Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Professor Senator Elizabeth Warren are making Republicans nervous by threatening them where it really hurts- their wallets.

Unfortunately too many Institutional Republicans with a ‘(D)’ weep with their crocodile tears and parrot their concern trolling.

The real reason Republicans are freaked out about Democrats’ move to the left
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
February 1, 2019

For a long time, Republicans were used to beating the daylights out of easily frightened Democrats who were constantly trying to prove to voters in the middle that they weren’t too liberal. We’re tough on crime, the Democrats would say. A war in Iraq? Sure, we’ll support that. Let’s just not talk about guns, OK? I too enjoy NASCAR and hunting!

Those days are over, and the Democrats in ascendence now offer a contrast to the past that is both substantive and stylistic. They aren’t hesitant to propose liberal policy solutions, and they don’t act like they’re afraid of Republican criticism.

In response, conservatives are offering liberals the friendly advice that if they don’t tack toward the center, they’re doomed. Here’s a brief roundup of recent right wing punditry along these lines:

• If Democrats “really want to beat Donald Trump and outflank any independent challenge they should consider running a more moderate candidate,” says John Fund.
• “The rapidly growing Democratic field has collectively moved so far to the left that it is about to fall off the edge of the political charts,” writes Michael Tanner in National Review.
• “In playing to his base, President Trump has left millions of voters up for grabs. Democrats appear set to make the same mistake.”
• “The more full of themselves the Democrats get, the more voters learn about this new breed of radical zealots,” writes Fox host Laura Ingraham. “The less they are going to want to roll the dice with this crowd, and the more they’ll start to appreciate President Trump.”

And of course, every new liberal idea will inevitably send us tumbling toward one destination: Venezuela. “Democrats now pushing many of the same socialist policies that destroyed Venezuela,” reads the headline of another story on Fox’s website.
…
But there’s a pattern developing: First, a Democrat proposes a new policy idea, like Medicare For All or increased taxes on the wealthy. Then Republicans say, “My god, are you insane? If we do this we’ll become Venezuela!” Then some polls are taken and it turns out that the crazy socialist idea is in fact extremely popular with the American public.

For instance, when Elizabeth Warren proposed a wealth tax on fortunes of over $50 million, conservatives were aghast, crying that this was horrifying socialism. But the progressive group Data For Progress just polled the idea and found out that people supported it by a rather dramatic margin of 61-21.

Likewise, a 70 percent marginal tax rate on incomes over $10 million, which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proposed, garnered the support of 59 percent of respondents in one poll, which isn’t too surprising given that taxing the rich more is consistently one of the most popular ideas in American politics. And for years, polls have shown majorities of the public favorably disposed to Medicare For All.

You could quibble with one or another of those results, or argue that they’ll change if you alter the wording. But the point is that on their face, these supposedly wacky socialist ideas Democrats are proposing are things Americans think are perfectly worthwhile.

That’s only part of the story, however. The fundamental premise of the conservative warnings is that when voters go to the polls next November, they’ll be making an ideological judgment, and if Democrats are too far from the center they’re guaranteed to lose.

This is what political scientists call the Median Voter Theorem, which assumes that you can array both candidates and voters on an ideological scale from left to right, and the candidate closer to the median voter is the one who wins. The problem with the Median Voter Theorem is that in the real world it seldom works.

That’s because it’s just not how voters understand candidates and how they make decisions. Ideology plays a part, but if it was just about aligning your positions with the median voter, Republicans themselves wouldn’t have won the White House any time in the last few decades. That’s the irony of their advice to Democrats: Nobody knows better than Republicans how little relevance ideology really has.

So many of the issue positions they hold — tax cuts for the wealthy, opposition to increasing the minimum wage, dismantling environmental regulations, loosening oversight of Wall Street, outlawing abortion, privatizing Medicare — are deeply unpopular. They understand this perfectly well, which is why they run shrewd campaigns built on identity, not ideology, and capitalizing on their voters’ higher propensity to turn out. The last presidential candidate who lost because the public judged him to be too far outside the mainstream was George McGovern, and that was nearly half a century ago.

