November 17, 2014

Actress tells how parents were taken, deported. Left alone at 14. No govt agency checked on her.

'Orange is the New Black' actress: My parents were deported


Actress Diane Guerrero is seen in the movie "EMOTICON." (Indican Pictures)

My parents came here from Colombia during a time of great instability there. Escaping a dire economic situation at home, they moved to New Jersey, where they had friends and family, seeking a better life, and then moved to Boston after I was born.

Throughout my childhood I watched my parents try to become legal but to no avail. They lost their money to people they believed to be attorneys, but who ultimately never helped. That meant my childhood was haunted by the fear that they would be deported. If I didn't see anyone when I walked in the door after school, I panicked.

And then one day, my fears were realized. I came home from school to an empty house. Lights were on and dinner had been started, but my family wasn't there. Neighbors broke the news that my parents had been taken away by immigration officers, and just like that, my stable family life was over.

Not a single person at any level of government took any note of me. No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own.

There is a CNN video at the link below of an interview with her on this topic.
'Orange Is The New Black' Actress Breaks Down Talking About Family's Deportation (VIDEO)

November 16, 2014

Fox Democrat Kristen Day blames "ideologically pure" voters for our election losses.

This article in The Hill on the 14th really angered me. I hate the use by "moderates" or "centrists" in the Democratic Party of the word "purity".

They make it sound like it is a naughty word.

This is a disgusting article to me. This is the kind of stuff that has gone on way too long in this party, and it needs to stop.

Do Democrats want pro-choice purity or to win elections?

Sound familiar? Same stuff the party think tanks started spewing after our colossal losses in 2010

Is it better to run pro-choice candidates who oppose all restrictions on abortion in districts where the majority of voters are pro-life, or is it better to end the abortion litmus test and support pro-life Democrats who can compete in these districts?

These are not abstract questions. In 2006 and 2008, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) made a concerted effort to recruit excellent candidates whose values matched the voters’ values. Democrats took control of the House, and newly elected Democrats, including pro-life Democrats, played a key role in passing legislation that has made a real difference in people’s lives, including the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which (even with its flawed implementation) has expanded access to quality, affordable healthcare to millions of Americans.

In 2010, however, the Democratic Party suffered a severe setback in a wave election that wiped out moderates, centrists, and other Democrats in swing districts. Pro-life Democrats, who received minimal backing from the party even in many of these critical districts, were hit harder than any other group. There were a variety of reasons Democrats struggled in 2010, including the economy, but the lack of clarity about abortion funding in the ACA was critical in some of these races, as right-wing anti-abortion activists smeared these Democrats, accusing them of voting for the public funding of abortion. And the party has done nothing to rebuild the strength of pro-life Democrats since.

The result is that there will be more Republicans in the House than at any point since Harry Truman was president. And there will be just a handful of pro-life Democrats.

Another thing. I am tired of people like Kristen Day claiming to be pro-life when in actuality they are anti-choice for women and their reproductive rights.

Our party should be standing up for women in the right wing attacks on their rights to choose. No more lectures from Kristen Day or anyone else in the party.

That is exactly why the policing of pregnant women is getting out of control and scary.

Women's choice advocates need to be aware of the Daschle Abortion Bill 1997

"Daschle's so-called compromise bill, as quoted in the New York Times, permits an exception to the ban for `a severely debilitating disease or impairment specifically caused by the pregnancy (emphasis added),' but makes no provision for a pre-existing, life- and health-threatening `debilitating disease or impairment' that is being exacerbated by the pregnancy. This could include kidney disease, severe hypertension and some cancers. Nor does the Daschle bill allow for an abortion in cases of severe fetal abnormality where it is unlikely the fetus would live long outside the womb, even with technological support.

"The physician certification requirement and the potential loss of a medical license in the Daschle language invites government scrutiny of private medical matters and threatens doctor-patient confidentiality. The intent of this and other abortion ban bills is to control women and to limit their ability to make critical reproductive decisions that affect their families, their health and their lives. These bills represent the ultimate in Congressional arrogance," Gandy charged.

That was an outrageous bill by Daschle, and it was even more outrageous for Clinton to endorse it.

