Mediaboss Marketing

The House Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, blasted the president for calling the media "the enemy of the American people," telling ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl, "This is something that you hear tin-pot dictators say."

"It's not something you have ever heard a president of the United States say," Schiff of California said in an exclusive interview that will air on "This Week" Sunday. "This is something that you hear tin-pot dictators say when they want to control all of the information.

President Trump tweeted Friday, "The FAKE NEWS media....is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!"

"I didn't think I could be shocked anymore by this president, but I have to say, of all the things he has said since he became president, or since the election, this to me was the most devastating and the most alarming," Schiff said. "That he essentially views the First Amendment -- because that's what these organizations represent -- as an enemy of the people."

"Not even Nixon went there," Schiff said of former President Richard Nixon.

Schiff said Trump's comment about the press was "deeply concerning" and that he hopes Republicans as well as Democrats will speak out against the remark.

"I hope it is repudiated by people from both parties, because this is not America," Schiff said.

See the original post here:
Top Democrat says Trump's calling media 'the enemy' is something 'you hear tin-pot dictators say' - ABC News

Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind., addresses the audience during the 2016 Indiana Democratic state convention at the Indiana Convention Center, Indianapolis, Saturday, June 18, 2016.(Photo: Jenna Watson/IndyStar)Buy Photo

WASHINGTON Could the next leader of the Democratic Party come from a state that Donald Trump won by 19 percentage points?

Let me begin by bringing progressive greetings from Mike Pences Indiana, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg said at a recent forum for candidates running to head the Democratic National Committee.

Buttigieg has been arguing at those forumsthat he knows how Democrats can win in red states, both up and down the ballot.

But Indiana is one of 10 states where Democrats, according to a recent Washington Post analysis, barely have a pulse, based on the large majorities Republicans hold in the state legislature, congressional delegation and statewide elected offices.

Nationwide, Republicans control both the governorship and state legislatures in half the states.

Im not as worried about our national prospects as I am the erosion and dissipation of the Democratic Party at the local level, said former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, who ran for the DNC chair in 2005 when he was trying to expand the partys appeal to working-class white and religious voters. You cant be a national party if you cant win local and state elections.

State Rep. Dave Niezbodski, a plumber who represents South Bend, said Hillary Clinton lost blue-collar voters in states like Indiana because she focused on Trump instead of talking about the people.

Whether or not they really believed his message or not, he was talking about what he was going to do for the people, Niezbodski said. And that is where I believe the touch with reality was lost. Pete realizes that.

If he wins the DNC race, Buttigieg has promised to visit every state and territory, coming up with tailored victory plans while selling an economic message that resonates with working- and middle-class families.

He points to the expensive cancer treatments his partners mother is receiving through her Obamacare insurance as an example of why Democrats need to fight efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

National security issues, he said, are not theoretical to him.As a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan, he could get called up if a reckless president leads us into peril.

And Democrats cant make false promises to bring back manufacturing jobs that were lost primarily to automation, he said. But, we have to make sure working people understand they have a role in the story of a modern and globalized economy.

I dont think emulating Trump is the way forward. But I do think he was speaking to a lot of people who were hurting, Buttigieg said. I think when people are fragile, theyre more inclined to vote for somebody with that style.

The style hes offering is what he calls the happy warrior, a term that has also been used to describe Pence.

The warrior part, to Buttigieg, is every falsehood has to be met with fact, and every outrage has to have a response.

At the same time, he said, you cant win the hearts and minds of voters if you come off as a sour complainer.

We want to make sure were not only raising our voices in opposition but also establishing a movement that people would want to be proud of, he said.

That cheerful spirit, he said, was present in the womens marches. (And hes been pointing out at the DNC forums that he was the only candidate to attend one of the marches.)

Because theres no Democrat in the White House, the ability of the next DNC chairman to be a strong messenger for the party is key, said former DNC chair Joe Andrew.

But even if the party doesnt chose Buttigieg, Andrew said, the race will have boosted Buttigiegs reputation and helped Indianas image.

Unfortunately and unfairly, he said, Indiana has gotten labeled a certain way right now because of Pence. And Buttigieg an openly gay, Ivy League, Afghanistan veteran, mayor of a Rust Belt city is not what people usually picture when they think of Indiana.

To have someone who defies all these expectations, thats great for Indiana, Andrew said. And it might take him all the way.

Contact Maureen Groppe at mgroppe@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter: @mgroppe.

Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/2ljteu2

Read the original:
Does a red state Democrat know how to beat Trump? - Indianapolis Star

Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., a candidate for Democratic National Committee Chairman, speaks during a Democratic National Committee forum in Baltimore, Md., Feb. 11, 2017.(REUTERS/Joshua Roberts)

MANCHESTER Raymond Buckley, New Hampshires top Democrat, went from contender to potential kingmaker Saturday, exiting the Democratic National Committee chairmans race to endorse Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison.

During a telephone interview, Buckley said hes 100 percent convinced Ellison will get the 224 votes needed to become chairman on the first ballot when the DNC meets next Friday in Atlanta.

Absolutely 100 percent convinced, I have been on the phone the last couple of hours, the response has been really terrific, Buckley said. He will have this thing wrapped up in a couple of days.

Buckley, a 57-year-old Manchester resident, is seriously considering seeking a sixth term as state party chairman now, but wont formally declare that until after the DNC vote.

Former House Speaker Terie Norelli of Portsmouth had been waiting in the wings to seek the chairmanship if Buckley became DNC chair.

If he wins, Ellison, the first Muslim-American elected to Congress, is expected to reward Buckley with a more high profile role. Buckley is already president of the Association of Democratic State Chairs.

When Buckley entered this race four days before Christmas, he said getting behind one of the other nine candidates was always a possibility.

I was talking about becoming a team, Buckley said.

It was very exciting to hear my words come back out of other peoples mouths. I dont think I anticipated 12 debates across the country, nearly all of them nationally televised, or that some folks would raise more than $1 million.

Ellison said he would empower Buckley to quarterback a 57 state strategy referring to Americas 50 states, six territories and U.S. Democrats living abroad.

Because in this fight against Donald Trump and Republican-controlled states, we need every state party firing on all cylinders, Ellison said. Thats how we take our country back, and I cannot be more proud to have Ray Buckley by my side in this fight.

Buckley said Ellison knows better than anyone grass roots politics is the secret to victory and not Madison Avenue marketing or Capitol Hill-style politicking.

Now, many candidates have spoken about these issues, but Keiths commitment to the states and a transparent and accountable DNC has stood out, Buckley said. He knows elections are not won and lost in the beltway, but on the ground across the country.

The race has many other hopefuls but its come down to a rerun of the 2016 presidential race with nominee Hillary and former President Bill Clinton along with Vice President Joe Biden all with Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez.

Clintons primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is with Ellison as is Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and New York City Mayor Bill deBlasio.

At a recent DNC forum in Baltimore, Buckley got national notice with a high octane message lecturing party leaders to grow up and realize their message of trying to shame Trump was a losing one.

The new DNC has gotten the message, Buckley said Saturday.

I feel very positive message wise, organizational wise, reforming our nominating process, opening up the DNC to more and more people, all of the changes that need to happen are going to come to pass, Buckley added.

klandrigan@unionleader.com

Continue reading here:
NH Democrat Buckley drops out, endorses national chair hopeful - The Union Leader

(1 of ) 3/31/2012: B1: PC: With Arch Rock in the background, large waves crash ashore at Goat Rock State Beach, Friday March 30, 2012, as a strong early spring storm bears down on Sonoma County. (Kent Porter / Press Democrat) 2012

MARY CALLAHAN

THE PRESS DEMOCRAT | February 18, 2017, 12:03PM

| Updated 6 hours ago.

Another big storm expected to hit the North Coast with a vengeance late today is forecast to raise the lower Russian River ever-so-slightly above flood stage by Tuesday, the National Weather Service said.

The river is projected to crest at 32.8 feet in Guerneville around midday Tuesday, the National Weather Service said. Flood stage at that location is 32 feet.

In the meantime, the region can expect to be battered by an atmospheric river bringing heavy rain, high, gusting winds, widespread urban and small-stream flooding and pounding ocean surf.

Accumulated rainfall above 3 inches is expected around the region by early Tuesday, with twice as much possible in the coastal hills, the weather service said.

Its a decent amount of rain, thats for sure, meteorologist Mark Strudley said.

The rain should start this morning but not become heavy until tonight, when gusting winds are forecast to reach 35 mph inland and 45 mph in the coastal hills and on the coast, Strudley said.

Winds and rain will be even stronger Monday, the National Weather Service said.

Surf is also expected to be very high and powerful, forecasters said.

The approaching rain could cause more problems in the far north, where damage to spillways of the Lake Oroville dam forced the evacuation of 188,000 people last weekend.