That’s not to say that Republicans aren’t sincerely horrified when they hear someone like Ocasio-Cortez suggest higher taxes on the wealthy, or when they see all the Democratic presidential candidates advocating universal health coverage. But it’s not because Republicans actually think those policies will be electoral poison, let alone that they would turn the United States into Venezuela.

The reason Republicans are so frightened is the prospect that the American public might hear what Democrats are offering and say, “You know, that sounds like a pretty good idea.”

Buying in to concern trolling is rarely a good idea. You want an example of inspiring leadership see Nancy Pelosi’s recent humbling of Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio.

Well, first of all, Witches are made of wood, just like Pinocchio.

It’s a fair cop.

But I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong. And I think it’s wrong that [1] a vast majority of the country doesn’t make a living wage, I think it’s wrong that [2] you can work 100 hours and not feed your kids. I think it’s wrong that [3] corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid by the government, essentially experience a wealth transfer from the public, [4] for paying people less than a minimum wage. And it not only doesn’t make economic sense, but it doesn’t make moral sense and it doesn’t make societal sense. – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Ta-Nehisi Coates

Paul Rosenberg correctly points out the main flaw in Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler’s assessment consists of the words- “I think it’s wrong”.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is making a judgement about the morality of our current Economic situation in this context and not making a factual assertion about a particular set of circumstances.

But even the particulars are mostly correct. The points Kessler takes issue with are numbered in the above quote.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs. the “fact-checkers”: Challenging the boundaries of conventional wisdom
by Paul Rosenberg, Salon
February 1, 2019

Kessler admitted that claim No. 2 was correct — in fact, it could be 135 hours, he said. But what of the other three claims? (On Point 1) Ocasio-Cortez claimed that “a vast majority of the country doesn’t make a living wage,” while Kessler claimed the figure was “only” “about 32 to 38 percent of workers,” relying on calculations based on the MIT Living Wage calculator. Even if he’s right, that’s still morally outrageous, and serves to support her larger argument.

(On Point 3) She claimed that Walmart and Amazon “experience a wealth transfer from the public,” and Kessler argued that only amounted to “between 20-30 percent of the benefits,” essentially confirming what she had claimed. (On Point 4) Ocasio-Cortez said such companies were “paying people less than a minimum wage,” which was likely a simple misstatement. Kessler responded that they paid more than the minimum wage — but not more than a living wage, which was clearly the intended focus of her remarks.

So even if Kessler were right on every factual point, and Bruenig and AOC were wrong, her argument would still stand. If fewer people earn below less than a living wage than she stated, then arguably the situation is less dire than she described — but it’s not radically different.
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So, read in context, everything AOC said was true, even if we accept Kessler’s factual counterclaims! The entire fact-checking ritual was a charade. As I suggested earlier, it was really a boundary-policing episode, meant to keep her “radical” ideas outside the sphere of legitimate debate by portraying her as untrustworthy. Further, it was meant to deter others from similar infractions while trying to break through the barriers excluding them from legitimacy. (See AOC’s related Twitter thread on “gravitas” here.)

But the problem is that Kessler’s implied boundaries are not worth policing, or even recognizing. The whole system is in crisis, and the mainstream media’s assessment of what is deviant, what reflects normative consensus and what represents legitimate debate bears little or no relationship to reality. Take two other examples AOC has been associated with — raising top marginal tax rates to 70 percent and a Green New Deal. The first idea drew immediate majority support — 59 percent in a poll for the Hill, including 56 percent of rural voters and 45 percent of Republicans—and scorn from the 1 percent at Davos.

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell laughed at the idea (video here), and said he thought it would be bad for economic growth. “Name a country where that’s worked,” he responded. “Ever.” Sitting there with him was MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who supplied the example: the United States, throughout most of its post-World War II expansion. It was a rare, Marshall McLuhan-in-“Annie Hall” moment. Usually, when the super-rich or their sycophants spout off like that, truth does not intrude. Certainly not from the fact-checking media.

