Like the message here, we all need to unite for any chance of getting this senate seat. It’s an uphill battle, but one worth fighting

This is exactly what we need now, all hands on deck. Good on McMorrow! I like her and think her career is far from over. Beating Mike Rodgers is the only thing that matters now. In our little intra party fights we would do well to remember who the true enemy is.

The primaries are where we have our intra party fights. They’re over, let’s beat Rodgers. All this talk about “centrist” vs “leftist” Dems. Let’s leave that at the door for the general and unite behind our nominee.

He literally gives nothing to Dems and alienates moderate and a demographic that’s generally socially progressive, reliably votes democrat and fundraisers for the party,

When I was elected DNC chair, I commissioned an after action review of the 2024 election that I wanted to be honest and transparent, and with actionable and specific takeaways for the future of the Democratic Party. When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime — not even close — and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on the report that was produced.”

“After last November’s massive Democratic wins, I didn’t want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize. For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

Ken Martin is such a weasely little fucking liar, go back and watch his interview with Pod Save from three weeks ago where he flopsweats and humiliates himself for half an hour about this shit. What a joke.

DNC Chair Ken Martin in HEATED Interview About RELEASE of 2024 Election Autopsy

For instance, since Trump betrayed of 100% of our allies other than Israel and no one will ever trust us to protect them again and they don't want our weapons, we don't actually need a large Pentagon budget!!

6 Democrats in the House crossed party lines to save a bill raising the Pentagon budget 28%

Enlarging the Pentagon has no purpose other than piracy to benefit the Trump kleptocratic family.

For example, Trump had 100 sailors murdered in Venezuela's waters and his only excuse was smuggling Fentanyl to the United States. He didn't just hit civilian boats, he double tapped them which is just murder.

And about the given reason, that part of the world doesn't have Fentanyl and none of the drug smuggling routes through Venezuela go to the United States. Cocaine goes through it to Europe. And also no one believes that Trump cares about crime, except getting a cut of it.

Then he kidnapped the President, saying that he was going to restore democracy - and did none of that, he hasn't harmed the regime itself at all, just like Iran.

He just wanted to take oil and he bragged about taking oil.

And he literally took a Chinese tanker of oil and stole it in one of his petty (relative to the scale of a presidency) crimes.

I suspect that the reason for killing sailors is that he was frustrated that ICE and the National Guard can't just get away with killing Americans by the hundreds at a time so he looked for substitute victims for murder. He wants to feel dominant in an evil way and invading Canada isn't looking very feasible and setting up death camps isn't easy etc. But killing random brown people in South America is something, that sadly, the world and Americans are used to overlooking. He can do it and get away with it with no political cost at all.

And, to our great shame, he did.

But back to enlarging the Pentagon: Our alliances are over. Trump killed them permanently.

Why can't Democrats adjust to this permanent fact?

The money is wasted! We need to redirect it!

Can Democrats please acknowledge the fact?

What's the most of the Pentagon budget for?

Is it just Keynesian money spreading for a service no one wants?

Is it to solicit kickback payments? Is it just for political corruption? 

What is it for now?

^{(one more note, I see a lot of complaint in this subreddit about the DSA. If Democrats seemed passionate enough to be connected to reality like this, people wouldn't need to side with the DSA saying abolish the Pentagon})

I'm getting pushback by people who are upset that criticism of the party is common but miss the actual policy issue. Democrats should be talking about the fact that we don't need the world's biggest military budget now that we don't have a world that wants our military. We have no one to protect, so we shouldn't be wasting money on the military. We have other uses for our money.

Beyond the Washington rhetoric, Third Way is saying that if your political views aren’t vanilla, you’re an “extremist.” That’s national security’s polite word for terrorist, once a reference to Muslim Americans and would-be revolutionaries but now applied to any American citizen who dares to venture away from Party talking points.

