A moment of silence for Deval Patrick, who is exiting the race the way he entered it, a day late and many dollars short. Another candidacy I didn’t understand – maybe a Patrick supporter in the comments can give his campaign a more fitting eulogy.
Another moment of silence for the rule of law, which is apparently being beaten about the head and face by Trump on Twitter, though I really don’t want to look.
Open thread.
zhena gogolia
OT but not really
dmsilev
@zhena gogolia: Her brow remains furrowed (we have high hopes for a nice soybean crop over the summer).
Mike in DC
8 left. Gabbard and Steyer have no shot at all. Biden’s last stand is in SC, and I wouldn’t bet on him winning there. So that leaves 5. Warren can hang in there, but only if she picks up a meaningful number of delegates on Super Tuesday and she has enough money. It’s possible that Bloomberg could faceplant.
The Moar You Know
It bothers me – it probably shouldn’t, but it does – when people who I’ve never heard of in my life decide to run for the presidency. Like Steyer, for one. Deval was another.
Of course, I’d heard plenty about Trump since I was a teen, and look how that turned out.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
any lawyers wanna weigh in on what’s going on at DOJ, and what can be done?
Hildebrand
“I’ll vote for him, but I won’t be happy about it. Bugger, my very first vote and I’ll have to hold my nose.” My 17 year-old daughter contemplating the possibility of voting for Bernie in the general (she turns 18 this summer). I reminded her that my first presidential election was 1984, and that at least she has a shot at removing the wanker in the Oval office.
She said, “Dad, if its Bernie, we have no chance. He’s going to get crushed by the bigot-in-chief.”
Just thought I would share that bit of political appraisal from a Gen Z’er.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’ve stopped reading Trump’s twitter feed. It used to be fun to mock or be outraged about. Now it depresses me. And it’s just stupid.
JMG
Patrick was a good Governor of Mass. for two terms. He left to get rich(er) in the private sector and seemed really happy. My son and his friends who worked on Patrick’s campaigns here had no idea why he ran for President at all.
zhena gogolia
@Hildebrand:
She’s correct.
Jeffro
@The Moar You Know: we can work to change that by working to amend the ol’ Constitution with a few requirements for prez
One of those could easily be “has served a full term in the US House, US Senate, or as a state governor prior to filing to run for president”. Introduce a little vetting to the process.
Just spitballing here and I know the GOP is with me, because otherwise they might get President Beyonce’ much sooner than they think ;)
Jeffro
@JMG:
Just to get his name out there for a VP nod, Cabinet post, or 2024 run.
Mathguy
@zhena gogolia:
The irony of her tweets is that a vaccine was developed in the 90s for Lyme disease, and provided significant protection, but was withdrawn because of antivaxxer BS about it causing arthritis (with zero evidence). Funny that she doesn’t mention it
Johnson’s tweet to her is spot on. We own land in Maine and plan to move there, so I’ve kicked in to Sara Gideon’s campaign to unseat the hypocrite.
Ghost of Joe Lieblings Dog
@zhena gogolia: Little Suzie really needs to wake up. “What are we gonna tell our friends when they say ‘Rule uh law!‘?”
She’s gotta go home.
trollhattan
@zhena gogolia:
Oh Lawd that’s so damn perfect, and for both targets. Robert Johnson must have just returned from the crossroads.
realbtl
Whenever I hear of her “furrowed brow” I picture a Gahan Wilson type cartoon of the furrow slowly consuming her face. It helps a little.
trollhattan
@Mathguy:
WTF the Lyme vaccine causes arthritis? Lyme causes arthritis, you fucking antivaxx monsters!
trollhattan
@Mike in DC:
So long as Warren doesn’t “make any sudden moves” in the next few days I’m filling her oval for California and turning the dang thing in, because I’m getting weary of canvassers and want to say “already voted, thanks.”
This is not playing out as I’d imagined but with two-dozen candidates and one spending a quarter-billion bucks, how could anybody have?
Mathguy
@trollhattan: Good Atlantic piece on it.
chris
@Mathguy: Yep, my dog can get the vaccine but I can’t. Pisses me off every time I pull another tick out of my hide.
cmorenc
We can’t ever again allow the GOP to tout itself as the party of “law and order” without hitting them hard and often over how they’ve openly supported its corruption.
waspuppet
@Jeffro: And take a few votes off Warren in NH. He announced his run just as she was making a move in the polls.
Cervantes
Here’s the full story of the Lymerix vaccine. It’s true that the claims that it caused arthritis or other harm are likely baseless. On the other hand it’s only 80% effective, and that’s if you get two boosters, so there is a legitimate concern that it might lead people not to take precautions and put themselves at risk of other tick-borne diseases. Not sure it had a lot of potential in the marketplace, though probably worthwhile for people at high risk.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Did you see the Democratic Socialist running in the Maine Primary for the senate selling guillotine t-shirts? If BS wins the nomination I shudder to think what will happen to the D party.
Betty Cracker
@waspuppet: Okay, good to know I’m not alone in thinking that. It wouldn’t just affect NH voters but could also freeze home state donors. Otherwise, I just can’t account for it. Did he even bother to campaign?
Kraux Pas
Yeah, Deval was a good governor I volunteered for his reelection effort in 2010. Recognized good ideas coming from either side (back when Rs were still allowed to have anything approaching a good idea, it wasn’t that long ago)
But yeah, I was proud to support him. Wait you mean this year? He ran for what? PRESIDENT?!?!?!?!?
Gin & Tonic
@Cervantes: As someone who contracted babesiosis, I can confirm that “other tick-borne diseases” are a) a thing and b) no fun at all.
WaterGirl
@waspuppet: @Betty Cracker: Around the time that Deval Patrick was announced, the rumor was that he was talked into running to stop Elizabeth Warren because the rich people were getting nervous.
Kraux Pas
@schrodingers_cat: I’ve been hearing a lot of guillotine talk, including real life interactions.
It’s, um, concerning.
bg
@Hildebrand: My gen Z feels the same
Martin
@Mike in DC: Latest polling shows 3 candidates viable in SC:
Biden
Sanders
Steyer
Steyer may not have a shot at the whole thing, but he’s spoiling this race for someone. Put another way, if you don’t want Sanders as the nom, the more people in the race now the better. The downside, the more people in the race now, the better for Bloomberg.
MattF
Open thread, so here’s (via jwz) my favorite new mobile phone.
Martin
@Kraux Pas: Yeah, the one they built and rolled down to the governors mansion in Puerto Rico definitely got my attention. Owning the libs is all fun and games until we hit our breaking point. I do not think it’s as far off as people might think.
West of the Rockies
@trollhattan:
I filled that oval in this morning and dropped it in the box. I so hope my local Rep (the loathsome LaMalfa) gets the boot right in his hairy, white arse.
Kent
Every candidate should have a compelling one or two sentence answer to the question: Why do you want to be president and why are you the best candidate:
“I want to be president because: ______________ and I am the best president because: _______________.
I think Bernie, Warren, Klobuchar, Harris, Booker, Castro, and Buttigieg, and Bloomberg all had effective answers to that question.
I don’t think Biden does and is suffering for it. Patrick most certainly didn’t. I don’t think Steyer or Yang did. And Tulsi doesn’t either.
If you can’t make the 15 second elevator pitch for your candidacy, don’t expect others to figure out how to do it for you.
Marcopolo
@trollhattan: He’s actually up to about $400 million as of this week, including about $40M just in CA (which is more than BS has spent total on ads). Steyer is approaching $200M. Just think what that cash could do in the Senate or House races… Nah, don’t, it’s too depressing.
