Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Verified, but limited!

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

This is how realignments happen…

Naturally gregarious and alpha

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

This Blog Goes to 11…

Just a few bad apples.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

Our job is not to persuade Republicans but to defeat them.

Han shot first.

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

The revolution will be supervised.

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

I personally stopped the public option…

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

No one could have predicted…

Good luck with your asparagus.

Also, too.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Wetsuit optional.

Women: They Get Shit Done

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Shocking, but not surprising.

You are here: Home / Archives for Open Threads / Excellent Links

Excellent Links

Election Year Excellent Read: The Financial Times Interviews Rep. Jim Clyburn

by | 240 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Whether Trump likes the idea or not, there will be an election this fall. Among other things, some interesting suggestions from Rep. Clyburn on Biden’s potential VP:

… I met Clyburn for the first time shortly before last month’s South Carolina primary, where his endorsement of Joe Biden almost single-handedly saved the former vice-president’s campaign. The 14-term lawmaker would not say then which candidate he was going to endorse. But he had told some people at his accountant’s funeral the previous week — because, he says confidently, “they would never betray Jim Clyburn”.

As we sip our drinks, I ask him when he told Biden. The pair met on the USS Yorktown, an old aircraft carrier turned museum, six days before the primary. He delivered the good news, but included a stern warning to his friend to stop reading speeches from a script.

“Here’s what I said to him,” Clyburn tells me. “You know these issues well enough not to be reading from a text . . . People can’t feel you when you read it.”

Using lessons he learnt from his father as a “PK” (preacher’s kid), he gave Biden some advice. “There’s a reason that preachers preach in threes,” Clyburn recalls saying. “I want you to answer every question in three ways: here is what my presidency will mean to you, here’s what it will mean to your family, and here’s what it will mean for your community.”…

Armed with Clyburn’s backing, Biden won in a landslide; according to the exit polls, 61 per cent of the voters said the endorsement influenced their decision. That dramatic victory then propelled Biden to win in a slew of states the following week, earning him clear frontrunner status over the leftwing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

Clyburn is used to having power in his state. For the past three decades, he’s hosted a fish fry during the Democratic primaries which has become virtually mandatory for would-be candidates to attend. In the course of the 2008 primary, Clyburn criticised Hillary Clinton; on the day that Barack Obama beat her in South Carolina, Clyburn remembers Bill Clinton phoning him at 2.15am, bellowing, “If you bastards want a fight, you damn well will get one.”

Did he ever think his endorsement of Biden would have such an impact? Clyburn says that people underestimated the latent support for Biden — before proudly adding that two women approached him after the primary to say, “Thank you for saving the Democratic party.”

Clyburn has come a long way since his youth in Sumter, a city near Columbia. In his 2014 memoir, Blessed Experiences, he recalls how his high-school band was asked to participate in the Sumter Christmas parade in 1955, the year after the Supreme Court struck down the segregation of public schools. But he and his black bandmates were forced to march at the end of the parade, behind the horses…

He says he lives by an adage from John F Kennedy, which goes something like: “I never get mad, but I will get even.” I joke that Oscar Wilde said it first, with “revenge is a dish best served cold”. Clyburn breaks into a smile: “Kennedy stole a lot from other people, he might have stolen that line.”…

But inexorably the conversation is drawn back to Biden. Clyburn says he would restore civility in politics. For instance, he says, Biden shuns the “bombastic” approach taken by the “Bernie bros” — the moniker for the most radical wing of Sanders’ movement.

Centrist Democrats worry that, should Biden win the nomination, Sanders will hold back from actively campaigning for him. Clyburn does not sound confident that Sanders will help unite the party, or rally his supporters behind Biden. “What’s that old mafia saying — that fish rots from the head.” As he slowly knocks off his crustaceans one by one, he has a warning for one famous supporter of Sanders.

“When I say, ‘I don’t get mad, I get even’, there’s one person who is going to hear from me. His name is Michael Moore,” Clyburn says. The film-maker and longtime Sanders supporter claimed after Biden’s victory in South Carolina that the state was “not representative” of the United States. “I don’t want to say much but I’m going to have a lot to say.”

Come on, I press, and he happily obliges. Reminding me that Biden won more than 60 per cent of the black vote in South Carolina and bigger percentages in Alabama and Mississippi, he says: “According to Michael Moore, South Carolina doesn’t matter because here’s what ‘the people’ want.” He says Moore is dismissing the voices of the most important segment of the Democratic electorate — black voters.

