Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the New Congress

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
I'm liking what I see so far from the new incoming so called Progressive congress members. In particular, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The so called moderate Dems and the wing nut/conservative vampires have throne their first punches at her and she hits back just as hard.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
If this group:

“the new incoming so called Progressives . . .”

Can maintain common ground and unity with this group:

“The so called moderate Dems . . .”

They will do just fine against this group:

“the wing nut/conservative vampires . . .”


.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
If this group:

“the new incoming so called Progressive . . .”




Can maintain common ground and unity with this group:

“The so called moderate Dems . . .”

They will do just fine against this group:


“the wing nut/conservative vampires . . .”



.


I hope so, because the moderate, middle ground Dems of the past haven't done such a great job of not being rolled by the so called conservatives on issues such as wars, economics, Human Rights, et al. The so called center has continually been pushed to the right so the center is much more conservative than it has been traditionally.


48418910_2459020680807154_6475391401835102208_n.jpg
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Rephrased:


If this group:

“the new incoming so called Progressives . . .”

Can maintain common ground and unity with this group:

“The so called moderate Dems . . .”

And, if this group:

The so-called moderate Dems . . .”


Can maintain common ground and unity with this group:

“the new incoming so-called Progressives . . .”


They will do just fine against this group:


“the wing nut/conservative vampires . . .”


BUT, if they can’t, they’ll be no better than these are now or than they were before.


.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Rephrased:


If this group:

“the new incoming so called Progressives . . .”

Can maintain common ground and unity with this group:

“The so called moderate Dems . . .”

And, if this group:

The so-called moderate Dems . . .”


Can maintain common ground and unity with this group:

“the new incoming so-called Progressives . . .”


They will do just fine against this group:


“the wing nut/conservative vampires . . .”


BUT, if they can’t, they’ll be no better than these are now or than they were before.


.


Has compliancy gotten us "better"?
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Has compliancy gotten us "better"?

Compliancy :confused: — not exactly sure what you mean . . .

But I’m hoping for cooperation and compromise among all points of view. None of the various caucuses or wings of a party have all the answers. Compromise and cooperation among them, hopefully, can bring progress.

.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Compliancy :confused: — not exactly sure what you mean . . .

But I’m hoping for cooperation and compromise among all points of view. None of the various caucuses or wings of a party have all the answers. Compromise and cooperation among them, hopefully, can bring progress.

.


cooperation and compromise
:roflmao::roflmao::roflmao::roflmao::roflmao::roflmao::roflmao::roflmao::roflmao:

Seems like the partial government shut down is the result of "cooperation and compromise"!

...hoping...
Rainbows and Unicorns!
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
I don’t believe we’re talking about one and the same thing. I’m talking about intra-party relations within the Democratic Party. Why would one “not” want cooperation and compromise towards progress ???

The shutdown is ALL Trump trying to have his way . . . at the expense of US taxpayers, when he promised Mexico would pay for his wall . . .


.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
I don’t believe we’re talking about one and the same thing. I’m talking about intra-party relations within the Democratic Party. Why would one “not” want cooperation and compromise towards progress ???

The shutdown is ALL Trump trying to have his way . . . at the expense of US taxpayers, when he promised Mexico would pay for his wall . . .


.

You mean like how former Senator of Nebraska Ben Nelson and former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman damn near sabotaged the ACA and altered it for the worse?

You call that compromise.
 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator


On Trump, new congresswoman says 'we're gonna impeach the motherf---"
By:


Posted: Jan 04, 2019 09:02 AM CST

Updated: Jan 04, 2019 09:02 AM CST


WASHINGTON, D.C. - Shortly after being sworn into to office, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman ever elected to congress, vowed to impeach President Donald Trump.

According to the New York Post, Rep. Tlaib delivered the remarks at a Thursday reception for the MoveOn campaign.

And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Mama, look you won. Bullies don’t win,’ and I said, ‘Baby they don’t’ — because we’re gonna go in and impeach the motherf—-r,” she said in a clip circulating online.


WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE:


Jon Levine

✔@LevineJonathan

https://twitter.com/LevineJonathan/...s-we-re-gonna-impeach-the-motherf-/1686445134

Congresswoman @RashidaTlaib tells cheering crowd that Trump impeachment coming

“We’re going to go in and impeach the motherfucker”


14.8K

10:58 PM - Jan 3, 2019 · Manhattan, NY

7,502 people are talking about this

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Tlaib is one of a record number of women and minorities who were sworn in to the 116th Congress on Thursday.

Tlaib took her oath using an antique Koran that belonged to Thomas Jefferson and dates back to 1734.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Rashida Tlaib’s Expletive-Laden Cry to Impeach Trump — Upends Democrats’ Talking Points


05dc-impeach-jumbo.jpg

Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, made no apologies for the remarks she made hours after being sworn in on Thursday.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

The New York Times
By Nicholas Fandos
Jan. 4, 2019


WASHINGTON — Impeachment was always going to hang heavily over a divided Washington. But it took little more than 24 hours this week for a freshman House Democrat’s exuberant, expletive-laden impeachment promise to upend the bonhomie of a new Congress and prompt President Trump, by his own telling, to ask the newly elected speaker if Democrats planned to impeach him.

The episode began Thursday night, just hours after the 116th Congress was sworn in, when a camera captured Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan promising profanely to impeach Mr. Trump as she drew cheers from liberal activists at a celebration at a bar near the Capitol. By the time Mr. Trump discussed the matter directly in a news conference in the Rose Garden on Friday afternoon, weeks of speculation about his potential peril had burst into the open.

Republicans, eager to portray Democrats as out to destroy Mr. Trump’s presidency, piled on criticism of Ms. Tlaib — some of it racially tinged. Ms. Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, is one of the first Muslims in Congress.

The Christian Broadcasting Network referred to her as a “foul-mouthed Islamic congresswoman.”

Democratic leaders, who view discussion of impeachment as politically dangerous and premature, offered worried words meant to tamp down speculation about their intentions.​

[President Trump threatened to keep the federal government partly closed for “months or even years.”]

Perhaps out of a belief that an impeachment fight would help him politically — as it did President Bill Clinton in the 1990s — or outright fear that newly empowered Democrats actually might threaten his presidency, Mr. Trump dived into the conversation head first:

“We even talked about that today,” he told reporters in the Rose Garden, referring to an exchange with Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a meeting earlier Friday to try to negotiate an end to the shutdown of the government, which Mr. Trump threatened to keep closed for years if he did not get money from Congress for a wall on the southern border. “I said, Why don’t you use this for impeachment? And Nancy said, We’re not looking to impeach you.”​

Senior aides to Ms. Pelosi and other Democrats in the room disputed that characterization. The president had indeed invoked Ms. Tlaib and other House Democrats who want to impeach him, they said, but Ms. Pelosi tried to shift the meeting back to its intended topic and did not offer the president reassurances.

“In his opening comments at the meeting, President Trump brought up impeachment,” Ms. Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, wrote on Twitter. “Speaker Pelosi made clear that today’s meeting was about re-opening government, not impeachment.”

