Tag Archives: friends

College-Educated Millennials Don’t Have It So Bad

by AlicaXEVyjojk Posted on June 4, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Quoctrung Bui of the New York Times writes today about perceptions of massive unemployment among young college grads:

We asked: “What would you guess is the current unemployment rate for four-year college graduates between the ages of 25 and 34?”…The most common answers for college graduates were between 20 and 30 percent. Perhaps an understandable mistake….But what surprised us was that the majority of people thought that unemployment rates for those with college degrees were higher than for those without.

….We posed the same question to our friends and parents. Many have college degrees themselves; some are educators. They, too, mostly guessed that college graduates would be more likely to be unemployed than nongraduates….We ran the quiz one last time with the same question and anchor, structured as a multiple-choice quiz. This time, nearly half of the people in the survey guessed that college graduates had higher unemployment rates. We had to concede that we weren’t witnessing a mirage.

Are we — the news media — to blame?

Yes! Yes you are!

But I’ll cut you some slack. The range of 20-30 percent seems to be the American public’s go-to guess for just about everything in the news. What’s the percentage of gay people in the US? 20-30 percent. The inflation rate? 20-30 percent. Illegal immigrant population? 20-30 percent. Amount of the federal budget dedicated to foreign aid? 20-30 percent. Bird deaths from wind turbines? 20-30 percent.

As near as I can tell, anytime something becomes familiar enough to intrude on the public consciousness, it falls into the 20-30 percent trap. That seems to be the all-around perception of “a smallish but still newsworthy amount.”

That said, the news media still shares a lot of the blame for this, because they’re the ones who collectively decide how much to cover stuff. By over-covering the alleged employment woes of college-educated millennials, they encourage people to think the problem is worse than it is—and they distract attention from where the problem really is. The truth is quite different: even at the height of the Great Recession, the unemployment rate of college-educated millennials never cracked 5 percent other than momentarily. It was young high school grads who suffered from astronomical joblessness:

But wait! Maybe college grads got jobs, but they were all crappy jobs that paid peanuts. Not really. College-educated millennials took a beating during the Great Recession, just like everyone, but rebounded to their 2003-05 level after three years and have rebounded even further since. Young high school grads, by contrast, are still making about 10 percent less than they did in 2003-05:

(This is from Census table P-28 here if you feel like checking it out yourself.)

College-educated millennials get all the attention, but that’s not because they have it so bad. It’s largely because they loom large in the minds of the press corps—who are all college educated themselves—and because they’re verbal enough that they write a lot about themselves. High school grads, not so much. But they’re the ones who were really hit hard by the Great Recession.

View the original here:  

College-Educated Millennials Don’t Have It So Bad

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on College-Educated Millennials Don’t Have It So Bad

The Great Matt Bruenig-Neera Tanden Kerfuffle Sort of Explained

by RodgerQuinonez Posted on May 21, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I spent the afternoon catching up on the latest in the world of liberal scuffles. Here’s the background: Lefty gadfly Matt Bruenig got into a Twitter fight with Joan Walsh yesterday morning over the topic of young people supporting Bernie Sanders. It culminated with this from Bruenig: “I have a daughter too. Your pathetic ageism against young people (remember taunting them as “barely shaven”) is sickening to me.” About then, CAP president Neera Tanden weighed in with a light comment defending Walsh, which prompted this follow-up from Bruenig:

Tanden is—and has been for a long time—a Hillary staffer and ally, so it’s not unreasonable to suspect that she might have supported welfare reform in the 90s. But Tanden denies ever having supported it, which is believable on its face since (a) her family used welfare when she was growing up, and (b) she was in law school at the time welfare reform was being debated.1

In any case, Bruenig’s tweets were nasty, apparently unfounded, and a bit two-faced (charging Walsh with “ageism” followed by insulting Tanden as “geriatric”). So what happened next? I’ll get to that, but perhaps some of you don’t know who Neera Tanden is. You should. To the best of my memory, I’ve never interacted with her and don’t really know anything about her, but a bit of googling turned up this:

Her birthday is a deeply held secret. However, she was born in 1970 and says she’s 45 now, so it must be sometime after May 19.
Her brother attended USC and she attended UCLA. Woot! I approve already. We need less Ivy League and more West Coast in high places.
She uses the word “actually” a lot. Maybe she picked this up at UCLA.
She is the president of CAP, the Center for American Progress. CAP is a high-powered progressive think tank that most people think of as either a very influential mainstream liberal think tank or, if you want to be a little more insidery, as the Clinton family’s personal think tank.2 Being president of CAP is, as Joe Biden might say, a Big Effin Deal. Tanden is the kind of person who gets mentioned frequently as a possible chief-of-staff in a Hillary Clinton White House.
Here’s the Washington Post shortly after she took over CAP: “At 5 feet 2 inches tall, with an infectious laugh and impatience for ineptitude, Tanden brims with a moxie that can shift to sarcasm. Critics and allies alike describe her as an effective molder and messenger of intricate policy, as well as an expert practitioner of in-house politics. Friends say she is remarkably well-rounded: a model wife and mother, ideal company for a glass of wine, a perfect partner for spontaneous office dancing.” Yikes!