I hate the use of the "purity" when it is used to refer to the strong beliefs some of us hold about what our party should support. It's simplistic and it's petty.

November 16, 2014

TBTimes John Romano: In FL Republicans make up only 34.9 percent of the registered voters

yet "the GOP somehow has the Governor's Mansion, the entire Cabinet, a majority of the state Senate and a supermajority in the state House. You don't have to be a math expert to realize those numbers don't add up."

He's right, they don't add up.

John Romano's column in the Tampa Bay Times today is pretty scathing toward Florida Democrats. He makes some good points.

Romano: Lots of excuses, little real message in Florida Democrats' playbook

Now I realize a good chunk of the equation involves crooked voting districts that almost guarantee Republicans an advantage in the Legislature. And the reality that corporations pour more money into GOP coffers is an undeniable factor.

Yet it is also true that Democrats contribute to their own demise by allowing Republicans to define them.

"People look at us as if we're the party of welfare,'' said state Rep. Amanda Murphy, D-New Port Richey. "How did we go from trying to help people to being accused of being the party of giveaways?'' How? By ceding the middle to Republicans.

Democrats have allowed the opposition to paint them as the party of special interests. Meanwhile, Republicans make themselves look like the responsible ones. The ones looking out for the average Joe or Jane. The ones with a vision for the future instead of just a partisan agenda.

Romano is on a roll. He posted more about the losses on November 5.

Romano: Good grief, how could Democrats lose Florida elections so badly?

Hapless, hopeless and oddly passive. They didn't just lose an election, they had the ballots pulled out from under them.

This was a nationwide trend but, naturally, Florida led the way. A more thorough butt-kicking is hard to conceive.

Unpopular Republican governor? He won. Controversial Republican attorney general? She won. Two Republican Cabinet guys you can't remember? They won.

The state Senate? It had 16 Republican incumbents, and all 16 won. The state House? It had 65 Republican incumbents, and all 65 won.

Only six sitting lawmakers lost and, of course, all were Democrats. I believe it was Charlie Brown, D-Palm Harbor; Linus, D-Tampa; Peppermint Patty, D-Maitland; Lucy, D-Orlando; Schroeder, D-Miami; and Pigpen, D-Lake Mary; but I might be wrong.

Overall Romano tends to be pretty fair, so I think our Florida brand of Democrats should listen to his words.

November 16, 2014

7 TX charter schools still open despite charter revocation. Students not legally to be there.

But according to this article from the NY Times Texas Tribune section, it doesn't bother the school administrators and most of the parents don't seem to know.

With all the cries for accountability going around lately, one would think we would hear a little outcry over this situation.

There is even still a banner at the entrance of one telling of their "highest academic distinction."

Public Charter Schools That Failed to Meet Texas Standards Are Still Operating

FARMERS BRANCH, Tex. — One recent morning, Branch Park Academy looked like any other bustling suburban middle school.

Beyond a packed parking lot, a banner hanging near the entrance boasted that the school had earned the “highest academic distinction” from the Texas Education Agency. Inside, students’ voices drifted from their classrooms.

By law, the students were not supposed to be there at all.

In June, the education agency revoked the charter of the Honors Academy Charter School District, which runs Branch Park Academy and six other schools. While some individual campuses, like Branch Park, had met state academic standards, Honors had failed to do so over all for three consecutive years, meaning that, under a 2013 law, it could no longer operate as a public school district.

They had not even informed the parents.

Parents waiting to pick up their children that afternoon said the school had not informed them that the state had revoked its charter. They were not aware of the risk that credits might not transfer to other public schools.

November 13, 2014

Greider: The trouble started when the party abandoned its working-class base.

This is from the December 1-8 2014 edition of The Nation. William Greider has strong words for the Democrats.

I fully realize there are many reasons, much speculation about why we lost so badly. But there is a reason at the heart of it all. Greider spares no words.

He mentions how President Obama and the Democrats kept telling us brighten up, the economy is getting better. Things are looking up. It may be true to economists, but I think it may be correct as Greider surmises....to assume the average person isn't feeling all that hopeful yet.

