Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
The Silencing and Rebuking of Elizabeth Warren Is an Attempt to Normalize the Intolerable
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
EWarren 0208wrp opt
(Photo: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, by Tim Pierce)
Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) refused to allow Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) to criticize Trump Attorney General nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama). In fact, he invoked a rarely used Senate rule to force Warren to end her remarks prematurely, while she was reading a letter written by Coretta Scott King. MSNBC reports:
Warren quoted from a letter that Coretta Scott King wrote in opposition to Sessions, an Alabama Republican, during his attempted confirmation for a federal judgeship 30 years ago.
The letter said that Sessions, who was then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, had used the "the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge."
McConnell and other Republicans said Warren violated Senate rules. The rule, No. 19, says senators cannot "directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator."
MSNBC adds, "The Senate voted along partisan lines, 49-43, to admonish Warren." Thus, Warren was silenced and rebuked for speaking truth to power through the words of a great civil rights leader. In effect, McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate were also sanctioning Coretta Scott King.
You can't argue with the facts. As a politician in Alabama, Sessions was well known for being an outspoken opponent of Black civil and voting rights. That does not bode well for people of color if he becomes attorney general of the United States. The attorney general oversees enforcement of civil and voting rights throughout the United States. Therefore, Warren's reading of the King letter was pertinent and timely to the debate about his confirmation in the Senate. King's letter conveyed the words, in essence, of an expert witness.
The notion that the Senate should be able to prevent a senator from speaking the facts in order to try to ensure that another senator's reputation remains untarnished by the truth is unacceptable. King and Warren weren't impugning Sessions' character; they were exposing it. As a result of oral and written testimony, such as King's, Sessions was not confirmed in 1986 to the federal bench by the Senate.
By both censoring and censuring Elizabeth Warren, the Republicans in the Senate are attempting to normalize the intolerable record of Sessions' racist past.
That is as deceitful as it is reprehensible.
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/comm ... ntolerable
Gore Vidal Sassoon
@JimmyJazz1968
Wow they've already got Sessions taking the oath
Sean Spicer Makes Delusional Claim About Coretta Scott King and Jeff Sessions
"I can only hope that if Coretta Scott King was still with us," she'd support Trump's Attorney General.
By Brad Reed / Raw Story February 9, 2017
White House Press Secretary said on Wednesday that he hoped that if Coretta Scott King were still alive that she would support the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R – AL) for attorney general.
King, the late widow of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr., had originally opposed Sessions’s nomination for a federal judgeship in the 1980s on the grounds that he had allegedly tried to “intimidate and chill the exercise of the ballot” by African Americans.
Despite this, Spicer said that he hoped that King would have come around to supporting Sessions today if she had ever taken the time to get to know him and understand his record on key issues such as voting rights.
“I would respectfully disagree with her assessment of Sen. Sessions then and now,” said Spicer. “His record on civil voting rights, I think, is outstanding.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D – MA) tried to read Coretta Scott King’s original letter opposing Sessions’s nomination on Tuesday night, but was censored by her Senate colleagues for it in a 49-44 party-line vote.
Watch Spicer’s full response below.
http://www.alternet.org/sean-spicer-mak ... f-sessions
McConnell's 'Gag Rule' for Warren Echoes the Slavery Debate
In 1836, the Jacksonian majority silenced former president John Quincy Adams for the same reason the Trump Republicans shut down the Massachusetts senator.
By Jefferson Morley / AlterNet February 8, 2017
The honor of Congress was at stake, said the esteemed legislative leader from a southern red state.
The people have the right to petition the Congress for redress of human rights grievances, replied an equally esteemed statesman from a northeastern blue state.
The majority of the Congress then ruled the liberal statesman out of order and struck his remarks from the official record.
No, I'm not talking about Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans' decision Tuesday to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren for quoting from Coretta Scott King's blistering 1986 letter about the racist politics of Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General.
The Enduring Conflict
I'm talking about the very similar debate that roiled Congress 181 years ago this week. At that time, Rep. Henry Pickney of South Carolina and the conservative majority of Congress sought to silence Rep. John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts for quoting from constituent petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.
While on Wednesday, pundits focused on the implications of McConnell's actions for Warren's 2020 presidential ambitions and for the embattled Trump administration, the long arc of American history demonstrates that the current debate in Congress over Jeff Session's racialized politics is nothing new.
In fact, the silencing of Warren is just the latest chapter in one of the most enduring conflicts in American politics: the red state-blue state struggle over civil rights.
In the 1830s, Andrew Jackson was president, and the Congress was, in the brilliant account of historian William Lee Miller, "Arguing About Slavery." Today Donald Trump works in the Oval Office adorned with a portrait of Jackson, and the Congress is arguing about the legacy of slavery and racism.
