Tuesday Open Thread

14 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Cory is going to need some reminding as he gets ready to vote yes on another Better Off Dead Act of meanness.

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2. The Boring Story of the 2016 Election

   …

   Donald Trump won because Hillary Clinton was an extremely unpopular candidate.

   Donald Trump did not win because of a surge of white support. Indeed he got less white support than Romney got in 2012. Nor did Trump win because he got a surge from other race+gender groups. The exit polls show him doing slightly better with black men, black women, and latino women than Romney did, but basically he just hovered around Romney’s numbers with every race+gender group, doing slightly worse than Romney overall.

   However, support for Hillary was way below Obama’s 2012 levels, with defectors turning to a third party. Clinton did worse with every single race+gender combo except white women, where she improved Obama’s outcome by a single point. Clinton did not lose all this support to Donald. She lost it into the abyss. Voters didn’t like her but they weren’t wooed by Trump.

   And the Matt Yglesias article mentioned.

   What really happened in 2016, in 7 charts

   What happened, fundamentally, is that both parties simultaneously took the unusual step of nominating someone who was already well-known and unpopular by the end of the primary process.

   Presidents have won before without winning a majority of the vote, but Trump was the first newly elected president to have been unpopular on Election Day. If you don’t like Trump and never did and find yourself baffled as to how the voters could have possibly disagreed with you, the answer is simple: They didn’t. He was able to win not just because of the Electoral College, but because most voters also didn’t like his opponent.

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3. As Hurricanes Strike, EPA Staffing Nears a 30-Year Low

   At the end of August, nearly 400 employees left the EPA. Staffing levels are approaching their lowest point since the Reagan administration, The Wall Street Journal reports.

   At the beginning of the summer, the agency offered a buyout plan to 1,200 staffers, and roughly a third took the agency up on the offer. More staffers are expected to retire or take buyouts this month, putting the Trump administration well on its way to slashing 3,200 jobs from the agency, the goal outlined in the president’s budget.

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4. Republicans giving Michael Bennet a chance to finally be himself and pressuring him directly with attacks on Obamacare and Colorado.

   Bennet has parroted Republican rhetoric and talking points on his Official Senate Website since Day 1.

   As our economy continues to recover, Michael believes we need to work together and start making the tough decisions necessary to put our nation's fiscal house in order. (What has Bennet done to make this principle policy? Nothing.-ed.) Putting the country on a sustainable, long-term fiscal path and bringing our debt under control is incredibly important to our economy and our standing in the world.

   Michael has been leading the fight for a comprehensive, bipartisan solution to our nation's unsustainable debt since joining the U.S. Senate in 2009. He's pushed for a balanced approach that materially reduces our deficit and demonstrates we're all willing to make the sacrifices necessary to reduce spending and reform our outdated tax code. That's why he voted against the eleventh-hour fiscal cliff package on New Year's Eve 2013 that was pushed through the Senate without any serious mechanism to reduce the debt.

   Now is his chance to come clean and let Colorado's voters know the truth about his concern for the economy and validate the lie that he was willing to lose his job in order to vote for a public option.

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   1. I truly believe Michael Bennet is willing to lose his job over a vote for Graham-Cassidy. 

      Funny how Pols always distracts from key progressive news by falling back on its failsafe superficial bullshit about Republicans all the time.  The only thing they believe in is their next consulting gig.

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      1. Go ZappAhab!!!   Go get Moby Dick er I mean Micahael Bennet.  Bennet lives the new Better Off Dead Act!  NOT!!!!

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         1. I think Zappy has become completely untethered. 

            I'd love to know what Bennet did to him to make him so batshit crazy.

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   2. Zap. Breathe. There is nothing in the CNN Money article you linked to showing that any Democrat, let alone Michael Bennet, plans on voting for the Graham-Cassidy POS.

      The only reference to Senate Dems in the article pumps up that they are "rallying troops for another fight."

      Just to be sure, I checked out Michael Bennet's twitter feed, and he seems to be pretty clearly against the latest iteration of Trumpcare:

      

      Now, I'd like Senator Bennet to be sponsoring the Berniecare single payer bill, and have asked him to do so. His explanations for "why not " seem lame. His grandstanding on Obamacare Take 1 was weak sauce. Nobody believed he'd lose his job over that vote, but Buck did come close to pushing Thurston out in 2010.

      Bennet certainly gambled away some of my retirement savings with his dealmaking as DPS Superintendent, and I don't trust how much he's in the pocket of his many rich donors.  But on Cassidy – Graham, Bennet seems on the side of the angels.

      Probably, Medicare For All can't pass this Congress right now. But it does keep the pressure on, and our eyes on the universal healthcare prize, so that we can take maybe baby steps (lowering Medicare age? Yoohoo! Buy in to Medicaid while increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates? Yes, ma'am! Laws prohibiting prescription price gouging and providing for direct negotiation with pharma? Absobulutely!) So if Thurston rejects even these baby steps, I'll be right there harpooning Bennet with you.

      So breathe. Then make your phone calls to both your Senators. You can yell at the poor Bennet staffer, if you must. They're used to it. Or go to a rally somewhere like the nice PCN folks tell you to do. It couldn't hurt, and you'll feel better.

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5. No idea how useful this is, but they have a table at Tech Crunch – http://www.99voices.org

    

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   1. DavidT – just missed your mom last week when I dropped by her office to say hi.  She's such a special lady.  Give her my regards the next time you talk to her. 

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   2. Their twitter feed shows only 11 tweets so far – not that impressive. And what exactly does this mean?

      The mission of 99Voices is to make transparent people’s views through corporate and political ratings by members of the 99 percent. The vision is to influence corporate and political change through the collective views of the people.

      If they're planning on  creating social change by Twitter trending, they'd better get busy. So ratings? Like a poll? Maybe. But they're going to have to grow fast.

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6. We're all #JohnKelly…

   

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7. Mark your Calendars, NOCO Polsters.

   

   Very proud of my Morgan County Dem organization. We get shit done.

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8. Yet another one of the GOP's deplorables……..

   https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/us/baton-rouge-shooting-killings.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=13&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2017%2F09%2F19%2Fus%2Fbaton-rouge-shooting-killings.html&eventName=Watching-article-click

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