Can The Democrats Still Lose This Thing?

Remember how Herr Trumpf used to go on endlessly at his bund rallies, in interviews and on Twitter about his polling numbers? That's when he was pulverizing the Republican Party's deep bench and bitch-slapping Sweaty Little Marco, Lyin' Ted, Low Energy Jeb and the rest of the sad sacks who thought they could go up against a NYC playground bully. These days... well, if he mentions polls it's only to whine that they're all fixed, like that sinister Fox poll that shows substantially more voters see Hillary as the lesser of two evils.

The newest poll, released yesterday and showing Hillary ahead of Mr. Trumpanzee 50-40% in a head-to-head match up, shows her beating him 45-37% if Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are in the running. The poll shows a 48-41% preference for which party voters would back for Congress. Looking' good for Team Blue, right? Perhaps, but there's still plenty of time for them to screw it up-- on every level. It is, after all, what moribund catastrophically-run operations like the DNC, DCCC and DSCC do better than anyone. In fact, screwing up is pretty much all they do. Let's start at the top with President Obama who can't stop sending loud, clear signals to the Democratic base that he's going to put all he's got into getting the almost universally hated TPP passed.

President Obama started a fresh push for the Transpacific Partnership on Friday when he sent Congress a draft Statement of Administrative Action.

That action means that after 30 days, the White House will be able to present Congress with legislation on the TPP.

And on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton chose Ken Salazar, who is an aggressively outspoken supporter of the Transpacific Partnership, to lead her White House transition team, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton has come out firmly against the TPP.

Salazar's appointment raises serious questions about what we can expect from a Hillary Clinton administration and whether she's sincere in her opposition to the TPP and other so-called "free trade" deals that are still being negotiated.

...[B]y far the most sweeping deal that's being negotiated in secret and largely overlooked by activists is the Trade in Services Agreement, also known as TiSA.

TiSA will undermine citizens' privacy and governments' sovereignty, and negotiators are hoping to have a deal finalized by the end of this year.

Paola Casale at EconomyInCrisis writes bluntly about TiSA that "You may be asking: 'how does this affect me?' The best one sentence response I can come up with is: 'how does this not affect you.'"

Fifty-one countries would be initially governed by TiSA, including the United States, the European Union, and 22 other nations from around the world, representing 70% of the world's services' trade.

If it goes into effect, it would cover close to 80% of the U.S. economy that falls under the heading of "services."

"Services" is a broad term that covers all sorts of things, such as shipping, air travel, e-commerce, telecommunications, the internet, healthcare, financial services, engineering, and the list goes on and on.

Based on leaked texts and summaries published by the European Union, it's clear that TiSA aims to go even further than the WTO to globalize markets, functionally destroy national borders, and to create new corporate-friendly rules and regulations in sectors like e-commerce and financial services.

TiSA would include a "standstill clause" for financial services, and Switzerland has proposed that the agreement force all signatories to allow "any new financial service" to enter the market, which would virtually guarantee that banks all over the world, freed from sovereign regulation, would adopt the same sort of reckless speculation that destroyed the global economy just 8 years ago.

...[I]t will cripple our democratic republic by making it even easier for corporations to manage or strike down our public laws.

In recent months under existing trade laws, we've seen Canada and Mexico successfully sue the United States to force us to overturn our Country Of Origin Labeling law for meat imports.

And TransCanada is suing the United States right now for $15 billion as retaliation for Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline.

...TiSA isn't just another sweeping regional trade agreement like the TPP or the TTIP.

TiSA aims to corporatize markets and functionally destroy borders around the world so that Corporate Big Brother can know everything about everyone and so that Big Business can sell anything to anyone, no matter the harm it may cause.

Call your lawmakers and tell them that you oppose any trade deal that gives corporations the ability to challenge the sovereignty of governments around the world.

Instead, democratic republics should be able to pass and enforce laws and trade policies that first serve the best interests of its citizens instead of transnational corporations and billionaires.

Just say "no" to TPP, TTIP, and especially to TiSA.

