Month: November 2014

Donna Edwards for DCCC chair

by digby

We need a DCCC chair who leads with values, elevates the discourse and inspires action. That leader is Congresswoman Donna Edwards. I know first-hand how effective, inspiring and wise Congresswoman Edwards is. In 2012, I was the Democratic nominee for United States Congress in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. I ran as a progressive Democrat in a conservative, rural district against a Republican congressman who spent $2.4 million against me. Every pundit and campaign analyzer, from left to right, said our campaign didn’t stand a chance. The DCCC listened to the pundits and wrote us off. Despite that, we received 48% of the vote, making us one of the most competitive races in the nation and out-performing the vast majority of candidates that the DCCC prioritized as “Red to Blue.”  

Throughout the campaign, we showed the DCCC that we could win. We hit our targets in field and finance. We had polling that showed the race was competitive. We were told that if we kept working hard, they’d come in and help us. The help from the DCCC organization never came. I remember how demoralized my staff and supporters were the final months of the campaign. We were like soldiers surrounded by enemy forces, assured that reinforcements would come, and realizing in our final moments that we’d be left behind. Luckily, like a hero who does what’s right instead of what’s told, Congresswoman Donna Edwards came to our rescue.  

She not only endorsed the campaign. In the final month, she flew to Ithaca, NY, and rallied my supporters and staff. She gave us, and especially me, the morale boost needed to push onward. What made her visit especially powerful is that she is a leader within the DCCC. It was the little signal to our team that we had a fighting chance. Even though the DCCC as a whole ignored us, she took individual initiative to help us. After she came, there was an electric feeling of hope among my team. After months of being demoralized by the DCCC, she gave us the inspiration to continue the fight.  

That’s the kind of leader the DCCC needs. Yes, Congresswoman Edwards raises money and works hard. Plenty of contenders for DCCC chair do. What makes her unique, though, is her values. She’s compassionate, open-minded, and progressive. She knows how small investments in people can yield tremendous returns later on. She’s simultaneously strategic and tactical, caring and analytical. I believe she can change the course of the DCCC and the Democratic Party. 

That’s just a piece of it.  I urge you to click over and read the whole thing.

Edwards is a real progressive. She’s also a savvy leader who will do everything she can to create a Democratic majority.  But unlike those who’ve been doing this job since the Rahm era, she’s very smart and has a creatively strategic mind.  Simply put, she is not going to miss opportunities to win with progressives like Shinagawa and she’s not going to assume that the only way to win is by being as conservative as possible. She may very well back some conservatives — sometimes there’s no other choice.  But she will not sabotage progressives in races they can win and she won’t set out of recruit only the most conservative candidates she can find regardless of whether or not they are the best choice for the district. She’s not a member of that club that made a bunch of promises to protect each other from liberal incursions on their gravy train.

Howie points us to a link to this Move On petition to have House majority leader Pelosi name Edwards to the job instead of one of the usual suspects like the Wall Street friendly Jim Himes.

And he included this awesome video of Edwards:

What can possibly excuse the police abusing a blind man?

by digby

Does it get any more callous that this?

On August 27th at approximately 8:30 pm, four plain clothes Miami Dade Police officers pulled onto a dead end street in South Dade and arrested three young black men. The scene was captured on video camera.

According to the police report, the three men were arrested because officers claimed to see them passing what appeared to be a marijuana cigarette. When the officers approached, they said they found a marijuana cigarette on the ground near where the men were standing.

They arrested the men for possession of marijuana – a misdemeanor.

Two of the men were released on the spot after signing tickets promising to appear in court.
The third man, Tannie “T-Man” Burke wasn’t given that option. Instead police officers handcuffed him and led him to the back of an unmarked car where he appeared to have trouble finding the door.

“He’s blind dumb***,” the man videotaping the incident is heard saying. “If you don’t tell him he’s walking to the car how the (expletive) is he going to know?”

“T-Man what are they taking you for?” a woman shouts.

“I don’t know,” Burke replies.

Blind since birth, the 21-year-old Burke can’t see anything out of his right eye, and is only able to make out general shapes and lights with his left.

He’s able to navigate around his block in the daytime but is afraid to wander too far at night.

