It Takes a Village TGIF Edition 2-24-17

February 24, 2017 Batch It Takes a Village, Uncategorized 82

Good morning meese…This Saturdays vote for the DNC chair is important and MEH all at the same time. It’s MEH becasue it’s not the endgame we as Democrats should be viewing it. We all know what needs to be done…Get out and beat the bushes and get the people that sat out the 2016 election and get them energized. To be inclusive with the people we see as the future of the Democratic party…POC, women and millennials.

There has been much made out of the WWC vote lately, especially by the guy all of us love to disavow, Bernie Sanders. He keeps running his mouth about his usual shtick, economics, and don’t get me wrong it’s important in the overall scheme of things but not the end all that Birdie Sanders makes it out to be to the exclusion of identity politics. As usual his merry band of jerkoffs from the alt-left has picked up on his bullshit and run with it. It’s like the primary all over again and a lot of people aren’t warming up to it.

“I am not interested in anarchy,” Marcel L. Groen, chairman of the Pennsylvania Democrats, told the Washington Times. “It was over the top and I contacted Keith, and Keith tried to stop it, to his credit. I want their enthusiasm and energy, but I do want it harnessed,”he said, adding, “Let’s say you were completely uncommitted. You don’t want 300 people calling you and telling you what to do.”

These are the seven original candidates in the race for DNC chair. Approximately 450 members of the Democratic National Committee will convene to vote.Tom Perez, Labor Secretary under PBO, Keith Ellison US Rep. from Minnesota, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley; South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana; Idaho Democratic Party Executive Director Sally Boynton-Brown; and television commentator Jehmu Greene.

Jaime Harrison has since dropped out and thrown his support behind Tom Perez…”Tom and I have dedicated our careers to helping people through public service,” Harrison said in the email. “With so much at stake, our next Chair will lead the fight of a generation. We must all fight side by side. I’m standing by Tom Perez’s side, and I hope you will join me in doing the same.”

Last week, Ellison  picked up the endorsement of another former candidate, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley, who also leads the association of state party chairs.

Pete Buttigieg is the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He is one of America’s youngest mayors, and the Washington Post has called him “the most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of.” An officer in U.S. Navy Reserve, Pete took a leave of absence to serve in Afghanistan in 2014, earning the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his counter terrorism work. Under his leadership, South Bend has addressed its toughest challenges and is growing at the fastest rate in years. He’s what you would call the “dark horse” candidate but he’s gotten some high profile backing such as Howard Dean, Martin O’Malley  and 3 former DNC chairs.

Buttigeig hopes for election would come down to a deadlock between Perez and Ellison…This is Howard Deans assessment…

Asked about Buttigieg’s chances of besting his better-known opponents, Dean said the Indiana mayor is “everybody’s second choice,” positioning him well in a party that remains divided after Hillary Clinton’s surprising and devastating defeat in last year’s presidential election. Perez and Ellison “represent certain interests inside the Democratic Party who are at odds with each other,” Dean said, opening a window for Buttigieg to win the chairmanship.

“We need outside-the-Beltway. I’ve had enough of all these endorsements from senators and congressman,” Dean said, recalling his own tenure as DNC chair. “I think it’s time for an outsider. I was an outsider. I came in. We didn’t have the House, the Senate, or the presidency, and when I left we had the House, the presidency and the Senate. You can do this in four years.”

Tweet time…

https://twitter.com/Harrison4DNC/status/834100890256732160

https://twitter.com/jessetweetsnow/status/834796973597216769

 

 

As always I need to thank WYgal for her assistance in compiling this material.

 

 

One thing before I let ya all go…Jan I’d like you to clear up something I don’t quite understand…Why is inserting tweets in the comment section different than inserting them in a new post? 

Can I please get some assistance on how to insert(imbed, tried not successful) tweets in the comments when using a PC and when using an IPad. Thanks!

TGIF…This is you open thread…

 

 

About Batch 76 Articles
64, Life long Democrat...Kossack ex-pat...fed up with the puritanical leftists wanting to destroy our Party.

