.@SenWarren joins @JakeTapper for a Presidential Town Hall. Live from Jackson, Mississippi. Monday at 9p ET #WarrenTownHall pic.twitter.com/YpPHm97XPN
— CNN (@CNN) March 17, 2019
A stray observation from talking to people in IA and NH recently: Elizabeth Warren would be a lot of Democratic voters' first choice, or at least current favorite, if it weren't for "electability" worries. I cannot count how many people have told me something to this effect
— Molly Hensley-Clancy (@mollyhc) March 16, 2019
They say a good teacher leads their students towards knowledge, rather than just inculcating them, and even her enemies admit Elizabeth Warren is a very good teacher. The longer she’s on her current mission, the more I’d like to see her as President… but even if that’s not the end point, she’s making an incredibly valuable contribution to the Democratic party just by running the way she’s running.
Senator Warren has assumed the burden of being the candidate who proposes Sensible Alternatives. X (the cost of childcare, tech monopolies, affordable housing) is a problem for too many Americans. Here is my suggestion for fixing that, and also a proposal for covering the cost of doing so. The Horse-Race-Tout Media immediately rejects her proposals, as simultaneously inadequate and too far-reaching — with a sidebar of sexism and a strong dose of misogyny.
A week later, some other Democratic candidate proposes a not-entirely-dissimilar fix for approximately the same problem… and the worst the Conventional Wisdom Pundits can come up with is ‘What, this again? Why can’t the Dems *agree* about every platform detail in advance, and save us the trouble of reading all those icky position papers?’
To paraphrase @jkarsh – Elizabeth Warren just keeps grinding along and focusing on policy. She’s running a very simple, substance-rich campaign. Will be interesting to see how that holds up against some of the other candidates’ sizzle. https://t.co/5xrhpdrwj6
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) March 16, 2019
61% of American voters support @SenWarren's wealth tax, which would create a 2% tax on those with $50 million in wealth and 3% for those with $1 billion https://t.co/qfBbwJM8Pm pic.twitter.com/R7cFLluZ0e
— Brookings (@BrookingsInst) March 17, 2019
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
OzarkHillbilly
Blech.
sukabi
Good morning back at you rikyrah?
Blech to you OzarkHillbilly
People talk about “electability” of a candidate because in their “reporting” and commentary the pundits and journalists infuse “electability and conventional wisdom” as buzz words into their commentary. What they’re really telling you is THEY don’t like a particular candidate and neither do the folks they work for and hang out with. They’re building consensus, shaping the narrative.
I think E. Warren would be a very good president.
OzarkHillbilly
@sukabi: “Electability” is an issue. George McGovern would have made a good president, but he was not “electable”. Same could be said for Dukakis.
ETA: I love EW, gonna send her some money today (which in my world means sometime in the next week or so) if for no other reason than that she has put a lot of thought into the issues and has sound workable solutions for them.
Wayne Marks
I’d vote for Nero’s horse to get rid of Trump. We’ve got a deep bench, but they need to not give the Asshat-in-Chief any ammunition. As Pierce says, “play nice ya bastids and keep your heads below the snake line!” I’d vote for any one of them, but I’d prefer to see a woman in the field take down the misogynist damned bastard.
Major Major Major Major
Her housing plan looks pretty good to this neoliberal sellout. Much better than some other proposals (Harris’s I want to say?) which have things like rent subsidies.
Mary G
The more I see of her the more I like.
sukabi
@OzarkHillbilly: and they weren’t “electable” because of how the press took a couple of insignificant moments and beat them into the ground. With Dukakis it was that silly helmet in the tank. With Howard Dean it was the 1.5 second “scream” they played on a loop everytime they had an Dean event to cover.
It seems that no matter what totally unfit, unqualified bozo the GOP runs they are all deemed “electable” by the same press corp / pundits that can’t find an “electable” democrat unless they’re joe fn lieberman or a republican…if you’ll remember McCain was pushed to run as a democrat by the pundit class/ they’ve also pushed a “unity ticket”.
They’re busy pushing Biden now. Have been asking if / speculating for months that he’s running. Everytime someone announces they spend almost as much time speculating about a Biden run as they do about the just announced candidate.
JPL
@Wayne Marks: Same. As long as a female not named Tulsi is on the ticket, I’m fine.
NotMax
Wound up being a tad troublesome for Socrates.
;)
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Gotta link?
?BillinGlendaleCA
Breakfast Time…
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Beto Mania explodes on Google Trends (photo)
OzarkHillbilly
@sukabi: I’m not saying there aren’t influences that push voters this way or that, I certainly wouldn’t want to disagree with my good pal Vladimir, just saying electability is very much an issue. Dukakis lost because he ran a horrible campaign making several mis-steps. Dean was, well, Dean (remember, the “scream” was a rah-rah response to a loss in IA where he had bet heavily). Kerry was electable and in a generic presidential election and with a better campaign team, maybe would have beat W, but he had an uphill climb in the wake of 9/11 and Iraq “Mission (un) Accomplished”. McCain was electable but running in the wake of W and with a tsunami of economic malfeasance coming to roost, he never had a chance. Hillary was very electable, she did win the popular vote after all, even with all the medias “but her emails” stories, the latent misogyny of the electorate, and the Russian ratfuckery. She lost the election by the thinnest of margins in 3 states. (I won’t speculate as to why)
There is a difference between losing an election and being unelectable. It isn’t always easy to tell the difference with 20/20 foresight, but I don’t blame people for taking it into account when voting in the primaries..
NotMax
Hmph. Was wide awake at the time and still somehow missed it.
:)
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Ok, found it. It does sound like a better plan.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly:
Hey, Trump has a good pal named Vladimir.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Beto Mania sweeps Wisconsin
(photo #1)
(photo #2)
Rose Twitter has been having a meltdown over this.
OzarkHillbilly
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Nice. I like the juxtaposition of the background, imparts a little bit of vertigo.
NotMax
Who knew? Soar and sore aren’t just homonyms anymore.
There’s Something About Space That’s Triggering Herpes in Astronauts
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
OzarkHillbilly
@?BillinGlendaleCA: wink wink, nudge nudge, Know what I mean? Know what I mean?
NotMax
Now we need a Kickstarter for targeting. //
US detects huge meteor explosion
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Yeah, loneliness, boredom, and extracurricular activities.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: It does indeed, and she’s got partners for a House version.
She knows how to do this legislating stuff.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
That’s definitely a plus for him.
rikyrah
Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) Tweeted:
If you thought travesty of justice against dozens of underage victims of Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t get worse, you were wrong -> Age of victim in prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein, long a source of confusion, eased his obligations to register as a sex offender. https://t.co/0PPwiwgc14 https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/1107451100301533184?s=17
Elizabelle
Good morning, jackals.
I like Elizabeth Warren. We are lucky to have her on our side, in any capacity.
OT: The Seattle Times had a very good story about Boeing’s issues with the Max 8. Lot of institutional fail here, both Boeing and FAA. Took too many shortcuts, without sufficient disclosure, that has cost lives.
Flawed analysis, failed oversight: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system
Lot of good reader comments, and, being Boeing’s “hometown newspaper” (just about), some good comments by retired Boeing staff and many pilots, current and past.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
OzarkHillbilly
@rikyrah: I love her by-line:
Baud
Today show says Beto raised $6.1 million in first 24 hours, best of anyone yet. Fascinating.
ETA: Beaten yet again.
Lapassionara
@Elizabelle: And it was written, and sent to Boeing for comment, as I understand it, before the most recent crash.
Good morning, everyone
Baud
I prefer candidates who can’t raise money. They aren’t beholden to anyone.
debbie
@Elizabelle:
It’s always, always, always the shortcuts that lead to disasters (BP, WV coal mine, etc.). You’d think by now they would have learned.
infovore
Looks like there may have been a terrorist incident in the Netherlands. Not much is known yet.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Early money Is like yeast — it makes the dough rise
Baud
Elizabelle
@Lapassionara: Yes indeed. Eleven days of no comment from Boeing, and then the Ethiopian tragedy.
I hope that survivors of the Indonesian and Ethiopian disasters take Boeing to the cleaners over this. And that CEO gotta go. $30 million in compensation last year. Blood money.
A lot of good can come from learning how badly things went off the rails here. I am relieved we have a Democratic congress to exercise some genuine oversight.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I guess that means your campaign coffers have an echo?
rikyrah
Uh huh ??
