Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Not all heroes wear capes.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Let there be snark.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Consistently wrong since 2002

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

This blog will pay for itself.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

This fight is for everything.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

The willow is too close to the house.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Probably Not, But Isn’t It Sweet to Watch Him Squirm?

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Probably Not, But Isn’t It Sweet to Watch Him Squirm?

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…“The speaker is not resigning,” AshLee Strong, Ryan’s spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Amodei is not particularly close to the speaker, who has a small inner circle of advisers and who makes decisions about his political future with an even smaller round of confidants and family.

But Amodei publicly reopened the discussion that has been kept to private whispers within the House Republican Conference about whether Ryan will run to lead the House GOP next year. He went even further by stating, with nothing more than gossip from his colleagues, that Ryan would resign within 60 days and that his successor had already been chosen…

Ryan, who was on a congressional delegation trip to the Czech Republic, has tried to bat down speculation about whether he wants another term as House speaker if Republicans hold the majority in the November midterm elections. Winning approval of the tax-cut bill in December marked a career highlight that led some to believe he might leave office in the winter, on a high note before what is likely to be a rough midterm…

Republicans would be stunned if there was an outright resignation, in the middle of the term, without any political scandal, and many would suspect they had little chance to win the majority in November.

The traditional route for a House speaker looking toward the exits is to run for another term and announce immediately after the election that he or she is stepping down, particularly if the party loses the majority.

There are, of course, rude whispers that Ryan wants to jump ship before he gets blamed for any part of a massive GOP loss come November. Ryan has never been a guy to stand and take punishment for the good of anyone other than Paul Ryan…


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And then there’s this… unpleasant spectacle:

Reader Interactions

107Comments

  3. 3.

    p.a.

    re: November, ASSUME NOTHING. tRump’s approval up, to 42%, on most recent CNN poll. Don’t know if the Stormy meme has taken hold, and of course the MSM has been pretty weak (even by their standards) on CambAn and foreign influence.

  5. 5.

    satby

    Cathy Myers is the other Democrat in the primary against Ironstache Randy Bryce. I hope both of them come out to meet and walk with the kids. And after the primary, I hope they both join forces to take Ryan down.
    Unless the little weasel has already quit, in which case they can take down whoever the Republican candidate is.

  6. 6.

    Jay

    As one wag on twitter pointed out, Ryan’s now adressed the Czech Parliement 2 times more than he’s addressed his Constituents.

  7. 7.

    Schlemazel

    Now or after he hands the gavel to Speaker Pelosi, it really does not matter much. The field to replace him as head of the GOP delegation will be smaller in January and that is a good thing.

  9. 9.

    Baud

    I don’t like this story. The media will certainly pivot to “why isn’t Pelosi stepping down?” before you can blink an eye.

  10. 10.

    Baud

    OT. Via Drum, the draconian demands of the March for Our Lives kids

    Fund more gun violence research. We actually made a step in this direction when President Trump signed the 2018 budget, which clarifies that the 1996 Dickey Amendment doesn’t prohibit the CDC from conducting gun research.

    Unleash the ATF. Let them store their background-check records on a computer, for example.

    Universal background checks. In theory, everyone is in favor of this. In theory.

    High-capacity magazine ban. This has long been my favorite. MFOL is calling for a 10-round limit. I’d make it six, myself.

    Assault weapons ban. The gun folks are right when they say it’s tricky to define “assault weapon,” but it’s not actually impossible.

    https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/03/heres-an-action-list-for-gun-reform/

  12. 12.

    cosima

    I’m now off to walk Lola dog and meet up w/a friend for coffee. However, before I go, and as this is an open thread, I’m going to post positive things:

    I’m combing through my FB saves with an aim to delete my page on or before the 31st — finding non-FB sites/pages for my saves. Fortunately I haven’t been on FB for long, and it took me much longer to figure out what ‘save post’ was, so I don’t have thousands to go through. Anyway, I have re-discovered some great things, and I’m sharing.

