DEMOCRAT party

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see DEMS 2 918

no merri

change name 12/17 -ic, bak

saved file in web?

tag lost "a" remove

see DCCC

this is a node (somewhat neglected?)

see tag w/ small d

see Sellout and Left

also climatehawk

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Sen. Menendez found guilty on corruption charges

an 7 24

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aha, why so many fewer dems than gop? tho tony coelho got dems in game:

grimm bk

we have ppl --> AOC

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-17-2019/

1976 carter kinda central, fix rep by post-prez

1978 newt g shellacking, longtime senators, lions like frank church, birch bayh

roger stone et al tactics, 1976 scotus camp fin reform [buckely valeo?], political consultant, pol ops, oppo, 30 sec ads TV, corp $ (TV and corp money // rose as factors together: we have opposite now, TV decline coupled with online small $ raising?))

dccc a backwater, tony c goes to corps and sez we have house 40 yrs (still have dixiecrats) so you need to fund us; win big in 1982? said to be b/c of Reagan recession, but grimm sez dem $ ctr; then dems pick Mondale, defiicit hawk, but was painted as liberal, landslide loss; dens say oh liberal is loser, so leads to clinton triangulation?

pelosi endorse by widow, beat DSA britt pro gay cand (so when she says i understand the SF left, she means i have beaten them); she thinks usa basically conservative in RR era, so she stuill fears backlash cf clinton impeachment.

918

AN DN

...ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: And the issues I ran on were very clear, and I think it was an important part to us winning: improved and expanded Medicare for all; tuition-free public colleges and universities, as well as trade schools; a Green New Deal; justice for Puerto Rico; an unapologetic platform of criminal justice reform and ending the war on drugs; and also speaking truth to power and speaking about money in politics not just in general, but how it operates in New York City.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, I’m going to play her clip talking about immigration activism. Yes, Alexandria Cortez—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to the border right before Election Day. In fact, her plane was delayed. I was concerned she wouldn’t be back in New York for the Primary Day. But if you could start by responding to this? And then we’ll hear what she has to say about immigration activism.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I think there’s—her victory was a quite spectacular and significant event. I think what it points to is a split in the Democratic Party between the—roughly speaking, between the popular base and the party managers. The popular base is increasingly, essentially, social democratic, following, pursuing the—concerned with the kinds of progressive objectives that she outlined in those—in her remarks, which should be directed not only to expanding the electorate but to the general working-class, poor population of the world, of the middle-class population of the country, for whom these ideals are quite significant. They can be brought to that. That’s one part of the party. The other part of the party is the donor-oriented, managerial part of the New Democrats, so-called, the Clintonite Democrats, who are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. The Republican Party itself has drifted so far to the right that they’re almost off the spectrum. But the split within the Democratic Party is significant, and it’s showing up in primary after primary.Will the party move in the direction of its popular base, with a, essentially, social democratic, New Deal-style programs, even beyond? Or will it continue to cater to the donor class and be essentially a moderate wing—a more moderate wing of the Republican Party? And unless that issue is resolved, I don’t think they have a very good chance in the forthcoming elections.

I think she was right in saying that the policies she’s outlined should have broad appeal to a very large segment of the population. We should bear in mind that, for now almost 40 years, since the neoliberal assault began, taking off with Reagan, on from there, a large majority of the population are living in conditions of stagnation or decline. Real wages are—for, say, male real wages—are about what they were in the 1960s. It’s been—there has been productivity growth. Hasn’t gone to working people. It’s gone into the very few extremely overstuffed pockets. And that continues. So, the Labor Department just came out with its report for wages in the year ending May 2018. Now, they actually slightly declined. All sorts of talk—real wages, that is, wages measured against inflation. And it’s apparently continuing, with an even further drop. This is a time when a lot of crowing about the marvelous economy, you know, full employment and so on, but wages continue to stagnate. And furthermore, it’s plainly going to get worse. The Republicans are on a binge of pursuing the most savage form of class warfare.The tax scam is a good example, the attacks on workers’ rights, on—Public Citizen just came out with a report on corporate impunity, which is almost comical when you read it.The administration has simply cut back radically on any kind of dealing with corporate crimes. And, of course, the EPA has practically stopped working. It’s as if grab whatever you can, stuff it in your pocket, before—while you have a chance. Under those conditions, the kind of appeal that she was talking about should mean a lot to the general population.

Notice, as everybody’s well aware, the tax scam was a purposeful effort not only to enrich the super-rich and the corporate sector—corporate profits, of course, are overflowing—but it was also an effort to sharply increase the deficit, which can be used—and Paul Ryan and others kindly announced to us right away what the plans were—the deficit could be used to undermine any elements of government structure which benefit the general population—Medicare, Social Security, food for poor children. Anything you can do to shaft the general population more can now be justified under the argument that we have a huge deficit, thanks to stuffing the pockets of the rich. This is an astonishing phenomenon. And under those conditions, a properly designed progressive program should appeal to a large majority of the population. But it has to be done correctly and not shaped in ways which will appease the donor class.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to the interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has really upended the Democratic Party, and the kind of message this candidate of Puerto Rican descent in New York has sent to the entire party, I think the Republican Party, as well. But this is what she says about immigration.

...

