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Tuesday, December 15, 2020
POLITICO NIGHTLY: The Joe and Mitch show gets started
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RSN: FOCUS | Bernie Sanders: 'Congress Cannot Go Home' for Christmas Without Passing Stimulus Checks for Americans
15 December 20
So Far Today Is a, “We Go Broke Day”
Only “2” donations for the day so far. That’s a bad start, a bad start means a bad finish and … we go broke.
Funding for the work that RSN does is no joke. The basic budget that meets our operating costs has to be there or the process does, for sure break down.
Thousands will come to RSN today. We need 30 donations to make it a decent day.
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15 December 20
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FOCUS | Bernie Sanders: 'Congress Cannot Go Home' for Christmas Without Passing Stimulus Checks for Americans
Oliver O'Connell, The Independent
O'Connell writes: "Bernie Sanders is again urgently calling on his colleagues in Congress to pass direct stimulus payments to Americans before returning home for the holiday break."
Senator says Americans are facing economic desperation
“Congress cannot go home for the Christmas holidays until we pass legislation which provides a $1,200 direct payment to working class adults, $2,400 for couples, and a $500 payment to their children,” the Vermont senator said on Monday.
"This is what Democrats and Republicans did unanimously in March through the CARES Act. This is what we have to do today."
So far, direct payments to Americans are not part of the $908 billion bipartisan compromise deal being championed by other senators to help deal with the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mr Sanders argues that as a result of coronavirus, tens of millions of Americans are facing economic desperation.
“They can't afford to pay their rent and face eviction, they can't afford to go to the doctor, they can't afford to feed their children and they are going deeper and deeper into debt,” he said.
Despite many economists arguing in favour of individual stimulus payments as a method of keeping consumer demand going, their inclusion in any federal economic response does not look likely until after President-elect Joe Biden takes office in late January.
In an interview with Politico, Mr Sanders urged Democrats to reject the current bill being tabled by the bipartisan congressional group, describing it as “totally inadequate”.
He said it fell far short of what was needed being only $748bn and not the original proposal of $3.4 trillion.
“What kind of negotiation is it when you go from $3.4 trillion to $188 billion in new money? That is not a negotiation. That is a collapse,” the independent senator told the outlet. “We cannot go home until there [are] strong unemployment benefits plus $1,200 per adult, $500 per kid for every working person and family in this country.”
Mr Sanders has found support from the other side of the aisle — Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri agrees that relief checks should be part of any proposal, although the total cost of the bill would then be elevated to a point that would make conservatives unlikely to support it.
The current proposal is a $748 billion compromise spending bill and a $160 billion supplemental bill of state and local spending with a liability shield for companies.
Friday’s deadline to approve government funding gives Senator Sanders some leverage to push for the inclusion of stimulus checks.
A White House proposal to give Americans a $600 check was branded by Mr Sanders as “crap”.
RSN: FOCUS | Iowa Autopsy Report: DNC Meddling Led to Caucus Debacle
15 December 20
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FOCUS | Iowa Autopsy Report: DNC Meddling Led to Caucus Debacle
Tyler Pager, POLITICO
Pager writes: "Democratic National Committee meddling, combined with missteps by the state Democratic Party, were the primary drivers of the chaos that torpedoed the Iowa caucuses earlier this year, according to a new audit commissioned by the state party."
State party audit finds plenty of blame to go around.
The report, which was distributed to the Iowa Democratic Party State Central Committee at a meeting Saturday morning and obtained by POLITICO, identified a series of errors made by the DNC, IDP and the technology company contracted by the state party to build a reporting app to collect caucus results.
The February caucuses were overrun by foul-ups: The state party was unable to report a winner on caucus night, the mobile app to report results failed to work for many precinct chairs, the back-up telephone systems were jammed and some precincts had initial reporting errors. The state party chair, Troy Price, resigned in the wake of the debacle, which put Iowa’s status as the first in the nation nominating contest in serious jeopardy.
But the report pins the blame squarely on the DNC for the heart of the problem on caucus night — the delay in the reporting of the results. According to the report, the DNC demanded the technology company, Shadow, build a conversion tool just weeks before the caucuses to allow the DNC to have real-time access to the raw numbers because the national party feared the app would miscalculate results. The DNC’s data system used a different database format than Shadow’s reporting app, which caused multiple problems.
