Hillary Clinton launches her new group: https://t.co/8puc3Qg7A2
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) May 15, 2017
… On Monday, Clinton described that effort as one to “encourage people to get involved, organize, and even run for office,” while tweeting out the names of several groups that have led anti-Trump or grassroots Democratic efforts this year, like: SwingLeft (which identifies potential districts to turn blue for would-be donors or volunteers), Run for Something, and Color of Change, which does a lot of criminal justice work…
Organized over the last few months with former DNC chair and governor Howard Dean, the group is still in the early development stages…
“We’re not looking to duplicate or replace the DNC or the DCCC or all that stuff,” Dean told BuzzFeed News recently. “We’re looking to give these folks the opportunity to do the building they’re already doing on their terms, but in a more organized way, when the one hand knows what the other hand is doing.”
Dave Weigel, in the Washington Post, “Possible 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls gather for progressive ‘ideas’ conference”:
Don’t call it a “cattle call.” Don’t call it the “CPAC of the left.” On Tuesday morning, the Center for American Progress will host a daylong “Ideas Conference” — its third, as CAP President Neera Tanden points out. It’s just different from the last two in that at least 140 reporters have signed up to cover it, and they’re not shy about calling it a 2020 scouting session.
“We’re focused less on the politics of the moment and more on, ‘What’s the alternative?’ ” Tanden said in an interview. “I expect there’ll be some criticism of Trump, but we expect most of our speakers to provide a positive vision.”…
The conference, which as in the past will take over the St. Regis hotel, will kick off with a speech from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and end with a speech from Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), both in their 40s and elected to their high-profile jobs in 2013. About half of the rest of Tuesday’s speakers are considered potential 2020 presidential candidates: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Gov. Terry MacAuliffe (D-Va.). Gov. Steve Bullock (D-Mont.), whose 2016 reelection victory gave Democrats one of their few reasons to cheer in a rural state, will also get a set piece speech…
On Wednesday, after most of the media are gone, CAP will host training sessions for “resistance” activists — part of a series that the think tank has organized. One of Tuesday’s panels will bring some of the activists together, as well as Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, whose “Daily Kos” blog has become a major crowdfunding source for Democratic campaigns.
“I LOVE these new resistance groups,” Moulitsas said in an email. “We need to stop chasing after white racists lost to the fake news bubble, and realize that out of the 97 million Americans who didn’t vote last year, the majority is our own liberal-leaning base. We need to get THOSE people registered and active in the franchise.”
Apart from organizing for the future, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Jumbo76
I don’t really care for any of those potential candidates. I’m still a little pissed at Obama for not strengthening the state parties while he was in office. It’s kind of his fault that our bench is so weak.
Baud
That Kos quote almost makes me want to go back to his site.
Almost.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Baud
@Jumbo76: No it’s not. Unless you think he was too far to the left. That’s why our bench is weak.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
rikyrah
Good Morning,Everyone???
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Even the liberal Jared Kushner:
At this moment, Kushner is putting on a dress and rushing to the Titanic’s lifeboats.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Watching Morning Joe, an am struck by the studious nature of the Obama NSC people that are talking, as opposed to the remoras attached to Trump.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
So much winning.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
I thought you were going to run with “fleeing Richmond”.
Baud
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: If the IC confirms that, I hope it leaks.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@rikyrah: ? ??
Betty Cracker
@Jumbo76: Seriously? Obama was supposed to not only run the country but run the state parties too? Jeebus take the wheel.
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: That last image made me laugh. Thanks, I needed that!
jacy
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
You’ll have to update us on the Morning Joe take. I gave my TV away last November.
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
I laughed and scared the cat. I can actually picture that perfectly.
OzarkHillbilly
@Jumbo76:
I think he was a little busy at the time.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Hard to believe the former Chancellor of a high class joint like Trump University would be instigating so much kaos.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
NOOOOOOO!
You scared me for a minute, Baud.
BlueDWarrior
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: The sad thing is that (around) 30% of the electorate wants everything to spin off into utter chaos. Because of course they will be on top of the junkpile when everything collapses.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Day 117 — America Held Hostage
Frankensteinbeck
I have no hope that the Republican base will stop being anything but extremist partisans driven by frothing racism. I do have hope that the unprecedented – and it is in modern times completely unprecedented – protests will mean that the politically unmotivated will finally start voting. As noted in the OP, we heavily outnumber them if we can get engaged. It’s not easy, since reasonable people are by definition less motivated than extremists. Maybe Trump has changed that.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly:
Probably off golfing like the new guy.
