Timex
2642
Donald trump says he won’t be on John Oliver’s show.
John Oliver says, “That’s fine, because we never invited you.”
Donald Trump has feuded with plenty of people during his presidential campaign. The latest: John Oliver.
Last week, the “Last Week Tonight” host said he has no interest in booking Trump on his late-night show.
“I don’t really care about him in any capacity,” Oliver said Friday on “CBS This Morning.” “I’ve really got nothing to say to him. He’s said everything he wants to say. He’s got no internal monologue, that man. It’s not like you’re going in to find the secret nugget he’s been holding back.”
“He’s an open book,” Oliver continued. “And that book doesn’t have that many interesting words in it.”
If Trump starts a fight with Oliver, it will be glorious.
Oghier
2643
Oh please please please please please.
The bill came due today. $1.5m for Ohio taxpayers so that Kasich could pander to the politicized fundamentalists in his party. Or maybe he’s just an asshole bigot on his own. Either way, shit like this is why I refuse to vote for that f*cking party, at least until it mends its ways.
538’s models see 2016 as a tossup, apparently:
The generic presidential ballot shows a slight GOP advantage. YouGov has tested a generic Republican presidential candidate vs. a generic Democrat four times since the beginning of September. GOP holds a 2.25 point average lead. That suggests to me, at the least, that the Democrats do not have an advantage heading into next year…
…Of course, who the parties nominate could change those numbers. It seems like this could be an election where the candidates make a huge difference, right? Let’s say Hillary Clinton wins, whether she faces Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio will have a big effect on the odds.
natesilver: Yes. That’s the proverbial and maybe literal elephant in the room.
micah: What order of magnitude are we talking about?
harry: Yes, this is the question. This is one where I could find myself in agreement with Mr. Silver on whether it’s a 50-50. Cruz, for example, would be a historically conservative candidate. If he’s the GOP nominee, that could be worth a few percentage points and harm the Republicans.
natesilver: Which, in an election that otherwise looks about 50-50, could make a lot of difference.
If Clinton has a 75 percent chance of facing a 50-50 election, and a 25 percent chance of facing a 75-25 election (e.g., against Cruz, Carson, Trump, or a GOP electorate that gets all screwed up because one of those guys runs as a third party), then her overall chances of winning are 56 percent.
I definitely think the insanity quotient of an actual GOP candidate vs a generic GOP candidate is a real thing.
Timex
2646
Just after that, he points out that if the Republicans put up rubio, or Kasich especially, they have an advantage.
Which I’ve been saying for ages.
Which pretty much guarantees the Republicans will put up some tool like Cruz.
Yeah, generic candidates tend to poll great because leaners project only what they like about the party onto them. At this point in 2011, 538 showed Obama slightly behind a “generic Republican” … but hey, he didn’t end up running against a “generic Republican,” he ended up running against a specific guy, and it turned out people didn’t like the specific guy for specific reasons.
That’s going to be a much bigger issue this time around. Every GOP candidate has huge amounts of specific baggage.* Really, they’d probably be best off if they could run a crash-test dummy with a sign reading “Generic Republican” around its neck.
*Within their own party, I mean. Clinton has huge baggage, but the biggest chunk of it is “the Republican base hates her with the heat of 10,000 suns” … which has relatively little net effect. Whereas I think the prolonged and bitter GOP infighting is going to result in a chunk of the GOP staying home on Election Day because their party nominated a crazy person … or a RINO, either way.
According to a GOP strategist, the Republicans are going to need to win somewhere around 47% of the hispanic vote in order to win the Presidential election. The best they’ve done is W with 40%, while Romney got 23. Rubio has disowned his own immigration bill, and being Latino doesn’t in itself mean he can get those kinds of numbers. Not that I don’t trust Nate (as he disabused my notion of a blue mid-west 'firewall), but if there is any kind of turn out it might be impossible for any Republican to win.
(Many news stories on this, here’s one.)
I didn’t want to start a new thread, but yesterday was actually Election Day… at least in four states and a handful of cities. It wasn’t a great day for the Left.
Here in Virginia, we maintained the status quo with the entire Virginia state legislature up for re-election. Before the vote, the GOP held a one-vote advantage, and after the vote… the GOP still holds a one-vote advantage, effectively stymieing the Democrat governor’s agenda. My wife and I both voted, but man it was a low turnout.
In Kentucky, the state elected a Republican governor… which might seem like a “duh” outcome, except recently Kentucky tends to elect Democrats to the high office while keeping their legislature Deep Red. The new guy is a far-right Tea Party fruit-loop who made much use of Kim Davis while running.
Mississippi reelected their GOP governor, which was not a surprise given that he was running against a long-haul truck driver whose own mother didn’t realize he was running until a couple weeks back.
In Ohio, the populace decided against a measure to legalize pot. In Houston, the city voted 2-to-1 against a nondiscrimination bill that would have protected gay and transgender people.
