is to become a democratic organization in a big way. Small d democratic. Minimal insiders. There are Democratic County Central Committees all over the country, and they could really fix a lot of things by using the power of activists to pick their winners. Hell, if they did that, I would be interested in joining their party. Going to their meetings would be fun and productive.

...a sitting member of Congress. it requires a full time effort. Congress members are too busy dialing for dollars and campaigning to preserve their own job.

no, to Howard Dean. been there, done that. Democratic rehash and now part of the establishment.

i would not be opposed to Martin O'Malley. he sounded his own whistles about the unfairness of the Democratic primary though he may also be considered too close to the establishment now. not sure. it would be hard to find someone not already running in Democratic circles. former Gov. Schweitzer maybe? he seemed to be a kick ass and take names kind of guy to get results.

what about some women? what would be some names to toss into the pool? no to Brazile. good gawd. that staffer was right.

"Oops. Turned out, we actually did need your votes. Something went wrong with our attempt to rig the general election."

"Will you come back if we give you a lollipop?"

after his super-delegate pledge was committed to Clinton though Sanders won the state? Now the Dem's are just tossing the burial dirt upon themselves. I'd be happy to hand them a shovel.

me pause. HRC and the Dems got what they deserved. Their neoliberal economic policies have ravaged the country, especially the rust belt mid west. As always, it's the economy. I'm thinking of posting the below excerpts over at Orange State. If that doesn't get me banned, nothing will.

This is why it is not so much that Donald Trump won this election as that Hillary Clinton and her campaign lost. Here the Democratic Party only has itself to blame. Bernie Sanders offered a far more potent challenge to the Trump phenomenon, both because he did not carry any of the baggage that Clinton brought to the election and also – perhaps more importantly – he represented a far sharper ideological counterweight to Trump.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/11/trump-brexit-and-the-collapse-of-...

Contempt for the white working class cost Hillary Clinton the White House to no small degree. The exit polls are very clear on that. Those polls also tell us I think that Bernie Sanders would very likely have prevailed over Trump in a general election. His leftish populist campaign was pitched largely to the economic and anti-plutocratic grievances and sentiments of the white majority working and middle classes, most of whom aren’t frothing racists, nativists, and sexists (Hillary’s “deplorables” comment notwithstanding). I think enough of those voters would have recognized Sanders as a more authentic articulator of their views and anger than Trump for Sanders to have prevailed over the Deplorable Donald.

As someone who was very critical of Sanders from the left (in part because of Bernie’s failure to go for the kill against Mrs. Clinton) from the get go, let me say flat out that the Democrats ran the wrong candidate. And Trump wasn’t wrong to point out that the Clintons and their allies atop the Democratic National Committee rigged the game against Bernie. The rigging was consistent with the neoliberal corporate Democratic Party elite’s longstanding vicious hatred of left-leaning progressives and anti-plutocratic populists in the ranks of their business party.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/11/the-long-death-march-of-the-disma...

First, the Democratic loss. There’s no two ways about it – this was a huge, and embarrassing loss for a party that’s clearly fallen out of favor with the mass public. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment were badly exposed in this loss, and the party is in the middle of a full-on meltdown. The country was told that Trump had little to no chance of winning, and that Hillary was a shoe-in to be our first female president. Obviously, that was a fiction that few challenged considering all the polls that consistently predicted Clinton would prevail on November 8th.

Looking back, it should be obvious that the Democratic Party’s Achilles Heel was its near-complete failure to prioritize the issues of economic inequality, jobs, and the aiding of America’s working class, middle class, and poor. The Dems had ample opportunity in Obama’s first two years in office to adopt a platform committed to limiting Wall Street power and aimed at serving the public via reforms promoting re-unionizing of the nation, introducing universal health care, and instituting a living wage. To put it simply, the party blew it big time, and it’s come back to burn the party badly, with Clinton now serving in the public mind as the ultimate symbol of Wall Street power and greed.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/11/88237/

It’s hard to empathize with the corporate liberals who streamed from the Javits Center in tears Tuesday night. Their corrupt Democratic Party had a good if not great candidate in Bernie Sanders and their DNC deliberately fought to keep him from winning the primaries. In every poll taken during his campaign, Sanders beat Donald Trump in a hypothetical general election.

Oh, they’ll start pouring out their bile now, blaming everyone but themselves and their candidate. It was the media’s fault for popularizing Trump (a Clinton strategy). It was the FBI’s fault for re-opening the email case (thanks to Huma Abedin’s ex). It was stupid Middle America’s fault for being racist and sexist (was that why they voted for Trump?). It was third-party supporters who screwed us in Florida again (Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow are furious that leftists didn’t vote for their heroine). It was Russia’s fault for hacking the DNC (no evidence) and plotting to invade Europe (no evidence).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/11/blaming-everybody/

The Democratic Party establishment this election cycle threw any shred of principle to the wind in orchestrating the nomination of Hillary Clinton, surely the most disliked candidate to run on a major party ticket in history. The party did this knowing that it was promoting a candidate who had a tin ear for the issues of ordinary people, who was demonstrably corrupt and dismissive of laws and ethical standards, and who was actually under investigation by the FBI the whole time she was running in the primaries.

We know, thanks to principled Democratic Party leaders who quit like Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, and to emails leaked by Wikileaks, that the DNC worked assiduously throughout the primary season to undermine Bernie Sanders’ insurgent primary campaign. The DNC and the Clinton campaign — actually facets of the same malignant organization — did this by scheduling early debates at times, like during the Superbowl, when few people would be paying attention, by working with corrupt mainstream journalists to plant hit pieces on Sanders, resorting to cheap red-baiting, lying about his history of civil rights activism, and questioning his mental abilities, and even resorting to voter suppression — usually a tactic favored more by Republican Party operatives.

When this DNC bias and manipulation of the primary campaign was exposed, forcing the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Clinton immediately made that disgraced Florida congresswoman the titular head of her own campaign, demonstrating her utter contempt for ethics and for the Democratic base.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/11/the-silver-linings-in-trumps-win/

Add this to the reasons why I hate Hillary: I was all set to go with yet another screed on how anti-Trump hysteria was, and always had been, a distraction, and how the most urgent task now is to build a movement that would prevent Commander-in-Chief Hillary from provoking overt confrontations and proxy wars with nuclear powers – only to find that the Empress of Ineptitude couldn’t even defeat a billionaire buffoon, a con artist extraordinaire, who seemed uninterested in governing but only in not losing to a girl, especially one as feckless as he knew Hillary to be.

She had the backing of the entire capitalist class, including the most nefarious high flyers among them, and of all “respectable” corporate media outlets. And, once Bernie Sanders crossed over to the Dark Side, she had no serious opposition within the Democratic Party. She also enjoyed at least the passive support of the Republican establishment. And yet she lost!

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/11/hillary-out-and-the-donald-in-goo...

Yes, I do love the writing at CounterPunch. I have a subscription and I usually read the whole thing everyday.

Having been a vagabond, I once lived in the district Ellison ran for his seat in and was able to vote for him. Slight reservations about not being a full-time chair, but no reservations about his progressive qualifications.