Progressives (Liberals)

You mean programing the middle class, while it lasts under progressive policies, and the lower income groups to think alike, conform, and basically stagnate. The whole idea is condescending and insulting. You clearly disdain the individual classifying them in a group based on income and needing advice based on that income for social reasons. People that make similar amounts of money could not be anymore different.

When you throw individual liberty under the bus, that bus will finish its route when it eventually runs you over, and will continue running over people that gets in its way. You cannot tell an individual how to think without fascism or worse.

You describe your upbringing in the US propaganda mill perfectly, cj.



So why then do you so readily embrace the program?



You've got a long way to go before you can join the ranks of the propaganda meisters. Stick to munching the grass, chewing your cud and pretending your are part of the political system.



The worse being the USA.

As I've said here before, I was raised by my grandparents. They were conservative Democrats, and my grandfather was very active, he was the precinct committeeman. I've always described myself as a moderate. That has become a dirty word, too, at least among the right-wing, which becomes more extreme with each passing day.

Several years ago, I was in the local diner, and one of the loud-mouths there asked me if I were a librul or a conservative. I told him I am a moderate. He then said, in a high sneering voice: "Oh, can't we all just get along?" So I walked down the counter and leaned over him, and told him that I had no ambition to get along with him. I then told he if he ever spoke to me that way again, I'd shove his teeth down his throat. Like all bullies, he was basically a coward. He did never bring politics up with me again.

The modern activist conservative is, essentially, a bully. They hope to intimidate the left (such as it is) and the center into silence. I don't really think there is much of a left in the United States. If I truly defined myself politically, I would say that I'm a moderate Anarchosyndicalist.

You can't open your mouth without hypocrisy gushing out, Set.

Is that why they are at the Senate hearing screaming like babies? Oh wait, they are not conservatives. Your statement runs counter to reality. The intimidation and violence clearly come from the Left.

Hypocrisy runs deep and thick thru the American psyche.

I hold out for liberalism, Democratic Socialism, the New Deal, end to warmongering - I anticipate capitalism and the far right ******* up everything for a long time to come. The Great Depression made liberalism viable, because so many of the rich suffered too, but there is nothing to restore it, now that it has been sabotaged and killed off. The capitalists have learned how to put the cost of depressions and recessions square on the working persons' backs. We are no longer all in the same boat.

You seem to operate under some silly, misguided notions that you and them were ever in the same boat, Edgar.

One reason I don't respect regular Democrats already in office.

I would think for a true liberal protecting free speech would be a good start, it could just be in a coma.

I am feeling proud that my home state dems nominated Ayanna!

Capuano is a good man with a good progressive voting record.
Ayanna's argument was that the district needed more than the votes --ie. she wants to be a vocal proponent of the progressive movement.

I understand that, I just wish one didn't have to be sacrificed for the other. According to the piece Edgar left the other day, he was a reliable leftist vote which we need all we can get. (those on the left)

Until the cancers of Pelosi, Schumer, and such are removed, the fortunes of progressives will be stalled and Republicans continue to prevail. These two in particular are getting paid off to lose to the opposition.

Trump’s Enablers Aren't Saving Us—They’re Looting the Nation
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trumps-enablers-say-theyre-saving-us-but-theyre-just-looting-the-nation/

The anonymous op-ed in the New York Times Wednesday that described a White House in meltdown was not an act of courage. It was a piece of moral cowardice of the worst sort.

The writer wanted to assure us that there are “adults in the room” around Trump who are reining in his worst plans and quietly sabotaging his attempts to withdraw from trade deals or assassinate Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

I am not assured. The author gloated,

There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
And that quote tells you everything you have to know. This author supported the tax scam passed by the GOP last February, which cut government services for most people and gave the super wealthy a huge and wholly undeserved tax cut. This is a constant stapping of the dep


The author supports “deregulation” of a sort that has gutted the environmental regulations that had reduced poisons in our air, soil and water. This regime is literally trying to poison babies. This guy thinks that is great.

