US Politics February 2019: This is one of the great losers of all time.

It is better if it comes out when Mueller thinks he has completed his investigation as thoroughly as he thought was required. Let the chips fall where they may. If the nation can't absorb this wisely without our being spoonfed at the proper moment, then we will absorb it foolishly. It's all on us, not on Mueller.

like, who is the hypothetical undecided voter who is eagerly waiting on the findings of the mueller report at this point? and who is the hypothetical trump voter that will be swayed by a damning mueller report? they just don't exist anymore

What happens to the investigation or report if Trump doesn't get reelected before it comes out?

I mean it still continues right?

I dont' think the report stops if he leaves office, esp since they could prosecute him then.

for that matter, given that Trump is already guilty in the eyes of so many, what happens if the report comes out and vindicates him? or if the report comes out and doesn't mention anything about him specificly at all?

was it here or somewhere else where there was a quote from senator Burr, who claimed that a lot of tangents of the Senate investigations are apparently very different from what Mueller is looking at. in a perfect world, whether before or after, Trump is hit by the results of several major investigations at once, all covering different facets of criminality and malfeasance.

The definitive answer to all these questions lies in our future. We'll know more when it arrives.

xp -- I for one congratulate senator Feinstein for singlehandedly giving the Green New Deal more traction via yelling at a bunch of precocious kids

(I know the video is edited, but the only exonerating context is it being a literal deepfake. otherwise there's pretty much no context in which those clips should ever have happened -- "you see, this shouting at a room full of 7-year-olds is actually a selectively chosen part of the 'shit sandwich' management strategy and will prepare these kids for the real world, where their death via natural disaster will be cushioned on either end by a hug and a nice funeral")

i've spent a fair time thinking about it and have come around to the opinion that in terms of electability, it just doesn't matter. all of his supporters will vote for him no matter what. they're beyond redemption and have been for several years at least. what matters for the 2020 election is getting everyone who hates trump (which is the majority of people, i think) to get off their asses and vote this time around. a damning mueller report might help with that, but really, trump is already guilty in the eyes of so many people that i doubt it will matter that much anyway

― Karl Malone, Saturday, February 23, 201

I posted this response a few days ago. Take the independents away and he loses.

they're beyond redemption and have been for several years at least.

are you putting all trump supporters in the same basket

i'm trying to imagine the trump voter that had a very good reason to vote for him on nov 8, 2016, still supports him now, and is not beyond redemption

the Trump supporters who are redeemable are the 2016 independents, many of whom stayed home or switched to Dems last year.

best case scenario to me: he loses and it comes out afterwards and it’s pretty fucking bad and he lives out a hopefully short, legally-tortured life and dies ignominiously, with all but the most credulous basement dwellers shaking their damn heads. GOP is fractured beyond repair.

but it’ll probably come out before election, there will be some illegal shit but somehow not *that* bad and mostly just stupid/ unethical stuff. FOX/ GOP claim victory, rest of MSM both-sides their heads completely up their own asses. he again loses the popular vote but manages to claim another (but thinner) electoral victory.

sadly, whatever the outcome, I don’t think he’ll be the albatross for all the “normal” Republican pols who went to the mat for this idiot—or just sat by and sternly wagged their fingers—that it should be. or would have been in our not-so-distant past.

and is not beyond redemption

so you’d say there’s no reason to think anything positive of the ppl in this basket

i admit that i am abnormally harsh and forgiving towards unapologetic racists, and that i hold the opinion that voting for a racist is the same as supporting a racist. since trump was very obviously a racist before the election to anyone who was paying attention (birth certificate trutherism alone) i am unforgiving toward his supporters.

but yeah, i'm sure some of them are lovely people

same. and I’m related to a lot of em.

same

xps - knowing Karl, he most likely meant that their politics are beyond redemption, where 'redemption' would indicate their acquiring the ability to see the manipulation and duplicity practiced upon them by forces that profit mightily from manufacturing their cooperation and stimulating their hatred of certain other, largely innocent, humans.

abnormally harsh and forgiving

should be unforgiving

i have to take my dog to her dog training class now, but i'll be back to say more dumb things later

but would you say that, say, half the ppl who voted for him in 2016 are not in this basket

where are you getting that figure, sic?

it's a basket of deplorables reference

feel like someone might have eyeballed the stats in September 2016, just wondering how they hold up

xpost yeah

Whatever else, the figure is unquantifiable, and to quantify it is an unedifying, depressing task. My parents -- compassionate, observant people who are better company in a bar than many acquaintances -- voted for Trump. I have no interest in parsing their motives. Who cares?

