March 14, 2018
We woke up this morning to the news that Democrat, Conor Lamb, squeaked past Rick Saccone by the thinnest of margins to win a victory in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District. Although the margin was less than 600 votes, it is an incredible feat in a district that Trump carried by 20 points merely sixteen months ago. Lamb was powered to victory by a combination of grassroots activists and organized labor. He ran a campaign that focused on issues that mattered to the voters in the district, such as protecting Social Security, saving the Affordable Care Act and fully funding miners’ pensions. Lamb’s campaign offers a blueprint for how to re-take Congress in November – take positions that are important to voters in the district and harness the energy of grassroots activists and labor unions to get out the vote. We should note that the $10 million dollars that Republican outside groups poured into the race was not enough to beat Lamb, who raised $3.7 million dollars without accepting money from PACs and with minimal help from the DCCC.
The Lamb victory was a welcome respite from the ongoing sh_tshow of the Trump administration. The chaos reached new depths yesterday. On Monday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sharply criticized Russian’s brazen assassination attempt on a former Russian double agent in the U.K. using nerve gas, an indisputable weapon of war. On Tuesday morning, Trump fired Tillerson via Twitter (Source: “Fired via Twitter,” by Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonnig, The Washington Post, 3/13/18). Trump didn’t even have the decency (quaint concept, I know) to call Tillerson until two hours after The Washington Post broke the story.
Although Tillerson was rightly panned for hollowing out the State Department and an appalling lack of transparency, his preference for a diplomatic approach in North Korea and his willingness to forcefully condemn Russia’s serial assassination attempts on British soil indicate that he retained some shred of common sense and a nodding familiarity with Article 5 of the NATO agreement, unlike his boss. None of this is assured with his designated replacement, Mike Pompeo. Pompeo owes his entire political career to the Koch Brothers. The Kochs bankrolled Pompeo’s first Congressional run in 2010 to the tune of $375,000 and provided their in house lawyer, Mark Chenoweth, to be his Chief of Staff (Source: “Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo owes his political career to the Koch Brothers,” by Heather Thomas, Quartz.com, 3/13/18).
On policy matters, Pompeo allows little daylight between himself and Trump and is much more likely to be an echo chamber than a source of sober, independent counsel. Pompeo has said that he doesn’t believe that Russian interference impacted the election results, contradicting the assessment of the intelligence community. He favors shredding the Iran nuclear deal, a move that would render upcoming talks between Trump and Kim Jong Un more of a farce than they already are. Pompeo favors keeping Guantanamo Bay open and granting the NSA massive power to spy on American citizens (Source: “Here’s where Trump’s new Secretary of State pick Mike Pompeo stands on Iran nuclear deal, Russian hacking and NSA spying,” by Amanda Macias, CNBC.com, 3/13/18). In short, Pompeo is an unmitigated disaster and we must pressure our Democratic senators to do all they can to block the confirmation of both Pompeo at State and his deputy,committed torturer, Gina Haspel as head of the CIA.
As more and more people with an iota of common sense or competence flee or are fired from this clusterf__k of an administration, the danger to our country ratchets up. The bad news is that until Democrats retake Congress, they can slow, but not stop, the trainwreck. The good news is, as Conor Lamb’s victory in a deeply red district shows, we can do it. Events in the last forty-eight hours show us that the stakes couldn’t be higher. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the world depends on it.
#Bluewave
#Notorture