Tips, Comments, Complaints, Etc!

Sen. Gillibrand: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren Leaders Of The Democratic Party

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is seeking a second full term in 2018, is asked to name examples of leaders in the Democratic party. Gillibrand replaced Hillary Clinton in the Senate when she resigned to become President Obama’s Secretary of State.

On CNN Monday morning Gillibrand cited Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as leaders of the party.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are testing Democrats’ left turn

It took a few minutes to find an opening, but when it came, Sen. Elizabeth Warren did not squander her best chance to connect with a heavily black audience inside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in late August.

“I was a Sunday school teacher,” said Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a former Harvard law professor, drawing a burst of applause before reciting from memory the verse in the Book of Matthew about helping “the least of these.”

A week earlier, at a black church in Detroit, Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, was handed his own opportunity to show a little-known side of himself to African-Americans: the pastor who introduced Sanders highlighted the senator’s youthful activism in the civil rights movement. But when Sanders took the podium, he made no mention of his attendance at the March on Washington, his arrest during a demonstration in Chicago against segregation or much of anything at all from his biography that could endear him to the congregants at the Fellowship Chapel.

The liberal senators are often linked, spoken of in the same breath as if there is scarcely any difference between them. But as Warren and Sanders work to expand their constituencies ahead of possible runs in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, the differences between them are becoming more marked. How their overlapping audiences sort themselves out could prove revealing about the party they seek to lead.

..

The Democratic center of gravity has plainly shifted leftward, as Sanders demonstrated last week when the senators eyeing presidential bids flocked to his news conference to support his “Medicare for all” legislation.

But between Sanders and Warren, there are important distinctions in political style, and whoever emerges as the dominant progressive candidate in 2020 will test how far Democrats have lurched in the two decades since Bill Clinton steered the party toward the center. The Democratic base’s choice could reveal how willing liberal voters are to disrupt the country’s political system the way Republicans did by nominating President Trump.

VINCENT FORT ANGERED DEMOCRATIC ELITES WHEN HE ENDORSED BERNIE SANDERS. CAN HE BE ATLANTA’S NEXT MAYOR?

ON A RECENT Saturday afternoon in Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood, Vincent Fort was out working the voters. As the populist wing of the Democratic Party has surged in recent months, it has created an unusual problem for a politician like Fort. Accustomed to being on the outer edge of the party, he now sounds like pretty much everybody else.

Or, as he puts it to one voter, everybody else now sounds like him.

“They want to deal with gentrification and all that,” he says of his opponents, “but they haven’t done it until the epiphany of the last six months.”

Fort, who served as the Democratic whip in Georgia’s state Senate until he resigned to run for mayor, has been a fixture of populist politics in the state for two decades. While politics in Georgia have swung from left to right, Fort served as the rare example of a politician who stuck by his guns, in good times and bad.

Ben Speight, the organizing director of Teamsters Local 728, says endorsing Fort’s bid was a no-brainer for the union. “This is about a guy literally walking the walk, viewing his role as a state senator as a way of amplifying movements,” he observes.

For years, that form of movement politics made Fort a lone voice in the wilderness. But, with radical municipal politics rising in neighboring Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham, Alabama, there’s a chance that his moment has finally arrived.

This radical money policy would easily pay for Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for all

Last week, Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-all dream got a lot more real. Long consigned to the fringes of politics, Sanders’ bill now has at least 15 cosponsors in the Senate. Admittedly, the bill is quite utopian, which has opened it up to criticism. But it should be understood as the opening bid in what will surely be a long and painful bargaining process.

That said, Sanders does have at least one big problem on his hands. Ironically, it’s not a problem created by his leftism or idealism. Rather, it’s created by the important way he actually agrees with the centrist political establishment.

Namely, how will Medicare for all be paid for?

Sanders has released some ideas for new taxes. But he tends to be pretty cagey on the question. At the same time, he doesn’t really deny that his proposal needs to be paid for, leaving him defenseless to charges of unseriousness.

Well, you know what? He should deny it.

It would be totally justifiable on the economics. But it would also drastically expand Sanders’ options for building a majority coalition of legislators.

A conversation with Bernie Sanders about ‘Medicare for all’ by John Nichols

Why do you think single-payer is gaining so much traction at this point?

SANDERS: What I think you’re seeing now is this:

The savage Republican attack (on the Affordable Care Act and other existing health care programs and protections), this effort to throw over 20 million people off the health insurance they have, people are resisting that.

People also understand that the Affordable Care Act did not go far enough. No one will tell you that deductibles are not too high, that co-payments are not too high, that premiums are not too high. The price of prescription drugs is totally unacceptable. Everybody acknowledges that. The Affordable Care Act did not resolve those issues.

People are saying, OK, we made some progress. Twenty million more people have health insurance; that’s important. In states like Kentucky and West Virginia, the number of uninsured plummeted; that is a good thing. But has health care reform gone anywhere near far enough? The answer is that it has not.

So now people are saying: What is the alternative? And then, suddenly, a lot of people are saying: You know what, maybe we should join every other major country on Earth in guaranteeing health care for all people. The good news for us is, we’re not proposing some kind of radical idea. I live 50 miles away — five zero — 50 miles away from Canada; they, without any big deal, under Liberal governments, under Conservative governments, they have a health care system that is far more cost-effective than ours, that guarantees health care to all people with prescription-drug costs that are far lower.

What Do Centrist Democrats Even Stand For?

Last week was a momentous one for left-wing politics in America. In a testament to his newfound influence on Capitol Hill, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced his “Medicare for All” single-payer health care bill with 16 co-sponsors. Even former Senator Max Baucus, a moderate Montana Democrat who helped kill a public option in the Affordable Care Act, is now on board. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank may have been exaggerating when he claimed that “Democrats have become socialists,” but there’s a reason that David Duhalde, deputy director of the Democratic Socialists of America, told him “this is a high water mark” for his ideology. “The left is the rising force in the party,” Michael Kazin, the Georgetown University historian and editor of the leftist Dissent magazine, told me. “It seems to be the part of the party that has ideas—the part of the party that stands for clear reforms.”

But plenty of Democrats aren’t ready to join Sanders in pulling their party left—including the woman who beat him in the 2016 primary. Promoting her new book in an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein published Wednesday, Hillary Clinton distanced herself from “the far right and the far left, both of whom want to blow up system and undermine it.” She said, “I think we operate better when we’re kind of between center right and center left, because that’s where, at least up until recently, most Americans were.” A decreasing number of Democrats in Washington occupy that band in the political spectrum, but they exist—people like Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall and Third Way vice president Jim Kessler. In the face of an ascendant progressive populism—one credited with injecting big, bold policy ideas like single-payer and free college into the Democratic bloodstream—these moderates reject the idea that Democrats are (or ought to be) all socialists now. And they say they’ve got their own ambitious ideas for the party’s future, ones that can actually appeal to parts of the country that handed Donald Trump the presidency.

“We need big and systemic changes in this country,” Marshall told me. “That doesn’t mean they need to be social democratic imports from Europe…. Part of what’s curious about my friends on the left is they think America’s destiny is to become a European-style welfare state.”

https://youtu.be/t4_qOyg4zU4

Splintered: Single-Payer Litmus Test Has Cut The Democratic Party In Two

The Democratic Party establishment may be skeptical of it it, but there is enthusiasm and energy behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) single-payer initiative. So far, it has 15 co-sponsors. It’s not that they’re against the aims of the bill, alternatively called Medicare-for-all, it’s the price tag, the optics, and the strategy in selling it.

To the more centrist wing, it’s causing concern that progressive cohorts want to use this as a litmus test for elections, in which the Democratic Party’s already limited pool of talented up starters could further shrink if this is the death knell for a potential candidacy for any office.

Like it or not, the Democratic Party is not a national one. It’s been decimated during and after the Obama era, with 1,000 fewer Democrats in office than there were in 2008-09. The GOP control Congress, the White House, 69/99 state legislatures, and two-thirds of the governorships. The Republicans are at the apex of their power.

In the rural regions that are not receptive to hyper-left wing politics that dominate the Silicon Valley area. Democrats would get killed—and a large portion of the party, albeit the older wing, knows this.

As Democrats try to unite in order to push an agenda forward for 2018 and beyond, Sanders’ single-payer push had split them right down the middle—and there’s ample concern that this push to purity could lead to all-out civil war

The Guardians Maria Liveblog

Hurricane Maria: Storm grows in force to category 5 as Caribbean battered again – live

Senate passes $700 billion defense policy bill, backing Trump call for steep increase in military spending

The Senate passed a roughly $700 billion National Defense Authorization Act on Monday but failed to include an amendment that would have eliminated the automatic spending cuts under the controversial sequester mechanism.

The NDAA, which sets forth the Pentagon’s budget and major programs for the next fiscal year, does authorize an additional $8.5 billion for the Missile Defense Agency to strengthen homeland, regional and space missile defense. That authorization is $630 million above the Trump administration’s request.

The final vote was 89 to eight. It required a simple majority to pass the Senate.

The 2018 national defense bill also authorizes just over $141 billion for military personnel costs, including costs of pay, bonuses, benefits and moving expenses. It provides a 2.1 percent increase in pay for troops.