It's Too Early To Just Hold Your Nose And Resign Yourself To The Status Quo Ante Candidate

On Monday, Biden's wife, told a crowd in New Hampshire that her husband might not be people's favorite candidate but asserted that he is the most electable. Maybe she doesn't know any better or maybe she's just trying to push the campaign's one and only strategy-- that Trump is worse than Biden and that Biden has the best shot to beat him. Trump is worse than Biden... but Biden would be very lucky to do as well as Hillary did-- and that's way too risky. Directing herself to Bernie supporters and Elizabeth Warren supporters-- the former is way ahead of Biden in the latest New Hampshire poll, the latter is rapidly catching up-- she said "Your candidate might be better on, I don't know, health care, than Joe is, but you've got to look at who's going to win this election. And maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, 'OK, I personally like so-and-so better,' but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump."

Sounds like the disproven Hillary Clinton strategy. So does Biden's lame first TV ad (released yesterday). The elites and the Democratic establishment certainly buys the messaging. And the corporate media has been moving heaven and earth to tear Bernie down and invalidate him. MSNBC (Comcast), particularly Maddow, may be the worst but not the only one disparaging her at every opportunity.

Yesterday, Katrina vanderHeuvel penned a powerful counterpoint to the Washington Post's anti-Bernie narrative-- in the Washington Post. She wrote that "Last week, after criticizing Amazon for underpaying its workers and paying nothing in federal income taxes last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VtT) noted: 'I talk about that all of the time. And then I wonder why the Washington Post-- which is owned by Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon-- doesn’t write particularly good articles about me.' The response was immediate. Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor, dismissed Sanders’s characterization as a 'conspiracy theory.' CNN’s commentators accused Sanders of using President Trump’s playbook; NPR similarly suggested he was echoing Trump. Nate Silver, [OF COURSE] the editor of FiveThirtyEight, descended to psychological babble, assailing Sanders for having a 'sense of entitlement,' feeling that 'he’s entitled to the nomination this time, and if he doesn’t win, it’s only because the media/the establishment took it away from him.' Let's be clear: The Post and the New York Times aren’t the same as Fox News, which has turned into a shameless propaganda outfit. But Sanders wasn’t repeating Trump; he was making a smart structural critique of our commercial mainstream media."

It’s not as if Sanders lacks for evidence that he has particularly suffered at the hands of the mainstream media. The New York Times featured an article on his trip to the Soviet Union decades ago as somehow formative of his views, and got caught quoting a Democratic strategist critical of Sanders without disclosing the strategist’s close ties to Hillary Clinton’s super PAC. Sometimes outlets simply pretend Sanders doesn’t exist, as when Politico headlined a national poll showing Sanders in a strong second place this way: “Harris, Warren tie for third place in new 2020 Dem poll, but Biden still leads.” After one fiercely contested debate between Sanders and Hillary Clinton in early March 2016, The Post published 16 news articles and opinion pieces, many of them critical, about Sanders in 16 hours; a few weeks later, The Times’ own public editor criticized the post-publication “stealth editing” of a piece originally favorable to Sanders.

But, contrary to his critics’ claims, Sanders disavowed any notion that Bezos controls coverage at The Post. “I think my criticism of the corporate media is not … that they wake up, you know, in the morning and say, ‘What could we do to hurt Bernie Sanders?’ ” he told CNN. Instead he offered a criticism that is neither new nor radical: “There is a framework of what we can discuss and what we cannot discuss, and that’s a serious problem.”

In an interview with John Nichols of The Nation (where I serve as publisher and editorial director), Sanders went out of his way to distinguish this critique of the media from Trump’s assault on the free press: “We’ve got to be careful. We have an authoritarian type president right now, who does not believe in our Constitution, who is trying to intimidate the media… That’s not what we do. But I think what we have to be concerned about... is that you have a small number of very, very large corporate interests who control a lot of what the people in this country see, hear, and read. And they have their agenda.”

In an email to supporters, Sanders wrote: “Even more important than much of the corporate media’s dislike of our campaign is the fact that much of the coverage in this country portrays politics as entertainment, and largely ignores the major crises facing our communities... As a general rule of thumb, the more important the issue is to large numbers of working people, the less interesting it is to the corporate media.” The corporate media inevitably turns politics into a horse race and policy into “gotcha” questions or personality disputes. Trump’s ability to dominate the free media in 2016 is testament to this tendency.

The structural bias of the corporate media is particularly clear in these tempestuous times. The elite consensus-- the post-Cold War bipartisan embrace of corporate globalization, market fundamentalism and the United States’ global reach-- has been shattered in the sands of Iraq and the suites of Wall Street. With the economy-- even at its best-- not working for most Americans, the old order cannot be sustained. When insurgent candidates such as Sanders shock Beltway pundits, conventional wisdom is exposed as folly. Sanders is particularly frowned on by the Democratic Party establishment and by big business, which disagree with his views, especially on inequality. Not surprisingly, a mainstream media that swims in that same pond takes on the same color. It doesn’t take a call from the outlets’ owners.

