Observer | ProgressivesNot TrumpNeed to Fix Our Public School Crisis Observer As a civil rights attorney, I've spent my career advocating for many of the issues that rally progressives. These bedrock points send us to the polls andin the era of President Trumpinto the streets. Economic inequality. Immigration. Criminal ... |
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ProgressivesNot TrumpNeed to Fix Our Public School Crisis - Observer
Progressives from across the state gathered at Binghamton High school on Sunday for the first New York Progressive Action Network state conference. The origins of this group have a not too distant past, stretching back to the 2016 presidential primary where the seeds of this movement were sowed by a certain senator for Vermont.
Most of us were Bernie delegates and we met while working on the petition drive last January. said Emily Adams, director of the Tompkins County Progressives and secretary of the NYPAN executive committee. We stayed in touch as we were getting up to the convention in July and many of us met each other in person for the first time at the convention in Philadelphia. We said we cant let this energy die after the convention so we stayed in touch and we formed NYPAN a few months later.
That formally materialized for the first time over the weekend as progressives from Buffalo, Albany, Syracuse, Ithaca and every other nook and cranny of New York gathered to talk progressive political policy and how to promote it moving forward.
There are a number of goals, Adams said. getting information out about single payer, getting information out about the environment and how that impacts the southern tier, but also really sort of a bonding moment a place to network and get your energy up a little bit because many people in the progressive community are feeling kind of down right now.
Adams also said NYPAN doubled its membership by approving 16 new affiliated groups, effectively doubling its membership to 32 member affiliates statewide.
The event featured several special guests including Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, Stephanie Miller, Mayor of Syracuse, Nomiki Konst of The Young Turks, and Arun Chaudhary, former Sanders campaign creative director and White House videographer under President Obama.
There are lots and lots and lots of folks who are taking it upon themselves to be activists in their community and its inspiring to see, said Chaudhary who now serves as vice president of Revolution Messaging, a media group committed to supporting progressive organizations nation-wide. Chaudhary says as people begin gearing up to the 2018 and even 2020 elections, business is booming.
It will be a lot about presentation of things and how you talk about things and how you make them emotional. Thats not always popular with people who are super smart and super wonky.
NYPAN is still in its infancy stages, but Adams and the other organizers are enthusiastic to continue organizing and pushing forward with the progressive agenda.
This is an opportunity not just to reach out, said Adams. But to connect with each other and to feel like were in this together and we can keep moving forward.
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Tompkins progressives head to Binghamton - ithaca.com
With a heavily local election this year and a congressional election next year, local progressives are organizing.
After last fall's election, the Democratic Party nationally is in bad shape and a lot of older politicians are discredited by the results of the November election. Surveys say younger voters are concerned about what they are seeing in the Trump Administration and its positions.
Locally, the former Bernie Sanders progressives are organizing themselves looking to fall and 2018. They held a meeting Tuesday night in Communications Workers Local 1122 hall in Cheektowaga with a number of political candidates present to speak and shake a few hands in a crowded room.
Local Liberty Union Progressives Co-chair Matt Dearing said it was organizing time.
"We're trying to build our own sort of base here in the area," Dearing said. "We used to be Buffalo for Bernie Sanders before the election, before he lost. So we want to be the engine that keeps the party moving forward and makes the changes that need to be made to get us some seats again. We're not even in control in the New York State Senate."
There are more Democrats than Republicans in the State Senate, but many work with the GOP as the Independent Democratic Conference. Dearing said there are opportunities for progressives, but not much locally.
"Not so much here in Erie County," he said. "Things are kind of locked in, at the moment, but all across the country there is a lot of growing more room for the progressive movement to sort of get their feet in and there's a big deliberation going on whether the choice is to join the Democratic Party or leave the Democratic Party and join the Green Party and start a third, a new progressive party."
Dearing pointed to Sheriff Tim Howard and the problems of the Holding Center as an issue for this year and Democratic sheriff candidate Bernie Tolbert was at the meeting.
"We've had a Republican sheriff, for instance, in Erie County for I don't even know how long, to be honest, but with the problems that are going in the Holding Center, we think, particularly here in an off-year, we have a chance to drive up engagement and interest among people in the region," Dearing said. "Next year is something that we're very excited for, especially with Mr. Collins being up for re-election."
Dearing says a number of his members live in Clarence Congressman Chris Collins' district. His close alliance with President Trump is not likely to go over well with progressives.
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Local progressives have eye on off-year election prizes | WBFO - WBFO
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WASHINGTON (CNN) - Spurned on health care by hard-line Republicans, President Donald Trump's White House is now looking for Democratic assistance to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, advance a massive new infrastructure investment and fund the government.
The Democratic base doesn't want any part of it.
Buoyed by its initial victory on health care, Democrats are interested in using the improved bargaining position that the party's House and Senate members suddenly find themselves in.
