This:
…the speaker is torn between his personal feelings about the tape showing Donald Trump discussing grabbing women by the genitals and his desire to preserve the historic GOP majority in the House of Representatives.
My reaction:
A) Profile in Courage.
B) Put his picture in the dictionary next to “Party Before Country”
I have many dreams about this election. One that is very unlikely — but less so than a week ago — is that the GOP loses the House, and Ryan loses his seat.
A boy can dream, can’t he?
Image:Éduoard Manet, The Rabbit, 1866.
.jpeg){kind=link}
ETA: I’ll confess. This post was motivated in part by a desire to use that picture in association with today’s GOP.
RaflW
As I said the other night, his bollocks are in a vice, and it’s tightening. Trump this morning was tweeting aggressively against Ryan. The civil war is on, and frankly, Ryan was part of the machinery that created this mudfight, so if he ends up being a casualty, he’ll have just the reward he deserves.
scav
My new visual is that Trump is the Gop’s Galaxy Note 7.
dmsilev
Does Ryan have a serious (or even vaguely plausible) opponent for his seat? Seeing him get turfed out because the Trumpenvolk petulantly leave his name blank on the ballot would be sweet sweet indeed.
amk
the corrupt granny starver’s only wish was that the video tape didn’t come out just now.
I am all for the racist sexist carnival barker taking down the entire corrupt gopee edifice with him.
Frank Wilhoit
All you need to know about Paul Ryan is that he is out of his depth.
Look at how the Republican Party has selected candidates and promoted internally since Reagan’s time. If you can pass an interview by shooting word salad based on the propaganda, you’re in. So lots of them are out of their depth.
amk
@scav: LOL. Good one.
Major Major Major Major
@Frank Wilhoit: but he’s such a deep thinker! He has graphs!
brendancalling
I for one am enjoying the entire spectacle. Best movie I have ever seen, and the plot just keeps thickening.
I mean, you can’t make this shit up.
A left wing populist uprising. A right wing populist uprising. A REAL Manchurian candidate, a “Face in the Crowd” style tape, Russian hackers, and the potential dissolution of a 160 year old political party.
Did I miss anything?
MattF
@RaflW: And, to be clear, Ryan’s doing this because of his undying commitment to lowering taxes for the wealthy and paying for it by strangling social programs. See Krugman, e.g., for details.
Eric U.
I love what Trump has done to Christie, Cruz, Ryan, and, to a lesser extent, Pence
PaulWartenberg2016
I doubt Ryan can lose his seat – although at this point ANYTHING can happen – but what would be hilarious is him losing the speakership when the House majority flips to the Democrats and he’s left with around 140 seats, which is under 1/3rd of the seats… meaning the Dems have 2/3rds control to PASS AMENDMENTS! (granted, the Dems would have to win every Senate seat as well to hit the 2/3rds mark as well)
He’d have to sit there as one of the weakest party leaders in minority control in Congressional history, and most likely booted from the leadership anyway. Wondering how the hell he fell so fast…
sherparick
One bit of sport is looking at turds like Instapundit, Andrew McCarthy of the NRO, and the various Federalists writers, individuals who have gone on for years about their love of the U.S. Constitution, Limited Government, Separation of Powers, and Obama’s alleged “tyrannical usurpations” as President cheering and defending a candidate who stated that he would bring the full power of the U.S. Government to put his political opponent in jail, along with the media he considered hostile, and that he would just issue laws by decree that the Congress would pass at his demand. An Emperor who will lower the marginal tax rate and eliminate the Capital gains and Estate tax is alright and completely Constitutional in everything he does:
As Richard Nixon said, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Frost: By definition.
Nixon: Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.
Amir Khalid
Paul Ryan wil do what cowards do and choose The Path of Least Pain: he’ll stick with Trump. If Trump wins, the House majority is likely preserved and he, Ryan, escapes punishment. If Trump loses, Trump won’t have the power to punish him anyway.
PaulWartenberg2016
@scav: speaking of, I have a Galaxy S7. is that different from the 7 Note?
JPL
Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell had the opportunity to denounce the wild man months ago, but thought they could control him. Our democracy is at risk because of leaders of the Republicans are cowards.
Amir Khalid
@PaulWartenberg2016:
Yes. The Galaxy S7 is from a different model series and lacks the capability to explode.
sigaba
@Frank Wilhoit:
He never wanted the job in the first place.
MattF
@JPL: Cowards, and apparently ignorant of Politics 101: If you let the thugs in, they will eventually take over. Who doesn’t know this?
WereBear
Seen on the web:
RoonieRoo
For awhile, I’ve fantasized about Ryan losing his seat but now I think I would have more pleasure at him retaining his seat BUT the house flipping and him losing the speakership. I just want him to feel his fall and feel it hard.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
You know who’s been pretty quiet for a while now?
Rand Paul. I think he was regarded as having more weight than a Jindall or Perry or Pataki, while not being a god botherer like Santorum or Cruz. I wonder if he’s thinking 2020…
I think he’s a putz, but is he tied to the Trump Taint in any way?
WereBear
Reminds me of a certain Weimar Republic Chancellor…
comrade scott's agenda of rage
The fact that Ryan has reacted this way wins the Claude Rains Memorial Gambling Awareness Award for the week with a 4 Claude rating.
He and the rest of the “establishment” probably thought that they’d dodged the “completely losing power” bullet as a result of down ticket aftershocks of the Trump Disaster. They thought this because while the Villagers were Gore-ing Clinton, Cheeto Donnie was skating, thus the polls were tightening, thus the Villagers could shout even louder HORSE RACE. That diverted enough attention so that the down ticket races weren’t as affected by what was at the top of the ticket.
That has all changed. The debates helped but everything else? Now that Ryan and the rest see the distinct possibilities of losing power, their tune is a’changin.
sigaba
@PaulWartenberg2016: Ryan’s district is R+3, technically a swing district, Obama won Wisconsin’s Fighting First in 2008, and lost it in 2012 by 5% (which considering it’s Ryan’s home district is remarkable). More northern exurb of Chicago than Wisconsin, very white though, lots of people that visit Chicago and know they don’t want to live there, but still a swing district if the correct Democrat is running. Here’s the man in question, Ryan Solen.
Recall the Trumpers almost got him primaried this spring, and if he had been I’m pretty sure his replacement would have lost.
Miss Bianca
completely o/t, but I took the shop vac to the interior of my car, blew all the road dust out and, mirabile dictu, my CD player is working again! So, who’s listening to “Hunt for Vulcan” right now? Happy Camper, petite moi!
Tom, I really appreciate your ability to explain math-heavy scientific concepts so clearly for the benefit of the practically innumerate among us!
As for Ryan’s ouster and the House flip, from your mouth’s to God’s ear, and may His Noodly Appendage make it so!
Major Major Major Major
@WereBear: Ha! Sent it to my parents :) thanks
Anoniminous
@Amir Khalid:
There’s an app for that.
hovercraft
New Trump AdShows Clinton Coughing, Falling Near 9/11 Memorial.
Go Donald, yes this will win you the election!!
JPL
@MattF: Rubio just came out in support of Trump.
Tonight’s rally is going to be fun.
Seanly
To paraphrase Chief Brody: “We’re gonna need a bigger popcorn bowl.”
Miss Bianca
@brendancalling: I’d be enjoying the spectacle if I were watching it in a movie theater rather than, you know, real life.
Me, I feel like one of the left-wingers in Berlin in 1933 watching their friends say, “wow, that Hitler, what a card! Can you believe anyone takes that little house painter wanna-be *seriously*? Don’t worry, this country will come to its senses – we’d never elect *him*!”
But maybe that’s because I’m just about to roll up my sleeves and plunge into that new biography of Hitler.
MattF
@hovercraft: Yes, people with pneumonia sometimes cough. But that is not a valid reason to vote for Donald Trump.
Betty Cracker
Rebecca Traister, who has been absolutely terrific at deconstructing the layers of misogyny underlying this election season, has a fantastic column up right now at NY Mag in which she argues that Ryan, Pence, et al, are just as noxious as Trump. An excerpt:
Worth a read, the whole thing is…
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
Interesting tweets regarding this very situation. The Republicans running down ticket are seriously screwed. Read ’em and laugh.
Link
the Conster, la Citoyenne
All of us women and people of color watching what’s supposed to be the apotheosis of white male superiority – the Republican party – have a collective psychotic break and subsequent nuclear meltdown because they had one challenge to their god-given authority – Barack Obama’s presidency – realize how fragile and frail and mediocre and insecure all these pathetic little white men really are. It’s not a good look Republicans, and now you’re going to wear it like a Cersei walk of shame. How does that feel?
Miss Bianca
@sigaba: My God, there’s a candidate in that race who’s calling himself a “Trump Conservative”? As in, “Trump Conservative Party”? OK, we have seen the new Monster Raving Loony Party. Unfortunately, it won’t be nearly as funny or as harmless as Monty Python’s version.
James E Powell
I’m reading a poll that shows Johnson up 5 points over Feingold. What’s the matter with Wisconsin?
hovercraft
@sigaba:
Only because he knew his caucus was crazy, and he thought it would hurt his chances of running for president one day. Having the psychosis of this House on his resume is not a good thing.
shomi
I’m sure Mr. deep thinker is asking himself “what would Ayn Rand do”.
Barbara
@brendancalling: One part of the spectacle I am not enjoying is the Russian interference. I don’t like it, it frightens me.
hovercraft
@MattF:
She has Parkinson’s and she is dying, so you must vote for Trump. I guess Tim Kaine doesn’t count for anything?
scav
Different front on Conservative Family Values, Government control, show us your long-form birth certificate and thinking things through: (WaPo) Louisiana isn’t letting immigrants get married.
LA: Where marriage should only be for white, heterosexual xians, fuck the rest of all y’all, ya sinners.
Anoniminous
PEC’s Electoral Vote Histogram’s has probability distribution of Clinton winning between 280 and 370 Electoral Votes and no chance of Trump getting to 270.
I believe the Senate will flip but I admit there’s damn all polling evidence for it.
Nothing about the House. Anecdotal evidence various GOP Representatives are in trouble & that’s it.
