So long Seth as Moulton decides to run for re-election to Congress instead

On the heels of Jay Inslee dropping out, CBS News has breaking news about another candidate leaving the Democratic presidential nomination contest, as it reported just last hour Seth Moulton drops out of presidential race.

Seth Moulton is the third Democratic presidential candidate to drop out of the race in the past week. CBSN political reporter Caitlin Huey-Burns has more on the latest developments.

Honestly, I'm surprised it took him this long, as Moulton did not make either of the first two rounds of debates.  For that matter, the reporters and editors at FiveThirtyEight probably aren't surprised either, as they picked Moulton second in their first 2020 drop out draft.  Three down, six to go.

nrakich [Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst]: OK, with the second overall pick, I choose Rep. Seth Moulton.

sarahf [Sarah Frostenson, politics editor]: He’s still running?

That remark turned into the preview image for the article, which says something.


The chat continued on from there, becoming more serious, if not any less dismissive of Moulton.

nrakich: Haha, indeed. I’m a bit surprised that he is.

He didn’t even qualify for the first two debates, which every other major candidate without a good excuse (i.e., jumped in the race after the qualifying deadline for the first debate) did.

He’s almost certainly not going to make the September debate.

In addition, he reportedly had to let go of half his campaign staffers, indicating his campaign might be in financial trouble.

Finally, although he can legally run for president and for reelection to his House seat at the same time, it’s not a good look.

sarahf: Yeah, I imagine his calculus has to be pretty similar to Eric Swalwell — a House member who also ran for president, but has since dropped out to focus on his 2020 reelection bid.

geoffrey.skelley [Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst]: All this makes sense to me, though I wonder if Moulton might hang around awhile longer. After all, the candidate filing deadline for Massachusetts isn’t until May 2020, whereas Swalwell had a December 2019 deadline to worry about if he was going to seek reelection.

nrakich: I hear that, Geoffrey, but Moulton is also already attracting primary challengers in the Massachusetts 6th District.

And he was already catching flak back home after he led a failed attempt to deprive Nancy Pelosi of the speakership after Democrats took back the House in 2018.

So I think he’d be smart to focus on his House primary, which I think he could be in real danger of losing.

geoffrey.skelley: But when does he drop out?

nrakich: Yeah, the one thing that gives me pause is the fact that he hasn’t already.

But I would say soon — particularly if he is indeed running out of money.

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, hard to get people to work for you if you can’t give them a paycheck.

Indeed, which is one of the reasons why I thought John Hickenlooper would leave the presidential contest.  Besides, both of them are better off, both for themselves and the country, running for Congress.

On another note, Talking Points Memo summarized the New York Times article about Moulton dropping out as Moulton Drops Presidential Bid With Warning, Regret.

In an interview with the New York Times, he said that the race is truly between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and warned that “veering too far left” could cost Democrats the White House.

He cited Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, another moderate who also struggled to make the debate stage, as evidence that the primary was pulling candidates further and further left.

Moulton himself serves as an example of the primary campaign pulling candidates to the left, as his ideological scores started off at 20 economic and 85 social in June, moved to 13 economic and 80 social in July, and dropped out at 8 economic and 83 social now.  He shifted left 12 points economically and 3 socially over the space of two months!  Even Moulton, who says doing so is a bad idea, couldn't resist the leftward pull!

I'll have more to say about candidates being pulled to the left later today.  Right now, follow over the jump for the drinks and memes I'm retiring now that Moulton is out of the contest.

Seth Meyers takes a closer look at Trump's remarks about Finland raking its forests

I took a serious look at California's Camp and Woolsey fires two days ago.  Now it's time for a more humorous one as Seth Meyers takes a closer look at Trump's weird lie about raking in Finland.

Seth takes a closer look at President Trump making up another weird thing about a foreign country while attacking a retired admiral for not getting Osama bin Laden sooner.

Trump so badly wants to make this about forest management instead of climate change that he will make stuff up, although I suspect he conflated what he saw the firefighters doing with his conversation with the President of Finland.  That may explain his comment, but does not excuse it.

Enough laughs.  For a more serious rebuttal of Trump's remarks, read Finnish Biologist Corrects Trump On Rakes at Talking Points Memo.  Ignore the spelling errors and weird grammar, as English is not the man's first language; his explanation of the Finnish environment and forestry practices looks to me, who is also a biologist, to be correct.

An attack ad and drink for today's special Senate election in Alabama

I haven't had anything to say about the Alabama special election for U.S. Senator here.  Since it's being held today, I'd better hurry before the entire topic turns into a pumpkin.  Besides, last week I wrote about Conyers resigns, setting up scramble for his seat, so it's time to give a Republican equal time for his problems.

Talking Points Memo posted both the video of a web attack ad and its text.