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rootsaction autopsy:

As Donald Trump enters his tenth month in office, public opinion polls find he is the most unpopular president at this stage in his term than any other occupant of the Oval Office in modern American history. His actions at home and abroad have alarmed Democrats, Republicans and independents. Apart from recent indictments by the independent counsel investigating charges of collusion between the Trump’s campaign and Russia, the president is seen to have triggered an number of ugly spats with Gold Star family members, NFL players, and the mayor of San Juan, Puerto, exacerbated tensions with North Korea and praised white supremacists as “very fine people.”

But as many U.S. voters remember the shock and dread they felt on election day 2016, when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the presidency, there are growing concerns that the Democratic party has failed to learn the lessons of last year’s election defeat.The Democratic National Committee chose not to do a public “autopsy,” examining the reasons their party no longer has control of any branch of the federal government, only holds 16 of 50 governorships, and has lost 1,000 state legislative seats since 2009.

Filing this void, a group of activists with the nonprofit Action for a Progressive Future, wrote a 34-page report titled, “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis”The report focuses on some key factors that have contributed to the Democrats' recent string of defeats, including low voter turnout among the party’s base. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Pia Gallegos, a longtime civil-rights lawyer and New Mexico activist, who was one of the team of four authors of the Autopsy. Here, shesummarizes the report’s conclusions and recommendations.

PIA GALLEGOS: The Democratic party itself did not do a self-analysis or a critique regarding its failures of how and why it lost the presidential election in 2016. Oftentimes, a party does that when it loses a major election. It didn't do that, and if it did, it didn't publicize it. And so, a group of us took it upon ourselves under the leadership of Norman Solomon to do this report. And so, we looked various factors that failed within the Democratic party. We looked atcorporate powerand the party and we looked at race, and we looked the youth vote, and we looked at social movements and we looked at democracy – or the failure of democracy – within the party, and war and the party.

And we divided the report into sections like that and showed how the Democratic party has continuously, in all of these areas, failed to address the concerns of its constituencies.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you see in terms of the leadership of the Democratic party right now, following the election defeat.

PIA GALLEGOS: Right. I'm sorry to say that there's really two wings to the Democratic party and we see this even with the head of Democratic party right now, Tom Perez who's head of the DNC. And he's just acted recently to purge the DNC of some of the most progressive members of the DNC––because he's allowed to appoint people and to depose people from the post. And so he's brought in a whole bunch of political operatives and lobbyists – corporate lobbyists – as members of the DNC who will have superdelegate status, which means that they will be able to vote for a presidential candidate without regard to the pledged delegates that are required on every state level through the Electoral College.

https://www.alternet.org/democratic-moderates-fear-socialist-left-will-wreck-party-they-want-keep-gig

No political organization in the recent history of the world has had a gift for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory quite like the Democratic Party. This is the party that has managed to lose three of the last five presidential elections, despite only once in that period getting fewer votes than the opposition. Although the Democrats nominally hold positions with broad majority support on a wide range of issues, following the heavy losses of the 2010 and 2014 midterms the party found itself in its worst nationwide position since the early 1930s.

For much of the 20th century, Democrats understood themselves to be the party of permanent hegemony on Capitol Hill, no matter who was in the White House: Between the Franklin D. Roosevelt election of 1932 and the Newt Gingrich election of 1994, the party held a House majority for 58 out of 62 years, and a Senate majority for 52 of 62. Sam Rayburn, a Democrat from an east Texas district that is now (of course) solidly Republican, was House speaker for more than 17 years, a record that will surely never be broken. That history has almost become a curse from the past, haunting the Democratic present; it’s like a lost paradise, and every few years a new messiah shows up to tell the faithful that (s)he knows the true path that will lead them back. Or it’s like the idyllic garden in “Alice in Wonderland,” which Alice knows she can reach if she can only squeeze through the door.

There is no garden, no path and no door. This mythic certainty that their kingdom will come again — expressed more recently in the mantra that “demographics is destiny” — has prevented Democrats from perceiving the true nature of their predicament. Over the last three decades, the party has been virtually wiped out in numerous states between the coasts where it was once competitive (or even dominant). It now holds a legislative majority in just 14 states. You can slice and dice the history of American party politics in all sorts of tedious ways, but there isno clear precedent for such an imbalance.More to the point, there’s no precedent whatever, in the United States or anywhere else, for a situation where one party appears to represent majoritarian opinion and typically gets more votes, but has conclusively been shut out of power.

Oh but wait, you say: Blue wave incoming! Yeah, whatever. Presented with the powerful unifying force of a massively unqualified and uniquely divisive president, Democrats may indeed win a House majority this fall. (The Senate remains unlikely.) But I don’t feel like betting the ranch on that outcome, do you? What may be even more impressive than the Democratic record of losing winnable elections is the party's aptitude for finding someone else to blame every time it happens. It was the Russians. It was Ralph Nader. It was the Swift-boat ads. It was liberal complacency. It was gerrymandering. It was all the mean things Republicans said. It was the unfortunate fact that the voters don’t like us all that much, which definitely isn’t our fault.

Over the past few weeks, ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's startling primary victory over Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., we’ve seen a remarkable display of intra-party, bad-faith concern trolling — an area where Democrats have set a high standard. Various “mainstream” or “moderate” figures in or around the party are already seeking to pin blame for a hypothetical November defeat, in advance, on the insurgent “socialist” faction associated with Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders. My daring analysis: This does not bespeak enormous confidence.

