Tag Archives: kevin drum

Chart of the Day: The Sean Spicer Show

by AWJCheri40066421 Posted on May 30, 2017

Mother Jones

Here’s a fun chart from Media Matters:

(Note: I have switched the colors in the graph to the correct red-state-blue-state representation.)

The remarkable thing here is not that President Obama’s press secretary was televised so little. That’s normal. The remarkable thing is that President Trump’s press secretary is televised so much. This is, pretty obviously, not because Spicer is singularly transparent and produces loads of news. It’s because the guy is a train wreck and we can’t look away.

But here’s a question: the standard excuse for this is that Spicer gets great ratings. But does he? I know he did in his first few weeks, but are his ratings still higher than ordinary news? I can’t seem to find any evidence one way or another.

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Chart of the Day: The Sean Spicer Show

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Senate Intelligence Committee Gets Ready to Start Dishing Out Subpoenas

by PQYJeanett Posted on May 30, 2017

Mother Jones

Michael Cohen is in the news again. Not for this:

But because he’s been “invited” to testify before the Senate committee investigating the Trump-Russia connection:

“I declined the invitation to participate, as the request was poorly phrased, overly broad and not capable of being answered,” Cohen told ABC News in an email Tuesday.

After Cohen rejected the congressional requests for cooperation, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to grant its chairman, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, and ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, blanket authority to issue subpoenas as they deem necessary.

Martin Longman didn’t expect this:

It’s still a bit premature to be effusive or unreserved in my praise here. But I have to give credit where it is due. The Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have shown courage here and real indications of seriousness. I wouldn’t have predicted it but I’m willing to acknowledge it now.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has historically been more serious and bipartisan than most committees, so this is probably not quite as surprising as it seems. Nonetheless, it’s good to see some confirmation that there are still a few redoubts of integrity in Donald Trump’s Washington DC.

Link:  

Senate Intelligence Committee Gets Ready to Start Dishing Out Subpoenas

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Democrats Don’t Brag Enough About the Stuff They Do

by BufordDelvalle Posted on May 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago Paul Krugman wrote about the Trump double-cross:

Let’s talk about West Virginia, which went Trump by more than 40 percentage points, topped only by Wyoming. What did West Virginians think they were voting for?

They are, after all, residents of a poor state that benefits immensely from federal programs: 29 percent of the population is on Medicaid, almost 19 percent on food stamps. The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare is the main reason the percentage of West Virginians without health insurance has halved since 2013.

….Trumpcare, the budget office tells us, would cause 23 million people to lose health insurance, largely through cuts to Medicaid….Then we need to add in the Trump budget, which calls for further drastic cuts in Medicaid, plus large cuts in food stamps and in disability payments. What would happen to West Virginia if all these Trump policies went into effect? Basically, it would be apocalyptic.

….So many of the people who voted for Donald Trump were the victims of an epic scam by a man who has built his life around scamming. In the case of West Virginians, this scam could end up pretty much destroying their state. Will they ever realize this, and admit it to themselves? More important, will they be prepared to punish him the only way they can — by voting for Democrats?

Since I happened to be chatting about this yesterday, I want to offer an alternative explanation for what’s going on here. More accurately, I guess, it’s a supplementary explanation, since there’s not much question that Donald Trump has indeed pulled a very long con on voters like the ones in West Virginia.

Basically it’s this: what do you expect if Democrats don’t support their own policies? For the past five years, Republicans have battered Obamacare as the most horrific policy ever enacted. Democrats have—what? Hidden under rocks, mostly. Moderates looked at the polls and decided to avoid even talking about Obamacare. Progressives mostly scorned it as a piece of crap and spent their energy explaining why we should all support single-payer instead. So what’s the result? Lots of people think Obamacare is horrific. After all, that’s what one side says, and the other side hardly even fights back.

