Rick Scott just lost his re-election bid because this happened:
In Scott’s defense, it was a black fan. And Crist might have been carrying a bag of skittles.
This post is in: Election 2014, Republican Stupidity, Clown Shoes
Rick Scott just lost his re-election bid because this happened:
In Scott’s defense, it was a black fan. And Crist might have been carrying a bag of skittles.
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Election 2014, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, General Stupidity
Further to the Ebola update thread below, it seems clear now that the World’s Best Healthcare SystemTM wasn’t prepared to safely treat patients after all, at least not in Texas. Valued commenter d58826 said the following:
It is with morbid ‘humor’ that I watch the events as they unfold in Texas. This is the heartland of profits before people. A state that prides itself on little regulation and what does exist is sold to the highest bidder for them to make a private profit. It is the poster child for cut government spending and every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.
It represents the GOP plan to reduce government to the fit in a bath tub and then drown it. The agencies charged with confronting this type of outbreak have seen their budgets cut by 50% over the past decade. Almost 50k government public health workers have lost their jobs as a result of budget cuts. The GOP game plan in action.
The final ‘laugh’ comes from the GOP’s call for an Ebola czar to be named when they will not confirm Obama’s choice for Surgeon General.
d58826 goes on to note that the GOP will probably gain control of Congress despite the massive fuck-ups it authored, of which leaving health officials ill-equipped to deal with an Ebola outbreak is only the latest example. Is this because people are stupid, racist, tribal, etc.? Undoubtedly that’s part of it. But sheer ignorance is part of it as well, and this is a teachable moment.
Joe Biden would be the ideal teacher, in my opinion, and here’s the lesson plan: Go before every functioning TV camera and bring a chart illustrating CDC and public health department cuts. Talk about why regulations and public safety organizations are needed and how the GOP has undermined them in places like Texas.
Reference other incidents that illustrate what happens when industries go unregulated and regulatory and public safety organizations are underfunded, e.g., that plant that blew up a while back in Texas, the latest coal mine disasters and water contamination incidents. Point out the obvious, because it ain’t obvious to everyone.
This approach will not work on hardened partisans, obviously. Nothing will. But the fact is, elections turn on persuading unaffiliated voters, who seem to zigzag right and left in panicky fashion like a herd of antelope menaced by massive prides of lions on either side.
It’s not really about Ebola, which poses an infinitesimal risk to anyone who isn’t a healthcare worker treating an infected patient. It’s about not letting the Republicans once again get away with hamstringing government and then complaining that it’s useless. It’s about countering the Reagan era lie that the government is always the problem.
Back when he was running for president the first time, President Obama said he wanted to be a transformative president like Reagan. Some people (i.e., PUMAs) pounced on this as evidence that Obama was a closet wingnut, but a reading of the remarks in context revealed that what he meant was he wanted to change the perception of government in a similar way, and swing the pendulum back. Well, now’s your chance, sir. And in October no less.
This post is in: Election 2014, Excellent Links, Open Threads, Republican Venality
Dave Weigel, at BloombergPolitics, on “the GOP’s Darth Vader“:
Last month, The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis published a meaty e-book biography of Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, who’s on track to run the Senate after this November’s elections. Since then, McConnell’s bid for re-election has maintained a very small lead over Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, but the press has looked for ways to find a pulse in the McConnell campaign and an open grave for the Democrats… Coverage of this race has often rewarded McConnell for his winningness and savvy, so I contacted MacGillis with a few questions about the politician and the portrait he declined to sit for.
DW: Right now, the political world is having a laugh over Alison Lundergan Grimes’s insistence on not admitting that she voted for Obama. I look at that and ask why she’s within spitting distance of McConnell when Obama lost the state by a bigger margin than Walter Mondale. McConnell always wins, but why does he always have a race?
AM: Exactly right. This shouldn’t be a race. Kentucky went for Mitt Romney by 23 points, all but one member of its congressional delegation is Republican, and McConnell’s sway as one of the most powerful people in Washington is still an asset even in the post-earmark era: for a state that’s used to being looked down on, it means something to have one of its own running the show. And he’s had 30 years to build a relationship with voters.
But that’s just it — he doesn’t have that relationship. He is so unnatural a politician that he hasn’t developed that reservoir of goodwill that a Robert Byrd had in West Virginia or Jack Warner had in Virginia. When McConnell was first elected to the Senate in 1984 (by a mere 5,000 votes in a year when Reagan won the state by nearly 300,000), Rep. Gene Snyder, a conservative who was McConnell’s first boss in Washington, was overheard remarking that Kentuckians had just elected to the Senate someone who had fewer friends in the state than “anybody elected to anything.” And that hasn’t really changed with time. Even in a state as Republican as Kentucky, familiarity has bred contempt more than affection. Kentuckians have watched from afar as McConnell climbed the ladder in Washington, and many of them, even ones who lean Republican, have been left with the sense that it’s all been about him, not them…
… It was indeed a revelation to me just how liberal McConnell had been in his early years… It’s hard to overstate how far he’s swung. This is someone who turned out for pro-civil rights rallies in college; who as a Senate staffer wrote the RNC with advice on how to go about “convincing Blacks and other minority groups in the country the Republican Party is a logical home”… who got the endorsement of the AFL-CIO in his first race, in 1977, by supporting collective bargaining for public employees; who repeatedly snuffed out anti-abortion legislation while he was county executive in Louisville; who opposed Reagan in both the ’76 and ’80 primaries.
