Sorry I didn’t post last week. There was some travel, some allergies, and some heavy searching for morel mushrooms. (Zero found to date despite ongoing Talmudic scrutiny of this map and related documents.)
But I’ve also been bummed about the Bernie campaign implosion. It happened fast and furious, and the fact that it happened in the wake of massive voting irregularities in his/my home, New York City, didn’t help.
It was depressing, but I’m doing my best to take solace from the fact that Bernie’s campaign (which succeeded beyond all reasonable expectations, considering where it began) is of a piece with Occupy, Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, the many campus movements currently underway, and a zillion other indicators. (Including the rise of Obama himself, btw.) We seem to be on the cusp of a new progressive era fueled by technology-enabled people power, while our enemies have fulfilled our version of Voltaire’s prayer and made themselves ridiculous.
So, in the matters of both morels and mores (a stretch, I know!) I remain toujours hopeful.
Anyway, sometimes success comes at you sideways. Yesterday, I found a bazillion ramps on a nearby hill. I harvested a few, from which “we” (Royal We) made a heavenly, megagarlicky pesto from this recipe, using vegan parmesan instead of pecorino.
And last week, I found years of faith in another realm amply rewarded:
I imagine some Juicers will be crying tears of ecstatic joy at this while the rest will all be wtf…
PS – “I’m going to roll away the Hamm.” LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
msdc
Yes, it was awfully irregular how over a million voters decided they liked the other candidate better than your guy. Must be fraud!
PS. I would agree that the Sanders campaign is of a piece with Occupy, BLM, campus protest movements, etc., but probably not in the way you mean.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Good god
trollhattan
Sweetie darling! One of my all-time guilty pleasures. Had no idea this was in the works.
Kylroy
@msdc: Honestly, I think it would be great if Sanders kept people rallied and interested during the general and afterward. But his insistence that this “is not a movement” makes me doubt he’ll keep going.
Mike J
Since Hillary won the areas with the voters who were removed from the rolls, we can pretty safely assume she would have won by even bigger margins had all of her supporters been allowed to vote.
Calouste
Well, if you believe that a guy who is hiding his tax returns is honest, of course you believe fables about “massive voting irregularities”.
But I guess it is hard for the marks to admit they have been conned.
Mike J
<blockquote>At this point it’s as if Sanders is determined to validate everything liberal skeptics have been saying all along about his unwillingness to face reality — and all of it for, maybe, a few weeks of additional fundraising, at the expense of any future credibility and goodwill. Isn’t there anyone who can tell him to stop before it’s too late?
LAC
Yay for the Ab Fab shout out. Otherwise it would be “Bernie ….whaaaa…zzzz” time.
Calouste
@Kylroy: Sanders is right about that. It’s not a movement, it’s a cult.
Hillary Rettig
@Kylroy: I agree – it would be disappointing if he didn’t leverage it into a movement.
Adam L Silverman
All of the systematic inquiry and analysis of the various movements lumped together as the Arab Spring have indicated that the role played by social media had negligible effects. Where it had a major impact was on 1) the western news media who needed a hook for the story and 2) western audiences that need to believe that social media can be useful for something other than advertising stuff and goofing off.
p.a.
msdc
@Kylroy: Keeping people rallied for progressive causes and candidates would be great (provided he recognizes that the next Democratic nominee is one of them). Going back home is fine too – it’s his choice. But this dead-ender “we wuz robbed!” stuff will be absolutely toxic for the general election – beneficial only to Trump – and I would like to see Sanders clamp down on this sort of nonsense from his supporters.
Cacti
Reasons why Bernie imploded in NY:
-Bombed NYDN interview and sounded like an ignorant rabble rouser
-Surrogate Rosario Dawson disses President Obama (90 percent approval among Dems)
-Bernie calls Hillary unqualified
-Surrogate Paul Song calls Hillary a whore
-Bernie invites himself to Rome to fan stalk the Pope
But really, it was voting irregularities that did him in. ;-)
dslak
@Calouste: Well, if there were voting irregularities and Sanders lost, there must be a causal relationship. You don’t see him losing, otherwise.
Hillary Rettig
For those too weak to mouseclick, it’s the NYS Attorney General who is making accusations of irregularities, as quoted in the Daily News, which is no friend of Bernie. The article also notes:
“The city BOE, which has a long history of screwups, mysteriously removed 126,000 Democrats from the rolls ahead of the election.”
dslak
@Hillary Rettig: Oh, it’s not the irregularities we’re disputing, but their relationship to Bernie’s loss.