I ask whether Clyburn thinks Biden will pick Stacey Abrams, 46, the African-American former minority leader of the House in Georgia and rising Democratic star, as his running mate to help woo younger voters in November.

“I doubt it,” he says. “There’s something to be said for somebody who has been out there.”

Clyburn does want to see a black woman on the ticket, though. And some Democrats believe that Biden, who has vowed to pick a woman, will also be under heavy pressure to repay Clyburn for his critical endorsement.

Clyburn says there has been a lot of talk about Kamala Harris, the California senator who struggled in the Democratic primary. He says a “sleeper” in the race is Susan Rice, who served as national security adviser to Barack Obama. But he also stresses that “the bench of black women is much deeper than people think”.

While he believes Abrams does not have enough experience, he has his eyes on another Georgia politician. “There is a young lady right there in Georgia who I think would make a tremendous VP candidate, and that’s the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms.”

It’s getting late, so we secure “one for the road”. I ask the former history teacher how he sees America’s place in the world. “We’re where Germany was in 1933 after the election of Adolf Hitler,” he warns. But he adds a note of optimism, saying that African-Americans can lead the charge against Trump. He cites as inspiration a hero of the 1930s: Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics…

Election Year Excellent Read: The <em>Financial Times</em> Interviews Rep. Jim ClyburnPost + Comments (240)

Excellent Read: Nancy Pelosi Remains A Boss

by | 106 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Karen Tumulty, at the Washington Post, applauds “A troublemaker with a gavel”:

… Though Nancy Pelosi does not lack for self-confidence, she rarely indulges in public self-reflection. On that night at the Smithsonian, however, she gave a nod to those who had paved the way for her.

“The women who did all of this — oh my gosh — we revere them. We hold them up as icons. But what we hear people say is, ‘Yes, they were icons. You are troublemakers.’ They were considered troublemakers in their time, so maybe there is a future for all of us,” Pelosi said with a laugh. “But I can just tell you, a troublemaker with a gavel — that’s the real difference.”

This troublemaker with a gavel is the highest-ranking female elected official in the nation’s history and, [last] Thursday, Pelosi will also mark a personal milestone: her 80th birthday. Fittingly, it comes at the end of Women’s History Month. Just as appropriately, Pelosi will be marking it by attempting a huge, complicated and vitally important legislative lift — marshaling support for a massive spending bill to blunt the impact of the coronavirus.

Pelosi will be tested in the coming months, as her generationally divided party looks for a way to navigate the coronavirus crisis while regrouping behind a presidential nominee. Then, in the fall, every seat in the House will be on the ballot and, with it, Pelosi’s 35-seat majority. Voters will render judgment on her decision to press forward with President Trump’s impeachment last fall. But it is likely they will be focused more on figuring out which party can be trusted going forward, and specifically, which is better equipped to manage the next phase of the government’s response to the most challenging peacetime crisis in a century or more…

show full post on front page

Excellent Read: Nancy Pelosi Remains A BossPost + Comments (106)

COVID-19 Social Psychopathology: Decameron in the Hamptons

by | 249 Comments

This post is in: , ,

From the locked-down megalopolis, per NYMag — “The City’s One-Percenters Flee the Rest of Us to the Hamptons”:

… For those who could afford it — like the rich who fled plague-stricken Florence in the Decameron — salvation, it seemed, might be reached by the Long Island Expressway. Or at least space, and possibly social distance from their social inferiors. Doorman buildings all over New York had SUVs lined up out front, lifeboats against an invisible virus. Towns, just waking up from their winter hibernation, were caught unawares. The Stop & Shop in East Hampton was out of organic lettuce and the Cumberland Farms in Southampton out of firewood. And suddenly the short-term rental market was as hot as August…

“I just had an eight-bedroom house on the waterfront,” says Ms. White, “never rented before. A renter wanted $200,000 for eight weeks. The landlord came back and said ‘How about $750,000?’ I told my client and he said, ‘Fine. We’re on our way out.’” The competition is fierce. Ms. Breitenbach recalls, “I just got outbid in a bidding war for an unlisted house renting for eight weeks. We offered $300,000. Two hours later they had a $400,000 offer.”

Meanwhile, even as demand is up, supply is down. “A lot of people who usually rent [out their houses in the summer] are not going to Europe,” explains Bonnie Aarons, a broker with Douglas Elliman. “This creates a shortage.” And not everyone can capitalize on it.

“I just got a call from a real-estate broker asking whether I’d rent out my place,” says the author Steven Gaines, a long-time Hamptons resident and author of Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hampton. “I said, I’d love to but I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

(Sidebar: I had not known that, according to NYC law, doormen are considered ‘essential workers‘ during this pandemic.)

