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A Republican-aligned super PAC is trying to knock down Democrats official effort Monday to rebrand themselves as a better deal -- launching an ad campaign that targets House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and argues her party remains mired in the same, old liberal ideas.

The Congressional Leadership Fund is behind the digital ad campaign, which is titled Resistance and targets Pelosis San Francisco congressional district and 12 other Democrat-leaning districts that President Trump won last fall.

All 435 House seats are up for reelection in 2018.

The Democrats are the party of the resistance, the narrator says in the 33-second ad that includes images of window-smashing and other protester-driven violence surrounding the inauguration.

Radical extremists who destroy buildings, burn cars and divide America. Hollywood celebrities who are blinded by their hatred of the president. Nancy Pelosi and the Washington Democrats answer to them.

SCHUMER TELLS CLINTON, 'BLAME YOURSELF'

On Monday, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will lead an event in Virginia to announce the better deal agenda, following party leaders acknowledging they lost to Trump in large part because voters didn't know what the party stood for.

They intentionally are heading outside Washington to host the event in the district of GOP Rep. Barbara Comstock, whom they hope to defeat next year.

The new message -- formally titled A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future -- follows months of internal debate and analysis of polling and focus groups. (After an earlier and abbreviated version leaked on Thursday, Twitter users mocked the similarity to the slogan for Papa John's pizza, "Better Ingredients, Better Pizza.")

Schumer acknowledged on Sunday that Democrats were partially to blame for Americans not knowing what the party stands for.

"When you lose an election with someone who has, say, 40 percent popularity, you look in the mirror and say what did we do wrong? he said on ABCs This Week. And the number one thing that we did wrong is we didn't have -- we didn't tell people what we stood for."

However, Congressional Leadership Fund leaders say the message continues to advance the same, old liberal ideas including single-payer health care, tax increases and military cuts, despite all of the poll testing.

The simple truth is that a Democrat is someone who is beholden to Nancy Pelosi, wants to raise your taxes, is blinded by their hatred of the president, and regularly loses elections, said Cory Bliss, the political action committees executive director.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Republicans dismiss Dems' 'better deal' with ad targeting Pelosi - Fox News

President Donald Trump delivers remarks on health care during a lunch with members of Congress in the State Dining Room of the White House on Wednesday.

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President Donald Trump didnt end his weekend on a cheerful note. In an unusual pair of Sunday afternoon tweets, the president hit out at Republican lawmakers, saying some who owe their positions to his candidacys coattails are leaving him on his own. As the phony Russian Witch Hunt continues, two groups are laughing at this excuse for a lost election taking hold, Democrats and Russians! Trump wrote shortly after 4 p.m.

Six minutes later, the commander in chief followed up with another tweet: It's very sad that Republicans, even some that were carried over the line on my back, do very little to protect their President.

Trump wrote his two tweets about an hour after he returned to the White House from the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. Its unclear exactly what got the president so worked up on Sunday afternoon, but his pair of tweets came shortly after his new press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said Trump would sign a bill that severely curtails his ability to lift Russian sanctions unilaterally. Earlier in the day, Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications chief, said the president still had not made up his mind about whether Russia attempted to interfere in last years presidential election.

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Trump Angrily Lashes Out at Republicans for Failing to Protect Their President - Slate Magazine (blog)

By Jared Bernstein By Jared Bernstein July 24 at 6:00 AM

Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of the new book 'The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity.'

Last week, four A-list Republican economists published a validator document to support the contention that economic plans by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans will boost the real GDP growth rate from 2 percent to 3 percent.

This is the sort of piece you get when policymakers, having put forth a plan that they say will accomplish something, ask their allies on the outside to publish a document validating their claim (I dont know if thats the origin of this particular piece). Such documents do not necessarily argue that 2 + 2 = 5; validators can be honest or phony, and an honest validation doc can be a useful tool, one that helps the media, for example, to assess the credibility of the underlying claim.