Mike J
How to build a revolution:
Cacti
@Hillary Rettig:
And we can naturally assume that 100% of them would have voted for Sanders.
Applejinx
(smacks trolls)
Good on you, Hillary. Don’t be downhearted.
I figure we have nearly half a year to build our frankenstein monster and go out to stomp the Republicans out of existence. Not sure what the new fascists will call themselves. Maybe just straight up ‘neofascists’? Everything’s ‘neo’ these days.
We ought to go for ‘neosocialists’. Sort of ‘yes we can have an aspirational consumer-driven market religion for everything, as long as we pay people to participate in it’. Otherwise it doesn’t work at all. You gotta subsidize the players (educating them helps, too)
Our big challenge with the technology-enabled people power is that it’s controlled by an elite (Hillary’s in part won, and WILL smash Trump next, because she knows how to get the cooperation of those elites: we will be needing that skill bigtime) but I’m also seeing the same elites in favor of education and non-means-tested, non-bureaucratic societal supports for citizens (from futuristic transportation systems all the way to UBI) so I think we can expect Hillary will NOT drop that ball. It’s even possible she is more likely to rapidly adopt new ideas than Bernie: Bernie could be trying to do the right thing in old ways ‘cos he doesn’t sway from what he knows is right. And everything is changing SO fast…
Very interesting times these are. I’m glad to see you again, Hillary Rettig, and I’m glad you’re not shutting down like some of my Facebook surroundings. It’s awkward even knowing what to say to a ‘liberal’ who’s gone all ‘RAGGGH smash the state, anarchy and justice!’ when anarchy is goddamn well not justice, ever.
I trust Bernie will sort this out somehow but this is not his time to execute a sudden capitulation. There’d be riots :P
Calouste
Btw, if you believe that, why do you support Sanders? Sanders is not a progressive, he is a revolutionary. Some of his goals might overlap with progressive goals, but he hasn’t shown a way to actually make progress, just sloganeering.
Frankensteinbeck
Wow. I… might as well just copy and paste my post from the previous political thread, since it just became topical:
Are we back to Bernie Bashing? Oh, good. Because every day on my internet feed it’s at least one friggin’ post about how Clinton is only winning because she’s cheating. It’s driving me up the wall. They’ve come up with a way of convincing themselves he actually won Chicago by 19%, but the Democratic Party changed the vote count. And they think the Republican voter suppression in Maricopa County means he should have won Arizona, because ‘minorities and college students’ are Sanders’ base. And… every freaking day it’s some new conspiracy theory victimization. And yes, I lay it on Sanders’ doorstep. He doesn’t have to say it specifically. He stokes their paranoia constantly with talk about rigged systems and corruption, and his top campaign people’s explanations for why he should have won races. I’m getting this from normally sane people, and it’s like watching a relative go RWNJ. It’s all I can do not to write sarcastic posts back, which wouldn’t help. My patience is on the edge.
FlipYrWhig
@dslak: There’s always something extrinsic that made Bernie Sanders lose, because Hillary Clinton’s being judged preferable by more people, I mean, THAT DOESN’T JUST “HAPPEN.”
dslak
@Mike J: But does she have dank memes?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Well, so ends (thankfully) the Sanders phony baloney revolution – not with a bang, but with a petulant whine.
FlipYrWhig
@Calouste: Sanders isn’t a “revolutionary.” Sanders is a bullshit artist who’s been cosplaying “revolution” for 50 years.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mike J: money laundering! corruption!
Betty Cracker
I’ve heard rumors of an AbFab movie so many times over the years, but an actual trailer with celebs — it’s gonna happen! Huzzah!
Face
Another HRC/B-Sando flame war. Joy.
EconWatcher
I found the following optimistic article about the U.S. refreshing and convincing. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-05-01/u-s-decline-is-campaign-hype-not-reality
And its closing lines are similar to a point I’ve been making for a while. We’ve got big problems in this country, but would you trade them for any other country’s? Not on your life. We’re still the country to bet on over the next 25 years.
However, we really do need to get rid of Citizens United….
