U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is in Cole Country this weekend. He’s taking his “Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here” tour to West (By God) Virginia today and Saturday.
John Cole is currently at the Capitol Theatre in Wheeling waiting for the rally to start. He reports that the venue is half full at 4 PM, and the event isn’t scheduled to start until 6 PM. He’s unable to post from his phone (because WordPress) but sent this photo to share with y’all:
John’s looking for a live feed in case anyone wants to follow along when the rally starts. I’ll post one here if he relays a link or I find one at showtime. Will also update with pics from Cole if/when I receive them. Here’s a description of the event from the local CBS affiliate:
During the speech, organizers say Sanders is expected to focus on the takeover of the national government by billionaires and large corporations and the disastrous “Big Beautiful Bill,” which will cause 15 million Americans to lose their health insurance and destroy the national safety net.
Also speaking at the event will be local workers who have been helping the community, challenging corporations, and fighting for labor rights in West Virginia, according to organizers.
Meanwhile, open thread!
ETA: John forwarded a live stream!
cain
Posted on the dead thread that our boy Ziggy got a bladder blockage and needs to be hospitalized. Lend a few thoughts in his direction.
WTFGhost
This is some sort of test, how many threads can we make that crazy Ghost haunt, isn’t it?
Well:
Several glugs of extra virgin olive oil
About 10 garlic cloves, peeled, smashed, then chopped. You can crush them if you feel mean.
Two cups of sweet onion (about 1 fist sized onion)
1 can mild Ro-tel because I listened to *you* people!
Simmer for ten minutes. Add tomato paste, then commercial “chunky” salsa.
Simmer for another ten to let flavors combine. Wonder if that’s Ro-tel, or Garlic and lots of EVOO you’re smelling.
Congratulations – you now have healthy salsa that’s got a huge amount of vegetable and healthy fats in it, suitable for serving to gimps and temporary, hip-recovery, style gimps. Add black beans or refried beans to boost protein; also, goes well with canned fish, though it’s a bit weird if you’re used to Italian seasoning over your sardines.
I’m working on whorehouse sauce next, I think. Apparently I need to add some hijinks.
No, wait. *CAPERS*. Not hijinks.
WTFGhost
@cain: Good thoughts sent.
zhena gogolia
@cain: Praying for Ziggy.
Jackie
@cain: Get well soon, Ziggy!
eclare
@cain:
Fingers, toes, paws crossed here for Ziggy!
eclare
Yay! Thunderstorm in Memphis. The rain is really coming down.
Also I RSVP’d to go to my D rep Steve Cohen’s town hall on Monday night.
Jackie
I’m looking forward to Cole’s post tonight!
trollhattan
@cain:
Fingers crossed for you and Ziggy.
Our Bruno had bladder stones requiring surgical removal and lived more than a decade after. So know good outcomes do happen.
WaterGirl
@cain: Glad you got Ziggy to the vet in time.
Really scary stuff. Come on, Ziggy!
trollhattan
@Jackie:
He’s in Wheeling but they are making him mow the grass.
Jackie
@WTFGhost:
Small can of tomato paste? A squeeze of tomato paste from a tube?
It sounds delish!
Sister Golden Bear
@cain: Wishing the best for Ziggy. And hugs, if hugs are OK.
Jackie
@trollhattan: LOL!
rikyrah
Praying for Ziggy.
Healing thoughts.
Baud
@cain: 🤞
tam1MI
Sending healing vibes Ziggy’s way!
Omnes Omnibus
Cole is cataloging his misfortunes at the event on BlueSky.
WTFGhost
@Jackie: About half a (small) can – I had a tube sitting by, but it looked like “part of a can”. Truth to tell, I’ve only rarely used an entire can of tomato paste – I think the last time was when I had some chili you couldn’t serve using a spatula, so it needed thickening.
I used about 4 cups of Pace chunky salsa, plus the cup of Rotel.
(While writing this, I then bit into a huge, huge, chunk of sardine, and *nearly* choked on the oily fishiness, then nearly choked on laughter, “I said this went well with sardines, damn it!” )
ETA: yes, tomato paste comes in *big* cans, too – I think the small ones are a half cup, so I used about a quarter cup.
Jackie
@WTFGhost: Thanks! I use the tomato paste tubes now. No more “now what am I gonna do with this other half can…”
pieceofpeace
@cain: Will do and hope he has a swift recovery, with lots of attention for healing soon. Good fortune….
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes! Here’s a classic of the genre:
Betty Cracker
@cain: Best wishes and good vibes to the fuzzball!
chrisanthemama
That is one gorgeous theater. WV welcomes Bernie in style.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Heh. :-)
Mcat
@cain: Best wishes for little Ziggy.
Baud
Jackie
@Betty Cracker: LOLOL!!!
Jackie
@Baud: Ooooh LOVE IT!!! James Talarico knows Paxton doesn’t have the cajones to do anything but yap!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Guaranteed the hall will be packed by speachifying time.
Hopefully some of the prelim speakers will have fire and make strong statements about what should be core Dem issues. Outside of AOC here at the 35K Denver rally earlier in the year, *the* best speaker (better than Sanders quite frankly) was Jimmie Williams Jr, president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.
Funny how liberals come out for populist speakers these days and not somebody who’s gonna tell us how everything will be better if we tweak a tax rate here and there, expand tax credits, get rid of our small donor base in favor of tech billionaire donations, etc. As Martin said last night, what’s resonating with people at these rallies is a message that is essentially:
trollhattan
Huckafuck is trying to maneuver himself into another run as Republican nominee. This fuckin’ guy.
Professor Bigfoot
@cain: Sending that good fellow all the luck, right down to the quantum level.
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan: lol!
(Now I’m picturing Cole mowing the grass around the Capitol building with Bernie wagging his finger in his face, a la that famous Trumpov meme…does that make me a bad person? It does, doesn’t it?)
Jackie
Putin’s demands to end his invasion of Ukraine:
eclare
@Omnes Omnibus:
Hahaha…two bandanas!
sab
@cain: Oh no! I thought you were in Europe touristing.?
Jackie
Interesting… of course it’s just speculation at this point:
Omnes Omnibus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I really feel like you are fight with an enemy who isn’t here. I am willing to bet there aren’t more than one or two commenters here who wouldn’t be in favor of some good old fashioned Keynesian economics. If you recall, that’s what a bunch of us liked about Biden.
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca: No, if you hadn’t shared that thought, it would have made you a bad person.
sab
@eclare: My town hall with our Emilia Sykes last month was excellent. She was really sharp, and politely good against opponents in the audience.
WaterGirl
@Jackie: What the heck is a tomato paste tube???
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: You can get it in toothpaste-like tubes. That’s how Nigella does it.
WTFGhost
@WaterGirl: It’s like a frosting tube, only it has tomato paste in it. Be very careful when decorating cakes in blood red.
CaseyL
@cain: Healing thoughts headed Ziggy’s way, and best wishes for a swift and complete recovery.
trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
Pro tip: store in pantry and not medicine cabinet.
Citizen_X
@trollhattan: Fucking Huckabee. Ever heard of the Berlin Airlift, ambassador? Yes, we flew in food for the starving Germans. And some of them had to be ex-Nazis.
(Plus, Dresden? THAT’S your example?)
Dan B
@trollhattan: Precisely. My partner brushed his teeth with Arnica Gel that is in a toothpaste like tube. Tomato paste would have been preferable. The Arnica is in a jellied alcohol. Very little brushing occured.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Citizen_X:
I’ve reread that piece half a dozen times now and it still a) makes no sense, and b) shows an appalling lack of understanding of the time and event’s he’s referencing.
I once watched him give a talk at one of the amphitheaters in Ephesus on one of his ‘Holy Land’ grift cruises. Pure happenstance. His staff were flying drones taking video coverage and when caught, lied their way out of giving them up to the staff there.
Godbothering Nazi.
WaterGirl
@WTFGhost: I have never seen a frosting tube, either. I apparently need to get out more.
WaterGirl
@Dan B: Arniflora?
I am allergic to a lot of creams, so I love the Arniflora and Califlora gels.
Not for brushing my teeth, however.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: thank you for that.
eclare
Pretty photo today.
Dan B
@WaterGirl: Not for teeth! It is Arniflora.
Tony Jay
@trollhattan:
Standard R-Maggedon trolling from the cartoonishly incoherent Ambassador to East Bibleland. Just take a collection of unconnected bleats, each one honed and pared to remove any trace of factual accuracy, soak them overnight in a used chamber pot and spray them across the upturned faces of a credulous media under orders from above to carry any old stool-water, as long as it emerges from a conservative sewer.
