CNN Iowa Democratic Town Hall - Jan 25, 2016

With only one week to go before the Iowa caucuses, the three remaining Democratic candidates for President took the stage at Drake University in Des Moines on CNN Monday night for a Town Hall discussion moderated by CNN New Day program anchor Chris Cuomo. Cuomo asked former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to answer a series of questions.

---

In the closing two comments of Martin O’Malley’s appearance on the latest Democratic Town Hall event, Martin O’Malley, not so inconspicuously, urged his Iowa contingent to back Bernie Sanders if they do not reach the 15% needed under caucus rules to cast a vote for O’Malley. Specifically he said,

“America’s looking for a new leader… We can not be this fed up with our gridlocked dysfunctional national politics and think that a resort to old ideologies or old names (ie. Clinton) is going to lead us forward… America needs new leadership and I need the O’Malley supporters out there on caucus night to hold strong and move forward like Iowa does.” Forward is not referring the status quo and old ideologies attached to the Clinton name.

He continues during his next and final question with his implied support of Sanders by saying, “Time and time again in the history of the state of Iowa, Iowa has found a way to sort the the noise and sort through the national polls and lift up a new leader for our country… That is what you did eight years ago when you lifted up Barrack Obama (over Clinton) to lead our country forward and we need to build upon his good work and continue to move forward. … I’m not here to praise you Iowa, I’m here to challenge you. Lift up a new leader. Because you can change the course of this presidential race. (From Clinton to Sanders) You can shift this dynamic on caucus night. … There is nothing so divided about our national politics that it can not be healed with a renewed faith in each other and new leadership… But I think it important, in order to move our country forward, that once again Iowa lift up a new leader. …”

---

Texas Voter Registration and I.D. Requirements For 2016

by Michael Handley

Pursuant to Texas state election law, new Voter Registration Certificates are mailed to all "Active Status" registered voters in December of odd numbered years. “Suspense Status” voters do not receive a new certificate.

New blue color certificates were printed by the election registrar office of each Texas county and mailed between November 15th and December 5th. Voters whose renewal certificates are returned to the registrar as undelivered will be placed in "suspense" by January 2, 2016, following the mailing.

The certificates are valid for two years beginning January 1, 2016 through December 31, 2017.

Certificates must list jurisdictional numbers for seven designated territorial units: Congressional & State Legislative Districts, County Commissioners’, Justice of the Peace precincts and the City and School District precincts, if defined. In addition to the aforementioned, counties may include 3 additional districts for a total of ten jurisdiction.

You MUST be registered to vote in the county in which you currently reside, and have a currently dated government issued photo I.D., to vote in any Texas election. You must be registered, or have mailed your registration application to be postmarked, no later than midnight of the thirtieth day before the election date. And, as of the date of this article, you are still required to present photo I.D. at the polling place to vote in person. The last day to register to vote in any election is the 30th day before Election Day..

NOTE: On August 10, 2016, US District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Corpus Christi issued an order prescribing what Texas voters need to bring to the polls when they vote in person. The new procedures remain in effect until further Court notice.

New Procedures for Voting in Person All citizens wishing to vote must still be on the official list of registered voters. For the November 8th election, the deadline to register is October 11th.
Voters may still use one of seven (7) forms of photo ID, listed below. IDs may be expired up to four years. (Previously IDs could be expired no more than 60 days.)

• Driver license
• Texas Election Identification Certificate (EIC)
• Texas Personal Identification Card issued by DPS
• Texas license to carry a handgun issued by DPS
• US military identification card containing the person's photograph
• US citizenship certificate containing the person's photograph
• US passport

ADDITIONALLY, new procedures ordered by Judge Ramos allow registered voters who have not been able to obtain one of the photo ID's listed above to complete and sign a form and present one of the following documents to vote a regular ballot:

• Valid voter registration certificate (card)
• Certified birth certificate
• Current utility bill
• Bank statement
• Government check
• Paycheck
• Any other government document with the individual's name and address
• *The one-page form is called the "Voter's Declaration of Reasonable Impediment or Difficulty"

The Judge also ordered:

• Election officials cannot question a voter about the use of an ID type
• Poll watchers may never question a voter about Voter ID issues
• The ID address does not have to match the voter registration address. It was also made clear that the ID address does not have to match the voter registration address.

Judge Ramos' order followed a July 2016 decision by the full US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling the existing Texas Voter ID requirements had a discriminatory effect and directed Judge Ramos to arrive at an interim solution. She will continue to consider the subject of discriminatory intent.

Every registered Texas voter should have received their new 2016-17 blue Voter Registration Card (VRC) by the first part of January 2016, or within thirty days after you submitted your registration application. If you asked to register to vote while updating your driver's license with the Texas DPS, and you never received a VRC, your registration application may not have been processed.

If you have not received a new VRC, you may NOT be properly registered to vote. You should immediately check your registration status and take action to properly register, if you find you are not registered to vote in the county where you reside.