Frankensteinbeck
The thing is, other people’s voters don’t go to Sanders when they drop out. When Biden and Warren took hits, the votes went to Amy and Pete. Sanders is no one’s second pick. That makes it highly unlikely he’ll have a majority of delegates going into the convention, and highly unlikely he’ll be able to deal himself into a majority there.
guachi
@Martin: And this is how Sanders wins a plurality nomination. He’s strong enough to get votes everywhere and it’ll be different people getting the other votes. Maybe it’ll settle down by Super Tuesday but for now Sanders should be in the lead heading into Super Tuesday.
Betty Cracker
@Kent: Obama and Biden allegedly had a conversation about 2020 in which Obama said, “Joe, you don’t have to do this.” Maybe it was his polite way of saying, “Joe, DON’T do this.”
West of the Rockies
@trollhattan:
I filled that oval in this morning and dropped it in the box. I so hope my local Rep (the loathsome LaMalfa) gets the boot right in his hairy, white arse.
@Frankensteinbeck:
And, joyfully, he won’t run for president again. No way with his health history and age does he bumble his way in again in ’24.
Ohio Mom
Hildebrand and bg: What smart and insightful children you have raised!
My nightmares about Bernie alternate between him losing 49 states, and him winning and floundering so much that there is a tremendous backlash.
There are other Democratic candidates I don’t like but if I squint my eyes, I can kinda, sorta see why most of them might be attractive to someone. I can not see what is attractive about Bernie.
Leto
@Ohio Mom: I see we share the same nightmares. Eternally happy that good candidates can continually lose out to shouty demagogues.
Yutsano
Pressing F to pay respects…
schrodingers_cat
@Kraux Pas: Their magazine is called, the Jacobin, after all. Wanting to unleash a reign of terror is on brand.
schrodingers_cat
Hillary spoke the truth like always, outside his cult he is unpopular and no one likes him.
trollhattan
@Mathguy:
Thank you for the link. Depressing read.
We know somebody with Lyme who was not diagnosed in time to cure it, and will instead carry it the rest of her life. It’s at some levels chronically debilitating and the idea of so many more unnecessary infections is galling.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@guachi: This. Consistently getting 1/3 in each race, maybe more in some, is a good way to rack up delegates. That’s why having more candidates in the race is bad for people who want to stop Bernie. Fewer is better, one alternative is best, but nobody left has a compelling reason to drop out. Classic collective action problem.
trollhattan
@West of the Rockies:
A big ol’ LaMalfa boot would be a very pleasant surprise. Is his seat any more susceptible than Uberjerk McClintock’s?
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan:
I hope you looked at the pictures.
guachi
@download my app in the app store mistermix: I don’t think there can be any more than 4 candidates heading into Super Tuesday. Because the Democrats are more than willing to open up their primary to anyone two of the candidates will be not-Democrat Sanders and vote-buyer Bloomberg.
If the remaining candidates who aren’t the above two had any sense then all of the actual-Democrats but one or two would drop out.
zhena gogolia
Maybe my Slovak relatives would take me in. I cannot stomach Sanders.
trollhattan
@Marcopolo:
He’s up to $400MM now? I must have overslept. :-)
Bloomberg must not have been a NASA fan when he was a kid. Billionaire boomers are supposed to all have rocket companies. Even I could do something more interesting with that money than buy teevee time, and I literally don’t know how to spend that kind of dough.
schrodingers_cat
@download my app in the app store mistermix: You are assuming that he will get one third of the delegates in all the contests from here on out. Possible, but two data points don’t make up a trend.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Can I come with you?
trollhattan
@zhena gogolia:
Indeed, and glad I did because they completely make the quip work. [chef’s kiss emoji]
Gelfling 545
@Hildebrand: She echoes the opinion of this old lady who’s 50 some years older. It’ll be a disaster & I’ll have no choice but to vote for it.
trollhattan
This Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award picture is how I envision a Trump-Sanders contest. Please make this not happen.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Or we could go to Canada, I have cousins in Toronto.
West of the Rockies
@trollhattan:
LaMalfa has a solid challenger, but Butte County is pretty damn red. He has authored no meaningful legislation. He is just a puppet yes man who makes sure to line his own grubby nest.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
Yeah, something. My father got on a boat when he was 18. I didn’t think I’d have to do the same at a much more advanced age.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Mathguy: Fun fact, you can get the Lyme vaccine still, for your dog.
trollhattan
“I’m only hiring the best people and draining the swamp, believe me.” Oh boy, Donny’s going to all the best places to find talent. The best.
jackmac
@Hildebrand: I say this as a Bernie voter in 2016 and still very sympathetic to his agenda. It will be an epic mistake to nominate him in 2020. He has no idea what the Orange Fart Cloud and the GOP will hit him with and Bernie will — sadly — get crushed in the general. Start with a message that he’s an 80-year-old Communist with health issues and go from there. Repeat excessively, pile on more lies and it eventually it turns into “fact”.
Emerald
@Hildebrand: Wilmer is not going to be the nominee. He probably “won” last night, barely, because of crossover Republicans. The margin was narrow enough to allow for that.
Nobody wins the Democratic nomination without massive support from the base of the party, and those are Black voters. Wilmer does not now and will never have that.
I wouldn’t count Biden out, certainly after only two lily-white states, but I’m increasingly wondering if we’re going to wind up with Bloomberg.
I’m down for any of ’em, except Wilmer or Tulski.
mali muso
@schrodingers_cat: Yeah, this. I don’t even have cousins there, but started the lengthy immigration application paperwork process right after the Kavanaugh debacle as a Plan B. Scary times.
guachi
@Emerald: Last poll I looked at (today) had Sanders at #3 in black support at 18% behind a surging Bloomberg (22%) and a rapidly fading Biden (27%).
Looks like black voters really like old white guys.
Princess Leia
@Hildebrand: In my experience Gen Z seem less led on by Bernie- it seems the Millenials are more enthused. Which is confusing to the Millenials!!
Leto
@Emerald:
Which makes me wonder about that SC poll, shown up thread, about how Biden, Sanders, and Steyer are polling well with SC POC. Biden I understand, but Steyer and Sanders? All I’m going to do is just wait for the results. All I can do.
Raven Onthill
@guachi: many black voters vote strategically. They like whoever will win and defeat Trump. Bloomberg is an awful racist, but they’ve seen worse, and some of them think he might have the best chance of defeating Trump.
The Second Reconstruction is over. The Second Gilded Age continues.
rp
My prediction: If Warren and Biden both drop out now or right after SC and enthusiastically endorse Klobuchar, she likely wins. If not, it’s Bloomberg.
Betty Cracker
@Leto: & @guachi: My guess is voters are gravitating toward whomever they think has the best chance of beating Trump at any particular moment in time. For a long time, the media was beating the Biden front-runner drum, so they were for Biden. Now maybe it’s Sanders. Or the guy on TV with all the ads.
This blog is an anti-Sanders bubble. I understand why, and he’s not my favorite candidate either. But to pretend he’s broadly unpopular among Democrats or anathema to black voters in some special way is just wrong. (Not saying y’all said that…just a general observation.)
HumboldtBlue
Bye, Deval, it’s almost as of we forgot you were running.
Speaking of running, here’s the best of the agility competition at the Westminster Dog Show.
Ohio Mom
I don’t think Bloomberg would be particularly destructive as a president; I don’t think he’d move us forward much either. New York City is still standing, though it’s glitzier and blander.
But the symbolism of another ultra wealthy old white man (I know Trump isn’t all that rich but that is his schtick) is a bad look for a supposed democracy.
