Thursday, March 8, 2018

Diversity in American politics, part 2b


Part 2a of this series was about one of the factions in the Democrat Party.  When I started writing that page, I intended to include every Democrat faction on the page, but I had so much material about that faction, which I call Patriotoc Democrats, I had to move the rest of the material on the non-patriotic Democrats to this page.  On February 28, 2018, I moved part of this page onto a new page, which will be titled Part 2c.

Part 3 of this series will be about factions within some of America's minor political parties.  I will show that there are factions within the Socialist Party, the Green Party, and the American Communist Party.

Every section below represents a separate faction within the Democrat Party.  None of them are known for loving America.


Notes about Part 2a of this series

That page, published in early January, was about one faction within the Democrat Party, which I call patriotic Democrats.  The page named President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a patriotic Democrat.  He certainly played a major role in the victory of the Allied forces over Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.

This is the description of this photo on this website.

Black and white photo of Casablanca conference at Casablanca, Morocco, President Roosevelt with Major General George S. Patton, Jr., affixing the Congressional Medal of Honor upon Brig. General William H. Wilbur in the presence of General George C. Marshall, January 1943.

However, President Roosevelt was an advocate of some domestic policies that were just as certainly not compatible with a truly capitalist economy.  He called his domestic agenda a "New Deal" to distinguish it from the disastrous features of the Great Depression.

The 14-minute video on the right has been watched 2.5 million times as of the date that this blog page was published.

A page on the History Channel website about New Deal laws.

The Encyclopedia Britannica entry for The New Deal.

The Library of Congress page for The New Deal, which covers the period from 1933-45, the total amount of time that Franklin D. Roosevelt was President.

The Wikipedia page for The New Deal.

Part 1 of a two-part review of President Roosevelt's presidency, titled Reassessing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Policies.

Part 2a of series is titled New Deal or Raw Deal: FDR’s Great Depression Policies, Part II.

Part 2a includes these graphics.
When the people who have the highest incomes in the United States have 94% of that income taken from them by U.S. income taxes, it becomes hard to justify remaining a citizen of this country.
I wrote an essay five years ago, titled Taxes, the wealthy, the freedom to flee, on a different blog, about the same issue.

The laws that President Roosevelt passed, especially the laws that increased the tax rates, made it harder for smart, successful businessmen to keep the profits that they made from their successful businesses.

Fortunately, the U.S. Constitution gave United States courts the ability to oversee the power of the U.S. President.  This May 2005 article in the Smithsonian Magazine shows how Roosevelt's first reelection in 1936 caused him to urge Congress to pass laws that were eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.  The Smithsonian Magazine is the main publication of The Smithsonian Institution.


The Democrat Party has many factions

The first page in this series named some patriotic Democrats, but many Democrats who are in Congress, who are Governors, and who are members of state legislatures, are not patriotic.  In fact, some of them don't like capitalism.  Some of them don't even like democracy!  College students who give on-the-street interviews sometimes say that they like socialism, yet these same college students can't even define it!.  Future pages in this series will show all this.

Even in states that have a lot of Democrats, there is very little unity.  These are the first six paragraphs of a November 28, 2018 Sacramento Bee Op-Ed.
Political conflicts are wars without guns, and ordinarily, they pit those of one political party against those of another.

But what happens when one of the two major American parties becomes dominant in a city, a county, a state or the nation?

History tells us that warfare continues within the hegemonic party, which fragments into quasi-parties based on even minuscule differences of ideology, personality, ethnicity or geography.

And these intraparty rivalries are often quite nasty.

For decades, that’s been true in San Francisco among its dominant Democrats and was true for decades in Orange County when it was controlled by Republicans.  Democrats’ grip on California became even tighter in this month’s elections as the party flipped six or seven of the Republicans’ 14 congressional seats – one district is still too close to call – and gained even stronger majorities in the Legislature.

True to form, Democratic gains appear to be sharpening the simmering power struggle among three major factions – the regular establishment, the moderates and the leftist acolytes of Bernie Sanders.
This Op-Ed was also published on the same day and by the same author in a journal called CAL Matters.

This is the third paragraph of the previous op-ed.

"History tells us that warfare continues within the hegemonic party, which fragments into quasi-parties based on even minuscule differences of ideology, personality, ethnicity or geography."

The last quoted paragraph names three of these "quasi-parties", including "... the leftist acolytes of Bernie Sanders."  Some of these quasi-parties (the moderate Democrats and the leftist supporters of Bernie Sanders) are mentioned in this series about political factions, but this party has so many factions, it's difficult to say that it has a "regular establishment".  Proof of this will be seen during 2019 and 2020 as Democrat Party candidates for President begin to fight with each other for the nomination by their party.

These are the first two paragraphs of a March 11, 2019 article on the website FiveThirtyEight.  The links in these paragraphs were in their article.
There’s a lot of news right now about conflicts within the Democratic Party, and similar stories will likely continue to pop up for the next two years.  Much of this is normal and unsurprising.  The American political system has only two major parties, resulting in those parties being large and internally diverse — a political reporter could write a “Democrats divided” or “Republicans divided” story virtually any day of any year.  And the Democrats are in a complicated place politically at the moment, having just won a major election but not the presidency, which would give the party one single person to rally around.

