The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
This first week of June is a big one politically and policy-wise. Today the EPA issued incredibly important new rules about carbon pollution at power plants — arguably the most significant executive action ever, and one that will certainly drive the Koch party (i.e. the Republicans) absolutely bonkers. A big debate about student loans is getting going in the Senate (sign on to support Elizabeth Warren’s bill to allow refinancing of student loans). And going into the summer vacation season in July and August, June will be the last month before the fall campaign season end game to define the terms of the 2014 election debate.
Big things are shaking, but one thing is very important to understand in this highly charged political environment: The 0.1 percent wealthy elites and their supporters in the media are going to continue to insist that any attempt to rein in their power and wealth is outrageous and immoral. In true Ayn Rand-Social Darwinist fashion, this philosophy says that the wealthier you are, the more morally upright you are, and any suggestion that you pay more in taxes or pay higher wages is evil.
My organization, American Family Voices, wants to remind everyone of the underlying philosophy of these millionaires and their friends. It is a serious subject, because this is what the 2014 election, and in fact every election in this era, is about. But you know what? This philosophy is also so extreme it is also funny. Outrageous, yes. Revolting, sure. But these folks are so arrogant, it’s laughable… Shark Tank host and investor Kevin O’Leary thinks that “it’s fantastic” that the wealth of the world’s 85 richest people is equal to that of the 3.5 billion poorest people; Nicole Miller CEO Bud Konheim compares Americans making $35,000 a year to the rich in India; and “Money Honey” finance anchor Maria Bartiromo claims the rich are being held hostage (!!!).
Watch this video to hear what the plutocats (yes, you read that right) are saying. This video is actually the second in a series about finance fat cats, because there are too many of these kinds of comments to stop at just one video. Here’s the first one we did. And the comments will keep coming, so we expect we will keep doing more of these videos.
The plutocat philosophy would be pure comedy, if its implications weren’t so tragic. If our society is built along the lines these Rand-acolytes want, it will be a disaster economically, but even more importantly, it will be a nightmare in terms of morality. As the most recent decade just proved most conclusively, letting billionaire investors on Wall Street do whatever they want without much regulation will result in a poorer, weaker society. But as Bobby Kennedy once said:

“Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.
It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.
It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

The plutocats who judge our national morality by the notion that whatever is best for the wealthiest among us are both dangerous and laughable. Check out our video, have fun with it, and then get down to the business of making sure their philosophy is defeated.

If there is one crucial thought presented most frequently here at TDS, it is the importance of sorting out strategic and tactical issues from matters of values, goals and principles, particularly in intraparty conflicts. Sometimes strategic/tactical differences are blown out of proportion into “civil war” topics, and sometimes looking at different strategic approaches helps discern the underlying common ground between factions.
That is the case with the antichoice movement, as I discussed yesterday at Washington Monthly in a post based on the fine work of MSNBC’s Irin Carmon:

[S]upporters of more a more direct strategy and more confrontational tactics often reveal the extremism of party-wide ideological positions that more cautious people would prefer to disguise. So you can learn a lot from paying attention to the loud-and-proud types even if you don’t think they will prevail within their own party.
I say all this as a prelude to Irin Carmon’s piece at MSNBC about a new and abrasive wing of the antichoice movement that doesn’t believe in hiding its light under a bushel of pieties about late-term abortions or “women’s health:”

For the mainstream movement to ban abortion, graphic photos and aggressive language have generally gone out of style. The winning slogans, the ones Republican politicians prefer, are warmer, fuzzier: Thumbsucking ultrasound photos, or “women’s health” used as a pretext to shut down safe abortion clinics, including three in Texas this month alone. The losing slogans involve Akin-like “legitimate rape” and comparing Planned Parenthood to the Klan.
Abolish Human Abortion (AHA) begs to differ. Founded out of Norman, Oklahoma, and with chapters nationwide, AHA activists wear t-shirts emblazoned with “End Child Sacrifice” and proudly display photos of bloodied, fully developed fetuses. They protest outside churches – yes, churches – accusing them of not doing enough to end abortion, and talk scornfully of “pro-lifers” who make peace with rape exceptions to abortion bans.
AHA activists disdain the phrase “pro-life” altogether. They prefer “abolitionists,” with all slavery comparisons explicitly intended, and they want to push the larger movement to abide by their uncompromising positions. That means moving away from the incremental strategy – 20 week bans, admitting privileges laws for clinics – and sticking to banning all abortion without exceptions, equating hormonal birth control (even the daily pill kind) with abortion, and advocating that women who have abortions be tried as murderers. That sort of unblinking absolutism in the face of the messiness of real life decision-making may be what has drawn nearly 34,000 people to like their Facebook page.