Regardless, Mr. Trump’s frank embrace of the issue was another astonishing development: a president of the United States talking openly about his potential impeachment at a White House news conference.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump had asked on Twitter, “How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time?” He continued the theme at his news conference by asserting that “you can’t impeach somebody who is doing a great job.”

[b{Ms. Pelosi and senior Democrats said they were determined not to take the bait for now and risk generating a backlash from Mr. Trump’s supporters, who would most likely see impeachment as the overreaction of out-of-control Democrats. [/b] But the words of Ms. Tlaib, who stood by her comments on Friday, made evident the pressure already mounting from the left, where public opinion polls suggest a majority of liberals want the president removed from office.

“People love you and you win,” Ms. Tlaib told the crowd Thursday night. “And when your son looks at you and says: ‘Momma, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘Baby, they don’t.’ Because we’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.”

She made no apologies for the remark on Friday, proclaiming that “I will always speak truth to power” and fashioning her own hashtag, #unapologeticallyme. She told a Detroit television station that “it’s probably exactly how my grandmother, if she was alive, would say it.”

Her outburst ran counter to all Democratic talking points. Ms. Pelosi and her deputies have repeatedly made the case that it is too early to consider impeachment.

Even as Mr. Trump’s legal perils have deepened — and federal prosecutors in New York appear to have gathered evidence implicating him in a campaign finance crime — Democrats have said they want to wait to see the findings of an investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, of the president, his campaign and Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election.

“I don’t really like that kind of language,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — where any impeachment inquiry must begin — said on CNN. “But more to the point, I disagree with what she said. It is too early to talk about that intelligently. We have to follow the facts.”

Ms. Pelosi defended Ms. Tlaib on Friday at a town hall hosted by MSNBC at the speaker’s alma mater in Washington, Trinity University. “I’m not in the censorship business,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Mr. Nadler, Ms. Pelosi and other party elders believe Mr. Trump is threatening the country’s democratic institutions. Privately, many harbor suspicions that he obstructed justice, collaborated with the Russians in 2016 or both. But they also argue that an impeachment that does not have a reasonable shot of winning a conviction in the Senate will backfire and strengthen Mr. Trump in the 2020 campaign. In the meantime, they are planning to open multiple investigations into accusations of wrongdoing around the president, his campaign and his administration.

“We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason,” Ms. Pelosi said. “So we’ll just have to see how it comes.”

Republicans ignored the distinction.

“Is this the behavior that we are going to find with this new majority party in Congress?” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, asked at a news conference. He repeatedly singled out Ms. Pelosi, asking why she had not censured Ms. Tlaib.

Mr. Trump was similarly critical of Ms. Tlaib.

“I thought her comments were disgraceful,” Mr. Trump said at the news conference. “I think she dishonored herself, and I think she dishonored her family.” He added that her comments were “disrespectful to the United States of America.”​

Ms. Tlaib is far from alone among House Democrats. Representatives Brad Sherman of California and Al Green of Texas formally introduced an article of impeachment on Thursday, charging that Mr. Trump had obstructed justice in firing James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director. Others are expected to follow.

“I continue to believe that obstruction of justice is the clearest, simplest and most provable high crime and misdemeanor committed by Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Sherman said in a statement. “I hope that the articles of impeachment are the subject of hearings before the Judiciary Committee early in 2019.”

Many of Ms. Tlaib’s new colleagues expressed sympathy for her sentiments, even as they said the House should proceed differently.



“Donald Trump is going to be impeached whether it is by the ballot box or Congress,” said Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California and a member of the Intelligence Committee. “It will just be a matter of which one comes first.”

But, Mr. Swalwell added, Democrats need to avoid making “a martyr” out of Mr. Trump by affording him “a fairer investigation than he deserves.”


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/us/politics/tlaib-impeach-trump.amp.html


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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Rashida Tlaib’s Expletive-Laden Cry to Impeach Trump — Upends Democrats’ Talking Points


05dc-impeach-jumbo.jpg

Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, made no apologies for the remarks she made hours after being sworn in on Thursday.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

The New York Times
By Nicholas Fandos
Jan. 4, 2019


WASHINGTON — Impeachment was always going to hang heavily over a divided Washington. But it took little more than 24 hours this week for a freshman House Democrat’s exuberant, expletive-laden impeachment promise to upend the bonhomie of a new Congress and prompt President Trump, by his own telling, to ask the newly elected speaker if Democrats planned to impeach him.

The episode began Thursday night, just hours after the 116th Congress was sworn in, when a camera captured Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan promising profanely to impeach Mr. Trump as she drew cheers from liberal activists at a celebration at a bar near the Capitol. By the time Mr. Trump discussed the matter directly in a news conference in the Rose Garden on Friday afternoon, weeks of speculation about his potential peril had burst into the open.

Republicans, eager to portray Democrats as out to destroy Mr. Trump’s presidency, piled on criticism of Ms. Tlaib — some of it racially tinged. Ms. Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, is one of the first Muslims in Congress.

The Christian Broadcasting Network referred to her as a “foul-mouthed Islamic congresswoman.”

Democratic leaders, who view discussion of impeachment as politically dangerous and premature, offered worried words meant to tamp down speculation about their intentions.​

[President Trump threatened to keep the federal government partly closed for “months or even years.”]

Perhaps out of a belief that an impeachment fight would help him politically — as it did President Bill Clinton in the 1990s — or outright fear that newly empowered Democrats actually might threaten his presidency, Mr. Trump dived into the conversation head first:

“We even talked about that today,” he told reporters in the Rose Garden, referring to an exchange with Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a meeting earlier Friday to try to negotiate an end to the shutdown of the government, which Mr. Trump threatened to keep closed for years if he did not get money from Congress for a wall on the southern border. “I said, Why don’t you use this for impeachment? And Nancy said, We’re not looking to impeach you.”​

Senior aides to Ms. Pelosi and other Democrats in the room disputed that characterization. The president had indeed invoked Ms. Tlaib and other House Democrats who want to impeach him, they said, but Ms. Pelosi tried to shift the meeting back to its intended topic and did not offer the president reassurances.

“In his opening comments at the meeting, President Trump brought up impeachment,” Ms. Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, wrote on Twitter. “Speaker Pelosi made clear that today’s meeting was about re-opening government, not impeachment.”

Regardless, Mr. Trump’s frank embrace of the issue was another astonishing development: a president of the United States talking openly about his potential impeachment at a White House news conference.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump had asked on Twitter, “How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time?” He continued the theme at his news conference by asserting that “you can’t impeach somebody who is doing a great job.”

Ms. Pelosi and senior Democrats said they were determined not to take the bait for now and risk generating a backlash from Mr. Trump’s supporters, who would most likely see impeachment as the overreaction of out-of-control Democrats. But the words of Ms. Tlaib, who stood by her comments on Friday, made evident the pressure already mounting from the left, where public opinion polls suggest a majority of liberals want the president removed from office.

