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ALBANY, N.Y. - With former Gov. Mario Cuomo's death, liberals have lost one of their last, best champions, a proud populist who represented an older breed of Democrat.

During his three terms as governor, the former minor league baseball player from Queens championed the working class, reproached Ronald Reagan and flirted - repeatedly - with a run for the White House. In his 1984 address at the Democratic National Convention, he talked of a nation of haves and have-nots, of a yawning disconnect between rich and poor largely ignored by Reagan.

"A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well," he said. "Mr. President, you ought to know that this nation is more 'A Tale of Two Cities' than it is just a 'Shining City on a Hill.'"

The 82-year-old Cuomo died Thursday at his home in Manhattan of natural causes from heart failure just hours after his son, Andrew, began his second term as New York's chief executive. Services are planned for Tuesday morning at a Manhattan church.

Mario Cuomo's progressive legacy is reflected today by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose own 2013 campaign kickoff speech recycled the "Tale of Two Cities" image.

By contrast, Andrew Cuomo epitomizes the mainstream Democratic Party's recent tendency toward centrism. While Cuomo is socially liberal on gun control and abortion, he's seen as more fiscally conservative, willing to battle teachers unions and supportive of business-friendly tax cuts.

The elder Cuomo came from an older, more liberal strand of Democratic politics that included Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson. Like them, Cuomo combined public eloquence with an intellectual rigor. Unlike those two, however, he never ran for president, despite pleas to do so in 1988 and 1992.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who also spoke at the 1984 convention, said Cuomo's supporters "literally begged him to run." Jackson said Cuomo's brand of outspoken liberalism is needed now that "too few have too much and too many have nothing."

"He had room for everybody. There's so much polarization these days," Jackson said. "He was a big tent visionary."

Even those who disagreed with his policies respected Cuomo's passion and his rise as the son of Italian immigrants to the pinnacle of American politics. Republican state Senate Leader Dean Skelos called him "one of the great orators of our time."

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Liberals lose champion in Cuomo

Neil deGrasse Tyson is why Liberals and Science are Losing.
Blog post: http://www.blue-point-trading.com/blue-point-trading-daily-market-view-january-02-2015/

By: Blue Point Trading

More here:
Neil deGrasse Tyson is why Liberals and Science are Losing. - Video

January 2, 2015|6:34 pm

urbancure.org

Star Parker is the founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank which promotes market based public policy to fight poverty.

If you want to identify a serious potential leader, someone committed to getting America back on track as a free and prosperous nation under God, just check the intensity of efforts of those on the left to try and destroy the reputation and career of that individual.

The more time and energy liberals invest to destroy someone, you can bet that this is someone who loves America, what it stands for, and who can make a difference.

Latest case is attacks on Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) because he spoke, in 2002, to the European American Unity and Rights Organization, a white supremacist group founded by racist David Duke.

Scalise says the remarks were in the context of promoting tax reform legislation he was sponsoring when he was in the Louisiana state legislature, that he addressed many groups in promoting this legislation, and that he didn't appreciate then who these folks were.

But, really, who cares who they were? Shouldn't a legislator with reforms to improve his state or his nation be free to sell good ideas to anyone? How far do we let liberals go in censuring speech and ideas in America?

Even Dr. Ben Carson, whose magnificent career led to becoming head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, had to pull out of giving the commencement address at the very university where he built his career because liberals didn't like his views about marriage.

Is Steve Scalise a racist? Absurd. I know him since he started serving in the House of Representatives in 2008. He is an outstanding Christian American patriot without a racist bone in his body.

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Liberals, Get Off Steve Scalise's Case

How Liberals Use the False Myth of Voter Suppression to Rally Support But at the Expense of Better Race Relations

by Hughey Newsome (bio)

In interviews before the midterm elections, NAACP President Cornell William Brooks appeared on news programs to warn, as he did on MSNBC, "this is the first election in a generation where the American electorate is unprotected by the Voting Rights Act."

Brooks is not accurate: the Voting Rights Act remains powerful and in effect; only a small portion of the Act, Section 4(b), was struck down last year.

What's more, when he asserts that the Act was "gutted," his words imply there is a conspiracy to neuter African-American voters by requiring IDs to vote and rolling back conveniences African-Americans disproportionately use, such as Sunday voting.

To meaningfully discuss such claims, mistruths must be resolved.

Liberals vociferously oppose ballot protection laws recently passed in several states, saying valid identification requirements and more stringent voting rules disfranchise voters particularly minorities. They dismiss vote fraud as a rare occurrence, yet people have been convicted and investigations have proven that fraud can easily occur in the absence of common sense safeguards.

They also support President Obama in his opposition to voting safeguards. Yet they ignore the irony that Obama won his first election in 1996 by challenging and invalidating the candidate petitions of all his primary opponents, including the incumbent, so he ran unopposed in the primary and cruised to victory in the general election.

Where are the howls of voter suppression? Obama clearly disfranchised South Side Chicago voters.

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How Liberals Use the False Myth of Voter Suppression to Rally Support But at the Expense of Better Race Relations

South Australia's two big political parties - particularly the Liberals - are famous for long and bitter internal divisions.

But echoes from further afield - specifically the federal ALP's fraught Rudd-Gillard-Rudd period - can hardly be avoided if Labor loses its 12-year grasp on governing the state at Saturday night's election, as widely expected.

Parallels could include a successful leader pushed out by factional heavies and a governing party caught flatfooted by a new Opposition Leader

Not so fast, cautions Associate Professor of Politics at Flinders University, Haydon Manning.

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A more salient cause of South Australians' disenchantment with the Labor Government of Premier Jay Weatherill, Professor Manning says, is their fear of an economy in decline and the return of the spectre of a ''rust-belt'' state.

The Liberal Party, having chosen a previously unknown Steven Marshall as leader, free of the party's decades-old leadership merry-go-round, had managed to harness voters' disenchantment through an emphasis on Labor's $1 billion deficit and the loss of its hard-won AAA credit rating.

The biggest blow to confidence had been BHP Billiton's decision in August 2012 to postpone indefinitely its planned $30 billion expansion of South Australia's Olympic Dam mine. Less than 12 months previously, former premier Mike Rann had touted the mine expansion as his crowning achievement, and there had been a sense the state could continue to afford to build debt, knowing it could be paid off.

Now, with Rann and the mine expansion gone, there had grown ''a sense of hopes and aspirations dashed'', Professor Manning said. Holden's recent announcement it was quitting car manufacturing had deepened the gloom.

Weatherill, in his first term as leader after Rann was pushed from office by union-backed factional leaders in late 2011, has lacked Rann's touch in building a narrative of hope.

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Analysis: Disenchanted SA voters driven by fears of economy in decline