by liberal japonicus
Thought we needed an (h)open thread about the midterms. I did like the Guardian graphics, which are here. Comments, observations, and praises to whatever deity manages karmic retribution.
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
I really mean I’m not sure. That’s not a passive-aggressive rhetorical phrasing that actually means I know they shouldn’t investigate aggressively. It’s more a worry of mine.
just one (3) example: in addition to swamping the GOP in NC, voters also overwhelmingly passed three amendments:
State income taxes: lowering the maximum income-tax rate permitted by the NC Constitution from 7% to 3.5%.
Local property taxes: requiring the General Assembly to enact laws limiting increases in property-tax levies by local governments.
Photo ID for voting: expanding the Constitution’s existing photo ID requirement from in-person voting to all methods of voting. State law already requires photo identification or an exception process for absentee-by-mail voting; the amendment would place the broader requirement in the Constitution.
Dems were strongly opposed to all three. but they all passed with ~60% in favor.
this is not a sign that NC voters really love (or even know) what the Dems ran on. and Dems around here didn’t run on impeachments.
so, sure do it if there’s a strong case. but don’t be surprised if people start saying “Hey, i didn’t vote for this”
Swingers gonna swing. We can try to convince them that the Dems are doing their best to bring affordability under control and the rest, but they are not going to do nuance, so it’s a sempiternal crap shoot.
The latino vote, meanwhile, used to be Dem +40, and went Dem +9 in the last presidential race. And the black vote, usually out in force, was mobilized and in a mood for good trouble like Obama was on the ticket again.
I read one latino commentator saying that Trump rented the latino vote and though he had bought it. I think the Dems need to show some serious commitment to those voters, especially if they hope to keep Texas in play.
Swingers, in the final accounting, follow the smell of victory – not the small victories of legislative wins, but the smell of electoral success. The Dems need to build their base and maintain their coalitions, and project confidence and enthusiasm in public. That last bit is going to be the biggest challenge in our current media environment.
Map time!! Two prism maps of Texas counties viewed from the northwest (choosing where to place the “camera” is always hard). The volume of each county’s prism represents the total population, so the height indicates density. On the left, counties Harris won in blue and Trump in red. On the right, counties Talarico won in blue, Paxton in red. Simple red-blue, no attempt to code vote share or anything like that. The difference is clearly Talarico capturing the smaller metro areas, and the suburbs around the big ones.
OT gripe:
“with ~60% in favor”
that’s a tilde in front of the 60, not a minus.
~ –
this font doesn’t distinguish them very well 🙁
Photo ID for voting: expanding the Constitution’s existing photo ID requirement from in-person voting to all methods of voting.
Here in vote by mail Colorado one of the ballot initiatives would have required putting the last four digits of Social Security or driver’s license numbers on the outside of the return envelope. Of the 14 state-wide initiatives, it failed by the widest margin. Funding for signature collection for this initiative’s petition was heavily from out of state; Colorado voters of pretty much all stripes like the vote by mail system.
this font doesn’t distinguish them very well
One of the reasons that I don’t let pages choose their own fonts in my browser.
My short list regarding cleaning the Augean stables:
Congresspeople can’t trade stocks while in office.
Find who was cashing in on oil prices – both the Polymarket crowd and oil markets – based on advance notice of military actions in Iran and bring charges where appropriate.
Rebuild – or try to at least partially rebuild – all the stuff broken by DOGE. If we can recover all the personal data stolen by those bastards great but that is probably not feasible. At least restore whatever privacy protections we can going forward.
Defund ICE. Just shut it the fuck down. Fire or at a minimum seriously vet the agents hired during Trump II or find something else for them to do. Just fucking stop it.
Hegseth and RFK have to go. I’m not sure that Miller is in a position that is subject to impeachment, so we may be stuck with him. But if ICE and CBP are neutered I don’t really care what happens with him.
I think there would be very wide support across the political spectrum for the first two. The DOGE thing, I have no idea – I’m sure some folks would see that as the return of the dreaded deep state.
The last two would likely be seen as partisan, but fuck it – ICE / CBP and the Cabinet knuckleheads are still actively breaking stuff and ruining people’s lives. Shut them down.
in my heart, russell’s list is right on.
but it’s going to be tough to get 13+ GOP Senators to convict.
But at this point I can live with obnoxious people who get good stuff done.
russell, as it happens I completely agree. And funnily enough, according to the more lefty friend I mentioned, a report by Marie Le Conte today saying she sneaked into an AES meeting also calls him a “a bit of a dick”, while making some of the same points. I was just so disappointed in the moment, because I had thought him so impressive. What you say is what I was rather inarticulately grasping for when I talked about his character versus his principles. If character = dick, but principles and policies = righteous, I can very much live with that too. And as for his attitude to foreign media and institutions etc, I guess once he is in the Senate he may find out that it can be helpful for senators (who can be very involved in foreign affairs) to moderate their tone.