But whereas in earlier decades the mainstream media, the keepers of the consensus, could easily set the terms of public debate, new technology gives candidates the chance to challenge that status quo. Sanders has started to build his own independent media apparatus, including a web show, a podcast and a newsletter. While the corporate media focuses on the limits of Sanders’s support, he laps the Democratic field in garnering small donors across the country. While “mainstream” pundits question his reach among people of color, polls show him leading among Latinos and polling favorably among young African Americans.

As Sanders noted, “We have more folks on our social media than anybody except Donald Trump… We are nowhere near where he is. But we have a lot of people on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, who use it every single day. So certainly one of the technological breakthroughs that has been of help to us in an ability to circumvent corporate media is to talk directly to people, and we do that virtually every day.”

With the elite consensus shattered, this is a frightening and exhilarating time of new ideas and new movements. It is also a time when the gatekeepers of established opinion no longer hold as much sway, when new forms of communication and independent media challenge the old. It’s not surprising that the corporate media gives Sanders bad press. Thankfully, though, that matters less and less.

Franklin And Eleanor Roosevelt Wing vs The Joe Lieberman And Blanche Lincoln Wing

No, not just another pretty face

Democrats from the Democratic wing of the party-- people in the tradition of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt rather than Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln-- had some nice strong wins Tuesday. It was very healthy for the Democratic Party in general that Chamber of Commerce Democrat Mary Glassman was defeated by Teacher of the Year Jahana Hayes in Connecticut, that progressives with powerful personal brands like Randy Bryce WI-01) and Ilhan Omar (MN-05) were nominated for congressional races they should win and that Vermont Democratic voters overwhelmingly picked Christine Hallquist, a transgender women, as their nominee for governor. In fact, not only did Hallquist outpoll popular Republican incumbent Phil Scott Democratic turnout was 57,102 compared to Republican turnout of just 35,840, despite a barn-burner primary on the GOP side. Actually significantly more Democrats voted than Republicans-- both statewide and in every contested congressional race-- in all 4 states that had primaries. Even in midwestern districts that Trump won in 2016, Democrats showed up in greater numbers than did Republicans. All good.

Yesterday, Reid Wison, a tepid status quo pundit type, writing for The Hill sounded almost like yours truly did a year ago-- throwing at the possibility that the GOP could be facing a 70-seat wipeout. You rarely-- really rarely-- hear that kind of talk inside the Beltway. He points to "Democratic enthusiasm and a GOP malaise surrounding" Señor Trumpanzee and the table being set for "a potentially devastating midterm election for the House Republican majority." He talked about Democrats over performing Hillary and Republicans underperforming Trumpanzee in the special elections. "If that pattern holds in November," he offers, "the worst-case scenario for the GOP is a truly historic wipeout of as many as 72 House seats." I've been hearing others say "as many as 80."

Wilson's a hack though and he immediately launched into all his buts-- like this classic foolishness: "Turnout in November is likely to be higher, which could help the GOP." Or it could help the Democrats-- as it probably will-- but that depends on where that higher turnout comes from. There's no reason to think that it will come from, even what he himself referred to voters suffering from "a GOP malaise" brought on by the monstrosity in the White House. Judging from trends and Trump's increasing psychosis, that malaise is far more likely to grow than subside-- and Democrats are revving up by the day. Even someone like myself, who has talked for years about not voting for the lesser of two evils, is now urging everyone to just hold their noses and vote for even the worst Democrats just to get the House majority to but Trump in check.

A far sharper observer than Wilson could ever hope to be is Katrina vandal Heuvel, editor of The Nation who pointed out that something as important as Democrats winning is that progressive ideas are winning. Beyond Wilson's ken, she points out that "There is clearly a powerful reform movement building on the left. It is spearheaded by activists inspired by the Sanders campaign, but also by movements like Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers, #MeToo, and growing environmental activism. What is surprising-- and what should be exciting to Democrats-- is that much of the energy is focused on electoral politics, on remaking the Democratic Party rather than leaving it."

This upheaval is a long-overdue response to the failure of the Democratic establishment. The policy failure is expressed in stagnant wages, rising insecurity and inequality, widespread corruption, and unchecked climate change, to name a few calamities. The political failure is undeniable, with the loss of the White House to the most unpopular candidate in modern times, control of Congress to a remarkably reactionary Republican Party, and a thousand seats in state legislatures across the country.

To date, the reform movement has made its greatest gains in the war of ideas. This shouldn’t be surprising. The reforms that the activists are championing are bold, striking, and address real needs: Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a $15 minimum wage, universal pre-K, a federal jobs guarantee, a commitment to rebuild America, a challenge to big-money politics, police and prison reforms, and a fierce commitment to liberty and justice for all.

These ideas aren’t “radical.” They enjoy broad popular support-- even the Koch brothers’ own polling demonstrates that. Not surprisingly, these ideas are increasingly championed not just by progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but by more mainstream liberals like Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker as they gear up for the 2020 presidential race.

