Andy Beshear

Dear Commons Community,

Based on yesterday’s political contests, a suburban revolt against President Donald Trump’s Republican Party is growing even in the South. 

Democrats won complete control of the Virginia government for the first time in a generation on Tuesday and claimed a narrow victory in the Kentucky governor’s race, as Republicans struggled in suburbs where President Trump is increasingly unpopular.

In capturing both chambers of the legislature in Virginia, Democrats have cleared the way for Gov. Ralph S. Northam, who was nearly driven from office earlier this year, to press for measures tightening access to guns and raising the minimum wage that have been stymied by legislative Republicans.

In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin, a deeply unpopular Republican, refused to concede the election to his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Andy Beshear. With 100 percent of the precincts counted, Mr. Beshear was ahead by 5,100 votes.

Mr. Beshear presented himself as the winner, telling supporters that he expected Mr. Bevin to “honor the election that was held tonight.”

“Tonight, voters in Kentucky sent a message loud and clear for everyone to hear,” Mr. Beshear said. “It’s a message that says our elections don’t have to be about right versus left, they are still about right versus wrong.”

Mr. Bevin asserted to supporters that “there have been more than a few irregularities,” without offering specifics.

Mr. Bevin’s troubles did not appear to be a drag on other Republicans, who captured every other statewide race in Kentucky — a sign that Kentucky voters were rejecting Mr. Bevin and not his party. Daniel Cameron handily won the attorney general’s race, becoming the first African-American to claim the office and the first Republican to do so in over 70 years.

Republicans did manage to capture the governor’s mansion in Mississippi as Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves defeated Attorney General Jim Hood by about five percentage points in an open-seat race that illustrated the enduring conservatism of the Deep South. The final governorship up for grabs in these off-year campaigns is in Louisiana where Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, is facing re-election a week from Saturday.

According to reporting by the Associated Press: “It’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions from state elections, each with their own unique quirks and personalities. But there’s little doubt Tuesday’s outcome is a warning to Republicans across the nation a year out from the 2020 election and a year after the 2018 midterms: The suburbs are still moving in the wrong direction.

“Republican support in the suburbs has basically collapsed under Trump,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant. “Somehow, we need to find a way to regain our suburban support over the next year.”

The stakes are undoubtably high. While neither Virginia nor Kentucky is likely to be a critical battleground in the presidential race next year, Tuesday’s results confirm a pattern repeated across critical swing states — outside of Philadelphia, Detroit and Charlotte, North Carolina. They’re also sure to rattle Republican members of Congress searching for a path to victory through rapidly shifting territory.

To be sure, Republicans demonstrated their firm grip on rural areas, and turnout for both sides appeared to be healthy for off-year elections. Notably, Kentucky’s voters elected Republicans to a handful of other statewide offices. In Mississippi, another Trump stronghold, Republicans kept their hold on the governor’s office, as Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves defended well-funded Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood.

But the GOP’s challenge was laid bare in places like Virginia’s Henrico County just outside Richmond.

Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant won there by almost 20 percentage points four years ago. The area has recently been transformed by an influx of younger, college-educated voters and minorities, a combination that’s become a recipe for Democrats’ support.

With the final votes still trickling in Tuesday night, Dunnavant was barely ahead of Democrat Debra Rodman, a college professor who seized on Trump and her Republican opponent’s opposition to gun control to appeal to moderate voters.

In northern Virginia, Democrat John Bell flipped a state Senate district from red to blue in a district that has traditionally favored Republicans. The race, set in the rapidly growing and diverse counties outside of Washington, D.C., attracted nearly $2 million in political advertising.

Democrats’ surging strength in the suburbs reflects the anxiety Trump provokes among moderates, particularly women, who have rejected his scorched-earth politics and uncompromising conservative policies on health care, education and gun violence.

Republicans’ response in Virginia was to try to stay focused on local issues. In the election’s final days, Dunnavant encouraged Trump to stay out of the state. The president obliged, sending Vice President Mike Pence instead.

Struggling for a unifying message, some Republicans turned to impeachment, trying to tie local Democrats to their counterparts in Washington and the effort to impeach Trump.

No one played that card harder than Kentucky’s Bevin, who campaigned aside an “impeachment” banner and stood next to Trump on the eve of the election.

