Perhaps another pickup in 2016:
Progressive Democrat Russ Feingold announced Thursday that he will run for Senate in 2016, hoping to win back the seat he lost six years ago.
Feingold made his announcement in a video that was provided in advance to The Huffington Post. In it, he cites issues near and dear to his heart, like taking on corporations and big money in politics, as his justification for running.
Let’s see if voters have buyers remorse over Ron Johnson.
Cluttered Mind
In the years since Ron Johnson was elected I have not seen any indication that he is anything other than this Onion article made him out to be.
Wisconsin can do so much better. The only question is, will they this time?
Cacti
Nothing personal against Russ, but I’d say this is Exhibit A for the Dems having thin benches at the state level across the country.
That said, I hope he wins.
JCJ
@Cluttered Mind:
I just looked at the election results on Wikipedia. Feingold’s vote totals have been as follows:
1992 – 1,290,662 (defeated incumbent who had 1,129,599 votes)
1998 – 890,059 (defeated challenger who had 852,272 votes)
2004 – 1,632,697 (defeated challenger who had 1,301,183 votes)
2010 – 1,020,958 (lost to challenger who had 1,125,999 votes)
I hope he gets the 2004 turn out. He was lucky to win in 1998 – his opponent was a complete tool, about the same as Ron Johnson. These numbers really emphasize the need for people who support Democrats to VOTE!!!
Davis X. Machina
This means he can’t run for President.
And he’d win the DKos primary going away, too.
Oh well, the Senate’s gain is the internet’s loss.
kent
We Wisconsinites were really really hoping he’d run for governor. But this will do.
In my view, he is close to a lock to win this as the election will be held in conjunction with the presidential race. Wisconsin is purple rather than blue only because so many of our voters don’t come out during off-year elections. Unless the Republicans pass a bunch more voter ID laws or some such, you can book WI for both Hillary and Feingold in 2016.
Cacti
O/T but it looks like the end is near for The Simpsons.
Harry Shearer has walked away, leaving $14 million on the table.
With him go the voices of:
Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner, Kent Brockman, Mr. Burns, Mr. Smithers, Dr. Hibbert, Rev. Lovejoy, Lenny, and Rainier Wolfcastle.
Don’t see how the show can plug that many holes.
pamelabrown53
@JCJ:
Russ’s entry into the WI senate race is indeed good news and thanks JCJ for providing previous vote totals. I only hope that Feingold learned from his last race when he refused to go negative and refused SuperPac help. The repubs will be pouring obscene amount of $$$ to keep that seat. Hope it all goes to waste.
squid
Checking in from Wisconsin! Some good news after the constant Scott Walker nonsense, and the hilarious travesty of Ron Johnson, plastics magnate. I’m excited for this campaign, and hopefully I can volunteer a little.
This is the kind of campaign that progressives need to be excited about, all the way down to dog-catcher. The whining about Hillary is pointless if you can’t get progressives elected in what was historically one of the most left-leaning states…
Cluttered Mind
@JCJ: His biggest wins were in 1992 and 2004, which happened to be presidential election years, which are when the Democratic base shows up to the polls. Incumbency is powerful so I won’t go so far as to say this is Feingold’s race to lose, but the likely composition of the 2016 electorate is going to favor him. This is also why I hate when people point out that Scott Walker won three elections in Wisconsin. While true, there’s a rather gigantic asterisk. The Governor of Wisconsin has to run for re-election every four years, and those elections always happen in a midterm election year. As a result, even though Wisconsin is a blue state and Walker is widely hated, he’s always in a position of strength while running for re-election.
The biggest challenge for the Democrats nationwide is figuring out how to fix its midterm cycle turnout problem. Fix that and you can stick a fork in the GOP. Hence all the voter ID laws and voter suppression tactics, because the GOP knows it too.
askew
He ran a horrible campaign in 2010. He refused any outside help and he skipped Obama appearances in state pissing off AA voters. He also didn’t engage Johnson on anything until late in the campaign.
He was also a prima donna in the Senate. He made Frank-Dodd get watered down by voting no leaving Dems to negotiate with Scott Brown to get him to vote yes. He is progressive in theory only. If a bill isn’t perfect, he’d rather vote no and get no progress at all. In short, he’s no Wellstone.
