Category: Elections

My Condolences to the People of New York

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It looks like Eric Adams, aka Rudy with a Tan, will be the next mayor of New York City.

Seeing as how his Republican opponent in the general election does not have billions of dollars (Bloomberg), and is a racist con-man, Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Anglos Angles.

I expect to see more charter schools, less police accountability, and more stop and frisk.

To quote Dick Tuck, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

Eric L. Adams, who rose from poverty to become an iconoclastic police captain and the borough president of Brooklyn, declared victory in the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City on Tuesday, putting him on track to become the second Black mayor in the history of the nation’s largest city.

The contest, which was called by The Associated Press on Tuesday night, was seen as one of the city’s most critical elections in a generation, with the winner expected to help set New York on a recovery course from the economic devastation of Covid-19 and from the longstanding racial and socioeconomic inequalities that the pandemic deepened.

But as the campaign entered its final months, a spike in shootings and homicides drove public safety and crime to the forefront of voters’ minds, and Mr. Adams — the only leading candidate with a law enforcement background — moved urgently to demonstrate authority on the issue.

Mr. Adams held an 8,400-vote lead over Kathryn Garcia, a margin of one percentage point — small enough that it was not immediately clear whether she or any of his opponents would contest the result in court. All three leading candidates had filed to maintain the option to challenge the results. If no one does so, Mr. Adams’s victory could be certified as soon as next week.

Not my problem, I live in Baltimore.

New York Mayor Primary Election and Ranked Choice Voting

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With the counting of the in-person votes being more or less finished (this is the famously corrupt and incompetent New York City Board of Elections, after all), what looked like a run-away victory has turned into a nail biter.

Just to remind you, the voting was that you could rate candidates from 1 to 5, and the votes were tabulated based on the first choice initially, giving Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams 31.6%,  former de Blazio counsel Maya Wiley with 22.3%,  former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, with 19.7%, and smug asshole Andrew Yang with a dismal 11.7%.

With a normal US style election, what the British call, “First Past the Post,” Adams would be the next mayor of New York.

This was not a normal US style election though, it was ranked choice voting, which is also called instant runoff voting (IRV), though it’s not exactly instant, as we can see from the delay of a bit over a week.

Additionally, the top two finishers were originally numbers 1 and 3 in the first vote.

With IRV,  if no one gets a majority on the first vote, then the person with the lowest total votes in the first round has their votes struck from the tally, and those voters second choice is counted instead.

If no one still has 50%+1 of the votes, the procedure is repeated until someone does have an absolute majority.

In this case, Katheryn Garcia overtook Maya Wiley, and it appears that she is pretty close to Eric Adams, something on the order of 2-3%, with thousands of absentee ballots not yet counted. 

Then those numbers were withdrawn, because they mistakenly included test data, but it is clear that the top 2 at the end of the process will be Adams and Garcia, and that it will be close.

Given that Eric Adams is Black, these results illustrate interesting point about instant RUNOFF voting, which is an artifact of most (if not all) runoff voting systems in the United States, which is that runoff votes allow white voters to get behind the proverbial “White Guy”, which is why it has been a fixture of voting in the South for years.

Without getting into the weeds of the relative merits of first past the post versus instant runoff voting versus proportional representation, I think that it is clear that any runoff system, whether instant or traditional, will make it more difficult for a minority candidate to win.

It’s troubling, and so I have mixed emotions about the whole process:

The New York City mayor’s race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city Board of Elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a “discrepancy.”

The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.

But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”

By Tuesday evening, the tabulations had been taken down, replaced by a new advisory that the ranked-choice results would be available “starting on June 30.”

Then, around 10:30 p.m., the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the statement said. The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.

………

For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale, and skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process despite its successful use in other cities.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: As the lower-polling candidates are eliminated, their votes are reallocated to whichever candidate those voters ranked next, and the process continues until there is a winner.

………

A few hours later, the board disclosed its unspecified discrepancy, and it was not at all clear Tuesday night how accurate the most recent tally was, or if it was accurate at all.

The results may well be scrambled again: Even after the Board of Elections sorts through the preliminary tally, it must count around 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots. Once they are tabulated, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of ranked-choice elimination rounds, with a final result not expected until mid-July.

………

If elected, Mr. Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Some of Mr. Adams’s supporters have already cast the ranked-choice process as an attempt to disenfranchise voters of color, an argument that intensified among some backers on Tuesday afternoon as the race had appeared to tighten, and is virtually certain to escalate should he lose his primary night lead to Ms. Garcia, who is white.

It appears that I’m not the only one who thinks that runoffs tend to disadvantage minority candidates.

………

While it is difficult, it is not unheard-of for a trailing candidate in a ranked-choice election to eventually win the race through later rounds of voting — that happened in Oakland, Calif., in 2010, and nearly occurred in San Francisco in 2018.

The winner of New York’s Democratic primary, who is almost certain to become the city’s next mayor, will face Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who won the Republican primary.

Yeah, that racist clown is the Republican nominee, so the primary is the real election here, even if the eventual nominee is found in bed with Donald Trump.

………

Other close observers of the election separately expressed discomfort with the decision to release a ranked-choice tally without accounting for absentee ballots.

Yeah, this has been completely mismanaged.

BTW, did I mention that the board of elections also sent out the absentee ballots late in 2020? 

The good citizens of New York are in for a bumpy ride.

There Was a Primary in New York Last Night

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The Democratic primary for mayor was conducted by ranked choice voting (also called instant runoff voting), so the the results won’t be certain for a few days,

It appears that the 2nd worst candidate has won, with Eric Adams getting about ⅓ of the first round vote.

Adams is a machine politician, and (among other things) expressed support for the restoring the NYPD’s racist stop and frisk policies.

