"Do you want them [the Senate] to drop everything and not confirm the Supreme Court justice?" Rep. Devin Nunes said at a recent fundraiser

By Phil Helsel @ MSNBC.com, Aug. 8

Hard-line conservative Republicans in the House recently hit a roadblock in their effort to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein when Speaker Paul Ryan opposed the move. But one of those conservatives, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., gave a different explanation to donors recently when asked why the impeachment effort had stalled.

He said it's because an impeachment would delay the Senate's confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, made the statement in an audio recording surreptitiously made by a member of a progressive group who attended a Republican fundraiser on July 30 in Spokane, Washington. The recording was obtained by The Rachel Maddow Show and was played on MSNBC on Wednesday night [....]

A number of analyses of the Ohio special election results — including the one offered by your humble blogger earlier today — focused on the outsize energy in the suburbs of Columbus, where Democrat Danny O’Connor ran up large vote totals, something that bodes well for Democratic chances this fall.

But it’s also worth taking a quick look at how O’Connor performed in some of the rural, exurban counties, because that sheds a bit of light on an argument that’s simmered among Democrats over how to win back working class whites.

O’Connor was able to keep the race within a point in a district that Donald Trump carried by 11 points largely due to the suburban surge. But what also helped was that he improved to some degree on Hillary Clinton’s performance in some of the more blue collar, small town counties as well.

.......

I asked pollster,Jason McGrath, whose firm GB Strategies did O’Connor’s polling, how he did this. McGrath told me that one important ingredient was a focus on jobs, health care, and infrastructure spending.

McGrath noted that one reason for the improvement was that Republican turnout in these areas was lackluster, while the (much smaller) number of Democratic voters in them were more galvanized. But he also said O’Connor had been able to win over some independent voters who supported Trump and moderate Republicans with a focus on issues.

“We had to run on real issues and be grownups and talk about things that matter to people,” McGrath said.

To be sure, these O’Connor gains in tough areas didn’t really upend the larger pattern we’ve been seeing in the Trump era. As Ron Brownstein demonstrates, this race showed that Trump continues to deepen the polarization between suburban/urban areas on the one hand, and exurban/rural areas on the other. Once again, the Republican ran up huge, Trumpy totals in blue collar white strongholds, especially relative to Mitt Romney’s totals among them in 2012, while losing ground relative to Romney in more educated, suburban, white collar areas.

But still, O’Connor did improve on Clinton’s performance in some of these areas, even if it may not have been enough to win. O’Connor’s approach carried echoes of another Democrat who pulled off a huge upset in Trump country — Conor Lamb in western Pennsylvania. Lamb emphasized jobs, unions, and social insurance to prevail in hostile territory.

O’Connor ran ads that vowed to rebuild infrastructure, made a personal case for improving access to health care, and argued that congressional Republicans are doing nothing for “working families.”

The route to a Democratic House majority probably will have to run through many more educated and suburban districts. But for Democrats, the map is also getting broader because they are putting some districtswith a lot of working class white voters in play. Democrats have been consumed in an argument over how to reach out to working class whites without backing off their commitment to minority rights and immigrants. In this district, Republicans worked hard to tar the Democrat as the party of crime and open borders. In the face of these attacks, O’Connor stressed a bread-and-butter Democratic message about jobs, infrastructure, and health care.

The fact that he came so close in Trump country will mean that other Democratic candidates will be looking at his approach to winning back these voters, even if doesn’t look like it was quite enough.

Greg Sargent, WaPo, earlier this afternoon.

By Niv Ellis @ TheHill.com, Aug. 8

The federal deficit jumped 20 percent in the first 10 months of the 2018 fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported Wednesday. Spending outpaced revenue between the beginning of the fiscal year, on Oct. 1, and July by $682 billion, $116 billion more than over the same period in the last fiscal year.

The rising deficit is largely the result of the tax cuts President Trumpsigned into law at the end of last year, as well as a bipartisan agreement to boost spending, according to CBO.