“Attempting to graft an entirely new software element onto the back-end reporting system at the proverbial eleventh hour is likely always going to be problematic, and it was ultimately the cause of a major problem on caucus night,” the report concludes. “Furthermore, the IDP was not involved in the development of this tool. The IDP simply permitted the DNC to direct the IDP’s vendor.”
The audit states the conversion tool had coding errors that spit out inaccurate numbers and caused confusion about the accuracy of the results, eventually leading to delays in reporting. But the state party’s app never malfunctioned nor was hacked, the report concludes.
“When the DNC’s database conversion tool failed to work correctly, it caused the DNC to wrongly stop the IDP from reporting its results, and the IDP’s entire planned reporting process was thrown into disarray,” the report says. “The DNC’s interjection was the catalyst for the resulting chaos in the boiler room and in the IDP’s attempts to manually collect and confirm caucus results by hand. If the DNC had not interjected itself into the results reporting process based on its erroneous data conversion, caucus night could conceivably have proceeded according to the IDP’s initial plan.”
The audit was conducted by Bonnie Campbell, the former attorney general of Iowa, and Faegre Drinker, an international law firm. The team conducted dozens of interviews with top IDP staffers, employees of Shadow and representatives from the Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg campaigns.
The DNC refused to participate in interviews by the lawyers who conducted the audit.
"Evaluating the nominating process always happens following the election so that DNC staff can remain focused on winning the general election, and this cycle that work helped contribute to President-Elect Biden's historic victory,” David Bergstein, a spokesman for the DNC, said in a statement.
The DNC said it offered to provide written answers so staff could remain focused on the work of the general election. The authors of the report declined that request, the DNC said.
Bergstein also defended the need for a “quality control check,” pointing to errors that were discovered in the initial caucus results. He also said Shadow was responsible for the technical issues.
Since 1972, Iowans have held the nation’s first presidential nominating contest, a position that has come under attack from Democrats who argue the state’s overwhelmingly white population is not representative of the country and therefore should not play an outsize role in picking the party’s nominee. Even before the botched caucuses, Democrats were calling on the party to reshuffle the nominating order and replace Iowa with more representative states.
Biden’s emergence as the Democratic nominee, after finishing in a dismal fourth place in the caucuses, served to ding the state’s reputation for picking presidents even more. Now, as the DNC and the IDP elect new leaders, the fight over the nominating calendar is likely to intensify in the coming months.
The audit also faults the IDP for waiting too long to develop the reporting application, which resulted in inadequate training and use. Many precinct chairs were unable to log into the app or faced other technical challenges, leading them to call-in their results.
The report notes the DNC contributed in part to the delay of the original app, saying the organization “aggressively interjected itself in all of the IDP’s technology endeavors,” primarily for cybersecurity reasons. The DNC was particularly worried about cybersecurity after foreign election interference in 2016.
But the report also blames the IDP for poor boiler room set-up and execution on caucus night, saying the party failed to train its volunteers on how to input data that was reported via phone and provide enough phone lines to handle the influx of calls after precinct chairs abandoned the application. Only 439 of the 1,765 precincts successfully submitted results on caucus night through the app.
The report says new requirements for caucus contests — passed by the DNC in order to improve transparency and accessibility, such as the mandatory reporting of the first and second alignments of caucusgoers — contributed to problems. In particular, the audit points to the difficulties the state party faced in increasing participation while avoiding any processes that were similar to primary voting because of New Hampshire’s insistence on being the first primary state in the nation.
“The DNC has certainly taken the position that there should no longer be caucuses in any state and has imposed requirements that make it even more difficult to carry out caucus,” the report concludes.
Bergstein, the DNC spokesperson, said the organization’s reforms were successful in increasing transparency and participation, and the DNC will go through another review process in the coming months.
“Every four years, the DNC looks back at what worked and what didn’t work and the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee will continue to evaluate all areas of our nominating process and make recommendations for any changes,” he said in a statement.
The state party and its leadership also failed to communicate effectively with the media, the report says, exacerbating the reporting problems. News organizations were given a clear indication that results would be out on caucus night — the delayed release of data simply created more chaos and confusion.