The worst candidate was Andrew Yang, the former Presidential candidate, who (among other things) based his candidacy on harassing the homeless, crypto-currency, and self-driving cars.

Eric Adams, who ran for mayor of New York City on a message intensely focused on issues of public safety, emerged on Tuesday with a substantial lead in the Democratic primary, but fell well short of outright victory in a race that will now usher in a new period of uncertainty.

With 82 percent of the results in, Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, was the first choice of 31.6 percent of those who voted in person on Tuesday or during the early voting period, as New Yorkers chose a leader to steer the city’s reopening and economic recovery.

The initial outcome capped an intensely acrimonious campaign defined by debates over public safety and the economy, political experience and personal ethics, as the candidates presented sharply divergent visions for how they would lead New York into its post-pandemic future.

Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, was in second with 22.3 percent; Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, was in third with 19.7 percent. Either would become the city’s first female mayor.

Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, was a distant fourth, and was the first candidate to concede on Tuesday night, a striking development after he had spent months as the dominant candidate in the race.

Yang was never the dominant candidate in the race.  He was just well funded, and presented a shiny bauble for the press to cover.

There was also the (not quite decided) race for Manhattan District Attorney, which is a classic first past the post where Alvin Bragg is leading Tali Farhadian Weinstein by about 3½% with 84% reporting.

I hope that Weinstein loses.  In addition to spending millions of her own dollars, ran ads which could be credibly reported as racist, being tied at the hip to Wall Street, and was one of the very rich people who were revealed to have paid next to no taxes.

Given that the Manhattan DA is at the center of many investigations agaings Donald Trump, Weinstein is ……… Problematic, to put it mildly.

Finally, in upstate New York, a black Socialist woman has defeated the incumbent in the primary in Buffalo:

India B. Walton knew her bid to unseat the entrenched 16-year mayor of Buffalo was a long shot.

………

A self-described democratic socialist, Ms. Walton, 38, has never held political office, and she was challenging Mayor Byron Brown, 62, who was seeking a fifth term, had served as chair of the state Democratic Party and was once was mentioned as a candidate for lieutenant governor. Few people thought she could win. Mr. Brown mostly tried to ignore her campaign.

But on Tuesday, Ms. Walton defeated Mr. Brown in the city’s Democratic primary, making it almost certain that she will become not only the first woman elected mayor in New York State’s second-largest city, but also the first socialist at the helm of a large American city in decades.

Her upset on Wednesday shocked Buffalo and the nation’s Democratic establishment as most of the political world was more intensely focused on the initial results of the still-undecided mayoral primary in New York City. Her win underscored the energy of the party’s left wing as yet another longtime incumbent in the state fell to a progressive challenger, echoing the congressional wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman.

If Ms. Walton wins in the general election in November — a likely result in a city that leans heavily Democratic — she would join the growing ranks of Black female mayors elected to lead other major U.S. cities, including Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Kim Janey in Boston and London Breed in San Francisco.

………

Ms. Walton, whose campaign was backed by the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, said she preferred not to get caught up in the semantics of labels — describing her ideology as focused on “putting people first.”

The last time a socialist was the mayor of a large American city was 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor. And it was more than a century ago when a socialist won a mayoral race in New York: In 1911, George R. Lunn, of the Socialist Party of America, was elected mayor of Schenectady, according to Bruce Gyory, a Democratic political consultant.

While rare, socialist mayors are not unheard-of: Bernie Sanders took office in 1981 as mayor of Burlington, Vt., a city one-sixth the size of Buffalo, before being elected to Congress nearly a decade later.

Ms. Walton ran an unabashedly progressive campaign in a Democratic city of about 250,000 people — about 37 percent of them Black — that had elected mostly white men as mayors for nearly two centuries. (Mr. Brown became the city’s first Black mayor in 2006.)

She said she supported implementing rent control protections. She pledged to declare Buffalo a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. And she vowed to reform the city’s Police Department, arguing in favor of an independent civilian oversight board and changing the way police officers respond to mental health calls.

“Our police budget is as high as it’s ever been, and crime is also up, so something is not working,” she said.

People suggesting that campaigning on reform of the police, take note.  It’s a winner, at least in a Democratic primary.

Law enforcement in the US is broken, as is painfully obvious from this picture.

………

Mr. Brown’s actions suggested that he did not take Ms. Walton’s challenge seriously. He refused to debate her — “Maybe he believed pretending I didn’t exist was going to make the race go away,” Ms. Walton said — and he did not campaign vigorously, failing to fund-raise as aggressively as he had in previous primaries or spend on ad buys until late in the race.

“I think it was almost a perfect storm that was working against the mayor in this case, but it was brought about by his nonchalance in this race,” said Len Lenihan, the former Erie County Democratic chairman.

Rule 1 of politics:  People will not vote for someone who never asks for their vote.

………

Under Mr. Brown, Buffalo, in western New York, has undergone a resurgence in recent years with the construction of major projects in the downtown area. But the city’s poverty rate is more than twice the national average, and its unemployment rate, while improving, has not fully recovered to prepandemic levels.

Indeed, there was a sense among some residents who voted for Ms. Walton that low-income communities were not reaping the benefits of downtown development.

………

Upstate New York has large swaths of rural and conservative areas, but many of its cities are reliable Democratic strongholds with large minority communities that left-wing activists see as fertile ground to replicate the upsets they have staged downstate. So far, democratic socialists have picked up seats in the House, the State Legislature and the New York City Council, but Ms. Walton’s win would mark the first time a D.S.A.-backed candidate won a citywide election in New York.