There were a couple bright spots for progressives – in Denver, those idiot school board members who wanted to revise the US History course for high schoolers to make it “more patriotic” were booted in a landslide. In CO, the voters decided to let the state use the $66M in funds gained for the sale of marijuana – the law as written required that money to be refunded to the taxpayers (last year, everyone in the state got a $7 check). The money will be used for education and drug-prevention programs.
That wasn’t so much a left/right thing as it was a piss-poor initiative. It was to set up a cartel system, preventing anyone except for ten (10) predetermined entities (the primary financial backers of the initiative, I might add) in the entire state from growing a significant amount of it (normal individuals could only have up to 4 flowering plants, and could only possess or sell up to 8 ounces). Many people who support decriminalization and/or legalization voted against it because of that. I’m not a big fan of the drug, but I’d still probably vote for legalization because it’s a pretty stupid law. However, if it’s going to be legal then I can’t see any decent argument why these 10 people should have special rights. That I simply couldn’t vote yes on. They’ll try again next cycle and it will probably pass.
The KY results are troubling. Bevin at one point was all but disowned by the national Republican party and never lead in any poll leading up to the election. And yet he won easily. In effect Kentuckians voted to remove their own health care (Bevin has said he wants to repeal ACA and the medicaid expansion, although he kinda sorta walked that back later.) Another result of low voter turnout? Maybe, but Obama is deeply unpopular in that state and Bevin essentially ran against him; McConnell won a landslide with a similar strategy last year. I don’t know if this translates to the national election next year but I don’t think it bodes well.
The pot initiative in OH is something I would have voted against too as passing it would have given a monopoly to just 10 growers (as “Big pot” enters the lexicon.) Portland, ME - a very liberal city - also voted against raising the minimum wage to $15/hr bucking trends seen in Seattle and elsewhere.
CraigM
2652
The Ohio bit isn’t quite a loss for the left. A lot of that was probably blowback to the mechanics, effectively a state granted monopoly to friends of the governors. I.e. crony capitalism at its worst. That measure had been picking up some heat over the last few weeks.
My friends in KY (I worked at a camp for the gifted there for many years, so I know a ton of bright, fairly liberal young people) are pretty crushed this morning, but then again, living in KY is always pretty bleak.
Not that I have any room to talk, languishing in North Carolina.
LockerK
2654
The worst part of the Ohio results is that Issue 2 passed by a thin margin. Part of Issue 2 had direct language that would have nullified legalization if it passed (which already seems questionable to me – if people don’t want pot legalized then they’ll vote no on that issue). The other part gives the Ballot Board power to effectively kill any legislation they don’t like because of how poorly it is worded.
The proposed amendment would:
[ul]
[li]Prohibit any petitioner from using the Ohio Constitution to grant a monopoly, oligopoly, or cartel for their exclusive financial benefit or to establish a preferential tax status.[/li]> [li]Prohibit any petitioner from using the Ohio Constitution to grant a commercial interest, right, or license that is not available to similarly situated persons or nonpublic entities.[/li]> [li]Require the bipartisan Ohio Ballot Board to determine if a proposed constitutional amendment violates the prohibitions above, and if it does, present two separate ballot questions to voters. Both ballot questions must receive a majority yes vote before the proposed amendment could take effect.[/ul][/li]
So if the Secretary of State appointed Board thinks an amendment fits those criteria it has to pass two votes to actually pass, one of which uses such lovely, neutral language as “violation” and “monopoly”. The proponents of Issue 2 did a great job of framing it as another way to vote down legalization while ignoring the other implications. FWIW, I’m for legalization with no interest in using but the way it was presented yesterday was awful.
At least the people in my local board of education race who were trying to collude to keep one of them in power by abusing the by-laws around resignations both lost, so there’s that.
Yeah, I went yes-no-no on my ballot because it seemed like 2 had some rather odd language. Note that it limited only petitioners, not legislators. The idea behind it seemed fine, but the choice of language left a lot to be desired. While I’m normally not one to let “perfect” get in the way of “good,” there seemed to be some hidden “bad” buried inside.
In PA, we had a supreme court election. 2 out of 3 of the positions went to democrats, and that could greatly affect voting redistricting. So, that’s pretty good for the left.
Keep in mind this is a state where KyNect is (well, I guess the proper word would be “was” at this point) very popular, but absolutely hated Obamacare… sometimes you just gotta throw your hands up and say “whodafuckknows?”
Geez Louise, in Kentucky apparently most voters are so afraid of their kids “catching the gay” [the Kim Davis debacle] that they’re going to bone a bunch of poor people out of health insurance. And in Ohio they’re not even allowing for medicinal marijuana, because f*ck cancer patients. :rolleyes:
LockerK
2659
Except medicinal wasn’t up for a vote, it was recreational and medicinal with a very small group of investors set to profit big thanks to the constitutional monopoly they’d have been granted. Legislators are already discussing it, though.
Yup. And recreational will likely pass within a year or two, by my best guess.
OK, that makes me feel better about that. Kentucky on the other hand…