It takes a lot to make Keir Starmer look like the injured party in any Israel-based slanging match. Good on Huck the Hick for going that extra mile.
Such a prick.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl: You can also get pesto in a tube.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: “There aren’t more than one or two”. Fucking typos.
zhena gogolia
The Ukraine news is just . . . beyond beyond beyond
Why? Why? Why?
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: Harris had a weird laugh.
trollhattan
@Dan B:
Lordy. I gather you restrained your laughter as well as possible?
We give and we give, and do they really appreciate that?
mrmoshpotato
@eclare:
I’m jealous!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Omnes Omnibus:
That makes more sense now.
The kind of economic policy BS that Martin’s been writing about in the comments the last couple of days (and that significant segment of Dem electeds, federal, state and local, who support it) has been peddled in here for years by certain FPers (some now gone) and plenty of regular commenters. The kind of Dem electeds they support and fluff is a dead giveaway.
Moreover, my comment above wasn’t necessarily aimed, for once, at those usual suspects but more about what’s resonating with live audiences and bringing people to rallies and it’s not what New Democrats/Blue Dogs/New Liberalism electeds preach.
Martin’s been saying it better.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I read that 3 times trying to understand it, so when I saw your comment, I fixed your typo. Hope that’s okay.
Dan B
@trollhattan: My partner is a great guy, loved by many. He’s not interested in pesky details.
There was partially stifled giggling.
trollhattan
@Tony Jay:
The endtimers are insufferable already but Huck, and his vile kid, in this case not the dog-killing one, take it to unexplored depths.
The “attaboy, you just go ahead and scrape away the rest of that mean, nasty Gaza” phone calls to Bibi must be something to behold.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: Cool.
Dan B
@mrmoshpotato: Im jealous of rain as well. Seattle has had less than two inches of rain since May first. Fire at this point would be catastrophic.
WaterGirl
@eclare: So jealous about the rain!
trollhattan
Some headlines just need to be held and admired.
Maybe not “Headless body found in topless bar” but still epic.
Meet Mags: bbc.com/news/articles/c07p9ng1zvno
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I’ve been waiting a lifetime for it to resonate with voters and being people to the polls.
Maybe Mamdani represents the start of something finally taking hold, but I’m too old to wait with bated breadth for change to happen.
Omnes Omnibus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
There are some politicians that people support because they believe that the politician is the left most electable at that time and in that place. It does not mean that they don’t support policies to left of that. Now, whether they are right or wrong in that belief is a matter of debate.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: But I’m not suggesting something particularly Keynesian either. The central problem is this over-relianace on markets, and while Keynes did call for government intervention when markets failed, and recognized that markets do not self correct, it still centers the economy almost exclusively around markets (which is how things worked when he shaped his theories). The problem is that many market failures aren’t because we tweaked the wrong knob around the market, it’s that it’s not a market, or that its a market that is so unstable as to not be able to function.
A lot of healthcare is not a market because we have a moral expectation that a parent cannot refuse to participate in that market on behalf of their sick child, or that an unconscious car accident victim be presumed to be refusing to participate either. We have a moral obligation to treat people which is in direct conflict with the very notion of what a market is. If you are forced to consume a good, it cannot function as a market without an infinite amount of bureaucratic knobs and levers to force it into some semi-equilibrium state because no matter how many knobs and levers you add to reach equilibrium, it will leave that state and require more, which goes on forever.
So it’s not just a question of intervention or non-intervention, which is the primary Dem/GOP argument of the last half century, but whether the market should even be relied on at all, which generally hasn’t been an argument except at the margins. Medicare, until we jammed Part C in there to try and force it to have a market option, isn’t a market to the consumer, but it still is to the supplier – doctors can choose to take it, etc. The VA is even less of a market as the doctors are employed by the agency. The ACA is interventionist, but still centers the solution on the market.
So Biden is still a market based interventionist, rather than a non-market interventionist. His bills negotiate drug prices to bring costs down, by contrast California said ‘we’ll just produce our own generics’. No need for taxpayers to provide incentives or regulation, the state will just make them (it’s actually a non-profit the state contracted with so the regulation is still somewhat needed). All of the polices on housing are around incentives ($25000 downpayment assistance paid for by the taxpayers) rather than on ‘what if the government just built housing and sold it at cost?’ Mamdani says ‘the city can just run a grocery store’.