Keith B. Whittington (@pbo4us12) Tweeted:
Shashana he is not as DUMB as you think. Chuck Todd knows exactly what he was saying. He is definitely aware of the Racism PBO was met with and the amount of obstruction he faced. Chuck is playing the ole White Supremacy game of GAS LIGHTING. Their act never changes. https://t.co/49o3qqo85l https://twitter.com/pbo4us12/status/1107469541121187841?s=17
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie:
They have, that doing things with proper care and safeguards costs money.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
I am the only Democrat who is not in the pocket of Big Citizen.
rikyrah
In m-o-d-e-r-a-t-i-o-n, please help
rikyrah
@Elizabelle:
Sue sue sue ???
OzarkHillbilly
King cobra bites python. Python constricts cobra. Cobra dies of constriction. Python dies from venom. 100% holy shit.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Best First day cash hauls
Beto……………….6,100,000
Wilmer…………….5,900,000
Kamala……………1,500,000
Klobuchar……….1,000,000 in 48 hrs
Hickenlooper…..1,000,000 in 48 hrs.
Baud
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
I’m surprised Kamala didn’t raise that much more than Klobuchar or Hinkenlooper. She gets a lot more buzz.
Elizabelle
@Baud: LOL. Good morning.
satby
@Baud: my son, the former Sanders fan, now is very interested in Beto. I suspect my nieces and nephews are too, not seeing any Sanders propaganda from them so far this time. All of which is deeply satisfying to me. Good morning it is!
@rikyrah: Good morning rikyrah!
@OzarkHillbilly: ?
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: From the same twitterer: Don’t stop watching this
H.o.l.y. F.u.c.k. An absolutely mesmerizing 2:20.
rikyrah
Every candidate running, not only Presidential, but Congress and the Senate too, should have to take a stand.
https://twitter.com/skepticalbrotha/status/1107438100748341249
plato
Brexshit.
Where are the nigel farage and boris johnson racist assholes?
rikyrah
Damn, I love Stacey Abrams ???
https://twitter.com/amandalitman/status/1107481399546793984
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Looks like it’s gonna be another Irish-Catholic
satby
It’ll be interesting to compare and contrast Tapper’s questions and behavior with the women candidates like Warren and the male candidates like Mayor Pete. Pete got good questions, if Warren gets hostile or stupid ones not related to policy maybe the misogyny will be more obvious to people. Not holding my breath though.
JPL
@infovore: Individual 1 will be tweeting about it shortly.
Baud
@Elizabelle: Good morning.
Sam
Trump broke the electability argument
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: ??that was great.
OzarkHillbilly
This made me laugh: Iron man is actually Fe Male.
(on the periodic table the symbol for iron is Fe)
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform
satby
@Elizabelle: ?it’s early afternoon where you are, right? Good afternoon! What adventure is planned for today?
satby
@Baud: do I need to remind you about math in the morning?
Brachiator
@OzarkHillbilly:
You only can say this using the benefit of hindsight.
Also, who should have been the presidential candidate?
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: I’ve watched it 3 times and want to watch it yet again.
TS (the original)
@Baud: My part of the world most people have never donated to a politician (which is not to say the same for business). We support them, work for them but public funding should be enough. The ones who raise money from business are the slimes.
Princess
That someone who in 2016 loved Bernie can in 2018 love Beto demonstrates how shallow people are when it comes to political decisions. Those two are pretty much at opposite ends of the Demcratic spectrum. Still, if it wrecks Bernie, I’m okay with it.
But Elizabeth Warren is my fave.
Immanentize
Hello All. Back at home, I have my usual travel head cold. Cough.
What is it with first day donation figures? Who cares? It’s not like an IPO where it changes value. Also, these people are cagey about when they announce, so how do people know — I must give TODAY! I don’t have the time to look it up, but how much of Sanders’ and Beto’s first day hauls includes transferring their prior campaign warchest and its donor details to their new Presidential campaign? But like I said, I don’t care about this data point at all.
Unless it pisses off Sanders.
OzarkHillbilly
@Brachiator: See my 2nd comment on this subject.
plato
@Brachiator: Yup, shrub was in no way ‘electable’ material and yet he won twice. Never underestimate the voters’ stupidity.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I suppose a physicist would see the beauty in the math, but I prefer the pure poetry of motion in the video. :-)
Baud
@Princess:
Yeah, there’s no excuse for anyone to support Bernie with Warren in the race. Ironically, they have the potential to take each other out.
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly:
She Blinded me with Science
SCIENCE!
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: Thanks for the link to that feed. I am Fe male, hear me roar.
Immanentize
@Baud: If that is all Senator Warren did, she would prove to be one of the greatest candidates ever (and then she could get back at it in the Senate replacing Shumer?)
satby
@Princess: no question that a lot of lower info voters have pretty shallow knowledge of policy positions candidates hold. My gang of former Wilmerites at least are young and learning to assess better as they mature.
I was afraid Wilmer’s sore loser routine would permanently turn off his young fans to politics and further decrease voter participation from that age group. Fortunately, that doesn’t appear to be happening.
eclare
Not a fan, I do not like her position on tariffs.
OzarkHillbilly
Gotta take the truck in for a leaky brake system. Y’all play nice now, ya heah?
JPL
@eclare: Trade wars are easy to win.
infovore
@JPL: So what seems to be known so far: there was a shooting in a tram, with several victims including at least one fatality. The culprit has not been caught yet. There may have been shootings elsewhere. A specialized anti-terror police unit seems to be surrounding a house in the neighborhood. It is treated as a likely terrorist attack.
rikyrah
Industrial Policy set by Fox News ???
https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1107612013482688512
O. Felix Culpa
@Elizabelle: Very good article. Thank you for posting.
Betty Cracker
@Princess: I was thinking the same thing. It’s political engagement as performance art. To be fair, President Obama benefited from that during his primary run. However, unlike Beto, PBO had a comprehensive governing philosophy laid out in print before he ran. If the folks who projected their own longings onto him were disappointed later (and some of them were), they had only themselves to blame because he told us what he was going to do. Obama was unfairly accused of being a blank screen onto which people projected their own wishes and desires. Beto actually is, IMO.
Chyron HR
@Brachiator:
Duh, BERNIE would have won in ’88 and ’72.
Princess
@satby: Yes, it’s a great thing that they are still involved, and I did not mean what I said as a knock on your kids or young Berners in general. I didn’t agree with their choice, but I think young people supported him for the right reasons and it is important they stay engaged.
Betty Cracker
We’re having a giant swamp oak taken down this morning. Thank dog my husband took the day off so he can deal with the crew. I feel bad about it because the tree just leafed out again. It must be a very old tree because it’s so huge. But it’s in bad shape — lots of dead wood, and it is a frequent target of woodpeckers. It could definitely fall over and smash our house in even a category 1 hurricane or tropical storm, so it makes sense to take it down. Still, it’s sad to see such a mighty living thing taken down. My husband thinks I’m a sap for pitying the tree! (See what I did there?)
Raven
@Betty Cracker: We’ve got a dogwood that has to go but the boss lady insists we let whatever blooms happen before we do. The damn thing is covered in ivy and it’s incredible that it’s last as long as it has but it block the view of the front of the house and the great gingerbread so I say “take er down’!
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: @Princess: Here’s the thing about Bernie Sanders that “the left” fucks up constantly. Very large amounts of people voted for Sanders NOT BECAUSE he was the Real True Left alternative they’d been dying to see for their whole lives (which is what “the left” almost universally thinks). They did it because Hillary Clinton was boring, uncool, and normie, while Sanders was rough around the edges and impassioned. About what? I honestly don’t know how many Sanders supporters really worried about that.
Underneath it all, the point of the Sanders campaign was for St. Bernie to get airtime for 50 years of dimly thought out lefty positions. But what caught fire with people who didn’t have any connection to lefty positions was the personality campaign based on anger… as a mode of inspiration. The people who were that age in 2008 gravitated to Obama for his personality campaign of inspiration. The people who were that age in 2020 will gravitate to O’Rourke for his personality campaign of inspiration. To me it makes perfect sense.
satby
@Betty Cracker: @Raven: they have a lifespan and it sounds like both your trees are at the end of it. Better to take them down rather than have them fall in your house.