“Roy Moore has infiltrated our Alabama communities and his rap sheet reads like a serial sexual predator,” the ad’s narrator says as prison rap sheet-like images with Moore’s face flash onscreen. “His record from the Alabama Supreme Court paints an even darker picture. Judge Moore has repeatedly sided with rapists and sexual predators. These aren’t Alabama values. On Tuesday, Dec. 12, vote no on Roy Moore.”

This makes Moore sound like he should be in the slammer instead of the Senate.  His opponent, Doug Jones, actually put people in the slammer as a U.S. Attorney.  Hmm.  I have the drink with the perfect name for this contest, the Alabama Slammer.  Take it away Skyy and Brittany!

It's fun, delicious and easy to make...THE ALABAMA SLAMMER! This supposedly a favorite drink of NFL Quarterback Brett Favre.
...
THE ALABAMA SLAMMER
3/4 oz. (22ml) Sloe Gin
3/4 oz. (22ml) Southern Comfort
3/4 oz. (22ml) Amaretto
Top with Orange Juice

The Alabama Slammer, a place Moore is lucky to have avoided.  May the voters of Alabama agree with me today that Moore should not be in the U.S. Senate.

ETA: On the Booman Tribune version of this post, I added a music video:

I close with a song dedication to Moore: Little Girls by Oingo Boingo.



Welcome to Moore's new theme song.

TPM's readers on gun owners and the zombie apocalypse

Last week, Talking Points Memo published three letters from its readers about guns and gun culture.  Two of them deal with guns in a post-apocalyptic world, one of them specifically about the zombie apocalypse.  The first was Readers on Guns #2, which deals directly with a theme I explored in Zombies meet preppers on 'Fear the Walking Dead' Season 3 -- racism as a motivation behind prepping for the zombie apocalypse.

I know that a lot of the rhetoric from the pro-gun crowd revolves around “protection from tyranny,” but my sense is that the “tactical situation” they are mostly thinking about is more lurid than that. You sometime hear them talking about the “zombie apocalypse” or more generally some sort of “social breakdown,” where their stockpiles might form the basis of a protective arsenal. Are they really worried about zombies? Of course not. That’s just a wink-wink, nod-nod.

Follow over the jump for the rest of this letter and all of the next.

Trump threatens to 'Lock Her Up!'

After watching the Republican Convention, I left a comment on The Morning After, Day 2, and Why I Can't Watch 2 in response to P.M. Carpenter.

Christie was another of last night's pseudoconservative luminaries, who also delivered a frothing denunciation of Crooked Hillary, "smil[ing]" as the arena's neofascistic mob "erupted in chants of 'LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP!," reports Slate's Michelle Goldberg.

"'LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP!'" Given Manfort's history, that takes on a chilling meaning. Here's what Wikipedia wrote about his involvement in Ukraine.

"In 2010, under Manafort's tutelage, the opposition leader put the Orange Revolution on trial, campaigning against its leaders' management of a weak economy. Returns from the presidential election gave Yanukovych a narrow win over Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the 2004 demonstrations. Yanukovych owed his comeback in Ukraine's presidential election to a drastic makeover of his political persona and, people in his party say, that makeover was engineered in part by his American consultant, Manafort."

And what did Yanukovych do to Tymoshenko after he won? Lock her up.

After Manafort left the campaign, in part because of his ties to Yanukovych, I felt less worried about such an outcome and decided that I wasn't going to recycle that comment at this blog.  Then Trump threatened to prosecute Clinton over emails at Sunday night's debate.

During the second presidential debate, Donald Trump said that if he wins the election, he will appoint a special prosecutor to look into Hillary Clinton's email "situation."

Eep!  Trump threatened to "lock her up!"  Manafort may be gone, but Bannon and others from Breitbart have replaced him, and they have continued this part of his legacy.  That's another Weimar moment that reinforces the idea that 2016 may not be 1968, but Trump is worse than Wallace.  I'll let Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo speak for me by explaining what this Weimar Moment meant to him.

I don't think we can discuss this debate as citizens, take stock of it as a country, without noting that this is certainly the first time one candidate has openly threatened to jail the other candidate. Trump said openly that he would instruct the Justice Department to open a new investigation of Clinton and that he'd make sure it ended with her imprisonment. That's something we expect it kleptocracies and thin democracies where electoral defeat can mean exile, imprisonment or death.

Such a ferocious claim, one that puts our whole constitutional order on its head, is not something that can be easily undone. That's the ranting threat of a would-be strongman and dictator The threat itself is like a bell that can't be un-rung. Through the course of what was often an ugly debate, I was thinking a lot of the destructiveness of this entire campaign, virtually all of which stems from Trump's transgressive, norm-demolishing behavior. It's a topic we'll have to return to in the ed blog and one the country is going to need to wrestle with. None of this is going to disappear after November 8th. These are slashing wounds to the country's political fabric that will at best leave tremendous scar tissue we'll still see for decades.

