Gambling And Prostitution Czar Sheldon Adelson Is Underwriting The Republican Party's Overtly Racist Advertising

Macau/Vegas Mob-affiliated right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson continues to fund McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund and Ryan's Congressional Leadership Fund to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. He is, by far, the biggest contributor to right-wing politics in America, around $60 million so far this year... with plenty more coming. Among House races, the biggest Adelson cash dump has been in Wisconsin, against Randy Bryce, where hundreds of hours of vicious smear attacks have seriously changed the complexion of the race. An old friend of mine in Kenosha told me, "You can't escape the barrage of really ugly ads against Randy. Ryan is really doing a job on this guy. If there's a TV ad next week saying the Randy looked over someone's should in the 3rd grade to get a test answer, it wouldn't surprise me one bit. They don't want to talk about issues; they just want to attack, attack, attack on all this made-up personal crap... I hope it backfires on that little slimeball Ryan is pushing."

On Wednesday, one of the right-wing slime-buckets, Republican Nancy Douglass, who's been slanting the news on WLKG, her Lake Geneva radio station against Bryce for months, was forced to resign as chair of the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association. She appeared in an ad sponsored by Ryan's PAC, referring to Bryce as a deadbeat. Remember, Bryce is union iron worker who's been slaving away his whole life supporting a family. Brian Steil, a shady corporate attorney, has been busy working for a firm that specializes in sending Wisconsin jobs to low-wage hell-holes overseas.

Widely considered one of the most vicious broadcasters in the Midwest, Douglass is a frequent contributor to the Republican Party of Walworth County and has spent lavishly to support Paul Ryan and other right-wingers in southeast Wisconsin. An anti-union zealot and repulsive racist, Douglass represents everything that's wrong with the Trumpist party today. The Wisconsin Broadcasters Association is fortunate to be rid of her and her unAmerican propaganda.

Bryce may be getting the largest amount of Adelson sewer money thrown at him, but he's hardly the only one. Republican Party racism is on display big time as the party and its affiliated SuperPACS descend into a frenzy of white nationalism around the country. Jamiles Lartey has been watching for The Guardian as the GOP takes aim at non-white congressional candidates. Trumpism has given racism a seal of approval. He wrote that "as the 2018 midterm election campaign pulls into its homestretch, Republican attacks in two congressional races happening 3,000 miles apart have triggered alarm bells for targeting non-white candidates in an apparent effort to highlight their 'otherness.' The first comes from California’s 50th district, where Ammar Campa-Najjar is running as a Democrat for a seat currently occupied by the Republican Duncan Hunter. NBC’s Chuck Todd, a veteran political reporter and commentator called the spot 'maybe the most shocking and outrageous political ad I’ve ever seen,' in a Meet The Press Daily segment."

The ad zeroes in on Campa-Najjar’s heritage-- his mother is Mexican American and his father is Palestinian-- calling him a “Palestinian, Mexican, millennial Democrat” who is “working to infiltrate Congress” and a “security risk.”

“At best it’s desperate. That’s putting it mildly,” said Campa-Najjar, who also called the effort “blatantly ignorant” and “unhinged from reality.”

Last Wednesday a bipartisan group of dozens of national security veterans decried the spot as a “racist and bigoted” attack. “The baseless allegation that he is somehow a ‘security threat’ is an affront to our professionalism as national security experts, our American values, and our collective national dignity,” the group said in an open letter.

The ad accuses Campa-Najjar of being supported by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood with no evidence, and despite the fact that Campa-Najjar is a Christian. “It’s just so interesting that we live in a world where Islamophobia even extends to non-Muslims,” Campa-Najjar told The Guardian.

...In a email statement to The Guardian, Hunter’s spokesman, Michael Harrison, declined to provide a source for the claims about the Muslim Brotherhood or the quote from Campa-Najjar’s father, but insisted that “the facts … raise national security concerns.”

Ironically, when Drunken Hunter was arrested and arraigned on a wide range of corruption, fraud and theft charges recently, Paul Ryan kicked him off the House Armed Services Committee since he really is a security threat. (And to make it worse, one of the groups he stole from was Wounded Warriors.) Hunter, a far right extrenmist, is a well-known philanderer and substance-abuser, who stole money to buy drugs and companionship from sex workers. First the San Diego area saw Duke Cunningham get thrown in prison-- a close "associate" of Duncan Hunter, Sr.-- and now it looks like Duncan Hunter will be the next San Diego member of Congress headed there.

“The fact is, there’s me, who was cleared by the FBI to work at White House, and there’s Hunter who was indicted by the FBI,” said Campa-Najjar. “So the law’s on my side and not his side as of late.”

David Schweidel, a professor of marketing at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University said ads like this may increasingly be more en vogue in the post-2016 election climate largely because Trump’s well-documented reliance on personal attacks proved effective enough to win the White House.

“We saw pundit after pundit kind of commenting on the fact that these personal attacks weren’t coming across as presidential and how ‘it’s the wrong temperament.’ Well, guess what, people responded to it,” Schweidel said.

He added that spots like Hunter’s are generally not intended to sway undecided voters, but to inspire the base to show up at the polls. As US politics continues its long slog towards ever-increased partisanship, elections become more about turning out the base and less about converting undecideds: which could mean negative and personal attacks only become more prevalent.

On the other side of the country, attack ads on a black congressional candidate’s former career as a rapper have taken on racist undertones in a district that, like California’s 50th, is predominantly white. Antonio Delgado, a Harvard Law graduate and Rhodes Scholar is running as a Democrat for a seat in New York’s 19th district currently held by Republican John Faso.

As a young man, Delgado released a socially conscious and political hip-hop album under the name AD the Voice in 2006.

Since the album came to light, a number of Republican groups have seized on it to paint Delgado’s flirtation with hip-hop as out of step with the values of the district. The Congressional Leadership Fund released an advert spot referring to Delgado as a “New York City liberal” and “[Nancy] Pelosi’s candidate” before clipping a handful of Delgado’s song lyrics, overlaying dramatically loud “bleep” sounds over words like “fuck,” “sex” and “porno.”

The ad also accused Delgado of “lacing his raps with extremist attacks on American values”, playing a clip where Delgado states, factually, that more civilian lives were lost during the Iraq war than the 9/11 attacks.

Faso didn’t place the ads, but has not condemned them either, saying in a statement this summer that “Mr Delgado’s lyrics paint an ugly and false picture of America.”

The subtext of the ads was seemingly illuminated in a New York Times article from July when Gerald Benjamin, a friend of Faso’s and director of the Benjamin Center at State University of New York at New Paltz, posed the question: “Is a guy who makes a rap album the kind of guy who lives here in rural New York and reflects our lifestyle and values?”

He continued: “People like us, people in rural New York, we are not people who respond to this part of American culture,” eventually sparking protests from students at his home campus in New Paltz. Benjamin later apologized for his remarks.

Delgado has said the ads are an effort to “otherize” him in the eyes of the white voters he needs to win.

“It’s insulting to people in the district that Faso believes they will buy into this sort of deception and dishonesty,” said Delgado’s campaign manager, Allyson Marcus, noting that a similarly themed Super Pac radio ad was even pulled by the local radio station WDST, which called the ad “highly offensive” and “factually distorted” in a statement.

“The truth is Antonio grew up in a working-class family in Schenectady, right here in upstate New York, where he learned the values of hard work and accountability. The real question is, why won’t Faso condemn these divisive and deceptive ads,” Marcus asked.

Faso did not respond to a request for comment.

History Will Remember Paul Ryan-- If At All-- As A Racist Pig

Paul Ryan's PAC has unleashed a series of vicious personal smear attacks across the country. The Trump enablers his PAC is defending can't run-on issues because voters hate their anti-healthcare, anti-middle class, pro-millionaire stands. So they're running on personal hate ads. They want to run by claiming Democrats are socialists or that they have tattoos or that they were in punk rock bands as teenagers or were skateboarder. They seem to have special animus towards Democratic candidates who were veterans and served the country on the front lines. Ryan, a draft dodger, has always pushed policies that target veterans. And now his SuperPAC is denigrating men and women who served defending the country.

In the upstate New York district (NY-19) represented by Trump rubber stamp John Faso, Ryan has run a series of vile racist ads against Faso's Democratic opponent Antonio Delgado, exposed last week by Tim Murphy at Mother Jones: Republicans Are Deploying Staggeringly Racist Ads in Upstate New York. The ad up tops released on Friday by the NRCC, controlled by Paul Ryan. "Delgado," wrote Murphy "did release a rap album, in 2007, under the pseudonym AD the Voice. In a July story about his race against incumbent Republican Rep. John Faso, the New York Times reported Delgado’s songs 'criticize capitalism and America’s history of racial injustice…include frequent use of a racial epithet common among black rappers, and criticize some of the founders as dead presidents who believe in white supremacy.' It sounds a lot like the kinds of political views, in other words, you’d expect from a young, politically active black progressive. But Republican campaign ads have emphasized the vehicle by which Delgado expressed himself as much, if not more, than the actual ideas he espoused. The Republican ad barage is deliberately focused on rap and, by extension, race. The new spot comes a week after the NRCC released this ad:



Why is Paul Ryan resorting to such disgusting racism? Delgado has Faso on the ropes. He's outraised Faso-- $2,703,056 to $2,297,980 and has now pulled ahead of him in this extremely tight race. The 538 forecaster shows Delgado with a 51.7% chance to win and Faso with just a 48.3% chance.

Ryan and the two PACs he controls have panicked and gone all racist in their ads, consistently referring to Delgado-- who was born in Schenectady-- as a "big city rapper." In fact there are a lot of ways to describe him. A graduate-- with honors-- from Colgate in Hamilton, NY, a Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford before graduating from Harvard Law. This is the second racist ad Ryan made and released trying to make Delgado sound like the other who should be feared:



A couple of weeks ago, the NY Post reported that "Republican sources told The Post they’re concerned about losing the seat because Delgado has emerged as a formidable candidate and prodigious fundraiser while Faso is running a lackluster campaign."

So far, Ryan's PAC has spent $1,699,211 smearing Delgado-- basically screaching "nigga, nigga, nigga"-- while the DCCC and Pelosi's PAC have responded with $1,155,736 in defense of him. Ryan and the GOP can't help their innate racism. Here we have a successful young African-American man-- far more accomplished academically than Ryan, for example-- and all they can do is point to the color of his skin. Wow-- the Party of Lincoln really has turned into the Party of Trump!

Republicans Not Even Campaigning For Independent Voters Anymore-- For Them, It's All About Their Crackpot Base Now

GOP base strategy works with hardcore Republican voters, but not with normal people

This morning when Trump tried bragging about his magnificence, the UN General Assembly burst out in sustained, audible laughter. No, Señor T, you're not in Kansas anymore. (Ironically, even Kansas may not be Kansas anymore.)

Ugly monkey: "In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country."

World Leaders: laughter.

Ugly monkey: "It's so true."

World Leaders: more laughter.

