We don't need no stinking meetings, as the GREEN MOUSE presents NAWBANY WEEK IN REVIEW for 17 April.

The good news is that Republican mayoral candidate Kevin Zurschmiede finally has a platform.

The bad news is that Rush Limbaugh wrote it yesterday -- and the election was five years ago. Off to Facebook we go:

K: I’ve been saying for several years that life has been so good for so many of us for so long that we take it for granted that it always will be good.

Guess what -- We have reached a lengthy blip of uncertainty lasting for several days, weeks now, turning into months soon. If we do not act now many of our treasured day to day activities will be gone for years to come and many may never return.

See thoughts from Rush yesterday

---

April 16, 2020

R: All right this cannot go on, folks. It cannot go on. Even Barry Diller now is calling this cataclysmic, and it is cataclysmic ... We’re at a point now where no matter how many people die from coronavirus, it’s not gonna equate to the damage done to the U.S. economy. 22 million people are not working ...

 ... It is hurting all of us. And it’s scary that there are still people who want to maintain this and have it get even worse. Literally scary. But as I have been saying — I’ve been overusing the word — this isn’t sustainable. It hasn’t been sustainable for a month. It has to change.

(T)here are people who want to continue this. Why?

Jeff Gahan defeated Zurschmiede in 2015 (I participated as a candidate as well and tallied more votes as an independent than Dan Coffey did four years later), and Gahan's giving it his best Winston Churchill pandemic impression.

Also getting $1 million from the state is New Albany. Mayor Jeff Gahan said that the city is currently focused entirely on the coronavirus pandemic, but that officials look forward to moving ahead when the time comes.

“We continue to encourage employees and contractors to wash their hands, practice social distancing, wear DIY masks and other Personal Protection Equipment when it is available, but we are very happy to learn we are the recipient of Community Crossings Grant for $1 million," Gahan said in a statement. "This important grant allows us to extend our road repair efforts and to be fully prepared once construction resumes. Roads are selected by need from our Paving and Road Status Inventory that ranks each road in New Albany by condition. This street ranking and selection list is required for the Community Crossings Grant.”

Inspiring, and they're words that make me want to run out and storm a beach -- masked and socially distant, of course. It's like General Patton said: "The object of campaign finance is not to die for your TIF zone, but to make some other mayor die for his."

The biggest local story of the week came from John Boyle at the Newsy 'Bune: New Albany City Council cancels meetings during outbreak.

“My interpretation, the council attorney’s interpretation and the city attorney’s interpretation was that we shouldn’t have gatherings of 10 or more people and that the only city business that should be taken care of had to relate directly to COVID-19,” (council president Bob) Caesar said of his decision to cancel the meetings. “We didn’t need to take care of anything else. The mayor’s office would take care of everything else.”

Caesar contended that the city’s finances, along with entities like the police and fire departments, are in “great shape.”

If you can't trust the city's most prolific sycophant, who can you trust? Fortunately there are dissenting voices.

(5th district councilman Josh) Turner contends that the council should be holding meetings digitally, utilizing tools like Zoom. Other governing bodies in Southern Indiana have taken advantage of such tools during the pandemic.

The New Albany City Council did hold a virtual meeting last month to pass five funding resolutions to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jeffersonville City Council and the Floyd County officials have held meetings that were broadcasts using those platforms. Even in New Albany, the redevelopment commission and board of public works are holding meetings via Zoom.

Maybe Caesar's reasoning is more, um, personal.

If meetings were to be held over Zoom or any other digital platform, Caesar said only those with certain technological capabilities and savvy would be able to participate. “We can’t have public hearing, because people can’t come into our building,” he said. “You can’t just have one for people with access to those devices. You have to have it for everybody.”

Dude's still on AOL dial-up, isn't he?

Certain situations, Caesar noted, would call for a meeting. If an essential entity in the city were to need immediate assistance to make it through the outbreak, he said the council would spring into action.

One hypothetical situation would be a food bank, for instance, needing food or money to serve their clients.

“We’ve got to do something about that, and we will do something about that,” he said. “We will act extremely fast to get something like that done.”

At least CeeSaw has used the shutdown to hone his stand-up routine. Maybe he'll entertain us on YouTube soon, or more likely utilizing the latest in black and white Pathe newsreel technology prior to the Roy Rogers double feature at the Bijou.

Speaking of political maladroits, they come in all party affiliations. By the way, Tennessee Trey Hollingsworth, whose net worth of $50 Million Dollars makes him the 7th wealthiest member of Congress (deliciously, just behind Nancy Pelosi), wants to buy a vowel, or a consonant -- aw, what the fuck, daddy, just buy the newspaper for scrap.

In an exclusive interview with IndyStar Wednesday, Hollingsworth declined to say his words were poorly chosen but indicated he was trying to make a more nuanced argument about the need for better planning as the White House, Congress and other elected officials make tough decisions going forward.