...The insurgent candidates have fared remarkably well, given the odds. They are, almost by definition, fresh and inexperienced. They face opponents who start with more money, more experienced operatives, and greater name recognition. Deep-pocketed outside groups line up against them. Many are seeking to build small-donor and volunteer-driven campaigns from the ground up.

The victories in the various House primaries-- Ocasio-Cortez in New York, Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Katie Porter in California-- are impressive. But less well-known is the remarkable surge of insurgent candidates in down-ballot state and local races. One that did get attention was the upset victory of Wesley Bell for St. Louis County prosecutor, ousting a 27-year incumbent who had failed to even charge the officer involved in the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

...The media need to focus less on the horse races and more on what’s being built and what’s being discarded. The insurgency is neither on its deathbed nor about to sweep out the old. Indeed, Democrats are still in the early stages of a huge debate on the party’s direction. Insurgent candidates are only starting to build the capacity to run serious challengers. But there is new energy in the party and a new generation demanding change. This reality is forcing more established Democrats to adjust. In the face of Trump’s venom, Republican reaction, and the failure of the party leadership, that is surely a good thing. And that thermometer above-- that's so you can lend a hand to the progressives who won their primaries but which the DCCC-- still firmly controlled by the Lieberman/Lincoln wing of the party-- refuses to support against their Republican opponents!

Can Bernie And Jeremy Drag Their Respective Parties Into The New Century?

Two weeks out from the February 1 Iowa caucuses, there is a dead-heat between Bernie and Hillary. The Nation, as you've probably heard by now has made a very persuasive case about why Bernie Sanders would be a better president than any of the other candidates. I scratch my head when I see Democrats passionately backing Hillary Clinton; it just makes no sense to me. Why pick someone who's "not that bad" when you can pick someone who's actually great. The editors of The Nation point out that "Sanders’s clarion call for fundamental reform-- single-payer healthcare, tuition-free college, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, the breaking up of the big banks, ensuring that the rich pay their fair share of taxes-- have inspired working people across the country. His bold response to the climate crisis has attracted legions of young voters, and his foreign policy, which emphasizes diplomacy over regime change, speaks powerfully to war-weary citizens. Most important, Sanders has used his insurgent campaign to tell Americans the truth about the challenges that confront us. He has summoned the people to a 'political revolution,' arguing that the changes our country so desperately needs can only happen when we wrest our democracy from the corrupt grip of Wall Street bankers and billionaires."

Voters can trust Sanders because he doesn’t owe his political career to the financial overlords of the status quo. Freed from these chains of special interest, he can take the bold measures that the country needs. Sanders alone proposes to break up the too-big-to-fail banks; to invest in public education, from universal pre-K to tuition-free public college; to break the power of the insurance and pharmaceutical cartels with Medicare for All reforms. He alone proposes to empower workers with a living wage. He alone stands ready to put Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and to confront climate change by making the United States a leader in renewable energy. His audacious agenda proves that money in politics doesn’t widen debate; rather, it narrows the range of possibility. While Sanders understands this, we fear that his chief rival for the Democratic nomination does not.

...[T]he limits of a Clinton presidency are clear. Her talk of seeking common ground with Republicans and making deals to “get things done” in Washington will not bring the change that is so desperately needed. Clinton is open to raising the Social Security retirement age, instead of increasing the woefully inadequate benefits. She rejects single-payer healthcare and refuses to consider breaking up the big banks. We also fear that she might accept a budgetary “grand bargain” with the Republicans that would lock in austerity for decades to come.

...Critics of Bernie Sanders dismiss him as an idealist (he is!) on a quixotic crusade. Meanwhile, the corporate media has paid shamefully little attention to his campaign’s achievements, instead lavishing attention on the latest outrageous pronouncements by Donald Trump and the Republican candidates struggling to compete with him. Nonetheless, polls show that Sanders-- even as he still introduces himself to many voters-- is well poised to take on the eventual GOP nominee, frequently doing better than Clinton in these matchups. Moreover, in contrast to the modest audiences at Clinton’s campaign stops, the huge crowds at Sanders’s grassroots rallies indicate that he’ll be able to boost turnout in November.

Whether his candidacy, and the inspired campaign it fuels, will spark a “political revolution” sufficient to win the Democratic nomination and the White House this year remains to be seen. We do know that his run has already created the space for a more powerful progressive movement and demonstrated that a different kind of politics is possible. This is a revolution that should live on, no matter who wins the nomination.

Bernie Sanders and his supporters are bending the arc of history toward justice. Theirs is an insurgency, a possibility, and a dream that we proudly endorse.

In yesterday's Guardian Ewen MacAskill did an insightful piece on how Jeremy Corbyn is successfully reshaping the Labour Party. It's the kind of reshaping the Democratic Party is desperately in need of-- and the kind of reshaping the Democratic Party establishment will resist with all its collective might. If the party doesn't change-- if it is led by more and even worse versions of Wasserman Schultz, Steve Israel, Chuck Schumer, Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel, Harold Ford, Joe Lieberman, the party will be doomed to whither away-- a tragic betrayal of the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Corbin's people-powered revolution faced the same adamant, vicious, dug-in opposition from the Labour Establishment. According to a detailed survey by The Guardian, he seems to be prevailing so far.