“People love you and you win,” Ms. Tlaib told the crowd Thursday night. “And when your son looks at you and says: ‘Momma, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘Baby, they don’t.’ Because we’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.”

She made no apologies for the remark on Friday, proclaiming that “I will always speak truth to power” and fashioning her own hashtag, #unapologeticallyme. She told a Detroit television station that “it’s probably exactly how my grandmother, if she was alive, would say it.”

Her outburst ran counter to all Democratic talking points. Ms. Pelosi and her deputies have repeatedly made the case that it is too early to consider impeachment.

Even as Mr. Trump’s legal perils have deepened — and federal prosecutors in New York appear to have gathered evidence implicating him in a campaign finance crime — Democrats have said they want to wait to see the findings of an investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, of the president, his campaign and Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election.

“I don’t really like that kind of language,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — where any impeachment inquiry must begin — said on CNN. “But more to the point, I disagree with what she said. It is too early to talk about that intelligently. We have to follow the facts.”

Ms. Pelosi defended Ms. Tlaib on Friday at a town hall hosted by MSNBC at the speaker’s alma mater in Washington, Trinity University. “I’m not in the censorship business,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Mr. Nadler, Ms. Pelosi and other party elders believe Mr. Trump is threatening the country’s democratic institutions. Privately, many harbor suspicions that he obstructed justice, collaborated with the Russians in 2016 or both. But they also argue that an impeachment that does not have a reasonable shot of winning a conviction in the Senate will backfire and strengthen Mr. Trump in the 2020 campaign. In the meantime, they are planning to open multiple investigations into accusations of wrongdoing around the president, his campaign and his administration.

“We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason,” Ms. Pelosi said. “So we’ll just have to see how it comes.”

Republicans ignored the distinction.

“Is this the behavior that we are going to find with this new majority party in Congress?” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, asked at a news conference. He repeatedly singled out Ms. Pelosi, asking why she had not censured Ms. Tlaib.

Mr. Trump was similarly critical of Ms. Tlaib.

“I thought her comments were disgraceful,” Mr. Trump said at the news conference. “I think she dishonored herself, and I think she dishonored her family.” He added that her comments were “disrespectful to the United States of America.”​

Ms. Tlaib is far from alone among House Democrats. Representatives Brad Sherman of California and Al Green of Texas formally introduced an article of impeachment on Thursday, charging that Mr. Trump had obstructed justice in firing James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director. Others are expected to follow.

“I continue to believe that obstruction of justice is the clearest, simplest and most provable high crime and misdemeanor committed by Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Sherman said in a statement. “I hope that the articles of impeachment are the subject of hearings before the Judiciary Committee early in 2019.”

Many of Ms. Tlaib’s new colleagues expressed sympathy for her sentiments, even as they said the House should proceed differently.


“Donald Trump is going to be impeached whether it is by the ballot box or Congress,” said Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California and a member of the Intelligence Committee. “It will just be a matter of which one comes first.”

But, Mr. Swalwell added, Democrats need to avoid making “a martyr” out of Mr. Trump by affording him “a fairer investigation than he deserves.”


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/us/politics/tlaib-impeach-trump.amp.html


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MCP

International
International Member
AP_19003808883680-ocasio-cortez-crop-1546617219.jpg


Behind the Pay-go Battle Is a Central Contradiction That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Her Allies Will Need to Resolve

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/04/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-pay-go/

In the first vote of the 116th Congress on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was one of just three Democrats who split with their party and voted against a rules package introduced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and backed by the leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Ocasio-Cortez’s political career so far has been largely defined by her willingness to break from the pack, but her dissenting vote alongside just two others highlights the paradox of her position in the House: Her high-profile platform allows her to shape the national conversation, but the same energy that fueled her rise can be met with a very different reaction inside the walls of the Capitol.

The debate over the vote started Wednesday morning, when it became clear that the House rules package for the 116th Congress would include a fiscally conservative measure known as “pay-go.” A spokesperson for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called for progressives in the House to oppose it. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., was the first out of the gate, calling it “terrible economics” and promising to vote down the rules package. Ocasio-Cortez soon followed suit.

For a moment, it looked like a rebellion could brewing among the newly energized and organized left. Except it wasn’t. There was no stampede of opposition, and later that day, the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., put out a statement in support of the rules package, ending any real chance at a last-minute insurrection.

The next evening, when the package hit the House floor, just three Democrats voted it down: Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez were joined by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, who has hinted at 2020 presidential aspirations.

Jayapal, who came to Congress as an organizer and has played a key role in shaping the progressive Democratic agenda on issues like immigration, said she was frustrated about how the debate was framed on social media, in newsletters, and in part by some outletsthis one included. The conversation, she said, lacked the full context of the ways in which the CPC had defanged pay-go.

The narrative that emerged “is so hurtful to the progressive movement because we got so much out of this,” Jayapal said. One result, she said, has been to take the focus off the CPC’s major organizing effort to pack powerful committees full of as many progressives as possible. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez are both angling to land some of those coveted spots, and their opposition to the rules package could make it harder for them to do so.

“There were lots of things in the rules package that we negotiated in that were really good, and it’s not that we caved on this, it’s not that we just decided we didn’t have the power to change it — it was really a strategic question about what is most necessary to move progressive legislation,” Jayapal told The Intercept.

Jayapal stressed that her criticism was not directed personally at her colleagues, with whom she is in agreement on the issues, but rather at the framing on social media and press coverage of the pay-go conflict. In the hectic final days of recess and the swearing-in, it can be difficult for a coalition to align on strategy, particularly with fast-moving debates.

Indeed, Pocan and Jayapal’s support for the package came after they negotiated with Pelosi and won significant concessions, including seats on powerful committees, the repeal of a rule that required a supermajority for tax increases, hardened rules around sexual harassment, and strengthened language around the War Powers Resolution, which will make it easier for the House to vote to put an end to U.S support for the war in Yemen.

AP_19003860504825-jayapal-pelosi-1546639611.jpg


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, administers the House oath of office to Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., during a ceremonial swearing-in on Capitol Hill on Jan. 3, 2019, during the opening session of the 116th Congress

Pelosi has guaranteed that the House will hold a hearing on “Medicare for All,” Jayapal said, noting that critics who argued that pay-go will get in the way of that are wrong. Pelosi and Rep. Jim McGovern, chair of the House Rules Committee, have both said that pay-go can be waived in such circumstances. “The waiving we’ve been working on for a while with McGovern, but honestly we were trying to keep it kind of quiet, because not all of the conservative members know this, and now they’re saying, ‘Oh, you’re going to waive the rules? What do you mean?’” Jayapal said. “So sometimes I’m just like, come on people, let’s be strategic about some of this in terms of what we take on.”

The rules, waivers, and statutes involved in the legislative process can get confusing, so let’s pause for a primer. In 2007, when Pelosi first became speaker, she instituted the pay-go rule. In 2010, under pressure from Blue Dog Democrats, Pelosi made pay-go not just a rule, but a law, one that was also passed by the Democratic Senate and signed by President Barack Obama. The law allows the president to unilaterally sequester money if Congress passes a bill that isn’t paid for, but if a bill specifically bars the presidents from doing so, then the pay-go statute is rendered moot. When Republicans took over in 2011, they converted pay-go to “cut-go,” meaning that any new spending had to be matched with cuts elsewhere.

