Two reasons why Hillary Clinton will never be President

For one, Hillary Clinton seems to want to be able to control the press or at least, her press.

The story via CNN:

Gorham, New Hampshire (CNN)Hillary Clinton’s campaign used a rope to keep journalists away from the candidate on Saturday while she walked in this small town’s July Fourth parade.

The ensuing photos of journalists, including a CNN reporter, being somewhat dragged by a thin white rope as Clinton walked down Main Street caught fire online.

Initially, Clinton’s campaign was not using a rope to corral the press, allowing journalists to get close to her and ask her questions.

But campaign aides said they brought the rope out because they feared the press scrum of around a dozen reporters and photojournalists would obstruct the view of New Hampshire voters attending the parade.

The rope was held by two of Clinton’s advance staffers, who at times walked ahead of reporters, seemingly pulling them along the parade route.

“You guys, we are going to do 10 yards and a little more organized,” said one of the advance staffers after breaking out the rope.

In explaining why they were using the rope, the staffer said, “so maybe a voter could see her, that kind of thing.”

Clinton’s Secret Service detail also urged journalists to abide by the mobile rope line.

“You are not going fast enough,” one agent said when the rope tightened around a reporter’s waist.

When Hillary Clinton is not trying to control the press covering her; she is outright lying about her record. Case in point:

Via Politico:

HANOVER, N.H. — Hillary Clinton arrived in this liberal New England enclave with a message for anyone thinking about voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders of next-door Vermont: “I take a backseat to no one when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values.”

Sanders, according to the latest New Hampshire polls, is trailing Clinton by just eight points. And at the first stop of her two-day swing through the early-voting state, Clinton highlighted contrasts with her main Democratic rival without mentioning him by name.

“We have to take on the gun lobby one more time,” said Clinton, speaking without notes or a teleprompter in front of a crowd of about 850 Dartmouth students and native Granite Staters. “The majority of gun owners support universal background checks, and we have to work very hard to muster the public opinion to convince Congress that’s what they should vote for.”

She said it was the “height of irresponsibility not to talk about it.” Sanders, who represents a pro-gun constituency, has voted against the Brady Bill, which required federal background checks for gun purchasers, as well as other major bills supported by gun-control advocates.

She also signaled that she would have no problem defending President Barack Obama’s domestic agenda.

Well, there is only one problem with that little statement, it, like most everything that comes out of Hillary Clinton’s mouth, is a bald-faced lie. Ron Chusid at Liberal Values Blog explains and I am going to quote the thing, links and all. Hopefully, he does not mind:

Hillary Clinton said, “I take a backseat to no one when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values.” Quite a lie, but not surprising coming from a candidate who the majority of voters agree is dishonest in recent polls.

Clinton believes she needs to make such false claims now that Bernie Sanders is posing a serious threat in Iowa and New Hampshire, but she will hardly convince Sanders supporters that she has ever been progressive. The former Goldwater Girl has maintained conservative values throughout her career, except that Barry Goldwater was more socially liberal than Clinton.

In February Truth-Outhad a post on Five Reasons No Progressive Should Support Hillary Clinton, which is worth reading–and there are several more reasons besides what is in that article.

Besides the economic differences which have dominated the campaign so far, it was Sanders who, reviewing the same intelligence as Hillary Clinton, voted against the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton not only voted for the war, she went to the right of other Democrats who voted to authorize force in falsely claiming there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. She showed she did not learn from her mistake when she continued to advocate for increased military intervention as Secretary of State.

In an era when the nation is becoming more liberal on social issues, Hillary Clinton’s long-standing conservatism on social/cultural issues also make her too conservative to be the Democratic nominee. This was seen when she was in the Senate when she was a member of The Fellowship, being influenced on social issues by religious conservatives such as Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback. Clinton’s affiliation with the religious right was seen in her support for the Workplace Religious Freedom Act , a bill introduced by Rick Santorum andopposed by the American Civil Liberties Union for promoting discrimination and reducing access to health care, along with her promotion of restrictions on video games and herintroduction of a bill making flag burning a felony. Her social conservatism is also seen in her weak record on abortion rights, such as supporting parental notification laws andstigmatizing women who have abortions with the manner in which she calls for abortion to be “safe, legal and rare.” Clinton was speaking out against same-sex as recently as 2013.

Clinton has disappointed environmentalists in supporting fracking and off-shore drilling. Her views on the Keystone XL Pipeline is just one of many controversial issues where Clinton has refused to give her opinion. The vast amounts of money she has received from backers of the pipeline lead many environmentalists to doubt that Clinton can be counted on to oppose the pipeline, or take any positions contrary to the wishes of the petroleum industry.

Bernie Sanders voted against the Patriot Act while Clinton supported it. Sanders has spoken out against the illegal NSA surveillance while Clinton has remained quite, and has an overallpoor record on civil liberties. Clinton’s failures to archive her email as required when she was Secretary of State and disclose donations to the Clinton Foundation as she had agreed to are just the latest examples of her long-standing hostility towards government transparency.

Saying she is a progressive is not going to win over progressives after she has spent her career opposing liberal values.

Not to mention that Hillary’s hubby sold out the American worker, when he signed the NAFTA Bill in the 1990’s. Speaking of unions, the AFL-CIO just sold its members up the river too:

Richard Trumka has a message for state and local AFL-CIO leaders tempted to endorse Bernie Sanders: Don’t.

In a memo this week to state, central and area divisions of the labor federation, and obtained by POLITICO, the AFL-CIO chief reminded the groups that its bylaws don’t permit them to “endorse a presidential candidate” or “introduce, consider, debate, or pass resolutions or statements that indicate a preference for one candidate over another.” Even “‘personal’ statements” of candidate preference are verboten, Trumka said.

The memo comes amid signs of a growing split between national union leaders — mindful of the fact that Clinton remains the undisputed favorite for the nomination — and local officials and rank and file, who are increasingly drawn to the Democratic Party’s growing progressive wing, for whom Sanders is the latest standard-bearer.

The South Carolina and Vermont AFL-CIOs have passed resolutions supporting Sanders, and some local AFL-CIO leaders in Iowa want to introduce a resolution at their August convention backing the independent senator from Vermont. More than a thousand labor supporters, including several local AFL-CIO-affiliated leaders, have signed on to “Labor for Bernie,” a group calling on national union leaders to give Sanders a shot at an endorsement.

So much for standing for the American worker eh? Oh, there’s more:

The AFL-CIO’s constituent unions — as distinct from divisions of the federation itself — remain free to make endorsements however they wish. But they can’t make those endorsements acting through local and regional divisions of the AFL-CIO, as Trumka reminded everyone in the memo.

His message wasn’t anything new for the federation’s state leaders: They know that endorsement decisions belong to the national leadership. Still, it was unusual for Trumka to call them out in a memo. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one before like this,” said Jeff Johnson, the president of the AFL-CIO’s Washington state labor council.

Johnson agreed that it was important for the AFL-CIO to speak with a single voice. But “there’s a lot of anxiety out there in the labor movement,” he said, “and we’re desperately searching for a candidate that actually speaks to working-class values. The Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders camp is very, very attractive to many of our members and to many of us as leaders, because they’re talking about the things that need to happen in this country.”

Similarly, Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Steven Tolman said he agreed that Trumka had to lay down the law. More tellingly, though, he added: “Bernie Sanders has spent his life actually fighting for working people. He’s made no secret of it, and he’s used it as his mantra. And that I respect very much.” When asked about Clinton’s candidacy, Tolman was less effusive: “Who? Who? Please. I mean with all respect, huh?”

Other state-level union leaders affiliated with the AFL-CIO didn’t bother to give Trumka and his memo lip service. “I was disappointed by it,” said UPTE-CWA Local 9119 organizing coordinator Lisa Kermish, of Berkeley, California. “I think that local unions and national unions, while it’s important to work together for strength, I think that this is in some ways truncating dialogue. And I find that very unfortunate.”

The memo surfaced a day before top staffers for Clinton and Sanders participated in a meet-and-greet with AFL-CIO political directors Thursday morning in Washington. A person who attended the meeting said those present included Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, Clinton labor liaison Nikki Budzinski, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver and top Sanders strategist Tad Devine.

If I were the President of the UAW right about now; I would be calling an emergency meeting and holding a vote to leave the AFL-CIO ASAP. No wonder the teamsters left them after the 2004 election. The AFL-CIO does not give a tinker’s damn about the American worker. They simply care about power and money; and believe you me, they get plenty of it. This is proof of that.

This my friends, is one of the many, many examples why I stopped voting for Democrats. Social issues were a secondary reason. My primary reason is of stuff like this; how the progressive left is chock full of liars and corruption. There was a time in America, when the organized labor movement was something of integrity that stood for those who they represented. Sadly, those days ended long ago. Now, before any says it; are there liars and corruption in the Republican Party? Yes, there is. I never said there was not. But, this sort of blatant control of press and supporters; is like nothing I ever saw before.

