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Michael Avenatti, a potential Democratic presidential contender, said Monday that anyone seeking to represent the party in the 2020 presidential election should commit to a Cabinet with equal parts men and women.
Avenatti sent the tweet Monday while saying the “lack of female cabinet members over the years is a disgrace.”
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Avenatti, the lawyer for adult-film star Stormy Daniels, has publicly floated the idea of running for president in 2020 but has not officially announced his candidacy.
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The lawyer made headlines last week when he said the 2020 Democratic nominee “better be a white male,” though he added he wishes it weren’t so.
Avenatti made the remark as he discussed his potential run for president in an interview, according to Time.
“When you have a white male making the arguments, they carry more weight,” he said. “Should they carry more weight? Absolutely not. But do they? Yes.”
Avenatti later clarified in a tweet that he was calling on white men “to step, take responsibility, and be a part of stoping the sexism and bigotry that other white males engage in.”
In the Time profile, Avenatti said every political event he attends “puts me a little closer to actually” running for president.
Vowing to take on a “rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) officially launched her 2020 presidential campaign in Lawrence, Massachusetts on Saturday with a call for bold reforms to America’s dysfunctional economic and political status quo.
“If you don’t have money and you don’t have connections, Washington doesn’t want to hear from you. That is corruption, plain and simple, and we need to call it out.”
—Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Noting that President Donald Trump is an alarming symptom of America’s political crisis, but not its cause, Warren declared that “we can’t afford to just tinker around the edges—a tax credit here, a regulation there.”
“Our fight is for big, structural change,” said the Massachusetts senator, who throughout her speech invoked popular policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a wealth tax, and ambitious criminal justice reform.
During her remarks, Warren repeatedly lambasted the fundamental injustice of a political system that rewards those with the deepest pockets at the expense of the most vulnerable.
“If you don’t have money and you don’t have connections, Washington doesn’t want to hear from you,” Warren said. “That is corruption, plain and simple, and we need to call it out.”
“Now when I talk about this, some rich guys scream, ‘class warfare!’ Well let me tell you something: These same rich guys have been waging class warfare against hardworking people for decades,” the senator added. “I say it’s time to fight back.”
As remedies to America’s deep-seated political and economic woes, Warren proposed a wide array of reforms, including overturning Citizens United, barring members of Congress from accepting lobbyist donations, and scrapping “every single voter suppression rule that racist politicians use to steal votes from people of color.”
Warren also vowed to spend no time “sucking up to a bunch of big donors on Wall Street” and promised to run a campaign free of PAC money and billionaire donations.
“Millions and millions and millions of families are struggling to survive in a system that has been rigged,” the senator said. “We are here to say enough is enough.”
Watch Warren’s first campaign event below:
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Just a few months after directly blaming U.S. President Donald Trump for fueling crackdowns on the press in her country, award-winning Filipina journalist Maria Ressa—a long-time critic of the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte—was arrested Wednesday for what reporters and media advocates around the world denounced as “trumped-up and politically-motivated” libel charges designed to intimidate and silence Ressa and her colleagues.
In November, while accepting an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Ressa said: “Our problems are partly caused by yours: American social media technology platforms, once empowering, now weaponized against journalists, activists, and citizens, spreading lies across borders; and, a president so much like ours whose attacks against the press (and women) give permission to autocrats (like ours) to unleash the dark side of humanity and extend their already vast powers with impunity, especially in countries where institutions have crumbled.”
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Ressa is far alone in calling out Trump for emboldening hostility toward journalists. In Reporters Sans Frontières’ (RSF) lastest World Press Freedom Index, U.S. ranking declined due to Trump, and the group warned the “downward trend has drastic consequences at the international level.” Just this week, a BBC cameraman was violently attacked at a Trump rally in Texas after “the crowd had been whipped up into a frenzy against the media by Trump and other speakers.”
In the Philippines, as the Washington Post reports, plainclothes officers arrived at the office of Rappler, of which Ressa is CEO and executive editor, Wednesday evening. She and former Rappler researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. were arrested following a complaint from businessman Wilfredo Keng about an article published in May of 2012 that noted Keng’s alleged ties to illegal drugs and human trafficking. The “cyber libel” law they are accused of violating was enacted four months after the story ran.
