The reverberations of Ocasio-Cortez’s win

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.”

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Surprise win in New York Democratic primary

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.
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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.

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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.

Exciting finish to Windies-Sri Lanka Test series

The third Test ended today with Sri Lanka winning, thus equalizing the three-Test series at 1-1, with one game drawn. The Windies won the first test easily, outplaying Sri Lanka in all areas of the game. The second Test was an exciting see-saw affair with the Windies dominating early, then Sri Lanka unexpectedly gaining the upper hand on the fourth day, and the game poised evenly on the fifth and final day. Unfortunately rain halted play before a decision could be reached. It was the kind of match that Test cricket aficionados love.
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Reality Winner’s guilty plea

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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What drives the ‘Flat Earth’ belief?

When I was a young boy in Sri Lanka, there was a Jesuit priest-in-training named Basil, a friend of the parents of a friend of mine, who liked to argue with us that the Earth was flat. We of course believed that it was round but as anyone who has argued with a flat-Earther knows, they have quite an array of arguments that they can drop on you to counter your objections and it is a good example of how almost any proposition can be defended if one is allowed to make ad hoc assumptions. We suspected that Basil did not really believe what he was saying but was using the formidable argumentative skills that Jesuits learn to mess with our young minds and show how hard it is to defend even what seem to be obvious truths.
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“Be a Hitler”

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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“Kirstjen Nielsen, child snatcher!”

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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