Organizing & Resistance

Folks, this proposal to drastically narrow the window of people who’d qualify for bailout checks is terrible. It is bad politics. It is bad policy. It just gives certain legislators a chance to peacock around for a tiny audience of lazy opinion writers who have no concept of policy as a thing that affects people in the real world.

Yes, call your Senators. If you live in West Virginia then call Joe Manchin twice. If you don’t live in West Virginia then please don’t; you’ll just waste time and annoy his staff. Tell them to just give everyone the damn money. The top 1% is by definition just 1% of the population, so it won’t do a thing to the bill’s bottom line to give them an equal share.

Help put a stop to this nonsensePost + Comments (57)

It would be great if someone who reads this blog and lives in West Virginia were to call up Joe Manchin’s office and get to know the staff a little. Yes I mean that he needs to hear about impeachment and changing his stance on the filibuster. But also in general, he seems like a (relatively) decent guy who represents a very Trumpy red state, so he has a lot of concerns to balance right now and it would be a good idea if someone could make contact and find out what his folks think we can do to help him do the right thing. His staff are Democrats and even if they’re not all on board with the “Green New Deal”, they all want to expand health insurance, expand collective bargaining rights and a raise the minimum wage to something people can live on. I’d like to know what they think we can do to help firm up the Democratic team and make those things happen.

The same applies to folks like Conor Lamb in PA. Like Manchin, he strikes me as a decent guy trying to both represent his red district and promote core Democratic priorities. If you live in his district, I’d like to hear back about what his people think we can do to help. That’s doubly important since it’s so critical we hold the House in 2022. Obviously Krysten Sinema needs attention too…she strikes me as a bit of a contrarian peacock in the old McCain/Lieberman mold, but that doesn’t mean she is immune to pressure from constituents.

Do you have a conservative Democrat who either needs some encouragement or might be vulnerable in two years? Get in touch with their team and let’s hear back what they think we can do for them.

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ETA: and of course this comes right after John wrote something along the same lines. Sorry John. Also, call your Senator.

We do what we must because we canPost + Comments (45)

Do you live in AZ? Call Kyrsten Sinema. She seems like a fine person but she may not know Mitch McConnell like Democrats who’ve had the misfortune of working with him know the guy. She could use a reminder that Democrats will get slaughtered if they roll over to McConnell’s endless bad faith obstruction and accomplish nothing in the next two years. He won’t compromise and if you offer him good faith he won’t reciprocate.

Sinema has […] made it clear that she will not go along with her Democratic colleagues. Her office said recently that she is “not open to changing her mind.”

A spokesperson for Sinema told the Post that the senator is “against eliminating the filibuster, and she is not open to changing her mind about eliminating the filibuster.”

This is suicide. If you live in AZ or know someone who does, please ask her office to reconsider.

Meanwhile, if you have a Republican Senator then let them know the party won’t recover until they cut Trump out of it. If that sounds like it contradicts what I just said, well yes, both things can be true at the same time. Pollyannish Charlie Brownism can cut the Democratic party’s achilles tendon before Biden ever gets a chance to govern, and Trumpism can permanently destroy the GOP’s credibility unless they act now to sever it and cauterize the stump. If someone’s going to make a mistake, I’d rather it be them than us.

Arizona on my mindPost + Comments (124)

A counterpoint from reader Desargues:

Excuse me, Tim, but I have to disagree with your framing. You did what they call “himpathy” in feminist theory. Reflexively empathizing with the bad guys. You know who’s had to literally fear for their lives from day 1 on their job in Congress? Ilhan Omar, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and a few others like them. Constant death threats — out in the open, not from an anonymous payphone — plus daily incitement by the braying beasts like Limpballs and his animal ilk.

These Republicans deserve no sympathy from anyone. They have choices, and they’ve always had a choice. They’ve made their choices, and whatever risk they incur is their problem, not our problem. Please update your understanding.

Yep. This complaint describes me to a T. And if you disagree with that then you’re going to disagree with me.

Lemme tell you a quick story about a Republican I knew a long time ago. This guy was one of those aggravating hoo-rah milbloggers who popped up like fireweed after 9/11. These guys all had their blog-rings and friends’ blogs on the left margin of the page and award bugs down the right margin like “second most popular milblog, signals or intelligence, top 800-1000 traffic, 2002” or “RCP wipes self regularly prize, 2003”. He was a bit of a blowhard who helped Erickson start RedState, but he let anyone comment on his blog and he was more fun to annoy than a brick like Jim Hoft. I wouldn’t say I was friendly per se, but I did try to write with what you could call “himpathy”. I made a point to disagree about the topic and not his character or hygeine.

