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Brian Murray knows just how fierce an opponent Arizonas Sen. Kyrsten Sinema can be. The Republican strategist saw his candidate lose to Democrat Sinema in their 2012 race for the House.

Calling the experience unpleasant, Murray admits his candidate, Vernon Parker, was flawed, but flawed candidates win all of the time. Kyrsten, however, was an absolute machine.

Sinema, along with fellow centrist Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has recently become the epicenter of American politics largely because she insists on siding with the interests of her constituents instead of the demands of her party. Over the past few weeks, she has refused to support the Democrats Build Back Better bill a social spending package with an initial $3.5 trillion price-tag (now $2 trillion) to fight climate change, fund child care and universal pre-K, and extend the expanded child tax credit.

Progressives saw her stance as a betrayal, and she has been hounded by activists. At Arizona State University, where she is a lecturer, angry protesters followed her as she left a classroom and headed into a nearby restroom, chanting: We need a Build Back Better plan right now! Others demonstrated outside a private wedding she officiated in Bisbee, Arizona.

But Sinema has never been the Prada Socialist she once jokingly called herself in a 2006 interview with the now-shuttered fashion magazine 944.

Ever since January, the ruling class has expressed shock that she opposes the elimination of the Senates 60-vote threshold. But she has held this view for the entire six years she served in the House and the three years she has spent in the Senate.

The left despises her obstructionist views that do not allow the Biden administration, and the Democrats, to get everything they want. But anyone who has everlistened to herspeeches knows that Sinema has always been,Independent, like Arizona.

Born in Tucson, Sinemas parents divorced when she was a child, and she moved to a small town in Florida with her two siblings after her mother remarried. When her stepfather lost his job, the family became homeless and spent more than two years living in an abandoned gas station.

Eventually the familys economic fortunes improved and they moved into a small home. Despite her circumstances, Sinema was a star student, graduating from Brigham Young University with a Bachelors degree, then going on to earn a Masters in social work, a law degree and a doctorate in justice studies.

Of her childhood with no electricity or running water, shetold the Washington Postin 2013: There are lots of people like that in this country. We dont talk about it, but its true.

Born and raised as a Mormon, she left the faith after she earned her first degree from Brigham Young.I have great respect for the LDS church, she told the Washington Post. Their commitment to family and taking care of each other is exemplary. I just dont believe the tenets of the faith that they believe.

In 2016, she told alocal Arizona newspaperhow she recovered from poverty. You think about the traditional narrative, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and the liberal message, help those in need and have a safety net. But the reality is, its a combination of those two. Thats what shaped my life working hard and getting the help I needed.

The 45-year-old lawmaker was briefly married to a fellow Brigham Young classmate and is now divorced with no children.

The fact that she was brought up Mormon probably had a certain degree of influence in her life. And the fact that she was homeless as a youth, that had impact on her life, said Steve McMahon, a Washington-based Democratic strategist who worked on the presidential campaign of Howard Dean and on the Senate staff of Ted Kennedy.

But in reality, she is a workhorse, like former Senator John Kyl but shes also a show horse like the late Senator John McCain. I mean, shes like both of them combined into one, and thats pretty rare, he said of the two iconic statesmen who represented Arizona for decades.

Sinemas ascension into politics began like a lot of successful lawmakers she lost. Twice, in fact, running first for Phoenix City Council in 2001 as a Green candidate and then for the Arizona legislature in 2002 as an independent.

In 2004, she ran again for the state legislature but this time as a Democrat and won. Eight years later, when a new Phoenix area congressional seat was created as a result of redistricting, she took advantage of the new balance of Republican, Democrat and Independent voters to handily beat GOP candidate Parker, despite all the socialist spaghetti Murray could throw at the wall to defeat her.

I remember we called her a Prada-socialist in one of our TV ads. You know what? It wasnt true. In the end result, thats just not who Kyrsten Sinema is, Murray admitted.

Murray says Sinema embodies the spirit and values of Arizona.

