Foreign Correspondent: Will Trump Bring Peace To Afghanistan? Don’t Hold Your Breath

-by Reese Erlich

Washington, DC is buzzing with talk of troop withdrawals and the impact on peace talks in  Afghanistan. The U.S. may start withdrawing troops within months, the start of what would be a gradual withdrawal of all 14,000 U.S. troops from the country.

Then on Sept. 7, President Trump called off planned secret Washington meetings with the Taliban after an American soldier was a killed in Afghanistan. It was not clear if the Taliban had agreed to attend the meeting, however.

Trump had hoped to claim that he brought peace to Afghanistan sometime prior to the November 2020 presidential elections. In reality, the administration is far from ending the war, let alone providing justice for the Afghan people.

To be fair, any President would have a hard time ending what has become the longest war in U.S. history. Washington was politically defeated in Afghanistan long ago, and no shift in U.S. tactics will change that-- whether it is a troop surge, the renewed training of local soldiers, or a focus on counterterrorism.

The U.S. lost because most Afghans see the USA  as an occupying power. And the Taliban is winning, as seen in the increase of areas under its control and its ability to attack anywhere in the country. On August 2, while the chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad was on Afghan TV, the Taliban set off a massive explosion in the heavily fortified Kabul housing compound where foreign mercenaries live.

Basir Bita, a leader of Afghan Peace Volunteers in Kabul, says the level of fear is increasing in the capital. “Even outside your own home, you don’t know what will happen next,” he tells me in a phone interview. “You have no idea if you will come home alive.”

The U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion on the war in Afghanistan since it began in 2001. Some 139,000 Afghan civilians and combatants have been killed. More than 6,300 U.S. soldiers and contractors have died.

Latest peace talks

The Afghanistan War was a disaster from its inception. Now Washington is trying to clean up the mess by pretending we won.

U.S. negotiators and Taliban leaders have been meeting in Doha, Qatar, since 2018. The U.S. side insists the Taliban not participate in international terrorism and that it negotiate with the Afghan government.

The Taliban has agreed to not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for international terrorism, but demands that all US troops be withdrawn before a ceasefire can take place, and so far has refused to negotiate with the US-installed President Ashraf Ghani.

U.S. officials have leaked a few details of a proposed peace plan, but stress that Trump hasn’t yet signed off. Within 135 days of signing a peace accord, the US would withdraw 5,400 of its 14,000 troops now in Afghanistan. It would depart from five military bases or give them to the Afghan military. If the Taliban meets US conditions, then all US troops would be withdrawn in 16 months.

It’s not at all clear that Trump will agree with the plan, nor implement it if signed. One faction in the White House wants to leave CIA paramilitary troops in the county “to fight terrorism.” The Afghan Army and police have lost battle after battle, with two provincial capitals temporarily overrun just this week. Will any peace plan be meaningful if U.S. and Afghan troops can't control the country?

Popular opinion

Peace activist Bita calls the talks “complicated.” He favors the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops. But ordinary Afghans are wary of the negotiations that leave them out of the process.

“What will happen to human rights, women’s rights, and the Afghan constitution?” Bita asks. “What will happen to the economy?”

Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, agrees that economic development is a key component to any lasting peace. “Incomes are vital to peace,” she says in a phone interview, shortly before heading back for a short trip to Kabul where she works with grassroots groups.

Right now, Kelly notes, the country's main export is heroin. “Afghans live in  a failed narco state,” she explains. “The vast bulk of U.S. reconstruction aid has gone to counter-narcotics, building Afghan government capacity, and sustaining Afghan police and military. Most Afghans don’t want to join the security forces.”

What should the U.S. do?

In my opinion, Washington should immediately pull out all troops, CIA operatives, and U.S.-contracted mercenaries, and close its bases. NATO-allied troops will quickly follow suit.

Then the U.S. and its allies should commit billions of dollars to rebuild the country by funding neutral, international organizations to provide emergency relief and development aid.

“Reparations should be paid to the Afghan people, not the government,” Kelly adds. Washington should fund only those small and medium sized aid groups who have a proven track record and are not corrupt, she says.

The dire conditions on the ground in Afghanistan are likely to force a U.S. withdrawal from the country. It’s only a matter of when and under what circumstances. I wish I could tell you that the administration in Washington will handle the withdrawal in a way that benefits both countries. But don’t hold your breath.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Little More (From DWT)

Admiral Joe Sestak, the highest-ranking former military officer to have ever served in Congress, is now running for president. He released a statement yesterday that's worth reading in light of Reese's post, even though it isn't a perspective that Reese or DWT necessarily embraces as policy:

President Trump has said that he has canceled a secret meeting with the Taliban and the President of Afghanistan at Camp David that was set to take place on Sunday-- and he has canceled peace talks. This decision to call off negotiations that could lead to a cessation of hostilities is rash and destroys progress made by our diplomats, moderated by our allies in Qatar. It also endangers our troops and makes it harder to one day withdraw the forces we still have in Afghanistan.

In one month, we will be marking the 18th anniversary of our involvement in that country. We must pull our troops out, but we must not forget the people we will be leaving behind-- especially the women and girls who would suffer so much if a weakened Afghan government were overrun by radical islamist forces. In 2017, I brought over an Afghan all-girl Muslim team to the first global robotics olympics in Washington, D.C., despite President Trump’s Muslim visa ban. What will happen to those girls if we do not reach peace in Afghanistan?

Why Chuck Schumer Fought To Give Rob Portman Such A Weak Opponent

One of the great (so far) untold stories about the battle for the Senate involves Schumer's very explicit threat to Bernie Sanders to not interfere in primaries against his hand-picked candidates in 4 key states. The threat was loss of a good Senate committee chairmanship in 2017 if Bernie did anything to help progressives against Schumer's Wall Street-friendly picks in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio. I saw polling yesterday-- that apparently was also seen by a Huff Po writer last night-- showing that Joe Sestak would be beating Toomey by a higher margin right now if he were the nominee instead of Schumercrat, Katie McGinty, who's in a neck-and-neck race with the odious Pat Toomey. Travis Marketing found that with McGinty ahead of Toomey 46-45%, Sestak would be ahead 48-44% right now. I don't know if Grayson would be beating Rubio now had Schumer not spent millions in Florida on Patrick Murphy's behalf (only to abandon the state as soon as Grayson was "safely" knocked out of the race and I don't know if PG Sittenfeld would be doing better than the flailing and failing Schumercrat Ted Strickland, whose campaign not got off the ground against another GOP boob, Rob Portman. I know for certain that Grayson and Sittenfeld would have run far better and more robust campaigns than either Murphy or Strickland.

