Tom Wakely

Republicans are still embarrassed about how Reagan got caught in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra scandal. It started as a scheme to ransom 7 U.S. hostages being held in Lebanon by having Israel sell U.S. weapons to Iran and the U.S. replacing those weapons for Israel. Oliver North's twist was to have the Iranian money shipped to fascist rebels in Nicaragua (the Contras).

With Raul Grijalva, Keith Ellison and Mark Pocan leading the way, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has just sent President Obama a letter about the skyrocketing profits of drug companies wrung from their policies of monopolization and price gouging. This is the letter:

Yesterday, Hillary had an OpEd in Policy.Mic, Here's What Millennials Have Taught Me.

Yesterday the House Science Committee-- the majority of whose members were chosen to serve by the GOP leadership because they don't believe in or understand science-- held hearings on electronic vulnerabilities of U.S. election systems to hacking.

When Tom DeLay directed the Texas legislature to radically gerrymander up the the Lone Star State's congressional districts, one of the key objectives was to take away the very progressive voice of Travis County, primarily Austin.

Jeff Flake has never been someone with whom we've found much common ground here at DWT. He was a very conservative House member and he is a very conservative senator. But unlike most Republicans in Congress, Flake isn't a coward when it comes to the execrable Señor Trumpanzee.

Although educated women in the Texas Republican heartland-- the suburban belts around Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth-- have turned against Señor Trumpanzee, the Washington Post/Survey Monkey poll released yesterday that shows Hillary leading in the Lone Star State shouldn't be taken to mean she's actually going to win Texas' 38 electoral college votes; she's not.

Paul Ryan and his utterly dysfunctional House Republican conference is riven with so much in-fighting and back-stabbing and with so many ideological purity tests that they can't get anything done-- not even the most basic functions of government. The Florida delegation-- both Democrats and Republicans-- have been begging and are now demanding that Ryan call Congress back into session to deal with the Zika crisis.

This morning, I was speaking with one of the congressional candidates Blue America is most enthusiastic about this cycle, Paul Clements from southwest Michigan. He's running for the seat held by Energy Committee chairman Fred Upton (MI-06) and he told me that "the biggest holes in investment in America, if we were going to promote broad-based economic growth, are in infrastructure and education.

One ominous development we've been watching with alarm this cycle is the DCCC's systematic discounting of the public's preferences in primaries. It seems that every time a progressive wins, the DCCC decides the district is "not winnable" and they immediately abandon the winner and the district.