[Because FYWP was acting up earlier… ]
Part I here.
pete buttigieg right now: “i’ll take anybody’s money if they’re givin’ it away”
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) December 20, 2019
harvard boy pretending he doesn't understand how corruption and influence works
— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) December 20, 2019
Pete was so focused on taking down Warren and defending his own actions, he charged into the field defending a wine cave and lost sight of the larger issue. To convince himself he's not doing anything wrong, he defended a corrupt system. Which is exactly how the system works.
— Adam Jentleson ?????? (@AJentleson) December 20, 2019
"Just crossing out a racist policy and replacing it with a neutral one…." Mayor Pete: There's no such thing as a race neutral policy. #DemDebate
— Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram) December 20, 2019
Folks on stage may have more money now, but none of them were handed a $200K/ year job after college.
That's just Pete.
— Rebecca Katz (@RebeccaKKatz) December 20, 2019
is buttigieg going to respond to every critique with “how dare you, i’m a troop”?
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) December 20, 2019
I am interested in the fact that Mayor Pete is mute when Bernie and Biden attack but goes into TED talk mode against the ladies.
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) December 20, 2019
My Twitter is clear that Democrats who were recently Republicans find Mayor Pete thrilling.
— Will Wilkinson ?? (@willwilkinson) December 20, 2019
======
Talk is that Warren got ‘dinged’ by Buttigieg, but she still seems like an excellent choice to me:
Warren answers the first impeachment question with an emphasis on corruption, saying Democrats need a candidate who can make the “sharpest distinction” between corruption and anti-corruption to face Trump.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) December 20, 2019
“How do you answer top economists who say taxes of this magnitude would stifle growth and investment?”@SenWarren "Oh, they're just wrong"#DemDebate pic.twitter.com/7Zo6J7Z119
— QuickTake by Bloomberg (@QuickTake) December 20, 2019
Elizabeth Warren to Pete Buttigieg: “Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.”
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) December 20, 2019
Selfie with Mayor Pete: $5,000
Selfie with @ewarren: $0
Watching Mayor Pete scramble to defend courting billionaires behind closed doors in a wine cave beneath thousands of Swarovski crystals: Priceless#DemDebate
— Maddy-Care For All ????????????? (@madsmaru) December 20, 2019
======
Bernie Sanders… remains Bernie:
Bernie goes existential and PBS ain’t having it. pic.twitter.com/CEh9bDmldF
— Nick Decaro (@decaro_nick) December 20, 2019
(Can’t see it in this tweet, but Sanders looked *really* flushed last night, and his hands were red — blood thinners?)
Bernie Sanders doesn't say if he'd pursue more modest steps if Congress rejects Medicare for all: "I think we will pass a Medicare for all single payer system and I will introduce that legislation in my first week in office."
Notable difference between him and Elizabeth Warren.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) December 20, 2019
======
Asked about climate change, @AndrewYang talked about the possible benefits of Thorium-based nuclear power.
How many of you had heard of Thorium before tonight? #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/ERJT24e4Pw
— QuickTake by Bloomberg (@QuickTake) December 20, 2019
Contrary to Andrew Yang at tonight's debate, the idea that racism contributed to Trump's win is not solely a media theory based on Trump's racist statements — it's backed up by a significant amount of survey research https://t.co/Zjd7Jh6rGT
— Arthur Delaney (@ArthurDelaneyHP) December 20, 2019
And the applause he got he paid for.
— Jack Shafer (@jackshafer) December 20, 2019
“Does Mike Bloomberg belong on the stage?”
Brian Williams, asking for no living human beings.— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) December 20, 2019
Asked whether they'd give a gift to, or ask forgiveness from, their fellow candidates, the men on stage have offered gifts. The women on stage have asked forgiveness.
Hat tip @dwallbank for noticing #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/ElrZg5YZN6
— QuickTake by Bloomberg (@QuickTake) December 20, 2019
germy
germy
germy
PsiFighter37
While I’m not a big fan of Mayor Pete, the shitting on him for getting a McKinsey job is ridiculously out of line IMO. You also don’t get ‘handed’ those kind of jobs – the interview process is quite rigorous. A lot of the griping about that on Twitter, frankly, comes across as people who wish they were talented / smart enough to get a job like that. YMMV, but that’s my take.
Mr. Mack
I’ve been dying to try this… Blech. Did I do it right?
WereBear
@PsiFighter37: It’s not mine. Mayor Pete is far more Republican than Democratic and while I can understand over-compensation as a gay man in a blood red state, I don’t want to vote for it.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Trump is up and tweeting.
ET? Have the aliens taken over?
(I hope this shows up ok. I don’t see the txt tab)
OzarkHillbilly
@Mr. Mack: Blech. It’s all in the inflection.
Kraux Pas
So maybe let’s not have a nominee with a brood of nepotism beneficiaries. We can look more skeptically at fundraising practices.
Oh, and can we please get everyone on record regarding potential mechanisms to hold presidents accountable beyond impeachment? If presidents can’t be charged with crimes as things stand, some president needs to be a mensch and accept that limitation for the sake of all future presidents.
Kay
@germy:
It was just weird to me when some candidates said working class people won’t want to send “other peoples” kids to college. That’s not the pitch. They pitch is they would be able to send their own kids to college.
It sets up a division between “working class adults” and then “college bound upper middle class kids”. Why wouldn’t you compare the two groups of kids? Or two groups of parents?
Baud
@Kraux Pas:
As president, I will allow myself to be indicted for my many crimes.
HalfAssedHomesteader
RE Bernie’s red hands: It was the lighting — which was terrible. I noticed the same thing on Biden. Plus some boom operator kept casting shadows on the candidates.
satby
@WereBear: he’s not really a Republican at all, but the denizens of Bj have declared him so. I’m about to check out of here for the duration and he’s not even my first choice.
and using endless *not* debates as a way of vetting candidates has basically succeeded at turning me off all of them. I just don’t give a shit any more. I just want to vote in November and get the entire hideous business over with.
Kraux Pas
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
No president has done more to show the hypocrisy of Evangelicals, this is true. It’s not close.
And ET? Wasn’t it “Christian Times?” Also I don’t believe he ever read it, or much of anything.
@Baud:
Well, if it comes down to you and Biden, you have my vote
OzarkHillbilly
Sarah Sanders finds out that what is sauce for the goose is not for the gander:
Yeah, I don’t believe she didn’t know either.
Baud
@satby:
FWIW, I think Pete had a really bad night, but I agree with you on HOW is being criticized. Not that his actions aren’t subject to criticism, but I find a lot of it not intellectually satisfying.
Frankly, whenever anyone calls a Dem a Republican, that tells me that the person doesn’t fully grok what Republicans have become.
sdhays
@Kraux Pas: I remember Kamala Harris explicitly said that her Justice Department would retract the stupid memo declaring that the President couldn’t be indicted. But she decided to leave the race to give one of the other women a better chance (at least that’s my interpretation of her exit).
Kay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
It’s amusing he’s so rattled by it because it probably doesn’t matter, at all. So incredibly thin-skinned. He and the low quality team spend their days searching for individuals who don’t worship them, and then targeting them. It must be 100% adoration or they lose their shit.
JPL
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I saw that and thought of Entertainment Tonight, since he’s enamored with Hollywood.
Cheryl Rofer
Didn’t watch the debate, although did watch Twitter some.
satby
@Baud: well, I’m partly dispirited by having lunch with friends yesterday. We were community organizers in Chicago in the 90s, and for a long time I considered the older sister my mentor. They’re both black, and one was happy Harris was out because she bought the “Kamala is a cop” story (she’s for Biden), the other likes Warren still, but thought Andrew Yang was interesting. That was after I was treated to a discussion about the hidden hands controlling things worldwide that would have been right at home at a Birch Society meeting. I just can’t deal with the deluge of disinformation any longer. I’m done.
sdhays
@Kay: It’s also part of the cult enforcement, though. No slight is too small to be noticed, so no one dares deviate from Dump’s orthodoxy.
Jinchi
The controversy isn’t that he got the job. It’s that he can’t (or won’t) disclose what he did when he was working for them. Given the recent headlines (like this one: McKinsey Proposed ICE Cut Spending on Food and Medical Care for Detained Migrants to Reduce Costs), there was simply no way he was going to avoid questions about that.
I may have missed it, but I haven’t seen a statement by Pete condemning McKinsey’s work for Trump’s detention camps.
Anne Laurie
It’s Christianity Today, but of course Trump got it confused with Entertainment Tonight, which is *his* version of the Bible.
Kay
@Baud:
I think Democrats are having a debate over a real question- does it matter who you take money from? It does matter to a certain extent- we all agree on that- because candidates regularly return money from people who are “bad” for one or another reason. They won’t take money from some people because that would imply they agree with those people or are allied with them. So you can’t say it doesn’t matter. Then the question becomes if taking money from some people implies agreement or being allied with why doesn’t that apply to donors you DO take money from?
OTOH, while I agree with Warren, I don’t think enough people care to make it a central political issue, which she has done. I don’t think her broader definition of corruption is mainstream. I wish it were- I agree with her- but I don’t think it is.
Baud
@satby:
Ugh. It’s tragic to experience that in real life. I’m sorry.
Kraux Pas
@sdhays:
Speaks to why she was at the top of my list. But I don’t think this will be quite enough. The next administration can just reinstate that terrible policy. There needs to be a law, not just this but on a wide range of anti-corruption measures.
Mr. Mack
@OzarkHillbilly: Well there’s a reason it belongs to you. I typed it without much inflection.
Satby, if you are still here. I fully get the frustration. This is a grind, thankfully we can largely endure it from our comfortable homes. It’s early, and the rhetoric will only ramp up. I step away from time to time, turn off the news, and seek distractions for awhile. I got called a concern troll here in 2016. It’s a useless term and usually misdirected. Still, I visit this site several times a day and have for a decade or more. Good people here. We will disagree from time to time. Hopefully we can do it without the labels and name calling.
raven
@satby: I have a friend in Berkley who is a very progressive lawyer and she really really dislikes Harris.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Scalzi had a good column yesterday.
stinger
I was just reading that editorial. @Dorothy A. Winsor:
There’s no possible way Donald Trump has ever once read anything in Christianity Today that didn’t have his name in it.
