Mother Jones
Update 12:50am ET Friday, May 26, 2016: The race has been called for Republican Greg Gianforte.
On Thursday voters in Montana went to the polls in a special election to replace Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who left Congress in March. (See below for the results, beginning at 7 p.m. PT.) The race was marred by a fishing-hole dispute, a concert at a nudist resort, and, in the waning hours of the campaign, a misdemeanor assault by the Republican front-runner, Greg Gianforte, who “body slammed” a reporter. No one ever called Montana politics boring.
The race has major national implications: Although Republicans consistently carry the state at the presidential level, Democrats have won statewide races for senator and governor in Montana in recent years—and this contest offers the party’s most serious opportunity yet to chip away at the Republican majority in Congress and show that with the right candidate and message, it can compete and win in Trump Country. Gianforte, a businessman, has consistently led in the polls against Democrat Rob Quist, a country music singer.
After Gianforte narrowly lost his bid for governor last fall (largely on the basis of a decade-old lawsuit over fishing access), he kept a low profile during his comeback bid and sought to win election by avoiding taking a position on the most contentious issue in Washington: the Republican health care bill, which would leave an additional 23 million Americans without health insurance by 2026. Quist, an unabashed economic populist, campaigned aggressively on a single-payer platform and ran ads about his own preexisting condition (a botched gallbladder operation). Gianforte stalled for the final 21 days of the race, insisting first that he would wait to pass judgment until after a new Congressional Budget Office score had been released, and then after the CBO report was released, body-slamming the first reporter who asked his position. Win or lose, he’s due back in Bozeman in June for a court date.
Follow along with the results here, via Decision Desk:
View post:
Here Are the Results for Montana’s Body-Slamming-Marred Special Election
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
S&P says that Obamacare isn’t failing at all:
With better data supported by actual individual market experience, most insurers put in for increased premium pricing for 2016. Also, several insurers introduced narrower network products to control medical costs. Regulatory changes such as tightening the SEP rules also helped this year-over-year improvement. We expect the full-year 2016 underwriting losses to be lower than in 2015 and 2014.
….Insurers have put in meaningful premium rate increases for 2017…but we view 2017 as a one-time pricing correction….For 2017, we believe the continued pricing correction and network design changes, along with regulatory fine-tuning of ACA rules, will result in closer to break-even results, in aggregate, for the individual market, and more insurers reporting profits in this segment.
Hey, how about that! Now that insurers are pricing their coverage about where the CBO expected it to be, they’re starting to move toward profitability. Who could have guessed that?
This reminds me of something. A lot of lefties were unhappy with Obamacare because, in the end, it didn’t include a public option. Thanks, Joe Lieberman! But the truth is that although a public option would have been nice, it’s not really what Obamacare needed. What Obamacare needed was two things:
About twice as much funding.
A higher tax penalty for not buying insurance.
That’s it. But Democrats were fixated on Obamacare costing under $1 trillion (over ten years), and that prevented them from creating a program that people truly would have loved. If, instead, they had supported funding of, say, $2 trillion, generous subsidies would have continued into the working and middle classes; maximum deductibles could have been set much lower; and more insurers would have entered each local market. Combine that with stiffer penalties to back up the individual mandate and a lot more young people would have joined the insurance pools—and would have done so without resentment since the cost would truly be affordable. All of this together would have made Obamacare far more popular with the public and much easier to manage for insurers.
But where would that extra trillion dollars have come from? This is where the hack gap comes into play once again. If this were a Republican plan, and it were something they really wanted, they wouldn’t have bothered with funding. They would have just made up a story about medical inflation coming down (which it is) and broader health coverage leading to improved economic growth blah blah blah. Democrats weren’t willing to do that. Alternatively, they could have just funded a $2 trillion program. That would have meant even higher taxes on the rich and maybe some higher taxes all the way down into the upper middle class. Or maybe a small increase in the payroll tax. Who knows? There are plenty of possibilities.
But Democrats weren’t willing to be hacks and they weren’t willing to raise taxes more than they did. This is despite the fact that the public plainly doesn’t care much about deficits no matter how much they may say so, and the public is positively delighted with higher taxes on the rich. Multiple polls repeatedly show this by a wide margin.
