Month: October 2018

“A transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before”

by digby

I would post the scary new story about the fact that we’re all going to die from climate change much earlier than we thought but I thought maybe Margaret Sullivan’s meta story about it might be easier to take:

After a week of dire news — the certainty of our ruptured nation, the likelihood of a journalist being murdered — the United Nations’ report on climate change was, for some people, a bridge too far.

“I heard something about it,” a normally well-informed friend told me, “but I’m on a week-long hiatus from the news.”

For those who were still able to take it in, the report could hardly have been more frightening: By 2040 — only 22 years from now — the world will be in deep trouble, according to the unassailable expertise of the U.N.’s experts. Food shortages, wildfires and the mass death of coral reefs are just some of the dangers.

Getting the planet’s warming under even a modicum of control requires a fast-moving “transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before,” The Washington Post reported.

That story on the report was the most prominent one on The Post’s home page on Monday morning, and in almost as prominent a place in the New York Times, as well as both papers’ print front pages. It got prominent attention on TV, too.

But it will need sustained emphasis, by the media and the public, all over the world, if we stand a chance of maintaining a livable planet.

“A bracing reminder that every issue we devote attention to other than climate change is really a secondary issue,” wrote Philip Gourevitch, author and New Yorker staff writer, on Twitter about the report.

And The Post quoted Erik Solheim, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program: “It’s like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen. We have to put out the fire.”

That will be very much against the grain for the distraction-prone media and the news-weary public.

Recall that in the three presidential debates, not a single question was asked about climate change. Nor was it raised in the vice presidential debate.

Since his election, President Trump has turned his back on national and global efforts to control the problem — essentially saying it’s going to happen anyway so why bother to try to stop it?

Meanwhile, there is so much else to distract us at every turn.

Taylor Swift, we learned on Sunday, has broken her vow to keep out of politics, declaring her support to Tennessee Democrats.

Trump is holding raucous rallies and tweeting at every turn, portraying his political opposition as a dangerous mob of arsonists — and all but ignoring the Times’s groundbreaking 18-month-long investigation that revealed fraud and deception in his, and his family’s, finances over decades.

There is just so much happening at every moment, so many trees to distract from the burning forest behind them. And some of that news seems more important: Certainly the apparent murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Post global opinions columnist, deserves our immediate attention.

So it’s hard to sustain interest in the environment. It’s not easy to find a compelling, immediate angle to compete with palace intrigue or horse-race politics.

“There’s not a lot of news in this area — we’re watching glaciers melting — so there isn’t an urgency to get things into the paper right away,” Elisabeth Rosenthal, then a New York Times science reporter, told me in 2013.

Just as the world, especially the United States, needs radical change to mitigate the coming crisis, so too for the news media.

Journalists and news organizations all over the world — but especially in America — need their own transformation.

This subject must be kept front and center, with the pressure on and the stakes made abundantly clear at every turn.

There is a lot happening in the nation and the world, a constant rush of news. Much of it deserves our attention as journalists and news consumers. But we need to figure out how to make the main thing matter.

In short, when it comes to climate change, we — the media, the public, the world — need radical transformation, and we need it now.

Just as the smartest minds in earth science have issued their warning, the best minds in media should be giving sustained attention to how to tell this most important story in a way that will creates change.

We may be doomed even if that happens.

But we’re surely doomed if it doesn’t.

That’s going to happen right?

Right???

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Oh Lisa? They don’t want you …

by digby

Alaska has an Independent Governor. Lisa Murkowski might have to become one too:

Alaska Republican party leaders plan to consider whether to reprimand U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski for opposing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The party has asked Murkowski to provide any information she might want its state central committee to consider.

Party Chairman Tuckerman Babcock says the committee could decide to issue a statement. Or he says it could withdraw support of Murkowski, encourage party officials to look for a replacement and ask that she not seek re-election as a Republican.

He says the party took that more extreme step previously with state legislators who caucused with Democrats.

He says all this follows outrage from Alaska Republicans.

Well, one Republicans says it’s all over for her:

President Trump predicted Saturday that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) “will never recover” politically for her vote against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh as he celebrated his nominee’s ascension following an extraordinarily brutal confirmation process.

In a brief telephone interview with The Washington Post, Trump said voters in Alaska “will never forgive” Murkowski for voting against confirming Kavanaugh, and he forecast her defeat in a Republican primary should she run for reelection in 2022.

