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US Politics: What Price Loyalty?


mormont

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17 minutes ago, Shryke said:

It looks like some time in the early 90s the Democrats suddenly had more women and have basically had 2x-3x the number of women as the GOP since then. With the overall amount doubling from about 10% then to about 20% now.

1992 is known as "The Year of the Woman:"

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In 1992 women went to the polls energized by a record-breaking number of women on the federal ticket. Nationally, 11 women won major party nominations for Senate races while 106 women contended for House seats in the general election.46 The results were unprecedented. The 24 women who won election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time that November comprised the largest number elected to the House in any single election, and the three women elected to the Senate tripled the number of women in that chamber.47 Dubbed the “Year of the Woman,” 1992 also marked the beginning of more than 20 years of remarkable achievements for minority women. Forty-seven of the 58 African-American, Hispanic-American, and Asian-Pacific-American women who have served in Congress were elected between 1992 and 2016.

 

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13 hours ago, Mudguard said:

Presumably, if Mueller was ready to interview Trump, then he must have been almost finished with the investigation.  Interviewing Trump would be the final step of the investigation.  It's unlikely to be something Mueller would do in the middle of the investigation.  I am surprised that he hasn't yet interviewed Kushner or Trump Jr. yet.  We'll see if those are done in the next month or so.  My guess is that the investigation is wrapped up before midterms, but we shall see.

My assumption is that because Trump is so atypical, you have to operate in an atypical way yourself. Furthermore, there seems to be some upside in interviewing Trump in the middle of the investigation rather than at the end. His responses could literally screw everyone else over while also being self-incriminating.

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I doubt that Mueller is going to try to subpoena Trump.  If Mueller already has the goods on Trump, the grand jury testimony from Trump is unnecessary and would be just for show, which is not Mueller's style.  He gave Trump an opportunity to explain himself and he declined.  Too bad for Trump.  If Mueller doesn't have the goods on Trump, it's hard to justify issuing the subpoena to do a fishing expedition.

Why? Do you trust Congress to do anything? This would be his only route if Republicans are signaling that they’ll fail to act, which they are currently doing.

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I've found my new favorite twitter account that doesn't have enough followers. It's a bot that tweets anonymized voter profiles from the respondents to the most recent Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. The two most recent ones:

Really highlights how fascinating voter preferences can be compared to the simplified views pundits go on endlessly about.

 

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34 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

Yeah, but they're re-engineering it to aim for 1855

Silly Jace. We’re going further back than that, to the point where I have to figure out if your father will have to bribe me to take you off of his hands or  if I have to bribe him to take you and make you my cattle.

If it’s the latter, do you think a signed, game used Larry Bird jersey would do it? I can throw in a couple of goats if I have

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9 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Silly Jace. We’re going further back than that, to the point where I have to figure out if your father will have to bribe me to take you off of his hands or  if I have to bribe him to take you and make you my cattle.

If it’s the latter, do you think a signed, game used Larry Bird jersey would do it? I can throw in a couple of goats if I have

Papa would love that. But if you have a tape of any of Ali's fights that would also do the trick. Or a healthy VHS player, those things are becoming rare.

But I fear he means to marry me to the mayor! He's promised my weight in gold. :bawl:

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22 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

Papa would love that. But if you have a tape of any of Ali's fights that would also do the trick. Or a healthy VHS player, those things are becoming rare.

But I fear he means to marry me to the mayor! He's promised my weight in gold. :bawl:

I actually think I have one of those TV/VHS hybrids in my parent’s storage unit, but the dust on that has to be horrific. I’m still mad that mi madre got rid of my Disney VHSs though. Those things are worth a lot today. :bawl:

That said, I will have to :fencing:the mayor. Time to :ph34r: up!

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4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I actually think I have one of those TV/VHS hybrids in my parent’s storage unit, but the dust on that has to be horrific. I’m still mad that mi madre got rid of my Disney VHSs though. Those things are worth a lot today. :bawl:

That said, I will have to :fencing:the mayor. Time to :ph34r: up!

I'll dig out a series of handkerchiefs so that I can have one to give the Mayor, reluctantly of course and only under pressure from my mom to please my father, then one that I can hold to my face in horror when you obtain a flesh wound, and finally one for when you defeat the villain. 

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1 hour ago, Fez said:

Yeah. I mean, I think everyone knows the House GOP caucus is mostly male. But even so, I was going through the congressional member spreadsheet I have, and I had to triple-check to make sure I wasn't missing anyone. I thought for sure the gender check would at least push the number down into the 40s.

I also found the analysis delightful. I actually went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if "like a green fly circling shit" was a regionalism and might help us out. Closest I found was someone somewhere suggesting it was an Ohio thing.

I did, however, discover that Samantha Bee and Wonkette came to the same conclusion.

 

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‘Untruthful slime ball’: Trump blasts Comey as details emerge from scathing book

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/untruthful-slimeball-trump-blasts-comey-as-details-emerge-from-scathing-book/2018/04/13/489ae64a-3eff-11e8-8d53-eba0ed2371cc_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9ab074236c15

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In a pair of tweets, Trump accused Comey of leaking classified information and lying to Congress under oath. And Trump said Comey’s handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state would “go down as one of the worst ‘botch jobs’ of history.”

 

What a childish buffoon.

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11 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

I also found the analysis delightful. I actually went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if "like a green fly circling shit" was a regionalism and might help us out. Closest I found was someone somewhere suggesting it was an Ohio thing.

I did, however, discover that Samantha Bee and Wonkette came to the same conclusion.

