Author Archives: TristanFrank

Ted Cruz Was the Most Tweeted Candidate on Tuesday Night

by TristanFrank Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m not even sure what this means, but it’s a slow news day and I figure a colorful chart might brighten things up. Everyone loves colorful charts, don’t they?

Anyway, a team of wonks from the Monkey Cage has put together a measure of Twitter activity during the Republican debate on Tuesday. Unfortunately, their software chose three shades of teal for three of the candidates, and I sure hope I got them right when I labeled the lines. Ted Cruz was apparently the most talked about by a large margin. This might be due solely to the fact that he got far more talking time than anyone else (13 minutes, vs. 11 minutes for the second-place Donald Trump). Ben Carson was the least talked about, and he also got the least talk time (about 9 minutes).

In any case, by the end of the debate (23:00) the top candidates were Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, and Trump. The other four had all faded to nothing. Oddly, while tweets about most of the candidates ebbed after the debate ended, Cruz continued to take off. His Twitter activity was higher at 11:30 than it was at any time during the debate. Make of this what you will.

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Ted Cruz Was the Most Tweeted Candidate on Tuesday Night

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John Roberts Just Saved the Republican Party From Itself

by TristanFrank Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that upheld a core tenet of the Affordable Care Act is good news for the millions of Americans whose health insurance was on the line. But it’s also, in a strange way, good news for a completely different group: the Republican politicians who have all but called for Obamacare to be shot into space on a rocket.

Had the court gone the other way, gutting federal subsidies while leaving the shell of the law on the books, congressional Republicans, as well as GOP governors such as Scott Walker and Chris Christie, would have been put in the uncomfortable position they’ve managed to avoid since Obamacare was signed into law—having to fix it. The Associated Press outlined Walker’s dilemma neatly on Wednesday:

About 183,000 people in Wisconsin purchase their insurance through the exchange and nine out of 10 of them are receiving a federal subsidy, according to an analysis of state data by Wisconsin Children and Families. The average tax credit they receive is $315 a month.

Health care advocates who have been critical of Walker for not taking federal money to pay for expanding Medicaid coverage have also called on the Republican second-term governor to prepare for the subsidies to be taken away.

And many of those Wisconsonites enrolled in the federal exchange are there because Walker put them there. As Bloomberg’s Joshua Green noted in a prescient piece in March, Walker booted 83,000 people from the state’s Medicaid program and put them on the federal exchange instead. That’s not the kind of crisis you want to be dealing with in the middle of a presidential campaign—or ever.

Conservatives would have been thrilled with a ruling in their favor on Thursday. But Roberts’ decision spares Walker and his colleagues from what would have come next, and frees them to continue lobbing rhetorical bombs at the law they’re now stuck with. As previous generations of Washington Republicans can advise, it’s much easier to go to war if you don’t need a plan for how to end it.

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John Roberts Just Saved the Republican Party From Itself

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Marco Rubio Wants to Make Neocons Cool Again

by TristanFrank Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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All-but-announced presidential candidate Jeb Bush caused a stir recently when he cited his brother, former President George W. Bush, as a top policy adviser on the Middle East. But it’s fellow Floridian Sen. Marco Rubio who has made a Bush-era neoconservative foreign policy a centerpiece of his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

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Marco Rubio Wants to Make Neocons Cool Again

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