"I believe that I stood up and said on a radio show, (that) we are going to have to make tough decisions going forward ," Hollingsworth said, "and we owe a plan that acknowledges the reality that the risk of coronavirus will never be equal to zero and there are costs associated with this shutdown of our economy, real costs that Hoosiers and Americans are bearing.

"What I got back was Trey wants people to die. I never said that, and it's not true."

Hollingsworth spoke more starkly to WIBC on Tuesday, saying Americans have to go back to their way of life, and it's the lesser of two evils versus the number of people who might die from the coronavirus.

Now if you're excuse me, I have to go take a shower.

Dining on the poor, part one: "Meet Joseph Albert “Trey” Hollingsworth III, the biggest goober in Washington."

Dining on the poor, part two: Trey "Big Boy Pants" Hollingsworth reminds us that capital accumulation comes before YOUR life.

Dining on the poor, part two: Trey "Big Boy Pants" Hollingsworth reminds us that capital accumulation comes before YOUR life.

Context here: Dining on the poor, part one: "Meet Joseph Albert “Trey” Hollingsworth III, the biggest goober in Washington."

Yes, I'm supposed to be refraining from politics, but when an elected official says something as purely dipshittian as our imported congressman Trey Hollingsworth did yesterday, what's a lefty supposed to do?

Sweep the all the decimal point Darwinian dipshits like Trey away, that's what.

He's making Tennessee proud, right here in Indiana, but surely there's a congressional seat in Nebraska or Oklahoma or somewhere else that would be even better for his portfolio than our ultra-gerrymandered constituency.

As CNN introduced it, "GOP congressman says letting more Americans die of coronavirus is lesser of two evils compared to economy tanking."

Take it away, Trey.

"But it is always the American government's position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life of American lives, we have to always choose the latter."

Then:

"It is policymakers' decision to put on our big-boy and big-girl pants and say, ‘This is the lesser of these two evils.' That is our responsibility, and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office."

Trey Hollingsworth can sod off, now and forever. Meanwhile at Twitter, the writer Pat Blanchfield offered a countering rant, which I fully endorse.

Look, let's be real. The ultimate reason the economy "must reopen" is so everyone can once more be individually blamed for their own unemployment, desperation, etc., in this coming depression.

It is fundamentally dangerous to our system to have masses of people simultaneously unable to work or make basic ends meet in a way that would suggest blame lies elsewhere (other) than on them (whether in the virus, our leaders' failures, quarantine orders, market chicanery, etc), which is collectively experienced, and that might give them ideas.

Everything we're doing - i.e., tokenistic "aid" (which just funnels money back to creditors and landlords) - is just the barest minimum not for survival, but to ensure that we can blame people for their own starvation and misery once things are "normal" again. That's it.

Of course the fucking Dems are turning to COBRA. Of course the GOPers want to make being back at work by May Day (what an irony that!) a sign of patriotism. The faster everyone is responsibilized individually in a "reopened" economy, the faster ideas alternative possibilities can foreclosed.

"Re-opening" back to "normal" is being bipartisanly accepted and hyped as an imperative PRECISELY because it is actually totally unnecessary. It's presented as a matter of necessity precisely because it's actually a totally artificial order THAT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

None of this necessary, fucking none of it, and the people in power and with influence who are insisting that it is are either so conditioned and incentivized to not see that, OR they do, and they are fucking *shook* at the prospect everybody else will catch on too.

Dining on the poor, part one: "Meet Joseph Albert “Trey” Hollingsworth III, the biggest goober in Washington."

Originally published here on October 14, 2018; we're revisiting Hollingsworth's cash-engorged inhumanity because of this:

Dining on the poor, part two: Trey "Big Boy Pants" Hollingsworth reminds us that capital accumulation comes before YOUR life.

---

As borrowed from Facebook (sorry; the source has been lost -- is it you, Dan Canon?), this profile effectively rests the case. It remains that I have significant issues with the Democratic dumb-ocracy, but voting in favor of Hollingsworth isn't something I plan on doing in this or any other lifetime.   

This is a profile of Joseph Albert “Trey” Hollingsworth III, the biggest goober in Washington.

As his name might lead you to suspect, he has been rich since before conception. His father, Joe Jr., is a prominent Tennessee capitalist who, in addition to owning “the largest developer for semi-rural industrial property in the Southeast,” [1] is known for an “adventuristic nature” that “expands beyond taking risks with start-ups, stocks and investments” to “hang gliding in Rio de Janeiro, racing Formula 1 cars and deep sea fishing off the Great Barrier Reef.” [2]

But Trey overcame his hardscrabble upbringing and in 2005, at the age of 22, founded Hollingsworth Capital Partners, which “purchases, renovates and repositions underperforming industrial and distribution investment property throughout the nation.” [3] His daddy is a silent partner.

