Animals smell fear-- and it emboldens them. Tuesday most Democrats did the right thing for America and humanity by voting against the Keystone XL Pipeline project. The calculus about how much more poison the earth could take wasn't on the minds of the fearful Democrats who crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans and their Big Oil allies.
Watch the video of Rachel above talking about what she called "a parallel universe in our politics." Towards the end she says that "Conservatives have built themselves a very popular, very successful media landscape that doesn't just tell conservatives things that they want to hear in terms of opinion; they just make stuff up. They make up news stories that aren't true. And when they are corrected in other places, they never disappear from the conservative media. And this is, increasingly, what American conservatives consume as their news diet. This is what they think news is.
The ugly, happy faces of political dysfunction in New York: Skelos and CuomoSaturday we looked at the fallout from Andrew Cuomo's treachery in regard to Bronx state Senator Jeffrey Klein, leader of the small faction of right-wing fake Democrats who work with the New York GOP to keep the state Senate a conservative force.
New York State has 62 counties. A majority of voters in only 16 of them backed Andrew Cuomo's reelection as governor last week. He beat Republican Rob Astorino 1,919,225 (53.96%) to 1,443,713 (40.59%)-- with 173,606 votes (4.88%) for Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins.In September Cuomo spent $60.62 per voter to win a 62-35% victory over staunchly progressive icon, Zephyr Teachout, who managed to win 30 counties, several-- like Ulster, Sullivan, Columbia, Schoharie, Saratoga, Otsego, and Tompkins-- with over two thirds of the vote.
Andrew Cuomo, Jeffrey Klein-- same, sameBlue America didn't get involved with all that many state legislative races this cycle. But one we did work on was in the Bronx, for a reformer and former New York Attorney General, Oliver Koppell, who ran against an extremely corrupt fake Democrat from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, state Senator Jeffrey Klein.
As we mentioned yesterday, election day was bad for the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.
No surprise that McConnell won. And not a surprise that that was the very first race called last night. The Democrats had a weak, inauthentic, poll-driven candidate who didn't inspire anyone who didn't already hate McConnell or who wanted a family friend of Bill and Hill to win or just a generic woman in office. McConnell won by a bigger margin than most pundits were predicting-- 754,777 (55.7%) to 557,652 (41.2%).
When I woke up this morning, I saw a tweet by Joe Stiglitz that caught my attention-- part of a series regarding a new article he had just published, Europe's Austerity Zombies.
