And Jim Webb just facebooked himself out of consideration for the current and any future Democratic nomination.
A Generally Higher Elevation Point Upon Which To Expire
Progressive organizations keep winning big, you guys.
With the high-stakes vote on Fast Track set for today, the liberal group Democracy For America is threatening to primary any Democrats who vote for it. From DFA’s statement:
We will not lift a finger or raise a penny to protect you when you’re attacked in 2016, we will encourage our progressive allies to join us in leaving you to rot, and we will actively search for opportunities to primary you with a real Democrat.
If Fast Track passes, and we do get a final Trans Pacific-Partnership trade deal, these divisions will only continue.
Awesome. I move across town and get my new apartment set up, I get internet back and this is the crap that greets me: DFA now actively threatening to primary anyone who backs President Obama on fast track authority.
What could possibly go wrong there?
Fight it out in the comments.
A Generally Higher Elevation Point Upon Which To ExpirePost + Comments (290)
Today in Failed Senate Candidacies
Hello and goodbye, Loretta Sanchez:
US. Senate candidate and Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris was at a loss for words Saturday when told that her principal opponent, U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Santa Ana, had been videotaped making a joke about the difference between Indian Americans and Native Americans in which she tapped her hand to her mouth in imitation of a “war cry.”
Harris’ mother is Indian and her father Jamaican.
Fail.
O’Malley Needs to be Asked About This
This is just a scathing indictment of Martin O’Malley and how he ran Baltimore:
Originally, early in his tenure, O’Malley brought Ed Norris in as commissioner and Ed knew his business. He’d been a criminal investigator and commander in New York and he knew police work. And so, for a time, real crime suppression and good retroactive investigation was emphasized, and for the Baltimore department, it was kind of like a fat man going on a diet. Just leave the French fries on the plate and you lose the first ten pounds. The initial crime reductions in Baltimore under O’Malley were legit and O’Malley deserved some credit.
But that wasn’t enough. O’Malley needed to show crime reduction stats that were not only improbable, but unsustainable without manipulation. And so there were people from City Hall who walked over Norris and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, Norris got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically. On paper.
How? There were two initiatives. First, the department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form.
***The second thing Marty did, in order to be governor, involves the stats themselves. In the beginning, under Norris, he did get a better brand of police work and we can credit a legitimate 12 to 15 percent decline in homicides. Again, that was a restoration of an investigative deterrent in the early years of that administration. But it wasn’t enough to declare a Baltimore Miracle, by any means.
What can you do? You can’t artificially lower the murder rate – how do you hide the bodies when it’s the state health department that controls the medical examiner’s office? But the other felony categories? Robbery, aggravated assault, rape? Christ, what they did with that stuff was jaw-dropping.
So they cooked the books.
Oh yeah. If you hit somebody with a bullet, that had to count. If they went to the hospital with a bullet in them, it probably had to count as an aggravated assault. But if someone just took a gun out and emptied the clip and didn’t hit anything or they didn’t know if you hit anything, suddenly that was a common assault or even an unfounded report. Armed robberies became larcenies if you only had a victim’s description of a gun, but not a recovered weapon. And it only gets worse as some district commanders began to curry favor with the mayoral aides who were sitting on the Comstat data. In the Southwest District, a victim would try to make an armed robbery complaint, saying , ‘I just got robbed, somebody pointed a gun at me,’ and what they would do is tell him, well, okay, we can take the report but the first thing we have to do is run you through the computer to see if there’s any paper on you. Wait, you’re doing a warrant check on me before I can report a robbery? Oh yeah, we gotta know who you are before we take a complaint. You and everyone you’re living with? What’s your address again? You still want to report that robbery?
They cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren’t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they’d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.
I mean, think about it. How does the homicide rate decline by 15 percent, while the agg assault rate falls by more than double that rate. Are all of Baltimore’s felons going to gun ranges in the county? Are they becoming better shots? Have the mortality rates for serious assault victims in Baltimore, Maryland suddenly doubled? Did they suddenly close the Hopkins and University emergency rooms and return trauma care to the dark ages? It makes no sense statistically until you realize that you can’t hide a murder, but you can make an attempted murder disappear in a heartbeat, no problem.