FlipYrWhig
@James E Powell: The Democrats should have nominated a true progressive to excite the base! I hear that’s a foolproof strategy.
MCA1
@scav: Nice!
My preferred analogy frame for the GOP’s 2016 is Ghostbusters. The rabid white resentment base is Zuul (aided and abetted by the gatekeeper and key master, Kellyanne and Bannon). Trump is the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (Reince was thinking about The Apprentice when the base told him to choose their doom), and Ryan, McConnell, Priebus and Hannity think they’re the Ghostbusters. Their only problem is that, since none of them believe in science, instead of proton packs their weapon of choice is foam #1 fingers.
Barbara
@JPL: Actually, coward is too kind. The right word is craven: having or showing a complete lack of courage: very cowardly. The only thing lacking in “craven” is the component of greed or opportunism that permeates every breath they take.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Betty Cracker:
Remember, establishment Republicans aren’t offended by the substance of Trump’s positions, rather that he expresses them so baldly.
GOP policy toward women has always been barefoot, pregnant, chained to the bed with just enough length in the chain to get to the kitchen.
In many ways, Cheeto Donnie’s been a godsend since he’s peeled away the dog whistle layer covering the GOP for all to see despite Villager attempts to portray it otherwise.
gogol's wife
@Betty Cracker:
Excellent.
sigaba
@Miss Bianca: Oh wow, I didn’t notice that.
I’m not that surprised, again I see a parallel with California’s Republican implosion. A lot of upstate conservatives in the San Joaquin don’t consistently vote Republican, they’ll split their vote for various Conservative Party candidates, and candidates from other self-styled conservative movements. When you drive up to Yosemite at the right time of year you see a lot of yellow campaign signs, candidates use this color to distinguish themselves (it’s a Gold Standard reference).
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Unless your last name is Schlafly or Coulter. They decide who’s a woman.
NotMax
@RaflW
Trump currently has cornered the market on vice.
Ryan’s ‘nads are in a vise.
? Martin
So my hypothesis the other day was that Clinton was going to try and keep Trump alive so he could rally his base and then hang them on downballot races.
Yesterday and today we have Trump turning on Republicans who have abandoned him, and DCCC has polling showing that cutting ties with Trump doesn’t save them – it’s too late.
So with downtickets unable to distance from Trump out of fear Trump will turn on them, and it being a pointless exercise anyway, they can start to open the oppo floodgates. They may wait until the 17th to ensure Trump comes to debate #3, but it’ll be all-in after then. Priorities USA is looking to move into Senate races, Clinton has an ad up targeting Mormons trying to peel off Utah and Arizona.
This is just a complete dismantling of the GOP – constantly giving them enough rope to hang them by, and then hanging them, and repeating over and over. This is serious hardball politics being played. It’s not slimy like the Max Cleland stuff – it’s calculating and just utterly unforgiving of error.
Botsplainer
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
He’s not tied to it, but he may actually be dumber than Trump. Head to head against someone like Sandoval or Huntsman, he gets destroyed.
piratedan
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: …
just something to remind me that not all of the folks that followed people with R’s behind their name were unreachable…
here’s this feed:
Conservative Woman
mr_gravity
@Anoniminous: How much extra for the pyrotechnics?
Asking for a friend.
RaflW
@Frank Wilhoit:
Yup. Though even Yurtle, over in the senate, is having a bit of a bother, from what I hear. And he’s a very experienced (though not terribly intelligent) snake in the grass.
Schadenfreude, its whats for dinner.
tsquared2001
Motherfucking Donny tweeted that the “shackles” are off him.
That white male privileged motherfucker has me about ready to stroke the fuck out.
This election can’t end soon enough for me.
gogol's wife
@tsquared2001:
He’s a regular Nat Turner.
? Martin
@tsquared2001: Cheer up, Trump is going to spend as much energy going after Ryan and the rest of the GOP as Clinton. The shackles were the RNC trying to keep him in line in exchange for financial support. Now that Trump feels betrayed, he’ll try and take them out as well.
catclub
@MattF:
People get over pneumonia. Not so getting over Donald Trump as president.
Punchy
And he wears his hat backwards!
trnc
Too late for “You broke it, you bought it?”
hovercraft
@Betty Cracker: Excellent read.
This part bugs me:
She will not get the credit she deserves for winning, the media will put an asterisk next to her name. They will claim she only won because Trump was such a loser. The only way to avoid that is to GOTV so they can’t say she barely scraped out a victory against a psychopath.
trnc
@Barbara: Spot on.
hovercraft
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
Life is so unfair!
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@piratedan:
Does she actually come out and say somewhere how she’ll vote? Or will she simply go the Embarrassed Republican route and vote glibertarian? Either way, it’s a win for us.
catclub
@Miss Bianca: I did not look. Is that the Louisiana Senate primary?
SenyorDave
I’m starting to view Ryan, McConnell and others who refuse to TOTALLY repudiate Trump as I would view Nazi collaborators. These people don’t give a damn about this country. They can all DIAF as far as I am concerned. And where are the elder statesmen of the party? At this point they should be front and center laying into Trump.
? Martin
@Amir Khalid: Ryan is in an R+3 district. It’s hardly a safe district. Now, being Speaker means that he’ll naturally pick up a lot of additional support, but it also means that a concerted effort by the Dems could make him have to fight hard to keep that seat.
tsquared2001
@gogol’s wife: OMG – it was bitter laughter but laughter nonetheless.
trnc
@piratedan: Holy Frijole!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
OT: Dear Babby Jeebus
If you tell the Great Pumpkin to bring me this one thing, I promise not to ask Santa Clause for anything, and to clean my room, and be nice to my little brother, and….
Face
Maybe others have noted above (didnt read whole thread), there’s no way you’d get 75% of the states to agree to anything. No chance. At all. I suspect we’ll never have another amendment passed ever. Just too polarized a country.
Miss Bianca
@piratedan: Yeah, another one comes to her senses! Huzzah!
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@hovercraft:
This. The Villagers have been peddling this crap from Day One: “lesser of two evils”, “if she were up against Rubio/Cruz/Jeb!/etc., she’d be losing”, blah, blah, blah. They’re not gonna give up on their cherished electoral plot line no matter what. And if Clinton doesn’t get 50.000001% of the popular vote, they’ll make endless comparisons to Bill’s 92 election, make the usual sweeping pronouncements “she doesn’t have a mandate”., etc.
It’ll be deja vu all over again.
? Martin
@hovercraft: I think the media are rethinking their role in covering elections. I’m not saying you are wrong, but look at the endorsement by Foreign Policy:
I don’t see an asterisk there.
trnc
@hovercraft: I’ve said the same thing, but it may not matter much if she manages to at least get a compliant senate. If she can get the house, too, and push forward, it won’t matter how much screaming there is from outraged journalists/deplorables/deplorable journalists.
hovercraft
@scav:
This is the problem with total republican control, Texas was refusing to issue Birth Certificates to the kids of parents who could produce “proper documentation” of their immigration status a couple of years ago. I think it was resolved by the courts, that pesky little 14 amendment thingy.
Miss Bianca
@catclub: Paul Ryan’s district in WI
joel hanes
@brendancalling:
Did I miss anything?
The biggest gender gap in any national election since women got the vote.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I keep seeing Republicans say “any of the other primary candidates would’ve crushed her”. To say nothing of the fact that against Jebbie!, Li’l Marco, Walker or even (especially) St Kasich, we’d be talking about tax cuts and Social Security and I still think she would win, I want one MSMbot to just say “Really? Rick Santorum? Carly Fiorina? Gilmore? Pataki? Carson….”
The Moar You Know
Ryan can save his seat, but not the speakership. And the only way he can do it is to resign now and pull a Ben Sasse (the Ted Cruz of the House, an utterly smug, repugnant human being and legislator, who in no way deserves the lauds of the press that he’s been getting the last week) by publicly disavowing Trump.
Boehner knew it was better to jump than be pushed. I don’t think Ryan as nearly as smart as Boehner was.
BR
@? Martin:
I’m not as confident as you are that they are really driving this. Maybe they are playing off of what’s going on out there, which is good to see, but I really don’t think they have this all planned out and are in complete control of the oppo flow.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@? Martin:
As a decades-long reader of FP, I know where they’re coming from. But, nobody outside of foreign policy wonks know about or care about the publication. I bet at least 75% of the Villagers have a) never heard of it, and b) those that do will dismiss it as having any real impact on the media narrative of the election and its outcome.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Botsplainer:
Oh, I sure don’t think he’s a theoretical physicist (can’t go with brain surgeon anymore since sleepy Ben Carson).
But the GOP digs/dug Palin, Bachmann, Paladino, Walker, etc. They like their knives dull and rusty.
JPL
@Barbara: Craven is a better word. The Republican controlled Senate already embarrassed themselves when they decided not to advise and consent on the President’s nominee for the Court. Now they are buckling down, determined to get Trump in office. They would rather have a mad man, within reach of the nuclear button.
Yesterday I was depressed, now I’m just pissed.
rdldot
@? Martin: agree with the hardball politics. I have never understood the Clinton hatred of the GOP but I finally decided that they hated them because the Clintons beat the GOP at their own game – playing rough to win. I don’t think the Clintons pull out the really trashy stuff like the GOP but they understand how politics is played.
Patricia Kayden
@RaflW:
What a polite, British way to describe Ryan’s torment. I hope the vice tightens and results in his ouster from House Leader. Would love to see Ms. Pelosi retake her position as House Leader next January.
tsquared2001
@? Martin: I’d expect that Donny loves shackles as long as he remembers his safe word.
BUT – pretend Richie Rich using “shackles” to describe his predicament offends me to no end. My people were literally shackled and that motherfucker needs to step the fuck off with that bullshit.
hovercraft
@Anoniminous:
Steve Schmidt and other GOP strategists were saying Sunday that the internal polling of many supposedly ‘safe’ congresscritters took a precipitous nosedive in the last week. That was before the tape, and before the adoption of the scorched earth campaign began. Remember the democrats are now beginning to blanket the nation with Ads tying every republican to the orange shitgibbon. Charlie Cook said yesterday that a Hillary lead of 7 Nationally is the tipping point for the House to flip. With the Trumpsters now vowing to punish the traitors, this will only get worse. The generic lead the dems now have 49 to 42 is the largest since the 2013 shutdown.
