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Month: February 2024

The Republican Party Is Weird

Published by digby on February 14, 2024

And I’m talking about stupid weird

Monmouth poll:

 – Just under 1 in 5 Americans believe the singer Taylor Swift is part of a covert effort to help President Joe Biden win the 2024 election. At the same time, the Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll also finds that most Americans are supportive of efforts by Swift to encourage her fans to vote.

Just under half (46%) of the American public has heard something about Swift being part of a supposed covert government effort to help Biden win the 2024 presidential election. Just under 1 in 5 Americans (18%) believe such a conspiracy involving Swift exists. Fully 71% of those who believe this identify with or lean toward the Republican Party and 83% indicate they are likely to support Donald Trump in the fall. Also, nearly three-quarters (73%) of those who believe the Swift conspiracy also believe the 2020 election outcome was fraudulent. [Monmouth will be releasing a poll on the 2024 presidential election tomorrow.] It should be noted that the group of poll respondents who accept the Swift story as fact includes some people who claim to have been unaware of it (i.e., 42% of those who say the conspiracy exists also say they had not heard about it before being contacted by Monmouth).

“The supposed Taylor Swift PsyOp conspiracy has legs among a decent number of Trump supporters. Even many who hadn’t heard about it before we polled them accept the idea as credible. Welcome to the 2024 election,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

On a less sinister note, two-thirds (68%) of the American public approves of Swift encouraging her fans to vote in the upcoming election. However, Republicans (42%) are much less supportive than Democrats (88%) and independents (71%) of these turnout efforts.

If this polling is representative, roughly 25 million registered voters believe this inane nonsense.

If the Republicans are really curious about why they are losing this is one of the reasons. They MAGA movement is full of weirdos. And that includes their Dear Leader.

AOC Speaks

Published by digby on February 14, 2024

This is good:

None of that means she’s going to back off on the issues that matter to her — Gaza pre-eminent among them. It does mean that she isn’t being myopic about the stakes for the whole world, including Gaza, if Trump wins the election. It will be a nightmare of epic proportions.

She is an amazing politician and I can’t wait to see how she matures even further. I would vote for her in a second.

The Discharge Petition Gambit

Published by digby on February 14, 2024

Could it work this time?

With members of the GOP at each others’ throats and yet another special election loss, largely due to their inane antics on the border/foreign military aid bill, it just might:

With House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) swearing he will not allow a House vote on a Senate-passed bill to provide Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in weaponry to fight off a Russian invasion, supporters of aid to the nation ― who make up a clear majority of Congress ― are looking for alternatives.

The option that’s been mentioned most is a so-called discharge petition, signed by a majority of House members to force a floor vote. But the history of discharge petitions shows they are far easier to talk about than actually execute. Still, it may prove to be the best available option to get the Ukranians needed weaponry.

“It’s a dreadfully slow, cumbersome, and brittle process that is not well suited for anything dynamic or urgent,” said Liam Donovan, a former Republican Hill staffer and a partner at lobbying firm Bracewell LLP.

The Senate cleared the $95.5 billion bill early Tuesday morning after working through the weekend on it. It would provide about $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, mostly by funding replacement equipment for existing U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine and for Ukraine to buy new weapons.

Funds would also be provided for Israel ― to support stepped-up U.S. military activity in the region, humanitarian aid to Gaza, and for beefing up Taiwan’s defense.

The Senate vote was 70 to 29, with 26 Republicans, two Democrats and one independent voting against it.

There’s little doubt (even among opponents of Ukraine aid) that the bill would easily pass the House if Johnson brought it up for a vote.

“If it were to get to the floor, it would pass — let’s just be frank about that,” admitted Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus and an opponent of aid to Ukraine, on “The John Fredericks Show” on Tuesday morning.

Despite the clear support, Johnson doubled down Tuesday, insisting he would not take the bill up on the floor, despite its bipartisan margin in the Senate and the possibility of a similar tally if the House voted on it.

“The House has to work its will on this. There’s a deliberative process, and we’re engaged in that,” Johnson told Fox News.

“I certainly oppose it and hope it would not be considered,” he said of a discharge petition.

He’s only following orders. In the past he supported the aid to Ukraine but Dear Leader needs to scratch his good buddy in Russia’s back if he expect to get the help he needs in the election. So that’s that.