    Backshopjournal.com posts interesting things, and talks about interesting books. They had a post about a series of books that Little C (and Mr C) are crazy about — Kabu Kibuishi’s Amulet series. Not many (enough!) know about them, they are fab, and Little C has got several of her friends hooked on them (she was maybe 9 or 10 when she started reading them). Anyway, given there was an overlap there, I looked at another recommendation of theirs, ‘Awkward’ by Svetlana Chmakova, it arrived yesterday, Little C picked it up, and finished it within an hour or so, laughing all the way. Good thing I bought her the second (and have now pre-ordered 3rd). So, if you have a tween or young teen, and they like graphic novels, they’ll like all of those books. One of the things about the Kibuishi Amulet series is that apparently it works quite well for dyslexic children???? Little C gave the 1st 3 in the series to a friend for her bday, we had no idea she is dyslexic, and the mum was over the moon b/c her daughter had loved reading them, they sort of sparked a love of reading in her, given that she struggled so much with traditional books.

    On the music front, Mahogany Sessions, MOSTLY Strings and SleepTime, all of which have amazing youtube channels. If you like alt/folk/acoustic you’ll like those.

    Finally, I’ve got lots of saves from HeySigmund. If you &/or a loved one struggle(s) with anxiety, depression, or anything on those spectrums, it is a fab resource. It also has some really really (!!!) wonderful parenting resource pieces. So much love for that site.

    And finally — Ryan sucks, hope he is caught up in the CA mess, the rotten traitor, and well done to the warrior children calling him out!

  13. 13.

    Immanentize

    I’m starting to wonder whether the whole tarrif show was to announce tarrifs but never implement them. Delay at ‘talks’ continue. See? Trump brought the Chinese to the table!

  14. 14.

    Central Planning

    I saw on a chyron this morning that the shooter in Maryland killed himself last week; it wasn’t the resource officer/”good guy with a gun”

  15. 15.

    Schlemazel

    @OzarkHillbilly: In the House smaller is all that really mtters. The rules give power to the majority. The Senate is a different matter & that is where we need not just wins but sanity. It is going to be a rough few years

  16. 16.

    Chyron HR

    @Baud:

    What part of this photoshopped picture of a skinhead lesbian tearing up the constitution do you not understand?

  18. 18.

    Matt McIrvin

    @p.a.: I’m going to break character and be the one to dismiss the pessimistic poll news here: while Trump’s job approval numbers crept up a bit from December to February, no other poll shows a big recent jump up like that CNN one.

  19. 19.

    Baud

    Thank god we didn’t elect the Goldman Sachs candidate.

    NEW YORK — Wall Street bonuses are climbing toward record highs again, according to government data released Monday showing that in 2017, the average bonus payout reached $184,220.

    
That is a 17 percent increase compared to the previous year and the closest Wall Street has come in more than a decade to its all-time high of $191,360 in 2006, according to the New York state comptroller. It follows an 15 percent increase in 2016, when the average bonus was about $157,660.


    The bigger bonuses reflect a revival on Wall Street as the Trump administration begins rolling back financial industry regulations. The recent sell-off in the markets is creating the kind of volatility that Wall Street traders thrive on. And the Federal Reserve has begun raising a key interest rate, making it easier for banks to make a profit. The financial industry’s revenue increased 4.5 percent last year to $153 billion, according to the New York state comptroller.

    WaPo

  21. 21.

    WereBear

    Assault weapons ban. The gun folks are right when they say it’s tricky to define “assault weapon,” but it’s not actually impossible.

    Of course it’s not. It’s just more of their Newspeak and mindless chatter and ridiculous “rules” liberals have to live by.

    On Pod Save America, they interviewed the marchers on Saturday, a charming mix from grandmothers to grade-schoolers. So many of the adults, young and old, “weren’t that politically active” until the pool of super-saturated liquid finally crystallized around Trump.

    As someone who has been screaming into the void since 2000, I don’t understand it, but I sure welcome it.

  23. 23.

    debbie

    @p.a.:

    What poll are you referencing? I just took a look at 538, and his approval has improved minutely — 41.4% from 40.7% about a week ago. Plus the disapproval isn’t dropping.

  29. 29.

    Matt McIrvin

    @WereBear: We can do a lot better than the 1994 law, but any assault-weapons ban will have some kind of edge case that makes it look absurd, which will be a source of gun-people bellyaching–because that’s what happens with laws. “Why do you ban this one but not that one? It’s almost the same!” Well, when you draw a line it has to be drawn somewhere. At some point “shut up” is a valid response.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    Tomorrow, the World! coming up in a few on TCM.

