Iowa Didn't Quite Work Out the Way Trump Wanted

What does “underbabied” even mean? We don’t have enough kids? I have fur babies and they should count.

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One in three is underbabied. Subject-verb agreement, and “one” is a singular noun, pretty obviously. I’d like to know whether that “one” applies only to mothers or also to fathers.

Having spent the last week with doctors and nurses and innumerable healthcare workers in a hospital where my husband was being treated for a pseudomonas, post-surgical-procedure infection (and, before that, two weeks with healthcare workers connected to the original procedure), I can attest that Dr. Oz is an embarrassment to the whole medical profession. The nurse (a Caribbean-born Black man) who oversaw hubbie’s latest discharge knows about as much about the human body, and much more about human beings, than “Dr.” Oz will ever know.

I marvel at medical people’s ability to maintain concentration on the science/medical details relevant to the patient of the moment (there are always other patients in waiting) while handling each patient’s and (in a hospital) that patient’s family. Sort of like a line of students coming to a prof’s office to discuss their papers but with no family to deal with (directly!) and much less at stake.

Mr. mch is doing well, btw. I may or may not visit comments here as often as I once did. Having been taken away for a time, I have been reminded that there is a larger world than TPM comments.

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Hope all goes well with his recovery. Good to remind us of a context larger than what takes so much of our energies on this site.

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Nnnoooo! Well, if there is, I’m settling on TDS

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Yep. And Trump could never win anything either.

Trump to nominate Blanche for attorney general on permanent basis

US President Donald Trump has said he will nominate Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to take on the role permanently.

If confirmed by the Senate, Trump’s former personal lawyer will become the administration’s number one prosecutor on a continuing basis. The US attorney general is the top law enforcement position at the Department of Justice (DOJ)

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World? I understand but don’t be a stranger!

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That study was funded and performed by the Unite America Institute. Kathryn Murdoch (daughter-in-law of Rupert Murdoch) is the major funder. They self-describe their funders as a mix of center-left, center-right and independent business people. They are 501(c)3, so they don’t have to disclose their funders.

I would be really cautious about any conclusions that report reaches. It was funded by billionaires and not conducted by an entity at arms-length from the funders.

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Money is the mother’s milk of politics.

Jesse Unruh, Speaker of the California Assembly 1961-1969.

Son, if you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them, you’ve got no business being up here.

Jesse Unruh

Unruh transformed the California State Assembly into a professional legislative body with an independent staff, and freed the Assembly from reliance on special interests for information and policy analysis. California’s special interests couldn’t abide that, so they killed it off with term limits.

Vote. I don’t care who you vote for, but vote. There are going to be down-ballot races that need your vote and because it’s California there are going to be half-a-dozen bad-idea citizen initiative props that need to be beaten back.

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We have to learn some lessons the hard way. “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” is apocryphal but as aphorisms go it’s not a bad one.

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Indeed. The “lessens extremism” thing may have been a noble goal, and it was a response to a very real problem: In the California of 10+ years ago, when this whole thing was passed, you really did have the party primaries skewing more and more to the extremes, leaving out a lot of folks in the middle.

Now, a perfectly valid counterargument there would be, if all those folks in the middle who are feeling left out would vote in the goddam primaries then maybe they wouldn’t be so left out. But set that aside for now.

Because the simple fact is that the experiment hasn’t worked as intended. The top-two-advance model was supposed to encourage more centrist candidates, not just voters, because (so the theory went) they needed to appeal to as many people as possible, not just the rabid party base, in order to get into the top two.

In practice, voters of both parties increasingly found themselves forced to vote based on strategy and not preference. “Well, I really like candidate A, but I’m afraid that if we split the Dem (or Rep) vote, we’ll get locked out of the general, so I guess I’m gonna have to go with candidate B who is polling better.”

Also, the wide-open nature of the ballot leads to such fascinating choices on this round as Barack D Obama Shaw (D) or LivingForGod AndCountry DeMott (NPP). It really did feel like a revival of the 2003 recall election free-for-all. That was 135 names instead of “only” the 61 names this time, but still pretty clearly crocked.

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Yeah usually the only thing I don’t vote for is uncontested judge seats, because why bother. There’s bound to be a bunch of special interest propositions, as usual.

It’s just depressing that the candidates are even more profoundly mediocre that normal. I did vote for Scott Peters as he’s the best of a trash bunch.

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