A decade later, Trey decided to move to Southern Indiana and buy himself a seat in the US Congress, furnishing his campaign with over $3.1 million of his own money -- 88.4% of the total amount raised by the Hollingsworth 2016 effort. This was supplemented by $1.5 Million that the Hollingsworth Companies donated to Indiana Jobs Now, a Super PAC his father created for the sole purpose of getting Trey elected (and which he terminated weeks after achieving this goal). Mostly, this fortune went to TV ad buys, which were enough to marshal 34% of the competitive Republican primary vote, securing Trey the opportunity to face a Democrat in Indiana’s gerrymandered 9th District. Then, he rode the anti-Clinton wave straight to Washington, DC.

(Campaign finance epilogue: At the end of the race, Trey still owed the strangely repetitive sum of $246,246 to his pollster and other political consultants, so he, of the nearly $60 Million asset portfolio, asked his colleagues for help paying up. “Representative-elect Hollingsworth,” said a senior campaign adviser, “is extremely appreciative of those willing to help retire campaign debt that is owed to vendors.”) [4]

My favorite detail about his 2016 run is his approach to the press, summarized neatly in this excerpt from a profile in Slate: “The 9th District... doesn’t have much local media, and Hollingsworth frequently dodged what media there was. When he did agree to interviews, he often evaded, even on seemingly benign questions. He declined to release his tax returns. When someone asked him to name his three favorite Hoosiers, he declined to do that, too. One reporter asked him where he’d lived before moving to Indiana; ‘I’ll have to go back,’ Hollingsworth said, speaking about his own life, ‘and check the record.’ Pressed on when exactly he moved to Indiana, he finally answered with early summer. Another reporter tried to clarify whether that meant June or July. ‘I think that’s a good characterization,’ Hollingsworth said.” [5]

In his 22 months in Congress, Trey has maintained this demanding level of constituent accountability, appearing in zero public in-district town halls since being sworn in. His sacrifices in the name of transparency reached their peak one week at the end of 2017, during the fight over the Free Millions for Billionaires Bill, or as it was more commonly known, “tax reform.”

One provision of the initial draft of that bill would have taxed tuition remissions, which low-wage graduate students receive, as income, meaning workers earning roughly $15,000 a year would be taxed as though they were earning around four times as much. Indiana University being the largest employer in the district, Trey’s constituents did not all smile on this prospect. Specifically, on the evening of Monday, December 11, Campus Action for Democracy grad students staged a sit-in in his office in Greenwood, demanding to hear from Trey.

Rather than call and speak to them, Trey and his DC-based security chief issued two instructions: 1) that the building manager allow the protesters to stay in his office, but have the police restrict them from going into the hall, where the bathrooms are, and b) that his pregnant staffer supervise the student demonstrators for as long as they continued the occupation. So, as the occupiers explain in this video [6], they spent hour after hour with no access to bathrooms or contact with the outside world, never quite managing to get arrested for the cause.

Four days later, on December 15th, the Scott County Chamber of Commerce announced a Koch Brothers-sponsored “Tax Reform Town Hall” [7] with Trey. It was open to the public, with a few minor provisos: 1) Attendees had to register that very day on Eventbrite, 2) The Eventbrite link didn’t work, 3) The Town Hall was to take place in three days, on a Monday, 4) at 8 o’clock in the morning, 5) one week before Christmas, and 6) in the tiny town of Scottsburg. (Scott County, of which Scottsburg is the seat, gained some notoriety years earlier when then-Governor Mike Pence closed the local Planned Parenthood clinic, the county’s only site for HIV testing. [8] When, two years later, the worst HIV outbreak owing to needle-sharing in US history broke out in Scott County, Pence took three months to permit a temporary needle exchange, in which time nearly 200 Scott County residents were notified of an HIV-positive diagnosis.)

How did the Town Hall ultimately go? Citing a mysterious “threats of violence,” Trey cancelled the event. [9] A spokesperson said that, on the recommendation of Capitol Police, they would not release any details. That very same day, I swear before God, he posted on Facebook that, due to a fire in the building, the Greenwood office -- which students had occupied precisely one week earlier -- would be closed for re-construction until January 3rd.

The fire’s devastation was evidently total: no one survived to manage to get it reported in the local paper.

In the end, Trey voted for the Free Millions for Billionaires Bill, and made out like a bandit, handing himself $4.5 Million via the law’s “Pass-Through Tax Deduction” -- more than any other Member of Congress. The Grad Student Tax was removed from the final bill, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t believe me that he personally called Tracey, the lead organizer of Campus Action for Democracy, to explain how hard he had worked to strike that unconscionable provision.

At this point, a lot of people have noticed that Trey spends about as much time in Indiana’s 9th, now that he represents it, as he did a couple years back, before he moved to it. Liz Watson, his Democratic challenger, has repeatedly invited him to a joint candidate forum, as have several non-partisan press outlets and organizations, including Hoosier Action and Campus Action for Democracy. Citing whatever and also this other thing, he has declined these invitations.

