Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This is how realignments happen…

Too inconsequential to be sued

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Wetsuit optional.

No one could have predicted…

Word salad with all caps

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

What fresh hell is this?

This is a big f—–g deal.

Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

This Blog Goes to 11…

Good luck with your asparagus.

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

We have all the best words.

It’s a tarp!

The revolution will be supervised.

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

I personally stopped the public option…

Also, too.

The Math Demands It!

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

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Election Open Thread: The 2020 Campaign Seems to Have Kicked Up A Notch…

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On Thursday, two of the Democratic frontrunners went to South Carolina — not ‘First in the Nation’, but the first primary state where voters aren’t disproportionatly white. The NYTimes chose to highlight the Dems in disarray!!! angle, and to focus on Joe Biden. But IMO what’s important about the separate incidents is how the candidates handled them.

Elizabeth Warren’s event:

… Ms. Warren was in the opening minutes of her speech, a major address on racial inequities, when she was disrupted. In an interview, an organizer of the protest, Dianechia Fields, 40, who is from Memphis, criticized Ms. Warren for pledging to cut funding for charter schools. Ms. Warren’s education plan calls for ending federal funding for opening new charter schools and banning for-profit charters.

Ms. Warren eventually received some assistance from Representative Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts, who had introduced her at the event. Ms. Pressley came back onstage and urged the protesters to let Ms. Warren proceed with her speech, which highlighted the story of black washerwomen who went on strike in Atlanta in 1881.

“We are grateful for your activism and your voice and you are welcome here, and we would love to convene after this about the issue that you are here to stoke our consciousness about,” Ms. Pressley said. “But when these women have been ignored this long, this is their moment, and we are going to hear the story.”…

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Pre-Debate Open Thread: Not Yet Endorsing, But You Know I Have A Favorite

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Gonna Be Another Busy Week…

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Awwww…

Speaking of which…

The NYTimes smells blood in the water. “President Trump Bet Big This Election Year. Here’s Why He Lost”:

… The results in Kentucky and Louisiana are particularly ominous for the president, in part because they indicate that his suburban problem extends to traditionally conservative Southern states and may prove even more perilous in the moderate Midwest next year.

They also reveal political weakness for the president at a moment he is embroiled in a deepening impeachment inquiry and desperately needs to project strength with his own party. And as he enters what will likely be a difficult re-election campaign, the two states emphatically demonstrated that he has become just as much of a turnout lever for the opposition as with his own supporters…

The Louisiana results are a stinging rebuke for the president, because he spent so much time there and because Trump allies couldn’t chalk it up entirely to local factors as they did for Kentucky, where Mr. Bevin was deeply unpopular. And even before the Louisiana race was called on Saturday night, finger-pointing from the Capitol to the White House to Mr. Trump’s campaign broke out about why he spent so much political capital on the race in the first place…

Still, the main instigator for the president’s involvement in the races, many Republicans said, was Mr. Trump himself, who simply craves the adulation of his supporters and is singularly focused on notching victories, no matter the details. He is even more eager to flex his political muscle in the face of impeachment, and has surrounded himself with several aides who either defer to his whims regardless of the neon-flashing signs of risk before them, or know little about politics.

People close to Mr. Trump — who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive matters — said he viewed the campaigns he had weighed in on mostly as opportunities for gratification. And with few seasoned political advisers in his inner circle — his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has control over the president’s campaign, has never worked on another race — there was nobody to tell him that attacking an anti-abortion rights, pro-gun Democrat like Mr. Edwards as a radical would be folly. ..

Mr. Trump, of course, is not the first president to be faulted for his party’s losses. But few have so openly invited the risk of being blamed for them.

“Donald Trump just happens to relish this centrality more than most,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, “and has a tendency to say the quiet part loud, sometimes to his detriment.”

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Smart Move, Sen. Harris

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The horse-race touts at Politico would *very much* like Kamala Harris to shut up and go back to her knitting the Senate, but Houle’s right; New Hampshire would not vote for a woman of color from the opposite coast even if she promised to rebuild the Old Man of the Mountain at (other states’) public expense. The state is very white and its politics are very retro; they’re working as hard as any formerly Confederate state to make sure the college kids who might not understand ‘our local traditions’ can’t corrupt the purity of their voting pool. Even leaving aside the cranky libertarians who’ll swarm the Dem primary before voting for Trump next year, Democratic primary voters are pretty much divided between Sanders and Warren. Also, too:

So Kamala went to Iowa, later that day, and did this:

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Kamala Harris Took the Lead This Weekend

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Rep. Shirley Chisholm, one of my earliest political idols, said “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” After Friday’s HBCU Trump debacle, Senator Harris took her chair, and changed the conversation.