This is a good start

Ms. Walton’s win was also buttressed by extensive support from the Working Families Party, which had previously endorsed Mr. Brown. The party helped her campaign set up an online fund-raising operation, a large field program with hundreds of volunteers and a text message and phone bank operation that made 19,000 calls on the night before the election — in a contest where fewer than 25,000 voters cast ballots.

This is an explicit “F%$# You” to “Ratface Andy” Cuomo, who has done his best to kill the WFP trough riders on legislation.

………

Ms. Walton is an organizer for activist groups that supported the state’s bail reforms and legalizing recreational marijuana. Last summer, she gained exposure marching against police brutality in the protests following George Floyd’s death.

She ultimately decided to run, she said, because Mr. Brown had failed to implement meaningful reforms at the Buffalo Police Department and because of what she saw as his poor response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Again, BLM is a winning cause, unless you are a Democrat cowering fear to Republican racists and corrupt police unions.

Her first step should be to reassure various developers who have incentive deals that the city of Buffalo will abide by their contracts, but that the recipients of taxpayer largess need to abide by the terms of their contract as well.

It is interesting how New York State seems to be the epicenter of Socialist political victories in the US.

I Did Not Think that This Would Happen

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I know that the deal had been made, and Netanyahu (יִמַּח שְׁמו) 12 year long reign as Israeli PM supposed to end, but I did not want to comment about this, because I was afraid that Netanyahu (יִמַּח שְׁמו) would find some way to pull a rabbit from the hat and stay in power, and out of jail.

Thankfully, I was wrong.  The Knesset has successfully had a vote of confidence in a new government that does not include Binyaman Netanyahu (יִמַּח שְׁמו).

So he is out, and there is no way that the current parliament will grant him immunity.

In fact, I rather expect that this government, with it’s “eclectic” group of ideologies and one vote majority, won’t survive more than a month beyond Netanyahu’s (יִמַּח שְׁמו) conviction and jailing.

Still that corrupt demagogue is out, and he is very likely going to jail:

The long and divisive reign of Benjamin Netanyahu, the dominant Israeli politician of the past generation, officially ended on Sunday night, at least for the time being, as the country’s Parliament gave its vote of confidence to a precarious coalition government stitched together by widely disparate anti-Netanyahu forces.

Naftali Bennett, a 49-year-old former aide to Mr. Netanyahu who opposes a Palestinian state and is considered to the right of his old ally, replaced him as prime minister after winning by just a single vote. Yair Lapid, a centrist leader and the new foreign minister, is set to take Mr. Bennett’s place after two years, if their government can hold together that long.

It won’t.  Bennett is a real horror show on his own, but he lacks the political acumen and native cunnint of Binyamin Netanyahu’s (יִמַּח שְׁמו), is a better alternative.

There is no one and nothing that Binyamin Netanyahu’s (יִמַּח שְׁמו) would not sacrifice to his own power and impunity, as he has proved over the years.

………

Members of the bloc agree on little but a desire to oust Mr. Netanyahu, the longest-serving leader in the country’s history, and the need to end a lengthy political gridlock that produced four elections in two years; left Israel without a stable government or a state budget; and formed the backdrop to a surge in interethnic mob violence between Jewish and Arab citizens during the recent 11-day conflict with Hamas.

Violence which was aggressively fomented and encouraged by Binyamin Netanyahu’s (יִמַּח שְׁמו) to further his political aims.

………

During 15 years in power, the last 12 of them uninterrupted, Mr. Netanyahu helped shift Israel further to the right and presided over the dwindling of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, collapsing hopes of a two-state resolution to the conflict. He was also accused of undermining the rule of law by staying in office while standing trial for corruption. It was a decision that divided the Israeli right and contributed to Mr. Bennett’s decision to side with Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents.

Mr. Netanyahu, 71, simultaneously scored several diplomatic triumphs, including agreements with four Arab countries that upended assumptions that Israel would only normalize relations with the Arab world after it sealed peace with the Palestinians.

………

Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, approved the new government by the slimmest of margins — the vote was 60 to 59. In a sign of challenges to come, one lawmaker who had originally agreed to support the coalition balked at the 11th hour, deciding to abstain instead of voting in its favor. To ensure the coalition’s victory, a second lawmaker left a hospital to vote — and then returned to her hospital bed.

………

One celebrant, Shoval Sadde, expressed relief that the coalition had come together after weeks of uncertainty.

“Today is final,” she said. “There are no secret magics anymore that Bibi can pull out of a hat. It’s final.”

My feelings exactly.

I’m glad that I was wrong about my misgivings.

Consider the Source

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The second most contemptible Democratic think tank in Washington, DC, Third Way, has an analysis of why Democrats performed poorly in the 2020 elections, and it comes down to the fact that Democrats stand for nothing.

When one considers the source, a group who has fought for years to ensure that the Democratic Party stand for nothing, this is telling:

In the months since the Democrats’ underwhelming performance in last year’s election, we’ve more or less been able to figure out why the party did so poorly despite a historically unpopular opponent and the two world-historical crises he presided over.

………

Surprise, surprise: a new 2020 postelection autopsy comes to many of these same conclusions — conclusions that observers on the Left have been stressing for months, pulling their hair out as the Democratic Party’s CIA caucus sought to publicly put the blame on the party’s handful of socialists, and popular, commonsense ideas like Medicare for All. But what genuinely is a surprise is who authored this particular autopsy: Third Way, the corporate- — especially Wall Street– — funded think tank that exists to shape Democratic policy for the benefit of tycoons like the Kochs.

………

Finally, there was the decision to cancel in-person canvassing, at the same time that the GOP launched a furious door-knocking and voter registration effort. “Many of those included in this analysis said in hindsight Democrats could have been on doors safely in more places — and Democrats would have won several close races if they had gone back on the doors either sooner or in a more robust way than they did,” states the report. This point was made repeatedly on the record by a host of the party’s leading lights after the election and was almost certainly responsible for not just the drop in support among Latinos but for the Republicans’ crucial triumphs at the state level.