This would have solved virtually every problem Obamacare has had. Higher taxes on the rich would have been a populist winner. Higher funding would have made the program genuinely affordable and far more popular. And the increase in both funding and the mandate penalty would have made the eventual insurance pool closer to what insurers expected, which would have kept them nearer to profitability and truly duking it out to gain market share against their competitors. It was a missed opportunity.
Excerpt from:
No, it isn’t ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson.
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, named to serve as ambassador to China, is in favor of wind energy and policies that promote it. Like, really in favor.
“Our leadership in green energy not only makes us a leader in renewables but also powers job growth,” the Republican said in his 2016 Condition of the State address in Iowa. “Every wind turbine you see while driving across our state means income for farmers, revenue for local governments, and jobs for Iowa families.” As governor of the No. 2 wind state, he’s also in favor of federal incentives for wind energy like the production tax credit.
Branstad may experience some whiplash as he represents an administration that is particularly antagonistic to wind energy to a country that has invested billions of dollars in wind and solar.
On climate change, Branstad is not a denier but he buys into his party’s reasoning for not acting. “We need to recognize this climate change issue is a global issue,” he said in 2011. That’s the excuse many Republicans use to argue that the U.S. shouldn’t clean up its act until developing economies like China and India do.
But if he doesn’t know it already, Branstad will soon learn that China is doing plenty to fight climate change right now.
Read More:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
With 2 days left until our long national nightmare ends, we are now arguing about the statistical models underlying poll averaging. Seriously. Last night, Nate Silver got into a massive war with Huffington Post writer Ryan Grim after Grim published an article headlined “Nate Silver Is Unskewing Polls — All Of Them — In Trump’s Direction.” Grim basically accused Silver of applying an ad hoc correction to his polling model so that it would show a tighter race. Silver responded pithily: “This article is so fucking idiotic and irresponsible….The article made clear you have **no fucking idea** what you’re talking about.”
Well. I guess it’s not surprising that a historically nasty presidential race has also produced a historically nasty wonk war. This morning, however, Silver was on This Week, where he defended himself in more family-friendly terms:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Another variability that we’ve seen here right now. There have been a lot of other forecasts out there, Princeton Election Consortium, Huffington Post, several others — and The New York Times. Yours is much more bullish for Donald Trump and more cautious on Hillary Clinton than theirs are. Why?
SILVER: Because we think we have a good process and, presumably, the other guys have lousy processes. –ed….Look, you have some forecasts that show Clinton with a 98 or 99 percent chance of winning. That doesn’t pass a commonsense test, which is we’ve seen lots of elections where there’s about a three-point polling error. In 2012, in fact, Obama beat his polls in many states by about three points. If Clinton were to beat her polls by three points and you see something we call a borderline landslide, but if it goes the other way, and all of a sudden Trump could very easily win the electoral college.
I have a couple of comments. First, I don’t get the point of making a prediction about the percentage chance that a candidate will win. It’s useless. If Hillary Clinton wins, every pollster will be able to say they called it, because every pollster has her with more than a 50 percent chance. What’s the point of this? Better to just tell us the national and state averages, and leave it at that. I think everyone is smart enough to tell a tight race from a blowout.
Second, Silver is being a little disingenuous here. Have we really seen a “lot” of elections where there’s a three-point polling error in the poll averages? Sure, in some state contests, where there aren’t very many polls. But in a presidential election, where there are dozens? In the case of Obama 2012, Silver had Obama ahead of Romney by 2.1 points a couple of days before the election. Obama won by 3.9 points. Pollster was farther off, showing Obama ahead by 1.5 points. But even that’s still an error of only 2.4 points.
Silver’s point about a 99 percent chance of winning defying common sense is well taken. Stuff happens. Maybe all the polls are missing something. Even if Clinton were five points ahead, I’d probably still operate under the assumption that Trump had a one in twenty chance of winning. That said, a three-point lead with two days left really is pretty overwhelming. You can make a case that maybe Clinton will only win the popular vote by one point, but will then lose all the swing states and lose the Electoral College. But even that strikes me as a one-in-twenty kind of deal. If Al Gore had won the popular vote by 1 percent in 2000, he would have won the Electoral College handily.
Anyway, Hillary Clinton has been ahead of Trump by a steady 3-4 points for the past year, and I’ve come to believe that most of the variability in the polling averages is fictitious. On Tuesday, I’ll bet she wins by a solid 3-4 points, maybe a bit more because Trump’s ground game is so amateurish. That’s my prediction.