It’s all fun’n’games, until the proles realize where the richest, softest targets are. From the NYPost, “‘We should blow up the bridges’ — coronavirus leads to class warfare in Hamptons”:

… “There’s not a vegetable to be found in this town right now,” says one resident of Springs, a working-class pocket of East Hampton. “It’s these elitist people who think they don’t have to follow the rules.”

It’s not just the drastic food shortage out here. Every aspect of life, most crucially medical care, is under strain from the sudden influx of rich Manhattanites panic-fleeing, bringing along their disdain and disregard for the little people — and in some cases, knowingly bringing coronavirus.

The Springs resident says her friend, a nurse out here, reported that a wealthy Manhattan woman who tested positive called tiny Southampton Hospital to say she was on her way and needed treatment.

The woman was told to stay in Manhattan.

Instead, she allegedly got on public transportation, telling no one of her condition. Then she showed up at Southampton Hospital, demanding admittance.

“Someone else took a private jet to East Hampton and did not tell anybody ’til he landed,” the resident says. “That’s the most horrendous aspect. The virus is already here, and we don’t have any medical resources.”

“We’re at the end of Long Island, the tip, and waves of people are bringing this s–t,” says lifelong Montauker James Katsipis. “We should blow up the bridges. Don’t let them in.”…

Here’s something that never gets mentioned or seen in coverage of the Hamptons, whether it’s the news or gossip columns or “Sex and the City” reruns: There are actually poor people who live here. There are three trailer parks (one, of course, is already going luxury). There are food pantries for the needy, and that includes schoolkids.

Normally, the haves and the have-nots converge only in summer, and everyone plays their parts. No more..

The offseason, October through June, is sparsely populated and can be very isolating. During that time, local grocers only stock food and supplies for a severely reduced population. There is no FreshDirect, no Whole Foods, no door-to-door food delivery.

Most year-rounders don’t have the ability to drop, as The Post reported, $8,000 in one shot at gourmet grocery Citarella, or import hundreds of pounds of meat as another overlord just did, then stash their hoard in the extra brand-new freezers they just bought…

show full post on front page

COVID-19 Social Psychopathology: <em>Decameron</em> in the HamptonsPost + Comments (249)

New Coronavirus Hotspot Indicator: “Tourists Welcome”

by | 115 Comments

This post is in: , ,

DATA =Don't Actually Test Anyone

(Bob Shannon via GoComics.com)
.

It’s very few peoples’ favorite chore even now, but before the widespread availability of washers & dryers, doing the laundry was one of the most demanding and least rewarding essential jobs. Any time after the Civil War up through the first Gilded Age, there was a standing trope about ‘washerwomen’ — drudges reduced by circumstance to picking up bundles of others’ soiled linens, heating huge amounts of water to ruin their hands scrubbing heavy wet sheets, shirts, and undergarments, hanging out the wet results to dry, and then heating cast iron implements on wood stoves to finish the job, before toting the fresh laundry (usually on foot) back to the various customers. Because it was a skill that every woman learned, since most homes already had the basic implements available, and because it was the sort of job that anyone who could afford it would gladly pay someone else to do, ‘taking in washing’ was the stereotypical terrible fate of widow ladies and other unfortunate women.

Since this was something every adult could be presumed to understand, there was also a standing joke about the nation’s capital and its monopoly industry: The city was called ‘Washing Done’ because its inhabitants made their livings swapping each others’ most tedious and demanding chores between them. ‘Washing Done’ was a specific, political catchphrase.

I thought of this when I heard about some of the earliest COVID-19 outbreaks, at places where vast numbers of strangers gathered to enjoy themselves before dispersing widely to their homes: A 40,000-person New Years potluck in Wuhan, various spas and funparks, a Swiss ski resort where the first British victims seemed to have picked up their infections. Tourism has become the go-to industry for many localities, where a comparatively modest expenditure and a large labor pool with few other options can hopefully attract itinerants with money to leave behind. ‘Tourists Welcome’ is our 21st-century version of ‘Washing Done’.

And now it’s reached the U.S., and not just the Disney parks and Las Vegas casinos. From TPM, “An Unexpected COVID-19 Hotspot Emerges In The Colorado Rockies”:

… Brueck would soon become one of the first diagnosed cases of COVID-19 in Eagle County, Colorado, a region of the Rockies spotted with idyllic resort towns. Dozens of people came down with similar symptoms around the same time.

