true, but perhaps Beto could take out Cornyn in the meantime.Quote:
Originally Posted by Cat Mom
FUCK i hate Ted Cruz.
true, but perhaps Beto could take out Cornyn in the meantime.Quote:
Originally Posted by Cat Mom
FUCK i hate Ted Cruz.
My favorite line of his is along the lines of (and I'm paraphrasing here), "I have more legislative experience than Donald Trump, I have more executive experience than Mike Pence, and I have more military experience than the both of them combined."Quote:
Originally Posted by Cat Mom
Mayor Pete knows what his message is and it shows.
I think Warren will be OK - there is an air of "but her emails" with this scandal about her Texas Bar application and she's already apologized to the Cherokee nation both for the video and for other claims she had made about her incorrect heritage.
Strong belief in a candidate's positive potential will colour one's interpretation of complaints about them; but, as I see it, Warren's and Clinton's two situations are not comparable. The private e-mail server stuff was vastly overblown by the Republicans into a manufactured outrage cycle, whereas BIPOC upset by Warren's minimization of ancestral heritage are not expressing anything remotely in the same category. She should listen, and respond to their concerns intelligently and graciously. Continuing to ignore that frustration and outrage (most of which is justifiable, given that "gaffes" like this one Warren made, apparently over and over, will bring up feelings of erasure that Indigenous Americans suffer again and again) will get her nowhere. Apologizing to a single band's representatives about that one video is not the same as owning your complicity and making amends for perpetuating that racist dynamic in public. This shouldn't be that hard to do, when you're running to replace the guy who is like, over-the-top 50s-cartoon racist.Quote:
Originally Posted by ltrandazzo
the problem is “but her emails” worked against Clinton significantly in the end. I love Warren, but her age and this “Pocahontas” bullshit makes her too risky. We need someone who can clearly knock this out of the park. In other circumstances let’s change the world and roll the dice, but not this time.Quote:
Originally Posted by ltrandazzo
CNN pundit, is that you?Quote:
Originally Posted by Jinsai
Please try and look at this less from the analysis view because I've seen too much of this lately that falls into the "politics as sports" category. Worrying about how Republicans and Trump will attack Elizabeth Warren is not the problem of progressives, especially when his hardline base makes up about 35% of the electorate. We're never winning them over so we shouldn't try to cater to them. We are a year away from primary voting and the only candidate I've disqualified so far is Tulsi Gabbard because of her prior hardline anti-LGBTQ views and actions and because she's super cozy with Al-Assad in Syria. Everyone else is still too early to dismiss, especially as this candidate field is still growing.
@botley - the reason I mentioned Cherokee nation is because that's the tribe she specifically identified with and they pushed back hard against that so she 100% owed them her first apology for that. Spreading it out to the rest of BIPOC is something that she will have to take seriously and would be perilous to her in the long run if she chooses to ignore them. I hope she doesn't, but if she does, then I have approximately *checks notes* 13890723 other Dem presidential candidates to choose from.
I’m not thinking about the other side and I don’t think @Jinsai is, either. I’m thinking about Democrat voters and perhaps Independent voters. Clinton did not get NEARLY the number of black votes that Obama did. Native Americans have never voted in significant numbers, and many tribes are attempting to change that but, until then, it’s difficult to determine how they’ll vote. Meanwhile, Black Twitter is largely - right now, anyway - leaning heavily toward Kamala Harris and they’re pissed off at Warren. Now, is this mostly due to identity politics more than issues? Possibly. I guess we will see, but fucking NEW HAMPSHIRE and IOWA sure as fuck ain’t ever gonna tell us (remembering Chris Rock covering the primaries and noting the obvious lack of black hair care products).Quote:
Originally Posted by ltrandazzo
I totally agree that it’s way too early to dismiss candidates, but I’m disheartened that pretty much every candidate is going to have to have lived in a cloistered cave to escape any Opposition Research. Things get dirty real fast. Now, it’s going around that Senator Klobuchar has the highest staff turnover in the Senate and tells interns stuff like “this work is crap.” So, being hard to work for (with Trump being the biggest revolving door in Oval Office history) is valuable Opposition Research. “Oh, what a BITCH.”