Speaking of, I heard over the weekend that my old, tree-hammered house in Michigan is vacant again. Apparently the people who bought it as is from HUD were unprepared (or uninformed) about the structural damages that the huge sugar maple caused. Sad.
Betty Cracker
@Raven: We’ll have a lot more sunlight (relatively speaking) once the tree is gone. The entire yard is shady, as one would expect a swamp compound to be, and shady is how I like it. But the removal of this tree will allow a few hours of sunlight on part of the property, and the mister has already developed specific plans for what he’ll grow in that space. I am looking forward to a less obstructed view of the night to the south. Got a telescope for Christmas that I’m still learning to use!
Raven
@Betty Cracker: Nice!
Kristine
@sukabi:
The thing is, I swear that at the time it was discussed that whoever made that clip edited it so the crowd’s cheers were dampened. Dean had to shout because they were so loud, but the editing made it sound like he was screaming before a fairly quiet crowd. Tweety even wondered whether that edited moment cost Dean the nomination.
I’m not making this up. I think the press glossed over it and stopped talking about it because if the discussion had continued, they’d have had to admit that something they did affected an election. And as we all know, that never happens. (sarcasm)
Raven
@satby: Our area had tons of water oaks planted after a horrible tornado in 1968 and they are dropping like flies.
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: That sounds about right to me. One common thread that cuts across party and ideological lines is a deep dissatisfaction with politics as usual. It’s not illegitimate — there’s a lot to be dissatisfied about! But it can be destructive as hell, as we’ve seen.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I’ll take the usual politics over the unusual politics we now have to deal with every day.
Immanentize
@Betty Cracker:
We had to have two very large white lines which had created (they start looking like ice cream cones), and a hemlock that was splitting taken out. While the tree guy was there, he noticed our HUGE (35+ foot) Norway Maple (junk tree Indeed) was diseased. They all went. It was truly sad and my yard burnt up the next year. But, bonus!! I now have rooftop solar!
rikyrah
Uh huh
Uh huh ?
Justin Elliott (@JustinElliott) Tweeted:
NEW: Feds raided Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy’s office in money laundering probe https://t.co/hVactFfjVc from @RobertFaturechi and me https://twitter.com/JustinElliott/status/1107603724061548545?s=17
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker:
Tell your husband you aren’t the only one. Big gnarled trees are old souls.
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly: How’s the brakes?
Gin & Tonic
Catching up with some slightly old news, as I was traveling and the a bit under the weather – as we mark 5 years since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, the US House of Representatives voted on H.R. 596, entitled (awkwardly) the Crimea Annexation Non-recognition Act, which passed 427-1. The lone “nay” was Thomas Massie, KY-4, R (obviously.) Now that Rohrabacher has been turfed out, he’s the only remaining member of Congress who attended the big diner with Torshin and Butina in DC the month after Trump’s inauguration. I can’t help wondering what a forensic accountant would find in his campaign finances.
Oh, “not voting” were Tulsi Gabbard and Sean Maloney. Interesting bedfellows.
Ladyraxterinok
@sukabi: Dukakiis was taken out by the WILLIE HORTON AD!! Lee Atwaters greatest success!!
HW legacy. Plus Thomas!!
GOP–‘election dirty tricks our speciality’
Gin & Tonic
“diner” = “dinner”
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
UH HUH
UH HUH
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
I am a sap too.
Is there anyway for you to salvage some of the wood for other things?
Brachiator
@OzarkHillbilly:
Ah, yes. I still think too much hindsight to really be useful. And it blurs campaign missteps and other factors with the ultimately fuzzy notion of electability.
In the end I don’t think that categories such as likable or electable are meaningful, and only give you a clue about a pundit’s biases.
rikyrah
Interesting question ???
If #JeffreyEpstein was specifically NOT CHARGED with sexual assault and trafficking of the 14 year-old victim to avoid registration, can’t he be charged and tried now since there’s no federal SOL for trafficking? No double jeopardy, right?
— ???? Only4RM ???? (@Only4RM) March 18, 2019
Gin & Tonic
Incidentally, here are all the countries that *have* formally recognized said annexation: Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea.
Immanentize
@Immanentize: White PINES! Not white lines! It’s not Mia.i, 1989 anymore. Or, As Raven said once, how the mighty have fallen!
rikyrah
He had the right idea.
William Tecumseh Sherman – who knew red states weren’t sh*t way back in the 1860s pic.twitter.com/a4mrr2ILNa
— J-L Cauvin (@JLCauvin) March 17, 2019
SFAW
@NotMax:
Norman, coordinate!
rikyrah
No, it is not ??
Democrats have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections, but two Republican presidents (Bush and Trump) have been elected during this time, and dramatically changed the course of the country, solely because of the electoral college. This is not democracy. https://t.co/HJ7MYWlGqe
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) March 18, 2019
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: I made it into town. Had to put it into low low on the hills so I wouldn’t need them too much, but I didn’t need to make any sudden stops, so no worries about suddenly blown lines.
Ladyraxterinok
@OzarkHillbilly: Kerrhy hit by SWIFT BOAT attacks!!
This plus HRC’s emails—GOP will ALWAYS try to manipulate the coverage to take out even the best dem!!
The GOP do NOT believe any dem can be a legitimate president!!
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: I think the word “other” in front of the word candidates was silent, but understood. Up your reading comprehension! :-)
BruceFromOhio
@OzarkHillbilly: Mathematics describes it, physics defines it, the eyes capture it, and the mind turns it into a hypnosis. Nicely done!
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: Holy shit. I can’t click on that article because, you know, snakes — but there is surely a metaphor in that story somewhere.
edit: maybe Trump and FOX news?
Uncle Cosmo
@OzarkHillbilly: Ferric the Red?
@Brachiator:
As1972 opened, the consensus Democratic front-runner was Senator Ed Muskie of Maine, Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968. His campaign was brought down in the runup to the New Hampshire primary by a combination of vicious attacks on his wife by the RWNJ publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader (the main newspaper in NH) and (an early incarnation of Rethuglican ratfuckery) scurrilous anonymous phone calls allegedly from the campaign (in fact from GOP ratfuckers) insulting those of French-Canadian descent. The campaign pulled a trailer up in front of the Union-Leader offices & Muskie climbed up to denounce the slurs on his wife, but (again IIRC) the wintry winds blowing in his face caused him to tear up & the fucking MSM gleefully reported that he was “crying” during his speech.
CREEP (the “Committee to Re-Elect the President”) was the first to go in for rodent fornication in a big way. Nixon fingered McGovern as the easiest Democrat to beat & so CREEP made heroic efforts to trash every other potential opponent. Tricky Dick got his wish, & he would have crushed McGovern in any event**, but he got greedy: When CREEP’s burglars/buggers were arrested inside DNC offices in the Watergate complex, the subsequnt chain of events (especially the uncovering of the coverup of White House involvement) led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace little more than 2 years later. So in a sense McGovern did defeat Nixon in the end.
(I might discuss 1988 in a subsequent post. Or I might not.)
—-
** The McGovern campaign’s major misstep (other than its perceived “far-left” antiwar tone, which was central to the effort) was insufficient vetting of his choice for running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri. It turned out that Eagleton had undergone electroshock treatments for depression, & at the time emotional illness (like divorce & remarriage, cf. Nelson Rockefeller) was perceived as fatal to a national candidate’s chances. Eagleton was unceremoniously dropped from the ticket & replaced by Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver, but the narrative of McGovern as incompetent lived on…
WaterGirl
@satby: I was just about to comment that I was shocked and impressed by Jake Tapper at the CNN Town Hall for Pete Buttigieg. No blah-blah-blah in the questions, no attacks, just short questions and then Buttigieg was allowed to answer, no questions or digs at what the answer was.
If he doesn’t do the same for the female candidates, every thinking person on twitter ought to slam him for it. Or maybe all those people should tweet him and ask if she will be on the receiving end of the same professionalism and competence that was shown Buttigieg.
TerryC
@Betty Cracker: I’m so sorry about your oak.
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: Is that one about snakes, too? Because I am afraid to click it, but if it’s great and not snakes, I would like to watch it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Brachiator: Agreed, mostly. Hindsight is a double edged sword, one can learn a lot by looking at past elections, and the lessons learned will apply to varying degrees, but every election is different.