The Guardian has interviewed Labour secretaries, chairs, other office holders and members from more than 100 of the 632 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales. Almost every constituency party across the country we contacted reported doubling, trebling, quadrupling or even quintupling membership, and a revival of branches that had been moribund for years and close to folding.

...The survey findings are borne out by Labour’s national figures, released to the Guardian in a break with party tradition of keeping them secret. Membership jumped from 201,293 on 6 May last year, the day before the general election, to 388,407 on 10 January.

Party membership figures are a controversial issue, with the former cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, who is opposed to Corbyn, telling a Labour meeting in the Lords last month that “30,000 long-term members have left the party, real members, tens of thousands.”

But the newly released figures undermine his claim, showing a total of 13,860 have left since the general election, some of them having resigned while others have gone as part of natural churn. The increase in membership is continuing, with just under 1,000 having joined since Christmas Eve.

The Guardian survey, coming after months of infighting within the Parliamentary Labour party (PLP) following Corbyn’s leadership victory, provides an opportunity for the voices of the party grassroots to be heard.

The survey found:

• The rise in membership has been uneven across the country. In contrast with steep rises in London and elsewhere in England and Wales, the rises in Scotland have been relatively modest, ominous for the party’s hopes in May’s Scottish parliamentary election.

• Members, in spite of unhappiness with public splits within the PLP, say there is no appetite for deselection of MPs. But some acknowledge that proposed boundary changes in 2018 could result in de-facto deselection.

• Returning members, who had left Labour mainly in protest over the 2003 Iraq invasion, are making an immediate impact, partly because they are familiar with the rules.

• Both returning members and new ones tend to be mainly leftwing. There are few reports of attempted infiltration from hard-left groups.

...The constituencies attributed this mainly to the Corbyn effect. Garry Parvin, High Peak constituency secretary, reported an increase in membership from 100 to 463-- with 259 joining after the May election before and 30 September. “In the main, yes, they are Corbyn supporters,” he said.

Asked whether remaking the party to reflect leftwing values was more important to them than winning the 2020 general election, Parvin said: “Frankly, yes. There are a lot of ideologically driven people who feel that we’re going to lose anyway so we may as well lose on principle.”

Breaking this down, Joanne Hepworth, constituency secretary for Pontefract and Castleford, West Yorkshire, said: “We’ve had 360 new members since the election. We have 610 now. Between 7 May and 12 August, we had 144 new members. The rest have joined since then, mostly during the leadership race.”

That view is not universal. Brynmor Hollywell, constituency party secretary for Caerphilly, south Wales, said: “A lot of us are disturbed about Corbyn. He’s a wonderful individual but not a potential prime minister.”

Overall, though, support for Corbyn at grassroots level suggests he will eventually prevail in his battle with the PLP [the Parliamentary Labour Party] or if there was to be an attempted coup.

Some constituencies do complain that none of the young members have turned up yet for meetings or turned up only once, but others say young members are already actively engaged, with some constituencies reporting potential rifts between long-term members used to rule-bound discussions and the younger ones seeking more zest and passion in their politics.

The Rahm-Van Hollen-Israel will never, regardless of who the GOP nominates for president, win back the House. It should be a priority to blow that edifice up and rebuild it from scratch. The DC Dems are about to go into a dark period with Wall Street's own senator, Chuck Schumer, as head of the Senate Democrats. Unless this is somehow balanced, the party will be useless as an engine for progressive values and for the aspirations of working families.

If you'd like to help this political revolution succeed, at least on this side of the Atlantic, please consider contributing to Bernie and to the candidates who have endorsed him, here on our Blue America ActBlue page.

Senate Dems Back Domestic Spying Nominee David Barron For A Judgeship

Shenna Bellows (D) and Rand Paul (R)-- a real bipartisan approach

Thank God, some of our candidates-- particularly Shenna Bellows (ME) and Jay Stamper (SC) for Senate and Ted Lieu (CA) and Alan Grayson (FL) for the House-- are taking a stand against unconstitutional domestic spying. And a few Democrats in the Senate, particularly Mark Udall (CO) and Ron Wyden (OR) are doing some actual fighting against Obama and his NSA. But, truth be told, a lot of the heavy lifting in this crucial battle is coming from libertarian Republicans Justin Amash (MI) in the House and Rand Paul (KY) in the Senate. A few Democrats-- particularly Bellows and Stamper-- have been advocating a transpartisan effort that will put the privacy interests of Americans first.