All that said, it’s worth unpacking these divides among elected Democrats.  Not because they will necessarily hurt the party in November 2020, but because those divides will explain a lot of what happens day-to-day until the presidential election and potentially afterward.  These conflicts are often hard to understand — factions and officials have incentives to obscure both the existence and the specifics of their differences.  Many labels have lost their utility by becoming too broad and oversimplified; the term “progressive,” for example, has become virtually meaningless to describe different kinds of Democrats, since politicians as different as Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both define themselves as progressive.
The only time an effective unificatiion of a political party happens is when a majority of its' members (or one charismatic leader) can express a set of principles for all to follow, and only if a majority of its' members are willing to live their political lives according to those principles.

There is a big difference between America's Republican Party and its' Democrat Party.  Republicans, including myself, have a set of principles that they follow.  Democrats do not have a set of unifying principles.  Instead, they try to unify their members around two lesser-quality substitutes.

  • hatred of the current Republican President

  • membership in one of the special-interest groups whose leadership makes financial contributions to the Democrat Party

Some of these special-interest groups are shown below.



These are the first six paragraphs of a July 11, 2019 Newsweek story.
The squabble between four first-term, progressive House members and Speaker Nancy Pelosi escalated Thursday, with other Democrats of color lambasting their colleagues for suggesting the party's top Democrat was racially motivated when she privately scolded the caucus over recent tweets.

An intra-party struggle among the Democrats was highlighted this week when Pelosi admonished representatives against engaging in public disputes with one another, particularly on social media.

"You make me the target, but don't make our Blue Dogs and our New Dems the target in all of this, because we have important fish to fry," Pelosi told Democrats during a closed-door caucus meeting Wednesday, according to a person in the room.  "You got a complaint?  You come and talk to me about it.  But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just okay."

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a first-term Democrat from New York, then suggested to The Washington Post that Pelosi had been "outright disrespectful" with "the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color."

Ocasio-Cortez, along with fellow first-term Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, make up what has become known as "The Squad," whose more progressive ideology and public Twitter remarks have led to clashes with leadership — and now criticism from some of their Democratic colleagues.

"How dare they try to play the race card at this point.  It shows you the weakness of their argument," said Democrat William Lacy Clay, an African American representative from Missouri, of the progressive freshmen.  "It's damaging to this party and the internal workings of the Democratic Party."
This is the second paragraph:

"An intra-party struggle among the Democrats was highlighted this week when Pelosi admonished representatives against engaging in public disputes with one another, particularly on social media."

An "intra-party struggle" is part of the definition of a political faction.


These are the first six paragraphs of an April 2, 2022 story in The Hill.  This story reports on another intra-party struggle.  The links in these paragraphs were in their story.
When House progressives met privately with President Biden about using his executive powers to enact policies they say will improve Americans’ lives, they viewed it as a step toward achieving their top line items.   

Less than 24 hours later, some moderate Democrats and, predictably, Republicans were already warning about the perils of the pen swipe strategy.  

“The No. 1 thing we need to do is to get bills to the president’s desk,” Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), who chairs the moderate New Democrat Coalition in the House, told The Hill in an interview. “That’s the only way we get a long-term, durable policy in place.” 

The closed–door discussion, which took place Wednesday night between Biden and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was meant as an opportunity for liberal lawmakers to implore the president to offer solutions for daily burdens facing millions of people, including high college debt and the astronomical cost of prescription drugs. 

Congressional Democrats have failed to pass an ambitious agenda that had many of the items on progressives’ wish list, such as paid family leave, cuts to child care costs, an expansion of pre-K and extensive climate measures. 

Many on the left insist that help from the White House is overdue. But while some felt momentum exiting the meeting, it also sparked questions from others in the party — and garnered attacks from the opposition — about carrying out a strategy that’s temporary by design.
Intra-party struggles show up often in American politics.  They show up in both major parties and in every minor parties.  A future page in this series will show policy differences within the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Green Party.


The Clintons and the Obamas

Note: This section is about two separate factions - Democrats who like Hillary Clinton and Democrats who like Barak Obama.  Many members of these two groups don't like each other, which makes them separate factions within the Democrat Party.  Neither of these groups is known for loving America, which makes both groups different than the Democrats who were featured in Part A of this series.

These are the first five paragraphs of a June 21, 2014 New York Post story, which included the following photo.

Outwardly, they put on a show of unity — but privately, the Obamas and Clintons, the two power couples of the Democratic Party, loathe each other.

“I hate that man Obama more than any man I’ve ever met, more than any man who ever lived,” Bill Clinton said to friends on one occasion, adding he would never forgive Obama for suggesting he was a racist during the 2008 campaign.

The feeling is mutual.  Obama made ­excuses not to talk to Bill, while the first lady privately sniped about Hillary.

On most evenings, Michelle Obama and her trusted adviser, Valerie Jarrett, met in a quiet corner of the White House residence.  They’d usually open a bottle of Chardonnay, catch up on news about Sasha and Malia, and gossip about people who gave them heartburn.

Their favorite bête noire was Hillary Clinton, whom they nicknamed “Hildebeest,” after the menacing and shaggy-maned gnu that roams the Serengeti.
Link to a similar story, dated June 23, 2014, in the Washington Times.

Link to a similar story, dated June 23, 2014, in the (U.K.) Guardian.

Link to a similar story, dated June 25, 2014, in The Blaze.

Link to a column, dated August 3, 2014, published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, written by someone who considers this book to be gossip, not fact.

Link to the book on the Barnes and Noble website.

Link to the website of the author of the book "Blood Feud".

These are the first five paragraphs of a September 9, 2015 Washington Times story.  All of the links in these paragraphs were in their story.  Note that the U.S. President was Barak Obama from January 20, 2009 until January 20, 2017.
Federal investigators formally investigated top Hillary Rodham Clinton aide Huma Abedin for the crime of embezzlement after confirming she took a “Babymoon” vacation and maternity time at the State Department without expending her formal leave, resulting in thousands of dollars of pay she wasn’t entitled to receive, The Washington Times has learned.

The probe also gathered evidence she filed time sheets charging the government for impermissible overtime and excessive hours after she converted from a full-time federal employee to a State Department contractor.

Those timecards were filed during a period that remains under investigation over questions about possible conflicts of interest, documents gathered by the State Department inspector general show.

Ms. Abedin, who served as a deputy chief of staff to Mrs. Clinton from 2009 to late 2012, told investigators she hadn’t noticed she had received a $33,000 lump sum payment — about a third of which investigators determined was improper — when she left the State Department.

She suggested her husband, the disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, failed to let her know.

These are the first three paragraphs of a September 23, 2015 New York Post story, which included the following photo.  All of these links were in their story.

An enraged Hillary Rodham Clinton blew up at President Obama, demanding he “call off your f–king dogs” looking into her emails during a tense Oval Office meeting, according to a new book.

The book, “Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary,” says the former first lady was furious at what she believed were damaging leaks by Obama aides that led to investigations of her use of a private email server as secretary of state.  So she went right to the top to settle the matter.

Clinton requested a meeting with Obama, against the advice of hubby Bill Clinton, believing “she was being persecuted for minor, meaningless violations,” author Edward Klein writes.
The previous New York Post story was linked in a story in The Blaze, published the same day.

These are the first five paragraphs of an April 13, 2016 New York Daily News story.
First Lady Michelle Obama continues to "resent" Hillary Clinton, wanted Joe Biden to run for president in 2016 and is eager to leave the White House so she can resume making money, a new bombshell book alleges.

In "First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies," best-selling author Kate Andersen Brower dove into the intricate, but not always intimate, relationships between the nation's first ladies.

And while many wives of U.S. presidents past and present had complicated relationships, the one between Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama is particularly rocky, Brower wrote, due to the "bad blood left over from the bruising" 2008 campaign.

"The 2008 presidential campaign left deep and lasting scars on both the Hillary and Obama camps, and they are still shockingly fresh," Brower wrote, citing countless interviews with former aides to both women and their husbands.

"I don't think that Michelle thought much of the Clintons," a former Obama adviser said in one such sit-down with Brower.
Link to a Facebook page called Defeat the Hildabeast 2016.


The 2016 presidential campaign has now ended, ...

... and the Director of the F.B.I. cares more about protecting a political candidate than he cares about investigating threats to the United States so that the people that have the most evidence of criminality can be prosecuted..

These are the first four paragraphs of a January 20, 2018 Daily Caller story.
A former federal prosecutor says the truth is starting to seep out about the Obama Administration’s “brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton” and “frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy,” according to an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Joe diGenova, a former federal prosecutor, connects the dots on former Obama administration Justice Department and FBI officials who may have “violated the law, perhaps committed crimes” to politicize law enforcement and surveillance against political opponents.

He says former FBI Director James Comey conducted a fake criminal investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as they “followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, with no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrants.  That’s not an investigation.  That’s a Potemkin village. It’s a farce.”

DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited Steele dossier about President Donald Trump.  Without a justifiable law enforcement or national security reason, he says, the FBI “created false facts so that they could get surveillance warrants.  Those are all crimes.”  He adds, using official FISA-702 “queries” and surveillance was done “to create a false case against a candidate, and then a president.”

Notes
  • This May 9, 2017 New York Times story is about the firing of James Comey, Director of the F.B.I., who is mentioned in the third paragraph.

  • A Potemkin village, also mentioned in the third paragraph, is a village created with the specific intent to deceive tourists and other foreigners.  The economy of this town is not based on the usual economic considerations of tourist income, imports, or exports.  A Potemkin village will have
    • an inadequate electrical grid, drinking water system, and an infrequent process for treating waste water and solids because these villages will not be expected to have much tourism.
    • a small amount of truck traffic to import and export its' products.
    • actors who play the part of the residents and shopkeepers of this town.  They will not admit to being actors.

  • F.I.S.A., mentioned in the fourth paragraph, is an acronym for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.  This law involves courts where classified testimony can be heard in criminal cases.  All of this evidence, all of the legal motions, and all of the judicial decisions are only available to people who have a security clearance at the right level.  Wikipedia Page.


Classic liberals

The definition of the term

These are the first three paragraphs of the definition of the word "liberal" in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary.  All of the emphasized words in these paragraphs and all of these links were emphasized on their page.
Liberal can be traced back to the Latin word liber (meaning “free”), which is also the root of liberty ("the quality or state of being free") and libertine ("one leading a dissolute life").  However, we did not simply take the word liber and make it into liberal; our modern term for the inhabitants of the leftish side of the political spectrum comes more recently from the Latin liberalis, which means “of or constituting liberal arts, of freedom, of a freedman.”

We still see a strong connection between our use of the word liberal and liber in the origins of liberal arts.  In Latin, liber functioned as an adjective, to describe a person who was “free, independent,” and contrasted with the word servus (“slavish, servile”).  The Romans had artes liberales (“liberal arts”) and artes serviles (“servile arts”); the former were geared toward freemen (consisting of such subjects as grammar, logic, and rhetoric), while the latter were more concerned with occupational skills.

We borrowed liberal arts from French in the 14th century, and sometime after this liberal began to be used in conjunction with other words (such as education, profession, and pastime).  When paired with these other words liberal was serving to indicate that the things described were fitting for a person of high social status.  However, at the same time that the term liberal arts was beginning to make 14th century college-tuition-paying-parents a bit nervous about their children’s future job prospects, liberal was also being used as an adjective to indicate “generosity” and “bounteousness.”  By the 15th century, people were using liberal to mean “bestowed in a generous and openhanded way,” as in “poured a liberal glass of wine.”
People who describe themselves as "classic liberals" usually live their lives being open-minded to new ideas ("the quality or state of being free").

The following definition was copied from Dictionary.com.  The link in their third definition was on their page.
  1. favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
  2. (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
  3. of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism, especially the freedom of the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and liberties.

Applying the theory

The freedom of the individual would include the freedom of an individual 21-year-old American man to drink alcoholic beverages, to smoke tobacco (or marijuana), and to register as a voter in any political party he chooses.

He can also choose to become a member of the U.S. military or a member of a seminary that teaches him religious dogma and thus prepares him to hold a position of leadership in an American church, including the Roman Catholic Church.

An individual 21-year-old American woman can also choose to smoke, drink, and try to be a good mother to the baby that she had when she got pregnant at 15.

She can, instead, become a member of the U.S. military or a member of a Catholic religious order that prepares her to serve God without any reservation, hesitation, doubt, or regret.
This 1-minute video explains the process of becoming a Catholic nun.


Differences between true liberals and leftists

These are the first three paragraphs of a June 7, 2017 article in Current Affairs titled "The Difference Between Liberalism and Leftism".  The subtitle of this article is "Is true unity among Democrats possible?  No.  But collaboration is". All of the links in these paragraphs were in their article.  The italicized words were also shown that way in their article.
It is reasonable to wonder whether the divide between liberalism and leftism actually matters very much.  Why does there actually need to be so much animosity between the Clinton and Sanders factions of the Democratic Party?  (Or the Blair and Corbyn factions in the UK’s Labour Party.)  Why on earth did the race for DNC chair between Keith Ellison and Tom Perez grow so vicious, given their substantially similar progressive credentials?  With Donald Trump poised to ravage the planet, either through boiling it slowly over time or blowing it up instantaneously with his vast nuclear arsenal, it would seem time for liberals and leftists to emphasize their similarities rather than their differences.  Squabbling over minutiae is a fine way to ensure political irrelevance, and if everyone agrees that right-wing policies are poisonous and immoral, then surely the differences among progressive and leftish people can be worked out later.

It’s also true that, according to one view, the differences between liberals and leftists are not even differences of substance, but differences of political strategy.  The claim of people like Clinton and Blair is that, while they share the core progressive principles of compassion and equality, they are simply more hard-nosed and pragmatic.  They are more cynical about the limits of political possibility, and believe that change happens slowly.  From this perspective, the core difference between Clinton and Sanders is not their ultimate end goals (they both want a world of progressive values), but how to get there.

If that’s the case, and the core of the divide is over “compromise” versus “purity,” or “a view that major progress happens slowly” versus “a demand that it happens immediately,” then the disagreements here should be friendly ones.  Unity should be pretty easy, because we’re literally trying to help one another pursue the same objective.  I want the same things you do, but I simply think that I have a more effective way of getting them.
These are the last two sentences in the quoted part of the article, which includes 15 more paragraphs that I didn't quote.

"Unity should be pretty easy, because we’re literally trying to help one another pursue the same objective.  I want the same things you do, but I simply think that I have a more effective way of getting them.

The inability of the Democrat Party to achieve unity, during the 2016 presidential campaign or any other time, shows that there are true factions within the party.


This man shows the difference between liberals and leftists

This section was added July 5, 2018.

He is intolerant of anyone who has a different opinion than his own opinion, so he is a leftist, not a liberal.  The next two tweets were posted by a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina.



In contrast, Hunter Richard, the 16-year-old boy who was assaulted is a liberal.  This is the complete text of a July 4, 2018 story on the website of the San Antonio NBC affiliate.
SAN ANTONIO - Police are investigating after a teen says he was verbally attacked and assaulted at a Whataburger for wearing a Make America Great Again hat.

In the video, you can see a man throw a drink in 16-year-old Hunter Richard's face before leaving the restaurant with his hat.  Hunter said some of his hair was pulled during the assault.

"I support my President and if you don’t let’s have a conversation about it instead of ripping my hat off.  I just think a conversation about politics is more productive for the entire whole rather than taking my hat and yelling subjective words to me," he said.

Hunter was with his friends at the Whataburger off Nacogdoches and Thousand Oaks Tuesday night when it happened.  They say the attack was unprovoked.

"I didn’t think it was going to generate the amount like what people are doing, I was looking at the comments by some people and “ they are like this is uncalled for” and other people are like mixed opinions but I didn’t think it would blow up to what it is now," he said.

A police report has been filed.
The third paragraph of the story shows that young Mr. Richard fits the definition of a liberal, someone who is willing to let other people express their own opinions on political issues, even if those other opinions disagree with his own opinion.

"I support my President and if you don’t let’s have a conversation about it instead of ripping my hat off.  I just think a conversation about politics is more productive for the entire whole rather than taking my hat and yelling subjective words to me," he said.

A liberal will allow someone else to express a different opinion than his own opinion, but when a crime occurs, the person who committed the crime must still face justice in an impartial court.

This tweet was posted by someone who replied to the tweet from the South Carolina newspaper.

He has been identified.


If there's evidence that a crime has been committed, such as the previous video, and if there's evidence that one particular person committed that crime, such as the same video, he should be arrested by the police and forced to appear in court as a defendant.

It must be an impartial court, one that makes impartial rulings on any evidence that is presented and then weighs the evidence in favor of a defendant and the evidence against the defendant.  The appearance of the defendant and the name of the defendant must not be factors in the guilt or innocence of the defendant.  If a jury decides the guilt or innocence of a defendant, that jury must be impartial.

Link to my October 2014 essay Justice is not being done in Ferguson,  Missouri, which asked for impartial courtrooms instead of the street violence that was occurring in that city at that time.

This video is on that page.

He has been arrested.

These are the first two paragraphs of a July 4, 2018 KENS story, updated on July 6, 2018.  KENS is the San Antonio affiliate of CBS News.
SAN ANTONIO -- In a viral Facebook post, a woman claims a man became angry at her teenage son and his friends because one of them was wearing what appears to be a "Make America Great Again" slogan hat.

The San Antonio Police Department announced late Thursday that 30-year-old Kino Jimenez has been arrested and charged with theft.  SAPD says that Jimenez was arrested at his home in Universal City without incident.
This is the first sentence of the second paragraph.

"The San Antonio Police Department announced late Thursday that 30-year-old Kino Jimenez has been arrested and charged with theft."

That has to be a mistake.  Theft happens when someone breaks into an unoccupied house, car,  private business, public storage room, or some other place and takes something that doesn't belong to him.  In this case, Mr. Jimenez took something directly from a person.  That is a more serious crime called robbery.  In Texas, this is second-degree felony.  A robbery, under the definition in their state law, takes place when someone "intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly causes bodily injury to another".  The hat wasn't on the table when Kino took it.  It was on the boy';s head, and some of the boy's own hair was torn out when Kino took the hat.  Kino Jimenez recklessly caused bodily harm to the boy.

Either the district attorney decided not to prosecute him for robbery or the San Antonio television station didn't report the story accurately.

This July 6, 2018 U.S.A. Today story says that he was charged with "felony theft".  That accusation still doesn't do justice to the young man whose hair was pulled out when his hat was taken from his head.  This story includes this photo, taken when he was being arrested.


If I find news stories about his trial, I will post them here.


A group of teens do the same thing

These are the first seven paragraphs of an August 1, 2019 WLNY story.  They are the New York City affiliate of CBS News.  The photo and caption were included in their story.




NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – A man claims he was attacked by a group of teens because he was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.

It happened at 6:50 p.m. Tuesday on Canal Street near Greene Street in Manhattan.

Jahangir Turan, 42, claims he was walking down the street when he was passed through a group of 15-18 people. He was wearing a MAGA hat.

“One girl flipped my hat, and then within five, eight seconds, I got pushed from the back and my face hit the scaffolding pole,” Turan said.

Turan said his attackers said were “chanting anti-Trump stuff.”

He crossed the street and called the police.

“That’s kind of ridiculous, to get beat up like this for wearing a hat,” he said. “I wanted to put it on my TV stand. I had no intentions of wearing it in New York City, because it’s dangerous to wear a hat like this in New York City.”
A story published the same day in The Hill linked to this story.

The Daily Caller published a similar story the same day.


The future of liberalism

The group called classic liberals, because they are, by definition, open-minded, are always vulnerable to being led by charismatic radicals, but whenever a large part of the public perceives that these radical leaders have ideas that are too impractical or too specialized for their taste, the naturally inclusive nature of the core group of classic liberals regains its' traditional political value as a faction within the Democrat party.


These are the first three paragraphs of his obituary in Stars and Stripes, a news organization published with the approval of the U.S. Defense Department.
ATLANTA — As Georgia's governor, Zell Miller successfully championed selling lottery tickets to fund scholarships in a Bible belt state and lost a fight to change the Confederate-themed state flag.  As a U.S. senator, he enraged fellow Democrats with a primetime convention speech endorsing the re-election of President George W. Bush.

Time and again, Miller proved himself a stubbornly independent Southern Democrat during a political career that spanned four decades.  Miller died Friday at age 86 in northern Georgia, where he grew up in a mountain home built from rocks his widowed mother pulled from a stream.

"He had an independent streak that was governed by what he thought was right," said U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican who befriended Miller after a bitter political rivalry. " We need more people like him."
This is his page on the website of the National Governor's Association.  It has been updated to show that he has died.


Economic moderates

Part 2c, published in May 2018, has information about a specific group called the Blue Dog Democrats.

The law that some Democrats are trying to change

This paragraph, on the website of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, describes the Dodd-Frank law, named after U.S. Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut and U.S. Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank Act) enhanced the CFTC’s regulatory authority to oversee the more than $400 trillion swaps market.

link to a page on the website of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation titled FDIC Initiatives under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Link to a similar article, undated, on a financial website called Investopedia.

Link to the law, in PDF format, on the website of the U.S. Government Publishing Office.

A tweet was posted by a Fox News radio host

This is his self-description on his Twitter account, which has 131,000 followers. The link was included.
Radio/TV host: FOX, PBS, MSNBC, NY1. Heard on 710 WOR Radio Monday thru Friday 10am-Noon. Nationally on iHeart Radio. Podcasts at
This is his tweet. You can see it on his account by clicking on the date at the end of the tweet.


