Month: November 2019
Federal Health Department Contract Funneled Money to Trump Allies
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“At least eight former White House, presidential transition and campaign officials for President Donald Trump were hired as outside contractors to the federal health department at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year,” Politico reports. “They were among at least 40 consultants who worked on a one-year, $2.25 million contract directed by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma. The contractors were hired to burnish Verma’s personal brand and provide ‘strategic communications’ support.”
Late-Entry Candidates Never Win
“Bloomberg’s surprise late entry into the 2020 race is a familiar story: The candidate who casts himself in the role of The Savior Who Is Waiting in the Wings is a quadrennial feature of presidential campaigns. For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike have persisted in looking beyond the field of those desperate few who have spent months, if not years, racking up frequent flier miles; eating indigestible food; begging for money; and crowding into coffee shops, union halls and living rooms trying to build a constituency. Right around this time of the cycle, these voters and pundits and party operatives reliably hit the panic button, certain that somewhere above the fray stands a candidate free of the now-obvious flaws that burden the rest of the field. … There’s one pesky fact about these late-entry candidacies: They never succeed. Only once have they even materially affected the outcome of a fight for the nomination.”
— Jeff Greenfield
If They Had Evidence Trump Was Innocent, They’d Be Demanding to Testify
“If Mr. Mulvaney had information that contradicts the consistent and incriminating testimony of numerous public servants, Mr. Mulvaney would be eager to testify, instead of hiding behind the President’s ongoing efforts to conceal the truth.”
— CNN, quoting a statement from an official involved in the impeachment inquiry.
Why Doug Jones will Lose His Senate Seat to a Republican in Alabama
When a less chewed up and spit out Jeff Sessions vacated his Senate seat in 2017 to become Donald Trump’s first U.S. Attorney General, it forced a special election in Alabama to replace him. And that’s about the only way a Democrat like Doug Jones was ever going to win in that state.
The reason is straight ticket voting (STV). Alabama (and six other states*) still offer this option for those who have one concern when casting a ballot: party affiliation.
[…]
Paul Calls the Russians
With impeachment, it looks like Donald Trump’s heading for a fall.
And most Republicans don’t seem to be helping much at all.
But if you want to out the whistleblower,
Just turn to a rhetorical missile-thrower,
That smarmy libertarian asshole, Rand Paul.
