Last Call For The State Of Play

This month's Pew Research poll is up on the state of American politics in the wake of the GOP wins last week, and they're very informative.  First of all, while Democrats want President Obama to work with Republicans, Republican want Congress to tell President Obama to go to hell, effectively the same place things were in 2010.



Secondly, nearly half of Latino voters see no difference between President Obama and Republicans on immigration reform legislation.




Food for thought, and much more at the link.

The Sinister Six

Senate Republicans seem pretty confident they can get things past a Democratic filibuster in the Senate to force president Obama to veto things.  There's three scenarios there: 

1. Mitch McConnell will use budget reconciliation tricks to require a 51-vote majority with no filibuster on things like Obamacare,
2. Senate Republicans will get rid of/severely limit the filibuster altogether,
3. There's enough Democrats that will vote with the GOP to break a 60-vote filibuster.

TPM's Sahil Kapur looks at scenario three there and identifies six Dems who can be flipped.  Regular readers should be able to guess who they are already.

If he does manage to keep his caucus united, here are McConnell's six top Democratic prospects for reaching 60 votes.

Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri

It took Todd Akin of "legitimate rape" notoriety to save McCaskill from electoral doom in 2012, and this second-term Missourian recognizes that she can't vote in lock-step with her party if she wants to stay in the good graces of her conservative-leaning state. Look for her to side with Republicans from time to time to appease her right flank, on issues such as the Keystone pipeline. 

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia

This conservative Democrat has always looked for ways to make himself attractive to West Virginians, from literally shooting the cap-and-trade bill in a campaign ad to voting against Reid on filibuster reform. With the ranks of conservative Democrats diminished in the wake of the 2014 blowout, Manchin will look for opportunities to tout his bipartisan bona fides. 

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota

Heitkamp won her first Senate election in 2012 by a razor-thin 1 percent margin in deep-red North Dakota. Not shy about breaking with her party, she was one of just four Democrats who voted to block the popular gun background checks legislation in 2013 — the other three have retired or lost reelection. Expect her to hunt for issues where she can align herself with the new Republican majority. 

Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana

Donnelly largely owes his seat to Indiana Republicans who threw out an untouchable incumbent in 2012 in favor of a candidate to imploded amid a rape gaffe in the general election. One of the more conservative Democrats, he'll likely be willing to partner with McConnell's Republicans in some cases, such as reversing the 30-hour work week definition under Obamacare. 

Sen. Angus King of Maine

King, a progressive-leaning independent who says he'll continue to caucus with Democrats, has often looked for ways to polish his nonpartisan credentials. In two years as a senator, King has tried to play deal-maker and split with Democrats on issues like gun control and student loans. 

Sen. Jon Tester of Montana

Tester survived reelection in the Democrat-friendly year of 2012, but his party got wiped out this year in the race for Montana's other Senate seat. Tester has been willing to buck Democratic leaders at times, most notably when he helped kill the DREAM Act by filibuster in 2010.

Of those six, Manchin and King are going to be the largest problems, but McCaskill is wholly involved in her own self-aggrandizement as well, and the rest can be counted on from time to time to play the same role Olympia Snowe did as a Maine Republican and Evan Bayh did as an Indiana Democrat: the person who will make the call on pass or fail and who can extract the most from both sides.

Manchin is especially keen on allowing the GOP majority to pass bills.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) made in clear in an interview published Monday that he has no plans to support Democrats who want to take a page out of the GOP playbook by obstructing the new Republican majority. 

"That's bullshi—…. I'm not going to put up with that," Manchin told Politico when discussing the prospect of Democrats blocking the Republican agenda over the next two years. 

Manchin didn't appear to be alone either. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) also talked about the need to get something done. 

"Our caucus needs to take a hard look at the way we do things and make sure we are putting the policy issues first before politics," McCaskill told Politico. "The habit we got into in doing nothing, no one was happy with that. I hope that we never go back to that."

In other words, if you thought President Snowe jokes were annoyingly accurate in 2009, you've not seen anything yet with these six lovely individuals, who won't waste a minute in rushing to screw over Obama heading into 2016.

And Manchin?  Well, don't be surprised if he decides to stay in West Virginia and run for Governor again, opening the door for a second GOP senator from that state in 2016 to go along with Shelly Moore Capito's win last week.

