Alex Burns, NY Times via twitter:
This kind of thing is so often a throwaway line, when it is really the root of the issue
“It’s easy to blame the voters of West Virginia for this mess. They should know better than to give a former convict a shot at the GOP nomination for the Senate.”
nationalreview.com/2018/05/party-…
It’s considered extremely gauche for analysts/journalists/politicians to say — or imply — “the voters really screwed up on this one.” So we end up focusing on structural and tactical reasons for, say, Roy Moore getting nominated.
And many of those structural and tactical factors are extremely important! But focusing on those to the exclusion of making judgments about the electorate can have the perverse effect of making voters sound as though they have no agency.
Sometimes it’s ok to blame the voters. And that’s especially true in a GOP primary.
Blankenship didn’t win, but he should not have been in the race at all.
Biggest story, maybe, is the NC-09 race, where incumbent Robert Pittenger (backed by Kevin McCarthy) lost to conservative pastor Mark Harris (a Freedom Caucus type). That’s now a competitive seat.
In OH, its Richard Cordray vs Mike DeWine for governor.
In W by God VA, it’s Patrick Morrisey to take on Joe Manchin.
And November edges closer and closer.
Big Russia story:
NBC:
Stormy Daniels' attorney claimed Tuesday that President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen received $500,000 from a company controlled by a Russian oligarch, deposited into an account for a company also used to pay off the adult film actress.
Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, also detailed other transactions he said were suspicious, including deposits from drug giant Novartis, the state-run Korea Aerospace Industries, and AT&T — which confirmed it paid Cohen's company for "insights" into the Trump administration.
If true, Avenatti's claims, made in a dossier posted to Twitter, could add a new dimension to the federal investigation into Cohen. NBC News has reviewed financial documents that appear to support Avenatti’s account of the transactions.
TPM:
Tonight we have what I’d say may be the most staggering revelations since the tangle of “Trump/Russia” investigations began almost two years ago. This is not hyperbole.
Late this afternoon Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti posted what he called a “Preliminary Report” on financial transactions of Michael Cohen. The claims were staggering. But this wasn’t a legal filing in which the attorneys in question need to vouch for their accuracy. For all the fancy language it was simply a press release, with no clear explanation of the basis for the various claims. (It’s an example of how TPM is in many ways a much more conservative operation than many mainstream media publications. Bloomberg for instance published basically all the claims even though it was clear that it could not independently verify them. To be clear, this is not necessarily a criticism. These are fact cases for which there is little obvious precedent.) In any case, the key claims are now being confirmed – in most cases to the letter…
In other words, just through this single shell company Cohen was receiving major payments from a Russian oligarch and additional moneys from various Fortune 500 companies looking for access to President Trump. On the US corporate side these are classic off-the-books pay-for-play payments to what appears to have been a slush fund. If you’ve spent any time covering political scandals you can’t look even at these initial details and not think this is the kind of story that sends a bunch of people to prison.
The Iran fiasco:
Paul Waldman/WaPo
Trump just abandoned the Iran deal. Does he have any idea what to do next?
Today, President Trump announced that the United States is pulling out of the agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear program — which was negotiated in 2015 by the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union — and said the United States would reimpose strict sanctions on Iran.
This decision is deeply uninformed, utterly illogical, inimical to the interests of the United States, taken for the pettiest of personal reasons and done with absolutely no plan for what to do next. In other words, it’s pure Trump.
One thing presidents can do unilaterally: make the world less safe. Congrats, or something.
People who know this stuff are upset.
Like, really upset.
The fight for Congress:
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump is a disaster, and that’s helping Democrats. But not how you think.
There’s a narrative about our politics right now that you constantly encounter on social and political media. It goes like this: Democrats are too obsessed with the Russia investigation, or with Stormy Daniels, or they’re just too focused on “not being President Trump,” and as a result, they aren’t articulating an affirmative agenda and risk getting caught flat-footed by Trump’s supposedly rising popularity.
But this narrative is entirely wrong, and two new pieces this morning help set the record straight. Taken together, they point to a much more accurate version of what’s happening: Trump’s unpopularity does in fact remain historically abysmal. This and Trump’s many scandals are in fact helping Democrats — but not in a way that is immediately apparent and not in a manner that betrays any unhealthy Democratic obsession with those things.
Ron Brownstein/CNN:
But in the district-by-district battle to retake the House, many Democrats are focusing less on condemning Trump's character than on discrediting the Republican agenda. Central to that mission is arguing that the GOP has benefited the wealthy, and burdened the middle class, with its twin legislative priorities of the past 17 months: passing a large tax cut and attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Most political professionals and journalists talk about "the health care repeal and the Trump tax plan as two different issues," says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant working with outside groups supporting the ACA. "The voters see them as ways Washington isn't looking out for them. ... On both of them, it's basically the same: they [Congressional Republicans] have been giving tax breaks to health insurance companies, to pharmaceutical companies and those come at the expense of people who work for a living. It means higher health care costs, eventually higher taxes, more debt for your kids, and cuts to Social Security and Medicare as you get older."
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
How far did Trump allies go to discredit supporters of the Iran deal?
Just when you thought President Trump’s allies could no longer surprise you with the depths to which they’re willing to sink, they may have come through again. This latest story is about an attempt to dig up dirt on officials in the Obama administration, with the purpose of discrediting the Iran nuclear agreement to justify the Trump administration abandoning the deal.
This story is still developing. So we need to carefully distinguish what we can say for sure with what is still unverified. Multiple news organizations are surely pursuing the story, which means we’ll be learning more in the coming days.
This was a favorite topic of mine a decade ago, timer well spent. But a good reminder we still have issues (from CIDRAP):
Experts review 1918 pandemic, warn flu is global threat
[Michael Osterholm] then argued that, during the next influenza pandemic, more people will die from the non-pandemic aspects of such a global health crisis. Illustrating his point with pictures of massive container ships that move goods across the globe, Osterholm said that the US economy is so inextricably linked to other countries, especially China's, that a pandemic would paralyze supply chains for both consumer and medical goods.
"A flu pandemic would result in unprecedented employee absenteeism," Osterholm said. He also noted that 30 of the most common generic medicines currently used in the United States are wholly or partially manufactured in China.
"Look at what happened with saline bags in Puerto Rico," said Osterholm, who predicted months before the devastating 2017 hurricanes that storms on the island would cause problems for US clinics and hospitals.
In a counterpoint to Osterholm's talk, Arnold Monto, MD, from the University of Michigan, said that he certainly did not disagree with Osterholm's conviction that the next pandemic would be deadly, but he said modern tools, including the flu vaccine, would mean it's unlikely the 1918 pandemic could ever be repeated.
Luciana Borio, MD, of the White House National Security Council, said the administration also sees the threat of pandemic flu as a global health crisis.
"Flu is our number one health security issue," said Borio. "We do not close borders to control flu."
A decade later, the arguments are similar. We are closer to a universal vaccine, but a pandemic would be deadly and disruptive. BTW, the worry these days is H7N9 more than H5N1 (i.e. different forms of bird flu).