In the Republican Primary this year, a man named James Dean Alspach challenged Trey. He did not campaign. He barely posted a website. [10] His team, whoever they were, stapled up a bunch of lawn signs that said “James Dean” and showed his face. “If I win this primary,” he told WLKY News Louisville [11], “I’m going to announce my intentions to run for President as James Dean.” Detecting the interviewer’s confusion, Dean clarified: “So my whole focus in the Congress is to legislate for my Presidency.” He got nearly a quarter of the vote.

Trey is vulnerable, especially because he is facing an unusually strong candidate in Watson, a labor attorney who wrote the federal legislation on a $15 minimum wage, a staunch supporter of Medicare for All, and a friend to Pramila Jayapal, Bernie Sanders and around twenty labor unions. Her campaign has been so impressive -- raising over $1 Million, with nearly 50,000 contributions averaging under $40 -- that the DCCC added Indiana’s 9th, which Trey won by 14 points and Trump won by 25 -- into its “Red to Blue” class of swing seats.

In collaboration with the Working Families Party, Hoosier Action is running an independent expenditure on her behalf. Between our work, Watson’s strengths, Trey’s weaknesses, the mood of the country, and Sen. Donnelly’s rise in the polls, I think we might just be able to scale this immense mountain of a political effort and unseat the biggest goober in Washington, Joseph Albert “Trey” Hollingsworth.

The third.

[1] https://hollingsworthcos.com/about/history/founder/
[2] https://hollingsworthcos.com/…/04/EntrepreneurialOdyssey.pdf
[3] https://www.inc.com/profile/hollingsworth-capital-partners
[4] https://www.usatoday.com/…/millionaire-congressma…/95446364/
[5] http://www.slate.com/…/can_tennessee_s_trey_hollingsworth_b…
[6] https://www.facebook.com/campusactionfordemocracy/videos/526096767775024/
[7] http://www.scottchamber.org/…/tax-reform-town-hall-with-con…
[8] https://www.huffpost.com/…/mike-pence-indiana-hiv_n_57f53b9…
[9] https://www.indystar.com/…/indiana-congressman-c…/961036001/
[10] http://www.jamesdeanushouse.com
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x8uXa_qBa0

Save your Darwinian drivel for another time, and urge Senators Young and Braun, and Representative Hollingworth, to be accountable to their constituents.

Fact is, 800,000 unpaid federal workers are being held hostage not by one man, but by America's wretched two-party system. In any other facet of our lives, being given a "choice" between two options would be laughable, and yet we continue to accept one or the other of two entities that both suckle the same teat of accumulated wealth for sustenance.

Want to be independent? I hate to be a buzzkill this early in the year, but first, you have to think independently.

Those of you hugging the Darwinian ledge on the far right side of the aisle, who currently chortle with glee at the prospect of at last achieving Saint Grover Norquist's cherished wish to drown government in a bathtub, are displaying even less empathy toward fellow human beings than usual -- which is saying something.

You're seemingly fine with expediently eliminating "non-essential" jobs by starving job holders, when the jobs were created by ... wait for it ... the two-party duopoly. Can you explain to me why this process cannot be a process, rather than collateral damage suffered by de facto hostages, and for a reason (a wall) that has nothing whatever to do with your "small government" mantra?

Doesn't it contradict this mantra?

My friend Amanda wrote at Fb. My boss Joe was spot on: enough is enough.

---

So today my husband- the FBI agent one who is currently working without pay- was told if we miss another paycheck due to the shutdown we lose our vision and dental insurance. Yeah.

I phoned my congressional representatives Senator Young, Congressman Hollingsworth and Senator Braun. I've emailed them before. This time I invited them to dinner.

Not one of them seems to care about out situation. Nor do them seem to want to respond to me or my family, their constituents.

If you can, give them a call & tell them your displeasure in their inability to even call or email back those of us who are affected by their actions. You might want to throw in that they need to do their jobs when my husband is doing his without pay. Their phone numbers are below. Let them know Amanda Beam sent you.

(And please be nice to those answering the phone. Sen. Young and Rep. Hollingsworth's staff were very kind and did a great job. I even told them to go grab a beer. Sen. Braun's assistant made ME want to grab a beer.)

Senator Young: 202-224-5623

Senator Braun: 202-224-4814

Representative Hollingsworth: 202-225-5315

Meet Joseph Albert “Trey” Hollingsworth III, the biggest goober in Washington.

As borrowed from Facebook, this profile effectively rests the case. It remains that I have significant issues with the Democratic dumb-ocracy, but voting in favor of Hollingsworth isn't something I plan on doing in this or any other lifetime.   

---

This is a profile of Joseph Albert “Trey” Hollingsworth III, the biggest goober in Washington.

As his name might lead you to suspect, he has been rich since before conception. His father, Joe Jr., is a prominent Tennessee capitalist who, in addition to owning “the largest developer for semi-rural industrial property in the Southeast,” [1] is known for an “adventuristic nature” that “expands beyond taking risks with start-ups, stocks and investments” to “hang gliding in Rio de Janeiro, racing Formula 1 cars and deep sea fishing off the Great Barrier Reef.” [2]

But Trey overcame his hardscrabble upbringing and in 2005, at the age of 22, founded Hollingsworth Capital Partners, which “purchases, renovates and repositions underperforming industrial and distribution investment property throughout the nation.” [3] His daddy is a silent partner.

A decade later, Trey decided to move to Southern Indiana and buy himself a seat in the US Congress, furnishing his campaign with over $3.1 million of his own money -- 88.4% of the total amount raised by the Hollingsworth 2016 effort. This was supplemented by $1.5 Million that the Hollingsworth Companies donated to Indiana Jobs Now, a Super PAC his father created for the sole purpose of getting Trey elected (and which he terminated weeks after achieving this goal). Mostly, this fortune went to TV ad buys, which were enough to marshal 34% of the competitive Republican primary vote, securing Trey the opportunity to face a Democrat in Indiana’s gerrymandered 9th District. Then, he rode the anti-Clinton wave straight to Washington, DC.

(Campaign finance epilogue: At the end of the race, Trey still owed the strangely repetitive sum of $246,246 to his pollster and other political consultants, so he, of the nearly $60 Million asset portfolio, asked his colleagues for help paying up. “Representative-elect Hollingsworth,” said a senior campaign adviser, “is extremely appreciative of those willing to help retire campaign debt that is owed to vendors.”) [4]

My favorite detail about his 2016 run is his approach to the press, summarized neatly in this excerpt from a profile in Slate: “The 9th District... doesn’t have much local media, and Hollingsworth frequently dodged what media there was. When he did agree to interviews, he often evaded, even on seemingly benign questions. He declined to release his tax returns. When someone asked him to name his three favorite Hoosiers, he declined to do that, too. One reporter asked him where he’d lived before moving to Indiana; ‘I’ll have to go back,’ Hollingsworth said, speaking about his own life, ‘and check the record.’ Pressed on when exactly he moved to Indiana, he finally answered with early summer. Another reporter tried to clarify whether that meant June or July. ‘I think that’s a good characterization,’ Hollingsworth said.” [5]

In his 22 months in Congress, Trey has maintained this demanding level of constituent accountability, appearing in zero public in-district town halls since being sworn in. His sacrifices in the name of transparency reached their peak one week at the end of 2017, during the fight over the Free Millions for Billionaires Bill, or as it was more commonly known, “tax reform.”

One provision of the initial draft of that bill would have taxed tuition remissions, which low-wage graduate students receive, as income, meaning workers earning roughly $15,000 a year would be taxed as though they were earning around four times as much. Indiana University being the largest employer in the district, Trey’s constituents did not all smile on this prospect. Specifically, on the evening of Monday, December 11, Campus Action for Democracy grad students staged a sit-in in his office in Greenwood, demanding to hear from Trey.

Rather than call and speak to them, Trey and his DC-based security chief issued two instructions: 1) that the building manager allow the protesters to stay in his office, but have the police restrict them from going into the hall, where the bathrooms are, and b) that his pregnant staffer supervise the student demonstrators for as long as they continued the occupation. So, as the occupiers explain in this video [6], they spent hour after hour with no access to bathrooms or contact with the outside world, never quite managing to get arrested for the cause.

Four days later, on December 15th, the Scott County Chamber of Commerce announced a Koch Brothers-sponsored “Tax Reform Town Hall” [7] with Trey. It was open to the public, with a few minor provisos: 1) Attendees had to register that very day on Eventbrite, 2) The Eventbrite link didn’t work, 3) The Town Hall was to take place in three days, on a Monday, 4) at 8 o’clock in the morning, 5) one week before Christmas, and 6) in the tiny town of Scottsburg. (Scott County, of which Scottsburg is the seat, gained some notoriety years earlier when then-Governor Mike Pence closed the local Planned Parenthood clinic, the county’s only site for HIV testing. [8] When, two years later, the worst HIV outbreak owing to needle-sharing in US history broke out in Scott County, Pence took three months to permit a temporary needle exchange, in which time nearly 200 Scott County residents were notified of an HIV-positive diagnosis.)

How did the Town Hall ultimately go? Citing a mysterious “threats of violence,” Trey cancelled the event. [9] A spokesperson said that, on the recommendation of Capitol Police, they would not release any details. That very same day, I swear before God, he posted on Facebook that, due to a fire in the building, the Greenwood office -- which students had occupied precisely one week earlier -- would be closed for re-construction until January 3rd.

The fire’s devastation was evidently total: no one survived to manage to get it reported in the local paper.

In the end, Trey voted for the Free Millions for Billionaires Bill, and made out like a bandit, handing himself $4.5 Million via the law’s “Pass-Through Tax Deduction” -- more than any other Member of Congress. The Grad Student Tax was removed from the final bill, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t believe me that he personally called Tracey, the lead organizer of Campus Action for Democracy, to explain how hard he had worked to strike that unconscionable provision.

At this point, a lot of people have noticed that Trey spends about as much time in Indiana’s 9th, now that he represents it, as he did a couple years back, before he moved to it. Liz Watson, his Democratic challenger, has repeatedly invited him to a joint candidate forum, as have several non-partisan press outlets and organizations, including Hoosier Action and Campus Action for Democracy. Citing whatever and also this other thing, he has declined these invitations.

In the Republican Primary this year, a man named James Dean Alspach challenged Trey. He did not campaign. He barely posted a website. [10] His team, whoever they were, stapled up a bunch of lawn signs that said “James Dean” and showed his face. “If I win this primary,” he told WLKY News Louisville [11], “I’m going to announce my intentions to run for President as James Dean.” Detecting the interviewer’s confusion, Dean clarified: “So my whole focus in the Congress is to legislate for my Presidency.” He got nearly a quarter of the vote.

Trey is vulnerable, especially because he is facing an unusually strong candidate in Watson, a labor attorney who wrote the federal legislation on a $15 minimum wage, a staunch supporter of Medicare for All, and a friend to Pramila Jayapal, Bernie Sanders and around twenty labor unions. Her campaign has been so impressive -- raising over $1 Million, with nearly 50,000 contributions averaging under $40 -- that the DCCC added Indiana’s 9th, which Trey won by 14 points and Trump won by 25 -- into its “Red to Blue” class of swing seats.

In collaboration with the Working Families Party, Hoosier Action is running an independent expenditure on her behalf. Between our work, Watson’s strengths, Trey’s weaknesses, the mood of the country, and Sen. Donnelly’s rise in the polls, I think we might just be able to scale this immense mountain of a political effort and unseat the biggest goober in Washington, Joseph Albert “Trey” Hollingsworth.

The third.

[1] https://hollingsworthcos.com/about/history/founder/
[2] https://hollingsworthcos.com/…/04/EntrepreneurialOdyssey.pdf
[3] https://www.inc.com/profile/hollingsworth-capital-partners
[4] https://www.usatoday.com/…/millionaire-congressma…/95446364/
[5] http://www.slate.com/…/can_tennessee_s_trey_hollingsworth_b…
[6] https://www.facebook.com/campusactionfordemocracy/videos/526096767775024/
[7] http://www.scottchamber.org/…/tax-reform-town-hall-with-con…
[8] https://www.huffpost.com/…/mike-pence-indiana-hiv_n_57f53b9…
[9] https://www.indystar.com/…/indiana-congressman-c…/961036001/
[10] http://www.jamesdeanushouse.com
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x8uXa_qBa0

According to FiveThirtyEight, Trey Hollingsworth (R) is likely to defeat Liz Watson (D) in November.

FiveThirtyEight offers three House forecasts, none of which bode well for Liz Watson (D), who is challenging incumbent Trey Hollingsworth (R) in the 9th district congressional race.

How do you like your House forecast?

Lite: Keep it simple, please — give me the best forecast you can based on what local and national polls say

Classic: I’ll take the polls, plus all the “fundamentals”: fundraising, past voting in the district, historical trends and more

Deluxe: Gimme the works — the Classic forecasts plus experts’ ratings

It's a grim prognosis.

Lite forecast: 98.2% chance the Republican (Hollingsworth) wins 61.8% - 38.2%

Classic forecast: 78.3 chance the Republican (Hollingsworth) wins 53% - 47%

Deluxe forecast: 90% chance the Republican (Hollingsworth) wins 55% - 45%

From a national perspective, FiveThirtyEight provides a bit of relief for Democrats.

Considering the source? I read something at FiveThirtyEight almost every day.

FiveThirtyEight. | Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis — hard numbers — to tell compelling stories about politics, sports, science, economics and culture.

Hollingsworth? Nah. Local Democrats may be useless, but calling them out doesn't mean I'm a Republican.

Home sweet home.

With Tennessee Trey in town earlier today to raise funds (could he even find his way?) what can I add except this: let's always remember the famous Scottsburg town meeting, and the congressman's links to the Koch Brothers, and his desire to build walls ... but of course he's rich, and in our advancing oligarchy, the money's all that matters.

Hope you enjoyed the first Gilded Age.

Where is Trey Hollingsworth? Carpetbagging Congressman cancels first-ever town hall, angering constituents and emboldening opponents, by Christopher Rex (Medium)

They descended on Scottsburg under the cover of early-morning darkness, from all over Indiana’s Ninth Congressional District. They came from places like Mitchell and Bedford, Bloomington, Memphis, Floyds Knobbs, and more. They were teachers and construction workers, mental health counselors and high school students; retired postal workers and stay-at-home moms. One was a bundled-up third grader in a pink Colts stocking cap. They were there to speak face-to-face, finally, with their elusive representative, Congressman Trey Hollingsworth.