Trump raised the US war budget to $700 bn. even though the US has no peer enemy. We spend as much on our military as the next 14 countries combined. All together, the US probably spends $1 trillion a year on military-related expenses. Military spending creates few jobs, and about half of that money is given out to private contracting firms, so that it is welfare for the rich. The money could have gone to student debt relief or rebuilding Puerto Rico. This guy thinks that the bloated military budget is an accomplishment.

The conclusion is that the more corrupt sections of the ruling US business classes are perfectly willing to use Trump to achieve their Libertarian paradise of no taxes on the rich and their praetorian paradise of a military potlatch. (The dictionary defines it this way: “(among North American Indian peoples of the northwest coast) an opulent ceremonial feast at which possessions are given away or destroyed to display wealth or enhance prestige.”)

While they are taking steps to reinforce inequality, harm our health and increase instability, they are mildly worried about the erratic behavior of the big orange man who brought them to Washington.

They are managing and manipulating the idiot president and achieving their fondest goals of looting the country.

The op-ed isn’t treason to Trump. It reveals that the Trump administration is committing treason toward “We the People.”

—-

(CNN)Progressive insurgents are hoping to deliver yet another gut punch to the Democratic establishment on Thursday, this time in tiny Delaware, where Sen. Tom Carper is facing a primary challenge from the left by first-time candidate Kerri Evelyn Harris.

