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Now that folks have begun to speculate openly about the possibility of a coming recession, its long past time for the White House to start acknowledging economic reality. Put plainly, the people are hurting, the picture is not at all rosy and things could well soon be taking a turn for the worse.

With the November midterm elections fast approaching and Democrats likely to lose their majorities in one or both houses of Congress, theres effectively no time left for President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers to turn things around. So what to do?

Send Biden out on the road to tell folks that things really arent as bad as they appear. Thats one of the administrations plans, anyway. Not a good one, obviously.

Democrats, from Biden on down the line, need to accept reality: Most people are focused on the economy, and they dont like what they see. How could they?

Anyone who has been to a gas station, a grocery store or a restaurant or has endeavored to buy pretty much anything of late has doubtless been shocked by the prices. Things appear out of control, with no end in sight.

Want even worse news? Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently used the s-word. Yes, she said theres a real worry about stagflation, the term for an era of increasing prices coupled with stagnant growth.

If you arent old enough to remember the late 1970s, you may wish to ask someone who is to describe how things were back then. You mean in the bad old days? he might begin, before regaling you with stories of spiraling prices, endless lines at gas stations and general malaise across the land.

Except for the folks who have fond memories of nights at the disco, you wont find too many people waxing poetic about the late 1970s.

If Biden goes hither and thither, touting a success story or two in the hinterlands, hell not be doing Democrats, or anyone, a bit of good. Hell look completely out of touch.

Democrats need to acknowledge reality, accept their share of the blame and promise to do better going forward.

First, though, the so-called progressives need to realize that they are living in fantasy land and that doubling down and pledging more of the same is a losing proposition.

See more here:
Democrats need a reality check on the economy (Editorial) - MassLive.com

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York at a press conference on Capitol Hill on April 7, 2022.Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

AOC slammed top Democrats for backing Rep. Henry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Democrat with an A rating from the NRA.

Cuellar faced a primary challenge from progressive Jessica Cisneros, but leads her by less than 200 votes.

"This was an utter failure of leadership," said AOC. "Congress should not be an incumbent protection racket."

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York laced into top House Democrats late on Tuesday night, condemning them for working to bolster conservative Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas over a progressive challenger.

"Accountability isn't partisan. This was an utter failure of leadership," Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. "Congress should not be an incumbent protection racket and sadly it is treated as such by far too many."

Cuellar, the only House Democrat with an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association and the only House Democrat to vote against a bill that would codify abortion rights into law, faced a primary challenge from progressive lawyer Jessica Cisneros. As of Wednesday morning, the incumbent congressman led Cisneros by less than 200 votes.

But despite his conspicuous break from major party priorities, top Democrats held fundraisers and recorded robo-calls on behalf of Cuellar. That support became even more notable as aleaked draft Supreme Court opinion indicated that Roe v. Wade was likely to be overturned, and two mass shootings took place in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas.

Adding to the drama, Cuellar's home and campaign office were raided by the FBI in January, though his lawyer says that the congressman is not the subject of the investigation.

"On the day of a mass shooting and weeks after news of Roe, Democratic Party leadership rallied for a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent under investigation in a close primary," Ocasio-Cortez wrote. "Robocalls, fundraisers, all of it."

Top Democrats had defended their support for Cuellar in light of the leaked abortion ruling. House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told Insider earlier this month that the Democratic Party is a "diverse party" with "diverse opinions," while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended him as a "valued member of our caucus."

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"The fact is those who fail their communities deserve to lose," Ocasio-Cortez said. "They don't need rescuing from powerful leaders who state they fight for gun safety, the right to choose, and more."

The New York congresswoman and other top progressives including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington had backed Cisneros, who was challenging Cuellar for the second time. And Cisneros had called on Democratic leaders to drop their support for Cuellar in light of the leaked abortion opinion.

Noting that the run-off was "extremely close," Ocasio-Cortez argued that Democratic leaders had "gone to the mat for a pro-NRA incumbent" and will have "mobilized against a badly needed grassroots" ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

She also noted that Cuellar was a member of the "Unbreakable Nine," a group of conservative House Democrats who demanded that the bipartisan infrastructure law be passed separately from the now-doomed "Build Back Better" social spending bill, which ultimately imperiled the expanded child tax credit that was set to be renewed as part of the legislation.

"We can't afford to reward such acts," she concluded. "We can do better."

Read the original article on Business Insider

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AOC denounces top Democrats for supporting an anti-abortion congressman with an 'A' rating from the NRA on the heels of two mass shootings and news of...

A draft of the new map was released on May 16, with stakeholders having the opportunity to submit feedback throughout the week before a final map was produced on Friday. The newly drawn map features districts that are more compact, particularly in New York City, which is famed for its unusually apportioned seats. But opponents of the special masters draft map argued that the odd shapes of many current districts reflect the historic racial and ethnic makeup of those areas, thus giving those populations a voice in Congress.

It certainly is a fairer map from the partisan perspective than the one passed by the legislature, Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, told The New Republic on Friday. The bigger issue is whether the map gets the right balance with respect to various communities, and in particular, communities of color. Its unclear to me that the map violates the Voting Rights Act, which is not to say it doesnt necessarily adversely affect communities of color.

Cervas seems to have taken some of these considerations into account in the finalized map, reuniting some communities that he had divided. One such example was Sunset Park, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that was previously divided between the districts of Representative Jerry Nadler and Representative Nydia Velazquez. Sunset Park has significant Asian and Hispanic populations, Lerner argued, so it made sense for part of the neighborhood to belong to Nadlers district, which includes Chinatown in Manhattan, and part to Velazquezs district, which has a plurality Hispanic population. But under the special masters initial map, the entirety of Sunset Park had been drawn into a new district with Staten Island, with smaller Hispanic and Asian populations. Cervass initial map therefore significantly diminished their voice within the district, said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, an advocacy group that opposed the new map.