The Republicans had 16 candidates in 2016, and the MEDIA had a lot to do with which ONE got the MOST attention. I suspect that might happen this time, too, even on the Democratic side.
And that’s why OPRAH needs to run for President LOL LOL.
It was intriguing to see that oppo dump happen after she tweeted she had an announcement for this weekend. I do think that it's fair to question if this is something that could be said about a male politician. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0871047588649Quote:
Originally Posted by Cat Mom
Fuck yes. She's a LAWYER. Law is BRUTAL with criticism. I can count on less than one hand the "constructive" criticism I've experienced in Law. You have to have a thick skin (and you have to be prepared to do all kinds of shit outside of your job description, or at least fight back against crazy corrupt shit people try to get you to do ... I could write a book).Quote:
Originally Posted by ltrandazzo
As View Host Sunny Hostin pointed out the other day on the show, Hostin once clerked for an esteemed (male) Judge whom she really respected and she wrote a brief that she'd spent a lot of time on and she submitted the brief to him with a lot of pride, and he returned it to her with a giant red line through the first page; she was, like, is the first page bad? No, he hated the entire thing. She had to re-write it all, but said it was valuable experience. Now, that being said, we do have to remember that these D.C. interns make SHIT when we consider how much it costs to live in D.C., and perhaps Klobuchar isn't being realistic as to her expectations when compared to the caliber of staff that's being hired. That ain't the fucking SCOTUS. But, it IS the entry level job to a lot of other higher state-level jobs, so it's EXPERIENCE, and likely VALUABLE experience. But, perhaps Klobuchar needs to do some soul-searching and tone it down a bit. Or a lot.
I remember, when I was about 23 and starting out in corporate management at a pretty young age, when my department director took me aside and gave me some friendly advise: "Remember, not EVERYONE is as smart as you."
There is criticism, and there is constructive criticism. I've found that the legal profession tends to have managers who went through law school but never received any real training or education in management and there's a whole LOT of them that really suck at management.
As we've seen with the Cheetoh (and, really, with George W Bush, who delegated pretty much HIS ENTIRE JOB), being good at management is REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT if you're POTUS.
Here's the thing that I'm really afraid of and what also informs my posts about this upcoming election - I don't want to see what happened in 2016 with the Dem primary happen again with 2020. We can't do that again. Part of why I'm excited about this crowded field is that we can avoid a 1 vs. 1 match-up early on and that we can have a crowd head into many of the larger primaries before folks start dropping out. I think that every policy discussion is important and that we really need to understand where every single one of these candidates are coming from, how they're influenced, and how honest they're willing to be with voters about their proposals. I want to know what they truly believe is the best path forward for this country and why they believe that with conviction so that we can head to the polls knowing everything we can know about them.
And then, when the dust has settled and the nominee is clear, we're going to fucking rally behind them to not only beat Donald Trump but beat the Republican party that propped him up in the first place, whether that nominee is Warren, Booker, Harris, Sanders, Castro, Buttigieg, Biden, Gillibrand, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, Brown, Abrams, etc. It doesn't fucking matter after that (except for Tulsi because she's a monster).
I don't want to hear about anyone being in Wall Street's pockets, big pharma, special interests, whether someone is a cop, them being too socialist, WHATEVER after the nominee is clear. We fucking rally behind that person and we vote for them and take back the fucking White House. Because if we end up with another 2016 and Donald Trump gets re-elected, they are coming for the border, they are coming for healthcare, they are coming for the poor, they are coming for minorities, and they are coming to fuck you, your family and this country over so they can keep their rich buddies rich while everyone else suffers. And then everything we did in 2018 gets wiped away. Not again.
See... here's the thing... I want the candidate most likely to win, and after the primaries, I'm a rabid fanboy of whomever won the primaries. This includes Tulsi. I'll get a Tulsi tattoo on my forehead at this point.Quote:
Originally Posted by ltrandazzo
All that matters is that Trump is not given a second term. I can't fathom it.
