Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

The lights are all blinking red.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

In after Baud. Damn.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

75% of people clapping liked the show!

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Post-Debate Open Thread

Post-Debate Open Thread

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Local news, FWIW, predicting a potentially heavy snowfall next Tuesday, the day of the NH primary.

So… what did I miss, this evening, while (over) focusing on the debate?

Reader Interactions

175Comments

  4. 4.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    I know this is a debate thread but off topic – Maurice White of EW&F died. Lots of artistes dying recently.

  5. 5.

    Wag

    Well I had a delightful evening reconnecting with an friend from elementary school and college. What did I miss? Anything?

  7. 7.

    Wag

    @Mai.naem.mobile:

    I think out generation is going to go through a die-off kind of like the 70’s when the jazz greats died off and our parents went through years of mourning and confusion.

  8. 8.

    seaboogie

    @Larime: Woot Woot!!! I am rather much of a poor, but did kick in a few sheckels a couple of times, and appreciate the gofundme updates.

  9. 9.

    Oldgold

    I liked this synopsis in the Atlantic.

    “The duo seemed determined to illustrate Archilochus’s classic binary between the fox, who knows many things, and the hedgehog, who knows one important thing. Sanders knows that what the country needs—the only thing it needs—is a political and economic revolution. Clinton knows the country needs progressive policies on a range of matters and a pragmatic, realistic strategy to implement them.”

    Josh Marshall’s take was similar.

    ” Sanders has the virtue of coherence, a tightly argued, interlocking set of critiques and explanations of what is wrong, how the different parts fit together and what he believes needs to change. There’s very little of that with Clinton. It’s more of a barrage: I’m going to do my best to improve things on each front. I’m also going to protect our gains.”

  12. 12.

    Howard Beale IV

    This is too good not to share:

    EXCLUSIVE: Pictured, the pick-up artist at center of storm over ‘pro-rape’ blog – in sweat-stained T-shirt at the door of his mother’s home (where he lives in the BASEMENT!)
    Daryush ‘Roosh’ Valizadeh, 36, calls himself the ‘King of Masculinity’ but has faced anger from around the world for his views on rape
    He posted an article advocating legalization of rape on private land and has said women’s value is dependent on ‘fertility and beauty’
    This weekend he was planning ‘tribal meetings’ for his followers in 45 countries but called them off because of ‘death threats’
    Today Daily Mail Online found him at his mother’s cul-de-sac home in Silver Spring, Maryland – where he lives in the basement
    Valizadeh called police to complain about alleged threats and answered the door in stained t-shirt, geeky glasses and with a graying beard
    It was posted more than a year ago and yesterday he decided to add a disclaimer that it should not be taken literally

  14. 14.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    Local news, FWIW, predicting a potentially heavy snowfall next Tuesday, the day of the NH primary.

    it would be prudent to lower expectations.

    first the polls have indicated for six months that Sanders would win in his neighboring state.

    second if a lost occurs you can deflect much of the impact against the media

    then you can easily move on to favorable territory.

  15. 15.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Oldgold: It is coherent and neat in the way that econ arguments are coherent and neat.

    There is an old joke: An engineer, an agronomist, and an economist are stranded on an island.. they talk about how to survive. The engineer says x. The agronomist says y. The economist says “first assume a can opener.”

  16. 16.

    The Republic, Blah Blah Blah...

    Since this is an open thread, LinkdIn’s stock crashed in after hours trading, dropping over 50 points, (nearly 30% of its value) almost immediately after the close of markets at 4 pm (EST)…

    In the prior 52 weeks, it had traded as high as $276/share… right now it’s at $137…

    Tomorrow morning s/b interesting…

  17. 17.

    Redshift

    @Wag:

    And what we need is a bit of both.

    My reaction to most attempts to draw contrasts between their positions is “yes, we need to do both of those; they don’t conflict.”

  20. 20.

    mclaren

    I’m kind of amazed Chris Matthews didn’t jump up and scream “Commie! Commie! Red! Pinko! Comsymp! Traitor! Pinko subversive! Evil! Evil! Evil!!!” whenever it was Sanders’ turn to speak. You could see his jaw twitching uncontrollably and his hands clenching and unclenching in spasms…he really wanted to.

  21. 21.

    trollhattan

    @Howard Beale IV:
    Loved this, which was my first learning the dude existed.

    Professional douchebag Roosh V. has made a name for himself advocating offensive misogynistic positions on his terrible website Return of Kings, and he’s collected a handful of devoted followers in the process. But after scheduling an International Meetup Day for his “tribesmen” this weekend, he appears to have met his match: female boxers.

    When they heard that Roosh and his followers were planning to meet up in Toronto, the women of the Toronto Newsgirls boxing club decided they’d attend the meet-up, too. That way when Roosh did what he threatened to do — take photos of any female protesters who showed up to dissect and criticize online later — he’d actually be snapping photos of badass bitches in boxing gloves.

  23. 23.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    I think [Sanders would] be cut to pieces in a general election. ~ Josh Marshall

    The issue Sanders’s supporters have been at a complete loss in answering is how is Sanders electable.

    Not that it matters.

    The demographics of the primary, not shouting bloggers, determine the destiny of the primary. But it would be nice for someone, anyone, to present an argument in that favor. But in the 10 months since Sanders announced his candidacy, no one has constructed any persuadable case.

    Simply saying he does well with yooots is unpersuasive because McGovern won yooots by 16 points and then lost 49 states.

    Just sayin

  24. 24.

    mclaren

    The other thing that the Hillbots and the Sandernistas seem to overlook, when they get into it on this forum, is the immense chasm between the sensible evidence-based closely reasoned discussion by the Democratic candidates, and the frothing raving gibberings vomited out by the Republican loons. The Republican candidates have come totally unmoored from reality. They’re babbling goobledygook about putting muslims in internment camps and cutting the minimum wage and sending cruise missiles to blow up the caves where Mexicans allegedly hide before sneaking across the border into Arizona. None of that word salad has any connection to the observed reality of the issues facing America right now. This kind of drivel may excite some of the mouthbreathing wannabe-Machiavellis of the far right, but outside of the foetid movement-conservative swamp, the issues real people care about in the real world of America right now boil down to making a living wage, creating jobs, shutting down our endless procession of foreign wars, reining in the infinite expansion of corporate power, getting America’s out-of-control police back under control, shutting down the uncontrolled militarization of American society, putting the billionaires out of the back rooms in congress where they’ve been writing legislation that destroys the middle class.

    These are the issues the average American cares about. The Democratic candidates are speaking to these issues. The Republicans have run completely off the rails and they’re babbling about crap most people are not interested in — anchor babies, bombing ISIS, cutting the minimum wage. It’s as though we’re in a restaurant and the Democrats are suggesting some salad followed by a lasagna, while the Republicans counter with the proposal that we eat broken glass and sulphuric acid, with a chaser of radioactive polonium.

  26. 26.

    Howard Beale IV

    @Frankensteinbeck: Click Trollhattan’s link.
    @trollhattan: He has proven the old archetye of being a loudmouth misogynist living in his mother’s basement. Priceless. This is a dude that Anonymous should have no trouble making his life miserable from now on.

  27. 27.

    NotMax

    Presume both Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location polishing up for their respective mini-moments in the midnight sun this Tuesday.

    After which both can hibernate for another four years.

  28. 28.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @mclaren: You are right that the Dem. candidates are the only ones talking about the issues. Their announced positions are quite similar. It comes down to personal trust and preference.

  33. 33.

    mclaren

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:

    Comparing McGovern with Sander is absurd. I was alive during that clusterfuck. Let’s consider the differences:

    [1] The Republican convention in 1968 was an orderly dignified somewhat stuffy affair. Meanwhile, the Democratic national convention was a replay of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 100 Days of Sodom. I watched berserk Chicago police beat and tear-gas priests in wheelchairs and reporters carrying mobile cameras. Then Mayor Daley (a Democrat) came on TV afterwards and announced, “Get it straight, people — the police do not create disorder, they preserve disorder!” In between, yippies nominated a pig called Pigasus for president. By the time that clusterfuck was over, no one in the American middle class wanted anything to do with the Democratic party. It was basically MAD MAX FURY ROAD, but without the pretty girls.

    Fast forward to today: in 2016, the Republican primaries are MAD MAX FURY ROAD, while the Democrats are conducting orderly somewhat stuffy debates. Republican crazies compete to see who can bite the head off the biggest chicken in public. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates are discussing issues of real concern to the average America.

    [2] I was around in 1968, and I can tell you that most Americans still supported the Vietnam war at that point. The war was the divisive issue in America back then. Everything else paled by comparison. My Lai had just barely begun to penetrate the consciousness of the typical American. McGovern found himself locked in a death struggle with one of the popular politicians in the Democratic party, Hubert Humphrey, and the bad blood created chaos at the convention. McGovern’s only real selling point as a candidate was that he opposed the Vietnam war…and his running mate turned out to be a guy who had gotten electroshock treatments for depression (never a good move when nominating someone for national office).

    [3] Meanwhile, the sadistically ingenious sociopath Richard Nixon ran a masterful Southern Strategy campaign taking full advantage of all those burning cities, in which he fomented race hatred while claiming to be above the fray. Should I mentioned that racists were blowing up churches full of black kids in the deep south almost every week during 1968? Should I go into detail about how MLK and RFK both bot blown away by lone assassins? Do I need to list all the cities that burned in race riots during 1968?

    Okay, Mr. Canadian Anchor Baby, where are all the U.S. cities burning due to race riots today? Where are the major political figures getting gunned down by crazed assassins? Where’s the Richard Nixon equivalent in the Republican party today? None of the loons and halfwits running for president today come up to Nixon’s shoetops in terms of diabolical ingenuity or savage ratfvcking skill. The Republicans running for president in 2016 are the Little Kiddies Table, a bunch of three year olds who can’t even manage to enumerate their accomplishments in office coherently.

    [4] Nixon had his finger on the ragged pulse of the American people back in 1968, and he chose brutal and corrosive dirty tricks and racist fearmongering that he knew would play very well in the deep south and in middle America where cities were burning due to race riots. There are no cities burning today: race is not the big issue to the U.S. middle class right now. Middle America is not terrified of long-haired hippies anymore, and there is no longer a draft sending thousands of young people to their deaths in some foreign jungle and ripping America apart along race and age lines.

    Sanders is now the guy with his finger on the pulse of the America electorate. Sanders is now the guy enunciating the issues that the average American cares deeply about. Look at the polls. 3 out of 4 Americans are sick of our foreign wars. 85% of all Americans, even 53% of Republicans, say we need to raise the minimum wage. 80% of Americans want Citizens United repealed.

    Back in 1968, McGovern was proposing deeply unpopular positions. Most of the country didn’t yet want to get out of Vietnam — that turning point didn’t hit until Nixon widened the war into Cambodia in 1970. Most Americans were sick of race riots and hated the way the Democrats kept counseling everyone to be patient. Crime was way up in 1968 and the average middle American loved Tricky Dick’s “get tough” solution to the crime problem. Today, in 2016, crime is way down. Today, in 2016, the average America sympathizes with blacks getting shot in the back by muggers with badges, courtesy of all those YouTube videos where they watch in horror for themselves as the out-of-control cops murder innocent bystanders and then lie about it.

    2016 is a very different time than 1968. I call 1968 “the year of hell” because the whole country almost came apart in a civil war. It was total chaos. 2016 is nothing like 1968. No burning cities, no multiple assassinations of major political leaders, no police riot at the Democratic convention (I’m going to go out on a limb and predict right now that wherever the Democratic convention is held, berserk cops will not beat and tear-gas priests in wheelchairs and reporters on live television as hundreds of thousands of anti-war Democratic hippies hurl rocks and bottles at the cops), no Republican evil genius using all this chaos to promote the Southern Strategy.

    Sanders will win the general election easily because the policies he proposes resonate with the vast majority of the American people. Hillary Clinton and the Republicans have miscalculated. They both think that serving up more of the same old thin gruel proferred by the Heritage Foundation (repubs) or DLC (Hillary Clinton) in years past is enough to satisfy the American electorate’s hunger for substantive change this year. They’re wrong.

    Moreover, Sanders showed conclusively that he appeals to older voters just as much as Hillary Clinton does with his 50-50 showing in the Iowa Caucus. There’s no problem with Sanders not appealing to the vast majority of Americans. The problem in this election is that the Republicans have blundered and think they can get by with a stale re-run of the 2004 election (Terror! Terror! Terror! Tax cuts for billionaires! Patriotism! Demos are traitors!!!). 2016 is a very different time from 2004. The Rove playbook no longer works in an era when the middle class is getting destroyed by the limitless growth of corporate power and people are watching their jobs get automated out of existence weekly.

    Comparing Bernie Sanders to George McGovern, or the year of hell 1968 to 2016, is such a complete misunderstanding of the political situation, that I’m surprised you didn’t point out that Sanders can’t possibly accede to power because he’s not Catholic and not backed by the Spanish Armada, and therefore can’t become Pope and order an invasion of the heretic Lowlands.

  34. 34.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @mclaren: George McGovern ran in 1972. HHH was the nominee in 1968.

    ETA: Thanks for playing, you’ll get a copy of the home edition as a parting gift.

  36. 36.

    Kropadope

    I love Bernie, but he has to drop that canned answer about his Iraq vote as his opening line in all things foreign policy.

  37. 37.

    different-church-lady

    @mclaren:

    It’s as though we’re in a restaurant and the Democrats are suggesting some salad followed by a lasagna, while the Republicans counter with the proposal that we eat broken glass and sulphuric acid, with a chaser of radioactive polonium.

    Sounds… familiar, somehow…

  38. 38.

    Kropadope

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:

    Simply saying he does well with yooots is unpersuasive because McGovern won yooots by 16 points and then lost 49 states.

    I’m pretty sure he also does better with independents than any other candidate. aren’t they the Holy Grail of general election politics?

  39. 39.

    ruemara

    @Larime: Hooray! I’ve been following the updates you send. Very happy for you both.

    I’d watch the debate but the whole thing is like a management debacle. 2 people with 50% of the traits required of being a good manager & 100% of the traits required to increase turnover. I’m already tired. I will say that Sanders is entirely electable. I have no doubts about that. But so is a cat named Mittens. Can he govern? Can he pull together a coalition to build a Democratic Socialist friendly House Senate and local legislatures? I’d say no, just hoping to be very wrong.

  40. 40.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @efgoldman: Jeff Greenfield wrote part of a book about that, “And then it All Changed”. He worked on the 1968 RFK campaign.

