T1B

88 wrote: Probably more fake news, but here goes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... x-overhaul

Screw_Michigan wrote:

88 wrote: Probably more fake news, but here goes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... x-overhaul

Yeah, a measly $1000 for 20 years of work at Wal-Mart. You really are a GOP cock chomping hack.

88 wrote:

Diego in Seattle wrote:Carrier laying off 632 workers.

I bet the taxpayers of Indiana are so grateful for Pence shoveling their money at Carrier...

Probably more fake news, but here goes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... x-overhaul

Diego in Seattle wrote:

88 wrote:

Diego in Seattle wrote:Carrier laying off 632 workers.

I bet the taxpayers of Indiana are so grateful for Pence shoveling their money at Carrier...

Probably more fake news, but here goes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... x-overhaul

That's might white of them to offer a wage required by state law here in Washington.

Diego in Seattle wrote:Meanwhile...

88 wrote:

Diego in Seattle wrote:Carrier laying off 632 workers.

I bet the taxpayers of Indiana are so grateful for Pence shoveling their money at Carrier...

Probably more fake news, but here goes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... x-overhaul

Papa Willie wrote:Pull up "State Debt per Capita"

Maybe 4 red states in the top 20. https://ballotpedia.org/State_debt

Diego in Seattle wrote:

Papa Willie wrote:Pull up "State Debt per Capita"

Maybe 4 red states in the top 20. https://ballotpedia.org/State_debt

States receiving most federal aid.

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is expected to deliver a floor speech on Wednesday in which he will compare President Donald Trump's attacks on the news media to the rhetoric of late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

According to an excerpt of the speech, Flake will criticize the President for calling the news media the "enemy of the people," calling it "an assault as unprecedented as it is unwarranted."

"Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own President uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies," reads the excerpt. "It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase 'enemy of the people,' that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of 'annihilating such individuals' who disagreed with the supreme leader."

Flake's prepared speech goes on to say the President's actions should be "a great source of shame" for the Senate and the members of the Republican Party.

"The free press is the despot's enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy," Flake's remarks say. "When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn't suit him 'fake news,' it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press."

Flake, who announced he will not be seeking re-election in 2018, has said he will use his remaining time in the Senate to speak out against the President when he believes it is warranted.

A frequent critic of Trump, Flake announced his decision to retire in a Senate speech in October that bemoaned the "coarsening" tenor of politics in the United States and criticized his own party's "complicity" with Trump's behavior.

The Arizona Republican has said he doesn't have any formal plans to run for President after his time on Capitol Hill.

"I don't rule anything out, but it's not in my plans," Flake told ABC's "This Week" last month.

Papa Willie wrote:

Secondly, you DO understand that the states in your list also all have the largest minority populations, do you not?

Goober McTuber wrote:

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is expected to deliver a floor speech on Wednesday in which he will compare President Donald Trump's attacks on the news media to the rhetoric of late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

According to an excerpt of the speech, Flake will criticize the President for calling the news media the "enemy of the people," calling it "an assault as unprecedented as it is unwarranted."

"Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own President uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies," reads the excerpt. "It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase 'enemy of the people,' that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of 'annihilating such individuals' who disagreed with the supreme leader."

Flake's prepared speech goes on to say the President's actions should be "a great source of shame" for the Senate and the members of the Republican Party.

"The free press is the despot's enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy," Flake's remarks say. "When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn't suit him 'fake news,' it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press."

Flake, who announced he will not be seeking re-election in 2018, has said he will use his remaining time in the Senate to speak out against the President when he believes it is warranted.

A frequent critic of Trump, Flake announced his decision to retire in a Senate speech in October that bemoaned the "coarsening" tenor of politics in the United States and criticized his own party's "complicity" with Trump's behavior.

The Arizona Republican has said he doesn't have any formal plans to run for President after his time on Capitol Hill.

"I don't rule anything out, but it's not in my plans," Flake told ABC's "This Week" last month.

It doesn’t take a stable genius to comprehend the trouble that Republicans find themselves in 10 months before President Donald Trump’s first midterm election. Ignore the optimistic bromides about “fake news,” “fake polls,” and the political savior of a federal tax overhaul that Trump, and the Republican-controlled Congress, delivered late last year to a soon-to-be-grateful-they-just-don’t-know-it-yet American public. Some incumbents might convince themselves that all is well, especially if they rode into Washington on one of two red tsunamis that flooded Capitol Hill during the Obama era. But veteran Republican operatives, scrambling to help the party survive the gathering storm, know better. The Democratic base is apoplectic and energized. The number of Republican lawmakers who are opting to retire, rather than walk into the electoral buzzsaw, is matched only by the surge of Democratic candidates running in suddenly competitive districts. And Trump, despite the occasional good news cycle, has become no less toxic.

