#hillary clinton moved to New York to run for the Senate

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Another 10 min election primer for my friends outside the USA.

Reminder to Americans:

Hillary Clinton relocated to the state of New York because there was an OPEN SENATE SEAT.

Mitt Romney relocated to the state of Utah because there was an OPEN SENATE SEAT.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 3, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 04, 2024

The fallout from the New York jury’s conviction of Donald Trump on 34 felony counts last Thursday, May 30, continues. Trump’s team continues to insist that the guilty verdict will help him, but that’s nonsensical on its face: if guilty verdicts are so helpful, why has he moved heaven and earth to keep the many other cases against him from going to trial? And why are he and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) calling for the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions? 

As political consultant Stuart Stevens put it: “I worked in five presidential races and helped elect Republican governors or Senators in over half the country. I have never heard anything more transparently desperate than a party trying to spin that there is some non-MAGA pool of voters who can't wait to vote for a convicted felon.”

On Friday, Morning Consult conducted a poll to gauge how voters were reacting to the guilty verdict. It showed that 54% of registered voters approved of it, while only 34% disapproved. Perhaps worse for Trump was that 49% of Independents and 15% of Republicans thought he should end his campaign. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 10% of registered Republican voters and 25% of Independents said that his conviction made it less likely that they would vote for him for president. 

Then, on Saturday, there was what Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times called a plot twist. It turns out the state of Washington has a law on the books that prevents felons from running for office. But because a candidate has to be certified to be on a ballot before they can be challenged, the issue can’t be resolved until Trump officially becomes the Republican Party’s presidential nominee at the July convention. Westneat asked, “Republicans: You sure you want to go down this road?”

On Sunday, Trump appeared on Fox and Friends for his first interview since his conviction. The interview was heavily edited, suggesting his comments were problematic in some way, but what was there was still bad enough. He repeated his plans to fire generals who refuse to do his bidding and to deport immigrants by using local police to round them up. Notably, considering his own looming sentencing, he claimed he never said “lock her up” about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a claim that reporters on social media promptly shredded with video clips of him doing exactly that. 

Media figures are puncturing Trump’s image. The verdict buried a story by The Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt, who is now free of a nondisclosure agreement, explaining how he and others created an illusion that Trump was a successful businessman and alleging that Trump used the n-word on set. On Saturday, an image circulated on social media of Trump leaving Trump Tower and waving as if to a crowd, but there was no one there.

Also on Saturday, top sports talk host Colin Cowherd pushed back on the idea that the trial was rigged, telling his listeners: “If everybody in your circle is a felon, maybe it’s not rigged. Maybe the world isn’t against you.” “Donald Trump is now a felon,” Cowherd said. “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his National Security Adviser, his Trade Advisor, his Foreign Policy Adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Cowherd went on: “[Trump’s] trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist.” “Stop trying to sell me on ‘everything’s rigged, the country’s falling into the sea, the economy’s terrible,’” he continued. “The America that I live in is imperfect. But compared to the rest of the world, I think we’re doing okay.”

This morning, Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that Trump’s businesses and campaign committees have funneled significant financial benefits to at least nine witnesses in the criminal campaigns against Trump, often at crucial moments in the legal proceedings. The pay of one campaign aide doubled; another got a $2 million severance package that barred him from cooperating with law enforcement. The daughter of one of the campaign’s top officials was hired onto the staff and is now the fourth-highest-paid employee, with a salary of $222,000. Payments to the companies of certain witnesses dramatically increased.

Faturechi, Elliott, and Mierjeski note that it is not uncommon for bosses to find themselves defendants, complicating their relationship with employees who might have witnessed alleged crimes. In such cases, lawyers advise the defendant not to provide any unusual benefits or penalties, to avoid the appearance of witness tampering.

Trump’s attorney, David Warrington, sent ProPublica a cease-and-desist letter saying that if the outlet and its reporters “continue their reckless campaign of defamation, President Trump will evaluate all legal remedies.” He demanded that ProPublica kill the article, keeping it from publication.

And then, this afternoon, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams, along with the U.S. Department of Labor and the State Department, unsealed an indictment charging Weidong Guan, also known as Bill Guan, the chief financial officer of the global news outlet The Epoch Times, with using the outlet to launder at least $67 million. The Epoch Times is affiliated with the ultraconservative Chinese anticommunist religious group Falun Gong and supports Donald Trump and other right-wing U.S. politicians with both press and cash. It was a major promoter of Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules that claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen. A voter depicted in that film sued for defamation, and just last week the distributor settled with the plaintiff, issued an apology, and stopped distributing the film.

The allegation that The Epoch Times is a money-laundering operation comes on top of yesterday’s story by Joseph Menn in the Washington Post, reporting that the editor of another media site that pushes disinformation from both the far right and the far left, The Grayzone, has worked for Russia’s Sputnik as well as taken money from Iranian government-owned media. One of the people who retweets Grayzone stories is Senator Mike Lee (R-UT).

In the middle of all this bad news for MAGA Republicans, it felt like desperation today when the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic tried to resurrect Covid conspiracy theories against Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, serving under seven presidents. President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the U.S., for his work on combating the global AIDS epidemic. 

Fauci’s position as NIAID director put him at the center of U.S. attempts to grapple with Covid-19, and for his work on developing a vaccine, Trump awarded him a presidential commendation. But first QAnon and then MAGA Republicans centered him as a villain who either started or covered up the pandemic, or forced people to mask or to get vaccines they told their supporters were unnecessary or even dangerous. QAnon conspiracy theorist Ivan Raiklin and convicted January 6 rioter Brandon Fellows were seated behind Fauci today; Fellows made pouty faces when Fauci was describing the death threats he, his wife, and his daughters have endured. 

Video creator and political commentator Michael McWhorter noted that Raiklin has made dramatic threats of violence against those he considers members of “the Deep State” and that he should have been nowhere near Fauci. McWhorter also noted that the two men were likely invited to the hearing and that it would be useful to know who invited them.  

Committee member Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has skipped seven of the last ten hearings and who has expressed sympathy for QAnon in the past, attacked Fauci by saying he should be prosecuted: “You know what this committee should be doing? We should be writing a criminal referral because you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity,” she said. “You belong in prison, Dr. Fauci.” For all the nastiness, the hearing turned up nothing.

Later, Greene told Manu Raju of CNN that Speaker Johnson should shut down the government over the Trump verdict and prosecutions. “We're literally a banana republic. So what does it matter funding the government? The American people don't give a sh*t.” 

While MAGA Republicans are insisting that a Manhattan jury’s conviction of Trump means that President Joe Biden has weaponized the Department of Justice and that they must take revenge, the trial of Biden’s son Hunter on federal gun charges, brought by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney whom Biden kept on, started today. Former top Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann noted that Biden is “living the rule of law…in the most personal way. He is not telling DOJ to stand down…. He is not pardoning his son…. He is living what it means to have a rule of law in this country…. If you want to know if he believes it, you can actually see what is happening with his own son.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[novumtimes]

Trump is now a convicted felon. That will actually matter in November

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Whether it was by luck or some other means, Donald Trump has spent his entire life evading consequences, moving through the world with impunity and accusing others of being criminals when his own conduct was called out. This “I’m rubber, you’re glue” strategy was in part how he defeated former New York senator turned Obama administration Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when they faced off in the 2016 presidential election. For those who may not remember, Clinton spent much of the 2015-2016 election cycle embroiled in a scandal stemming from her use of a private email server while serving as America’s top diplomat. A congressional investigation had found that some of the emails she’d received from aides contained information later deemed to be classified, which — in theory — may have been enough to charge her with violating US laws governing the handling of national defense information. On the stump during that campaign, Trump repeatedly branded her as a criminal. At an October 2016 debate between the two candidates, he told her that she’d “be in jail” if he were to become president. Now, eight years later, Trump’s luck has run out. He’s been branded a criminal where it matters most: in a court of law. Trump Hush Money (Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.) A jury of 12 New Yorkers found him guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an effort to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election. He had been accused of covering up reimbursement payments to his then-attorney Michael Cohen for $130,000 in hush money to Stormy Daniels, whose story about having sex with Trump threatened to derail his campaign against Clinton. Though Trump now claims that his conviction was “rigged” and “corrupt” and has vowed to appeal, he will, for the first time, face real consequences. He may be barred from voting in his new home state of Florida – but only if he’s behind bars. He could be barred from obtaining some professional licenses and operating some forms of businesses in many states. And some countries may bar him from entry or require him to jump through extra hoops before receiving visas to travel to them. But for Trump, the most serious consequence — and the one with the most wide-ranging effect on his future — could come from voters. According to a new poll commissioned by NPR and PBS and carried out by Marist College, 17 percent of respondents surveyed said a guilty verdict against Trump would make them less likely to vote for him this November. That 17 percent may not seem like much. It represents just one in six voters, while much larger percentages of respondents said a guilty verdict against Trump would not make a difference in how they cast their vote, for or against. But in American presidential elections, it’s the small margins that can matter most. That’s because we pick presidents not by a single national plebiscite, but by 50 individual elections with the results weighted by each state’s population. That byzantine system is how Trump managed to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, by carrying three key states (Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania) even though he lost the overall national election by a margin of several million. What mattered, in the end, was roughly 30,000 votes across those three states. It was only a few more — 44,000 votes — in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin that kept Biden and Trump from a tie when they faced off four years later. And even though Biden appears to be lagging in many opinion polls, if one in six Trump-inclined voters stays away or votes for the incumbent this November, it could doom Trump’s chances of returning to the White House. And should he fail to win a second non-consecutive term this November, the combined weight of the three remaining criminal cases against him means Trump could spend his remaining years in prison. Source link via The Novum Times

[acquariusgb]

9/11 Bill POV

While Hillary was in Washington and Chelsea in New York, Bill was in Australia. Here's an extract from Man of the World by Joe Conason, describing the events from that day.

In Clinton’s suite at the Sheraton Mirage, a luxurious hotel surrounded by palm trees, he turned on the television to see the nightmarish images that would soon become a historic symbol of horror for Americans. Across the bottom of the screen, a crawling ticker listed the names of passengers on the four flights hijacked by the al Qaeda terrorist teams. Suddenly, Clinton saw the name of a friend, someone who had worked with him for years, a man with a family of his own. “Oh my God,” he breathed.

He knew Chelsea was in New York City, visiting a friend before her scheduled departure for England. Now he had to find out exactly where she was and who was with her, but nobody had been able to find her yet. When Hillary finally got through to his room, she pretended to know already that their daughter was safe, hoping to calm him—even though she felt inwardly frantic as her Senate staff continued to try to locate their daughter.

By her own account, Chelsea had been watching television at her friend’s apartment in Union Square when the second plane hit, and quickly tried to call her mother in Washington—but as she spoke with an aide in Hillary’s office, overburdened phone lines went dead. In a panic, she left the apartment and headed downtown, searching desperately for a pay phone to reach Hillary’s Senate office again. She was standing in line at a pay phone, about twelve blocks from the disaster scene, when she heard the deafening roar of the second tower collapsing. She headed back toward Union Square, eventually found her friend, and they walked uptown, like thousands of other New Yorkers. When she found a working phone and reached Hillary, her mother burst into tears of relief.

At Clinton’s office in Harlem, Karen Tramontano and members of the foundation staff were meeting in a conference room with a panoramic southward view when they saw the first plane. Someone came running into the room and suddenly they were watching the catastrophe on television. Tramontano picked up a phone immediately, trying to reach Band in Australia.

With all flights into the United States canceled, the Clinton entourage was stranded in Australia. After talking with Band, Tramontano placed a call to Condoleezza Rice to ask for help. After some wrangling that involved more calls from Band to the Secret Service and to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, the Pentagon dispatched a military aircraft to pick them up at Cairns Airport in Port Douglas. “It won’t be very comfortable,” Rice warned, “but it’s the only plane we have available out there right away.”

It wasn’t comfortable at all aboard the C-130 cargo plane and the trip took almost twenty-four hours. There were no seats, there was no food, and at thirty thousand feet, the interior of the plane was cold—very, very cold. They stopped in Guam and switched to a refueling plane, which was no better. Band had tried to scrounge some sweaters and other warm clothing at the hotel, but they were all bone-chilled, starved, and exhausted when the plane finally landed at Stewart Airport, a New York National Guard airbase about fifty miles north of Chappaqua. Almost immediately they departed for Manhattan, where they headed to Union Square.

Despite their ordeal, Clinton was grateful to have gotten home, unlike thousands of Americans left overseas with no way to return until the airports reopened. Among them was Al Gore, who had been in Vienna when the terrorists struck, giving a speech to an Austrian Internet forum.

Evidently the Bush White House was not prepared to provide military transportation for the former vice president, who could find no way to get back except via Gander Airport, a tiny facility in Newfoundland. From there, he and an aide would have to drive southward across the Canadian border.

While seeking help with their predicament, a former Gore aide—who had also worked in the Clinton White House—called the Harlem office. Gore and Clinton had exchanged messages within the first hours after the terrorist attack, but had not spoken yet. Distant as relations between their bosses had become, the staffers remained friendly. When Gore’s aide reached Tramontano, they talked casually about “the crap that’s gone on for far too long” between Gore and Clinton—who literally had not spoken since a bitter two-hour argument about who was to blame for the disastrous outcome of the 2000 election. She suggested that on the long drive down from the Canadian border, Gore might stop in Chappaqua. When Tramontano reached Clinton to discuss the proposed sleepover, she wasn’t surprised by his enthusiasm. That evening around 8 p.m., the former vice president picked up his cell phone to speak with the former president for the first time in many months.

“Why don’t you come down here, and then we’ll fly down together Friday morning?” Clinton asked. An Air Force jet provided by the White House would take them to the capital for the special memorial service on September 14 at the National Cathedral.

Hours after midnight, driving a rented car, Gore arrived at the five-bedroom colonial on Old House Lane. Clinton was waiting for them in the living room, where he had been napping on and off, and got up to greet Gore.

As he climbed the steps to the front porch, the former vice president noticed a refrigerator, sitting where it had been moved while the kitchen was undergoing renovation—a tableau that struck him as more hillbilly Ozarks than chic Westchester. Eyeing the fridge, he cracked, one Southerner to another: “Well, you’ve really come a long way, haven’t you?” At the door, Clinton roared with laughter.

They stayed up almost until dawn, talking mostly about the 9/11 attacks, their own efforts to deal with terrorism, and the murky times ahead. Chelsea met them in the morning at Westchester Airport to fly to Washington. On the flight down, Gore invited the Clintons to join his family after the memorial service for lunch at his home in Arlington, Virginia.

At the cathedral, a century-old Gothic Revival structure on the northern outskirts of the capital, Clinton sat in a front pew alongside President Bush and the other living former presidents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush. He listened as the president delivered words of compassion for the bereaved and a warning to the enemy. He was speaking out forcefully in support of Bush at every opportunity, starting with his departure from Australia. He had canceled all of his speaking engagements abroad to remain in Manhattan, spending hours at local vigils and especially at the Armory on Park Avenue, where he tried to comfort families whose loved ones were missing and presumed dead.

“They cheered, they wept, they hugged him,” wrote a reporter for London’s Daily Mirror. “All around him, New Yorkers gathered, some to pass on their thanks that he had rushed to their side, others to grab his hand and use him as an emotional crutch. . . . All felt lifted to be in the presence of the man they had looked to for most of the past decade when their country was in its hour of need.”

The Mirror correspondent was not alone in contrasting Clinton’s instinctive leadership with the unsteadiness displayed by his successor in the early hours following the attack, although Bush soon righted himself and took command. America and the world had turned a page, moving beyond the petty controversies that had almost consumed Clinton in the days after he left office. Gaunt, somber, and worried, he and his fellow Americans now found themselves in a very different world.

Not everyone was willing to leave old habits behind, however, especially among Clinton’s most rigid detractors on the right. Even as Bush and congressional leaders prayed for the nation to unite, the habitual haters simply could not resist a fresh opportunity to target him. Nothing mattered more than proving (or at least asserting) that the terrorist attacks of September 11 should be blamed not on the current president, but the one who preceded him. Before long a writer for National Review warned, only half-jokingly: “If we members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy don’t get back to our daily routine of obsessive Clinton-bashing, then the terrorists will have won.”

[patriotsnet]

Why Is The Media Against Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-is-the-media-against-republicans/

Why Is The Media Against Republicans

Mcconnell And Co Are Playing As Dirty A Game As Possible In Their Quest To Fill Ginsburgs Seat Before The Election But You Wont Find That Story In Most News Coverage

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US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell at a press conference at the US Capitol on September 22, 2020. McConnell said in a statement that the Senate would take up President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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The argument against confirming Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court before the inauguration is a Republican argument. They invented it, they enacted it, and they own it. That’s because it was Republicans, not Democrats, who changed the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to eight for 10 months in 2016, when a Democratic president was in the White House. It was Republicans who argued that no Supreme Court nominee should even be considered by the Senate in an election year. And it was Republicans who promised to block the confirmation of Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court nominees in the event that she became president while Republicans retained control of the Senate.

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And that argument is simply untenable. We do not have a legitimate third branch of government if only one party gets to choose its members.

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Vaccine Advocacy From Hannity And Mcconnell Gets The Media Off Republicans’ Backs But Won’t Shift Public Sentiment

Sean Hannity, Mitch McConnell and Tucker Carlson

Amid a rising media furor over the steady stream of vaccine disparagement from GOP politicians and Fox News talking heads, a number of prominent Republicans spoke up in favor of vaccines early this week.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “shots need to get in everybody’s arm as rapidly as possible” and asked that people “ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice.” House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, got the vaccine after months of delay and then publicly said, “there shouldn’t be any hesitancy over whether or not it’s safe and effective.” And Fox News host Sean Hannity, in a widely shared video, declared, it “absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.” This was treated in the press as an unequivocal endorsement, even though the use of the word “many” was clearly meant to let the Fox News viewers feel like he’s talking about other people getting vaccinated. 

Is this an exciting pivot among the GOP elites?  Are they abandoning the sociopathic strategy of sabotaging President Joe Biden’s anti-pandemic plan by encouraging their own followers to get sick? Are the millions of Republicans who keep telling pollsters they will never get that Democrat shot going to change their minds now? 

Ha ha ha, no.

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— Matthew Gertz July 20, 2021

The Technology 202: New Report Calls Conservative Claims Of Social Media Censorship ‘a Form Of Disinformation’

with Aaron Schaffer

A new report concludes that social networks aren’t systematically biased against conservatives, directly contradicting Republican claims that social media companies are censoring them. 

arrow-right

Recent moves by Twitter and Facebook to suspend former president Donald Trump’s accounts in the wake of the violence at the Capitol are inflaming conservatives’ attacks on Silicon Valley. But New York University researchers today released a report stating claims of anti-conservative bias are “a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.” 