West Virginians on Medicaid probably have no idea they’re getting it via Obamacare. West Virginians who buy insurance from Healthcare.gov probably have no idea they’re insured via Obamacare. West Virginians who got a payroll tax break early in the Obama years probably have no idea they even got it, let alone that it came from Democrats. West Virginians who got new roads or schools from the stimulus program probably have no idea it came from Democrats. West Virginians who got an increase in the minimum wage in 2007-09 probably have no idea it was passed by Democrats.

On the other hand, they certainly do know that Obamacare is destroying the nation; that Democrats want to take away their guns; that Mexicans took away all their jobs; that Obama wanted to let a flood of ISIS terrorists into the country; and that fanatical leftists want to allow men into their daughters’ bathrooms.

Republicans are going to say what they’re going to say. There’s not much you can do to stop them from lying. What you can do is to loudly and proudly demand credit for the stuff you’ve done. If no one really knows that you subsidized their insurance or provided them with Medicaid or raised their wages or built them new schools, you can hardly expect them to vote for you.

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Democrats Don’t Brag Enough About the Stuff They Do

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Camera Collection Update

by FrancineCoote Posted on May 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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I have a new camera, so that means I need to update my camera gallery. This time I took a family photo, and then practiced my Photoshop skillz by erasing the background so they all look like they’re floating in air. I’m really bad at this kind of thing because I can’t draw a straight line with a mouse to save my life. So it was good practice even if it was kind of tedious.

Anyway, here it is: 80 years of Drum family cameras. More details in this old post if you’re curious about them.

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Camera Collection Update

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Trump Tweets Get Ever More Divorced From Reality

by Brendoncero Posted on May 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has a long history of tweeting nonsense, but this might be his most unbelievable tweet ever:

Uh huh. I’ll bet he’s going to dive right into that report. He lives for this kind of bedside reading.

In other news, you can ignore all that Kushner stuff you’ve been reading about. The Times and the Post are just inventing it. “It is very possible that those sources don’t exist but are made up by fake news writers,” Trump says. I’m glad he’s finally put this to rest.

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Trump Tweets Get Ever More Divorced From Reality

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Quote of the Day #2: Tax Plans

by ByronHUYuap Posted on May 26, 2017

Mother Jones

The Wall Street Journal provides an example of the criticism leveled at Donald Trump’s press operation:

Some Trump advisers have also questioned the judgment of communications officials, citing as an example the rollout of a tax-plan outline in April that featured Goldman Sachs alumnae Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Gary Cohn, the National Economic Council director.

“The left is automatically going to say the tax plan is tailored to the rich and to Wall Street. And we just gave them an image of the rich and of Wall Street,” one Trump former campaign official said.

First off, who else is going to roll out a tax plan? The Secretary of Defense?

Second, the left isn’t automatically going to say the tax plan is tailored to the rich and to Wall Street. We’re going to say that if it actually is tailored to the rich and to Wall Street. But the confusion here is easy to understand since Republican plans are always tailored to the rich and to Wall Street. That makes it hard to parse responses from the left, I suppose.

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Quote of the Day #2: Tax Plans

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Friday Cat Blogging – 26 May 2017

by IsabelFlanigan4 Posted on May 26, 2017

Mother Jones

Someone in comments the other day was kvetching about the fact observing that I tend to crop my photos pretty tightly, and that’s true. I like sharp, tightly-cropped pictures. Still, variety is the spice of life, and my fondness for close-ups means that you rarely get to see Hilbert or Hopper in action. I use the word “action” advisedly, since that mostly just means walking around. But even that’s something, so today you get an exciting action shot of Hilbert.

