BC POLITICS
Saved by @SteveeRogerr

Thanks Stewart! Election day at CDU's conference is just beginning. Speeches by candidates Laschet, Merz, Röttgen start at 9:45 (Berlin time, so in 10 mins), then the 1,001 delegates begin voting at 11:10.

 First up is Armin Laschet, the continuity candidate. Key messages: US example of dangers of polarisation; CDU can't take "Merkel voters" for granted; change requires experience, trust and teamwork rather than just big ideas; namecheck for his more-popular running mate Jens Spahn.
Verdict: not a bad speech tbh, nicely organised around theme of trust and teamwork that marked his father's work as a miner; the warning about the dangers of polarisation captured Laschet's own strengths and the risk of electing Merz
Next up is Friedrich Merz, the right-wing veteran. Climate change, digitisation, ideas blah-blah [aka I'm not a blast from the past]; don't fear the future; "consensus and compromise" require more contest; CDU must return to the "real centre"; no left-wing majority in Germany.
Verdict: weak, weak, weak. No organising theme, no coherence, just buzzwords over substance. And coming from Merz, the (genuinely valid) case for more robust political debate in Germany just comes across as cynical and reactionary.
Last up is Norbert Röttgen, the moderniser. Key messages: Merkel good but party must turn to future; younger, greener, more female, more digital; beware risks of hate & populism; CDU can revive transatlantic relations (only one to nod to Biden); I can integrate CDU's tendencies
Verdict: lacked Laschet's folksy charm and narrative but easily the most convincing about the realities facing CDU and Germany
Now Q&A session, which is not entirely going according to plan... Painfully prolonged technical problems with one questioner (did someone mention digitisation?). And health minister Jens Spahn uses his question slot to deliver a political ad for his running mate Laschet.
Spahn's stunt is a risky move. He is popular and an asset to the Laschet ticket, and sought to remind CDU delegates of that, but some may take badly to his breaking with the supposed neutrality of the party conference.
Now for the voting...
We'll see if the delegates see it this way but the CDU's leadership conference - too male, too pale, digitally incompetent - is itself a ringing endorsement of Röttgen's argument about the party's need to move faster towards future.
Voting is over. Result of 1st round imminent...
Laschet: 380
Merz: 385
Röttgen: 224

992 delegates voted
Better than expected for Laschet, worst than expected for Merz. The two now go through to runoff round.
Röttgen's votes are expected to break towards Laschet, so this is now Laschet's to lose. 2nd round runoff voting has started.
Quick recap of who Armin Laschet is: folksy state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany's most populous); continuity candidate who supported Merkel's refugee policies; backed by much of CDU establishment; economically centrist; dovish on Russia and China
...but some questions as to whether he is really fit to be chancellor candidate. The alternatives are health minister Jens Spahn (Laschet's running mate, he of the Q&A stunt) and Bavarian state premier Markus Söder. Selection expected in spring.
2nd runoff round of voting over. Final result imminent...
Final CDU leadership result:

Laschet 521
Merz 466

Armin Laschet, state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, is new CDU leader and thus frontrunner to be the party's candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor at September general election.
Question now is whether he takes the CDU/CSU chancellor candidacy when that's decided in the spring. Focus on party's polling and particularly its performance at two key state elections in March. The alternatives are health minister Jens Spahn and Bavarian premier Markus Söder.
But notable and welcome that Merz, the worst of the possible candidates for 🇩🇪 and 🇪🇺, has been ruled out.
More on Laschet's win, and what comes next, on @NewStatesman shortly...
Armin Laschet: the personification of Rhineland joviality and Christian democratic consensus politics. But can he, should he, be the next chancellor of Germany?

My @NewStatesman piece on the new leader of the CDU:

https://t.co/yXgwygvfVi

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The Irish Border
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Let's track some of Donald Trump's solutions to problems: Give Hurricane victims paper towels (to sop it up), rakes to wildfire fighters (make America rake again), teaching kids to look at solar eclipses (they're too smart for that), and asking for global warming in cold winters.

This is the perfect asymptotic approach to the extremes of both Republican and Democratic rhetoric (which are both inevitably devoid of any sound logic) - you eventually get presidents like this. This is a warning call to dissolve the Republican and Democratic parties.

It seems to me our nation is now tossed between two insane extremes, bickering and arguing with each other, embodied in the Republican and Democratic parties. When you get extremist politicians who adhere fully to broken logic and rhetoric, our future is laid waste.

New parties must emerge soon. For fun, I propose a new party : "Uniters" and call the other parties "Dividers" (Republicans and Democrats). We can say that the Uniters believe in uniting people rather than dividing people.

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A lot of people don't understand that Trump & his incoming team didn't face a normal transition period, like it was over a in a matter of a few weeks or months.

The DOJ transition period JUST ENDED when Sessions left. Almost 2 exact years to get it there.

Pompeo at the CIA took over a year before he was done and ready to shift over to the State Department.

All kinds of stuff has been going on behind the scenes nobody leaks or talks about.

We only had the barest mention of the fact the Clinton Email investigation restarted

Nobody leaked in a year that Huber was deep diving into the Clinton Foundation.
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ClearingTheFog
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@clearing_fog
The Republican Party is an authoritarian power structure.

For decades, it embraced greedy nihilists in order to win elections.

In the last 10+ years, a well-funded insurgency has infiltrated and captured it.

They are now threatening & purging any remaining opposition.

We can’t address the threat they pose to democracy without addressing the methods by which they maintain popular support.

This requires action across multiple fronts.

In terms of public policy, we are working on the right things:

-Bills to eliminate the GOP’s counter-majorian control (voting security, eliminating vote suppression)

-Exposing dark money networks who are funding them (forcing transparency for anonymous shell companies)

-Addressing the immediate socio-economic pain that places people in anxiety-laden debt traps, makes them feel isolated, and makes them ripe targets for disinformation/authoritarian messaging appeals (fighting Covid with a plan, financial relief, genuinely empathetic leadership)

Biden and the Dem Congress are working on all of these things already.

This is moving us in the right direction, and shows that they get what needs to be done here. This is good.

There are three areas that still concern me, that I have been trying to call attention to...
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1/ Back in the mid-aughts, I was a Koufax Award-nominated political blogger (I don't know what Drezner was doing then; I first heard of him about a year ago). So I was into the blogosphere pretty deep, as I also ran a second high-traffic blog that was focused on the art world.

2/ The "blogosphere" was an outgrowth of MySpace and LiveJournal, inasmuch as in the heady early days of the internet people suddenly realized that they could engage in private diaristic writing—a very specific subgenre of writing—in the public square, and it was suddenly "okay."

3/ So the blogosphere as such had *nothing* to do with journalism, which needless to say was in a different state just 15 years ago (note: unlike Drezner, I also teach writing and journalism at the university level, so this thread is squarely "in my area," unlike his Post piece).

4/ The blogosphere was a manifestation of the transformation of the public-private binary at the dawn of the internet—and *also* connected to the "creative writing" explosion (what I did a PhD on); in the aughts, creative writing was the fastest-growing discipline *in the world*.
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