Election Results more of a Relief than anything…Had the Dems not won the House, America faced a potential catastrophe!!! There’d be no check on Trump, he’d feel emboldened to wipe out the Mueller probe to hide his criminality, & his devious scheme bent on establishing an authoritarian dictatorship might have been realized! God Bless America with those election results, as the Dems will win around a +40 on House seats to take the majority!!! We have a fighting chance to rein in the prez & expose his crimes!
To prove how immorally corrupt the GOP still is, consider the buffoons who did win their races. The election results resulted in wins for a NY rep charged with securities fraud and lying to the FBI (Collins), a CA rep charged with illegal misuse of campaign funds (Hunter), a MT rep who was guilty of assaulting a reporter (Gianforte), & in a landslide win there was elected a rep to a Nevada state office who’s a dead brothel owner (Hof). Also winning seats were some of the biggest knuckleheads ever elected to American political office, names like Cruz, Blackburn, Nunes, S. King, Jordan, Gaetz, Gosar, Gohmert, Yoho, Meadows & a few others, plus the likelihood of DeSantis as Fl. governor (dishonesty, racism & immorality may win out in both the Fl & Ga gov races).
All’s not totally lost as we can take heart the likes of Kobach, Brat & Rohrabacher lost. Unfortunately, many of the GOP reps defeated in the House were the more rational moderate ones from purple states, whereas the deep-red states reelected their extremist radicals who are professed Trumpian puppets. So the hollowing out of center-right conservatives from the party rolls on unabated. But on the Dem side, many of the most far-left progressives lost their races, which sets up a strange dynamic that was once unthinkable, us center-right conservatives are now far more ideologically aligned with the Dem party than the newly radicalized far-right GOP. There’s also a huge hole in the middle should any independent party or candidate somehow manage to catch on.
Let’s Identify the Causes & Find Real Solutions for the Forgotten Working Class
And here’s an excellent place to start! In the conclusion posted below from midterms-working-class-labor, it offers logical reasons why the system has been rigged against workers for decades, while many of the right answers might be found in a good book. These are the types of ideas we should implore our political leadership to work across the aisle & have civil discussions how bipartisan solutions can evolve from these thoughts, but unfortunately it’s very hard to work on behalf of the American people when all they do is fight each other. Excellent stuff is seen here:
Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it. The crucial question is whether America’s leaders will listen and respond. One way to start doing that is to read Oren Cass’s absolutely brilliant new book, “The Once and Future Worker.” The first part of the book is about how we in the educated class have screwed up labor markets in ways that devalued work and made it harder for people in the working class to find a satisfying job. Part of the problem is misplaced priorities. For the last several decades, American economic policy has been pinioned on one goal: expanding G.D.P. We measure G.D.P. We talk incessantly about economic growth. Between 1975 and 2015, American G.D.P. increased threefold. But what good is that growth if it means that a thick slice of America is discarded for efficiency reasons?
Similarly, for the last several decades American, welfare policy has focused on consumption — giving money to the poor so they can consume more. Yet we have not successfully helped poor people produce more so that they can take control of their own lives. We now spend more than $20,000 a year in means-tested government spending per person in poverty. And yet the average poverty rate for 2000 to 2015 was higher than it was for 1970 to 1985. “What if people’s ability to produce matters more than how much they can consume?” Cass asks. The bulk of his book is a series of ideas for how we can reform labor markets. For example, Cass supports academic tracking. Right now, we have a one-size-fits-all education system. Everybody should go to college. The problem is that roughly one-fifth of our students fail to graduate high school in four years; roughly one-fifth take no further schooling after high school; roughly one-fifth drop out of college; roughly one-fifth get a job that doesn’t require the degree they just earned; and roughly one-fifth actually navigate the path the system is built around — from school to career. We build a broken system and then ask people to try to fit into the system instead of tailoring a system around people’s actual needs.