Plus, there is the problem with Dems electing senior citizens and not buliding a bench. The GOP has brought in a long of new, younger Senators. Isn’t there someone better we can run?
askew
@Cacti:
Our thin bench has become a big problem. We just aren’t developing a farm team. We need younger Dems to move up the ladder and it would be nice if our elected officials started looking more like our base which is compromised of women and minorities.
Cacti
@askew:
In a word, no.
The best chance for the Wisconsin Dem Party is a 62-year old retread.
Mike J
@Cluttered Mind:
It’s not a blue state if the blue voters don’t show up.
Cacti
@askew:
You’re preaching to the choir, amigo.
I think it’s especially important to build up our national bench in the deep blue states, which we’re also not doing.
In California for instance, the highest profile Democrats are 75 year old Nancy Pelosi, 74 year old Barbara Boxer, 81 year old Dianne Feinstein, and 77 year old Jerry Brown. Boxer is retiring, but other than that, it’s a total gerontocracy.
trollhattan
@askew:
Even California lacks an obvious upcoming crop of savvy and high-profile young Dems. I blame it on several running decades of convincing people that politicians and politics are “the worst” and so today, it does not attract the talent it would take to make it
betterless worse. That and term limits.Turgidson
@Cacti:
I think you’re right, but I also think Russ is pretty great, remains well-liked, and even if the Dems had a good bench in Wisconsin, Russ might be the best choice available. He can take the self-righteousness and purity a bit far (Dodd-Frank), but generally he’s real good.
I’d be astounded if he doesn’t win comfortably in a presidential-turnout election against that lollygagger Johnson.
Calouste
@Cacti: A show the size of the Simpsons has understudies on call for each and every role, just like your average theater production. What would they do if that guy caught a cold or something worse, just cancel a few episodes?
Tommy
@Mike J:
Not sure any truer statement has ever been said.
I live in a blue state. Even bluer district. That is what the polls say but we elected a Republican to our House seat for the first time in 70 years. Please let that sink in. 70 years we never elected a Republican.
But we didn’t vote and what happens, we elected a Republican.
Frankensteinbeck
@Cluttered Mind:
My observation has been that conservative voter turnout is driven by how angry and afraid they are. Liberal voter turnout is driven by how much we think it will make a difference. News coverage in the last month up to the 2014 midterm elections was wall-to-wall ISIS and ebola. It was the frustratingly dumbest scaremongering I’ve ever seen, and Democratic voter motivation plummeted, while Republican voter motivation skyrocketed. I can’t see this as an accident, even though I hate conspiracy theory thinking.
They are much more aware than we are that whites are heading to minority status. For us it’s a detail. For them it’s a nightmare they’ve watched grow all their lives.
shortstop
@Mike J: Yeah, I think it’s time people stopped being nostalgic for the Wisconsin of yore. It’s gone.
That said, Feingold is still popular there and yes, it’s a presidential election year, so he may very well win if he runs a decent campaign. I share Cacti’s general concerns about thin benches but I don’t really worry about it here. The best Democrat to run in any purple or red state is the one who can win in that particular state, and Feingold seems to be the one in this case.
gf120581
The polling certainly looks optomistic for Russ. The latest Marquette poll (which is the gold standard for polls in WI) had him routing Johnson by 16. In a Prez election year, Russ should win.
Plus, Johnson is an idiot who has acted like he doesn’t care about his reelection chances. I’d say he’s likely the most vulnerable incumbent Senator this cycle, even more so then my own Mark Kirk, who, while a sitting duck next year, at least tries to be a moderate. Johnson doesn’t even try.
Mandalay
@Turgidson:
He will be taking it way too far if he refuses PAC money again, then loses by a handful of votes.
catclub
@Calouste: Harry Shearer is a wonderfully talented guy, but I suspect there are LOTS of talented voice artists. If they asked for some to sound exactly like him, they could find those. I would suspect they will start with that and drift to new voices. Law and Order replaced DA after DA. Simpsons is a franchise.
dedc79
The phrase “thin bench” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but I’ve got no idea what it means in practice. Are people talking about name recognition? Do the Republicans have a full bench in Wisconsin? What would a Democratic full bench look like for a Wisconsin Senate seat — a bunch of people who have won house races already? Don’t we have that?
