Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Michigan, Washington, Missouri, Idaho, Mississippi and North Dakota Democrats-- Don't Be Fooled... And Don't Let America Down Today

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Joe and Strom-- they got things done

Remember when Biden-- before he stopped saying anything unscripted-- mentioned that by working with overt racists in the Senate "We got things done?" On the air with Amy Goodman last June, one of America's most revered public intellectuals, Ta-Nehisi Coates, stated flatly that "Joe Biden shouldn’t be president... [I]f he ends up being the nominee, better him than Trump, but I think that’s a really, really low standard."
I think when you have somebody who is celebrating their relationship, the ability of a person who saw no problem depriving an entire population of African Americans in their state of the right to vote, the right to participate as American citizens, the fact that that person was polite to them? I mean, it’s nice that Eastland never called, or Talmadge, whoever it was-- never called Joe Biden “boy.” It’s nice that Joe Biden had that privilege. But the fact of the matter is, Joe Biden owes his very presence in the race, right now, to the first black president, to Barack Obama. And if it were up to Eastland, and if it were up to Talmadge, Barack Obama would not only not be in the White House, he actually would not exist.


And so, I don’t know what is going on in your brain where you decide to celebrate the fact these people were polite. They could afford to be polite, because the major opposition in their state, that being African Americans, was effectively, at that time, in their time, through most of their career, wiped out of the political process and erased as an electorate.

You know, Joe Biden says that he’s been involved with civil rights his entire career. It’s worth remembering Joe Biden opposed busing and bragged about it, you know, in the 1970s. Joe Biden is on the record as being to the right of actually the New Democrats in the 1990s on the issue of mass incarceration, wanted more people sentenced to the death penalty, wanted more jails. And so, you know, I’m not surprised. I mean, this is who Joe Biden is. You know there’s that saying: When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. This is who Joe Biden is.
Yesterday Washington Post reporter Jose Del Real wrote that Bernie wants you to know that Biden "once supported cuts to social security, cast a vote to prohibit federal funding of abortions, and used to favor a ban on openly gay people serving in the military. In recent speeches, Sanders has cautiously tested new and forceful attacks on Biden’s record on gay rights and women’s issues, potent critiques aimed at two key bases of the Democratic Party."
For much of the campaign, Sanders has focused on economics and inequality, attacking his opponents for accepting donations from the wealthy and opposing Medicare-for-all. But in recent days, Sanders has also begun to challenge Biden’s record on LGBT rights and women’s reproductive health.

He repeatedly knocked Biden for, until recently, supporting the Hyde amendment, which banned Medicaid funds from being used to cover abortions.

He has criticized the former vice president for supporting “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the 1990s, a policy that prevented openly gay people from serving in the military. And he has stressed Biden’s 1996 vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law that barred legal recognition of same-sex marriages.

“Joe Biden in the past has voted for what is called the Hyde Amendment, that said that women could not use Medicaid dollars in order to protect their reproductive rights and get an abortion,” Sanders told a crowd of 15,000 supporters Saturday at a rally in Chicago, echoing comments he also made in Phoenix, Detroit and Flint, Michigan.

“I am proud to tell you that I have a 100 percent pro-choice voting record throughout my entire life,” he added. “I believed then, and I believe now, that it is women who have a right to control their own bodies, not the government.”

The new line of attack comes at a crucial moment for the Sanders campaign, which is struggling to gain momentum ahead of Tuesday’s votes in six states. Though Sanders racked up wins in some early states, Biden won most of the nominating contests on Super Tuesday amid a consolidation of moderate support and now holds a lead in delegates.

On the stump, Sanders has framed these new comments as a way to emphasize his own liberal record, noting that he supported gay rights when it was far more difficult to do so-- unlike Biden. The supercharged contrast on social issues, Sanders said repeatedly in recent days, is crucial to give voters a clear picture of who has “the vision” to lead.


“The point here is not just to look back 20 years ago, not just to look at consistency, it is to look at which candidate had the guts to cast difficult votes because they were the right votes,” he said Friday during a news conference. “All I can tell you is, whether it was Iraq, whether it was DOMA, whether it was ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’ those were difficult votes. I was there, on the right side of history, and my friend Joe Biden was not.”

