Category: Elections

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Explores New Frontiers in Lame

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Remember when I wrote that Debbie Wasserman Schults had agreed to debates with primary challenger Tim Canova?

Now we learn that the Congresswoman has defined agreeing to debate as one 15 minute long joint appearance. After the introductions and opening statements, that leaves time for ……… well ……… nothing:

Last week, Debbie Wasserman Schultz told Sun Sentinel Editor, Rosemary O’Hara, that she was in debate discussions with me. That statement was a complete fabrication. In fact, Wasserman Schultz and no one from her campaign has ever responded to the debate challenge that I made back in April.

Days ago, I tried again in an open letter and by email to Wasserman Schultz and her staff to suggest a series of two-hour debates. Again, I never received any reply. Instead, Jim Defede of WFOR CBS 4 Local News sent an invitation to both candidates to debate on his Sunday morning 8:30am talk show, Facing South Florida. At 4pm, my campaign learned that Wasserman Schultz said she “scheduled” a debate.

After four months of dodging debates and running scared, Wasserman Schultz now wants to schedule a 15 minute debate? If she believes one 15 minute debate is sufficient to defend her record, it shows she’s learned nothing from her failures in scheduling debates at the DNC before her shameful resignation. In April, I proposed a series of real debates, and that’s still my hope, that the voters will get the benefit of hearing us discuss the issues in more than one debate of at least two-hours each to cover a wide range of issues of importance to all of us.

Great googly moogly.

DWS has got to be the lamest politician in Florida, and considering that Jeb “Miss Congeniality” Bush and Rick “Governor Batboy” Scott are Florida politicians, that’s saying a lot.

I so hope Tim Canova wins the primary.

Corbyn Just Scored Some Major Wins

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He just won a court case over voting rights for members and his supporters slate swept the elections for Labour’s executive committee:

Jeremy Corbyn has consolidated his grip on the Labour party after he won the first round of the latest high court battle over the rules of the leadership contest – and his supporters swept the board in elections to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee.

After another day of twists and turns in the fierce battle for the future of the party, some of Corbyn’s critics among Labour MPs were privately saying his position now appeared unassailable.

The next step by the Blairites and their ilk will be to actively sabotage the next election, because they will keep the Tories in power forever to keep their privileged positions within the party.

I Really Hope That They Stream This Online

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We now know that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is concerned about the primary later this month, because has just agreed to debate Tim Canova:

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Thursday she would debate her primary challenger Tim Canova.

“I have always said that when we got to August that I would focus on the question of whether or not I was going to debate my opponent,” she said in a brief telephone interview. “I am going to debate my opponent.”

Canova’s campaign treated the development like a victory. “It’s good news for the residents of South Florida,” Canova said. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz has never had to account for her record. She’s never engaged in a debate as long as she’s been a member of Congress. And it’s well past time to have that accounting.”

If you are comfortably in the lead, you pretend as if your opponent does not exist.

She is agreeing to debate because she expects the primary to be close.

I’ll post updates about when and where the debates will be, but in the meantime, throw some money at Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page which is currently set up to split contributions between Tim Canova and Alan Grayson, who is running for Florida Senate against former Republican, serial fabulist, and Wall Street BFF Patrick Murphy.

Brownback’s Folly

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Turns out Speaker Boehner is indeed enjoying Kansas primary night. Just received this from former staffer! pic.twitter.com/hIzmFt8hn0

— carl hulse (@hillhulse) August 3, 2016

Well, Boehner is happy

Yesterday was primary night in Kansas, and Governor Sam Brownback’s motley crew of Teabagger scum got served:

A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators lost their seats as moderate Republicans made Tuesday’s primary election a referendum on the state’s budget problems and education funding.

Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, of Nickerson, fell in his south-central Kansas district to Ed Berger, former president of Hutchinson Community College. Bruce’s defeat came amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies that appeared to spell trouble for conservatives.

“The way the state has been going, we have so many problems, and we need some changes to be made,” said Stanley Prichard, a 46-year-old manufacturing worker from Hutchinson, who voted for Berger in the Republican primary.

Five other conservative senators lost in races that spanned the state. So did five conservative House members, all of them from affluent Kansas City-area suburbs in Johnson County, the state’s most populous, where voters have cherished good public schools for decades.

The voting occurred against the backdrop not only of the state’s fiscal woes but ongoing legal and political disputes over funding for public schools. The state Supreme Court could rule by the end of the year on whether the Legislature is shorting schools on their state aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Browback got a sh%$ load of money a few years from the Koch Brothers to get antediluvian reactionary candidates, and once they were elected, they proceeded to destroy the state.

