And until Dems realize that it is a bad idea to run people who identify with nutty far left hot button issues in competitive races, we will continue to lose them. This was not a City Council race in western Queens. Mark Pocan is almost as bad as Barnes, but Republicans gave him a Democratic vote sink.
I am reminded of the 2016 New York primary. It ended Bernie Sanders' chances of ever becoming President. He actually did very well upstate. And had he run a different campaign in NYC he might have won. But he hired Cornel West, who hates Barack Obama, as his outreach person for African-Americans, and he hired Simone Zimmerman, who hates Israel, as his outreach person for Jews. African-Americans mostly like Barack Obama and Jews mostly like Israel. Barnes didn't just retweet people of Zimmerman's ilk, he featured them at campaign events. STOO-PID.
RE: Fulton County GJ Foreperson: Saw her on NBC evening news. Was taken aback. Don't see any way these appearances have good ends. Am not excited for the sure-to-be resulting shitstorm.
Is this her 15 minutes?
And, Mona, I guess I'm not the only one hell-bound for not worshipping St. Jimmy.
I'm far from being an expert in Wisconsin politics. But given what I do know, it might be the state with the most nakedly and securely rigged state and federal districts in the country.
Politically, the state is about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, with Democrat Tony Evers winning consecutive gubernatorial elections by margins of 1.1% and 3.4%, resp. At the federal level, Republicans control 6 of Wisconsin's eight political districts.
But the worse part of it is that at the state level, Republicans are one and two votes shy, respectively, of veto-proof supermajorities in the state Senate and Assembly. Which means that Evers just barely escaped being powerless to defy a Republican legislature. And in case anyone harbors doubts that Republicans would be so ruthlessly partisan, note how they passed a bill during the lame duck period of 2018, kneecapping the executive in advance of the incoming Democratic administration. The bill was dutifully signed by outgoing Republican governor Scott Walker, no doubt motivated by concern for the integrity of his office and the unsettling balance of power it enjoyed during his term.
This leaves Wisconsin voters particularly powerless to break the Republican Party's stranglehold on the legislature, because Wisconsin does not have a public referendum provision. And the Supreme Court has already prevented Federal Courts from intervening, leaving only state courts and Congress as possible avenues of redress. That is, outside of pounding away at a public relations campaign and hoping that enough Republicans prioritize democracy over partisan interests for Democrats to retake the legislature while controlling the governor's mansion. So yeah, state courts and Congress.
After Trump won in 2016, I learned to be careful what you wish for, as I had been one of the people who was happy to see Trump sink the Republican establishment, under the assumption that he was about to go down with them and force a real reckoning among the Republican Party regarding the type of voter they courted. Thusly chastened, I was upset a couple years later to hear reports of Democrats hoping to put the xenophobic Chris Kobach over the top in the Republican primary for the Kansas gubernatorial race.
But then again, that gamble paid off. And despite all of the understandable criticism from the anti-Trump right about Democrats strategizing to do the same in the 2022 midterms, that one paid off too.
So now I have to admit, I'm torn. Was the lesson from 2016 a fair one? Or have we forgotten to account for the bizarre nature of our system for electing a President? And the fact that Trump, supposedly the guy who showed Republicans "how to win" courting an ever narrowing electorate, would have lost but for being spared the one requirement every other electoral candidate in the country must achieve: getting more votes than your opponent.
Trump and his acolytes have more electoral weight than you'd want, making things far too close for comfort. Still, the evidence so far is that MAGA has been a costly fluke for the Republican Party, one that even the supposedly "good Republicans" seem helpless against. At the end of the day, even the "good ones" feel compelled to play for their team. Would the better Republican candidate for the Wisconsin court vote against the interests of the Republican legislative machine? Somehow I doubt it.
So we are now left to ponder a reality that I fear is becoming increasingly clear: that trying to force the Republican Party to own MAGA and suffer the consequences is no less hopeful of a strategy than supporting "good" Republican politicians in the hope they can painlessly lead the electorate out of the darkness.
Ohio is definitely a bad situation, but I would say a far more remediable one. They actually do have a public referendum, and just recently used it to amend their state constitution to (theoretically) prohibit politically biased redistricting. Now they need to do it again and give it some teeth, by say, empowering the courts to appoint an independent redistricting commission if need be (or just requiring one in the first place).
