An Alternative To A Coal Is King Mentality In Kentucky?

There's a debate raging among progressives about Bernie Sanders running for president. [Blue America is encouraging him to run.] Most progressives-- or at least the ones I talk to-- think he should run. Some want him to run, as he has for his entire career, as an Independent. He would be on the ballot as an alternative to the two corporate shills the Republicans and the Democrats put up. Others want him to run in the primary as a Democrat-- something he has never done in his entire life-- so that he could debate Hillary Clinton on the issues she would rather not discuss, like economic inequality and corporate trade policies that have devastated the American middle class.

There's a similar dynamic playing out in Kentucky, where independent-minded progressive Democrat, Ed Marksberry has withdrawn from the Democratic primary-- when the Democratic Party elites and their Establishment stacked the deck unfairly against his long-shot bid-- and is now running as an independent against both horrible status quo, corporate-zombie candidates, Mitch McConnell ® and Alison Lundergan Grimes (D).

Ed lis ooking for some help to accelerate the collection of the 5,000 signatures he needs to get his name on the ballot. McConnell, a reviled underdog, is challenging Alison Lundergan Grimes to 3 debates and if Ed can get the signatures in time, he's likely to be able to join the debate(s). The issues he's talking about are not the issues either of the corporate candidates want to discuss.

"I know a lot of people," he told me this morning, "are asking why I decided to run as an Independent instead of just hanging in there and waiting for a better opportunity. The reason is simple; I found out that the establishment doesn't give a fuck about people like myself and it's not going to change. I'm okay with that and it feels pretty good being an Independent.

But I am worried about Climate Change and how backwards-ass our political leaders in Kentucky are and the strangle-hold King Coal has on them. This is an opportunity in the most the most watched US Senate race to take a chance to expose the truth about Climate Change." This is from a letter he sent to supporters in Kentucky today:

Climate Change is here and it is time we take action.

But here in Kentucky we have a monumental problem with both prominent candidates for the US Senate race; Mitch McConnell and Alison Lundergan Grimes. They are both fighting over King Coal’s political backing and money to fuel their campaigns.

Mitch McConnell and Alison Lundergan Grimes lack the political courage we need to explain the truth about coal and how it contributes to Climate Change.

I’m running as an Independent candidate who wants to tell the truth about Climate Change right here in the heart of Coal Country.

This US Senate race will give us national prominence about the effects of Coal and Climate Change. The people of Kentucky need to hear the devastation that Climate Change will bring to the world if we do nothing about it now!

I’m not running to win; I’m running to influence the conversation about Climate Change, because if the good folks of Kentucky aren’t exposed to the truth, they will never change their hearts about Coal and Climate Change.

You see, sometimes you have to go right at the root of the problem even if it’s not the most popular thing to do at the time. But time is something we no longer have. And I need your help.

To have my name on the ballot I have to collect 5000 signatures. I’m well on my way but the quicker we get all 5000 signature the faster my voice we be heard in the media.

I’m pleading to you to support my campaign with any donation you can spare. Our goal is just $5000.00 over the next week. These donations will be used only to help collect the 5000 signatures.

You can donate by going to my website or clicking on the following link.

www.Marksberry2014.com

http://marksberry2014.com/donate-3/

Are Corporatist/Careerist Democrats Even Worthy Of Carrying The Progressive Vision?

Independent candidate

Adolph Reed, who exploded onto the national scene last week with an incisive article-- and Bill Moyers interview-- about the demise of the left, said he expected pushback from liberals. And he got it. Many Democrats-- particularly the ones whose incomes depend on being a party functionary-- don't have an inkling that the Democratic Party as a vehicle for a progressive agenda is what makes the party valuable, not just a "blue" color or a meaningless "mystery meat" brand being pushed by the Beltway professional Democrats and careerists. No one is voting for your turgid careers; voters want authenticity and integrity. In an essay this morning, Reed pushed back himself-- against an apologia for the Democratic Party by Michelle Goldberg.

There’s a vast gulf between “elections don’t matter” and “shut up and lineup behind this season’s Democrat.”

For the record, I don’t argue for backing third party candidacies, which as a rule are quixotic by definition, and I agree with Goldberg that in any given election it’s overwhelmingly likely to be true that the only realistic choice is to vote for whichever Democrat is running. So her beef on that score is with someone else, not me.