Shell
Love how one o f the GOPs attack lines is that a Hillary win is just another four years of Obama. Meanwhile , Obamas approval ratings are the highest yet. And theres a really strong feeling , that if he could run for a third term, he might get it!
Punchy
You’re fooling yourself if you’re implying the reverse, that a >50% of the vote will cause them to admit she has “a mandate”. Sans winning all 50 states, she “wont have a mandate”. In fact, she could win all 50, plus Canada and Mexico, and take 3/5ths of Fiji, and she wont have a mandate, per the GOP.
And CNN and MSNBC will gleefully report it as such.
shomi
@Barbara: So you are enjoying it because it frightens you?
Doom porn addict confirmed.
shomi
@Patricia Kayden: Not gonna happen. Even the Senate is in question but at least that is doable.
Schlemazel
@PaulWartenberg2016:
Yes the S is a different beast with not flame features of the Note
Schlemazel
@PaulWartenberg2016:
Yes the S is a different beast with no flame features of the Note
hovercraft
@tsquared2001:
Him and his ilk are the same people who believe they are the most oppressed in the country. All the rights and priviliges that have been give to the blacks, women, the gays, and hispanics have pushed whites down below them. They believe that the mens rights movement have legitimate gripes, I mean it used to be no big deal to steal a kiss or a grope, now it’s like you know a federal crime for God’s sake!
The National leaders were constantly telling him to keep it kosher, now he gets to call it like it is, everything is on the table. All the stuff that was only on the real news sites, Infowars, Alex Jones will be used against Hillary.
Wolverines !!
? Martin
@BR: The timing of events leading into and out of debates is unbelievably coincidental. Clinton mentions in debate #1 that Trump may have not paid any federal tax for years, and a few days later his returns drop providing some evidence of exactly that. People complained that Clinton let some easy stuff slide in debate #2 – and she did. She left the red meat/conspiracy stuff for the base slide to energize Trumps voters, and she refuted the stuff that independent voters might know/care about. She’ll never get the former group, but they are rightly calculating that the Trump base are more damaging to other Republicans than they are to Clinton, so she’s building them up. She refutes the stuff that voters she thinks she can reach will hear and she’s peeling them off.
Instead of hitting Trump directly with the tape stuff, as she would have done in debate #1, she spoke to women in society broadly, and let Trump attack her personally. That was calculated. That was a different tactic than before. That excited Trumps base and disgusted almost everyone else. She’s driving a wedge between the Trump supporters and the less authoritarian-minded conservatives and independents. Look at LePage today: “We Need A Donald Trump To Show Some Authoritarian Power” – I mean, holy fuck. Clinton had polling that showed that about 10% of LVs – men in Trumps base were more approving of Trump when they heard the tape. That group becomes an advantage for Clinton – she wants them empowered. She wants them defending sexual assault. This is a very similar set of tactics that McCaskell used with Todd Akin. Except in Clinton’s case she has a fucking mountain of oppo on Trump to back up the strategy – make it nearly foolproof. She knows that a decent number of Trumps supporters will run to his defense for any horrible thing he does, so she teases that out, lets them defend it, and then hits us with a worse illustration of it, forcing them to defend that as well (Mechado -> ET tape). It’s a deplorable ratchet that they are powerless to reverse on.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@trnc:
Found out that she’s still unreachable, just voting glibertarian. That means she’s simply an Embarrassed Republican. Screw her.
Miss Bianca
@shomi: where did she say she was enjoying it? She said she *wasn’t* enjoying it.
Is it too much to ask for that we get trolls who can read?
Schlemazel
@Barbara:
Let’s not argue, why not both?
Craven cowered works just fine!
? Martin
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I agree, however FP is still part of the media. Tavis was raging about how complicit the media has been in all of this (himself included). We’re seeing increased attention being paid to how nobody is talking to Clinton supporters to see if they really are excited about their candidate – trying to break the ‘nobody likes her’ myth. We’re seeing increased attention being paid to Clinton’s approvals when she’s in office and how she is really liked when she’s in office, it’s only during campaigns that her approval drops (hmm, wonder why…)
I agree that the media has done a terrible job up to now, but I’m seeing some evidence of that turning. Clinton is pushing 50% in several polls now, even with 3rd parties included. Once you are pulling majority support, even with someone like Trump in the race, you have to explore whether voters really hate her or not and we’ll start to see those stories done.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
I just got a call from Ivanka!
? Martin
@PaulWartenberg2016: Yes. There’s no evidence there are any problems with the Galaxy 7 or with any other Samsung phones. Only the Galaxy Note 7 is problematic.
Barbara
@shomi: I was going to clarify and then I saw it was you. No need.
dmsilev
I don’t know if anyone’s linked to it yet, but the NYT Magazine just posted a long inside the Clinton campaign story, mostly a-day-in-the-life-of, but at the end, we see that Hillary is well aware of her role as that last person standing in the zombie film and has picked up the chainsaw and is ready to go:
hovercraft
@? Martin:
FP so far has been the exception, theirs was an actual endorsement. So many of the others have been along the lines of we’re only endorsing you because he’s terrible and dangerous. Too many in the media hat her too much to give her any credit for her accomplishments. I think it’s a combination of CDS and that they want someone new and exciting, so they say. I say BS, Paul Ryan has been in Washington for years, he’s a very boring Speaker, Mike Pence is stupid and boring, where is the excitement ? They just don’t like her.
Remember when Obama came in after a few months they started carping about him blaming the economy on Bush, wanting him to take responsibility for it’s sluggishness.They want change, always change. If the media had their way we would have a presidential election every two years.
Hillary bores them because all she wants to talk about is policy, and since they have only the most superficial knowledge of policy they don’t. FP agree or disagree with them is a serious magazine with deep knowledge of their area of focus, so for them knowledge and wonkiness is an attribute not a hindrance. For the rest of them it’s like getting homework for your summer vacation.
Anoniminous
@hovercraft:
I know people are saying that and it makes sense given the objective conditions but there’s no evidence for it as of October 11, 2016. The key demographic that needs to shift for a Wave Election to happen is white women who were ~36% of all voters (~ 44 million) and went GOP by 56% in 2012. Clinton has been estimated (Brookings Institute) to have shifted ~5 million R-to-D which is great on the Presidential and State Level races, e.g. Senate races, but how that transfers to House races is unknowable without some numbers to gnaw on.
tsquared2001
@hovercraft: It is ALWAYS a zero sum game to the GOP.
Jelani Cobb is on twitter storm re: the lack of what used to be called civics class, where one was taught the basic norms of the democracy of the United States. Of all the sins of the media are committing, the normalization of the unprecedented GOP obstruction and beliefs are just as valid as facts ethos is a sin that will bite us on the ass eventually.
Wolverines!
FlipYrWhig
@Patricia Kayden: Except that the tool is a “vise.” Although I suppose Trump’s tool is rife with “vice” too.
JPL
Someone needs to ask Paul Ryan if he lets his children watch Trump’s rallies. Here’s clip from last night.. link
CNN addressed this earlier, because of fears about their reporters.
Fair Economist
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
It doesn’t matter. “Mandate” talk means nothing. What did Obama get for his clear mandate? Diddly and squat. What counts is votes in the Congress. If the Democrats get a majority of more than 5-10 seats in the House, she’ll have a smashingly successful presidency no matter what the villagers say about mandates. If we don’t get the House, she’ll have a holding action Presidency, although we’ll at least get the Court. It’s that simple.
shomi
@Barbara: On Ball Juice I can call some people idiots and not even read half their posts and still be right most the time. I think that person has said a lot of stupid stuff so I just assumed it was more the same with them.
I need a litmus test for you. How big a factor do you feel AL GORE’s 2000 loss is in this election?
Anoniminous
NO! MANDATE! is the post-election equivalent of HORSE! RACE!
Infotainment Mediums are the nation’s storehouse and reserve of semi-articulate puerile cretins.
jenn
Ugh. The media sucks. Evidently one of the Podesta emails talks about how Clinton doesn’t like the phrase “every day Americans.” However, because it’s an internal brainstorming email not an official memo, it’s inartfully phrased. Given the context of the email, it’s entirely obvious that they’re talking about the phrase; however, the media (and now conservative media) is running with the “Hillary hates every day Americans” theme.
They suck. It’s all about ratings and pageviews, with only a few actually concerned with informing the public.
Calouste
Miss Bianca
@Calouste: That dipshit. What else is there to talk about, Yertle? How can even you possibly pretend that there is anything else to talk about?
Would love it if everyone left the room and left him standing there with his reptilian jowls all a-quiver.
Felonius Monk
@SenyorDave:
Vichy republicans?
psycholinguist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I wondered this in the previous thread, but I’m curious if people believe McCain carries enough weight, (if that’s what’s needed) to be the one to end Trump, something akin to McCarthy’s “Have you no sense of Decency Sir?” moment. Or maybe the video already accomplished that and we’re just hearing the death rattle now.
SenyorDave
@Felonius Monk: Vichy republicans?
I considered that (I was youtubing recently and watched the “round up the usual suspects” scene), but most people these days don’t know what the Vichy connotation is.
debit
@Calouste: Hmmm. I wonder if anyone will ask him why he doesn’t want to talk about his party’s nominee. Ah, who am I kidding? The press will meekly go along with it.
Aimai
@? Martin: The Deplorable Ratchet was my favorite Lemoney Snicket book.
hovercraft
@Shell:
Every time I hear Trump and his GOP minions say Hillary is just another four years of Obama. I say yes keep saying that. I can’t remember where I read or heard someone say that the Right Track Wrong Track numbers which have been terrible for years now is no longer just a reflection of how the president is performing. It includes the performance of the congress, which has been mired at historic lows for years, and also wages that have been stagnant for decades now. The media and the GOP have been lulled into a sense of complacency by their mid-term wins, never bothering to ask why they only win in low turnout elections. The fact that the higher the turnout the lower your prospects of success, should tell you are on the wrong track, but the GOP have only understood that they need to reduce the number of people voting. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are what’s winning them elections not the popularity of their positions. This is and will always be a short term solution to their problems. Perhaps the reckoning is beginning. One can only hope.
