Category: Uncategorized

Yesterday, Trump tried to attack me at his campaign rally by saying I abandoned Pennsylvania. I’ve never forgotten where I came from. My family did have to leave Pennsylvania when I was 10 — we moved to Delaware where my Dad found a job that could provide for our family. Trump doesn’t understand the struggles working folks go through. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to worry you will lose the roof over your head. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to wonder if you’ll be able to put food on the table. And he doesn’t understand that the longest walk a parent can make is up a short flight of stairs to their child’s bedroom to say, honey, I’m sorry. We have to move. You can’t go back to your school. You won’t see your friends because Daddy or Mommy lost their job. My dad had to make that walk in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how hard it must have been for him.
But he was not alone. This story isn’t unique to the Bidens. Too many people around this country have had to make that walk.That’s why I’ve spent my whole career fighting — and I will continue to fight — like hell so that no one ever has to make that walk again.
If you’re with me, I hope you’ll join my campaign and chip in what you can

Joe Biden, responding to Trump and showing that, even though I view his 2020 prospects as pretty dim, he can still bring it. The man understands the power of a simple, yet visceral appeal that is clearly drawn from experience and not some focus grouped amalgam of a “formative experience from my recent book.”

I won’t miss the Weekly Standard even a little bit, as I have never considered it an honest enterprise. I do understand the longing some people on the left have to find some decent interlocutors on the right [… and it would] be nice if someone would pay right-leaning journalists to do honest work, but I’ve seen no evidence that that ever occurs. And since it doesn’t, there is no such thing as an honest debate on the issues between the left and right. If the Standard dies, nothing of real value will be lost and we can be grateful that they won’t use an opposition to Trump as a cover to advocate for the things that Neo-conservatives really care about, like permawar in the Middle East.

Booman Tribune neatly sums up my thoughts on all the weeping and rending of clothes over the end of the God awful Weekly Standard. Good riddance to bad garbage.

Even if it’s all true, does it disqualify him?

Kevin Cramer, sitting House member and currently running to be the junior Senator from ND, very neatly sums up the postion of the entire GOP on Kavanaugh. And, while we’re at it, it’s also their position on Trump, whether it be his many personal issues or the straight up treason of conspiring with a foreign power to impact the outcome of an election. But, yeah, both sides.

I don’t have an attorney general. It’s very sad.

Donald Trump. I’m still waiting for a journalist, anyone with access really, to ask him “In the simplest terms, what do you think the job of the Attorney General of the United States is?” I think the answer would be quite illuminating.

You can’t plead Trump on this one, Republicans. You can’t say the base drank the Trump Kool Aid, and you had no choice but to submit. [With the indictment of  Maria Butina] we are staring at clear evidence that the Russians decided in or before March 2015, before Trump was remotely in the picture, that they were going to target your party, working through the NRA, and bank on your winning the 2016 election so that America would become more pro-Russian.You need to ask yourselves why they might have thought this.

Yes, yes; you opposed Putin on Crimea and Ukraine, and you attacked Barack Obama for not being tough enough with him. But even so, Republicans, the Kremlin felt it could play you. If I were you, I’d be asking myself: What was it they saw?

Maybe they saw what some of the rest of us here in America see. That you became, before the rise of Trump, a party devoid of any principle except the maintenance of power. Or that if they won over the NRA, they’d have you, because you’d never cross the NRA. Or maybe they saw that what really matters to you at the end of the day is that if Barack or Hillary was against it, you could be persuaded to be for it. And just maybe they peered a little deeper and saw the growth of the authoritarian turn of mind in your party’s base and liked what they saw.

That is what you became, even before Trump. And look what you’ve become now. Look what you’ve given us. Some of you howled in protest at what Trump did Monday in Helsinki (but it’s still worth noting that many did not). Well, it’s a little late now, isn’t it? You have placed an anti-patriot in the Oval Office. Exactly as the Russians bet you would. Never again browbeat us with your cheap shows of patriotism. You’re the un-Americans.

Michael Tomasky gets it exactly right and simultaneously explains why the vast majority of the GOP is was and forever will be in lock-step with Trump. All that “joking” between Ryan and McCarthy about being in the employ of Putin was not, in fact, joking. More like gallows humor. They knew. They know. They cannot change course. All they can do is hope that Trump goes away before the party burns to the ground in the inevitable blowback should the full truth ever emerge. I suspect that, come November, we’ll see some meaningful rank-breaking as individuals try to protect themselves and their careers. And then the dam will truly break. And then they all have to be tried and serve meaningful jail time. All of them.

Donald Trump is unequivocal proof that A’s hire B’s and B’s hire C’s, and Trump hires people without the judgment, qualifications, ethical foundations, and moral stature to run an underground bum-fighting operation. Scott Pruitt’s obvious money problems should have screamed out in any background check, to say nothing of a Senate confirmation hearing.

  Pruitt is a man, like so many of Trump’s claque of low-rent hoodlums, bus-station conmen, edge-case dead-enders, and caged-immigrant child porn aficionados, utterly unsuited to a role of public trust and responsibility.

Rick Wilson, the conservative who really gets Donald Trump. Just a perfect distillation of the current state of play.

Opinion | Inside the coming campaign to block Trump’s Supreme Court pick

I really don’t understand the Democratic messaging problem here. Every Democrat from dog catcher to Senate Minority leader only needs to remember three words: “Merrick Fucking Garland.” Repeat any time a microphone is near. He is the only acceptible nominee for this or any seat on the court until he is seated. Period. The fucking end. Anything else is window dressing and a needless and message-diluting distraction. After Garland is ensconced, we can start to talk about the legitimacy of any Trump nominee for any position, assuming the Orange Man isn’t already in jail by then.

There should be at least 1 million people surrounding the Capitol right now with one simple demand: Garland is seated or no one leaves this building. These are the messages that the modern GOP can and will understand.

Opinion | Inside the coming campaign to block Trump’s Supreme Court pick

Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.

All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes, given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.

Michelle Goldberg somehwat inexplicably unleashing a torrent of pure truth in the struggling Times of New York.