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Daily Archives: February 8th, 2017

The Democratic Party Needs Keith Ellison


02/04/2017 11:40 am ET | Updated 20 hours ago
Richard Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

María Elena Durazo
Vice Chair, Democratic National Committee; General Vice President, UNITE HERE

The American people have faced stagnant wages and rising inequality for decades. Many Americans voted for Donald Trump or decided not to vote at all because Democrats failed to communicate effectively with working people and turn out the vote – end of story. The fact is that shouldn’t have happened. The Democratic Party has long been the Party of working people, and needs to do a better job of making that case. No one knows this better than Keith Ellison, and we are proud to endorse him as the next Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
These are extremely challenging times. President Trump has put forward a nominee for Labor Secretary who openly disdains workers. Congressional Republicans are readying plans to roll back worker protections, repeal the Affordable Care Act and end Medicare as we know it. And in state capitals across the country, the assault on workers and unions has been fierce and swift. Now more than ever, working people need public servants who will stand up and fight for better jobs, higher wages, good benefits and a voice at work.
Keith knows how to win elections, and has a track record of defeating anti-worker forces wherever they are. When Keith was first elected to Congress in 2006, his district had the lowest turnout in Minnesota. Voters just didn’t feel engaged. They didn’t feel like they mattered. Keith decided to do something about it: he organized. He knocked on as many doors as possible. With labor at his side, he talked about the issues that mattered to people. It worked. Since Keith began his grassroots voter turnout campaign, his district is the highest performing in the state. And on top of all this, he’s been getting pro-worker candidates elected from the school board to the U.S. Senate, traveling to nearly 30 states just last cycle.

When nurses went on strike to keep their health insurance, Keith was there. When communications workers went on strike to protest pension cuts, Keith was there. When hotel workers went on strike for a decent wage, Keith was there.

He hasn’t done this alone. Keith has always organized alongside working people. He’s marched on our picket lines and offered support to our members. When nurses went on strike to keep their health insurance, Keith was there. When communications workers went on strike to protest outsourcing and pension cuts, Keith was there. When hotel workers went on strike to stand up for a decent wage, Keith was there.
Each and every time, he’s pounded the pavement, not for some sort of political benefit, but to stand in solidarity with those who want a better life for ourselves and our families.
That’s who Keith is, and that’s precisely why he’s long been a friend of labor – especially in the halls of Congress. He’s voted to increase the minimum wage, advocated for better working conditions and proposed a bill to make union organizing a civil right. As Co-Chair of the Progressive Caucus, he’s used his microphone over and over again to speak up when unions or working people have come under attack. Simply put, labor has the strongest possible ally in Keith-someone whose primary focus is to create opportunity for all and grow the middle class, regardless of what you look like, where you were born, or who you are.
And now that he’s running for DNC Chair, he’s not wavering in his commitment to us—not one bit. He understands that many working people voted for Donald Trump because the Democratic Party didn’t make a compelling enough case. He understands we are hungry for political leaders that listen to us and work with us, and that labor’s agenda will always lead our politics, not the other way around. With Keith at the helm of one of America’s two major political parties, working people will be in a much better position to have our issues advanced and our concerns heard.
Both of us have been a part of the labor movement for decades, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. But we’re not in the business of mincing words. Tough days lie ahead for working people. And so, it is more important than ever that we have a leader who will stand up, fight, organize and win.
There is no doubt in our minds: Keith Ellison is the person for the job. He has our strong support. We encourage you to give him yours, as well.
Richard Trumka is president of the 12.5 million member AFL-CIO, America’s labor federation.. Maria Elena Durazo is a Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, and a General Vice President of UNITE HERE.
Follow Richard Trumka on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/RichardTrumka
Follow María Elena Durazo on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/@LALabor
More: Dnc Democratic Party Keith Ellison

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Mitch McConnell Sees ‘High Level of Satisfaction’ With Trump Administration


I am wondering what Mr. McConnell is drinking or smoking ?MA.