Silly rabbit, the consultants don’t get their vig with door to door canvassing, and their payday is WAY more important than winning elections.

This is yet another confirmation of the Harry S Truman quote, “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.”

Chile: 1 — Chilean Elites: 0

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Chile held elections for a constitutional assembly to rewrite their constitution this week, and it was a disaster for the right wing, where they failed to come even close to getting the ⅓ necessary to block changes to the constitution.

Hopefully, the privileged position of the military, indigenous rights, a completely dysfunctional pension system, elector reforms, the role of the Catholic Church, and taxation will be addressed.

It’s likely that what emerges will be better than what brutal dictator Agusto Pinochet forced on the nation, but that’s an awfully low bar.

Pennsylvania Elections Today (Larry Krasner:1 — Philly PBA:0)

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Reformer Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, just destroyed his Police Union supported opponent by an almost 2:1 margin in today’s primary. 

This makes him almost certain to win the general election, as Republicans are severly out-numbered in Philadelphia, and their nominee is best known for having an ex-girl friend found dead in his bathtub: (Not kidding here)

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner easily defeated Democratic primary challenger Carlos Vega on Tuesday, taking a giant step toward winning a second term after campaigning on his record of criminal justice reform.

The Associated Press projected Krasner as the winner over Vega late Tuesday night. With 22% of the projected votes counted, Krasner held a wide advantage, 65% to 35%. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans seven to one, Krasner is now very likely to win November’s general election. He won the 2017 general election with 75% of the vote.

“Four years ago we promised reform and a focus on serious crime,” Krasner told supporters at a Center City hotel Tuesday night. “We kept those promises. And this time they put us back in office for what we have done. Not ideas, not promises, but realities.”

Krasner, 60, was a defense and civl rights lawyer for three decades, with a long record of suing the Philadelphia police before he was elected as a reformer in 2017. That victory helped propel him to the forefront of a new crop of progressive prosecutors across the country, a reform movement that was tested this election in Philadelphia by rising violent crime.

In his victory speech, Krasner said he had a mandate “from the people most affected by serious crime,” voters he suggested had rejected critics who blame the DA for shootings plaguing the city.“That mandate has rejected, definitively, a politics of fear that is built on falsehoods,” he said, calling for more funding for crime prevention. “We have to invest in all those things because we were robbed of them a long time ago. And what we are facing now is the consequences.

You have a mandate to push even harder, particularly against the Philadelphia police who still have a lot of Frank Rizzo in them.

Also, on the other side of the state, a DSA supported candidate scored an upset victory over the incumbent mayor.

Beating a two-term incumbent in a race centered on equity, state Rep. Ed Gainey won the Democratic primary on Tuesday, which should pave the way to becoming Pittsburgh’s first ever Black mayor.

Mr. Gainey was beating incumbent Mayor Bill Peduto 45 to 41 percent as of 11:11 p.m., with retired police officer Tony Moreno garnering 13 percent of the vote and local ride-share driver Michael Thompson registering 1 percent.

“I just called [Ed Gainey] and congratulated him on earning the Democratic endorsement for Mayor of the city of Pittsburgh. Wishing him well. Thank you Pittsburgh for the honor of being your Mayor these past 8 years. I will remain forever grateful,” Mr. Peduto tweeted shortly before 10:30 p.m.

Mr. Gainey, a 51-year-old state lawmaker representing a district stretching from Highland Park to Wilkinsburg, frequently asked, “For whom is Pittsburgh most livable?” — a question that he backed with facts from the many task forces and reports Mr. Peduto commissioned to identify problems. His message seemed to match the moment, and he thanked God, his wife, his children, his mother, his step-father and all of his campaign staff after Mr. Peduto conceded on Tuesday.

………

Mr. Gainey is almost certain to win in November, with no Republican filed to run in the primary and the city’s dark blue demographics making it unlikely a challenger could oust him — though it’s possible a Republican will have emerged from the write-ins.

Not a bad result, particularly given that Peduto tried to accuse Gainey of “Socialism”  toward the end of the campaign.

Nice to see the term shifting from a detriment to something positive.

Of Course they Are Blaming Corbyn

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There were by-elections in the UK yesterday, and labour completely screwed the pooch, loosing a seat that they have held since its founding 62 years ago.

Jeremy Corbyn is being blamed, because ……… Blairite Labour is sees Boris Johnson and the Tories as the opposition, and people who actually support progressive policies as the enemy.

It is not 1995.  It’s not even 2008.

The great recession changed things, and you are going to get more Boris Johnsons and more Donald Trumps until they stop sucking up to predatory capital as a campaign strategy:

Keir Starmer is facing immediate pressure from the left of Labour to change course after losing the Hartlepool byelection and a string of council seats to the Conservatives.

It came as Boris Johnson, visiting Hartlepool after the Conservatives took the seat for the first time in its 47-year history, said the result – which turned a Labour majority of 3,600 into a Tory win by nearly 7,000 votes, a 16-point swing – was “a mandate” for the government to press on.

………

While Labour had accepted the early results were likely to be among the worst of the series of votes across England, Scotland and Wales, the immediate message from Starmer and his allies was to push for a more rapid move away from the Jeremy Corbyn era.

Corbyn out-performed expectations in 3 of 4 elections with the party infrastructure actively sabotaging him.

You followed that up with party purges against him and his supporters.

If you think that the problem is that you are not moving fast enough away from Corbyn, you are delusional.