It was a small group, not more than 25 in number, and they were carrying signs with slogans like Protect Working Families; Stop Re-Writing the Tax Code in SECRET; and, most simply, #SHOWINGUP. They were exceedingly polite and civil in their actions, huddled together along South Lake Road North, trying desperately to keep warm as cars and trucks whizzed past in the dark, but they were angry, too, oh yes, and they had some questions they wanted the man representing them in Congress to answer.

Chuck Sebastian, a local barber, wanted to know who Hollingsworth was really working for, the people of the Ninth District, or the large donors that the tax bill would benefit the most; Barbara Burton, a cancer survivor, wondered if Hollingsworth and the GOP would be coming for her Medicare next; High school senior Dylan Baker had the $1.5 trillion deficit in mind when he asked why he and his generation were being asked to pay, tomorrow, for rich people’s tax cuts today; Roger Pedigo, a construction worker, wanted to know why we weren’t investing in infrastructure — the roads and bridges he helps build — while his wife, Jennifer, wondered how her two daughters were expected to thrive, financially, with crippling student loan debt.

There was one singular question, however, that they all demanded an answer to:

Where was Trey Hollingsworth?

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: America's everlasting Reconstruction: Carpetbaggers, scalawags, canards and a biography of U.S. Grant.

The book is Ron Chernow's Grant, a biography of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885). When the Civil War began, Grant was a former military officer languishing in obscurity in Galena, Illinois. The war changed everything, because Grant's fundamental skill was grasping the logistics of warfare, and it served him well, indeed.

Grant coordinated the strategy that won the war for the Union, became Commanding General of the Army, and then was elected to two terms as the 18th President of the United States.

The war itself was finite. What came afterward continues to vex us.

Chernow is clearly out to find undiscovered nobility in his story, and he succeeds; he also finds uncannily prescient tragedy. There are ways in which Grant’s times eerily resemble our own.

It’s jolting to read about how the Union’s Civil War victory proved to be a beginning, not an ending; how it led to a spike in white supremacist groups and their efforts to keep newly enfranchised black men from voting; how the president who succeeded Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, seemed determined to undo the Union’s success; how the voting rights for freed male slaves guaranteed by the 15th Amendment were allowed to erode; how the once squeaky-clean Grant began surrounding himself with rich friends and became embroiled in financial scandal once he attained the power of the presidency.

The first half of the biography documents Grant's life and career up to the conclusion of the Civil War, with the remainder devoted to his presidency and later life.

As a Civil War buff since childhood, Grant's war record is very familiar to me. However, I've never properly studied his post-war career in politics, which is synonymous with the period of the Reconstruction -- and like most Americans, I know far too little about this period of the nation's history.

Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, two more years of war, service by African American troops, and the defeat of the Confederacy, the nation was still unprepared to deal with the question of full citizenship for its newly freed black population. The Reconstruction implemented by Congress, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, was aimed at reorganizing the Southern states after the Civil War, providing the means for readmitting them into the Union, and defining the means by which whites and blacks could live together in a non-slave society. The South, however, saw Reconstruction as a humiliating, even vengeful imposition and did not welcome it.

Whatever else might be written about Reconstruction, it spawned the imperfectly understood term "carpetbagger."

Five Myths About Reconstruction, by James W. Loewen (Zinn Education Project)

3. Northerners used Reconstruction to take advantage of the South and get rich.

Many Americans still learn this canard, epitomized by the term “carpetbaggers.”

The story—as exemplified in the 2011 edition of the textbook The American Journey — is that fortune-hunters from the North “arrived with all their belongings in cheap suitcases made of carpet fabric.” Penniless, they would then make it rich off the prostrate South. John F. Kennedy said in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage, “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi.”

The first clue that this view might be far-fetched comes from the fact that the economies of most Southern states were in ruins. Fortune-seekers will go where the money is, and it was not in the postwar South. Instead, immigrants from the North were mostly of four types: missionaries bringing Christianity (and often literacy) to newly freed people; teachers eager to help Black children and adults learn to read, write, and cipher; Union soldiers and seamen who were stationed in Mississippi and liked the place or fell in love; and would-be political leaders, Black and white, determined to make interracial government work.

A "canard" is a noun about a duck, implying buffalo chips.

Before 1850, from French canard "a hoax," literally "a duck" (from Old French quanart, probably echoic of a duck's quack); said by Littré to be from the phrase vendre un canard à moitié "to half-sell a duck," thus, from some long-forgotten joke, "to cheat."

It's an interesting question of perception.

We've long since accepted "carpetbagger" in the sense of an opportunistic political candidate, and I've been among those who've used the term to describe Trey Hollingworth, who came to Indiana from Tennessee with a cash-stuffed banjo on his knee and bought a seat in the House of Representatives.

