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Ad will collapse in seconds CLOSE / the national interest August 7, 2017 08/07/2017 8:31 am By Jonathan Chait Share Wall Street in happier days, unburdened by Big Government regulation. Photo: New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images

This is the third time in 100 years weve had this alignment of government that weve got to get it done or else I [am] really worried our country will continue down a bad path, said Paul Ryan this weekend. This alignment of government means conservative Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The previous two times Ryan is describing are the 1920s, when Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover presided over a Republican-controlled Congress, and the George W. Bush administration. (Ryan is omitting 19531954, when Republicans narrowly controlled both chambers, presumably because Dwight Eisenhower governed as a moderate deeply at odds with conservatives.)

The Republican government of the 1920s ended when a wave of loosely regulated stock speculation produced a crash in the financial system. The Republican government of the 2000s ended the same way. Its not clear what lessons Ryan has absorbed from these prior episodes, but he does not seem to be especially concerned about repeating those policy errors.

In possibly related news, The Wall Street Journal reports today, Penalties levied against firms and individuals by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in the first half of 2017 were down nearly two-thirds compared with the first half of 2016putting regulators on track for the lowest annual level of fines since at least 2010.

And it is true, as President Trump now boasts on a near-daily basis, that the stock market is performing well. Weak regulations are one way to help produce higher stock values. In the short run.

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As Tillerson meets with Duterte, the Pentagon mulls opening a new front in Americas war against the (so-called) Islamic State.

Hes just the latest in a growing trend of liberal-leaning politicians and political operatives taking up podcasting.

Nobody thought Judge Roy Moore had a chance to win a special Senate election in Alabama, until his main opponents began destroying each other.

The venture capitalist was an early passenger on the Trump Train, but it looks like hes steeling himself for a derailment.

McEnany once mocked Barack Obama for having a brother who lives in a hut in Kenya, and expressed support for the birther movement.

He announced a boost on high-end income-tax rates to fund public-transit fixes and reduced-fare MetroCards.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans can probably avoid a government shutdown or a debt default. But Trumps border wall could be a deal-breaker.

The senator used an interesting term to describe the GOPs health-care defeat.

Trump wants to let coal companies pay well below market rate for the right to despoil public lands and damage the climate.

The GOPs advantage in dominating small states is giving it a permanent advantage in controlling the U.S. Senate, even in bad years for the party.

Wheres John Kelly when you need him?

This is the third time in 100 years weve had this alignment of government, says Paul Ryan. So, how did the previous two go?

The government said it was a terrorist attack, but the men claimed they were defending democracy via a legitimate rebellion.

Diplomats complain that the former Exxon CEO is a surprisingly ineffectual manager but that may be what Trump wants.

Many have tried. All have failed.

A new Times report says that some Republicans, including Pence, are quietly betting against Trump being willing or able to run for president again.

No one was injured in the Saturday-morning blast, which may have been a domestic terrorist attack.

The U.S.-drafted resolution, which received unanimous support, is the first international measure taken against Pyongyang since Trump took office.

The DOJ inserting itself into this debate would represent a dramatic break with history and prior practices.

Conservative commentator Eric Bolling is the latest Fox News staffer to be accused of lewd behavior.

Read more:
Republicans Gearing Up for Third Financial Crash in 3 Tries - New York Magazine

The upper chamber of Congress, where acreage gets more representation than actual voters.

Republicans love wide open, empty spaces. From the Oval Office to many Twitter precincts, they like to brandish maps of the 2016-presidential-election results by congressional district, or even by county, implicitly suggesting the bloody-red hues signify political dominance:

This is extremely misleading because Americans are not distributed equally by geography, of course, and acreage does not receive representation in our electoral system, right? Wrong: Theres the United States Senate.

Those who look at all the close presidential elections since 2000 and the roughly equivalent levels of party self-identification and assume the two parties have an equal shot at political power may be missing a subtle shift with profound implications: There are now far more red than blue states, and they have equal representation in the Senate.

As David Wasserman explains at FiveThirtyEight:

In the last few decades, Democrats have expanded their advantages in California and New York states with huge urban centers that combined to give Clinton a 6 million vote edge, more than twice her national margin. But those two states elect only 4 percent of the Senate. Meanwhile, Republicans have made huge advances in small rural states think Arkansas, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia that wield disproportionate power in the upper chamber compared to their populations

Republicans dont even need to win any swing states to win a Senate majority: 52 seats are in states where the 2016 presidential margin was at least 5 percentage points more Republican than the national outcome. By contrast, there are just 28 seats in states where the margin was at least 5 points more Democratic, and only 20 seats in swing states.

