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.

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.”

The December 2, 2016 Thread

It looks like a few Republican Senators are trying to clip Paul Ryan’s wings when it comes to his plan to move forward on privatizing Medicare.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was blunt about the outlook for a major Medicare overhaul. “I think we should leave Medicare for another day,” he said. “Medicare has solvency problems. We need to address those, but trying to do that at the same time we deal with Obamacare falls in the category of biting off more than we can chew.”… Most Senate Republicans agreed that there was still a lot of work to do on Obamacare before the topic of Medicare changes could even come up in the Senate. “I’m all for a kind of step-by-step approach, so let’s do one thing at a time,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told TPM. “A step-by-step approach makes a whole lot more sense as opposed to something big and comprehensive. We don’t do big, comprehensive very well here in Washington, D.C.”… “It’s just too much to bite off,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told TPM. He added that he thought Ryan’s plan was “worthy of consideration,” but that ultimately any changes to Medicare should be considered in a bipartisan manner.
Who is the Other in our Poll?

Who is the Other in our Poll?

Right now, Other is tied with Bryan Townsend with 22% and trailing Eugene Young in our nonscientific nonrandom purely for fun internet poll of who would be the best young upstart progressive candidate to actually defeat Senator Tom Carper in a primary, or who should replace him should the Senator realize reality and retire at long last. Senator Carper will be 71 years old on Election Day 2018, and has been in elected office in one form or another for over 40 years. He has been in Congress, either as a Senator or a Congressman, for 25 years. His Third Way brand of right wing Democratic politics has been discredited time and again. He yearns for bipartisanship as a goal in an of itself in a time when partisanship warfare is not only desired but required. His time is past, and we need a new Senator. So who is the other candidates voters are thinking of? Or are you all just not satisfied with Townsend, Williams, Meyer or Young?
The December 1, 2016 Thread

The December 1, 2016 Thread

Politico: “Congressional Republicans are setting up their own, self-imposed deadline to make good on their vow to replace the Affordable Care Act. With buy-in from Donald Trump’s transition team, GOP leaders on both sides of the Capitol are coalescing around a plan to vote to repeal the law in early 2017 — but delay the effective date for that repeal for as long as three years.” “They’re crossing their fingers that the delay will help them get their own house in order, as well as pressure a handful of Senate Democrats — who would likely be needed to pass replacement legislation — to come onboard before the clock runs out and 20 million Americans lose their health insurance. The idea is to satisfy conservative critics who want President Obama’s signature initiative gone now, but reassure Americans that Republicans won’t upend the entire health care system without a viable alternative that preserves the law’s popular provisions.” LOL. So they will repeal it, but then keep the law in place. Uh huh. And when those three years are up they will have no replacement and have to either pass another delay, or pass some minor change and call it Trump Care. Meanwhile, a timely new Kaiser Health poll finds just a quarter of Americans say they wanted to scrap the Affordable Care Act, down from nearly a third in October. By contrast, nearly half say they want the law expanded or implemented as it is. Another 17% say they want the law scaled back. The GOP has no replacement, probably because the Conservative idea for Health Insurance Reform was Obamacare. So if they repeal and do not replace, it will be a political disaster for them.