Democratic (Party) Direction

this provides a great example of something a dude credibly accused of shitty behavior could actually do towards making amends. Franken releasing a statement calling off the dogs against Gillibrand would go a long way I think.

I mean I fully expect them to fall in line if she does end up getting the nod but it's still incredibly galling

who, dare I ask, *is* your favorite candidate Fred

wow we just really hate women here i guess

I wonder if he knows hadrian had a wall named after him but nothing else we remember, so he wants trumps wall to be his legacy

disclosure, I knew of Franken grabbing ass during photos because it was on a friend's fb feed years ago before metoo. Hopefully his year of looking inward will let him admit he fucked up.

if there's one thing comedians are traditionally great at it's sober self-reflection

louis_ck_comeback_trail.htm

Remarkable how the grumbling at Gillibrand continues even after Sen. Tina Smith won by a bigger margin (10.4 points) and more total votes than Franken ever did.https://t.co/wfZLJ3Ah4t

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) November 26, 2018

who, dare I ask, *is* your favorite candidate Fred

― resident hack (Simon H.), 26. november 2018 16:31 (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, I think. Not that it matters.

Good piece

So what should progressives do in this moment? They should be doing what they have been doing already: pursuing an inside-outside strategy for exerting power within the Democratic caucus.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/11/political-cross-currents-house

lmao No Labels and Third Way are feuding https://t.co/2V7p96UkrQ

— Italian Alex Pareene (@pareene) November 27, 2018

i don't think this is a joke i'm dying pic.twitter.com/nhz0TAStAQ

— Italian Alex Pareene (@pareene) November 27, 2018

we laugh now but this all ends with Joe Lieberman and an ice pick in Mexico City

— Italian Alex Pareene (@pareene) November 27, 2018

So more laughter then.

— Peter Huestis (@RealSparklePony) November 27, 2018

"The Republican Party wants to raise your taxes, America."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-brady/top-us-house-tax-writer-floats-tax-bill-on-retirement-plans-irs-idUSKCN1NW07W

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz3L79mBKD0

Jeffries beats @RepBarbaraLee by 10 votes, 123-113, with Debbie Wasserman Schultz speaking on behalf of Jeffries https://t.co/K7pA1tOHw7

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 28, 2018

the old guard still going strong I see

Lee is 25 years older than Jeffries and has been in Congress about three times as long as he has.

I was referring to the ppl backing Jeffries but sure.

I've flagged k3v so much it doesn't matter anymore, but yeah...

― Frederik B, Saturday, November 24, 2018 3:50 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in which fred b seemingly thinks you can just keep flagging people and this accrues?

I don't know enough to take a side between Jeffries and Lee.

Jeffries is a big money Democrat and a member in good standing of Andrew Cuomo's New York machine. There is no way to spin his victory over Barbara Lee as a sign the party is moving in a progressive direction. https://t.co/639XkN8P3Z

— Zach Carter (@zachdcarter) November 28, 2018

when the usual suspects say that Hakeem Jeffries beating Barbara Lee is actually still a 'victory for progressives', remember what kind of 'progressives' they're talking about https://t.co/IiCamE3sgx pic.twitter.com/K087IjTQeC

— Matt Karp 🌹🦏🇺🇸 (@karpmj) November 28, 2018

Lee is, AFAIK, still maybe best known for this 9/14/01 speech and vote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_sxilhyV0

that's some bullshit, I like Barbara Lee a lot

xp

My org has a strong relationship with Lee (she made a shaky phone call to our founder seeking encouragement minutes before walking to the floor to give that speech) and we were all really hoping she'd come out on top, hallways quiet today

Barbara Lee is a total hero.

fuck these ppl

I do think it's important to note the 10 vote margin there -- people will rightly holler at me for comparing different units as I'm about to do, but looking at the trajectory since Spring 2016, it's super evident to me that far from "losing to moderates over and over," the narrative some might insist on about the left wing of the party, they're getting closer and closer to seizing the apparatus. Note:

Clinton (DNC Delegates): 58.93%
Sanders (DNC Delegates): 39.76%

Perez (DNC Members): 54.02%
Ellison (DNC Members): 45.98%

Jeffries (Caucus): 52.12%
Lee (Caucus): 47.88%

Add the victories from the noted lefty favorites to this narrative and this is looking like we're fighting a long battle that we're moving closer and closer to winning.

BIG HOOS, what is your take on Andrew Yang?

I think he's got a lot of borrowed good ideas (Medicare for All! Let's modernize uh timebanking fuck it why not) to sit alongside his main UBI hobbyhorse, but he's also totally got the flavor of a Silicon Valley Democrat. A lot of focus on ""innovating"" our way out of a variety of complex problems (free, uh, marriage counseling for everyone! find. . . new uses for shut down malls? we're gonna geoengineer the shit out of climate change) and that always gives me pause because it allows space for shitty ideas in the name of eclecticism.

and honestly UBI is complex enough territory that i don't have a clean take on it so i'll leave that one on the table for someone else to tee off

"allows space for shitty ideas in the name of eclecticism" is a useful formulation - thanks.