This tweet, from an advocacy group, has some facts



Wall Street reform is passed

These are the first two paragraphs of an April 28, 2013 article in The Nation.
The mood was triumphant on the morning of July 21, 2010, when Barack Obama, not quite two years into his presidency, strode to a podium inside the Ronald Reagan Building, a few blocks from the White House.  As he prepared to sign the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—the sweeping legislative package designed to prevent another spectacular financial collapse—into law, the president first acknowledged the miracle of having a bill to sign at all.  “Passing this…was no easy task,” he told the crowd of hundreds.  “We had to overcome the furious lobbying of an array of powerful interest groups and a partisan minority determined to block change.”

Indeed, some 3,000 lobbyists had swarmed the Capitol in hopes of killing off pieces of the proposed bill—nearly six lobbyists for every member of Congress.  For Michael Barr, then an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, the trench warfare spurred by Dodd-Frank left him shellshocked.  “You pick a page at random,” says Barr, now a law professor at the University of Michigan, “and I’ll tell you about all the issues on that page where the fighting was intense.”  Remarkably, despite the onslaught, Dodd-Frank “got stronger rather than weaker the closer we got to passage, which is incredibly unusual,” says Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, one of a handful of advocacy groups that fought tenaciously for the bill.
The previous article, on the website of The Nation, and published in 2013, does not mention any factions within either major political party, but both parties have always had them.  This article on this website has chosen not to mention them.


These two paragraphs about the Dodd-Frank law, are on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations.  The article is dated December 10, 2013.  The link in the second paragraph was in their article.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act ("Dodd-Frank"), signed into law in July 2010, is one of the most significant regulatory reform measures since the Great Depression.  Proponents contend its major provisions—monitoring systemic risk, limiting bank proprietary trading (the "Volcker rule"), placing new regulations on derivatives, and protecting consumers—will help prevent another financial crisis.  Detractors, including many Republicans and Wall Street executives, argue that the reforms will imperil future economic growth by over-constraining the financial system.

After three years, the implementation of Dodd-Frank has been partial, with many delays.  In late 2013, regulatory experts estimated that only 40 percent of Dodd-Frank’s roughly four hundred provisions were finalized.  However, federal regulators’ approval of the Volcker rule in December marked a substantial step forward.  Meanwhile, debate continues over Dodd-Frank’s potential effectiveness.  Republican lawmakers have introduced bills to amend or repeal the act, and to curb funding of financial regulatory agencies.  Others suggest the law does not go far enough in addressing central issues such as banks that are "too big to fail" (TBTF) and the associated moral hazard.
These two paragraphs state that the only opposition to this law comes from the Republican Party. This is the last sentence in the first paragraph in the previous article.

"Detractors, including many Republicans and Wall Street executives, argue that the reforms will imperil future economic growth by over-constraining the financial system."

This sentence is part of the second paragraph in the previous article.

"Republican lawmakers have introduced bills to amend or repeal the act, and to curb funding of financial regulatory agencies."


A new President took office in January 2017

These are the first four paragraphs of a February 9, 2017 CNBC story.  All of these links were in their story.  The graphic below the story was also in the story.
The Trump administration is already digging graves for some of the regulatory rules put into place by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act — but the legislation never fully lived in the first place.

About 30 percent of the rules mandated by the sweeping reform package have yet to be implemented after years of being held up by legal action and the complexity of the task handed to regulators.  After the bill was signed into law in 2010, many of the nearly 400 new rules were waylaid as they were run through the rule-making process of regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

Take, for example, anti-corruption rule requiring that energy companies disclose the payments they make to foreign governments.  Republicans in Congress summarily killed the rule last month.  The law required the SEC to have that rule in place by April 2011, but the agency didn't issue a rule until 2012, when it was immediately challenged in court by industry groups and struck down in 2013 by a federal judge.  After being sued for its delay in creating a rule, the SEC finally issued one in 2015.  The new rule became effective in September 2016 — just four months before it was wiped out by the GOP-led Congress.

Countless other rules also stalled during the Obama administration, and some now may never be finalized.  While most deadlines were about a year after the law was instituted, actual rule-making has progressed slowly every year since then.  As of this week, about 72 percent of rules have been finalized, according to data from the law firm Davis Polk, which has been tracking the law's many provisions for years.

The third paragraph of the previous story mentions "Republicans in Congress", but the only Democrat who is mentioned is the generic term "Obama administration" (fourth paragraph).  The Dodd-Frank law has many features, and it affects a large percentage of the American population, so companies and consumers who didn't like the law and who were represented in Congress by Democrats spoke to them and asked them to change or repeal the law.  Some of these Democrats listened to their constituents, especially the Democrats who were worried about being reelected.

These complaints to Democrats in Congress were is in addition to complaints made by companies and consumers who were represented in Congress by Republicans.


Wall Street reform is being reformed

Some Democrats have moderate economic views.  They share a wish to amend or repeal the act, as shown below.  These economic moderates are a separate faction within the Democrat Party.

The following news stories are arranged in chronological order, oldest first.  They are followed by an editorial which is also in chronological order.

The Associated Press

These are the first six paragraphs of a March 5, 2018 A.P. story that was published on the website of U.S. News and World Report.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ten years after a financial crisis rocked the nation's economy, the Senate is poised to pass legislation that would roll back some of the safeguards Congress put into place to prevent a relapse.

The move to alter some key aspects of the Dodd-Frank law has overwhelming Republican support and enough Democratic backing that it's expected to gain the 60 votes necessary to clear the Senate. Several Democratic lawmakers facing tough re-election races this year have broken ranks with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

The legislation would increase the threshold at which banks are considered too big to fail. Such banks are subject to stricter capital and planning requirements, and lawmakers are intent on providing them relief in hopes that it will boost lending and the economy.

