Quick with a quip Stephanie Rhule ad libed the best Kari Lake put-down

Quick with a quip Stephanie Rhule ad libed the best Kari Lake put-down

and has a delightful exchange with Gov-elect Wes Moore from Maryland 

by Hal Brown

One of the benefits of living in Oregon is that I don't have to stay up until 11:00PM to watch Late Night with Stephanie Ruhle which airs at 11:00 PM on the east coast. It is on at 8:00 here.

I was watching in bed last night and I was dozing off so I missed a great ad lib about Kari Lake. It wasn't until I saw the story about it on RAWSTORY this morning that I played the video (here).

The quip comes just before three minutes on the video.

Here's the ad lib in context:

Ruhle wondered if Lake would be flying to Mar-a-Lago to appear at the event with Trump. (guest Tim) Miller recalled that many of the Lake supporters were saying that she was on the VP train and would likely end up in consideration for Trump's running mate. 

"She can be the VP of catering services at Mar-a-Lago," quipped Ruhle.

This begs the question as to whether Lake even would have the chops to be VP of catering at Mar-a-Lago. It may be a job beyond her capabilities.

Now let me praise Stephanie Ruhle who I consider to be the best regular evening MSNBC host since Rachel Maddow left.

Ruhle breaks the stereotype of a financial expert nerd.  She was a drastic personality change from Brian Williams who she replaced at The 11th Hour. 

She is an incisive interviewer who rarely goes through a show without interjecting a witticism. She is not shy about expressing her own opinions.

I've seen her confront an evasive interview subject with one or another version of an eyebrow raised version of "oh come on, you don't really believe what you're saying" which conveys "you've got to be shitting me" quite clearly.

Click above to watch video

Last night she delighted in watching Wes Moore, the amiable governor-elect of Maryland who won an overwhelming victory, masterfully handle her when she wouldn't relent in pressing him on aspirations for higher office when he gave stock answers about only thinking about what he wanted to do for Maryland as governor. I can see her thinking "I'm going to have some fun with this man" who she clearly was impressed with

She knew what he was doing and that he could easily have demurred and said that he was only human and sometimes had thoughts about how his political life would develop long term. Truth is that he would make a great candidate for the Senate, president or vice president as he proves himself as a highly effective governor even a decade from now.

About Stephanie Ruhle from Wikipedia:

•  She is a graduate of Lehigh University where she earned her bachelor’s degree in international business.  
• Prior starting her journalism career at joining Bloomberg News, Ruhle spent 14 years working in the finance industry.  
• She's Senior Business Analyst for NBC News and was one of three Bloomberg reporters who broke the story of the London Whale, identifying the trader behind the 2012 JPMorgan Chase trading loss.
• She founded the Corporate Investment Bank (CIB) Women's Network and co-chaired the Women on Wall Street (WOWS) steering committee.  
• In 2003, Ruhle joined Deutsche Bank as a credit salesperson covering hedge funds. She ended her eight-year career there as a managing director in Global Markets Senior Relationship Management.  
• While at Deutsche Bank, Ruhle founded the Global Market Women's Network to help women move into leadership roles at the company.

I suggested Trump took documents so he could have the ultimate trophy room back in August

Above: Elvis earned all of these trophies.

Now the talk is all about this report about why Trump may have taken the documents. 

Basically the Post reports the following:

Federal agents and prosecutors have come to believe former president Donald Trump’s motive for allegedly taking and keeping classified documents was largely his ego and a desire to hold on to the materials as trophies or mementos, according to people familiar with the matter.

I thought of this and posted about it in August when I was still allowed to write on Daily Kos. This is what I wrote:

A psychological reason Trump might have stolen the top secret documents

By Hal Brown

There’s plenty of speculation as to why Trump wanted to bring top secret documents home to Mar-a- Lago. I have yet to hear one that isn’t nefarious.  These include his wanting to sell them to foreign adversaries or curry favor with them, but I am posing a different reason just as consistent with his personality. If he wanted to use them to benefit himself in the former way it speaks to his being a traitorous sociopath. I suggest another possiblity. It is based on another aspect of his psychology. This is that he may have wanted to use them as trophies, either to enjoy by himself or to show off to select mucky-mucks who he wanted to impress. This speaks to his over-the-top pathological grandiose narcissism.

If he didn’t take them for evil reasons I lean towards his wanting to show them off because I don’t see Trump as the kind of wealthy person who is like the collector of illegally obtained fine art which he keeps in a vault where he enjoys just sitting by himself enjoying the work of the masters only he is able to look at.

I can see Trump trying to impress a guest, perhaps a foreign leader, a business magnate, sports star, or celebrity and taking them into his trophy room as saying “do you want to see some nuclear documents? I could have started World War III with these.”  Alternatively he could have said “I could have lost World War III with these.”

Trump most likely knew he wasn’t allowed to take home gifts from foreign leaders to show off to his pals but figured that showing these off was no big deal (see From chess sets to model jets, foreign leaders lavish gifts on Trump White House) compared to flashing a document labeled Top Secret with the locations of our nuclear submarines on it. For example Chinese President Xi Jinping gave Trump a paper panel with five columns of calligraphy, valued at $14,400, that’s a big ho-hum.

