Thursday Open Thread

17 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

1. WOTD: “It seems like you don’t know the definition of Oppression” Rep. Jasmine Crockett.

   Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) goes off on Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) after he used the word “oppression” during a committee hearing on the “Dismantle DEI Act”

   What does a group of privileged white male politicians know about oppression?

   Republicans are trying to advance a bill that would fire all workers that work in offices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion – because according to them, diversity oppresses white men. I gave them a vocabulary lesson on the meaning of oppression.

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   1. Speaking from the position of an old ,white, man;

      You go Rep. Crockett…Clay Higgins is a fool. White boys got lazy and complacent. When women began to compete with them, they began to fall behind. Add ethnic and  racial groups looking to succeed…How is a spoiled white boy to compete?

      Now they are reduced to this…

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2. Trump is Proposing a Very Different United States

   If the Democratic Party cannot come up with a COMPELLING alternative, he’ll succeed

   Trump is proposing changes so fundamental that many in the Democratic Party are viewing them as unworthy of debate and that we just need to get the voters to return to sanity. This is a mistake.

   Trump is truly working to return us to the government we had before WWII. We’ve always had a segment of our electorate desirous of this. But now it’s become the policy of the administration. And has the support of roughly ½ the voters.

   Click here to read the rest…

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3. A few updates from Alaska. For those who thought ranked-choice was great because Dems got Mary Peltola, that was then and this is now. Peltola was defeated this year even as an incumbent, and chances are great that was because Rs didn’t split their first-choice votes between Nick Begich and Palin like they did in 2022 (Palin wasn’t running in 2024). Alaska also had a ballot measure to get rid of the ranked-choice/all-parties primary system, but this repeal ballot measure failed by 664 votes or about 0.2%. The $15 million spent on the anti-repeal campaign couldn’t have hurt.

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   1. I like jungle primaries and IRV. But the results of trying to add it in places (all failed) or remove it (all succeeded or almost succeeded) means it is not something the voters want. At present. To bad…

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4. Ok, the State of Colorado has people working on the following two initiatives:

   • Enhancing the power grid
   • Streamlining permitting for power lines, etc.

    
   How can I find who is doing this? If anyone reading this is – please email me. david -at- thielen -dot- com (i.e. – my name).

   thanks – dave

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   1. Are you referring to SB24-212 Local Govs Renewable Energy Projects?

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      1. I believe not. I think it's federal money funding it (might be state). And it's focused on the power grid while SB24-212 appears to be focused on power generation.

         Any idea who I could reach out to in the state to find the appropiate people?

         thanks

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         1. maybe this? https://citap.gov/

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            1. Thanks – I'll try them.

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5. One more update from me this morning, and then it's time for adulting. Two Dem members of the Colorado Senate who won re-election in 2024 have already resigned – Sens. Chris Hansen and Janet Buckner. Obviously they had their reasons, not in the tiniest saying I would've done differently. But still, we get vacancy committee elections now to replace almost 10% of the Dem caucus, and that's assuming everyone else stays.

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   1. Hansen announced last week that he had taken another job running the La Plata Electric Assn. He’s my Rep. I’m plenty ticked that he didn’t withdraw before the election and allow someone else to run for the seat. 

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      1. Frankly, a choice between working as a state legislator for $40,000 (plus whatever else "fits" into other time) or as a CEO for over $500,000 seems like a no-brainer.

         Hansen apparently was recruited for the La Plata job. Don't know when that started, but KUNC's story said

         Hansen also said the electric association job opportunity came too late in election season, after September 5, the date ballots are finalized by the Secretary of State’s office. If he had dropped out of the race, there would not have been a Democratic candidate on the ballot.

         Mechanisms for filling vacant seats all have elements I don't like, and I'm not certain what I'd prefer. 

         • Vacancy committee – activists within the district choose.
         • Named by the party's leader in the chamber —
         • Named by the governor
         • special election — which as I understand it, would require notification of vacancy, some time for selection of candidates, certification & creation of the ballot, and then voting ending "not less than forty-five days nor more than sixty days." Final "cure" period for voters would be an additional 8 days. Final certification of the election is the fifth day after the special legislative election.  Plus the expense of conducting the election.

         Proposal in the last session was to allow vacancy committees to name someone, but block that person from running for the subsequent term

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6. Gaetz has given up his bid for U.S. SoS:                                                      https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/matt-gaetz-withdraws-trump-attorney-general-pick-rcna181207

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7. Democratic Coalition: Who ya gonna vote off the island? H/T Josh Marshall at TPM

   Finally, Edsall brings in Nick Gourevitch, a partner at Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm that worked for the Harris campaign (and countless others) who finally notes the point that Democrats just lost a national election by about a point and a half, and outside of the presidential race actually did reasonably well. Clearly, Democrats need to do better, but Gourevitch makes the pretty obvious and I think salutary point that you need to consider pretty carefully which parts of your coalition you’re going to toss aside if you’re coalition is still around 50%. 

   …

   My default position is to want to get behind a series of popular positions and just run elections on that basis. Package the deliverables in really clear, easy-to-digest language. An election isn’t a wish list or a moral exercise. It’s an effort to get a majority of votes and get power. When “defund the police” language, if not actual policy positions, became the vogue in mid-2020, I was apoplectic. In my experience no one outside of hyper-ideological spaces thinks like that. Most people even in communities most victimized by police seldom want there to be no police. I don’t want to go too far off on this tangent. My point is that I should be a pretty receptive audience for a lot of this. But you just can’t be convincing talking straw men arguments or engaging in hyperbole.

   Going forward, Democrats need to keep their focus on a cluster of easy-to-understand issues that big majorities of the public support. They equally should be wary of distracting from those core issues by getting pulled into the minutiae of activist agendas. So lesson learned. But that’s not the same as abandoning various people to hate campaigns or scapegoating them for a tough loss. For what it’s worth, I think the evidence that trans issues played a substantial role in Harris’ defeat is minimal at best. To a great degree, I think the takeaway from the 2024 campaign may simply be that Democrats were the incumbent party during a period of upheaval and economic hardship for much of the population and had a visibly aging incumbent president. It may be as simple as that. To the extent we’re trying to learn lessons from it, I would say that at least as important as managing the expectations of interest groups is learning to speak clearly about Democrats’ priorities — the concrete deliverables they’ll deliver if elected — to people who don’t come from the college educated milieus where the core of the Democratic Party currently resides.

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   1. My concern is running against an incredibly flawed candidate, it's 50:50. That's not good.

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      1. A flawed candidate from Republicans versus a short-term Senator who ran for the Democratic nomination of 2020 and dropped out before the first primary.  

         A former President of modest (or less) accomplishments versus a good President but AWFUL candidate who then dropped out, replaced by a Vice President who like so many other VPs who ran and could not adequately develop an alternate vision [Nixon '60; Humphrey '68, Ford '76, Gore '00]. 

         Someone who had been running a campaign since 2015 versus someone running a campaign for 103 days.

         A White guy (like all Presidents before #44) versus a Black & Asian woman like no other President before.

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