Will The Democrats Really Nominate An Anti-Choice Candidate For President? Biden's Been Wrong About EVERYTHING Since The 1970s

In 2008, just as Biden was about the launch another of his 5 or 6 aborted presidential runs, the Texas Monthly asked him-- on video tape (above)-- where he stands on abortion. First words out of his mouth: "It's going to be very difficult [for him as a slimy politician]. I do not view abortion as a choice and a right... I think we should be focussing on how to limit the number of abortions." That's always been his position and that is still his position. "I'm a bit of an odd man out in my party. I do not vote for funding for abortion. I voted against partial birth abortion."

He's such a fucking turd. If my vote was the deciding vote between him and Trump, the worst "president" in history, I'd let the decision remain a tie. Nothing would ever get me to vote for Biden, not in a primary, not in a general. I've hated his guts since the 1970s when I first realized what a racist pile of vomit he was. I was so disappointed Friday when I read that whoever picked which presidential contenders would speak on night one and which would speak on night two had decided to protect Biden from Elizabeth Warren. I guess she'll have too wait and shred him at a future debate.

In 2005, bankruptcy was on the rise and had been for years.

Lawmakers were pondering why, exactly, that was happening-- and what, if anything, they should do about it-- when two future presidential rivals squared off over a bankruptcy overhaul bill that would restrict who could write off their personal debts.

In one corner, Joe Biden-- one of the staunchest Democratic advocates for the bill and a senator from Delaware, home to several large credit card companies. He was also a member of the Judiciary Committee, which was debating the bill.

In the other corner, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor who had fought against this type of bankruptcy overhaul for years and who was on a panel convened for a hearing over the bill.

Their conversation started off with a testy (but weedy) exchange about bankruptcy courts. And it escalated from there, with plenty of interruptions and the occasional barb-- Biden at one point cast Warren's arguments as "mildly demagogic." It ended with a tense dispute over what, exactly, the dispute ought to be.

WARREN: [Credit card companies] have squeezed enough out of these families in interest and fees and payments that never pay down principle.

BIDEN: Maybe should talk about usury rates. That maybe, that's what we should be talking about, not bankruptcy.

WARREN: Senator, I'll be the first. Invite me.

BIDEN: Now, I know you will, but let's call a spade a spade. Your problem with the credit-card companies is usury rates, from your position. It's not about the bankruptcy bill.

WARREN: But Senator, if you're not going to fix that problem, you can't take away the last shred of protection for these families.

BIDEN: OK, I get it. [pause] You're very good, Professor.

It was heated debate with a polite, even charming end-- complete with laughter throughout the hearing room, but the stakes are higher now, with both Warren and Biden potentially poised to share a debate stage.

And while debate over a 14-year-old bankruptcy bill might otherwise be largely forgotten by now, the 2020 presidential election has made the disagreements between Biden and Warren relevant again-- and shows how their exchange over that 2005 bill show up in their current presidential campaign strategies.

With Democrats in the minority in the Senate in 2005, Biden argues he was trying to make a Republican bill better. Warren thought, even then, that it was fundamentally flawed and bad for consumers.

A major question at the heart of the 2005 bankruptcy bill was why bankruptcies were on the rise.

One side-- including Warren and many Democrats-- said it was because people were financially strapped because of major obligations like medical debt, and that credit card companies were exacerbating the problem.

Others-- largely Republicans, but also some Democrats, like Biden-- said that it was a combination of irresponsible spending and a system that made it too easy to apply for bankruptcy, leading to abuse. That abuse, these lawmakers argued, leads to higher costs for other people seeking credit.

The 2005 bill restricted who could discharge their debts via Chapter 7 bankruptcy and also made the process more difficult. It included a means test, in the form of comparing a person's income with their state's median income. The goal, proponents argued, was to make sure that people who could still pay their debts weren't able to unfairly escape their debts, while also ensuring that people who couldn't pay were able to get relief.

The bill also said that a person had to go through credit counseling before obtaining bankruptcy.

Opponents, however, cast bankruptcy as an important financial protection that the legal system provides to people in difficult circumstances. They thought that the bill would make it unduly hard to file, enriching credit card companies in the process. And indeed, as they argued, credit card companies themselves had lobbied for it.

Warren and her fellow opponents also argued that bankruptcy was a women's issue, as single and divorced women were disproportionately represented among bankruptcy filers. Passing this type of reform would therefore disproportionately hurt women and children, they said (an argument that Warren pointedly made in a 2002 Harvard Women's Law Review essay that focuses heavily on Biden).

This was not new legislation. Similar bills had been proposed in Congress several times-- it even reached the Oval Office in the final days of Bill Clinton's presidency, but he declined to sign it.

Biden and Warren had been on opposite sides during that period, as well-- Biden voted for that 2000 bill, and Warren had counseled Hillary Clinton that it would be bad for consumers.

And that was the lay of the land when they met on Capitol Hill.

"This is one of those situations where the current story is not misleading. They were both very key players in this," said David Skeel, professor at the University of Pennsylvania law school and the author of a history of bankruptcy.

"Elizabeth Warren was the most important critic of the legislation, and she spent years fighting it. That's what really first got her into the into the public eye," he said. "And Joe Biden was critically important to passing the legislation because credit card companies are very important to Delaware. And that's where he was coming from."

In the end, the bill passed. And as for the effects, they're complicated. One outcome: The bill included a provision that made obligations like child support and alimony a top priority for debtors to pay off-- which addressed one concern of the bill's opponents.

And another, overarching result: Bankruptcies fell sharply afterward. And that's linked to one other effect of the bill, according to Skeel.

"The biggest effect is that it is now more expensive to file for bankruptcy than it used to be," Skeel said, "because of the the so-called means test that was put into the 2005 amendments that requires that debtors fill out forms to determine whether they would be capable of repaying some of what they owe."

But, crucially, it's not totally clear that that shows a reduction in bankruptcy abuse, he added.

Research on the bill also doesn't hand either side a total win. On the one hand, the reform was associated with lower interest rates on credit cards, as Vox's Matthew Yglesias pointed out in an article on the Warren-Biden debate.

But, Yglesias argued, studies also suggested that the law meant less access to credit and lower credit scores for some borrowers, not to mention a potentially slower bounce back from the Great Recession.

Potential 2020 voters have already had a preview of Warren's attacks on Biden. In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) attacked Hillary Clinton's vote for a similar 2001 bankruptcy bill-- a vote she took after Warren convinced her it was a bad bill. Sanders used Warren's criticisms as part of his attacks.

Warren talked about her disappointment in a 2004 interview with journalist Bill Moyers:

WARREN: She voted in favor of it.