? Martin
@hovercraft: FP hasn’t really been the exception. Yes, it’s hard for her superlatives to stand out against criticisms against Trump. I could not think of enough good things to say about Michelle Obama that would match the volume of shit I could deal on Trump. That’s just who he is, but the vast majority of endorsements that I read carried a similar refrain – she is incredibly qualified for this job, she is thoughtful and hard working and fully deserving to be elected. Yes, there’s no sense that she will be transformative, because that’s not how she sells herself, but I think in may ways she will prove to be transformative. She has a very different way of thinking about the Presidency. I think that will show through.
But if Trump is apocalyptic, it’s impossible to raise Clinton up to the level of Washington or Lincoln in an endorsement for it to seem ‘balanced’.
Amir Khalid
@dmsilev:
That’s no exaggeration. Hillary is the last thing standing between the world and the Trumpendämmerung.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Can you report starbursts?
NickM
Politico reported that 10% of Republicans polled said they felt MORE favorably about Trump after hearing the Access Hollywood tape. Which means by my estimation that the Republican pro-sexual assault caucus is a larger constituency Trump’s African American, Jewish and Latinx supporters combined.
hovercraft
Carol Costello of CNN cuts off Katrina Pierson, says the conversation is going nowhere.
Katrina was trying to blame democrats and Hollywood for Trump’s puzzy comments.
Maybe our media is learning, and won’t let the Trumpsters just spout nonsense. Maybe?
Comrade Scrutinizer
@The Moar You Know:
Ouch!
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Miss Bianca: science question… Reptilian or amphibian?
Hal
@Miss Bianca: Yeah. They should have all got up and left him there. There is nothing else to talk about.
Shell
@Calouste: “What? Discuss our partys nominee, four weeks from the election? Mercy me, whoever heard of such a thing!”
BR
@? Martin:
I’ll give you that her debate strategy makes a lot of sense. I just meant that I don’t think the campaign is in control of the flow of damaging oppo research, like the Trump tape that came out on Friday. It sounds like NBC itself was digging around in its archives and found it, and someone there leaked it to WaPo when NBC execs were dragging their heels.
Maybe there will be more things like that, but I don’t know if it’s the Clinton campaign doing it or just media outlets finally letting out what they know.
Immanentize
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Was she pushing her new design collection of pu$$y bow blouses? Or did she just want money for her dad?
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
Ah, looked it up. Turtles are reptiles. And so is McConnell.
local observer
@? Martin: i love the deplorable ratchet….it’s analogous to Muller’s ratchet in evolution – whereby an asexual organism accumulates deleterious mutations irreversibly with ever declining fitness
hovercraft
@? Martin:
They pointed out that the candidate with more people voting for the candidate than against the other candidate almost always wins.
RaflW
@hovercraft: It’s like the entire campaign is being run by the absolute worst, nastiest click in the middle school cafeteria.
All these leaders in the GOP have no sense of shame, clearly. They won’t stop this tweener endless rampage of stupid.
hovercraft
@Anoniminous:
According to Charlie Cook, in 2006, 2010, and 2014, the wave didn’t show in the numbers till the last three weeks. But what they are seeing already is scaring the crap out of the GOP. It may be wishful thinking at this point since there are no public polls showing this. The media will not spend the money to poll congressional races, so we have to go with what the scutlebutt tells us. So yes no data, but fingers crossed.
hovercraft
@Calouste:
Aww poor baby.
RaflW
Mostly off topic, but I’ll toss this in since Ryan is a big showy Catholic (who’s been rebuked for his poverty-shaming and granny starving).
Pope Francis has released the newest list of Cardinals. He is shaking things up. He is moving out of the Euro-centrism of millennia. And, “all three new U.S. cardinals, for example, have been strong supporters of Francis’ efforts to make the church more pastorally flexible so as to better include gay Catholics.” He is working to remake the Church.
Yes, I know, the Catholic church is still has a lot of problems. But he is the most progressive Pope in a looooong time. I actually think, on a purely political level since the Papacy is of course that, he is an indicator that large institutions can shift and be changed. They’ve gone from Ratzinger to this man in mere years.
May we be so blessed in our domestic politics!
sigaba
North Carolina Democratic early voting ballots are up slightly this year. Republican early voting is DOWN BY HALF.
gvg
@Betty Cracker: I disagreed with the view that it was belittling women for men to denounce Trump by stating they had daughters, mothers, wives. Just about everyman has those unless they are an orphan alone. It seems odd to me that so much of human history has been anti woman. Today it seems natural that of course women have rights. Even as a child in the 60’s and 70’s I thought any other view was dumb. I am sure my dad helped my views…still, I have never known how to make an argument to someone who…had other views. It’s like listening to a moron and being polite. The sun comes up in the east and women are equal no matter what some idiots say.
So there are other issues that I can make persuasive arguments on and most of them have more than one reason for being the best choice. It’s perfectly natural to make one argument to a person who cares more about that reason and another to a known different person. When the various men declare themselves against Trump, they can list reasons all day, but for breaths sake mostly pick the one that should be nearly universal-I have women relatives.
For variety though, might be nice if one of them said “he has a history of double crossing everyone and I don’t want to get screwed. I think all of his supporters are foolish, and I hope you will save yourselves”
hovercraft
@psycholinguist:
No he doesn’t. His opinion matters to the media, Kelly Ayotte and Lindsay Graham, that’s it.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@Betty Cracker: Going to read it later when I have time, but I agree 100% with the excerpt. This is who they’ve always been. Trump’s just less socially acceptable. It’s like a blood-covered ax murderer in dirty overalls versus a well-groomed man in a suit pulling a gun. Same result — one just looks nicer.
waysel
@hovercraft: Trump likes to grab women by the Mitch McConnell.
RaflW
Blergh. Wrote a comment about Pope Francis new, reform-minded Cardinals. FYWP eated it. I brought it here since Ryan is such a showy, pious Catholic man. Trying again but much shorter comments this time.
Immanentize
It looks like Trump is scaring republican voters away from the polls
At least the early voters who turned out for Romney
sigaba
@RaflW: Whenever I have a long comment I write it up in Notes first.
Immanentize
@sigaba: You beat me by this much | |
sigaba
I was just thinking, if only Trump had taken Hillary’s advice and actually deleted his account…
Josh Marshall wins the morning:
RaflW
@NotMax: Aaaagh. vice/vise.
To my shame (not really, I actually don’t care that much), I got terrible, terrible grades for spelling even back in elementary school. As an adult, I almost always know exactly what word I want, but often see the red line of correction under it as I type. Can’t help with homophones though (or whatever the vice/vise is, it doesn’t (always, depends on the speaker) actually sound quite the same. But it isn’t a homonym. Uhhh. I hated grammar too).
Immanentize
@gvg: My wife was really offended by the “wife, mother, daughters” comments because it defines women as a role, not as people. What’s wrong with saying — “I know and work with a lot of women” instead of “I have a mother, wife and daughters?” The second statement makes the issue about the man — “look at me, I’m hip to the lady thing” — that’s what the issue is with that construction. It also suggests that women (because of their roles, not because of their humanity) need male protection instead of respect and support.
scav
@Immanentize: The not-early voting thing might be people just holding off a bit because so much is going on on team theirs, especially with the internal in-fighting. Their eventual voting (sending in ballots) may be baked in, but they still may still be deciding down-ticket things (“Those denying traitors!”) in addition to still deciding what to do on the top line (Mike Pence or His Orangeship).
raven
Local boys do good
Unreleased live R.E.M. song to be part of anti-Trump voter initiative
NorthLeft12
@RaflW: @Shell: @Shell: Ryan does not have the attributes that one needs to brawl with Deadbeat Donald.
First off, he has already bowed down to him on numerous occasions. Second, Ryan still cares about maintaining his image as serious and honourable politician so he will be slightly impeded in how he deals with Trump. And finally, Paulie does not have the brains, bravery, or blow hardiness to get down to Donald’s level.
raven
30 Days, 30 Songs is an independent website that will release one song per day from October 10 until Election Day. It is produced by the creators of 90 Days, 90 Reasons, which sought to motivate voters to give President Obama a second term, and it features work from artists across the country.
MomSense
Good ole John Boehner is probably the happiest, no make that the only happy Republican in America. I can see him sipping his merlot and crying with laughter as he watches Ryan squirm.
raven
” September of last year, after a joint appearance by Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a former GOP presidential contender at which R.E.M’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” was played as Trump walked to a podium, former frontman Michael Stipe sent out an email saying “Go f**k yourselves, the lot of you — you sad, attention grabbing, power-hungry little men. Do not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign.”
? Martin
@Immanentize: The comments are horrible against any other human being. We don’t even need to qualify it in any way, let alone in a way that begs the question if you were single you’d totally be down with the püssy-grabbing. It also begs the question if these suddenly-offended Republicans would be offended by Trump’s proclamations about Mexicans if they were married to a Mexican, or about Muslims if they were married to a Muslim. The suggestion being that you are only deserving of civil rights in a Republican run country if you happen to be married to a Republican elected official.
This was an assault by one person against another person. That alone should cover us.
Peale
@NorthLeft12: And truthfully, what Ryan wants most of all is for Trump to calm the fuck down and behave like a presidential candidate so he can fool the people into thinking everything will be o.k. hunky dory normal while he guts the rest of the new deal. Its much easier to brawl when you don’t have to consider the other party’s feelings.
Anoniminous
Well I’ll be damned.
NBC’s Chuck Todd: Republicans “May Be Staring At A Total Collapse Of The Party By Election Day”
hovercraft
@sigaba:
I am surprised that he didn’t go back on the attack against Mr Khan, who was on with Lawrence O’Donnell last night. But I guess Kellyanne and Bannon pointed out to him tat he has bigger fish too fry. Like the entire GOP establishment.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
Regarding Trumps tweet storm against other Republicans:
hovercraft
@Anoniminous:
I told you so, yesterday the wave talk with Cook was on MTP Daily.
enplaned
Private Eye nails it:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cue4u9IXEAAmxEl.jpg
aimai
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Christ, I”m seeing some (white) (male) democrats say that.
burnspbesq
@Anoniminous:
If this is what you mean by “anecdotal evidence,” gimme all you got. My hometown hasn’t sent a Dem to the House since 1978. I was OK with Marge Roukema, but Scott Garrett is an odious toad who really needs to go. My debit card is about to take a hit.
