REID, H SEN

his staff --> pol ops?

retired, but got masto in by sheer will?

lcv 2013 scorecard analysis:

harry holds the line/like a hockey goalie on anti green (eg vitter)

http://scorecard.lcv.org/sites/scorecard.lcv.org/files/LCV_SCORE_FINAL_2.3.14.pdf

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altmo 10 25

no lnx

The Democrats’ Heterodoxy Problem

There’s not enough of it, according to one political operative.

By Elaine Godfrey

October 14, 2025

The age of the conventional Democrat is over. The time of the Democratic contrarian has come.

So says Adam Jentleson, anyway. The veteran political operative and former adviser to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently launched a think tank that asks Democratic candidates to ignore pressure from the far left, take positions outside the “liberal box,” and be a lot more “heterodox” in general. If this seems to you like Beltway speak for asking Democrats to sound more like Republicans, well, you would be at least partly correct. The Democratic Party used to have supermajorities in Congress because it allowed its members to hold a wide range of positions, Jentleson told me. To start winning again, the party needs to bring that back, he said. His new think tank, Searchlight Institute, plans to help.

With its seven-person team, a polling arm, and a $10 million budget, Searchlight promises to offer a “menu” of orthodoxy-challenging ideas for Democrats to run on. “We don’t need to create a new Joe Rogan,” Jentleson said. “We need people to go on Rogan with better ideas.”

Some Democrats are excited about that menu, at least in theory. The party needs to figure out an agenda beyond opposing President Donald Trump, they say. And there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. It’s “like that year in the 1980s when Saturday Night Live fired everybody and kept Eddie Murphy,” Mike Nellis, a party strategist and former adviser to Kamala Harris, told me. “Right now you’ve gotta prove you’re Eddie Murphy or get the hell out of here. So I’m not begrudging anybody that’s trying something new.”...

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daily kos

Harry Reid's latest floor statement is certainly not going to be his last. Reid seems to be relishing his role as enemy number one of the Koch brothers, and is happy to be the point man in Democrats' effort to expose the Koch brothers' efforts to buy themselves a Congress.

[Reid's] Koch rhetoric serves to spearhead a party-wide strategy aimed at highlighting the political influence of the brothers and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee repeatedly warns in fundraising solicitations that the Kochs' influence could tip the balance of the Senate as AFP pours millions into battleground states to pound Democrats.

Reid said that at this point, AFP has become even more powerful than Senate Republicans' official campaign arm.

"Senate Republicans hardly need the NRSC anymore, which decade after decade was their main funding tool for the Republican Senate. Not any longer. The Koch brothers take care of that," the Democratic leader said.

Democrats nationwide are joining Reid in taking on the Kochs. Rep. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), a Senate candidate, has aggressively fought AFP's ads in Michigan and asked the organization to document its claims. Vulnerable Democratic incumbents are pushing back against the Kochs in campaign rhetoric and fundraising requests, with Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) warning that people "are not going to let the billionaire Koch brothers buy this seat."

Reid seems to really enjoy goading the Kochs, and it's working. For example, consider this statement from Philip Ellender, a Koch spokesman: "Senator Reid is attacking private citizens rather than the problems facing this nation. It is no wonder that Americans have lost faith in Congress." Rather than answering Reid's claim that the AFP is lying in their anti-Obamacare ads—which it is—the Kochs play the victim card. Of course. They've perfected victimhood; no mean feat for billionaires who basically control an entire political party, the House of Representatives, and the minority in the Senate.

grew a pair?

In a speech opening up this year’s 5th National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave one of the most powerful public speeches on climate that any national policymaker has made in years.

Reid joins Senators Al Franken, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, and Sheldon Whitehouse, all of whom have made excellent climate speeches on the Senate floor in the last year. However, today’s speech was done in a much more prominent public forum in front of top journalists, regulatory officials, and policymakers.

Here’s the climate portion of the speech, which was used to set up the pressing need to develop more renewable energy and efficiency:

Twenty-five years ago, President George H.W. Bush promised to use the “White House effect” to combat the “greenhouse effect.” Yet a quarter century later, too many elected officials in Washington are still calling climate change a liberal hoax. They falsely claim scientists are still debating whether carbon pollution is warming the planet.

Of course, if those skeptics had taken a stroll along the Potomac River on a 70-degree day this February, they would have seen cherry trees blossoming earlier than at any time since they were planted 100 years ago. Washington experienced its warmest spring since record keeping began in 1895.

And back in the skeptics’ home states, the harbingers of a changing climate are just as clear as those delicate February blossoms – and infinitely more perilous.

This year alone, the United States has seen unparalleled extreme weather events – events scientists say are exactly what is expected as the earth’s climate changes.

The Midwest is experiencing its most crushing drought in more than half a century – or maybe ever. Presently, disasters have been declared in the majority of U.S. counties. More than half the country is experiencing drought, and seventy-five percent of the nation is abnormally dry this year.

Corn crops are withering and livestock are dying – or going to slaughter early – as heat waves parch America’s breadbasket, breaking records set during the Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl years.

Now ravaging wildfires have replaced the dust storms of the 1930′s. Devastating fires have swept New Mexico, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada and other parts of the Mountain West, destroying hundreds of homes and burning millions of trees. These fires are fed in part by vast areas of dead forest ravaged by beetles and other pests that now survive through warmer winters.

