Chuck Todd

The lawmakers are doing it. The candidates are doing it. The mass media are doing it. All are excluding from their arenas the leading citizen groups as never before, since the early nineteen sixties. The nonprofit national advocacy/research organizations that led the way for social reforms are being shut out of the political process. These groups were pioneers in consumer rights, environmental protections, labor rights, and whistle-blower protections.

Even if Trump loses the presidency and the Democrats hold the House, McConnell will still be able to block a progressive agenda if the GOP holds the Senate— or even a strong minority in the Senate. The Republicans are fighting to hold onto a majority and they will have all the money in the world to do just that. One screw up would be not being able to win back the Alabama Senate seat they narrowly lost to Doug Jones when Trump named Jeff Sessions Attorney General and then Republican voters nominated extremist and— worse for some GOP voters— child molester Roy Moore to replace Sessions.

SCAM-ALERTElizabeth Warren was in tiny Kermit, West Virginia yesterday, where she and her message were warmly received. The media dubbed it Trump Country. Politico's story headed it like this: Trump backers applaud Warren in heart of MAGA country. And it is true that Mingo County voters went strongly for Trump in November of 2016.

Cook's Amy Walter framed Biden's misguided run for the presidency slightly different from my own preference to hearken directly back to Warren G Harding's Return to Normalcy campaign; hers is Restoration Versus Revolution.

Last month, Chuck Todd's team at NBC News posed 10 questions that they were looking for Mueller to answer.

A few days ago, the Cook Report published a piece by Amy Walter about the 2020 prospects of a Blue Wall, basically that "the 'easiest' or least risky electoral path for the Democratic nominee in 2020 is to reconstruct the so-called 'Blue Wall' in the industrial midwest. If the Democratic nominee wins every state Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, plus Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, that Democrat would win 278 electoral votes-- eight more than the 270 needed to win.

No love lost, but late yesterday, Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey, wrote that Señor Trumpanzee's management of the shutdown, which they are kind enough to remind us is his first foray in divided government, has exposed as never before his shortcomings as a self-proclaimed great dealmaker.

Rolling Stone's politics guy, Matt Taibbi welcomed the new version of the Weekly Standard (RIP), The Bulwark by noting that "Neoconservatives, the architects of the War on Terror, are the political version of Jason in Friday the 13th: You can never bank on them being completely dead. They just hide under a log until the next funder appears."

21st Century Wire says…
All the proof you need of the media losing their minds over their own craven ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory coverage.

Maybe Trump will find solace tomorrow tangoing in the arms of his Russian master, but everything at home is collapsing around his ears-- as should be expected by the country when someone of Trump’s calibre and lack of preparation, apptitude and qualifications is elected (sort of) to the highest office in the land-- and then allowed, by a supine Congress, to run amuck.