Over a year ago, Jon Schwarz, writing for The Intercept pointed out a confluence of interests between Schumer and Portman to screw domestic business and regular Americans. "In today’s bitter, poisonous political environment," noted Schwarz, "there’s still one place where Democratic and Republican leaders find common ground: an abiding devotion to multinational corporations." He went on to explain the then just-proposed plan to give "corporations something they’ve always wanted: a so-called 'territorial' tax system in the U.S."

A territorial tax system would only tax U.S.-based multinationals on their profits earned within the United States-- which sounds like it makes sense, except that it’s incredibly easy for big corporations to use financial trickery to sell to a big market like the U.S. but say their profits were earned in another country. Another country that always happens to have a much lower tax rate than here. For instance, in 2010 U.S.-based multinationals claimed that so much of their profits were earned in Bermuda that these profits were 1578 percent the size of Bermuda’s economy.

According to the current law, though, U.S.-based corporations are taxed on those profits at U.S. rates if they ever bring these profits back home. So they just leave them overseas-- right now they have about $2.1 trillion stashed in other countries.

The Schumer-Portman plan would impose a tax on corporate profits purportedly earned in other countries whether they came back to the U.S. or not. But it would do so at a far lower rate than the current standard corporate tax rate of 35 percent-- President Obama has proposed 14 percent, and while Schumer and Portman haven’t come up with a specific number, Portman says 14 percent is much too high.

The obvious consequence if the Schumer-Portman scheme becomes law is that businesses based solely within the U.S. would be at a permanent disadvantage. Multinationals could earn profits in the U.S., get their armies of lawyers and accountants to make these profits appear to have been “earned” in the Cayman Islands, and get taxed at the overseas profit rate. Meanwhile, purely domestic companies would either have to pay the higher domestic rate, or turn into multinationals themselves.

There is a much simpler, fairer, more efficient way to run the tax system for international corporations, called “formulary apportionment.” With formulary apportionment, it wouldn’t matter how many subsidiaries and departments corporations had scattered all over the globe, and which “earned” their profits where. Instead, a formula (based on a combination of a corporation’s sales, payroll and capital stock) would determine what proportion of the corporation “belonged” to each country. Then the corporation’s overall profits would be allocated according to that proportion, and the corporation would pay that country’s tax rate on that proportion.

This would be good for the U.S. overall, given that we’re a huge market that accounts for a large proportion of most multinationals’ sales. It would be good for domestic business, making it possible to raise the same amount of revenue at a lower corporate tax rate. And it would make companies compete based on who made the better product, not who has the better lawyers and accountants. But it would make it far more difficult for multinational corporations to play governments off each other and evade taxes, so don’t look for it anytime soon.

A Democratic campaign staffer told me this week that this was why Schumer was so rough with Bernie about the Ohio race and why he was adamant that a tough candidate like Sittenfeld be given no oxygen against a weak and doddering Strickland who would have zero chance to beat Portman. Portman has spent $21,341,755 to Strickland's $9,537,702. (As of October 19's FEC reporting deadline Portman had $5,144,370 cash left and Strickland had just a tenth of that, $598,658.) Another $28 million has been spent of behalf of Portman by the NRSC and right-wing allies. The DSCC and it's allies have spent far less than half of that on Strickland and gave up on his race almost instantly after he won the primary against Sittenfeld. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Portman beating Strickland with a 15.6 point spread, 50.3% to 34.7%. The most recent poll, by Quinnipiac last week, is even worse for Strickland, who Portman is beating 56-38%, an 18 point margin.

Maybe the DSCC-- and especially Chuck Schumer-- should get out of the primary business and concentrate on defeating Republicans, not progressive Democrats. This kind of tape drives Schumer insane... and the Democratic Party is made to suffer because of that insanity.

Will Pennsylvanians Let NY Greaseball Chuck Schumer Pick Their Senator Today?

Few people remember Joe Biden's Senate record. But I'm one who does. "Corporate whore" comes rapidly to mind. Biden was a right-of-center establishment Democratic who represented Wall Street interests while painting himself as a man of the people who road Amtrack. Outside of Delaware-- where he was a sentaor from 1973 'til 2008-- no one ever bought the hype back then, though Politico, which wasn't around then, does today. Biden's presidential bids never got off the ground. Biden's innate conservatism led him to the Republican Party, although his dislike of Nixon inspired him to register as an independent. The boss of his law firm was a Democrat and eventually, in his late 20s, Biden slipped into the Delaware Democratic Party. He won his first Senate election, an upset, against GOP incumbent Caleb Boggs, by 3,162 votes, running on a progressive platform. After a short time, he pivoted away from progressive stands and towards the very establishment, very status quo positions that have kept him from ever breaking through politically. His anti-consumer bankruptcy bills on behalf of predatory credit card companies are his top legislative achievements.

Now Biden is busy working with Chuck Schumer to make the Senate more Wall street-friendly, less progressive and less open to nay form of the kind of populism he's faked for his whole political career-- basically, his whole life. He's been the establishment's happy warrior in the ugly Democratic Party campaign against independent-minded Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania. Media buffoons never stop talking about how Biden is from Scranton, which is true, but he hasn't lived there since he was 9 years old. The establishment is using his status as son of Scranton in a vicious anti-Sestak campaign in favor of the Machine's worthless puppet candidate, Katie McGinty, who was recruited by Chuck Schumer when Sestak refused to pledge personal allegience to the power-mad Schumer.

The two other right-of-center Wall Street whores Biden has gotten behind this cycle are Schumercrats Ted Strickland in Ohio and "ex"-Republican Patrick Murphy in Florida, Wall Street's #1 priority for a Senate seat for 2016. As soon as Biden had given up on running for president himself, Schumer was all over him to help him elect more conservative Democrats to the Senate.

Within weeks, incoming Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was at the Naval Observatory for breakfast, talking over the details. Not long after, he returned with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chair Jon Tester (D-Mont.) for a 90-minute briefing on their top races.