This week, in an OpEd for the Washington Post, Reining in the surveillance state, Katrina van den Heuvel gave Rand Paul his due on this critical issue. "Paul vowed," she wrote, "to filibuster the nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit of former Justice Department official David Barron, who helped write memos supporting said argument." Wednesday afternoon the Senate shut down his filibuster, every Democrat but Manchin (WV) and Landrieu (LA) voting against him. In the end it was 52-43, all the Republicans ready, as always, to just filibuster everything and anything from the administration.

Paul’s strong libertarian principles have always differentiated him from many of his Republican colleagues. It is, therefore, not all that shocking for him to speak out against a president he dislikes on a policy he disdains. Yet his outspokenness has many liberals and leftists asking a legitimate question: Why aren’t there more Democratic voices opposing the surveillance state? Protecting civil liberties should be a critical piece of the progressive platform, but too many establishment Democrats and progressives have been silent on this issue simply because one of their own is in the White House.

Some Democrats in Congress have taken bold stands. Longtime civil-liberties champion (and former House Judiciary Committee chair) John Conyers has worked to limit the National Security Agency’s collection of bulk telephone data. Reps. Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Adam B. Schiff of California have probed the administration’s drone and surveillance programs. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California is pushing to prevent the NSA from weakening online encryption. In the Senate, Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy of Vermont has held oversight hearings questioning excessive surveillance. Even Dianne Feinstein of California, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and normally a committed defender of the intelligence community, finally spoke out after discovering that the CIA spied on Senate staffers. And last week, Sens.Mark Udall of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon sent a letter to Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., strongly criticizing a “culture of misinformation” that has resulted in “misleading statements . . . about domestic surveillance.” And Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, has proposed a bill limiting FBI and NSA spying.

Still, too many Democrats and even progressives are reluctant to challenge the Obama administration, either because they don’t want to criticize a besieged president or because they’re focused on other priorities. As they stay silent, a host of troubling policies, including the assassination of U.S. citizens without due process, the prosecution of record numbers of journalists and whistleblowers, the unaccountable growth of the surveillance state and the vast expansion of the drone program, are proliferating unchecked.

To combat the spread of these policies, we need not just outraged rhetoric but also serious, concrete actions to seek accountability. And we need more progressive elected officials who are willing to fight for change.

We need leaders such as Shenna Bellows, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Maine. In her eight years leading Maine’s American Civil Liberties Union, Bellows has consistently worked across the aisle, bringing together unlikely allies to pass marriage equality, to restore same-day voter registration in the state and to make Maine one of only two states to establish cellphone privacy protections in the wake of the recent NSA spying revelations.

Bellows is an eloquent, vocal champion of progressive values across the board. But she is particularly focused on what she calls “the surveillance industrial complex.” “I just disagree on the amount of intrusion that is acceptable in our private lives,” she recently told MSNBC. Bellows wants to repeal the USA Patriot Act and release the CIA’s 6,000-page report on torture practices after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She has expressed an interest in working with Paul and others on anti-surveillance legislation.

According to polls, Bellows has a tough race to unseat incumbent Susan Collins, a Republican. But she is leveraging her considerable organizing skills. And while Collins has vastly more money in her campaign coffers, Bellows-- who recently earned belated support from Emily’s List and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee-- outraised Collins in the last quarter of 2013.

Bellows has been called “the woman who could be the future of progressive politics in America.” While this overstates the case, her unwavering commitment to civil liberties gives hope that progressives will soon have a champion who can help lead a transpartisan fight to rein in the national security state’s unconstitutional overreach.

You can contribute to Bellows' campaign-- and Stamper's-- here on our Senate ActBlue page.




UPDATE: Congress Authorizes More Unconstitutional Domestic Spying

Jim Sensenbrenner's Orwellian-named USA Freedom Act passed this morning, 303-121, most members of both parties eager to continue warrentless, unconstitutional bulk spying against American citizens. During the debate Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who said, "regrettably, we have learned that if we leave any ambiguity in the law, the intelligence agencies run a truck right through that ambiguity," and Alan Grayson (D-FL) joined libertarians like Justin Amash in calling out Military-Intelligence Complex shills, Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) for their treachery against the American people and the Constitution. Amash: “This morning's bill maintains and codifies a large-scale, unconstitutional domestic spying program." 70 Democrats and 51 Republicans voted against the bill, a veritable declaration of war against the American people. Suggestion: fight back-- vote against all 179 Republicans and 124 Democrats who voted to violate our rights and the Constitution.

A bold-face lie:

The truth:

Can Eric Holder Stop The GOP From Disenfranchising Millions Of American Citizens? Will He Even Try?

In state after state, ALEC has plans for those with Republican-controlled legislatures and ruthless, fascist-minded GOP governors (obviously Scott Walker stands out, but Wisconsin is far from alone). 117 Members of Congress signed a letter asking AG Holder to report back to them about what actions his department is taking to prevent Republicans from disenfranchising millions of citizens, as many as 11% of the entire voting public:


Tuesday Katrina vanden Heuvel did an op-ed for the Washington Post outlining a staggering state-by-state crusade by outright fascists to undermine American democracy. Ever notice that when democratic parties win elections they never try to disenfranchise the political right but that's always the first thing fascists do?