And I'm thinking this shouldn't be a difficult sell. "Support amending our constitution so that the state can actually enforce the last amendment you enshrined into law, preventing politicians from repeatedly violating it until the clock runs out." Leave out any mention of which party is doing the violating and dare Republicans to bitch about it and remove the ambiguity.
That 50 percent of Americans don't care if Putin swallows Ukraine whole and burps the USSR National Anthem reminds me of our own approach to WWII. It was a moral imperative that we send troops into Europe--but the American public, and by extension Congress, wanted nothing to do with it. If Japan had not bombed Pearl Harbor, I believe we would have stayed out of Europe, and the world would be a far darker place for it, then and now.
This is Putin's goal. It's why we should fight as long as it takes for Ukraine to get its sovereignty back:
1. What on Earth was that jury forewoman smoking to think going on the teevee was a Good Idea? The public should never know what grand jurors are doing or thinking--grand juries are secret for a reason. Worse, her statement will be used as a defense-team stalking horse for "this horrendous jury bias should render any indictment moot, your honor!" It was appalling.
2. I will never forgive Jimmy Carter's lies about Israel being an apartheid nation, or that the PLO never advocated for Israel's destruction. He wasn't naive when he said those things, he was racist, just like the UN was when it declared "Zionism is racism."
As for contending that North Koreans wouldn't accept Carter's calling their man-god a criminal? Of course they would, because they already know it. Most people under the thumbs of brutal dictators despise their oppressors. They just can't say so publicly. Carter is not a stupid man, so, like in his dealing with Israel, he chose to lie instead of truth.
I wish Carter a gentle voyage into his final goodnight, but he will be more than an irritating and self-righteous mediocrity as president.
Yeah, I've been warning my friends who think the Fulton County DA is going to put the stake through Trump's heart (or lack thereof.) As my late father used to say, those people could screw up a one car funeral procession. The grand juror's liberal media tour is just proof of that.
I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I'm so over the MAGA morons and their stupidity. They wear their ignorance as a badge of honor. Here's the latest stupidity I saw on my morning walk with my dog this AM. An adjacent neighborhood next to mine has a MAGA wingnut that has had banners since 2016 professing his support for TFG. As of today he now has hanging from his garage Trump 2024 for president and right next to it a banner of DeSantis for prez, "Make America Florida" As I said a badge of honor. God help us. Thank you Joe Biden!
I feel like "Make America Florida" would be about the worst campaign slogan in history. I know Florida gets some positive vibes from certain corners of the MAGAverse, but whacked out stories from Florida is kinda of a national guilty pleasure.
Super disappointing from Mona but so typical. Take a dig for partisan purposes to disparage and undermine the character of a genuinely good person entering hospice who had intergrity and tried his best.
I think it was the last straw for me. I'll skip her pieces from now on.
I could understand the ire if he were a acted in bad faith, but as other people said he was just ill-suited for an impossibly hard job at an impossibly hard time. I'll die content if I accomplish half a percent of what Carter accomplished in his lifetime.
To our shame, the Ukrainians show us what patriotism and democracy look like. The least we can do is help them keep the flame of freedom burning. If Russia invaded the United States, maga would welcome them and point out the Americans to be killed.
Carlson said it made the characters “less sexy” and warned his audience: “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous, until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them.”
Somehow it doesn't surprise me that _ucker would consider having a drink with an anthropomorphic candy spokesperson, but only if she was sexy.
We know now, if we ever had doubts, that Carlson doesn't believe anything he says. Is it possible that he's a masterful satirist, like Swift, testing whether there is anything so idiotic that maga wouldn't swallow it? Nah.
Donald Trump & America First back in charge will mean a whole lot more than Putin-friendly. I can see the breakdown of the United States, Trump would sell off Claifornia and other blue states to the highest highest bidder and call it smart. What we have seen so far is just the beginning. The only chance to preserve US government as we know it is for establishment Repubs to denounce the crazies.
Charlie I can see how Dems helping crazies win primaries is the opposite of helpful. But Dems CANNOT evict the crazies from our 2 party system, only Repubs can.
The DNC giving money to any republican when so many good candidates languished with not a penny from them. This is why I will NEVER give a cent to DNC again. I will give only to individual candidates.
Did they actually give money to them? I heard a lot of stories about how they'd run ads proclaiming candidate X too extreme for (insert locality) that wound up boosting them in the primary with R voters who wanted extreme.