And is anyone surprised that CT would prefer Mike Pence over Donald Trump?
(But I’m chuckling over aliens!)
Gin & Tonic
For those who might be interested. a long-ish, well-researched piece about a tune we all hear too many times this month, the mis-named The Carol of the Bells. It’s a Slate link, if that matters.
Baud
@Kay:
This issue is real and worthy of debate. But it’s often presented as a moral transgression (you’re bad and evil for doing this) rather than a policy issue.
I agree most voters really don’t care than much about fundraising.
satby
@Jinchi: you missed it
Dorothy A. Winsor
@satby: Yeah, I’ve had to stop reading it even to mock it. It’s like I can feel the brain cells dying every time they’re asked to take in another bit of nonsense.
Professor Bigfoot
@satby:
Oh I hear this loud.
I’ve gotten so much “secret hidden conspiracy” nonsense from close friends and relatives that if I never hear the word “Illuminati” ever again it will still be too soon.
Of course, I do understand the temptation to believe in these conspiracies– 400 years we’ve been on this continent and somehow we’re still not free. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@germy: why does his free college plan only apply to public colleges and not private colleges. Why is his plan to pay for college living expenses means tested. Why does he automatically cancel public school debt, but require people to fill out red tape for private school debt.
He’s yells about principle as long it suits him.
Ten Bears
Ho-boy with the Thorium-based reactors (thank you Dr Rofer). Who is this guy? Did he mention sunspots? Orbiting mirrors? Slipstones? Mars Bitches!?
satby
@Mr. Mack: I’ve been here mostly as a lurker since before John left the Republicans. So I know there’s good people here. But we forget to our peril that most voters don’t read Balloon Juice, aren’t as liberal as we are, and get fed a constant stream of bullshit daily packaged as news. And we forget it because we consume our own specially packaged artisanal bullshit news.
Amir Khalid
@Gin & Tonic:
I haven’t read anything in Slate since they paywalled it. It’s a shame; I miss reading Dahlia Lithwick.
Kraux Pas
@Mr. Mack:
It’s a good strategy. Especially since so much of this process is out of any one person’s control anyway.
I’ve been looking for a new book. I want to find a new documentary since I’ve been something on a fantasy kick the last few years and want to shake things up. I heard about both a new movie and book about sustainable farming (not associated with one another aside from subject matter). I wrote down the titles and I just. can’t. find them.
I’d be interested in reading recommendations of any sort.
Kay
@Baud:
Agreed. The moral framing is annoying. The way I am too, I always take it all the way out. So can I work at a job where I BUILD an ICE facility? Can I put in the water lines? I have to turn that down too? It starts to approach “Al Gore boarded an airplane so is therefore not credible”. I don’t know where the line is.
Just debate the question. “If you take money from wealthy donors does that mean you’re in their pocket?” That’s the question.
It’s complicated by the fact that part of Trump’s bullshit is anti-corruption, ‘the swamp”, meaningless of course- he has the most corrupt administration in modern history so he discredits the whole line of thinking.
IMO, too, we saw how bad it can get with “Kamala the Cop”. Do we really want that rule? No black people may work in law enforcement? No black prosecutors at all? What about judges. They’re part of the criminal justice system and I guarantee you every one of them has sent someone to prison. 100% public defenders?
Baud
@satby:
I like to think I produce more than I consume.
Jinchi
I think this is a common mischaracterization of the pledge Warren and others have taken, which is to avoid exclusive, big-money and dark money fundraisers, not to refuse money from wealthy people, entirely. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are free to donate to her campaign, she just doesn’t think it should buy them personal access.
Baud
@Kay:
Why even frame it that way, as a negative? Warren could just say, “I don’t hold fundraisers so you can trust that my decisions aren’t influenced by big money.” I would find that a more powerful statement than talking about wine caves. Admittedly, most people aren’t like me though.
E
The shitting all over Mayor or Pete is nauseating. The guy was an Ivy League grad who volunteered to go to Iraq. And it was the ladies that were attacking him. And in his exchanges with Warren most people I watched thought he clearly got the better of it. All of those above tweets are really off base.
Amir Khalid
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
As I understand, the only federally-owned universities in the US are the service academies. All other public universities are owned by the states. I’m wondering how the Federal Government can cancel student debt owed to state governments without compensating the latter, which would be hugely expensive — unless the plan includes a proposal to buy that debt for so many cents on the dollar.
Kay
@Jinchi:
Thanks that’s a good point. But it’s the kind of distinction I feel like she’s assuming most people understand and I don’t think they do. They’re looking for lines- rules. So it’s not the money it’s the access. It’s funny because all these issues are explored in campaign finance- the rules and the decisions- including in Citizens United. I (obviously) think it’s vitally important but she’s going to have to lead people thru it and it isn’t going to become mainstream overnight.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
The debt is federal or private, usually not state.
Kraux Pas
@Amir Khalid: The states own the public universities but they aren’t the ones loaning out the money.
I believe (I could be wrong) that the federal government is one of the largest lenders and the private loans are subject to heavy federal regulation.
sdhays
@Kay: The same people who had a problem with “Kamala the cop” had no problem with Biden and his work on the Crime Bill in the 90’s. I just don’t believe the sincerity of anyone making that argument. It was an effective “respectable” excuse to not support a black woman for President.
Baud
@E: The tweets are one sided, but IMHO neither party came off well in the exchange. Klobuchar did though. I thought she won the debate and it’s interesting that no one is talking about her.
Kay
@Amir Khalid:
Because the state already got paid. The student borrowed the money with a loan guaranteed by the federal government, paid the state, and now it’s the student and the federal loan guarantee. They would be forgiving debt that is (ultimately) federal. The debt is held by a separate entity but it’s guaranteed by the feds- that’s how an 18 year old can borrow 20,000 with no income and no assets to secure the loan. It’s secured by the federal government.
That’s how DeVos is able to NOT forgive the debt that Congress said should be forgiven for the group of students who got ripped off by the for-profit Corinthian colleges. Corinthian has already been paid and they’re bankrupt so it’s federal money now.
John S.
@Kay: The notion of being against and not working for The Man has been around for quite some time. The Man even featured as a spectacular villain in I’m Gonna Get You Sucka.
But the reality is that The Man is trying to keep us all down in subservience to the 1%. And it’s nearly impossible to navigate life without crossing paths with him.
Kraux Pas
@sdhays: If this here blog is in any way a representative microcosm of D primary voters, I think Harris may have suffered from being too many people’s second choice.
Mr. Mack
@satby: I don’t disagree. I’m constantly seeking balance in what I read here and other spots, and my real life conversations with people with whom I interact on a daily basis.
Cheryl Rofer
@Amir Khalid: The loan programs were federally administered, and the debt is to banks, not the universities and colleges. The students got loans from banks to pay the universities
ETA: I see that Kay got it right, but I would emphasize that the private entities she refers to are banks.
Baud
@sdhays:
I still don’t understand how the Crime Bill is a weapon used against Hillary and Biden, but not Bernie, who voted for it. That always seemed hypocritical.
satby
@sdhays:
by black women making that argument?!?
Dorothy A. Winsor
I admire Nancy Pelosi. She leaves me in awe.
chopper
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
entertainment tonight? i mean, it’s not a magazine, it’s a show, but i’ll bet he watches it all the time.
Baud
@Cheryl Rofer:
Today most debt is owed to the Department of Education. A lot of debt was federalized as part of the ACA bill.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
@Kraux Pas:
I see. The Federal Government can forgive its student debtors, of course, but wouldn’t those private-sector creditors want at least part compensation? That still looks like a lot of money to me.
Jinchi
@Kay: Agreed, she should spell this out explicitly when it comes up.
And it comes up a lot. Like the media firestorm a week ago pointing out that she had made $2 million in legal fees…. Over a 30 year career…. Which is about what you’d make as a public school teacher over the same time period.
Pete tried a variant like this last night with his comment suggesting she’s a hypocrite, because she herself is a millionaire. “This is the problem with issuing purity tests you yourself cannot pass”.
As long as she pays her taxes and isn’t lobbying for personal tax breaks, she’s passes the test just fine.
Kay
@Baud:
Right but then the attacks on Warren adopted her argument. The attacks were “she worked for these corporations as a lawyer so is therefore compromised”. Okay, so taking money DOES compromise the taker? The better argument for that side is “it doesn’t matter”.
Baud
I do think the current field explains why Hillary was the presumptive nominee I’m 2016. Not that the current crop is bad, but Hillary was uniquely prepared for the job.
satby
@Baud: as long as our fascist opponents take all the money they can for elections, we need to not handicap our ability to fight back. When we win, we can pass laws that reinstate election finance oversight and limits.
Kraux Pas
@Baud: When Bernie voted for the crime bill, he recognized it as flawed. In his floor speech, he pointed out a lot of the same issues that are now more commonly recognized as problems with the bill and said we need to work on these.
Did he follow up? I don’t know.
Did he succeed in getting anything done about it? Obviously not.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@chopper:
That was my guess too.
Sometimes I wonder if the person entering his tweets is deliberately trolling him. I know it’s not true, but it’s a fun thought.
Ken
@Dorothy A. Winsor: So Mike Pence is a “Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns”? Interesting. I did not know that.
JMG
I did not see the debate, because I was trimming the tree and drinking wine instead. I’ve already made up my mind about my primary vote (Warren) and will cheerfully support whoever wins. Well, maybe not cheerfully if it’s Bernie, but if he’s the nominee, I will work hard for him. I don’t think he will be, though.
Baud
@Kay: Purity kills.
@satby: Fundraising doesn’t matter that much to me in the near term. But it can be a selling point for a candidate. Who knows how effective it is though.
Baud
@Kraux Pas:
Why didn’t he vote against it like he’s against NAFTA 2.0?
Do you have a link to his floor speech?
Baud
Shit. Cache issue is back.
Kay
@Baud:
And that’s what DeVos is REALLY fighting. The federalization. She’s 100% an ideological animal. She’s not fighting those Corinthian students- in fact, she knows it makes her look bad. What she objects to is “public” anything. Every one of her press releases on the issue includes a broad ideological slam at the whole notion of public guarantees of student debt.
I knew it was big when they put it in the ACA and DeVos’ response validates that. It’s one of the two things she has put actual effort into- the other is federal protections of civil rights in schools. She doesn’t believe in those. Like Rand Paul, she doesn’t think there’s a constitutional basis for them.
It all goes back to FDR for these people. Always. They know FDR “built the house we all live in” and they are on a lifelong mission to tear it down.
Baud
@Kay: Agreed.
Kraux Pas
@Baud: I don’t know, but I’m not going to fault someone for supporting an imperfect bill as long as they recognize the trade-offs they’re making. I’m personally for the update to NAFTA.
The speech I haven’t seen in roughly four years. I promise I’ll get it to you. I don’t promise it’ll be quick. I’m not too motivated on my days off at this hour and a breakfast of oatmeal, bananas, and ramen will apparently contribute to lethargy (I ate these separately, im not a monster)
PenAndKey
@Kay: “Agreed. The moral framing is annoying. The way I am too, I always take it all the way out. So can I work at a job where I BUILD an ICE facility? Can I put in the water lines? I have to turn that down too? It starts to approach “Al Gore boarded an airplane so is therefore not credible”. I don’t know where the line is.”
I hate to say it Kay, but at this point the gap between ICE and the Schutzstaffel is far smaller than I’m comfortable with and I’d absolutely hold it against anyone who helped construct their camps or run the organization in any way. This is an organization that denies flu shots to people in their custody, lets kids die alone on a concrete floor without aid, and who debated the merits of witholding food and medicine to save money. As far as I’m concerned they’re just a few more years and a few more bad leaders away from a more permanent solution mentality. It’s been obvious they’re trending that way for years, so yeah it’ll get held against anyone who helped build, run, or maintain it.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Since donors over a certain amount have to disclose their employer, there’s also the trick of equating donations from employees of a company with donations from the company, which infuriates me. It seems to me as if campaigns trying to emphasize their solidarity with workers and organized labor would do well not to try to muddy the waters here.
Baud
@Kraux Pas:
That’s fine. But I’m not going to give him more leeway than I would anyone else when deciding whether to support or oppose something despite it’s flaws or benefits.
Immanentize
@satby:
Don’t despair. Get Salty.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: Agreed. It’s our side’s own form of disinformation.
NotMax
OT.
Batten down the hatches. Warning just issued for winds up to 60 mph over the next six hours.
Immanentize
@stinger:
The Senate really should just vote to make Pence President. I’m all for it. Whether the Christian Times agrees or not.
OzarkHillbilly
‘We put our lives on the line’: US miners’ strike drags on over wages and safety
2,000 Asarco miners in Arizona and Texas head into third month of strike over low pay, healthcare costs and poor working conditions
Kay
@John S.:
Right and as long as I’ve been a Democrat Republicans have been successfully using this to tell people who work for “the man” that the Left side of the D party who opposes “the man” opposes THEM- so Trump can take an attack on a coal company owner and turn it into an attack on coal miners. The Left side of the Democratic Party has never successfully made this distinction. Bernie pretends they have but they haven’t. If they say “Kamala the Cop” police will understandably and reasonably believe they are opposed to every individual cop. Personally. They have to figure this out if they want to be the working people party. Those people work somewhere.
Betty Cracker
@satby: I understand that argument, but we’ve been hearing it since 1984 or so, and the situation has gotten worse. You and I may understand that it’s Republicans who’ve made it worse, but people who don’t follow this stuff 24/7 don’t trust politicians from any party to address it. I don’t agree, but I understand why they’d believe that.
Omnes Omnibus
Public defenders are complicit in a corrupt system. I have actually heard that argument.
Baud
@Kay: I agree with this. I think the problem flows from the assumption that all these workers are already closeted socialists who are just waiting for a strong leader to lead the fight.
Kay
@John S.:
Republicans actually run into this too. With public sector workers. So Chris Christie says “teachers are overpaid babysitters”, teachers take that personally. Understandably. He then tries to say he objects to the system – public schools- but they don’t buy that- anymore than individual police officers buy that “Kamala the cop” is an attack on the system.
Another Scott
@Baud: Good candidates grow into the position as time goes on.
Politics is a nasty business at times. And unfair memes are part of the business. We all know that.
We need to do more of Obama’s shoulder dusting and keep our eyes on the prize. Most people still aren’t paying attention yet – especially now. They’re thinking about the holidays and the huge credit card bills they’re going to get in January along with the big electric and gas bills…
Hang in there, everyone.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kraux Pas
@Baud:
Well, I have Bernie’s speech. Sorry, the nature of his criticism isn’t quite as I remembered. It more hit themes of, we aren’t going to solve societal problems by jailing people, we need to address root economic causes.
Baud
@Kraux Pas: Thanks. I appreciate you looking that up.
geg6
@Cheryl Rofer:
You’re in my wheelhouse here and I’m here to say you are not correct. That is how it worked a decade ago, but no longer. The lender is the US Department of Education. No one with a direct loan from the federal government owes a penny to a bank. What they have done, however, is contract out with private servicers (some of whom could be considered banks, maybe) who service the loans for a fee for the feds. The only loans a student might owe to a bank would be what we call alternative loans, or private educational loans. These are the loans that are the biggest problem in the student debt bubble. The federal undergrad loans limit the amount students can borrow and have some protections (not many, but some) that are not possible in the world of private loans. The federal loan system works pretty damn well, I think. I only wish that they would raise the limits for the student loans, which hasn’t been done in about twenty years.
NotMax
@satby
Sounds as if a dose of The Old Philosopher is in order.
:)
Hoodie
I know some folks will hate this, but Joe has this in the bag unless he completely strokes out. Warren is not going to get enough momentum unless Bernie drops out, which likely would only be for health reasons; as past performance indicates, he will otherwise go to the bitter end and his followers will loyally go with him. If Warren can’t get enough momentum, pragmatic voters like older AAs will not swing her way, not because they have anything against her, but they have an intuition that radical change is not going to be a big seller with the lumpen electorate with current economic circumstances. They do see an existential threat in Trump, and his defeat is the first order of business.
Candidates like Mayor Pete and Klobuchar are going to cut each other to shreds. In addition, Klobuchar inadvertently made a great argument for Joe in acting on her (justified) resentment toward the sexist double standard evidenced by Lil’ Pete becoming the darling of the centrist commentariat despite his lack of experience. That could put her in position for a VP slot but, if I were Joe, I’d go with Harris, Booker or Castro, as they give him more help with demographics where he may be weak.
Impeachment has really put Biden in a stronger position because the presidency inevitably ends up focusing on national security. The Crackpot Dome scandal underscores that we have narcissistic, addle-brained kleptocrat in the White House who needs to go as soon as possible before he does irreversible damage. None of the other candidates have focused much on national security issues, and Biden doesn’t have to do that much in that realm because he already has some credibility. True, he’s tainted by his initial support of the Iraq War, but that’s been a while ago, he had a lot of company and he also scrubbed away some of that taint by being serving under Obama, who was an early critic of the war.
artem1s
@sdhays:
I think she also decided she needed to take care of business in the Senate. As a former prosecutor and AG, she understands more than most how important it is to show up and prepare for a trial. I wouldn’t be surprised if Moscow Mitch only wants the House Management Team because he fears certain Senators ability to look impressive on camera. Mitch doesn’t want Kamala anywhere near any of the witnesses.
BTW, she would be an impressive minority or majority leader. I don’t mind her staying in the Senate one bit.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: + eleventy billion.
Unless things have changed, billionaires can’t donate more than $2800 for the primary and $2800 for the general election to a candidate. Going above that is illegal. And corporations, federal contractors, and foreigners, cannot donate to candidates.
But, of course, they can give much more to the Parties (~ $28,000? IIRC) and all they want to PACs and 501c3(2.6g87.n.$%##!)s. Because it’s only fair that people with $10B have more to say about how politics work than the rest of us.
It’s not the individual donations. It’s the access at the high-cost fundraisers where most of the money doesn’t go directly to the candidate’s campaign. It the political machinery that needs money to work and depends on donations from people who want a particular outcome to get that money.
Remember the Rmoney thing that the server-guy taped. None of us would get to interact with him that way, and get commitments that he would do what they wanted – only people who pay up get to do so. Elizabeth’s right that voters shouldn’t have to pay huge amounts to get access to her, or to any other candidate.
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@artem1s
Only those senators appointed to do so may speak during the trial proceedings.
rp
Part of the reason McKinsey is an issue for PB is his ultra thin resume. If he had 15 more years of interesting experience no one would care, but there’s only so much to look at. That said, while I can’t stand PB, I think the McKinsey complaints are silly.
schrodingers_cat
Yesterday’s debate summary, teacher’s pet and teacher had a big fight.
Ivan X
Paywall, but I found this NY Mag article about liberal efforts to influence via social media in the way conservatives do fascinating:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/democrats-digital-strategy-2020-election.html
Shalimar
“I will introduce that legislation in my first week in office” is not how legislation works. I realize Bernie knows how Congress works and the president isn’t all-powerful. He does know that, right? He’s just talking down to us like we’re idiots who don’t understand politics because most Americans are idiots who don’t understand politics?
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: It gets a little too close to “I voted for it for the right reasons unlike [insert name]” for my comfort. Also, the Crime Bill was a long time ago, but I still remember members of the CBC supporting it and standing behind Clinton at the signing ceremony.
Kraux Pas
@Hoodie:
The Iraq War is far from the only problematic vote he ever made and certainly not the first. As far as the Obama administration, Biden seems so keen to present himself as the only person who did anything worth a damn during Obama’s years that I’m inclined to not give him credit for any of it. Joe needs a little humility.
Betty Cracker
@Hoodie: I don’t like it at all, but I think you’re right. Le sigh.
Gin & Tonic
@Kraux Pas:
I think you’ll be disappointed to find that “humility” and “running for President” are generally incompatible traits.
Omnes Omnibus
Humility is not a trait common to presidential candidates.
gene108
@PsiFighter37:
I don’t get it either. It’s like they believe most Americans don’t want to make more money, if they had the chance.