On the East Coast, extreme thunderstorms and high winds called “derechos” – literally meaning straight-line storms – have eliminated power for 4.3 million customers in 10 states in the mid-Atlantic region. One 38-year veteran of the utility industry told the New York Times this: “We’ve got the ‘storm of the century’ every year now.” At the height of this storm – while the power was out and the air conditioning wasn’t working – the East Coast experienced record high temperatures.

Down south, the Mississippi River is nearly dry in various places, with shipping barges operating in only 5 feet of water. Just Friday, barges were grounded because the water level was so low. And New Orleans’ water supply is now being threatened by salt water moving up the Mississippi due to extremely low water.

But while record drought has struck many parts of the United States, torrential rains have poured down in others. In June, the fourth tropical storm of the hurricane season – a season which typically begins in the fall – dropped 20 inches of rain on Florida.

Andour nation’s infrastructure is literally falling apart because it wasn’t designed to withstand these conditions. Runways are melting, trapping planes. Train tracks are bending, derailing subways. Highways are cracking, buckling and breaking open. The water used to cool power plants – including nuclear power plants – has either run dry or reached dangerously high temperatures.

And that’s just in the United States – just through the month of July.

Arctic sea ice is also at its lowest point in recorded history.

This month, the massive ice sheet atop Greenland experienced sudden and almost uniform melting – a phenomenon not seen in the modern age.

This spring, rain fell unexpectedly in Mecca despite 109-degree temperatures. It was the hottest downpour in the planet’s recorded history.

The Amazon River Basin has experienced super-flooding – reaching record high levels due to long summer rains and greater than normal glacial melting.

Massive forest fires have swept Siberia.

Monsoons in Bangladesh left hundreds dead and nearly 7 million people homeless.

And last week more than 600 million people in India were without power. Late monsoons and record temperatures increased demand for electricity to irrigate crops and air condition homes, overloading the fragile power grid and causing the blackout.

Scientists say this is genesis – the beginning. The more extreme climate change gets, the more extreme the weather will get. In the words of one respected climate scientist: “This is what global warming looks like.”

Dozens of new reports from scientists around the globe link extreme weather to climate change. Not every flood or drought can be attributed to human-induced transformation of our planet’s weather patterns. But scientists report that these extreme events are dozens of times more likely because of those changes.

The seriousness of this problem is not lost on your average American. A large majority of people finally believe climate change is real, and that it is the cause of extreme weather. Yet despite having overwhelming evidence and public opinion on our side, deniers still exist, fueled and funded by dirty energy profits.

These people aren’t just on the other side of this debate. They’re on the other side of reality.

It’s time for us all – whether we’re leaders in Washington, members of the media, scientists, academics, environmentalists or utility industry executives – to stop acting like those who ignore the crisis or deny it exists entirely have a valid point of view. They don’t.

Virtually every respected, independent scientist in the world agrees the problem is real, and the time to act is now. Not tomorrow. Not a week from now. Not next month or next year. We must act today.

We’ve argued over and over on this blog that it’s impossible to talk about clean energy without talking about climate and public health.

In 2009 and 2010, supporters of a comprehensive climate bill tried virtually every messaging strategy — except talking about climate. We all know how that turned out. And today, the boom in unconventional fossil fuels has diminished traditional clean energy talking points around innovation and jobs. Of course, renewable energy spurs entrepreneurial innovation and creates jobs — but so too do carbon-intensive fossil fuels like tar sands, shale oil, and shale gas.

Given the new reality in today’s energy market — and the new climate reality — we must communicate the environmental imperative of clean energy.

Kudos to Senator Reid for making that case today.

Tags:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Reid

sunk kerryilieberman by putting immigration in front b/c of his reelection atwb

What became known as the Dayenu meeting took place on Thursday, April 22nd, Earth Day. A few hours before the meeting, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig had sunk to the bottom of the Gulf. The spill began to spread; soon it would show signs of becoming one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Then, suddenly, there was a new problem: Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said that he wanted to pass immigration reform before the climate-change bill. It was a cynical ploy. Everyone in the Senate knew that there was no immigration bill. Reidwas in a tough reëlection, and immigration activists, influential in his home state of Nevada, were pressuring him.

Senior aides at the White House were shocked by Reid’s statement. “We were doing well until Reid gave a speech and said it was immigration first. News to us!” a senior Administration official said. “It was kind of like, ‘Whoa, what do we do now? Where did that come from?’ ” Reid’s office seemed to be embarking on a rogue operation. In a three-day period, Reid’s office and unnamed Senate Democrats leaked to Roll Call, The Hill, the Associated Press, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal that the phantom immigration bill would be considered before the climate bill. Graham once again said that he felt betrayed. “This comes out of left field,” he told reporters. “I’m working as earnestly as I can to craft climate and energy independence, clean air and jobs, and now we’re being told that we’re going to immigration. This destroys the ability to do something on energy and climate.”

Graham didn’t tell the press that immigration was mostly just an excuse for his anger. That day, he had urged Reid to release a statement supporting the modified linked fee that Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman had used in negotiating with the refiners. Reid’s office greeted the request with suspicion. Reid and Graham didn’t trust each other. Reid’s aides thought the Republican leadership was trying to trick Reid into supporting something that sounded like a gas tax. The fact that Kerry and Lieberman were also supporters of the proposal did little to allay Reid’s fears. His aides drafted a pro-forma statement for Graham that promised simply that Reid would review the legislation. Graham dismissed the statement as meaningless. During one phone call, Graham shouted some vulgarities at Reid and the line went dead. The Majority Leader had hung up the phone.