 

AFL-CIO Posts tribute to Pete Seeger, screws up photo

d’oh!

I tend to think that Pete would get a kick out of it though.

I let them know about it:

 

Oy! They need to hire me; I would at least get the tributes right! 🙄

Update: Can’t be no worse than me. In the process of writing the post, I posted embed code in the visual editor! I think me and the AFL-CIO both need more coffee! 🙄

Update on hot dog stand owner

Needless to say, I feel like a chump. I trusted that those that I linked to, might be have actually telling the truth about this incident. Well, it turns out, they, of course, were lying about that as well. Go figure. Rolling Eyes

Anyhow, Chris Savage, much to his credit flushes out the spin and hype about this little lie told by the corporatist right. I hope like heck he does not mind me quoting him a bit, but here goes:

The right wingnut blogosphere is apoplectic that Lansing, Michigan’s iconic “Hot Dog Guy”, Clinton Tarver, was a victim of union thug violence at yesterday’s anti-Right to Work for Less rally. The reality is that Tarver is simply a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He also happens to be married to the Michigan Republican Party’s Ethnic Caucus Vice-Chair — perhaps one of the loneliest leadership positions in the entire state.

[…]

This is a far cry from the all-caps-can-you-believe-what-these-union-thugs-did freak out by conservatives who would have you believe that Tarver lost his entire livelihood at the hands of union goons. Tarver was set up on some tables under the tent and did not even have his cart. He must have had a very slow day. Anyone who was at the rally and wandered by the two giant AFP tents will tell you that they were essentially empty all day. There were a few AFP folks standing out front, taunting union members and provoking confrontations, but there was not a lot of activity inside the tent where Tarver was.

[…]

….According the article, they have raised over $10,000 for him (UPDATE: MIRS News reports that it’s now over $16,000.) The total value of what he lost in the scuffle?

$500.

I wonder what they’ll do with the thousands of extra dollars not needed to buy more buns, hot dogs, ketchup, mustard and a couple of folding tables and coolers?

Certainly Clint Tarver didn’t deserve to be treated as shabbily as he was by the union folks there. His wife claims he was called a “nigger” and jeered for working for the enemy. If true, that’s reprehensible and inexcusable. But the off-the-charts poutrage from the right on this is an absolute joke. Some of the same people decrying the verbal taunts that Tarver experiencde are here on this very website calling union members all sorts of hideous names. So let’s keep it real, shall we?

One more thing: if you’d like to meet Clint Tarver in person, I’m hearing that he’ll be selling hot dogs outside Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville’s office tomorrow, capitalizing on his newfound political fame with Republicans. Stop by and buy a dog.

Adding… Let’s not kid ourselves about what “Tentgate” and “Hot Doggate” are all about:distracting the country from noticing that corporatist ideologues have turned the birthplace of American organized labor into a Right to Work for Less state.It’s a smokescreen, chaff to make sure the conversation is not about screwing union members and is, instead, about the AFP losing a couple of tents.

I can understand the spin, it is what happens in politics; but I will never understand the lying about what happens. Do these people even have any sort of conscience at all?!?! The real cute part is this; this Steven Crowder guy, claims to be a Christian — to the point of writing about how stinking Christian he was to not get his noodle wet until he was married. But yet, he lies like this? My question is this: which God and Jesus does he serve? Does this man know not what the Bible says about lying and liars in the Old and New Testaments? Hypnotized I really hated to bring religion into it, but good grief these people give  good and honest Christians a horribly bad name. Not talking

Now before anyone points it out; Yes, I have commented on the fact that I thought his stuff was funny. Yes, I did and I still think he is funny, as an comedian and an actor. However, when he started acting as shill for the corporatist right, and came out in support of this union busting crap by Governor Snyder; he lost me. When he was making his video himself, without people like AFP backing him up. I respected him. I no longer do as such. Because he is a corporate shill.  Which is a far cry from the small business owners that I happen to respect and want to be myself.

A possible way out of this “right to work” mess?

This could be some very good news, hopefully, the unions and the Democrats can pull this one off and quickly:

Today, Governor Rick Snyder is expected to sign “right to work” legislation in Michigan. Obviously, this will constitute a hard blow to organized labor, for a host of reasons, symbolic and practical alike.