82 Comments

  1. Thanks, batch!

    I too don’t care all that much who wins the DNC chair – but if someone other than Ellison wins it would send the bernie bros a ‘we’re just not that into you’ message. If bernie is going to throw a tantrum I’d prefer he (and his disciples) get it over with now.

    • Agree completely about the “get it out of their system now”. Plus if the “new” people are unreliable voters, we already have plenty of them!! I want us to build a party of super-voters – folks who vote in every primary every election even if it isn’t exciting. I don’t need the kind of excitement that 6 years of Republican control of Wisconsin brought.

      I admit to being from the Democratic Party wing of the Democratic Party and I don’t want to see the Bernie Sanders and Lincoln Freaking Chaffees running in our primaries again. The party was built on the blood sweat and tears of people of color and working people. We can’t just turn it over to a bunch of people who have not paid their dues.

        • Plus fk running under the banner of “Wall Street billionaires are ebil”. We have families getting split up and kids getting deported to countries they don’t know and Indian engineers getting shot and killed in bars for looking foreign and 20 million people in danger of losing their health care and a dead (literally) halt to climate change mitigation. We need to protect people NOW, not blather about an idyllic America that will never exist. No, I am not refusing to “dream big” – I want to focus first on ending this nightmare!

      • totally agree…the man’s not even a Democrat for gods sakes…if he doesn’t like or care enough about the party to join than why should he have a say…

    • Morning ink….I heard that Perez has the votes he needs so it should be fun listening to pouty purists heads explode…Maybe Bernout Sanders will get it through his head that his ideas suck and he’ll take his blankey and go home…

      • Good! Perez will do a great job.

        As for bernie and his disciples, that’s what I’m hoping for! His take over the Democratic Party crap needs to end.

      • {{{Batch}}} – BS already did – he ran straight back to Independent status and the Thom Hartmann show and all that. But they’ll never shut up because they aren’t really his supporters. They’re Alt Left extremists who glommed onto BS as their messiah but it’s not the real person, it’s the fantasy “perfect” candidate. If he actually had the ability to win (as in had won), they’d have deserted him already just as they deserted the real Obama 8 years ago. But since he lost, he will stay their fantasy messiah as long as they live (note I didn’t say as long as he lives) because reality will never get in the way.

      • Thanks Batch for the post awesome as always, If Jaime Harrison’s supporters also support Perez, he would have enough to win. I will have my ear muff ready for the purist screams.

    • I think this was one of the major failures of the Dems in 2016, they didn’t put their foot down on the Buster BS and they should have. They need to do it this time around and cut their loses rather than build on another shaky foundation of entitled little whiners who will cut and run the first time they don’t get everything they want. Or worse letting the friendly fire happen again because they think they’re justified to frag anyone on their own side who doesn’t agree with them.

      • Figuring out how to shut down on them was the problem as long as BS was running as a Dem – and the DNC couldn’t stop him from doing that either as long as he’d fulfilled whatever the state laws and state party rules are for running as one. Alt anything is noisy as hell and real media grabbers. Especially the Alt Left because the RW-owned media (even thought they weren’t nearly as consolidated as they are now) loves the “Dems in disarray” meme. We couldn’t stop them in 1972 or 1980. They got suppressed not from our side but by the Rs during Reagan-Bush and again under W – but every single time we manage to get the White House they come running back to make sure we lose Congress and the next run at the White House. Actually we were lucky that they were starting to coalesce around BS in 2012. If they had been backing a real Dem it might have been 1980 all over again.

  2. In reply:

    Jan I’d like you to clear up something I don’t quite understand…Why is inserting tweets in the comment section different than inserting them in a new post?

    Can I please get some assistance on how to insert(imbed, tried not successful) tweets in the comments when using a PC and when using an IPad. Thanks!

    The WordPress roles, developed years ago before Tweeting, were rather limited in the rights granted to authors and users. Embedding a Tweet requires permission to use the scripting that is included, a right granted by default in a post but not in a comment. I found a workaround and built two new roles, Author-Plus and Trusted Subscriber that gives Twitter embed rights. You should have that now – let me know if you continue to have problems.

