U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren
The “Run Warren Run” movement to draft U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren for president is over. The movement, spurred by MoveOn.org and Democracy For America, spanned six months, garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures, and even included ground operations in Iowa and New Hampshire. However, Warren insisted from the get-go that she did not want to run. To mark this shift, MoveOn.Org, Democracy For America and the Working Families Party held a conference call last night featuring Senator Warren. The message from Warren was that she is going to continue to fight hard for Americans from her Senate seat, but that she needs our help to do so.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2016 Elections, Barack Obama, Democracy For America, Dodd-Frank, Elizabeth Warren, Fast Track, MoveOn.org, Senate, Social Security, student debt, TPP, trade, Wall Street, Working Families Party
The New York Times Building
Like it or not, the 2016 election cycle is in full swing. Numerous media outlets are well into covering the campaigns and candidates. These media organizations are also giving early clues as to the quality of their election coverage. If the last week is any indication, the New York Times has distinguished itself both for bias and inanity.
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Dennis Hastert
After the recent sexual revelations involving Josh Duggar and Dennis Hastert, businesses that replace windows in glass houses are doing very well. Both the Duggar and Hastert cases are about hypocrisy, and psychologists might also say they involve loudly criticizing others’ sexual behavior to cover one’s own past behavior. But both cases offer some sharp political lessons:
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2016 Elections, Bill Clinton, Dennis Hastert, Duggar family, FBI, House of Representatives, incest, Josh Duggar, Mark Foley, Mike Huckabee, Patriot Act, Republican Party, Rick Santorum, sex, sexual predator, Ted Nugent
Retreating Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska
Last Thursday, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) held a Google hangout video conference sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters. Also on hand for the video chat were Gene Karpinski, President of LCV, and LCV’s Senior Vice President for Government Affairs, Tiernan Sittenfeld. Senator Whitehouse is perhaps the leading Senator on climate change issues, and has given a “Time to Wake Up” environmental speech on the Senate floor every week for the past 100 weeks that the Senate has been in session, i.e., over the past three years. Whitehouse also took questions from the Google hangout audience, and worked with LCV to use the Twitter hashtags #TimeToWakeUp and #100Reasons to further the interaction with the audience. Here are some highlights from the video conference:
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Republican Clown Town
In years past, the parade of Republicans running for higher speaking fees, book sales and Fox News contracts a/k/a running for the Republican nomination for president, has been referred to as the Clown Car. This year, there are so many potential GOP candidates that they need a bigger vehicle. Say hello to Clown Town!
High speed trains in London
The recent Amtrak derailment in Pennsylvania has once again exposed America’s embarrassing train transportation system. Parts of this system are up to 150 years old, and it’s falling apart. Yet, when Democrats, including President Barack Obama, propose to modernize our train system and build high-speed trains, Republicans oppose these plans.
Predictably, after the Amtrak accident, in addition to the horrible optics of simultaneous Republican budget cuts, we are hearing the usual Republican talking points about America’s train transportation system. Here are the main GOP talking points, along with some possible responses:
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Leave a comment! Tags: 9/11, Amtrak, conservatives, Democrats, infrastructure, liberals, Postal Service, Republicans, Shock Doctrine, Trains, transporation
“Birther” protesters, St. Cloud, MN, 2013
Anyone who pays attention to the arguments made by conservatives (and Republicans, same thing nowadays) versus those made by liberals and Democrats knows that their respective ways of thinking and speaking is entirely different. Researchers have even found that conservative and liberal brains work very differently. But what the scientists haven’t mentioned is that you can usually identify whether someone is a liberal or a conservative by listening for one word.
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Leave a comment! Tags: Barack Obama, climate change, conservatives, Democrats, framing, gay marriage, George Lakoff, George W. Bush, liberals, Republicans, tobacco
Ted Cruz, clowniest passenger in the GOP Clown Car?
In the 2012 Presidential primaries, the Republican Clown Car had a crackup. The GOP candidates fell all over each other to kowtow to the narrow, extreme Republican primary base (comprised, for example, in Iowa, of 60 percent Evangelical Christians). Michele Bachmann said that the HPV vaccine causes “mental retardation,” and Herman Cain mocked the very idea of having foreign policy knowledge. Then came Willard Mitt Romney‘s disastrous “Etch-A-Sketch” moment, in which Romney’s Communications Director dumbly asserted that, after lurching to the right in the primaries, Romney could simply “hit a reset button” for the general election, “like an Etch-A-Sketch,” as if no one would hold Romney accountable for the positions he was taking and as if the giant Memory Machine known as the Internet didn’t exist. Romney’s Etch-A-Sketch moment perfectly summed up the Republican Party’s 2012 problem. Romney’s Republican rivals such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum pounced on the Etch-A-Sketch statement as proof that Romney could not be trusted by the GOPs conservative base. Romney ended up being trusted by no part of the electorate. Fast forward to the present day, and it appears that the GOP is poised to repeat these same mistakes of 2012.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2012 election, 2016 election, Barack Obama, climate change, Etch-A-Sketch, gay marriage, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Republican Party, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, Texas
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA)
Last Tuesday night, Representative Brad Sherman, Democrat from California’s 30th Congressional District north of Los Angeles, held a town hall meeting by telephone. Taking questions from constituents, Sherman explained his positions on a number of hot issues, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), climate change, Net Neutrality and California’s historic drought. Sherman also appeared on the RT network on Tuesday to talk about the TPP. Join us for a recap of these events after the jump:
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Leave a comment! Tags: Brad Sherman, California, Congress, drought, Iran, Net Neutrality, nuclear weapons, offshoring, renewable energy, taxes, TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership
Famed Hispanic Lucille Ball
Among the many incorrect or inane items from the U.S. media is the contention that, because white guy, Phillips Academy, grandson of a Nazi-loving Senator John Ellis (“Jeb”) Bush is married to a Mexican woman, Jeb himself is somehow “Hispanic” or part of the Hispanic culture. After all, Bush even listed himself as Hispanic on his voter registration form. If Jeb Bush is Hispanic because of his wife, then the following stereotypes about famous people and their spouses or former spouses would also be true:
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