Election 2014

Evening Open Thread, and Note that Maybe God Loves Me

by Soonergrunt| January 15, 201311:31 pm| 50 Comments

This post is in: Election 2014, Proud to Be A Democrat, Assholes, Clown Shoes, Good News For Conservatives

Mark Sanford, he of the naked hiking on the Appalachian Trail–who knew it went all the way down to Brazil?–will supposedly announce tomorrow that he’s running for Congress in South Carolina. There is no report as to whether or not his ex wife will vote for him at this time.

Sanford will announce via press release tomorrow; there will be no press conference or public events associated with it, according to an aide.

NBC previously reported that Sanford would attempt a political comeback running for his old first congressional district seat. Sanford would be running to replace Tim Scott, who was appointed to Jim DeMint’s Senate seat.

Get the popcorn and the beer! This is gonna be fucking great!

UPDATE: We have the de riguer invocation of God’s Will ™:

“I’m not saying it was God-ordained or anything like that,” Sanford said, “but a series of rather miraculous events have coincided here, that did not escape the attention of the friends who were urging me to look at this.”

God DOES love me, to give me such a show!

Evening Open Thread, and Note that Maybe God Loves MePost + Comments (50)

Alienating The Electorate, Nineteen Million Americans At A Time

by Tom Levenson| December 5, 20126:27 pm| 95 Comments

This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Election 2014, Good News For Conservatives

Ladles and Jellyspoons!

As Anne Laurie has so ably documented, your modern GOP has once again managed to be both vicious and stupidly self-destructive. This time, it’s their wisdom in the decision to piss on some 19% of the American people — from a considerable height — in the process of blocking ratification of the UN treaty on the rights of the disabled.*

The wickedness at the heart of the trumped up objections that led 38 Republican senators to tell our disabled brothers and sisters that they do not rate equal protection under the law is, I think, obvious. It’s well documented, at any rate. (Link via Anne Laurie.)

So, yeah. To channel my inner Dennis Green,** the Republicans are who we thought we were.

Evil.

Dumb (also too).

Fresh on the heels of repeated, reasonably high profile forays into insulting Obama voters, minority voters, Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, and whoever they’ll figure out they hate next, it turns out there are a fair number of disabled folks in this country.

How many?

According to the US Census Bureau [pdf], as of 2010, 56.7 million Americans from the civilian, non-institutionalized population had a disability — that’s 18.7% of the US population. Of those, 38.3 million, 12.6 percent, had a severe disability (as defined in Table 1 of the linked report).***

show full post on front page

Bringing it down to the sharp edge of what it takes to make it through the day, “About 12.3 million people aged 6 and older (4.4%) needed assistance with one or more activities of daily living (ADLs) or instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs). (See p. 9 of the linked report for definitions of those terms of art.)

That’s a lot of folks, no matter what level of disability you choose to emphasize. They’ve all got families — and that’s a lot more people. [Full disclosure — this is an issue that has at times, though not now, impinged on my own family.] They have friends too…and you get the point.

Befoere stating the obvious about the wisdom of the GOP vote in light of these facts, let me drop in a bit of anecdotage.

A few Sundays ago, I was up in New Hampshire, knocking on doors to get out our vote. I and my partner were nearing the end of our list, and, after a rough beginning — first stop at a house where the vehemence with which we were ordered off the property bordered on the “or I’ll get my gun” territory — we’d had mostly good quick conversations, the “yup, I’m voting for your guy” kind.

We had split up at that point, my colleague taking a couple of houses down the road while I walked up a little hill to an old house on one of those big New Hampshire yards that always look like they’re thinking about being a farm. It was a gorgeous afternoon, and I saw one woman out doing yard work, so I didn’t bother with the door bell.

She was soft spoken, and little reserved, and she told me that she really didn’t do politics, that I needed to talk to her partner. She very kindly walked me a little further up the hill and called out, and then almost a cliche of a tough old New Hampshire bird came rolling down on an ATV to talk to me — a small woman, well into middle age (look who’s talking, pilgrim!), lots of daylight on that face over the years, thick New Hampshire accent and an air of utter no-nonsense competence. Reminded me a lot of the best sergeants I’ve met over the years.

She liked to talk as much as her partner craved quiet, and we had a great conversation, sharing our disdain and horror at the person and prospects of W. Mitt Romney. She agreed to volunteer for the campaign and I gave her contact info, and then we got to trading greatest hits (the horse as tax deduction! “Our turn!”). Then I mentioned the 47%, and we starting going over who actually lives inside that number — the old, I said, students…the disabled.

