Daily Archives: June 28, 2017

To some degree, the politics of The Progressive Liberal Dan Richards align with those of the real Dan Richards. Given that this is pro wrestling, a big red sign displaying Is this a work? is always flashing, but Richards claims he leans hard left. Its not much of a stretch, he says on the phone. When he tells me that Democrats should be as ballsy and unapologetic about their beliefs as the Republicans are about theirs, it could be either the character or man talking, and it still makes sense.

Regardless of how much Richards plays up the left-wing politics to crowds in Kentucky and nearby states, it works. Look no further than the videos to see that those crowds despise him. Theres a kid in the crowd telling him to shut up, and relentless jeers, or Trump masks worn by attendees. And even the occasional death threat, according to Tennessee-based wrestler and booker Beau James, who met Richards in 2003 and has served as something like a mentor. As James and Richards tell it, at a 2016 show in West Virginia, where Richards spoke about taking everyones guns, a patron displayed a pistol in a holster on his right hip and started rubbing it.

Another time, one fan threatened that if that fucking liberal showed up at a different show, hed bring his gun.

The heat is real:

Richards came up with the germ for the Progressive Liberal in 2015, with Donald Trump a few months into his presidential campaign. James, who vouches for Richardss authenticity, says, he is what you see on the TV. He serves as a barometer for Richards, figuring out how to get under the crowds skin without cutting too close. Appalachia has real problems, like many parts of the country: A lack of jobs, drug addiction, poverty. Ridiculing those topics will anger people in ways that go beyond riling up a crowd before a bout. We could use national politics, James says. We dont touch local politics.

The details really make the gimmick, and theyre not as obvious as the Not My President shirt. Its the way the Progressive Liberal says Appalachia, pronouncing the third syllable with a hard A as in ate, instead of the flat A preferred by locals. The audience immediately understands that hes not from here. Richards was originally billed out of Richmond, Virginia, his actual hometown. But he and James realized that when performing in Kentucky, which has a Richmond of its own, the crowd would become confused. So his origin became Washington, D.C.

The industry has always been replete with guys working effete liberal gimmicks, but this is the perfect place and time, and Dan Richards has built a sustainable meal ticket, at least within the limited scope of the indie circuit. Test your mental constitution and imagine for a minute if Hillary had won; this character would still be popular and paying customers would still project their frustrations onto him, for a different reason. For the time being, its an absolutely foolproof heel. And hell always be the heel. As Richards points out in our conversation, he could face the scummiest, most vile opponent, who cheats to win in the most obvious ways and with outside interference, and the people will still refuse to support the Progressive Liberal.

This gimmick has an expiration date, because they all do, but for the time being, the Progressive Liberal is something as fresh as it is seemingly obvious, with a lot of potential to go wideror be copied elsewhere. From what Ive seen so far, people who identified as left-leaning find Richards amusing, and so do self-identifying conservatives and Trump supporters. Their reasons for enjoying the character are vastly dissimilar, but they are all able to get something out of it. The holy grail of wrestling is to straddle the line between face and heel, to be someone the crowds love to hate. In the fair grounds and school gyms of Appalachia, Dan Richards may have found a shortcut.

Excerpt from:

No One Is Pissing Off Local Wrestling Crowds Like The "Progressive ... - Deadspin

The night Hillary Clinton lost the White House, Amanda Litman cried so hard she threw up.

In Atlanta, as the returns rolled in, Traci Feit Love faced a question from her anguished 8-year-old daughter: Now what do we do?

Across the country, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Rita Bosworth wondered the same thing.

The three never met, never spoke, never communicated in any fashion. But in the days and weeks that followed, they became common threads in a sprawling patchwork: the angry and politically aggrieved who with no help from politicians, political parties or any formal campaign structure have joined to fight President Trump and his policies.

From her Brooklyn apartment, the 27-year-old Litman co-founded a group called Run For Something, which encourages people under age 35 to do just that. Thousands have signed up, many of them political novices.

Love, a 40-year-old attorney, took to Facebook and virtually overnight created Lawyers for Good Government, now a coast-to-coast army of legal experts battling Trump on issues such as immigration and a ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries.

