Trial Of The Century 2.0, Con't

After three days of brutal evidence presented by House impeachment managers, Trump's defense is expected to wrap up Friday night in a matter of a few hours total. He doesn't need a defense of course, because his enablers are the jurors.

 

Former President Donald Trump's defense team expects to finish its arguments in the Senate's impeachment trial by Friday night, two sources tell CNN. 

His lawyers will take the Senate floor on Friday after impeachment managers wrap up on Thursday, but they are not currently expected to use all of their allotted time. Each side gets 16 hours for presentations. 

Attorneys David Schoen, Bruce Castor, Michael van der Veen and William Brennan are all expected to speak during Friday's arguments, according to a person familiar with the latest plan. Using videos of Democratic lawmakers, they plan to argue that Democrats glorified violence by recreating the January 6 riot, will claim the trial is unconstitutional and stress Trump's First Amendment rights. 

Because the legal team is so disorganized, Trump's allies are apprehensive about how the defense will go. Trump erupted Tuesday as Castor made a meandering opening argument during which he praised the prosecutors. 

Several of Trump's allies lobbied him to get rid of Castor that day, which Trump briefly considered, according to two people. Trump was upset as he watched multiple people, including his usual allies on Fox News, trash Castor's performance. But Castor has remained on the team and is expected to present, at least in part, on Friday. He has told people he wasn't planning on speaking Tuesday, which led to the muddled speech. Castor also admitted on the Senate floor that he swapped speaking roles with David Schoen because Democrats presented such a strong opening argument. 

Allies reassured the angry former president by reminding him he's still headed toward acquittal. President Joe Biden told reporters he thought grim new footage presented Wednesday could have changed the minds of some senators, but conceded, "I don't know." 

 

Nobody expects enough Republicans to vote to acquit, and next week Trump will declare victory after the vote and then unleash his cultists in a wave of deadly rhetoric. It will be up to the states to administer justice, as our Senate is infested with evil GOP idiots. Hell, GOP senators are falling asleep and leaving the chamber during the trial because it bores them.

Senators are tuning out as former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial grinds into its third day, with many falling asleep and more than a dozen Republicans exiting the chamber at various intervals.

As many as 15 seats of Republican senators were empty during the first few hours of the trial Thursday, compared to just a handful of Democrats who were outside of the chamber, according to pool reports.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) were both away from their desks, for instance, while Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) was in the basement on his phone, CNN’s Manu Raju reported.

Many within the chamber were preoccupied with other activities: Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) were reading papers, while, according to CNN’s Jeremy Herb, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) “had a blank map of Asia on his desk and was writing on it like he was filling in the names of the countries.”

On both sides of the aisle, a general malaise was setting in, with many senators reportedly appearing to struggle to stay awake, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Tom Carper (D-Del.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.).

Even Trump’s lawyers were checked out, with David Schoen and Bruce Castor reportedly not taking notes and Schoen even leaving the chamber to speak to reporters and participate in several TV news interviews.

Asked by Raju why he was breaking from the trial to do interviews, Schoen said impeachment managers’ arguments are “more of the same thing,” labeling their use of footage of Capitol rioters citing Trump as their inspiration, “offensive, quite frankly.”

“It’s the same as yesterday and the same as the day before… it’s just redundant. The same thing, over and over again,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) told reporters of impeachment managers’ arguments on Thursday. “To me, the more you hear it, the less credibility there is in it.” 

 

They're bored because the outcome is assured. It's a mobster trial where the jurors are accomplices of the criminal. 

 

As to justice, well, even if a miracle happens and Trump is indicted in a state trial, he'll never be convicted because rich people never go to jail in this country.

Besides, there's no way jurors in any Trump trail can be kept safe. Not when the cultists are police, prosecutors, and federal law enforcement agents at all levels. They will be found, and they will pay the price, and they will acquit, or they and their families will be "accidentally" killed in police raids.

That's how America works.

The impeachment trial will be over in a matter of days.

The trial of America begins when Trump is acquitted.

Centrist Dalek Horror Theater Presents: The Schoening

As the New Hampshire primaries get underway today, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg confirms this week that he is considering entering the 2016 presidential race as an independent, something that made the rounds as a trial balloon two weeks ago.  Now however Bloomberg himself is saying he's considering making the jump.

The billionaire media mogul and three-time former New York mayor told Financial Times in an interview published Monday that he is “looking at all the options.”

Fellow New York billionaire Donald Trump has been leading polls on the Republican side for months, and Hillary Clinton only narrowly escaped Iowa with a victory over a self-described "democratic socialist." Bloomberg, who is considering running as an independent, said Americans deserve “a lot better.”

Bloomberg has set a March deadline to determine whether he will run, and should he decide yes, he told the FT he would have to begin getting his name on ballots next month. He has signaled he could spend at least a billion dollars of his own money to sustain a campaign, according to a New York Times report citing anonymous sources briefed on his deliberations.

That's not the funny part.  The funny part is who's advising him.

