I think its shameful that Dems play this game. Most (or at least, many) democrats sandbag on big issues that affect their big corp donors. They don't suddenly get stupid, they craft the only message they can given their own financial interests. And it looks stupid and nonsensical because that's all you have left when you go against the interests of your presumed base (e.g. working people).

Repubs, at least generally speaking, are more upfront about their support for big corp over working people....and concentrating power/wealth to the ruling class.

Dems are saying these things and more, but they are getting squeezed out by the coverage of the growing opposition to RyanCare from the right. Which, frankly, is a bigger story. Dems have nowhere close to the number of votes to defeat the bill in the House. If it goes down, it will be because a substantial number of conservatives opposed it.

Should it move over to the Senate, then Democratic views are more relevant to the outcome and I think you will start to see more coverage of that.

If it's going to fail, it's better if the narrative is that lack of Republican support killed it than that Democrats killed it. I don't see any long term benefit in just being the new Party of No.

There's plenty of research showing that the president's approval rating effects his party all the way down to state level races. Politically it's obvious that anything that hurts the president helps the opposition party. That's what the GOP exploited so well over the last eight years.

In the long term this is a tremendous problem, but neither party can surrender and let the other obstruct while they try to cooperate. That will only move policy towards the obstructionists.

It would get a bunch of Democrats (especially the left leaning ones who have been criticizing the moderate Dems incessantly since last year) fired up about the party if the Democrats torpedoed TrumpCare.

I'd argue that the party doesn't need more leftist Democrats coming on board to give each other hand jobs and get stuff done. We've got plenty of Democrats. What we need are moderates and centrists to align themselves with Democrats.

Start by just being the Party of Sanity and Not Doing Embarrassing Shit, then grow leftward.

The leftist fringe is just as terrifying to the average American in the center as right-wing nationalist kooks. Doubling down on the getting the fringe excited doesn't strike me as a recipe for success.

Lets not go left. Let us stay in the middle. Going left or right is what is the problem.

Find the midle ground and work fromn there.

So evidently Nigel Farage, the Trump stand-in in England, was seen leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy. That's currently the home of Julian Assange. When he was asked why he was there, as he was leaving, he said he couldn't recall. 10 days ago, Farage was in American hanging with Trump.

I sometimes feel (and kind of wish) that they know how things will look and just do it to fuck with people, but they also aren't that smart. I kind of feel like there are people behind the scenes who are just too loathsome to be elected themselves, but they vastly overestimated the competence of their public faces.

End of conspiracy rant.

I don't think it is conspiracy nor requires tinfoil to be skeptical of the political class and see that big coincidences are not coincidences.

There certainly are reasons we have wall st, big pharma, and big insurance (among a few others) paying both sides of the political establishment. And it isn't because of social issues.

The 'middle' of where the Republicans and Democrats are presently isn't the middle - its where the 'right' used to be back in the 60's ... going left now takes us back towards some semblance of sanity and looking after the populace not corporations imho.

Over the last 40+ years the right have cleverly become more extreme, relying on the lefts inclination to try and find a sensible 'compromise' between the two viewpoints ... this has allowed the political stance to be dragged continually to the right over a long period of time ...

(there is a book called 'the establishment' - its about politics in the UK which explains how this happened there ... while I don't agree with all of it, its an interesting read)

So, did Trump's handlers finally take his twitter away? If you look at his tweets since seemingly reaching peak insanity last weekend, it appears very clear he has not tweeted in his "Trump" way since then.

Yet the Tea Party has shown that doing embarrassing shit is not that much of a downside (well maybe except in some Senate races). What seems to happen is that by going to extremes, you fire up your base, which goes out to the polls in midterm elections and therefore you win because your base is more fired up than the other side's base.

Democrats tried to be the Party of Sanity and Not Doing Embarrasing Shit - it was called the Obama Administration. It was good, but look what has followed it.

I'd rather lose than take notes from Tea Party strategy. How you win is just as important as winning, as far as I'm concerned.

Admittedly, as a straight,white,protestant,gun-owning,midwestern liberal with a good job and decent savings, I'm fairly insulated from the actual consequences of not winning...so not having to worry about getting shot/deported/arrested for most of the things that get people shot/deported/arrested for by the government (or hillbillies) provides a little less urgency about addressing injustice than it otherwise might.

.

lol

until they get bad numbers of course. Then its back to being phony

Just another three hours at the Trump White House

There's plenty to dump all over this president and his minions for, but this isn't one of them.


Maybe instead of never citing your sources, you'll actually do so from now on. Until then, you're just as bad as Trump is.

From AP:
February's jobs report was the first to cover a full month under President Donald Trump. During the presidential campaign, Trump had cast doubt on the validity of the government's jobs data, calling the unemployment rate a "hoax."

But just minutes after the report was released at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time, Trump retweeted a news report touting the job growth.

Later in the day, his spokesman, Sean Spicer, quoted Trump as saying of the jobs reports: "They may have been phony in the past, but they are very real now," a comment that incited laughter, including from Spicer himself, during a press briefing.

Calm down. I think I got it from TPM that probably got it from the AP.

Not that it changes the hypocrisy of suddenly praising what was fake last fall.

