Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 189
Navigating the Nonsense
“As of December 7 there were 369 women running or planning to run for Congress in 2018, according to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, which would be the most women House candidates ever,” Axios reports.
“The number is subject to change, as the filing deadlines for most states are months away.”
President Trump has agreed to record a robocall for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R), “the president’s most direct involvement in Alabama on behalf of the embattled candidate to date,” Politico reports.
“The call is expected to go out to Alabama voters on Monday, a day before the election.”
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) says he’s considering running for Sen. Al Franken’s (D-MN) U.S. Senate seat, KSTP reports.
Dan Balz: “For Republicans, there likely can be no truly good outcome. If Moore wins, the party will have preserved the seat but will be saddled with a new senator under a cloud of allegations, including assaulting a teenager many years ago as well as a pattern of pursuing teenagers half his age when he was in his 30s. If he wins and is sworn in, he probably will face an ethics investigation that will keep the controversy alive until his fate is resolved and perhaps much longer than that. For the Republicans, it’s a hot mess.”
“If Moore loses, the GOP would be spared his presence in the Senate. But the result will have inflamed the anti-establishment forces led by former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, deepening antagonisms that continue to roil the party… Additionally, a Jones victory would put the Republican majority at greater risk in 2018.”
Vanessa Alarid told the New York Times about working as a lobbyist in New Mexico:
“You can have my vote if you have sex with me,” Ms. Alarid recalled the lawmaker saying, although he used cruder language for sexual intercourse. He told Ms. Alarid she had the same first name as his wife, so he would not get confused if he called out in bed. Then he kissed Ms. Alarid on the lips, she said.
Shocked, Ms. Alarid, who was 32 at the time, pushed him away. Only after he was gone did she let the tears flow.
When her bill came up on the floor of the New Mexico House of Representatives the next day, March 20, 2009, it failed by a single vote, including a “No” by the lawmaker, Rep. Thomas Garcia (D).
As Ms. Alarid watched from the House gallery, she said, Mr. Garcia blew her a kiss and shrugged his shoulders with arms spread.
Politico: “The departures of AP and Fox from the 20-year alliance of news organizations that have commissioned and reported national and state exit polls doesn’t necessarily sound the death knell for exit polling. The four remaining networks in the pool — ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News — are locked into the current exit poll regime through the next presidential election.”
“But they will be facing unprecedented competition — from the AP and Fox News, among others — and the future beyond 2020 remains uncertain.”
New York Times: “For other presidents, every day is a test of how to lead a country, not just a faction, balancing competing interests. For Mr. Trump, every day is an hour-by-hour battle for self-preservation. He still relitigates last year’s election, convinced that the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, into Russia’s interference is a plot to delegitimize him. Color-coded maps highlighting the counties he won were hung on the White House walls.”
“Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. People close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back.”
Glenn Greenwald: “It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow to the Trump/Russia collusion story.”
“There was just one small problem with this story: it was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story – and then hyped it over and over and over – the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.”
“The Trump administration has rejected a sweeping Russian proposal seeking a mutual ban on foreign political interference,” BuzzFeed News reports.
“Putin dispatched Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov to Washington for a July 17 meeting with Under Secretary Tom Shannon, the No. 3 official at the State Department. … [T]hree U.S. administration officials, including one inside the meeting, said Ryabkov handed over a document containing a bold proposal: A sweeping noninterference agreement between Moscow and Washington that would prohibit both governments from meddling in the other’s domestic politics.”
“Republicans negotiating a final GOP tax bill are reconsidering proposals to shrink the plan’s corporate tax cut amid ferocious opposition from Senate Republicans as well as outside conservative and business groups,” the Washington Post reports.
“Both separate bills that passed the House and Senate would lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent. But lawmakers negotiating the final bill have considered raising the corporate rate to 22 percent, raising new revenue that they would use to offset other changes they plan to make in the final package.”
Vice News: “Twelve conservative voters gathered inside a Birmingham coffee house Thursday for a candid discussion about the Alabama senate race.”
Associated Press: “Revealing that they know every word Manafort changed in a recently published op-ed, prosecutors for the special counsel argued Friday that the former Trump campaign chairman’s attempt to mount a public relations campaign to defend himself while under house arrest ‘raises serious concerns about his trustworthiness.'”
“Writing in Microsoft Word, Manafort changed several sections of the essay, going line-by-line for over 30 minutes on the night of Nov. 29, court papers show.”
“Each change was tracked in the document, which prosecutors later compared to talking points Manafort drafted last year to respond to news reports about his consulting work in Ukraine. They found they mirrored his edits, and appeared to show he had a ‘public relations campaign’ in mind to help his case.”
A new SurveyMonkey poll finds that “minor differences in the methods used to model or select the likely electorate produce wildly varying estimates in Alabama. Data collected over the past week, with different models applied, show everything between an 8 eight percentage point margin favoring Jones and a 9 percentage point margin favoring Moore.”
“The same survey data also reveal the underlying tensions behind the volatile results: Alabama Democrats are angry and energized, while a significant but critical minority of Republicans are conflicted between a nominee they dislike and a President they support.”
“Jones leads by wide margins when we simply ask voters if they plan to vote… An alternative, which favors Moore, defines likely voters as those with a self-reported history of voting in lower turnout elections.”
Juliet Huddy, a former Fox & Friends Weekend anchor, told a radio show that Donald Trump once tried to kiss her on the lips unexpectedly after a business lunch.
“As Trump said goodbye to her in the elevator, in the presence of his security guard, he leaned in and tried to kiss her on the lips.”
Said Huddy: “I was surprised that he went for the lips.”
A few years later, Trump appeared on her syndicated show and off-air, to a studio audience Trump laughed about the pass in the elevator: “I tried hitting on her but she blew me off.”
KMSP-TV overheard Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) — just hours before his resignation from Congress — talking to someone on the phone about setting up a $2 million political action committee to go after the issue of the filibuster.
When confronted, Franks refused to discuss the issue.
“For the first time in American politics, anonymous ‘dark money’ political donations could become tax-deductible. That’s if a provision currently being debated between House and Senate negotiators makes it into the final tax bill,” CNN reports.
“The issue at hand started with the ‘Johnson Amendment,’ named after then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson’s 1954 measure that prohibits nonprofit groups who maintain tax-exempt status, including churches and charities, from directly participating in politics.”
“But efforts to repeal the Johnson Amendment have resulted in language that would ease political speech rules for all nonprofits. The results, critics say, could effectively let people deduct de-facto political donations and further hide those donations and spending from the public.”
The Treasury Department paid $220,000 in a previously undisclosed agreement to settle a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment that involved Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), according to documents obtained by Roll Call.
Washington Post: “Before Ronna Romney McDaniel took over as Republican National Committee chairwoman earlier this year, President Trump had a request: Would she be willing to stop using her middle name publicly? Though she had used her maiden name for years in Michigan, where her grandfather had been governor, McDaniel dropped ‘Romney’ from most official party communications and has rarely used it since.”
“The moment offers a window on Trump’s complicated and often tense relationship with Mitt Romney.”
“Those tensions were on display again this week, when White House aides scripted a trip to Utah with a single political goal in mind: to convince Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) to run for reelection and thwart Romney from mounting his own bid for the seat, according to a senior White House official involved in the preparations.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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