Plenty of people win elections without early name recognition – hell, Republicans do this all the time.
shortstop
@gf120581: Kirk a sitting Duckworth? May it be so! That presidential year rule applies just as much here as it does one state north, as we were reminded most recently and cruelly with the election of Guv Ruiner.
catclub
@Frankensteinbeck:
This. 2006 was an non-presidential election year. The Democrats did pretty well then.
shell
Didn’t even have time to pull out the egg timer. He’s already been attacked by the Right as your ‘typical tax and spend Democrat.’
catclub
@dedc79:
It means there are major states, such as Texas and Florida, in which the Democrats do not even have candidates for every single statewide office and every federal office.
And the rest of the south is even worse.
Turgidson
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yeah, and we discovered in 2004 that liberals voting out of anger/fear of another four years of a disastrous fuckup as president was only enough to create decent turnout but not enough to win when our candidate was so-so and the Right was crawling over broken glass to vote for their heroic protector against the scurry terrerist monsters under their beds.
The Obama 2012 performance showed that the Dem coalition can come out in sufficient numbers to win even when they’re not ultra-inspired, but they/we do need to be really, really prodded. I hope Hillary’s campaign studies up on how to do this, since she’s not going to be able to run an Obama 2008-esque campaign for numerous reasons.
mai naem mobile
I know Ted.Cruz, Jim.Inhofe and the Breadbag lady get way more attention.but Ron.Johnson is one of the doofiest of doofuses in the Senate. I can’t remember if.it was HRC or Eric Holder who made him look like a total maroon at some.hearing and he didn’t seem to.even realize that they’d made him a laughingstock.
Germy Shoemangler
@Cacti: Maybe the producers will give in and let him keep his outside projects.
Haven’t cast members fought before? I remember a few years ago when they demanded a salary increase. The network gave in.
If not, they’ll probably get Billy West to come in and do all the voices. He doesn’t care who he replaces.
Turgidson
@catclub:
That was a perfect storm of Republican dumbassery. Iraq War turned into such shit that their flag-waving propaganda lost its potency. Tom DeLay’s ultra-corrupt House had a bunch of scandals catch up to them and that creep got caught with pages. Katrina. Bush pissing off his base with the Harriet Miers pick. Bush pissing off the blue hairs with his SS privatization fail.
The Democrats won that election by being the other guy, and the GOP couldn’t scare enough of their dittoheads into voting by saying “oooooh SF liberal Pelosi!” because they’d been in control of everything for years and voters didn’t think Democrats could do any worse.
That election has looked more and more anomalous as time has passed.
Chris
@Cluttered Mind:
Seems to me that Democrats are essentially in the same spot that Republicans were in between 1968 and 1994. Looking good in national elections, but still unable to crack the opposition party’s hold on politics at the more local and state levels. That finally ended for Republicans with the Gingrich Revolution, whose aftereffects we’re still dealing with. I can only hope Democrats figure out how to come up with our version of that, like, soon.
Tommy
@shortstop:
Yes. I am not an expert on Duckworth’s politics. But I do follow her a little and as an Illinois resident I don’t think Kirk wants any part of her.
One of the reasons Ruiner and Kirk can win in what is considered a blue state, my experience, voters in this state are suckers for successful, rich white dudes.
Kylroy
@gf120581: “Johnson doesn’t even try.”
Without any further explanation, I think this sums up Johnson’s tenure in the senate.
Calouste
@Cacti: Kamala Harris is the next, new-on-the-block, high profile Democrat in California, but she is already 50. As a random comparison, David Cameron is younger than her.
Turgidson
@Mandalay:
Agreed. In a presidential year he might have a shot even without Super PAC money, but he’d be stupid to refuse it. You know the Kochtopus will be dumping tens of millions into that race if they think there’s more than a 10% chance they can drag Johnson over the finish line in so doing.
Chris
@askew:
Would also be nice if when we spotted talent, we didn’t have a knee-jerk reaction of “oooooo, let’s get them to the White House!!!” which is what’s irritated me the most about all this “Draft Warren” stuff. There’s more to politics than the presidency.
kindness
Glad Feingold is in. Sure hope he’s a better Democrat than he was last time. Mind you, I don’t expect he will. The Prima Donna is strong in that one.
