Dem
51
Ties
4
GOP
45
It's been a while since we've done one of these. We really will need to do at least a couple this week to catch up. We have over 100 links that probably don't merit an entire item, but do at least merit a mention.
Gallup-ing Donkeys: The newest poll from Gallup is quite a doozy, and may help explain why Donald Trump is losing his mind. According to the pollster, 50% of Americans now identify as Democrats, or Democratic-leaning, as opposed to just 39% of Americans who identify as Republican, or Republican-leaning. That is the highest party identification number for the blue team since 2009—i.e., the Barack Obama honeymoon.
Our Take: If half of America is, or leans, blue, then the Democrats don't even need many crossover voters. They just need the people who see themselves as Democrats to vote that way.
Always in Threes: Everyone knows the old chestnut that celebrities die in threes, right? Well, yesterday gave us quite the trio of high-profile, politics-adjacent deaths. The first to be announced was former Speaker Dennis Hastert, who molested several teenage wrestlers in his charge (before his political career), and then went to prison for trying to hide the hush-money payments he was making to cover it up (at the end of, and after, his political career). The second to be announced was former British MP Jeffrey Archer, who cheated on his wife with a prostitute, was outed in the newspapers, sued for libel and won, and then went to prison when it turned out he had lied on the stand during that libel case. The third to be announced was former televangelist Jim Bakker, who bilked his followers for millions, and who also cheated on his wife, with all of this eventually leading to the collapse of his faux-Christian empire.
Our Take: It would seem that someone in hell decided they needed some reinforcements, pronto.
The Past, Present, and Future: Presumably, with Dennis Hastert out of office and dead, the Republican Party would prefer that you not think of them as the party of child molesters. The fact that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who was also part of a wrestler-molestation scandal, is still in office, does not make that an easy sell. Also not helping the case is that the Palm Beach County Republican Party just endorsed Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts Mike Caruso (R) for reelection. This despite the fact that Caruso was arrested in August for molesting a relative who is a child, and who was under the age of 5 at the time.
Our Take: Is a dinky municipal office really that important? And even if it is, is having a formal endorsement (which doesn't move many votes) out there really necessary? Apparently so. In any case, this is not going to help the perception, one also encouraged by the Epstein files, that the GOP has a real problem with sexual abuse of underaged boys and girls.
Fox "News"-y Lady: Former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has just been hired by Fox as their newest correspondent.
Our Take: Because of course she has. This was as predictable as the Angels not making the playoffs this year. Will the presence of yet another administration mole within the walls of Fox cause Trump to stop kvetching about the lack of rally coverage (and about the firing of Maria Bartiromo)? Probably not.
Tarred and Feathered: The various Republican PACs just canceled their ad buys for North Carolina's Senate race. Then, the Democratic PACs canceled most of their ad buys for that race. In other words, it's all over but the shoutin'.
Our Take: Roy Cooper (D) is going to be your next senator from North Carolina, while Michael Whatley will have to go back to being "Lord of the Dance," we suppose. That was him, right?
Schmitt-head: It looks like at least one person will pay a price for the idiotic Jack Smith "gotcha," where the former special counsel was accused of being at an Atlanta Hawks game in Atlanta, when in fact he was at an Iowa Hawkeyes game in Maryland. The lawyer responsible for holding (and making?) the fancy posterboard with Smith's allegedly incriminating tweets, Ethan Harper, was supposed to start a new job at the White House this week. But, presumably because the White House is already overstocked with utter incompetents, that move has been put on ice for now, and maybe forever.
Our Take: OK, voters of Missouri. Now it's your turn when the sleazy Schmitt is up for reelection in 2028.
Spinning Their Wheels: On Meet the Press this weekend, NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur did a segment where he revealed that 19,433 bills have been introduced in Congress this session, and only 119 have become law—a passage rate of about 0.6%.
Our Take: The obvious lesson here is that the current Congress doesn't get very much done. That said, every Congress has a pretty low passage rate (albeit not usually this low). The slightly less obvious, but still very clear, lesson is that there are way too many "show" bills that have no possibility of becoming law, and that are only introduced to send a message to one constituency or another. There's no easy fix here, since it would be somewhere between "bad" and "unconstitutional" to limit how many bills any given member can introduce. However, anti-gerrymandering legislation would certainly help some, and so would some version of ranked-choice voting. If you're from a deep-red or deep-blue district, and all you have to do is keep those voters happy, then putting up far-right or far-left legislation is the way to go, even if it has no chance of becoming law. On the other hand, if you actually have to get substantive things done because your district is not hyperpartisan, then there will be fewer nonsense bills.
That's it for now. Good morning, and have a pleasant today. (Z & A)