Bernie Sanders Calls for Progressives' Election as Means to Defeat Trump

Will the Democratic Party establishment wake up and work for progressives in this Blue Wave year?

Democratic primaries in the coming weeks will tell, including in key states Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Ohio

In Ohio, Dennis Kucinich (with Tara Samples) is running for the Democratic Party's nomination for governor. The election is May 8.

Kucinich is backed by Our Revolution, a non-profit progeny of Bernie Sanders' 2016 run for the presidency. In a rational political culture, Our Revolution's endorsement would give the primary election to Kucinich.

The failed War on Drugs has destroyed communities, filled prisons and cost taxpayers millions.

More and more states are doing their part to restore sense, compassion and fairness to their criminal justice systems. It's time Ohio did the same. #OHGov https://t.co/ggMQ0dnEjr

— Dennis Kucinich (@Dennis_Kucinich) May 1, 2018

Tune in next Tuesday night at MSNBC to watch the results come in.

Pennsylvania

In Pennsylvania, Bernie Sanders has made three endorsements—John Fetterman for Lieutenant Governor, Greg Edwards for Congress, and Jess King for Congress. (The race for governor is widely seen as a likely win for Democratic incumbent Tom Wolfe).

The Pennsylvania election is May 15.

From a fundraising email from Bernie Sanders:

If we are going to defeat right-wing Republicans in 2018 and 2020, we need to win in states that Trump won, like Pennsylvania. And, in my view, the only way we win in those states is by supporting progressive candidates who have the guts to defend working-class families - white, black, Latino, Asian American, Native American - and take on the power and greed of the billionaire class.

Here's some very good news. In Pennsylvania there are three strong progressive candidates who can win their primary fights and win the general election.

As you know, Donald Trump represents something we have never seen before in the history of the United States. It is not just that he represents the interests of the wealthy and powerful. It's that we have never had a president with more authoritarian tendencies than him.

The 2018 midterm elections will be long remembered as a pivotal moment in American history because, if we are successful, we can put an end to the disastrous Trump agenda. If we are not, we will have at least two more years of a rapid shift toward authoritarianism, the further normalization of corruption and the continued rise of oligarchy.

But we cannot defeat Trump and the Republican Party with the same playbook, or by supporting the same kind of candidates long favored by the political establishment and financial elite. That is how we got to where we are today.

That is why I am traveling to Pennsylvania later this week to support three strong progressive candidates: John Fetterman for Lieutenant Governor, Greg Edwards for Congress, and Jess King for Congress. Their primaries are on May 15, and they need your help now. So here is the part where I ask:

This is our chance to elect three great progressives who will help lead the fight against Donald Trump and the dangerous Republican agenda. They need our help to win in Pennsylvania.

Our job in 2018 is to take on and defeat Trump's authoritarianism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia and religious bigotry. But we can only do that if we run candidates who can rally the American people around an agenda that works for them, not the billionaire class.

For more than a decade now, John Fetterman has been an outstanding progressive leader in Pennsylvania. From early in his career he has stood with the working families of the state as he advocated for a $15 per hour minimum wage, Medicare for all, marriage equality and ending the failed war on drugs. He has been an outspoken defender of women’s health, immigrant rights, racial justice and LGBTQ equality.

For the past 25 years, Greg Edwards has worked tirelessly to organize for justice in health care, education and economic dignity. The powerful grassroots movement behind Greg Edwards is championing Medicare for all, universal pre-k, debt-free college and raising the minimum wage, and he is living his values of unwavering inclusion by building the diverse coalition Democrats need to win in his district.

Jess King has seen firsthand how the biggest corporations have hurt workers and squashed competition. In Congress, she will work to pass Medicare for all, rein in Wall Street, break up corporate monopolies, and support the real job creators: small businesses in our local economies.

These are three great candidates you can be proud to support. Candidates like John, Greg and Jess will help us stop Trump while ushering in an era of strong progressive change in this country. Thank you for supporting them. They need our help.

In Solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

House Republicans Fly Into Black Hole on Anti-Infrastructure Ideology

The insanity of Wisconsin GOP Gov Scott Walker and Ohio GOP Gov John Kasich giving away federal money ($810 million from Wisconsin and $385 million from Ohio) will reverberate for years as the resulting labor-intensive projects would have provided badly needed jobs and begun a regional transit policy.

Dreams of launching an economic corridor among Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago are now the nightmare of Republican rule as House Republicans take the torch.

Many felt that Wisconsin Gov. Walker really wasn't that crazy to give away $810 million and all of those construction jobs, campaigning aside. But here we are with the GOP trying to explain transportation infrastructure policy; they're off to a clumsy start.

One suspects the GOP doesn't know what a regional transit policy is and has only a vague idea of the function of infrastructure.

Listening to Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) talk about infrastructure is like listening to a Tea Partier lecture on the dynamics of biological evolution.

But the House GOP cannot govern on banal talking points. And the entertainment value of Cantor's fiscal non sequiturs does not off-set the catastrophic damage they can inflict onto American society.