OK, so what happened next? Bruenig works for Demos, a lefty think tank (yeah, they’re everywhere), which got wind of his tweets and immediately apologized: “Sincerest apologies for @MattBruenig’s judgment and demeanor. It’s unacceptable and we’re on it. While @MattBruenig blogs with Demos, we do not condone personal attacks. We are dealing with this internally. Thank you for understanding. We value the important work you’ve done and continue to do. @neeratanden @joanwalsh” This afternoon Demos fired him:

Today, we are taking a harder look at how our staff, fellows and independent contractors engage on social media—and unfortunately, we are finding that we have not met our own standards of vigilance to ensure that nobody associated with Demos is crossing an important line. After our tweet apologizing for Matt’s personal attacks including the term “scumbag,” we received emails from multiple individuals who made it clear that we were not aware of the extent to which Matt has been at the center of controversies surrounding online harassment of people with whom he disagrees.

It was evidence of a pattern of behavior that is far out of line with our code of conduct. After multiple conversations, Matt Bruenig and Demos have agreed to disagree on the value of the attack mode on Twitter. We part ways on the effectiveness of these kinds of personalized, online fights and so we are parting ways as colleagues today. And just as we did with Matt three years ago when he first joined our blog, Demos will continue to find and amplify the voices of lesser-known progressive policy commentators to make for a more inclusive public sphere.

As their statement goes on to say, there’s an overlay of Bernie vs. Hillary in all this, and this prompted a flurry of Twitter condemnations of Demos. Glenn Greenwald was fairly typical:

So which was it? Was Bruenig fired for offending the great and good, or was he fired for being a jerk? It’s hard to say, isn’t it? Demos says it got a pile of emails that suggested a longtime pattern of “online harassment.” But the rest of us haven’t seen those emails, so who knows? They also say they had “multiple conversations” with Bruenig, and apparently he declined to just apologize and move on. It also sounds like he declined to rein in his behavior.

If you assume that Demos is telling this straight, it’s hard to see how they could hold onto him. This is the kind of thing that I’d normally call a non-firing offense, but only if the offender agrees there’s a problem and promises to rein it in. The risk of having an employee like this go completely ballistic at some point and write something either libelous or just plain repellent3 is too great. All of these tweets may have been on Bruenig’s private account, but he’s still very publicly associated with Demos—which is explicitly in the influence biz and has to be careful about making lots of random enemies just because one of its employees has a bit of a temper problem.

The whole thing is a damn shame. I hope Bruenig lands on his feet somewhere, but I’ll bet that any future employer will ask for pretty much the same promise about tone and harassment that Demos did. It’s a little hard to imagine any outfit in the think tank trade not caring about this. In the end, I suspect Matt Yglesias has the final word:

1It’s times like this I wish I still had access to Nexis so I could check this out, but I don’t.

2Dammit, is there a synonym for think tank?

3More repellent, anyway. You know what I mean.

Read the article: 

The Great Matt Bruenig-Neera Tanden Kerfuffle Sort of Explained

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Great Matt Bruenig-Neera Tanden Kerfuffle Sort of Explained

Americans Aren’t Really Very Angry — Except Toward Uncle Sam

by ZoilaSandes65 Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Are voters really angry this year? The Associated Press says no:

All that talk of an angry America?

An Associated Press-GfK poll finds that most Americans are happy with their friends and family, feel good about their finances and are more or less content at work. It’s government, particularly the federal government, that’s making them see red.

