Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

The revolution will be supervised.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Everybody saw this coming.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

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Proud to Be A Democrat

Monday Morning Open Thread: Reasons to Go On

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In less high-minded news…

… That’s a steep drop from the president’s standing one year ago, in March 2017, soon after his first address to Congress had received good reviews. Then, 47% expressed approval, a high-water mark for him in the poll; 44% expressed disapproval.

What’s more, the intensity of feeling is hardening against the president. Now, the percentage who “strongly disapprove” of him is more than double the percentage who “strongly approve,” 39% compared with 16%.

A new CNN poll released Sunday put Trump’s approval rating at 35%, his lowest level in that survey…

When it comes to Trump’s approval ratings, there also are some significant demographic divides. Younger voters are the least likely to approve of the job he is doing as president. Just 31% of those under 35 years of age express approval, compared with 42% of those 50 and older.

The president’s standing is strongest among whites, although a majority still disapprove of him, 44% approve-55% disapprove. Only about one in five Hispanics and one in ten African-Americans approve of the job he’s doing…

Any bets on how soon he breaks the Crazification Factor?

(One reason I’m not on twitter: I would absolutely encourage the Twitter-verse to applaud ‘President’ Dollhand’s breaking-the-CF “triumph”, and he absolutely would, after which I’d probably get a visit from the Secret Service… )
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Apart from that, what’s on the agenda as we gear up for another week?

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“Progressive Independent” Open Thread: Death Wish

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… AWAY & SHUT UP, if I get my wish.

If we Democrats do as well as projected in 2018, St. Bernie will be scrabbling for figurehead position on the bandwagon. If we, Goddess forbid, don’t, he’s all set to work the “Buy my book, and make a token $27 contribution to my exploratory committee” circuit, right across the aisle from Newt Gingrich. Except, as ever, the man’s timing is impeccable…

Bernie Sanders on Wednesday blamed Hillary Clinton for not doing more to stop the Russian attack on the last presidential election. Then his 2016 campaign manager, in an interview with POLITICO, said he’s seen no evidence to support special counsel Robert Mueller’s assertion in an indictment last week that the Russian operation had backed Sanders’ campaign.

The remarks showed Sanders, running for a third term and currently considered a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, deeply defensive in response to questions posed to him about what was laid out in the indictment. He attempted to thread a response that blasts Donald Trump for refusing to acknowledge that Russians helped his campaign — but then holds himself harmless for a nearly identical denial.

In doing so, Sanders and his former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, presented a series of self-serving statements that were not accurate, and that track with efforts by Trump and his supporters to undermine the credibility of the Mueller probe.

“The real question to be asked is what was the Clinton campaign [doing about Russian interference]? They had more information about this than we did,” Sanders said in the interview with Vermont Public Radio.

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Well, I’m On My Way I Don’t Know Where I’m Going

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Let me say up front that I like Junius Rodriguez. He is the only viable Democrat running against unrepentant ZEGS fellator Darin LaHood, our current rep. And Junius works hard. Since last summer, he’s been going to every rubber-chicken dinner that can draw five cranky county Democrats between here and the Mississippi. He just posted that he’ll be attending fifty events in the next thirty days. He’s run before, knows how to do it, and has a relationship with all the local Dems. Since he’s a history prof at Reagan’s alma mater, Eureka College, it would be sweet if he could oust our local political princeling. (Darin is the son of beloved bipartisanship bemoaner, former representative, and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood).

But when I read stuff like this:

and this…

… my enthusiasm deflates.

IL-18 is very red. It is a weird-looking district that includes about half of my town and some, but not all, of Peoria and Springfield. Republican candidates carried the district by around fifty points in the last three elections. I’m no gerrymanderologist, but it’s always seemed to me that the district was designed to keep it Republican, in spite of the fact that Democrats drew it up in 2010.

I’m not saying that Junius should go all Dennis Kucinich. That would be absurd and, I’m pretty sure, not his style anyway. Still, I feel like he is trying to peel off a few Republican votes with the kind of posturing above. Rather than make Sensible Centrist his brand, I would prefer he run as an out-and-proud Democrat. Tell us why Democrats are great, Junius! Not how you can feel like a conservative, but not vote for the Republican. All that being said, I will give him as much money and time as my resources allow.

In the marketplace of elections, however, there are more inspiring candidates running for local and–should Daniel Biss beat billionaire chickenheart J.B. Pritzker in the upcoming gubernatorial primary–even statewide office. And I think it’s natural for people, even if they are pragmatically inclined, to give just a little bit more to campaigns that dare to articulate something more ambitious.

But hey! At least we’re fielding someone here. We need to field someone everywhere.  So let’s heap more onto the fund that’s split between all eventual Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.

Goal Thermometer

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: WINNING!

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Other Democrats are getting ambitious — more power to us!

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: WINNING!Post + Comments (167)

Wut Choo Looking At?

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Tikka is not amused:

 

Meanwhile:  this is the kind of thing a good representative does:

This isn’t headline legislation. It’s not going to transform lives tomorrow, or next month.  It’s not going to answer the question of why, in a modern, extremely wealthy and technologically sophisticated country, everyone isn’t sure of their next meal.  It doesn’t even make a difference to many folks in the slice of the problem under scrutiny: elite colleges, for example, are pretty good about making sure everyone’s on a meal plan.

But it does move the ball.  Maybe just a little — but you take the small steps when you can get them along with (and especially in between) the breakthroughs. There are lots and lots of students for whom college is a struggle.  Food insecurity doesn’t help, or rather, it just makes life worse, perhaps derailing education altogether.  This is an attempt to ease that burden, not now, not fast, but sooner than it would have been without this one senator’s intervention.

In other words:  good leaders do good in plain view and way below the reader radar. Let’s elect more of them this fall.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Heritage & Its Limits

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Families tell each other stories to establish their place in the world — even if the story is “We’re just normal, we have no stories.” Because my own parents came from families that believed in putting the ‘fun’ in ‘dysfunctional’, they also cheerfully introduced us to the concept of the unreliable narrator about the time we were old enough to go off to school. And even so, the eventual unspooling would prove weirder than any fiction about Irish kingdoms and hidden murders (the real family skeleton would turn out to be a failed trans-Atlantic Romeo-and-Juliet story that didn’t emerge until after the deaths of both participants and their only offspring).

Obviously I’ve sympathized with Senator Warren’s “Pocahontas” problem; she trusted what her parents told her — what her parents, and their community, believed — but the rules about claiming Native American ancestry have pretty much been reversed over the last half-century. I still hope she’ll be my senator for a great many years to come, but it’s good that she’s done her best to clear the deck to campaign for other Democrats as we march towards 2018.

Per the Boston Globe:

Senator Elizabeth Warren made a surprise appearance at the National Congress of American Indians Wednesday, forcefully denouncing President Trump’s use of the name “Pocahontas” to deride her and defending her claims of Native American heritage more expansively than she has before.

The Massachusetts Democrat also made an impassioned pledge to advocate for issues of importance for Native Americans. The speech was a clear attempt to put to rest a sensitive issue that has been used by her enemies to attack her character and another signal of her potential 2020 presidential ambitions.

Warren did not apologize for her undocumented claims that her mother’s family had Cherokee blood — instead, reaffirming: “My mother’s family was part Native American. And my daddy’s parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship. So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy had just turned 20, they eloped.”

“The story they lived will always be a part of me,” she said, as tears came to her eyes. “And no one — not even the president of the United States — will ever take that part of me away.”

But she told the gathered tribal leaders from around the country that she drew a distinction between claiming native ancestry and claiming tribal membership. She repeatedly referred to Trump’s insensitivity, not only in calling her Pocahontas but in doing it last year during an event at the White House meant to honor Navajo code-talker veterans of World War II…

Warren — who has been criticized for not advocating more aggressively in the Senate for Native American issues, given her claims to ancestry — also appeared to assert greater common cause with Native Americans than she has in the past.