Same people, who don’t understand that most folks work for Big Evil Corp (BEC), and they don’t want to burn capitalism to the ground.
They want to get a larger share of the profits.
But they are very loud.
They made it so a candidate, who releases 39 years worth of tax returns is just setting herself up for a take down, rather than being applauded for transparency.
eclare
@Hoodie: That assessment sounds right to me. I vote on Super Tuesday, and whoever wins SC will get my vote. Looks like that will be Joe in a landslide.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Hoodie: I don’t hate it. But Joe’s growing on me.
Baud
@gene108:
QFT
zhena gogolia
@PsiFighter37:
I really don’t like long hit pieces on people who might be the nominee. Not interested in strings of tweets like those above that are ALL negative about one of the prospective candidates.
Kraux Pas
@Gin & Tonic: @Omnes Omnibus: Just a little humility will do. I don’t need him to have a normal human amount. Voters may find it clarifying if our nominee is less of a braggart than Trump.
FlipYrWhig
@PenAndKey:
Buttigieg didn’t work for ICE. He worked for a management consulting firm that after he left consulted for ICE. This is a stupid fucking argument and people should stop making it.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
I think Biden would need to put someone on the ticket who has broad appeal to young voters, someone like Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish
Professor Bigfoot
It oughta be about the behavior of the candidate with that money, not simply getting the money from the “wrong” places (obviously we aren’t taking Russian money, but the point stands…)
Omnes Omnibus
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: If only Billie were just old enough. I would pay to see those rallies.
Betty Cracker
@Professor Bigfoot: It’s not the sacks of money per se, it’s the access. If someone spends 12 hours a day with bundlers, those are the concerns and perspectives they’ll hear.
tobie
@Amir Khalid: That’s a good question. State schools receive federal aid but are still governed by state legislatures. On the other hand, tuition assistance / financial aid / student loans are usually funded by the federal govt. That’s at least my understanding.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@Omnes Omnibus: Rolling Stone just put out a great interview with her and her brother on the serendipity of standing at an unfamiliar crosswalk in Sydney leading to the beat and hook of their runaway hit song (video)
Jinchi
Teachers take it personally because Republicans have done a lot more than simply insult them. They’ve stripped them of job security, underfunded their facilities, cut and frozen their pay, increased their workload and raided their pensions, all while blaming them for most of society’s problems. This isn’t just rhetoric.
Kraux Pas
@Jinchi: My mom has a chip on her shoulder about teachers, how they make all this money and get the summer off work.
Meanwhile every public school teacher I know personally needs a second job to make ends meet and is not paid anywhere near what a similarly educated professional would expect.
germy
germy
WaterGirl
If performance in debates was a major driver for how well the candidates are doing, then Biden would have tanked long ago. Kamala was still be in the race, and a whole lot of people would have a different standing in the polls.
germy
Jinchi
My brother would make the same complaint to my mother, while she was a public school teacher.
Meanwhile, two of the younger teachers at my kid’s school still live with their parents, because they can’t afford housing in our city.
Baud
@germy:
He spelled deplorables wrong.
WaterGirl
I’m not saying we should disregard debate performance entirely, but I think it’s helpful to keep in mind that what makes you good in debates is not necessary correlated with what would make you a good president.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: In Barack’s announcement speech low those many years ago, he said something like this: lobbyists have access “and you get to write a letter”.
James E Powell
@sdhays:
Agreed. It was like people argued that as a district attorney, she should have adopted the policy recommendations of the defense bar. That’s not how the world or politics works.
Yarrow
@satby: Please don’t leave. I always enjoy your comments and I really enjoy hearing your first-hand knowledge of Mayor Pete.
I keep an eye on the presidential primary but I’m not very interested in it. My interest, attention and effort is going to flipping a district and a Senate campaign. I think the Senate is essential. I find it much less stressful to focus on the downticket races.
Re: your friends, if you run into that kind of situation again maybe switch the conversation to disinformation and how it’s been used to manipulate voters. The Democrats released their recommendations for how to combat disinformation. Here’s the link for the general public. If you talk about the larger problem then people might be more aware when they read something online. We all have a role to play there.
Barbara
@PsiFighter37: Regarding McKinsey, generally, I think the way you do, that you shouldn’t judge someone on a first job out of college, especially if you have student debt. But, importantly, it’s also not really the sterling credential that many make it out to be. It’s a “go to law school because I am smart and I can” kind of experience. And as for the rigorous hiring process — you would want to know what kinds of traits they are selecting for and against before you decide that it is a significant plus in the political process. I think we can agree that McKinsey hires have a clean criminal background check, a higher than average GPA, and majored in some subject that makes them economically literate.
mapaghimagsik
@PsiFighter37:
The McKinsey consultants I worked with weren’t all that. I’m sure, like any other consulting firm, there’s stellar consultants and there are those that either barely made it under the bar or had the bar lifted a little.
But I have seen the mindset about “optimization” they take, and they are enablers of greedy management with better than average power point decks.
tobie
Warren’s best line of the night may have been when she was asked about her age and she said she’d be the youngest female President. It was a great line. Turns out Warren was quoting HRC from 2015. I really wish she’d given credit to HRC.
Barbara
@satby: I suspect that I share Klobuchar’s view, which is that if Buttigieg were female he would never have gotten on the stage to begin with. The fact that he implied he would be able to appeal to a wide range of voters because of his success in Indiana when he has never won a statewide office, is the kind of puffery that I find exasperating. The fact that the press doesn’t look behind it is doubly exasperating.
Baud
@tobie:
Steyer is the only candidate who has mentioned Hillary favorably. It makes me sad.
Kay
@Jinchi:
It’s a really hard job and I literally don’t know how they do it. They should get paid more. What was eye-opening to me on a school committee was how little TIME they have. It must be a feeling of “I will never get this done”, all day every day. The day is just packed. There’s always a student that needs MORE than they’re getting. And they’re not like adults, kids. You can’t just say “well, put in more time!” They’re good for about 6 hours, max. After that it doesn’t matter if you make them stay there physically, they just mentally check out. It’s like pushing on a…cloud.
They say about doctors and lawyers that they’re only as happy as their neediest patient/client so I imagine 30 needy people every day. Plus, they’re small and likely to cry.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy: true, but…
I know there are rich white guys w/out college, I know several IRL, but I would bet most of trump’s base, as represented above, are not millionaires.
zhena gogolia
THAT was the last question???? God, I’m glad I skipped it.
Kraux Pas
@Yarrow:
I had a conversation last night with one of my buddies about Biden and the whole Burisma thing. He outright denied the fact that the matter was already investigated finding no wrongdoing by the Bidens while telling me I obviously didn’t know the whole story, asserted that having the prosecutor removed was the corrupt act, doesn’t recognize that legally conducted nepotism is a separate issue that I’m happy to talk about (but seems unbothered by Trump’s kids), and can’t see the difference between witholding aid as a matter of actual US policy rather than to seek a personal favor.
Worst of all he made me defend Biden, whom I fucking can’t stand, but not for these made-up bullshit reasons. He’s one of the two people I know pushing Tulsi.
ETA: Even though some aspects of it are bullshit, there are too many areas where Biden muddies the moral high ground the Ds hold over Trump.
gvg
@Amir Khalid: The debt isn’t owed to the states, the loans come from the Federal government. The students have to pay the tuition the semester they incur it, its the source of the payment Federal Stafford loans that follows the students around for decades.
The states have lower tuition costs because the tuition and all the costs of maintaining the public colleges are subsidized by the state which means tax payers. What the students pay, is not the “real” cost of what they get. Many states have cut that underwriting a lot in recent decades, so student cost has gone up, but not equally in different states. Private schools don’t have that benefit, but they also don’t have taxpayers that will scream if they pay raise the tuition too high, so if the federal government just says “we will pay your college costs” the private schools will raise their tuition higher to get more Federal money with the government having little control over it. Corruption would be inevitable.
Now states might be tempted by this but ultimately the federal and state tax payers are the same people so we have some control.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m not overly-impressed by Buttigieg, but I really doubt he’s so strong in Iowa because Jennifer Rubin and Jon Weaver like him so much
@zhena gogolia: how is that not embarrassing to the people who said it with their mouths? in the office before the debate at least one other person said: “Yeah, that’s it. That’s our closer.”
zhena gogolia
@Hoodie:
Good analysis. This matches my own scientific survey of one non-BJ reader (my husband) in my own home. He’d like to see Biden-Harris. (He doesn’t know Stacey Abrams from a hole in the ground.)
zhena gogolia
@Kraux Pas:
Does this person just have RT on a constant loop in his brain?
Shokin (whom Rudy is hobnobbing with) was the corrupt prosecutor whom the entire international community, including the official US policy, wanted out. He would have been LESS likely to investigate Burisma. So Joe pushing him out would have hurt Hunter Biden, not helped.
Kraux Pas
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
What IS this famously awful question?
@zhena gogolia:
What is RT?
Yarrow
@zhena gogolia: I’m no fan of Yang but he had the best response to that idiotic question. It was basically, “uhhhhh…..” and then he looked around like “what the hell kind of question is that?” It felt completely real. Those kinds of questions should be off limits.
PsiFighter37
@Jinchi: Also indicative of people not understanding how these jobs work. If people think Mayor Pete got to choose what he worked on as an entry-level McKinsey employee, they are gravely mistaken. Junior employees are told how high to jump, and they do it.
Gin & Tonic
@Kay:
And they bring with them a myriad of physical and psychological issues, which many times are not adequately resolved at home for a million reasons. (My daughter is a
union thugpublic elementary-school teacher.)Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kraux Pas:
last tweet in the OP
tobie
@Baud: Lots of people take pot shots at HRC. It bugs me too.
