.@POTUS: ‘I’m ready to pass the baton’ https://t.co/id0U9wKli8 | Getty pic.twitter.com/ZbI4yCI01H
— POLITICO (@politico) July 28, 2016
… Speaking on the penultimate night of the convention, Obama made a forceful case for his former rival. He’s not likely to have an audience like this again as president, and Obama soaked in the cheers and chants of “Yes we did!” from a party that, despite its divisions, remains enthralled by his charisma and vision.
Before the speech, Obama’s aides had said that it would be more of a positive testimonial for Hillary Clinton than anything else. But Obama also delivered a passionate indictment of Donald Trump, casting him as a menace whose positions aren’t just on the other side of the political spectrum, but on a different spectrum all together.
This election, Obama said, is “not just a choice between parties or policies; the usual debates between left and right. This is a more fundamental choice – about who we are as a people, and whether we stay true to this great American experiment in self-government.”…
“You know, there’s been a lot of talk in this campaign about what America’s lost – people who tell us that our way of life is being undermined by pernicious changes and dark forces beyond our control,” Obama said.
Of the current Democratic nominee, Obama said, “there has never been a man or a woman, not me, not Bill, nobody more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.”
He added, as Bill Clinton leapt to his feet and roared a cheer, “I hope you don’t mind, Bill, but I was just telling the truth, man.”…
To begin the day watching Trump's incoherent, inflammatory press conference and end with Obama speech. What a time in America #DemsInPhilly
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) July 28, 2016
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a politician make such a stirring paean to a globalized, multicultural, immigrant-friendly America.
— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) July 28, 2016
"This election isn't just about Donald Trump's judgment. It's about our own." No truer words. #DNCinPHL
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) July 28, 2016
It's time to put a racist bully in his place, and a tough woman in hers: The White House!
— Martin O'Malley (@MartinOMalley) July 27, 2016
Number of black delegates at…
Democratic National Convention: 1,182
Republican National Convention: 18
via @Fusion https://t.co/YakEn3iFqs— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) July 27, 2016
Keep this in mind: Most undecided voters in our country have a favorable opinion of President Obama.
— Wyeth Ruthven (@wyethwire) July 28, 2016
It's remarkable how much more the Democratic convention has leaned into "America is good," while the GOP one said America is screwed.
— Justin Green (@JGreenDC) July 26, 2016
Also leaned into "we like minorities," while the GOP one said “minorities will kill your family." https://t.co/zp2QRmZKqk
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) July 26, 2016
I hate term limits tonight more than ever, but it's the reality we live in and I can work with that. ¡Viva la coalición!
— Al Giordano (@AlGiordano) July 28, 2016
As soon as I saw this, I figured we were due for a @realDonaldTrump eruption. He can take anything but bad ratings!https://t.co/RxXR98qUTn
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) July 27, 2016
Aqualad08
Yeah but, come on…not one mention of Lucifer?
rikyrah
Yeah!
Good Morning ?, Everyone ?
p.a.
Oh no. I’m beginning to feel optimistic. This goes against every fiber of my being. Let the talk of strengthening downticket to prep for the next census be more than talk. Senate possible in ’16. House by ??? Let’s not forget the importance of Scalia’s death to start the ball rolling. Thanks, Nino! (I’ll pay for saying that, I’m sure.)
Big R
An important question I have: what’s the over/under on when the Republican Senate realizes that Trump is toast and votes to confirm Judge Garland?
OzarkHillbilly
Heh.
SFAW
Meanwhile, The Always-Clueless Joan Vennochi continues to be Maureen-Dowd-lite. “Hitlary The B*** Still Needs to Make the Human Connection” is this morning’s episode. Joan can always be counted on for her own special form of misogyny — she pulls the same shit vis-a-vis Elizabeth Warren. It’s as if she, a second-or-third-rate op-ed “author,” needs to tell the world about how imperfect all those powerful wimmins are. At least Maureen Dowd can actually write, from time to time.
As with the BernOrBusters and the Trumpster-divers, there is nothing Hillary could do or say that would cause TACJV to modify her opinion.
One of the reasons we stopped getting the paper version of the Glob.
SFAW
Photos, or it didn’t happen.
SFAW
@rikyrah:
Good morning, youngster!
SFAW
@p.a.:
Not if there’s a just God, you won’t — He’s probably saying the same thing.
J R in WV
@rikyrah:
Good Morning rikyrah~!! And everyone!
Wasn’t last night the best political night since election day 2008/2012? What a great lineup of speakers, and what a great job they all did building to that oration by President Obama.
I saw my first “Trump” bumper sticker yesterday afternoon at the grocery store. It was on the back left of a big Ford SVU. In the middle was a “Hillary for Prison” and on the right was a “1-20-’17 – End of an Error”. So with three very short statements you learned that this guy hates women, hates the best president in recent history who nailed bin Laden, because he’s black, and hates America because of the sociopath he would put in charge of our precious nation.
I can’t wait for Hillary’s acceptance speech tonight. And I plan to try to find Youtube copies of Joe Biden’s speech, and Mike Bloomberg’s as well. I thought Tim Kaine’s speech was a great lead in to Obama’s, and when Hillary came out and they hugged and walked around the stage hand-in-hand it was so warm and wonderful.
And once we figured out who that was beside Chelsea, I was amazed by how good Gabby Gifford looked, after the terrible attack she has been recovering from. I’m so grateful for the leaders willing to put their lives on the line for our nation.
Baud
Atlantic
Aimai
@SFAW: me too! I HATE joan vennochi. She has been like this for years. She is like the boring, faux seriouus, maureen dowd.
Mustang Bobby
I loved every minute of President Obama’s speech, but now Hillary Clinton is in the tough spot of following it… I know she’ll pull it off.
Ultraviolet Thunder
Morning! I slept through what I gather was an awesome night at the convention.
I’ll find a recording of Obama’s speech and watch it later.
So far that sounds like it was the speech of his career. And it needed to be.
Have a good day.
Keith G
@Baud: Sounds like a solid move.
Late yesterday, Sam Wang’s shop changed Ohio’s map color from white (even split) to light blue. Keeping the Buckeye State away from Trump, and therefore Trump away from the presidency, is very doable. Cementing in the “bounce” numbers that Hillary will get will be a good thing.
Baud
@Keith G: One theory of this convention is that Hillary shored up the Democratic base so they can devote more time for retail politics with the white working class voters who are Trump’s base.
Aimai
@Keith G: with that “little old lady from ohio” on our side i think we can do it!
Matt McIrvin
@Keith G: Though, per his notes, it was not so much an actual motion in the polls as a change in the sampling rules for Huffington Post’s poll-number feed. Still, he thinks it was a change that made the numbers more accurate. Here’s hoping this wasn’t motivated reasoning.
Pogonip
How’d the fart-in go?
SFAW
@Aimai:
I don’t recall when I first noticed it. It started before Elizabeth Warren’s Senate run. Shannon O’Brien, maybe*? At first it was puzzling, then annoying, now I just refer to her as TACJV.
Jeff Jacoby is (almost) always a counterfactual moron, but that’s to be expected, because he’s a right-winger. What’s her excuse?
*Fun factoid: in the 2002 MA Governor election, Jill Stein got 3.5 percent of the vote. Let’s hope that her vote total in PRES 2016 equals her MA 2002 total.
rikyrah
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
Don’t stop at POTUS.
Please watch all the speakers : Joey B, Bloomberg, and Kaine.
rikyrah
@Matt McIrvin:
Remember that NYT graphic.
Hillary has over 900 ways to 270
Trump has under 80.
If Hillary wins Florida?
Trump has 1
SFAW
@rikyrah:
Seconded.
At some point last night, I realized how much I’m going to miss both Handsome Joe and our President. Damn.
debbie
And yet, and yet.
Tom Cole (R-OK) is often interviewed on NPR. He’s been very skeptical of Trump and not shy about saying it. This morning, however, he was totally in the bag for Trump. Every single question asked of him about Trump turned into a rail against Hillary and those emails — even the question whether he was going to say anything about Trump’s suggestion that Putin find those emails.
Baud
@debbie: He’s a Republican from Oklahoma. He came home. On the list of reasons to worry, that’d pretty low.
bemused
So glad I’ve been recording the convention. Impossible to watch it all in real time but what we have been able to watch has been amazing. Glaring contrasts between conventions in every category. I felt sick to my stomach and depressed watching what little I could tolerate of Trumpalooza. So many awesome DNC speakers displaying the maturity, intelligence, experience, expertise and authentic concern for their country and all Americans.
Amir Khalid
@Pogonip:
The coverage seems not to have mentioned it at all, So my guess is that the fart-in didn’t achieve take-off.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Hey buddy, got a bone to pick with you. You were dissing the practitioners of the Dismal Science yesterday. Wait until you need we Economists to pull the wreck of the economy out of the ditch when you are President(I’m thinking that’ll be in 2032 or so).
Keith G
@Aimai: Absolutely.
Her home town and mine were hs sports rivals. At one time, my step dad and three of his brother worked at the automolive glass factoris there.
So much of that industrial sector is gone, that it can be a bit frustrating for the communities there. Trump was in Toledo (across the river) yesterday is stir discontent.
Hope Sharon Belkofer is a small ignore for what will happen there.
Peej01
@Amir Khalid: I thought the fart-in was supposed to be for tonight.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
That’s only because no one had their Zippo.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
This comment?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Peej01: No matter when it is/was, it’s gonna stink to high heaven.
Matt McIrvin
Oh, God, Trump is actually attempting the “it was just a joke” defense.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Ah, yeah.
debbie
@Baud:
I’m not worried, just sorry to see such a total loss of backbone.
JGabriel
Big R:
Probably never. It’s not about politics, it’s about hating President Obama. And even in the lame duck period after Clinton wins the election but before she takes office, they will still hate the President.
The only thing that might sway them to give Judge Garland a hearing is if the Senate Republicans decide they hate Clinton even more; i.e., if they decide misogyny trumps racism.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Did you see the video that comment related to?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Yes, I was amused by it; we Economists do have a sense of humor.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: no doubt. Just didn’t know if I had to explain.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I also realized I didn’t know you were an economist.
satby
Good morning! I’m glad that the conservatives are sad puppies today. I hope all the positive reviews of last night make Drumpf blow a few more gaskets. And I hope more people like Bloomberg speak up and call him insane. I’m thinking Warren Buffett and Bill Gates would be good, to continue countering the “successful businessman” myth around the Drumpf.
MattF
@Matt McIrvin: ‘I was lying’ would be more believable.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: OK, a peace offering.
ETA: My MA is in Economics, though I’ve never actually worked in the field; professionally I’m a computer nerd.
Baud
@MattF: It’s the only sentence in the English language I would find credible coming from Trump.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Pretty.
SFAW
@Matt McIrvin:
Assuming you’re talking about Deadbeat Donnie’s Russia comments:
Actually, had he worded it slightly differently, I could see that — “I dunno, maybe someone found the missing 30K emails while they were at it.” — but he’s such a fucking imbecile, he couldn’t tell the difference between implying something, and being as blatantly un-American as he was.
Let Deadbeat Donnie be Deadbeat Donnie!
Amir Khalid
@SFAW:
An interesting concept: the 1st Airborne BoBs.
Patricia Kayden
@SFAW: Who the hell is Joan Vennochi? Some people are better off being ignored.
@satby: Definitely Warren Buffett, who was a big Obama supporter. I believe Gates is Republican, however, so not sure about him.
Baud
GMA had no news this morning so I guess that proves yesterday was a success.
Patricia Kayden
@Matt McIrvin: A reporter on Good Morning America was trying to defend Trump by saying that he’s always joking. Really dude? The last time I checked, Trump wasn’t running to be our Chief Comedian in Charge.
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: They are Republicans. They long ago surrendered to their worst instincts.
bemused
@J R in WV:
Joe’s speech was a barnburner. Obama made a terrific choice for VP. Yesterday MPR broadcast the early July wide ranging interview with Biden by Walter Isaacson at Aspen Ideas Festival. I heard parts of interview driving around and thought I must hear the whole thing. On my husband’s drive home, he heard other parts of the interview which was one of the first things he talked about when he walked in the door.
I was excited to find the video and transcript of the interview on aspen ideas.org, In Conversation with Joe Biden, bookmarked for us to watch when time permits.
Kaine was great last night and I think he will be just as excellent a partner with Hillary as Obama/Biden.
Patricia Kayden
@Amir Khalid: Bernie Bros are saving up all their farts for tonight, I guess. What an embarrassing situation to contemplate. These are grown adults, right? Sigh.
Baud
@Patricia Kayden: Luckily I missed that. All I saw was fluff news.
amk
@Matt McIrvin:
I wonder on the nov 6th victory party, if you would still be fretting about those ‘polls’. Give it a break, man.
Truegster
If Trump plays the Russia thing as “it was a joke”, they need to respond “yeah, like your whole campaign is a joke, we know”
SFAW
@Patricia Kayden:
Sort-of “centrist” op-ed writer at the no-longer-liberal Boston Globe. I mostly ignore her, or try to, but sometimes …
mike in dc
I do wonder what the turnout model assumptions are for some of these polls. I’ve heard that some assume 85% of the electorate will be white, which is an 80s-era level. It seems like it would be pretty easy to oversample whites and undersample non-whites.
OzarkHillbilly
@JGabriel: My bet is the confirmation vote takes place 5 mins after the last vote is counted.