I think they are meaningful despite the fact that they are wholly undefinable. A very large number of swing voters have no idea what policies the candidates are pushing, or how those policies might effect them. But they will vote for one or the other based on who they’d rather have a beer with.
To some extent I think that’s why Gore lost. (well, that and the SC) As a person he was head and shoulders above the empty headed W, but a lot of people decided they would much rather have a beer with good old boy (teetotaler) Bush, then straight laced, lecturing Gore.
Eta, meant to add it was Bush’s campaign who managed to define the candidates thusly
WaterGirl
@Princess: They are also at the opposite ends of the continuum as people. But as others are saying, if it pushes Bernie off the map, I am all for it.
Ladyraxterinok
@plato: Read Farage has an EU position and is in Brussels heavily agitating that DU keep UK out–ie, refuse any accommodation, etc.
Also that Johnson has basically disappeared from sight.
satby
@WaterGirl: exactly! And Mayor Pete’s status as an extremely long shot was partly why I think. Tapper didn’t feel the need to “take him down a peg” like he and the rest of the media seem to feel they have to do with higher profile Democratic politicians. Especially women politicians.
OzarkHillbilly
@Brachiator:
Ach! I see you are talking about pundits and I am talking about voters. Sigh.
satby
@WaterGirl: no snakes, just wonderfulness ?
different-church-lady
Oh god, she’s doomed…
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: I cried when they took down my silver maple, and that was even after it had crashed on my house. It was 7′ in diameter and the tree guy said it was the matriarch of the neighborhood. So sad. But I do feel much safer in a wind storm, and now, 5 years later, I’m not at all sorry to have it gone.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: more closely related than we all would like, since pundits shape what a lot of people think they “know” about politics.
WaterGirl
@Raven: The first tree we had to cut down was a dogwood. After 3 years of cutting out half the tree every spring — because half of it was dead every year — and lots of speculation about what the half-life of a dogwood tree was, we took it down. Sometimes it just has to be done.
I also had to take down my beloved 25-year old redbud, the first tree I had ever planted. That was sad, too, but it had been kind of black for 2 years and it was clearly dying-dying-dying. Even for this tree lover, sometimes it has to be done.
OzarkHillbilly
@WaterGirl: You DEFINITELY want to watch it. No snakes involved.
Jameb
I LOVE Sen. Warren and wanted her as the Dem candidate in 2016. I think that when one digs down even one layer past the shitty surface arguments advanced by the Jake Tappers and John Heilmans of the world, she’s electable as fuck.
She’s warm, wise, smart, sensible, true to her roots and has great integrity–in short, the same stuff I most admired about President Obama.
This country seems determined to keep its head buried in its ass. A Warren presidency would truly make America great again, and saddens me beyond words that I have to watch while the press plays homecoming committee by trying to make a horse race out of the prom king or queen election.
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: My tree had always reminded me of Treebeard from the Hobbit books. It definitely felt like it had a personality and a soul.
Betty Cracker
@rikyrah: I’m told it’s only good for pulp or firewood.
@OzarkHillbilly: That’s how I feel! The mister deals with trees on a regular basis on the job, and he’s ruthlessly utilitarian about them.
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: Thanks for the reassurance. Will watch now.
tobie
@FlipYrWhig:
Great insight. 2016 was all about anger because we didn’t have a candidate capable of soaring rhetoric, which is a rare gift, but something we came to expect after Obama.
I’m in the minority on this blog in that Warren doesn’t do it for me and part of it is her tendency to put a personal face on things she opposes (like “monopolists” instead of monopolies) which sets off alarm bells in my head. She also has something of the sociology-professor in her approach to governing as a social engineering experiment (“this is how we fix it”), and I guess I’d be more excited she’d speak like a constitutional law professor with emphasis on broader underlying principles. Anyhow, tonight’s town hall should be interesting. I’ll watch and learn.
Ladyraxterinok
@plato: Media!!
And ballot initiatives in many states in 2004 vs same-sex marriage.
On RW and ‘Christian’ talk radio here listened as they began to scare-tactic sane-sex marriage and kept getting ‘scarier and scarier’!!
Also–media positively swooned before 2000 GOP primary about how much $$ W had raised. Talked about it so much I decided they wanted to cancel the primary and hand nomination to him.
Ditto for election. Media labelled Gore a ‘serial liar’. I heard people call him that several years after the election.
rikyrah
Did I miss a FrontPager attacking this subject?
Trump admin tracked individual migrant girls’ pregnancies
Rachel Maddow reports exclusively on details of a newly obtained spreadsheet kept by the Trump administration’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, led by anti-abortion activist Scott Lloyd, tracking the pregnancies of unaccompanied minor girls. Brigitte Amiri, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project senior staff attorney, joins to discuss details of the case.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: OT, but your opinion is valued. I have two wooden storm doors, probably original to this 1903 house. The original screen inserts for summer were discarded by the previous owner, along with all the window screens, when he got central air conditioning. He even caulked his windows shut. My question: would it be better to have a millwork shop make new screen inserts for the doors, or should I just hire a carpenter to do it? I hate not being able to get a little fresh air on nice days, and replacing the doors would be a hugely expensive custom job.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: I am not so sure about that. It is definitely true to some extent, at least with partisans like us, but with the general electorate I think their influence is overstated. (to say the very least, by them) I think campaigns have far more of an effect with the gen elec than pundits, although we now have to take into account dark moneyed super pacs and Russian ratfuckery too.
Campaigns are far different now than they were in 2000.
Ladyraxterinok
@Kristine: Remember that editing claim as well.
My son was a Dean supporter in the IA caucus and was really angry about that media treatment!
WaterGirl
OT, but maybe someone here will know the answer to a question I have.
Amazon Prime now includes an audible subscription for FREE, but I can’t figure out how to activate that or how to start using that. Does anyone know how to do that? Everything I found on Amazon or Google was not helpful in telling me HOW to do it, it only told me that I could.
OzarkHillbilly
@WaterGirl: @Betty Cracker: I used to hunt morels in a secluded and quiet valley far from any road. There was an old elm growing on top of an outcropping of limestone, he had a trunk diameter of almost 2 feet. Every year I took a break in his shade and scanning the ground in front of me I would espy dozens of the tasty little morsels waiting for me (I always left the first I saw as a gift for the gods). Then came the April when instead of shade there was bright sunshine.
I sat on his trunk and truly mourned the passing of this old man of the woods who had blessed me so many times over the years.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: It has not been front-paged, though after reading it, many of us have discussed, lamented, cried, raged and vomited at the disgusting news. It definitely deserves a front page, but it’s been pretty quiet on BJ lately in terms of front-page posts.
WaterGirl
I would also like to see this front-paged: (from the dreaded NYT)
It makes me sick that they have gotten off scott free for their brutal murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi. And apparently others, but damn, Khashoggi was a US resident and a journalist for god’s sake. His murder was the equivalent of Trump shooting someone on 5th avenue and getting away with it.
It’s just appalling.
jk
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: @Baud:
Elizabeth Warren is head and shoulders above Beto in terms of substance and experience.
tobie
@WaterGirl: I’ve been trying to figure out for a while why countries as different as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE were all in the tank for Trump and it finally dawned on me that what unites Israel and the Gulf States is their hate of Iran. The quid pro quo is so clear it’s startling–they’ll support Trump, as long as he goes after Iran, and Trump will let them do anything as long as they do everything to support his reelection.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: Screen doors are cheap (provided they are not a custom fit) Standard for exterior doors is 36″ x 80″. If a standard will fit (32 x 80 is not unheard of) it is far cheaper to just replace the doors. I’m getting ready to do just this for some friends. The doors will cost app $70 apiece (I could get the half priced doors but this is an exposed location and they wouldn’t hold up well) and shouldn’t take me more than 2 hours to fit and hang each one.
If they are an odd size,
it would depend on the carpenter. Most older carpenters have a fair amount of millwork experience (I worked in a cabinet shop for several years so I have more than most) and could do a credible job of it. You will need to to do some homework on the various people you talk to.
germy
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: I would love to just get inexpensive replacements, but the replacements would have to be custom, the doors are 82″ .?