But NBC’s Michael O’Brien reports that labor operatives believe they may have it on a new procedural way to force a vote on the legislation. If the major unions avail themselves of this option — and if it pans out legally — this means the Dem threats to turn this into an extended all-out war could come to pass.

Republicans have tried to protect the law from going before the voters by attaching an appropriation to it; spending bills can’t be overturned by legislative referendum in Michigan. But union operatives think there is another mechanism by which the law can be challenged. According to one good government group’s analysis of the state constitution, there exists the option of the “statutory initiative,” which would be forced by the collecting of signatures equal to at least eight percent of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election.

Will unions and Michigan Democrats avail themselves of this option? Eddie Vale, a spokesman for the labor-funded Workers’ Voice, which played a big role in the Ohio and Wisconsin labor wars, tells me it’s being seriously considered. “The Michigan Constitution allows two other ways to let the people decide this issue on the ballot, and whether it’s one of those options or the 2014 Governor’s election itself, Michiganders will be heard loud and clear,” Vale says. (There may also be another referendum option as well.)

via The Morning Plum: A way out for labor in Michigan?.

This a good thing and hopefully the Democrats use it and the Unions get behind it.

The best darned thing written so far about Detroit, The Labor Movement, and “Right to Work”

This is very good:

To understand why the impending transformation of Michigan into a right-to-work state is so mortifying to labor and its supporters—far worse, even, than what happened in Wisconsin and Ohio—one must consider the totemic status of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Although there are, despite all you have heard, many good reasons for public-sector workers to have the right to unionize, nobody ever made a movie or wrote a song about a public-sector worker; public-sector organizing campaigns are pretty tame affairs. But if someone were to write a book titled (with apologies to Vivian Gornick), The Romance of 20th Century American Unionism, it would likely be a dual case study. One story would be about the United Farm Workers of the 1960s and 1970s, courageously built from the grape and lettuce fields by migrant Latino laborers in California.

The other would span from the mid-1930s until about 1970 and tell the story of the United Auto Workers, the union that the Prospect’s Harold Meyerson correctly called the other day the “best” American union. Mass industrial workers, whom many believed were impossible to organize, spawned the UAW. These workers, the immigrant laborers of their time, shocked the nation with the imaginative militancy of their factory-floor sit-downs and “flying picket” lines at the legendary Flint, Michigan, strike in 1937. The union’s brilliant, incorruptible president, Walter Reuther—himself beaten and bloodied in organizing campaigns—sought, with the power of his union and his ideas, to leverage the United States into something resembling the social democracies of Western Europe. He had to settle for millions of working-class people ascending into the middle class in the 25 years following World War II, benefiting directly from UAW collective-bargaining agreements, or seeing their own wages and benefits tied to those of the UAW (and Steelworker’s union) standard.

Reuther, furthermore, supported both the nascent civil-rights movement (and fought hard to cleanse his own union of racism), the New Left, and even supported the beginning of modern environmentalism. The Port Huron statement—the founding, now canonical, document of Students for a Democratic Society—was written in 1962 at a UAW-owned campground for use by its members. You can see Reuther standing behind Dr. Martin Luther King during the “I Have a Dream” speech on the Mall in 1963, while George Meany’s AFL-CIO, from a mixture of racism and red baiting, shied away.

The UAW had enormous political clout, too. It couldn’t change the political economy of the country, but it was a powerful member of the Democratic Party coalition. Reuther had the ear, and vice versa, of every Democratic president and candidate of the postwar era. During this era, the presidential election campaign would begin for the Democratic candidate in—where else?—Cadillac Square in Detroit before a throng of union, mostly UAW, members. One can measure the changes in the Democratic Party, Michigan, and the country from, for example, reading the text of JFK’s 1960 Cadillac Square speech.

When Reuther died in a private plane crash in 1970, every auto plant in the country stopped its assembly lines for one minute in silent tribute—thus the “Big Three” car companies honored their remarkable adversary and the formidable institution he and his members built.

via This Is Not Wisconsin. It’s Worse – RICH YESELSON  – American Prospect

I could not have worded it better myself. This isn’t about “right to work”, this piece of legislation is simply about destroying the labor movement in Detroit. Which is what the Republicans in Michigan and in Washington DC have wanted to do for ages.  If the labor movement is smart, they will stand up to the weasel Snyder and not let this stand. Hopefully, they have the guts to do it.

