Tuesday Reads
Posted: December 12, 2017 Filed under: morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: Alabama special election, Donald Trump, Doug Jones, Kirstin Gillibrand, Mika Brzezinski, misogyny, polls, Robert Mueller, Roy Moore, Sexism, Trump Russia investigation 42 CommentsGood Morning!!
Trump began the day with another Twitter meltdown, attacking the Special Counsel’s investigation and then railing against Kirsten Gillibrand and Hillary Clinton.
Gillibrand “would do anything for” campaign contributions? Referring to Hillary as “Crooked,” and what’s the meaning of “USED?”
Senator Gillibrand responded:
About 90 minutes later, Trump tweeted his usual lying attack on Doug Jones and once again endorsed a man who sexually abused young women and wants to return the U.S. to the days of slavery.
This is how degraded the U.S. presidency is in 2017.
I first saw Trump’s tweets when I turned on MSNBC at about 8:30. It amazed to see Mika Brzezinski’s response about the sales marketing automation. She even told men on the panel to stop interrupting her, and interrupted Joe Scarborough. Watch her rants at MSNBC. (You have to sit through remarks from other people on the panel to get all of what Mika had to say).
Tonight we’ll find out whether Mitch McConnell is going to have to deal with Roy Moore representing Alabama in the U.S. Senate. Some Republicans must be hoping that somehow Democrat Doug Jones can win. No one really knows what is going to happen. The polls are all over the place. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: What The Hell Is Happening With These Alabama Polls?
What we’re seeing in Alabama goes beyond the usual warnings about minding the margin of error, however. There’s a massive spread in results from poll to poll — with surveys on Monday morning showing everything from a 9-point lead for Moore to a 10-point advantage for Democrat Doug Jones — and they reflect two highly different approaches to polling.
Most polls of the state have been made using automated scripts (these are sometimes also called IVR or “robopolls”). These polls have generally shown Moore ahead and closing strongly toward the end of the campaign, such as the Emerson College poll on Monday that showed Moore leading by 9 points. Recent automated polls from Trafalgar Group, JMC Analytics and Polling, Gravis Marketing and Strategy Research have also shown Moore with the lead.
But when traditional, live-caller polls have weighed in — although these polls have been few and far between — they’ve shown a much different result. A Monmouth University survey released on Monday showed a tied race. Fox News’s final poll of the race, also released on Monday, showed Jones ahead by 10 percentage points. An earlier Fox News survey also had Jones comfortably ahead, while a Washington Post poll from late November had Jones up 3 points at a time when most other polls showed the race swinging back to Moore. And a poll conducted for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in mid-November — possibly released to the public in an effort to get Moore to withdraw from the race — also showed Jones well ahead.1
These differences are significant, according to Silver, because automated polls cannot call cell phones and may have less representative samples because so many people just hang up on them.
Last night a heartbroken Alabama father spoke outside Roy Moore’s final rally before the election. The Washington Post reports:
Perhaps it was the man’s strong but plain-spoken rebuke outside a Roy Moore rally on the campaign’s final night, condemning the Republican candidate’s past comments lambasting homosexuality.
Perhaps it was the admission of the man, a peanut farmer, that he too, had harbored some of the same anti-gay feelings.
Perhaps it was his sign, a photograph of his daughter, a lesbian who, he said, had killed herself when she was 23.
Whatever it was, the two-minute video of Nathan Mathis struck a nerve, traveling far and wide as a sort of emotional coda to a wrenching U.S. Senate race in Alabama that has captivated the country.
And here’s an energized Doug Jones voter speaking this morning:
Interesting tweets this morning from former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce Alene:
Here’s the link Alene responded to:
A couple of weird things happened during Moore’s closing argument.
New York Magazine: Roy Moore’s Wife: We’re Not Anti-Semitic, ‘One of Our Attorneys Is a Jew’
Roy Moore’s stance on Jewish people probably isn’t at the top of anyone’s list of reasons not to vote for the Alabama Senate candidate. Yet on the eve of Tuesday’s election, his wife, Kayla Moore, attempted to shoot down one of the lesser-known allegations against her husband.
