On Tuesday, the primary in Illinois' third congressional showed the failure of Cheri Bustos' toxic plan to defeat progressive challenges to Blue Dog incumbents who are out of sync with their constituents. Anti-Choice, anti-healthcare, homophobic, anti-immigrant conservative Blue Dog/New Dem Dan Lipinski was beaten by progressive candidate Marie Newman.
CNN's Chris Cillizza doesn't mention in this video that the Democrats are more likely to lose more seats than they pick up. Instead he says Republicans don't have enough money to win back a majority and that ether aren't enough opportunities. First off more Republicans have announced retirements (or are otherwise leaving) than Democrats-- 31 to 11. Open seats are usually the easiest to win, although many of the Republicans who are retiring are in deep red, gerrymandered districts. Here's the GOP House count with the PVIs (and the 2016 Trump presidential scores).
Chicago's top political reporter, Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times, just blew up Blue Dog Dan Lipinski's reelection campaign by exposing an internal campaign document about how to appeal to Republican voters.
On Monday, Vox published a strong piece by Tara Golshan about the establishment Democrats' uncomfortable dilemma over Lipinski: The Democratic Party is protecting one of its last anti-abortion members in a safe blue district.
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.
Yesterday the big news was that Alabama Republicans had passed a total, punitive-- and unconstitutional-- ban on all abortions in their state. The worst DCCC chair ever, the odious Blue Dog from northwest Illinois, Cheri Bustos, thought that would be a good day to announce that she's hosting a fundraiser for Congress' most anti-Choice Democrat, fellow Blue Dog, Dan Lipinski. That's the invitation above.
When Bustos and Pelosi formulated the excuse for the DCCC's vile new anti-progressive "no primaries" diktat, they claimed it was to protect freshmen in swing districts, but that was a typical Pelosi lie. If they wanted to protect endangered freshman, they could have formulated a rule to protect endangered freshmen. Instead their incumbent-protection racket is trying to protect conservative incumbents-- like what was once Joe Crowley-- from insurgent progressives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
Gay equality used to be a contentious issue for Democrats. The DCCC and leadership assholes like Hoyer used to quietly counsel Democrats representing-- or running in-- swing districts to vote against equality-- and the Blue Dogs mostly did just that. That was then; now Democrats proudly embrace the LGBTQ community and there are more openly gay and lesbian members of Congress than ever before.
Jacobson- Rabid fox in the hen houseOn Sunday we looked at a relatively new phenomenon happening in American politics right now: conservative-- usually Republican-- billionaires investing huge sums of money in Democratic primaries.