Bosworth, 38, helped start a network that steers donors and activists in Democratic-leaning states like California toward legislative contests in more Republican redoubts, on the theory that their actions can have a greater impact where resources are scarce.

The idea is to build a pipeline of candidates and create incubators for policy that can eventually take the national stage, said Bosworth, who plans to leave her job as a San Jose public defender soon to work full time for her organization, the Sister District Project (as in sister cities).

Powered by social media and fired up by deep antagonism, Bosworth and others have produced a movement seemingly without precedent: artists, doctors, lawyers, scientists, software engineers and others organizing themselves to seek elected office, flood congressional town hall meetings and agitate on a broad range of issues.

Their numbers are unknowable; for many, a good part of the appeal of the do-it-yourself movements is the lack of rigid structure or top-down management.

But seemingly every week brings a new group with new designs: academics giving advice, librarians raising their voices, quilters taking up their sewing needles.

It turns out Trump, a president loathed by Democrats, is a far greater spur to liberal activism than the revered Barack Obama, a former community organizer who hoped to inspire a wave of officeholders and Democratic idealists. Instead, he presided over the hollowing-out of his party.

In November last year, being a politician was the last thing I would have ever, ever, ever intended to do, said Kellen Squire, a 32-year-old emergency room nurse in central Virginia, who, helped by Litmans group, is waging an uphill fight for a seat in the state House of Delegates. But I saw whatever was going to come down the pike was going to be so jacked up, I wasnt going to just take it. I had to stand up, yell, scream and holler.

Not all of the incipient energy is being directed toward the electoral arena.

A group calling itself the Resistance Media Collective has assembled 200 animators, graphic designers, videographers and other volunteers to live-stream anti-Trump protests and produce materials such as a cartoon brochure titled A Preparedness Guide for Undocumented Families.

Its tips, in English and Spanish, include finding a U.S. citizen to act as a childs legal guardian and advice on navigating the court system. Our goal, very very simply, is to amplify the resistance, said Kathryn Jones, 48, a former actress in New York City and one of the groups leaders.

Much of the effort is aimed at revivifying a Democratic Party that lost hundreds of gubernatorial, congressional and legislative seats under Obama, slumping to its weakest position in decades.

But many involved have purposely kept their distance from the national party and also tried to steer clear of lingering resentments over who backed Clinton or Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Its not a Bernie thing or a Hillary thing or an Obama thing, said Alex Wall, a Democratic communications strategist and one of dozens of volunteers working together to help the anti-Trump opposition hone its message and broaden its reach on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. Its about speaking with one voice.

Party leaders say they welcome the freelancing. Were all united in the same message, said Sabrina Singh, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee. We want to elect Democrats that reflect our values and the values of the states theyre running in.

Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times

Amanda Litman pitches Run For Something to an audience of prospective candidates and donors at a house party in Brooklyn Heights.

Amanda Litman pitches Run For Something to an audience of prospective candidates and donors at a house party in Brooklyn Heights. (Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times)

Litman, a product of the Washington, D.C., suburbs, started walking precincts in Virginia as a 16-year-old. She went from Obamas political operation to directing Clintons 2016 email program. After her queasy election night, she binged on Netflix and traveled to Costa Rica, where she devoured a history of Emilys List, the Democratic group that promotes women running for office.

She contemplated a life away from campaigns. During an interview with a New York publishing house, however, she found her thoughts drifting to the imagined horrors of a Trump presidency and passively watching from the sidelines.

That just seemed pathetic, she said, as she headed to her office for the day, a table and chair at a Lower Manhattan wine bar renting work space in the off hours.

Running up her credit cards and digging into savings, Litman worked with Democratic consultant Ross Morales Rocketto, the husband of a Clinton campaign co-worker, to launch Run For Something. Their idea was to tap thousands of political contacts and share that knowledge base with a fresh generation of candidates.

They launched on Inauguration Day, and within a week 500 people had visited their website and expressed interest. The number, Litman said, has since climbed to more than 10,000.

The most common question what should I run for? is easily answered, she told about 20 potential donors and candidates gathered beneath a leafy canopy at a backyard party in New Yorks Brooklyn Heights. Decide the problem you want solved and the best place to do so, she said.

