Tag Archives: sargent

We Still Have 1,496 More Days of Trump to Go

by MizunoC36rm Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump was eager this morning to fight back against the news that Vladimir Putin worked hard to get him elected:

Greg Sargent comments:

By referring to this episode, what Trump is inadvertently revealing here is that, yes, the complaint about Russian hacking to hurt Clinton did in fact precede the election, and this was widely and publicly known. Of course, there is ample other evidence that Trump is fully aware of this. The intel community had publicly declared it weeks before the election. Trump had reportedly been privately briefed on it by U.S. officials. Trump was confronted with evidence of the hack at a debate with Clinton that was watched by tens of millions of people. At the debate, he cast doubt on the notion that Russia had hacked the materials to hurt Clinton. And yet, as Mark Murray points out, Trump himself widely referenced the material dug up in the hacks at rallies, where he used that material to — wait for it — try to damage Clinton.

Yeah, Trump knows all this. He just doesn’t care. He knows that most people have poor memories for this kind of stuff and are likely to believe him if he says nobody talked about the Russian hacking during the campaign. Give him a few months and he’ll be tweeting about how no one brought up health care during the election, so why are they all so upset about it now?

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We Still Have 1,496 More Days of Trump to Go

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Don’t Worry About the Polls. Nothing Much Really Happened Today.

by KatheriKSJL Posted on July 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton has had a couple of poor showings in the polls recently, but I mostly shrugged them off. It was inevitable that she’d take a hit from the conclusion of the FBI email probe, but those kinds of things are almost always temporary. And it’s only July, anyway. Polls won’t start to mean too much until the middle of August.

That’s just my two cents, but Greg Sargent reports that it’s pretty much the opinion of the pros too:

I spent some time talking to senior Democrats today, and the basic feeling among them is this: Yes, it’s very possible Clinton did take a real hit from the FBI news. But if so, they see this as more of a temporary dip than anything else. They see the polling right now as mostly useless, since we will know a lot more about the race once both candidates choose their vice presidential running mates and the conventions take place later this month.

….One senior Democrat with access to a lot of private polling tells me that some surveys in states and districts where Clinton should be leading are showing her tied or slightly behind. But this senior Dem thinks the data probably reflects a momentary dip due to bad coverage of the FBI mess….Top Dem pollster Mark Mellman, for instance, conceded that Clinton may have taken a real hit. But he noted that the current polls, if anything, still show her up after a very tough stretch, leading into a period that could prove more favorable to her.

The fact that a man like Donald Trump is even within shouting distance of becoming president is reason enough to be nervous. But small blips in the polls don’t really add anything to that. If you’re the jittery type, stay away from the poll madness until next month.

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Don’t Worry About the Polls. Nothing Much Really Happened Today.

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Donald Trump’s Beautiful Chinese Ties

by NancyTisdall55 Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent on Donald Trump’s continuing appeal:

One core assumption driving Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is this: Voters will see even the seamier details of Trump’s business past as a positive, because even if he got rich by milking the corrupt system, Trump is now here to put his inside knowledge of the corrupt system to work on behalf of America — on your behalf. Trump has repeatedly said this himself in various forms.

In other words, he may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard. But Sargent wonders if he can survive stuff like the video excerpt on the right. “Where are the ties made?” David Letterman asks. From offstage comes the answer: “The ties are made in China.” Trump doesn’t even respond. He just smirks. Sargent: “This suggests once again that there is no reason to assume that the big debate over globalization and trade will necessarily play to Trump’s advantage. Democrats will be able to point out that Trump repeatedly profited off of foreign labor in ways that he himself now claims sell out American workers.”

Could be! It’s not clear at this point that Trump can do anything that his fans won’t forgive, but maybe this will do it. For more details, the New York Times has you covered.

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Donald Trump’s Beautiful Chinese Ties

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This chart shows the United States’ mind-blowing clean energy potential

by DanelleGirardin Posted on March 30, 2016

This chart shows the United States’ mind-blowing clean energy potential

By on 30 Mar 2016commentsShare

The United States uses about 3.7 million gigawatt-hours of electricity each year. That’s an unfathomably huge number. But the next time someone tries to make the argument that 100 percent renewable energy is out of reach for the U.S., show them this image:

Environment America Research & Policy Center

All of U.S. electricity usage is down there at the bottom right. Everything else is the States’ renewable potential.

Earlier this year, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory released a report that said the United States’ upper ceiling on rooftop solar generation potential was around 39 percent of all U.S. electricity sales. That’s the tiny yellow circle in the middle. The potential of utility-scale solar? 350 times that li’l guy.

In a new report from Environment America Research & Policy Center — where this image appears — researchers lay out the achievability of a U.S. transition to 100 percent renewable energy. “There’s no question of whether or not there’s enough renewable energy,” said Rob Sargent, a program director at Environment America, on a press call. It’s more a function of how to achieve such a transition.

The recommendations in the report will sound familiar. If we want to make it to a 100 percent renewable future, we need to start by ramping up solar and wind production, shifting toward electric vehicles, pumping dollars into energy storage research, and taking advantage of energy savings and efficiency programs.

But maybe more than anything, we need to take a good long gander at that bowling ball of renewable generation potential and convince ourselves that carving out a grape’s-worth is within our power.

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This chart shows the United States’ mind-blowing clean energy potential

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Anger at the Plutocracy Isn’t Strong Enough to Make a Big Difference in November

by Veta68O Posted on April 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent writes today that the Democratic strategy of going after the Koch brothers isn’t about the Kochs per se, but “a gamble on what swing voters think has happened to the economy, and on the reasons struggling Americans think they aren’t getting ahead”:

Dems are making an argument about what has happened to the economy, and which party actually has a plan to do something about it. Today’s NBC/WSJ poll finds support for the general idea that the economy is not distributing gains fairly and is rigged against ordinary Americans….The Democratic case is that the all-Obamacare-all-the-time message is merely meant to mask the GOP’s lack of any actual affirmative economic agenda, and even reveals the GOP’s priorities remain to roll back any efforts by Dems to ameliorate economic insecurity.

….I don’t know if the Dem strategy will work.

I think Sargent’s skepticism is warranted. The problem is that the NBC/WSJ poll he mentions doesn’t find an awful lot of evidence for seething anger. Here are the basic results:

Those are not really huge margins. The first question in particular is one they’ve been asking for two decades, and 55-39 is a very typical result, especially during times of economic weakness.

Given this, and given the extreme difficulty of a party in power taking advantage of economic discontent, will the Democratic strategy of bludgeoning Republicans over their plutocratic leanings work? I doubt it. Specific agenda items like a higher minimum wage, health care success stories, and universal pre-K seem more likely to work. At the margins, a bit of Koch bashing and a few high-profile Wall Street indictments might help a bit too, but only as an added fillip.

Oh, and a nice, short, decisive war against some minor global bad guy would also do wonders. In October, maybe.

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Anger at the Plutocracy Isn’t Strong Enough to Make a Big Difference in November

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Only Republicans Believe Obamacare Is Doomed

by Aaron Duff Posted on November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent points us this morning to the latest CNN poll on Obamacare, and it shows that despite all the rollout problems, attitudes toward the law haven’t changed an awful lot:

There are some additional crosstabs at the link, and Sargent points out that they paint a cautiously positive picture:

The poll also finds 54 percent believe current problems facing the law will eventually be solved, versus 45 percent who don’t. Again, that latter sentiment is driven by Republicans: Independents think they will be solved by 50-48; moderates by 55-43. By contrast, Republicans overwhelmingly believe they won’t be solved by 72-27.

Crucially, young Americans — who are important to the law’s success – overwhelmingly believe the problems will be solved (71 percent). Part of the campaign by Republicans to persuade Americans that the law’s doom is inevitable is about dissuading people from enrolling, to turn that into a self fulfilling prophesy.

Republicans are convinced the law is already a failure. And why wouldn’t they? The Fox News bubble has been telling them that for months. But the rest of the country is willing to give it a chance and thinks its problems will probably be solved. When they are, support will go up even higher.

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Only Republicans Believe Obamacare Is Doomed

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