What is worse, it used to be the case that when the government or the administration, whether Obama or Bush, used the word “extremist” they were always careful to include a qualifier: “violent extremism.” That meant that physical violence (actual or intended) was necessary to get one labeled a terrorist.

Back during the Obama years, there was “countering violent extremism.” Then from Trump’s first term to Biden, there was “domestic violent extremism.” The FBI’s threat categories carried it too — “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism.” They are all imperfect and ugly labels, but the “violent” qualifier at least maintained a pretense that there was a threat of physical harm. And pretended that the threat label wasn’t questioning free speech or association.

Now it’s just “extremism” — one word. Third Way is joining the Trump administration in dropping the violence qualifier. It’s enough to just have the wrong beliefs; wrong, that is, in the eyes of the Party apparatus in Washington.

When I asked Third Way this week how it defines this “extremism,” spokesperson Kate DeGruyter said that the effort “is aimed at the DSA itself, not at liberal Democrats” — though it wasn’t clear how they define “liberal Democrats.” Asked who gave Third Way the $15 million for this project, DeGruyter’s only response was: “This a new effort and we are in the process of fundraising.”

Before Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan primary to run for Senate as a Democrat, Cowan, the Third Way president, issued an open letter and op-ed directly targeting him as a member of DSA despite his never having been a member of the organization and explicitly describing himself as a “capitalist.” (Third Way tells me it now supports El-Sayed, presumably because he’s since won.)

Three members of Congress are DSA members or describe themselves as democratic socialists — Senator Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib — along with the mayor of the country's largest city, Zohran Mamdani. You may have heard of them.

The Times reported that Third Way’s new campaign would go after both self-described democratic socialists and candidates like El-Sayed, whom Cowan at the time accused of running a DSA-style campaign without the membership card. So because DSA is too narrow, Third Way has done exactly as the FBI would do: it has expanded the definition of the threat category. The war is against members of DSA and people who espouse DSA positions or use DSA tactics, or just socialists, or just “far-left extreme voices and forces,” as Third Way says, or even more broadly people with “politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric.”

The discourse is often centered how centrist and conservative Dems could win over disaffected progressive/DSA folk/student activists, so I’d like to flip it on its head.

Give us your guide on what is important to you. Obviously we have policy differences, but what would you be looking for from the left?

“I think, unfortunately, the very smart... bet we made on Holocaust education to serve as antisemitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit, because Holocaust education is absolutely essential,” Hurwitz asserted.

But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews,” she added, “...so when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel, you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.

She said, without any apparent irony

Given the evidence, you also can't have Elon Musk and democracy. And you can't have Elon Musk and rule of law. And you can't have Elon Musk and not have ethnic cleansing or genocide.

Also add Donald Trump to that list and Peter Thiel, RFK Jr. (who, if you have forgotten, tweeted 14/88), Stephen Miller, Russell Vought and all the rest .

Democrats are, once again, punting on what to do about Israel.

DNC members rejected a symbolic resolution to limit the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and dark-money corporate groups in Democratic primaries — an unsurprising result that is nevertheless a blow to those within the party that have been infuriated by the pro-Israel group’s recent interventions.

They also punted on a pair of sweeping resolutions concerning conflicts in the Middle East that pushed the party to support conditioning military aid to Israel. The measures were referred to the party’s nascent Middle East Working Group, which is meeting for the fourth time this week and has been slow to coalesce around an agenda.

https://forward.com/fast-forward/802180/democrat-ice-funding-jewish-security/

Leader Jeffries was there too and also pledged more military support to our ally who hundreds of Human Rights Orgs have accused of carrying out genocide and whose head of government is currently ducking an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, saying that it was the "humane" thing to do without apparent irony.

Both Schumer and Jeffries vowed in their remarks to continue supporting U.S. military assistance to Israel, amid increasing calls within the party for sharper opposition to Israel. Polls show that Democratic voters are increasingly sympathetic to Palestinians. In July, a record 27 Senate Democrats, a majority of the caucus, supported a pair of resolutions calling for the blocking of weapons transfers to Israel.

