Month: December 2022

They unveiled Nancy Pelosi’s portrait today, Fun fact: it was painted back in 2014 but had to be put back in storage because she stayed on as Minority Leader and then Speaker.

Obama: She helped rescue the economy not once but twice. She helped make historic investments in the fight against climate change. She helped kept marriage equality the law of the land and after insurrectionists broke into her office, she never stopped defending democracy.. pic.twitter.com/Njbwj5kvER

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 14, 2022

Schumer: We cannot talk about the Affordable Care Act, American Rescue Plan, Infrastructure Law, Violence Against Women Act, The Lilly Ledbetter Act, repealing don’t ask don’t tell, so much more without mentioning Nancy Pelosi pic.twitter.com/dCUMwbsrRV

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 14, 2022

Even John Boehner showed up and made gracious comments, sobbing as usual. I’m surprised Lauren Boebert and Marge Greene didn’t rush up and cold cock him on the spot:

Boehner: Well, I could say it’s good to be here but pic.twitter.com/cdjw2loDro

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 14, 2022

Boehner: my girls told me, tell the speaker how much we admire her… pic.twitter.com/Ji2rAJ4sHl

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 14, 2022

Pelosi yesterday to a few reporters, when asked if she likes her portrait, which was done in 2014 and has been in storage ever since:

"I have a thing about pictures. If it's when you were younger, then people look at it and think, 'Oh, my God.'" 😂 https://t.co/u5VTH2t3AG

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) December 14, 2022

It’s a nice portrait. I suspect she will one day have a statue in Statuary Hall as well. She is the most powerful woman to have ever held office in American politics and she was damned good at it. She’s wise enough to go out on a high note as well. This last session with a tiny majority she managed to keep the fractious Democratic caucus together and pass some huge, consequential legislation. We are already seeing just how skilled she was by watching the way the presumptive new Speaker struggles before he’s even sworn in. It ain’t easy.

You don’t want to read the grotesque replies to any post or article celebrating this event. The hatred for her is overwhelming. Of course we knew that:

 A San Francisco police officer testified on Wednesday that he witnessed the attack on U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband when the suspect attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer in late October.

Prosecutors at the preliminary hearing for suspect David Wayne DePape, 42, played a recording of Paul Pelosi’s 911 call during the hearing and showed video of the attack from police body cameras, USA Today reported.

“My partner said, ‘Drop the weapon’ …. He started to pull the hammer, Mr. Pelosi let go and the man lunged and hit Mr. Pelosi in the head,” San Francisco Police Officer Kyle Cagney testified on Wednesday, adding the House speaker’s husband was struck “very hard,” according to the USA Today report.

The suspect, demanding to see the House speaker, had broken into her San Francisco home and attacked her husband in an assault that had stoked fears about political violence in the United States in the days leading to the midterm elections.

San Francisco Police Sergeant Carla Hurley, who interviewed DePape on the day of the attack, testified to the hearing on Wednesday that the assailant told her he wanted to target other people too, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, actor Tom Hanks and President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, CBS News reported.

I’m sure you recall that Elon Musk personally spread the right wing rumor that the whole thing had been a lover’s quarrel between the 82 year old Pelosi and the assailant. That’s who they are.

John Boehner, who is anything but a liberal, is a dinosaur. Every last one of the Republicans who put up with this garbage and cynically benefit from it are guilty. Kevin McCarthy attended as part of his formal duties as Minority Leader but he should have hung his head in shame.

Good luck Kev. I suspect you’ll be getting your own valedictory portrait sooner rather than later.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking, you can do so here or at the address on the left sidebar.

What!?! LOL, no. pic.twitter.com/UVBmdy75jA

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) December 14, 2022

Can you feel the magic? No?

Nobody’s talking about this which says something. It is bizarre, bordering on pathetic.

He is going to have to start trying, really trying, again. He has to go on Fox and return to twitter and give interviews constantly if he wants to get back to where he was. Does he have “the strength and the stamina” to do that? It’s looking more and more like he doesn’t.

Happy Hollandaise everybody!

Let’s take a look at Leonard Leo, shall we?

People are very worried about all the campaign contributions and dark money that the disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried is alleged to have run afoul of campaign regulations. It sound bad and it looks as though the Department of Justice is going to get to the bottom of it. Crypto is one of those mystifying financial instruments that lay people should probably stay away from and the government should heavily regulate.

