Democratic consultants: pay me five grand and I'll tell you how to win

I have long chastised local political goofball (it's like a curveball, except dumber) Marc Campos for this sort of "hire-me-and-I'll-tell-you" baloney, and it's not really surprising to see a carpetbagger like Jeremy Bird recognizing a huge business opportunity in Texas when he sees one.

Two top veterans of President Obama’s campaigns are asking political campaigners to pay $5,000 per person for the chance to learn their secrets and then work for five weeks in an unpaid campaign job somewhere in America.

Democratic operatives and progressive activists are questioning this training program launched by Obama campaign architects Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird. The $5,000 program promises access to the wizardry of Obama’s presidential bids — and a five-week, unpaid gig on an “important Democratic campaign.”

Run by Bird and Stewart’s consulting company, 270 Strategies, the new program’s emphasis on placing paying customers in essentially volunteer roles on Democratic campaigns is atypical in the campaign training industry, and some Democrats say it sets a dangerous precedent. The firm’s first-ever “270/360 Training Intensive” program is scheduled to begin in September.

The program’s website describes a six-week program, consisting of five days of “intensive” campaign training at 270’s Chicago HQ featuring Stewart and Bird and other “architects of the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns,” followed by five weeks of volunteer work on an “an important Democratic campaign in the United States.”

The cost for the five-day training with Bird and Stewart is $3,500. It costs $1,500 more if a student wants the five weeks of work experience. Critics say those costs are way above the market rate for campaign trainings.

“It’s deeply concerning that leaders in our party are launching a ‘pay to play’ system for would-be campaign staff,” said a Democratic campaign veteran. “As Democrats, we should be working together to eliminate workforce barriers — such as unpaid internships — rather starting programs that further discourage participation in electoral work.”

I saw a Tweet from Houston's uber-Dem-activist Erik Vidor about this -- seeming to offer his own experience for hire -- and breezed on past it, thinking he was just being, you know, entrepreneurial.  But in context he's miffed, and then I saw that Juanita Jean was pretty steamed.  When she goes off on a Democrat about something, you know it's gotta be bad.

Yeah, it’s Jeremy Bird doing his damnest to turn Democratic politics into WalMart.

He also owns Battleground Texas (where they fight each other) and Ready for Hillary (where they openly admit that they want you to collect emails and phone numbers for them so they can “sell” them to Hillary if she decides to run).

When you put politics in the hands of people who want to get rich off of free labor, you’re might as well try to make honey out of pig poop or go on and elect the Tea Party because that’s what they want, too.

Worthless as corn flake recipes.   I’ll tell you something  - I’d rather have a four card flush than these guys.

Progressive Texans don’t know whether to laugh our butts off or to be totally mortified.  Mostly, we’re pretty damn mortified.

Democrats have long forgotten that they're supposed to be the party of "socialism" -- in the sharing sense of the word -- and not pure, raw, brutal, naked-and-afraid capitalism.  They've abandoned it because, like the the denigration of the word liberal (which only goes back to the Reagan administration) it's become a perjorative that they shirk from.

Give conservatives credit for being masters at framing the discussion.

Besides that, you might have noticed -- if you carefully read the links above -- a certain amount of frustration that extends to the Wendy Davis campaign.  As Kuff likes to say, make of that what you will.  I think it's notable that we haven't gotten to August yet and the criticism is starting to go public.  Another reminder that when someone says 'nobody pays attention to elections until Labor Day', that person is full of shit.

As far as paying a political expert for anything, you should know how I feel about that.  As far as paying a political expert this kind of money for this kind of experience, my advice is to negotiate a train car of lubricant for the sellers to throw in.  It's not like anything is going to blow up in your face, it'll just feel better after you have completed your training.

P.T. Barnum at work here, people.  It's just business.  My only question: is this a facet of the booming Texas economy for which we need to thank Rick Perry?

Unlike the credit he gets for having killed and buried all those dinosaurs millions of years ago in places like the Permian Basin and Spindletop and elsewhere across our Great State, in this case I would have to answer 'yes'.

The battle for control of the US Senate, updated

I'm not changing my mind; I'm just adding some point/counterpoint for the sake of watching the trend.  These updates deserved their own post.