This is a state where people come to start over. Her independence and recognition that you need to compromise to get things accomplished is what has always made her a perfect fit with the electorate.

While she is openly bisexual and likes to dress with flair she is not opposed to wearing thigh-high boots or pink wigs in the chamber Sinema has never been a banner for radical activism.

When she ran for the House, common ground were the two words she used most often in her ads and speeches. When she reached the House in 2015, she voted against Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, opting for John Lewis instead. When she announced her run for the US Senate in 2017,she said:Its time to put our country ahead of party and politics and vowed to not vote for Sen. Chuck Schumer as Senate minority leader if she won. (Because the Senate votes for their leader behind closed doors, it is unknown if she stuck to her guns on that promise.)

Dane Strother, a California-based Democratic strategist, said Sinema is doing exactly what she is supposed to. In a representative democracy, you are hired to represent your constituents, Strother said. If you dont do that, theyll find someone who will.

When Sinema ran for the Senate seat vacated by Republican Sen. Jeff Flake in 2018, she defeated fellow Arizona congresswoman Republican Martha McSally and became the first woman elected to the US Senate in Arizona history. Her presence has helped the Democrats move from a minority in the Senate to a 50-50 split with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie breaker.

McMahon said he thinks progressive activists should wake up and realize just how valuable Sinema is.

Instead of criticizing Kyrsten Sinema, progressives should thank God that shes able to win in a competitive state like Arizona, because without Kyrsten Sinema, there would be no majority leader, Chuck Schumer.

Murray, meanwhile, chuckles when he hears both progressives and Republicans talking about running against her in 2024.

I mean, thats a joke. There is zero chance whatsoever that anybody in Arizona has a chance of defeating her, especially from within the Democratic Party.

Salena Zito is the author of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.

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Wake up, progressives: Youre lucky to have Kyrsten Sinema - New York Post

Property tax bills. Photo courtesy San Diego County tax collectors office

The House has passed President Joe Bidens $1.85 trillion social policy package but it faces a tough slog in the evenly divided Senate.

The White House and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer are being squeezed between demands from two centrist Democratic senators that the package be trimmed and warnings by those on the left, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, they might turn against the legislation if it is diluted too much.

One of the specific points of contention is something that would have multi-billion-dollar impacts on California a partial repeal of the $10,000 cap on income tax deductions for state and local taxes, dubbed SALT.

The cap, part of a Republican tax overhaul signed by former President Donald Trump in 2017, hit high-tax states such as New York and California hard. It indirectly raised federal taxes on their high-income residents and, state officials worried aloud, encouraged them to either migrate to other states with lower taxes or otherwise reduce their tax exposures.

Californias Franchise Tax Board, its income tax collection agency,estimated in 2018that the SALT deduction limit cost Californians an additional $12 billion a year in federal taxes.

Three-fourths or $9 billion of the estimate fell on Californians with incomes of $1 million or more, the tax board calculated, with the other $3 billion coming from those with taxable incomes of $100,000 to $999,999. Given the sharp growth in personal income since then, the bite is probably more like $20 billion today.

Schumer, who is from New York, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is from California, have been trying ever since the cap was imposed to either repeal or modify it, and the governors of affected states, including Californias Gavin Newsom, have been pushing hard for a change.

The version of Bidens package that emerged from the House would raise the cap to $80,000 through 2030, then reduce it back to $10,000 in 2031 before allowing it to expire in 2032, seven years after the current 2025 expiration date. The manipulation of SALT deductions is aimed at making it pencil out, on paper, as a net gain in federal revenue over the long term.

However, Sanders and others on the left see it as a giveaway to the rich that would violate the Democratic Partys mantra that the wealthy should shoulder a greater tax burden.

Rep. Jared Golden, a Maine Democrat, tweeted last week that the partial repeal of the cap sounds more like something Republicans would propose, rather than top Democrats.

Proponents have been saying that the (Biden package) taxes the rich, Golden said on Twitter. But the more we learn about the SALT provisions, the more it looks like another giant tax break for millionaires.