I do argue that it’s a serious mistake to exaggerate what we’re doing when we vote for them and that that practice has come back to haunt us since Clinton at least. As only one small illustration, where has the American antiwar movement been since November 2008, even as President Obama has expanded the theaters of American military intervention? My vote for Nader in 2000, by the way, stemmed mainly from the right-tilting campaign Gore ran, which was embodied in his selection of reactionary tool Joe Lieberman as his running mate. (And I’m still proud to say that I’ve never voted for Lieberman for anything.)

…[W]hat do we say about the social impact of Clinton’s support for financial deregulation and his role in gutting the federal commitment to provide income-support and housing for the poor? Or his failure to pursue labor law reform when he had the opportunity? What about NAFTA? And that leads us to the nearly parodic imagery of Obama’s simultaneously tossing off a passing gesture to concern with inequality-- worthy of a more florid version of Mr. Mackey from South Park (“Inequality is bad, mmkay”)-- and then heading off to twist Congressional Democrats’ arms to support fast track for the Trans Pacific Partnership “trade” agreement, which certainly would produce a bunch more inequality.

I wish I could say I didn't vote for Lieberman either. I certainly didn't intend to. At the last minute, there were predictions Bush could win California and I lost my nerve and voted Gore-Lieberman, something I've regretted ever since. They didn't need my vote and beat Bush 5,861,203 (53%) to 4,567,429 (42%). Last year I finally broke free and was one of 456,169 voters who picked Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate running against Obama and Romney.

This cycle, we've been looking closely at Marianne Williamson's independent race for Henry Waxman's seat (CA-33), a candidate I'm thinking could be something like Bernie Sanders. She's announced she'll join the caucus he founded-- the Congressional Progressive Caucus, work with the Democrats on policy and seek counsel from Alan Grayson and Keith Ellison. And she's not the only progressive independent going beyond the "more and better Democrats" theme and into "better THAN Democrats."

Ed Marksberry, a Kentucky populist and former Democrat, is running for McConnell's Senate seat. He's taking a lot of flack because he may take enough votes away from the corporatist neo-liberal Democrat, Alison Lundergan Grimes, to help McConnell get reelected. Voters have to decide if they're ready to help elect another garden variety Democrat, certainly the lesser of two evils but… you want to vote for evil? This note on tax reform came from Marksberry this morning:

Today’s Tax Codes favor large Corporations over small businesses. The large corporations have exploited the myriad of tax credits and loopholes that puts an unfair burden on small businesses.

My plan is to simplify the tax code for small businesses and large corporations while also attracting manufacturers back to the United States.

We need to lower our corporate tax rate to 22% to be more competitive with other industrialized nations. We can afford this by eliminating all tax credits and loopholes that our current convoluted tax codes allow.

It’s simple and it’s fair.

With “Income Inequality” eroding our economy, it is time to restructure capital gains tax for our seniors, middle class and working poor.

I propose implementing a stair-stepped reduction on capital gains tax based on income.

This will encourage more investment and savings for those who have not shared the same economic success as the top 2% income earners.

Our seniors have paid their fair share of taxes and it’s wrong to tax them on investments when they are struggling to pay for daily needs.

The Democrats may wind up being very sorry they pushed him out of the primary and the party.

Mitch McConnell Is Paralyzed By Fear

McConnell doesn't get a lot of good news lately. But he did yesterday. The progressive Kentucky Democrat running for his seat dropped out of the Democratic Party primary against centrist Alison Lundergan Grimes and declared his intention to run as an independent.

Marksberry says Grimes is a good Democrat, but she has given up the most important fights against McConnell to pander to special interests.

"I want to give empowerment back to those that are impoverished, back to those who understand what the environment is experiencing right now and back to those who created the middle-class," says Marksberry. "And the only way to do that is to speak about the issues. And I hope that Alison Lundergan Grimes one day will open up and talk about the issues."

Marksberry had been suing the state party, alleging it has favored Grimes's campaign despite bylaws requiring it to stay neutral in primaries.

If only the DSCC and the Kentucky Democratic Party hadn't interfered in the primary, Grimes would have probably won and Marksberry would have probably campaigned for her in the general. Now he may take enough votes away from her to give the highly unpopular McConnell the margin he needs to beat her. If McConnell even wins his own primary. This week, the National Review's website posted an incendiary story about McConnell's woes with his right flank, Gunning for McConnell. The far right Madison Project is backing Matt Bevin, McConnell's very outspoken opponent.