Their theory was that if they lowered taxes on rich folk to next to nothing, and strip mined government, that prosperity would ensue.

As you can see, it did not work.

BTW, one of the most obnoxious of Teabaggers in Congress, Tim Huelskamp, just got crushed in the primary.

Boehner is having a glass of wine to celebrate because he drinks a lot, and because Huelskamp was the most Teabagger of the Teabagger Caucus in the House of Representatives, and undermined the then Speaker at every turn.

I think that the new members of the state lege are in for a rude awakening if they think that Brownback will see this as anything by an excuse to double down on his failed policies, because in his mind, wing nuttery can never, it can only be failed.

Kansas will be having interesting times, as in the Chinese curse, over the next few years.

Debbie Wasserman Thrown Under Bus

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Then they backed up the bus, ran her over again, then broke out the steamroller, then got some kerosene and set fire to the remains, and finally sprinkled holy water over the ashes to ensure that she would never rise again.

This Politico article is as nasty a hit job I’ve seen on anyone in the media,

Among other revelations:

  • Ignoring a DNC fund raising need to raise funds for her own campaign from Joe Biden.
  • She also ignored another DNC need at the same meeting to ask Biden to show up to her daughter’s bat Mitzvah.
  •  Described her as, “An increasingly imperious and politically tone-deaf chair who often put her own interests ahead of party functions..”
  • Hassled Obama staffers seats at an event, allegedly for her big donors, and then gave those seats to her family.

Read the rest:  It’s brutal.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz may very well be more loathed by her fellow party members than Ted Cruz is loathed by his.

I cannot help but think that they actually want her to lose the primary to Tim Canova this August.

h/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

This is an Insanely Good Idea

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The Labour party should set up a fund to help people on low incomes become MPs, the frontrunner for the party’s leadership has said.

Jeremy Corbyn said Labour’s members of parliament needed to be drawn from people who were facing the brunt of government policy so that they would understand what was at stake.

The diversity fund would help party members in the top 100 target seats from working class backgrounds with selection costs, which the Corbyn campaign says can amount to as much as £4,500.

“If the party is to win back the five million predominantly working-class voters lost since 1997, then we must reflect those we seek to represent. It is not enough to be for working people – we have to be of working people as well,” the candidate argued.

“Because if at the next election we as a party have hardly any candidates from the frontline of Tory cuts then it will be very hard to be heard by voters we need to win back.

I think that this should be considered in the United States as well..

Ha Ha!

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Notwithstanding the fact that the his Blairite opposition has settled on a single competitor to run against Jeremy Corbyn to head labour, but the current Labour leader still has a strong majority in polls:

Jeremy Corbyn is the overwhelming favourite to win the Labour leadership contest, according to the latest Opinium/Observer poll, which shows he has more than twice the level of support among party supporters as his challenger, Owen Smith.

The online poll finds that among those who say they back Labour, 54% support Corbyn against just 22% who would prefer Smith. Some 20% say they are undecided and 4% say they do not intend to vote.

The findings offer further proof that grassroots support for Corbyn remains firm despite weeks of bitter conflict between the leader and Labour MPs at Westminster, a large majority of whom backed a vote of no confidence in him after the EU referendum.

This is not a surprise.

What is also not a surprise is that Labour is not polling well, because they managed to appear more f%$#d up than the Tories, which is no small thing, considering that they just made Boris f%$#ing Johnson their foreign minister.

The Blairites are more than willing to destroy Labour to maintain their positions within the party.

I So Hope that DWS Loses the Primary

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We now have reports that Bernie Sanders will cmapaign against Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in the upcoming Congressional primary:

In an interview with USA Today, Bernie Sanders announced plans for the Sanders Institute and other educational and political organizations to continue the revolution his campaign spawned.

Sanders will also be campaigning for at least 100 progressives around the country—including democrat Tim Canova, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s primary congressional challenger.

………

With Sanders’ endorsement for Clinton behind him, his next steps leading up to the Democratic National Convention are to maintain a progressive presence within the party. As Wasserman Schultz was spared in negotiations for Sanders’ endorsement, the next best way to maintain a progressive presence is by ensuring she loses her reelection bid to a more progressive alternative like Tim Canova.

Canova has already raised over $2 million in his congressional race against Wasserman Schultz, in large part thanks to contributions from disenfranchised Sanders supporters. His momentum has received backlash from Democrats keen on keeping Wasserman Schultz in Congress.