MOYERS: Why?

WARREN: As Sen. Clinton, the pressures are very different. It's a well-financed industry. You know, a lot of people don't realize that the industry that gave the most money to Washington over the past few years was not the oil industry. It was not pharmaceuticals. It was consumer credit products. Credit card companies have been giving money, and they have influence.

MOYERS: And Mrs. Clinton was one of them as senator.

WARREN: She has taken money from the groups, and more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.

For her part, Clinton argued that she was able to support the bill because it, at that point, included better protections for women seeking child support and alimony.

That whole dynamic surrounding the law is repeating itself in this election.

"If you talk to many independent voters, they worry that both parties are funded by the same corporate interests," said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has endorsed Warren ahead of 2020. "Elizabeth Warren has been part of the solution trying to re-brand the Democratic Party as being of the people. The credit card fight was just one chapter of that ongoing struggle."

While Warren uses the fight as evidence of her willingness to fight corporations on behalf of everyday Americans, Biden and his supporters frame the bankruptcy bill as evidence of his practicality-- and they also emphasize protections in the bill like those prioritizing child support.

"Sen. Biden, knowing essentially that the bill was likely to make it through a Republican-led Congress to a Republican-controlled White House, really worked hard to make sure that bill protected middle-class families," said Terrell McSweeny, who worked as a Biden staffer just after the bill's passage.

And that plays into a larger narrative from the Biden campaign.

"Folks, I'm going to say something outrageous," he has said. "I know how to make government work. Not because I've talked or tweeted about it, but because I've done it. I've worked across the aisle to reach consensus, to help make government work in the past."

Democratic voters are concerned with far different topics than the bankruptcy bill, like climate change and a health care overhaul.

But then, if both candidates remain key contenders for the nomination-- and if they share a debate stage-- there's a good chance the topic will come up again, as a symbol of the differences between the two candidates.

And while bankruptcy expert Skeel acknowledges that he's not a political strategist, he does have one political prediction based on the Biden-Warren bankruptcy fight.

"It strikes me that one potential implication," he said, "is it's highly unlikely you will see a Democratic ticket with both of them on it."

DCCC Is Starting To Come To Grips With A Very Different 2018 Electoral Landscape

Most people agree-- it's time for this bum to say good-bye

Did you read Bill Moyers' piece Friday, Donald Trump's Demolition Derby. Who would disagree with him that "in just a few days, Donald Trump seems to have set out to wreck government and turn over the remains to his plutocrat friends?"

We’re a week into the Trump administration and it’s pretty obvious what he’s up to. First, Donald Trump is running a demolition derby: He wants to demolish everything he doesn’t like, and he doesn’t like a lot, especially when it comes to government.

Like one of those demolition drivers on a speedway, he keeps ramming his vehicle against all the others, especially government policies and programs and agencies that protect people who don’t have his wealth, power or privilege. Affordable health care for working people? Smash it. Consumer protection against predatory banks and lenders? Run over it. Rules and regulations that rein in rapacious actors in the market? Knock ‘em down. Fair pay for working people? Crush it. And on and on.

Trump came to Washington to tear the government down for parts, and as far as we can tell, he doesn’t seem to have anything at all in mind to replace it except turning back the clock to when business took what it wanted and left behind desperate workers, dirty water and polluted air.

In this demolition derby, Trump seems to have the wholehearted support of the Republican Party, which loathes government as much as it worships the market as god. Remember Thomas Frank’s book, The Wrecking Crew? Published in 2008, it remains one of the best political books of the past quarter-century. Frank took the measure of an unholy alliance: the century-old business crusade against government, the conservative ideology that looks on government as evil (except when it’s enriching its allies), and the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Karl Rove-- the one that had just produced eight years of crony capitalism and private plunder.

The Wrecking Crew-- and what an apt title it was-- showed how federal agencies were doomed to failure by the incompetence and hostility of the Bush gang appointed to run them, the same model Trump is using now. Frank tracked how wholesale deregulation-- on a scale Trump already is trying to reproduce-- led to devastating results for everyday people, including the mortgage meltdown and the financial crash. Reading the book is like reading today’s news, as kleptomaniacs spread across Washington to funnel billions of dollars into the pockets of lobbyists and corporations.

There's a lot more Moyers had to say and his essay with off into a direction disparaging of the new Trumpian plutocracy.

But today we're going to start the day with something more optimistic-- taking back the House in the 2018 midterms (and the 2017 special elections). Dan Sena is the new Executive Director of the DCCC. I don't know him but everyone tells me he's a lot better than the disaster, Kelly Ward, who ran the shit-show for Steve Israel and oversaw the evisceration of the House Democratic Party. Sena sent out a memo yesterday talking about the DCCC's early offensive. "Republican incumbents across the country," he wrote, "are damaged after unexpectedly close 2016 contests, dozens find themselves defending seats where Donald Trump is already deeply unpopular, and together the House Republicans and Trump Administration are pushing a wildly unpopular agenda that threatens their standing from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt." Rah rah... but he's not wrong. As he pointed out, "The American people have repeatedly organized this month in peaceful marches to resist the Trump Administration and the Republican vision for our country, from their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement, to a tax-payer funded Mexican border wall and this weekend’s dangerous Muslim ban. This widespread backlash will only grow as Trump and House Republicans continue to ignore this loud chorus from their constituents, who so clearly oppose what this Republican-controlled Washington D.C. has to offer."

That's exactly the Blue America premise as we go forward. We've been working towards recruiting progressive candidates everywhere. Unfortunately, many are still so damaged from their or their colleagues' horrific and destructive past encounters with the DCCC that they're reluctant to run or run again. And, one of the architects of last year's disasters, Rahm Emanuel disciple and vile reactionary Blue Dog Cheri Bustos, is still trying to shove her loser candidates down the throats of the DCCC recruitment committee. But with Israel and Ward gone, Bustos is... well, let's say taken less seriously.

Send is defining the battleground very widely including the 23 seats that Republicans still hold but that Hillary won-- 7 of which are seats that Obama didn't win, "indicating," he noted, "a potential Trump-driven problem for these Republicans."

Had enough of this?

