Category: Elections

Labour is Determined to Suck the Life out of Their Party

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In the UK, the political party formerly known as Labour has been spooked by the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn, who is surging in the race to be the next party leader, because he is talking like he were actually a member of the Labour Party, instead of being a Tory lite like Tony Blair.

It appears that the party has taken a page out of Jeb Bush’s vote suppression playbook in 2000:

Harriet Harman, the interim Labour leader, has defended the integrity of her party’s leadership election system amid claims it has been infiltrated by hard left extremists as well as Conservatives out to discredit the process.

She said “rigorous due diligence” was being undertaken by Labour staff, and the new electoral system introduced in 2014 was less open to manipulation than its predecessor, which freely allowed opponents of Labour to vote without any checks.

She also disclosed a new email was being sent to local branches setting out how they could check whether bogus applicants were trying to join the party as registered supporters.

Labour has been hit by allegations that the party, by offering a vote to anyone paying a £3 fee, has left itself vulnerable to mass infiltration, mainly by hard leftwingers but also by Tories.

When signing up as a registered supporter – rather than joining as a party member – people must agree to the declaration: “I support the aims and values of the Labour Party, and I am not a supporter of any organisation opposed to it.” More than 20,000 new full members have joined the party since the leadership nominations closed. It is a good chance that most are genuinely enthused, and many are likely to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

Let me get this straight:  People are willing to pay money to associate themselves with the Labour Party, and you are trying to suppress their votes?

What is the next dumbass policy you are going to try?  Maybe going out of your way to piss off people in the Labour strongholds in Scotland?

Oh ……… wait ……… They already did that, probably losing everything north of Hadrian’s wall for a generation.

This is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

I Have an Endorsement for the Florida Senate Race

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Rather unsurprisingly, it is Alan Grayson, who formally announced his entry into the Democratic primary:

The 2016 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Florida just got interesting.

 U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, the liberal firebrand whose unpredictability enthralls progressives and worries moderates, announced Thursday that he will run against the more centrist U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy for the Senate seat that would be vacated by current Sen. Marco Rubio, a candidate for the presidency.

 “People understand what I stand for,” Grayson said on the WKMG television station in Orlando on Thursday. “They know I am a champion for justice, equality and peace and I do my best to help people in need.”

 He plans to campaign on giving seniors a Social Security raise, expanding the services covered by Medicare, reducing student loans and expanding access to healthcare.

 “I don’t think Obamacare has gone far enough,” he told the Miami Herald after his announcement.

 The race pits polar opposites against each other.

 Grayson, 57, from Orlando, is known for his raucous style. In 2009, he described a proposed GOP healthcare plan as “if you do get sick, die quickly” and once compared former Vice President Dick Cheney to a vampire.

The Democratic Party establishment is supporting Patrick Murphy who, “Was a Republican until he ran for Congress in 2012,” who voted for the Keystone Pipeline, the House kangaroo hearings on Benghazi, corrupt for profit colleges, donated to Mitt Rmoney in 2007, and is a member of the corporatist “New Democrat” caucus.

Hmmm…..The DSCC, which is effectively run by Chuck “Wall Street’s Bitch” Schumer, is supporting a Wall Street loving faux Dem.

What a surprise.

Needless to say, Alan Grayson is now on Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page.

Looks Like the Congressional Delegation in Florida Will Be Changing

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The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that at least 8 Congressional districts must be redrawn:

The Florida Supreme Court took a wrecking ball to Florida’s political landscape Thursday, throwing out the state’s carefully crafted congressional districts drawn by the GOP-led Legislature and ordering a new map within 100 days.

In the historic 5-2 ruling, the court not only ruled the maps were the product of an unconstitutional political gerrymandering, it signaled its deep distrust of lawmakers and provided detailed instructions on how to repair the flawed map in time for the 2016 election.

“This is a complete victory for the people of Florida who passed the Fair District amendment and sought fair representation where the Legislature didn’t pick their voters,” said David King, lead attorney for the League of Women Voters and the coalition of voter groups which brought the challenge. “The Supreme Court accepted every challenge we made and ordered the Legislature to do it over.”

The new maps are likely to reconfigure nearly all of the state’s 27 congressional districts, open the door to new candidates, and threaten incumbents, who will now face a new set of boundary lines and constituents close to the 2016 election.

………

But the justices reversed the trial court’s order approving the Legislature’s revised redistricting plan “because we conclude that, as a result of legal errors, the trial court failed to give the proper effect to its finding of unconstitutional intent, which mandated a more meaningful remedy commensurate with the constitutional violations it found.”

The court concluded however, that the plantiffs didn’t show enough evidence to support revisions to the whole map but ordered changes to eight districts “and other districts affected by the redrawing.”

The court also ordered the Legislature to turn over all documents related to the redrawn maps and urged lawmakers to refrain from conducting secret meetings and “consider making all decisions on the redrawn map in public view.”

In siding with a coalition of Democrat-backed voter groups, the court majority concluded that lawmakers violated the Fair District amendments to the Florida Constitution. The amendments were approved in 2010 by more than 63 percent of voters — over the objections of the Republican-controlled Legislature — to prohibit lawmakers from intentionally drawing districts that favor incumbents or political parties.

The court gave the Legislature 100 days to meet in special session to complete a new map, and ordered the trial court to issue an order that opens the door for it to review the final product. House and Senate leaders have not responded to the ruling.

It’s only 8 out of 27 seats, necessarily, some of the other districts will have to change because of the facts of simple geometry.

It won’t be enough to flip the house, but I could see the Dems go from the current 10 to 12-13seats in Congress, particularly since 2016 is a Presidential year.

Óχι!*

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Not only did the no vote win the referendum vote on further austerity for Greece, it absolutely crushed:

Greek voters gave their government a desperately needed victory Sunday in its showdown with European creditors as the country decisively rejected a bailout proposal that officials here had scorned as “blackmail.”

 With nearly all of the votes counted, “no” had won a landslide 61 percent — a bigger figure than nearly anyone had predicted. The result sent thousands of government supporters streaming into central Athens’s Syntagma Square to wave blue-and-white Greek flags, dance to traditional folk songs, and revel in their collective defiance of dire European warnings.

 But even as they celebrated, an angry reaction from European officials suggested that Greece’s profound economic struggles may be only beginning. With Greek banks on the verge of in­solvency, analysts immediately raised the odds that Greece will be ejected from the euro zone. Government opponents despaired that the country may have taken a dark turn.

 ………

 Several top European officials suggested that there would be no new leeway for Greece, and that in fact the vote had made a deal less likely.

 Germany’s deputy chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, said Greece had “destroyed the last bridges across which Europe and Greece could have moved toward a compromise.”

 “Tsipras and his government are leading the Greek people onto a path of bitter sacrifice and hopelessness,” he told the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel.

 Julia Klöckner, deputy chairwoman of Germany’s ruling party, tweeted: “The E.U. is not a make-a-wish club in which a single member sets the rules and the others pay the bill.”