At that, the first women I’d met suddenly spoke up. She’d been standing off to one side the entire time (ten minutes or so, now), clearly defining herself as audience and not participant in our little GOP loathe-fest. But now it was as if a valve blew. She was, she said, herself disabled, couldn’t work. Was it really true, she asked me, that Romney had said that about the 47%? That she herself was a taker?

Yup, I said.

That’s it, she said. That makes me mad.

We talked a bit longer — really it was a grand way to spend twenty minutes on a stunning New England afternoon, revving each other up to take action on our own and our country’s behalf. The sun was kind, the trees still had some color, and I was talking to two people who were not just going to vote, but do whatever they could to drive a stake through the vampires that both exsanguinate our politics and work to deny the possibility of American dreams for so many of our fellow citizens.

So though I think it both tragedy and travesty that 38 ~~scumbags~~ senators blew up the UN treaty, I take a residue of comfort in seeing the Grand Old Party reaffirm its commitment to alienate an ever greater majority of the American people. The party cannot collapse too soon — but I suppose I could say we owe our friends in the minority a debt of thanks for doing so much on their own to advance that goal.

Factio Grandaeva Delenda Est

*That treaty would, by the way, be the international agreement that would enshrine one more example of American Exceptionalism (in the good sense), with the US actually playing the role of that shining city on a hill that offers a light to the nations, being as it is more or less the enshrinement in international law of the landmark protections and perspective of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

**Get him out of me. RIGHT NOW!

***those numbers are based on sampling, not derived from the total census, and the report records a 90% confidence level in the significance of the estimates — which isn’t great. But the broad magnitudes are what matters here, not the decimal places. Tens of millions of folks with disability is the key take away for this argument.

Image: El Greco, Christ healing the blind, c. 1567

Alienating The Electorate, Nineteen Million Americans At A TimePost + Comments (95)

Voters and others

by Kay| November 27, 201210:10 am| 50 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!, Domestic Politics, Don't Mourn, Organize, Election 2012, Election 2014, Assholes

Elizabeth Drew, celebrating the determination of voters:

Despite their considerable efforts the Republicans were not able to buy or steal the election after all. Their defeat was of almost Biblical nature. The people, Democratic supporters of the president, whose votes they had plotted, schemed, and maneuvered—unto nearly the very last minute—to deny rose up and said they wouldn’t have it. If they had to stand in line well into the night to cast their vote they did it. The lines were the symbol of the 2012 election—at once awe-inspiring and enraging.
On election night, the Romney camp had at least four planes ready and aides had bags packed to take off as soon as a state’s result appeared narrow enough to warrant a challenge. But they ended up with nowhere to go. The Republicans’ effort to stop enough votes of Obama supporters to affect the outcome in any given state—even prevent the president’s reelection—failed. Obama’s margins, while narrow, were sufficient to render any challenge futile. So the nation was spared the nightmare of reliving Florida 2000, a fear that had gripped many until late Tuesday night.
Yet the fact that the Republicans’ voter suppression effort didn’t succeed doesn’t mean it didn’t cause a lot of damage: to individuals who had to struggle or weren’t able to exercise their right to vote; and to the soul of the democratic process. Small minded men, placing their partisan interests over those of the citizenry, had concocted schemes to subvert the natural workings of our most solemn and exhilarating exercise as a self-governing nation. By the time of the election, more than thirty states had passed laws requiring voters to present some form of identification, often a government-issued photo ID card that they didn’t possess and couldn’t obtain. The point was to make it more difficult for constituent groups of the Democratic Party—blacks, Hispanics, low-income elderly, and students—to exercise their right to vote.

I just wanted to show you what voters and democracy enthusiasts had to go through at the state and federal level to achieve the victories over voter suppression. We’ll use this handy map compiled by the Brennan Center For Justice:

There were four approaches that were employed to combat voter suppression: vetoes by governors, vetoes by voters, state court actions and federal court actions.

There was pushback from Democratic governors in Minnesota, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Montana. There was pushback from a GOP governor in Michigan. In Maine and Ohio, voters fought back. Ohio was sort of extraordinary, because we had a petition drive to put the voter suppression law to a referendum, an action that stayed the new law, and then two court cases over early voting and provisional ballots, respectively. Wisconsin and then Pennsylvania had state court actions.The DOJ sued in South Carolina, Florida and Texas, (partly) relying on the Voting Rights Act.

This map is current as of October 2, 2012, so it does not include the rejection of voter suppression efforts in Minnesota on Election Day.