………

Diane Abbott, who was shadow home secretary under Corbyn, tweeted: “Keir Starmer must think again about his strategy.” She added: “Crushing defeat for Labour in Hartlepool. Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result. Labour won the seat twice under his leadership.”

Richard Burgon, the Leeds East MP who was shadow justice secretary under Corbyn, said Starmer’s team “needs to urgently change direction”. He tweeted: “It should start by championing the popular policies in our recent manifestos – backed by a large majority of voters.”

A spokesman for Momentum, the Corbyn-allied Labour group, said: “The leadership are reacting to this disaster by promising ‘more change’ – but over the last year we’ve gone backwards. It’s time to change direction, not double down on a failed strategy.”

They are going to double down on a failed strategy, because playing to win means that they lose power within the party. 

One of Tony Blair’s “innovations” for Labour was the imposition of a top-down process in selecting MPs in many seats, and if the left takes power, and has the guts to deal with members more interested in power IN the party than the power OF the party, their positions will be far less secure.

Here’s Hoping that Israeli Politicians Hate Bibi Enough to Work Together

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After the 4th election in 2 years, and a failed attempt by Benyamin Netanyahu to form a government

Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid will get a chance to try and form a government.

It won’t be easy, because when all is said and done, his best sales pitch to get a coalition, he would need to add 44 MK to his party’s 17, is, “If we can keep a government together long enough, Bibi goes to jail.”

That’s enough for me, but in the batsh%$ insane world of Israeli politics, who knows:

Israel’s president has handed centrist politician Yair Lapid a shot at forming a government after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to do so, stirring anticipation that Israel’s longest-serving leader could soon be out of power after 15 years in office.

The outcome is uncertain, however. Mr. Lapid faces a difficult task in stitching together a government from a group of rivals across the political spectrum over the next four weeks. Some are united only in their desire to replace Mr. Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption. He denies any wrongdoing.

Mr. Netanyahu faced similar problems after March’s national election. He had hoped to win back defectors or persuade right-wing partners to form a government with the support of an Islamist party before his mandate expired at midnight on Tuesday.

If Mr. Lapid also fails, then President Reuven Rivlin would hand responsibility for selecting a new prime minister back to Israel’s parliament before a new election is called, which would be the country’s fifth since 2019.

 I run the numbers of the usual suspects, and Yesh Atid (17) + Blue and White (8) + Labor (7) + Meretz (6) only takes them to 38 seats.

This would mean that they would need to get coalition members from some combination of Arab Parties (10), religious parties (22), and right wing parties not named Likud (20) to get to 61 seats.

I do hope that they manage it though, because Netanyahu in jail would be good for Israel and the world.

Good Riddance, You Incompetent Prat

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DCCC chair in the last election cycle, who has seen her chances to advance in House leadership as a result, will not be running for reelection in 2022.

In a just world, she would be run out of town on a rail.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos of Moline announced Friday she would not seek reelection next year after serving since 2013 in a northwest and west-central Illinois district that has trended increasingly Republican.

She does not know how her district will change in redistricting.

………

At one time, Bustos had been viewed as a rising star among House Democrats, demonstrating an ability to win in largely Republican territory.

No, she managed to get mentored by Nancy Pelosi, which is why she got, and mismanaged her time as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, most egregiously when she explicitly stated that consultants working on primary challenges would be blacklisted by the organization.

It’s called saying the quiet part out loud, and it is very very stupid.

I’m not sure if Pelosi is just a bad judge of people, in the early 2000s, she pushed Anthony Weiner and Deborah Wasserman Schultz who were similarly disastrous in their own special ways, or if she decided that the best way for her to remain speaker was to support flawed individuals as a part of the next generation.

I think that she may be following the advice of Lord Julius, “When you’re running a bureaucracy the best way to safeguard your job is to make sure you’re the only one who knows how the whole thing works.” (Pelosi might also be following he advice of Weisshaupt, but that is enough of a deep dive into Cerebus quotes)

Her path up the Democratic Congressional leadership is done for a very long time, and she knows it, so she’s looking to cash in as a lobbyist or a pundit.

Failure is VERY Profitable

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Following her 9 point drubbing by Susan Collins, Democrat Sara Gideon still has $11,000,000.00 left in her campaign accounts.

By way of context, the population of Maine is 1.35 million.

Collins raised about $30 million, and Gideon raised about $75 million.  (And the loser spent only about 85% of that, because there is only so much media in Maine)

This is addition to at least $70,000,000.00 in “independent” PAC spending.

This from a campaign that was literally sending out frantic funding requests emails the day before the election.

The reason that they spent so much money was that for every media buy, the consultants associates with the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) got a percentage.

The same thing happened in Kentucky, where Mitch McConnell destroyed the hapless Amy McGrath by almost 20 points.

In both cases, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) chose to run a largely content free campaign and a largely content free candidate, and the only winners on the Den side were the consultants.

The same could be said from North Carolina, where 3rd party expenditures, and hence commissions, dwarfed spending be l by both campaigns.

All of these races were seen as winnable, and all of these races were not even close, despite the best efforts of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

By comparison, Democrats won both (still hugely expensive) races in Georgia, largely on the get out the vote efforts of Stacy Abrams, which were a TINY fraction of total spending.  (I still don’t trust her though, because of her choices in literature)

For to many in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), the strategies never change, because they make money from these failed strategies.  Lots and lots of money, something like 20% on media buys, and 10% on fundraising.

My advice is the same as always tell the DCCC, DSCC, and the DNC to pound sand, never respond to online or phone solicitations for funds, and chose your candidates yourself.

Act Blue is good, but going through a candidate’s web site is better, and you can get links to their web sites through Act Blue.

Until the plague of consultants, who I liken to a plague of locusts, are ejected from the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), it’s all you can do.

H/t Atrios

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Posted via mobile. 