And the confirmed cases have continued to climb — so much so that Eagle County’s numbers have grown to the “hotspot” conditions found in much larger U.S. cities. As of Friday, there were 61 confirmed cases of the disease there, according to the state — nearly as many as Denver in a county of around 55,000.

While those numbers alone made Eagle County the heaviest-hit county in the state, the disease is likely much more widespread than the confirmed cases let on. Between a hundreds-deep backlog of test results and the typical gap between contracting the disease and showing symptoms, public health officials haven’t been able to track the true extent of COVID-19 spread…

show full post on front page

New Coronavirus Hotspot Indicator: “Tourists Welcome”Post + Comments (115)

COVID-19 Coronavirus: A Few Longer Reads

by | 33 Comments

This post is in: , ,

First, some good news:

… Outlines of the plan were shared Wednesday evening with Trump administration officials, with the hope of reaching a bipartisan deal ahead of the vote. The legislation includes free coronavirus testing, up to three months of emergency paid leave benefits to all workers affected by the coronavirus, and could also include an 8 percentage point increase in the federal share of Medicaid payments to states, lawmakers and aides said.

The House effort shows the urgency with which political leaders are moving to contain the economic turmoil caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Although the Senate may not have time to act before a congressional recess scheduled for next week, a number of Republican senators indicated openness Wednesday to at least some elements of the House plan and said it was important to act quickly…

Events were developing rapidly on Capitol Hill after the World Health Organization announced it was declaring the coronavirus a pandemic. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking, said that the White House would review details of the plan before commenting. But this official was complimentary of the effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), saying, “From the beginning, ideas the speaker had were important parts of the conversation.”

President Trump was scheduled to address the nation from the Oval Office later Wednesday and could announce more economic proposals to address the virus.

Some GOP senators were waiting to take their cues from the White House. “A lot of it will depend on what the White House says,” said Senate Finance Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

Trump is pushing aides to develop a large tax cut package, and he could allow people to delay filing their taxes. Trump pitched Republican senators Tuesday on a big payroll tax reduction that could last through the end of the year and his reelection. But the response was skeptical, and House Democratic leaders are not including any such measure in their plan.

The paid sick leave component of House Democrats’ plan would replace two-thirds of wages for most workers, up to a $4,000 a month plan. The proposal would extend eligibility for unemployment insurance. It is also expected to include about $1 billion in emergency appropriations to expand access to food security programs including food stamps, Meals on Wheels and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. The overall price tag of the plan was unclear as of Wednesday evening, but was expected to be in the tens of billions of dollars at least…

Pelosi spoke twice Tuesday with Mnuchin, including just before meeting with the House Democratic caucus Wednesday evening to discuss the legislation, but she told reporters that White House priorities — included the broad payroll tax cut Trump supports — will not be included in the House package. The tax cuts alone that the White House has proposed could cost as much as $400 billion over one year.

“We made our proposal, and we’ll see how they are in agreement with it,” Pelosi said, adding that White House priorities might be added “for the future, but for right now, families first.”…

Biologist Trevor Bedford is one of the experts I’ve been following for my COVID-19 updates, but a lot of his best stuff is too technical for quick Twitter extraction. Vanity Fair has a new piece on his work — ““The Nature of Viruses Is to Mutate”: Mapping the Spread of a Deadly Disease”:

The map looks like an elaborate subway schematic of lines and circles, except that the dozens of dots aren’t stations in an urban metro system. Colored violet, orange, sky blue, and lime, these circles are places you definitely don’t want to be in. To find yourself inside one of the multihued dots on this highly viral online map means you are at risk of exposure to Covid-19—the novel coronavirus.

Few people are more aware of the literal micro-movements of this tiny bug that’s unnerving billions of people than the map’s cocreator Trevor Bedford, a 38-year-old evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutch, a medical research center in Seattle, the city that also happens to be something of a ground zero in the U.S. for Covid-19. With red, wavy hair and a reassuring smile, Bedford is part Holmesian sleuth, DNA detective, and graphic artist in the mold of Yale statistician and artist Edward Tufte, whose visual depictions have made data not only accessible, but often beautiful.

Since the outbreak began, Bedford (@trvrb on Twitter) has also become an unlikely social media star. “It’s been very, very surreal,” he said. “I now have 70,000 Twitter followers who are all very interested in genomic epidemiology.” At last glance Bedford had over 106,000 followers.

All of this attention is being directed at a previously obscure website that Bedford cocreated in 2015, now called Nextstrain (nextstrain.org)—which last week recorded over 400,000 hits. Nextstrain tracks the genetic mutation patterns of Covid-19—changes in the virus’s genetic code that appear in newly infected people in different cities and countries—as it spreads around the world.