The report found there is no trustworthy large-scale data to support these claims, and even anecdotal examples that tech companies are biased against conservatives “crumble under close examination.” The report’s authors said, for instance, the companies’ suspensions of Trump were “reasonable” given his repeated violation of their terms of service — and if anything, the companies took a hands-off approach for a long time given Trump’s position.

The report also noted several data sets underscore the prominent place conservative influencers enjoy on social media. For instance, CrowdTangle data shows that right-leaning pages dominate the list of sources providing the most engaged-with posts containing links on Facebook. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino, for instance, far out-performed most major news organizations in the run-up to the 2020 election. 

In The Past The Gop Would Be Rallying Their Voters Against This Bill Their Failure To Do So Now Is Ominous

Mitch ?McConnell, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro

With surprising haste for the U.S. Senate, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, just after passing a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. And Democrats could not be more excited, as the blueprint covers a whole host of long-standing priorities, from fighting climate change to creating universal prekindergarten. The blueprint was largely written by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who released a statement calling it “the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s.”

Sanders isn’t putting that much spin on the ball.

While the bill fallls short of what is really needed to deal with climate change, it is still tremendously consequential legislation that will do a great deal not just to ameliorate economic inequalities, but, in doing so, likely reduce significant gender and racial inequality. It’s also a big political win for President Joe Biden. In other words, it is everything that Republicans hate. Worse for them, it’s packed full of benefits that boost the middle class, not just the working poor. Traditionally, such programs are much harder to claw back once Republicans gain power — as they’ve discovered in previous failed attempts to dismantle Social Security and Obamacare. 

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But that’s not really happening here. 

The Actual Reason Why Republicans And Their Media Are Discouraging People From Getting Vaccinated

Independent Media Institute

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, “A surprising amount of death will occur soon…” But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?

there’s always a reason

Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last Sunday, “I don’t have a really good reason why this is happening.”

But even if he can’t think of a reason why Republicans would trash talk vaccination and people would believe them, it’s definitely there.

Which is why it’s important to ask a couple of simple questions that all point to the actual reason why Republicans and their media are discouraging people from getting vaccinated:

1. Why did Trump get vaccinated in secret after Joe Biden won the election and his January 6th coup attempt failed?

2. Why are Fox “News” personalities discouraging people from getting vaccinated while refusing to say if they and the people they work with have been protected by vaccination?

3. Why was one of the biggest applause lines at CPAC: “They were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated and it isn’t happening!”

4. Why are Republican legislators in states around the country pushing laws that would “ban” private businesses from asking to see proof of vaccination status ?

Death is their electoral strategy.

Is there any other possible explanation?

So, what’s left?

Destroying Trust In The Media Science And Government Has Left America Vulnerable To Disaster

For America to minimize the damage from the current pandemic, the media must inform, science must innovate, and our government must administer like never before. Yet decades of politically-motivated attacks discrediting all three institutions, taken to a new level by President Trump, leave the American public in a vulnerable position.

jonmladd

Trump has consistently vilified the national media. When campaigning, he the media “absolute scum” and “totally dishonest people.” As president, he has news organizations “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” over and over. The examples are endless. Predictably, he has blamed the coronavirus crisis on the media, saying “We were very prepared. The only thing we weren’t prepared for was the media.”

Science has been another Trump target. He has gutted scientific expertise and administrative capacity in the executive branch, most notably failing to fill hundreds of vacancies in the Centers for Disease Control itself and disbanding the National Security Council’s taskforce on pandemics. During the coronavirus crisis, he has routinely disagreed with scientific experts, including, in the AP’s words, his “musing about injecting disinfectants into people .” This follows his earlier public advocacy for hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, also against leading scientists’ advice. Coupled with his flip-flopping on when to lift stay-at-home orders, the president has created confusion and endangered people.

Media Bias Against Conservatives Is Real And Part Of The Reason No One Trusts The News Now

Members of the media were shocked as he was supposedly revealed as incredibly anti-woman presidential candidate, perhaps even the most ever nominated by a major political party in the modern era. He had admitted that he reduced women to objects and the Democrats pounced, seeking to make him lose him the support of women and, in turn, the presidency.

I’m not talking about the media coverage of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and the “Access Hollywood” tape, but his predecessor, Mitt Romney.

His sin? Saying that he had “binders full of women” that he was looking at appointing to key positions were he elected president. Sure, it was an awkward way of stating a fairly innocuous fact about how elected executives begin their transition efforts — with resumes of candidates for every position under the sun —- well before an election is held. Yet, the media and commentators came for Mitt Romney and they did so with guns blazing, as he was portrayed as an anti-woman extremist… for making a concerted effort to hire women to serve in his administration as governor of Massachusetts.

There Is No Liberal Media Bias In Which News Stories Political Journalists Choose To Cover

1Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.

2University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.

3Brigham Young University-Idaho, Rexburg, ID 83460, USA.

?*Corresponding author. Email: hans.hassellfsu.edu ; jh5akvirginia.edu

?† These authors contributed equally to this work.

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‘it’s Time To End This Forever War’ Biden Says Forces To Leave Afghanistan By 9/11

The enormous national anger generated by those attacks was also channeled by the administration toward the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which was conceived to prevent any recurrence of attacks on such a massive scale. Arguments over that legislation consumed Congress through much of 2002 and became the fodder for campaign ads in that year’s midterms.

The same anger was also directed toward a resolution to use force, if needed, in dealing with security threats from the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That authorization passed Congress with bipartisan majorities in the fall of 2002, driven by administration claims that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction.” It became law weeks before the midterm elections.

Once those elections were over, the Republicans in control of both chambers finally agreed to create an independent commission to seek answers about 9/11. Bush signed the legislation on Nov. 27, 2002.

The beginning was hobbled when the first chairman, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and vice chairman, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, decided not to continue. But a new chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, and vice chairman, former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, filled the breach and performed to generally laudatory reviews.

Long memories

Top House Republican Opposes Bipartisan Commission To Investigate Capitol Riot

But McCarthy replied by opposing Katko’s product, and more than 80% of the other House Republicans did too. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., initially said he was keeping an open mind but then announced that he too was opposed. This makes it highly unlikely that 10 of McConnell’s GOP colleagues will be willing to add their votes to the Democrats’ and defeat a filibuster of the bill.

Republicans have argued that two Senate committees are already looking at the events of Jan. 6, as House panels have done as well. The Justice Department is pursuing cases against hundreds of individuals who were involved. Former President Donald Trump and others have said any commission ought to also be tasked to look at street protests and violence that took place in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd.

But with all that on the table, several Republicans have alluded to their concern about a new commission “dragging on” into 2022, the year of the next midterm elections. “A lot of our members … want to be moving forward,” said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the No. 2 Senate Republican toMcConnell. “Anything that gets us rehashing to 2020 elections is, I think, a day lost.”

Resistance even after 9/11

The Taliban were toppled but bin Laden escaped, and U.S. forces have been engaged there ever since. The troop numbers have declined in recent years, and President Biden has indicated that all combat troops will be out by this year’s anniversary of the 2001 attacks.

Opiniontrump And His Voters Are Drawn Together By A Shared Sense Of Defiance

Americans in general have begun to catch on: 66 percent of Americans believe that the media has a hard time separating fact from opinion and, according to a recent Gallup poll, 62 percent of the country believes that the press is biased one way or the other in their reporting.

So when CNN, NBC News, Fox News, or another outlet break a hard news story, there is a good chance that a large swathe of the public won’t view it as legitimate news.

And politicians, right and left, are taking advantage of this.

The entire ordeal is part of an ever-growing list of examples in which the media seemed to be biased, whether consciously or not, against Republicans.

Before Donald Trump, there was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who in 2014 accused the media of “dividing us” because they asked him about some protesters who had chanted “NYPD is the KKK” and . He also accused the media of McCarthyism when they dug into the personal life of an aide of his, who reportedly had a relationship with a convicted murderer. The mayor also publicly and privately accused Bloomberg News of being biased against him, since it is owned by his predecessor. However, de Blasio is not terribly popular within his own party, so Democrats in New York did not buy what he was selling.

The Media Has Entered The Republicans Pounce Stage Of Critical Race Theory

Now that polls show a majority of Americans oppose Critical Race Theory, the Democratic Party and their scribes in the legacy media have launched a rearguard action against parents — by casting them as the aggressors. As is true every time the Left misfires or overreaches, the media ignore the offense and focus on the popular backlash in a tactic popularly known as “Republicans pounce.”

Media coverage proves that CRT has entered the “Republicans pounce” stage. Witness the words of one Politico writer, who said on Thursday, “he right is hoping to capitalize on the grassroots angst over critical race theory and excite its base voters in next year’s midterms.” Chris Hayes, who has the unenviable position of competing directly with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, agreed Thursday night that all the Republican Party’s “rhetorical fire has moved away from the deficit and on to some random, school superintendent in Maine after his district dared to denounce white supremacy after the murder of George Floyd.”

But why are grassroots Americans so filled with “angst”? Because they are intellectually deficient and, of course, racist, according to Vox.com.

“Conservatives have launched a growing disinformation campaign around the academic concept” of CRT. “It’s an attempt to push back against progress,” wrote Vox.com reporter Fabiola Cineas. The problem is that “Republicans … want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country.”

Trump Continues To Push Election Falsehoods Here’s Why That Matters

Republican opposition to the commission

Rice was featured in one of the very few congressional commissions ever to receive this level of attention. Most are created and live out their mission with little notice. Indeed, Congress has created nearly 150 commissions of various kinds in just the last 30 years, roughly five a year.

Some have a highly specific purpose, such as a commemoration. Others are more administrative, such as the five-member commission overseeing the disbursement of business loans during the early months of pandemic lockdown in 2020. Others have been wide-ranging and controversial, such as the one created to investigate synthetic opioid trafficking.

In the initial weeks after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, the idea of an independent commission to probe the origins of the attack and the failures that let it happen seemed a no-brainer. It had broad support both in Congress and in public opinion polls. It still enjoys the latter, as about two-thirds of Americans indicate that they think an independent commission is needed. The idea has fared well — particularly when described as being “9/11 Commission style.”

Opiniona Guide For Frustrated Conservatives In The Age Of Trump

Conscious bias or not, such practices do not engender trust in the media amongst conservatives. They only reinforce the belief that the media seeks to defend their ideological allies on the left and persecute those on the right while claiming to be objective.

This idea that the media is made up of unselfconsciously liberal elites who don’t even recognize the biases they have against conservative policies and conservatives in general goes back decades, to when newsrooms were more or less homogenous in nearly every way. At first, conservatives fought back by founding their own magazines; after Watergate and in the midst of the Reagan administration and liberals’ contempt for him, organizations like the Media Research Center began cataloguing the myriad examples of biased coverage, both large and small.

And there was a lot to catalogue, from opinion pages heavily weighted in favor of liberals to reportage and analysis that looks a lot more like the opinion of the writers than unbiased coverage.

Despite Cries Of Censorship Conservatives Dominate Social Media

GOP-friendly voices far outweigh liberals in driving conversations on hot topics leading up to the election, a POLITICO analysis shows.

The Twitter app on a mobile phone | Matt Rourke/AP Photo

10/27/2020 01:38 PM EDT

Link Copied

Republicans have turned alleged liberal bias in Silicon Valley into a major closing theme of the election cycle, hauling tech CEOs in for virtual grillings on Capitol Hill while President Donald Trump threatens legal punishment for companies that censor his supporters.

But a POLITICO analysis of millions of social media posts shows that conservatives still rule online.

Right-wing social media influencers, conservative media outlets and other GOP supporters dominate online discussions around two of the election’s hottest issues, the Black Lives Matter movement and voter fraud, according to the review of Facebook posts, Instagram feeds, Twitter messages and conversations on two popular message boards. And their lead isn’t close.

As racial protests engulfed the nation after George Floyd’s death, users shared the most-viral right-wing social media content more than 10 times as often as the most popular liberal posts, frequently associating the Black Lives Matter movement with violence and accusing Democrats like Joe Biden of supporting riots.

Politifact Va: No Republicans Didn’t Vote To Defund The Police

Rep. Bobby Scott speaks at a 2015 criminal justice forum.

Speaker: Bobby ScottStatement: “Every Republican in Congress voted to defund the police when they voted against the American Rescue Plan.”Date: July 12Setting: Twitter

In last fall’s campaigns, Republicans thundered often inaccurate charges that Democrats wanted to defund police departments.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., is flipping the script and saying that all congressional Republicans voted to defund police this year when they opposed a $1.9 trillion stimulus plan.

“Every Republican in Congress voted to defund police when they voted against the American Rescue Plan,” Scott tweeted on July 12.

Scott represents Virginia’s 3rd congressional district, stretching from Norfolk and parts of Chesapeake north through Newport News and west through Franklin.

His claim, echoing a Democratic talking point, melts under scrutiny. Here’s why.

The Facts

The term “defunding police” arose after the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Many advocates say it does not mean abolishing police, but rather reallocating some of the money and the duties that have traditionally been handled by police departments.

Scott’s explanation

Barbera sent an NBC article noting that communities in at least 10 congressional districts represented by Republicans who opposed the bill are using some of its relief funds to help their police departments.

Our ruling

We rate Scott’s statement False.

Opinion:no The Media Isnt Fair It Gives Republicans A Pass

The right-wing media, willfully ignoring the press investigations into Tara Reade’s accusations, insist that former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has not been treated similarly to accused conservative men . They have a point, but not the one they were trying to make.

arrow-right

Let’s start with the big picture: Right-wing groups persistently engage in conduct for which Republicans are not held to account. The latter are allowed to remain silent after instances of conduct with a strong stench of white nationalism, but pay no penalty for their quietude. Right-wing demonstrators at Michigan’s statehouse this week — angrily shouting, not social distancing, misogynistic in their message, some carrying Confederate garb — were not engaged in peaceful protest. This was a mob endangering the health of police officers and others seeking to intimidate democratic government. Some protesters compared Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to Adolf Hitler and displayed Nazi symbols. Newsweek reported:

The media has adopted the approach that a pattern of sexual harassment claims over decades is not relevant because Trump has denied them, yet they want investigated the single assault claim against Biden. Biden responded in an interview and in a lengthy ; the media insists these things have to be investigated further. They do not ask Trump’s campaign why the president does not respond to questions. They do not ask Republicans about Carroll, Zervos or others.

Social Media: Is It Really Biased Against Us Republicans

Wednesday promises to be another stressful day for Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Their chief executives will be grilled by senators about whether social media companies abuse their power.

For Republicans, this is the opportunity they’ve been waiting for.

Two weeks ago, Twitter prevented people posting links to a critical New York Post investigation into Joe Biden.

It then apologised for failing to explain its reasoning before ditching a rule it had used to justify the action.

For many Republicans, this was the final straw – incontrovertible evidence that social media is biased against conservatives.

The accusation is that Silicon Valley is at its core liberal and a bad arbiter of what’s acceptable on its platforms.

In this case, Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz believed Twitter would have acted differently if the story had been about President Donald Trump.

Sobering Report Shows Hardening Attitudes Against Media

NEW YORK — The distrust many Americans feel toward the news media, caught up like much of the nation’s problems in the partisan divide, only seems to be getting worse.

That was the conclusion of a “sobering” study of attitudes toward the press conducted by Knight Foundation and Gallup and released Tuesday.

Nearly half of all Americans describe the news media as “very biased,” the survey found.

“That’s a bad thing for democracy,” said John Sands, director of learning and impact at the Knight Foundation. “Our concern is that when half of Americans have some sort of doubt about the veracity of the news they consume, it’s going to be impossible for our democracy to function.”

The study was conducted before the coronavirus lockdown and nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd.

Eight percent of respondents — the preponderance of them politically conservative — think that news media that they distrust are trying to ruin the country.

– Deal gives Atlanta company control of Anchorage TV news

The study found that 71% of Republicans have a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of the news media, while 22% of Democrats feel the same way. Switch it around, and 54% of Democrats have a very favorable view of the media, and only 13% of Republicans feel the same way.

That divide has been documented before but only seems to be deepening, particularly among conservatives, Sands said.

In The Age Of Trump Media Bias Comes Into The Spotlight

Almost 20 years ago, after my first book, “,” came out, I made a lot of speeches, some of them to conservative organizations. The book was about liberal bias in the mainstream media. I had been a journalist at CBS News for 28 years and, so, it was a behind-the-scenes exposé about how the sausage was made, about how bias made its way into the news. 

I said that despite what many conservatives think, there was no conspiracy to slant the news in a liberal direction. I said that there were no secret meetings, no secret handshakes and salutes, that anchors such as CBS’s Dan Rather never went into a room with top lieutenants, locked the door, lowered the blinds, dimmed the lights and said, “OK, how are we going to screw those Republicans today?” 

It didn’t work that way, I said. Instead, bias was the result of groupthink. Put too many like-minded liberals in a newsroom and you’re going to get a liberal slant on the news.    

Liberal journalists, I said, live in a comfortable liberal bubble and don’t even necessarily believe their views are liberal. Instead, they believe they are moderate, mainstream and mainly reasonable views — unlike, of course, conservative views which, to them, are none of those things.

But what I wrote and spoke about then — mainly about how there was no conspiracy to inject bias into news stories — seems no longer to be true today. 

Pandering, it seems, is good for business.

Bias shows itself not only in what’s reported, but also in what’s ignored. 

Florida Republicans Move Against Social Media Companies

TALLAHASSEE — Concerned that social media companies were conspiring against conservatives, Florida Republicans sent a measure Thursday to Gov. Ron DeSantis that would punish online platforms that lawmakers assert discriminate against conservative thought.

The governor had urged lawmakers to deliver the legislation to his desk as part of a broader effort to regulate Big Tech companies — in how they collect and use information they harvest from consumers and in how social media platforms treat their users.

Republicans in Florida and elsewhere have accused the companies of censoring conservative thought on social media platforms by removing posts they consider inflammatory or using algorithms to reduce the visibility of posts that go against the grain of mainstream ideas.

With the ubiquity of social media, the sites have become modern-day public squares — where people share in the most trivial of matters but also in ideas and information that often are unvetted.

In recent years, social media companies have acted more aggressively in controlling the information posted on their platforms. In some cases, the companies have moved to delete posts over what they see as questionable veracity or their potential to stoke violence.

DeSantis is a strong ally of the former president, and the Republican governor is supporting hefty financial penalties against social media platforms that suspend the accounts of political candidates.