Cass suggests that we instead do what nearly every other affluent nation does: Let students, starting in high school, decide whether they want to be on an apprenticeship track or an academic track. Vocational and technical schools are ubiquitous across the developed world, and yet that model is mostly rejected here. Cass also supports worker co-ops. Today, we have an old, adversarial labor union model that is inappropriate for the gig economy and uninteresting to most private-sector workers. But co-ops, drawing on more successful models used in several European nations, could represent workers in negotiations, train and retrain workers as they moved from firm to firm and build a safety net for periods of unemployment. Shopping for a worker co-op would be more like buying a gym membership. Each co-op would be a community and service provider to address a range of each worker’s needs. Cass has many other proposals — wage subsidies, immigration reforms. But he’s really trying to put work, and the dignity of work, at the center of our culture and concern. In the 1970s and 1980s, he points out, the Emmy Award-winning TV shows were about blue-collar families: “All in the Family,” “Taxi,” “Cheers,” “The Wonder Years.” Now the Emmy-winning shows are mostly about white-collar adults working in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, New York and Washington. We in the college-educated sliver have built a culture, an economy and a political system that are all about ourselves. It’s time to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody.
Can the Dems start delivering?
With the Dems at least gaining control in the House from the election results, can they initiate policies that could truly help the middle class/working class who’ve been steadily falling behind for far too long? If they can really articulate good ideas without breaking the bank (which the GOP has already done with their tax cuts), they could broaden their base & position themselves well for the 2020 presidential campaigns. Please read these excerpts from dear-democrats-dont-be-worthless-corporate-stooges-too, where the pendulum has swung wildly against workers & in favor of corporations, so we need competent governing leadership to help swing it back to the middle & help restore our middle class:
Congratulations fellow Democrats on the midterm elections. We took back the U.S. House. We put Democrats in governor’s mansions in seven more states, including: Maine, Wisconsin and Kansas. We flipped hundreds of state legislative seats nationwide, and at least six legislative bodies. But if we want to build on these victories into 2020 and beyond; if we want to save our republic from the anti-democratic assaults of the Trump administration; then we must do more than just build fleeting electoral majorities. We need to use them. It is only by unambiguously improving the lives of the majority of Americans that the Democrats can become the majority party America desperately needs.
Rising economic inequality is shredding the political norms and social cohesion on which a healthy democracy depends. That is why our country will not get better until our people feel better; and they will not feel better until they do better. And the American people will not do better until they are actually paid more. How much more? $2 trillion a year. Seriously. Over the past 40 years under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, the collapse in real wage growth has been astounding. From 1935 until 1973 — an era in which hourly compensation grew in near lockstep with net productivity — the real income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose an average of 4.2 percent a year. This was substantially faster than incomes of the top 1 percent. But since 1973, the bottom 90 percent have actually seen their real incomes decline, while the top 1 percent have seen their incomes soar.
In fact, over the past four decades, large corporations and their wealthy shareholders have captured nearly all of the benefits of economic growth. After-tax corporate profits have doubled from about 5 percent of GDP to about 10 percent, while wages as a share of GDP have fallen by about the same amount. Meanwhile, the wealthiest 1 percent’s share of personal income has nearly tripled, from about 8 percent in the 1970s, to about 22 percent today. Taken together, these two trends amount to a shift of more than $2 trillion a year from middle-class paychecks to the bank accounts of corporations and the super-rich. Today, the median American family earns about $59,000 a year. Had inequality held constant since 1980, that figure would be $86,000. Had middle-class incomes continued to grow with productivity, the median American family would be earning over $100,000 a year. This is the inconvenient economic truth that is tearing our country apart. America owes the median family a raise of somewhere between $25,000 and $40,000, per year. And only by enacting policies that right this wrong can Democrats build a democratic majority.
What would a majority Democratic agenda look like? A $15 minimum wage, a $70,000 overtime threshold, crucial infrastructure investments, modernized labor laws, paid family leave, affordable housing, health care, childcare and public college. And when you’re asked how you’re going to pay for all these things, grab a page from the Republican playbook: “They’ll pay for themselves.” (Though in this case, by growing the middle class, they actually will). All of these policies share two core features in common: they are both broadly beneficial and broadly popular. Yesterday, in Missouri and in Arkansas, Democrats and Republicans, alike, approved ballot measures to raise their state minimum wage. These next two years are crucial. If Democrats put the American people back at the center of the American economy, voters will reward us at the polls. But if we merely prove to be kinder, gentler corporate stooges — if we allow the nascent Trump loyalist autocracy to take hold — we may not get a second chance.
Dems must Appeal to Workers!