But what about this perfectly legal big money influence? Why should this be ok?

Flush with money after receiving the largest-known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, conservative activist Leonard Leo and his associates are spending millions of dollars to influence some of the Supreme Court’s most consequential recent cases, newly released tax documents obtained by ProPublica and The Lever show.

The documents detail how Leo, who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative majority as an adviser to President Donald Trump, has used a sprawling network of opaque nonprofits to fund groups advocating for ending affirmative action, rolling back anti-discrimination protections and allowing state legislatures unreviewable oversight of federal elections.

Fact-based, independent journalism is needed now more than ever.Donate

The records also show that the Leo-aligned nonprofits paid millions of dollars to for-profit entities connected to Leo.

Leo and one of his top associates did not respond to requests for comment.

The money flowed mostly through so-called dark money groups, which don’t have to disclose their donors. They are required to reveal the recipients of their spending in their annual tax returns, which are released to the public, but often those are also dark money groups or other entities that have minimal disclosure rules.

As ProPublica and The Lever detailed in August, Leo was gifted a $1.6 billion fortune last year by a reclusive manufacturing magnate, Barre Seid. The newly revealed tax documents cover last year, just as Leo was in the process of receiving that enormous donation.

The Supreme Court case involving a Colorado-based website designer who refuses to work for same-sex couples provides a window into Leo’s strategy.

At least six groups funded by Leo’s network have filed briefs supporting the suit, which seeks to overturn Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. The Ethics and Public Policy Center, which records show received $1.9 million from Leo’s network, submitted a brief supporting the web designer. So did Concerned Women for America, which has received at least $565,000 over the past two years from the Leo network, as well as an organization called the Becket Fund, which got $550,000 from a Leo group.

Leo’s network has also been the top funder of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which spends money to elect GOP attorneys general and serves as a policy hub for the state officials. Twenty Republican attorneys general have also filed a brief in support of the case. One Leo group donated $6.5 million to RAGA during the 2022 election cycle, according to the association’s federal filings.

The largest donation by Leo’s network was $71 million given to DonorsTrust, a so-called donor-advised fund that pools money from numerous funders and gives it out to largely conservative and libertarian groups. Past reports have described DonorsTrust as a “dark-money ATM” of the conservative movement.

Another case that Leo groups have sought to influence is Moore v. Harper, which could have sweeping implications for American democracy. The question posed in the case is whether the Constitution affords state legislatures the power to create rules for federal elections without state court oversight or intervention.

Moore v. Harper is crazytown and the fact that Leo’s money supported that tells you just how extreme his project really is. He’s often considered a Grand Beltway Poohbah and guidling light of establishment conservatism.

No.

Leonard Leo is a right wing extremist no less threatening than Donald Trump himself. He has a mission to destroy American liberalism and the means to do it. This should not be swept under the rug.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking, you can do so here or at the address on the left sidebar.

House wingnuts aren’t the only ones with subpoena power

Now we’re talking. Senate Democrats finally have subpoena power, and they claim they’re ready to use it.

Though their target list is still under discussion, Democrats in the upper chamber have made clear that they intend to use their investigative authority — newly acquired thanks to their functional 51st Senate seat — as a counterpoint to House GOP probes of Hunter Biden’s business dealings and the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

They’re also mulling picking up the baton from House Democrats on two fights: scrutinizing the oil industry’s culpability for climate change and obtaining former President Donald Trump’s tax returns, according to senators.

The House has been the epicenter of investigations in the current Congress given the deadlocked Senate, but that spotlight will be shared starting next year. Democrats’ loss of the House has created an investigative “vacuum” that party senators intend to fill, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), an investigative-minded former prosecutor and senior Judiciary Committee member.

“There are very definitely investigations that I think now will be possible,” Blumenthal said, referring to Democrats’ inability to issue subpoenas in the current 50-50 Senate because Republicans could block them at the evenly divided committee level.

They’re also going after private sector malfeasance with Bernie Sanders’ committee beginning with the pharmaceutical industry. But before we get too excited there is a problem. Of course…

[T]hey’ll have to carefully navigate aggressive investigations for another reason: a difficult 2024 Senate map. Several of their seats in red and purple territory are up next term, where partisan probes may not pay political dividends.

