The Illinois legislature was working on Monday-- and in a very bipartisan way. The House has 67 Democrats and 51 Republicans but the vote on Robyn Gabel's Automatic Voter Registration bill was 115-0. The Senate had already passed i-- also unanimously. (It had passed last year as well but was vetoed by Gov.
For our final push, Blue America ran independent expenditures in 4 races, two for Senate seats and two in House races. When Adelson and his slimy allies jumped into the CA-33 race with a million dollars worth of racist smear against Ted Lieu, we decided to reach likely voters with a full page ad in the L.A. Times, which we think has worked very well. Early vote returns from Democrats started spiking very sharply as soon as the ad ran.
The speech above is about a progressive vision that Michelle Nunn, Alison Grimes, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu-- let alone Greg Orman or Larry Pressler-- could never give. Shenna Bellows have the speech Thursday night at at the Portland Expo rally. Blue America contributors have given more to the Bellows campaign than to any other Senate campaign anywhere-- not because she's the most likely to win (she isn't), but because she's the ideal candidate our contributors want to see keep fighting. Grimes won't even admit she voted for Obama.
Election day is two weeks from next Tuesday. I’m sure you either know there’s a lot at stake or just don’t care. Blue America isn’t trying to save the Democratic Party. That isn’t our job and it isn’t possible anyway— not with them working against themselves the way they have this cycle. Instead we have focused on a small handful of races where we feel there’s a legitimate shot to replace a conservative with a progressive. One of those races is for the Maine senate seat that Susan Collins has occupied for 18 years.
In the video above, Bernie Sanders was addressing the Culinary Workers Union at their convention in Las Vegas yesterday. He made a powerful speech about how the right wing oligarchs and plutocrats divide working people up so that they can dominate American politics. “We are not living in a democracy when 60 percent of Americans are not voting, while billionaires like the Koch brothers are spending hundreds of millions to buy the United States Senate. That's called oligarchy, not democracy… The Koch Brothers are trying to buy the Senate. This is not what democracy is supposed to be about.
Bob Herbert’s piece in last week’s Politico Magazine, The Plot Against Public Education— How Millionaires And Billionaires Are Ruining Our Schools, casts Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, as the arch-villain of public education.
Yesterday Marianne Williamson endorsed Shenna Bellows for the U.S. Senate seat occupied by Susan Collins. "We desperately need candidates who carry the banner of new possibilities for America,” she wrote to her supporters, “and we need to support them in every way possible when they appear. Shenna Bellows represents such a banner.
Always the fount of Beltway conventional wisdom, the Washington Post's Fix headline parroted exactly the messaging the DSCC and NRCC want to push: These five races will decide control of the Senate.
It's almost the end of the quarter-- and you know what that means-- hundreds of e-mails from the DCCC and DSCC and their careerist candidates begging for money. Please tell them you already gave-- through Blue America-- to individual candidates whose agendas you believe in and whose values you share.As you probably know, we’ve supported Shenna Bellows' entirely grassroots campaign for Senate in Maine this cycle more than any other candidate, and now we’re asking you to step up again.
My two favorite senators are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They both have phenomenal records, not just on voting, but on leading. No one's perfect though. Bernie, for example, endorsed anti-choice Michigan reactionary Jerry Cannon, the former commandante of the Guantánamo gulag. What does that say about Bernie? Not much; just that he's human and makes mistakes.