In states across the country, Republican legislatures are pushing through laws that make it more difficult for Americans to vote. The most popular include new laws requiring voters to bring official identification to the polls. Estimates suggest that more than 1 in 10 Americans lack an eligible form of ID, and thus would be turned away at their polling location. Most are minorities and young people, the most loyal constituencies of the Democratic Party.

There are only two explanations for such action: Either Republican governors and state legislators are genuinely trying to protect the public from rampant voter fraud, or they are trying to disenfranchise the Americans most likely to vote against them. The latter would run so egregiously counter to democratic values-- to American values-- that one hopes the former was the motivation.

And yet, a close examination finds that voter fraud, in truth, is essentially nonexistent. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found the incidence of voter fraud at rates such as 0.0003 percent in Missouri and 0.000009 percent in New York. “Voter impersonation is an illusion,” said Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center. “It almost never happens, and when it does, it is in numbers far too small to effect the outcome of even a close election.”

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) disagrees. He argues that voter fraud is a serious problem that requires serious action. But as proof, Kobach cites just “221 incidents of voter fraud” in Kansas since 1997, for an average of just 17 a year. As a Bloomberg editorial points out, “During that same period, Kansans cast more than 10 million votes in 16 statewide elections. Even if the fraud allegation were legitimate... the rate of fraud would be miniscule.”

The facts, however clear, did not deter the Kansas legislature from passing one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country. Neither have they deterred other states that have passed such laws this year, or dozens of others considering similar action.

That’s because the facts of voter fraud are, in reality, wholly irrelevant to the Republican push for stricter laws. Republicans aren’t concerned with preventing a problem that isn’t occurring. They are concerned with preserving their party’s position in power, and they are willing to disenfranchise millions of people to do so. No other explanation could possibly pass the smell test.

This is seen, as well, in the fact that a number of new restrictive voting policies wouldn’t prevent voter fraud, even if it were occurring. In Ohio, for example, a recently signed law to curb early voting won’t prevent voter impersonation; it will only make it more difficult for citizens to cast their ballot. Or take Florida’s new voter registration law, which is so burdensome that the non-partisan League of Women Voters is pulling out of Florida entirely, convinced that it cannot possibly register voters without facing legal liability. Volunteers would need to have “a secretary on one hand and a lawyer on the other hand as they registered voters,” said Deirdre MacNabb, president of the Florida League of Women Voters.

What’s worse is that these aren’t a series of independent actions being coincidentally taken throughout the country. This is very much a coordinated effort. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a corporate-funded organization that works with state legislators to draft model legislation. According to The Nation’s John Nichols, “Enacting burdensome photo ID or proof of citizenship requirements has long been an ALEC priority.” It’s not surprise then, that the Wisconsin state legislator who pushed for one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation is also ALEC’s Wisconsin chair.

I asked Alexander Keyssar, one of the country’s premier voting rights scholars, for some historical context. When was the last time an effort of this nature was so central to the agenda of an American political party? “What is so striking about the wave of legislation for ID laws is that we are witnessing for the first time in more than a century, a concerted, multi-state effort to make it more difficult for people to exercise their democratic rights,” he said. Keyssar, author of The Right to Vote, noted that “it is very reminiscent of what occurred in the North between 1875 and 1910-- the era of Jim Crow in the South-- when a host of procedural obstacles were put in the way of immigrants trying to vote.”

...That there is still a party in American politics willing to use disenfranchisement as a political tactic is gut-wrenching. Today, 46 years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, it must be the job of the American people to fight back against the forces that are disfiguring their nation on behalf of their party. Our dignity and the destiny of our democracy depends on it.

A week from Tuesday voters in 6 senatorial districts in Wisconsin will make a decision that will have heavy national reverberations. They will chose democracy or fascism by recalling and replacing 6 Scott Walker zombies or not. The Koch Brothers and other dangerous native fascists are pouring millions of dollars into the state to advance the cause that was stopped with World War II.

A Different Approach To The State Of The Union-- A Smart One From Nicholas Ruiz, Florida Congressional Candidate

Though many teabaggers are embarrassed enough by the prospect to distance themselves from her, tonight CNN is helping Michele Bachmann make Ayn Rand zealot Paul Ryan look vaguely sane-- at least by comparison. But, truth be told, Obama's spending freeze and defense of an unjust status quo (the very definition of conservatism) is just a tad less right-wing than Ryan's Wall Street-dictated GOP response. And, after all, as Paul Krugman has made abundantly clear, Ryan, no matter how his crafty benefactors from Big Business prop him up, and no matter how Boehner fluffs him, is not the serious thinker they try portraying him as and is just another Wall Street puppet-- and, in Krugman's words, a sad little flimflam man.