Turgidson
@Calouste:
I live in CA and was surprised to find out she was that old. She looks younger than 50. She may have risen faster if Boxer and Feinstein hadn’t had a lock on those seats for the last 20+ years and Jerry had retired in 2010 rather than run for gov again (I’m glad he did though. The contemptible Meg Whitman might have had a chance in that election if our candidate had been Gavin Newsom).
In any event, she should win and hold that seat for three or more terms if she wants to. She may have aspirations to get on a national ticket too, who knows.
trollhattan
@Calouste:
True enough. And while she’s perfectly competent in office and was reelected without even putting her shoes on, she’s not a high-profile party leader type. Legions of folks project those qualities upon her, however, and I don’t find that helpful in the overall scheme of things. And with that all out of the way, “Senator Harris” sounds fine to my ears.
kindness
@trollhattan: Kamela Harris? Our next Senator. Gavin Newsome too but I’m not a big fan there. He’s more DiFi than I like in a Democrat.
shortstop
@Tommy: It goes beyond rich, white and male. Illinois has so far rejected all blatant teabaggers for statewide office, and there have been several rich, white, male candidates in that category of late (Brady and Oberweis, to name just two). Rauner and Kirk both ran campaigns in which they posed as moderates — Rauner by simply refusing to answer any in-depth policy questions — and average voters (i.e., non-political junkies) bought it.
Just as Democratic Wisconsinites are nostalgic for their glory days, a lot of Illinoisans still want to think there are Percys and Dixons and even Fitzgeralds still out there. It’s hard for a lot of people to accept the current extent of party polarization.
shortstop
@Chris: THANK YOU! And while we’re at it, can we stop making ludicrous suggestions for SCOTUS?
sharl
@catclub: I think this is right, but I’m expecting a derpalanche of “audiophiles”* to be coming out of the woodwork to provide drearily verbose critiques of the replacement talent.
…..*I’m thinking better dressed versions of The Comic Book Guy, equipped with (so they will claim) top-of-the-line headphones and superior connectivity. Or better yet, they’ll ditch the connectivity and get the DVDs, which will be much superior, maaaan.
I hope this Dark Vision of mine is wrong, but these people are out there, waiting….waiting…
Belafon
@shell: “At least I try to find a way to pay for the stuff I buy.” – Some Democrat needs to reply.
trollhattan
@kindness:
I don’t know anybody who holds Newsome in high regard (including the brother of a buddy who was on his staff in SF) but Gavin seems to believe in his Destiny! So there’s that.
.
And while it’s tempting…practically mandatory to laugh off the California Republicans they have a couple up-and-comers who could spoil a Democratic statewide race or two down the road: Kristin Olsen and Ashley Swearengin.
Kay
@squid:
It’s very much like Strickland versus Portman in Ohio, except Strickland was a governor.
The reason Strickland is polling 9 points ahead of Portman is people have no idea who Portman is. They literally don’t recognize the name :)
I wouldn’t over think it. Unless Johnson has been a big headliner (and he hasn’t) I bet you’ll find a bunch of voters who think Feingold is the incumbent and will happily “re-elect” him :)
Tommy
@Chris: I think many liberals just don’t want to run. Maybe I am wrong here but I think most liberals are honest and fair-minded people.
There is talk about Feingold not taking PAC money. If I ran for office I wouldn’t take any PAC money, which is why I can’t run. I think money in politics is the problem and not the symptom.
I have also made some mistakes in my life. I assume most people have and I got no desire to belittle somebody for their mistakes, nor have somebody dig through my life decades before.
I know what I’d need to do to win an election in 2015. I won’t do those things. I assume there are a lot of liberals that feel the way I do. This is just never said that often.
fidelio
Cole, you were asking about that Kennesaw State student’s video over on Twitter. Here’s a link to what’s up at the the Chronicle of Higher Education website.