There were so many and varied efforts this cycle I couldn’t keep up. Whether it was purging voter lists in Florida, targeting students in Maine, disenfranchising old people in Tennessee or limiting early voting in Ohio, it was difficult to follow state by state. This map a good overview of where we were successful in fighting back.

Voters and othersPost + Comments (50)

Help me out here, I’m not that creative

by Kay| November 25, 20122:12 pm| 50 Comments

This post is in: Election 2011, Election 2012, Election 2014, Enhanced Protest Techniques, Getting The Band Back Together, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Daydream Believers

I’ve been reading comments along the lines of “how do we repeat 2012 in 2014?” and I’ve been thinking about that, too. Here’s the thing, though. The 2012 effort was huge, even the small section of it that I witnessed. We had a full-time organizer staying at the house beginning in May, I think, although it may have been earlier. We had canvassing shifts every spring weekend where we ID’ed voters for both Obama and Sherrod Brown. After that, we had people in blue states making phone calls so we could concentrate exclusively on knocking doors to get the “sporadic voters” we had identified out and early voted. We had really, really good lists that were updated constantly, so much so that I had this nice middle aged woman go into fits of laughter election day at 6:30 PM when I was the third person to knock on her door. She was giggling at the lunacy of it all: “I just got back from voting! I swear I did!” We basically followed that woman until she voted. Luckily she liked us and had a sense of humor. That’s separate and apart from the whole voter protection element what with the regional teams of lawyers and all. I’m not clear how that would go in 2014. We had great volunteers, but we also had a full-time organizer who worked 12 hours a day.

My only other experience with folding OFA in where Obama was not on the ballot was 2010-11 in Ohio, and the collective bargaining fight. The collective bargaining effort was run by labor groups and was deliberately and carefully planned as non-partisan and issue-oriented. We were told early on that labor groups did not want a “partisan identifier” on the effort, because Ohio is a 50/50 state and framing it as a partisan issue would repel GOP voters who might otherwise have supported protecting collective bargaining. The thinking was they would dig in if the thing was tied to Obama and reflexively oppose. That turned out to be true, because there were obviously a lot of crossover voters in this 50/50 state with a 61% final result.

But, OFA ran a petition drive at the same time as the collective bargaining petition drive where we gathered signatures to repeal Ohio’s 2010 (latest version) voter suppression law. Everybody won there, because OFA wanted to repeal the voter suppression law in anticipation of 2012 and re-electing Obama and labor wanted to repeal the voter suppression law in anticipation of 2011 and overturning the union-busting law.

A controversial new Ohio elections law was suspended on Thursday as a coalition of Democrats, voting-rights and labor groups submitted over 300,000 signatures to put the law on the fall 2012 ballot. That means the Nov. 8 election — and probably next year’s presidential election — will be run under the same early-voting laws that benefited Democrats in 2008.

So are we talking about campaign organizing in 2014 or issue organizing?

If we’re talking about issue organizing, I personally might be interested in protecting those parts of the health care law that benefit low wage employees. I liked this description of that part of the law, and I think it’s now clear there’s going to be a coordinated effort to resist implementation by large, low wage employers and their lobbyists, legislators and media personalities:

The debate, unfortunately, got bogged down in a lot of nonsense about death panels and socialism rather than focusing on the brass tacks stuff that matters. Low-income workers—the kind of people likely to be working as servers at Denny’s—really will see huge benefits from the law. And the kind of people who own dozens of chain restaurant franchises really will suffer, at least a bit.
The main issue facing chain restaurant owners is the law’s “employer responsibility” provision. If you’re a small employer with fewer than 25 employees, the Affordable Care Act is extremely generous to you and you’ll get special subsidies to help make an insurance plan for your workers affordable. But if you have over 50 employees, then it’s another matter. If everyone on your payroll already gets group health insurance, you’re in the clear. If they don’t, but they’re all paid enough to buy insurance on the new insurance exchanges without a subsidy, then you’re also in the clear. But if you’re employing low-wage workers who’ll get subsidies for their new insurance plans, then you’re going to get taxed to the tune of $2,000 a worker.

We see a lot of low wage workers come through this law office, and low wage uninsured actually pay a lot for health care. There seems to be some sort of myth floating around that they go to the emergency room or clinic and just wave their hand on the way out and the medical care they received is now categorized “uncompensated care” but that isn’t how it works for them. They’re billed for whatever last-ditch medical care they may be lucky enough to get, and a lot of them work out payments with the provider. If they don’t work out payments with the provider the bills go to collection and if the provider sues and gets a judgment they’re subject to having their wages garnished. There’s plenty of uncompensated care received in this country, that’s true, but low wage workers are also paying plenty for health care right now.