What a guy, huh?

The Real 2014 Election Winners

Let's not forget that the real winners in last week's elections were the billionaire Republican donors who bought eight new Senators for their oligarchy.

To get from the 2012 doldrums to the 2014 victory, GOP groups went through significant transformations. The network of groups backed by David and Charles Koch started buying attack ads with a new super-PAC instead of the nonprofit it used two years ago. The upside for them is the operation is more efficient (tax rules require nonprofits to spend at least 50 percent of their budget on nonpolitical activity, so every dollar on TV political ads must be matched with nonpolitical work). The downside is donor names are disclosed.

Perhaps the greatest example of a turnaround is Rove's American Crossroads. The group was the biggest loser two years ago, dumping more than $120 million into campaigns and watching 10 of the 12 Senate candidates it backed go down in defeat. This time Rove's group won 8 of the 11 Senate races where it made investments.

Crossroads went on a well-publicized soul searching mission last fall, including a donor meeting that kicked off the week of the government shutdown in 2013--an event that infuriated the business community. Despite the group's efforts to improve it's image, big checks were slow to come in. Over the summer Republicans were outspent in key races, Crossroads President Steven Law said in an interview. "Many of our candidates hit Labor Day and were underwater with their image," Law said. 

Unlimited money made all the difference this year.

The donor freeze started thawing in September when polling began to tighten in a number of races and big-names such as Sheldon Adelson started opening their wallets. He wrote a $10 million check to Crossroads GPS in September, a nonprofit arm of the Rove organization. GPS, as a nonprofit, is not required to disclose its donors. Adelson's windfall was leaked to the news media. "Typically donors who support Crossroads are pretty sophisticated consumers of political information," Law said. "My guess is donors paid attention to what they saw on sites like Real Clear Politics."

The group scraped together $36 million to put into television for senate races in the last 90 days of the campaign, according to figures provided by Crossroads. It was the lead spender in Colorado, Arkansas and Alaska, where GOP Dan Sullivan is about 8,000 votes ahead of Democrat Mark Begich.

And money buys cooperation.

However, resources weren't arriving evenly or predictably. That forced Crossroads and some of the other GOP groups to cooperate this year in ways they've never done before. One example came in October when Crossroads realized there was a "hole in our budget" for Colorado, Law said. 

Law emailed Brain Baker at Ending Spending Action Fund, the super-PAC backed by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and the two worked out a deal—the Ricketts group would go up on the air and continue pounding incumbent Democrat Mark Udall while Crossroads took a week off. "Ending Spending filled a gap," Law said. "The take away for all of us was sharing information and strategy was smart for all of us." Udall lost to Republican Cory Gardner. 

Ending Spending took the lead in other places, including Georgia where Republican David Perdue beat back Democratic challenger Michelle Nunn, in a race that was widely thought would go to a runoff.

So these GOP billionaires joined forced and coordinated their attacks worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  As a result, Democrats were utterly crushed across the country.

There's a lesson here if Democrats wish to choose to learn it.  You'd better believe the 2016 ads designed to depress voter turnout are already starting too.

Billionaire Republican donors bought Congress outright with this election.  If they get the White House as well, this country is done.

And it doesn't look like anyone can stop them unless we vote.  While you still can, that is.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping have announced a bilateral agreement to cut carbon emissions by more than 25% over the next two decades.
• Republican Dan Sullivan is claiming victory in Alaska's Senate race with a margin of absentee ballots of less than 8,000 votes.
• Five global banks have been hit by fines totaling $3.4 billion for allowing currency traders to manipulate foreign exchange markets.
• Iran has signed a deal for up to eight nuclear reactors with Russia as nuclear talks with the West are stalled out.
• A major Windows vulnerability bug in transport layer stacks could allow hackers to take over entire computers and Microsoft is urging all Windows users to update this week's security patch.

Last Call For The Fold On Lynch

Who would have predicted that after running away from President Obama and losing the Senate that Senate Democrats would no longer have President Obama's interests at heart in the lame duck session?

President Obama will have to get his nominee for attorney general past a Republican-controlled Senate, Democratic and Republican aides say. 