For reasons Ill share in a moment, the piece is unconvincing. But when Steve Liesman and I discussed it on CNBC the other day, he posed an interesting challenge. Steve granted my rap about why these guys are wrong. But whats wrong with trying? he asked. Shouldnt Democrats also be for faster growth (assume for the purposes of this discussion that such growth is environmentally sustainable)?

Its a fair question.

The fundamental problem with the study is its lack of evidence to back up the authors claims. As regards the administrations vague agenda to boost the growth rate by half, the authors merely assert (my italics): We believe it can. We judge that such a policy package, in part by encouraging firms to expand by bringing new investment to production, can help raise trend labor productivity growth to around 2.3 percent per year in the non-farm business economy and perhaps higher

The piece offers no evidence to support such beliefs or judgments. They instead assert that high marginal tax rates, especially those on capital formation and business enterprises, costly new labor market and other regulations, high debt-financed government spending (largely to fund income transfer payments), and the lack of a clear monetary strategy have discouraged real business investment and reduced both the supply of and the demand for labor.

But theres no such simple, empirical relationship between high marginal rates and investment, productivity, or GDP growth, either over time in the United States or across countries (see scatterplots here and on page 256here). President Bill Clinton raised high-end tax rates in the 1990s and productivity boomed later in the decade (2.5 percent per year, 1995 to 2000); President George W. Bush lowered top rates and, a few years later, productivity growth started to slow. To be clear, Im not saying that higher taxes boost growth. Instead, Im strongly warning you to reject simplistic claims either way.

That lack of a clear monetary strategy bit is a swipe at the Fed, again offered without evidence. In fact, as I show in this recent testimony, the Feds aggressive response to the Great Recession was effective in lowering key interest rates in the economy and thereby helping to pull the recovery forward.

A more credible attempt at calibrating the growth effects from the Trump budget comes from the recent Congressional Budget Office evaluation. As opposed to more than tripling the rate of productivity growth, the budget office finds that (my bold) average growth in inflation-adjusted GDP over the 20182027 period would be about 0.1 percentage point higher under the presidents proposals than under CBOs baseline.And they get that small increment to growth only by accepting team Trumps promise that theyll offset their tax cuts with increases to be named later (the old magic asterisk approach).

But heres where Liesmans challenge comes in. Democrats should not take the above to imply that better policies cant lead to at least somewhat faster growth, and most important, growth that reaches the poor and the middle class.

Its tempting for progressives to conclude that if Trump is pushing it, we must push against it. But being against Trump doesnt mean were against growth. To the contrary, Democrats need their own growth agenda, one thats evidence-based and inclusive. The rap on Democrats is that they care only about redistribution, never about growth. Thats demonstrably false, and progressives shouldnt let ourselves be painted into that corner.

(We could, for the record, point out that growth has, in fact, done better under Democrats, but sorry, I just dont think theres much of a substantive argument there.)

So, whats a pro-growth Democratic agenda? Funny you should ask, because congressional Democrats are rolling out their Better Deal agenda this week. As I understand it, its a plan to increase jobs and pay, reduce the cost of some of the more expensive parts of the lives of moderate-income families (e.g., prescription drugs, higher ed, child care), and to help workers whove been stuck on the job-market sidelines by boosting apprenticeships (earn while you learn), and incentivizing companies to train and then hire workers whose skills need an upgrade.

Im not here to write a validator paper on their agenda, although Ill let you know what I think as I learn more about it. I can tell you that these measures have a much better chance of reaching those who need an economic boost than trickle-down tax cuts. In terms of growth, improved quality of the labor force is an input into faster productivity growth; family-friendly labor policies have been shown to significantly boost labor supply, especially of working moms.

Whats more, such ideas exist at that rarefied intersection of good politics and good policy. Republicans claim to be at that intersection, but as the health-care debate revealed, theyre way on the other side of town. That leaves a vacancy the other side needs to fill.