To be fair, Democrats of all factions and ideologies were united this week in telling former FBI director James Comey — a lifelong Republican, at least until he worked for President Donald Trump — to shut up and go away after offering unsolicited advice to Democratic voters:

Lordy, no -- not the socialist left! As many people observed, the guy who may have single-handedly tipped the balance in the 2016 presidential election should perhaps not view himself as a fount of political wisdom. But at least Comey’s tweet seemed like a sincere opinion, consistent with his grandiose view of himself as a white knight who embodies all the most honorable tendencies of America in one extremely tall white man.

Lieberman was purely trolling, in especially distasteful fashion, in writing a July 17 Wall Street Journal op-ed that Red-baited Ocasio-Cortez with an extraordinary assortment of lies and urged Crowley, the 10-term incumbent she defeated in the June Democratic primary, to run against her on a third-party line in the fall. Since the Journal article is behind a paywall, here's a taste:Joe Lieberman, however, the onetime Connecticut senator and 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, is just an odious little garden gnome, in constant danger of being peed on by the family Schnauzer. He seems, in fact, to have undergone the same process of physical and intellectual shrinkage as Rudy Giuliani: Was this a bargain offered by an evil sorcerer, which conveys immortality at the cost of one’s soul, stature and spine?

Because the policies Ms. Ocasio-Cortez advocates are so far from the mainstream, her election in November would make it harder for Congress to stop fighting and start fixing problems. Thanks to a small percentage of primary votes, all of the people of New York’s 14th Congressional District stand to lose a very effective representative in Washington.

Fortunately, Joe Crowley and the voters in his district can prevent this damage. On Election Day, his name will be on the ballot as the endorsed candidate of the Working Families Party. But for Mr. Crowley to have a chance at getting re-elected, he will have to decide if he wants to remain an active candidate. I hope he does.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform, like hers, is more Socialist than Democratic. Her dreams of new federal spending would bankrupt the country or require very large tax increases, including on the working class. Her approach foresees government ownership of many private companies, which would decimate the economy and put millions out of work.

First of all, Lieberman surely knows that Crowley will do no such thing — he’s a decent guy and a party loyalist, and the PR damage would be enormous — and that Crowley would lose even worse the second time around. (I live in the 14th district; I doubt Lieberman has been here in 30 years, except crossing overhead on the Cross-Bronx Expressway.)

Secondly, the actual point here may be to none-too-subtly remind Journal readers that Lieberman himself ditched the Democratic Party after his own primary defeat in 2006, and endorsed John McCain against Barack Obama in 2008. Whose interests is he serving by encouraging Democrats, in the pages of the house organ of Big Capital, to sabotage a young, progressive woman of color?

None of this makes clear why powerful people like Comey and Lieberman are so worried about a small-scale insurrection within the Democratic Party that is nowhere near as "far from the mainstream" as they pretend, and is also a long way from staging a coup and hanging portraits of Trotsky and Che in DNC headquarters. Socialist-dread syndrome also appears to have driven the recent gathering of “moderate” Democrats in Columbus, Ohio, under the aegis of the think tank Third Way, as reported in a widely circulated piece by Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News (a former Salon staffer).

Several attendees said they were worried that single-payer health care and abolishing ICE and other Bernie-fied policy proposals of the “angry left” would alienate swing voters and damage the party’s prospects for victory in the midterms. That’s at least a valid debating point, although it has been the Democratic default setting for decades. (And has led to that, um, amazing record of uninterrupted winning.)

I was struck by the comments of former Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, who admitted that Democratic moderates find themselves on the defensive in ideological terms: "The only narrative that has been articulated in the Democratic Party over the past two years is the one from the left," he told Seitz-Wald. "I think we need a debate within the party. Frankly, it would have been better to start the conversation earlier."

Markell is absolutely right: A debate is overdue. But a debate about what? The problem for Democratic moderates is precisely that they will not define or explain their positions clearly, except in wonky, granular, political-calculus terms, in large part because their ideas are widely discredited and massively unpopular.

Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois told reporters in Columbus that she stands for "a silent majority who just wants normalcy. Who wants to see that people are going out to Washington to fight for them in a civil way and get something done. ... There's a lot of people that just don't really like protests and don't like yelling and screaming." As Seitz-Wald observes, Bustos sounded more like a Nixon-era Republican than a traditional Democrat, but in any case that's a statement about messaging and style that deliberately avoids any discussion of ideology or specific policy proposals.

At the Democratic convention in 2016, I tried to find a single elected official or candidate who would tell me, straight up, that the financial deregulation and free-trade agreements and welfare cuts and mass incarceration policies of the Bill Clinton years had generally been good ideas, whatever bumps we might have encountered along the way. Nobody would do it — but I don’t think that was because none of them believed it.

Attendees at the Third Wayconference were clearly aware that middle-path Democrats will need big, new ideas in order to compete successfully with Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, debt-free college and the other dangerous pinko proposals that would have had near-unanimous support in the pre-Reagan Democratic Party. Here's what they came up with: A private-sector, employer-funded universal pension plan to supplement Social Security.OK, I'm just spitballing, but that probably isn’t going to suck the wind out of the red sails of Bernie’s fleet and sweep Mitch Landrieu (or whomever) into the White House.

