Monday Morning Open Thread: “If You Witness… “

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Open Thread: Netroots Nation #14 Is Now Taking Place in Philadelphia

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Any Jackals in attendance? Or planning to attend over the weekend? Honest curiosity — I’d like to get your impressions!

I can remember when ‘we’ all hoped NN would be the progressive answer to CPAC… but, as people warned at the time, even if we had the same deep-pocketed ‘donors’ as the Repubs, getting Democrats to work together is like herding cats. I’m holding on to the Good Thought that the many, many breakout panels are supporting and training local activists working on local issues, which Murphy knows is every bit and more as important as taking back the White House.

Dave Weigel, for the Washington Post:

… Four thousand or so liberal activists will spend the next three days here, gathering for the 14th annual Netroots Nation conference — the third with a presidential forum. In 2007, nearly every Democratic presidential candidate attended the conference in Chicago, staying for a debate and holding special sessions for attendees. In 2015, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley (but not Hillary Clinton) sat for Netroots interviews in Phoenix, only to be interrupted by Black Lives Matter activists who protested the lack of a focus on racial justice in the questions.

This year, just a handful of the 25 Democratic presidential candidates will make the trek to Philadelphia. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a frequent speaker at the conference, will join former HUD secretary Julián Castro, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) at the Saturday presidential forum — and that may be it. With Warren’s exception, the highest-polling Democratic candidates will not be in Philadelphia. Joe Biden, whose campaign is headquartered in that city, will be in New Hampshire; so will South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Neither Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif) nor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will be attending, and the Sanders campaign says the candidate is off the trail completely this weekend, for unspecified reasons.

Sanders will have a surrogate, of sorts, at Netroots; former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, a co-chair of his campaign, will appear on a panel and join a solidarity protest with hospital workers. But the smaller footprint for presidential candidates is notable, and organizers say that Biden et. al. are making a mistake by skipping.

“Netroots attendees are the core activists of the party and will play a key role in determining who Democrats’ 2020 nominee will be,” said Carolyn Fiddler, the spokeswoman for Daily Kos, the group blog that founded the conference. “Candidates not in attendance are missing the opportunity to speak directly to this ultra-engaged group of voters and engage core progressives the issues they care about most.”
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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: RESIST

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GOP Venality Open Thread: Kiddie Concentration Camps, Not Polling Well

by 5:55 pm. It has 108 Comments.

WE NEED TO KEEP FIGHTING BACK – LOUDLY.

Small comfort for the children now suffering — or dead — but if Senate Majority House Minority Leader ‘There’s two people Putin is paying’ McCarthy and Erik ‘Voice of the Gated GOP Community’ Erikson are alternately blustering and pantomiming Christianist concern about Trump’s concentration camps… it’s not good news for conservatives.

Clearly the GOP had assumed that enough voters were indifferent to human suffering that they could afford to tickle ‘the Base’ by kicking the untermenschen. Fortunately for the survival of our GOP-battered commonwealth, they seem to have miscalculated. Trump folds when he’s put under pressure, especially the pressure of being publicly shamed… and Trump’s enablers know that the I-was-only-following-orders defense doesn’t work in courts of law.

EvenTheVerySeriouslyBipartisan NYTimes has jumped ship on this…





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Dark Night of the National Soul Open Thread: Trump’s Concentration Camps

by 11:42 pm. It has 25 Comments.

Thing is, I don’t think this is a power move — it’s the GOP’s frantic effort to appeal to worst elements of its Base by upping the public cruelty, because Trump’s lost his novelty and the economic impact of the GOP’s smash-and-grab is affecting too many ‘dependable’ GOP voters. It’s like offering fentanyl to a heroin addict in withdrawal… assuming the GOP oligarchs are fentanyl addicts already, and the junkie has the key to the drug safe.

I remember reading that, by the final months of World War II, Hitler’s staff was pulling desperately needed resources away from the production of weapons to keep the trains running to the death camps. We need to fight back, hard, but we shouldn’t let an unwarranted despair over Republican power deter our efforts.

The current “debate” started, AFAICT, because Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez “decried the conditions of migrant detention facilities the administration is using to cope with a surge of border crossings and highlighted a decision to hold some children at an Oklahoma Army base that was used as an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.” So Dick Cheney’s favorite daughter Liz — already “the No. 3 Republican in the House” — upheld her family’s proud tradition of inhumanity by pretending the Holocaust meant something more to her and her GOP associates than a rhetorical tool. Every Media Village Idiot (plus some quasi-liberal people who should’ve known better, like Chris Hayes) rushed to wallow in the quicksand…
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