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President Barack Obama tells us, You did not build that. Hillary Rodham Clinton tells us, Corporations do not create jobs.

Every penny spent by city, county, state and federal governments comes from one place taxpayers. Every one of their employees and projects undertaken gets the money from one place taxpayers. Every check sent for unemployment, Aid to Dependent Children, food stamps and other programs comes from one place taxpayers. Governments cannot do one thing for anybody until they take money from one place taxpayers.

People who work and pay taxes keep this country going, and we are in the process of reducing their numbers due to a progressive agenda that is failing. The current agenda and the debt will eventually ruin this country, and I hope I am not here to see it happen. My regrets to my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

MIKE McCOY

Fort Wayne

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Failing progressives lead nation to ruin

Why are progressives so blithe about pressuring Christians to act like non-Christians?
Why are progressives so blithe about pressuring Christians to act like non-Christians?

By: Nj89121

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Why are progressives so blithe about pressuring Christians to act like non-Christians? - Video

I was born to parents who believed if you didnt vote Democratic you couldnt be buried in the Catholic Church. A family joke is that my first word was vote. The Church would later switch parties. Not me. On Tuesday Ill stand at the polls as I do every year and say that if Democrats win, peoples lives will be better.

Each year its a harder case to make, even to other Democrats. Each year the middle class grows smaller, the democracy grows more corrupt and the chance of stopping global warming in time to save ourselves or our planet grows dimmer. You cant run forever on the slogan Die Slower! Vote Democratic! Times running out on the democracy and the middle class, just as it is on global warming.

In the words of political upstarts everywhere, its time for a change. If it comes, it will be from within the Democratic Party, or rather from the progressives who still reside there. But for all the talk of a populist revolt, progressives have yet to spark one. If Democrats win the Senate on Tuesday, thats unlikely to change. If they lose, progressives might wake up, which would be the best thing to happen to the Democrats in a long time. It may not feel like much consolation, but its true.

Let me be clear. There may be scant evidence of it lately, but it matters who runs the Senate. You dont throw away a race on a theory; who knows if even losing the Senate would be a shock sufficient to revive Democrats? But we do know our politics grows ever more vicious and empty and that we are in desperate need of serious political debate. We know Wall Street colonized the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party colonized the left, and that well have no such debate without a stronger, more independent progressive movement to help set its agenda.

This election has been an insult to democracy. The $4 billion spent on it has tightened the grip of the powerful without moving the needle on a single issue. Its ceaseless squalor has startled a public that thought politics hit rock bottom in the last election. The explosion of Super PAC and 527 dark money is one cause of it, but it only strengthened what is by now a 40-year trend.

Rail all you like against the Supreme Court or the Republicans. It isnt just them. If you ever gave money to a Democrat you get the emails that read like pleas from phishing friends robbed in Majorca who need only your bank routing number to get home: Bill, its seconds till our filing deadline. Our extreme Tea Party opponent has Congressman Bob locked in a basement. Theyve shot Fido. So much is at stake. Please send

Most days thats all you get. October marked the first anniversary of the last government shutdown. Ashamed to find themselves tied with a party so recently found in the throes of lunacy, Democrats kept mum. They routinely fumble issues they once owned. Their spring crusade to raise the minimum wage petered out by fall. They cant talk about corruption on which they feast. They cant talk about climate because they shun topics that require any explanation. So they talk of saving the sensible center from extremists, a familiar line for being the central trope of the Obama administration and the very same promise Republicans make.

Democrats call the election historic but cant say why. Its hard to enlist people to an agenda you cant articulate, or make them care who runs a government that has stopped working. Voters see politics as a cesspool and Congress as a sideshow. So do progressives, yet they act as if the next Democrat in line will get us where we need to go. Heres some really good news: the merry-go-round on which theyre trapped cant run without them. Not only can they get off, but if they do, it stops for good.

Regardless of how Democrats do on Tuesday, many progressives will rush to hop on another horse. Someone should stop them. The time has come for progressives to hit the pause button on electoral politics, to take some time to reexamine their agenda, rethink their strategy and recognize their power. Some thoughts for them to ponder if they do:

Focus First on Policy

The rest is here:
Heres how we beat the right: How progressives withstand Fox News, blast Obama defenders, and chart a new future

Mike McFadden, left, and incumbent Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., meet at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn. on Sunday, Nov. 2, 2014, in their final debate before the election for the U.S. Senate seat. (AP Photo/Minnesota Public Radio, Bridget ... more >

Powerful liberal groups on Monday launched a final offensive on behalf of Sen. Al Franken, the first-term Minnesota Democrat facing a challenge from Republican Mike McFadden.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), a rising force on the left, had some of its members make last-minute phone calls Monday to urge Minnesota voters to back Mr. Franken in his re-election bid.

Having won in 2008 by just a few hundred votes, Mr. Franken told PCCC members their work, especially in the final hours of the campaign, is crucial.