The Democrats need to win a net of 24 seats to take back the House. Sena identified 59-- not counting Paul Ryan's seat-- where he thinks Democrats have a reasonable shot. Below are the seats, with the incumbents and the results that Trump and Clinton had in each. Several are seats the DCCC never targets, like the Orange, County, California seats where rejection of Trump was very strong. And in Miami, it looks like the DCCC is finally ignoring the wretched Wasserman Schultz and preparing to go after her crony, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen who sits in a nice blue district and only survives because of Wasserman Schultz's machinations. (The DCCC is still taking a Steve Israel-mandated hands-off approach to NY-02, his pal Peter King's very winnable seat.) Remember, this is a DCCC list and even they're in the process of healing, it's still an historically incompetent organization so there are insane targets included (like this first two) and also remember that the first number is Trump's performance and the second is Clinton's. The seats Clinton won are the bolded ones:

•  AL-02 – Martha Roby- 64.9- 33.0%

• AR-02 – French Hill- 52.4- 41.7%

• AZ-02 – Martha McSally- 44.7- 49.6%

• CA-10 – Jeff Denham- 45.5- 48.5%

• CA-21 – David Valadao- 39.7- 55.2%

• CA-25 – Steve Knight- 43.6- 50.3%

• CA-39 – Ed Royce- 42.9- 551.5%

• CA-45 – Mimi Walters- 44.4- 49.8%

• CA-48 – Dana Rohrabacher- 46.2- 47.9%

• CA-49 – Darrell Issa- 43.2- 50.7%

• CO-03 – Scott Tipton- 52.0- 40.0%

• CO-06 – Mike Coffman- 41.3- 50.2

• FL-18 – Brian Mast- 53.3- 44.1%

• FL-25 – Mario Diaz-Balart- 49.6- 47.9%

• FL-26 – Carlos Curbelo- 40.6- 56.7%

• FL-27 – Ileana Ros-Lehtinen- 38.9- 58.6%

• GA-06 – Tom Price- 48.3- 46.8%

• IA-01 – Rod Blum- 48.7- 45.2%

• IA-03 – David Young- 48.5- 45.0%

• IL-06 – Peter Roskam- 43.2- 50.2%

• IL-13 – Rodney Davis- 49.7- 44.2%

• IL-14 – Randy Hultgren- 48.7- 44.8%

• KS-02 – Lynn Jenkins- 55.8- 37.4%

• KS-03 – Kevin Yoder- 46.0- 47.2

• KY-06 – Andy Barr- 54.7- 39.4%

• ME-02 – Bruce Poliquin- 51.4- 41.1%

• MI-07 – Tim Walberg- 55.7- 38.7%

• MI-08 – Mike Bishop- 50.6- 43.9%

• MI-11 – Dave Trott- 49.7- 45.3%

• MN-02 – Jason Lewis- 46.5- 45.3%
• MN-03 – Erik Paulsen- 41.4- 50.8%

• NC-08 – Richard Hudson- 56.1- 41.1%

• NC-09 – Robert Pittenger- 54.4- 42.8%

• NC-13 – Ted Budd- 53.4- 44.0%

• NE-02 – Don Bacon- 48.2- 46.0%

• NJ-02 – Frank LoBiondo- 50.6- 46.0

• NJ-03 – Tom MacArthur- 51.4- 45.2%

• NJ-07 – Leonard Lance- 47.5- 48.6

• NJ-11 – Rodney Frelinghuysen- 48.8- 47.9
• NY-01 – Lee Zeldin- 54.5- 42.2%

• NY-11 – Dan Donovan- 53.6- 43.8%

• NY-19 – John Faso- 51.0- 43.7%

• NY-22 – Claudia Tenney- 54.8- 39.3%

• NY-24 – John Katko- 45.3-48.9%

• NY-27 – Chris Collins- 59.7- 35.2%

• OH-01 – Steve Chabot-51.2- 44.6%

• OH-07 – Bob Gibbs- 62.5- 32.8%

• PA-06 - Ryan Costello- 47.6- 48.2%

• PA-07 – Pat Meehan- 47.0- 49.3%

• PA-08 – Brian Fitzpatrick- 48.2- 48.0%

• PA-16 – Lloyd Smucker- 51.0- 44.2%

• TX-07 – John Culberson- 47.1- 48.5%

• TX-23 – Will Hurd- 46.4- 49.8%

• TX-32 – Pete Sessions- 46.6- 48.5%

• VA-02 – Scott Taylor- 48.8- 45.4%

• VA-10 – Barbara Comstock- 42.2- 52.2%

• WA-03 – Jaime Herrera Beutler- 49.9- 42.5%
• WA-08 – David Reichert- 44.7- 47.7%

•WV-02 – Alex Mooney- 65.8- 29.4%

Again, these are just DCCC preliminary targets, NOT Blue America targets. Some of them they have right and some look like they had a 5 year old throwing arrows at a dart board. I'm sure someone will straighten them out before they start shoveling money down some of these sewers.

And by the way, while Democratic congressmembers rushed to airports this weekend to help rescue Trump's prisoners, some of these targeted Republicans made their chances of political survival worse with statements like these:


• Rod Blum (R-IA)- "The bottom line is they can’t properly vet people coming from war-torn areas like Syria and Iraq. If we can’t vet people properly, then we shouldn’t be allowing them into our country. I’m supportive of that."

•Ed Royce (R-CA)- "[Barring] refugees from terror hot spots is the right call to keep America safe."

• Pete Sessions (R-TX)- "Just as President Obama suspended the refugee program in 2011 for six months, the Trump Administration is working to protect national security by making adjustments in the refugee vetting process."

• Scott Taylor (R-VA)- "While I do not agree with some of the rhetoric, taking a pause, figuring out if we are properly vetting people, and making changes if necessary to continue our American principles is prudent and needed."

• David Trott (R-MI)- "Until we can adequately vet these refugees and ensure the safety of all Americans, I support President Trump's executive order to stay refugees from these terror-prone countries."

• Lee Zeldin (R-NY)- "I support the temporary entry restriction from certain nations until the administration, Congress and the American people know with confidence that any individual being granted admission does not pose a threat to our security."

Anyway, the DCCC may be getting better but it has a long way to go. If you'd like to consider lending a hand to the Blue America House candidates already running against vulnerable Republicans, please tap the thermometer below:

What's To Be Done About The Disease On The Body Politic Named Debbie Wasserman Schultz?

The Democratic Party stood for something we could all be proud of... before these two took over

Yesterday, a few hours before Bernie told Jake Tapper he would fire Wasserman Schultz if he were elected and that he would support Tim Canova over her in the primary, the Courage Campaign emailed their members that "the big Wall Street banks have a new best friend in Washington. Her name is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and she's the head of the Democratic National Committee. Representative Wasserman Schultz has raised millions of dollars from big banks. And now she's co-sponsoring legislation to block Senator Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from cracking down on predatory payday lenders." They wrote that they're "turning up the heat" on her and "demanding that the CFPB be allowed to stop predatory payday lenders." They forgot to mention, though, that the way-- probably the only way-- to stop Wasserman Schultz and the corrupt "bipartisan" cabal around her is to replace her in her Broward/Miami-Dade district with Tim Canova on August 30, the day of Florida's congressional primaries.