New Nevada Democratic Party Leadership Raises Money Looted by Old Guard

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You may recall that after reformers took over the Nevada Democratic Party, the entire staff quit, transferred much of their cash to the DSCC, took most of the remainder as severance, and quit. (The consultants quit too)

I called it an, “Own Goal,” because it ended up removing ears and eyes and potential saboteurs affiliated with the old guard from the organization.  (This is a lesson that can be learned from Jeremy Corbyn and the active monkey-wrenching committed by professional staff in Labour)

Now it appears that, the Nevada Democratic Party has raised a crap-load more money than was looted by the old guard:

Just over a month after the staff of Nevada’s Democratic Party quit rather than work alongside an incoming slate of candidates backed by the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, taking $450,000 and severance with them, the party’s new leadership has raised that money back with some to spare.

The Nevada Democrats have raised $530,000 from more than 16,500 contributions since the March 6 elections, when a progressive slate of five candidates — one incumbent and four newcomers — took over the party, beating the preferred picks of the local machine. The figure includes $100,000 raised on their own within a few weeks of the election and a boost in contributions with help from national progressive allies like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who sent fundraising emails over the last several weeks on the party’s behalf.

………

When Judith Whitmer, founder and chair emeritus of Left Caucus, won the March 6 election for state party chair, her predecessors did not only almost empty the state party’s accounts, but they also funneled the money to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and notified Whitmer that all their consultants had terminated their contracts. The DSCC will use the money to support the 2022 reelection campaign of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. In the runup to March 6, Cortez Masto asked Whitmer to drop out of the race and approached her opponent, Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, a Sanders ally who is more established in the state party, to run.

Don’t rehire the consultants.  Instead, focus your efforts about increasing registration and turnout for likely Democratic voters.

The consultants are parasites, the old guard is useless.

It’s OK if You Are a Republican (IOKIYAR)

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Remember disgraced former Missiouri Governor Eric Greitens>?

He resigned after credible allegations emerged of rape, blackmail, and other sexual misconduct with hid hair stylist.

In fact, impeachment proceedings had begun by the time he resigned.

Well now, he is looking to run for the US Senate to replace retiring Senator Roy Blunt.

He seems to think that the aforementioned crimes just don’t make a difference, talk about chutzpah:

Former Missouri Republican Gov. Eric Greitens on Monday announced a bid to replace retiring Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.).

Greitens’s announcement came nearly three years after he resigned as governor amid mounting scandals, including allegations that he photographed a woman nude without her consent in an effort to conceal an extramarital affair.

Despite the scandals, Greitens has floated a Senate bid for weeks, even before Blunt announced his retirement earlier this month. On Monday, he made his decision official.

“I have been so encouraged by the people of Missouri that I am happy to announce tonight that I am running for the United States Senate to continue serving the people of Missouri,” Greitens told Fox News’s Bret Baier.

 Also, he is a Jew, so in addition to being a narcissistic psychopathic megalomaniac, he is a, “Shanda fur die Goyim,” an embarrassment to Jews around the world for his behavior.

It makes him a perfect Republican though.

When You Follow a Defeat with an Own Goal

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Following years or organizing, progressive Democrats in Nevada took 4 of 5 of the leadership positions in the state Democratic Party, out organizing the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) there.

The Nevada Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) then shot itself in the foot by convincing the entire staff of the party to quit. 

You see, you want your people there, picking up the mail, conducting polls, and managing the budget, because they are the ones best placed to sabotage the new leadership, as evidenced by the years long campaign of sabotage against Jeremy Corbyn by the professional staff of the Labour Party in the UK.

Not only will the new leaders be able to hire people that they trust, but should they refuse to resign when there is a change of power, they will be difficult, or at least embarrassing, to fire: 

Not long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.

She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.

(Emphasis mine) 

As an aside, make sure that the consultants stay resigned.  They are useless.

On March 6, a coalition of progressive candidates backed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party, sweeping all five party leadership positions in a contested election that evening. [I have gotten conflicting reports on this, it appears that the party Treasurer might be the old guard candidate] Whitmer, who had been chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, was elected chair. The establishment had prepared for the loss, having recently moved $450,000 out of the party’s coffers and into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s account. The DSCC will put the money toward the 2022 reelection bid of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a vulnerable first-term Democrat.

Again, asking for unity, and when your side does not win, sabotage the winners.

Democrats never do this for Republicans, but false Democrats always do this to real Democrats. 

………

Despite the pushback, Whitmer ultimately won the election, in which the state party’s governing members voted. In the certified election results, she received 244 to Segerblom’s 214; Jacob Allen won first vice chair by 101 votes; Dr. Zaffar Iqbal, on Whitmer’s progressive slate, was reelected second vice chair by 127 votes; Ahmad Adé won secretary by 39 votes; and Howard Beckerman won treasurer by three votes. [Again, note, the Las Vegas Review-Journal story has Beckerman losing.]

After the results, Mounce sent the email making clear that everyone on the small staff had resigned, including the party operations director, communications director, research director, and finance director.

An interesting coda to this is that, “The Democratic National Committee hired Mounce as their new political director last month.”

The final word on all of this is a reworking of Lyndon Johnson an old Lyndon Johnson quote:  “It is better to have them outside the tent pissing in than it is to have them inside the tent pissing in.”

Reid’s machine will try to take power back, and they will do so until the sun collapses into a cinder, but with all of their inside people gone, it will become much harder for them to do so.

Well, This Is a Right Rat-F%$#ing

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In an attempt to sabotage the national popular vote compact, a growing agreement between states to allocate presidential electors on the basis of a national popular vote, the North Dakota Senate has passed a bill making it illegal for the vote totals to be released before the actual electoral college vote.