Hmmm. People are generally pretty happy with their finances and their personal lives, but they’re really pissed off at the federal government. We’ve seen this dynamic before. Here’s a long-term look at polling data from the Washington Post:

Anger toward the federal government has been on a steady upward trend ever since 2003 (though voters in 2016 are less angry than they were in 2014). And this trend is notably unaffected by economic conditions. Anger didn’t spike during the 2000 dotcom bust and it didn’t spike during the 2008 crash. So what’s going on? The obvious culprits are:

Fox News and the rest of the conservative outrage machine
The Iraq war, which explains why anger started to rise in 2003
The tea party, which explains the spike in 2010
The election of Barack Obama, which would explain a spike beginning around 2008 (there’s no data between 2004-2010)

Take your pick. Maybe it’s a combination of things. But the bottom line seems fairly simple: there’s voluminous data suggesting that, in general, Americans are fairly happy with their personal finances and fairly happy with their lives in general. As happy as they’ve ever been, anyway. But they’re pretty pissed off at the federal government. If there’s anything interesting to be said about voter anger, this is the puzzle to focus on.

Continue reading – 

Americans Aren’t Really Very Angry — Except Toward Uncle Sam

Posted in alternative energy, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Americans Aren’t Really Very Angry — Except Toward Uncle Sam

I’m a Transgender Man in North Carolina. Here’s What the Bathroom Law Means For Me.

by KitStringfield Posted on April 14, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Charlie Comero, a 35-year-old transgender man in Charlotte, North Carolina, was nervous about having to use women’s bathrooms after his state enacted HB2, a sweeping anti-LGBT law that says you can only use public facilities that match the sex on your birth certificate. So he decided to prepare: He printed cards (see photo below) to hand out to the women he met inside. We asked him to share his story below, in his own words, edited for length and clarity.

I grew up in Michigan, on a farm in a small town, and I moved to Charlotte almost four years ago to teach for a local high school. I was very nervous about moving to North Carolina—it’s technically the “Bible Belt”—but the truth is that Charlotte is amazing, liberal. I fell in love with the city and have stayed ever since.

Charlie Comero

Now, one person’s story is obviously not an example for the entire community. But I identify as a transgender man and as a nonbinary individual, which means I’ve never identified only as a girl or only as a boy—I’ve always identified as both. I wear men’s clothing, though I do have a closet full of five-inch high heels that I absolutely love and will never get rid of.

Growing up I always felt different from other girls and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Maybe it was a lack of representation of trans people in the media. And I didn’t see it growing up in a small town, so being transgender wasn’t an option, as far as I knew.

Not all transgender people decide to transition physically, but I decided to when I was 34 years old. It took me that long, and you know what got me there? The book The Alchemist: This talk of personal legend and embodying that, that’s what woke me up. I got a ton of support from the yoga community—I do yoga every day—and from the LGB and trans communities. Unfortunately my best friend stopped talking to me, and another dear friend changed how she acted toward me.

I probably started going into the men’s room when I was about six months into my physical transition, which is taking testosterone. I made my decision based on how I was being perceived in society. As soon as my voice got low and I was starting to be seen as male, that’s when I started going to the men’s bathroom. I was scared shitless. It was gross in there. It was liberating and scary. I had this fear that they were going to know I have a vagina. It took me a couple of weeks to realize no one in the men’s bathroom cares; there’s no way to know I wasn’t born with a biological penis.

The day HB2 became law, I was there to testify in front of the Senate, and I had my speech prepared. I was sitting there listening to the senators talk about how important this bill is and how it would protect women and children. If they really cared about women and children, Republicans would actually do things to help women and children, rather than making up some story about an imagined bogeyman walking into a women’s bathroom dressed in women’s clothes to rape women and children. It was absurd. I felt like I didn’t exist, like I wasn’t an equal human.

Afterward I was sitting down with my girlfriend at brunch and I asked her: Where do I go to the bathroom now? It’s literally against the law for me to use the men’s room, and it’s also risky. Even though I’m more than a year on testosterone—I’m getting facial hair, my hair has receded a little—I still don’t always pass as male. Or do I use the women’s room, follow the law, and clearly make people uncomfortable? We started going through the different examples of what would happen, what could happen, and she started crying because it became clear to her that I was at risk for getting hurt.

The first time I went back into a women’s bathroom, I was so nervous. I’m still nervous. I’ve created these cards—I keep them in my wallet. One time I was in a bathroom at a government center in Charlotte, and a woman asked what I was doing there. I tried handing her the card but she didn’t want to take it, she walked away. I saw her later in the hallway, and I said, “I didn’t mean to startle you.” She looked at me and said, “I hope I never make that mistake again.” I have no idea what she meant—I don’t think she knew what it meant to be a transgender man. And then the other day someone gave me a hug after I gave her my card. I don’t know if she recognized it because it’s been viral.

But here’s what I’m most afraid of: When they don’t say anything and just ignore me and leave, I’m afraid to leave the bathroom and to be met by that woman’s boyfriend or husband or an authority figure. Because I could easily be socked.