...[T]here are fears that Biden may not be able to energize Sanders’s base if he wins the nomination. Many Sanders supporters have expressed uncertainty about whether they will cast ballots in November for anyone else.

Jerome Palmer, 45, said during a rally in Phoenix on Thursday that he identifies as a “progressive” and was until recently a “Democrat with reservations.” He said he has struggled with the idea of voting for Biden in November if he is the nominee.

Palmer said he does not want Trump to be reelected, and he knows that he may have to make an uncomfortable political compromise to prevent it. But he cannot shake the “sour taste in my mouth” after casting a ballot for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The fact that she lost, he said, added insult to injury.

He now identifies as a political independent after a lifetime voting for Democrats.

“The past four or five years, I’ve had an awakening. The Democrat Party, they’re not the good guys. They’re bad news in my opinion,” he said, noting that he had always voted for Democrats before. “Democrats, it’s literally two parties within one party. I think the moderates are just conservative-lite. It’s the progressives who want to see change.”

...Unlike when he is talking about Biden, Sanders’s comments on Trump are scathingly personal. He calls him a “pathological liar,” a “fraud,” a “racist” and an “autocrat.” He regularly accuses the president of never having read the Constitution.

By those standards, the final stretch of the Democratic primary may look tame.

Notably, Sanders has not mentioned Biden’s son, Hunter, whose business associations have already become fodder for Trump’s attacks, and were at the center of the Congressional inquiry that led to the president’s impeachment six weeks ago.

Still, the overwhelming bulk of his critiques have focused on health care, prescription drug prices, trade, and campaign finance reform-- his bread-and-butter issues.

On those topics, Sanders is loud, aggressive and direct.

“I just don’t think that Joe Biden can generate enthusiasm when you’ve got 60 billionaires contributing to his campaign,” he said Saturday in Dearborn, Michigan, his voice and his hands rising. “At the end of the day, people understand that if you’re taking lots of money from billionaires, you’re not going to be there standing up for the working class and the middle class in this country.”
A new poll released by YouGov shows that, although a Biden nomination will be greeted with enthusiasm by 51% of Democrats, just 26% of the crucial independent vote is enthusiastic about him as the nominee. Compare that to Bernie, who generates enthusiasm from 45% of independent voters. Democrats are likely to vote for whoever wins the nomination. If the Democrats want to win in November, they need not Republicans but Independents. And 35% of Independents same that a Biden nomination would "upset" them (as opposed to 20% who say a Bernie nomination would upset them). 47% of independents say they were either "dissatisfied" or "upset" by Super Tuesday's results.

If you read New York Magazine, you probably know that entertaining columnist Jonathan Chait is a rabid Bernie smear machine, but when he's not red-baiting Bernie, he's focusing on Señor Trumpanzee and yesterday he noted-- as more an more people will in coming weeks-- that we are watching the probable demise of Trump's reelection in real time. He wrote that throughout the unending series of disasters of Trump's own making, he "has maintained a floor of support that is apparently immutable and just high enough to give him a plausible chance of reelection. Yet the pair of crises now enveloping the administration appear to be of a completely different political magnitude than anything that has faced Trump to date. It may now really, finally, truly be over for him." He's talking about two things no one, no matter how much they detest Trump, should be cheering about: the pandemic and the Trump Recession.

"Trump’s continuous din of scandals and gaffes," he wrote, "is unintelligible to many Americans who either do not follow the news closely, or follow Trump-controlled news organs, and who have instead judged his presidency by the direct experience of peace and prosperity. Trump has done one very big thing very well: He rebranded the economic expansion he inherited as his own creation, like the licensing deals he makes to splash the Trump name over hotels and resorts other people built. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus turns his greatest strength into perhaps his greatest liability. A somewhat less obvious factor is that Trump’s own mismanagement has demonstrably contributed to these disasters. The entire crisis has grown out of Trump’s constitutional aversion to long-term planning. In his autobiography, Trump boasted that he does not even plan his days, but simply reacts to events as they happen."

Incapable of patience, Trump "keeps repeating that the coronavirus will blow over without much hassle. He believes the conspiracy theories that it’s a hoax designed to bring him down, and he also believes any messaging problem he has can be solved by more messaging from Trump. Trump seemed totally oblivious to the danger of hardening his public image as the national-level equivalent of the mayor in Jaws, blithely ignoring reports of a gigantic shark because he didn’t want to hurt the tourism season.




Enough of the debacle has played out in public to supply Democrats with a campaign’s worth of damning video clips. Trump appeared in public insisting that the virus was “contained,” and that the number of cases “within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero.” Trump and his surrogates kept advising people to buy stocks after every dip. The strategy made no sense except as a desperation gambit to prop up the stock market on an hour-to-hour basis with dumb money from Trump’s marks.

For all the apparent durability of Trump’s personality cult, it is worth recalling that George W. Bush was once a figure of nearly equal stature on the right. He was the swaggering, flight-suit-wearing alpha male who had conquered Afghanistan and Iraq. The conservative media slathered over him in almost erotic terms. When things went south for Bush, after his failed attempt to privatize Social Security was followed by Hurricane Katrina and the unraveling of the Iraq occupation, they went south very fast.

It is possible that the public-health and economic catastrophes that loom so large at the moment will be gone by autumn. It is even possible that they will remain and Trump will somehow survive anyway. (After all, the mayor in Jaws had somehow retained his position in Jaws 2. And he was still minimizing shark risks!)

But it seems more likely that Trump has finally made his unfitness for office so blatant that even his own supporters will notice. The American economy, its health infrastructure, and perhaps more are plunging into foreseeable crisis. And every step Trump has taken along the way seems almost calculated to expose him to maximal blame. Trump is now quite likely to lose his reelection, and we will look back at the last few weeks as the time when he sealed his own fate.


UPDATE: Biden Is A Better Republican Than Trumpanzee

Michael Taylor, the Republican mayor of Sterling Heights. Michigan, chose yesterday to announce that-- though still a Republican-- he's backing the less extreme Republican. Taylor is backing Biden, not Trump, even though Biden has (wink, wink) a "D" next to his name. Noting that Trump is "deranged," he told the Newsweek that he thinks "Joe Biden is the candidate who can unify all of the Democrats, and he’s the candidate who can appeal to moderates and Republicans like me who don’t want to see four more years of President Trump... I remember thinking this Trump thing is insane, but when it was down to him and Hillary, I kind of said, 'Well, you are a Republican, and yeah he's nuts, but maybe he'll get better and you know he's going to lower taxes. I slowly talked myself into it. 'He can't seriously be this deranged once he gets in there,' and he's even more deranged now than I thought then. So, I take the blame. I voted for him."





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Thursday, February 11, 2016

Hall And Coates (CA-44)

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California state Senator Isadore Hall, widely considered the most corrupt politician in Sacramento, must have been feeling his oats when he snagged a cushy deal at the Alameda Court apartments development he helped push through... with a nice subsidy from the City of Compton. Shortly after the initial approval, the developers contributed $10,000 to Hall. Can you spell quid pro quo? Or you thought only Republicans engage in this kind of bribery? Did he get his place rent free while the other tenants were subjected to leases based on the old racist "rent-to-own" program historically foisted upon African-Americans who were red-lined by the banks? The idea is to take the money but find an excuse-- any excuse will do-- to void the agreement and steal the money while evicting the hapless and helpless buyer. In his much discussed Reparations piece for The Atlantic last week, Ta-Nehisi Coates went into this ugly practice in some depth. "From the 1930s through the 1960s," he reminds his readers, "black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market."
Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting-- while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full-- and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.

The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay-- taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told the Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:
Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.
In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. “The thrill of the chase and the kill.” ... Contract sellers became rich.
Now... back to Compton and Hall, the crooked state senator being boosted by the party establishment for a congressional seat (CA-44) that covers, San Pedro, Wilmington, Carson, Compton, North Long Beach, Willowbrook, Lynwood, Watts, South Gate and West Rancho Dominguez, a district that is over 70% Latino.

After some of the Alameda Court tenants filed a lawsuit over the leases, complaining of violations of their supposed "rent-to-own" provisions, claiming that there was never any intention to let these tenants buy their apartments, they were served with eviction papers-- and further claiming that Senator Hall received special "white glove" treatment and was exempt from the harassment that Plaintiffs endured because of his relationship with the landlord. Instead of being credited towards down payments, the additional payments were confiscated by the property managers to cover "repairs" and "deposits." Sound familiar? And Coates thought this was a practice that was used against blacks "from the 1930s through the 1960s?"

While the plaintiffs continued to proffer rents, their payments were rejected and the retaliatory evictions proceeded. And caught up in the mix was our friend, Senator Hall. He too was served with eviction papers (less than 3 months ago while he was running for Congress)! Somehow he owed rent of $4,800 and ran up utility bills of $5,000! What was he growing?? After allowing Hall to live rent-free in the complex, "Landlord" Doug Baker signed a declaration, under penalty of perjury, that Hall had not paid rent since March, 2015.

Are you listening, California Democrats? You endorsed him for Congress! Yes-- it's a good idea to get him out of LA-- even his landlord agrees-- but is this the best way to do it? Congress has more than enough crooks already.

Blue America has endorsed environmental hero Nanette Barragán in the CA-44 race. If you can, please help her raise the money she needs to compete against the Democratic Party establishment machine behind Hall. You can contribute to her grassroots campaign here.

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Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Electing Ben Carson President Would Not Be Consistent With The Constitution Of This Country

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"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
-- the Constitution, Article VI (paragraph 3)

The Founding Fathers wanted to keep the Constitution flexible. They rarely used the word "ever" or "never." They must have thought this section was pretty important to the essence of what they were trying to accomplish. I get the idea that not many Republican politicians grasp that, certainly not Ben Carson.

Sunday on Meet the Press Carson stumbled into a political hornets' nest, likely without having thought through the implications of his remarks that American Muslims-- around 1% of the U.S. population, most of whom are native-born African-Americans-- should not ever lead the country. But he couldn't back down, not in the midst of a Republican primary that will be determined by racists, bigots, teabaggers and lo-info voters who are brainwashed by Hate Talk Radio and Fox, and he reiterated his stupidity to Jonathan Easley in an interview at The Hill later in the day.
"I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country," Carson said. "Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution."

Carson said that the only exception he’d make would be if the Muslim running for office "publicly rejected all the tenants of Sharia and lived a life consistent with that."



"Then I wouldn’t have any problem," he said.


However, on several occasions Carson mentioned "Taqiya," a practice in Shia Islam in which a Muslim can mislead nonbelievers about the nature of their faith to avoid persecution.

"Taqiya is a component of Shia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals," Carson said.

Pushing back at the media firestorm over his remarks, Carson sought to frame himself as one of the few candidates running for president willing to tell hard truths.

"We are a different kind of nation," Carson said. "Part of why we rose so quickly is because we wouldn’t allow our values or principles to be supplanted because we were going to be politically correct… part of the problem today is that we’re so busy trying to be politically correct, that we lose all perspective."

Carson told The Hill that the question of a Muslim president is largely "irrelevant" because no Muslims are running in 2016. He said the question, which Todd is posing to all of the Republican presidential hopefuls who go on his show, "may well have been" gotcha journalism meant to trip the candidates up.

However, he acknowledged the question "served a useful purpose by providing the opportunity to talk about what Sharia is and what their goals are."

"So often we get into these irrelevant things, because obviously if a Muslim was running for president, there would be a lot more education about Sharia, about Taqiya," Carson said.
Keep in mind that Carson has bragged that his tax plan is literally based on the Bible while whining that "Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that's not consistent with our principles and our Constitution." In short, Carson is a deranged crackpot, no better than bottom-of-the-barrel bigots and hate-mongers like Huckabee and Santorum.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Atlantic, responded in a way that most normal Americans could probably relate to:
Ben Carson is a Christian-- a fact he shares in common with all our greatest domestic terrorists and self-styled Indian-killers. From slave-holding to ethnic cleansing, Christianity has repeatedly been employed to sanctify our most shameful acts. One might counter that Christianity has also been employed to inspire our most honorable acts. But this is a level of complexity that Carson’s ilk do not grant to Islam. To Carson, Islam is terror and nothing else.

Christians, fully conscious of their own pedigree, need not completely renounce their faith, nor repudiate their scripture. (If a man seeks to plunder you, Dr. Seuss will suffice.) But you would think a wise Christian would be more prudent. But Carson is neither prudent nor wise. Carson is a bigot playing to a base that considers bigotry to be a feature, not a bug.
Reactions from politicians to what Carson had to say have been varied. But even a crackpot bigot like Ted Cruz reminded Carson that "the Constitution specifies there shall be no religious test for public office." And no less of a pathetic also-ran than Bobby Jindal left open the possibility that he might vote for a theoretical Muslim:
If you can find me a Muslim candidate who is a Republican, who will fight hard to protect religious liberty, who will respect the Judeo-Christian heritage of America, who will be committed to destroying ISIS and radical Islam, who will condemn cultures that treat women as second-class citizens and who will place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, then yes, I will be happy to consider voting for him or her." He added another criteria-- he or she must "respect the Judeo-Christian heritage of America.
Another Republican widely considered a crazed Islamaphobe and bigoted imbecile, Rep. Peter King of Long Island, was on Fox News criticizing Carson-- instead of his usual targets, Muslims. "A Muslim has every right to run for President and be President," he said."It’s wrong to paint this broad brush. We’re isolating the Muslim community when we should be trying to find those elements in the community that want to work with us."

Perhaps King could start by working with Keith Ellison, a Muslim-American congressman from Minneapolis, who issued a statement after Carson's appearance on Meet the Press:



Bernie Sanders, a Jewish-American, led the way among the presidential contenders:

You know, this is the year 2015. You judge candidates for president not on their religion, not on the color of their skin, but on their ideas on what they stand for. … I was very disappointed in Dr. Carson’s statement... For a long, long time in the history of America, there were people saying, 'Oh, we don’t want a Catholic to be president of the United States.' Then John F. Kennedy became president in 1960. And then people said, 'Oh, we don’t want a black guy, an African American, to be president of the United States.' Then finally Barack Obama became president of the United States.
For Republicans disturbed by a campaign thus far dominated by the hysteria and lies of Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, there was some hope that Carson's soft-spoken and superficially respectful demeanor might offer a reasonable alternative. But they didn't know Ben Carson. Lawrence Goldstone sought to correct that in The New Republic over the weekend.

"Dr. Ben Carson excels," he wrote, "in addled interpretations of America’s founding principles. In May, the Republican presidential candidate claimed that the president has the power to ignore the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling. And last month, when asked by Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd whether the Bible has 'authority' over the Constitution, said, 'That is not a simple question.' He extended this streak of misinterpretation on Sunday."
In the end, the argument is about whether the United States is everyone’s country or just certain people’s country. Dr. Carson once again raises the specter that, despite all evidence and jurisprudence to the contrary, America is a “Christian nation.” Those who take this stance seem to do so only on the basis that most, if not all, of the Founders were Christian, somewhat ironic because overwhelmingly they were, at best, lax in their beliefs. And it is no more accurate to say America is “Christian” because it happens to have a Christian majority than it is to say that America is “white” for the same reason.

“[I]n the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens,” Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in his stinging dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). “There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” This is also true of religion, as everyone in America-- and especially its political leaders-- should understand by now. If candidates like Carson can’t be bothered to read and understand the 4,500 words that comprise our founding document, they should not be considered fit for the job that requires they defend it.
A week before Carson's latest foray into a netherworld of far right extremism he's all too familiar with, PFAW's Right Wing Watch was warning that "Carson is getting a pass because he doesn’t share Trump’s bombastic tone. While Carson may not use Trumpian rhetoric, that doesn’t make what he says any less absurd. For starters, Carson had told enthusiastic audiences that Obamacare is worse than slavery (and is 'slavery, in a way') and the September 11, 2001 attacks." He's been scaring already paranoid and dumbed-down Fox viewers that Obama might cancel the 2016 election so he could have a third term and that in any case "Obama is driven by Mein Kampf and has ushered in 'a Gestapo age'... So egregious is Obama’s presidency in Carson’s eyes that he has accused the president of committing treason and opening up the country to terrorist infiltration and the dangers of Ebola-tainted urine... And remember, this is the only candidate who has stayed competitive with Trump." Electing Bernie Sanders seems more crucial every day. You can do your part here.

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