This week at progressive state blogs is designed specifically to focus attention on the writing and analysis of people focused on their home turf. Here is the October 13th edition. Inclusion of a blog post does not necessarily indicate my agreement with—or endorsement of—its contents.
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At Plunderbund of Ohio, Ryan Michael writes—An Ohio Woman’s Place Is In The House — And The Senate:
We’ve all seen far too often what happens when legislative bodies are non-representative of their constituents. Infamous images abound of panels of elderly, white, wealthy, Republican men staring down on women and people of color from their positions of power, enacting policies to benefit and enrich themselves at the harm of everybody else.
It’s long overdue that we should see an influx of women into the Ohio House of Representatives and State Senate. To say the least, it’s incredibly frustrating that 27 of the 33 State Senate seats and 76 of the 99 House of Representative seats in Ohio are held by men, with both bodies controlled by Republican supermajorities.
There’s a movement of women hoping to change that on Nov. 6 as the midterm elections rapidly approach. 46 elections in our state’s legislative bodies will feature a Democratic woman running to defeat a Republican man or claim a seat in an unopposed election.
The future is female and Ohio’s women have come to claim that future now.
At Show Me Progress of Missouri, WillyKay writes—State Rep. Derek Grier – not so moderate after all?
I first met my state representative, Rep. Derek Grier (R-100), when he was canvassing in my neighborhood prior to the 2016 primary elections. He seems to have sussed my proclivities, or, perhaps, realized that the formerly right-wing suburbs were changing. His argument to me was that he was a common sense moderate, far less extreme than Mike Allen, his GOP primary opponent and the husband of the former, term-limited incumbent, Sue Allen.
Grier won the primary, ran unopposed, got elected and that was about the last I heard from him apart from periodic “newsletters” that rarely did more than list new legislation or an occasional slap-dash constituent “opinion” survey. However, in a year that saw the success of right-to-work-for-less legislation, tax cuts for the rich, inroads against women’s reproductive rights, failed efforts to regulate legislators’ lax ethical behavior, and secure adequate funding for infrastructure and education—not to mention the resignation of a Republican governor on grounds of moral turpitude, I heard not a peep from Rep. Grier about where he stood on any of these contentious issues.
So imagine my surprise this week when I received a card listing the “accomplishments” of Rep. Grier’s two years in office, gathered under the rubric of “promises made, promises kept.” My first response: what promises? Could it have been that implicit promise he made during the 2016 primary to moderate the far-right agenda espoused by so many members of Missouri’s GOP? [...]
At Capital & Main of California, Matthew Cunningham-Cook and David Sirota write—Richard Blum, a $100 Million UC Investment, Feinstein Campaign Donations: Business As Usual at UC?
University of California regents approved a nine-figure investment in a private equity fund run by a major donor to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, whose husband sits on the regents’ board. The investment was disclosed just as some of the private equity fund’s overseers and advisers were pumping thousands of dollars of donations into Feinstein’s campaign, according to documents reviewed by Capital & Main.
In the fall of 2017, UC regents decided to shift $100 million worth of university endowment and pension resources into the RISE fund, operated by TPG. That firm was founded by David Bonderman, who has forged extensive business relationships with Feinstein’s husband, regent Richard Blum. Over the past quarter-century, Blum served as a TPG executive, founded a fund overseeing TPG’s Asia business and partnered with TPG on numerous investment deals with his own investment fund, Blum Capital. The $100 million investment was UC’s first investment with TPG. [...]
“The decision by the UC regents to make an investment in a fund run by a close friend and business partner of Richard Blum raises potential issues of institutional corruption,” said Jay Youngdahl, an attorney and pension expert. “When money saved for workers’ retirement is placed into high-fee investments that benefit those close to politicians, questions need to be asked and answered. Investment funds in several states have suffered problems with similar practices.” [...]
At Blue in the Bluegrass of Kentucky, Yellow Dog writes—Dare to Do Our Duty:
Christine Blasley Ford is still in hiding from right-winger threatening to kill her and her family. She knew that would happen, knew Kavanaugh would be confirmed regardless, but testified anyway.