Aimai
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: thank you so much for posting this!
Baud
BTW, on topic, good for Hillary. Like the name of the PAC.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Do you all think that Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland wants to have pretend babies with me? I thought she was just a talking head from the past.
She’s absolutely, delightfully charming.
*swoon*
amk
@Jumbo76: And the dems mock the rethugs for having the big daddy syndrome.
amk
Did the twitler dumbass really go after colbear?
Baud
I wish someone had warned us that Trump was dangerously unfit for the presidency.
amk
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: running like a smooth oiled machinery. winning bigly.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: She was a pretty good talking head, it’s nice to see she’s gone on to better and greater things. I knew she was a MP, but I didn’t know until last week that she was the Foreign Minister.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: “It’s so nice to have a politician who speaks in complete sentences” -Trevor Noah.
Baud
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Ha! Perfect.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Wouldn’t have made a difference, he didn’t have an email server.
amk
@BlueDWarrior: Doesn’t speak well of the balance 70%, does it now?
bystander
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: I love a good Allyn Joslyn reference. (My employer did his best imitation of AJ on 9/11 when our midtown building was evacuated as a cautious measure.)
Can he and Ivanka share wardrobe? Or would Jared opt for a frock by Diane Von Furstenberg to mislead?
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: True. Enforcing IT best practices > America
Westyny
@BlueDWarrior: it’s their only hope – economic anxiety . . .
Baud
@amk: Nope.
bystander
@Baud: The Moanin’ Joe panel is debating: Treason or stupidity? Because you know, stupidity we can live with.
Baud
@bystander: Let’s be real. Joe could live with treason too.
amk
@bystander: Nothing to debate. Thugs are happy with either or both.
debbie
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
I love that Susan Collins quote. That was my mom every day yelling at us kids.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
He’s tweeting and confirming. He just burned McMaster AND the Russian Foreign Ministry.
BlueDWarrior
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: the Dignity Wraith strikes again. At some point, the media is just going to have to accept that Lord Orangemandyias believes is the Grand Dictator of the American Empire and only someone dragging him away in handcuffs or a hearst will strip him of that belief.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Coulda dropped that retirement packet, McMaster, but noooooo…..?⬇️
debbie
Someone woke up a little defensive…
bystander
@amk:
@Baud:
Always with the realism.
The best part of Joe today was Joe railing about the “anti-anti-Trump” rightwing pundits continuing to ride the gravy train of Trump supporters’ boundless stupidity. Steve Ratner replies, “I wonder where Hugh Hewitt is on this?” Joe looked very flat footed.
Baud
@Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire: haha emojis.
amk
twitler is doubling down this am. nutz.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@debbie: I guess Jared or Abu Ivanker al Amirki wrote that tweet. Or CobraAnne Conway.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire:
I’m setting the over/under on McMasters’ resignation at 10 days.
debbie
Listening to Ben Sasse pimping his book on making kids tougher, I wonder if he realizes what he’s alluding to when he says, “Work makes you free.”
debbie
@Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire:
I can’t read Trump’s tweets without hearing Steven Colbert’s Trump voice.
MomSense
Rubio is tweeting bible verses this morning. It’s unsettling.
Baud
@debbie: Freedom is slavery.
bystander
@OzarkHillbilly: The sooner you admit Obama gave the state parties the Benghazi treatment, the sooner we can get on with the business at hand. Of eating each other alive and blaming the delicious taste of human flesh.
amk
@debbie: openly scheduled = closed to the murkan press & public. the fecker can’t stop lying. I thought I had seen at it all with mittbot.
Baud
@MomSense: Given the current situation. I assume it’s something from Revelations.
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: To be fair, he’s not in the Navy, so he never learned when to abandon a sinking ship. ?
Patricia Kayden
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: So Trump’s mouth has already killed at least one person who infiltrated ISIS. This after he promised to destroy ISIS within one month of taking office. Trump is dangerous on so many levels. I hope our allies start speaking out against him since he may start endangering the lives of their citizens given his coziness with Russia.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Sasse actually may have a point about young men and the complaints of young women about “manbabies”.