The thermometer on the right is where you can go to contribute to Canova's grassroots campaign-- a campaign that is on fire. The Courage campaign continued to explain, as Canova has for the past 6 months that "after the 2008 financial crash, Sen. Warren created the CFPB under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform package to protect American consumers from the financial industries' scams and ripoffs, like the payday loan industry. Payday lenders are notoriously-predatory short-term loan operations that target low-income communities and communities of color to charge interest rates that would make a loan shark blush. It's exactly the kind of abusive behavior that inspired Sen. Warren to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the first place. Unless top Democrats like Rep. Wasserman Schultz team up with Republicans in Congress to block the CFPB, we are confident that the CFPB will lay down the law with payday lenders. That's why it's so important that we keep up the pressure to hold Rep. Wasserman Schultz accountable-- and show other Democrats that we won't stand for this kind of behavior." Nothing will send that message more strongly and definitively than helping Canova to defeat her in the primary.

Bill Moyers had a few choice words for #DebtTrapDebbie this weekend as well, beginning with how the Democrats will never be able to unify if she's running the DNC. "She embodies the tactics that have eroded the ability of Democrats to once again be the party of the working class. As Democratic National Committee chair she has opened the floodgates for Big Money, brought lobbyists into the inner circle and oiled all the moving parts of the revolving door that twirls between government service and cushy jobs in the world of corporate influence. And that ain’t all. As a member of Congress, particularly egregious has been her support of the payday loan business, defying new regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that would rein in an industry that soaks desperate borrowers. As President Obama said, 'While payday loans might seem like easy money, folks often end up trapped in a cycle of debt.'"

Rep. Wasserman Schultz is facing a primary challenge for the first time this year, her opponent a law professor, activist and progressive Sanders supporter named Tim Canova. But the primary’s not until late August, long after the Democratic National Convention. Unless she steps down now or Hillary Clinton has her removed, Philadelphia will be dominated by someone who represents everything that has gone wrong with the Democratic Party and Washington. At the convention’s opening session, Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be bringing the gavel down squarely on progressive hopes of returning the party to its legacy as champion of working people and the dispossessed.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Time for her to go.

Friday The Hill wrote of an army of Sanders supporters fuming over Wasserman Schultz. Many of these people "blame Wasserman Schultz for what they see as system rigged against their candidate and say he is being cheated by contests closed to independents and unfair weight to superdelegates."

The feud between Wasserman Schultz and Sanders has been going for some time.

The Sanders campaign has criticized a DNC debate schedule that put contests on weekend nights, when they were less likely to garner viewers.

Late last year, Sanders sued the DNC after the party briefly blocked the Sanders campaign's access to party files and data following a report that Sanders staffers had improperly accessed Clinton's campaign information.

The Sanders campaign dropped the lawsuit in late April.

Two weeks ago, Sanders sent a letter to the chairwoman accusing the party for giving Clinton supporters more committee representation at the July convention. Wasserman Schultz denied that the DNC is favoring the former secretary of State.

Liberal commentator Van Jones said this week on CNN that he’d prefer Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee chairman, over Wasserman Schultz after a “leadership failure” for Democrats.

“Debbie, who should be the umpire, who should be the marriage counselor, is coming in harder for Hillary Clinton than she is for herself. That is malpractice,” Jones told CNN's Brooke Baldwin Wednesday.

And Mika Brzezinski, the co-host on MSNBC's Morning Joe, said the DNC chair should “step down,” condemning the party’s treatment of Sanders since he entered the race.

“This has been very poorly handled from the start. It has been unfair, and they haven’t taken him seriously, and it starts, quite frankly, with the person we just heard speaking. It just does. You know that,” Brzezinski said about Wasserman Schultz.

A former DNC official noted that party members selected Wasserman Schultz as DNC chair and said that it's easy for campaigns to shift the blame onto her since she's the face of the party.

“Something that’s getting lost in a lot of this discussion is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a democratically elected chair of the party,” said Holly Shulman, a former DNC spokeswoman and now Democratic consultant. “Democrats elected her to lead the party, and that’s what she’s doing.

Like every word ever uttered by Holly Shulman, that's another establishment lie, meant to mislead people, including an imbecile Hill writer, too naive to challenge it. Wassermann Schultz was selected by Obama and rubber-stamped by a gaggle of establishment ass-lickers.

As for the army of angry Bernie supporters, will they connect the dots that connect how they feel about Wasserman Schultz to defeating her in the primary (especially a primary a month after the national convention)? I wish I was more sure they would. Bernie won a landslide victory in Orgeon last week. Grassroots power propelled him to a 320,746 (56.0%) to 251,739 (44.0%) victory over the establishment candidate. BUT... the Berniecrat running in the 5th district, Dave McTeague, didn't fare all that well in his race against the odious chief Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. Schrader was able to outspend McTeague $442,433 to $30,629 and Schrader beat him 62,046 (72.9%) to 23,107 (27.1%). Bernie won all 7 of the counties in the fifth congressional district. His coattails didn't do much for McTeague in any of them. Pretty dismal and there's no other way to interpret it than that Bernie supporters didn't pay enough attention to vote down-ballot for the candidate running on his platform. This is bad. But not necessarily predictive of what's going to happen in Florida.

Canova is running a far more viable campaign and where McTeague only managed to raise $31,620, Canova has already raised over a million dollars, all of it from small grassroots donors (like us). And Canova is more adapt than most of the other Berniecrat campaigns around the country at making sure his message gets out to voters. When Wasserman Schultz puked out her latest distorted and hate-filled message about Canova's prowess of raising money outside the bounds of Beltway norms-- unlike her, he takes small contributions from people who want a better government, not from special interest PACs and corporations buying access to one of Congress' most corrupt members-- he struck back immediately:

After another rough week for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, her campaign sent an email to her supporters... Not only does it attack our campaign for refusing to take money from corporations or wealthy billionaires, but it accuses people like you of "spinning a web of distortions" about our opponent’s anti-progressive record. This is further proof that not only do we have her attention, but she is increasingly worried about our growing movement. With just months to go, our campaign needs your support now more than ever.

...It’s alarming that the Chairwoman of the Democratic Party thinks it wise to attack progressives for funding a campaign with small-dollar contributions. Even so, we actually received more donations in Florida than Wasserman Schultz! It speaks volumes about the kind of leader she’s been for the party when she’s more concerned about contributions of $18 than big donations of $10,000 from Goldman Sachs executives.