Anyway, after a while that blogger got so annoyed with the George W. cult’s brainless groupthink that in ’04 he invited me to join him on the blog. And that’s how some medium profile diarist at Daily Kos became a writer on a crappy right wing milblog called Balloon Juice. It was a weird time.

So yeah, I lean towards this “himpathy” thing. I like the dissonant feeling of seeing from a different angle. That’s true even and maybe especially when it’s hostile. I will also say as an old activist that I have learned to use it tactically. I tried the “at” theory of change, and I have tried the “with” theory of change, and if I had to rank them I’d say that “at” feels a *lot* more satisfying but the “with” method gets better results.

So the operative question here is, what am I after? I want the Republican party to break into smaller parts so we Democrats (if we hold together) can beat them in the next election like a rented stepchild. It happens that right on this day we have arrived at a moment that I’ve been expecting for a long, long time. To wit, we are looking at a powerful and (hopefully) irreversible break between Chamber of Commerce Republicans who just want to steal everyone’s money versus Trumpist maniacs looking for some Khmer Rouge regime of insanity and murder. That’s an opportunity that comes up once in a lifetime, and I’d like to seize it. If I have to convince people like Pat Toomey they want to work with a liberal asshole like me more than with dangerously unstable colleagues like Goehmert, Nunes, Tuberville, or Hawley, then the scumrag who *isn’t* interested in genocide gets a warm hug from me.

Now, imagining we had Bart Stupak-type blue dogs to convince, those guys would get quite a lot of my attention. You can’t split Republicans without Democrats holding together. Thankfully (in one sense anyway) Stupak, Blanche Lincoln, Evan Bayh, those guys are all gone. Hell, one of the great no-shits-to-give barn burner speeches last week came from Conor Lamb. There just isn’t enough daylight between ‘the squad’ and Democratic leadership to matter right now. The edge of the knife is in the Republican party, and if giving some of them a hug helps me push the knife in further then that’s what I’m gonna do. If that inspires you to tear me a new one, well, you came to the right place.

Sympathy For The DouchenozzlesPost + Comments (212)

All right everyone, it’s game day in the House. Most Representatives should know how they plan to vote by now, but enough may be on the edge today that it’s worth calling their offices again. In the end though, whether five GOP Congressmen vote to impeach or fifteen, the House will send a bipartisan referral to the Senate some time late today or tomorrow. What happens then will be “interesting”, as the apocryphal Chinese proverb says.

WATCH: Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) says majority of GOP "paralyzed with fear" @RepJasonCrow: "I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues. … A couple of them broke down in tears … saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment." pic.twitter.com/ESEu40WW1P

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 13, 2021

I called Pat Toomey’s Pittsburgh office this morning and told a pleasant young man that I greatly respect the Senator’s courage in standing up to Trump. While it’s fair to say my opinion of Toomey could hardly have gone down, we should acknowledge that Republicans who stand up to Trump each take on a significant a personal and professional risk.

Actually, correct that. The personal risk and the professional risk are stark opposites of each other right now. Professionally speaking, Republicans who *support* Trump have gotten themselves way, way out on a limb. The nutbag faction is watching donors and job prospects dry up like a rain puddle in the Mojave desert. Republicans who want the Chamber of Commerce to take their phone calls in a year know they need to lose a shoe up Trump’s ass today, or at least keep their head down in the fashion of blog favorite Tom [****] Cotton. On the other hand, *personal* risk is the same story flipped on its head. For Republicans like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, Trump’s frothing mob is their neighbors. It’s the people who sit next to them at church, the dude who cuts their grass, and the guy who walks their dog back home. It’s their kids’ best friends and the reliable primary voters who hoard survival rations and keep binders of printed-out instructions for hand-made ghillie suits and home brewed IEDs.

An atheist city dweller like me has the privilege of seeing all those folks from a distance. I don’t have to care (much) whether some part-time machinist in the exurbs gets over his Trump mania or does something self-destructive and regrettable. Any Republican who stands up to Trump doesn’t have that privilege. They’re going to lose lifelong friends and gain a security detail, and it’s worth keeping that in mind when you call their offices today.

Get To Know Your Senators’ StaffPost + Comments (115)

Busy today. Use this space to check in if you’ve gotten any responses from your Senators or Congresspeople.

Has anyone spoken with staff from Murkowski or Collins’ offices?

Call your representatives open threadPost + Comments (70)