So, would you call security on a kid who’d been waiting to get some help from their advisor, or apologize for the wait they had before getting to see you?
boatboy_srq
@shell: I still have trouble with that particular dogwhistle. Where do wingnuts think their roads, schools, SSBNs and other toys come from if not taxes; and conversely how does Gubmint get those things without spending? I realize it translates as “raise our taxes and spend all that and more on Those People” – but honestly this seems like something easily turned around if Dems could be persuaded to own the idea of government collecting taxes and spending the revenues on stuff that’s worthwhile.
Turgidson
@trollhattan:
She’s the closest thing to a Republican I actually kinda-sorta like that I’ve seen in a while. James Fallows has been writing a lot about Fresno’s attempts to revitalize its abandoned downtown, and Swearingen comes off really well in his reporting. She did just lose a statewide race (for Controller, I think) in 2014, but by a narrower margin than the rest, and with little name recognition.
I’d be surprised if she didn’t run for governor in 2018, and if the GOP’s moneybags fund her while letting her run as a moderate, she could beat Newsom. And maybe bring the GOP back into the realm of sanity in so doing. Which might not be the worst thing in the long run. Hell, she’s more supportive of high speed rail than he is.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
That’s more than a bit unfair. There’s always a tendency for incumbents to stick around, which is why you have a bunch of ancients in the highest elected offices. When those four retire, there’s not going to be any shortage of Democrats like Kamala Harris, John Chiang, and Eric Garcetti to replace them. I would argue that one of the few real benefits of legislative term limits is that they create churn further down the ladder, creating a constant stream of people whose main choice if they want to stay in office is to go for something higher up.
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: There’s also the awareness among many Dems that they’re real people with real vulnerabilities (the mortgage debt, the bad investment, the affair 20-odd years ago, the less-than-amicable divorce, the kid with education and/or substance issues, etc) that don’t want to get their names dragged through the muck for four years for Congress or eight years for Senate (counting the campaign and duration of office). There’s plenty of dirty laundry to be had if anyone knows where to look. The MSM does a pretty good job of ignoring these things amongst the GOTea until they’re forced to look; Dems seemingly can’t so much as blow their noses without somebody making a fuss. And Dems don’t necessarily have the “go-to-Gun-Totin’-Capitalist-Jeebus-to-get-out-of-jail-free” gambit: had a Dem pull the stunt(s) Vitter has to keep the Huggies-and-hired-girls mess under wraps, or that Sanford did to get off the Appalachian Tail, they’d have been dogmeat, where Vitter, Sanford et al simply had a weepy moment on camera with their pastors and suddenly all’s forgiven.
askew
@Chris:
Warren isn’t the best example of this since she is way too old to be a new talent. But, that is a problem.
I think a bigger problem is the progressive darlings that get latched on to are almost always white politicians and our young pols are mostly minorities. They always seem to get overlooked for the next promotion and they have a harder time getting press coverage, attention from liberal groups and raising funds in general.
trollhattan
@Turgidson:
IF somebody like Swearengin could force a centrist swing of the California Republican Party I’d welcome it and (grudgingly) accept a couple Rs in statewide office. A tall order of course but they have to be weary of losing every stinking race and the non-insane ones know it’s time to kick the teabaggers off the bus. We’re not far removed from Tim Donnelly nearly winning the governor nomination, so that’s how far they need to pivot.
FlipYrWhig
@boatboy_srq:
92% of “tax and spend” means that. The other 8% means “throws money at problems instead of making Hard Choices about What Works.”
boatboy_srq
@FlipYrWhig: “making Hard Choices about What Works” generally also translates to “Starving/Kicking Those People So They Stop Mooching and Get A Job.” “Hard Choices” aren’t inflicted on their own.
Tommy
@boatboy_srq:
I live in a blue district but a red town. A small rural town of less than 10,000 people. We buy nice stuff for us, but a white town. 98.7% so according to the 2010 Census Report.
I have noted my town built a $60M high school in recent years. We voted in an election for McCain but at the same time to raise our property taxes to tear down a few old buildings on Main Street to build parks. We pay local artist to create artwork for said parks.
When I say the above people tell me white people like to give white people nice things. I used to think that was wrong, but I have come to think I was in fact wrong.