The California Department of Water Resources, however, said Saturday night that the level of Lake Oroville continues to fall despite the stormy weather. And the amount of water flowing down the spillway has been reduced to 55,000 cubic feet per second and continues to be cut, the department said.

Earlier this week, outflows were at nearly 100,000 cubic feet per second.

Northwest of Sacramento, nearly 200 people were evacuated Saturday as overflowing creeks turned the town of Maxwell into a brown pond, with some homes getting 2 feet of water. Nearly 100 homes and the elementary school filled with a couple inches of water.

Southern California was cleaning up Saturday from Fridays storm, which killed at least three people,

In Victorville, several cars were washed down a flooded street and one man was found dead in a submerged vehicle. In Sherman Oaks, a man was electrocuted when a falling tree downed power lines that hit his car. Searchers on Saturday found the body of a man who was swept down a rain-swollen gully in Thousand Oaks a day earlier.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read more from the original source:
Sonoma County targeted by President's Day storm - Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Scranton, Pennsylvania, retained its fundamental link between population density and party politics, even in the topsy-turvy 2016 election.

Denis Tangney Jr./Thinkstock

Back in early November (such a simple time!), I wrote a piece for Slate on political scientist Jonathan Roddens analysis of precinct-level voting patterns.Rodden, a professor at Stanford, showed that the familiar pattern of high-density Democratic areas and low-density Republican areas had been re-created, fractal-like, in the small towns and cities of the Rust Belt during Barack Obamas presidential election in 2008.

Henry Grabar is a staff writer for Slates Moneybox.

These little-downtown voters, who helped Obama carry several swing states, were supposed to be irrelevant to the Democratic Party in 2016, as Chuck Schumer infamously said in July:For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin. After Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania flipped for Trump on Nov. 8, it was easy to think that small-town Democrats had abandoned the party wholesale.

But it turns out Democrats didnt lose those town cores inPennsylvania and Ohio; in fact, as Rodden showed with new data this week in the Washington Post, the correlation between living downtown and votingDemocrat was (relative to nearby rural areas) just as strong in this presidential election as in its predecessors. Red counties werent homogenous before, and theyre not homogenous now.

Rodden thinks this trend rebuts a common cultural trope about small-town America: "A popular claim is that Trumps populist anti-trade rhetoric resonated most in postindustrial towns with severe job losses, he writes in the Post. "If so, we might expect that these towns suddenly started to vote more like their neighboring Republican precincts, with the graphs flattening in 2016.

In fact, his graphs show two things: First,Clinton did worse across the board in all these countiesthanAl Gore, John Kerry, and Obama (both times). Second, her returns mirrored almost exactly the existing correlation betweenpopulation density and politics.People who lived closer to downtown were still more likely to vote Dem.

Im not sure Rodden is right to characterizethe downtowns of Ashtabula, Ohio, and Muncie, Indiana, (among other places) as more stung byindustrial job loss than their outskirts. They were once. ButJohnUpdikes America, whereHarry Angstrom could take the bus home from his job as a linotype operator, is a long time gone. Manufacturing work has taken place outside of downtownfor manydecades.The top four small metro areas for job sprawl, according to a 2009 Brookings analysis, were all post-industrial Northeast cities: Poughkeepsie, New York; Scranton and Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; and Worcester, Massachusetts. In Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, for example, more than half of all jobs are more than 10 miles from the two cities downtowns. Thats not new. So when the plant closes, it shouldnt burn downtown voters more than others.

Still, whatever voters grievances about deindustrialization, there are other correlations that would tip these old town centersScranton, Wilkes-Barre, Reading,and Johnstown, in Pennsylvania, for exampletoward Democrats. For one thing, they are almost all poorer than theirsuburbs. For another, they all have concentrated minority populations. They also have more rental housing, and their residents ought to have a closer relationship to the public assets that Democrats have traditionallychampioned, like universities, libraries, parks, and transit.

U.S. Census Explorer

Racial Dot Map

For Democrats, the problemwith these people isnt that they didnt vote Democratic; its that they didnt vote at all. In some cases, turnout in downtown precincts was about half what it was a few miles away. Clinton still carried them.

This, then, is an optimistic message about left-wing politics in non-metropolitan America: Those deep-red swaths of countryside in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana are more politically diverse than they look. It just depends on your frame of reference.

Excerpt from:
Even in 2016, Democrats Carried Rust Belt Town Centers. Why? - Slate Magazine (blog)