Oddly, Republicans see the SALT modification through the same political lens, alleging that it would benefit coastal elites in California, New York and other blue states but hurt Democrats in swing states next year.

I think theyre struggling to maintain their professed support for taxing the wealthy, yet they are providing a huge tax windfall under the SALT cap, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee,told the New York Times.If your priorities are working families, make that the priority, not the wealthy.

With heavyweight support from leading Democrats and the White House, the SALT cap modification is very likely to remain in the package if, indeed, it garners enough votes to win final approval. Well know in a year whether it helps Republicans regain control of Congress.

CalMattersis a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how Californias state Capitol works and why it matters.

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Opinion: End of Cap on 'SALT' Deductions Would Help California Homeowners, But Progressives Oppose - Times of San Diego

Oberlin College in Ohio has a noble progressive history, and this fall it has become a battleground for an important political question: Is Palestinian solidarity undermining the Democratic Party coalition?

Oberlin instructors who are concerned that the issue is dividing progressives organized a student trip to Israel this coming January, titled Bridging the Gap: Israel, that cast Israel as a robust democracy progressives can love, and cast Palestinian solidarity as a harbor for antisemitism.

Were really concerned that the left and the progressive movement dont know how to talk about and dont take antisemitism seriously, one of the instructors, Megan Black told Walter Thomas-Patterson of the Oberlin Review.

A second instructor, Simon Greer, who has a long resume in Jewish activism, has also worked to keep support for Israel a progressive cause.

A student leader of the trip, Havi Carillo-Klein, wrote an article in the Oberlin Review days after the last Israeli onslaught on Gaza last May, lamenting the supposed antisemitism in leftwing discussion of Palestinian rights:

My questions are: how does pro-Palestinian activism regularly blend with anti-Jewish activism? What is going on within our communitys pro-Palestinian protests and activism circles that allows this pattern to continue?

The winter trip was published in an Oberlin catalog in October, and its description raised eyebrows because it never mentioned Palestine, stated the cost at $4500 for eight days, plus airfare, and repeatedly described Israel as a democracy. It said the trip would address the complexity of issues facing Israeli democratic society that are too often deeply simplified in U.S. analysis, including the Occupation.

This project encourages participants to take on the challenge of engaging the deep divides that plague American democracy by thinking deeply about Israel, a nation that is both important and divisive in U.S. political and campus discourse.

Soon after the trip was announced, Oberlin Students for a Free Palestine (SFP) began a campaign against it. They said the trip made Oberlin complicit in oppression and apartheid, and it must be condemned.

A reported 600 people have signed the SFP petition (on a campus of 2600 students), but so far it appears that the course has the support of the administration. A former dean of students was one of the trips initial organizers.

The Students for a Free Palestine petition offered a brief history of Palestine because the course description had nothing to say about Palestine.

Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Israeli government and Israel Defense Forces have forcefully removed Palestinian inhabitants from their historical homes and inflicted violence on Palestinian people. Militarization, brutality, murder, bombings, demolition, and family separation have traumatized Palestinians for over seventy years. Palestinians have been forced to resist occupation and apartheid that has left most of Palestines historical population seeking refuge; the land which once belonged to Palestinians has been plagued by illegal Occupation and continues to shrink, potentially into oblivion.

The organizers of the trip then revised the description of their trip. They renamed it, Bridging the Gap: Israel, Palestine, and the Politics of Division Here at Home, and said it would include extensive exposure to Palestinian experiences and perspectives.

The price dropped to $2500, and the new course description made it clear that the organizers want to prevent Israel from dividing the Democratic Party rank and file. They blame actors external to our movement for politicizing differences between Democrats over Israel and Palestine (Trumpers/antisemites, presumably).