Mnemosyne
@trollhattan:
I’m assuming that this is an attempt to cancel the lawsuits against PG&E from the federal side. Assholes. ?
Kent
I think Biden regrets not running in 2016 and thinks he could have beaten Trump back then if he did. Obviously he had the family tragedy to deal with. But also Hillary. Counter-factuals are really tough, maybe he could have beaten Trump. We will never know. But I suspect Hillary would have wiped the floor with him in the primaries as she was just an infinitely better organizer and campaigner with a much larger and more loyal Dem constituency.
Warren too, maybe should have run in 2016. Maybe there was too much deference to clearing the field for Hillary. And now we have the opposite reaction where no one wants to step aside. I don’t know.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
So true. The whole point of the primaries is for the voters, not pundits or the media, to decide who the candidate should be.
I don’t particularly like Sanders. But I have seen enthusiastic support for him on social media. And I have seen very enthusiastic supporters for him in person, and they are a diverse crowd.
Iowa and New Hampshire were just the first contests. They are important, I guess, but they aren’t everything.
Kent
What I take is that most of the commenters here don’t believe Sanders is a loyal Democrat who will rebuild the party, stock his administration with Democrats, and implement Democratic objectives. And they think he doesn’t have widespread appeal outside the left wing of the party, and will be a poor general election candidate. I tend to agree on both counts. If it comes to it, I will be willing to be proven wrong.
Chyron HR
@Betty Cracker:
Well, they can learn the hard way, then.
PsiFighter37
Very late notice: anyone in the Columbus, OH vicinity and want to meet up tonight? Should be free after 6 PM for a couple hours if there are Juicers in this neck of the woods.
Betty Cracker
@Kent: Self-regarding old farts who believe they alone can save the world may doom us all, one way or another.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
My happy place.
HumboldtBlue
@Brachiator:
It’s only anecdotal, but in the past four years I have seen a number of younger colleagues enthusiastically endorse Bernie and the local Democratic Party is also dominated by Bernie supporters.
These are well educated 25-30-year olds who are responding to his message and they are eager. Hell, one of them even threw Ralph Nader at me as she explained how reading about him and his past work led her to back Bernie.
There is a theme the current Democratic leadership is too centrist and unwilling to act decisively on social and economic issues, particularly for those who have recently graduated from university and are facing years of paying off steep student loan debt.
Cost of housing, health insurance, cost of living in California (if you live in Eureka you pay 8.75 percent sales tax) and the lack of wages keeping up with expenses are very real issues for an awful lot of people, including young liberals.
Baud
I personnally also doubt he can have a successful presidency, and that he will attempt to govern the way Trump governs the Republicans, but less successfully.
Yutsano
@Betty Cracker: My brain ran to a very strange place with that comment…
Basically: literal old farts choking off all life on this planet. Remind me to tell y’all about my harrowing ride home from Texas. I still don’t think I’ve recovered from it.
Chris Johnson
@Kraux Pas: I think that is entirely fair.
If we end up in November, in a ‘democracy’, picking between Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg, with one entire political party completely captured by the Russians and the only other political party completely captured by literally the one guy, Mike Bloomberg, I think it’s fair to say that’s the only option. There will be no getting out of that one.
Villago delenda est.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I read The Root. I really like their weekly Black Power rankings of primary candidates. Very funny. They are generally skeptical of all the “Caucasian” candidates, but given credit where its due. The writers do acknowledge substantial support for Sanders among younger African Americans, and the comments bear this out. I look for Sanders to do OK in South Carolina among African Americans, but not great. We’ll see. I’m really interested in where Biden’s Congressional Black Caucus endorsers like Terry Sewell of Alabama go if he drops out. Biden sure is taking up a lot of space.
Barbara
@guachi: Or maybe, just maybe, black voters understand white voters better than we do.
Betty Cracker
@Kent: I don’t disagree with any of that, but I’m talking about broad popularity within the party. These aren’t mysteries we have to suss out for ourselves. There are polls that are generally reliable for this sort of thing. The Democratic Party at large doesn’t hate Sanders.
Betty Cracker
@Yutsano: Ha! Sounds like my escape from Hurricane Irma, riding in the back of the car with an extra-farty boxer dog. It took a while to recover from that too.
catclub
Although today’s poll shows neither Buttigieg or Klobuchar very high in SC, I bet they are rapidly rising there. I think Buttigieg (the present leader in delegate count) is being rapidly written off, and I do not see that.
columbusqueen
@PsiFighter37: Damn, I’ve got another commitment. Sorry!
Cacti
You only just noticed that it’s mostly youngs who are wildly enthusiastic about Bernie’s promises of free stuff?
PJ
@Kent: I get the anxiety that Democrats have now because we all have a good idea of how bad a second Trump term could be. But the idea that any candidate should step aside in the interests of alleviating that anxiety is counter-productive. Every candidate should stay in the race as long as they can or want to. The general election will not begin until after the convention, no matter whether there are 5 contenders going into it or 2 or one.
I was reminded today that Bill Clinton didn’t emerge as the leading candidate in 1992 until the middle of March – Tom Harkin won Iowa in a landslide (Clinton got 0 delegates), and Paul Tsongas won NH. Jerry Brown and Tsongas were competitive with Clinton through April. Clinton just kept at it and kept steadily accruing delegates.
TL/DR: Anything can happen, and no one knows what is going to happen. And Elizabeth Warren can still win.
trollhattan
@Kent:
Monster!
Otherwise, yeah, all that. He seems pretty effective at arson and clueless on barn-raising. What are his accomplishments? I still do not know.
Mandalay
@Martin:
I certainly hope so. He’s certainly not my preferred candidate, but I’ve laid a bet at 7 to 1 that “Bloomberg Beats Trump” in November. I think (hope) that those odds will shorten.
Betty Cracker
@catclub: I can’t see Mayor Pete going the distance, but I’ll admit that’s probably my own bias. I don’t particularly like or dislike him. His pitch just doesn’t make sense to me.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I didn’t think would do as well as he has, so he’s overperformed in my book.
trollhattan
@Cacti:
My small slice of the new voters (post-2000, whatever they’re labeled) seem primarily interested in Pete and Liz. Pete’s in town again, this weekend and it will be interesting to find out how big the turnout this time.
WhatsMyNym
@Betty Cracker:
It depends what you mean by that. Sanders easily won the 2016 caucus in WA and lost the primary. I don’t just see the enthusiasm in WA he had in 2016.
He also lost the 2016 primary in CA.
Baud
@Mandalay:
It’s like when you root against your own team because of the players you have in your fantasy baseball league.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
The thing about progressives not caring about debt or deficit is so off-key I hardly know how to process it. He either has a vastly complicated strategy nobody can parse, or holes in his worldview you can drive a Tesla through.
catclub
yeah, Corbyn will look like a moderate statesman by comparison to Sanders by the end.
trollhattan
@Baud:
Heh. Or tanking for the first draft pick. “Not every draft has a LeBron, Timmy.”
Frankensteinbeck
@Cacti:
I think his promises of free stuff is a minor issue. All Democrats offer ‘free stuff’ because we’re all for greatly increasing social services and restoring progressive tax rates. Sanders’ big draw is that he is loudly ‘eat the rich’. Young voters have plenty of evidence that the rich want to hurt them, and not enough experience that simple solutions don’t work.
HumboldtBlue
@Cacti:
If “over the past four years” means “only just noticed” then yes.
Look at it this way, the tuition to attend a UC in 2000 was just over $5,000. That is now just under $15,000.
At a CSU it cost about $2,500 in tuition in 2000 and now that’s up to $8,000.
Califor ia did make it far cheaper, even free, to attend a Community College, however.