“He was a man of the Senate, cared about the Senate, and we said, ‘We really need you to be our point guy,’” Schumer said. “And he has been.”

That's meant campaigning against progressives for Schumer's weak and corrupt batch of Wall Street-backing establishment shills. Patrick Murphy may be the worst Democrat running this year-- if you count the rich, spoiled GOP brat as a Democrat at all-- but Wall Street is all in on him and Biden got dragged into it by Schumer, promising presidential library contributions from banksters and from Murphy's crooked parents. Today Pennsylvania Democrats will pick between a man they know and respect and the puppet candidate of the machine. Obama has a generic ad he's cutting for the Schumercrats like McGinty. Paul Kane, in yesterday's Washington Post seems to be one of the only Beltway journalists to have figured out the destestable Schumer is pulling all the strings from behind the curtain. Here's how he described a scene with a criminal state Senator in Philly:

Katie McGinty has never been elected to anything, and her name is not well known to Pennsylvania voters. So last week, at a bustling transit stop in West Philadelphia, the unlikely Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate was relying on a local power broker to sell her to his dubious constituents.

A friend with a bullhorn beckoned commuters as state Sen. Vincent Hughes (D) insisted that McGinty would prevail in Tuesday’s Democratic primary on the strength of endorsements from powerful party leaders, including President Obama.

“There’s a crystallization, largely in the African American community, around Katie as they see folks like myself and others come out in support of her,” Hughes said.

...In Pennsylvania, the feud is more about personality than policy: Democratic leaders despise Sestak, who never stopped campaigning for the Senate after losing narrowly to Toomey six years ago.

“I don’t think anybody would call Joe Sestak paranoid if he said the Democratic Party was out to get him,” said John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock and the third Democrat in the race.

The dispute has turned into a roughly $10 million brawl for the nomination that is likely to leave the victor broke and in desperate need of a strategy to unify the Democratic ranks against Toomey and his $10 million campaign war chest.

Polls showed Sestak, 64, with a large early lead. Now the race is neck and neck, but no one is sure whether McGinty, 52, can marshal her momentum and financial edge to overcome the reservoir of goodwill that Sestak has established during his years-long, nonstop campaign.

...McGinty has run in just one previous race, finishing a distant fourth in the 2014 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Her commercials tend to feature others talking about her-- in one recent ad, Obama’s voice made up almost the entire audio-- rather than the candidate explaining her policy proposals in her own voice.

McGinty has been willing to throw elbows. She has accused Sestak of contemplating cuts to Social Security benefits, because he once said nice things about a bipartisan debt-reduction plan known as Bowles-Simpson. And she has twisted his 2009 vote in favor of a proposal to tax Wall Street bonuses into an allegation that he supports unlimited bonuses for bank executives.

Still, it’s a measure of their deep dislike for Sestak that party leaders are backing such an unproven candidate in such a critical race.

In addition to helping McGinty’s campaign raise money, Democratic leaders have helped build an outside coalition of support that includes the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Emily’s List, labor unions and environmental groups. All told, the outside groups have so far spent an additional $4 million on McGinty’s behalf.

“This has become a campaign that is driven by Washington, D.C.,” Sestak said in an interview with the Washington Post.

For his part, Sestak says he tried to mend fences with party leaders. He says he considered their recommendations for his new campaign manager and fundraising chief. But he says he just couldn’t take it when he was given a direct order by a senior Democrat: “Sestak, whenever I tell you anything, the only answer is yes.”

In the interview, Sestak declined to name the party boss in question, but in earlier talks with local media, he made clear that it was Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

DWT has been reporting this for over a month. What we didn't know until we read Kane's piece though is that Philly political machine bosses, like Hughes and Robert Brady, are angry at Sestak because he refused to pay the traditional "walking around money" (half a million) to their machine the last time he ran. Kane implies Schumer and Biden are planning the same kind of treatment against Grayson and on behalf of Wall Street errand boy Patrick Murphy. HuffPo seems to have noticed what Schumer is up to as well, although none of the mainstream media is reporting about the explicit and aggressive threats to Bernie from Schumer to not interfere in the Senate races. In an interview, John Fetterman, the third candidate in the Pennsylvania Senate primary-- the real progressive in the race-- told Michael McAulife, the DSCC lied to him about remaining neutral in the race and letting Pennsylvania Democrats decide on their own. Schumer and his vile sock-puppet, Jon Tester, have spent close to $2 million boosting McGinty as of last night.

“They reneged on that promise, clearly, in a big, big way,” Fetterman said. “That’s the only conversation that we’ve had in Washington with the elites or the establishment.”

Fetterman is not especially surprised. He’s the sort of outsider whose ideas about inequality and belief in the need for fundamental change have long alarmed cautious, triangulation-prone party leaders who now worry that Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is making overly bold promises that he can’t possibly deliver. But Fetterman is also exactly the sort of candidate who, if he can win, would give Sanders a better chance of passing things like a $15 minimum wage, universal health care and free public college. And right now, not only are Democratic Party leaders not helping, they’re standing in the way... “I wanted to be a true progressive option in a race of more centrist and kind of traditional Democrats,” said Fetterman, who has endorsed Sanders.

...In the context of 2016, Fetterman’s policy aspirations are not that different from those of many left-leaning Democrats. He backs a $15 minimum wage, a woman’s right to choose, immigration reform and tighter gun laws, although he’s a gun owner.

It’s the way he approaches those issues that puts him at odds with party leaders in Washington who have cast themselves as reasonable compromisers against Republicans who are unyielding obstructionists.

Fetterman believes standing in the way can have its place.

“I’m the only candidate in this race that’s proud to say I have litmus tests for any Supreme Court nominee that I would vote for, and first and foremost of those is repealing Citizens United,” he said, referring to the 2010 court decision that paved the way for unlimited corporate spending in campaigns.

He also doesn’t believe in compromise for compromise’s sake when he views the other side as entirely unreasonable.

“This idea that you can compromise with crazy or unreasonable-- that’s not compromise, that is appeasement, and that doesn’t help anybody move it a long,” Fetterman said.