Because a statutory waiver would have been needed, regardless of the rules package, the smarter play in 2019 was to nail down a promise of rules waivers and fight on other fronts, Jayapal contended, allowing leadership to keep pay-go officially in the rules. Under a scenario after 2020, when Democrats will potentially hold the White House, changing the rule would take on more significance, she said. (On Friday, Jayapal introduced legislation — co-sponsored by Ocasio-Cortez, Khanna, and Pocan — to repeal the statutory pay-go rule.)

Despite her “no” vote, Ocasio-Cortez said she recognized the value of the CPC’s negotiations with Pelosi. “I think there are a lot of wins that we’ve had so far policy-wise,” she told The Intercept on Thursday, referring to the CPC wins in the package. “When you look at what’s considered a loss, whether it’s the select committee or whether it’s pay-go, I see them as short-term losses, because in the long run, what we’ve accomplished is we’ve put these issues on the map.”

The sudden burst of energy over pay-go, and the just as sudden collapse, brought into relief in the starkest way yet the paradox that is Ocasio-Cortez’s position in the House — she has as much influence outside Congress as anybody else she serves with. Her every tweet is a potential news cycle, and the routine happenings of her high school and college life get turned into fodder for conservative face-plants on disturbingly regular occasions. She has used that platform to shift the broader political conversation in ways previously unthinkable. For nearly two decades, Democrats have quietly grumbled that it’s just not possible to get people interested in doing something about climate change. Ocasio-Cortez sparked a national conversation about ambitious climate change legislation, which is now backed by 45 members of Congress and has become a litmus test of sorts for 2020 Democratic presidential contenders.

But inside the building, she is heavily outgunned. Aside from her close ally Khanna, the only member of Congress to endorse her primary bid (after also endorsing the incumbent), Ocasio-Cortez is strengthened by her “squad,” which includes insurgent Ayanna Pressley, who unseated a longtime Democratic incumbent in Massachusetts, and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, who won competitive primaries to replace Keith Ellison and John Conyers, respectively.

But even the squad broke with Ocasio-Cortez on the House rules package and supported Pelosi. The gap between the New York Democrat’s power outside the Capitol and the display of it on day one inside of it could hardly have been greater, and it’s an imbalance that simply can’t hold long-term. Something has to give; one side or the other will need to break or bend. It remains to be seen which one it will be.

As she was walking to the House chamber to be sworn in on Thursday, The Intercept asked Ocasio-Cortez how her view on politics and Congress had changed since she’d won her primary. “I think coming through this process from the background of organizing, and as an organizer, it really makes you think of the political process as – it really opens what that field looks like, of what change is possible. So it’s not just about whipping votes or getting someone to a yes or no — although all of those are critical elements of the job — but the other part of it is really shaping the landscape of what we think is possible,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Her first organizing effort in the halls of Congress began with the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats-led occupation of Pelosi’s office during orientation. Ocasio-Cortez and the activists demanded a select committee to craft legislation toward a Green New Deal. It sparked a national conversation that is still alive today, but the committee Pelosi ultimately created — unveiled in Thursday’s rules package — is weaker than one she created on the same issue in 2007.

But putting the climate on the map came at a cost — and here’s where the contradiction comes in — in that her proposal angered her colleagues, who furiously defended the turf of their respective committees, seeing themselves in competition with the proposed select committee. That hostility built upon already strong wariness on the part of her fellow lawmakers, who see in Ocasio-Cortez’s brand of people-powered, corporate-free politics a challenge to their own integrity or progressivism. She is a walking reminder to some Democrats of the space between their ideals and how they have come to practice politics — and they don’t appreciate the reminder. Indeed, incoming Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone flat-out refused to move an unrelated bill by Khanna, citing his public support for what he saw as a rival committee.

Part of what Ocasio-Cortez has been so good at since arriving in Washington is educating the public – introducing people outside of Congress to arcane but crucial levers of power at work, such as the way she exposed elements of freshman orientation as little more than corporate propaganda.

But, said Jayapal, the organizing effort needs to be fully thought about at every step, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t breed cynicism and limit progress. It requires recognizing that different people respond to different approaches differently, and that while social media pressure sometimes works, in other cases, a direct, educational approach might work better. “Before I came to Congress, I didn’t know what pay-go was. If somebody just said, this is a bad idea and anybody who votes for something that has it is a sellout, I might’ve believed it, but I think it’s our job as members to try to educate people about the different ways to think about this. And the fact that all but three people voted for this rules package — including some really progressive members — should tell people that there’s a lot more to this story than just pay-go is bad, therefore vote against the rules package.”

Outside pressure is still important, she argued. “I’ve been arrested three times for civil disobedience because I think that there are times when that’s appropriate, but you’ve got to pick the right strategy for the right time, and you’ve got to pick the right fight — and we can disagree about what those right fights are — but to somehow believe that the entire Progressive Caucus is wrong on this and two people are right, I think is a disservice to the issue and to the strategy and frankly, to the overall movement,” she said.

Those types of communication kinks can be worked out over time, but if every win Ocasio-Cortez notches on the outside, elevating an issue and reshaping the conversation, simply creates more distance between her and her colleagues on the inside, organizing an effective progressive majority is impossible, and even getting the dozen to two dozen members needed for a solid progressive sub-caucus would be difficult.

But it’s not that simple, as the groundswell of support Ocasio-Cortez has experienced on the outside has yet to be fully felt on the inside. Why, after all, did Jayapal and Pocan even have to contend with Democrats such as Pelosi who wanted pay-go in the rules package, not because it’s already in statute but because they think it’s the right thing to do?

It’s a relic of the 1980s, when Democrats lived in fear of being branded tax-and-spenders, and a reminder that time has long lagged far behind the institution of Congress. It’s the lack of the sense of urgency in the halls of power that Ocasio-Cortez is so eager to take down. The United Nations has given humanity roughly 12 years to turn its fossil fuel-based economy around, which climate scientists say can only be accomplished on a wartime footing. Politics have moved awfully fast the last few years, but perhaps not fast enough yet.
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered
I'm liking what I see so far from the new incoming so called Progressive congress members. In particular, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The so called moderate Dems and the wing nut/conservative vampires have throne their first punches at her and she hits back just as hard.

I would be careful with her, whites have been known to use proxy black, hispanic, asian politicians to enforce their racist agendas. A common tactic that is used in Corporate America that is now being seeping more into politics.

Appearing out of nowhere and going straight into a legislative position, eerily similar to President Obama rise to power. Another red flag is white MSM will over cover this person on the news, trying to force us to adopt their proxy candidate. They will quickly remove any TV host within your peer group that supports a white candidate over this proxy candidate or is overly critical of this person.