Brachiator
@Ohio Mom:
Bloomberg is so far, despite his ad spots, an unknown quantity to me. And I cannot upscale his achievements as NY City mayor and speculate on how this might apply if he were elected president.
And as I noted in another thread, right now, Bloomberg has partially disqualified himself by refusing to be interviewed by the editorial board of the NY Times (or any other newspaper).
Yutsano
@Betty Cracker: Long story short: massive flight delay in Dallas made me miss my connection in Minneapolis. Landed back home, had just enough time to go home, change, then get to work. Then physio, dinner with the family, and two loads of laundry before I could finally sleep. Still feel exhausted.
Oh and if you think my therapist cut me any slack…well he recognised my limits anyway.
MisterForkbeard
@WhatsMyNym: I think Sanders has a committed core of really fanatical followers and they’re overrepresented online. He also has a lot of Democrats who generally like him or think he’s fine.
Lastly, I think he has also has a bunch of Dems (like us) who don’t like him and/or don’t trust his judgment, but we’re not the “majority” of the party.
Betty Cracker
@WhatsMyNym: I mean broad popularity, as in favorable rating or whatever, among Democrats. Pretty sure Sanders’ popularity in the party is comparable to Biden’s, which you wouldn’t know if your only source about Democratic Party voter sentiment was Balloon Juice. I get WHY, just pointing out we’re an outlier on that.
catclub
My thought is that one ( of many ) things that will need to be rebuilt after Trump is gone is the Federal Government work force. I fear that Mike Bloomberg as president is one of the worst alternatives to inspire people to work for the US Government.
But what do I know.
piratedan
my biggest issue with the Senator of Vermont candidacy is the continued tacit support of Vladimir Putin. Putin has been spot on with his choice of support of what makes America vulnerable and his continuing ratfucking efforts on behalf of Senator Sanders appear to indicate that he’s working his way in to a heads “I win”, Tails “you lose” scenario in regards to a Trump/Sanders election.
I may not have a lot of issues with Sanders’ policies (despite them being exceptionally light on specifics) but I do have issues with who he’s received support from and how he continues to allow people to be absolute shits to his opponents within the Democratic Party apparatus.
catclub
In addition, I think Bloomberg should NEVER have said that the Bloomberg organization would be neutral on his candidacy. I think he should have said that the Bloomberg organization will be every bit as neutral on his – Bloomberg’s – candidacy as the Trump organization is on Trump’s candidacy. Or less. Let trump whine about unfair.
Martin
I’m just going to say that having two candidates with narrow but intense support from their base is a great way to invite a strong 3rd party candidate into the field.
Good luck controlling the outcome of that.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Do you have a poll that says that or is that a guess on your part? Also, if he is as popular as you say he is why did only get 25% in the NH primary. He should have got a majority wouldn’t you say? He has been running since 2016.
Baud
@MisterForkbeard:
True, which is why I might take a break from politics if he’s the nominee. I can’t really pretend to feel good about him, but I’m also not interested in playing the role of wet blanket.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t have a link, but I’ve seen polls that show that he has a high net favorability.
PsiFighter37
@Brachiator: After the ridiculous taped special the NYT did for their primary endorsements, I can’t say I blame him for skipping that one.
Yutsano
@piratedan: He’s not a Democrat. He has outwardly worked against other Democrats. He has no business becoming the defacto head of the Democratic party. That’s really what it boils down to for me.
I live in Washington. I have the option to abstain from voting for President. The state will go Democratic regardless of my vote. If Wilmer is the nominee I will leave that slot blank. Simple as that.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Brachiator
@HumboldtBlue:
I am in Los Angeles County. I would love to pay only 8.75 percent sales tax instead of 10 percent.
This year, the Sanders supporters I’ve seen, including a couple who came to my home passing out literature, were middle aged. Probably long time lefties.
Cacti
I don’t think they’re minor at all. The only way they get paid for is with across the board tax hikes on every economic bracket. He hasn’t been remotely honest about that.
Baud
@Yutsano:
I will vote for him. I expect others to vote for the lesser of two evils so I feel like I should abide by that rule myself.
Martin
@HumboldtBlue: That’s not right. Tuition and fees is a bit over $5K per quarter – $15K per year. It was about $5K per year back in 2000. It was the Higher Education Compact in 2004 that really started to ramp up the fees.
Annual need for an undergrad should be between $26K and $35K annually. The $15K/semester must include some kind of room and board – living at home for Berkeley and maybe living on campus at Merced (the only two semester UCs).
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
I have a giant geographical separation from Bloomberg and know very little about him, in office. Yeah, mayor of New York is the nation’s most prominent mayor but that alone reveals nothing about how he built and ran his administration and thus, the city, to folks not there or in the region.
His idea of a WH cubicle farm fills me with existential dread.
HumboldtBlue
@Martin:
I edited my comment.
Brachiator
@PsiFighter37:
Notice I also added, “or any other newspaper.” I note the general disdain folks here have for the NY Times. But it is not really relevant to Bloomberg’s avoidance of vetting.
In 2016, reading the transcript of the interview with Sanders by the Daily News editorial board helped me decide that Sanders was a waste of my time.
Bloomberg has not appeared in any debates yet (even though most of these have also been crap) nor talked to any editors. And of course he has the editorial board of Bloomberg News officially working for his campaign.
So far, I have no reason to consider him at all. He is nothing more than political noise.
Ruckus
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I blocked his moronic ass long ago. It helps your sanity. And really, the only thing you miss is more proof of how big an ass he really is.
TS (the original)
Bloomberg is centre front page on the Washington Post. Any wonder old white wealthy men keep running for president and women are too often ignored by the voters regardless as to what they do/achieve.
Gin & Tonic
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Anyone here who believes that Barr will show up on 3/31, please contact me immediately, as I have a real-estate investment opportunity of a lifetime – but you have to act fast.
Fair Economist
@Ohio Mom: The problem with Bloomberg is not the symbolism, it’s the reality. If Bloomberg wins, then multibillionaires can just buy the Presidency even if not a good fit to their party. Depressingly like late Republican Rome.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: Sure, here’s one. You can Google it for yourself if you require further evidence; there are a lot of similar polls taken over the years. They’re not designed to predict how well someone will do against other candidates in a particular race; they just measure general popularity within the party.
In the linked poll, Sanders is more popular than Warren or Biden, but I’ve seen other polls come down in a different order. Do you think the NH results mean Democrats hate Joe Biden? I don’t. He’s generally popular in the party. So is Sanders. Doesn’t mean either one will ever be president.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Thanks. You are right net favorability doesn’t say much of anything regarding voting for the said person as a president.
BS proposals sound enticing if you don’t think too much about how he is going to make it all happen, who doesn’t want free college and healthcare.
Kent
To be fair, most of the working parts of the White House are already a cubical farm, with tiny cubicles at that. All Bloomberg was talking about was bringing that up to the Oval Office which was a ridiculous notion and would never happen as the oval office is mostly ceremonial anyway. It is where you meet heads of states and dignitaries and do photo ops. If they did that to the oval office they would need some other ceremonial office space in which to meet important delegations and that sort of thing
HumboldtBlue
In the least surprising news of the day, Jim Jordan implicated in covering up sexual abuse claims.
“Jim Jordan called me crying, crying, groveling, on the Fourth of July…begging me to go against my brother, begging me, crying for half an hour,” Adam DiSabato said at the hearing. “That’s the kind of cover-ups that’s going on here.”
Gravenstone
@Baud: Someone in another thread posited that Bloomberg would work to boost downticket candidates if for no other reason than to give himself a chance to actually enact whatever agenda he has in mind. I find that plausible.