Our project has its roots in the political turmoil of the last five years, when it became clear to many organizers in progressive and racial justice movement spaces (including us) that internal differences over Israel/Palestine and associated charges of racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia were being effectively weaponized by actors external to our movement to divide and destabilize progressive coalitions. These efforts weakened pro-democracy forces at a critical time for protecting voting rights, expanding political participation, and countering the surge of far-right anti-democratic organizing. The Bridging the Gap project and the Coalition of the Future course that we are currently teaching are both efforts to equip Oberlin students and future leaders to effectively navigate wedge attacks and the weaponization of racialized oppression through bridge-building, deep relationships, and complex strategic thinking.

That description is very much in line with J Street and other liberal Zionist lobby groups that want to keep pro-Israel a bipartisan issue. They want to end the battle between the pro-Israel establishment and the pro-BDS left because they fear that advocating for Palestine will lower the Jewish commitment to the Democratic Party. J Street combines criticism of settlement expansion with support for full military aid to Israel, because it believes those positions are broadly supported by American Jews.

Oberlin instructor Simon Greer has boasted that American Jews like himself have answered the challenge from Israel to protect, defend and support Israel.

Oberlins Students for a Free Palestine group are not content with lip service to Palestinian human rights. They are angry that fees from the trip are sure to help support the Israeli army, and that the students will enjoy freedom to travel around the country that millions of Palestinians dont have. A member of SFP told me thats a privilege thats offensive on a campus that famously was once a stop on the Underground Railroad.

That student suggested that the trip organizers dropped the price of the trip because theyre having a hard time recruiting students. The trip was supposed to be for 15 students. Who knows how many will show up for a pro-Israel propaganda tour that a petition drive aims to stop?

But by all appearances, the student said, the college administration is committed to the trip, and is determined that it will not be canceled. I emailed two of the instructors to ask about the trip. Neither responded.

Mondoweiss is a nonprofit news website dedicated to covering the full picture of the struggle for justice in Palestine. Funded almost entirely by our readers, our truth-telling journalism is an essential counterweight to the propaganda that passes for news in mainstream and legacy media.

Our news and analysis is available to everyone which is why we need your support. Please contribute so that we can continue to raise the voices of those who advocate for the rights of Palestinians to live in dignity and peace.

Support Mondoweiss from as little as $1. Thank you.

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A funny thing happened when Oberlin announced Israel trip for progressives to see democracy (at $4500 a pop) - Mondoweiss

Artist Krishen Khanna has a new project. He takes out his phone to show me the beautiful sculpture being created in England based on his designs. Its inspired by a particular famous incident in the Ramayana, which he insists has been portrayed badly by painters and not at all by sculptors.

The sculpture transcends time and space to simultaneously evoke Persian, Welsh and Indian mythology. The fact that I see it on the day before Dussehra isnt lost on me, nor is the fact that though we celebrate Rams defeat of Ravana, a lot of creatures fought him. It was an army of animals, who supposedly had no agency or power, who won the war for Ram.

Khanna points to the painting hes working on in his drawing room. Its a black and white rendition of a bandwallah on a cycle. My son says I should colour it but its meant to be the bandwallah going home at night. Theres no need for colour, is there?

Khanna has an extraordinary body of work that spans pre- and post-Independence India. He first copied the Last Supper at the age of seven, which means hes been an artist for 89 years. I cant live without them, he says, as I ask about the Husains and Padamsees on his walls. When I look at him for clarification, he replies that he cant live without painting. But painting and his peers among the Progressive Artists Group (PAG) are equally compelling for Khanna. He has always been inextricably bound with PAG, a group of artists that included M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza, K.H. Ara, Ram Kumar, Bal Chhabda, Akbar Padamsee and Tyeb Mehta.

Each one of us did very different work. There was no dictate on the types of painting. We were all poets and existed in bonhomie. For example, Husain had an exhibition in Tokyo and he was short of paintings. Chhabda sent him his own collection of Husains works. When Husain came back and offered him the money that the paintings had sold for, he refused, saying that hed given Husain the paintings. They could have considered me an outsider, Khanna muses. A bada sahib. But they were big hearted and honest. Each one was an extraordinary person. Now Im lonely.