To check your Collin Co. registration status - click here. To check your registration status in another Texas county - click here. If you find you are not registered to vote, you can find the Voter's Registration application for Collin Co. by clicking here or any county by clicking here. For specific information about voting in Texas, click here to find the Secretary of State’s pamphlet on Texas Voting.

43rd Anniversary Of Roe v. Wade

On the 43rd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Roe v. Wade decision—which affirmed a woman’s right to abortion — the Center for American Progress released a column and an infographic examining how decades of state abortion restrictions have prevented many women from fully accessing the right to abortion granted to them in Roe.

Forty-three years after Roe, the absence of women’s access to the full range of legal reproductive health care services can still literally be a matter of life and death.

In March 2015, the Supreme Court will hear Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, a case challenging Texas’ H.B. 2 — a law that placed dramatic restrictions on state abortion clinics and currently threatens to reduce the number of abortion clinics in the state from 50 to 10 or fewer. Since H.B. 2 was passed in 2013, more than 130,000 and up to 240,000 women report having attempted to self-terminate a pregnancy without consulting a medical professional. These staggering figures prompted some Texas lawmakers to protest the bill on the floor of the state Legislature by holding coat hangers—a chilling symbol of pre-Roe at-home abortions that often left women maimed, infertile, or dead.

Primaries: Texas Starts Third After Iowa, New Hampshire

Texas primary early voting starts third on Feb 16th, after the Iowa Caucuses on Feb. 1st and New Hampshire Primary on Feb. 9th. Heavy media coverage of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire Primary leading into the start of Texas early voting will drive election interest among Texas voters of both parties. That media attention will prime the turnout pump for the first week of Texas early voting.

Media coverage of Nevada's caucuses on Saturday Feb 20th, half way through the Texas early voting period, will keep Texas early voting interest high. During the last week of Texas early voting, media coverage leading into South Carolina's Saturday, Feb 27th primary will also keep interest high.

And heavy media coverage of South Carolina's Saturday primary results during the Sunday and Monday before Super Tuesday will drive election day turnout interest among Texas voters and voters in the other Super Tuesday state.

Iowa

Iowa precinct caucuses will allocate 46 pledged delegates on Monday, Feb. 1, 2016.  The byzantine rules of Iowa Democratic Party caucuses give outsider presidential candidates a chance at legitimacy — or sudden irrelevance. Unlike Republican caucus rules, where all votes are counted equally, Democratic Party caucus-goers gather in groups for each candidate during a 30-minute alignment period. If a candidate's group count does not reach 15 percent of the total attendance count, its members must realign with a different candidate to be counted for delegate apportioning.

The complicated Democratic caucus rules are tilted toward normalizing the strength of candidates, especially in two and three person races. Only the number of delegates awarded in each of Iowa's 1,681 precincts will be published on caucus night. (video right documents a 2008 caucus.

No official record of the each candidate’s share of total caucus vote counts, which usually mirrors polling data, will be published. Candidates can easily tie in the precinct delegate count allocation, even if one candidate has far more support inside the caucus room. Whether the Sanders campaign or Clinton campaign is more successful at getting out caucus voters, they're relative delegate count reported by the precincts — individually and collectively — may in fact look more like a draw than a win.

No Texas Two-Step For 2016 Super Tuesday Primary

Seven years after Barack Obama earned the majority of Texas' presidential delegates, despite losing the primary vote count to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, the Democratic National Committee put an end to the Texas "two-step" of primary vote and then "caucus" to allocate presidential delegates the Democratic National Convention. The DNC said the Texas two-step "had the potential to confuse voters" for the 2016 primary. Under DNC rules the process must be either all caucus or all polling place votes.

The 2016 "Super Tuesday" Texas primary will allocate the largest slate of delegates up for grabs on that election date for Democratic presidential contenders vying for the party’s nomination. With Bernie Sanders increasingly looking like a primary contender against Hillary Clinton, the DNC did not want repeat of the 2008 delegate allocation controversies caused by the two-step process.

Pledged Texas delegates will be allocated to each 2016 Presidential candidate based solely on the number of ballots cast for each candidate in March 1, 2016 Democratic Primary election. Presidential candidates must receive at least 15% of the vote in a Texas Senatorial District to receive a district delegate and must receive at least 15% statewide to receive at-large delegates. Texas is the big post Iowa and New Hampshire prize on Super Tuesday with Texas Democrats selecting 252 delegates, including 30 pledged super delegates, for largest single delegate count of any state up to and including the other super Tuesday states.

The Democratic National Committee long ago adopted a rule specifying presidential delegates must be allocated based solely on the count of primary ballots cast for each candidate. The Texas two-step has been grandfathered by DNC waiver for every presidential election cycle since the DNC adopted that presidential delegate allocation rule.

At its June 26th meeting in Washington, the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee unanimously rejected the Texas Democratic Party's 2016 primary two-step waiver request. Texas was long the lone remaining state to have continually been granted a waiver to allocate delegates through a two-step primary and precinct convention "caucus" process. Texas Democratic Primary voters WILL NOT return to precinct "caucus" conventions after the polls close on Primary Election Day.  Election Day precinct "caucus" conventions are a thing of the past.

