Trump, May 2017: 100 days of [unintelligible]

Nobody in Denmark gives a shit about titles - except people with titles, I suppose - and the thing that weirds me out is that Trump seems to think the king would be doing foreign policy, as if we're some sort of autocracy...

But then again, he is an idiot, and I'd wager Bruce knew that in advance.

Good series of posts here re Montana

Leading up to tonight’s results, want to relate the best recap I’ve heard about how Montana politics got the way they are today

— Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) May 25, 2017

I did a video for @GuardianUS about the past 24 hours https://t.co/3ecqDBRwG3

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) May 25, 2017

I really hope this shithead from Montana loses

It was always unlikely; the thing to keep an eye out for is the margin.

Neck and neck with 20% reporting. Quist 47.3%, Gianforte 46.9%

nice

live results: https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/montana-house-special-election

Cascade (Great Falls) -- early vote

Gianforte 49%
Quist 42%

Was Trump +21.5

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) May 26, 2017

WilliamC's numbers are backwards, gianforte is ahead

NY Times has it 47.3% Gianforte, 46.9% Quist, 5.7% some other asshole.

Aka "libertarian"

Quist was ahead at the time I said he was ahead, but results are still coming in.

i'm not really sure how the margin matters. if it's closer than expected, it could easily just be chalked up to the body slam rather than any anti-GOP sentiment

Quist isn't ahead of Gianforte and has never been ahead. What Quist is ahead of is the typical Democratic performance in this seat, which has been in Republican hands since 1997, and where the Democrat has been within 15 points only once, in 2012.

also, the republican candidate happened to body slam a reporter on the day before the election

So, the best remaining outcome would be that Gianforte is charged, tried, & convicted of assault and the judge is a hard-nosed bastard who comes down on him with both feet.

it's a misdemeanor tho

the best remaining outcome is that reporters shove tape recorders in gianforte's face every single day he spends in washington

that's about it

Surely the law should be that if you're arrested for anything, all bets are off re public office.

not sure we'd like how that would make our candidates look, given how we police here

i believe that all bets should be off for anyone in public office regardless of previous arrests

even if quist overperformed it's still a depressing result, the majority of people, conservatives and liberals alike, are simply going to see this as "progressive populist couldn't even beat the bodyslamming guy I keep hearing about". it's an easy and stupid narrative that can be exploited by people who want to keep propping up moderate/right-leaning dems. ossoff's gonna win an easier district with a boatload of dnc cash quist didn't get, and they'll be able to point to it and say "this needs to be our plan going forward"

I'm being pessimistic probably

i think you're totally wrong that the majority of people have spent one second thinking about an issue as fine-grained as "should dems run candidates more like rob quist or more like jon ossoff" -- i think among people who are not part of the hardcore right wing the narrative is going to be as simple as "man there are a lot of dirty / corrupt / criminal Republicans in office right now"

far from clear ossoff is gonna win btw though it would be a big surprise if his race isn't closer than this one

probably shouldn't have used ossoff as an example as i have literally no idea what kinds of policy he stands for

but i'm mostly talking about liberal blowhards using this loss as an argument, and indeed the first thing i did after reading your post was visit neera tanden's twitter, where her most recent post is a retweet of matt yglesias saying "Schweitzer Would Have Won" lol

and this idiot

Some activists misinterpreting this as an ideological point. I mean serious candidates - progressive, centrist, liberal. https://t.co/5cLkeU3uof

— Paul Kane (@pkcapitol) May 26, 2017

the reality of montana's votership doesn't matter if you don't want it to. also like every third U.S. representative out of the south is nothing more than a "quirky personality"

I'm being pessimistic probably

Nah, you'll never go broke betting on DNC incompetence

yay, progressive populist couldn't even beat the bodyslamming guy I keep hearing about!

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/25/politics/montana-special-election-results/

over a quarter of the votes had already been cast by absentee ballots when the incident occurred

Gianforte won the election day vote as well, though. Though by less than expected. So it might have made an impact...

It was an extreme longshot, Rob Quist was not the best populist candidate imaginable, and he still came quite close. I'd say it's a moral victory in defeat, while the GOP won but only became even more morally abominable. If Ossoff doesn't win, though, after so many others has done so much better than expected, it will be very disappointing.

No one expected him to win: I was looking at margins and a possible symbol of decadence for 2018 elections.

first thing i did after reading your post was visit neera tanden's twitter, where her most recent post is a retweet of matt yglesias saying "Schweitzer Would Have Won" lol

I mean, yeah, professional liberals like Neera Tanden or M Yglesias or M Stoller or whatever are gonna be like BUT WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT BERNIE V HILLARY but that's their job, I think rank-and-file dems just don't care about this that much anymore? Or maybe it's just that I don't care. All I care about is that every race is contested and the party runs the best candidate it can in every race.

