NORTON META TAG

28 March 2014

Hahahaha - Wall Street "Democrats" losing so badly they need to smear us in the media & Kos Folds Up the Big Tent & We Don’t Need Two Wall Street Parties & Here's where I punch back at Third Way in Politico 19,28,24&25MAR14

Elizabeth Warren and Markos Moulitsas posing together.
Dear Third Way: Boo!
voice of the day


"Too often are poor and oppressed people (especially people of color) regarded as threats here in America, while poor and oppressed people in other countries are viewed as victims. This type of perspective is dehumanizing to people here and to people abroad. To overlook the problems here and to focus on issues elsewhere sends the message that poor and oppressed Americans' problems are either insignificant, unimportant, or non urgent and at the same time it leads to the objectification of the "exotic other."
- Ryan Herring
+third way democrats are starting to panic about the projected results of the 2014 US Senate elections. They are mounting a propaganda campaign against +Daily Kos, and will probably attack the +PCCC / the +Progressive Change Campaign Committee next, blaming them for the chance the Democrats will loose the senate in November 2014. What the refuse to acknowledge is the the threat to Democratic control of the Senate is due to their kow-towing to the gop / tea-bagger obstructionist in the Senate, their participation in the Democratic grand betrayal of the electorate that delivered the White House and Congress in 2008. The AFA? third way negotiated with republicans and tea-baggers, the legislation was weakened to meet their demands and in the end not one republican or tea-bagger voted for the bill. They have held 50 votes to repeal the AFA in the house. We could have achieved Universal Health Care. Thanks third way. Dodd-Frank? They should have restored and strengthened Glass-Steagall. Thanks third way. Economic stimulus? third way gave in to the gop and tea-baggers to the extent that the unemployment rate is still 6.7%, there are millions of underemployed and millions who have dropped out of the workforce altogether because there aren't any jobs. Unemployment benefits, job training and other social safety net programs have been cut. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans struggling to survive on $2.00 a day, poverty usually found in Third World countries. Thanks third way. The economy is stagnant, economic mobility is stagnant, wages are stagnant, income inequality has increased by leaps and bounds,  while the rich, corporate America, Wall Street, the bank-financial cabal increase their wealth and power on the backs of the poor, students, the retired, our military vets and the shrinking middle class. Thanks third way. It is understood the political parties have to negotiate and compromise in order to govern the country. But when the opposition continues to vote against compromise legislation and begins to dictate how things are going to be or nothing gets done and you go along with that your agenda changes from third way moderation to collusion. You have embraced austerity economics to protect the wealth and power of the 1%, these are the reasons why control of the US Senate is at risk. Thanks a lot third way. rover norquist and the koch brothers say thanks too, but you probably heard that from them in person. This from Politico, followed by an appeal from Daily Kos for a donation to their fund supporting Progressive candidates for congress. Click the link to donate if you can, I did. And finally, Markos Moulitsas' response to third way on +Politico and Daily Kos.....