Instead, progressives are continuing to demand total opposition to Trump.
With the confirmation fight over Gorsuch and a deadline to fund the government both looming, Democratic lawmakers are under intense pressure not to give an inch, even if that means forcing what could be a losing battle over the filibuster in the Senate.
Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-California, said Tuesday that the party's constituencies feel "energized" and "emboldened" now that Republicans have failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and believe they can hamstring Trump for the duration of his presidency.
"If he were a TV show, I think he would be canceled for next season," Sanchez said of Trump.
An epic clash between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, looms over the Gorsuch confirmation battle.
If Democrats don't supply at least eight votes to get Gorsuch over the 60-vote threshold, McConnell is likely to invoke the "nuclear option" -- removing Democrats' ability to filibuster Supreme Court nominees.
As of Tuesday night, 26 Democrats have said or suggested they will filibuster Trump's nominee, according to CNN's tally.
But liberal groups aren't concerned about losing that potential leverage for future confirmation fights.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee sent a letter to members in Vermont this week criticizing Sen. Patrick Leahy over what the group called "squishy comments" about confirming Gorsuch. He'd said he is "not inclined to filibuster" Gorsuch.
It's not just Gorsuch. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus on Monday sent a letter to House budget-writers urging them to reject Trump's request for border wall funding as a deadline to fund the government and avert a shutdown draws closer -- signaling that any effort to implement a key Trump campaign promise could trigger another major battle.
"Across issues, the Republican agenda represents handouts to giant corporations and the rich while a populist progressive agenda fights for the little guy," said Progressive caucus co-founder Adam Green. "Those are two completely opposite directions, and Trump has broken his campaign promises by running full-steam toward corporate welfare over and over again."
On health care, Trump has predicted Obamacare will ultimately collapse and that Democrats will seek to strike a bargain with him.
Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, the Democratic caucus chair, said he is unaware of any direct outreach from Trump's White House to House Democrats.
"If the president is serious about working with Democrats, he has to completely revamp the way he has conducted himself in office so far," he said.
Before working on health care changes, Democrats say Republicans first need to take the party's longstanding desire to repeal the law off the table.
"We're at the table. We're ready to negotiate. We just need them to abandon the purely political attacks on Obamacare," Crowley said.
Left-leaning groups also say they don't buy the sincerity of Trump's desire to work with Democrats.
"Trump and the GOP have done nothing to indicate they are legitimately interested in working with Democrats on bipartisan solutions that would benefit the American people," said MoveOn.org national spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre.
"If Trump wants to endorse progressive ideas like Medicare for All and massive government investments without corporate giveaways -- in a way that unites populist progressives, Democrats, and a minimal handful of swing-district Republicans -- that would be a fantasy world that is not going to happen," he said.
Democrats are suggesting they'll work with Trump only if he fully embraces their ideas -- an unlikely prospect.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California sent fellow party members a letter Tuesday congratulating them on their health care victory and soliciting ideas to improve Obamacare.
"It would be my hope to create a list of priorities to engage with our colleagues, with social media and advocacy groups," she said, "and perhaps even with the president."
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Progressives continue to demand total opposition to Trump - NBC Montana
By Joan Swirsky It's easy to deride the aberrant behavior of the leftists we've been unhappily witness to, both over the course of the presidential campaign and particularly since Donald J. Trump ascended to the presidency on November 8th, 2016. After all, they've never recovered from the Bush v Gore race of 2000!
But as a wise neighbor told me years ago about an exceptionally vile person we both knew: "She's more to be pitied than scorned."
At the time, this seemed overly charitable to me. But as the decades have elapsed and I've watched progressives consistently acting so infantile, it is clear that their limited repertoire hurling of insults and obscenities, public temper tantrums, wanton destruction of property, idle threats to leave the country, physical assaults on people who disagree with them, engaging in serial lies of increasing magnitude and pepper spraying mothers and children marching in support of President Trump dictates that they are indeed more to be pitied than scorned.
After all, all of their sound and fury has resulted in drum roll here nothing!
Make that worse than nothing, especially if you're dealing with the mortal enemy of the progressive agenda FACTS!
In 2010, in the first midterm elections after Barack Obama took office, the Democrat Party experienced some of the hugest losses since the Great Depression, with Republicans gaining 63 seats and a majority in the House, six seats in the Senate which expanded its minority, 680 seats in state legislatives, and 29 of the 50 state governorships.
Still, in their head-in-the-sand fashion, Democrats ignored the losses and continued to believe that as long as they could, ahem, control the outcome of the big elections with conservatives who had died but strangely reappeared after death as Democrats, and organizations like ACORN aiding and abetting their efforts their power actually abuse of power would go on forever.