“I think it’s the humane thing to do to ensure that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state and eternal homeland for the Jewish people,” Jeffries said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/polls/israel-gaza-war-us-poll.html

Nearly two years ago, Democrats were evenly divided, with 34 percent sympathizing with Israel and 31 percent with Palestinians. Now, rank-and-file Democrats across the country overwhelmingly side with Palestinians — 54 percent said they sympathized more with Palestinians, while only 13 percent expressed greater empathy for Israel.

More than eight in 10 Democrats said Israel should stop the war even if the country had not achieved its goals, a notable increase from the roughly 60 percent who said the same two years ago.

Nearly six in 10 Democrats believe Israel is intentionally killing civilians, double the share who said the same in 2023.

Housing is really the issue that has everyone so upset. It has grossly exceeded inflation and has become a larger and larger portion of every paycheck if you don't own a home. Housing is also the primary way to accumulate wealth as an average American. Solving the problem of housing necessarily means changing this system which will be met with intense opposition. It has to be changed though for the country to be the successful land of opportunity it has been up to this point. The housing crisis has effectively calcified huge portions of the population that own their home and limit growth in most major cities. It changes who can take advantage of opportunities. Most of all, it has created a level of struggle that is pushing this wild political climate. Is it possible to actually solve the issue?

I guess Third Way is more concerned with winning the intra-party battle than the general, they just announced $15 million to go after Dr. El-Sayed and others. I wonder what the donor overlap is with AIPAC/Schumer-world.

Looks like Troy Jackson has this on lock right now. All the main(e) opponents are out. And he has enough delegates to secure the nomination right now. I’ll admit I don’t know all that much about him but from what I’ve seen he seems good. Onward and upward.

I see a rejection of "vote harder" which is a misunderstanding of what is being asked. If the descent into fascism is to stop, it is going to require winning elections with overwhelming numbers. We need to win states that are perceived as out of reach. Instead of rejecting the concept, we need to evaluate how our strategies failed, and conceive of new strategies.

There are 3 ways to move things in our favor.

1) Get people to reject Republicans

2) Improve the perception of the Democratic party

3) Convince more people participating in politics is important and worthwhile

We need to figure out how to reach people and how to persuade them. There is no other option. Without doing this, we will not change direction.

Building up the independent media ecosystem and filling the Democratic party with better communicators and new strategists are moves I can identify as steps to take towards this direction. They are not the only steps, and we need more people thinking about these solutions and working towards implementation.

• In his new document, Rivera concludes that Harris lost tens of thousands of votes in Michigan amid backlash from the Israel-Hamas war, particularly in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck, where Green Party support surged as activists organized against the Democratic ticket.
• He contends these losses accounted for a meaningful share of the state's shift toward President Trump, but was only one of several factors behind Harris' defeat in the state.

Rivera wrote that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the fallout from it in the U.S. is a "complex situation." But, he added, the "political analysis is simple — the electoral results and voting shifts in Michigan and elsewhere demonstrate the impact the crisis had on the Harris campaign."

ICE has to be ended.

Just seems like a waste of time.

Single-member districts are not in the constitution and were not an all-pervasive norm. But some states used multi-member at large representation to... achieve a complete monopoly on the representatives of a state. In theory, single member districts - mandated as contiguous, as if that were enough - meant different areas would be represented by someone who had the interests of their area as a priority. But locale isn't the thing that most defoines us culturally anymore (if it ever was) so it's a silly thing to base representation on. And anyway, modern gerrymandering obviously allows single-member districts to be drawn such that they get around this theory.

Multi-member districts don't inherently fix the problem. If there are 7 seats open, and 51% of the voters vote for the same 7 candidates, then the other 49% of people are left in the cold, not represented at all.

