Blue Dogs

You like Bernie's progressive agenda? Elizabeth Warren's progressive agenda? Even if America elects one of them-- or, hopefully, both of them-- to run the executive branch, without a more progressive legislative branch, much of that agenda will be stymied. As we saw Thursday, Medicare had been blocked since 1915 by a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans until a Democratic landslide in 1964, a landslide that made the GOP irrelevant and took power away from the Southern Democrats (the garbage members called Blue Dogs and New Dems today).

Although there are rumors that South Jersey machine boss George Norcross is toying wit the idea of replacing Jeff Van Drew with Patrick Kennedy as the Democratic nominee for the second district seat, so far Van Drew has no primary opponent, just a 3 Republicans trying to get to the right of him, no easy task.

I keep getting complaints that our early June episode of The Freshmen on New Jersey Blue Dog Jefferson Van Drew, didn't do him justice and was far from complete. He is, after all, the worst Democrat in Congress and deserves a more thorough look.

There are only 5 freshmen with perfect voting records-- here are 3 of themIn March we decided to take a first look at how the new House members were getting started in the voting department. At the time, 24 freshmen still had 100% perfect scores-- and only 23 had "F" ratings.

There are 27 Blue Dogs in the House. Here's the whole list of them, organized by the number of twitter followers each one has:

The Republican wing of the Democratic Party, grudgingly went along with the Democrats Tuesday when Pelosi passed a bill to protect DREAMers with a massive bipartisan majority.

Alabama has a Republican House and a Republican Senate and a Republican governor. When the state government of Alabama decided women in their state can no longer have abortions, it was horrible enough. But two weeks later, the Democratic governor of Louisiana signed another of the extreme anti-abortion bills that Republicans are using to deny women's Choice. And it isn't just happening in the Deep South.

Rep. X is in this photo of Republicans pretending to be DemocratsI was invited to join a conference call yesterday with a group of committed activists in a red district with an ultra-right-wing Democratic congressmember, who I will refer to as X, so as not to give anything away I was asked to not write about yet. X, a freshman, immediately joined the Blue Dog and New Dems and has a ghastly (F) voting record already.

Bernie vs Establishment by Nancy OhanianI don't know how to get people I don't know off my Facebook "friends" list without going through all 5,000 names and deleting people I don't know. More than 90% of what I use Facebook for is to provide links for my DWT posts. Lately I've been getting a lot of comments like this: "Jesus Fucking Christ....I do not care who the Dem candidate is!

Many Americans are unaware of just how important an event in world history the French Revolution was. Before we talk about what Ryan Grim termed a counterrevolution for an The Intercept piece about reactionary Blue Dog and DINO Josh Gottheimer, let's remember, for a little context, that the French Revolution, gave hope to all Europe other than to the nobles, ecclesiastics, and some bourgeois (the 1%).