Privatization Ruining Our Education System

Profit-seeking in the banking and health care industries has victimized Americans. Now it’s beginning to happen in education, with our children as the products.

There are good reasons – powerful reasons – to stop the privatization efforts before the winner-take-all free market creates a new vehicle for inequality. At the very least we need the good sense to slow it down while we examine the evidence about charters and vouchers.

Charter Schools Have Not Improved Education

The recently updated CREDO study at Stanford revealed that while charters have made progress since 2009, their performance is about the same as that of public schools. The differences are, in the words of the National Education Policy Center, “so small as to be regarded, without hyperbole, as trivial.” Furthermore, the four-year improvement demonstrated by charters may have been due to the closing of schools that underperformed in the earlier study, and also by a variety of means to discourage the attendance of lower-performing students.

Texas charters had a much lower graduation rate in 2012 than traditional schools.

Read the full story at Salon: 4 ways privatization is ruining our education system

The Democrats' Tunnel Vision

By now even a narcoleptic could recite the GOP's parody of Democrats. The party of "big government." Champions of "class warfare" programmed to "tax and spend" other people's money. An amalgam of interest groups divorced from the national interest. Practitioners of "identity politics" bent only on getting to 51 percent. Enemies of the "job creators." Enablers of listless bureaucrats and their shiftless dependents. Spineless hand-wringers with no respect for our past or faith in our future.

A lot of this is political bilge, a shameless inversion of the GOP's divisive politics and intellectual vacuity. In debate all three Democratic candidates are specific, informed and grounded in a reality largely absent from the Republican contest. But all too often, and particularly on the stump, Democrats themselves can verge on self-parody, purveyors of programs bereft of a larger vision.

According to public opinion expert Peter Hart, the great majority of Americans want a new course after the Obama years, and by two to one believe that America is headed in the wrong direction.  Bilious as it is, Donald Trump's pledge to "make America great again" touches something deeper than just resentment or nostalgia -- a desire for national renewal which, at its best, could inspire a more transcendent politics, transforming widespread angst about our future into a shared and positive mission.

All too often Democrats who speak of pragmatism rather than with vision fail to transcend.

Read the full article published at HuffingtonPost 

The 4th Democratic Debate - January 17 2016

Sunday's Democratic debate, hosted by NBC, was the party's second-most watched this election cycle, with about 10.2 million viewers tuning into the channel, according to the network.

While NBC's ratings beat out the last two Democratic debates it isn't even close to the first Democratic debate hosted by CNN, which brought in 15.3 million viewers. ABC had about 7.8 million viewers and CBS had about 8.5 million viewers opposite the debate on NBC.

The uptick in audience share last night, over the last two DNC debates, could be the result of the last two debates were also held on Saturdays, which typically see lower ratings than Sundays. The third debate on the Saturday before Christmas day on ABC attracted only 6.71 million viewers. The second debate attracted 8.5 million viewers on a mid-November Saturday when two Iowa university football teams matched off. And interest may have increased with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) closing the polling gap with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in early voting states Iowa and New Hampshire, which has resulted in Clinton going on the attack against Sanders by pointing out their differences on health care and gun control. 

The Republican debates have all lacked what the Democratic debates have. This was another substantive debate among the Democrats, devoid of the histrionics, name-calling, and fact-free pronouncements that are pro forma in the Republican presidential debate shows. The Democratic candidates disagree on how to achieve certain policy goals, but they all agree on those big goals. Democrats have a real vision for the country. There isn’t a battle for the direction of the party happening on the Democratic side.

Any of three Democratic candidates would make a better president than any of the dozen Republicans running for the White House. Democrats demonstrated their competence and ability to govern during the NBC debate. Clinton, Sanders, and O’Malley have the policies that are missing on the Republican side. While Republicans fight the culture wars and rage against the nation’s changing demographics, Democrats are speaking to the real problems of ordinary Americans.

Case in point -- When Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were asked if they saw any scenario where ground forces could be used to combat ISIS. Former Sec. Clinton said, “absolutely not.” Sanders blasted Republicans for not learning the lessons of Iraq, and he said that using ground forces to combat ISIS would lead to perpetual war and be a complete disaster. Sanders said that ISIS won’t be destroyed with American troops in perpetual warfare. Martin O’Malley said that he believed that President Obama was doing the right thing. O’Malley said that he appreciates that Democrats don’t use the term boot on the ground.

• Salon: Democratic debate puts GOP clown show to shame: “Makes the Republican debate look like the real kids table”

But that's not to say the fourth Democratic debate was all kumbaya. Clinton and Sanders presented different visions on their approach to governing – big ideas verses pragmatism. While Sanders urged his audience to “think big,” Clinton repeatedly cautioned thinking big is not pragmatic.

• Associated Press: “Their heated rhetoric highlighted the central question fueling the increasingly competitive primary race: Will the Sanders passion beat out the Clinton practicality?”
• ABC’s Rick Klein: The debate re-framed the race as “a battle pitting the party’s head against its heart.

