It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.
Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday. It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama, never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.
As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.
In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.
Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:
1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.
2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.
3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.
The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:
1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..
2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.
3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.
4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).
5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.
6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.
7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.
Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,
An abrasive arrest of young pool party attendees in McKinney has led to the suspension of one of the responding officers after a video of the incident appeared online.
The video, seen by many as another example of racially motivated and unnecessary police force, shows the officer throwing black juveniles in swimsuits to the ground and pulling his gun on them in one instance. The incident occurred Friday at a community pool in the city northeast of Dallas. One officer has been suspended pending an investigation, according to a statementby the McKinney Police Department on Sunday morning.
RELATED: 24 episodes of police abuse caught on camera.
The department said officers were responding to reports of juveniles fighting at a community pool. In the YouTube video, one officer can be seen forcing a black male to the ground. He then spends a significant portion of the seven-minute video dragging to the ground and detaining a 14-year-old black girl in a bikini.
When she stands up again at one point, the officer pulls his gun out. He puts it away several seconds later and puts his knees to the girl’s back while waiting for other officers to cuff her. The officer also is seen shouting and cursing at pool partygoers throughout the video, telling them to get to the other side of the street or they’d also be arrested. In the middle of the scrum, one girl yells at him, “You’re not going to be a cop no more.”
Here’s what the McKinney Police Department had to say about the incident:
“The initial call came in as a disturbance involving multiple juveniles at the location, who do not live in the area or have permission to be there, refusing to leave. McKinney Police received several additional calls related to this incident advising that juveniles were now actively fighting.
First responding officers encountered a large crowd that refused to comply with police commands. Nine additional units responded to the scene. Officers were eventually able to gain control of the situation.
McKinney Police later learned of a video that was taken at the scene by an unknown party. This video has raised concerns that are being investigated by the McKinney Police Department. At this time, one of the responding officers has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of this investigation.”
Buzzfeed News spoke to the Brandon Brooks, who uploaded the video and believes the incident was racially charged. “Everyone who was getting put on the ground was black, Mexican, Arabic,” said Brooks, who is white. “[The cop] didn’t even look at me. It was kind of like I was invisible.”
Another 14-year-old girl, who said she was the only white person detained at the scene, told BuzzFeed News the fight broke out after adults told the black juveniles to return to “Section 8 [public] housing.” The girl was released after 25 minutes and her family told BuzzFeed News they’ll file a complaint against the adult woman who made the racist remarks.
Days after the launch of two newspaper database projects aimed at tracking killing by police officers, two Democratic senators announced Tuesday that they will introduce legislation that would require all states to report to the Justice Department anytime a police officer is involved in a shooting or any other use of force that results in death.
The legislation, introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), would require reporting of all shootings by police officers — including non-fatal ones — which is a step further than the Death In Custody Reporting Act, which was approved by Congress last year. Each state would be required details including age, gender, race and whether the person was armed for any police shooting.
“Too many members of the public and police officers are being killed, and we don’t have reliable statistics to track these tragic incidents,” Boxer said in a statement. “This bill will ensure that we know the full extent of the problem so we can save lives on all sides.”
(Post analysis: 385 people shot and killed by police during first five months of 2015).
The nation has faced months of at-times tense discussions around issues of race and law enforcement following a series of deaths of black men and boys at the hands of police officers that became national stories — including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in New York, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C., and Freddie Gray in Baltimore.
Those incidents have renewed calls, which have been made for years by some civil rights groups, for more standardized reporting of police use-of-force incidents. To date, there is no accurate, comprehensive data available about how many people are killed by American police officers each year.
In a release announcing the bill, Boxer and Booker specifically cite The Post’s reporting — which on Sunday revealed that at least 385 people have been shot and killed by police since January, putting the nation on pace to have more than double the number of fatal police shootings tallied on average by the federal government.
That piece is the latest in a yearlong effort by The Post to report onpolice accountability, which includes the creation of a database that will chronicle every fatal shooting by police officers in country this year.
On Monday, the Guardian unveiled a similar reporting project, The Counted, which aims to tally every person killed by a police officer — by shooting, Taser or other death in custody — in 2015.
(Post analysis: Thousands dead, few officers prosecuted).
“The first step in fixing a problem is understanding the extent of the problem you have. Justice and accountability go hand in hand — but without reliable data it’s difficult to hold people accountable or create effective policies that change the status quo,” Booker said in a statement. “Our legislation is vital to ensuring we have the data required to make good decisions and implement reform measures that are balanced, objective, and protect the lives of police officers and the public.”
Some civil rights leaders have criticized Congress of passing little legislation in response to the unrest in Ferguson. Many activists who have led protests in the past year would consider the passage of legislation requiring detailed death in custody reporting to DOJ to be a major victory.
However, with Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate, Democratic legislative proposals face an uphill march toward passage.