I’m not saying that so-called moderate or mainstream Democrats don't have ideas worth discussing or don’t possess a legitimate ideology. I am saying, with Jack Markell, that it’s long past time for them to tell us clearly what they believe and defend it forcefully. Because there’s a widespread sense that the Democratic Party has some hidden agenda or obscure set of motives beneath its bland, corporate, coalition-building exterior, and that has been infinitely more damaging than any amount of socialist fervor. On the right, it has fueled the perception that Democrats are a pack of conspiratorial scolds who want to limit the freedoms of others -- and so has driven conservatives to the polls. On the left, it has fueled the perception that the party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs and its ilk -- and so has driven progressive apathy. (If neither stereotype is fair, neither is entirely false.)

This quantum ideological uncertainty is what drove people crazy about Hillary Clinton, I think, fueling the Trumpian narrative that she was deceptive ordishonest. (Which was hilarious in that context, needless to say.) She seemed impossible to pin down, first attacking Bernie Sanders as a wild-eyed radical, then gradually embracing the “progressive” label and finally running on a platform that incorporated most of his ideas. She seemed insulted by the suggestion that her Goldman Sachs speeches created any kind of political problem or required any explanation.

Clinton's political flexibility or malleability -- according to the conventional Democratic playbook -- was supposed to be a source of strength, a sign that she was a hard-headed, pragmatic decision-maker who would not be guided by doctrine. Amid the reversed magnetic field of the 2016 election, against an opponent who repeated the same forceful (if meaningless and insincere) phrases over and over again, it just looked like mendacity.

Like her entire generation of Democrats, Clinton had been programmed down to the cellular level with the early-‘90s creed that ideology itself was dangerous and toxic and likely to scare away suburban voters who just wanted civility and decency and problem-solving. Well, folks, I’m not a liberal or a conservative. I’m more of a Republibservatron! This avoidance or denial of ideology — the ideology of no-ideology — had perverse results: It elected two Democratic presidents to two terms apiece but left their party rootless and in ruins, seemingly defenseless before a deranged radical minority with a decaying relationship to reality (but no shortage of fervent ideology).

It’s tempting to say that a specter is haunting the Democratic Party and it’s the specter of socialism, blah blah blah. But that’s largely untrue: The specter is imaginary and so is the socialism, pretty much. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their loose array of allies across the country are a modest contingent within the party. Only a handful of them will win elections this year, and in any case they’re closer to being old-time left-wing populists, with a 21st-century overlay of multiculturalism and intersectionality, than, you know, to this:

Hubert Humphrey, the leading Democratic moderate of Hillary Clinton’s youth, would find little to object to in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, beyond the labeling on the package. (Once the Happy Warrior figured out what ICE and super PACs were, and what they had done to America, he’d go out and ring doorbells in her district.) Then again, Humphrey had no fear of open and often heated ideological conflict, which was a staple of Democratic discourse for decades and is exactly what the “democratic socialist” insurrection has reintroduced since 2016.

Those who shut down such internal conflict and purged the activist left from the Democratic Party, on the premise that it was the only possible way to win elections in a "centrist," anti-ideological nation, have never faced the consequences of their historic blunder. They have lost repeatedly and on a grand scale, insisting every time that they really should have won — or in some other, better world, did win — and that whatever went wrong was somebody else’s fault. They are the ones who appear committed to an inflexible, dogmatic ideology that is out of step with political reality. They are surprised and outraged to learn that if they want to continue their losing streak, they will have to fight for it.

538 6/18

MEMBER ▲ ▼	PARTY ▲ ▼	STATE ▲ ▼	TRUMP SCORE ▲ ▼ How often a member votes in line with Trump's position	TRUMP MARGIN ▲ ▼ Trump’s share of the vote in the 2016 election minus Clinton’s	PREDICTED SCORE ▲ ▼ How often a member is expected to support Trump based on Trump’s 2016 margin	TRUMP PLUS-MINUS ▲ ▼ Difference between a member’s actual and predicted Trump-support scores
Kirsten E. Gillibrand	D	NY	8.2%	-22.5	23.1%	-14.9
Jeff Merkley	D	OR	9.6%	-11.0	33.9%	-24.3
Elizabeth Warren	D	MA	9.6%	-27.2	20.6%	-11.0
Bernard Sanders	I	VT	11.0%	-26.4	21.0%	-10.0
Cory A. Booker	D	NJ	12.3%	-14.1	30.1%	-17.8
Edward J. Markey	D	MA	12.5%	-27.2	20.8%	-8.3
Kamala D. Harris	D	CA	15.1%	-30.1	19.3%	-4.2
Ron Wyden	D	OR	16.4%	-11.0	33.9%	-17.5
Richard Blumenthal	D	CT	19.4%	-13.6	30.5%	-11.1
Mazie K. Hirono	D	HI	21.9%	-32.2	18.5%	+3.5

https://www.alternet.org/education/republicans-are-becoming-less-educated

There are several key attributes that define the Republican Party in its modern incarnation: its overwhelming whiteness; its self-reported religiosity; its slavish devotion to a man who boasts he a single vote, thus proving his point. Moving forward, that list should probably also include as a distinguishing factor the fact that the party is less educated than its Democratic political rivals, and growing increasingly more so.

That’s according to a study released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center. The polling organization now finds “the widest educational gap in partisan identification and leaning seen at any point in more than two decades” between Republicans and Democrats. In 1994, the majority of U.S. residents with four-year college degrees leaned or identified as Republican, at 54 percent; just 39 percent of college graduates leaned or identified as Democrats. As of 2017, those numbers have switched exactly, with the majority of college degree holders now leaning Dem-ward.