Yarrow
@Hoodie: Completely agree. I also like the direction Biden seems to be going. His social media is strong. His ads hit Trump. He had a good debate and talks about how we have to go after Trump. If he’s hiring advisers who are getting him to do those things then that also shows good leadership and understanding of his strengths and weaknesses, which is a good thing in a president.
gvg
@sdhays: Time is the context. Back when bill was running, crime had been growing for quite some time and it was the black community pushing for a lot more tough on crime measures including some more of their own to go to jail, because it was the black communities that were the hardest hit. Bill and Hillary were actually being responsive to their black supporters in passing some of theses things. Now it’s 30 years later and things are different. Crime is way down and apparently not especially because of either tough or gentle laws. Best explanation is less lead in the environment to impact babies, but I am not sure that is proven. We also have found out those laws can and were used in a more racist weapon way than we realized, we screwed up, and now we have to fix it. So, there is a big difference in supporting those things 30 years ago and supporting them now. They mean you are different types of people, depending on when.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
listening to an NPR report on the massive wildfires in Australia, a few minutes after hearing about a new trump rule that will, effectively, force states to buy power from coal and I kind of just want to cry
gene108
@Matt McIrvin:
That threshold is $200.
It’s something a lot of folks, will fall into.
Yarrow
@Kraux Pas: Russia Today. Russian propaganda network.
Gin & Tonic
@Kraux Pas:
Please specify which aspects of the Biden/Burisma/Ukraine “thing” are not bullshit.
Fair Economist
@Barbara:
Not so much Buttigieg on the economic literacy, because he thinks, and said in a national forum, that Democrats are less concerned with the deficit than Republicans, when the reality is entirely the reverse with all major moves increasing the deficit done by Republicans and all major moves decreasing it done by Democrats. You have to be profoundly economically illiterate and getting your info from propaganda sources to believe what Buttigieg said.
Kraux Pas
@Gin & Tonic: The Burisma thing is precisely what is bullshit. There are plenty of legitimate non-Ukraine criticisms to make of Biden, however.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I don’t feel like I can rely on gender gaps. I get that one has appeared re:Trump and maybe it played into 2018 but I feel like we’ve been saying it’s the “year of the woman” since 1987.
Gin & Tonic
@Kraux Pas: That was not at all clear from the way you phrased your ETA.
Kraux Pas
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Oh. Ewwww.
So if I ever apply for a job with a major news organization, I’ll remember to include “utterly vapid” under my skills on my CV.
Immanentize
@Gin & Tonic: advances in psychopharmacology have drastically changed the landscape of education. From primary Ed through terminal degrees. It has opened the world of education to so many who had no access previously. But it has also vastly complicated the work of teachers (front line) and administrators.
gvg
@Amir Khalid: There are 2 kinds of Federal student loans. The older was the Stafford loans made by the banks but guaranteed by the government and the schools certified the amounts to the government to specific Federal rules. The newer are the Ford(Federal direct student loans) loans which are exactly the same except there are no banks, the government directly makes the loan. The amounts and rules are the same and the new name never caught on. People call them all Staffords (and the parent loans are Pluses). there have always been ways to get some of them “forgiven” and if it is a bank, the government paid them back. Sometimes employers like school systems will pay some of your loans for you, that is up to them, not the government. DeVos has been preventing a lot from processing that used to be routine but the law hasn’t actually changed.
There are also private loans to students and those are NOT especially regulated. The more expensive the school, the more likely it is for students to turn to them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: that poll doesn’t make me confident, for all of us here who say we’ll crawl across broken glass to vote for our nominee, there are a dozen Bubbas in MI, WI and PA who will do the same for trump, because while he cuts taxes for their boss’s bosses, he makes them feel like they’re scoring points in life because we’re pissed off.
Betty Cracker
The Biden-Burisma-Ukraine thing is 100% bullshit, but Biden needs a better answer than he’s come up with so far because if he’s the nominee (and I am 80% resigned to that probability), because that’s all we’re going to hear about in the general campaign.
We know Trump’s M.O. — use lies and insinuation to dirty up his opponent to distract from his own filth. Biden’s answer to-date is something like “My son and I didn’t discuss what he did in Ukraine, but I trust my son.”
Not good enough.
Biden has smart advisers, and I hope they can figure out a way to not only alleviate the concern that Hunter was engaged in hinky business abroad (it may have been perfectly legal, but it looks bad and plays right into Trump’s phony “swamp” bullshit) but use it to attack Trump’s massive corruption.
Immanentize
@Kay:
Hasn’t it been?
Kraux Pas
@Gin & Tonic: It should have been clear from the body of my post. I will say, though, the prevalence of nepotism, even if not explicitly endorsed by the parent, is a perfectly valid discussion to have.
Kay
@Gin & Tonic:
Everyone should have to do a mandatory 3 months on a school committee. I got it in 3 meetings. Your school is a perfect reflection of your community. For better or worse. Our band director said it best “everything that’s out there? It comes in here”. That was about vaping but it applies across the board.
The job is complex too. One of my sisters who doesn’t have children said to me “I couldn’t manage their emotional weather like you do” and I feel like that describes it. There’s sudden squalls. Sunny days. Whole bad seasons.
Immanentize
@Kay: Also, speaking of women, the ERA is about to get the 38th state — Virginia — for ratification. Of course some retrograde states are suing to stop it from becoming an amendment to the Constitution. Although Congress put a time limit on ratification, they never withdrew it….
waysel
@Fair Economist: I know a former McKinsey person- the economic background is not requisite. They recruit from engineering grads, probably from any background in any subject. They seek brilliance and creative thinking. They work in teams, so no doubt every team has an accounting expert, and a legal one, but economics knowledge isn’t a given.
jonas
@Kraux Pas: It was Christianity Today. The idea that Trump reads, much less reads CT, is pretty risible.
waysel
Hey, my comment showed on my first try today! Progress?
barb 2
Mansplaning — that’s what mayor Pete was doing to both women candidates. Biden is also guilty of manspaning to Warren in the last debate.
I will not vote for a male — period! Since my vote does not count — in the way votes are counted in solid blue states — I can write in whatever I want and it does not matter. The Electorial college is what matters — perhaps 11,000 voters in Wisconsin.
Seems like what needs to be done is to toss out the f***ing EC. No matter how many new voters are registered in California — those votes really do not matter in the EC. We know that Trump cheated his way into the white house via help from the Russians. Moscow Mitch seems determined to allow Russian to help Trump again.
Sort of funny that Trump was impeached because of the Putin story about how it was Ukraine that was out to harm Trump and Trump holds grudges. What a baby — sorry to insult real babies. (This according to reports — Putin and Trump had their secret talks.)
The GOP — Biden thinks he can work with those traitors??? He is too old — he mind is gone to the olden days — those days may never return. Me thinks that the GOP party needs to be buried so that it can return as something sane. Will it happen in our lifetimes? Probably not mine. I just wonder who among the GOP aren’t traitors to the US. How many get money from Russia? Doesn’t Biden realize that a whole lot a house cleaning needs to be done with the GOP? The Environmental crisis is real — what sort of future awaits of babies born today? I don’t think Biden is aware of the crisis — he thinks he can take a moderate approach. He is an idiot.
My dad was a cold warrior, WWII Vet, Vietnam War Vet. He retired from the military when I was in college. Now I wonder why he bothered. Why he put his family through the hell of military life? For a traitor now living in the white house? Someone who is willing to believe Putin over his own Intelligence Professionals? Trump is probably a useful idiot — or is he? Is he an agent? His son in law seems to be an agent for ruler Saudi Arabia according the the bragging of the Prince.
—end rant — sorry
gvg
@Kraux Pas: He also should get credit for good things more recently like the Violence against women act. It also seemed to me like he influenced Obama into coming out for gay marriage when the timing was right, though I am not sure about that. Joe has not done just bad things or he would not be here.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I wonder how many people in WI, MI and PA thought the same in 2016. and in FL in 2000. “Not a dime’s worth of difference!”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@gvg: also, as I keep saying, Biden will be as progressive as the Congress, House and Senate, allow or require him to be, and with him we won’t have people asking Mark Kelly and Betsy Sweet to justify, or distance themselves from, eliminating private insurance.
Baud
@barb 2: Sorry, but there’s no noble reason for not voting against fascism.
Kraux Pas
@gvg: He’s done enough bad things that I just plain don’t trust him. I’ve skipped the last couple debates because he’s just straight-up lied about his fellow candidates* in each of the ones I did watch and I’m gonna have a hard time voting for this guy next year if I keep hearing his voice. If we want a bullshit artist as president, we already have one.
*The one that stuck with me was about Harris’s approach to healthcare. He infuriated me that night. And healthcare is the one issue that I actually prefer his position.
Kay
I don’t know if other people find this clarifying, but I always do. So Trump and the low quality hires actually believed Pelosi didn’t have the votes in the House.
It’s that combination of stupidity and arrogance. They don’t know jack shit about Pelosi if they thought that, but their assumption is they’re ahead of her.
I feel like political media is on a kind of mission to make these people smarter and more savvy than they are – they’re not. They’re just inexperienced low quality hires who happened to hit the fucking lottery of electoral vote combinations. Not only do they not know, they don’t know what they don’t know, and they’re too impressed with themselves to learn anything, ever. And there’s a reason for that- it’s because no one ever checked them, hard. They were coddled and over-praised every step of the way. They’re outraged they get criticized because they are people who never had to bear up under criticism. It feels “unfair” to them, like it does to kids.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
there we go: Not a dime’s worth of difference… I just can’t bring myself to vote for…
I’d guess we’re about a dozen comments away from “after four more years of trump, the people will turn to BERNIE!”
Miss Bianca
@PsiFighter37: Speaking as someone who worked for McKinsey, albeit very briefly, I would say dinging him on getting a McKinsey job right out of college is A-OK by me.
germy
Kraux Pas
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Well, if we nominate Biden, what we’re going to get is four more years of Trump.
ETA: And I think it’s at least fair to say that he muddies some of the distinctions we want to separate our candidate from Trump.
And Bernie is waaaaaay down my list too, by the by.
Miss Bianca
@Professor Bigfoot: How did Public Enemy put it? – oh yeah – “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back”.