WASHINGTON — While there is plenty of anxiety in Washington about the shaky early performance of the Trump administration, don’t count Senator Mitch McConnell among the hand wringers.
Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican and the majority leader, says he and his Senate Republican colleagues are quite satisfied with the Trump team so far. In fact, he said, they are reassured by signs that President Trump is going to hew to a conservative agenda after early fears that the president — a relatively unknown quantity to most elected Republicans — might not really be one of them.
“The country doesn’t need saving,” Mr. McConnell said when asked during an interview in his Capitol office if there was any cause for a senior-level congressional intervention given early chaos in the evolving West Wing.
“I think there is a high level of satisfaction with the new administration,” he said, dismissing concerns about dissonant eruptions from the new president and some of his top staff members. “Our members are not obsessed with the daily tweets, but are looking at the results.”

He added: “No matter what sort of theatrics that go on around the administration, if you look at the decisions that are being made, they are solid — from our perspective — right-of-center things that we would have hoped a new Republican president would have done.”
Mr. McConnell has broken with the president on a few subjects, taking a much harder line against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia than Mr. Trump has and objecting to some of the president’s “drain the swamp” initiatives, including a proposal for congressional term limits.
Other members of the Republican establishment — inside and outside Congress — have expressed growing alarm about the conduct and competence of the White House. But Mr. McConnell said things might even be turning out better than anticipated.
“Back during the campaign, there were a lot of questions: Is Trump really a conservative? A lot of questions about it,” Mr. McConnell recalled. “But if you look at the steps that have been taken so far, looks good to me.
“It is the kind of thing we would have expected of one of the others, had they been nominated and elected,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to Republican presidential candidates defeated by Mr. Trump who had more conventional political and government backgrounds.
Mr. McConnell’s view clashes violently with that of Senate Democrats and their allies around the country. They have viewed the beginning of the Trump era as a disaster best exemplified by an immigration executive order they decry as unconstitutional and un-American, as well as a selection of cabinet choices they rate as unqualified and carrying the very same baggage that has prevented others from being confirmed in the past.
Even some Republicans have criticized as inept and amateurish the rollout of the immigration order, which is now at the center of a federal court fight. Others have expressed trepidation at the prospect of being hammered in a Trump tweet if they run afoul of the new president.
Mr. McConnell, who is known for being able to take the temperature of his colleagues and to act accordingly, said he sensed no real unease about Mr. Trump on the Republican side of the aisle.
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“We have had very good unity on our side,” Mr. McConnell said. “People are genuinely excited about taking the country in another direction. I don’t find any decision that he has made surprising.”
He said Senate Republicans had been enthusiastic about Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees, dazzled by his Supreme Court pick and elated at the chance to roll back what he called the regulatory rampage of the Obama administration
“A lot of us were wondering, what is Trump really going to be like?” Mr. McConnell said. “He used to support Democrats and have various views earlier in his life about politics. But when he got to the point of actually having the office and making the decisions, I think the decisions have been very comforting to my members, most of whom are a little bit right of center and further right of center.”
It goes without saying that having Mr. Trump in the White House gives House and Senate Republicans the opportunity to pursue an aggressive legislative agenda if they can find common ground. That prospect should be heightened by installing colleagues like Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama and two fellow Republicans, Representatives Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina and Tom Price of Georgia, at the highest levels of the administration. Mr. Sessions is Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general while Mr. Mulvaney has been tapped to run the White House Office of Management and Budget and Mr. Price to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
Mr. McConnell looms as potentially the president’s most important ally in Congress because success in the Senate is central to any legislative victory.
But Republicans have not even started on the legislative end of the new Congress. Now their job is going to be made more difficult by the increasingly hard line that Democrats are taking against Mr. Trump by opposing his cabinet nominees en masse. Mr. McConnell’s frustration at Democratic tactics boiled over Tuesday evening when he invoked a rarely used Senate rule to force Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, to end a speech on the grounds she was impugning the integrity of Mr. Sessions, a fellow senator, by criticizing his record on civil rights.
“It is a superficially poisonous atmosphere, not a fundamentally poisonous atmosphere,” Mr. McConnell said.
Still, he noted that Republicans could do much of their preliminary work in the Senate just by relying on their party’s 51 votes there as they take up health care, tax changes and nominations, and could try to work out the differences with Democrats later.
“Sooner or later we will get around to things that will require some level of cooperation,” Mr. McConnell said. “Hopefully there will be a kind of dysfunction fatigue. I think it will set in way before then.”
His point raises a question: Will that same passage of time produce a kind of Trump fatigue among the now-satisfied congressional Republicans?

