traderdave wrote:

curveball wrote:The Dems have got to start changing the language we use when it comes to politics. Like saying expand Medicare. Lots of voters don't want to hear that. Were going to "repair Medicare and Medicaid". The Democratic party needs a whole bunch of new-speak to push their agenda.

And people. I'm tired of seeing the same names over and over again. Who is the "rising star" of the Democratic Party? It seems like an awfully short bench.

Jason Kander, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Chris Murphy, Kirstin Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Gavin Newsome, Julian Castro. There are plenty of people on the bench that aren't Schumer, Pelosi, or Biden. Remember, President Obama was relatively unknown so who knows what is out there.

slugsrbad wrote:Pelosi and Schumer are cowards.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/ ... ssion=true

Just going to bump this. If we really do a clean kick-the-can spending bill I'll be incensed.

So a few days back there was an overblown story abut '7 banned words' at the CDC. It turns out the words were not 'banned', but were discouraged internally by more liberal people within the CDC in order to sway more conservative legislators. It was not an instance of the Trump admin mandating a change, but liberals censoring their message and work to make it more palatable.

Something seemingly unrelated to this is the review that was going on at the EPA:

The Republican PR firm that was awarded a $120,000 EPA contract for media monitoring has pulled out of the deal, days after Mother Jones first revealed the controversial arrangement. The no-bid contract drew widespread scrutiny in recent days, in part because the for-profit firm, called Definers, is overtly partisan and is connected to a network of GOP political groups, including America Rising and America Rising Squared, that have performed opposition-style research on environmentalists. Definers itself specializes in opposition research and what it calls “war room”-style media monitoring.

Mother Jones first reported on Definers’ EPA contract on Friday. Later that day, the New York Times reported that an employee at the firm had filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests seeking records from EPA staffers who had been critical of EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. The controversy continued to grow over the weekend. On Tuesday, two Democratic senators, Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) and Kamala Harris (Calif.), called for the contract to be canceled. The senators quickly got their wish.

Due to good reporting and backlash, this particular instance of purge was rooted out. However, the EPA is under a hiring freeze and people have been accepting buyouts and general attrition is putting it at 1980s levels of staffing.
Then there is the State Department and its massive understaffing; career diplomats and service people have been leaving and spots left unfilled and instead the overtly political arm has become a 'parallel' department taking over many of these roles.
Finally, the tax bill. It will cut 1.5 trillion in taxes; taxes are also revenue to the government. The federal government will be facing a huge deficit and will now have a GOP president, House and Senate that is facing a government shutdown of its own making due to the right and far right disagreeing on basic funding of governance. Next year they plan on bringing up their ACA repeal again, and the Speaker of the House has been talking about gutting the social safety net for his entire adult life.
The CFPB is being rolled back, daily. Hiring has been freezed, rulings have been ceased, reviews stopped, and fines are being undone. Dodd-Frank is being attacked. More and more mergers are and will take place in all parts of society.

Something far more nefarious than 7 banned words is going on. We are seeing the mass devolution of the federal government that Reagan could've only dreamed of doing. Grover Norquist and his friends will have finally achieved their goal of drowning the government in the bathtub and it will take more than one Democratic administration to fix this. This is a generational shift. This is the new normal. Welcome to the oligarchy.

Happy Wednesday.

Warszawa wrote:Every dem running for Congress in 2018 should make very clear that although republicans are so worried about how we are going to pay for social security and Medicare they just raised the debt $1.5 trillion. There doesnt need to be any other message

then how they gonna counter Hillary'e emails

slugsrbad wrote:

slugsrbad wrote:Pelosi and Schumer are cowards.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/ ... ssion=true

Just going to bump this. If we really do a clean kick-the-can spending bill I'll be incensed.

Senators and House members with real sway and backing appear to not be going for it, so hold out hope. Lots of energy behind pushing Schumer and Pelosi from the ground level, too. There's literal hunger strikes going on.

Virginia is onto a new frontier as it has no mechanism to deal with ties, so there are methods used by other states...

I like WY's approach myself: Coin toss. Not kidding. The use of coin toss helped break a legislative tie in Wyoming in 1974 and remains the preferred method to dealing with partisan gridlock, according to the NCSL.

traderdave wrote:

curveball wrote:The Dems have got to start changing the language we use when it comes to politics. Like saying expand Medicare. Lots of voters don't want to hear that. Were going to "repair Medicare and Medicaid". The Democratic party needs a whole bunch of new-speak to push their agenda.

And people. I'm tired of seeing the same names over and over again. Who is the "rising star" of the Democratic Party? It seems like an awfully short bench.

TONS of people are running on local and state levels. It's coming, and this time they're going to be bringing a really good agenda. Thing is, they're going to take some time. I've been keeping my eye on Gillibrand as far as 2020, fwiw. I refuse to do anything more than keep my eye on 2020, however.

Curveball - Who are you talking to that doesn't like 'expand Medicare?' People love Medicare.

Gillibrand was sort of a medium fist in a Clinton pond for a long time, and now she is a target of Trump's campaign for concessional abuse. I think whoever is heading there needs to keep it under cover so that there is not just a barrage of twitter attacks for 3 years.

Grotewold wrote:We’ve got way bigger problems than people taking on loans for college imo

I disagree. This debt is real debt that hampers peoples' lives and sticks around for 20+ years. We may just fundamentally disagree, which is fine, but it prevents spending on so many other items and affects the daily budgets of millions of people, let alone the people that have simply defaulted.

“God made Republicans to cut taxes", Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma.

Savannah Guthrie asked Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) during an interview on NBC's "Today" show early Wednesday if he was “living in a fantasy world” to think that the GOP tax bill will help workers.

“I’ll ask you plainly, are you living in a fantasy world?” Guthrie asked Ryan.

This was Guthrie paraphrasing Michael Bloomberg's op-ed which call the argument that companies are just waiting to expand business and increase worker pay a “pure fantasy.”

Ryan pushed back, citing a (note the singular) survey from the National Association of Business Manufacturers when he said:

“Surveys would show the vast majority of businesses are going to do just what we say, reinvest in their workers, reinvest in their factories, pay people more money, higher wages.”

I like the fantasy world in which Savannah Guthrie is asking hard questions of Ryan, but I am really disappointed to hear the plan to sucker americans with survey versus reality.

Turtle saying that if we elect Democrats in 2018 it will be a very short tax bill, so there’s that

pacino wrote:

traderdave wrote:

curveball wrote:The Dems have got to start changing the language we use when it comes to politics. Like saying expand Medicare. Lots of voters don't want to hear that. Were going to "repair Medicare and Medicaid". The Democratic party needs a whole bunch of new-speak to push their agenda.

And people. I'm tired of seeing the same names over and over again. Who is the "rising star" of the Democratic Party? It seems like an awfully short bench.

TONS of people are running on local and state levels. It's coming, and this time they're going to be bringing a really good agenda. Thing is, they're going to take some time. I've been keeping my eye on Gillibrand as far as 2020, fwiw. I refuse to do anything more than keep my eye on 2020, however.

Curveball - Who are you talking to that doesn't like 'expand Medicare?' People love Medicare.

Paul Ryan doesn't.

It just seems to me that using a little different approach when talking to the voters can go a long way to changing the look of the Democratic party. As soon as a Repub congressman sees "expand medicare or medicaid" you hear their talking points about the crazy Dems are going to raise your taxes again and they make sure they get that out to the voters in a scary way. I always felt that certain words or explaining things a certain way can soften the blow of information to come. This should apply to all of the Dems agenda when communicating with the voters. Jmho.

pacino wrote:

Grotewold wrote:We’ve got way bigger problems than people taking on loans for college imo

I disagree. This debt is real debt that hampers peoples' lives and sticks around for 20+ years. We may just fundamentally disagree, which is fine, but it prevents spending on so many other items and affects the daily budgets of millions of people, let alone the people that have simply defaulted.

I don't disagree, but even within that one particular context I'm much more concerned with keeping them alive until 18 and, secondarily, preparing them to succeed in college and life.

More broadly, I think it's a loser politically. Keep it simple (and resentment-free), like burts said the other day: Medicare for all, soak the ultra-rich.

It's not nearly as simple as changing a message or the messengers. The playing field is massively uneven. The Rs have no scruples whatsoever. They will lie about anything, use fear tactics (exacerbated by lies), bullying, and more lying to get the votes of the less sophisticated. I don't know how that is countered given the current rules.

Mediaite's Top 75 Most Influential in News Media for 2017

Fox and Friends is #1, because it's literally programming for one person.

the rest of the top 25 about whom we can quibble and have arguments:
1. Fox and Friends
2. Jeff Zucker
3. Sean Hannity
4. Matt Drudge
5. Rachel Maddow
6. Jake Tapper GO EAGLES
7. Joe and Mika (Morning Joe)
8. George Stephanopoulos
9. Chris Cuomo
10. Tucker Carlson
11. Megyn Kelly????
12. Joy Reid
13. Shep Smith
14. Don Lemon
15. Ronan Farrow
16. Maggie Haberman
17. Jim Acosta
18. David Remnick
19. Brian Stelter
20. Bill Maher
21. Chris Wallace
22. The View
23. Jimmy Kimml
24. Stephen Colbert/Chris Licht
25. Cenk Uygur

where's the 700 club and the like at

or alex jones or breitbart

yes, Alex Jones should definitely be on it

breitbart's clicks and influence has really waned from 2016 to 2017 as FOX News has basically copied them with Tucker Carlson and Ingram and Hannity. Bannon himself is at #45

I agree with Jamie. I disagree with Pac in that the Blue Hair Crew are pretty much all in on Fox & everything. I am not sure that large swaths of Florida even get another channel. When I see my mother in law the FoxN is so loud that you can hear it between the bungalows.