So Is This OK, or...

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Wednesday August 21, 2019 · 2:59 PM PDT

2019/08/21 · 14:59

So apparently it’s now fine for Daily Kos contributing editors to just spout racist and misogynistic BS without consequence? Really can’t wait until Markos gets hit with a 90% marginal tax rate...

Hillary vs Bernie Iowa Endorsements

liberalminded

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Tuesday February 02, 2016 · 9:23 AM PST

2016/02/02 · 09:23

Saw nobody else pointing this out, but here are the endorsements from prominent Iowa-based electeds, newspapers and organizations going into the caucuses, which were eventually tied. Bernie failed to win the endorsements of a single state or federal official in Iowa. His level of support, then, comes up against the highly disproportionate level of support Hillary received from the Democratic Establishment. A pretty impressive feat, IMO.

Nate Silver’s been hocking the stupid-sounding The Party Decides all election cycle, and it appears that model doesn’t match up with reality. Bernie had the support of (1) prominent Democrat official in Iowa, and received 49.6% of the vote. Hillary had the support of (31) prominent Democrat officials, 32 if you count Ruth Harkin, which you really should. (sourcing from Wikipedia.)

Bernie:

Davenport Mayor Bill Gluba

The Quad City Times

The Daily Nonpareil (Council Bluffs)

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund

Hillary:

Iowa legend, 5-term US Senator Tom Harkin and his prominent lobbyist wife Ruth Harkin

Secretary of Agriculture and former two-term Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack

Congressman Dave Loebsack, Iowa’s only federally-elected official

Iowa State Treasurer Michael Fitzgerald

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller

The Des Moines Register

Dubuque Mayor Roy D. Buol

Iowa City Press-Citizen

Sioux City Journal

Ako Abdul-Samad, IA Rep.

Marti Anderson, IA Rep.

Timi Brown-Powers, IA Rep.

Tom Courtney, IA Sen.^[238]

Jeff Danielson, IA Sen.^[247]

Bill Dotzler, IA Sen.^[247]

Bob Dvorsky, IA Sen.^[238]

Abby Finkenauer, IA Rep.^[247]

Mary Gaskill, IA Rep.^[293]

Ruth Ann Gaines, IA Rep

Michael Gronstal, IA Sen. Maj. Leader^[299]

Chris Hall, IA Rep.^[300]

Wally Horn, IA Sen.^[238]

Pam Jochum, IA Sen. Pres.^[302]

Vicki Lensing, IA Rep.^[238]

Mary Mascher, IA Rep.^[247]

Liz Mathis, IA Sen.^[308]

Matt McCoy, IA Sen.^[309]

Jo Oldson, IA Rep.^[295]

Janet Petersen, IA Sen.^[295]

Kirsten Running-Marquardt, IA Rep.^[293]

Sally Stutsman, IA Rep.^[295]

Phyllis Thede, IA Rep.^[247]

Hillary at 100,000

liberalminded

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Friday October 23, 2015 · 4:54 PM PDT

2015/10/23 · 16:54

A diary on the rec list celebrates the fact that Hillary has gained over 100,000 new donors since October. I think it's high time to reflect on another six digit number: 144, 532.

liberalminded

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Monday August 17, 2015 · 1:25 PM PDT

2015/08/17 · 13:25

Unfortunately, many white Bernie Sanders supporters are not understanding the basic realm of possibility under which Bernie can win the Democratic nomination, with success in South Carolina integral to him actually winning the whole shebang.

I wrote a diary ("Black Folks No on Bernie? Really) a month or so go ago because I was outraged (and continue to be outraged) at the suggestion that Hillary was a better candidate for Black folks. But now is the time to turn inwards to pro-Bernie white Kossacks and encourage a change in direction.

liberalminded

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Friday July 10, 2015 · 9:17 PM PDT

2015/07/10 · 21:17

I find it disturbing that a few ostensibly Black diarists/commenters have said that "Black people don't like Bernie" and that Hillary will be the candidate of Black voters.