Ugly monkey: "I didn't expect that reaction, but that's okay," smirking as though waiting for someone to feed him a banana-- or hand him a submachine gun.

Republican Party strategists have come to realize that appealing to independent voters this year is a rabbit hole for their candidates and they are now doubling down on getting out their own base and virtually ceding the independents-- as much as a third of the vote in many places-- to the Democrats. Our election coverage here at DWT has centered on independents ability to decide the midterms. GOP strategy is to now run such vile negative advertising as to just discourage independents from voting, not to get them to vote for Republican candidates.

At Axios Monday morning, Caitlin Owens outlined a Republican strategy to save hardcore red districts and basically abandon all swing districts. "With the midterm elections fast approaching and Democrats riding a clear advantage on health care, many Republicans are nevertheless doubling down on largely unpopular ideas like repealing the Affordable Care Act and cutting Medicare," she wrote."This strategy may seem counterintuitive on its face. However, it likely reveals that the party has all but abandoned independent voters this year and instead is focused on turning out its base. Republican leaders have recently become more public about the likelihood of trying again on ACA repeal, whereas a few months ago it was largely a private assumption among the party.

• Vice President Mike Pence told reporters in Wisconsin that if the GOP candidate wins the Senate seat there, the effort will be revived, per The Hill. “We made an effort to fully repeal and replace ObamaCare and we'll continue, with Leah Vukmir in the Senate, we'll continue to go back to that," he said.
• “We need to win this election and then get more seats next year" before trying again, GOP Whip Steve Scalise told the AP.

Is that a good idea in Wisconsin, a state where independents decide elections? It may be a good strategy for Mississippi but there isn't a single poll-- including partisan Republican polls that no one takes seriously-- that shows Vukmir with a pathway to victory. FiveThirtyEight gives her a 1 in 40 chance to beat progressive Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin (in a state Trump won-- albeit narrowly and with Kremlin help-- in 2016.

As Owens explained, "ACA repeal only resonates well with one group of voters: registered Republicans. 'It’s all about the base, because as far as I can tell, they’ve lost the independents, there’s no one left to woo,' said conservative economist Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former campaign aide to John McCain. 'The Republicans face a very odd problem…when you ask actually registered voters what they want to do with the future of the ACA, no one wants to repeal and replace it except the Republicans, which the majority do,' said Robert Blendon of Harvard's School of Public Health. 'If you are looking at the aggregate, you can't imagine why you’d even mention it. But if you’re trying to encourage your own voters… then they're trying to say that we would come back and try to do something,' Blendon added."

Worse yet for the GOP's election hopes among normal voters, the Trump Regime is now talking about cuts to Social Security and Medicare again. Owens reminds us that Trumpanzee's top economic advisor, drug addict and crackpot TV personality Larry Kudlow, "recently said that the administration will probably look at entitlement cuts next year." She brought up 3 very vulnerable Republican incumbents-- in districts with huge numbers of independent voters-- who are going along with Kudlow and Trump are likely to lose their seats because of it. John Faso, for example, was keeping his seat in play. It is now starting to trend, ever so slightly, towards Anthony Delgado. Faso is making noises that will make independents (and seniors) see him as a threat to Social Security and Medicare. Fine for the GOP base-- but NY-19 is not some backward rural district in Oklahoma or Alabama. The PVI is supposedly a deceptive R+2 but Obama won it both times he ran and it was only Hillary's lousy campaign and flaws as a candidate that gave Trump his win there (50.8% to 44.0%).

Peter Roskam is another one the need to rein in spending on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. That's a bad idea in Chicagoland. IL-06 gave Obama a win over McCain, Romney a win over Obama and Hillary a 7 point win over Trump (50.2% to 43.2%). The PVI is also a deceptive R+2. The Democratic candidate, Sean Casten, isn't especially strong but it's a neck-and-neck race that Roskam's to lose by talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare.

Very similar story in Texas' 7th district (Houston), where the Democrats nominated a weak candidate, Lizzie Fletcher, but where Hillary narrowly edged Trump (48.5% to 47.1%). Incumbent John Culberson is a poor campaigner. Fletcher has outraised him, $2,312,615 to $2,007,183 and he will be committing political suicide if he embraces-- as he appears to be doing-- an all base strategy. Fletcher isn't capable of winning this race; Culberson is very capable of losing it.

Again, Owens explained the risk to Republicans like Culberson: Although the bet is that the GOP base is concerned with deficits, "as soon as the other side switches to 'you're going to cut back Medicare and Social Security,' you're on the wrong side," Blendon said. "The highest turnout rates are among people above 60." Like clockwork, the DNC blasted out an email criticizing Kudlow's comments, saying that he "admitted that Republicans will try to cut vital programs relied upon by millions of working families."

New Animal: Fake Progressives In Democratic Primaries

Does this look like a Bernie supporter to you? Neither does his contribution record

Whatever their strategy for general elections, it's pretty important for candidates to present themselves a progressives during Democratic primaries. We've been using a foolish example of "ex"-Republican multimillionaire lottery winner Gil Cisneros having claimed ridiculously that he was a Bernie supporter during the 2016 primaries. He's a major campaign contributor but he didn't give a nickel to Bernie-- ever. But he did max out a couple of times to Hillary, including on March 31, 2016 a week before the California primary and again on July 7, still in time for plenty of other primaries. He also gave around $150,000 to the DNC which was being run by crooked Hillary booster Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who certainly wasn't using anything to benefit Bernie (to put it mildly). Cisneros is a conservative Republican masquerading as an establishment Democrat and the progressive pose is a little far-fetched. But, as Eric Draitser pointed out at CounterPunch Friday, there are other conservatives besides Cisneros pretending to to be progressives before their primaries.

Some people-- like Cisneros-- have records of one kind or another you can look at. Kaniela Ing, for example was loudly campaigning to Bernie and introducing Bernie-oriented issues in the state legislature. One of his candidates for Congress, Beth Fukumoto, was not just voting against all of Ing's legislation, she was the minority leader of the House GOP and was campaigning for Trump. She can't pretend to have backed Bernie-- open and shut case. The other congressional candidates, Doug Chin and Donna Kim, were also on record as Hillary primary backers... with conservative records to match.

Today, wrote Draitser, "Democratic incumbents from Texas and Illinois to New York and California now suddenly find themselves facing challenges from their left, forcing them to try to save their jobs by adopting progressive talking points. While this upsurge could be seen as a welcome development for anyone interested in progressive causes, there is a dark side to the burgeoning left movement, one that remains mostly shrouded behind a veil of secrecy and omission. For it seems that progressive candidates aren’t the only ones who learned the lesson of Bernie Sanders in 2016; the neoliberal Clintonites have too. So, while left-wing campaigns crop up in every corner of the country, so too do astroturf faux-progressive campaigns. And it is for us on the left to parse through it all and separate the authentic from the frauds."

Nestled in the heart of New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley, the 19th congressional district (NY-19) encompasses some of New York’s most appealing scenery and towns: Woodstock, Kingston, New Paltz, Hudson and the majority of the Catskills Region. It is littered with historic sites dating back to the Revolutionary War, and boasts names like Oneonta and Shawangunk as a reminder of the indigenous peoples of the region. From artist retreats to an endless labyrinth of hiking trails and small farms, this area represents a microcosm of the state with its New York City expats and its upstate lifers.

And it is here in NY-19 that one of the more interesting congressional races is shaping up as a number of Democrats vie to win the party nomination and try to unseat the Republican incumbent, the loathsome John Faso who, according to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, has voted in line with President Trump nearly 90% of the time.

Beals has a crooked smile

One candidate currently generating some buzz in the race is Jeff Beals, a self-identified “Bernie democrat” whose campaign website homepage describes him as a “local teacher and former U.S. diplomat endorsed by the national organization of former Bernie Sanders staffers, the Justice Democrats.” And indeed, Beals centers his progressive bona fides to brand himself as one of the inheritors of the progressive torch lit by Sanders in 2016. A smart political move, to be sure. But is it true?

Beals describes himself as a “former U.S. diplomat,” touting his expertise on international issues born of his experience overseas. In an email interview with CounterPunch, Beals describes his campaign as a “movement for diplomacy and peace in foreign affairs and an end to militarism…my experience as a U.S. diplomat is what drives it and gives this movement such force.” OK, sounds good, a very progressive sounding answer. But what did Beals actually do during his time overseas?

By his own admission, Beals’ overseas career began as an intelligence officer with the CIA. His fluency in Arabic and knowledge of the region made him an obvious choice to be an intelligence spook during the latter stages of the Clinton Administration.

...Beals shrewdly attempts to portray himself as an opponent of neocon imperialism in Iraq. In his interview with CounterPunch, Beals argued that “The State Department was sidelined as the Bush administration and a neoconservative cabal plunged America into the tragic Iraq War. As a U.S. diplomat fluent in Arabic and posted in Jerusalem at the time, I was called over a year into the war to help our country find a way out.”

This is a Master’s class in blatant historical revisionism and outright dishonesty. Beals was not a soldier unwillingly drafted into service, but an intelligence officer who voluntarily accepted an influential and critically important post for the Bush Administration in its ever-expanding crime against humanity in Iraq.

Moreover, no one who knows anything about the Iraq War could possibly swallow the tripe that CIA/State Department officials in Iraq were “looking to help our country find a way out” a year into the war. A year into the war, the bloodletting was only just beginning, and Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, and the other corporate vultures had yet to fully exploit the country and make billions off it. So, unfortunately for Beals, the historical memory of the anti-war Left is not that short.

Beals also claimed in his CounterPunch interview that he “turned down a lucrative job offer from Exxon because of my opposition to the fossil fuel industry.”

That was another lie that Draitser unmasked in great detail, pointing out that Beals was already looking towards a political career and "knew that Exxon on his resume would be an irreversible stain. This seems plausible considering the fact that Beals’ burgeoning political trajectory, presented as progressive in the Sanders tradition, is in fact carefully managed by one of Hillary Clinton’s most loyal henchmen. The district voted for Obama both times he ran and then rejected Hillary 50.8% to 44.0%. The PVI is now R+2. There are 7 full counties in NY-19 and parts of 4 others. This is how the 11 counties (the partial 4 at the end) voted in the primary:

• Columbia-- Bernie- 57.1% (more votes than Trump)
• Delaware-- Bernie- 60.9%
• Greene-- Bernie- 51.5%
• Otsego-- Bernie- 59.1% (more votes than Trump)
• Schoharie-- Bernie- 63.6%
• Sullivan-- Bernie- 56.1% (more votes than Trump)
• Ulster--Bernie- 62.6% (more votes than Trump)

• Broome-- Bernie- 56.6% (more votes than Trump)
• Dutchess-- Bernie- 51.5%
• Montgomery-- Bernie- 57.9%
• Rennselaer-- Bernie- 58.4% (more votes than Trump)

That's right-- the district didn't just go for Bernie over Hillary, voters also showed a preference for Bernie over Trump. Bernie beat her in every single county-- no exceptions-- and in some by landslides. They just didn't want Hillary, the status quo establishment candidate. Now there are 7 Democrats competing for the party nomination to take on Republican incumbent John Faso. Three Democrats have raised over a million dollars: Antonio Delgado, Brian Flynn (half of that in self-funding) and Pat Ryan. Beals has raised $233,580.

Beals’ burgeoning political trajectory, presented as progressive in the Sanders tradition, is in fact carefully managed by one of Hillary Clinton’s most loyal henchmen.

It is self-evident that Beals has a laundry list of things in his past that he must answer for. For those of us, especially Millennials, who cut our activist teeth demonstrating and organizing against the Iraq War, Beals’ distortions about his role in Iraq go down like hemlock tea. But it is the associations Beals maintains today that really should give any progressive serious pause.

When asked by CounterPunch whether he has any connections to either Bernie Sanders and his surrogates or Hillary Clinton and hers, Beals responded by stating:

“I am endorsed by Justice Democrats, a group of former Bernie Sanders staffers who are pledged to electing progressives nationwide. I am also endorsed for the Greene County chapter of the New York Progressive Action Network, formerly the Bernie Sanders network.  My first hire was a former Sanders field coordinator who worked here in NY-19.”

However, conveniently missing from that response is the fact that Beals’ campaign has been, and continues to be, directly managed in nearly every respect by Bennett Ratcliff, a longtime friend and ally of Hillary Clinton. Ratcliff is not mentioned in any publicly available documents as a campaign manager, though the most recent FEC filings show that as of April 1, 2018, Ratcliff was still on the payroll of the Beals campaign. And in the video of Beals’ campaign kickoff rally, Ratcliff introduces Beals, while only being described as a member of the Onteora School Board in Ulster County. This is sort of like referring to Donald Trump as an avid golfer.

Beals has studiously, and rather intelligently, avoided mentioning Ratcliff, or the presence of Clinton’s inner circle on his campaign. However, according to internal campaign documents and emails obtained by CounterPunch, Ratcliff manages nearly every aspect of the campaign, acting as a sort of éminence grise behind the artifice of a progressive campaign fronted by a highly educated and photogenic political novice.

By his own admission, Ratcliff’s role on the campaign is strategy, message, and management. Sounds like a rather textbook description of a campaign manager. Indeed, Ratcliff has been intimately involved in “guiding” Beals on nearly every important campaign decision, especially those involving fundraising.

And it is in the realm of fundraising that Ratcliff really shines, but not in the way one would traditionally think. Rather than focusing on large donations and powerful interests, Ratcliff is using the Beals campaign as a laboratory for his strategy of winning elections without raising millions of dollars.

In fact, leaked campaign documents show that Ratcliff has explicitly instructed Beals and his staffers not to spend money on food, decorations, and other standard campaign expenses in hopes of presenting the illusion of a grassroots, people-powered campaign with no connections to big time donors or financial elites.

Ratcliff, along with Republican strategist John Pudner, is the founder of Take Back our Republic (TBOR), a well-funded, well-connected NGO that focuses on campaign finance reform. The organization has written a “People’s Democracy Playbook.” As TBOR’s own website noted:

“Take Back Our Republic is teaming up with the Bridge Alliance and the Pluribus Project to work with Pudner’s long-time data and analytics guru,  who launched the data effort for President-elect Trump, an original organizer of Occupy Wall Street, and a team that helped defeat Congressional Majority Leader Eric Cantor to create the People’s Democracy Playbook.”

Got that? Ratcliff and Pudner are using the same kinds of data-mining that we now know Cambridge Analytica (and possibly others) used to help Trump win the presidency. While this may simply be good strategy to some, it certainly raises serious questions about the authenticity of Beals and any other candidate connected with Ratcliff, Pudner, and the other Beltway ghouls and political lifers.

Essentially then, it seems that Ratcliff is the wizard behind the curtain, leveraging his decades of contact building and close ties to the Democratic Party establishment while at the same time manufacturing an astroturfed progressive campaign using a front man in Beals.

But how exactly is Ratcliff, and by extension Beals, connected to Clinton and the Washington power elites?

Ratcliff made his career working under Bob Squier, one of the founders of modern political advertising and campaigning. Squier worked for nearly every prominent Democrat from the late 1960s through the nineties, with then President Bill Clinton and then Vice President Al Gore even delivering eulogies at his funeral in 2000. Squier launched Ratcliff’s career, and even passed the torch to him when Ratcliff left Squier’s firm after having become Senior Vice President; Squier gave Ratcliff his client list which included nearly every influential Democrat.

And those relationships carried through to Ratcliff’s lucrative lobbying career when he became a point man for the Clintons on numerous occasions.

One of Ratcliff’s most infamous, and indefensible, acts of fealty to the Clinton machine came in 2009 when he and longtime Clinton attorney and lobbyist, Lanny Davis, stumped around Washington to garner support for the illegal right-wing coup in Honduras, which ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in favor of the right-wing oligarchs who control the country today. Although the UN, and even U.S. diplomats on the ground in Honduras, openly stated that the coup was illegal, Clinton was adamant to actively keep Zelaya out. Clinton admitted as much in her book Hard Choices where, in an excerpt that was subsequently removed from later editions, Clinton wrote:

“In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico… We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”

But it was Ratcliff and Davis who enabled Clinton’s coup in Honduras by acting as a bridge between powerful interests in Washington, and actors on the ground in Honduras and the region broadly.

...Essentially then, Ratcliff is a chief architect of the right-wing government in Honduras – the same government assassinating feminist and indigenous activists like Berta Cáceres, Margarita Murillo, and others, and forcibly displacing and ethnically cleansing Afro-indigenous communities to make way for Carribbean resorts and golf courses.

