National

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?

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.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

(Steve Mnuchin) is the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis…His selection as Treasury secretary should send shivers down the spine of every American who got hit hard by the financial crisis, and is the latest sign that Donald Trump has no intention of draining the swamp and every intention of running Washington to benefit himself and his rich buddies,"

President-elect Donald Trump says he intends to set aside his business interests to focus on “running the country,” Bloomberg reports. In a series of tweets on Wednesday, the President-elect wrote: “I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to make America great again!” That's insufficient if his children will be running the businesses and also acting as paid or unpaid, official or unofficial advisers. He must liquidate all his businesses and all his real estate holdings across the planet at once or face unconstitutional conflicts of interest that will require his immediate removal of office upon his inauguration.

Nate Silver: “Let’s not call it a ‘recount,’ because that’s not really what it is. It’s not as though merely counting the ballots a second or third time is likely to change the results enough to overturn the outcome in three states. An apparent win by a few dozen or a few hundred votes might be reversed by an ordinary recount. But Donald Trump’s margins, as of this writing, are roughly 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 votes in Wisconsin and 68,000 votes in Pennsylvania. There’s no precedent for a recount overturning margins like those or anything close to them. Instead, the question is whether there was a massive, systematic effort to manipulate the results of the election.” “So what we’re talking about is more like an audit or an investigation. An investigation that would look for signs of deliberate and widespread fraud, such as voting machines’ having been hacked, whole batches of ballots’ intentionally having been disregarded, illegal coordination between elections officials and the campaigns, and so on. Such findings would probably depend on physical evidence as much or more than they do statistical evidence. In that sense, there’s no particular reason to confine the investigation to Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania, the states that Hillary Clinton lost (somewhat) narrowly. If the idea is to identify some sort of smoking gun indicating massive fraud perpetrated by the Trump campaign — or by the Clinton campaign, or by the Russian government — it might be in a state Clinton won, such as New Hampshire or Minnesota. Or for that matter, it might be in a state Trump won fairly easily, like Ohio or Iowa.”