“I think she will never recover from this,” Trump said. “I think the people from Alaska will never forgive her for what she did.”

Trump is an idiot so he knows nothing. And the locals seem to have forgotten that she won her last election in a write-in vote against the Republican candidate. Alaska voters wanted her so much that they learned how to spell Murkowski right so their votes would all count.

These Alaskans are very, very dumb. She could decide to caucus with the Democrats and could still win. I don’t doubt that Mitch got on the horn the minute he heard this.

By the way, Sarah Palin is threatening to run against her in 2022 over the Kavanaugh vote. But she’ll quit before it ever gets started.

by digby

“Lock them Up”

Trump, talking with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, said he hated watching the slew of sexual assault allegations grow against Kavanaugh and dubbed all the accusations “fabrications” with “not a bit of truth.”  

“I think that they should be held liable,” Trump told Pirro. “You can’t go around and whether it’s making up stories or making false statements about such an important position, you can’t do that. You can destroy somebody’s life.”

Bringing a Dish Rag to Nuclear War 

by tristero

Chuck Grassley on Sunday:

“I hope the battle cry of Republicans for the next 30 days will be ‘Remember Kavanaugh,’” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Judiciary Committee chairman, at a Republican dinner Sunday in Iowa. 

But Democrats have even a better strategy to help Republicans win. Instead of making “Remember Kavanaugh” their battle cry, the Dems have decided to fold. It’s an absolutely perfect strategy to lose every single election next month.

[T]he terms of the debate have shifted profoundly for Democratic Senate candidates.
From North Dakota and Missouri to Montana and Tennessee, they have been trying to localize races, either ignoring Mr. Trump or highlighting their willingness to work with him while playing down the court fight and emphasizing regional issues. 

In Montana, Senator Jon Tester and his allies have been assailing his Republican opponent, Matt Rosendale, a Maryland native, as an East Coast real estate developer. In Missouri, Senator Claire McCaskill has taken every chance to highlight the Ivy League and law professor background of her challenger, Josh Hawley. 

At the same time, Phil Bredesen, the Democratic Senate nominee in Tennessee, has done just about everything he can to distance himself from national Democrats. He has spent much of his campaign talking about his tenure as governor and as Nashville’s mayor, and even tried to inject the invasion of Asian carp in the state’s waterways as an issue in the race. 

And Ms. Heitkamp has portrayed herself as a champion of North Dakota’s farmers and ranchers, recording ads of herself standing in knee-high soybean fields. 

Posing with soybeans?? Asian carp??? What the fuck??? And we think Trump is crazy?

And when they all lose — which they surely will with such a weak-kneed strategy — Democratic leaders will take that as proof that Kavanaugh was the reason, not simply that the Democrats’ devised a strategy that projected weakness, cowardice, and cluelessness.

Authoritarian wingnuts rising — Trump’s potential new boyfriend

by digby

The first round of voting occurred in Brazil’s presidential election yesterday. This man received nearly 50% of the vote and almost won outright. He is the favorite to win the runoff:

Many people in Brazil cannot bring themselves to utter the name of the rightwing extremist expected to win the first round of voting in the country’s presidential election on Sunday. On social networks, the former army officer Jair Bolsonaro is often referred to simply as “the thing”.

To understand why Bolsonaro evokes such dread, consider some of the things he has said in the last few years:

• “I had four sons, but then I had a moment of weakness, and the fifth was a girl.”

• “I’m not going to rape you, because you’re very ugly” – to a female representative in Congress.

• “I’d rather have my son die in a car accident than have him show up dating some guy.”

• “I’m pro-torture, and the people are too.”

• “They don’t do anything. I don’t think they’re even good for procreation any more” – referring to quilombolas, the black descendants of rebel African slaves.

• “You can be sure that if I get there [the presidency], there’ll be no money for NGOs. If it’s up to me, every citizen will have a gun at home. Not one centimetre will be demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas.”

• “You won’t change anything in this country through voting – nothing, absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, you’ll only change things by having a civil war and doing the work the military regime didn’t do. Killing 30,000, starting with FHC [former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso]. Killing. If a few innocent people die, that’s alright.”

