Senior Trump person reminded me earlier that this whole affair started with Sessions getting AG. "Now Trump hates him and a Democrat is in the Senate." https://t.co/0EMyZ8Vg0v
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) December 13, 2017
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Could not have happened to a more deserving Malevolent Leprechaun…
Let this sink in – Jefferson Beauregard Sessions’ Senate seat was taken by a civil rights lawyer who convicted Klansmen. Justice is sweet.
— Lily Adams (@adamslily) December 13, 2017
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***********
It took an extraordinarily unsuccessful series of choices, by Republican leaders, to make the Alabama race competitive even *before* the Moore scandal. Let’s review them in choose-your-adventure form.
— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) December 12, 2017
You’re President-elect Trump. You have to choose an attorney general. Do you:
(1) Reward Jeff Sessions for loyalty, knowing it will prompt a potentially messy special election
(2) Pick one of many non-senators available to the job, at the risk of disappointing your (then-)friend— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) December 12, 2017
(click on either tweet to read the whole thread)
Major Major Major Major
Ruckus
I think we are fortunate to have, if we must at all, a group of moronic assholes who can’t see past their bigotry and perversions to actually plan out a course of action, to see consequences before they bite them in the ass. Yes it’s messy, yes it’s very dangerous, but think how bad it might be if it wasn’t that Roy Moore’s horse is the smartest mammal among all of them.
hellslittlestangel
Lie down with The Orange Better One, wake up with … if you’re lucky, fleas.
So I guess I’ll have to go to one of those déclassé blogs to read and write mean jokes about Dan Johnson?
Brachiator
OT. Reports that PBS host Tavis Smiley has been suspended, for sexual improprieties.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Trump really stepped into some horse poo.
And now the backbiting. Heard a white Alabama voters complain about being exploited and betrayed by the Washington elite. She talked about doing what she was told, being loyal and voting for the Republican candidate even as the GOP leadership seemed to waffle.
She also seemed to suggest that Luther Strange was not the best candidate and that Rep Mo Brooks should have been the guy.
Oddly enough, Ann Coulter of all demons thinks that Brooks indeed should run in 2020.
Brooks suggested that bad health was a personal failing. Lucky thing that he’s got good health insurance anyway, as he recently announced that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
guachi
We don’t appear to have exit polls from 2016 but we do have them for 2012 in Alabama even if all I could find was a black/white voter breakdown.
Jones actually managed to do one point better among black voters than Obama and black turnout was higher as a percentage of total voters.
Jones did a LOT better among white voters, like 15 points better.
The net result is that about 1/4 of Jones’s vote percent increase came from black voters and 3/4 came from white voters.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Ya know I’m not one to wish cancer on anyone. It sucks donkey balls even when everything goes to plan. It’s far, far worse when it doesn’t.
But prostate cancer is not all that abnormal in men over 65-70 yrs old. If it’s caught early it can be reasonably treated and not as bad as most other cancers. Except for the side effects of treatment. If one has to have surgery there is a 95% chance of incontinence and impotency. And that’s a major improvement from not all that long ago when it was 99.something%. If not caught early a major side effect is it metastasizing into bones. All bets are off at that point, remission is not possible, control is about as good as it gets. It will, like all other cancers that do not go into or stay in remission, kill you. But only after, like many other cancers, fucks with your life for a while.
All that is to say that I hope he has good insurance, where the deductible is high and the copay is massive. I doubt that he will learn anything from this though, because he is a republican fuck.
guachi
To add to my above comment: I haven’t seen anything that pinpoints where the doubling of Jones’s white support came from – whether it was a uniform increase among various white demographic groups or there were particular groups of white voters that shifted more heavily to Jones than other groups.
ThresherK
@Ruckus: You are more generous than I.
I would like him to be visited by the Ghost of Prostates Past, and, only if he learns something, to have successful treatment. Otherwise he can go peg himself
Anne Laurie
@guachi:
Too tired to google, but what I’ve seen says that white women as a whole — especially mothers, for some reason! — shifted enough to help Jones, and white voters of all sexes under the age of 30 shifted significantly.
What interests me is how many formerly ‘dependable’ white voters chose to stay home rather than voting at all. Especially among those who will admit that they looked at Moore’s last Hatefest-Palooza and said, Okay, that’s a burning bridge too far!
I’m sure we will be seeing many, many, many statistical breakdowns on this in the next few days… some of them even based on actual numbers & not on the writers’ prejudices.
NotMax
@guachi
Moore’s past of course was inescapable and played a huge part.
Moore’s present antics and rabid showboating did as well.
Beyond that, would hazard speculation that for some percentage there has come a realization – perhaps not even a conscious realization but one which carries impact and import nonetheless – of one or more of the following:
1) Policies such as same sex marriage have not resulted in having to daily dodge flaming globs of brimstone.
2) That the incessant crying wolf by FOX, etc. is not only debilitating but also diluted by dint of sheer repetition.
3) Petulance and/or inertia are less preferable to the clear and strong potential for both themselves and their state becoming tarred as near universal objects of ridicule entirely because of this one vote.
4) There is starkly quite a few more diimes’ worth of difference between the two major parties than they chose to see evidence of previously.
5) Dolt 45 really is an irredeemable idiot.
