Delaware Dem

Friday Open Thread [8.28.15]

Paul Krugman:

…Go back to the politics of 2009, when the new Obama administration was trying to cope with the most terrifying crisis since the 1930s. The outgoing Bush administration had already engineered a bank bailout, but the Obama team reinforced this effort with a temporary program of deficit spending, while the Federal Reserve sought to bolster the economy by buying lots of assets.
And Republicans, across the board, predicted disaster. Deficit spending, they insisted, would cause soaring interest rates and bankruptcy; the Fed’s efforts would “debase the dollar” and produce runaway inflation.

None of it happened. Interest rates stayed very low, as did inflation. But the G.O.P. never acknowledged, after six full years of being wrong about everything, that the bad things it predicted failed to take place, or showed any willingness to rethink the doctrines that led to those bad predictions. Instead, the party’s leading figures kept talking, year after year, as if the disasters they had predicted were actually happening.

…How would the men and women who would be president respond if crisis struck on their watch?

And the answer, on the Republican side at least, seems to be: with bluster and China-bashing. Nowhere is there a hint that any of the G.O.P. candidates understand the problem, or the steps that might be needed if the world economy hits another pothole.

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You should see the headline at Huffington Post

Now go there and read their huge story on DuPont’s destruction of West Virginia. Here is a taste:

Then, in the early 1980s, DuPont, which ran a sprawling chemical plant called Washington Works in nearby Parkersburg, approached the family about buying some acreage for a landfill. The Tennants were wary of having a waste dump so close to the farm. But DuPont assured them it would only dispose of non-toxic material like ash and scrap metal, and so they agreed to sell.

Shortly after the deal closed, Jim and Della, whose home abutted the new landfill, say their two young daughters started wheezing and hacking. Worried about the girls’ health, they moved to a house in town. But most of their relatives stayed, and Jim and Della continued hunting game and eating beef grazed on the farm.

Della took her daughters’ Girl Scout troop there to catch tadpoles in the creek and make plaster molds of deer tracks. Then, at some point in the mid-1990s, the water in the creek turned black and foamy, and the family began finding dead deer tangled in the brambles. The cattle started going blind, sprouting tumors, vomiting blood.

“One time this cow was coming down the road and it was just bellowing, the awfulest bellow you ever heard,” Della told me. “And every time it would bellow, blood would gush from its mouth and its nose. It just bellowed and bellowed and blood just kept flying, and then it would fall down, and it would try to get up … We didn’t have anything to shoot it with, so we just had to watch it until finally the cow bled to death.”

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Thursday Open Thread [8.27.15]

Jeet Heer at the New Republic says Donald Trump is not a populist, he is the voice of aggrieved privilege…

….of those who already are doing well but feel threatened by social change from below, whether in the form of Hispanic immigrants or uppity women (hence the loud applause he got at the first GOP debate when he derided “political correctness”). Far from being a defender of the little people against the elites, Trump plays to the anxiety of those who fear that their status is being challenged by people they regard as their social inferiors. That’s why the word “loser” is such a big part of his vocabulary.

Trump is not the first authoritarian bigot to be mislabeled a populist. In truth, the term almost always gets misused to describe movements that are all about persevering (and enhancing) hierarchy, not about creating a more egalitarian society. Populism has been misused to describe Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade, the John Birch Society, and David Duke’s white nationalism, among others. […]

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The Latest Dispatch from the Biden Front.

After Monday, the news on the Biden front has decidedly shifted. Remember we had Tomasky’s piece on a game changing Biden-Warren ticket after their meeting on Saturday. But now we get a lengthy piece from Glen Thrush at Politico that highlights that “Biden is still not himself” after Beau’s death, that his family and his wife Jill are not sold on another run, etc.

Mourning the loss of his eldest son Beau, who succumbed to a brain tumor three months ago, and under intense pressure from the presidential hype he’s helped stoke, Biden is more subdued, grayer and grimly on-task than usual — this while occupying political center stage for the first time since the promising opening days of his doomed 1988 campaign.

For all the breathless reporting on Biden’s every move and meeting, he is, at core, a 72-year-old man presented with an unexpected, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at one of the worst times of his life.
Several people Biden has talked to in the past month say he starts off conversations by conceding that “some days are better than others,” mixing recollections of Beau with logistical questions about mounting a state-by-state challenge to a vulnerable yet still formidable Hillary Clinton. “He’s just not himself,” says a longtime friend of Biden’s. “He’s sort of all over the place. He’s engaged but not in that childlike, manic way he usually is. He’s taking it all in and soaking up information, but he’s hard to read. And Joe Biden isn’t usually that hard to read.” […]

But reports that the vice president has all but made up his mind to run are simply not true, according to a half-dozen people in his inner circle interviewed by POLITICO.

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Mark Your Calendars: Legislative Panel on the FY2017 Budget Next Week

On Wednesday, September 2, at 7 pm at the Del Dem HQ in New Castle, the Progressive Democrats for Delaware are hosting a pretty great event: a Legislative Panel on the Budget for the next fiscal year. Remember the 6 Progressive Democratic State Representatives who voted against the Budget for FY2016 at the end of the last legislative session? Remember their reasons? Because the leadership did not address a looming deficit in the coming fiscal year and did not have the courage to raise taxes on the wealthiest in this state.

Well guess what, the planning for this fiscal year is here, and we have now reached the can that we have kicked down the road.

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Wednesday Open Thread [8.26.15]

Some idiots on Fox News complained about a Tennessee school’s decision to ban students from displaying any flag due to the renewed controversy over the Confederate flag. The exception of course, is the American flag flying on flag pols.

“This is a about a long-term trend where the people who run everything — the elites in Washington, New York, and L.A. — despise rural America and its culture, suspect anybody who doesn’t live in their cities of being a bigot, and they’re trying to crush that culture by banning its symbols — not just the Confederate flag, but the American flag,” “Fox and Friends” co-host Tucker Carlson said on Sunday. “They hate expressions of patriotism. It makes them uncomfortable.”

Co-host Anna Kooiman chimed in to say that “Americans are feeling guilty” about their patriotism.

Flying the American flag is about patriotism. Flying the Confederate flag is about treason, which is the opposite of patriotism.

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So… Sen. Chris Coons to decide his fate next Tuesday.

From Politico:

The drama could all be over soon. Delaware Sen. Chris Coons will announce his position on the Iran nuclear deal next Tuesday at the University of Delaware. We are assured he is still undecided, but his impending public announcement indicates there’s likely to be few, if any, Democrats that are still wavering when Congress comes back.

It is likely that the Coons vote won’t be a deciding one, as most Democrats in the Senate, save Schumer and Menedez, are not cowardly war hawks that love to fellate Dick Cheney. Chris Coons will decide whether to get down on his knees to join them or whether he will instead stand up for diplomacy. And Senator, while 2020 is five years away, we have long memories. If you vote for war, no matter what else you do, your legacy and career are forever destroyed. You could cure cancer, save Social Security, establish universal single payer healthcare, and provide a living wage to all Americans. But if you vote no on the Iran Deal, it all matters not.

Stay tuned. And once we have more details to when and where this UD Announcement is taking place, we will pass that on.

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The Christian Party

Finally, some conservatives are giving up the long con that they are not theocrats wishing to completely destroy the constitutional foundation on which this Republic was built. Some of them are leaving the Republican Party and forming their own Christian Party. Indeed, they already have a presidential candidate in Tennessee resident Darrell Trigg. His platform is as insane as you thought it would be….

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