… In the hours after Harris initially announced she wouldn’t be present at the forum, talks began between her campaign, Mayor Benjamin and Benedict College to create an end result that didn’t include the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center with a breakthrough happening overnight, a Harris campaign aide said.

“People were figuring out a solution where the group honoring President Trump wasn’t involved and students had access to speeches and the ability to ask questions,” the aide said.

Another aide said Harris, the only graduate of a historically black college in the 2020 field, wouldn’t stand for the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center “disrespecting” the legacy of HBCUs and their history rooted in protest, justice and equality.

“When it became clear Donald Trump would receive an award after decades of celebrating mass incarceration, pushing the death penalty for innocent Black Americans, rolling back police accountability measures and racist behavior that puts people’s lives at risk, and then learned all but ten Benedict students are excluded from participating, I cannot in good faith be complicit in papering over his record,” Harris said in a statement Friday…

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Amy, Amy, AMY

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Amy Klobuchar isn’t as flashy as poor Winehouse was, but Klobuchar gets shit done. Here’s an example from Mother Jones:

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) released evidence on Tuesday that the Justice Department buried the whistleblower complaint about President Donald Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president by failing to refer the matter to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Klobuchar suggested the Justice Department violated a longstanding agreement between the agencies to share information about possible campaign finance violations for potential enforcement action…

This is clever because while everyone else was understandably focused on Barr hiding the whistleblower complaint from House Democrats, Klobuchar laid the groundwork to expose further wrongdoing by verifying that Barr hadn’t notified the Federal Election Commission either. Turns out that is required!

[U]nder a 1978 memorandum of understanding between the [Justice D]epartment and the FEC—which, like Justice is authorized to penalize campaign finance violations—the complaint should have been passed onto the FEC even if the department declined to launch a criminal investigation, so the election watchdog can determine whether a civil penalty is called for.

Earlier this month, Klobuchar set out to uncover whether the Justice Department had honored this agreement, sending two letters to the FEC inquiring whether it had received any such referral. On October 18, the commission’s Democratic chair, Ellen Weintraub, confirmed to Klobuchar that the FEC had not been notified. “The refusal to inform the FEC and refer the matter regarding the President’s call to the FEC as required to do, as the Justice Department is required, undermines our campaign finance system and is unacceptable in a democracy,” Klobuchar said in Tuesday statement.

I haven’t watched much news coverage of the shit-show this week because disgust and baseball. That said, I doubt Klobuchar’s revelation got a lot of attention, what with the SS Trumptanic taking shots below the waterline. But this week, Klobuchar produced further hard evidence that Barr is a crook.

Thanks to the courage of the whistleblower, Barr’s attempt to make the complaint go away by fiat didn’t succeed, but Barr was sticking to the original lie/rationale (“it was a nothingburger!”) to protect Trump from Congress. Notifying the FEC isn’t optional, even if it’s deemed a “nothingburger,” according to the longstanding agreement between the federal agencies. That Barr failed to provide the notification is more evidence of a cover up. Way to go, Klobuchar!

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Speaking Truth

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Readership Capture

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Elsewhere:

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Balloon Juice After Dark Open Thread: GO COUGARS, Sen. Warren!

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Friday night, presumably the young & impressionable are either in bed or off partying somewhere, let’s indulge in a nice rowdy game of Kick the Wohl-ball!

First off — if Warren isn’t our 2020 candidate, the winner should most definitely hire her social media staff instanter, because they are GOOD:

Backstory / fisking, ICYMI:

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Kamala Harris Gets Her TIME Cover

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Molly Ball is always worth reading, even when her editors have saddled her with a blatantly biased pre-take. “Kamala Harris Is Making Her Case… “:

… Harris is here, in Iowa, trying to regain her footing in the race. After a promising start in January, her campaign has stalled. While she is in the competition for the nomination, she’s stuck in the mid–single digits in most national and early-state polls and draws modest crowds. Perhaps three dozen people showed up to see her in Waterloo, where they were packed into a few rows in front of the stage so that the large room–an ornate century-old former department store–wouldn’t look so empty.

In mid-September, Harris said she’d be focusing on the first-to-vote caucus state. It was something of an unwitting announcement: she was overheard in Washington joking to a colleague, “I’m f-cking moving to Iowa.” (At least, a staffer quipped, “she didn’t say, ‘I’m moving to f-cking Iowa.’”) Her campaign is doubling its staff in the state, to more than 130 people, and she has pledged to visit every week for the foreseeable future. “I’m really excited about it,” she tells me, saying the opportunity to engage in “old-school retail politics” reminds her of her San Francisco political roots. “I like people.”

People like Harris too; they just can’t quite place her. Like the acquaintance you recognize but can’t recall how you met, she seems both familiar and yet mysterious. Is she a liberal or a moderate, establishment or populist, reformer or radical? Critics point out that she has flip-flopped or obfuscated her positions on important policy issues, like health care and immigration, and the speeches she could use to define herself often devolve into paeans to unity.