Watch the full debate video:

Fact checkers of the last Democratic Debate found that nearly all of the major claims made by the candidates were actually true.

Iran's Crude Oil Flowing To World Markets And U.S. Debt Bubble

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog, Saturday issued a report confirming Iran's compliance with the July 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran, the U.S. and five world powers. International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Yukiya Amano released the following statement via the IAEA:

Today, I released a report confirming that Iran has completed the necessary preparatory steps to start the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The report was submitted to the IAEA Board of Governors and to the United Nations Security Council. ... full statement ...

After the IAEA issued the report confirming Iran's compliance with the nuclear deal, Secretary of State John Kerry signed a waiver lifting Congressional enacted sanctions related to Iran's nuclear program. At the same time, President Barack Obama issued a new executive order to lift sanctions that were enacted under his authority, and the U.N. and EU moved to provide sanctions relief to Iran.

With sanctions lifted, the Iranian oil minister has said his country will immediately begin selling as much of its crude oil onto the world energy market as it can produce to generate cash the country badly needs to help its economy recover from years of sanctions. Unfortunately, Iran rejoins the world energy market just as the world energy market slumps into a deep price depression. 

Sanctions background

BlogTalkUSA: Eyes Wide Open / DemBlogTalk - 01/12/2016

On our Tuesday evening BlogTalkUSA.com program this week, my co-host Rheana Nevitt Piegols and I talked about President Obama's last State of the Union address. (Program was pre-recorded before the SOTU Address.)

We also talk about the state of mind of those who criticize President Obama's, his assessments, his proposals, and his vision for the future, despite the facts and realities he referenced and has spoken about in prior SOTU addresses.

To wrap up the program, we discuss new polling data on Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as it relates the Democratic Party caucus and primary schedule in February.

Click to listen to our podcast:


Listen or download - MP3

• Read my review of President Obama's last State of the Union address at Pres. Barack Obama Delivers His Last State of the Union Address
• Read my rebuttal to the GOP's rebuttal of President Obama's last State of the Union address at SC Gov. Nikki Haley’s 2016 GOP State of the Union Response 
• Eyes Wide Open DemBlogTalk program link for Jan. 12, 2016

Clinton Says Bernie Sanders Would Take Health Care From Millions

Over the last few weeks Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been hitting fast-rising rival Bernie Sanders over his longtime advocacy for single-payer health care. That's a system in which everybody, or almost everybody, gets insurance directly from a government-run "Medicare for all" program.

The Clinton campaign's assault on Bernie Sanders over health care got more intense this week as Hillary Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, made the claim Sanders intends to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid -- and "strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance."

• WaPo: Clinton attacks produce windfall of campaign cash for Sanders
• Hillary Clinton’s Polling Trend Not Her Friend

But in 2008, Clinton decried the notion that a fellow Democrat would attack another for proposing universal coverage. Health care was also a major issue in the 2008 Democratic primaries. At the time, Clinton supported an individual mandate requiring everyone buy a commercial health insurance policy or pay a fine, as was eventually enacted in the Affordable Care Act, otherwise know as Obamacare. Then Preisdential candidate Barack Obama did not at the time support the individual private insurance mandate.

SC Gov. Nikki Haley’s 2016 GOP State of the Union Response

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was tapped by the Republican Party to deliver its response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address. Haley's message was clearly intended to convince voters seven years under the thumb of  a Democratic president has been seven years too many. Haley directed explicit criticisms of the president, saying:

Barack Obama's election as president seven years ago broke historic barriers and inspired millions of Americans. As he did when he first ran for office, tonight President Obama spoke eloquently about grand things. He is at his best when he does that.

Unfortunately, the President's record has often fallen far short of his soaring words.

As he enters his final year in office, many Americans are still feeling the squeeze of an economy too weak to raise income levels. We're feeling a crushing national debt, a health care plan that has made insurance less affordable and doctors less available, and chaotic unrest in many of our cities.

The South Carolina governor followed up her opening shot at Pres. Obama by savaging his foreign policy and highlighting Republican priorities on immigration, taxes, education, and the Second Amendment.

Haley's alternate state of the union was a clear attempt to disparage the Democrat in White House to reconstitute conservative governing ideology as good governance, as Republicans have done since Pres. Bush moved out of the White House.

During his State of the Union address last night, President Obama seemed eager to tout the nation’s economic gains. “The United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world,” he said, before rattling off key statistics, including rapid job growth and the strength of the American auto industry. “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” the president added.

• A LONG List Of President Obama’s Accomplishments (With Citations)

The Great Recession legacy Pres. George Bush and his Republican controlled congress left to the United States after eight years in office the nation's longest, and by most measures worst economic recession since the Great Depression between December 2007 and June 2009. The follow discussion reviews the course of the economy following that recession against the background of how deep a hole the recession created – and how much deeper that hole would have been without the financial stabilization and fiscal stimulus policies enacted by Pres. Obama in early 2009.

Hillary Clinton’s Polling Trend Not Her Friend

Several polls out this week show Hillary Clinton trailing (to various degrees) in New Hampshire, and now, also falling behind in Iowa in the January Quinnipiac University poll taken after New Year's Day and completing Jan. 10th.