If you’re sick and tired of Wasserman Schultz standing with Republicans and huge corporations against progressives and working Americans, then join our campaign in sending a message that our voices will no longer be silenced by the establishment.

I cannot win this election alone. I need your continued help and support to overcome the odds.

That's where we come in. Let's make sure Wasserman Schultz goes back to live permanently in her district and is never again in a position to sell out working families and Democratic Party values in DC:

Why Rahm And Debbie Must Go-- Hold Your Nose Against The Aroma Of Entitlement

Way past time to take out the garbage

in 2008 Rahm was forced-- after weeks of ongoing and intensifying outrage from the grassroots-- to fire a corrupt and arrogant Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chair of the DCCC's Red to Blue Program. One of her first official acts was to announce that she would not support three South Florida Democratic nominees, Annette Taddeo, Raul Martinez and Joe Garcia against her Republican allies, respectively, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart. She dragged poor Kendrick Meek into his dysfunctional cauldron of intrigue, which eventually led to the premature end of his puppet-like political career. She and Rahm, though, are still around, still playing their self-serving games and causing tremendous damage and still soiling the Democratic Party brand. This week Bill Moyers and Michael Winship called for both of them to either resign or be forced out by their allies in the Clinton Machine, pointing out that "they represent everything wrong with the Democratic Party."

Their disappearance might also help Hillary Clinton convince skeptical Democrats that her nomination, if it happens, is about the future, and not about resurrecting and ratifying the worst aspects of the first Clinton reign when she and her husband rarely met a donor to whom they wouldn’t try to auction a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.

In fact, while we’re at it, and if Secretary Clinton really wants us to believe she’s no creature of the corporate and Wall Street money machine-- despite more than $44 million in contributions from the financial industry since 2000 and her $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, not to mention several million more paid by other business interests for an hour or two of her time-- she should pick up the gauntlet herself and publicly call for the departure of these two, although they are among her nearest and dearest. And we don’t mean Bill and Chelsea.

No, she should come right out and ask for the resignations of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee Chair-- and Florida congresswoman-- Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In one masterstroke, she could separate herself from two of the most prominent of all corporate Democratic elitists.

Each is a Clinton disciple and devotee, each has profited mightily from the association and each represents all that is wrong with a Democratic Party that in the pursuit of money from rich donors and powerful corporations has abandoned those it once so proudly represented-- working men and women.

Rahm Emanuel first came to prominence as head of the finance committee for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, browbeating ever-increasing amounts of money out of fat cat donors, and following Clinton into the White House as a senior adviser attuned to the wishes and profits of organized wealth. Few pushed harder for NAFTA, a treaty that would cost a million or more working people their livelihood, or for the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” crime bill which Clinton later admitted was a mistake. After alienating most of Washington with his arrogance and bluster Emanuel left in 1998 and went into investment banking in Chicago, making more than $16 million in less than three years.

He came back to Washington as a three-term Illinois congressman, chaired the fundraising Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (calling on his Wall Street sources to get in on the gravy by electing so-called New Democrats over New Deal Democrats), and soon was back in the White House as Barack Obama’s chief of staff. There, he infamously told a strategy meeting of liberal groups and administration types that the liberals were “retarded” for planning to run attack ads against conservative Democrats resisting Obamacare. Classy. Writer Jane Hamsher described him as tough guy wannabe but really “a brown nose for power ready to rumble on behalf of the status quo.”

And now he’s mayor of Chicago, reelected last April for a second term, but, as historian Rick Pearlstein wrote in the New Yorkera couple of months ago, “Chicagoans-- and Democrats nationally-- are suffering buyer’s remorse.”

Remember that shocking dashcam video of a black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by a Chicago policeman while he was walking away? Of course you do; who can forget it? Remember, too, that for 400 days the police kept the existence of the video secret and did nothing about the shooting. Meanwhile, the City of Chicago paid five million dollars to McDonald’s family, who at that point had not filed a lawsuit. But despite the large sum of money coughed up by his own administration, Emanuel claims he never saw the video. If that’s true, he was guilty of dreadful mismanagement; if he did know, he’s guilty of far worse.

Only after his re-election was the cover-up of the murder revealed. In Pearlstein’s words, “Given that he surely would not have been reelected had any of this come out before the balloting, a recent poll showed that only 17 percent of Chicagoans believe him. And a majority of Chicagoans now think he should resign.”

The Laquan McDonald murder is just one of the scandals on Emanuel’s watch: crime and abuse by police run rampant, the city’s public schools are a disaster, the transit system’s a mess. Yet while Emanuel has devoted little of his schedule to meeting with community leaders, Pearlstein reminds us that he did, however, “spend enormous blocks of time with the rich businessmen, including Republicans, who had showered him with cash…” Now many of them have deserted him, including one of his richest Republican-- yes, Republican-- contributors, multimillionaire Bruce Rauner, who became governor of Illinois.

Emanuel should go-- and Hillary Clinton should say so. But while Senator Bernie Sanders, campaigning during the Illinois primary, said he would not seek and would not accept the mayor’s endorsement, with Secretary Clinton it’s business as usual. Emanuel has held fundraisers for her campaign since 2014 so chances are she’ll stay mum, take the money and run.

As for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she embodies the tactics that have eroded the ability of Democrats to once again be the party of the working class. As Democratic National Committee chair she has opened the floodgates for Big Money, brought lobbyists into the inner circle and oiled all the moving parts of the revolving door that twirls between government service and cushy jobs in the world of corporate influence.

She has played games with the party’s voter database, been accused of restricting the number of Democratic candidate debates and scheduling them at odd days and times to favor Hillary Clinton, and recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper that super delegates-- strongly establishment and pro-Clinton-- are necessary at the party’s convention so deserving incumbent officials and party leaders don’t have to run for delegate slots “against grassroots activists.” Let that sink in, but hold your nose against the aroma of entitlement.

But here’s just about the worst of it. Rep. Wasserman Schultz-- the people’s representative, right?-- has aligned herself with corporate interests out to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s effort to create national standards for the payday-lending industry, a business that in particular targets the poor. Payday loans, as Yuka Hayashi writes at the Wall Street Journal, “are quick credits of a few hundred dollars, with effective annual interest rates ranging between 300% and 500%. Loans are due in a lump sum on the borrower’s next payday, a structure that often sends people into cycles of debt by forcing them to take out new loans to repay the old ones.”

According to the nonpartisan Americans for Financial Reform, this tail-chasing cycle of “turned” loans to pay off previous loans makes up about 76 percent of the payday loan business. The Pew Charitable Trust found that in Wasserman Schultz’s home state, the average payday loan customer takes out nine such loans a year, which usually has them mired in debt for about half a year.