Applejinx
From way downstairs in the basement (what can I say, it was early morning)…
If Bernie had bitch face and was red and cranky, it’s because
a) he lost, and it’s been handled damn gracefully by the Democratic Party
b) everybody in the party up to Obama is saying, good job, important work, we need your constituency and they have valid points
c) i.e. ‘we can take them over now, issues adopted, thanks kbai’
d) the ones who ARE still seeing him as the sole leader for this platform are annoying jerks who are hurting what he cares about
e) it’s obvious they’re not helping and not capable of helping him hang on to a powerbroker type of role.
I do feel badly for him, and that’s why I’m so dogged and fierce about protecting his role as my Senator. He was there for me waaaaay before any of this. Loyalty is earned. I’m a Vermonter and I’m entitled to have that opinion because again, he was there for me many years before all this went down.
At the same time (Russia, I mean DNC, are you listening?) I’m completely prepared to let the Democrats take over what Bernie wanted to exclusively represent. He wanted to be the socialist populist guy, the one running against oligarchy. Unfortunately he made his case so exhaustively, that now the oligarchy is (quite rightly) running against oligarchy. If the Dem speeches can be believed, that means Bernie is superfluous. If Hillary’s got that message as strongly as it would appear, we technically don’t need Bernie anymore.
Noted rich-guy Nick Hanauer has been carrying on for years about how we gotta get populist or the poors will break out the tumbrels. Observing Brexit ought to have been evidence enough for anybody that it can happen here. I’m not shocked if Obama (most of all) but also Clinton (who keeps getting smarter and more determined) are up to speed with all this. When you put all the pieces together, it’s ‘bail out Main Street, (votes in place of ???), profit!’ time. That is why Trump is so desperately trying to co-opt that message, though it’s absurd for him even to pretend it.
I’m cool with looking after Bernie as the scale of his ambitions returns to us few up here in Vermont. I won’t see that taken away from him, it’s really rude even to suggest it after the way our leaders have carried on over him: he’s now the pet socialist, to be kept as an example of right thinking in our green-mountained rest home for the no longer politically central.
I’m more than happy for Hillary Clinton to continue that direction and get credit for making it a real thing. That’s the message we got. I say ‘please do’. In so doing, we take on board all the revolutionaries who’re worth a damn… all the revolutionaries who can get to work once they get what they want. We leave behind the ones who would just break stuff to have something else to yell about…
gene108
I drifted over to Townhall.com, just to see what the other side thought. They like Obama’s speech, since lofty rhetoric is the only thing he’s good at, they gave him his due. They dissed Kaine’s speech.
The comments section were people living in an alternate reality, though not everyone was onboard with Trump, they agree defeating Hillary is tantamount to saving the future from annihilation.
D58826
As Nicole Wallace, on MSNBC enthused about Obama’s speech I half expected her to say that if Obama could run for a third term she would vote for him
Patricia Kayden
@gene108: Just saw a poll on CBS’ “This Morning” show where Trump is leading Clinton by a whisk (45 to 44). It’s tight now but I hope Secretary Clinton gets a good bounce from the DNC. She’s still reportedly working on her speech. Hope she hits it out of the park tonight.
Ella in New Mexico
This convention, combined with Trump’s incredible fuck up yesterday, MUST be scaring the shit out of the Hilary-haters on the right. I’ve seen more angry posts about her, BLM, and Liberalism being a mental illness in the past two days than I’ve heard in a year. Last night, my husband’s sister-in-law posted no less than 5 essentially false or completely ugly political memes in a row-she might post one “If you’re voting for Hilary you’re crazy” a month.
The thing that’s really scary about them is they literally are outright falsehoods, even “footnoted”, as a quote from some legit source. If you other, you find that out with a quick Google search. Yet this is how these folks are really making up their minds. These people BELIEVE them, and they never go any farther to check their veracity.
(There is particularly popular bag of shit and lies that is ubiquitous among my panicked Right-wing family/”friends” showing up every where right now. It’s a mish-mash of some shit Dick-head Morris wrote saying Hilary’s resume is basically made up titled “Bill Clinton’s Loving Wife”.)
Yesterday, when I was in a patient’s room I heard the “Come on Russia hack our election” story. Snuck a peak at the major headlines on decent, reliable newspaper sites and political blogs and all were running the quotes and story.
FOX News.com? Not a single thing, anywhere. Just anti-Clinton rumors and praise for the dismissal of charges in the Freddie Gray case. And this was at about 1:00pm my time, 3:00pm Eastern, so sorry, they were actively ignoring the damn story.
So these folks not only don’t get the news, they literally live in a bubble of propaganda and distortions. Poking a hole in that bubble should be every one of our daily goals for the rest of this election.
Snopes, Fact-check, and even Politifact need to become our best friends, folks. I’m posting a link under each and every one of those people’s posts until they unfriendly me.
mike in dc
Trump’s bounce only got him to even or slightly ahead. Clinton should get a substantial bounce as a lot of Dems “come home” and some swing voters lean back towards her.
D58826
@Applejinx: I’m completely prepared to let the Democrats take over what Bernie wanted to exclusively represent.
gene108
@Patricia Kayden:
I do not see how she could not get a bounce from this convention, but we live in strange times.
Patricia Kayden
@Ella in New Mexico: I supposed I live in a bubble too because none of my friends or family are Republicans. I work with folks who may be Republican but they’re very discreet about it and we don’t talk about politics.
It’s interesting to read comments like yours because you have the opposite situation. I guess I’m too intolerant of Rightwing b.s. to have friends that actively promote lies. Plus, I am not on Twitter or Facebook so my friends are face-to-face.
The projection is strong.
BC in Illinois
@Patricia Kayden: @Amir Khalid: @Pogonip:
I still think that the “Fart-In” is a real asshole move.
Patricia Kayden
@BC in Illinois: LOL!! Well played.
barb2
@J R in WV:
Tuesday afternoon in Washington state we saw the exact same bumper sticker. First sighting. All I noticed was “Hillary” and said “oh look a Hillary” sticker. My husband had gotten a better look. That’s a nasty Trump bumper sticker, he said. Trump isn’t even original – he used some of the graphics of the authentic Hillary bumper sticker. Then the Hillary Prison nasty stuff. I looked away, we were hurrying home to watch day two of the convention. I did notice that the driver is the typical Trump devotee, male, white and old.
Weeks ago I started seeing real Hillary bumper stickers in the Trader Joe parking lot.
Trump and his fan club are haters.
MattF
@Ella in New Mexico: RW world continues to lurch away from reality. The first lurch was a series of things that didn’t actually happen (e.g., murder of Vince Foster, Bill Ayres writing Obama’s book), the next lurch seems to be completely ignoring things that do happen.
MattF
@Patricia Kayden: I expect a significant bounce, but what I expect doesn’t count.
OzarkHillbilly
@Patricia Kayden:
I have a # of RW friends (all of whom think Trump is a disaster, they will never vote for H but they aren’t voting Trump either) When I hear bullshit, I counter it. They all know I am somewhere to the left of Marx already and we have a lot of fun trashing each others positions.
D58826
@Ella in New Mexico:
But But But facts are a liberal plot to destroy the true Murka. Didn’t you get the memo from the Wizard of Walsilla.? :-)
Cat48
My president never disappoints at speech time. Such a moving words.
Quinerly
@debbie:
I’m a big Diane Rehm fan and am going to miss her on NPR. Do think it is time for her to retire. I think it is so odd that she took her vacation last week and this week. Her show has been covering the convention each day. I suspect today’s will be good, even with the guest host. As for Cole from Oklahoma, it’s his same old crap everytime he’s on.
MomSense
What a great night. I couldn’t sleep after that speech. It was so much more than a rebuke of Trump ugliness and division and more than passing the baton to Hillary. It was a reaffirmation of American principles and a reminder that they are only as strong as our willingness to work for them. Sharon Belkofer was the perfect person to introduce our President. Each of us will have to step up our game to make sure we keep making progress.
Quinerly
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
If you can, catch the retired rear admiral’s speech. Quite good.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: Maybe the key is to tell these folks that they’ll have a better candidate on 2020 if Hillary wins this year.
Matt McIrvin
@Patricia Kayden: That speech last week sure was the work of a jolly guy.
D58826
@OzarkHillbilly: My sister and her hubby are the same way. Very conservative GOPers. Hate Hillary but won’t vote for Trump. Well by default that is a vote for Trump, even if they write-in or vote for Johnson. As Nader proved in 2000, bled enough votes from Hillary and ‘old little hands’ can get a plurality of the vote in a state and thus get all of the EC votes.
Karen S.
The morning after a great night of speeches… My wife and I are still tickled and overjoyed at the LGBTQ inclusion in the speeches, particularly Tim Kaine’s and Pres. Obama’s. I cried when Obama came on stage to deliver his speech. Part of the reason is a special pride I feel in him because we’re both African American, but also because he’s the best president I’ve seen in my lifetime. In his decency, sense of humor, intelligence and strength, he reminds me of my dad. My dad, who is 88 years old, loves Obama. I’m so happy that he and my mom, who grew up in Missouri and Virginia, respectively, during the Depression and at a time when blacks’ second-class status was overtly codified, got see a black man lead this country. I think my tears of happiness were as much for my parents as they were for my happiness at Obama just being.
OzarkHillbilly
@Quinerly:
Pretty sure her reasons for retiring influenced the timing of her vacation (meaning she is not feeling well- hope I’m wrong)
japa21
The Chicago Tribune sucks:
Front page teaser for inside article: “Donald Trump dared Russia to commit espionage …”
Headline for actual article: “Trump defies Russia to hack Clinton’s emails”
Correct headline would be : “Trump asks Russia…”
D58826
@Quinerly: Esp. the part where he said ‘old little hands’ isn’t qualified to shine McCain’s boots. McCain got a bigger cheer at the DNC than he did at the RNC. Strange times
MattF
@D58826: Sounds to me like a .5 vote loss for Rs. They’re never going to vote for downballot Dems, and they will vote in the election, regardless of who they vote for Prez.
japa21
@D58826: Actually, in the case of normal GOP voters, if they don’t vote for Trump and don’t vote for Hillary, that is actually not a vote for Trump. They aren’t bleeding votes from Hillary, they are bleeding votes from Trump. The hope is that there are a lot of GOPers that can’t stand either so they won’t vote for either and just choose to stay away from the polls. That would help down-ticket.
Quinerly
@OzarkHillbilly:
She’s been kinda cranky for several months. She plans to be active after her retirement, though….in the right to day movement because of her husband. Met her a few weeks ago when she was here in St. Louis at our wonderful local station. Beautiful woman.
delk
Last week made me sick to my stomach. This week is like staying home from school, laying in bed as a Bewitched rerun starts and my mom walking in with a TV tray and a bowl of chicken soup.
Baud
@delk:
Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll win or lose, but I know I’m with the people I should be with.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: @D58826: For a Repub to not vote for Trump is a minus in his column even if it isn’t a plus in Hillary’s. I like to think of it like the baseball standings. If the Cubs lose on a night the Cards aren’t playing we still gain half a game in the standings.
I am more than happy to encourage these (old school) base voters to sit out the election.
Quinerly
@D58826:
I was appalled when the Bernie Bros were booing Panetta. Can’t remember if it was the Oregon or Washington delegation. Say what you will about Panetta…he was in the room when we took down Bin Laden.
barb2
Bloomberg’s speech was really good. If you are sending links to Republican famity – Bloomberg’s speech might sway a few votes to Hillary – and away from Trump.
Another speech was by Admiral Hutson JAG. For the Veterans. He’s another ex Republican. He got in a lot of zingers at Trump. After every zinger I’d say, Go Navy!
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: copy paste FAIL. did not even notice, referring to DR vacay I’m sure you realize.
MattF
@Quinerly: Surprised that Panetta was there. His book did a whole lot of score-settling.
Quinerly
@barb2:
Not a fan of Bloomberg but fantastic speech. NYT was reporting last night that he is the first high profile person to publicly and openly question Trump’s sanity. We need more of this.
OzarkHillbilly
@Quinerly: I’m going to miss her.
barb2
@Quinerly:
Go Navy!
liberal
@Big R: my guess is that they plan to thwart all HRCs appointees, even if they lose the Senate. So they wont confirm garland.
tobie
What was so wonderful about the President’s speech was the way he framed this election as a choice between the principle of self-government on which this country was founded and autocracy (“we are not looking to be ruled”).
This convention has inspired me enough that I’ve volunteered to do voter registration in PA. It’s easy to sign up for these things. Just go to HRC’s campaign website and click on the volunteer button.
Quinerly
@MattF:
Shocked me too. I thought it said a lot about him and Obama/Clinton for him to be there. The people booing didn’t have a clue about his background. I thought he was visibly rattled.
Quinerly
@OzarkHillbilly:
Who do you think is going to replace her? Any thoughts?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I am just having trouble seeing how a guy whose being accused of selling out to the Russians is going to get the conservative vote. I mean all these die hard GOP voters minds were set during the Cold War and their going to let the Russians win? Jesus Christ.
OzarkHillbilly
@Quinerly: No idea, but I’d be real happy with Susan Page.
Applejinx
@gene108: Bear in mind that the corporate media is so completely a kept thing serving oligarchs that they are capable of refusing to record a post-convention bump for Hillary no matter how big it is.
Trump suggesting that Russian hacking might be welcomed by the media is a little too painfully true. This is the same media that suppressed coverage of Bernie’s rallies as long as it possibly could, because it didn’t serve their narrative.
I’m seeing a moderate post-convention bump among BOBusters on Facebook: some of them are rattled by Trump turning to Russia for hacking help. There can be a bump that’s not covered by media. It’s about doing what Obama did: doubling down on values and principles and trusting the word to get out through grassroots. I’m doing what I can to help that happen. It is VERY helpful that I can say ‘hey, all the people at the Dem convention were praising Bernie to the moon, up to and including Obama. Looks like triangulation but in 2016 that means a tack LEFT into the general’. That wakes people up, because they don’t believe such a thing is possible, and that forces them to look at the facts and not just their own preconceptions.
Thanks Obama :D
tinare
@Quinerly: He did look uncomfortable and not sure what to do. I was happy when the crowd would cheer loudly in response to something that he said. I thought his speech was good. Wanted to shush the hecklers.
OzarkHillbilly
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
gogol's wife
@tobie:
I loved that moment too. This morning I was wondering if he was in part referencing the “Varangian myth,” the ur-myth of Russian history, that the Russians hated disorder so asked the Varangians to come and rule over them (Wikipedia: “According to the Primary Chronicle, in 862, the Finnic and Slavic tribes in the area of Novgorod rebelled against their Varangian rulers, driving them overseas back to Scandinavia, but they soon started to conflict with each other. The disorder prompted the tribes to invite the Varangians back ‘to come and rule them’ and bring peace to the region.”)
Quinerly
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think it will be Susan Page.
MattF
Note that, according to Rasmussen, Obama’s approval margin has gone from -7 to +1 in less than a week. Hmm.
Kay
Good piece on how Tim Kaine wins w/urban + suburban rather than trying for rural:
It’s funny because clever people were joking about this on Twitter after his speech- how he’s the “nice suburban dad” – he catches you smoking pot in high school but instead of yelling he sits you down for a lecture on teenage brain development :)
They had a whole series of “nice dad” scenarios.
Nina
I’ve seen “Tim Kaine = Ned Flanders” memes popping up, and a bunch of Tim Kaine dad jokes.
Betty Cracker
@tinare: I didn’t want to shush them; I wanted to repeatedly smack them upside their stupid heads with a week-old mackerel. To paraphrase someone on Twitter, it’s like the town is burning down and these assholes are trying to slash the tires on the only firetruck.
Chyron HR
@Quinerly:
So you’re saying that he was in the room where itUSER HAS BEEN BANNED FOREVER FOR THIS POST
Botsplainer, Neoliberal Corporatist Shill
@gogol’s wife:
I do love me some Primary Chronicle.
Kay
@Nina:
They were very funny. “He comes downstairs at his kid’s sleepover to ask everyone to “really listen” to these great jazz albums he has”
MattF
Dan Drezner explains why he would not agree to work for a Trump administration.
Bill E Pilgrim
Footage found of Russians caught in the act coaching the Trump campaign
barb2
@Quinerly:
The booing was vile. This election isn’t a game. One of the reason Panetta was there was the issue of treason by Trump. Asking or telling Putin to hack Hillary’s email. The Bernie bots are as self centered as Sanders.
Josh Marshall at TPM explains why the booing was dead wrong:
No more being nice to these creeps. Bernie’s campaign was unethical, he created some monsters.
Trump is out of control and dangerous. We have had National security experts warning us about Trump’s Russian ties. Secretary of State Albright warned of Trump’s links to Putin. Tonight even more – yet the booing idiots had to ignore the real danger – Trump.
The actions of the Bern bots is on Sanders.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: This is for you, Betty: The Fish Slapping Dance.
gogol's wife
@barb2:
Absolutely.
gogol's wife
@Chyron HR:
lol
When are they going to have the big Hamilton production number? It has to be tonight, right????
OzarkHillbilly
This actually made me laugh out loud:
Well, that’s one way of putting it.
hovercraft
@Karen S.:
Great post.
Major Major Major Major
@?BillinGlendaleCA: “Economics. They call it the dismal science. Well, they’re half right.”
–me
Naw, but I love y’all.
D58826
Michelle in 2024
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-convention-speech-tonight-promises-to-be-all-about-hillary-clinton/2016/07/27/9cd34a54-542d-11e6-bbf5-957ad17b4385_story.html
JosieJ (not Josie)
@Karen S.:
My dad grew up in Missouri, too, and after surviving the Depression and Jim Crow, he was so excited to vote for Obama. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite make it to Election Day–he died that August. My stepmom carried his picture into the voting booth when she voted for Obama.
NickM
@debbie: I heard that and was so disgusted I could have punched someone. What a traitorous asshole.
Quinerly
@barb2:
Great post. I have been a big fan of TPM for years. You really don’t want to get me started about how I feel about Saint Bernie. I think he purposely tried to divide our party. In short….I loathe him.
Gin & Tonic
@MattF: I don’t read Drezner much (at all, probably) and don’t know what he stands for, but see what’s telling about the way he writes this sentence:
Quinerly
@Chyron HR:
I have been a lurker for 10 plus years. Only recently have been commenting. I have no idea what you are talking about.
OzarkHillbilly
@Gin & Tonic: Evidence lacking on Ryan.
Poopyman
@barb2: The idiots booing last night were either useful idiot anarchists or straight up ratfuckers on Roger Stone’s payroll. They weren’t Democrats. And Bernie didn’t create them, but he swept them up and carried them like an STD to the convention.
They shouldn’t be allowed in that hall tonight. Period.
Central Planning
@OzarkHillbilly: Because they died earlier than average, or are having a cocoon-like life?
tobie
@gogol’s wife: Love this blog. Always learning things like the “Varangian myth.” Thanks for the reference!
James E Powell
I have the impression that nearly all of the reviews of Hillary’s speech tonight are already written.
gogol's wife
@Quinerly:
It’s a reference to the obsessive Hamilton quoting of Hamilfans.
gogol's wife
@Poopyman:
Is there any way to exclude them? I was so embarrassed when they were chanting during the admiral’s speech, and Panetta’s, and even Obama’s.
Major Major Major Major
@D58826:
Oddly enough, showing somebody that their main point is based on a lie usually makes them double down. Brains are weird. And we’re a little too focused on truth-telling ourselves, to be honest. It’s fine for journalists to focus on the truth but Republicans are masters of slime and invective, which is one of the reasons they’re so effective at getting elected–which is to say, effective at all, when you consider how repugnant their policies are. Our politicians, at least the lesser apparatchiks, need to be better at this. Kevin Drum calls it the “hack gap”.
It doesn’t matter how many times journalists say Hillary is honest, because Hillary is dishonest. etc. EDIT: See also @James E Powell above:
Gin & Tonic
@James E Powell: Everyone will stake out their usual positions. Like this hed on a Salon piece by Amanda Marcotte: “Obama’s DNC letdown: The president needed to hit it out of the park, but he surprisingly fell short.” Same old same old.
Quinerly
@gogol’s wife:
Thank you.
Jeffro
@D58826:
Yup. And there are going to be a lot more Rs, R women especially, who just won’t be able to bring themselves to vote for the Cheeto, and/or will begin to see Clinton as Obama’s third term.
Fired Up! Ready to GO! Don’t Boo, VOTE!! And best of all: “We OWN the finish line!” =)
Kay
@Poopyman:
Delegates are generally “party regulars”- we caucus to elect ours and I was part of it and although the Obama delegates were “the insurgents” (Clinton was the favorite in Ohio) they were not just “Democrats”, they were active Democrats before they were delegates. It’s just really tough to have people who say they have rejected an organization at an organization event. They’re “opposed” to the thing they’re supposedly participating in. It’s the same kind of dilemma Tea Party House Republicans have- they can’t be part of that organization or govern because their whole reason for being is to oppose it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Central Planning: The early astronauts were all well known for their hell raising ways brought into sharp focus by their Boy Scout compatriots John Glenn and Neil Armstrong.
MattF
CNN needs to raise its game in commentary (via Twitter):
Jeffro
A little OT but it occurred to me: any party with half a brain…or let’s just say, any party NOT run by Reince Priebus…would have, should have insisted that any candidate planning to run for higher office (any higher office, not just prez) under its banner MUST release X years’ worth of tax returns. Not summaries, returns.
If this is not a DNC requirement going forward, it sure better be. RNC, hey, do what you want but in my best concern-troll advice, you really ought to make it your requirement too.
Karen S.
@JosieJ (not Josie): Sweet that your stepmom carried your late father’s picture into the voting booth with her when she voted for Obama. My dad grew up in New Madrid. He has some horrific stories about what it was like to be black there when he was growing up, and he hasn’t told me all of them. I doubt he will because he and my mom made a conscious decision not to tell me and my brothers all the stories about their time during Jim Crow. They felt to do so would make us “unduly biased” against white people.
Jeffro
@James E Powell:
Unfortunately, I think you’re right.
As tightly choreographed as this convention has been, my hope is that Clinton references the best lines of all the previous speeches – “they go low, we go high”, “we own the finish line”, and so on. That’s really all she needs to do (other than keep it short, and also to have all these other big D hitters come out on stage at the end – great optics compared to sore loser loner Trump!)
MattF
@Jeffro: Actually, I’m thinking that releasing your tax returns should be a requirement for getting the pre-election intel briefings. It’s quite reasonable, given the requirements for security clearances, and every other recent Presidential candidate would have qualified.
FlipYrWhig
@Gin & Tonic: Marcotte is usually better than that. I’m not giving Salon the clicks, though. Does it follow one of the Salon templates, like “The thing you probably liked before thinking about it was actually (racist | homophobic | misogynist | transphobic) and here’s why”?
dr. bloor
@MattF: I’m going to guess that the relevant security agencies have had a peek at The Donald’s returns, even if he decides not to make them public.
Betty Cracker
@Gin & Tonic: She seriously wrote that? I’m not her biggest fan by any stretch, but I don’t see how a sentient (non-Republican — but I repeat myself!) human being could have watched that speech and arrived at that conclusion.
MattF
@FlipYrWhig: I’ve gotten very tired of contrarian takes on just about everything. How about some informed analysis? Please?
hovercraft
Good Morning. Last night was an exceptional night to be a democrat, and an American.
Barack Obama’s speech was amazing, the others were very good too, but there is only one person who can bring it like Obama can. There’s a reason that the republicans spent eight years trying to dismiss him as a good speech reader, and an empty suit. They were trying to minimize has extraordinary ability to move people with his oratorical gifts. After seeing Michelle speech on Monday night, he stayed up until 3.30 am re-writing his speech to bring it up to her level, and boy was it worth it. He makes me proud of my country and grateful to it for producing such an incredible man, and for electing him. I am grateful every day that he is my president. But the two things I am most grateful for are that first he became president soon enough for many of the people who were the heart and soul of the civil rights movement to witnesses to his election and his extraordinary ability in their lifetimes, they fought for and bled for this moment and they got to see it. Secondly for every child growing up in this country seeing this man and his family in the White House, provides them the inspiration to know that they too can do anything they want to, that race, creed, income bracket are not barriers to what you can achieve with hard work and a good education. He did that, we did that. I am proud that I was a very tiny part of getting him there, I gave money and volunteered to help get him elected. There are millions of voters like me who had voted in the past, but never gotten involved, until this community organizer spoke to us and implored us to take charge of our future and our country, and we did. This as much as anything else is his legacy, the millions of people who got involved in politics for the first time, and will stay involved for the rest of our lives. He built that, we built that.
I don’t want this to end, I love my president, he’s is a good and decent man, and we’ve been so lucky to have him. The Obama’s have earned the right to have their lives back, but we will miss them. Having them in our lives everyday has been a true blessing in good and bad times, and for that I will always be grateful.
MattF
@dr. bloor: I think you have to actually explicitly sign away your right to privacy wrt the IRS to get a clearance.
hovercraft
Good Morning. Last night was an exceptional night to be a democrat, and an American.
Barack Obama’s speech was amazing, the others were very good too, but there is only one person who can bring it like Obama can. There’s a reason that the republicans spent eight years trying to dismiss him as a good speech reader, and an empty suit. They were trying to minimize has extraordinary ability to move people with his oratorical gifts. After seeing Michelle speech on Monday night, he stayed up until 3.30 am re-writing his speech to bring it up to her level, and boy was it worth it. He makes me proud of my country and grateful to it for producing such an incredible man, and for electing him. I am grateful every day that he is my president. But the two things I am most grateful for are that first he became president soon enough for many of the people who were the heart and soul of the civil rights movement to witnesses to his election and his extraordinary ability in their lifetimes, they fought for and bled for this moment and they got to see it. Secondly for every child growing up in this country seeing this man and his family in the White House, provides them the inspiration to know that they too can do anything they want to, that race, creed, income bracket are not barriers to what you can achieve with hard work and a good education. He did that, we did that. I am proud that I was a very tiny part of getting him there, I gave money and volunteered to help get him elected. There are millions of voters like me who had voted in the past, but never gotten involved, until this community organizer spoke to us and implored us to take charge of our future and our country, and we did. This as much as anything else is his legacy, the millions of people who got involved in politics for the first time, and will stay involved for the rest of our lives. He built that, we built that.
I don’t want this to end, I love my president, he’s is a good and decent man, and we’ve been so lucky to have him. The Obama’s have earned the right to have their lives back, but we will miss them. Having them in our lives everyday has been a true blessing in good and bad times, and for that I will always be grateful.