    As far as iPhone/iPad embedding, I can’t help you. I have the same issue with the TweetCaster app I use on my Android phone – there is no option to find and share the embed code. On the web based Twitter, there is a pull-down that shares the embed. If anyone figures it out, please let us know!

    • Thanks for replying Jan…Still didn’t answer my question about tweeting from my desktop though…When I pull down the options on a tweet and I use the embed option it says to copy and paste which I’ve done…It has 3 or 4 line of gobbleygook and doesn’t embed anything other than a link…What am I missing…Ya have to remember you’re talking to an empty head when it comes to putergese…lol

  3. I normally avoid making fun of how people look because the awfulness is in their words and intentions, not their hairstyles or clothing choices. But this sequence made me laugh out loud:

  4. Thanks for this stimulating Village post, Batch! Enjoyed reading it and fuming. Agree with the comments upthread about Perez winning, and actually Buttigeig sounds like a good guy. How on earth did he get elected mayor in a place like Indiana?

    Glad we have this Village so we can be together again. Have a good Friday, all!

    • South Bend from the perspective of one family:

      When my family migrated (the story of white America) from Germany in the very late 1800s, South Bend was their destination. The draw for them was working as blacksmiths (their trade) for Studebaker; when Studebaker switched from wagons to cars, they stayed on. Studebaker was THE industry in South Bend; of my great-grandparents’ eight surviving children, my grandfather, the oldest, was the only one who left South Bend and never came back. But working for Studebaker was a feast or famine situation (which even today is very much a part of the auto industry). Layoffs were common. One of my great uncles managed to save enough to buy a farm on the outskirts of South Bend, and most of his siblings helped with it. It was often the difference between having fruit and vegetables and chicken on their tables during a layoff, or not. My great-grandparents never did have an empty nest. They bought a home sometime after 1910, and one or more of their kids/kids’ families lived with them until the day they died (the house is still in the family and owned by a second cousin).

      Around this time, another wave of migration occurred, this time from Hungary. The German-speaking Evangelische (Lutheran) churches were seeing Hungarian Catholic churches crop up. A good number of these Hungarian immigrants also worked at Studebaker, but the melting pot (or stew) had its effect. The strong social hold of the Evangelische churches dissipated, and “intermarriage” was common. Almost half of the kids of the original eight siblings in my family married Hungarian women or men and to do so within the church, they converted to Catholicism. Most of them tell me that the conversion had little to do with a true belief in Catholic teachings, but it was the only way they could get married.

      The net effect of all of this was that by the second generation, the ties to South Bend were diminished. Studebaker was not viewed as a path to the future, and post-WW2, a good many of them left. The ties to the church were secondary, so they did not feel a strong social or familial need to stay in South Bend. Studebaker closed its doors in 1963, but it was in decline long before that. Like so many Midwestern cities that had too-long been dependent on one industry, the decline was immediate and severe. Not even the presence of Notre Dame could save South Bend. But the presence of Notre Dame did ensure that South Bend didn’t fade from the map entirely, and similar to Detroit, the foundation (buildings, land) for resurgence existed. So South Bend has been working to reclaim itself. It’s been a decades-long process (renovations of the old Studebaker plant only started in 2015, after years of being used mostly for storage), but South Bend is the kind of place in which strong Democratic leadership can take hold.

      I have to add that I don’t know the racial history of South Bend. I haven’t been there in years since most of my family has left, and the stories I know are mostly because of trying to track down the vast network of relatives that my grandfather and his 7 siblings started. If I had to guess, I’d say that Studebaker probably has a similar history to Ford or GM…AA workers who came north during the Great Migration, and stayed long after the more privileged and affluent left. But that’s just a guess…

      • {{{DoReMI}}} Good towns with good people as long as things are going well – but any town that is dependent on a single industry, or even a few industries, will follow this path when the major industry goes down. The only thing I can think of that might break that pattern is a tax structure designed to entice major industries into implementing/phasing in new concepts instead of subsidizing them to hang onto the old stuff with a death grip. Wagon/coach makers shifting to auto-body makers is a good example of the former. Energy sector demanding we continue to use fossil fuels and refusing to shift over to renewables is an very unfortunate and deadly example of the latter.

