Absentee Ballots May Cement Democrat Upset in Pennsylvania

At times I have to think Republicans are living in a bubble or alternate universe - just like the Christofascists who make up a key element of their party's base.  They ignore reliable and mostly fact based news outlets preferring propaganda TV on Fox News and similar outlets that tell them only what they want to hear and play up to their worse prejudices, even fanning hatred at times.  They also continue to ignore the reality that less than 30% of registered voters supported Trump in 2016.  A huge portion of voters stayed home seemingly disliking both main party candidates.  That they stayed home in November, 2016, doesn't mean they will always stay home on election day or that they aren't finding the Trump//Pence regime to be nothing short of repulsive.  Republicans in Congress and down the ballot may be willing to sell their souls for short term gain, but it increasingly appears that the majority of Americans have not thrown away concern for decency and/or a longing for proper behavior by the occupant of the White House.  Thus, at the moment, Conor Lamb, a Democrat remains in the lead in Pennsylvania's 18th District where Trump won by 20 points in 2016.  Lamb's lead may well be cemented by absentee ballots which skew towards Democrat leaning Alleghany County.   A column in the New York Times underscores why Republicans ought to be very worried even if their candidate some how squeaks out a win.  Here are highlights:

It’s hard to imagine a candidate with friendlier looks, a more harmless demeanor and a gentler-sounding surname than Conor Lamb.

It’s hard to imagine a message for the G.O.P. scarier than the one that Lamb, a Democrat, just delivered in a special House election in Pennsylvania’s 18th district, where he led his Republican opponent, Rick Saccone, by less than 1,000 votes in a race that remained too close to call on Wednesday morning.

Lamb declared victory. But even if he somehow ends up losing, Democrats have reason to rejoice and Republicans to tremble. Just 16 months ago, Donald Trump won this district by 20 points, and its promise as the kind of place brimming with the sort of voters who thrill to him was confirmed by his visit there late last week for a rally in support of Saccone. [Trump] The president put what popularity he retains on the line, and flexed his trademark schoolyard humor with the epithet “Lamb the Sham.” This is all that he has to show for it.

Politically and ideologically, Saccone glued himself to Trump, running a campaign whose slogan might as well have been, “I’m With Him.” Outside Republican groups poured millions into the race, some of it for ads that touted the very tax cuts that are supposed to buoy their hopes to hold onto their House majority in the November midterms.

So Lamb’s showing — win, lose or draw — is remarkable, and it’s of a piece with the victory of Doug Jones, a Democrat, in a special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama and with what happened last November in Virginia, where Democrats prevailed decisively in the gubernatorial race and picked up a large number of seats in the state’s House of Delegates. Clearly, the opposition to Trump is energized and organized. In the upcoming hours and days, you will hear otherwise. Republican leaders will spin like mad. They’ll make the case that what happened in Pennsylvania was peculiar to Pennsylvania and that there are few omens to be seen in it or lessons to be gleaned. They commenced that effort even before the voting in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, spooked by late polls that suggested serious trouble for Saccone, 60. . . . . They bemoaned everything about him down to his mustache. They noted that Lamb, 33, a handsome (and clean-shaven) military veteran, was straight from central casting . . . . “When your message is simply I am for new leadership and cleaning up Washington, and you look like you just walked out of an Orvis catalog, you are going to connect with voters on both sides of the aisle,” wrote Saleno Zito in the Washington Examiner late last week.

[M]any of the Democrats who will vie to unseat Republican incumbents in House races in November won’t be able to follow Lamb’s playbook. To get through their party’s primaries, they’ll have to stake out more progressive ground than he did, and adopt a more combative, fiery tone. That could undercut their chances of replicating his success.

Indeed, Democrats’ euphoria over how he fared on Tuesday will give way to sharp internal tensions and sustained quarreling over which sorts of candidates — soft-spoken or bold, centrist or liberal, eclectic or pure — the party would be wisest, from a pragmatic standpoint, to promote.

But if the Pennsylvania results put Democrats in an awkward position, they leave Republicans in an even worse place. What exactly is their best strategy for the midterms? Sending President Trump into districts that supposedly smile on him isn’t looking like such a hot proposition. The mantra of “tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts” is obviously no panacea.

And with each passing week — each passing day — the Trump administration’s turbulence intensifies and the scandals and scandal-ettes pile up. Yes, it’s a long way from now until November, and much about the national mood and the playing field can change. But in that yawning stretch of time, Trump can also render himself and his enablers even less attractive. I have faith.