But here’s the thing: their basic positions are generally shared by antichoice activists of all varieties. What the AHA zealots are demanding is that antichoicers exhibit some honesty about them:

They don’t care who they offend. They aren’t interested in a political or legal strategy; they reserve their deepest scorn for the incrementalists who have crafted a step-by-step plan to overturn Roe v. Wade. As far as AHA is concerned, those guys are sellouts. But in the end, there isn’t so much that the mainstream movement and Abolish Human Abortion disagree on besides tactics.

That’s very important to know.

NYT columnist Paul Krugman has a message suggestion for President Obama’s Tuesday SOTU: “There’s an enduring myth among the punditocracy that populism doesn’t sell, that Americans don’t care about the gap between the rich and everyone else. It’s not true. Yes, we’re a nation that admires rather than resents success, but most people are nonetheless disturbed by the extreme disparities of our Second Gilded Age. A new Pew poll finds an overwhelming majority of Americans — and 45 percent of Republicans! — supporting government action to reduce inequality, with a smaller but still substantial majority favoring taxing the rich to aid the poor…of the two great problems facing the U.S. economy, inequality is the one on which Mr. Obama is most likely to connect with voters.
Yawn, as many do, at state of the union addresses. But Mike Dorning reports at Bloomberg.net that “Though the 33.5 million viewers Obama drew last year is half the number Bill Clinton had 20 years earlier, the address remains a major TV event, topping both the Emmy Awards and World Series in viewership.” And team Obama is putting a lot of digital muscle into leveraging the speech: “The speech, usually about an hour long, “is the biggest engagement of the year” for the White House’s digital media operation, said its acting director, Nathaniel Lubin…The campaign includes Google Hangouts and Facebook (FB) chats by cabinet members and senior administration officials, a flood of advance Twitter messages under the hashtag #InsideSOTU, and an “enhanced” web live stream of the speech with graphics and data amplifying Obama’s themes. As part of the build-up, speechwriter Cody Keenan did a one-day “takeover” of the White House’s Instagram Account featuring photos of preparations.”
For their part, NYT’s Jeremy W. Peters explains that the Republican response to Tuesday’s SOTU will be largely balkanized, with the official response from the relatively unknown Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers being drowned out by bomb-throwers like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, who will be capering all over social media.
At CBSnews.com, Walt Cronkite’s “Schumer offers Democrats a strategy to defeat tea party” explains: “…in framing the debate with the tea party, Democrats should focus on four or five simple and easily explainable examples where government can help the average family. Schumer’s examples included: raising the minimum wage, assisting with college affordability, investment in national infrastructure, promoting equal pay for women, and ensuring America has fair trading relationships and isn’t exploited by countries like China.”
Although only 17 states and Washington, D.C. now approve same-sex marriage, that’s nine more than just a year ago. Further, regarding key bellwether states, WaPo’s Juliet Eilperin reports, “A decade after 62 percent of Ohio voters approved a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, a recent Quinnipiac poll showed a narrow majority now backs gay-marriage rights…The changing political dynamics were on full display this week as Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) announced he would not defend the state’s ban on same-sex marriage on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Herring won a close election with strong support from gay-rights groups, and his decision infuriated conservatives, who accused him of violating his oath to uphold state laws.”