For all that, however, Harris remains in the hunt. She consistently polls among the top five candidates in the jumbled Democratic field, and she has the financial resources to remain viable. Her campaign raised $11.6 million in the quarter ending Sept. 30–a respectable haul, although far short of what some other front runners pulled in. As more long-shot candidates bow out of the race, campaign officials expect Harris to benefit from voters’ renewed focus. With a little luck, they say, she still has a fairly clear path to the nomination…

Meanwhile, as the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives moves toward impeachment, another piece of Harris’ record may supercharge her candidacy in the coming months: her background in law enforcement. At a time when liberals are clamoring to make the criminal-justice system less punitive, her record as a district attorney and state attorney general has been a liability. But in this new political climate, voters may relish the idea of seeing Harris–with her icy prosecutor’s glare–square off against President Trump on the national stage.

“This guy has completely trampled on the rule of law, avoided consequence and accountability under law,” she says of the President. “For all the sh-t people give me for being a prosecutor, listen. I believe there should be accountability and consequence.”…

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Warren Moves Fast , Wins (Some) Hearts

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… Hunter Walk, a former product director at Google who is now a venture capitalist, calls it his “evolution.”

“To find her right on everything else and then disqualifying when it’s about my industry? Maybe that’s a little bit too precious,” said Walk. “I’m willing to say, ‘Yes, change all the other things! Uproot all these other assumptions!’ But then, oh my goodness, when she said something about tech, that’s disqualifying? Come on.”

Walk isn’t alone. Recode’s canvass of a group of major Democratic donors and fundraisers in Silicon Valley shows Warren is making significant inroads with some of tech’s wealthiest Democrats. That progress would have been unthinkable just six months ago after she called for the industry’s iconic companies to be split asunder.

Warren has not moderated her at times vitriolic rhetoric toward Silicon Valley. But tech elites are not, as often caricatured, single-issue voters driven by tech policy. And the two dozen tech executives, investors, and veteran fundraisers who spoke with Recode outlined three key reasons why their industry is making this unexpected shift toward Warren: They say they respect her policy rigor. They see her as less radical than once imagined (and especially when compared to Bernie Sanders). And perhaps most importantly, she has a reasonable path to winning the nomination, and there’s nothing Silicon Valley loves more than a winner.

What’s even more unusual is that Warren is gaining traction with these elites by doing barely any of the traditional coaxing and coddling that is a mainstay of today’s big-money era. While some of her 2020 competitors are returning to Silicon Valley multiple times within a single month, Warren is, by at least one measure, doing the best in the tech industry while also doing the least — sometimes with glee…

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

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Possibly related?…


 
Which reminds me, in case anybody missed this during the rush of news last week:

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread

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(John Deering via GoComics.com)
.

From a Watergate prosecutor:


 
Living Well: The Best Revenge…

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: No Lie Told, Madame Secretary

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Meanwhile, the manly-men MAGAts are cheering for their Dear Leader’s threat…

It’s all fun’n’games until they start setting Black churches on fire…

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Excellent Read: “Why Ex–Sanders Supporters Are Backing Warren”

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Tip O’Neill always warned candidates not to neglect the voters who could be assumed to be on their side: People like to be asked.

Elaine Godfrey, at the Atlantic:

In 2016, Bernie Sanders described the Working Families Party (WFP), a grassroots progressive organization, as “the closest thing there is” to his “vision of democratic socialism.” The group endorsed him in his primary race against Hillary Clinton, and it’s grown more powerful in the past three years, as it has sought to build a multiracial populist movement nationwide. But this time around, with Sanders taking another shot for the White House, the group is throwing its weight behind someone else: Elizabeth Warren. The group’s surprising decision could be an early indicator of how progressives—including those who backed Sanders in the past—are planning to organize and vote next year.

“The political conditions are different” in this election, Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the WFP, told me earlier this week, after the group announced that Warren defeated Sanders in a vote of WFP members and leadership, earning 61 percent compared to Sanders’s 36 percent. Unlike in 2016, there is more than one progressive candidate in the race to choose from, Mitchell said. Warren “has a track record of finding that nexus between visionary structural change and also the tools to operationalize it.”

Mitchell’s reasoning echoed the sentiments of other progressive voters I’ve spoken with recently. They have affection for Sanders and appreciate what he’s done for the movement, as roughly one dozen voters explained to me this week. But Warren, they argued, is proffering a kinder, gentler version of progressivism—one that is rooted in her experience, simple to understand, and compelling enough to attract a broad swath of voters.

“She’s everything Bernie is—but a bit more electable,” said Joe Piluso, a 71-year-old former Sanders supporter and former social-services worker living in San Diego…

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