Nice words from the Krauts, but it is also a bald faced and pernicious lie, as the latest IMF report has revealed that the Troika has been negotiating in bad faith:

On July 2, the IMF released its analysis of whether Greek debt was sustainable or not. The report said that Greek debt was not sustainable and deep debt relief along with substantial new financing were needed to stabilize Greece. In reaching this new assessment, the IMF stated it had learned many lessons. Among them: Greeks would not take adequate structural reforms to spur growth, they would not sell enough of their assets to repay their debt, and they were unable to undertake sufficient fiscal austerity. That left no choice but to grant Greece greater debt relief and to provide new financing to tide Greece over till it could stand on its own feet. The relief, the IMF, says must be provided by European creditors while the IMF is repaid in whole.

The IMF’s report is important because it reveals that the creditors negotiated with Greece in bad faith. For months, a haze was allowed to settle over the question of Greek debt sustainability. The timing of the report’s release—on the eve of a historic Greek referendum, well after the technical negotiations have broken down—suggests that there was no intention to allow a sober analysis of the Greek debt burden. Paul Taylor of Reuters tells us that the European authorities worked hard to suppress it and Landon Thomas of the New York Times reports that, until a few days ago, the IMF had played along.

As a result, the entire burden of adjustment was to fall on the Greeks before any debt reduction could even be contemplated. This conclusion was based on indefensible economic logic and the absence of the IMF’s debt sustainability analysis intentionally biased the negotiations.

As an international organization responsible for global financial stability, it is the IMF’s role to explain clearly and honestly the economic parameters of a bailout negotiation. The Greeks, many said, benefited from low interest rates and repayments stretched out over many years. Therefore, no debt relief was needed. But, of course, as the IMF now makes clear, if a country has to repay about 4 percent of its income each year over the next 40 years and that country has poor growth prospects precisely because repaying that debt will lower growth, then debt is not sustainable. If this report had been made public earlier, the tone of the public debate and the media’s boorish stereotyping of Greeks and its government would have been balanced by greater clarity on the Greek position.

………

The creditors’ serial errors are well documented, including by the staff of the IMF. Continuing deliberately to suppress past errors is an act of bad faith but continuing to repeat those errors in making future projections of the Greek debt burden is a willful abuse of the trust that the international community has placed in an organization set up to serve the best interests of all nations. If the IMF’s latest numbers are properly reconstructed, the Greek debt burden is much greater than portrayed—and the policy measures proposed to reduce that burden will make matters worse.

………

Here is how this principle applies today to Greece. Recall that prices in Greece have been falling for about two years now. Since debt repayment obligations do not change when businesses sell at lower prices or when wages fall, businesses and households struggle to repay their debt in that deflationary environment. Investment and consumption are held back, the government receives less revenue, making its debt repayment harder. If fiscal austerity is imposed in such a deflationary setting, prices and wages are forced down faster, making debt repayment even harder. This is Fisher’s debt-deflation cycle. Greece is in a debt-deflation cycle. It is the medical equivalent of a trauma patient: the blood flow does not stop on its own and, in such a condition, austerity is like asking the patient to run around the block to demonstrate good faith.

The IMF’s latest numbers bear out this diagnosis. In November 2012, the IMF tentatively concluded that Greek debt was borderline sustainable if it would undertake austerity to reduce its debt burden and structural reforms to spur growth. The primary surplus (the budget surplus without interest payments) was to rise from -1½ percent in 2012 to 4½ by 2016—an extraordinary additional austerity on top of the extraordinary austerity that had already been undertaken since 2010. The Greek government actually delivered on the austerity through 2014, bringing the primary budget in balance, as per the proposed timeline.

But look what happened along the way—and this is the debt deflation cycle. In 2012, prices were expected to be broadly stable over the coming years. Instead, prices fell by over 5 percent just in 2013 and 2014. True, it is important for Greek wages and prices to eventually fall. But because of the Irving Fisher theorem, when prices fall, the debt burden increases. To reduce the debt burden, Fisher says, not only must austerity stop, but the economy must be “reflated.” He emphasizes that it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy of reflation that ultimately stopped the Great Depression. In an analogy similar to the trauma patient, Fisher says that when tipped beyond a point, the boat continues to tilt further until it has capsized. In a deflationary economy, the bankruptcies and distress can go on in a vicious spiral for years.

………

We may not like the conclusion, but it is quite simple. Greece has not grown and prices have fallen because that was to be expected when persistent austerity is laid on top of an unsustainable debt. The debt-deflation spiral always outpaces the returns from structural reforms. As certainly as these things can be predicted, on the path set out by the creditors, the stakes will continue to be escalated: the debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to rise, the calls for more austerity will grow, and, as the pattern repeats, more debt relief will needed.

The IMF report is very specific, it says that Greece needs billions in debt forgiveness or the debt will remain unsustainable: (See also here)

The International Monetary Fund, a big Greek creditor, conceded a point on Thursday that the Athens government has long been making: Without some reduction in the country’s staggering debt load, Greece has little hope of a sustained economic recovery.

 It was a significant acknowledgment, and an indication that if or when bailout negotiations resume, Greece might win some relief from its debt of 300 billion euros, or about $330 billion. It just might not be relief granted to the leftist government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

It should be noted that the EU bureaucracy aggressively tried to suppress this report:

Euro zone countries tried in vain to stop the IMF publishing a gloomy analysis of Greece’s debt burden which the leftist government says vindicates its call to voters to reject bailout terms, sources familiar with the situation said on Friday.

 The document released in Washington on Thursday said Greece’s public finances will not be sustainable without substantial debt relief, possibly including write-offs by European partners of loans guaranteed by taxpayers.

 It also said Greece will need at least 50 billion euros in additional aid over the next three years to keep itself afloat.

 Publication of the draft Debt Sustainability Analysis laid bare a dispute between Brussels and the Washington-based global lender that has been simmering behind closed doors for months.

This may be the reason for the lopsided vote: Any Greek voter who understood these dynamics could help but conclude that the Troika have no interest in Greece beyond making an example of the country.

My guess is that Germany, with the acquiescence of the EU bureaucracy, will attempt to expel Greece from the Euro Zone, since the alternative is to rip the mask off their attempt at regime change, but Greece could tie this up in legal proceedings for months, if not years:

“The Greek government will make use of all our legal rights,” proclaimed the finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, according to The Daily Telegraph.

We are taking advice and will certainly consider an injunction at the European Court of Justice. The EU treaties make no provision for euro exit and we refuse to accept it. Our membership is not negotiable.

But, can a hypothetical Grexit decision adopted by the EU institutions be legally challenged?

………

So, what decision would Greece be challenging? It would be a decision adopted by the EU institutions and the Eurogroup finance ministers to force a Greek exit of the eurozone due to its default on fulfilling the obligations attached to its participation in the monetary union (criteria laid down in Article 140.1 of the Treaty of the Function of the European Union) and the conditions attached to Greece’s bailout program.

Greece would then still be an EU member state but it will have to revert to the drachma or adopt a new currency. Nevertheless, as mentioned, there is no explicit legal basis for such a decision. One can argue that the failure to fulfil the eurozone commitments would amount to a serious violation of the founding treaties, and that it is possible to adopt the decision based on the principles embodied in the treaties. But the fact is that the treaties would need to be amended in order to provide for this.