To me, Democrats need to cease internal squabbles and avoid the bullshit like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders sought to inject into the Democrat primary in Virginia.  Thankfully, their effort failed and a far better candidate won the primary.  The same thing needs to happen in districts across America where the real goal should be to defeat Republicans everywhere possible.  Democrats also need to take a lesson from Ralph Northam and Conor Lamb's playbook:  the ground game and turn out the vote effort means EVERYTHING. 

Will 2018 Be the End of the Trump Presidency?

As 2017 comes to an end, the usual predictions for the coming year are being made.  One issue that bookies are still taking wagers on is whether 2018 will see the end of the presidency of Donald Trump.  As much as I detest Trump - and Pence as well - and as much as I would be thrilled to see him exit the White House, as a piece in Vanity Fair lays out, 2018 will likely not see that dream realized.  As for 2019, the results of the 2018 midterm elections could shift things should the Democrats sweep and regain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.  Until we know that result, prognostications for 2019 would be premature.   Here are article highlights:

At this point, London bookies still think it’s likelier than not that Trump will exit before his first term is over, something no president has done while still alive. So it’s time to revisit the betting terrain and prognosticate for the coming year.

Will Donald Trump be impeached in 2018?  Mighty, mighty unlikely. If you don’t stand to multiply your investment by 20, I’d skip the bet. Impeachment is a political act, and the Republican majority will remain in place through 2018. If the investigations into collusion with Russia were yielding anything seriously damning (and if journalistic blunders on the subject weren’t outpacing scoops), it’d be different. As things stand, however, special counsel Robert Mueller seems to have found little in the way of collusion—at least that we know of—and instead shifted his focus to the obstruction of justice.

Obstruction of justice is a significant crime in itself, of course, but people are more willing to punish it if it’s part of the concealment of a bigger crime rather than the sum of the crime. As people are starting to notice, independent counsel investigations have a tendency to start by focusing on one thing and then indicting people for something else, after the process itself has made them trip over their own feet. Republicans are not going to join a pile-on over what role Donald Trump played in the false statements that former national security adviser Michael Flynn made to the F.B.I. Even Democrats are likely to flinch from impeachment talk, recalling what happened during the Clinton years.  In sum, make sure you get a big return on any Trump-impeachment bets.

Will Donald Trump be removed by the 25th Amendment?  Again—very, very unlikely. To remind readers, the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution lays out an elaborate palace-coup process with which to depose a sitting president. Such an ouster is arguably even harder to pull off than impeachment, except in cases of obvious emergency. Unless Trump interrupts a state visit to tear off all his clothes and run down Pennsylvania Avenue in winter, the palace coup won’t happen.

Will Trump resign in 2018?  Still very unlikely. To be fair, the odds of resignation are slightly better than those of impeachment or of a 25th Amendment palace coup. It requires only one powerful man, Donald Trump, to sign on. . . . . The odds of this happening with Trump, however, are mighty low. Donald Trump, while thin-skinned and incapable of rising above provocation, is indefatigable as a fighter, reminiscent of Clinton, Nixon, and other presidents in his resilience. Resignation would wound his pride too severely, because there’s no face-saving way to do it.

Will the Democrats sweep the midterms? Yes and no. They’ll do great in the House. Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics predicts a 40-seat gain, which would give Democrats a handy majority. Midterm elections have favored the incumbent president’s party only twice in the past 60 years—the first in 1998, when Republicans pushed to impeach Bill Clinton, the second in 2002, when Americans were rallying after 9/11. Trump has poor approval ratings, and there are many vulnerable House Republicans.  Flipping the Senate, though, is a lot harder.

Will Trump destroy much of life on earth?  Trump could go to war with Iran. As the fiercely anti-war Pat Buchanan has warned, U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley seems to be helping Trump to lay the groundwork for it. That would destroy Trump’s presidency, kill countless Iranians, and hasten the collapse of the United States as a great power. A bad outcome, to be sure. But it probably wouldn’t end in nuclear fire or mass civilian death in the United States.

As for North Korea, we may, ironically, be safer now that its nuclear program is nearly complete. It reduces Trump’s temptation to attack the country pre-emptively.

Politico: Meet the Real Jared Kushner

A viper behind a pretty face?