“For far too long, your story has been pushed aside, to be trotted out only in cartoons and commercials,” she said. “So I’m here today to make a promise: Every time someone brings up my family’s story, I’m going to use it to lift up the story of your families and your communities.”…

Rebecca Nagle, the Cherokee activist who wrote the ThinkProgress column, said on Wednesday that the speech was a “giant step in the right direction.”

“It’s a historic moment for Indian country for a senator to make a speech like that,” Nagle said. “That’s exactly what she needed to do.”…

Mr. Charles P. Pierce adds:

Here’s a partial transcript, via The Boston Globe:

… In the fairy tale, Pocahontas saves John Smith from execution at the hands of her father. Except that was probably made up too. In the fable, her baptism as “Rebecca” and her marriage to a Jamestown settler are held up to show the moral righteousness of colonization. In reality, the fable is used to bleach away the stain of genocide. As you know, Pocahontas’s real journey was far more remarkable — and far darker — than the myth admits.

But in her teens, Pocahontas was abducted, imprisoned, and held captive. Oral history of the Mattaponi tribe indicates that she was ripped away from her first husband and child and raped in captivity. Eventually she married another John — John Rolfe. Her marriage led to an uneasy harmony between Jamestown and the tribes, a period that some historians call the Peace of Pocahontas. But she was not around to enjoy it. John Rolfe paraded her around London to entertain the British and prop up financial investments in the Virginia Company. She never made it home. She was about 21 when she died, an ocean separating her from her people. Indigenous people have been telling the story of Pocahontas — the real Pocahontas — for four centuries. A story of heroism. And bravery. And pain. And, for almost as long, her story has been taken away by powerful people who twisted it to serve their own purposes.

In the Capitol, right there in the rotunda, there is John Gadsby Chapman’s a massive painting, The Baptism Of Pocahontas. It is a huge and beautiful lie that has been hanging there since 1840, all through the debates over treaties that never were worth the paper on which they were printed, all through the passage of military appropriations that paid for the genocide in the West. And now, Elizabeth Warren works in that same building and, on Wednesday, she tried in her own way to put paid to all of the lies and broken promises. She should not be alone.

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And then there was this *other* Warren-related story, which didn’t get nearly so much ink…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Nancy STILETTO, Too

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Readership capture. Dana Houle, in the Washington Post, “Nancy Pelosi is incredibly underrated”:

… Pelosi has never tried, as Ryan did, to seduce the press, and what she says in public is occasionally convoluted. Her strength is in what she does away from the microphones.

Growing up in a political family, Pelosi learned to balance competing demands, get people enough of what they needed for them to feel satisfied, to keep track of who crossed you, who helped you, and whom to call on to return favors. And she learned to listen and ensure that people know they are heard. Pelosi draws on this experience while serving both her constituencies: San Franciscans, and the Democratic members of Congress she has led since 2003.

Pelosi is a master vote counter — and more than most 20th-century congressional leaders, she has to be. Majorities are narrower, and to pass partisan legislation, or keep a unified opposition, leaders cannot afford to have many members voting against their caucus. When Democrats have been in the minority, she has kept her representatives in check, even as Ryan and his predecessors have had to pull bills from the House floor because they got the whip count wrong.

And when Democrats were in the majority, Pelosi amassed a record that’s all the more impressive given her unpopularity nationally. In 2008, despite favorability ratings around 30 percent and attacks from the left for not defunding the Iraq War, Pelosi led House Democrats to their second straight wave election. Former Republican majority leader Tom DeLay — who knew a thing or two about keeping a caucus together — called her “the most powerful speaker in a generation. She will be able to do anything she wants.” The next two years, she passed nearly all of President Barack Obama’s legislative priorities.

Yes, of course, Pelosi is unpopular. So are Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). So is Congress. Yet, for some reason, only Pelosi gets blamed for an unpopularity that really stems from disgust with Congress and partisan polarization. Pelosi is not a scorched-earth partisan; indeed, at numerous times in her career she has been criticized for cutting deals, such as on Iraq War appropriations and Obamacare. But she also understands polarization. She sees her public role not as using policy to communicate a common ground to centrist swing voters but to expose differences between Democrats and Republicans…

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Apart from honoring our street fighters, what’s on the agenda for the weekend?

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