And these are radical ideas to most elected Democrats, and I don’t know if they’re radical to Biden, but he certainly didn’t shape policy in those directions apart from the college debt relief which was a very simple ‘what if we just crossed it off the ledger’. Mainly he was interventionist in terms of quickly adding a bunch of new knobs and levers and not worrying too much about the cost, which is Keynesian, but what if we just built houses? What if we kept the ARA UBI policies for parents forever? What if we just made public college education free? Like, we dabble with these things but it’s still very margins of the party, rather than central, mainly because we still have this notion that markets are the only correct way to do stuff, and I think if we could break from that we’d get pretty responsive solutions to people’s problems that voters could understand in your 30s commercial, etc. Wealth tax is another of those ideas that seems to violate some fundamental rules of how we think things should work that falls in the same category.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Remember those Harris-Walz rallies? They were lit!
mrmoshpotato
@Dan B: Wow. Hope you get some rain.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Probably for the wrong reasons.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Hearing Springsteen sing “This Gun for Hire” for the nth time and see Beyonce say a few words.
Chief Oshkosh
I’ve never really understood why Keynesian economics aren’t championed more. As far as I know, there are lots of data showing very clearly that it works and almost no data suggesting that it does not. But, it’s not my field, so what do I know?
trollhattan
Straight into my vein with this.
schrodingers_cat
DSA types can get elected in NYC and deep blue areas, so can anyone with a D after their name. If they start flipping red seats blue then I will take them seriously.
I don’t like idealogues of any kind. Tankie kind or MAGA kind. YMMV.
trollhattan
@Chief Oshkosh: Zombie Milton Friedman and the Chicago School would be sad.
And that’s about it.
NotoriousJRT
@cain: Virtual pats and lots of positive thoughts for Ziggy (and his peeps).
Dan B
@mrmoshpotato: We got 1/16″ this month but not at our house. It didn’t get wet under the trees.
schrodingers_cat
@Chief Oshkosh: Biden did and fat lot of good it did him. The horseshoe left crapped on his achievements 24/7 as did the media.
Ultimately by their actions, these two groups helped T2.0 happen. In addition to the MAGAs and R donors.
eclare
@mrmoshpotato:
Temperature also dropped 30 degrees.
Tony Jay
@trollhattan:
This is what they want. This is what they’ve wanted for as long as R-Maggedonism has been part of the Krazy Kristian Kult’s ur-mythology. Israel running headlong towards the End Times with America providing the running shoes.
Huckabee must be creaming his starched pants to be there at the centre of it.
jowriter
@trollhattan: Janet Mills is awesome. She is not young (77) and in fact is 5 years older than Collins, but she is an exceptionally good politician for Maine. She is tough, tough, tough. I spend a lot of time in Maine but am not a resident. If I were, she would have my vote in a heartbeat. Mills is Maine born and raised, which is important in this state.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: I will note that Trump is basically doing the same thing but rather than have the government directly provide the results, he’s keeping the market system in place and simply using authoritarian force to get the same result (at least in theory). He hasn’t turned it on the cost of groceries or whatever and I suspect he never will, but he’s strong-arming the market to achieve a result (and provide who knows what kickback in return) rather than doing it from the government where its accountable to voters. They’re both a tearing down of the centrality of markets – one by recognizing where markets don’t work and just substituting government, the other by simply negating market forces by force but keeping the structure (which is one definition of fascism).
I think voters (not all of course, but quite a lot) are saying ‘give us results’ and are now presented with one model of how that can work by Trump (which we are hoping he’s too incompetent to execute on), but not really one by Democrats apart from the DSA folks (and Warren is now on the team apparently). At least the liberal view doesn’t seek to invalidate how the remaining markets work, but Trumps does. If you are a more honest free-marketer, there’s a contrast here that Democrats should be able to campaign around as they are the ones better preserving markets overall. The risk is that voters right now see results as incompatible with democracy (this pulls in a little bit of the ‘big government’ argument and the ‘fraud, waste, and abuse’ argument), and I think it would benefit Democrats through whatever inner strength they can muster to prove that democracy and economic progress can coexist – because we have been making progress in very narrow directions.