On the question of “who needs to be impeached”, I reckon Todd Blanche is high on the list. No matter what Vance and others say, right up there with the cost of living and the war, corruption was very much in the forefront of voters’ minds. And some of those pay-for-play pardons are unbelievably obvious and egregious.
hsh: I’m also very sympathetic to your fears. This result is such a gift, and one can’t help worrying that the Dems will screw it up by letting the impression be revenge (“lawyer up”), rather than putting the system to rights in the people’s interests.
I think it’s important that the Dems make an effort to hold people accountable whether or not they can overcome that 13 vote lift. It’s not just performative even if it is not successful. It’s like defending intellectual property or filing grievances as a union – you have to demonstrate your commitment to defending rights and contracts. If you don’t, then those rights and agreements don’t exist except as respectable façades.
I don’t think we should approach ethics and civic values through the lens of market efficiency. Any fight not initiated is a value conceded.
Given that voters flagged corruption as one of their top issues, I think investigation and legislating would be a big plus politically. And investigating would jump-start the DoJ’s work after 2028.
Juries sometimes award punitive damages in civil lawsuits. Laws permitting that are based, I think, on the notion that merely making the victim whole — compensatory damages — offers a perverse incentive to crooks and fraudsters: if the worst that can happen to you is that you have to give back your ill-gotten gains, you’re not dissuaded from trying another scam. Heads you win, tails you only might lose.
The clamor for Democrats to focus on compensatory efforts and forgo punitive ones is analogous to laws which forbid punitive damages in certain cases. Maybe such laws are a good idea on some grounds (and I’d love to know what those are) but eliminating perverse incentives is not one of them.
Eight years ago, we were hearing that Democrats should pass good bills in the House even though they’d never even get a vote in the Senate, but forgo impeachment because it would never get anywhere in the Senate. The proposition was that The American People would reward “positive” but futile legislation, but tsk-tsk impeachment because of its futility. I called it the “get things done trap” then, and I call it that now.
“Hold on,” I hear you cry, “the Democrats won the next election even though they could not pass good legislation. They were rewarded for trying.” The Dems seem to have really believed that, and went on to pass (and enact) some good legislation while shilly-shallying on prosecutions. How did that work out?
–TP
despite the Dems impeaching him, twice, Trump was re-elected.
does that say nothing about the public’s appetite for justice?
The Dems under Biden got some big “things done”, and lost. What does that say about what The American People reward? Would it have hurt to throw in some actual justice?
–TP
When you’re down and ready to murder your enemies, promote a Nazi (and in this case Soviet KGB):
July 1944: Hitler appointed Goebbels as the Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War to mobilize the German domestic economy and population for the failing war effort.
April 30, 1945: In his final political testament before committing suicide, Hitler appointed Goebbels to succeed him as Chancellor of Germany (a position Goebbels held for roughly one day before committing suicide on May 1, 1945).
Vermin Goebbels and his lovely cow of a murderous wife, administered morphine and then cyanide to their little children, before releasing the world from his subhuman grip.
Would that we will be so lucky.
Goebbels prophesied:
“We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals.”[303]
I don’t think the current Nazi filth are so ambiguous about the judgement of history.
What does that say about what The American People reward?
it says the public en masse is dumb as shit.
now, about my question: does that say nothing about the public’s appetite for justice?
Stephen “Nosferatu “Miller has been named new White House Chief of Staff. His predecessor Susie Wiles has been fired and scapegoated for the lost election.
No, that is not a joke (on my part at least).
let them fight
“This result is such a gift, and one can’t help worrying that the Dems will screw it up…”
GftNC, that’s exactly it. All of it (truncated for brevity).
A journalist friend of mine. The source doesn’t allow copy and paste. Screenshot it is.
This interview with Schumer is interesting and a bit disappointing.
https://youtu.be/mxOBWyc7-po?si=_G7-dESzBqDl0yr_
I think you aren’t going to get him to step back even a little without an industrial level pry bar.
Fixed that for you.
The public en masse are simply not paying attention most of the time. If you do something good, you can’t just announce it and expect them to notice that you did it. You have to talk it up at length. Go to Kentucky and hammer on the point that kynect Health Coverage (which they love) is, in fact, the Obamacare that Democrats did. Because, if you don’t, they won’t know — and, in point of fact, they didn’t.
Similarly, if your opponent does something bad, you need to hammer on it long and loud. Trump’s first impeachment simply wasn’t for something the general public cared that much about. But now, after a couple of years of egregious corruption, and starting a war which pushed gas prices up? Those things hit home. The public noticed, with the results we saw. Impeachment on the grounds of corruption would be very different.
The problem isn’t stupidity. Unless you define stupidity as failing to pay attention to things that you think are important. The problem is that you need to work hard at telling your story. Because, like it or not, the general public simply doesn’t, and won’t, pay attention otherwise.
Note that passing legislation and publicizing it are two very different things. On rare occasions someone will come along who can do both. But insisting on one guy (say the House Speaker) doing both is, you’ll pardon the expression, dumb as shit.