Dems just elected a "No Labels" person to run House recruiting for 2020 https://t.co/SXmxrH9c1M

— blupman. (@blippoblappo) November 29, 2018

lmao

I'm pretty much ALWAYS suspicious of UBI guys. If you can push for any formulation of universal income, you might as well push instead for its vastly superior cousin, universal services.

Some around me have encouraged me to be (uh) universally suspicious of UBI, but others insist that there's such a thing as a properly utopian-left-oriented UBI -- I just don't have a firm enough grasp of the nuance to pretend I know what I'm talking about.

Simon I'd be curious to hear more about universal services over here:

Basic income

I don't have an interest in the nuance, I want to not work, that's all really. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

see for ex The False Promise of UBI which takes Andy Stern (!) to task for UBI advocacy before coming around to:

The left hasn’t seriously organized around welfare rights for years. But in the coming years it will be more important than ever to defend what remains of U.S. social provision from Paul Ryan and company, particularly given the nasty racial tack that fight will undoubtedly take. And we can’t defend welfare just as a backstop for vulnerable and unlucky members of society, or as a handout to the benighted poor, but as a fundamental and universal good for all. In other words, we should advocate for the exact opposite of the Clintonian welfare reform programs of the 1990s, and the only kind of welfare program that can build a broad and universal constituency for social provision rather than marking out the undeserving poor.

A recent New York Times op-ed argued for UBI as a kind of reparations for decades of unpaid work done by women, echoing socialist-feminist arguments about the value of social reproduction. The Movement for Black Lives endorsed basic income as part of a reparations program, in the model of a new Freedom Budget. The labor movement in the United States has understandably focused on higher wages, but it can—and must—also revive the demand for shorter hours and more leisure. Basic income isn’t the only way to make that demand, and it isn’t even a necessary part of it—but its utopian elements can help drive a more visionary agenda for labor.

compare to The Wrong Kind of UBI:

While the idea of a basic income as an egalitarian reform can be traced back to Thomas Paine, interest in the policy has picked up in the last few decades. Belgian philosopher and economist Philippe van Parijs, for example, sees in the basic income the possibility for a “capitalist road to communism” — a strategy for leaping over socialism (understood as collective workers’ ownership of the means of production) and moving directly to communism (“from each according to her abilities to each according to her needs”).

In recent years, a UBI has been embraced in particular by the post-productivist left, which carries a strong feminist and ecological bent and rejects the traditional left’s valorization of labor and the working class.

For example, feminist theorist Kathi Weeks identifies a basic income as the linchpin of a “postwork political project,” which regards the minimization of work as the key to an emancipatory society. Her case for a UBI comes from the perspective of social reproduction feminism. In capitalism, socially reproductive labor within households is largely uncompensated, and still overwhelmingly performed by women; by severing the connection between income and activities designated as “work,” Weeks writes, a basic income “highlights the arbitrariness of which practices are waged and which are not.”

By shortening working hours, a basic income expands the realm of freedom and encroaches upon the realm of necessity, taking us closer to a society where we can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, criticize in the evening, and wash dishes after dinner. Furthermore, a UBI generates more hospitable conditions for social movements, freeing up time and energy and creating “a kind of unconditional and inexhaustible strike fund,” as the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright puts it.

More free time can also enable more ecologically sustainable lifestyles, replacing capitalist production with leisure.

i dont remember what No Labels is

tell me abt Bustos

damn she's good

Say it again for the people in the Senate https://t.co/4Qr0EsoGfQ

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 29, 2018

https://i.imgur.com/QONVIyz.gif

i am annoyed as f that she can't run in 2020. maybe she can primary schumer

^^ this, i think, is legit the move

that would be so sweet

is Schumer up for re-election in 2020?

cuz if so I can almost kinda see it happening. although it seems there are always more conservative/biz-oriented capitalist assholes in NY state than one would think

He is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_Senate_elections#New_York

My rep, Schrader (D-Or), was one of the blue dog fools who signed that open letter opposing Pelosi. I had considered phoning his three offices to heap scorn on him, but my wife beat me to it. So, I just snail-mailed his local office an earnest old-person letter, written longhand on lined legal pad paper, in which I scolded him severely in earnest old person language.

I composed it on the computer, but I thought that longhand would attract more attention and worry them more.

and worry them more.

but was it stained with bodily fluids?

No blood, sweat, or tears were shed in the making of that letter and I'll be damned if I would ever jack off for Kurt Effing Schrader. Mucus is the only bodily fluid yet unnamed and nope, I withheld.

puss? earwax?

I've been bottling my lymph and sending it to my representatives for years