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Frankensteinbeck:
That was my FB feed a month ago – now I’m down to one Japanese soldier posting USUncut articles and Jill Stein screeds from a cave in Maine.
catclub
@Calouste: I really really want Hillary to push hard on Trump’s tax returns. I have confidence that will make him squeal.
msdc
@Frankensteinbeck:
To be perfectly honest, I’m not getting this from normally sane people – it’s mostly Naderistas and Steinhards, exactly who you’d expect – but your analogy to the relative who’s falling into the Fox News decaying orbit is sadly on point.
dslak
@Face: But, Mom, she started it!
FlipYrWhig
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: That US Uncut business, holy frijoles. Where did they come from?
Calouste
@Applejinx:
Google, Facebook, Twitter, make almost all their money of advertising, not of your “technology-enabled people power”. So, three quesses who they will side with when there is a clash between advertising and “technology-enabled people power”.
And btw, “technology-enabled people power” has been around since Gutenberg started the first printing press.
msdc
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Ha! More perfect analogies.
I’m not there yet – we just had our primary, and FB has been a cloud of progressive butthurt – but your comment gives me hope that we’ll get there soon.
Hillary Rettig
@Adam L Silverman: The Arab Spring participants themselves disagree. Wael Ghanim (a former Google employee who was one of the leaders in Egypt) told 60 Minutes: “Our revolution is like Wikipedia, okay? Everyone is contributing content.” Agree that we’re just at the early stages of those movements however.
Do you think Obama would have been elected, or BLM or Dream been national movements, absent social media?
dslak
@Calouste: I would recommend that they look into how community groups have made use of social media, but that would require them admitting that they have something to learn.
Much easier to sit back and then take credit for anything BLM or Fight for Fifteen manage to accomplish.
Applejinx
@Hillary Rettig: What _I_ heard was that it was Republican chicanery striking Democrats indiscriminately from the rolls. This underscores the charges of corruption… you could even say it makes it more likely for Hillary, who’s capable of operating within that same political system, to be acquainted with corruption just by way of detente with the staggeringly corrupt Republicans… but I’ve seen nothing to contradict the picture of a split Democratic ticket, with a progressive and kinda young and loopy Sanders wing having ONLY rallies and social media to organize itself, and a slightly larger Clinton wing having literally everything else.
This is something to be GRATEFUL for. All the olds and property-owners aren’t all off being Republicans. Craploads of them moved in to the Democratic Party and run the show there, which is why they don’t take kindly to a hippie takeover. In many ways they’ve been mighty accepting, and in other ways they’re total bastards to compete with, just brutal.
It’s that brutality that will win the election against Trump, not a young-driven wave of idealism. But without the wave of idealism the Dem powermongers have no souls and turn into Republicans by osmosis. We need both, but this time around it will be the Clinton people driving the train, and the coalition-minded Sanders people choosing what tracks it runs on.
Welcome to the coalition-minded, Hillary. Thank you for not wanting to wreck the goddamn country just to throw all the ‘system’ out at once. If nobody else will say thank you, I will. I just don’t believe with the decades of corruption practice this country has had, that a revolution will give us anything but a fascist uprising, and I don’t want that.
Matt McIrvin
@EconWatcher:
Yes, I would trade them for the problems of many other countries. Particularly Canada’s or Sweden’s.
Old Dan and Little Anne
The Ab Fab movie better have Bubble in it. That’s for damn sure.
Calouste
@FlipYrWhig: That’s an awesome comment. It’s just everything I thought about Sanders explained in one simple sentence.
Hillary Rettig
@dslak: You can have that discussion but you’ll be arguing it with yourselves because I never said he would win absent the screwups.
aimai
“Cheers…you don’t get that on British Airways”–that must be my favorite line in the short. But I agreee with Old Dan and Little Anne the movie MUST have Bubble. Must.
randy khan
I’ve recently been thinking of this in terms of Kubler-Ross and five stages:
1. I’m winning even though it doesn’t look that way.
2. Even though I’m not winning now, I have an easy path to the nomination.
3. I’d be winning if the rules were fair.
4. If I can manipulate the rules in my favor, I’ll win.
5. I wholeheartedly support the nominee against the vile candidate of the other party.
Sanders is at stage 4. His supporters vary from stage 3 to stage 5. For what it’s worth, at this point in 2008 Clinton was somewhere between 3 and 4, but her transition to 5 was very quick after it became clear she had no shot. I’m hoping Sanders will do the same thing.
rp
@Hillary Rettig: Bull. You said “But I’ve also been bummed about the Bernie campaign implosion. It happened fast and furious, and the fact that it happened in the wake of massive voting irregularities in his/my home, New York City, didn’t help.”