Historically, the party in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue loses seats in the first midterm. Ronald Reagan did (26 House seats); Bill Clinton did (52 House seats, eight Senate seats, and control of Congress); and, of course, Barack Obama did (63 House seats, six Senate seats, and control of the House). All three were far less polarizing, and far more widely embraced—initially—than Trump, who has a dismal job-approval rating of about 40 percent during the first full year of his administration. A normal president brags about his achievements. So could Trump. (Yes, he’s accomplished a few things, including the first tax-reform legislation in over three decades.) But most days, it seems the president prefers to spend his “executive time” jabbing at his enemies, real and perceived—if they’re Republicans running for re-election, so be it—in what amounts to a fiery stream of consciousness, usually via Twitter. He dabbles in white identity politics and traffics in conspiracy theories. In just the latest in a long list of racially-tinged insults to push his party off message when it can least afford it, Trump referred to Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries,” lamenting that the U.S. accepts so many immigrants from those troubled spots rather than first-world, and predominantly white, Norway. “It’s bad,” a senior Republican strategist involved in a 2018 campaign told me flatly. “The environment is really bad. It’s challenging and it could get worse.”

Each of the dozen or so Republican strategists I spoke to offered a similar assessment. A Democratic base that couldn’t be bothered to show up to the polls for Hillary Clinton just 14 months ago is now supercharged. And a critical sliver of the traditional Republican coalition—the college-educated, upscale suburbanites, especially women—is disgusted with Trump despite the booming economy. It’s put the Republicans’ 24-seat House majority in serious jeopardy, and threatens to depress their potential to capitalize on a favorable map and build on their 51-49 margin in the Senate. The standard phrase for running against the unpopularity of a president of your own party is “political headwinds.” But as a senior Republican congressman told me during a recent conversation: with this president, Republicans have to navigate “political crosswinds.” Do Republicans run with Trump or against him? Do they run as traditional Republicans or Trump Republicans? How should Republicans on the 2018 ballot talk to all of the various voting blocs of G.O.P. voters, never mind swing voters and Independents, especially in instances where they have to hug a Trump-friendly primary electorate while appealing to a Trump-hostile crowd in the general election? “We’re not prepared,” the Republican congressman said.

On the record, Republican strategists are all happy talk about how Trump is a surmountable problem, or that they’ll be fine because voters don’t view the president as a real Republican. Or that voters will set aside their reservations about his chaotic, exhausting leadership and punch the G.O.P. ticket out of gratitude for a tax bill that as yet remains broadly unpopular. Indeed, Republicans are relying on the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the massive reordering of the federal tax code that provides $1.4 trillion in tax relief, to save them from Trump. Every Democrat in Congress opposed the law, and Republicans are betting their congressional majorities that voters will reward them as they connect the robust national economy to its enactment, and begin to realize the benefits. The plan, of course, rests on convincing Americans to pay attention to what Trump has done, rather than what he continues to say, and how he continues to say it.

Above all the custom strategies that will emerge in individual House and Senate contests, the tax law is the strategic tie that binds. It’s also the one thing just about each and every Republican incumbent has in common with Trump—a shared interest they hope will spare them the Twitter rod when they inevitably have to declare their independence from his more provocative rhetoric. “Our fate is tied directly to this simple sentence: ‘Do middle-class voters think the tax bill helps them or not?’ That’s the most important factor for the midterm—period. End of story. That’s the most important thing by a multiplier of 1 million,” a Republican strategist said. “If you don’t succeed in selling the middle-class tax cut, then the only villain is Trump.”

Republicans, meanwhile, are leaning on Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California to keep the blue tide at bay. Republican voters are about as repulsed by the House Democratic leader as the Democratic resistance is to Trump. Republicans turned the mega-millions special House election in suburban Atlanta last June into a referendum on Pelosi, and G.O.P. strategists say she deserves full credit for the party’s victory in the G.O.P.-leaning, but Trump-wary, Sixth Congressional District. It’s a turnkey template that Republicans expect will go viral in the coming months.