In a mid-November Quinnipiac University poll, Clinton had the support of 51 percent of likely Iowa caucus attendees to Sanders' 42 percent, for a 9 point lead. Quinnipiac last polled Iowa in December, at which point Hillary Clinton led Bernie Sanders by 11 points. That poll was completed Dec. 13.  The Iowa poll out on January 12, 2016 showed a five-point 49 percent to 44 percent advantage — for Sanders. That's a 16-point swing over the course of a month. This also wasn't the only poll to show Sanders with a lead. A survey from American Research Group this week has him up three points.

So what happened to Clinton? Well, part of it is that her favorability slipped. Among all voters, she dropped seven points in the head-to-head matchup (Sanders gained nine), but the percentage of people viewing her favorably fell from 81 to 74. Among groups that have preferred Sanders (like men), Sanders's lead increased.

Pres. Barack Obama Delivers His Last State of the Union Address

When President Obama took office in January 2009 after 8 years of Pres. Bush's administration, America was experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Job losses were mounting by 800,000 jobs per month, people were loosing their homes and life savings, and tens of thousands of U.S troops were deployed in Iraq and Afganistan. Seven years later, our businesses have created 14.1 million new jobs over the past 70 months. America has reformed its health care system, reinvented its energy sector, and brought home more than 160,000 troops.

President Obama used his final State of the Union address to reflect on his presidency and accomplishments, and the work yet to be accomplished.

• A LONG List Of President Obama’s Accomplishments (With Citations)
• Fact Checking GOP’s Claims About Obama’s Record

About 31.3 million people watched President Obama deliver his last State of the Union address on network and cable television Tuesday — the smallest audience recorded since ratings company Nielsen started keeping track in 1993. The ratings count the 12 networks that carried the address live: ABC, Al Jazeera America, Azteca, CBS, CNN, FOX, FOX Business Network, FOX News Channel, Galavision, MSNBC, NBC and NBC Universo. Spanish-language Univision also carried the speech on tape delay. These TV ratings numbers do not include other ways people follow the State of the Union address on streaming video sites like YouTube and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This year, the White House added Amazon video and Snapchat to the mix. Nielsen said 9.8 million people saw one or more of the 2.6 million tweets sent in the United States about the speech. The Twitter audience peaked at 30,600 tweets-per-minute immediately after the president's speech.

Watch the video of President Barack Obama delivering his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress in Washington on January 12, 2016.

VP Joe Biden Praises Bernie Sanders

Vice President Joe Biden has nothing but glowing praise for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Biden, who contemplated a run for the presidency but decided to opt out, said of Sanders:

“Bernie is speaking to a yearning that is deep and real. And he has credibility on it. And that is the absolute enormous concentration of wealth of a small group of people, with a middle class now being left out.”

Biden was referring to Sanders’ consistent record of speaking out on and pushing initiatives about income inequality throughout his career. Sanders has made the issue a central theme of his campaign. Biden also believes the issue of income inequality is of vital importance to the country.

Biden said: “There used to be a basic bargain. If you contributed to the profitability of an enterprise, you share in that profit, and that’s been broken. Productivity is up and wages are stagnant.”

Biden continued, commenting on Hillary Clinton, "It's relatively new for Hillary to talk about that," acknowledging that Clinton has "come forward with some really thoughtful approaches to deal with the issue" of income inequality. Hillary's focus has been other things up to now, and that's been Bernie's -- no one questions Bernie's authenticity on those issues,"

Government Isn't The Solution, It's The Problem, When Run By GOP Conservatives

President Ronald Reagan in his first Inaugural Address proclaimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”  Conservative humorist P. J. O'Rourke often quips, "The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it." Here is another example of the absolute truth of O'Rourke's quip.

If you watch Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program you know she has devoted a great deal of time to reporting about "emergency managers" appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and the Flint, Michigan water crisis, created by that city's emergency manager. If you haven’t heard Rachel's reporting on this on this scandal, it’s important to get up to speed.

2016 Iowa Brown & Black Democratic Presidential Forum

The Iowa Brown & Black U.S. Presidential candidate Forum was founded in 1984 by Co-Chairs former Iowa State Representative Wayne W. Ford and Mary E. Dominguez Campos. Rep. Ford is the Founder and Executive Director of Urban Dreams, a United Way agency located in Des Moines, Iowa. Ms. Campos is a prominent member of the Des Moines Latino community. It is recognized as the oldest non-partisan forum for Presidential candidates in the nation addressing issues of concern to the minority community. It is the fourth oldest, established forum for presidential candidates in the nation.

On Monday, January 11th, Clinton, O'Malley and Sanders took this year's Forum stage to discuss where they stand on the issues that matter to young, diverse America. Including: social justice, immigration, education, health care, and the economy. The Forum was moderated by FUSION anchors Jorge Ramos and Alicia Menendez as well as FUSION contributor Akilah Hughes and New York Magazine Writer-at-Large Rembert Browne. watch the video now.