Among those up for reelection, besides Sinema, are Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who chair the energy, veterans’ affairs and banking committees, respectively. And all hail from states that voted for Trump in 2020, two by overwhelming margins.

It’s always something with the Senate, isn’t it? There was a time, during the long ago era of bipartisanship (largely because northern liberals were Republicans and conservative southerners were Democrats) they were able to form bipartisan committees and commissions that could get to the bottom of something like an insurrection or the use of the federal government for partisan gain. That’s much more difficult now for Senate Democrats dealing with a red state majority that votes in lockstep.

But they do have to try. The House is going to be batshit crazy for the next two years and I was worried the Senate Dems were going to opt for “statesmanlike” silence in the face of it out of a misplaced belief that they would be rewarded for being the adults in the room. That won’t work. It’s a fight and they need to engage.

We’ll see how it goes. I suspect a lot of this will be driven by the presidential race and Donald Trump’s legal woes. But with DeSantis breathing down their necks as the Great Whitebread Hope who plans to dismantle public health and install quacks at every level of government funded science, they might want to think about planning some public hearings to counteract that.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

*scroll down for newer posts

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo and I want to thank those who have supported this “vintage” blog through the last 20 years. I literally could not have done it without you and you’ll never know how much I appreciate it.

I also want to send out a big thank you to my incredible morning man, Tom Sullivan, who never, ever misses a day, religiously writing two great posts a day with humor, insight and compassion. His dedication to local activism in his home state of North Carolina is an inspiration and the small pamphlet he’s written about grassroots organizing called “For the Win” is being used in districts all over the country. I am so lucky to have him and so is the Democratic Party. It’s progressives like Tom, toiling away in a purpleish state like North Carolina who ensure that the very necessary but slow, frustrating process of transitioning a Red state to Blue continues. He never gives up and we can’t give up either.

The next two years are going to be interesting and possibly terrifying times in American politics. We’re already in the presidential election cycle (ohmydeargod). Social media is hurtling off in new directions and nobody knows if we’re going to be able to keep the information flowing in useful ways. I believe that blogging’s old-fashioned mixture of long form analysis mixed with short takes and our unique synthesis of various news sources with opinion and activism is a necessary part of the mix.

If you agree, I’d very much appreciate your support so that we can keep doing it through what you know is going to be a crazy time. It means the world to me.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

It’s a good thing he can’t run for president

Poor Donald Trump must be feeling especially unloved right now. Practically everyone in the Republican Party is blaming him for their losses in the midterm elections, and few of his usual media supporters are defending him in his latest legal woes. At least some recent polls have him trailing Ron DeSantis in the forthcoming race for the GOP presidential nomination — and if he pulls it off anyway, suggest that he’d lose the general election to Joe Biden. But what has to hurt more than anything is that his title as chief MAGA troll has been usurped by a man who has outstripped him in virtually every way: Elon Musk.

Now, it’s true that Trump can brag that he was used to be president of the United States, but that’s getting old considering that everyone knows that he lost his re-election bid and has spent the last two years whining like a tired toddler that it was stolen from him. That accomplishment is irrevocably tarnished. But Musk’s business career leaves Trump with his old fashioned real estate fortune in the dust. Musk has nine children by three different women, and is still working on it. Most important, Musk has way, way, more money than Trump, even if as of this week he’s been demoted from the richest man in the world to No. 2. 

Trump is a principal in the Truth Social platform and Musk is the outright owner of Twitter, if you squint you could claim they are ostensibly on equal footing when it comes to social media power. But once again, it’s not close and Musk is the big winner of the platform wars. Twitter has massive media influence and helps set the political agenda, while Truth Social is just a relatively tiny echo chamber for Trump fans. Trump had 75 million Twitter followers. Musk has 120 million.

In other words, Elon Musk is the man Trump has been pretending to be.