FlipYrWhig
@askew: I think the bigger problem is that Republicans have a darling-making industry that hypes its newcomers, and Democrats don’t really like to do that–apart from that whole Obama ’04-’08 thing, which was partly why that became so electric.
askew
@kindness:
Newsom is slimy. Isn’t Loretta Sanchez going to run for Senate/Governor? I can never remember which Sanchez sister is the one who said some horribly racist things in her last race.
Hilda Solis is another rising star in California.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
I hope he knows Obama won’t be there to fight with any more.
FlipYrWhig
@boatboy_srq: Agreed, but I still think part of why “tax and spend” has rhetorical force is that it’s also supposed to stand for “easy politics”: “they don’t REALLY want to get serious, they just want to pretend to be doing stuff.” But of course “FOR THOSE PEOPLE NOT YOU AND ME AMIRITE” is the primary not-quite-subtext of everything contemporary Republicans do.
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: Elsewhere, that’s the same impetus that puts people in communities with HOA fees that exceed their mortgages and HOA bylaws that dictate their living conditions (practically down to the brand of taupe interior paint and the thread count of the West Point Stevens upholstery on the Broyhill furniture) who will scream bloody murder about Big Gummint when somebody puts up a single speed limit sign on the road outside the gate and whinge about Takers when they get their comparatively-minuscule property tax bill.
KithKanan
@boatboy_srq: I REALLY don’t get that. Compared to the services provided for the property taxes in non-HOA communities around here, the lcoal HOA fees seem like highway robbery for what they provide.
boatboy_srq
@FlipYrWhig: Exactly why 60-odd votes to revoke the ACA, 50-odd votes to grant citizenship/voting rights to foeti, etc all while not once touching an actual workable budget and leaning on Simpson-Bowles for the heavy lifting should be held up as the GOTea “Pretending To Be Doing Stuff Shuffle”.
askew
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s a great point. All we have is MSNBC and now that Olbermann is gone the only people getting face time as Dems on that channel are people like Brown or Warren who are old and aren’t going anywhere. Olbermann was a douchebag behind-the-scenes but at least he brought in a variety of voices. I can’t remember the last time MSNBC spent time with a Dem minority. But, that’s because white progressives don’t seem to acknowledge non-white progressive voices a lot of the time.
Olbermann was the one driving positive Obama coverage on MSNBC in 2007-08, but he still didn’t get 1/2 the coverage Hillary got until he won Iowa.
Tommy
@boatboy_srq: Exactly. Vitter and Sanford are perfect examples. I have never been to a prostitute. I also would never, never, never cheat on my wife (if I was married). I’d get a divorce.
But I have done things in my life I assume would make for a terrible attack ad.
Heck this is something my father mentions. He is often asked to run for office. I think he could win his House seat going away.
He refuses. Says he doesn’t want people pouring through his personal life. You’d think he had a PhD. Worked for the DoD for 30+ years. Top Secret security clearance. His policy statements. That might count for something.
But they would find something to attack him on.
boatboy_srq
@KithKanan: IS. No “seems like” about it. But because it’s The Price You Pay For Living [Here]”, and because it isn’t GUMMINT charging the fees, apparently it’s all hunky-dory because they chose to live there and pay it. Freedumb!
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: As I’ve mentioned before, my Draft Warren friends have all gone over to Bernie Sanders now, and they’re not just considering voting for him as a symbolic effort (which I may well do myself). They seriously think Bernie Sanders can be President, to the point where they’re going to be dealing with serious disappointment and possible abstention/third-party votes if he’s not the Democratic nominee.
I have to remind myself that liberals on this level (which is my level, really, I just have what I think is a clearer-eyed view of the electoral situation) are really a smallish minority even within the Democratic Party. What worries me is that in between being a smallish minority and being a majority, there’s the zone mirroring the Tea Party in which liberals get strong liberals nominated but can’t get them elected.
Mandalay
@askew:
This x1000. A narcissistic fraud of the first order.