DNC Chair Wasserman-Schultz Blames Voters for Failures of Democratic Party

Rarely do politicians appear to go out of their way to alienate their core constituencies. It is even more rare that they do so in the course of an election cycle in which they play a critical role, and in which turnout will be key to winning. Nonetheless, that is exactly what Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) did, in what was an otherwise very brief interview published by the New York Times Magazine on January 6.

It’s a doozy. Wasserman Schultz is also chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and ostensibly working to elect more Dems in 2016. Yet in a few short paragraphs, she insulted an entire demographic of female voters, made misleading statements about medical marijuana and the heroin epidemic, and suggested that drug addiction was not a problem “in the suburbs.”

The interview has caused a firestorm among progressive groups and advocates, including CREDO Action, which has launched a petition calling on her to resign. Wasserman Schultz calls herself a progressive, but that appears more an effort to ally herself notionally with a growing political movement than a reflection of her actual politics, positions, or actions.

Primary Challenger For DNC Chair Wasserman-Schultz

Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL), the controversial chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has a progressive primary challenger in her bid for re-election in Florida’s 23rd Congressional district. Tim Canova, a little-known liberal economist and law professor, announcedThursday that he would challenge Wasserman-Schultz, who has aroused the ire of progressives for her perceived supplication to corporate interests, outdated policy beliefs, and mishandling of the primary election season.

U.S. Was Hit With Seriously High Temperatures In 2015

2015 was the second hottest on record in the United States since data collection began in 1895, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday. Last year was also the 19th consecutive time that average temperatures in the U.S. exceeded the 20th century average.

Everyone born after 1996 has only known warmer than normal temperatures. NOAA also reported that December was record warm for the contiguous United States, with temperatures at 6°F above average. Twenty-nine states had their warmest December on record, while no state was record cold.

Mounting evidence behind man-made climate change doesn’t mean that skeptics are backing down, however.

Read the rest of the story at Think Progress: U.S. Was Hit With Seriously High Temperatures In 2015

The Best Economic Plan For The 99 Percent

The Democratic presidential campaign – unlike the Republican circus – has actually produced a debate in which each candidate’s economic agenda has gotten better and more populist. But as you can see at CandidateScorecard.net, there are also big differences.

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders agree that America’s long period of stagnant wages and growing inequality has been due to chronic slow growth and high unemployment. InClinton’s words, “getting closer to full employment is crucial to raising wages.” Both are committed to some amount of increased public spending on infrastructure and investments in “green industries.” But the differences between the two candidates on public investment are a matter of scale.

Clinton wants $275 billion more in infrastructure investment over the next five years.

Sanders would increase the public investments in jobs-creating infrastructure by $1 trillion over the same five-year period – creating one million new jobs, while helping to retool the U.S. economy to reduce carbon emissions.

Limited Taxes, Limited Ambitions

BlogTalkUSA: Eyes Wide Open / DemBlogTalk - 01/05/2016

On our Tuesday evening program, my co-host Rheana Nevitt Piegols and I talked about gun safety, among other topics.

Each year: More than 100,000 people in America (all ages) are shot in murders, assaults, suicides, accidents, or by police intervention.

31,537 people die from gun violence: 11,583 people murdered; 18,783 self inflicted; and 584 accidental shootings.

71,386 people survive gun injuries: 51,249 people intentionally assaulted by gun owners; 3,627 people survive at tempted suicide; and 15,815 people are shot accidentally.

Click to listen to our podcast:


Listen or download - MP3

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains why "The gun lobby's con game will come to an end.." As Dionne writes, "... Something important happened in the East Room when Obama offered a series of constrained but useful steps toward limiting the carnage on our streets, in our schools and houses of worship and movie theaters. He made clear that the era of cowering before the gun lobby and apologizing, trimming, hedging and equivocating is over...Bullies are intimidating until someone calls their bluff. By ruling out any reasonable steps toward containing the killing in our nation and by offering ever more preposterous arguments, the gun worshipers are setting themselves up for wholesale defeat. It will take time. But it will happen."

At ABC News Gary Langer has "Views on Gun Control: A Polling Summary."

From Pew Research Center, via Greg Sargent

Sen. Bernie Sanders On Wall Street And Banking Reform

If you’ve seen the Adam McKay's film “The Big Short,” you know it was the greed of Wall Street traders and bankers, combined with the lack of regulatory control, that produced the 2008 economic crisis. You also know that nothing has changed. Congress still has not enacted the kind of financial reforms needed to prevent the next 2008-like financial crash and, even more disturbing, most of the banks are now bigger than they were before the 2008 crash. As noted by the Washington Post, “three of the four largest financial institutions are nearly 80 percent larger” than they were in 2008.

At Town Hall in New York City, Bernie Sanders delivered a major policy speech declaring that he will "break up any banks that are too big to fail and that big bankers will not be too big to jail."


YouTube
Politico: Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday offered some strong praise for Bernie Sanders Wall Street speech.

Huffington Post: Hillary Clinton's Campaign Response to Sanders' Wall Street Reform Proposals.