If Markos Moulitsas had his way there’d be no Affordable Care Act, no Dodd-Frank, no economic stimulus package. That’s the price when purity tests are applied to Democrats.
In a remarkable post yesterday, Moulitsas, founder and publisher of the progressive community site DailyKos, celebrates the departure from the Senate of 10 moderate Democrats over the last decade, and makes clear his hope that Senators Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) lose their tough reelection battles this year. He doesn’t name some other moderates in tight races, like Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), but his logic suggests that he’d be only too happy to say goodbye to them as well.
Moulitsas cares passionately about progressive politics, and he is a very savvy political observer—he knows that we must have Democratic majorities in Congress to make real progress, and that to create those majorities we must have Democrats win in red states like Arkansas, Alaska, Louisiana and North Carolina. Surely he can see that such Democrats must be somewhat different than the full-throated progressives that he name-checks in his essay.
Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel understood that fact. As the chairmen of the DSCC and DCCC respectively, they aggressively recruited moderate leaders in red states and districts in 2006, and those moderates made Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House and Harry Reid Senate majority leader.
The majorities those moderates helped create made possible the progress of Barack Obama’s first term. Without them, the president would have been unable to reverse our slide toward depression with the stimulus, extend stable and secure health care coverage to all with the ACA, reform the worst abuses of the financial services sector with Dodd-Frank, remove the scourge of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell from the military or pass a sensible immigration reform bill through the Senate.
A charge implicit in the Moulitsas post is that moderate Democrats lack political courage—that they would do the right thing if only they were brave enough. This just doesn’t withstand scrutiny. We actually sat in meetings with Senate moderates during the darkest days of the ACA deliberations. They knew that voting for the bill could send them to the Valley of the Doomed, and for many it did or still could. They put their careers on the line and took that vote anyway—every single moderate named in the piece who was still in the Senate voted for the ACA. So did those unnamed, like Senators Begich and Hagan. That is political courage.
It was laudable, but hardly courageous, for a Democrat from a blue state to have voted for the ACA. The last time a Democratic Senate incumbent lost in New York was 1899, and in Massachusetts it was 1947. They don’t stare political death in the face on any vote, ever. The moderates do.
Moulitsas might have a stronger case if the moderates he abhors were replaced by more liberal members. But almost every instance saw the opposite result. Of the 10 former Democratic senators that Moulitsas identifies, seven were replaced by Republicans, one by Montanan John Walsh, who is in a fight for his political life this year, and another by Democrat Joe Donnelly of Indiana, who is unlikely to make the DailyKos Pantheon of Progressiveness. Just one, Joe Lieberman, of midnight-blue Connecticut, was succeeded by someone to his left. Meanwhile, the moderate Democrats in tough fights this cycle are running against Tea Party true believers.
Democrats across the spectrum agree on far more than we disagree—almost all supported President Obama’s key initiatives, including universal health care and fundamental immigration reform. Most support new gun safety laws, marriage for gay couples and a vigorous federal response to climate change. Yet for some, that’s not pure enough.
If we are to make progress in a divided Washington—and if we are to protect the Democratic Senate majority—we simply must embrace a big tent for the Democratic Party. Even in purple states, there are not enough self-identified liberals to elect Democrats without their winning significant pluralities or majorities of moderates. The idea that more liberal candidates could win in places like Arkansas, Indiana or Alaska is pure fantasy. And to write off those states would consign Democrats to long-term congressional minority status.
We have all witnessed the devastating effect that the politics of purity can have, as the Republicans grapple with the toxic impact of the Tea Party on their candidates, their congressional leadership and their governing philosophy. Let’s not become them.



Matt Bennett and Jim Kessler are both co-founders and senior vice presidents of Third Way, a think tank in Washington.

Hahahaha - Wall Street "Democrats" losing so badly they need to smear us in the media

Craig, corporatist “Democratic” group Third Way launched a direct assault on Daily Kos last week, writing an op-ed in Politico to try to smear me and the work we all do here to elect progressives.

Well, I like to think that if the Wall Street crowd is scared enough to attack us by name, then we’re doing something right.

Can you chip in $5 so that Daily Kos can keep fighting?

Third Way is the same group that called Elizabeth Warren “catastrophically anti-business” when she was running neck-and-neck with Scott Brown and then said after the election that Democrats following Warren’s lead would be “disastrous” for the party. They also like to spend their time scaremongering people into supporting cuts to Social Security.

So, while Third Way thinks that Democrats need to suck up to the rich to win, I think that we can leave that to Republicans. (I just don’t think we need two Wall Street parties.)

Daily Kos works to elect Democrats who stand up for core Democratic values, including protecting—and expanding!—Social Security, raising the minimum wage, ensuring everyone has access to quality and affordable healthcare… You know, the sorts of stuff that the corporatists hate.

I’ll chip in $5 so that Daily Kos can keep fighting.

Keep fighting,
Markos Moulitsas
Founder and Publisher, Daily Kos

Elizabeth Warren : Classic Takedown of Geithner Over TARP Bailout (from 2009) - MUST SEE !!!


http://youtu.be/Egc_5UAJIIk

We Don’t Need Two Wall Street Parties

Yes, I think Democrats should stop sucking up to the rich. Leave that to the Republicans.