The theory here is that if North Dakota does not report the vote, there is no popular vote count, and hence, no basis for the national popular vote compact to execute.

My suggestion for the states that have already entered into the vote compact, about 190 EVs so far, is to change the vote compact to reflect the total REPORTED vote.

This means that the state of North Dakota loses representation, but f%$# them with Cheney’s dick:

The North Dakota Senate this week passed a bill which aims to forbid election officials from disclosing how many actual votes are cast for each candidate in upcoming presidential elections. The total tallies would only be disclosed after future Electoral Colleges convene to select an official victor.

The measure, Senate Bill 2271, was introduced by Sen. Robert Erbele, a Republican from Lehr, N.D., who represents a district situated southeast of Bismarck. It would withhold the state’s vote count from the public and allow officials to only reveal the percentage of the total vote each candidate receives.

“[A] public officer, employee, or contractor of this state or of a political subdivision of this state may not release to the public the number of votes cast in the general election for the office of the president of the United States until after the times set by law for the meetings and votes of the presidential electors in all states,” the bill states. “After the votes for presidential electors are canvassed, the secretary of state may release the percentage of statewide votes cast for each set of presidential electors to the nearest hundredth of a percentage point, a list of presidential candidates in order of increasing or decreasing percentage of the vote received by presidential electors selected by the candidates, and the presidential candidate whose electors received the highest percentage of votes.”

………

The bill is designed to prevent implementation of the national popular vote compact – a multi-state agreement aimed at circumventing the Electoral College.

………

The national popular vote compact is a nascent agreement amongst a coalition of states which have enacted statutes dictating that their presidential electors only cast votes for the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact—which would effectively neuter the Electoral College—takes effect once the coalition of states involved possess 270 or more electoral votes. According to nationalpopularvote.com, the agreement has been passed into law in 16 states possessing a total 196 Electoral College votes, including New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

………

Appearing on the political podcast Plain Talk, the former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, Saul Anuzis, said the measure was “almost a politburo situation from Soviet Russia,” referring to the political policymaking committee in the former Soviet Union.

The comments of former chairman of the Michigan GOP lickening this action to the Soviet Politburo is completely unfair though, to the Soviet Politburo.

They were way more respectful of the will of the people than the North Dakota Republican Party.

Honestly, I think that it is time to right a historic wrong, and merge North and South Dakota, who were only created as separate states to create partisan advantage.

I Am So Hoping That Matt Taibbi Is Wrong

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Unfortunately, his analysis is pretty good, so his take that Kurt Shilling is the future of the modern conservative movement is rather alarming.

This is a guy who makes Donald Trump look measured and intelligent:

Curt Schilling, cauldron-bellied baseball star turned political activist, has apparently decided to run for Senate in Massachusetts. His goal will be ousting an icon of the liberal hegemony he proudly despises.

………

If you think the white-guy grievance movement will die after Donald Trump’s likely landslide defeat this November, think again. There will be plenty of filterless, self-pitying dunces to carry the torch in Trump’s place. Schilling is a leading candidate.

His story, maybe even more than Trump’s, is a parable on the comically comprehensive inability of some to recognize the advantages us white guys enjoy.

………

More recently, Schilling worked at ESPN, where he was paid $2.5 million a year to be an analyst.

He needed the money. Soon after his playing career ended, he blew his $50 million fortune on a failed video game venture, a fiasco that cost Rhode Island taxpayers $75 million.

After that, he fell back into the ESPN gig, which should have been easy money. For all his other qualities, Schilling is an excellent baseball analyst (although, humorously, his ex-teammate and rival Pedro Martinez is better).

But Curt couldn’t keep his job. As is usually the case with people who can’t hold on to gravy-train situations, the culprit was addiction. In Schilling’s case, it wasn’t booze or pills, but line-crossing political rants.

………

Having proven incapable of running a business, being a good steward of either his own money or the taxpayers’, or holding down the world’s cushiest job, Schilling naturally decided to get into politics.

Don’t bet against him winning a Senate seat in my home state of Massachusetts, either. His would be a victory for the cause of ignorance and tone-deafness perhaps even exceeding Trump’s capture of the Republican nomination.

………

Schilling should wake up every morning and compose a five-page letter to God thanking him for the American white-guy lifestyle jackpot. Instead, he’s consumed with bitterness over the raw deal he thinks people like him have gotten.

In this, he’s very much like Donald Trump, who spent much of his adult life partying with models and celebrities and somehow emerged in late middle age as the most obdurate complainer in American history.

………

This shouldn’t be too big an ask, since (as the likes of Trump and Schilling regularly prove) American white men still mostly run the world and live highly failure-resistant existences. Just take yes for an answer, enjoy the ride, and try to have the decency to not act like a victim; that’s all anyone asks.

But they can’t do it. The Schilling/Trump principle is never shutting up, particularly on topics about which they are ignorant, which is pretty much all of them. This is a movement, not limited to Trump, and it’s not going to end anytime soon. God help us.

If Taibbi is right, and I think that he is, this likely is an indicator of a society in precipitous decline into absurdity and obscurity.

This is Angela Merkel Desperately Trying to Salvage Her Electoral Chances

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Frau Merkel* has signed onto a proposal to ban face veils from public places in Germany:

Europe’s battle over public attire for Muslim women moved on Friday from the outcry over banning “burkinis” in France to a strong call from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing conservative bloc for a ban in Germany on face veils in schools and universities and while driving.

The German proposal, announced by the interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, was clearly driven by an intensifying political season and a surge in support for the far right since Germany accepted more than a million refugees last year. There has been mounting public anxiety over integrating the refugees, who are mostly from Muslim countries, particularly after a series of terrorist assaults and a gun rampage last month.