It's really easy to push a merry-go-round when someone else spent all their effort to get it going.

intruder arrested with a backpack at The White House, while Trump was there.

It took more than a week for the Trump administration to come up with a story to defend the wiretapping claims. What they settled on is Trump didn't mean wiretapping literally. What he mean was general surveillance. He also didn't mean Obama. What he mean was people in his administration.

And they used cameras in the microwaves.

Jeea. If you are really worried about it, put the damn tinfoil hat on. That is the best defense.

Oh, no. You should never use tinfoil in a microwave.

Or a camera.

Breitbart is going in hard against Paul Ryan. Interesting to see how Breitbart and the like are used to get Republicans in line behind Trump's agenda.

How about this?

I don't understand how this is news. The overwhelming majority of (R) politicians were saying the exact same thing back then, and they have predictably changed their tune.

Are Americans really that stupid?

Yes.

If Trump needs an excuse to turn on Paul Ryan he should throw Ryan under the bus for this health care bill fiasco. Trump has been trending downward in the polls the last couple days - 39% approval in Gallup and 46% in his beloved Rasmussen poll. Time to pull the plug on a bad bill and try something more popular like tax reform or infrastructure.

The knives are coming out. Lou Dobbs ran a piece calling for Ryan's resignation.

Does anyone here personally know people who have done complete 180's on Trump like our spineless political leaders?

Political disagreements aside, Rachel Maddow generally strikes me as being generally an intelligent person.

What on EARTH was she thinking????

RATINGS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Heh. Seems AWFULLY short-sighted if that's it.

If Cay Johnston is being truthful, someone mailed him the two pages. If he went to Maddow and offered her the story she has to take it because someone else will if she doesn't. I don't have a problem with her running the story, but the hype was way overblown. That's where she was pretty clearly trying to get viewers hoping to get more than they did.

"We have two pages of Trump's 2005 return. See visual proof of why he wants to abolish the AMT." That's about all it was worth.

The hype is mainly what I was referring to. I don't watch much television, so I have no idea what MSNBC might've been doing, but she was personally hyping it on her Twitter account to make it look like they had recent/current returns: Rachel Maddow MSNBC on Twitter: "BREAKING: We've got Trump tax returns. Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC.

(Seriously)."

Yeah, her hype definitely didn't deliver.

But eventually the job is about getting viewers, and it's hard to see how this hurts her future audience numbers.

I figure if there's ever an important tax release the details will start leaking before the story airs as a way to entice viewers.

Considering that I wasn't even sure that she still had a job until her named popped up in FB trending yesterday, I'd say you have a pretty good guess there.

You don't think the next time she hypes something people are going to be skeptical? I know I will.

I've got small kids and am generally an early riser. On any given weeknight, it's about 50/50 on whether I'm still up at 9pm, and if I am up, the TV is almost never still on then. The most frequent exception to that besides sports??? Politics. Debates, convention speeches I want to see, election night returns, etc. That area is pretty much the only reason other than sports that I'm watching television at 9pm on a weeknight.

I'm fighting illness right now, so I went to bed before her show started, but had that not been the case, I'm part of the target audience for that Tweet. Odds are very high that her Tweet would have gotten me to watch her show live for the first time ever if I had been feeling well. But now, the next time she hypes something, there's zero chance that I'm staying up/turning the TV on to watch it. TV host who cried "wolf" and all that.

Relatively few people who will bother with Maddow at all are likely to be skeptical. Most will either accept or reject her out of hand & carry on. (Look no further than the different headline spins that the situation has gotten). The impact of this sort of thing would likely be very negligible

My guess is you aren't a regular viewer, so you turning it on last night was a net positive. Whether or not you'll tune in to a future hypothetical scoop is less important than getting you to tune in now. A bird in the hand and all that. Her regular audience is still going to be there regardless.

I'd also bet that this was a play to beat out O'Reilly for the week so as to use that for commercials. She was close last week and actually ahead in the 25-54 demo. One big night coupled with healthcare coverage the other nights could be enough to give her a #1 for the week, which I'm sure they'd plug the hell out of.

This is one of those times where I imagine how this thread might look were it Fox News overhyping the release of some information about a top democrat in similar fashion. I feel it would look drastically different.

News orgs do things to get viewers. I don't like it if the content is inaccurate, but hyping stories is what they all do. Eventually the business is about getting people to look at advertisements.

FYI I don't mean that your posts here would necessarily be different. I have no idea and am not trying to guess. But, if this had happened on Fox News instead of MSNBC, this thread would be a raving shitstorm this morning with way more activity from way more people.

I've been amazingly wrong about most everything Trump.

Here's something else it looks like I was wrong about. I figured that "the wall" would end up being some symbolic extensions of the fence, a lot of new border guards, and a pivot to "See, we've really reduced illegal immigration, which was always the point."

But it looks like they are spending political capital on really building an actual wall: Texans Receive First Notices of Land Condemnation for Trump's Border Wall

Threatening to use Eminent Domain to take private land away from Texans is not a costless political move.

:lol:

Its fascinating watching the ways that the Trump Administration is willing to blatantly fuck over its own base and tell them that is actually going to be fine. Its more relevant and widespread with the healthcare bill than the wall I suppose, but stories like that one are going to keep coming.

They're offering the completely fair price of roughly $2,800 per acre.