    ETA: The Ambassador Hotel where RFK was shot is now a high school.

  44. 44.

    mclaren

    Damn. You’re right. Anyway, the point is that Humphrey refused to come out against the war in 1968. That was the big issue in 1968 and the Democratic party was brutally split about it. Moreover, the split was along age lines. You had talk shows hosts like the former commandant of the marine corps Buzz Krulak urging parents to take up rebars and baseball bats and beat their anti-war protestor children to death.

    Where is all that today?

    The big issues today are economic, and to a lesser extent, about elites lording it over minorities. Back in 1968, the big issues were cities burning in race riots and a deeply divisive war getting fueled by a profoundly unpopular draft.

    There is just no parallel between 1968 and 2016.

    Moreover, the Republican candidates have already provided any Democratic nominee with so much oppo research ammunition for the general election that whoever the Republican nominee is will wind up getting nuked like Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.

    Just listen to the Republican debates. Trump openly calls for a lower minimum wage! Cruz gleefully suggests shutting down social security and medicare! Jeb publicly and repeatedly proposes more tax cuts for billionaires and says Americans “need to wean themselves off welfare.”

    Even the Republican elites are now sounding alarms that the infighting has gotten so vicious that the Democratic nominee will have an easy time merely by replaying the Republicans’ own attack ads against the eventual Republican candidate.

    That is a totally different situation from 1968.

  45. 45.

    seaboogie

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Look at those faces. I hope he peed his pants and ran home.

    What the mind do get up to, sitting in Mama’s basement, dick in one hand, other on the keyboard)…

  46. 46.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @different-church-lady:
    I think if he wins the nomination he’ll have proven that he can get a whole lot of people to vote for him. I just don’t see how he can win the nomination. Iowa was one of his best states, and he needed a shakeup in the polls across the nation. He’s not likely to get that winning only his guaranteed New Hampshire before things swing into HIllary-friendly territory.

  49. 49.

    Kropadope

    @efgoldman: I don’t know, there’s definitely more than just a few swing voters out there. How else could things like “ticket-splitting” be a phenomenon? Massachusetts routinely has a state legislature with veto-proof Democratic majorities, but more often than not elects Republicans to the Governor’s office.

    I’m a registered independent (called unenrolled in MA), but while all of my proudest votes were for a particular set of Democrats, I’ve voted for more than just a couple Republicans in my time. They may have even been the majority of my votes at one point. My favorite president was a Republican and while I think the R party by and large has been on the fast track to hell since Reagan, there’s definitely fertile ground for some R candidates to gain my support.

  50. 50.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    @different-church-lady: @Kropadope:

    Dukakis led 55-38 on July 26, 1988.

    100 days later he lost 40 states. Poooof. And like that, he was gone.

    Those great Independents everyone loves are easy to scare and they turned on Dukakis in a New York minute. The middle and working classed ignored Dukakis’s strong economic message and credentials and were baited with insubstantial issues like the pledge of allegiance, death penalty, and prison furlough which were demagogued.

  51. 51.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    I should add political dialectics are very healthy and people shouldn’t hesitate to add their input.

    Dialectic or dialectics (Greek: διαλεκτική, dialektikḗ), also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned arguments.

  52. 52.

    seaboogie

    @Frankensteinbeck: Sorry – didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just the spectre of these weak guys getting all riled up and feeling entitled, and developing a “rape-y” subculture as they try to find someone to take down and make their victim, so that they can feel stronger and have a sense of power that their own lives do not give to them – and able to network via the internets.

    There was a study done many years ago, asking men and women what was their greatest fear. For men it was humiliation. For women, it was physical harm from men. Men feel humiliated, women get beaten or killed.

  54. 54.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @efgoldman: It was on the 11pm local news here, well since it was local. I’ve lived in the LA broadcast market all of my life, save 3 years in Seattle for grad school.

  57. 57.

    Kropadope

    @efgoldman: All I’m saying is that people choose their votes for a complex array of reasons and the polling disparity between Sanders and Clinton among independents gives me major concerns about Clinton’s electability. Among the people I know who are prone to vote for Democrats, I’m the only one even considering voting for Hillary if she gets the nomination.

    As far as those Republicans you mentioned, yeah they’re to the left of the baseline Republican. But just goes to show that the core Republican principle, preference for state over federal control, doesn’t need to be tied in with the slate of pure evil policy positions that have become the Republican national platform.

  58. 58.

    gwangung

    All I’m saying is that people choose their votes for a complex array of reasons and the polling disparity between Sanders and Clinton among independents gives me major concerns about Clinton’s electability.

    Against Sanders, sure. Against Republicans? Doesn’t say that much…you need to compare on the right level.

  59. 59.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Kropadope:
    The core Republican position is racism. Like the deficit, state’s rights are something they only bring up when it suits them, and the ‘State’s Rights’ argument is itself just a spawn or racism. There’s an argument that for part of the Republican Party the core position is plutocracy, but since the vast majority of their voters are in the ‘racism’ camp, I go with the racists as the core.

  60. 60.

    Kropadope

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: He came from basically nowhere to near parity with a candidate with what was previously deemed prohibitively insurmountable establishment support. Momentum is on his side and he still has time to build support in other states.

    To hear some Clinton supporters talk, you would think she won in a landslide.

  61. 61.

    Anne Laurie

    @seaboogie:

    There was a study done many years ago, asking men and women what was their greatest fear. For men it was humiliation. For women, it was physical harm from men. Men feel humiliated, women get beaten or killed.

    Margaret Atwood codified it nicely:

    Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.

    Women are afraid that men will kill them.

  62. 62.

    Vhh

    @mclaren: I voted for 1st time in 1968. Your analysis flawed. Poor LBJ did as much for the US as FDR, with a big mistake in Vietnam that he tried too late to unwind. The Left abandoned Humphrey, giving Nixon the win in spite of the fact that Wallace took the South, so much for the southern strategy. Sanders would become Prez @ age 75, at which age Reagan showed clear signs of dementia. Odds of Bernie finishing his term very low. Price tag on his policies huge, and proposed raise in taxes not enough. He projects no comprehension of minority issues of growing importance, has the naive foreign policy attitudes of Henry Wallace, and in 25 years has shown no legislative prowess. Oh yeah, and he still refuses to join the Democratic party. A vote for Bernie is a vote for the GOP wrecking gang. Me and mine have two passports, and we’ll skip town for Australia. Good luck to you.

  63. 63.

    Kropadope

    @Frankensteinbeck: There are a lot of arguments for more state autonomy that aren’t about race. For starters, I’m not very happy with the fact that 16% of my federal tax dollars go to help MS pay for the unnecessary costs it incurs by deliberately not financing its education and by denying healthcare access to its poor residents. We could be using that money for infrastructure projects that the federal government ignores while Congressfolk mug for cameras and say irrelevant shit about the shiny objrct in the news that day. I don’t like that Dixie has a say in whether New England gets to have nice things like new rail projects.

  64. 64.

    Redshift

    @Frankensteinbeck: Sometimes “preference for state over federal control” is a smokescreen for venue-shopping rather than racism – picking the forum where they can get, the lax regulations they want, for example.