“When the other side is espousing these views that have no room for compromise, and they’re absurdist-- we don’t argue about the science of the camera that’s recording me, we don’t argue about the science of our iPhones, but why are we arguing about the science of climate?” he said. “It’s just because someone’s gut says if it snowed last week, I don’t have to worry about it-- you can’t really compromise on that.”

He allows that the divide in the country is especially broad right now, as seen in the rise of both Trump and Sanders. He sees both candidates as opposite sides of the populist coin, with Trump tapping into the destructive, dark side of populism embraced by so many in the tea party.

“This tea party, angry mindset-- they’ve just become performance artists. How many more dozens of times are they going to repeal Obamacare? How many dozens of more times are they going to scream and yell about transgender [people] using bathrooms, or that the world will spin off its axis if we grant marriage equality? The only marriage that I saw fall apart after [the Supreme Court upheld marriage equality] was Josh Duggar’s,” he said.

He also takes the unpolitician-like position of not claiming to have all the answers, including how to bridge the gaping divide. But he promises to try.

“[I’m] not guaranteeing an outcome other than to say I guarantee to work hard to achieve that outcome,” Fetterman said.

He especially can’t guarantee the outcome of this election.

One of the biggest hurdles he points to is the spending in the race, which makes his chances of taking the step up especially slim. Party insiders are determined to advance McGinty, and the combined spending on her behalf by the DSCC and other outside groups exceeds $4 million. That’s on top of almost $3 million spent by her own campaign. Sestak’s campaign and a super PAC backing him have spent about $3.5 million.

Fetterman has only raised about $600,000, and state news coverage of the contest has been dominated by the battle between the better-known Sestak and the party’s choice, McGinty.

“The money in my race has had massive, massive influence,” Fetterman said. “It’s not about ideas, it’s not about experience, it’s not about debates, it’s about how much money can you bring in from outside forces and just carpet bomb the airwaves with television ads.”

In a large state like Pennsylvania, the barrage has left very little room for Fetterman, whose polling numbers have ranged from the single digits to the mid-teens.

At the same time, neither Sestak, who generally leads, nor McGinty are getting support above the mid-30 percent range in spite of all their spending.

Fetterman still sees a chance to make up the difference by Tuesday’s election, in which he may be able to count on many Sanders supporters swinging his way while Clinton backers split between McGinty and Sestak.

Blue America has been rising money for Fetterman but our real hope to stop the complete conservative takeover of the Senate Democrats is in the race in Maryland today, where Donna Edwards may be able to beat establishment shill Chris Van Hollen today, and in Florida, where Grayson is still ahead of Murphy and beating him significantly in the race for small donor money. Only 10% of Murphy's campaign money comes from small contributions. Nearly 60% of Grayson's does. Please consider contributing to our Senate candidates here:

Nation's Oldest Black Newspaper Comes Down Against The Corrupt Establishment-- Endorses Bernie And Joe Sestak

The Philadelphia Tribune started publishing in 1884 and today it's the oldest continually publishing African-American newspaper in the country. The paper is and has always been a steady and reasonable voice for black equality in southeastern Pennsylvania. It reaches over 620,000 black readers weekly. And they're calling on their Pennsylvania readers to vote for Bernie on Tuesday. Although the editors acknowledge that Hillary would also be better than Trump or Cruz, they came down on the Bernie side, writing that he "offers an inspiring message and bold vision for America without the excessive baggage of Clinton, which is why Sanders is our choice for president in the Democratic primary."

Clinton has on many occasions exercised bad judgment on critical issues including her avid support for her husband’s draconian 1994 crime bill which led to a major increase in mass incarceration of African Americans. She may not be responsible for signing the crime bill but she strongly supported it. She has since apologized for her support including her use of the race-coded term “super predator” to describe Black males involved in crime. But her previous stance raises serious questions.

She also exercised bad judgment in giving highly paid speeches to Wall Street, whose reckless speculation help lead the country to the worst recession since the Great Depression. In foreign affairs, she supported the invasion of Iraq and has publicly advocated a far more aggressive approach toward Syria than President Barack Obama. Obama and Sanders opposed the war in Iraq. Sanders is also a strong advocate of Palestinian statehood, which requires considerable courage. The New York Times describes Clinton as more hawkish on military matters than Obama and most Democrats in Congress.

Since his days as a student at the University of Chicago protesting against segregation in public schools in Chicago and throughout his political career, Sanders has supported policies and programs that would be in the best interest of all Americans and African Americans, specifically. He has been a consistent fighter for a more just and equitable society.

The killing of unarmed Black men by police officers in Ferguson, New York, Baltimore and elsewhere have finally brought the important issue of police brutality and mass incarceration to the national dialogue.

Sanders takes a strong stance against police abuse and misconduct without demonizing good police officers. He has called for demilitarizing local police departments and holding police officers accountable for misconduct and abuse.

His support for free tuition at public colleges and universities would disproportionally help African Americans and would have a major positive affect of alleviating poverty.

His critics say Sanders proposals are too ambitious, costly and would never get through Congress. They are right that most of his proposals would not pass the current Republican-controlled Congress. His proposals will not happen overnight. But Social Security was also once seen as impossible.

But most of Sanders’ proposals including free tuition at public colleges and universal health care are not new and are already well established government programs in European countries with far less wealth than the United States.

The paper doesn't publish Mondays. Let's hope the circulation over the weekend is strong and that the impression lasts through Tuesday. The editorial board also came down in favor of Joe Sestak for Senate insteda of for the boss-backed Schumercrat, Katie McGinty. "Regardless of who wins the presidency," they asserted, "there will be need for a new Congress to get anything done. Senator Pat Toomey joined with some of his more conservative Republican colleagues in the senate in opposing Loretta Lynch for U.S. Attorney General. He opposes holding a confirmation hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s pick to replace Justice Antonin Scalia who died in February. Lynch, who overcame Toomey’s opposition, and Garland, are highly qualified. There are several Democrats seeking to replace Toomey in the Senate. We endorse Joe Sestak, former Navy admiral and former congressman, to be the Democratic nominee. Sestak lost to Toomey in a close election in 2010, despite having many Democratic Party leaders opposed to him because of his independence. Sestak did well in an election year where Republicans rode tea party anger against Obama to take control of Congress. On the issues, Sestak and his closest rival, Katie McGinty, are not far apart, but Sestak has the experience and proven record in Congress."

