A dispatch from Kansas, democratic socialist heartland
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders ventured to Kansas City on Friday for two rallies for Democratic candidates for Congress running on left platforms, James Thompson and Brent Welder. Today, Ocasio-Cortez headed to St. Louis to campaign for Cori Bush, who’s challenging Rep. Lacy Clay Jr.
Clay or his father have held the seat since 1969, and if he falls in the wake of Crowley’s defeat, it’ll be a sign that the Bronx and Queens upset wasn’t a fluke. Primaries in Kansas and Missouri are on August 7.
Briahna Gray was in Kansas for us, and filed this dispatch on the new message emerging from Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
Background on the Welder primary: the race includes an interesting candidate, Sharice Davids, backed with $400,000 from EMILY’s List’s super PAC, as well as a more moderate candidate who may sneak through. Dave Dayen’s piece on the race from earlier this week is great.
Sometimes standing up for press freedom means standing up for somebody you find odious. That’s the case here with Wikileaks. If the government successfully sets a precedent that a publisher -- and Wikileaks is very much a publisher -- can be punished for publishing classified information, journalism will become criminalized, since so much of what the government does is over-classified. Here’s Glenn on where this is headed.
To run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump has tapped a woman who has no experience doing consumer protection or remotely connected to the financial industry regulation. That lack of experience emerged today under questioning by Elizabeth Warren in the confirmation hearing for Kathy Kraninger, an official at the Office of Management and Budget whose top qualification is that she is close with acting OMB and CFPB honcho Mick Mulvaney. Our story, by Dave Dayen, on that is here.
And the process to bring children back to their parents, after Trump separated them illegally, is chaos. Debbie Nathan’s reporting here.
Yesterday, I wrote about a strange new corporate lobbying firm that thinks there is a viable business model in identity politics.
Trump, meanwhile, has tweaked some language to make it easier for the U.S. to sell weapons to countries that slaughter civilians. Story by Alex Emmons. That’s all for now! Have a good weekend.