William Weld

Winners And Losers From The February 7 Democratic Debate And The Iowa Caucuses

WINNERS: 

Bernie Sanders: Not only did Sanders win the popular vote in Iowa, the complete failure of the Democratic Party’s caucus app and the transparency of their attempts to relitigate the results to keep him from winning will only reinforce the self-defeating crookedness of the existing party system and his opposition to it, which will only help his image. Wait, there was supposed to be a joke here somewhere

Bill Weld: With a stunning 1.3% of the vote in the Republican caucuses, showed that his primary challenge to Donald Trump won’t be dismissed that easily

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Encyclopedia Johnson and the Case of the “Aleppo Moment”

To a visitor, Albuquerque looked like any ordinary state capital. It had a courthouse, a capitol building, a police station, and a sleazy, moodily-lit Italian restaurant where crooked politicians made Faustian bargains with bloodthirsty mafiosi bank.

But there was something out of the ordinary about Albuquerque: from 1995 to 2003, no child or grown-up had had to deal with a tax hike. People wanted to know: how did Albuquerque do it?

The brains behind it all was the governor during that time, Encyclopedia Johnson. Now, Encyclopedia’s real name was Gary. But he was only called that in official state documents. Everyone else knew him as “Encyclopedia” because his brain was filled with more facts than a reference book. He was so smart that they said he should run for President, so he did. And to prove how great and smart he was, they booked him a town hall meeting with Chris Matthews, broadcast live on MSNBC. (more…)