As a result of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win, the Democratic Socialists of America are reporting an increase in their membership. Matt Taibbi has a roundup of the alarmed reactions to this result from the political-media establishment and says that the Democratic party leadership and the media pundits are dumping on AOC’s victory because she represents a different world from their comfortable one.
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Shuan King sent out this Tweet showing police tasering a man for no reason even though the man was just sitting on the curb. Why? Because they can.
This police officer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania should be fired immediately. After he is fired, the District Attorney should immediately press charges for criminal assault.
What he did here is completely illegal.
This man was compliant, calm, unarmed, and non-violent. pic.twitter.com/kJCjzAoBiE
— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) June 28, 2018
I had expected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be attacked by the political-business-media establishments for her progressive views, for calling herself a democratic socialist, and for her highlighting of the deaths of dozens of protestors in Gaza at the hands of Israeli Defense Forces. The loss of her opponent, incumbent Joe Crowley is being mourned by lobbyists and business-friendly pundits, though Crowley himself was extremely gracious to her in conceding his loss.
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One periodically reads news stories of spokespersons for Donald Trump going on news talk shows (other than Fox News) and then being taken to task by the hosts for their evasions or lying. “That’s great!” you think, someone is finally telling it like it is to these people. But Michelle Wolf, in a very good segment, exposes this for the charade it is. It is all a game played by the media and politicians and their spokespersons to provide entertainment to the rubes, with the same scenario played out over and over again.
The political media is abuzz about the implications for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shocking win over fourth ranking Democrat long-term incumbent Joe Crowley by a 15% margin in the New York primary election.
Ocasio-Cortez represents in many ways the new face of progressive politics growing in strength on the left flank of the Democratic Party. She is a young woman of color whose campaign platform included Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a universal jobs guarantee, protection for Dreamers and a “clean campaign finance” system. You couldn’t have written a more liberal platform if Bernie Sanders – for whom Ocasio-Cortez worked as an organizer in 2016 – had written it himself. Late Tuesday night, Sanders said in a statement: “She took on the entire local Democratic establishment in her district and won a very strong victory. She demonstrated once again what progressive grassroots politics can do.”
This news just broke.
The fourth-ranking Democrat in the House has lost his bid for another term: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old activist who ran on abolishing ICE and making Medicare a universal program, defeated Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) in an upset.
…Ocasio-Cortez argued that the increasingly non-white district, which stretches from the Bronx to Queens, had been represented too long by a figure from the local political machine.
…
Ocasio-Cortez told voters that they could do better — she refused corporate PAC money, emphasizing that most of the $300,709 she’d raised for the campaign came from small donors, most of them from in and around the district.
She not only won, she won by a whopping 57.6-42.4% margin.
I wrote about Ocasio-Cortez’s insurgent campaign against the Wall Street friendly Crowley before. For a young progressive Latina to beat an entrenched incumbent who was fourth highest in the party leadership is a huge upset. I hope the party leaders learn a lesson from this.
Trevor Timm writes that the whistleblower has agreed to plead guilty to one count under the Espionage Act and serve a sentence of 63 months in prison plus another three years of supervised release. Her lawyers felt that given the enormous resources that the government has, all the roadblocks that they threw up against her lawyers to provide a reasonable defense, and their sheer bloody-minded vindictiveness, this was the best outcome she could hope for.
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Jimmy Durmaz committed a foul in the closing seconds of Sweden’s match against Germany that gave the Germans a free kick that they converted into the winning goal. Some Swedish fans hurled racist abuse at Durnaz who was born in Sweden to a Syriac Christian family. In response, he and the team recorded this message.
I have written many times about how there is a militant and bigoted group of Buddhists that includes Buddhist monks who feel that Sri Lanka should be a purely Sinhala Buddhist country and that every other ethnic-religious group does not belong. They have incited mobs to attack non-Sinhala Buddhists, most recently against the Muslim minority. Now a leading monk has gone to the next level, explicitly urging a presidential candidate to adopt Hitler as a model.
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Back in the days when Margaret Thatcher was an ambitious up-and-coming politician eager to make her mark as a Conservative cabinet member by cutting benefits and services, she instituted polices that resulted (as I recall) in children having less access to milk. This led to chants of ‘Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher’. The Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen also seems anxious to make her mark in conservative politics by showing how mean she can be with her enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump’s cruel politics and rhetoric towards immigrants. Those policies have led to 3,700 children already being separated from their parents with no idea of how to reunite them that have led to the slogan “Kirstjen Nielsen, child snatcher!” which does not rhyme but is apt nonetheless.
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