On that same theme where workers have been getting shafted & political leadership needs to step it up, here are excerpts coming from with-house-control-dems-must-now-fight-for-the-middle-class, showing the Dems have a chance to become heroes to the working class, with health care being an issue taking center stage:
Tuesday’s election results raise all sorts of questions, but in the long-run, one of the most important is what economic issues will be emphasized by the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Three issues stand out: taking further steps on health reform, getting high-income households and corporations to pay more taxes and undertaking an all-out assault on the policies that have suppressed wages for most American workers in recent decades.
Further steps on health reform rises to the top tier for some obvious reasons. Health-care costs remain a steady drag on the wages and living standards of American households. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a huge step forward in improving access to uninsured households, but it left lots to do in regards to containing growth in health costs. It’s well-known by now how much better other countries with larger public health insurance programs do when it comes to cost-containment; this recognition lies behind enthusiasm for “single-payer” or “Medicare for all” plans. Even if full-on single-payer can’t be obtained in the short-run, many of its cost-containment virtues can be imported into the current health system piecemeal. For example, a number of different policies could be passed to restrain the power of pharmaceutical companies to gouge American consumers.
The voting public’s enthusiasm for further health reform is striking. In a circus election characterized by dozens of attention-grabbing sideshows, the desire for further health reform stubbornly stayed at the top of voters’ concerns in polling. Policymakers should not ignore this. Paying for more ambitious health reform would require revenue. Given that huge increase in income inequality in recent decades, the natural place to look for the first tranche of revenue is at the top of the income distribution. Of course, the tax cut passed at the end of 2017 went in precisely the wrong direction — starving the federal government of revenue to disproportionately boost the incomes of these rich households. Recent signals from the Hill are disappointing in how timid too many Democrats seem to be about rolling back the worst parts of the 2017 tax bill. This timidity should give way to a full-throated call to raise top tax rates, close loopholes and (crucially) radically improve tax enforcement to raise revenue for needed public investments and expansions to safety net programs.
Finally, the crisis in American pay needs to be addressed by policymakers. The bottom 80 percent of American workers have seen anemic-at-best wage gains for decades. This is not a sad outcome of apolitical market forces; instead it is the outcome of a sustained policy assault on these workers’ leverage and bargaining power in the labor market. The common root uniting these calls for fundamental health reform, more progressive taxation and stopping wage suppression is that all require confronting the prerogatives of the wealthy and corporations. This makes them a heavy lift, and too many would argue this means that they’re bad politics for any party looking to maintain a majority. This seems like the politics of defeatism to me. More importantly, whether they’re good short-run politics or not, they’re what American families need for genuine economic security.
Looking for Big Ideas!
We all know who really benefits from this economy: cbo-incomes-grew-three-times-faster-for-top-earners. This crony-capitalist war on workers & autocratic rule has spread to become an international problem, which such big challenges require big solutions, seen in excerpts from inequality-has-reached-morally-indefensible-heights-but-we-can-still-turn:
Political dysfunction, violence, floods, droughts, hurricanes and opioid addictions. The news headlines are depressing and the problems seem overwhelming. From Russia to America; India to Turkey; Italy and most recently from Poland to Brazil — growing numbers of people have voted for authoritarians — presumably as a way to return to a simpler and better past. Meanwhile, the challenges and threats keep mounting. Inequality has reached morally indefensible heights, power concentrates in ever fewer corporate hands. Busy speeding up a runaway train, we see our dominant gauges of success continue to point in a positive direction. Unemployment is down, GDP is up. The stock market keeps hitting record territory. In service of growth, the economy and with it politics, no longer adequately reflect our realities.
The deeper reality is this: Today, in an overpopulated world choking on stuff, a focus on more has become both absurd and dangerous. Three recent international studies all came to the same conclusion: We have reached very real limits to growth. Our train needs a new track. One focused on a greater vision of human and ecological wellbeing, one leading to real human prosperity anchored in environmental health and sustainability. An emphasis on what is actually good for us — more connection, more opportunities, less inequality. Above all: a healthy environment and stable communities. There is little difference between Democrats and Republicans, but neither can answer a simple question: How to grow indefinitely on a finite planet? Neither can answer why growth would even be desirable, when its drawbacks range from resource depletion to pollution, from accidents to addictions, from more miles commuted to more hours worked?