      • Thank you for this very interesting piece of history, DoReMI! I love hearing stories about people’s family backgrounds.

        Political Granddaughter-from-Austin, now aged 22, graduated from Purdue, and during her three years there was president of the College Democrats. She’s now gone to Lima, Ohio to work on a campaign there, but will move to Cleveland with the campaign in a few months.

        So proud of her. I applauded her decision to attend Purdue because it got her out of Texas (although Austin is pretty liberal, for Texas), and into a new place where she could meet people from different backgrounds. Sounds as if Indiana has more potential for liberalism than I’d thought.

        • Indiana was also a Klan stronghold, so that is something to be overcome. But as bfitz made clear, a lot of the “economic anxiety” we were blasted with post-election is based on so much of the Midwest’s single-industry dependence from years past. Building the New Economy takes vision and grit and messaging. Dems can do all of that, but too many have been running scared, rather than running forward. Hillary tried, I think, but there were too many other forces working against her.

  5. good morning Batch it is wonderful to see you. Thank you Jan for your quick attention, it is nice to not feel so threatended when I log in. I’m so outnumbered here where I live that I get enough real life threats to make the online ones particularly annoying.

  7. 55 and sunny is the forecast for today in Sacramento but only 34 right now. Good morning Dwellers of the Moose pond and TGIF to those who aren’t retired. Excellent diary Batch, as always. I’ve been on Team Tom for a while because he hasn’t held elected office. I think that’s a plus. I see Jan fixed your problem (I would’ve forgotten to ask) but can’t fix mine. ????Off to get ready for my hair appointment. I will come back later to read and comment.

    • Thanks baby….Have fun getting your hair done..Just make sure that you don’t come away bald…:)

    • WYgal, ask Jan to make you a Trusted Contributor so you can embed tweets. The Twitter app doesn’t have an option to embed though – you have to do it from the website (using the desktop View, not mobile view)

  8. {{{Batch}}} – thank you so much for the Friday morning post. it is so good to see you and reese here. (There are those who keep thinking the DK Village will regroup as the folks who’ve left “will come drifting back” now things have calmed down. Wishful thinking. Things have “calmed down” because the Village over there is now small enough to not be a threat to the Alt Left/berners – and the folks who could make it strong enough to be a threat again were mostly banned. Thank heavens for MM.) I have only one “care” about the DNC thing. That the person who gets it is a good organizer because that’s what we need to do – organize at all levels – to get Congress in 2018 and start steering the Ship of State away from the rocks. And that means not Ellison on two counts. I want Ellison in Congress because that’s where he has experience. I do not want a noob in that position until/unless we get both houses of Congress by enough that training in won’t be a problem. I don’t want Ellison for DNC because he doesn’t have the organizing experience that other candidates do.

    I’ll be back and forth as usual, if a little more slowly than usual. At least until my back stops hurting. sigh . {{{Village Peeps}}}

    • Totally agree about the DK village and about Perez…Ellison is a member of Congress where the real action should be…the fact that he is willing to resign from that to take what essentially is a bureaucratic position makes me think that he is confused as to whether he thinks he’s running for Democratic Party Chair instead of the chair of the DNC…
      {{{BfitzinAR}}} healing energy for your back…

      • {{{shenagig}}} – thanks, it’s better as long as I’m very careful about how I move, but not good. I suppose it is in a way – it gives me a very, very, very, vague idea of what folks like Aji and snoopydawg live with. I really admire those women, the work that they do with the pain they’re in. And it tells that part of me that wants to give up “not on your tintype” – if they can carry that much heavier burden, you can carry your own.

        yeah, it does kind of make me wonder what Ellison thinks he’s running for. No surprise the berners/Alt Left haven’t a clue about what the DNC chair does – they had to make up a reason for bernie’s failure that doesn’t include bernie didn’t do it right, so they made up the all-powerful DNC Chair. But Ellison should know better and the fact he doesn’t seem to is one more reason I want him where he is – where he actually does know what he’s doing.