Mnemosyne
@Applejinx:
As we were saying last night, Republicans didn’t realize until last night that while they were desperately trying to prevent Obama from triangulating on legislation, he did an end run around them and triangulated patriotism. All of that Reaganesque optimism and greatest country in the world stuff? We own that now.
And the best part is, they only just figured it out:
Major Major Major Major
@dr. bloor: what level of background check do they do before you get briefings? It must be a lower threshold than they do to hire you as an analyst. Trump would never have even been let in the interview room by that standard.
Poopyman
@Kay: The impression I got from what I’ve read about the caucus states is that the delegates were selected at the caucus, and for those states where the caucus went for sanders, I would expect there to be plenty of opportunity to for the caucus-goers to choose whomever, party regulars be damned. Would that be incorrect?
ETA: And these guys came (exclusively?) from the West Coast states, not Ohio, IIRC.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: I said last night that I was getting a feeling that Bernie Sanders was starting to think of his campaign as a sort of Working Families / “fusion” sort of effort that could withhold support from Democrats if they weren’t satisfied. It would partially explain the dustup the other day (which had upset me greatly) about Sanders’s intention to go back to being an independent in the Senate: he’s trying to activate a group of people _not_ to be Democrats for the long haul but to link up with Democrats on a case by case basis. You’re the organizer/joiner/ground-game person, though — what do you think of that take?
Jeffro
Every time I think of last night’s speeches I think of an artillery bombardment…from the retired admiral with “Trump’s not fit to shine John McCain’s shoes” to Bloomberg questioning Trump’s sanity to Uncle Joe laying. it. OUT. and on and on and on.
I mean seriously, I can hear howitzers still ringing in my ears…
OzarkHillbilly
@MattF: Jeebus.
Poopyman
@MattF: Yep, otherwise that would be highly illegal. And believe it or not, intelligence community folks have a real desire to stay out of jail.
D58826
@MattF: from the article
My bolds.
I’m reminded of the old cliche the only thing that allows evil to flourish is when good men remain silent. They can’t quietly vote for Hillary. They have to come out and say so in public. The risks are to great of a Trump presidency.
Punchy
@MattF: Please tell me that’s snark. Please
Hoodie
@Betty Cracker: That review seemed to be an inartful attempt at expectations management, i.e., don’t characterize Obama’s speech as great (it was) because then Hillary really will never be able to top it. That’s kind of silly, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because the usual suspects will put Hillary’s speech in their little boxes long before it’s delivered. Hillary’s main goal is to make the base happy with the choice and to simply show that she’s a legitimate heir to the Obama legacy, which she is. Last night showed that there are plenty of Dems who can do that because they’re all part of the “we” of “yes we can” and, in that sense, Obama’s speech primarily was advocacy for the Democratic Party with Hillary as an exemplar. It was secondarily an invitation to Republicans to reform their party, hence the shoutouts to Roosevelt and Reagan. A think some of the GOPers got that.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@FlipYrWhig: Don’t know what Kay thinks, but that’s been Bernie’s m. o. forever. That’s why he caucuses with Democrats, but runs as an Independent. I wouldn’t expect anything else. The mystery to me is why Das was okay with him running in the Democratic Primaries. Did she expect anything else than what happened?
Kay
@Poopyman:
I don’t know- Ohio has a primary. We caucus for delegates and it’s really pretty time-intensive, which may self-select for Party people. I first caucused at a state convention and then went on to a congressional district caucus. I helped a friend caucus as a Clinton delegate this year but she lost. To win you have to bring your own people, so naturally you would need to know some local, active Democrats because you’re asking them to drive 40 miles and sit around for 5 hours on a weeknight. I would think it tends to self-select for people who consider themselves part of the organization. I think one of the reasons the RNC “low energy” (a lot of empty seats and I heard it was dull- we had a county commissioner go as an alternate and he left early) was because most of the delegates AREN’T Trump-type people. They’re Party Republicans. They want a REPUBLICAN convention, not a Trump show. The same is true for Democrats. They’re not there for the Bernie show.
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: I haven’t played the ground game in a while, but that sounds about right.
Poopyman
Yesterday in an email from clearancejobs.com there was a relevant article. I don’t know whether others can access that link, so here are the first 2 graphs:
For the record, I believe that Trump would have a much bigger problem getting the clearance than Clinton for a variety of pretty obvious reasons, and the fact that prior mishandling of classified info is not a de facto disqualifier, but is left to the discretion of the adjudicating agency.
D58826
@Mnemosyne: There was a response to that tweet from another Goper – he said no the GOP gave it away.
OzarkHillbilly
@FlipYrWhig:
My take was just: “Sorry guys, you’re on your own now.”
hovercraft
@Betty Cracker:
Seconded.
FlipYrWhig
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
I think if Sanders had run as an independent we’d be in a world of hurt right now, though, and I bet Debbie Wasserman Schultz et al. thought the same thing. There’d be no way for him to ever stand down. He’d Eliot Cutler the whole election, or he’d push the Clinton campaign _to the right_ to make up for lost votes on the left. I’m not impressed with Bernie Sanders’s apparent approach to politics, but even he has to know that would be disastrous.
Major Major Major Major
@Poopyman: that’s grand, thanks! ? I shared it. Just what I was looking for.
hovercraft
@Gin & Tonic:
I don’t know what speech she watched.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t get that at all. Bernie Sanders looks uncomfortable to me, like he’s miserable. He’s not stupid. He can call himself whatever he wants. We have a 2 party system. He knows that. The whole “independent” thing was always a cost-free political stance. Now it might come with a cost.
Last night to me was about the organization- it was all in for the team. Party regulars will be energized by that because they are fundamentally people who join organizations. I think he feels isolated. The room itself has a powerful effect. It’s about coalescing. Liberals are always challenging me on whether I’m on the team but the truth is I joined an organization. I don’t think “team player” is an insult. I consider myself a good team player. I know that’s uncool to say but that is actually how I am. I’m not at all ashamed of it. I’d rather work with me than them. They’re a giant pain in the ass to work with. It’s okay when they’re not the majority, because the much-maligned “team players” put up with all their bullshit, but if it was 100% mavericks it would be a nightmare.
Mnemosyne
@gogol’s wife:
I vote for either a solo appearance by Chris Jackson or Leslie Odom Jr and the cast singing, “Wait For It.”
FlipYrWhig
@OzarkHillbilly: The thing that made me fly off the handle was that there had JUST been an article by Matt Yglesias talking about how the Sanders campaign was such a healthy development because it pulled all these new people into the Democratic fold to stay and work. And then Sanders himself decided not to stay and work within the Democratic fold. And then pockets of his supporters started acting up _at_ the convention, and a lot of his supporters online started to vent about how the Democrats were being so mean by wanting the convention-goers to shut the fuck up, and it all fit together, and I didn’t like any of it. So one theory is that he’s basically a troll leading a campaign of trolls. But another theory might be the “fusion” sort of thing I tried to outline earlier. And I hope it’s that.
aimai
@Poopyman: That critique of Hillary is so, so, so, very dumb.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
IIRC, science shows that the best way to counteract someone who’s repeating a lie is not to tell them the truth, but to ask them to explain the lie. Many times, they’ll talk themselves out of it, because trying to explain (for example) why Hillary Clinton is personally responsible for Benghazi makes no sense when you try to explain it to someone else.
ETA: The Snopes, Factcheck, etc. rebuttals would not be for the original person promulgating the lie, but for any lurkers who aren’t sure who’s telling the truth and need to see the other side.
aimai
@FlipYrWhig: I think this is absolutely correct. But I think it is going to lead to endless bitchery and fuckery over the next four years. Because Bernie is no Barack Obama and he’s not much of an organizer. And neither are his fans. So they are going to run with the attacks and the whining and dissapointment and be completely unable to muster actual voters. They will play the spoiler, when they can (or threaten to) but they will bring nothing to the table organizationally, in terms of GOTV, or in terms of useable ideas. And every time anyone points out to them that certain things are impossible absent total Democratic control over both houses of congress they will wail and beat their breasts about how “if only” the Democrats had done something different they would be in a position to just wreak their will on the 48 percent of the country that votes Republican and puts republicans into office. Their proximal enemy will always be the Democrats,a nd not the Republicans. So they will never, ever, put in the work to defeat actual sitting Republicans.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay:
I think that’s just his resting expression. JK. But you’re right that he doesn’t look like he’s beaming with pride, which works against the idea that it’s all a carefully created plan. Still, I’d have preferred it if the endgame of the Sanders campaign was to say “everyone who was energized by Bernie Sanders, you’re Democrats now, so go forth and work to remake the party in your image.” Instead it seems to be more like the Bloomberg pitch: in THIS election, suck it up and vote for Hillary Clinton, and then, whatever, political revolution, vote, tweet, something, hey, that’s your business.
Dadadadadadada
@Chyron HR: Never goin be president now. One less thing to worry about, one less thing to worry about.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
To give you an example. During the Issue 2 fight in Ohio (the anti-labor law) my friend Dolores who is a Lefty wanted to bring Occupy into it, as separate issues and people. I don’t actually have any institutional power in the county Party but I asked her not to. The county Party had been working with an AFL-CIO organizer and he was very good and focused so we were just following his lead. The idea was “focus”- ONE issue. She got furious w/me because I was “following”. Yup. That’s what I was doing. We let him lead. I don’t think that’s a shameful thing or a lack of character. It’s an ordinary decision. She was completely disarmed and confused when I told her “that’s exactly what we’re doing! yay! you get it now!” To her that’s something to deny. She sees this thing as …a bunch of leaders? I don’t know.
Mnemosyne
@MattF:
Agreed. Knee-jerk contrarianism is just as lazy as knee-jerk agreement.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: OK, good point about the Fact Check stuff. Snopes is good for urban legends too, which are less impervious to reason than politics.
I guess in my experience most of the people *who I encounter* aren’t receptive to facts because the thing they’re lying about is built on lies and it’s more or less lies all the way down. The ones on the left who don’t like Hillary think Obama was just as bad as Bush, deep down, and this is all based on that worldview. So when you ask them to explain it, “ok, well even if she didn’t do whatever, she’s still a tool of the military industrial/prison industrial/big pharma/Israel/whatever lobby and they’re evil.” From the right, I don’t run into those people much but it seems just as impervious. Libertarians are just assholes though.
Mnemosyne
@hovercraft:
I got chills every time I saw an African-American in their 70s or older in the audience, because I could see from their expressions that while they had dreamed that the day would come that the country would have a black president, they never dared to dream that he would be one as great as Obama is. Seriously, for me, it’s Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Obama, not necessarily in that order, and I’m white.
D58826
@Kay: Given that it is Brteitbart a grain of salt is in order. But they are quoting a number of Bernie folks about how badly they were treated by the Clinton people. That it was the mist corrupt convention they ever saw. One guy complained that 400 Bernie volunteers were replaced by 400 Clinton volunteers and the Bernie volunteers were not allowed on the convention floor. They were seated up in the nosebleed section. AH Hillary won. its her convention not Bernie’s. I’m not sure how the convention mechanics work but are volunteers allowed on the convention floor? Or is that reserved for delegates?. Another complained about how the roll call was conducted. They wanted the super delegates to be single out to show that Hillary didn’t really win. But everything I’ve read says that the roll call process was worked out between Bernie and Hillary. Bernie agreed to it. They didn’t get a chance to speak even though most of the Monday speakers were Bernie supporters. For the losing candidate Bernie had a very big impact on the convention.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: it’s lazier. With agreement you have to take the additional step of picking who to agree with.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@aimai: But—“Both sides! “
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: I’d add Teddy Roosevelt into my personal pantheon, which is why I almost screamed last night when PBO name-dropped him to invoke the image of Clinton as social justice warrior: it was like, “take THAT, Republicans – one of YOUR OWN practically INVENTED the rhetoric of political leader as social justice warrior!”
Great speech, great man, great President,
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
This may be overly generous but I think there is a kind of echo chamber w/in campaigns and candidates can get sucked in. This happens here with our House candidates. They believe they will win. They start out knowing the R/D breakdown (they will most likely lose) and by the end they are telling me about yard signs and how there will be an upset. I think Bernie Sanders is coming off that adreniline jag, except it’s national so X100000 our House candidates.. I think it’s MAYBE why Obama and Clinton appear more generous to him than we would expect. They’ve been in that- what Obama calls “the wild ride”. Obama said that about Palin- that she was on the “wild ride”. He understands it.
aimai
@D58826: The most annoying charge by the Bernie people is that HIllary’s people (and the online supporters) were “sore winners.” Jesus fucking christ these asssholes demanded everything up to and including the actual nomination even though they lost. There is a god damned diary up at Kos describing Bernie as the “real winner” of the entire primary process. There wasn’t even a big victory celebration front page diary about Hillary at Kos. The online community of women supporters of Hillary were told to shut up and not celebrate at all for months–literally months–for fear that the berniebots would get their little feelings hurt and, once they did, would act like assholes and refuse to vote for the nominee at the convention or afterwards. And lo and behold despite the most extensive, sophisticated, hand holding process of all time they are still bitching and moaning about their supposed treatment. When I saw the morons with tape over their mouths, and heard the ones (presumably not taped) heckling our speakers, I almost burst a gasket.
Kay
@D58826:
There are various levels of credentials and electeds and delegates and media have the most access. This is horrible but I don’t remember any volunteers :)
Obviously I wasn’t very gracious to them for their help. I didn’t even notice them. We were busy celebrity-spotting, frankly. I was riven by how incredibly thin women on cable have to be (I assume they have to be- they look starved). The men look pretty well-fed. They’re allowed to eat, I notice. The women are so thin their heads look too big for their bodies. It made me sad.