It is an observation I’ve been making a while.
bystander
I switched to TCM, and just in time for the big production number of I Dream Too Much with Lily Pons.
Perennial apocryphal favorite: Lily Pons is at a Hollywood party to meet and greet at the beginning of her short American film career. She is introduced to Hedda Hopper who asks if she might be familiar with any of Pons’ work. Pons asks, “Do you know Lakme?”
To which Hedda replies, “Oh no, dear, I like you very much. I’ve just never seen any of your movies.”
Kay
Master negotiator. Russia will never know what his objective is due to his steely poker face.
I laughed out loud when I read they turned up the tv to cover “shouting”- I bet there’s a LOT of shouting in that White House.
Patricia Kayden
@debbie: Russia supports the Syrian regime which is killing its own citizens and has built a crematorium prison to hide the killings. Trump’s collaboration with Russia is outrageous in the light of Russia’s support for Assad.
BlueDWarrior
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: A lot of it has to do with the fact that we have devalued blue collar work to an extent to where a lot of the people we want doing the work see it as worthless. So these typical areas where young men (in the past) would get themselves grounded and ready for the real world basically don’t exist in their own heads, even if you have umpteen fields screaming for fresh blood.
Until we get culture at large to truly value blue collar work, then it will continue to be underserved in both ways.
(And that’s not even talking about the creeping Wall of Doom that automation may be)
satby
Only 7:40 and I’m already burned out by the news. If there was a God, he’d stroke Drumpf out and leave him alive but incapacitated (hard to tell from his current mental state, I know) so he could be removed from office and live out the rest of his miserable life in diapers getting bedsores.
I have never hated a human so much.
Kay
@debbie:
I get instantly angry when one coddled generation points to the next as coddled. We left them a giant fucking mess to clean up. We should apologize to them.
I worked immediately after high school before I went to a technical institute and later to college. It was easier to move up than it is now. People my age should not kid themselves that they were “tougher”. It was easier. I had a technical certificate when I got out of high school – 100% free to me- and then community college free- as in “no cost to me at all”. I benefited from programs and subsidies that were put in place by people who are now in their 90″s. It worked. I’ve been paying taxes ever since. It was a good investment.
There’s a price to pay when you don’t invest anything over 30 years. This is the price.
debbie
@Kay:
I have to say I giggled last week when Mara Liasson said Trump couldn’t negotiate with himself.
satby
@BlueDWarrior: Not only devalued it, but cut off most entry level ways for someone to train into a skill.
debbie
@Kay:
Exactly!
Baud
@satby: I think the election definitively answered the “is there a god” question.
Checkmate, Ontological Argument.
Patricia Kayden
@OzarkHillbilly: Naw. You know Black people can do it all. It’s not as if there aren’t any state Democrats who could run their own local party operations. President Obama had to do all the work of a president and then insert himself into the party operations of 50 states. Otherwise, he was just being lazy. Got it now?
This kind of idiotic thinking is beyond me.
Baud
@Patricia Kayden: Obama still hasn’t fixed my bike! Thanks, Obama.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@BlueDWarrior:
Thing is, there’s a shitton of money to be made in the trades. Electricians, HVAC, plumbing – they’re all howling for bodies, and the pay and opportunities are genuinely solid. Every one of my high school classmates in the trades is really comfortable – most with their own businesses could retire now, in their mid-50s, and are now semi-retired. They have time and money for travel, golf, fishing, drama and mistresses…
BlueDWarrior
@Kay: Not to mention that a lot of innovation is being driven by under-40s. One of the bigger problems with the whole ‘manbaby’ issue is that a lot of these innovations are letting ‘marginal’ men get away with not being shoved into positions they probably should be nowhere near. The lazy layabout today was the dumbass employee of 50-70 years ago that all of the then-new safety regulations were created to try and work around and deal with.
Plus social media benefits those who have the time to prattle on endlessly, so the men out there doing hard, time-consuming work might comment once or twice here and there on Facebook and Instagram, but the ‘manbabies’ can comment ten to twenty times.
Patricia Kayden
@satby: The good thing about Trump is that he’s working hard to get impeached or otherwise kicked out of office. Hopefully, we won’t have to endure 4 years of this.
I have never seen someone as incompetent and clueless as Trump in a position of authority. I don’t understand why the people who surround him don’t do simple things like take away his cell phone so that he doesn’t send out embarrassing text messages like the tape threat against Comey.
Sunny Raines
seriously, they need to start with that question? Here’s a clue: moral character, community, working together.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Kay:
My law school total bill was under $15,000.
BlueDWarrior
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Not only that, but these are critical jobs for allowing our urbanized lifestyle to actually work. But we are suffering from a massive perception gap; to where people think that your local electrician is a minimum wage slave (how I don’t know), when he’s likely making more than half the people he is serving on an hourly basis (at least if we are just throwing darts at a city map to see where he has to go sort out some wiring issues).
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: And where the hell is my Obama phone? How has Obama failed me today?
BlueDWarrior
@Patricia Kayden: It’s the White Knight-ism that plagues our set of low-information voters; and no, I don’t know how to get around it either.
Baud
@BlueDWarrior: I don’t understand all of this. Isn’t “manbabies” the type of criticism that’s designed to appeal to working class conservative men? Sasse isn’t trying to appeal to white collar liberals here.
Kay
@debbie:
He runs a family business. This is the first time in his life his performance had been evaluated objectively. He might have been good at it- he doesn’t have the personal qualities or character so that was extremely unlikely but it was remotely possible- but he isn’t good at it. As it turns out.
He won’t get better either. To get better he would need the personal qualities and character he doesn’t possess.
Trump needed one of two things- he needed to be a “natural”- surprisingly good at this, OR he needed to have the internal qualities to get better at it on the job. He has neither. They can rank him right now – he needed to be good immediately or it wasn’t happening.
I haven’t hired that many people over the years but you really do know in a week or two. This bad at the start combined with the fact that he has no inherent good qualities from which to draw doesn’t get better- it gets worse.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@BlueDWarrior:
I keep telling my under/unemployed 20 something Manbaby clients (and their mommies and daddies who bring them to me about their child support and custody issues) all about opportunities in the trades.
The fathers of the manbabies generally act like they want to hug me while the mommies furrow their brows over their babies maybe having to make effort….
Another Scott
@debbie: He threw McMaster and Tillerson under the bus (“He didn’t do it – it’s false.”), because of course he did.
It’s what he does.
And it’s only Tuesday, the 116th day of this disaster.
Cheers,
Scott.
TS
tRump decided the news item saying he had the right to release classified information was on the money. Hence the morning tweet, turns all the discussion apologists (McMaster and the Russians and a large number of GOP congress people) into liars.
Also too – does anyone who works at the White House have a suit that fits?
D58826
OK playing devils advocate (and that is in very very large letters), I can see a reason to share this info with Russia.
1. Russia may have been in a position to take out the bomb builders
2. Since Russian passenger planes have been bombed out of the air they would have a vested interest in stopping this plot. They would have no reason to think that Daesh would not pass the skill set on the Chechen rebels.
NOW that being said, it seems to me, that kind of information would be transferred at a lower level than POTUS and only after it was carefully sanitized to avoid Russian re-engineering. And maybe even in exchange for something of value from the Russians
Or I have been watching to many spy movies??????
efgoldman
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Baud has always said he’d be president of all the people, even purity ponies
BlueDWarrior
@Baud: well the perception is that urbane men are a bunch of ‘manbabies’ because they aren’t out there doing backbreaking ‘field’ labor (even though a lot of them are in mind-numbing service work).
To me, and maybe to Sasse, this is referring to the fact that we don’t honestly need 18-24 year olds to go straight into the workforce anymore, so you do have something of an extended adolescence. Though, a lot of research is coming out that says psychological maturity really doesn’t kick in until the mid-20s, so maybe the trends are just reflecting what always was, but was masked because we were culturally press-ganging young men into doing things needed to make society run.
That’s why I’m wary of a ‘national service’ regime to ‘solve’ this problem, because it entirely depends on what we need people to be doing and how we’d want them to be doing it.
Aleta
Trump’s new tweet presentation is the big accomplishment for the inner circle of governance for the last week.
Except it ‘didn’t happen’ down in the well that McMaster was standing in.
At least he knocked Comey out of the headlines, just like Comey took the focus away from health care and the custom Kushner visas for the Chinese market.
So now T needs another headline grabber, maybe a quick terror incident in Syria so he can say he predicted this + he’s a humanitarian. Maybe the Russians can help him out with this.
And the Republicans can jump in to declare that intelligence failures don’t lead to terrorist events.