    Mention it because the German accent and voice evinced by Skippy Homeier has to be the inspiration for the voice of Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory. Movie is a serious drama but now has been rendered intermittently and unintentionally amusing every time Emil (Skippy) speaks. One simply cannot shake off the identicality of speech.

  34. 34.

    debbie

    Love that Trump’s bragging about yesterday’s stock markets like the couple-thousand-point drop never happened.

  35. 35.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: The tax cuts are the Wall Street culture writ large. Rape, pillage, burn, fuck anybody and everybody just so long as you get yours.

  36. 36.

    Patricia Kayden

    @OzarkHillbilly: If Democrats flip the House, it doesn’t matter which incompetent boob replaces Ryan. In any case, Ryan isn’t that much better than Gohmert and his ilk.

  37. 37.

    SFAW

    @Baud:

    I don’t like this story. The media will certainly pivot to “why isn’t Pelosi stepping down?” before you can blink an eye.

    Well, if that happens, then it’s incumbent (so to speak) on you to issue a formal statement on the order of “President-to-be Baud looks forward to working with Speaker Pelosi to help return America to its pre-Rethuglican greatness.”

  39. 39.

    Patricia Kayden

    @debbie: Trump only sees positive things for which he can claim responsibility. Anything negative is the Kenyan’s fault.

  41. 41.

    SFAW

    @WereBear:

    Bit of a fan of Skippy Homeier. He was a child star and worked into at least middle age; that’s rare.

    Me, too. And my grandmother before me. So it was saddening to find out (just now) that he died last June. Goddammit.

  43. 43.

    bystander

    @Matt McIrvin: The good part is it’s CNN, so twitler can’t really quote it, can he?

    @NotMax: Thanks for the tip!

    I have yet to hear any teevee personality announce that the repubs’ silence on twitler/Stormy means they can never make hay off a Clinton/Monica affair again.

  45. 45.

    WereBear

    @bystander: I have yet to hear any teevee personality announce that the repubs’ silence on twitler/Stormy means they can never make hay off a Clinton/Monica affair again.

    And you won’t, because they are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Koch/Mercer/Murdock criminal enterprise. The old order is dead. It would behoove us to act with that knowledge.

  48. 48.

    Matt McIrvin

    @debbie: It’s a lot like the way Republicans liked to blame Obama for the rise in gasoline prices during his first term–when if you had any memory at all of the Bush administration, you knew that a huge rise had happened then, but gas prices happened to be anomalously low on Inauguration Day 2009 because the global economy had just collapsed.

  53. 53.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Baud: So the tax cuts are going into bonuses for millionaires versus creating jobs or increasing wages for workers. Good to know.

  59. 59.

    Baud

    @Patricia Kayden:

    About half the people without jobs or higher wages vote for the party giving the millionaires tax cuts for their bonuses, so I don’t see why anyone should care.

  60. 60.

    Immanentize

    @Matt McIrvin:
    First, I applaud your rejection of single poll depression!
    Second, did you see the NYTimes Op Ed yesterday about how big a wave would be needed to flip the House? ?. That was worrisome, until I realized their model was developed to support the Appellants in the Supreme Court to end radical political Gerrymandring. Still… What do you think about their analysis?

  64. 64.

    zhena gogolia

    @SFAW:

    Only on BJ could you find a flashmob of Skip Homeier fans.

    But I always mix him up with Shepperd Strudwick.

  66. 66.

    germy

    Drumpf wants to ask census respondents whether they are U.S. citizens.

    Question: is this constitutional?

  67. 67.

    germy

    @zhena gogolia: I watched Dr. Cyclops a few weeks ago, and Albert Dekker’s voice and odd accent reminded me suddenly of Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth (from the Futurama saga).

  68. 68.

    condorcet runner-up

    @MJS: Followed by, “what other models are substantially similar? Why don’t you submit a list?”

    And then ban those too.

  71. 71.

    Immanentize

    @germy:
    The question was last used, I think, in the 50s at the height of the red scare. It was never held to be unconstitutional per se….

    But the argument is that the effect will be unconstitutional as this question will undermine the clear constitutional command of a dicenial “actual Enumeration.” Also, there is an argument that the request to include that question, which came from Session’s shop, came too late.

    ETA,. I love tooking at my family’s old census reporting — they were immigrants from Moravia. It is where I learned my Grandmother’s name was not “Frances” as she was known to all including my Dad, but originally, Francesca. Sounded too foreign, I guess.

  72. 72.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Immanentize: I was going to take a trip to the coast, but my back was sore and I rinsed my contacts with the cleaning solution instead of saline(ouch).

    ETA: Also I wanted to try some graduated filters and see if that helped with light pollution(they didn’t help much). That was much easier to do at home than “on the road”.

  73. 73.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @germy: Quick check says that it was asked in both 1930 and 1940. I know I’ve seen it earlier; I’ve been diving mostly in 1850-1870 lately.

  74. 74.

    p.a.

    re:CNN poll. I don’t have cable, I’m going by the chyrons of CNN on the Y’s sound-off gym tv. Also, given horserace journamalism (all they can do) a meaningless margin-of-error uptick becomes a dangerous meme of tRumpRising to the general public.

  77. 77.

    germy

    @Immanentize: I just saw this:

    The state of California sued the Trump administration Monday night, arguing that the decision to add a question about citizenship in the 2020 Census violates the U.S. Constitution. The state’s attorney general acted just after the Commerce Department announced the change in a late-night release.

    link

  79. 79.

    p.a.

    @Immanentize: Yep. All my aunts’, uncles’, parents’ birth certs have Italian first names but they were all born here and always used Am English first names. One aunt’s given name is Mercedes, always goes by Marcia. She was 7th child, says she thinks the folks “just ran out of name ideas.”

  80. 80.

    germy

    Has anyone here been following this story?

    Authorities caught up with the alleged fugitive self-help guru behind the walls of a luxury gated community near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

    The villas inside, according to court documents filed this week, had a price tag of up to $10,000 a week, not a place to expect a man who claimed for years he was penniless and didn’t even have a driver’s license.

    But Keith Raniere — known to his followers across the world as the Vanguard — was living inside one of the properties with several women, according to federal prosecutors. Mexican authorities took him into custody and delivered him to Texas on Monday. He is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday on federal sex trafficking charges. As Raniere was taken from the Mexican villa, the women chased after authorities in their own car at high speed, prosecutors say.

  82. 82.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Jim Wright brings up some salient points about the real life difficulties of arming teachers: This veteran’s rant about arming teachers is going viral.

    A veteran, meaning me, thinks it’s a bad idea.
    That’s what they said.
    That’s what they all said.
    Pro gun. Anti gun. Didn’t matter. When people attempted to answer my questions, they all, every single one, thousands of them, they all came to this same conclusion: Gee, Jim, you’re saying arming teachers is a bad idea.

    No, I didn’t.

    I didn’t say that at all.

    YOU did.

    Beautifully done.

  83. 83.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Immanentize: The reference I had handy only goes through 1940, since 1950 hasn’t been released yet.

    I’ve never had to research recent immigrants*, but IIRC immigrants in the 1800s could use their census entries in their citizenship applications. Maybe they quit asking after immigration paperwork became more tightly managed?

  85. 85.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    Damn, forgot the footnote.

    *Multiple colonial lines, no post-Revolution immigration.

  87. 87.

    R-Jud

    @germy: No, but as I am just finishing up the cult documentary Wild Wild Country, thank you for pointing that out to me.

  88. 88.

    Jeffro

    FYI the lead story right now on Fox News dot com is of a journalist who was captured in Syria (supposedly by Al-Qaeda) and then “betrayed” by the FBI – specifically Mueller and Comey, go figure – when the FBI didn’t make his kidnapping case priority #, etc etc.

    Man, they are really reaching, aren’t they? Here’s an anvil, you drowning mofos…

  90. 90.

    raven

    @R-Jud: We watched the first one last night. When I think of all the shit that I could have gotten into in the late 60’s-early 70’s. . . . .

  94. 94.

    LAO

    @R-Jud: I just started that last night, Unfortunately, I had a couple of Margaritas at dinner so I may have to re-watch the first episode. Is it as good as I hope it will be?

  96. 96.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Tenar Arha: I doubt that asking the question is. What’s probably unconstitutional is the use this Administration wants to make of the data.

    It’s like the big to do that’s erupted over the changes to the race question. No one would blink at it if it weren’t Trump.

  98. 98.

    Chip Daniels

    Then there’s this:
    Repeal The Second AMENDMENT from retired justice John PaulmStevens.
    I raised that a year or so ago as a way of being deliberately provocative, to stretch the boundaries of discussion.
    And yet here we are, with the subject suddenly out in the wild.
    Things are impossible, until they aren’t.

