Much discussion is now taking place in liberal and progressive circles about the need for a liberal/progressive infrastructure that’s comparable in strength to the that of the right. You’ll get no argument from me there. But when I hear people enthusiastically cheering models that simply replicate those on the right, I see a flow of donor cash going to efforts that will ultimately fail, while progressive media starve and the work of existing grassroots organizations are never leveraged at the national level.
Our people are not their people. Our movement is a coalition of many parts—different kinds of people with a range of concerns and policy priorities. You cannot create a structure built on that of the right’s and expect progressives to sign up for whatever you’ve built. We don’t roll like that.
What we need is a structure based on needs identified by real activists, not people who barely venture outside the Beltway, or people who want to build “a Breitbart of the left.” And we need spaces—physical spaces.
I’m no expert on political strategy, but I have spent much of my career reporting on the right as it built its infrastructure. While the shape of the right’s political infrastructure is not amenable to the needs of the left, one important characteristic of right-wing infrastructure that is transportable—and necessary—to liberal and progressive organizing is that of interlocking parts. Look at the Koch network: Its parts are entirely interlocking—the get-out-the-vote groups, the think tanks, the events. For progressives, “interlocking” might yield to something less rigid, given the nature of the base. We need physical spaces designed to encourage cross-pollination between the constituencies of the left. To achieve that, the kind of donor cash that flooded certain election-based efforts could, when redirected at building progressive spaces in the cities where they’re needed, help locally based organizations amp up their efforts while encouraging interaction and collaboration between the various constituencies that form the progressive coalition. [...]
“A fair and correct history of the native American should be incorporated into the curriculum of public schools. Indians should be taught their own history, and schools created where tribal and Indian thought would be taught on the Indian pattern by Indian institutors. All Americans would benefit, for in denying the Indian his ancestral rights and heritages the white race is robbing itself.” —Óta Kté aka Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Lakota, My People the Sioux, 1928.
At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—Republicans start to squirm over sequester:
Republicans are starting to squirm and look for ways out of the upcoming sequester. And no wonder: If it goes into effect, it would deal another blow to the economy. It would be wildly unpopular. And, for all the GOP's efforts to pin it on President Obama, Republicans would be in for blame from the public—as they should be. After all, at the time the sequester was signed into law, John Boehner said he'd gotten 98 percent of what he wanted. So how do you solve a problem like the sequester? For Republicans, the answer is a foregone conclusion. You demand massive cuts to the programs that people rely on, and ultimately give in grudgingly on cosmetic compromises on a few teeny tiny revenue increases that Democrats and voters want and that would help the economy.
Here are some of the blows to ordinary people. Republicans would be willing to trade to get rid of the sequester: raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67. Changes to Medicare premiums. "Reforming" federal pension programs. Chained CPI. Changes to Medicaid. Get the picture?
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Senate Dems pull an all-nighter, but Pence puts DeVos over the top. Trump Regrets vs. Trump Worship. SNL haunts WH dreams. Rosalyn MacGregor surveys the nuts & bolts of MI voting. Border Patrol agents pushed for Muslim ban from Breitbart studios.
For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.
The news media’s spectacular failure to get the election right has made it only easier for many conservatives to ignore anything that happens outside the right’s bubble and for the Trump White House to fabricate facts with little fear of alienating its base.
Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.
That’s true as far as it goes, but misses an essential: on the left, on the right and in the center, honesty still matters. If the right gives Trump a pass, it isn’t because they don’t see him as honest (“He’s a truth teller!!! He tells it like it is!!”), it’s because we don’t agree on what the truth is. Nonetheless, and crucially, we still agree on the importance of honesty.
Perhaps the best illustration of this is the near universal desire, even among Republicans, of seeing Donald Trump’s taxes released (views of abstract “ethics” issues are partisan and split, but concrete examples like taxes are not.
President Donald Trump was confused about the dollar: Was it a strong one that’s good for the economy? Or a weak one?
So he made a call ― except not to any of the business leaders Trump brought into his administration or even to an old friend from his days in real estate. Instead, he called his national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, according to two sources familiar with Flynn’s accounts of the incident.
