+1

One thing I didn't think about, but the senate committees look to be 10-9 GOP. That makes every GOP member the king of the world. That could really come in to play for nominations.

See? I told you it was going to be a fun four years if nothing else.

Watching left-wing heads explode is just about as good as it gets. His calling out of the "seven sisters schools up in New England" is great stuff.

The Gallup tracking poll went from -65 before the election to +5 this week among GOP respondents on the question of is the economy getting better.

I guess America is great again.

I love it for the easy spin: "Even Republicans agree that Obama has made the economy better."

Addition by subtraction basically. There isn't the expectation / fear of seeing even more imbalanced taxation, less likelihood that success will be penalized or discouraged.

Yeah.

Or the number is solely a representative figure for is the president elect on your team.

Not sure those two things aren't considerably linked.

Ascribing exactly that reasoning to the answer, they're answering the question they want to hear ("will the economy get better?") instead of the one they were actually asked.

Being as generous as possible towards their deductive reasoning skills, that becomes entirely a WOO TEAM answer. "The Trump Recovery that's been going on the last six years is going just swell!"

The economy was in the toilet, but all of a sudden, it's not anymore! Magic at the ballot box!

Serious question. In the age of 24-hour coverage and social media, why would the physical appearance of any candidate or even worse, the appearance of a celebrity with a candidate make any difference?

I get what they were going for there - 'if we give him the prize, he'll spend the next 4-8 years working to try and live up to it' - but...the Nobel Peace Prize really shouldn't be aspirational. That was goofy.


You're kinda proving my point, though, Bucc. Right now, there IS no reason for a Republican candidate to spend much time in the GOP's "firewall" states. Aside from Georgia and Arizona, and the ever-present prospect of a purple Texas (which may never happen), most of those "firewall" states are pretty reliably double-digit states for a Republican. That includes, as I said, most of the Midwest, much of the Mountain West, and most of the South.

As far as the lament that three states get somebody almost 40% of the way to 270...population centers matter, and they'd matter either in the system we've got, or a popular vote system.

If you want to blunt the impact of population centers on Presidential elections (and I'm not sure why you would other than to grant rural areas much more disproportionate influence than they currently enjoy), what you do is keep the Electoral College but distribute Electoral Votes one per Congressional district.

And then you'd probably see the Democrats spend a half-century or more in the political wilderness as they tried to broaden their reach beyond urban populations; whether that's a bug or a feature is probably up to one's personal politics.

I have a client that has not spent one single dime on television advertising in a year. He released funds to do so on Wednesday, the day after the election.

Also, the question as asked (per gallup.com) is
Gallup tracks daily the percentage of Americans who think that economic conditions in the country as a whole are "getting better" or "getting worse."

Not "the economy" but "economic conditions". So the rationale I mentioned is perfectly valid. Attitudes & expectations are an aspect of "economic conditions".

Conservatives understand protecting slavery.

We can all play this game.

Exactly right.

Rand Paul says he will oppose Giuliani and Bolton for SOS. The GOP doesn't have big margins, so the cabinet battles could get interesting.

I think I much prefer Newt as SOS. Wonder what happened there as the was an early candidate for it.

This is one thing I can support Trump on. I'm willing to pay more at the pumps and go into a recession if we achieve the goal of breaking our dependence from the oil cartels. They are building a Disney world from our oil money, our foreign policy is tied to it, and nothing would make me feel better than watching them crater.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/16/saudi...l-imports.html

Oil is a global commodity. Unless you're talking about reinstating the ban on exporting oil, there's no way for the U.S. to be free of OPEC.

Why do you say that? Oil shale and fracking will go a long way in independence.

Best way towards independence would be supporting green alternatives obviously - but hey ho, Trump has already indicated he's against any support for such things ..

All of that will go to the highest bidder. Even if we're technically getting all our fossil fuels from the U.S., the price is still set globally and subject to global pressures.

Have we ever had a President openly root for a business to fail? I'm thinking of the war on the NY Times here. I'm sure there are industry wide examples (Big Tobacco maybe? Telecom break-up?), but I can't remember a single company target like the tweet storm from DJT.

Moved a bunch of posts about the Election. Let's try to keep the post-mortem stuff in the election thread and keep this to the Trump transition/Presidency. (Or, even better, CREATE A NEW THREAD FOR POST-MORTEM!!!!)