Kay
@Immanentize:
I actually find my interactions with white women deflating. My personal experience is the problem. I see the polling and I think “ok, but they’re not actually a group of voters and they may never be”
A lot of people want them to be! But they’re not. I recently had a conversation where a woman told me she supports a right to an abortion and then it just went off the rails where she’s excluding, I don’t know, “whores” or this group of women she thinks she knows who “use it as birth control”- I’m just appalled. Like, struck dumb by how horrible this got where I’m “you know, I’m NOT actually agreeing with you”. This happens a lot.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I saw a clip of Kellyanne a couple of weeks ago saying the “dirty little secret” was that Pelosi didn’t have the votes. As if. Conway isn’t fit to sharpen Pelosi’s stilettos.
You’re right — the media coddles these incompetent clowns because they didn’t think Trump would win, and they don’t recognize that it was a black swan event, not some hidden genius on the part of Team Trump.
You’d think three solid years of watching those arrogant assholes stomp their own dicks at every turn would be edifying, but nope.
O. Felix Culpa
@Immanentize: You’re joking, right?
Another Scott
@tobie: The University of Virginia gets something like 2-3% of its annual budget from the state of Virginia.
Public colleges and universities are very, very different beasts now than they were when they were founded. Direct public support of higher public education has been severely cut over the years and it’s a big problem (because, among other things, it places huge burdens on students and their parents that those 40+ years ago didn’t have to deal with).
Cheers,
Scott.
Jinchi
@Miss Bianca: I’m curious. As someone who worked there, how would you describe what McKinsey actually does?
L85NJGT
If you can’t drink their wine, take their money, and vote against them, you got no business being up there.
Duane
@germy: That on-your-ownership society line is a crock of Republican crap. Might as well say ” Good luck with your health care.”
sdhays
@barb 2: I think there’s a pretty decent chance that there will be at least one woman on the ticket. If Biden is the nominee, I expect him to choose a woman as running mate.
PJ
@Omnes Omnibus: There are a significant number of Twitter leftists (and it seems they are all Bernie supporters) who advocate doing away with not just the criminal justice system entirely, but the civil justice system as well. How 300 odd-million people reverting to self-help to protect their interests creates a better world is left unexplained, but I guess “do what thou wilt” immediately brings the socialist paradise into being.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
It’s important to me because we spend so much time trying to guess their motives or next move. Is this a distraction from this, etc., what are they really thinking? This is the defensive posture of powerless people. I won’t accept it. I don’t accept my role in this ecosystem they invented. I get to be an actor with agency too. I think media coverage like the kind the NYTimes specializes in reinforces this- we may only watch and guess. They have some inside information so they’ll relay that to us but to make it valuable we have to accept their premise, which is that these people know what they’re doing. They don’t.
A nice thing about Nancy Pelosi is she doesn’t bluff. They always think she’s bluffing but she says exactly what she thinks and will do. I think it’s WHY she’s successful. It’s not a double back flip secret plan- it’s exactly what she said.
Miss Bianca
@Jinchi: I can only speak from the perspective of a lowly production assistant. So, from that perspective, I made pretty charts and graphs to help consultants explain to the fat-cat management types who hired them on how getting rid of their oldest and most experienced workers would boost their quarterly profits. Stuff like that.
Fair Economist
@Kay:
I wish MSM would report the truth like you do.
Kent
@PJ: What they don’t understand, is that doing away with the entire criminal justice system is basically the wet dream of all the white racist survivalist militia types who arm themselves to the teeth and do play soldier maneuvers in the woods. It’s basically the entire wet dream of much of the most militaristic wing of the NRA. It would not end well for most normal Americans.
mrmoshpotato
@PJ:
I don’t even know where to begin. Would be interesting to see their reaction once they get robbed.
Laws? We ain’t got no laws. We don’t need no laws. I don’t have to follow any stinking laws.
Kay
This is Joe Biden’s true super power against the Trumps and the low quality Trump hires- it’s that they are mean-spirited petty assholes and for some reason he is able to humiliate them on it in a way that almost no one else has been able to do.
It’s delightful to watch.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: I think that’s one of the main reasons McConnell and Graham don’t want witnesses. Pompeo would lie smoothly, and Mulvaney probably wouldn’t fuck up enough for Susan Collins to start trusting her lying eyes, but the Beast and his Beastlings would howl for the Bidens and the smarter Rs aren’t willing to risk a “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” moment from Uncle Joe.
Though from Joe it would be an extended rant starting with “C’mon, man…” instead of prep schooled eloquence. But maybe by the time he got to reminding Lindsey of how they sat together at Beau’s wake, the public might be on Joe’s side
Ksmiami
@Hoodie: Agreed 100 percent- I like Warren in the Senate or as a chair of the Banking Committee etc but she exhausts me. Most people don’t want to follow politics daily and Biden (w Harris) offers some peace.
Kay
Watching religious Trump supporters have another round of fake-anguish for supporting him all of Twitter is pointing out his nastiness and his divorces and his assaulting women and his racism, but even if you forget all that- he LIES ALL THE TIME. That’s in the ten commandments! They have to reject him just for that!
I feel like they’re making this too complicated. Lying constantly? Done.
Fair Economist
@Kay:
I agree, and you’d expect it *would* make a big difference for somebody making deals on hot and difficult issues. If a Representative is going to be willing to make a deal to take a risky vote or vote against their own preferences they are going to have to really trust the person they are dealing with – that they mean it, and that they can deliver. Nancy can be trusted – she delivers. Part of the reason she gets flack from the public is that she treats the public the same – she won’t make promises she doesn’t *know* she can deliver.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, he needs a better answer, but even with a better answer it’s not going to go away if he’s the nominee. Hillary stiffed a waitress and was mean once, don’t ya know. (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)
Reuters:
(Emphasis added.)
“If you’re explaining, you’re losing”, but they need to find a way to distill this story into a sound-bite and move on.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: That’s a great point. He really does inspire those assholes to reveal themselves. That will come in handy.
mrmoshpotato
@Kay: It’d make a hilarious movie. Think National Lampoon or Groundhog Day. As real life, it’s disgusting to have a crime family in such positions of power – and such a classless, white trash family at that.
artem1s
@mrmoshpotato: @mrmoshpotato:
Srsly, do we need any more proof that Wilmer’s base are former Ron Paul supporters?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@mrmoshpotato: trump had one of his slip-ups the other night when he starts bragging about how he’s so much more elite than those elitists his howler monkeys hate, then he remembered that his voters aren’t trust fund babies who live in tacky hotels with gold-plated toilets. Not that he’d lose them for good, but every once in a while the crowd goes quiet, only for a minute or two, and it throws him. So he comes up with something like “John Dingle is burning in hell” to make them howl and hoot again.
Fair Economist
@germy: I do the healthcare choices in my family, and in my case, with 4 options, it’s plausible to figure the differences between the plans, although I have to construct a pretty complicated spreadsheet for it, and I’ve made consequential mistakes*. In the end it doesn’t matter, because the differences work out to “this plan is better if I’m going to need this amount of healthcare and that plan is better if I’m going to need that amount.” Actually choosing a plan requires knowing the statistical distribution of my expected healthcare needs for the coming year, which of course I don’t know because I’ll only get to run the trial once and I haven’t even been able to yet. As a result, I just stick with the existing plan whenever possible because it is *such* a PITA to switch insurance. (So much fun figuring out which of my existing providers are still covered.)
*The consequential mistake was switching from a standard plan to a health savings account a few years ago because I didn’t notice there were much higher deductibles on drugs.
Another Scott
@Kraux Pas: If Biden wins it’s because he’s the strongest candidate in the primaries according to the primary voters. If the other candidates, and their voters, feel that he would be a disaster in the general election, then they need to get on the ball and convince other primary voters.
That’s the way the system works.
Cheers,
Scott.
PJ
@Kent:
@mrmoshpotato: I can only imagine that the “we don’t need no stinking law and order people” have no awareness of historical periods, or contemporary places (Somalia, Afghanistan) where there is no justice system and people are left to tribal/clan/warlord retribution and protection to survive. I’m guessing they also think that people only do bad things because of a bad system, so if you take away the bad system, voilà, people are living happily in harmony.
L85NJGT
@germy:
Pete’s right.
“Democrats are working to take away your healthcare choices.”
I mean seriously; are they really running with the argument that you all are too fucking stupid to grok the healthcare.gov site?
That’s not an own goal, but straight up political suicide.
zhena gogolia
@Another Scott:
You’ve convinced me. I am not voting for Hunter Biden under any circumstances.
Brachiator
@Kay:
They see Trump as chosen by God. His imperfections don’t matter. This, of course, makes no sense, but zealous religious rationalization is immune to logic, common sense and any kind of rebuttal.
Fair Economist
@Another Scott:
I think Biden should say something like “Burisma probably was trying to influence me, but they were wasting their money because I’m not corrupt like Trump, making the government overpay for his own tacky hotels.”
Bill Arnold
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Just for the record, Christianity Today is in no way “far left”.
Media Bias Fact Check: Christianity Today “RIGHT-CENTER BIAS”
D.J. Trump is not being well served politically by his Mammonite ear-whisperers, with whom he shares the weakness of unfettered greed.
ThresherK
@germy: Plus, means-tested programs are designed to let anyone near upper-middle-class (or aspiring to there), or in our mainstream media, whine “we’re giving soooo much away to the poooooors, and what are they doing with it? Are they wasting our moneez?”.
SocSec isn’t means-tested. No new programs I can think of had ought to be. Paid-for public undergrad tuition, especially.
Fair Economist
@L85NJGT:
That’s absolutely not true. One of the biggest advantages of M4All is that patients will get to choose their doctors. Right now your insurance company does.
Democrats are trying to expand people’s healthcare choices enormously, and a lot of vested interests are lying about it.
James E Powell
@Kay:
I hear that. It’s second only to “the kids will turn out” as a recurrent Democratic fantasy.
Apologize for projecting negative, but I will probably never recover from the large number of pro-choice women who voted for Bush or the white women with no college who voted for the candidate who regards them as little more than toys for his amusement.
Betty Cracker
@Another Scott: They won’t be able to move on. That’s my fear. Trump will bring it up incessantly, so I hope they’re prepared. Biden has said he’ll bar any family member from working overseas during his term, which strikes a contrast with Trump.
But given that he’ll be going up against the most corrupt motherfucker to ever hold the office, I wish he’d go bolder. I wish he’d say straight up that while what his son did was legal, he knows it looks bad and that he wishes he’d asked his son not to take a job he would never have been offered in a million years if his last name wasn’t Biden.
