This week at progressive state blogs is designed specifically to focus attention on the writing and analysis of people focused on their home turf. Let me know via comments or Kosmail if you have a favorite state- or city-based blog you think I should be watching. Here is the November 5 edition. Inclusion of a blog post does not necessarily indicate my agreement with—or endorsement of—its contents.
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Atif Qarni at Blue Virginia writes—The LAST thing people want to hear from tone-deaf politicos is that “move on, unite and heal”:
Since election day, hate crimes against Muslims and Latinos have skyrocketed. The LAST thing people want to hear from tone-deaf politicos is that “move on, unite and heal.”
My wife, brother and I were Bernie people, but after the primary we voted for HRC. Unfortunately, many stayed home. Multiple times I said to people that I feared Trump getting elected, but many politicos put me down. Now I am speaking about concerns I have, and many politicos from both sides of the aisle are saying that bad things wont happen.
Let me put a few things in perspective for you. Since moving to Prince William County, I have been pulled over twice and questioned whether I had explosive devices in my car. The second time, my children were with me. My wife has been denied service at our local DMV because she wears a hijab. Both of us have the knowledge and the political means to fight back. Many do not.
Is my county vulnerable to hate crimes, and will there be a movement to put in bad policies to target Latinos and Muslims? Absolutely. It has been done before. In 2007 the bigoted Trumponian Corey Stewart led a movement to drive out Latinos from the county. Many folks looked the other way. And he keeps getting re-elected.
Please do not expect me to believe that bad things are not coming. I am organizing and preparing for what is to come. And I call on others to do the same. And I welcome all help from everyone.
Tom van Alten at FortBoise of Idaho writes—Very unfair, come together, be proud:
Best line of the morning in my Facebook feed: "All I ask of Democrats, is to work with Trump, the same as Republicans worked with Obama."
The political divide in the country hasn't moved very much in the last couple of decades. Being so close to right smack down the middle, with torrents of wealth seeking power, the erosion has been considerable, however. Grant Park in Chicago 8 years ago looked like the mountaintop for some of us, and (I imagine) the end of the world for others.
Now this new view of an abyss.
POTUS and FLOTUS met with their elect successors yesterday, and news reports of the event made it look decent and gracious. A moment to savor, perhaps, with what's ahead. Last night, anti-Trump protesting in Portland, Oregon turned destructive and was declared a "riot." Something more than smashed windows, a dumpster on fire, "objects" thrown at police, firecrackers and "a larger bonfire set with a molotov cocktail near the elk statue downtown"? The police used "less lethal munitions" such as pepper spray and rubber projectiles. One report of "widespread" damage talked about "a small group of anarchists" responsible.
The RNC could say some things about how a few well-positioned anarchists can cause a lot of trouble. Or maybe the Bundy brothers or Raúl Labrador or Heather Scott or Matt Shea could opine.
nemski at Delaware Dem writes—The Need to Attract White Voters:
There is a lot of racists, bigoted, and misogynistic shit going down right now – the termites of America have come out in droves. This post is not about that.
Since 1976, a Democratic presidential nominee has never won the white vote. The 2016 Election continues that trend. Of course, some votes for Trump were from the termites, but many of the of those who voted for Trump are not racist at all. But most importantly we have to stop labelling all Trump supporters as vile termites.
The Democratic Party needs to figure out how to connect with white voters. The lessons the party has learned in accepting and fighting for minorities and disenfranchised people, must be taken and adapted into an outreach program for American whites, both uneducated and college-educated who feel extremely left out of the process.
If you keep on labelling all Trump supporters as disgusting, you are just being elitist and judgmental. More importantly, we will continue to lose elections and isolating a large portion of the American population. We need to find someway to bring them in to the fold.
Bill Raden at Capital & Main of California writes—Why Proposition 55 Sailed to Victory:
One clear winner to emerge from Tuesday’s statewide election was California education.
Proposition 55, the wealth-tax initiative, swept to victory with a 62 percent approval margin. Its passage will extend until 2030 Proposition 30’s emergency stabilization funding passed by voters in 2012. It also means the job of restoring public schools and health-care programs badly mauled by the biggest budget cuts since the Great Depression — and insulating them against future recessions — will continue with billions in additional revenues earmarked for the state’s perennially cash-starved K-12 programs and community colleges.
