How Great I Art

Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball is a good place to get a look at what's going on - and coming up - in electoral politics.

Larry Joseph Sabato is an American political scientist and political analyst. He is the Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, where he is also the founder and director of the Center for Politics, which works to promote civic engagement and participation. The Center for Politics is also responsible for the publication of Sabato's Crystal Ball, an online newsletter and website that provides free political analysis and electoral projections.

Not Too Deep

An apple a day will keep anybody away - if you throw it hard enough.

A Mashup

Stuck In The Middle With Crow --Tom Teeley

Today's Beau

Beau Of The Fifth Column - aka: Justin King

"I sat there and watched these scars of history burst open in front of me."

Full Frontal

Samantha Bee

Professor Warren

Elizabeth Warren is my front-runner right now.

She can read. She's been learning an awful lot about how things get done and how things are kept from being done, and she's not shy about being pugnacious - about getting in the Repubs' faces about it.

I've worked with women like her - the ones who'll look power in the eye and say straight out, "Oh c'mon", when she hears something she knows is clearly false or rationalizing or silly. I don't know what it is about that particular phrase. Could be just the fire beneath it. Could be the commitment to finding and speaking the truth. Could be a lot of stuff. But somehow, when a smart capable woman says that, a big part of the bullshit stops dead in its tracks.

And she's a teacher. Fake lord knows we could use some good solid instruction on a shitload of things too many of us have either neglected to learn, or actively and purposely forgotten.

Elizabeth Warren

for

President

Today's Thing

Justin Bieber called out Tom Cruise, challenging him to a UFC-type fight, and now apparently it's turned into one of those weird internet things where everybody's supposed to google a celebrity who's 31 years older than you are and challenge them to public fisticuffs.

And damn - I gotta bail on this one. I just really don't need all those people watching Betty White kick my ass on national TV.

Today's Today

They really weren't asking for much. They just wanted a pig-headed and corrupt government to leave them alone so they could love each other and be a family like any other family.

Loving v Virginia (1967)

...a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage as violations of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[2] The case was brought by Mildred Loving (née Jeter), a woman of color, and Richard Loving, a white man, who had been sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored".

The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case. On June 12, 1967, the Court issued a unanimous decision in their favor and overturned their convictions. The Court struck down Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, thereby overruling the 1883 case Pace v. Alabama and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Virginia had argued that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender's race, and thus it "equally burdened" both whites and non-whites.[3] The Court found that the law nonetheless violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was based solely on "distinctions drawn according to race" and outlawed conduct—namely, getting married—that was otherwise generally accepted and which citizens were free to do.[3] Additionally, the Court ruled that the freedom to marry was a constitutionally protected fundamental liberty, and therefore the government's deprivation of it on an arbitrary basis such as race was violation of the Due Process Clause.

The decision was followed by an increase in interracial marriages in the U.S. and is remembered annually on Loving Day. It has been the subject of several songs and three movies, including the 2016 film Loving. Beginning in 2013, it was cited as precedent in U.S. federal court decisions holding restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States unconstitutional, including in the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges.[4]

In Plain Sight

They're not a buncha fuckin' morons. They're a buncha fuckin' crooks.

They're not stoopid. They do this shit out in the open for a coupla good reasons.

1 - They have to make it look normal. By pulling this shit "out in the open", they can pretend they have nothing to hide. We're shocked, but not really surprised. Eventually, we accept it as just the way these things work.

2 - It's aimed at making a relatively smooth transition to Daddy State Plutocracy because it's been going on for so long, it's come to feel like the natural order of things. And "Gee, if you didn't know this is the way its always been, well then you're just a naive little dope - not smart like me cuz I've seen this all along and blah blah blah."

Today's Tweet

If you ever wondered what you would've done had you been in Germany in the 1930s, you're doing it now.

This is sick.

We will look back at this moment in time and ask ourselves what we did to put a stop to these horrific, inhumane policies. Speak up. Speak out. Be on the right side of history. https://t.co/cnm4ME5IVw

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 12, 2019

Whooda Thunk It

WaPo:

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), a lead architect of the GOP tax bill, suggested Tuesday the tax cuts may not fully pay for themselves, contradicting a promise Republicans made repeatedly while pushing the law in late 2017.

Pressed about what portion of the tax cuts were fully paid for, Brady said it was “hard to know."

“We will know in year 8, 9 or 10 what revenues it brought in to the government over time. So it’s way too early to tell,” said Brady at the Peterson Foundation’s annual Fiscal Summit in Washington D.C.

The federal government’s deficit typically shrinks during strong economic times, but the deficit is up nearly 40 percent so far this fiscal year, according to the latest Congressional Budget Office report released Friday.

Wait - ya mean opening the drain and turning off one of the spigots isn't a good way to fill a bath tub? Huh.

But let's be careful not to dismiss this - to laugh it off as another example of how stoopid some of these GOP clowns are, and how stoopid the rubes must be to go on voting for them. 

At this point, after a couple of generations of Trickle Down and Supply Side, and knowing it's all just 10 gallons of shit in a 3 gallon bucket, no one should think the Repubs are dumb enough ever to have believed it'd work the way they say it's supposed to work. These are pretty smart guys who know what they're doing.

It should be obvious to us by now that there are reasons they keep coming back to it, and the main reason almost has to be that Republicans have come to hate the very idea of democratic self-government, and everything they do is part of a plan to dismantle it in order to replace it with plutocracy.

Today's Today

Happy birthday to an American hero.

Jeannette Rankin, born this day in 1880.