This is to a large degree a rerun of the 1930s where economic problems were the central concern, we flirted with fascism, and high tariffs and all that. And it fell apart but it didn’t have the opportunity to see if the fascist stuff might have made it work better from the citizens perspective. Hoover couldn’t strong-arm the problems away like Trump is trying to do and fortunately that failure led to FDR. I’m not sure Trump will fail as badly as Hoover did from the citizens perspective, though. I think he will fail, but I don’t think it’s good for Democrats to be relying on that.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
218 – 50+VP – 5 -1. And two of those 50 were Manchin and Sinema. He did as much as he could have – and more than I would have believed possible – with the Congress he had. What non-market intervention would have passed that Congress?
Martin
@Chief Oshkosh: So the theory I’m offering here is that in the 70s/80s we saw all the great things we could do with computers and basically decided that the economic problem throughout the 70s were because government couldn’t intervene fast enough, but we could sharpen our economic measures and models with this new technology and algorithms and robotics and fancy gee-gaws and produce really accurate and dynamic economic models around markets, and they could rapidly self-correct and so on and so forth. It’s a utopian view of capitalism that technology would unlock and the US and UK swallowed that shit whole along with the notion that the government was unavoidably a fuckup. Democrats and Republicans didn’t differ on the central utopian view, merely on the details of how much regulation and intervention was needed and where. And for the middle class it’s been decent, though you have to work harder each generation to get into the middle class, and for the rich it’s been fantastic, and for everyone else it’s been kind of shit. And every decade or so the system is going to crash, wipe out half your assets (so make sure you earned got as many as you need) or nuke your job and we’ll wrap a new layer of computer models around it and slowly wind it back into shape.
The system worked well enough for enough people that we kept voting for it. I’ll also note that the Democratic Party which used to be mostly working class and marginalized communities until the 80s started actively campaigning for middle class whites to come out of the GOP starting with Clinton and the party has transitioned to mainly be that in service of that class of voter. The working class, for whom both parties had few solutions because whenever the technical models failed, they failed from the bottom up, mostly got ignored and are now in a kind of political no-mans-land, and not reliable for Democrats like they used to be.
Covid marked the latest of these crashes (not Biden’s fault) and the working class again got nuked and never really recovered and Democrats have finally lost enough of them to not be able to win elections – this time even losing some loyal POC and young voters. Biden’s instinct was to big, and in a lot of ways Democrats did, but most of it never reached those voters. The EV tax credits and renewables never trickled down into good enough jobs to make up for all that was lost.
So now there’s enough people disillusioned with this system to no longer vote for it, and Trump isn’t some hands-off technocrat. He pretends he’s a great negotiator and if insulin is too expensive he’ll roll up his sleeves and get the price lowered by 500%. Democrats aren’t yet offering a break from the old system, and when candidates do show up to say ‘hey, I’m willing to do it!’ we dutifully hammer those little nails right back into place and say ‘no, that’s not how we do things here’.
To break from this and do more government intervention is to accept that the mathematical scholarship around how to make an exclusive market based economy work isn’t actually useful, to go back several decades in terms of thinking, and start a new branch up. Investors don’t like it because they rely on that scholarship, businesses do as well. This would be economic policy based on achieving social aims.
I would argue AI is very similar to this in terms of a perfect machine we can rely on to solve some array of social problems. At least with the mathematical economics someone understood what the model was doing and why it was spitting out the result it was.
Martin
@schrodingers_cat: I would argue that the traditional Dem/GOP neoliberals are the ideologues because they cannot help but return to that utopian capitalist idea. DSA would be if they were socialist ideologues, but I’ve never seen a policy suggestion by them that reflected that. Every policy I’ve ever seen is just pragmatic liberalism.
Now, maybe they’re seeking to get there someday, but I’m inclined to take whatever left-leaning escape hatch from this trap as we can find. We can always reject their ideological solutions should they start offering them.
Miss Bianca
@jowriter: you mean, she don’t consider Mills some geriatric who deserves to be shoved out onto the ice flow, experience and all be damned? You don’t say!