A packed schedule after the election is almost certain to push the vetting process for Loretta Lynch into January, when Republicans are set to take power in the upper chamber. 

“It seems likely [the Lynch vote] would be in the next Congress. It’s difficult to process an [attorney general] that quickly,” said a Democratic aide. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has not yet made a decision on whether to move Lynch’s nomination in the lame-duck session, according to spokesman Adam Jentleson.

But aides say the time crunch and growing GOP opposition to Lynch make it exceedingly unlikely that the replacement for Eric Holder will be confirmed in December. 

That means the task of approving a new attorney general — a position that is a lightning rod for controversy — will fall to the new Republican majority of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 

“Ms. Lynch will receive fair consideration by the Senate. And her nomination should be considered in the new Congress through regular order,” McConnell said in a statement.

So yeah.  Outgoing Senators have their own agendas, and helping the President is absolutely not one of them.  But sure, the problem is Obama hasn't reached out enough to the people in his own party who told him to go to hell, right?

The Long Knives On Vee Jay

Washington insiders have long resented Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, comparing her to everyone from "the voice in Obama's head" to Othello villain Iago to the last guy to hold the role in the last White House, Karl Rove.  But after 2014's brutal loss for the Democrats, a lot of pressure is now on the President from the left to clean house, and to start with letting Jarrett's head be the first to roll.

And nobody on the left hates Valerie Jarrett quite like New Republic editor and author Noam Scheiber, who has quite the extensive post-midterm hit piece on Jarrett up.  My feeling is that it would have gone up even if the Democrats had done well.

Jarrett’s work behind the scenes served the president well so long as people like Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel, and Robert Gibbs (the former press secretary, with whom Jarrett also clashed) remained inside the building. She diversified the views he received without stifling internal debate. But then, one by one, the big personalities left. After two years, Summers and Gibbs had been replaced by far more amenable actors; Emanuel’s strong-willed successor, Bill Daley, lasted less than a year before being replaced by a relative cipher, too. 

Today, Obama’s top economic adviser is Jeff Zients, a former management consultant and Jarrett pal who had no experience in government before joining the administration. The senior adviser seat that David Axelrod once occupied now belongs to Dan Pfeiffer, and the chief of staff is Denis McDonough. Both joined Obama in 2007 and have long since made their peace with Jarrett’s influence. “My sense is Denis does his best to not turn that into a reckoning kind of relationship,” one former White House official told me. “He doesn’t want to test it.” 

As Jarrett has outlasted her rivals, it has increasingly fallen on her to do more than simply protect Obama from those who might undermine his presidency. She must nudge him when he becomes self-satisfied and rein in his worst political impulses. It is a position for which she is uniquely unqualified.

And then Scheiber goes on a pretty epic roll.

Valerie Jarrett is not above keeping a shit list—or as hers was titled, a “least constructive” list. One progressive activist recalls Jarrett holding the document during a meeting and noticing her own name on it, along with the names of others in the room. “It was kind of an honor,” the activist told me. This was not out of character for Jarrett. The woman who once resisted Emanuel’s commandment against rewarding bad behavior has often gone out of her way to suppress dissent among ideological allies and others who question the president. (A White House official says the document was prepared by a staffer acting without orders and that it is not a common practice.) 

Consider her interactions with the LGBT community when they agitated for an executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors. Jarrett had been one of the Obama team’s biggest supporters of gay rights since the campaign (long before Obama himself “evolved” on the marriage question). She had even authored a memo advising the president to sign the executive order. But when Obama decided against it in 2012, he dispatched Jarrett to deliver the news to four or five groups active on the issue. 

The meeting was a minor fiasco. A BuzzFeed reporter had broken word of the gathering just before it began, prompting Jarrett to lecture everyone in the room for several minutes about speaking to the press. She fumed that the reporter was outside “writing stories,” and told the activists that “we can’t have White House meetings if you do this kind of thing.”

Scheiber goes on for another 3,000 words or so of anecdotes and stories on how Jarrett is basically the Bitch From Hell and how everyone hates her and how she's destroying Obama's legacy,  It's amazing then to find somebody that Scheiber hates more than Obama himself, and that person is definitely Jarrett.

He ends with this:

It’s no surprise that Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett would govern as reasonable people. It’s who they are. The tragedy is that we live in surpassingly unreasonable times.