It's going to get a lot uglier even if Democrats do not take the House. And if we do Digby:
Lincoln had this to say to his fellow Unionists about how to proceed in a situation such as this:
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
At Blog for Arizona, AZ BlueMeanie writes—Mitch McConnell: Republicans are coming for your healthcare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Believe them:
Republicans were supposed to run on their tax cuts. Instead, they’re running away from them. Only the Chamber of Commerce (naturally) is running ads thanking Republicans like Martha McSally for making permanent the deficit busting corporate welfare tax cuts for wealthy plutocrats that did not benefit the average American taxpayer.Republicans stunned to learn voters understand exactly what their tax cut did:
The reality is not in dispute. Around two-thirds of the benefits of the tax cuts went to those in the top quintile of taxpayers, with about 20 percent of the benefits going to the richest 1 percent. By 2025, when the cuts are fully phased in, the top 1 percent will get 25 percent of the benefits. (See details here.) The centerpiece of the plan, furthermore, was a gigantic corporate [welfare] tax cut. Republicans promised that this cut would produce a wave of investment and wage increases for workers, but so far the only wave that has resulted is a tsunami of stock buybacks benefiting wealthy shareholders, which is exactly what liberals predicted.
Those facts are available to anyone who might seek them out, but most people aren’t going to. What people do notice, however, is that their paychecks didn’t look much bigger after the tax cut. Maybe they’re getting a few more dollars a week, but it certainly wasn’t life-transforming. [...]
Tax cuts are actually tax expenditures that are paid for by borrowing money. Tax cuts do not pay for themselves, despite the GOP’s insane adherence to faith based supply-side “trickle down” economics. All it does is explode the federal deficit. Republicans like to claim they are “deficit hawks” when a Democrat is in the White House, but the truth is they are actually deficit peacocks who really don’t care about the federal deficit, especially when a Republican is in the White House.
At FortBoise of Idaho, Tom Von Alten writes—The hard road toward legitimate unity:
Ezra Klein's description and think piece, on the eve of an election likely to have profound consequences for our future: The rigging of American politics. "Political systems depend on legitimacy. In America, that legitimacy is failing."
He points out that the architects of our political system feared majority rule, "with[holding] the vote from women, African Americans, and Native Americans." Still, UNITY was of the essence. Compromises were made between states to find a way to form a union. Four score and seven years later, we sacrificed more than 600,000 lives to coerce union without slavery. [...]
Now we have the GOP quite successfully rigging the system for minority rule with little concern for unity. It's not "conservative," it has come down to looting.
The rules are broken. The president nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court and the GOP-controlled Senate, led by Mitch McConnell a
nd Chuck Grassley, simply refused to consider the nomination, casually violating their oaths to uphold the Constitution in favor of a partisan take-over. Klein notes that we're in "an unstable equilibrium."
"[The] current political system is producing outcomes that feel illegitimate to the left. Any effort to reform that system would produce outcomes that feel illegitimate to the right. We cannot stay here, but we cannot move."
Speaking of the control of the Senate, this (my emphasis):
"By 2040, 70% of Americans will live in the 15 largest states. That means 70% of America will be represented by only 30 senators, while the other 30% of America will be represented by 70 senators." [...]
At BlueNC, scharrison writes—The NC GOP's continual war on early voting:
Fewer voting locations = more difficulty casting a vote:
North Carolina voters are once again dealing with changes to how the state runs its elections. At a time when early voting is becoming increasingly popular nationwide, a new law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature will result in nearly 20 percent fewer places to cast votes before Election Day.
Democrats say the changes could disproportionately affect African-American voters but some local Republican officials also complain about the changes, arguing they impose too much top-down control on election administration and amount to an unfunded mandate from the state.
Make no mistake, their intent with this law was to place more burdens on county-level elections officials, forcing them to make hard choices. And true to form, the architects of this crisis had their talking points lined up so they could avoid taking responsibility for their deceitful tactics:
Republican state Rep. David Lewis, who championed the most recent changes to early voting this summer, said during debate on the bill that minimizing confusion for voters was the goal.
"What we set out with the intention to do is to be able to make it more reliable and dependable that the voters would know that the early voting site or sites in their county was open from a set time in the morning to a set time in the evening," he said, also pointing out that across the state, early voting sites will be open for a longer number of total hours.
That "minimizing confusion" excuse is pretty handy, I would say. You could even use it to justify doing away with early voting in its entirety, leaving voters with just one day (and place) to cast their vote. Less confusing, right? Or, you know, just taking away their vote completely, because voting itself is very confusing.
At Blogging Blue of Wisconsin, Ed Heinzelman writes—Is the Trump Regime Making Peace or Selling Out Afghanistan.
Will all of the hub bub in Washington around Kanye West in the West Wing and Melania Trump’s visit to Africa and Jared Kushner’s lack of tax paying…this little story about an American diplomat meeting with the Taliban was buried in the main news section of the Sunday New York Times.
The diplomat is Zalmay Khalilzad who was born in Afghanistan. Mr. Khalilzad met with representatives of the Taliban in Doha Qatar and then flew to Kabul Afghanistan to consult with that nation’s president, Ashraf Ghani. So on the face of it, it could be some shuttle diplomacy here. And it sounds like the United States would like to see talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government…but the Taliban wants no part of that. In fact they want no part of actual peace talks until the United States ends their ‘occupation’ of the nation. And according to the NYT’s article they want no part of the upcoming elections either…elections that have already been delayed for years.
No, I’d like to see the US out of Afghanistan ASAP but it doesn’t sound like we can leave and expect any type of non-Taliban government to survive our exit. That’s not good. And I really don’t think the current hardline Taliban stance is a negotiating ploy. They can smell a victory in the current civil war if US involvement ends.
But I am really nervous about the current American diplomat entrusted with this decidedly delicate negotiation. Mr. Khalilzad was just appointed as special representative for Afghan reconciliation a month ago. And this was his first visit to the region and with the Taliban in this role. But he has a rather checkered past with the Taliban, the State Department, and Afghanistan. [...]
At Blog for Iowa Dave Bradley writes—David Young: The Epitome Of Today’s Republican Party:
Iowa’s 3rd district has a tight contest going on and I am kind of at a loss to understand why. During his time in office, David Young has done little to help the people in his district. Instead, like nearly all Republicans of the past two decades Young votes for the think tank prescribed solutions to the problems that are created by Republicans and then goes back to his district to try to sell these bogus policies.
In the video above from last January, Young is trying to sell the huge tax cuts for the richest to some of his constituents. As you can see at least one of his constituents seems have a lot more knowledge about taxes than old Dave there. Frankly Young looks and talks like an old fashioned film-flam man.
From the comment posted by Progress Iowa on the video:
“Susie Olesen, a retired teacher from rural Iowa, took Congressman David Young to school at his town hall meeting in Redfield, Iowa yesterday. Olesen accurately describes the TrumpTax scam bill that Young voted for, which would harm middle and working class Iowans. She corrected Young’s statements when he started to spin, and even proclaimed “geez, Louise” at the amount of money Young and Republicans are giving to big corporations who don’t pay their fair share.”
This is hardly the only example of Young trying to sell crappy policies to his district. After promising over and over he would not vote to end pre-existing conditions protections in health care, Young has voted over and over to end the ACA which would in effect also bring back pre-existing conditions clauses in health care insurance. Then he has the audacity to claim he favors keeping the pre-existing conditions protections in place.
At The Last Ogle of Oklahoma, writes—Hayley writes—Oklahoma congressman challenges Stormy Daniels’ lawyer to MMA-style fight …
With the lunacy of their legislation and uncanny ability to make asshats of themselves, Oklahoma politicians always give use plenty of material to write about. But today, one of our very own U.S. Representatives is in the news for his courage. I never thought I would write an article that pointed out the chivalry of our elected officials. Then again, I never thought a grown ass congressman would challenge another grown ass man to an MMA fight.
Via NewsOK…
U.S. Rep. Markwayne Mullin challenged Michael Avenatti, the high-profile lawyer of adult actress Stormy Daniels, to a charity fight Tuesday morning.
The challenge came in response to Avenatti’s suggestion last week that he and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, compete in a mixed martial arts fight.
“It’s ridiculous that @MichaelAvenatti would even challenge @DonaldJTrumpJr to a fight,” Mullin wrote on Twitter Tuesday. “But if he’s looking for a publicity stunt, I‘d be more than happy to meet him on the mat.”
Every family in Oklahoma seems to have that one cousin who has been wearing the same Stone Cold Steve Austin 3:16 wrastlin’ shirt since 1997 and is always wanting to pick a fight at family get-togethers to show everyone that you don’t need a day job to be manly. I have a sneaking suspicion that Markwayne Mullin is that cousin in his family. What is Markwayne wanting to prove, anyway?