US Politics Mega-Blog - Page 75

On November 08 2018 05:12 Mercy13 wrote:
What's your beef with him? I suppose he wasn't very effective in protecting Trump and his associates from the Russia probe, but that's not really his job. On the other hand he has done a good of supporting Trump's anti-immigrant agenda, and given police departments free reign. I would have thought he's given conservatives lots to cheer for, but I guess not?

On November 08 2018 07:45 xDaunt wrote:

Let me preface this by saying that the problem with analyzing Sessions as AG is that we don't really know what's going on behind the scenes as it pertains to the Mueller investigation, FBI/DOJ corruption, and the Hillary email server stuff. However, and by all outward appearances, Sessions has appeared to be, at best, in over his head on this stuff (resulting in his premature and probably unnecessary recusal), and at worst, complicit in the worst abuses of the DOJ (by assisting in covering up the true extent of the bad activities that that agency has been up to over at least the past two years). The one thing that pushes me away from the latter possibility is that the DOJ and FBI have been thoroughly purged over the past year.

EDIT: One thing that I am very interested in watching is what the new acting AG does. Whitaker is on record saying that he would prosecute Hillary and otherwise expressing hostility towards the Mueller investigation. This guy could be the necessary savage that we need.

On November 08 2018 07:50 ChristianS wrote:
That reminds me, xDaunt. IIRC before I stopped reading the thread for a few weeks you were really hyping some big info dump on DoJ corruption that Trump was supposed to release just before the midterms. Did that ever happen? I don't recall seeing headlines about it, but maybe something something liberal media, something something echo chamber so I didn't see it?

On November 08 2018 08:21 Danglars wrote:
"Necessary savage," "vermin," ...

By the way, congratulations on Florida voters for choosing not to "monkey this up" and going with DeSantis. I don't want to be complacent in an America where allegations of racist dog whistles get shot down, in case the Republic falls on hard times in the future.

Also an aside: Imagine if the executive went full Eric Holder and refused to comply with House subpoenas and were held in contempt of congress.

On November 08 2018 08:31 xDaunt wrote:

Yeah, I was referring to the FISA declassification, which has not happened (about which I further complained a few weeks ago) for unclear reasons. Maybe Trump decided that it would be too risky politically to release that stuff in the run up to the election. We'll just have to wait and see. This is just one of the reasons why I am interested in what this new AG does. I highly doubt that he's going to recuse himself from the Russia collusion probe, which means that he, not Rosenstein, is now in control of Mueller.

On November 08 2018 07:52 GreenHorizons wrote:



lol you can never appreciate the range of emotions reading that provoked. I'll just say that I imagined Forrest Whitaker from Ghost Dog (underrated movie btw) and then got conflicted on your use of "savage".

Anyway you gotta know the concept of holding Hillary accountable is the same ruse Democrats are playing with investigating/removing Trump and is/was never going to happen right?

Forrest Whitaker for AG!

On November 08 2018 08:57 GreenHorizons wrote:
Maybe you're being jerked around like Democrats are with rumors about Trump. I understand if you don't presume that but you do entertain it as a reasonable probability no?

On November 08 2018 08:59 iamthedave wrote:
Also, if we're prosecuting Hilary for e-mails do we prosecute Trump for using his iphone that the Chinese are listening in on?

On November 08 2018 08:57 GreenHorizons wrote:


Desantis was using a dog whistle appealing to racists, that's not really in question. That you get to say it by quoting him is just a bonus for you.

That said, Gillum was just going to be a typical Democrat and Florida is full of old people that vote so his turn to the center probably didn't calm anyone fretting about him being a socialist or that didn't want to put a Black guy in charge but dampened the enthusiasm that won him the primary.

All in all it was a remarkably close race but horseshoes and hand-grenades and all that. Can't argue that Republican turnout for Desantis wasn't impressive.

National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar and the Nation contributor Sean McElwee put together a list of eight of the country’s most progressive candidates in challenging races in a helpful effort to gauge just how receptive the public was to the modern progressive message. Today, we have the answer: not very.

