Well for one, the writer doesn't detail how socialist policies would be different, other than by saying trumps protectionism doesn't go far enough (and lets throw in a sentence or two about corporate profits).

11/8/2018 2:33:10 PM

Marco Rubio is such a fucking clown lol. Amazing how all the young conservative "stars" have basically made themselves irrelevant in the age of Trump.

https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1060596874577657856

11/8/2018 2:33:15 PM

I’ll actually agree that the trump mocking the disabled reporter thing was overblown.

But trump is very obviously a white nationalist too.

11/8/2018 3:57:56 PM

Who is overblowing it?

11/8/2018 4:12:56 PM

It was overblown at the time. No one cares now and we’re iditoic for talking about it.

11/8/2018 4:57:03 PM

How was it overblown? By whom?

11/8/2018 5:32:24 PM

While it is an important window into his character and intelligence. It is a tiny mote of dust on the trash pile that is his administration and wholly insignificant in terms of the real damage he has and is and will do.

11/8/2018 5:44:44 PM

11/8/2018 6:58:31 PM

Gillum and Nelson are both within mandatory recount range, and Abrams is .3% from a runoff.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/gillum-statement-stokes-intrigue-florida-vote-margin-tightens-n934081
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/08/politics/brian-kemp-resigns-secretary-of-state-georgia-governor-race-stacey-abrams/index.html

11/8/2018 7:37:32 PM

Puts voter suppression shit in perspective. Across a big ass state like Florida, a few thousand people stepping out of a long line because they have somewhere they need to be. The long line caused by missing power cords (or whatever else bizarre shit you heard about this election). It adds up at these tight margins.

11/8/2018 8:24:38 PM

How about they revote and let the 1.5 million Floridians participate who just regained their rights

11/8/2018 9:42:15 PM

Florida is gonna get really ugly.

GOP is not pleased that votes are being tallied.

11/8/2018 9:59:46 PM

It pisses me off really. The general voter suppression sucks and when you have millions of people turning out to vote, I get that there are gonna be hiccups.

But god damn if Florida doesn’t epically fuck this up on a regular basis. They fuck it up so bad it seems intentional (see Bush v Gore). Why should the rest of the country accept any election that comes out of the third world election process that florida regularly turns out?

11/9/2018 6:15:20 AM

Underrated story is how the Republican gerrymander essentially backfired on them. They designed those districts for someone like a Mitt Romney leading their party, who would hold those durable leads in the suburbs. Trump though? They got totally washed out.

11/9/2018 8:04:49 AM

It’s cool that’s rubio is tweetquoting a far left Seth Rich truther.

11/9/2018 8:22:26 AM

Kinda weird how the narrative of this election has changed as , you know, the votes actually got counted. Started out hopeful for Democrats, then doom and despair as Florida had people reliving 2016. The House continued to look good from the start, but all the Republican Senate flips and then Beto losing almost made it feel like Trump won the night.

Now, several days later, the full magnitude of the Republican wipe out across the map is clear. We're looking right now at a net gain of 35 seats, and good chance at a few more than that. That's already the biggest win for Democrats since Nixon. The fact that it came during a strong economy for the incumbent party is a flat out embarrassment for Republicans. Gained 7 governorships, about a third of state legislative seats lost during the Obama years, and a bunch of progressive ballot initiatives passed (medical pot and medicaid expansion in Utah!!!11).

For the Senate, 27 Democrats up for re-election vs. 8 Republicans, and they will likely only net two seats. That's a fucking terrible performance, any way you slice it. After 2016, folks were talking about a potential Republican super majority in the Senate, they'll have at best 54 seats. This was an unequivocally good election for Democrats.

11/9/2018 1:54:44 PM

Eh, House votes always swing opposite of the incumbent.

Nothing will be substantial until someone is elected over Trump.

11/9/2018 2:59:35 PM

Most in the know are pretty sure Sinema will take Arizona. Votes outstanding should put her in.

The GOP missed a golden chance to put away the Senate for a decade with that map.

