Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I personally stopped the public option…

What fresh hell is this?

Han shot first.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Word salad with all caps

This Blog Goes to 11…

Naturally gregarious and alpha

We still have time to mess this up!

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

How has Obama failed you today?

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Women: They Get Shit Done

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

We have all the best words.

The revolution will be supervised.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

I can see Russia from this blog!

This blog will pay for itself.

You are here: Home / Archives for Economics / C.R.E.A.M.

C.R.E.A.M.

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: “How did the Republican party arrive at this place?”

by | 80 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: <em>“How did the Republican party arrive at this place?”</em>Post + Comments (80)

Impeachment Inquiry Open Thread: Girl Power, Ivanka!

by | 154 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

… The prior relationship came to light as investigators with the Department of Justice Inspector General’s office was looking into allegations of political bias at the origins of the Russia investigation since May 2018.

Steele gained notoriety as the investigator who ignited a firestorm by authoring the highly controversial 2016 dossier alleging links between the Trump Campaign and Russia, and embarrassing incidents involving Trump before he took office. Critics of Steele have argued that the former intelligence officer was biased against Trump and was inclined to produce a negative report on the presidential candidate – excoriating Steele on social media and elsewhere.

In 2007, Ivanka Trump met Steele at a dinner and they began corresponding about the possibility of future work together, the source said. The following year, the two exchanged emails about meeting up near Trump Tower, according to several emails seen by ABC News. And the two did meet at Trump Tower according to the source. The inspector general’s report mentions a meeting with a “Trump family member” there. They suggest Ivanka Trump and Steele stayed in touch via emails over the next several years. In one 2008 exchange they discussed dining together in New York at a restaurant just blocks from Trump Tower…

Members of President Trump’s family have never publicly discussed the interactions – and their past meetings with Steele went unmentioned as the Trumps leveled charges against the British intelligence expert in the wake of the controversial and hotly disputed memos he wrote about President Trump…

The inspector general’s report, which was released publicly today, briefly references these past dealings. In his discussion with investigators from the inspector general’s office, Steele cited his past cordial relationship with Ivanka Trump as reason to believe that he was not biased against her…

Ivanka’s never gonna challenge the sort of people who join Mensa, but she’s by far the brightest of the Donald/Ivana litter. And the firstborn, too. Yet she’s been told, since she could bang two blocks together, that she’d never inherit the Trump empire, because she was ‘just a girl’. On the one hand, she was taught that money and its acquisition was the only real measure of human worth; on the other hand, she’s complained that both her parents kept her chronically under-funded, requiring her from childhood to resort to ‘clever’ business measures like selling faked ‘Indian arrowheads’ to her childhood peers. The Trump ideology is that powerful people swing their weight around, take whatever they like, and brag about their taking… but Ivanka, as a girl, was required to be ladylike, not to fight, but to get what she needed by pleasing & manipulating people (especially Daddy, the source of all good things). As a Trump, she was told, she had the best heritage from the best family in a world of sheep and slackers — and yet: Her job was to be eye candy, and (secondarily) to trade her gifts for an allegiance with another family (almost) as powerful and rich as her own…

Spymakers, the story goes, have an acronym: M.I.C.E. You lure potential ‘assets’ through the judicious use of Money (to those who feel themselves undercompensated), Ideology (‘you & I both agree about what is truly important’), Compromise (blackmail, when targets or those important to targets — hellooo, Jared — have left evidence of lawbreaking), and Ego.

It’s not that Ivanka has necessarily been recruited by foreign power, but…

… Being able to plausibly suggest that Ivanka might’ve been recruited is not nothing, for a sufficiently busy & mischievous foreign power.

… In her role as a senior vice president of her father’s company, Ivanka Trump was particularly involved in its overseas real estate projects. In 2006, she traveled to Moscow to explore the possibility of a Trump Tower in Russia.

Impeachment Inquiry Open Thread: <em>Girl Power,</em> Ivanka!Post + Comments (154)

“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”…Modern Republican Update

by | 79 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

The GOP today, and Trump himself, make a lot of noise about how much they love Israel.  What they really value, of course, is the racist and corrupt current Israeli government–and, some of them, the apocalyptic vision of Israel’s Jews massacred in a final confrontation on the plains of Megiddo, which would thus usher in the arrival of their god: Rambo Jeebus.

Trump is mystified — sincerely, I believe* — that his performative slobbering over Bibi hasn’t translated into support from American Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom interpret  the obligation to “Tikkun Olam” (heal the world) rather differently than does our presidential cager of children and patron of war criminals.