“Fake news would tell you that we don’t care for Jews,” Kayla Moore said Monday night while introducing her husband at a rally in Midland City, Alabama.
“I tell you all this because I’ve seen it all, so I just want to set the record straight while they’re here,” she said, gesturing to members of the media.
“One of our attorneys is a Jew,” she continued, pausing for cheers and laughter from the crowd.
“We have very close friends that are Jewish, and rabbis, we also do fellowship with them.”
Um . . . okay . . .
Another speaker “joked” about how he and Roy Moore “accidentally” ended up in a brothel full of underage girls in Vietnam. Think Progress:
One of the introductory speakers was Bill Staehle, who said he served with Moore in Vietnam. Staehle told the story of a night he spent with Moore and a third man, who he did not name. According to Staehle, it was the third man’s last night in Vietnam and the man invited them to a “private club” in the city to celebrate with “a couple of beers.”
Moore and Staehle agreed. According to Staehle, they didn’t expect there was anything untoward going on at the “private club” because “there were legitimate private clubs” in Vietnam. The third man drove them to the club in his Jeep.
Staehle said that, when he and Moore arrived, they soon realized the man had taken them to a brothel. The third man, Staehle suggested, essentially tricked them. “I could tell you what I saw but I don’t want to,” Staehle said mischievously.
“There were certainly pretty girls. And they were girls. They were young. Some were very young,” Staehle acknowledged. But according to Staehle, Moore was shocked by what he saw. “We shouldn’t be here, I’m leaving,” Moore said, according to Staehle.
They asked the third man to leave with them but he didn’t want to. So Staehle and Moore took his Jeep and left him there all night with sex workers, who they agreed were underage. The man returned to base the next morning on the back of a motorcycle, Staehle said with a grin.
Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan must be so proud.
Meanwhile, back in Washington DC, the “president’s” men are plotting against Robert Mueller.
Mike Allen at Axios: Trump lawyers want second special counsel appointed now.
President Trump’s legal team believes Attorney General Jeff Session’s Justice Department and the FBI — more than special counsel Robert Mueller himself — are to blame for what they see as a witch hunt.
The result: They want an additional special counsel named to investigate the investigators.
More at the link.
At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky asks: Will the Senate Still Protect Robert Mueller From Donald Trump’s Ax?
Remember the first round of gossip about whether President Trump would fire special prosecutor Robert Mueller, back during the summer? Republican senators were quick to say what a grave error this would be. Susan Collins said in June it would be “an extraordinarily unwise move” back. In July, Lindsey Graham said that “any effort to go after Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency unless Mueller did something wrong.”
Most of them chimed in along similar lines. Consequently we were all assured: Yes, maybe they’ve been in the tank for Trump up to now, but surely they would never tolerate that. That is the moment when they’d say enough.
Well. We may find out about that very soon.
People keep saying “we’re close to a crisis.” No we’re not. We’re in it. We have a president who already obstructed justice on national television…..
A former national security adviser copped a felony plea. Three former campaign officials are under indictment. This has never happened in the first year of a modern presidency. Probably any presidency. And that’s just the legal stuff. Then there are all the lies. Obama spied on Trump (this one still has legs among the creatures of the black-ops lagoons of the far right). Trump has no Russia ties. Hillary sold our plutonium to Putin.
And finally, there’s the madness, which is slightly different from lies. The current madness is that Russia is great and can do no wrong, while the FBI is suddenly a subversive and un-American organization. And Robert Mueller is a partisan, pro-Clinton, Never-Trump pawn of the liberal order….
We have never been here. Richard Nixon and his henchmen subverted the law. They did not attempt to subvert reality itself. Nixon did not go around saying that in fact it was George McGovern who belonged in prison. A news network did not exist to scream on a daily basis that McGovern should face indictment, peddling false “scandals” about him. In the summer and fall of 1973, before Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, influential congressional Republicans and prominent former congressional Republicans did not go around saying that there wasn’t one honest investigator on Cox’s staff or that Cox was corrupt.
Please read the rest at the link.
That’s all I have for you today. What stories are you following?
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Yeah, give me an amen.
Amazing. Just when you think he can’t get much lower, Trump manages to pull another one out of his fat ass.
This is the POTUS suggesting that a female senator offered to commit a sexual act with him for money and endorsement.
Appalling. Where is the GOP leadership? Or any other congress person for that matter.
What a disgusting human being. Words fail.
Jokes about “Jew” attorneys, trafficked children, and back in the good old days before women could vote and when African Americans were slaves would drive me to the polls, that’s for sure! Mueller hopefully has a holiday delivery for the Kushners and Junior!! Lock them up!!!!!
Putin receives daily briefs on Trump’s tweets………..and while all the noise is going on, he signed a defense policy to make the military PERFECTO. And they are trying to finalize the tax bill at the end of this day!
Great reporting! And let’s not forget basketball legend Charles Barkley on the stump last night, pleading with his fellow Alabamians to vote for Doug Jones! I don’t recall Barkley being political before.
Yeah, he is from Alabama and went to Auburn University. I thought that he also lived in New Orleans.
Half of Americans are paying attention.
Al Capone Corrupt…all of them fancy ruling from Washington DC.
Another story on the danger Trump feels from Mueller’s investigation.
Well we can’t expect Xtian evangelicals to conduct an honest election can we? That would be ridiculous. We sure don’t in Georgia.
Have friends calling into the Auburn area and they say they’re getting a lot of Jones voters and a very few Moore … every republicans but that’s east and it’s a university area
The greatest setback seems to be the voter ID laws, that they think are fully balanced.
Damn, changed to Moore leading.
From WaPo:
VOTE %
Moore (R) 211,542 51.8%
Jones (D) 191,571 46.9%
Total Write-Ins 5,405 1.3%
38.6% reporting
Lots of reports of voter suppression: cops at the polls checking voters for outstanding warrants, active voters finding they’re on inactive status, cops stopping people for traffic violations and making them late to the polls, and similar.
Tightening again
Looking really good right now given what’s out
We busted on through tRump’s base.
WaPo
VOTE %
Moore (R) 522,226 49.6%
Jones (D) 515,187 48.9%
Total Write-Ins 16,422 1.6%
85.5% reporting
Damn those write-ins. If they don’t want Moore, then vote for his opponent, otherwise they’ll get Moore anyway.
Jones just took the lead!!!!
MSNBC still won’t call it…but I think it is still good.
McConnell puts blame on Bannon.
Says Bannon is the one who brought tRump and Moore with him. Ha.
You don’t think that because Moore is a sexual predator could have anything to do with it?
I am so excited, Doug Jones, and the Democrats pulled it off. Now Arizona and Nevada is in play 2018.
Joe Ashol, wants to run in Arizona………….This is for you Pat! Good chance we are going to be winning in 2018. Trump will be campaigning 5 days a week in Arizona. When he loses, he can kiss the supreme court goodbye.
WoooHoooo!
I stayed away for a while, fearing that it would be another Nov 2016 in lesser degree. But look! Sweet Goddess almighty, thank You!
Unf***kingbelievable!!! First Virginia, now Alabama!!!
Right on.
That medium “critique” was…I need to bleach my eyes. If it wasn’t for the comments after I don’t know what…
But, that is the fucking mindset that is taking over the DNC!
Holy shit!
Key actions for the win:
Most of that article focuses on the numerous stories of Moore’s sexual assaults and predatory behavior with underage girls. Not until the last few paragraphs is there a discussion of the black voters who carried the lion’s share of the voting power which made this a win.
I’m glad that predatory men get more scrutiny now, but considering the number of white men (and women) who voted for Moore, the black vote was crucial. The Dem party base is POC, and especially women of color, in the red states, and the DNC better keep that in mind.
Stunned.
I’m so accustomed to seeing my favored candidate lose it’s hard to know how to feel!
The GOP has awakened a sleeping tiger – it’s fangs are POC and it’s claws are millennials. Jones captured the university towns too.
I like your metaphor very much.