As a Black man, I have to say that's preposterous.

Bernie has issues on race, don't get me wrong. He should be much more out front about Black Lives Matter and police brutality, and should acknowledge that America's imperial wars abroad disproportionately affect Black communities. His staff should have more Black people, and he certainly could have done more in the Senate to reach out to Black communities.

But to act like Hillary is somehow better on race than Bernie is absolutely ridiculous--willfully ignorant of the reality of her tenure at the State Department, her votes in the US Senate, and her role in her husband's administration. For any thinking Black person to say Hillary is better for Black folks than Bernie is to be "out of their minds," to quote Malcolm.

More below the fold...

liberalminded

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Sunday April 24, 2011 · 10:47 AM PDT

2011/04/24 · 10:47

This is going to be my first diary in years (usually a lurker), but I wanted to examine the various arguments that I find problematic in Citizen K's recent rec list diary. (Background: I am likely considerably to the left of the Daily Kos mainstream, but I am not wealthy, and I am not white, which likely excludes me from citizen k’s definition of the “professional left”. I currently work as an organizer for a labor union.) I thought this would be too big for a comment, but correct me if I'm wrong and I'll take it down and post it as one, I am not too familiar with the most recent diary etiquette.

Since Barack Obama began to find success in the Democratic primaries of 2008 he and his supporters have attracted virulent attacks from the professional left of liberal commentariat, lobbyists, pundits, think tankers, and academics.

That’s somewhat fair, it is true that Obama has received a great deal of criticism from the more left-wing members of the commentariat. This assertion, however, ignores the enormous amount of grassroots criticism of Obama. If you go to your average Quaker meeting, or social justice meetup, or black community association, or any place where the left resides on an atomic level, you will find frustration with the Obama administration’s demonstrated commitment to the wealthy against the poor and the oppressed. To ignore this fact either demonstrates an extraordinary amount of insularity or willful intellectual dishonesty. In the case of citizen k, I’m guessing it’s probably some sort of dynamic tension between the two.

The underlying basis for the attacks is class - the class of professional liberals/leftists, cut off from any popular movement, derives its authority, prestige, and income from its status as the official interpreter and judge of "leftism" or liberalism.

Well, I’d be interested in some kind of objective analysis where you can prove that Glenn Greenwald or Jane Hamsher has said that they are the official interpreter of leftism or liberalism. I personally haven’t seen any blog posts in that regard.

That's why they get writing assignments, TV invitations, grants, jobs in DC or NY writing position papers for liberal institutions. The term "professional left" then describes a group of people who generate liberal/leftist opinion as their profession (these are not organizers). But while the professional right is disciplined and assiduous in supporting the Republican Party, the professional left is disciplined and assiduous in attacking the Democrats especially the Obama Democrats. There are three main reasons:

Maybe again. I think we can see an enormous amount of people who are professionally employed to create opinion who are in large part supportive of the Obama administration- ever heard of The New Republic?

1. Professional rightists work under tight corporate management at Koch brothers think tanks, Murdoch or corporate media, billionaire endowed chairs- they know that they work for the corporate elite and any dissent will rapidly lead to an end to the fat contract at AEI or speaking invitations at the Federalist Society meetings or appearances on TV. The professional left depends on the same right leaning corporate media - plus some philanthropists and universities who don't care about the Democratic Party. Nobody is going to get on TV by discussing the work Hilda Solis is doing for poor workers but they will get on TV for agreeing with Robert Reich that the administration is clueless. David Sirota, Ed Schulz, Jane Hamsher, Glenn Greenwald and the like have found attacking Obama to be a passport to the Green Room - as have Tavis Smiley and Cornell West and a number of other people who could not get on TV without taking a hostage before they learned to attack the President.