The MAGA weirdos have him by the short hairs:

Johnson could allow the bill on the floor, but require a two-thirds majority for it to pass, as he has done recently with bills he’s supported but were blocked by his fellow Republicans. But that could further antagonize anti-Ukraine members of his own party who then could try to oust him, as happened with his predecessor, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy.

Discharge petitions are a way to get around such sycophancy but they are hardly ever tired because they hardly ever work.

Since 1996, only two bills have made it to the House floor through a discharge petition — a 2015 bill to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, and in 2002, a campaign finance measure named for the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.). Both went on to become law.

Usually discharge petitions are started by members of the minority party with the hope of getting all of their fellow party members and a handful of the majority to sign on and provide the 218 signatures needed. But signing the other party’s petition risks angering party colleagues and leaders.

And that’s not all. Under House rules, the bill the discharge petition would be trying to get freed from being bottled up in a committee has to have been in that committee for at least 30 “legislative days.” That includes only days the House meets, which means it would be longer than 30 calendar days.

With a possible debt default looming last year, Democrats cooked up an effort to try to supercharge a discharge petition timetable by having it aimed at a bill that had already been referred to several committees for more than 30 days. But using that petition for Ukraine would have its own issues.

Donovan said forcing the Senate bill onto the floor could take at least 40 days using a new discharge petition, and using the petition originally set up for the debt limit would mean sending the bill back to the Senate for final passage, which would also add time.

“In other words, it’s a terrible option that may eventually prove to be the cleanest dirty shirt,” he said. Donovan noted another option for giving aid to Ukraine may be forthcoming negotiations over how to avoid a government shutdown: “The big question in the meantime is how the House deals with regular appropriations, and whether these conversations can be merged.”

They could take a page from the MAGAs and take some hostages:

“Only three or four House Republicans have to agree to take down every rule until that agreement is made and it’s iron-clad,” he said. “The best analogy I use is if everybody in a room has a hand grenade, the one that’s willing to actually pull the pin and drop the grenade is the most powerful of all these grenade-wielding people.”

That seems pretty far-fetched. But there are a whole lot of Republics retiring next year. Maybe they could round up a handful who don’t think starting WWIII in Europe is a great idea.

This is such a mess and I truly hope the Democrats work very hard to let the American people know just how fucked up these people really are.

Hopium High

Published by digby on February 14, 2024

Tom Sullivan posted another video of Dem strategist Scott Rosenberg discussing the win last night in NY earlier today. As you know, Rosenberg’s site is called “The Hopium Chronicles” and he called another one right last night. Here’s his post from today:

In March of last year I launched this site and community with a memo, Get to 55, which argued that because of MAGA’s escalating extremism more would be possible for us in this electoral cycle. That we needed to go big and shoot to get to 55% of the national vote in November. That our strategy in 2024 should be one of growth and expansion, and taking away geographic and demographic terrain from them. That as Biden went big legislatively in 2021 and 2022, we needed to go big politically in 2023 and 2024 and make this election a clear repudiation of MAGA, which is the only way MAGA will start to lose its dark grip on the GOP – something that would be good for us, for Republicans, for the country.

In the memo I lay out some ideas about how we could grow our coalition and get to 55 but “getting to 55” was always really about adopting an offensive mindset, one based on this basic idea we have:

Joe Biden is a good President. The country is better off. The Democratic Party is strong and winning elections across the US. And they have Trump, and MAGA and deserve to lose as no other group of political leaders have ever deserved to lose in our history

2022 had been a very good election for us. In the aftermath of Dobbs we overpeformed our 2020 results in 5 House special elections by an average of 7 points. We blew it out in Kansas. Our candidates dramatically outraised theirs.. Voter registration across the US turned more Democratic. In almost every state the early vote was better for us than 2018 and 2020, a remarkable thing given how much better we did in those elections. Then the election came, and despite high inflation, low Biden approval and a media spitting red wave every day we outperformed 2020 in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA. We got to 59% in CO, 57% in PA, 55% in MI, 54% in NH. We picked up a Senate seat, state legislative chambers, governorships. Yes, we lost the House but we kept it close enough to deny Republicans ideological control and make it far more likely we win it back this year. Parties in power almost always lose mid-terms, off-year elections. Not this time – we gained ground all across the country, and MAGA had its third disappointing election in a row. We overperformed and won. They struggled.