Why can't Obama just give me my pony?

No Longer Neutral On Net Neutrality

President Obama weighed in this week on the issue of Net neutrality, and he's instructing the FCC to regulate broadband internet as a utility.  It may sound boring to you, but it would mean a lot of good news for consumers.

Obama, who campaigned on the issue of net neutrality, said the FCC's new rules should explicitly ban such paid prioritization deals and sided with consumer advocates who have pushed for the FCC to reclassify ISPs so that they can be regulated more like a public utility. 

"Simply put: No service should be stuck in a 'slow lane' because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth," Obama said in a statement. 

"I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online."

He also said the FCC should apply its new rules equally to mobile and wired ISPs, with a recognition of special challenges that come with managing wireless networks.

Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T have been fiercely lobbying against this, claiming government regulations will crush their business and the internet.  Republicans will certainly go berserk over this too.  But America has the slowest, most expensive internet in the developed world and the only way to fix it is by treating broadband internet as a public utility the way we do power, water, and sanitation.

Of course, we're behind by several trillion dollars in maintenance of power, water and sanitation, so I wouldn't hold your breath on all that getting fixed any time this generation either.

The reality however is that up until this week, tens of millions of voters had no idea what net neutrality meant.  Now they know that Obama is for it and Ted Cruz is against it, so it has to be evil, and everything that you don't like about your internet will be Obama's fault.

And that's all that matters.

StupidiNews!

• On Veteran's Day, VA Secretary Robert McDonald has announced a major rearrangement of the department, and disciplinary action against more than 5,600 employees.
• The FBI's latest figures on violent crime shows the number in 2013 was down to 1.16 million, the lowest number since 1978.
• The South Korean captain of a ferry that capsized in April, killing 304 passengers, was found guilty of negligence but acquitted on homicide charges and will serve 36 years in prison.
• Greece may have finally recorded its first quarter of economic expansion in six years, finally pulling out of the country's worst recession since WWII.
• A Chinese hacker attack has exposed up to 600,000 Postal Service employee records, including addresses and SSNs, according to the USPS.

Last Call For Obama's Coaled Shoulder

Jazz Shaw figures that President Obama's EPA coal plant regulations are deader than dirt.

The writing should be on the wall for this one, particularly since the Democrats have essentially lost coal country entirely, as Ed pointed out this weekend. Energy – and the millions of jobs associated with it – was featured on the campaign trail and proved a winning issue for Republicans. And now, as reported by The Hill, the new GOP majority in the Senate is gearing up to finally do more than just talk about it.

The GOP Senate plans to defund the EPA so the new rules can't be enforced, setting up a potential budget shutdown situation, and that Obama will fold under pressure from 2016 candidates.

Of course, any of these measures would have to get past the President’s veto pen, but if the White House takes too strong of a stand on that they could be springing a terrible trap for Democrats. With both houses of Congress unified, the President would be essentially standing alone as the person blocking a path to cutting costs for consumers and the creation of more jobs. This sets up the GOP for 2016 with a new and potentially more salable message. Traditionally we’ve seen political combatants arguing that “the next president” will be the person selecting Supreme Court justices. It’s an important debate to be sure, but a more direct line to the voters will be to clearly explain that “the next president” will be staffing up the EPA and other regulatory agencies, and do you really want four more years of these policies? Voters also need to be reminded that these changes are largely cosmetic, feel good measures which are not only hugely expensive, but have no effect on the far dirtier energy policies of countries with vastly larger populations who will continue to do what they’ve always done.

Here's my response about this. First, yes, red state voters do want Obama's EPA regulations.

When asked flat-out whether they supported EPA regulations limiting carbon pollution, 67 percent of total voters said yes, while 26 percent said no. In the red states, 64 percent of voters supported EPA regulations to combat climate change, as opposed to 29 percent that did not.

And that's after having Shaw's arguments explained to them.

Second, the great part about the 2014 midterm losses is that the losses happened to Blue Dog, Red State Democrats.  Exactly who's left to complain in Coal Country?  West Virginia's Joe Manchin is about it, and he's not going anywhere.  He'll be a reliable vote for Senate action on the EPA for the GOP anyway.