Trump’s 2024 Revenge Tour is off to an extremely slow start, and that’s putting it generously. He has hardly left the private residence at his Florida beach club except to come downstairs and eat dinner with a couple of antisemites. His social media feed is mostly re-posts of worshipful memes about him and some all-caps primal screaming about his legal difficulties. Every once in a while he says something about present-tense politics but mostly it’s just kvetching about the 2020 election. There have been no rallies, no real interviews, no ads, no press conferences, nothing. Let’s just say it’s an unusual way to start a presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, Musk has completely taken over the political conversation that Trump used to dominate. He’s mastered the art of the right-wing troll, openly courting the most extreme denizens of the fever swamps and delighting in shocking normal decent people with crude, over-the-top statements. There is a new outrage almost every day as he dives head first down the wingnut rabbit hole and revels in the fuss he causes. Rich Lowry, writing for the New York Post, says Musk has “trumped Trump as the nation’s foremost culture warrior.” There you have it.

A sampling of Musk’s recent tweets show someone who is completely immersed in some of the craziest right wing arcana, including anti-vax and QAnon conspiracy theories. He’s also shown that he has a mission that’s driving him and likely explains why he bought Twitter in the first place. For example:

Many battles remain, but, yes, the tide is starting to turn on the mortal threat to civilization that is the woke mind virus.

Humor relies on an intuitive & often awkward truth being recognized by the audience, but wokism is a lie, which is why nobody laughs.

He appears to believe he has been called to save humanity by owning the libs, which mostly amounts to relentless trolling, and allowing all kinds of fascists, racists, dirty tricksters and snake oil salesmen free rein to spread their “ideas” in the online public square. No doubt they’re enjoying themselves, at least until the objects of their derision and cruelty simply decide to leave. Will humankind have been rescued from the evil of wokeness if that happens? It appears we are going to find out.

Musk has released some of the internal Twitter correspondence regarding the infamous “Hunter Biden laptop” story and Donald Trump’s post-Jan. 6 Twitter ban to a couple of contrarian journalists. Musk and his allies have evidently reached the conclusion that Twitter committed unpardonable sins that resulted in Trump losing the election, in the first instance, and then being unfairly railroaded, in the second. Those conclusions are highly contested, to put it mildly. 

It’s ridiculous to claim that one news story about a presidential candidate’s adult son being suppressed for a couple of days on one social media platform made any difference in the election (which up until now we’ve been told had been stolen at the ballot box). And as for Trump’s Twitter ban, he should have been thrown off the platform long before he was. He lied incessantly, blabbed classified information and put people’s lives in danger with his big mouth, including his own vice president on Jan. 6.  

Trump sees the “Twitter files” as ultimate vindication, of course, and demanded that the Constitution be terminated so he can be reinstated as president immediately. For a moment, he got the attention he craved when the political world reacted as it typically does whenever he says something insane. But mostly he’s being ignored, which has to have him intensely frustrated.

But Donald Trump has an ace in the hole. Musk may be creating daily entertainment with the endless chaos of his Twitter takeover and all the hiring and firing at random, but Trump may be about to vault back into the spotlight in operatic fashion. He has one thing going for him that Musk with all his money and success doesn’t have. He may be looking at a criminal indictment, and perversely enough, that might be exactly what he needs. There’s nothing that turns on the American right more than grievance. Elon Musk’s greatest weakness, at this point, is that he’s got nothing to complain about. 

If you’d like to share some Christmas cheer, it would be very welcome. Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Anti-vaxxers place warped ideology over saving lives

Even as bodies stacked up in refrigerated trailers and were buried in mass graves during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, 21st century Know Nothings refused to wear masks and to avoid close quarters. They refused to take vaccines even their favorite right-wing propagandists took. Instead they pursued quack remedies and did “their own research.” Their political crushes promoted insanity and they dutifully followed them and the wildest internet conspiracy theories. Anything not to bend the knee to smartypants elites who know how to thwart diseases or fuse atoms.

(When people ask if I had any reaction to the vaccines, I say no, except for minor irritation from the microchip. If they still complain if you wear a mask in stores, look around furtively and start babbling about gummint surveillance and defeating facial recognition. Fight crazy with crazy.)

MAGA Republicans gobbled up whatever nonsense the god of makeup and comb-overs sold them in his quest to prove he was too “strongly” for the deadly virus. Even after he nearly died from it. Even after he claimed credit for the vaccine.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is still playing to vaccine conspiracists. He seems determined to run for the presidency over more bodies of Floridians.

MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on Tuesday spotlighted a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research that tells us what we already knew: Republicans died from the virus in greater numbers than Democrats. For Republicans in Ohio and Florida the death rate was 76 percent “higher than the excess death rate for Democrats.” The gap widened after vaccines became widely available.

Republicans in those states continue to die needlessly because they are not getting vaccinated against Covid. DeSantis wants a grand jury to investigate any misconduct in his state surrounding vaccines, with particular focus on the Centers for Disease Control (read, Anthony Fauci).

Politico:

DeSantis’ announcement was the latest in an ongoing war between his administration and the Biden administration — and the broader medical community — over the pandemic. DeSantis has built a national reputation fighting against Covid-related mandates such as vaccine requirements or schools ordering students to wear masks. The Biden administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Along with his surgeon general, DeSantis has rejected vaccines for young children even after the FDA gave approval for the vaccines in kids under 5. Florida was the only state in the nation to not re-order vaccines for children ahead of the FDA’s fast-tracked approval.

“The data don’t lie, Republicans killed their fellow Republicans by lying to them about covid to make money & win elections,” strategist Rachel Bitecofer tweets.

And why wouldn’t they? The GOP doesn’t care if erecting new barriers to voting hurts their own voters so long as they hurt Democrats more. They sent meat processing workers back into factories to die of Covid in service to the economy. It’s as cynical as it is morally bankrupt. And their own voters line up for more.

If you would like to put a little something in the Holiday stocking it would be most appreciated. You can use the snail mail address on the side bar or the button below. Happy Hollandaise!

Just not in public investment

Maybe it was all the cowboy movies. Or before that, Horatio Alger’s sermonizing about a “can do” spirit and the power of hard work and perseverence. And after both, Ayn Rand’s Übermenschen. Why stand on the shoulders of giants when you can be one? Alone. Resolute. Unbending. “Oh marvelous me,” said Yertle, the Dr. Seuss stand-in for Hitler.

We’ve been sold the “great man” (it’s always a man) theory for well over a century. Romanticizing ourselves as great sells books, comics, and movies. Political movements allow us to vicariously identify with great men who often are better salesmen than great ones.

That soft-focused view of history tends to brush away ways in which we collectively accomplish things through our government that we could not do ourselves. Like win wars, build highways, explore space, and fuse atoms. The last took decades of public investment on top of all that hard work and perseverence that seems to have paid off, at least in a lab, only last week at Lawrence Livermore Labs:

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) — a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power. On Dec. 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. This first-of-its-kind feat will provide unprecedented capability to support NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program and will provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy, which would be a game-changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy.

“This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting our world-class scientists — like the team at NIF — whose work will help us solve humanity’s most complex and pressing problems, like providing clean power to combat climate change and maintaining a nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing.”

“This is only possible due to the long-term commitment of public investment in fusion science,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Dr. Kim Budil told a press conference Tuesday.

“The pursuit of fusion ignition in the laboratory is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity, and achieving it is a triumph of science, engineering, and most of all, people,” LLNL Director Dr. Kim Budil said. “Crossing this threshold is the vision that has driven 60 years of dedicated pursuit — a continual process of learning, building, expanding knowledge and capability, and then finding ways to overcome the new challenges that emerged. These are the problems that the U.S. national laboratories were created to solve.”

Basic research is not profitable. Not in the short term. Those who view the world through quarterly profit statements have eschewed basic research for decades and sought profit through rent seeking. But they’ll gladly exploit the products of public investment for private gain.

Our myths about the winning of the West gloss over that the first transcontinental railroad that made industrialists of the first Gilded Age rich was financed and subsidized by federal and state governments. We forget that westward expansion was made possible (to indigenous people’s detriment) by the Homestead Act (1862). Rural electrification, the Central Valley Project, etc. Sorry, Randians, sorry Republicans, it was public investment. When America sets its mind to something, as Joe Biden likes to remind us, we can accomplish anything together. Like splitting the atom. Or fusing it.

If you would like to put a little something in the Holiday stocking it would be most appreciated. You can use the snail mail address on the side bar or the button below. Happy Hollandaise!

That elusive soft landing may be materializing

Take a deep breath. Mike Konczal analyzes the inflation numbers and it should make you all feel a little bit better about things. For now.