How the Democratic Party Lost Its Soul

A party truly connected to the people would never have dared to make such a claim. In the real world of voters, human experience trumps macroeconomics and the slowly declining official unemployment rate. An official at the AFL-CIO culled the following insights from what voters said about themselves on Election Day: 54 percent suffered a decline in household income during the past year. Sixty-three percent feel the economy is fundamentally unfair. Fifty-five percent agree strongly (and another 25 percent agree somewhat) that both political parties are too focused on helping Wall Street and not enough on helping ordinary people.

Instead of addressing this reality and proposing remedies, the Democrats ran on a cowardly, uninspiring platform: the Republicans are worse than we are. Undoubtedly, that’s true—but so what? The president and his party have no credible solutions to offer. To get serious about inequality and the deteriorating middle class, Democrats would have to undo a lot of the damage their own party has done to the economy over the past thirty years.

Long ago, the party abandoned its working-class base (of all colors) and steadily distanced itself from the unglamorous conditions that matter most in people’s lives. Traditional party bulwarks like organized labor and racial minorities became second-string players in the hierarchy that influences party policy. But the Dems didn’t just lose touch with the people they claimed to speak for; they betrayed core constituencies and adopted pro-business, pro-finance policies that actively injure working people.

The shift away from the people was embraced most dramatically when Bill Clinton’s New Democrats came to power in the 1990s. Clinton double-crossed labor with NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements, which encouraged the great migration of manufacturing jobs to low-wage economies. Clinton’s bank deregulation shifted the economic rewards to finance and set the stage for the calamity that struck in 2008. Wall Street won; working people lost. Clinton presided over the financialization of the Democratic Party. Obama merely inherited his playbook and has governed accordingly, often with the same policy-makers.

“The people,” of course, are still present in the party, but they’re treated mainly as data for election strategies. The voters themselves resemble the supernumeraries in a grand opera: they appear on stage at election time, always lavishly praised by the pols. But they are given no lines to speak or songs to sing.

Greider was one of those who loudly called attention to the efforts recently by both parties to cut benefits of Social Security while proclaiming they were making it safer.

Social Security: Bipartisan Fervor to Whack the Old Folks

In appalling consensus has developed among Washington elites: they tell themselves cutting Social Security is a slam-dunk. If the two parties will hold hands and act together, they reason, voters can’t blame either one. When Washington players talk up “bipartisan compromise,” it usually means the people are about to get screwed.

It’s part of the new austerity—American-style. We’ll all have to learn to live with less, we’re told, in order to reduce America’s swollen federal deficits. So we’ll whack Social Security benefits, dump school teachers and other state employees, and suppress wages by accepting high unemployment.

Yes, indeed, Greider is right. In the words of one of the founders of one centrist Dem think tank that was superceded by another similar centrist Dem think tank....that is EXACTLY what they intended to do.

Raising money to lessen reliance on the traditional interest groups of the party.

Yes, I quote this guy often.

"Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, "We're trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way," he adds, "they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win."

It was done deliberately, and now it is time to reverse course. Their way has not worked out too well during the last two midterms.

November 12, 2014

Speaking of Zeke Emanuel..he wants to phase out Medicare, proposes vouchers.

From a post of his at Huffington Post in 2008.

More Reform is Cheaper: The Paradox of Health Care Reform

The biggest surprise is that even more comprehensive reform, not only achieves universal -- true 100% -- coverage of all Americans but does so while controlling costs. Prof. Victor R. Fuchs and I have proposed Guaranteed Healthcare Access Plan. It phases out employer-based insurance, Medicaid, and Medicare. Instead each American would receive a voucher to buy a standard benefits package modeled on the federal employee health benefits plan through regional insurance exchanges in which private health plans would compete. Workers would receive a pay increase from their employers who no longer pay for health care; state taxes decline because states no longer have to devote 32% of their budgets to health care. The plan is financed by a value-added tax.

Our plan is similar to the Wyden-Bennett bill in the Senate in which employers would have to convert workers' health care premiums to higher wages or, if they do not provide coverage, to pay a tax to pay for Americans to buy coverage. Americans would then have to buy health coverage through a state insurance exchange. American families earning under $80,000 per year would be subsidized. Both our proposal and the Wyden-Bennett plan assure Americans complete portability, guaranteed enrollment, and preclude exclusions for any pre-existing conditions.