Thanks, I will have to ask around for someone with good references, because the local Mr. Handyman franchise hasn’t been a stellar success.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: You could still make a standard 80″ door fit in an 82″ opening. It’s an easy adjustment to make by adding some millwork to the top of the frame. Just talk to a decent, well respected carpenter, we’ve all done this kind of thing.
rikyrah
@jk:
No lie told
bemused
@OzarkHillbilly:
Someone has probably already thought and said this but fervently hoping this is the GOP’s fate and soon.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Nope you didn’t. Also did not miss any posts on the upcoming consolidation of USCIS offices stateside and closure of all offices abroad. Moves specifically designed to bring legal immigration to a crawl or better still a grinding halt.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: I wondered after I typed my reply, good to know. Thanks!
I really hate that this house is sealed up like a tomb, but replacing all the window screens is more than I intend to deal with as long as I can be a cross breeze through the doors.
Another Scott
Warren won Drum’s on-line poll (1700 respondents).
MO’M’s and David Merry Christmas Koch’s favorite was 6th.
Cheers,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: If your carpenter does a good job on the doors, talk to him about putting in replacement windows. The vinyl clad type are a lot more affordable than you might think and installing them is a breeze. Also you don’t have to do them all at once. Most folks will have a minimum labor charge. Maybe he’ll have a soft spot for redheads and agree to a half day minimum labor and install 3 or 4 at a time.
I can’t imagine living in a house without fresh air, they need to breath as much as humans do!
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
You have always been in the vanguard. Knew and said from the beginning, that the entire ‘illegal immigration’ argument was nothing but bullshyt.
Shana
@sukabi: My recollection of 2008 primaries is an awful lot of people really liked Obama but worried that America wouldn’t elect a black man and therefore fretted about “electability.” That ended up working OK.
trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
We had one “too close to the house” and I had to take it out before it ruined the foundation. Silver maples can literally be killers, as they’re brittle and in our neighborhood one killed a homeowner when it dropped a branch on him in front of his house.
I really miss its summertime afternoon shade and the birds that would cruise up and down its trunk eating insects; of which it had plenty–aphids that made a sticky mess and ladybugs that would gobble them up.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Sometimes it feels like I am whistling in the wind, so its good to know that you have been listening. Thanks.
zhena gogolia
@tobie:
Warren doesn’t do it for me either. But I can’t really decide until I see a debate.
I was underwhelmed by her at the Democratic convention in 2016. She was unnerved by the booing by the Berniebros. I think Harris would have handled that better, but IDK.
germy
This thread:
Just One More Canuck
@germy: Maybe most white people are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing white supremacist cancer they must be held responsible.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: Wow! Pete Buttigieg is third. I imagine you would get a different answer depending on the publication that did the on-line poll.
Uncle Cosmo
@Another Scott: Guess what? Online polls aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. $6.1M collected in the first 24 hours seems a lot more significant. But hey, you knew that – you’re just trying to be an oh-so-clever smartarse.
(FTR I am not committed to supporting any candidate for President – other than whichever one becomes the Democratic nominee to face off against Tangerine Twitler. I am interested in anything any of them has to say.)
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: Shade. Highly taken for granted until you don’t have it anymore. My huge tree shaded my entire house and the entire back yard except for right along the fence line. The sun in my backyard was absolutely brutal after the tree came down. It took me 3 years before I was able to get the screened in porch, and until then I was only out long enough to do whatever I had to in the garden, and it was still brutal ay 9am.
Mandalay
A Tulsi Gabbard tweet from Saturday:
Why is Gabbard even a Democrat? She needs to be gone.
WaterGirl
@Uncle Cosmo: Wow, I did not think I would ever see the day that someone accused Another Scott of being a smart-ass, let alone an aoh-so-clever one.
WaterGirl
@Mandalay: I don’t count any of the russian stooges as Democrats. That includes Wilmer and Gabbard.
Betty Cracker
@Mandalay: Good God. Gabbard’s 21st century anti-gay activism was enough to exclude her from consideration from me. But the “logic” of that tweet — you made Trump act like a belligerent fool! What a fucking idiot.
Uncle Cosmo
@OzarkHillbilly: FTR I live in a row-house development from the late 1930s where all the original entry doors were nonstandard lengths. Relatively easy to cut down a standard 80″ door to 76-77″ (rear & basement). When my neighbors wanted to replace their 84″ front entry door, they had the opening built down to 80″. Not real tough for workmen who know their trade, & a lot cheaper than a custom door. I’m going to do likewise this spring, except I’ll retain the original entry door & have the outer opening built down to 80″ for the new security storm door.
plato
Good out of the box thinking to ‘cuck’ the electoral college.
Ninedragonspot
@Mandalay: This is an article of faith among many Bernie bros. Democrats were responsible for Trump’s strikes in Syria, Democrats are bringing us to the brink of nuclear war with Russia.
WaterGirl
@plato: Go Colorado!!!
TerryC
I’ve lived in this 1870 farmhouse for 32 years now and finally have succeeded in completely shading the west side of the house with deciduous trees that do not block the gorgeous view. Evening and late afternoon sun in summer used to be devastating, but no longer. By mid-summer my house won’t be visible in an aerial view.
Steve in the ATL
Bumper stickers in the Mayo Clinic parking deck this morning:
W: Still the President
Who is John Galt?
Gun Owner for trump 2016
Don’t ever change, Florida!
ETA: all three of those are on cars parking in handicapped spots, naturally
FlipYrWhig
@Ninedragonspot: Yup, I’ve heard it a lot from the Greenwald / Taibbi fan set too.
Uncle Cosmo
@WaterGirl: He did something that got my Irish up**: he threw in the name of my friend Martin O’Malley because he thought it’d get a laugh.
By all appearances MOM pretty much had everything go wrong in his first (& likely last) nationwide campaign, but he was a solid two-term Governor of MD with real accomplishments (e.g., abolishing the death penalty – ETA: & persuading MD to [provisionally] allocate its 10 EVs to the popular vote winner, see #171 supra), he still has something to offer the party & country, he doesn’t deserve the ridicule, & no putz on this blog gets to use him for a cheap laugh without my pushback. We clear?
(** Turn of phrase. AFAIK I have no Irish in me but the blarney I was born with & the Guinness & Jameson I occasionally direct down my alimentary canal. DNA analysis pending.)
schrodingers_cat
@FlipYrWhig: Wasn’t Taibbi in Russia too. He is the Megan McCardle of the lefty set. Opines about finance when he can’t do the math.
Baud
@Ninedragonspot:
To be fair, they also blamed Republican “Soft on Crime” rhetoric for Hillary’s”super predator” comment.
Oh wait, no they didn’t….
Tractarian
BETO/WARREN
WARREN/BETO
I mean, they both kind of roll off the tongue, don’t ya think?
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
People get to make a candidate like this into whatever it is that they are looking for, rather than find out what this person thinks. They become the ideal candidate because these people think they are getting exactly what they want. Do you ever wonder if that’s what the journalists are doing, projecting their own ideals upon the candidate and when they find that this person fits all or even most of them he/she must be a great candidate? A candidate that is this person doesn’t want to have their own views they want to be liked and people like a candidate that is exactly who they are looking for – electability. HC, EW, KH, have all come out with their personalities and ideals showing and that means that we can see the real person, not our idealized version. BS is the perfect example of grandpa with lofty goals but no road so people superimpose their own ideal road and they like what they see.
In my world the more electable a candidate is considered by the press, the less substance there is to them, but their like-ability is high. Trump has like-ability to racists down pat, if no one else and the policy chops of chicken liver. They voted for him because he provided them with the only thing they wanted in a candidate. People like Beto because he gives them the like-ability factor more than anything else. He may make a decent president, but that’s not why most people vote for president, any more than it was why they voted for their high school senior class president. Most people don’t understand the job of president, including a lot of people that run for the office, they understand the adulation of being president, not the actual work involved. People that only understand the work don’t want the job, because it’s a massive amount of stress and bullshit. One has to see at least a bit beyond the work to actually want the job.
Mike J
@sukabi: Dean did not lose because of the scream. Dean lost because he lost. The trading markets had him a walking away favorite and there was no strong polling that early back then.
Dean built a cult instead of a campaign. Kerry quietly went around the state and hired coördinators in each of Iowa’s 99 counties, and those coördinators made sure they every precinct had a trained precinct captain to handle the ins and outs of the caucus.
