How Tom Carper’s Positions and Votes Screw People and Help Rethugs Screw People. Volume 3

Perhaps no issue defines who Carper represents in the Senate and who he doesn't represent in starker terms than his leadership in screwing families down on their luck in favor of the big banks and credit card operations. MBNA, to be more specific. In Carper's world, any feigned empathy consistently takes a back seat to the banking and financial interests who fund his campaigns.  While there is so much to dislike about his record, this issue, in my opinion, is the clarion call for his replacement in 2018. You see, Charles Cawley and MBNA had a dream. A dream that came to them almost every day and night.  They dreamt of a world where down-on-their-luck folks could no longer get out from under huge credit card balances by declaring bankruptcy. No exceptions. The dream was funded by campaign contributions. Huge sums of money dating back to the early 1990's.  One of the earliest beneficiaries of MBNA's largesse was then-Sen. Joe Biden.

Coons MIA, Bonini Shadow Governor, Carper spoiling for fight (over climate change?)

A couple of takeaways from yesterday's NJ front pager from Adam Duvernay. 1) Coons is signaling a desire to just be left alone for four years. Fat chance of that happening. History has its eyes on this Congress. Will it be the one that sells out the Republic for a little peace and quiet and some highway money? The coons response to that appears to be a stage whisper, "Hell yes"

The December 6, 2016 Thread

“The problem for the Democratic Party is not that its policies aren’t progressive or populist enough,” writes Fareed Zakaria in a Washington Post op-ed. “They are already progressive and are substantially more populist than the Republican Party’s on almost every dimension. And yet, over the past decade, Republicans have swept through statehouses, governors’ mansions, Congress and now the White House. Democrats need to understand not just the Trump victory but that broader wave…Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for instance, should have been centered around one simple theme: that she grew up in a town outside Chicago and lived in Arkansas for two decades. The subliminal message to working-class whites would have been “I know you. I am you.” It was the theme of her husband’s speech introducing her at the Democratic convention, and Bill Clinton’s success has a lot to do with the fact that, brilliant as he is, he can always remind those voters that he knows them. Once reassured, they are then open to his policy ideas.”

Delaware’s 2016 Election Results in Map Form

Hat tip out there to Donviti who pointed me to these Election Result Maps for Delaware put together by First Map. The maps are all broken down by Representative District and Election District, and the races covered are the President, Governor, U.S. Representative, Lt. Governor, Insurance Commissioner and State Senators and Representatives. It is an instant bookmark for me, and I will even link to it on side right column on the front page. Go here and play around with it for a few hours.

The December 5, 2016 Thread

CNN's Brian Stelter:
Let's tell some truths about lying, because the way Donald Trump lies has people rethinking some of the basic premises of journalism, like the assumption that everything a president says is automatically news. When President-elect Trump lies so casually, so cynically, the news isn't so much the false thing he said, it's that he felt like he could just go ahead and say it, go ahead and lie to you. That's the story. [...] Court cases involving Trump have shown that he lies even when the truth is really easy to discern. And that's what we're seeing all again now. That's why I think fact-checking is important, but the framing of these stories is even more important. Take Trump's promotion of this voter fraud conspiracy idea. He said on Twitter "I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." The journalistic impulse was to say something like "Trump claims he won the popular vote." I would suggest to you that better framing is "Trump lies again, embracing a far-right-wing conspiracy theory." See, focusing on the falsehood createsmore confusion and gives the lie even more life. And that's the wrong way to go. Focusing on Trump's tendency to buy into BS gets to what's really going on here. This calls for more reporting and for reporters to show our work, to show that we actually know the truth.
Finally and exact. If what Trump is saying is a lie, the word lie should be in the headline. Trump lies again. Exactly.

Coons’ smootchy statement on nomination of General James Mattis for Sec Def

The Constitutional principle of civilian control of the military is a bunch of old-timey bullshit in the opinion of Senator Chris Coons. It might be anyway. He is studying it. I wonder what other parts of the Constitution are relics that might need shit canning? It isn't an idle question because trump's cabinet is shaping up to be one that will challenge Senators like Coons to decide how much of the Constitution still matters.

The December 4, 2016 Thread

New York Times: “When Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, called Donald Trump shortly after the Nov. 8 election, they talked about domestic policy and infrastructure. But when Ms. Pelosi raised the specific subject of women’s issues, the president-elect did something unexpected: He handed the phone over to another person in the room — his 35-year-old daughter, Ivanka.”
The December 3, 2016 Thread

The December 3, 2016 Thread

Jonathan Chait: “Consider how the world looked eight years ago. The Republicans lost power amid having let Osama bin Laden and his followers escape in Afghanistan, launched a failed war on the basis of misleading intelligence, managed a scandal-ridden administration stuffed with hacks, handed off an economy plunging into the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and had its outgoing president’s approval ratings bottoming out in the 20s. Barack Obama leaves office with a growing economy throwing off wage gains up and down the income ladder, and with a president whose approval rating has risen into the upper 50s. Some conservative intellectuals tried to grapple with their party’s governing failure in the Bush years, but their mental exertions wound up having no bearing at all on the circumstances that brought their party back to power. Sometimes there is no moral, just a bunch of stuff that happens.” “The party that needs to search its soul about whether it has the capacity to govern competently is not the one out of power. And what should concern Democrats is not whether they’ll get back in power but what will be left of the country when they do.”