But even in ruby-red Kentucky, Trump was not a cure-all and the trouble in the suburbs emerged.

Bevin struggled in Republican strongholds across the northern part of the state, where the Democrats’ drift and increased enthusiasm was clear.

In 2015, Bevin won Campbell County south of Cincinnati handily. On Tuesday, Beshear not only carried the county with ease, he nearly doubled the number of Democratic votes there, compared to the Democratic nominee of four years ago. Beshear also found another 74,000 Democratic votes in urban Jefferson County, home of Louisville.

Beshear led Bevin by the narrowest of margins Tuesday night.

Republicans were quick to blame Bevin for his stumbles. The governor was distinctly unpopular and picked fights with powerful interests in the state. Still, it was difficult for Republicans not to note the warning signs for the party next year and beyond.

“They continue to lose needed support in suburban districts, especially among women and college-educated voters,” said Republican strategist Rick Tyler. “That trend, if not reversed, is a death spiral.”

Good election night for Democrats!

Tony

Andrew  Napolitano

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano says President Donald Trump could receive some news from the Supreme Court just before the holidays ― and it might not be a “Merry Christmas.” 

Trump plans to appeal a ruling this week that ordered his accounting firm to comply with a grand jury subpoena to give his tax returns to prosecutors in New York. Napolitano said that appeal would go first to Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an attempt to stay the decision, then possibly to the full Supreme Court. 

“If the Supreme Court were to hear this, I think they would hear it on an emergency basis, meaning before Christmas,” he said. “They know how important this is.”

Napolitano also laid out the arguments in the ruling that might not fill Trump with holiday cheer. First, the appeals court ruled against Trump’s argument that he was immune from criminal prosecution because the case wasn’t a criminal prosecution. It’s an investigation into payments by the Trump Organization to adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom said they had affairs with the president and were paid to keep quiet.  

“No one is immune from the government investigating their behavior,” Napolitano said.

The court also ruled that the subpoena doesn’t place any burden on Trump as president because it’s not aimed at him. It’s directed at his accounting firm. The federal appeals court, Napolitano said, ruled that the subpoena “doesn’t require him to do anything that might be disruptive of his job as president.”

In a separate appearance on the network, Napolitano said that if New York prosecutors obtained Trump’s tax returns and found evidence of a crime, the courts would be in uncharted legal waters.

Tony

Anthony Sacaramucci

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump’s former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci is making the rounds on the talk shows and is the latest Wall Street name to issue a dire warning on the markets should Warren ascend to the White House. In fact, ‘The Mooch’ is making a more aggressive call than many of his peers up and down Wall Street.  As reported by Yahoo News.

“Well, I think she would halve the markets,” Scaramucci said on Yahoo Finance’s On the Move when asked about Warren’s potential market impact. “Just don’t go by me, go by Lee Cooperman and Paul Tudor Jones. The reason why the market is up is because we had a 35% corporate tax go down to 21% and propelled about a 45% to 50% move in the markets. She [Warren] is talking about reversing all of that and then a wealth tax.”

Recently, investing legend Paul Tudor Jones said the stock market could plunge 25% if Warren wins. Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman also said in early October the markets could drop by 25% amidst a Warren win.

Cooperman has since waged a public battle on Warren, who questioned his efforts to improve society on Twitter. Cooperman is largely seen as one of the more charitable top figures on Wall Street.

Pick your poison as to why Warren could be bad for markets.

To Scaramucci’s point, Warren has made taxing the wealthy and pushing an expensive Medicare for All health care plan, the foundation of her climb to the top of the Democratic primary polls.

Meanwhile, Warren’s plans to deal with China trade imbalances could be equally as destabilizing for the U.S. economy and asset markets. Some on Wall Street think a President Warren could be tougher on China than Trump.

“They [institutional investors] are very worried,” former Trump administration official Stephen Pavlick told Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade.

This is a dilemma for the Democrats.  Their first priority in 2020 has to be to beat Trump.  They have to put forward a candidate who has a broad appeal. Elizabeth Warren is not likely that candidate.