BlueDWarrior
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: To me, it is a wrong-headed argument to be telling people to be going to work because we need them to be doing something. You can appeal to my generation, or more like the generation immediately trailing me (I’m in my early 30s), more easily by saying “Hey look, these fields are wide open, and for a couple of years of investment (less than college) you can jump straight to a $17/hr job.
The whole “Work because we need you to do work” argument isn’t going to hold up in a environment when machines are chewing up job opportunities like a particularly slow Pac-Man; and I wish parents would stop making the argument along those lines.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Let me distill what this does – it eliminates the likelihood that anybody in Southwest Asia and the Moslem world informs to anybody with the Five Eyes or EU on the chance that they’ll be “outed”. He just strengthened ISIL’s hand, as well as the Taliban.
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I got a scholarship. Which I lost halfway thru 2nd year because I got a C in one class, BUT STILL :)
I liked how fair law school was. They put a lot of effort into fairness. They had money available for entering students with higher scores, but you could lose it if you got lazy and they then gave it to someone else. That made sense to me. There should be two shots – one for potential and then they put the money into the pool again so the people who missed the first round might get it. It was comforting to me that my catastrophic C meant someone in my class got a free year.
OzarkHillbilly
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Sounds like a good idea. Reality is a little different.
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I’m active in the public school here and it’s awkward because there’s a lot of push back against standardized testing- good critiques which I agree with- but my personal experience was standardized tests were the single key to my “success”. Horrible student but a heck of a good test-taker! Nothing I like better than “clear you desk and get out your number 2 pencil”. Finally! The thing I’m good at! :)
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@BlueDWarrior:
Companies I know about are hiring unskilled laborers with misdemeanors and low level felonies at $15 an hour. After a period, if they work out, the companies pay for training and journeyman tickets, bumping pay to $20 an hour, and no exclusion on moonlighting.
BlueDWarrior
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Which should tell you just how in demand these services are. But once again, a failure of society and parenting (and yes this is one of those things I agree with the crazy old farts on) has coddled a certain number of the population.
But I’m not trying to disagree with you, I’m just trying to get around at how to defuse this particular demographic bomb.
Kay
I went to dinner with the book club ladies last night. One of them is active in the state GOP- has held Party positions, like that, and she was a big Trumpster. So she’s going to Atlantic City to gamble and someone asked her if she was staying at a Trump hotel and she got this sour expression and said they were staying at the Tropicana.
They try not to mention him. They were always willing to engage on Bush- almost belligerent- but there’s this eerie silence with Trump.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Kay:
No scholarships from me – I was too much of a dilettante about studies and class, and worked nearly full time. On the plus side, I made some money running betting pools in the back of class. I frequently brag that I graduated in the top 2/3 of my class…
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I met a couple yesterday who came all the way from Arkansas to work here. They can’t find a house to rent so they just stopped in to the law office to ask us (which isn’t that bad a plan- it’s a small town). They had left their 3 kids in Arkansas to finish the school year. They’ll start at 14 which is apparently a lot in Arkansas. They’ll be making Honda interior parts- the assembly that goes over the interior door.
They have such a soft accent, Arkansans. I didn’t know they had such a clearly regional accent. It’s lovely.
OzarkHillbilly
@BlueDWarrior:
They are not wide open. last I heard, the electricians have a 5 year wait list, and that’s IF you can pass the test. Operators even longer. Pipefitters, not quite as bad. Carpenters? Laborers? Sure, you can get in. Because so many are dropping out.
A couple years ago I got a letter from the Carpenters begging me to come back. I thought about it, and damn the money sure would be good, but my wife was adamant: No way. After 30 years of constant abuse I’m in enough pain already.
OldDave
blush Thank yew…
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
My son is working a ton because so many older guys are retiring. I think they’re getting out before the next downturn.
He’s making a lot of money. He promised to put a storm door in for me for Mother’s Day but he’s either at work or asleep.
He wants the federal courthouse project in Toledo. That’s coming up and they all want it because they want to stay on the same site for a while.
rikyrah
@Kay:
You are so nice. I would have brought up Dolt45 every freaking minute.
Jeffro
I’ll take Harris, Klobuchar, or Gillibrand in any combination as the 2020 Dem ticket – case closed, done, now let’s get busy punching Republicans in the nose and hard.