I can get how that is objectionable, but it isn't the same as giving money to republicans.
Yes paying for ads to support someone in a primary is precisely same effect though admittedly in our crazy finance system, different. Bottom line is DNC is spending money in a republican primary instead of supporting democrats in the general election and worse than that several of the ones they helped get nominated got elected.
All those ads actually criticized the Republican candidates as too extreme. Republican voters took that as a good thing. You can think of those ads as an early start on defining the Republican in the general election.
All of the "establishment Republicans" who might have denounced the crazies have been purged, or joined the other side. The only alternative if the survivors are unwilling to form another party to fight them is to keep voting Democratic until the crazies die off.
I believe there are a lot of estabishment repubs in congress, they are just not speaking up or going against McCarthy. And there are a ton of voters who are still voting repub or abstaining. Even McCarthy doesn't think MAGA can do real harm even with his help.
Even here and now at The Bulwark, while they know & duscuss the dangers, they don't actually advocate voting for Democrats other than against Trump. All Charlie could say about Senate race in Wisconsin was how dumb Dems and Barnes were at messaging.
Perhaps we should all be writing these Repubs in Congress, daily demanding integrity and honor from them.
I wish that were true, but Sarah Longwell, Charlie, and the team have convinced me that all those "establishment" Republicans are gone from the House, and most are gone from the Senate. The majority of the Republican members of the current House who were members on January 6 voted against confirming the election: "integrity and honor" don't mean anything to them anymore.
I'm not sure that Bulwarkers don't advocate for voting for Democrats other than against Trump. I read them as "vote for any Democrat that you can bring yourself to who is running against a MAGA candidate." That's been my policy since 2016: vote for the Democrat if I can, don't vote if I can't. I'm just glad that I'm not from Wisconsin, and didn't have to make the choice on Barnes.
Cheap shots is going to the CDN screenshot instead of linking to the original tweet
Thank you for the Wisconsin judicial race coverage!
I'm pissed at CNN for putting the grand jury foreperson on. It's like they want to help Trump win his case if he's indicted.
He really was that bad.
And until Dems realize that it is a bad idea to run people who identify with nutty far left hot button issues in competitive races, we will continue to lose them. This was not a City Council race in western Queens. Mark Pocan is almost as bad as Barnes, but Republicans gave him a Democratic vote sink.
I am reminded of the 2016 New York primary. It ended Bernie Sanders' chances of ever becoming President. He actually did very well upstate. And had he run a different campaign in NYC he might have won. But he hired Cornel West, who hates Barack Obama, as his outreach person for African-Americans, and he hired Simone Zimmerman, who hates Israel, as his outreach person for Jews. African-Americans mostly like Barack Obama and Jews mostly like Israel. Barnes didn't just retweet people of Zimmerman's ilk, he featured them at campaign events. STOO-PID.
Agree.
RE: Fulton County GJ Foreperson: Saw her on NBC evening news. Was taken aback. Don't see any way these appearances have good ends. Am not excited for the sure-to-be resulting shitstorm.
Is this her 15 minutes?
And, Mona, I guess I'm not the only one hell-bound for not worshipping St. Jimmy.
I'm far from being an expert in Wisconsin politics. But given what I do know, it might be the state with the most nakedly and securely rigged state and federal districts in the country.
Politically, the state is about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, with Democrat Tony Evers winning consecutive gubernatorial elections by margins of 1.1% and 3.4%, resp. At the federal level, Republicans control 6 of Wisconsin's eight political districts.
But the worse part of it is that at the state level, Republicans are one and two votes shy, respectively, of veto-proof supermajorities in the state Senate and Assembly. Which means that Evers just barely escaped being powerless to defy a Republican legislature. And in case anyone harbors doubts that Republicans would be so ruthlessly partisan, note how they passed a bill during the lame duck period of 2018, kneecapping the executive in advance of the incoming Democratic administration. The bill was dutifully signed by outgoing Republican governor Scott Walker, no doubt motivated by concern for the integrity of his office and the unsettling balance of power it enjoyed during his term.