That was an early response and a rather restrained one, although Marshall was rattled enough to forget some of his punctuation.  The next morning, Keith Olbermann unleashed his full fury on the topic in Jailing Hillary!? Trump’s Outrageous Case for Dictatorship.

Floating his new plan to lock up his political rival, Donald Trump borrows a page from the Putin playbook.

Thank you, Keith, for saying everything I was thinking along with everything I should have been thinking.  I've missed you and I'm glad you're back.  It's times like this that I need you and the country needs you, too.

2016 may not be 1968, but Trump is worse than Wallace

I opened June's stats and top posts with a statement of revulsion and despair.

I'm having a reaction to this week's news much like I did when I posted Grumpy Cat rates this past weekend.  The result was a retreat into life imitating art and three retrospectives before coming up for air.  The most I can say today is that it's still 1968 and the year is only half over.  I might have more to say by Monday.

The idea that we are at 1968 levels of political conflict has become so widespread that it got a lot of attention from the media over the weekend.  Jonathon Chait noted the analogy on Friday at New York Magazine.

It has been especially strained during a presidential campaign in which Republicans nominated a race-baiting demagogue for president. And last night, when a gunman murdered police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, it appeared to reach a kind of breaking point. In the feverish late-night heat, race-baiters at the New York Post, Breitbart, and Matt Drudge stoked a race war they clearly craved. It was 1968 again, more than a few observers said. Everything seemed to be coming apart.

So did Libby Nelson at Vox.

On Wednesday night, a sniper shot 14 people, killing 5, near the end of a protest against police brutality in Dallas. The shooting followed two killings of African-American men by police earlier in the week, and the deadliest mass shooting in American history in Orlando, Florida, less than a month ago.

The sense of instability — plus the chaotic Republican campaign of Donald Trump — brought one comparison to mind for many in the media: 1968.

The superficial parallels are obvious: Shocking gun violence. A nation convulsing over racism and inequality. A chaotic presidential campaign featuring populist candidates who gleefully paint nonwhite people as the enemy.

The reference to 1968 — even, and maybe especially, by people who don’t remember the year themselves — may also be to a national mood. It’s a feeling captured by William Butler Yeats in his apocalyptic poem, The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” 1968 is a shorthand for a fear of institutions breaking down, or a fear of new wounds that will leave scars that persist for generations.

There are similar comparisons at Reuters, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and Talking Points Memo.  The Reuters piece noticed another similarity besides the mood and level of political conflict.

According to the Chinese Zodiac, 1968 and 2016 are both the Year of the Monkey. But maybe we should call this the Year of the Ghost Monkey of 1968. From the presidential primaries to the convention platform battles to bloody mayhem in the streets, 1968 is the go-to, default metaphor for what we seem to be reliving.

This year, like 1968, is certainly one of bitter conflict and wrenching change.

Yes, nearly all of these articles refer back to 1968.  However, they also make a strong point that things aren't as bad as they were then.  Follow over the jump for the pushback to the meme, including one example of how today actually is worse.

1968 has arrived with a Weimar moment in San Jose

I made the following historical allusions to open and close The torches and pitchforks came out for Trump last night.

Last night, my wife and I watched as Donald Trump's rally on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus was "postponed" in the face of massive protests.  They were at least one step above calls to 'Dump Trump' and 'Arrest Snyder' at the Detroit Republican Debate.  My wife said that "the torches and pitchforks came out for the Trumpenstein monster last night."  Yes, they have, but a different image came to my mind.  The protests and the conflict afterward stuck me as just one step short of Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold fighting with the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten during the Weimar Republic.*  The mainstream media's came off as less alarmed, but not by very much.
...
As for ABC News' comparison of today to the summer of 1968, I think it's a better analogy than Weimar Germany.  We're not at either place yet, but 1968 is only blocks away and we're headed right for it. Weimar Germany, on the other hand, sits way out on the horizon where one can make it out with sharp eyes.  Let's hope we're not headed there.  Otherwise, it's welcome to Weimar America, where it's Springtime for Trump.

*The sides aren't as extreme as Sturmabteilung vs. Roter Frontkämpferbund--yet.

We've now arrived at 1968 and it's only June.  ABC News has the story in Trump Protesters Attack Supporters At San Jose Rally.

Supporters of the presumptive Republican nominee were sucker punched and pelted with eggs.

That's definitely a significant escalation from what happened in Chicago last March.  Then, tensions were high and there were a lot of confrontations that threatened violence, but I don't recall seeing any blood flowing.   This time, the crowd went from protesting to rioting.  Welcome to 1968.

As my readers can figure out, I consider this to be a bad development.  I understand why the protesters are reacting the way they are, but I also think it's dangerous and counterproductive.  Follow over the jump for people who agree with me.