Cook: NJ-05 a Toss-Up
Iowa Old Lady
You heard how Trump criticized a woman’s skin on one of his shows? Turns out she’s from my town. The local paper’s front page headline today is “Waterloo chanteuse criticized by Trump.” My favorite part is the “chanteuse.” I wonder how many readers don’t know what that is?
Ceci n'est pas mon nym
@RaflW: Spelling errors are forgivable.
Except loose/lose.
hovercraft
@MomSense:
He may be the happiest republican in the country. But he shouldn’t be he is a major part of what went wrong with the GOP, he courted the Teahadists, and when they got to Washington with all their birther crap and burn the system down to the ground and start over, he did not reign them in. He may have escaped this clusterf**k, but it’s his clusterf**k.
So f**k him.
aimai
@Iowa Old Lady: The way he’s going, with the number of people he has insulted over the last decades, I really think he might manage to personally insult someone from every single home town in the US. If all politics is local, he may singlehandedly manage to insult the locals in every locality.
trollhattan
@Iowa Old Lady:
My daughter has a dress made from chanteuse.
WereBear
@Anoniminous: I love the way that, every time I tune in, the situation has become WORSE for the Republicans.
Which means there has never been a better time to read The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein, which I just finished last night. He goes into delightful detail about the pivotal year of 1976, in which all this crap really got started.
And to think at least the beginning of the end came in my lifetime, too.
burnspbesq
@RaflW:
Kupich, Tobin, and Farrell? Good day for the good guys. Now maybe Dolan will finally get the hint.
nonynony
@Anoniminous: I mean, that’s great and all, but I still don’t give a rat’s ass what Chuck Todd thinks about anything. Even when he’s saying things I want to hear (and whoo-boy is that something I’ve been wanting to hear for quite some time…)
Rand Careaga
The next time I see a comment by “shomi” that adds value to these discussions will be the first.
Ceci n'est pas mon nym
Anecdatum: So far I’ve seen only one lawn sign in my neighborhood, a Trump / Pence sign that went up a week or so ago at my next-door neighbor’s, a blue-collar over-60 evangelical.
Noticed yesterday the sign is gone.
Jim Parene
@Miss Bianca: Miss B, I received my copy of “The Hunt for Vulcan” yesterday. I cannot put it down. It is a wonderful book!
AFAIK, Tom is up there in a glowing galaxy of science writers. He ranks up there with S.J Gould, Dava Sobel, Rachel Carson and………. (Dare I say their names?) Issac asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.
Amir Khalid
@Anoniminous:
I don’t know how good this Chuck Todd fellow is at predicticating things, but it will certainly be happy days at Balloon Juice if he turns out to be right. I’m just doubtful that the party is so weak that it risks collapse with one heavy election-day defeat.
sigaba
@hovercraft: Hillz was clearly bringing them out as a matter of due diligence in case Trump had momentarily indecision about who to Hate Tweet, fortuntely it proved to be unnecessary.
He barely is able to keep Hillary on his radar, he’s too busy talking about Paul Ryan. I think he might sense that he can’t actually hurt her anymore, but he can sure as hell hurt other GOPers.
hovercraft
@burnspbesq:
You poor thing he is more than a toad, he is a weasel. I have the estimable Frank Pallone.
Amir Khalid
@trollhattan:
Jame Gumb in Silence of The Lambs was making himself a dress like that too.
? Martin
@Anoniminous:
That’s what I’ve been saying. Had Clinton taken Trump out in this debate, the GOP would have abandoned him. Clinton let the red meat stand. She stood there and took it. She needs Trump’s voters strong enough to be willing to go after establishment Republicans and she needs Trump weak enough that moderates will abandon him. She wants Trump at 30%. At 30% Republicans can’t leave him. Assuming a Dem challenger was even only at 40% in the polls, the Rep is torn – 30% with Trump, 30% without him. They’re screwed.
The key is the so-called deplorables that have no loyalty to the GOP. And god help me for linking to Brooks (I’m certain this is a first):
I think Brooks is somewhat correct here, but establishment republicans have worked themselves to a point where they see the party as protecting the other bits. Trump’s supporters aren’t like that. Trump supporters are the ones that think that Congress and the courts are fucking useless. They’re the ones that were energized by hearing about sexual assault. They seem to be tribal at a level outside of the the party tribality. Either white supremacy, or mens rights, or what have you. These aren’t positions that they have faith that the party will protect. They want to burn down the GOP almost as badly as they want to burn down the Dems. They’re with LePage – we need some authoritarianism, we need to lock up Clinton trial be damned, maybe we should start shooting people at the border, and so on. This isn’t evangelicals lining up behind a Mormon Romney. This is something a bit different – this is domination politics. If their numbers are large enough, they may take Ryan out for disloyalty.
We’ve certainly heard enough talk of that within our own ranks after 2008 against Clinton or calls for Sanders to get primaried, etc. The question is whether those voices get quieted or amplified. We tend to quiet those voices, give people some space, and they change their mind. Trump isn’t doing that – he’s amplifying those voices. That’s new. That’s never been done before anywhere to my knowledge.
Calouste
Ben Carson was on CNN today (via TPM), normalizing bragging about sexual assault.
First question to those people should always be: “How often have you bragged yourself about sexual assault considering you think it’s normal to do that?”
BR
@Amir Khalid:
I think the bigger issue for the GOP would be this:
1. Slim loss of both the house and senate.
2. Trump starts a network with Bannon and goes after GOP establishment from day one.
3. GOP blames Trump for loss.
4. Trumpers form a new bigot party to run against GOPers in 2018.
Mnemosyne
@Immanentize:
I’m a woman and, honestly, that didn’t bother me at all. For one thing, it’s a fairly standard thing to say, so if you’re coming up with a statement in a hurry, that’s the first thing a lot of people are going to say.
Also, to me it’s a clear repudiation of the whole bros before hoes mentality — it’s a statement that you’re going to stand with the people you love, not the people society says you “should” side with because you have the same genitalia and, hey, boys will be boys.
hovercraft
@Ceci n’est pas mon nym:
They’re simply joining the rest of the shy Tories who will vote for him in the privacy of the voting booth. Though I do think a big chunk will also just stay home.
Miss Bianca
@West of the Rockies (been a while): Altho’ it does seem a bit unfair to reptiles to compare them to McConnell.
Patricia Kayden
@raven: From your link:
This a million times!
piratedan
@Amir Khalid: well, we’re hoping for a national collapse, in hopes of turning over the House as well. State legislators and governors… will have to see. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Koch Brothers will continue to build their grass roots and ALEC ties to continue to fuck people over at the local level.
nonynony
@Amir Khalid: The national party is screwed.
The collection of state-level parties are stronger than ever outside of the decidedly blue states. (California and New York, for example, have GOPs on life support). Kansas, for example, couldn’t elect a Democrat to save the state (as we’re seeing in real time right now).
I’m not sure how this paradox resolves itself. You’d think that the state parties could just form together Voltron-like to create a new national party, but they can’t because of Citizen’s United money and the craziness of their coalition. As a group of authoritarians they need a leader figure to tie them all together, but right now the best they’ve got is Trump and he is no good. (Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell might hold leadership positions, but No True Authoritarian would mistake either one of them for General Zod and start kneeling).
If they find a strong leader in the next 4 years who the various coalitions can rally behind and the Citizen’s United money can fund we’ll be in trouble. If they’re counting on noodles like Ted Cruz to rally the troops, the GOP will be in trouble at the national level for a while to come.
catclub
@Anoniminous: I heard that too, and was surprised. It takes a lot to finally get away from “Democrats in Disarray”, but he may have made it (for the moment).
rikyrah
I want Nancy Smash to get the gavel back so bad.
catclub
@nonynony:
I would guess Kasich.
nonynony
@BR:
I want to dig into this because everyone is speculating about it.
Who the hell is going to fund this venture? Trump can’t – it’s patently obvious that he’s not worth nearly the amount he claims to be. And he has problems getting money because of his known status as a man who screws over his partners.
So who is going to be the rich idiot who hands over a bunch of money to Trump and Bannon to start a media empire to rival Fox news? And why wouldn’t these folks just be content with the existence of Fox news? Unless there is money to back this venture up there will be no venture – and Trump’s brand is in the toilet. He might be able to start up a Palin-like Vblog channel after the election to fleece the rubes of some coins, but I don’t think he’s going to be able to convince anyone to hand him the multiple millions it would take to get a media venture off the ground.
catclub
@BR:
you rang?
See the angry letter from Cernovich at the link.
BR
@rikyrah:
I want her to get the gavel but never to do another TV interview again. Not her strong suit. Leave it to less insidery Dems like the hopefully-new-Rep Zephyr Teachout.
burnspbesq
@hovercraft:
Oh, it’s even worse than that. Ridgewood is where I grew up. My actual Congresscritter is Mimi Walters (CA-45)
Calouste
Most obvious proportional response would be to hack the American subsidiary of the Kremlin, aka the Trump campaign. Of course, it will have to be disguised as hacking the Russian contacts of said campaign, but that can’t be too hard.
BR
@nonynony:
The Mercers and Ailes. I could see Ailes wanting revenge on Fox and the Mercers back Breitbart.
Miss Bianca
@gvg: Well….I was going to make the point that it shouldn’t be too much to expect that men might be able to condemn rapist language and actions against women without reference to their status as wives, daughters, girlfriends…then I read about this guy, who even in the face of his own daughter’s pleas, refuses to condemn Trump and still plans to vote for him. So, those guys who can’t quite wrap their heads around the fact that women might have a right to exist unmolested regardless of their relationship to men? Their responses are still better than that guy’s response.
scav
@Mnemosyne: I’m not fond of it exactly because it puts people in your genetic and intimate in-circle ahead of all those other humans out there. “I don’t have any black or gay family members or friends, so who cares?”