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, the latest ABC and NBC polls have Clinton up by 5 points.
View original:
Poll Averagers Are Having the Wonk Version of a Knife Fight. Choose Your Side!
Mother Jones
Jay Nordlinger and I don’t agree on much, but I’ve never held that against him. However, with 17 days left until we go to the polls, I do hold against him the five minutes of my life that I lost from reading Pat Buchanan’s latest column. But you know what? If I have to suffer, so do you. Ladies and gentlemen, here is Buchanan’s latest defense of Donald Trump:
What explains the hysteria of the establishment? In a word, fear.
….By suggesting he might not accept the results of a “rigged election” Trump is committing an unpardonable sin. But this new cult, this devotion to a new holy trinity of diversity, democracy and equality, is of recent vintage and has shallow roots. For none of the three — diversity, equality, democracy — is to be found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers or the Pledge of Allegiance.
….Some of us recall another time, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in “Points of Rebellion”: “We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.” Baby-boomer radicals loved it, raising their fists in defiance of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. But now that it is the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America they love, elitist enthusiasm for “revolution” seems more constrained.
Around the world, there are many, many places that lack the “niceties of liberal democracy.” You don’t want to live there. You would quickly discover that the niceties are more like necessities — a rule of law necessary to live a good, decent, and free life.
Is this just garden-variety Buchanan? It’s been years since I’ve read or listened to him. He’s always been a bit of a lunatic, but it seems like he’s gotten even crazier in his old age.
Read More –
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
It’s 23 days until this sordid campaign finally ends. Polls currently suggest that (a) Hillary Clinton will become president, (b) Democrats will regain control of the Senate, and (c) Republicans will maintain control of the House. Let’s assume that’s how things turn out. What happens next? A few things:
The Republican Party will completely disown and repudiate Donald Trump.
Mitch McConnell will be a nonentity. He doesn’t pretend to be a national leader, especially if he’s in the minority, and he’s shown pretty often that he’s willing to do deals in a fairly conventional way. He’s a caucus manager, not a visionary.
With few other choices around, Paul Ryan becomes the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.
After the election Republicans will do their usual “autopsy,” and it will say the usual thing: Demographic trends are working against them, and they have to reach out to non-white, non-male voters if they don’t want to fade slowly into irrelevance. In the last 25 years, they’ve won two presidential elections by the barest hair’s breadth and lost the other five—and this is only going to get worse in the future.
Hillary Clinton will remain the pragmatic dealmaker she is. And despite the current bucketloads of anti-Hillary red meat that Republicans are tossing around right now, most of them trust her to deal honestly when it comes to political bargains.
This means that the next four years depend entirely on Paul Ryan. So what will he do? I maintain that this is a very open, very interesting question.
I’ve gotten some pushback lately for a couple of posts where I’ve gone soft on Ryan. But here’s the thing: when it comes to Ryan’s budget policies, I have nothing but contempt for him. Here’s a typical post of mine from a few years ago, and there are plenty more just like it. But it’s foolish to insist that simply because someone disagrees with my politics they’re either stupid or irredeemably evil. Ryan is neither.
So what will Ryan do? One possibility, of course, is that he’ll take the simplest route: endless obstruction, just like 2009. Republicans may be a divided party, but one thing they all agree on is that they hate Hillary Clinton and they want to prevent her from doing anything.
But there’s another possibility. Ryan is not a racial fearmonger. He’s always been open to immigration reform. He’s consistently shown genuine disgust for Donald Trump. He’s been open to making low-key deals in the past. He’s smart enough to know precisely the depth of the demographic hole Republicans are in. And despite being conservative himself, he may well realize that the GOP simply can’t stay in thrall to the tea party caucus forever if it wants to survive. On a personal level, he saw what they did to John Boehner, and he may well be sick and tired of them himself.
It’s also possible that he wants to run for president in 2020, and if that’s the case he’ll do better if he has some real accomplishments to show over the next four years. Running on a platform of scorched-earth obstruction might get the tea partiers excited, but that’s not enough to win the presidency.