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The Republicans' growth plan doesn't add up. That's an opening for Democrats. - Washington Post

Janine Jackson interviewed Mara Verheyden-Hilliard about the right to protest for the July 14, 2017, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Janine Jackson: A recent popular op-ed called on those engaged in resisting the Trump administration to stop counting so much on lawyers. "The fate of the nation cannot be left in the hands of the courts," the piece, written by a lawyer, argued, and that's solid advice. Popular action is what historically has moved the country forward.

But when people do go into the street and are arrested, what then? When they put their bodies on the line and the state creates a new law to criminalize that resistance, what then? Like it or not, the law is still one of the bigger tools in the box for Americans. So what does and doesn't it do for us in the present moment?

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard is an activist and attorney. She's co-founder and executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: Thank you for having me.

Well, I'd like to start, if we could, with an update on the J-20, those arrested in inauguration protests in DC, who are facing what I've heard called unprecedented charges for demonstrators, felony charges that could lead to 75, 80 years in prison. One of those still facing charges is journalist Aaron Cant, now at the Santa Fe Reporter, who has written for FAIR. We talked about the case in January. What should we know now about this ongoing story?

This case is really of extraordinary proportions, when you look at what the government is doing to people who are engaged in protests on the first day that Trump took office. And it's really in its own context significant, too, because of the major shift in policing in Washington, DC, which we believe is intended to send a signal.

What's happened now is more than 200 people were swept up in a dragnet arrest by the police, and this occurred after the police had followed the demonstration for, by their own account, approximately half an hour, while there were some people who broke windows, only a handful of people. And rather than going in and arresting the people for whom they had probable cause to arrest, the police waited that arbitrary time, tracked and detained 200 people. And so they swept up demonstrators, passers-by, journalists, anyone who's in proximity, anyone who is chanting and protesting.

And then they undertook this mass prosecution with the United States Attorney's Office here in the District of Columbia, in which people are being threatened with, as you've mentioned, jail time that is decades and decades long, really a lifetime of jail time, with these felony charges. They are charging people en masse with crimes that may have happened, in terms of property damage, but charging everyone with crimes without particularized probable cause, without being able to point to a person and say, you committed this act and so we're charging you for this act. They're charging everyone in the vicinity for being in proximity.

This is extremely dangerous; it sets the stage that for any demonstration, if anyone commits a criminal act, an act of property damage, whether that be a protestor or, frankly, a police agent provocateur, the police can now use this as license, or they wish to, to sweep up everyone else around them.

This is what we talked about before. It's not a crime, now, is it, to be in proximity to other people who break the law in conjunction with First Amendment activities?

Of course it's not, and it cannot be. And the First Amendment has always stood for that, in fact, you cannot criminalize a person for the acts of another. And particularly in the context of the First Amendment, when it's an issue where the connection is that there may be a sympathy of political views, one cannot do that. There are cases dating back, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware and others, the courts said you have to act with precision. You cannot say that just because people have a similar point of view, or may have similar political goals, that those who carry out illegal acts or acts of violence in pursuit of those goals, that those acts can be attributed to the others who do not.

Right. These charges, at the level they're at, it feels new, but we know that the effort to repress First Amendment expression is not new. The Supreme Court last month rejected a First Amendment case that dates from years back, Garcia v. Bloomberg. Can you tell us about that and how it relates?

The Garcia v. Bloomberg case comes from the Occupy demonstration of 2011, when 700 people were peacefully marching, compliant with police orders, there was no violence, and as people marched, the police escorted the march. The police themselves closed the Brooklyn Bridge roadway to vehicular traffic. The police and police commanders themselves opened up the roadway to pedestrian traffic. It is the police and police commanders who led the demonstrators onto the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge, and once those demonstrators had flowed and followed behind the lead of the police, the police stopped the march, trapped them from behind, mass-arrested 700 people.

When we litigated this case, we won at the District Court level, we won at the Second Circuit, in fact. And then Mayor de Blasio, who had taken office, frankly, running on an Occupy ticket, had the court reevaluate the ruling, and the court, in an extraordinary measure, reversed itself. And we took this case up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court just last month determined that they would not hear it.