So there's Obama giving Democratic voters a big middle finger. After all, someone has to pay for the most expensive presidential library in history! And it's not going to all fall on Patrick Murphy's parents and Saudi backers. Meanwhile grassroots Democrats are campaigning on stopping TPP. This morning, for example, Wisconsin progressive Mary Hoeft told us her Republican opponent, "Sean Duffy voted in support of the Trans Pacific Partnership knowing full well the devastating impact such a partnership will have on American jobs. More than 5 million manufacturing jobs have left our country thanks to tax incentives making it 'cost effective' for company owners to terminate American employees. When elected to Congress, I will work to end all tax incentives that make it easy for company owners to profit at the expense of American workers."

Plenty of progressive Democrats still have a queasy feeling about Hillary Clinton, the lesser of two evils candidate who's still too evil for many self-respecting progressives to vote for. As Maureen Dowd pointed out last weekend, she's really a less right-win, more mainstream GOP nominee at heart anyway. She wrote that Republicans revolted by Mr. Trumpanzee and who find him "too volatile and unhinged... already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up-- unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else" and that, of course is Hillary.

The erstwhile Goldwater Girl and Goldman Sachs busker can be counted on to do the normal political things, not the abnormal haywire things. Trump’s propounding could drag us into war, plunge us into a recession and shatter Washington into a thousand tiny bits.

Hillary will keep the establishment safe. Who is more of an establishment figure, after all? Her husband was president, and he repealed Glass-Steagall, signed the Defense of Marriage Act and got rid of those pesky welfare queens.

Pushing her Midwestern Methodist roots, taking advantage of primogeniture, Hillary often seems more Republican than the Gotham bling king, who used to be a Democrat and donor to Democratic candidates before he jumped the turnstile.

Hillary is a reliable creature of Wall Street. Her tax return showed the Clintons made $10.6 million last year, and like other superrich families, they incorporated with the Clinton Executive Services Corporation (which was billed for the infamous server). Trump has started holding up goofy charts at rallies showing Hillary has gotten $48,500,000 in contributions from hedge funders, compared to his $19,000.

Unlike Trump, she hasn’t been trashing leading Republicans. You know that her pals John McCain and Lindsey Graham are secretly rooting for her. There is a cascade of prominent Republicans endorsing Hillary, donating to Hillary, appearing in Hillary ads, talking up Hillary’s charms.

Robert Kagan, a former Reagan State Department aide, adviser to the McCain and Mitt Romney campaigns and Iraq war booster, headlined a Hillary fund-raiser this summer. Another neocon, James Kirchick, keened in The Daily Beast, “Hillary Clinton is the one person standing between America and the abyss.”

She has finally stirred up some emotion in women, even if it is just moderate suburban Republican women palpitating to leave their own nominee, who has the retro air of a guy who just left the dim recesses of a Playboy bunny club.

The Democratic nominee put out an ad featuring Trump-bashing Michael Hayden, an N.S.A. and C.I.A. chief under W. who was deemed “incongruent” by the Senate when he testified about torture methods. And she earned an endorsement from John Negroponte, a Reagan hand linked to American-trained death squads in Latin America.

Politico reports that the Clinton team sent out feelers to see if Kissinger, the Voldemort of Vietnam, and Condi Rice, the conjurer of Saddam’s apocalyptic mushroom cloud, would back Hillary.

Hillary has written that Kissinger is an “idealistic” friend whose counsel she valued as secretary of state, drawing a rebuke from Bernie Sanders during the primaries: “I’m proud to say Henry Kissinger is not my friend.”

The Hillary team seems giddy over its windfall of Republicans and neocons running from the Trump sharknado. But as David Weigel wrote in the Washington Post, the specter of Kissinger, the man who advised Nixon to prolong the Vietnam War to help with his re-election, fed a perception that “the Democratic nominee has returned to her old, hawkish ways and is again taking progressives for granted.”

...As Republican strategist Steve Schmidt noted on MSNBC, “the candidate in the race most like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a foreign policy perspective is in fact Hillary Clinton, not the Republican nominee.”

And that’s how Republicans prefer their crazy-- not like Trump, but like Cheney.

And it's not much better down-ballot. Chuck Schumer and Jon Tester have spent more money against progressives than against Republicans, eagerly delivering the party nomination to conservative puppets with no chance to win other than being swept along on Clinton coattails, like fracking lobbyist Katie McGinty, make believe Democrat Patrick Murphy, reactionary New Dem Ann Kirkpatrick, corporate shill Patty Judge, and poor old confused Ted Strickland. The DCCC is even worse. They've systematically abandoned districts where progressives have won the primaries-- even districts they've identified themselves as "must win" and districts where Hillary is going to pulverize Trump. Instead the DCCC is once again putting virtually all their resources into the kind of corrupt conservative candidates that replicates DCCC heavy-weights like Steve Israel, Ben Ray Luján, Denny Heck and Jim Himes. This week, writing for Rewire, Ally Boguhn, reported on how conservaDems are trying to sneak thoroughly discredited anti-Choice politicians-- discredited by the Democratic grassroots at least-- back into Congress.

Former Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA) contends that’s what happened to her and other anti-choice Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, which resulted in Republicans wresting control of the House.

“I believe that pro-life Democrats are the biggest threat to the Republicans, and that’s why we were targeted-- and I’ll say harshly targeted-- in 2010,” Dahlkemper said in an interview.

She alleged that anti-choice groups, often funded by Republicans, attacked her for supporting the Affordable Care Act. A 2010 Politico story describes how the Susan B. Anthony List funneled millions of dollars into equating the vote with support for abortion access, even though President Obama signed an executive order in the vein of the Hyde Amendment’s prohibition on federal funds for abortion care.

Dalhkemper advocated for perhaps the clearest strategy to counter the narrative that anti-choice Democrats somehow aren’t really opposed to abortion.

“What we need is support from our party at large, and we also need to band together, and we also need to continue to talk about that consistent life message that I think the vast majority of us believe in,” she said.

Self-described pro-choice Georgia House Minority Leader Rep. Stacey Abrams (D) rejected the narratives spun by DFLA to supporters. In an interview with Rewire at the convention, Abrams called the organization’s claim that Democrats should work to elect anti-choice politicians from within their ranks in order to win in places like the South a “dangerous” strategy that assumes “that the South is the same static place it was 50 or 100 years ago.”

“I think what they’re reacting to is … a very strong religious current that runs throughout the South,” that pushes people to discuss their values when it comes to abortion, Abrams said. “But we are capable of complexity. And that’s the problem I have. [Its strategy] assumes and reduces Democrats to a single issue, but more importantly, it reduces the decision to one that is a binary decision-- yes or no.”

That strategy also doesn’t take into account the intersectional identities of Southern voters and instead only focuses on appealing to the sensibilities of white men, noted Abrams.

“We are only successful when we acknowledge that I can be a Black woman who may be raised religiously pro-life but believe that other women have the right to make a choice,” she continued. “And the extent to which we think about ourselves only in terms of white men and trying to convince that very and increasingly narrow population to be our saviors in elections, that’s when we face the likelihood of being obsolete.”

Understanding that nuances exist among Southern voters-- even those who are opposed to abortion personally-- is instead the key to reaching them, Abrams said.

“Most of the women and most of the voters, we are used to having complex conversations about what happens,” she said. “And I do believe that it is both reductive and it’s self-defeating for us to say that you can only win if you’re a pro-life Democrat.”

To Abrams, being pro-choice means allowing people to “decide their path.”

“The use of reproductive choice is endemic to how we as women can be involved in society: how we can go to work, how we can raise families, make choices about who we are. And so while I am sympathetic to the concern that you have to … cut against the national narrative, being pro-choice means exactly that,” Abrams continued. “If their path is pro-life, fine. If their path is to decide to make other choices, to have an abortion, they can do so.”

“I’m a pro-choice woman who has strongly embraced the conversation and the option for women to choose whatever they want to choose,” Abrams said. “That is the best and, I think, most profound path we can take as legislators and as elected officials.”

I might add that Kathy Dahlkemper served one term in Congress, where she proved herself to be one of the worst members anywhere in the county. She didn't just lose her seat because she was anti-Choice. She lost her seat because she was a reactionary Blue Dog who voted against almost everything the Democratic base expected. So when she was up for reelection, they simply didn't show up at the polls-- not for her and not for most of the Blue Dogs in the House.