And finally, tell me again how the Obama EPA regulations are costing jobs when President Obama has added millions since 2009.  And we can't take action because China or Inida won't?  What happened to "American exceptionalism"?

That leaves defunding the EPA as part of a larger GOP plan to shut down the government.  By all means, play that card again heading into 2016.

Too Turned Off To Turnout

The 2014 midterm election turnout results are grim indeed.  At 36.4%, it's the worst turnout since 1942.  No wonder Republicans did so well.  PBS Newshour:

Final numbers are still being tallied, but at this point it looks pretty clear that turnout in these midterms was the lowest overall in 70 years. Turnout of the voting-eligible population was just 36.4 percent, according to the projection from the United States Elections Project, run by Dr. Michael McDonald at the University of Florida. That’s down from the 41 percent that turned out in 2010. You have to go all the way back to 1942 for lower numbers when turnout in that midterm was just 33.9 percent. They had a pretty good excuse back then — many adult-age Americans were preoccupied with fighting in a world war.

States with competitive races saw increased turnout, but the rest of the country didn't bother to show up at all.

Turnout actually increased in 14 states, plus D.C., from 2010-2014. In 10 of the 14, there were competitive to potentially competitive Senate races. In nine of the 14, there were governors’ races. Here’s where turnout increased, ranked by biggest increase: 

1. Louisiana: +12.9% (38.9%-43.9%)
2. Nebraska: +10.1% (37.5%-41.3%)
3. Arkansas: +9.9% (37.5%-41.2%)
4. Wisconsin: +9.4% (52.0%-56.9%)
5. Maine: +7.4% (55.2%-59.3%)
6. New Hampshire: +6.8% (45.7%-48.8%)
7. Alaska: +6.6% (51.9%-55.3%)
8. Washington, D.C.: +4.8% (28.9%-30.3%)
9. Colorado: +4.7% (50.6%-53.0%)
10. Kentucky: +4.2% (42.4%-44.2%)
11. North Carolina: +3.8% (39.2%-40.7%)
12. Florida: +3.4% (41.7%-43.1%)
13. Kansas: +2.6% (41.7%-42.8%)
14. Iowa: +1.4% (49.9%-50.6%)
15. Oregon: +0.2% (52.6%-52.7%) 

It was down, though — and by a lot in many places — in 36 others. Here are the top 10 biggest decreases: 

1. Missouri: -27.4% (44.5%-32.3%)
2. Washington state: -27.3% (53.1%-38.6%)
3. Delaware: -27% (47.5%- 34.5%)
4. California: -25.5% (44%-32.8%)
5. Indiana: -24.5% (37.1%-28.0%)
6. Oklahoma: -23.2 (38.8%-29.8%)
7. Nevada: -23% (41.3%-31.8%)
8. Alabama: -22.1% (43%-33.5%)
9. Utah: -20.7% (36.3%-28.8%)
10. Mississippi: -19.7% (37%-29.7%) 

Significantly factoring into the overall decrease because of its population was California, which despite a governor’s race was off by a quarter of its 2010 participation. Also factoring in — Ohio (down almost 20 percent), as well as New York and New Jersey, which were both down about 17 percent. Even Georgia, despite its hotly contested Senate race, was down 14 percent. And for Democrats looking for what went wrong in blue states like Maryland and Massachusetts, turnout was down in those states by 10 percent as compared to 2010.

 The bottom line is no matter how you look at it, Democrats didn't show up to vote.

If that doesn't change in 2016 and 2018, this country's as good as done.

No Love For Mia

Mother Jones reporter and Utah native Stephanie Mencimer takes a look at newly minted Utah Rep. Mia Love, the first African-American Republican woman elected to Congress, and finds she's just part of a distressing a depressing trend of recent GOP Representatives who care more about the national spotlight than local constituents.

Of all the victories conservatives are crowing about this week, none seem as welcome as that of Utah's Mia Love, the first black Republican woman ever to be elected to Congress. She's been the subject of fawning profiles and officially dubbed a "rock star" by Michelle Malkin and other right-wing pundits. But Mia Love is a rock star mostly to people who don't live in Utah.