No wonder radio host and financial guru Dave Ramsey describes the payday loan business, which loans $38.5 billion a year, as “scum-sucking, bottom-feeding predatory people who have no moral restraint.” The very people, it must be acknowledged, who now have an ally in the chair of the Democratic National Committee, who has so engineered the rules of the current Democratic primary process so as to virtually assure her unlimited access to a Clinton White House where she can walk in freely to press the case for her, ahem, “scum-sucking, bottom-feeding predatory” donors and pals.

So imagine now the Democratic National Convention this July. Presiding over it will be, yes, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, tribune for a party of incumbency, money and crony capitalism. Follow her as she makes the rounds of private parties where zillionaire donors, lobbyists and consultants transact the real business of politics. Watch as she and Hizzoner Rahm Emanuel of Chicago greet and embrace. Then imagine those thousands of young people outside the convention hall who have arrived from long months of campaigning earnestly for reform of the party they see as an instrument of their future, as well as members of Black Lives Matter and other people of color for whom Rahm Emanuel is the incarnation of deceit and oppression.

This is why Emanuel and Wasserman Schultz must go. To millions, they are enablers of the one percent, perpetuators of the Washington mentality that the rest of the country has grown to hate. What a message such servants of plutocracy send: Democrats-- a bridge to the past.

I wonder how many years it will take for Moyers and Winship to include Chuck Schumer? I hope less than a decade. As for Hillary pressuring them? Sorry, but Hillary is them! It's like asking her to amputate an ear or a toe. It's important to remember that Emanuel isn't resigning unless it's part of a plea bargain and the only way to excise Wasserman Schultz from the Democratic Party power structure is for Tim Canova to beat her in the late August primary in south Florida. We'll see what the new Cook County State's Attorney, Kim Foxx, does about Emanuel but helping Canova against Wasserman Schultz is as easy as clicking on either one of these thermometers:

On To New Hampshire-- And Another Reason Hillary Should Drop Out And Endorse Bernie

A few years ago I read Elizabeth Warren's book, A Fighting Chance and I remember being very impressed with a story about how then First Lady Hillary Clinton had single-handedly turned around the Administration on a toxic brankuptcy bill and persuaded her husband to veto it at the very end of 2000. It actually made me feel good about Hillary. But, it turns out, I didn't actually have the full story.

The banking industry bought everything; they even bought their own facts. The industry commissioned three different studies, each of which was touted as "independent." Each explained the urgent need to change the law-- exactly the way the banking industry wanted it changed. One particularly damaging result of these bogus studies was a claim that bankruptcy cost every hardworking, bill-paying American family a $550 "hidden tax." The number was entirely made up, fabricated out of thin air, but the press reported it as "fact" for years.

This one hit me hard. I'd spent nearly twenty years sweating over every detail in a string of serious academic studies, agonizing over sample sizes and statistical significance to make certain that whatever I reported was exactly right. Now the banks just wrote a check, commissioned a friendly study, and purchased their own facts. They had their own press people distribute the facts and lobbyists hand the facts to congressional staffers. From the halls of Congress to the front pages of newspapers all over the country, these new "facts" became reality.

This strategy-- and the cynicism behind it-- made me furious. It also scared me. If the facts about bankruptcy could be purchased, then who knew what they could claim next?

...[T]he president [Bill Clinton] was under enormous pressure from the banks to sign the bill, but in the last days of his presidency, urged on by his wife, President Clinton stood strong with struggling families. With no public fanfare, he vetoed the industry's bill.

...The banks lost in 2000, but they didn't quit-- they just spent more money on lobbying and campaign contributions. Soon the banking industry was outspending everybody else-- tobacco, pharmaceuticals, even Big Oil. Credit card companies lined up to boost George W. Bush's presidential campaign.

In 2001, the bill looked sure to pass Congress again, and now George W. Bush was in the White House, promising to sign it into law. The recent election kept the House in Republican control, and every single Republican was ready to support the bill. The Senate was evenly split between the two parties, but one of the bill's lead sponsors was Democratic powerhouse Joe Biden, and right behind him were plenty of Democrats offering to help... The baking industry had lost for a second time, but it came back once again, bringing even more money and more lobbyists. It was like fighting some kind of mythical creature-- cut off one head and two grow back.

Now, take a look at that video up top of Elizabeth Warren speaking with Bill Moyers in 2004. Turns out there was more to that story than Warren put in her book. In the interview, she acknowledges that Hillary-- who had a far keener understanding of the disastrous consequences of the bill-- got President Clinton to veto it. However... "One of the first bills that came up after she was Senator Clinton was the bankruptcy bill. This is a bill that's like a vampire; it will not die. There's a lot of money behind it. Her husband had vetoed it very much at her urging. She voted in favor of it. As Senator Clinton, the pressures are very different. It's a well-financed industry... A lot of people don't realize the industry that gave the most money to Washington over the past few years was not the oil industry, was not pharmaceuticals, it was consumer credit products-- the credit card companies-- and they have influence. She has taken money from the groups..."

Oh, yes, she has. Hillary, in fact has taken far more from the Financial Sector than anyone who has served in Congress other than Obama and McCain-- $36,846,987 and rapidly growing, sure to overtake McCain momentarily.

Maybe this helps explain why Warren hasn't endorsed Clinton so far and why she's the only Democratic woman in the Senate who hasn't. And maybe it helps explain her statement the other day on the Senate floor: "A new presidential election is upon us. Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club." It came right after the Clintons claimed that single-payer is just too hard to achieve. If conservatives like the Clintons (and the Republicans) had had their way, we would still be a British colony; there would still be slavery; only wealthy old white men would be voting; there would be no public education; there would be no Social Security or Medicare...

A few days later Warren released an 11-page report, Rigged Justice 2016, showing how wealthy and powerful corporate parasites go unpunished. The Warren-Sanders wing of the Democratic Party "contends that aggressive prosecutions would not only signal to executives that they’ll be held to the same standard as everybody else, they could also spare working people who’d otherwise get gouged. In other words, Warren is arguing that by simply wielding the laws already on the books, rather than struggling to pass new ones, a president could strike a blow against the inequality now agitating the left. And all it would take is somebody in the White House committed to stocking the administration with likeminded enforcers." These are the people who have financed the Clintons' careers.

But, just in case Hillary doesn't drop out of the race now, you can help make sure Bernie wins the nomination by contributing what you can here.

Zephyr Teachout In The U.S. House Of Representatives?

You probably remember Zephyr Teachout's spectacular run against Andrew Cuomo in 2014. He beat her in the big city machine counties but she won Albany, where they know him best and she won up and down the Hudson Valley as well. In fact, of the 11 counties that make up NY-19, the seat Chris Gibson is giving up at the end of the year, Zephyr won 10. The biggest county in the district is Ulster, where she beat Cuomo 69.95% to 27.41%. Dutchess is the second biggest county and she beat him there 57.51%- 40.36%. The comes Rensselaer where it was Zephyr 63.42%, Cuomo 33.02%. In Columbia County it was Zephyr 77.91% to 20.43 for Cuomo. And so it went. Only a tiny sliver of Broome County is in the district, the one place show lost, and only 3,449 people voted, of which Cuomo took 49.46% and Zephyr took 44.77%. She won 71.06% in Schoharie County and 72.75% in Otsego County. On average she took 62% of the votes district-wide. Point being... shamed an impression on the folks in NY-19.

It's a blue district with a retiring Republican. The DCCC hasn't been able to find a candidate, although there are five Republicans already running and a couple of Democrats sniffing around. Obama won the district against McCain 53-45% and beat Romney 4 years later 52-46%. NY-19 is not a Trumpf or Cruz kind of district and if either of them is the nominee, it's safe to predict a Democratic tsunami up and down the ticket. She works at Fordham University and has aan partment in Brooklyn and a home in Dover Plains, a hamlet in Dutchess County. Right now she's consulting with Democratic leaders in the district and hopes to make an announcement, one way or the other, in about a week.

The Oneonta Daily Star suggests that both Republican and Democratic Party county leaders are anxious to avoid a costly, divisive primary. That's generally an anti-democratic notion and the Democratic county leaders need to rethink that.

In Cooperstown, Otsego County Democratic Chairman Richard Abbate said he is convinced Democrats have a strong shot at capturing the House seat this year, particularly if Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham Law School professor who challenged incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2014, is selected as his party's nominee.

He said Teachout is set to be interviewed by county Democratic committee members Wednesday. Other possible candidates will also be interviewed. The Daily Star quoted Democratic insiders earlier this week saying Julian Schreibman, who unsuccessfully challenged Gibson in 2012, is interested in making another attempt for the seat this year.

Abbate also said another Democrat, Columbia County farmer Will Yandic, is also interested in running. Yandic received 476 votes last November in getting re-elected to the Livingston Town Board.

"My hope is that the candidates will respect the decision of the party chairmen if we are united" behind one candidate, Abbate said. But if there is division among the chairpersons, he added, "I think it is inevitable that we will have a primary."

Abbate said he is very impressed with Teachout based on her ability to rally the enthusiastic supporters she gained in the 2014 gubernatorial primary against Cuomo.

"Zephyr is someone who has proven she has the ability to get the base motivated," Abbate said. He noted he is hoping the county Democratic leaders throughout the 19th District can unite behind done of the candidates in February.

Congressional primaries in New York will be held June 28, giving voters time to focus on them following the state's April 19 presidential primary elections. As a closed primary state, voters can only vote in the primary for the party in which they are enrolled.

Last week the Kingston Times reported that a local social media movement has sprung up to draft a high-profile progressive into the mix. On Facebook, the page 'Run Zephyr Run-- Drafting Zephyr Teachout to Run for Congress in NY-19' urges the academic and former gubernatorial candidate to jump into the race for the Democratic nomination.

There's no doubt Zephyr would not be just another run-of-the-mill careerist congressmember. She's exactly the kind of unbossed, unbought independent thinker Congress needs more of, regardless of party. When Blue America endorsed her for governor in 2014 she wrote a guest post. Much of it was specific to her contest with Cuomo but there was a broader and more universal theme as well:

Today, Democratic leaders, even some of the good ones, believe that Wall Street creates wealth, and that the role of the government is to protect those monopolies and then kick some of the resulting wealth to the middle class or poor. Their debate is whether to kick back a little, or a little more. Ultimately they think the role of government is to serve charity, not justice.


I believe the basis of wealth creation comes from ordinary citizens who have access to opportunity, and infrastructure. It's the immigrant restaurant, the neighborhood lawyer or baker or farmer, these are the people that build the society we love. Democrats need to represent them, Democrats should make sure that they have power, and that justice doesn't mean charity. It means balanced markets, competition, and flourishing small businesses.

...It's time for a new generation of Democrats, not in age but in spirit, to repudiate the corporate financiers. Liberty is our right as Americans, both negative liberty in that government should not punish the innocent, but also positive liberty in our right to have housing, medicine, education, and economic opportunity. That's why I'm running. That's what the Democratic Party used to stand for, and that's what we're going to make it stand for again.

Climate Change Shouldn't Be A Partisan Issue-- But It Is

Why is young fogey Marco Rubio such a willfully ignorant science denier?

Yesterday we talked about the passage of Fred Upton's disastrous anti-climate change bill. How is it possible? There are two ways to look at why America is acting like a nation of ostriches with their heads buried on the sand, although both lead back to special interests putting their own tremendous wealth ahead of the survival of the human race-- predominantly the Koch brothers, who virtually control the Republican Party lock, stock and barrel.

Last year when California Governor Jerry Brown denounced the GOP by saying "virtually no Republican" in Washington accepts climate change science, PolitiFact looked into his outrageous charge-- and found it true. Brown, responding to a question from This Week's host George Stephanopoulos, said "[T]here's virtually no Republican who accepts the science that virtually is unanimous. I mean there is no scientific question. There's just political denial for various reasons, best known to those people who are in denial." So PolitiFact decided to find investigate that since Republican elected officials are more skeptical about climate change than Republican voters are (Republican voters not dependent on Koch-related checks). First up was a senator whose state is starting to feel the effects of rising sea waters pretty dramatically:

Most recently, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., made waves for denying a link between human activity and climate change.

"I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it," Rubio told Jonathan Karl on ABC’s This Week May 11. "And I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it. Except it will destroy our economy."

That’s in line with other prominent Republicans, such as House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Organizing for Action, a group that backs President Barack Obama, published a lengthy list of climate change deniers in Congress, with evidence to back each one.

Still others, like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have notably changed on the issue, even after co-authoring legislation to address the issue.

The only Republicans they managed to dig up who believe in the science of climate change and are taking it even a little seriously were Michael Grimm (R-NY), currently serving out a prison sentence for corruption, Chris Smith (R-NJ), Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) and 5 relatively mainstream GOP senators, Bob Corker, John Thune, Susan Collins, Lamar Alexander and Mark Kirk. But when I wrote they were taking it a little seriously... well, this is what Frelinghuysen put it: "With the weather patterns over the past five years. … What causes it? Quite honestly, I don’t know. … Humans have some effect on climate change. There’s so many factors." So 8 out of 278 Republicans (3%) are open to arguments from scientists. And Pennsylvania's Republican ex-Congressman Jim Greenwood told PolitiFact that the number of Republicans standing by climate change science has been shrinking. "There used to be a lot more of us. A lot of us were very green in our voting records. That has changed. I think it's part of the phenomenon of the polarization of the Congress." What a party!