If, as it seems, he lost the Latino vote largely because of ICE, and the Black vote even more than usual because of the gerrymandering and the Voting Rights Act, it makes sense to make it a priority to immediately do something (and be seen to be doing something) about those two things. They are two of the most important issues that the Dems would want to tackle anyway, it wouldn’t be pandering, and shows a clear direction of travel towards safeguarding constitutional rights. And, as for going for the most egregious of the wrongdoers, choosing which carefully, they could go for that at the same time. So then they wouldn’t convincingly be accused of just seeking revenge.
The most important thing, as always these days it seems, is comms. How do you get the message (about what you are doing and why) across successfully to a public that doesn’t trust and no longer consumes its news via heritage media? Particularly when the tech bros won’t (presumably) be doing their U-turns anytime soon enough. This is the half a billion dollar question…
Or, what wj said immediately above.
The most important thing, as always these days it seems, is comms. How do you get the message (about what you are doing and why) across successfully to a public that doesn’t trust and no longer consumes its news via heritage media?
First, you have to decide what content you want to communicate. We held more hearings? We passed a bill in the House? It died in the Senate because a minority of 44 Republicans refused to let it advance? If the content is we sent Trump a bill restoring the Child Tax Credit and he vetoed it. We sent Trump a bill restoring the Voting Rights Act and he vetoed it. We sent Trump a bill forbidding construction that shadows the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and he vetoed it. We can find channels for those. Schumer has to kill the filibuster.
This. Because the public isn’t going to buy this as an excuse.
They can understand “But Trump vetoed it.” But “You gave us a majority in the Senate, but we let the minority block it anyway.”…? Not even slightly understandable to anyone who is not up to their elbows in politics and the arcana of Senate rules — which is our target audience.
If we were back to using the talking filibuster, it would be less bad. Still seriously bad, but nowhere near as bad as a no-effort minority block like we have had these past few decades.
A friend on facebook posted this from John Matthews and why it was so important to talk to Sayed
https://news.sky.com/story/james-matthews-abdul-el-sayeds-response-to-me-felt-like-a-misstep-after-stressful-contest-13608148
and I passed these thoughts on to him, after apologizing for the rant, which I do here as well…
=======
I have to call BS on Matthews’ article. Point one, the Senate committee is Foreign RELATIONS, not Foreign Affairs, which is the House of Representatives. Because of the 6 year senatorial term, only three of Dems were up for an election and all of them won. Furthermore, only one member, Jeanne Shaheen (NH), who is the chair, was leaving her seat, so assuming that they want to stay, there is only one spot (Given the size of the Democratic win, this is the case with most committees, so this is a great problem to have). However, Chris Pappas will replace Shaheen in her NH Senate seat and because NH has a lot of defense industries, it is more likely that he would go on the committee than Sayed.
Also, the Foreign Relations committee handles the advise and consent requirement for treaties and nominations. Does Matthews think that there will be some treaties and nominations promulgated by Trump that will lay the issues of the Palestinians open for discussion? I don’t think so. So Matthews doesn’t know shit about how the two houses of Congress work, despite having been Sky News US correspondent since 2022.
About Sayed’s campaign, while Sayed supports the Palestinian cause and hasn’t tried to massage his message or back away from that, his primary message has been Medicare for All and dealing with public health, befitting his training as a doctor (as well as he being a Rhodes Scholar in Public Health, and experience as Exec Director of the Detroit Health Department and Director of the Wayne County Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services).
But assuming that Matthews suggestion that Sayed is somehow angling for a position on the Foreign Affairs Committee[sic] because of his religion, we see that it is based on an implicit assumption by Matthews that he wants some job to talk about Palestinians because Sayed supports the Palestinian cause, and he’s a Muslim. Kinda racist if you think about it, though I’m sure it is clickbait to UK viewers who know even less about US politics than Matthews.
It might be different if Sayed somehow expressed a desire to do that, but I can’t find anything suggesting that he did (His call and response at campaign events was “Money out of… POLITICS! Money in your…POCKET! Medicare for…. ALL!” but maybe Matthews thought he was saying ‘Intifada’ instead of Medicare)
It is also unlikely that he’d be on Foreign Affairs, because he’d make a bigger difference grilling RFK Jr. and anyone that turd has appointed at HHS. Getting the UKians all riled up because a Muslim was poised to be a Senator might be not be in bad faith, but the amount of doubt I extend has been in short supply lately. Especially after we had to deal with Piers Morgan and James Corden….
It might be enlightening, for him, to ask if he thinks any Senators who are Jewish (and, for him, presumptively pro-israel) should similarly be prime candidates for the Foreign Relations Committee. Highlighting the assumption behind his suggestion (e.g. that Israel is the primary, or even the only, issue in American foreign relation), could also be educational for him.
A little over 30 years ago the American West was pretty heavily Republican. It has been fascinating to watch that change. Assuming all the uncalled races go to the current leader, Republicans will hold only 20 US House seats across the entire 13-state region (of 102 total). Eight of the 13 will have a state-level Democratic trifecta and two Democratic US Senators.
In Colorado specifically, in 2004 the Republicans held all statewide offices, both chambers of the legislature, both US Senate seats, and five of seven US House seats. This January, Democrats will hold all statewide offices, have two-thirds supermajorities in both chambers, seven of eight US House seats, and both US Senate seats.