    It certainly isn’t a core principle; Republicans have often turned on a dime to push federal legislation that preempts state law if states are doing things they don’t like. Something you only follow when it helps you isn’t a core principle, it’s a rhetorical tactic. Actually, that’s probably giving them to much credit; really, it’s just bullshit.

  65. 65.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Kropadope:
    Those arguments exist. They’re not in use. You don’t use State’s Rights as an argument yourself here, even though you have thoughts about it. ‘State’s Rights’ became a popular issue in the context of slave holding states arguing that the federal government couldn’t interfere with slavery, although at the time nobody was shy about discussing slavery for what it was. It was picked up by people who didn’t want to admit that the Civil War was about slavery so they could glorify the Confederacy. It was revived as a political issue by racists who wanted to resist desegregation. It is used, now, almost exclusively by the political descendants of (and sometimes those very same) racists in arguments about how the federal government can’t tell them to stop shitting on minorities. There are other meanings for ‘State’s Rights’, but they’re as rare as actual civil libertarians. For any practical political purpose, ‘State’s Rights’ means racism, and that is how the GOP uses it.

  66. 66.

    Kropadope

    @Vhh:

    He projects no comprehension of minority issues of growing importance

    Ahh, one of my favorite zombie Bernie tropes. He’s been fighting against the War on Drugs and tough-but-dumb-on-crime policies and police militarization for ages. His principle argument against these policies, rightfully, is their disproportionate negative effect on minority communities. He’s been walking the walk, he understands what government policies are hurting minority populations, he knows the relevant laws and can discuss them and the problems they cause in detail, and he has a plan to fix these things.

  67. 67.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    @Kropadope: The smart money always said Sanders would win Iowa.

    Bernie Sanders Could Win Iowa And New Hampshire. Then Lose Everywhere Else.

    By Nate Silver, July 8, 2015

    Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa and Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire are really liberal and really white, and that’s the core of Sanders’s support.
    ***
    What’s received less attention is that Sanders has so far made very little traction with non-white Democrats.

    On August 12, 2015 I wrote on this blog, “Welp, looks like Hillary is toast” stating Hillary would lose IA & NH, but win SC & NV.

    This was based on demographics, polling, and the fact that Clinton only received a paltry 29% of vote in IA in 2008.

    A week before the caucus CNN had Sanders up by 8 pts.

    So, no, I never thought she would win Iowa, neither did Nate. She definitely exceeded expectations, polling, and her 2008 results.

    And I’ve been on record for six months saying she’ll lose NH. So when he wins by 25 to 30 pts next week, as I predicted, please don’t say nobody thought he’d win his neighboring state.

  69. 69.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Kropadope:
    It is rude to run off in the middle of a debate, but I really, really have to get to sleep. Let me note that while I have disagreed with you on almost every point, it’s been nice in the heated Sanders/Hillary debates to actually debate instead of name calling and paranoia. Thank you.

  70. 70.

    Kropadope

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    ‘State’s Rights’ became a popular issue in the context of slave holding states arguing that the federal government couldn’t interfere with slavery

    I thought the free states started using the “states’ rights” argument first when the federal government passed laws requiring free states to return escaped slaves. The former slave states stole the argument and started using it as an after-the-fact rationalization when they lost the Civil War. You know that crowd has been into rewriting history for a long time.

  71. 71.

    David *Rafael* Koch

    @Kropadope:

    He’s been fighting against the War on Drugs and tough-but-dumb-on-crime policies

    not true.

    He voted for the infamous Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. the worse crime bill ever.

  72. 72.

    Kropadope

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:

    So, no, I never thought she would win Iowa, neither did Nate. She definitely exceeded expectations, polling, and her 2008 results.

    You’re out of your mind. Aside from an outlier poll or two, Hillary was ahead in virtually all the Iowa polling. In what is supposedly the most authoritative poll of the Iowa caucuses she was ahead by 3 points just days before the voting. As far as expectations, there was no reason to expect anything other than what we had, a very narrowly decided election that was probably going in Hillary’s favor.

  73. 73.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    @Kropadope: Some one should have told Sanders’s supporters they were out of their minds, because nearly everyone was predicting victory in Iowa.

    ps thank you for the nice substantive discussion.

  74. 74.

    Kropadope

    @David *Rafael* Koch: That’s a very comprehensive bill that while it had some very bad provisions, it also had some good provisions. I’ll look into his role during the crafting of that bill, should any such info be available, before judging on that.

  75. 75.

    seaboogie

    I seem to have gotten my long latent feminist knickers in a twist this eve, per a few comments. And then got called out for lacking a sense of humor (to which I responded in a very “game gal” sort of way) and then “whoah….backing away…after a pointed comment. Mea culpa for not being more assertive in pursuing that.

    Too late at night to make a difference now, but good gentlemen of BJ, I urge you to fairly consider these very legit comments from the distaff side – instead of calling me out and then doubling down on your other, more political arguments. It feels kind of like “run along, girls and repair to the drawing room”, while we gents smoke some cigars and drink some brandy while discussing the affairs of state.

    All politics is local, and it starts at the kitchen table. A quote from Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy is Coming to the USA:

    It’s coming from the sorrow in the street,
    the holy places where the races meet;
    from the homicidal bitchin’
    that goes down in every kitchen
    to determine who will serve and who will eat.
    From the wells of disappointment
    where the women kneel to pray
    for the grace of God in the desert here
    and the desert far away:
    Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

  76. 76.

    Kropadope

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:

    Some one should have told Sanders’s supporters they were out of their minds, because nearly everyone was predicting victory in Iowa.

    Probably more cautious optimism than anything. We knew he needed a strong performance, but I never encountered a single Sanders supporter confidently predicting that he would win, just that it was possible.

  77. 77.

    Amir Khalid

    @Kropadope:
    In light of the quotes upthread from Nate Silver (and Silver was not the only one) I sense some rewriting of the history on your part.

  79. 79.

    mclaren

    @Vhh:

    “If Bernie Sanders becomes president, we’re leaving for Australia.” Well, nothing like a closely reasoned logical argument to settle things.

    “A vote for Bernie is a vote for the GOP wrecking gang.” Any evidence to support that fact-free claim? Like, how exactly will the GOP suddenly become triumphant if Bernie Sanders becomes president?

    As for “Sanders still refuses to join the Democratic party,” you may not have noticed, but the Democratic party has turned around and joined Sanders.

    Yes, I know the DINOs on this forum hate with the burning heat of a thousand suns the concepts of democratic justice and common human decency and a living wage and an end to endless unwinnable foreign wars and a revival of the middle class…but guess what? The Democratic party has already decided. The Democratic party as a whole is moving in Sanders’ direction. Hillary’s desperate efforts to recast herself as a progressive prove that.

    And you know what else? This mass movement to the left of the Democratic party is so deep and now so institutionalized and so broad-based, that even if Hillary becomes president, she’s going to find herself forced to move relentlessly farther left than she ever planned. Hillary thinks if he gets into the Oval Office she can give some Obama-style triangulation-Slick-Willy lip service to progressive values while drifting farther and farther right, but she’s mistaken. The public simply won’t stand for it. The progressive caucus in congress consisting of people like Elizabeth Warren won’t stand for it. And the progressives who are now running for the senate with an excellent chance of taking back a Decmoratic majority, people like Russ Feingold, are never going to stand for it.

    For those of you who love to repeat the mindless mantra “the party decides,” it’s time you realize that this applies to policy as well as candidates, and the Democratic party has decided to move in a genuinely left-leaning direction.

    See the article “Why America is moving to the left,” The Atlantic, January 2016, for more details.

    The story of the Democratic Party’s journey leftward has two chapters. The first is about the presidency of George W. Bush. Before Bush, unapologetic liberalism was not the Democratic Party’s dominant creed. The party had a strong centrist wing, anchored in Congress by white southerners such as Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who had supported much of Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who had stymied Bill Clinton’s push for gays in the military. For intellectual guidance, centrist Democrats looked to the Democratic Leadership Council, which opposed raising the minimum wage; to The New Republic (a magazine I edited in the early 2000s), which attacked affirmative action and Roe v. Wade; and to the Washington Monthly, which proposed means-testing Social Security.

    Centrist Democrats believed that Reagan, for all his faults, had gotten some big things right. The Soviet Union had been evil. Taxes had been too high. Excessive regulation had squelched economic growth. The courts had been too permissive of crime. Until Democrats acknowledged these things, the centrists believed, they would neither win the presidency nor deserve to. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, an influential community of Democratic-aligned politicians, strategists, journalists, and wonks believed that critiquing liberalism from the right was morally and politically necessary.

    George W. Bush wiped this community out. Partly, he did so by rooting the GOP more firmly in the South—Reagan’s political base had been in the West—aiding the slow-motion extinction of white southern Democrats that had begun when the party embraced civil rights. But Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.

    In the late 1980s and the 1990s, centrist Democrats had argued that Reagan’s decisions to cut the top income-tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and to loosen government regulation had spurred economic growth. When Bush cut the top rate to 35 percent in 2001 and further weakened regulation, however, inequality and the deficit grew, but the economy barely did—and then the financial system crashed. In the late ’80s and the ’90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagan’s decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam.

    If the lesson of the Reagan era had been that Democrats should give a Republican president his due, the lesson of the Bush era was that doing so brought disaster. (..)

    ut that’s only half the story. Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.

    Given the militant opposition Obama faced from Republicans in Congress, it’s unclear whether he could have used the financial crisis to dramatically curtail Wall Street’s power. What is clear is that he did not. Thus, less than three years after the election of a president who had inspired them like no other, young activists looked around at a country whose people were still suffering, and whose financial titans were still dominant. In response, they created Occupy Wall Street.

    When academics from the City University of New York went to Zuccotti Park to study the people who had taken it over, they found something striking: 40 percent of the Occupy activists had worked on the 2008 presidential campaign, mostly for Obama. Many of them had hoped that, as president, he would bring fundamental change. Now the collapse of that hope had led them to challenge Wall Street directly. “Disenchantment with Obama was a driver of the Occupy movement for many of the young people who participated,” noted the CUNY researchers. In his book on the movement, Occupy Nation, the Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.”

  80. 80.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    @seaboogie: I like your comments. Always have. I even like your nym. You are appreciated. Please don’t let anyone stop you from posting here or speaking your mind.

  81. 81.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    @mclaren: thanks for the link. I haven’t seen the article. it looks like a good read.

    the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning.

  84. 84.

    seaboogie

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Thanks Dave – your thoughtful comment is the cherry on my sundae this night. Since you like my nym, this might change your view – based on pronunciation – but it was a fond name for my dearest pal Seamus – my golden retriever. So it is pronounced “shay-boogie”. But I live a very short drive from the Pacific ocean, and am a water baby.

  86. 86.

    Ripley

    Whoever set the Spittle Flecker switch to standby for this thread, thanks. I learn more when that’s the case.

  87. 87.

    Bruce K

    I suspect that the tire-rims-and-anthrax analogy could use some expansion at this stage of the game.

    At the moment (post-Iowa, pre-NH), the Dems are being asked to choose between lasagna and scallopine, while the GOP is being asked to choose between raw sewage, anthrax, depleted uranium, and hydrofluoric acid (and probably some other substances that escape me at the moment).

    It is left as an exercise to the reader to determine which candidate equates to which entree.

  88. 88.

    WereBear

    @Bruce K: it is a consistent area of despair that when I try to discuss the hideous policies of the Republican nominees, I am told “they don’t really mean that. They are just saying it to get elected.”

    It is a statement so full of smugness, rationalization, and sheer bleating stupidity it shuts down rational discourse.

  89. 89.

    Zinsky

    Didn’t watch the Bernie-Hillary face-off. It makes me depressed and just gives the right-wing shitbags sound bites to fire back at them during the general election. As I said in another thread, the barbarians are at the gate and every Democrat, progressive, independent and person with an IQ over room temperature needs to mobilize this summer and fall to elect one of these two or darkness will fall.

  90. 90.

    Betty Cracker

    @Zinsky: It was a pretty good debate, IMO — perhaps it wouldn’t have depressed you! Maddow and even Chuck Todd did a decent job of moderating, and it wasn’t a feces-flinging spectacle like the GOP debates at all.

  91. 91.

    amk

    @Zinsky:

    I am positive that after all that bickering in intertoobs, most of the dems will turn out for whoever is the nominee, especially once the kenyan and his team get involved in campaigning. I expect that only a very negligible amount of partisans who may take their ball and go home, just like in every election.

  92. 92.

    Eric

    @Howard Beale IV: I can picture him referring to himself as “The King” while his mother cooks for him.

    “What do you want for dinner, dear?”
    “Tonight, The King will feast on Hot Pockets and Kraft Mac and Cheese. His Royal Highness is also out of Rolling Rock and demands a six pack.”

    I can also imagine him telling her he’s been terminal for a couple of years now. I can’t imagine any other way she’d put up with his shit.

  93. 93.

    Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    I hear that there’s video on the net of nude lesbian wrestling, winner gets to do whatever she wants to the loser. I hear the wrestling is actually fairly straight up wrestling.

    ahem….

  94. 94.

    Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class

    @mclaren:

    You’re dumber than fuck if you think that hopeful blather by parochial New York based sociologists on Occupy or BLM has ANY meaningful translation to the country as a whole.

  95. 95.

    Althea

    I adore Bernie Sanders. Simply adore the man. But I’m not in this thing to fall in love, not this time.

  97. 97.

    Schlemazel (parmesan rancor)

    @Althea:
    Its OK to fall in love, just keep in mind every summer fling does not become a permanent relationship. Be grateful for the summer romance but prepared to dance with a partner you just like at the big dance in fall.

  99. 99.

    Joel

    The thing you would miss watching the Twitter fights is that most Democrats like both Clinton and Sanders.

    No shit? It’s like we didn’t learn anything from 2008.

  100. 100.

    Mustang Bobby

    @Amir Khalid: Not so.

    There is 3 degrees of roasted flavour present in maple syrup. Light, medium and strong. A light roasted flavor could be described as golden sugar, chicory or toast. For a medium flavour, you could use cooked sugar, caramelized, burnt wood, ground coffee, brown coffee bean or chocolate. And for a strong roasted flavour you would say burnt sugar, ground black coffee, black coffee bean, smoked.

    The things we learn from Google…

  101. 101.

    Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class

    @Mustang Bobby:

    When they’re running sap for production, it comes out clear as water and has only the tiniest bit of sweet to it. Done the historic way, the sap goes into a series of wood-fire evaporating pans where it picks up a smoky taste.

  103. 103.