Schumer's Jihad Against Joe Sestak Is Making Many Senate Democrats Nervous

Tuesday is primary day in Pennsylvania. It looks like Trump will defeat Cruz and Kasich massively and that Clinton will chalk up a narrower victory over Bernie-- unless there's a massive turnout, in which case Bernie will chalk up a narrow victory over her. But many people are taking the presidential results for granted and are more interested in the Democratic Senate primary pitting former Congressman Joe Sestak-- an Admiral who is the highest-ranking military officer ever elected to Congress-- against machine boss hack Katie McGinty. Blue America has been raising money for Braddock Mayor John Fetterman, the progressive in the race, although he isn't well known, is getting virtually NO institutional support and his polling numbers are weak.

The lastest polling shows the establishment pounding Schumer is directing aagainst Joe Sestak taking a toll, as his corrupt Wall Street-oriented candidate, McGinty, creeps up. Sestak is still leading 38% to 29% among likely voters with Fetterman in single digits. Fetterman has endorsed Bernie but Schumer has threatened to take away Bernie's chaimanship of the Senate Budget Committee if he tells his voters to get involved in Senate races like Pennsylvania and Florida where Schumer is running Wall Street-approved candidates.

One well-connected Senator told me, under condition of anonymity that "the DSCC has now spent significantly more against Joe than they spent to help Michelle Nunn in 2014 and only $100,000 less than they spent against Mitch McConnell in the general in 2014. Everything you've been warning us about in regard to Chuck is turning out to be true and it's starting to worry some of us."

Democratic voters don't get a say over who the Majority or Minority leaders are in the Senate. Tuesday's primary in Pennsylvania will allow Democratic primary voters there to send a message to Washington by rejecting Schumer, the party elites and the bosses. Nominating Sestak will be a way for Democrats to rebuke Schumer and his repulsive and deceitful brand of politics. That he can't tolerate an inependent-minded and proven Democrat like Joe Sestak says a lot about with a 2017 Senate will be like if Schumer gets his grubby paws, encreusted with Wall Street filth, on the levers of power.

How Odious A Character Is Chuck Schumer? You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Like me, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders are both graduates of PS-197 and James Madison High School in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. There isn't much else, though, that Schumer and Bernie have in common. Bernie is a life-long progressive and reformer. Schumer has never had a reformist moment in his miserable political life. Bernie went from serving as mayor of Burlington to being Vermont's independent House member in 1990. He had to fight both corrupt conservative Republicans and corrupt conservative Democrats to win and keep his House seat. He started the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991. Their times in the House overlapped but, of course, Schumer never joined the CPC. Progressivism is as foreign to Schumer as communism... or Mormonism. In 2006 Bernie was elected to the U.S. Senate with 65% of the vote. He was reelected in 2012 with 71%. Schumer was already there.

Schumer got out of law school in 1974 and immediately ran for state Assembly. He held the district until progressive icon Elizabeth Holtzman vacated her congressional seat to run for Senate in 1980. Schumer grabbed it and immediately asked for a place on what is now the House Financial Services Committee, the fount of the most blatant corruption in government. He quickly allied with the Wall Street banksters and they helped him beat Brooklyn reformers, totally and explicitly selling them whatever he has that passes for a soul in 1982 in a tough incumbent vs incumbent battle with progressive Steve Solarz. Then, in 1998 Schumer beat Geraldine Ferraro and Mark Green to get the Senate nomination for a Senate seat and he went on to beat the notoriously mobbed-up GOP crook Alfonse D'Amato with 54%. A publicity-hound and dogged careerist, Schumer is widely considered a modern-day version of Boss Tweed, especially in the Senate, where he routinely tells candidates that it's his way or the highway.

Recently he had a run-in of this nature with Admiral Joe Sestak who he tried playing the my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours game with. Basically, he told Sestak that when he (Schumer) says "jump," the only acceptable response is "how high, sir?" That's an odd thing for some draft dodging chicken hawk to say to the highest ranking military officer ever elected to Congress. It didn't end well and Schumer went out and helped recruit an unbelievably incompetent candidate for the primary, Katie McGinty, who has no chance of ever becoming a senator but will sop up Sestak's cash so he can't compete with Toomey. That's how Schumer plays the game. Toomey, of course, is over the moon.

Once Politico or the Washington Post runs with the story I'm about to relate, it will probably be a big deal, but right now, no one knows about it who isn't a DWT reader. If Bernie doesn't win the presidency, he's up for chair of the Senate Budget Committee, something Schumer's Wall Street allies aren't thrilled about to begin with. Early into the campaign, Schumer told him-- in no uncertain terms-- that if he interfered in the Senate races in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida, he could kiss that chairmanship bye-bye. Think about that, while you read this post by Michelle Goldberg at Slate yesterday about how much John Fetterman would like some help from Bernie's revolution. (Blue America has Fetterman on our Bernie Congress page and last I checked a couple hundred Bernie supporters had contributed to Fetterman's Senate run.) Goldberg makes the point that Fetterman "is, like Sanders, a political outsider with a populist and progressive platform that overlaps Bernie's and is anathema to establishment politicians like Schumer and his Schumercrat McGinty. And like Bernie, his money comes in small increments from online donors.

Fetterman’s criticism of McGinty echoes Sanders’ case against Hillary Clinton. “When she ran less than two years ago, she was for $9 an hour instead of $15,” he says, referring to the minimum wage. “She brought fracking to Pennsylvania, and she also supported NAFTA.” She has a massive financial advantage in what is currently the most expensive Senate race in the country, with more than $17 million already spent.

Given the money and political power stacked against him, Fetterman says he needs Sanders’ help to have any chance next Tuesday, the same day as the Pennsylvania presidential primary. So far, however, it has not been forthcoming. There’s been no endorsement, no fundraising support, no joint appearances. Fetterman’s campaign finds this confounding. On the ground, he says, there’s enormous overlap between his supporters and the Sanders grassroots. (“The crowd at the Fishtown brewpub is young, liberal, urban. They rave about Sanders-- and Fetterman,” says a recent Philadelphia Inquirer story.) In a three-way race, he believes, Sanders’ backing could be decisive; Fetterman estimates that he’ll win if he gets 60 or 70 percent of Sanders’ voters.