In his campaign for the governor’s mansion in Arizona, David Garcia vowed to treat access to health care as “a right,” pass a single-payer health-care plan for his state, make access to college “free,” and “double down on solar” energy investments. “He doesn’t seem to be outrageously progressive,” University of Arizona Professor Thomas Volgy told the left-wing outlet the Intercept. Arizonans disagreed. Garcia lost to incumbent Gov. Doug Ducey by over 17 points.

Former NAACP chief Ben Jealous ran for the governorship of Maryland by promising to transform that mid-Atlantic state into a model for progressive racial and economic justice. He, too, promoted a plan to institute a single-payer system, tuition-free college funded by ending “the era of mass incarceration,” and a $15 minimum wage. Jealous lost his bid for the governorship in dark-blue Maryland to incumbent Republican Gov. Larry Hogan by over 13 points.

University of California, Irvine, law professor and “Elizabeth Warren’s protégée” Katie Porter ran for the House in a suburban Golden State district that should have been ripe pickings for Democrats in a year in which the suburbs turned sharply against the GOP. On the campaign trail, Porter railed against “predatory” banks, the GOP’s tax code reform legislation, and charter school legislation. Porter affixed her name to a letter attacking Justice Brett Kavanaugh for failing to be properly impartial and dispassionately deferential when defending himself against accusations of sexual violence. Voters in this targeted district opted to stick with the Republican Party.

Scott Wallace, the grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s former vice president and Communist sympathizer Henry Wallace, was criticized for co-chairing a fund that gave liberally to anti-Israel organizations and to the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Western British politician George Galloway. His allies promoted him as a pioneer “on climate justice” and promised to expand Social Security and impose sick- and medical-leave plans on firms. Ultimately, Wallace cost the Democratic Party a key swing district in the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia.

Ammar Campa-Najjar somehow managed to lose a race against a Republican incumbent facing a criminal indictment alleging the misuse of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds. Liz Watson helped develop Bernie Sanders’s minimum-wage policy and campaigned on a pro-union platform before losing by nearly 20 points to a first-term Republican in Indiana. Arizona Attorney General candidate January Contreras positioned himself as an activist whose priority was to challenge Donald Trump in high-profile political cases. She, too, was soundly defeated.

And of course, the great hopes of Democrats for the 2018 cycle—Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams—both (as of this writing) went down to defeat. Like Ocasio-Cortez, they suffered from a national media culture that was deeply invested in buying what they were selling. That contributed to their stagnation as candidates. They entered the race as unabashed progressives keen to appeal to the mercurial passions of liberal grassroots activists, and they never tailored that message to their states, which were more hostile toward a progressive message than the average pop-political weekly magazine in the Acela Corridor.

Friends of progressivism do their movement no favors by filling its champions’ heads with the false notion that they are popular. The failure of these office-seekers to understand and acknowledge the obstacles that center-right states and districts place before them leads to hubris, bravado, and a lack of seriousness. In such a comfortable environment, the progressive left’s most foolhardy aspirants are tempted to say out loud what they actually believe. It’s clear now that, even on a good night for Democrats, that kind of honesty represents a grave error in judgment. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said with some unintended wisdom, they just paid for it.

On November 08 2018 09:10 Danglars wrote:

DeSantis was pointing at the dangers of progressive policies messing up good economies. But let's play your game: It's not really in question that he meant it as mucking about the economy, and I'm surprised people actually think it's in question. It's well in line with the overarching theme that everything not racist just proves all the more that everybody is actually racist.

In other news, GA finally fell to Kemp.

Commentary Magazine

American isn't ready for the progressive transformation yet.

On November 08 2018 09:10 Danglars wrote:

DeSantis was pointing at the dangers of progressive policies messing up good economies. But let's play your game: It's not really in question that he meant it as mucking about the economy, and I'm surprised people actually think it's in question. It's well in line with the overarching theme that everything not racist just proves all the more that everybody is actually racist.

On November 08 2018 09:17 NewSunshine wrote:

I do enjoy watching the hoops you try to jump through to reach a "totally not-racist" conclusion. If he was talking about "messing up good economies" or "mucking about the economy", he would've used those words. He said "monkey it up". He had time to prepare that statement. This isn't difficult.