I would note that throughout all of this, someone is spreading a rumor that the Greek government is working on a program of depositor bail-ins, where depositor accounts would be raided to pay off the EU lenders, as happened in Cyprus.  (My money is that these rumors are coming from Brussels)

One hopes that the confluence of all these events will result in something other than the moral and economic bankruptcy that we have seen from the EU, IMF, and Germany, but I doubt it.

*Greek for no.

I am Amused

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In the latest Fox News Poll, Donald Trump is the 2nd most popular candidates in the Republican primaries:

There’s been a lineup change in the race for the GOP nomination, as businessman Donald Trump moves up after declaring his candidacy. He’s now second in the order after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who also got an uptick in support after his formal announcement.

For Democrats, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is still — by far — the team leader, according to a new Fox News national poll on the 2016 presidential election.

Bush tops the list of GOP contenders with 15 percent support among Republican primary voters. That’s up from 12 percent last month and his best showing yet. Support for Trump more than doubled since his announcement and that catapults him into the top tier at 11 percent. He’s followed by retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 10 percent. No one else receives double-digit backing.

Bush officially kicked off his campaign June 15 and Trump launched June 16. It’s common for candidates to see a bump in their numbers in the days following their formal announcement and the media coverage that comes with that.

The bad news for Trump is that only 29 percent of GOP primary voters consider him a serious candidate. More than twice that many — 64 percent — think he’s a side show. Among all registered voters, nearly 8 in 10 say Trump is a side show (77 percent).

This appears to mean that the “2nd worst Donald on Earth,”*Fox News, much to the chagrin of the voters, is trying to limit its debates to the “top 10” candidates, which has the effect of eliminating those at positions 11 and below from having a meaningful chance in Iowa or New Hampshire, and hence the primaries.

And it appears that the biggest joke in Presidential politics will get one of those seats at the table.

It so sucks to be a Republican right now.

Heh.

*Larry Wilmore called Donald Rumsfeld, “The Only Donald Worse than Trump,” and I wholeheartedly agree.

Why Does this Remind Me of Stalinist Architecture?

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Positively Hideous

It seems to me that whenever a reactionary government remains in power too long, it seems that they develop an edifice complex:

A plan to erect a 10-storey statue in a national park on one of Canada’s most scenic shorelines has prompted outrage and sparked a growing political row as the country heads towards a general election this fall.

The statue of Mother Canada – a cloaked female figure with her arms outstretched towards the Atlantic Ocean – is intended to honour the country’s soldiers who died overseas.

But growing anger over the plan has made it a new focus of opposition to the increasingly unpopular government of Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.

The proposed monument is an awkwardly remodelled, vastly upscaled version of an earlier statue, known as Canada Bereft, which adorns the memorial to the country’s first world war dead near Vimy, France.

The design has been widely lambasted both for its design and its proposed location in Cape Breton Highlands national park. In an editorial this week, the Globe and Mail newspaper described it as “offensively tasteless” and a “hubristically arrogant act of arrogant unoriginality”.

“The bigger-is-better approach to art is best left to Stalinist tyrants, theme park entrepreneurs and insecure municipalities hoping to waylay bored drive-by tourists,” the paper wrote.

Stephen Harper has gagged government scientists,  used the Canadian Revenue Agency to target charities who protest his agenda, and gutted the census, among other things, and now we have this.

My condolences to my friends in Canada, because this cannot be good, particularly if the Conservatives are not turfed out in the 2015 elections.

My Bad! Bernie Sanders is not Going to be Ratf%$#ed in New York

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Last week, I noted that Bernie Sanders’ independent status would prevent him from being on the primary ballot in New York.

I was wrong. It turns out out that his independent status will not prevent his being on the ballot, though there is always the possibility that they will find a different way to ratf%$# his campaign:

Several New York politics blogs and publications have recently said that Bernie Sanders is in danger of being kept off the New York presidential primary ballot because he is not a Democrat and the Democratic Party has the power to keep non-members off its prseidential primary ballot. Here is the article in Power Line; here is the article in Gothamist. Here is the CapitalNew York story.

The articles are incorrect. The Wilson-Pakula law does not pertain to presidential primaries. The Wilson-Pakula law, sec. 6-120, does keep non-members off the primary ballots of parties (unless party committees approve letting them on), but it only relates to offices for which nominations are made. No state’s presidential primary nominates a major party’s presidential candidate. Only the party’s national conventions do that. The candidates in New York Democratic presidential primaries are individuals running for Delegate to the national convention.

My bad.  I was wrong.

Sanders Faces a Rat F%$#ing in the New York Primary

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Ballot access laws for candidates are among the most restrictive in the nation, and it appears that Bernie Sanders could be kept off the ballot in New York State:

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, will face a significant legal barrier if he attempts to run in next year’s New York primary while remaining unaffiliated with a party.

A section of state election law commonly known as Wilson-Pakula prohibits candidates from appearing on the ballot in a party’s primary unless they are either enrolled members or receive the approval of the party’s committee.

Sanders, of Vermont, is an independent and so would need the approval of the state’s Democrats to get his name on the ballot. But the state’s two major parties have historically granted Wilson-Pakulas only in rare circumstances. Several longtime political observers contacted by Capital could not recall a single instance in which either party has granted one to a candidate in a statewide race. Clinton’s deep political connections to New York make the likelihood of them doing so even less.

“Hadn’t thought about it, but my initial answer would be no,” Assemblyman Keith Wright said when asked if he thought Sanders should be allowed on the ballot for New York’s Democratic primary.

Let’s be clear here.  This is a classical rat f%$#ing, to paraphrase former Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone. though it is not one directly tied to the 2016 campaign.

New York has been rat f%$#ing the electoral process with Wilson-Pakula for almost 70 years.

It was intended to keep communists and socialists off the ballot, and was a product of red scare hysteria.

ISIS’ Biggest Ally Suffers Election Rebuke

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Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had hoped to get a super majority in the Turkish Parliament so that he could grant himself even more powers.

I guess that he felt that his war on the independent judiciary and freedom of the press was simply not proceeding as fast as he would like.

Well, it appears that this was the proverbial bridge too far for Turkish voters, who not only denied him a super majority, but also reduced the number of seats to a plurality in the Turkish legislature:

Turkish voters delivered a rebuke on Sunday to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his party lost its majority in Parliament in a historic election that thwarted his ambition to rewrite Turkey’s Constitution and further bolster his clout.

The results represented a significant setback for Mr. Erdogan, an Islamist who has steadily increased his power since being elected last year as president, a partly but not solely ceremonial post. The prime minister for more than a decade before that, Mr. Erdogan has pushed for more control of the judiciary and cracked down on any form of criticism, including prosecuting those who insult him on social media, but his efforts appeared to have run aground on Sunday.

The vote was also a significant victory to the cadre of Kurds, liberals and secular Turks who found their voice of opposition to Mr. Erdogan during sweeping antigovernment protests two years ago. For the first time, the Kurdish slate crossed a 10 percent threshold required to enter Parliament.

Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., still won the most seats by far, but not a majority, according to preliminary results released Sunday night. The outcome suggests contentious days of jockeying ahead as the party moves to form a coalition government. Already, analysts were raising the possibility Sunday of new elections if a government cannot be formed swiftly. Many Turks were happy to see Mr. Erdogan’s powers curtailed, even though the prospect of a coalition government evokes dark memories of political instability and economic malaise during the 1990s.