Two Democratic Women Who Lost In November Are Running Again: Ann Kuster (NH) And Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ)

Perhaps you'll recall that last year Blue America endorsed Ann McLane Kuster in a fierce primary battle against a Joe Lieberman type conservative in the New Hampshire primary for the seat that had opened up when Paul Hodes vacated the seat to run for the Senate. Ann trounced her cash-rich Establishment-backed opponent 71-29%. We also endorsed her in the general election against Republican corporate shill and rubber stamp Charlie base-- whose campaign was partially financed by Beijing-- but she lost by a heartbreaking 3,000 votes. Bass has been as awful a congressman as we expected, consistently voting against the interests of his own constituents and in favor of corporate demands and the right-wing ideological agenda. We expect to endorse Ann again when she officially throws her hat into the ring.

Not so with another Democratic Party candidate across the country in Arizona, also an Ann. This one, Ann Kirkpatrick, lost her seat to teabag extremist Paul Gosar in November after running up one of the most worst voting records of any Democrat in Congress. But she wants the seat back.

"It's clear to me, now that Paul Gosar has a record, that he is toeing the party line rather than serving the district," she said. "The real key for me is the number of people who I've been hearing from in the district-- and this is Democrats, independents, Republicans and even folks who are actively involved in the 'tea party'-- that they feel he is deeply out-of-touch with the district."

Kirkpatrick said she hopes the 2012 political climate will be more hospitable to her candidacy because it is a presidential year and likely will have a bigger turnout.

When Kirkpatrick first ran in 2008 for the sprawling open seat that takes up most of the state she took 56%-- 155,791 votes (as opposed to 109,924 for his GOP opponent). She won 6 of the district's 8 counties with the biggest, Yavapai, being a virtual tie-- 45,014 for her and 45,487 for her opponent). Last year, her confusing voting record-- she stuck with the Republicans whenever it mattered most-- depressed Democratic turnout and the results were astonishing. Gosar won even more GOP votes than Hay, the character she first ran against-- 112,816 but over 50,000 of her initial supporters evaporated. She only managed to get 99,233 votes, a pathetic result of a pathetic 2 years in Congress. She only won 3 counties of the 8-- and was trounced by Gosar 47,449- 27,179 in Yavapai.

There is no path to victory for Kirkpatrick in Arizona. The Democratic activists and the base hate her and all the corporate cash the DCCC will dump into the district will be wasted. This is the repulsive hallmark of Steve Israel as DCCC chair. The Democrats would be better off finding a real Democrat who represents the interests of working families in one of the nation's poorest districts rather than some corporate shill whose one claim to fame is that she isn't as bad as the teabagger in office. Ann Kirkpatrick is a loser and Steve Israel is a loser for recruiting her again and a loser for falling back on a tired, self-defeating formula that encompasses his own conservative worldview. At least the Sierra Club, which endorsed her in 2008, is unlikely to make the same mistake twice.

Between a vote to swap federal lands to allow mining near Superior, and the vote against the climate bill, the Sierra Club is not pleased... "Her district will feel the effects of climate change significantly, especially in the greater Grand Canyon area," said Grand Canyon Chapter Director Sandy Bahr. "Reduced flows in our rivers and streams is only one of many issues. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the higher temperatures will result in even more dead trees and more significant forest fires." 

..."There are certainly a lot of progressive Democrats who are disappointed by her votes at this point," said Democrat Avtar Khalsa. But those sentiments appear to stop somewhere near the city limits, with farther-flung Democrats more supportive. 

 ..."I basically think that Ann Kirkpatrick should return to her Republican roots," said Democrat Debbie Leavitt, referencing Kirkpatrick's childhood in a home that was politically divided. "I don't think she should be allowed to continue pretending to be a Democrat." 
 
Others spoke on parallel tracks, including one of her more generous donors in Flagstaff. 
 
"I am very disappointed in her promise versus performance on environmental issues," said William Putnam of Lowell Observatory. 

Perhaps some local Democrats didn't fully understand who they were electing, said city councilwoman Karla Brewster. 
 
"The people I've talked to are angry ... and believed she would be more liberal than she has been voting," Brewster said. "In talking to Ann myself, I've believed she would be more moderate." 
 
...Democrat Bill Breed supported Kirkpatrick and congressional candidate Howard Shanker last year, before siding with Shanker. 
 
"She doesn't vote like a Democrat," he said of Kirkpatrick.