Tony

Katie Hill

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, had good advice for Congresswoman Katie Hill yesterday. Dowd advised her and others “ don’t leave yourself vulnerable by giving people the ammunition — or the nudes — to strip you of your dreams.”  Hill’s career has tanked in a scandal that has featured revenge porn, a throuple, sexual fluidity and dirty bong water.  Here is an excerpt:

“…on the topic of Katie Hill, the 32-year-old freshman California congresswoman who is openly bisexual and ran what Vice News dubbed “the most millennial campaign ever.” Her promising career flamed out in a scandal that was both age-old and very millennial, in that it featured revenge porn, a throuple, sexual fluidity and dirty bong water.

Hill was a blast of fresh air on the Hill. And it is amazing that, after two centuries of men treating the political landscape here as a droit du seigneur playground, that the one ensnared in an ethics investigation about the new rules enacted last year on sexual harassment — barring lawmakers from having sexual relationships with staffers — is a woman.

Hill pointed the finger at her “abusive” loser husband, Kenny Heslep, who has been unemployed for the past five years, implying that he leaked the pictures and texts to Hill’s foes. Not since Linda Tripp has there been such a creepy betrayal in politics.

It turned out that one of the people responsible for publishing Hill’s photos and texts is a Republican operative who worked for her opponents.

As The L.A. Times reported, Heslep wrote in divorce papers that Hill came home from Washington and said she was leaving. “She took our only operable vehicle and left me stranded at our residence,” he wrote, adding that his parents had to lend him money to hire a divorce lawyer.

In her fiery exit speech, Hill gave her side: “The forces of revenge by a bitter jealous man, cyber exploitation and sexual shaming that target our gender and a large segment of society that fears and hates powerful women have combined to push a young woman out of power and say that she doesn’t belong here.”

She continued, “Yet a man who brags about his sexual predation, who has had dozens of women come forward to accuse him of sexual assault, who pushes policies that are uniquely harmful to women and who has filled the courts with judges who proudly rule to deprive women of the most fundamental right to control their own bodies, sits in the highest office in the land.”

Hill’s parting vote on Thursday was to endorse the impeachment inquiry.

… I felt sad watching her implode. But, while I agree with Hill that there are double standards and that we still dwell in a misogynistic culture, I also think she should have realized that we’re operating under new rules now and that they apply to both sexes.

I reiterated my bewilderment that every millennial moment — even the most private — can be enjoyed only if it’s documented and uploaded God knows where.

… it was reckless for Hill to be in those sort of pictures once she had entered the political arena, he said that I was missing the forest for the trees: Youngs who can’t even imagine that they will one day run for office may already have racy shots somewhere out there.

He [Shawn – Dowd’s millennial aide] pointed to a viral text going around this past month as evidence that most young people have at least one picture on their phones that they don’t want to get out. The first line of the text refers to Instagram and pops up on the recipient’s phone with the most horrifying words known to the millennial mind: “Why is there a nude on your story??” Once the text is opened, it turns out to be a prank. Nonetheless, Shawn said, it caused a lot of spilled coffees and near car crashes among his friends.

He said that iPhones and social media have so reshaped culture that older people would have to accept the new and sometimes naked reality. He had to agree with Representative Matt Gaetz, the 37-year-old Florida Republican and Trump lap dog, who told Fox News: “This is an issue where a lot of millennials, I think, sympathize with Katie Hill because a lot of young people who grew up with a smartphone in their hands took pictures, sent them, shared messages and materials that are now recoverable later in life.”

I get that young people are digital natives, even cyborgs. But I had to offer a riposte to Shawn that, while society can be reshaped, human nature is immutable. What I learned from studying Shakespeare is that the primary colors of emotions carry through the centuries.

There will always be vengeful exes and envious allies and ruthless opponents and double-crossing friends. Whether the messages are being carried by pigeons or pixels, you have to protect yourself — and your data. Don’t let our shiny new tools blind you to the fact that some horrible truths about humanity never change.

And don’t leave yourself vulnerable by giving people the ammunition — or the nudes — to strip you of your dreams.”

Good advice to Hill and all!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump attacked Fox News’ again after its pollster’s latest survey shows that nearly half of voters favor impeachment proceedings.  As reported by the Huffington Post.

“As Trump spoke to the press outside the White House on Sunday, he interrupted a journalist who had begun a question by citing “several recent polls,” which the reporter said showed “more Americans want you to be impeached and removed from office than the number of Americans who don’t.”