“The nature of viruses is to mutate,” said Bedford, explaining that as these microorganisms rapidly reproduce, genetic errors can occur. But these aren’t the scary mutations that wipe out billions of people like in Hollywood films. “The vast majority of these mutations are absolutely meaningless,” said Emma Hodcroft, an epidemiologist who is on Bedford’s team and based out of the University of Basel in Switzerland, “but they are useful to help us see how the virus travels and changes.”…

The data for Nextstrain is provided by hundreds of scientists the world over, working to sequence samples of the virus as it expands into new locales. “We can post new data in as fast as five minutes between a genome being released and Nextstrain being updated,” said James Hadfield, a geneticist in Bedford’s lab. “I’d say the vast majority is being done within an hour.”

The sequences that feed into this system, however, can take between one and five days to complete, depending on the logistics on the ground—faster than before, said the CDC’s MacCannell, “but it needs to be even faster.”…

Intriguing article from Asia Times — “Why are Korea’s Covid-19 death rates so low?”:

Robust healthcare, prior preparation, aggressive testing – and good fortune

South Korea has the dubious distinction of suffering the second-highest number of Covid-19 infections after China – but can also boast the lowest death ratio among countries with significant numbers of cases.

According to the WHO on March 6, the crude mortality ratio for Covid-19 – that is, the number of reported deaths divided by the number of reported cases – is between 3-4%. In Korea, as of March 9, that figure was a mere 0.7%.

While 7,478 cases were confirmed in South Korea by the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) on Monday, only 51 have died. Meanwhile, according to data from John Hopkins University, Italy has 7,375 cases and 366 deaths, while Iran has 7161 cases and 237 deaths.

Amid the outbreak, neighboring China has used a “Great Wall” strategy to cordon off entire cities. South Korea has stuck to a liberal playbook: even its most affected city, Daegu, has not been isolated. This makes Seoul’s apparent success in the struggle against Covid-19 a potential benchmark for other affected democracies.

What is behind Korea’s low fatality rate from a virus that has spooked the world? Government briefers speaking to foreign reporters in Seoul on Monday offered some pointers.

Key factors include a robust national health service; prior experience of virus outbreaks and related preparations; aggressive execution of testing, isolation and treatment protocols, fully backed by the law – and two incidences of good fortune…

And a longish (semi-stripped) twitter thread, on what we *should* have learned from earlier pandemics:

2/ Starkloff was the city health commissioner of St. Louis. In October 1918, St. Louis had its first 7 cases. Two days later, Starkloff abruptly ordered the closure of ALL schools, movie theaters, bars, sporting events, religious services, playgrounds, and other public places.

3/ It was a bold move, just two days after the first cases were identified. The mayor backed Starkloff and gave him legal authority to make public health edicts.

City residents had one day to prepare.

4/ St. Louis was the only city in the country to react so swiftly and aggressively. Many in St. Louis initially thought that Starkloff was overreacting. Theater owners protested. There were angry letters to the editor.

6/ St. Louis’s 7 initial cases quickly grew into hundreds, and then thousands. Starkloff responded by expanding the closures to include most businesses except for banks, newspapers, embalmers, and coffin-makers.

7/ People were furious. Presidents of major companies made statements denouncing Starkloff. The pressure was immense, but he didn’t back down…

10/ But Starkloff never backed down. He instructed his deputies to assert that “the lives of the people should be considered first and the business and money interests of the city later.”

City officials, it’s time to #BeLikeStarkloff…

15/ Starkloff’s measures lasted about two months and had a dramatic impact on the impact of the pandemic on St. Louis.

St. Louis ended up with the lowest mortality rate of any major US city.

COVID-19 Coronavirus: A Few Longer ReadsPost + Comments (33)

Thursday Morning Open Thread: Nevertheless…

by | 223 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

I have this consolation: Elizabeth Warren will still be my senior Senator, even if the rest of the country doesn’t appreciate what they’re missing. But I’m not giving up on her Presidential campaign until I hear it from her.

… I try never to lead with my injuries, but it’s one thing to work hard to get over a disloyal love. A heart can heal, after all. It’s something quite different when the betrayal never comes to an end.

Once again, it seems, we will have to wait at least another four years to see a woman sworn in as president of the United States.

“It’s not because she’s a woman,” people tell me.

“It’s because she’s that woman,” people tell me.

“It’s because of Hillary’s loss that it feels like a woman could not win,” people tell me.