Democrats are dismissive, noting that anti-Pelosi messaging failed in 2006, during President George W. Bush’s second midterm, in which they won control of Congress for the first time in a dozen years. But, retort many Republicans, the voters didn’t know her then, and didn’t know what a liberal scourge she would turn out to be. “Main plan: Run against Pelosi,” said one of the more optimistic Republican consultants to be found in the nation’s capital. “There’s no questioning the environment is bad right now. Will it continue to be bad? Probably, but if there’s anything we’ve seen over the past several cycles, [it] is that things change. Conventional wisdom, particularly in D.C., has gotten the election wrong for House and Senate Republicans every cycle since 2012.” In 2014, President Barack Obama’s second midterm, the Republicans picked up nine Senate seats, and were a percentage point away from winning a tenth in Virginia, and won control of the chamber. The predictions did not keep pace with the results. No matter, the prognosticators again foretold disaster for the G.O.P. in 2016 with Trump leading the ticket. Instead, Republicans won nearly every competitive senate race and held their historic advantage in the House. And so it’s somewhat understandable that Republicans might disbelieve the doomsayers this time around.

They shouldn’t, say most Republicans who lived through not just the boon years of 2010 and 2014, but the lean years of 2006 and 2008, which functioned as a sort of double-wave backlash against Bush that netted the Democratic Party 52 House seats and 14 Senate seats. Those two elections showed how quickly the political tide could change in response to an unpopular president. And this year has all the hallmarks of a wave against the president and the ruling party. The G.O.P. didn’t just blow the gubernatorial race in purple Virginia, on its own not necessarily a death knell. The party lost 15 state legislative contests, many in seats gerrymandered for G.O.P. control, and nearly control of the legislature. The Republicans also saw their power upended in historically red suburban counties outside of Philadelphia and New York City.

Those are the warning signs before accounting for Trump and his Twitter feed, and why many Republican strategists are resigned to the crash that’s coming, absent an intervening event, like a war or something unexpected that would rally the country behind the president. All that’s left to do is mitigate the damage. “It’s impossible to navigate Trump,” a Republican consultant said. “And it’s all about him.”

Papa Willie wrote:You know it's a bad day when DiS starts bringing out his spank bank pix.

Dinsdale wrote:Or maybe he doesn't believe that other people should pay for your life choices? Or in a system that promotes breeding among those who can't afford to raise their kids on their own dime? There's no question that people with children create much higher costs to society that those without.

Why do you support freeloaders?

Goober McTuber wrote:Well, Sirgulpaload, if that's a melt, here's some more melting for you.

It doesn’t take a stable genius to comprehend the trouble that Republicans find themselves in 10 months before President Donald Trump’s first midterm election. Ignore the optimistic bromides about “fake news,” “fake polls,” and the political savior of a federal tax overhaul that Trump, and the Republican-controlled Congress, delivered late last year to a soon-to-be-grateful-they-just-don’t-know-it-yet American public. Some incumbents might convince themselves that all is well, especially if they rode into Washington on one of two red tsunamis that flooded Capitol Hill during the Obama era. But veteran Republican operatives, scrambling to help the party survive the gathering storm, know better. The Democratic base is apoplectic and energized. The number of Republican lawmakers who are opting to retire, rather than walk into the electoral buzzsaw, is matched only by the surge of Democratic candidates running in suddenly competitive districts. And Trump, despite the occasional good news cycle, has become no less toxic.

Historically, the party in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue loses seats in the first midterm. Ronald Reagan did (26 House seats); Bill Clinton did (52 House seats, eight Senate seats, and control of Congress); and, of course, Barack Obama did (63 House seats, six Senate seats, and control of the House). All three were far less polarizing, and far more widely embraced—initially—than Trump, who has a dismal job-approval rating of about 40 percent during the first full year of his administration. A normal president brags about his achievements. So could Trump. (Yes, he’s accomplished a few things, including the first tax-reform legislation in over three decades.) But most days, it seems the president prefers to spend his “executive time” jabbing at his enemies, real and perceived—if they’re Republicans running for re-election, so be it—in what amounts to a fiery stream of consciousness, usually via Twitter. He dabbles in white identity politics and traffics in conspiracy theories. In just the latest in a long list of racially-tinged insults to push his party off message when it can least afford it, Trump referred to Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries,” lamenting that the U.S. accepts so many immigrants from those troubled spots rather than first-world, and predominantly white, Norway. “It’s bad,” a senior Republican strategist involved in a 2018 campaign told me flatly. “The environment is really bad. It’s challenging and it could get worse.”