You can see this played out on the current and future Senate landscapes, where sometimes sharp partisan differences occur because only one third of the seats are up in any given cycle.

Democrats have a famously difficult landscape for 2018, defending 25 of 34 seats, with ten Democrats running in states carried by Donald Trump last year (only one GOP incumbent, Dean Heller of Nevada, is running in a state carried by Hillary Clinton).

It gets much better after 2018, right, but the red state/blue state factor limits Democratic opportunities for gains, even in theoretically favorable years.

In 2020, Republicans will be defending 22 Senate seats, with Democrats only defending 11 in 2020. But only two of those 2020 Republicans will be running in states carried by Clinton in 2016, and both of those were relatively close states (Colorado and Maine). In 2022, Republicans will again have to defend 22 seats. But not a single one is in a 2016 blue state.

Republicans having an advantage in the Senate carries no guarantees: At the moment, the Cook Political Report shows Democrats leading in all ten 2016 red states where they are defending Senate seats. If Democrats hold their own in the Senate next year, and particularly if they do well in the 2020 presidential contest, there is no reason they cannot gain control of the upper chamber in 2020 and hold it through 2022. But theyll be fighting a small-state bias built right into the system by the Constitution, which makes a mockery of the idea of equal representation.

As Tillerson meets with Duterte, the Pentagon mulls opening a new front in Americas war against the (so-called) Islamic State.

Hes just the latest in a growing trend of liberal-leaning politicians and political operatives taking up podcasting.

Nobody thought Judge Roy Moore had a chance to win a special Senate election in Alabama, until his main opponents began destroying each other.

The venture capitalist was an early passenger on the Trump Train, but it looks like hes steeling himself for a derailment.

McEnany once mocked Barack Obama for having a brother who lives in a hut in Kenya, and expressed support for the birther movement.

He announced a boost on high-end income-tax rates to fund public-transit fixes and reduced-fare MetroCards.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans can probably avoid a government shutdown or a debt default. But Trumps border wall could be a deal-breaker.

Trump wants to let coal companies pay well below market rate for the right to despoil public lands and damage the climate.

The GOPs advantage in dominating small states is giving it a permanent advantage in controlling the U.S. Senate, even in bad years for the party.

This is the third time in 100 years weve had this alignment of government, says Paul Ryan. So, how did the previous two go?

The government said it was a terrorist attack, but the men claimed they were defending democracy via a legitimate rebellion.

Diplomats complain that the former Exxon CEO is a surprisingly ineffectual manager but that may be what Trump wants.

Many have tried. All have failed.

A new Times report says that some Republicans, including Pence, are quietly betting against Trump being willing or able to run for president again.

No one was injured in the Saturday-morning blast, which may have been a domestic terrorist attack.

The U.S.-drafted resolution, which received unanimous support, is the first international measure taken against Pyongyang since Trump took office.

The DOJ inserting itself into this debate would represent a dramatic break with history and prior practices.

Conservative commentator Eric Bolling is the latest Fox News staffer to be accused of lewd behavior.

See original here:
Republicans Are Playing With a Stacked Deck in the Senate - New York Magazine

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When the next Congress convenes in January 2019, there won't be a single Republican member who voted against the Iraq war, thanks to Rep. John "Jimmy" Duncan (R-Tenn.) announcing that he will not seek re-election.

Duncan's retirement is sad news that hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. The reliably conservative Duncan has quietly pushed back against a bipartisan foreign-policy consensus that has kept America mired in apparently unwinnable wars for nearly 17 years.

Duncan isn't alone as an antiwar Republican voice in Congress. After a short-lived "freedom fries" crusade, Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) became a passionate opponent of the Iraq war and similar interventions. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), meanwhile, are prominent libertarians who are as skeptical of war as they are of welfare.

But Duncan was one of just seven Republicans in either house of Congress who voted against the original authorization of the use of military force in Iraq, at a time when half the Democrats in the Senate (including Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden) were voting for war.

Four of those Republicans Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, Rep. Connie Morella of Maryland, and Rep. Amo Houghton of New York were among the most liberal remaining GOP lawmakers at the time of the vote in 2002. That left Duncan among three conservative Republicans, alongside Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and Rep. John Hostettler of Indiana, to vote against the war at a time when many argued that support for President George W. Bush's foreign policy was the very definition of conservatism.