Now that it is known that he is a person of interest in the Russiagate investigation, I suspect that we will be learning much more about presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.  Based on a piece in Politico's magazine section, what we are likely to learn is not going to be good or flattering. Seemingly,  in the opinion of the article's author, beneath the polite veneer he works to maintain, Kushner is far more like his thuggish father-in-law and only too willing to play dirty and engage in underhanded conduct.  One would have thought that Kushner would have realized the truth would come out at some point.  His ties to Russiagate will likely accelerate that process and his reputation in society circles could well take a hit.  Here are brief highlights from a very long article:

He was supposed to be the calm one, cool and unflappable under his Ray-Bans and beltless blue bespoke suits. If Steve Bannon was the Rumpelstiltskin of the administration, donning multiple half-tucked dress shirts at a time and always carrying a clutch of briefing papers and barreling through the administrative state, Jared Kushner, through pedigree and temperament, could reach out one of his long, elegant fingers and tap everyone in the West Wing on the shoulder and urge them to just cool out a bit. In a White House sullied by ties to Russia and all sorts of unsavory characters from the fringe, Kushner was set to float above, surrounding himself with fellow figures from the elite worlds of Manhattan finance and real estate and deep-sixing the harder-edged ideas of the White House’s “nationalist” wing.

Except that this isn’t quite how it has gone in the White House over the last several months. It was Kushner who reportedly pushed for the firing of FBI Director James Comey over the objections of Bannon. And it was Kushner who was the lone voice urging for a counterattack after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the appointment of a special prosecutor, according to the New York Times. And it is now Kushner whose family’s business activities leave him open to the same level of charges of conflict of interest that have dogged his wife and father-in-law, and Kushner who appears to be as closely tied to the Russian government as anyone serving in the White House: NBC News and the Washington Post reported Thursday that the FBI is taking a close look at his contacts with the Russians.

The widespread assumption liberals make about Kushner seems to be this: Because he is soft-spoken, slim and handsome, with degrees from Harvard and NYU and a family that donates to Democrats, he couldn’t possibly be the same guy knifing his West Wing rivals and urging the president to go to war with the Justice Department and the FBI.  But that assumption is wrong. . . . . those who know him from his days as a young New York real estate magnate and newspaper publisher say that America is just getting to know the Jared Kushner they have always known. . .

By all accounts, Jared was deeply affected by his father’s prison sentence [for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering], and visited him weekly.

And so in an effort to rehabilitate the family name, Kushner focused the family business on Manhattan and purchased the New York Observer, a pink-paged society weekly that made up in influence among the social and literary elite what it lacked in circulation or profitability (full disclosure: I worked as a political reporter there from 2010-2012). But the paper soon expanded into coverage of Kushner’s home turf of commercial real estate, and people in that world saw the paper’s editorial resources devoted to pushing Kushner’s agenda or settling his scores.

“The Observer became his mouthpiece in the world of New York City real estate,” said one prominent real estate broker who asked to remain anonymous because “like everybody else in New York and New Jersey real estate I realize there is no upside to talking about Jared Kushner or Donald Trump.”

[T]he anger toward him among former Observer employees runs deep. . . . . Just before the election, Kahlon described her former boss on Facebook thusly: “We’re talking about a guy who isn’t particularly bright or hard-working, doesn’t actually know anything, has bought his way into everything ever (with money he got from his criminal father), who is deeply insecure and obsessed with fame (you don’t buy the NYO, marry Ivanka Trump, or constantly talk about the phone calls you get from celebrities if it’s in your nature to ‘shun the spotlight’), and who is basically a shithead.”

Meanwhile, damaging stories keep landing as journalists dig into the Kushner real estate empire, which is said to have taken part in at least $7 billion worth of acquisitions over the past decade and, according to Forbes, to have a worth close to $1 billion. A recent investigation by ProPublica revealed that Kushner Companies have bought thousands of distressed apartment complexes in Rust Belt cities in recent years, hardly the stuff of Manhattan dreams. A subsidiary that manages the complexes has been ruthless in pushing out those who didn’t pay their rent, ProPublica reported, hitting them with steep late fees and even going after them in court.

Alec MacGillis, who reported the story, found that few of the “Kushnerville” residents he met knew their money was going to a company owned by the son in law of President Trump. “That Jared Kushner?” one exclaimed. “Oh, my God. And I thought he was the good one.”

Read the whole piece.