Democrats must focus like a laser on defeating the dangerous Donald Trump

Democrats need to get serious about winning in 2020 

Opinion echo Harold Ford Jr. echo opinion published in The Tennessean newspaper
Bring the country together around a common set of ideas

Stop the pandering and have a serious debate about the challenges America faces in the 21st century

Obviously, the stakes could not be higher for winning the 2020 presidential election and the Democratic candidates are off and running. But toward what end?

Of course, the contest seems to be early. Nevertheless, so far, the Democrats are laying out big policy proposals to spend hundreds of billions of dollars with little or no regard to how the plans will solve our nation’s toughest problems.

Defeating Trump is an obvious imperative, but as satisfying as it might be to defeat him, it won’t be enough.

America's next president must be able to unite the country around a common purpose that enables us to do big things.

The Democratic candidates would be well advised to remember the eloquent words of President John F. Kennedy about our journey into space when he said, “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard ... because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”

So, let’s stop the pandering and have a more serious debate about the challenges America faces in the 21st century.

There is not much to be achieved in promising Medicare for All or irrationally high taxes if those policies don’t propel middle class incomes higher, increase academic achievement and graduation rates or incentivize businesses to invest in economically left behind areas.

If the next president puts these policies forward, they will likely fail to pass Congress and yet another president unable to keep promises made in the campaign will further embitter the American people.

Instead of spending an inordinate amount of time beating up on the ultra wealthy, the next president should outline a tax system that rewards investing in a smarter and healthier workforce.

Instead of punitively taxing the rich at levels above 70 percent, why not incentivize these Americans to invest in improving and strengthening the country. 

Our tax laws should be reformed to treat investment income more like ordinary income, and reward those who donate generously to well-run organizations with smaller endowments and create a new good citizen metric for big businesses and set a sliding business tax rate based on it.

• We should also eliminate the carried interest tax provision that allows rich people to pay a lower effective tax rate than the average middle class worker.

• The next president should fix Obamacare, not abandon it.

Flippantly eliminating the private sector health care market, which represents one-fifth our nation’s gross domestic product, is not a serious proposal and would disrupt our economy.

We need a new vision for health care than just spending more on it. We need to imagine a health care system with financial incentives for people to stay fit and healthy, and a drug pricing system that is transparent and allows consumers to be more informed about competitive pricing.

Just as new technology has made ordering groceries, transportation, food and clothes faster and cheaper, new medical innovations can deliver lower costs and better outcomes across the health care system – from surgeries to prescription drugs to regular doctor visits.

The next president should not promote free college tuition for all who seek to go to college and ask nothing from them in return.

In exchange for free tuition, students should have to perform national service and take a degree in a field that leads them to a profession that will help the country.

America needs more scientists, engineers, teachers, nurses, electrical workers and plumbers. Why not devise a college tuition program that drives us toward offering opportunity and strengthening the economy?

Democrats have a very good chance of winning the 2020 presidential election if we are thoughtful and smart and offer an agenda that brings the country together around a common set of ideas to strengthen our country and put it on a path toward binding our social wounds.

Harold Ford, Jr. represented Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District from 1997-2007.

Republicans can't manage their own convention proof they can't govern

Achtung!

Democracy at the Republican convention was squelched during a failed attempt to "simulate" GOP unity about the Donald Trump and Mike Pence (nonsense) leadership candidates.  

"Trumpzis" prevailed.

Republicans will be unable to govern America when it's proven they can't even manage their own political convention in Cleveland.
No, seriously!

"This is disgusting," said Ken Cuccinelli, conservative party leader.

Chaos erupts on GOP convention floor after voice vote shuts down #Never Trump forces

Backroom unity talks failed, and so the party feuded publicly.

By Kyle Cheney

07/18/16 02:46 PM EDT

CLEVELAND — The Republican party came within a whisker of reaching the unity it had long sought Monday. What it got instead was convention floor chaos.