This awful "Uncle Joe Biden is a pedo" shit going around is surely going to cause all kinds of trouble. Surely, it's bullshit, but if it plants even a LITTLE bit of a seed of doubt in people, then he's toast right out of the gate. There are VIDEO edits of this shit that are being passed around everywhere.
Never mind the photo of what appears to be a teenage Ivanka giving her Dad a lap dance.
All photos and videos can be manipulated to "look" like something is going on that really isn't.
But politics is all nasty now.
I found the Klobuchar thing genuinely surprising because, even though I think she's a decent senator and I've voted for her a couple times now, she's always struck me as a fairly subdued and boring person. It kinda makes perfect sense that she represents Minnesota because she perfectly captures this certain kind of bland, middle class, suburbanite that we have in droves up here: mild-mannered, pleasant, boring, slightly forgettable. I don't recall her background info but she MUST have been raised in like Bloomington or Plymouth or some shit, because she perfectly captures that type of Minnesotan.
I don't even mean this in a mean or disdainful way to be honest. I actually kind of like the fact that she's sort of unremarkable and just does her job well and that's that.
I'm just saying it's pretty weird to see these articles claiming that she's really tyrannical and harsh. When I first saw that huffpost headline I literally laughed out loud, because my thought was, "What? Amy Klobuchar, seriously? Wow. I didn't know she had it in her." Guess it just goes to show that our impressions of these people mean literally nothing.
I'm gonna let Cenk Uygur handle this Amy Klobuchar & Cory Booker nonsense:
https://youtu.be/uIbaK1PBiYA?t=361
start at 6:01 if it doesn't start there itself.
He's especially dead on with Klobuchar.
Yeah well, he ain’t seeing Black Twitter poke fun at Bernie Sanders right now after he got fried YET AGAIN by a slave reparations question.
And his last response to the SOTU when a black woman was doing one for the Democrats, let’s just say that didn’t go over well, either.
Who knows. Sanders ran as a Democrat in the Senate primary in Vermont only to shut out an opponent then reject the Democratic nomination and switch back to Independent.
Meanwhile, CNN ... whatever. That’s like the Good Morning America of politics. And the Young Turks is the UHF.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Klobuchar doesn’t stand a chance. Not due to general name recognition, or lack of progressive views, but due to minority identity politics. Which is a thing, now.
It’s SUCH a big thing, I’ve changed my mind and now I don’t think Joe Biden has a snowball’s chance in Hell. He shouldn’t even try running.
Meanwhile...
The smear campaigns against Harris are not only raging on the right; I’ve gotten into arguments with Bernie fans on Twitter for trotting out the “Harris slept with a married man to get ahead” bullshit; some of these fans were (old white) WOMEN. A lot of us are checking join dates and shit to make sure we’re not talking with Sputnik.
This thread is awesome: https://twitter.com/notcapnamerica/s...311463424?s=21
Bernie is in, officially; says he's gonna win this time. I'm interested to see what 2020 Bernie does compared to 2016 Bernie.
Your post time is a good omen, to me at least, especially considering I've not seen the news yet and just learned this from the above.Quote:
Originally Posted by ltrandazzo
Idk, though. I'M best described as a democratic socialist, and agree with pretty much all of Bernie's positions. But I also worry about the insanity of the division in this country, and fear that the right will hate Bernie as much as we hate trump.
Then again, Obama was far more moderate, and they fucking hated him, too, and not just because of his race. They'll probably hate anyone opposing trump, so perhaps this isn't an issue.
The right hates all Democrats, progressives and liberals so we shouldn't try to cater to them. It's a losing battle.Quote:
Originally Posted by elevenism
Man, yeah, I'm afraid you're right.Quote:
Originally Posted by ltrandazzo
Already taken care of - https://www.npr.org/2018/08/25/64172...nating-processQuote:
Originally Posted by elevenism
I deleted that part of my post because it's somewhat controversial, but, hot damn. That's fucking excellent.Quote:
Originally Posted by ltrandazzo
Well, Bernie it is, for me.