Now, of course, he rails against unions, has twice voted against immigration reform (in 2007 and last year), appeared at CPAC last spring waving a rifle in the air; and a few months later declared to the National Right to Life Convention that “Kentucky is proudly pro-life.” It’s hard to find someone who more closely tracks the transformation of that party over the past three decades–which, for me, was part of the intellectual appeal of taking him on as a subject…
DW: On every page of the book or so there’s some McConnell acquaintance saying the guy had no friends. How did he end up taking over the GOP conference? Why, when it came down to it, was his only potential opponent Larry Craig?
AM: It’s like the sports cliche: he wanted it more than anyone else. He’s like Harry Reid in this regard: all he’s ever dreamed of is climbing in the Senate, unlike the other 98 senators who think they might someday become president. He actually failed in his first couple bids to move up the ladder, twice losing out to Phil Gramm to head the National Republican Senatorial Committee. But then he started gaming things out like Tracy Flick, sending Bob Bennett out as a wing-man months or even years before leadership elections to gauge support and bad-mouth possible rivals… It didn’t hurt that a lot of senators knew they owed McConnell for the dirty work he’d done in fighting campaign finance reform on their party’s behalf. He became the Darth Vader on that issue so that they could keep the money flowing, and earned their undying gratitude for that…
That’s the thing about turtles — they’re survivors. If you don’t mind breathing through your cloaca and urinating through your mouth, you too can survive a marginal environment for millenia…
This post is in: Election 2014, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment
Great piece in the CJR by David Uberti:
All politics is local, as the old saying goes. But if Monday’s Kentucky Senate debate is any indication, the same can’t be said of political media coverage.
Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes made national headlines during the debate for again declining to share how she voted in previous presidential elections. At the same time, however, the Washington press corps barely covered a claim by incumbent Sen. Mitch McConnell that Obamacare, unpopular in Kentucky, could be repealed without dismantling Kynect, the popular statewide healthcare exchange funded through the law. McConnell’s argument is not only factually questionable, at best, but also seems to be of much more potential consequence to the state’s voters. Monday’s debate was the only televised face-off scheduled before the November election, and the imbalanced coverage calls into question the national media’s role in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.
Grimes’ non-answer received headline treatment on Web stories at CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. The Washington Post devoted an entire piece to the refusal, which led the Associated Press’ story, and Politico and National Journal both listed it as their top takeaway of the debate. Such stories either omitted McConnell’s claim or played it down relative to Grimes’ comment. FoxNews.com mentioned only the latter, meanwhile, and The Wall Street Journal left McConnell’s statement as its story’s kicker, unchallenged.
Our media is failing us on a daily basis, particularly our political press (although the financial press is a close runner-up. There was an interesting interview with Matt Bai on TDS last night that discussed how functionally there is no difference between the writers at the Fix, Politico, etc., and TMZ:
It’s depressing.
Oh, btw- Taegan Goddard still won’t explain how his bullshit rending of garments about the Davis ad was just him saying it was “not effective.”
by John Cole| 37 Comments
This post is in: Election 2014, Our Failed Media Experiment
#GOP wants an "Ebola Czar" umm it's called the Surgeon General and you've blocked the nomination you dimwits.
#SaveTheSenate
— John Joseph (@CAPolitics) October 14, 2014
Budget cuts may have been a minor contributor:
A liberal advocacy group is blaming Republicans for the Ebola crisis in a new ad that will first air on TV in Kentucky next weekend.
The Agenda Project released an ad online late Sunday that interlaces self-described “disturbing footages of the Ebola outbreak” with a mash-up of top Republicans — including those tied up in crucial midterm contests and potential 2016 candidates — saying the word “cut.” The ad describes how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw its discretionary funding cut by $585 million from 2010 to 2014 and the National Institute for Health has faced $446 million in cuts during the same period.
The group plans to continue to play up public fears over the Ebola virus in the final weeks leading up to the midterms and will modify the ad with state-specific versions to hit Republican Senate candidates like Iowa’s Joni Ernst and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis who want to cut federal government spending, the group’s founder and president Erica Payne said.
Payne called the ad an “indictment” of Republican policies that have “led directly to thousands of deaths overseas” and said the ad is not “sensationalized” or “aggressive.”
SHAMELESS!