That is a dream world to believe that employers would be gracious enough to do this. Around here companies lay people off rather than have anyone go over the 29 hours that would constitute full time under ACA. It wasn't meant to happen that way, but that is often the reality.

Someone I know runs a sizable company, and his wife was recently talking about how the ACA was causing him to lay off so many long time workers. I asked her why, and it is because of the 29 hour deal of having to provide insurance. Ideally it shouldn't work that way.

I notice a lot of discussion lately about his statements on not wanting to live past 75.

I find that alarming from someone who was one of President Obama's main health care advisors during the reform time.

I believe that is scary. Views like that would influence the way seniors are given health care. Hey don't worry too much about them. They are old, we don't want to spend too much money on their health care.

Knowing how corporate concerns control our nation now, if they adopt that view seniors would be deprived of the latest technology in many cases.

Zeke's view of life may appeal to some, but I think it is a defeatist view. He sounds like a depressed person pretending to be tough.

When a person limits themselves by age as Zeke does, they might as well get all their affairs in order at 74 and sit back and wait. It's a terrible view.

November 11, 2014

Ah memories. How my 2nd graders and I used to "Shake our Sillies Out".

Ran across this on You Tube today. Brought back classroom memories. This was the perfect remedy to a restless class of little ones. They would calm right down and then put their heads down for a minute or so.

Then Raffi always had a little environmental enlightment for us as well. Watch the little ones in the audience in both videos.



These were relaxing songs with a calming effect.

November 11, 2014

The policing of pregnant women getting out of control and scary.

The GOP has made the subjection of women's reproductive rights a main goal. Unfortunately our party did not stand up for women strongly enough. In fact some Democrats through the years tried to pass extreme laws of their own. I never did understand, I guess trying to out-tough the other side.

One example: Back in the 1990's Tom Daschle tried to pass a bill which was endorsed by Bill Clinton. It was a shocking bill for a Democrat to propose.

Women's choice advocates need to be aware of the Daschle Abortion Bill 1997

"Daschle's so-called compromise bill, as quoted in the New York Times, permits an exception to the ban for `a severely debilitating disease or impairment specifically caused by the pregnancy (emphasis added),' but makes no provision for a pre-existing, life- and health-threatening `debilitating disease or impairment' that is being exacerbated by the pregnancy. This could include kidney disease, severe hypertension and some cancers. Nor does the Daschle bill allow for an abortion in cases of severe fetal abnormality where it is unlikely the fetus would live long outside the womb, even with technological support.

"The physician certification requirement and the potential loss of a medical license in the Daschle language invites government scrutiny of private medical matters and threatens doctor-patient confidentiality. The intent of this and other abortion ban bills is to control women and to limit their ability to make critical reproductive decisions that affect their families, their health and their lives. These bills represent the ultimate in Congressional arrogance," Gandy charged.

The bill apparently was endorsed by President Clinton, according to this NPR newscast in 1997.

It's getting worse now with the extremists on the right trying to get even more outrageous in their efforts to treat women as 2nd-class citizens. And still not enough on the other side taking strong stances to protect these women.

‘The Policing of Pregnant Women': Texans Demand Obstetric Care In County Jails

Shela Williams stood before the Texas Commission on Jail Standards (TCJS) Thursday morning holding a little white box of mementos from her son Israel’s funeral in August—a funeral she was not allowed to attend because Israel was born, and died, while Williams was incarcerated in a central Texas jail and in the custody of Travis County sheriffs.

Williams, who lives in Austin, is part of a coalition of reproductive and racial justice advocates who are demanding better standards of care for the 500 or so pregnant Texans—most whom are Black and Latina—incarcerated in Texas county jails each month.

“Williams was treated very badly,” Coleman told the commission, explaining that Williams, who was 19 weeks pregnant when she was incarcerated on a parole violation, had a high-risk pregnancy. During her two-month incarceration, Williams never received the obstetric care she needed. With the right treatment, Coleman said, Israel might be alive today.

More from RH Reality Check.