It’s tough to be a “Third Way” corporatist in today’s Democratic Party. Sure, the numerically small faction of Wall Street and Beltway Democrats has long enjoyed an outsized influence on public policy, but all the hedge fund money in the world can’t change the fact that the party is in the midst of a dramatic reorientation toward a new progressive populism. And it turns out that populism is popular! Voters across the country are increasingly concerned about the pressing issues of income inequality and economic security, and elected Democrats have responded with a renewed focus on solutions for working Americans.
So what’s a group that exists—as far as I can tell—solely to defend the narrow interests of Wall Street Democrats, to do?
Apparently, the answer is to lash out at me and others who simply want to see the Democratic Party work for Democratic values. Third Way’s Matt Bennett and Jim Kessler took to this site last week to charge me with the apparent sin of celebrating the party’s current Senate majority, one that is finally starting to function thanks to the absence of corrosive elements like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman, who tied the Democratic caucus in knots just 10 years ago.
Bennett and Kessler’s argument seems to be that I, and by extension the new populist majority of the Democratic Party, am somehow particularly intolerant of certain flavors of Democrats—that we’re closing up the “big tent” and limiting the party’s national appeal. That’s pretty rich coming from a group whose raison d’etre seems to be to hammer progressive candidates and policies.
Indeed, it was September 2012, just months before election day, when Third Way’s Bennett claimed that Elizabeth Warren was “catastrophically antibusiness” and that her economic populism was “not a winning strategy.” It would make sense for Third Way to prefer Sen. Scott Brown over Warren, given that 27 of the organization’s 29 board members are current or former CEOs, corporate lawyers or principals at financial service institutions.But you don’t get to whine about big tents after undermining Democratic candidates in the heat of an election.
Still, let’s look at the question of whether our populist approach is compromising the party’s ability to win across the country. Bennett and Kessler lament that seven of the 10 right-wing Democrats that I celebrated for no longer being in the Senate were replaced by Republicans—but what was then a Democratic two-seat minority is now a Democratic 10-seat majority. If you’re genuinely a Democrat, you have to admit that a 55-seat caucus reinforced with strong progressive voices is objectively preferable to a 49-seat caucus packed with corporatist Democrats who voted for the disastrous Iraq war and George W. Bush’s budget-busting tax cuts. If you’re genuinely a Democrat.
Furthermore, the notion that Daily Kos and I are intolerant toward moderate Democrats just doesn’t square with the facts. We’ve raised millions of dollars and generated on-the-ground activism for moderate Democratic candidates such as Jon Tester in Montana, Jim Webb in Virginia, Mark Begich in Alaska, Jack Conway in Kentucky and Jim Martin in Georgia. No liberal or progressive would categorize a single one of those candidates as anything other than moderate, yet our community backed them with significant financial resources. The Senate races in Kentucky and Georgia will be getting plenty of love this year despite featuring moderate Democrats on the ballot. We’ve backed similar moderates at the House and state level for more than a decade
Even Sen. Chuck Schumer—no enemy of Wall Street, he—wrote in his book Positively American about his stint as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, “[The netroots] helped identify and encourage viable candidates, like Jim Webb and Jon Tester,” thus “it seemed somehow appropriate that as a new majority dawned for Senate Democrats, two candidates who had been propelled by the growing ‘netroots’ (Democratic leaning bloggers), had made all the difference in the end.”
Let me put it plainly: We aren’t the Tea Party, undermining our party’s electoral chances by nominating fringe candidates like Christine O’Donnell, Richard Mourdock, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin and Linda McMahon. Quite the contrary, in fact. We support Democrats of all flavors so long as they support basic Democratic values and their fellow Democrats. Can Third Way say the same, or point to anything remotely similar they’ve accomplished on behalf of Sens. Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley or (ahem) Elizabeth Warren?
So if Bennett and Kesler were going to try and argue that I don’t want a big Democratic tent, they’d have to invent some pretty impressive straw men. And that they did: “A charge implicit in the Moulitsas post is that moderate Democrats lack political courage,” they wrote—which was neither implied in anything I’ve written nor relevant to my argument in favor of a more ideological cohesive Senate Democratic caucus. But what was even funnier was the sentence that followed: “This just doesn’t withstand scrutiny.” It sure is easy to swat down straw-man arguments! As a blogger and columnist, I have written well over 10 million words over the past decade, and I’m never shy about what I believe. If you have to put words in my mouth, you’ve already lost the debate.
But I sort of pity the Third Way guys. They’ve had a rough few months. Back in December, they were laughed out of the room when Kessler and Jon Cowan, Third Way’s president, argued in the Wall Street Journal that cutting Social Security benefits would prove popular electoral politics.
Not only did mainstream Democrats from all wings of the party immediately reject the premise, but one of the organization’s co-chairs, moderate Rep. Allyson Schwarz, quit Third Way, saying Bennett and Cowan’s op-ed was “outrageous.” It was a stunning rejection by the broader party establishment and proof that the Democrats’ “big tent” was united around the idea of preserving—and even expanding—Social Security.
Third Way’s and its “centrist” allies have spent decades building a Beltway elitist consensus on the need to slash the safety net. It must tear them up seeing all that hard work evaporate over the span of a few years—with their economic ideas now on the party fringe, they have nothing left to do but cry persecution.
But Third Way’s attacks on me and my fellow progressives have never been about tolerance for disagreement—it’s always been about policy. And they’re losing the argument, now more than ever. Given America’s pressing economic problems, it is clear to the vast majority of Democrats that Wall Street isn’t part of the solution, it’s part of the problem. And a Democratic group that relentlessly promotes Wall Street’s agenda is as welcome among the progressive base as cholera.
Bennett and Kessler are right about one thing, however. The Democratic tent isn’t big enough for those who privilege the wants of Wall Street over the needs of working Americans.