Even if Rick Scott hangs on in FL it was a massive night for the Dems.

11/9/2018 3:47:24 PM

Every time I look down from what I’m doing and just check in on Florida to wassup, my god damn blood pressure goes through the roof.

Matt Gaetz is on the scene (100s of miles from his district btw) riling up the MAGA shock troops outside the place where the recount is happening.

Just drop the bomb on that shit state already.

11/9/2018 4:28:25 PM

stacey abrams is the shit and it would make my year if this works out for her

https://twitter.com/kira_lerner/status/1060296429997092871

11/9/2018 8:12:33 PM

She’s fantastic and Georgia will be ripe for the picking within 10 years for statewide elections. She absolutely could win a Senate race.

[Edited on November 9, 2018 at 8:18 PM. Reason : I’m punting on this race because I have zero confidence Kemp won’t do whatever it takes ]

11/9/2018 8:17:38 PM

Quote :

"Underrated story is how the Republican gerrymander essentially backfired on them. They designed those districts for someone like a Mitt Romney leading their party, who would hold those durable leads in the suburbs. Trump though? They got totally washed out."

Not in NC, where 50.5% of the vote netted 76.9% of the seats.

11/10/2018 2:35:38 AM

The good news there is that map gets redrawn next year. I expect that the 2020 NC state and us house elections will look much different.

11/10/2018 8:39:50 AM

11/12/2018 8:44:11 AM

Yup, it's gonna end up being that Nelson lost because Broward County liberals are too dumb for democracy.

11/12/2018 9:19:38 AM

Arizona senate election has been called for Kyrsten Sinema. Funny what happens when you take the time to count all the votes.

11/12/2018 8:40:39 PM

Quote :

"Matt Gaetz is on the scene (100s of miles from his district btw) riling up the MAGA shock troops outside the place where the recount is happening. "

I like FL a lot in many ways...

but Gaetz (my Rep) can die of stage 5 dick cancer, for all I care.

[Edited on November 12, 2018 at 11:43 PM. Reason : maybe he'll choke to death on Trump's syphilitic, malformed hog.]

11/12/2018 11:42:19 PM

I wonder who Jeff Flake voted for?

11/13/2018 12:54:51 AM

^^ Matt Gaetz won your district by over 40 points.

Was Jennifer Zimmerman that bad of a candidate or are the people in your district just that crazy?

11/13/2018 9:59:12 AM

I guess the latter? It's always on the order of 70% (R), which means that getting elected can be just a matter of being the craziest jackass in the primary. That said, Gaetz's predecessor, Jeff Miller, wasn't a total buffoon. He was pretty much a party-line Republican, but not a wingnut. He was actually a Democrat until just a few years before getting elected. Miller's predecessor was Joe Scarborough, who was very sensible. Before him, it was a held by the Dems for many years. The district has some coastal wealth, most of it is rural, and it has numerous military bases. Given the history of Representatives being sensible or at least normal for many years before Gaetz, maybe it doesn't cry out for crazy candidates...but given that it's one of the reddest districts in America, there's also very little immunity against them, and with the GOP on the whole being crazy now, it's at best, probably a train wreck waiting to happen (i.e. Gaetz).

Zimmerman had zero chance, ever, and I think she raised almost no money. For whatever it matters, she didn't really offer a stance on most issues--I voted for her, but it was basically (a) Gaetz is the worst of the worst, (b) Zimmerman seemed pretty centrist, reading between the lines, and (c) normally i won't vote for someone if I don't really know where they stand, but there was no chance whatsoever of her actually getting elected. I felt like it would represent a token statement against Gaetz without being an endorsement of the Dem party's hard left turn.

11/13/2018 10:48:37 AM

Weird. I wonder what dynamic would have caused the district to go from many Democrats, to Joe Scarborough, to a former Democrat, to Matt Gaetz.