Bloomberg's pollster, Douglas Schoen, outlined the case for his boss's potential White House bid in an op-ed last week for the Wall Street Journal.

Pundits are missing a large group of centrist voters who opt out of partisan primaries, Schoen argued, pointing to the low turnout in Iowa.

“That’s the new silent majority: the millions of Americans who don’t participate in Democratic or Republican primaries. They are equally as fed up with the status quo, but they have a different approach to problem-solving and different policy prescriptions than those on the ideological extremes,” Schoen wrote.

That has created an opportunity for someone to mount an independent run, he argued:

“Who fits the bill? Michael Bloomberg, a centrist with a clear (and arguably unique) record in business as an entrepreneur and in politics as a three-term mayor of New York. Mr. Bloomberg is a fiscally prudent conciliator who advances pro-growth policies and takes tough stands."

That's right, the guy running Bloomberg's numbers is none other than our old friend Doug Schoen, the obnoxious No Labels/Americans Elect centrist grifter that warned Obama could never win re-election in 2012 and that Hillary had to primary him, that Obama had to champion the Simpson/Bowles Catfood Commission, that the Democrats were the real extremists, that Obama had to become a right-wing Democrat in order to attract Tea Party votes, that Trump should have gotten into the race in 2012 as in independent, and my personal favorite, that Barack Obama should have dropped out of the 2012 race completely for the good of America.

It looks like Doug has found his Trojan Horse to sink the Democrats and get his massive austerity cuts by splitting votes in favor of the GOP in Bloomberg, so if there was any doubt that a Bloomberg run is more Nader than Perot, the fact that Doug Schoen is involved should have you running for the exits.

The Centrist Daleks are baaaaaack!

Third And Fourth Party Crashers

The worst "Democratic strategist" team in the universe is back, apparently.  Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell have been screaming for years that the Democratic Party is infested by extremist hippies, that Democrats had to tack hard right in order to win the Tea Party in 2010,  and then suggested that President Obama shouldn't run at all in 2012 in order to bring the country together.

Now the pair are warning that because nobody listened to them, that the Democrats will suffer complete defeat in 2012 at the hands of a third party or even fourth party movement that Schoen and Caddell just happen to have an advertising spiel for.

We already see evidence on the ground that from the discontent coursing through the electorate there may emerge a third or even fourth political party that would be competitive in next year's presidential election. Look no further than the recent launch of the centrist, bipartisan, Americans Elect. This is a nonprofit political organization that plans to break the stranglehold of the two-party duopoly by selecting a third presidential ticket, via an Internet convention, that will be on the ballot in 2012.

Meanwhile the tea party movement is functioning as a quasi-third party already, having already demonstrated an unprecedented level of activism, enthusiasm and influence over the primary and general-election outcomes during the 2010 midterms—and, most recently, driving the debate over the debt ceiling. Polling done by Douglas E. Schoen LLC last year shows that a tea party presidential candidate could get between 15%-25% of the vote running on that line, depending on the precise alignment of the candidates.

There are now rumblings from Donald Trump, a former contender for the Republican nomination, that he may run as an independent. There are certain to be others.

We have seen in the past where economic distress and political alienation can lead. In both the 1980 and 1992 presidential campaigns, third-party candidates emerged—John Anderson and then Ross Perot—and each garnered high levels of public support. Mr. Perot actually led in the polls for several months during the 1992 campaign. And the conditions in those years were nowhere near as severe as they are today.

The political order as we know it is deteriorating and disintegrating, and politics abhors a vacuum. So there is very good reason to believe that a credible third party, or even fourth political party, may be on the ballot in 2012. The American people clearly are looking for alternatives. Now.

Yes, and Schoen and Caddell will be there to offer their services to Americans Elect candidates who run to save America because the Democrats are just as broken and extremist as the Tea Party Republicans.  Firebaggers and Tea Partiers unite to bring down the evil President Darkie McBlackerthanyou!  Americans Elect will show us the way!  Centrism uber alles!

This would crack me up if it wasn't so obviously a Hamwaldian grift job.

How To Lose Without Really Trying

Doug Schoen and Patrick Caddell, a pair of Democratic pollsters from the Clinton Triangulation School (Schoen is a regular FOX News guest) is warning that Obama and the Dems must tack hard to the right in order to save themselves from a "November Bloodbath".

The swing voters, who are key to the fate of the Democratic Party, care most about three things: reigniting the economy, reducing the deficit and creating jobs.

These voters are outraged by the seeming indifference of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, who they believe wasted a year on health-care reform. These voters will not tolerate more diversion from their pressing economic concerns. They view the Obama administration as working systematically to protect the interests of public-sector employees and organized labor -- by offering specific benefits such as pension protection and tax reductions at the expense of all taxpayers.

Democrats must understand that voters will not accept seeing their tax dollars used to pay for higher wages and better benefits for public-sector employees when they themselves are getting higher taxes and lower wages.

