Archives for 2024

AOC is apparently thinking about running to replace Jamie Raskin as ranking member of the Oversight Committee.  Last night I noted on Bluesky that she’s smart: she walked into Congress, looked around, and figured she could run the place if she wanted.  So what she did was first lock down her fundraising, so she could donate to PACs of her colleagues.  Then she locked down her district — she regularly destroys her well-funded opponents (and primary challengers).  Now, she’s on step 3:  moving up the committee ladder, but not at the snails pace usually happens, and choosing a committee where she’s distinguished herself as a tenacious, well-informed questioner.

I also think she uses social media the way every Congressperson should, and she runs a good district office.  Her office does a lot of constituent services, and they also do things like hand out turkeys on Thanksgiving.

Anyway, there’s a piece making the rounds arguing that Democrats need to undergo a transformation to address the fact that the US is a “Civic Desert”.  Basically, the idea is that the loss of social clubs and other interactive spaces have isolated people, and Democrats’ could step in to address that.  I don’t think it’s a bad idea.  Certainly, I’ve witnessed the death of local party meetings in rural red states.

The piece identifies four areas where Democrats could do something:  Membership Cards, Maps (by which the author means precinct maps maintained by captains who live in the precinct), Meeting Halls and Mutual Aid.

The author, Pete Davis at The Nation, is a little too wedded everything starting with “M,” so Membership Cards encompasses more than just a card — it’s tracking registration and recognizing precinct captains that grow their membership.  He also mentions dues as part of the membership package.

Maps, and all the infrastructure associated with maintaining likely voter lists, was often the work of the federal office holders in red states.  They had the money to keep those lists going, and when they lost office, the underfunded state party couldn’t keep up with it.

Meeting Halls that we pay for directly is a big ask, but having a place to gather is important.  And, of course, Mutual Aid probably already happens but if Democrats were a visible part of organizing this, that’s all to the good.

The barrier to this is obviously money.  Other than the 50-state project, which never really amounted to much, it’s clear that money spent by the Democratic Party is almost all spent during elections, for infrastructure that doesn’t last.  And, there’s just a shitload of money spent on TV ads that I think is at least partially wasted.  There are a bunch of political consultants who won’t get anything out of the 4 M’s, so they will certainly resist.

That all said, one of the smartest people in Congress, AOC, is doing a lot of these “M’s” in her district, and it’s working for her.

AOC, as Usual, Is the ModelPost + Comments (121)

First, Joe and Mika seem to have completely lost the plot yesterday:

David Frum just shared a disturbing anecdote from an appearance this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. According to his short article at The Atlantic, he made a flippant reference to reporting that Pentagon nominee Pete Hegseth was known for drinking on the job at Fox News. The specific line was: “If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”

He went on to compare the case to that of John Tower in 1989, a long-serving senator whose Secretary of Defense nomination (Dick Cheney got the nod after Tower bowed out) was torpedoed over claims of drinking and womanizing. According to David, after he said this, an MSNBC producer piped up in his ear objecting to his comments and warning him not to repeat them. Not long after, David was ushered off the set, apparently sooner than expected. Then Mika Brzezinski read out an apology for what he’d said.

Apparently Joe is yelling at everyone who criticized them today but I’m too lazy to dig up the video (I saw it go by on Bluesky, which really, really needs bookmarks.). I guess Trump’s election just broke their brains?

Second, Ro Khanna, smh:

Strong “pick me” energy there.  I get the strategy, which is to look for common ground and also expose Musk and Ramaswamy when they back away from doing anything to cut defense, but this comes off as pathetic to me.

What the Hell is Going on in Some People’s Heads?Post + Comments (128)

The title of this post comes from words that the killer of the United Healthcare CEO wrote on the casings of the bullets used in the killing yesterday morning.  It’s apparently a riff on the three D’s of healthcare insurers:  Delay, Deny, Defend.  At the moment, there’s a massive manhunt going on in New York City, just as there would be for any other murder.

I’ve been interested to read the social media reaction to this killing, which is pretty uniformly sarcastic and/or full of stories about healthcare denial.  There were also a lot of comments about how cops only get energized when capital is at risk.  I thought this piece by Marisa Kabas was a good examination of the reaction to the death of people engaged in massive injustice, and she compares the reaction to CEO Thompson’s death to that of Henry Kissinger:

When I saw the responses to Thompson’s killing start to roll in, it quickly became clear he was someone who many Americans considered to have violated the human contract. […]

In his 2020 book “I You We Them”, British author Dan Getton writes of the “desk killer”: a person who doesn’t carry out direct violence against people, but orchestrates and sanctions it from the comfort of a temperature-controlled office.

“You can find people killing from their desks and their computers in the military, but also in the civil service,” Gretton writes. “They might be in the oil industry, armaments, pharmaceuticals, but you can also find them in finance, insurance, politics or law. They rarely intend to kill, or injure, but their actions, combined with the vast and diffuse reach of government and contemporary corporate power, result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and devastated lives.”

Brian Thompson, with the healthcare of 49 million Americans under his purview, could have been considered a “desk killer.” But does the implicit harm he inflicted by helming a company that routinely denies people access to life-changing medication and procedures (and consequently punishes people for being too poor to pay) excuse his killing? Right away people seemed to be ascribing their own feelings about the healthcare system onto this stranger in the absence of any concrete information about what had actually motivated him to kill. Revenge fantasies danced in their heads before we even knew whether or not revenge was a factor.

She quotes Spencer Ackerman on Kissinger’s violation of the human contract:

[…] But that emerges from our understanding of our humanity, what we owe to one another, the basic respect and dignity in viewing human lives as precious and in viewing them as valuable. And that’s a contract. And there are gonna be some people, like Henry Kissinger, who break that contract at grand scale, and you don’t have to be sad when someone like that dies. You can feel relieved. You don’t want, in general, to be happy when people die. That is not a good way of being that will ultimately hurt you more than it will hurt them. But there are some people whose deaths come as a relief, and sometimes they come as a relief because justice was never served for the acts of such a person. And relief is the closest thing to justice that people will experience.

Anyway, I don’t even know if I feel much at all about this guy’s death.  I know people whose denial of care by United Healthcare led to, shall we say, “poor outcomes”.   Thompson made millions from their suffering.   He was not a good person, and I generally don’t mourn the death of bad people.

Deny, Defend, DeposePost + Comments (171)