https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/charles-booker-rand-paul/

In November, McGrath fell far short in her fall race against McConnell, securing just 38 percent of the vote to the Republican leader’s 58 percent. With a campaign budget of more than $90 million, she finished barely three points better than progressive Democratic US Senate nominee Marquita Bradshaw in neighboring Tennessee. Bradshaw got little help from national Democrats and spent just $1.6 million.

Even before the November 2020 election, Kentucky Democrats were speculating about what Booker might have been able to accomplish in a race against a Republican incumbent. Could his mass-mobilization vision for building new coalitions and bringing new voters to the polls have gained traction if he’d had a little more time? Could the “hood to the holler” strategy have succeeded? They didn’t get an answer in 2020. But they could get an answer in 2022.

Booker announced this week that he has formed an exploratory committee to prepare a run against Paul. And that announcement was inspired. “They called us a long shot, said the movement in Kentucky was impossible. But, man, we proved them wrong,” Booker declared in a remarkable video released on Monday. “As we made our stand together, I could not have imagined the new world we were about to step into at the height of racial tension, the pandemic, and insurrection.”

Despite the failures of “a handful of privileged politicians” such as McConnell and Paul to meet the challenges of the moment, Booker says, grassroots Kentuckians have begun to make choices that “have already changed Kentucky forever.”

“Those folks building walls between us, they’re scared now,” says Booker. “They saw how close we came to shifting the scales. Our forward motion knocking them on their heels. They’ll stop at nothing to drag us backwards. They’ll lie. They’ll cheat. Just to keep us from the polls. So our next move is one we must make together. It’s a choice. A choice to adopt a Green New Deal for Kentucky and ensure a healthy planet for generations to come; a choice to guarantee quality healthcare for every man, women, and child. A choice to ensure every person in Kentucky has more money in their pocket. A choice to move mountains and build a society where we all go to bed nourished. Where we can all rest easy without worrying about our front door being busted down. Where we come together, united, from the hood to the holler, Black, white, brown, and to live in a commonwealth where everyone can thrive and reach for their God-given potential.”

Rand Paul should be scared. If Democrats in Kentucky and Washington embrace Booker’s “hood to the holler” vision and provide it with the support that was refused them in 2020, he can make Kentucky a 2022 battleground—and a testing ground for the next politics of a state and a nation. “We will transform Kentucky,” promises Booker. “And Rand Paul, you know it, too.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/16/john-fetterman-profile-2022-senate-politics-pennsylvania-481259

Since launching his Senate campaign in February, Fetterman has quickly amassed nearly $4 million—more than any other Democrat in the field and mostly in small-dollar donations. He’s running as a progressive and supports raising the minimum wage, Medicare for All, criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization. But he’s more middle-of-the-road on items like fracking and the Green New Deal. And while he’s pro-gun control, he has been a gun owner himself. (Two lesser-known contenders, liberal state lawmaker Malcolm Kenyatta and moderate county commissioner Val Arkoosh, have also already thrown their hats in the ring. Other big-name Democrats who are more centrist than Fetterman, like Rep. Conor Lamb, might still jump in.)

Fetterman’s fans think his brand of economic progressivism and his Carhartt-wearing linebacker vibe make him uniquely able to win elections in the kinds of Rust Belt and white working-class areas where Democrats have been hemorrhaging support. In a party often seen as too elite, the lieutenant governor is unfussy and plainspoken—he poses for official government photos in workman’s shirts and calls Republicans “simps” on Twitter. Fetterman’s campaign is making the case that he has the best shot at picking off Trump voters in the general election.

That is, if he can get anywhere in the primary first. Already, he’s butting up against fierce resistance from a wide array of party leaders. Some take issue with his politics: Moderates think his deep commitment to getting repentant convicts out of life sentences is too radical. Progressives say he’s too squishy on fracking. Other Democratic honchos—from left to center—resent his go-it-alone attitude. They argue he’s a loner who doesn’t spend any time trying to build alliances with other pols—and that as a result he’ll be less effective in office.