Applejinx
@BlueDWarrior: And we do have to talk about the creeping Wall Of Doom that automation may be.
The thing is, that’s not the whole story. We are able to pack IMPOSSIBLE levels of energy and technology into little crap that any old prole can have. It doesn’t stop there. Elon Musk is going to have people making solar roofs, running everything off batteries. It’ll make him even wealthier… but it will make going off the grid increasingly available.
One side is ‘starving the poor and putting them in jail and telling them to migrate across the country like manic butterflies looking for busy Ubers to exploit them’. The other side is ‘why does there even have to BE poor when we’ve mastered technology, energy, etc as much as we have?’
It’s like people talking about genetic engineering increasing crop efficiencies when hunger is a POLITICAL problem. Face it: we are heading in a direction where there doesn’t have to be poverty, starvation, unrest, anxiety. We are also heading in a direction where we maximize all that crap for the benefit of the ultra-rich, and that’s spearheaded by the Republicans but imitated by the Democrats for far too long.
Fuck economic insecurity. We can just welfare it out of existence if we get power… IF we choose to do so. Or, not. But technologically this is not a problem, has not been for some time. We have the power to feed and house everybody, just like that. People starve, locked out of empty homes, because those are capital owned by somebody rich.
BlueDWarrior
@Applejinx: I think part of that is why Right-Wing politics is or will evolve into this sort of “ethno-welfare state” argument. Basically they will recognize they have the technology to rid themselves of ‘problems’, but why share it with the undesirables? Some clever right-wing populist will start banging on in a major way about how we should leverage technology for those who are promoting proper American (*coughWhitecough*) culture, and everyone else can either submit or get bent.
Miss Bianca
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Note to Susan Collins: Nope. You broke it, you bought it. Actually, you broke it and now we’re all paying for it. Thanks, GOP!
Jumbo76
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s fairly well established that Obama had the DNC focus more on the presidential race than state and congressional races. I don’t even think this is controversial. Both Keith Ellison and Tom Perez were making the same point in the DNC leadership election that occurred two months ago. Being president means you are head of the party and it was Obama’s responsibility. And for all his busy-ness, the party didn’t get any long term benefit out of whatever he was doing. We are currently locked out of all three branches of the federal government, and we control a small minority of states. Being from the Ozarks, you ought to be more aware of that than pretty much anyone else.
Mnemosyne
@Jumbo76:
Two words for you before you go too far down the road of saying that Democratic losses at the state level were all Obama’s fault: Citizens. United.
It’s not a coincidence that CU was decided in January of 2010 and the Democrats just happened to suffer massive losses in November of 2010.
Jumbo76
@Mnemosyne:
It may not be a coincidence, but it’s not causation either. If you’re narrative is that we can’t have nice stuff, because there is money in politics, you’ve already lost. Good government is a second order concern that doesn’t win elections. It really only appeals to highly educated liberals. We need to reduce the amount that we focus on that issue since it’s largely preaching to the choir. If you could show that the liberals who didn’t turn out for Hillary refused to vote for her because she was weak on money in politics, I might agree with you.
This is one reason I’m not excited by Elizabeth Warren. It’s just goo-goo nonsense that doesn’t address the problems people actually have.
Mnemosyne
@Jumbo76:
The narrative isn’t that we can’t have money in politics. The narrative is that there isn’t a level playing field when Democrats are only accepting money from citizens and Republicans are accepting money from the Russians.
And if you think I’m being paranoid, let’s see how that FBI raid on a Republican consultant shop with ties to Roger Stone and Paul Manafort turns out.
Jumbo76
@Mnemosyne:
There is basically nothing factual in your narrative. Let’s put it all together just o make the point clear. Your argument is we lost Congress in 2010 due to Citizens United. You then say that the playing field isn’t level because democrats only take money from citizens while republicans take money from Russians. So, you’re saying that we lost Congress in 2010 because Russians were funding Republican candidates.
You’ll have to admit, I think, that that claim is bonkers. Hell, the claim that Democrats only take money from citizens is also bonkers given how much money Dems raise from large companies. Again, Hillary was accused of being too cozy with Wall Street.
EBT
@BlueDWarrior: But these people who would have been the dumb ass employee 60 years ago couldn’t ever get even a journeyman’s license. It’s years of hard study plus your AS, at least when I was looking at it a decade ago.