Ultimately, the DNC shit was one piece of the puzzle for his loss in 2016. Another was his low support with black voters. He's gonna have to fix that to seriously contend in 2020. I think he has a few good head-to-head match-ups that he can win, but there are others that he will be absolutely annihilated on, so I do wonder if he's running to sort of push the rest of the field further left.Quote:
Originally Posted by elevenism
Is he running as a Democrat again, because :rolleyes:
He is as opposed to that other asshole independent who thinks that he can just override the whole process because he's a fucking billionaire who burns coffee beans.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sarah K
If Coffee Boy runs as an Independent, I think it'll hurt TRUMP more than the left.Quote:
Originally Posted by ltrandazzo
Regarding candidates on the left or center or whatever ...
I remember Obama running in 2007 with his PRIMARY promise being "UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE" because he wanted to move forward Ted Kennedy's and John Dingell's Medicare for All plan, which Kennedy had been working on since the 1970, along with Jacob Javitz.
However, since the Executive branch can't legislate, once Obama started getting closer to winning, he quickly found out that Congress is filled with Democrats and Republicans who are beholden to Health Care and Insurance lobbyists who have ZERO intention of disrupting the status quo, since their own money and investments depend on it.
We can elect the biggest fucking left-wing hippy on the planet as President, but REAL change won't happen until we get rid of every single crony capitalist from Congress and get rid of all lobbyists, enact strict campaign finance laws, and reboot the whole fucking health care mess.
Health Care is a FOR PROFIT greedy business, and the Government has fucked it up even WORSE by determining the price of everything.
If we are going to fix this mess, we need to hire third party experts to determine cost evaluations across the board, and to FORCE the health care industry to lower all costs, and perhaps even force the industry to be not-for-profit. When there are share holders and trustees and millionaires at the top of the health care system, and raking in profits are the only concern, of COURSE the costs are going to be high, so how we are going to PAY for it should be SECONDARY to how the fuck we lower those costs and keep money out of the pockets of the people we elect.
See the above-linked NYT article:
The first candidate who focuses on fixing THIS shit has my vote.Quote:
“You can’t get upset at a snake for having fangs,” Mr. Cooper told me. “We need to design a system that takes payment decisions out of the hands of elected representatives. We think of interest rates as so important and complicated that we’ve tried to remove politics and give the responsibility to the Fed. The same argument holds for health care. When the government spends a trillion dollars on health care, it’s too easy for members to direct funds to their districts.”
We’ve been close to a possible solution. The A.C.A. called for establishing an Independent Payment Advisory Board, a 15-member panel charged with making changes to Medicare to control costs. The proposed reforms would have been put into effect unless Congress introduced alternate policies to achieve the same savings. But the advisory board faced fierce bipartisan opposition and was never created.
July 30, 1965: LBJ signs Medicare into law, with President Harry Truman by his side - Truman being the first to call for universal health care in 1945.
Quote:
During his administration, President Truman called for the institution of a federally funded health insurance program in 1945 and again in 1947 and 1949. Each presidential plea, however, was thwarted or ignored by the U.S. Congress, aided and abetted by powerful medical lobbies such as the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association, which denigrated such efforts as a descent into “socialized medicine.” Harry Truman’s devotion to this cause was, in a sense, a means of honoring his former boss, Franklin D. Roosevelt who, for political reasons, was forced to remove an extensive health benefit plan from what became the Social Security Act of 1935. Parenthetically, another Roosevelt — Theodore Roosevelt — included a government-backed health plan on the platform of his failed presidential run in 1912 on the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) ticket.