I started Hopium last March because I thought that we could do something historic in this cycle and get to 55 together. And look at what we’ve done since last March. We took away a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat with 56% of the vote, ending right-wing ideological control of the court in one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. We took away Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, two of the largest Republican held cities in the country. We took away the six week abortion ban in Ohio, getting 57% of the vote there in two elections. We took away the Virginia House, and ended the fantasy that the 15 week abortion could somehow give them an escape hatch from ending Roe. Governor Beshear grew his margin in Kentucky, we gained seats in the New Jersey legislature, and won cities, city council races and school board races all across the US. In 2023, like 2022, we overperformed and won. And they struggled.

And now this same basic dynamic – overperforming and struggling – is showing up in 2024 now too. We took away a critical state House seat in Florida last month, HD-35, Tom Keen. We took away NY-3 last night, turning an 8 point loss in 2022 to a 8 point win, and outperformed public polls, as we’ve been doing repeatedly since Dobbs. Joe Biden had a higher margin of victory in NH than Trump as a write-in candidate, and got more votes than Trump in Nevada. Our party committees and candidates are outraising Republicans across the US, as we did in 2022. And look at them. Turnout in their Iowa Caucus was anemic despite $100m spent and lots of candidate time. Trump only received 56,000 votes of the 750,000 registered Republicans there – big yikes stuff. The heir apparent, DeSantis, flamed out, spectacularly. Trump underperformed public polls in NH by 10-15 points. Polling in these early states showed a very large number of Republicans very worried about Trump and willing to vote for Biden. The RNC is broke, and broken. State Republican Parties in the battlegrounds have atrophied under MAGA extremist leadership. Dozens of prominent Republican Party leaders in the states have been indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, many more are under investigation. GOP Party Chairs in Arizona and Florida just resigned due to epic scandals. Ugly MAGA candidates are winning primaries again. They tossed their Speaker. The new one is a coward and a traitorous fool. Trump’s putting his family in charge of the RNC. We keep overperforming and winning. They keep struggling.

MAGA is a failed politics. It lost in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023, and is losing 2024. And this struggle Republicans have seen could get worse for them in the coming months. Their nominee is far weaker than 2020. He is campaigning from the court house not the White House this time. He is far more degraded, extreme, dangerous. His performance on the stump more unhinged, erratic, distributing. Because of his decline and uncontrolled impulsivity, he is making huge traditional political errors – like coming out against the ACA – that cause candidates to lose elections all the time.

Additionally, there are at least seven things voters will come to learn about Trump they didn’t know in 2020 when he lost. He raped E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room. He and his family committed one of the largest financial frauds in American history. He led an insurrection against the United States, tried to end American democracy for all time and has promised to finish the job if he gains control of the Oval Office. He stole America’s secrets, lied to the FBI about it and shared these secrets with others. He and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments while in and running for office than any family in American history. More than any other person in America, Trump is responsible for ending Roe and taking away the rights and freedoms of more than half the population. He has committed to side with Putin and end the Western alliance. I just don’t know how this horrible, serial betrayer of our country could possibly overcome all this to mount a serious campaign for the Presidency.

Even more worrisome for Republicans, in recent months, due to the success of the Biden Presidency, their central attacks against him have evaporated. The economy is strong not in recession. Inflation is down, prices are falling, real wages making enormous gains. There is no crime wave – murder rates and violent crime rates are down across the US. There is no war on energy – all forms of domestic energy – renewables, oil, gas – broke records in 2023.

Which left them with the border and immigration, a place they choose to go all in, largely because it was all that was left for them. And their cowardly and foolish Speaker, pushed by their diminished and desperate leader, blew that one too last week, turning a political winner into a huge political loser, as we saw last night in NY-3. They’ve got nothing left to run on now. And if they think their guy, as bat shit crazy and corrupt as he is, is going to win a debate about who is more fit to lead us, go for it my MAGA brothers and sisters. Go. For. It.

Where they’ve ended up now, this once proud party of Lincoln and Reagan, is in this ridiculous place, much further from the electorate than 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023:

They want Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to be in chaos, and migrants to keep flowing into the country. The economy to crash. Women, people of color to lose more freedoms and rights. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist’s baby to term, and for more women to die on an operating room table. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. Verified rapists in positions of authority. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Big tax cuts for their donors, higher deficits and less for everyone else. Books banned across the US. Seniors to pay more for insulin and prescription drugs. Foreign governments free to pollute our daily discourse and harass our citizens. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to get pardoned. To end American democracy for all time.

