Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Let me file that under fuck it.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

It’s the corruption, stupid.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

I really should read my own blog.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

“But what about the lurkers?”

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

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Archives for November 2019

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Good News!

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Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Bluegrass Schadenfreude

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Election Returns!

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With 99% of precincts reporting, but all the votes in (don’t ask me what that means, I just have a PhD that’s joint in political science…) Democrat Andy Beshear has been declared the winner of the Kentucky gubernatorial race by a little over 5,000 votes. Governor-elect Beshear has already given his victory speech and confirmed that he will restore voting rights for over 140,000 Kentuckians who have had their civil right to vote taken away because of the legacy of Jim Crow.

Governor Bevin, gracious and classy as always (that was sarcasm), has, of course, refused to concede claiming irregularities. Those irregularities are, of course, that he lost the election.

Anyhow, there is no automatic recount in Kentucky. Governor Bevin would have to request one. If he actually does so, the request is made in a petition to a state of Kentucky court and whichever judge is assigned the case will determine if a recount does or does not occur. Given Bevin’s known proclivity for being a raging asshole, I don’t expect him to go quietly, gracefully, and/or professionally into the political night. But we’ll see, so stay tuned.

In Virginia the Democrats have flipped both chambers in the Virginia state legislature giving them unified control of Virginia’s executive and legislative branches.

This wonderful election result also happened in Virginia!

Both of these results, in Kentucky and in Virginia, are exceedingly important going into the next congressional reapportionment as it will make it very hard to gerrymander Kentucky’s congressional and state legislative districts as Governor-elect Beshear will have a veto over whatever maps the Kentucky legislature produces and the Democrats control the entire process in Virginia.

That leaves the Mississippi gubernatorial race. As of right now Republican Tate Reeves is leading Democrat and incumbent Attorney General Jim Hood.

Mississippi was always going to be a tough pickup, even for Hood who has won statewide four times. One of the reasons for this is that Mississippi has a Jim Crow based electoral system for all statewide races that aren’t for the US Senate. Ian Millhiser has the details:

Jim Hood is a political unicorn. A Democrat, Hood nonetheless has won four consecutive statewide elections in the red state of Mississippi — all of them for attorney general. Now he hopes to add a new line to his résumé. He’s the Democratic candidate for governor in Tuesday’s election. And the polls suggest that he’s got a real fighting chance.

But there’s a catch. Mississippi held a constitutional convention more than a century ago to, in the words of one former state governor and US senator, “eliminate the n***er from politics.” One still-remaining vestige of that convention is the unusual way the state conducts its statewide elections.

For statewide positions other than US senator, Mississippi uses a system similar to the electoral college. It’s not enough for a candidate to simply win the statewide popular vote. Rather, they must win both a majority of the popular vote and win a majority of the state’s 122 state House districts. If no candidate clears both of these hurdles, the House chooses the winner from the top two candidates.

Thus, as a practical matter, Mississippi’s system all but ensures that Reeves will win the election, even if a majority of the state’s voters prefer Hood (the incumbent, Republican Phil Bryant, cannot run again due to term limits). Republicans currently control almost 60 percent of the state’s House of Representatives. And state House districts are gerrymandered in a way that would make it very difficult for Hood to win a majority of those districts. Though there is a chance that the courts could intervene to declare Hood the winner of the election if he wins the popular vote.

Hood has his work cut out for him regardless of the Jim Crow legacy in Mississippi’s constitution. There is a lawsuit pending to overturn this racist, neo-Confederate, white supremacist portion of the Mississippi constitution. The plaintiffs are being represented by Democratic election lawyer supreme Marc Elias. And the Federal district court judge who is assigned the case has clearly stated that if Hood wins the popular vote, but loses the election because of the Jim Crow legacy constitutional provisions, that he is likely to overturn that provision and declare Hood the governor. He made it clear he wouldn’t preemptively do it because the voters who brought the suit hadn’t suffered any harm as the election hadn’t happened yet, but that he would rule if the election winds up going in Reeves’ favor despite Hood winning the statewide popular vote. Of course this would be appealed first to the extremely conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is chock full of Federalist Society extremists and then, potentially, to the Supreme Court. Where, given that Mississippi’s constitution is discriminating on the basis of race in regard to how it allows Mississippians to elect/select their governor, one wonders if Chief Justice John Roberts would side with the liberal justices to overturn this Jim Crow legacy because, as he famously stated when striking down the pre-clearance enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Consistency, hobgoblins, small minds…

There is some good news in the Mississippi results, even if they are tied to a Republican being elected.