Voters with post-graduate degrees are even more likely to cast their votes for Democratic politicians, Pew finds. Sixty-three percent of postgraduates identify as Dems or Dem-leaning, while just 31 percent describe themselves as Republican or GOP leaning.That’s a huge difference from the mid-1990s, when postgraduates were almost equally likely to opt for either party, with 45 percent supporting Republicans and 47 percent backing Democrats.

While Dem ranks have filled with more educated voters, Republicans saw increased support from those whose highest education attainment level is a high school diploma or less. “Among those with no more than a high school education, 47 percent affiliate with the GOP or lean Republican, while 45 percent identify as Democrats or lean Democratic,” Pew researchers write in their report. That’s a shift from the late 1990s and early aughts, when a plurality of those without college degrees voted Democratic, 47 to 42 percent.

As always in America, race can’t be removed from these numbers. Since 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, Pew researchers have found that “white voters with no more than a high school education have moved more to the GOP.” In the near-decade that has elapsed since then, among voters without a degree, “Republicans have held significant advantages, including a 23-percentage-point lead in 2017 (58 percent Republican, 35 percent Democratic).” Whites with college degrees mostly leaned or identified as Democrats at 49 percent, just slightly outpacing the 46 percent who lean or identify as Republican. Among whites with postgraduate degrees, “59 percent align with Democrats and 37 percent Republicans.”

Pew notes that “white voters continue to be somewhat more likely to affiliate with or lean toward the Republican Party than the Democratic Party (51 percent to 43 percent).”

... graphs]

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/democrats-target-2018-races-12-states-prevent-another-decade-republican-gerrymanders

Forget, for a minute, which party controls the House after November’s elections. There’s another decision that will be made this fall that will determine if Republicans will likely dominate the 2020s as they have this decade, in Congress and state capitals.

That fateful decision concerns whether the GOP will monopolize the process for revising political maps that will hold for a decade of congressional and state legislative elections starting in 2022. Ten years ago, after being trounced by President Obama and seeing Democrats take full control of Congress, Republicans plotted a comeback by targeting this same process in 16 states. They wanted to monopolize redistricting and they did, producing gerrymanders that diluted Democrats’ power.

On Wednesday, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee revealed its 2018 strategy. The NDRC is targeting 12 states it believes hold the key to preventing another decade of runaway Republican rule. Their strategy is not to turn the tables on the GOP—they can’t; they’re too far behind. Rather, Democrats hope to elect a slate of governors wielding veto pens and to retake enough state legislative chambers to force Republicans to negotiate sharing power.

“During the last redistricting process in 2011, Republicans had trifecta control [the governor and both legislative chambers] in 19 states, which gave them complete power over the drawing of 213 congressional districts,” the committee said. “The NDRC is committed to changing that and making sure Democrats have a seat at the table in the 2021 redistricting process.”

“This is a critical election year for redistricting because it is the first cycle where the officials elected will serve during the redistricting process in 2021,” the NDRC continued. “NDRC is targeting 12 states during the 2018 election cycle, including 9 gubernatorial races, 20 legislative chambers, 2 ballot initiatives, and 2 down-ballot races. There are 8 additional states on our Watch List.”

While Americans keep hearing that the House will be up for grabs as 2018 is turning into a blue wave year, these statewide races—especially for governor where there are open seats due to term limits—are arguably more important if one doesn’t want to live under outsized GOP rule for another dozen years.

“People need to keep in mind that the GOP has key structural advantages,” said David Daley, author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, which documents the GOP’s gerrymander of 2011. “Turnout [next fall] matters. Democrats need to run everywhere, while prioritizing ruthlessly: if they miss these targets in 2018, they will not have another shot at the maps in many of these states until 2031.”

“They also need to understand taking back the House and having a seat at the table in redistricting are two different things,” he continued. “The first could happen. But the second is arguably more important — and that’s a harder, longer fight that needs to be measured in flipping state legislative chambers in key states, and winning seats at the table in 2021.”

Indeed, getting that negotiating power is the goal, NDRC founder, former Attorney General Eric Holder, told theNew York Times. “From my perspective, success is if you break a trifecta… I don’t think that in December of 2018, you measure success by whether you have assumed control of a particular state.”

NDRC’s 2018 Targets

To break up red-state monopolies, NDRC is targeting open governors’ seats in Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, Florida, Colorado, Nevada and Maine. The NDRC also wants to keep Democratic governors in office in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, just as it wants to challenge GOP governors and legislators in Wisconsin and New Hampshire.

In some states, like Ohio, the NDRC will also be targeting the secretary of state and auditor races, as those officials sit at the table shaping political maps. In other states, like Nevada, it wants to break the GOP’s legislative monopoly. It is also targeting ballot initiatives in Michigan, Ohio, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and South Dakota.

These priorities make sense, Daley said.

...

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tool: https://environmentamerica.org/page/ame/environmental-scorecard

Sadly, Democrats and Republicans don't agree on much these days, including the need to protect our environment. It shouldn't be this way, it didn't used to be and we're doing all we can to make sure it's not this way in the future.

But, as we release our environmental scorecard for 2017, we want to not only applaud the Democrats who scored 100 percent, but also cheer on those members of both parties who boldly stood up for our planet this year.

