Monday Mood [DOT 25/3/24]

25/3/24 MegMegMcGee 33

Hope everyone had a nice weekend. I went on a spring cleaning rampage but other than that nothing too exciting. How about you guys?

Weakened House GOP majority reckons with Johnson’s leadership
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/24/house-speaker-johnson-spending-complaints/

Here’s what happens if Trump can’t get a $464 million bond
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/24/politics/what-happens-trump-civil-fraud-bond/index.html

You guys I figured out how he can pay for it…

Mega Millions and Powerball combined at $1.9bn is ‘one of the largest’ jackpots
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/24/mega-millions-powerball-lotteries-largest-jackpots

Stonks!

It’s been four years since the market’s Covid low with the S&P 500 returning 25% annualized since
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/23/its-been-four-years-since-the-markets-covid-low-with-the-sp-500-returning-25percent-annualized-since.html

Sprots!

Houston gives top 8 seeds clean sweep to Sweet 16, holding off Aggies 100-95

https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/recap/_/gameId/401638626

We had some wild weather this weekend but the blossoms are hanging on…

Have a great day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

33 Comments

    • Every one of these articles is an alibi. They never, ever think they have anything to do with it.

      I noticed that Frank Luntz, the guy their Opinion Section hired to run supposedly unbiased, honest focus groups, just attacked Chuck Todd. Luntz, by the way, was Newt Gingrich’s PR guru for Contract on (for) America.

      Luntz pulled out the “I listen to people even when I disagree with them” cheapshot on Todd, who to his credit listed legitimate reason after reason why Ronna Romney McDaniel couldn’t be trusted to talk straight to NBC audiences. Luntz knew he had to give it the false framework because reality would bite him hard.

      And that’s the Times’ game in a nutshell. Instead of waking up to the game, like Todd belatedly did, they go the Frank Luntz route and double down on “objectivity” which is nothing more than normalization of the worst people in the world.

      • “Voters think…” followed by giant paragraph where there’s a link to a Times story about the named issue in every single sentence. Gee, why would voters think that?

        I was shocked at the level of backbone shown by NBC reporters to the Not Romney hiring over the weekend. Wouldn’t have assumed Chuck Todd had that in him, to be quite honest.

      • …based on not altogether dissimilar people I’ve run across in person from time to time…I think that framing sort of overlooks the part where*for those people* it can be a sincere conviction that the things they say accurately convey the reality…& that *for them* their experience confirms rather than denies that perspective

        …they think *they’re* the ones with the secret decoder ring

        …I happen to think they’re wrong…but mostly because I think assuming there’s only one of those decoder rings that’s right in the first place is tying your mental shoelaces together before you try to walk your talk…& that does rather tend to result in a face plant at some point when you try to cover too much ground between keeping your feet on the ground

        …but that’s the joy of implicit bias…we never notice when we’re the ones doing it until we’re wiping mud off our face…whereas from further off it’s comically obvious to observers?

  6. I’m curious to see how quickly the State of New York moves on Trump’s assets. I read one analysis that opined they might hold back a bit to avoid looking … vengeful? That’s not the right word but I can’t turn up the article now. Of course, Trump would never viciously attack someone who held him to account, so it’s best for NY to be courteous, right?

    • It’s complicated because every property is enmeshed in partnerships and has financing with other companies which have claims. But unlike what some writers say, complicated isn’t impossible. Governments do this kind of thing all the time.

      One thing to remember is that even though Trump had a long time to be prepared for this event and screwed around doing things like hiring joke lawyers, the state has had a long time to do their homework. They have had an independent expert overseeing the Trump “empire” and they’ve had access to his records for a long time.

      This isn’t like a bank taking back a house after the owner failed to pay the mortgage, and the bank having no idea what the owner did to the house, like flooding the basement and raising alligators. NY state already knows what it wants and where to find it.