Over the weekend, Trump has explored this mystery, and has reminded us what Jews really are to him. Via Vanity Fair, here’s the shitgibbon speaking to the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida:

He started off by once again invoking the age-old cliché about “dual loyalty,” saying there are Jews who “don’t love Israel enough. After that warm-up he dove right into the stereotype about Jews and money, telling the group: “A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all,” he said.

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"...Crayon Edition

“But you have to vote for me—you have no choice. You’re not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let’s take 100% of your wealth away!” (It feels beside the point that neither Elizabeth Warren nor any other Democratic candidate has proposed a 100% wealth tax.) He continued: “Some of you don’t like me. Some of you I don’t like at all, actually. And you’re going to be my biggest supporters because you’re going to be out of business in about 15 minutes if they get it. So I don’t have to spend a lot of time on that.”

That’s us.  Jews aren’t really Americans, or not American enough — we’ve got Israel to take care of.  And Cash Rules Everything Around Us. (Not the best acronym, I know.)

You know, the old, familiar hate: the international conspiracy of world Jews, driven only by money, “not nice people at all.”

The Republican Party in any of its forms has not, as I write this, said anything about the shitgibbon’s remarks.

Silence = acquiescence.

That is: GOP is, until clearly demonstrated otherwise, home to and comfortable with exactly the same kind of anti-Semitism that underpinned persecution from pogroms to the Holocaust.  This kind of bigotry doesn’t have to end there, of course, but to avoid an escalation of the same hate that barely a year ago “inspired” the killer in the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, those closest to the President have to respond forcefully.  They haven’t and on the evidence they won’t.

The Republican Party has been playing on white fears of black and brown humanity for a long time, and it has long been a shock to the conscience how readily so many in power have been to do so instrumentally, not because they “in their hearts” hate black people or whoever, but because it works.

Well, it has, too well — and now the next phase is unfolding: when you unleash hate, sooner or later, it always finds the Jews.

And every other vulnerable minority.  We really are in this together, and 2020 truly is an existential election.

Other than that, how was your day, all you Mrs. Lincolns?

*I think that Trump is genuinely mystified by a lack of Jewish support.  He’d do business with someone he loathes if it made him a couple of bucks. Wouldn’t everyone?

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of a Rabbi, 1635

“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”…Modern Republican UpdatePost + Comments (79)

Late Night Open Thread: Buttigieg Seeks Republican Votes

by | 127 Comments

This post is in: , ,


(Can’t get the embed to work properly, but it’s worth five minutes to watch.)

Striving to impress the Never-Trumpers isn’t a bad move, for someone with Mayor Pete’s (admittedly slender) political credentials. But his dogwhistle wasn’t particularly well performed here, because it seems to have pissed off a lot of Democratic voters without impressing his target audience…

And were I his Comms Director, I wouldn’t have “defended” my boss to Democrats by citing The Bulwark, which is… an outfit explicitly for Never-Trumper Republicans:


(Note: Dana Houle, professional political operative, has said that the more non-professionals know about a campaign’s press staff, the less likely that campaign is to succeed.)

show full post on front page

Late Night Open Thread: Buttigieg Seeks Republican VotesPost + Comments (127)

Mad dog who’s lost his way

by | 53 Comments

This post is in: ,

I don’t normally get upset about Trump.  My feeling is that we’ve got to have a Republican president, it’s better that it be someone who is poor politician.  I mean, Marco Rubio would be bombing Iran and have a 60% approval rating right now (the latter because of the economy).

But certain things do make me hope that someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.  One is the continued popularity of David Brooks, sixteen years after he cheerled the Iraq War with North Korean-style propaganda about Dear Leader W.  Another is that Ken Starr is still on my tv sometimes, even after heading up a rape factory at Baylor.  But what pisses me off most these days is Jonathan Turley.  He was everywhere in 1998 telling people that Clinton had to be impeached.  He also thought that W should be impeached.  He mused about having Obama impeached.  And now he’s using the old “if my dog has a fit, you must acquit” defense in support of Trump.

“I get it: You are mad,” he testified. “The president is mad. My Democratic friends are mad. My Republican friends are mad. My wife is mad. My kids are mad. Even my dog seems mad — and Luna is a goldendoodle and they don’t get mad. So we’re all mad.

I don’t think that this goes in healthy societies.  There’s never a shortage of hacks and liars but couldn’t we at least get a new crop of hacks and liars every 20 years or so?  Is that asking for too much?