This also ignores the fact that for the most part when these folks are on TV, there are usually folks from the pro-Obama side defending the administration’s policies. Not to mention the fact that the President has an enormous communications apparatus that is pretty effective at getting media coverage. And about Hilda Solis, yes she has been doing things, but the lived experience on the ground (and I’m saying this as a union organizer) is that Obama has not been doing anything for poor people. In my experience, this is what a majority of the economically oppressed people that I talk to actually tend to say. If you’ve never been poor, or you don’t know any economically oppressed people, you probably are again ignorant of this fact.

The pragmatic non-ideological liberalism of the Administration and its emphasis on direct grass roots organizing threatens the core business model of the whole group. If your professional status is based on your academic papers on race and class in America and the Administration is basically declaring your body of work to be irrelevant ideological hand-waving you might get as angry as Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz whose furious (and creepy) indignation surfaced during the primaries or Princeton Professor Cornell West who complained that the President "talked to me like I was a Cub Scout, and he was a pack master, you know what I mean?" On the other hand, right wing "intellectuals" understand that they are employees and that nobody serious takes their work product as anything but propaganda. The Cato institute can publish 100 million articles denouncing corporate subsidies and Exxon management and the Republican Caucus will applaud and hand out merit badges, cookies, and milk, while ignoring them entirely and everybody plays along. The professional left, desperately competing for a much smaller number of slots at universities and a much smaller pie is constrained to take itself more seriously.

I have an academic background in race and class studies, so I take particular offense to the know-nothingism embodied in this passage. First of all, the idea that the Obama administration doesn’t have an ideology is beyond farcical. Everybody has an ideology, just like everyone speaks a language. Secondly, you obviously haven’t read a single word of Cornel West or for that matter any academic critics of the administration. They actually have very cogent critiques of American society that are essential for one’s intellectual development, that is, if someone is actually interested in hearing multiple sides of a debate. Third, do you really want academics on the left to be the same as on the right, that is, completely in lockstep with their Dear Leader?

2. Finally, the natural political affiliation of American professional intellectuals of any stripe is (American) libertarianism because it reflects their class interests. Libertarianism is socially liberal (at least for people with money in metropolitan districts), individualistic and scornful of the solidarity ethos of the labor/civil-rights movement, status conscious, obsessed with wording and process and profoundly indifferent to the economic interests of the larger working class.

This is probably more or less accurate in some cases, but the Obamas are quite wealthy by any standard and so it would be in their class interest as well to be libertarians. If you’re arguing in favor of a clear class determinancy, then it is likely that every prominent person on the left and in the Democratic Party is an enemy of the working class. I’d be willing to go with that, but again, I’m much further to the left than your average person on Daily Kos. Personally, I’d consider myself someone who critiques the Obama administration (which is really just a reflection of the present state of power relations in the United States) from both an organizing and communitarian perspective as well as an intellectual perspective. If you recall, Dr. King was called Dr. King for a reason- he combined both complex philosophical and theological theory with community and labor organizing.

3. People don't mechanically follow political theories just because those correspond to the interests of their own profession but they tend that way. That's why "progressive" Glenn Greenwald extols the candidacy of Republican child labor champion Gary Johnson. Johnson is a classical libertarian - as the joke goes, a Republican who wants to smoke pot. Greenwald's business partner and ally Jane Hamsher worked with right wing libertarian Grover Norquist to attack the Obama White House. And Professional Left favorite Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone often sounds the same alarms about the conspiracy at the Federal Reserve that one would otherwise associate with the Ron Paul Republicans.

I agree that supporting Gary Johnson and partnering with Grover Norquist is not something I would personally do. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t think that Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher have very valuable criticisms of the current state of affairs in the United States today. Just because someone says something that I don’t agree with (especially when that thing is relatively peripheral to their overall ideological project) doesn’t mean I am going to reject them out of hand because of that. If I did that, I don’t think I would be able to accept anybody.