America Hates The Republicans And They Dont Know Why

@jonathanchait

Americans harbor certain deep-rooted impressions of the two parties, which have held for generations. Democrats are compassionate and generous, but spendthrift, dovish, and indulgent of crime and prone to subsidize poor people who don’t want to work. Republicans are strong on defense and crime, but too friendly to business and the rich. What is striking about the Republican government is how little effort it has made to push against, or even steer around, the unflattering elements of its brand. President Trump and his legislative partners have leaned into every ingrained prejudice the voters hold against them. They have acted as if none of their liabilities even exist.

That is not the approach Democrats have taken in office. Bill Clinton famously fashioned himself as a “New Democrat,” angering his base on crime and welfare and declaring the era of big government over. Barack Obama did not position himself quite so overtly against his party’s brand — which had recovered in part because of Clinton’s success — but he did take care to avoid confirming political stereotypes. Obama frequently invoked the importance of parenting and personal responsibility. He did not slash the defense budget, and took pains to woo Republican support for criminal-justice reform. Obama tried repeatedly to get Republicans to compromise on a deal to reduce the budget deficit. Whatever the merits of these policies, they reflect a grasp of the party’s innate liabilities.

Placing Some News Sources On The Political Spectrum

Here are a few examples of major news sources and their so-called “bias” based on ratings from AllSides  and the reported level of trust from partisan audiences from the Pew Research Center survey.

Note that much of these ratings are based on surveys of personal perceptions. Consider that these may be impacted by the hostile media effect, wherein “partisans perceive media coverage as unfairly biased against their side” . A three-decade retrospective on the hostile media effect. Mass Communication and Society, 18, 701-729. ).

The Capitol Siege: The Arrested And Their Stories

It would only be logical for that memory to inform the imagination of any Republican contemplating a similar independent commission to probe what happened on Jan. 6. The commission would likely look at various right-wing groups that were involved, including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, some members of which have already been charged. The commission might also delve into the social media presence and influence of various white supremacists.

Moreover, just as the 9/11 Commission was expected to interview the current and preceding presidents, so might a new commission pursue testimony from Trump and some of his advisers, both official and otherwise, regarding their roles in the protest that wound up chasing members of Congress from both chambers into safe holding rooms underground.

House Minority Leader McCarthy was asked last week whether he would testify if a commission were created and called on him to discuss his conversations with Trump on Jan. 6.

“Sure,” McCarthy replied. “Next question.”

All this may soon be moot. If Senate Democrats are unable to secure 60 votes to overcome an expected filibuster of the House-passed bill, the measure will die and the questions to be asked will fall to existing congressional committees, federal prosecutors and the media. To some degree, all can at least claim to have the same goals and intentions as an independent commission might have.

The difference is the level of acceptance their findings are likely to have with the public.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson

January 2, 2021 (Saturday)

Today the fight to pick up Trump’s supporters continued. Eleven senators, led by Ted Cruz (R-TX), said they would object to certifying certain state electoral votes when Congress meets on Wednesday, January 6, to count them. They want a commission appointed to audit the results. This attempt is separate from the one launched yesterday by Josh Hawley (R-MO) to object to the counting of the electoral votes from Pennsylvania, but both are a transparent attempt to court Trump voters before 2022 and 2024.

The senators signing onto the effort are: Ron Johnson (R-WI), James Lankford (R-OK), Steve Daines (R-MT), John Kennedy (R-LA), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Mike Braun (R-IN), and Senators-Elect Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

President-Elect Joe Biden’s transition spokesperson Michael Gwin called their efforts a “stunt.” He isn’t wrong. This plan is unfounded. Biden won the election by more than 7 million votes and by a margin of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. The Trump campaign tried to challenge the results in the courts, and lost or had dismissed for lack of evidence 60 out of 61 cases, including two they tried to take to the Supreme Court, where three justices appointed by Trump himself sit. Although Trump supporters grabbed headlines with their accusations of irregularities and fraud when they made them in conference rooms and in parking lots in front of landscaping companies, they could produce no evidence in courtrooms, where there are penalties for lying. The suggestion that there is somehow a problem with this election, when they could produce no evidence of wrongdoing in front of judges in 60 cases, is laughable.

But there is more to their efforts than just creating a show to attract the future support of Trump voters. The attempt of these Trump Republicans to launch yet another baseless investigation is in keeping with their use of investigations to discredit Democrats since at least the 2012 attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans. Ten investigations of the circumstances that led to that attack resulted in no evidence that members of the Obama administration acted inappropriately in that crisis. But the constant repetition of accusations convinced many Americans that something had gone terribly wrong and Obama’s people, especially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were to blame.

As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, then in running for Speaker of the House, said to Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity in 2015, “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought."

The repeated Republican investigations into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails were similar. Although the State Department’s final report on Clinton’s email use, issued in October 2019, declared there was no systematic or deliberate mishandling of classified information, the constant barrage of accusations made the email story the most important story of the 2016 election. It outweighed all the scandals involving then-candidate Donald Trump: the ones involving sexual assault, financial corruption, mocking of a disabled reporter, attacks on immigrants, and so on.

A study by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild in the Columbia Journalism Review noted that in the 2016 election season there were 65,000 sentences in the media about Clinton’s email use but only 40,000 about all of Trump’s scandals combined. There were twice as many sentences about Clinton’s emails than about her policies. The authors wrote, "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The email scandal likely cost Clinton the 2016 election, and even now, after the State Department cleared her of wrongdoing, many Americans still think Clinton mishandled classified information in her emails.

Trump tried the same tactic in 2020. Smearing an opponent through investigations was at the heart of the Ukraine scandal of 2019. Trump pressured new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, not to start an investigation of Hunter Biden and the company on whose board he had sat, but rather simply to announce that he was starting an investigation. An announcement would be enough to get picked up by the American news media so that story after story would convince voters that Hunter Biden and, by extension, his father were involved in corruption, even without evidence.

Then, just before the election, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani drummed up the story that Hunter Biden had left a laptop that contained incriminating evidence against both Bidens at a repair shop, and Republican leadership clamored for investigations-- this time to no avail because the story was so outrageous.

Now, they are alleging the need for an investigation into irregularities in the 2020 election, although they have failed repeatedly to produce any evidence of such irregularities in court. Their argument is that the country needs an investigation to relieve people’s worries about the legitimacy of the election, but those worries have been created precisely by the unjustified accusations of Republican leaders. An investigation would simply convince people that the election results are questionable. They are not.

The attempt of the senators to get Congress to appoint an investigatory committee into alleged fraud in the election is dangerous and unprecedented, and they know it. In their statement, they tried to suggest they are simply following the precedent established by Congress after the chaotic 1876 election, but the two situations are very different.

In 1876, elections were organized by the parties themselves and were notoriously corrupt. Parties printed their own ballots in a distinctive color with only their own slate of electors. Men dropped the ballots for their party, unmarked, into a box, but their votes were not secret: how men voted was obvious from the colored ballots, at the very least. Politicians watching the polls knew exactly what the counts would be, and it was not unusual for ballot boxes to be either stuffed or broken open before results were reported.

In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina in 1876, Democrats appeared to have won the election, but there was no dispute that they had terrorized Republican voters to keep them from the polls. The results were a hopeless mess: in South Carolina, for example, 101% of all eligible voters cast ballots. Florida and Louisiana both reported more reasonable numbers of voters, but they each sent competing sets of electors to Congress. In both states, different officials signed off on different certificates of election, so it was not at all clear which certificate was the official one. In this utter confusion, Congress established a committee to figure out what had actually happened.

None of that is the case today. The processes were transparent and observed by Republicans as well as Democrats. The Trump campaign had the right to challenge vote counts and did so; each turned up virtually the same result as the original count: Biden won, by a lot. Each state in the country has delivered to Congress certified results that have been signed by the state governors, who nowadays have the final say in the state certification process.

This should be a done deal. But Trump Republicans are trying to undermine the election, and Biden’s administration, with a disinformation campaign. This is about more than this particular election. It is clear that a faction of today’s Republican Party refuses to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic president, no matter how big the victory. They are working to smear Biden by investigation, as has become their signature move.

Democracy depends on a willingness to transfer power peacefully from one group of leaders to another. By revealing that they refuse to do so, the members of the “Sedition Caucus,” as they are being called on social media, are proving they are unworthy of elected office.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

2024, I give slightly better than 50-50 odds that Biden runs for re-election.  There was an unspoken agreement in 2020 that he would serve only one term because he’s old and moderate, he was a compromise candidate to prevent centrists from voting trump of third party.  But he’s also ambitious, he’s wanted this job for over 30 years, he’s not gonna give it up just because his brain is turning to pudding; Reagan literally had Alzheimer's while in office and hid it from the public, Biden will serve well past the point he should become incapacitated.  I think most people are expecting Harris to get the nomination, I think that was the understanding they had, that Biden was picking her as his successor, but she is divisive for multiple reasons.  She’s not more popular than Hillary Clinton was; in 2016 everyone on Earth thought she was destined to be the first female president, whether they liked her or not (and believe me, a lot of them hated her), but then she lost and has slunked away into post-election obscurity.  Harris wasn’t even popular enough to stay in the race until the primaries, she dropped out in 2019.  Republicans hate her because she’s a democrat and a woman and black, and a big chunk of Democrats hate her because she’s a lying cop who is pretending to be a progressive socialist.  Neither are particularly strong candidates going forward, but Biden has the best odds because it is historically difficult to defeat an incumbent, Trump just sucked really bad.

As for the Republicans, it depends entirely on whether or not Trump throws his hat in the ring again.  He wants to run, everyone knows it, and he’ll likely announce his campaign sometime this year, but I don’t think he’ll officially make any moves until he sorts out his business.  He is in a shit load of foreign debt, hundreds of millions of dollars which he doesn’t have (most of his assets are not liquid), plus he’ll be on the hook for a ton of criminal lawsuits in New York for his campaigns, and civil lawsuits in a bunch of other states for his general douchebaggery, so I think he’s gonna pretend like he’s running again until the 11th hour and then announce that he’s dropping out of the race on his own accord.  But so long as he’s in it, no Republican will dare to challenge him.  There are plenty of suckerfish hitching a ride on Trump, riding his coattails, vying to be his successor, but they’ll all stand down so long as he overshadows them.  Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Tayor Green, Lauren Boebert, they all worship the man and wouldn’t dare run against him.  Mike Pence used to worship him until he sicced his goons to hang him, and now he’s considering running in 2024, but he’s 1) a spineless coward, and 2) despised by Trump’s base for not overturning the election.  He doesn’t stand a chance either.  Nikki Haley is positioning herself as an anti-Trump Republican, so she’ll likely be one of his primary opponents, though it’s no guarantee she’ll be able to hold her own against him; Democrats are split between moderate and progressive factions, while Republican are basically unified under Trump, so it’s not like half the party will be rooting for her(Bernie Sanders had a shot against Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, but Haley likely doesn’t have a shot against Trump in 2024).  Trump himself will pretend to be in the race for as long as possible to keep it from becoming congested, then bow out and play king maker; whoever he endorses will become the nominee.  He’ll very likely pick one of his spawn, Don Jr or Eric or Ivanka (though I think she wants to have a political career outside his shadow, so she’ll probably run for senate instead).

The most likely scenario I see is Joe Biden running against Josh Hawley.  The Republicans will run someone younger to juxtapose against the 82 year old Biden.  I could definitely see a Hawley-Haley ticket, the anti-Biden-Harris, it would be super close and given how Republicans reacted to losing this time around, I don’t think they’d just sit idly by and accept defeat next time.  We came close to civil war, we literally had right-wing terrorists storm the capitol at the president’s behest, but 2024 could be much, much, much worse.  Pay close attention to the various secretaries of state, especially in swing states; they’ll be in communication with the Republican nominee, willing to do then what they weren’t willing to do now.  Republicans were testing the waters this time, they wanted to see how far they could go, how much damage they could do, and now they’re gonna learn from it and adapt their strategy to try again.  Expect a lot of disenfranchisement in the South, new voter ID laws and citizenship tests, all of which will be upheld by the conservative Supreme Court.  2020 was not an anomaly, it was a dress rehearsal.

[punkrockpolitix]

Strap in for an Ugly Ride

by Mitch Maley — This week, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden did the most Joe Biden thing left to do in announcing that centrist NeoLiberal Senator Kamala Harris would be his running mate. The establishment left swooned and suburban liberals rejoiced, while the lunatic right clutched their collective pearls at such a “radical” choice. Meanwhile, the rest of us yawned as the stage was set for an absurd, bizarro world, alternative-reality election that will take place in the midst of the most unstable American society in modern history.

The chaos created by the 45th President of the United States has a way of wearing the reasonable mind rather thin. After all, who aside from the angry mobs of nativists does not long for a return to the normalcy of the early aughts when all we had to worry about was forever wars in the Middle East, an infinitely-expanding wealth gap, 50 million Americans without healthcare, and trade policies that had hollowed out the middle class. Sure, the children of white collar elites would continue to thrive (so long as they could avoid pill mills and heroin needles). Meanwhile, the offspring of former factory workers who couldn't afford an increasingly cost-prohibitive college education would toil in Amazon warehouses with few benefits and no shot at the kind of modest defined-benefit pensions that had allowed their parents to enjoy some modicum of prosperity in their twilight years and increasingly gloomier chances of even enjoying the social security payments that have kept millions more from abject poverty once their working days were behind them, but that was certainly a little easier to swallow than 2020 has thus far been.

Sure, automation had already begun eating away at more jobs than even offshoring had, we'd done nothing to address the climate crisis beyond symbolic, feel-good policies that avoided pissing off the wrong special interests, and the only amber waves of economic growth in the past 30 years had been driven by engineered bubbles. So what? Wall Street was happy (the stock market tripled under Obama) even if the big party was being floated by artificially-cheap credit, and besides, we could all go to sleep each night relatively certain that we wouldn't face a zombie apocalypse type situation on any given morning which is more than you can say about our current situation.

But let's not forget where things had gotten by 2016 when populist spasms on both sides of the ideological spectrum saw our traditional two party-driven political process totally upended. Harnessing the power of the internet had been largely responsible for President Obama successfully splintering the Democratic establishment in 2008, but let's not over-romanticize the grass or the roots. Obama was the product of an inter-party schism that saw a large number of career Dems break from the Clinton dynasty and its requirement for complete fealty to the party's grudge-bearing first family.

Obama was not an anomaly. He was Wall Street approved, Bilderberg-blessed and mainstream media anointed because, regardless of what others projected upon him, he was a typical center-right Dem who wouldn't rock any of those boats. Yes, the right labeled him a dangerously-radical liberal, but those who paid attention in the 2008 primary will recall that the actual semi-progressive candidate, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, had to be actively cropped out of the debates in order for that narrative to take hold. After all, it wouldn't do to have Kucinich onstage talking about Medicare for All and explaining how to get out of Iraq tomorrow any more than it would do for Ron Paul to be onstage in Republican debates calling out the NeoCon likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Under Obama, the war machine kept rolling, taxes remained at historic lows, deportations skyrocketed and we expanded warrantless surveillance and other Big Brother police state tactics, including sending "surplus" tanks and other military armament to your local police forces. In other words, most of the things liberals hated most about the Bush era continued only they didn't hate them as much anymore. That said, institutional norms remained in place, our allies were quite happy and Americans, or at least those who weren't driven mad by the thought of someone with brown skin holding the highest public office, could hold their heads high knowing that they had an intelligent and articulate statesman at the helm who wouldn't embarrass them with Bush's tangled English or Clinton's infidelities. He was a family man who loved his wife and children and treated even his most vile-mouthed opponents with the courtesies of polite society. Yes, it's easy to grow nostalgic for such normalcy in the age of Trump.

However, years of bailing out Wall Street banksters who'd crashed the economy, allowing hedge fund managers to pay lower tax rates than teachers and failed companies to hand out huge bonuses often paid for by the taxpayers themselves took its toll. Millions of Americans who'd seen their homes foreclosed upon were scolded for buying into the worthless products being pushed by those same banksters—reverse mortgages, sub-prime interest-only loans, etc.—and lectured about "personal responsibility" and the "moral hazard" of bailing them out, even as those same fat cats who'd been rescued themselves swooped in to buy up all of those empty houses for cheaply-borrowed pennies on the dollars in order to make money hand over fist renting them back to the creditless schmoes who'd been kicked to the curb. It turns out a lot of people were fed up.

Enter Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump, two men, as different as can be, who nonetheless each managed to harness enough of the sometimes dangerous power of populist anger to finally upset the apple cart that had been two-party politics. While their platforms were radically different, the essential nature of their messaging was the same: you're getting screwed and have been for a long time. Their message was particularly well-received by working-class whites in formerly industrial states who'd been ignored by both parties for decades, beyond rhetoric from the right about it being the fault of illegal immigrants and rhetoric from the left about educational programs that would retrain the working class for the jobs of tomorrow. Regardless of whether they believed in or even understood the solutions either candidate was offering didn't matter so much as someone at last acknowledging that the reality they'd been experiencing actually existed.

The Clinton machine, with the DNC's foot on the scale and the MSM distorting perception, was able to (barely) keep Sanders at bay. Meanwhile, the GOP may have been able to do the same had it not been for the sheer giddiness of legacy media outlets like WAPO, the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN for what they saw as the death of the modern Republican party should it actually nominate a crass, foul-mouthed blowhard of a third-rate reality TV star (who'd until recently been a Democrat) for President. Make no mistake, Clinton's people desperately wanted to take on Trump, believing it amounted to not only an easy win, but a path toward retaking Congress, despite having been gerrymandered out of contention (for those of you who came to politics late, the GOP's electoral success in 2010, saw them take over a majority of state legislatures just ahead of the once-every-decade reapportionment that follows a census, allowing the party to gerrymander Congressional districts to such a degree that Democrats could not gain ground, despite regularly receiving millions more total Congressional votes than Republicans each cycle).

Everyone inside the beltway was caught sleeping in 2016. The Republican establishment never saw Trump coming and didn't know what to do with him when he arrived. Remember how sad Jeb Bush seemed in the debates? Remember how ineffective Marco Rubio was when he tried to sink to Trump's name calling? By the same token, the Democrats were so tone-deaf as to who Bernie was appealing to (far more aging New Dealers and working-class labor Democrats than the teen radicals they imagined) that they actually thought making trans-bathroom laws a wedge issue would drive turnout for their side. Imagine living in Michigan and working the counter at a Dollar General because the stamping factory you used to work at moved to Mexico, wondering whether your kid's rehab from Oxycodone would finally stick this time while being told that the real fight to be won was about where the gender fluid would take a leak.