Ressa’s arrest ignited a flurry of fresh concerns about Trump’s attacks on the news media—from popularizing the phrases “fake news” and “enemy of the people” to laughing when Duterte denounced journalists as spies during a 2017 bilateral meeting—as well as the dangers of the U.S. president’s high praise for Duterte, notorious for his vicious drug war on which Rappler has extensively reported:
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RSF secretary general Christophe Deloire declared that Ressa’s arrest “is an obvious violation of press freedom which should be denounced by all the heads of states and governments which can exercise influence on Rodrigo Duterte.” He added that she has the full support of RSF’s Commission on Information and Democracy, of which she is a member.
“This is brazenly politically motivated, and consistent with the authorities’ threats and repeated targeting of Ressa and her team. Authorities should end this harassment, drop the charges, and repeal this repressive law,” Amnesty International Philippines section director Butch Olano said in a statement.
“In a country where justice takes years to obtain,” Olano noted, “we see the charges against her being railroaded and the law being used to relentlessly intimidate and harass journalists for doing their jobs as truth-tellers.”
Ressa’s arrest on Wednesday comes after Duterte’s government—in a move also widely decried by journalists across the globe as an intimidation effort—hit her and Rappler with five charges of tax fraud, which could land the CEO behind bars for up to a decade. Ressa and the online outlet deny evading taxes.
She was arrested over the tax charges in early December, after returning to the Philippines from a trip to the United States, where she visited Washington, D.C. to accept the 2018 Knight International Journalism award as well as New York City to accept the CPJ’s 2018 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award. She was also honored, alongside other journalists reporting in increasingly dangerous conditions, as TIME magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year.
The Duterte government’s intimidation tactics, meanwhile, don’t appear to have fazed the decorated CEO and her fellow reporters of Rappler, who pledged in a statement on Wednesday to “continue to do our jobs as journalists. We will continue to tell the truth and report what we see and hear.”
Ressa, for her part, added: “We are not intimidated. No amount of legal cases, black propaganda, and lies can silence Filipino journalists who continue to hold the line. These legal acrobatics show how far the government will go to silence journalists, including the pettiness of forcing me to spend the night in jail.”
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This post has been updated with comment from Amnesty International.
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As some Senate Democrats offer up half-measures that fall far short of Medicare for All and rush to distance themselves from Sen. Kamala Harris’ (D-Calif.) expressed support for eliminating private insurance, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) on Wednesday made heavy use of buzzwords and verbal gymnastics—with phrases such as “the moniker of what you call the concept”—in an attempt to paper over these substantive and crucial healthcare policy differences within the Democratic Party.
“If a Democratic presidential contender offers you Medicare for All, read the fine print.”
—Addy Baird, ThinkProgress
“I think we have to look past the surface-level name for it,” Wasserman Schultz said during a CNN appearance when asked about Harris’ remarks and what Medicare for All really means.
“The moniker of what you call the concept, which we are all fully embracing, is that healthcare is a right and should not be treated as a privilege that is only available to those who can afford it,” the Florida congresswoman continued. “That is what Democrats are for, that’s what you’ll see every Democratic presidential candidate be for. And, as you would expect, they will take different approaches to getting there.”
Wasserman Schultz went on to dismiss “the black and white choice of are you or are you not for Medicare for All” as meaningless, arguing that the more important “litmus test” for Democrats is “making sure that everyone in America can get access to quality affordable healthcare.”
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Single-payer advocates have long warned of efforts by politicians to co-opt Medicare for All as a useful and popular campaign slogan while stripping the program of its substance. As Common Dreams reported last week, Medicare for All advocates have also denounced Democrats like Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and others for advocating various incremental public option plans that would not adequately confront America’s for-profit healthcare crisis.
Concisely summarizing the wariness among longtime single-payer activists, Addy Baird of ThinkProgress wrote on Wednesday, “If a Democratic presidential contender offers you Medicare for All, read the fine print.”