After mounting for weeks, tension exploded into a high-profile fight pitting the Donald Trump campaign and Republican National Committee leadership against a coalition of conservative activists and delegates from the "never Trump” movement.
The two sides were reduced to shouting at each other on national television after party leadership blocked a roll call vote on the convention rules, which virtually guarantee Trump the party nomination by requiring delegates to vote in accordance with their state’s primary or caucus results. Trump critics were unlikely to be able to vote down the rules — and even less likely to achieve their ultimate goal of replacing the rules with ones that “unbound” pledged delegates — but they were seeking a platform to voice their displeasure with Trump and demonstrate the strength of their movement.  (Republicans only follow the rules when they want to but never when the majority rules!)

They almost got the vote. The Never Trump delegates joined forces with a small but aggrieved band of GOP delegates — led Virginia delegate Ken Cuccinelli and Utah Sen. Mike Lee — furious with party leaders and the Trump campaign for their role last week in blocking a slew of changes to party rules that conservative activists favored. Together, they shocked Trump campaign and GOP leaders on Monday afternoon by producing signatures from a majority of delegates from 11 states and territories, far more than the seven jurisdictions necessary to force an up-or-down vote on the convention’s rules package. That would’ve left approval up fate to 2,472 delegates on the convention floor — and embarrassed Trump regardless of the results.

But when the time came to present the proposed rules to the full convention, the combined Trump campaign-party leadership faction crushed the rebellious faction.  (Well, well, well, so much for Democracy, it has left the floor at the Cleveland convention.)

Party leaders, anticipating an anti-Trump push, had installed Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack to preside over the convention – bucking recent history of having the Republican House leader preside over the proceedings. Womack initially determined on a voice vote that the rules package – as approved by a convention committee last week – would be adopted without changes. 

But a furious outcry among conservative delegates erupted, with hundreds of support chanting for their right to a “roll call vote.”

Then, Womack stepped off the stage and let the RNC and Trump campaign whips go to work. With the lists of insurgent delegates in hand, dozens of aides worked the convention floor for about 15 minutes, collecting their own set of withdrawal signatures. In the end, four of the initial 11 states saw enough delegates abandon the roll call effort to scuttle it: Minnesota, Maine, Iowa and the District of Columbia. Alaska, according to the RNC, failed to submit enough valid signatures to begin with.
Alaska delegate Fred Brown told POLITICO he did get the required signatures. “I had secured more than enough signatures from Alaska delegates, but the convention secretary was not at the designated location where I was told to submit them,” he said. “Some said she was hiding. Others said she was protected by guards. Regardless, I was told I could also present the signatures from the floor. Nevertheless, when the vote occurred, my mic was not turned on. When I attempted to present these signatures at the stage, my effort was ignored by the chair, and the security guard turned me away.“

When Womack announced the result from the stage, the rebellious delegates went ballistic, swamping the continuing proceedings with screams and still demanding a vote. Colorado’s Unruh convinced her state’s delegates to walk out and screamed for nearby Texas’ to do the same, though they declined. Morton Blackwell, a conservative Virginia delegate told POLITICO that the process was “crooked.” Blackwell, a veteran RNC member of 32 years, guessed that several of the delegations that withdrew from the effort were plants by the RNC to convince insurgents they had reached their goal. He wondered whether the bitterness they felt would linger.

For their part, RNC and Trump campaign aides involved in the convention argued that many of the delegates who signed forms demanding a vote had been duped, told at delegation breakfasts Monday morning that they would be supporting Trump by joining the effort.

Iowa delegate Marlys Popma, who helped lead the state’s effort to support the roll call vote, rejected that suggestion. “People knew exactly what they were signing,” she said.

“This is about the full assault on the delegates,” Waters said in an interview, while aides frantically bounced back and forth collecting signatures from friendly delegations. At one point Monday, 11 jurisdictions had signed on: Maine, North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Alaska, Colorado, Washington, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Minnesota and Virginia.

The scene, with party officials feuding in front of reporters and cameras, was a distressing one for a party looking to present a united front amid Trump’s battle with Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

And it was all the more frustrating for party leaders because they came an eyelash away from preventing it. 

Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia 

In the final hours before the voting Monday, Cuccinelli — a leader of the party’s conservative faction — reopened talks with Republican National Committee leaders in an attempt to forestall the public spectacle. The conversations, confirmed by GOP sources involved and by Cuccinelli, began late Sunday and continued into Monday morning. They were an attempt to revive negotiations that failed last week, when Cuccinelli pushed for changes to party rules that would encourage states to close their primaries to Democrats and independents.

For the second time in a week the two sides almost reached an accord, but just like the unity talks at last week’s pre-conevntion meetings, the negotiations again fell apart because Cuccinelli couldn't bring other conservative leaders – and especially Utah Sen. Mike Lee – on board.

As a condition of the renewed negotiations, RNC leaders demanded that Cuccinelli secure Lee’s support for the closed primary push. But Cuccinelli told POLITICO that it wasn’t Lee’s fight. He said the Utah senator told him “I’m not going to sell myself for some deal with the RNC.”

According to a source familiar with the talks, a Washington state delegate helped broker the renewed conversation between Cuccinelli and the RNC. In those talks, Cuccinelli said he’d accept a relatively modest version of a deal he asked for last week. He’d like to see states awarded a 20 percent bonus to their at-large delegate pool at the next national convention, and he’d also like the RNC to do away with an anti-transparency rule adopted last week: keeping the identities and contact information of the GOP’s convention rules committee secret.

The RNC agreed to the latter proposal and countered with an offer of 10 percent bonus at-large delegates instead. But without Lee, the RNC balked, opting for confrontation on the convention floor instead.

Backers of the conservative delegates and anti-Trump forces never expected to win a roll call vote on the floor, only to cause enough discomfort for party leaders to exert their will. But as their effort failed, they lashed out at leadership and created that discomfort anyway.

The conservative and anti-Trump delegates seethed in the aftermath of their failed bid for a vote, and they vowed to keep fighting as the convention went on.

"You will see more insurgency, because, and I have nothing to do with the fact that people now know that their voices were squelched," said anti-Trump Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh, the founder of the Free the Delegates movement, in a live interview on C-SPAN where she accused party leadership of using "strong-armed tactics." (Wake Up America- this that's how Trumpizis will govern if they are - God Forbid- elected. This must never happen. #NeverTrump)

"I have never in all my life, certainly in six years in the United States Senate, prior to that as a lifelong Republican, never seen anything like this," said Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of the most prominent signatories to the push for a roll call vote. "There is no precedent for this in parliamentary procedure. There is no precedent for this in the rules of the Republican National Convention. We are now in uncharted territory. Somebody owes us an explanation. I have never seen the chair abandoned like that. They vacated the stage entirely."

"It’s coercion masking as unity," Lee said later. "It may well be the case there were only 9 states that submitted the petition… if that’s the case, then it appears we did not satisfy the threshold," Lee continued.

New Hampshire Sen. Gordon Humphrey personally filed the signatures to the convention secretary — an exchange that followed after a frantic search to find the secretary before the deadline to submit the signatures. At the time, Never Trump leaders raised concerns that the secretary, Susie Hudson of Vermont, might intentionally avoid them to ensure the effort was defeated.

After the vote, he was livid: "The very unpleasant scene that unfolded here just a moment ago I think is a glimpse into the future of a trump presidency,” Humphrey told POLITICO. "We have seen the trump presidency and prototype many of his supporters if they are not fascists, act very much like fascists, shouting down the opposition, treating them roughly.”

“My first act after Mr. Trump’s nomination if that occurs will be to get up, walk out and go home,” he continued. “And after that I will resign from the Republican Party if that is the case."

Blackwell, the Virginia delegate, said he expects the fight is over now and will resume again in four years. If so, he added, there’s a positive takeaway.

“There were many more conservatives on the convention floor this time,” he said. Next time, he said, might be different.

