yurbud
yurbud's JournalAl Gore could unite business & progressive Democrats in 2020.
I just watched the trailer for the sequel to AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.
Al Gore was part of the DLC team, but has progressive credibility because of his work on climate change.
Bernie or someone like him could win, but the business wing of the party would fight tooth and nail to keep them from reaching the nomination.
Hillary would have the unqualified support of the business wing, but her ties to Wall Street and the neocons and their cruel, destructive foreign policy would mean progressives might vote for her, but not have an infectious enthusiasm that gets people to the polls who otherwise wouldn't go.
Al Gore is the only candidate with credibility in both wings of the party.
Of course whether someone like him or further left gets the nomination depends of the Democratic Party leadership realizing they ain't going to win over the Republican base, or to the extent that they do, it won't be by aping Republican policies.
After Trump, the only way GOP could win presidency is if Democrats screw up
I suspected they were trying a variation of the Schwarzenegger grift they pulled on California, to get low information voters to polls to vote for a celebrity.
After Arnold, Republican candidate Meg Whitman won about as many votes as you would expect the GOP to against Jerry Brown.
The celebrity gimmick seems like something that should only work once, or maybe once a generation.
If the Republicans go back to their usual sort of extremists, the can't get close enough to winning for voter suppression and vote rigging to credible even if it could put them over the line.
How could they hope to win after this, at least at the presidential level?
If private ISP's want to sell our data, it's time to revive PUBLIC run internet
and put these assholes out of business.
Add the internet to the list of things the private sector can't be trusted with without them blackmail or screwing us.
How many places in America do this?
Borrowers 'Chilled to the Bone' as DOE Reneges on Student Loan Forgiveness
What if you took a low paying public sector job and arranged for lower payments on your student loans based on the promise of public service loan forgiveness, and a new administration breaks that promise?
This is an opportunity for Democrats to remind voters what they do better, and once back in power, we need to devote at least as much the time, money, and effort to bail out student loan borrowers and others crapped on by the financial sector as we do to bailing those who did the crapping.
Responding to an ongoing lawsuit from four borrowers, the DOE has given no explanation but says that approval letters sent to individuals who signed up for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program are not in fact "binding," the New York Times reported Thursday.
Times reporter Stacy Cowley wrote:
In a legal filing submitted last week, the Education Department suggested that borrowers could not rely on the program's administrator to say accurately whether they qualify for debt forgiveness. The thousands of approval letters that have been sent by the administrator, FedLoan Servicing, are not binding and can be rescinded at any time, the agency said.
The filing adds to questions and concerns about the program just as the first potential beneficiaries reach the end of their 10-year commitment—and the clocks start ticking on the remainder of their debts
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/03/31/borrowers-chilled-bone-doe-reneges-student-loan-forgiveness
Democrats Exploring Deal With McConnell On Gorsuch Nomination
I hope this story isn't true because
A) They have no reason to believe McConnell will keep his word
B) The truck case alone shows that Democrats should oppose him as an anti-worker extremist.
Democrats might lose anyway if they filibuster Gorsuch, but at least they will have stood for something, which might inspire more people to stand in line to vote for them.
That’s just one proposal being floated as part of ongoing conversations between more than half a dozen Senate Democrats, according to two Democratic aides familiar with the talks. Another proposal is offering to confirm Gorsuch in exchange for a commitment from McConnell to preserve the 60-vote threshold just for future Supreme Court nominees, a source told The Huffington Post, and which Politico also reported on Wednesday.
So far, the talks remain very preliminary. Leadership isn’t a part of the group exploring such an arrangement, and there haven’t been any conversations with McConnell himself or other GOP senators. Instead, it is more of an organic dialogue among rank-and-file Democrats looking ahead to Gorsuch’s confirmation vote in the next two weeks.
But the objective among these Democrats is to preserve the filibuster ― the party’s only real leverage while in the minority, with the fear being that McConnell will remove it if Gorsuch’s nomination is blocked. The thinking among the group is that McConnell will end up just shy of the 60 votes he needs to advance the Gorsuch nomination, with all 52 Republicans likely to vote for him and a handful of moderate Democrats likely to join. McConnell has hinted that he’s prepared to nix the filibuster rule altogether if he can’t hit 60 votes. That would mean that going forward, it would only take 51 votes to advance a Supreme Court nominee.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mcconnell-deal-court_us_58d312e9e4b0f838c62f60f9?lwa77zc06nfpzoxbt9&
a thought on surveillance state & mind of financial elites
Whites in the South in the Jim Crow era feared black men raping white women because they had raped black women with impunity for centuries and expected retribution.
Likewise, as Wall Street tries to take over public education, they think they can win over teachers with competition and "merit pay." A variation of this was just proposed in California, with tax relief for teachers to prevent them from taking jobs in other states.
In both instances, the very wealthy imagine the rest of us think and act exactly as they do.
So it is with the surveillance state that we find out more and more about with each new leak.
The intent of the mass surveillance is likely as much to catch us plebes plotting to storm the castle and take over through elaborate secret machinations because that is exactly what they would do.
However, the vast majority of us, even those who want change, don't want to take the place of the wealthiest individuals in the country and have no secret plans.
We would like to have a decent standard of living, a safe place to live, education and health care for ourselves and our kids, and a reasonable chance of decent world for our descendants to live in.
That aint no secret, and most of us don't have the time or means to plot to disrupt the Bilderburgers or whatever.
What will happen is what is already happening. People are refusing to cooperate here and there in increasing numbers, including the middle managers for the financial elite, both in and out of government. And those middle managers are the ones leaking the stuff that is ruining things for the ruling class.
What those at the top should really be worried about is all that surveillance infrastructure being turned on them.
If they cannot plot, and threaten, and buy politicians out of public view, much of their power is gone--especially if they depend on the rest of us buying stuff their company makes or borrowing money from them.
And I say, the sooner we turn the cameras and bugs the other way, the better.
Republican Senator Sends Cease-and-Desist Letter to Constituent for Calling Too Much
What a change one election has made.
If more politicians had this problem more of the time, we would have a better country.
Now one of Johnson’s constituents has received a cease-and-desist letter from the senator’s office, demanding that he stop calling the senator and stop trying to meet with his staff. The letter to Earl Good of Milwaukee instructs him to only contact the office in writing from now on.
Good is a Vietnam veteran and attentive constituent who, in an interview with his local CBS station, acknowledged that he has been very persistent in his attempts to get through to the office and talk to the senator’s staff about issues that concern him, including the possible privatization of the Veterans Administration.
He acknowledged that he once called 83 times before someone picked up the phone.
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/wisconsin-republican-senator-sends-cease-and-desist-letter-to-constituent-for-calling-too-much/
Trump's increase in the Defense budget is almost as much as cost for free public college for all
who want to go.
One study put the cost of free public university education at around $62 billion a year (IF we stopped public funding of for profit Trump Universities).
We already spend more on our military than nearly all of the rest of the world combined, have bases in more countries than everyone else combine, and in several categories of weapons, we have no peers.
We have twice as many aircraft carriers as the rest of the world combined.
Only Russia has thousands of nukes like we do.
The UK, France, China, India, and Pakistan around 100-300 each.
Estimates about Israel's stockpile vary, but like four of the five above, they are our allies.
Russia and China are primarily threats to us if we go to them. Apart from Russia's nukes, both countries' military might shrinks exponentially the farther they get outside their own borders.
I think there's near zero chance of Trump proposing or signing off on free public higher education.
But this needs to be said.
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