Re Michelle Nunn’s chances for picking up a U.S. Senate seat in GA for Dems: “Her campaign will test whether the rapidly changing demographics of Georgia — where state elections data show that the white vote dropped to 61 percent of the total in 2012 from 75 percent in 2000 — have shifted enough to return a Democrat to Washington. And it will reveal how much legacy still matters in politics. from Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s NYT article “Old Democratic Name (Nunn) Stakes Bid on Shifting Georgia.” Further adds Stolberg, “Two of his closest Republican friends, former Senators John W. Warner of Virginia and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, are now donors to Ms. Nunn. Mr. Warner attended the breakfast, he said, and walked away impressed. So did Mr. Nunn; watching his daughter tackle military policy questions changed his view of her race…”That morning,” he said, “was when I said to myself, ‘Hey, she’s got as good a shot as anybody in this race, maybe better.’ “…If Ms. Nunn has a path to victory, Democratic strategists say, it will be by increasing minority turnout while attracting independent-minded whites, especially young voters and women. Democrats hope that a potentially fractious Republican primary, with eight candidates, will produce a far-right opponent whom Ms. Nunn could defeat.
Melanie Trottman of the WSJ reports a small gain for unions in the private sector during 2013.
At ThinkProgress Aviva Shen’s “Conservative PAC Targets Secretary Of States Who Won’t Back Voter Suppression Laws” alerts Dems to a new GOP focus: “A new conservative super PAC hopes to proliferate more voter suppression laws by pouring money into secretary of state races. The group, SOS for SoS, is looking to spend $10 million in nine states in support of candidates who will champion “smart voting,” such as restrictive voter ID laws, voter purges, and proof of citizenship requirements. Secretaries of state set elections procedures and can determine mundane but crucial aspects like voting hours, provisional ballot rules, and recounts…The announcement, per Politico, comes days after a judge overturned Pennsylvania’s hotly contested voter ID law because it could disenfranchise 750,000 voters. A Democratic counterpart, SoS for Democracy, launched in December to promote secretary of state candidates who are against voter suppression measures. Currently, 29 secretaries of state are Republican, while 21 are Democrat…A recent study found that states with higher minority turnout are more likely to try to pass voter suppression laws.”
At The Monkey Cage Alan I. Abramowitz crunches recent opinion data on reproductive rights explains why “Americans may be divided on abortion, but it won’t matter for the midterms”: “abortion could have been a major wedge issue in 2012 — potentially prompting defections among those whose views differed from those of their party’s candidates. But despite efforts by candidates in both parties to exploit divisions among the opposing party’s supporters, such defections were limited. Only a small minority of voters whose opinions on abortion conflicted with their own party actually voted for the opposing party’s presidential candidate. Moreover, these defections essentially canceled each other out. According to the data from the 2012 ANES, 17 percent of strongly pro-life Democrats voted for Mitt Romney, and an identical 17 percent of strongly pro-choice Republicans voted for Barack Obama. Neither presidential candidate gained a clear advantage from voter defections on the issue of abortion in 2012…This is likely to be true in the 2014 midterm elections, as well…” Moreover, adds Abramowitz, exceptions tend to favor Democrats: “In 2012, two Republican Senate candidates, Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana, lost what appeared to be very winnable races because of defections by Republican voters. According to state exit polls, Republican defectors outnumbered Democratic defectors by 21 percent to 4 percent in Missouri and by 20 percent to 7 percent in Indiana. It seems likely that Akin’s and Mourdoch’s outspoken opposition to abortion even in the case of pregnancies caused by rape contributed to these extraordinarily high defection rates among Republican voters and to their defeats.”