And this Washington insider lobbyist and apologist for war criminals and crimes against humanity is the guy who’s on a crusade to reform campaign finance and fix Washington? This is the guy masquerading as a progressive? This is the guy working to elect an “anti-war progressive”?

In a twisted way it makes sense. Ratcliff has the blood of tens of thousands of Hondurans (among others) on his hands, while Beals is a creature of Langley, a CIA boy whose exceptional work in the service of Bush and Clinton administration war criminals is touted as some kind of merit badge on his resume.

What also becomes clear after establishing the Ratcliff-Beals connection is the fact that Ratcliff’s purported concern with campaign financing and “taking back the Republic” is really just a pretext for attempting to provide a “proof of concept,” as it were, that neoliberal Democrats shouldn’t fear and subvert the progressive wing of the party, but rather that they should co-opt it with a phony grassroots facade all while maintaining links to U.S. intelligence, Wall Street, and the power brokers of the Democratic Party.

Ryan, Blue Dog

Beals isn’t the only candidate for NY-19’s Democratic nomination with ties to the Iraq War and the intelligence establishment. Patrick Ryan, who served two tours in Iraq as an intelligence officer after graduating from West Point, is also running in the primary against Beals.

...Ryan is backed by right-wing elements of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by his receiving support from the New Democrat Coalition PAC, a conservative, pro-business element of the party. In contrast, Beals doesn’t have such overt institutional support, and is instead handled by a Clinton surrogate who actively discourages large-scale fundraising as part of his strategy to build up his candidate as the true voice of the grassroots.

As such, Beals is attempting to craft an image as a progressive who stands in contrast to the Blue Dog conservatism of Ryan. What can you call this farce? It is the primary equivalent of professional wrestling. A rigged game.

Beals and Ryan represent a disturbing trend taking place across the country: intelligence insiders and military officers running as Democrats in an election year that expects to see triumphs for Democrats in reaction to the Trump shit show.

The World Socialist Website’s Patrick Martin has compiled a rather exhaustive list of other candidates who fall into this trend as well, including, but not limited to:

• Elissa Slotkin (Michigan’s 8th District) – served three tours with the CIA in Baghdad
• Gina Ortiz Jones (Texas’s 23rd District) – Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq [And backed by the DCCC against an actual Berniecrat, Rick Treviño.]
• Abigail Spanberger (Virginia’s 7th District) – served as CIA operations officer for nearly a decade
• Jesse Colvin (Maryland’s 1st District) – Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan and Korea’s DMZ
• Shelly Chauncey (Pennsylvania’s 5th District) – CIA undercover officer in Latin America, East Asia, and, unsurprisingly, within the borders of the U.S.

These candidates represent only a small sample of the more than dozen races in which U.S. intelligence and/or military operatives are running as Democrats. Many of them directly participated in war crimes and crimes against humanity. And a significant number of this rogue’s gallery are posturing as “progressives” in the Bernie Sanders tradition.

What we are witnessing is the inevitable counter-insurgency by the forces of entrenched political power in Washington, and capital more generally. While Bernie Sanders was no revolutionary, his campaign ignited a grassroots upsurge that now threatens the power of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party and the neoliberal Clinton political machine that, for all intents and purposes, controls it.

By presenting real progressive voters with manufactured, faux-progressive candidates like Jeff Beals, the Clintonites think they’ll pull the wool over the eyes of the progressive left.

Will the Left allow them to? That depends on us.

Will Zephyr Teachout Be The Face Of A New Congress? Or Will It Be Sleazy Lobbyist John Faso?

Reading beneath the horse-race stats in the new polls yesterday, I noticed an incredible unanimity of opinion on campaign finance reform and Wall Street regulation. The CBS/You Gov polls in Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina and Pennsylvania all show tremendous support for seeing the new president and Congress deal with both issues. In Republican Arizona 77% of respondents want action on campaign finance reform and 74% want action of new regulations for Wall Street. Among Colorado voters, the numbers are 76% for campaign finance reform and 71% on Wall Street. 77% of North Carolina voters want action on campaign finance reform and 72% want it on Wall Street regulations. Bluer Pennsylvania is the most gung-ho on campaign finance reform-- 79%-- and 74% want more regulations on the banksters.

Now let's focus on the congressional race that has-- more than any other in the country-- focused on those two issues in laser-like fashion. In New York's 19th congressional district-- the central Hudson Valley and the Catskills, where the only moderate Republican left in Congress, Chris Gibson, is retiring-- campaign finance reform expert Zephyr Teachout faces off against John Faso, a slimeball lobbyist propped up by a bevy of modern day robber barons and hedge fund crooks. In fact, over the weekend, James Nani from the Times Herald-Record pointed out that more outside money is pouring into NY-19 than in almost any other House race in the country. The predators and crooks don't just want to elect a shady little puppet like Faso, they're willing to spend millions to keep Teachout out of office. She scares them the exact same way Elizabeth Warren scares them. She's incorruptible and focused on the public good-- the opposite of what the plutocrats expect from "democracy." As of Oct 13, wrote Nani, $13 million dollars had flooded into the race-- $7.8 million of it from SuperPACs. This chart shows outside spending so far:

Notice that Paul Ryan's Congressional Leadership Fund has spent over $3 million smearing Zephyr, a number bolstered by the NRCC with another $1.3 million, while the DCCC has responded with an ineffective $1 million in total. The DCCC is too busy spending money on grotesque New Dems and Blue Dogs-- the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- to give Zephyr the kind of help she needs. Pelosi's House Majority PAC has made it's biggest investments on inconsequential right-wing Blue Dogs like Kim Myers ($2,023,202) and Josh Gottheimer (1,622,340) will contributing exactly ZERO towards Zephyr. Gee, and I'm old enough to remember when Nancy Pelosi made a substantial effort to portray herself as a real progressive... and when she was a little more, um, clear-minded.