Jeannette Pickering Rankin (June 11, 1880 – May 18, 1973) was an American politician and women's rights advocate, and the first woman to hold federal office in the United States. She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Montana in 1916, and again in 1940. She remains the only woman elected to Congress by Montana.

Each of Rankin's Congressional terms coincided with initiation of U.S. military intervention in each of the two world wars. A lifelong pacifist and a supporter of non-interventionism, she was one of 50 House members, along with six Senators, who opposed the war declaration of 1917, and the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

- and -

On December 8, Rankin was the only member of either house of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on Japan. Hisses could be heard in the gallery as she cast the vote; several colleagues, including Rep. (later Senator) Everett Dirksen, asked her to change it to make the resolution unanimous—or at very least, to abstain—but she refused. "As a woman I can't go to war," she said, "and I refuse to send anyone else."

After the vote, a crowd of reporters pursued Rankin. She took refuge in a phone booth until Capitol Police arrived to escort her to her office. There, she was inundated with angry telegrams and phone calls, including one from her brother, who said, "Montana is 100 percent against you." Rankin refused to apologize. "Everyone knew that I was opposed to the war, and they elected me," she said. "I voted as the mothers would have had me vote." A wire service photo of Rankin sequestered in the phone booth, calling for assistance, appeared the following day in newspapers across the country.

While her action was widely ridiculed in the press, William Allen White, writing in the Kansas Emporia Gazette, acknowledged her courage in taking it:

Probably a hundred men in Congress would have liked to do what she did. Not one of them had the courage to do it. The Gazette entirely disagrees with the wisdom of her position. But Lord, it was a brave thing! And its bravery someway discounted its folly. When, in a hundred years from now, courage, sheer courage based upon moral indignation is celebrated in this country, the name of Jeannette Rankin, who stood firm in folly for her faith, will be written in monumental bronze, not for what she did, but for the way she did it.

Two days later, a similar war declaration against Germany and Italy came to a vote; Rankin abstained. Her political career effectively over; she did not run for reelection in 1942. Asked years later if she had ever regretted her action, Rankin replied, "Never. If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute."

- and -

A member of the Republican Party during the Progressive Era, Rankin was also instrumental in initiating the legislation that eventually became the 19th Constitutional Amendment, granting unrestricted voting rights to women. In her victory speech, she recognized the power she held as the only woman able to vote in Congress, saying "I am deeply conscious of the responsibility resting upon me". She championed the causes of women's rights and civil rights throughout a career that spanned more than six decades.

The Death Of Us All

Back in 2018, 45* got together with Emmanuel Macron at the White House and they planted a tree to symbolize the partnership between the US and France, and also as a token of friendship between the two leaders.

MSN:

The French president offered the young oak to Trump on the occasion of a state visit to Washington in 2018, and the two shoveled dirt around it under the watchful eyes of their wives -- and cameras from around the world.

It was a symbolic gesture: the tree came from a northern French forest where 2,000 US Marines died during the First World War.

But a few days later, the tree was nowhere to be seen, having disappeared into quarantine.

"It is a quarantine which is mandatory for any living organism imported into the US," Gerard Araud, then the French ambassador to America, wrote on Twitter, adding that it would be replanted later.

But it was never replanted: the tree died during its quarantine, the diplomatic source said.
So let's see if we can torture this into an analogy.

The tree immigrates to the US.

It's put in a concentration camp for a while to make sure its OK for this alien to be here.

And while in custody, it dies - like everything that Trump touches.

Questions?

Today's Tweet

Rooster Demands Credit For Sunrise

Trump Trade War In Four Acts:

—Act One: Threaten to burn down your own house.

-Act Two: Your family tells you it’s a really bad idea to burn down the house.

-Act Three: Agree Not to burn house down

-Act Four: Put out press release demanding praise from family for saving home https://t.co/jKjSSXCI7M

— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) June 8, 2019

Last Nite's Bill

Katie Porter is one of the best things that's happened for the Dems in a very long time.

"If Democrats ever adopt a motto - and I really hope we don't - but if we do, it'll probably be something like: SOLVING YESTERDAY'S PROBLEMS TOMORROW - MAYBE".

New rules is pretty dumb tho - worth skipping.

Podcast

Kind of a Never give. Never surrender thing.

The Professional Left

support the podcast

Today's Tweet

Believe only what I tell you at any given moment.  And be sure to check with me often because I'll change it all if it suits my immediate need.

Laura Ingraham tells her viewers not to believe what they just heard Donald Trump say. pic.twitter.com/xVdQCSnhkQ

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) June 7, 2019

Today's Pix

click it

Maniacal Mango Man

Lord Commander Smarmalade knows the rubes won't hear anything about anything that's not on DumFux News or on the endless loop running in the Right Radical Echosphere of Breitbart and The Daily Caller and BlazeTV et al.

And don't be fooled into thinking it doesn't matter what he does because "the base" always seems to be with him no matter what. I don't know what goes on with his polling, but there's something a little weird about a guy with such horrible negatives managing to stay above 35-45% "approval".

But also, don't be fooled by the "amazing shrinking base" meme. Radicalizing and re-radicalizing and hyper-radicalizing a core group of fanatical devotees is the Daddy State at it's most dangerous.

Today's Tweet

Our extended family across the pond is doing us proud.

I’ll say it again people—

The Brits are killing us in the #ProtestTrump arena.#BabyTrump #TrumpInUK
pic.twitter.com/Iyst7q3RAW

— JΛKΣ (@USMCLiberal) June 5, 2019