That's not to say that trans rights aren't a worthy issue, so much as to point out how out of touch you would have had to have been to think it was a winning one in that moment of time. And if you think there was something more altruistic behind it, ask yourself how much energy has been expanded by the party on the same subject since. Like abortion-related ballot referendums used by Republicans to drive evangelicals to the polls, out-of-touch Beltway Dems thought that identity politics was the path to uniting the left-wing of their party and getting the Bernie crowd to turnout for Hillary, even after the DNC got caught smoothing her path to victory. After all, the donor class Dems never mind looking woke, especially if it prevents them from having to get behind things like a living minimum wage that might actually mean less coins falling into their coffers. And that my friends is what created the relatively small yet curious "I voted for Bernie in the primary and Trump in the general" demographic, not sexism, spite or misogyny.

Fast-forward to 2020 and Bernie is finally poised to emerge as the resistance candidate. Despite the MSM again selling alternative facts that kept explaining away his success, his path to the nomination looked inevitable until the Democratic establishment again intervened, this time with Obama in the role of Clintonesque king maker, convincing moderate establishment favorites Pete Buttiegeg and Amy Klobuchar to take one for the team ahead of Super Tuesday so that a path could be cleared for a sputtering Biden campaign to claim the nomination. For his part, Biden's 40-year record is as right of center as a Democrat can be without going full Joe Lieberman, so the remaining question was how not to repeat 2016 in alienating so much of the left-wing as to ensure Trump another four years.

Then, like a gift from the political gods, Trump began shooting himself in the foot so frequently in his responses to the pandemic and civil unrest that his approval rating—which has never even hit 50 percent even once during his presidency (not surprising considering he won the White House with a smaller share of the vote than either Romney or John Kerry managed in losing)—sunk to a pathetic 35 percent, convincing the NeoLiberal bosses that it was no longer necessary to kiss any rings on the far left. Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and even Tulsi Gabbard and AOC had already bent a knee to Uncle Joe, imploring their supporters to vote blue no matter who, so why not instead go after the moderate Republicans and Bush-era Never Trumpers whose ideology make the Democratic donor class feel much more comfortable than the progressive left’s anyway?

Enter Kamala Harris, who, to the Democratic donor class at least, signals nothing less than a female Barack Obama. And they’re not exactly wrong in that she’s a highly-articulate, ideologically-flexible politician capable of putting a friendly, progressive veneer on the modern NeoLiberal platform. That’s probably why the left-leaning corporate media outlets tried so hard to give her a push in the primary, even though voters simply didn’t find her to be a compelling candidate. Despite a healthy fundraising machine and the focused attention of MSNBC and CNN, Harris didn’t even make it to Iowa, dropping out ahead of what surely would have been a bottom tier finish in her home state of California. In that sense, it’s hard to see what she brings to the ticket in terms of electoral success. Fortunately, she won’t have to deliver her home state, but while much has been made of the fact that she’s the first woman of color to be on a major party ticket, it’s worth noting that there’s little to suggest she’ll help turn out the African American vote as most polls had her fourth of fifth even among black voters, who preferred Biden, Warren and even Sanders over the Senator from California.

As long as we’re on the subject of Harris’s race, however, it’s worth noting that the we're-not-racist right immediately went down the rabbit hole with birther conspiracies disgustingly-similar to those used against Obama that, within moments of the announcement, were used to question her eligibility to ascend to the presidency and fear monger that it was all a plan to install Nancy Pelosi when an aging Biden stepped down soon after being elected. Harris was born in the United States and, furthermore, born to two U.S. citizens. Her eligibility shouldn’t be in question to anyone who’s taken a junior high civics class, yet from what we’ve seen already, I’m sure it won’t be long until someone asks to see her birth certificate.

That said, despite the RNC's painting Harris as the most radical choice possible, her politics are no more progressive than Biden's, as evidenced by the two articles in the Wall Street Journal about Wall Street “breathing a sigh of relief” at her selection. In fact, one of the audition rounds for the veepstakes included hosting a Biden fundraiser and insiders have suggested that it was deep-pocketed Obama donors and not Uncle Joe himself who put her over the top. In Harris, the NeoLiberal establishment has all but cordoned off the progressive wing of the party, perhaps for a decade to come. Like Obama, she allows them to market a progressive package to make affluent suburban liberals feel good without making Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, or the military industrial complex the least bit nervous. In fact, in a communication to investors, Goldman Sachs essentially said that even if it means the Trump tax cuts go away, the stability and predictability of a Biden administration would be at least as good for the 1 percent's bottom line.

To hear the Trump campaign tell it, however, Biden's selection of Harris is nothing less than a signal that, in his cognitive decline, Sleepy Joe has acquiesced to becoming nothing more than a puppet for far left radicals like Bernie, AOC and the rest of The Squad. In their narrative, if elected, he’d be doing the bidding of Antifa, while doing away with everything from God and religion to guns and even the suburbs, and the dangerously radical Harris is only further proof of that. In one of their weirdest turns yet, the Trump campaign is literally showing clips of what America has become under Trump himself and warning that this is what will happen if Biden is elected and only by reelecting the man that brought it to you in the first place and has failed to end it by uniting the country (or even trying) can you stop our present from becoming our future. When taken literally, it is a message that says the world I brought you is the world my opponent will bring you and the only way you can stop that from happening is by keeping the guy who brought it to you! If that doesn't make sense, congratulations, you're not an imbecile.

However, if you buy the narrative that the radical left has taken over the Democratic Party then I'm sorry to report that such may not be the case. Biden-Harris is literally the most Law & Order ticket I can imagine either party fielding. It’s the guy who brought us the Crime Bill, supported the private prison industrial complex and paved a smooth road for Clarence Thomas paired with the AG who wanted to jail young single mothers whose kids missed too much school, blocked access to DNA evidence of the wrongfully convicted, supported marijuana criminalization and pretty much accumulated the least progressive record any prosecutor could ever hope for. 

So no, Harris's pick wasn't to appease the progressive left. It was a middle finger to them, just like the initial convention lineup which didn't even feature AOC or Andrew Yang, the two stars of that set. Meanwhile, NeoCon warmonger John “life starts at the first heartbeat” Kasich is in primetime, along with Jeb Bush acolyte Anna Navarro. AOC finally got space for a 60-second pre-recorded (read vetted) afternoon spot, and the Yang Gang was able to kick and scream until their candidate was given a low-billing slot as well. In other words, if you don’t see that the progressive left is not only not running the show at the DNC but is all but powerless in the party’s politics, you’re simply not paying attention.

Why are NeoLiberals more interested in Bush-era Republicans than the media rock stars on the left who seemingly hold the future votes of the party in their hands? Simple, there's less of a difference in platforms, which means unlike working with the left, they don't really have to give anything up to court NeoCons. That’s because the age of Trump has seen those Republicans give up on social issues they never actually cared that much about from gay marriage to abortion in exchange for a seat at the table on the issues they do—things like energy policy, deregulation, aggressive foreign policy and, above all, jockeying their snoots into the trough of money that the winning team gets to eat from.

Excited because a Black Lives Matter protester is going to Congress? Slow down, Ace, as the hallowed halls are also about to get their first QAnon member. We've reached peak lunacy under Trump, this much is true, but the wheel has spun back to same old song and dance, remixed for 2020. The American empire is falling apart and one side is offering four more years of the lunatic king, while the other is betting that such a thought will scare voters enough to accept the same brand of politics that brought us that President in the first place. All that remains to be seen in whether Dems finally got the calculus correct. Are progressives so infuriated by life under Trump that they'll vote blue no matter who, or have they picked off enough white suburban Republican women for it not to even matter? We'll find out, though likely not until weeks after November 2, assuming we aren't fighting each other in the streets by then.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here. 

[progressiveparty]

Bigger Than Bernie: The Other Progressive Challengers Taking On the Democratic Establishment (via Christopher Hass)

Our Progressive Candidates

Our endorsed candidates are running for office representing progressive values. Fighting for progressive ideas, for the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, ending mass incarceration and deportation. It’s time to empower the voice of a new generation of Progressives who represent the people. A new generation of Progressives who will fight for solutions that match the need of the many.

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CANDIDATES CLICK HERE   Can not find your progressive candidate?

Year 2020 – Recognize a Progressive – Nominate a Candidate:

The Other Progressive Challengers Taking On the Democratic Establishment

By Christopher Hass “Today,” Bernie Sanders booms in his monotone shout, “we begin a political revolution to transform our country—economically, politically, socially and environmentally.” He marks each beat with his right hand, as if conducting with an invisible baton. Behind him, a lone seagull flaps its wings as it flies across Lake Champlain. The crowd of 5,000 that has come to Burlington, Vt., on a sunny afternoon in May to witness Sanders’ official campaign announcement breaks into a cheer. At the time, it was easy to dismiss talk of revolution as the rallying cry of a 74-year-old democratic socialist who clings too dearly to memories of the 1960s. Eleven months and more than six million votes later, Sanders’ call for revolution is harder to ignore. But what, exactly, would this political revolution look like? It’s not hard to imagine Sanders marching in the streets with the masses—he’s walked plenty of picket lines, most recently alongside Verizon workers in New York City last October—but that’s not the revolution he’s calling for. For Sanders, political revolution means shifting control of American politics away from corporate interests, convincing non-voters to go to the polls and attracting white working-class voters back to the Democratic Party, all while moving the party left enough to embrace democratic socialist policies. A political revolution of that kind is going to require two things: a wave of candidates committed to a bold set of progressive ideas and a mass of voters with the political will to elect them. There’s evidence both of these are already here.

Progressives are fired up here for a victory against big money. —Jamie Raskin read the full interview In These Times spoke to U.S. House and Senate challengers across the country who are very much a part of this wave. They are all outsiders to varying degrees, and all of them are running against the Democratic establishment in its various forms—from corporate donors and super PACs to the head of the Democratic National Committee herself. These challengers range from first-time candidates to experienced lawmakers, from community organizers to law professors. Each is balancing the individual concerns of the voters they seek to represent alongside the larger mood of the nation. None of them is running because of Bernie Sanders, but they clearly benefit from the enthusiasm and sense of progressive possibility his campaign has created. It would be a mistake to call them “Sanders Democrats” (and it’s unlikely Sanders himself would want anything to do with the term). Some have endorsed Sanders, others remain neutral or even back Hillary Clinton. But they are coalescing around a set of progressive policies familiar to anyone who has heard Sanders speak, including single-payer healthcare, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage and breaking up the big banks. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic platform more at odds with Bill Clinton’s centrist Third Way of the 1990s. More importantly, these positions increasingly reflect the popular will. Even after the brutal battles over Obamacare, polls show that more than half of Americans support moving to a single-payer healthcare system. Fifty-eight percent want to break up the big banks. Sixty-three percent support raising the minimum wage to $15. And Americans are nearly united in agreement (78 percent) that Citizens United should be overturned. What’s striking about recent polling, though, is not the support for these progressive policies (many have enjoyed widespread approval for a while), but the openness to new, radical ideas—especially among young voters. In a January YouGov poll, people under 30 rated socialism more favorably than capitalism. On the eve of the Iowa caucus, when asked how they describe themselves, 43 percent of Democratic caucusgoers chose “socialist.” Take a moment to let that sink in. This is what happens when you have a generation of young people whose central experiences with capitalism have been two recessions, a financial crisis, crushing college debt, flat wages and soaring income inequality. For young people, the devil they don’t know is looking better and better than the devil they do—and that sentiment is fueling insurgent challengers. Many of these candidates continually emphasize the need to purge U.S. politics of corporate money, starting with the Democratic Party. “It’s easy for candidates to say they’re for overturning Citizens United, but it’s really meaningless when they’re also taking so much corporate and dark money that they’ll never follow through,” says Tim Canova, who is running for Congress in Florida’s 23rd congressional district. “The Democratic Party has lost its way. It has gone corporate and Wall Street on so many issues that it has unfortunately turned its back on its own grassroots base.” And it’s more than a matter of principle: Many of these candidates believe that voters are fed up with how the corporate capture of the party has pulled it to the right. “The Democratic Party has been Lucy with the football and the voters have been Charlie Brown,” says Tom Fiegen, a candidate for Senate in Iowa. “Democrats have pulled the football away too many times, so the voters say, ‘Nope, I am not going to be tricked again. I am not going to have you lie to me and tell me you’re on my side, and then when I send you to D.C., you vote for the TPP or you vote for the Keystone Pipeline.’ ” Nowhere is this trust gap felt more keenly than among young voters. Sanders has won the support of young people like few politicians before. In each of the 27 states that held primaries or caucuses in February or March, he won the youth vote, often by more than 50 points. In his home state of Vermont, he defeated Hillary Clinton among voters under 29 by an overwhelming 95 percent to 5 percent. Tom Fiegen saw how this played out in Iowa. “In the conventions I went to,” he says, “there was probably 30 to 40 years difference in age between Bernie supporters in one half of the room and Hillary supporters in the other half of the room.” Fiegen himself has endorsed Sanders, and you can hear in his voice the same passion that has animated so many young people: “We are idealists. … We want a better world. We think we can achieve it. We’re willing to basically throw our bodies in front of the bus to do that.”

The number one lesson that everyone can learn from Bernie Sanders, and that I’ve tried to emulate, is: Tell the truth. —Tom Fiegen The challengers:

Tim Canova (FL)

Donna Edwards (MD)

Tom Fiegen (IA)

Lucy Flores (NV)

Alan Grayson (FL)

Eric Kingson (NY)

Pramila Jayapal (WA)

Susannah Randolph (FL)

Joseline Peña-Melnyk (MD)

Jamie Raskin (MD) It would be a mistake to overlook the fact that this year’s election is playing out in a moment when protest movements have interjected themselves into the national conversation in a way we haven’t seen in a long time. Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, the climate movement and more have demonstrated the value of setting uncompromising demands and pushing the boundaries of what is politically possible. It’s no surprise then that some of these progressive challengers come directly out of protest movements. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state senator running for the 7th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, has a long history of activism and advocacy in Seattle. She founded the post-9/11 immigrant rights group Hate Free Zone (now OneAmerica), which has held massive voter registration drives. “The only reason I got into politics was because I believed it was another platform for organizing,” she says, “and that’s what I want to do with my congressional campaign. We’ve brought in thousands of leaders, young people and people of color and women who never saw themselves as part of democracy.” Joseline Peña-Melnyk, who is running for Congress in Maryland’s 4th District, says: “These movements give me hope for the future of our democracy. They show that the spirit that gave rise to the civil rights movement is still alive as people take up causes that matter and challenge the status quo.” Donna Edwards, a co-founder of the National Network to End Domestic Violence now running for Maryland’s open Senate seat, agrees. “I’ve always believed in outside movements,” she says. “Government doesn’t move effectively and elected officials don’t move effectively unless they have a big push from the outside.” Candidates like Debbie Medina, a democratic socialist running for state Senate in New York’s 18th District, are happy to be that push. As she told The Nation, “This election is just another rent strike.” Sanders himself is arguably the biggest protest candidate of them all. But a funny thing is happening: Many of the protest candidates are winning. By the middle of April, Sanders had won 16 states, as well as the Democrats abroad primary. Donna Edwards has led by as much as 6 points. Polls show Lucy Flores, a Sanders supporter running for Congress in Nevada, leading by 20 points. In Maryland’s 8th congressional district, Jamie Raskin’s two closest opponents are busy arguing over who’s in second place. For any new president to enact a progressive agenda, they’re going to need a new Congress. The establishment, however, is not going quietly. In Florida, where Tim Canova is challenging Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her congressional seat, news got out in March that the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) had denied Canova’s campaign access to the party’s voter file. His supporters created an uproar; the file is crucial to any campaign’s get-out-the-vote efforts. The FDP eventually backed down in order to avoid, in the words of the state party executive director, the “appearance of favoritism,” but the policy remains in place for all other Democratic primary challengers in Florida. And not just Florida—Democratic challengers in other states are routinely denied access to this data or charged extra for it. “The DNC and state Democratic parties must stop favoring incumbents over insurgents in Democratic primaries,” Canova says. “We need to recruit activists committed to our progressive agenda to run for office, and that includes challenging incumbent Democrats.” Given that these candidates want to rid the party of corporate influence, it’s no surprise that many are going head-to-head with big money. In Maryland, Jamie Raskin’s two biggest challengers in the Democratic primary are a wine mogul named David Trone, who has already spent more than $5 million of his fortune on the race, and Kathleen Matthews, who once oversaw the Marriott political action committee and is now herself the recipient of more lobbyist money than any Democrat running for the House in 2016. “My major opponents here have no real history of involvement in Democratic Party politics,” Raskin says. “They are creatures of the big money politics that have overtaken our country.” He’s won the endorsement of both liberal groups and a number of Democratic state lawmakers, and—borrowing a page from Sanders’ playbook—has relied on a surge of small-dollar donations to remain competitive. “Progressives are fired up here for a victory against big money,” Raskin says. In Nevada, Lucy Flores faces a multi-millionaire, Susie Lee, who has loaned her own campaign $150,000. But as Jeb Bush will tell you, money alone only gets you so far, especially in a year when voters seem more interested in authenticity. “The number one lesson that everyone can learn from Bernie Sanders,” Tom Fiegen says, “and that I’ve tried to emulate is: Tell the truth.” Donna Edwards put it this way: “We should not run away from who we are as Democrats and the values that we share. … We lose elections because our voters stay home.” For a President Sanders or a President Clinton to be successful, they’re going to need voters to come out not just in November, but in 2018, 2020, and beyond. For any president to enact a progressive agenda, they’re going to need a new Congress, made up of people like Donna Edwards, Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal and others. When Barack Obama first ran for president, he spoke frequently about how his election was not about him, but us. He may have meant it, but it was hard to shake the feeling that at that moment in American history, it was in fact very much about him and the qualities he possessed. Today, when Sanders uses the same language, you believe him—if for no other reason than it’s hard to imagine a wild-haired septuagenarian in a baggy suit as the catalyst for a popular movement. Clearly, something deeper is going on. For the most part, Sanders himself has remained focused on his own election fight with Hillary Clinton. He has avoided talk of the future. But in a recent interview with Cenk Uygur of the “Young Turks,” Sanders let his guard down for a minute, saying, “We need, win or lose for me, a political revolution which starts electing people who are accountable to the working families of this country.” There it was—“electing people,” plural, not a single president. That’s what revolution looks like. These challengers are also carrying the flag of the political revolution sparked by Bernie Sanders. This Piece Originally Appeared in Christopher Hass Read the full article

[bountyofbeads]

How the Iowa Caucuses Became an Epic Fiasco for Democrats https://nyti.ms/38fjHf1

Tom Perez and his leadership team MUST GO!!! We CAN'T AFFORD any MORE of these SCREWUPS if we're going to DEFEAT Donald Trump.