But these guys weren’t satisfied with just juking their own stats. No, the O’Malley administration also went back to the last year of the previous mayoralty and performed its own retroactive assessment of those felony totals, and guess what? It was determined from this special review that the preceding administration had underreported its own crime rate, which O’Malley rectified by upgrading a good chunk of misdemeanors into felonies to fatten up the Baltimore crime rate that he was inheriting. Get it? How better than to later claim a 30 or 40 percent reduction in crime than by first juking up your inherited rate as high as she’ll go. It really was that cynical an exercise.
Read the whole thing, but if you watched the Wire, by the second paragraph you’ll find that all of a sudden it feels like you are in a smoky bar listening to Bunk and McNulty.
And While We’re On The Subject Of Idiot Governors And Gay Rights
It’s easy for me to laugh at Indiana Pence and the Backlash of Doom when next door here in Kentucky we have Dinosaur Steve Beshear finding a way to make the guy look like a genius.
Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear says the state’s ban on gay marriage should be upheld in part because it is not discriminatory in that both gay and straight people are barred from marrying people of the same gender.
In an argument labeled absurd by gay marriage advocates, Beshear’s lawyer says in a brief filed last week at the U.S. Supreme Court that “men and women, whether heterosexual or homosexual, cannot marry persons of the same sex” under Kentucky law, making the law non-discriminatory.
The argument mirrors that offered by the state of Virginia nearly 50 years ago when it defended laws barring interracial marriage there and in 15 other states, including Kentucky, by saying they weren’t discriminatory because whites were barred from marrying blacks just as blacks were barred from marrying whites.
The Supreme Court in 1967 rejected that argument in the historic case of Loving v. Virginia, in which Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman, were charged with a crime for marrying.
Beshear has done a lot for Kentucky, overseeing Kynect, arguably the most successful state insurance exchange under the ACA, expanding Medicare, and improving education out of the “close in state rankings to Mississippi” range.
But on LGBTQ rights, the guy lives up to his nickname, and I can’t frankly wait for current Attorney General Jack Conway to replace him in elections this November.
Unless, you know, the Republican who wants to kick 400,000 people off Medicare wins.
And While We’re On The Subject Of Idiot Governors And Gay RightsPost + Comments (68)
Are These People for Real?
Speaking of stupidity, these guys are either a ratfucking operation intent on making HRC look bad, or just dumb as a sack of hammers:
A group called HRC Super Volunteers just warned me "We will be watching, reading, listening and protesting coded sexism…" (1/2)
— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) March 25, 2015
2/2 Sexist words, they say, include "polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, over confident…"
— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) March 25, 2015
Also sexist, according to HRC Super Volunteers: "Secretive" and "will do anything to win, represents the past, out of touch…"
— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) March 25, 2015
"You are on notice that we will be watching, reading, listening and protesting coded sexism…" the email reads.
— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) March 25, 2015
Thin-skinned, asinine, self-defeating, and eminently mockable aren’t on the list, so I’ll point out that this approach is all of them. We have a notoriously cowardly media when it comes to most things, but you pitch them a softball like this, they are going to go to town. Please tell me that no one on the official but not announced campaign team is associated with these idiots. Please.
Like I said, the media is a bunch of cowrds, but they will react when you try to tell them what they can and can not say and start issuing threats. Not to mention, I’m not sure how most of those words are sexist in and of themselves, and some of them aren’t sexist in any context. “Inevitable?” “will do anything to win?”
Vaya Con Dios
This came out of the blue (for me, at least):
The Justice Department expects to file corruption charges against Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, a law enforcement official said Friday, culminating an investigation that has dogged the senator for two years.
The investigation has focused on his relationship with a Florida eye doctor who is a longtime friend and political benefactor. Federal prosecutors said Mr. Menendez did political favors for the doctor, Salomon Melgen.
A lawyer for Mr. Menendez did not immediately return a message seeking comment, but the senator and his lawyers have adamantly denied that Mr. Menendez did anything improper.
The expected charges, which were first reported by CNN, are expected in the next few weeks, the official said.
The investigation began with a tip — unproven and vehemently disputed by Mr. Menendez — that Dr. Melgen had helped pay for underage prostitutes for Mr. Menendez in the Dominican Republic. The women who made the accusations ultimately recanted, but the F.B.I. continued to investigate.
The scrutiny shifted to the senator’s relationship with Dr. Melgen and whether he traded gifts for official duties, and federal agents raided Dr. Melgen’s offices. Both men have denied doing anything improper.
So, New Jersey peeps- what state level Democrats have a shot at winning a Senate race…