Bolsonaro has also said he will not accept the election result unless he is the winner – only to backtrack after a negative reaction.

When president Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ party (PT) was forced from office in 2016 through an impeachment process of dubious legal merit, Bolsonaro viciously dedicated his vote “to the memory of colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra”. Ustra was one of the most sadistic torturers and murderers in the military dictatorship that choked Brazil between 1964 and 1985. He died without answering for his crimes.

For this election, Bolsonaro’s children and supporters have printed the torturer’s face on their T-shirts, with the phrase “Ustra lives!”.

By celebrating Ustra, Bolsonaro has rekindled the horror of that period. And he can do it only because Brazil has never punished those who tortured, kidnapped and killed in the name of the state. Bolsonaro is the monstrous product of Brazilian democracy’s silence about the crimes committed by its former dictatorship.

Bolsonaro embodies the grimmest forces of old and new Brazil

In August, Ludimilla Teixeira, a black anarchist born in one of the poorest communities of Salvador, Bahia, created a Facebook page: Women United Against Bolsonaro. The page, which accepts only female followers, now has almost 4 million of them. A movement grew out of this group, last week spurring hundreds of thousands of women – and men – on to the streets of Brazil and around the world. Many carried banners with the slogan and hashtag: #EleNão – #NotHim. It was the biggest demonstration organised by women in Brazil’s history.

Famous Brazilian women recorded videos explaining why #NotHim. Considering everything the far-right candidate has said in public, such explaining might seem unnecessary, but this is a feature of today’s Brazil – and today’s world.

Explaining hasn’t had any effect. Bolsonaro is less a post-truth phenomenon than a phenomenon of what I call self-truth. The content of what he says doesn’t matter: what matters is the act of saying it. Aesthetics have replaced ethics. By saying everything and anything, no matter how violent, he is labelled truthful or sincere by his voters at a time when politicians are being shunned as frauds and liars. At the same time, “truth” has become an absolute and a personal choice. The individual has been taken to a radical extreme.

Bolsonaro, “the thing”, is a retired army captain. He’s being sold as new to voters, but he’s anything but. In his 26 years as a federal lawmaker, he managed to pass only two of his proposed laws.

Meanwhile, his running mate, retired general Hamilton Mourão, has said publicly that, if elected, the president could launch a self-coup backed by the military.

Bolsonaro embodies the grimmest forces of old and new Brazil. Most grileiros(public land grabbers) and big farmers support him in the Amazon – one of the regions that will be hit hardest if he is elected. Brazil ranks as the deadliest country for environmental activists, and there is the grave potential for violence to explode, along with greater deforestation, if Bolsonaro wins.

In the cities, he has the support of the leaders of evangelical religious empires, who defend the concept that marriage is possible only between a man and a woman. The far-right candidate also leads among wealthier, more educated men, reflecting the calibre of the Brazilian elites.

In addition to his staunch supporters, he attracts a slice of the population that is simply anti-PT. These people hate the PT for many reasons. Some because under former presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Rousseff, the party reduced poverty, widened university access to black students, and strengthened rights for housemaids – for a long time, a form of modern slavery in Brazil. Others because they cannot forgive a party that rose to power promising change, only to become corrupted and aloof. Poor, mostly black, women are most vociferously against Bolsonaro.

During the first decade of this century, Brazil appeared to be a country that was finally reaching for the future. Now it seems mired in the past. The violence of this election has plunged Brazilians into a kind of collective convulsion. There is no other subject; people are starting to feel sick with fear. On the left, the reality of a dictator’s defender being the choice of 39% of voters, according to recent polls, is more frightening than any dystopian fiction.

He got 46%.

This is happening.

Despite misgivings, Brazil's business community begins coalescing around far-right candidate. https://t.co/KZECf2UdPn— The Associated Press (@AP) October 6, 2018

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Politics and Reality Radio: Dahlia Lithwick on Kavanaugh | Ari Berman With a Voting Rights Roundup | How Overt Sexism Became a Partisan Thing

with Joshua Holland

We have a really great lineup this week.

First up is Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate, who talks to us about the future of the Court now that Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed, and what a dramatic loss of institutional legitimacy might mean going forward.

Then we’re joined by Ari Berman from Mother Jones. Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, tells us what he fears the most in the voting rights arena as we approach the 2018 midterms, and also highlights some things that give him hope.

