Progressives Gather Tonight For Celebrating America's Future 2014 Awards Gala
Bill de Blasio, Lee Saunders and Saru Jayaraman to be honored tonight, with Sally Kohn as MC: click here for details on purchasing tickets.
AFSCME President and Award Gala honoree Saunders defends public pensions, criticizes W. Post edit board in its own pages: "The Oct. 9 editorial on public employee pensions, 'Reining in pensions,' was misguided ... There have been five municipal bankruptcies since 2010 ... These bankruptcies were triggered by the unique problems of each city. None was caused by 'unsustainable' pensions of public service workers."
Warren Puts Populist Stamp On Midterms
Sen. Warren seeks to boost populist candidates. The Hill: "...she [will] spend the final three weeks before the November election visiting some of the nation’s toughest Senate battlegrounds. The campaign tour will take her to Colorado and Minnesota on behalf of her colleagues Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.), and Iowa, where she’ll be looking to bolster the candidacy of four-term Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) ... Democrats are well aware of how potent Warren’s populist economic message can be with voters, and have embraced it with their 'fair shot' agenda for the midterm elections."
Oversized banks lack capital. Bloomberg: "Too big to fail is likely to prove a costly epithet for the world’s biggest banks as regulators demand they increase debt securities to cover losses should they collapse. The shortfall facing lenders from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to HSBC Holdings Plc could be as much as $870 billion..."
Conservatism Albatross For GOP Governors
Conservative governors in midterm trouble. Bloomberg: "The biggest group of endangered governors are the Republicans who won in 2010 thanks in large part to the Tea Party wave. That includes four who took seats that had been held by Democrats: Kansas's Sam Brownback, Maine's Paul LePage, Michigan's Rick Snyder and Wisconsin's Scott Walker. The wave pushed a fifth, Rick Scott of Florida, just over the finish line in one of the closest races that year."
NC GOP Senate candidate believes aid to poor amounts to slavery reparations. TPM: "House Speaker Thom Tillis ... once released a statement that said federal and state governments had 'redistributed' 'trillions of dollars over the years' — amounting to 'de facto reparations.' ... an explanation he offered on his website for why he supported a joint resolution expressing the North Carolina general assembly's regret for slavery ... Tillis then went on to accuse a 'subset of the democrat majority' that's kept pushing reparations."
"Mitch McConnell Wants Kentucky To Believe Its Obamacare Exchange Is Just A Website" reports HuffPost: "Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has struggled throughout his re-election campaign to explain what repealing Obamacare would mean for the 500,000 people who have been insured by Kentucky's health care exchange, Kynect ... 'Kentucky Kynect is a website ...,' McConnell said [in last night's debate]. 'The website can continue, but in my view the best interests of the country would be achieved by pulling out Obamacare root and branch.' ... McConnell continued to argue that Kentucky officials could continue the state exchange 'if they'd like to.'"
Climate Dialogue Warms Up
Sens. Manchin and Whitehouse continue to talk climate compromise. Roll Call: "You would be hard-pressed to find two Democratic senators who more clearly demonstrate the party’s divide on energy and environmental issues, so it was notable when the pair announced plans to visit each others’ states to discuss energy and climate policy. Manchin followed through on the first half of the bargain Friday, joining with Whitehouse in meeting with oceanography experts, fishermen, environmental officials and residents and business owners at risk of seeing their properties washed away by rising tides."
"Pentagon Warns Climate Change Will Intensify Conflict" reports Bloomberg: "Natural disasters from climate change will intensify global instability, disease, poverty and conflict, according to the U.S. Defense Department. ... 'We refer to climate change as a "threat multiplier" because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today -– from infectious disease to terrorism,' Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said..."
September warmest month since 1880 reports Time.