The reason Khanna, unlike the rest of the Progressives, could be considered a bada sahib was because he was a banker for 12 years before he resigned to become a painter. He came from a family of educators; went to study at the Imperial Service College in Windsor on a scholarship at the age of 13 and came back to Multan four years later because World War II broke out and he was evacuated. His family moved to India in 1947 and by 1948 he secured a job with Grindlays Bank and moved to Bombay where he met the Progressives. He was transferred to Madras and Kanpur by the bank while he continued painting on the side and only took the plunge in 1961 and quit Grindlays. He left the farewell party his bank colleagues threw for him to head straight to a party his artist friends threw in celebration. And from there he flew into a new life, first on a fellowship to the U.S. and then into a small house with his extended family in a resettlement area in Delhi called Bhogal as a full-time artist.

But he, like the rest of the Progressives, was not only creating a new international idiom in painting that contrasted with the more figurative Bengal masters in these heady days. They, especially Khanna and Husain, were also telling stories of the newly independent India as it was buffeted by war, penury, scarcity and migrations. In the early days of their friendship, Husain and Khanna would sketch refugee families at the New Delhi railway station. Bhogals wandering population and its proximity to the crowded tombs of Nizamuddin helped Khanna use it as his personal observatory of the changing character of Delhi and to tell stories of displaced refugees and humanity on the streets: the men in dhabhas; exhausted, sleeping people; labourers crowded into the back of trucks; the bandwallahs in their gaudy uniforms that served as reminders of British era princes. He also used figures from Hindu and Christian myths to reflect the turmoil of the 1970s: the midnight arrests, censorship of the press; the repression and hostility of state machinery. The differing styles of the Progressives can actually be compared by their immensely different treatment of the same biblical allegories. Khannas Christ became one of those itinerant pilgrims found around Nizamuddin even now, reflecting resistance against persecution by an oppressive system.

Khannas political lens is probably at its clearest in a place so public that no one notices it: the lobby of the ITC Maurya Sheraton hotel in Delhi where he both painted the dome over four years, and was involved in curating a collection of some of the greatest art of India. While the hotel itself was modelled on the ancient Buddhist Chaitya cave temples in Karla, Maharashtra, the heart of the hotel is Khannas glowing mural called the Great Procession in the lobby. In the artists words, it depicts the great procession that is India and Indian life. The scenes portrayed are typically Indian, including tea-sellers and old women gossiping. There is even a portrait of Khushwant Singh, an old friend of Khannas.

Fusing past and present

Khanna uses the three-tiered curved surface to fuse scenes of the Mauryan past and the present day. As Khanna says, [it]...uses ordinary daily life incidents to show a continuous journey with no beginning and no end. If you look carefully, you can find yourself in it... One side of the dome isnt painted, so if you stand there, you are a part of it. While this is possible at the lobby, its far more apparent on the 12th floor where you find yourself equal in dimension to the girl painted on the dome to your right. Another friend, Manjit Bawa would climb up to help Khanna paint parts of the dome. Khanna got paid 5 lakh but ultimately only made 1 lakh after expenditures.

But Khanna has focussed on his bandwallahs for a while now, whom he says reflect the Indian preoccupation with pomp and relics of the British Raj while at the same time telling the stories of the groups of men who dress up to perform at weddings. Arun Vadehra, whos known Khanna since the foundation of Vadehra Art Gallery, says Khannas preoccupation is with form and colour. The bandwallahs, like Husains horses, are interesting in their blown-up cheeks and thick lines, but we shouldnt try to see what we want in the work of an artist, especially one of the greats like Khanna. Instead, we should look at the form and colour. But I still believe Khanna is one of the great raconteurs who tells the stories of ordinary men through his brushes.

Much like the miniature artists I love, Khanna speaks with a few strokes. But the forms and colours he uses are also delightful. His work is like Picassos it has got simpler over time but it is an allegory for an age.

The writer is the author of the fantasy series Weapons of Kalki, and an expert on South Asian art and culture.