I agree it’s boilerplate, which is what people, especially politicians, reach for in a rush, but that doesn’t mean it’s unproblematic as a statement. Society also (on paper, alas, more than in practice) says we should be fair to all people.
catclub
@nonynony: I think the name is Mercer. They had backed Cruz, then jumped heavy to Trump. One reason Cruz had to endorse was to get their money.
BR
@Calouste:
I hope Obama has the FBI monitoring for election system hacking. There have already been reports of it happening, and nothing could be worse than election day chaos.
nonynony
@catclub:
Ahem:
Listen, I’m afraid of Kasich as much as the next liberal because Kasich is the guy who can put the happy mask on a whole bunch of GOP policies. In a world where GOP voters were rational actors trying to maximize their chances of winning elections – rather than rational actors trying to maximize the perceived strength of their leaders – Kasich would be the guy they’d rally behind.
The GOP coalition is not that coalition right now. Kasich is not openly racist enough. Kasich is not anti- immigrant enough. Kasich is a wet noodle. He’s not going to be rallying the troops.
I’m sorry to say that I believe Kasich may be sitting pretty in a Senate seat come 2020 anyway. It’s very likely that Sherrod Brown loses that seat in the 2018 election as much as I hate to say it, and Kasich is almost a lock for winning it if he runs, which he will, because Ohio is getting older and whiter as the years pass.
? Martin
And Billy Bush is fired. Can’t wait to hear Trump call this some kind of injustice.
To be clear, the tape happened in CA while Billy was working – it was a workplace environment. CA has very aggressive hostile workplace laws and women would probably have pretty good standing about having to work with Billy given his previously documented workplace behavior. That doesn’t mean he can’t redeem himself, but it would be tough. Not only did Billy engage in inappropriate discussion of a coworker, he initiated an additional hostile workplace situation by encouraging the young lady give Trump a hug from a position of authority.
catclub
@scav:
When Jesus asked who is your neighbor, it was a big deal. It still is.
hovercraft
Booman
Calouste
@nonynony:
Putin.
nonynony
@BR: Ailes is not rich enough. he has money, but not “fuck you” money.
The Mercers? Maybe. Maybe they really are that dumb. I actually kind of hope so – because everything Trump touches turns to shit and it would be fun to see Robert Mercer go bankrupt bankrolling Trump in a war against Rupert Murdoch.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Rand Careaga: Shhh! Naming calls.
nonynony
@Calouste: If oil prices stay where they’re at, Putin will have trouble continuing to fund RT and Sputnik, let alone starting up something new.
shomi
@Calouste: Ahhh no. Whatever it is it would probably not have anything to do with Chump….unless of course if it’s showing money changing hands.
Several months from now you will hear about something happening in Russia or one of it’s allies. Something that embarasses them. Maybe trying to meddle in one of their elections or show vote rigging. Releaseing private emails between people in high levels of gov’t. Or phone calls. Or some fairly convincing evidence about something else Russia is doing.
The CIA probably already has some of this stuff. Sometimes it’s better if Russia doesn’t know about it though.
The Ancient Randonneur
@rikyrah:
And the visual of Nancy Smash sitting behind HRC at that first State of the Union will be as powerful as the visual of her sitting behind Obama at his first SOTU.
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
@Iowa Old Lady: “Waterloo chanteuse criticized”? I can see dismissing ABBA as empty pop music, but…
BR
@nonynony:
I see Ailes being more of the guy to make it happen rather than the money man.
sukabi
I like Samantha Bee’s take on it via Mother Jones
Villago Delenda Est
They’re all fucking Leninists: Party before Country.
Betty Cracker
@raven: You tell ’em, Michael!
Betty Cracker
@aimai: There’s at least one commenter here who surfaces every time a bad poll is released to say just that. Haven’t seen that person lately…
hovercraft
@burnspbesq:
Kevin McCarthy, Darrell Issa, and Ed Royce all endorsed her initial run. My condolences.
? Martin
@nonynony:
Right. The only way to get someone like Kasich there is to change how the GOP handles policy to entice back the voters displaced by Trump. Tall order.
sukabi
@PaulWartenberg2016: don’t think the galaxy’s blow…they’ve stopped production and sales of the note 7 all together.
Schlemazel
@BR:
That would be great! Pull the white nationalists out of the GOP and neither half can win. We should support their efforys particularly on the local level. A generation of Democratic total dominance could return to the New Deal
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Immanentize: It seemed to be their idea of a GOTV effort.
Villago Delenda Est
@MomSense: His only regret is that Eric Cantor isn’t squirming side by side with Ryan.
inventor
@nonynony: Ailes should be able to get funding.
Felonius Monk
Rethugs have released a MONSTER which they are unable to destroy. I certainly hope the Dems can.
Punchy
@Amir Khalid:The racists are the protons, and GOP establishment are the neutrons. Normally, they can co-exist and even intermingle in small numbers, but pack enough of them into a space, and they begin to spontaneously emit rancid energy and cause great harm while slowly splitting up. This current crop went from alpha particles to gamma bursts in record time.
hovercraft
@BR:
Ailes cannot bankroll it, not if he wants to keep the $ 40 million he just got, he has a non compete clause in his severance package.
sigaba
@nonynony: If I was a Maoist I’d observe that the Republican Party is fracturing along urban and rural lines. The Democratic Party is already an essentially urban party so it can’t break in this particular way.
Democratic parties control all the states that have large urban areas, but for a lot of reasons rural interest and rural voters get extra fingers on the scale in our system, through federalism, through apportionment and gerrymandering, through structural policies in our budget, in our political culture…
catclub
@trollhattan: Is it chartreuse?
RaflW
Coming over the ethers, breaking news: Laura Ingraham now suggesting Paul Ryan should lose.
Hardly surprising, since she is a bomb-throwing culture warrior. But it is nice to get reports from the front lines of the GOP battle.
Schlemazel
@nonynony:
Putin!
Villago Delenda Est
@RaflW: Michele Bachmann claims that there is no GOP civil war in progress.
She’s such a brilliant political observer, being a friend of both Donald Drumpf and Paul Ryan…
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
Ironically, they’ve finally gotten pissed off at the obstructionist party for obstructing everything. The strategy has worked for, what, about 25 years now?
RaflW
@nonynony: It is fascinating that so far, Citizen’s United seems to be doing far more damage to the GOP than they ever could have imagined, at least on the national level. I think it is a disaster for Dems on state and regional levels, but for now it is eating the Prez & Congressional GOP’s lunch, after stealing the lunch money, and decking the cafeteria workers.
patrick II
@Immanentize:
I am an asshole, and I know it. And I agree with your wife in theory. However, republicans are well known for their lack of empathy — if someone they know isn’t affected they don’t care. Handicapped Bob Dole cared about handicapped rights, Nancy Reagan came out in favor of stem cell research after Ronnie’s Alzheimer’s. So, if at least some republicans have the imagination to take an abstraction like “woman Trump would abuse”, redirect and apply it to women they know and thus have some sense of its awfulness, I applaud it as one step up from their usual total inability to empathize.
I guess I’ll just say its a start and I’ll take what I can get.
trollhattan
@catclub:
Yes, trimmed in puce.
JR in WV
@brendancalling:
You left out the Sovereign Citizens, the various religious fanatics who preach hatred and bigotry, and that women cannot be placed above men, [which I’ve actually heard voters say to me when I phone bank] and the Second Amendment true believers, and the people who think Black Lives Matter is anti-white hatred instead of trying to save lives.
Some of these may be bit players, others may become significant later on, we can’t know which is which right now. A butterfly’s wing in Brasil may cause Hurricane Katrina here in America, after all… I think that’s chaos theory of weather prediction. Or Republican politics, because they’re crazy.
catclub
@Villago Delenda Est:
If only Bill Kristol and Ben Carson can confirm this….
sukabi
@? Martin: it wasn’t that one incident, there are many of the same with Billy all by himself on tape making lewd, inappropriate comments…
Schlemazel
@trollhattan:
You are being obtuse
Sigh, no use
Miss Bianca
@Jim Parene: Exalted company, perhaps, but Dr. Levenson can hold his own among ’em! This is the best history of science book I’ve read since Hedy’s Folly, which I loved, about Hedy Lamarr’s role in inventing spread-spectrum radio.
RaflW
@Villago Delenda Est: I’m not quite sure how Bachmann manages to avoid drowning in her shower or falling off cliffs on a daily basis, she is so stupid.
Ptuh ptuh feh. She brings shame on the state of Minnesota, my home for 21 years now and birthplace of my father.
PST
I see Trump’s crew are taking all necessary steps today to solidify his support among the anti-Beyoncé crowd. I would have thought that the set of all those who were upset by Beyoncé’s Super Bowl show should be almost identical to the set of all Trump voters.
hovercraft
Dana Bash
Democrats should put the hammer down now.
japa21
@Betty Cracker: He/she was here right after the town hall “debate” with the results of the Luntz focus group (probably the only “poll” that had Clinton losing) crowing about how she totally blew the debate. Once more results came in showing just the opposite, she/he disappeared.
Schlemazel
@RaflW:
Prey that Jason Lewis is a victim of the wave. Just as crazy and evil but a lot smarter. Tom Emmer is a real winner too. As horrible as the woman he replaced but bright enough to keep it on the down low
Timurid
@Villago Delenda Est:
Baghdad Bachmann
? Martin
@PST: I suspect that, mysteriously, they are all okay with Ted Nugent’s lyrics. What could be different about these two artists…
Mnemosyne
@scav:
Almost — to me, it’s choosing between two different in-circles, not choosing an in-circle over an out-circle. These men are rejecting the idea that they should choose to side with other men, and are instead choosing to side with the women in their lives. I think that’s still a powerful message since we can also get into a discussion of whether the category “women” is truly an in-circle in our society.
Gin & Tonic
@shomi:
You really are a moron, aren’t you? Russia meddles in allies’ and neighbors’ elections all the time, and if “meddling” doesn’t work, they poison candidates they don’t like. You don’t need sooper-sekrit CIA/NSA spying to know it, you just have to read the fucking newspapers. There is no embarrassment attached at all. In fact, they hire well-known American consultants to help them do this.