The governor for eight years before entering the Senate in 2001, and the state's lone US House representative for a decade before that, Carper began his run in statewide office, as treasurer, in 1977. After former Vice President Joe Biden, who endorsed him two weeks ago, Carper is probably Delaware's best-known political figure. A loss to Harris would be the first of his long career.
Ayanna Pressley's win shows just being liberal isn't enough in today's Democratic Party
Ayanna Pressley's win shows just being liberal isn't enough in today's Democratic Party
But in 2018, Carper's Senate seniority and decades of experience are as much a burden as a selling point. Harris, a 38-year-old Air Force veteran and community organizer, is pitching new blood and a different worldview. By almost any metric, ousting Carper would be the Democratic left's most astonishing victory of the season, which has helped the cash-strapped campaign attract a late outside boost from the progressive Working Families Party.
Respectful, per Delaware's exacting demands for politeness in the political arena, but firm in her criticism, Harris, who is biracial and gay, has sought to cast Carper, 71, as an out-of-touch centrist who, for all his good intentions, is disconnected from "the urgency of now."
"We can't wait a little bit longer for a pay raise," Harris said in an interview on a searing hot Labor Day in Wilmington. "We can't wait a little bit longer for health care that we can actually afford to use. We can't wait a little bit longer for our children to be properly educated or for our climate to be clean. These things are necessary and they have to happen now."
The Ocasio-Cortez connection
Back in late June, Harris took a brief detour from her own efforts to stump alongside a little-known candidate in New York's 14th Congressional District named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both are running on platforms headlined by "Medicare-for-all" single payer health care, a $15 minimum wage, ending cash bail and a refusal to accept corporate political action committee donations.
When Ocasio-Cortez won her primary, a handful of organizers from her team traveled south to join Harris' small, feisty operation. Last Friday, Ocasio-Cortez hosted a pair of town halls with Harris in Delaware.
"She had my back and I'm here to have hers," Ocasio-Cortez said in Newark, "because that's how the progressive movement really works."
But the similarities between their contests have been checked by Carper's relentless political retail work. Unlike New York's Rep. Joe Crowley, whom Ocasio-Cortez defeated, the three-term incumbent has over the years gone to great lengths, literally, to sustain his relationship with voters back home. He commutes almost daily from Wilmington to Washington, DC, and frequently touts the 482,000 miles he's put on his Chrysler minivan "traveling up and down the state."
Carper and his supporters are quick to underline the differences between him and Crowley, a Queens Democrat with a home in Virginia who Ocasio-Cortez cuttingly alluded to in her viral campaign ad as someone who "doesn't send his kids to our schools, doesn't drink our water or breathe our air." They have also gently, but consistently over the last couple of days, sought to portray the Harris campaign as a front for out-of-state progressives.
"My gut tells me that they believe that Kerri is the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and they believe that I'm somehow the next Joe Crowley," Carper said in an interview at a Labor Day picnic in Wilmington. "They think that Delaware is New York City. And I think they're mistaken on all three counts."
Sweat seeping through a green Navy flight suit, worn to honor the late Sen. John McCain, Carper -- now the Senate's only Vietnam veteran -- argued that voters in Delaware want two things he is uniquely positioned to provide: someone with the clout to shape compromise on Capitol Hill while also leveraging that power to "stop Trump from ruining this country."
"Delaware's almost schizophrenic, and I think the country is too. They want us to stop Trump from doing more stupid and, in some cases, cruel things, at the same time they want us to try to find common ground on a number of other issues," he said, ultimately landing on an optimistic note: "And I think you can do both. I think you can do both."
To say Harris takes a different view of the current landscape misunderstands, or at the least underestimates, the fundamental clash at the heart of this contest -- and so many others in this remarkable season of upheaval in Democratic politics. Harris has been critical of Carper's record, including two votes in particular that favored the banking industry and pharmaceutical companies, but the roots of her challenge run deeper.
A different kind of politics
Their exchanges at a debate last week, the only one of the campaign, made clear the ideological and stylistic gulf. When Harris, in response to a question about college costs, said she would push for the elimination of all student debt, Carper dismissed the suggestion as plainly unrealistic.
"I don't have a magic wand that would enable us to do that," he said. "It would cost a pretty penny."
"What bothered me," Harris said days later of his response, "is that there's this idea that these are extreme ideas. But they only seem to be extreme for those who are multimillionaires living in Congress. They don't feel extreme to the people that you speak to in the streets. ... We see that 'magic wands' are always available and present when corporations win."
She has also criticized Carper's vote in 2006 to elevate current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Carper was the only Democrat still in the Senate to cross party lines.
Asked during the debate why he had backed Kavanaugh then, Carper said his decision turned on the guidance of distinguished Delaware Judge Walter Stapleton, for whom Kavanaugh had clerked, and other respected jurists from the state.
"I voted my hopes over my fears," he concluded. "I will not do that again."
At the debate, Harris returned to Carper's explanation when questioned about her inexperience in elected office, suggesting that his vote on Kavanaugh and, more recently, to back former drug company executive Alex Azar as the new secretary of health and human services underlined the need for a "diversity of experience."
"It's scary when you hear him say, 'I voted for Kavanaugh because all of his people (vouched for him),' " she said on Monday. "That's also the excuse for why he voted for Azar. He said he knew someone who went to Yale with him and said he was a good guy. If that's your reason for voting on things that can affect all of our lives, that's a problem."
Carper said in a statement after the confirmation vote that he believed Azar was qualified for the job and shared his desire to transform the health care system "to one that rewards health care providers based on the quality of care patients receive."
The shadows of 2010?
Delaware is no stranger to unexpected primary challenges -- or bewitching outcomes.
The state has mostly elected some combination of the same handful of leading politicians, from both parties, over the past few decades. But it has also seen one of them, former GOP governor, lieutenant governor and US Rep. Mike Castle, lose to an outsider who in turn squandered what had been viewed as a winnable Senate seat. That was in 2010, during the rise of the tea party.
Eight years on, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, who defeated Republican nominee Christine O'Donnell that November, is warning that a win for Harris on Thursday could similarly imperil what's now considered a safe Democratic seat.
"I think it would be dramatically harder for (Harris) to win in November than Tom Carper," Coons said in a phone interview. "I think there were a number of Delaware Republicans who voted for Christine O'Donnell in 2010 to send a message to Mike Castle, that they wanted him to be a little sharper, little more conservative, little more ideologically pure. But they didn't imagine that they were handing the seat away."
The Harris campaign rejected any claim that her nomination would open the door for the eventual Republican nominee, either Gene Truono or the favored Sussex County Councilman Rob Arlett, who was President Donald Trump's state chairman in 2016.
Joe Dinkin, campaigns director for the Working Families Party, which through its independent expenditure committee pledged to back Harris with $100,000 in field work, direct mail, texting and digital advertising in the home stretch of the campaign, dismissed Coons' warning as "preposterous."
Even with the late rush of support, Harris' campaign enters primary day having been outspent by something like 20-to-1, according to Federal Election Commision filings. Carper also boasts nearly every big ticket endorsement the state has to offer, from Biden to the Delaware AFL-CIO, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the state teachers union. The Working Families Party's outlay alone will nearly match Harris' total fundraising, which came in at around $120,000.
"We're investing substantially in the race because Carper is operating a version of the Democratic Party that might've passed muster in the 1990s," Dinkin said. "But it is not the direction progressives want to see right now."