So maybe Ryan decides that now is the time to try to reform the Republican Party. Once he wins the speakership again, he makes clear to the tea partiers that they’re finished as power brokers: he’s going to pass bills even if it means depending on Democratic support to do it. He reaches out to women and minorities. He passes immigration reform. He makes sure that budgets get passed and we don’t default on the national debt. He works behind the scenes with Hillary Clinton in standard horsetrading mode: she gets some things she wants, but only in return for some things conservatives want.
This could go a long way toward making him the next president of the United States. If he plays his cards right, Clinton might suffer with her base for selling them out on some of the deals she makes. Ryan will get the tea partiers under control and have some accomplishments to run on. He’ll soften the nonwhite disgust with the party enough to pick up some minority votes. Maybe the economy helps him out by going soft in 2019. And he’s already got good looks, youth, and an agreeable speaking style going for him.
So which Paul Ryan will we get in 2017? The movement conservative who breathes fire and insists that Hillary Clinton will never get one red cent for any of her satanic priorities? Or a conservative but realistic leader who’s willing to make deals as a way of bringing the Republican Party back from the brink of destruction that Donald Trump has led them to?
If it’s the latter, this presents liberals with a real quandary: just what are they willing to give Ryan in return for passage of some of their priorities? That’s worth some thought just in case Ryan decides to take the smart route.
This article is from:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Here’s an odd thing:
Net favs Friday update. A little shift in last week. Will vote follow next week? pic.twitter.com/apmAg0N3DA
— Charles Franklin (@PollsAndVotes)
Around Monday or Tuesday of this week, Hillary Clinton’s favorables went up about four points and Donald Trump’s went down four points. In Clinton’s case, maybe her pneumonia generated some sympathy? In Trump’s case, it’s hard to figure out what might have happened. David Fahrenthold’s big story about Trump’s charity scams came out around then. The whole “deplorables” thing was getting some attention. And…that’s about it. Nothing really comes to mind that might account for a sudden downward spike.
So what’s going on? It could be that this is nothing but reversion to the mean after a couple of weeks of Emailgate and Foundationgate taking a toll. That would actually make some sense, since attitudes toward Clinton and Trump have been remarkably stable for the entire past year. In any case, maybe this will help panicky Dems to panic a little less.
Continue reading here:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Donald Trump is getting smoked in the polls right now because he has run the most inept campaign in the history of campaigns and also he’s a fundamentally unlikable racist who lies a lot.
So with that being the state of the race on this balmy Wednesday, the 17th of August in the year of our Lord 2016, Michael Cohen, one of Donald Trump’s top advisers, went on CNN to talk about how his boss is great and has very pretty eyes and is totally going to win. Anchor Brianna Keilar asked Cohen about these polls that say the exact opposite. Cohen was not having any of it!
Watch what happens when the unstoppable force of stupidity meets the unmovable object of reality.
Watch Michael Cohen, counsel to Donald Trump, repeatedly ask “says who?!” on CNN when told Trump is losing. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/OlCPxwWugM
— Chad Mosher (@ChadMosher)
“All of them.”
What a time to be alive.
UPDATE UPDATE: Oh my God, the full interview is even more insane.
Visit site –
One of Donald Trump’s Top Advisers Just Lost It on CNN—and the Video Is Hilarious
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Two national magazines, The New Yorker and Time, have unveiled strikingly similar cover illustrations this week to depict Donald Trump’s precipitous decline in the polls since the Republican National Convention in Cleveland concluded only three weeks ago.
An early look at next week’s cover, “Donald’s Rainy Days,” by Barry Blitt: https://t.co/9C6wGberuC pic.twitter.com/Q8d2PgeNpm
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker)
89 days. Here’s the cover of Time. pic.twitter.com/DNVcheFNxu
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko)
The covers come amid the latest controversies to hit the Trump campaign. Just this week, the real estate magnate issued a remark that appeared to suggest gun violence against his presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, which he swiftly followed up with the claim that President Barack Obama is the “co-founder of ISIS.” Despite growing calls from Republicans to disavow the real estate magnate and slash the party’s funding of his campaign, Trump has pledged to continue his inflammatory style of campaigning.
But it’s not all doom and gloom! This week’s “rainy days” also brought a rare sunny prediction. Trump appeared finally to acknowledge that he might not make it to the White House, but he presented the election as a win-win, telling CNBC he’d either emerge victorious or take a “very, very nice long vacation.”
See the article here –
Donald Trump’s Freefall Captured in Two Scathing Magazine Covers
Libros