Anne Laurie
@guachi: Here’s one data set cite:
Ruckus
@ThresherK:
If it was pretty much anything but cancer. An alien living in his intestine that ruptures his insides and causes him to bleed to death within seconds for example. But cancer touches a bit close to home. Members of my family, friends, me…. It’s an equal opportunity disease and I’d like him to have something unique, something incurable, at least a strange disease that costs far too much for his insurance company to pay for and for which the treatment is as bad or worse than the disease. And all because he’s willing and stupid enough to want to hurt people when they need help the most. Doesn’t it figure that he’s got insurance? IGMFY at it”s finest.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@guachi: Some of this might also be due to a lot of shitgibbon voters just not bothering to show up. I haven’t seen statistics on how many voters went Trump-Jones versus how many went Trump-abstain, but IIRC Moore only got around 47% of Trump’s vote total while Jones got something like 94% of Clinton’s.
Elizabelle
@Anne Laurie: The evangelicals are the pox that Christ warned us about. Fake people with false values. Satan’s sheeple.
On their asses, under a steeple.
T S
@Ruckus: Your comment about metastasis is not true. My dad had it in his bones. Radiation + hormones. He’s off hormones. We have remission. It is possible. And if it comes back…hormones. Prostate cancer is a little wuss.
The prostate cancer isn’t going to do him in.
JGabriel
Alex Burns @alexburnsNYT:
Number two should probably read more like:
Gator90
My white liberal friend in Alabama texted me after Jones was projected the winner, stating “So this is what pride in your state feels like.” He is over the moon because neither of his Republican parents voted for Moore. His mom declined to vote, and his dad amazed and delighted him by actually voting for Jones.
opiejeanne
@guachi: I think college educated vs non was a big difference among white voters.’
‘
And all of what Anne Laurie said, above.
opiejeanne
@T S: Depends on two things: how fast is it moving and whether they caught it in time.
JGabriel
@Ruckus:
Maybe, though I think the inability to see consequences is a quality we could do without in someone empowered to deploy the most effective nuclear arsenal in the world.
Zinsky
If you make a deal with the Devil, all it gets you is halfway to Hell!
Elizabelle
@Gator90: 3 cheers for your friend’s dad. That is huge.
Perhaps the mom will come around next. We have precedent.
J R in WV
One of my best friends was diagnosed with prostate cancer at a relatively young age, in his mid 50s. He had surgery after it was caught early, and seems to have had no reoccurence and needed no chemo or follow up radiation treatment.
He did well enough to go out to AZ for 3 months and be part of the crew building our western winter camp house, which we got under roof and wrapped with building wrap in that time.
Weather was much worse than normal for AZ, down cold enough to freeze water pipes that were just wrapped with old insulation. We spent the better part of a week working on my cousin’s water system to get it back in operation. Later on we redid part of her roof that was leaking badly, some guy thought shingles would work on a nearly level porch roof since it’s mainly desert.
But when it does rain it rains a lot, and would blow up under those flat shingles and fall into her living room!
debbie
Does Trump even realize that it is he himself who is responsible for all of the pain he’s feeling?
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
With, ahem, both sexes..if the rumors are true
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
Wow. He must really have been worried after Charlie Rose got dumped.
chopper
@Zinsky:
this reminds me of Priest’s song Satan Love Boogie:
Lucifer! Do your duty
Slam my head, shake your booty
Wham! Bam! Thank you, Nell
I’m on the Amtrak to hell
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@chopper: Fairly sure that was Deathtongue.
Ruckus
@T S:
I hope for the best for your dad and I’m sorry that he has cancer. I’m not in any way an expert, just a cancer patient with an educational background and quite a bit of experience, both good and bad. A metastasized cancer is harder to control, harder to find, because it can be anywhere and some places or many places make treatment far more difficult. But treatments have changed and gotten better, but cancer is still a crap shoot. My doc is somewhat amazed at my progress, I’m rather amazed at the cost in mental health that cancer brings. And I’ve seen it up very close before so I shouldn’t be. And that stress can cause many other negative consequences.
Ruckus
@JGabriel:
I easily could have put in there, “bite them and us in the ass or worse…..”
But I wasn’t writing War and Peace so went with want came to me in the moment.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
I was suspected to have it in my late 40s. Turned out I didn’t and that was nice because that was the only treatment then, surgery and normally at that age it is very agressive. I know someone who was diagnosed around 50 and had surgery. He’s doing good, has learned to live with the side effects. I know six gentlemen who are black and were in Vietnam (Agent Orange exposure) and those two things can make them far more likely to get prostate cancer and for it to be far more aggressive, so they have had maximum treatment. Their ages and responses to it and the treatments vary but none of them were having a great time mentally. But then I’ve never known anyone to have a great time mentally with a cancer diagnosis. Even people who lived decades after. There are always costs involved.
dmbeaster
If you were going to pick a sitting GOP Senator for executive office and risk a replacement election, its hard to think of a safer choice than one from Alabama. What really happened here is that non-stop winger base tendency to pick the biggest moronic creeps over more mainstream Republicans. Its the Fox News effect biting the GOP in the ass again, and there is a long history of it — Akin, Angle, O’Donnell, just to name a view. Moore probably tops the list, but its just another case of the same thing.
smedley the uncertain
@J R in WV: BUG roof works…
Built Up Gravel. All of my AZ houses had it.