Carper's a projected winner.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/michael-moore-trump-is-a-symptom-not-the-disease/

Trump is “the symptom” of deep dysfunction within U.S. democracy—”not the disease.”

Notably, that very same message was echoed by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, in a speech on Friday in Illinois.


The nation’s current crisis “did not start with Donald Trump,” Obama said. “He is a symptom, not the cause.”

The film examines some of the undercurrents of American culture which Moore has explored in his previous films: the unchecked corporate greed which has led to the decimation of whole communities and the 2008 financial meltdown, the subject of his films “Roger and Me” and “Capitalism: A Love Story”; the immense power of private interest groups like the NRA and for-profit health insurance companies, as he explored in “Bowling for Columbine” and “Sicko.”

All those dynamics helped to set the scene for November 9, 2016, when Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States.

“This is not a film telling you what a jerk Donald Trump is or what an [sic] buffoon Donald Trump is or what a liar Donald Trump is. You already know all that,” wrote Moore. “[Trump’s 2016 win] was the logical end result of a long, downward spiral in America that culminated in one of our most loathsome citizens conquering our most powerful office. One of our most deceptive minds, commanding the bully pulpit. One of our most fraudulent hucksters, armed with the powers of the presidency to protect him.”

In addition to Trump, Moore takes aim at Obama for his administration’s insufficient response to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as well as Democratic establishment leaders including Nancy Pelosi and the Clintons for driving the party to become increasingly beholden to corporate interests while ignoring the needs of working class families and the common good.

You could feel the crowd squirm when Michael Moore turned on Obama and Pelosi: FAHRENHEIT 11/9 is an equal opportunity offender. It has rage to spare, but also a sense of old-school solidarity.
As McClennen writes, Moore uses the Flint water crisis as a microcosm representing how politicians like Gov. Rick Snyder (R-Mich.), who made the decision to switch the city’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River to save money, have come to willfully ignore the humanity of their constituents:

Moore makes the case that the story of Flint is not one of isolated corruption and greed; it is a story of a nation that has allowed this sort of criminal behavior to be more than acceptable, but routine…Moore works hard to drive home the point that the story of Flint is not an isolated incident or a tragic accident, but proof of the triumph of corporate capitalism over democratic ideals.

The film was well-received
“This film is the moment of truth we’ve all needed for some time,” Moore wrote on his website, “and I believe its release in theaters nationwide on September 21 may well be the real beginning of the end for Donald J Trump (and perhaps, more importantly, the eventual end of the rotten, corrupt system that gave us Trump in the first place).”

“It’s a story about hope—and what false hope has done to us. It’s a story about deception and betrayal,” he continued. “It’s a story about what happens to a nation when it hits rock bottom. It’s the story about who we are as a people and what it means to be an American in the era of Trump.”

I am glad Obama is out there. People can now remember the terrible things he did, and how the economy moved like a snail headed into the wind. Trump will tear him a new asshole.