Banks have long complained about the cost of complying with the many requirements of Dodd-Frank. Under the Senate bill, some of the nation's biggest banks would no longer have to undergo an annual stress test conducted by the Federal Reserve. The test assesses whether a bank has enough capital to survive an economic shock and continue lending. Dozens of banks would also be exempted from making plans called "living wills" that spell out how the bank will sell off assets or be liquidated in a way that won't create chaos in the financial system.

The legislation increases from $50 billion to $250 billion the threshold at which banks are considered critical to the system. The change would ease regulations on more than two dozen financial companies, including BB&T Corp., Sun Trust Banks Inc. and American Express.

Opponents of the bill argue that the same banks getting regulatory relief through the Senate bill also got about $50 billion in taxpayer-funded bailouts during the financial crisis. They note Countrywide Financial, which was at the center of the mortgage crisis, was smaller than some of the banks targeted for relief now.
This news story is balanced journalism. It shows both points of view on this legislation without criticizing either side too much.

This is the second sentence in the second paragraph.

"Several Democratic lawmakers facing tough re-election races this year have broken ranks with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass."

The Democrats who "have broken ranks with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass" are a faction within the Democrat Party.

The New York Times

These are the first five paragraphs of a March 6, 2018 story titled Why Are Democrats Helping Trump Dismantle Dodd-Frank?.
This week, the Senate begins debate on the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, known as the Crapo bill for its primary sponsor, Mike Crapo, a Republican senator from Idaho.  The bill would roll back or eliminate parts of the Dodd-Frank Act.

The Crapo bill is unusual in today’s hyperpartisan environment:  It has over 10 Democratic co-sponsors, many from swing or red states and up for re-election this year — like Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Jon Tester of Montana and Claire McCaskill of Missouri — making its passage possible.

Why would some Democrats provide support for a rollback of Dodd-Frank?  Proponents argue that this bill provides much needed relief for community banks and credit unions, which, these proponents claim, face enormous difficulties.  They also say that it doesn’t endanger financial reforms aimed against the largest and most dangerous players.

But that view is mistaken:  This bill goes far beyond the health of community banks and credit unions.  It removes protections for 25 of the top 38 banks; weakens regulations on the biggest players and encourages them to manipulate regulations for their benefit; and saps consumer protections.

What do Democrats get in return?  Nothing substantive that they should want.  They could demand better funding for regulators or an appointment to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — or a vote on gun control.
I would not call the person who wrote this story an objective journalist. The third and fifth paragraphs are much too sympathetic to the Democrat Party's ideals.  The views of "the proponents" of this specific legislation are mentioned in the third paragraph, but not the overall ideals of the Republican Party.

The Washington Post

These are the first three paragraphs of a March 6, 2018 Washington Post story.
A plan to scale back post-financial-crisis banking rules cleared a key Senate hurdle Tuesday, with more than a third of the Senate Democratic caucus joining united Republicans to move the measure toward passage.

The vote was 67 to 32, well over the 60 votes needed in the closely divided Senate, setting up debate and final passage in coming days.

Days of contentious wrangling on the Senate floor lie ahead, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pledging to deliver speeches in opposition.  But the level of bipartisan support Tuesday, with 17 members of the Senate Democratic caucus voting “yes,” suggested the measure will ultimately get the chamber’s approval.
The seventeen Senate Democrats who voted "yes" can accurately be considered a faction within the total number of Democrats who are current members of the U.S. Senate.  They are still registered members of the Democrat Party, and on some issues, they will vote the same way that other Democrats do, but they will vote with the Republican Party on other issues.

Bloomberg

These are the first seven paragraphs of a March 6, 2018 Bloomberg story.
President Donald Trump has promised for more than a year to give banks relief from the Dodd-Frank Act. The moment has arrived.

The Senate voted 67-to-32 Tuesday to formally kick off the process of considering a bill that would mark the biggest congressional overhaul of the post-crisis banking law.  In the coming days, the Senate is expected to debate and then pass the measure.  It will then go to the House, where lawmakers would also have to approve it for it to reach Trump’s desk.

The legislation is a compromise, with some Democrats voting to advance it Tuesday.  The bill doesn’t go nearly as far as many Republicans and some in the finance industry would like, leaving big Wall Street firms in particular close to empty handed.  It mostly provides regulatory relief for small and regional banks, including raising the threshold for which lenders are considered “too big to fail.”

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican, sponsored the legislation and has been working behind the scenes with lawmakers in the House and Senate in recent days to hash out an amendment with some last-minute changes.

Divided Democrats

Democrats are divided on the bill.  On one side are moderates who were instrumental in building support for the legislation.  Many of those senators are from states Trump won in 2016, and they face tough re-election fights in November.  But progressives such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren argue Crapo’s bill will undermine crucial reforms put in place after the 2008 financial crisis.

The wedge between Democrats was on full display Tuesday as both sides held dueling press conferences.  Warren said that anyone who votes for the bill will put consumers at risk.  Senators Jon Tester, Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly and Mark Warner told reporters that the bill does nothing to help the Wall Street banks that fueled the 2008 meltdown.

“We understand there’s going to be divisions in the Democratic caucus,” Virginia’s Warner said. Democrats are working through our differences “respectfully,” he said.
This story makes it clear that there are factions within the Democrat Party.

Factions within the Republican Party were mentioned in the first page in this series, published on January 8, 2018.  A link to that page is provided at the top of this page.  You can also find it in the dated archives on the right side of this page.

Link to a March 6, 2018 Los Angeles Times story titled Democrats fail to mend split over rolling back Dodd-Frank financial regulations.