Why do people like Kessler make these mistakes? They are operaring out of a misplaced sense of “fairness” and under erroneous assumptions.

In part, fact-checkers are always seeking a false balance — as PolitiFact was doing in 2011, after twice awarding its “Lie of the Year” to Republican falsehoods about Obamacare — in 2009 for “death panels,” and in 2010 for calling it a “government takeover.” Now the Post Fact Checker’s database has tallied 8,158 false or misleading claims made by Trump in his first two years as president, so its team feels obliged to ding Democrats as well.

Or, as Stockton would put it-

So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here–not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Rosenberg says-

But there’s something more complex happening here too, that’s probably best understood in terms of press scholar Daniel Hallin’s three-sphere model of how the media functions, from his 1986 book The Uncensored War. At the center is the sphere of consensus, mom-and-apple-pie country. Surrounding that, like a donut, is the sphere of legitimate debate, where journalists’ attention is usually focused, where there are two sides to every story and a need for objectivity and balance to be maintained.

Beyond that, though, is the sphere of deviance, the outer darkness in which dwell “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” The shoddy fact-checking directed at Ocasio-Cortez reflects a boundary-policing instinct, and an outdated one, considering that the entire political landscape has been irrevocably changed.

The reason Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is drawing such attention and ire is for the simple reason she’s shifting the boundaries of acceptable political debate in D.C. away from the Neo Liberal Corporatist policies we have suffered under for the last 40 years (or longer) back to the principles of true fair play that animated the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society.

There are other individuals worthy of note, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have been working hard to change these conditions for years, but if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accomplishes nothing else in her Legislative tenure than this single signal shift, she will have done a great service for our country.

Yeah, Billionaire Banksters ought to be quaking in their boots. We’re coming for you.

Let me tell you about Internet Years. They’re kind of like Dog Years where the cliché goes that every Human Year is the same as 7 Dog Years which is fair enough actually when you consider the rate they develop from bumbling (but cute) Puppies to rather fragile and elderly companions. Most Dogs live about 15 years or 105 Dog Years which is a tribute to the value and esteem we place them in. You want a friend in D.C.? Get a dog.

So it is with Internet Years. While my mind is sharp as a razor even I have a hard time remembering what happened yesterday. Last week is like, over a month ago and last month might as well be last year. Considering my own Internet longevity, the 14 years I’ve been writing publicly seem every bit of 98 Dog Years and I measure it against the fact I’ve seen the Wright Brothers fly and Men land on the Moon. Didn’t take that long really, seems like a blink.

And it is the same recalling the dim, dark days of 2015, a mere 28 Dog Years ago shortly after the Pre-Cambrian Eon when Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio rode down the Golden Escalator to proclaim that Mexicans and other Hispanic Brown type people were uniformly Rapists, Murderers, Drug Dealers, Thieves, and Terrorists.

But it really isn’t that long and the Wheels of Justice really do grind exceedingly slow and thus a cause célèbre from the earliest days of the 2016 Campaign is finally headed to Court where Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio may be forced to testify under oath.

Best of all it’s a New York State suit which means he won’t be able to weasel out by citing Federal DoJ procedures.

A case against Trump is going to trial. Attorneys want a judge to force him to testify.
By Deanna Paul, Washington Post
January 31, 2019

Five protesters who allege that President Trump’s security team assaulted them in 2015 have subpoenaed the president to testify at trial.

The case was brought against six defendants, including then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, the Trump Organization and Trump security director Keith Schiller, three months after Trump announced his candidacy.

New York law is clear: A defendant must appear in court when subpoenaed for trial testimony.

But Trump’s legal team, two weeks after receiving the subpoena, advised plaintiffs’ attorneys that Trump intended to disobey it. According to a letter dated Jan. 11, Trump was “rejecting” the subpoena.

In a Wednesday court filing, plaintiffs’ attorneys asked Bronx County Supreme Court Judge Fernando Tapia to compel Trump’s attendance; the trial is scheduled for March 6.