Also too, let’s raise a little more money for the seventeen most vulnerable House incumbents.  They’re going to have to vote for impeachment soon and many of them are in districts that Trump carried.

Goal Thermometer

Mad dog who’s lost his wayPost + Comments (53)

Schadenfreude Open Thread: Soft, Soft Targets

by | 153 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

Speaking of TP-USA, what’s triggering its leader Charlie Kirk, this week?

Schadenfreude Open Thread: Soft, <em>Soft</em> TargetsPost + Comments (153)

Repub Failson Nepotism Open Thread: Jared Is ON It

by | 94 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

President Trump has made his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the de facto project manager for constructing his border wall, frustrated with a lack of progress over one of his top priorities as he heads into a tough reelection campaign, according to current and former administration officials.

Kushner convenes biweekly meetings in the West Wing, where he questions an array of government officials about progress on the wall, including updates on contractor data, precisely where it will be built and how funding is being spent. He also shares and explains the president’s wishes with the group, according to the officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.

The president’s son-in-law and senior adviser is pressing U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the process of taking over private land needed for the project as the government seeks to meet Trump’s goal of erecting 450 miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border by the end of 2020. More than 800 filings to seize private property will need to be made in the coming months if the government is going to succeed, officials aid.

Kushner has told other West Wing officials that he is in charge of the wall, according to aides, and that it is paramount to Trump that at least 400 miles be built by Election Day…

… Kushner has clashed with the career officials who have questioned some of his ideas, such as installing web cameras to live-stream construction. He has blamed former chief of staff John F. Kelly and former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for not focusing enough on the wall, senior administration officials said. For their part, former officials have said Kushner displays a lack of knowledge of the policy issues and politics involved in the immigration debate.

show full post on front page

Repub <del>Failson</del> Nepotism Open Thread: Jared Is ON ItPost + Comments (94)

Repub ‘Traditions’ Open Thread: Feelers… Nothing More Than Feelers…

by | 53 Comments

This post is in: , , ,


The people she knows best are Republicans. Even the ones who can read would rather not risk muddying their propaganda skillsets. Fox News and the Oval Office Occcupant’s twitter feed tell them all they need to know to succeed in grinding through their daily routines.

Every so often, the Republican Party reaches a new nadir, where they can’t even scrape up a conventionally good-looking figurehead to spin the propaganda on television. Now it’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who looks entirely too much like her old man (nepotism, of course, being her only qualification). Last time the GOP was about to get stomped, it was the Albino Amphibian who led the charge:

Gotta hand it to Newt: He’s an inspiration to every soulless grifter in American politics.

Repub ‘Traditions’ Open Thread: <em>Feelers… Nothing More Than Feelers… </em>Post + Comments (53)

Saturday Night PopCult Nostalgia Open Thread: CYBERTRUCK!

by | 113 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

Soundtrack for this post:

RIP my menchies, as the kids say, but this was too good *not* to share. Bryan Feldman, at NYMag, “We May Not Want the Cybertruck, But We Deserve It”:

… The Cybertruck is a truck that Elon Musk unveiled last night. It is a Humvee-ish vehicle that looks like it was made for a direct-to-video Starship Troopers ripoff called Spaceship Soldiers. It looks like a secret car you unlock if you get a high score on every Cruisin’ USA track. It looks like one of those first-pass shots on a visual-effects highlights reel from 1992. It looks like it has a physics system completely separate from every other object on this earth and if you hit a curb at the wrong angle, the truck will glitch out and clip through an entire city block, causing untold devastation. It is the Cybertruck.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Ah, a Cybertruck. A truck that is computer-y.” Wrong! Cybertruck should be said in the exact same way that one might pronounce the word “cyberpunk,” a sci-fi genre all about how technology will completely ruin us once we start jamming chips into our brains. Just look at the Cybertruck logo. It’s not some coder font — it’s graffiti. It’s the Official Truck of App-Catalyzed Urban Decay. This a Blade Runner-ass truck for the end times. It is not a utopian, idealistic creation — and in that sense, it is refreshing. Elon Musk is not selling us the world we want; he is selling the world we have (starting at MSRP $39,900). The Cybertruck is, in a sense, practical. Everything about this truck screams, “This is the car you will drive through overgrown suburbs full of decaying houses, searching for potable water. This is the car the next three generations of your family will be born in the trunk of. When the feral wolves attack, this truck will protect you.”