We need our own media outlets to prevent this from happening
 
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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
What some on the Right (Far Right???), are saying
about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-Cortez, and her kind:


Opinion: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the voice of an ignorant generation



AP19004633696681.jpg

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., walks down the House steps to take a group photograph of the House Democratic women members of the 116th Congress on the East Front Capitol Plaza on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, Jan. 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Fox News
January 14, 2019


The majority of American Millennials identify as socialist, according to surveys by both Reason-Rupe and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. That's the bad news. The good news is that just 32 percent of Millennials can define socialism. The frequently-wrong but never-in-doubt freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., may indeed be the voice of her ignorant generation.

During an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes," Anderson Cooper asked Ocasio-Cortez, "When people hear the word socialism, they think Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela. Is that what you have in mind?" He neglected to mention the vicious socialist regimes of Cambodia, Ethiopia, Poland, Romania, North Korea, and China, among others.

Ocasio-Cortez retorted, "Of course not. What we have in mind—and what of my—and my policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden." In fact, her economic proposals bear little resemblance to British and Nordic public policy.

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, OTHER DEMS WANT YOU TO EMBRACE A SOCIALIST AGENDA - HERE ARE 4 GLARING EXAMPLES

As early as the 1950s, Britain began to privatize its social security and pension programs. By the 1990s, as decades of socialism caused economic growth to stagnate, Sweden followed suit. Neither Sweden nor Norway mandates a minimum wage, and Britain demands a minimum wage well below Ocasio-Cortez's proposed $15 per hour. Britain and Finland offer a lower corporate tax rate than the United States, and all the nations she names have lower rates than her proposal of 28 percent. None has a health care regime as socialistic as her proposed Medicare-For-All scheme, which constitutes a full federal takeover of health care.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's ignorance of economics and foreign affairs typifies her generation. Despite holding expensive degrees in both Economics and International Relations from Boston University, Ocasio-Cortez threw up her hands in exasperation during an interview on Margaret Hoover's "Firing Line" program, laughing, "I'm not the expert on geopolitics." Fortunately for her, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king; and among a blithely ignorant generation, the lightly educated activist is congresswoman.

The seed of Millennial miseducation, which grew into the Tree of the Lack of Knowledge as activist educators substituted ideology for scholarship, is finally bearing its rotten fruit. According to one survey, one third of Millennials believe President George W. Bush killed more people than Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Over 40 percent of Millennials have never heard of Mao Zedong; another 40 percent and 30 percent, respectively, are unfamiliar with Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara. Two-thirds of Millennials cannot identify Auschwitz, and 22 percent have never heard of the Holocaust, twice the percentage of American adults on average.

Millennials might not know much, but according to a 2016 Harvard survey, they know they don't support capitalism, with 51 percent of young adults rejecting economic freedom.

During the 2018 midterm elections, the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed 42 candidates for local, state, and federal office across 20 states. Of those candidates, 24 won their primary campaigns, and 18 won in general elections. Millennials have largely cheered them on. Raised in the United States after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these young Americans have been sheltered both empirically and academically from the myriad horrors wrought by socialism throughout history. And so the problem worsens.

Socialism is an economic disease born of envy and ignorance. Unfortunately both abound in our present politics. The sickness has found an attractive spokeswoman—perhaps, sadly, the voice of her generation.

Michael Knowles is an author, actor, and hosts "The Michael Knowles Show" at the Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter @ michaeljknowles

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

©2019 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fo...ortez-the-voice-of-an-ignorant-generation.amp


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thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
What some on the Right (Far Right???), are saying
about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-Cortez, and her kind:


Like who gives a fuck what the far right is saying. As if they have "our" best interests at heart.

source: The Hill

Ocasio-Cortez calls out CBS News for not assigning a 'single black journalist to cover the 2020 election'

ocasio-cortez.12143.jpg


Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y) criticized CBS News Saturday night for what she considered lack of diversity in its team of reporters covering the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

“This WH admin has made having a functional understanding of race in America one of the most important core competencies for a political journalist to have, yet [CBS News] hasn’t assigned a *single* black journalist to cover the 2020 election,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet.

“Unacceptable in 2019. Try again,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

"

Her tweet was in response to another post shared by an associate producer at CBS News, Ben Mitchell, who shared a tweet showing the news agency’s 2020 election team of reporters and associate producers.

“It's Official: The @CBSNews 2020 Election Team has assembled!” Mitchell said in the tweet, which also featured a photo of the 12-person team of media professionals.

The newly sworn-in congresswoman faced some blowback from other reporters over the criticism, including Josh Kraushaar, a politics editor at the National Journal, who said the New York Democrat had “another thing” in common with President Trump: “media scold.”



The congresswoman appeared to be referencing data released from by the liberal group Media Matters for America on Friday.

The Hill reached out to CBS News.

The report showed that Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (Mich.) profane vow to impeach Trump received five times more cable news coverage than Republican Rep. Steve King over his latest inflammatory comments questioning why the term “white supremacist” is offensive.

In another tweet responding to Ocasio-Cortez, however, Kraushaar wrote that he felt the team's reporters looked racially diverse "at least based on [their] last names."

">

But Ocasio-Cortez responded to Kraushaar's reasoning in another tweet in which she also contended that "one race isn’t substitutable for another."

"It doesn’t work like that. It’s not about 'quotas.' It’s about understanding the country you’re living in," the New York Democrat added.

 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: Miami Herald

‘Where’s Mitch?’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pursues Mitch McConnell


WASHINGTON -Furloughed federal workers have displayed their unpaid bills at Mitch McConnell’s Senate office in protest. House freshmen marched to his office Wednesday to urge a vote. And he’s drawn the ire of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newest star of the Democratic party.

Yet through it all, the Senate Majority Leader has persisted and never wavered: The shutdown, he insists, is the Democrats’ fault.

As Democrats look to turn McConnell, R-Kentucky, into the face of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, they’ve erected billboards in Kentucky and raised money off his refusal to hold a Senate vote on House bills to re-open the government. The shutdown will enter its 27th day Thursday with no apparent end in sight.

On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, a self-described Democratic socialist, called McConnell out on Twitter and for the second time in two days joined a parade of House freshmen who crossed from the House to the Capitol and over to McConnell’s Senate office. They delivered a letter calling on McConnell to put the House spending bills up for a vote “so that we can end this manufactured crisis.”





“We’re here doing our jobs,” Ocasio-Cortez said, standing by McConnell’s office. “We have voted, repeatedly, over and over again to re-open the government. Where’s Mitch? That’s my question.”


She accused McConnell of ducking the members of Congress and said the freshmen wanted to have a “conversation with him about getting people their paychecks.”

McConnell’s office provided the House members with use of a copier to run off more letters and McConnell’s deputy chief of staff, Don Stewart, said he told them he’d deliver the letter to McConnell.



The taciturn majority leader has remained firm for weeks. After President Donald Trump threatened not to sign a spending bill that didn’t include money for his promised border wall, McConnell pledged the Senate would only consider legislation Trump would sign.