Each of the dozen or so Republican strategists I spoke to offered a similar assessment. A Democratic base that couldn’t be bothered to show up to the polls for Hillary Clinton just 14 months ago is now supercharged. And a critical sliver of the traditional Republican coalition—the college-educated, upscale suburbanites, especially women—is disgusted with Trump despite the booming economy. It’s put the Republicans’ 24-seat House majority in serious jeopardy, and threatens to depress their potential to capitalize on a favorable map and build on their 51-49 margin in the Senate. The standard phrase for running against the unpopularity of a president of your own party is “political headwinds.” But as a senior Republican congressman told me during a recent conversation: with this president, Republicans have to navigate “political crosswinds.” Do Republicans run with Trump or against him? Do they run as traditional Republicans or Trump Republicans? How should Republicans on the 2018 ballot talk to all of the various voting blocs of G.O.P. voters, never mind swing voters and Independents, especially in instances where they have to hug a Trump-friendly primary electorate while appealing to a Trump-hostile crowd in the general election? “We’re not prepared,” the Republican congressman said.

On the record, Republican strategists are all happy talk about how Trump is a surmountable problem, or that they’ll be fine because voters don’t view the president as a real Republican. Or that voters will set aside their reservations about his chaotic, exhausting leadership and punch the G.O.P. ticket out of gratitude for a tax bill that as yet remains broadly unpopular. Indeed, Republicans are relying on the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the massive reordering of the federal tax code that provides $1.4 trillion in tax relief, to save them from Trump. Every Democrat in Congress opposed the law, and Republicans are betting their congressional majorities that voters will reward them as they connect the robust national economy to its enactment, and begin to realize the benefits. The plan, of course, rests on convincing Americans to pay attention to what Trump has done, rather than what he continues to say, and how he continues to say it.

Above all the custom strategies that will emerge in individual House and Senate contests, the tax law is the strategic tie that binds. It’s also the one thing just about each and every Republican incumbent has in common with Trump—a shared interest they hope will spare them the Twitter rod when they inevitably have to declare their independence from his more provocative rhetoric. “Our fate is tied directly to this simple sentence: ‘Do middle-class voters think the tax bill helps them or not?’ That’s the most important factor for the midterm—period. End of story. That’s the most important thing by a multiplier of 1 million,” a Republican strategist said. “If you don’t succeed in selling the middle-class tax cut, then the only villain is Trump.”

Republicans, meanwhile, are leaning on Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California to keep the blue tide at bay. Republican voters are about as repulsed by the House Democratic leader as the Democratic resistance is to Trump. Republicans turned the mega-millions special House election in suburban Atlanta last June into a referendum on Pelosi, and G.O.P. strategists say she deserves full credit for the party’s victory in the G.O.P.-leaning, but Trump-wary, Sixth Congressional District. It’s a turnkey template that Republicans expect will go viral in the coming months.

Democrats are dismissive, noting that anti-Pelosi messaging failed in 2006, during President George W. Bush’s second midterm, in which they won control of Congress for the first time in a dozen years. But, retort many Republicans, the voters didn’t know her then, and didn’t know what a liberal scourge she would turn out to be. “Main plan: Run against Pelosi,” said one of the more optimistic Republican consultants to be found in the nation’s capital. “There’s no questioning the environment is bad right now. Will it continue to be bad? Probably, but if there’s anything we’ve seen over the past several cycles, [it] is that things change. Conventional wisdom, particularly in D.C., has gotten the election wrong for House and Senate Republicans every cycle since 2012.” In 2014, President Barack Obama’s second midterm, the Republicans picked up nine Senate seats, and were a percentage point away from winning a tenth in Virginia, and won control of the chamber. The predictions did not keep pace with the results. No matter, the prognosticators again foretold disaster for the G.O.P. in 2016 with Trump leading the ticket. Instead, Republicans won nearly every competitive senate race and held their historic advantage in the House. And so it’s somewhat understandable that Republicans might disbelieve the doomsayers this time around.