I think we are going to win the Presidential election in November. We should flip the House, and if we work really hard we should keep the Senate. The Democratic Party is a force for good in America and the world, Joe Biden is a good President and we are far better off today. We have a very strong case for re-election and the President will be laying out his agenda for his second term in the coming weeks. We keep winning elections of all kinds, all across the country, over many years now. And they are the worst group of political leaders our history. No one has deserved to get their asses kicked more than these cowardly betrayers of everything that has made America great. We should keep winning, and they should keep struggling.

I couldn’t agree more. And I hope his optimism is well founded. I have to say — so far it has been. He even called that Florida state house race a couple of weeks ago for the Dems even though nobody else thought he had the chance. If you believe in logic at all in these chaotic times, his analysis above certainly makes sense. (I’m trying, I’m trying …)

I can’t explain why the polls are so off but last night’s race had Suozzi up by a point and he won by 7, outside the margin of error. This keeps happening, over and over again. I don’t pretend to know why, but the pollsters seem to be quite stubborn in spite of their ongoing underestimation of Democratic strength.

I’m not suggesting that “the polls are skewed.” But the fact that we are in constant panic mode about the Democrats losing big and Biden completely falling apart based upon polling, it’s worth asking if they are the best guide right now to make any judgments about who should be running and what his chances are.

Leu-seur

Published by digby on February 14, 2024

Lol. The greatest sore loser in the history of the world has a few words:

You really have to wonder when the wingnuts are going to get tired of this. Ever? Or are they so brainwashed they’ll never learn?

She Won’t Back Down

Published by digby on February 14, 2024

Lara finally gets her star turn

Poor RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. Nobody has debased and humiliated herself more chasing the approval of Donald Trump, even going so far as to change her name from Romney McDaniel to just McDaniel because Trump despises her uncle Mitt. But it didn’t really do her any good in the end because like so many others before her, loyalty and Trump are a one way street and he has decided that he’s done with her.

In some ways you can’t blame him.The RNC is a mess. The  Federal Election Commission released its year end fundraising reports and they showed that the RNC had its worst fundraising year since 2013 only managing to take in $87.2 million in 2023. According to Fox News, “if adjusted for inflation, the RNC’s fundraising was last this low in 1993 — before the 2002 McCain Feingold Act restricted political committee fundraising from corporations and capped donations from individuals.” They started off this year with just $8 million in cash. That’s bad. To make matters worse, the Democrats raised three times as much last year and are rolling in the dough.

This isn’t really McDaniel’s fault, however. The reason they can’t raise any money is because Trump is hoovering it all up for his campaign and his Super PACs which are paying his voluminous legal expenses. In addition, the GOP primary candidates have all been spending like drunken sailors on their doomed campaigns, further consuming cash which might have gone toward national party building.

The Republican Party is actually in disarray all over the country. There are battles royale going on in various states over who controls the party apparatus and controversies over spending. The swing states, Arizona, Michigan and Nevada are among them and they are very important to Trump’s presidential ambitions.

But McDaniel is out because Trump wants to totally control the RNC with MAGA purebreds, which he has never considered McDaniel to be. After all, she was a Romney. So on Tuesday, he endorsed a couple of new co-Chairs, which he assumes will be elected without debate. He named Michael Whatley, the head of the N. Carolina GOP and current RNC general counsel, and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wife of Eric, to run the party for him.

Whatley is a true blue, “Stop the Steal” election denier who’s been sowing mistrust in the electoral system for many years. In fact, it’s what he’s known for which explains why he and Trump are so sympatico. (That, and the fact that Trump apparently thinks he can get the RNC to start picking up some of his legal bills again with Whatley in charge.)

Just in case you were wondering if the RNC was going to maintain even a shred of independence, Trump is also expected to install his campaign manager Chris LaCivita as RNC Chief Operating Officer where he will continue to do both jobs. He might as well rename it the Trump Organization.

But what about Lara Trump whose desire to be a “star” is so overweening that you’d think even Donald Trump would cringe in embarrassment. (In fact, according to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump and the rest of the family mocked her for years.) But she is family and she wants desperately to be in the middle of everything so it seems he finally found a slot for her.

Lara Trump has done everything possible to leverage her Trump name into fame but it just never seems to work. She doesn’t have the moneyed glamour of Ivanka or Melania and neither does she have the crude brazenness of Don Jr’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle. But she tries, oh how she tries.