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The last of the Progressives, Krishen Khanna told stories of a newly independent India - The Hindu

FOX Business host Larry Kudlow discusses Biden's economic agenda, inflation, the president's pick for Federal Reserve chair and the programs in the social spending package.

Progressives celebrated the passage of Democrats' nearly $2 trillion reconciliation spending bill Friday morning after months of negotiations but that bill is a shell of its former self and they have little leverage to keep it from shrinking further in the Senate.

"If I'm looking at the situation, I think the progressives didn't get anything, really," R Street Institute senior fellow for governance James Wallner told FOX Business. "They have a much more scaled down infrastructure package, you know, trillions of dollars less than what they originally were demanding, and that was dictated by moderates' pressure to not vote for it."

"Simultaneously on that, they ended up giving up their only leverage, which was letting the infrastructure bill go, which is now signed into law," Wallner added. "It like a perfect storm of badness for House progressives right now."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks during a news conference to discuss legislation that would strengthen Social Security benefits, on Capitol Hill Oct. 26, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images / Getty Images)

WHITE HOUSE STANDS BY CLAIM THAT RECONCILIATION BILL WON'T ADD TO DEFICIT, DESPITE CBO SCORE

Wallner worked on Capitol Hill for more than a decade and worked in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, including as the legislative director to Sens. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) demanded for months that the House not touch the infrastructure bill until the Senate passed the reconciliation bill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., agreed.

Then Pelosi and progressives were demanding that the House should pass the reconciliation and infrastructure bills at the same time. But eventually it was Pelosi who strong-armed progressives into passing infrastructure first earlier this month.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was fond of saying that he would prefer a $6 trillion bill and $3.5 trillion was the compromise. House progressives were behind him.

But the bill was whittled down slowly to just under $3 trillion, then just above $2 trillion, then just under $2 trillion.

Sanders said Friday he was glad the bill passed, but, "Nowthe legislation comes to the Senate where I hope to see it strengthened in a number of ways." Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said it's "not just conservative changes" that are possible in the Senate but she hopes for "expansionary changes that could happen as well."

Unlikely.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduces Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., U.S. 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate during a rally at University of Michigan on Sunday, March 8, 2020 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)

PELOSI, THE MODERATES, AND THE PROGRESSIVES: SPEAKER'S SHIFTING ALLIANCES AS SHE PUSHED BIDEN'S SPENDING PLANS

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., held firm for months to his topline demand of $1.5 trillion and wants to strip the paid leave provision out of the bill. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., hasn't committed to voting for anything yet. And even House moderates like Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., are saying the bill needs to get smaller in the Senate if they're to vote for it when it comes back to the House.

"I continue to have reservations about the overall size of the legislation and concerns about certain policy provisions that are extraneous or unwise," Murphy said in a Thursday statement heavily couching her vote for the bill. "I will work with my Senate colleagues to improve this bill, and I hope to vote onand enacta more streamlined version of the bill once it returns from the Senate."

"The budget rules make it really hard to increase the spending in a reconciliation bill on the Senate floor," Wallner said. "The key stage is gonna be how Schumer handles the internal party discussions ahead of that floor debate... They have to have all their ducks in a row, they have to have a come-to-Jesus moment."

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., introduces Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., at a campaign event in Nashua, New Hampshire, Dec. 13, 2019. (REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz / Reuters Photos)

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The fact is, Wallner said, moderates hold all the cards in shaping what the final reconciliation bill will look like. And it is not going to look very much like what the "Squad" or the CPC want it to.

"Obviously, you're gonna have to compromise," Wallner said of the legislative process. But progressives will have to ask themselves, "What did they get for all this effort?"

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But Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said Friday that the legislative effort is not over.

"Today is a day to celebrate," she said. "Tomorrow is the day to continue to go back to the negotiations and push it in the Senate."

Fox News' Caroline McKee contributed to this report.

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Spending bill passed but leftists got rolled, expert says: 'Perfect storm of badness for House progressives' - Fox Business