The elder Paul later drew attention to an alternate libertarian-conservative take on foreign policy through his two Republican presidential bids in 2008 and 2012, spawning a small army of admirers and imitators who believe in constitutionally limited government and don't consider the Pentagon an honorary member of the private sector. But Duncan has largely remained an unsung hero.

Duncan is no pacifist. He followed most Republicans in voting for our first war in Iraq, Operation Desert Storm. And like every other Republican, he voted to retaliate against those who aided and harbored the murderers who attacked America on 9/11, though he hasn't been on board with the bipartisan commitment to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely.

So why did he vote against the Iraq war in 2002?

"I supported the first Gulf War because I went to all those briefings and heard Colin Powell and all of them say that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the entire Middle East," he told The American Conservative in 2005. "I saw his troops surrendering to CNN camera crews and I became convinced that the threat had been greatly exaggerated."

As George W. Bush famously said: "Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me you can't get fooled again."

Duncan wasn't fooled again. The second time Saddam Hussein was presented as an international menace who could only be dealt with through immediate military action, this time without committing an act of aggression first and with regime change as the explicit goal, he voted no.

Since then, Duncan has also opposed President Obama's "kinetic military action" in Libya, which like the Iraq war toppled a dictator but led to chaos afterward and ended up leaving Islamic radicals who threaten America and its allies with more power, not less. He has voted to withdraw from Afghanistan.

"There's nothing fiscally conservative about this war, and I think conservatives should be the people most horrified by this war," he said at the time. "We turned the Department of Defense into the department of foreign aid."

Duncan's views recently seemed to be ascendant in the Republican Party. In last year's primaries, voters rejected hawkish candidates like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham in favor of Donald Trump, a man who criticized the Iraq war in conservative, military-heavy South Carolina in terms that nearly got Ron Paul tossed off the debate stage less than a decade before.

Trump has reiterated some of those criticisms as president, saying that the United States would be better off if Bush and Obama had gone to the beach during the time period when they were engaged in nation-building in the Middle East.

Yet there is a yawning gap between Trump's rhetoric and the reality of his administration. For Republican hawks, his presidency seems to be a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition. We remain at war in Afghanistan. We are still intervening, without much fanfare, in Yemen. We have bombed Syria. We might shoot first and ask questions later in North Korea.

Trump's more hawkish advisers seem to have the upper hand inside the White House. And if Trump goes down, neoconservatives are well positioned to reclaim their lost influence, having warned the GOP against the president's flaws early and often via the "Never Trump" movement.

"I'm pro-military," Duncan once told The American Conservative, "but you can't give any department or agency in the federal government a blank check."

That seems like a good philosophy for our times. So why does Jimmy Duncan look like a member of a dying breed?

Read the original:
The last of the antiwar Republicans - The Week Magazine

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Republicans 'move on' to tax reform, and yet it looks oddly familiar - Washington Post

Up until now, Russian and other foreign bots have been chummy with Trump and the GOP on social media, with "nearly half of the presidents followers appearing to be fake or spam accounts," according to Newsweek.

But over the last 48 hours, these bots have begun to change their tune. According to Newsweek:

Russian-linked bots and trolls have caused a surge in use of the hashtag #ResignPaulRyan on Twitter over the last 48 hours, just as the Republican speaker of the House was returning to his hometown of Wisconsin for a month-long respite from Washington, D.C.

A monitoring dashboard established by the Alliance [German Marshall Funds Alliance For Securing Democracy] noted the uptick Monday morning. It coincided with surges in the use of other hashtags by Russian bots, including #TrumpTV, #Magnitsky, #Fake and #ConfessYourUnpopularOpinion.

It hasnt been a common occurrence for the Alliances dashboard to pick up on Russian bot activity targeting members of the GOP since the site was first launched last week by former FBI special agent Clint Watts. But Ryan wasnt the only member of Trumps party to face countless bots demanding his removal. A campaign calling on the president to fire National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster received widespread support from bots and trolls over the last several days using the hashtag #FireMcMaster, eventually getting picked up by some right-wing fake news sites that seem to have the presidents full attention, including Breitbart.

Nice time to go on a 17-day vacation.

Image: DonkeyHotey

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Russian bots are turning against GOP, attacking Republicans - Boing Boing