I also doubt Bernie has any intention along those lines because he seems to be the Underpants Gnome given humanoid form. As such, a Sanders presidency will be an utter disaster with zero accomplishments. Sort of like his entire legislative career, if one wished to be that catty (and I do).
Martin
@HumboldtBlue: 2 years of community college is free.
And will reiterate my warning regarding free college for all plans that are otherwise devoid of details. My institution is sitting on 120,000 applications for 8,000 seats. We have an average loan balance at graduation of $18K for in-state students. That’s half the cost of a new car, and roughly equal to the expected salary bump over not having a degree.
So, are students willing to trade out $18K in student loans for potentially a large increase in applications relative to seats – because free college plans so far have no funding to expand capacity. Yes, the next generation of students may get through loan free, but we’re already at a mean 4.15 GPA needed for admission at a public university. Are they willing to see that go to a 4.25 or 4.3 in exchange for that $18K? Because that’s what I expect it’ll be without a lot of funding for expansion. A lot of students worried about that $18K may find themselves shut out of the universities they thought they could get into.
I’m fine with free college for all, but it’s got to come with a LOT of base funding for expansion. I’d be even more in favor of the base funding and funding of trade schools and apprenticeship programs and not worry about the college debt for now. College loans are among the few appropriate debts to carry because it’s an appreciating asset. Car loans are a far more pernicious problem.
Don’t get sucked into the arguments over 6 figure debt loads, unless they’re a doctor. Med school definitely needs to be addressed, but if you have 6 figures of debt as an undergrad, then it’s because you went out of state or to a private, and I don’t have a ton of sympathy for you making that decision without having scholarships.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
That’s six weeks away—an eternity in crazy Trump time! By then Barr could be Minister of Truth.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
It’s interesting that popularity doesn’t seem to be translating into votes so far. I have no idea what it means, but it’s interesting. ?
J R in WV
I have all I can do supporting actual members of the Democratic Party… Sanders isn’t a Democrat, has never been a Democrat. That said, I will vote for him if he is somehow the nominee of the Democratic party, no matter how much that would hurt.
I do not believe he will be the nominee.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
Blommie knows how to spend it. He could give it away, he could support better candidates, he could buy stuff-that he doesn’t need, because he already has it, but spending 400 large isn’t that hard.
trollhattan
@TS (the original):
Has anybody checked whether he bought it off Bezos in the last couple days? Cheaper than ad buys.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
My exasperation with Sanders is that he keeps blabbering about how the US needs health care or free college “like they have in Europe.”
It’s like he has spent 25 years being the lone purity pony in the Senate, but has never actually studied how various European countries designed and implemented their economic systems.
And this is not just a complaint about Sanders. I find it frustrating that so many American lefties want a progressive paradise, but ignore the realities, positive and negative, of existing systems elsewhere.
I do note, by contrast, that Warren has at least consulted with economists and political scientists in developing her proposals.
catclub
I think Trump and Bloomberg are re-writing how presidential candidates act. Both need zero( better yet, negative) amounts of retail politics.
Why would such an interview benefit him?
Kent
Bloomberg wouldn’t have to work quite so hard to boost down-ticket candidates if he hadn’t dropped over $6 million in support of Pat Toomey in the 2016 PA Senate race over Katie McGinty, which he ended up winning by a razor thin margin of 1.5%.
But better late than never I suppose. Trump as bounced back and forth between the parties at least a half dozen times and Warren was a Republican until her….40s?
Geminid
I might not like Bernie as a person or like his policies but I’m not spoiled and I don’t require my party to satisfy me all the time. My objection to him is that he could blow our chance to win the presidency and take the Senate and might even cost us the House, which would be catastrophic.
Jay
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Also lefties compare US to Denmark or Costa Rica or whatever never take into the account how big the United States is in both area and population. It is fucking ridiculous. This is before we get into any kind of political detail about various states or the cultural and racial diversity.
As Scandinavian countries are getting more of an influx of immigrants they are rethinking their generous welfare state.
Gin & Tonic
@Martin: Have you ever addressed the inflation in costs? This has piqued my curiosity from time to time – I went to a currently expensive private, but even there, friends of mine were able to pay a large chunk, sometimes all, of their tuition by working some unskilled or semi-skilled summer job, e.g. painting houses. That’s no longer anywhere in the realm of possibility, even for publics.
I just took a quick glace at some NCES statistics. From 1976-2006, the tuition and fees for in-state students at 4-year public universities increased by a factor of about 9.5. In the same time period, average cost-of-living went up by a factor of 3.5. How is that sustainable?
Jay
HumboldtBlue
@Martin:
I don’t think the argument is for “free college” but for far more affordable college. As you mention the CCs are now free and College of the Redwoods began turning their focus to more vocational education in 2014 in a direct effort to provide students with skills needed in the marketplace and it’s been successful and it should only grow as it’s far easier to get the training.
The Regents voted in 2014 I believe to increase tuition to UCs by 5-percent each year for five years but what are the students getting that is 5-percent better for their investment?
Martin
@Fair Economist: Why do you think Trump and Citizens United hasn’t already made this true?
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid:
Agreed that’s why I could live with Pete B or EW but the thought of BS as the nominee gives me hives.
Kent
I think it is a bit different than that. Both Trump and Bloomberg are going to need to rely on a tremendous amount of retail politics. That’s what all the MAGA rallies and twitter nonsense is for Trump. And that is why Bloomberg is hiring up massive staffs in the super Tuesday states and beyond for traditional GOTV efforts. He is gearing up for a massive traditional campaign.
What they are both doing is an end-run around the traditional gatekeepers of American politics and the nonsense traditions like letting Iowa and New Hampshire decide the nominee. And, in Bloomberg’s case, he has abandoned the traditional and unsavory retail fundraising that all the other candidates are forced to do because of our broken campaign finance system.
I’m not necessarily a Bloomberg fan, but if he kills off the Iowa/New Hampshire lock on our nominating process and drives a stake through the endless rubber chicken circuit the candidates have to do, then that might be a positive. It would be a better world if everyone could campaign like Bloomberg but that’s not the world we live in.
Barb 2
@Emerald:
trump can and will sent out the Trumpbots to vote in the Democratic Primary. Trump was telling the Trumpbots to vote for the weakest rem candidate. I’m guessing the means the dems he thinks he can beat. Sanders is seen as a communist by many voters. The don’t know the difference between socialism and communism.
Trump is already cheating to win. Plus he has help from foreign hackers.
Mayor Pete again is considered a weak candidate by Trump. Trumpbots buy into the rants and rages at the revival tent shows. There is so much evangelical hypnotism going on that former Pentecostals tell me they believe that Trump is using the tricks used by the mind bender preachers they watched as children.
Do any of the dems candidates realize what they will be dealing with? Dems are the enemy. Whatever values we hold dear will be turned into something very evil. Kerry’s swiftboating times one thousand. For instance Empathy for others? How can this be twisted? Children in cages on the boarder. The environment.
women have learned to put up with male put downs all our lives. How many males know the games that Trump will use? Sander will not. His pointy finger speeches are useless.
Ruckus
@Kent:
I think you are right on about BS. It is not just good ideas, everything is and has a process, and while he may have a clue (I don’t think he really does) his knowledge of process seems to be zero. It takes more than a command/use of anger to be a leader and accomplish things in government.
Ella in New Mexico
@Jeffro:
Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower on line 2 for your conference call, sir. ;-)
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne: Has there ever been a correlation? Honest question; I have no idea.
Baud
@HumboldtBlue:
Sanders: That is why we are going to make public colleges and universities tuition free, and cancel all student debt.
Warren: We can do that by recognizing that a public college education is like a public K-12 education — a basic public good that should be available to everyone with free tuition and zero debt at graduation. My plan for universal free college will:
Kent
@Martin: I agree completely. My wife’s clinic has plenty of young doctors with $250,000 debt loads. But they are also making $300,000 per year with moonlighting potential to earn even more. They will be fine
What we really have in this country is an “affordability” crisis. I think there was a recent Slate or Atlantic article to that effect. If you are under 30 then college has become unaffordable, housing has become unaffordable, health care has become unaffordable, and child care has become unaffordable. If you get slammed by 2 or 3 of these at the same time as many are, it is almost impossible. This despite the lowest unemployment rates in generations.
Sensible Democratic policies would be to attack all of these affordability crises with equal effort. And even just bending the cost curve downwards in each of them by say 25% would result in tremendous improvement in the lives of most young people and get us closer back to how this country used to be when the boomers were young.
We don’t need free college or free healthcare or free housing or free child care. We just need it to be affordable and life will be immeasurably better.
Baud
@Kent:
Maybe we should give $1000 per month to every American.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Boy, his corpse isn’t cold yet and here you are dancing on it.
Mike in NC
Who can really blame Bloomberg for not sitting down to be grilled by the NY Times? They worked overtime to give us Trump. Don’t know how they viewed Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor.
Tenar Arha
@Betty Cracker: YUP.
These men in their late 70’s running, are ignoring that they’re applying for an 8 year contract, where they have to decide if they’re going to stay after only 2 years on the job! So I’m absolutely furious at Biden, Bloomberg & Sanders for putting the country in the position where 3 of our candidates will all be over 80+ when they have to decide if they’re running for a 2nd term.
Martin
@Gin & Tonic: Oh, it’s not. And I don’t pretend that it’s sustainable.
My view is this:
I think the free college for all is a dodge to avoid dealing with the access problem – which is even more unsustainable, and the housing problem, which is more widespread and damaging. Let’s start with exploring why more US land area is devoted to cars than housing, and what the motivations from cities and property owners might be toward maintaining that situation?
I think if you fix the underlying problems, the college debt problem will take care of itself.
Fair Economist
@Martin: Maybe. The point is that if Bloomberg wins, it’s facts on the ground making it possible that are the problem, not any symbolism or even direct effects of Bloomberg winning. That said, I don’t think Citizens United is the problem here, as Bloomberg is self-funding. The problem is the incredible concentration of wealth allowing one person to outspend an entire national Presidential campaign, combined with gullibility on the part of voters.
Kent
@schrodingers_cat:
Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, and Copenhagen are all about half the size of Portland Oregon. In fact metro Portland has more population than metro Oslo and metro Helsinki combined.
And Portland is only the 25th largest metro area in the country.
The scale of any social project in the US is just orders of magnitude immensely different from anything in Scandinavia.
Martin
@Mike in NC: Has anyone demonstrated that editorial board endorsements mean jack shit any more? How many voters does it sway?
I suspect it’s an anachronism, not unlike the Iowa caucuses.
Baud
@Fair Economist:
I think it’s fear more than gullability. If Bloomberg is swinging the biggest dick, people think maybe he’s the most likely to beat Trump, and they don’t particularly care that the dick swinging is self financed.
HumboldtBlue
@Baud:
That’s why I voted for Warren.
A universal basic income would do wonders for this country and while I would be a staunch supporter I also recognize the madcap howling that would pour forth from opponents.
It appears that when you give people who need money a monthly allotment they tend to spend it on essentials.
Mnemosyne
@Kent:
The tricky thing about getting to universal healthcare is that we’re probably going to need most doctors to be making about half that, which would be more similar to doctors’ salaries in places like Canada.
If that needed to happen, I would be totally open to loan forgiveness for medical students who go into primary care and/or who agree to work in underserved areas for 5 years. There might also be a way to figure out loan forgiveness for people who have already launched their careers but have a big chunk of debt to pay off.
germy
Baud
@Kent:
Almost any system can work if you have near univsersal buy in. America’s size and diversity makes that a rare occurrence. That’s why Social Security and Medicare started off as much smaller programs and were expanded over time. The current zeitgeist says reforms have to be done all at once, however.
Baud
@HumboldtBlue:
Heh. That comment is in jest. I’m not necessarily opposed to UBI, although I have questions and the devil is in the details.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t know either. I know that Hillary Clinton was frequently cited as one of the most admired women in America until she had the audacity to run for president and her approval ratings plummeted into the basement. So who knows?
Martin
@Fair Economist: But Citizens United means that a Sheldon Adelson can singlehandedly support a candidate in their place. They are largely the same problem.
And given how hostile to campaign finance reform the GOP is, why would electing Warren get them to do anything other than double down on billionaires? Seems to me the key to getting the GOP on board is to demonstrate that Dems are better able to out-billionaire them. That might actually get them to de-escalate. They don’t respond to reasoning – they respond to getting their ass kicked.
So, drop the charade, go full throated ‘Imma gonna buy this shit’, win, and then let the Congress do their thing. Bloomberg isn’t going to write that legislation – Congress will. He’s just got to sign it, and I think he will. And if it requires a constitutional amendment, he doesn’t even need to do that.
But I fear that if Warren can out-small-dollar-donate and beat Trump, then the moment the GOP have a chance they’re going to put even more money in politics, and we’ll wind up right where we started.
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: Polling everything to death gives zero clarity. That’s my hot take for today.
Jeffro
@Ella in New Mexico: Yup and no need to take those calls, either. Grant was horrible, and Eisenhower was a mixed bag. I wouldn’t even grant (see what I did there) former general officers an exemption from this requirement.
Show us you can run for, win, and excel at a public office, ANY significant office, and we’ll let you run for president. trumpov would have been fired in his first week as county dogcatcher.
schrodingers_cat
@Kent: Say tomorrow we were able to confiscate wealth of all the billionaires, divert all the money spent on the military to domestic programs and had 100 votes in the senate even then it would be immensely difficult to pull off what BS wants in one fell swoop. He is selling unicorns and rain bows.
germy
@Jeffro: I think the Grant was horrible theme has been passed down from generations of confederate textbook authors and editors.
I remember even my elementary school history textbooks spending page after page criticizing carpetbaggers. There were even illustrations of sneaky-looking carpetbaggers.
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
45% agree, 44% disagree, 11% are undecided.
;)
Kent
I agree, although I think even this is more a regional issue rather than a national issue. From your description it sounds like you are writing from California. Here in Washington State where I am currently college shopping with my daughter we don’t really even have an access problem. We have one large flagship, the University of Washington in Seattle which has selective admissions and only admits about 50% of its applicants. But the rest of the state’s universities are easy to get into and even in some cases struggling for students. Of course, a lot of people would rather have degrees from the UW instead of Western Washington or Central Washington Universities, but they are both decent legitimate schools and reasonably affordable.
Where people go wrong is that they borrow immense sums of money to get degrees in things like Art History or Literature at Reed College where tuition is pushing $60k per year. And then they find themselves unable to service their debt working as a barista or bookstore clerk in downtown Portland. And yes, I know that is a stereotype, but I actually went there and I actually know people like that.
Citizen Alan
@Mnemosyne:
This! I’ve said for years that we were never going to solve the healthcare problem so long as it was an a priori assumption that all doctors should be rich and all specialists should be filthy rich.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Proponents of UBI also usually want to get rid of all other social safety net programs in return for UBI. That’s not a good bargain.
germy
@Kent: Yes, but it’d be nice to have a civilization. Must everyone major in business or STEM?