 

Peter King is a good guess too, and definitely someone who swears a lot. The reason I crossed him off the list is because I don't think you can call his district "very Republican." Obama won it twice, even if Clinton had a big drop off, losing it by 9. I think King is safe, but that's because of his personal popularity there, not because of how Republican it is. But, of course, this one of those variables where we don't have a hard definition for what Erickson meant; so, maybe.

I hadn't thought to look into the "green flying circling" phrase, but that's an interesting tact to try.

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49 minutes ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

I'll dig out a series of handkerchiefs so that I can have one to give the Mayor, reluctantly of course and only under pressure from my mom to please my father, then one that I can hold to my face in horror when you obtain a flesh wound, and finally one for when you defeat the villain. 

:love:

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5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I had never even heard of the term “kakistocracy,” but it was deftly used here!

I'm pretty sure Jim Harbaugh would be the president of any kakistocracy.

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1 hour ago, Fez said:

Peter King is a good guess too, and definitely someone who swears a lot. The reason I crossed him off the list is because I don't think you can call his district "very Republican." Obama won it twice, even if Clinton had a big drop off, losing it by 9. I think King is safe, but that's because of his personal popularity there, not because of how Republican it is. But, of course, this one of those variables where we don't have a hard definition for what Erickson meant; so, maybe.

I hadn't thought to look into the "green flying circling" phrase, but that's an interesting tact to try.

Dunno if you read the links, but the Full Frontal crew based their take off the Forrest Gump mention -- King is the only one they could find who'd publicly mentioned the movie before.

This is like that scene in The Good Shepherd where CIA analysts discovered the hotel room where some shit had gone down based on the sound of church bells and the kind of ceiling fan in the room!

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So I went back to my list. As a reminder, if we narrow down to Republican House members elected prior to 2007, who are male, running for re-election, in districts Trump won, who are not Devin Nunes/Steve King/Louie Gohmert, who are in districts that Clinton 16/Obama 12/Obama 08 all lost by at least 5 points, who do not have a Democratic opponent who got within 5 points in any of the last 5 elections, and who is not Walter B. Jones, Jr. leaves us with 23 names:

Jim Sensenbrenner, Hal Rogers, Chris Smith, Ken Calvert, Frank Lucas, Mac Thorberry, Robert Aderholt, Kevin Brady, John Shimkus, Mike Simpson, Greg Walden, Sam Graves, Joe Wilson, Rob Bishop, Michael C. Burgess, John Carter, Tom Cole, Mike D. Rogers, Mike Conaway, Jeff Fortenberry, Kenny Marchant, Michael McCaul, and Patrick T. McHenry

If we then exclude the ones that won their last 5 elections each by at least 40 points (because members in those districts should never, ever be worried about losing in the general election), we get to 19 names.

But if we push that a bit more, excluding the ones who won their last 5 elections each by at least 30 points, we get down to 13 names:

Chris Smith, Ken Calvert, John Shimkus, Mike Simpson, Sam Graves, Joe Wilson, Rob Bishop, Michael C. Burgess, John Carter, Mike D. Rogers, Kenny Marchant, Michael McCaul, and Patrick T. McHenry.

I compared my list to Wonkette's and I only have two names on it that they don't, Mike Simpson and Mike D. Rogers. I looked in to them, Mike Simpson was a true NeverTrump and has consistently criticized Trump even now, so he's off. I can't find anything on Mike D. Rogers though. So I'm keeping him on it; also he was on Samantha Bee's list. The only name I have that she didn't was Rob Bishop, but I couldn't find a reason there either; and he is on Wonkette's list.

Next I looked for any Fox News TV clips online of them (or articles about TV interviews) since the election. That narrowed to 7 names:

Ken Calvert, Sam Graves, Joe Wilson, Michael C. Burgess, John Carter, Michael McCaul, and Patrick T. McHenry.

Next up, I made the assumption that whoever it is must have some relationship to Erick Erickson, to be willing to be this candid to him. So I looked for any connections to him or to RedState, the blog he was EiC of for 8 years. There were four names:

Ken Calvert, Joe Wilson, Michael C. Burgress, and Michael McCaul.

However, Calvert's connection was bad; one of Erickson's early moves at RedState was to lead a campaign against Calvert's appointment to be Ranking Member of House Appropriations back in 2007. Maybe they've made up since then, but there's no public evidence of it. Meanwhile, Wilson and Burgess have had fawning interviews and McCaul used to sometimes contribute diaries to the site. So I'm crossing him off.

So, Wilson, Burgress, and McCaul. I'm not sure yet how to narrow it down further.

ETA: In rebuttal against Peter King, https://www.mediaite.com/online/gop-reps-office-denies-he-ripped-trump-as-evil-forrest-gump-never-set-foot-in-a-safeway/

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What’s more, Erickson describes his relationship with the unnamed congressman as amicable. “We have known each other for years and have been promising to connect this week while I’m passing through DC,” he wrote.

But Erickson and King appear to have bad blood: As recently as 2014, Erickson described King in several articles as “a man who raised money for a terrorist organization while that organization was murdering American allies” and “supported a Soviet backed terrorist group responsible for killing many,” all while “ignoring the blood on his own hands.”

 

 

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39 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

I'm pretty sure Jim Harbaugh would be the president of any kakistocracy.

Many who frequent this thread won’t get this joke, but it is truly phenomenal.

That said, I’m sure talking about Crazy Eyes Jim opens up old wounds for you, so we can drop the subject.

Take a knee, champ!

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1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

Donald Obama-issued-too-many-executive-orders Trump issued an executive order last night demanding a full analysis of the USPS’s financial situation, presumably to have his accusations about crooked Amazon confirmed.

On the contrary, I think this is really all an excuse to privatize the Post Office.

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