The senators who wrote this bill made it a lot more difficult for transgender people, because a lot of them have the gender on their driver’s license changed, but not their birth certificate. If I wanted to do that, I’d have to fly back to Michigan. Some of my friends would have to fly out of the country. Some people, depending on the state, have to go in front of judge, and some judges are not going to be cool with allowing a transgender person to make the change.

Last night I reached out to two really close transgender women friends who are people of color, because I’m worried about them, and they are both scared—they feel unsafe. I’m scared, yeah, I’m at risk, yeah, but not as much as them. They were already at risk before this bill, they were already a target, and now it’s multiplied. And that’s the thing that really upsets me—that this bill gives people permission to be bigots.

HB2 isn’t just about bathrooms. It’s stripping away all city ordinances that are in place to protect marginalized folks. Women, including those who aren’t transgender, are starting to realize this affects them, too. It puts all of us at risk unless you’re a white man. And who wrote the bill? White men. Isn’t that interesting?

Link:

I’m a Transgender Man in North Carolina. Here’s What the Bathroom Law Means For Me.

Posted in Anchor, bigo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on I’m a Transgender Man in North Carolina. Here’s What the Bathroom Law Means For Me.

This Genius Babysitter Created a Simple Game That Will Make Every Kid a Feminist

by AndreasLwm Posted on March 27, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

My friend Emily Stout is an actress in New York who baby-sits on the side. She created a game to play with little Sal, age 9, and it is so great that I have to share it with you. (Also what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t use it to point to your friends when they do something cool?)

(function(d, s, id) var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)0; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3”; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));

New favorite babysitting game:Every historical woman you can name earns you 10 seconds of Candy Crush. Each round…

Posted by

(if you can’t read that post, here’s what it says:)

New favorite babysitting game:

Every historical woman you can name earns you 10 seconds of Candy Crush. Each round lasts one minute.

Round 1 with Sal Liebman, age 9:

Sal: “Ummmm…..okay okay.

1) Harriet Tubman who invented an underground tunnel to free slaves, okay

2) Amelia Earhart, first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean, ummmm

3) Ann something, Ann something, Annie Mary? The first woman on Ellis island!

4) okay okay, umm, her name is Melba I think? Melba and she was the first African American trombone player in a symphony, like a real symphony, uhhhh

5) ugh this is hard, this is hard, can I do someone I know? Okay, my mom, one of the scientists at Columbia who watches yeast in the nighttime and the daytime…. Does that count?”

Me: “Is she a smart woman changing history?”

Sal: “Yeah…?”

Me: “Yeah, it counts.”

Sal: “Okay, one more and I get a full minute. Ahhh!! This is so hard! It’s hard cause I can only think of men right now!”

Me: “….whose problem is that?”

Sal: “Please can I have a whole minute?? Please?!”

Me: “No way if you can’t name me another lady! There are hundreds!”

Sal: “Uh, uh, okay, um, UM, Emily Stout, the best babysitter in the whole world with the silliest laugh and nicest person with so many fun things and games?!?”

Me: “…………………alright, yeah you got it.”

As one of the commenters put it on her post, “you’re doing the lord’s work.” Amen.

Continue reading here:

This Genius Babysitter Created a Simple Game That Will Make Every Kid a Feminist

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Stout, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Genius Babysitter Created a Simple Game That Will Make Every Kid a Feminist

Super Tuesday Is Looking a Lot Like Super Trumpday

by AltonMast09011 Posted on February 29, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. On the Republican side, Donald Trump continues to hold a commanding lead both nationally and in nearly every state being contested. No surprise there. But what happened on February 15 or thereabouts?

The Pollster chart on the right shows the state of play over the past few weeks. Since February 15, the non-Trump part of the field has gone nowhere. They attract almost exactly the same aggregate share of the vote today as they did two weeks ago. Trump, by contrast, has gained more than five points.

Is this a bandwagon effect, in which Trump has been picking up undecided voters who felt like they had permission to take him seriously after he won New Hampshire? Is it because Trump is picking up nearly all of the votes of the candidates who have dropped out of the race? Is it somehow related to the death of Antonin Scalia on February 13?

It’s a bit puzzling. Trump’s sudden spike comes after two months of holding pretty steady in the national polls. So what happened on February 15?

Visit source:  

Super Tuesday Is Looking a Lot Like Super Trumpday

Posted in ATTRA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Super Tuesday Is Looking a Lot Like Super Trumpday

Raw Data: Illegal Immigration From Mexico

by EdytheGates Posted on February 28, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Are unauthorized immigrants “pouring across the southern border”? Since Donald Trump said it, there’s automatically a strong chance that it’s a lie, and sure enough, it is.

