The December 8, 2016 Thread

The December 8, 2016 Thread

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“After meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Tuesday to hash out plans to repeal Obamacare, top Senate Republicans are no closer to resolving an issue that’s splintering the GOP heading into the start of Donald Trump’s presidency: how long to give themselves to replace the law,” Politico reports. “Pence communicated that the incoming administration is prepared to work closely with Congress on the issue, senators said, but did not dictate how long the transition period should last. That decision will affect millions of Americans’ health care and send insurance companies scrambling to adjust.” “They have nothing to put in its place. And believe me, just repealing Obamacare, even though they have nothing to put in its place, and saying they’ll do it sometime down the road, will cause huge calamity, from one end of America to the other. They don’t know what to do. They’re like the dog that caught the bus.” — Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), quoted by the Huffington Post, on Republican promises to repeal Obamacare next month.

Carper Considers Quitting

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I don't know how I missed this:

Carper hasn’t decided if he will run for re-election in 2018

Dec 5th, 2016 · by · Comments: 2
DOVER — U.S. Sen. Tom Carper, who has held elected office in Delaware continuously for 40 years, has not yet decided whether he will seek a fourth term in the Senate.
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) Looking to Carper’s Help Repealing the ACA as Early as January

Sen. John Thune (R-SD) Looking to Carper’s Help Repealing the ACA as Early as January

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Republican Senate leaders said Tuesday that they plan to charge through with their plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act as soon as the new Congress convenes in January. "Obamacare repeal resolution will be the first item up in the new year," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said at his weekly press conference after the GOP caucus lunch.
Either the GOP thinks it has Carper's vote in the bag, or they want Obamacare repeal to fail YET AGAIN in order to be able to keep it in place in order to run against it YET AGAIN in the next mid-term. Flip a coin. Both outlandish explanations make sense in the up is down world of Trump's America. If the answer is Carper's vote is in the bag, we will be hearing about "budget balancing" as the vote draws near. Thune said that Republicans will be attacking the ACA through budget reconciliation, a method that only requires a bare majority vote in the Senate. It is a method that Carper has previously supported when it entailed trading off "entitlement cuts" for debt reduction in what came to be called the "Grand Bargain."

The December 7, 2016 Thread

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Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast and his take on Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees:
By my count, Ben Carson, nominated by Donald Trump to be his HUD secretary, makes the fourth designee who seems to oppose the very mission of the department he’s about to take over. There’s Jeff Sessions at Justice, who isn’t likely to be enforcing many civil rights cases or pursuing many antitrust violations. Tom Price at Health and Human Services, who wants to dismantle the same Obamacare that it’s HHS’s job to implement and who more broadly will bring a ferociously anti-statist world view to an agency that embodies the state’s concern for its citizens’ health and well being—especially its female citizens, who have extra reasons to worry about Dr. Price. And finally there’s billionaire Betsy De Vos for Education, who’s basically against, y’know, public education. Critics of the Carson choice complain that he’s totally unqualified because he has no background whatsoever in housing. Well, if you wanna get technical about it, that’s true. But as the Beast’s Gideon Resnick wrote the other day, Carson has actually shown interest in public-housing issues for some time. The problem is that his interest is pretty much of the “public housing is social engineering” variety, even to the point where he (inevitably) compared the things the government does to house its poorest people to socialism and communism.
Is Senator Chris Coons Completely Useless?

Is Senator Chris Coons Completely Useless?

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When it comes to standing up to Trump, Coons really is winning the "most spineless" derby. In a recent Slate Podcast Coons spends 15 minutes rephrasing all of Dahlia Lithwick's questions about the beating that the Constitution is already taking, without ever answering any questions. The closest he comes it an answer is to opine, from on high, about that fact that the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution sets up a "fascinating conflict" between originalists and people who think that the Constitution is a living document. Could there be a more entitled approach to Trump's multiple and egregious conflicts of interest? "fascinating conflict" JESUS!

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

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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?)

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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

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“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

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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

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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.