11/13/2018 11:26:41 AM

centrist, centrist, centrist, far right...hmmmm

11/13/2018 11:59:16 AM

^^ Not sure if it was many Democrats...but it was one democrat from way back when up until the mid 90s (when Scarborough took it). Whatever it was before then, I don't know is even relevant now.

and the former Dem (Miller) was a conservative Republican while he held the seat...I wouldn't describe him as a centrist by any stretch, but he wasn't part of any of the insane subgroups of the GOP. In fact, I met him at a cookout, and followed that up with about a 30 minute meeting with him at his office a few weeks later. This was before he announced his retirement (opening the door for Gaetz), but I sensed he had some frustration with the most extreme elements within the party and their puritanical inflexibility.

^ so probably more like (~1980) centrist, (1994) centrist, (2000) conservative but sensible, (2016) full-retard insano-right. Even back in the Scarborough years, though, it was a 70% red district. Joe could have eaten a baby on CSPAN and still gotten reelected if he had wanted to.

*and I can't say what Miller was like in 2000 when he got elected just a few years removed from being a Dem. My characterization is circa mid-2014. In any case, fuck Gaetz.

[Edited on November 13, 2018 at 10:11 PM. Reason : ]

11/13/2018 10:10:23 PM

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway

Quote :

"Remember the infamous “With which candidate would you rather have a beer?” narrative? It basically got George W. Bush elected in 2000. Halperin and Heilemann didn’t invent it, but they might as well have. That cliché is probably dead now, since reporters feel guilty about declaring Trump the winner of the “beer test” last time (“Who wouldn’t want to pull up next to barstool with this guy?” asked Slate of Trump in February of 2016). But it spread havoc across five presidential races before hitting the Trump speed bump. In polls at the start of the 2000 race, voters felt Al Gore would do a better job on virtually every issue, from the economy to protecting Social Security to education to naming Supreme Court judges to managing health care costs. Bush was really struggling to find an issue to run on that year. Nobody remembers this, but Bush ran as a military pragmatist who would not use the army as global police. Condoleezza Rice at his Republican Convention that year said America’s armed services were “not the world’s 911.” Back then, it was Al Gore who was saying new world realities would demand “we confront threats before they spiral out of control.” Whether he deserved to or not, there was every indication that Gore was going to win. Then, before the crucial third presidential debate, something happened. A beer company, Sam Adams, commissioned a poll: Which candidate would you rather sit down and have a beer with, Bush or Gore? By three points, 40-37%, Americans decided they’d rather have a beer with a recovering alcoholic than Al Gore. That’s right: this madness began as a publicity stunt by a beer company, looking to latch on to debate coverage as a way to score free PR. For decades, we’d run presidential candidates through humiliating marathons, making them divulge embarrassing family secrets on afternoon talk shows, trade scripted barbs with Lettermans and Lenos, and mock themselves on comedy shows like Saturday Night Live. We wrote seriously about all sorts of things they did that had nothing to do with being President, but answered a lot of questions about their cravenness and their willingness to jump through media hoops. We also systematically removed issue politics from races and gradually degraded the office, training voters to think of presidential candidates as boobs who would do whatever reporters asked of them. They were like contestants on loony Japanese game shows of the Takeshi’s Castle type, the ones that had morons gleefully diving face-first into rivers of mud while wearing Hamburger Helper costumes. The big prize was the beer test. By 2004 the major news organizations were regularly commissioning this poll as a serious indicator. Bush walloped John Kerry that year in a Zogby re-hash of the Sam Adams quiz, winning with 57% of voters. A tradition was born. Reporters love the beer test because it’s a way of making elections about something other than politics. It’s also a great way to make elections about us. No crowd of millions ever banged down the door of Time magazine and demanded, “We want a president who’s a good beer companion.” No, that idea came from a beer company, and reporters just happened to like it. It appealed to our caricatured idea of voters as brainless goons who can be trained to pick politicians using the same marketing techniques we use to sell soda or breakfast cereals. With tests like this, we never had to write about the policies. Halperin and Heilemann could write thousands of words in a row about presidential races without so much as mentioning a policy position. They turned the Sam Adams ad into their idea of investigative reporting,"

11/13/2018 11:32:53 PM

I cant even remember the last time I heard the beer test used or referenced

11/14/2018 7:01:07 AM

^ apparently 2016 during the primaries. Taibbi claims the general process of journalists using bullshit like the beer test, likability, and other similar personality fluff for the last couple of decades paved the way for the reality star to get elected.