Sanders'Speech text as prepared for delivery:

Who Turned My Blue State Red?

By Alec MacGillis, ProPublica

It is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.

In his successful bid for the Senate in 2010, the libertarian Rand Paul railed against “inter-generational welfare” and said that “the culture of dependency on government destroys people’s spirits,” yet racked up winning margins in eastern Kentucky, a former Democratic stronghold that is heavily dependent on public benefits.

Last year, Paul R. LePage, the fiercely anti-welfare Republican governor of Maine, was re-elected despite a highly erratic first term — with strong support in struggling towns where many rely on public assistance.

And in November 2015, Kentucky elected as governor a conservative Republican who had vowed to largely undo the Medicaid expansion that had given the state the country’s largest decrease in the uninsured under Obamacare, with roughly one in 10 residents gaining coverage.

It’s enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.

But this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that’s taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic Party’s growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps us from fully grasping what’s going on in communities where conditions have deteriorated to the point where researchers have detected alarming trends in their mortality rates.

How Democrats Could Win The U.S. House

Whoever wins the White House in 2016, it’s an article of faith among political pundents that not much will change in the House, where Republicans have a seeming lock on the majority.

It’s true the Democrats’ odds of flipping the 30 seats needed to win back the House of Representatives are not good. But the current polling leaders for the Republican presidential nomination are candidates almost perfectly designed to turn off Republican voters in the districts Democrats need to win to retake the House.

Read more at Politico.com:

Hillary v. Bernie Polls And Sampling Frames

If the 2016 U.S. presidential election were held today, a sampling of all voters finds Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would win by a landslide over GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, according to a new poll released Tuesday by Quinnipiac University.

Voters favor Sanders over Trump 51 to 38 percent, giving Sanders the general election win by 13 points — nearly double Sanders' chief rival for the Democratic nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton would likewise beat Trump, but her margin of victory over Trump is seven points — 47 to 40 percent. This suggests Sanders would attract some politically disaffected voters Clinton would not.

Columnist Brent Budowsky writes for The Hill:

If Sanders' margin held in a general election, Democrats would almost certainly regain control of the United States Senate and very possibly the House of Representatives.
It is high time and long overdue for television networks such as CNN to end their obsession with Trump and report the all-important fact that in most polls, both Hillary Clinton and Sanders would defeat Trump by landslide margins.
[....] It is noteworthy that in this Quinnipiac poll, Sanders runs so much stronger than Clinton against Trump.

Budowsky concludes, "analysts would be talking about a national political realignment and new progressive era in American history if an enlightened candidate such as Sanders would defeat a retrograde race-baiting candidate such as Trump by a potentially epic and historic margin."

Season's Greetings From DemBlogNews

We offer our readers a holiday treat with a video of Bob Dylan reading “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan hosted a satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, once a week for almost three years. For his 2006 Christmas broadcast, the show featured a wide variety of Christmas music with Dylan’s commentary.

Following the Dylan video, we offer a 1939 radio broadcast and then a 1935 British movie of  "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens.


Here is the 1939 Campbell Playhouse radio broadcast productions of "A Christmas Carol" featuring Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge.


Play starts at 3:00 minutes [MP3] - [Mercury Theatre Info]

Seymour Hicks plays the title role in the first sound version of the Dickens classic about the miser who's visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve. This British import is notable for being the only adaptation of this story with an invisible Marley's Ghost and its Expressionistic cinematography. This is the uncut 78 minute version from the Internet Archive.

DNC Penalizes Sanders Campaign For VAN Security Breach

On Thursday, December 17th at 11:47 p.m., the Washington Post broke a story reporting Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had cut off presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign access to the DNC's master 50-state voter file managed for the DNC under a sole-source contract, by NGP VAN Inc., a private political data services vendor. Schultz accuses a VAN data base system expert working for the Sanders campaign of intentionally breaching VAN system security firewalls to gain access to Hillary Clintion’s campaign data about voters.

Chairwoman Schultz intentionally misrepresents the facts after the Sanders campaign VAN administrator stumbled upon and investigated a VAN software bug introduced Wednesday morning, December 16th, at approximately 10:40 AM, when NGP VAN, the company whose software hosts the Democratic National Committee’s voter file, installed a routine software update. The update introduced a bug that allowed members of Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, among others, to filter the voter records they share using custom “scores” each campaign had independently tagged to those common voter records. Such custom scores tagged by individual campaigns are to be private to those campaigns, but the bug exposed that campaign specific scoring as public data to all VAN users. (about which more shortly).

Josh Uretsky was the Sanders campaign’s National Data Director who discovered NGP VAN had opened every candidate's campaign data for viewing by every other NGP VAN client user.

WaPo headlined its story, "DNC penalizes Sanders campaign for improper access of Clinton voter data," with a lead paragraph reporting,

"Officials with the Democratic National Committee have accused the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of improperly accessing confidential voter information gathered by the rival campaign of Hillary Clinton, according to several party officials." The article's third paragraph said, "The discovery sparked alarm at the DNC, which promptly shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to the strategically crucial list of likely Democratic voters." The DNC had shut down access Wednesday morning.