So now it seems the odds on favorite for Attorney General is Ted Cruz? I guess selling your soul netted you something, Ted.

Amazing that Trump would consider a serial liar like Lyin' Ted for such a high position, too!

They will just cost more when compared to what it costs to produce over there.

Ah yes, those solar cars are such a reliable option.

Well someone has to prosecute the women getting abortions. Ted's a good fit there.

Lindsey Graham has proposed an alternative for Cruz: SCOTUS. I read this as: Instead of AG, please put him somewhere so I don't have to look at his fucking face ever again.

What green alternative gives us energy independence?

Many green alternatives could eventually lead to a fully renewable energy society. I don't know that there is a single magic bullet, but a mix of many different sources can lead there.

Not researching it at all or remaining as climate change deniers will continue to lead to fossil fuel dependence.

Not only that, but green energy is an industry that can lead to vastly more quality jobs which aren't easily outsourced.

But it is something that takes time and money for research, not something that most governments have the stomach for.

Which green alternatives? I just hear this a lot about energy independence and vague platitudes but no one seems to really go into detail on what they are talking about.

Like I'm all for ditching and cutting back on fossil fuels. But this idea that it'll make us independent is silly.

Pretty much any I would have thought - the reliance is on Oil, so electric cars for instance is a move away from that dependence.

Hydrogen vehicles would similarly decrease that dependence there are loads of different approaches which don't require fossil fuels.

On a domestic energy front I'd like to see more investment in solar and wind rather than potentially going back to coal as Trump seems to be interested in doing.

FWIW, Cruz was at his best as Texas SG. If I had to put him in one place in the government to maximize his talents and minimize his flaws, it would be as SG.

This debate about energy independence is strange. As pointed out, oil is a global commodity subject to global supply and demand. Are we talking price mandates?

The batteries for electric cars are primarily made in China, Japan, and South Korea. And then you shift from battling over oil to battling over rare earth minerals.

I'm all for changing things because so we aren't pumping a bunch of garbage into the atmosphere, but these changes won't make us independent of other countries. And while I think there are people standing in the way of solar and wind, a big reason why they aren't catching on is they are expensive and just suck.

I mean lets say we all switched to electric cars. What happens if China decides to slow down mining for neodymium?

Being "economically independent" really doesn't work if you want to be a capitalist country. Just about every since economist on Earth will tell you this. This stuff has been known for centuries, since David Ricardo came up with his theory on comparative advantage.

Yeah, countries tried autarky (economic independence) before... recently most notably in the 1930s... right before they were planning on going to war.

Personally, I don't believe that the point of energy independence should be 100% US sourcing for everything. It should be about finding alternatives to lessen our carbon footprint and free us from a non-renewable resource that will run out in the next century.

Huh. So apparently when Chris Christie was AG he prosecuted the father of Jared Kushner (Ivanka's husband & the one Donald is trying to get top secret clearance for) and put him in jail for two years. So that adds a little backstory to the purge of Christie & his aides from the transition team once Trump actually started taking it seriously, and makes me think Christie's chances at a cabinet post are lower than thought.

Crooked Christie shouldn't be near the white house anyways.

If Trump had picked Crooked Christie as VP back in July would he have still won? All that Bridgegate stuff came out right before the election.

And now I present to you the Japanese internment camps argument...



For my next trick, I will down an entire bottle of whiskey.

Oh, sure, but they said the whole "forced camps" thing was bad when it was supposedly Obama and the UN behind it.

Yea I saw that segment while on the treadmill at the gym. All I could do was shake my head at any argument that uses internment camps as precedent. Glad Kelly called him out, too.

So now word comes that he's looking at Nikki Haley as Secretary Of State. Put Cruz in as Attorney General to go along with that, and if the President-Elect is to be believed, we'd have a Secretary Of State who is "an embarrassment" and an Attorney General who is a serial liar.

Although at the end she said she was glad to talk to him again. Maybe instead enabling these people, when you call them out on their bullshit, don't then make with the niceties. Tell them to go to hell and they're not welcome back on your show.

^^^This please^^^

SMH how folks can sit there straight faced and use the internment camp as a precedent.