Lisa Brown

There was no primary or special election in North Carolina yesterday and the Democratic candidate, Dan McCready, is a Blue Dog who will be voting frequently with the GOP when he gets into Congress-- Blue Dogs always do. But with the existential danger of Trump hanging over us, with have to hold our noses and hope congressional candidates like McCready win. And in this case, we probably don't have to hope too hard, because he's very likely to win.

The GOP thought that at least they'd have one "achievement" to run on in the midterms-- the massive taxcut. But the tax cut-- which many call "the tax scam"-- has turned out to not be that popular, not popular enough to run on. Over the weekend, the NY Times reported that Republicans aren't barging about and aren't even bragging about the continuation of the Obama economic expansion Trump takes credit for.

Laura and MiloEver hear of Milo Yiannopoulos? Don't worry, no one else has either... unless they watch Fox News commentators as a lifestyle.

In the political prognostication biz, DC Insiders are very conservative. I don't mean they back conservative policies or that they're anti-Choice or pro-Wall Street. I mean they are loathe to go out on a ledge prognosticating.

Carl Hulse in the NY Times yesterday: "Here’s how significant things don’t get done in Washington even in a moment of crisis and opportunity. The president throws out a hodgepodge of ideas but refuses to put his full weight behind any of them.

This week, the Open Markets Institute reported some good news, namely that the Federal Trade Commission may be about to "waken from it's anti-trust slumber." Hard to imagine.

In 2014 Oklahoma reelected conservative Republican Mary Fallin over conservative Democrat Joe Dorman 460,298 (55.8%) to 338,239 (41%). Although there have been some shocking recent special election wins by Democrats in Oklahoma, the state Senate has 39 Republicans and just 8 Democrats and the state House has 73 Republicans and 28 Democrats. The Oklahoma congressional delegation consists of 5 Republican congressmen and 2 Republican senators...

National SuperPACs operate out of Washington DC. I guess they could have a satellite office in L.A. or Chicago or NYC, although few are so fancy to even do that. But after Ryan passed the TaxScam, the Koch brothers patted him on the head, said "good boy," and gave him $500 million to play with. That's why Ryan's PAC has set up an office in... hold on, Spokane.

The first video is the first TV ad for the Chicagoland district (IL-03) by progressive reformer Marie Newman, the Democrat working to unseat Blue Dog Dan Lipinski, one of the most pro-Trump Democrats in Congress. It's pretty self evident what Marie is doing to create a plausible narrative to replace Lipinski. Recent polling shows that if the messaging in the video gets out to voters in the district, Lipinski will be defeated.

This week Blue America endorsed two inspiring candidates for Congress on opposite ends of the country. Nina Ahmad in running in Philadelphia and Lisa Brown is running for the eastern Washington seat based in Spokane. Yes, they're both women and since 51% of the population of this country are women and just 19% of the House are women, its great that two will help right that egregious disparity.