Emma
@D58826: As far as I saw, the roll call was conducted as every roll call had been conducted since I’ve been watching conventions. Still, I wasn’t really politically obsessive until recently. Anyone else?
But in general, all I can say is if their request was “to show Hillary didn’t win,” they’re have jumped into the lake of denial and nothing anyone can do will make them resurface.
Kathleen
@SFAW: Just about every delegate I heard NPR talk to was African-American. I got the vibe that NPR was bound and determined to disabuse us of any notion that Rethugs are not racist.
dmsilev
@D58826: The roll call was by state. “Arizona casts A votes for Clinton and B votes for Sanders”, etc. You have to be actively looking for a grievance to take offense at that. And yes, there certainly was that faction of Sanders bitter-enders (someone over at LG&M proposed the term dinglebernies because of the way they’re now hanging around smelling up the place…) that were and are actively looking for a grievance.
Fuck, one of them even tried to heckle Obama last night.
Gelfling 545
@Mnemosyne:
It’s only stuff they put out with the trash.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Poopyman: You are correct in that it is not a “de facto DQ”, but ignore the reality that, in real life, for folks like you or I, you’re not getting a clearance with a prior reportable finding of mishandling classified material. Nobody’s going to sign off on that.
A guy with Trump’s credit history would be one of the very rare cases where I could say to a guy “don’t even bother, you can’t pass” and not hire him, and not have to worry about defending that in the inevitable lawsuit. He could not be given a clearance – unless elected president, in which case he gets full access automatically, as the president decides what is classified and what is not.
They sure go easy on the DUI folks, though.
Iowa Old Lady
@Major Major Major Major: I know someone whose subordinates did some of the security checks on Obama’s staff when he entered the WH. I asked this person if members of congress who were appointed to commitees like the intelligence committee had to pass a security check. This person said more likely the intelligence people would suggest to congressional leadership that the appointment was a bad idea. I don’t know how accurate that is, because this person was just guessing on that. But intelligence folks hesitate to thwart someone who’s duly elected because democracy and all that.
Poopyman
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Written by a journalist(?) who managed to land a job at a job search website. No clearance required, obvs.
Kathleen
@Aimai: I loved her. How fitting that she was chosen to intro the Prrsident. How cool is that!
dogwood
Time will tell in terms of the effect Bernie has had on the party. But as I’ve said before, 56%. of his voters self-identified as moderates. Whithout those voters Bernie would have never gotten very far. Personal anecdotes are nothing more than impressions, but over the last 3 days I’ve received 3 phone calls and 3 texts from Bernie voters who are downright remorseful that they voted for him. This heckling and booing has embarrassed the shit out of them. So if Bernie thinks his 13 million voters are all -in to sign up for round 2 of the revolution, he might be surprised to find out it wasn’t all about that for everyone. As one of my friends said in a text “When I see Nina Turner, and all those delegates being interviewed on tv, and when I hear them heckling and booing people I respect, I have to take some responsibility. My vote helped to enable that. Never again!”
dmsilev
@Mnemosyne: Rich Lowry apparently thinks that history started with Reagan. ‘Shining City Upon a Hill’ is an analogy that’ been used by people such as John F Kennedy and Mario Cuomo, as well as Sanctus Ronaldus.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@FlipYrWhig: I understand about not wanting Bernie to run as an Independent. Bernie’s inclusion did pull the party slightly to the left (I think). To the extent that Bernie had a bunch of
loonsfollowers who were not familiar with Democratic Party rules and procedures, and who were never willing to learn, plus a small noisy contingent of, well, assholes who were more interested in tearing the Party apart than in selecting any nominee made his inclusion problematic. Fortunately, the Republicans this year had the same problem with Trump. Our party is strong enough to resist the influence of the BoBs; the traditional Republican party has been destroyed by the Koch and the Tea Party dunderheads.Major Major Major Major
A person who is rapidly moving out of the “otherwise intelligent” column just posted this on FB.
Hoodie
@aimai: Bernie is a guy who gave out a bunch of free passes to the DNC on the street corner, and inevitably some assholes showed up among the group. However, they didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory, so it would be interesting to know how many people initially drawn in by Bernie stayed because the real show was way better than the what Bernie and his friends delivered. My hunch it will turn out a net positive for Clinton and the Democratic Party. They handled Bernie pretty well, which may be why he seemed so glum.
hovercraft
@Mnemosyne: @Miss Bianca:
That’s part of is greatness, that he means it when he says that we are all one people, and not to demonize the other side. He is willing to give credit to everyone’s contributions, even though almost no one on the other side gives him credit for anything. That’s why he’s a better person than me, I’d be inclined to say you fought me at every turn and I beat you at every turn. But that’s me.
The faces of older black people with tears running down their faces always gets to me, every time. There is one person I’m sad never got to see him elected, Madelyn Dunham, his grandmother who died the day before he was elected. I remember bawling like a baby as he stood in front of that massive crowd in Virginia the night before the election day wishing that she could have held on just a little longer.
dmsilev
@dogwood: A large fraction of Sanders’ voters were and are committed Democrats who were going to back the eventual winner of the primaries no matter which way it came out. The Bernie-or-Bust crew was only something like 1/10 of his support, and that number is only going to shrink over the next three months. Some of them will vote for Clinton. Some, the hard-core Paulites and so forth, might go 3rd party. And some just plain won’t vote.
Miss Bianca
@dmsilev: In fact, the origins of the phrase “shining city on a hill” are Biblical – the Sermon on the Mount, no less – and entered American political consciousness via the Puritans – John Winthrop, to be precise, in 1630. So for Rich Lowry to be meeping about “they stole that from us!”…uh, no, asshole. Just no.
Jeffro
I don’t care about whether Trump or Clinton would be able to get a security clearance of whatever type, or about Bernie’s sad face…I just want to revel in LAST NIGHT’S BOMBARDMENT!! An EPIC SHELLING FOR THE AGES!!!
I’m serious! (hey and if it makes me that much more fired up to register voters and what not, y’all can just deal with it…;)
scav
@dmsilev: What’s more, they’re not apparently really clear on recent events either. “They’re trying to take all our stuff” after Jon Stewart’s “You don’t own patriotism.”?
gwangung
@Patricia Kayden:
Pretty sure Melinda is Dem….but their donation record is split, with a lean to the Dem side; and they support the Dem Senators.
Jeffro
@Jeffro: Seriously! Go check out the HuffPo homepage: “DNC BEATDOWN!” So. Happy.
Stan
“Bernie Sanders looks uncomfortable to me, like he’s miserable.” Agreed, he looked awful.
But – the guy is a human being. He just poured a year of his life into an election, exceeded expectations, and got beat. That will really chap anyone’s ass. It takes a long time to recover from that shit.
That said, he should have declared his intent to stay in the party.
germy
@dmsilev:
I saw that and it pissed me off. I couldn’t make out what the heckler was yelling. Obama kept going and thankfully someone apparently stuck a chew toy in the heckler’s mouth.
Does anyone know what the heckler was shouting?
Feebog
@Poopyman:
The usual meaning of the word reprimand does not comport with what the FBI Director did in his press conference. Basically, he lied about what they found in the emails. If you read his sworn testimony before congress, he admitted that none of the emails were marked classified. One had a (c) in front of some of the paragraphs, which he said meant the information was “confidential”, but even that email was not marked “classified”.
Miss Bianca
@Hoodie: I’m also willing to give Bernie Sanders the benefit of the doubt, as someone who is constantly accused of Resting Bitch Face – looking constipated may just *be* his resting expression – my impression whenever they cut to him was that he seemed pretty satisfied with the shout-outs he got. I don’t think he’s going to be a problem. Now, some of his followers – who took all the “corruption” stuff a little too much to heart – I kind of want to slap with a brick, but Sen. Sanders has done a bit to redeem himself in my eyes.
? Martin
Let’s be clear about something regarding Republicans praising Obama’s speech. He didn’t say anything last night he hasn’t been saying since 2004, but they clearly heard something different. The only difference is that as of this week, Obama is no longer the enemy – either Clinton or Trump are (depending on which camp they’re in) and with the ‘enemy’ label off of him, they could finally listen to what he’s been saying for years.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
I think Bernie himself has behaved badly, and not because he couldn’t wrangle his supporters. Concession to the winner is part of competing. He owed her that, and he paid up so reluctantly that it was worse than ot conceding when he finally did it. I also think it was shitty and small to use the word ‘selected’ rather than elected. Words have meaning. I think it was deliberate and it’s just so fucking grudging and hedged. Watching him the last 3 months convinced me he would have been a terrible leader, of anything. I never thought he could win the primary and I thought he would lose the general too so I didn’t look at him as potential “leader” but once he had a shot at it he came up short, IMO.
Technocrat
@Major Major Major Major:
The sad thing is that a lot of those people aren’t lying. They have come to fairly rational conclusions based on the information presented to them. One of the more interesting things about the liberal/conservative blog divide is how they pull from the same pool of news stories, but filter them very differently.
singfoom
@Miss Bianca:
It’s the same thing as “Make America Great Again”. These things, they aren’t yours, they belong to the entire country. Lowry isn’t always an ass, he can actually make salient points and does so on Left,Right and Center where he’s become the normal Right spokesperson on the show.
But he suffers from the same delusion that drives a lot of Trump supporters, that there’s this “Real America” out there that has to be “taken back”. Was so happy to hear Obama repudiate that so effectively and succinctly last night.
hovercraft
@dmsilev:
To quote the Usual Suspects,”the Greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” This is what republicans have done over the last 40 years, pretend that history begins with Reagan, and that the Southern strategy was not the biggest factor in the reversal of their fortunes. They’ve used race and love of country as cudgels to win elections, while denying it the whole time. Well now their nominee has dragged all of their race baiting out into the open, and they are shocked just shocked by it.
ruemara
@OzarkHillbilly: That’s his M.O. since forever. I don’t know why such lofty organizing dreams are being conferred on someone who has shown antipathy for organizing, long term planning and even basic strategy. The Bernie in your heart is not the man.
singfoom
@? Martin: I’d say it’s that and also the high contrast of Obama’s optimism and hope for the future / American people vs. Trump’s dystopian hellscape plagued by roaming immigrant criminals. Since the RNC was a giant resentment fest, when people hear suggestions of solutions and actual optimism, it’s normal for many to gravitate to the more optimistic vision. YMMV
Matt McIrvin
@singfoom: They also specifically associate that optimistic vision of healing with Ronald Reagan. Both Carter in 1980 and Mondale in ’84 were people whose public image was that they were dour, weak, scolding people who told you that America was in terrible shape. They tried to pin that on Obama with the “apology tour” nonsense. But after eight years in office, Obama isn’t saying that.
D58826
@dmsilev: Actually goes back to John Winthrop one of the Pilgrims – was a prominent early Puritan minister. He was one of 20,000 who came to America between 1620 and 1640. He clearly laid out the Puritan agenda in his memorable exhortation to the Puritans in 1630. As they prepared to sail out on their voyage to the New World he charged the early colonists with these words,
“….we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill,
(and that) the eyes of all people are upon us..”
dmsilev
@? Martin: Within about 2 days of him leaving office, Republicans are going to start looking back at Obama as “the reasonable one who we could work with”. Also, we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
dmsilev
@D58826: Yeah, I know. The point I was trying to get at, which admittedly I didn’t really make, was that Ronnie Raygun was hardly the first modern American politician to appropriate that phrase.
hovercraft
@Kay:
That my beef with him, Hillary lost by a nose, and was gracious. Bernie was soundly beaten, and yet every single step since his loss has been like drawing teeth, maximum resistance. Losing is tough, I’m sure they both were shattered to get so close but come up short, but she was gracious and mourned privately, he has subjected us all to his pouting and not given one inch that wasn’t begrudgingly conceded. Talk about a sore loser. When someone tells you who they are believe them.
D58826
@Feebog: Remember for all his integrity he was part of the Starr witchcraft in 1996
Kay
@Stan:
Which might be why he’s unsuited to it. I think they have to have more of a capacity to not take it personally. Obama has that, and so do Bill and Hillary Clinton. They have an ability to stand apart and see clearly even though they’re on the “wild ride”.
I watched the documentary about Mitt Romney and he has it too. There’s a portion where he is watching FL returns come in and he expected better numbers. He’s sitting there reading a device, while his chirpy family and campaign people are all “we still got this”. He knows it’s bad.
gogol's wife
@MattF:
A soccer analogy? Even I know that’s wrong!
If you knock it out of the park playing soccer, ur doing it wrong.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: I don’t think he likes having to do the concession thing because he’s been trying to have it both ways: running for the Democratic nomination but not really wanting to be a Democrat or build Democratic organizations because he thinks they’re rotten and corrupt. He tried to crash the gates and make it non-rotten and non-corrupt, and when that failed he reverted to being more of a faction leader who’s willing to ally with the Dems _this time_ and for some concessions, kind of like Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems, but he’s never been that guy — in fact he’s been the opposite of that. It’s like he’s had to have a crash course in some basic principles of teamwork and etiquette that he’s been able to ignore for 40 years, because he’s always been a guy who demands concessions rather than a guy who has to accept that other people can make concessions from him, which he clearly hates doing and wants all sorts of credit for.
gogol's wife
@hovercraft:
Beautiful!