The revealing thing about the professional left attack on President Obama is that so much of it is demeaning and aimed at personality. One reads Wilentz's article with a sense that he's pounding the keyboard in anger directed personally at Mr. Obama. Or consider "environmentalist" Glenn Hurrowitz's article 'Obama as Snuffleupagus: Expect our imaginary friend to skip out on Power Shift again'
"So no one's waiting for Obama any more. We've realized that in the great battle between Big Bird and Big Oil, President Obama is Snuffleupagus -- our imaginary friend. When we're alone together, we can dream of a bright future. But when the dirty energy lobbyists show up looking for a fight, somehow he's never there. Suddenly, you're alone up against their billions -- and when you look in the distance, it occasionally seems as if he's reappeared on their side. Also, you realize that he's not as furry as Snuffy, and doesn't have a Snuffle. WTF, Barackalupagus?”

I actually don’t really see how Wilentz is directing his ire at Obama’s personality. This exchange seems totally policy related, from my reading. But maybe that’s because I’m a member of the “professional left”. Oh wait, I make $10/hour working as a labor organizer.

“Greenwald is a great example of the professional left in a number of ways. First, he's totally financially dependent on talking engagement, journalistic assignments, and book sales for his material attacking the Obama presidency. Second, his slashing style and utter disregard for fact is unfortunately representative of the type. Here's Greenwald in the "liberal" on-line magazine Salon:
"In December, President Obama signed legislation to extend hundreds of billions of dollars in Bush tax cuts, benefiting the wealthiest Americans. Last week, Obama agreed to billions of dollars in cuts that will impose the greatest burden on the poorest Americans."
Let's look at the second sentence and the AP analysis
As a result of that sleight of hand, Obama was able to reverse many of the cuts passed by House Republicans in February when the chamber approved a bill slashing this year's budget by more than $60 billion. In doing so, the White House protected favorites like the Head Start early learning program, while maintaining the maximum Pell grant of $5,550 and funding for Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative that provides grants to better-performing schools. Food aid to the poor was preserved, as were housing subsidies.
Instead, the cuts that actually will make it into law are far tamer, including cuts to earmarks, unspent census money, leftover federal construction funding, and $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can't be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused bonus money for states that enroll more uninsured children in a program providing health care to children of lower-income families.

Greenwald actually was exactly right here. How is what he said factually wrong? Not spending already-appropriated funds is a cut, plain and simple. And yes, a $3.5 billion cut to SCHIP will impose a significantly greater burden on the poor.

In reality, faced with an intransigent right wing Republican House majority and a fractured Democratic Senate, the President outplayed the Republicans and saved his social spending budget.

This is a statement of opinion, not of fact. While you may believe that, the Presidency is a powerful bully pulpit, as Bush demonstrated. Obama could likely have extracted considerably greater concessions from Republicans.

But the professional left wasoutraged anyways. Now let's consider the first sentence which is even worse. The reality is that the President traded tax cuts for the rich in exchange for keeping millions of people's unemployment insurance alive, funding for green energy, tax breaks for the poor and middle class, DADT repeal, and a food safety reform bill.

DADT repeal was not tied to this compromise. (And I don’t remember hearing anything about this food safety reform bill included in it either, but I could be wrong.)

Certainly one might disagree with the tradeoff and possibly there is an honest liberal argument for why letting millions of people lose their last lifeline is a good thing, but Greenwald's not making that argument because he pretends that the entire package was tax cuts for the rich.

I think that with sufficient organization, the left as a whole could have successfully ended the Bush tax cuts and passed an unemployment insurance extension. Due, however, to the weddedness of significant portions of the left to Obama, and the refusal to push for ideas and instead just push for the Dear Leader, this organization is not currently possible. To concede the realm of the possible to anything that Obama can due is a massive cessation of ground, and it is something that the great social justice leaders in this county (Debs, Haywood, Mother Jones, Frederick Douglass, Cesar Chavez, etc.) never did and would never consider doing. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has a good summation of how movements that were successful were those that did not become wedded to institutions or politicians. And Obama himself in a debate in 2008 pointed this out- when the candidates were asked by a questioner who they thought Dr. King would endorse, Hillary Clinton said foolishly that he would endorse her because of what she had accomplished, but Obama rightfully pointed out that King would not endorse any of them and would instead push for the people autonomously of politicians and institutions.