But for many party leaders, this isn’t a question of “the intractable outsider” vs. “the establishment.” Fetterman’s candidacy hits at the heart of the debate roiling the Democratic Party today: Should the party try to win back working-class white voters who stray further from them every year or double down on the suburban and Black electorate that has powered their recent wins? Fetterman’s white guy working-class appeal, they say, is outdated for a party that should be committed to addressing structural racism.

Pennsylvania has a history of rewarding outsider candidates. But Fetterman’s rocky history with party elites still poses a problem, because for every Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Democratic politics, there are still more Bernie Sanders who lose out to the establishment. In the very Senate seat that Fetterman is vying for, there is a history of crushed mavericks.

To win, Fetterman will have to figure out how either to surmount his party problems or render them irrelevant.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/superfund-taxes_n_6078a871e4b09614f9b395b2

For 15 years, the industries responsible for the nation’s worst toxic pollution helped pay into a federal trust for cleaning up waste sites through special taxes on petroleum, chemical components and corporate income. That program became known as “Superfund.”

But in 1995, the Republican-led Congress allowed those taxes to expire. They have never been reinstated, and the money for fixing many of the most noxious public health hazards in the U.S. has come entirely from taxpayers. That funding has dwindled, creating a lengthy cleanup backlog and leaving poor communities and fragile ecosystems exposed to deadly pollutants.

Efforts to reinstate these Superfund taxes have fizzled repeatedly over the past quarter-century. But Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), long a proponent of reimposing the levies on petrochemical companies, thinks the moment has finally come.

The Democrat plans to introduce a bill to restore the Superfund taxes next week. President Joe Biden has signaled his support, Democrats control Congress, and ― unlike the last time those stars aligned more than a decade ago ― public understanding of the threats of ecological destruction and the unequal burden placed on poor, often nonwhite communities has infused a wonky policy fight with the energy of a new-age civil rights movement.

“We have an administration that is committed to racial equity and to a broad vision of rebuilding and renewing America, which you can’t do if you have hundreds of Superfund sites that are not going to be cleaned up anytime soon,” Blumenauer said by phone. “The landscape [for passing the bill] is more favorable than it has been in the last 30 years.”

The legislation would impose an excise tax of fractions of a penny on crude oil and oil products, and between six cents and $14.30 on chemical feedstocks, while it would tax corporate income over $4.7 million at less than 1%.

Those represent relatively modest levies on companies like Dow Chemical, which reported profits of over $1.2 billion last year, and Exxon Mobil Corp., whose chemical division boasted its best quarterly result in years in the final three months of 2020.

But the funds add up. The levies would generate upward of $1.7 billion per year, or nearly $19 billion over the next decade, according to a Congressional Budget Office scoring of a past version of the legislation.

That funding would go a long way toward dealing with a backlog of unfunded Superfund projects that nearly tripled during the Trump administration, EPA data show. In 2016, the agency had 12 cleanups that stalled for lack of funding. By 2019, that figure grew to 34 across 17 states and Puerto Rico.

The lack of money in the Superfund gives polluters an advantage in negotiations with the EPA. With enough funding, the agency could fund cleanups on its own and stick companies that refuse to make a deal with hefty bills.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/new-poll-shows-americans-overwhelmingly-oppose-anti-transgender-laws

The rights of transgender Americans has been a growing topic of debate on sports fields, in state capitols and in Congress. The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, says more than 30 state legislatures have proposed more than 115 bills that would limit transgender rights, from participation on sports teams to access to medical care.

But two-thirds of Americans are against laws that would limit transgender rights, a new PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll found. That opposition includes majorities of every political ideology from liberal to conservative and every age group.