Seniors over age 65 were 23 percent of the turnout in 2010, up from 19 percent in 2006. In 2006, they evenly split their votes between Democratic and Republican House candidates. In 2010, they favored Republican House candidates 59 percent to 38 percent. According to Administration on Aging, three in five people over age 65 are women. African American persons made up 8.3 percent of the older population. By 2050, the percentage of the older population that is African American is projected to account for 11 percent of the older population. In 2008, Latinos were 6.8 percent of the older population.. Minority populations are projected to be 23.6% of the elderly by 2020.
For an interesting history of senior voter turnout from 1952-2000, read Andrea Louise Campbell’s “How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State.”
Emily Brandon’s “States with the Best Older Voter Turnout” at U.S. News notes the following: “Senior citizens are much more likely than younger people to show up on election day to cast ballots. Nationwide, 61 percent of people age 65 and older voted in the 2010 election, compared to 46 percent of all citizens. Here are the states where retirees were the most likely to vote in the November 2010 election.” According to Brandon, Washington state lead in 2010 with 77 percent of over-65 voters turning out, followed by: ME (76%); MT (74%); ND (75%); CO (74%); WI (72%); SD (70%); MN (70%); OR (71% of over 75); AK (69%).
In another article Brandon notes, “But even in the states with the lowest older voter turnout–Georgia, Virginia, and Indiana–more than half of citizens age 65 and older voted” in 2010. Perhaps Georgia and Virginia are trending purple as a partial result of lower than average senior turnout.
Hard to say how much of the following is lip-service and how much is straight talk. In 2004, Tucker Sutherland, editor of seniorjournal.com reported, “Counter to the political stereotype of seniors as single-issue, self-interested voters, a strong majority of American grandparents say they will be casting their vote this election day with the interests of their grandchildren in mind,” according to the new Ipsos-Public Affairs poll released today by the non-partisan group, GrannyVoter.org… Only 26 percent said they make up their mind on Social Security and Medicare mostly on the basis of how it will affect them in the short-term.
“As of April 2012, 53% of American adults age 65 and older use the internet or email” and “as of February 2012, one third (34%) of internet users age 65 and older use social networking sites such as Facebook, and 18% do so on a typical day,” according to a Pew Internet and American Life post, “Older adults and internet use” by Kathryn Zickuhr and Mary Madden. The figures represent a significant uptick in facebook and internet use by seniors. This could be a significant trend because “a single get-out-the-vote message sent to 61 million Facebook users on Election Day 2010 influenced 340,000 people to cast ballots when they otherwise would not have, according to the findings of a massive social experiment,” reports LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas in her post, “Facebook Friends Carry Huge Influence on Voter Turnout.”
With senior voters, it’s apparently not all about bread and butter issues. As Robert H Binstock notes at Medscape.com, “During President Reagan’s first term in office, 1981-1984, he presided over a freeze in Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment and proposed additional direct cuts in benefits (Light, 1985). When Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, the Democratic campaign against him highlighted these actions to portray the President as an enemy of Social Security. Yet…older voters substantially increased their support for Reagan from 54% in 1980 to 60% in 1984, paralleling the large increase provided by the electorate as a whole.” Of course the difference could also be attributed to incumbency.
Here’s how photo i.d. laws reduce senior voter turnout. An estimated 18% of seniors don’t have identification, according to Jodeen Olguín-Tayler of Caring Across Generations.
Among seniors who intend to vote, the tide appears to be turning blue. In “Why Seniors Are Turning Against The GOP” DCorps’s Erica Seifert reports, “There’s something going on with seniors: It is now strikingly clear that they have turned sharply against the GOP…In 2010, seniors voted for Republicans by a 21 point margin (38 percent to 59 percent). Among seniors likely to vote in 2014, the Republican candidate leads by just 5 points (41 percent to 46 percent.)…Seniors are now much less likely to identify with the Republican Party. On Election Day in 2010, the Republican Party enjoyed a net 10 point party identification advantage among seniors (29 percent identified as Democrats, 39 percent as Republicans). As of last month, Democrats now had a net 6 point advantage in party identification among seniors (39 percent to 33 percent)…–More than half (55 percent) of seniors say the Republican Party is too extreme, half (52 percent) say it is out of touch, and half (52 percent) say the GOP is dividing the country.”
Brent Roderick’s “Identify and Reach Senior Citizen Voters” at the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) ArcWatch focuses on a “geospatial” approach to segmenting America’s nearly 40 million eligible voters over 65. Rooted in “the theory that people seek and live near others with the same tastes, lifestyles, and behaviors,” ESRI helps clients target such senior segments as “Prosperous Empty Nesters,” “Rust Belt Retirees,” “Senior Sun Seekers” and the “Social Security Set.” Hey, it might be fun to look at “Aquarian Elders” (older hippies).