FlipYrWhig
@askew: There’s a small presence of younger black women in the Liberal Media. I’ve seen Donna Edwards, Nina Turner, and even (pre-Freddie) Stephanie Rawlings-Blake a fair amount on MSNBC.
boatboy_srq
@FlipYrWhig: Doesn’t this speak directly to what L3tBulb was saying yesterday? There’s no point in complaining that The People Aren’t Being Educated About Their Options if the one part of the MSM that isn’t quivering in recently-neutered terror of the Powers That Be is going Full Metal Wingnut on anything left of Fascism. Unless we can convince Branson or Geffen or somebody to dump a few billion into a news network to offset sNoozecorp, there’s not a lot to be done here.
Turgidson
@trollhattan:
Indeed. By 2018, maybe the knuckledraggers who have prevented the state GOP from evolving over the past decade in particular will be tired enough of losing to let a rising star try something new. But they’re an awfully stubborn, stupid bunch.
Mandalay
@boatboy_srq:
And here’s another example from today: the Republican speaker in Missouri, John Diel accepts “full responsibility” for sending dirty texts to an 18 year old intern, and looking for sexy fun time, but hasn’t resigned. And his colleagues are backing him:
The phrase “accepting responsibility” has now come to mean “There is clear evidence that I did wrong so I am not going to deny it”.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
Nina Turner is recognized as really talented in Ohio. She didn’t have any interest in the Senate run:
I guarantee you’ll see her out with Clinton a lot in ’16, talking voting rights.
Turgidson
@askew:
Big fan of Solis, but amazingly she’s 57 years old – she had a long career in state politics before moving on to the House and then Sec. of Labor. I’d love it if she was our 2018 candidate for governor and not the Gav, though.
Tommy
@boatboy_srq: We tax people where I live. I got no concept of a HOA outside of moving back to rural IL after living in DC.
I could go on and on about my city. I have a freaking fiber optics backbone. We are going to court with Verizon and Frontier because we want to offer fiber direct into every house.
Know what we pay in taxes? The less in the entire county. You can run a city effectively and not raise taxes.
FlipYrWhig
@boatboy_srq: I’m not even sure that would work, though. Fox’s genius, and the genius of talk radio before them, is that the right is an audience eager to be re-brainwashed. I don’t know if the left wants to be told its just-so stories day after day after day after day. There’s just not the same compulsion to chest-beat and (re)affirm.
Mandalay
@boatboy_srq:
I don’t know about Geffen, but Branson is a slick con artist with a brilliant PR team. He is neither a cool guy nor a progressive. He’s all about milking money from wherever he can, just as much as anyone on Wall Street.
samiam
“Let’s see if voters have buyers remorse over Ron Johnson.”
As usual, nothing but fail sauce from Cole.
Nothing to do with buyers remorse. The people who voted Republican before will do it again. It’s all about voter apathy. In a presidential election year it is not as much of a problem for Democrats and Feingold knows this. I’ll be willing to bet that Johnson will get more or less the same number of votes as he did in 2010. The difference will be that there will be more voters.
askew
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s true. It’s just less often than Brown or Warren and they don’t get nearly the attention that Brown/Warren do on blogs. It gets frustrating.
Matt McIrvin
@FlipYrWhig: Liberals who want to be retold their just-so stories get that mostly from blogs and social media.
But the other thing about the Fox News audience is that they are ideally positioned to vote. Many of them are retirees, the most diligent voters in the world. A truly liberal news network would probably try to play to a liberal audience, who are younger people and don’t watch TV news anyway. And they don’t vote, except to some extent in presidential elections.
FlipYrWhig
@Matt McIrvin: Yup.
boatboy_srq
@FlipYrWhig: That assumes that a libprog network would reach only the converted. Murdoch’s genius was at least as much the reach into exurban and rural markets as it was the adventure in infotainment: that is what needs to be replicated – and in those markets the approach you mention will at least give Fauxnews watchers/listeners an alternative. Progressive audiences are already up on the cable/Internet markets (how many of us are content with CPB-sourced stuff?), so it’s not as if we haven’t identified our own means of staying informed; Conservatist audiences aren’t going past the power button for the TV-and-cable-box, which is where we need to be to get our message out.