I guess this means a lot of right wingers are so fed up with the media they they think its ok to attack them.

All Republican candidates will now be required to ceremonially beat up at least one reporter on election eve. It worked, and why mess with a formula that works?

Interesting read:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/26/ukrainians-say-fbi-questioning-them-about-manafortat-last

Separately, more Nelson laughs!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/us/politics/health-care-senate-republicans.html

I think Ossoff is gonna lose.

His TV ads are smartly made and informative while Handel's are fear based garbage, so you're probably right.

I guess this means a lot of right wingers are so fed up with the media they they think its ok to attack them.

― Violet Jax (Violet Jynx), Friday, May 26, 2017 8:50 AM (forty-eight minutes ago

many Montanans hadn't even heard of the attack! Also 37 percent of the vote already cast.

I mean it's important to remember in all these cases that special elections are happening precisely because GOP members left to work in the admin. Ergo, uphill battle no matter what.

if the incident had happened a week ago instead of the night before an election in which two-thirds of the ballots had already been cast and Quist had lost, I'd grumble more loudly

The other thing to keep in mind, I think, is something which has been handily irritating me over the past few months: the assumption that Trump supporters are already turning on him for economic reasons. FAR too soon. It's when the amped up people who thought he was the solution to larger structural problems look at things potentially next November, but more likely in 2020, and ask themselves if things are better that you'll see a change. But this is why 2018 could provide its own problems for the right -- after two years of GOP control of Congress and the WH, if you're one of those voters still facing barely any change in your circumstances, you might rightly ask what's going on. As such, the Carrier announcement this week has been some useful cold water -- and a sign.

This one's amusing

Huh https://t.co/rEGQ7RhFdM

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) May 26, 2017

"He already had Russia mania in 1986, 31 years ago," asserts Bernard Lown, a Boston-area cardiologist known for inventing the defibrillator and sharing the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize with a top Soviet physician in recognition of their efforts to promote denuclearization. Lown, now 95 and retired in Newton, Mass., tells The Hollywood Reporter that Trump sought and secured a meeting with him in 1986 to solicit information about Mikhail Gorbachev. (Gorbachev had become the USSR's head of state — and met with Lown — the year before.) During this meeting, Lown says, the fast-rising businessman disclosed that he would be reaching out to then-president Ronald Reagan to try to secure an official post to the USSR in order to negotiate a nuclear disarmament deal on behalf of the United States, a job for which Trump felt he was the only one fit.

"He said to me, 'I hear you met with Gorbachev, and you had a long interview with him, and you're a doctor, so you have a good assessment of who he is,'" Lown recalls. "So I asked, 'Why would you want to know?' And he responded, 'I intend to call my good friend Ronnie,' meaning Reagan, 'to make me a plenipotentiary ambassador for the United States with Gorbachev.' Those are the words he used. And he said he would go to Moscow and he'd sit down with Gorbachev, and then he took his thumb and he hit the desk and he said, 'And within one hour the Cold War would be over!' I sat there dumbfounded. 'Who is this self-inflated individual? Is he sane or what?'"

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Gianforte is obviously a shithead and a garbage candidate for a million other reasons, but I do wonder how many liberals would really change their vote, or more likely, not vote at all, if their candidate bodyslammed a reporter the day before the election. As a resident of NC, I'd like to tell myself that if Roy Cooper had suplexed a beat reporter on election eve I would've just refrained from voting for that race altogether, but once I was in the ballot box it would've been mighty hard not to cast a vote towards kicking out McCrory.

The other thing to keep in mind, I think, is something which has been handily irritating me over the past few months: the assumption that Trump supporters are already turning on him for economic reasons. FAR too soon. It's when the amped up people who thought he was the solution to larger structural problems look at things potentially next November, but more likely in 2020, and ask themselves if things are better that you'll see a change. But this is why 2018 could provide its own problems for the right -- after two years of GOP control of Congress and the WH, if you're one of those voters still facing barely any change in your circumstances, you might rightly ask what's going on. As such, the Carrier announcement this week has been some useful cold water -- and a sign.

the Trump admin's inability to push any policy through or succeed on any of their anti-populist agenda is gonna wind up helping them in the end

xpost Also, if it was a Dem candidate tackling a Fox reporter asking questions about the latest Drudge Siren scandal, the guy would be just a little less popular on the left than Richard Spencer's puncher.

frogbs otm. Trump's budget and health care plan would literally kill millions of his voters.

I sometimes wonder if he *truly* understands that. Ryan and McConnell certainly do.

does ryan understand that? maybe but I don't think he cares since it's his health care plan