………

Yet the proposals now being floated in Germany around restricting the burqa make it clear that France is not the only European country grappling with whether some Islamic coverings amount to a barrier to the full participation of women in Western society.

Ms. Merkel had sent a signal about the partial ban on face veils on Thursday, when she told a group of provincial newspapers that “from my standpoint, a fully veiled woman scarcely has a chance at full integration in Germany.”

Mr. de Maizière said the same day that “the burqa doesn’t fit with our country and does not correspond to our understanding of the role of women.”
Continue reading the main story

Mr. de Maizière and Ms. Merkel stopped short of calling for an outright ban on the burqa, but the proposal put forward on Friday tiptoes along a path that the French traveled down with a 2010 law that barred any covering that hides the face.

………

The German plan would not ban shawls or abayas that cover the body and are often worn with a hijab, a head scarf that does not cover the face, which German officials acknowledge would not win approval from the country’s constitutional court.

It would ban full face veils in schools and colleges, and while driving, appearing before courts or at public registry offices, or when going through passport control. Women who want to wear a face veil in public should not teach or become civil servants, Mr. de Maizière said in announcing the plan on morning television.

“We want to make it a legal requirement to show your face in places where that is necessary for the cohesion of our society,” he said.

He was flanked by the conservative leaders of two states with elections next month — Lorenz Caffier of the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Frank Henkel of the city-state of Berlin. Both men are running on strong law-and-order platforms and had called for a ban on veils.

This is all about the elections.

Merkel has managed to burn through a lot of good will from the German electorate with her handling of the Syrian refugee crisis, and this is an attempt at damage control.

*Horses whinnying.

I Cannot Imagine Any of My Elected Officials Doing This

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While riding in a crowded train on a three hour trip to debate with his opponent for Labour leadership, Jeremy Corbyn spent 3 hours sitting on the floor rather than upgrading to first class:

Spending a busy train journey without a seat, crushed up against other commuters in the aisle, or crouched uncomfortably in the luggage compartment is an all-too-common experience for many. But you don’t expect to spot the leader of the opposition on the floor of a train on your way to work.

Jeremy Corbyn, famed for standing up for his principles, sat down for them last week, along with 20 other seatless commuters on a three-hour train journey from London to Newcastle.

In a video shot as he was on his way to debate with Owen Smith in the Labour leadership hustings in Gateshead, Corbyn is seen sitting on the floor of the train, a coffee and brown paper bag at his feet, reading Private Eye. The freelance filmmaker Yannis Mendez, who has been following Corbyn and volunteers for his campaign, filmed the footage.

From his spot on the floor, which he chose rather than upgrading to first class, Corbyn turns to the camera and says: “This is a problem that many passengers face every day, commuters and long-distance travellers. Today this train is completely ram-packed. The staff are absolutely brilliant, working really hard to help everybody.

“The reality is there are not enough trains, we need more of them – and they’re also incredibly expensive.” He said the whole experience was a good case for public ownership.

Later, Corbyn said: “Is it fair that I should upgrade my ticket whilst others who might not be able to afford such a luxury should have to sit on the floor? It’s their money I would be spending after all.”

I cannot for the life of me imagine why the voters are choosing him over the posh clueless assholes from the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Somehow, the geniuses who lost the last two elections, and have converted Scotland from a Labour fortress to Terra Incognita, think that Corbyn is going to lose them an election.

I don’t know whether or not  Corbyn will win the next election, but I do know that the Labour establishment will find a way to lose.

The 38 Minute Debate

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Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova finally had a debate ……… for about 38 minutes ……… on a Sunday morning.

Needless to say, it it got kind of heated, which is not surprising.

When you have what amounts to just ½ a debate, you don’t have the time to explore policy differences:

Hostility oozed from South Florida TV screens Sunday morning as Tim Canova and Debbie Wasserman Schultz faced off in their first, and likely only, debate before the Aug. 30 Democratic congressional primary.

Incumbent Wasserman Schultz and challenger Canova clashed on a handful of issues, most notably on Israel and Social Security, which are both important in the Broward/Miami-Dade County 23rd Congressional District, home to a large Jewish community and to many seniors.

Even sharper exchanges concerned charges about judgment, temperament and commitment to South Florida. The two repeatedly expressed exasperation with each other, often seeking to interrupt the other to make a point.

I watched a bit of it at the site, but I cannot stand listening to DWS.

I don’t think that it will make much of a difference.

It was at a time when no one tuned in, and it was too short, which was what Wasserman Schultz wanted.

Damn

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The Labour Executive Council won its appeal, so 130,000 new Labour members will not be able to vote in the next leadership election:

Labour’s ruling body has won its bid to overturn a high court decision allowing new party members to vote in the forthcoming leadership election, a ruling that could bar tens of thousands of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn from voting in the ballot.

The ruling by three court of appeal judges, Lord Justice Beatson, Lady Justice Macur and Lord Justice Sales, will mean 130,000 new members who joined less than six months ago will not be able to vote in the forthcoming poll between Corbyn and Owen Smith for the Labour leadership.

Corbyn’s campaign condemned the decision as wrong “both legally and democratically”, warning that it threatened to disenfranchise members who were explicitly told upon joining the party that they would have a vote in any leadership election.

“Crucial to the outcome today was the introduction of a new argument by the Labour party HQ’s lawyers, who invoked an obscure clause in the Labour party rules (chapter 4, clause II, 1A), which could be read as giving the NEC the right to ignore all of the rules laid out for leadership elections,” a campaign spokesman said.

“In other words, this is a ‘make it up as you go along’ rule. We do not think that making it up as you go along is a reasonable way to conduct democracy in our party.”

I still think that Corbyn will win, but I think that it will be a much closer thing.