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Harris’ remarks in support of eliminating the private insurance industry—which her team has since walked back—during a CNN town hall earlier this week intensified an ongoing national conversation about what Medicare for All would actually look like and how the transformative policy might be implemented.
Warren Gunnels, policy director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), pointed to the Vermont senator’s Medicare for All Act and emphasized in a tweet on Tuesday that Medicare for All “ain’t a slogan. It’s a 94-page bill.”
Democratic Socialists for Medicare for All—a single-payer campaign organized by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—declared that the recent “obfuscation” by Democrats on the definition of Medicare for All is why they go out of their way to “define Medicare for All according to five guiding principles”:
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As demands intensify for the U.S. government to cease its “dangerous” and anti-democratic meddling in the internal affairs of Venezuela, President Donald Trump on Sunday morning said that sending U.S. troops to the politically fractured Latin American nation is “an option” he continues to consider.
“Certainly, it’s something that’s on the—it’s an option,” Trump said during an interview with CBS’s “Face The Nation” with Margaret Brennan.
“We strongly urge an alternative approach, based on seeking a peaceful and negotiated transition of power rather than a winner-take-all game of chicken.”
—Francisco Rodríguez & Jeffrey D. Sachs
Asked by Brennan what he sees as the national security interest of sending troops or helping overthrow Venezuela’s elected president Nicolas Maduro would be, the president didn’t provide an answer. “Well I don’t want to say that,” said Trump. The president did say that Maduro requested a meeting at some point last year, but that the request was turned down.
Trump is not the only one threatening the Maduro government. On Saturday, Vice President Mike Pence said, “Maduro would do well not to test the resolve of the United States of America.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the leading members of Congress working for regime change in Venezuela, has been openly encouraging members of the nation’s opposition—as well as members of the armed forces—to rise up in violence against the government. As journalist and media critic Adam Johnson noted, the corporate media in the U.S. has continued to uncritically endorse this behavior with their coverage:
Meanwhile, anti-war voices—even those who believe Maduro’s government is deeply problematic—are continuing to call for a negotiated settlement to the crisis in Venezuela while arguing emphatically against further U.S. intervention.
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In a New York Times op-ed on Saturday, Francisco Rodríguez, chief economist at Torino Economics, and Jeffrey D. Sachs of at Columbia University—both experts on Latin America—issued an “urgent call for compromise” on Venezuela, arguing that the risks of further harm by the Trump administration’s provocations and “winner-take-all” approach were “extraordinary” and must be stopped.
“The U.S. track record of fomenting regime change is very poor,” wrote Rodríguez and Sachs. “In Afghanistan, incredibly, it is negotiating a peace agreement with the Taliban after 18 years of a United States-led war to defeat the Taliban. Interventions in Iraq, Syria and Libya have also led to continuous strife. There is no guarantee that Venezuela would be any different.” They continued:
In a video posted Sunday morning, journalist Rania Khalek of InTheNow news, offered a six-minute rundown of what most U.S. news consumers were not being told about the situation in Venezuela:
The situation, Khalek notes, remains “incredible dangerous” on the ground. Even if the Americans’ chosen guy, president of the National Assembly Juan Guaido, “doesn’t get to take over Venezuela, this is going to incite violence and possible a civil war” in the country.
“As for those opposed to Maduro, fine, you don’t have to love him. But it’s not up to the U.S. or anyone else to decide Venezuela’s future.” —journalist Rania Khalek”As for those opposed to Maduro,” she adds, “fine, you don’t have to love him. But it’s not up to the U.S. or anyone else to decide Venezuela’s future. After all, when has U.S. meddling ever ended well for the people in the targeted country? Honduras, Syria, Iraq, and Libya are just a handful of a long list of countries that are worse off after U.S. meddling. The result is always more oppression, more authoritarianism, more violence, more misery, more privatization, more corporate exploitation, and more poverty. Every single time.”