According to Pew Research, the population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico peaked in 2007 at 6.9 million and has been dropping ever since. Currently it stands at 5.6 million. As the chart on the right shows, net migration from Mexico has been negative every year since 2008. But maybe the ones that are here are disproportionately murderers and rapists, as Trump also says. Nope. The number of unauthorized immigrants in US prisons is relatively small, and the bulk of the available research suggests that they’re incarcerated at lower rates than US citizens. It’s just another lie.

Source – 

Raw Data: Illegal Immigration From Mexico

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Raw Data: Illegal Immigration From Mexico

Hillary Clinton Crushes Bernie Sanders in South Carolina

by StefanieLuce Posted on February 28, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This is nuts. Yesterday Pollster had Hillary Clinton ahead in South Carolina by about 20 points. Today they added one new poll, and they have her ahead by 50 points—which is about what she won by.

Did Bernie really lose 30 points of support in the past two weeks? That’s what the polls seem to show. But why? And how did the press not pick up on this? Most of the coverage I’ve seen has suggested that, sure, Hillary is going to win, but she’s really being pressed in the black community and Bernie could do better than expected. But according to the exit polls, she ended up winning 84 percent of the black vote. And perhaps even more worryingly for Bernie, she even crushed him among voters who agree that our economic system favors the wealthy. That’s his wheelhouse, and he won only 30 percent of their vote.

We’ll know more after Tuesday, but this doesn’t look good for Sanders. If Hillary racks up a big win on Super Tuesday, she’ll be so far ahead in the delegate count she’ll be almost mathematically unbeatable. At that point, it will be pretty hard for him to justify staying in the race.

See original – 

Hillary Clinton Crushes Bernie Sanders in South Carolina

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Clinton Crushes Bernie Sanders in South Carolina

Will Conservatives Abandon Donald Trump in the General Election?

by VanitaBrydon50 Posted on February 27, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The New York Times has a big story this morning about the trials and tribulations of the Republican Party establishment in their efforts to stop Donald Trump. I would like to draw your attention to two things. First this:

Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump….A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.” No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.

….Mitt Romney had been eager to tilt the race, and even called Mr. Christie after he ended his campaign to vent about Mr. Trump and say he must be stopped. On the night of the primary, Mr. Romney was close to endorsing Mr. Rubio himself, people familiar with his deliberations said.

Yet Mr. Romney pulled back, instead telling advisers that he would take on Mr. Trump directly. After a Tuesday night dinner with former campaign aides, during which he expressed a sense of horror at the Republican race, Mr. Romney made a blunt demand Wednesday on Fox News: Mr. Trump must release his tax returns to prove he was not concealing a “bombshell” political vulnerability.

So why didn’t Romney just fund this Super-PAC himself? $10 million would be pocket change for him, and these PACs all know how to keep contributions anonymous if Romney had wanted that. It’s ridiculous that the Republican Party’s many zillionaires have all been unwilling to drop a few megabucks on this effort, and doubly ridiculous that Romney is willing to go public with his “horror” but wasn’t willing shell out to do something about it. Maybe that’s why he lost the 2012 race.

And there’s also this:

At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.

….While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination….Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

Mitch McConnell is the ultimate transactional politician. He never bothers with fancy justifications for what he wants to do; he just tells reporters that his goal is stop x or push y because it’s what he wants, and that’s that. It’s almost refreshing in a way.

So if he’s seriously suggesting that Republicans in significant numbers might break with Trump and hand the election to Hillary Clinton, he’s probably serious. He doesn’t play 11-dimensional chess. I’ve been frankly dubious about all the promises I’ve heard from conservatives about abandoning Trump even if he wins the nomination, and I still am. I think most of them will eventually invent some reason to “reluctantly” pull the lever for him thanks to their existential horror of a Hillary Clinton presidency. But who knows? If McConnell is up for it, maybe it’s a more serious possibility than I think.

Link – 

Will Conservatives Abandon Donald Trump in the General Election?

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will Conservatives Abandon Donald Trump in the General Election?

Friday Cat Blogging – 26 February 2016

by GertieMoffet Posted on February 26, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here is Hilbert resting magnificently on his red blanket on my desk. Upstairs, he has a gray-and-white polka dot blanket on Marian’s desk. I really need to clean this thing over the weekend. At this point, I think there might be more cat fur than actual blanket on my desk.

Link – 

Friday Cat Blogging – 26 February 2016

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 26 February 2016