“The law gives plaintiffs a right to the testimony of every defendant in the case. By our motion today, we have asked the court to secure that right and affirm the principle that no one, including defendant Trump, is above the law,” said Roger J. Bernstein and Benjamin N. Dictor, attorneys for the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit stems from a September 2015 incident in which Efrain Galicia and four other Mexican demonstrators were confronted outside Trump Tower. The men had gone to protest after the Trump campaign announced that their home country was funneling rapists and drug runners into the United States, according to court documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

Two of the protesters were dressed as Ku Klux Klan members — in white hoods and robes, a reference to self-proclaimed white supremacist David Duke’s endorsement of Trump — and carried signs that read, “Trump: make America racist again,” the documents said.

Schiller, then-director of security for the Trump Organization, snatched two of the signs from the men, according to court documents. A struggle ensued, ending with Schiller, a former New York City police officer, violently striking Galicia, who went to a hospital.

Several news outlets aired a surveillance video on television and on social media of a security guard punching a protester, who had attempted to retrieve his sign, The Post previously reported.

Trump tried to argue that he was not involved and, therefore, not personally responsible, but Tapia rebuffed the attempt to distance himself from the lawsuit. In August, Tapia ruled that a jury could find that Trump “authorized and condoned” the guards’ conduct.

(The judge based his decision, in part, on a statement Trump made at a campaign rally, which he buried in a footnote: “Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” Trump said, according to the judge’s decision in August.)

Tapia’s decision about Trump’s trial testimony will largely be guided by a defamation case pending in New York’s appellate court. The appeal — which involves Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who accused Trump of groping and kissing her in 2007 — will determine whether a sitting president can be sued in state court in connection with pre-election conduct. If the judge rules in Trump’s favor, the demonstrators’ case would become moot.

In the Jan. 11 letter, Trump attorney Lawrence Rosen claimed that Trump did not need to testify. Rosen further alleged that the plaintiffs had also waived the right to call Trump as a trial witness and should have taken Trump’s deposition — by video and from the White House — during the discovery phase.

In a statement to The Post on Thursday, Rosen said, “We are in receipt of the Plaintiffs’ application to the court and legal position concerning the subpoena, with which we disagree, and will address these issues in our formal court filing, should one be necessary.”

This may or may not pan out, but the point is that Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is not immune from jeopardy in State Courts and New York for one seems ready and willing to take him on.

So instead of ADX Florence he ends up in Ossining. Well, good enough for Al Capone is good enough for me.

Sigh, not my best moment. From the time I was about 11 until I was 15 or 16 I suffered from severe Eczema on my feet and legs and also my arms.

It was pretty terrible. My skin would slough off in sheets leaving weeping red welts. I itched constantly. Skin moisteners and Cortisone had no effect at all. I wore long sleeve shirts and long pants consistently, even in the hottest Summer months. I still wear White socks because they doubled as dressings. I had to peel them off.

The worst part was Swimming on Team because… Speedos. Not much left to imagine. Coach had to explain that it was an Auto Immune disorder, not Leprosy (which presents entirely differently by the way), but not at all contagious and besides… Chlorine. Lots and lots of Chlorine.

Eventually I hooked up with a Dermatologist who had an ointment that burned like hell but was remarkably effective. Turns out it’s also Carcinogenic so you can’t get it anymore except in Tiajuana. I’m pretty much in remission at the moment but I still have relapses which I treat with over the counter creams and I no longer despair that it will persist for the rest of my life.

Which it will, and maybe even the symptoms, but at 120+ a year or 2 is not such a big deal as it once was.

Among the misdiagnoses I received was Allergies (anti-Allergy shots helped a lot but didn’t entirely erase my symptoms) and Athlete’s Foot.

So during WW II they were planning a landing and the General said to the Admiral- “Don’t worry about guns, I have a bunch of Howitzers.”

“Really, will they fire in the wet?”

“Sure. We practice in the rain all the time.”

“No. I mean, will they fire when exposed to Salt Water?”

Umm…

No, I don’t know this guy, but then again I don’t watch America’s Next Top Model or Dancing With The Stars (ok, DWTS a little if they have an embarrassing Republican contestant).