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1382836149098483715?s=20

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/gops-infrastructure-objection-is-a-plan-for-barebones-usa.html

Someone has to care for your children, your parents, and someday, you. Absent this person, who steps in? A relative, maybe, if they’ve got the time. Otherwise you’re on your own, left to sort out the burden of care with whatever resources you possess. Should those resources be plentiful, you’ll be fine. If they aren’t, you’re in trouble. You’ll have to leave work to care for your children. Your parents will depend entirely on you. And as you age, no one will be there to nurse you.

That fate is already reality for thousands of Americans who lack the means to afford child care or nursing care in their homes. President Biden’s new $3 trillion infrastructure plan takes some steps toward relief. It allocates new public funding to care work and child-care facilities. The plan is far from perfect: Some argue it doesn’t do enough to raise wages for child-care workers. But it contains a suggestion that is radical by American standards: Care work is infrastructure, as necessary as a road or a bridge.

Republicans disagree. On CNBC, Senator Shelley Capito of West Virginia said she wants a different kind of infrastructure plan, something that doesn’t fund “home-health aides and school buildings and all of these kinds of things.” Her colleague, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, tweeted that the Biden plan “is about anything but infrastructure.”

The Washington Post reports that a group of Republican senators, including Capito, are working on their own bill, which would “narrow their focus” to “traditional” infrastructure, without the corporate tax increase Biden had proposed to pay for it. Ignore, for a moment, Capito’s assertion that school construction is somehow not infrastructure: Care work, too, is infrastructure, as many left-wing economists, organizers, and advocates have argued for years. Republicans seem to believe that physical infrastructure simply appears, as if a giant hand descends from the sky and builds a road by itself.

The GOP doesn’t have a plan because it doesn’t think care work matters. They don’t value the people who perform it. When members of the party rail against the elites, and fashion themselves champions of the worker, they aren’t talking about low-income Black women who take care of the elderly. They aren’t even referring to the archetypal white man in a hard hat. That man has a family, and that family has needs. They’re thinking of themselves, and their own families, because they have the means to pay for care. Most Americans aren’t so fortunate. The GOP’s barebones America would leave millions behind, and that’s the way they like it.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/548551-biden-wins-over-skeptical-progressives

President Biden is approaching the 100-day mark high in the polls, thanks in large part to his ability to unite fractious Democrats behind his policies.

Two polls out earlier this week showed Biden’s approval ratings at almost full support. A Quinnipiac University survey showed Biden with support among Democrats at 94 percent. A Monmouth University poll showed Biden doing even slightly better, at 95 percent, with those in his party.

The results are surprising given the skepticism many progressives had for the 78-year-old Biden, whose age and background seemed out of step with the direction of his party.

But as he approaches the 100-day marker, Biden has been successful in uniting Democrats behind him.

There have certainly been some moments of friction.

Progressives criticized Biden for proposing a slight increase in the defense budget, rather than cutting it.

There have also been complaints about Biden’s handling of the border crisis, where child migrants are being held as a wave hits the border. On Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) gave a nudge to Biden on refugees, arguing it was time for him to lift a ceiling on the number allowed into the country.

Progressives are also wary of the Biden administration’s plans to move ahead with a $23 billion arms sale to the United Arab Emirates that had been approved under the Trump administration.

But Dyson, who with other historians met with Biden last month at the White House, said the president clearly learned lessons from his time as vice president under Obama, who was more cautious on policy issues.

“That kind of caution, carefulness, calculation, this man has seemed to throw to the wind,” he said.

Dyson said even he has been somewhat surprised by Biden’s approach, which he says is more Lyndon Johnson than Obama.

“I thought he would be working with Republicans out of necessity and temperament,” he said. “But he won’t compromise fatally with Republicans and he hasn’t done it with venom. He’s done it with a smile on his face.”

INBOX: Sen. Elizabeth Warren Endorses Karen Carter Peterson for Congress pic.twitter.com/JHrw6VyiLy

— Jacob Rubashkin (@JacobRubashkin) April 16, 2021