Even with the fancy new camera, this is surprisingly hard to do. Cats in motion are frequently blurry or out of focus, and the follow-focus feature of the Lumix is pretty hit-or-miss. All that said, here it is. Photographic proof that Hilbert doesn’t just sit around 24 hours a day.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 26 May 2017

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The Blue-Slip Rule Is On Its Last Legs

by VictoriOConor Posted on May 26, 2017

Mother Jones

The Washington Post confirms what we’ve already heard about Senate Republicans doing away with the blue-slip rule:

Leaders are considering a change to the Senate’s “blue slip” practice, which holds that judicial nominations will not proceed unless the nominee’s home-state senators signal their consent to the Senate Judiciary Committee….Removing the blue-slip obstacle would make it much easier for Trump’s choices to be confirmed. Although Trump and Senate Republicans have clashed early in his presidency, they agree on the importance of putting conservatives on the federal bench.

….The Senate acted Thursday on Trump’s first appeals-court nomination, elevating U.S. District Judge Amul Thapar of Kentucky to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

….“Eliminating the blue slip is essentially a move to end cooperation between the executive and legislative branch on judicial nominees, allowing nominees to be hand-picked by right-wing groups,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, wrote in a memo this week. She pointed out that the vacancy for which Thapar is nominated exists only because McConnell refused to return a blue slip for Obama’s nominee, Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Lisabeth Tabor Hughes. The seat has been vacant since 2013, and Tabor Hughes never received a hearing, because blue slips were not returned.

Christopher Kang, who advised Obama on judicial nominations, said that was the reason 17 of the president’s picks did not receive hearings, killing the nominations. But the impact was even greater than that, because Obama gave up on trying to find nominees in some states, such as Texas, with two Republican senators. One vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, has been open for five years.

Were Republicans snickering in private for six years because Democrats continued to be Boy Scouts during the Obama presidency, respecting the blue-slip rule despite blanket Republican opposition of the kind that Republicans now say will prompt them to kill it? Probably. Was it the right thing to do anyway? I guess I’m still unsure. But it sure doesn’t look like it.

The Brookings table above shows the effect of all this for circuit court vacancies. The absolute numbers aren’t huge, but both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama simply gave up nominating judges in states where there were any Republican senators. They would object as a matter of course and their objections would be honored. George Bush, by contrast, continued nominating judges everywhere. Democratic senators sometimes objected, but not always—and Republicans often ignored their objections anyway when they controlled the Senate.

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The Blue-Slip Rule Is On Its Last Legs

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Gianforte Issues Stomach-Turning “Apology”

by Frederick Cunningham Posted on May 26, 2017

Mother Jones

Yesterday Greg Gianforte melted down and assaulted a reporter who tried to ask him a question. Today he issued one of the most repugnant apologies I’ve ever heard:

Yesterday, when it might have hurt his election chances, Gianforte went the full Trump: he belligerently denied doing anything wrong and issued a craven statement that basically blamed Ben Jacobs for assaulting Gianforte’s fist with his nose. His supporters all roared their approval. That Jacobs guy had it coming for having the bad manners to ask a question about some breaking news.

Now, when there’s no longer any price for apologizing, he apologizes. That’s squalid enough. But to pretend that he’s manning up is just stomach turning. What a disgusting human being.

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Gianforte Issues Stomach-Turning “Apology”

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Obamacare Is Pretty Stable — Unless Republicans Cripple It

by KristiPaton Posted on May 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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The CSR subsidies that President Trump keeps threatening to kill are pretty important:

Here in California, our insurance commissioner has asked all health insurers for two sets of rate hike requests: one that assumes the CSR subsidies continue and one that assumes they don’t. We won’t get the rate requests for several weeks, but I expect that we’ll see the same kind of difference. At a guess, average rate increase requests will be around 6 percent with CSR and 15 percent without.

Just to be crystal clear about this: What this means is that if Republicans stop screwing around with CSR, rate hikes nationwide would probably be in the 5-10 percent range, which is fairly normal. It also shows that the market has started to stabilize after last year’s big increases. The only reason we’re likely to see another year of big increases is because of a deliberate campaign to undermine the Obamacare market by Republicans.

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Obamacare Is Pretty Stable — Unless Republicans Cripple It

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