There was some movement towards developing a national health care program during the Eisenhower years and even more so during John F. Kennedy’s far too brief presidency. But it was the powerful and politically savvy LBJ and the Democrats’ landslide victory in 1964 giving them control of both houses of the U.S. Congress that pushed Medicare across the federal finish line.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/...n-2020-1173608
great article with his chief pollster on Bernie's strategy for winning the primaries...but more importantly the general, based on some old and some new (and very enlightening) polling data and how things played out in 2016. I like how they're thinking and they have some really good things on their side as described in the article, as well as plenty of obstacles too.
My wife & donated today in the middle of our vacation. Bought some stickers and magnets too. Bernie raised the most money of any 2020 candidate so far on his first day, easily eclipsing Harris. Bernie's people are jazzed for this, and this bodes well for his core base, his volunteers and his staff getting out his message and hopefully getting out the vote for him come the actual primaries.
Crooked Media had the Benenson Strategy Group run an analysis that was generous to Schultz regarding electoral college votes, but showed that in his best-case, he ends up re-electing Trump instead of helping Dems retake the White House.Quote:
Originally Posted by Cat Mom
Quote:
This baseline scenario still leaves only 268 electoral votes up for grabs in battleground states. In other words, even if Schultz were to run the table and win every single battleground, no candidate would win 270 electoral votes, and, under the rules set forth in the Constitution, the House of Representatives would have to pick the next president.
But those rules don’t hand the decision to the full House, which Democrats currently control. Instead it allocates one vote to each state delegation, so the party that controls more state delegations, rather than the party with the most overall members, would determine the winner. California gets one vote, as does Wyoming, and every state in between. Thanks to its small-state advantage, the GOP would thus have the power to select the winner despite lacking a majority, and you’re delusional if you think they’d listen to the will of the people and hand the presidency to Schultz—let alone the Democratic nominee.
In a likelier scenario, Schultz would win few if any electoral votes, and would simply siphon net votes away from one candidate or the other in battleground states. And here, too, a generous interpretation of Schultz’s effect on a relatively close race has him handing Trump victory in enough states that Democrats would otherwise have won to give him over 270 electoral votes.
^ The articles I’ve seen haven’t seen Schultz going so far as that scenario; just being the Ralph Nader spoiler for Trump far more than any Democrat.
Schultz is not the “centrist” he says he is; his recent angry outbursts have shown that he loves the Republican tax reform bill, is against any kind of affordable health care plan, wants to cut back entitlements, and he wants to protect the wealthy.
His campaign manager being John McCain’s former campaign manager is a hint.
How Democrats can think he’s a threat to Democrats just because he had a hip overpriced coffee chain is beyond me. Like Democrats are known for a cup of frothy milk with a shot of coffee in it.
Schultz hasn’t even decided to run, yet. He’s too busy whining that he’s being bullied.
Meanwhile, Mike Bloomberg already spent a boat load of money on a study proving that an Independent can never win the Presidency due to the Electoral College.
Tulsi Gabbard, so i know about her homophobic stance in the past and i understand that some folks might not want to give her the benefit of the doubt on whether or not she's genuinely grown out of those beliefs. She has pointed out her record with LGBT issues and it seems pretty comprehensive https://www.tulsigabbard.org/tulsi-gabbard-on-lgbtq
There's also the thing about her and Assad. i don't know the whole story there but from what I've heard her discuss regarding foreign policy she does have a lot of great points and she has the military experience of being overseas during wartime to back it up.
What else do people find so concerning about her? I had heard a report about Russia supposedly supporting her but i think that's been debunked although i can't say for sure and don't forget the same thing supposedly happened with Bernie in 2016.
Russia has purposefully been muddying the waters everywhere so i wouldn't be surprised to hear about them backing anybody at this point.
Does she take corporate handouts?
@ltrandazzo , you've stood out specifically as someone who is opposed to her and perhaps you know more about her deal than i do. I would love to hear you elaborate more on why you don't like her as a candidate.
I know politicians will always tell us what we want to hear with all kinds of word salad, none of it really means anything without something to back it up and actually seeing them live up to their promises once they're in office. To me though she's read as pretty level-headed, calm and collected in a lot of the interviews I've seen of her so far. She certainly talks a good game i think.
What am i missing here?