Right now, that seems unlikely; a poll from early April had him at 9 percent of the vote, with 66 percent saying they haven’t recently seen, read, or heard anything about him, and 63 percent saying they didn’t know what his ideology was. The only ray of hope: When people had heard about him, what they heard made them like him more. Lacking the resources to get on the airwaves, he’s doing as much retail campaigning as he can, including going to Sanders rallies to talk to voters one on one. (The Sanders campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

“To me, Pennsylvania represents the perfectly framed battle within the party war of 2016,” Fetterman tells me. “Untold millions in outside money and establishment endorsements versus the will of Sanders’ grassroots supporters who could, quite literally, pick the next nominee in this state. That nominee, badly outspent, represents a decimated steel town on society’s economic fringe.”

Sanders often says that his audacious agenda depends on a political revolution, one that would sweep progressives into office behind him. So far, however, he’s done notably little to make that happen. It’s not just his failure to support Fetterman; he hasn’t gotten involved in any Senate races. He made his first congressional endorsements just last week, sending out fundraising emails for three female House candidates: Zephyr Teachout of New York, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and Lucy Flores of Nevada. In Wisconsin, a conservative Supreme Court candidate triumphed in part because 11.5 percent of Sanders voters didn’t vote in the judicial election, compared with 4 percent of Clinton voters.

“The president can do very little by him or herself,” says Fetterman. “You need Congress, too, and we could be somebody in the race that supports a lot of the Sanders agenda.” He’s still holding out hope that Sanders comes through: “I’m sitting here with my corsage, waiting.”

There are dozens of candidates running on a Bernie platform who have endorsed Bernie--candidates for the Senate, the House and even in state legislative battles. Some, like Fetterman, are the real deal. Others-- like Shawn O'Connor in New Hampshire, for example-- are frauds just trying to glom onto Bernie's success for themselves. Bernie can't get involved in vetting every one of them and he's smart to leave it to his political revolution to sort it all out. It took some guts to endorse Lucy Flores in a Nevada House race for two reasons. One of her opponents, state Sen. Ruben Kihuen, is at least as progressive as Flores, is far more effective and with a record of accomplishment that drives hers, BUT, has endorsed Hillary and-- and here's where it gets hairy-- is very much the Harry Reid candidate. Reid is pushing Kihuen and I'm sure he would have rather not seen Bernie elevating Lucy's campaign and helping her raise a reputed $300,000 last week, a figure I haven't been able to verify. But Reid is retiring and won't have any say over who does or doesn't become chair of the Senate Budget Committee-- and Schumer doesn't care who wins an obscure North Las Vegas House seat.

Think about the Pennsylvania Senate race and in a little bit I'll tell you what's happened in the Ohio and Florida races where the odious Schumer was so gung-ho that Bernie not get involved in. Meanwhile...

How Beltway Insiders Like Chuck Schumer Are Stinking Up The Democratic Party

The internet has freed grassroots campaign contributors from having to contribute money through the extraordinarily corrupt Beltway campaign organizations-- the DCCC, the DSCC and the DNC-- by making it easy and convenient for anyone to contribute directly to a candidate of his or her choice without going through establishment gate-keepers with suspect agendas of their own. The establishment, which has been apoplectic at the loss of power inherent in grassroots candidates being able to fund without them, struck back with a systematic campaign of undermining the new model. The DCCC and DSCC, particularly sell e-mail name as widely as possible and encourage their own candidates to "burn the lists," over-use them so that small donors get hundreds of annoying, content-free e-mails a day.

Modern day ward-heelers and latter-day Tammany Hall bosses like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Steve Israel, Chris Van Hollen, Jon Tester and Chuck Schumer haven't been telling the donors they sucker into contributing to their organizations that they now sometimes use more of the contributions to fight primary battles on behalf of their conservative establishment candidates against popular Democratic front-runners than against Republicans. Although the Democratic committees are doing this kind of thing everywhere in the country, two of the worst examples involve the DSCC in Pennsylvania's Senate race and the DCCC in Santa Clarita's House race. Chuck Schumer is trying to shove C-level political operative Katie McGinty down Democratic voters' throats over far more competent, electable and independent-minded candidate Joe Sestak. All polls show Sestak as more popular and more likely to defeat Republican incumbent Pat Toomey. But he refused to bow down to Schumer-- "when I say jump, all you say is 'how high'"-- the way that comes naturally to a hack like McGinty (a former fracking lobbyist).

Schumer must have been chewing on his leg when he saw the endorsement of Sestak yesterday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, an endorsement that refers to his own unpopular interference in Pennsylvania's primary. "Sestak's refusal to be put into a partisan box may have contributed to his inability to get the endorsement of some Democratic heavyweights. But demonstrating his willingness to put principle above party may improve Sestak's chances in a second contest against Toomey, who beat him by only two percentage points in 2010."

Out in California, in a newly blue district with a weak Republican Tea Party incumbent, the Democrats in the Antelope Valley, Simi Valley and Santa Clarita overwhelmingly chose progressive former marine, policeman and local elected official Lou Vince as their candidate. Despite mammoth pressure from the DCCC and other corrupt party elites, Vince got the endorsement of the state Democratic Party-- by a huge margin-- over some random rich lawyer from Orange County the DCCC and Zoe Lofgren parachuted into a district he had never even set foot in before he declared his candidacy. Instead of accepting the will of the local and state parties, Lofgren, Pelosi and Steve Israel launched an all-out war against Vince, who they insist is too progressive (i.e., he endorsed Bernie), spending DCCC resources to boost their establishment shill, Brian Caforio. The DCCC has gone so far as to call and threaten labor unions officials on the verge of endorsing Vince in order to curtail his fundraising. They even called a state senator and told him to pull his endorsement; he politely told them "fuck off."

So what the DCCC and DSCC are both doing is going to low-info contributors and asking them for money to defeat Republicans in November but then turning around and using the money-- in Pennsylvania all of the money-- to defeat popular Democrats, virtually guaranteeing GOP victories in the general election. You wonder why the Democrats can't win in Congress? Look no further than Schumer and-- I'm sorry to say-- Pelosi and her series of corrupt, incompetent DCCC chairs from Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and the current losers, Steve Israel and Ben Ray Luján. If you want to help specific progressives win in November the thermometer on the left is for Senate races and the thermometer on the right is for House races:

Have Democratic Voters Had Enough Of Corrupt Insiders From The Party's DC Establishment Rigging Primaries?

