The bad news is everywhere, blaring its message with click-bait headlines to lure you in.
And although we can’t deny its existence, we also shouldn’t ignore the many, many reasons to be hopeful and optimistic. We also should never, for even one moment, forget that we are the majority.
We shouldn’t forget that with hard work and dedication we can win in November and we can begin the process of saving our democracy.
We can’t avoid defeats, but we can remember to keep our eyes on the prize and keep working for our future.
on to the good news:
Russia Russia Russia
Judge Denies Trump’s Secrecy Claim in Review of Cohen Documents
Striking a note for transparency, a federal judge ruled on Friday that President Trump and his longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, cannot proceed in total secrecy as they weigh in on the final stages of a laborious review of a huge trove of materials seized from Mr. Cohen during a series of raids by the authorities in April.
There’s actually lots of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion
The circumstantial case for collusion
- Two separate hacks of Democratic Party emails
- Their releases also seemed strategically timed
- Trump and his campaign, at the time, believed these emails were a big deal and cited them frequently.
- “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” he said on several occasions on the campaign trail, and he also explicitly called on the Russian government to hack and release Hillary Clinton’s emails.
- Trump also spent the 2016 campaign running an overtly pro-Russian campaign message, praising Vladimir Putin’s leadership, defending him from allegations of murdering his political opponents, and calling for a realignment of US strategy in Syria and Ukraine.
There was extensive outreach between Trump and Russia
In reality, as exhaustively documented by the Moscow Project, there were extensive communications between people in Trump’s orbit and Russian government figures or others who had, or purported to have, close ties to the Putin regime.
The Manafort-Deripaska nexus is very suspicious
Manafort clearly saw his work for Trump as directly linked to his work for pro-Russian forces.
The collusion in plain sight
in Trump’s case, there was absolutely no secret! Trump quite openly ran on a pro-Russia platform, adopting Russian views on the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, defending Putin’s character, and vowing to break up the NATO alliance.
Remember, Mueller may be quiet, but he is working on all of this. The truth will come out.
In the meantime: November, November, November!
Good Election News
Sen. Dean Heller is Democrats’ biggest Senate target in 2018
He’s the only Republican senator up for reelection in a state Hillary Clinton won in 2016. He has a 2-point net approval rating, and President Donald Trump is underwater in the state. Nevada Democrats also have one big advantage: They have about 60,000 more registered voters in the state than Republicans do.
Historic number of LGBTQ identifying candidates running in Texas
More than 50 LGBTQ candidates are running in Texas this election cycle, more than three times what the state has seen in previous years.
Trump court move on Obamacare bolsters Democrats' midterm message
The Trump administration's decision not to defend key provisions of the Affordable Care Act could deal Democrats a sizable win going into the midterm elections, handing a party already prepared to run on health care a cudgel to use against vulnerable Republicans.
Voters, both in interviews and a series of polls, have consistently said that health care is the issue they care the most about going into the midterm elections and Democratic candidates have responded by making it the cornerstone of their attacks on Republicans.
On Thursday, the Trump administration clearly outlined their position on key -- and popular -- provisions in the Affordable Care Act, telling a court that the law should be invalidated and that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. In the legal filing, the Department of Justice argues in favor of invalidating protections for those Americans with pre-existing conditions.
Believe it or not, hard-rural-red South Dakota's June 5 primary was a bad day for Trumpists
Lots of votes in South Dakota suggested a skin-deep weakness to Trumpism in our rural corner of Trumplandia. Neal Tapio demonstrated most vividly that the only guy who can turn Trumpism into votes is the unique monster that is Donald Trump. Trump wasn't on any South Dakota ballot Tuesday, and Trumpism helped few if any candidates win.
The Democratic National Committee and members of Congress are turning to Hollywood for help with voter turnout and messaging ahead of the midterm elections and 2020 presidential campaign, quietly consulting with a group of actors, writers and producers here.
DNC Chairman Tom Perez, several House members and other top elected officials have already met with the group, formed by members of the entertainment industry in the wake of the 2016 election, that participants liken to a TV writers’ room, complete with producers of such programs as “Veep.”
“We’re a messaging strike force, mostly around voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts,” said Mathew Littman, a former Joe Biden speechwriter who helped to organize the group with Stephanie Daily Smith, a political consultant based in Los Angeles.
Voto Latino aiming to register 1 million new voters by 2020
Saying that they feel Latinos are in President Donald Trump’s “crosshairs,” Voto Latino, the group committed to engaging and empowering Latinos in politics, is preparing to roll out a campaign to hit 1 million registered voters by 2020.
The roll-out of the new program comes as Voto Latino adds three members to its board, including former Housing Sec. Julián Castro, who is eyeing a presidential bid of his own in 2020.
The new initiative, called Somos Mas(We Are More), will focus on seven states: Texas, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and California, including on 27 college campuses spread among them. They’ll also have a digital effort concentrated on North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
“I gently remind people that once Latinos register, their chance of coming out to vote is 80 percent,” said María Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino’s president and CEO. “The game is going to be played in seven states.”
The effort is aiming to spend $7 million, with $4 million of that identified so far. Kumar points out that there will be 12 million new young voters by the 2020 election, two-thirds of them of color — and that 60 percent of Latinos are under 33 years old.
Democrats are awesome!
It is super hard for Democrats to get their message out with the 24 hour trump show dominating the news. But they are there, working hard for our democracy. Here are some examples:
Democrats have a plan to prevent another Puerto Rico hurricane death-toll fiasco
The controversy over Puerto Rico’s real death toll stems largely from this fact: State and local governments can calculate disaster deaths however they want.