Winning over swing voters will require a bold, new focus from the president and his party. They must adopt an agenda aimed at reducing the debt, with an emphasis on tax cuts, while implementing carefully crafted initiatives to stimulate and encourage job creation. This is the agenda that largely motivated the Clinton administration from 1995 through 2000 and that led to a balanced budget and welfare reform. It promoted a modest degree of social welfare spending. This agenda is enormously popular with the electorate and could eventually turn around Democratic fortunes.

Democrats can avoid the electoral bloodbath we predicted before passage of the health-care bill, but in one way: through a bold commitment to fiscal discipline and targeted fiscal stimulus of the private sector and entrepreneurship.

In other words, Schoen and Caddell are saying that the 18% of Americans who are the hard core conservative Tea Party will certainly vote for the Democrats rather than the Republicans if the Dems simply pretend to be the Republicans.

Really?  Because if you believe that, you really are as stupid as these two think you are.  Let's get something straight:  the Tea Party voters are Republicans.  They despise, loathe, and vilify the Democrats every chance they get.   They call Obama a Socialist even when he's not, they yell and scream that he has raised taxes when he's lowered them, and a healthy chunk of them don't even believe he's legally President because they're not sure if he's a U.S. citizen.

What on God's green Earth makes anyone believe for a microsecond that in 2010 with such virulent anti-incumbent fervor out there that incumbent Democrats can convince these voters to not throw them out of office?  What exactly can they do to make hard core Republican supporters vote for the Democrats?

It's idiocy at its core here.  Not only are the Tea Party voters never going to vote for the Democrat, they are not "mainstream swing voters" either...by any stretch of the imagination.  What Schoen and Caddell are trying to do is get the Dems to run as Republicans and scrap Obama's agenda...in which case they get voted out of office anyway.  Does nobody recall 1996?  It took the Dems a decade after tacking back to the right after 1994 to get the House back, and that was done how?

By running as Democrats.

It's a lesson the Democrats of 2010 need to continue to apply now instead of surrendering to the Tea Party fringe.

Whatever You Want Them To Be

Our old friend Doug "Third Party" Schoen is back in Politico today, screaming that Occupy Together really means America wants a centrist third party candidate who will tame the evil partisans in Congress and bring them together to push his Americans Elect effort to destroy "reform" Medicare and Social Security and save America.

In my recent polling, both parties and the congressional leadership all draw net negative ratings.

So there is good reason to believe that a credible third party may be on the ballot in 2012 — and would garner far more support than most political analysts would expect.

I recently polled for Americans Elect, a nonprofit political organization that is now planning an Internet convention to select a third presidential ticket for the 2012 election. They are in the process of securing ballot access in all 50 states.

This demonstrates that an increasing number of Americans are now searching beyond the two parties for effective leadership. Many now support an alternative 2012 ticket to break the two-party duopoly’s stranglehold.

Amazing.  He's polling for an organization that wants to create a third party ticket and he of course found that Americans really want a third party ticket.  Quelle surprise!

Voters desperately want the opportunity to change the political system. Polling showed they are looking for their voices to be heard by electing a centrist alternative to the Democratic and Republican presidential tickets in 2012. They believe, our results show, that this could force the two parties to work together, bringing logical ideas from both.

I'm having trouble figuring out how this would actually solve the problem, since the problem is Congress (and specifically Republicans in Congress), not the White House.  A centrist candidate would have what leverage exactly over Eric Cantor and John Boehner?  No, nobody expects this third party candidate to win...but it certainly would damage President Obama's re-election chances.  There's no way the Tea Party would support a relentlessly centrist candidate.  They'd line up behind the GOP for sure.

But Americans Elect would effectively split independents and Democrats, which is the point.  If these guys were serious about reforming government, they'd start with Congress, not the White House.  The fact that they exist to make sure the GOP wins in 2012 tells you everything you need to know about Doug Schoen (who has been trying to get rid of President Obama by any means possible) and the people he works for.

When I Go To Extremes

A new poll from The Hill shows some rather depressing figures about which party is seen as being "dominated" by extremists, but the only thing extreme here is the hippie punching.

This result comes from The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll, which found that 44 percent of likely voters say the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, whereas 37 percent say it’s the Republican Party that is more dominated by extremists.

The revelations in a survey of 10 toss-up congressional districts across the country point to problems for Democrats, who are trying to motivate a disillusioned base and appeal to independents moving to the GOP ahead of the Nov. 2 election.

The polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland conducted the survey, contacting 4,047 likely voters by phone between Oct. 2 and Oct. 7. The margin of error for this sample is 1.5 percent.

More than one in every five Democrats (22 percent) in The Hill’s survey said their party was more dominated than the GOP by extreme views. The equivalent figure among Republicans is 11 percent. 

Results for independent voters reflected the larger sample. Forty-three percent of likely independent voters said the Democratic Party is more dominated by its extreme elements, compared to 37 percent who thought the GOP had fallen under the sway of extreme views.

Honestly, America?  The Democrats are dominated by extremists?   Do some research, people.  Christine O' Donnell?  Carl Paladino?  Rand Paul?  Any of these folks ring a bell?  Jim DeMint?  Michele Bachmann?  Virginia Foxx?

You know, this is where "The President Is Secretly X" crap is paying off for the GOP.  And surprise, the poll was done by our old friends Doug Schoen and Mark Penn.  As BooMan says, the goal here is to lay the foundation for the Mother of All Hippie Punching festivals after the elections.  Here's the money quote:

“That’s real trouble for Democrats,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.

“All the press coverage has been about how these Tea Party candidates are fringe ideologues, and there have been high-profile examples of them proving the point,” he added. “Yet, still at this moment, you have independents saying, ‘I think the Democrats are a little more extreme than the Republicans.' "

Third Way, ladies and gentlemen.  It's the hippies' fault!  Obama must go to the Center!   Obama will obey the Village Daleks!



TRIANGULATE!  TRIANGULAAAAATE!

New tag.

The Meme Of The Week

Scott Rasmussen is the Jesus Christ of political polling (complete with perfect neutrality and total infallibility), and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

Except for all the times where Rasmussen is wrong.

Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal fell for the same trap, publishing an op-ed by Democratic pollsters — and Fox News contributors — Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen about the “virulent attacks from left-wing bloggers” against Rasmussen:

The reaction against him has been strident and harsh. He’s been called an adjunct of the Republican Party when in fact he has never worked for any political party. Nor has he consulted with any candidates seeking elective office.

The attacks on Rasmussen and Gallup follow an effort by the White House to wage war on Fox News and to brand it, as former White House Director of Communications Anita Dunn did, as “not a real news organization.” The move backfired; in time, other news organizations rallied around Fox News. But the message was clear: criticize the White House at your peril.

The falsity comes from Rasmussen’s official bio. But according to the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity, Rasmussen has in fact been a paid consultant for the RNC and President Bush’s 2004 campaign. He accepted $95,500 and $45,500 from each, respectively, for “survey research.” Also, as Media Matters points out, The Wall Street Journal “failed to identify Caddell and Schoen as Fox News contributors, despite their defense of the network.” Nate Silver has more here on Rasmussen’s polling techniques.

At this point, protecting Scott Rasumssen's polls is more important to the GOP thn coming up with actual ideas to fix the economy.  Stop and think about why the issue is "the economy is in shambles" and the answer is "Rasmussen's polling numbers!"

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Still My Enemy

Steve M. catches this Peter Baker column in the NY Times this morning.

The reality of presidential politics is that it helps to have an enemy. With Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, they shoulder responsibility for the country’s troubles. No amount of venting about George W. Bush or the filibuster rule has convinced the public otherwise. But if Republicans capture Congress, Mr. Obama will finally have a foil heading toward his own re-election battle in 2012.

“The best possible result for Obama politically is for the Republicans to gain control of both houses,” said Douglas E. Schoen, a Democratic pollster and strategist who helped President Bill Clinton recover from his own midterm Congressional defeat in 1994 to win re-election two years later. “That’s what Obama should want.” 

Ahh yes, here it comes, the Golden Clintonian Path, as espoused by our old friend Doug Schoen again.  Steve M. reminds us that painting the GOP as the enemy did nothing for Obama in the first two years.

Attacks on the Bush presidency, and warnings that Republican successes in the midterms will bring us Bush 2.0, actually make it harder for the public to understand what's going on. Attacking Bush reinforces the impression that Republicans had power then; warning of a possible upcoming era of neo-Bushism suggests that Republicans could misuse power in the future. All of this makes it hard for voters who aren't politics wonks to grasp the fact that Republicans, using the filibuster and relentless party discipline, have a hell of a lot of power right now, and are abusing it.

Steve is correct.   But what Peter Baker's real job here happens to be is playing the Centrist Dalek card.

Mr. Clinton employed a triangulation strategy after Mr. Gingrich’s Republicans took control, trying to play off both his own party as well as the empowered opposition. He declared the era of big government over and cut deals with Mr. Gingrich on welfare reform, while positioning himself as a bulwark against Republican excesses during the budget battle that led to the partial shutdown of the federal government.

“The Republican victory in 1994 saved the Clinton presidency,” said Mr. Gillon, “because it freed him from the liberal wing of his party and allowed him to be more nimble and flexible, which he’s brilliant at. And it forced the Republicans to develop a governing philosophy. A campaign slogan may get you through Election Day but it doesn’t help you solve these very difficult problems.” 

THE OBAMA WILL TRIANGULAAAAATE!  or he will be blamed for all problems.  Assuming the Republicans will even attempt to work with Obama is asinine.  They will want 100% of what they want, if Obama doesn't sign it into law they will impeach him.  It really is that simple.  And as usual, for "Obama to win" he must lurch far to the right as he can...and still get impeached for it by the Republicans.

The Teabaggers will demand it.

The Hillary Wedge, Again

And whenever President Obama is making headway with his numbers clearly improving, enter our dear old friends Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen with an op-ed in the WSJ screaming that OBAMA IS DOOMED and that only Hillary can save the Dems.

