BeckyDem
BeckyDem's JournalProgressive Group To Spend $35 Million More Targeting Democratic Base Voters
Way to Win hopes to expand the electorate by turning out liberal voters who sometimes stay home.
By Daniel Marans
The progressive group Way to Win announced Wednesday that it is spending an additional $35 million to mobilize liberal voters in battleground states behind Democrats up and down the ballot in November.
The new funding adds to a $50-million investment that Way to Win unveiled in September 2019, bringing the group’s total spending this election to $85 million.
What distinguishes Way to Win from more traditional Democratic players is its focus on identifying, organizing and turning out what it calls “base” voters who agree with core Democratic Party ideals but may be less likely to vote on a regular basis.
While the party’s national leaders continue to focus on courting moderate “swing” voters in predominantly white industrial states, Way to Win’s “high potential” voters ― including young people, people of color and white liberals ― are more concentrated in the Sun Belt.
“The resources are really mobilized behind the goal of expanding the electorate, bringing that fraction of the nearly 100 million people that are estimated to have stayed home in 2016 out to vote in very critical emergent battlegrounds,” said Tory Gavito, the president and co-founder of Way to Win.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/progressive-group-way-to-win-targets-democratic-base-35-million-dollars_n_5f73d8cdc5b66377b27a18b3?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004
Lawyer for grand juror in Breonna Taylor case: Kentucky AG didn't present everything
( This breaks my heart but at least we now know. )
A lawyer for the grand juror said his client felt compelled to act after remarks by Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron "about how everything played out."
Sept. 29, 2020, 3:42 PM EDT / Updated Sept. 29, 2020, 5:56 PM EDT
By Janelle Griffith
A grand juror in the Breonna Taylor case who filed a court motion seeking the release of the grand jury's transcripts and permission from a judge to speak publicly did so out of a concern for truth and transparency, the juror's lawyer said Tuesday.
"The grand juror that we represent felt compelled to take some sort of an action based upon the indictment that was rendered in the subsequent press conference and messages from the attorney general's office about how everything played out," Kevin Glogower, one of the juror’s lawyers, said at a news conference Tuesday.
In his 15 years in practice, Glogower said he had never seen a grand juror make such a request.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/grand-juror-breonna-taylor-case-filed-motion-out-concern-truth-n1241394
Ex-Trump aides say the president regularly mocks his evangelical supporters behind their backs
( Typical of Trump and in line with a sociopath's tendencies: use people. But I honestly believe many of them know it, he is a means to an end. Parts of our country are soulless zealots. )
Published 2 hours ago on September 29, 2020
By Brad Reed
Former aides to President Donald Trump tell The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins that the president regularly mocks his own evangelical Christian followers behind their backs.
In particular, the aides say the president sees many evangelicals in the same way that he reportedly sees American soldiers who died during World War I as “suckers” and “losers.”
“Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base,” Coppins writes.
However, the president nonetheless seems to have genuine respect for certain religious leaders whom he sees as fellow con men who are getting rich from taking advantage of their followers’ religious devotion.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/09/ex-trump-aides-say-the-president-regularly-mocks-his-evangelical-supporters-behind-their-backs/
'Deterrence': Leaked Trump Campaign Documents Show Facebook Suppression Against Black Voters
President Donald Trump has claimed to do more for Black Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln but internal documents from his 2016 campaign reportedly reveal that he saw them as a threat.
According to an upcoming report from Britain’s Channel 4 news, the Trump campaign listed more than 3 million Black voters as “deterrence.”
“Channel 4 News investigation reveals a huge Trump campaign data leak, exposing how 3.5 million Black Americans were listed as ‘Deterrence’ – to try to stop them voting in 2016,” a tweet from the news network said on Monday.
View a preview of the report below.
President Donald Trump has claimed to do more for Black Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln but internal documents from his 2016 campaign reportedly reveal that he saw them as a threat.
https://crooksandliars.com/2020/09/trump-campaign-documents-show-effort-stop
LONG-CONCEALED RECORDS SHOW TRUMP'S CHRONIC LOSSES AND YEARS OF TAX AVOIDANCE
( Trump and his entire family have been exclusively about grifting and fraud. )
The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire
Sept. 27, 2020
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html?referringSource=articleShare
TRUMP TAPS AMY CONEY BARRETT -- MEMO LAYS OUT TACTICS FOR OPPOSITION
A new memo spells out the myriad options available to Sen. Chuck Schumer to delay confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice.