They shouldn’t, say most Republicans who lived through not just the boon years of 2010 and 2014, but the lean years of 2006 and 2008, which functioned as a sort of double-wave backlash against Bush that netted the Democratic Party 52 House seats and 14 Senate seats. Those two elections showed how quickly the political tide could change in response to an unpopular president. And this year has all the hallmarks of a wave against the president and the ruling party. The G.O.P. didn’t just blow the gubernatorial race in purple Virginia, on its own not necessarily a death knell. The party lost 15 state legislative contests, many in seats gerrymandered for G.O.P. control, and nearly control of the legislature. The Republicans also saw their power upended in historically red suburban counties outside of Philadelphia and New York City.

Those are the warning signs before accounting for Trump and his Twitter feed, and why many Republican strategists are resigned to the crash that’s coming, absent an intervening event, like a war or something unexpected that would rally the country behind the president. All that’s left to do is mitigate the damage. “It’s impossible to navigate Trump,” a Republican consultant said. “And it’s all about him.”

Derron wrote:

Goober McTuber wrote:Well, Sirgulpaload, if that's a melt, here's some more melting for you.

It doesn’t take a stable genius to comprehend the trouble that Republicans find themselves in 10 months before President Donald Trump’s first midterm election. Ignore the optimistic bromides about “fake news,” “fake polls,” and the political savior of a federal tax overhaul that Trump, and the Republican-controlled Congress, delivered late last year to a soon-to-be-grateful-they-just-don’t-know-it-yet American public. Some incumbents might convince themselves that all is well, especially if they rode into Washington on one of two red tsunamis that flooded Capitol Hill during the Obama era. But veteran Republican operatives, scrambling to help the party survive the gathering storm, know better. The Democratic base is apoplectic and energized. The number of Republican lawmakers who are opting to retire, rather than walk into the electoral buzzsaw, is matched only by the surge of Democratic candidates running in suddenly competitive districts. And Trump, despite the occasional good news cycle, has become no less toxic.

Historically, the party in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue loses seats in the first midterm. Ronald Reagan did (26 House seats); Bill Clinton did (52 House seats, eight Senate seats, and control of Congress); and, of course, Barack Obama did (63 House seats, six Senate seats, and control of the House). All three were far less polarizing, and far more widely embraced—initially—than Trump, who has a dismal job-approval rating of about 40 percent during the first full year of his administration. A normal president brags about his achievements. So could Trump. (Yes, he’s accomplished a few things, including the first tax-reform legislation in over three decades.) But most days, it seems the president prefers to spend his “executive time” jabbing at his enemies, real and perceived—if they’re Republicans running for re-election, so be it—in what amounts to a fiery stream of consciousness, usually via Twitter. He dabbles in white identity politics and traffics in conspiracy theories. In just the latest in a long list of racially-tinged insults to push his party off message when it can least afford it, Trump referred to Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries,” lamenting that the U.S. accepts so many immigrants from those troubled spots rather than first-world, and predominantly white, Norway. “It’s bad,” a senior Republican strategist involved in a 2018 campaign told me flatly. “The environment is really bad. It’s challenging and it could get worse.”

Each of the dozen or so Republican strategists I spoke to offered a similar assessment. A Democratic base that couldn’t be bothered to show up to the polls for Hillary Clinton just 14 months ago is now supercharged. And a critical sliver of the traditional Republican coalition—the college-educated, upscale suburbanites, especially women—is disgusted with Trump despite the booming economy. It’s put the Republicans’ 24-seat House majority in serious jeopardy, and threatens to depress their potential to capitalize on a favorable map and build on their 51-49 margin in the Senate. The standard phrase for running against the unpopularity of a president of your own party is “political headwinds.” But as a senior Republican congressman told me during a recent conversation: with this president, Republicans have to navigate “political crosswinds.” Do Republicans run with Trump or against him? Do they run as traditional Republicans or Trump Republicans? How should Republicans on the 2018 ballot talk to all of the various voting blocs of G.O.P. voters, never mind swing voters and Independents, especially in instances where they have to hug a Trump-friendly primary electorate while appealing to a Trump-hostile crowd in the general election? “We’re not prepared,” the Republican congressman said.

On the record, Republican strategists are all happy talk about how Trump is a surmountable problem, or that they’ll be fine because voters don’t view the president as a real Republican. Or that voters will set aside their reservations about his chaotic, exhausting leadership and punch the G.O.P. ticket out of gratitude for a tax bill that as yet remains broadly unpopular. Indeed, Republicans are relying on the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the massive reordering of the federal tax code that provides $1.4 trillion in tax relief, to save them from Trump. Every Democrat in Congress opposed the law, and Republicans are betting their congressional majorities that voters will reward them as they connect the robust national economy to its enactment, and begin to realize the benefits. The plan, of course, rests on convincing Americans to pay attention to what Trump has done, rather than what he continues to say, and how he continues to say it.

Above all the custom strategies that will emerge in individual House and Senate contests, the tax law is the strategic tie that binds. It’s also the one thing just about each and every Republican incumbent has in common with Trump—a shared interest they hope will spare them the Twitter rod when they inevitably have to declare their independence from his more provocative rhetoric. “Our fate is tied directly to this simple sentence: ‘Do middle-class voters think the tax bill helps them or not?’ That’s the most important factor for the midterm—period. End of story. That’s the most important thing by a multiplier of 1 million,” a Republican strategist said. “If you don’t succeed in selling the middle-class tax cut, then the only villain is Trump.”

Republicans, meanwhile, are leaning on Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California to keep the blue tide at bay. Republican voters are about as repulsed by the House Democratic leader as the Democratic resistance is to Trump. Republicans turned the mega-millions special House election in suburban Atlanta last June into a referendum on Pelosi, and G.O.P. strategists say she deserves full credit for the party’s victory in the G.O.P.-leaning, but Trump-wary, Sixth Congressional District. It’s a turnkey template that Republicans expect will go viral in the coming months.

Democrats are dismissive, noting that anti-Pelosi messaging failed in 2006, during President George W. Bush’s second midterm, in which they won control of Congress for the first time in a dozen years. But, retort many Republicans, the voters didn’t know her then, and didn’t know what a liberal scourge she would turn out to be. “Main plan: Run against Pelosi,” said one of the more optimistic Republican consultants to be found in the nation’s capital. “There’s no questioning the environment is bad right now. Will it continue to be bad? Probably, but if there’s anything we’ve seen over the past several cycles, [it] is that things change. Conventional wisdom, particularly in D.C., has gotten the election wrong for House and Senate Republicans every cycle since 2012.” In 2014, President Barack Obama’s second midterm, the Republicans picked up nine Senate seats, and were a percentage point away from winning a tenth in Virginia, and won control of the chamber. The predictions did not keep pace with the results. No matter, the prognosticators again foretold disaster for the G.O.P. in 2016 with Trump leading the ticket. Instead, Republicans won nearly every competitive senate race and held their historic advantage in the House. And so it’s somewhat understandable that Republicans might disbelieve the doomsayers this time around.

They shouldn’t, say most Republicans who lived through not just the boon years of 2010 and 2014, but the lean years of 2006 and 2008, which functioned as a sort of double-wave backlash against Bush that netted the Democratic Party 52 House seats and 14 Senate seats. Those two elections showed how quickly the political tide could change in response to an unpopular president. And this year has all the hallmarks of a wave against the president and the ruling party. The G.O.P. didn’t just blow the gubernatorial race in purple Virginia, on its own not necessarily a death knell. The party lost 15 state legislative contests, many in seats gerrymandered for G.O.P. control, and nearly control of the legislature. The Republicans also saw their power upended in historically red suburban counties outside of Philadelphia and New York City.

Those are the warning signs before accounting for Trump and his Twitter feed, and why many Republican strategists are resigned to the crash that’s coming, absent an intervening event, like a war or something unexpected that would rally the country behind the president. All that’s left to do is mitigate the damage. “It’s impossible to navigate Trump,” a Republican consultant said. “And it’s all about him.”

You honestly think anybody is going to read all that ??

Papa Willie wrote:

Mikey wrote:

Papa Willie wrote:You know it's a bad day when DiS starts bringing out his spank bank pix.

His on the right hand side, yours on the left?

You're better than this.

Papa Willie wrote:

Mikey wrote:

Papa Willie wrote:You know it's a bad day when DiS starts bringing out his spank bank pix.

His on the right hand side, yours on the left?

You're better than this.

Like the claim that the GOP tax plan will lead to much job creation.

Moving Sale wrote:So what your saying is you just hired two white guys?

schmick wrote:I've hired 2 new employees so far in January and will probably hire 2 more by Valentine's day

Left Seater wrote:

Moving Sale wrote:So what your saying is you just hired two white guys?

Swing and a miss. Poor BB.

The crew scheduler/logistics hire is a Hispanic female. She is just out of the Army where she was a logistics person. The other position is in the final stage of interviews and the two leading candidates are female.