Jeffro
@Kent: there is this thing called “returning to (highly?) progressive tax rates” that would make all of those things easily affordable for a huge number of Americans.
It’s weird how it’s never a solution.
trollhattan
@Jay:
They copied somebody else’s homework? How very unTrumpian of them! Speaking of our Israeli entanglements.
“UN lists 112 businesses linked to Israeli settlements”
Bibi’s response is 100% Bibi.
My shocked face:
:-|
germy
@schrodingers_cat: That’s been my objection to it. Yang said the robots were coming for everyone’s jobs. But who can live on $250 a week after losing their job to a robot, when the rest of the safety net has been dismantled?
Jeffro
@germy: Let me elaborate: he was a horrible president. Great general. ;) But those textbooks didn’t come out of nowhere.
My point remains: you want to be the country’s/world’s top political executive, you have to perform somewhere, anywhere, in that capacity before we (as a society) will let you run. Way too much at stake.
Kent
The more politically palatable solution, and probably the better one, would be to make essentials much more affordable. Taxpayer funded M4A and taxpayer funded free early childhood education would be an immeasurably large improvement for most every poor family in the country. Much more so than a free $1,000 per month.
germy
@Jeffro:
It reminds me of everything being considered to prevent gun violence except… gun control.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: Right. Thus, the devil part.
trollhattan
@germy:
They’re still mad he broke Klan Ver. 1.0.
prostratedragon
@The Moar You Know: Yes, truly a situation for which one must construct one’s propositions carefully …
germy
@Jeffro:
They came out of the South. And they called him a bad president, as well.
Feathers
On Bernie: People who know him, hate him. My mother worked as a lobbyist for a beloved non-profit. Shudders at his name. One of her friends working for HUD, told me he realizes that politicians are generally assholes, you have to face that fact and use the knowledge to work on getting things done. But with Bernie, it’s all asshole. He’s not trying to get anything done to help anyone. He doesn’t have any sense that he’s part of the government and should thus be doing something. In fact, even before 2016, Sanders was used as the example of a dangerous lefty/organizers: someone who is stuck at the level of believing things are bad because everyone else is just stupid.
Jeffro
@germy: Exactly. Make schools fortresses and give everyone a bucket of rocks to throw at gunmen…but…no way can we talk about restricting access to guns, ammo, even the ‘spray & pray’ stuff.
Ah well.
But yeah, people seem to ignore that cutting taxes on the rich just …gives the rich more money to buy politicians…who then cut taxes on the rich again, instead of subsidizing state college costs, or leaning into Medicare For All Who Want It, etc etc.
Truly, it is a mystery where all the money is going and why we’re getting the (non) outcomes we’re getting.
Martin
@germy: That’s a strawman. 19% of undergraduate degrees last year were STEM degrees.
Universities are predisposed to expand humanities and social science seats because those programs are so much cheaper to implement than STEM programs. It costs about 3x as much to educate an engineer than a humanities major.
germy
Mnemosyne
@schrodingers_cat:
I’m feeling that way right now, too. So many polls that seem to have so little relation to reality.
Cacti
Except it wouldn’t. The countries with all of the things that Bernie likes wouldn’t be able to afford them without a high VAT tax that everyone pays.
germy
@Feathers: Klobuchar was asked about that during the last debate. She said she likes Bernie, and has worked with him.
Maybe she’s an outlier.
trollhattan
@Jeffro:
If you’ve not yet done so, read the Chernow Grant biography. It forced me to reappraise my perception of President Grant which, to be honest, was very shallow beforehand. He is both misunderstood and underappreciated. His overarching flaw seems to be naivete over other people’s intentions. His own character and morals were exemplary, for the most part.
Mnemosyne
@Jeffro:
Current thinking by historians seems to say that it’s less that Grant was a horrible president and more that he was undermined by white supremacists in both parties at every turn. He certainly wasn’t perfect, and he took a lot of bad advice, but he wasn’t an objectively bad president.
MisterForkbeard
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Two points on this:
A) Good! Glad we’re getting Barr on the record.
B) We’re waiting SIX WEEKS? I would have thought Dems had learned the lesson by now – Trump commits new atrocities daily. We need to be really aggressive about this and treat it as the outrage it is. Demand he show up in a week. Give him the weekend to gather his records and if he can’t answer the questions at the hearing then make him look incompetent and like he’s hiding something.
trollhattan
@germy:
Have to wonder what else she would say, being a fellow senator and all. Hell, Joe can’t even say bad things about Republican senators, just that he’ll work with them like before.
Jay
@schrodingers_cat
Finland just raised Paid Parental Leave to 7 months, (each) for both parents, a bit more than 3 months is transferrable between parents, ( so one parent can be off longer), provides 14 months to a single parent, and it’s gender neutral and conception neutral, ( adoption is covered).
While some “nationalists” are using thinly veiled white nationalism, ( immigration or social services, can’t have both), they arn’t having much sucess with it.
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
Lots of public universities shut down their nursing programs in the 1990s not because there was no demand for nurses, but because educating nurses is very expensive and they’ll never make enough money to endow a chair like doctors will, so why bother?
Martin
@Mnemosyne: Yep. It’s why we’re so badly constrained on doctors as well. Lots of demand, but nobody is growing their med schools because holy hell is it expensive. So, instead, we all just pay twice as much for medical care. No big.
Kent
Basically the Joe Biden of the 19th Century. He trusted the good intentions of the Mitch McConnell’s of his era way too much.
Princess
@Brachiator: Forget Europe. The most socialist place in North America, the province of Quebec, shares a common border with Vermont. I have no sense he has any clue it is there, or how they manage to do what they do.
tobie
@Martin: This is not correct. Louis Menand cites the figures for majors in one of his articles. I don’t remember the exact numbers but the largest majors in America were education and business by a healthy margin. English was near the bottom. Foreign language majors scarcely registered.
@Kent: Reed College graduates have a very high employment rate. I’m not sure where the canard that Art History majors become baristas comes from but it ignores the dirty secret of higher education, which is if you graduate from a high-ranking school you will likely find employment because the name value of the institution still matters to employers. I guess you could say that that’s how privilege perpetuates itself.
Jay
@Cacti:
https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-finland.pdf
Funny, Finland doesn’t rely on a high VAT for revinue.
HumboldtBlue
@Mnemosyne:
That was a huge story here in Humboldt when HSU cut its nursing program. They finally brought it back in 2019 realizing it was one of the most successful programs for moving graduates into immediate employment particularly in a health care desert like rural Northern California.
It’ll be up and running this year.
Yutsano
@Gin & Tonic: To be SLIGHTLY fair to ol’ Yang, he didn’t come up with the idea for Universal Basic Income. His idea was flawed to the max sure, but not original.
Brachiator
@Princess:
Yep. Quebec is a good example.
Chris Johnson
@schrodingers_cat: do you have ANY IDEA of the wealth of all the billionaires. D:
If you could get one percent, one hundredth of what they’ve got, it’d solve practically everything. If you got two percent, one-fiftieth, also known as ‘all it costs Bloomberg to purchase one entire political party in a hostile takeover without inconveniencing himself in the slightest’, we’d be feeding all the people and then putting them to work on green infrastructure to address climate change.
Funny how Bloomberg needs to spend that money (when he’s not putting the guy in place who poisoned Flint, MI) by hiring away white-collar people from working campaigns at exorbitant, luxurious markups and showering his people with copious bribes. It’s almost like that is what he’s really like.
He’s just ONE billionaire.