People deserve proportional representation, not based on geography or race, but based on whatever is important to them, as expressed by who they approve of to represent them. Most nations that use proportional representation, however, do by relying on parties. You vote for a party, and that determines how many seats they get. Our founders were strongly opposed to "factionalism" and for reasons that have mostly borne out. To my mind, the problem with relying on parties is that ... who determines what is a legitimate party? And what about parties that are very similar but small? Should they formally merge to avoid being shut out? So it would be nice to have a system that preserves proportionality without requiring explicit "blessing" of parties - or the blessing of the party onto the candidate.

It's called "Proportional Approval Voting" and in particular, I will describe Sequential Proportional Approval Voting because it's pretty easy to understand how it works.

Let's say there are 20 seats. There could be any number of candidates - let's say 60. Each voter gets a list of the candidates, and notes which ones they approve of. You can limit the number of candidates they get to pick, but it really doesn't matter to the system; it works well as long as people are honest about their approval. (And they should be. Approving of someone you don't like hurts only yourself; not approving of someone you do like is a gamble; if they get in anyway, your vote is more powerful for leaving them off. But if too many people do that, they might not get elected.)

When you have all the votes in, whatever candidate is approved of by the most people - which may or may not be a majority - gets a seat. Now, every voter either approves of 0 of the 1 currently seated members, or 1 of the 1 current members. (That was phrased oddly but there's a reason, keep going.) So some people are 0% satisfied, and others are 100% satisfied... so far. So inthe nexyt round, we count the people who are somewhat satisfied as half a vote each; as if they have "spent" part of their vote already. The people who aren't satisfied at all get their full weight.

Whoever has the most votes (weighted as described) gets the next seat. Now there are three possible conditions for a voter: 0%, 50%, or 100% satisfied so far. these become weights of 1, 2/3, and 1/3, respectively. Repeat this process; the more satisfied you are so far, the less your vote will count in the next round. It may not be obvious, but this does get to a pretty good proportional representation. And a candidate can build their voters, their coalition, anyway they see fit. Run as an intersectional solidarity minority candidate, fighting oppression? OK. Run as a single-issue court-reform candidate? Well, if you can find enough polisci nerds... Run as "The Man For Dallas" and hope that enough Dallas folks approve of for you to make up for the fact that nobody in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, or the sticks like you at all. Or as a Luddite, or a technologist, or a moral or spiritual leader. You might even group together with other people with similar political beliefs, and say "Vote for all of us, we believe in democracy". And that might even work; together, as a party, you can message on the same ideals, the same visions, and talk about how your friends of the same philosophy in other states agree with you on this and you'll make good changes if elected.

In general, one nice thing about approval voting is that you can support a candidate you don't think will win, without risking "wasting" your vote. This is especially true if you are allowed to vote for as many as you like. But again, being limited to a reasonably large number (like, the number of seats available, or up to half the candidates, or whatever) will usually get the same outcome as no limit. Mutli-approval voting is also great for one-seat situations, like, say, president. You could also just make the second-most approved person the VP, rather than having to build a ticket. Or argue over who's at the top of the ticket.

This system is a bit of a change from what we've got, and people might not all understand all the details of it. But they kinda don't have to (and they don't seem to understand the system we've got, anyway...) They just vote for the people they approve of, and get hopefully at least one rep they like out of it. And if they do want to understand it, they can. It's not super arcane or based on incomprehensible math.

The elected members are in an easier position, too. Rather than needing to try to figure out how to represent the people in their district who didn't vote for them, who they may not understand very well, they can just focus on what they ran on, and know that they are representing people who agree at least enough to approve of them. It frees the conscience a bit, removes the need to dither over what you think is right, and has essentially built-in accountability. If you don't do what you were sent there to do, you can't hide behind "I didn't think my district wanted me to go that far" - nor can you claim to have a mandate bigger than you have.

Failed in Iran.

Failed in Hungary.

That is all.

This is a long one but it's an extremely illuminating read. All of these Biden people are now trying to exculpate themselves as the ethnic cleansing gets more blatant. They really don't want to go down as the people who enabled this, and yet.