CBS News

These are the first four paragraphs of a March 7, 2018 CBS News story.  The links in the third paragraphs were in their story.
Republican efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act, net neutrality and tax rates for corporations have all attracted fierce opposition from Democrats and left-leaning voters.  Yet a new GOP effort to dismantle Obama-era financial regulations is gaining traction, thanks to support from Democrats.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 was created to strengthen rules for the country's largest financial institutions, with the goal of avoiding a repeat of the devastating crisis that caused millions to lose their homes, jobs and retirement savings.

The bill may not be surprising on the face of it, given that some Republican lawmakers have been itching to roll back all or part of Dodd-Frank for years.  Yet it has a dozen Democratic co-sponsors, which makes it a rare bipartisan effort, a backing that Brookings Institution's Aaron Klein described as culminating from an "old-school traditional approach" to creating legislation that crosses the aisle.

Nevertheless, the bill isn't garnering rave reviews from all sides of the political spectrum.  Progressives, some Democrats and consumer advocates are sounding the alarm and raising concerns about whether it might heighten the risk of another financial crisis by weakening the rules that some banks would need to adhere to.
This reporter is also not very objective.  The very next paragraph quotes a research assistant from "a left-leaning think tank", but no one from a right-leaning think tank is ever quoted anywhere in this story.  The ninth paragraph paraphrases the view of the same left-leaning think tank, but no right-leaning think tank gets the same amount of respect.

This news story even reproduces a tweet from a far-left U.S. Senator, and it quotes a statement that she made about the legislation, but it fails to reproduce any other tweets or to quote any other Senator.  This is not a politically-balanced story.

This is the second sentence of the first paragraph in the previous story.

"Yet a new GOP effort to dismantle Obama-era financial regulations is gaining traction, thanks to support from Democrats."

This is the second sentence of the fourth paragraph in the previous story.

"Progressives, some Democrats and consumer advocates are sounding the alarm and raising concerns about whether it might heighten the risk of another financial crisis by weakening the rules that some banks would need to adhere to."

Some Democrats support this legislation, but other Democrats, labeled "progressive", are against it. That is the definition of a political party that has factions in it.

An editorial from the business community

These are the first four paragraphs of a March 8, 2018 editorial in Investor's Business Daily.  The link in the second paragraph was in their story.
Financial Crisis: After nearly a decade of failure, the banking regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis are about to get a rewrite in Congress.  And, surprisingly, the reform will be truly bipartisan, with some 12 Democrats supporting the changes.

The 2010 Dodd-Frank bill has been a disaster.  Not only did it fail to address the true cause of the financial crisis, which was federal meddling in the housing market, but it blamed all banks equally for the economy's wreckage following the housing market meltdown.  The result has been devastation.  The new bill tries to fix the problem.

As the Washington Post reports, "The core of the new bill exempts about two dozen financial companies with assets between $50 billion and $250 billion from the highest levels of scrutiny" by the Fed.

Shockingly, Democrats are going along with it.  They've apparently discovered that Dodd-Frank is doing far more harm than good.  "The bill has overwhelming Republican support and enough Democratic backing that it's expected to gain the 60 votes necessary to clear the Senate," the New York Post reported Wednesday.
I'm not shocked that some Democrats are voting with the Republicans to reform the Wall Street reform law.  By any objective standard, it is a bad law that was passed, as many bad laws are, immediately after a disaster.

This is one reason why America's Founding Fathers deliberately made it hard to add amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  This document is now regarded by American courts as our highest law.  Its' importance should not be reduced by amendments that are passed in haste.


May 24, 2018 update

These are the first six paragraphs of a May 24, 2018 Washington Examiner story.  The link in the fifth paragraph was in their story.
President Trump signed bipartisan legislation to revamp parts of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and primarily ease burdens on small and regional banks Thursday, in a White House event that was overshadowed by his decision to cancel a planned meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“It doesn’t seem so important now,” Trump said of the bill, after a brief statement on North Korea.  “But it is important, it’s incredible.”

The legislation is a legislative triumph for regional banks such as BB&T, SunTrust, and Keycorp, as well as for smaller banks and credit unions.

“The legislation I’m signing today rolls back crippling Dodd-Frank regulations that are crushing community banks and credit unions nationwide,” Trump later added.

Assembled by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, with Democratic co-sponsors, the bill was carefully negotiated to reach Trump’s desk.

It’s not the repeal or replacement of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that conservative Republicans hoped for. Rather, it’s a smaller legislative victory that Trump can claim and that moderate Democrats running for re-election in red states also can tout.
As stated in the first sentence of this story, this was bipartisan legislation, which means conservative Democrats deserve as much credit for passing this much-needed legislation as the Republican Party.  This is the entire fifth paragraph.

"Assembled by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, with Democratic co-sponsors, the bill was carefully negotiated to reach Trump’s desk."

... with Democratic co-sponsors.


Information about future pages in this series

Another faction within the Democrat Party is mentioned in Part 2c of this series.  This faction, sometimes called the Blue Dog Democrats, publicly disagrees with most of the Democrat members of Congress.  Part 2d, published in May 2018, is about Democrats who don't like capitalism.  They prefer socialism.  Part 2e, published in July, is about Democrats who don't like democracy because they prefer street demonstrations, whose leadership is never elected by the people in a free election.  Part 2f is still being written.

Part 3 will have factions within some of America's minor parties, including the Socialist Party, the Green Party of America, and the Communist Party.

These pages are also listed in the archives on the right side of this page.

I'm also writing another page about factions within the Republican Party.
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