This leaves Wisconsin voters particularly powerless to break the Republican Party's stranglehold on the legislature, because Wisconsin does not have a public referendum provision. And the Supreme Court has already prevented Federal Courts from intervening, leaving only state courts and Congress as possible avenues of redress. That is, outside of pounding away at a public relations campaign and hoping that enough Republicans prioritize democracy over partisan interests for Democrats to retake the legislature while controlling the governor's mansion. So yeah, state courts and Congress.
After Trump won in 2016, I learned to be careful what you wish for, as I had been one of the people who was happy to see Trump sink the Republican establishment, under the assumption that he was about to go down with them and force a real reckoning among the Republican Party regarding the type of voter they courted. Thusly chastened, I was upset a couple years later to hear reports of Democrats hoping to put the xenophobic Chris Kobach over the top in the Republican primary for the Kansas gubernatorial race.
But then again, that gamble paid off. And despite all of the understandable criticism from the anti-Trump right about Democrats strategizing to do the same in the 2022 midterms, that one paid off too.
So now I have to admit, I'm torn. Was the lesson from 2016 a fair one? Or have we forgotten to account for the bizarre nature of our system for electing a President? And the fact that Trump, supposedly the guy who showed Republicans "how to win" courting an ever narrowing electorate, would have lost but for being spared the one requirement every other electoral candidate in the country must achieve: getting more votes than your opponent.
Trump and his acolytes have more electoral weight than you'd want, making things far too close for comfort. Still, the evidence so far is that MAGA has been a costly fluke for the Republican Party, one that even the supposedly "good Republicans" seem helpless against. At the end of the day, even the "good ones" feel compelled to play for their team. Would the better Republican candidate for the Wisconsin court vote against the interests of the Republican legislative machine? Somehow I doubt it.
So we are now left to ponder a reality that I fear is becoming increasingly clear: that trying to force the Republican Party to own MAGA and suffer the consequences is no less hopeful of a strategy than supporting "good" Republican politicians in the hope they can painlessly lead the electorate out of the darkness.
Ohio makes WI look like Gerrymandering Amateur Night.
Ohio is definitely a bad situation, but I would say a far more remediable one. They actually do have a public referendum, and just recently used it to amend their state constitution to (theoretically) prohibit politically biased redistricting. Now they need to do it again and give it some teeth, by say, empowering the courts to appoint an independent redistricting commission if need be (or just requiring one in the first place).
And I'm thinking this shouldn't be a difficult sell. "Support amending our constitution so that the state can actually enforce the last amendment you enshrined into law, preventing politicians from repeatedly violating it until the clock runs out." Leave out any mention of which party is doing the violating and dare Republicans to bitch about it and remove the ambiguity.
That 50 percent of Americans don't care if Putin swallows Ukraine whole and burps the USSR National Anthem reminds me of our own approach to WWII. It was a moral imperative that we send troops into Europe--but the American public, and by extension Congress, wanted nothing to do with it. If Japan had not bombed Pearl Harbor, I believe we would have stayed out of Europe, and the world would be a far darker place for it, then and now.
This is Putin's goal. It's why we should fight as long as it takes for Ukraine to get its sovereignty back:
https://youtu.be/pL4l7tO1LKg
1. What on Earth was that jury forewoman smoking to think going on the teevee was a Good Idea? The public should never know what grand jurors are doing or thinking--grand juries are secret for a reason. Worse, her statement will be used as a defense-team stalking horse for "this horrendous jury bias should render any indictment moot, your honor!" It was appalling.
2. I will never forgive Jimmy Carter's lies about Israel being an apartheid nation, or that the PLO never advocated for Israel's destruction. He wasn't naive when he said those things, he was racist, just like the UN was when it declared "Zionism is racism."
As for contending that North Koreans wouldn't accept Carter's calling their man-god a criminal? Of course they would, because they already know it. Most people under the thumbs of brutal dictators despise their oppressors. They just can't say so publicly. Carter is not a stupid man, so, like in his dealing with Israel, he chose to lie instead of truth.
I wish Carter a gentle voyage into his final goodnight, but he will be more than an irritating and self-righteous mediocrity as president.
Yeah, I've been warning my friends who think the Fulton County DA is going to put the stake through Trump's heart (or lack thereof.) As my late father used to say, those people could screw up a one car funeral procession. The grand juror's liberal media tour is just proof of that.
"Janet Protasiewicz’s promise to set aside our law and our Constitution whenever they conflict with her personal values"
Typical MAGA. Accuse others of doing exactly what you do yourself.