And in a surprise reversal, Californians also backed Proposition 51, the $9 billion school construction bond initiative that was opposed by Governor Jerry Brown, and was lagging in the polls as recently as October. That measure, which will help finance repairs and new school facilities across the state, came from behind to pass with 54 percent of the vote.
Together, the two education measure wins stand as a striking vote of confidence by Californian for their public school system and its teaching force. [...]
This represents a significant change in fortune from only a few years ago, when California’s public school teachers were demonized by an “education crisis” narrative promoted by backers of charter schools, their privately managed, market-driven and mostly nonunion doppelgängers. That message was seized on by anti-tax and business groups and wealthy anti-union donors four years ago in a campaign that raised $53.4 million to fight Proposition 30 at a point when public schools had already lost 82,000 teaching and classified jobs, nearly a week of instructional days and countless art, music, athletic and summer school programs to the financial crisis’ budget shortfalls.
deciminyan of Blue Jersey writes—Beyond Voting:
OK. So because of the quirky Electoral College, America just elected an unqualified, anti-environment bigot to be the Leader of the Free World. We’re stuck with him for four years – a tragic sequel to the generally successful and positive term of Barack Obama.
But hand-wringing does not change that. Post-election protests do not change that. (By the way, I wonder how many of these protesters actually did the hard work on knocking on doors and making phone calls before the election).
There are ways to reverse or at least slow down the draconian Trump agenda. Change Congress in two years. Put pressure on your state legislators where appropriate. Volunteer. Open your pocketbook.
There’s a lot to do. Let’s concentrate here on our endangered environment. Christie has been a disaster. New Jersey’s leadership in solar power has eroded over the last eight years. He has stymied the development of wind turbines off our coast. Dangerous pipelines are on the rise while resilient distributed energy systems are taking a back burner.
You can vote Christie out next year and Trump in four years. But there are things you can do now. Here in New Jersey, there are several organizations that are fighting for clean air and water, and you can help with your wallet and with your time. Here’s a list of just a few such organizations. Every one of them has been under attack by the Christie administration in one way or another. Call them. Volunteer. Or just send them some money – maybe what you spend over two weeks at Starbucks or the local movie complex. Consider it an investment in your children’s health.
Primo Encarnación at Juanita Jean’s of Texas writes—I Was Wrong:
Everything I’ve learned and observed in politics all my life was wrong. Everything I believed about the American electorate was wrong. Everything that I thought I knew was wrong.
I’m a data guy, and data let me down. I’m a field guy, and field let me down. I’m an American, and America let me down. But worst of all, I let you down.
I apologize to all of you. I’m deeply sorry for what I’ve written over the last year from the smug comfort of my own self-importance. I apologize to everyone I led to false hope. I promise I will do better in the future.
Right now, we don’t have the luxury of wallowing in self-pity. I fear for the greatness, nay, I fear for the life of this nation as I never have before, and I feel called to re-enter public life in order to fight the creeping fascism which threatens anyone who doesn’t conform to the WASP ideal.
For what it’s worth, I think there’s a chance that he doesn’t even finish his term. Cold comfort, with Theocracy Ken waiting in the wings.
As I said, right now, I’m not inclined to find out what happened. I am still trying to process the shock and grief that I am sure has enveloped us all like damp, grey woolen blanket.
But…
We’re only 4 days short of 2 years to the midterms. We’re going to shake this off, and come out fighting. This is not a new war. This is the same old war, a war centuries old: the war against superstition, ignorance and hate. We lost a big battle in this war. This is indeed a huge setback.
I’m going to love up my family, I’m going celebrate Christmas, then I’m going to start again to try to fix this. This fight may take longer than we’d thought. It may be harder than we’d like. But it’s a fight I have no inclination to shirk and no intention to lose again.
Donna at Democratic Diva of Arizona writes—I Turned Them Off. You Should Too:
Protests have erupted in big cities all over the country in the aftermath of Trump’s (s)election (he lost the popular vote but won the undemocratic-as-shit Electoral College). I’m not sure how effective they are but I certainly understand the impulse to vent anger over this horrifying result, even if you don’t know quite what to do.
I’m not out on the streets. I’m too numb for that. I haven’t even cried – or yelled (that much), which is uncharacteristic of me. What I am doing, which I began immediately doing when it was clear that Trump was going to win, is telling everyone who will listen to turn off the fucking “news” that spent the last two years tongue-bathing Trump while assiduously tearing down Hillary Clinton over nothingburgers like her email server or not holding press conferences for several weeks (remember the obsession over that, completely forgotten when Donald Trump did the same thing later?).
Part of it could be chalked up to what are called Clinton Rules, which is the inexplicable hostility of the Beltway toward the Clintons and their avid willingness to run with bullshit dangled in front of them by right wing ratfuckers. Generally they avoid going with the obviously ridiculous stuff – Andrea Mitchell and Wolf Blitzer know they’d look like complete doofuses if they breathlessly pounded Vince Foster or Benghazi. But those EMAILZ!!1! were a vaguely complex topic that provided the perfect opportunity for Very Serious Pundits to furrow their brows and pretend to be deeply concerned about Hillary’s judgment despite clearing knowing exactly jack and shit about the particulars of the issue and having no apparent sense of its relative importance.
Similar faux-theatrics were at work with the talking head giddiness over Wikileaks stolen emails, which revealed little more than DNC people disliked Bernie Sanders and that a bunch of politicos talked trash, as they are wont to do. As for the Clinton Foundation “scandal”, a pile of crapola peddled by right wing Judicial Watch and lapped up by the AP, the Clinton Rules were definitely at play:
Sean Kitchen at Raging Chicken Press of Pennsylvania writes—I Promise to Fight Like Hell:
The results of yesterday’s election are personal and will most likely have a burden on me. I grew up on Pennsylvania’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, and did not have any health care coverage after my time on CHIP expired. It expired when I was 19, and it took 7 years for me to get coverage when Governor Wolf expanded Medicaid. This post isn’t about that, but that’s coming up.
This post is about the impact a grade school teacher’s single action has had on my life. Most of the day, I was thinking about the morning after we invaded Iraq. I was in 8th grade and I remember waiting for class to begin that morning. But our teacher decided to skip teaching. She spent the whole day telling us how much of a monumental mistake the Iraq War would turn out to be, and she was right. This feels like that day, but the adult in me knows that it is much worse than that day.
I spent the day thinking about how parents and teachers would address their children and their students on this calamity. I dont know how I would have been able to compose myself, and I havent been able to compose myself after she reached out to me to thank me for my activism.
I’d like to return that thank you and thank her for skipping class someday 13 years ago. It was one of the earliest, and one of many, instances that helped me understand the social injustices we have carried out, and it is something that will always stick with me.
Now that I got this tear-jerker out of my way. Now is not the time to be standing on the sideline or living life on your knees. There are serious days ahead of us, and If you have something to contribute, you must. A racist, a homophobe, a serial abuser, a con-man, a charlatan and – most importantly – a strong man has been elected president, and I promise like hell that I will stand up and fight back.
Rob Schofield at Progressive Pulse of North Carolina writes—Court packing move would set a dangerous new low for NC GOP:
It’s hard to imagine that North Carolina conservatives could ever sink lower than they did during last March’s kangaroo special session of the General Assembly in which they took the execrable HB2 from the back of an envelope to state law in just a few hours. Unfortunately, as NC Policy Watch reporter Melissa Boughton reports this morning, they may be contemplating just such an effort.
Though state Democrats won control of the Supreme Court on Tuesday when Judge Mike Morgan defeated incumbent justice Bob Edmunds, legislative Republicans may be considering a plan to add two new justices to the court in a special session that would take place prior to the end of Gov. Pat McCrory’s term. McCrory would then be free to appoint the new justices and neither would have to face election until 2018. [...]
The story goes on to quote Orr, Phillips and other experts as decrying such a possible move as “dangerous,” “extreme,” “smarmy” and undermining the independence of the courts.
These critics are right, of course, but they’re also much too understated. Such a move would be better described as one of the lowest of all low and despicable acts that one can imagine elected officials in our state ever contemplating. It would be the kind of act rightfully associated with despots and tin pot dictatorships, with Putinism and banana republic coups d’état, and an outright assault on democratic government.
WillyKay at Show Me Progress of Missouri writes—Jim Talent is in Trump’s talent pool:
TPM has compiled a list of the fringe-dwelling GOPers who are reputed to be under consideration for posts in a Trump administration and it’s both as comical and as horrifying as you might expect. Dark days ahead indeed.
Some of the rumored appointees are real head-spinners. Florida’s Attorney General Pam Bondi, for example, is on the list of possible Attorneys General – which suggests that she may have gotten lots more than a great big campaign donation from Trump in return for backing away from investigating allegations of fraud leveled against him and his Trump University debacle.
Of special interest to Missourians, though, is the presence of Jim Talent, listed as a possible candidate for either Secretary of Defense, or Secretary of Commerce. Talent is a former Missouri GOP Senator who lost his seat to Democrat Claire McCaskill in 2006. He is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and acts as the director of something called the National Security 2020 Project, which “is working on the formulation and promulgation of a new paradigm for defense policy, planning, and budgeting.”
Right Web, a site that tracks “militarists’ efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy,” notes in its profile of [former U.S. Senator Jim] Talent that he has been critical of Trump’s Middle East policies, especially in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. Certainly, if Trump insists on lying about his opposition to the Iraq war, he might have some differences with Talent who not only approved of the invasion of Iraq, but declared that “he would still have voted for the Iraq war had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction, because he thought removing Saddam Hussein from power was crucial to the war on terrorism.” Dick Cheney on steroids, in other words. And like neocon Cheney, neocon Talent is unlikely to share Trump’s uncritical Russia love.
However, as those of us who were listening during the campaign quickly noticed, Trump’s most firmly held positions are subject to abrupt change depending on his mood, the nature of his audience, and the latest input he has received – he’s only consistent about denying his past positions. Consequently, the nitty-gritty of Talent’s past policy positions are not likely as important as they would be for a more informed and engaged president.
Sally Jo Jorgensen at Bluestem Prairie of Minnesota writes—Are ties of new MN Senate majority leader with New Apostolic Reformation recipe for gridlock?
In the Fargo Forum, veteran political reporter Don Davis reports Rural insurance man tapped as MN GOP Senate leader.
But there's so much more to state senator Paul Gazelka, R- Nisswa, than selling State Farm insurance in Baxter.
Take his appearance nearly a year ago at the Now is the Time! Now is the Season! Jubilee! Chuck Pierce and Dutch Sheets, Duluth MN in Duluth, at which the state senator joined other Christian dominionists to pray for the Zenith City. (For a quick look into the mind of Dutch Sheets, check out his Baal Teachings, which equate LGBTQ people with demons; someone should find out in Gazelka--who in 2010 grabbed the endorsement from the MNGOP's only openly gay legislator--if he agrees). [...]
This wasn't a sudden conversion for Gazelka, who has maintained ties with the New Apostolic Reformation movement for year. His book on extending Christianity into the second cultural "mountain"--business--of seven mountains was issued in 2003 by Creation House Press (which appears to be a co-publishing/self-publishing service, if this Christian author's experience is correct).
Joseph at Plunderbund of Ohio writes—Help Fight Back Against Trump’s Agenda In Ohio:
Like much of America, I woke up yesterday morning somewhat hung over, very tired and totally overwhelmed with dread about the fact that Donald Trump had been elected US president.
Then I got text from my mom that inspired me: “Dad is online making donations to some of the groups that are going to be hurt by this. He went to bed angry but is thinking ahead whereas I can barely cope.”
That’s so my dad… Retired cop. US Navy Veteran. Environmentalist. And ever the pragmatist.
My dad decided to proactively work to counter Trump’s anti-environment promises by donating to the Sierra Club, the Ocean Conservatory, Green Peace and the Union Of Concerned Scientists. My mom donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The rest of us can help too.