Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Books are my comfort food!

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

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

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Republicans in disarray!

“But what about the lurkers?”

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

I really should read my own blog.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

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

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

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The Call is Coming From Inside the House, Donald

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Oh:

During more than five years as a housekeeper at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., Victorina Morales has made Donald J. Trump’s bed, cleaned his toilet and dusted his crystal golf trophies. When he visited as president, she was directed to wear a pin in the shape of the American flag adorned with a Secret Service logo.

Because of the “outstanding” support she has provided during Mr. Trump’s visits, Ms. Morales in July was given a certificate from the White House Communications Agency inscribed with her name.

Quite an achievement for an undocumented immigrant housekeeper.

Ms. Morales’s journey from cultivating corn in rural Guatemala to fluffing pillows at an exclusive golf resort took her from the southwest border, where she said she crossed illegally in 1999, to the horse country of New Jersey, where she was hired at the Trump property in 2013 with documents she said were phony.

She said she was not the only worker at the club who was in the country illegally.

Sandra Diaz, 46, a native of Costa Rica who is now a legal resident of the United States, said she, too, was undocumented when she worked at Bedminster between 2010 and 2013. The two women said they worked for years as part of a group of housekeeping, maintenance and landscaping employees at the golf club that included a number of undocumented workers, though they could not say precisely how many. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump or Trump Organization executives knew of their immigration status. But at least two supervisors at the club were aware of it, the women said, and took steps to help workers evade detection and keep their jobs.

“There are many people without papers,” said Ms. Diaz, who said she witnessed several people being hired whom she knew to be undocumented.

This is the most infuriating thing about the demonization of immigrants by Republicans- they all know immigrants, and on a one on one basis, love them, pay them, etc. But they still feel free to whip up the racists and nativists because it helps them politically.

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What could possibly go wrong?

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The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott has a piece up today about Team Trump’s plan to respond to the Mueller report. The plan is, there is no plan. Aides know Trump would ignore any strategy they create anyway, so they aren’t bothering with it.

“We would always put together plans with the knowledge that he wouldn’t use them or they’d go off the rails,” one recently departed official told me. “And at this point, with Mueller, they’ve decided they’re not even going to do that.”

“It’s like, ‘Jesus, take the wheel,’” the source added, “but scarier.”

Okay then. There are some pretty salty quotes from Giuliani in the story. Here’s one on Trump drafting responses to Mueller’s questions a while back:

“Answering those questions was a nightmare,” he told me. “It took him about three weeks to do what would normally take two days.”

You don’t say. Here’s Giuliani, pretend lawyer, on trying to control the raging, overgrown toddler who pretends to be president:

Giuliani initially pushed back on the prediction that Trump would take center stage after the report drops. “I don’t think following his lead is the right thing. He’s the client,” he told me. “The more controlled a person is, the more intelligent they are, the more they can make the decision. But he’s just like every other client. He’s not more … you know, controlled than any other client. In fact, he’s a little less.”

Jesus, Rudy — you’re lucky Trump doesn’t read.

Here’s Giuliani on Trump’s busy schedule:

There was the sheer problem of finding time—Giuliani recalled one instance when they were working on the list and Chief of Staff John Kelly broke in to tell Trump about the migrant caravan, which grabbed the president’s attention immediately. And there was the specificity of the questions themselves: “He’s got a great memory,” Giuliani said. “However, basically we were answering questions about 2016, the busiest year of his life. It’s a real job to remember.”

Yeah, gotta drop everything to respond to the national threat posed by [dun-dun-DUN] The Caravan. Something tells me this isn’t the last time we’ll hear excuses for Trump’s failure to remember events that occurred in 2016.

Anyhoo, cool strategy, bro. I’m sure it’ll all work out.

Open thread!

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Slogans to text is a big jump: New York Single Payer Edition

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New York will have a solid Democratic trifecta in 2019. The New York State Senate will have a 39-24 Democratic majority. This means any Democratic only bill can lose 7 votes or 18% of the Democratic Senate caucus and still maintain a minimal viable winning coalition. The New York House will have a 106-44 majority. Any Democrat only bill can lose 29% of the Democratic Assembly Caucus and still maintain a minimal viable coalition. As a reminder Senate Majority Leader had an effective 0% margin and Speaker Pelosi had a 14% margin within her caucus to pass the ACA.

Politico reports that one of the major bills that is being debated and prepped for a 2019 introduction is New York state single payer. It is a bill that is splitting the caucus as major internal interest groups are at loggerheads.

While public-sector unions in New York City have voiced concerns over the bill’s potential to curtail their generous health benefits, which POLITICO first reported last week, two leading health care unions are among those continuing to back the legislation….

The Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella group of New York City unions, recently met with the bill’s sponsors — Assemblyman Dick Gottfried (D-Manhattan) and state Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx) — in the Lower Manhattan offices of District Council 37 to express their concerns.

They worry they will lose the option to select virtually full coverage because of a provision in the legislation that passes a fraction of a proposed payroll tax onto employees. They are also concerned about losing union-controlled “welfare funds” to which the city contributes about $1,500 per member. Those accounts pay for a variety of expenses, including prescription drugs, eyeglasses and hearing aids.

The biggest challenge for national single payer is that it is massively disruptive. People who have good to very good benefits right now and who make significantly more than median income (ie high propensity voters) are going to be incredibly disrupted in the short term even if they are promised that they will be better off in the long term. The union fight in New York state is a good exemplar of how the political coalitions can be fractured.

The biggest challenge at the state level is two parts of the same problem:

  • How does this get paid for
    • How does this work in a 2008-2010 scenario?
  • How do the waivers that are not yet legal get approved by the Feds

The bill would cost an estimated $139 billion in new tax revenue each year, making its fate especially uncertain in the hands of a governor who has been reticent to raise taxes. Sponsors have argued that the price tag is misleading because the taxes displace money already being paid in co-pays and premiums…

A state-level plan would need an unprecedented federal waiver to allow for federal Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare funds to be redirected into the new system, among other complications….

Single payer is a good slogan. Figuring out the nuts and bolts of how to implement this slogan into policy is an extraordinarily difficult political and policy act.

Is the challenge and pain worthwhile?

If the goal is to eliminate insurance companies it may be; if the goal is to make sure there is universal coverage that is good and affordable then other methods may be superior.

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Early Morning Open Thread

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Good Morning. The usual crew is nowhere to be seen.

This is how Ric greets me in the dining room as I make breakfast.

Trump is not yet tweeting.

The rightwing gets some of its jollies from what we might call EMP porn. EMP is electromagnetic pulse, a concomitant of nuclear weapons explosions. Nuclear weapons can be engineered to produce more of it. The rightwing fantasy is that a country like Iran or North Korea, with not many nukes, would magically, maybe by floating it by balloon, sneak such a nuke or nukes over the US, detonate it, and END ELECTRICITY IN THE US FOREVER!!!!! This is nonsense – developing such a bomb would require tests, and it’s not like the US wouldn’t notice the nuke part and fry the perpetrators. Plus if you have only a few bombs, the smart way to use them is to take out a city. There was another such article in a national publication this week. Here’s one reaction.

https://twitter.com/NuclearAnthro/status/1070537358401912833

https://twitter.com/NuclearAnthro/status/1070538966040961024

The EMP (DRINK!) thing is sort of an in-group joke.

How’s your day going so far?

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On the Road and In Your Backyard

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Good Morning All,

On The Road and In Your Backyard is a weekday feature spotlighting reader submissions. From the exotic to the familiar, please share your part of the world, whether you’re traveling or just in your locality. Share some photos and a narrative, let us see through your pictures and words. We’re so lucky each and every day to see and appreciate the world around us!

Submissions from commenters are welcome at tools.balloon-juice.com

 

Have a wonderful day, be thankful, and enjoy the picture!

 

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Late Night Open Thread: When Slugs Vote for Salt

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My every instinct revolts against agreeing with Tom Nichols, but: If even the hardcore conservative Conservatives have stopped making excuses for the Noble Hardscrabble Heartlanders, how long can the GOP oligarchs and their paid minions continue to engineer elections in their own favor?

And what happens when those oligarchs — and their ‘If dirt voted, white farmers/ranchers would be invincible!’ willing victims — realize their idealized past is never coming back?

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A Cure for Your Imposter Syndrome (Open Thread)

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Many of us suffer occasional bouts of imposter syndrome*. Michelle Obama is one of our number.

Former first lady Michelle Obama confessed she still suffered from “imposter syndrome,” even as her memoir, Becoming, broke sales records last month and became the year’s best-selling book 15 days after it was published.

[…] Asked at the event how Obama felt about being seen as a “symbol of hope,” she said: “I still have a little imposter syndrome, it never goes away, that you’re actually listening to me,” according to the BBC.

“It doesn’t go away, that feeling that you shouldn’t take me that seriously. What do I know?”

When I’m dealing with this, I’ll think on past successes, or remind myself of times when I’ve succeeded by soldiering on. Sometimes, yes, I’ll think about the ways I’m more capable than others. Mrs. Obama has a much better tool for this than I do.

But Obama offered a “secret” to young women everywhere: “I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of, I have worked at nonprofits, I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the U.N.: They are not that smart.“

I’m going to assume she’s using an absolute scale and not a relative scale (it is hard to be smarter than her, after all). And that does make me feel better about myself… but maybe not about like, the world?

In unrelated news, here’s something interesting from the world of data mining.

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