Increasing the stakes are polls that have shown that the race between Teachout, a Fordham University law school professor, and Faso, a former state Assembly minority leader, is neck-and-neck. Cook Political Report, an online political newsletter, is calling the race a toss-up.

Recent polling has given Faso a one-point edge. Voter rolls as of April showed Democrats with an enrollment edge of about 2,300 people.

With that competitiveness, the cash has flowed. An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that the 19th District ranks seventh in the nation in outside spending raised in all House races. The district ranks ninth in outside money actually doled out.

...Through the bruising Republican primary, Faso was helped along by the New York Wins PAC, which received $1.15 million from just four super-wealthy donors. They included billionaire New York City hedge fund founder Paul Singer, who gave $600,000, and reclusive Long Island hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who gave $500,000.



That spending allowed Faso to preserve much of his campaign cash for the general election.

A heavyweight in outside spending in the race has been the Congressional Leadership Fund, which dedicated more than $3 million to oppose Teachout, more than Faso's campaign has raised this whole election cycle. The Washington D.C.-based super PAC, which is dedicated to promoting Republicans, is spending more than $300,000 to canvas the district, with representatives ringing doorbells and telling residents about Teachout's connections to New York City.

The race has also seen big spending by more conventional PACs. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has shelled out more than $1.3 million to oppose Faso. Its partisan counterpart, the National Republican Campaign Committee, has spent about the same amount to oppose Teachout.

Aside from the DCCC, Teachout's biggest outside supporter has been End Citizens United, a PAC dedicated to overturning the U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows for unlimited outside spending in elections. It's spent about $422,000 to oppose Faso.

In all, outside spending that's benefited Faso has reached $5.5 million, dwarfing the $1.98 million benefitting Teachout.

"Teachout has borne the brunt of it - the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is tied to the House leadership, has spent $3.1 million attacking her, its biggest investment in any race," Novak said.

Though outside money has overshadowed the race, candidates have raised substantial sums as well.

Faso brought in about $2.3 million since he kicked off his campaign in July 2015, and has spent about $2 million as of Sept. 30. About $1.9 million, or 84 percent of that, has come from individual contributions, and about $328,000, or 14 percent, has come from political action committees.

Faso said that money his campaign has raised has largely come from the district or within New York. Center for Responsive Politics data shows that about 81 percent of his cash came from New York and 21 percent came from the 19th District. About 60 percent of Teachout's campaign cash came from New York, and 12 percent from the district.

"I have much more local support," Faso said, adding that he said he can't control what outside entities spend.

But Alexis Grenell, a spokeswoman for Teachout, said the average contribution to Teachout's campaign has been $19, and that she has the highest number of small contributions of any congressional candidate. About 63 percent of Teachout's cash has come from small donors, according to Crowdpac, a political data company. Grenell said Teachout is an "independent fighter" who will put "people before powerful interests."

"Her campaign is all about raising up the voices of people throughout the district," Grenell said.

Teachout has outraised Faso, collecting about $3.3 million since January this year. About $3 million has come from individual contributions and about $242,000 from PACs. Teachout's funding has also piggybacked off the funding infrastructure of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has been sending out fundraising emails on Teachout's behalf for months.

Combined, the race for the 19th has become a $13.1 million barnburner.

With a little more than a week until the election, Novak said spending may not be over yet.

"If the polls show things are close, I wouldn't be surprised to see a gusher of further outside spending on both sides between now and Election Day," Novak said.

As of Sunday morning, hundreds of Blue America members had contributed $15,463.94 to Zephyr's campaign. There's always a chance Pelosi will snap out of her delusion about Blue Dogs and start helping Zephyr, but I just made another personal contribution to Zephyr's campaign today. If you can, please do the same... because if we've learned one thing over the last 3 or 4 years, it's that counting on Nancy Pelosi is a death knell for progressive politics America-- and we need leaders like Zephyr Teachout, Pramila Jayapal, Payl Clements, Ruben Kihuen, Tom Wakely, to pick up the ball that Pelosi dropped when she threw her lot in with careerist crooks like Rahm Emanuel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Joe Crowley. Please tap the thermometer below and give what you can to Zephyr Teachout while it can still make a difference. Thanks.

A Case For Zephyr Teachout, Congressional Candidate In NY-19

Records are important. Political figures like Bernie have spent decades building-- what amounts to-- platforms to run on. When Blue America first started urging people to contribute to Bernie, he was a member of the House, a member of the House who had started and led to Congressional Progressive Caucus and who had been working diligently to push a progressive perspective on issues from economic inequality, criminal justice reform and money in politics to issues around war and peace and equal justice for minorities. These are the things that motivated Bernie's public life. When he announced he was running, he didn't have to invent a platform and he didn't manufacture some kind of edifice to please voting blocks. He had decades of leadership initiatives to run on.

Political hacks-- from Trump to, say, New York lobbyist John Faso (the right-wing Republican opposing Zephyr Teachout)-- put a wet finger to the wind, figure out what to say to various constituent groups they consider their electoral coalition-- what they want to hear-- and cobble together a platform to run on. Do you get the impression that career politicians and political opportunists will say anything to get elected? That impression is correct. Watch the brand new Zephyr Teachout ad above. That's who she is and what she stands for-- who's she's always been and what's she's always stood for (as are the two videos below).

