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
Friday, January 8, 2016
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
Thursday, December 24, 2015
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:
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.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."
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
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,
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.
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.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
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:
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:
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Who Is On 2016 Texas Primary Ballots
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.
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