One year ago in these pages, we warned that if President Obama continued down his overly partisan road, the nation would be "guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it." The result has been exactly as we predicted: stalemate in Washington, fights over the debt ceiling, an inability to tackle the debt and deficit, and paralysis exacerbating market turmoil and economic decline.

If President Obama were to withdraw, he would put great pressure on the Republicans to come to the table and negotiate—especially if the president singularly focused in the way we have suggested on the economy, job creation, and debt and deficit reduction. By taking himself out of the campaign, he would change the dynamic from who is more to blame—George W. Bush or Barack Obama?—to a more constructive dialogue about our nation's future.

Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country. A CNN/ORC poll released in late September had Mrs. Clinton's approval rating at an all-time high of 69%—even better than when she was the nation's first lady. Meanwhile, a Time Magazine poll shows that Mrs. Clinton is favored over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by 17 points (55%-38%), and Texas Gov. Rick Perry by 26 points (58%-32%).

But this is about more than electoral politics. Not only is Mrs. Clinton better positioned to win in 2012 than Mr. Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does. Given her strong public support, she has the ability to step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington. 

Yes, because Republicans love Hillary Clinton and would totally work with her if just the awful black man does the honorable thing and refuse to run for a second term.  Bonus Verbatim Stupid:

Put simply, it seems that the White House has concluded that if the president cannot run on his record, he will need to wage the most negative campaign in history to stand any chance.

Right. You know, unlike the GOP in 2008.  That was a campaign of rainbows and unicorn farts.

If you honestly think that the best thing to do right now is for President Obama to give up, hand everything over to Hillary Clinton, and that by doing so, this will magically make the Republican Party totally come back to the table for awesome bi-partisan compromise, then I have a lovely royal friend in Nigeria who needs your money in order to get his treasury funds out of the country.  Just cut me a check now along with your credit card number and your SSN.  It'll be great.

The best part is at the end, where they blame 100% of the partisan divide on the black guy and demand that he not only step aside but be made the step aside by Pelosi and Reid, and that Hillary be made to run.  Or else...well, umm...well Doug and Pat aren't sure, but it may involve Obama not being President anymore.

And if this entire article doesn't drip with absolute burning hatred for the President, the implied condescension that not only is he completely incompetent, but that any of his supporters must have their judgment thoroughly questioned as Democrats as well, as if any thinking Democrat, any real Democrat, would instantly agree with their logic as tautology of the most pristine credibility, the assumption of privilege here that President Obama should listen to his moral superiors and exit the election as the "right" thing to do is staggering.

How dare, they say, should the President dare run for re-election when the country is suffering when his very existence offends the authors to the point where the only chance the Democratic party has, they believe, is political suicide.  The suggestion that Hillary Clinton will step above partisan politics where Barack Obama is incapable of doing so means that either Caddell and Shoen have frightfully short memories...or that they believe you do.

Imagine, two professional conservative "Democrat" pollsters demanding that the entire Democratic party drop everything to validate their confirmation bias, pleading their case in Rupert Murdoch's outlet of choice for "gravitas".

They've been running this game of three-card monte for a year now.  I'm sure they have our best interests at heart, considering we're just brain-dead anyway.

He's So Good At His Job He Should Just Quit

This is the mind-boggling, bizarro world conclusion that Centrist Daleks Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell come up with: for Obama to be a great President, he must refuse to run in 2012.

No, really.   Behold their Centrist Dalek logic.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.

The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that, for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment - or of the 2012 campaign.

Quite simply, given our political divisions and economic problems, governing and campaigning have become incompatible. Obama can and should dispense with the pollsters, the advisers, the consultants and the strategists who dissect all decisions and judgments in terms of their impact on the president's political prospects.

Obama himself once said to Diane Sawyer: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." He now has the chance to deliver on that idea.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama spoke repeatedly of his desire to end the red-state-blue-state divisions in America and to change the way Washington works. This was a central reason he was elected; such aspirations struck a deep chord with the polarized electorate.

Obama can restore the promise of the election by forging a government of national unity, welcoming business leaders, Republicans and independents into the fold. But if he is to bring Democrats and Republicans together, the president cannot be seen as an advocate of a particular party, but as somebody who stands above politics, seeking to forge consensus. And yes, the United States will need nothing short of consensus if we are to reduce the deficit and get spending under control, to name but one issue. 

I really wish Prop 19 had passed in California, because these two could have made an absolute fortune in cultivating and selling whatever primo weed these two clowns were smoking when they came up with the theory that Obama announcing he wouldn't run would magically make the Republicans compromise.  The visions of mythological beasts that accompanied this revelatory nonsense would give Hieronymous Bosch night terrors.

Let me explain to you what would happen if Obama said "I'm not running again in 2012."

It would be the same thing that would happen if Obama did run in 2012, which is that the Republicans will do everything they can to dismantle every law and executive order he passed, still insist he is a danger to the country, still insist that he gives them 100% of what they want right now and will attack him anyway.  There will be no grand magical compromise.  There will be no national unity.  The Republicans will get what they want, every single piece of legislation they introduce from January 2011 on, or they will attempt to destroy the country through petulant refusal to govern the country, and they will still blame Obama for it.