With 99 percent of the votes counted, the A.K.P. had won 41 percent of the vote, according to TRT, a state-run broadcaster, down from nearly 50 percent during the last national election in 2011. The percentage gave it an estimated 258 seats in Turkey’s Parliament, compared with the 327 seats it has now. [There are 550 seats in the Turkish Parliament]

………

The vote turned on the historic performance at the ballot box of Turkey’s Kurdish minority, which aligned with liberals and secular Turks opposed to Mr. Erdogan’s leadership to win almost 13 percent of the vote, passing the legal threshold for earning representation in Parliament.

Selahattin Demirtas, 42, a former human rights lawyer who leads the largely Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, told reporters Sunday night: “As of this hour, the debate about the presidency, the debate about dictatorship, is over. Turkey narrowly averted a disaster.”

The People’s Democratic Party, known as H.D.P., was able to broaden its base by fielding a slate of candidates that included women, gays and other minorities and appealed to voters whose goal was to curtail Mr. Erdogan’s powers.

………

Turkey, a member of NATO, has seen its relations with its Western allies deteriorate, mainly over Syria and the fight against the Islamic State, the militant group that controls vast areas of Iraq and Syria. An American-led coalition has been carrying out an air campaign against the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, for nearly a year, but Western officials complain that Turkey has not done enough, such as allowing its air bases to be used for bombing runs. Critics also partly blame Turkey for the rise of the Islamic State for its early support of Islamist groups in Syria.

………

“The A.K.P. has lost votes, and it’s because of him. People are tired of having their lives dictated by one nutty man. It’s time for change.”

Yes, one nutty man.  Shades of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback.  (I told you that I would bring the stories together.

Erdoğan has been cut a lot of slack by the west in general, and the US in particular, because he has initiated a program of  “liberaliation”, which generally has the west ignoring all sorts of foibles of the country.  (See how we are actively courting the classically fascist BJP government in India.)

It’s easy to understand.  Neoliberal reforms to government and the economy present an opportunity for transnational corporations and Wall Street to loot the Anatolian peninsula on a scale that has not occured since the sack of Constantinople during the 4th Crusade.

BTW, just in case you wondered if my characterization of the Turkish President as, “nutty,” I present this:

Demirtas has been the target of fierce campaign attacks by Erdogan, who belittled him a “pretty boy” who is merely a front for the outlawed separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Erdogan also called Demirtas an “infidel” after he pledged to abolish the government directorate of religious affairs and likened him to a “pop star” because he plays the saz, a Turkish folk lute.

But Demirtas responded to those barbs with trademark serenity, challenging Erdogan by saying: “We, as the HDP, will transform the lion in your heart to a kitten.”

(emphasis mine)

Meow, President Erdoğan. Meow.

Achilles Emerges from His Tent

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Saying his “desire to serve is stronger than ever,” Democrat Russ Feingold announced Thursday a bid for his old U.S. Senate seat against the Republican who defeated him four and a half years ago — Ron Johnson.

A Johnson-Feingold race would be a rare rematch of Senate opponents, offer voters a stark ideological contrast and easily rank as one of the top Senate races in the country in 2016, fiercely contested by both parties.

Feingold made the announcement in a short video shot at his Middleton home, saying he wanted to “bring back to the U.S. Senate strong independence, bipartisanship and honesty.”

He did not mention Johnson in the video or lay out his campaign message in any detail. He said he was focused on the worries people in Wisconsin have about “their economic well-being.” He also raised a familiar Feingold theme — the role of money in the political process.

“People tell me all the time that our politics in Washington are broken and that multimillionaires, billionaires and big corporations are calling all the shots. They especially say this about the U.S. Senate. And it’s hard not to agree,” Feingold said.

I would expect a Democratic pickup here.

Ron Johnson won in a Republican wave year, and he was to some degree an unknown quantity.

Now, he is known as one of the stupidest guys in the Senate, as well as being a teabagger.

Feingold should have run against Walker in the recall, but he was brooding in his tent at the time.

Labour Loses Big in the UK Elections

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They got their clock cleaned in an election that was supposed to be too close to call:

Oh how painfully familiar this is. Any Labour supporter of my generation has been here too often before, hopes raised and dashed on the night. A wash of blue sweeping the board is excruciatingly familiar. But all the same, for every poll to be so dreadfully wrong delivered a profound shock to a stunned Labour party.

 A dismal night for Labour – extraordinary to lose more seats than Gordon Brown lost last time. Nuneaton just before 2am felt like the coffin nail that confirmed the exit poll’s accuracy. Forget neck and neck, this was a terrible trouncing.

 Why? Under their skin, a lot of old hands felt in their bones that it was remarkable that Labour was level pegging when the Tories had everything in their favour. Never has there been such a mighty blast of nearly all the press denouncing Labour in the crudest ways. Add to that six months of nothing but good economic news, on jobs and on growth, with orchestrated paeans of praise from business. Even if people didn’t feel it in their pockets, they were fed a story of sunlit uplands ahead.

Inside Labour the inquest will be bitter, a battle ahead that risks turning into a grim repeat of old arguments between Blairites and Miliband radicals. Was it the man, or was it his ideas that were defeated?

 But it’s far from clear that Cameron will relish his victory. He has won it at a dreadfully high cost. He was forced to concede an EU referendum that risks taking Britain out of the EU. The volcanic eruption of nationalism in Scotland will be turbo-charged by another Conservative government they didn’t elect. Cameron’s wretched place in the history books looks set to be the man who broke the union, and left a diminished little England as his legacy. This may be the last election of a United Kingdom ever, both Labour and Tories sharing some blame.

 As I write, it’s not clear Cameron has won a majority. If not, the Fixed Term Parliament Act – passed in haste to be deeply regretted by all – means he can’t threaten an election to bully minor parties into supporting him. But if he has pulled it off, the country can expect an even more radically rightwing government. Austerity of double the ferocity lies ahead, benefits cut to the marrow, public services shredded. The NHS can expect accelerated privatisation while the BBC should prepare itself for savage treatment in next year’s charter renewal. Labour’s failure to stave off this future will lead to great soul-searching and self-blame.

The aforementioned Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 makes the calling of an election because a coalition member has pulled out or a loss of confidence in government vastly more difficult, which should give Cameron plenty of time to privatize Britain’s National Health Service.

This is not a good day for the UK, and I think that it gives impetus to both the anti EU factions and the forces of Scottish independence.

It was supposed to be close, but Labour leader Ed Milibrand explicitly ruled out any coalition with the Scottish National Party, which had the effect of  driving almost all of Scotland to go SNP:

After a shock exit poll forecast that the SNP could win 58 out of Scotland’s 59 seats, early count figures suggested the party would win all seven of Glasgow’s Labour-held constituencies, eight months after the city voted yes to independence, also unseating Scottish Labour’s former deputy leader Anas Sarwar.

Interestingly enough, labor actually picked up a bit on the total votes, but they got steamrolled on a by constituency level:

National results (so far, only 520 of the 650 of the seats have been decided) indicate that Labour was eliminated as a political force in Scotland (for a while, at least), and that the Lib-Dems have been absolutely demolished.