Point (Booman):

I can't blame Stu Rothenberg for bitching about a polling firm that won't show its work, but I think he's just annoyed that polling keeps coming out that doesn't look good for Republican Senate candidates and governors. In the end, Rothenberg doesn't even really doubt that the race in Montana has grown closer and he lists it as a Toss-Up/Tilts Republican race, which is maybe even a little more of a pessimistic assessment than is warranted by the polling. I'd say that Montana Leans Republican right now, and the only toss-up part of it is that a lot can change between now and November.

A look at the latest polls shows Gov. Scott Walker in real trouble in Wisconsin, Gov. Rick Scott trailing in Florida, Udall and Hickenlooper up narrowly in Colorado, Sen. Kay Hagan up in North Carolina, Gov. Andrew Cuomo up by 37 points in New York, Michelle Nunn crushing David Perdue in Georgia, Rep. Gary Peters up by nine in Michigan, Mary Landrieu up in Louisiana, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen comfortably ahead in New Hampshire. People have already written obituaries for Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and the Republican governors of Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, and Michigan aren't looking like they're in too great a shape, either. The last poll out of Maine has Democrat Mike Michaud win a narrow lead in a three-way race.

The news isn't all good. Some races are scarily close, for example, the Senate races in Iowa, Arkansas, and Colorado. But only in Arkansas does an incumbent look to be in truly serious danger. Unless these races all tilt against the Democrats in the end, the GOP is on course for a galactically bad election night. 

Counterpoint (Associated Press, referencing the Montana contest in the first paragraph above):

Montana Sen. John Walsh's thesis written to earn a master's degree from the U.S. Army War College contains unattributed passages taken word-for-word from previously published papers.

The Democrat is running against Republican Rep. Steve Daines to keep the seat Walsh was appointed to in February when Max Baucus resigned to become U.S. ambassador to China, and national Democrats said Wednesday they remained "100 percent behind Sen. Walsh."

The apparent plagiarism in Walsh's 2007 thesis, titled "The Case for Democracy as a Long Term National Strategy," was first reported by The New York Times in a story posted online Wednesday afternoon. Walsh submitted the paper to earn his Master of Strategic Studies degree nearly two years after he returned from Iraq and about a year before he became Montana's adjutant general overseeing the state's National Guard and Department of Military Affairs.

Walsh's campaign said the senator did not intend to plagiarize and that he would speak to The Associated Press later Wednesday.

Walsh is saying he was suffering from PTSD at the time he "wrote" the thesis in question.

I think that race is safe for the GOP.

Safe abortions decline in Texas; late-term and unsafe ones rise

When abortions are outlawed, only outlaws will have abortions.  The actual effect -- not the Lege's intended one -- is already showing up in the statistics.

A new study released Wednesday reports in the six months since Texas' new anti-abortion law took effect, the number of legal medical abortions has dramatically declined while the number of second-trimester abortions has risen, suggesting to researchers that women are being forced to wait for the procedure.

HB-2 limits medical abortions, a non-surgical method, by restricting the time window during which the drug can be prescribed from 9 weeks to 7 weeks, and by forcing patients to return to a medical provider to ingest the medicine in front of a doctor four separate times rather than taking the regimen at home something not all women can afford financially or logistically. The law also requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals, which many hospitals can't accommodate, and bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

HB-2 went into effect last November and has already had a dramatic impact on women's access to reproductive healthcare in the months since.

Of the 41 clinics open in May 2013, only 20 remain open, causing the number of women of reproductive age living more than 200 miles from a facility to jump from 10,000 to 290,000, according to the report.

Medical abortions, which allowed women seeking abortion early in their pregnancy to avoid an invasive and potentially traumatic surgical procedure, have dropped by 70 percent under HB-2.

Legal abortions have decreased 13 percent, 9,200 fewer than last year, and researchers, noting surprise this number wasn't higher, credited the state's network of non-profits and abortion funds helping to finance women's reproductive healthcare with mitigating the decline.

Many of the state's Republican leaders are going to celebrate this news. That would be a grave mistake on their part.

Despite the overall decline in abortions, the number of second-trimester abortions actually increased, suggesting the decrease in access to clinics and medication abortions is forcing women to wait until later in their pregnancies to have the procedure.

That's just the ones that are included in the official numbers.

Between HB-2's sweeping restrictions which limit access and Texas' 2011 cuts to family planning funding, Grossman says he expects the unintended birthrate to rise and worries the rate of self-induced and illegal abortions will rise as well.

"[Researchers] suspect that self-induced abortion will rise in Texas as access to clinic-based care becomes more difficult," Grossman told the Huffington Post. "Depending on the method used and when in pregnancy women attempt to do this, there may be health risks for women associated with self-induction."

'Suspect' and 'may be' are a little cautious, which is appropriate for a medical research analyst.  That person might be unaware that do-it-yourself abortions are already rising.

When the Texas Lege -- and many other states, to be clear -- passed reproductive rights restrictions in 2011 (the ultrasound law), state legislators were shocked to return in 2013 and discover the same thing that is happening now: more poor women were giving birth to more babies.  Any concerns they may have had about psychological trauma inflicted on the women involved, the extra expense associated with the waiting period, and the fact that they weren't changing any hearts or minds might have gotten lost in the fiduciary worries.

We already know how Texas Republicans feel about babies who are actually fetuses and zygotes.  "Once that umbilical cord is cut, kid, you're on your own."  And they DO mean 'on your own'.

We're in the process of watching the fruit of compassionate conservatism come to harvest.  And the damage is much deeper than the rare pricked conscience of someone like David Simpson.

More on clinic closings from Andrea Grimes.

The battle for control of the US Senate

Sorry, Dr. Alameel, you won't be mentioned in this post, or in any conversations going forward about the topic.

Many pundits, politicos, and prognosticators are giving the edge to the GOP for a flip this fall in the Congress' upper chamber.  I'm not one of them, and not for partisan reasons.  I have believed for some time now that there is some amount of unmeasured, unpolled support for candidates across the country who favor actual progressive populism, including women's issues such as reproductive choice and raises in the minimum wage, not to mention the revulsion of the policies and conduct of Republicans in general and Tea Party Republicans in particular.  And I also think that female candidates are somewhat uniquely positioned to take advantage of that.  And I have two recent data points that support this premise.

-- The first is the result from yesterday's Georgia Republican Senate primary, where former Dollar General Store chief David Perdue vanquished Rep. Jack Kingston for the right to face Democratic nominee Michelle Nunn in November's contest to replace retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss.

Despite Kingston having the stamp of approval from the Tea Party and the US Chamber of Commerce (the most disparate of bedfellows among conservative factions) and the fact that nearly all polling showed Kingston leading comfortably -- the last one taken just a week ago gave him a widening 7-point margin -- Perdue prevailed by a slim 51-49 margin.  (That's still Eric Cantor-ish.)  And Perdue won despite declaring his support for tax increases, in the home stretch of the GOP primary two months ago, a fact his conservative opponents repeatedly hammered him with in both the primary and runoff campaigns.

Even Digby thought that Perdue was dead after that.

This is more than the usual significant: a Republican candidate deviated sharply from longstanding Republican orthodoxy, and finished first in a crowded primary and then won his runoff.  In Georgia.

Perdue's autumn opponent, Nunn, also a relative of previous Peach State electeds, currently holds a 5-6 point lead in the recent polls.  In Georgia.

Are Republicans really in this much trouble in their bid to take back the US Senate?  Well, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell certainly is, and his challenger, Allison Grimes, seems well-positioned for the shades-of-Tom-Daschle upset.  And we could go on from there about female Democrats -- and male ones too -- either holding their own in unlikely places or showing uncharacteristic strength in their races.

-- The second data point comes from a source I am usually in vehement disagreement with: a pair of very establishment Democrats who are among the highest paid consultants in the nation.

Look at the most competitive US Senate seats up for grabs in 2014, and you might be surprised that they are, in fact, competitive.

Of the 12 states in which there is so far no likely winner, eight are traditionally conservative. Mitt Romney won those states in 2012 – six by double digits.

But according to Democracy Corps, a political nonprofit formed by Democratic strategists James Carville and Stanley Greenberg in 1999, their polling indicates that the Democratic candidates are not that far behind.

The group points to what it says is a spillover effect of the House GOP’s record-low favorability rating as the main reason that the Democratic Senate candidates in the 12 states are within striking distance.

And the group has advice for how the Democratic candidates can close the remaining gap with their opponents: Rebrand their message to unmarried women, an undermobilized electorate.

“Unmarried women comprise about a quarter of the electorate, so they have a lot of sway in terms of determining who is and who is not elected,” says Page Gardner, founder and president of the nonprofit Voter Participation Center, a research-driven non-profit seeking to increase the political participation of historically under-represented groups. According to Ms. Gardner, the changing views of women in the 12 states result in significant shifts in polling results.

Read on there.

It's accurate to point out that this same demographic is the low-hanging fruit for the Wendy Davis campaign, and she will certainly harvest it.  I have previously underscored my concerns about her actions that degrade critical electoral support among Latinos, however, and Texas is still Texas and not Georgia.  Unless I am gravely mistaken -- always a possibility, and I would be delighted to be wrong about this -- she has already committed a fatal error by lining up alongside our Full Metal Jackass governor on the border.

Even as Greg Abbott demonstrates new depths of corruption, she is unable to capitalize.

But this post is about the US Senate.  Which, as of today, will very probably remain under Harry Reid's control.  That would be a good thing for Barack Obama, as he would not have to deal with an impeachment proceeding in his final two years in office.  (That doesn't mean the president should keep attending fundraisers as Palestinian civilians are slaughtered, and a humanitarian crisis in South Texas continues.  Optics and all that.)

Now if we could get some vampires to actually crash a Ted Cruz fundraiser at the W library... why, we would have a true moral victory in Texas.

Rick Perry's border surge

"I will not stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children from Central America are detained in squalor," Perry said at a briefing in Austin. "The price of inaction is too high for Texans to pay."

Perry's move came just hours after the White House announced that the number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border is dropping – from 355 per day in June to 150 in early July, according to spokesman Josh Earnest.

Earnest said the reasons for the drop remain unclear, but suggested the administration's efforts "to work with Central American leaders to publicize the dangers of the journey" have contributed significantly.

Perry on Monday acknowledged the drop in the new arrivals in recent weeks, but he offered a different theory for the trend, saying it was a "clear indication" that local, state and federal law enforcement efforts are working.

I'm already dizzy from the spin. The governor finally took this action after the president refused his request to do so.  The difference between the two?  When Obama does it uses federal dollars; when Perry does it, it's Texas money that pays for it.  And it's going to cost us $5 million a week.  And then there are the legality questions.

Perry’s move could also run into constitutional problems. The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause prohibits states from interfering with areas of regulation that have been preempted by the federal government, and the U.S. Supreme Court has already invalidated provisions of state law that seek to legislate on immigration reform. Washington and Lee University law professor Margaret Hu told ThinkProgress this provision could suffer similar constitutional problems, particularly because it interferes with national security and Department of Homeland Security policies also.

Perry’s announcement comes several days after several House of Representatives members introduced a resolution calling on Perry and several other governors in border states to send National Guard troops to the border. The resolution “recognizes, supports, and defends the Constitutional authority” of these governors to send troops to the border, and “urges” them to immediately deploy troops. But this, too, raises constitutional flags.

The resolution also commits to covering the cost of the troops — estimated to be $5 million per week just in Texas. The state is already spending $1.3 million on a state-funded border surge.

I guess we're not broke after all.  A bit more from Kimberly Reeves at Quorum Report.

Perry deflected criticism of his executive order to send 1,000 National Guard troops to the border this afternoon, shifting the focus from deportee children from war-torn countries to drug traffickers and criminal opportunists crossing the Texas border to commit hundreds of thousands of crimes over the last 6 years.

News of Perry’s decision to deploy the National Guard troops to assist the Department of Public Safety in the ongoing effort called Operation Strong Safety leaked out over the weekend, giving critics enough time to question the how, why and how useful the National Guard would be at the state’s southern border.

Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, called for support along the border last month with emergency funds, but he balked at the use of additional law enforcement in The Monitor over the weekend.

“They (cartels) are taking advantage of the situation,” Hinojosa told The Monitor. “But our local law enforcement from the sheriff’s offices of the different counties to the different police departments are taking care of the situation. This is a civil matter, not a military matter. What we need is more resources to hire more deputies, hire more Border Patrol. These are young people, just families coming across. They’re not armed. They’re not carrying weapons.”

For her part, Wendy Davis wishes some law enforcement officers could have been mobilized, so that some of those children could be arrested.

(Davis) responded to Perry’s announcement by calling for a different border surge—adding more sheriff’s deputies to the region.

Davis reiterated her demand last month that Perry convene an emergency legislative session to deploy the deputies.

“If the federal government won't act, Texas must and will. However, we should be deploying additional deputy sheriffs to the border like local law enforcement is calling for, rather than Texas National Guard units who aren't even authorized to make arrests,” she said in a statement following Perry’s briefing.

Okay then.  I have already posted my opinion about Davis' mistakes with regard to the border crisis, so this doesn't surprise me in the least.  Hope she gets a whole lot of Republican votes out of it, because she'll need them to replace the Democratic ones she's going to lose.

One last observation about the money it's costing us for this show of bravado force.

The National Guard deployment — added to the DPS surge — will bring the price tag of troopers on the border to about $5 million per week, the memo said. And the funding source for the effort remains unclear.

“It is not clear where the money will come from in the budget,” the memo states, adding that Perry's office has said the money will come from “non-critical” areas, such as health care or transportation.

Read that as Medicaid and highway construction.

I just exhausted my week's ration of outrage.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance isn't ready for the hottest part of summer as it brings you the roundup of the best of lefty Texas blogs from last week.

Off the Kuff looks at Travis County's design for a new kind of voting machine, one that will add security, ease of use, and an honest to goodness paper receipt.

From WCNews at Eye on Williamson, Democrats running for office in Texas should make every Republican answer about Greg Abbott's "drive around" remark about explosive chemical storage in their neighborhoods: Abbott hemmed in by the GOP's ideology.

As the federal trial over Texas redistricting began, a series of GOP e-mails outlining their anti-Latino mapping strategy was revealed. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs observes that the ooutcome won't be known for months, and the decision won't affect the 2014 midterm elections, but the case for the Republicans looks very grim.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants everyone to know that the Texas Tribune exposes Dan Patrick as a liar and Leticia Van de Putte as a truth-teller.

Stace at Dos Centavos handed out a few bouquets and also had some brickbats for Texas and national leaders on immigration reform.

In the wake of Denton City Council's failure to ban fracking, TXsharon at BlueDaze kept up the pressure by remobilizing her community for the November ballot referendum.  She also noted the Russian connections between the frackers (and the anti-frackers).

The Lewisville Texan Journal posted his local roundup of news and views, starting with the worsening Texas drought.

Texas (more like Rick Perry, Greg Abbott and Republicans) did not accept the Medicaid expansion, leaving millions of Texas' poorest families without healthcare options. But as Texas Leftist discovered, there are over 800,000 Texans that qualify for Medicaid and CHIP under current policy and just don't know to sign up. Even as we fight for expansion, helping these families is something that can be done right now.

Egberto Willies attended Netroots Nation and had a few posts on some of the highlights, including Joe Biden's keynote speech.

Neil at All People of Value took the Wendy Davis campaign to task for having nothing on its website about immigration reform.

======================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Joe the Pleb at Burnt Orange Report posted the rescheduling of Open Carry Texas' march through Houston's Fifth Ward for August 16th.  That's going to be almost as incendiary as concealed chemical storage caches.

Greg Abbott gave Socratic Gadfly one more reason not to go to the movies, and suggested everyone text the attorney general and GOP gubernatorial candidate a different F-word than "Freedom" to him.

Lone Star Q notes that only six Texas mayors have signed on to the national bipartisan coalition Mayors for the Freedom to Marry, and none from North Texas.

Bay Area Houston connected the dots between Greg Abbott and state representatives Gary Elkins and Vicki Truitt on payday lending "reform" in the Texas Lege.

Lone Star Ma is busy block-walking for Wendy.

The Texas Election Law Blog highlights a few issues with the Comptroller's webpage on the relative level of debt financing of counties, cities, school districts, and special law districts.

The Lunch Tray reminds us that summer camp is another opportunity for kids to get loaded up with junk food.

Grits for Breakfast wants to know why DPS is doing a full set of fingerprints for every drivers license renewal, even though the Lege has not authorized that.

And finally, the TPA congratulates Andrea Grimes on her new gig as "State of the Media" columnist for the Texas Observer.