Martin
He did in the sense that Keynesianism is very interventionist, but what was the most successful policy Biden did economically? It was the American Rescue Plan:
These are all interventionist, but they’re not market-based. It’s straight up ‘give people money’ rather than ‘create incentives for companies to give people money’. And they worked great, personal savings rate hit the highest levels in decades, credit card debt plummeted, childhood poverty plummeted. But they were temporary and within a few months we hit the lowest personal savings rate in history, credit card debt skyrocketed, and everything went right back to where it was. After that, we got various college debt relief programs, but every single other policy was market based. It was a LOT of taxpayer cash to a lot of corporations promising good jobs, a few of which showed up, some might still show up, but in the end were pretty minor relative to the scale of the problem. Median wages still lagged inflation, and your median wage only goes up if the folks below it make more. They didn’t.
Biden was great in terms of throwing austerity out the window, but never actually pivoted off of market solutions. As such he was Keynesian. But Keynes also says that the state should intervene when markets cannot, and that’s kind of a foreign concept right now. Markets fail not because they are not feasible, merely because the incentives are wrong – they can always be fixed. And so we set out to fix them rather than say ‘oh, I guess we can’t solve this with markets, let’s just hand people money’. Covid was a sufficient excuse for why that had to happen, but once it was over we were back to business as usual.
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: I mean $15 minimum wage was rejected by 8 Senate Dems. Yes, M&S were two of those, but so was Tester, King, Shaheen, Hasan, Coons and Carper. Democrats weren’t even close. And that’s kind of the easiest one to do. Whether we should have a minimum wage is not widely debatable. Voters were passing them on ballots around the country. It should have been easy. And all those benefits get delivered at the bottom. Biden campaigned on that and couldn’t get his party on board (I don’t blame him for that). Harris started out campaigning on a living wage and ended up dropping that. Democrats don’t really have credibility on it.
I guess it’s fine, Waffle House has raised wages to $3/hr, so the market is working.
jowriter
@Miss Bianca: I believe Maine has the oldest demographic in the US, so voters here may be more forgiving of her years. Collins’ appeal has always been that she brings home the bacon for her constituents, and many natives appreciate her for that. Janet Mills is also capable in that respect. She knows her home state very well, so I think she has a better chance among the Dem options.
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I have noticed thst Martin also speaks well of Blue Dog Mary Gluesenkamp Perez.; another *talented* (and young) Democratic Representative who is on your extensive shit-list.
dnfree
@trollhattan: I thought you had to store tubes of tomato paste in the refrigerator after they’ve been opened?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Geminid:
All your “talented” Dems generally happen to be center/center-right Blue Dog/Abundance types who punch everybody to the left of Bill Clinton. WelcomeFest, aka Abundance Coachella, was a who’s who of such “talented” Dems.
They qualify as “more” Dems, not “better” Dems. Do their votes matter? Yes. But the point I belabor is that they and their policies/strategy have run this Party for too long, again, Martin talks about this at length, and are part of why we’re where we are today. Again, it’s narrowing the political spectrum from pro-choice, Moderate Republican to Nazi.
I can’t speak for Martin but his positive comments on MGP are far more narrow and nuanced than just “speaks well of”. Much of his economic/policy critiques of the Dem Party are the exact kind of BS her and her ilk want to double down on as an electoral solution.
I’m gonna quote Omnes Ominbus (who might consider it waaaay out of context) of all people from a thread earlier today:
Add people like MGP to that list of fucking off into the sun. She wins a “tough” district, fine, it can stop with that.
Martin
@Geminid: Yeah, I don’t think all of her policies are great, but that’s okay. I think her focus on the working class and her constituents is very good.
In the horseshoe theory of politics that regularly gets mentioned, what seems to be omitted is that the top of the horseshoe where Democrats and Republicans are is neoliberalism and the bottom where the left and right come closer together is populist policies. I have noted that AOC and Anna Paulina Luna (who I think is a fascist) have cosponsored the 10% cap on credit card rates bill, as has Bernie and Hawley in the Senate. Hawley and Moreno (OH) are really strong on the STOCKS act stuff and going at their GOP colleagues.
And I think it’s a mistake for Democrats to be ceding that space to Republicans. MGP is interesting because she doesn’t fit neatly into that horseshoe. She broke with Dems a little on environmental issues because it was economically good for her district. She most famously broke with Dems on the college debt relief but not because she wanted it smaller but because she wanted it bigger – she wanted something for trade schools. That’s more like what you would expect AOC to do and who she speaks to is more like AOC than Schumer. I’m not thrilled with some of those decisions but it’s not our old definition of moderate which was either moderate on social issues or less interventionist/deficit hawk economically. She’s pretty solidly left on social issues and not economically centrist in the style of Manchin.