Lara had ambition to be in showbiz originally, but only went as far as associate producer on Inside Edition before quitting to join the campaign in 2016. She became a paid adviser on the 2020 campaign proving that she’s a true Trump (just like Melania, who was paid $155k by the Super Pac for a speaking engagement on behalf of her husband.) Sure, most family members do that sort of thing as volunteers but the Trumps never leave a nickel on the sidewalk.

In 2021 Fox News hired her as a regular contributor, a real dream come true. She sas finally on TV. Unfortunately, they said they had to let her go at the end of 2022 once Trump announced his run for president. They did say she was welcome to appear in an unpaid capacity as a campaign surrogate which basically means they knew she’d be paid by the campaign again and didn’t feel as if they should have to do so too. It’s not as if her commentary changed in any way.

Since then she’s been spending a lot of time putting out strange Instagram videos which seem more like auditions for the Real Housewives of Mar-a-Lago.

Podcasting, of course:

And then she decided she really wanted to be a singer, like Taylor maybe, because she’s just that good. She released a single:

Being a Trump she naturally complained that the system was rigged and her song had been “shadow banned” on all the streaming platforms because it was “too political” to explain why it was getting no play. She went on Hannity to complain: “It’s really sad, because this is the kind of treatment that I think conservatives are used to. We’re used to being censored, we’re used to being shadow-banned.” Let’s just say, social media was not kind:

One person said: “Now would be the ideal time for Lara Trump to back down”.My ears have been violated,” another said. A third person tweeted: “I can never un-hear this. It is fitting for Halloween as it’s one of the creepiest cringy things I’ve ever seen.” While another Twitter user begged: “Please don’t make us listen to more.”

The Tom Petty estate has demanded that Trump stop playing his song at his rallies but I’d guess he’ll be playing Lara’s version and paying her for it as well. That’s how the Trumps roll. They always get a taste.

So now Lara’s got herself a new gig. It’s not as glamorous as she might have liked but she’ll be able to pretend to be important even if all the power will really be in the hands of Whatley, who is actually a political professional.

She’s off to a great start. I’m sure all the GOP office holders and candidates are thrilled to hear what the Trump RNC agenda for 2024 will be:

Of course it will be.

Salon

Where It Hurts

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 14, 2024

Can you smell the fear on the GOP?

Molly Jong-Fast reflects on Robert Hur’s hit job. Democrats freaked out about the special counsel’s gratuitous comments about Joe Biden’s memory. The press obsessed over it. Republicans redistributed theories that Biden might drop out and Michelle Obama might step in. Biden himself has responded with jokes about his age.

Jong-Fast writes (Vanity Fair):

Now, I understand why everyone’s so anxious; another Trump presidency could be the end of American democracy. But there’s also a reason why Republicans are so obsessed with trying to get Biden to drop out. It’s not because they are concerned about Biden’s mental acuity; it’s because they know that incumbency is a huge advantage and the economy is picking up. (Meanwhile, Trump is trying to look like an incumbent president—while taking credit, somehow, for the stock market’s rise.)

[…]

The media’s decision to seize on bad polls, especially around Biden’s age, has ratcheted up Democrats’ nerves for months. Yet polls have been wrong before. Remember the red wave of 2022? Never happened. Biden may not be sexy, but he’s sturdy and he’s running against someone who has confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. Biden will need to prove to voters that he’s up to the job, but as for the pundit class, he owes us nothing.

Democrats must learn 1) to play offense, and 2) to counterpunch. Keep Republicans staggering and cornered.

The Lincoln Project has Donald Trump’s number. They know where it hurts.

As Democrat Tom Suozzi did in the New York special election, they are going straight at Trumpian sabotage of immigration reform and MAGA Republicans’ complicity.

 
Post by @lincolnproject.us
View on Threads

And Republican attacks on Biden’s mental acuity? Trump lives in a house of glass. The Lincoln Project is not shy about throwing stones.

 
Post by @lincolnproject.us
View on Threads

Trump has lived most of his life shielded by his daddy’s wealth and the Potemkin image he’s built that he is a highly successful, self-made billionaire. Then he stuck his hairsprayed head out far enough to get a taste of what Hillary Clinton endured for decades from critics. Now the indicted former illegitimate member of the Forbes 400 is a legitimate target in a political free-fire zone.

He’s not too happy about it.