“You’re reading the wrong polls,” Trump repeatedly interrupted. “I have the real polls.”

“The CNN polls are fake,” he declared. “The Fox polls have always been lousy. I tell ’em they oughta get themselves a new pollster. But the real polls, if you look at the polls that came out this morning, people don’t want anything to do with impeachment. It’s a phony scam. It’s a hoax.”

It’s unclear what “real polls” from that morning the president was referring to. Other polls released on Sunday included an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that found 53% of respondents disapproved of his job performance and several general election polls which found Trump trailing 2020 presidential opponents Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in hypothetical match-ups.

The Fox News poll, released Sunday, found that 49% of voters wanted Trump impeached and removed from office, while 41% opposed impeaching him. Notably, they also found that among those opposed to impeachment, 57% said that nothing could change their minds.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Friday found the same number of voters in favor of impeachment, as did an NBC-Wall Street Journal survey.

Last month, Trump launched a Twitter attack on Fox News’ last poll ― which showed that 51% of registered voters favored impeachment ― saying “whoever their pollster is, they suck,” and claiming he had “NEVER had a good Fox News poll,” despite regularly tweeting about favorable polls from the network.”

Trump should be careful not to bite the hand that feeds him.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Newly released documents show a Trump campaign official told the FBI that during the 2016 presidential race the campaign’s chairman, Paul Manafort, pushed the idea that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers.  The Associated Press is reporting that Paul Manafort falsely pushed the idea that Ukraine was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee servers during the special counsel’s Russia probe. The unsubstantiated theory, advanced by President Donald Trump even after he took office, would later help trigger the impeachment inquiry now consuming the White House.

“Notes from an FBI interview were released Saturday after lawsuits by BuzzFeed News and CNN led to public access to hundreds of pages of documents from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The documents included summaries of interviews with other figures from the Mueller probe, including Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Information related to Ukraine took on renewed interest after calls for impeachment based on efforts by the president and his administration to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrat Joe Biden. Trump, when speaking with Ukraine’s new president in July, asked about the DNC servers in the same phone call in which he pushed for an investigation into Biden.

Manafort speculated about Ukraine’s responsibility as the campaign sought to capitalize on DNC email disclosures and as Trump associates discussed how they could get hold of the material themselves, deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates told investigators, according to a summary of one of his interviews.

Gates said Manafort’s assertion that Ukraine might have done it echoed the position of Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort business associate who had also speculated that the hack could have been carried out by Russian operatives in Ukraine. U.S. authorities have assessed that Kilimnik, who was also charged in Mueller’s investigation, has ties to Russian intelligence. American intelligence agencies have determined that Russia was behind the hack, and Mueller’s team indicted 12 Russian agents in connection with the intrusion.

Gates also said the campaign believed that Michael Flynn, who later became Trump’s first national security adviser, would be in the best position to obtain Hillary Clinton’s missing emails because of his Russia connections. Flynn said he could use his intelligence sources to obtain the emails and was “adamant that Russians did not carry out the hack” because he believed that the U.S. intelligence community couldn’t have figured out the source, according to the agent’s notes. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.”

What a bunch of slimes!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

 

The Old Gym Building is now part of Lehman College.Credit…The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

A photo posted on Twitter of a group of religious leaders with their hands on President Donald Trump as they prayed for him didn’t sit very well with conservative attorney George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.

He skewered the hypocrisy of the holy gathering for a president who routinely lies, and has been accused of paying hush money to an adult film star and withholding military funds to pressure Ukraine’s president into launching an investigation of his political rival Joe Biden and his son.

“Blessed be they hush money, mayest all quid pro quos be thine, and mayest thy falsehoods persuade the multitudes,” Conway scoffed on Twitter Friday.

Conway was reacting to a photo originally posted on Thursday by Johnnie Moore, president of The Congress of Christian Leaders, which showed a group of conservative religious leaders putting their hands on Trump in the Oval Office to pray for him.

Below is a quote from Matthew about those who pray in public.

Tony

Bret Stephens

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist and conservative, Bret Stephens, has a column today dedicated to the Republican “NeverTrumpers”  who may be dwindling in numbers but have not disappeared and pose a threat to Trump’s 2020 election.  Below is the entire column.  It is worth a read!

