Sunday, January 17, 2016

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.
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

Thursday, January 14, 2016

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.

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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."
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.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

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.
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.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

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.
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.

Monday, January 11, 2016

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.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

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.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

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

Friday, January 8, 2016

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

Thursday, January 7, 2016

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.

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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

gun chart.jpg

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:

Monday, December 28, 2015

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.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

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: