Local DemoDisneyDixiecrats appalled as "Bernie Sanders and AOC Unveil a Green New Deal for Public Housing."

Half of Jeff Gahan's enthusiasts in the Floyd County DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party are horrified by this idea because they agree with Dear Leader that the best solution to the public housing problem is to run the residents out of town.

The other half are scandalized because this is radicalism run amok, and can't we just be clean safe centrists -- you know, avoid insulting the 1%?

Let's see a show of hands: who's a left-winger, or are you all just a slightly less vivid shade of Republican?

Bernie Sanders and AOC Unveil a Green New Deal for Public Housing, by Kriston Capps (CityLab)

The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act would commit up to $180 billion over a decade to upgrading 1.2 million federally owned homes.

Socialist Democrats are pushing the progressive envelope with a new iteration of Green New Deal legislation this week, this time with a focus on public housing ...

 ... The bill is an effort to bag two birds with one stone. America’s public housing portfolio is in a shambles, with deferred maintenance costs nationwide running into the billions. The bill introduced by AOC and Sanders would bring that backlog up to date while also reducing the energy consumption from this aging housing stock.

This social democrat agrees: "AOC, Sanders, and Warren Are the Real Centrists Because They Speak for Most Americans."

Photo credit.

An old one but a good one, generally credited to Dan Hagen.

“See, the American people have to realize that universal health care is just a dream. It's too expensive. It's too impractical. It's impossible. No other country in the world has been able to establish it, except for Canada, Uruguay, Brunei, Hong Kong, India, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and pretty much the entire civilized modern world.”

I dunno. We might be forced to reduce the profit margins of the 1%.

AOC, Sanders, and Warren Are the Real Centrists Because They Speak for Most Americans, by Mehdi Hasan (The Intercept)

DO YOU KNOW what really annoys me about the media’s coverage of U.S. politics, and especially the Democratic Party?

Google the words “moderate” or “centrist” and a small group of names will instantly appear: Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, and, yes, Howard Schultz.

Bloomberg is considered a “centrist thought leader” (Vanity Fair). Klobuchar is the “straight-shooting pragmatist” (Time). Biden is the “quintessential centrist” (CNN) and the “last hurrah for moderate Democrats” (New York magazine). Shultz is gifted with high-profile interview slots to make his “centrist independent” pitch to voters.

Now Google the freshman House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s been dubbed a member of the “loony left” (Washington Post), a “progressive firebrand” (Reuters), and a “liberal bomb thrower” (New York Times).

Got that? Biden, Schultz and Co., we are told, sit firmly in the middle of American politics; Ocasio-Cortez stands far out on its fringes.

This is a brazen distortion of reality, a shameless and demonstrable lie that is repeated day after day in newspaper op-eds and cable news headlines.

“It’s easy to call what AOC is doing as far-lefty, but nothing could be farther from the truth,” Nick Hanauer, the venture capitalist and progressive activist, told MSNBC in January. “When you advocate for economic policies that benefit the broad majority of citizens, that’s true centrism. What Howard Schultz represents, the centrism that he represents, is really just trickle-down economics.”

“He is not the centrist,” continued Hanauer. “AOC is the centrist.”

Hanauer is right. And Bernie Sanders is centrist too — smeared as an “ideologue” (The Economist) and “dangerously far left” (Chicago Tribune). So too is Elizabeth Warren — dismissed as a “radical extremist” (Las Vegas Review-Journal) and a “class warrior” (Fox News).

The inconvenient truth that our lazy media elites do so much to ignore is that Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren are much closer in their views to the vast majority of ordinary Americans than the Bloombergs or the Bidens. They are the true centrists, the real moderates; they represent the actual political middle ...

"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Crusher of Sacred Cows."

The average American politician would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla. They’re usually in office for one reason: someone with money sent them there.

Sorry, lost the thread ... immersed as I am in Jeff Gahan's 2018 financial report, which details exactly why he's here -- and why he needs to go away.

Too bad the Democrats have a human money suction machine like Gahan and not a straight shooter like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but of course our local Democrats don't know what to do with smart and strong women, do they? 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Crusher of Sacred Cows, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

With its silly swipes at AOC, the American political establishment is once again revealing its blindness to its own unpopularity

One of the first things you learn covering American politicians is that they’re not terribly bright.

The notion that Hill denizens are brilliant 4-D chess players is pure myth, the product of too many press hagiographies of the Game Change variety and too many Hollywood fantasies like House of Cards and West Wing.

The average American politician would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla. They’re usually in office for one reason: someone with money sent them there, often to vote yes on a key appropriation bill or two. On the other 364 days of the year, their job is to shut their yaps and approximate gravitas anytime they’re in range of C-SPAN cameras.

Too many hacks float to the capital on beds of national committee money and other donor largesse, but then — once they get behind that desk and sit between those big flags — start thinking they’re actually beloved tribunes of the people, whose opinions on all things are eagerly desired.

So they talk. What do they talk about? To the consternation of donors, all kinds of stuff. Remember Ted Stevens explaining that the Internet “is not a big truck”? How about Hank Johnson worrying that Guam would become so overpopulated it would “tip over and capsize”? How about Oklahoma Republican Jim Bridenstine noting that just because the Supreme Court rules on something, that “doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional”?

There’s a reason aides try to keep their bosses away from microphones, particularly when there’s a potential for a question of SAT-or-higher level difficulty in the interview. But the subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each other.

We’ve seen this a lot in recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to “AOC,” who’s also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them.

That doesn’t make anything she says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. There isn’t a cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working. Virtually the entire spectrum of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish ...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the chimp Ray-Gun left behind.

For anyone in a huff about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's collegiate dancing, allow me to introduce you to this bountiful genre called Movies Ronald Reagan Made.

Ready to change the subject now? I thought so.