In his New York Times magazine article, “Data You Can Believe In The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In” Jim Rutenberg illuminates some of the strategies and techniques deployed by the Obama campaigns digital wizards in 2012.
With respect to ad-buying, Rutenberg explains:

… The campaign recruited the best young minds in the booming fields of analytics and behavioral science and placed them in a room they called “the cave” for up to 16 hours a day over the course of roughly 16 months. After the election, when the technology wizards finally came out, they had not only helped produce a victory that defied a couple of historical predictors; they also developed a host of highly effective marketing techniques that were either entirely new or had never been tried on such a grand scale.
Grisolano and McLean and the others were part of a singular breakthrough in the field of television-ad buying, where about 50 percent of the campaign’s budget was spent, or more than $400 million. Previous campaigns would make decisions about how to direct their television-advertising budgets largely based on hunches and deductions about what channels the voters they wanted to reach were watching. Their choices were informed by the broad viewership ratings of Nielsen and other survey data, which typically led to buying relatively expensive ads during evening-news and prime-time viewing hours. The 2012 campaign took advantage of advanced set-top-box monitoring technology to figure out what shows the voters they wanted to reach were watching and when, resulting in a smarter and cheaper — if potentially more invasive — way to beam commercials into their homes. The system gave Obama a significant advantage over Mitt Romney, according to Democrats and many Republicans (at least those who were not on Romney’s media team).
…Grisolano told me that the campaign literally knew every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex and income. What’s more, he hinted, the campaign had figured out how to get its television advertisements in front of them with a previously inconceivable level of knowledge and accuracy.

Regarding data-collection and classification:

Wagner dismisses the notion of “romantic war rooms” operating on political gut instinct as outdated and misguided. His is a hard-data system that rejects anything that is not definitively quantifiable. In the Bush era, strategists boasted about how they could predict voter behavior based upon car and sport preferences, a well-publicized bit of political magic that captured the imaginations of politicians and journalists alike. Wagner’s approach, part of a broader move in politics, cut all of that out; why engage in such divination when you have the time and money to just call voters and ask them about their leanings directly? “We’re trying to predict political preference; we’re not trying to predict whether you buy a car,” Wagner says dismissively.
The campaign couldn’t call the more than 150 million registered voters, obviously. But they could call enough of them in swing states (up to 11,000 a night) to figure out how they — and other people who lived near them, looked like them and earned like them — were likely to vote with an increasing degree of accuracy. In 2008, Wagner and his small team combined information from those calls with any other data they could find — census data, state voter lists and the like — and fed it into algorithms that produced support scores. One ranked how likely swing-state voters were to support Obama on a scale of 0 to 100, and another ranked how likely they were to show up at voting booths. Those scores helped the campaign direct resources toward the right voters, and Obama beat John McCain by 7 percentage points.

Read more…

Kevin Roose’s New York Magazine post “Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook the Global Austerity Movement” is getting lotsa buzz on facebook and elsewhere. For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s an excerpt:

Most Ph.D. students spend their days reading esoteric books and stressing out about the tenure-track job market. Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the global austerity movement.
Herndon became instantly famous in nerdy economics circles this week as the lead author of a recent paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” that took aim at a massively influential study by two Harvard professors named Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Herndon found some hidden errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s data set, then calmly took the entire study out back and slaughtered it. Herndon’s takedown — which first appeared in a Mike Konczal post that crashed its host site with traffic — was an immediate sensation. It was cited by prominent anti-austerians like Paul Krugman, spoken about by incoming Bank of England governor Mark Carney, and mentioned on CNBC and several other news outlets as proof that the pro-austerity movement is based, at least in part, on bogus math.
…Herndon chose Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” in part, because it has been one of the most politically influential economic papers of the last decade. It claims, among other things, that countries whose debt exceeds 90 percent of their annual GDP experience slower growth than countries with lower debt loads — a figure that has been cited by people like Paul Ryan and Tim Geithner to justify slashing government spending and implementing other austerity measures on struggling economies.

It gets even more delicious. Do click on Roose’s post to savor the rest of the feast.