“I’ve got to be with somebody, or I’ve got to call somebody and have them meet me at this spot and I’ll walk with them,” Burke told CBS4’s Jim DeFede.

For 20 minutes Burke estimates the officers drove him around before finally releasing him in a dark and desolate section of South Dade nearly a mile from his home.

“They put me off somewhere in Goulds. There were no street lights and no houses,” he said. “It was just dark.”

CBS4′s Jim DeFede asked, “Did you tell the officers you were blind?”

“Yes I told them in the car I was blind and I couldn’t see,” Burke said.

DeFede then asked, “Did they seem to care?”

“Not that I know of,” he answered. “They put me out somewhere where they aren’t no street lights and no houses.”

Out on the edge of some vacant farm land, they made him sign an arrest form he couldn’t read.
Burke said he asked them to drop him off closer to his house, but they refused.

He had no cell phone. The police had taken it.

DeFede asked, “Were you mad or angry?”

“I was trying to get home. That’s all it was. I was just trying to find my way home,” he said.
Unsure of where to go, Burke started walking. He kept his right foot on the road and his left foot in the weeds to prevent him from wandering into the middle of the street where he might get hit by a car.

“I went down the street until I found some light and I stayed on the same street going back and forth until somebody came,” he said.

Eventually, he came upon a stranger who helped him get home.

It’s disgusting and they should be all be fired. How can they possibly explain this behavior other than a sadistic desire to be cruel to a blind man?

You can see the whole report at this link.

Secrets and more secrets

by digby

I wonder how many more secret programs there are out there that nobody, not judges, not lawmakers not the people know about? This one isn’t about terrorists. They say it’s about killers and drug dealers:

The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

This is a secret program, of course. Nobody knows if judges who sign warrants have any idea that this technology is being used. Nobody knows whether or not they’re using it the way they say thy’re using it. Because it’s secret.

But never fear, they’ve assured us that they are only using it to catch bad guys.They have no interest in anything you might be doing.  Well, unless you’re doing something wrong.  If you are an upstanding citizen there’s little reason to worry that the police might be re-routing your phone calls without your knowledge right? Why should you care?

In fact, we really need to re-think that whole 4th Amendment thing altogether. When you think about it, you shouldn’t object to the police ransacking your house and your car without any probable cause either. They could be looking for someone they know is in your neighborhood. If you have nothing to hide in your home why would you object? Sure, they might find something they think is suspicious in your house when they go on their fishing expedition but maybe you shouldn’t have suspicious things in your house if you don’t want the cops finding it, eh?

This is what we call liberty.

What’s your land doing under our toll road?

by Tom Sullivan

Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? Sadly, there’s no hooker with a heart of gold to melt the cold hearts of corporate raiders stripping America for parts. (Where’s Julia Roberts when you really need her?) But some people are, however, finally seeing the vultures for who they really are. Take the Trans-Texas Corridor, for example [emphasis mine]:

The TTC, a proposed 4,000-mile toll road, rail and utility project, died a death of a thousand cuts in 2010. First proposed as a much-needed infrastructure investment, the well-intentioned project grew into a monstrosity of politically connected contractors, private property concerns and conspiracy theories. The biggest blow to TTC was statewide opposition to granting Spanish-owned developer Cintra a 50-year, multibillion-dollar deal to control and collect tolls on a concrete corridor bisecting the very heart of Texas. The plan even proposed turning over to Cintra land seized by eminent domain, where the company could franchize roadside amenities like hotels and rest stops to supplement its collected fees.

This degree of private control over infrastructure raised the spectre of a highway built more to benefit contractors than Texas communities. The toll road could bypass towns and exits could be designed to feed contractor-owned fast food joints instead of local restaurants.

Kelo v. City of New London. How quickly we forget.

Now, I’m sure you could find Texans in 2003 who missed the joke in asking what our oil was doing under Iraq’s sand. It feels a little different, doesn’t it, when a foreign conglomerate asks Texans what their land is doing under its proposed toll road?