Dean did great if you were in the three precincts on campus in Ames or Iowa City. Everywhere else hard work and understanding the system crushed him. Dean was trading at over .75 on the Iowa Electronic market, and when it was shown he didn’t have a campaign, he plummeted and Kerry went over .90 overnight.
https://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/graphs/graph_DConv04.cfm
Another Scott
@Uncle Cosmo: I only mentioned MOM because I got an e-mail from him over the weekend saying that he supported Beto. So, he’s MOM’s favorite.
Similarly, DMCK obviously likes Beto a lot, too, based on his recent posts here.
I didn’t say anything about the reliability of this or any other on-line polls. But it’s hard to say that this poll has problems. The question was: “Which Candidate Do You Prefer At The Moment?” The people who were willing to read it, login to their Google account, and express a preference (none of the above wasn’t an option), totaled 1700 and Kevin put up a bar chart. It has no predictive value, and Kevin doesn’t claim that it does.
That is all.
:-)
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
I think this is really unfair. Obama didn’t have a comprehensive policy for anything the first week he announced. And you know what? I still supported him right then and there. Me, with a degree in political science and forty years of working the street and phones for candidates. You are using the same framing as Joe Scarborough did this morning. Which should make you think twice about that. We don’t yet know what Beto will have to say about every topic under the campaign trail sun, just as we didn’t when Obama announced.
The snickering here and in the MSM about Beto is making me like him all the more. Fuck that bullshit. He has said some things he supports and hasn’t discussed others. What, really, is different there from any other candidate other than Warren?
satby
@Tractarian: Warren/ Buttigieg
Better rhythm. Though Harris is still my #1
Brachiator
@OzarkHillbilly:
No. My bad. I was trying to type quickly while on my commute. I should have referred to voters as well. Even more to the point, individual voters rarely talk about likability or who is electable. This kind of thing is a summary judgement of reporters and pundits and political junkies. That said, even if you try to focus on voters, I still don’t see much point, value, or validity in talking about who’s electable or likable.
I think it’s a fair question to ask about whether the electorate has evolved. By the old standards, you couldn’t even run for president if you were single, divorced, a woman, non-white, Catholic or Jewish. Or too radical. These were absolute disqualifiers. But for most people today these don’t matter, or matter as much.
Also, electable seems to imply some potential inability to rally the various elements of the Democratic Party, or appeal to white men and an unspecified number of swing state voters, depending on time of day and the weather. But ultimately, this seems to be about comfort zones than any political reality.
FlipYrWhig
@geg6: I’m also surprised by the Beto backlash. I do think Ruckus has a point about how the inspirational quality can verge on superseding The Message, presuming that the message is policy, but I think we overthink how much policy matters to most people voting. IMHO “seems like a good guy who wants to do good things” has carried people to victory as ideologically different as Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter. If Beto O’Rourke can do that, I have no qualms about him.
Baud
@geg6:
@FlipYrWhig:
I’ve pledged not to make any decisions until at least the first debate.
tobie
@geg6: I don’t know how to embed this but there’s a Texas Tribune reporter assigned to O’Rourke, and he transcribed a conversation that O’Rourke had with a voter on healthcare:
https://twitter.com/PatrickSvitek/status/1107053548204904448
The guy’s no empty suit. His knowledge of the debate on healthcare impressed me, and he gets two more points for not letting the snide Sanders/Warren supporter get a rise out of him. I’m fine with folks supporting other candidates. As I’ve said, Warren does not do it for me. But this absurd argument that some folks have substance and others don’t is annoying and speaks to a certain anxiety. Full disclosure: I’ve made small contributions to Klobuchar, O’Rourke, and Harris, and may throw in a few bucks to Buttigieg.
JR
@germy: Well, along those lines: “To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency”.
geg6
@jk:
That may be. Part of that is a function of the vast age difference. However, I don’t agree about her substance or her being vastly more experienced in politics. She hasn’t really been in elected office all that long, really. And Beto has experience in different types of office. As for her policy chops, she has great policy chops on certain subjects on which she is a very well-known expert. I have no idea what her policies are about, say, the Middle East or Israel or Syria or most anything having to do with foreign policy, just as I don’t know what Beto thinks about those things. I think Beto has experience and knowledge of some things that Warren doesn’t, probably about border issues, immigration and the needs of the Hispanic community. Meanwhile, he polls better than her and he has raised vastly more than she has.
I’m not supporting anyone in particular right now, but this type of criticism seems ridiculous to me this early in the process.
Plato
Bummer for brexshitters and Theresa.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-47614074
geg6
@Baud:
I’m with you on that.
@tobie:
And I’m right there with you on that.
Betty Cracker
@geg6:
I didn’t say Obama had concrete policies right off the bat; I said Obama had a comprehensive governing philosophy, which he outlined in “The Audacity of Hope.” I read it and understood the type of president he would be — that’s why I supported him. I like Beto, but he doesn’t have anything like the ideological or intellectual underpinning Obama had when he threw his hat in the ring.
zhena gogolia
@tobie:
They ALL (and I’d even include the dreaded Bernie) have more substance than Trump.
I will not vote for Bernie unless he shares his tax returns. Gabbard sounds like a complete nutcase. Other than that, if ANY of these people is the nominee, I will be happy to vote for them.
Tony Jay
Brexit Hilarity Alert.
You may or may not be aware that Theresa May’s “Just Say Yes” campaign has been down in the gutter sneakily offering to break international contract law and any lingering moral constraints on straight-up bribery in order to convince Northern Ireland’s most dour and joyless representatives of sectarian hatred that they should vote for Her Deal (the one that has been brutally rejected in Parliament twice already) or lose any hope of leaving the E.U. this year. It’s been suggested that if she can wheedle the DUP into holding their noses and taking a nibble of the shit sandwich, the barking mad Quitservatives on her own back-benches might do the same and plunge the country into a slightly shallower Pit of Endless Gloom.
However, in a quite lovely bit of timing, the Speaker of the House, John Bercow (Tory, tanned and taking no shit from the Legions of Doom) has announced to the House that he’ll be following centuries of Parliamentary custom and won’t be allowing her to bring her Deal back for a 3rd Vote unless there are ‘substantial and fundamental changes’ to it. He’s ruled out a sudden bout of DUP support crossing the threshold for what he considers ‘substantial and fundamental’, and since the E.U. has already made it crystal clear that the Deal she’s coughed-up is the only Deal Parliament will get…… looks like she’s not getting her re-vote of a re-vote unless the Deal she’s offering Parliament gets something major tagged to it.
Something like the amendment to make passage of May’s Deal provisional on a confirmatory Referendum that offers Remain as option B, maybe? The amendment Labour have already said they’re pushing for.
Interesting times.
Another Scott
@Plato: Trouble is, as I understand it, if Parliament doesn’t pass (and get the EU to go along) something, then the UK will crash out of the EU on Friday March 29.
May’s tactics to run out the clock and refuse to consider any alternatives is working swimmingly for her, isn’t it? It’s her way or the highway. At least until the Speaker made his decision today.
Not so much for the country though… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
Having listened to a bunch of his stuff, I must disagree.
Betty Cracker
@Tony Jay: Damn! BTW, I’ve been meaning to say I’ve enjoyed your colorful and informative comments on Brexit. Thank you, and good luck!
Tony Jay
@Another Scott:
She’s already said that if she can’t get her deal through she’ll seek an extension. This just piles on the pressure for her to accept the Labour amendment to have a vote on her Deal or Remain. She won’t want to, and the Quitters – really – won’t want to (because they’re looking at the same polling as everyone else and seeing the margin of a Remain victory creeping up and up) but she hasn’t got many options. The E.U. can play hardball too and refuse any extension that doesn’t come with the prospect of meaningful change in Britain’s position.
We’ll see, but this is promising.
Betty Cracker
@geg6: Is any of the stuff you’ve listened to available online? I’d love to listen to it and be convinced otherwise because I really do like Beto. He’s an inspirational guy. He has an amazing knack for connecting with people and explaining divisive issues in terms everyone of good will should be able to understand (I’m thinking particularly of that clip where he explains why he supports athletes who kneel during the anthem). What I’m not seeing is a unifying theme or overarching concept behind his candidacy.
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
Hey, I just ask myself “How would Betty put this?” and go from there.
And yeah, we’ll need luck.