Miscarriage Isn’t Illegal, But It’s Increasingly Treated With Suspicion

In Indiana, for example, a woman named Purvi Patel is facing a possible sentence of decades in prison for not producing a live baby. Patel admitted to taking abortion-causing pills, which induced labor; she was caught when she went to the emergency room to get help for the bleeding. The fetus was found dead in a dumpster. The messed-up thing about the situation is that the State of Indiana is so determined to put Patel in prison that they’ve hit her with two conflicting charges. If they determine that the baby was born alive, they’re going to prosecute her for “neglect.” But if she successfully terminated the pregnancy, she’s getting hit with “fetal murder of an unborn child.” Heads, you lose; tails, they win.

But the situation is even more frightening than that. Even if you don’t try to end your own pregnancy, you could be subject to an investigation for being insufficiently excited about having a baby.

Take the case of Christine Taylor, who was arrested in Iowa for merely saying out loud to a nurse that she had considered abortion. Taylor had fallen down a flight of stairs; when she went to a private hospital, she was accused of trying to abort her (unharmed) fetus, even though there was literally no evidence of this beyond her very understandable concerns about having a baby with her estranged husband.

And from the New York Times this week:

Pregnant, and No Civil Rights

In Iowa, a pregnant woman who fell down a flight of stairs was reported to the police after seeking help at a hospital. She was arrested for “attempted fetal homicide.”

In Utah, a woman gave birth to twins; one was stillborn. Health care providers believed that the stillbirth was the result of the woman’s decision to delay having a cesarean. She was arrested on charges of fetal homicide.

In Louisiana, a woman who went to the hospital for unexplained vaginal bleeding was locked up for over a year on charges of second-degree murder before medical records revealed she had suffered a miscarriage at 11 to 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Florida has had a number of such cases. In one, a woman was held prisoner at a hospital to prevent her from going home while she appeared to be experiencing a miscarriage. She was forced to undergo a cesarean. Neither the detention nor the surgery prevented the pregnancy loss, but they did keep this mother from caring for her two small children at home. While a state court later found the detention unlawful, the opinion suggested that if the hospital had taken her prisoner later in her pregnancy, its actions might have been permissible.

In another case, a woman who had been in labor at home was picked up by a sheriff, strapped down in the back of an ambulance, taken to a hospital, and forced to have a cesarean she did not want. When this mother later protested what had happened, a court concluded that the woman’s personal constitutional rights “clearly did not outweigh the interests of the State of Florida in preserving the life of the unborn child.”

Anti-abortion reasoning has also provided the justification for arresting pregnant women who experience depression and have attempted suicide. A 22-year-old in South Carolina who was eight months pregnant attempted suicide by jumping out a window. She survived despite suffering severe injuries. Because she lost the pregnancy, she was arrested and jailed for the crime of homicide by child abuse.

My question is which party is taking a stand for the rights of women to have reproductive choice.

November 9, 2014

"In a private club 54 floors above the convention hall they monitored the party they infiltrated."

That sentence is from an article below about the 2000 Democratic convention, and the power the DLC had over it.

This is just my opinion, but I believe the Tea Party extremists gained power because our side was too busy listening to the calls for "bipartisanship" coming from the policy think tanks. The Republicans didn't fight them because they needed to win and used whatever was needed to do so.

So in effect both sides moved right. The GOP moved right out of conviction. The Democrats moved right for two reasons. They feared the media machine formed by the Republicans, and they took the advice of corporately funded think tanks.

Behind the DLC Takeover

By John Nichols

At the national convention of a major political party, an ideologically rigid sectarian clique secures the ultimate triumph. It inserts two of its own as nominees for the Presidency and the Vice Presidency. Heavily financed by the most powerful corporations in the world, the group's leaders gather in a private club fifty-four floors above the convention hall, apart from the delegates of the party they had infiltrated. There, they carefully monitor the convention's acceptance of a platform the organization had drafted almost in its entirety. Then, with the ticket secured and with the policy course of the party set, they introduce a team of 100 shock troops to deploy across the country to lock up the party's grassroots.

This is not some fantastic political thriller starring Harrison Ford or Sharon Stone. This is the real-life version of Invasion of the Party Snatchers--with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) burrowing into the pod that is the Democratic Party.

