The Progressive Midwesterner

At yesterday's U.S. Senate debate in Missouri between Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill and Republican challenger Josh Hawley, McCaskill's response to Hawley's claim that he'll protect health care coverage for Missourians contained multiple sentence, but one sentence in particular stood out: If he believes we should protect pre-existing conditions, he should ask tomorrow for the case to be dismissed. Hawley is currently the Attorney General of Missouri, and Hawley is one of numerous Republican state attorneys general who are suing in an attempt to undermine health care coverage protections for those with pre-existing conditions. Hawley, if he wanted to, could withdraw the State of Missouri from the lawsuit, but he hasn't done so. What Hawley and a lot of other Republicans are doing amounts to gaslighting, since they're claiming to support protecting health care coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, while, at the same time, their actions seek to...

At a League of Women Voters (LWV) forum for Minnesota State House District 25A (district map here ), which includes northwestern Olmsted County and portions of Dodge County in southern Minnesota, Republican incumbent Duane Quam and Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) challenger Jamie Mahlberg were required to share a microphone. While that was a well-intentioned idea on the part of the local LWV chapter in that part of Minnesota (I assume they didn't want the candidates talking over each other, which is a common occurrence in political debates/forums where each candidate has a dedicated microphone), it didn't work out well. That's because Quam, at one point in the forum, ripped the microphone out of Mahlberg's hands, and, after giving a rebuttal to Mahlberg's response to a question about education funding in Minnesota in, threw the microphone down in front of Mahlberg: It's inherently clear that Representative Quam has zero respect for women. I seriously doubt th...

Despite a very large gubernatorial candidate field seeking the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin (including ten candidates who were invited to speak at the Wisconsin Democratic convention a few days ago, eight of which received at least 8% of the vote in the non-binding convention straw poll ), the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association (WBA), a trade group representing the right-wing corporate media in Wisconsin, only intends to invite a total of four candidates to a scheduled Democratic gubernatorial debate: The Wisconsin Broadcasters Association says no more than 4 candidates will be invited to its debates on July 21 for Republican Senate candidates and July 27 for Democratic governor candidates. Criteria includes being in top 4 of latest @MULawPoll pic.twitter.com/ilwGLcSAoH — Scott Bauer (@sbauerAP) June 4, 2018 It's important to note that, unless Marquette University does another pre-election opinion poll before the scheduled July 27 debate, the Marquette poll that was r...