Rick Wilson has the luxury of not being a politician having to appeal to voters. But his brush-offs of Trump and his MAGA cultists are still instructive. MAGA-mind is all about dominance and testosterone. And a deep insecurity that what they got ain’t enough. It’s why they amass arsenals. Wilson knows where the soft spots are and punches.

The mirror on his wall tells Trump (and MAGA men) he’s the least manly of all. Go there.

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Is Our Democrats Learning?

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 14, 2024

Dems post another pair of special election wins

Former congressman Tom Suozzi won the special election on Tuesday for the Long Island congressional seat recently held by “serial fabulist and expelled former GOP Rep. George Santos,” as CNN framed it. Santos won the seat by 8 points in 2022. Suozzi, a Democrat, defeated Nassau County GOP legislator Mazi Pilip by nearly 8, a 16-point swing in Democrats’ favor. The win shaves House Republicans’ majority thinner than it was on Monday (New York Times):

The outcome flipped one of the five House seats Democrats need to retake the majority in November, giving the party a badly needed shot of optimism. But Mr. Suozzi’s campaign also provided something that may prove more valuable, a playbook for candidates across the country competing on turf where President Biden and his party remain deeply unpopular.

The strategy went something like this: Challenge Republicans on issues that they usually monopolize, like crime, taxes and, above all, immigration. Flash an independent streak. And fire up the Democratic base with attacks — in this case, nearly $10 million in ads — on the abortion issue and former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican nominee for the White House.

“It’s a very interesting lesson to Democrats that you can escape your opponent’s attacks on immigration by not only leaning into the issue, but doubling down on it,” said Steve Israel, a former congressman from the district who once led the House Democrats’ campaign arm.

“Instead of trying to pivot around the issue, he charged into it,” Mr. Israel added.

Timidity is not an effective campaign strategy. Offense is.

“Worth noting that Suozzi bashed Republicans for killing the border deal in the home stretch of the race,” tweeted Greg Sargent of The New Republic, “which also suggests it’s good politics for Dems to be associated with wanting to make a deal (its specifics aside) and bad for Rs to be associated with killing it for Trump.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observed on Threads, “If the shoe were on the other foot, Dems would be freaked out and frankly I think R’s should be way more freaked out than they are. This should have been very favorable terrain! The whole race was run on ‘their’ issue. They still lost.”

In a Pennsylvania state House special election in Bucks County, Democrats won again (Washington Post):

Democrat Jim Prokopiak was also projected to win a Tuesday special election for a state House seat in Pennsylvania, building his party’s narrow edge in a chamber that until recently was deadlocked 101-101. He beat Candace Cabanas after tying her to Trump and what he called “extremists” in the GOP, echoing national Democrats’ 2024 message.

“Donald Trump has turned the Democratic Party into the Kansas City Chiefs of special elections,” Joe Scarborough noted this morning.

It’s fine if Republicans double or quadruple down on what’s not working. But will Democrats elsewhere learn from this election what is? Will they fight their reflex to hunker down and play defense instead of offense?

Hayes quips:

I wrote recently that the constant refrain among Democrats that this is (like every damned one) the most important election of our lifetime only inspires them to adopt a defensive posture, to do the same thing they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it, just more of it. When it’s the most important election of your lifetime you don’t take chances, don’t experiment. Also, you don’t adapt, don’t grow. That’s what’s killing the GOP now.

Cut it out. Take the win and learn from it.

“Joe Biden is a good president. The country is far better off today. The Democratic Party is winning elections all across the country,” strategist Simon Rosenberg tells MSNBC.

“We keep winning and they keep losing.”

Republicans are on their back foot. Democrats have to keep them there.

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Melania Gets Paid To Campaign For Her Husband

Published by digby on February 13, 2024

I guess she hasn’t received her check recently

Melania has been conspicuously absent from the campaign trail since Trump announced. Maybe that’s why. She used to get paid for it:

A super PAC aligned with former President Donald Trump paid his wife, former first lady Melania Trump, $155,000 in 2021, according to new financial filings.

The New York Times first reported that the group, Make America Great Again, Again — which has since been closed — made the unusual payment to the first lady in December 2021. The payment was not included on the group’s initial federal reports, which instead listed two transactions, for $125,000 and $30,000, last year for a client called the Designer’s Management Agency.

Melania Trump is listed as a client of that agency.