The sheer dishonesty of these two sentences as description of the President's activities, however, is nothing compared with the dishonesty of Greenwald's pretense to care about these Democratic Party issues at all.
Here'sGreenwald in 2005, during the Bush administration sounding like Jan Brewer on the campaign trail.
"There already is a “closed sign on the border” when it comes to illegal immigration. It’s called the law. The problem is that the “closed sign” isn’t being enforced because the Federal Government, which has its interfering, power-hungry hands in virtually everything else, has abdicated its duty in one of the very few areas where it was actually meant to be: border security.”

This blog post by Greenwald is FUBAR. I don’t agree with it. I think that many of Greenwald’s other discussions of civil liberties are quite cogent, however. Again, unlike Citizen K, I think I have a relationship with people that goes beyond a “you’re either with us, or against us” type of mentality, where I agree with something that people say and disagree with others. I don’t 100% agree with anyone on anything. I am in favor of pushing for a just society, I am not in favor of pushing for anybody within that. As a result, I take influences and alliances from a variety of places, but I always retain my own right to criticize anybody who I may have been influence by or am allied by.
Citizen K, on the other hand, likely has a different approach. Can they name a single thing they have criticized the Obama administration about? If there is a case, I will be pleasantly surprised. But I doubt it. Instead, this diary is much more reflective of a broader commitment to Obama as a singular personality as opposed to a commitment to an actual philosophy of how life and society should be. This unfortunately is indicative of a lack of critical thinking about life in general, which is something that I find profoundly sad, and is something also that in the past has had profoundly destructive implications.

Is Fox News Doing Subliminal Messaging? Rats!

liberalminded

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday February 04, 2010 · 2:59 PM PST

2010/02/04 · 14:59

I normally don't publish at Daily Kos, usually more of a "lurker". I was watching the Stewart - O'Reilly interview today and saw something interesting. Below the fold!

Poll

28 votes Show Results

Subliminal Messaging?

28 votes Vote Now!

Subliminal Messaging?

Â¡SÃ!

22 votes

Â¡No!

6 votes

A Daily Kos Primer on Hugo Chavez, Pt.1

liberalminded

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Monday June 29, 2009 · 5:14 PM PDT

2009/06/29 · 17:14

With the recent Honduran coup, lots of folks have been talking about a certain character named Hugo Chavez. As someone who has spent an enormous amount of time researching Chavez, what is happening in Venezuela, and what is happening inb Latin America more generally, I wanted to take some time to provide a introduction on him to the Daily Kos community. Although Chavez himself would likely deny this, as would most actors in the recent events in Honduras, I argue that the presence of Chavez on the global scene does have a lot to do with the events in Honduras, and in order to understand what is happening in Latin America today, it is crucial to have at least a basic understanding of what the man is about, and what is going on in Venezuela today.

Considerably more below the fold. Come on down!

liberalminded

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Thursday November 09, 2006 · 7:22 PM PST

2006/11/09 · 19:22

After looking into the records of both Steny Hoyer and Jack Murtha, I believe that neither of them should be the Majority Leader of the 110th Congress. Read More

BREAKING: Yet Another Republican Retirement...

liberalminded

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday March 10, 2006 · 6:25 PM PST

2006/03/10 · 18:25

Elton Gallegly (R-CA-24) , in his 11th term, has announced his retirement for health reasons. Read More

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So Is This OK, or...

Hillary vs Bernie Iowa Endorsements

Hillary at 100,000

Getting Bernie Elected and BLM

Black Folks No on Bernie? Really

Pushing for ideas, not people

Is Fox News Doing Subliminal Messaging? Rats!

A Daily Kos Primer on Hugo Chavez, Pt.1

Draft John Lewis for Majority Leader

BREAKING: Yet Another Republican Retirement...