Trump's ads don't give you much of a clue about who he is and how he would govern. His life does. Faso's record and how he's led his life as a sleazy lobbyist and a pawn for the wealthy and powerful interests financing his political career, tells you far more about him than empty promises he's making today to try to win a congressional seat in the Hudson Valley and Catskill region of upstate New York. Zephyr... these three video clips confirm an inspiring record she's been building over years. When you watch them, please consider contributing to her grassroots campaign by tapping the thermometer on the right. She's not just up against squirrelly little political hack John Faso, she's up against the predatory hright-wing edge fund billionaires Paul Singer and Robert Mercer (to date the single biggest contributor both to Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and the guy who placed deranged neo-Nazi Steve Bannon at the top of the Trump campaign). She even challenged the two modern day robber barons to debate her! Instead, they've poured over a million dollars into Faso's campaign coffers. No need to worry about what interests he'd bone serving in Congress, is there?



Like that? You'll like this next one too. There isn't anyone better running for office anywhere in the country. The Democratic Party in DC is pretty moribund-- old and in the way like the entrenched, sclerotic career politicians who have clawed their way it the top of the establishment. If the Democratic Party is going to be relevant again, it desperately, desperately needs leaders like Zephyr Teachout (as well as Pramila Jayapal, Alina Valdes and Tom Wakely) to start building a future inside the party, a future that's not all about Wall Street fraud pushed by "next generation" Democratic leaders Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Crowley.

Bernie Stumps With Zephyr Teachout In Upstate New York

Zephyr: "We’ve gotta take on the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics and that’s what we’re doing in this campaign."

I'm not a big fan of Rasmussen as a polling organization and I don't think any of the polling aggregators even use them in their averages. Nor am I a big fan of the whole silly theme about what happens if Hillary drops out (or even about what happens if Trump drops out). Hillary's not dropping out and neither is Trump. That said, Rasmussen did conduct a national survey asking who should replace Hillary if she did drop out. I guess they didn't ask Debbie Wasserman Schultz or other establishment bosses. The question was asked of likely Democratic voters.

• Bernie- 48%
• Biden- 22%
• Tim Kaine- 14%
• someone esle- 9%

Yesterday, the day after the first of three scheduled debates Zephyr Teachout has with lobbyist John Faso, the Republican puppet candidate of hedge fund billionaires Robert Mercer and Paul Singer, Bernie was in New Paltz, New York speaking at a rally for Zephyr. The night before Faso, in a fit of nastiness he's well-known for, accused Zephyr of being more in synch with Bernie's values than with the values of the 19th district-- a district that Bernie won overwhelmingly against Hillary-- and against Trump. There are 11 counties-- in full or in part-- that make up the 19th district. Bernie won every one of them in the primary. And Bernie's vote total in the 11 counties was 53,458-- compared to Trump's 43,182.

• Broome- Bernie- 9,176, Hillary- 7,035 (Trump- 8,409)
• Columbia- Bernie- 3,302, Hillary- 2,481 (Trump- 2,522)
• Delaware- Bernie- 1,663, Hillary- 1,067 (Trump- 2,683)
• Dutchess- Bernie- 11,680, Hillary- 11,005 (Trump- 12,447)
• Greene- Bernie- 1,458, Hillary- 1,062 (Trump- 2,538)
• Montgomery- Bernie- 1,630, Hillary- 1,185 (Trump- 1,957)
• Otsego- Bernie- 2,623, Hillary- 1,817 (Trump- 2,573)
• Rensselaer- Bernie- 6,649, Hillary- 4,738 (Trump- 4,559)
• Schorharie- Bernie- 1,088, Hillary- 622 (Trump- 1,419)
• Sullivan- Bernie- 2,671, Hillary- 2,088 (Trump- 2,563)
• Ulster- Bernie- 11,562, Hillary- 6,927 (Trump- 6,042)

Zephyr also won this district overwhelmingly, not just in her congressional primary but when she ran against Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The biggest county in the district is Ulster, where she beat Cuomo 69.95% to 27.41%. (Yes, that's a landslide-- and in the county where NY-19 is won or lost.) Dutchess is the second biggest county and she beat him there 57.51%- 40.36%. Then 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 on. So Faso may be on shaky grounds when he says her values are not the values of NY-19. One example that came up during the debate was his support for the disastrous "free" trade agreements that people in NY-19 (including Zephyr) hate-- and Faso's opposition to women's choice-- another example where his values might as well be from outer space compared to most voters in NY-19. He tried throwing everything in the book at her-- hypocrisy, carpetbaggery, anti-Semitism, too pro-Black... Nothing stuck. She landed some good punches though just sticking to the issues and Faso's lockstep posture aligning him with Paul Ryan's unpopular Austerity agenda.



Hours later, Zephyr was in New Paltz, campaigning with Bernie, emphasizing exactly what we've been pointing out here at DWT, namely that Zephyr isn't going to Washington to be another go-along-to-get-along careerist robot, but to lead Congress in a different direction. "If Zephyr Teachout is elected to the U.S. Congress-- I am very confident that you are going to elect-- you will have a leader in Congress at a time when we are in desperate need of bold leadership," he told the large, upbeat crowd. "You will have a leader who has the guts to stand up to the billionaire class and tell these greedy people that they cannot have it all. You will have a congresswoman who understands that grassroots democracy and bringing our people together and mobilizing people is the only way that real change ever, ever takes place." Please consider contributing to Zephyr's campaign at the thermometer on the right that will take you to a page filled with the Berniecrats who won their primaries and are in in through November.