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And We Don’t Digress!


The next several years will provide political and humorous fodder which will emanate from Washington D.C. and the Whitehouse at least for the next few years. The staffing of the Whitehouse seems to have at least 1 prerequisite: the ability to lie deny and backtrack with no shame. The information staff of the Whitehouse apparently are just glad to be there. This is possibly the largest staff of prevaricators since the Nixon Whitehouse. It has always been the job of chief information folks to put forth the President’s words correctly and honestly. It seems that this group got both of them right. TOTUS is uncontrollable in his outbursts (much like a bratty child) so his mouthpieces espouse the same insanity without such much as blink. That is pretty much like acting (but not entertaining or informative) except for the damage their “talks” create. Speaking in superlatives does not translate into actions. It is apparent that the President and his  minions think that superlatives are the same as actions. This is similar to the some members of Congress citing “The American People” as reasons for doing harm to those same American people. Each day there is new evidence that we are in the hands of a certifiable  amoral miscreant aided by an errant political party. Our duty as voters is simply to look beyond the talking and understand  what these Government pimps are doing to us in our names and feeding it to us like poisoned Kool aid.

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Silencing Elizabeth Warren backfires on Senate GOP


The Beat Goes On!! Our current Congress again shows how un-American they are ( or are they?). In my opinion this is one  of if not the worst Congress we have had in years. This particular Congress has shown that they are incapable of doing the job they campaigned on and have further moved us back 20 years. This TOTUS will soon prove to be the undoing of the GOP along with their anti-American activities. If as a voter you think we will be OK, think again. This administration has the potential to out us in more danger than any previous and the GOP is determined to install poor choices for his cabinet. I have reproduced the letter below this post. MA.

Washington (CNN)The Senate has silenced Elizabeth Warren.
And by doing so, majority Republicans just handed the liberal firebrand a megaphone — further elevating President Donald Trump’s fiercest and most prominent critic in the Senate and turning her into a Democratic hero.
The rebuke of Warren came after the Massachusetts Democrat read a letter written 30 years ago by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions for a federal judgeship.

#LetLizSpeak: ‘She persisted’ becomes rallying cry for Warren supporters
Warren cited the letter during a debate on the nomination of Sessions — now an Alabama senator — as Donald Trump’s attorney general. Reading from King’s letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Warren said: “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.”
Republicans cried foul — charging that Warren violated Senate rules against impugning another senator. A vote along party lines upheld that decision, turning what could have been an ordinary late-night partisan floor speech for political devotees into a national story.
“They can shut me up, but they can’t change the truth,” Warren later told CNN’s Don Lemon.
Warren is now forbidden from participating in the floor debate over Sessions’ nomination ahead of a confirmation vote expected Wednesday.
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said on the Senate floor.
The line was an instant classic — the kind liberals imagine being replayed ad nauseum in TV ads in a future presidential campaign.

Elizabeth Warren set to release book taking on Trump
It couldn’t have come at a better time for Warren, who is up for re-election in 2018. On Tuesday, she announced she hired an aide who is an expert on national security, a move that could help burnish her expertise in that area, as well as the publication of a new book, which will become available in April.
Liberals had been frustrated with Warren’s vote in committee in favor of Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Coretta Scott King letter Elizabeth Warren was trying to read
No more.
By Tuesday night, the hashtag #LetLizSpeak was trending on Twitter.
Warren used Twitter to attack Sessions and McConnell.
“I will not be silent about a nominee for AG who has made derogatory & racist comments that have no place in our justice system,” she wrote.
In a follow-up tweet, she said: “I will not be silent while the Republicans rubber stamp an AG who will never stand up to the @POTUS when he breaks the law.”
And then: “Tonight @SenateMajLdr silenced Mrs. King’s voice on the Sen floor – & millions who are afraid & appalled by what’s happening in our country.”