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I'm With Her

Monday Morning Open Thread: Back to the Daily Leap of Faith

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And a little start-the-week-well self-indulgence, because she’s not just my favorite candidate…


Later, in Iowa:

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Election Open Thread: The 2020 Campaign Seems to Have Kicked Up A Notch…

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On Thursday, two of the Democratic frontrunners went to South Carolina — not ‘First in the Nation’, but the first primary state where voters aren’t disproportionatly white. The NYTimes chose to highlight the Dems in disarray!!! angle, and to focus on Joe Biden. But IMO what’s important about the separate incidents is how the candidates handled them.

Elizabeth Warren’s event:

… Ms. Warren was in the opening minutes of her speech, a major address on racial inequities, when she was disrupted. In an interview, an organizer of the protest, Dianechia Fields, 40, who is from Memphis, criticized Ms. Warren for pledging to cut funding for charter schools. Ms. Warren’s education plan calls for ending federal funding for opening new charter schools and banning for-profit charters.

Ms. Warren eventually received some assistance from Representative Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts, who had introduced her at the event. Ms. Pressley came back onstage and urged the protesters to let Ms. Warren proceed with her speech, which highlighted the story of black washerwomen who went on strike in Atlanta in 1881.

“We are grateful for your activism and your voice and you are welcome here, and we would love to convene after this about the issue that you are here to stoke our consciousness about,” Ms. Pressley said. “But when these women have been ignored this long, this is their moment, and we are going to hear the story.”…

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Pre-Debate Open Thread: Not Yet Endorsing, But You Know I Have A Favorite

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Gonna Be Another Busy Week…

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Awwww…

Speaking of which…

The NYTimes smells blood in the water. “President Trump Bet Big This Election Year. Here’s Why He Lost”:

… The results in Kentucky and Louisiana are particularly ominous for the president, in part because they indicate that his suburban problem extends to traditionally conservative Southern states and may prove even more perilous in the moderate Midwest next year.

They also reveal political weakness for the president at a moment he is embroiled in a deepening impeachment inquiry and desperately needs to project strength with his own party. And as he enters what will likely be a difficult re-election campaign, the two states emphatically demonstrated that he has become just as much of a turnout lever for the opposition as with his own supporters…

The Louisiana results are a stinging rebuke for the president, because he spent so much time there and because Trump allies couldn’t chalk it up entirely to local factors as they did for Kentucky, where Mr. Bevin was deeply unpopular. And even before the Louisiana race was called on Saturday night, finger-pointing from the Capitol to the White House to Mr. Trump’s campaign broke out about why he spent so much political capital on the race in the first place…

Still, the main instigator for the president’s involvement in the races, many Republicans said, was Mr. Trump himself, who simply craves the adulation of his supporters and is singularly focused on notching victories, no matter the details. He is even more eager to flex his political muscle in the face of impeachment, and has surrounded himself with several aides who either defer to his whims regardless of the neon-flashing signs of risk before them, or know little about politics.

People close to Mr. Trump — who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive matters — said he viewed the campaigns he had weighed in on mostly as opportunities for gratification. And with few seasoned political advisers in his inner circle — his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has control over the president’s campaign, has never worked on another race — there was nobody to tell him that attacking an anti-abortion rights, pro-gun Democrat like Mr. Edwards as a radical would be folly. ..

Mr. Trump, of course, is not the first president to be faulted for his party’s losses. But few have so openly invited the risk of being blamed for them.

“Donald Trump just happens to relish this centrality more than most,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, “and has a tendency to say the quiet part loud, sometimes to his detriment.”

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Smart Move, Sen. Harris

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The horse-race touts at Politico would *very much* like Kamala Harris to shut up and go back to her knitting the Senate, but Houle’s right; New Hampshire would not vote for a woman of color from the opposite coast even if she promised to rebuild the Old Man of the Mountain at (other states’) public expense. The state is very white and its politics are very retro; they’re working as hard as any formerly Confederate state to make sure the college kids who might not understand ‘our local traditions’ can’t corrupt the purity of their voting pool. Even leaving aside the cranky libertarians who’ll swarm the Dem primary before voting for Trump next year, Democratic primary voters are pretty much divided between Sanders and Warren. Also, too:

So Kamala went to Iowa, later that day, and did this:

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Kamala Harris Took the Lead This Weekend

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Rep. Shirley Chisholm, one of my earliest political idols, said “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” After Friday’s HBCU Trump debacle, Senator Harris took her chair, and changed the conversation.

… In the hours after Harris initially announced she wouldn’t be present at the forum, talks began between her campaign, Mayor Benjamin and Benedict College to create an end result that didn’t include the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center with a breakthrough happening overnight, a Harris campaign aide said.

“People were figuring out a solution where the group honoring President Trump wasn’t involved and students had access to speeches and the ability to ask questions,” the aide said.

Another aide said Harris, the only graduate of a historically black college in the 2020 field, wouldn’t stand for the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center “disrespecting” the legacy of HBCUs and their history rooted in protest, justice and equality.

“When it became clear Donald Trump would receive an award after decades of celebrating mass incarceration, pushing the death penalty for innocent Black Americans, rolling back police accountability measures and racist behavior that puts people’s lives at risk, and then learned all but ten Benedict students are excluded from participating, I cannot in good faith be complicit in papering over his record,” Harris said in a statement Friday…

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Amy, Amy, AMY

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Amy Klobuchar isn’t as flashy as poor Winehouse was, but Klobuchar gets shit done. Here’s an example from Mother Jones:

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) released evidence on Tuesday that the Justice Department buried the whistleblower complaint about President Donald Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president by failing to refer the matter to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Klobuchar suggested the Justice Department violated a longstanding agreement between the agencies to share information about possible campaign finance violations for potential enforcement action…

This is clever because while everyone else was understandably focused on Barr hiding the whistleblower complaint from House Democrats, Klobuchar laid the groundwork to expose further wrongdoing by verifying that Barr hadn’t notified the Federal Election Commission either. Turns out that is required!

[U]nder a 1978 memorandum of understanding between the [Justice D]epartment and the FEC—which, like Justice is authorized to penalize campaign finance violations—the complaint should have been passed onto the FEC even if the department declined to launch a criminal investigation, so the election watchdog can determine whether a civil penalty is called for.

Earlier this month, Klobuchar set out to uncover whether the Justice Department had honored this agreement, sending two letters to the FEC inquiring whether it had received any such referral. On October 18, the commission’s Democratic chair, Ellen Weintraub, confirmed to Klobuchar that the FEC had not been notified. “The refusal to inform the FEC and refer the matter regarding the President’s call to the FEC as required to do, as the Justice Department is required, undermines our campaign finance system and is unacceptable in a democracy,” Klobuchar said in Tuesday statement.

I haven’t watched much news coverage of the shit-show this week because disgust and baseball. That said, I doubt Klobuchar’s revelation got a lot of attention, what with the SS Trumptanic taking shots below the waterline. But this week, Klobuchar produced further hard evidence that Barr is a crook.

Thanks to the courage of the whistleblower, Barr’s attempt to make the complaint go away by fiat didn’t succeed, but Barr was sticking to the original lie/rationale (“it was a nothingburger!”) to protect Trump from Congress. Notifying the FEC isn’t optional, even if it’s deemed a “nothingburger,” according to the longstanding agreement between the federal agencies. That Barr failed to provide the notification is more evidence of a cover up. Way to go, Klobuchar!

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