Rarely do they report on policily, who is backing them and other seemingly obvious due diligence for a politician.

11/14/2018 8:11:54 AM

I could definitely see myself enjoying a beer with Obama and Bush Jr. Maybe Obama even more so because I think the conversation would be so much more interesting. I would go out of my way to double book a beer meetup with Trump so I'd have an excuse not to go. There's absolutely nothing that I feel like I'd like to discuss with him. Which is kinda ironic seeing as he's billed himself a president of the people.

11/14/2018 8:29:19 AM

Well, plenty of people are narcissistic assholes who have no problem fucking people over.

11/14/2018 11:01:04 AM

Since you seem to like Taibbi a lot:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/taibbi-moderates-centrism-conventional-wisdom-pundits-754399/

Quote :

"Forget ‘Conventional Wisdom’: There Are No More Moderates Beware the latest call to “move to the center” — which is just the same old tune, re-packaged"

11/14/2018 1:42:19 PM

Lots of republicans out there really want a moral victory trophy because they didn't lose by as much as some thought they would.

11/15/2018 12:31:38 AM

^^ Yup, the new book seems to be a longer form expounding on some of the ideas from that article. He even mentions the beer test in your linked article:

Quote :

"The point is, conventional wisdom is pretty much always wrong, and often spectacularly so. Invented media storylines too often dominate elections. The worst was probably the infamous “beer standard,” i.e. America always picking the candidate it most wants to have a beer with (Slate last time, in a headline it would probably like to forget, declared “There has never been a better candidate to have a beer with than Trump”)."

His takedown of Eric Holder is pretty good too.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/eric-holder-wall-street-double-agent-comes-in-from-the-cold-49262/

Quote :

"Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street’s favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses."

11/15/2018 8:40:07 AM

at that RS article.

11/15/2018 9:26:33 AM

https://theslot.jezebel.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-says-she-keeps-getting-mistake-1830476039

11/16/2018 10:01:12 AM

they're also still on the "she's secretly rich" while also making fun of her for being poor thing

11/16/2018 10:09:06 AM

Id assume anyone under 40 gets mistaken for an intern. Congress is a nursing home.

11/16/2018 10:31:07 AM

So Florida...

1. It's garbage that voters can submit their vote on time, but because Broward County was late by 2 whole minutes, 700,000 votes will not be recounted. This is a failure of government, not the people.

2. In Hillsborough County, the MACHINE recount came up 846 votes short. How does that even happen? Why wouldn't it be exactly the same?

3. In Palm Beach, the recount couldn't be completed because the machines were fucking overheating, lmao. Greatest country on earth!

4. NPR this morning couldn't help but both-sides this thing, saying the rhetoric of the "candidates" is bad, when it's clearly only the Republicans that are shitting lies out of their mouths.

5. This insanely biased Fox NewsCNN article: https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/16/politics/florida-recount-day-7/index.html

Quote :

"Scott would like to get on with his life. The best way to do that is for his opponent, Sen. Bill Nelson, to declare this game over."

Quote :

"It is now abundantly clear that Gillum lost the race for governor. The end of machine recount did not move the needle much, and as a result, they will stop counting ballots in his race. Despite this reality, Gillum has still not conceded."

11/16/2018 10:54:03 AM

This is in another thread

https://www.wral.com/hyde-smith-appears-to-joke-that-making-it-harder-for-students-to-vote-is-a-great-idea-/17998090/

11/16/2018 2:32:18 PM

Apppears to?

Joke?

[Edited on November 16, 2018 at 2:55 PM. Reason : That story is wack]

11/16/2018 2:55:00 PM

^^^ Is this just another Trump lie or is there possibly a kernel of truth to this?

11/11/2022 8:38:25 AM