Overall, the U.S. Senate had a score of 47 percent and the U.S. House of Representatives scored 45 percent, which does not bode well for our air or water.

The good news is that 139 members from the two branches voted with us 100 percent of the time, which means our planet and our families are represented by a lot of real environmental champs.

And on a number of issues, the environment received bipartisan support. In particular, a cadre of Republicans in the U.S. House supported funding to make public transit available and to ensure that the EPA had enough money to do its job protecting our air and water. In the Senate, limiting methane pollution was the big bipartisan winner.

Unfortunately, with 145 of our federal decision-makers scoring 0 percent, it's obvious we have a lot more work to do to make sure our elected officials represent the majority of Americans who want to see a cleaner, greener, healthier planet for future generations.

https://www.ecowatch.com/environment-america-scorecard-2515982183.html

"the fall"?

"CLEAN" MONEY

Kitzhaber saga fuels conservatives' fight on clean energy

The former governor's downfall hands conservatives ammunition to use against environmentalists.

By Jonathan Topaz and Elana Schor E&E?

02/18/15 12:06 PM EST

Updated 02/18/15 06:27 PM EST

For years, conservatives have decried efforts at the state and federal level to support renewable energy producers as crony capitalism.

In Oregon, Gov. John Kitzhaber, they may now have their poster child.

The downfall of Kitzhaber — the Democrat who last week said he would resign because of conflict-of-interest allegations over his first lady’s consulting contracts — hands conservatives on and off Capitol Hill ammunition to use against billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, green nonprofit groups and national Democrats advocating clean energy.

“This is just another example of environmental activist groups attempting to influence policy under a veil of secrecy, and one more reason these groups merit additional scrutiny,” Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.)said in a statement Tuesday. “Beneath the violation of public trust by the Oregon state officials, we have far-left foundations funneling significant funds to an environmental group to orchestrate this type of activism without any public disclosure.”

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who opened an investigation into environmental nonprofits giving during his time as the environment committee’s top Republican, on Tuesday connected the Kitzhaber investigation to “a well-funded, highly developed far-left environmental network in place to influence environmental public policy.”

“This appears to be only one key example of how far they are willing to go to advance their agenda,” Vitter, who is running for governor of the Pelican State this year, said through a spokesman.

Democrats for weeks have distanced themselves from Kitzhaber, whose fiancée, Cylvia Hayes, earned at least $213,000 on contracts closely tied to her work in the Kitzhaber administration. Most of those contracts were related to clean energy, a major priority in the governor’s administration on which Hayes served as an unpaid adviser.State Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum has an open criminal investigation into the Kitzhaber administration’s actions, and federal authorities on Friday issued a criminal subpoena to the Oregon Department of Administrative Services for information related to Hayes’ contracts.

ALSO ON POLITICO

Oregon Gov. Kitzhaber resigns

JONATHAN TOPAZ

Kitzhaber, who leaves office on Wednesday, was just beginning a record fourth term as governor.

Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown, a Democrat, took over and became the state’s 38th governor. When asked about how committed Brown will be to clean energy in her upcoming administration, spokesman Tony Green said she wasn’t yet ready to address specific policy questions.

But conservatives are seeking to link Kitzhaber’s administration to the national green-energy policies advocated by the White House and other Democrats. They claim that Democrats have propped up failed clean-energy projects that aren’t financially sustainable without government aid, and that aid ends up financially benefiting only the politically connected companies lobbying for it.

“The skepticism is with Washington politicians picking winners and losers in the marketplace,” said Catherine Frazier, spokeswoman for Sen. Ted Cruz(R-Texas), who argues that government funding for clean energy projects amounts to “corporate welfare.”

Kate Brown is pictured. | AP Photo

ALSO ON POLITICO

Meet Kate Brown

JONATHAN TOPAZ

“I have no doubt that this should serve as a call for an investigation beyond Oregon’s borders,” said Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank. Horner and others cited emails, obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests, between officials in the governors’ offices in Oregon, Washington state and California in 2013 discussing a multistate climate strategy. In the emails, state officials discuss potential funding from Steyer and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and indicate that White House Council on Environmental Quality staff are “interested” in the proposal.

In the past several days, bothThe Wall Street Journal and National Review have published opinion pieces highlighting Oregon as an example of the failures of the clean energy industry. “[T]he Hayes-Kitzhaber operation exposes the underside of the big-money, insider politics that has come to dominate the environmental movement,” the Journal wrote in an editorial, an argument congressional Republicans have also used to criticize the Obama administration’s backing of companies such as Solyndra and Fisker Automotive.

Conservatives also argue that liberals — and the media — are holding the oil industry to a much higher ethical standard than the clean energy industry. “When Obama is giving tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks, this isn’t for a mom-and-pop wind or solar company. It’s for corporations,” said Charlie Pearce, a former campaign official for Dennis Richardson, the Republican who lost to Kitzhaber in November. Pearce vowed to launch a recall petition against Kitzhaber before the incumbent announced his resignation.

And the situation in Oregon also allows conservatives to target Steyer, the billionaire climate advocate that has become a major player in national electoral politics — someone who, Pearce acknowledged, has become “the Democratic boogeyman” — akin to Charles and David Koch, who support GOP candidates.

For Republicans dedicated to undercutting the network of Democratic campaign support and activism that Steyer has helped build, his ties to the Oregon scandal advance a simple but potent argument: Wealthy environmentalists are not above the same tactics they savage conservatives for using.