“The problem in Washington, D.C., right now is the current GOP leadership and their unwillingness to fight the big-government policies that are coming down the pike,” says Drew Ryun, the group’s political director and a former deputy director at the Republican National Committee. “That is encapsulated in Mitch McConnell.”

While other top conservative groups, such as the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks, have remained on the sidelines so far in the Kentucky primary, the Madison Project has enthusiastically jumped in, endorsing Bevin and making a $27,000 radio buy in August for an ad attacking McConnell.

It’s a repeat of the group’s strategy in Texas in 2012, when they were the first national conservative organization to endorse Ted Cruz. “The importance of their endorsement in the early days was significant,” says John Drogin, who served as Cruz’s campaign manager and is now the senator’s state director. “When Senator Cruz was still a long-shot, far behind in the polls, Madison Project stood with him because they knew he would stand for conservative principles.”

“That gave Ted some early credibility,” says Ken Emmanuelson, a tea-party activist from Dallas. “That kind of thing can put a guy on the radar, so I’ve always given them props for that.”

But while Cruz wasn’t the establishment candidate in the GOP primary, his establishment-backed rival-- Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst-- wasn’t an incumbent, much less the top Senate Republican. McConnell is known for his ruthless campaigning, and he has a long track record of victories in Kentucky. His campaign has already vehemently pushed back on attacks claiming that he’s not conservative enough by noting that he has a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union. And Rand Paul, a tea-party favorite and Kentucky’s other senator, has already endorsed McConnell.

Drew Ryun is confident, however, that Bevin is the little engine that can, despite a McConnell-campaign poll released last month that showed Bevin trailing McConnell 21 percent to 68 percent. “He’s slightly behind [where Marco Rubio was] at this stage of the campaign, and he’s slightly ahead of Ted [Cruz],” says Ryun. “Where he is right now I actually feel pretty comfortable with it, given the fact that his name recognition is not what it could be in Kentucky.”



For the Madison Project, Bevin’s candidacy is a perfect fit for their twofold mission of transforming Republican leadership and making sure the most conservative candidate possible represents comfortably Republican districts. Republicans, says Daniel Horowitz, the group’s policy director, are “underutilizing” solidly red districts. “You look at the Democrat side, you won’t find any inner city where you have a blue-dog Democrat,” he comments. The group has launched the Madison Performance Index, which compares Republican House members’ voting records, as analyzed by Heritage Action and Club for Growth, with how Republican their district is.

As a result, don’t expect to see the Madison Project playing in purple states or swing districts, although the group won’t definitively rule that out.

The group’s passion for defeating McConnell is grounded in a worry that even conservative stalwarts can’t flourish under the current Republican leadership. Horowitz says activists have asked him what happened to certain conservative politicians, such as Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), after they went to Washington.

“The problem is leadership,” Horowitz argues. “You throw them into a situation where leadership fundamentally doesn’t want to change the status quo... we’re never going to get anywhere.”

“The same old people are going to be put into tough situations,” he continues. “We feel if we change leadership, we’ll change the direction of the party, both in the House and the Senate.”

Jim Ryun, chairman of the Madison Project and a former Kansas congressman, recalls vividly the pressure he faced when he opposed GOP House leadership. He voted against Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind, and today he remembers “some calls from the president where somehow we got disconnected when he didn’t agree with what I was going to do.”

The Madison Project isn’t as much of a fundraising powerhouse as some other conservative groups; it raised just under $2 million in the 2012 cycle. But the group is looking to expand their influence significantly in this cycle. “Will we be an 800-pound gorilla this election cycle? No,” Drew Ryun remarks. “But maybe a 400-pound gorilla.”

For the Madison Project, however, there’s less of an interest in pricey TV buys and more of a fascination with how a well-executed ground game can change the outcome of an election. “You have to do such a massive amount of television to even move the political dial incrementally,” says Drew Ryun, whereas “if you put the time and effort into the ground game, you can actually move a political dial, 3, 4, 5 percent in a precinct versus these television buys that are moving it half a percentage point.” Emmanuelson, the tea-party activist from Dallas, says that Ryun is known for helping inexperienced campaign teams with ground-game politics.