Today the House Ethics Committee tabled the spurious ethics charges Chuck Schumer cooked up against Alan Grayson to drive him out of Congress and make room for Wall Street's errand boy, pitiful Schumercrat Patrick Murphy. In fact, instead of investigating Grayson, the Ethics Committee has decided to investigate Murphy for directing one of his sleazy staffers to leak confidential information to the media during the Office of Congressional Ethics investigation.

The corrupt Beltway Democratic Party Establishment feels itself under attack and is reacting ruthlessly to protect its power and the source of its spoils. Schumer has been orchestrating attacks against progressive icon Alan Grayson and against former Admiral Joe Sestak to insure the nomination of weak candidates without a point of view who will be willing puppets for himself and his Wall Street allies, respectively, Murphy and Katie McGinty, although neither of these unqualified candidates would be likely to survive a general election.

New polling from Harper came out this morning, showing Sestak continuing to increase his lead over McGinty. Even after the Obama and virtually the entire Democratic establishment endorsed their puppet, Sestak is leading 41% to 31% with Fetterman at 9%. This chart shows how likely Democratic primary voters responded when asked who they will vote for in 3 weeks. Sestak has stronger intensity of support (62% of his voters definitely voting for him, 31% probably) than McGinty (52%/42%).

After Sestak refused to pledge allegiance to Schumer personally-- Joe's old fashioned that way-- Schumer decided he'd rather see Toomey re-elected than allow an independent-minded Sestak get into the Senate. This is from his campaign a few days ago:

In 2010, Washington D.C.’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) did something it had never done before: it gave a candidate in a contested primary the $1.4 million it had always reserved for the general election. Nevertheless, Sen. Arlen Specter lost to Joe Sestak.


The day after the primary, Pat Toomey began spending millions of dollars on TV ads against Joe that went unanswered-- unanswered, because the DSCC financing meant to be available for a Democrat in the general election was spent propping up Specter in the primary. Undefended on TV, Joe dropped 18 points in the polls before he raised replacement funds for his own TV ads months later. Dogged, Joe only lost by 2%, but Pat Toomey became PA’s Senator.


On Friday, DSCC took the same dangerous action for the 2nd time in its history-- again, in PA. With Joe now ahead by 17% against a primary opponent who has no more of her own money to spend, DSCC placed $450K into this week’s TV buy against Joe-- the beginning of the full $1.9 million DSCC can do in 2016-- in order to dictate who Pennsylvanians should pick.


Worse, spending the $1.9 million in the primary means it once again won’t be available for the general election-- and this time Pat Toomey has $10 million in ready campaign cash for unanswered TV ads the day after the primary. The DSCC is handing Pat Toomey his election-- once again.


Dem Party leaders in Washington are taking money that should be used to beat Pat Toomey and instead using it to prop up a candidate trailing by 17% in the polls just because the top Dem Senate leaders will not accept Admiral Joe Sestak’s independent thought and people-first approach.

Also in Pennsylvania the progressive candidate who was running against Republican incumbent Ryan Costello in the 6th district, Lindy Li, was forced out of the Democratic primary last week. The DCCC candidate, Mike Parrish, a Republican-turned-quasi-Democrat, was recruited by Steve Israel who showed Parrish how to challenge Li's petitions. After Parrish's challenge, a court invalidated her signatures because the notary public stamped the petitions but neglected to sign them and then conveniently "disappeared" during the court case. Much of the $600,000 Li had raised for the primary was eaten up by the court case, which is exactly what the DCCC teaches their REpublican-lite candidates to do to progressive "interlopers."

Steve Israel may be very happy that his conservative candidate will now be the nominee but the chances of Parrish uniting the Democratic parties in parts of Chester, Berks and Montgomery counties that make up the 6th district is exactly zero. Winner by default: Ryan Costello in a district won against McCain 53-46%.

The establishment pulled their ultimate rabbit out of their hat in Florida, where they got Obama to endorse payday lender fanatics Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Patrick Murphy. Grayson reported a huge upsurge in online contributions from his progressive followers right after Obama endorsed "ex"-Republican Murphy and in yesterday's Huff Po, Amanda Terkel reported the same phenomena for Tim Canova, the progressive law professor challenging Wasserman Schultz, in post entitled Obama’s Endorsement Of Debbie Wasserman Schultz Brings In Serious Money... For Her Challenger.

Canova raised $557,000, powered by small donations. Nearly 15,300 people donated, for an average contribution of $20. Only six donors gave the maximum amount allowed under law, meaning he still has a significant pool of people to tap into for future donations.

...In the four days following Obama’s endorsement, Canova received nearly $100,000, according to his campaign-- almost a quarter of what he raised in the three-month period, even though they never actually fundraised off the endorsement.

Canova said he read Obama’s statement as “pretty boilerplate” and thought it showed that Wasserman Schultz was worried about losing her race.

“It’s what you would expect from a favor being called in. Let’s see if he does much more in the way of campaigning for her,” Canova said, adding that he has been trying to point out to voters key areas where the DNC chair has disagreed with Obama-- such as in her pushback on policies being put forward by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“We’ve gotten her attention. She wouldn’t have been running to the White House to get that sort of statement if she wasn’t worried,” he said... Canova said he had also seen other spikes in donations to his campaign after three other developments: after news broke about Wasserman Schultz’s payday lending legislation, when the DNC reversed the ban on federal lobbyist donations and when the Florida Democratic Party said it would deny Canova access to its voter database (it later reversed that decision).

Let's continue to fight back against the corruption and the establishment dominance of what was formerly "the people's party." We don't need two Republican parties. One is bad enough. You can contribute to Grayson and Canova by tapping on the thermometer below. And if you're feeling flush, remember that Alex Law in South Jersey and Dave McTeague in western Oregon are also fight the good fight to rid the country of corrupt conservative incumbents, respectively, the Norcross Machine's Donald Norcross and chief Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. Congress would be a far better place without Wasserman Schultz, Patrick Murphy, Donald Norcross and Kurt Schrader.

What Will Obama's Presidential Library Cost The Progressive Movement?