For their part, Rodríguez and Sachs urged “all sides of the political battle to find common ground to prevent bloodshed, starvation, millions more refugees or political solutions dictated by outside forces. We believe that the world, and especially the country’s neighbors, should listen to Venezuelans themselves. The United States could eventually get its way in a winner-take-all struggle, but at the grave risk of the extreme suffering of millions of Venezuelans — beyond the great suffering to date.”
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As a new interactive tool “paints a startling picture of how much Americans are spending on healthcare”—and bolsters the case for a single-payer system—new reporting sheds light on a powerful industry effort to make sure upcoming Medicare for All proposals are dead in the water.
As the New York Times lays out,
They’ve recently joined to form the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), with Lauren Crawford Shaver, a veteran of Clinton’s 2016 campaign, at the helm. Politico previously reported on the coalition, as did The Intercept.
The group’s focus is not on extending healthcare to all Americans but keeping the Affordable Care Act, and with members including powerful groups like the American Medical Association, Federation of American Hospitals, PhRMA, and HCA, PAHCF’s “reach is undeniable,” as the Times notes. Seeing legislative proposals, such as Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Wash.) Medicare for All Act, fast approaching, the group is ready to “step up the tempo,” the Times reports.
Indeed, last week, it announced a six-figure digital campaign “to inform the American public about ways to protect and strengthen our nation’s existing healthcare system, while warning them that a one-size-fits-all health care program—whether called Medicare for All, Medicare buy-in, single-payer or public option, will lead to higher taxes and less patient choice for every American family.” A recent analysis, however, showed that a single-payer system would slash healthcare costs, boost systemic efficiency, and expand coverage.
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The coalition had similar remarks in reaction to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2020 presidential campaign announcement, asserting that the American public doesn’t back his long-championed Medicare for All system. Recent polling indicates that, in fact, most Americans do.
The new reporting in the Times comes days after the Kaiser Family Foundation released a “Household Health Spending Calculator.” Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) reacted to the tool in a six-part Twitter thread, writing that while “as bad as this household health spending calculator makes things look, just remember…the complete picture is even worse.”
“These outrageous costs are why we desperately need, and can absolutely afford, #SinglePayer,” the group said. “Improved #MedicareForAll would reduce health spending for everyone but the very wealthiest Americans, and would improve coverage to boot. What are we waiting for?”
PNHP’s new president, Dr. Adam Gaffney, recently acknowledged the deep-pocket forces at work to kill Medicare for All.
“The industry is not going to go down without a fight,” he told Common Dreams‘s Michael Winship. “Obviously, they’re going to pour money into Washington, they’re going to pour money into lobbying, they’re going to pour money into candidates, they’re going to take out ads, they’re going to smear it left and right, so our work is cut out for us.”
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Jumaane Williams, a progressive activist, is New York City’s public advocate-elect.
Williams, a city councilman from Brooklyn, won election as advocate with a plurality of votes on Tuesday, defeating 16 other candidates that included progressive journalist and activist Nomiki Konst and Queens councilman Eric Ulrich. Ulrich was the second place finisher, with 19 percent to Williams’s 33 percent.
As advocate, Williams will have control over the office’s $3.5 million budget and the power to hold public hearings. Williams will be the only person of color in the top of city government—Mayor Bill De Blasio, acting public advocate Corey Johnson, and comptroller Scott M. Stringer are white men.
The role of public advocate is seen as a stepping stone on the way to higher state office and the advocate replaces the mayor temporarily if the mayor leaves office early. De Blasio himself made the jump in 2013.
Congratulations for Williams on his win came from across the New York progressive spectrum.
Turnout for the special election was low for the city with only around 400,000 New Yorkers casting ballots in the race.
Williams entered the race with a recently elevated public profile after running unsuccessfully against Kathy Hochul for Lt. Governor in the Democratic primary on September 13, 2018, and had the support of prominent progressives in the city including State Senator Julia Salazar and progressive activist and Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout.
The position was vacated at the end of December by newly elected state Attorney General Letitia James. Acting public advocate Johnson congratulated Williams on Twitter and promised a smooth transition.
Due to the timing of James’s departure and the next election, Williams could have to face off against unknown challengers in a primary for advocate in June and then again in the general election in November.