Drew Ryun is cautiously optimistic that the GOP could take back the Senate in 2014, but “a Republican majority that is led by Mitch McConnell, frankly, is not that appealing to me.”

Nonetheless, he thinks that 2014 could be a crucial year for conservatives. “2014 has the potential to be like 2010, except on steroids,” Ryun enthuses. And perhaps even more important, “what we do and the races that we win in 2014 will dictate how 2016 unfolds.”

With Grimes leading McConnell in the polls-- and his negative ratings with Kentucky Republicans soaring-- McConnell is, basically, hiding in his closet and refusing to come out. (No, not the gay closet, the leadership closet.) He must be hoping no one in Kentucky reads the NY Times:

At the climax of each of the fiscal crises that have paralyzed the nation’s capital since the Republican landslide of 2010, Senator Mitch McConnell, the wily Kentuckian who leads the Senate Republicans, has stepped in to untangle the seemingly hopeless knots threatening the economy.

But as Congress trudges toward its next budget showdown, the Mr. Fix-It of Washington is looking more like its Invisible Man as he balances his leadership imperatives with his re-election ones.

...Democrats and, increasingly, Republicans are complaining that the minority leader’s absence from many of this year’s most intense and consequential negotiations-- from immigration overhaul to the budget to a fight over internal rule changes that almost paralyzed the Senate-- has created a power vacuum and left Democrats without a bargaining partner.

They worry that Mr. McConnell is too hamstrung by political concerns in the Capitol and back home in Kentucky. In Washington, a rebellious crop of new Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, has adamantly rejected his compromising brand of politics. Mr. Cruz has almost single-handedly led the charge to tie any further government financing to gutting President Obama’s health care law, a movement that has angered many veteran Republicans but has also brought the federal government to the brink of a shutdown. The junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, has largely set the agenda for a Tea Party-infused Republican Party in his home state.

And in that home state, Mr. McConnell is dealing with an unwanted primary challenge from a well-financed Tea Party candidate who keeps telling Kentucky voters the senator is an establishment pawn.

McConnell Upset By Working Class Guy In The Senatorial Race In Kentucky-- How Did That Happen?

Special Guest Post by Ed Marksberry
Part 1

Well, let’s start from the beginning; a working class guy Ed Marksberry who has been an advocate and volunteer for past Democrats seeking election and was the Democratic Party nominee for Congress in 2010, demonstrated from the start of his campaign that it was time to give the ownership back to the grassroots supporters, who have been ignored for years by the party powers-that-be in past elections. Yes, that’s right, instead of a career politician who is tainted by the political process and the influence of money; we finally had a candidate who gave a fresh approach to reenergize and organize the base by empowering them, not shunning their beliefs and the party platform. And at first, when the media ignored his campaign, he used it to his advantage to sound off a message that the working class folks didn’t matter to the media and Washington. People believed in Marksberry because he is the face and voice of the working class families of Kentucky; they knew he couldn’t be corrupted by big corporations' money nor was he some talking point robot,. No he communicated frankly what was wrong with the system and shed light on the problems with the election process.

It became evident when he released his first of several campaign song What About Us [above] that his message would resonate with voters waiting for someone like Marksberry, even if the closed minded media didn’t catch on at first.

Once the message was out, the McConnell machine tried to reinvent Senator McConnell, to make him more likeable but as they say in the south, "you can’t polish a turd."

Marksberry took on McConnell smartly by exposing his failed leadership by just pointing out the problems Kentucky has faced since McConnell’s reign in Washington-- Kentucky ranks at the bottom when it comes to education, income, poor health, highest cancer rates, obesity, diabetes, low birth weights and every imaginable social ill out there. By pointing out that the policies that McConnell embraces only serve the wealthy or corporate interests, Marksberry hit on a nerve that majority of citizens could relate to.

By demonstrating that it isn’t about who raises the most money (McConnell spent 5 times as much) but they that communicates the best uninfluenced message, Marksberry has redefined the way campaigns should be ran; true grassroots supporters who know they had ownership in a campaign that was for the betterment of the all, not just the special interests. His campaign drew the best staff and volunteers because of his leadership style was far from the draconian egotistical candidates of the past, instead of political insiders and political hacks running the show, Marksberry encouraged innovation, creativity and a genuine trust that they were on the right side of history.

Ed at work at his real job-- one they can't export to China

Part 2 coming soon

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