Flynn has a long record in counterintelligence but not in macroeconomics. And he told Trump he didn’t know, that it wasn’t his area of expertise, that, perhaps, Trump should ask an economist instead.
This is Donald J. Trump here, self-proclaimed business genius and so-called president, having no effing clue about, you know, money, and dialing up his national security advisor—a disgraced Army officer who was pushed out of the Defense Intelligence Agency for being an unhinged prat—at 3 o’clock in the morning (in his bathrobe?) seeking advice on matters economic.
Even for Trump, that rates a serious fucking “wow.” At least Flynn had the good sense to demur, but that response, according to the Huffington Post, still pissed off the “POTUS.” And there’s an even scarier thought: an enraged, befuddled commander-in-chief, alone in the middle of the night, unable to figure out how dollars work, looking for a suitable target for his ire. Next time he gets spurned after a midnight drunk-dial, who knows how he’ll react?
Want to do something about this maniac? It starts with winning seats back in the House, and that means chipping in a few bucks to Democrat Jon Ossoff, running in a winnable special election that’s coming up soon in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silenced Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on the Senate floor in the debate over the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be attorney general. Warren was reading a portion of Coretta Scott King's letter to the Judiciary Committee from 1986, when Sessions was up for a federal judgeship, which he was denied because he was too much of a goddamned racist.
Warren responded to McConnell’s objection incredulously: "Mr. President, I am surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States senate. I ask leave of the senate to continue my remarks." "Object."
Coming into Donald Trump's presidency, Democratic attorneys general dominated talk as one of the best and only lines of defense against the GOP-laden federal government. In particular, New York's Eric Schneiderman and California's Xavier Becerra got a lot of ink. But when it came time to cripple Trump's egregious Muslim ban, it was Washington attorney general Bob Ferguson who launched the broadest and perhaps most effective attack on the order.
Most attorneys general who filed suit against Trump's ban did so on behalf of aggrieved individuals in their states—often university professors and students who were not allowed entry or re-entry into the U.S. But Ferguson found a different opening, largely because he and his colleagues had dared to imagine that Trump would actually make good on one of his worst pledges: banning Muslims from traveling to the country. Alexander Burns writes of Ferguson:
After rushing home and conferring with staff members, he began calling up Washington-based corporations — including Expedia and Amazon — to enlist them in a lawsuit. [...]
Mr. Ferguson, a cerebral former state chess champion, said his office had been bracing for just such an action. “We’d been anticipating that the president would execute an executive order along these lines,” he said. “We’d been having internal communications about it.”
Mr. Ferguson told his staff that he viewed Mr. Trump’s policy as thoroughly unconstitutional. An effective lawsuit, he said, should leave the order in tatters. [...]
Mr. Ferguson filed the first and broadest state lawsuit on Monday, Jan. 30, with a far more sweeping complaint depicting the executive order as an unlawful assault on Washington businesses and communities.
Ultimately, Ferguson's suit resulted in the broadest halt (a temporary nationwide injunction) of any of the lawsuits filed against Trump's ban. While he had asked other states to join him, only Minnesota's attorney general, Lori Swanson, agreed to sign on to the original suit.
Here's why you can't just use catchphrases like "repeal and replace" when you're talking about the health sector: It's about 17 percent of the nation's GDP and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, employment sector. Woven throughout the entire sector—and particularly throughout Obamacare—is the health insurance industry. When you go messing around with one part of what they do, like providing insurance through the Obamacare markets, the blowback can ripple through the whole industry. That's got employers—who cover the largest chunk of Americans—worried.
Now, as President Donald Trump promises a replacement for the Affordable Care Act that will provide “insurance for everybody,” employers worry Republican attempts to redo other parts of the insurance market could harm their much larger one.
“We’re deeply embedded” in the health law, said Neil Trautwein, vice president of health care policy for the National Retail Federation, a trade group. “Pick your analogy — it’s like being tied to the railroad tracks or having a bomb strapped across your chest. It’s tough to disarm these things.”
Business dislikes many parts of the ACA, including its substantial paperwork, the mandate to offer coverage and the “Cadillac tax” on high-benefit plans that takes effect in 2020. But large companies in particular—those that have always offered job-based insurance—say a poorly thought-out replacement might turn out to be worse for them and their workers.