How the Iowa Caucuses Became an Epic Fiasco for Democrats

The problems that beset the Democratic Party’s first state caucus of the presidential race ran far deeper and wider than one bad app.

By Reid J. Epstein, Sydney Ember, Trip Gabriel and Mike Baker | Published Feb. 9, 2020 | New York Times | Posted February 10, 2020 |

DES MOINES — The first signs of trouble came early.

As the smartphone app for reporting the results of the Iowa Democratic caucuses began failing last Monday night, party officials instructed precinct leaders to move to Plan B: calling the results into caucus headquarters, where dozens of volunteers would enter the figures into a secure system.

But when many of those volunteers tried to log on to their computers, they made an unsettling discovery. They needed smartphones to retrieve a code, but they had been told not to bring their phones into the “boiler room” in Des Moines.

As a torrent of results were phoned in from school gymnasiums, union halls and the myriad other gathering places that made the Iowa caucuses a world-famous model of democracy, it soon became clear that the whole process was melting down.

Volunteers resorted to passing around a spare iPad to log into the system. Melissa Watson, the state party’s chief financial officer, who was in charge of the boiler room, did not know how to operate a Google spreadsheet application used to input data, Democratic officials later acknowledged.

Others, desperate to verify results, began telling some precinct leaders to email photographs of their worksheets — the paper forms used to tally results — to a dedicated email address. But for hours, no one monitored the inbox. When it was finally opened Tuesday morning, there were 700 unread emails waiting, with photos that had been sent sideways; volunteers had to crane their necks to decipher the handwritten forms.

An hour after the caucuses began, the Iowa Democratic Party chairman, Troy Price, huddled in another room with other officials, none of them with a clear strategy to manage the unfolding chaos or answers to share with increasingly exasperated presidential campaigns. A conference call with the campaigns ended with Mr. Price hanging up on them, amid accusations that caucus results in Iowa may have been incorrectly reported for decades.

As disastrous as the 2020 Iowa caucuses have appeared to the public, the failure runs deeper and wider than has previously been known, according to dozens of interviews with those involved. It was a total system breakdown that casts doubt on how a critical contest on the American political calendar has been managed for years.

Until now, the main public villain in the Iowa caucus fiasco has been the reporting app, created by a company called Shadow Inc., along with a “coding issue” in a back-end results reporting system that state party officials blamed for the chaos. But the crackup resulted from cascading failures going back months.

The fragile edifice of the caucuses, which demoralized Democrats in search of a strong nominee to take on President Trump, crumbled under the weight of technology flops, lapses in planning, failed oversight by party officials, poor training, and a breakdown in communication between paid party leaders and volunteers out in the field, who had devoted themselves for months to the nation’s first nominating contest.

The wider scope of the malfunctions came to light partly because of a new set of reporting requirements, mandated by the Democratic National Committee after allies of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont pushed the national party to demand more transparency following his narrow loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Iowa caucuses.

The widespread lack of faith in the Iowa results has shaken many Americans’ confidence in their electoral system. Mr. Trump has reveled in the meltdown. Democrats have proposed abolishing caucuses and ending Iowa’s time at the front of the presidential nominating calendar.

Even as party officials scramble to contain the fallout, the full extent of the problems in Iowa is still not known.

An analysis by The New York Times revealed inconsistencies in the reported data for at least one in six of the state’s precincts. Those errors occurred at every stage of the tabulation process: in recording votes, in calculating and awarding delegates, and in entering the data into the state party’s database. Hundreds of state delegate equivalents, the metric the party uses to determine delegates for the national convention, were at stake in these precincts.

The Iowa Democratic Party released a list of 92 precincts on Sunday that it said were flagged as problematic by three presidential candidates — Mr. Sanders; Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind.; and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. That figure is far fewer than the number with inconsistencies captured in the Times review. The Associated Press said it was unable to declare a caucus winner.

Sean Bagniewski, the Democratic chairman of Polk County, which includes Des Moines, blamed state officials for neglecting the hard work of overseeing the caucuses.

“It’s very easy to slip into the celebrity of the caucuses,” Mr. Bagniewski said. State party leaders, he said, were distracted by offers to appear on cable TV, hobnob with national Democratic leaders and meet presidential candidates, and did not take their day-to-day duties “seriously from the get-go.’’

In the aftermath of the disaster, state and national party leaders are pointing fingers at one another. On Sunday, Mr. Price, the state party chairman, said he was proud of the volunteers who put on the caucuses and that the state party worked with the national committee for months to prepare for them.

“We are conducting a thorough independent review of the process, and it would be irresponsible for us to rush to judgment before that review is complete,” he said in a statement.

Tom Perez, the chairman of the national committee, placed blame directly on the Iowa Democratic Party and Mr. Price.

“Troy Price was doing his best, but it wasn’t enough,” Mr. Perez said in an interview with The Times on Sunday, noting that while the national and state parties work in partnership, the Iowa Democratic Party is ultimately responsible for administering its own nominating contest.

The D.N.C. approved Iowa’s delegate selection plan, but left the state party to determine on its own how to collect and tabulate caucus results, Mr. Perez said, adding that the national party did not test the state’s app or set standards for training or preparation.

Mr. Perez said he was not responsible for what state parties and their leaders do.

“I do not conduct a performance evaluation of every party chair,” he said.

Asked whether the D.N.C. would increase its scrutiny of other caucuses run by state parties, including Nevada’s in less than two weeks, Mr. Perez said he would “implement all of the lessons learned,” but did not specify how.

A BID FOR TRANSPARENCY

Some of the roots of the Iowa debacle stretch to 2016, when Mr. Sanders finished a fraction of a percentage point behind Mrs. Clinton in the state’s caucuses. He and his allies were furious.

Their caucus-night data indicated he had won the popular vote, but there was no way to prove their case. Precincts only reported how many delegates should be allotted, without the underlying vote totals. And there was no mechanism for Iowa Democrats to recount caucus results, because the state party did not maintain paper records of them.

In 2017, the D.N.C. formed a commission to propose changes to the party’s presidential nominating system, including the way caucus results are reported.

The Iowa Democratic Party tried to comply with the national committee’s orders, which were enacted in 2018, but the two organizations sparred over how the state should address the new requirements and what role the national party should play in Iowa Democrats’ affairs.

Since the disaster Monday night, the D.N.C. has said it took a hands-off approach to the entire operation. But an email from the summer, obtained by The Times, indicates that the national committee tried to involve itself in preparing for the caucuses — in particular, with security.

In July, according to the email, Kat Atwater, the D.N.C.’s deputy chief technology officer, proposed language for vendor contracts that would give the national party access to source code, and allow it to test apps and other products used by the state party.

Iowa party officials rejected the proposed language.

Weeks later, in August, the national party cited security concerns when it vetoed the Iowa Democratic Party’s proposal to hold a “virtual caucus,” which would have allowed absentee participation by phone.

The disagreements delayed approval of Iowa’s caucus plan until late September. The state would use remote “satellite caucuses” to allow Iowans who could not make it to their precinct caucus sites to participate, and a smartphone app for precinct leaders to report results.

One man would oversee all of it.

Mr. Price, 39, a lifelong Iowan who became chairman of the state Democratic Party in July 2017, had a sterling resume. He had been an aide to two former Iowa governors and a top figure in both President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign in the state and in Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 run.

He relished the national attention the caucuses attracted. In early November, at an annual state party dinner that drew 13,000 people, he spoke for 18 minutes, longer than any of the presidential candidates did.

Mr. Price spent the months before the caucuses defending Iowa’s pre-eminent position in the presidential primary process, as candidates bemoaned Iowa’s lack of diversity and arcane caucusing process.

At an August news conference, Mr. Price projected total confidence.

“Just know this,” he said, gesturing with a pointed finger for emphasis. “On Feb. 3 of 2020, caucuses will take place in this state. We will be first. And they will be, without a doubt, the most successful caucuses in our party’s history.”

SOFTWARE ON A RUSHED TIMELINE

Just days before the caucuses, precinct leaders received their first instructions for downloading an app they were to use to record and send results.

The app was created by Shadow Inc., a company recommended to Iowa party officials by Democratic leaders in Nevada, who were working with it as well.

The chief executive of Shadow, Gerard Niemira, was a veteran of the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, where he oversaw tech products like an app the campaign used to take advantage of the quirky math of caucuses and track results in real time.

Because of the delays in planning Iowa’s caucuses, Shadow personnel didn’t enter into a contract for the Iowa app until the fall of 2019, compressing an already tight timeline on a deal that paid relatively little — a bit more than $60,000 so far — for customized technology services.

In November, Iowa officials gathered in Des Moines with Harvard election security experts including Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, to test processes involved in the caucuses. But the app wasn’t part of the exercise.

Still, Shadow developed an initial version of the app that month and began testing and updating it, according to a person involved in the effort. As the caucus date approached, more updates came, but the developers didn’t regard them as critical.

The weekend before the caucuses, officials from Shadow, the state party and the D.N.C. gathered to run final tests. They fed in false data to verify that the quality-control system would catch anything amiss. The app worked well, according to a person involved. But no evidence arose of a bug that would jumble a portion of the results on caucus night.

The Sunday before the caucuses, Mr. Price kept up a busy schedule. He taped an interview with Kasie Hunt of MSNBC in the early afternoon. He posed for a photo on the Fox News set with Donna Brazile, a former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. In the evening, he was at a Super Bowl party with Senator Amy Klobuchar.

Yet in Polk County, where Democrats were preparing for 177 precinct caucuses, it had already been clear all week that the app had problems.

When precinct chairs reported issues, the state party referred them to a lone help-desk employee, who did not always respond to calls and emails.

Six hours before the caucuses were to start at 7 p.m. Monday, precinct leaders received a final email about the app with an ominous instruction: “If the app stalls/freezes/locks up: Close out of the app and log back in with your PIN. The app should save where you were. If it does not, please call in your results.”

Most precinct caucuses ran smoothly across the state. But when some precinct leaders tried to report the results, the app sometimes froze. Calls to the state party hotline sometimes languished on hold for five hours.

To relieve pressure on the state party, D.N.C. officials executed a contingency plan created for natural disasters or terror events: using a backup call center at the party’s headquarters on South Capitol Street in Washington, where about 40 people began taking calls.

By then, it was clear that a catastrophe was taking place at the Iowa Events Center, a venue for auto shows and state wrestling tournaments that was serving as caucus central.

The state party’s phones were jammed. Users on the website 4chan had publicly posted the election hotline number and encouraged one another to “clog the lines.” The party’s volunteer phone operators also had to deflect calls from television news reporters in search of caucus results that were hours overdue.

One floor below, representatives from the seven presidential campaigns competing in Iowa waited in a room with no windows, no food, no water and no information. They took turns trying to call state party officials in search of information.

On a conference call with the campaigns later that night, Mr. Price struggled to explain the information blackout. He said the problems stemmed from party officials having to collect three sets of data from all precincts for the first time.

“You always had to calculate these numbers, all we’re asking is that you report them for the first time,” Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s closest adviser, said he told Mr. Price on the call. “If you haven’t been calculating these numbers all along, it’s been a fraud for 100 years.”

Mr. Price ended the call.

As engineers scrambled to repair the app, panicked Iowa party leaders were making a choice. It was time, they decided, to abandon digital methods and rely on the old ways, gathering data over the phone and doing the math by hand — a decision that would open a whole new can of worms.

Each precinct leader had 36 separate figures to report, along with two separate six-digit verification numbers — and there were more than 1,700 precincts, including the satellites.

In the chaos, caucus results collected by phone operators were riddled with errors. Dozens of the volunteers returned over the next three days to crosscheck them and input results from caucus worksheets that came in by email or through the app. One was delivered days later by the Postal Service.

In the Times review of the data, at least 10 percent of precincts appeared to have improperly allocated their delegates, based on reported vote totals. In some cases, precincts awarded more delegates than they had to give; in others, they awarded fewer. More than two dozen precincts appeared to give delegates to candidates who did not qualify as viable under the caucus rules.

Given the slim lead Mr. Buttigieg now holds over Mr. Sanders in state delegate equivalents, a full accounting of these inconsistencies could alter the outcome. But without access to the precinct worksheets, it is difficult to determine whom the errors hurt or favored.

As caucus night gave way to a week of finger-pointing, some local Democratic volunteers expressed anger at what they saw as efforts by national party officials to blame Iowa for the mess.

“The D.N.C.’s kind of hanging us out to dry,” said Steve Drahozal, the Democratic chairman in Dubuque County. “Instead of saying ‘Good job!’ to the local volunteers, they’re disrespecting a lot of grass-roots organizing that was done. There are criticisms they can make, but this was an extremely smooth, well-organized caucus. We just couldn’t get the data reported.”

______

Reid J. Epstein and Sydney Ember reported from Des Moines and Manchester, N.H., and Trip Gabriel and Mike Baker from Des Moines. Reporting was contributed by Michael Wines and Jack Healy from Des Moines, Shane Goldmacher from Manchester, and Keith Collins, Denise Lu, Charlie Smart, Steven Moity and Pierre-Antoine Louis from New York. Jack Begg, Susan Beachy and Alain Delaqueriere contributed research.

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Not just Democrats but Independants and Republicans who don't feel at home with Trump's behavior.

The Question All Democrats Need to Ask Themselves.... If your preferred candidate doesn’t win the nomination, will you still do everything you can to deny Trump a second term?

By David Leonhardt | Published Feb. 9, 2020 | New York Times | Posted February 10, 2020 |

It’s been a rough week for Democrats. President Trump is preening over his acquittal, his poll numbers and the economy, while the Democratic nomination race looks like a divided mess. Many Democratic voters are anxious that they have no great candidates, only those guaranteed to alienate one half of the party or the other.

Moderates worry that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren aren’t just wrong on big issues, but too left wing to get elected. Progressives worry that Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bloomberg are uninspiring centrists who resemble recent presidential losers and wouldn’t solve America’s problems even if they won.

My message to panicking Democrats is: Take a deep breath, and don’t make your job harder. Neither side of the party can ensure that its preferred candidate will win the nomination. But both can help avoid the outcome they fear most — Trump’s re-election.

The current moment, when everybody is wearing a veil of ignorance about the nomination, is a good time for Democrats to ask themselves a question: If the primaries don’t turn out as you hope, will you still do everything in your power to deny Trump a second term?

Or will you instead exaggerate your differences with the nominee — say, complain about Sanders or Warren as a Trump-style radical; or buy into the caricature of Buttigieg as a corporate tool; or retweet, with outrage added, the least enlightened things Biden or Bloomberg has ever said?

Yes, the candidates have their differences. But they have much bigger similarities. If elected, every single Democratic presidential candidate would act to slow climate change, raise taxes on the rich, reduce gun deaths, expand voting rights, lower health care and education costs, protect abortion access, enforce civil-rights laws, appoint progressive judges, rebuild overseas alliances and stop treating the Justice Department as a personal enforcer. The moderates are running to the left of Barack Obama, and the progressives would be constrained by Congress.

The alternative, of course, is truly radical. Many Democrats know all this, yet they still get so caught up in the passions of the primary campaign that they risk helping Trump.

Whether progressives and moderates can find common ground is likely to be a defining political question not just of 2020 but of this decade. As E.J. Dionne asks in the first sentence of “Code Red,” his new book, “Will progressives and moderates feud while America burns?”

Dionne, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and Washington Post columnist, tells a story about American politics that I find clarifying. In the past, thorny policy debates typically took place between the two parties. Examples include the best way to expand health insurance (through the private sector or government), control pollution (through taxes or regulations) and reduce the deficit (through spending cuts or tax increases).

Today the Republican Party has become so radicalized that it opposes almost any government action to solve problems. Its domestic agenda consists largely of cutting taxes for the rich and freeing companies from oversight. The substantive part of many policy debates now happens within the Democratic Party — which means that tensions are only natural.

And yet progressives and moderate Democrats still agree on far more than they disagree. Each side would be more effective if it were open to learning from the other, Dionne writes, rather than lapsing into “an unseemly moralism that feeds political superiority complexes.”

Progressives are right that over the past half century Democratic moderates have often allowed conservatives to dictate the terms of political conversation, on economic growth, criminal justice, family values and more. I’d add that moderates have also spent too much time designing technocratically elegant policies (like tax credits) rather than creating easily understandable, popular programs.

Moderates, for their part, are right that every great progressive victory in American history — abolition, women’s suffrage, the income tax, labor rights, Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, marriage equality and more — has required compromise in the service of persuading allies who disagree with progressives on other issues. It’s not enough to state your case purely and wait for a silent progressive majority to emerge as never before.

In the long run, each side is likely to accomplish much more if it can recognize that the other isn’t the enemy. In the short run, obviously, there is an inescapable dilemma: The party can nominate only one person.

Before that choice is made — while both sides are fighting hard for their preferred nominees, as they should — they should pause to reflect on the strengths of the other side. For progressives, that means recognizing that moderate congressional candidates really did fare better in swing districts in 2018. It also means celebrating (quietly, for now, I realize) the progressivism of, say, Buttigieg’s agenda.

For moderates, it means acknowledging that Sanders’ pugnacious authenticity appeals to some swing voters more than wonkish centrism does. And it means pushing back against the false notion that Sanders and Warren are somehow un-American. A Sanders or Warren presidency would have more in common with Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency than a second Trump term would have with either of them.

The 2020 campaign still has a long way to go. Democrats should remember which parts of it they can’t control and which they can.

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Who’s Really Shredding Standards on Capitol Hill?.... Naming the alleged whistle-blower is much worse than tearing up a speech.

By Joanne Freeman, Dr. Freeman is a historian at Yale | Published Feb. 9, 2020 | New York Times | Posted February 10, 2020 |

Last week, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said a lot without speaking a word. At the close of President Trump’s State of the Union address, she calmly, deliberately and now famously tore her copy in two and tossed it down with a shrug, declaring her disdain for its contents with aplomb.

This simple gesture sent a strong message. Most speakers are expressionless during State of the Union addresses or they come close; Speaker John Boehner couldn’t quite mask his “micro-expressions” of frustration during President Barack Obama’s address in 2015.

Speaker Pelosi offered a cri de coeur in comparison, as she intended. The speech was “a manifesto of mistruths,” she said during a news conference two days later. “It was necessary to get the attention of the American people to say, ‘This is not true.’” And she succeeded, perhaps beyond her expectations. Violating congressional traditions to make a point is itself a longstanding tradition for good reason.