By Brian Beutler of TPM

One area the Republican party's anti-spending crusade puts them in a bind is infrastructure spending. Repairing roads and bridges, modernization, etc. have historically been bipartisan priorities -- but they've also always cost a lot of money.

Ask Republicans whether they want to include transportation infrastructure in their calls for broad spending cuts, and you don't get a very specific answer.

"We've got to learn how to prioritize and do more with less in all areas of government," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at his weekly press conference today. "It just is what it is. In the terms of transportation, we've got to figure out ways how to leverage dollars, how to come up with innovative ways to address the nation's ailing transportation infrastructure."

There's a reason for that. Ask instead how they propose to upgrade the country's transportation infrastructure without new spending, and it turns out there's no simple answer.

"I don't think anybody would tell you that our nation's transportation infrastructure is in a state of existence that we would accept," Cantor admitted.

We've got the aviation industry that, you know, anybody trying to fly in and out of the tri-state airports up there in New York? No. When that area gets clogged up, the whole nation, practically, is delayed. Something needs to be done in that arena trying to bring us into the new digital age here, in terms of those issues. But you look at the bridges in disrepair. The highways -- certainly, for sure, we've got to be able to address those. There are things that are occurring at the state level, some innovative ways to approach the need for financing. But at the end of the day we've got to look to see where the tax revenues are being spent, what they're being spent on, are the priorities what the American people expect. But this is the kind of analysis that's got to be undertaken. And it's going to take work. It's not some easy answer: just spend more. I mean, again, this is what the American people are tired of, this response, we just need to spend because there's no other answer. That's not good enough, because the money's not there, we don't have the money.This is a real fix.

On the one hand, the Republicans banned earmarks, so individual members now have less capacity to direct federal dollars to these sorts of projects than they used to have. On the other hand, they also want to diminish the executive branch's resources, making it less able to tackle these problems alone. That means more and more crumbling roads, more and more unhappy voters, more and more demands from local governments and constituents for Congress to do something about it. But without the will to tax and spend, they can't.

Wisc AG Van Hollen hosts McCain 'victory' party

From the Capital Times (Madison, Wis), John Nichols reports:

VAN HOLLEN TO HOST McCAIN "VICTORY" PARTY
After claiming for weeks that there was nothing partisan about his ambitious election season regimen of suing the Government Accountability Board and dispatching attorneys and special agents to polling places where high Democratic turnouts might reasonably be expected, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen comes out of the closet Tuesday night.
He's co-hosting the 'Wisconsin GOP Election Night Party' -- where supporters of John McCain and Sarah Palin will toast their successes or drown their sorrows -- at a Waukesha hotel.
Van Hollen, a McCain campaign co-chair, will be joined by other non-partisan good government activists like Republican congressmen Paul Ryan and Jim Sensenbrenner.

Wisconsin is in the bag folks, no one is complacent here. We'll handle Van Hollen and the pricks here.

But Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada and even Pennsylvania, any obstruction problems voting there, go the polls prepared:

- 1-866-OUR-VOTE Hotline (1-866-687-8683)
- Find your local Obama office and vote prepared to call them, http://www.barackobama.com/index.php
- Find your local paper's office and prepare to call them

Fighting Suppression in Swing States

If you can't convince them to vote for you: Stop as many as you can from voting.

That's the GOP's mantra, but Barack Obama and a coalition of groups are fighting back.

From the Brennan Center for Justice:

Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Russell Simmons have teamed up with the Advancement Project and the Brennan Center for Justice on a voter education campaign in the key states of Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado.

The campaign kicked-off Saturday, with the release of Public Service Announcements, released to radio, which gave voters important information to bring ID and to contact 1-866-OUR-VOTE with any problems.

Radio ads can be found here.

When voters show up at the polls and have their eligibility questioned, they may be asked to vote with 'provisional ballots.' Known as a fail-safe for voters who are being challenged or who are not on the rolls, provisional ballots should be treated skeptically.

Rules vary from state to state, but these ballots are often counted only if the voter appears in a voter registration database or if the voter can provide evidence of his eligibility in the days after the election. For this reason, many provisional ballots go uncounted. In the 2008 primaries, 40% of provisional ballots were ultimately rejected.

The bottom line is that provisional ballots are not counted like regular ballots and are easy to toss out, as the New York Times reported last week. In a close race, results can rest on how many provisional ballots are ultimately counted.

Our experts can talk about voter purges, challenges, provisional ballots, voting machines, registration problems, intimidation, judicial elections, and other election day issues.

BREAKING: Federal Judge Compels GOP IT Guru Mike Connell to Give Deposition in Ohio '04 Election Case

Update: In related GOP vote-suppression news, Colorado District Court Judge Orders CO Secretary of State to Cease and Desist Voter Purges

We'll what we see in Ohio.

Check out Federal Judge Compels GOP IT Guru Mike Connell to Give Deposition.

The Republican IT guru, recently described as a 'high tech Forrest Gump' for his proclivity to be ;at the scene; of so many troubling elections since 2000, and even at the heart of the 'lost' White House email scandal, has been ordered by a federal judge to appear for an under-oath deposition next Monday in Ohio.