@Tommy: Wingnuts don’t get that. And wingnuts are too wedded to the idea of wealth=Righteous that spending money – even spending money they don’t actually have – is good because it implies their Good Righteous Xtians. Put those two together and they’ll submit to whatever fees communities charge and whatever rules communities set just to be among the Right Kind Of People. I’ve seen community bylaws that go into the types and colors for window treatments, the exact Pantone numbers for the exterior paint, the height of the (mandatory, lush and green) grass on the front lawn and the type and size of the numbers on the equally-defined mailbox. Fees for places like that go to thousands per month, just for the privilege of being told what your house should look like. Of course the costs for these things aren’t accounted, and nobody talks about the water bill required to keep the lawn its regulation length and shade, but those hidden costs add up too.
boatboy_srq
@Mandalay: Geffen is no different. But both of them are willing to say “sustainability” and “ecology” and “conservation” and the like in public without tying it to “stupid” or “soshulist” or some other Reichwing epithet. So long as the message gets out there do we really care whether the source is One Of Us? Or are we requiring purity tests from the folks spending the cash to get our message out? If the latter, it’s no wonder nobody wants to run as a Dem: our own purity tests are at least as bad as anything the GOTea would use in a smear campaign.
Mandalay
@Mandalay: Update…After previously refusing to resign:
Creepy doofus.
Roger Moore
@FlipYrWhig:
But somehow the Laffer Curve, which says we’ll actually increase revenues by cutting taxes, so we can eat our cake and still have it, is the height of seriousness. I still want to know how that’s supposed to work.
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
I think a huge reason that HOA fees are OK is because they stay strictly within the association. You know they are only going to benefit nice homeowners like you, not to subsidize Those People.
boatboy_srq
@Roger Moore: My favorite rejoinder to the Reichwing whinge of how “a Democrat looks at $1 in tax revenue and says, ‘What can we do with this $1.75?'” is “A Republican looks at the same $1, looks at the taxpayer and says ‘Next year, I’ll make sure you only pay 50c of this.'”
boatboy_srq
@Roger Moore: No argument. The problem I have is that HOAs strip every last right from a homeowner, just to keep the community appealing according to bylaws that have precious little relationship with the realities of homeownership; yet people willingly submit to them, and pay ridiculous fees, all the while whining about Tyranny-und-Soshulism from the city/state/federal sphere. The disconnect is mindbending.
Mandalay
@boatboy_srq:
In a word, yes. Branson is a jailbird, a tax exile, a slimy con artist, and a sanctimonious hypocrite with a carbon footprint the size of Montana. I don’t want anything to do with him. I wish he’d STFU about green issues and go away. Like Sting, he does more harm than good, however honorable his intentions may be.
Hildebrand
Having Feingold join Baldwin would make the Wisconsin senate delegation pretty darn strong for liberal causes – and she may actual help to temper some of his more purist tendencies (as she tends to be mostly pragmatic about getting stuff done). She also won in 2012 by a nice, healthy 6 pts. against Tommy Thompson, by actually supporting a vigorous liberal agenda – imagine that. If Russ can do that, he should be able to overturn his 2010 defeat to the knave.
boatboy_srq
@Mandalay: Who is out there with enough capital or sufficient credit to build a broadcast network from the ground up who doesn’t have unacceptable baggage? And assuming we could find such a person, what are the odds that person would be drafted to run for POTUS instead?
Mandalay
@boatboy_srq:
On personal level?…nobody. You don’t become a billionaire without acquiring unacceptable baggage, and it looked like that you were singling out Branson and Geffen as good guys compared the rest of possibilities. If not, my apologies.
Regardless, it doesn’t have to be an individual going down that path. For example, Al Jazeera already has the expertise and infrastructure and could expand, though I don’t know about their financial situation.
boatboy_srq
@Mandalay: I was just looking for someone who could be persuaded to fund the antiFauxnews, and those were two names that came to mind. Getting a corporation to take this on is silly: nobody out there in for-profit-land would ever take on Murdoch because there just isn’t money in it, and when you’re answering to the board and the shareholders you’ll go with what sells versus what’s true and ethical. If it worked any other way the Big Three really would be the Librul Media the Reichwing rants about. It will take building a journalism enterprise, but something tells me it’ll have to be an individual (or small group of individuals) behind it, because anything else will only go the route of the older networks. AJ is a Qatar state holding comparable to BBC, CBC or Australia Plus; what we need is something that at least functions as a commercial enterprise rather than a presumed arm of the sponsor state.