But the truck will not protect you. In its unveiling last night, Musk tried to show off the vehicle’s “bulletproof” windows. He asked an employee to throw a rock at the window. The window fractured. They tried it again on a second window. That window also fractured. It was a pure, perfect distillation of what Elon Musk’s whole, like, deal is. He has spent years pouring his billions into projects that make science fiction into science fact, in order to sell people and governments expensive stuff that maybe half-functions. A demonstration of the dent-proof doors went off more successfully.

Many of Musk’s products are self-indulgent, but this might be the most self-indulgent. Like, you know how there are people who design their living rooms to look like the bridge of the Enterprise, or have rooms dedicated to baseball paraphernalia? The Cybertruck can then be read as Musk’s attempt to shape not just his own life, but the lives of others, to mimic the media of his youth. The whole thing resembles a low-poly model — a 3-D asset made of a limited number of polygons based on the limited computing power of older devices. Musk doesn’t just want a Cybertruck for himself, he wants to see thousands of Cybertrucks roaming the streets, sticking out like sore thumbs, parts of the world that quite literally haven’t fully rendered to the level of everything else around them. The notion might not be as far-fetched as it seems. Silicon Valley is full of newly minted millionaires with more money than they know what to do with. The Cybertruck looks very stupid, but so do AirPods…

show full post on front page

Saturday Night PopCult Nostalgia Open Thread: CYBERTRUCK!Post + Comments (113)

Friday Evening Open Thread: Mike Bloomberg Can Afford to Drive the Media Horse-Race Touts Nuts(ier)

by | 176 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Earlier this week, while everyone was busy watching the impeachment inquiry:

Maybe not the most effective political advertising strategy, but talk about an Oligarch Status “prestige” move!

But also:

Today:

“Huge show of financial force!!!”…

… The ad buy will begin on Monday in more than two dozen states from California to Maine, according to ad trackers. This initial television campaign will feature 60-second ads — a sign of a huge 2020 Bloomberg campaign budget that could easily stretch into the nine-figure range.

The scope of Mr. Bloomberg’s ad buy is staggering. It costs more than some smaller campaigns have spent all year on advertising…

The spending on Friday follows a separate $100 million digital ad campaign Mr. Bloomberg is funding that will solely target President Trump. Together, his ad buys signal his willingness to wield his wealth in perhaps unparalleled ways to oust Mr. Trump from the White House….

Mr. Bloomberg, with an estimated net worth of more than $50 billion, is one of the wealthiest people in America, with a fortune that dwarfs even Mr. Steyer’s…

On Friday, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign submitted forms to television stations designating himself as a federal candidate, which entitles him to the lowest price available for ads.

show full post on front page

Friday Evening Open Thread: Mike Bloomberg Can Afford to Drive the Media Horse-Race Touts Nuts(ier)Post + Comments (176)

Paging Doctor Teeth

by | 87 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

Doctor Teeth & The Electric Mayhem Can’t Be Beat

Last week was a frustrating week in chez Mara. After years of messing around with cleanings for the old teeth, I finally got to see a periodontist for a gap in my back teeth. Please note, this has been an issue I’ve brought up for years. And every hygienist & dentist has brought it up to me, as if I have jack shit to do with solving bone loss in my jaw.

The solution, it turns out, is cutting open my gum & stuffing it with, uh, bone, I believe. Like stuffing a bra with tissues only the hope is the tissues will bond with the boobies to build healthy bone in the jaw. Or something like that. This procedure costs $3k. With insurance. Which is a yikes. And a “motherfuck, is this going to give me superpowers, at least? ” Because, yikes, and on both sides of my jaw. Double yikes.

I’ve been struck by how ridiculous the American health insurance & medical system is. We have outrageous costs for service & materials, yet we only talk about insurance costs. Coverage for dental and mental health are often discrete from general coverage. Why has the industry been allowed to do this? Last I checked, your mind operating right helps your body & teeth are a critically important component of eating, which is a reason to live. Bacterial infection in your mouth can have some serious consequences, RIP Andy Hallett. We can implement insurance reform measures but making healthcare affordable will require addressing the scale of costs in the U.S. for medicine, tools, personnel, materials — the whole shebang. I don’t believe Medicare for All addresses that except with the idea that we excise insurance companies from the equation. Stepping over the landmine of legal authority, dealing with displaced employees, etc., I don’t get the impression that’s something people are truly dealing with in their proposals.

No human system is perfect. We’re going to be retooling things for decades, as we should have been for all time past. I guess the problem is we have to cure innate selfishness so we don’t craft health policy that respects profit over patients, yet respects the rights of doctors et al to make money. No one will get everything they want but we should get what we need.