Ryan Grim
September 24 2020, 10:24 p.m.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, setting up a ferocious confirmation battle as votes are already being cast for the November 3 election.
Barrett, who was previously named to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals by Trump, is an outspoken social conservative, broadly hostile to abortion rights, and a strong supporter of corporate rights. Her confirmation would give conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Court, making Justice Brett Kavanaugh the swing vote, and would be the culmination of a decades-long strategy on the right to marry the pro-corporate, anti-worker, and anti-consumer movement with social conservatism.
https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1309606675326795776
( excerpt) A memo circulating on Capitol Hill, put together by several people with knowledge of congressional procedure and obtained by The Intercept, lays out some of the options that could be available to Schumer even in the face of a determined Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Senators looking to obstruct in the Senate have a dizzying array of opportunities, but a majority leader with 50 votes, plus a tie-breaking vice president, also has an extraordinary amount of power in the upper chamber. Elements of the memo were first published earlier Thursday by the Daily Poster.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/24/memo-laying-out-delay-tactics-circulates-among-senate-democrats/
The Democrats' Supreme Court Hail Mary
( I'm pleased Biden will not answer the question on this issue. Don't reveal your hand now.)
This is the progressive case for court packing in a nutshell: “If your wallet is stolen, you don’t forgo efforts to recover it just because it might be stolen again.”
ELAINE GODFREY
5:00 AM ET
It was only a matter of time, really. Ever since Senate Republicans refused to hold a vote on Merrick Garland four years ago, progressives have argued that Democrats need to wrest back control of the Supreme Court by packing it full of liberal justices. By the Democratic primary last year, the idea had gone relatively mainstream, and half of the presidential candidates expressed openness to it. Now, in the five days since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, calls from the left to pack the court have reached a volume that will be difficult for party leaders to ignore. Democrats have few options to try to prevent President Donald Trump from confirming his nominee, whom he plans to announce on Saturday. So they’re already gaming out how to get revenge.
If Trump confirms a new justice this year, “when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court,” Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts tweeted over the weekend. Democrats at various levels of seniority followed suit, including House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seemed receptive: “Nothing is off the table next year” if the GOP tries to fill Ginsburg’s seat, he said.
Aaron Belkin, a political-science professor at San Francisco State University and the executive director of the think tank the Palm Center, is grateful to see prominent Democrats finally coming around to the plan he’s spent the past year trying to advance. In 2019, Belkin co-founded the advocacy group Take Back the Court in response to Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
The trouble for Belkin and other Democrats is their goal’s political feasibility—and not just because the party has to win the Senate and the White House first. Joe Biden has shown reluctance to eliminate the filibuster, which Democrats would need to do to pass a court-expansion law, and he is outright opposed to increasing the justices’ numbers, disinclined to take any radical action that would further exacerbate partisan tensions. “We need to de-escalate, not escalate,” he said during a speech in Philadelphia over the weekend. In a local-news interview last summer, he warned that Democrats would “rue” the day they packed the Court because Republicans would simply do the same the next time they were in power.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/democrats-case-court-packing/616446/
RepBarbaraLee: It's been 66 years since the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education
https://twitter.com/RepBarbaraLee/status/1306020304041451521
ACLU @ACLU VICTORY: Fulton County, Georgia will increase the number of drop boxes this election.
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1305944424069967872
Noam Chomsky And Robert Pollin Have A Blueprint To Overcome Climate Change
By KATHLEEN CREEDON & KIM JOHNSON • SEP 12, 2020
In the past three months, the U.S. has experienced a spate of extreme weather and experts say there's no doubt that human-induced climate change is to blame.
From wildfires, record-setting heat and widespread drought conditions to turbo-charged hurricanes and flooding, extreme weather events are increasing both in intensity and frequency.
The anxiety-provoking idea of an eventually uninhabitable world is compounded by fear and uncertainty caused by the country's pandemic-related fallout.
Scientists warn time is running out to take significant action -- a daunting task made more so by the ongoing economic crisis.
In their new book "Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal," Noam Chomsky and economist Robert Pollin assert that the transition to a green economy is necessary but will not bring on further economic disaster, as many assume.
That fear is misplaced, they write, and encourages climate denialism. In fact, climate change is an economic threat in and of itself.
https://www.tpr.org/post/noam-chomsky-and-robert-pollin-have-blueprint-overcome-climate-change
Profile Information
Gender: FemaleHome country: USA
Member since: Thu Feb 9, 2017, 01:31 PM
Number of posts: 8,361
