One of the jobs of the Democratic leadership, including whoever is elected new Chair of the DNC, is to sit down with people such as Carl Marlinga and quietly dissuade them from running for Congress, Senate or governor.
You know he is bad when he loses to loser John James. Ugh. Come on Michigan we have better candidates. I’d love to see us send John James packing and I’m not even in that county.
James started out with Devos money funding him and likely still has that. I can’t find anything substantial he has done while in Congress so we just need someone that actually works to beat him.
It's still a Lean GOP district and John James hasn't exactly been tested just yet as an incumbent while Trump has been POTUS. Remains to be seen in the 2026 midterms how Trump's popularity affects James when he runs for re-election.
However, I also wouldn't be under any illusion that unseating James in MI-10 will be easy.
That would have been bad if he beat Peters. Peters is a worker in the senate. He actually gets things done instead of sitting in front of cameras he’s working.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is grappling with an identity shakeup as internal tensions boil over regarding how to best use its voice on immigration and border security issues in a GOP-dominated Washington.
There’s growing frustration among the group’s House members over what several CHC sources complain is an overly passive approach by its Senate counterparts. Beyond that, there’s a divide between progressives and Frontline members on how Democrats should counter the Trump administration’s hardline border policies.
I know it may not be politically correct to point out, but there is significant racism also in immigrant communities. For example, many American citizens of Hispanic background simply want to fully integrate, and don’t look kindly on the wave of undocumented Latin American immigrants, many of whom have more Native American ancestry and hence much darker skin than they do.
Today, Americans have forgotten the long list of immigrants who once were "not considered proper, good White people". That includes Italians, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, the Irish, and of course Jews regardless of their country of origin.
Federal authorities such as ICE and the Border Patrol claim the power to conduct warrantless stops of people and vehicles within 100 miles of the US border. That includes within 100 miles of the West Coast, Eastern Seaboard or Gulf Coast.
What most people don’t know is that "two-thirds of the U.S. population lives within this 100-mile border enforcement zone".
Never knew that the Fourth Amendment did not apply within 100 miles of a border. They can set up roadblocks to conduct searches I imagine. But that doesn't give them the right to go around stopping and searching vehicles anywhere within 100 miles.
State Rep. Manny Rutinel, a Commerce City Democrat, announced Monday on social media that he will run in 2026 to represent Colorado’s 8th Congressional District.
Wish he had a little more electoral experience but he seems solid and his colleagues in the legislature seem to like him.
"Rutinel, an environmental attorney, was first appointed in 2023 by a vacancy committee to represent House District 32 in the state Legislature, and he won election to a full term last year. His campaign announcement touted his work on legislation expanding access to health care, housing and poverty-reducing tax credits, along with endorsements from more than 20 fellow Democrats in the Legislature."
For the first time in decades, the Republicans now lead the Democrats in Nevada voter registration. (Non-major-party voters still are well ahead of both parties.)
Hopefully 2024 has put the 'unaffiliateds are secret liberal voters for xyz reasons" people to rest and we can move on to actually making people want to be registered Democrats again. Sadly voter registration is something I haven't heard being discussed among DNC candidates as a priority. Including Ken Martin and Ben Wikler.
Seems registration should be issue number 1 for us.
A messaging change will pay dividends; frankly I could care less about registration affiliation; what I care about is actual registration and turning out; if Biden voters show up, Harris wins in 2024; that's a messaging problem for the good guys
20 states don't have partisan registration. It's not a DNC concern when you literally physically can't register as a Democrat or a Republican in TX, GA, WI, MI, etc. I'd say more important than making people want to be registered Dems, is making people want to vote for Dems. Registration is the lagging trend that follows people wanting to vote Dem or GOP, and accordingly Republicans gain when more people want to vote Republican. Can't get out of that hole by making registration "issue number 1".
But yes, unaffiliated registration continues to leave both parties in the dust, and it is heavily concentrated among young and/or non-white voters, groups that decidedly did not bail out Democrats last year.
it's a state with really low educational attainment and a relatively young population, two groups that are really susceptible to Trumpism. I'm not sure it's moved more than one would expect it to given its demographics, although your theory isn't crazy. Until we stop the bleeding with young voters of color we'll have trouble in Nevada and Arizona consistently and will be fighting uphill to make Texas competitive in the next decade.
Because I believe this is really important, I am sharing this post by an anonymous employee at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). It was posted on Reddit; I saw it on Hopium:
"I'm a current employee at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I’m posting this because people need to know what’s going on at OPM.
I’ve been an OPM employee for nearly a decade and a Federal Employee for almost 20 years. I’ve never witnessed anything even remotely close to what’s happening right now. In short, there's a hostile takeover of the federal civil service.
Let me say this in no uncertain terms — OPM has been compromised and taken over. The very backbone of American Government, the HR of all HR in the U.S. Government has been taken over by outside politicals. In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President's henchmen.
The current Acting Director, Charles (Chuck) Ezell is a low-level branch chief. He's the friendliest “yes man” you'll ever meet. He never says no. It’s clear they pushed aside all the high-level non political civil servants who refused to do Donald Trump's bidding, until they found Chuck.
Under his name, they’ve sent numerous requests to all the agencies to collect information on gov't employees that they see as a threat to their agenda. Instructions say to send these lists to Amanda Scales. But Amanda is not actually an OPM employee, she works for Elon Musk. She wasn’t even properly cleared by OPM Personnel Security.
Our CIO, Melvin Brown, (also a non political career public servant) was pushed aside just one week into his tenure because he refused to setup email lists to send out direct communications to all career civil servants. Such communications are normally left up to each agency.
Instead, an on-prem (on-site) email server was setup. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our network to make it appear that emails were coming from OPM. It's been the one sending those various “test” message you've all seen. We think they're building a massive email list of all federal employees to generate mass RIF notices down the road.
The non-political civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit. Even the IGs are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we've filed.
Please share this and tell the world that OPM is not the bad guy. We're just as helpless to stop this as the rest of our fellow public servants. Hopefully someone out there can help us, but it’s looking pretty grim."
This was all previewed by The Atlantic, among others. The Chuck Grassleys of the world either knew this was coming (and are faking outrage after the fact) or should have known it was coming.
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Florida — Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried won reelection on Saturday, maintaining her position in a state that just sent a president, policies and personnel to the White House.
Fried won reelection 296-83 over a sole challenger, Audrey Gibson, who’s a former state Senate minority leader. Florida Democrats opted to remain with their current chair despite getting trounced in recent election cycles, with President Donald Trump winning the once-battleground state by a decisive 13 points in November.
.
.
.
Fried said in an interview after the vote that she would not be running for governor in 2026, as had been widely expected. The state chair job is for a four-year term.
Ahead of Saturday’s vote, Fried told Democrats she would “be here for the long haul, listen to you and never give up this fight.” She pledged to conduct yearround organizing and to come up with a messaging strategy. She pointed out that under her tenure Florida Democrats had victories at the school-board level and for mayors of Jacksonville and Miami-Dade County.
Gibson, who unsuccessfully mounted a race for mayor of Jacksonville in 2023, stressed the need for real-time analytics about voter registration trends. Florida Republicans had a 1.2 million voter registration advantage in the state by the end of last year and have far outraised Democrats.
“People are not confident with us right now, no one believes that,” Gibson said. “We need to restore confidence in our party and the way we do that is not doing the same thing the same way all the time.”
One of the jobs of the Democratic leadership, including whoever is elected new Chair of the DNC, is to sit down with people such as Carl Marlinga and quietly dissuade them from running for Congress, Senate or governor.
Quietly but firmly, yes! Time to turn the page, Democrats!
You know he is bad when he loses to loser John James. Ugh. Come on Michigan we have better candidates. I’d love to see us send John James packing and I’m not even in that county.
James is actually a vote getter and we need to realise it..Marlinga is frankly too old and stale, we can do better and beating James won't be easy
James started out with Devos money funding him and likely still has that. I can’t find anything substantial he has done while in Congress so we just need someone that actually works to beat him.
none of that matters at all; he's a vote getter and we need someone other than Marlinga to take him down; it won't be easy to do
Why and what do you mean by ‘vote getter’?
He has nearly beaten a Democratic incumbent senator and he has held a competitive house seat ever since.
It's still a Lean GOP district and John James hasn't exactly been tested just yet as an incumbent while Trump has been POTUS. Remains to be seen in the 2026 midterms how Trump's popularity affects James when he runs for re-election.
However, I also wouldn't be under any illusion that unseating James in MI-10 will be easy.
He doesn't seem especially better than anyone else at winning votes. This is a lean repug district, that's where his advantage is.