A lot of socialists are pro-gun, which doesn’t fit. Unions opposed the EV credits by Biden because EVs need fewer workers to make so you sometimes get a mismatch on environmental/labor issues, and you’ll get mismatch on environmental policy when it affects affordability. Like I said I don’t think all of her votes were great, but she’s a populist that doesn’t look like a DSA, and I think that suggests there is space for Democrats to do this not from the left. I don’t think of Sherrod Brown as a DSA type, but I think he fits in there too.
satby
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: au contraire, neither of you say it well. Or even coherently. Not that it’ll stop either of you.
Martin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I agree with OO. I wouldn’t take their advice on what Dems need to do to win, if for no other reason that anyone who crosses over from the GOP in that way is either a market tweaker or neocon that no longer is welcome in the GOP and I think by and large voters don’t want them.
I don’t think MGP is what the party should be centered on, but I think she’s a better stake on the edge of the tent than someone like Sinema was, whose politics I could never sort out other than ‘self-serving’. I don’t think MGP is an Abundance type, but I might be wrong. Newsom has, however, specifically referenced that book as a model and we generally don’t think of him as a moderate (though he’s working on that).
Geminid
@Martin: The National Republican Campaign Committee has recruited a candidate to run against Mary Gluesenkamp Perez this cycle. It’s State Senator Carl(?) Braun, who was a Navy officer and Reservist. Perez beat radical Joe Kent two cycles in a row, so now Republicans will try to knock her out with a more mainstream candidate. This could be an interesting race.
The Northwest Progressive Institute’ Cascadia Advocate has covered Perez’s career farly extensively, and is a good resource for anyone who wants to know more her and her campaigns.
An excerpt from an article about Perez’s 2024 race indicates that reporter Andrew Villenueva is a bit of a political theorist:
Theory aside, Mr. Villenueve seems to be a practical man. The Cascadia Advocate he edits appears to be a good site for political reporting on Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Bullshit. I have posted positive material about Democrats across the ideological board, including Reps. Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. You’re the one who sneers at the 90% of Democrats who do not meet your standards.
And when I said that the commenter “spoke well” of Rep. Perez, that was just a fact.
Martin
@Geminid: Yup. You characterized my statements properly. And he’s also correct that my speaking well is nuanced.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers here – far from it. But I think the way we talk about the spectrum within the party needs to shift particularly looking at politicians like AOC and Mamdani as outsiders trying to pollute the party, and I think we need to look at economics a lot more closely to try and better make sense of 2024. Note, I don’t think Dems need to back off on social policy as a lot of the immediate takes after the election indicate. I haven’t yet seen anything of substance to suggest that was anything but a complaint of people who were likely never going to vote for Dems anyway. I don’t dismiss the roles that racism and sexism played, but we can’t really fix that, we can only overcome it, and we did elect Obama. It can be done. And there’s an awful lot of data that doesn’t align with that narrative as the primary cause.
But I also think that if Democrats can win in 2028, they need to really deliver in order to continue to win. We’ve switched parties 3 times in a row now and that doesn’t usually happen if voters are happy with how things are going. So I think it’s important that Democrats don’t just win on the ‘not Trump’ platform but one that addresses real problems voters are facing and can address them in 4 years time, possibly in 2 years time given how midterms tend to go. And that’s another reason why I’m skeptical of the current economic approach. In our discussion last night about inflation, I linked to the fed analysis of their efforts to combat inflation and they suggested 18 months from interest hikes to any impact on inflation. That’s almost the entire operating window before the first midterm assuming the rate change happened immediately after inauguration. These market based tools tend to be very slow, and voters aren’t that patient – especially when they are falling behind. But if you looked at the savings rate/credit card data when the American Rescue Plan started and ended, it was almost immediate – 2-3 months, and dramatic – from decades highs to all time lows. But if the other measures – IRA, CHIPS worked, we’ll never really know because they’ll be lost in Trumps policies. The market based recovery after the GFC took until the end of Obama’s term and continued into Trumps. It worked, but holy shit is that slow. It took 6 years to get unemployment under 6%. As Keynes said ‘in the long run we’re all dead’, so the fuck on with it.