It’s unclear if there will be much appetite for another free for all race, however, as Williams earned a decisive margin of victory in his plurality win.
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According to reporting by the Washington Post, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told fellow Democrats in a closed-door meeting that a controversial vote that had been decried as an ill-conceived attempt to rebuke Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for criticizing the Israeli lobby will take place on Thursday.
Hoyer’s reported plan comes on the heels of reports late Wednesday that House Democratic leaders decided to indefinitely postpone a vote on the resolution in the face of widespread backlash. As of this writing, the text of the resolution has not been made public.
According to the Post:
“Democratic leadership made the right choice yesterday. After listening to the voices of Jews, Muslims, and our allies, they decided to delay voting on this resolution indefinitely. It is disappointing to see them taking the cowardly move of reviving the bill behind closed doors,” the youth-led Jewish advocacy group IfNotNow tweeted in response to the planned vote.
Progressive Jewish Groups Thank Diverse Coalition That Mobilized to Thwart Democrats’ Misguided Rebuke of Omar
Progressive Jewish advocacy groups leading the grassroots mobilization in defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) celebrated late Wednesday after House Democratic leaders were forced to delay a resolution rebuking the congresswoman over her criticism of the Israeli lobby and government.
“We must not equate anti-Semitism with legitimate criticism of the right-wing, Netanyahu government in Israel.”
—Sen. Bernie Sanders
“This is a victory. Grassroots pressure from Jews, Muslims, and our allies challenged the double standard applied to Ilhan Omar, forced Dem leadership to delay the vote,” declared IfNotNow, a youth-led Jewish organization. “Now they must withdraw it and replace it with a resolution condemning white nationalism.”
And Jewish Voice for Peace, which launched the #IStandWithIlhan hashtag with the help of a diverse coalition of allies, tweeted:
The House Democratic leadership’s decision to indefinitely postpone a vote on the resolution came as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—all major 2020 presidential contenders—issued statements defending Omar from attacks by the right and her own party.
“Anti-Semitism is a hateful and dangerous ideology which must be vigorously opposed in the United States and around the world. We must not, however, equate anti-Semitism with legitimate criticism of the right-wing, Netanyahu government in Israel,” said Sanders. “Rather, we must develop an even-handed Middle East policy which brings Israelis and Palestinians together for a lasting peace.”
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“What I fear is going on in the House now is an effort to target Congresswoman Omar as a way of stifling that debate,” the Vermont senator concluded. “That’s wrong.”
In a statement posted on Twitter, Warren condemned right-wing threats of violence against Omar and said attempts to label “criticism of Israel as automatically anti-Semitic has a chilling effect on our public discourse.”
When news broke earlier this week that House Democrats were planning to publicly rebuke Omar in a floor vote as early as Thursday, Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and other progressive Jewish advocacy groups moved quickly to defend the congresswoman, urging Americans to call their representatives and delivering thousands of petition signatures to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
“We’re witnessing a huge change in our society,” tweeted IfNotNow. “Our political leaders are becoming less afraid to speak out against Israeli policy and it’s because of our grassroots movements. This is winning.”
In addition to opposition from Jewish advocacy groups and Democratic presidential candidates, House Democratic leaders pushing the resolution have also faced an internal revolt from their own members.
“Democrats seem to have underestimated the groundswell of support that manifested for Omar.”
—Rex Santus, Vice
According to the New York Times, a number of House Democrats—including members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Progressive Caucus—spoke out against the efforts to rebuke Omar during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday.
“What would be the appropriate level of punishment—a public flogging?” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) asked in an interview after the meeting. “We are all responsible for what we say, and there are consequences, whether it is this resolution or something else. But there is a double standard we have to be aware of. The level of condemnation on Ms. Omar has been really intense.”
Following Wednesday’s meeting, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters that there is no vote scheduled on the resolution—though he did not say it has been completely withdrawn, which advocacy groups are demanding.
“Democrats seem to have underestimated the groundswell of support that manifested for Omar,” wrote Vice reporter Rex Santus.