“Does he answer to the president or does he answer to the American people?” Rep. Susan Wild, D-Pennsylvania, one of the freshmen accompanying Ocasio-Cortez, asked of McConnell.

“I understand his frustration, that after we all agreed, the president changed his mind,” Wild said. “But that doesn’t stop the fact that we ought to be doing what Congress was elected to do.”

McConnell took to the Senate floor Wednesday for the third day in a row, again looking to pin the blame for the shutdown on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — and by extension, some of the very same Democrats who showed up in his office.

McConnell charged that Democrats who once backed border security are now taking their cues from Pelosi’s “extreme, fringe position that walls have now become immoral” — a reference to the speaker’s characterization of Trump’s proposed border wall.


“Democrats have made a marketing decision to obstruct President Trump, at all costs, even if it hurts substantive priorities they used to support,” McConnell said.

In an editorial he offered to newspapers Wednesday, McConnell suggested that “Democrats are operating purely on political spite directed at President Trump. Why else would they rather have a partial government shutdown drag on for weeks than continue to support border security?”


Allies suggested the protests would have zero effect on McConnell, who is not easily rattled and is up for re-election in 2020 in a state where Trump is more popular than he.





McConnell is not feeling pressure from his fellow Republican senators to break with Trump either, even as some GOP senators on Wednesday signaled interest in signing a Democratic and Republican letter to Trump requesting that he support a short-term spending bill that would temporarily re-open the government.

Some Republicans acknowledged there could be a political cost to pay as the shutdown continues.

“When you start taking a look at TSA agents or border security or other people with central positions that aren’t getting paid, I worry about them,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina, referring to reports of backups at some airports as Transportation Security Administration personnel don’t report to work.


“Some people are going to look at that and question whether they’re being treated fairly. But right now the American people are not blaming any one party or any one person,” Tillis said. “They’re blaming all of us, which is why we need to solve the problem.”

Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, said his constituents at home see split 50-50 on who takes the blame the impasse.

“At the end of the day you just listen to what your constituents have to say and make the best decision you can,” Scott said. The 50-50 split, he said suggests “that people are dug in and they want their representatives to stay where they are consistently.”
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
AOC is showing herself to be a master politician. Both the so called moderate Dems and republicans (are they that much different?) are scared shitless of her.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: Newsone

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Has Officially Been Labeled ‘The Most Dangerous Person In America’
The New Yorker has Republicans shook.

Republicans are truly afraid of a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezhas stormed in Washington, D.C. holding no punches on anyone who is not properly serving the people. Now, she has been labeled the “most dangerous person in America” by an Oscar winning actor.

Actor James Woods, 71, wrote on Twitter, “This is the most dangerous person in America right now. Ignore her at your peril…” See below:




This is from an actor who was accused by two women of predatory behavior when they were teenagers. One of the accusers, Amber Tambyln, wrote in the New York Times, “Mr. Woods attempted to pick me and a friend up when we were at Mel’s diner in Hollywood, seeing if we wanted to go to Las Vegas with him that very night. I informed him of my age, to which he said, ‘Even better.’ I told this story publicly as a way to back up the claim that Mr. Woods was, indeed, a hypocrite. Mr. Woods called my account a lie.” She was reportedly 16 at the time.

Woods appears to be the one who is dangerous.

Thankfully, Ocasio-Cortez knows how to handle these Republicans. Back in December, Mike Huckabee, who has failed at running for president more than once, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who lies for a living, felt the wrath.

Mike Huckabee, who once said he wanted to replace the Constitution with the Bible, whined, writing in a tweet, “Ocasio-Cortez compares her election to moon landing. Huh? Big difference. Moon landing was LUNAR, not LOONEY; Moon landing done by ppl who knew what they were doing…those who elected someone who thought there were 3 branches of Congress did NOT.”

See the tweet below:



Well, Ocasio-Cortez had time and clapped back with, “A Green New Deal will take a level of ambition + innovation on the scale of the moon landing. We’ve been done it before, and can do it again.” She then threw some shade at his daughter, saying, “Leave the false statements to Sarah Huckabee. She’s much better at it. Also, you haven’t been a Governor of any state for 10+ years now.”




Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman elected to Congress at the age of 29. She is representing New York’s 14th District and clearly isn’t like other Democrats who are sometimes passive and quickly back down.

We are looking forward to the change Ocasio-Cortez will bring to D.C.
 

crossovernegro

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
I swear, the people on the right who keep talking about Cortez must be extremely stupid.

it's almost a guarantee that if you ask any sample of 10 random people (not including a congressional campaign gathering and/or capitol hill), 8 of them would not know the name of the congressman that represents their own district, let alone the names of any congressmen outside of ones that chair important House committees (ways and means, etc). They're taking a freshman congresswoman and giving her national, if not international name recognition.
 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
Ocasio-Cortez gives ‘zero’ f–ks about what other Democrats think


By Mark Moore

January 22, 2019 | 9:13am



MORE ON:
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ
Ocasio-Cortez: System that allows billionaires is 'immoral'

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could probe banks' earnings

Ocasio-Cortez attends NYC Women's March amid anti-Semitism controversy

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praises Cardi B's shutdown rant
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admitted that she gives “zero” f–ks when her Democratic colleagues criticize the youngest woman elected to the House for speaking her mind.

Appearing on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Monday, she was asked about how she feels when other Democrats admonish her by saying “wait your turn” and “don’t make waves.”

Colbert asked: “I want to ask this question in a respectful manner, knowing also that you’re from Queens, so you will understand this question. On a scale from zero to some, how many f–ks do you give?”

“I think it’s zero,” the 29-year-old said.

Ocasio-Cortez, who has become a force on Twitter and amassed more than 2.5 million followers, said she doesn’t always fire back at her critics on the social networking site because she doesn’t want to go after “some innocent bystander.”

But “If you have a blue check, if you’re in my mentions, if you’re being sassy in a way that I think is unjustified, and if I haven’t eaten in two to three hours,” she said she will.

The freshman lawmaker was enlisted last week to give Democrats some pointers on how to use social media to their advantage.

“Rule No. 1 is to be authentic, to be yourself and don’t try to be anyone that you’re not,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the show. “So don’t try to talk like a young kid if you’re not a young kid.

Don’t post a meme if you don’t know what a meme is – that was literally my advice, and I said don’t talk like the Founding Fathers on Twitter.”
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered
There's something not right about her. It looks like she is trying to sabotage progressive causes. She blurted out this crap about a 70% tax rate which was megaphone by MSM.

She is a non-white person talking about taxing white people. We need to start using racial cover when proposing something that will impact whites mostly. She can refer to the taxes that are implemented in Europe or there are plenty of white progressives that can speak about imposing taxes on the wealthy.
 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
An agency…that repeatedly and systematically violates human rights does not deserve a dime.’



Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling on Congress to cut funding to ICE and Border Patrol until they end their abusive treatment of immigrants
 

MCP

International
International Member
AP_19030739399678-AOC-Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez-Redistricting-gerrymander-Democratic-1549049093-e1549049595629.jpg


https://theintercept.com/2019/02/09/ocasio-cortez-district-redistricting-2020/

New York Democrats Could Eliminate Ocasio-Cortez’s District After 2020

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is prepared for the possibility that Democrats in New York could redraw her district after the 2020 election, she told The Intercept in an interview.


Following the 2020 census, every state will draw new district boundaries to reflect changes in the population, the political implications of which will stretch for at least the next decade. In 2014, New York approved a constitutional amendment establishing a nonpartisan redistricting commission, which is set to take over the redistricting process starting in 2020. The 10-member commission, meant to be independent from the legislature, is made up of individuals selected by leaders from the state Senate and Assembly, and the original eight members pick two additional members.


But Ocasio-Cortez’s most determined adversaries are not partisan Republicans, but Democrats who say that she has been a disruptive influence. The Hill recently reported that at least one member of Congress has been urging New York party leaders to recruit a Democratic primary challenger to Ocasio-Cortez. But the news led to a surge of donations to Ocasio-Cortez, suggesting that a more efficient means of ousting her might be simply to eliminate her district.


The 29-year-old congressperson noted (accurately) that it’s generally expected that New York will likely lose a seat, despite the city itself growing at a consistent pace. “I don’t know if that means that all of our districts are going to be redrawn dramatically, because they have been historically gerrymandered, or what will happen, but there’s certainly a possibility, if not a guarantee, that my district in the coming years will not look like my district today,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “So I think it’s entirely possible, and New York politics being what it is, we have no idea where things are going to go.”


New York politics are famously insular, with a tight circle controlling major decision-making for years. That began to shift in 2018, not just with Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, but also wins from a number of insurgent candidates against Democrats who had caucused with Republicans in the state Senate.


Ocasio-Cortez, during a podcast interview with The Intercept, was joined by former North Carolina Rep. Brad Miller, who earned his “former” status as a result of statewide redistricting that eliminated his seat in 2012. The 2010 tea party wave handed control of the legislature to Republicans, who drew him out of the district. He decided not to run for re-election. He told The Intercept that his work on the House Financial Services Committee taking on powerful banks “probably” played a role in the redistricting. “And Republicans, it turned out, did not value my service, and they divided my district six different ways, and there was no one piece that was really recognizably the old district. And also it was true on the Democratic side,” he said, noting that his own party leaders weren’t thrilled with his work in a state dominated by financial interests, such as Bank of America.


Miller, however, did not have Ocasio-Cortez’s national profile, suggesting that the lesson may be that if you’re going to be a problem for party bosses, it’s better to be a huge problem than a medium-sized irritation.


Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez could just run, and probably win, in any nearby New York City district the party may try to draw for her. She noted that when it comes to future redistricting, she’s in a unique situation because her name recognition is so strong “that even when I won my primary in New York [District] 14, we won like a third ballot, a third-party primary in a different congressional district the same day.” And that was in November 2018, before an endless media cycle that has been all Ocasio-Cortez, all the time.


Moving her into a different district would pit her against another incumbent Democrat, and that Democrat has an incentive to avoid that race. ”Maybe some people wouldn’t want trouble for themselves,” she noted.


Another reason not to target Ocasio-Cortez would be Chuck Schumer. The Democratic Senate minority leader, and a major player in New York politics, is up for re-election in 2022. The commission redrawing the lines may be technically independent, but Schumer’s power is no secret. If Ocasio-Cortez were gerrymandered out of the House, she’d need something new to do — and primarying Schumer would be an obvious option on the table. That could make Schumer Ocasio-Cortez’s strongest advocate at the redistricting negotiating table.


The potential loss of a congressional district as a result of falling population has focused extra attention on the Trump administration’s push to add a controversial citizenship question to the next census. That ploy is driven in significant part by a desire to dampen participation in the process. “This is one of the reasons why we’ve been fighting the 2020 census question, and between the federal government really looking to fund the census at a much lower rate, communities like mine are the ones that are essentially targeted by the current administration,” Ocasio-Cortez said.


Opponents say the citizenship question would intimidate immigrants and their families into not completing the form, reducing the participation of people of color and undercounting the population. A federal judge earlier this month blocked the citizenship question, but the Trump administration is appealing the ruling in the lead lawsuits. Aside from the court battles, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is set to testify about the citizenship question before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which Ocasio-Cortez is now a member of.


“Communities that are poor, more working class, communities that are diverse, communities that have high immigrant populations, whether they’re documented or not,” she said. “It’s all, all the actions that the administration is taking is around really dense urban areas losing congressional seats.”


o far, the effort to primary Ocasio-Cortez, however, isn’t going well. The Daily Caller followed up on the article in The Hill and spoke to New York Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who said three names were floating around as potential challengers to Ocasio-Cortez: New York City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, Sen. Julia Salazar, and Assembly Member Catalina Cruz.

“The Daily Caller is trash. 1. I would never primary @AOC, even if I lived in her district (which I do not). 2. I have no intentions of ever running for Congress. 3. Who on earth calls Jimmy Van Bramer ‘James?’” Salazar tweeted.


Van Bramer tweeted “This whole thing is crazy. I’m kind of loving having @AOC as my Congressmember! I’m not taking her on. I’m backing her up!”


.@DailyCaller clearly doesnt have a fact checking department- ya’ll over there gossiping and we are over here doing the work @AOC #HermanasEnLaLucha #NiceTryTho pic.twitter.com/wvklFlTTRf


— Catalina Cruz, Esq. (@CatalinaCruzNY) January 30, 2019


 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: Huffington Post

Conservative Men Are Obsessed With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Science Tells Us Why.
Conservatives respond to fear more strongly than liberals do, says one neuroscientist who studies political anxiety.


Conservatives’ bizarre, escalating obsession with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) reached a new level this week when The Daily Caller published fake revenge porn of the new congresswoman.

“Here’s The Photo Some People Described As A Nude Selfie Of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” the Caller’s original headline read, before it was changed and the site posted a “we regret the error” message on Twitter. For the record, the photo is not of Ocasio-Cortez, despite what “some people” have said.

Since Ocasio-Cortez, a 29-year-old working-class democratic socialist, unexpectedly toppled powerful white male incumbent Joe Crowley in a June primary, she’s become an object of fixation among Republicans, especially Republican men. Conservative writer Ed Scarry posted a photo of her backside on Twitter, questioning whether her black suit was befitting of a “girl who struggles.” Right-wing media discovered that she ― like a lot of people named “Alexander,” “Alexandra” or some variant thereof ― went by the nickname “Sandy” in high school. A self-proclaimed “proud Christian Dad” on Twitter circulated a video of her dancing in a T-shirt in college as if it would be a career-damaging revelation. A Republican strategist referred to her as “the little girl” on Fox News, which runs segments about her constantly.





The obvious explanation is that men have literally never seen a woman in her 20s in the halls of Congress before. She’s attractive, telegenic and good at social media. She dances outside her Cannon House office. Conservative men are confused at being drawn to this bright rising star in the Democratic Party while loathing everything she stands for.

