After incumbent Wisconsin governor Scott Walker lost re-election to Democrat Tony Evers last November, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a controversial bill stripping key powers away from both Evers and incoming Attorney General Josh Kaul. Under the new rules, ...read more
Republicans are many things. Honest is not one of them. For the past two years, they have been avoiding investigating Trump's numerous scandals and running interference in the investigations they couldn't avoid. They've gone from insisting that nothing happened to maybe ...read more
Last night, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft announced that he has launched an investigation into outgoing Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley, claiming that Hawley hired campaign staffers to run his office while using taxpayer dollars. Hawley ran for Attorney ...read more
Despite the Democrats' massive victory in the 2018 midterms, Republicans in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania - the three states that decided the 2016 election - are determined to hold on to power by any means. The GOP's bid to maintain power is so extreme they are willing ...read more
On Election Night, networks called California's 21st congressional district for incumbent Republican David Valadao over Democratic challenger TJ Cox. The district, which encompasses parts of Fresno as well as the Central Valley, the state's largest agricultural region, has not ...read more
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton's plan to oust assumed incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has always resembled what Bob Cesca calls the "Underpants Gnomes Model." This phrase, which comes from a South Park episode where the boys meet the legendary underpants gnomes, ...read more
Yesterday Democrat Gil Cisneros finally took the lead over Republican Young Kim to become the next representative from California's 39th district. The district, which encompasses Yorba Linda - home of the Nixon Library - had been held by retiring Republican Ed Royce since 2013 ...read more
Chuck Schumer was comfortably re-elected as Senate Minority Leader yesterday by the Democratic caucus, but a stunning New York Times exposé of Facebook reveals that he attempted to impede investigations into the tech giant. The story, which runs about 5,000 words and carries ...read more
No other Republican has done more damage to the United States than Mitch McConnell. In 2010, before he became Senate Majority Leader, he famously said his party's "top political priority should be to deny President Obama a second term." Once he became Majority Leader, he rammed ...read more
Since his inauguration, Donald Trump has challenged America's belief that its history was an upward trajectory, correcting past mistakes and rising towards Abraham Lincoln's "more perfect union." Other countries had experienced grave democratic crises, but we thought we were the ...read more
Early voting has been going on in Florida for more than a week now, and the results so far have been strong. Totals in Orange County and Lake County have favored Democrats and surpassed those set during the last midterm cycle in 2014. One million voters have shown up to vote ...read more
Texas, the second-biggest state in the nation, is a tantalizing brass ring for Democrats. It has not voted for a Democratic President since Jimmy Carter in 1976 and has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994. Its heavy Latino population makes it one of five ...read more
One of my least favorite traits about Democrats is that we tend to get dissatisfied with our leaders pretty quickly. In the year following Obama’s inaugural, major news outlets were already writing articles saying Obama was disappointing them, despite the fact that he hadn’t ...read more
Yesterday, NBC News ran a story that threatened to send fervent election-watchers into a downward spiral. Using data provided by TargetSmart, reporter Adam Edelman and the NBC News Data Analytics Lab said that Republicans were outpacing Democrats in early voting, which is now ...read more
A few weeks ago, Real Time host Bill Maher invited Steve Bannon onto his show, after he was disinvited from the New Yorker Festival. The interview was criticized by the left, just as Bannon's recent appearance in The Economist's festival and his documentary with Errol Morris, ...read more
There's a narrative conservatives (and sometimes the media) love to push when trying to explain away how people who say they don't support Trump still somehow can't stop themselves from blindly voting for Republicans: Yes, it's the "Why do you keep making me hit you?" defense ...read more
Today marks the one-year anniversary of The New York Times' report that brought down Harvey Weinstein, which effectively launched the #MeToo movement. The Republicans have decided to honor that by confirming an alleged sexual assaulter to the Supreme Court. Despite the thousands ...read more
There's an annoying habit among people to bitch and moan about "Congress" as if everything that's going wrong in our government is somehow the fault of all 100 Senators and all 435 congresspeople. People love to joke about how great it would be to just get rid of all of them. ...read more
Trump continues to draw out the darkest impulses of white Republican voters, egging them on to ever greater heights of depravity and cruelty. For conservatives who refuse to follow him down this path, they're left wondering what the fuck is happening to their fellow ...read more
Jonn Elledge of the New Statesman penned a humorous column about how 4-year-olds are not actually the little angels people seem to think they are but rather more like the Tories (the UK's answer to the GOP). After explaining "Theory of Mind", the ability to understand the world ...read more
“I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway's last and perhaps greatest story, The Old Man And The Sea keeps popping into my head as I watch Donald Trump and the congressional ...read more
In 2014, before he ran for President, Donald Trump said that America had become the laughing stock of the world. It was a theme he repeated over and over throughout his campaign: the rest of the world was laughing at us, and we had lost their respect. At the beginning of 2016, ...read more
There are only three areas of bipartisan consensus in America anymore: the sun is hot, water is wet, and Ted Cruz is a terrible person. Democrats have hated him since he was elected Senator in 2012, and Republicans haven't been much nicer - as Lindsey Graham said, "if you killed ...read more
The 2018 midterms are potentially America's last chance to hold Donald Trump and his corrupt administration to account. But now, they have also become a referendum on Brett Kavanaugh and the sham hearings Republicans have foisted upon us. There were many red flags against ...read more
Although the Brett Kavanaugh hearings will reopen on Monday, with Doctor Christine Blasey Ford testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the White House still refuses to ask the FBI to investigate her allegations of sexual assault and attempted rape, much to the ...read more