That WaPo news headline replaced the day's headline story that Sen. Sanders received endorsements from the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America union, secured 88.9 percent of 270,000 votes cast in Democracy for America’s official endorsement poll, and received a record 2 million campaign contributions, with over $2 million raised in just 72 hours.

The initial Thursday night Washington Post story and all subsequent stories through the day Friday were clearly originally sourced from individuals at the DNC and NGP VAN. The frame of that sourced reporting - "Sanders campaign gained improper access to" and "breached" Clinton data - gives the impression Sanders campaign staffers with malice of forethought hacked system security to access Clinton campaign data. The DNC seemingly used that same framing language in notifying the Clinton campaign its data had been breach through four Sanders campaign VAN/VoteBuilder userids.

DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz, by taking the story public, stating to Washington Post reporters and other reporters she cut off Sanders campaign access to the DNC's voter information database, because Sanders' campaign staff had "improperly accessed confidential voter information of Hillary Clinton's campaign" and that "cutting the Sanders' campaign's access is the only way we can make sure we can protect our significant asset that is the voter file," Schultz instantly flipped Sanders' news momentum for the week, leading into the Saturday Democratic debate, from positive to negative.

Democratic Debate - December 19, 2015

You probably didn't watch the third Democratic presidential primary debate at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire Saturday night, hosted by ABC New correspondents Martha Raddatz and David Muir. Maybe you had something better to do on a Saturday night six days before Christmas. Maybe you went to a holiday party. Maybe you watched the New York Jets take on the Dallas Cowboys. Maybe you got some Christmas shopping done. Maybe you went to see "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." Maybe you were so burned out with the political ranker over Democratic National Committee (DNC), Debbie Wasserman Schultz cutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to the campaign's NGP-VAN's voter information database, you just didn't feel like tuning in.

The debate attracted only 6.71 million viewers, the lowest number so far for any 2016 debate organized by the DNC or the RNC. Saturday night’s debate was such a flop that it barely attracted one quarter of the viewership of the most watched Republican debate.

If you didn't watch it, you missed a good debate! In the third Democratic presidential primary debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Hillary Clinton quickly moved past the previous day's rancor over the DNC's handling of a campaign data exposure breach caused by data services company NGP-VAN switching off data privacy protocols between all the candidate's campaign data. The Democratic National Committee contracted with NGP-VAN to store and securely manage its voter data for Democratic candidates. NGP-VAN is run by Stu Trevelyan, a veteran of Pres. Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign "War Room" and then Pres. Clinton's Administration.

Saturday night's debate moved on to a pointed but polite and factual discussion of national security, Americans' heightened terrorism fears and the economy between Sen. Sanders, former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley.

Watch the entire debate in this video, courtesy of ABC News:


Transcript: 

Who Is On 2016 Texas Primary Ballots

The Tuesday, March 1st, 2016 Texas primary election to nominate candidates from each political party for the Tuesday, November 8th, 2016 general election is less than one year distant. Twelve days of early voting begins on Tuesday, February 16, 2016, the first business day after Presidents' Day, just two months from now.

The 2016 primary election filing period ran from Saturday, November 14, 2015, through the filing deadline date of 6 p.m. Monday, December 14, 2015.

With the filing deadline past,Republican and Democratic Party precinct chairs of each county will meet during the coming days to approve their party's ballot and set the order of candidate names for contested office ballot positions.

Presidential Candidate Filings

Office Sought

Ballot Name

Party

--------------	--------------	-------
President/Vice-President	Bernie Sanders	DEM
President/Vice-President	Calvis L. Hawes	DEM
President/Vice-President	Hillary Clinton	DEM
President/Vice-President	Keith Judd	DEM
President/Vice-President	Martin J. O'Malley	DEM
President/Vice-President	Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente	DEM
President/Vice-President	Star Locke	DEM
President/Vice-President	Willie L. Wilson	DEM
President/Vice-President	Ben Carson	REP
President/Vice-President	Carly Fiorina	REP
President/Vice-President	Chris Christie	REP
President/Vice-President	Donald J. Trump	REP
President/Vice-President	Elizabeth Gray	REP
President/Vice-President	Jeb Bush	REP
President/Vice-President	John R. Kasich	REP
President/Vice-President	Lindsey Graham	REP
President/Vice-President	Marco Rubio	REP
President/Vice-President	Mike Huckabee	REP
President/Vice-President	Rand Paul	REP
President/Vice-President	Rick Santorum	REP
President/Vice-President	Ted Cruz	REP

Congressional Filings

Of the 36 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats currently hold 11 seats and Republicans hold 25 seats.  According to filing information on the Texas Secretary of State website, Democratic candidates filed in 28 of the 36 Congressional seats. No Democrat filed for congressional district 4, 5, 8, 11, 13, 19, 32, or 36, however, it is my understanding Democrats had intended to file in districts 4 and 5 -- filing information for 4 and 5 may not have yet been posted on the SOS website.