After Mr. Obama was reelected in 2012, Democrats held control of the Senate and Republicans maintained their hefty lead in the House, as well as the majority of governorships. None of this mattered to Mr. Obama, whose contempt for the duly-elected Congress was matched by his arrogance in consistently bypassing that august body to foist his own Marxist agenda on an increasingly suspicious electorate.
The results of the November 2014 midterms were, by any measure, a catastrophe for the left. Republicans gained a total of 247 seats in the House of Representatives and 54 seats in the Senate, achieving the largest Republican majority in the U.S. Congress since the 71st Congress in 1929. In addition, the GOP won 31 governors' races, Democrats 18. And Republican-controlled legislatures increased from 57 to 67, leaving Democrats in control of the smallest number of state legislatures since 1860.
While both midterms rejected the Progressive agenda, the clueless left still had enough blustery confidence in the Democrat Party to put up not one but two socialists for president in 2016: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Unmistakable hints that the Progressive agenda might be coming to its ignominious end came over the course of the 18 months that Donald Trump ran for the presidency. During that time, candidate Trump, speaking to stadium-sized audiences, systematically attacked every one of Barack Obama's failed ideas, policies, and executive orders that had been inflicted on Americans during the previous eight years, calling them "disastrous," "failures," and most important, "bad for America." Among the items on his laundry list were:
All of this rang resoundingly true to Americans who lived outside of the East and Left coasts of America, those blue-state bastions of Progressives who love the goodies that freeloading communists and socialists always love free everything, from housing to schooling to education to medical care to illegal drivers' licenses to illegal voting rights. Oh, not to omit a demonstrably low regard for America and American exceptionalism.
I personally laugh out loud when I hear of the uber-wealthy people from both coasts and their slavish echo chamber in the media sending out tweets and emails from their privately-piloted planes bad-mouthing Wall Street and vilifying people who support secure borders, when none of these sanctimonious phonies would let a day go by without checking their spectacular bank accounts, having their armed body guards at-the-ready to protect them, and their valets and maids double-check that their home alarm systems were in perfect working order.
In the same way, I laugh when I see leftist relics like Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg from "The View" and their ilk in other leftist media cite Donald Trump from 12 years ago talking locker-room talk about women, when these self-appointed defenders of morality and women's rights have twisted themselves into labyrinthine knots to avoid mention of the quintessential abused woman of the 20th century, Hillary Clinton, and the degree to which her husband Bubba their hero spit in Hillary's face every day and night for eight years as well as before and after his presidency with his serial abuse, cheating, accusations of rape, and lying under oath about his sordid behavior.
Their hypocrisy should not only discredit them for all time, but also the so-called journalists like Mika (MSNBC) and Norah and Gail (CBS-TV) and Alisyn (CNN) and Rachel (MSNBC), and the other faux feminists who work for uber-rich male leftists, with their globalist agendas, running media empires for multimillion-dollar salaries it's always about following the money and literally dictating what their employees say.
Hey, ladies, you're angry at Pres. Trump, whose wife and daughter both run hugely successful businesses? Ivanka now has an office in the West Wing! Why are you angry at him instead of your cheap bosses? Why aren't you running a channel or cable network yourselves? Pathetic!
But this is relatively small potatoes in comparison to the barrage of anti-Trump commentary these fake journalists regurgitated both before and after the election, including the false, go-nowhere Russian narrative. They should be the first to admit, but never will, that all of their efforts have resulted in another drumroll here nothing!
Fake words real deeds
President Trump is still filling stadiums and still accomplishing more every week than Barack Obama did in eight years. An article edited by Jim Kouri, founder of a homeland-security consulting firm and Board Member of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, "First 50 Days a Major Victory for Americans," spells out a number of those accomplishments:
Sweet
I remember watching the returns come in on November 8th, with virtually every commentator on every network and cable channel pronouncing the inevitable conclusion.
At 8:30 p.m. on the East Coast, this is what I heard:
"It's going to be an early night...probably over by 11 p.m."
"I think this will be a landslide...."
"There is simply no way that liberal states like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania will ever vote for a Republican...never been done."
On and on blathered the "experts"!
But they were all wrong!
What we're seeing today is the result of what happens when a grown up steps in to save the mess that out-of-control Progressive children routinely make. Tooth fairies and unicorns and the glamorization of brutal regimes run by megalomaniacs like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the Castro brothers in Cuba and the mullahs in Iran all of which leftists support! are antithetical to freedom and prosperity and everything else that America stands for.
President Trump effectively destroyed his opponents' identities everything they think, believe in, embrace, base their behavior on, agree with their friends and partners about, everything that animates their entire lives. What we've been witnessing is their pitiful reactions.
To them, I say without a shred of sympathy for their offensive, classless, and seditious behavior Boo Hoo!
Joan Swirsky
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Progressives devolving - RenewAmerica - RenewAmerica