UPDATE: And A Third

This time it's anti-Choice fanatic and arch-conservative Kathy Dahlkemper, who lost last November after two pathetic years in office, who wants to try to reclaim her old seat representing the Erie area (PA-3). In 2008 she had narrowly edged out incumbent Phil English 146,846 (51%) to 139,757 (49%) with a big win in Erie County (71,332 votes, 57%), a close win in Mercer and losses Butler and the 4 smaller counties. Last November, after an excruciating 2 years of aisle-crossing and trying to please Republican voters while screwing Democrats and having given her own base no real reason to bother coming to the polls, she lost the seat to a rich car salesman, teabagger Mike Kelly 111,909 (56%) to 88,924 (44%). Over 60,000 of her voters sat it out, while GOP drop off from the presidential year was less than half that. Her vote in Erie County went down by over 30,000 and she lost Mercer and every other county. Steve Israel and the DCCC may think recruited Dahlkemper ticks off some boxes but she has no path to victory-- short of the Republican legislature and Republican district redrawing (enlarging) the district to make it more Democratic. That's not going to happen.

"Is this the best way for me to continue to serve the community that I love so much? I'm trying to make the best decision for me and my (former) constituents,'' she said.

Dahlkemper, 53, said it's difficult to say when she will decide. But she said she couldn't wait too long because of the need to raise campaign funds and get her message out.

She announced in October 2007 when she ran in the 2008 election cycle. "Waiting until fall would put me or anyone else at a great disadvantage,'' she said.

Dahlkemper confirmed that she's talked to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee about a possible run.

Bill Cole, the Erie County Democratic Party chairman, said he also asked Dahlkemper in a recent phone conversation about her future political plans.

"Though she has not made a firm commitment to running, she was going to do some exploratory activities to see whether she'd run again-- kind of test the waters, to see how people felt,'' Cole said.

...The political environment could be better for a Democratic congressional candidate in 2012 than it was in 2010 because President Barack Obama will be seeking re-election, said Robert Speel, associate political-science professor at Penn State Behrend.

That could boost voter turnout among Democrats and help a Dahlkemper candidacy, he said.

"We'll have to see President Obama's popularity at the time of next year's election, but right now, I would say she probably would have a better chance of winning next year than she had last year,'' he said.

Dahlkemper said she thinks running during a presidential year would help.

"Hopefully, the Democrats will be more engaged and enthused than they were in the 2010 election," she said. "I think that they are already showing signs of that.''

Dahlkemper offers pretty much the same weak tea to Democratic voters that Republicans do: "We're not as bad as they are." Obama nearly tied McCain in the 3rd district in 2008-- but he still lost. And that was when there was Hope and Change in the wind. Now all there is is an alternative to a pack of mad dogs running the GOP.

The Daily Blue America Report

Superb Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter

Texas-10- Early voting, increased Democratic voter registration, a lack of enthusiasm for McCain and for Republicans in general looks like it is turning one of Tom Delay's gerrymandered districts-- a big swatch of eastern and central Texas from Austin to the Houston suburbs-- blue. Larry Joe Doherty is doing an incredible job and Bush rubber stamp Michael McCaul' is suddenly waking up to realize he may soon be working for his father-in-law directly. Today's Austin Statesman seems to have detected a bit of the old gloom and doom setting in at McCaul campaign headquarters.

After looking at the early voting turnout-- two to one, Democrat over Repug-- McCaul campaign manager Jack Ladd sent out an e-mail alert to right-wing activists: “This is very bad news. If you think your friends are volunteering, they are not. I know I’m not going to sit down and die, and I know you will not either. There are only 12 days left, and this is not a lifelong commitment, we are asking you just give part of a day or days and help keep CD10 Republican.”

Between the Rick Noriega, Barack Obama and SEIU ground campaigns-- not to mention Larry Joe's own-- McCaul would probably be better off spending the next 12 days in one of the snake-handling churches that support him begging for some of that sky-god intervention Palin is counting on.

New Hampshire-01- None of the freshmen elected in 2006 has been more forthright in battling the special interests and always keeping the interests of working families front and center than Carol Shea-Porter. Unfortunately, Jeb Bradley, the rubber stamp reactionary the voters in eastern New Hampshire decided to replace in 2006, is trying to get his old job back. And there's nothing he won't stoop to to get back to Washington. Right now he's using a poor distraught Gold Star mother to distort Carol's support for the troops and principled opposition to the war. Carol has received the endorsement of the VFW's PAC, and an A+ rating from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. What Bradley is trying to do to her is despicable. 

