Power shifted Wednesday, on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Washington, the dim performance of Robert Mueller, in the hearings House Democrats insisted on, took the last air out of the Collusiongate balloon. The notion that Donald Trump would be hounded out of office has been revealed as the fantasy it always was.
— A forecasting model based on postwar electoral history along with the president’s approval rating and the House generic ballot points to Democratic gains next fall.
— The model’s projection won’t be finalized until late next summer and will be based on whatever the president’s approval and the House generic ballot polling is at that time.
— The Republicans enjoy some advantages on both the House and Senate map that might allow them to overperform whatever the model’s final projection is.
We have been hearing now for four years, ever since that escalator ride at Trump Tower, how then-candidate, now President Trump is such an idiot. The media, Democrats and NeverTrumpers virtually in lockstep assured us that Trump would never be the Republican nominee. When he was, they doubled down promising that he would never be president. Nearly every so-called opinion poll confirmed their predictions.
Dante de Blasio is the son of Democratic New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has abandoned his crime-wracked city (but not his public office, tax-subsidized salary or perks) for a quixotic presidential bid to become America's social justice warrior-in-chief. Calculated to promote his race card-playing dad's campaign, Dante stoked anti-cop hysteria a few weeks ago with a widely disseminated USA Today op-ed. Dante's screed came just days after de Blasio declared at the first Democratic debate:
Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign was just disrupted by campaign workers demanding the same $15 per hour Sanders demands government force all employers to pay.
Finally, we seem to have a bipartisan consensus in Washington. Both parties are terrified of new private money, and they want to regulate it out of existence. The near universal fear and loathing by government officials of these so-called cryptocurrencies is all the more reason they should exist.
"Send her back! Send her back!"
The 13 seconds of that chant at the rally in North Carolina, in response to Donald Trump's recital of the outrages of Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, will not soon be forgotten, or forgiven.
How should the Democratic Party resolve its civil conflict between progressives and centrists? Society has a simple rule. When an argument gets out of control, it's up to the side with the most money, power and social standing to extend an olive branch.
The air is thick with lamentations that our two political parties are tearing themselves -- and the nation -- to pieces. The Republican president has picked a Twitter fight with four Democratic freshman congresswomen, and the Democratic speaker has chosen to violate House rules to pick a fight with the president.
In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions.
Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no impossibility for the Turkish Brigade."
GOP retains edge, but perhaps not as sharp of one as it had following 2010.
— The Supreme Court’s recent decision to stay out of adjudicating gerrymandering doesn’t necessarily change anything because the court had never put limits on partisan redistricting in the first place.
— Republicans are still slated to control the drawing of many more districts than Democrats following the 2020 census, although there are reasons to believe their power will not be as great as it was following the last census.
— How aggressively majority parties in a number of small-to-medium-sized states target incumbents of the minority party following 2020 may help tell us whether the Supreme Court’s decision will lead to more aggressive gerrymanders.
If you were shocked by the images of the Mexican flag flying over an Aurora, Colorado, immigration detention center this weekend, you'll be appalled at an even more disgusting spectacle:
It's official. President Donald Trump wants to index capital gains taxes for inflation. This would be a big stimulus boost for the U.S. economy immediately and over time and could get us back to 3% to 4% growth by liberating potentially hundreds of billions of dollars for new capital investment. My sources tell me that the president has told his White House team that if he can get his legal counsel to give him a ruling that he has the right to make this change administratively, he will do exactly that.
Recording events from public land shouldn't be a crime.
Yet when a woman in Utah, standing by a public road, filmed farmworkers pushing a cow with a bulldozer, the farmer drove up to her and said, "You cannot videotape my property."
President Donald Trump's playground taunt Sunday that "the Squad" of four new radical liberal House Democrats, all women of color, should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came," dominated Monday morning's headlines.
Living as they do in a bipolar political world where politics consists of Democrats and Republicans and no other ideology is real, media corporations in the United States use "left," "liberal" and "Democrat" as synonyms. This is obviously wrong and clearly untrue -- Democrats are a party, leftism and liberalism are ideologies, and Democratic politics are frequently neither left nor liberal but far right -- but as Orwell observed, after you hear a lie repeated enough times, you begin to question what you know to be true rather than the untruth.
We are all, to some extent, prisoners of the past. Things that have already happened -- or that we remember as having happened -- constitute the world that we know. Anything else is a product of imagination.
When Sir Kim Darroch's secret cable to London was leaked to the Daily Mail, wherein he called the Trump administration "dysfunctional ... unpredictable ... faction-riven ... diplomatically clumsy and inept," the odds on his survival as U.K. ambassador plummeted.
Farewell Ross Perot; Senate races on the fringe of the competitive map; the curious case of Justin Amash.
— Ross Perot, who died earlier this week, provided something of a template for Donald Trump. He also was the best-performing third-party presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
— They are not top-tier races, but there have been noteworthy Senate developments on the outer fringes of the competitive map in Kansas, Kentucky, and Virginia.
— Justin Amash’s decision to leave the GOP creates another House swing seat.
Well, well, well. "Follow the facts," Democratic strategist Christine Pelosi now advises fellow liberals in the wake of billionaire and high-flying political financier Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking indictment this week. Some of "our faves" could be implicated in the long-festering scandal, the Pelosi daughter warned, so it's time to "let the chips fall where they may."