Beatrice Peterson, Rachel Bade and Nick Gass contributed reporting.

Donald Trump followers are a cult they drink the kool aid

"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for." - Harper Lee "To Kill and Mockingbird"

Donald Trump followers are somehow immune to the candidate's incredible political flaws. They're blindly unfazed by Trump's ethnic slurs, insults towards the disabled, his ability to project a multiple personality disorder with pseudo-names, and telling slanderous lies about all of his critics even among his chaotic staff.

In fact, Trumponian followers are "drinking the kool aid", referring to a person or group holding an unquestioned belief, argument, or philosophy without critical examination. They knowingly go along with Trump's dangerous ideas, like building an anti-immigration wall, because of his bullying behaviors.

Somebody must wake up these delusional people, to prevent our nation from falling into dangerously irrational leadership.

#NeverTrump

Maybe, there's an anecdote, like Narcan, for the Trump kool aid drinkers.

Tump and the evil art of "the Big Lie"

"....if Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over..."

The dangerous acceptance of the liar Donald Trump- The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik 

Ted Cruz called Trump a pathological liar, the kind who doesn't know the difference between lies and truth. 

Whatever the clinical diagnosis, we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies. 

The Big Lie- tell a bold like often enough and innoculate people to the truth - Trumponian pathological aversion to telling the truth (and entertainment media is buying it).

In fact, the Big Lie was fit for a time of lock step processionals, and nighttime rallies and films that featured them. 

By the time Nazism arose in Germany in the 1930s, anti-Semitism was nothing new. Rather, the J­ewish people had suffered a long history of prejudice and persecution. Although Nazis perpetuated centuries-old lies, this time those lies would have their most devastating effects. Like never before, anti-Semitism was manifested in a sweeping national policy known as "the Final Solution," which sought to eliminate Jews from the face of the Earth.

To accomplish this, Adolf Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, launched a massive campaign to convince the German people that the Jews were their enemies. Having taken over the press, they spread lies blaming Jews for all of Germany's problems, including the loss of World War I. One outrageous lie dating back to the Middle Ages claimed that Jews engaged in the ritual killings of Christian children and used their blood in the unleavened bread eaten at Passover [source: Landau].

Using Jews as the scapegoat, Hitler and his cronies orchestrated what they called "the big lie." This theory states that no matter how big the lie is (or more precisely, because it's so big), people will believe it if you repeat it enough. Everyone tells small lies, Hitler reasoned, but few have the guts to tell colossal lies because a big lie is so unlikely, people will come to accept it.

Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place. OMG- It wasn’t his voice on that tape of pitiful self-promotion (as mythical John Miller). O.K., ues it was—but he never mocked the handicapped reporter, he was merely imitating an obsequious one. The media eventually moves on, shrugging helplessly, to the next lie. Then the next lie, and the next. If the lies are bizarre enough and frequent enough, they provoke little more than a nervous giggle and a cry of “Well, guess he’s changed the rules!”

He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.

The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. 

Obviously, the right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. 

Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t mind bringing down the Democratic Party to prevent it from surrendering to corporate forces—and yet he may be increasing the possibility of rule-by-billionaire.

There is a difference between major and minor issues, and between primary and secondary values. Many of us think that it would be terrible if the radical-revisionist reading of the Second Amendment created by the Heller decision eight years ago was kept in place in a constitutional court; many on the other side think it would be terrible if that other radical decision, Roe v. Wade, continued to be found to be compatible with the constitutional order. What we all should agree on is that the one thing worse would be to have no constitutional order left to argue about.

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate. Before those famous schoolroom lines, Pope made another observation, which was that even as you recognize that the world is a mixed-up place, you still can’t fool yourself about the difference between the acceptable and the unacceptable: “Fools! who from hence into the notion fall / That vice or virtue there is none at all,” he wrote. “Is there no black or white? / Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain; / ’Tis to mistake them, costs the time and pain.” The pain of not seeing that black is black soon enough will be ours, and the time to recognize this is now.

Wake Up America #NeverTrump