Party Seats Gain Loss Net Votes Vote share (%) Swing (points)
Conservative 229 26 6 20 8,286,508 34.3% -0.1
Labour 208 18 46 -28 7,777,190 32.2% 1.2
Scottish National Party 55 49 0 49 1,434,291 5.9% 3.9
Democratic Unionist Party 8 1 1 0 184,260 0.8% 0.0
Liberal Democrat 6 0 38 -38 1,820,063 7.5% -14.7
Sinn Fein 4 0 1 -1 176,232 0.7% -0.0
Plaid Cymru 3 0 0 0 181,704 0.8% 0.0
Social Democratic and Labour Party 3 0 0 0 99,809 0.4% -0.1
Ulster Unionist Party 2 2 0 2 114,935 0.5% N/A
UK Independence Party 1 0 0 0 2,955,216 12.2% 9.3
Others 1 0 3 -3 214,683 0.9% N/A
Green – – – – 855,008 3.5% 2.7
Alliance 0 0 1 -1 61,556 0.3% 0.1

I would argue that the poor showing of the Lib Dems is a good thing. They were not a moderating element in coalition with the Tories, and the only principles that they pushed with any vigo(u)r were those were electoral policies which would serve to put them in a position as a junior coalition partner yet again. Good riddance.

UKIP more than tripled their share of the vote, but (thankfully) it appears that they will have somewhere between 0 and 2 MPs.

However, even without their winning many/any seats, their rise is yet another indicator of how right wing nativist parties are gaining traction throughout the EU.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!

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You read that right.
PC went from 70 to 10 seats in an 81 seat parliament
Screen shot Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

If Canada has a Texas, it is the province of Alberta, which is very much a Petro-Feudal state.

For the past 43 years, the Progressive Conservative (PC) party, Canada’s mainstream conservative party, has been the majority, and for over 30 years before that, the right wing populist Alberta Social Credit Party held the majority.

In yesterday’s election, the PC was turfed out, and the liberal New Democratic Party (NDP), the most liberal of Canada’s 4 mainstream parties, won, and the PC was completely crushed.

This is a stunning result:

The NDP has won a majority in Alberta by toppling the Progressive Conservative colossus that has dominated the province for more than four decades.

The party under leader Rachel Notley swept all 19 seats in Edmonton on Tuesday and made inroads in previously barren NDP territory in Calgary and Lethbridge.

The Wildrose party appeared poised to take second place and form the official Opposition, while Premier Jim Prentice and his PCs were trailing in third.

Of course, as Tip O’Neil was wont to say, “All politics is local,” so the recent disarray in the Alberta PC party (4 premiers in 4 years) likely has a lot to do with their electoral disaster, but I have to assume that there are also some generational changes in the Alberta electorate, which in turn may indicate changes in Canadian politics:  Alberta is a power base of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Here’s hoping that this bodes ill for the Prime Minister Steven Harper, as well.

Throw a Case with a Dead Black Man, and Get Elected to Congress

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Something is seriously wrong with Staten Island:

The Staten Island district attorney, Daniel M. Donovan Jr., whose office investigated [Covered Up] the chokehold death of Eric Garner in a struggle with the police last year, easily won a special election for the House of Representatives on Tuesday, according to unofficial results.

He threw it all at a grand jury with no direction, and then fought like hell to make sure that the grand jury testimony never saw the light of day.

He didn’t think that a black man’s death at police hands warranted a serious investigation.

With nearly all precincts reporting, Mr. Donovan, a Republican, was leading with nearly 60 percent of the vote, compared with about 39 percent for Councilman Vincent J. Gentile, the Democratic candidate, in the race to represent the 11th Congressional District. It covers Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn.

The victory makes Mr. Donovan the lone Republican from New York City in the House.

Mr. Donovan, in his victory speech, cast his election as a rebuke to Democrats in Washington and New York, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is widely disliked on Staten Island.

“You sent a message to President Obama, to Nancy Pelosi and, yes, even to Bill de Blasio, that their policies are wrong for our nation,” Mr. Donovan said. “They’re wrong for our city and they’re wrong for the community of the 11th Congressional District.”

Conceding defeat, Mr. Gentile declared his campaign a moral success for “starting a real conversation” about bringing political change in the district. “I want to say loudly that our work is not yet over,” he said.

The seat has been vacant since January, when the previous representative, Michael G. Grimm, a Republican, resigned after pleading guilty to tax fraud.

The election — held under unusual circumstances because of Mr. Grimm’s abrupt resignation and lingering tension around the Garner case — never developed into a heated contest. National Democrats, who were bitterly disappointed after spending millions of dollars in an unsuccessful effort to defeat Mr. Grimm in 2014, never got involved on Mr. Gentile’s behalf.

………

Neither candidate spoke often about the Garner case, which prompted demonstrations across New York and other cities late last year when a grand jury declined to indict a police officer who was captured on video placing Mr. Garner in a chokehold.

Mr. Donovan defended his office’s handling of the matter, expressing sympathy for the Garner family but saying that his team had managed the grand jury properly. He declined to answer detailed questions about the case, citing laws governing grand jury secrecy.

Mr. Gentile did not raise it because he believed that caring about a dead black man would not play well with the Staten Island voters.

 Mr. Donovan won because Mr. Gentile was right.

The Worst Democrat North of the Manson Nixon Line Wins Reelection

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I am referring, of course, to Rahm Emanuel, who won a double digit victory over challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel soundly defeated challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia on Tuesday, capturing a second term in Chicago’s first-ever runoff election and striking a note of humility by thanking voters for “a second term and a second chance.”

The win followed six weeks of a hard-fought, nationally watched second round in which Garcia tried to cast the contest as the latest proxy battle between establishment Democrats and the party’s progressive wing. Emanuel’s overwhelming financial advantage ultimately helped save the mayor as he fought for his political life.

………

With 98 percent of the city’s precincts reporting, Emanuel had 55.7 percent of the unofficial vote to 44.3 percent for Garcia.

It was closer than I expected, but money, and the self defeating bigotry of a significant portion of the Chicago African American community was too big a hill to climb.

I may be a political Little Orphan Annie here, but I do think that Rahm’s mantle has been pierced, and so when the creative accounting that has been obscuring the true state of Chicago’s finances, much of which appear to be in the form of sweetheart deals for his Bankster buddies for complex (and high fee) derivatives of the sort that f%$#ed Greece, collapses, the knives should come out.

At least, I hope that this is what will happen.

I’m bummed.

Election for Chicago Mayor are Tomorrow

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All indications are that he will win handily, though the abnormally high early voter turnout might give Jesus Garcia a slim chance, but polling indicates that it is a very slim chance, even with the endorsement of Garcia by many liberal organizations, including Howard Dean and Democracy for America.

One of the big problems is that the black community appears to be unwilling to vote for a Hispanic candidate, even if this candidate was a strong supporter of the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington:

Jesus G. Garcia, candidate for mayor, strode down the sidewalk on Monday evening, trailed by a giddy pack of supporters, volunteers and passers-by. They snapped pictures and chanted his nickname: “Chu-y! Chu-y!”