Of course the last paragraph there is the key to what these two knuckleheads really mean:

And yes, the United States will need nothing short of consensus if we are to reduce the deficit and get spending under control, to name but one issue. 

Because loosely translated from Centrist Dalek, it means "Obama needs to capitulate completely to the Tea Party-controlled Republicans and ignore his base, and dismantle the last 80 years of social programs so that we can finish the transfer of the remaining 18% of the country's wealth to the richest 20% of Americans because 82% is just unacceptable."

Triangulate nothing.  Only full and complete surrender as a stating point is acceptable to these two, and the completion of America as a banana republic in status as well as in name.

If Obama surrenders the country now, it will be much appreciated by our new lords.  Slimy little Vichy bastards, these two.  But this is of course serious thinking, followed by "Of course the Catfood Commission's recommendations are a good starting point towards a national unity government..."

These men are souless, even for Centrist Daleks.  Oh, and the Centrists called Reaganism dead after 1982 midterms too just like Clinton was "irrelevant" after 1994.  Villagers:  still clueless after all these years.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

So, not a couple days after authoring a controversial op-ed piece with the crazy advice to Obama that he should just refuse to run for re-election and "transcend partisan politics" by giving the Republicans 100% of what they want, Doug Schoen's polling outfit just happens to have a poll showing that only 26% of people think Obama will win re-election, prompting yet another op-ed from his partner Mark Penn that implores Obama to give Republicans 100% of what they want.

Funny how that little self-fulfilling narrative is shaping up there with the op-ed coming first, then the poll backing up their conclusions.  How convenient for them.

Last Call

Once again we spend twice as much on health care per capita than any other country, and we still have one of the most inefficient systems on Earth.

The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries -- Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found.

"As an American it just bothers me that with all of our know-how, all of our wealth, that we are not assuring that people who need healthcare can get it," Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Previous reports by the nonprofit fund, which conducts research into healthcare performance and promotes changes in the U.S. system, have been heavily used by policymakers and politicians pressing for healthcare reform.

Davis said she hoped health reform legislation passed in March would lead to improvements.

The current report uses data from nationally representative patient and physician surveys in seven countries in 2007, 2008, and 2009. It is available here.

In 2007, health spending was $7,290 per person in the United States, more than double that of any other country in the survey.

Australians spent $3,357, Canadians $3,895, Germans $3,588, the Netherlands $3,837 and Britons spent $2,992 per capita on health in 2007. New Zealand spent the least at $2,454.

This is a big rise from the Fund's last similar survey, in 2007, which found Americans spent $6,697 per capita on healthcare in 2005, or 16 percent of gross domestic product.

"We rank last on safety and do poorly on several dimensions of quality," Schoen told reporters. "We do particularly poorly on going without care because of cost. And we also do surprisingly poorly on access to primary care and after-hours care."

 Health care reform will help with this, but we still have decades of improvements to make.  Meanwhile, let's look at what's gone on just 3 years ago:


And over the last 30 years.





Remember, the Republicans want to go back to this system, because they think it's the best on Earth.

Right Nightmare, Wrong Party

Politico reminds us that terrorism that should happen on a Republican's watch is a chance for America to come together when 3,000 people are killed.  Should a Democrat be in charge however, it's a nightmare.

The muted response, allies said, was aimed at denying al Qaeda a propaganda victory, and at demonstrating how little the terrorists can now disrupt Americans’ lives. “The president and his team have done a good job at handling the situation given the competing interests at play. He’s been forceful without the bellicose chest bumping of the last administration,” said Jim Manley, the chief spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “One thing he’s got going for him is Republicans have no credibility on this issue when their sending out former Vice President Cheney you know they’ve hit the bottom of the barrel.”

Still, the response failed to reckon with the intense public interest in a story of repeated government failures and a near-fatal attack. Not to mention that Americans and flight crews were on edge – as evidenced in the detainment of a man who was in an airplane bathroom for too long and who authorities released once they learned he was just a businessman who’d gotten ill. The White House, already feeling heat for its Christmas Day response, had a spokesman quickly issue a statement when the man was taken into custody.

In Obama’s effective absence, Republicans began sharply attacking the administration, producing a partisan stand-off critics say could have been avoided.

“They should have approached it as a national security emergency requiring a bipartisan response, not a political response,” said Doug Schoen, a pollster who worked for President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. “He absolutely should have interrupted his vacation and absolutely should have gone back to Washington, and convened a high-level, bipartisan meeting.”

So, to recap:  Republicans have no credibility on terrorism because 9/11 happened on their watch.  Democrats however have less credibility because a Nigerian man set his crotch on fire on an airliner.

Our liberal Village media, ladies and gentlemen, demands a bipartisan solution to the problem, which apparently entails letting the Republicans (with their zero credibility) lecture the President on how to stop the terrorists they couldn't.

Our political discourse is broken.

