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posted by fyngyrz on Thursday April 12 2018, @08:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the they're-all-ryan-through-their-smiles dept.

Many media outlets are saying "Paul Ryan Retires" (For example, Vox's original headline.) This doesn't mean he won't still be there until the new Congress is seated in January 2019.

Vox reports:

More and more Republicans are looking at how the 2018 elections are shaping up and deciding they want no part of them--with Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) just the latest to announce they won't run for reelection this year.

This makes 25 House Republicans and three GOP senators who are calling it quits, not counting several more who are stepping down to run for another political office (or who have already resigned). That's the highest such number[1] for just one party in decades.

Revealingly, only nine House Democrats and zero Democratic senators have so far made the same choice. (Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota resigned due to scandal, but his seat has already been filled by Tina Smith, who will run this fall.) That's a dramatic discrepancy.

Though the explanations offered for these decisions differ, and though many of these GOP-held seats are in no real danger of flipping to Democrats, these retirements are revealing how members of Congress currently view the national political environment. That is: they think there's a real possibility of a Democratic wave.

But the trend is more meaningful even than that. These very retirements could help make such a wave even bigger, because it's generally easier for the opposition party to flip open seats than it is to knock off incumbents.

[...] According to FiveThirtyEight's numbers,[2] the only time in the past 40 years there's been a bigger partisan discrepancy in [the who's not running for reelection stats] was 2008, which turned out to be a Democratic wave year.


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @06:21PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @06:21PM (#666087)

    Many billionaires spend a lot of their time trying to make even more money.

    Sure, and many do not. Very many of them switch from "earning" to "burning" when they get old. Bill Gates is a recent example. He was obsessed with getting his billions, but now he runs around spending it. A much older example would be Carnegie.

    Trump is old. The pattern fits.

    There are old interviews going back into the 1980s that show him with the same sort of patriotism we see today. The man is legit.

    Meanwhile, the main alternative somehow got 65 million while doing modestly-paid government work as a senator and as the secretary of state. Hmmmm. Clearly, that was an unsatisfied and corrupt person seeking to abuse the presidency to make money. The country dodged a bullet there.

    There's reason to think Trump's claims that he's a billionaire aren't actually true

    There is more reason to think it is true. Third-party estimates suggest he was at 4 billion prior to the election, and has since dropped to 3 billion.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @08:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @08:07PM (#666139)

    You are a fool.
    Gates has never done anything that wasn't about profit.
    He's heavily invested and is making sure that those investments are going to pay off.
    Every "giveaway" he makes comes with stipulations that enriches a corporation in which he has lots of stock.

    Carnegie

    After years of abuse of The Working Class, trying to do damage control by putting your name on everything is sight isn't charity either.
    WRT to the my-name-on-stuff thing, Carnegie and Trump have a lot in common.

    secretary of state

    Yup. Killery getting $150k per speech is clearly payback from Wall Street.
    The Clinton's foundation isn't about charity either.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]