That would have been bad if he beat Peters. Peters is a worker in the senate. He actually gets things done instead of sitting in front of cameras he’s working.
He outperformed the baseline and expectations in two consecutive Senate races.
He usually overperforms, although he didn't in 2022 which was a bad year for the GOP in Michigan. He doesn't come off as a crazy man.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is grappling with an identity shakeup as internal tensions boil over regarding how to best use its voice on immigration and border security issues in a GOP-dominated Washington.
There’s growing frustration among the group’s House members over what several CHC sources complain is an overly passive approach by its Senate counterparts. Beyond that, there’s a divide between progressives and Frontline members on how Democrats should counter the Trump administration’s hardline border policies.
https://punchbowl.news/article/washington/chc-looks-for-new-voice-against-donald-trump/
I know it may not be politically correct to point out, but there is significant racism also in immigrant communities. For example, many American citizens of Hispanic background simply want to fully integrate, and don’t look kindly on the wave of undocumented Latin American immigrants, many of whom have more Native American ancestry and hence much darker skin than they do.
Today, Americans have forgotten the long list of immigrants who once were "not considered proper, good White people". That includes Italians, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, the Irish, and of course Jews regardless of their country of origin.
Unity is definitely the most important thing; IMO going back to the middle-ground Obama-era stances on immigration is a good place to start.
Federal authorities such as ICE and the Border Patrol claim the power to conduct warrantless stops of people and vehicles within 100 miles of the US border. That includes within 100 miles of the West Coast, Eastern Seaboard or Gulf Coast.
What most people don’t know is that "two-thirds of the U.S. population lives within this 100-mile border enforcement zone".
I encourage you to look at this map:
https://www.southernborder.org/100_mile_border_enforcement_zone
Never knew that the Fourth Amendment did not apply within 100 miles of a border. They can set up roadblocks to conduct searches I imagine. But that doesn't give them the right to go around stopping and searching vehicles anywhere within 100 miles.
It doesn't apply if the fucking Supreme Court says it doesn't apply.
I'm assuming all their districts moved right. Maybe they need to get to the bottom of why that is.
State Rep. Manny Rutinel, a Commerce City Democrat, announced Monday on social media that he will run in 2026 to represent Colorado’s 8th Congressional District.
https://coloradosun.com/2025/01/27/manny-rutinel-8th-congressional-district-colorado/
Wish he had a little more electoral experience but he seems solid and his colleagues in the legislature seem to like him.
"Rutinel, an environmental attorney, was first appointed in 2023 by a vacancy committee to represent House District 32 in the state Legislature, and he won election to a full term last year. His campaign announcement touted his work on legislation expanding access to health care, housing and poverty-reducing tax credits, along with endorsements from more than 20 fellow Democrats in the Legislature."
https://coloradonewsline.com/briefs/manny-rutinel-congress-8th-district/
For the first time in decades, the Republicans now lead the Democrats in Nevada voter registration. (Non-major-party voters still are well ahead of both parties.)
https://x.com/RalstonReports/status/1883933742751965299
Hopefully 2024 has put the 'unaffiliateds are secret liberal voters for xyz reasons" people to rest and we can move on to actually making people want to be registered Democrats again. Sadly voter registration is something I haven't heard being discussed among DNC candidates as a priority. Including Ken Martin and Ben Wikler.
Seems registration should be issue number 1 for us.
A messaging change will pay dividends; frankly I could care less about registration affiliation; what I care about is actual registration and turning out; if Biden voters show up, Harris wins in 2024; that's a messaging problem for the good guys
20 states don't have partisan registration. It's not a DNC concern when you literally physically can't register as a Democrat or a Republican in TX, GA, WI, MI, etc. I'd say more important than making people want to be registered Dems, is making people want to vote for Dems. Registration is the lagging trend that follows people wanting to vote Dem or GOP, and accordingly Republicans gain when more people want to vote Republican. Can't get out of that hole by making registration "issue number 1".
But yes, unaffiliated registration continues to leave both parties in the dust, and it is heavily concentrated among young and/or non-white voters, groups that decidedly did not bail out Democrats last year.
I suspect that continued fallout from Covid lockdowns are still hurting us in Nevada.
it's a state with really low educational attainment and a relatively young population, two groups that are really susceptible to Trumpism. I'm not sure it's moved more than one would expect it to given its demographics, although your theory isn't crazy. Until we stop the bleeding with young voters of color we'll have trouble in Nevada and Arizona consistently and will be fighting uphill to make Texas competitive in the next decade.