StupidiNews!

• A major winter Nor'easter could drop 18-24 inches of snow in New York City and into New England over the next 48 hours.
• Several Myanmar civilian leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi, have been detained by military forces in what appears to be an apparent coup.
• Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the city's teachers' unions will delay resumption of in-person classes for at least a day as the two sides work out COVID-19 safety issues for educators.
• Donald Trump has named new impeachment lawyers Doug Schoen and Bruce Castor after Trump's entire impeachment defense team quit over the weekend.
• Researchers have finally figured out why the wombat has cubical poop, due to flexible, efficient intestines that remove nearly all the water from the wombat's waste.
  

Turkey Week Last Call: The Road To Gilead

With the end of legalized abortion seven months and one SCOTUS decision away, the circular firing squad by women's groups, abortion rights activists, and fundraisers on the Left is now in full bloom.

As Planned Parenthood and its progressive allies have rallied the resistance, the shift in fortunes in the abortion wars has been mostly attributed to the right’s well-executed game plan. Less attention has been paid to the left’s role in its own loss of power.

But interviews with more than 50 reproductive rights leaders, clinic directors, political strategists and activists over the past three months reveal a fragmented movement facing longstanding divisions — cultural, financial and political. Many said that abortion rights advocates and leading reproductive rights groups had made several crucial miscalculations that have put them on the defensive.

“It’s really, really complicated and somewhat controversial where the pro-choice movement lost,” said Johanna Schoen, a professor at Rutgers University who has studied the history of abortion.

National leaders became overly reliant on the protections granted by a Democratic presidency under Mr. Obama and a relatively balanced Supreme Court, critics say, leading to overconfidence that their goals were not seriously threatened. Their expectation that Mr. Trump would lose led them to forgo battles they now wish they had fought harder, like Judge Merrick B. Garland’s failed nomination to the bench.

Local activists in states like Alabama, Georgia, North Dakota and Missouri where abortion was under siege say national leaders lost touch with the ways that access to abortion was eroding in Republican strongholds.

“Looking at the prior presidential administration, there was a perception that everything is fine,” said Kwajelyn Jackson, the executive director of the Feminist Women’s Health Center, an independent clinic in Atlanta that has provided abortions since 1976. “We were screaming at the top of our lungs, everything is not fine, please pay attention.”

Discord at Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest and most influential abortion provider, exacerbated the problem. In July the group’s new president, Dr. Leana Wen, was forced out in a messy departure highlighting deep internal division over her management style and how much emphasis to place on the political fight for abortion rights.

Planned Parenthood’s acting head, Alexis McGill Johnson, said that Mr. Trump’s election, new abortion restrictions and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court provided a wake-up call to many national leaders, including herself, that forced them to confront the entrenched challenges of class dividing their movement.

“A lot of us are awakening to the fact that if you are wealthy, if you live in the New York ZIP code or California ZIP code or Illinois ZIP code, your ability to access reproductive health care is not in jeopardy in the same way that it is in other states,” Ms. McGill Johnson said in an interview.

"Where the pro-choice movement lost" was when 53% of white women decided Donald Trump was a better candidate for women than Hillary Clinton in November 2016.  That's where it lost, guys.  This was a choice white women made.

You took abortion away when you voted for Trump.  It's not the fault of the pro-choice movement.  It's the fault of the women who took the pro-choice movement for granted and said "Trump won't take abortion away from me, I voted for him."

What did you think was going to happen?

The Bloomberg Is Off The Rose

As I mentioned this morning, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is officially not going to get into the race for the White House as a third party spoiler, and the NY Times received some of Bloomberg's research on the run.  It's interesting stuff indeed.

Bloomberg's advisers thought he had a real shot as the third party alternative in a Trump v Sanders matchup:

Amazing.  Bloomberg's team thought he would win the Upper Midwest with the exception of Minnesota, while utterly breaking Trump in the South, with Bloomberg somehow being competitive in both Texas and California and being in position to get to 270 win easily.

But the reality of a Clinton/Trump matchup apparently forced him to fold his cards completely.

The scenario here is that Bloomberg weakens both sides to the point where nobody gets to 270, and then the GOP-controlled House would decide the election for Trump.

Note the maps come from our old friend Doug Schoen, which means they are vastly overstating Bloomberg's chance of winning any state whatsoever.  The actual reality is that much like Perot's run two decades ago, Bloomberg wouldn't win a single state, but would split a vast number of states that would make for a different swing state group.  That chaos would almost certainly benefit Trump as well, allowing him to win states that he wouldn't have a shot at.

The upshot would be the same: Bloomberg would create a path for President Trump.  Luckily that's not something that he wants to be remembered for, so for now, we're being spared his ego.

Last Call

What?  You didn’t think you were going to get through the DNC without unsolicited advice for President Obama from The Centrist Concern Troll Twins in the Wall Street Journal, did you?  Oh, you silly dears.  Roll the tape, Claude!