For those who want to do something about the shameful vote in the U.S. Senate yesterday, Kos’s “In 2014, it will be the NRA against the American people,” notes two organizations you can contribute to who are committed to fight the NRA, with contributor page links added: “Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Gabby Gifford’s Americans for Responsible Solutions have already restored some balance in the public gun debate, pushing back against what was once a one-sided NRA attack. Bloomberg’s Independence USA SuperPAC has already shown a willingness to counter the NRA’s millions with millions of its own.”
The seats of thirteen Republican U.S. Senators in “Class 2” are up for re-election in 2014, including: Sessions; Chambliss (retiring); Risch; Roberts; McConnell; Collins; Cochran; Johanns (retiring); Imhoffe; Graham; Alexander; Cornyn; and Enzi. Only Collins voted with the Democrats on the background checks filibuster. Not all of them have announced opponents yet, but Sabato’s Crystal Ball names a few of their emerging opponents. Best bets for Dem pick-ups among this group are senate races in GA, KY and NE. But all would require upsets.
Every public appearance of the senators who voted wrong should be met with protesters bearing posters showing photos of the betrayed kids, and these senators should get photos of the kids in their office email and faxes — until we get some legislation.
if you had to pick one sentence in all the news coverage of the background check vote, this one from the Washington Post editorial board would do: “A COWARDLY minority of senators blocked a gun background-check proposal on Wednesday, in one vote betraying both the will of the American people and the charge voters gave them to work in their interest.” Rarely does the Post editorial board use all caps for emphasis in a sentence.
At The Washington Monthly Ed Kilgore flags Ezra Klein’s and Evan Soltas’s well-titled post, “The gun bill failed because the Senate is wildly undemocratic,” and adds “…For this to change, the first step is for political actors and political media to recognize and draw attention to the problem. I noted late yesterday that in a long report on the Manchin-Toomey vote in The Hill, the words “filibuster” and “cloture” do not appear, even though the vote in question was actually on a motion for cloture to end a filibuster. The defeat of the measure by a Senate minority was treated as just the way things are done. That is what has to change first, before real change can come to the Senate. And frankly, any post-mortem on the failure of gun legislation, however well-meaning, that doesn’t prominently mention the horrifically anti-democratic set-up of the current Senate is missing a crucial point.”
For Mitch McConnell, defeating yesterday’s background check initiative is not enough. he has to gloat.
It’s hard to see a ray of hope for a sane firearms policy in our future in yesterday’s senate vote on gun safety. But Jonathan Bernstein gives it a try at the Plum Line: “…While today is clearly a crushing setback for proponents of tougher gun legislation, overall the effort has been a very solid step towards eventual passage. If, that is, the people who strongly supported today’s amendment keep working to reward Senators who supported them, to make life difficult for those who opposed them; and, most of all, to make it a must-support for future candidates.”
There was a real hero in the U.S. Senate — up in the gallery. Maybe she should run.
I’m with those who would like to see some party discipline, perhaps in terms of funding or committee assignments, invoked on the four Democratic Senators who supported the filibuster. That would be Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Mark Begich of Alaska. I understand their perceived predicaments. But party should mean something. At least “Never filibuster against fellow Dems” ought to be a principle that comes with a price for breaking it.
At least Sen. Chuck Schumer put Ted Cruz in the clown car.

if you have felt despair about the relentless dominance of the MSM as a force for stifling progressive change, ‘Proglegs’ has a Daily Kos post that should lift your spirits considerably. Here’s a taste:

Ever since hate radio golden boy Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on Sandra Fluke a year ago, karma has been a real bitch for Clear Channel–who stood by their man.
Clear Channel’s radio revenue has been decimated by the StopRush movement through the efforts of activist groups like Flush Rush Facebook. These activists have worked every day to monitor Limbaugh’s broadcasts across the nation, enter ad information in The StopRush sponsor database, and contact advertisers to convince them to withdraw ads from the offensive program.
Last month, Clear Channel reported losses of $424 million for 2012. The media company has been firing employees throughout the past year in an effort to stop the hemorrhaging, to no avail. And Chairman of the Board Mark Mays announced his impending resignation.

Proglegs has more details about the Clear Channel’s troubles, and concludes:

Decent folks who believe in tolerance and equality are no longer powerless against Limbaugh’s efforts to spread intolerance on the radio. StopRush is making a major impact–and with your help we can do even more. Just a few emails, tweets, or Facebook messages a week to Limbaugh’s advertisers can go a long way toward making hatred less profitable. It is our collective voice that makes us strong.

Yet another reminder that political activism has forms for involvement other than campaigns and elections, especially in times when our political institutions seem mired in gridlock. There was a time when Clear Channel seemed indomitable, so vast was it’s reach. But a few hearty groups of progressive activists are bringing an end to their reign, and it’s just possible that a new era of progressive radio can now begin to take root across the nation.