………

Even though Wasserman Schultz’s Democratic primary is just around the corner—on August 30—she has consistently refused to debate Canova, and has limited her exposure as DNC chair. While Wasserman Schultz has avoided the public eye, Canova has exposed a litany of her policy shortfalls among progressives. The Miami Herald reported that Wasserman Schultz broke down in tears after the Florida AFL-CIO declined to endorse her, due to her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement—which Canova staunchly opposes.

Gee. She has a sad, because a labor union declined to endorse her because she has proved herself implacably hostile to the needs and desires of that union.

This is how politics is supposed to work.

Canova’s support for Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guidelines pushed Wasserman Schultz to flip-flop in her support for payday lenders. He also recently challenged Wasserman Schultz’s vote in favor of the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act, which allows pension and benefit cuts to 400,000 American workers—many of them teamsters and union members.

Gee, supporting loan sharks, the TPP, and gutting union pensions?  I can’t imagine why, “the Florida AFL-CIO declined to endorse her.”

I so hope she is sent packing in the primary.

Trumpster Fire*

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Spotted at the #RNCinCLE. I’m told it’s being replaced for obvious reasons. pic.twitter.com/SVayl1zGCd

— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) July 16, 2016

OOPS!


And his new logo.


As re-imagined by Samantha Bee


And a new slant on the image

At the RNC, which I am not watching because I value my sanity, they had color coded elevators to help convention goers find their way around, with rather unfortunate results:

This year’s RNC may be a grand old segregated party.

 Republican National Convention organizers are scrambling to replace signs labeling a bank of elevators the “white elevators.”

 ………

 Byron Tau, a Wall Street Journal reporter who first spotted the signs, said RNC staffers were replacing them “for obvious reasons.”

 It’s unclear who vetted the signs or why they were hung in the first place. Neither RNC organizers nor Trump’s campaign immediately responded to the Daily News’ request for further comment.

And then there is his new logo, and the various permutations therein.

This really is a complete clusterf%$#..

*Not my bon mot.  It comes from BS at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Schadenfreude, New Labour Edition

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As if the Labour coup could not get any more pear shaped, his opponents are now at Each Other’s throats:

The Labour party has been engulfed by a fresh bout of infighting as the camps of the two potential “unity candidates” set to fight Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership embarked on their own war of words.

On the eve of a pivotal week for the future of the party, one MP supporting Angela Eagle accused rival Owen Smith of using “sneaky tactics” to manoeuvre himself into being the sole challenger.

Meanwhile, a senior MP supporting Smith claimed there was an overwhelming consensus that only one candidate should emerge, and warned that currently supportive MPs would not give Eagle their nomination if she did not swiftly recognise the situation.

“Angela needs to be very careful,” said the source. “It is not a question of who deserves to be leader; it is about the best possible candidate to beat Jeremy.”

The row blew up following Smith’s public declaration in a BBC interview on Friday that Corbyn should be presented with just one challenger. The formal window for MPs to declare their support for a leadership candidate starts on Monday and finishes on Wednesday.

Smith suggested in his interview that either the deputy leader, Labour’s national executive committee or the parliamentary party could devise a process to whittle the two challengers down if they both had the required 51 nominations to go on the ballot paper.

However, sources close to Eagle immediately dismissed that suggestion, pointed out that the candidate who won the fewest nominations became leader last year and that she was “in it to win it”.

One angry MP backing Eagle described Smith’s suggestion as an attempt to “bully Angela into some sort of corner”.

The circular firing squad metaphor app is even more apropos for Labour than it is for the Democratic party.

Quote of the Day

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I’m all for pragmatism and common sense in these things. All the regulars here know that. But, in this case, I’d almost rather have an open, declared enemy than this back-stabbing false balancing oligarch sock puppet. He’s just a prettier version of Joe Lieberman. He’s one of that tiny handful of people who make me sound like the people I deride as the rainbow farting unicorn-mounted purity cavalry.

—a Comment from ncsteve on Talking Points Memo in response to the news that contemptible Evan Bayh is running for Senate Again.

I wholeheartedly agree.

While at the Other Ocean………

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It appears that the elections called by Malcolm Trumbull just made Australia’s approval of the TPP next to impossible in the near future:

With a new Senate likely to be hostile to free trade deals, the road to signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership just got bumpy, writes Richard Denniss.

One thing that is certain after Saturday’s election, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead, and along with it the Coalition’s economic agenda and narrative. The free trade agreements that Andrew Robb signed with China, Korea, and Japan were some of Tony Abbott’s proudest achievements, yet they are exactly the sort of deals that Pauline Hanson, Nick Xenophon, and Jacqui Lambie believe cost Australian manufacturing workers jobs.