Of course I may be totally wrong here, but then again sometimes a simple explanation is the right one. Both reasons are consistent with who we know Trump is.

My possible, emphasis on the word possible, reason is not as newsworthy as those being suggested. It doesn’t paint him as an evil traitor. In fact while it might be embarrassing to him to offer this as a defense should the case end up in court, it might be offered to exculpate him. It would be a kind of “not guilty by reason of pathological narcissism.”

On a personal note, I was friends with Biggie Munn’s daughter Jane when he was the athletic director of Michigan State University. She showed me the trophy room he had in his beautifully furnished basement. The walls of the room were lined with shelves and displays of fancy trophies which he or his teams had won dating back to when he was an All-American at the University of Minnesota through his coaching career, to when he eventually became athletic director at MSU. In one way or another he earned each and every one of them. None of them were stolen.

Georgia gave us REM and The B-52s, delicious peaches, yummy Vidalia onions, and now may give us a historic Senate

By Hal Brown

Archives are on the right

This story is dedicated to my dear friend who lives in a town of 200 which is about 20 miles south of, and 200 years back in time, from Athens, Georgia.

Georgia has pleased the pallet of the nation with delicious peaches and Vidalia onions, and rocked out with Athens based bands REM and the B-52s

 Less known nationally is that way back in 1987 a group of Athens residents who attended a forum on AIDS at the University of Georgia in February 1987. The group initiated AIDS Athens which is still active today (website here). The year is significant. Consider this from the CDC Museum website:

 The first year of the AIDS epidemic seemed isolated to a few individuals in a few cities, so it received little media attention. When cases were reported in infants and people with hemophilia, widespread panic struck Americans. Those with AIDS were often stigmatized. In 1985, Ryan White, a teenage hemophiliac living in Indiana, contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. Parents in his community feared he would expose their children to AIDS, resulting in Ryan being barred from attending school.

In 1986, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop issued the Surgeon General’s Report on AIDS. In it, he called for a comprehensive program of sex and AIDS education, urged the widespread use of condoms, and dispelled myths that HIV could be spread by mosquitoes. In 1987, CDC launched an unprecedented national campaign, America Responds to AIDS (ARTA). The goal of ARTA was to increase awareness and understanding of AIDS, to prevent HIV infection, and to encourage people to seek more information and counseling. CDC also began a program to support HIV prevention efforts with national minority organizations that provided HIV prevention expertise to community-based organizations, developed HIV prevention programs targeting minorities, especially African Americans and Hispanics, and supported groups that used culturally sensitive AIDS prevention programs to address their communities’ needs.

I don't know if it was the first such organization in the nation but it certainly was among the first.

Of course Georgia also gave us Martin Luther King and Jimmy Carter.

Now we have something else that Georgia may give us thanks to the decisions by the state's Republican leadership to back Herschel Walker for Senate. They can read a pie chart:

Had they managed to find someone they thought could be a great male white to run against Senator Warnock they surely would have lost decisively 

As it happened thanks to a deviously disruptive independent running as a Libertarian by Oliver Chase there will now be a runoff election.

Now the Republicans are saddled by one of the worst Senate candidates in recent history. Not only is Walker woefully ignorant and beset with trying to deal with what one could call his women problem,  he is unstable and unpredictable. The GOP is saddled with a candidate prone to putting his hoof in his mouth, an impossible contortion for a horse but something Walker manages to do on a regular basis.

One obvious result of a Warnock win is that it will diminish the power Sen. Manchin has. It also has major ramifications for the appointment of judges, including Justices to the Supreme Court should a vacancy occur. This is from Reuters:

If Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock were to win the Dec. 6 Georgia runoff election against Republican challenger Herschel Walker, that would expand Democrats' majority to 51-49. That would give Democrats an additional edge in passing the few bills that are able to advance with a simple majority of votes, instead of the 60 needed for most legislation.

It would also dilute the influence of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin in West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona, "swing" votes who have blocked or delayed some of Biden's major initiatives, including expansions of some social programs.

I will leave it to the pundits to elaborate on what else a one seat advantage in the Senate will mean for legislation. One additional thing is that the power sharing agreement of a 50/50 split would no longer apply (read more). 

Suffice say it is so significant that the Republicans have no choice but to go all in on supporting Walker and holding their collective breath that he doesn't say something totally cray-cray or have an accusation leveled against him that he can't lie his way out of.

Update: News like this can't thrill Republicans:

Excerpt:

"Now let me tell you this here: If we was ready for the green agenda, I'd raise my hand right now," he said. "But we're not ready right now! So don't let them fool you like this is a new agenda, this is not a new agenda! We're not prepared, we're not ready right now! What we need to do is keep having these gas-guzzling cars, because we got the good emissions under those cars. We're doing the best thing that we can!"

This is not the first time that Walker has spoken confusingly about energy and environmental policy.

Earlier this year, for example, Walker seemed to suggest that China was taking America's "good air" and replacing it with "bad air."

"Since we don't control the air, our good air decided to float over to China's bad air, so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move," Walker said. "So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we got we to clean that back up."

See my related Walker story: