Paul Clements

It's been nearly a year since Move On, in the wake of the Republican government shut down, polled dozens of competitive congressional districts in Republican-held districts across the country asking, among other inquiries, these two questions:

If there's one district that demonstrates the venality of Steve Israel and his utter unfitness to head the DCCC, it is the race in southwest Michigan between the hereditary multimillionaire chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Fred Upton, and Paul Clements, a professor at Western Michigan University, an advocate for middle class families and for environmental sanity. MI-06 has a PVI of R+1, one of only a dozen districts in the country with that rank. Five of those seats are held by Democrats and 7 are held by Republicans.

Yesterday, Yale's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies released a report and survey, The Politics of Global Warming, that should send shivers down the spines of Climate Change deniers in Congress. "We find," they reported, "that registered voters are 2.5 times more likely to vote for a congressional or presidential candidate who supports action to reduce global warming.

Zach Goldfarb celebrated the 4th of July with a column for the Washington Post informing us that the moneymen behind the New Dems, Blue Dogs and Third Way-- i.e., the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- have had enough of all this income gap and economic inequality palaver.

My grandfather was a Socialist who was proud to have voted for FDR in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944. A couple of decades after his last vote for Roosevelt, I had come on the scene and he told me too never trust the Democrats. No, he hadn't turned Republican, of course, he just saw how the corporate warmongers and Southern racists were able to extort effective control over the party on crucial issues. I've usually taken his advice to heart.

Obama hasn't helped our country's image recover from 8 years of Bush-Cheney as much as everyone expected. In fact, the U.S. is looked at as the biggest threat to world peace-- by far.

I almost never leave the house anymore unless I'm going to Mali or India or Tuscany or someplace cool.

There were a lot of Democrats who won tough primaries last Tuesday, but there was only one that caused an orgy of twitter ecstasy from the DCCC: Petey Pie, Steve Israel's flawed New Dem who would like to get into Congress so he can help the Republicans cut Social Security benefits for retirees while increasing his perceived value as a lobbyist, when he goes back to his original profession.

Michigan progressive, Arkansas conservative-- guess which one the DCCC is backingA few days ago, Steve Israel announced the DCCC had already reserved $43.5 million in TV and radio ad buys in the races the DCCC was getting serious about.

View the FOX 17 clip "Western Michigan Mothers Rally to Bring Back Our Girls" here.Everyone in the world knows the tragic story by now. Primitive, anti-education, mysogynist religious fanatics in the failed oil plutocracy of Nigeria kidnapped 276 young girls from their school and are threatening to sell them into slavery.