Because I believe this is really important, I am sharing this post by an anonymous employee at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). It was posted on Reddit; I saw it on Hopium:
"I'm a current employee at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I’m posting this because people need to know what’s going on at OPM.
I’ve been an OPM employee for nearly a decade and a Federal Employee for almost 20 years. I’ve never witnessed anything even remotely close to what’s happening right now. In short, there's a hostile takeover of the federal civil service.
Let me say this in no uncertain terms — OPM has been compromised and taken over. The very backbone of American Government, the HR of all HR in the U.S. Government has been taken over by outside politicals. In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President's henchmen.
The current Acting Director, Charles (Chuck) Ezell is a low-level branch chief. He's the friendliest “yes man” you'll ever meet. He never says no. It’s clear they pushed aside all the high-level non political civil servants who refused to do Donald Trump's bidding, until they found Chuck.
Under his name, they’ve sent numerous requests to all the agencies to collect information on gov't employees that they see as a threat to their agenda. Instructions say to send these lists to Amanda Scales. But Amanda is not actually an OPM employee, she works for Elon Musk. She wasn’t even properly cleared by OPM Personnel Security.
Our CIO, Melvin Brown, (also a non political career public servant) was pushed aside just one week into his tenure because he refused to setup email lists to send out direct communications to all career civil servants. Such communications are normally left up to each agency.
Instead, an on-prem (on-site) email server was setup. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our network to make it appear that emails were coming from OPM. It's been the one sending those various “test” message you've all seen. We think they're building a massive email list of all federal employees to generate mass RIF notices down the road.
The non-political civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit. Even the IGs are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we've filed.
Please share this and tell the world that OPM is not the bad guy. We're just as helpless to stop this as the rest of our fellow public servants. Hopefully someone out there can help us, but it’s looking pretty grim."
But, y’know, egg prices
This was all previewed by The Atlantic, among others. The Chuck Grassleys of the world either knew this was coming (and are faking outrage after the fact) or should have known it was coming.
NRSC Chair Tim Scott already recruiting Georgia Gov. Kemp to run against Dem Sen. Ossoff next year. They met this month
https://x.com/burgessev/status/1883992553999196277
Scott would be an idiot not to feel Kemp out. We’ll see if Kemp bites - I could see him going either way
FL Democratic Party Chair Election
FL Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried has been re-elected by an overwhelming margin over the sole challenger, Audrey Gibson.
However, there's a divide on where FL Democrats can lead so they can get more traction in the state.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/25/florida-democrats-nikki-fried-00200617
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LAKE BUENA VISTA, Florida — Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried won reelection on Saturday, maintaining her position in a state that just sent a president, policies and personnel to the White House.
Fried won reelection 296-83 over a sole challenger, Audrey Gibson, who’s a former state Senate minority leader. Florida Democrats opted to remain with their current chair despite getting trounced in recent election cycles, with President Donald Trump winning the once-battleground state by a decisive 13 points in November.
.
.
.
Fried said in an interview after the vote that she would not be running for governor in 2026, as had been widely expected. The state chair job is for a four-year term.
Ahead of Saturday’s vote, Fried told Democrats she would “be here for the long haul, listen to you and never give up this fight.” She pledged to conduct yearround organizing and to come up with a messaging strategy. She pointed out that under her tenure Florida Democrats had victories at the school-board level and for mayors of Jacksonville and Miami-Dade County.
Gibson, who unsuccessfully mounted a race for mayor of Jacksonville in 2023, stressed the need for real-time analytics about voter registration trends. Florida Republicans had a 1.2 million voter registration advantage in the state by the end of last year and have far outraised Democrats.
“People are not confident with us right now, no one believes that,” Gibson said. “We need to restore confidence in our party and the way we do that is not doing the same thing the same way all the time.”
As Treasury Secretary, I’m committed to eliminating income taxes, replacing them with a fair consumption tax, and adopting a gold-backed currency.
https://x.com/Scott_Bessent/status/1884014609872609669
And 15 Democrats voted to confirm this right-wing nutjob who wants to install a 19th century economic model.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1191/vote_119_1_00019.htm#position
He seems to have scrubbed it all. He also needs Congress to do any of that. Also, gold-backed currency limits liquidity and is prone to deflation.
I.e., depression.
I guess it was a fake account.
In other words, he's another Ron Paul type.