Carol is a military spouse and has been one of the best friends our fighting men and women have in Congress but Bradley is callously manipulating this woman-- apparently driven insane and filled with partisan rage and hatred-- as an attack dog against Carol.

Bradley's corporately funded campaign includes the most vicious and deceitful ads being run by anyone from either party in New England. His ads are entirely based on distortion and outright lies-- like this ugliness. Fortunately New Hampshire is not Alabama and most of the voters there seem to see right through Bradley's slimefest. The two most recent polls-- both in October-- show Carol ahead of him by an average of 7 points. The problem is that Bradley was a 100% corporate shill before Carol banished him from Congress and K Street wants him back-- and right-wing front groups and hate organizations like Freedom's Watch are flooding the district with ads. Carol can really use our help-- and she's earned it.

Pennsylvania-03- The only independent who Blue America has endorsed this year, Dr. Steven Porter, is running against an anti-choice fanatic/pathetic Democratic hack from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, Kathy Dahlkemper and against one of the most useless and personally corrupt GOP shills in Congress, Phil English. Predictably, the two superficial and unqualified major party candidates have conspired to keep Steven out of the debates. When Edinboro University announced recently that they are including him in a debate next Tuesday, the petrified and tongue-tied Dahlkemper immediately backed out. English isn't saying whether or not he will participate.

"Dahlkemper’s refusal," Steve told us, "is evidence of a fatal flaw in the character of a legislator:  the lack of courage. When the choice before the electorate is limited to one between clever thieves and shallow puppets, the only results possible are disastrous. We are experiencing those kinds of results now in our land and across our planet. And still, things can get worse. Recessions can collapse into depressions. Terrorist conflagrations can escalate into nuclear war. The greed of international business can result in ecological holocaust. To stave off such calamities, legislative leaders around the world will need the courage to speak the truth and act accordingly. The cowardice of Mrs. Dahlkemper (and a very corrupt political system which supports her) in both driving independent voices off the ballot and refusing to face them in open debate signals her complete unpreparedness for the office which she seeks. It is a warning sign of unmistakable dimensions."

And English, as usual, has problems of his own. One of the misguided labor unions that has backed him preciously, AFSCME, has finally woken up and seen the light, launching a half million dollar campaign against him for his consistent support of Bush's anti-working family economic agenda. The AFSCME campaign may not be enough to defeat English. Steve has virtually no money to mount a campaign and Dahlkemper is such an abysmal candidate that no self-respecting progressive could possibly vote for her. On top of the corporate pals who English has sold his soul to are coming through for him with last minute mega-donations, especially mutual fund firms, mortgage bankers and other authors of the economic collapse he has helped preside over. Needless to say Big Oil and every big corporation that opposes labor unions, especially Wal-Mart, is donating to English.

Tonight's last item: in a move that surprised most people, Oklahoma's fourth largest newspaper, the Muskogee Phoenix endorsed one of the best candidates running for Senate anywhere, Andrew Rice.

There is no doubt that Inhofe maintains a conservative attitude that reflects the position of his constituent base, but the extremist statements he has made throughout his career on many subjects hurts his credibility and the state's image despite whatever positive contributions he has made while in Congress. And extremism, whether to the right or left, does not promote good government policies or government that benefits everyone.

That is why Andrew Rice is a better candidate in the U.S. Senate race.

Rice has a more even-handed and rational approach to the issues and problems we are experiencing. He has gained a experiential world view as a missionary, working with rural development projects in Asia, that would serve him well in the Senate.

And another great Blue America candidate for Senate, Jeff Merkley, had a pretty special endorsement today too:



Meanwhile, I want to remind everyone to be sure to wander over and check out Digby's Blue America fundraiser.

Blue America Welcomes Dr. Steve Porter, Progressive Candidate For Congress-- Round 3

Last night I read that Cindy Sheehan had qualified for the November ballot to oppose Nancy Pelosi and will base her campaign on Pelosi's refusal to start impeachment proceedings against Bush and for not taking any effective action against the war in Iraq. I used to live in the district. If I still did, I'd vote for Cindy. And she isn't the only worthy independent running for Congress. Today is a week shy of the one year anniversary of our last chat with Blue America fave Steve Porter. As he did in 2006, Steve is running for the House seat still held-- if tenuously-- by Republican rubber stamp Phil English. Of course, when Steve was our Blue America candidate in 2006, he was running as a Democrat-- even if the national Democrats ignored his race.