What voters are looking for—and particularly what swing voters, independents, and disillusioned Obama voters are looking for—is a new direction for America based on fiscal discipline, a balanced budget, and economic growth and leadership. 

More than anyone else in this race, Paul Ryan has spoken of the need for fiscal discipline and economic growth—two themes that have been largely absent from the Obama-Biden campaign—which explains a large part of the Ryan-inspired Romney bump.

That bump is like 0.75 points, but who cares.  Dorka Schoen and Give ‘Em Caddell need not your facts.  Centrist Daleks will Tri-ang-u-laaaaate!  And hey, Paul Ryan is a Centrist too!  You should listen to his Very Serious Centrist Positions on tesseract marathon running and the joys of children conceived through coercion and force.

For his part, President Obama needs to change direction—immediately and decisively. His campaign strategy has been to divide the country on the basis of class, demonize the wealthy, call for higher taxes and unceasingly attack Mr. Romney. Yet poll after poll has shown that while voters embrace the idea of higher taxes on the rich, it does not translate into votes. 

In 2008, Mr. Obama promised to help unite America in a “post-partisan” Washington. But the 2012 campaign has been one of the most negative in memory. What he needs to do is acknowledge that he’s made mistakes and that he wants to pursue a substantive approach to governance. Put another way, he needs to bring back “hope and change” and abandon his divide-and-conquer strategy.

Should he do this before or after he announces he’s not running in November because it’s really tragically unfair of him to have broken such a historic streak of white men running the place, you know.  It’s the right thing to do.

It has been said before, but only because it’s so true: Mr. Obama should follow the lead of President Bill Clinton, who emphasized in both his terms in office the need for unity and consensus to achieve fiscal restraint. Inviting Mr. Clinton to speak at the convention Wednesday night is a sure sign that the Obama campaign understands the need to move to the center, if not in substance then in style. 

Yet nothing would appeal to independents and swing voters more than if the president were to embrace the findings of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission and make it clear that he too has a plan to revitalize the U.S. economy, reduce the deficit, reform entitlements and spur economic growth through a fairer and leaner tax system.

So President Obama has the unique opportunity to be the adult in the room by handing control of the country over to the nice folks who aren’t all that sure about evolution because the open-minded scientist must question the theory, but they believe tax cuts magically create additional tax revenues because rich people will spring forth from the nothingness like Orks from Warhammer 40K (and reach a collective critical mass of entrepreneurs, a WAAAAGH! of small business owners who will run around franchising at everything, paint their businesses red because they’ll create jobs faster, and leave nothing but career opportunities in their wake of mass construction.  Sure).

Yeah, I’ll buy that.  President Obama should totally listen to these guys.  (Also, Centrist Daleks versus Small Business Orks.  Somebody make that happen.)

Another Headscratcher From Newsweek

Newsweek's Jon Meecham freely admits that we've seen the Hoffman Effect before, 45 years ago when Barry Goldwater's reactionary conservatism broke the country in two.

As Evan Thomas argues in this week's cover, the Reagan style was one that might not have passed muster with Palin's adoring fans. Reagan realized that movement conservatives like him needed moderate conservatives to win and ultimately to govern. In 1976, in his challenge to President Ford, Reagan announced that he would run with Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker, a Rockefeller Republican. It never came to that, but four years later, in Detroit, Reagan seriously considered only two men for the ticket: Ford and George H.W. Bush, both men from the middle, not the far right, of the Republican Party. It is difficult to imagine the 2012 nominee choosing a more moderate running mate, not least because there are so few moderates left in the GOP. Even those of centrist inclinations are finding it virtually impossible to work with the administration for fear of a backlash from the base.

So who does Meecham blame for the current problem?
Why, Obama and the Democrats, of course.  The very next paragraph:

We have been to this movie before, when the unreconstructed liberals of the fading New Deal–Great Society coalition obstinately refused to acknowledge the reality that America is a center-right nation, and that Democrats who wish to win national elections cannot run on the left. We are at our best as a country when there is something approaching a moderate space in politics. The middle way is not always the right way—far from it. But sometimes it is, and a wise nation should cultivate a political spirit that allows opponents to cooperate without fearing an automatic execution from their core supporters. Who knew that the real rogues in American politics would be the ones who dare to get along?

It's not 1964 that Meecham is channeling here, but 1995, where a chastened Bill Clinton turned to running as a conservative Democrat, and got impeached for his troubles, his policies to appease the "center-right" setting the table for both the dot-com bust and the meltdown that followed eight years later.
It's the Democrats who have to change in Meecham's view, who have to swing hard to the right to try to capture the disaffected Republicans in the middle in order to save the country.

Sarah Palin and the Teabaggers are allowed to do whatever they want, in fact Meecham seems they are inevitable.  The Democrats have to change, you see.  Never the GOP.

And there's your Village for you.

[UPDATE 5:57 PM]  Scott "Obama Derangement Index" Rasmussen and Doug "Clinton's Pollster" Schoen have some friendly advice for the President:  Obama should triangulate now, throw away his domestic agenda, and just be a Republican.  That will win him the election for sure!