Calouste
@Betty Cracker: He’ll be back soon, blabbering about trendlines and how that one Rasmussen poll that shows Clinton at +7 where all the others show her in double digits is a sure sign of impeding doom.
Amir Khalid
@Miss Bianca:
Actually, our Tom doesn’t have a doctorate. He’s had to correct some commenters here who mistakenly assumed he did.
hovercraft
@PST:
That plus her line about if you f**k me good I’ll take you to Red Lobster. This apparently encourages rape culture. It’s our old friend Betsy McCaughey
gogol's wife
@raven:
I finally got around to that Drive-By Truckers article last night. Interesting!
catclub
USAToday:
I figure two years at most.
Amir Khalid
@Betty Cracker:
The recent polls haven’t been bad enough to summon that person.
raven
@gogol’s wife: Oh, glad you saw it. The Bitter Southerner or NYT?
Amir Khalid
@hovercraft:
Dinner at Red Lobster doesn’t seem like that much of a reward.
Miss Bianca
@Amir Khalid: My oops! I’m just handing out honorary Ph.Ds!
WereBear
She did get a law degree from William and Mary. However, right wing Evangelical indoctrination is anti-thinking in many important ways.
Ever see a dog trained to avoid an electric fence? That’s evangelical women. They start thinking they have been lied to and duped and dumped on and ZZZZZT! They are shocked back into the well worn groove of only allowable thoughts.
This is why they all have that panicked horse look in their eyes; her and Laura Bush and Pat Nixon and so many others. My dislike of her and her actions are tempered by the fact that she is trapped in a loveless marriage and cannot think and certainly has anxiety disorders.
Lizzy L
@catclub: OTOH, you could be wrong. *cackles evilly*
I think “a generation” is an exaggeration. OTOH, I could be wrong. It might take them that long to re-organize into a real political party that can actually offer people more than tribalism and bullshit conspiracy theories.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
thanks for the tip
Punchy
@RaflW: Linky? I figured the fringy-iest of the batshit crazies may be saying this, but I didn’t think a nationally syndicated blowhard would demand that Ryan lose….his election? His speakership? His decency?
hovercraft
I think George Will is being too optimistic about the lesson his party will take from this debacle.
Via Martin Longman
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: When the polls are good, they switch to saying “clearly anyone could have beaten Trump, but you wusses blew your chance to nominate Bernie.” The assumption being that any liberal who voted for Hillary was holding their nose and following some electability argument.
WereBear
@Lizzy L: Just what do they have to work with, though? How much of the Republican party are Trump fans? If they move towards sanity, they lose those. It has been the same bind since they got into bed with the Evangelicals, and now they have added white supremacists and the like.
If they became respectable again, how much of the electorate would they have? These aren’t principled sensible small business folks like a Norman Rockwell town hall. I am reading that 74% of the party want the GOP to stick with Trump.
They are three quarters Flying Monkey. Where do you go from there?
JR in WV
@Amir Khalid:
Well, more lacks a pronounced tendency to explode. All lithium-ion batteries can catch fire. I saw a fine cell-phone video of a laptop on a table at a conference/meeting burst into flames, burn through the table in like 20 seconds, it was amazing.
But it wasn’t in someone’s pocket! Except for loss of data and sheer terror, no real harm, thankfully it wasn’t in a carry-on in an in-flight aircraft!!
catclub
@Lizzy L: Unfortunately, I have evidence: 1976-1978, 1992-1994, 2008-2010.
also, 1964-1966.
Applejinx
@WereBear:
Oh, no. William and Mary won’t do.
FlipYrWhig
@Matt McIrvin: Given the crankish stuff Bernie Sanders wrote about women and sex when trying to be a sex-positive hippie freakin’ out the squares, I have a feeling that the latest brouhaha about Trump’s habits and morés wouldn’t have landed quite so hard in a contest between the two of them.
RaflW
@Punchy: Linky.
It’s a winger site, but I wouldn’t be listening to her show, so I’ll tend to believe it.
eta: she doesn’t demand that he lose, but that he maybe oughta (hence the ‘suggest’ that I pasted in my original comment).
peach flavored shampoo
He’s the cause of the cancerous tumor, not the cure. Things only get worse for them on Nov. 9th.
geg6
@Mnemosyne:
Maybe you’re okay with only being considered an appendage to a man, but I’m not and that’s exactly what those statements normalize. Sorry, but leave me out of any male’s need to find an excuse to repudiate something that should be sickening to anyone, male or female. Why aren’t they saying they are doing to set an example to their sons and fathers? Fuck that noise. I’m not inclined to excuse the sloppy excuse making there.
catclub
@Gin & Tonic: Shomi may be a moron, but the CIA does not have a good reputation vis a vis elections in other countries.
geg6
@nonynony:
Russia. Duh.
Matt McIrvin
@FlipYrWhig: As I was saying in the other thread about feminism and the sexual revolution…
JR in WV
@James E Powell:
You have a crummy right-wing poll. I’ve contributed to Russ, and watched those polls for weeks now – he’s up by 5-8 points, and has been all along.
In the same time period another poll has Russ up by 12 !!
Schlemazel
@Applejinx:
Well William would but not Mary, no way.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
For all the Morning Joe haters here are some choice quotes from a conservative radio person.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid:
Clearly you have never eaten their cheese biscuits. The Google machine tells me there are three locations around KL, so you can taste for yourself.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@FlipYrWhig:
The tax return issue would be neutralized too, and two scoldy handwaving tone deaf old white men would have been a huge turn off for women and people of color – the real Democratic base who have to vote. Plus, raising taxes as the main policy item is just not a winner this year against a con man selling himself as a successful businessman and a tax avoidance genius. We got the perfect candidate to match up against Trump to showcase his misogynistic, racist true nature. Who knew?
Mnemosyne
@geg6:
Maybe they don’t have sons or fathers.
But, no, my brothers or husband saying that they choose to side with me over their fellow males doesn’t make me an “appendage” to them. It puts them on my side.
RaflW
@WereBear: The ability to memorize and recite case law, and to maybe bang out some papers (with help? Who knows. Irresponsible not to speculate) is not the same as the ability to understand said case law and how to, y’know, legislate. Which is why she basically never authored shit in either her MN or D.C. stints.
She’s a dolt. And I think we all know that that in addition to smart lawyers, the world has more than a few dumb ones.
Schlemazel
@catclub:
If someone comes in and pisses on my rug every day I don’t give a damn what they may know. The reserve of ill will is too deep to ignore
FlipYrWhig
@Matt McIrvin: Yup. FWIW I think it’s pretty clear that Trump for his whole adult life has been trying to pattern himself after Hugh Hefner.
trollhattan
@Schlemazel:
My sister was once bitten by a møøse.
James E Powell
@JR in WV:
Thanks for that. In the interim I did some checking and you are correct that it is the only poll to show Johnson with a lead. We really really need this one. We need Wisconsin to come back to the D team.
FlipYrWhig
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: The Internet left has predicted 9 of the last zero populist uprisings.
Gin & Tonic
@trollhattan: How did it get loose?
trollhattan
@hovercraft:
Jesus, he had the word salad shooter set to 11 for that one. This bit should make us all glad he’s writing Republican talking points and not soft-core pr0n.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
Same as last time–fell off the caboose.
Punchy
@RaflW: Certainly no shortage of pretend-smart ones on this blog….
I keed, I keed
trollhattan
@FlipYrWhig:
Same record as the WSJ predicting hyperinflation.
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
It had the juice
catclub
If Trump had made zero statements after winning the nomination, refused to attend any debates, and claimed he was working feverishly to get his companies organized for the time he would be President, he could have been winning. The media would have focused entirely on Hillary’s emails.
I think Paul Waldman basically said the same thing back in May. If he could hide for the next 6 months, he will do better. But that would fly against everything that Trump is.
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: The estimator that Vox put up showed my taxes doubling. I know that it might not have been a good to the penny estimate, but even if ballpark was cause for much concern.
geg6
@Mnemosyne:
Sorry, but when these assholes are saying this stuff, it’s because they “revere women” and “women should be on a pedestal,” blah, blah, blah, blahbetty, blah. I’m tired of the whole framing. You don’t need your family, your mother, your sister or your daughter to be a man and stand up for right for its own sake. I have no respect for that type of framing. It’s another way of keeping us in their tight little frames where the end result is that women are not really people and don’t count unless they are attached to man in some way. Fuck that noise. I’m over it and this fucking election is what put me over the edge.
Schlemazel
@trollhattan:
The conductor gave it a goose
Lizzy L
@WereBear: Those are all good questions, and truly, I don’t know. It’s possible that Republican party as it exists now is dead. (Can’t say that I’d mind; I loathe most of these people. Paul Ryan gives me hives. When John Kasich and Lindsay Graham are your most honorable members, you’re in for a rough ride.) I don’t have the faintest idea who would replace them if they go down in flames. I also don’t think we know the numbers on the hard-core Trump supporters; I think we’ll get this information after the election, because I believe (and hope) that by Nov 8, Trump will be down to the rock bottom hard core, and his vote will reflect them plus a small percentage of the soft middle. Are they 40% of the Republican electorate? Are they 27% of the Likely Voters? If they are a large number, then we’re screwed for a longer time, until the old hardcore deplorables die. Prognostication is not my skill. I wish it were; I’d worry less about my retirement funds.
Dork
@Schlemazel: You’re just an Anti-Incontinentist
Mnemosyne
@geg6:
I disagree. I think the conservatives who say that are saying it for that reason, and because they’re trying to cover their asses, but I think a lot of the athletes and other non-politicians saying it are saying it for the reasons I think they are.
You can be pissed off at the hypocrisy of conservatives without assuming that everyone who uses the same phrase is using it for the same reason the conservatives do.
Schlemazel
@Dork:
I AM NOT INCONTINENT!
debit
@Lizzy L: I remember the Rachel Maddow show doing a GOP death knell repeatedly after Obama’s first win. She was sure they were over as a party and we all know how that turned out. I don’t think the Republican party will ever be finished; it will just continue to grow increasingly vile and disgusting. The hate monster has become accustomed to a steady diet and it refuses to go hungry.