The payments were revealed Thursday after Trump filed new financial disclosure forms, which listed the $155,000 figure as the fee for a “speaking engagement.” The date of the payment coincides with a private fundraiser at the Trumps’ Mar-a-Lago club in Florida at the the time, which sold seats for $125,000 a pop.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump stand together during an event at his Mar-a-Lago home on Nov. 15, 2022, in Palm Beach, Florida.

There’s nothing illegal about this. But it’s more than a little unusual, especially since her husband, the candidate, is supposedly worth billions. But the cult followers love to throw their hard earned money at Trump so I suppose they probably don’t care.

Is Comer’s Next Big Flop A Russian Asset?

Published by digby on February 13, 2024

Could be…

He’s still at it:

Tony Bobulinski, the high-flying investor who is the House GOP’s star witness in the Oversight Committee’s ever-expanding probe into Hunter Biden, has become the one Biden business associate that Republicans would like voters to believe.

“Of all of the guys that were involved in the Hunter Biden orbit, Tony Bobulinski appears to me to be the one solid guy that tried to do the right thing and was honest,” Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) told Lou Dobbs earlier this month.

But as Republicans examine Hunter Biden’s questionable business ties, it turns out Bobulinski is connected to one particular character perhaps more unsavory than any other figure in the inquiry’s constellation: Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg.

Vekselberg is a Ukrainian-born energy magnate who’s been a close ally of Vladimir Putin’s for decades. And in 2017, Vekselberg reportedly funneled $500,000 to an LLC run by Donald Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, supposedly with the intention of influencing the new administration to let Russia illegally occupy parts of Eastern Ukraine.

U.S. law enforcement has placed sanctions on Vekselberg multiple times, citing Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine, and the oligarch’s ties to Putin. (Vekselberg tried to evade those sanctions with the help of an American attorney.)

But Republicans are trying to look past Bobulinski’s ties to Vekselberg, as they paint Hunter Biden—dishonestly and without actual evidence—as a corrupt figure facilitating payments to his father. And they want voters to take Bobulinski’s word about Biden’s shady business dealings.

Given Bobulinski’s personal history and connections to people like Vekselberg, however, Democrats think that would be outright foolish. In fact, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said on Monday that Bobulinski’s biography raises “giant red flags.” Other impeachment witnesses have also directly disputed Bobulinski’s unproven claims about the Bidens, including a former business partner who characterized Bobulinski’s allegations to FBI agents as “wishful thinking” and “unicorns and rainbows.”

“Fuck Tony for, for trying to—I mean for taking little pieces of emails or, you know, and not showing the structure of an LLC or taking pieces of conversation that he recorded,” this witness told FBI agents. “I don’t know what’s in it for Tony but, but that email looks bad.”

All the same, Bobulinski will appear Tuesday for a private interview before the House panels exploring potential impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden. And during that interview, Bobulinski is expected to reiterate claims that he believes some of the cash from an ill-fated Chinese energy venture with the president’s son made its way to the current Oval Office occupant’s bank accounts back in 2017. (No parties have produced evidence confirming any pay-to-play relationship involving Joe Biden, and reporting has thrown cold water on the notion.)

What Bobulinski seems less inclined to discuss—given his failure to respond to repeated inquiries for this story—are his past connections to Vekselberg, a prominent Russian oligarch who sought repeatedly to influence Trump’s administration, including with payments to promote a proposal that would allow the Kremlin to retain control of the illegally occupied Crimean peninsula.

That proposal, which Trump attorney and fixer Cohen ferried to the White House in January 2017, also happened to contain the seeds of another plan, one that would later bloom into Trump’s first impeachment: ginning up suspicions about Hunter Biden’s ties to the troubled Ukrainian state-owned energy outfit, Burisma.

The pro-Putin plan claimed, falsely, that the U.S. was shielding Ukrainian government figures involved in a massive offshore money laundering scheme, thanks to “political cover by Joe Biden.”

“His son Hunter is active in the gas business in Ukraine which will suffer if relations between Russia and Ukraine are restored,” the plan said, adding that “the disclosure simultaneously of these thefts of U.S. aid will render the current Ukrainian administration unable to contest” the so-called peace deal.

Remember, Cassidy Hutchinson testifed that Mark Meadows clandestinely met with Bobulinski in October of 2020, shielded by Secret Service agents.

Oh, and by the way, there’s evidence that Bobulinski lied to the FBI too.

I think we know who this man is, don’t you?