Tax revenues from individuals rose, even as revenues from corporate taxes dropped.

The Trump administration has argued that the tax cuts would bring down the deficit, as economic growth led to higher tax revenue. The economy did expand in the second quarter by 4.1 percent [....]

By Alan Feuer and Shane Goldmacher @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 8

Representative Chris Collins, a New York Republican who was one of President Trump’s earliest and most vocal supporters, was charged with insider trading on Wednesday. He was accused of tipping off his son and others to sell stock in an Australian pharmaceutical company before the results of one of its failed drug tests became public, federal prosecutors said.

The charges against Mr. Collins stem from his involvement with Innate Immunotherapeutics Limited, a drug maker based in Sydney, Australia, whose primary business was the research and development of a medication designed to treat a form of multiple sclerosis, according to an indictment [....]

The culture wars are coming for the best utopian project of the early internet. Can it survive the informational anarchy that’s disrupted the rest of media?

By Alexis C. Madrigal @ TheAtlantic.com,  Aug. 7

The ever-widening maelstrom surrounding tweets by Sarah Jeong, the latest hire by the New York Times editorial board, may consume all the atoms in the known universe, and as Wikipedia is of this world, it, too, must be a place to immortalize (or attempt to immortalize) Jeong as racist. [...] After her hiring, these tweets were picked up by right-wing media as proof of her “racism.” The battle over including these tweets in her Wikipedia bio has been the subject of a brutal edit war, which is like a grim national-politics-level recapitulation of the old, funny Wikipedia wars about cow-tipping, hummus, and Nikola Tesla.

Wikipedia’s internal rules guide debates about what content belongs in articles, and how events can be described. These rules are arcane and quite specific to Wikipedia. For example, Wikipedians maintain that they must maintain an NPOV, or Neutral Point of View. They value certain sources over others. They try to stay away from “presentism.” They’ve tried to create objective standards (of importance, say) for including facts about people [....]

Baba Ramdev built a business empire out of mass yoga camps and ayurvedic products. But is his pious traditionalism a mask for darker forces?

By Robert F. Worth, feature for NYTimes Sunday Magazine, July 24

[....] Ramdev has been compared to Billy Graham, the Southern Baptist firebrand who advised several American presidents and energized the Christian right. The parallel makes some sense: Ramdev has been a prominent voice on the Hindu right, and his tacit endorsement during the landmark 2014 campaign helped bring Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power. He appeared alongside Modi on several occasions, singing the leader’s praises and urging Indians to turn out for him. Ramdev has called Modi “a close friend,” and the prime minister publicly lauds Patanjali’s array of ayurvedic products — medicines, cosmetics and foodstuffs. Although Modi campaigned heavily on promises to reform India’s economy and fight corruption, there were frequent dog whistles to the Hindu nationalist base, some of them coordinated with Ramdev. A month before Modi’s landslide victory, a trust controlled by Ramdev released a video in which senior leaders of Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), including the current ministers of foreign affairs, internal security, finance and transportation, appeared alongside him with a signed document setting out nine pledges. These included the protection of cows — animals held sacred in Hinduism — and a broad call for Hindu nationalist reforms of the government, the courts, cultural institutions and education. After Modi won, Ramdev claimed to have “prepared the ground for the big political changes that occurred.”

But Ramdev is far more than a useful holy man. Even beyond his political patrons, Ramdev is the perfect messenger for a rising middle class that is hungry for religious assertion and fed up with the socialist, rationalist legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-independence leader. Ramdev has led vastly popular campaigns against corruption, donning the mantle of swadeshi, or Indian economic nationalism, to cast foreign companies as neocolonial villains. In a sense, Ramdev has changed Hinduism itself. His blend of patriotic fervor, health and religious piety flows seamlessly into the harder versions of Hindu nationalism, which are often openly hostile to India’s 172 million Muslims [....]