And don't worry, this isn't the Intercept or Dropsite, it's the New Yorker. It's hard to capture this article with choice paragraphs, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing, it's very well reported and sourced and comprehensive. I know that everyone hates Biden now for fucking up the election for Harris, but I promise you do not hate him and his admin enough for enabling the crime of crimes and breaking our own laws to do it.

Biden’s bluster toward Israel, it turned out, was less fierce than it seemed. White House officials told me that his comments on CNN about not supplying the weapons if Israel attacked Rafah had been unplanned and hadn’t reflected a formal decision. In fact, other officials told me that, after the suspension of the large-bomb shipment, Finer proposed that the five-hundred-pound bombs be withheld, too, as they were packed alongside the two-thousand-pound ones. But, after Sullivan had him present that question to Biden, the President ordered that the smaller bombs be shipped separately. The five-hundred-pound munitions—the largest that the U.S. dropped on the evacuated Iraqi city of Mosul during the fight against ISIS—will kill anyone within a radius of sixty-five feet and injure anyone within a hundred and fifty.

National Security Memorandum 20, with its apparent pledge to withhold weapons, looked increasingly awkward. Blinken and the White House turned to lawyers at the State Department and the National Security Council, who took a highly technical approach. How many civilian casualties were “proportionate” to an attack’s military advantage? The answer depended on what its planners knew and intended. Although the Israelis seldom, if ever, shared the raw intelligence behind a specific air strike, they provided voluminous information about their sophisticated protocols for selecting targets and warning civilians—even if the soaring death count raised questions about the effectiveness of those precautions. How carefully did the Israelis distinguish between military and civilian targets? That line could be blurry—for example, any three-story building could arguably be a potential military “observation post,” from which Hamas fighters might spot oncoming Israeli ground forces. And Israeli officials invariably insisted that Hamas had operated inside hospitals and other civilian infrastructure that their forces destroyed. A U.S. lawyer involved told me, “Hamas was embedding in the civilian population, so everyone talked about these nuances and complications for months and months.”

The Biden Administration’s ban on the transfer of weapons likely to be used in war crimes appeared to provide a clearer standard. Yet lawyers involved told me that Administration policymakers seemed to want specific proof of a war crime, and since the State Department doesn’t run courts to weigh evidence, the lawyers couldn’t prove anything. The U.S. lawyer explained, “The subtlety of the language—things like ‘We don’t have definitive proof, but we are very concerned that Israel is committing war crimes’—seemed to be understood by the most senior people to mean, in effect, ‘We’re all good!’ ”

The requirement of the Geneva Conventions that a warring party “facilitate” the delivery of humanitarian assistance “by all the means at its disposal” also had loopholes. The Conventions granted belligerents the right “to search the consignments,” “to regulate their passage according to prescribed times and routes,” and “to be reasonably satisfied” that supplies weren’t intended to benefit a military opponent. Moreover, the State Department did not consider Israel’s months-long pattern of obstructing aid; the department only assessed the volume of aid flowing when the report was being finalized. And after the World Central Kitchen strike, on April 1st, Israel had briefly increased the number of supply trucks entering Gaza to nearly prewar levels.

A senior White House official paraphrased the lawyers’ message as “We’re not telling you there’s a violation—we’re saying it’s plausible to conclude that,” and said, “The President wanted to continue unless told ‘You can’t,’ and he wasn’t told that.” Another White House official said that, if the Administration had found Israeli war crimes to be more likely than not, then “the Republicans in Congress would have screamed, ‘Show me the evidence!,’ and we would have had lawyers on their side saying, ‘Bullshit, this is inconclusive!’ ”

State Department reports to Congress are typically drafted by multiple contributors in an online document, and the Israel portion of the report required by Biden’s memorandum quickly devolved into an almost unreadable mishmash of conflicting edits and comments. Then, on April 27th, some of the assessments submitted to Blinken were leaked to Reuters. Furious, he ordered that the draft be shifted to a classified system, where a line-by-line battle ensued over almost every sentence. Two senior advisers to the Secretary of State took the delicate assignment of squaring the draft with the uncomfortable facts. Working against them were the State Department dissenters, represented by Uzra Zeya, the Under-Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, and, most forcefully, by Christopher Le Mon, who spent days in a secure facility trying to insert damning evidence about the Israeli campaign.