I wish he’d say he understands how it looks to people and he gets that it undermines faith in government, which it does. If he got religion in a big way on this issue and said he’d make fighting corruption a central focus, that could possibly break through.
Going big like that could possibly neutralize the issue, but I don’t think Biden is an anti-corruption reformer at heart, so that’s not going to happen. As a result, one of the most potent weapons against Trump will be effectively lost to us in a both-sides sleaze fest if we nominate Biden.
Kay
@Fair Economist:
And that to me is where the “low quality” part of the Trump hires come in, because they DON’T operate like that. They operate by trickery and lying. That’s what they think is savvy and sophisticated. If Pelosi were a real player she would lie to her caucus and they would have to follow her anyway, because she’s powerful! It’s a way of looking at the world. A shitty and deeply cynical way of looking at the world. They don’t value things like “trust” because that’s a longer term investment. They value quick shiny (empty) “deals” and then you move on to the next. That people don’t trust you doesn’t matter because you have power over them. For a while. Long enough to get in and out and get that one thing you want. They are just like their boss, which is why he hired them.
barb 2
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
that is stupid. Got to vote? Not if my vote is not counted.
I wrote that I live in a solid blue state. My vote for Prez does not count — that is a fact. All of the number crunchers tell us that votes in the deep blue states do not count. Clinton won by vote total.
Russia or China or North Korea can flip a few votes here and there in critical states. Many States have done nothing to protect their votes. Any connection to the internet by any of the states means that computers will be hacked. Voting rolls can be altered. Talk to security experts — they will wake you up (maybe).
This means that unless voting is via paper ballet and all information has firewalled to protect date, that any of our votes are meaningless. It does not matter who we vote for if our vote can be changed. We are told that hackers are trying right now to break into our voting data. Moscow Mitch keeps killing clean voting legislation.
I live in a blue state we elected a computer data expert on the county level. Every single county everywhere is a target. We have so many blue votes in my state that most hackers wont bother. Hackers go for easy and non traceable.
But there are lots of soft spots –change vote, purge voter rolls and hackers can get another win for Trump. It doesn’t matter if the Blue candidate wins by 10 million votes. Only a few votes count in a few states.
Bush won with the help of the Supreme court — by only a few votes. Then again in Florida in 2018 there are vote totals that don’t make sense.
The GOP wins by cheating and it doesn’t matter who the hell I vote for as Prez in my solid blue state, Governor & both houses are Dem and I vote on the state level.
Apparently the only votes that count are the ones that can be hacked in 3 or 4 backward Trump cult states. We don’t have a democratic system of voting. There is a paper written by a stat expert showing how he could flip votes in key counties – in key states which would give the vote to ???? fill in the blank. That paper was written in 2005 — looks like the Russian hackers used that to give them ideas for 2016. Ohio was easy to hack back in 2004 — or would have been. Computer Engineers have been concerned about online vulnerability for years.
And in my blue state I will not vote for another Mansplaing male for Prez. Unless it is Cory Booker and he is the only male of the male candidate who “gets it”. I am too old to put up with MCP crap. Pete is an example of this thing that males do — and if you didn’t hear him . . . . then.
I’ll vote for Warren or Harris. or Amy.
These Male Candidates Couldn’t Answer A Simple Debate Question On Women In Power
mrmoshpotato
@artem1s: Nope.
patroclus
I agree with Hoodie above that all of this is playing to Biden’s benefit. Yes, he is gaffe-prone and easy to mock for a wide variety of things, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is massively more qualified on foreign affairs (which is what Presidents mostly do) than all of the other candidates. And I’m fairly sure that he would sign all liberal legislation that Congress would pass and appoint qualified liberal judges. Klobuchar is my current favorite (and Harris and Booker were also) but her chances are very slim – she has to either win Iowa or do extremely well and come close, If not, she’s toast. So, I’m likely to switch to Biden…
That said, if I have to defend him, the Crime Bill also contained the Assault Weapons Ban. We all say that we support that to stop the rash of deadly shootings – he was and is the point person on getting an updated version, together with comprehensive background checks. Bernie? He might sign it but his record is that of Vermonter who voted against gun control for most of his career. Warren? She’d sign it too but it isn’t a big part of her campaign – would it really be a priority? On guns, Biden is the lefty. With all this talk about moderates and progressives, please pay attention to that crucial issue.
James E Powell
@Betty Cracker:
The press/media coddle, promote, and protect these clowns and crooks because Trump is the best to happen for their business and their individual careers since 9/11. As a group, they despised Hillary Clinton and rarely passed up a chance to disparage her. They were ecstatic that Trump won. And now, even the people who are on cable every night slamming Trump recognize that he is golden for them, nation and world be damned.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker:
more than that, Biden has a cult about his family, and himself. “My word as a Biden”. His refusal to apologize, his demand that Booker apologize to him for pointing out how odd (to say the least) his James Eastland story was. I’ve always been skeeved out by how he used his son’s death to leak to Maureen Fuckign Dowd about how the country needed “Biden values”. IT’s one of the things I like least about him.
I think he may be our strongest candidate by default, but I’m not thrilled about it.
mrmoshpotato
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yup. I doubt they’d turn away even if he showed them with grade school math how he and the Rethuglican party are fucking them. Because then they would have to admit getting conned, and they can’t have that. They’re smart, not stupid like everyone says.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@barb 2: pro-tip: Nobody’s gonna read your childish, self-indulgent ramblings, so you can use your typing time for something more productive, like putting your navel lint in jars.
People like you put first Bush, then trump, in office. So you can fuck off now.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: I agree that the appearance of nepotism is bad, and can be demagogued into being exactly the same as actual nepotism. When it’s not.
But
really bothers me. Hunter is a grown man, he’s not Joe’s property. If Hunter found a way to take advantage of his famous last name that wasn’t illegal or even unethical, then such is life.
The argument that Joe will somehow “bar” his family from doing something is a decent sound bite, I guess, but it treats voters like children. It rubs me raw the same way as those who scream at politicians who don’t “send their kids” off to fight in wars that they authorize. That’s not how it works – adult offspring of politicians aren’t their property…
Hunter is entitled to earn a living. Joe didn’t corruptly get him a job. End of story, IMHO.
[/rant]
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
barb 2
@Betty Cracker:
gvg
@PJ: And you believe they are real and not fake personas? Or that there are a real numerically significant number of people who hold that position? I know people can be alarmingly ignorant, but I can’t swallow this concern.
tam1MI
@E: One of the things that struck me was when he dunked on Warren after her “wine cellars” crack, the entire auditorium burst into wild applause.
Baud
@Another Scott:
Agreed. We’re playing on the Republicans field here. Joe has nothing to apologize for or explain.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Yep.
Jinchi
It took me a while to realize that Trump actually believes all the B.S. he utters. I use to think he was just a con-man pulling one over on willing rubes, but at this point I’m convinced that he even believes Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
DetectiveLove
I know this makes me a bad progressive, but I’m ok with Rhodes scholars making $80k annually after they get their degree.
PJ
@gvg: some of them seem to be real. In real life, we all have friends or family (or ourselves) who spout opinions on things they know nothing about, and when called on it, will probably acknowledge their ignorance. But because the internet is such an echo chamber, people who are supremely ignorant of history and blind to human behavior will never consider that, while there are legitimate problems with how an institution operates, destroying it entirely might be a bad idea, because there are hundreds of similarly ignorant people who will chime in with a “right on, sister!”, and anyone who points out flaws in this thinking is just a hater. You can see this across the political spectrum – just because someone is a bleeding heart does not mean they have any critical thinking skills. I mean, just today I saw a tweet from the Jacobin guy stating that Tulsi was right and impeachment was a distraction from stopping the cruelty of the Trump Administration.
Jinchi
Yeah, I’m not sure how Joe can actually do that. I don’t know how many adult family members he has, but Hunter is almost 50 years old.
This sounds like the sort of thing you say when you know you have a problem, but haven’t actually thought through the solution yet.
Betty Cracker
@Another Scott:
Yep, such is life, and that’s one reason millions of eligible voters don’t even bother to exercise their franchise. They think the system is rigged, and they aren’t altogether wrong.
bemused
@Kay:
They are a mutual admiration society. Paul Ryan was a brilliant economist. The young guns were going to be the hip new conservative leaders. All hat, no cattle. They have to put themselves on pedestals because the rest of Americans won’t.
Kent
@Jinchi: I took it to mean he would just make the request as head of the Biden family. Not that he would be implementing some presidential executive order. Sure, Hunter would be legally free to ignore him and Joe Biden would be free to disinherit him and cut him off. That’s how families work. In any event, Biden could most certainly make it stick if he wanted. What foreign corporation is going to hire Hunter Biden if they know up front it is going to piss off the President of the United States and put them under a media microscope?
Ella in New Mexico
@Hoodie:
This may be the wisdom of the folks who support him:
It’s exactly what we should be prioritizing right now–restoring our national security and foreign affairs relationships and restoring our Executive Branch and other government institutions. I’m not going back over his career to worry about 30 year old anachronistic votes–what he is today is a result of growth and experience and yes, I think he is capable of coming to new positions based on new evidence or present day social changes.
Without a functional government and good relationships abroad we can kiss universal healthcare and Pre-K and student loan forgiveness and a new National Voting and Election Law overhaul and pretty much any big domestic policy changes anyone was talking about on that stage.
If he keeps his lead, so be it. He’d better pick a VP who has the progressive domestic agenda ideas we all want to see implemented, though. And be a qualified leader and in good health enough to take his place should that be needed.
So that knocks out Bernie and Pete as far as I can see. Elizabeth wins in this scenario.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: I always thought one of the Clintons’ mistakes was acting like retired politicians– the indiscriminate buck-raking and the elaborate, star-fucking, international foundation they couldn’t explain– when they knew there was at least a chance HRC was going to run again in ’16. Biden did the same thing by turning a blind eye to Hunter, and on top of that was sanctimonious about the Clintons.