You can tell me and you can tell me and you can tell me — but let me tell you: There’s not a lie I haven’t heard about what a woman can and cannot do. At my age, every act of sexism and misogyny is an encore production…

If you had told me 20 years ago that we’d still be having this conversation about the limitations of women, the only thing I would have allowed you was a running start to get out of my way…

Thursday Morning Open Thread: Nevertheless…Post + Comments (223)

Why I {Heart} Elizabeth Warren: Sometimes All You Have Is Courage

by | 225 Comments

This post is in: , ,


(I didn’t see this on Political Twitter — I found it on one of the virologist sites I check for corona-virus updates, between links to scientific papers and the latest news about Ebola in the Congo.)

Monica Hesse, in the Washington Post:

KEENE, N.H. — Within three minutes of getting in line for an Elizabeth Warren rally, I’ve been handed a business card for a woman-empowerment organization called Brass Ovaries, and the founder, my linemate, has drawn me into a conversation about Warren that has begun to feel like the only conversation to have about Warren: the kind that’s about hope, and despair, and how it’s possible to love America and also want to throw it out the window.

“I went to one of her events before, and I gave her one of my Brass Ovaries pins,” Michelle Johnson says. “And I started to explain how it’s about fed-up women — but she said, ‘Oh, I get it,’ and I said, ‘I knew you would,’ because Elizabeth always gets it, doesn’t she?…

“I’m leaning toward Warren,” says Frank Brownell, a retired editor who relocated to Keene from Upstate New York. “I’m not a big Buttigieg fan. But I want to pick someone to win.” He sighed, deeply troubled. “Women have such a burden. I actually wish women ran the world.”

If he wished women ran things, I asked him, was there a reason he was still merely leaning toward Warren? Here was a woman he liked who was offering to run the country, and he literally had the chance to give her the job.

“I’m going to vote for her,” he decided, then waffled. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

His qualms weren’t with Warren. He loved Warren. His qualms were about everyone else, everyone else who might not be ready to vote for a woman. “I’m hopeful but I’m not hopeful. I don’t think America is what I always hoped it was.”…

At one event in New Hampshire, a little girl approaches the microphone, accompanied by her mother.

“My name is Elizabeth,” she says.

“Your name is Elizabeth?” Warren reels back. “Oh wow! Double Elizabeths! I feel the power.”

“I’m seven years old.”

Warren pauses, deadpan. “I’m . . . not.”

show full post on front page

Why I {Heart} Elizabeth Warren: Sometimes All You Have Is CouragePost + Comments (225)

Cheap Snark Open Thread: Being Mean to MAGAt Morons

by | 46 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

I try not to encourage being mean to people (yeah, you should read me when the filters are *off*), but when people waltz into someone else’s online conversation attempting to ‘slay’ them, well — don’t start none, won’t *be* none, fellas. Since Ben Shapiro is well-compensated for being a professional Guy Who Never Learns, only fitting he lead this clown parade…

Cheap Snark Open Thread: Being Mean to MAGAt MoronsPost + Comments (46)

Weekend Reading: Elizabeth Warren Is the Real Deal

by | 48 Comments

This post is in: , , ,


This is brilliant! Don’t argue with those who insist ‘My gun is a tool, I need it’… go with the analogy “So is your car, but we’ve managed to reduce highway deaths by 80% without eliminating cars.” Of course, a good part of that improvement came from government mandates insisting on seatbelts and insurance and sobriety tests, but who’s in favor of uninsured drunks in exhaust-spewing clunkers?

Weekend Reading: Elizabeth Warren Is the Real DealPost + Comments (48)

Proud to Be A Democrat Open Thread: Stacey Abrams Knows Her Worth

by | 167 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

Excellent piece by Stephen Robinson, at Wonkette — “Pick Another White Guy To Take Off Your Money Because Stacey Abrams Is Gonna Be President “:

… Abrams is equal parts badass and fascinating. Her ambition has always been coupled with practicality. This probably isn’t rare for black women. Many white men — be they billionaires or mayors — believe they can not only win the presidency but effect sweeping change without any practical experience. They snottily dismiss knowing what the fuck you’re doing as “DC experience.” Abrams is very different. She understands that someone in any public executive position, either as governor or president, won’t be very effective if they don’t understand the legislative process. That’s what Abrams set out to do. She served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2006 to 2017 and was minority leader for more than half that time. She’s already more qualified than several candidates in the Democratic primary. Sneering your nose at “Washington bureaucracy” won’t make it go away. If we’ve learned anything from the past few months, it’s that we need seasoned political operators to confront a united GOP machine. We can’t just plug some fresh-faced kid into the Matrix, upload the legislative kung-fu program, and send them off to face Agent Mitch McConnell. This is the real world. We’d get killed…

Abrams has had to contend with a lot of trifling racist nonsense in her career. Her campaign for Georgia governor was historic, but she wasn’t regarded as the Wright Brothers. She was constantly asked if a state with a 30 percent black population was ready for a black woman governor.