 One man did not join in. An African-American who wore a knit Blackhawks hat, he glared at Mr. Garcia from the curb.

 “I’m voting,” he said, when asked if he would take part in Tuesday’s election. “But I ain’t voting for no Chuy. I ain’t voting for a Mexican.”

 Pressed to explain, he said he was tired of competing with Latinos for jobs. Then he walked away.

 The scene exposed a fault line in Mr. Garcia’s campaign to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Tuesday’s runoff election. Mr. Garcia’s strategy was to build a coalition of white liberals, blacks and Latinos — angered by Mr. Emanuel’s closing of dozens of schools and supportive of a plan to shift development from its wealthy downtown to poorer neighborhoods.

 But a Chicago Tribune poll released Tuesday showed Mr. Emanuel with a commanding lead. He not only has large margins among white voters, but a nearly two-to-one margin among black voters, 53 percent to 28 percent. Mr. Garcia has not been able to increase his share of the black vote.

 ………

 Mr. Garcia, 58, who has won election to the City Council, the state Senate and the county board of commissioners, has been one of the most prominent Latinos in elected office here, beginning in the 1980s. If elected, he would be the city’s first Latino mayor.

 From the start of his campaign, he spoke of building a multicultural coalition in the spirit of Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, on whose campaign Mr. Garcia worked.

 He has reached out to black leaders, collecting endorsements, campaign donations and promises of votes. And he has focused his campaign on concerns Chicagoans share, including improving public education, a higher minimum wage, reducing gun violence and modernizing mass transit.

(emphasis mine)

Once again, we see that when bigotry to drives the vote, hate voters vote against their own interests. (It kind of explains about 95% of the Republican electoral success in the past few decades)

We already have indications that Rahm Emanuel will double down on those policies which led to this runoff in the first place. It’s why one of Rahm’s big donors is squawking that Emanuel should shut down even more public schools:

The Chicago Teachers Union predicts more school closings if Tahm is re-elected. A major campaign contributor said he should have closed 125 schools, not just 50. This donor, Ken Griffin, is a Republican who also has given to Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

………

Rahm Emanuel’s refusal to seriously pursue any meaningful, progressive revenue solutions for Chicago Public Schools (CPS) funding needs will without question lead to further mass school closings in the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods if he wins re-election on April 7. As Emanuel’s economic policies prioritize the financial interests of billionaire campaign donors like Ken Griffin and other big business supporters, at the expense of public education in Chicago, the mayor is making a clear choice to drive the district into even further dire financial straits that he will use to justify additional school closings.

Griffin, one of the top contributors to Emanuel’s re-election campaign and the richest man in Illinois, has accused Chicago’s mayor of being “lackluster” for not closing 125 schools instead of 50, and recently reiterated to the New York Times that the number of closings, which disproportionately affected African American and Latino students and their families, “should’ve been 125.” Griffin also has claimed that the top 1 percent of income earners have too little influence in politics, which is seemingly why he has backed Emanuel with more than $1 million in campaign contributions. As Griffin’s influence on City Hall grows, future school closings are inevitable if Emanuel is re-elected.

This is a pretty big tell that Rahm wants to continue to privatize public schools, much like his predecessor privatized parking for pennies on the dollar.

Meanwhile Rahm is aggressively fighting the release of emails between him and his big ticket donors.  (see also here)

Of course, given the history of elections in Illinois, it may all be moot, as the chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners appears to have gotten lucrative lobbying contracts for his lawfirm, and it appears that he has already pulled strings for Rahm Emanuel allies down the ticket:

If Chicago’s first mayoral runoff in history ends up razor close on April 7, the city will be relying on a purportedly independent arbiter to oversee any recount. But that arbiter, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, is chaired by a politically-connected lawyer whose firm has received secret city lobbying contracts from incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration. After receiving those contracts, the chairman has already used his power to boost the mayor’s allies against anti-Emanuel challengers in other municipal elections.

Board chairman Langdon Neal was appointed to his position by the Cook County Circuit Court, not by any city official — a structure that is supposed to preserve the board’s independence from candidates for municipal office. However, the laws establishing the election commission do not prohibit Neal from getting contracts from the mayor, whose election he will oversee. How much he has made from those contracts remains a closely guarded secret: the Emanuel administration has denied an open records request for the terms of the deals, refusing to respond to International Business Times within the timeframe mandated by Illinois law.

What’s that Josef Stalin quote again?

I remember, it’s, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Goodluck Jonathan Defeated in Nigeria

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In a first for the west African nation, an incumbent President has been defeated in a bid for reelection.

This is a good thing, because it indicates the development of a more robust political culture, as well as indicating a relatively free and fair election.

On the other hand, the man who won, Muhammadu Buhari, was the military ruler of the nation in the mid-1980s following a coup:

Former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari has become the first opposition candidate to win a presidential election in Nigeria.

Incumbent Goodluck Jonathan telephoned Gen Buhari, 72, on Tuesday night to congratulate him and concede defeat.

Unofficial voting tallies put Gen Buhari more than two million votes ahead of his rival.

Observers have generally praised the election, though there have been allegations of fraud.

“I promised the country free and fair elections. I have kept my word,” Mr Jonathan said in a statement.

He said he had conveyed his “best wishes” to Mr Buhari, and urged “those who may feel aggrieved to follow due process… in seeking redress”.

A spokesman for Gen Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) party praised Mr Jonathan, saying: “He will remain a hero for this move. The tension will go down dramatically.”

Gen Buhari’s supporters took to the streets in APC strongholds, including the northern cities of Kano and Kaduna, to sing and dance in celebration.

The concession by President Jonathan is a big deal.

It shortcuts the many challenges to the legitimacy of the elections which are legion in that part of a world, and it allows for a smooth transition.

Here’s hoping that this will allow for moves to reduce corruption in the infamously crooked government.

OK, This Idea Makes Sense

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It is clear that Elizabeth Warren is not interested in running for President.

It is clear that Elizabeth Warren does not want to run for President.

However, with Harry Reid retiring, the recent moves by liberal organizations to promote Elizabeth Warren as the next Democratic Senate leader seems a good idea.

Unfortunately, Warren appears to have eschewed this idea:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) announcement Friday that he will not seek reelection next year has progressive groups licking their chops at the prospect of seeing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as the Democratic leader.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer, currently Democrats’ No. 3 in the Senate, is the heavy favorite to succeed Reid, but progressive groups have other ideas.

Democracy for America (DFA) is urging Warren to run for president, but says that if she passes, they’d back her or someone from her wing of the party as the next Democratic leader in the Senate.“There are real concerns about whether Chuck Schumer should be the frontrunner for leadership in the Senate among progressives,” DFA spokesman Neil Sroka told The Hill. “The Wall Street wing of the party, that Chuck has been close to, is dying, and the Warren wing is rising. So if Sen. Warren chooses not to run for president … she should run for leader of the Senate. She’d make a great leader.”

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee echoed that sentiment, predicting the race for Democratic leader won’t be a coronation for the establishment members of the party believed to be next in line.