Finally, we speak with Tufts political scientist Brian Schaffner, whose recent study found that expressions of hostile sexism have become a partisan issue. Schaffner explains how Trump’s victory appears to have made his supporters more likely to say the quiet parts out loud.

Playlist:
Junior Martin: “Police and Thieves”
King Crimson: “Man With an Open Heart

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As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

Their whining can’t drown out the voices of the majority

by digby

Michael Tomasky notes the right wing’s one true talent:

Modern conservatism, which has proven to us repeatedly that it can’t manage the economy effectively, prosecute a war successfully, or win the White House honestly any more, is very adept at one thing: Whining.

Conservatives are really good at it. They’re the Bobby Knight of political parties. They throw a lot of chairs. They know how to work the refs, i.e. the media, and get them to buy into a narrative they create not quite out of whole cloth, but out of very little.

Are you old enough to remember the first Al Gore-George Bush debate in 2000? If so, you know what I mean. Gore let out an exasperated sigh a few times when Bush told obvious whoppers like that the vast majority of his tax cut would be going to the middle class. Yes, Gore came off as haughty, but in the immediate aftermath of the debate, it just wasn’t one of the major takeaways. A few days later, Gore’s “elitism” had become The Story of the debate. Insta-surveys showed that Gore won the debate as it happened, but by the time the right was done spinning it, Bush was the winner.

He goes on toe detail the absurdity of Paul Wellstone’s funeral.

I would add that they are doing it right now, saying that Trump’s crude assault on Christine Blasey Ford was what turned the tide for Senate Republicans, strengthening their resolve.

Total, 100% prime bullshit, of course. They were always going to confirm him (or as Mitch McConnell put it, “plow through”) they were just forced to win ugly, which they actually prefer.

I could fill five columns with examples, but you get the idea, so let’s cut to the chase. Republicans and conservatives are going to spend this week trying to drive home the narrative that the left’s opposition to Brett Kavanaugh was unhinged, un-American, and out of touch with the decent people of the heartland. They’ve already started, as you’ve probably noticed. “Progressive psychosis.” “Insane, disgusting.” And so on and so on.

Okay, here are two points I will concede. One, average people don’t like protesters. They never have, even when they agree with them. By mid-1968, a firm majority of Americans opposed the Vietnam War. But most of those Americans still didn’t like the protesters who marched against it. Dirty hippies. Get a job. Think public opinion backed Martin Luther King marching across that bridge? Think again. This obviously doesn’t mean people shouldn’t protest. It just means we should be aware of this reality.

Two, undoubtedly some protesters or commentators or Tweeters went too far. Impolite and plain nasty things have been said about Susan Collins since last Friday. And of course about Kavanaugh himself. People are angry, and angry people sometimes say inappropriate things.

But let’s be crystal clear about this: Liberals are not the ones who are out of touch. Conservatives are.

Virtually every poll I saw showed healthy pluralities and sometimes outright majorities opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation. An NPR-PBS-Marist poll had it 52-40 against.

News reports didn’t often provide this context I’m about to give you, but this was astonishing. Historically, most people don’t pay close attention to Supreme Court nominations, and they just assume that if the president chooses someone, there must be a good reason. Strong pluralities continued to back Clarence Thomas in 1991 even after Anita Hill testified. It’s extremely unusual, and possibly unprecedented, for most Americans to oppose a Supreme Court nominee. But it’s the case here.

It is also a fact that more Americans believed Christine Blasey Ford than believed Kavanaugh. That same NPR-PBS poll had it at 45 percent believing Ford, and 32 percent Kavanaugh.

Republicans, not Democrats, are in the minority.

Yes, they do have a majority in the Senate, which is why this happened. And Kavanaugh passed by one vote. His 50 votes may have represented in this case the bare majority of the Senate, but the senators who voted to confirm him do not represent 50 percent of the country. It isn’t even close. Assigning half a state’s population to each voting senator and doing a little rounding produces the result: Senators who voted for Kavanaugh represent around 145 million Americans, while senators who voted against him represent 181 million. That’s 56 to 44 percent, with the will of the majority brazenly thwarted by the most unrepresentative legislative body in the democratic world.

And of course let’s not forget, and yes it’s fair and entirely relevant, that Kavanaugh was nominated in the first place by a president who lost the popular vote and of whom a minority of Americans approve.

Angry? You bet we are. But crazy? Out of touch? Absolutely not. We who oppose Kavanaugh are the majority. We are the decent people of the heartland.

This has been going on since the absurd impeachment of a popular and duly elected president over blowjobs back in the 90s. We’ve since had two elections where Republicans lost the popular vote but eked out dubious victories in the anachronistic electoral college, something that had happened only once before over a hundred years ago. They’ve broken the norms about redistricting outside the census years and have now welcomed foreign interference in the elections on their behalf.

It takes a massive effort on the part of the decent people to overcome their cheating. Democrats have to have a much larger margin to win than they do and they have to work twice as hard to get their people out to vote because the Republicans have put up as many barriers as possible to allow them to vote.

But it can be done. There are more Democrats than Republicans and more Independents who are freaked out by Trump and his minions than there are Independents who like him. They all have to vote.

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Performing patriotism
by Tom Sullivan

The United States Senate party membership by state. States with two Democratic U.S. Senators are in blue, states with two Republican U.S. Senators are in red, and those with one of each are in purple. States with an independent U.S. Senator are marked with green stripes on a blue or red background, depending on the party of the other U.S. Senator. – Wikipedia

Reality TV isn’t. Under a party led by a reality show star, democracy isn’t either. Royalists want to rule. Republicans want to fall in line.

Former secretary of state Colin Powell told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday his three favorite words in the U.S. Constitution have long been “we the people.” That puts him out of step with his political party, one that, for all its patriotic bluster, breaks faith with the constitution after those first three words. The Republican Party does not believe in them, nor in democratic institutions it cannot control.

That break came long before the sitting Republican president took office. Powell nonetheless lamented that since January 20, 2017, Donald Trump has twisted those three words into “me the President.”

The alleged leader of a crime family asserted Republicans believe in the rule of law while describing women protesting the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court as an angry mob.

But as Will Bunch observes, one person’s mob to others is what democracy looks like. If you are into that sort of thing:

Believe me, this so-called “angry mob” would much rather spend its fall weekends at their kids’ soccer games or picking apples than chanting themselves hoarse or, in dozens of cases, getting arrested. But this was inevitable after two years of watching Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his henchmen crash through the guardrails of democracy to stall and kill the SCOTUS nomination of the profoundly decent Merrick Garland and then ram through the indecent and indignant Kavanaugh. Not to mention a confirmation process designed to throw darkness rather than shed light, right up to a sham FBI investigation as ordered by the White House. No wonder citizens are airing their complaints to a government that’s indifferent at best and autocratic at worst. If this was a mob, then it was a mob in the exact same spirit as — dare I say it — the Boston Tea Party, without the tragic waste of caffeine.

But a sham democracy is just what America is headed for if Republican leaders have their way with us. Blogger Susie Madrak opined that they only “perform conscience” these days. Performing democracy has long been second nature.

The New York Times’ Charles Blow would agree:

The founders, a bunch of rich, powerful white men, didn’t want true democracy in this country, and in fact were dreadfully afraid of it.

Now, a bunch of rich, powerful white men want to return us to this sensibility, wrapped in a populist “follow the Constitution” rallying cry and disguised as the ultimate form of patriotism.

Performed patriotism, that is.

How democracy dies:

Judge accused of sexual assault who lied 10x under oath confirmed with sham investigation

Stolen SCOTUS seat

Foreign election interference

Voter suppression

Rigged census

Attacking free press

Trump, GOP Senate & Kavanaugh all complicit in this— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) October 5, 2018

One reason one of America’s major parties has rejected democracy and embraced ruthless Trumpism “is rooted in the certain knowledge that they are in the minority,” says Democratic strategist Paul Begala. Thus, they “maximize every opportunity to assert the power they do have.” Being in the minority is in their minds no reason they shouldn’t rule.

Bunch offers several actions America might take to undo the corrosive effects of antidemocratic elements in the constitution left over from its slave origins. Those, the GOP has used to leverage its minority support into control of all three branches of government and the near elimination of checks and balances.

“The system of government as written up right here in Philadelphia in 1787 is in shambles,” Bunch writes, “badly broken to the point that if we don’t make radical repairs soon, American democracy will die a painful, ugly death.”