Founded in the mid-1980s with essentially the same purpose as the Christian Coalition--to pull a broad political party dramatically to the right--the DLC has been far more successful than its headline-grabbing Republican counterpart. After Walter Mondale's 1984 defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, a group of mostly Southern, conservative Democrats hatched the theory that their party was in trouble because it had grown too sympathetic to the agendas of organized labor, feminists, African Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, peace activists, and egalitarians.

....A day is soon coming when "we'll finally be able to proclaim that all Democrats are, indeed, New Democrats," declared DLC President Al From on the eve of this year's Democratic National Convention.

After every success we have as Democrats all kind of op eds appear, saying that we need to be careful as a majority not to leave the other side out of discussions. That's fine and good, but not practical when the other side are extremists.

It used to be the Democratic Leadership Council guiding the steps of our party, but in 2011 Fox Democrat Kirsten Powers let us know that Third Way was taking their place.

From her column at the Daily Beast:

DLC Shut Down: The Democrats’ New Power Base

Reports of the death of centrism in the Democratic Party have been greatly exaggerated.

Monday’s news that the Democratic Leadership Council is folding after three decades was greeted with glee by those on the left who see it as evidence that centrism has gasped its last breath.

.."The truth is, the DLC’s position as the leading centrist Democratic think tank was long ago overtaken by a group called Third Way, which has been growing more influential by the day.

Before joining the White House, Bill Daley, President Obama’s new chief of staff, was a board member of Third Way.

I found an opinion piece written in 1995 by the present head of the Third Way. He was calling on Democrats to privatize Social Security for everyone but the very needy.

Pure gold from 1995. Op ed from Third Way prez Cowan calling to privatize Social Security.

The time has come to reinvent Social Security based on a "cut and privatize" approach that will be fair to all age groups. This reinvention should be based on three principles:

Start immediately to lower boomers' expectations of the returns they will get and encourage them to increase private savings.

Separate out the welfare portion of Social Security and pay out poverty benefits to today's--and tomorrow's--needy seniors from general government revenues.

Idea #3 is to lower the Social Security payroll to 10% (where the heck was it in 1995...isn't it 6.2 now?) and "give workers the option of putting their money into private pension programs that offer far higher returns and sounder prospects than today's Social Security system."

Some quotes from those who have warned the party to include the left and behave like Democrats.

False centrism and the rush to "bipartisanship". They are failing our party. Some quotes.

I still quote Howard Dean now and then. I stopped for a while because I believe he stepped back a while from telling things straight and clear. Hopefully he will again.

From June 2010:

"You did your job," Dean added. "You elected Barack Obama. You elected a Democratic Congress. You elected a Democratic Senate. And now it's time for them to behave like Democrats if they want to get reelected. They have forgotten where they came from -- and they haven't been here that long."

Dean echoed other progressive leaders who opened the conference Monday, expressing dismay, even anger, at the White House and Congress, saying they have been too timid and compromising on issues such as health care, the economy, climate change and banking reform.

Dean said the progressive base is critical to Democrats' electoral successes this fall and beyond. "If Washington understands that they can't do things that demoralize their base," Dean said, "then we'll have a permanent (Democratic) majority."

It proved to be true about needing the progressive base in 2010.

R. J. Eskow's masterpiece just after the 2010 midterms was clear.

After last night's rout, what are these experts advising? You guessed it: more of the same so-called "Centrism." That's an odd word to use for policies that most Americans oppose, like cutting Social Security or allowing bankers to enrich themselves by endangering the economy, but theirs is an Alice-in-Wonderland world.

Real centrists would defend Social Security and do more to rein in Wall Street, since those positions are popular across the political spectrum. It's a good thing the president said today that he wants to spend more time with the American people. Bankers and the Deficit Commission aren't "centrists" where most Americans live.

Robert Reich has a frank and open interview with Speigel Online.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: When you served in the White House, President Bill Clinton began on the left but drifted to the middle after the Democrats lost significant ground in the mid-term elections. Do you see that happening again?

