Valid point. A Blue Wave™ will do a lot to stave off further destruction, but vetoes are vetoes
Which is fine. Put a Jackass in the White House in 2020, and he’s there to sign that universal healthcare bill that uses reapportioned funds, without a spending increase that just passed with 52 votes in reconciliation…
"In effect, the tax bill achieves four main things:
- It takes money away from schools and students.
- It restricts our ability to invest in infrastructure.
- It does nothing to boost real wages while making health insurance more expensive.
- It makes it harder to control the costs of Medicare and Social Security without cutting defense and other spending – or further exploding the deficit.
To what end? To hand corporations big tax cuts they don’t need, while lowering the tax rate paid by those of us in the top bracket, and allowing the wealthy to shelter more of their estates. […]
The tax bill is an economically indefensible blunder that will harm our future. The Republicans in Congress who must surely know it – and who have bucked party leaders before – should vote no."
By Michael R. Bloomberg
I called Rubio’s office about the tax bill. I was put on hold and then hung up on. I kid you not.
It’s almost as if their sole goal is to make their donors happy instead of taking care of the American people. What a disgrace to the human race these assholes are.
Sadly, at this point that’s all that’s left for them. Their actions on healthcare and even getting the tax bill this far basically has shut off the path to reelection by appealing to independents and the working class. All they can really do at this point is appeal to their donor class and hope the money taps stay on and mitigate the looming midterm disaster they face.
Please them now and get them to fund the propagation of the lies they will use to get re-elected. It’s a simple formula.
The antidote is a reasonably informed electorate willing to vote its own interests. Oops.
And remember, people, this is only Phase One. Next comes the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth once they’re shocked, SHOCKED by the ensuing rise in the yearly deficits. At which point they call for a further dismantling of the federal government apparatus, especially those parts of it that aren’t putting money directly into the pocket of some fatcat donor or other.
There goes all hope of having a robust infrastructure repair/replacement program, adequate funding of toxic waste cleanup, National Parks, STEM scholarship programs, CHIP, SNAP yadda yadda yadda.
Yes, there hasn’t been any evidence of that happening at all in politics in the last 6 weeks. Good point.
Your faith in the American electorate’s ability to (1) remember what happened more than 2 weeks ago, (2) look past the few dollars in tax cuts that they’re getting, and (3) actually vote is inspiring, @triggercut. Hope you’re right.
About 5% of the population also stopped being Republicans since he got elected.
Party identity for Republicans has dropped about 5-8 points, especially in the younger ranks.
I wonder at what point another party just steps in and takes over?
There must be a threshold where a party is so small it’s no longer viable on a national level.
I mean 19% of the population claims to be Libertarian and Republicans are hovering around like 30% last I knew.
I’d say about 15% of the population also stopped being human since he got elected. It’s unreal how shitty a decent % of Americans have turned out to be.
That 15% was never human, we just didn’t realize it at the time.
What do you think would have happened if Strange had got the nomination? You think the Democrats would have won in Alabama? I tend to think of Moore as a bit of an outlier, not that I wasn’t a bit heartened to see Jones win. And I’ll be surprised if Jones can win re-election. Very surprised.
I do expect to see Democrats do better overall, but I don’t really expect to see the people who voted Trump in have a change of heart. Will they suddenly embrace immigration? Will they become less afraid of people of color? Will the reasons they voted for Trump no longer seem valid to them? The next Republican will follow Trump’s playbook without Trump’s idiocy, and be a much more dangerous candidate. Imagine someone competent in the White House working hand in hand with a Republican Congress, selling plans that favor the rich as populism.
He would have won, probably by 10-12.
I just answered your redundant question.
Yes. You are not dropping new knowledge here. Everyone thinks of Moore as an outlier. No need to qualify it with “a bit”.
No disagreement. You wrote some other stuff that’s just a rehash of the other stuff you’ve already said. Your memory seems short.
Here, see if this looks familiar to you:
That fine commonwealth is a place called Virginia. We had a pretty long thread here about the statewide election here, where Ed Gillespie and a bunch of his Republican cronies swept to a huge red tide victory.
Or maybe they didn’t.
On that same night, Democrats grabbed control of the Washington state legislature and took over the New Jersey governor’s mansion.
There’s data to support my optimism. There’s historical patterns to support my optimism. I appreciate everyone’s homespun anecdotes, but eventually saying the same pessimistic wowzy-wowzy-woo-woo starts to sound hollow.
If Strange were the Republican candidate, he probably would have won. But by a narrower margin than usual. And that’s the point. Trump is making it much harder for Republicans to win, everywhere. That doesn’t mean Republicans will lose everywhere. It means marginal candidates will lose, and strong candidates will become marginal. And in such a closely divided electorate, that could easily result in massive losses. As Jones showed, candidates lose as soon as their support creeps under 50%.
That’s like saying “The next Republican will invade Iraq with a much better postwar plan”. Not gonna happen. Trump is the face of the anti-immigrant wing of the party. A spectacular failure is imminent, and it will poison that well.
To magnet’s point, there’s a new catch-word that got some play in the Virginia statewide delegate elections last month: “dummymandering”. A lot of that was on display in the Old Dominion last month. A lot more may be on display in 11 months.
The concept of the dummymander is this: you draw a ridiculous district to try to cut the other party’s potential representation in areas where they might have equal or more than your own party. The problem is…populations and political sentiment are both always fluid. Danica Roem’s district in Prince William County probably seemed perfectly safe 8 years ago when it got dummymandered into its current shape. But then Trump happened, and a wave happened, and a whole swath of what should be safe Republican territory is now represented by a leftist transgendered woman. A longtime Republican powerhouse in state politics is now unemployed. You’re welcome!
Dave Wasserman at Cook Political Report had a great tweet this morning about alarm bells going off at the RCCC because a poll in a district that was gerrymandered to cut a swath out of Columbus, Ohio and clump that bluish area into a bunch of safe red rural areas has a largely unknown Democratic candidate who’s declared there running neck and neck with ultra-powerful GOP stalwart congressman Steve Stivers. It’s a district that Cook rates as having a roughly Republican +7 advantage…and that’s the panic alarm going off among Republican party planners. That district, the Ohio 15th, appears to be in danger of being a dummymander.
There are other districts like it, in Georgia, Texas (one that slashes into Austin, specifically) and across the country. The great fear right now, after Alabama and Virginia and New Jersey and Washington is that there a bunch of once-safe gerrymandered districts that could potentially bite the party in the ass, and cost them some of their most-tenured leadership in Congress.
They really need to just make a simple computer algorithm that automatically draws district lines.