Another Scott
@Tony Jay: But hasn’t the EU said that they’ll only grant an extension if it’s not for kicking the can down the road? Isn’t May going to have to cave on something for the EU to go along, and hasn’t she been totally unwilling to do that so far?
I agree it’s promising, but the lack of leadership from both major parties has been quite disconcerting to see from this side of the pond.
Good luck!
And I second the “thank you” for your commentary on this Brexit stuff.
Cheers,
Scott.
Amir Khalid
@Tony Jay:
You must be aware already that the Netherlands PM has compared Theresa May to the Black Knight from Monty Python and The Holy Grail.
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
Holy shit! He kneecapped her.
May was running out the clock. Bercow smashed the damned clock.
I would think that everyone must be scrambling to make sense of and react to Bercow’s ruling. You could not have a referendum unless the EU granted a substantial delay. And a no deal BREXIT could still be on the table.
@Another Scott:
I don’t think anyone is quite sure what this latest move quite means.
But, damn, it’s fun. It shakes up BREXIT big time.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker:
I thought his video with his wife on the couch laid out a pretty broad set of themes.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/beto-officially-announces-2020-run
I see he’s being criticized for not having his wife speak. Sheesh.
Ruckus
@FlipYrWhig:
If you don’t understand a job how do you interview someone for it? Like-ability.
This is the bane of HR doing the initial interview for a technical job. Someone who might actually do the job better gets a lower score than someone the interviewer likes because the interviewer has zero idea about the actual work. It most likely has doodly to do with the persons ability, and all with how well they interview. Like-ability.
What most of us know about the day to day workings of the oval office is West Wing. A TV show. And my only experience with someone who kept as neat and tidy a desk as Martin Sheen did is a boss I had who spent more time arranging/cleaning his desk than anything to do with policy or productivity, so he looked like he was doing something.
Most of us here take our job as citizens seriously. We don’t want to just follow whomever tells us that candidate GOP is the one. We want to see the person, hear what they have to say, to be moved by their story, to believe them, to trust them. President Obama gave us all that because he’s easy to like, believe, understand and especially trust. And yet many here will still question some of his ideals and outcomes, as we should, because we hired him to lead us, not to entertain us. It’s a singular job, this president thing, a harsh job, a difficult job, it’s like being a parent to a family of millions, some of whom are morons and some of whom are brilliant and most of whom are somewhere inbetween. This person has to understand how things work, how to make them work and work better, how to settle arguments and fights, how to get people to do things they don’t want to do, and smile most of the time doing it. What we are doing right now is setting up the interview, deciding what we’d like most in an employee, what the job demands and how we’d like them to do it. We all have our favorites or are open to any one of the applicants, with some absolute rejections. How this plays out in the next 20 months will be vital to us, and yet the vast majority of interviewers will sleep for the next 19 months and make up their minds based upon bits and pieces of information they hear second hand that may not even be true.
Fair Economist
@Amir Khalid:
I’ve seen that reference a half-dozen times already – and I’m still chuckling. It’s so perfect! Two huge historical defeats, a complete failure of the Tory whip (with the chief whipper even breaking!) – and she still keeps trying to get it passed.
Fair Economist
@Brachiator:
It means May’s deal will not pass before the deadline. Something else has to be done. Bercow at least made sure there will be a few days to do something – May was probably planning to have Meaningful Vote 3 late Saturday night when there would be no way to negotiate anything (although the EU has wisely provided the option to revoke Article 50, so there would still be that out to avoid disaster).
Tony Jay
@Another Scott:
They have, but the E.U. have also very clear that their favoured endgame is Britain dropping this whole Brexit nonsense and stating in the E.U. If they can facilitate that while simultaneously giving the tide of obnoxious anti-E.U. Nationalism a sharp kick in the beanbag, all the better.
Britain might still prove to be an historic example of democratic process, just not in the way the Quitters and their foreign sugar-daddies imagined.
Tony Jay
@Amir Khalid:
I am. Though Captain Ahab works as well on a number of levels.
Another Scott
@Fair Economist: Supposedly just revoking Article 50 won’t do it:
Trouble for this plan is, the EU has a say on things. They want any extension to be short (before the next EU elections in a couple of months). It’s hard to imagine the Tories and the UK Parliament figuring out that Brexit was a stupid idea and rolling it all back to the previous status quo in a couple of months…
We’ll see!
Cheers,
Scott.
Gravenstone
@schrodingers_cat: Here’s a novel thought. If you (anyone) feel strongly enough about a subject and believe you can speak to it with some knowledge, then assemble the post you want to see and send it to a front pager. See if they will accept it as a guest post. If nothing else, it might provide them a basis for their own take on the matter.
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
The last hour in Parliament has seen question after question thrown at the Speaker from MPs trying to get a sense of what he – would – see as necessary to get a vote to the floor. He’s holding his cards pretty close to his chest, though. Hand grenade tossed, over you you, Parliament.
Though of course, the Quitservatives have gone straight for the dignified option of asking can they exploit the fine print of Parliamentary procedure to just close this session of Parliament and open a new one. How democratic of them. How deeply respectful of Parliamentary sovereignty. /s
Arseholes.
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
May needed to have something resolved prior to the EU summit on March 21/22. This latest decision might upend this.
joel hanes
@OzarkHillbilly:
Kerry lost largely because Jerome Corsi is lower than pond scum, and the media amplified his vile emissions.
And because the Republicans cheated in every way they could, of course.
Fuck you Ken Blackwell.
WaterGirl
@geg6: I get frustrated when people here express anger or frustration that Beto is raising funds at a level that their preferred candidate can not, or has not, and people who express the same thing because Beto gets more news coverages than their candidate. To hold either of those things against Beto, who is a serious candidate, makes no sense to me.
My top 3 at this point or Beto, Buttigieg and Harris. I don’t begrudge anything against any Democratic candidates, except for Wilmer at Tulsi, neither of whom I consider a democrat.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t have time to dig up the videos, but here is a progressive critique of his policy preferences from before the midterms with updates:
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/beto-o-rourke-platform-policy/
He is especially forceful about reproductive rights.
WaterGirl
@geg6: I completely agree.
Here’s the thing, though. I listened to the CNN town hall with Pete Buttigieg because I happened to see him on Colbert and he was interviewed on Pod Save America. I had liked enough of what I saw on those two venues to take the time to listen to a 45-minute town hall.
Now Elizabeth Warren — someone I very much like as a senator — has a town hall coming up — but I’m not very enthused about watching/listening because thus far she hasn’t grab me much as a candidate and I think she is focusing on some things that are way less than critical in this time when the country is on fire and climate change is breathing down our necks.
So it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
If Betty Cracker isn’t much impressed with Beto, then maybe she won’t spend the time watching some of the videos and listening to things that might demonstrate that he isn’t an empty suit.
The same thing is true of me if I don’t listen to the upcoming CNN town hall with Elizabeth Warren.
I think we’ll all be better off if people like me listen to Warren’s town hall even though I’m not crazy about her candidacy, and if we all try to listen to enough of all the serious candidates to be able to fairly assess whether someone is a candidate that deserves consideration.
I think the town halls and other interviews are better than debates if what you want is to get a feel for what kind of person they are, what their values are, what their worldview is. Debates, with their time limits and sometimes bullshit debate rules tell you more about how good a debater is than any of those things I listed in the previous sentence.
edit: @Betty Cracker: I should have included a reply to you since I mentioned your name in this comment.
schrodingers_cat
@Gravenstone: I have done some of what you have recommended. I have covered immigration on my blog, although not in the last few months. I had also offered to do a Q and A on something, I think it was the caste system when the topic organically came up when Gabbard announced, many commenters were interested, there was no FP response, except some ridicule/snark by a FPer. I should start posting on my on own blog again and do more.
Also, advocating for immigrants should not only be up to other immigrants. These are important political stories, since demonization of immigrants is the President’s signature issue.
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl:
And I see that by the time I finished typing my comment, Betty Cracker had already asked for Beto videos.
I should clarify that I wasn’t talking about Betty in particular so much as trying to use myself and Betty as examples. Apologies if that came out as specific to Betty.
Plato
@Another Scott:
Swimmingly for her?
Two most historical defeats in UK Parliament history. Now speaker smacking down her 3rd clumsy attempt to ‘pass’ her nonsense compromise.