“I don’t object to Steyer spending his money trying to persuade people; I object to the hypocrisy,” GOP energy lobbyist and strategist Michael McKennasaid in an interview. “Whether it’s criminal or not, it all smells pretty bad, and it’s a rebuke to everybody who says our side’s different from the other side.”

American Energy Alliance President Tom Pyle, whose pro-fossil fuel nonprofit is backed in part by funding from the Kochs, said in an interview that the Oregon flap is “indicative of systemic problems with all these programs” focusing on green energy.

“They’re so heavily dependent on government intervention and involvement,” said Pyle, a former Koch Industries lobbyist. “It’s beyond cronyism — bordering on corruption.”

The web of nonprofit grants and support that connects Steyer to Hayes might be indirect, but its structure mirrors the conclusions of Vitter’s report last year, which traced the financial influence of a group of wealthy green donors Republicans dubbed “the Billionaire’s Club.”

The Energy Foundation, one of two massive nonprofits that paid for Hayes’ $118,000 fellowship — income she failed to publicly disclose until questioned by Oregon media — got a $500,000 grant approved from Steyer’s TomKat Charitable Trust in 2012, according to the trust’s tax filings for that year.

The Energy Foundation steered two $25,000 grants in 2012 and 2013 to the Clean Economy Development Center, which gave Hayes her fellowship, federal tax forms show.

The GOP Senate report targets the Energy Foundation as “a quintessential example of a pass-through frequently employed” by a nationwide network of green donors working to influence federal and state policies.

The Energy Foundation said conservative attacks are skirting the issue on clean energy. “It’s unfortunate that some are using recent events in Oregon to make old, familiar attacks on clean energy work being done in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation,” the foundation said in a statement to POLITICO.

Bobby Whithorne, a spokesman for Steyer’s NextGen Climate political action committee, said the Oregon attacks are part of a broader industry campaign to twist the truth.

“It’s no surprise the Big Oil special interests and their feckless minions will blow as much dirty smoke as they can - in the last several weeks they have denied basic climate science, rejected human evolution and, in this case, ignored the actual facts,” he emailed Wednesday.

The TomKat trust’s Energy Foundation donations amounted to less than 1 percent of the latter group’s annual intake for 2013, NextGen noted, and were not permitted to be used on “legislative, lobbying or electoral purposes.”

In a Feb. 6 statement posted on its website, the Clean Economy Development Center said Hayes’ work focused on “communicating the economic benefits of clean economy projects” and that it “does not engage in any lobbying activities.” CEDC did not return a request for further comment by press time.

One of the projects on which Hayes focused during her fellowship, CEDC said, was a Gulf Coast sustainable communities project set up after the BP oil spill that won praise from the White House in 2011 for having “established a model of collaboration that brings together local communities, federal agencies, nonprofits, and businesses to rebuild neighborhoods.”

CEDC’s executive director Jeffrey King co-founded a group called Clean Economy Network that in 2011 became part of Advanced Energy Economy, another green nonprofit, of which Steyer is a co-founder and board member. The CEN’s affiliate education fund received $2.5 million in grants from Steyer’s TomKat trust in 2012, according to federal tax returns.

:{Former Inhofe aide Matt Dempsey, now a senior director at FTI Consulting, predicted that the Oregon scandal would come back to haunt Steyer as the hedge funder seeks to influence the next election.

“This is a black eye for his efforts moving forward in 2016,” Dempsey said.}:

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/john-kitzhaber-oregon-clean-energy-115287#ixzz43Glx7Gvb

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/john-kitzhaber-oregon-clean-energy-115287#ixzz43GljMi2I

2014

- While Republican Senate candidates are nearly unanimous in their desire to either ignore or deny the existence of global warming, the major Democratic Senate candidates this cycle are more of a mixed bag.

Those in tough races in more conservative-leaning states avoid the issue of global warming or climate change on their websites. They include Sens. Kay Hagan (N.C.),Mark Begich (Alaska), Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Mary Landrieu (La.), as well as Kentucky candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes.

Those hailing from more traditionally Democratic states fully embrace the need to confront the issue. They include Sens. Al Franken (Minn.), Ed Markey (Mass.), Cory Booker (N.J.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.). But in swing states some candidates also discuss the issue on their websites, such as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, whose website touts the senator’s efforts to “confront the global threat of climate change.”

Other Democrats don’t address the issue quite as directly. Rep. Gary Peters, who is running for Michigan's open Senate seat, touts that he has “fought for clean air and clean water in Michigan communities” without mentioning “climate change.” Rep.Bruce Braley, the Democratic candidate for Iowa's open Senate seat, also does not refer directly to climate change on his campaign website, but he discusses his support for the Renewable Fuel Standard as a way to make “clean energy progress.”

And then there is Michelle Nunn, the Democratic Senate candidate running in Republican-leaning Georgia. She goes squarely at the matter on her website: “We must continue to decrease our reliance on foreign oil and confront the challenges of climate change.”

Nunn's website continues:

===

Robert Reich's Blog [1] / By Robert B. Reich [2]

Why Democrats Can't Be Trusted to Control Wall Street

May 25, 2013 |

Who needs Republicans when Wall Street has the Democrats? With the help of congressional Democrats, the Street is rolling back financial reforms enacted after its near meltdown.