You don’t really have a sense of how much capital these people have captured. You’re acting like it’s some little percentage of the whole pie. Bloomberg alone has the financial power of many small countries, and a huge chunk of the entire American population all put together. ONE guy. There are other billionaires. They’re just as bad.
Feathers
@Martin: @Kent: From my understanding, the free college plans involve state schools only, with a plan for building them out and increasing funding for them. One thing is that this will kill off marginal private colleges, which hopefully could be rolled into the state college system. I grew up in Virginia, which has a healthy ecosystem of different types of university to match the needs of various students.
One thing many people don’t seem to realize is that this really isn’t going to do much for graduate students. We do need an overhaul of graduate education.
@Mnemosyne: One proposal I’ve heard is free medical school, but you have to agree to take Medicare/Medicaid patients. If you don’t, the tuition gets turned into a loan.
Mike in NC
@trollhattan: Still working my way through Chernow’s bio of Grant. Excellent reading.
danielx
@trollhattan:
Kris Kristofferson was diagnosed with Lyme disease a while back, it was initially thought he had Alzheimer’s,
Martin
@tobie: Mine were from the US dept of ed. And business and education are not STEM majors.
MisterForkbeard
@germy: I really doubt she would say “I’ve worked with him and he’s an asshole” on the debate stage.
More seriously, there’s a lot of pressure to be nice on a personal level during the debates, and women are treated much worse than men on this. Being aggressive or saying you don’t personally like someone is portrayed as being bitchy.
Jay
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@catclub:
Yep. Instead all we hear is Bloomberg Bloomberg Bloomberg.
I’ll take his money, and I’ll take him over Bernie, but I would really like to nominate a DEMOCRAT instead.
Tenar Arha
@Jeffro: On the scales we currently judge Presidents, he really wasn’t a bad one. He was a mixed bag, like most of them. But the people who in the end wrote those textbooks didn’t forgive or forget he had to send in troops to eliminate the first Klan or participated in getting African American men the vote.
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat: The thing that makes me crazy about modern-day so-called “Jacobins” is that the actual, historical Jacobins DID do some good along with the bad, unlike these self-satisfied little SOBs. They were instrumental in getting family and inheritance law changed so that women were allowed to inherit property, for example, rather than have it all go to their male relatives. Among other things. Not all of their innovations lasted, and of course nobody remembers the good because of the bad, but still…they were actively TRYING to form a better society, not just execute their enemies.
I have yet to see any evidence that modern self-described Jacobins are actually *working* on anything *but* fantasizing about executing their enemies.
@trollhattan: OMG! That’s like “Empire Strikes Back” done by mice!
debbie
I cannot figure out the disconnect between the incredible enthusiasm at Warren’s rallies with the selfie lines and her blah results so far. Did she not visit either Iowa or NH?
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
Tesla at full speed, no worries.
trollhattan
@danielx:
Wow. Can’t begin to guess how many undiagnosed cases with a broad array of bad consequences there must be.
Makes me ponder drug-resistant syphilis. :-(
trollhattan
@Miss Bianca:
Can’t you just hear their little squeaks?
“I am your father.”
“Nooooo!”
schrodingers_cat
@Chris Johnson: You totally missed the point of my thought experiment which was with even with all the capital and political power BS plans in the time period he has announced are fantastical.
Ksmiami
@Martin: I’m pretty much resigned to hitting back at this point@Geminid: but that’s where you and I differ- after the 2016 nightmare and in the face of complete fascist takeover, Bernie should never have been allowed back into the Democratic primary and it’s a complete insult to all the loyal Democrats that he was. Let him run third party (I doubt he’d have the stomach) but don’t sell me crap and tell me after I’ve donated and worked hard to elect Democrats, that I have to vote Bernie- he is a disaster in the making
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan: EXACTLY
Kent
I’m a Reed College graduate. I’m personally acquainted with a number of my fellow alums who spent decades messing around working at local bookstores and coffee shops complaining about their student loans. Mostly because they didn’t want to leave Portland I think. Which is probably the bigger problem. Of course I know plenty of others who are ultra successful. I don’t know any who are involuntarily unemployed. I also know plenty of English Lit majors who went on to law school or got MBAs and now make big bucks in corporate America.
evodevo
@Kent: Yes. The daughter of a friend went to Vassar (and this was back in the late 90’s) and got a degree in English lit (??!!). Last I heard she was teaching with TeachAmerica in MS or somewhere…hard to justify that pricey tuition. We lost touch, so I’m hoping she found a wealthy husband and paid off those loans…
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jeffro: How about Obama, he didn’t serve a full term in the Senate before running for President?
Kent
I’m just back from walking the dog and I don’t know if this thread is dead or not. But a couple of points.
First, the way to address the private school issue is to develop private-public partnerships with local private universities. Rather than build a new nursing school, if there is a struggling private university down the road, establish a partnership with them so that they can take nursing students tuition free with public dollars provided they meet X, Y, Z, criteria. You wouldn’t want to make all private college free and subsidized. But if there are high-demand professions that the local public universities can’t accommodate, then work out a partnership for those specific degrees. Win-win.
Second, for med school I’d prefer a system like in Chile where med school is free at public universities but you owe 3-years of service in an underserved community after you graduate. My wife went to med school in Chile and served her rural service requirement in a rural town in Southern Chile where she was only doctor. It’s basically like Peace Corps within your own country.
Rich kids who don’t want to do the service? They have to pay back all the cost of their education to the state. Some just do this. Dad just writes the check. But most spread out throughout the countryside and do their required service. It’s a rite of passage.
Morzer
@trollhattan:
Now that’s what I call leadership.
Morzer
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/klobuchar-saved-campaign-new-hampshire-buttigieg-attack.html
Interesting piece on just how ruthless Klobuchar was in attacking Mayor Pete. I can’t say I much like the dishonesty being applied to another Democrat, but I sure wouldn’t mind seeing her go after Trump with a similar brutal shamelessness.
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
I see The Diplomat has posted this bit of Indian news from The AP:
Not the end of life for BJP, but shows that the people of India aren’t buying into their Hindu nationalism without resistance. Congratulations seem to be in order!
Cacti
@Jay: Wut? Finland has a 24% VAT tax, with certain goods and services reduced to 14% or 10%.
Fifth highest among EU member states.
Jeffro
@Cacti: and progressive tax rates. They have both. We actually have regressive rates at this point.
Jeffro
@trollhattan:
@Mnemosyne: thank you both and these takes are appreciated. I also have only a passing knowledge of any details of his presidency. I would just suggest that perhaps being extremely naive, as well as letting oneself be undermined by white supremacists, might also be considered ‘bad’. Ok, ‘not good’.
For the book recommendation: I cannot possibly add one more book to my reading pile (and I’m proud that as of this date, I have at least stuck to this one resolution! No book purchases or check-outs until at least July =)
Jeffro
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Ok. So Next-Obama would be disqualified. I’m fine with that.
schrodingers_cat
@J R in WV: They lost Maharashtra and Jharkhand where they were in power in the fall. They were not in power in Delhi Assembly anyway, the incumbent party won
HumboldtBlue
@Morzer:
That’s a classic.
Of course, there is also Cold Harbor.
Kent
Ted Cruz has served a full term so you can swap him in for the next Obama. If length of Senate experience is your mandatory criteria.
Jeffro
@Kent: it’s my criteria – one of many, actually – that would apply, sure.
making different rules for different parties or personalities is what got the GOP to their cult-like IOKIYAR. We need a return to standards, preferably ones enshrined in law.
I’m good with what I proposed. 10 years of tax returns in order to file + all assets in a true blind trust by Inauguration Day (or forfeit the office to your opponent) too.