We also need to address medical outcome disparities for POC. I wouldn’t have gotten my consultation without finally getting mad and saying, “Look, this has been going on for years, why are you just talking about cleanings still? Shouldn’t you do more? What are my options?” I wish I was only talking about a few months and one provider. We’re talking over 8 years and 3 dental providers. This could have been tried years ago, when I had the actual income to do it. Instead, lots of “caution”. It doesn’t mean any of the dental offices were unskilled or that they didn’t provide decent service. But when it comes to offering good health action plans, advanced care options – they’ve all fallen short and I’m not alone. This shit kills people. I’m probably more forward about finding solutions than others and I can attest that largely, I’ve been recommended to be patient. Many times, that patience would have severely injured me or killed me, see also, adventures with birth control, Georgia & the blood thinners. How do we get medical providers to accept & overcome implicit biases? Maybe Mr. Anderson can weigh in with his valuable expertise.

We have a lot of work to do on medical care. Just fixing the for profit insurance part of it won’t resolve it. I’d love to see anyone running for office who’d make a stab at these issues. I’d also like to be a billionaire just so I can upend the entire GOP as my personal petty vendetta. So I’ll settle for landing some more VO gigs so I can make an action plan on this teeth bullshit. Have at folks. And really, what kind of policy do you think should be discussed for any issue at all versus how it’s presented during elections? I got a million of them, but I’ll save it for another long post.

2 Floofy cats, watching birds.
The Morning Crew

Paging Doctor TeethPost + Comments (87)

Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Dean ‘The Dean’ Baquet Knows His Audience

by | 33 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

And it ain’t you or me; it’s the plutocrats who sign his paychecks:

The executive editor of the New York Times has accused Donald Trump of putting his reporters’ lives at risk by subjecting them to personal abuse and describing them as “enemies of the people”.

Dean Baquet, who has led the news outlet during one of the most tumultuous periods in its history, said the US president’s history of verbal attacks on journalists such as the New York Times’s political reporter Maggie Haberman was “appalling” and risked having serious consequences.

“I think his personal attacks on reporters, including Maggie, are pretty awful and pretty unpresidential,” he said. “I think personal attacks on journalists, when he calls them names, I think he puts their lives at risk…

[‘Doesn’t he understand that we’re on his side?’]

He acknowledged making mistakes in the 2016 election, having failed to grasp the anger in the US that led to the election of Trump, but said he was constantly fighting against pressure to “take a full-bodied side” against the president. “The way I see it is, our job is to cover the world with tremendous curiosity. And with a desire to understand the people who voted for Donald Trump and why they voted for Donald Trump. I think some of our readers want us to dismiss some of those people. I think that’s not empathetic coverage.”

Some of these rows have now affected the newsroom, which has seen an influx of younger reporters from more diverse backgrounds, prompting what Baquet believes is the biggest change in newsrooms since the Vietnam war in the 1960s. “We have a new generation that grew up in a different world that have not only different demands of their news, they want a different relationship with their readers.” …

Best news in the article is a throwaway line: “Baquet… will step down in two years’ time”.

show full post on front page

Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Dean ‘The Dean’ Baquet Knows His AudiencePost + Comments (33)

Election 2020 Open Thread: Looks Like Deval Patrick Is the Mark At This Table

by | 43 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Deval Patrick was my governor for eight years, and he was a perfectly fine governor, as far as that goes. He didn’t have any big initiatives that got his name into the national news, but he also didn’t have any ‘scandals’ big enough to draw national attention. Given the choices I’ve had since I moved to Massachusetts at the end of 1988, I’d certainly pick him over current corner-office occupant Charlie Baker, or placeholders Paul Celluci/Jane Swift. I’d crawl over broken glass to pick him over Mitt Romney, of course. But if he were running against Bill Weld?… it would actually cost me a twinge, because even though he was a Republican I actually remember Weld fondly. And the stakes would be so much lower, since the MA governorship is a legislatively weak position.

But why now, in the name of Murphy the Trickster God, should Deval Patrick decide he wants to run for the legislatively strong position of president, in the face of an internationally acute crisis and a dozen other better-positioned candidates? Best clue I’ve been able to find is in this Washington Post beat-sweetner:

Newly minted presidential candidate Deval Patrick wants to appeal to black voters, but by a matter of days he missed the deadline to make the ballots in Alabama and Arkansas, two states with large black populations. He wants to win moderates and build a national coalition, but because he didn’t alert officials in Michigan of his candidacy earlier this week, he now faces the extraordinary task of gathering 11,000 signatures in the next month.