? Martin
@singfoom: But that’s been true for years as well. The GOP has been whinging on about socialism and how Obamacare would destroy jobs and about crime and all that. Trump may be distilling that, but he didn’t invent any of it. And the Democrats have been steadily talking about progress and things getting better. Sure, conventions are where you summarize the argument, but the GOP tone hasn’t gotten any more dire in my view in the last week.
dogwood
@dmsilev:
Of course. But the point is that this talk about how he moved the party to the left isn’t necessarily true. Some of my friends who flirted with the left this time are completely soured and won’t be open to socialism or anything that sounds like that for a long while if ever.
liberal
@ruemara:
Yeah, let’s confer them on the guy who is using Obama for America to stump for the TPP.
Barbara
@singfoom: To me, Reagan’s optimism versus Carter’s too transparent sanctimony probably contributed to his victory. There is a fundamental aspect of human psychology that resists too much negativity, even when it is objectively justified. I believe this was a difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush as well. I don’t know how you sound positive and energized while trying to alarm people about the state of climate change, but Al Gore didn’t do it. I know that he did actually win Florida, but if he had won New Hampshire he would have been president regardless of the outcome in Florida.
Barbara
@liberal: And if Sanders had been a Dem maybe he would have more influence in this department. Independence confers a benefit but also comes with a price tag.
liberal
@? Martin:
I’m extremely critical of Obama (from the left, of course), but when I hear right-wing nutjobs going on about how he’s destroyed America, I don’t even have the vaguest clue WTF they’re talking about.
Job growth has been anemic by the standards of post-war recessions, but not when we restrict to 1990 and after. Crime, though, is way down. I don’t think it actually has much to do with Obama, it’s a much longer-term thing than that, but to talk about crime as though it’s getting worse is hilarious.
liberal
@Barbara: I see the point went right over your head.
FlipYrWhig
@hovercraft: That’s no accident. THAT’s his M.O.: grudging. “Well, if you want me to vote for your bill here are the things I’m going to want to see included, or you can just take a hike, because I’ll be fine either way.” And complaining that everyone else is too concerned with making nicey-nice and raising money. It’s very much in keeping with his Congressional career _even as his supporters describe it_. These kinds of things are what Kropadope and others praised as the basis for his reputation as the “amendment king.” He doesn’t want it to be easy or gracious because ever since coming to Washington he’s had more power being difficult and graceless.
hovercraft
@dmsilev:
Any democrat who is not in a position of power to challenge them is the one they like. In 2007 they were all for the fresh new face, who was clean of the Clinton taint. By 2009 it was bipartisan Sen. Clinton and her husband who was willing to compromise with his accusers. Come January it will be that wonderful Obama who never called them racists, whereas Madame President calls them sexist. In order to insulate themselves from the partisan hack charge they pretend to like some democrat who lacks the power to challenge them. But hey their asses are still hanging out, we see you.
gogol's wife
@aimai:
The misogyny is strong throughout this whole thing.
I have wracked my brain for any memory of any Hillary supporter acting up at the 2008 convention. Nothing comes to mind
Technocrat
@Kay:
After her crushing defeat, Hillary looked radiantly happy nominating Obama. Bernie couldn’t even clap. I get Resting Bitch Face and all that, but at some point every politician, diplomat, negotiator or salesperson needs some level of poker face. I’m not hating on the guy – I feel for him – but I am objectively surprised at how a politician can get to his level wearing their heart on their sleeve.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal:
They mean that there are too many gay people and interracial couples on TV and that too many signs in stores are in Spanish.
liberal
@Barbara: Martin Seligman claims there’s evidence that politicians who sound more optimistic do better.
Trump’s a mixed bag in that regard. There’s the completely fascistic “OUR AMERICA HAS BEEN DESTROYED!!1!” stuff, which is pessimistic, but the insane ramblings about how he’s going to get us a good deal, and it will be “YUGE!” are optimistic (after you filter out the psychotic aspect).
gogol's wife
@dmsilev:
I think a guy named John Winthrop might have something to say about it.
FlipYrWhig
@hovercraft: And for Democrats it tends to be the reverse. “I hate how Democratic President N is such a quisling and appeaser. Say what you will about Democratic President N-1, at least s/he took the fight to the Republicans instead of all this compromising.”
gogol's wife
@Jeffro:
It was a thing of beauty. Admiral, Panetta, Bloomberg, Biden, Kaine, Obama —
just a thing of beauty.
singfoom
@? Martin: Agreed. The right has been going on the whole “country is going to hell in a handbasket” tip for years, back through the 80s to now… Trump didn’t invent it for sure, but his distillation plus the lack of actual ideas other than “I’m the only one who can fix this.” highlights it in such a way that the Republicans who normally ignored that part and focused on the GOP intellectual heavyweights and their policy planks look at Obama and realize what their RNC was missing. That’s my take anyways.
dmsilev
@liberal: Job growth has been weak but steady. It’s taken a long damn time, too long, to recover from the recession (and in large part, we can blame the saboteurs in the GOP for hamstringing the government spending that helped speed the recovery from previous recessions), but we’ve just about gotten there. Standard unemployment is low; the more expansive U-6 measure is steadily dropping as well. No argument on the crime side. Kevin Drum would have us believe that it’s all due to the long-term decline of environmental lead; he makes a convincing case that that’s at least one factor, but there are probably others.
gogol's wife
@Kay:
Having ignored his existence for decades (and he was quite easy to ignore), I now hate him with the fire of a thousand suns.
hovercraft
@FlipYrWhig:
And that was my number two reason for never giving him a serious look, no. one I was with her, the fact that after decades in congress he couldn’t get virtually any of his colleagues to support him was damming.
Joel
@dmsilev: It goes back to 1630 with John Winthrop; the idea is that the actions of the New Englanders would be visible to the entire (western) world. So that they need to lead by example. In keeping with the puritan ideal and also the original Christian intent.
liberal
@dmsilev: The number I’ve seen is 85% of Sanders supporters will vote for Hillary. That’s actually a pretty large fraction.
Major Major Major Major
@dmsilev: the republicans hamstrung the recovery so hard that central bankers–not exactly prone to exuberance–had to invent new ways of printing money to help make up for it.
dmsilev
@gogol’s wife: There were a few PUMAs protesting outside the convention in 2008, but I don’t think there were any actually inside, and the ones that were outside were the targets of near-universal ridicule.
rikyrah
@singfoom:
I hate that ‘ Real America’ bullshyt, which means White people.
Our President said…no, Boo…Real America is ALL OF IT. Deal with it. REAL AMERICA elected me President – TWICE.
I love how our President has taken the GOP Clubs away from them and beat the shyt out of them senselessly with them…
The Foreign Policy club is the one that makes me happiest.
Snatched it from them, and any time they step towards him..
THWACK!!
Get’s me happy everytime :)
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: IIRC that poll result was when the choice was narrowed to Clinton or Trump rather than Clinton, Trump, someone else, or not voting at all.
Miss Bianca
Stumbled on this Handsome Joe and Hillary tweet via LGM and am LMAO.
singfoom
@Barbara: I was not of age during Reagan vs. Carter, I only remember Reagan as an old man who would interrupt primetime TV to lay out a boring speech as a kid. That said, I agree with your point, people want to be optimistic.
As for Gore vs. Bush, I think that’s definitely part of it. Trying to ring the alarm while being optimistic is something I think some people could pull off, but Gore didn’t do it then. Add to that all of the shennanigans in FL with the Brooks Brothers riot (fuck those guys) and boom, W.
? Martin
So two of China’s largest tech assemblers (Foxconn, Pegatron) is investing big in automation, cutting their labor forces by around 80% over the next few years. Foxconn has already cut labor in half at a number of their factories. If they successfully hit that 80% mark, that’ll amount to several million workers eliminated.
Once again, blocking trade deals are not going to solve any of the problems their opponents expect them to solve. It’s not that the US is losing these jobs, they are simply ceasing to be jobs that humans do.
liberal
@Applejinx:
The media’s always sucked. It sucked long before all this corporate concentration (not that I think the concentration is a good thing). Those little small-town papers are typically extremely right-wing and have been as long as I can remember.
Major Major Major Major
@liberal: that figure is probably the most accurate if you’re trying to parse what I think we all want, which is a parallel to 2008. Essentially that number comes by looking at regular and likely voters who support Democrats. So it doesn’t include the greenie come latelys and Paultards (as it shouldn’t) that drag down other numbers.
liberal
@dmsilev: I think the environmental lead hypothesis is very strong.
Re employment, the employment-to-pop ratio isn’t very inspiring. There are all sorts of excuses made like “people are retiring earlier” etc, but in general I don’t think the picture is all that great. Then again, I’m not stupid enough to lay it all on Obama; it’s a trend that really began in 1973.
singfoom
@rikyrah:
I hate that shit too, and you’re right, the “Real America” is code for White People, but I think it’s more specific than that. Not all white people are included in that “Real America”. It’s this bullshit retrograde throwback to a 50s dream that never really existed. If you care about people of other races or orientations, you’re not part of their “Real America”. It’s just another wedge they use to break people up and generate resentment. Same shit as it ever was.
Obama’s speech last night once again shredded their bullshit idea. He’s done it before. I’ll miss him.
Applejinx
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Yes, she expected his message wouldn’t really resonate with anybody because things were more or less stable and getting better.
Boy, did she learn different. Bernie’s run was ALWAYS a DNC trial balloon to sound out what the outskirts of the Democratic electorate was like. They didn’t have to let an Independent run under the Dem banner. They did it to see what would happen, secure in their belief that he was way too left-wing to be any kind of threat.
Wildly successful experiment, and a complete surprise. Thank goodness Hillary can adjust to the new reality. I see upthread a bunch of people who need to relisten to last night’s speeches. Sometimes I despair of our inability to listen to our own goddamned talking points. Srsly, quit talking about purging Bernie and his people when the party leadership are frankly desperate to bring as many as possible on board, and have successfully brought Bernie on board (you think he’s suddenly going to be caucusing with the Republicans? feh!)
dogwood
@Kay:
Every election we have to decide that our opponent in this election is the worst ever. I don’t fall for that. John McCain was a scarier potential president than Mitt Romney to me. And part of that is what you referred to. It’s not all personal to people like Romney. Obama and Mitt are at different ends of the spectrum when it comes to political talent. But they share one quality – even temperament.
liberal
@Technocrat: “Not all Conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are Conservative.”
ruemara
@liberal: hey, I’m sure there’s a white male identity group who cares what you say. Me? I don’t.
Punchy
@? Martin: This doesn’t seem to jibe well with an ever-increasing human population.
liberal
@dogwood:
I think if McCain had won in 2008, we might not be here today, given his advisers’ ties to the Republic of Georgia. I even had a bad vibe about him when he was running against W.
liberal
@ruemara: Good for you, fuckhead. And nice race-baiting by the way, you POS.
billcoop4
@Emma:
Most of the time, as in Cleveland, the home state of the winner passes, and then, when its votes will put the candidate over the top, the home state announces the delegate vote total. New York voted in alpha order at the DNC; I forget which state which put Hillary over the 2383 (or w/e) she needed–but it was after NY. Vermont was allowed to pass to complete the total, and then Sen. Sanders moved for nomination by acclamation. The Clinton campaign graciously allowed that process as a recognition of the Sanders campaign.
WMC
Soylent Green
I wondered if Bernie’s sour look meant he had finally had his “Bridge on the River Kwai” epiphany (“What have I done?”) and was mortified by all the tawdry heckling his minions were doing. Maybe I am giving him too much credit. Going forward, I still want him to make a sincere effort to admonish his followers not to piss on our allies. We are feeling good now but have a long way to go and need all the help we can get.
Technocrat
@liberal:
If a politician could reliably make jobs, I feel certain he would do so – and win every election for the rest of his life. I’m more inclined to believe that no politician has the first clue how to do it, or else they would.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Kay: “Mitt” was an impressive documentary. I liked him a lot more after it and liked his horrid family even less, which I did not think was possible.
I think his vision of America is seriously at odds with mine and his blithe contempt for those on the wrong end of the economic stick is horrific, but I did not see him as a threat to the existence of the Republic in the same way that Trump, and to a lesser extent McCain, are. He was competent enough for the job and didn’t take setbacks personally, or get wound into a rage about stuff, especially about losing. That’s really important for that kind of job. You’re going to fail. A lot. If you can’t handle that the job will turn you into Nixon or worse. He has the “no drama” genes.
liberal
@singfoom: There’s one sense in which it’s not bullshit. Prior to the early 1970s, people without a college education could make a decent middle-class life for themselves through their labor. Those days are over, and it’s not even clear they’re still on for college-educated people. Not to mention that in the old days you could go to a good state school for next to nothing. Etc. Though I doubt that’s what most of the resentment is about.
ruemara
@liberal: mirror much? Considering your comments? Now learn this lesson, I don’t care about your identity politics.
scav
Another reason for Bernie to keep quiet is having apparently called spirits from the vasty deep, he doesn’t want it made too visible that he’s more the one with the Mickey Mouse ears surrounded by bucket carriers than any Prospero breaking his staff as he rides off into the sunset.
Major Major Major Major
@Punchy: good thing we don’t have one of those.
liberal
@Technocrat: Of course we know how to do it, or at least a reasonable approach—increase government spending. Money is practically free right now, anyone with half a brain in their head knows that the government can print money without damaging the real economy unless we’re up against real resource constraints (which we’re not).
