9:40 PM: Progressive wars.
9:41 PM: Whichever side of this you’re on, it is hard to imagine that a GOP version of this no-contact townhall format would be 1/30th as articulate and substantive as what we’re seeing tonight. I think most Republicans would have a hard time disagreeing with that.
9:44 PM: If you’re interested, this is the piece I wrote about the out-of-control rise of overdose deaths in the country, which is driven mostly by the growth of abuse of prescription opiates and heroin.
9:47 PM: This is the real issue for Sanders. Personally, I think Sanders would be cut to pieces in a general election, for a number of reasons. Maybe I’m wrong. Who knows? How can he overcome the doubts of people who believe that?
9:12 PM: This isn’t really a critique of single payer, as such. And over time, it should shake out. But here’s a question I have, both about implementation and the politics of it. At the end of the day, you pay for your health insurance, even if your employer pays for it. Because it’s carved out of money you otherwise would receive in direct compensation. But in practice, in the moment, it’s not that clear cut. So if you have a relatively small tax increase and in exchange we have Medicare for All, the immediate savings are to your employer. Do we assume your employer will immediately push those savings to employees? I doubt it. Overtime, sure, some more elasticity in wages. But as a practical matter and in the moment, I think this is a complication to the argument.
9:20 PM: I will say Bernie Sanders has gotten maybe a 100 times better at this than he was only a few months ago.
9:21 PM: With the guy who asked about a class-based political and worldview I was thinking, what’s with the ridiculously articulate questions?
9:24 PM: The injustice question, I mean, that won him a few votes.
9:29 PM: Akrit.
9:30 PM: Not a lot of excitement in that segment. But Sanders made the case for himself about as well as possible, I thought. There were a couple points where I sort of expected Cooper to press him a bit further, but didn’t, especially on the religion question. I think Sanders is an agnostic or atheist. And he didn’t precisely say otherwise. But he seemed to say that religion was actually an important part of his life and the way he sees the world. But then he sort of shifted to spirituality and a message about human solidarity. I sort of expected that Cooper was going to ask, “Do you believe in God?” Didn’t.
Video emerges of Jeb “please clap” moment …. initial analysis of video suggests less “desperate and pitiful” and more “somewhat self-aware and pitiful.”
It involves Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and CNN. And it includes Ted Cruz arguably being a conniving weasel. So needless to say there was no way we could resist. Just what happened Monday night when CNN pushed an update suggesting (though not quite saying) that Carson was on the verge of dropping out and the Cruz camp jumped on it to try to convince Carson supporters to move to Cruz since Carson was dropping out? And who’s right when Carson calls it ‘Dirty Tricks’ and Donald Trump says the caucus results should be tossed out and the caucus held again? Well, here’s the definitive timeline: who said what, when and a lot of other stuff.
Cue the ‘Law & Order’ music.
I wanted to add a bit more to my post below about how our first two nominating states – Iowa and New Hampshire – are basically lily white, while America gets less white and the Democratic party is now effectively a multi-racial party in which whites make up at most a bit over half the voters. I’ve been digging into the American Community Survey, the Census Bureau’s broad survey of numerous demographic characteristics of the US population. And man, Iowa and New Hampshire are really, really white.
For all the talk about South Carolina and Nevada and all the rest, Iowa and New Hampshire still play a massive, massive role in the presidential selection process. The generally accurate conventional wisdom is that Iowa has extremely conservative conservatives and extremely liberal liberals. I was just hearing some pundit on TV explaining how Iowa’s conservatives are more weighted towards evangelicals while New Hampshire’s have a more libertarian hue. All true, as far as it goes. But there’s one overwhelming reality about these two states: everybody is white.
Not everybody, of course. But pretty close. Let’s look at the numbers.
We can now see how important it was for the FBI to release the video of the final moments of Oregon standoff spokesman Robert ‘LaVoy’ Finicum. Before the video’s release we were moving rapidly on our way toward a version of events where Finicum was cowering on his knees with his hands clasped behind his head when an FBI agent put a gun to his head and said, “Barry told me to give you this message.”
Of course, we’ve now all seen the video. There’s room for interpretation at the margins. But a few things seem very clear. Finicum, in the driver’s seat, made a run for it after a brief stand off where his vehicle and two FBI vehicles were parked together on an isolated road. He raced about a mile before running into a police/FBI roadblock. After coming close to running down an FBI agent, he plowed his vehicle into a high embankment of snow. He darted out of the car, either with his hands up, with his hands out to steady himself in the snow or motioning to people to back off. After two law enforcement officers emerge, his arms go down and he makes a couple quick moves to his hands to his waist before falling to the ground. But now his family is coming forward to allege a ‘coverup’.
When you’re the tough guy and the alpha you can’t seem subdued, weak or frankly, ridiculous. Trump’s getting close here.
As you can see in this update here, The Intercept announced this afternoon that it had “discovered a pattern of deception in the actions of a staff member” named Juan Thompson. They further said that Thompson had “gone to great lengths” to produce fake stories. For anyone who has seen these fabulism controversies erupt it is a familiar set of alleged infractions: fabricated quotes, fake email accounts, sources who can’t remember speaking to reporters, quotes that may be valid but can’t be verified. The Intercept made a series of corrections and editor’s notes tied to the affected pieces, including retracting one piece entirely.
Last summer, in our since-discontinued section The Slice, TPM published a freelance story by Thompson, then still a staffer at The Intercept, on the role of criminal violence in his own family. The piece was aggressively fact-checked. I know this because I was peripherally involved in the process at the time. And this has been confirmed this afternoon by a further review of emails, notes and discussions with relevant TPM staffers.
Trump supporters are totally shocked. One woman tearfully says, “It’s just heartbreaking. He really wanted to Make America Great Again."
— Matt Viser (@mviser) February 2, 2016