I'll repeat: don't waste oxygen wooing deplorables. He's losing the independents. It's our and the candidate's job to assure they stay lost to him.

Take the independents away and he loses.

Not reassuring. His loss must be definitive, not some sort of 1% gap, and it will take more than independents to do that.

A lot more than 2% of the electorate are self-described independents

No loss is definitive. Remember 2008?

THE END OF THE GOP WHOA NELLY

Anyway.

NOW: Mueller's office has filed its redacted sentencing memo for Paul Manafort in his DC case. They're not taking a position on how much prison time he should get, or whether it should stack on top of whatever he gets in his Virginia case https://t.co/TLePiNxWsX pic.twitter.com/ZjGjxB0IlN

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) February 23, 2019

The government's sentencing memo notes that the estimated sentencing guideline range is 210-262 months, BUT: the legal maximum sentence for the two counts that Manafort pleaded guilty to is 10 years (5 years for each count.) So Manafort can't get more than that in his DC case pic.twitter.com/4xr4hmraqU

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) February 23, 2019

Breaking: Manafort filing is out. In it, Prosecutors say Manafort’s "criminal actions were bold, some of which were committed while under a spotlight due to his work as the campaign chairman and, later, while he was on bail from this Court".

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) February 23, 2019

So Mueller could have, but didn't, elaborate on Manafort's cooperation lies at all.

Interesting.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 23, 2019

The document listing all the activities Manafort took to try to spin Ukraine's imprisonment of Tymoshenko as just is 38 pages long.

(Start on p 121 of Exhibit G). LOTS of journos were part of it.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 23, 2019

a LOT of self-described “independents” are right wing, erstwhile tea party types

Trump won independents 46 - 42 over Hillary in 2016. they were a sizable reason for his win. if you swung the results 4% the other direction, he loses.
Alfred otm

I'm not seriously trying to get anyone to quantify whether the basket is half-full or half-empty. Just reminded by Karl's post that Hillary was plainly OTM when she made the comment, that it was a symptom of a profoundly broken media that she was forced to apologise for it, and that polling has alarmingly suggested that she underestimated the proportions within the basket.

(The hopeful gloss on the polling is that polls are likely to be reaching the kind of genuinely low-information-voter that won't actually vote.)

I understand that few elections are "definitive" these days, but I'd say the CA House sweep(out) and IL Gov (for example) were pretty definitive statements. I'm just coming from the position that Trump is an unusual president, not normal, and therefore he should not lose normally (any more than he won normally, which is to say, he didn't). So what I'm saying is that if Trump loses by 1-2% - hell, 4% - even though a loss is a loss that's an indicator of more problems to come. It should not be close at all, or we will be dealing with Trump (specifically and generally) for several more years to come.

sure, but state races aren't national ones. Obama's election in 2008 wasn't a landslide on the LBJ, Nixon, or Reagan level, nor even the Poppy Bush level, but it qualifies as a landslide in modern times because so few people are in the middle.

His loss must be definitive

If Trump is not president in Feb, 2021, then his loss was definitive. Look at George Bush the Lesser's win in 2000 for god's sake. What matters is holding or not holding office. I'll take that any way it comes. Definitive would just be the icing on the cake.

THE END OF THE GOP WHOA NELLY

This rhetoric was not on my radar in 2008, but inferring from your dismissal: seems like it may have been the end, but instead in a "fuck it, mask off" fashion? Perhaps Cheney's presidency hollowed out the party for Tea Party destabilisation to fill the void more than Obama's election knocked the foundations away. And the core mission of the party had been Kill The Poor on the low for a long time, but more as a sock for lobbyists than an active belief of many individual reps and senators.

But the shamelessness of not even having fake positive policies reads new, and seeing the last year of bemused Jeff Flake standing around blinking and saying "guys... c'mon, this isn't us. surely this isn't us" so sincerely speaks to the Grand Old Party Of Civility veneer being dropped, with nothing to replace it.

Norm’s Superego (silby) at 1:36 23 Feb 19

A lot more than 2% of the electorate are self-described independents

I wonder how many are really independent vs how many like to gas themselves up about how independent minded they are then they generally vote one way 90% of the time

nah, every national pundit fell over themselves proclaiming a new era of liberalism regnant. That's when FDR books and the LBJ revival began, remember?

http://img.timeinc.net/time/images/covers/europe/2008/20081124_400.jpg

What matters is holding or not holding office.