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New Yorks Redistricting Has Caused a Train Wreck of Democrats Own Creation - The New Republic

A group of vulnerable House Democrats is warning of spikes in ObamaCare premiums this fall, saying that enhanced financial assistance from last years relief bill needs to be extended.

Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) led the letter from 26 swing-district House Democrats to Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), calling for the enhanced ObamaCare financial assistance to be extended as part of any party-line economic package that Democrats put together.

If Congress does not act, experts note ObamaCare enrollees will receive notices of increases in their premiums in the run-up to the midterm elections, adding a political blow for Democrats at a time when the party is already facing major electoral headwinds.

The American Rescue Plan signed by President Biden early last year temporarily provided enhanced premium help for ObamaCare enrollees. But those extra subsidiesare slated to expire at the end of this year, leading to calls for Congress to act to make the enhanced help permanent.

These out-of-pocket cost increases are imminent: starting this autumn, when enrollees begin receiving notices of their premium increases for 2023 health plans, our constituents will find that the same high-quality coverage that they have been able to afford thanks to the American Rescue Plan will now be out of reach, the lawmakers write.

We cannot allow the progress we have made to be temporary, they add.We must make lower out-of-pocket costs and expanded coverage a permanent pillar of our health care system, and reconciliation is our only chance to get this done.

Extending the enhanced ObamaCare subsidies was part of President Bidens Build Back Better package that House Democrats passed in November.

But negotiations over the Senate version of thepackage have been stalled for months, and it is unclear if leaders will be able to reach a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the key swing vote if Democrats hope to use reconciliation to bypass a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Manchin has expressed openness to the enhanced ObamaCare subsidies in the past, though their fate is tied up in the larger negotiations.

If the enhanced subsidies are not extended, premium increases could be substantial. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that premiums would have been 53 percent higher on average this year without the extra financial assistance.

The lawmakers are also calling for a provision extending health coverage to low-income people in the 12 states that have not expanded Medicaid to be included in the package.

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Vulnerable House Democrats urge action to prevent ObamaCare premium hike this fall - The Hill

Legislation sponsored by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal supported by Connecticut's other senator, Chris Murphy, and Governor Lamont, Democrats all which was narrowly defeated in the Senate on May 11, titled the Women's Health Protection Act, isn't nutty just because it would authorize all abortions all the time, right up to birth. It's also nutty because, after its title, it doesn't mention women at all, not even once.

Instead, the text of the legislation substitutes "person" for "woman," apparently on a premise shared by all Democratic senators, except Joe Manchin of West Virginia, that there are no longer different genders and that men now can become pregnant.

The hallucination of transgenderism now rules the Senate Democratic caucus and Connecticut's Democratic Party.

After all, why title the bill the Women's Health Protection Act and then immediately cut women out of the text except to deceive and signal belief in transgenderism?

Since Connecticut's senators, the governor, and their supporters complain aboutRepublican extremism, they should be pressed about the implications of their legislation.

Do they really believe that men can become pregnant and need abortions?

Do they really believe that the law should be indifferent to the abortion of viable fetuses of full gestation?

Do they really believe that parents shouldn't necessarily know that their minor daughters are having surgery?

Last week the governor admitted that he opposes conditioning abortions for minors on the notification and consent of their parents, even though state law requires parental consent for mere tattooing. The governor argued that the law doesn't need to require parental notification because most minors seeking abortions tell their parents anyway.

Most may do so, but law is customarily enacted to apply to departures from the norm. Most people don't rob banks but, for good reason, bank robbery remains illegal, and a sensational case from 2009 provided Connecticut with everlasting good reason for requiring parental notification.

In that case, a 15-year-old girl who ran away from her home in Bloomfield and had been missing for almost a year was discovered living with an unrelated 41-year-old man in West Hartford. She had obtained an abortion at a Connecticut clinic after becoming pregnant from statutory rape of her by him, only to be returned tothe manand sex slavery because no one involved with the abortion asked critical questions.

While the age of majority in Connecticut is 18, for years now liberal Democrats in the state, starting with former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, have claimed that young people are incapable of taking full responsibility for themselves until they are 25 or so and that, as a result, they should be exempt from serious criminal penalties. So how do 15-year-olds become competent to decide by themselves on surgery?

The Women's Health Protection Act, which the Democrats likely will keep submitting in Congress, would duplicate the horrible conflict of interest that Connecticut law creates with abortion. It would deprive minors of any true guardians at a moment of the most profound risk to their physical and mental health, instead giving guardianship to their abortion providers, even though, by definition, the pregnancies to be terminated are the result of statutory rape or worse and the failure to notify parents, guardians, or law enforcement may conceal the most abusive felonies and facilitate still more abuse.

You're supposed to know better than to ask the barber if you need a haircut. So who should ask the abortion clinic if she needs an abortion?

Connecticut Democrats are calling the Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, an extremist for his position on abortion. But Stefanowski supports the abortion policy established by Roe v. Wade unrestricted abortion prior to fetal viability, state regulation afterward as well as parental notification, which Roe allowed.

With the Women's Health Protection Act, the governor and Connecticut's senators and most state Democratic candidates would go far beyond Roe. Thus, they have become the extremists here, and crackpots as well because of their legislation's suggestion that there is no biological difference between men and women and that biology itself has been a myth all along.

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The Day - In Connecticut, Democrats are the abortion extremists - News from southeastern Connecticut - theday.com