Republicans heard that message loud and clear, denouncing her incivility, accusing her of shredding “decades of tradition” and demanding her resignation. It was the “most classless act ever conducted in Congress,” Ian Miles Cheong, the managing editor of the conservative website Human Events, charged.

But was it? Not by a long shot; when it comes to misconduct, Congress has a long history. Congressmen have pulled guns on each other. They’ve shoved and punched each other, and smacked at foes with fireplace tongs. They’ve engaged in mass brawls, toppling desks, tossing spittoons and, in one case, yanking off a toupee. The most famous violence in congressional history is the caning of the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the Senate floor in 1856, but it was not an anomaly.

Nor is Ms. Pelosi alone in violating traditions for all to see; it was far from the first time that members of Congress met alleged lies with bold displays of open contempt. In 1790, Representative Aedanus Burke of South Carolina showed his feelings with a flourish after Alexander Hamilton, the Treasury secretary, slurred the Southern militia during an Independence Day speech. Hamilton had said that Southern troops were dispirited and in disarray before the arrival of Gen. Nathanael Greene. Burke — outraged and hoping to impress folks back home — used the theater of Congress to have his say. Turning toward the visitor gallery, he declared, “In the face of this assembly and in the presence of this gallery … I give the lie to Colonel Hamilton.” Onlookers were stunned.

Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas did much the same when President Obama discussed his health care plan before the House in 2009, waving a handwritten sign that read, “What Plan?” “The things he was saying were certainly not true of the only bill we had at the time,” Mr. Gohmert later said. On that same night, Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “You lie!” at the president for a similar reason.

By far, the most skilled practitioners of this showy statecraft were Southern slaveholders in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Threatened by even the hint of opposition to slavery, they used bold public threats during debate to frighten their foes into compliance or silence, tossing off insults or dangling duel challenges to set an example. Faced with the choice of a fistfight or a duel — or the humiliation of avoiding one — most men backed down or held back. For Southerners, transgressing rules was part of the point; it was a show of power.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky used the same form of showmanship when he exposed the alleged whistle-blower’s name during impeachment proceedings last Tuesday. Days after Chief Justice John Roberts refused to read a question from Mr. Paul that revealed the name, Mr. Paul did the deed himself. During a period reserved for impeachment speeches, he read his question aloud while standing next to a large blue poster with the name in bold yellow, endangering the whistle-blower and violating the spirit of whistle-blower protection laws in the process; although those laws are meant to protect informants from retaliation, they don’t explicitly stop members of Congress or the president from revealing names. Tradition and ethics alone keep them silent.

Although not strictly speaking illegal, Mr. Paul’s actions were wrong, and some Republican colleagues said as much, privately admitting that they “probably” wouldn’t have done it. But for Mr. Paul, violating norms was the point. By exposing the name — and getting away with it — he was warning off potential whistle-blowers-to-be.

Did he succeed? We don’t yet know, though the bar of success is low; prevent one potential informant from stepping forward, or even give one pause, and Mr. Paul has scored a victory. President Trump’s public name-calling and bullying have done much the same, frightening people into compliance for fear of vengeance in Washington or back home.

Mr. Paul’s stunt shows us the real power of such transgressions. Incivility is one thing; bullying people into silence is quite another. The former scores points. The latter potentially warps the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch, and smothers the protections that make government go. These are the sins that should merit our outrage, get us out campaigning and march us to polling places. The defense of our system of government demands no less.

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This very distressing and dangerous, that the GOP would use the full weight of the United States Government to go after your political rivals using a private citizen to dig up unvetted information. Putin is laughing all the way to the bank.

Justice Dept. Reviewing Information From Giuliani on the Bidens, Graham Says.... Senator Lindsey Graham warned that the information should be viewed skeptically. “Russia is playing us all like a fiddle,” he said.

By Catie Edmondson | Published Feb. 9, 2020 | New York Times | Posted February 10, 2020 |

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has begun receiving information obtained by Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, from Ukraine about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Senator Lindsey Graham said on Sunday.

Mr. Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a vocal Trump ally, said Attorney General William P. Barr told him in a telephone call early Sunday morning that the department was “receiving information coming out” of Ukraine delivered by Mr. Giuliani.

“He told me that they have created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified,” Mr. Graham said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment on Mr. Graham’s assertion. The department has previously taken steps to distance itself from Mr. Giuliani, and in September, it said Mr. Barr had “not discussed anything relating to Ukraine” with Mr. Giuliani.

The Trump administration’s effort to dig up damaging information in Ukraine on the president’s political rivals was at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, which resulted last week in Mr. Trump’s acquittal by the Senate.

Mr. Trump and his allies have since signaled a continuing effort to investigate the business relationship Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, had with Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, and whether the elder Mr. Biden acted improperly to benefit Burisma when he was vice president. There is no evidence behind the claim that Mr. Biden intervened inappropriately with Ukraine to help his son, and Mr. Graham expressed new wariness on Sunday of the information Mr. Giuliani might be collecting.

“Any documents coming out of the Ukraine against any American, Republican or Democrat, need to be looked at by the intelligence services who has expertise that I don’t,” Mr. Graham said, “because Russia is playing us all like a fiddle.”

The receipt of information from Mr. Giuliani does not mean that the Justice Department will open any investigation into Mr. Biden or his son. The attorney general issued a memo last week saying that he must clear the opening of any investigation into a presidential candidate.

Mr. Graham’s remarks came after Mr. Giuliani claimed in an interview on Saturday night with Fox News that he had found a “smoking gun” in his investigation into the Bidens and called on Mr. Graham to investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.

“We’ve got the documents, Lindsey,” Mr. Giuliani said.

Mr. Graham had indicated in the fall that he would use the power of his Judiciary Committee gavel to investigate the Bidens’ work in Ukraine, requesting documents from the State Department and the Secret Service. In December, he invited Mr. Giuliani to testify before his committee about the trip he took to Ukraine in an effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens.

On Sunday, Mr. Graham cited conversations with Mr. Barr and Senator Richard M. Burr, a North Carolina Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for his new skepticism of the information.

Asked if he thought Mr. Giuliani was being used by the Russians, Mr. Graham responded, “I don’t know.”

“I’m saying that anybody who has got any information coming from the Ukraine needs to turn it over to the intelligence community,” he replied.

______

Katie Benner contributed reporting.

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A Plea to Save the Last Nuclear Arms Treaty.... Two former diplomats, from Russia and America, call for extending the nuclear arms limitation pact called New START, to make the world more secure.

By Madeleine Albright and Igor Ivanov |

Published Feb. 10, 2020, 12:34 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted Feb 10, 2020 |

**Dr. Albright is a former United States secretary of state and Mr. Ivanov is a former Russian foreign minister.

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The relationship between Russia and the United States has been mired in crisis for much of the past decade. Communication once considered routine has been cut off, deepening mistrust and making it more difficult to reduce tensions and avoid miscalculation. The current state of affairs does not serve the strategic interests of either country, and it puts global security at risk because Russia and the United States are the only countries that possess enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other — and all of humanity.

Rebuilding mutual confidence and putting United States-Russian relations on a safer track will be a challenging long-term endeavor, given the political climates in Washington and Moscow. But the two countries have a chance to head off even more instability by extending the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires in one year, on ‎Feb. 5. While 12 months may seem like a lot of time, in diplomatic terms and in the present environment, the clock is ticking fast.

The United States and Russia can avoid a senseless and dangerous return to nuclear brinksmanship if they act soon. There is no reason to wait, and extending the treaty, known as New START, is the place to begin.

With the unfortunate dissolution of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty last year, New START is the only agreement still in place that limits the size of American and Russian nuclear forces. It also provides vital verification and transparency measures, including on-site inspections, that have helped foster strategic stability. The treaty allows for a five-year extension if the leaders of both countries agree. President Vladimir Putin and President Trump should seize this opportunity.

Our countries survived the nuclear dangers of the Cold War through a combination of skilled diplomacy, political leadership and good fortune. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not eliminate those dangers, but the years that followed saw continued progress on arms control, a sharp drop in nuclear peril and a reduced reliance on military means for addressing potential conflicts.

Today, in contrast, geopolitical tensions are rising and the major powers are placing a renewed emphasis on the role of nuclear weapons in their military strategies. Experts are suddenly talking less about the means for deterring nuclear conflict than about developing weapons that could be used for offensive purposes.

Some have even embraced the folly that a nuclear war can be won.

Late last year, we met in Vienna with other former foreign ministers from more than a dozen countries, as part of the Aspen Ministers Forum, to review the global security landscape and examine these trends in depth. We emerged from these consultations deeply troubled by the possible worldwide consequences of an accelerating global arms race, the increased risk of military incidents and the degradation of arms reduction and nonproliferation agreements. We believe that the world needs to move in a new, less hazardous direction.

As a result of that meeting, we and 24 other former foreign ministers are now issuing a statement calling upon leaders of all countries to counter the uncertainties posed by nuclear weapons more urgently. The means to address these dangers are at our disposal, but they can be carried out only through wise leadership. During the Cold War, the world proved that well constructed, balanced and faithfully implemented treaties, political commitments and norms of behavior can effectively reduce tensions and the likelihood of conflict.

This spring, 190 nations will gather in New York on the 50th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to review current nuclear risks and proliferation challenges. Extending New START would send a signal to the rest of the world as other countries consider their responsibilities to help halt the spread of nuclear weapons. It could also lay the foundation for increased international cooperation in the next decade.

The recent escalation of attacks between the United States and Iran demonstrated how quickly the lack of guardrails can move us to the brink of war. Amid the erosion of multilateral agreements and diplomatic channels, we came close to calamity. The dangers of miscalculation are too grave for leaders to resort to ambiguous communication, threats and military action.

In the years ahead, the security landscape will be made only more challenging by emerging technologies and their interplay with conventional and nuclear capabilities. So it will be crucial to create a revitalized spirit of diplomacy based on a shared understanding of the dangers, and ways to mitigate potential sources of harm. As former foreign ministers, we pledge to continue speaking out on this issue and do our part in this effort.

Right now, the most important thing to do is extend New START. Russia has indicated, at the highest levels, its willingness to do so. All that President Trump needs to do is agree. Legislative approval is not required.

Time is critical. Doing nothing while waiting for a “better” agreement is a recipe for disaster: We could lose New START and fail to replace it. The treaty’s agreed limits on nuclear arsenals are too important to be put at risk in a game of nuclear chicken.

Moreover, we have an opportunity to improve security and rebuild trust between the world’s two great nuclear powers. It must not be thrown away.

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Madeleine Albright was the United States secretary of state from 1997 to 2001. Igor Ivanov was the Russian foreign minister from 1998 to 2004.

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I wonder if there had been a Democrat (Hillary Clinton) were on trial if Chief Justice Roberts would have been as restrained. Just sayin!!!

Chief Justice’s Impeachment Handbook: Determined Minimalism.... The restrained approach of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to what he called his “ill-defined responsibilities” did not please liberals. But it insulated him from combustible confrontations.

By Adam Liptak | Published Feb. 10, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted February 10, 2020 |

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has returned to his day job, and he must be relieved.

His grim demeanor during President Trump’s impeachment trial made plain that he did not enjoy his role in it. As the trial ended, the chief justice said he had “attempted to carry out ill-defined responsibilities in an unfamiliar setting” during “my period of required residency.”

He approached the task of presiding over the trial with stoic restraint, no doubt having concluded that doing as little as possible was the best way to try to protect the authority and legitimacy of the Supreme Court in an era of poisonous partisan warfare.

He told the senators that he hoped to see them “under happier circumstances,” inviting them to visit the court. On his home turf, the chief justice suggested, things were more to his liking.

During Supreme Court arguments, lawyers’ positions are relentlessly  tested by a barrage of questions from the justices. At the impeachment trial, the chief justice read senators’ questions passed to him on notecards.

The queries were usually empty, banal and directed to allies, who responded with little speeches. It was a parody of the adversary system. Chief Justice Roberts read the questions dutifully, even when they were aimed at him.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a 2020 presidential candidate, had the chief justice recite this one: “At a time when large majorities of Americans have lost faith in government, does the fact that the chief justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican senators have thus far refused to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the chief justice, the Supreme Court and the Constitution?”

That echoed criticism from liberals who wanted Chief Justice Roberts to do more to turn the impeachment trial into an actual one. But the Constitution is notably cryptic about the his role, saying only this: “When the president of the United States is tried, the chief justice shall preside.”

Chief Justice Roberts certainly showed no inclination to explore the limits of his role as presiding officer, for the very reason Ms. Warren noted. A loss of legitimacy, the chief justice must have reasoned, was more likely to follow from action than inaction.

He made this clear when Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, asked whether the chief justice would break a tie vote. Mr. Schumer noted that Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase had done so twice at the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in 1868.

Chief Justice Roberts rejected those precedents, noting that they concerned procedural matters: “I do not regard those isolated episodes 150 years ago as sufficient to support a general authority to break ties.”

“If the members of this body elected by the people and accountable to them divide equally on a motion, the normal rule is that the motion fails,” Chief Justice Roberts said. “I think it would be inappropriate for me, an unelected official from a different branch of government, to assert the power to change that result so that the motion would succeed.”

Senate Republicans seemed determined not to put him on the spot. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said the chief justice’s predicament figured in her thinking when she voted against calling witnesses. A contrary vote would have resulted in a tie.

“It has also become clear some of my colleagues intend to further politicize this process, and drag the Supreme Court into the fray, while attacking the chief justice,” Ms. Murkowski said, in a jab at Ms. Warren. “I will not stand for nor support that effort. We have already degraded this institution for partisan political benefit, and I will not enable those who wish to pull down another.”

There was one question Chief Justice Roberts refused to read. It was submitted by Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, and it named the person widely believed to be the whistle-blower whose complaint helped lead to the trial.

Early in the proceedings, the chief justice tried to encourage civility, chastising the two sides when things got particularly raw as arguments extended beyond midnight.

“I think it is appropriate at this point for me to admonish both the House managers and the president’s counsel in equal terms to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body,” he said. “One reason it has earned that title is because its members avoid speaking in a manner and using language that is not conducive to civil discourse.”

In an earlier impeachment trial, he said, an accusation of “pettifogging,” or an undue emphasis on petty details, was said to have crossed a line. “I don’t think we need to aspire to that high a standard,” Chief Justice Roberts said, “but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are.”

The trial may be over, but Mr. Trump’s policies and personal affairs will continue to occupy the chief justice and his court. Next month, for instance, the justices will hear three cases on whether Mr. Trump must disclose his financial records.

The two men interacted briefly before the president’s State of the Union address last week. Mr. Trump did most of the talking; Chief Justice Roberts adopted a fixed and cheerless expression that made clear that he was ready to return to his judicial duties.

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[keepingupwithlinmanuel]

Hamilton in Puerto Rico: a joyful homecoming ... but it's complicated

About 20 miles (32km) west of San Juan, traces of Miranda are inescapable in Vega Alta, an unglamorous town of 39,000 people where his extended family still lives. Its theatre was torn down in the 1970s to make way for a car park, but a small new plaza built by his father includes a bakery, bar, cafe, souvenir shop – hats, mugs, T-shirts, postcards, lifesize cardboard cutouts of Miranda – and a small museum showing off artwork, awards, cast recordings, family photos and theatre programmes. On the walls there are colourful tile mosaics that include Miranda’s face, the Hamilton logo and the Puerto Rican flag. Salsa music plays as tourists snap photos.

A short walk away, on a cul-de-sac of single-storey houses where the quiet is punctuated by squawks from tropical birds, is the home where the young Miranda and his sister would while away summers with their grandparents. He would often run over to see his neighbour Margo Rodriguez and enjoy her homemade limbers – a local treat that resembles a popsicle frozen in a plastic cup. “He spent a lot of time with me here, singing, drawing and making jokes,” says Rodriguez, now 85. “I would pretend to play guitar with a broomstick and he would sing. He was a good kid. He was priceless.”

She is not alone in her pride. Elliot Knight Nater, a music director, says: “This town loves him. When they know he’s coming here, you can see 200 to 300 people waiting: people who used to see him as a kid running in the streets.” He added: “I hope he never gets into politics because people change as soon as they get in that position.”

And yet Miranda’s family is steeped in politics. His great-uncle, Gilberto Concepción de Gracia, was the founder of the Puerto Rican Independence party. His father, Luis Miranda, is a Democratic party consultant who left the island at 18 to chase the American dream and, despite speaking little English, found that New York “fit like a glove”. He settled in a Latino neighbourhood in Washington Heights – the inspiration for Miranda’s breakthrough musical In the Heights, which he brought to Puerto Rico in 2010. Luis Miranda was a special adviser to the New York mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s and helped manage Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand’s successful campaigns for the US Senate.

His son has taken on the baton. Accepting a Tony award in 2008 for In the Heights, he waved a small Puerto Rican flag. Hamilton, which celebrates diversity by casting people of colour as the founding fathers of the US, was hailed by New Yorker magazine as “the Obama-era musical”. Its cast delivered a pointed statement to the vice-president, Mike Pence, after one performance, while Miranda has tweeted that Donald Trump will go to hell for criticising the mayor of San Juan after the hurricane. He has also gone to Washington to plead with Congress to help Puerto Rico with its economic crisis and appeared on the comedian John Oliver’s HBO show to rap: “Paul Ryan, I’ll come sing Hamilton at your house. / I’ll do-si-do with Pelosi, I’ll wear my Hamilton blouse. / Your citizens are suffering, stop the bleeding, stop the loss. / Help Puerto Rico, it’s just a hundred miles across.”

Amid the Spanish colonial buildings, cobbled streets and ornate balconies of old San Juan, where tourists disgorged by giant cruise ships wander among cats and pigeons, many are expressing their gratitude before opening night. Javier Santiago, 59, the director of the National Foundation for Popular Culture, has a small shrine to Miranda, including the red shirt he wore for the Broadway run of In the Heights, and invites young visitors to try on Miranda’s cap. Some burst into tears. “That’s something they will never forget,” he says.

“We feel very proud of the work he did in In the Heights. He showed the soul of our community: the getting together, the importance of family. This is a side that West Side Story never showed. Hamilton coming here is symbolic of the Puerto Rican soul that will never die. He’s in the diaspora that left Puerto Rico to go to the United States; his parents brought him back every year and he never lost contact with his roots. The idiosyncrasy, the Latin way of being, is in him, pumping in his heart.”