Reich: I was there with Bill Clinton when he tried to so called "triangulate" and please the voters in the middle. But the middle is a fiction. The middle is simply where most voters who respond to surveys say they are. What Clinton did and what Obama may be forced to do is to give up leadership; that is, to simply respond to polls. I think it would be a shame if Obama moved from leadership to opinion polls, but his advisors may feel that that's the only way to guarantee him a re-election.

There are good ideas there at the Third Way in some cases. They are usually geared to the business community. That group often speaks of the left in not so friendly terms.

Simon Rosenberg, a co-founder of the DLC gave away their game and left no doubt. He spoke of why the DLC was founded. The article was in The American Prospect, and the actual link is hard to keep up with. Here is his quote:

"freed... from positions making it difficult for us to win. "...Simon Rosenberg.

"Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, "We're trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way," he adds, "they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win."

Now I believe we are looking at the XL pipeline being okayed, the safety nets cut for seniors, schools finally privatized, more troops sent to our wars around the world.

A country is not healthy without an opposition party. We had a chance to be one, and I think we failed too often.

November 9, 2014

Rahm in The Thumpin: "We have no base." Said only thing matters is who can win.

Doesn't matter what they stand for, only matters if they can win. That's what he believed as head of the DCCC during much of the time covered in the book. What he thought mattered...a lot.

From The Atlantic 2007:

The Meaning of the Midterms

But the more compelling story, which continues to unfold even today, comes when Bendavid pulls back from the day-to-day of the campaign to examine what the midterm elections meant for the identity of the Democratic Party. In an election where more moderates and centrists were elected than in any year past, many -- bloggers being the loudest among them -- have wondered whether the party has abandoned its base.

Certainly Emanuel holds no such romantic notions that there even exists such a base of voters loyal to core Democratic values. He is adamant that "we have no base!," a view that clearly guided his strategy for selecting candidates. As Bendavid writes, "he would not support the most loyal Democrats, or those whose populism was purist. His only criterion, he said, was who could win." This kind of single-minded, values-be-damned vision is anathema to some on the party's left. Writing for The Nation after the election, John Nichols complained that "many of the Democrats who prevailed on November 7 did so despite Emanuel's efforts, not because of them" and argues that liberal candidates could have won had Emanuel made the decision to support them. Yet as Bendavid points out, "of the 30 candidates who took seats from the Republicans, about 20 had been nurtured, funded, advised, and yelled at by Emanuel for months. Perhaps a half dozen had been supported by grassroots activists with little help from the DCCC."

Howard Dean was chair during that time. Rahm simply appeared to despise him. He screamed at him, treated him rudely. Once that we know of for sure Rahm cussed Dean out.

The relationship that epitomizes the rift between Emanuel and the party base is the congressman's tenuous partnership with Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean. As the book relates, Emanuel spent most of the campaign furious with Dean, whose Fifty State Strategy to build up party infrastructure nationwide he saw as little more than a way to throw money to the wind. In May 2006, Emanuel and Senator Charles Schumer, his counterpart in the Senate, met with Dean to ask for more money for their respective campaigns. Banging his hand on the table, Emanuel chided Dean's grassroots plan, "No disrespect, but some of us are arrogant enough, we come from Chicago, we think we know what it means to knock on a door. You're nowhere Howard. Your field plan is not a field plan. That's fucking bullshit." The two wouldn't speak again until election time.

Rahm worked with our Florida Democratic party chairwoman, Karen Thurman, and together they forced any progressives out of the race. Then they put Republican-Lite in their places.

Sometimes it is necessary to lose if by winning you lose the soul of your party.

To be sure, there's some benefit to breaking fundraising records. But any Emanuel-style strategy of focusing on the wealthy is sure to exclude from candidacy all but the wealthiest and those who know how to attract them. If the Democrats continue on this path, finding candidates who represent a district's constituents will become increasingly difficult as those very constituents are shut out. Too bad that this, as Bendavid points out, is no longer Emanuel's fucking problem.

Now Rahm is Chicago's problem. He is the problem of Chicago teachers. Thank God he is no longer Obama's Chief of Staff.

We took that "Thumpin" Bendavid referred to in 2010, but that was not enough. We took an even bigger "Thumpin" last week.