This weekend, Stanford Professor Christine Blasey Ford revealed that at 15, she was sexually assaulted by a then-17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, who held her down and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. If there was ever a moment to end this farce of a hearing and yank his ...read more
With the focus on Steve Bannon being disinvited from The New Yorker, there has been a flurry of hand-wringers on both the left and right asking why we can't engage the other side in debate. The answer is because people like Bannon, are so steeped in their own self-righteousness ...read more
This week, long shot Republican congressional candidate Jazmina Saavedra broadcast a Facebook live video from a Denny's in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she stalked a trans woman into the ladies' room and harassed her until she left. Saavedra, a Trump ...read more
Since the election of Donald Trump, Maxine Waters has become one of the most visible icons of the Resistance. Whether she's "shoving" TYT correspondent Michael Tracey, appearing on t-shirts with her catchphrase "reclaiming my time," or openly calling for impeachment following ...read more
When Lt. Col. Oliver North became NRA President yesterday, gun lovers throughout America welcomed their new leader. CEO Wayne LaPierre called him "a legendary warrior for American freedom, a gifted communicator and skilled leader" and Dana Loetsch praised him as "a total warrior ...read more
Yesterday, Reuters/IPSOS released a new poll that, if you believe the headlines, could mean trouble for Democrats in the 2018 midterms. The poll is accompanied by a look into the primary for New Hampshire's First District, where millennials appear wishy-washy as to which ...read more
Kanye West's recent statements make him appear like a permanent resident of the Sunken Place. The hip-hop giant recently got back on Trump's favorite social media outlet to send out a series of missives that have baffled his fanbase, most notably his praise for Candace Owens, an ...read more
Fareed Zakaria is rewriting history to give conservatism a pass. Rather than Trump being the natural evolution of Republicanism, he's now the "end" of Reagan's revolution, destroying the "libertarian" GOP and turning it into something ugly and crass: The Reagan redefinition of ...read more
Republicans are sad and bewildered at their ongoing failure to convince millions of Americans that the scant crumbs left over from the massive tax cuts they bestowed upon billionaires is actually a feast: More than three months after the passage of the GOP’s tax-cut law, new ...read more
I grew up in Los Angeles and now live in Brooklyn, so it's fair to assume that I live in "a bubble." However, I went to college at Northwestern University, right outside of Chicago, and even at a school whose political makeup was mostly center-left, we had quite a few ...read more
Tuesday's headlines were all about how Trump wants to change the Census to add a citizenship question: Trump’s Census Change Could Give the GOP an Advantage for Years to Come Trump Admin Makes Change To Census Experts Say Will Lead To Undercount Trump administration's census ...read more
It seems as if, for the moment, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, has had it with not just the GOP but conservatism as a whole. In a scathing editorial over the hiring of John Bolton as Trump's new national security adviser, Scarborough skips over the ...read more
Back in the 1960's the Republican Party went all in on "ratfucking", the practice of winning elections by any means necessary. They tricked people into voting on the wrong day. They fooled people into thinking a Democratic candidate was gay (this was the 60s) or a criminal or ...read more
Since repealing net neutrality last December, the FCC has faced significant pushback. In the federal government, Senators have introduced a resolution to overturn the decision. The governments of Montana, New York, and Hawaii have passed laws protecting consumers from ISPs that ...read more
While the kids in Parkland have been speaking out about the terror they experienced when one of their former classmates shot up their high school, conspiracies are being born and perpetuated by the most despicable among us. This, after the death of 17 people in yet another ...read more
We’ve fallen into this sad state of accepting the worst when it comes to what our President is going to do in times of emergency. Trump’s responses to horrific events always compound the situation -- and that’s exactly what’s been happening in the aftermath of the latest school ...read more
The school shooting in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 kids and terrorized an entire school. As a result, schools across America were reevaluating their lockdown drills and parent-run social media groups are having heated debates over teachers being armed. Meanwhile, videos from ...read more
UPDATE: Literally as I was posting this article, word came down that Justice Alito rejected the plea of the PA GOP to preserve their unconstitutional congressional map. Republicans are running out of legal options to forestall the loss of their precious map. Now we'll see if ...read more
The Banter Long Read: The current common wisdom is that the Democratic Party doesn't actually stand for anything other than running against Trump. The right wing says it. The Purity Left says it. The "liberal" media says it. So many people say it just has to be true. Except for ...read more
Roy Moore is going to be the next senator from Alabama. Believe it. Barring last minute divine intervention (unlikely) or a massive groundswell of anti-Moore voting (possible but I wouldn't bet on it), he's going to win by a few points. It won't be the kind of blowout victory he ...read more
“What I use in the battle for the mind Hit it hard like it supposed Pulling no blows to the nose” ...read more
(WARNING: SATIRE!) Deep into the strike by The International Association of Societal Bar Adjusters Hell, Inc. represented by the law firm of Asmodeus, Baphomet, and Schwartz filed an injunction to prevent the lowering of the Morality Bar any further. “While Hell sympathizes with ...read more
[SATIRE WARNING: THIS IS SATIRE. SORT OF...] Controversial Alabama Republican Senate Candidate and two time former State Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore released a how to guide on “courtship and feminine etiquette”. “I felt, with the way my name has been maligned in the media, ...read more
This last year has been hard for anyone with a working brain, given how every day under our Russian stooge of a President and the hypocrites in his party produces some new nightmare. But hope is not lost, as several organizations have risen to prominence to help us take back ...read more
The Banter Long Read: Yesterday, Miramax/The Weinstein Company co-founder Harvey Weinstein was fired effective immediately following the New York Times' report documenting the multiple allegations of sexual harassment against women and the years of cover-ups... To continue ...read more