“Her lifetime of fighting for the little guy against Wall Street power … shows she can think big, wage tough fights against powerful interests, and win key votes in the Senate,” the PCCC said in a statement. “She’s the definition of a leader. … There will likely not be a coronation to replace Harry Reid as Senate Democratic Leader, and Elizabeth Warren is right up there with others as someone who would be taken very seriously.”

Warren’s office on Friday morning said she would not run for the leader’s spot.

(emphasis mine)

I really do hope that it is someone other than Chuck Schumer though, he is basically Wall Street’s rent boy.

Emmanueldämmerung* in Progress

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We have always know that Rahm Emanuel is a bully, who kisses up to his superiors and kicks down at his subordinates, or for that matter anyone he sees as unimportant, but this report seems to indicate that the long time Obama ally is seriously losing his sh%$:

They say old Rahm Emanuel came out last night—or maybe it was the real one hiding in plain sight all the time: a sneering, aggressive pol who went “nose-to-nose” with a mental-health advocate demanding, “You’re gonna respect me!”

The alleged exchange took place off-camera between Chicago’s mayor and Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a member of Mental Health Movement, a group that has been fighting the mayor over the closure of six mental health clinics across the city. Behind a door that separated the mayor from a roomful of constituents at a campaign stop in the Wicker Park neighborhood, Ginsberg-Jaeckle says, he got Rahmbo’d.

 “This is the Real Rahm,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote on Facebook. “Calm and collected in public, raging angry and self-defensive behind closed doors.”

 But Emanuel’s campaign, while not directly refuting the mayor’s alleged call for respect, said the exchange was more cordial than Ginsberg-Jaeckle’s version of events. The mayor’s office has reached out Ginsberg-Jaeckle and Delgado to address their concerns, campaign spokesman Steve Mayberry said in a statement.

“The mayor was eager to get to the substance of the residents’ concerns,” Mayberry said via email. “After respectfully listening to the residents, he asked that they respectfully listen to his point of view. As a result, the meeting ended cordially and the mayor is working with health officials to address the residents’ needs.”


Debbie Delgado, another member of the group, interrupted Emanuel, prompting the behind-closed-doors altercation.

“She told of losing her son to gun violence,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote. “She told [Emanuel] how her other son was holding him as he died. She told about how the city’s Northwest Mental Health Clinic in Logan Square saved their lives, helped her and her son deal with the PTSD and depression. Then she asked why he took that clinic away from her.”

 Rahm said he would speak with the pair, and Ginsberg-Jaeckle said they then left the room for a private conversation. That’s when Emanuel allegedly shouted: “You’re gonna respect me!”

 The mayor’s office wouldn’t address the supposed angry exchange.

 “Since it was a non-city event there were no city people there to witness it,” said Chloe Rasmas, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office.

 Rahm said he would speak with the pair, and Ginsberg-Jaeckle said they then left the room for a private conversation. That’s when Emanuel allegedly shouted: “You’re gonna respect me!”

 ………

 “We delivered 10,000 letters to the mayor’s office in October 2012. They didn’t respond. So, we started sending one email a week. No response. We held forums and protests. The day before a vote on the budget we did a sit-in outside the mayor’s office, and they forced us out by cutting off any access bathrooms,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle said, running down years’ worth of attempts to talk with the mayor.

 “I could go play by play, but long story short we could not get through to this man. Finally, the extreme we reached was crashing his events.”

 That’s what they did Wednesday night, not expecting much other than to be escorted out. Locke said Rahm told police to hold off when Ginsberg-Jaeckle and Delgado rose from their front-row chairs to confront the mayor. It was all cordial, until the trio left the room.

Demanding respect at the top of his voice.

Respect should not be demanded, it should be earned.

Why do I get the sense that Rahm Emanuel is suffering from a really bad case of “Middle Child Syndrome”?

In either case, I hope that the people of Chicago realize that they are dealing with a guy for whom a difficult reelection campaign is likely to make him an even worse mayor than he already is.

I would also one of his supporters, Republican Senator Mark Kirk, is blowing the racist dog whistle by invoking Detroit, while Republican Governor Bruce Rauner is leaning on begging 3rd place mayoral candidate Willie Wilson to endorse Rahm as well.

They wouldn’t be endorsing who is tied in the minds of their base to the “Kenyan Muslim Atheist Radical” Barack Obama unless they were pretty firmly on the same side, and they were worried about his chances.

I am so hoping that he loses the April 7 contest.

*I cannot claim credit for this bon mot. It was coined by Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism.

While the People of Chicago Tolerate a Certain Level of Corruption, the Looting was a bit too Blatant

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Last night, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel failed to secure a majority in the election, and will be forced into a runoff:

Rahm Emanuel, who was easily elected mayor of this city four years ago, was dealt a setback Tuesday. Though he came in first among five candidates, Mr. Emanuel failed to seal a second term by winning support from enough voters to avoid a riskier runoff election this spring.

 It was a serious blow after a campaign in which Mr. Emanuel had a huge fund-raising edge over lesser-known opponents, not to mention an in-person endorsement last week from President Obama in his adopted hometown.

 The outcome underscored Mr. Emanuel’s newfound vulnerability in a mostly Democratic city that had not had a mayoral runoff since it began holding nonpartisan elections 16 years ago. In 2011, Mr. Emanuel swept into office on a first balloting with more than 55 percent of the vote in his first run for mayor.

 “This makes it an entirely different ballgame — a brand new election,” said Dick Simpson, a political scientist and former alderman who has contributed to political candidates, including Mr. Emanuel’s opponents. “It becomes a real battle and it sharpens the issues.”

 Mr. Emanuel, who angered some here when his administration closed nearly 50 public schools, clashed with public schoolteachers and oversaw the city through flashes of gang violence, received 45.4 percent of the vote, with almost 99 percent of precincts reporting, not the 50 percent plus one needed to win outright. His closest competitor was Jesus Garcia, a county commissioner known as Chuy, who had important backing from the Chicago Teachers Union. He got 33.9 percent of the vote, giving him a place in a runoff against Mr. Emanuel on April 7. The rest of the votes were split among three other candidates.

I think that this is the first since the election laws in 1995 that a sitting Chicago mayor has been forced into a runoff.

Considering the fact that Rahm got about 55% in the first round in the last election, when he was running in an open seat, this is a fairly epic.

What it comes down to is the fact while the good people of Chicago expect a bit of corruption in the provision of public services, under the expectation that services will actually be delivered to those who need them.

Emanuel’s tenure as mayor has been marked by a devotion to the 1%, particularly Wall Street, makes Michael Bloomberg look like Che Guevera.

In Rahm’s Chicago though, the ordinary citizen has become little more than a profit machine for the fat cats:

Why did progressives–why do progressives–want to humble Emanuel? The answer’s been blaring from magazines like In These Times and Rolling Stone and the Nation for months. In the election-month cover story of In These Times, for example, progressive historian Rick Perlstein explained why the deal Emanuel cut with a company to remake the city’s transit cards never stopped hurting him.