Although in doing so, we're accepting the Southern definition of the term as one of opprobrium, and ignoring the fact that it was used to denigrate well-intentioned people who'd now fancy themselves as left-leaners voting against the likes of Hollingsworth.

We probably should be referring to Hollingsworth as a canard, not a carpetbagger. 

Perhaps I'm too European, but a duck quacks, a quack is a meteorologist physician politician, and the notion of a politician quacking like a duck reminds me of certain opportunistic city council members embracing urban designs redolent of suburban outlet malls.

As Groucho Marx might have asked, viaduct?

By the way ...

What’s the difference between a carpetbagger and a scalawag? by Elizabeth Mix (History)

White Southerners who supported Reconstruction-era Republicans were called scalawags by their political enemies, who considered them traitors to the South and just as bad, if not worse, than carpetbaggers. Scalawags included non-slaveholding, small-time farmers; middle-class professionals and others who had stayed loyal to the Union during the war. Although the exact origins of scalawag are unknown, it was in use in the United States before the Civil War as a term for both a farm animal of little value and a ne’er-do-well individual.

What are YOU reading?

Dan Canon's good ink underscores the ideological problem for Adam's local DemoDisneyDixiecrats.

The author wouldn't identify the brewery, so I have.

It's an excellent profile of Dan Canon, man and candidate -- and I promise not to mention the local DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party's right-wing assault on public housing ... not even once.

Oops.

Is This Indiana Civil Rights Lawyer the Great Progressive Hope of 2018?, by Michael Powell (Vice)

Dan Canon is suing Trump, calling out white supremacy, and running for Congress. But can he win?

Less than a day after announcing his campaign for Congress in the parking lot of a brewery near his New Albany, Indiana, home, Dan Canon stood on a bench on a well-trafficked pedestrian bridge over the Ohio River telling anyone who would listen why they deserved healthcare. Some kept walking, some stopped to join in the growing circle around him.

"Healthcare is your right, and you have to assert that right. You get a small group of people that believe that and it spreads. If we tell our elected representatives we [have that right], well, they're not doing their jobs,” he told them in his role as a political busker. “So what do you do? You fire them!”

That’s the sort of personalized campaign Canon is running to flip Indiana’s Ninth District from red to blue. The progressive civil rights attorney is one of the most fascinating midterm House candidates in the country, a longtime advocate for causes ranging from gay marriage to immigration to cannabis who spends his free time acting in community theater, playing in bands, and marching in protests. If he can get into Congress, it'll be proof for a lot of leftists that yes, their preferred candidates really can win.

He has his work cut out for him: In 2016 Donald Trump won the district by 27 points and Republican Congressman Trey Hollingsworth beat his Democratic opponent by 14 after moving from Tennessee in 2015 ...

This important point remains:

The incumbent Hollingsworth has one advantage over any eventual Democratic opponent—he’s one of the wealthiest members of Congress, with almost $60 million in assets. Canon says his advantage will come through optics and lived experience. “You have people like Trey Hollingsworth who come to a district as an outsider millionaire with multi-generation wealth and doesn’t understand living paycheck to paycheck, doesn’t understand making the choice between paying for health insurance and paying the rent, or scrounging for change in the couch to buy a Big Mac,” Canon told me. “These are things that I’ve actually experienced, and I think gives me a point of identification with lots of other people. Very few if any candidates at an office this size understand those very real problems because of the prevalence of money in politics… It’s difficult for working-class folks to run for office.”

Hollingsworth is a plutocratic carpetbagger, and I'd say the same thing if the situation occurred in reverse, and it was a Democrat from Massachusetts.

Just one more quote.

“[Dan’s] message focuses a lot on fighting for individuals. It manifests itself in different issues, but he’s articulating a vision that goes deeper than what previous candidates have had to offer.”

The speaker is none other than multi-chairman spider web spinner Adam "Boy Wonder" Dickey, and after one wades painfully past the robotic code language, there's a grain of unintended truth.

Not only is Canon running against Republicans outside the Democratic Party, but also the ones within it -- and not only Washington County's implanted Falangist.

Another of Adam Dickey's hilarious DemoDisneyDixiecratic shit shows provides timely comic relief.

Those progressive themes Canon repeats aloud?

Try imagining Jeff Gahan uttering any of them, privately or publicly. More bluntly, the only future hope for Dickey's local DemoDisneyDixiecrats is that Canon wins, and the party is reshaped by younger, more progressive activists -- and this phenomenon, should it occur, would transform Jeff Gahan into Doug Leatherbury.

Or is it the other way around?

ON THE AVENUES: David Duggins’ violent “jokes” will continue until the New Albany Housing Authority’s morale improves – or Duggins is fired. We advocate the latter.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: "Individual bullying is usually characterized by a person behaving in a certain way to gain power over another person."