And thanks to Malcolm Turnbull’s new Senate voting rules and double dissolution election, Hanson, Xenophon, and Lambie are now the block of votes that the Coalition will need to win over to pass their legislation when the ALP and Greens are opposed.

This may not kill the TPP, but it has the effect of making the timetable Obama that wants (he sees it as a presidential legacy issus), where there is a lame duck vote, next to impossible.

It is not clear who will win the election, but it is clear that the Colalition will not have the votes to pass TPP without significant support from smaller parties because the Senate is looking to be a complete mess, and unlike other upper houses in the British Commonwealth, the Australian Senate is much more powerful, being somewhat analogous to the US Senate in power.

Again, good news, because much like CETA and the TPIP, the TPP is a horribly flawed “trade deal.”

I Called This

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A few days ago, I made a comment on a Facebook post in response to the an assertion that the British have no leverage in negotiating the Brexit.

I noted that Britain is by far the most EU migrants of any nation in the organization, and that they could use that as leverage in negotiations.

FWIW, the numbers are pretty stark: 1.2 million Britons living in other EU countries versus 3.3 million EU citizens living in the UK.

I would also argue that a larger proportion of the British expats are pensioners than the EU expats, because people don’t tend to move to England to retire, they move to England to work.

In any case, the Conservative Party has announced that any decision on the status of EU citizens living in the UK would be the product of the negotiating process:

British immigration minister James Brokenshire told the House of Commons Monday that the government cannot make any promises about the future of EU citizens in the U.K.

It would be “unwise” to tell them they can stay before the U.K. has negotiated with other EU countries about the rights of British nationals living elsewhere in Europe.

Brokenshire added that if the government made a promise now, that could trigger more migrants to come to the EU.

He also said that “EU nationals continue to be welcome here in the meantime.”

“EU nationals can have our full reassurance that their right to enter, work and study in the U.K. remains unchanged.”

………

The debate came after Home Secretary Theresa May, who is in the race to become the next Conservative party leader, on Sunday said that the position of EU nationals remains unclear.

The irony here is that May is an opponent of Brexit, while her opponents for party leader, Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom, are both saying that expelling EU nationals in the UK should not be on the table.

Needless to say, the status of EU nationals in the UK has to be on the table, particularly if Article 50 is invokes, as Brussels has no reason to negotiate in good faith otherwise, and every reason to allow the clock to run out, so as to punish the UK for leaving.

Oh F%$#

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A ruling by the ConstitutionalCourt of Austria means that Austrian presidential election result have been annulled, and a new election must be held.

Last time, the candidate from the right wing Freedom Party came within a fraction of a percent of winning, so what happens in a post Brexit vote is a complete crap shoot:

Austria’s Freedom party will get another go at providing the first far-right president in the European Union, after the country’s constitutional court annulled the result of May’s presidential election.

The court president, Gerhart Holzinger, announced on Friday that the run-off vote, in which Norbert Hofer of the Freedom party (FPÖ) narrowly lost to Green-backed Alexander Van der Bellen, would have to be repeated across the whole country after an investigation revealed irregularities in the count of the vote in several constituencies.

The unprecedented ruling comes a week before Van der Bellen was due to be sworn into office. Hofer had lost out to his rival in a knife-edge election on 22 May by only 30,863 votes.

While the Austrian presidency is a largely ceremonial role, the outcome has been seen as hugely symbolic, with the Freedom party seemingly buoyed by growing anti-refugee sentiment and disaffection with the country’s political establishment.

The Austrian President has one significant power: He can dissolve parliament and force new elections.

The citizens of the EU are living in interesting times.

Read Taibbi

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He makes what should be the obvious point, “If you believe there’s such a thing as “too much democracy,” you probably don’t believe in democracy at all:

In 1934, at the dawn of the Stalinist Terror, the great Russian writer Isaac Babel offered a daring quip at the International Writers Conference in Moscow:

Everything is given to us by the party and the government. Only one right is taken away: the right to write badly.

A onetime Soviet loyalist who was eventually shot as an enemy of the state, Babel was likely trying to say something profound: that the freedom to make mistakes is itself an essential component of freedom.

As a rule, people resent being saved from themselves. And if you think depriving people of their right to make mistakes makes sense, you probably never had respect for their right to make decisions at all.

This is all relevant in the wake of the Brexit referendum, in which British citizens narrowly voted to exit the European Union.

Because the vote was viewed as having been driven by the same racist passions that are fueling the campaign of Donald Trump, a wide swath of commentators suggested that democracy erred, and the vote should perhaps be canceled, for the Britons’ own good.

Social media was filled with such calls. “Is it just me, or does #Brexit seem like a moment when the government should overrule a popular referendum?” wrote one typical commenter.

On op-ed pages, there was a lot of the same. Harvard economics professor and chess grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff wrote a piece for the Boston Globe called “Britain’s democratic failure“………

………

I would argue that voters are the critical ingredient to save elites from themselves, but Sullivan sees it the other way, and has Plato on his side. Though some of his analysis seems based on a misread of ancient history (see here for an amusing exploration of the topic), he’s right about Plato, the source of a lot of these “the ancients warned us about democracy” memes. He just left out the part where Plato, at least when it came to politics, was kind of a jerk.

The great philosopher despised democracy, believing it to be a system that blurred necessary social distinctions, prompting children, slaves and even animals to forget their places. He believed it a system that leads to over-permissiveness, wherein the people “drink too deeply of the strong wine of freedom.”

………

You have to be a snob of the first order, completely high on your own gas, to try to apply these arguments to present-day politics, imagining yourself as an analog to Plato’s philosopher-kings.

………

“Too much democracy” used to be an argument we reserved for foreign peoples who tried to do things like vote to demand control over their own oil supplies.

………

It doesn’t mean much to be against torture until the moment when you’re most tempted to resort to it, or to have faith in voting until the result of a particular vote really bothers you. If you think there’s ever such a thing as “too much democracy,” you probably never believed in it in the first place. And even low-Information voters can sense it.

He’s right.  As political philosopher and political prankster Dick Tuck once said, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

At the end of the day, an fair election is a fair election.

Quote of the Day

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It seems to me that the alleged “good guys” — the liberal, cosmopolitan class of which I myself am a part — have fallen into habits of ridiculing, demonizing, writing off, or, in our best moments, merely patronizing huge swathes of the polities to which we belong. They may do the same to us, but we are not toddlers, that is no excuse. In the United States, in Europe, we are allowing ourselves to disintegrate and arguing about who is to blame. Let’s all be better than that.

—Chris Arnade

The comment is about the Brexit, but I think that it can be applied more generally.

Your Brexit Update

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It’s been close all night, but the trend has been clear


The geographic divide is pretty clear


The history of EU elections mitigates against this coming to fruition

I’ve been following EU Referendum Results.

There were 46,501,241 votes cast, with 15,203,370 leave votes and 14,157,273 stay votes counted at this point, which means that Brexit leads by 51.8% to 48.2% and the stay votes will need to get 56.1% of the remaining vote to win.

So, my prediction appears to have been wrong, and Britain will vote for a Brexit.

Rather unsurprisingly, there was a significant geographic divide, with England and Wales going Brexit, and Scotland going stay. (middle pic)

The question, of course, is what it all means.  I’m inclined to believe, as Moon of Alabama posits, that neither Cameron, nor the EU, nor the City of London will meekly accede to this vote as the bottom pic clearly shows.

I rather expect that we will be talking about “When the Brexit finally happens” 10 years from now.

The pics will pop up if you click on them.

OK, so Now the Brexit Polls Have Closed

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My money is still on a close race, where the not-England parts of the UK have the Brexit rejected.

That being said, I think that there are some in this election, and when taken in juxtaposition:

  1. When ignoring the political opportunists (Hi, Boris), I think that the pro-Brexit campaigners have overwhelmingly relied on nativism, bigotry, and anti-immigrant sentiment in their campaign.
  2. The substantive complaints made about the EU by the pro-Brexit forces are essentially correct.
  3. Because of items 1, item 2 has simply not been a meaningful part of the campaign.

Personally, I believe that if the EU continues as it does, (An undemocratic font of German political hegemony and German economic mythologyz) it will lead to another war in Europe.

We can see the tensions deriving from the EU inflicting pain and suffering on the ordinary citizenry in order to protect the elites, and this (along with there being no meaningful leftwing opposition to the EU) has led to the rise of reactionary and bigoted parties across Europe.

The UK pulling out of the EU could be the dick punch that it needs to realign itself from an unelected (the European Parliament is a glorified debating society) imperial bureaucracy unto a real democratic institution.

As an aside, there are some secondary benefits to a Brexit:

  • It should reduce the incidence of foreigners using London real estate for “in case of popular uprising” bolt holes, which would make the city more affordable for ordinary Brits.
  • It should reduce the size, and hopefully influence, or Britain’s bloated and corrupt financial sector.