I Suppose This is Also Beyond the Pale and the Nastiest Ad EVAH!Post + Comments (37)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 131 Comments
This post is in: Election 2014
I had written off the South Dakota Senate race as a gimme for popular former governor Mike Rounds, but boy was I wrong about that. This doesn’t quite rise to the level of the Wendy Davis ad that John posted below, but it leaves a mark:
The short story is that Rounds is getting some mud from an EB-5 scandal spattered on his heretofore pristine britches. EB-5 is a law that lets rich foreign investors buy their citizenship by investing in companies, and the head of a private company that was skimming from SD’s EB-5 effort committed suicide last year. Rounds endorsed the EB-5 effort and the DSCC and Democrat Rick Weiland’s campaign are going after him hammer and tongs.
In addition to the EB-5 scanda, Rounds has two other problems. First, he hasn’t raised shit for cash–he’s got $750K on hand which is low for a House campaign, never mind the Senate. So when outside PACs and the DSCC lay down $3 million in ads, it’s hard for Rounds to respond. Rounds has spent less than $1 million on ads during his entire campaign. Rounds’ second problem is that a sort-of Republican is running in the race, Larry Pressler. Pressler is the former Republican Senator who’s now cast himself as a centrist (and probably voted for Obama), and it’s likely he would caucus with Democrats, plus or minus a few pirouettes and tours en l’air. Pressler is now polling near Rounds, with Weiland not far behind. The DSCC ad wisely just pummels Rounds, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Democrats in the state strategically hold their noses and vote for Pressler, depending on how the final race polls look. At this point, however, I’d give to Weiland if I were in a giving mood. He ran Daschle’s field operation through some of the toughest campaigns any Democrat has faced in the last 20 years, and he’ll know how to spend the money wisely in the next couple of weeks.
If you want to read more about this race, here’s a suitably negative take on Rounds’ prospects from Jonathan Ellis at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. It’s also nice to see Larry Lessig’s PAC doing something useful instead of just bemoaning Citizens United, by throwing a million bucks behind Weiland.
by John Cole| 88 Comments
This post is in: Election 2014, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment
The only people I see getting the vapors about the Davis ad are opportunistic wingnuts and chattering classes
— John Cole (@Johngcole) October 11, 2014
Last week, all the DC fluffers reporters and courtesans in the Washington press were having conniption fits about the following commercial:
There is nothing wrong, evil, mean, or out of bounds about that commercial, despite the fierce protestations of the sweater of the month club at Morning Joe and among the rest of our failed media. It’s simply the truth. A tree fell on him. He was paralyzed. He sued and got millions. He has then spent the rest of his life doing everything he could to stop anyone else from receiving the same kind of treatment he had. It’s no different from Ayn Rand receiving Social Security and Medicare and Paul Ryan using benefits to propel him to where he is now in order to get where he is.
At any rate, guess what? The ad is working:
The pollster for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis defended her controversial TV ad Sunday, saying it’s working as intended despite widespread criticism that using the image of an empty wheelchair in an attack ad on a disabled candidate was mean-spirited and unfair.
Davis pollster Joel Benenson, who advised Barack Obama in both of his presidential races, said the ad underscored the theme they’ve been hammering on for months: that Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott is an “insider” who sides with the rich and powerful over average Texans.
Asked about the use of the wheelchair in particular, Benenson noted that Abbott himself had “prominently featured himself in the wheelchair in his ads” in the Texas governor’s race.
“This ad is not about Greg Abbott in a wheelchair,” Benenson said. “This ad is about Greg Abbott’s behavior and actions with other victims after he had his opportunity and rightly sought justice and received a substantial amount of money.”
This Wendy Davis ad is a Todd Akin-like implosion by a candidate. Not defensible.
http://t.co/xwX7xqyZ3c
— Taegan Goddard (@politicalwire) October 10, 2014
The reason it is working is because it is the truth. While this may make Taegan Goddard and other well-off pundits recoil in horror in the face of honesty, the people get it.
*** Update ***
I’ve been sending out spittle flecked tweets, and Goddard responded:
@johngcole @nickbaumann @brianbeutler I said I think it's not an effective ad. But we'll soon see how well it works for Wendy Davis.
— Taegan Goddard (@politicalwire) October 13, 2014
Nowhere in his tweet or the link he provided does it mention the efficacy of the ad. Instead, it’s all Akin comparisons and this:
Nastiest Ad of the Year?
The Fix: “Wendy Davis is almost certainly not going to be the next governor of Texas. Apparently, though, she’s willing to try just about anything to alter that reality.”
Her new ad is among the most vicious you’ll ever see.
Not sure why he is trying to lie about it. Actually, I think what I mean is I’m not sure why he thinks he can lie about it, given that the words “not effective” appear nowhere in the tweet or post. Just plain weird. Page hits are a helluva drug.
And for the record, I’ve never had anything against Goddard until this nonsense. Maybe he just had a bad day or something. This kind of simplistic punditry is very easy to do (see also, every post I have ever written), so maybe he was just phoning it in and following the rest of the stampeding fauxtrage herd. Who knows?
For the life of me, I still don’t understand why anyone would find this ad below the belt or offensive. It’s just true. If there is anything offensive about the commercial, it’s Abbott’s actions.