To a person like me, born and raised in Utah, Love's victory is a symbol of our trend toward nationalized elections. Her issues are generic, conservative hobby horses—defund Obamacare, abolish the Department of Education, etc.—the opposite of Tip O'Neill's old adage about all politics being local. She has adopted precisely one Utah-specific platform point from state conservatives—the demand that the federal government turn over to the state all the land it owns in Utah, a long-running and hopeless quest that is deeply opposed by the state's environmentalists. Beyond that, Love, a persona preternaturally well suited for Fox News, has an embarrassingly weak grasp of policy—particularly as it relates to her adopted home state.

Now there's a shocker.  A Republican who looks really good outside her state, but is dismal towards it.  Why does that sound familiar?

Love has made a big show of her concern for the Second Amendment and her fondness for packing heat—issues that sell well with both Utah and national conservatives. But the summer of 2012 saw a rash of costly wildfires in Utah, including a big one in Saratoga Springs that required the evacuation of 9,000 of Love's fellow residents. It was one of at least 20 fires attributed to outdoor target shooters, whom Utah's Republican governor was desperately trying to persuade to use indoor ranges instead. Not long after the governor made his appeal, Love made a big appearance on the Today Show, where she showed off her shooting skills—outside, in the dry brush.

Born in Brooklyn, Love first relocated to Connecticut before moving to Saratoga Springs in 1998 after converting to Mormonism. I spent some time in Saratoga Springs in 2012, and was struck by what a transient place it was. A new suburb of Salt Lake City, it didn't even exist until 1997, and everyone I met there had come from somewhere else. Few were Utah natives, and next to none of them had heard of Love, even though she'd been their mayor or a city councilwoman for several years. Even Saratoga Springs' congressional district was brand new, having been gerrymandered in 2012 by a state Legislature intent on ousting Matheson, the state's lone Democrat, from his perch in Congress. In some ways, it was the perfect place to launch a congressional career. Being the mayor of Saratoga Springs was like being the mayor of nowhere—or everywhere, depending on your perspective.

In other words, if if sounds to you like Mia Love is the perfectly manufactured candidate for the "post-racial" FOX News age of America, that's because she is.  She's being packaged and sold, a product for consumption by guilty GOP voters who feel better that a black Mormon woman supports what they stand for, and isn't one of those people.  How good of a product Mia Love is is pretty self-evident.  How good of a Representative she is to the people of Utah, well, that doesn't really matter, does it?

Ask Eric Cantor about that.

Absolution for sale.  Get it while it's fresh.

StupidiNews!

• Boko Haram militants are suspected to be behind Monday's bombing of a high school in northern Nigeria, killing at least 47 and injuring nearly 80.
• President Obama says he sees growing momentum behind a US free trade deal with Asia as he landed in China on the first day of an eight-day Asia tour.
• Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto is condemning violent protests against the state government of Gurerro over the massacre of 43 students ordered by a corrupt mayor and drug cartel.
• The G20 nations are looking to impose new capital requirements on the world's largest banks to prevent a repeat of the 2008 banking crisis.
• Multiple "darknet" sites connected to Silk Road 2.0 may have been seized by US and EU law enforcement after having their locations revealed by denial of service attacks.

Last Call For Misinformation Nation

Breitbart's clowns are screwing up everything they can find, as usual, and this time their stated mission of lying to America about the Obama administration is no different.

According to a November 8 Breitbart.com article by Warner Todd Huston, "few are talking about" the fact nominee Lynch "was part of Bill Clinton's Whitewater probe defense team in 1992." Huston pointed to a March 1992 New York Times article that "reported that Lynch was one of the Clintons' Whitewater defense attorneys as well as a 'campaign aide.'" And in a November 9 article Huston's colleague, Breitbart.com Senior Editor-at Large Joel Pollak wrote, "The connection to Whitewater ought to provide additional fodder for Republicans during Lynch's confirmation hearings".

Only one problem.  It's the wrong Loretta Lynch.

The Loretta Lynch referred to in the New York Times article is a California based attorney who has worked on several prominent political campaigns, not Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch. Obama's nominee is shown on the right, while the Loretta Lynch Breitbart refers to is on the left:

These idiots can't even get the correct race of the actual person right, which is everything you ever need to know about Breitbart.com.  Of course that doesn't matter to the right, they'll find some other way to block Lynch.

The same day that President Obama nominated Loretta Lynch to be the next attorney general, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) signaled that it won't be an easy process.