I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I'm so over the MAGA morons and their stupidity. They wear their ignorance as a badge of honor. Here's the latest stupidity I saw on my morning walk with my dog this AM. An adjacent neighborhood next to mine has a MAGA wingnut that has had banners since 2016 professing his support for TFG. As of today he now has hanging from his garage Trump 2024 for president and right next to it a banner of DeSantis for prez, "Make America Florida" As I said a badge of honor. God help us. Thank you Joe Biden!
I feel like "Make America Florida" would be about the worst campaign slogan in history. I know Florida gets some positive vibes from certain corners of the MAGAverse, but whacked out stories from Florida is kinda of a national guilty pleasure.
Super disappointing from Mona but so typical. Take a dig for partisan purposes to disparage and undermine the character of a genuinely good person entering hospice who had intergrity and tried his best.
I think it was the last straw for me. I'll skip her pieces from now on.
I could understand the ire if he were a acted in bad faith, but as other people said he was just ill-suited for an impossibly hard job at an impossibly hard time. I'll die content if I accomplish half a percent of what Carter accomplished in his lifetime.
To our shame, the Ukrainians show us what patriotism and democracy look like. The least we can do is help them keep the flame of freedom burning. If Russia invaded the United States, maga would welcome them and point out the Americans to be killed.
Carlson said it made the characters “less sexy” and warned his audience: “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous, until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them.”
Somehow it doesn't surprise me that _ucker would consider having a drink with an anthropomorphic candy spokesperson, but only if she was sexy.
We know now, if we ever had doubts, that Carlson doesn't believe anything he says. Is it possible that he's a masterful satirist, like Swift, testing whether there is anything so idiotic that maga wouldn't swallow it? Nah.
Donald Trump & America First back in charge will mean a whole lot more than Putin-friendly. I can see the breakdown of the United States, Trump would sell off Claifornia and other blue states to the highest highest bidder and call it smart. What we have seen so far is just the beginning. The only chance to preserve US government as we know it is for establishment Repubs to denounce the crazies.
Charlie I can see how Dems helping crazies win primaries is the opposite of helpful. But Dems CANNOT evict the crazies from our 2 party system, only Repubs can.
The DNC giving money to any republican when so many good candidates languished with not a penny from them. This is why I will NEVER give a cent to DNC again. I will give only to individual candidates.
Did they actually give money to them? I heard a lot of stories about how they'd run ads proclaiming candidate X too extreme for (insert locality) that wound up boosting them in the primary with R voters who wanted extreme.
I can get how that is objectionable, but it isn't the same as giving money to republicans.
Yes paying for ads to support someone in a primary is precisely same effect though admittedly in our crazy finance system, different. Bottom line is DNC is spending money in a republican primary instead of supporting democrats in the general election and worse than that several of the ones they helped get nominated got elected.
All those ads actually criticized the Republican candidates as too extreme. Republican voters took that as a good thing. You can think of those ads as an early start on defining the Republican in the general election.
All of the "establishment Republicans" who might have denounced the crazies have been purged, or joined the other side. The only alternative if the survivors are unwilling to form another party to fight them is to keep voting Democratic until the crazies die off.
I believe there are a lot of estabishment repubs in congress, they are just not speaking up or going against McCarthy. And there are a ton of voters who are still voting repub or abstaining. Even McCarthy doesn't think MAGA can do real harm even with his help.
Even here and now at The Bulwark, while they know & duscuss the dangers, they don't actually advocate voting for Democrats other than against Trump. All Charlie could say about Senate race in Wisconsin was how dumb Dems and Barnes were at messaging.
Perhaps we should all be writing these Repubs in Congress, daily demanding integrity and honor from them.
I wish that were true, but Sarah Longwell, Charlie, and the team have convinced me that all those "establishment" Republicans are gone from the House, and most are gone from the Senate. The majority of the Republican members of the current House who were members on January 6 voted against confirming the election: "integrity and honor" don't mean anything to them anymore.
I'm not sure that Bulwarkers don't advocate for voting for Democrats other than against Trump. I read them as "vote for any Democrat that you can bring yourself to who is running against a MAGA candidate." That's been my policy since 2016: vote for the Democrat if I can, don't vote if I can't. I'm just glad that I'm not from Wisconsin, and didn't have to make the choice on Barnes.