You explicitly linked Sanders losing to the voting irregularities.
Gretchen
Great news about AbFab!
Calouste
@Hillary Rettig:
That’s a really unbiased source you have there.
Germy
SHOCK & DENIAL
PAIN & GUILT
ANGER & BARGAINING
“DEPRESSION”, REFLECTION, LONELINESS
THE UPWARD TURN
RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH
ACCEPTANCE & HOPE
aimai
@Hillary Rettig: Yes, of course Obama would have been elected absent social media. People have been getting elected for fucking years without social media. Someone was getting elected that year and someone will get elected this year and it won’t be because the youts are all hooked up. It will be because lots of people get together and work their asses off dragging their candidate over the finish line. I’m going back to school in the fall and I expect that there will be real world as well as virtual meet ups to get shit done. But in any event the same damn 20 percent of the peoplew ill be doing 80 percent of the work.
raven
Yes yes, being drunk and stupid is just hilarious.
Germy
The seven stages of grief for Bernie Sanders:
http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2016/04/the-seven-stages-of-grief-and-bernie.html
Applejinx
@EconWatcher: And why did we recover better than anybody else? Because thanks to Obama we didn’t go full austerity.
Let that be a lesson to Clinton. This truly is a historic moment with a lot of potential. Right now, any redistributionist tack by a major politician will result in both personal popularity and a regional economic boom, as the beneficiaries become buyers and that bit of the world becomes a little more liquid. It’s like watering parched plants: it ought to be pretty striking.
Looks like New Deal 2.0 would go over well. Same basic problem as before…
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@dslak:
A revolution championed by entitled white dudebros was never going to be anything other than a suckfest of failure. Sanders has been flailing around since Super Tuesday looking for a rationale for his campaign after being overwhelmingly rejected by the real victims of his rigged economy, because he insisted on white mansplainin’ to them that race is a distraction. If he’s going to lead anything other than a cult he needs to learn and impart that lesson, but he won’t because he’s a narcissistic asshole.
Applejinx
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Do you have no political instincts at all?
Thank heavens Hillary is better at this than you D:
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Applejinx:
I’m sick and tired of hearing so much delusional bullshit.
Amir Khalid
Objectively, Bernie’s campaign has actually failed: he is not going to be the Democratic nominee for president. This failure happened only because he decided to make that his goal, rather than bringing to the forefront his issue of economic inequality.
Along the way, Bernie has demonstrated a poorer understanding than Hillary’s of the scope of the Presidency as an executive job. He has not demonstrated enough of the executive, diplomatic, political and interpersonal skills necessary in a President, compared to Hillary. He’s just not up to the job. (Of course, you could in theory still wind up with President Trump — who would be lke a President Biff Tanner.)
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx:
Yes, if there’s one constant in American politics, it’s that when the government gives poor people more money, it’s wildly popular.
Applejinx
@aimai: Every now and then I agree profoundly with aimai.
This. This. As one of the people doing work in a Sanders field office while drop-ins came by to talk about how right we all were, I can only agree.
lwestsd
@FlipYrWhig:
Thanks for that. Suddenly everything slides into place — from the uncombed hair to the “no new tuxes” stance.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The composition of the House and Senate suggest otherwise, but isn’t it pretty to think so?
FlipYrWhig
@Amir Khalid:
See, I don’t think his issue really is, or was, or has been, “economic inequality.” It’s been “money in politics.” One of the effects of money in politics, in Sanders’s rhetoric and, it seems, in his thought as well, is that wealthy interests impede the political system from redressing economic inequality, but the root cause for him is money in politics, and the reason why he’s so proud of himself is that by representing a state with no wealthy interests and no media markets he’s managed to avoid having to make the kinds of home-state compromises that sully most politicians, even the left-of-center ones. And he thinks this means he’s cracked the code, and that everyone who hasn’t followed his path is choosing to be dirty because it’s so easy to be clean.
Applejinx
@Amir Khalid: Are you only fooling, or did you think that only a year ago, addressing a little group of people in Vermont, Bernie’s goal was to lead a progressive revolution and become President?
Do you think the only possible motive someone might have there, is to personally win the race and take the prize?