When Obama stabbed Joe Sestak in the back during the 2010 Pennsylvania primary in the ill-conceived establishment rush to support Republican-turned-faux-Democrat Arlen Specter, Specter was up by 30 points. The earliest polls all showed Spector crushing Sestak. Three months after Specter switched parties, the July 19, 2009 Quinnipiac poll, for example, had Specter running away with it, 55-23%. The whole corruption-ridden Democratic Establishment, especially corporate Democrats Ed Rendell, Harry Reid and Joe Biden put pressure of Sestak to drop out. Obama offered Sestak a cushy job if he would withdrawn from the race; he refused. Then Obama cut the ad. Specter spent $17,486,421 during the primary. But the more Obama, Biden, Rendell and the other establishment bosses campaigned for him, the more Specter's polling numbers dropped and Sestak's rose. By late April, 2010 Quinnipiac reported a poll showing Specter still ahead with 47% but Sestak was gaining and had risen 16 points to 39%. By May 12, Quinnipiac was showing it essentially tied, Specter 44%, Sestak 42%. The primary was May 18 and Quinnipiac released one last poll 2 days before. After an onslaught of Obama ads targeted hard at African-American audiences, Specter had fallen behind with 41% to Sestak's 42%. Two days later the news was much bleaker for the Establishment and their conservative candidate. Sestak beat Specter 568,563 (53.9%) to 487,217 (46.1%).

The Democratic establishment never really got behind Sestak during the general election battle with Toomey. Specter's chief of staff, David Urban, went to work for Toomey's campaign rounding up conservative Democratic support. The DSCC spent $1.4 million on Specter during the primary but only $200,000 on Sestak during the general. The race was extremely close in a cycle very favorable to Republicans, in which the GOP beat the Democrats in Massachusetts, Illinois, Arkansas, Indiana and Wisconsin. Democrats failed to pick up any Republican Senate seats at all. Sestak came closer to victory-- only about 1% separated him and Toomey-- than any other Democrat including incumbents Russ Feingold and Blanche Lincoln who the DSCC spent millions on. Had the DSCC spent on Sestak, he would have won the seat.

Now he's trying again and, once again, the DSCC, Reid, Rendell, Biden and Obama are campaigning against him. This time they have an even more ridiculous candidate than Specter, Katie McGinty, who polls indicate that Pennsylvania's Democratic voters are utterly turned off to. New York political boss, the heir to Tammany Hall, Chuck Schumer, is orchestrating the campaign against Sestak and, nationally, against any Democrat who is independent enough to stand up against Schumer's allies (and financiers) on Wall Street. Obama endorsed the female version of Schumer last week, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the single most hated Democrat by the Democratic grassroots anywhere in the country. (You can contribute to her opponent in the FL-23 congressional race, Tim Canova here).

On that same page, you will also find Alan Grayson, the progressive icon in the Florida Senate race who Schumer and Wall Street have declared war on in favor of pathetic "ex"-Republican Schumercrat Patrick Murphy, known in the halls of Congress as "Wall Street's errand boy." Obama, eager for the Schumer-engineered contributions for his presidential library from Wall Street banksters and from Murphy's Republican parents, endorsed Murphy despite Murphy's shockingly anti-Obama voting record. Murphy, for example, didn't just vote for the Keystone XL Pipeline every time the Republicans brought it up in the House, he was one of just a tiny handful of extreme right-wing Democrats who voted for the Republican bill to take Obama out of the decision-making process on Keystone, a proposal Grayson countered at the time with a constitutional challenge.

Murphy was also one of just a tiny bunch of right-wing Democrats to vote for the Republican plan to derail Hillary Clinton's presidential bid with the creation of a special committee to use the Benghazi tragedy to smear her. Murphy has worked with the Republicans to repeal Obamacare, to deal a death blow to Wall Street reform in return for legalistic bribes, and to compromise away Social Security benefits for the elderly using the Republican longtime trope about "saving it."

I'm thinking this worthless endorsement of McGinty by Obama can just be filed away under the growing list of shameful Obama endorsements. It worked to kill Regina Thomas' campaign, although ultimately led to the loss of a Georgia seat to the Republicans but Sestak won despite Obama last time and I bet he can again. It will be interesting see if Canova can overcome Wasserman Schultz and if Grayson can beat back the Murphy money onslaught. A new poll from PPP of the Florida Senate race yesterday showed Grayson still beating Murphy despite Schumer and Biden and Obama-- or maybe that establishment garbage is working against Murphy in this very unique political year. This, from the PPP survey of likely Florida Democratic primary voters is ominous for Murphy and his establishment backers:

If you'd like to help Grayson's and Canova's grassroots campaigns, they're both on this page of progressive candidates running for the Senate and the House this year.

UPDATE: DSCC Would Rather Elect Toomey Again Than See Joe Sestak Win

Joe Sestak's campaign sent out an e-mail to their supporters today denouncing the DSCC for their sabotage of his campaign. This is Schumer and Tester at work:

In 2010, Washington D.C.’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) did something it had never done before: it gave a candidate in a contested primary the $1.4 million it had always reserved for the general election. Nevertheless, Sen. Arlen Specter lost to Joe Sestak.

The day after the primary, Pat Toomey began spending millions of dollars on TV ads against Joe that went unanswered-- unanswered, because the DSCC financing meant to be available for a Democrat in the general election was spent propping up Specter in the primary. Undefended on TV, Joe dropped 18 points in the polls before he raised replacement funds for his own TV ads months later. Dogged, Joe only lost by 2%, but Pat Toomey became PA’s Senator.

On Friday, DSCC took the same dangerous action for the 2nd time in its history-- again, in PA. With Joe now ahead by 17% against a primary opponent who has no more of her own money to spend, DSCC placed $450K into this week’s TV buy against Joe-- the beginning of the full $1.9 million DSCC can do in 2016-- in order to dictate who Pennsylvanians should pick.

Worse, spending the $1.9 million in the primary means it once again won’t be available for the general election-- and this time Pat Toomey has $10 million in ready campaign cash for unanswered TV ads the day after the primary. The DSCC is handing Pat Toomey his election-- once again.

Dem Party leaders in Washington are taking money that should be used to beat Pat Toomey and instead using it to prop up a candidate trailing by 17% in the polls just because the top Dem Senate leaders will not accept Admiral Joe Sestak’s independent thought and people-first approach.