“This is a step in the right direction. I’d have to read the bill to understand the details but the fact that there seems to be political will to establish a federal database is a very good sign,” said David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of Missouri who has been fighting for more than a decade for better reporting on police use of force incidents.
WASHINGTON — Early this year, Megan E. Green, a St. Louis alderwoman, met with officials of a local police union to discuss a proposal for a civilian oversight board that would look into accusations of police misconduct. After Ms. Green refused to soften her support for the proposal, the union backed an aggressive mailing campaign against her.
But Ms. Green won her primary with over 70 percent of the vote, and the Board of Aldermen approved the oversight board by a large margin. “All that stuff backfired,” Ms. Green said. “The more they attacked me for it, the more people seemed to rally around me.”
During the urban crime epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s and the sharp decline in crime that began in the 1990s, the unions representing police officers in many cities enjoyed a nearly unassailable political position. Their opposition could cripple political candidates and kill police-reform proposals in gestation.
But amid a rash of high-profile encounters involving allegations of police overreach in New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., the political context in which the police unions have enjoyed a privileged position is rapidly changing. And the unions are struggling to adapt.
“There was a time in this country when elected officials — legislators, chief executives — were willing to contextualize what police do,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “And that time is mostly gone.”
In Baltimore, the local police union president accused protesters angry at the death of Freddie Gray of participating in a “lynch mob.” In South Carolina, the head of the police union where an officer had shot and killed an unarmed black man who was fleeing fulminated against “professional race agitators.” In New York, Patrick Lynch, a local police union chief, accused Mayor Bill de Blasio of having blood on his hands after the shooting death of two police officers last December.
If voters’ reactions to Mr. Lynch’s statements are any indication, the provocative language has largely served to alienate the public and isolate the police politically. According to a Quinnipiac University poll in January, 77 percent of New York City voters disapproved of Mr. Lynch’s comments. Sixty-nine percent disapproved of police officers turning their backs on Mr. de Blasio at funerals for the two slain officers, a protest seen as orchestrated by the union.
In Baltimore, too, the police union has been less than sure-footed in navigating the more hostile political terrain of the past few years. The union, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, has responded with open resistance to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s proposals to make it easier to remove misbehaving police officers, and to give the city’s police civilian review board a “more impactful” role in disciplining officers.
The union also opposed the decision by Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts to invite the Justice Department in to help overhaul the city’s Police Department after an investigation by The Baltimore Sun produced numerous allegations of police brutality.
Union officials say they have been fulfilling their mandate to protect their members, airing legitimate concerns about overreach on the part of their civilian overseers. And sympathetic observers have questioned the political motivations of the mayor.
“She seems to suggest that the blame lies elsewhere, when the buck should stop with the mayor, always,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “She’s been there five years. The thing is an institutional disaster. It’s your institution.”
A spokesman for the mayor said that some of her efforts, like disbanding a plainclothes unit linked to an unusual number of excessive-force complaints, began shortly after she took office.
In some cases, the union’s hostility to scrutiny has been self-defeating. In 2014, the Fraternal Order of Police declined to endorse Gregg Bernstein, then the state’s attorney for Baltimore, after members of the union’s endorsement committee complained that Mr. Bernstein had been too aggressive in prosecuting police misconduct, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
Mr. Bernstein, who suffered from diminishing support in districts where the union has long been influential, lost his re-election bid to the current state’s attorney, Marilyn J. Mosby, who has made prosecuting police misconduct a priority. Ms. Mosby recently charged six Baltimore police officers in the death of Mr. Gray, the resident whose death last month set off tumultuous protests around the city.
St. Louis offers a particularly vivid example of the inability of police unions to update their tactics amid widespread frustration with policing. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen first passed a measure creating a civilian oversight board back in 2006. Mayor Francis G. Slay, a Democrat, vetoed the bill at the time, citing its “inflammatory antipolice” language and questioning whether it would survive a legal challenge given that the State of Missouri still formally controlled the local Police Department.
But, in December, after months of outrage following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in nearby Ferguson, Mr. Slay agreed to support a bill similar to the one he vetoed a decade ago. A spokeswoman for the mayor said that local control of the Police Department now made the bill legally defensible.
The St. Louis Fraternal Order of Police, one of two prominent local unions, was not persuaded. Although the alderman involved in drafting the legislation met with union officials around the same time and asked them for input, the union offered suggestions in writing only on April 13, two days before the board was set to vote on the bill, and far too late to incorporate any of its changes.
“When we met with them in December, I was honestly interested in their thoughts,” said Alderman Terry Kennedy, who sponsored the legislation. “I would have tried to incorporate as much as I could have.” But, Mr. Kennedy said, the union’s objections proved to be a “constantly moving target.”
Jeff Roorda, a spokesman for the union, said that once it became clear that the Board of Aldermen was determined to give the oversight board investigative authority, rather than simply review powers, the union felt it was better to save its reservations for a future legal challenge.