Tony

———————————————————————————————————————————————————-

New York Times

The NeverTrump Vindication

By Bret Stephens

Nov. 1, 2019

Even by Donald Trump’s standards, his tweet of Oct. 23 — the one that called NeverTrumpers “human scum” — plumbed new depths in the debasement of presidential speech.

But what else has changed? If Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, were given the job of finding Trump’s moral bottom, he’d fail.

Far more revealing in Trump’s tweet was its first sentence. “The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats,” the president wrote, before warning of their scummy natures.

Think that one over. If the few remaining NeverTrump conservatives can still be that dangerous while we’re on respirators, we must be powerful indeed. Somewhere in eternity’s permanent exile, Leon Trotsky is smiling.

Yet Trump’s tweet is basically right on both counts. As a movement, NeverTrumpism is on life support. And the president has greater reasons than ever to fear it.

Three years ago, on the eve of the election, the NeverTrump coalition was a wide one, ranging from hard-core conservatives like Erick Erickson and Ted Cruz to somewhat squishier ones like Michael Gerson, John Podhoretz, and, well, me.

Then Trump won. The guy who was supposed to lead his party to a catastrophic defeat became the man who, in the eyes of the right, uniquely figured out how to save the country from Hillary Clinton. The coarseness of speech and crudeness of character that were supposed to be his central flaws became evidence of his gutsy indifference to liberal reproach.

There were also those conservative policy and political victories. Regulatory rollback. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and all the lower court judges. Increased military spending. The tax cut. Withdrawal from the Iran deal. An expanded G.O.P. majority in the Senate. The Mueller fizzle.

The NeverTrumpers scattered. Some became ex-conservatives. Others, full-on Trumpers. Still others, anti-anti-Trumpers — which only meant they were smart enough to see the president for what he is and churlish enough to be angry at those who wouldn’t join them in capitulating to it.

Yet the NeverTrumpers never scattered entirely, and thank heavens for that. Every political system will always have a conservative faction, and every healthy democracy needs that faction to be rooted in some combination of classical liberalism and moral traditionalism. Trump’s G.O.P., whatever its political fortunes, is the opposite: a nativist party led by a libertine.

At some level, conservatives know this. Trump knows they know it. Which explains why he has turned his sights on Never Trumpers: What despots and demagogues fear most is their followers developing a conscience.

No wonder the president chose to lambaste Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as a “Never Trumper.” The combat veteran had the simple decency of being scandalized by what he heard from the president on the Ukraine phone call, and by what he knew of the discrepancies between what he heard on the call and the account of it released by the White House.

The decency of being scandalized is what being NeverTrump is centrally about, and why the movement remains important. It’s the opposite of the opportunism required to go along with the president because you might get something out of him.

It’s the same sense of scandal that led to the first significant G.O.P. revolt against Trump since John McCain turned his thumb down on Obamacare repeal in 2017: The suppurating disgust even pliant conservatives like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham feel at Trump’s cavalier betrayal of the Kurds. It could motivate John Bolton (a born-again Never Trumper, along with John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Anthony Scaramucci and everyone else who made the mistake of working for this president) to deliver what may yet be the most devastating insider’s indictment of the president’s shameless shadow foreign policy.

And it helps explain why the president’s support with his base is slipping at last. A new poll finds Trump’s support among Republicans at 74 percent — an eight-point decline since September and the lowest since he was elected. Nearly one in five Republicans support impeachment and removal. So do 47 percent of independents. These numbers will not move in Trump’s favor if the truth about his “drug deals” (to borrow Bolton’s phrase) continues to come to light.

I doubt any of this will be sufficient to get at least 20 Republican senators to vote for Trump’s removal from office. But Trump knows that the number needed to spell his moral defeat on impeachment is four. If Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and one other Republican join the Democrats to convict, the political humiliation will be thunderous. And, as my colleague David Leonhardt has convinced me, it could devastate his re-election chances. If the administration thinks impeachment is such a political winner, they wouldn’t be fighting it this hard.

In the meantime, someone ought to print “Human Scum” on a limited-edition T-shirt. Given who said it about whom, it turns out to be a badge of honor.