        • Yeah it seems like a lot of people suffer with back pain…I have curvature of the spine that was not bad when I was young but has gotten worse as I age…pulls my hips to the front and up on one side shorting one leg…If I didn’t go to my Chiropractor once a month I’d be in a world of hurt…he mainly uses stretching and massage with some manipulation…I swear by it and have gone since college…
          We are in agreement about Ellison…as far as the alt-left is concerned, the super delegates seem to be a big deal…if you tell them they are not they come back with “then why are you against getting rid of them if they aren’t?”…I wonder how they reconcile Bernie’s lame attempt to use them to over turn the people’s choice of Hillary?…oh that’s right they don’t care…it’s all ok if you are the JSFV…

          • My chiropractor gave me some exercises that have helped tremendously. if I manage to damage myself there are two almost givens – 1) it’s a lot colder than the previous day and 2) I forgot to do my exercises that morning. One thing the Alt Left doesn’t know because it doesn’t fit in their meme is that super-delegates mean more regular people can go as delegates. If the already-elected officials were running for those delegate slots, they’d win them solely on name recognition. But yeah, facts don’t matter to the Alt-Left any more than they do to the Alt-Right.

          • And the end justifies the means…if it means threatening or intimadating people to get their way they have no hesitation about doing so…

          • Yep – Alt Left and Alt Right are mirror images. Fortunately even added together they are less than 10% of the population. If they weren’t so loud, we could ignore them entirely. As it is we need to avoid them as best we can as we reach out to the center Left folks who wander through Life blithely assuming they don’t need to worry about politics or voting.

            We need to rebuild the dem party machine (without the corruption) – from the precinct level on up. Using the DNC voter ID data, we need people visiting every single Dem in every single precinct and find out in just ‘general conversation’ what’s important to them. Then show them why their personal concern is best served by voting at all in general and especially voting Dem. Point to the race that is most applicable to their issue, and where that fits with other races so they’ll vote all the way up and down the ballot. And until we can get people with both drive and vision to do that, we will take the White House when we have an “Elvis” candidate like BHO – and lose everything else. sigh.

          • The local and state level is where most of the change needs to happen at…I know we get upset when the party doesn’t even put up a candidate but I’ve read because of some of the extreme gerrymandering the party can’t find anyone who will run…I hope Obama and Holder follow through on their promise to fight that…I’m not sure how you can convince people that their vote matters if the election of Dolt45 hasn’t done it…

        • I have a congenital back thing made worse by auto accident(s). Weight training has kept me in good shape! I found Pilates-based PT to be a great rehab method, also.

  9. Morning Village Meese! Hi Batch, thanks for the rundown on the DNC chair. I’ve heard a lot about it only because it can’t be avoided but I’m in the “anyone except Ellison” camp and not because of Ellison, whom I like mostly. I did see a program on Cspan a couple of Saturdays ago with Joy Reid introducing all the candidates and I think she either asked them questions or they had a short opportunity to speak. That was the first time I saw Perez talk about what he wants to do with my own eyes/ears and I liked what I heard. I also thought the other candidates were reasonable, there wasn’t anyone I didn’t think could do the job. Sally Boynton-Brown was very spunky and likeable and Jehmu Greene had a good presence.

    Whoever wins, I hope the Alt-Leftists can be vanquished, not because they don’t have a right to their views. I don’t expect them to fall in line at all, or stop distracting and attacking, I just hope they dwindle as the excitement and the spotlight fade.

    • I feel much more strongly about the Alt-Leftists because I lived through 1972 when they showed the whole country why no one wanted to vote for them. It’s a shame because lost in all that is the fact that McGovern was truly decent human being who had to live with being mis-characterized by his own putative allies. At least the berners were straight up honest in their hatred of everything Hillary and she will not be the one tarnished by association with them.

