But the attack does reveal a key weakness in today's Democratic Party that could haunt it for the next decade or more -- it has a relatively barren farm system of young up-and-comers. The party could easily survive 2016 with Clinton at the top of the ticket, but what about subsequent cycles?

Continue Reading...

“The same left-wing extremists who support Pete Gallego want more burdensome regulations that put the interests of spiders above our need to create more jobs,” the flier declared, referring to discovery of the endangered Braken Bat Cave meshweaver. “The best way to stop left-wing extremists from killing jobs is to vote against their hand-picked candidate Pete Gallego.”

Continue Reading...

Newly published research suggests that’s a complete misreading of the facts. According to this analysis, politically engaged Mexicans who move to the U.S. fall all over the ideological spectrum, very much like native-born Americans.

What’s more, according to University of Nebraska-Lincoln political scientist Sergio Wals, those on the right are more inclined to participate in the American electoral process than those on the left.

Continue Reading...

There has been a lot of coverage about the potential for fast food chains and other employers to cut the hours of some of their employees to under 30 a week in order to avoid having to offer them health coverage. To the extent that employers do cut back hours, it will accelerate a long-trend toward part-time low wage work; part-timers increased from 17 percent to 22 percent of the workforce just from 2007 to 2011.

Continue Reading...

But what he doesn't see are the deadly police protest crackdowns in the streets of Istanbul that have caused many to question whether Turkey is ready to join the bloc of European countries.

“The EU gave Turkey time for reforms before it can come in and live up to EU standards knowing this would take ages,” the Greek official told International Business Times on a recent afternoon in New York City. “But Turkey needs help.”

In other words, if the EU is concerned about the violence between anti-government protesters and police that has left as many as five dead and thousands injured then the best way for the 27-country political union to deal with that problem would be to accept Turkey as a member. That would give the EU the leverage necessary to force the Turkish authorities to show more respect for human rights and more restraint in the face of domestic protests. Such a course of action would offer the added advantage of letting Europe benefit from Turkey's economic vitality.

Continue Reading...

Soon after, she declared to her parents at their Brampton, Ontario home that she'd come up with a solution to her phagophobia.

"I want to be cremated," she said. "That way I don't have to worry about the bugs eating me."

Jim Cuthbertson looked down at his 10-year-old daughter and reluctantly told her that there are also bugs that live in and feed on ashes.

Sixteen years later, this memory re-surfaced as Jamie sat down to prepare what will be her last digital will and testament using the If I Die app.

The resulting three-minute video shows Jamie smiling into her webcam, her long bangs framing her dark brown eyes. "A bug-proof coffin is totally worth it," she says. "You can also throw in some of my favourite things and photos of the people and animals I loved."

Continue Reading...

Her cheeky Twitter debut told me two almost contradictory things: Hillary Clinton is having an enormously good time with this phase in her life, and she’s planning on running for president.

Obviously a winning campaign will be way harder than launching her Twitter presence, but let’s give her credit for a bold first step. Still, I was thrilled by Clinton’s sure-footed Twitter move – and then I was kind of horrified by how thrilled I was, particularly as I saw a comparable giddiness among liberals and the media (and no, they’re not the same thing.)

Continue Reading...

The aforementioned quote, from state Democratic Chairman John Walsh in Sunday's Boston Globe, "shows you exactly what’s driving everybody in this race," Boston-based Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh told Salon. "They want to make sure that there’s not one thing that doesn’t get done -- an ad made, a door knocked, a resource afforded, an endorsement, an appearance, what have you -- to drum up enthusiasm for June 25. They're taking nothing for granted."

Continue Reading...

The state voted for Obama in 2012 and 2008, and has two Democratic senators, so it should be a pretty easy pickup for Democrats, right? Not so fast. Instead, it's just a slim Democratic lead, with the big joke in Richmond being that this is a contest between two guys who cannot win. On the Republican side, this makes some sense, as they nominated Attorney General Ken Cuccinnelli, one of the most extreme conservatives in the country, in an increasingly Democratic-leaning state. So why aren't the Democrats running away with it? Is it something about Virginia, or Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe?

"Nobody likes either of them," said Norman Leahy, a conservative analyst and the editor of the Virginia political blog BearingDrift, referring to both nominees. "If the election were held today, I think you could make a strong case for 'none of the above' doing pretty well as a write-in candidate."

Continue Reading...

Do those things go together? The political scientist John Sides thinks it’s going to be a problem:

[T]o be the Republican nominee, he’ll need the support of his Republican colleagues. The 2012 election once again showed—and despite some skepticism—that it is very hard to win the nomination unless you’re preferred by a substantial chunk, if not the vast majority of, your party’s leaders (as was Romney). Which is to say, it pays to be nice to your colleagues. It’s no guarantee, of course: junior Senator Hillary Clinton kept her head down and played nice, and lost the nomination. John McCain often irritated his fellow Republicans, but still mustered enough support within the party to win the nomination.

But political scientist Dave Hopkins isn’t so sure: “Don't think this is the problem for Cruz that John does. McCain bugged Sen colleagues/leaders too; still won '08 nom.”

Continue Reading...

I leaked the recording to Mother Jones, which published it with a transcript and analysis in April, and over the days that followed, blogs and cable news shows lit up with the revelations from that one meeting. At the time, McConnell was prepping for a race against the actress Ashley Judd -- it was “the Whac-a-Mole stage of the campaign,” McConnell said smugly -- and the recording captures his team in some Grade-A jackassery, including plans to use Judd’s history of depression against her.

But also up for debate was the the ethics of the audio recording itself. Here's the latest: An assistant U.S. attorney, Bryan Calhoun, telephoned my attorney yesterday, asking to meet with him next Friday as charges against me are being presented to a grand jury.

In a technology age marked by vigilante heroes like Julian Assange and Anonymous, the line between journalism and espionage has grown thin. McConnell was quick to frame himself as the victim of a crime, which was to be expected. It was the guilty repositioning of a politician who has been caught being craven.

Continue Reading...

As Josh Eidelson reported for the Nation:

“I’m sick of seeing my co-workers and me essentially get pushed and pushed and barely be able to eat,” Taco Bell employee Caroline Durocher told The Nation Wednesday. “And I think it’s time that we pushed them back"...

The Seattle strike comes two weeks after New York's fast food workers campaign released a report alleging rampant wage theft in the industry, and hours after the Congressional Progressive Caucus announced plans to MSNBC.com for a nationwide tour focused on low wages and economic inequality. It also follows a day-long strike last week in Washington, DC, staged by federally-contracted workers – federal building fast food employees included – demanding that President Obama take executive action to improve their working conditions.

.... The fast food strike wave represents organized labor’s most dramatic challenge to the massive, fast-growing, and virtually union-free industry. As I’ve written previously, fast food’s low-wages, precarious employment, and emotional labor are increasingly representative of the larger economy. The shape of the strikes – single-day walkouts, by aminority of the workforce, with an emphasis on community support – represents anincreasingly prevalent labor strategy for attempting to build worker organization, squeeze management, and avert retaliation, in the face of legal and economic changes that havemade strikes more risky and less effective.

Continue Reading...

President Nicolas Maduro scraped into the presidency last month with a margin of just 1.5 percent, an unexpectedly-close result given the candidate’s double-digit polling lead throughout his campaign. Venezuelan popular opinion allotted a 10 percent difference between Chavez and his anointed successor, the firebrand president having defeated the same opponent, the fresh-faced Henrique Capriles, by a more convincing 11 percent margin just five months previously.

“If I win by one vote, I win; if I lose by one vote, I lose,” proclaimed a visibly shaken Maduro in his typically rambling victory speech. Yet Venezuela’s new president has been left without the necessary mandate to foot the bill that Hugo Chavez left without paying.

Continue Reading...

"After a great deal of thought and deliberation, I have decided next year I will not seek a fifth congressional term to represent the wonderful people of the 6th District of Minnesota. After serious consideration, I am confident that this is the right decision," she says in a video posted on her website.  The decision had nothing to do with her electoral prospects or ethics issues, she says explicitly, but rather a belief in term limits. Still, it's hard to look at a recent poll that found the congresswoman down 2 points and believe it was irrelevant.

Continue Reading...

Let’s start with what he has going for him. Most critically, Weiner begins this race possessing a prerequisite for an upset: the field of candidates he faces has failed to catch the attention of voters. The current frontrunner, City Council speaker Christine Quinn, leads early polls but none show her approaching the 40 percent mark needed to avoid a runoff, and she inspires intense opposition among many New York voters. Add to that the fact that other leading candidates like Bill de Blasio and Bill Thompson have failed to consolidate their bases of support, and you’ve got an unsettled race -- just the kind of backdrop essential for Weiner to have a prayer of winning.

Continue Reading...

The implication was that House Republicans had decided that the lesson of the bruising 2012 election was to back off on anything that Democrats could tar as a war on women. (In the meantime, their allies in the states could push through real changes in abortion and contraception access, with very few political barriers.) But that fragile detente may be over, both nationally and in this year’s key state races. The question is whether it's a battle Republicans even want to fight.

Continue Reading...

This time around, he'll start with higher-name ID -- "I think we started off last time around at 18 percent and now we're pushing 75 to 80 percent" -- and more support from national Democrats, who were initially skeptical about his chances and didn't get heavily involved until mid-October. "I don't think they jumped in at all," Graves quipped of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, before quickly excusing them in a typical Minnesota-nice fashion: "There was lower-hanging fruit, I don't blame them."

Continue Reading...

Legend and myth was important to ancient Roman society. They practiced augury, such as reading the way birds fly, then attributing bad situations to unhappy gods. In reality, their government (a republic, no less) was run by a few elites who made bad decisions. Americans tend to be similar in buying into myths, while a real culprit of our stagnant democracy is right before our eyes. Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but too many of us are focused on distractions -- like blaming Citizens United v. FEC for everything wrong with politics -- while political insiders rig the game.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...