  99. 99.

    Tenar Arha

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Yeah.

    I suspect that the original reasons for dropping the question in the first place were a combination of trying to encourage trust & obtain fuller responses. Also, by the 1950’s, it probably wasn’t a hugely useful question bc immigration had been shut off so completely in 1924. Now, of course the federal government does have non-citizen entry/resident data available to it, it’s just they are really obviously looking for something else. And because it’s so central to representation and money and almost everything else our local & federal government does…no one in their right mind in “blue” states can or should let any changes to it go unchallenged. (Also, ?, even if the federal government is caught up in a “blue wave,” “red” states don’t need more tools to discriminate against their residents).

  102. 102.

    cosima

    Re: whether or not asking about citizenship is unconstitutional, I’m going to go with ‘yes, it is.’ Purely based on the fact that it appears as though legal experts have jumped on that boat already.

    The more important question that could/should be asked is whether or not someone in the household is paying taxes, into SS, etc. I realise that this is a panacea for the mouth-breathers who think undocumented immigrants are everywhere, and whatever the results of the next census, I have zero faith in a R-led WH, Congress or Senate to use that information in good faith. There are people in immigration limbo who pay taxes, into SS, etc., so pushing for that to be the question(s) asked seems a valid action, given that those mouth-breathers seem to think non-citizens are all getting some plush free ride at the expense of taxpayers.

    We are not citizens of the UK (we are officially residents), but we pay taxes here, and into the pension system. Please do ask me that on the UK equivalent of a census form! We also pay US taxes. We do receive a form every year asking about the residents in our home (address-based), we complete it, and have to check the box that says that we are not eligible to vote (we vote absentee).

  103. 103.

    Stan

    @Baud: The gun folks are right when they say it’s tricky to define “assault weapon,” but it’s not actually impossible.

    Not to head off in another direction, but no, it’s really easy.

  104. 104.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Immanentize: I tend to fret about aggregates, not about the motion in individual polls. Media outlets that have their own polls like to write “analysis” stories making up some reason for the swing they saw in their one poll–but if you compare that to every other poll out there, you often find that most of the change they found is just sampling noise.

    Didn’t see the NYT op-ed, but I know Sam Wang has calculated that gerrymandering since 2010 has given the Republicans something like a 7-point advantage in House elections. If you compare that to current generic House preference polls… it’s inconclusive. It seems like a lot of media polls give the Democrats a bigger lead than that whereas online polls (which release more frequently) give the Democrats a smaller lead. But the results from special elections suggest that the optimistic numbers may be more accurate.

  105. 105.

    Matt McIrvin

    …OK, I see the NYT op-ed claims the threshold is more like 11 points rather than 7. All I can say is that that’s significantly higher than the other estimates I’ve seen.

  106. 106.

    Brachiator

    @germy:

    Drumpf wants to ask census respondents whether they are U.S. citizens.

    Question: is this constitutional?

    A couple of things I picked up from a The Hill story on this early this morning (California time)

    Trump’s Team of Evil wants to claim that the citizenship question will help enforce voting rights laws.

    President Trump’s Commerce Department said Monday evening that the 2020 Census will include a question on citizenship, despite the strong objections of Democrats.

    Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced his decision to reinstate the citizenship question in a post on the Commerce website. The citizenship question has not appeared on the census since 1950, but Ross argued that collecting citizenship data has been “a long-standing historical practice.”

    The Department of Justice (DOJ) under Attorney General Jeff Sessions has reportedly pushed for inclusion of the question, arguing that it would allow the the department to better enforce the Voting Rights Act….

    Meanwhile, Congressman Warren Davidson hopes that census results could reduce California’s congressional representation. From his Twitter message:

    @WarrenDavidson
    #CitizenshipMatters Apportionment for Congressional seats and electoral votes should be based on citizens, not on residents. Otherwise citizens are underrepresented… For example, California gets roughly three extra members of Congress based on estimates of illegal residents.

    The clock is ticking: By law, the bureau has to provide Congress with the final wording of the census questionnaire by March 31, this Saturday.

  107. 107.

    SmokeyB

    The 2010 Census left the citizenship question out deliberately. The Census Bureau stated it is “…required by the U.S. Constitution to count everyone in this country, regardless of immigration or citizen status”.

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