Lots of good ink for 9th district congressional hopeful Dan Canon.

Taxman Brewing's pretty good, too. 

The primary election is less than four months away (Tuesday, May 8). Dan Canon's been getting good ink; here are two examples.

Dan Canon looks to flip Indiana's Ninth District, by Mark Dunbar (NUVO)

(Canon) and his staff playfully refer to Rep. Hollingsworth as “Tennessee Trey” — on account of Hollingsworth moving to Indiana from Tennessee just a month before running in 2015 — but stay on the topic for very long and it becomes obvious that Canon doesn’t find Hollingsworth’s political consumerism very amusing.

“Here’s a guy who’s a multimillionaire, who comes from multi-generational wealth, that had probably not set foot in Indiana prior to 2015, with him and his dad clearly fishing for a district to buy. It’s really hard for somebody like that to have any meaningful understanding of what people are going through in the Ninth District,” Canon said.

Canon’s policy proposals are comprehensive to say the least. He’s for legalizing marijuana and against the Electoral College. For nationwide healthcare and against private prisons. For automatic voter registration and against exorbitant interest fees. For labor representation and against state harassment of migrant workers.

Brazenly putting forward such progressive policies has earned Canon endorsement from some of the Midwest’s most left-leaning organizations, including Democratic Socialists of America’s Louisville chapter.

When I asked if he thought some of these endorsements might be used against him in the general election, he snickered a bit before answering, “Look, my opponent called Shelli Yoder a socialist. Shelli Yoder. That’s what they’re going to do. Anyone who wants the government to work better for working class people as opposed to wanting the government to work solely for rich people is gonna be called a socialist. So we’re gonna be called that and we know that. It’s gonna be better for us if we don’t run from that term.”

This one's in a lighter interview format.

INTERVIEW: Dan Canon on his run for Congress, impacting change through the law, and his favorite restaurant, by Syd Bishop (Never Nervous)

... Never Nervous: What prompted your run for office? Did someone nominate you or were you otherwise inspired?

Dan Canon: When you’re a lawyer who cares about stuff, I think people encourage you to run. There aren’t many folks who can take a public flogging like a civil rights lawyer. So people had suggested it to me for years, and I always resisted because I’m not the model of a pristine, charismatic politician that we’ve come to expect (and largely dislike) in the United States. My finance director Dawn hit me with the idea again after the elections in 2016, and I went for it. I think we are at a unique time in history when people want something different from the status quo, and I’m definitely that. But also I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that American democracy is really in trouble right now, and we’ve all got to do what we can to save it. This is something I can do.

SNIP

NN: What does it take to be a good leader?

DC: I don’t know how to answer that in the short space I have here, and I’m not sure I know the answer at all. I’m still learning, and I hope I always am. It seems to me that one critical aspect of leadership is having the humility to admit you don’t always have all the answers, and the resourcefulness to find and ask the people who do.

NN: How do you intend to hold people in power accountable?

DC: In my experience, the key to holding people accountable is to be willing to do it. That’s not as easy as it sounds. But I’ve got a track record of doing just that, regardless of party affiliation or any other factor, and I don’t intend to quit once I’m elected.

And if the malign contagion happens to exist in one's own political party? Dear Leader could use a lesson in accountability, and I continue to hope that candidate Canon will speak publicly in favor of the residents of the New Albany Housing Authority. I'd really like to be able to cast my ballot for him, and so my fingers are crossed.

Previously:

THURSDAY, MAY 11, 2017: ON THE AVENUES: Would a Canon candidacy compromise Deaf Gahan's and Mr. Dizznee's shizz show? A boy can dream.

DACA and Congress: "The repeated failure to pass bills has left America with immigration laws that are unenforceable."

Here is a dispassionate and rational editorial stance on DACA and the Dreamers, but will Congress act rationally?

What a wretched place we've become.

Donald Trump is right: Congress should pass DACA (The Economist)

The repeated failure to pass bills has left America with immigration laws that are unenforceable

IF YOU could design people in a laboratory to be an adornment to America they would look like the recipients of DACA. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an executive action issued in 2012 by Barack Obama to protect most of those who were brought to the country as children from deportation, covers about 800,000 people. They are a high-achieving lot. More than 90% of those now aged over 25 are employed; they create businesses at twice the rate of the public as a whole; many have spouses and children who are citizens. They are American in every sense bar the bureaucratic one.

Correcting that ought to be about as hard politically as declaring a new public holiday ...

 ... But the choice on DACA is not between the rule of law and rule by presidential edict. It is between two different types of legal failure—executive actions that are possibly unconstitutional and a set of immigration laws that are definitely impossible to enforce.

The solution ...

 ... is for Congress to write DACA, or something like it, into law. Yet the long-running saga over DACA and its recipients, whose average age is now 25, has been another sign that Congress’s default setting is to inaction. Mr Obama issued his executive action after years of waiting for Congress to write legislation. Congressmen ducked the decision, leading the president to take it unilaterally, on questionable authority.

A sensible conclusion.

Better if the lawmakers who spent years denouncing Mr Obama for grabbing power from Congress now choose to exercise that power themselves. The alternative is an act of economic and moral self-harm, in which Congress would further undermine both itself and the standing of the law.

Democrats "might want to try developing a substantive policy agenda to run on."

Bland and inoffensive?

Why does this sound so familiar to Floyd County Democrats? Republican Lite seems no longer to be working for them, and one hopeful sign is that Jeff Gahan's public housing putsch has awakened some of the party's principled leftward standard bearers.

But they'll have to get past Dickey the Gatekeeper, won't they?

Jon Ossoff’s Georgia special election loss shows Democrats could use a substantive agenda, by Matthew Yglesias (Vox)

 ... Corbyn’s electoral map, in the end, turns out to look a lot like Hillary Clinton’s. He did well in the most diverse and most educated parts of the United Kingdom and worst among older voters. Whites with college degrees, in short, weren’t secretly dreaming of socialism. At the same time, running on a bold progressive policy agenda didn’t stop him from picking up support in exactly the kind of upscale precincts that the Democratic establishment has been trying to target. And it did succeed in doing what post-Obama Democrats have failed to do — engage young voters and encourage them to come to the polls.

But perhaps most of all, running on a bold policy agenda helped focus voters’ minds on policy rather than on the (extremely long) list of controversial Corbyn statements and associations from past years. Pundits had long expected Corbyn to get crushed at the polls, and had Theresa May succeeded in running an election focused on the Falklands War, the Irish Republican Army, and unilateral nuclear disarmament, she would have won. But instead, the UK ended up with a campaign about promises to nationalize utilities, eliminate university tuition, and raise taxes.

Ossoff’s effort to stay bland and inoffensive let hazy personal and culture war issues dominate the campaign — and even in a relatively weak Trump district, that was still a winning formula for Republicans.

Rep. Baron Hill belongs to the House Small Brewers Caucus. He is encouraged to support H.R. 4278, too.

I may have written this previously, but if not: Alone among Indiana's delegation in the House of Representatives, Baron Hill (9th district) has signed on as a member of the House Small Brewers Caucus.

Thanks to Rep. Hill for doing so.

However, not one Indiana member of the House has yet declared co-sponsorship of H.R. 4278 (excise tax reduction legislation).

H.R. 4278 is the result of months of intensive effort on the part of Representatives Richard Neal (Massachusetts, 2nd District) and Kevin Brady (Texas, 8th District), individual Brewers Association (BA) member breweries and BA staff to ensure American small brewers are given the best chance to remain strong and competitive.

Representative John Yarmuth (Kentucky, 3rd District) recently climbed on board.

I encourage Rep. Hill to do so.