Markos Moulitsas is founder and publisher of Daily Kos. 
Tue Mar 25, 2014 at 02:13 AM EDT

Here's where I punch back at Third Way in Politico

by kos
Elizabeth Warren and Markos Moulitsas posing together.
Dear Third Way: Boo!
Seriously, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Bennett and Kessler’s argument seems to be that I, and by extension the new populist majority of the Democratic Party, am somehow particularly intolerant of certain flavors of Democrats—that we’re closing up the “big tent” and limiting the party’s national appeal. That’s pretty rich coming from a group whose raison d’etre seems to be to hammer progressive candidates and policies. Indeed, it was September 2012, just months before election day, when Third Way’s Bennett claimed that Elizabeth Warren was “catastrophically antibusiness” and that her economic populism was “not a winning strategy.” It would make sense for Third Way to prefer Sen. Scott Brown over Warren, given that 27 of the organization’s 29 board members are current or former CEOs, corporate lawyers or principals at financial service institutions.But you don’t get to whine about big tents after undermining Democratic candidates in the heat of an election.
By the way, my original version said that "25 of 29 board members" were Wall Street types. Politico fact-checked me and, well, I like 27 of 29 even better. I somehow missed a couple.
Still, let’s look at the question of whether our populist approach is compromising the party’s ability to win across the country. Bennett and Kessler lament that seven of the 10 right-wing Democrats that I celebrated for no longer being in the Senate were replaced by Republicans—but what was then a Democratic two-seat minority is now a Democratic 10-seat majority. If you’re genuinely a Democrat, you have to admit that a 55-seat caucus reinforced with strong progressive voices is objectively preferable to a 49-seat caucus packed with corporatist Democrats who voted for the disastrous Iraq war and George W. Bush’s budget-busting tax cuts. If you’re genuinely a Democrat.
And so it goes, for over 1,000 words. On the plus side, for the Third Way dudes, Politico apparently couldn't find a goofy looking picture of them to illustrate the piece. So for them, at least there's that!

Originally posted to kos on Tue Mar 25, 2014 at 02:13 AM EDT.

Also republished by Daily Kos.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/daily-kos-democrats-moderates-104817.html#.UzXZkoXij8v 
 

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