I think everyone remembers that I won by 312 votes [in 2008]. Every one of these calls makes an enormous difference and could be the call that wins it for me, the senator told progressive supporters on a conference call. Get on the phones. The stakes are so high.

Mr. Franken appears to have his re-election sewn up, according to recent surveys. A Real Clear Politics average of recent polls puts his lead at 10 percentage points. The polls were conducted from Oct. 16 through Oct. 30.

But the McFadden campaign has been making a final push of its own, seeking to paint Mr. Franken as an ineffective senator who merely does whatever President Obama wants him to do.

Mr. Frankens record of voting in favor of the White House position 97 percent of the time has been a central point of the McFadden campaign.

Al Franken has fallen short. Minnesota deserves a senator who will work hard, reach across the aisle, and get things done. Instead, Al Franken puts party over people, McFadden Campaign Manager Carl Kuhl said Sunday night.

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Progressives make final push for Minnesota's Sen. Al Franken

Yves here. This post gives a historical account of how progressives have become a shadow of their former selves. It overlaps with a 2013 post, Why Progressives Are Lame.

By Ed Walker, who writes as masaccio at Firedoglake. You can follow him at Twitter at @MasaccioFDL, and heres his author page at Firedoglake.

The Economist says Eric Holder is the most liberal US Attorney General in recent memory, and explains with a quote from one of those liberals at MSNBC:

[He] has shown amazing leadership on the issue ofLGBT rights. Hes challenged Republican restrictions onvoting rights. Hes fought forsentencing reforms. Hes condemned Stand Your Ground laws and showed effective leadership during the crisisin Ferguson. He cleared the way for Colorado and the state of Washington to pursuemarijuana legalization. Hes worked toreverse the disenfranchisementof the formerly incarcerated.

Buzzfeed sent a couple of reporters out to interview nominally progressive groups about a replacement for Holder, and they all confirmed that they think Holder is with them on their issues, except, of course, national security and spying on US citizens. They interviewed the ACLU, sentencing reform groups, LGBT groups, and vote protection groups.

Thats a lot of liberal box ticking, but whats missing? Thats right, not a single word about the real power of the office, the right and duty to enforce securities and anti-trust laws against white collar criminals. On those issues, Eric Holder stands further to the right than most Republican AGs. And whats really sickening is that not a single one of these groups thought to mention these crucial economic law enforcement in their list of demands for a replacement for Holder. Its just one more indication of the absence of progressives from all discussion of the economy.

Before we see how this happened, I want to point out that progressives are doing a lot of good work on financial matters, including the SEIU and others on the minimum wage, and those working on health care like National Nurses Unitedand Physicians for a National Health Program. I am especially impressed with the work done by the FACT Coalitionwhich is working effectively towards tax reform. This group is a good example of different organizations putting staff and efforts behind a coordinated push for economic fairness.

There are a number of powerful writers on these issues as well, including Bill Black on control fraud, Dave Dayen on the housing disaster, and blogs like this one which keep a sharp focus on the FIRE sector and its predatory tactics. Still, neither the Economist nor Buzzfeed thinks these individuals are worthy of consultation on the priorities of a new AG.

It wasnt always like this. Heres a short refresher on economic issues and politics. Beginning in the late 1800s, there was a powerful wave of economic liberalism, fiercely and sometimes violently opposed to the rampant capitalism of the times. Outbreaks of violence include the Ludlow Massacre, the Pullman Strike, and the Homestead Strike, where states and the federal government and armed thugs attacked striking working people and their families. Sometimes there were electoral fights such as the campaigns of William Jennings Bryan as a Democrat demanding Free Silver and trust-busting (along with his support for prohibition and against Darwinism). Journalism in the form of the muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair was a vital and vibrant part of the US political scene. I read The Pit and The Octopus by Frank Norris in high school, and they showed in melodrama both the extent of the crimes of the rich of that era, and the damage they did to hard-working people.

The progressives and their labor class supporters had some successes, but many of them were stolen by the Supreme Court in cases like the 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York, which struck down New Yorks 60-hour work week for bakers over a vigorous dissent by Oliver Wendell Holmes. That process of victories in the legislature destroyed by the Supreme Court was a constant in the early 1900s. As legislative victories turned to dust, economic progressives became more aggressive. Leftist intellectuals and labor leaders turned toSocialism and Marxism as alternatives to bloody capitalism. Workers continued to strike and there was violence in the streets. The economic elites continued to use their control of state and national government to put down those strikes with more intense violence. The few public figures who espoused Socialism were subject to bad-faith prosecutions and jailed, among them Eugene Debs, jailed on specious charges on the watch of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and his horrid Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. This was an early example of Democrats running from the shadows of non-capitalist economic theory.

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Masaccio: The Sorry State of Progressives on Economic Issues