      Trump gets hurt worse the more messed up the process becomes and the more properties get tangled up between competing claims, because that hurts his ability to use them as collateral or refinance. The state can just keep plugging away.

      • …it’s true government does it all the time…asset forfeiture is totally a thing…& when it’s some gangbanger’s tricked out hummer bought with meth money…folks mostly don’t think that’s a particularly unfair thing

        …even if it’s the feds not the state

        …but if you’re struggling to keep the family farm in business & some developer has a massively subsidized green energy farm they’re setting up but haven’t got hooked to the grid yet…& they get a strip of your property condemned under eminent domain so they can have a corridor of pylons or whatever…or just lots of maintenance trucks & heavy equipment moving through there

        …there’s some distinctions you might stop seeing between the one thing & the other…& what might be fair…mainly to you

        …& if that sort of sentiment can be kept in the zone

        …add the usual move/counter loop of legalese & only one side doesn’t care about the feedback eclipsing the signal with noise…so I think despite the way all this drags along so slowly…it’s premature to be claiming the prosecution hasn’t got its act together…we haven’t amassed that kind of quantity of tea leaves yet as far as I can make out?

        • This is true but also the people who likely have stakes on Don Poorleone’s properties are also way more likely to fight the government taking them (and probably have both deeper pockets and better connections to make the fight if not fair, at least interesting.)’

          That said, nothing would be funnier than the government being like “Nope, it’s ours” and suddenly Vlad Putin’s bag man and MBS show up in Albany being like “Actually, that’s ours.” At the very least, it would be quite clarifying!

          • Part of it depends on what the state’s approach is. A lot of times for seizures of property, the state goes in knowing that they’ll never get the assessed value, and they just cut deals to make the disposal go as easily as possible, even when they take a haircut.

            If they seize a used car lot, they may well hold a one day auction, take what they can on individual cars in high demand, and then sell off the rest of the fleet as a unit for a lot less than what they might get if they stretched out the process for another year.

            With Trump it’s possible they have options to go to partners and tell them they can choose – make a decent offer, or risk the state dumping the share on someone the other partner doesn’t want to work with. The state might only get fifty cents on the dollar of assessed value, but it avoids a lot of the litigation.

            I’m sure it’s a pain to sort out, but they’ve known since Engoron issued the summary judgment six months ago that they could expect to go after a big chunk of what they wanted, even if they didn’t know the full figure. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have some easy claims already scoped out as they’re figuring out how to get the bulk of what they’re owed. They don’t have to get it all at once.

            • …all of which would be solidly in the sort of weeds the court may very well concern itself with…but the point I was making wasn’t about that side of the equation

              …& whichever way you mix those permutations makes effectively zero odds to the sort of person prepared to stop at the point where as far as they’re concerned what’s being done to their chosen effigy champion is “just like what they done to poor [insert name here] over the way”…then you can keep flogging tickets to the show you want them to flock to

              …as yet it’s unclear to me how…although I’m prepared to believe they’ve found a way…one threads the needle to get the money from somewhere…have that somewhere actually take a chunk out of his financial standing…which is the point of the penalty…to be something he feels…doesn’t make it easy to paint it as a form of over-reach…doesn’t allow him to derail it with a technical bankruptcy curve-ball…& doesn’t take approximately forever to bounce its way along to the point where the SC(R)OTUS weigh in to let us know what the end result looks like

              …particularly if by then it’s all academic since he’s somehow gotten away with the incredibly shady (& probably properly-speaking actually illegal) SPAC thing…so a half-bill ain’t even enough to make him wobble…much less fall down?

              …mind you…again…none of that would be remotely relevant to the sort of support that responds to his framing of his legal woes since it bears scant resemblance to the picture they think they see as clear as day right in front of their nose?

    • My hope is that they have everything ready to go and are just waiting for the clock to tick midnight. Even then, Trump will likely throw another delay tactic in the works which will push the seizure off until who the fuck knows when.