We’ve had single good months in the past year, hopes that were quickly dashed with reversion. But now we have two in a row, the first since summer/fall 2021.

But as opposed to then, the underlying trends are all pointing in the right direction. Let’s dig in.

There are two key things Powell has discussed. The first is the three things he recently said he is watching for: goods in deflation, housing peaked, and the rest of services to be cooling down.

All three happened, and happened again for the second month in a row.

The second Powell wants is to see divergence between 3-month inflation and 6- and 12-month inflation. For the past year, they've all been lined up the same, a discouraging signal through the monthly noise of this-and-that.

But now we finally start to see a break downward.

And obviously there’s a long way to go, but if you look on a further timeline, to pre-pandemic times when inflation was just below target, you can see that 3-month average decline looks even bigger.

Let's dig into specifics: here's services broken down in housing and the rest of services.

There had been some big “rest of” prints in the past year, I shared the worry. But at this specific moment, it’s tough to see any wage passthrough in this generally inertial category.

It's a joke around the office that I've been saying "yeah, goods should go into deflation over the next six months," but for the past 19 months now. Like, it's been a lot of months.

The joke is over coworkers. Check out that auto price index in freefall.

(And as the Odd Lots fans and @fcastofthemonth stans know, medical services are a driver here. But for those who might go there, yes, services ex housing *ex medical services* is also still low. We're already ahead of that here.) /7

Inflation is landing where we want it while we added over 800,000 jobs in the past three months.

This is the very definition of a soft landing Powell articulated earlier this year. It’s there if the Fed pauses and let’s these positive developments all play themselves out.

Originally tweeted by Mike Konczal (@mtkonczal) on December 13, 2022.

I hesitate to get my hopes up. My very uneducated, primitive instinct has told me that this year’s economic turmoil was logically tied to the fact that the world was turned completely upside down by the pandemic and that it would take a while to put it right. It’s not your usual downturn or recession. If Konczal is right and we are starting to pull out of it, that’s very good news.

But don’t assume that the government can’t screw this up. The Republicans are planning to hold the debt ceiling hostage for massive spending cuts and the Democrats are being weirdly passive about it. I guess Sinemanchin must be against them raising it in the lame duck session before the House cretins can get their grubby little paws on it. That’s the only possible explanation for not doing it now.

It’s really too bad. These Republicans are batshit insane and I don’t think they can be counted on to capitulate even if their donors are pressuring them to do it. They are that far gone.

So, enjoy the moment. There’s a good chance the Republicans are going to fuck it up.

If you would like to put a little something in the Holiday stocking it would be most appreciated. You can use the snail mail address on the side bar or the button below.

Happy Hollandaise!

The motley group of Trumpers who failed bigly

The environment was slightly favorable to Republicans — as it almost always is in midterms when you’re the opposition party — but a series of bad and almost always Trump-aligned candidates cost them winnable races. The result is that the party actually lost governor’s mansions and failed to take control of the Senate, despite needing to gain just one seat to do so. You could also make a credible argument that its House majority should be at least somewhat bigger, but for shooting itself in the foot in some key races.

There were Democrats who underperformed what you would expect in their districts, too, but nothing on the scale of Republicans in many key races.

So who were the worst of the worst — and the costliest? Let’s run through them.

Blake Masters

GOP Senate candidates underperformed their party’s Election Day showing in crucial races in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Ohio and arguably Nevada and Pennsylvania, too — but not all by the same amount. The Arizona Senate candidate performed worse than everyone else in his state — including Kari Lake and the GOP’s election-denying secretary of state candidate, Mark Finchem. Masters’s 4.9-point loss to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) was slightly larger than Finchem’s 4.8-point loss, and it was the largest of six statewide GOP candidates. The GOP also managed to win races for state schools superintendent and treasurer (the latter by double digits), reinforcing the missed opportunity. Masters is now set to advise on the Republican National Committee’s 2022 election postmortem.

Kristina Karamo

Michigan is the other big swing state in which the GOP nominated extremists and bad candidates for many big statewide offices — and paid the price. And the worst performer was its secretary of state candidate. Karamo, who rose to prominence thanks to baseless and false accusations about issues in the 2020 election, lost to the incumbent Democrat by 14 points. That’s the largest loss among the most prominent election deniers running for secretary of state, who themselves had a brutal election. It was also larger than the GOP’s deficit for governor (minus-10) and attorney general (minus-eight). Given that this is a state that was close in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, all three results are pretty shocking. But Karamo’s was the worst, and now she’s running for state party chair.