    Schlemazel (parmesan rancor)

    @Mustang Bobby:
    With the toddler I’m just grateful he didn’t ask “If you could be a tree what kind of tree would you be?” or, more to his political leanings “What do you plan to do about Planned Parenthood’selling baby parts?” he vacillates between vapid & evil

  111. 111.

    OzarkHillbilly

    The basic ingredient in maple syrup is the sap from the xylem of sugar maple or various other species of maple trees. It consists primarily of sucrose and water, with small amounts of the monosaccharides glucose and fructose from the invert sugar created in the boiling process.[62] Accordingly, sugars comprise 90% of total carbohydrates which contribute nearly all of the 261 calories per 100 g serving (right table).

    Maple syrup generally is devoid of micronutrient content (right table), excepting appreciable amounts of zinc and manganese which contribute 44% and 157% of the Daily Value, respectively, per 100 g of syrup consumed (right table).[63]

    Maple syrup also contains trace amounts of amino acids which increase in content as sap flow occurs.[64] Additionally, maple syrup contains a wide variety of volatile organic compounds, including vanillin, hydroxybutanone, and propionaldehyde. It is not yet known exactly what compounds are responsible for maple syrup’s distinctive flavour,[31] however its primary flavour contributing compounds are maple furanone, strawberry furanone, and maltol.[65]

    New compounds have been identified in maple syrup, one of which is quebecol, a natural phenolic compound created when the maple sap is boiled to create syrup.[66]

    One author described maple syrup as “a unique ingredient, smooth- and silky-textured, with a sweet, distinctive flavour – hints of caramel with overtones of toffee will not do – and a rare colour, amber set alight. Maple flavour is, well, maple flavour, uniquely different from any other.”[40] Agriculture Canada has developed a “flavour wheel” that details 91 unique flavours that can be present in maple syrup. These flavours are divided into 13 families: vanilla, empyreumatic (burnt), milky, fruity, floral, spicy, foreign deterioration or environment, maple, confectionery, plants forest-humus-cereals, herbaceous, or ligneous.[67] These flavours are evaluated using a procedure similar to wine tasting.[68] Other culinary experts praise its unique flavour.[69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76]

  115. 115.

    Baud

    @Mustang Bobby: I don’t like to call women shrill because it’s such an oppressive stereotype. I’m confident she was an asshole, however. (I clicked quickly.)

  116. 116.

    debbie

    @Baud:

    She was just on NPR, complaining. When the conversation moved on to economic issues, Fiorina pointed out that wages had remained stagnant for the past 40 years. Allowing for rounding (which I do), would this not mean that Reagan and his policies (as well as those of his GOP successors) are in fact the real cause for this stagnation?

  117. 117.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: I do not have a very refined palate. When they talk about

    “These flavours are divided into 13 families: vanilla, empyreumatic (burnt), milky, fruity, floral, spicy, foreign deterioration or environment, maple, confectionery, plants forest-humus-cereals, herbaceous, or ligneous.”

    I’m like, Ida know, tastes like maple syrup to me. In fact, I won’t even use it. My wife loves maple syrup and we buy it for her, but at the price it is money wasted on me. I use the Log Cabin.

  118. 118.

    Mustang Bobby

    @Baud: I think shrill is universal, especially after Paul Krugman was tagged as such back in the early part of the stimulus debate. But I shall refrain in deference.

    About the assholery, that is most assuredly so.

  119. 119.

    Baud

    @debbie: I blame Obama.

    @Mustang Bobby: I guess I assumed he was called shrill in part to diminish him by “feminizing” him. Like when men are called hysterical. That was initially a term directed at women, but I think is more generic now.

  121. 121.

    Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class

    @Baud:

    You didn’t qualify for the debate either, so you should be gazing on Mika, too.

    Mika really needs to wear her “Ilsa, Chief Inquisitor of the SS” outfits more often.

  125. 125.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @debbie: The stagnation of wages is generally accepted to have begun in the mid 70’s for reasons no one is quite sure of. I feel it is safe to say that the oligarchic economics that were ushered in by Reagan and cohort locked it in tho (free trade, tax cuts, corporate personhood, etc etc etc)

  127. 127.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    The stagnation of wages is generally accepted to have begun in the mid 70’s

    One word will explain that: Nixon. His wage freeze, not Jimmy Carter, was responsible.

  128. 128.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @debbie: I was thinking that the Nixon “Wage and Price Controls” probably got things started and the decline of the unions in the 80’s made it worse.

  129. 129.

    Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    The country was looking pretty scruffy in the mid-70s. Look at movies from the period and notice the street scenes. I think that the wealth that was being produced was diverted in a big way – it went into a bunch of bombers and a bloated Air Force that’s stored as skeletons at Davis-Montham AFB. Another bunch of it disappeared into the maw of meritorious inheritors that collected bullshit and indulged every useless whim. Where it didn’t go was to the working class, where the velocity would have benefitted all.

  130. 130.

    debbie

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    Yeah, I would guess Reagan’s PATCO escapade was the start of the unions’ decline. Ah, there’s nothing like the interventionist policies of Small Government!

  131. 131.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @debbie: It’s a little more complicated than that. His wage and price freezes were complete disasters in that they put a lid on a boiling pot. When the lid blew off, inflation came back even stronger than before.

  132. 132.

    Kay

    @debbie:

    The “stagnation of wages” can be explained a lot of ways, but they always forget the other side of that. Not everyone’s “wages” stagnated:

    The chief executive officers of America’s largest firms earn three times more than they did 20 years ago and at least 10 times more than 30 years ago, big gains even relative to other very-high-wage earners. These extraordinary pay increases have had spillover effects in pulling up the pay of other executives and managers, who constitute a larger group of workers than is commonly recognized.1 Consequently, the growth of CEO and executive compensation overall was a major factor driving the doubling of the income shares of the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of U.S. households from 1979 to 2007 (Bivens and Mishel 2013; Bakija, Cole, and Heim 2012). Since then, income growth has remained unbalanced: as profits have reached record highs and the stock market has boomed, the wages of most workers, stagnant over the last dozen years, including during the prior recovery, have declined during this one (Bivens et al. 2014; Gould 2015) .

    There’s two things going on- the huge lower and middle group are stuck and the tippy-top group are soaring.

    That’s why I find the most popular explanations incomplete. There’s an increase in “wages”. They’re finding the money to pay the people at the tippy-top more and more and more. They just can’t seem to find any when it’s time to give everyone else a bump.

  133. 133.

    Joel

    One thing that’s a bit disappointing in this election is seeing left-leaning outfits like Gawker, which is primarily staffed by younger folks, unwittingly pushing forward the Murdoch/Scaife/Ailes narratives on Clinton. It shows that a lifetime of marinating in this bullshit has really had an effect.

  134. 134.

    Mustang Bobby

    I’m in a Twitter exchange with Matthew Dowd trying to bat down his complaint that Rachel Maddow “wasn’t objective.” I countered with Hugh Hewitt at the Fox debate, but it’s like trying to explain gravity to a chicken.

  136. 136.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @debbie: Reagan changed the rules in a way that was nothing but deleterious to unions. We had big fights back then but the country was in a definite “anti-union” state of mind and we just could not win with a few exceptions. In MO there was a huge fight over Right to Work and we won that one but Ronnie’s Rules changed the landscape of labor law such that all battles would forever after be uphill.

  137. 137.