No we must grow, as economists and politicians keep telling us. Trust the market. Trust science and technology. Trust something, just so long as you don’t question growth. As more aspects of our lives turn into contributions to the growth mantra, our focus on quality of life — on community, on meaningful work, on family and love, on a natural world that can nurture our children — inevitably shrivels. The good thing: There is a growing number of people whom are building companies that don’t depend on fossil fuels, cities that serve people rather than cars, communities that don’t generate poverty or homelessness, health-care systems that don’t leave anyone behind, regions that provide security and jobs for everyone. On the frontiers, we’re learning how to create prosperity without waste — waste of resources, people, potentials.
Rubin says Please Move to the Center
As the Dems push for their new agenda, I contend many on the progressive left have taken it way too far: democratic-socialists-america-we-deserve-share-wealth. So if they could only have enough self-discipline to occupy that enormous gap in the middle, they could soon gain power in the White House & Senate, becoming free to set their own agenda. But as I keep warning no matter which party takes power, if we can’t find an effective way to fix modern-day capitalism for the working class, voters seem on the verge of soon trying socialism. Rubin offers suggestions the Dems should adopt more moderate positions heading towards 2020, since evidence from this week’s election results indicate that’s what worked to win, seen in what-do-the-midterms-say-about-2020 & also three-cheers-for-the-moderates & also these excerpts found inside heres-what-did-and-didnt-work-for-democrats:
Democrats lost to President Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio in 2016. Tuesday, they were delighted to see that the 2016 losses might have been an aberration. Consider that Democrats held on to all four of the Senate seats, flipped the governorship in Wisconsin and Michigan, and held the governorship in Pennsylvania. The only loss was the Ohio governorship. Democrats in these states ran on health care, education and other bread-and-butter issues. They didn’t have to adopt Trump’s anti-immigrant claptrap, nor did they change their views on social issues. In other words, they had a clear message, appealed to a wide audience and were able to put together an electoral majority of college-educated whites, younger voters, women and nonwhites — President Barack Obama’s winning coalition. Perhaps the problem wasn’t the Democratic message of economic opportunity and fighting for the little guy but a presidential candidate in 2016 who just didn’t connect with voters and a campaign that dropped the ball. Lesson: You can keep the message, not give in to xenophobia, and still win in the Rust Belt and upper Midwest with a down-to-earth candidate.
As for the House, here again moderates did extremely well. Third Way, which promotes centrist Democrats, put out an election eve memo on House candidates, which laid out the results of an election eve poll that “asked Democrats and Independents to think about the Democratic candidate in their district and asked if they would have preferred a more liberal, moderate, or conservative option.” The survey found: “A plurality (37%) would not have preferred anyone different. Thirty-five percent would have preferred a more moderate (21%) or conservative option (14%). Just 16% said they would have preferred a more liberal candidate.” Third Way also makes an interesting point: Although some national Democrats rushed to join Sanders in support of single-payer health care, only one Democrat in a competitive House race actually campaigned on it. The “moderate Republican” is essentially extinct. Democrats will need to beat a fully Trumpized GOP to complete their quest to repair our democracy and oust a dangerous, divisive president.
The Right Reich Ideas
Here are more excellent suggestions on the direction of Dems as seen in this article posted from robert-reich-america-has-rejected-trumpism-opinion, although Reich differs on our suggestion the Dems should occupy the middle:
No one seriously expected the Senate to flip, because Democrats had to defend 26 seats in that chamber, compared with only nine held by Republicans. The real battleground was the House, where Democrats had to achieve a net gain of 23 seats to get the 218 needed for a majority. They did. Trump wasn’t on the ballot but he made the election into a referendum on himself. So Americans turned against House Republicans who should have acted as a check on him but did nothing—in many cases magnifying his vileness. The nation has repudiated Trump, but do not believe for a moment that our national nightmare is over. He still occupies the White House and in all likelihood will be there for two more years.
The Republican Party remains in control of the Senate. Fox News is still Trump’s propaganda ministry. (The line between Fox and Trump, already blurred, vanished completely at his last pre-election rally when Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro joined him on stage.) The American people will be subject to more of Trump’s lies and hate, as amplified by Senate Republicans and Fox News. Trump can be expected to scapegoat House Democrats for anything that goes wrong. American politics will almost certainly become even meaner, coarser, and uglier. We will remain deeply and angrily divided. Most worrisome, America still won’t respond to real threats that continue to grow, which Trump and his enablers have worsened—climate change; the suppression of votes, and foreign intrusions into our elections; the most expensive and least effective healthcare system in the world; and, not least, widening inequalities of income, wealth, and political power.