“Whatever the Republicans are going to do, they’ve got to make it look as different from the ACA as they can” for political reasons, said Edward Fensholt, a senior benefits lawyer at Lockton Companies, a large broker. “There are some pieces that aren’t broken, and the more you … make something different from the ACA, the more you risk screwing up things that look OK.”
Gee, now why do you suppose benefits lawyer doesn’t think the Republican-controlled Congress is capable of coming up with a plan that doesn’t screw everything up?
Now that we’ve finished calculating the 2016 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts, Daily Kos Elections is formally kicking off our project to crunch those same numbers for every state legislative district in the nation, which we call by the shorthand “pres-by-LD.”
This is a massive undertaking (there are 7,383 legislators in America), and as a bit of an amuse-bouche, we’ve already released results for both chambers in a couple of states: Virginia’s state House and Senate and Wisconsin’s Assembly and Senate. There’s a lot more data to come, so here’s how you can access it all:
To keep track of which states we’ve published 2016 data for, we’ll be updating this chart continually. It also contains links to our detailed calculations for each chamber.
We also have a Google Doc that contains just the topline results for every district, along with the names and parties of the legislators who sit in each seat (which come to us via Ballotpedia). Right now, it contains results from 2012 for (almost) every state, but we’ll be adding the 2016 results there, too.
We’ll officially get things moving with a visit to New Hampshire, which is home to by far the most state legislators in the nation. The GOP holds the New Hampshire Senate 14-10, while Team Red controls the state House 226-174 (any vacancies are assigned to the party that last held the seat). All lawmakers are elected to two-year terms. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu’s win last fall gave the GOP complete control of the state government for the first time since 2004, and they’re already using it to try and pass anti-labor legislation, among other conservative priorities.
Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Donald Trump 47.6-47.2 in the Granite State, but the GOP-drawn Senate map allowed Trump to carry 14 of the state’s 24 Senate seats. Republicans enjoyed a similar advantage four years ago, when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each carried 12 seats, even though Obama won 52-47 statewide. But some of the ground shifted in 2016, as Clinton traded five Obama seats for three Romney districts.
For years, Republicans have been hoping they could get their grubby hands on Medicaid and destroy it. Oh, they wouldn't out and out end the program—they’d call it "reform" while they turned it into a slowly deteriorating block grant program that would eventually fail. But it isn't going to be so easy for them, as the opposition is getting organized and sounding the alarm.
“A block grant would end the guaranteed access to care for millions of Americans who are eligible and instead provide a fixed amount of federal funding to each state for its Medicaid program, which may not take into account increases in actual cost or need,” AARP senior vice president of government affairs Joyce Rogers wrote members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee in a letter last week. [...]
“We oppose the end of the guarantee and are concerned that fixed federal funding to states will result in cuts to program eligibility, services or both–ultimately harming some of our nation’s most vulnerable citizens,” AARP’s Rogers wrote. “Moving from the current Medicaid financing structure to fixed federal Medicaid block grant funding would shift costs to states and state taxpayers.” [...]
“Block grants have been a policy idea for more than 20 years, and past proposals always translated to dramatic cuts to federal spending on Medicaid,” says Dr. Bruce Siegel, CEO of America’s Essential Hospitals, which represents the nation’s public health systems and hospitals. “Essential hospitals, which already operate with no margin on average, would have little choice but to scale back services dramatically or close, worsening access to care in already underserved communities.”
If you really want to draw the wrath of millions against you, go against AARP.
Donald Trump likes to claim credit for jobs he didn’t create, and for money he didn’t save. When it comes to the F-35 fighter, Donald Trump has claimed credit for chopping the price of the expensive jets and for bolstering the number of people working to build them.
"I have already saved more than $700 million when I got involved in the negotiation on the F-35," Trump said Monday during remarks to U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla.
The media has rushed to reprint those claims despite the fact that last week, Sen. Jack Reed made it clear that Trump didn’t deserve credit for savings on the F-35.
"This is simply taking credit for what's been in the works for many months," Reed told CNBC in a telephone interview. "These are savings that would have happened anyway."
