The Limits of Credulity

Ah, another day, another twist.

Chris Christie Endorses Donald Trump and Calls Marco Rubio ‘Desperate’
Maggie Haberman
New York Times

Updated, 1:54 p.m. | Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey endorsed Donald J. Trump on Friday, a major turn in a wild race and one that gives the New York businessman a significant boost as he heads into the pivotal “Super Tuesday” contests.

Mr. Christie was a candidate for president himself until he came in sixth place in New Hampshire’s primary. Seeing his political career facing an abrupt conclusion after his failed presidential campaign, he expressed his anger Friday at Senator Marco Rubio, whom he was said to be upset with, blaming the “super PAC” backing the Florida senator for halting his momentum in New Hampshire with a string of slash-and-burn ads….

And once again, no pundits saw it coming. Like every other day in this long-running terrible, horrific Reality Show.

Listening to the NPR feed yesterday morning, I couldn’t help but be reminded of watching the “news” on TeeVee lately: all pundits and politics all the time. We are in the second year of wall-to-wall coverage of that horrific hybrid of Infotainment and Reality Television: “Who Wants To Be President?” starring Donald Trump.

It was the standard “we have a reporter, a democrat and a republican” with various titles that made them seem impressive. Like, say, “political consultant.”

The Limits of Privacy

PRIVACY! scream advocates of privacy, and normally I’d be with them.

Apple Unlocked iPhones for the Feds 70 Times Before
Shane Harris / The Daily Beast

Apple CEO Tim Cook declared on Wednesday that his company wouldn’t comply with a government search warrant to unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers, a significant escalation in a long-running debate between technology companies and the government over access to people’s electronically-stored private information.

But in a similar case in New York last year, Apple acknowledged that it could extract such data if it wanted to. And according to prosecutors in that case, Apple has unlocked phones for authorities at least 70 times since 2008. (Apple doesn’t dispute this figure.)

OK: so the “super duper” encryption can be broken. I get it; I saw “The Imitation Game.”

Our Crossed Stars

I remember many New Hampshire primaries, and this one is of a different order entirely.

You see, in any previous year, the results would have been big news. This year, an overactive if under-reporting and over-blathering media has successfully welded infotainment news with reality TV to create the hit series “Who Wants to be President®” now in its second season!

Naturally, the seasoned Reality Show star took the lead and kept it, to the consternation of those sad remaining dinosaurs who believed that substance (even the granfalloon whoop-de-do alternate Universe Dark Matter substance of modern GOP politics) still matters in politics.  New Hampshire vindicated the polls, and no one was really surprised. Bernie Sanders “crushed” Hillary Clinton and it was a ho-hum.

Much Ado About Not Much

It’s important that I write this before the results are known.

The Iowa causes have been meaningful previously exactly twice, and then only for the Democratic Party.*

[* explained below.]

For the Republicans, Iowa has been a bust.  Consider last time (2012): “Mitt Romney” WON the Iowa caucuses. Oh wait. RICK SANTORUM  won, but by the time it was known it was too late to do Santorum any good. The media buzz (and that’s all Iowa actually supplies)  had already gone to Romney, the ultimate loser.

Ironically, the ACTUAL winner of Iowa was Ron Paul, who ended up winning 22 of Iowa’s 28 delegates at the state convention. The whole GOP side of Iowa is basically the single most expensive straw poll in the history of the world, with the actual results decided at the state party convention many months later.