Nate McMurray

Recently, J.D. Scholten, who's still considering another run against Steven King in northwest Iowa, told me that "In the last decade, King has missed 82% of the Small Business Committee hearings and nearly 40% of the Agriculture Committee hearings.

Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman thinks the media Is badly botching the Medicare-For-All debate. He's correct.

For politics junkies, yesterday started with a pre-dawn Rachael Bade/Heather Caygle click magnetic piece at Politico, Exasperated Democrats try to rein in Ocasio-Cortez. One of my former jobs was editor of Alternative Rock, one of America's first punk zines.

Devolution of the Star ChildDemocrats winning the House means there will be an effective check on Trump's worst authoritarian tendencies. It also kills the Republican Party's ambitions to repeal the Affordable Care Act and further eviscerate the social safety net. So how many seats did the Democrats pick up? We don't know yet because so many seats-- and not just in California-- are still uncalled.

Someone in Cheney's office came up with the wildly popular neo-con slogan, "Boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran." Maybe it was Bolton? I'm not sure-- nor does it matter, because what I want to talk about today is that the DCCC goes to R+2 and +3 districts, while real men are looking to flip R+11 districts.In most parts of the country it takes all the skill a gerrymandered can muster to create an R+11 district.

Only Collins has been arrested so far but Reed sells his votes to fracking interestsThe most conservative congressional district in New York (NY-27) isn't one the DCCC thought was winnable. So they ignored it, allowing a progressive who backs Medicare-for-All, Nate McMurray, to win the primary.

For the past decade, the DCCC has been wrong about one of their most basic tenets-- to win in red districts candidates have to go-- or be-- GOP-lite. This has proven a disastrous, failed policy but one the DCCC has dug in on. This cycle, for example, nearly every single candidate they recruited and nearly every single candidate they are supporting with money is a New Dem or Blue Dog from the Republican wing of the party.

How does a progressive Democrat will in a Republican district with an R+11 PVI? Nate McMurray got a helping hand when the FBI barged into Republican incumbent Chris Collins' Manhattan penthouse and arrested him on a long list of charges related to Insider Trading.

Nate and Ammar are running against 2 indicted crooksThe DCCC still refuses to back progressive Democrats Nate McMurry and Ammar Campa-Najjar despite the fact that both their opponents, extreme Trumpists Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter, have been indicted on multiple counts of fraud and related financial crimes. The DCCC claims the districts are too red for them to compete in.

In the last few weeks, I've been complaining that the elites who control both parties recruit elites like themselves to recruit and to support. When someone from the working class self-selects and manages to win a primary, those elites are more likely to turn up their nose at them than to support them. After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary about a member of the House elite club in New York, I sensed that the House Democrats were more vicious in their reaction than even the House Republicans were. I remember thinking to myself, self, I sure hope she has a thick skin!