The transit cards can double as debit cards, you see, promoted as a boon for Chicago’s un- and under-banked. But dig the customer fees hidden in the 1,000-page contract the city signed with Cubic: $1.50 every time customers withdraw cash from an ATM, $2.95 every time they add money to their online debit account with a personal credit card, $2 for every call with a service representative and an “account research fee” of $10 an hour for further inquiries, $2 for a paper copy of their account information, and, if you decide you’ve had enough, a $6 “balance refund fee.” This all makes mincemeat of the pro-privatization argument that “the marketplace” is more transparent than a government bureaucracy. The city might have been able to anticipate this before inking the deal had they paid attention to the fact that Money Network, the payment processing company partnering with Cubic, had received the lowest possible grade from the Better Business Bureau, and that another partner, MetaBank, was fined $5.2 million by federal regulators for a scheme to issue debit cards funded by tax refund loans at interest rates of up to 650 percent.

Mayor Emanuel is clearly cutting sweetheart deals that will encumber Chicago for years, if not decades, with the implicit promise that he will get highly remunerative do-nothing jobs in finance after he leaves office, much like he did after leaving the Clinton administration in the late 1990s.

Sh%$ like this is why “Rahmbo” has been forced into a runoff despite the fact that Barack Obama flew to Chicago to campaign for him.

I do not expect Mr. Garcia to win.

Emanuel has more money for his campaign than God, I expect that the former White House Chief of Staff to win handily, though I expect “Chuy” to do better than yesterday’s 33.9%.

As to the campaign, I expect wall-to-wall ads across the Chicago media, with a focus on driving a wedge between the Hispanic and Black communities through racist and nativist dog whistles.

In a multi-candidate campaign like the primary, negative ads tend to put voters off both the source and target of the ads.  In a 2-candidate runoff, this is not an issue, and Rahm’s millions can pump out a lot of slime.

Case in point, a Republican mega-donor, and financier, Muneer Satter, has donated big time to the Emanuel campaign:

Chicago investor Muneer Satter has spent more than $1 million in the past three years helping Republicans win. He’s so focused on the party taking back the White House that he paid for a poll assessing the 2016 Republican field, the results of which convinced him to get behind former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

 But one Democrat has managed to capture Satter’s wallet: his hometown mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who is up for reelection Tuesday.

 Satter doesn’t just scatter campaign checks to the wind, fellow Illinois Republican donor Ronald Gidwitz said in an interview. Rather, his support is both tactical and complete. “He wants to see the best person win and is putting his money where his desires are,” Gidwitz said.

 Satter and his wife, Kristen Hertel, have put more than $352,000 into Emanuel’s mayoral campaigns and supportive political committees, according to Illinois State Board of Elections records. They’re among his top-flight donors, despite having spent heavily in 2012 trying to oust Emanuel’s former boss, President Barack Obama. The mayor was White House chief of staff until October 2010.

 Although he has a robust history of Republican contributions, Satter began giving to Emanuel in 2007, when he was an Illinois congressman, and Hertel was one of the first contributors to his first campaign for mayor. It’s a reflection of donor pragmatism in Chicago, a city that last elected a Republican mayor in 1927.

 “In Chicago, as everywhere, leadership is everything,” said Lisa Wagner, Satter’s spokeswoman. “Muneer looked at all of the candidates in the mayor’s race, and Rahm was the only candidate who could effectively tackle the problems of our city.”

We have also seen an orgy of no-bid awards to has donors:

In 2006, then-Congressman Rahm Emanuel attacked his Republican colleagues for oversight failures, focusing in particular on the awarding of a $7 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton, which had for a time been headed by Dick Cheney. Yet data examined by International Business Times show that, as Chicago mayor, Emanuel, a Democrat, has used an even less transparent no-bid process, where there is not even a contract, just a payout — in many cases to some of the mayor’s largest campaign contributors.

 In all, firms that have received tens of millions of dollars’ worth of shadowy “direct voucher payments” (DVPs) from the Emanuel administration have given more than $775,000 worth of campaign contributions to the mayor’s political organizations. That’s a subset of the $1.2 million in total campaign contributions that Emanuel has received from employees of all vendors doing business with the city, according to municipal documents reviewed by IBTimes. Emanuel accepted those donations after signing an executive order purporting to ban campaign donations from city contractors.

 Chicago’s DVP process is permitted thanks to loopholes in Illinois’ procurement law that allow municipal officials to circumvent the traditional contracting process. Unlike standard government contracts, DVP payouts do not require any type of public documentation. Emanuel appointees retain substantial discretionary authority to approve DVPs. The payments are not required to go to the lowest bidder; vendors receiving the payments do not have to list their qualifications and never need to document the services they provide to the city in return for the money. The DVPs appear to have been used for everything from phone service to interest payments to financial firms, but unlike the George W. Bush administration’s no-bid contracts, DVP payments do not even require a formal contract, so it is impossible to verify what the money purchased.

 In 2010, Chicago’s inspector general issued a report that criticized the secrecy surrounding DVPs, alleged that some of the payments ran afoul of state law, and called for stronger contracting regulations. The report discourages the use of DVPs, but it does not appear to have prevented politically connected firms from benefiting from the process in a nontransparent way. The public can see which firms received the DVPs but still cannot ascertain what the citizens of Chicago received for the money — more than $38 million of which flowed to Emanuel’s campaign donors and their lobbying clients.

 ………

 Last year, IBTimes reported that Emanuel has directed tax subsidies to some of his major donors, and that he received cash from executives of firms managing city pension funds. (That disclosure prompted city lawmakers to request a Securities and Exchange Commission probe.) Emanuel also awarded coveted city-owned lakefront property to the George Lucas museum, after Lucas’ wife and Disney executives donated nearly $50,000 to Emanuel’s campaign. The Chicago Tribune has published a series detailing how millions of dollars’ worth of city contracts have gone to the mayor’s top contributors.

Finally, it appears that Emanuel  has had some serious negative coat tails, with liberal reformers out-performing in the elections as well:

Not only was Mayor Rahm Emanuel forced into a primary runoff for the first time in Chicago history, there was a strong showing by progressives across the board:

Emanuel’s weakness was felt all across the ballot. He’d created a super-PAC, Chicago Forward, to bail out 17 of his allies on the council and to beat progressive incumbents. Only seven of them won outright: Will Burns, Mike Zalweski, Danny Solis, Robert Maldonado, Margaret Laurino, Pat O’Connor, and Debra Silverstein. The rest were forced into runoffs, including Deb Mell, the sister-in-law of disgraced former Governor Rod Blagojevich. Meanwhile, Chicago Forward had lobbed mailers at two aldermen–Scott Waguespack and John Arena–who’d asked the SEC to investigate the legality of donations to Emanuel from the executives of companies managing the city’s pension funds. Arena narrowly missed a win and will head to a runoff; Waguespack won outright.

It was not all progressives wanted, but it was not what the super-PAC had wanted either. The progressive bloc was expected to expand to 12 of the council’s 50 seats.

“The good guys won Round One,” said Working Families Party national director Dan Cantor in a statement. “Forcing Mayor 1% into a run-off is a remarkable achievement. Along with the run-off, the progressive caucus on the Council is poised to make gains.”

Again, I don’t expect Rahm Emanuel to lose the runoff, but it has to be clear to his supporters, his patrons, and his various lackeys that he has been deeply damaged by his electoral performance.

As such, I cannot help but wonder if those who have hitched their star to his political career aren’t making some serious contingency plans.