America will eventually overcome and reverse Trumpism. The harder challenge will be to reverse the reasons Trump and his Republican lapdogs gained power in the first place. Some blame racism and nativism. But these toxins have poisoned America since the founding of the Republic. What’s new has been the interaction between them and the long economic slide of tens of millions of working Americans, most of them white and lacking college degrees. They used to be the bedrock of the Democratic Party, many of them members of trade unions whose strength in numbers gave them an increasing share of the gains from economic growth. Their long economic slide has generated the kind of frustrations that demagogues throughout history have twisted into rage at “them.”
Meanwhile, most economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent, whose wealth is now greater than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent—giving them enough political muscle to demand and get tax cuts, Wall Street bailouts, corporate subsidies, and regulatory rollbacks. These in turn have created even more wealth at the top. All were trends before Trump. Yet Democrats failed to reverse them, even though Democrats occupied the White House most of these years (and during four of them controlled both houses of Congress.) Trump has worsened them by slashing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, whittling back the Affordable Care Act, and loosening restrictions on Wall Street.
Jobs may be back but they pay squat, especially compared with the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education. And they’re less secure than ever. One in five is now held by a worker under contract without any unemployment insurance, sick leave, or retirement savings.
Which presumably is why Trump decided to focus the midterms on hate and fear rather than the economy. He thereby created a large opening for Democrats aiming for 2020. They can become the party of the bottom 90 percent by creating a multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition to wrest back control of our economy and democracy. They would focus on two big things: First, raise the purchasing power of the bottom 90 percent through stronger unions, a larger wage subsidy (starting with a bigger Earned Income Tax Credit,) and Medicare for All. Second, get big money out of politics through public financing of elections, full disclosure of all sources of political funding, an end to the revolving door between business and government. Democrats shouldn’t try moving to the “center.” The center no longer exists because most Americans are no longer on the traditional “right” or “left.” The vast majority of Americans are now anti-establishment, and understandably so. The practical choice is either Trump’s authoritarian populism backed by the moneyed interests, or a new democratic populism backed by the rest of us. The direction couldn’t be clearer. It is the Democrat’s hour.
Huge Mind-Boggling Debt
Reading these figures in the next link, it becomes almost incomprehensible to wrap our minds around the true size of our debt bubble. I do credit the GOP for at least having the nerve to bring up entitlement reform, not that they have the political capital to do anything about it. Click here democrats-fight-fiscal-gap-reforms to read about our unfathomable $200 trillion fiscal gap, a number so large the human mind can barely grasp the reality of it! Things are also really getting out of hand with the annual deficits, helped along by the reduced government revenues from those tax cuts, as seen in this article posted from us-records-98-billion-deficit-in-october-cbo. It’s become clear from these excerpts the big-spending Dems are now in some ways actually more fiscally responsible than the GOP:
The federal deficit increased $35 billion in October compared to the same month last year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Wednesday. The U.S. spent $98 billion more than it took in during October, the first month of the 2019 fiscal year, according to the latest CBO report. The spike in the deficit was fueled by the Republican tax law, which substantially cut revenues without offsetting them. It was also inflated by a bipartisan agreement to increase discretionary spending. Top administration officials have repeatedly claimed that strong economic growth would produce a surge of revenue to bring down the deficit, even as the White House’s own projections put the 2019 deficit at more than $1 trillion. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who is likely to become the next Speaker after Democrats regained a majority in the House in Tuesday’s elections, has said she would reintroduce pay-as-you-go rules to keep deficits down. Conservative advocacy groups have called on Republicans to pass mandatory spending cuts in the lame duck session, before the new Congress is sworn in early next year.
Let’s Hope this Dream comes True!
Gerrymandering has been toxic to the political process, fueling extremism, polarization & gridlock in the House. As seen in this opening to gerrymandering-results-democrats-midterm-election, we may (hopefully) be on our way to fixing those abuses:
The biggest story of Tuesday’s election is that Democrats overcame Republican gerrymanders intended to lock them out of power in the House of Representatives. In the long run, however, an even bigger story may be that gerrymandering itself suffered a significant loss last night. Michigan, one of the most gerrymandered states in the Union, overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment which provides that future legislative maps will be drawn by an independent commission. At the peak of its effectiveness, in 2012, Michigan’s gerrymander allowed Republicans to win 9 of the state’s 14 U.S. House seats, despite the fact that President Obama won the state by over 9 points that year.