      • Yes, B. Sanders is the one tarnished and unfortunately he seems to be capable of spreading the contamination. HRC is now a folk hero. :)

      • {{{wordsinthewind]]] – the Alt Left certainly didn’t help in 1972. They don’t learn though. Facts have to mean something to a person before he/she can learn. sigh.

  11. Thanks Batch…lovely morning post…it’s 19 and snowing here in N. Utah…way colder than normal…we do need the snow but it needs to be in the mountains rather then here in the valleys…while I like Ellison I’m rooting for anyone one but for the DNC Chair…choosing Perez would send a FU to the Berners which I would enjoy immensely but maybe the best route to go is a third party…someone who can defuse this unnecessary fight…

  14. Good Morning, Village Meese! I’m off to Santa Cruz for the weekend for a Ragtime Festival! And then off to Singapore for two weeks.

  16. Joy Reid has a whole series of tweets that are must read. It actually covers a lot of the stuff I have for next Tuesday’s diary; maybe I should have just posted her tweets instead of writing my post! And no, I don’t have full Twitter privileges here, so this is the best I can do.

    There’s more about what to expect, but this mirrors quite a bit of what I’ve been thinking.

    • Oh yeah – I’ve said for a long time that the 1890s is where this group wants to take us. They want to erase every bit of progress made – they’d take us back to the 1850s if they could. And that means exactly what you think it means.

    • Can I just ask…..at what point after a presidential advisor says the words ‘economic nationalism’ do people start to wonder where they heard phrases like that before? When do they start to worry? Am I the only one who literally said COME ON!!! It’s not funny anymore!

      • I haven’t listened to Bannon’s comments yet, but everything I read on Twitter yesterday scared the bejesus out of me. The man is clearly out to destroy anyone who opposes him or his puppet, Trump. Who needs Putin when you have Bannon in the house?

        • Bannon’s a fascist. And he’s trying to recreate fascist Germany here as the America Firsters of the 1930s wanted to do. Fascist became a dirty word due to WWII so the fascists had to wait until a couple of generations died off before trying again. We shall see how successful they are this time around. But always remember, aside from the 3-5% actual fascists about 20% of this country supports them and another 20% can be manipulated into thinking they do.

          Our base sees the threat because our base is usually the target of the purges. Those of our base paying attention make up The Resistance – we need to get more of our base to pay attention. We outnumber them but we have to get our folks to the polls to stop them.

    • Oh, and I DO have full Twitter privileges apparently. Basking in the glow provided courtesy of JanF!

  17. I’ve been thinking about the questions Capt. Black Dog posed yesterday, and particularly about why we seem to rush for “change”after 8 years. I don’t have answers, but I do wonder if the 22nd Amendment has helped to create an artificial mechanism that promotes this apparent need. I know FDR was an historical aberration, but as our parties have become so polarized, is it possible that “must replace” has become conflated with “need change”? Something more to ponder…because isn’t this what everyone does to kick off the weekend? :D

    • Maybe – but I think it has more to do with become accustomed to what we have. If things are going poorly then obviously we want change to get something better. But even if things are going well, we become used to it and no longer value the degree of riches attained. Our society at least since the 1960s when the advertising industry deliberately turned us from a conserving society to a consumer society has always desired more. More what is really kind of amorphous, but more. If more isn’t coming or isn’t coming as fast as desired, our society reacts as if it were enduring hardship.

      So if somebody somehow manages to have an administration that starts with folks feeling bad, brings them to feeling good, then lets them drop into bad again until finally brings them to feeling really good (or really patriotic or both) during election year – well, that administration could probably be re-elected as long as that president lived just like FDR. That’s pretty much the pattern of the FDR years. A steady but incremental increase in good isn’t going to hack it. Our society gets used to that, too – and it’s not good enough. Mostly we’re dealing with propaganda – ad agencies and media both hired by major corporations to make it so do their work well. sigh.

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