Anyhow, we wait and see what Mississippi will bring us.

Open thread!

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Open Thread: On The Ballot

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I hope everyone who could, voted today.

Not sure how I missed this yesterday, but I like it.

If you see an ad, local or national race, you’d like to share, email it to me, I’m happy to front page it.

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Elizabeth Warren *Still* Has All the Right Enemies

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So many Wall Street ‘Masters of the Universe’ have denounced Senstor Warren’s candidacy that it’s become a running joke — see NYMag‘s “Elizabeth Warren’s Growing List of Anti-Endorsements”. Not that she doesn’t have Wall Street fans, as well, per Vox:

On Wall Street, there are rich guys, and then there are very rich guys. And in the first camp, there are a surprising number who think an Elizabeth Warren presidency would not be the apocalypse.

“You know what I like about Warren? Warren doesn’t want my money, actually,” said one mid-level hedge fund executive who has already maxed out on his donation to the Massachusetts Democrat in the 2020 presidential primary. “My firm is great, but some people in the industry are scumbags.”…

I spoke with more than three dozen people from across the financial sector — professionals who work at hedge funds, big banks, and private equity funds, in asset management, financial advice, investment banking, trading, research, and compliance — who support Warren’s presidential bid. They know if she lands in the White House that may make their jobs a bit different, their companies a little less lucrative, or mean they’ll pay more in taxes. And they think that’s great. They support Warren because of her policies, not in spite of them.

“Even though, on a personal basis, Elizabeth Warren may be bad for me economically, she would be better for society, which I want my kids to grow up in,” a director at Citi told me…

The latest rash of performative outrage reminded me that I’d been meaning to share a certain historical anecdote. Via the Bill Moyers website, here’s an extract from Warren’s memoir A Fighting Chance:

In early April [2009], I got a call from the office of Larry Summers. I didn’t know Larry well, but I’d met him a few times while he was president of Harvard in the early 2000s. According to reports, Larry had been Tim Geithner’s mentor when they were both in the Treasury Department in the 1990s. Now Larry was the director of the National Economic Council, which meant that, along with Secretary Geithner, he advised President Obama on economic issues. Would I be interested in meeting him for dinner?…

It was a long dinner, with plenty of intense back-and-forth about everything from the bailout, to deregulation, to the foreclosure crisis. I also talked to Larry about an idea I’d been working on for a new consumer financial agency and he seemed interested. We didn’t agree on everything, but I give Larry full credit: I’ll take honest conversation and debate any day of the week over the duck-and-cover stuff I so often saw in Washington that spring.

Late in the evening, Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. By now, I’d lost count of Larry’s Diet Cokes, and our table was strewn with bits of food and spilled sauces. Larry’s tone was in the friendly-advice category. He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.

I had been warned.

Nevertheless… she persisted!

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Mikhail Gorbachev, Hero

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As the world watched the Soviet Union breaking apart in the late 1980s – early 1990s, there was much fear that things could go badly wrong and even escalate to nuclear war.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, had introduced reforms that he believed would reinvigorate the Soviet economy. But movements in the satellites, like Solidarity in Poland, wanted independence. There were similar movements in the Soviet republics. Those movements used Gorbachev’s reforms for their own interests.

This month is the 30th anniversary of Gorbachev’s releasing the satellites – Poland, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany – from Soviet rule. Two years later, the 15 Soviet republics became independent countries.

Hard-liners in Moscow would have used force to prevent those outcomes. There were some clashes with the Soviet internal police, OMON, and military forces were ordered into some of the republics as demonstrations took place. But Gorbachev decided against major force and allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve, even though it was not the outcome he wanted.

The United States has become too accustomed to using force to solve problems. Russia has become an international spoiler, looking for ways to create chaos. With 14,000 nuclear weapons between them, this is unsustainable.

Gorbachev is speaking out.

And Don’t build a wall between Russia and the West.

He will always be a hero to me for handling the Soviet Union’s breakup peacefully. Not so much in Russia, where that breakup led to misery for many.

What he’s saying isn’t outstandingly new, but it’s always worth hearing, especially from someone who stared war in the face and walked away.

 

 

 

 

 

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