This victory for democracy is part of a larger pattern. Ohio approved a ballot measure last May which creates a Rube Goldberg-like series of obstacles to lawmakers seeking to gerrymander that state. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court struck down that state’s gerrymandered maps last January — allowing Democrats to gain three seats in that state yesterday. And one more large state will likely see its gerrymanders fall shortly. North Carolina’s legislative maps are so aggressively gerrymandered that, even though the state frequently has competitive statewide elections, Republicans currently hold veto-proof majorities in both houses of the state’s legislature. They lost those supermajorities in the incoming state house, but will still dominate both houses. After yesterday’s election, however, Democrats will control a 5-2 majorityon the North Carolina Supreme Court. That means that they can bring Pennsylvania-style gerrymandering reform to that state. Of course, this is only four states in a nation with 50 — but Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina are all large states, and that means that their gerrymanders had significant implications for the U.S. House.
Election Results mostly positive as Winning the House was key!
A problem I’ve always had with the media is the way they report the news from election campaigns more like a horse race, when there should be a lot more drilling down on the issues. But it’s always about ratings & what grabs the most interest from the audience. And watching the election results was an agonizing roller-coaster ride, especially knowing how critically important it was for American democracy that the Dems took the House. One hour after the polls closed in the Eastern Time Zone, it was very deflating when it looked like the anticipated blue wave might be shattered enough for the GOP to hold the House. But an hour later the momentum turned blue & it became obvious the Dems would flip enough House seats to win the majority. In the end this midterm was the biggest pickup for the Dems in the House since (ironically) the Watergate era! Of course, Trump claimed the election was “very close to complete victory” for him, always lying to try spinning his views to the positive. For more on the TV coverage for election night, click on tv-news-learned-nothing-from-2016-sports-style-election-coverage-remains-terrible-and-short-sighted, where this ending to the article concludes a big message coming from the election results is the nation is more divided than ever!:
In 2016, the emergent flaw in breaking political coverage strategy was that a distracted media focused on the antics of a reality show star plying an entertainer’s tactics. This may have gained them viewers in the short term, but it also drew attention away from issues of high importance, transforming the political debate from a consideration of substance and issues into a contest of which side peddled the better illusion. The tenor of Tuesday night’s coverage proves that the illusion still holds. “What you want to call a wave, what you want to call a red wall on the Senate side — a lot of that is just semantics and political spin,” said CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “The reality of it is the picture of this country and its electorate is pretty clear. We have divergent groups, and they are moving farther apart. That’s pretty much the headline, not to be cynical. It’s just the reality.” Continuing to emphasize that headline over the tale of the incoming tide is preventing viewers from appreciating its possibility and significance.
Search for these election results op-eds
Here are lots of articles about our election results, with the details & lessons we can draw from them. So as to not exceed our blog’s limit on outbound links, you can do a copy & paste of the news source & title to search for any of these articles you’d like to read. My comments are just above the article titles:
More indications of our huge wide divides:
msn/election-results-red-states-get-redder-blue-districts-bluer-the-partisan-divide-deeper
House Dems will have subpoena power, which could prove a vital tool to finding out what evidence Mueller has & what crimes were committed:
thedailybeast/house-intel-democrats-new-mission-protect-mueller-use-subpoena-power
GOP candidates in competitive purple states/suburban districts had to run from Trump, or else they’d lose by bigger margins:
thehill/retiring-gop-rep-trump-claim-republicans-would-have-won-if-they
Not just Trump’s unhinged derangement, but his incompetence helped swing voters to Dems:
thehill/dem-strategist-says-trumps-incompetence-has-been-a-lift-for-the-party
No doubt Trump is single-handedly enlarging the Dem base:
thehill/make-no-mistake-democrats-are-rising
Democracy has a pulse:
nytimes/midterms-trump
Immorality abounds with Trump pundits & supporters:
usatoday/election-did-not-repudiate-trump-he-has-normalized-immorality
GOP loses big in the suburbs:
usatoday/midterms-suburbs-republicans-democrats-trump
Nearly 40 pickups in the House was indeed a wave:
washingtonpost/yes-mr-president-tuesday-was-blue-wave
Yep, it was a spanking:
washingtonpost/three-days-later-hey-republicans-really-did-get-clobbered
Can’t just rely on a narrow base:
washingtonpost/the-real-real-america
The sugar-high wearing off & higher deficits from the tax cuts will actually suppress growth:
washingtonpost/midterms-economy-slower-growth-ahead
Thank God the Dems took the House, a victory for Democrats & Democracy!:
washingtonpost/a-great-day-for-democracy
Election results may start a positive trend:
washingtonpost/how-trump-lost-the-midterms
But rocky times are surely ahead for awhile:
washingtonpost/morning-bits-its-going-to-get-worse-before-it-gets-better
Here comes the expected & ridiculous claims of election fraud:
washingtonpost/trumps-authoritarian-response-to-florida-shenanigans-hints-at-worse-to-come
Even citing Fusion GPS…huh? The conspiracies never end:
washingtonpost/trump-ties-his-unfounded-allegations-voter-fraud-florida-his-russia-conspiracy-theory
Trump’s unhinged statements & threats since election results:
washingtonpost/nice-democracy-youve-got-there
Trump’s toxicity won the day for Dems:
washingtonpost/democrats-take-the-house-as-voters-give-trump-a-big-thumbs-down
I’m in support of moderate Dems until the GOP can return from the abyss:
washingtonpost/dont-let-progressives-fool-you-moderate-democrats-can-win
Trump campaign was a trail of destruction:
washingtonpost/trump-is-leaving-a-trail-of-ruin-behind-him
Trump’s claim of total victory was poppycock:
washingtonpost/morning-bits-trumps-victory-looks-an-awful-lot-like-a-loss
Women saved the day:
salon/women-are-just-deserting-the-republican-party-cnn-analyst-argues-trump-has-gone-too-far
Wide divide in many ways:
salon/this-election-is-exactly-who-we-are-divided-by-race-geography-and-gender
Big problems with GOP agenda:
slate/trump-house-midterms-exit-poll-takeaways
The Cult is Powerful:
theatlantic/democrats-have-long-way-go-defeat-trump
This represents my vote:
motherjones/tuesdays-big-story-moderates-switched-from-the-republican-party-to-the-democratic-party
15 Reasons:
motherjones/reasons-why-democrats-crushed-republicans-this-week
It was a yuge turnout! (largely anti-Trump):
apnews/trump-triggers-massive-midterm-turnout
The wide divide & who keeps stoking that:
apnews/trump-is-the-fault-line-of-widening-divide:
House Dems want to see tax returns:
yahoo/trump-says-wont-turn-over-tax-returns-not-up-to-him
Yes, Trump lost big on Tuesday:
yahoo/dont-let-your-expectations-fool-you-midterms-huge-defeat-for-trump
Trump clings to his alternate reality after election:
mediamatters/after-midterms-trump-leans-hard-his-alternate-reality
The American Dictator:
dailykos/-Wannabe-Dictator-Trump-Warns-Fellow-Republicans-to-SAY-GOODBYE-If-They-Don-t-Embrace-Him
The Situation is URGENT!!!
Our president is trying to take over all the levers of power in our democracy. Installing a stooge at the head of the Justice Dept. could shut down or severely hamper the Russia investigation, helping bury whatever serious crimes (possibly even treason) were committed with Russia during the presidential campaign. This comes on the heels of Trump’s relentless attempts to take over the courts, security/intelligence agencies, most of Congress, plus discrediting the media so his state-run echo anchored by Fox News can keep deceiving the millions in his Trumpeter base. He’s also come unhinged in viciously attacking any hint of opposition or disagreement, commanding total loyalty even to the point of wanting to be worshiped.
We either stop this madness now or else America could be in decline to the point we’ll never recover! The precedent is being set for rule through chronic dishonesty, bullying force & total subservience, much like a cult! As president he’s our worst nightmare, so we’re in a critical fight to protect our longstanding democracy! The most impending battle is stopping Whitaker from crippling the probe, so the American people can find out all the facts Mueller is putting together on the Russian scandal. This song shouts out it’s an urgent emergency!:
You play tricks on my mind
You’re everywhere but you’re so hard to find
You’re not warm or sentimental
You’re so extreme, you can be so temperamental
Urgent, urgent, emergency
Urgent, urgent, emergency
Urgent, urgent, emergency
Urgent, urgent, emergency
So urgent, emergency!!!
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