Of course, the Republicans would never let the Dems do it, even if the Dems wanted to do it (many of them don’t).
Believe me, I live in supposedly liberal MA, and the infrastructure here is total shit. There’s lots of work to do.
Kay
@gogol’s wife:
I don’t hate him but I don’t think he would be a good President because he can’t even handle a gracious, orderly concession. The Sanders family member I get a visceral bad vibe from is Jane. I do dislike her. I think she is personally dependent on this kind of Lefty/political view persona in a way that seems grifterish to me. Democrats and liberals have grifters too. They would take over in the same way they’ve taken over the GOP if they weren’t kept in check.
It all probably comes down to if Democrats win- if they win all will be forgiven. If they don’t, it won’t.
liberal
@ruemara: I don’t have any identity politics, you stupid fuck. My politics are to support a just order. TPP isn’t part of a just order. So shove it up your stupid ass.
Matt McIrvin
@liberal:
There’s at least three things going on.
1. People aren’t retiring earlier (it’s the opposite; labor force participation for old people is increasing). But the population is aging into brackets that are more likely to be retired. This has been going on ever since the baby boom stopped producing babies, but:
2. It was masked for decades by women entering the workforce. If you look at the employment/population ratio or labor force participation for men, you find it’s been declining since the 1950s. But it was growing for women, and that effect didn’t saturate until around 2000.
3. There’s a real problem, and you can see the real problem by looking at the other end of the age distribution, at young people. IIRC, their participation rate is way down, even though unemployment is down. That says to me that they’re delaying entering the workforce, and I think a lot of that is not voluntary. Some of them are pissed-off Occupiers and Bernie busters.
liberal
@Kay:
LOL. Do you have any idea how much the Clintons are worth, Kay? Sorry, but you sound like a complete idiot.
Applejinx
@D58826: From what I hear, Bernie got disciplinary, is personally responsible for some of the ‘stepping on toes of berniacs’ incidents, repeatedly went and talked with/begged his delegates and supporters to cool it, and is bitterly ashamed that he wasn’t able to be 100% successful at this aim.
Probably because he went into the thing believing he WAS going to be 100% successful at handling them, because he saw the look on their faces when the sparrow came to say hi to him, and he was like ‘Dang, I’m Atheist Jew Jesus to these people. For sure I can at least use that as political leverage.’
Did he give any hint about returning to being an Independent before he saw that he really didn’t have control after all? He’s not unreasonably concluded his constituency is NOT at all Dem, and has still tried to deliver them to the party at some cost to himself. I’d have liked him to cling to the D label (maybe if you give it time, not that it’ll matter to anybody but him and some dead-enders) but it looks like hasty backpedaling to me.
I would LIKE to see him keep the D and then depend abjectly on Clinton and the D leadership to continue to be nice to him, a show of trust and support that I think would speak volumes to the Clintons. But… well, look at this thread. I can’t blame him for panicking.
MY ‘D’ stays.
D58826
Ok, this is rich. Breitbart is quoting an ‘intelligence source’ that foreign intelligence agencies ‘have it all they are that good ‘. Which probably is true, so that means whither Hillary used a home brewed server or the state department system, foreign intelligence agencies would ‘have it all’. So what is the issue?
Eric U.
@Technocrat: Obama could easily created jobs if the so-called deficit hawk wing of the Democratic party hadn’t limited the size of the stimulus. Of course, that might not have saved the Blue Dogs in 2010, but they were largely responsible for the limits on the stinulus anyway. There are plenty of infrastructure projects that still aren’t being done because of those limits. Replacing public water pipes for one, Flint is one of many places with this problem
singfoom
@liberal:
Those things are true, I agree with you. But while the “Real America” shorthand does conjure up economic prosperity as part of the idea, it’s more about the heterogenity of the culture of the 50s / 60s and a time when non white people and women “knew their place”. It’s part and parcel of the “oppression” of white men by being equal.
The whole 1970s uneducated worker is too detailed and doesn’t contain enough resentment in my opinion to really be part of it. YMMV
Major Major Major Major
@liberal: so all rich people are grifters?
liberal
@Matt McIrvin: Completely agree with all your points. Very good, detailed, and thoughtful. I had the “aging into older brackets” thing way way back in my head, as I read it a few months ago, but didn’t remember it clearly.
I know at least a few people who have postponed retirement because their savings took a shellacking…
SiubhanDuinne
@gogol’s wife:
Winthrop, in his turn, was quoting Scripture. From the Sermon on the Mount (KJV):
ETA: Winthrop’s followers would, of course, have recognized the line instantly as a Biblical reference.
Barbara
@liberal: Maybe you should learn to say what you mean in a way that people can understand. In other words, it’s almost never the reader’s fault.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx:
They’ve successfully brought Bernie Sanders on board… for the moment. He could have stayed enrolled as a Democrat and urged all his people to join the party, get involved in local committees, etc. That would be a perfectly nice endgame of the campaign. Instead, he specifically did not. I think that was a less-than-productive move for the future of liberalism and populism in the Democratic Party. It shows an unwillingness to do all of the things that Kay talks about. If he decides to do something like what people hoped DFA and OFA would be, a grassroots pressure group outside of the Democratic Party that raises its voices for the things Bernie Sanders stands for, I’ll reassess.
Miss Bianca
@scav: awesome collection of images, ma’am! Or that he’s King Lear, raging impotently against “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child/delegate”!
D58826
Ok, this is rich. Breitbart is quoting an ‘intelligence source’ that foreign intelligence agencies ‘have it all they are that good ‘. Which probably is true, so that means whither Hillary used a home brewed server or the state department system, foreign intelligence agencies would ‘have it all’. So what is the issue?@billcoop4:
Kay
@liberal:
Even if you equate the two (I don’t) the total doesn’t matter. Jane Sanders is a big fish in a small pond in Vermont. A state Party grifter in Ohio who builds a career as “the principled liberal activist” isn’t measured by net worth compared to a national party grifter. I got a bad sense from Jane Sanders almost immediately- that was my impression. I thought her dancing around the tax returns was laughable.
singfoom
@SiubhanDuinne: We all know that Jesus stole that line from Ronnie Raygun.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Couldn’t get back in in time to edit my edit. Obviously, Winthrop was the first to use the line with reference to what would become the United States of America, but he was using an extremely well-known and well-understood NT red-letter phrase.
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
Actually, Sanders is doing that. He’s starting two new organizations:
liberal
Shit. We’re doomed. Election is basically over. Trump is now unstoppable.
Applejinx
@ruemara: …sigh
We were a pretty good team up in New Hampshire. Young, committed, predominantly female, no-bullshit people and we got it done.
I know some of the same people got sent off to places like Nevada… it seems like as the movement started to sweep up the fringier folks out West, we simply lost control. Things were already turning ugly in New Hampshire, and it just festered. Maybe there was no way that side of the Party could have been represented without stirring up a thick layer of silt.
Also, it’s always super-awesome when Russian hackers get involved and have to pick false colors to identify themselves under. But of course they were all pretending to be Martin O’Malley people and none of them EVER did bad things claiming to be Bernie’s people, right? ;P
Soylent Green
That would be a really good name for a rock band.
D58826
@billcoop4: The Clinton camp agreed not to have a ruinning total of the vote on the monitors as usually happens. That prevented people from celebrating when Hillary went over the magic number. This allowed Bernie to have the spotlight. Again nothing ‘wrong’ with what was done but does disprove the idea ‘we are being treated badly’ by the Bernie deadenders.
Chyron HR
@liberal:
Yes, because unlike The Chosen One (f/k/a Bernard Sanders) they actually released their tax returns.
Billcoop4
@D58826: Yes? Not sure why i was tagged on your post.
dmsilev
So, apparently Trump’s response to being rhetorically beaten over the head the last couple of days was to send out a fundraising letter telling his supporters not to watch Hillary tonight.
I think he might be sensitive because the DNC has now beaten the RNC in the TV ratings for all of the first three days and Donald can’t bear the thought of losing viewership to Hillary.
Billcoop4
@D58826: Agreed. Although C-SPAN did keep a running total.
dmsilev
@liberal: Too bad that endorsement didn’t come out a couple of weeks ago; Donald could have used an extra speaker at the RNC.
dogwood
@liberal:
This is going to get me in trouble here, but it’s how I felt at the time. I was so concerned about McCain’s cluelessness about the economic meltdown, and his erratic behavior at the time that if you would have put a gun to my head and said the choice was McCain or 4 more years of W. I would have gone with W. And I don’t think I’m wrong about that. There was a story in one of those post election books that exemplifies the danger of McCain. One obscure but good law that Bush got through Congress allowed candidates to submit 100 names of potential hires for security clearance as soon as they accepted the nomination. Before that law they couldn’t start clearing people until they became president-elect. The Bush White House was furious with McCain because while Obama turned those names in the day after Denver, McCain never submitted a single name.
FlipYrWhig
@D58826: There are people whose political identity, and maybe their personal identity, is bound up very tightly with the idea that they are being slighted, wronged, and silenced. Which gives me a flashback to my childhood: my dad would call it a “persecution complex.”
Poopyman
@liberal: And we’re being told that Social Security will run out in the 2030s. Tell me again why it makes good sense to retire now?
The best jobs program may be to simply remove the income cap on the SS tax. More olds will feel freer to retire, and everyone can move up a notch, as is the natural order of things. Well, that and an infrastructure program.
ThresherK (GPad)
From Starbursts Lowry (via.Digby)…
As Daffy Duck would say, the guy has pronoun trouble.
Villago Delenda Est
Donald Drumpf and his supporters must be kicked to the curb and stomped repeatedly…
And Hillary Clinton is just the right woman at the right time to do it!
ThresherK (GPad)
@dogwood: I never heard of the law, but it goes on a very uncrowded GWB Trophy Shelf. McCain was supposed to be one of the grown-up R’s!
Villago Delenda Est
@Poopyman:
THIS THIS THIS
Infrastructure drives the growth of an economy like nothing else…not even latent consumer demand. It makes everything else possible. Our infrastructure has been, under Rethuglican rule, ignored, because, heaven forefend, it benefits someone other than the 1%. Take back all that has been stolen by the 1% over the last 36 years and put it into infrastructure…both physical and virtual (regulation, research, the legal system, you name it).
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: How about a grassroots pressure group INSIDE the Democrats, owing nothing to Bernie, taking control of liberalism and populism and branding them with a big H with an arrow on it?
I am totally down with that. It’s been about the platform. Never mind whether Hillary would have run/governed that way from the start, or not, or whether she’d have been strikingly different: I think the course has been set.
Forgive my apostacy as a berniac if I suggest that maybe the Democratic party would be better at this sort of populist movement than a collection of drum circle puppet wielders from nearly Canada. We went to the electorate with the campaign organization we had. And it sucked, sucked, sucked compared with the power and expertise of the Clinton campaign, and the DNC. Point made, let them run with it. I am not convinced Bernie will be able to mount a national splinter group… not after asking his people not to be any such splinter group. We got told repeatedly to run for office, get involved, and to trust the process (not throw bombs at it). Out West, somehow that last bit went awry.
This shouldn’t have to depend on Bernie. This should be a Democrat thing, unhesitatingly. There shouldn’t have to BE a Bernie, to get this.
ruemara
@liberal: sure keyboard warrior. Like I said, identity politics, so you can jam that up your colon. If my issues are identity, then your pure economic focus is identity too. You’re a great example of liberal.
Villago Delenda Est
@FlipYrWhig: We must have our purity. It doesn’t matter that Bernie’s agenda is better served by working inside the party, our purity, our essence, our bodily fluids, must be kept apart.
ThresherK (GPad)
@D58826: You had me at “Breitbart”. In real life I’d owe you a drink for reading it so I don’t have to.
(My local Bernsters might not have stopped reposting Breitbart stuff on FB.)
Grumpy Code Monkey
@gogol’s wife:
The price of free speech is that occasionally you have to put up with assholes with no manners or common sense.
And it wouldn’t be a proper Democratic convention without at least one asshole yelling during a speech. It’s what we do.
Applejinx
@Grumpy Code Monkey: Pity Obama couldn’t say “Hi! Welcome to the Democratic Party! You know, over in Cleveland they’d already have your head in a bag for that!”
He had more important things to say. But that’s what _I_ thought (and the dumbasses were supposedly representing ME, of all things)
Fair Economist
@liberal:
A significant part of the reason our infrastructure is so bad is that post-war auto-oriented development is just too wasteful to run a country on. Those curvy culdesacs and massive parking lots result in a lot of pavement, and a lot of water and sewer lines under the pavement, and a lot of electrical lines overhead, and a lot of fire stations and police stations to reach everywhere in a few minutes. It’s not totally unaffordable, but only an upper-middle class area can afford to pay for it all. It takes a while for the maintenance bills to come due, especially for the underground pipes, but it’s starting to and that’s the consequence.
gogol's wife
@Villago Delenda Est:
Right on, brother!
gogol's wife
@Applejinx:
I would have been so thrilled if he’d said that.
Emma
@Major Major Major Major: I think liberal means “I don’t like the Clintons, so anything they did to make money has to be a grift.” Book writing and making speeches is a crime.
Aimai
@Kay: yes–that “selected” pissed me off too! I will never forgive him for that. What a sulky, small, man he turned out to be.
D58826
@Billcoop4: thunder thumbs on my part
hovercraft
@liberal:
That word ‘grifters’ doesn’t mean what you think it means. Making money after your time in office is not the same as running for office for the sole purpose of making money off the fact that you ran for office. So Noot’, Herman Caine, and several others never thought they had a chance to be president, they ran to up their speaking fees, get book deals, and maybe the golden ticket a Fox News gig. The Clinton’s were public servants for 40 years and at the end of it like every president since Reagan they went on the speaking circuit to make money (money they desperately needed after racking up huge legal bills). I’m sure that in addition to writing is memoires Obama will hit the speaking circuit, I don’t think that’ll make him a grafter.
Sarah Palin is a special case who left what could have been a promising career if she took the time to actually learn something, to cash in on her notoriety, that is a true grafter heart and soul. The Clinton’s are now worth over 100 million, if they were true grifters making that kind of money hand over fist, they would not give it up. All the bullshyt about the CGI is just that bs, the reason there is fodder for the media and the gop to pick through is that they disclose their financials, they did not have to set it up that way but they did.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx:
I’m all for this and have said so repeatedly. My sense is that Democratic Party politicians tend take the stands that match up with what their voters tell them they want, and in places where Democrats aren’t that liberal, they elect Democrats who aren’t that liberal. Which is logical. So make more liberals, or make the liberals we already have louder–as Obama last night challenged Democrats to do. But when doing this keep in mind that not all people voting for Democrats are vocal, insistent, populist liberals, so don’t be terribly surprised if your local Democrat keeps paying more attention to local lawyers, concerned moms, and totebaggers than he does to local anticapitalist firebrands, and keeps doing it until you manage to beat or co-opt him. Because the Uncompromising Liberal Party isn’t going to win many elections in America anytime soon, and that’s during a time when liberalism already seems to be much more on the advance than at any other time in my life, and I’m 44.
D58826
@ThresherK (GPad): figure its important to see what passes for thinking by the other side. Besides sometimes they are lol stupid.
Aimai
@ruemara: ???
Steve in the ATL
@Miss Bianca: you asked me a question the other night which I didn’t answer until the next day, so you probably never saw it at the rate people are posting now. I hit Garden of the Gods, Cheyenne Canyon (including but not limited to Helen Hunt Falls), and something called Trailhead 16 that is near Pike’s Peak. They were all fantastic.
And I’m still sore.
hovercraft
@liberal:
So he’s 2 for 4
Putin and Kim Jung Un are on board, but he’s having a hard time getting Sadam Hussein and Gadhaffi to returns his calls.
Omnes Omnibus
@dmsilev: The “city on a hill” thing is biblical, Matthew 5:14 to be exact. In US history, it was first used by John Winthrop in a sermon as he was coming to Massachusetts in 1630.
@Miss Bianca: God damn it.
Technocrat
@liberal: @Eric U.:
Both of you used the word “easy”. I build complex systems for a living, and I’ve lost count of the number of developers who tell me something is “easy”, then six months later they have a list of reasons it’s “impossible”. “Easy”, to me, means something you’ve successfully done several times before.
dogwood
@ThresherK (GPad):
Yah, it’s a very short list, but a good law. And when the economy started crashing in Sept., they repeatedly hounded the McCain campaign to get off their asses, because the law was designed for just such a circumstance. W. understood that he didn’t get to start clearing people until mid December, and that could be a problem for a new President waiting on FBI checks in the middle of crisis. McCain wanted to be Commander in Chief during a war. The rest of that presidentin’ stuff didn’t much interest him. “Country First”
Miss Bianca
@Applejinx:
Oh, dear, oh dear…you’ve just given a big old LOL this morning! I guess there’s a reason they didn’t hire you as Obama’s speechwriter! /
hovercraft
@dmsilev:
That is not a response to his butthurt over getting beaten up, he enjoys being the center of attention, and he would enjoy saying that the DNC was all about him. No his butthurt here is that he’s losing the ratings war so far, and he is trying to prevent the ignominy of he Donald Trump Superstar having more people tune in to view her speech than he had.
So everyone tune in, let’s make him cry in his Wheaties tomorrow.
MattF
@hovercraft: I’m starting to think that Putin is keeping him on hold.
Miss Bianca
@Steve in the ATL: Ahhh….lovely, but you’ll have to make it into the Central Mountains next time!
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: We political/biblical rhetoric junkies all obviously ate our Wheaties this morning!
Patricia Kayden
@Villago Delenda Est: If you go back and re-watch Bloomberg’s speech at the DNC, he could have stomped Trump to the curb as well. He really stuck the knife deep into The Donald, especially when he questioned Trump’s mental health.
I can just imagine how much Trump squirmed during that particular speech.
D58826
@hovercraft:
they would have taken the money and retired to the Riviera or some other balmy tax haven. It has been said over and over that to run for president you have to be nuts and yet here she is running for president when she could have retired in luxury. .
Eric U.
@Omnes Omnibus: not surprising that a Republican wouldn’t know anything about the bible, particularly the New Testament. Before I started calling them “Christianists”, I called them “Old Testament Christians”
gwangung
@hovercraft: What I suggest is a grifter is someone who bankrupts a college while landing a brand new college program of $500K+ to benefit their daughter.
? Martin
@liberal:
Ok, there’s a fair bit of willful blindness in here.
You can still make a decent life for yourself without a college degree, though its through a different set of paths than it was a few decades ago, and if you set your course back then, then yes, you’re pretty fucked now. The old set of core skills that schools and relatives would teach you would be machining and woodworking and all that. There are still those jobs around (I’m hiring for machinists right now and having a hard time finding any) but in far fewer numbers, and with far different job profiles. If you liked that machinist job because it allowed you to be a racist loudmouth fuck on the shop floor, then I won’t hire you because I need you to teach teenagers and that shit won’t fly here. Sorry, but that’s not a lack of opportunity brought about by the rich, rather a cultural change that you fought rather than embrace. I feel no particularly pity for you.
But there are a lot of service and other jobs that non-college folks can get. However, you better be sharp and you better be willing to learn. You might need to learn to code, or to be mathematically adept, or a good writer or a talented artist. You have to bring something to the job, because if all you are bringing is a pair of hands or the ability to file information, well, we have computers and robots that will do it faster and more accurately, and at that point nobody much cares if it’s cheaper or not. If you want to fuck off through high school and still get that plum factory job, that’s gone forever. Sure, you can drive a truck and those jobs are in huge demand right now and pay well, but it’ll be short lived because lets’ face it, you’re just bringing a pair of hands to that one too. The truck knows better than you do how to get to the destination, it just doesn’t know how to navigate traffic – yet.
College-educated workers never saw unemployment above 5% during the recession (which is considered full employment). That is, 100% of the structural job loss was with non-college educated workers. They got massacred, but if you had a degree, you either kept your job or you could find a new one. And wages for college educated workers has been climbing steadily. The wage stagnation is because wages for non-college educated are actually falling, and when you average them, it’s flat. If you are a recent graduate, you have a job. 90% of all 20-24 year olds with degrees are working – that’s not the employment rate, it’s the worker participation rate. For non-college educated 20-24 year olds, it’s under 70%. Getting a degree is still your best path to prosperity, full stop, and it’s as good now than it has been ever in our history.
And you can still go to a good public school for next to nothing. Average debt load for students graduating from either of the two California public university systems is $16K. That sounds like a lot, but that’s less than your expected wage benefit in the first year. That is, most students here can discharge all of their college debt in one year compared to not having that degree. That’s a deal. And that’s less than half of what the average automotive debt is in this country, and nobody complains about that. The $100K debt horror stories are from students going to private universities or going to out of state publics where they don’t get tuition benefits. Stay in state, and you’ll come out just fine.
So the reason there is resentment is because people have been lied to, and I will point at you as being one of the people, in an interest of appearing more righteous than the rest of us, of stoking that resentment by either misrepresenting or refusing to take the time to see what’s really going on.
Steve in the ATL
@Miss Bianca: I’ve spent both summers and winters in Vail, which is awesome, but this was just a business trip to Colorado Springs where I came in a day early and then ducked out of the office in the afternoons to go hiking. It’s so strange to leave the South and yet still encounter a bunch of Protestant extremists!
Soylent Green
@Applejinx:
In Seattle and to a lesser degree here in Portland is a contingent of lefties who are essentially anarchists. (“No, Donny, these men are nihilists.”) At the height of the Occupy movement they thought that smashing downtown store windows was a legitimate form of political expression. Sadly some of these yahoos have hitched their wagon to Bernie’s movement.
gvg
Actually the real America meme has always appeared to be rural versus city to me and from what I have read, not black versus white. Of course there is significant overlap but most cities are majority white still. The country whites really don’t like the city whites even if it’s family and their own children are often encouraged to pursue better opportunities in the city. There are old folktales and fables that show this going back pretty far. I would also point out that it’s part of the gun control divide in this country. I think this started being an issue back around Jefferson’s time.
Neither side has the right to declare only themselves as real Americans. I would encourage everyone to push back against that phrase.
Naturally is has also been infected by racism. Racists think that way. That stain seems to get on everything still. If you are black you probably notice it as an attack on you but I have been hearing it as an attack on me for decades. Palin pissed me off but she wasn’t the first.
hovercraft
@D58826:
Exactly, they are a couple who truly does believe in public service as CGI shows, W is off in Dallas travelling the oil and gas circuit “refilling the coffers”, but they jumped right back into the kitchen.
@gwangung:
Blasphemy!
Miss Bianca
@Steve in the ATL: *groan*. Yes, but if you make it to Manitou Springs, just west of Colorado Springs, you’ll meet an amazing number of old hippies/pagans – plus, great candy shop and mineral spring fountains around town! There actually are a fair number of leftists and freaks in Colorado Springs, it’s just that they are totoally outnumbered by fundies.
D58826
@hovercraft: The beloved Jerry Ford retired to play golf and get big bucks by sitting on various board of directors. Doesn’t mean he was a grifter just chose a different way to ‘cash in’. And in one way or another they ‘cash in’.
gwangung
@hovercraft: I note that this has been soft-pedaled. It wouldn’t have remained that way if Sanders won the nomination.
The Thin Black Duke
@ruemara: Phil Ochs figured out guys like “liberal” a long time ago.
Uncle Cosmo
@Kay: Just FTR…
My friend Martin O’Malley was twice elected Governor of MD opposing the death penalty, & finally brought the General Assembly around in his second term. And MD is south of the Mason-Dixon line (in fact the MDL forms its northern border with PA).
Also FTR, TK’s resume reads a lot like MOM’s, including the Jesuit schooling. Kaine’s time in the Senate, Spanish fluency, & remaining popular in a larger battleground state are the main differences.
aimai
@gvg: Cities vs. rural areas was always about both race and immigration. Rural areas weren’t naturally “white”–white was a contrivance resulting from anti slave and then anti free-black policies like “sundown towns” and native american reservation policies. Non whites–including Chinese, Black, Native American and Mexican were controlled in what you think of as “rural” areas and sometimes ended up congregating in cities. And the immigrant groups that came directly to cities–like many of the jews–were associated with foreign/dangerous ideas about socialism or unionism, were often thought of as not really white, and as unassimilated. So there’s no clear line between the rural/city divide and racism.
aimai
@aimai: Replying to myself to add that in the modern era the rural areas exert an enormous influence, out of proportion to their population density, because of the two senator rule and because there is both an enormous grift associated with the benefits accorded rural areas and agriculture and because there is enormous power accusing to whoever can harness the votes of this minority of modern americans. Its just way easier to buy the votes of a small, dispersed, homogenous, white population and throw up a wholly owned Senator or two than to do so in a city.
Matt McIrvin
@Chyron HR: I was wondering if some of Bernie’s grim expression last night came from Tim Kaine going on about how every presidential candidate in modern history releases their tax returns.
Matt McIrvin
@aimai: Voters in rural states are overrepresented, but on the other hand, rural areas in the big states dominated by urban populations are underrepresented. So it balances out to some degree.
Also, there’s still this huge arc of largely rural African-American districts stretching across the South in the old Cotton Belt. I suspect they are going to become more and more important as they form winning coalitions with liberal urban professionals and majority-black cities in Southern states.
D58826
fsm. Nina Turner is back on TV complaining that she has be silenced and wasn’t allowed to speak on Tuesday.
Linnaeus
@aimai:
As an aside, rural areas in the US could also be the source of radical/reform movements that, despite their mistrust of a lot of institutions identified with urban areas, formed coalitions with other groups (like the Knights of Labor) that were rooted in the cities.
Uncle Cosmo
@Feebog: Um, you sure about that? I don’t question that “(C)” in front of a paragraph stands for “confidential,” but as I recall*, “Confidential” is in fact the lowest level of classification. From Wiki: “Confidential material would cause damage or be prejudicial to national security if publicly available.” It’s certainly not as highly classified as “Secret,” let alone “Top Secret,” but it’s still classified.
(*NB I held a Secret clearance for ~20 yrs while working on DOD contracts.)
FlipYrWhig
@D58826: Is she trying to become the Berniac version of onetime netroots darling Darcy Burner?
D58826
msnbc is also reporting that the deadenders are planning on some kind of protest tonight.
Uncle Cosmo
@liberal: In fact the point is at the top of your head, asshole.
aimai
@Linnaeus: Sure, but that was long ago in a country far, far, away. We’ve seen that drain away over time.
Uncle Cosmo
@hovercraft: That can’t be right. I thought Trump Cellular had a deal on, unlimited calls to hottest Hell for a flat 10 cents per minute..