That’s an… odd position to hold. Have some sense of perspective. We didn’t know there was a Bernie wing of the Democratic party until it was demonstrated. Nobody knew, that was the whole problem. And
@FlipYrWhig:
IT KIND OF IS (sorry, sudden attack of the obvious. And why, pray tell, do you think that might be?)
SarahT
@LAC: What you said (“Yay for the Ab Fab shout out. Otherwise it would be “Bernie ….whaaaa…zzzz” time.”).
FlipYrWhig
@lwestsd: I feel like the clothes and hair thing is truly crucial to his approach to politics. I have a coworker who’s been doing this job for 40+ years and only wears Hawaiian shirts. If he were to put on a tie he’d be Selling Out To The Man. Bernie Sanders is so obviously a creature of the same moment.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: Are you Rip Van Winkle? Did you miss that “welfare” is one of the most demonized and demagogued words of the past half century? Good lord.
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker: I know. Teh joy. I may have to re-watch some of the series to celebrate. Or just drink a lot of vodka. : )
daves09
@rp: The man hasn’t lived in NY since he was 18, how is it his home?
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: Look up ‘socialist’, okay?
Whew. You know what? I think certain posters just desperately need to fuck over their preferred candidate with an orgy of hippie punching, even if they are literally spouting neoconservative rhetoric. Hillary Rettig is the punching bag and must be ceremonially scorned, even when showing signs of being an ally.
I’m in the fifth stage of ‘what the fuck are you people even doing’. Knock yourselves out, not like there’s a general election to win or anything. ;P
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: I’ll add “neoconservative” to the list of words you don’t understand. It’s a long list.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: i sometimes think this one is a spoof, but even given the weird psychology of trolling, I can’t imagine anyone putting that much time into anonymous internet commenter role playing.
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: ‘half century’? Pay attention to the last decade, please.
Mike J
@FlipYrWhig:
He went to the WHCD as a guest of CBS/Westinghouse while Westinghouse is bidding on decommissioning the Vermont Yankee reactor. I’m sure they’ll find a nice low
incomeinformation neighborhood for any waste.SarahT
@Cacti: “Reasons why Bernie imploded in NY:
-Bombed NYDN interview and sounded like an ignorant rabble rouser
-Surrogate Rosario Dawson disses President Obama (90 percent approval among Dems)
-Bernie calls Hillary unqualified
-Surrogate Paul Song calls Hillary a whore
-Bernie invites himself to Rome to fan stalk the Pope
But really, it was voting irregularities that did him in…”
Not to mention that the (admittedly fucked-up) Board of Election voter purges were far more likley to have hurt Hillary voters, aka “Registered Democrats”. Yet she still kicked his ass. Just another deep south state for hillary, right ?
Amir Khalid
@Applejinx:
I dunno man, I’m only going by what Bernie himself says. He did start out being all about the issue, but then he changed his goal to winning the Democratic nomination. And yes, I do think that when people run for a public office, it’s because they think they have some hope, however improbable, of winning it.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: In the last decade, redistribution became popular? That must have been why Obamacare was so easy to pass. You have a wild imagination.
Calouste
@Applejinx: I guess it is good that we now know that there is a whole wing of the Democratic party that is as math- and fact-challenged as anything on the right. It just demonstrates the damage to the education system that has been done over the years.
aimai
@Applejinx: Yes, the government giving poor people money is extremely unpopular. Obama had to fight like mad to get medicaid expanded to include the working poor and people without families. FFS. If you know only one thing about America it is that we can’t have nice things because our populaiton is filled with racist and classist hatred for everyone below them on the social scale and they would literally rather have their own teeth rot out and lose their noses to leprosy than pay taxes to make sure other people are not suffering and dying.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Hey now, hey now – stop it with that voice of reason stuff.
SarahT
@aimai: Yes, and Edina’s Mum, too !
aimai
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Applejinx says he/she is on the spectrum and therefore (in his/her mind) is relentlessly logical and uncluttered by emotions. Of course being on the spectrum doesn’t mean you are any better historically informed or necessarily have any real insight into other people’s motivations or desires. So, looking at his/her posts through this lens I think you can expect that whatever Applejinx says he/she believes he will defend tooth and nail.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
are you, Sir, suggesting that my typing comments on blogs is not political activism? In a different time and place, you would be hearing from my second.
gvg
Sanders is losing because more voters like Hillary. It’s like the joke about we lost because the other team scored more points. It’s supposed to work like this even if sometimes all of us haven’t liked the results. It’s entirely fair too which is why some of Sanders comments annoy many people.