      • That kind of reduction in the face of all of the trial evidence of his fraud is pretty stupid.

        On the other hand, they left in the place the ban on borrowing from NY State financial institutions, which his lawyers said was critical to getting his bond. Who knows if his lawyers were telling the truth or just complaining, of course. The question remains, if he has a white knight, why didn’t they show up already? Maybe Trump was always safe, but he’s cutting it awfully close.

        Trump’s preliminary hearing in the Stormy Daniels case didn’t go well today, and his lawyer was chastised by the judge. I’m not sure if that’s a lawyer problem or a client problem, or both.

        • Both, I would imagine. Topflight attorneys don’t work with Trump. And Trump is a legal nightmare, since he refuses to shut up, no matter how much damage his words do to his own situation. So it’s a lethal combination of incompetent legal advice and a dementia-fueled torrent of bullshit from Trump.

          This is an interesting “put up or shut up” moment. Can Trump actually pay $175 million? My suspicion is no. He lied about his liquid assets (as a general rule, it’s accurate to assume everything Trump says is a lie) and I wonder if he can post that bond. Mostly likely this will kick off another round of wrangling and begging.

          • They gave him ten days to get the bond, which isn’t a lot of time, and after that my understanding is he’s in trouble. Which means the wrangling starts now.

            It’s possible this is enough to let him find someone who will help with the bond. Two E. Jean Carroll bond payments may be easier to swing than five.

             

  7. Congressman Andy Kim, the guy who was photographed cleaning up the trash on his own that was left by the 1/6 rioters, took on the political machine of the NJ Democrats and won the nomination to the Senate race. The governor’s wife, Tammy Murphy, dropped out after grassroots Democrats rebelled and backed Kim for the Menendez seat.

     

  9. Excellent burn by Steve Schmidt via one of the links above:

    Rebecca Blumenstein arrived from the world’s largest word puzzle company, The New York Times, just over a year ago.

    Indeed, the NY Times Sunday puzzle is enjoyable.

  10. This is a decent explainer on the Ronna Romney McDaniel mess:

    https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/25/nbc-ronna-mcdaniel-chuck-todd-00148772

    NBC News execs Carrie Budoff Brown and Rebecca Blumenstein seem to have been the prime movers, and they failed to consult people downstream except for MSNBC head Rashida Jones.

    The execs for some reason liked RRM, having courted her for GOP debate hosting rights after CNN’s Chris Licht got the Trump town hall. Which of course is a weird decision, considering how that town hall was a disaster for CNN and helped lay the groundwork for Licht’s canning.

    RRM didn’t even do NBC a big favor because she insisted MSNBC couldn’t simulcast the debate.

    After RRM was dumped at the RNC, she signed with the talent agency CAA who shopped her around to networks. It clearly wasn’t a case of having an open slot that needed filling, execs just took the pitch.

    News staff quickly pointed out that RRM isn’t even a good option for what execs supposedly wanted. She has bad connections with the congressional GOP and she’s bad with anti-Trump conservatives. And of course she was forced out by Trump from the RNC.

    I’d add that she’s not even a good on-air talent.

    It seems awfully clear that these execs are living in a fantasy land, unable to understand the realities of GOP politics, incapable of navigating internal politics, and substituting personal feelings about people for any serious analysis of what audiences want.

    I don’t think they’re atypical of news execs, either.

    • My initial impression was that the NBC execs were trying to siphon off Fox News viewers. Fox News is a cesspool, but it’s got reliable ratings. But as you note, bringing in someone that Trump “fired” isn’t going to make headway with MAGA chuds.

      • It never works! They keep hiring stiffs like Corey Lewandowski and Mick Mulvaney and get on air failures who don’t even get good intel. They do it for Democrats too.

        Viewers just don’t care that someone has a vaguely recognizable name. They want good communicators with interesting information, but when execs don’t have a sense for any of this, they lose both ratings and trust.

Leave a Reply