Trump had nothing to do with the reduction. He didn’t negotiate it. He didn’t even suggest it. In fact, if anyone should get a nod, it’s Barack Obama—and everyone involved seems to agree. So why is Trump still getting credit? The biggest reason is that Lockheed, the jet’s manufacturer, has been quick to drop to their knees and credit the guy whose total contribution was mentioning them in a single tweet.
In addition with furthering the message that Trump has cut the jet's costs, Lockheed's carefully chosen words following meetings with the new president have created a public impression that his involvement in the deal helped increase F-35 production jobs.
Trump is getting credited for a win-win. And Lockheed is eager to help.
You're going to build a wall? We were thinking the same thing.
You're going to build a wall? We were thinking the same thing.
The nefarious plots of shadowy “globalists” have long been a staple of the Trump-favored purveyors of news-like-product. Whether it’s hidden in the pages of a plan to make the world slightly more sustainable, or blatantly trying to stage a military takeover of Texas, the global conspiracy never sleeps.
But for those Wolverines who have long been shouting about how the United States would never be a part of this New World Order, take heart. The world doesn’t want us.
Germany must stand up in opposition to the 45th president of the United States and his government. That's difficult enough already for two reasons: Because it is from the Americans that we obtained our liberal democracy in the first place; and because it is unclear how the brute and choleric man on the other side will react to diplomatic pressure.
Donald Trump will not be welcome to address Parliament on his state visit to the UK because of his racist and sexist attitudes, the Speaker of the House of Commons has said in a major snub to the American president.
We presume that all the people holding their breath while waiting for the Republican Party to distance itself even the teensiest bit from Donald Trump's authoritarian, anti-American, anti-Republican pronouncements have already long since asphyxiated, so the news that the malevolent and racist Rep. Steve King has jumped aboard the Defend Vladimir Putin bandwagon will probably surprise nobody at this point.
Republican Iowa Congressman Steve King argued Sunday that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was not nearly as bad as critics charged, noting that Putin never murdered one of his prominent critics.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse had previously in the day gently suggested that perhaps pooh-poohing away political murders by the Russian autocrat was not a swift move by President Manchild. In Trump's newly reforged party, this counts as a controversial statement. Steve King couldn't let that stand.
King also said that Putin was not as bad as Sasse was making him out to be. “Freedom of the press, dissent, I would say– Garry Kasparov now lives in the United States. He lived a long time in Russia with a very loud megaphone, and he’s still alive and well.”
It may be true that Putin's government has murdered both critical journalists and political opponents, but hey—look at this guy he hasn't murdered! He can't be that bad, right?
Jason Kander speaking with voters during his 2016 run for the U.S. Senate.
Jason Kander speaking with voters during his 2016 run for the U.S. Senate.
The Democratic breakout candidate who gave Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt a run for his money last November is launching an effort to combat the GOP's continual efforts to suppress the votes of people of color. Jason Kander, who just completed his term as Missouri secretary of state, is spearheading a new effort designed to move the fight against voter suppression beyond the courts. A press release from the new organization reads:
Jason Kander today launched Let America Vote, an organization dedicated to winning the public debate over voter suppression in the United States. For several years, challenges to voter suppression efforts have taken place almost exclusively in courts of law. With the launch of Let America Vote, the fight expands to the court of public opinion. [...]
“Voting in our country has never been easy, and unfortunately it’s never been guaranteed for everyone,” Kander said. “But through the work of brave civil rights leaders, some of whom died for the cause, in the early 2000s we got to a point where most, but still not all, people who wanted to vote could do so. Today, that progress is in danger as laws targeting low-income and minority voters continue popping up across the country. Let America Vote will make the case for voting rights by exposing the real motivations of those who favor voter suppression laws. For the first time, politicians intent on denying certain Americans the right to vote will first have to consider the political consequences.” [...]
In 2016, in perhaps the most egregious and transparent act of voter intimidation [Missouri] has seen in decades, a local election authority stationed police officers outside polling places in minority neighborhoods. What is happening in Missouri is happening around the country.
The organization's launch couldn't be more timely, with the House Administration panel voting 6-3 Tuesday to scrap the Election Assistance Commission that is tasked with helping states improve their voting systems. It's not the GOP's first attempt to snuff out the commission, but it underscores the necessity of focusing on voter suppression efforts.
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