But in Puerto Rico, neither a nation nor a state, where people can vote in US primaries but not in presidential elections, nothing is simple or straightforward. Hamilton was due to be performed at the University of Puerto Rico, where its producers spent $1m upgrading the theatre. Then, late last month, the show was abruptly switched to the Luis A Ferré Performing Arts Center because of concerns about student protests over budget cuts enforced by Washington. The Hamilton set was taken down, shuttled across town and hastily rebuilt.

Luis, 64, a former student at the university, was disappointed by the move but endorsed it. “There’s many things that you could compromise but security is not one of them,” he says. “If there is a minimum possibility that anything can happen, that should be enough for the production to move.”

But Nelson Rivera, a retired art history professor at the university, accuses the producers of losing their nerve. “I think the government threw shade at the students: ‘Oh, they’re a bunch of terrorists, get out of there.’ They fell for it. They should have won over the community, the university, and nothing would have happened. We’re very nice people.”

...

Miranda’s father is aware of the identity politics and does not shy away from them. “The forever debate is who is Puerto Rican,” Luis Miranda says in an interview with the Guardian in the theatre foyer, hours before the first dress rehearsal. “You hear the debate among normal people: ‘But he’s not Puerto Rican, he’s from New York, he’s from Puerto Rican parents.’ But what we do know is that there is enormous pride in him, particularly since he’s so proud of being Puerto Rican. He has said many times that he is using the megaphone and the spotlight that he has gotten thanks to Hamilton to push forward things like the recovery of Puerto Rico.”

Luis Miranda also appears to embrace the complexities of his son’s forays into politics, having fought many such battles himself. “I hate Trump and anything I could do to defeat Republicans, even now my friends who are Republicans, I would do because they have allowed the party to be hijacked by this orange nut. When you do that, you know people are going to be with you and people are going to be against you. It’s no different in Puerto Rico, but the important part that I hope I taught my kids is that you make decisions and you take stands and some will applaud you and some will criticise you, but you take the stand you believe is right.”

This is really good and worth reading to get your head around the various issues.

(The only thing I would add is that the production is not making a profit off Hamilton PR and that plus where the money is actually going is a good thing to bear in mind when talking about ticket pricing.)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 5, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Today, Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security. Haugen noted that Facebook co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg controls about 58% of Facebook’s voting shares, meaning he sets the terms of the company’s behavior. Her documents, illustrating that Facebook addressed only about 1% of hate violent speech and that its own algorithms pushed disinformation, supported her general observations about the need for government regulation of the social media giant.

While Haugen was testifying, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone reinforced that message when he texted the ranking Republican on the committee, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, to note that Haugen had not worked directly on issues of child safety or Instagram at Facebook, facts Haugen had already established.

Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch issued a statement attacking Haugen as untrustworthy but saying, “we agree…it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet…. [I]t is time for Congress to act.”

Tonight Zuckerberg responded in a Facebook post of his own. He echoed Pietsch’s call for government regulation.He called the recent coverage of the company a “false picture,” with claims that “don’t make any sense” because the company has “established an industry-leading standard for transparency.” He wrote that “[w]e care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health.” He says it is “just not true” that “we prioritize profit over safety and well-being,” and that it is “deeply illogical” that they “deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit.” “It’s very important” to him, he says, “that everything we build is safe and good for kids.”

While information about Facebook has demonstrated the dangers the social media giant poses for our democracy, the congressional fight over the debt ceiling has brought into relief a different struggle for the same cause.

The Republican Party has now swung almost entirely behind former president Trump—one heck of a gamble as his legal jeopardy continues to mount. Today, a New York state court said Trump must give a deposition in the defamation case brought against him by Summer Zervos, the former "Apprentice" contestant who said he sexually assaulted her and sued him for defamation after he called her a liar. And as the January 6 committee continues to take evidence, bipartisan groups of lawyers have asked legal organizations to investigate and possibly disbar the lawyers who backed Trump’s attempted coup, John Eastman and Jeffrey Bossert Clark.

Nonetheless, right-wing insurgents are tripping over each other to move to extreme positions behind the positions of the former president.

In Idaho today, for example, as soon as the state’s governor, Republican Brad Little, left the state for Texas to meet with nine other Republican governors about President Biden’s approach to securing the border, Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin, who is challenging Little for governor next year, flexed her muscles over the state. She issued an executive order declaring she had “fixed” Little’s executive order prohibiting the government from requiring proof of vaccines to access services by extending the prohibition to schools, saying “I will continue to fight for your individual Liberty!” Then she enquired about activating the Idaho National Guard to go to the southern border.

Little promptly responded to her declarations with his own statement calling her actions “political grandstanding,” noting that he had not authorized her to act on his behalf, and saying he would be “rescinding and reversing any actions taken by the Lt. Governor when I return.” In the midst of all this posturing, Idaho is suffering a spike in coronavirus cases, with death rates at nearly three times the national average.

But while Republican leaders have encouraged the rush to the right because it fires up the party’s base voters, it may now have painted them into a corner from which they’re hoping the Democrats will rescue them.

The fight over the debt ceiling suggests that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is no longer in control of his caucus.

The debt ceiling is a cap on how much the Treasury can borrow to meet its obligations. We are now in trouble because under former president Trump, Congress created $7.8 trillion of debt, and now the Treasury cannot borrow to pay back that money. Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, have said they want the ceiling lifted, but they want Democrats to do it on their own.

But Republicans do not want the ceiling lifted by a simple vote, which the Democrats tried and the Republicans filibustered. They want to force the Democrats to raise the ceiling under the process of reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered. This would prevent the Democrats from using the reconciliation process for their infrastructure package that would support human infrastructure like child care and elder care, and address climate change.

Yesterday, Democrats called Republicans out on this manipulation, and today, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) set up a vote on the debt ceiling for Wednesday. Democrats today suggested that McConnell and the Republicans are not simply trying to stop the Democrats’ infrastructure plans, but want to sow chaos by crashing the economy. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wondered on Twitter whether the billionaires “who prop up McConnell actually want a default” so “out of ashes they can build their new oligarchy.”

But tonight Adam Jentleson, an expert on the Senate whose knowledge of the institution is unparalleled among scholars, pointed out that McConnell seems unable to agree to let the Democrats save the country by a simple vote because five or six Republican senators will refuse. So, unable to control them, he seems to be forcing Democrats into a position in which they have no choice but to break the filibuster. Jentleson suggests McConnell knows that his own caucus might obstruct even reconciliation, so he is trying to open a door to make sure Democrats can keep the nation from defaulting and crashing the U.S. economy.

The fall of the Republican Party into the hands of extremists who are willing to destroy it recently prompted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to declare, “I'm astonished that more people don’t see, or can’t face, America’s existential crisis.”

Restoring sanity to the country will require free and fair elections, which, after years of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, will require federal legislation. The time for that to be most effective is running out, as Republican-dominated states are currently in the process of redistricting, which will determine their congressional districts for the next decade.

Today, in the Senate, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This measure would restore the parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court gutted in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder and the 2021 Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decisions. Of the three voting acts currently in play, the John Lewis Act seems like the easiest to pass, since Congress has repeatedly reauthorized the 1965 Voting Rights Act, most recently in 2006 by a vote of 98–0 in the Senate and 390–33 in the House of Representatives.

And yet, even this measure will be a hard sell for today’s extremist Republicans. When House Democrats brought the John Lewis bill up for a vote in August, not a single Republican voted for it.

—

Notes:

https://apnews.com/article/facebook-frances-haugen-congress-testimony-af86188337d25b179153b973754b71a4

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20online:%20testimony%20from%20a%20facebook%20whistleblower

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-set-to-appear-before-senate-panel-11633426201

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/04/biden-mcconnell-debt-limit-filibuster/

https://politicalwire.com/2021/10/05/schumer-sets-vote-to-lift-debt-ceiling/

Andy Stone @andymstoneFacebook Statement on today's Senate Subcommittee Hearing.

86 Retweets199 Likes

October 5th 2021

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPOaPE6MyWMdMV9f218nsSjGGrmSjnkw/view

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-deposition-summer-zervos-lawsuit-expected-before-christmas-2021-10

Adam Jentleson 🎈 @AJentlesonThis is your tell. McConnell is forcing Dems into a position where filibuster reform is clearly their best and perhaps only option. Why? Because he can’t control his conference. Reconciliation presents multiple chances for obstruction and he can’t guarantee Rs won’t exploit them. GOP Sen @RoyBlunt tells us he and probably 44 GOP colleagues would be willing to give consent to waive debt limit filibuster but other 5-6 senator would not give UC

Erik Wasson @elwasson

172 Retweets502 Likes

October 6th 2021

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/john-eastment-jeffrey-clark-coup-consequences.html

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/politics/idaho-lt-gov-janice-mcgeachin-vaccine-passport-order-covid-19/277-38c2fcb5-814b-4d33-ac7a-d9c6575cfe64

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/05/idaho-governor-guard-border-vaccines-515194

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[phroyd]

You know the coy thing that politicians do when they are teasing whether or not they should run for office. The thing where they walk out into a crowd of people cheering their name and act like they want it to stop but secretly love the adoration.

Two-time loser—I really don’t know what else to call her here—Hillary Clinton is doing the thing were she’s acting like an encore wasn’t already written into her setlist and the crowd’s cheers are really what’s bringing the band back on the stage, because Hillary is actually toying with the idea of running again in 2020.

The New York Times reports that during a Q&A with Recode’s Kara Swisher, Clinton was asked about possibly running in the next presidential election. After flatly stating “no,” which received laughs from those in attendance, Clinton then added: “I’d like to be president” but noted that she won’t consider it until after the midterm elections.

Hillary needs to stop.

Then stop some more.

Turn around, stop. And then stop.

Hillary Clinton needs to play musical chairs by herself and when the music stops, she can have her choice of seats. Hillary Clinton needs to look in the mirror and tell Hillary Clinton to stand down. If Hillary Clinton is on the Democratic ticket come 2020 there should a mandatory option that allows voters to choose a box that reads “not Hillary Clinton” which allows for a mystery candidate to take the nomination should they win. At this point, if Hillary Clinton is running against a push mower, I’m ready to start campaigning for the push mower because one of these candidates will at the very least keep your grass cut.

And not even a push mower with an automatic start. I’d be willing to serve in the campaign as the person responsible for pulling that tight-ass string to start the lawnmower-in-chief every day because president Troy-Bilt would be an infinitely better candidate than Hillary Clinton.

What Hillary doesn’t understand — and maybe that’s because of her insulated life, or maybe whiteness—is that the people don’t like her either. Clinton was the other half of one of the most undesirable presidential elections in the history of America. The Root openly hated Donald Trump and did everything we could to highlight all of his atrocities during his run for the White House and the best we could muster as a campaign for his opponent was, “Hold your nose for Hillary.”

In the same interview where Hillary declared that she’d like to be president she also made a “all black people look alike” joke. Hillary doesn’t understand how remotely horrible Hillary is and that’s sounds a lot like the guy we already have in office.

During the interview in which Clinton noted that we can’t treat all immigrants the same, “Swisher asked Clinton a question regarding a quip that was previously made by Holder, but mistook him for the junior senator from New Jersey.”

“What do you think of Cory Booker ... what do you think about him saying ‘Kick them in the shins,’ essentially?”

“Well, that was Eric Holder,” Clinton said. “Yeah, I know they all look alike.”

My nigga...

This is the same problem that Clinton’s husband had in office and becoming the sideshow to Clinton’s perpetually long guitar solos. You ain’t one of us and you never will be! That joke isn’t yours to make. (Which I would love to nominate for the 2018 “We Can’t Have Shit Awards”)

The Clintons have always been the white couple allowed to sit at the black table and then don’t understand when they make a blacks-playing-basketball joke, why the whole table looked at them like they just farted. They’ve been way too comfortable for a little too long.

There are other things for Clinton to do, the first of which is to move the fuck on. At this point, Hillary Clinton is becoming Napoleon Dynamite’s uncle who wants us all to watch her throw a football over a mountain.

Her time has come and gone. If she couldn’t beat a human bag of walking afterbirth with the policy knowledge of a 4-year-old then that should say something. In fact, that should say a lot. Her base turned on her. People literally refused to vote because they considered Clinton to be the other side of the same Donald Trump coin. And while we can talk forever about Russian bots, rigged elections, voting machines that weren’t working, voter suppression, and everything else used by Trump to steal the election, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton’s time has passed her by.

Unless she reads this, Hillary will never know my opinion. But hopefully one of you can talk some sense to her over a glass of a nice Shiraz while she is taking her anti-fainting meds. Please, white people, I beg of you: Come get your girl.

Look, we all want things that aren’t going to happen. I want my 10th-grade hairline back. I also want a credit score that doesn’t look like my college GPA. But when it comes to Hillary Clinton wanting to be president, I just talked to my friend Chief and he said, “this ain’t it.”

Phroyd

[acquariusgb]

9/11 Hillary POV

It’s a sad day today as we remember 20 years since 9/11. Here is an extract from Hillary Rodham Clinton- A woman living history by Karen Blumenthal, talking about the events from that day.

September 11, 2001, was to be another historic day: First Lady Laura Bush was to testify about early childhood education before one of Hillary’s committees. It would be an unusual First Lady meeting. Hillary put on a bright yellow suit for the event.

She was on the phone with Ann O’Leary, her legislative director, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Initially, they thought it was an accident—until the second plane hit. At that point, O’Leary said, Hillary was sure it was a terrorist attack.

By the time Hillary arrived at work near the Capitol, a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon, and police were evacuating her office building. She met some of her nervous staff outside, where she tried to assure them that they would be okay and dispatched them to a staffer’s nearby home.

By then, police were trying to clear traffic, and Hillary got back in the car. One of Bill’s former advisers, Gene Sperling, happened to be nearby, and she offered him a ride. While the radio reported the grim news, Hillary frantically dialed her cell phone. First she tried to reach Chelsea. Now twenty-one and a Stanford graduate, Chelsea was staying with a friend near Union Square in Manhattan before she was to go to England for graduate school. Her mom knew she often went for a jog at that hour of the morning.

Hillary couldn’t get through. Next, the senator from New York dialed officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ask about their response to the crisis.

“It was like watching her move back and forth from each role in her life minute by minute,” Sperling said. “Then suddenly, the radio announcer starts screaming, ‘Oh my God, the World Trade Tower has collapsed; oh my God, the World Trade Tower has collapsed,’ and suddenly the whole world came to a stop.”

The images of planes crashing into the towers had been horrible beyond words. But then the buildings came crashing down, killing thousands of people and remaking the famous skyline. Especially in New York City, people would look to their elected officials for assurance about their security and safety. Hillary was now on the front lines.

With so much still unknown, Hillary scrambled to get as much information as she could and to touch base with her family. She called Bill, who was in Australia for a speech. He was watching the destruction on television and wanted to know if Chelsea was okay. Though she didn’t know for sure, Hillary told him that everything was fine and not to worry.

Around the time that Hillary was calling, Chelsea had been in her friend’s apartment trying to reach her mother, but she couldn’t get through, either. Feeling an overwhelming need to reach her mom, Chelsea ran out to look for a pay phone, but there were long lines at each one. She returned to the apartment, and when her friend came back home, they followed the mayor’s advice and headed uptown.

Near Grand Central Station, people were panicking, yelling “Fire!” and “Bomb!” and running away from the terminal. Though there was no fire, Chelsea and her friend were frightened and crying. “For a brief moment I truly thought I was going to die,” she wrote later.

Chelsea was near Fiftieth Street and Madison Avenue when her mother finally got through. Just hearing her voice, Chelsea burst into tears.

After their conversation, Hillary called Bill again to tell him Chelsea was safe.

She also called Giuliani and the New York governor. She and the other New York senator, Charles Schumer, spoke with President Bush, getting his assurance that the federal government would help with the rescue process and New York’s rebuilding.

That afternoon, now wearing a more appropriate black suit, Hillary joined other senators at the Capitol Police headquarters, where they gathered to be briefed by Senate leaders. As the sun was setting, Hillary joined several hundred members of Congress on the Capitol steps. The leaders of both the House and Senate pledged their support, and called for a moment of silence. As they started to walk away, some members began singing “God Bless America,” tentatively at first, and then louder and stronger. When they finished, many lawmakers hugged. Hillary, the New York Times reported, was teary.

CNN sought her out for an interview just before President Bush was to speak to the nation. Hillary said she would stand behind the president—and she had strong language for the attackers: “Our country not only has to retaliate directly against those who perpetrated this attack, but we have to make it very clear that we cannot permit any state, any government, any institution, or individual to pursue terrorist aims that are directed at the United States or any country,” she said.

She said she expected many countries to unite behind the nation. “It’s not just an attack on the United States,” she said. “It’s an attack on everyone who cares about freedom and dignity and justice and humanity.”

After spending much of the long night on the phone, she joined the Senate the next morning to approve a resolution condemning the attack. That afternoon, she and Schumer flew from Washington to New York on a special Federal Emergency Management Agency plane. All other flights had been grounded the day before, after it was clear that four planes had been hijacked. (In addition to those that crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, a fourth plane came down in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back against the hijackers.) On September 12, theirs was the only plane in the air, outside of Air Force fighters. At New York’s LaGuardia Airport, they boarded a helicopter to tour the damage.

The site of the World Trade Center was still smoldering and smoky as they flew over. As rescuers desperately searched for survivors below, Hillary could see the twisted girders and shattered beams where two stunning and enormous buildings had once stood.

“The TV images I’d seen the night before didn’t capture the full horror,” she wrote later. It felt like she was looking into “the jaws of hell.”