This is a Bill Moyers show from 2012 that helps explain what's happened to the GOP and is very much well worth watching again:



Back to Climate Change and a study CBS News did a couple months ago on where the GOP candidates stand on the issue. Short version: scary.

Climate change, more than many other issues, lays bare a stark divide between the two parties: Democrats warn of the grave threat posed by global warming, stressing the need to reduce carbon emissions to prevent a catastrophe. Republicans, including most of the GOP's 2016 presidential candidates, either don't acknowledge climate change is happening, or they question whether it's caused by human activity.

...At an event sponsored by billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch in August, Cruz denied the existence of climate change.

"If you look to the satellite data in the last 18 years there has been zero recorded warming. Now the global warming alarmists, that's a problem for their theories. Their computer models show massive warming the satellite says it ain't happening. We've discovered that NOAA, the federal government agencies are cooking the books," he said.

In an interview with the Texas Tribune in March, he said, "the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of flat-Earthers," recalling that Galileo was once branded a "denier" for saying the Earth was round when contemporary scientific wisdom held that it was flat.

...Marco Rubio: "I believe climate is changing because there's never been a moment where the climate is not changing," Rubio said in CBS' Face the Nation in April. In an interview with ABC's This Week in May 2014, he said, "Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that's directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activity. I do not agree with that."

And what about Mister Republican 2015? Trumpf doesn't issue press statements; he tweets-- and CBS found some:

Yesterday, Paul Krugman, writing for the NY Times noted that "Future historians-- if there are any future historians-- will almost surely say that the most important thing happening in the world during December 2015 was the climate talks in Paris. True, nothing agreed to in Paris will be enough, by itself, to solve the problem of global warming. But the talks could mark a turning point, the beginning of the kind of international action needed to avert catastrophe. Then again, they might not; we may be doomed. And if we are, you know who will be responsible: the Republican Party... [M]ost of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are solidly in the anti-science camp. What people may not realize, however, is how extraordinary the G.O.P.’s wall of denial is, both in the U.S. context and on the global scene... The 2016 election should be seen as a referendum on that extremism."

Yesterday saw the release of a WBUR poll of people living in Massachusetts on, among other things, climate change. It was somewhat disheartening. The results also show most people believe climate change is occurring, and is caused by human activity, and that it can be stopped. OK, so far so good, right? However, they fear policies would be too expensive to implement.

Few are paying much attention to the Climate Change Summit in Paris, which is barely being covered by the mass media. Still 78% say the earth's temperature has been rising and 56% say it's due to human activities while another 21% say it's partially die to human activities. 68% say the effects of global warming will be felt within our lifetimes and of those 57% say the effects are already happening-- and 72% of those interviewed say the consequences for people in Massachusetts will be "very serious" (45%) or "somewhat serious" (27%). 55% say it isn't too late to stop global warming and 26% say it's already too late.

Then the questions start getting into costs:

When asked if "greenhouse gases were significantly reduced, but it raised your monthly energy bill by ten dollars," 58% still favored the remediation but opposition increased significantly to 32%. And that's Massachusetts! I don't know that he had seen this polling but early yesterday, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post asserted that "It’s often said that climate change doesn’t motivate voters, and that’s true."

But a confluence of events-- the implementation of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, plus the likelihood that we’ll have a global climate deal very soon-- mean the contrast on this issue really could matter more in this election than in previous cycles. The stakes surrounding this fundamental difference between the two parties are suddenly a whole lot higher. The question is now no longer an abstract one. It’s about whether the U.S. will participate in a concrete, long-term, global agreement to take sustained action to address a crisis that the scientists tell us could soon be irreversibly headed towards catastrophe.

What’s more, for Democrats, this issue is something of a two-fer. It isn’t just about whether we should act on climate, which now has majority support in polls. It’s also about whether to embrace international engagement as a means to act on it. The GOP nominee will have pledged to reverse the steps we’re now taking in this regard by pulling us out of an international deal that (hopefully) will have already been reached. That stance might not be a winner before a general election audience. Dems can use it (among other things) to hammer the GOP as trapped in the past.

Sure, some pundits will proclaim that Dems risk alienating blue collar whites in Rust Belt states by taking this on. But swing voters are dwindling as a factor. The 2016 election could turn on how successfully the Dem nominee motivates the core voter groups that have been powering Dem wins in recent national elections. Climate action polls very well with these groups.

Also, the issue is kind of important. It may not end up mattering much, or even at all, to next year’s outcome. But the more it gets talked about, the better.

Greg is correct; the more it gets talked about the better. And the Blue America candidates are all talking about it. Alex Law, for example, is running for a congressional seat in the South Jersey district across from Philly. The conservaDem incumbent, Donald Norcross, was proud that his very first vote in Congress was for the Keystone XL Pipeline. And he hasn't gotten any better since then. In fact when he was a state legislator, New Jersey environmental groups considered him the worst Democrat in Trenton. Alex has a very different perspective. This is what he told us yesterday after the vote Thursday on Upton's climate change denying "energy bill":

Moral arguments for green energy aside, sustainable energy also has a compelling economic argument. Sustainable energy means sustainable jobs for the United States in manufacturing, operations, and in research and development. These are jobs that aren't limited to areas 'lucky' enough to have oil; these are jobs that can come home to any district, including mine, in the country. America has a tremendous opportunity to lead the world in new technologies that every country on Earth needs. We must seize this moment to lead the world in this growing market and save our planet from the ever looming threat of climate change. Rather than allowing special interests spending to force our government to prop up big oil and coal (with subsidies and horrible legislation like the Keystone Pipeline), we should invest in sustainable energy. When I get to Congress, this will be one of the most important issues for me, and I plan to sponsor legislation making investment in sustainable energy a priority for the United States.

This morning it's been widely reported that negotiators from the 195 countries at theParis Climate summit agreed on a blueprint deal aimed at reducing global carbon emissions and limiting global warming, a good first step in the multinational effort to keep climate change in check. Several of the Republican candidates running for president have vowed to tear up the agreement when they're elected. You can help Alex get to Congress here at the Blue America ActBlue page or, if you'd prefer, on a special page we've set up for congressional candidates who have endorsed Bernie Sanders for President. NJ-01 is a solid blue district and the people there deserve a real Democrat, not a corrupt, conservative machine hack.