Eliminating the electoral college is a talking point that will not restore the principle of “one person, one vote” as armchair activists believe. That and demographic trends might help elect Democrats retake the White House, but with the GOP in firm control of the Senate, then what? Gridlock will prevent a Democratic president from advancing progressive goals or, as we have seen, appointing judges to the courts including the Supreme Court.

While demographic trends might favor Democrats on a aggregate basis, we elect the United States Senate geographically, not democratically. In those terms, we are headed towards a permanent Democratic House and a permanent Republican Senate with control over Supreme Court confirmations.

To restore “one person, one vote” in the Senate will require undoing the undemocratic Great Compromise, to which no small state senator or legislature will give assent in our lifetimes. Democrats’ only other near-term option is to win U.S. Senate seats in red states where they do not now. That will take the kind of unsexy organizing and infrastructure building election-cycle obsessed, Washington-focused Democrats do not do now.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

The “normalization” in the GOP is complete

by digby

If you’re looking for something to subscribe to that really offers real value for money, I urge you to consider subscribing to Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo for the insights he provides in his column. They truly are invaluable.

In his latest, he writes at length about the Kavanaugh process detailing how Mitch McConnell admitted that they thought they were in real trouble after Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony and the evidence showing McGahn and Kavanaugh decided to go full Trump as a defense in response to it. And he observes that it worked. Bullying Trumpism is a winner.

I hope Josh won’t mind if I share his conclusion (again, please subscribe!)

What this all means is that conservatism and the GOP are now Trumpism. More significantly it means that it is transferable. Others can pick up the mantle and make it work. This is hardly surprising. Last year Rep. Greg Gianforte body slammed a reporter days before his election and is now a Representative in good standing who is often praised for his physical toughness. Equally significant, Trumpism didn’t begin with Trump. I take some pride in the fact that I think this site has done as good a job as any news publication in the US over the last 18 years chronicling the rise of the revanchist right in the Republican party and the party’s subsequent transformation. The politics of aggression, norm-breaking, the penchant for conspiracy theories, the increasingly explicit white nationalism – these were all present in 2014, 2010 and in a more attenuated form in 2004. What Trump did was, through some malign and impulsive intuition, fused these together into a workable politics. He took what was still the underbelly of Republican politics, which nevertheless provided it with the bulk of the GOP’s motive force, and made it the face, the brand.

Kavanaugh himself is a noteworthy bridge. A scion of the beltway political elite who received the country’s finest elite education, he made his name in the Bush White House. He is the epitome of the pre-Trump conservative establishment. Yet we can see here how seamless the transition was to full Trumpism, as it was for all the Republicans Senators who rushed to his side after his Thursday afternoon performance.

They believe this is what their voters want and they believe that with the help of every means at hand, whether through vote suppression, gerrymandering and/or foreign assistance, they have enough of them to stay in power. Right now, they have a bare majority in the Senate. It’s still quite likely they will keep it for the next two years and will do everything in their power to keep Trump out of trouble. In 2020, there will be 33 seats up for grabs — 21 of which are currently held by Republicans. If Trump manages to make it through his first term, as he likely will unless something forces him to resign or he dies in office, he will hopefully be totally repudiated at the polls and likely take a bunch of those simpering sycophants down with him.

It’s something to think about and work toward. It is vital to take the House in 2018 and there’s a good chance the Democrats will do that. That spells the end of the Trump Party’s legislative agenda and finally marks the beginning of some constitutionally mandated congressional oversight of this criminal in the White House. But even if they eke out a majority in the Senate, which would be great and stop Mitch McConnell’s court-packing scheme, it won’t be enough until they have been turned into a powerless rump minority. 

This rightward turn is global and it’s terrifying. But the US is still the most powerful country in the world and can be an inspiration in righting our own ship and holding back the tide. At the very least we should be able to save ourselves.

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Mitch McConnell will tell you what the facts are

by digby

Testy exchange on @FaceTheNation as John Dickerson presses Mitch McConnell on his decision to block Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination in 2016 https://t.co/JXaP0vniZk pic.twitter.com/aChYVkAuCr

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 7, 2018

He will tell you what the history is, not … facts. That’s all there is to it. This is who they are are all the way down … Trump is their instrument as much as they are his.

I think if people are waiting for that “at long last sir, have you no decency?” moment from Republicans it’s going to be a long wait.

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