But that doesn’t fully explain the fervor with which conservatives hang on her every word, waiting for her to slip, and dig through her past for any feeble sign that she isn’t who she says she is. There’s an existential, panicked tinge to the behavior here ― what you might call “AOC Derangement Syndrome.” Indeed, some experts say conservative men are obsessed with Ocasio-Cortez because they’re threatened by her.

Conservatives tend to respond to fear more strongly than liberals do, according to Bobby Azarian, a neuroscientist whose expertise in anxiety has led him to examine political behaviors. His research has found that the brains of conservative people are likely to display the same attention biases as the brains of people with anxiety.

“The one main cognitive difference is that conservatives are more sensitive to threat,” he said. “Their fears are sometimes exaggerated. I think they fear her.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s power is a direct threat to conservatives because her very existence in Congress as a young, Latina, working-class woman threatens to upend the social order that has kept white men in the ruling class for centuries. (Eighty-eight percent of House Republicans are white men, most are over the age of 50, and the party’s voters are majority white and male.) On top of that, she is using her position and platform to directly challenge that order ― to attempt to get money out of politics, raise taxes on the super-rich and level the playing field.

“She doesn’t just challenge the patriarchy, she’s challenging the race, class, and gender hierarchies all at once, as well as the capitalist system that requires member of Congress be wealthy before they get there,” said Caroline Heldman, a gender and politics professor at Occidental College. “That’s remarkably threatening.”

In a way, Ocasio-Cortez is the most formidable opponent to President Donald Trump the Democratic Party has put forth yet. She has even more of a knack for social media than America’s first Twitter president; she’s anti-establishment like he is; she breaks all the rules of how a politician is supposed to behave; and she has an undeniably strong emotional appeal.

“She’s engaging attention and emotion in people at this visceral level,” Azarian said. “She has some combination of a lot of features that really seems to give her this ability to go viral. And I think that’s what Trump had.”

That’s why conservatives want and need to undercut her influence. And the most time-tested way to undermine a woman’s power is to sexualize her, to make her an object instead of an agent. A 2013 study by the Women’s Media Center found that merely discussing a female candidate’s appearance has a negative effect on her support from voters.

“The moment at which you turn someone into a sex object, you put yourself in a position of authority over them, which is why sexual harassment is classified as being a form of gender discrimination in the workplace,” Heldman said. “They are the object who exists for you, and you are validating their worth.”

Or, as former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer Jess McIntosh put it: “Defining a woman’s value by whether or not men want to have sex with her is the oldest trick in the patriarchy. Either way, she’s diminished.”

The problem for these men is that Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t seem interested in what they think of her. She doesn’t seek attention for anything other than her policy ideas and ambition, even though Americans still seem to dislike power-seeking women. The typical strategies men use to devalue women ― “sexualizing, dismissing, controlling, teasing, criticizing, interrupting, psychopathologizing, humiliating, abusing,” according to one psychologist ― seem to bounce right off her.

“Alexandria presents a challenge, because conservative men or men in general who are encouraged to objectify women are attracted to her, but she’s also ‘unmanageable’ in that she doesn’t exist for them,” Heldman said. “She is a woman who not only has now formal power, but a lot of informal power, in that she doesn’t give a damn what they think of her. I think it’s a disconcerting place for men who may be used to attractive women seeking their validation.”

That kind of inability to deal with a woman like Ocasio-Cortez is, in many ways, emblematic of the broader crisis facing the Republican Party, which is moving backward in terms of gender diversity in Congress even as Democrats add more women and people of color to their ranks each year. In the 1990s, women were equally distributed across both parties in Congress; today, there are 13 Republican women and 89 Democratic women. Republicans have only ever had one black woman in the House of Representatives, Mia Love of Utah, and she just lost her bid for re-election.

That’s a self-reinforcing dynamic, said Laurel Elder, politics professor and head of the gender studies program at Hartwick College.

“The way they’ve talked about some of the new women in the 116th Congress, and the way they’ve tried to belittle or mock [Ocasio-Cortez], this just makes women feel like, ‘Oh, this party is not welcoming of women,’” Elder said. “‘This is not a place where I’d feel comfortable throwing my hat in the ring.’ Now the dynamic has a life of its own.”

The obsessive focus on Ocasio-Cortez and her past may not just discourage Republican women from seeking office ― it could intimidate any woman who grew up in the age of social media and is interested in politics but doesn’t want to see her adolescent life splashed all over the front pages.

For now, though, Ocasio-Cortez has proven able to parry the attacks, simply by holding up a mirror to the men who are convulsing in anxiety as she rises to influence.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: Chicago Sun Times

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is under fire because she’s right

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U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) (C) during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol to unveil the Green New Deal resolution. | Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

By Jesse Jackson

The big guns are out for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the charismatic first-term legislator from New York.

In an apparent swipe at Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump used part of his rambling State of the Union address to say he was “alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country.”

Billionaire former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz cited Ocasio-Cortez’s support for a 70 percent tax rate on income above $10 million a year as one reason he may decide to run as an independent for president, and not as a Democrat.

OPINION

The young congresswoman isn’t easily cowed. She called out Trump, saying “I think he’s scared.”

“He feels himself losing on the issues. Every single policy proposal that we have adopted and presented to the American public has been overwhelmingly popular, even some with a majority of Republican voters supporting.”

Ocasio-Cortez is exactly right. Schultz may think calls for Medicare for all are “un-American,” but the vast majority of Americans support it. Consider the following:

Reuters poll: 70 percent support Medicare for all, including 52 percent of Republicans.

Fox News poll: 70 percent support raising taxes on those making over $10 million a year.

Bloomberg poll: 62 percent support tuition-free college.

Kaiser Foundation poll: 92 percent support having Medicare negotiate with drug companies to lower drug prices.

Hart poll: 63 percent support $15 minimum wage.

Yale/George Mason poll: 81 percent support the Green New Deal plan.

There is a wide gulf between the political center and the moral center.

Dr. Martin Luther King used to teach that “cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right? There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”

Politicians worry about donors. They hear from lobbyists, from special interests, from corporations that can spend unlimited money in political campaigns without revealing it.

The moral center is concerned with what is right — and what can work.

What is different now is that the moral center — what is right — is also increasingly popular. The political class is running scared because more and more people understand that the rules have been rigged to benefit only the few. So Trump and Republicans and billionaires like Schultz yell “socialism,” “Venezuela,” “extremism,” “radicalism.” They need to spread fear to protect a discredited political center.

Don’t fall for it. Medicare for all isn’t socialism; it’s common sense. A living wage isn’t radical; it’s a moral imperative.

We now suffer an extreme inequality not witnessed since before the Great Depression. It is time for the moral center to make itself heard.

And now a new generation of leaders is rising that just may be ready to take on the fight. Like AOC, they will come under intense fire. They will succeed only if we build a popular movement strong enough to overcome the resistance.

AOC is young and smart and charismatic, and she and her colleagues may help us begin to heal a nation.
 
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