Month: February 2018

CD8 Special Election Primary (preliminary results)

by

From the Secretary of State’s Office, Last Updated: 2/27/2018, 3:37:07 PM Precincts Reporting: 100% Registered Voters: 456,000 Ballots Cast: 109,426 Voter Turnout: 24.00% The candidate from the “Kochtopus,” state Sen. Debbie Lesko, leads in preliminary results. * Eight other GOP candidates with less than 3 percent of the vote. On the Democratic side, political newcomer … Read more

Incompetence at the D Triple Out Of Touch?

by

Julia Conley nailed the title on her piece at Common Dreams: From Pushing ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ to Dissing Medicare for All, DCCC Called Out for Sabotaging Bold Demands.

She also did a damn good job writing it.

A few key passages:

“It’s becoming evident that the DCCC—and the billionaire donors and revolving door consultants that make up the Democratic Party establishment—believe Democrats can only take back Congress by running on a watered down message…instead of the basic values of decency and fairness that voters demand,” said Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats in a statement.

Documents on healthcare messaging that were handed out to House Democrats in the wake of the 2016 election treated universal healthcare as a fringe issue, suggesting that lawmakers are not to entertain Medicare for All as a potential solution to the nation’s high healthcare costs and poor outcomes.

Read more

‘The Kush’ loses his security clearance – if he lied on his SF-86, he should be prosecuted

by

Last week, the Department of Justice informed the White House that there were substantial issues related to Jared Kushner that still needed to be investigated and would significantly delay a recommendation on whether he should receive a permanent security clearance. White House Told Kushner’s Security Clearance Will Be Delayed:

The White House was not told what the issues were involving Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. But the notification led White House lawyers and aides to believe that they were more problematic than the complexity of his finances and his initial failure to disclose contacts with foreign leaders — the reasons Mr. Kushner’s lawyers have said are holding up the process, the two people said.

An interim clearance has given him access to closely guarded information, including the presidential daily brief, the intelligence summary Mr. Trump receives every day. The issue took on added urgency after the chief of staff, John F. Kelly, issued a sweeping review of interim clearances in response to the disclosure that the White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, had his permanent security clearance delayed for a year because of spousal abuse allegations.

In a five-page memo to the White House staff, Mr. Kelly said that he would cut off high-level access to many of the aides who had been unable to get a permanent clearance.

Read more

Working Americans have not noticed the effect of the GOP tax cut on their personal finances

by

Erica Werner of the Washington Post today asserts As GOP tax cuts take hold, Democrats struggle for line of attack based upon conservative Democrat Joe Donnelly’s reelection campaign in the deep red state of Indiana:

The new law is rising in popularity as businesses in Indiana and elsewhere trumpet bonuses and bigger paychecks. And while Donnelly and fellow Democrats struggle to craft a consistent attack on the law, Republicans — boosted by outside spending from groups backed by the billionaire Koch brothers and others — are united in touting the tax cuts and slamming moderate Democrats who voted against them.

* * *

Americans have just started to see the tax cut show up in their paychecks this month, and along with those boosts in pay have come a spate of recent polls that show public opinion turning in favor of the tax legislation — leaving Democrats the unenviable task of trying to convince voters that a law increasing their paychecks now will be bad for the country later.

Werner is correct about the Koch brothers multi-million dollar GOPropaganda campaign to sell the GOP tax bill, and the resulting bump in polling (mostly from GOP-leaning voters responding to messaging for GOP tribalism). But there is contradictory evidence on any actual economic benefits of the GOP tax bill being noticeable in paychecks.

Read more

GOPropaganda, ‘fake news’ and the post-truth era comes to Gov. Ducey’s campaign

by

For all the controversy generated by Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the American news media by claiming they are “fake news” in an attempt to create a post-truth era where facts do not matter, a propaganda technique long employed by the Soviets/Russians and many other authoritarian regimes, this was not something new to the Trump campaign in 2016.

There was, of course, FAUX News and its mantra of “we report, you decide,” reducing everything to mere opinions rather than objective facts. “Don’t bother me with the facts, I know what I believe!” FAUX News is  a rejection of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s admonition that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

There was the quote attributed to a Bush aide by Ron Suskind (reportedly Karl Rove) in 2004: The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

In 2014, the National Republican Congressional Committee has launched more than 20 “fake news” sites to attack Democrats running for Congress, creating a media uproar and drawing protest from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the NRCC’s counterpart. GOP campaign arm launches fake news sites against Democrats. “If anyone was wondering why voters don’t trust Congress, look no further than the NRCC’s brand new voter outreach strategy—fake news sites,” said Josh Schwerin, national press secretary for the DCCC, in a statement.

Read more