The political dynamics, then and now, have certain parallels.
Back then, the Jacksonian majority in Congress sought to extirpate any trace of the anti-slavery petitions. Today the Trumpian majority seeks to eliminate any accusation of racism.
Like Trump and the Republican Congress in 2017, President Jackson and the conservative congressional majority faced an unprecedented outpouring of popular opposition to their agenda in 1836. Anti-slavery societies were springing up across the northern tier of the country. When the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1833, it had 10 chapters mostly in Massachusetts. Two years later, the free blacks of the North had organized themselves in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and there were 200 anti-slavery societies from Ohio to Maine. Their common demand was abolition of slavery in the nation's capital.
Just as Trump seeks to governs in the style of Jackson, his opposition claims the moral high ground with the passion of the abolitionists. And just as McConnell legislates like Pickney, Warren voices principled opposition in the prophetic mode of Adams.
In the words often attributed to (but apparently never spoken by) Mark Twain, "History doesn't repeat itself; it rhymes."
The Original 'Gag Rule'
McConnell's gag rule, like Pickney's gag rule, was intended to stifle a burgeoning popular movement and keep its increasingly effective arguments from reaching the floor of Congress.
The original "gag rule," as the press dubbed it, was written on February 8, 1836, when a special Committee in the House of Representatives, chaired by Pickney, recommended the following resolution:
“That all petitions, memorial, resolutions, propositions or papers, relating in any way or to any extent whatever to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid upon the table and that further action whatever shall be had thereon.”
Five months later, the House approved the rule. Adams was forbidden from challenging the slaveholding order, but he did not rest. There was no Twitter in 1836. There was no #LetJQAspeak hashtag. But there was an outpouring of public support for the former president and his creative and stalwart defense of American rights.
As recounted in "Arguing Against Slavery," Adams threw himself into struggle against southern tyranny with the same sort of formidable parliamentary skills that Warren brought to Wednesday's struggle. He battled the slaveholders for the next three sessions of Congress to vindicate the right of the people to petition Congress.
If history is any guide, Elizabeth Warren is the new John Quincy Adams, the leader of a principled congressional minority defending the exercise of American rights against those who would excise them from the annals of Congress.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politi ... ery-debate
Blue » Thu Feb 09, 2017 7:14 am wrote:As for Elizabeth Warren now being the object of hate transferred from the Hillary effigy, funny how you guys never offer a real world alternative. Just smack down the bitch.
Wombaticus Rex wrote:Blue » Thu Feb 09, 2017 7:14 am wrote:As for Elizabeth Warren now being the object of hate transferred from the Hillary effigy, funny how you guys never offer a real world alternative. Just smack down the bitch.
Well. There currently is none.
Tulsi Gabbard is alienating the donor class with her Syria talk right now and Cory Booker is a closeted gay man. Joe Biden is a prolific fondler, Tim Kaine is persona non grata, Michelle Obama won't run.
Lately I've been seeing people put forward Deval Patrick, which might turn out pretty well for them, especially since he's not that well known and has a good record for both law & order and progressive causes. Gillibrand and Klobuchar are in the same boat, potential is there.
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Feb 09, 2017 6:03 pm wrote:Blue » Thu Feb 09, 2017 7:14 am wrote:As for Elizabeth Warren now being the object of hate transferred from the Hillary effigy, funny how you guys never offer a real world alternative. Just smack down the bitch.
Well. There currently is none.
Tulsi Gabbard is alienating the donor class with her Syria talk right now and Cory Booker is a closeted gay man. Joe Biden is a prolific fondler, Tim Kaine is persona non grata, Michelle Obama won't run.
Lately I've been seeing people put forward Deval Patrick, which might turn out pretty well for them, especially since he's not that well known and has a good record for both law & order and progressive causes. Gillibrand and Klobuchar are in the same boat, potential is there.
Blue » Thu Feb 09, 2017 7:14 am wrote:As slad has requested many times: Please give us the list. Which sources are allowed? Which ones are beyond reproach? Infallible? Absolute Truth, All the Time?
A Propaganda Model
Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Manufacturing Consent, 1988
https://chomsky.info/consent01/
This constant harassment [sic!!!] about links to mainstream media only serves to elevate conflict and create a distraction. Everyone here knows you have to take MSM with a grain of salt and read between the lines.
Elevating bloggers or anonymous internet posts as inherently more better, more honest, more truthier than known media is illogical.
As for Elizabeth Warren now being the object of hate transferred from the Hillary effigy, funny how you guys never offer a real world alternative. Just smack down the bitch.
As slad has requested many times: Please give us the list. Which sources are allowed?
Is Brand New Congress the Future of Progressive Politics?
The goal is audacious: harness the enthusiasm and fund-raising muscle of the Sanders campaign to elect an entirely new Congress committed to the same platform.
“The Republicans I talk to don’t feel any more represented by their party than the Sanders Democrats,” says Corbin Trent. It’s a steamy night a few weeks after the California primary, in a hall belonging to Local 737 of the United Auto Workers. Bernie Sanders hasn’t yet endorsed Hillary Clinton, but even his most die-hard supporters know he isn’t going to be president. Trent, the founder of Tennessee for Bernie, is talking about the widening gap between Americans and the people who are supposed to represent us in Washington.
“We have a Congress made up mostly of millionaires who spend all their time talking to each other,” he says. “Our country is becoming an oligarchy.”
When Trent finishes, Zack Exley stands up. The people in the room are all Bernie volunteers, and Exley, a senior advisor to the Sanders campaign, begins by acknowledging their grief—and their frustration with the Vermont-based national campaign. “I was one of those people up in Burlington, and I want you to know you guys did 10 times what was required to win. In a whole bunch of ways, we let you down.”
Exley and Trent are a formidable double act. As the inventors of the “Bernie barnstorm”—a concentrated training session designed to turn green volunteers into the disciplined organizers who went on to build the biggest grassroots electoral movement this country has ever seen—they’ve been on the road since September. Exley, a tall, lean man with spiky silver hair and geeky glasses that make him look more like a film director than a veteran political operator, worked on Howard Dean’s pioneering campaign and then for MoveOn.org. A brilliant online organizer, he was chief revenue officer for the Wikimedia Foundation before joining the Sanders campaign—whose success in raising money from small donors proved that relying on corporate funding is a choice, not a necessity.
Trent is younger and more solid; with his calm good humor, he’d be an asset in a bar fight. He also seems less self-conscious—at least here in his home state, where his familiar accent and easy manner soften the radicalism of his message. While both Trent and Exley share their audience’s acute frustration with the outcome of a campaign that came tantalizingly close to victory, they’re in Nashville not to mourn, but to organize.
Their pitch is simple: Even if Sanders had won the nomination, and then the election, his ability to effect change—to bring about the political revolution—would have been severely limited by a dysfunctional Congress in thrall to corporate interests. So why not harness the energy, enthusiasm, national organization, and fund-raising muscle of the Sanders volunteers to elect a brand-new Congress—all at once, in 2018—committed to the same platform of greater economic equality, climate justice, civil rights, criminal-justice reform, and fair trade? Why not elect a Congress that not only looks like us—more women, more people of color—but that will actually work for us instead of for lobbyists and special interests?
This was the start of the Brand New Congress (BNC) campaign. “It sounds like a crazy idea,” admits Exley—and if anyone else were behind it, I’d probably agree. But in state after state, wherever I found Sanders volunteers phone-banking, canvassing, or holding Bernie Fest events to recruit their neighbors, when I asked how they managed to do so much with so little direction from the national campaign, the answer was always the same: “This guy Zack Exley came down for a couple of days…”
Wendy Sejour, a veteran of Florida progressive politics who got scores of volunteers onto the streets of Miami—right in Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s backyard—tells me: “We put out the word four to five days in advance. Found a local union hall. A hundred people showed up. Basically it’s just Corbin and Zack. They talked about what the campaign was doing, and how they wanted us to fit in.” With the national campaign focused on the four early states, the rest of the country was left to Exley and Trent’s “distributed organizing.” And while the national office can claim credit for Sanders’s stunning victory in New Hampshire, it lost Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina. Meanwhile, the volunteers went on to win another 22 primaries. Sejour has already signed on to BNC.
So when Exley says “I think we can do better than 40, 50 seats. I think we can pick up a couple of hundred seats,” I’m inclined to take him seriously. Because of what he’s already accomplished. And because of the numbers.
* * *
“Our job is to identify 100,000 people in each district who are pissed off with Congress,” says Debra Mayes, one of the group’s African American–outreach team leaders. “In most districts, you only need 30,000 votes to win the primary.” (Making a conscious, early, transparent effort to attract a truly diverse team is one way Brand New Congress is trying to learn from the mistakes of the Sanders campaign; this is one of the fruits of what Exley calls “this shared experience of how things should not be done.”)
For decades, pundits have lamented the decline in voter participation, especially in midterm elections. Brand New Congress looks at those figures the way the Barrow Gang looked at backcountry banks—as opportunities. “Turnout in midterm primaries is typically between 8 and 13 percent,” says Exley. And if the idea of a small, ideologically cohesive force challenging the party establishment sounds familiar, that’s not an accident either.
Like the Tea Party, BNC is in part an expression of frustration with a status quo that paralyzes government’s machinery while allowing insiders to prosper. But while the Tea Party (aided, funded, and directed by donors like the Koch brothers) works to pull the center of debate to the right, targeting only wayward Republicans, BNC aims not to take over the Democratic Party, but to do an end run around both parties, returning government to the people.
“We’re looking for people who are really good at what they do, with a deep history of service—teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters—who had chances to sell out but refused. That guy who keeps turning down promotions so he can stay in the union. The principal who doesn’t want to become a superintendent. The nurse who keeps everything together,” says Exley.
“Think of what we’re doing as a reboot of Congress,” he continues. In Democratic districts, the group’s strategy is straightforward: make sure every corporate or blue-dog Democrat faces an aggressive primary challenge like the one Tim Canova, a law professor and Sanders supporter in Florida, is now running against Wasserman Schultz. “And if we lose those primaries, we’re gonna run our candidates again as independents,” says Exley.
What’s new—and what distinguishes BNC from efforts like the Working Families Party, or from the Sanders-led Our Revolution—is the group’s commitment to finding progressive Republicans to run in red states and districts. “That probably makes working with us a nonstarter for Our Revolution,” says Trent.
“In Tennessee, the candidates would be mostly Republicans,” Mayes adds. What about the platform? “They’d be running on Bernie’s platform—plus a bigger-scale jobs program,” she says. Including abortion and gay rights? “Non-negotiable,” she replies.
Do such Republicans exist? “We live in my wife’s hometown in the Missouri Ozarks,” says Exley. “We go to church on Sundays. Everyone you meet is a Republican, but there are plenty of people who really believe that ‘love thy neighbor’ stuff in the Bible.”
“All of our candidates will have to support the living wage, access to health care, and education,” says Trent. “They’ll have to be committed to civil rights and social justice—and opposed to trade deals that don’t help us as a country. But if you want to win here in Tennessee, that also means they’re going to have to be Republicans. The First Congressional District here is R plus-20”—that is, a 20-point Republican advantage. “We’d be in a primary with [Tea Party stalwart] Phil Roe. And if you know Phil Roe, you’re gonna be excited to see him go home.”
Even among the Bernie faithful in Nashville, it isn’t an easy sell. “I’m a lifelong Democrat,” Sidney Bennett tells me after the meeting. “I would have a really hard time supporting Republicans to do anything. They just don’t see the value of social progress.”
Officials in the Working Families Party—who have been struggling to build an independent left faction inside the Democratic Party for nearly 20 years—dismiss Brand New Congress as a distraction. Others on the more “movement” side of the Sanders campaign remain dubious about the group’s investment in electoral politics—and skeptical about its ability to find Republicans, even nominal Republicans, willing to run on the Sanders platform.
Saikat Chakrabarti, the Sanders campaign’s director of organizing technology who is now part of BNC’s “core leadership,” says the group’s critics underestimate two critical factors. “There are so few things 80 percent of Americans agree on. But regardless of party affiliation, they agree that Congress is broken,” he says. The BNC’s other secret weapon is the size of the task. Far from being daunted, he says, “people get excited when it’s something big. Something transformational. When you ask them to do a lot.”
Yolanda Gonzalez, a teacher from California, spent two months traveling Nevada with a life-size cardboard cutout of Sanders and a bullhorn, spreading the message through the state’s immigrant communities. When we meet in Tennessee, she seems exhilarated, not discouraged—though when Exley broaches a plan for a “What’s Killing White People?” tour to persuade working-class white voters to support BNC, she rolls her eyes.
The next time I cross paths with Gonzalez is in Philadelphia, where she’s a member of the California delegation to the Democratic National Convention, festooned with Sanders buttons and shouting “Lock her up!” as part of the #NeverHillary brigade. “We definitely have some Bernie-or-bust folks,” Trent tells me a few days later. “People who believe the DNC is completely broken. But we also have plenty of pragmatists”—like Chakrabarti, who e-mailed me after Clinton’s speech to say he had “some hope that she might try to do something real. Hillary Clinton is someone who follows the tide, and…she’s possibly begun to realize the tide has shifted.”
Wombaticus Rex » Fri Feb 10, 2017 3:36 am wrote:I did not appreciate the fact the progressive, true believer wing of MoveOn has turned on their masters -- long overdue and quite interesting.
https://www.thenation.com/article/is-br ... -politics/Is Brand New Congress the Future of Progressive Politics?
The goal is audacious: harness the enthusiasm and fund-raising muscle of the Sanders campaign to elect an entirely new Congress committed to the same platform.
“The Republicans I talk to don’t feel any more represented by their party than the Sanders Democrats,” says Corbin Trent. It’s a steamy night a few weeks after the California primary, in a hall belonging to Local 737 of the United Auto Workers. Bernie Sanders hasn’t yet endorsed Hillary Clinton, but even his most die-hard supporters know he isn’t going to be president. Trent, the founder of Tennessee for Bernie, is talking about the widening gap between Americans and the people who are supposed to represent us in Washington.
“We have a Congress made up mostly of millionaires who spend all their time talking to each other,” he says. “Our country is becoming an oligarchy.”
When Trent finishes, Zack Exley stands up. The people in the room are all Bernie volunteers, and Exley, a senior advisor to the Sanders campaign, begins by acknowledging their grief—and their frustration with the Vermont-based national campaign. “I was one of those people up in Burlington, and I want you to know you guys did 10 times what was required to win. In a whole bunch of ways, we let you down.”
Exley and Trent are a formidable double act. As the inventors of the “Bernie barnstorm”—a concentrated training session designed to turn green volunteers into the disciplined organizers who went on to build the biggest grassroots electoral movement this country has ever seen—they’ve been on the road since September. Exley, a tall, lean man with spiky silver hair and geeky glasses that make him look more like a film director than a veteran political operator, worked on Howard Dean’s pioneering campaign and then for MoveOn.org. A brilliant online organizer, he was chief revenue officer for the Wikimedia Foundation before joining the Sanders campaign—whose success in raising money from small donors proved that relying on corporate funding is a choice, not a necessity.
Trent is younger and more solid; with his calm good humor, he’d be an asset in a bar fight. He also seems less self-conscious—at least here in his home state, where his familiar accent and easy manner soften the radicalism of his message. While both Trent and Exley share their audience’s acute frustration with the outcome of a campaign that came tantalizingly close to victory, they’re in Nashville not to mourn, but to organize.
Their pitch is simple: Even if Sanders had won the nomination, and then the election, his ability to effect change—to bring about the political revolution—would have been severely limited by a dysfunctional Congress in thrall to corporate interests. So why not harness the energy, enthusiasm, national organization, and fund-raising muscle of the Sanders volunteers to elect a brand-new Congress—all at once, in 2018—committed to the same platform of greater economic equality, climate justice, civil rights, criminal-justice reform, and fair trade? Why not elect a Congress that not only looks like us—more women, more people of color—but that will actually work for us instead of for lobbyists and special interests?
This was the start of the Brand New Congress (BNC) campaign. “It sounds like a crazy idea,” admits Exley—and if anyone else were behind it, I’d probably agree. But in state after state, wherever I found Sanders volunteers phone-banking, canvassing, or holding Bernie Fest events to recruit their neighbors, when I asked how they managed to do so much with so little direction from the national campaign, the answer was always the same: “This guy Zack Exley came down for a couple of days…”
Wendy Sejour, a veteran of Florida progressive politics who got scores of volunteers onto the streets of Miami—right in Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s backyard—tells me: “We put out the word four to five days in advance. Found a local union hall. A hundred people showed up. Basically it’s just Corbin and Zack. They talked about what the campaign was doing, and how they wanted us to fit in.” With the national campaign focused on the four early states, the rest of the country was left to Exley and Trent’s “distributed organizing.” And while the national office can claim credit for Sanders’s stunning victory in New Hampshire, it lost Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina. Meanwhile, the volunteers went on to win another 22 primaries. Sejour has already signed on to BNC.
So when Exley says “I think we can do better than 40, 50 seats. I think we can pick up a couple of hundred seats,” I’m inclined to take him seriously. Because of what he’s already accomplished. And because of the numbers.
* * *
“Our job is to identify 100,000 people in each district who are pissed off with Congress,” says Debra Mayes, one of the group’s African American–outreach team leaders. “In most districts, you only need 30,000 votes to win the primary.” (Making a conscious, early, transparent effort to attract a truly diverse team is one way Brand New Congress is trying to learn from the mistakes of the Sanders campaign; this is one of the fruits of what Exley calls “this shared experience of how things should not be done.”)
For decades, pundits have lamented the decline in voter participation, especially in midterm elections. Brand New Congress looks at those figures the way the Barrow Gang looked at backcountry banks—as opportunities. “Turnout in midterm primaries is typically between 8 and 13 percent,” says Exley. And if the idea of a small, ideologically cohesive force challenging the party establishment sounds familiar, that’s not an accident either.
Like the Tea Party, BNC is in part an expression of frustration with a status quo that paralyzes government’s machinery while allowing insiders to prosper. But while the Tea Party (aided, funded, and directed by donors like the Koch brothers) works to pull the center of debate to the right, targeting only wayward Republicans, BNC aims not to take over the Democratic Party, but to do an end run around both parties, returning government to the people.
“We’re looking for people who are really good at what they do, with a deep history of service—teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters—who had chances to sell out but refused. That guy who keeps turning down promotions so he can stay in the union. The principal who doesn’t want to become a superintendent. The nurse who keeps everything together,” says Exley.
“Think of what we’re doing as a reboot of Congress,” he continues. In Democratic districts, the group’s strategy is straightforward: make sure every corporate or blue-dog Democrat faces an aggressive primary challenge like the one Tim Canova, a law professor and Sanders supporter in Florida, is now running against Wasserman Schultz. “And if we lose those primaries, we’re gonna run our candidates again as independents,” says Exley.
What’s new—and what distinguishes BNC from efforts like the Working Families Party, or from the Sanders-led Our Revolution—is the group’s commitment to finding progressive Republicans to run in red states and districts. “That probably makes working with us a nonstarter for Our Revolution,” says Trent.
“In Tennessee, the candidates would be mostly Republicans,” Mayes adds. What about the platform? “They’d be running on Bernie’s platform—plus a bigger-scale jobs program,” she says. Including abortion and gay rights? “Non-negotiable,” she replies.
Do such Republicans exist? “We live in my wife’s hometown in the Missouri Ozarks,” says Exley. “We go to church on Sundays. Everyone you meet is a Republican, but there are plenty of people who really believe that ‘love thy neighbor’ stuff in the Bible.”
“All of our candidates will have to support the living wage, access to health care, and education,” says Trent. “They’ll have to be committed to civil rights and social justice—and opposed to trade deals that don’t help us as a country. But if you want to win here in Tennessee, that also means they’re going to have to be Republicans. The First Congressional District here is R plus-20”—that is, a 20-point Republican advantage. “We’d be in a primary with [Tea Party stalwart] Phil Roe. And if you know Phil Roe, you’re gonna be excited to see him go home.”
Even among the Bernie faithful in Nashville, it isn’t an easy sell. “I’m a lifelong Democrat,” Sidney Bennett tells me after the meeting. “I would have a really hard time supporting Republicans to do anything. They just don’t see the value of social progress.”
Officials in the Working Families Party—who have been struggling to build an independent left faction inside the Democratic Party for nearly 20 years—dismiss Brand New Congress as a distraction. Others on the more “movement” side of the Sanders campaign remain dubious about the group’s investment in electoral politics—and skeptical about its ability to find Republicans, even nominal Republicans, willing to run on the Sanders platform.
Saikat Chakrabarti, the Sanders campaign’s director of organizing technology who is now part of BNC’s “core leadership,” says the group’s critics underestimate two critical factors. “There are so few things 80 percent of Americans agree on. But regardless of party affiliation, they agree that Congress is broken,” he says. The BNC’s other secret weapon is the size of the task. Far from being daunted, he says, “people get excited when it’s something big. Something transformational. When you ask them to do a lot.”
Yolanda Gonzalez, a teacher from California, spent two months traveling Nevada with a life-size cardboard cutout of Sanders and a bullhorn, spreading the message through the state’s immigrant communities. When we meet in Tennessee, she seems exhilarated, not discouraged—though when Exley broaches a plan for a “What’s Killing White People?” tour to persuade working-class white voters to support BNC, she rolls her eyes.
The next time I cross paths with Gonzalez is in Philadelphia, where she’s a member of the California delegation to the Democratic National Convention, festooned with Sanders buttons and shouting “Lock her up!” as part of the #NeverHillary brigade. “We definitely have some Bernie-or-bust folks,” Trent tells me a few days later. “People who believe the DNC is completely broken. But we also have plenty of pragmatists”—like Chakrabarti, who e-mailed me after Clinton’s speech to say he had “some hope that she might try to do something real. Hillary Clinton is someone who follows the tide, and…she’s possibly begun to realize the tide has shifted.”
More at the link, I've just hit my limit with the Nation's shitty, shitty website for tonight
Shout out to "Web 3.0" innovators who turned the entire internet into the same flavor of crap
INDIVISIBLE
A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR RESISTING THE TRUMP AGENDA
Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.
https://www.indivisibleguide.com
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Feb 09, 2017 10:36 pm wrote:I did not appreciate the fact the progressive, true believer wing of MoveOn has turned on their masters -- long overdue and quite interesting.
https://www.thenation.com/article/is-br ... -politics/Is Brand New Congress the Future of Progressive Politics?
The goal is audacious: harness the enthusiasm and fund-raising muscle of the Sanders campaign to elect an entirely new Congress committed to the same platform.
“The Republicans I talk to don’t feel any more represented by their party than the Sanders Democrats,” says Corbin Trent. It’s a steamy night a few weeks after the California primary, in a hall belonging to Local 737 of the United Auto Workers. Bernie Sanders hasn’t yet endorsed Hillary Clinton, but even his most die-hard supporters know he isn’t going to be president. Trent, the founder of Tennessee for Bernie, is talking about the widening gap between Americans and the people who are supposed to represent us in Washington.
“We have a Congress made up mostly of millionaires who spend all their time talking to each other,” he says. “Our country is becoming an oligarchy.”
When Trent finishes, Zack Exley stands up. The people in the room are all Bernie volunteers, and Exley, a senior advisor to the Sanders campaign, begins by acknowledging their grief—and their frustration with the Vermont-based national campaign. “I was one of those people up in Burlington, and I want you to know you guys did 10 times what was required to win. In a whole bunch of ways, we let you down.”
Exley and Trent are a formidable double act. As the inventors of the “Bernie barnstorm”—a concentrated training session designed to turn green volunteers into the disciplined organizers who went on to build the biggest grassroots electoral movement this country has ever seen—they’ve been on the road since September. Exley, a tall, lean man with spiky silver hair and geeky glasses that make him look more like a film director than a veteran political operator, worked on Howard Dean’s pioneering campaign and then for MoveOn.org. A brilliant online organizer, he was chief revenue officer for the Wikimedia Foundation before joining the Sanders campaign—whose success in raising money from small donors proved that relying on corporate funding is a choice, not a necessity.
Trent is younger and more solid; with his calm good humor, he’d be an asset in a bar fight. He also seems less self-conscious—at least here in his home state, where his familiar accent and easy manner soften the radicalism of his message. While both Trent and Exley share their audience’s acute frustration with the outcome of a campaign that came tantalizingly close to victory, they’re in Nashville not to mourn, but to organize.
Their pitch is simple: Even if Sanders had won the nomination, and then the election, his ability to effect change—to bring about the political revolution—would have been severely limited by a dysfunctional Congress in thrall to corporate interests. So why not harness the energy, enthusiasm, national organization, and fund-raising muscle of the Sanders volunteers to elect a brand-new Congress—all at once, in 2018—committed to the same platform of greater economic equality, climate justice, civil rights, criminal-justice reform, and fair trade? Why not elect a Congress that not only looks like us—more women, more people of color—but that will actually work for us instead of for lobbyists and special interests?
This was the start of the Brand New Congress (BNC) campaign. “It sounds like a crazy idea,” admits Exley—and if anyone else were behind it, I’d probably agree. But in state after state, wherever I found Sanders volunteers phone-banking, canvassing, or holding Bernie Fest events to recruit their neighbors, when I asked how they managed to do so much with so little direction from the national campaign, the answer was always the same: “This guy Zack Exley came down for a couple of days…”
Wendy Sejour, a veteran of Florida progressive politics who got scores of volunteers onto the streets of Miami—right in Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s backyard—tells me: “We put out the word four to five days in advance. Found a local union hall. A hundred people showed up. Basically it’s just Corbin and Zack. They talked about what the campaign was doing, and how they wanted us to fit in.” With the national campaign focused on the four early states, the rest of the country was left to Exley and Trent’s “distributed organizing.” And while the national office can claim credit for Sanders’s stunning victory in New Hampshire, it lost Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina. Meanwhile, the volunteers went on to win another 22 primaries. Sejour has already signed on to BNC.
So when Exley says “I think we can do better than 40, 50 seats. I think we can pick up a couple of hundred seats,” I’m inclined to take him seriously. Because of what he’s already accomplished. And because of the numbers.
* * *
“Our job is to identify 100,000 people in each district who are pissed off with Congress,” says Debra Mayes, one of the group’s African American–outreach team leaders. “In most districts, you only need 30,000 votes to win the primary.” (Making a conscious, early, transparent effort to attract a truly diverse team is one way Brand New Congress is trying to learn from the mistakes of the Sanders campaign; this is one of the fruits of what Exley calls “this shared experience of how things should not be done.”)
For decades, pundits have lamented the decline in voter participation, especially in midterm elections. Brand New Congress looks at those figures the way the Barrow Gang looked at backcountry banks—as opportunities. “Turnout in midterm primaries is typically between 8 and 13 percent,” says Exley. And if the idea of a small, ideologically cohesive force challenging the party establishment sounds familiar, that’s not an accident either.
Like the Tea Party, BNC is in part an expression of frustration with a status quo that paralyzes government’s machinery while allowing insiders to prosper. But while the Tea Party (aided, funded, and directed by donors like the Koch brothers) works to pull the center of debate to the right, targeting only wayward Republicans, BNC aims not to take over the Democratic Party, but to do an end run around both parties, returning government to the people.
“We’re looking for people who are really good at what they do, with a deep history of service—teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters—who had chances to sell out but refused. That guy who keeps turning down promotions so he can stay in the union. The principal who doesn’t want to become a superintendent. The nurse who keeps everything together,” says Exley.
“Think of what we’re doing as a reboot of Congress,” he continues. In Democratic districts, the group’s strategy is straightforward: make sure every corporate or blue-dog Democrat faces an aggressive primary challenge like the one Tim Canova, a law professor and Sanders supporter in Florida, is now running against Wasserman Schultz. “And if we lose those primaries, we’re gonna run our candidates again as independents,” says Exley.
What’s new—and what distinguishes BNC from efforts like the Working Families Party, or from the Sanders-led Our Revolution—is the group’s commitment to finding progressive Republicans to run in red states and districts. “That probably makes working with us a nonstarter for Our Revolution,” says Trent.
“In Tennessee, the candidates would be mostly Republicans,” Mayes adds. What about the platform? “They’d be running on Bernie’s platform—plus a bigger-scale jobs program,” she says. Including abortion and gay rights? “Non-negotiable,” she replies.
Do such Republicans exist? “We live in my wife’s hometown in the Missouri Ozarks,” says Exley. “We go to church on Sundays. Everyone you meet is a Republican, but there are plenty of people who really believe that ‘love thy neighbor’ stuff in the Bible.”
“All of our candidates will have to support the living wage, access to health care, and education,” says Trent. “They’ll have to be committed to civil rights and social justice—and opposed to trade deals that don’t help us as a country. But if you want to win here in Tennessee, that also means they’re going to have to be Republicans. The First Congressional District here is R plus-20”—that is, a 20-point Republican advantage. “We’d be in a primary with [Tea Party stalwart] Phil Roe. And if you know Phil Roe, you’re gonna be excited to see him go home.”
Even among the Bernie faithful in Nashville, it isn’t an easy sell. “I’m a lifelong Democrat,” Sidney Bennett tells me after the meeting. “I would have a really hard time supporting Republicans to do anything. They just don’t see the value of social progress.”
Officials in the Working Families Party—who have been struggling to build an independent left faction inside the Democratic Party for nearly 20 years—dismiss Brand New Congress as a distraction. Others on the more “movement” side of the Sanders campaign remain dubious about the group’s investment in electoral politics—and skeptical about its ability to find Republicans, even nominal Republicans, willing to run on the Sanders platform.
Saikat Chakrabarti, the Sanders campaign’s director of organizing technology who is now part of BNC’s “core leadership,” says the group’s critics underestimate two critical factors. “There are so few things 80 percent of Americans agree on. But regardless of party affiliation, they agree that Congress is broken,” he says. The BNC’s other secret weapon is the size of the task. Far from being daunted, he says, “people get excited when it’s something big. Something transformational. When you ask them to do a lot.”
Yolanda Gonzalez, a teacher from California, spent two months traveling Nevada with a life-size cardboard cutout of Sanders and a bullhorn, spreading the message through the state’s immigrant communities. When we meet in Tennessee, she seems exhilarated, not discouraged—though when Exley broaches a plan for a “What’s Killing White People?” tour to persuade working-class white voters to support BNC, she rolls her eyes.
The next time I cross paths with Gonzalez is in Philadelphia, where she’s a member of the California delegation to the Democratic National Convention, festooned with Sanders buttons and shouting “Lock her up!” as part of the #NeverHillary brigade. “We definitely have some Bernie-or-bust folks,” Trent tells me a few days later. “People who believe the DNC is completely broken. But we also have plenty of pragmatists”—like Chakrabarti, who e-mailed me after Clinton’s speech to say he had “some hope that she might try to do something real. Hillary Clinton is someone who follows the tide, and…she’s possibly begun to realize the tide has shifted.”
More at the link, I've just hit my limit with the Nation's shitty, shitty website for tonight
Shout out to "Web 3.0" innovators who turned the entire internet into the same flavor of crap
In Meeting With Senators, Trump Referred to Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas Several Times
Source: Politico, via Mediaite
In Meeting With Senators, Trump Referred to Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas Several Times
by Justin Baragona 8:03 pm, February 10th, 2017
In a meeting with Democratic and Republican members of the Senate, President Donald Trump brought up a couple of blasts from the past. According to Politico,* Trump told the ten senators sitting in the room that he would have won New Hampshire in the election** if there wouldnt have been thousands of people bussed in from Massachusetts to illegally vote. This was, of course, doubling down on his previous, unsubstantiated claims of massive voter fraud.
However, he wasnt done there. ... With Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in the news over being silenced ion the Senate floor due to her reading a letter from Coretta Scott King, Trump decided to pull his old Pocahontas insult out of mothballs.
During the meeting, Trump also reacted to Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren being silenced on the Senate floor while trying to read a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King and in objection to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions before he was confirmed as attorney general. According to participants in Thursdays meeting, Trump referred to Warren several times as Pocahontas, the moniker he gave her during his campaign, and told the Democrats he was glad Warren is becoming the face of your party.
During the presidential campaign, Trump continually lobbed the attack at Warren, basing it on claims that she lied about her Native American heritage. Looks like he isnt done using it.
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* http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/t ... ing-234909
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Feb 09, 2017 10:36 pm wrote:
I did not appreciate the fact the progressive, true believer wing of MoveOn has turned on their masters -- long overdue and quite interesting.
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