“It put us in a tough spot, to tip our hand about what our legal objections were, telling them how to write legislation within the legal parameters,” Mr. Roorda said. The measure will become law this week.
In contrast to the unions’ hard-line public stance, many can be pragmatic behind the scenes when dealing with prosecutors over individual allegations of misconduct. In Baltimore, for example, there have been several recent instances when the police union declined to fund the legal defense of an officer whose behavior it had concluded was beyond the pale.
“People have the impression, when it comes to police unions, that there’s never an unwarranted case of police abuse,” said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois. “The public would be surprised by the level of rational behavior on the part of union grievance officers.”
But when it comes to what the unions perceive as larger, institutional threats, they are characteristically unrelenting, even when a more nuanced response might better serve their long-term interests.
There may be no better example than the creation of New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board two decades ago. In September 1992, after a monthslong standoff between the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins and the city’s police over his proposal for an independent review agency, a union-organized protest degenerated into what the news media called a “riot,” as thousands of police officers overwhelmed barricades blocking the steps of City Hall.
“It was a very bad inning for the unions,” Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union said. “Most people view that as being the incident that pushed civilian oversight over the line.”
Rick Brattin, a young Republican state representative in Missouri, has come up with an innovative new way to humiliate the poor in his state. Call it the surf-and-turf law.
Brattin has introduced House Bill 813, making it illegal for food-stamp recipients to use their benefits “to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.”
“I have seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs” with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, the legislator explained, according to The Post’s Roberto A. Ferdman. “When I can’t afford it on my pay, I don’t want people on the taxpayer’s dime to afford those kinds of foods either.”
Never mind that few can afford filet mignon on a less-than-$7/day food-stamp allotment; they’re more likely to be buying chuck steak or canned tuna. This is less about public policy than about demeaning public-benefit recipients.
The surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor as the country deals with the high-poverty hangover of the Great Recession.
Last week, the Kansas legislature passed House Bill 2258, punishing the poor by limiting their cash withdrawals of welfare benefits to $25 per day and forbidding them to use their benefits “in any retail liquor store, casino, gaming establishment, jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor, spa, nail salon, lingerie shop, tobacco paraphernalia store, vapor cigarette store, psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade, movie theater, swimming pool, cruise ship, theme park, dog or horse racing facility, pari-mutuel facility, or sexually oriented business . . . or in any business or retail establishment where minors under age 18 are not permitted.”
The Kansas legislators must be pleased that they have protected their swimming pools from those nasty welfare recipients. But the gratuitous nature of the law becomes obvious when you consider that it also bans all out-of-state spending of welfare dollars — so the inclusion of a cruise-ship ban is redundant in landlocked Kansas.
The Topeka Capital-Journal quoted a champion of the bill saying “this is about having a great life.” And the law is helping the poor have a “great life” by forbidding Kansas from accepting hardship waivers from the federal government that extend time limits for food-stamp recipients — reminiscent of many states’ refusal to accept an expansion of Medicaid that was fully funded by the federal government.
A profusion of such laws has bubbled up in states across the country in the last few years, imposing punitive new conditions on the poor. Many of these are from Republican states opposed to big government, but not entirely: According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, another state that prohibits welfare funds for cruise ships is true-blue Massachusetts (though it at least touches the ocean.)
In their budget plans in Congress, Republicans propose “devolving” food stamps and other programs to state control by awarding block grants with few strings attached. The states, the thinking goes, are closer to the people and have better ideas about how to reduce caseloads. But recent experience suggests that one strategy for reducing caseloads is to harass recipients:
Some states have been hiking legal fees for poor defendants — in Washington state, the American Civil Liberties Union has found, such obligations average $2,540 per case — and sometimes imprisoning them for their inability to pay. An NPR study last year found that defendants are routinely charged for public defenders, room and board in jail, parole supervision and electronic monitoring devices — items that were once free.
The federal government required in 2012 that electronic benefit transfer cards not be used for liquor, gambling or adult-entertainment, but many states went further. Massachusetts and Missouri require the EBT cards to have the beneficiary’s photo, according to the NCSL, while others block the use of benefits for “psychic services,” riverboats, “permanent makeup” and amusement parks.
NCSL also reports that 12 states, most in the South, have passed legislation in the last three years requiring drug testing for public-assistance applicants. Florida’s law, struck down in court, required applicants to pay for the drug test, reimbursing them if they tested negative.
And what if all these new costs for the poor put them out on the street? The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty last year reported a 60 percent increase since 2011 in city-wide bans on public camping and a 43 percent increase in prohibitions on sitting or lying down in public places.
Even then, poor people can still stay on the right side of this new round of punitive laws, as long as they don’t sleep, keep moving at all times — and lay off the steak and fish.
The Amazing Democrats 