ABRAMS: I’m electable if I win. And I’m electable because I can win. I’m not solely an avatar for black women, but I’m a proud avatar of both of those things because it stands as an example of what’s possible.

Yes! America is supposedly a nation that does bold things. We can walk on the moon (we did in fact) but we publish countless “think pieces” wondering if we’re “ready” for leaders who aren’t white men. You don’t even need rockets and zero gravity training to elect black people or women of any shade. You just vote for them…

The work Abrams is doing right now at Fair Fight to promote voter access is invaluable — as she knows better than most. If she gets the right offer from a current presidential candidate, I’m sure promoting voting rights will be a big part of the equation. But in any case, I absolutely believe that if there *is* a 2040, Ms. Abrams will be in the top leadership of whatever government looks like by then!

Proud to Be A Democrat Open Thread: Stacey Abrams Knows Her WorthPost + Comments (167)

The Oval Office Occupant’s Cannon Fodder Open Thread: “Headaches”

by | 134 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

David Roth, in the New Republic, “The Windbag of War”:

In the two weeks since Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, it’s both true enough and obviously, howlingly inaccurate to say that things have returned to “normal.” That just cannot possibly be the right word for the government’s ongoing state of clammy resting breakdown—and yet, as the situation seems to have stepped back from the briefly imminent prospect of an actual hot war, Trump has seemed more and more like himself. A day after the drone strike, when House pedant Dan Crenshaw insisted that Trump had a strategy and was following it, Trump wasted little time in contradicting the Texas congressman. On Twitter, naturally, he framed the conflict he’d created as A Hitting Contest that he could not be seen to lose. Trump continued to perform a series of panicky pivots from one unconvincing justification to another; various advisers and factotums gamely mirrored his erratic choreography, in the vein of Katy Perry’s Left Shark Super Bowl dancing companion—a beat late and reliably a bit off…

Because everything about Trump operates from the opening position that he has never been wrong, changed his mind, or contradicted himself; and because he is always wrong and never really knows what he’s saying and is constantly trying to wrench past stridencies into line with his befuddled present, this created a lot of work for everyone. There was a brief effort to spin the assassination of Soleimani as an act of diplomacy through kinetic operations—“an attempt to empower the country’s moderate voices,” as “several administration officials” told The Wall Street Journal. The ungainly human megaphone that exists to amplify and protect the president seemed happiest and most comfortable when claiming that Democrats loved Soleimani and in fact cried when he died because they wanted to hug and kiss him—both because that type of retro smear is a more natural movement for the megaphone operators and because it didn’t require any frantic trips to the memory hole. None of it was very convincing.

Trump really only regained his footing when he decided that the war he had nearly started was now over and won. Various discordant facts about what happened before, during, and after the assassination continued to emerge over time. The Journal reported that Trump pulled the trigger at least in part to appease senators whose loyalty he would need in his impeachment trial; 11 American soldiers were being treated for what Defense One termed “traumatic brain injuries” after the Iranian counterstrike that supposedly left U.S. troops unscathed; in place of the talk about imminent threat(s), Trump now told supporters that Soleimani had been “saying bad things about our country” and so the U.S. president used his maximal geopolitical power to decide “How much of this shit do we have to listen to?” …

The Oval Office Occupant’s Cannon Fodder Open Thread: “Headaches”Post + Comments (134)

Repub Venality Open Thread: Money Changes Everything Memories

by | 51 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , , ,

Two weeks out from the 2016 elections, a first-time donor born in Ukraine lit up the map of the Republican Party with a $50,000 cash donation to Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee.

By cutting just one check to Trump Victory Committee — well before he became a central figure in the impeachment of the president he helped elect — Lev Parnas left an indelible mark on two national and 20 state Republican entities.

Trump Victory subdivided his contribution into $33,400 for the Republican National Committee and $2,700 to Trump, the then-maximum allowable donations. The remainder went to GOP entities crisscrossing the country from New York to California, each receiving a modest sum of $661.90.

Official paperwork from the donation lists Parnas an employee of the Fraud Guarantee, the same company Parnas used to hire Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani in a relationship that has drawn scrutiny from federal prosecutors.