His campaign forgot to register the devalpatrick2020.org domain, so it’s instead forwarding to a harsh piece by Howie Carr, a Boston Herald columnist and longtime Patrick antagonist.

The former Massachusetts governor is proposing an audacious move — replicating in a few weeks what other presidential candidates have been trying to create for years — but as he attempts to leapfrog the field, the early days of his candidacy are an illustration of the height of the hurdles he faces.

He has no campaign cash, little campaign staff, low probability of qualifying for debates — and just 81 days to go, as of Thursday, before voting begins…

Patrick’s Thursday announcement opened with a video that had been quickly put together, focusing heavily on his biography to introduce him to an unfamiliar national audience. He also sat for an interview with CBS News, which had hired the former Massachusetts governor as a commentator in September but severed ties as his campaign began.

He said he thought he could offer something different than the rest of the field, appearing to knock Joe Biden as out of touch and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as too dug into her ideas…

Patrick had considered a race last year but decided against it. The current effort came together swiftly — just last Thursday he was speaking before the Republican-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

He was interviewed onstage by Neil Bradley, the chief policy officer for the chamber who is also a registered lobbyist, and made no mention of his political plans. The event was private, and there is no public record of the remarks.

On the same day, another potential presidential entrant, former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, was laying the groundwork for his campaign, ensuring he was on the ballot in Arkansas, Alabama and Michigan.

Patrick held meetings over the weekend, and some of his aides made a round of calls attempting to recruit potential staffers — but in some cases were rebuffed…

How I read this, devout Cynic that I am, is that a bunch of Republican donors persuaded Patrick — who’s had dreams of the presidency since at least 2004 — that he should jump into the race now, logic and prospects of winning be damned. They don’t trust Bloomberg to toe the GOP line, and they’re terrified that either Biden or Warren will beat Trump (or whatever placeholder gets slotted in, should Trump implode before November 2020). Patrick isn’t much of a candidate, by their standards, but he’s Bain-affiliated, African-American, and can arguably kneecap Warren in New Hampshire. Taking their anti-Democratic agenda through the next quarter or two is as far ahead as a bunch of MBAs are willing to plan, in any case.

show full post on front page

Election 2020 Open Thread: Looks Like Deval Patrick Is the Mark At This TablePost + Comments (43)

Russiagate Open Thread: Nothing Says ‘Holiday Cheer’ Like Setting Up An Extortion Scheme

by | 65 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

… At least, if you’re a member of the Trump Crime Cartel:

Among the many guests who had their pictures taken with President Donald Trump at the White House’s annual Hanukkah party last year were two Soviet-born businessmen from Florida, Lev Parnas and Igor  Fruman. 
In the picture, which Parnas posted on social media, he and Fruman are seen smiling alongside Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer.
At one point during the party that night, Parnas and Fruman slipped out of a large reception room packed with hundreds of Trump donors to have a private meeting with the President and Giuliani, according to two acquaintances in whom Parnas confided right after the meeting…
Eventually, according to what Parnas told his confidants, the topic turned to Ukraine that night. According to those two confidants, Parnas said that “the big guy,” as he sometimes referred to the President in conversation, talked about tasking him and Fruman with what Parnas described as “a secret mission” to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter…
To Parnas, the chain of command was clear: Giuliani would issue the President’s directives while Parnas, who speaks fluent Russian, would be an on-the-ground investigator alongside Fruman, who has numerous business contacts in Ukraine.
“Parnas viewed the assignment as a great crusade,” says one of the people in whom Parnas confided. “He believed he was doing the right thing for Trump.”
The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment to a series of questions regarding the meeting and Trump’s relationship with Parnas and Fruman…

show full post on front page

Russiagate Open Thread: Nothing Says ‘Holiday Cheer’ Like Setting Up An Extortion SchemePost + Comments (65)

It stoned me just like going home

by | 11 Comments

This post is in: ,

Some good news today:

Roger J. Stone Jr., a former aide and longtime friend of President Trump, was found guilty on Friday of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election in what prosecutors said was an effort to protect Mr. Trump.

Let’s try to hit our target today for the Balloon Juice House fund that is split among the seventeen most vulnerable House Dem incumbents. (You can divvy it out however you like to avoid getting on too many mailing lists.)

Goal Thermometer

It stoned me just like going homePost + Comments (11)