    Joel

    @Kay: I’ve always wondered if the plummeting cost of material goods has contributed to the stagnation of wages. Not just in the sense of outsourcing jobs, but the fact that people can essentially afford more with less takes away their incentive to push for improvement. All the while, costs for housing have been increasing steadily over the past generation, leaving people who don’t own further and further out in the cold.

  138. 138.

    Baud

    @Joel: Agree. Although 2008 was more contentious, I don’t recall Obama supporters buying into right wing memes about Clinton. Once you go down that rabbit hole, there is no coming back.

  139. 139.

    Kay

    @Joel:

    I agree it’s unfortunate, but IMO Clinton does have to rethink her approach to transparency. I think it comes off as dated. The approach to that has shifted since the 1990’s.

    In campaign finance, it’s an actual theory. With the gutting of regulations we were supposed to get increased transparency. We’d have an “open marketplace” and thus we wouldn’t need regulators because we’d know who was giving to whom and then we could bake that into any decision. That’s the theory and system she’s currently operating in, even though she supports increased regulation. I don’t believe transparency as a replacement for regulation “works” but that is the deal we were supposed to get.

  140. 140.

    Kay

    @Joel:

    but the fact that people can essentially afford more with less takes away their incentive to push for improvement.

    I agree. A lot of people must agree because that’s always 2 or 3 on the list of why we all must support every single trade deal that comes down the pike- cheaper consumer goods. That’s supposedly the benefit to middle and lower- more stuff. They won’t build any equity in anything real or valuable and they won’t have any security but they will have cheaper versions of everything rich people have.

  141. 141.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay:

    They won’t build any equity in anything real or valuable and they won’t have any security but they will have cheaper versions of everything rich people have.

    I call it the WalMartization of America.

  142. 142.

    Matt McIrvin

    Another effect of cheap consumer goods, cheap electronics in particular, is that it affects people’s perception of other people’s wealth. Especially if the perceiver is older. Things like cellular phones and computers and big color TVs used to be very expensive luxuries; if you see poor people who have them, it’s easy to conclude that they aren’t really poor, or that they’re spending their money stupidly and would be fine if they didn’t splurge on all that junk. But if there are cheap versions of these things available, it’s quite possible that going without them would have little effect on someone’s ability to make the rent.

  145. 145.

    Betty Cracker

    @Mustang Bobby: What was his specific beef with Maddow? I thought she did well — Chuckles too, really. They mostly stayed out of the way, unlike the preening FoxBots.

  147. 147.

    El Caganer

    @Amir Khalid: You can get some specialized exotic flavoring, too. There’s a company that sells maple syrup that’s been aged in bourbon barrels.

  148. 148.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I worry about what I think of as the downstream effects. We have two distinct groups of older middle and working class clients- economically secure people and economically insecure people. It’s as if I can see the shift. I feel like the remaining group of secure people are obscuring what will be a pretty stark reality for a lot of 50 and 60 year olds once that “secure” group have passed thru and out.

    One of the things that “building value” lets you do is pass is something on. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Ten or twenty thousand dollars or a piece of property or a modest house is a kind of stake for the next generation. If it’s well-timed it can make all the difference in the world. The insecure group may not have that to pass on. I don’t worry so much about right now as much as I worry about how no one seems to know how to stop the slide.

  150. 150.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Matt McIrvin: OTOH, things can appear to be cheap that really aren’t. RentToOwn places are infamous for preying on the poor and those who don’t understand the buried substantial interest charges for items that are “cheap” and “easy to afford”. Unfortunately, too many people don’t have access to reasonably priced credit, so they have little choice but use them.

    Poor people can get a house full of “cheap” stuff for a “low, low monthly payment” that ends up being very expensive in the not-so-long run.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  153. 153.

    beltane

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Yes. Aside from the egregiousness of Rent-to-Own operations, “Cheap stuff” is often not that cheap. Big Finance has perfected the art of bleeding people dry without them feeling a thing. Most people own very little of their cheap stuff outright.

  154. 154.

    Applejinx

    @Baud: The go-to person for the most vicious slams on Hillary IS Hillary.

    Here’s a brutal unforced error—again—from the Hillary camp. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/19/hillary-blames-bernie-old-clintonite-hustle-and-thats-rotten-shame

    I went and did a bit of research, because what it looks like is, “Hillary attacks Bernie for voting for the very same policy HER CURRENT finance advisor advocates. She is a trojan horse and is attacking Bernie for being tricked into the same policy she herself is going to enact when she’s President! She’s a lying treacherous sack of shit, !!oneone!”

    The truth is both more nuanced and uncomfortably revealing.

    This is Gary Gensler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gensler

    He was indeed the guy wanting to deregulate derivatives. He’s got some kind of idea that ‘transparency’ will help the situation (silly: transparency helps only if people care what they see) and at least compared to what’s out there, this passes as a fearsome commie among Wall Streeters who want no transparency much less regulation. It appears Enron had a profound effect on the lad, causing him to re-appraise things, and that he’s been crusading against the worst Wall Street abuses ever since. Gary Gensler is NOT a nefarious plutocrat-coddler (though I suspect he still holds an inflated opinion of Wall Street’s importance).

    But.

    Knowing all this, Hillary Clinton still tried to slime Sanders by painting him as a collaborator of the same great evils he rails against… KNOWING that the guy responsible for the legislation was (a) a Clinton insider working with the Clintons to do that, and (b) is NOW her key finance advisor, and (c) that is not a shameful thing, by all appearances.

    She knows all this and yet she still tried to turn his vote on a CLINTON initiative into a scandal to slime him with, hoping nobody would look into the details.

    I am really, really not liking Hillary’s judgement right now. To be that treacherous and deceptive is a bad thing, and anybody who says ‘Hillary is trustworthy!’, re-read this. Never mind that it was one of those omnibus bills: her current chief financial officer wrote the legislation she’s trying to slime Bernie with. If he is so bad, why is he on her team now? If he is so good, how can you fault Bernie for not being one of the very few holdouts who balked Clinton and wouldn’t vote for that derivatives deregulation Clinton wanted so much?

  155. 155.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Applejinx: You are WILDLY overreading this entire thing. It’s not even an attack exactly! It’s a bit of snark, really. “Even you, Bernie Sanders, cast some votes that contributed to the conditions that made the financial crisis.” “Slime” and “scandal” are what you’re putting into the whole thing. Glad you realized this time around that Gensler is semi-famous for seeing the light, as opposed to being a cartoon bankster villain.

  156. 156.

    rikyrah

    the new national Republican poll from Public Policy Polling,

    1. Donald Trump: 28% (down from 34% in December)

    2. Ted Cruz: 21% (up from 18%)

    2. Marco Rubio: 21% (up from 13%)

    4. Ben Carson: 11% (up from 6%)

  157. 157.

    Applejinx

    @FlipYrWhig: It’s a direct attack on Bernie Sanders’ honesty, suggesting that he had a phase where his message wasn’t consistent with what he says now. It’s impossble to read it otherwise. There would be no point to digging that up for any other reason.

    It’s aimed at low information voters to make them say ‘aaah, he’s another fake’, and all the while it was a Clinton initiative and designed by the guy who’s working for her NOW.

    That’s why it’s an unforced error. It’s so deeply dishonest, and the realities aren’t even secret. I call that slime because the intended take-away is a lie. And why fucking say it if it’s not an attack? Spare me.