Whether he wins or loses or serves out some variation of 3+ years, you think Trump is going to go off quietly to paint? Do you think after 24 hours of coverage for years on end that will be it? When he's out of office he's is for *sure* going to keep holding giant rallies and getting daily news coverage. And the same cycle we're in now will be repeated ad nauseam. He says something shitty, the media covers, mainstream politicians will be pressured into saying something, and by then he will move on to the next rally and it begins again. It will still be about him, he will still drive the debate, until he's dead or otherwise silenced.

BTW, is there any law that an impeached president can't run again?

back from dog training!

I'm not seriously trying to get anyone to quantify whether the basket is half-full or half-empty. Just reminded by Karl's post that Hillary was plainly OTM when she made the comment, that it was a symptom of a profoundly broken media that she was forced to apologise for it, and that polling has alarmingly suggested that she underestimated the proportions within the basket.[

oh, gotcha. when i left, i thought perhaps you were trying to say that a good portion of the trump voters are actually very kind and decent people and that i shouldn't just refer to them all as terrible fucking people. which would be fair - i don't actually think that 100% of trump voters are completely awful people. maybe just the vast majority? i have trouble imagining a scenario where it ever made sense to vote for trump, to anyone.

but of course i also recognize that somewhere there's a bizarro conservative mirror version of ilx, and john stockton is arguing that anyone who voted for hillary clinton is morally bankrupt, given her lack of attention to security protocols on her private server or whatever

remember?

I don't! While I have to work to ignore the American punditry class on the internet today, it made no impression at all from the other side of the globe and not obsessively following looking at ILX politics threads in 2008

My initial impression at the election was that it was, if nothing else, a massive symbolic step forward, 69 million people enacting the Shephard Fairey poster. That this was magnificently valuable and affirming in itself, but that as a solid machine politician, his actual achievements would probably be more limited and likely disappointing. (Obviously I earned my Nostradamus badge from the boy scouts within the year, but my god, it remained pleasurable to have an American president who spoke so well for the remaining eight years.)

Whether he wins or loses or serves out some variation of 3+ years, you think Trump is going to go off quietly to paint? Do you think after 24 hours of coverage for years on end that will be it? When he's out of office he's is for *sure* going to keep holding giant rallies and getting daily news coverage. And the same cycle we're in now will be repeated ad nauseam. He says something shitty, the media covers, mainstream politicians will be pressured into saying something, and by then he will move on to the next rally and it begins again. It will still be about him, he will still drive the debate, until he's dead or otherwise silenced.

yet he won't be president, which means he won't be taken seriously. The problem isn't Trump, necessarily -- it's ideas that have festered in the GOP swamp since January 1981 now bearing fruit in the judiciary, statehouses, and think tanks. I mean, fuck Trump -- I worry about that.

which means he won't be taken seriously.

No one took him seriously before and he was elected president. I'm not even sure how seriously people take him now, but he still sucks up all the air in the room. "Serious" has never been a standard for media saturation. He's not going anywhere, and whether he's taken "seriously" or not he's still going to be dangerous. And his impact on the courts will linger like a fart.

posting this here rather than the climate change thread because it deserves to be read slightly more widely, and david roberts is a good writer

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/23/18228142/green-new-deal-critics

i have trouble imagining a scenario where it ever made sense to vote for trump, to anyone.

There genuinely are low-information voters who don't understand anything about how politics or politicians affect their lives, and will not learn. Some of these are dumb or intractable or reprehensible in their ignorance, but some simply have more pressing concerns, or have accurately decided that thinking about politics is above their pay grade, and made an erroneous coin flip about which way they will vote, forever, in a two-horse race.

(They can be disregarded as recruitable just as well as deliberate or ideological Trump voters can, of course. I've always held that the primary benefit of Australia's compulsory voting is that it motivates the populace to inform themselves; since you have to go and write some sequential numbers on a piece of paper, you might as well get an impression of what order you want to put those numbers in. But still not everyone bothers. As I've written here before, the last time I tried to convince my mother not to vote for the party that was ideologically bound on gutting the public broadcaster I worked for and to which she listens exclusively, she declined, and then rang me up and cried asking what I'd done wrong to be made redundant when they were elected and cut $254 million from the operating budget.)