The BRAD BLOG has learned that Mike Connell, the Republican IT guru whose company, GovTech Solutions, created Ohio's 2004 election results computer network appeared in federal court today, as compelled, and has been ordered to appear for his deposition on Monday, November 3, just 24 hours before Election Day 2008.

Today's court order came after a contentious hearing, at which Connell was present. The hearing was part of a long-standing voting rights violations lawsuit, King Lincoln v. Blackwell, as previously covered by The BRAD BLOG and by Velvet Revolution's Election Protection Strike Force here and here.

Bush Seeks Forced Provisional Voting in Ohio

Incredible! Bush wants the US DOJ to look into the Ohio voting controversy, seeking forced provisional voting that suppresses legal voters.

After being shot down by the US Supreme Court on using the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) for the purpose of declaring eligible voters to be tentatively ineligible because of database mismatches - a purpose that the text of HAVA expressively forbids - Bush and the Republicans will not give up.

As the Milwaukee Branch of NAACP and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association write in their amicus brief in the Van Hollen v. GAB Wisconsin case, provisional voting is inherently suppressive, and many provisional voters will not be able to come back the next day to further corroborate their legal voting status, and will leave the polling place not knowing if their votes count.

A provisional ballot is a second-class vote. The voter leaves the polling place not knowing whether his or her vote will count. He or she will only find out by calling a toll-free number or checking a website. If the answer is that the vote was not counted, the voter will be given a reason, but by then it will be too late to correct. That voter will have been directly and absolutely deprived of the right to vote without a meaningful remedy. (Link to brief filed by Milwaukee Branch of NAACP and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association in Van Hollen v. GAB.)

This will not be a problem in Wisconsin, but the GOP is not giving up on stealing Ohio, again.

From RollCall:
President Bush is asking the Justice Department to look into whether 200,000 Buckeye State poll-goers must use provisional ballots on Election Day because their names do not match state databases.

White House spokesman Carlton Carroll confirmed Friday that the president will forward a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), requesting that the Justice Department look into whether the state’s voter rolls comply with the Help America Vote Act.
In a letter dated on Friday, the House GOP leader wrote that with Election Day 'less than two weeks away, immediate action by the Department is not only warranted, but also crucial.'

Folks, we have a major political party, the Republicans, who will do almost anything to stay in power. It's time for mass civil disobedience, something, to disrupt this outlaw element in the American political body. This is not a Party that is deserving of any respect whatsoever in our democracy.

AFL-CIO to Hit McCain in Wisconsin, Swing States

John McCain's hostile voting record against veterans will be the topic of a major media buy by the AFL-CIO.

The ad blasts McCain for his close political commitments to George W. Bush on veterans issues.

From the AFL-CIO's Union Veterans Council:

The AFL-CIO also is launching a TV ad today featuring Jim Wasser, a Vietnam-era veteran and retired Electrical Workers (IBEW) member.

In the ad, Wasser speaks about McCain, whose military service is honorable but whose Senate voting record hasn’t supported veterans and their families. The ad will run in communities around the country hard-hit by the nation’s economic crisis.

In the ad, Wasser praises McCain’s military service and discusses his concerns about McCain’s political agenda.

"Every vet respects John McCain’s war record. It’s his record in the Senate that I have a problem with," said Wasser.

Wasser says McCain supports continuing to spend billions in Iraq, yet he repeatedly voted against increased funding for veterans health care.

"People should let McCain know that his agenda is not what we need. Not now," said Wasser.

According to the Washington Post, "The ads will run on stations in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin for the next three weeks."

Watch the video:

Daily Kos Headlines

Good stuff at Kos:

- Ashcroft: "History will not judge this kindly" (Update w/Video)

- "Mr. Barammobama going to win it all!"

- Getting ready for the third wave of financial panic

- Why Elizabeth Edwards is Wrong

- [Update][w/Video] IN-06 Dem. Candidate Barry Welsh Punched in the Face

- Inflation Is Getting Worse

- Levittown Lovin’ Obama – Seriously (Photos!)

- Colin Powell praises Obama

Obama Will Outperform Polls Again

Update: See Ohio Buckeye State Blog for updates on Ohio. For Texas updates, see Texas Burnt Orange Report.

And Hillary, ["I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002." - Hillary Clinton] you know all these new people whom Obama is bringing into the political arena and all those progressives: Many will not vote for you in a general election, so you can take your negative bs out of the Democratic Party any time now.


Obama has outperformed polls in most every state. Wisconsin had Obama up some seven points before he blew away Hillary by 17 points, despite a spate of negative Clinton attacks.

With the polls showing a virtual tie, Obama will likely outperform Hillary again, and even a close showing in Ohio and Texas will be enough to show Hillary the door no matter how long she decides to stay in.

From Poster.com:

Polls Show Surging Obama in Texas and Ohio

From AmericaBlog (via Pollster.com):

I'm thinking a definite upward trend for Obama.