So tonight we're treated to a re-election campaign speech from Obama geared towards the lowest common denominator of American politics, followed by the pathetic Chamber of Commerce "but-we-want-even-more" response mouthed by Ryan and the "no one beats me when it comes to crazy" charade by Bachmann. I was very impressed yesterday with Alan Grayson's virtual plea to Obama at Huff Po that he address the real problems of real American working families. I turned to another progressive Democrat in central Florida, this time FL-24 congressional candidate Nicholas Ruiz, for a response to the State of the Union speech from the perspective of Americans hungry for real Change and who still want to believe in the Hope that motivated them to elect Obama in the first place-- as well as to elect both Grayson and a putative Democrat (since defeated) in neighboring FL-24.

Blue America will be hosting a live blog session at Crooks and Liars this Saturday at 2PM (ET). And we've already added him-- our first candidate of the 2012 congressional cycle-- to the Blue America ActBlue page. Why so soon? I think Nicholas' response to Obama's speech tonight will help you understand why we're so enthusiastic about him. I hope you will be too.

On The State of the Union

by Nicholas Ruiz III

Investment is a thoughtful word. Going back in time, we first see it in French and then Latin, where it originates with a simple concept: to clothe, or to envelop, and then to cover, or to adorn, and then ultimately for us, to endow, inaugurate or behold in esteem and high hopes of some future and greater return. In short, we invest in something, so that something else may be returned to us from it.

‘Investment’ is a fashionable word today, no? Sort of like ‘spending’ which the Republicans are all the time howling about with their insatiable need for cuts.


But let’s not forget-- spending is basically a form of investment. So when we cut spending-- we essentially cut investment in a particular idea. If we cut our spending on bubble gum-- we have essentially decided that investing in a chewable food product is no longer a nice idea. If we raise the Social Security retirement eligibility age, or lower the benefit payment in order to cut spending, we are then saying that investing in a particular concept-- that of a guaranteed public retirement system-- is a bad idea. Democrats don’t believe that investing in a guaranteed public retirement system is a bad idea. If they do-- they’re not Democrats.

My point: the national conversation about ‘spending’ really amounts to a simple question: “What are we going to invest in?”

There’s a bandwagon rolling through town. The Republicans are driving it, and it seems, Obama the Democrat wants to jump on it, too. But Democrats need not let him.

The increased radicalization of the American right is undermining any reasonable political balance available to our democratic republic. Under the disguise of spending cuts and cost-cutting, the nation is plainly being asked to accept a non-democratic investment plan for America. A reallocation program if you will, where we invest in something different than what makes America compelling as an egalitarian nation.

In a basic State of the Union preview op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on 1/18/11, Obama declares a new vanguard of national deconstructive investment: regulatory cuts. Citing the carcinogen, saccharin, Obama asserts: “The FDA has long considered saccharin, the artificial sweetener, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat saccharin like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your coffee, it is not hazardous waste. The EPA wisely eliminated this rule last month.”

The FDA’s idea, actually is that saccharin is ‘safe’ to consume in small quantities, and that theory is a speculative judgment call. Research shows that saccharin causes cancer in mice and rats in a variety ways, and by general scientific extrapolation-- it causes cancer in some human beings. Deregulating the carcinogen saccharin is a mistake that will allow greater exposure of the chemical to greater numbers of people and will almost certainly increase cancer incidence among the affected populations, as deregulation will also certainly increase corporate profits by lessening corporate accountability for use of the chemical. How’s that for rebalancing the nation’s investments?

Paul Ryan (R-WI), the Republican investment slasher has to like Obama’s Deregulatory New Deal. I doubt Democrats do. Paul Ryan already, last year, lavished his investment advice for the nation via his published ‘Roadmap’ for public destruction: an indecent proposal to slash billions in investment from the public sector. And why in the world would Paul Ryan want to bring public investment down to 2008 levels? Katrina vanden Heuval explains in the Washington Post on 1/25/11:

“Understanding the purpose of the "roadmap" is key to understanding Ryan. When he speaks of ‘fiscal responsibility,’ what he really means is that middle class and working Americans will shoulder the responsibility of tackling debts and deficits, while multinational corporations and financial institutions will reap the benefits of favorable government policies and taxpayer-funded bailouts… The respected Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, drawing on estimates of the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, concluded that the average tax cut for the top one percent of the population (with incomes over $633,000) would be $280,000. The richest one tenth of one percent, who had incomes over $2.9 million in 2009, would pocket a handsome $1.7 million a year in tax
breaks.”

Refining Katrina vanden Heuval’s logic further, the ‘investment’ idea being peddled by Paul Ryan, et al. essentially achieves very dark returns: the further decimation and demoralization of the working class. With record unemployment, record commodity and equity prices and the lowest working wages, worker benefits and citizen confidence in decades-- wouldn’t it be a better idea to increase our public investment? I’m sure. We need to remind our Democratic President that there’s a reason Democrats don’t vote for Republicans, so he need not act like one by floating Republican investment ideas like the New Deal of Deregulation.