This year, like Cindy, he's fed up with the national Democrats, didn't run in the primary and decided to challenge both parties in the November general election as an independent. Steve will be with us at Firedoglake for a couple hours this afternoon and he's eager to answer questions about his campaign and his new book, America's Dying Democracy.

Republicans and Democrats need 1,000 signatures to get on the ballot in PA-03. Independents need 2,171 and Steve filed a thousand extra, having collected almost all of them himself by walking door to door around the district and introducing himself to voters. He's says he's campaigning more vigorously this year than he did in 2006. "I'm running a more grassroots, door-to-door campaign this year," he told me. "I've walked over 500 miles so far; thousands of homes that I've been to." In nearly a third of the houses he visited, he found that the people weren't registered to vote. "It's alarming that so many people have given up on democracy and just say, when they come to the door, 'I can't stand it anymore; go away. I'm not registered; I don't vote.' In fact, that's one of the reasons I'm running for office. For me, both major parties have been derelict in their leadership... to put it mildly."

I asked him if he has a real chance to win this race-- after all, English is being underwritten by his corporate masters to the tune of around $1.5 million (so far) and if the DCCC ignored the independent minded Porter, they are lavishing support on the empty-headed cookie-cutter Democrat running this year, Kathy Dahlkemper. He told me he has a reasonable chance to win.

I think it depends very much on the level of frustration that people feel in this district and nationwide. Independent registrations have gone up while major party registrations have decreased and I think that people are in a mood to listen to an alternative voice. Neither major political party represents, or can represent, the average citizen of the United States. They're owned by special interests and I think the public is catching on to that. The lies that are being told-- by President Bush on the one hand and by Nancy Pelosi on the other-- are simply catching up to them. Polls show that the Democrats gained control of both Houses of Congress in 2006 for one overarching reason: the public believed that the Democrats would get us out of Iraq. And the day after the election, Nancy Pelosi takes the impeachment hearings off the table. The Democrats caved in and gave Bush virtually everything that he wanted. Other than raising the minimum wage they accomplished nothing. They did nothing about Social Security, nothing about health care, nothing about shoring up the economy, nothing about the energy crisis, nothing about ecology of the planet; they did nothing about our borders. Congress' approval rating is the lowest in history; I'm not surprised. I'm hoping the public will listen to an alternate voice that's not owned.

He makes the point that after running twice already, he has far more name recognition than Dahlkemper does. In 2006 over 82,000 people voted for him (to English's 104,000). English spent $1,466,487 (around $14.10 per vote) and Steve spent $63,034 (or .77 per vote).

He feels that the biggest difference since leaving the Democratic Party is that his hands are no longer tied. "I can say what I need to say. You don't get anywhere with the two major parties unless you sell yourself to them. I was willing to do that in 2006 because I still believed in their message and that they were serious about getting us out of Iraq. I really did. I was take in. I was very angry when Pelosi took all of that off the table; it was the clincher for me. The Democrats don't want people who think for themselves. They want people who they can control, just like the Republicans do. People who think for themselves don't make it in the two major parties."

In the end he knows he'll have to caucus with the Democrats if he's elected and he's aware that they might not like him. "I'm not going there to be Miss Congeniality. I'm going there to help my country and to help the people of this district... I'm not going there to whore myself out or to be anybody's ass kisser. I'm going to do the things I need to do to satisfy my own conscience and work for the well-being of our people. I'm not going to be like Kathy Dahlkemper. Kathy Dahlkemper is an idiot; she can't speak four coherent sentences in a row. She's a woman who doesn't believe in choice. But she's well-packaged and she's exactly what the Democrats want: someone they can lead by the nose."

ActBlue only collects donations for Democrats. You can give to an anti-choice candidate like Dahlkemper but not to a pro-choice independent. If you'd like to donate to Steve's campaign today, you can't do it through the Blue America site. You can do it on his own site or by sending a check to Porter for Congress, 9451 Page Road, Wattsburg, PA 16442. This weekend, anyone who donates at least $50 through Steve's site-- or who sends a check with a little "BLUE AMERICA" notation will get an autographed copy of America's Dying Democracy.