Democrats in the House and Senate want to change that. They want a standard federal process for states to calculate deaths from major natural disasters.
Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) will announce a bill on Monday that would require the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to work with scientists to identify the most accurate methodology to count deaths from major disasters.
The bill, called the Counting Our Unexpected Natural Tragedies’ Victims Act (COUNT Act), is the first step toward developing much-needed consistency and transparency around government death estimates — a glaring problem that emerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria’s landfall in Puerto Rico.
Democrats are working to find out how Jared and Ivanka have security clearance
5 Democratic congressmen want answers from John Kelly about the decision to grant security clearances to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump despite numerous lapses in their original Standard Form-86s.
Democrats are pushing against Pruitt’s corruption
Sens. Udall, Carper, and Whitehouse are requesting that the EPA IG investigate Scott Pruitt’s use of his official position to land his wife a job with Chick-fil-A.
Reasons for Optimism
America has seen tough times before (and survived)
It was another one of those weeks in which the wheels seemed to come off the axle of the American motor coach.
There is a tendency amid this chaos to think that American government is disintegrating before our eyes. But this week also reminded us that the country has survived worse. It was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, which itself followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., at a time of war and rioting. We survived 1968. We’ll get through this, too.
I took a break from my apocalypse vigil this week to speak with Robert Mickey, a political-science professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in U.S. political history. And I offer this glass-half-full perspective on our current troubles:
Trump will not destroy American democracy.
Trump is a symptom of problems, more than the cause.
We’ll solve these problems — eventually.
“Our political situation is much more stable than it has been at many periods in U.S. history,” Mickey tells me, “and our discourse is more civil than a lot of those periods.”
During the 1790s, it wasn’t at all clear the new country would survive foreign invasion or internal division. The 1810s brought more of the same. The divisions of the 1850s led to the Civil War. The 1890s were filled with farmer revolts, strikes, robber barons, massive immigration, war with Spain, an economic depression and the expansion of Jim Crow. The 1930s brought the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. And then there was 1968.
Now, by contrast, “we have stable democratic institutions across the entire country in a way we profoundly did not before,” Mickey says. “The institutions we have, while being challenged, have been a source of strength.” Federalism has been a check on Trump, as California, New York and other states push back against him. The justice system, though assaulted by Trump, is proving to be a check on him. Trump, though breaking norms, seems to lack the competence to pull off a direct assault on democracy.
ICE Came for a Tennessee Town’s Immigrants. The Town Fought Back.
The raid occurred in a state that is on the raw front lines of the immigration debate. Mr. Trump won 61 percent of the vote in Tennessee, and continues to enjoy wide popularity. The state’s rapidly growing immigrant population, now estimated to total more than 320,000, has become a favorite target of the Republican-controlled State Legislature. In 2017, Tennessee lawmakers passed the nation’s first law requiring stiffer sentences for defendants who are in the country illegally. In April, they passed a law requiring the police to help enforce immigration laws and making it illegal for local governments to adopt so-called sanctuary policies.
But Morristown, a town of 30,000 northeast of Knoxville that was the boyhood home of Davy Crockett, has drawn migrant workers from Latin America since the early 1990s, when they first came to work on the region’s abundant tomato farms. As stepped-up security has made going back and forth across the border more difficult, many of these families have settled into the community, enrolled their kids in school, and joined churches where they have baptized their American-born children.
So the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the Southeastern Provision plant outside the city and sent dozens of workers to out-of-state detention centers was the day people in Morristown began to ask questions many hadn’t thought through before — to the federal government, to the police, to their church leaders, to each other.
Donations of food, clothing and toys for families of the workers streamed in at such volume there was a traffic jam to get into the parking lot of a church. Professors at the college extended a speaking invitation to a young man whose brother and uncle were detained in the raid. Schoolteachers cried as they tried to comfort students whose parents were suddenly gone. There was standing room only at a prayer vigil that drew about 1,000 people to a school gym.
A lot has been written about some countries in Europe going populist. Less is written about the ones going the opposite way, and yet they exist too. Take Spain for instance:
Spain swears in mostly-female government
King Felipe VI on Thursday swore in Spain's new pro-EU government, with women holding the majority of ministerial posts.
Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez named 11 women to top posts including defence and economy in a cabinet with six male ministers.
That makes it the European government with the highest ratio of female cabinet ministers, ahead of Sweden's, which has 12 women and 11 men.
Dealing With Bad News
The Supreme Court’s decision to allow Ohio to purge voter rolls is a blow. No way around that. We all have our issues that get to us, and this is one for me. Yesterday was tough for me.
But you know what? It isn’t the last defeat we will face. That is how these battles work. Do you think that the world just opened up and changed for MLK? It didn’t. People fighting for what is right face defeat after defeat. That is how life works. Remember what Maya Angelou said:
We cannot be defeated. We are stronger than this. We keep fighting for our democracy and our ideals and our country.
Here is some great advice from a comment in a DailyKos Diary about this decision:
Don’t lose faith. Do what you can for November. They gave us another obstacle? Good thing we are up to the task! What can you do? How about this:
Donate to ActBlue
Donate to Swing Left
Send postcards to voters in other districts
Sign up to go door to door in your district
Sign up to drive people to the polls
Find your local Democratic Party and volunteer!
To close us out, the amazing students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas reminding us to measure our lives in love:
Have a great Tuesday everyone. So proud and grateful to be in this with all of you ❤️ ✊ ❤️