For many, that means local offices, such as school boards and city councils, which are easier to win than seats in Congress, and where results can be more immediate than in gridlocked Washington. Theyre affordable, Litman said, as though peddling a line of practical footwear, and so, so, so important.

Candidates who pass a screening they must be Democratic-leaning, personable and committed to the time and effort a campaign requires are offered a buffet of free advice from political pros: how to file for office, write a news release, design a website.

Heather Ward, 21, a recent college graduate running for a school board seat outside Philadelphia, was counseled on door-to-door canvassing: Polish a crisp message; leave a note if no ones home. With guidance from her tutor, who helped run Clintons North Carolina campaign, she finished atop a field of four candidates and reached the November runoff.

Like any start-up, theres a freedom that comes with low overhead and minimal expectations. No fat cat donors to appease, no anxious incumbents to allay, so the group can look beyond a single election cycle.

The hope, of course, is to win wherever and whenever possible, Litman said, but more important is grooming a stable of newcomers who can step up years from now to run for governor or U.S. Senate.

Or, she posited, the ultimate post-Trump fantasy: A 2032 presidential candidate who started with us.

mark.barabak@latimes.com

@markzbarabak on Twitter

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Trump succeeds where Obama failed spawning a new wave of liberal activism - Los Angeles Times

When Republicans claim they can't get a fair shake from news media, they have weeks like this one in mind.

The new Congressional Budget Office report for the Senate's Obamacare repeal bill has revived a false claim, parroted by many once respectable media outfits, that millions of people (this time 22 million, one million fewer than the House version of the bill) will "lose their insurance."

An estimate that says $1 trillion more spending will insure only a million more people is obviously fishy. But let's set that smell-test aside. Let's also set aside the fact that the CBO arrived at its number by using an imaginary and unrealistic baseline number for what Obamacare was likely to insure years from now. Even without those two glaring problems, there remains the irreducible fact that CBO does not claim that anywhere near 22 million will "lose their insurance." It has said only that its best guess is that fewer people will obtain insurance than if Obamacare were to remain the law.

More galling yet is the claim that the Senate's modest proposals will "kill" nearly 29,000 additional people each year." This is the worst sort of fact-free appeal, and a good example of why there is little intelligent discussion of politics anymore.

There are so many things wrong with this argument that it's hard to deal with all of them. We'll only refer to the fact that the death rate increased for the first time in 20 years beginning at exactly the same time Obamacare went into effect. With very few exceptions, it's pretty safe to ignore predictions about how many lives a bill will take.

We could save far more than 29,000 people a year by banning the automobile, or setting a 3 mile per hour speed limit. Who will be the first to argue that Republicans in Congress are killing 40,000 people every year for failing to implement such a policy, which no one would accept? There are trade-offs for every new rule or law, no matter how good its intentions.

There are more serious problems than that with the claim that reforming Obamacare will increase deaths by a five-figure number. A big one is that the connection between being insured and being healthy is weak. Far weaker is the connection between having health coverage and not dying. Buying insurance doesn't make you healthier any more than buying travel insurance makes a vacation safer.

A 2008 study of Medicaid patients in Oregon has become famous because it demonstrated that you can give people insurance free in a controlled environment and they might still end up with worse health outcomes than similarly situated people who go uninsured at the same time. The insured in that study had less stress and greater peace of mind because health insurance is a financial product, a safeguard against expensive risks. It is not usually a safeguard against illness or early death.

Health coverage is not the same thing as healthcare. Tens of thousands of veterans who died of old age or sickness while waiting for appointments at the VA can attest to that. So can many Medicaid patients whom doctors won't agree to treat. Likewise, many Obamacare customers find that their networks are so narrow that they must drive more than an hour to get to the nearest hospital that will give them non-emergency care.

There are good reasons to criticize Senate Republicans' healthcare bill. Liberals can argue without stretching the truth that more people will go without health insurance if it passes. They can make the case that this is bad for society even if, as is the case with many of those people, they are choosing to do without insurance. But the hysterical claim that a piece of legislation will kill 29,000 people is one that no educated or thoughtful person should take seriously.

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Death by legislation? Left-liberal critics just tipped Granny Logic off the cliff - Washington Examiner