ETA: and every election the hate they spew becomes more and more normalized. I can’t see it ever going away.
WereBear
@Lizzy L: I was just pointing out that during my entire adult lifetime, I have seen the Republican party get increasingly hijacked by hardcore fanatics. I just read an account of the 1976 Republican convention, when Ford narrowly managed to get the nomination over Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s supporters lied, cheated, stole phones, scoffed at campaign finance laws, intimidated opponents; and by the next convention, they had taken over.
This is who they are now. And it is not attractive to normal humans.
Lizzy L
Some good news: Doug Applegate in CA-49 is giving Darrell Issa (R-Hell) a real fight! I want SO badly for Issa to be gone. I despise the guy, as do friends who are in his district. Now if only we could get rid of Trey Gowdy in SC — but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Felonius Monk
@Gin & Tonic:
Well, I have eaten at a Red Lobster; and, cheese biscuits or no cheese biscuits, they essentially suck. You can make better cheese biscuits from scratch at home.
Gin & Tonic
@geg6: I’m with Mnem, that there can be more than one way to frame that. In my case, I’ve been married for a long time to a strong and independent woman, and together we raised two daughters to adulthood; this has exposed me to women’s perspective on issues that as a dude I wouldn’t normally think about. This is a good thing. Had I never been married or had never fathered daughters I might still be appalled by that conversation, but the fact that I have opens my eyes and ears more. Yet if someone stuck a microphone in my face I might not come up with the best way of saying that.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: Eh. I think there’s something, let’s say, hetero-patriarchal about the reflexive move to familial connection as the proper context for why to treat women well. I’m married, I don’t have kids, I have sisters and a mother I don’t talk to that often. So for “women connected to me,” sure, OK, I care about them, but there aren’t that many of them. (ETA) And I’m not obsessed with Looking Out For Them. I still care a lot about non-family women, both women I know and women I can imagine being like the women I know. I don’t think the family language is all that helpful.
Mike J
@Gin & Tonic:
Maybe if he tries a little harder he’ll get to.
gogol's wife
@raven:
NYT.
PPCLI
@nonynony: This is a good question. I may be mis-remembering, but as I recall Murdoch had to swallow major losses from Fox News for many years before it became the goldmine it is today. And he was entering a field without any polemical right-wing news networks to compete with.
Patricia Kayden
@Lizzy L: Wow. That would be great news. Looks like November 8th could be a great day for multiple reasons.
@catclub: Thank goodness that he didn’t hide then. He is wholly unqualified to be anywhere near the White House and he has done a great job showing the world that he is a petty, egomaniac who doesn’t have a presidential bone in his entire bloated, orange body.
Joel
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Merryl Streep @ Vassar 1983
scav
@Gin & Tonic: But, even then, there’s no reason not to push back and explain to the well-meaning spouters of boilerplate why the boilerplate legitimately gets up people’s noses. A learning experience and all that. Developing other boilerplate is within the realm of possibility. One doesn’t have to be married to a strong and independent woman to be exposed to their thinking — they may be voicing it right here for example.
Mnemosyne
@Gin & Tonic:
Along those lines, I think that having a mixed-race niece and nephew has made racial issues seem much more pressing and important to me. I’ve always been anti-racist, but having that family connection now makes those issues seem much more urgent. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but I think a lot of people make their connections that way.
germy
@Mnemosyne: George Carlin had a routine back in the ’70s about older folks’ gradual acceptance of long hair on men. Instead of saying “dirty hippie!” they’d think of their favorite relative and say “Maybe he’s like [insert name of nephew or grandson]”
Gin & Tonic
@scav:
Of course they are. But I spend far more time with my wife.
Clearly some men view their wives and daughters as objects to be controlled. Others view their wives and daughters as equal partners, where each can learn something from the other.
The Moar You Know
@Lizzy L: Sorry, but bullshit. I live, and always have lived in his district (he inherited my slice from the almost-as-execrable Bilbray when Bilbray drew short straw and lost his seat in the last gerrymandering of California). The ONLY reason I know who Applegate is, is because I read this and other political blogs. No ads. No posters. No mailers. No nothing. Yeah, I’ll vote for him, and yeah, he actually made Issa spend a couple of his hundreds of millions on signs this time, but he’s not winning this one. His core voters in Vista and Escondido are gonna keep that pile of shit in office until he dies and probably afterwards. Sorry. Again.
scav
A statement of support for people’s rights doesn’t have to contain the phylogeny of how the individual awoke to the basic issue. “As the niece and cousin to a murdered woman and infant, I’m in favor of laws against homicide.”
Joel
@SenyorDave: The quest for the grail is not about archeology…
Mnemosyne
@scav:
Personal stories make connections. We are a storytelling species. So, yes, mentioning that you are related to a homicide victim will make people more likely to listen to what you have to say about other homicides, like it or not.
psycholinguist
@Schlemazel: I’ve been thinking along those lines. In my perfect world, the result would be that republicans would be forced to moved to the left in order to pick off what are now conservative dems and separate themselves from the Trump white nationalists. And that would push Democrats farther left as well, to separate themselves from the republicans. And, in my best world ever, some of the more divisive social issues would be accepted as common planks (e.g. reproductive rights, gay rights, climate change, etc.) because attempting to use those as wedge issues drops you into that cesspool of nationalists that are confined to winning elections in southern states. Isn’t that basically where we were before Nixon’s southern strategy?
And we’d have Obama to thank for it, because he made fun of Trump at that correspondence dinner.
Mnemosyne
Also — and now I’m really going to wander into the weeds — both Obama and Clinton know that people connect to policies better if they have a personal story to go with it. One personal story about someone whose life was saved because of Obamacare is going to be more convincing to many people than a policy paper with statistics. That’s just how humans are, for the most part.
So the athletes telling us that they reject Donald Trump because of their wives, mothers, sisters and/or daughters are telling us a story about their lives.
scav
@Mnemosyne: I’m not arguing about how some people come to make their decisions and how they learn. And, yes, maybe some people find it more persuasive when you frame it as a personal story. Have you noticed that some, equally a part of the storytelling species, are finding the arguments less persuasive and heartwarming when inevitably phrased in the connection of me-me-me.
JR in WV
@shomi:
I have a little test for YOU:
Why do you suppose I knew you don’t read many comments here?
Sm*t Cl*de
@hovercraft:
I’m not seeing the imprudence. It worked with Reagan.
Lizzy L
@The Moar You Know: I haz a sad. Cook Political Report is showing CA-49 at “Lean Republican” not Likely Republican, which seemed significant to me,and the LA Times has called Applegate a “strong challenger.” However, you’ve got superior knowledge. Wishful thinking on my part.
Mnemosyne
@scav:
Different messages resonate differently with different people. I find it unpersuasive when, say, John McCain suddenly remembers that he has a wife and daughters and uses that as a reason to distance himself from Trump. I find it a little more persuasive when a non-politician does it, so for me, it’s the messenger, not the specific words. YMMV.
Brachiator
@debit:
Maddow loves political history, but has a decidedly mixed record when making any kind of predictions.
I am surprised to see how the GOP has been rattled, by the Tea Party, and now by Trump. We might be watching history in the making if they crumble and reassemble into new parties. Or get their act together. I don’t think there is any way to know yet.
The Democrats may be in for a little change as well. Younger voters in particular felt that they were getting something from Bernie that they were not getting from other Democrats. What might greatly help would be for the Democrats to win more Congressional seats, and clean up big time in the mid term elections. Maybe this might help make room for a new generation of Democratic Party leaders.
And as you note, the GOP may double down on appealing to fear and hatred. Again, no matter what, it is going to be interesting to see what happens over the next few election cycles.
Matt McIrvin
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I don’t know, the biggest Bernie fans I know in real life are all (white) women. I didn’t see the appeal, really, but they did.
Groucho48
@Immanentize:
I can certainly understand and agree with that. Speaking for myself, though, I’ve used the “what if it was your daughter” version a couple times since the tape went public.
One reason is that it’s slightly possible that the Trump supporter has just enough empathy to picture his daughter being groped by Trump and see it as a bad thing.
The other reason is if they don’t and respond that way it reveals to everyone else what slimeballs they are.
One recent exchange…what if Trump walked up to your 20 year old daughter, stuck his tongue down her throat and grabbed her privates. Would that be acceptable to you? The guy actually replied it would be all right with him if it was alright with her.
The subsequent pile on didn’t go well for him.
Yet another reason is that Trump supporters categorize most women as sluts and moneychasers who would like nothing better than to be groped by a rich guy. In fact, that’s what most of them want. So, you really have to bring it home to them and make it personal or they will shift the blame to the women.
les
@peach flavored shampoo:
Not quite, I think. He’s the tumor. Republican politics over the last 30 years are the cause. If we’re lucky, the cure will kill the patient. Certainly cause loss of weight.
Joel
@WereBear: that is probably the best part of Donnie Darko — Kitty Farmer.
JR in WV
@raven:
Is living in Athens somewhat like living on Hawai’i ?
A tiny blue spot in the middle of a huge, deep red sea?
;-)
I am jealous, we don’t have REM here nearly as often as you do! And our blue is more finely dispersed in the red sea of WV. You know, we were all blue just the other year! Then suddenly, we turned bright red. Bummer…
@raven:
I obviously should have read more of your comments before posting this comment. REALLY jealous!!
Uncle Cosmo
@nonynony: Choke Toad & Jerk Shtupper delenda est!
JR in WV
@Matt McIrvin:
I have liked Hillary Clinton ever since she worked to pass health care reform a hundred years ago, and got screwed by fellow Dems AND the big health care companies.
By the same token, I have never cared for Sanders, who seems like someone who uses people without caring about them; he has high office and doesn’t really do anything with it.
So I voted for the person, the woman I thought was the best candidate to lead the Democratic Party and the United States of America. So far, so good, huh?
I can’t wait for the next Trump rock to roll back showing the American public what’s underneath. No telling where, no telling what, no telling who, but I believe there are at least 2 or 3 more rocks to overturn. This one has bragging about rape underneath! The next one…. ?