Hard to believe someone like Ron Klain wasn’t savvy enough to have a quiet word with the boy.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: I think Another Scott’s point is you can’t “ban” grown adults from doing stuff you don’t like, even if they’re your family. I think Joe means that he has talked it over with his family and they have agreed not to take any jobs overseas, but that’s not really a solution to the problem – it just aims to assuage concerns over Biden personally.
What would be a good policy to address this? A separate office that monitors the activities of members of elected officials’ families and advises when the elected official should recuse themselves? I’m just spit-balling here, it seems tricky to me to handle well.
sdhays
They explained it just fine. But innuendo was still targeted at them anyway.
Quaker in a Basement
I have heard of Thorazine. That’s the same thing, right?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: part of the explanation for this, of course, is that when Hunter went in search of his fortune, Beau was the one who was supposed to pick up the torch for the dynasty, be the White Horse of the Scranton Kennedys, so to speak.
Ella in New Mexico
@Another Scott:
Seriously. At some point life sucks when it lets people who have famous last names get ahead of the rest of us but if it doesn’t cross the line into truly illegal or unethical behavior, what are we going to do?
Can anyone seriously name something Hunter Biden or any child/relative of any Presidential candidate could do to earn a living that could not be labeled as having unfairly obtained because “clearly their parent got them the job”?
What’s amazeballs is that this is only used successfully against Democratic candidates who really are NOT doing anything particularly unusual but the other side has cheered it’s Leader hiring his daughter and son in law in the WH, not to mention all the spouses and children of members of his cabinet or Republicans in Congress and here we all are falling into the same stupid hole being pissed at our pathetic example of corruption.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ella in New Mexico:
barb 2
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Nope I voted for the dems like a good little girl.
But I don’t have to vote for a male for prez — not in my state. If I were in AZ or NM then I would vote for whomever. I am lucky I live in Washington and Seattle and suburbs will vote dem.
I do not understand the demand to vote for the dem when he will carry this state by thousands?
It would be fun to head south for the winter — vote down there and get counted in the census down there. THEN I would vote for the penis. Up here I have a choice not to vote for the penis. I can’t forgive Biden for his treatment of Anita Hill — she says that he set the stage for Kavanaugh. Biden never ask for forgiveness for his behavior toward Anita Hill. I simply cannot forgive him.
You have a problem demanding a single vote for a candidate when one vote for a democrat in a solid blue state is meaningless. As a woman I can not vote for him. In AZ I would vote for him and then drink a bottle of rum (or something). Biden and his face lifts and Botox makes me ill.
It simply does not matter — as long as I don’t vote for that lying rapist Trump. We have some Clinton haters down the road — who put a hanging rope on their tree near the road. That is a cult member. The GOP worked hard to get their cult members to hate Clinton.
Demanding that someone vote for the Dem — when that vote is basically meaningless — seems a bit cultish to me. I grew up in a religious cult and I avoid anything resembling a cult.
Women voting for a rapist I don’t understand — that would be the evangelical females. Prosperity Gospel stupids. Generally these are the sadists who are racists — they hate the tribes. The tribes around here now own casinos — and the mega churches preach against the evil tribes.
A good place to donate would be the the tribes who are working to get out the vote on reservations. Most of these reservation votes are democratic. Four directions — is one group that is using native lawyers to help Indians register to vote. There are many road blocks set in place by white folk to stop Indians from voting. They managed to get a whole lot of Indians registered in AZ. AZ now has a Dem Senator! One vote in key places like AZ are meaningful votes.
Anyone know of any other group that works to get out the Native vote? Perhaps a front pager can make a list of groups who are working to get out the vote in place where one vote can make a huge difference.
Let’s not be nasty with each other — that’s what the Russians want us to do. I’m old — Biden is older than I am. He is too damned old. We need someone of color or a woman candidate. Trump wants Biden — WHY?
sdhays
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s because liberals do care about corruption and even whiffs of corruption damage Democrats with their base, generally speaking. Republican voters don’t care about corruption on their side. They think “everyone is corrupt”, so at least their people are getting the best corruption.
Brachiator
@Quaker in a Basement:
Isn’t Thorazine the Norse God of Thunder?
barb 2
@Ella in New Mexico:
Perhaps he (Hunter) was keeping them honest — and this made team Trump angry. He is a lawyer after all. On the job learning about whatever BoD do.
Compared to the cash (and dead animals) that the Trump spawn bring home — Hunter hasn’t made that much. My guess that the GOP won’t be happy until Hunter spends all his money on lawyers.
Hunter seems like the spoiled little brother of an older brother and father who made their own way in the world.
Jinchi
I took it that way too, but it’s not a real solution to the problem. It’s both completely toothless (because it’s self-enforced) and over the top (because it imposes obligations on every blood relation as long a Joe is in office). And really, what’s the argument for imposing a ban only on foreign conflicts of interest? Trump could argue that Hunter was just as conflicted if he worked as an executive for any major American corporation. If Joe had applied rules like that to his family during his political career, he would have closed off entire career paths to his adult family members for decades.
See how quickly these off-the-cuff solutions can escalate.
There are already ethical guidelines that allow people to separate personal conflicts of interest from official duties. Apply those, appoint a special inspector general to monitor potential conflicts, if necessary, and allow your kids to live their lives.
gene108
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Clinton’s mistake was humility, with regards to the Clinton Foundation.
Their charity has done good work around the world, is well run, and they should’ve pointed how they’ve used their celebrity to raise money and make the world a better place.
Here’s a link to the foundation, which shows what they are doing.
https://www.clintonfoundation.org/
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@gene108:
I know that, but I’m not the kind of news consumer who turns the TV on for background noise and pays bill while waiting for the sports and weather. That’s who they needed to hear it.
one of the lesser surprises of 2016, to me, was that we never got the big full-on Bubba speech explaining what the Clinton Global Initiative (oy, just the name) did. His health seems to wax and wane, I suspect he wasn’t up to it in that fall.
Brachiator
@sdhays:
But the Biden thing is a non-story kept alive by Trump’s BS. Dirty tricks plus “but her emails.”
The press had to report on it simply because Trump and his goons kept bringing it up. Originally, there would be a tag about “no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
And now somehow it has morphed into some generalized ethical issue about what, nepotism, conflict of interest? And Biden is now mysteriously slimed by his son’s decisions?
And I’m sure that some dopes are now filling in the blanks, that Biden himself inserted his son into Ukraine in order to personally benefit himself.
Meanwhile, the chief malefactor, Trump, who actually committed and directed corrupt acts, laughs his ass off.
Fair Economist
@Quaker in a Basement:
I had. It’s remarkably ignorant of Yang to say that because the reality is that people have been trying to get thorium reactors to work for decades, without success. Most projects have failed, and a very few that technically worked were shut down as uneconomic. The key problem is that it’s a lot harder to reprocess than uranium/plutonium because one of the breeder products (U232) is very nasty, with high gamma radiation.
To give an idea of how addled and/or dishonest promoters are, the U232 problem is used as a argument for thorium, by saying that it makes it hard to be used for a bomb, without mentioning that it creates even more problems for energy use, because energy production needs a much larger scale than bomb production. If the U232 reprocessing issue could actually be resolved, then thorium would create the same proliferation issues plutonium breeders do.
Fair Economist
@Ella in New Mexico:
Already quoted above but this needs to be quoted again. And again. And again.
misterpuff
@Kraux Pas: Drumpf only watches Evangelical Tonight.
J R in WV
@Mr. Mack:
Well, mostly. I think it’s normally not capitalized, tho. ;-)
hope you know I kid a lot !!
ETA: and moments later Ozark makes it clear that I AM WRONG!
Take that J R !!!
J R in WV
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I love Scalzi’s writing, and his wit. What a good guy!
J R in WV
@Kraux Pas:
So Bernie’s speech about the crime bill was more like:
This sounds like his stump speech about immigration, schools, drugs, guns, etc, etc… What am I leaving out?
He can’t talk about anything but “root economic causes” and he can’t actually provide any solutions to “root economic causes” — so he’s really a total loss on every issue. Plus a solid supporter of the Russian GRU. What’s not to love?
Bill Arnold
@Brachiator:
I would say resistant. It is not immune. Engaging with it theologically is difficult, though.
ns
Warren is being ridiculous. She did big money fundraisers in 2018, one with a Michelin starred chef at at private dinner party. Now she’s carping at other candidates for doing the same thing. It was smart of her to front load all that before declaring her candidacy so she can claim to be above the fray, but It’s BS.
jk
Wrong, optics matter. Hunter Biden joining Burisma’s board wasn’t illegal but it was sleazy and smelled. The only reason he was asked to join the board is because his last name is Biden.
# Fuck Biden
Zinsky
Yang’s thorium-based nuclear reactor proposal is all blue sky and pixie dust. There is no large-scale thorium reactor and the energy required to mine, extract, refine and produce the thorium significantly diminishes the net energy yield of such a reactor. You also haven’t solved the problem regarding the disposal of the spent fuel.
When are people going to realize that nuclear power is just a really expensive and dangerous way to boil water? We would be better off from an environmental perspective just using firewood to generate steam to drive turbines!
Citizen Alan
@Brachiator:
Close. It’s a magazine about the Norse god of thunder.
Ruckus
@Kay:
As long as we have the journalistic system that we have, it will cost a lot of money to win elections, especially national ones. The problem is of course that we have a constitution that specifically gives freedom of speech. Not that it’s wrong to do so but it takes away the concept that any broadcast/newspaper/blog can be restricted in their speech. We know that there are some restrictions but how do we make “truth” a priority? I just got off a commuter train and there were 2 people on there talking to themselves in a manor that suggested a medicinal issue, either too much self medication or too little. They weren’t yelling, just being obnoxious, did they both have the right to speak to the other passengers?
Where and how do you draw the line?
Ruckus
@Kay:
A world without cops and prosecutors and lawyers and, well the entire judicial system would be horrible. That it is run by humans it will not ever be perfect. Can it, like everything else be better? Sure it can but better for whom? Life is a balancing act, should I eat too much candy, or none at all, should I smoke or not, should I drink alcohol or not…… And of course it goes on and on but if all humans are going to exist in this world then all humans need to be part of running the place and not excluded from that. It’s only about 10,000 yrs past when we should have figured that out.