But that’s not what the article in the Houston Chronicle is really about. It’s about net neutrality and another kind of toll road. Here come the free marketeers again, for whom “competition” is just another gimmicky buzzword used to dazzle the rubes:

These companies also want to prohibit cities from building their own online freeways that could compete with private cyber toll roads. Texans didn’t tolerate a toll road system that would have discouraged cities from building competing public roads and shut out Cintra. But roads can be more obvious than wires.

Nineteen states – including Texas – already have succumbed to telecom lobbying and erected restrictive legal roadblocks that prevent communities from building and running their own broadband networks. In fact, San Antonio sits atop a publicly owned, superfast fiber optic network, but state law prohibits the city from selling access. It is as if the city built a road, but it could be traveled only by city-owned vehicles and everyone else was forced to take a private toll road.

With the limited options in broadband carriers there’s “more monopoly than market.” Yet both of Texas’ free-enterprizin’ senators, Cruz and Cornyn, and Governor Goodhair (Don’t you miss Molly?) back the telecoms and oppose net neutrality.

BTW: Cintra is the same firm North Carolina just signed a 50-year contract with – at Senator-elect Thom Tillis’ urging – to build toll lanes north of Charlotte. Two other Cintra toll projects in San Antonio and Indiana failed recently, potentially leaving taxpayers holding the bag. But who’s counting?

Proving they can govern


by digby

And here we are:

QOTD: Orrin Hatch

by digby

To the Federalist Society:

“I get a big kick out of them using the word ‘progressive,'” he said. “My gosh, they’re just straight old dumb-ass liberals anyway.”

He also said that he thought the GOP majority should keep the filibuster rules in place and give those dumb-ass liberals “a taste of their own medicine.” This contrasts with his previous opinion which was that the filibuster rules were tyrannical usurpations of Senate traditions and an assault on democracy itself. Or something like that.

I don’t know about you, but I find all this terribly shocking. This too:

“This president is prone to doing through executive order that which he cannot do by working with the Congress, because he won’t work with us. If he worked with us, I think we could get an immigration bill through … He has a Republican Congress that’s willing to work with him. That’s the thing that’s pretty interesting to me.”

And he’s right. If he would just pass the Republican agenda without any changes or compromise they’d probably go along. Well, maybe. He did try that, after all and it wasn’t good enough. Apparently “working with them” must also include an announcement that he’s officially joining the GOP and will willingly sign all bills rolling back Democratic policies going all the way back to Roosevelt. Or maybe televised ritual hippie sacrifices. But even that probably wouldn’t get the job done.

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“Mushy, indulgent, insulated and lame”

by digby

That’s Jay Rosen at Press Think talking about the scads of reporters and pundits who have have been robotically spouting this tiresome trope since election night: “Republicans must show they can govern.”

He writes:

Asserted as a fact of political life, “Republicans must show they can govern” is a failure of imagination, and a sentimentalism. It refuses to grapple with other equally plausible possibilities. For example: that declining to govern will produce so much confusion about lines of responsibility and alienation from a broken political system that voters can’t, won’t, or in any case don’t “punish” the people who went for obstruction. Behind a statement like Peter Foster’s: “Republicans must use the next two years to show they are a party of government…” is a prediction about price-paying that does not necessarily apply in a hyper-partisan and super-polarized era. Political journalists are supposed to know that. They are supposed to know that better than anyone else.

In raw ballot box terms, being against was successful in 2014. It could easily be successful in 2016. To declare otherwise is mushy, indulgent, insulated and lame. A reporter’s wish masquerading as an accepted fact.

You can say that again.

But I think there’s another possibility, which I mentioned here. Republicans can certainly obstruct the president and the Democrats from legislatively enacting their agenda. They have been richly rewarded for doing just that and it is daft to think they won’t continue to do it. They have no incentive to compromise — they win big in mid-term elections when they don’t.

But they can’ also pass their own agenda with their majority and let the president veto it, thus “showing” that the can govern — if only they have a Republican president who will work with them. I suspect we will see a lot of that activity and certainly a lot of that rhetoric over the next couple of years.

You have to admit that it makes sense. They obstruct anything the Democrats want to do. Then they pass their agenda and either they pressure the president into signing noxious crap that his own voters will hate or he vetoes it and they get their base all ginned up for 2016.

This has absolutely nothing to do with “governing”, of course, since the whole point is to prove that the Democrats are incompetent and that the president is a tyrant who refuses to work with them. The only things that “get done” are those things the president does on his own and which the GOP candidates can promise to reverse immediately. (And if a Democrat wins in 2016, you can bet that the Imperial Presidency will no longer be tolerated by the conservative courts.)

Gridlock serves the Republicans well in any number of ways. But in order to have a rationale for a GOP White House, they may decide it’s in their interest to “prove” that they can “get something done” if they can just get a president to help them. I doubt it matters what the “something” is — especially to the media which, as Rosen points out, don’t seem to be the slightest bit cognisant of what’s really going on.

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Why are Huckleberry Graham and pals maniacally licking their chops?

by digby

Salon’s headlines are often hilariously over the top.  (I don’t write ’em.) But today’s headline on my piece for them made me laugh out loud:

“Maniacally licking their chops” indeed. Get a load of Huckleberry:

“Each candidate on the Republican side embraced a bold foreign policy. They rejected leading from behind. So, from my point of view, the Republican conference is going to be made up of more traditional national security Republicans, and this era of flirting with isolationism, I think, has passed.”

– Sen. Lindsey Graham, to the South Carolina press corps

As Dave Weigel at Bloomberg quipped: “If that was too subtle, Graham found a better way of putting it when he talked to Washington Post reporter-blogger Jennifer Rubin: ‘The cavalry is coming over the hill’.”

You know we’re about to see a full-fledged, flag-waving, chest-thumping call to arms from the war hawks when they start seeing themselves as Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill. Sen. Graham, of course, never went up any hill unless an office building or courthouse sat on top of it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The military needs lawyers too. But it’s always fun to watch the hawks get themselves so worked up they start sounding like George C. Scott’s monologue at the opening of “Patton,” Graham especially.

Read on. Poor Rand Paul is all alone out there …

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Krauthammer takes the bait

by digby

Noted constitutional law professor Charles Krauthammer:

.@krauthammer on potential #Obama #immigration action: “I believe it is an impeachable offense.” #KellyFile pic.twitter.com/ep9RCzGyNl
— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 14, 2014

Here’s Krauthammer last August:

Obama had control of both houses of Congress during his first two years in office — and did nothing about immigration. So why now?

Because he’s facing a disastrous midterm election. An executive order so sweeping and egregiously lawless would be impeachment bait. It would undoubtedly provoke a constitutional crisis and stir impeachment talk — and perhaps even the beginning of proceedings — thus scrambling the electoral deck. As in 1998, it would likely backfire against the GOP and save Democrats from an otherwise certain sixth-year midterm shellacking.

Such a calculation — amnesty-by-fiat to deliberately court impeachment — is breathtakingly cynical. But clever. After all, there is no danger of impeachment succeeding. There will never be 67 votes in the Senate to convict. But talking it up is a political bonanza for Democrats, stirring up an otherwise listless and dispirited base. Last Monday alone the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised more than $1 million from anti-impeachment direct mail.

Apart from the money, impeachment talk energizes Democrats and deflects attention from the real-life issues that are dragging them down — the economy, Obamacare, the failures of Obama’s foreign policy. Everything, in other words, that has sunk Obama to 40 percent approval, the lowest ebb of his presidency.

Those clever, clever Democrats — even when the Republicans have them all figured out, they still get them to play right into their hands. Silly Republicans.

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Open carry demonstrator fondles his gun and screams “shut the f..k up!”

by digby

So the gun safety group Moms Demand Action wanted the grocery store company Kroger to ban open carry of guns in its stores. Seems they felt it made shopping a needlessly stressful experience. This did not sit well with one open carry advocate:

I think this is exactly the sort of responsible gun owner who proves that all these people who would prefer that people not carry guns in public places are wrong, wrong, wrong. Isn’t he just the sort of person who should be armed in public places defending his second Amendment rights against people like Moms Demand Action who just need to “shut the fuck up” and “put a dick in” their mouths? Obviously. Because freedom.

Liberaland has more on this fine fellow including some footage of him wandering around Kroger with a loaded gun. He’s also, incidentally, a white supremacist.

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