RSN: FOCUS: Ted Glick | Civil War?
15 December 20
So Far Today Is a, “We Go Broke Day”
Only “2” donations for the day so far. That’s a bad start, a bad start means a bad finish and … we go broke.
Funding for the work that RSN does is no joke. The basic budget that meets our operating costs has to be there or the process does, for sure break down.
Thousands will come to RSN today. We need 30 donations to make it a decent day.
Who?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
14 December 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
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FOCUS: Ted Glick | Civil War?
Ted Glick, Ted Glick's Website
Glick writes: "I can't remember ever hearing the two-word phrase, 'civil war,' as much as I've heard it over the past year."
Yesterday, at the latest, post-election, Trump-forever rally in downtown Washington, DC, the Washington Post reported that “podcaster David Harris, Jr. riled the crowd by suggesting if there were a civil war, ‘we’re the ones with all the guns.’”
This followed news reports that ultra-rightist Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, the day before, “posted photos taken inside the White House gates on the conservative platform Parler, adding that he had received a ‘last minute invite to an undisclosed location.’” White House officials denied that he had met with Trump or anyone else.
Is it realistic that Trump would have such a meeting? I’d say yes, given his desperation after all of the Supreme Court justices, including the three he appointed, summarily dismissed his latest loser lawsuit, clearing the way for the Electoral College tomorrow to officially elect Biden/Harris.
A desperate, anti-democratic, authoritarian, narcissistic, emotionally-depressed would-be dictator, with nowhere else to turn, could turn to extra-legal, extra-parliamentary action.
After all, in the months leading up to the November 3 election, he repeatedly and consistently declared that the elections were rigged. He called upon his supporters on election day to jam up polling sites. At the September 29th Presidential debate he said, "I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because that's what has to happen. I am urging them to do it."
Did any of this happen on November 3? Apparently very little, if any. If it did it sure hasn’t been reported anywhere that I’ve seen, and you’d think it would be.
The fact is that for all of Trump’s bluster and bombast, for all the tens of millions of people who voted for him, the fact is that the November 3 election, held during pandemic times, was possibly the fairest, most transparent and most successful Presidential election ever. Masses of people were willing to vote for Trump, and to turn out for his rallies, but the evidence so far indicates that the percentage of those supporters willing to go beyond that is very small.
This is a critical point when it comes to the question of “civil war.”
Is the country very divided ideologically? Yes, although there’s a definite majority of voters, 51-47%, who support a center-left orientation.
Has Trump inflamed and hardened those divisions? Yes.
Is it therefore more possible than in the past that those divisions could lead to increased physical attacks on the Left and others by ultra-rightist, armed militias? Yes, but what the new Biden/Harris administration does about them is very key. If the federal government, acting via the FBI and the Justice Department, is willing to investigate and prosecute groups doing so, similar to what was done this summer when a plot to kidnap and kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was discovered, it seems to me that this will definitely tamp down the domestic terrorism threat.
But more than this is necessary. What is needed is for a Biden/Harris administration to move to seriously enact policies on a wide range of issues that clearly and unmistakably are intended to improve the lives of working class people of all races and nationalities, urban, suburban and rural. There must be a willingness to take on the billionaire class and the deep-seated economic inequality that disproportionately affects people of color but affects people of all colors and cultures. We need Green New Deal-type initiatives and just transition policies that create jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors for the currently un- and underemployed and for workers displaced from a shrinking fossil fuel industry. We need a wealth tax on the 1% and shifting money from the military budget to programs that benefit working people.
In many ways, this is the harder work, given Biden’s historic ties to transnational corporations and the influence of the 1% over the dominant forces in the Democratic Party.
The Left must work with the Biden/Harris administration, but it must also be willing to speak up and bring pressure, including public pressure via action in the streets, nonviolent direct action, hunger strikes and more for a genuine people’s program. It is not an extreme statement to say that to the extent this does not happen, to that extent will popular disillusionment grow, the Trumpublicans be given political openings and the armed rightist militias be empowered and grow.
Let’s work to support Democrats Warnock and Ossoff in Georgia January 5 as we keep building a unified, grassroots-based, issue-oriented people’s movement, the prerequisite for forward progress after our historic defeat of Trump.
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