My sense is that these employees will be barraged with negative stories and threats from their employers and media on the terrible things that may happen to them if their employers have to pay 2 grand towards subsidized health insurance. I would consider it a real win if we could even make the people who stand to benefit most from the law aware of the facts so they might support implementing the law as written in states like mine. What might OFA/local people do there?

Help me out here, I’m not that creativePost + Comments (50)

A Fascinating Read

by John Cole| November 16, 20121:40 pm| 154 Comments

This post is in: Election 2014, Excellent Links

This Atlantic piece about the tech guys who ran the Obama campaign is well worth your time.

A Fascinating ReadPost + Comments (154)

Nothing he does can save him

by Dennis G.| November 16, 20121:02 pm| 117 Comments

This post is in: Election 2014, Lindsey Graham's Fee Fees, Open Threads, Assholes, DC Press Corpse, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?, Good News For Conservatives

Poor Lindsey Graham. In less than eighteen months he’ll be defeated in South Carolina’s 2014 GOP primary. He is the number one target of the Club for Growth. He is talking tough about the UN Ambassador and yelling “Benghaz!” over and over again as if it is a magic word that will save him from doom. It won’t help. Count Chocola wants his blood.

And this–more than anything else–explains every action Lindsey will take in the coming days, weeks and months.

And it helps to explain John McCain’s bitter panic as well. Lindsey will be his last sycophant standing when the 113th Congress comes to town. Lindsey will be the last Senator left who will automatically treat everything McCain does as “awesome”. McCain will do what he can to save his fanboy, but it will not matter. Even if they both went full Ni-CLANG on President Obama 24/7 (and they’re both almost there), they will not be able to save poor old Lindsey from the wrath of the wingnuts.

Any journalist who treats either of these doddering old fools as relevant will prove themselves to be hacks. As there are so many hacks in the media, we can expect a lot of fluffing and tire swinging as McCain and his sidekick sink into oblivion. This is known.

Cheers

Nothing he does can save himPost + Comments (117)

Evening “I mostly love my job” Open Thread

by Soonergrunt| November 15, 201211:30 pm| 89 Comments

This post is in: Election 2014, Open Threads, Organizing & Resistance, Rare Sincerity

I just haven’t had much to say the last few days. I’ve been Acting PC-Support Lead-my supervisor’s job-while he steps up to Acting Facility CIO while the FCIO is detailed up to Region.

My boss’ job sucks. It sucks even more without the his pay. I spend a tremendous amount of time on the phone dealing with vendors, some of whom are trying very hard to weasel out of their responsibilities, dealing with irate users, who usually have no legitimate reason to be irate, and with other leads and managers, as well as my coworkers whom I am ostensibly leading. I could probably grow into the position and I think I would be pretty decent at it if it ever opens for advancement, but I gotta say that the likelihood that I would strangle myself with a mouse cord is probably about 50/50 in the first year. On the other hand, I went to a staff meeting and it was an eye opener. EVERYTHING was about “how can we improve our service to our Veterans and improve our value to the Taxpayer?” And “what is your department doing to improve our service to our Veterans?” After many years of going to various meetings as a Soldier and as a civilian, in private sector, in contracting, and now as a civil servant, I never thought I’d say this about a staff meeting, but I left that meeting with a better feeling about my organization and my place in it.

I still get up every morning and say to myself “hey, I get to go to work today!” It’s a damn site better than my last job where I would lie in bed in the mornings and say “oh, I have to go to work today.” And when you consider that the only things Rmoney ever said about the VA was that he wanted to privatize it and put Vets on vouchers, back before he realized that nobody liked his policy positions, I was a little nervous about the potential for a Rmoney presidency. Yes, I said here on multiple occasions that I thought President Obama was going to win and win big, but I’ve never lost money underestimating my fellow human beings capability and especially, my fellow Americans’ capability to do the exactly dumbest thing they could do to themselves given the chance. So I am gratified that I’m going to have a job for a while, and especially that I and other Vets will get the proper care and service that is the VA’s mission to provide.

Thank you all, so much, for being such great bosses.

Now, before we all start a round of Kum By Ya, let’s remember that we are no less than two years away from a critical mid-term election…

Evening “I mostly love my job” Open ThreadPost + Comments (89)

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Everybody saw this coming.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

This fight is for everything.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

The revolution will be supervised.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I really should read my own blog.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.