Why Scott Walker Won and the Democrats in Wisconsin lost

I was going to try avoid writing about this, but I am seeing some rather silly stuff being written about this win; So, I thought I would offer my thoughts as a former Democratic Party voter. Update: Greg Sargent over at The Washington Post hits the post a bit, but fails, as most progressives do; to see the full picture.

Putting it plain and simple, The Democrats in Wisconsin picked a fight that they could not win. — They were outspent, out-organized, and out-boxed; the Democrats had zero chance of winning this recall election at all. But yet, they still decided to fight for a recall election. They should have taken their cues from Michigan and left well enough alone. The Democrats in Michigan tried unsuccessfully to get Governor Snyder recalled here twice and both times they failed horribly. This is because residents of Michigan knew that the former Governor of Michigan was a incompetent moron who could not Govern worth a damn and they did not want a Democrat back in office again. Thus, the Democrats wisely dropped the issue and decided to try and win the 2012 election.  Wisconsin should have followed their lead, but they did not and decided to try and force their hand and failed.

Mother Jones has some good ideas as well:

1) Campaign Money is King

Walker crushed his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, in the political money wars. The governor raised $30.5 million while Barrett pulled in $3.9 million—a nearly 8-to-1 advantage in candidate fundraising. Walker banked on in- and out-of-state donors, including heavyweight GOP contributors such as Houston homebuilder Bob Perry and Amway heir Dick Devos. Walker was able to raise so much money because of a quirk in state law that lets candidates potentially facing a recall raise unlimited funds for their defense. (The normal limit for individual donors in $10,000.) Barrett did not get to raise unlimited funds in his recall campaign—which placed him at a great disadvantage.

All that money helped Walker pound Barrett in the ad wars. An analysis by Hotline On Call found that Walker and his GOP allies outspent Barrett and his backers 3-to-1 on TV ad buys in the three months before Tuesday’s recall. The dark-money-peddling Republican Governors Association itself spent $9.4 million to keep Walker in office.

Just as the political money advantage proved crucial to labor’s win last year in repealing Ohio’s anti-union SB 5 law, campaign cash appears to have played a pivotal role in the GOP’s Wisconsin wins .

2) The Candidate

Filing nearly one million signatures to trigger a recall election, Democrats and union leaders and members had their sights trained on the governor. The recall election’s Democratic primary forced them to take their eyes off the prize. A primary fight between Barrett and former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk splintered the labor movement. The major unions endorsed Falk early on, sometimes over the opposition of their own rank-and-file. Several other unions held out until late March, when Barrett entered the race, and then endorsed the mayor. This primary drama knocked the anti-Walker effort off course for weeks, if not a month, in a race where every single day counts. It divided a unified movement into Barrett supporters and Falk supporters.

3) No New Ground

Democrats and labor unions touted their massive get-out-the-vote operation, which was supposed to tip the scales in their favor. Turn-out was way up in the elections, at 2.4 million, but the left failed to win over the types of people who elected Walker in 2010. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelnotes, Walker’s Tuesday win is a mirror image of his 2010 victory—just with more voters. He won men and lost women; won independents and lost moderates; and won suburban and rural voters but not urban voters.

More notably, Walker won 38 percent of votes from union households—an increase of 1 percent from 2010. Remember, union members or their spouses didn’t know in 2012 that Walker planned to target them after the election with his anti-union “budget repair” bill curbing collective bargaining rights. Yet 16 months after Walker launched his attack on unions, just as many people in union households voted for him. The unions failed to rally their own ranks.

My thoughts on the Unions — One of the main reasons why the unions failed; not because of a lack of members or money. The unions failed because for the following:

  1. They over played their hand, by storming the capital building and occupying it. This made them look like total buffoons in the eyes of the people, not mention the heavy handed tactics that were on par with communist gulags.
  2. The second reason is a rather simple one; not all union members are on board with the progressive movement, just because someone has a union card, does not necessarily make him a Democrat. Some union members are free thinkers and some of them resent being culled in together with the socialist crowd.
  3. The last reason is this; some union members are just not happy with the Democratic Party and with Obama. I believe Obama fatigue played a big part in the loss in Wisconsin. I believe it will also play out in November as well.

Needless to say, Scott Walker won big and the Unions and Democrats lost big. The results of this will be far-reaching and the Democrats in Wisconsin would be wise to lay low and try to hang on in 2012. But if they do not, they should learn the lessons of the massive over-reach that took place in Wisconsin and with the Democratic Party as a whole. However, knowing Democrats like I do; they will not learn a thing from this.