Obviously, lots of folks are taking their lead from this, and kind of joining on this bandwagon. We have a spate of anti-protest legislation around the country, even UN experts are issuing alarmed statements now. Some 20 states have passed or tried to pass laws allowing protesters to be charged with conspiracy, increasing penalties for blocking streets, even protecting drivers who run protesters over, banning masks and hoodies. I mean, is anyone really confused that the intent of these rules is to quash dissent, and doesn't that thinly veiled intent matter?

It's clear that there is an effort around the country to try, through legal means -- although we would consider illegal means -- to curtail people's fundamental First Amendment rights to gather together in the streets, to be able to speak out in unified action.

I do think, as much as we're seeing these kinds of restrictions imposed and these rulings, that at the same time it can obviously have a chilling effect on people, the reality is that people do always come out and people will continue to come out. And while this may be intended to have a chilling effect, it is really crucial that people stand up and speak out for what they believe in. And I do think the reason that we're seeing these is because there is a growing recognition that there really is this fire of people, these embers burning, where we keep seeing people come up and demonstrating for what they believe in. We're seeing so many more people entering political life, even since the election of Donald Trump. People are taking to the streets, protesting, who never protested before.

So while we're faced with what is I think overt repression, both in terms of these felony prosecutions, these state laws, these court rulings, we also are faced with the fact that there are millions of people who are engaging in political protest and political organizing who have never done so before, and that's a force that really can't be stopped.

We've been speaking with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. Find them online at JusticeOnline.org. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, thank you very much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

Thank you for having me.

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There's an Effort Around the Country to Curtail People's Fundamental First Amendment Rights - Truth-Out

Which makes what Schumer said about Clinton over the weekend all the more intriguing.

Gauntlet thrown.

Remember that Clinton has laid her defeat in the 2016 election directly at the feet of Russia's meddling -- via a series of hacked emails -- and then-FBI Director James Comey's decision to re-open the investigation into Clinton's private email server.

Schumer's comments to the Post are a direct rebuke of the idea that Clinton has pushed since the election: That she lost because of factors entirely beyond her control, not because of any flaw in her as a candidate or in the message she ran on. (It was "Stronger Together," in case you forgot.)

Schumer is arguing that Clinton lost because she ran a campaign devoid of any real message other than "I'm not Donald Trump." Schumer is also saying that if the Democratic Party wants to succeed in future elections, Democrats need to understand they didn't lose the White House because of Russia and Comey alone.

Neither candidate was at all well-regarded by the electorate. Trump was viewed favorably by 38% of people and Clinton by an only slightly better 43%. What the election came down to was this: Voters wanted change and viewed Trump as the candidate of change. Of the four in 10 voters who said a candidate who could "bring about needed change" was the most important trait for them, Trump won 82% to 14%. That's the entire election.

That Schumer would be willing to slam Clinton's campaign -- and her defense of that campaign -- also speaks to the fact that most Democrats want to move beyond the former secretary of state and the 2016 election. It may be in Clinton's interest to re-litigate the election to ensure she isn't blamed, but most Democrats trying to win reelection (or election) next November want to put her campaign far in their rear-view mirror. (Remember that 10 Senate Democrats are seeking reelection in states Trump won last fall.)

The problem with Schumer's attempt to get beyond the 2016 election is that Democrats remain largely leaderless in the aftermath of an election that no one in the party thought they would lose. Schumer is simply not a well-known enough figure nationally to speak for the party. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is too unpopular among anyone outside of the Democratic base to be that person. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are prominent but cancel one another out somewhat as they both seek to be the leader of the liberal wing of the party. Former Vice President Joe Biden is in the background even as he makes clear a 2020 bid is an option. Former President Barack Obama seems very conscious of not injecting himself into every debate involving his successor.

All of which means Clinton continues to fill that leadership vacuum with a message much more focused on reshaping her own personal narrative than re-positioning her party to persuade voters in 2018.

Excerpt from:
Chuck Schumer just threw Hillary Clinton under the bus - CNN