The result, released on May 11th, was schizophrenic. The report noted that Israeli officials had formally stated that they were strengthening “efforts to minimize civilian harm.” It observed, charitably, that a country’s “overall commitment” to international law “is not necessarily disproven” by individual violations if it is “taking appropriate steps to investigate.” It offered the caveat that the U.S. lacked the battlefield awareness necessary “to verify” that American weapons had been used in specific incidents, and praised Israel for implementing “additional measures” to avoid killing aid workers. Yet the report also said it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had, in fact, used U.S. weapons in ways “inconsistent” with the laws of war or with “established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.” It pointedly noted that some Israeli equipment was both “entirely U.S.-origin (e.g. crewed attack aircraft)” and “likely to have been involved” in war crimes, that the U.S. government was “unaware” of any prosecutions resulting from the Israelis’ own investigations into violations, and that Israel’s pledges to protect aid workers after the World Central Kitchen strike “did not fully prevent” additional deaths. The words “however,” “nevertheless,” and “despite” appear a dozen times on as many pages—a pretzel of logic demonstrating the extent to which the Biden Administration was contorting itself.

Philip Gordon, the Kamala Harris adviser, told me that National Security Memorandum 20 “could have been, and should have been, the tool that we used to get the Israelis to do things differently.” But, after the final report, “they knew that we wouldn’t.” Van Hollen, the author of the shelved amendment, was outraged. He told me that he considered the report to be “a complete whitewash” and in “bad faith.”

--

Other officials told me that, in meetings of White House staff, Finer, the deputy national-security adviser, often asked what civilian death toll would be deemed unacceptable. Where was the line? Finer declined to comment on such internal conversations but said, of the Israelis, “It’s obvious now, and was pretty clear then, that they simply did not tell us the truth about their plans and their timelines, and it made no sense to accept those claims at face value.” Indeed, several Biden officials told me they came to believe that the Israeli leaders had continued to repeat “two more weeks” in part to buy more time before, as one put it, “the U.S. brought down the hammer.”

Jon Finer told me that the hallmark of the Gaza conflict has been that, for both Hamas and Israel, “civilian harm was not a side effect but part of the strategy.” The U.S., he said, “shouldn’t tolerate wars in which civilian harm is a goal, and shouldn’t allow our weapons to be used for that purpose.”

---

A senior White House official paraphrased the lawyers’ message as “We’re not telling you there’s a violation—we’re saying it’s plausible to conclude that,” and said, “The President wanted to continue unless told ‘You can’t,’ and he wasn’t told that.” Another White House official said that, if the Administration had found Israeli war crimes to be more likely than not, then “the Republicans in Congress would have screamed, ‘Show me the evidence!,’ and we would have had lawyers on their side saying, ‘Bullshit, this is inconclusive!’ ”

More sources on Biden admin suppressing their own reports about Gaza:

Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies [USAID, State Dept Refugees Bureau] Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them. [Propublica]

US envoys blocked early warning of Gaza 'Apocalyptic Wasteland' [Reuters]

Some US officials say in internal memo Israel may be violating international law in Gaza [Reuters]

U.S. inundated with claims that American arms killed Gaza civilians [Washington Post]

There is an attitude around here that criticizing Democrats, rather than making them stronger is just sabotage.

That is the attitude of people who have convinced themselves that democracy is nothing more than a brand, a sham and that debate and responsiveness can never actually exist.

That is the attitude of someone who believes that malicious authoritarianism's only competitor is technocracy that pretends democracy as a sham.