low-gender-politics-risk attacks on Hillary Clinton. I watched her yesterday and saw a former CEO used to doing power-point presentations for stockholders doing her standard speech, amplified by a very lucky question she got about Donald Trump. And for all the (justified) talk about the Fox moderators being tough on candidates, nobody’s asking Fiorina the obvious question about her extremely limited qualifications for the presidency.

….I’m also a bit mystified by all the wild praise today for Marco Rubio, but maybe I’ve just seen his earnest Second-Generation-American routine one time too many to be impressed any more. He got reasonably lucky in his questioning; the only heat he drew was over his alleged support for a rape exception to an abortion ban; he denied it, and used the question to position himself as a real RTL ultra, which is apparently what he wanted to do.

Yeah, my sense is that both Fiorina and Rubio did fine, and since no one else did spectacularly, maybe that’s enough to make them winners. But big winners? I don’t see it either.

Interestingly, I also see this morning that the commentariat is quickly converging around the idea that Fox News manipulated the debate pretty blatantly. The GOP wanted Fiorina on the main stage because they wanted a woman there, and Fox obliged by giving her easy questions and then praising her to the skies after the debate was over. Likewise, the GOP really wants Trump gone, and Fox obliged by asking him lots of awkward questions. Trump himself certainly played along, claiming afterward that he had been ambushed and treated badly by the moderators, especially Megyn Kelly.

Maybe. I didn’t notice Fiorina getting off any easier than the other candidates, but I did notice the over-the-top effusive praise she received in the post-game shows on Fox. Something sure seemed to be going on there. Fiorina wasn’t that good.

As for Trump, I think he was bound to have trouble in a debate forum, where he has less opportunity to duck questions he doesn’t want to answer. Also, as I said last night, his schtick gets old when you see it over and over in the space of two hours. If, at some point, you don’t seem to take any of the questions seriously, even your supporters are going to start thinking that maybe you don’t belong in the White House.

In any case, this seems to be a pretty good example of the media having a bigger impact than the debates themselves. Fiorina and Rubio were the winners of last night’s media bowl and Trump was the loser. In the future, everyone will know to stay on Megyn Kelly’s good side.

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Rubio, Fiorina Declared Winners of Last Night’s Media Bowl

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7 Death-Defying Zombies of the Plant & Animal World

by DaniloPoirier Posted on October 24, 2014

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7 Death-Defying Zombies of the Plant & Animal World

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Will American Pot Farmers Put the Cartels out of Business?

by DaniloPoirier Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

For the first time ever, many of the farmers who supply Mexican drug cartels have stopped planting marijuana, reports the Washington Post. “It’s not worth it anymore,” said Rodrigo Silla, a lifelong cannabis farmer from central Mexico. “I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.”

Facing stiff competition from pot grown legally and illegally north of the border, the price for a kilogram of Mexican schwag has plummeted by 75 percent, from $100 to $25, the Post reports:

Farmers in the storied “Golden Triangle” region of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, which has produced the country’s most notorious gangsters and biggest marijuana harvests, say they are no longer planting the crop…increasingly, they’re unable to compete with US marijuana growers. With cannabis legalized or allowed for medical use in 20 US states and the District of Columbia, more and more of the American market is supplied with highly potent marijuana grown in American garages and converted warehouses—some licensed, others not.

As notes David Downs of the East Bay Express, this is a really big deal. In the past decade, Mexican drug cartels have murdered an estimated 60,000 people. The DEA annually spends more than $2 billion to deter the transport of illicit drugs across the border. “So now we have both the DEA and cartel farmers screaming bloody murder about legalization,” Downs points out. “Sounds like we’re on the right track.”

Of course, the American pot boom is also creating problems of its own, with some Mexican traffickers moving north to California and other states to set up vast “trespass grows” on remote public lands. To be sure, the illicit market for weed will prop up criminal syndicates for as long as pot remains illegal, yet this week’s news is some of strongest evidence to date that legalizing and decriminalizing pot will ultimately make everyone safer.

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Will American Pot Farmers Put the Cartels out of Business?

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The Latest Benghazi Freakout In Ten Sentences

by DaniloPoirier Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Last week, in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by Judicial Watch, the White House released a memo related to Benghazi that was authored by Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communication. The four-page memo, written a few days after the attacks, was designed to prep Susan Rice for her upcoming appearances on several Sunday talk shows. Among other things, it addressed the anti-American protests that had first sprung up in Egypt and then spread throughout the Middle East, including this line as one of the goals of her appearances:

To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.

Republicans say this is a “smoking gun” of a White House cover-up on Benghazi. But is it? Here are ten things you should know:

  1. First things first: this memo should have been released earlier, and conservatives are fully justified in asking why it took a FOIA request to finally shake it loose.
  2. That said, as an adviser for “strategic communication”—what the rest of us call spin—Ben Rhodes’ job is explicitly political, providing guidance on how to put the administration’s foreign policy actions in the best light.
  3. Nine hours before Rhodes sent his email, the CIA had provided its assessment of what caused the attacks in Benghazi: “We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US consulate and subsequently its annex.”
  4. The Cairo protests, in turn, were inspired by the YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims,” which is why Rhodes mentioned the video in his memo.
  5. As it happens, it turned out that there were no protests earlier in the day in Benghazi—but at the time, that was what the CIA believed.
  6. However, multiple sources—including McClatchy, Al Jazeera, the New York Times, and then deputy CIA director Michael Morell—have confirmed that anger toward the YouTube video did play a role in motivating the initial attacks.
  7. Multiple sources also confirm that that the Benghazi attacks were opportunistic—organized hastily to take advantage of the Cairo protests, not planned days or weeks ahead of time.
  8. Susan Rice, in all her Sunday show appearances, was properly cautious about the role of the video, the nature of the attacks, and the fact that everything she said was tentative and based on “the best information we have to date.”
  9. Like any administration, the Obama White House wanted to put the best face on its Middle East policy, and there’s no question that their public statements were designed to do just that.
  10. Nevertheless, the Republican theory that Obama was afraid to blame Benghazi on terrorism has never really made any sense; there’s simply never been any evidence of anything more than a fairly routine amount of spin in the aftermath of the attacks.

So: A “smoking gun”? “Cold, hard evidence” of an Obama cover-up? Just like Watergate? Hardly. Even George Will doesn’t believe that. The video really did play a role in the Cairo protests and then the Benghazi attacks, and there was never anything wrong with saying so. It’s inexplicable that Republicans think this memo proves anything more damning than that.

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The Latest Benghazi Freakout In Ten Sentences

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