But if Obama is in need of some regulations to reasonably review, Democrats can help. For example, let’s review the stifling minimum wage regulation. The minimum wage, unreasonably and unrealistically, remains untethered to the consumer price index. Therefore, it almost never goes up. But market prices sure do. And that’s why the buying power of the average American today pales in comparison to the buying power senior citizens had when they were young. Deregulate the minimum wage by tethering it to the market via the consumer price index. Republicans, whose charms and favor Obama seems too eager to court, will be happy, too: it has the word ‘market’ in it.

On the state of the union: today, the most important need we have as a nation is the need to invest in all our people. Government policies that favor a fractional minority of people, and legal entities called corporations are simply not right. And most everybody knows it.

Put a progressive Democrat in Congress.

Would you like to? Please consider helping Blue America and Nicholas do just that-- here.

"If we condone political theft . . . our civilization itself cannot endure" (Bill Moyers)

Great moments in Great Society history: the birth of Medicare. Sept. 1, 1965: HEW Secretary John W. Gardner (later the founder of Common Cause, second from left) and President Lyndon B. Johnson (far right, with Social Security Commissioner Robert M. Ball at left) formally accept the first Medicare Part B application received, from Tony Palcaorolla of Baltimore.

"The founder of Common Cause was a prophet in seeing money as the dagger directed at the heart of democracy. Like his fellow Republican Teddy Roosevelt, he opposed the ‘naked robbery’ of the public’s trust. A century ago, in one of the most powerful speeches in American political history, Roosevelt said: 'It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue; it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft, if we do not resent the kinds of wrong and injustice that injuriously affect the whole nation, not merely our democratic form of government but our civilization itself cannot endure.'”

-- Bill Moyers, in remarks on Common Cause founder John Gardner at the 40th-anniversary gala, Oct. 6

by Ken

Thanks to The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel, not just for a spirited and incisive Washington Post column today, "Predator's ball," which we'll come back to, but for calling attention to this remarkable speech of Bill Moyers', which reviews some of the best and worst times in 20th-century American governance, taking off from one of the last books by one of my favorite writers, Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land.

Judt described a time when "the public" was no fiction and the word wasn’t even a term of opprobrium. Public schools, public libraries, public parks, public highways, public goods and services were the means of creating a fair society for people who weren’t rich. At its heart was an ethical compact without which society is a war of all against all and the free market for wolves becomes a slaughter for the lambs.

Guess where the historian Judt located the closest America came to that notion of social democracy? In Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Much of what was best in the legislation and social policy of the 20th century, he said, was social democracy in all but name.

As Moyers notes, from his view inside the Johnson White House, LBJ's Great Society -- in pursuit of which he appointed Republican John Gardner as secretary of health, education, and welfare -- was undone by his catastrophic Vietnam blunder. And by 1980, "the social democratic climate that Judt thought so promising," and had so quickly come "to seem plain common sense," "abruptly vanished from sight." And Moyers provides a masterful survey of the process by which corporate powers took off the gloves and established a stranglehold on our political system, with a final cheering-on from "the activist reactionary majority on the Supreme Court," which --

has opened the floodgates for oligarchs and plutocrats to secretly buy our elections and consolidate their hold on the corporate state. One of the greatest of our Supreme Court justices, Louis Brandeis, warned that "you can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both." The pro-corporate Roberts majority looked at both options and declared, ‘OK. We’ll take the former.”

Vanden Heuvel, in her column today, covers some familiar post-Citizens United ground: the delusion of some Democratic Party money people that they could hold their own against right-wing cash, which by now, still in its early days, is coming to look even more overwhelming than our worst fears suggested when you factor in the unlimited cash pouring into those supposedly "independent expenditures."

"This flood of conservative money isn't an accident," vanden Heuvel notes, calling attention to Eric Lichtblau's recent NYT tracing ("Long Battle by Foes of Campaign Finance Rules Shifts Landscape") of the relentless and strategically masterful campaign pursued by conservatives going back to the late '90s to free corporate money from the shackles of government regulation.

And she comes to rest on the crucial point that all this money that's overwhelming our political process is being spent only partly on ideological grounds.

The money flooding into Republican coffers isn't for small government or balanced budgets. It's for retaining profitable subsidies, rolling back consumer or worker protections, sustaining anti-trust exemptions, reopening the financial casino, thwarting efforts to tax the wealthy. The respected economist Jamie Galbraith described this as the "predator state," where powerful corporate interests profit by creating and defending lavish government benefits. The Tea Party protest has been sparked in part by the widespread sense that government serves the powerful, not the middle class -- that it bailed out Wall Street, not Main Street. But the Republican campaign is bankrolled in no small measure by money from those intent on maintaining their government privileges and subsidies.

What I originally set out to write about will have to wait till tomorrow: a specific case of how this process of right-wing moguls spending huge quantities of money on ideology for profit works in practice, in the form of the billionaire Koch brothers' funding of a right-wing think tank, the Mercatus Institute, at a public university, Virginia's George Mason. I will be expressing the sincere hope that everyone connected with the once-reputable George Mason U be tarred with the brush of the Kochs' power-mongering corruption.


Bill Moyers addresses Common Cause's 40th-anniversary gala.

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