Three years later, down to the same month, the Justice Department on Oct. 10 unsealed an indictment of Parnas for using a straw donor and laundering foreign money into U.S. elections. Federal prosecutors claim he and his Fraud Guarantee co-owner, Igor Fruman, used the shell company Global Energy Producers to funnel $325,000 in foreign cash into America First Action, a Trump super-PAC.

show full post on front page

Repub Venality Open Thread: Money Changes <del>Everything</del> MemoriesPost + Comments (51)

Potential Book Club Material: “A Very Stable Genius”

by | 103 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , ,

I’m kidding, of course — we know most of this crap already. But kudos to the authors on the timing of their release…

President Trump reveals himself as woefully uninformed about the basics of geography, incorrectly telling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.” He toys with awarding himself the Medal of Freedom.

And, according to a new book by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig, Trump does not seem to grasp the fundamental history surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor…

“A Very Stable Genius” — a 417-page book named after Trump’s own declaration of his superior knowledge — is full of similarly vivid details from Trump’s tumultuous first three years as president, from his chaotic transition before taking office to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation and final report…

The book by the two longtime Post reporters — who were part of the team that won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Trump and Russia — was obtained ahead of its scheduled release Tuesday.

Many of the key moments reported in the book are rife with foreign policy implications, portraying a novice commander in chief plowing through normal protocols and alarming many both inside the administration and in other governments.

Early in his administration, for instance, Trump is eager to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin — so much so, the authors write, “that during the transition he interrupts an interview with one of his secretary of state candidates” to inquire about his pressing desire: “When can I meet Putin? Can I meet with him before the inaugural ceremony?” he asks…

In spring 2017, Trump also clashed with Tillerson when he told him he wanted his help getting rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that prevents U.S. firms and individuals from bribing foreign officials for business deals.

“It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump says, according to the book. “We’re going to change that.”

The president, they go on to explain, was frustrated with the law “ostensibly because it restricted his industry buddies or his own company’s executives from paying off foreign governments in faraway lands.”

The book, the duo writes in an author’s note, is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 200 sources, corroborated, when possible, by calendars, diary entries, internal memos and even private video recordings. (Trump himself had initially committed to an interview for the book, the authors write, but ultimately declined, amid an escalating war with the media).

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday…

show full post on front page

Potential Book Club Material: “A Very Stable Genius”Post + Comments (103)

Excellent Read: “May 17, 1954”

by | 69 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Michael Harriot (last seen here discussing the forgotten history of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment), deduces that was the date Donald Trump imagines when he talks about making America great again…


(Click on the link above to read the whole thing in post format)

Excellent Read: “May 17, 1954”Post + Comments (69)

Monday Morning Open Thread: Be of Strong Heart

by | 96 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

A year of hearing from the Democratic candidates who wish to replace Donald Trump in the White House has had an impact on Iowa voters, it seems. The recent Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll shows only 34% of registered Iowa voters would definitely vote to reelect Trump.

Another 44% is definitely set to vote for someone else, while 12% would consider a candidate other than Trump and 8% weren’t sure either way…

While the Register didn’t run head-to-head general election matchups among likely voters with Trump and a Democrat, the overall numbers here have to be concerning for Trump’s reelection prospects. The results also point to Iowa returning to its purple-state status after Trump’s nine-point victory here in 2016.

The movement would make sense given the barrage of TV ads run by Democrats in Iowa lambasting the President.

Although the Democratic candidates are aiming their message to caucus-goers in their own party, voters of all backgrounds are seeing the TV spots and even many of the online ads. As you can see in Starting Line’s latest caucus TV ad round-up, some candidates’ messaging has been focused mostly just on their own qualifications and policies, but many have taken direct aim at Trump…

And there’s this endorsement from Will Bunch, at the Philadelphia Inquirer:

… My perceptions about what’s wrong with America and how to fix it are different than they were in 2016. I’ve had four years to absorb what Trump’s presidency says about us as a nation — and who has resisted Trump, and why. I’m still committed to the exact same political revolution. But I believe the candidate who will get us there is Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

I plan to vote for Warren on April 28 for two reasons. One is simple, the other a bit more abstract. For starters, the two-term Massachusetts senator has run the best campaign, pure and simple. Her accidental rallying cry was handed to her by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who blocked Warren’s principled stand against the nomination of unqualified Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the Senate floor and added, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

show full post on front page

Monday Morning Open Thread: Be of Strong HeartPost + Comments (96)