"President Obama’s Attorney General nominee deserves fair and full consideration of the United States Senate, which is precisely why she should not be confirmed in the lame duck session of Congress by senators who just lost their seats and are no longer accountable to the voters," the senators said in a Saturday statement.

So yes, I expect the lame duck session will be about as productive as the rest of this dismal GOP-ruined Congress.  The threat is simple: if President Obama dares take executive action on immigration, Lynch is done.

Maybe if Obama was nicer to the GOP and resigned from office, he'd get Lynch through. 

Just a thought.

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

Time for part two of our sci-fi weekend double feature review, and if Big Hero 6 represented a bright future here on Earth, then its opposite is Interstellar, a future for humanity so awful that we need to leave the planet behind.





The movie opens in a Midwestern farm state, sometime in the 21st century.  There are no more wars, it's true, but that's because Earth's crops are dying off one by one to a disease called Blight, and there's not enough food to feed the planet.  Huge dust storms ravage the skies, driving people indoors to seeks shelter.  Carrying masks and goggles on you at all time is just what people do.

And science and technology are the first casualties of this new order.  Cooper (Matthew McConaghey) is a washed up NASA test pilot without a NASA program, as the government apparently mothballed it a decade earlier.  He's turned farmer along with his wife's dad Donald (John Lithgow), who reminisces about the good old days of, well, today (my theory is that Donald is a grown Millennial, putting the story about 2050 or so) and his kids, son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy).  Cooper is pissed to find out Murph has gotten into fistfights at school over bringing her dad's science textbook in and explaining to her classmates and incredulous teacher that the moon landings were real and not faked.

So yeah, super storms, dying crops, Luddite know-nothing nonsense and America isolated from the world?  It's Tea Party time!

But then things get weird.  A mysterious force is haunting Murph's bedroom, and somehow communicating with her (think Contact or Close Encounters) and when Cooper finally pays attention, he realizes he's getting coordinates to where NASA has gone, deep underground, off the radar, off the grid, and off the budget.  There he meets his old mentor Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his equally brilliant daughter (Anne Hathaway) who tells him that somehow, a stable wormhole to another galaxy has been located off Saturn, and NASA has been shooting scientists into it, looking for a new home for humanity.  Somebody's put that wormhole there for a reason, and it's up to Cooper and the young Dr. Brand to find out why.

One final mission is being planned to find that new home, and that mission is where the movie really picks up and turns into a grand space exploration adventure, as Brand and Cooper have to leave everyone they love and know behind for the good of all mankind.

I loved this movie, frankly.  It's the first movie I've seen with Anne Hathaway in it in ages where I didn't immediately loathe her Manic Pixie Dream Girl act, maybe because she's playing a scientist and explorer instead of a piece of arm candy, and the fact that the real relationship here is between Cooper and his daughter Murph.

Besides, it's a breathtakingly beautiful film, with more than a few nods to Gravity, and TARS the robot is awesome.

Just trust me.  This one's going to win an Oscar or two.  Go see it.

Your Sunday Long Read

This week's Sunday Long Read is Joe Sonka's postmortem on the Grimes campaign, and how she lost by 16 points in the space of only a couple of weeks.

But at the very least, Grimes had an opportunity to make Tuesday’s election competitive, and the overarching reason she didn’t give herself that chance was the hermetically sealed bubble in which Grimes’ intellect and personality was locked by her campaign. Her campaign repeatedly touted how “disciplined” she was, never going off script and saying something that could end up in an attack ad. Some extent of discipline is needed for any campaign, but they took this to an extreme that ended up defining her as a candidate and left many wondering who she was, what she believed, and whether she was up for the job. And any young, relatively unknown candidate presenting herself as a mostly blank slate is especially vulnerable.

Do read the whole thing.   If you want to know exactly how Kentucky Democrats blew the best chance they ever had to unseat Mitch the Turtle, well, this is the best article I've read of its epitaph.  Grimes's refusal to say if she voted for Obama or not pretty much turned a six-point loss into a sixteen-point one.

And the best part is we get to go through all of this next year here as Gov. Dinosaur Steve's job is up for grabs in 2015 between Dem AG Jack Conway and GOP Ag Secretary James Comer.