[alexsmitposts]

Of Lesser Men Imagine yourself in school. You are 8 years old and it is recess time. You look for your friends, for the boys it is baseball or football, and the natural leaders set up teams and it begins. This is humanity, from its roots as hunter-gatherers so many hundreds of thousands of years ago, this is the natural order of things. Then, some would not survive. Guile and weakness was seldom rewarded. With the onset of “civilization” that changed. Where, at one time, the natural leaders became royalty or nobility, the need to pass on power though lineage went awry and these bloodlines through inbreeding and degeneration became the Deep State, physical weaklings, moral reprobates, tasked with selecting more of the same and moving them into positions of authority. The goal has been division, entropy, suffering, and managing the expectations of those of promise, pushing them into piracy, banditry or killing them in wars. Thus, when we find ourselves, even the strongest of us, the best of the best as it were, subject to rule by our lessers, “under the thumb” of those who, as children, we shunned as cowardly or vile, why do we recoil in surprise? What was left runs Washington, London and Paris, other capitols as well, the “lesser men,” damaged, confused, inferior, pushed up the ladder, the chosen people, a class of “Untermensch.” America’s ruling elite, when examined, for the most part resemble a form of reverse Darwinism. We are going to be calling the comic tragedy of the Muller investigation what it really is, “MuellerGate.” Any possibility that there was ever an investigation of anything intended is gone but the real reasons might well startle all but the most paranoid or well-informed watchers. What began as RussiaGate is playing out as not just fakery, but a complex and well-crafted intelligence operation intended to destabilize both the United State and Russia with full complicity of the press, those who control the press from the inside. It was always not only a wrong assumption by insane as well to assume that somehow, the controlled corporate media, would declare war on a presidency that has been so friendly to the oil industry, Wall Street, big polluters and the big pharma “poisoners.” The only other force handling this much cash is the CIA/Deep State worldwide heroin ring run out of Afghanistan and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, with the help of well known and powerful American families, names very much like Romney, Bush and Walton, according to an FBI whistleblower who came forward in 2012. When Mueller investigators interrogated me in 2018, I brought the debriefing recordings with me and offered to play them. It nearly cleared the room. Here is what is playing out as of mid-April, 2019: Democrats who control congress are planning to subpoena the entire Mueller Report and to question both Mueller and Barr. Legal experts are saying that only a preliminary impeachment process provides needed statutory authority for this effort. The public, perhaps a majority approaching 60%, is hanging on this drama, waiting to “get Donald Trump” as though he were a masked villain in a fake professional wrestling match, which of course he is. What has been purposefully forgotten is that both Mueller and Barr are “lesser men.” Both, according to sources, were CIA recruits early in life. During Vietnam, the CIA began profiling a new generation to carry them past their roots. The CIA’s roots are Nazi Germany’s Abwehr. Their profile included intellectual ability combined with a bevy of negative traits including social psychopathy, feelings of inferiority and intense guilt, and a powerful need for approval and affirmation from authority figures. Two of my good friends, one a senior Army intelligence officer and the other a high-ranking FBI official, both “the best of the best” tried to get into the CIA and were turned away. They weren’t crazy enough. According to sources, both Barr and Mueller were “crazy enough” and for 4 decades or more, have been close personal friends while operating in and out of the corridors of power on behalf of what is now termed the Deep State. Similarly, Mueller and Comey as FBI directors were close friends. Remember, it was Comey that only days before the 2016 election put out highly derogatory and utterly unnecessary statements about the Clinton email case. That case, of course, was a fabrication of a GOP congress that spent endless millions concerned about “classified emails” that, thus far, were utterly without substance. Moreover, anything from the State Department that a Secretary of State wants to make pubic or declassify, has the full authority to do as the President does the same for the White House. Trump does this continually. Before that it was the phony Benghazi investigation and before that, Hillary Clinton was accused of personally murdering Vince Foster. Let us not forget the Clinton impeachment and the role of Kenneth Starr as prosecutor. Starr was a longtime acolyte of Richard Mellon Scaife, a typical James Bond bad guy, scion of one of the biggest Deep State banking families who simply bought Starr and spent millions hiring thugs of various kinds to smear the Clintons. Starr had been promised a seat on the US Supreme Court if he got Clinton. He failed but his “man,” Brett Kavanaugh, now holds a seat on the high court as a surrogate, we are told, for failed and disgraced Ken Starr. A key to understanding the dynamic is knowing that everything the public sees or is allowed to see is scripted. Comey went after Clinton not to damage or influence the election but to create the appearance of doing so while, as had happened in 2000 and 2004, Deep State operatives working with local election officials, literally thousands of them, simply hacked the election count. This has been investigated, studied and written of so many times and is forgotten and shelved. Everyone is complicit. Past that, every candidate is always from the same pool, either hopelessly insane like Trump or Bush 43 or deeply flawed or crippled like Bill Clinton or Barak Obama. When someone different sneaks in like Jimmie Carter, the answer is simple. The Federal Reserve cuts off the money supply, collapsing the economy and the CIA stages a coup in Iran in order to move Reagan in. Part of America’s suppressed history is the truth about Reagan, BCCI, Iran Contra and the collapse of America’s industrial economy, all done while America’s middle class disappeared. This was no accident. MuellerGate is a critical component of a “lesser man” ploy. Mueller and Barr, we assume, are in continual contact as they are constant companions, lifelong companions, who have planned and executed Deep State operations over and over during their careers. Barr exists to fabricate childishly absurd legal opinions. Read one of them. His early letter on the RussiaGate investigation, castigating his best friend Robert Mueller as dangerously incompetent, is classic deception and cover. Then, lo and behold, Mueller finishes an investigation that takes forever. The nation focuses on little else while everything that can be broken or stolen in the nation is broken and stolen. There are 3 White Houses, one in New York at Trump Tower, now a Secret Service protected home for the headquarters of the Kosher Nostra while at Mar-a-Lago, Chinese billionaires are buying America on the cheap. The White House in Washington is now “Tel Aviv on the Potomac.” Making it all work is the three-act play staged by the worst actors in the world, villain Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi of the fake left, and a cast of thousands. It was evident what was going to happen from the get go with the public sucked in the Mueller drama, taking it all seriously, while the GOP’s control of the Senate and the generalized agreement that a sitting president cannot be indicted. In fact, there is no such provision in the constitution whatsoever. The legal concept is the creation of now sitting Federal District Judge Raymond Moss, written in 2000 at the behest of then Attorney General Janet Reno. Was Reno expecting Bill Clinton to start murdering White House visitors on live television? That is, perhaps, the only rationale for a legal opinion that has entrained itself as a keystone of Deep State security. This is from Lawrence Tribe, perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the constitution: “In a recent opinion piece, I argued that the text and structure of the Constitution, a serious commitment to the rule of law, and plain good sense combine to preclude a rigid policy of “delaying any indictment of a president for crimes committed in winning the presidency.” My op-ed argued against the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos opining that the Constitution prevents the indictment of a sitting president. Nearly everyone concedes that any such policy would have to permit exceptions. The familiar hypothetical of a president who shoots and kills someone in plain view clinches the point. Surely, there must be an exception for that kind of case: Having to wait until the House of Representatives impeaches the alleged murderer and the Senate removes him from office before prosecuting and sentencing him would be crazy. Nobody seriously advocates applying the OLC mantra of “no indictment of a sitting president” to that kind of case. The same is true for any number of other cases that come readily to mind. Among those, in my view, must be the not-so-hypothetical case of a president who turns out to have committed serious crimes as a private citizen in order to win the presidency. Whether the president committed such crimes in collusion with a shady group of private collaborators or did so in conspiracy with one or more foreign adversaries, it should not be necessary for the House to decide that such pre-inaugural felonies were impeachable offenses and for the Senate to convict and remove the officeholder before putting him in the dock as an alleged felon and meting out justice.” Conclusion Are people like May or Macron or Trump little more than circus clowns? Is everything scripted, where the chance of peace breaking out, of justice and righteousness infecting the absurd global processes inoculated against? Are the current moves around the world to criminalize expression of these very thoughts an indication of how blatant and egregious the lesser men have become?

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

Visiting Julia Salazar’s North Brooklyn campaign office one warm july weekend, I’m greeted by a volunteer with a spreadsheet. Like nearly everyone else in the converted coffee shop, she’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and she asks me cheerily if I’m there to canvass. I’m not, but if I were, I would be instructed to make my way to a training session on the sunbathed patio out back that is scattered with half-full bottles of sunscreen. After that—in the span of just a half-hour—I would know everything I need to know about how to help elect a card-carrying socialist to the New York state Senate.

If Salazar makes it to Albany, she will join the ranks of 42 DSA-endorsed candidates who are now or will soon be serving in offices from the Moorhead, Minn., school board to Capitol Hill (that is, if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins the general election as handily as she did her primary in New York’s 14th Congressional District). So far this year, local chapters have endorsed at least 110 candidates.

DSA may soon have 50,000 members across 200 local groups in all 50 states—up from 6,000 members in 2015. The surge in freshly minted socialists came in three waves: First, those energized by Bernie Sanders’ primary run; second, those brought in by Donald Trump’s election and the Women’s March; and third, those inspired by 27-year-old DSA member Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory in May over incumbent—and Democratic heavyweight—Joe Crowley.

So what is DSA, exactly, and what is it doing with this growing army?

DSA’s electoral work has attracted national media attention in the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s historic win. Yet it’s just one part of a bottom-up approach to politics that sees the ballot box and state power as tools for advancing toward a more radically democratic society. Members—most of them millennials, in small towns and big cities in every corner of the country—are engaged in everything from occupying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices to evangelizing about Medicare for All. Many reporters have tried to divine what DSA believes, be that the group’s policy prescriptions or its ideology. DSA, though—to crib from Karl Marx—isn’t looking merely to interpret the world, but to change it, campaign by campaign, door by door. What’s made DSA’s ascendance remarkable is less its analysis of capitalism than its ability to put people angry about capitalism to work.

IT’S TELLING THAT, UNLIKE MOST SOCIALIST GROUPS, DSA WAS FORMED OUT OF A MERGER—NOT A SECTARIAN SPLIT. 

In 1982, at the dawn of the Reagan era, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New America Movement (NAM) combined forces. DSOC had been founded in 1973 by socialist intellectual Michael Harrington and other members of the Socialist Party who had grown disenchanted with political irrelevance. NAM, founded in 1972 by former members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was rooted in ’60s counterculture, the New Left and second-wave feminism. (In 1976, members of DSOC and NAM moved to Chicago to found In These Times, and for the next decade the then-newspaper reported diligently on the ins and outs of DSOC, NAM and DSA.)

The 1980s would prove a tough decade for left politics, the 1990s and 2000s even more so. DSA shed members and closed chapters around the country as a few loyalists and a steady trickle of young recruits kept the organization running.

Enter Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign and his stalwart identification as a “democratic socialist,” a surprise boon for an organization with those two words in its name. DSA’s commitment to being a pluralistic, “multi-tendency” organization also meant it was open enough to accommodate thousands of newcomers.

Democratic socialism itself has always been a heterodox term, encompassing everyone from ideological Trotskyists to New Deal Democrats. The surge of new, mostly 20-something members include anarchists, Marxist academics and—most numerously—political neophytes excited about Sanders’ message and frustrated with the Democratic establishment.

DSA isn’t keen to enforce a strict definition of “democratic socialism”—although mainstream media outlets newly hip to DSA are desperately looking for one. On its website, DSA writes:

At the root of our socialism is a profound commitment to democracy, as means and end. As we are unlikely to see an immediate end to capitalism tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people. ...

Our vision is of a society in which people have a real voice in the choices and relationships that affect the entirety of our lives. We call this vision democratic socialism—a vision of a more free, democratic and humane society.

Members I spoke with took this to mean everything from taking public goods like healthcare off the private market (along the lines of Scandinavian social democracies) to worker-ownership of the means of production. Central Iowa DSA co-chair Caroline Schoonover was among many to say that democratic socialism means “taking power from the few and giving it to the many.” All saw small-d democracy—people having a say in the decisions that affect them—as central, both in politics and workplaces, and in DSA itself.

The Socialist Feminists of Democratic Socialists of America organize a protest outside of the New York County Republican Office in New York City on July 5, 2017. (Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

For this story, I spoke with around two dozen DSA members from chapters around the country. The primary source of their excitement was that DSA chapters seemed to be actively working on something, not just sitting around reading Marx. Like the citizen action group Indivisible, which also exploded after the election, DSA let people shake off a feeling of helplessness about the political climate and roll up their sleeves.

DSA also offers a community. Chapters host regular beach days, parties, fundraisers and social events, like Metro D.C. DSA’s recent “No ICE Cream Social.” If Indivisible was able to connect many alienated, middle-class suburbanites jarred out of their political comfort zone, DSA has provided a home for tens of thousands of downwardly-mobile, debt-ridden millennials grappling with a system that simply isn’t working for them.

Adam Shuck and Arielle Cohen, 32 and 29, joined Pittsburgh DSA in its infancy; Shuck was among the seven people who first met at a bar in 2016 to talk about getting the chapter together. Each was energized by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign but disillusioned by his presidency. “I thought we were going to see some kind of New Deal,” Shuck says. The frustration led him at first to join the International Socialist Organization before the Sanders campaign brought him to DSA. While a student at SUNY Purchase, Cohen grew disillusioned with the sausage-making and compromise that created the Affordable Care Act, and organized with Occupy Wall Street before moving to Pittsburgh and finding her way to DSA. Now, Shuck and Cohen co-chair the Pittsburgh chapter.

Pittsburgh DSA held its first general meeting in December 2016 with around 100 people. Now it has a dizzying number of working groups: a health justice committee campaigning for Medicare for All; reading groups tackling Marx and Engels; an anti-imperialism committee lobbying for legislation criticizing Israel’s occupation of Palestine; a socialist feminist working group exposing crisis pregnancy centers; an ecosocialist group fighting the privatization of the city’s water and sewer system; a housing rights group pushing for protections for renters; and a number of inward-facing groups handling tasks like recruitment and communications.

The chapter also brought the newly revived DSA one of its early electoral victories, rattling the local Democratic machine. In December 2017, the group threw its weight behind Summer Lee’s campaign to represent House District 34. In the May primary, with the help of DSA and groups like Our Revolution and the Sierra Club, Lee, 30, a recent law school grad, beat Paul Costa, 57, a 19-year incumbent and member of a dynastic Pittsburgh Democratic family.

Lee had experience working on school board races and on a coordinated campaign to elect Katie McGinty governor and Hillary Clinton president in the 2016 general election, and she was impressed with DSA’s electoral work on Mik Pappas’ judicial campaign. Pappas ran on a platform of ending cash bail and working to end mass incarceration, and won in a landslide, with the help of a dedicated grassroots turnout effort staffed in part by DSA members.

“They were running 20 or more canvassing shifts a week,” says Lee. “I had never seen that type of energy around magistrate elections. I realized that ideologically we aligned.” She joined DSA shortly thereafter and sought them out as her first endorsement.

It wasn’t easy. DSA’s candidate endorsement process is a microcosm of its baked-in commitment to direct democracy. For every decision, at every level, there’s deliberate space for members to duke things out, combined with a commitment to ultimately supporting the group decision rather than splitting off into rival factions. The very question of whether to engage in the electoral process—and in particular, to work within the Democratic Party—remains fraught, with many members skeptical of investing limited organizational resources into elections rather than base-building.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is joined by New York gubenatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon at her victory party in the Bronx after upsetting incumbent Democratic Representative Joseph Crowly on June 26, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Scott Heins/Getty Images)

New York City DSA hotly debated whether to endorse Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s challenger from the left, Cynthia Nixon, after she declared herself a democratic socialist. Several dozen DSA members signed a “vote no” statement arguing that universal healthcare and rent control will be won not by electing candidates to office but by “building working-class power that holds [them] accountable,” citing the successful teachers’ strikes in Republican states. In late July, NYC-DSA officially endorsed her after an extended series of debates.

“We have folks who distrust electoral work, and even among those that don’t, there are different ways of thinking of how to approach it,” says DSA National Director Maria Svart, 38, a former SEIU organizer. “Everybody appreciates that electoral success only comes when you have an organized base. Having all these tendencies in conversation means that everybody learns from each other.”

While the endorsement process varies from chapter to chapter, in some cases—including Lee’s—the first step is filling out a lengthy form with questions from each of the chapter’s working groups. Typically, one is whether the candidate identifies as a socialist. Members weigh that alongside specific policy questions (“Do you support universal rent control? Abolishing the police?”) and a range of other concerns: How much of an impact could the chapter have on the race? How will it build the chapter’s capacity and the movement to challenge the capitalist class?

Next comes the interview process. After filling out Pittsburgh DSA’s questionnaire, Lee was interviewed by a roomful of members. The group voted to endorse both Lee and Sara Innamorato, a state representative candidate, and the two supported one another’s campaigns.

Ocasio-Cortez, in New York, jumped through even more hoops. Because her congressional district spans the Bronx and Queens DSA chapters, she had five interviews: with the electoral committees and membership of each branch, and then the citywide convention. “We put her through hell,” jokes Michael Kinnucan, a DSA member now co-managing the state Senate campaign of Julia Salazar (whom the organization endorsed alongside Ocasio-Cortez in a parallel process).

Abdullah Younus, co-chair of NYC-DSA and a member of DSA’s National Electoral Committee, explains that the extensive endorsement process isn’t just a means of vetting candidates, but of building members’ commitment to them. “It makes it a lot easier to have the same folks who write the questions come out and knock for those candidates,” he says. “They’re talking about work they’re invested in.”

Salazar, 27, estimates that some 800 DSA members live in and around her district, which has translated into hundreds of volunteers spreading the word about her September primary. Even in her short time with the group (she joined in late 2016), she’s seen a change in how fellow leftists relate to electoral politics. “I think part of it is people seeing the term ‘democratic socialist’ normalized in the electoral realm, through Bernie mostly, at least initially, and so seeing it as an actually viable strategy,” she told me between knocking doors.

Though she’d worked on legislative campaigns as a staff organizer with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Salazar only recently began to consider electoral work. “It’s not something I ever thought about before—not just for myself, but in seeing leadership development in community organizing as a path toward seizing state power,” she says. “That sounds like a jump, right? But ultimately that’s the goal.”

New York state senate candidate Julia Salazar (R) knocks doors in Bushwick, N.Y., with a fellow DSA member in July. (Photo by Raul Coto-Batres)

Thanks in part to the Sanders campaign and Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning upset, that goal feels more within reach now than it has since the days of the Socialist Party’s Eugene Debs. Big, universal programs like a federal job guarantee or Medicare for All draw overwhelming popular support. And small, local races offer an opportunity for the grassroots to tip the balance.

Establishment candidates in Democratic-controlled cities effectively depend on low turnout. Their political consultants tend to rely more on advertising and glossy mailers, and less on actually talking to people—particularly people who don’t usually vote. Mobilizing even a few thousand new voters in that context, then, is a fairly straightforward formula for victory. When DSA member Lee Carter won a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates in November 2017, he beat his Republican opponent by 9 points—a margin of 1,850 votes.

“Our party structure protects incumbency, and relies on an ignorant electorate,” Summer Lee says, noting how much time her campaign spent educating voters about the election itself. “If everybody were voting, we’d have a completely different system.”

Depending on the city, DSA can offer a large, self-organized volunteer base to candidates who navigate its endorsement process. Pittsburgh DSA estimates that its volunteers knocked on some 70,000 doors through the course of Lee’s campaign. Turnout in Lee’s district was 14 percent higher than in others around Allegheny County and 54 percent higher than in the last midterm election.

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