NM Democratic Party adopts Gaza ceasefire policy

With 74% in favor, pre-primary convention calls on congressional delegation and Biden to end war and military aid to Israel

 An overwhelming majority of the New Mexico Democratic Party’s membership this month voted in favor of a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza, an end to the blockade on aid, a pause on U.S. military aid to Israel and the release of hostages on both sides...

Continue reading at Source NM

 A recent PBS Newshour interview featured a member of the vestigial group of Republicans who do not support Trump, GOP Rep. Mike Lawler of New York.  He started off with the call for reduced spending and a lower deficit which has been the centerpiece of their platform since before the invention of the wheel. That relic has seldom been supported by any respectable economist since the Great Depression and, of course, the Republicans have never hesitated to throw money at any of their favorite projects.  Everybody, including most Republicans, know that party line is BS -- the current crop of office seekers may pay it lip service, but the Trumpists have moved on to a xenophobic obsession with building a border wall -- out of gold bricks if that is what it takes.  The bottom line for all this is that the "moderate" Republicans really don't have anything to say of interest to anyone at this point.

 I got in the last word on the Nov. 16 edition of Joe Monahan's New Mexico Politics blog:

Reader Mike Connealy says:

Ronchetti's claim in his concession speech that "This campaign was a grassroots movement..." is laughable considering the big outside money that was poured into the campaign. Unfortunately, the Dems cannot claim the "grassroots" label either. It seems like an issue that both sides should get together on. 

This is the home of New Mexico Politics. 

E-mail your news and comments. (newsguy@yahoo.com)

I'll try to come up with a more substantial analysis of the elections once the dust has settled. 

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is interviewed following the midterm elections by Ryan Grim at The Intercept.

Part 1:

"We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn."

 — Bernie Sanders, The Guardian - 2 Sep 2022

* * *

 I am currently having a debate with myself about how (or why) to vote in our local primary elections. I have not seen any clear policy or performance statements from any of the candidates.

The campaign ads that show up in the mail or on the media are useless, being full of obvious lies and distortions of opponents' positions and records. I'm thinking there is an opportunity here.

After the uproar about lies and disinformation in the online media the companies owning the websites set some standards and identified or banned ads and posts containing clear lies and distortions. It seems to me the print and TV outlets should be similarly accountable. I realize that presents a challenge to existing business models, but surely the public good has to trump profits when democracy is at risk. 

One possibility to offset lost ad income would be tax-supported subsidies for real debates and statements of policy and performance in media outlets which adhered to some standards, much as the League of Women Voters have done for years. Perhaps there is a role for the Federal Communications Commission in this regard.

In fact, the FCC does already have fairness standards, so no really new authority may be needed.  The restrictions which online media put on lies and disinformation have been tested in courts and the verdict is that such actions are not violations of First Amendment free speech restrictions because the online companies are private entities, as are the print and TV companies. The newspapers, networks and TV companies will try to invoke the idea that they are journalistic enterprises, but that is a distinction without a difference these days.

Of course the underlying problem is that the Supremes decided corporations have the same rights as citizens and somehow that means they are free to buy politicians. Undoing all that would be a big leap forward for democracy, but I'm not holding my breath for it to happen.

(A recent Supreme Court decision addresses some of the issues, but it probably isn't the last word.)

 Covid, Ukraine, Inflation, Immigration, Roe v Wade -- If Joe had his choice he likely would have picked some other time to be President.

CNN

One choice he is facing now is whether to continue onto a second term.  In spite of the likelihood the same problems and more will be with us a couple years down the road, there is no shortage of candidates to step into Joe's shoes.

Bernie has already said he was interested in the job if Joe jumps ship.

Warren is keeping herself in the news with spirited statements on the the big issues going into the mid-terms.

Believe it or Not, Hillary is still around.  She did a PBS interview recently, supposedly to promote a women's leadership group, but her comments on foreign policy issues sounded like campaigning.

Was it fourteen others on the stage with Joe during the run-up to the election?  We'll likely hear more from most of them, and probably some others as well.

 In almost every presidential election I can recall the country would have been better off seating the wife rather than the guy elected.

Jill Biden greets Olena Zelenskiy, Ukrain’s first lady, outside of School 6, in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, on Sunday. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

He craves attention.  The best way to deal with him is to just look away.  He is, after all, just a symptom of what is wrong with the country -- the domination of government at all levels by the Republican agenda.

There is some satisfaction to be derived from exposing Trump's thuggish behavior in the impeachment inquiries.  There is certainly also some value to exposing the hipocracy of Trump's congressional supporters.  In the end, though, none of that matters if Democrats don't have  an effective strategy for winning.

There is a good overview available at The New York Review of Books of how Democrats can regain momentum toward achieving control of the nation through a bottom up strategy.  Joseph O'Neill reviews of couple of books which examine Democratic Party successes and failures, and he extrapolates their evidence to some hard-hitting recommendations for the long haul.  Worth a read.

Time to stop for a moment to think about things before jumping on a bandwagon.

That's my self-prescription in view of the outcome of the primaries.  Of course, that is not what the candidates and their machines are advising.  Included in the "machine" category is a large chunk of the media which would rather you view it as a news source.  For instance, I have become deeply distrustful of the NY Times which I used to rely on for much of my daily news.  First, the Times jumped early onto the Clinton bandwagon.  Now that she is the presumptive primary winner, the Times is featuring carefully calculated daily headlines to manage public opinion about the upcoming election.  Thankfully, Times columnist Paul Krugman has been able to switch off his disgraceful attacks on Sanders and has gone back to musing about economics, though he hasn't written anything interesting in that regard since the primaries.

Then there is also that endless stream of click-bait from the Huffington Post.  A columnist there recently declared Jill Stein the world's most powerful woman.  I like the Green Party leader; she's smart and principled, but come on!

Fortunately, there are alternatives.

In today's Guardian there is an excellent, thoughtful essay by Rebecca Solnit which provides some useful perspective on both recent events and even a much longer time frame of the history of social and political movements.

At the New Yorker Adam Gopnik has written an article entitled Being Honest About Trump which puts the Republican candidate into the proper historical perspective in refreshingly clear language.

There is a  long article penned by Andy Kroll on the Mother Jones site about New Mexico Governor, Susana Martinez.  The piece has been linked to from Alternet and Huffpost and will get a lot of national attention.  The article makes use of a lot of intercepted conversations and emails from inside the Martinez machine, and it is likely to make the Martinez camp very nervous.  It will be interesting to watch how they combat the allegations of the article without calling more attention to the source.

It seems to me that Kroll has made an error in trying to characterize Martinez as the next Sarah Palin.  The Gov may be sketchy on policy detail, but she clearly is not an air head.  She and her handlers have been very adept at managing her media image.  Martinez has a bigger war chest already than all of her potential Democratic Party gubernatorial rivals together.  She has not hesitated to do effective hatchet jobs on rivals in her own party, but she has also not done anything that seriously harms her with the Tea Party wing of her party.  At the same time, Martinez has put considerable effort into ingratiating herself with the Republican mainstream, and she has been embraced by both the big names and the big funders.

Martinez currently has New Mexico approval ratings in the 50-60 per cent range.  It is hard to see how she might be bested in the upcoming Governor's race in the absence of some major scandal revelations.  While it may be hard to imagine anyone would take her seriously as a presidential candidate, when you look at the electoral history of the last couple decades, it is clear that there is a very low bar for aspirants to the second place on the ticket.