Don Bolduc

In no marquee state was the gap between the GOP’s performance for governor and Senate bigger than in New Hampshire. Gov. Chris Sununu (R) won by more than 15 points, but Bolduc lost by more than nine — a nearly 25-point split, on the margin. It’s true the GOP struggled in congressional races here, too. But Bolduc, like Masters, was a guy who could have helped deliver a GOP Senate majority in a competitive state where other Republicans were able to win, and he came up way short.

Doug Mastriano

National Republicans effectively conceded this race the moment Mastriano won his primary — and for good reason. Despite Mehmet Oz losing the state’s Senate race by five points, Mastriano lost by more than 15. He raised very little money and made almost no effort to moderate his positions on things like election denial and abortion. “I’m going to show you who the real extremist is in this race, and it’s not me and it’s not us,” he said defiantly in August. Mission not accomplished.

Sarah Palin

Palin would like to blame ranked-choice voting for a failed attempt at a political comeback, but she should blame Sarah Palin. The former GOP vice-presidential nominee lost both a special election in August and now a general election to Democrat Mary Peltola, despite coming from a state that favored Donald Trump in 2020 by 10 points. And Palin managed to lose the second time around by an even larger margin: nearly 10 full points. Adding insult to injury: The data suggest that the other Republican, Nick Begich, might well have won the seat in August if Palin weren’t in the race.

Joe Kent

Alaska was one of only five instances in which Democrats won a district Donald Trump had carried in 2020. And the only one of the five in which that Democrat wasn’t an incumbent? Washington’s 3rd district. Trump-endorsed GOP candidate Joe Kent knocked out impeachment-supporting Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) in the top-two primary, thanks to Trump’s support, and then proceeded to lose a district Trump had carried by four points. That’s not a huge underperformance, but it was a costly one. And there’s little doubt Herrera Beutler would have kept this in the GOP camp. But Trump had a point to make.

J.R. Majewski

This is another of those five Trump-Democrat districts. Majewski fell to Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) by 13 points despite Trump having carried the district by three points — a gap trumped only by Palin’s loss. Somewhat similar to Karamo, Majewski rose to prominence thanks to a pro-Trump stunt rather than any discernible talent as a candidate: He painted a Trump banner on his yard, which led to Fox News coverage. It was soon learned that he had been in Washington on Jan. 6, promoted QAnon and, perhaps most damningly, apparently inflated his military service.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)

She’s the only candidate on this list who actually won. But there is no universe in which it should even have been close. She comes from a district that favored Trump by more than eight points, yet she leads by less than 0.2 percentage points in the latest results. Her close call was perhaps the biggest surprise in the House, given handicappers didn’t even rate her district as being potentially competitive. You’d think that might send a signal of voters’ appetite for Boebert’s brand of “angertainment.” We shall see if Boebert adjusts course.

David Perdue/Janice McGeachin/Mo Brooks/Madison Cawthorn

We’re lumping these ones together because it’s worth recalling that pro-Trump candidates didn’t just crash and burn in the general election; they also did so in many key primaries. Perdue lost to Gov. Georgia Brian Kemp (R) by a stunning 52 points — despite being a former senator. McGeachin lost to Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) by more than 20 points despite also having Trump’s backing and being the incumbent lieutenant governor. (She engaged in a series of bizarre stunts, wielding her momentary power while Little left the state to temporarily change things like covid policy.) Brooks managed to perform so poorly that Trump unendorsed him, before he lost a primary runoff by 26 points. And Cawthorn took less than one-third of the vote in his primary and failed to even force a runoff, after a series of ugly personal revelations and effectively being disowned by his party. The loss came just two years after he was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention.

It especially warms my heart that the Queen of the Arctic lost. She was the GOP’s reigning superstar for a while, widely assumed to be a presidential candidate and she crashed and burned in a House race after showing once again that she’s lazy and careless. It just goes to show you that nobody is invincible. Maybe Trump can go down ignominy too.

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