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A new analysis warns that right-wing lawmakers across the United States are working to water down science education, as students around the world hold weekly school strikes, calling on adults take action to address the human-made climate crisis.
“The only way to be sure they don’t pass is to raise public awareness of them and to localize concerns about the integrity of public science education.”
—Glenn Branch, NCSE
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The Washington Post—citing the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), which tracks anti-science legislation—reported Monday that state legislators already have introduced more than a dozen measures targeting science education in 2019. That’s more in less than three months than NCSE typically expects for an entire year.
Detailing some of the proposals, the Post reported:
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While some bills already have failed, NCSE deputy director Glenn Branch emphasized that it is still important to make people aware of efforts to weaken science education—especially with respect to legislation that doesn’t specifically mention climate or science more broadly, but would ultimately impact what is allowed in the classroom.
“They’re not aware there’s a sizable constituency that likes to see these bills introduced and hopes they will be passed,” Branch told the Post. “The only way to be sure they don’t pass is to raise public awareness of them and to localize concerns about the integrity of public science education by speaking about them.”
Last month, Branch published a blog post on NCSE’s website outlining 14 anti-science measures introduced this year. The list includes bills in Indiana and South Carolina that would allow school districts to teach creationism as well as so-called “anti-indoctrination” legislation in Arizona, Maine, South Dakota, and Virginia.
Anti-indoctrination measures, as Branch explained,
Amid the wave of attacks on science education, some state lawmakers, such as Washington state Sen. Claire Wilson (D), are fighting back with measures designed to enhance science education. In January, Wilson introduced a bill (pdf) that aims to “increase learning opportunities and improve educational outcomes in climate science literacy.”
“We know there’s a growing crisis called climate change,” Wilson told the Post, “and we believe it’s underrecognized by many people… We cannot crack this nut and deal with it until we believe it’s true and we start teaching young people about it and have them help us come up with the solution.”
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In a far-ranging interview Monday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo criticized fellow Democrats and what he called an anti-business mentality in his state that he believes was part of a political miscalculation which cost the state an Amazon facility in New York City.
Cuomo’s remarks came during a 33-minute interview with Alan Chartock, chief executive officer of NPR affiliate WAMC.
Throughout the conversation, Cuomo repeatedly decried what he defined as a “political reptilian brain” on the part of politicians to act based purely on “fight or flight” instincts and placed much of the blame for his current problems with his party on said response.
The governor leveled particular criticism at some of his fellow New York Democrats—including, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Jimmy Vielkind, City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Democratic state Sen. Mike Gianaris, the state Senate Majority Leader. All three opposed the Amazon headquarters project in Queens, which ended when the company pulled out citing an unfavorable political environment.
Van Bramer fired back on Twitter, calling the governor’s words unhelpful.
Chartock asked Cuomo if he meant, by reptilian, that the politicians were snakes, but the governor demurred.
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Earlier in the interview, the governor fired on House Democrats in Washington, accusing the caucus of allowing an opportunity to condemn anti-Semitism to slip away because of a resistance to being criticized.
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“You’ve had, on the Democratic side, voices of anti-Semitism,” Cuomo said, apparently referring to comments from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) critical of Israeli foreign policy and the power the country’s lobbying arm has in Congress. “I think some people were reluctant to stand up and condemn it.”
Those comments came in for criticism from Waleed Shahid, the communications director for Justice Democrats.
Cuomo stopped short of blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for the outcome, instead pointing to the left wing of the Democratic Party.
“You have these polar extremes, and the best thing to do is duck,” said Cuomo. “There’s too much ducking going on.”
Cuomo also waxed philosophical on the 2020 primary, saying that the contest was driven by popularity instead of substance.
“This is a new type of presidential [campaign],” Cuomo said. “This is one of the legacies of Trump. You don’t really—anybody can run for president. It’s a celebrity contest. It’s a talent show. It’s one of those reality shows.”
“You don’t have to know how to manage anything,” added Cuomo. “You don’t have to know how to work with the legislative body.”
Cuomo also said he believed Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who announced a bid for the White House last Thursday, was a tall man—but conceded that might be because O’Rourke is so often standing on tables.
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