    And the reason it’s such a dumb error is, if you don’t research the guy you’d say ‘The same Wall Street Goldman Sachs guy who wrote that is her key finance guy NOW!’. It can backfire quite horribly and I for one have no interest in protecting her from the consequences of that. I did the research and found out he’s what passes for an apostate, turned by Enron and on the side of good now. Anybody who doesn’t dig that deep (and I’m still giving him a LOT of credit that he may not deserve) will run with the Goldman Sachs, Wall Street guy narrative: he did FUCKING WRITE the very thing she’s trying to paint as Bernie’s folly.

  158. 158.

    Denali

    @McClaren,

    You have forgotten the effects of terrorism on the culture. Terrorism was not on the radar of people in 1969. The fear factor was played on race and crime issues. Now the fear factor is played on immigration and Islam. Fear undermines rational approaches to problems. Trump uses fear masterfully; he plays the alpha male and strong man who can take on the world. Because there truly are evil and powerful people/governments, it works.

  159. 159.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Applejinx: I highly doubt this is aimed at “low information voters” (who have no idea what derivatives trading even is). It’s a whack at Bernie Sanders’s purist streak. “You’re not so pure, Bernie,” is something Bernie’s whole campaign has been BEGGING FOR in all of its REPEATED suggestions that Clinton is corrupt, bought and sold, a johnny-come-lately progressive, and so forth. It really can’t be good for you to be on a hair trigger about a mild sock in the nose like this.

  160. 160.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Applejinx:

    And the reason it’s such a dumb error is, if you don’t research the guy you’d say ‘The same Wall Street Goldman Sachs guy who wrote that is her key finance guy NOW!’.

    Wasn’t that what you were saying last night?

  161. 161.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Denali: In 1969, the other big thing was Vietnam, and the Cold War underlying it. A large segment of the population was terrified of Commies taking over the world, and another large segment was justifiably afraid of getting shipped off to Vietnam and killed there.

    The partisan divide played out differently, though.

  162. 162.

    C.V. Danes

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Have you not seen the contents of the Republican clown car? The Dems could win with Baby Hughie against that crowd.

    Seriously, and not to sound complacent, but questions on Bernie’s electability seem somewhat concern trollish to me. Either candidate would receive withering fire from the Republicsn machine, and the Dem base would rally in defense.

  163. 163.

    Applejinx

    @FlipYrWhig: Yeah, it’s easy to believe and even literally true.

    Apostate or not, dude is a Goldman Sachs alumni Wall Street deregulator dude from way back. I think that shows you something about who Hillary is going to protect. Now more than ever I’d love to know what she was saying to them. I bet it was a weird combination of fluffing and scolding: trying to make them love her so she could argue the case for regulation and rules. I have no idea how it went, other than she made a fuckload of money off it.

  164. 164.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: Some significant fraction of those houses that people do have are going to be underwater in 100 years, maybe sooner–not financially underwater, I mean physically underwater. Or some other climate-related disaster will make them unusable. I wonder at what point the general realization of that filters backward in time to destroy value.

  165. 165.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Applejinx: Uh, yeah, it shows you that Hillary Clinton is interested in the reforms put forth by reformers. NYT, 4/17/2015, on HRC adding Gensler as an advisor: “It was also the latest indication that Mrs. Clinton is prepared to take a tougher stance toward the financial industry. Mr. Gensler, as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2009 to 2014, overhauled the commission from one of Wall Street’s most lax regulators to one of its most aggressive, and campaigned to rein in risk-taking in response to the financial crisis.”

    You know who else was a Goldman Sachs alum? Jon Corzine. You know who ran the Corzine campaign? Tad Devine, who runs Bernie Sanders’s campaign. UNCLEAN!

    I guaran-damn-tee you that her speeches were about how leadership is leader-y and we live in a changing world. That’s what the speaker circuit is. Boring and stupid.

  166. 166.

    C.V. Danes

    @Matt McIrvin: That point in time will be when the insurance companies pull out of that market or become cost prohibitive. That’s starting to happen more and more in the high flood risk areas.

    I was just down in Florida for the Rolex 24 race at Daytona and was amazed at the amount of construction going on in a state that will be mostly under water in 50-100 years. What a waste of capital.

  167. 167.

    Tractarian

    @C.V. Danes:

    Seriously, and not to sound complacent, but questions on Bernie’s electability seem somewhat concern trollish to me. Either candidate would receive withering fire from the Republicsn machine, and the Dem base would rally in defense.

    The problem is that Bernie is pretty far to the left of the median Democratic voter. So you’d end up with the base but lose moderates and (to the extent they exist) true independents.

    I’ll be honest – I simply cannot understand Bernie’s appeal. I appreciate his message, and I’m not concerned that his goals are unachievable in the short term. That’s not what makes him unelectable, IMO. What makes him unelectable is his calling himself a socialist for decades, his age, and his demeanor. Call me an ageist, but to me, he does not look or sound like someone who can handle the rigors of the office.

  169. 169.

    different-church-lady

    Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are more progressive than almost anyone who’s ever run for POTUS.

    But people on the internets keep telling me she’s to the right of Hitler and the entire country will become a slum prison run by banksters. So I don’t know what to think here.

  170. 170.

    chopper

    @FlipYrWhig:

    You know who else was a Goldman Sachs alum? Jon Corzine. You know who ran the Corzine campaign? Tad Devine, who runs Bernie Sanders’s campaign.

    great, now nobody’s pure enough to vote for.

  171. 171.

    chopper

    @FlipYrWhig:

    if “even you, Bernie Sanders, cast some votes that contributed to the conditions that made the financial crisis.” is a ‘slimy attack’ then berniacs are gonna need to stock up on diapers when the general election comes around.

  172. 172.

    Bishop Bag

    @efgoldman: I was surfing in Huntington Beach the next morning in June. My buddy and I had finished up for the morning and were packing up the boards and towels to head home for breakfast when this guy walked up to us and “Can you believe what happened to Kennedy?” I thought he was talking about John and just said something along the lines of “Yeah, that was really too bad that that happened.” He looked at us shaking his head and said “No, Bobby was killed last night!”
    I couldn’t believe it….what a devastating time for our country….

  173. 173.

    TopClimber

    @mclaren: Some interesting points, but some bad chronology. McGovern ran in 1972, not 1968. He actually had a plausible shot until the Eagleton fiasco.

  174. 174.

    Procopius

    @Kropadope:

    … the core Republican principle, preference for state over federal control …

    I ordinarily wouldn’t add a comment, but I don’t think you’re right about this. Republicans talk about “states rights” and “local control,” but their real goal is the “control.” Look at all the Republican-controlled states that have imposed laws forbidding localities to regulate fracking. The reason for the Republican elites preferring state control is that states are cheaper to buy. They’re perfectly happy to impose controls from the highest level they can seize as long as it benefits their donors.

  175. 175.

    Procopius

    @Frankensteinbeck: It’s perfectly clear from speeches beforehand and the text of “statutes of secession” that the issue causing secession was slavery, but I was quite surprised to learn there *were* concerns about “states’ rights” at the time. Of course, the “states’ rights” involved were to force the other (non-slave) states to return escaped slaves, so were a bit contradictory, but if you listen to the lyrics of “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” one of the popular marching songs of the time (on the Rebel side) they claimed to be fighting for states rights.

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