monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

It is going to have to be someone strong with absolutely nothing in his/her background.

Politics Group-Chat: What to Make of Roy Moore Winning the Alabama’s GOP Senate Race?

...Jon: As Ed has suggested in his coverage, the fact that Strange had to get to Moore’s right was a surrender of the major principle before a shot was fired. If you can’t attack a lunatic for being a lunatic, and you have to paint him as a liberal, your party is too far gone.

The elite, ambitious candidate, saying one thing on the stump but another to wealthy donors, willing to cede big dreams for incremental, pragmatic fixes … You recognize her, right? Of course you do. She’s Massachusetts Senator and progressive firebrand Elizabeth Warren, who in the past few weeks has co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’s new Medicare for All bill, introduced a bill to preempt state right-to-work laws, prepared to take on leaders of Wells Fargo and Equifax on the Senate floor … and been hit with a blast of right-wing messaging and mainstream news coverage that feels positively uncanny.

The playbook that the right is running against Warren — seeding early criticism designed to weaken her from the left — is pretty ballsy, given that Warren has been a standard-bearer, the crusading, righteous politician who by many measures activated the American left in the years before Bernie Sanders mounted his presidential campaign. Warren is the candidate who many cited in 2016 as the anti-Clinton: the outspoken, uncompromisingly progressive woman they would have supported unreservedly had she only run. Yet now, as many hope and speculate that she might run in 2020, the right is investing in a story line about Warren that is practically indistinguishable from the one they peddled for years about Clinton. And even in these early days, some of that narrative is finding its way into mainstream coverage of Warren, and in lefty reactions to it.

Someone thumbed you down; so, I gave you a thumbs up to bring it back up to 4.

Consider three main assumptions that the law grew up with. The first is an underlying premise of informational scarcity. For years, it was taken for granted that few people would be willing to invest in speaking publicly. Relatedly, it was assumed that with respect to any given issue — say, the war — only a limited number of important speakers could compete in the “marketplace of ideas.”27 The second notable assumption arises from the first: listeners are assumed not to be overwhelmed with information, but rather to have abundant time and interest to be influenced by publicly presented views. Finally, the government is assumed to be the main threat to the “marketplace of ideas” through its use of criminal law or other coercive instruments to target speakers (as opposed to listeners) with punishment or bans on publication.28 Without government intervention, this assumption goes, the marketplace of ideas operates well by itself.

Each of these assumptions has, one way or another, become obsolete in the twenty-first century, due to the rise in importance of attention markets and changes in communications technologies. It is to those phenomena that we now turn.

As to Sanders voters voting Trump, I'm not surprised. A lot of them have the political awareness of a fresh water clam. Sanders is, and always has been an independent. But he wanted to be president so badly he could taste it. So, sartor resartus, he becomes a Democrat. But was he ever really a Democrat? Not in my never humble opinion. Did he go on the stump for the party's standard bearer? Certainly not--and while that it is understandable in a crotchety old man, did he go on the stump for Senate candidates? No, he didn't. Did he go on the stump for House candidates? No, he did not. He did not deploy any of his considerable political capital to aid the Democratic Party.

And that's because he was not, and still is not a Democrat. He's just another typical opportunistic politician.