According to the *New York Times* [3], a bill that's already moved through the House Financial Services Committee, allowing more of the very kind of derivatives trading (bets on bets) that got the Street into trouble, was drafted by Citigroup -- whose recommended language was copied nearly word for word in 70 lines of the 85-line bill.

Where were House Democrats? Right behind it. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a major recipient of the Street's political largesse, co-sponsored it. Most of the Democrats on the Committee, also receiving generous donations from the big banks, voted for it. Rep. Jim Himes, another proponent of the bill and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, now leads the Democrat's fund-raising effort in the House.

Bob Rubin -- co-chair of Goldman before he joined the Clinton White House, and chair of Citigroup's management committee after he left it -- is still influential in the Party, and his protégés are all over the Obama administration. I like Bob personally but I battled his Street-centric views the whole time I served, and soon after I left the administration he persuaded Clinton to support a repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

Jack Lew, Obama's current Treasury Secretary, was chief operating officer of Citigroup's Alternative Investments unit, a proprietary trading group, from 2006 to 2008, before he joined the Obama administration. Peter Orszag, Obama's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, left the Obama Administration to become Citigroup's vice chairman of corporate and investment banking, and chairman of the financial strategy and solutions group.

All these men are honorable. None has broken any law. But they and their ilk in congress -- the Democrats who are now rolling back Dodd-Frank -- don't seem to appreciate the extent to which Wall Street has harmed, and continues to harm, America.

It's not entirely coincidental that the Obama administration never put tough conditions on banks receiving bailout money, never prosecuted a single top Wall Street executive for the excesses that led to the near meltdown, and still refuses to support a tiny tax on financial transactions that would bring in tens of billions of dollars as well as discourage program trading.

Democrats can't be trusted to control Wall Street. If there were ever an issue ripe for a third party, the Street would be it.

The Democrats: A Critical History

Lance Selfa(Author)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Democrats-A-Critical-History/dp/1931859558

kpfa interview http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/83639

2012 Platform

Romney's stance on anthropogenic climate change has wavered over the years. He recently acknowledged that humans contribute to global warming, but added "there remains a lack of scientific consensus."

The 2012 Republican platform mentions "climate change" once, to downplay the issue's severity. The 2012 Democratic platform addresses climate change as "one of the biggest threats of this generation," although climate activists have criticized the platform as **:{weaker on climate legislation:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:** than the party's 2008 platform.

[Couple this with a new-fangled Democratic Party platform calling for expedited processing of oil and gas pipelines like the Keystone XL of Tar SandsAction/Tar Sands Blockade fame and an "all of the above" energy policy being touted by the Party at large, and soon it becomes quite clear for those with eyes to see that the people behind the taxpayer- and corporate-sponsored parties are also the people behind today's Democratic Party.] horn

As the final weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign unfold, one of the starkest contrasts between the recently released Democratic and Republican party platforms is in climate change policy.

While the 2012 Republican platform mentions the term "climate change" once (while downplaying the issue's severity), the**2012 Democratic platform**uses the term "climate change" 18 times."Our opponents have moved so far to the right as to doubt the science of climate change," it declares, adding:

We know that global climate change is one of the biggest threats of this generation -- an economic, environmental, and national security catastrophe in the making. We affirm the science of climate change, commit to significantly reducing the pollution that causes climate change, and know we have to meet this challenge by driving smart policies that lead to greater growth in clean energy generation and result in a range of economic and social benefits.

The Democratic platform promotes the development of clean energy jobs, the conservation of public lands, and highlights President Barack Obama's efforts to reduce carbon pollution and advance clean air and water safeguards.

The Hill points out that the new Democratic platform appears weaker on domestic climate change legislation than the party's 2008 platform, which proposed the implementation of a market-based cap-and-trade system.

The new version also supports an “all-of-the-above" energy strategy, which includes oil, clean coal and natural gas. As independent news site Raw Story points out, it removes the 2008 platform's language promising to "free this nation from the tyranny of oil."

The 2012 Democratic platform goes on to claim Obama has been a leader in tackling climate change, pointing to improvements in fuel efficiency standards.

The Obama administration was recently praised for finalizing new fuel economy rules, but an analysis on the blog "Get Energy Smart! NOW!" suggests that in terms of leadership, "The silence from the administration and the Obama-Biden election team on climate issues has been deafening … at least until the past few days."

In addressing foreign policy, the Democratic platform promotes nation-building at home by directing attention to "crucial problems," including the emerging danger of climate change. It argues that "The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of vital ecosystems across the globe."

It pledges to work on building an international effort to cut emissions and provide financing for developing nations to protect themselves from the effects of climate change.

Climate change is also mentioned in the Democratic platform as one of the "greatest dangers we face," requiring global cooperation.

Meanwhile, the 2012 Republican platform claims the current administration’s National Security Strategy "subordinates our national security interests to environmental, energy, and international health issues, and elevates 'climate change' to the level of a 'severe threat' equivalent to foreign aggression."

**As the*****Washington Post*****notes**, this is a marked difference from the **:{2008 GOP platform:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:**, which had a section dedicated to "Addressing Climate Change Responsibly."

U.S.,**Arctic sea ice melted**to record low levels this summer, and the connection between**global warming and extreme weather trends**was further established.

The climate will continue to change, whether party platforms acknowledge it or not.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/04/democratic-party-platform-climate-change-environment_n_1854579.html?view=print&comm_ref=false