Sure, she is swimming alright. In her own political blood.
goblue72
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Fixed it for ya. If you’re gonna be childish, be uniformly childish:
Vice Mag……………….6,100,000
Wilmer…………….5,900,000
RoboCop……………1,500,000
Mom Hair……….1,000,000 in 48 hrs
Hickeypooper…..1,000,000 in 48 hrs.
Gravenstone
@schrodingers_cat: Waiting for a response to an offer isn’t likely to get you (or anyone) very far. Things get missed, comments aren’t always read. Submit the post ideas, if not the actual post that you might like to see to a front pager. Yes, there is still the potential that an email containing such a post might get lost, but you at least take a more forward approach to raising an issue that you consider important. Who knows, someone might welcome the opportunity to post a community voice without having to assemble a more robust post of their own on such subjects.
And I don’t mean this to single you out. There have been multiple people over time who have lamented the absence of discussion on a subject they feel is important. Hell, maybe as a part of the site rebuild they can present a general submission email (of course, people would have to be responsible for checking such an email) for interested parties to submit specific posts/ideas to.
Gravenstone
@goblue72: You know, there’s a reason no one here likes or listens to you. Although I’d love to know how you keep slithering out of the pie filter. I think this is like the third time I’ve had to re-submit your idiot name to it, even though it always sits proudly in the middle of the list.
WaterGirl
Does anyone happen to know if the newshour has articles like this for all the candidates?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-does-pete-buttigieg-believe-where-the-candidate-stands-on-7-issues
Brachiator
@geg6:
Thanks for this. I don’t care much about what these progressives think about Beto (or any other candidate), but it is a useful summary of his policy positions.
Plato
@goblue72:
Because wilmer is not a dem and is a corrupt coward, hence the special mention.
jk
@geg6:
Beto’s resume is very thin compared to Warren, Harris, Inslee, Gillibrand, Booker, or Klobuchar
Starring in a few viral videos is no substitute for serving as a senator or a governor.
The last time I checked, Cruz was still serving in the Senate so this conquering hero treatment being given to Beto is a little absurd.
Beto 2020 – Hey, he almost beat Ted Cruz!
J R in WV
@Fair Economist:
I think this is the flaming neon sign that T. May isn’t very bright as in not smart at all. She is fixed upon a single thought, which has failed in a monster way, yet cannot think of anything else as a different option.
The hard border at N Ireland may wind up being hard borders into Scotland, Wales AND Ireland if May doesn’t manage to think of something positive to do. If it were me and I was Welsh, Scots or Irish, I would much rather be associated with the EU than with England, which now appears to be more like all the worst parts of Regency England and less like a 21st Century nation than ever before. By which I mean bigoted and reactionary rather than progressive and forward thinking.
Also, I too am at least Beto curious, with Harris in my second place, or even tied for first. Mayor Pete is impressive also, too. Non-Democratic Senator Sanders is a Russian stooge, and stupid and small minded as well. No chance I’ll ever vote for him. Warren is also a winner in my book.
Uncle Cosmo
@Another Scott:
I seem to have misread your intent. My apologies for going off half-cocked. The fact that you’re still getting (& reading!) e-mails from him suggests that you afford him a modicum of respect that is fairly rare among the Democratically politicized, here or elsewhere.
As I typed above, I’m not backing anyone (or more like backing everyone except Wilmer & Tulsi) at this stage. Let’s hear spirited but respectful debate on all sorts of policy positions.
Bobby Thomson
@Princess: most people are not that consistently ideological.
But people into white dudes are consistent about that.
Betty Cracker
@Gravenstone:
As far as I know, I have not been the recipient of a proposed post on a topic. But I do get mildly irritated when people complain about the lack of front-page treatment of XYZ issue, especially if they imply lack of posting on a particular topic means no one cares about that issue or insinuate that we have an obligation to cover it somehow.
I remember after Ursula Le Guin died, someone complained about the lack of a front-page post on it and said we must not give a shit about literature and women’s place in it. Meanwhile, there were at least two posts in process in the backroom about Le Guin’s legacy — folks were taking their time to be thoughtful about it.
Anyway, for me it boils down to this: I am a volunteer, so I post when I feel like it about what I feel like posting about. My output in pursuit of this unpaid hobby doesn’t even accurately reflect what I care about most (I rarely post about parenting, for example), let alone what’s most important in the world or collectively important to the people who write for and read this blog. The day we get assignment editors is the day I find a different hobby.
To end on a more positive note, I very often learn more from reading comments than front page posts, and I suspect that’s true of most of us. We have a lot of open threads around here, and that affords all readers an opportunity to inform, pass along links to expert opinions on issues and interact with others about the topic that is most important to them. That’s a good thing.
jk
@WaterGirl:
In 2018, Beto refused to endorse the Democrat who ran against Republican Will Hurd in Texas’ 23rd CD. Hurd was re-elected by under 1,000 votes. In an interview Hurd said he’d vote for Trump over Beto in a general election matchup. Beto isn’t a loyal Democrat he’s a selfish prick.
h/t https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/10/politics/will-hurd-beto-orourke-donald-trump-cnntv/index.html
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: The national press loves big fundraising numbers because:
1) “Numbers are objective” (even when they’re not)
2) The national press is owned by media organizations that live on selling advertising. They want those dollars to come home to them.
I remember when Phil Gramm was going to walk away with the nomination and the presidency because he raised a mountain of money early:
The only thing the press loves more than someone raising lots of money is having a front-runner taken down.
It’s very, very early and unexpected things are going to happen. :-)
(I’ve given to Warren and Harris (on their announcement dates), but that’s it for me for a while. I want to see more and am not in a hurry.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Gravenstone
@Betty Cracker:
Even as I was hitting Post on my second comment, I was imagining various front pagers muttering (or screaming) ShutUpShutUpShutUp…..
henqiguai
@WaterGirl (#229):
Why yes, it seems to. Right side of the page from your link. Looked like all of them have a similarly titled article of 5 to 11 questions for {the candidate}.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: One reason why fundraising numbers are important is that — right or wrong — it influences how seriously your candidate is taken, and that affects news coverage, which has an impact on how difficult or easy it is for voters to get to know you.
It can also have an impact on how people feel about your candidacy because there are definitely voters who want to vote for a winner. Thankfully, most of those people don’t start paying attention until we are further down the road than we are right now.
It’s really depressing to think about all the potential voters I have talked to in primaries who say: “well, I really like candidate X, but I think I am going to vote for candidate Y because it sounds like Y is going to win. Head-desk.
WaterGirl
@henqiguai: Duh. I swear I looked on that page before I posed the question. But I am really good at tuning out advertising and extraneous stuff on a page. (And, apparently, at tuning out something I am specifically looking for!!!)
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: My comment was not a personal criticism aimed at you. Immigration is the burning political issue of this presidency and it is not being discussed much on this blog. I am not insinuating anything, as you put it. It is my opinion plainly stated.
@Gravenstone: If I need your advice, I will ask for it.
Brachiator
@WaterGirl:
And yet, fundraising numbers is one of many worthless yardsticks that reporters and pundits fall back on as they attempt to assess how campaigns are progressing.
Here’s a WaPo story from July, 2015:
And if anybody remembers what happened to Jeb, please clap.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: I wasn’t talking to you or about you specifically — was responding to G’s more generic description of a fairly common complaint around here. (Unless you were the person who complained about the lack of an immediate front page post about Le Guin’s passing. TBH, I don’t remember who that was, just recalled the incident because I found it somewhat irritating.)
debbie
@Immanentize:
Hope you see this. It looks like no one answered your question. It’s important this cycle because the number of donations received (not the amount, just the number of people donating) will decide who gets to be in the first debate.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
Some days it’s difficult to remember that this is a free form blog, with no one getting paid. A lot of the commenters sort of camp out here and comment a fair amount, some of us have been here longer than a number of the front pagers have been front pagers. And the some days shear volume of posts and the quality of the posts suggest that there is more to this thing than just a love of the place.
IOW Thanks for the work, it’s worth far more than what you don’t get paid to produce it. With only a very few exceptions the front pagers since I’ve been here have been great. All of you that are still here are. Even John.
Betty Cracker
@Ruckus: Thank you, kind sir. I was sincere when I said I often learn more from comments than posts. The perspectives and wisdom outweigh the bullshit. That’s what keeps me going!
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: No I wasn’t. I guess our wires got crossed.