Pre-emption

Just trying to head off some of the bullshit that's already starting to spout from the Repubs on this one:

Sean Sullivan, WaPo:

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has appointed fellow Republican Rep. Martha McSally to the Senate, he announced Tuesday, picking a favorite of GOP leaders to fill the seat John McCain held for decades.
-and -

“I am humbled and grateful to have this opportunity to serve and be a voice for all Arizonans,” McSally said in a statement issued by Ducey’s office. She said she looked forward to working with Sen.-elect Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat who defeated her in November.
"Service" got nuthin' to do with it, lady.

Martha McSally is a power hungry simp who'll say and do any-fuckin'-thing she has to say or do in order to gain access to the National Millionaire-Makers Club popularly known as the US Senate.

The voters rejected her last month on the basis of her vote(s) in the House to repeal the ACA ("Let's fucking do this!"), coupled with the standard GOP bullshit mid-term campaign theme of "We're committed to protecting the rights of people with pre-existing conditions".

The bosses want her in there because she always does what the bosses tell her to do. Which makes this little episode all the more distasteful, as she's running for John McCain's old seat.

Ari Nails It

Jim Comey is another one of those weird figures in American politics who's basically a rich mixture of Truth-Teller and Scolding Prig - and it's going to take quite a while to know just what the fuck has been going on.

But here's a fair stab at a beginning from Ari Melber, The Beat on MSNBC:

And for right now anyway, if anybody needs to sit down and shut the fuck up, it's Jim Comey.

Maybe he could take up knitting.

On President Showboat

So, OK, I'm starting to warm up to Matthew Yglesias.  And not just because he's lined up with me on the anti-Trump thing. That's very nearly enough, but I think he's writing better stuff - trying to get at more than the usual shit we hear and see from the Press Poodles.

This is some good old fashioned nerd porn.

Vox:

If you take any one moment from the Trump Show out of context, it’s striking. But together, Trump’s antics are now banal. He says, tweets, and does weird things. He gets attention. He pisses people off while thrilling others. Tonight, he even managed to attract attention and garner praise for slightly dialing it down. But speeches are supposed to be tools to help do the work of actually being president — learning about the issues, making decisions about trade-offs, and collaborating to get things done.

Amid the nonstop and increasingly tedious theatricality, Trump is only ever performing the role of the president; he’s never doing the job.

-- and --

You can’t parse a president who doesn’t sweat the details.

In a normal address of this sort, the role of a policy reporter is to serve as a kind of translator. Having spent days, weeks, and months following policy debates in Washington, we are able to catch the quick references in the president’s speech and understand them in fuller context. In that spirit, for example, I might note that Trumps’ reference to creating “a level playing field for American companies and workers” appears to be a move toward endorsing a controversial corporate income tax reform that big exporters like but retail chains hate.

The problem is that to draw that conclusion would require us to believe the speech went through a traditional drafting process. That the Treasury secretary and the National Economic Council director and the legislative liaison staff all briefed the president on the meaning of the line, and that he therefore made a coherent, deliberate effort to embrace this plan.

But here’s another theory. The speech seems to be largely the product of tensions between Reince Priebus’s traditional Republican Party ideology and Steve Bannon’s populist nationalism. Priebus is close to Paul Ryan, who likes the controversial tax reform. But one interpretation of the tax reform idea is that it’s protectionist trade policy, which Bannon likes. So the two of them may have put the line into the speech even though Senate Republicans and the Trump administration economic team seem to think it’s a bad idea.

The premise of taking a close look at these speeches to read the tea leaves, in short, is that the president actually understands the policy issues facing him and cares about the words he’s speaking. With Trump, that’s far from true. He doesn’t like to read briefing books or make hard choices. His words about clean air or infrastructure or anything else are completely meaningless until we see real plans. And there’s no real indication that we ever will. The show is an increasingly meaningless spectacle.

 

Framing

Dueling Narratives

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone:

Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, I felt sure Trump was en route to ruining, perhaps forever, the Republican Party as a force in modern American life. Now the Republicans are more dominant than ever, and it is the Democratic Party that is shattered and faces an uncertain future.

And they deserve it. The Democratic Party's failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance. The party not only spent most of the past two years ignoring the warning signs of the Trump rebellion, but vilifying anyone who tried to point them out. It denounced all rumors of its creeping unpopularity as vulgar lies and bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

But the party's willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance across the American intellectual elite. Trump's election was a true rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of "the establishment." The target group included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the media. And we all closed our eyes to what we didn't want to see.

Kurt Eichenwald, Newsweek:

On Friday, I almost assaulted a fan of my work. I was in the Philadelphia International Airport, and a man who recognized me from one of my appearances on a television news show approached. He thanked me for the investigative reporting I had done about Donald Trump before the election, expressed his outrage that the Republican nominee had won and then told me quite gruffly, “Get back to work.” Something about his arrogance struck me, so I asked, “Who did you vote for?”

He replied, “Well, Stein, but—” I interrupted him and said, “You’re lucky it’s illegal for me to punch you in the face.” Then, after telling him to have sex with himself—but with a much cruder term—I turned and walked away.

A certain kind of liberal makes me sick. These people traffic in false equivalencies, always pretending that both nominees are the same, justifying their apathy and not voting or preening about their narcissistic purity as they cast their ballot for a person they know cannot win. I have no problem with anyone who voted for Trump, because they wanted a Trump presidency. I have an enormous problem with anyone who voted for Trump or Stein or Johnson—or who didn’t vote at all—and who now expresses horror about the outcome of this election. If you don’t like the consequences of your own actions, shut the hell up. 

And now, South Park explains the Liberal Elite:

Knowledge, and the ability to demonstrate that knowledge, is considered snobbish. A willingness to take an active (or activist) position on any issue requiring others to change their thinking and/or their behavior is "Elitist" and will not be tolerated by the rubes Real Americans.

"We demand you make it better - at the expense of people who aren't us"

John Oliver

Raisins - fucking epic is all this is.

Today's Smartest Thing

(My 2¢ - politicians take positions; abandon positions; and/or change positions when they recognize either political opportunity or political threat)

From a Balloon Juice post:

But there’s at least one difference between Portman and Obama on this specific issue: Portman did it because changing his position will lead to a clear and direct personal gain–his actual gay son might get an real benefit from the state based on his father’s position. As far as we know, Obama’s change in position gives him no such benefit. For you freshman logic fans, that’s the fallacy of equivocation. Glenn’s trying to say that one of Obama’s stated reasons (his empathy for friends and staff who are gay) is the same thing as Portman’s (a real parental interest in the outcome of the debate).

Today's Smartest Thing

They're talking about the sausage-making in DC, and at around the 4:45 mark, Alexis Goldstein (OWS) makes an observational analogy that just knocked me my off my chair.

Paraphrasing - lobbyists get in to see the Congress Critters so regularly and so often - effectively pushing constituents and consumers and "regular people" off to the side - that it starts to look like a Denial of Service Attack.

Watch, and gape - and then try to explain to me how you think your Reps in congress are there to serve you.

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Professional Left Podcast

If you do nothing else to stay current on political shit goin' on 'round this joint, listen to the podcast these guys put up every week (they record on Wednesday, and usually have it up by about noon on Friday).

They don't have a convenient way for me to embed the player, so here's the link:

http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/

Be aware - this is nothing if not "very liberal", but for a conservative like me it's pure tonic to hear somebody speaking what sounds like real truth.

Smart

Many many times, Rachel Maddow is just really annoying.  Just as many times, she shows herself to be among the smartest political analysts anywhere; and why it's a good idea for me to listen to people who frequently annoy me.

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