The voter suppression was aimed at Democrats in general, not republicans and not sub group Sanders supporters. If you didn’t intend to imply it’s why Sander’s lost, then you did not write carefully enough. The rest of us need to consider it a warning we need to prevent from causing a problem in the general.
I don’t think social media has actually changed much for elections so far, including Obama. I do think cell phone video’s and dash cam’s are changing safe white minds about what turns out not to have been exagerations by blacks about cops and institutional racism. Eventually I think it’s going to count a lot at the ballot box though not too much yet because no one has spelled out a plan to fix it that is too convincing. I am ready to support such things but haven’t found it yet. And I am not smart enough to build my own. I will say I always knew the drug suspicion confiscation before trial was a bad bad idea. I actually would have expected worse results. I knew when I was in Jr High. I consider it highway robbery and always have. simply changing that to not allowed before trial results would solve a small slice of the problems. Also laws that don’t allow filming of cops on duty….wrong. what else? It can’t get votes till someone runs on plans to fic.
Amir Khalid
@Applejinx:
Also, I stand by everything I said about Bernie: he’s just not Presidential material.
daves09
@lwestsd: The whole I am too busy for the social niceties, I will accept an invitation to a formal dinner but I will wear a thrift store suit, because I AM AUTHENTIC, makes me understand why know one in Washington has ever had much time for him.
I do think it’s time for Schumer to call Berndoe and ask him how much he really wants to be chairman of the Senate budget committee.
Hillary Rettig
@aimai:
“The topic of Barack Obama’s usage of social media in his political campaigns, including podcasting, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube has been compared to the adoption of radio, television, MTV, and the Internet in slingshotting his presidential campaign to success and as thus has elicited much scholarly inquiry.[1]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_social_media
aimai
@Calouste: I just had this discussion over at Kos. Someone wrote one of those “why I’m no longer voting for Bernie” diaries and a commenter said, furiously, that if this was true the poster had “never really been a Bernie supporter at all!” Being a Bernie supporter is an existential state, a total giving of oneself to Bernie, which can never be reversed or reconsidered. If you do change your mind, or vote for another person, you must have been a false believer all along. This is explicitly a christianist trope, btw. Its beyond Orthopraxy and Orthodoxy to some kind of religious purity trope where purity can only be retroactively proven by never wavering.
aimai
@Hillary Rettig: Sure, I remember it well! I was there! But, despite that, he still would have won his election without them.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
Meh. I kind of see what AppleJinx is saying, but it would have to be couched very carefully as, say, “infrastructure improvements” and not “welfare payments.”
And, let’s be honest, a lot of the white people who were all freaked out about “taking charity” from a black president won’t be quite as freaked out if it comes from a white president, even if she is a chick. I think people in Southern states will be a lot more demanding of the Feds once the race thing is taken out of the equation, I’m sorry to say.
muddy
@Amir Khalid: @Applejinx: I saw Bernie do a local Vermont interview well before he announced (might have been either You Can Quote Me or the 5:30). He said that his only motivation in running was to bring these issues to the fore. And he said that he knew how the media worked, he would have to run hard like he really meant it, for them to cover it. If he just came out and said, I’m just trying to air these issues, they’d not have given him 5 minutes. He said he would not run a 3rd party campaign, as that was just handing it to the Republicans.
When I watched the interview, honestly it seemed to me that he did not particularly want to be president, but was wiling to do so in order to push the issues that concern him most. I am acquainted with him a little, and that’s how it came off to me.
He’s done what he set out to do. He’s won that. Sometimes I wonder that the response he has gotten, which must be immensely gratifying and overwhelming, has drawn more of his ego into the matter. I hope not. But I keep thinking of how serious he was in that discussion about having to push as hard as possible as long as possible. It’s a strategy for the issues, not the presidency. I believed him, and expect that after the convention he will be just as fierce, as the issues he is concerned about absolutely require a Democrat, and he knows that.
I don’t know why people are in such a rush to be rid of him. If he dropped out the media would be 100% down on Hillary every day, they’d just concentrate on that as though we were in the general already. I wish people could let it play out without getting so nasty to each other in the meanwhile.
schrodinger's cat
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for confirming what I have always suspected about the Arab Spring. Did Tom Friedman start this spurious meme?
MomSense
@Frankensteinbeck:
The revolution cannot fail. It can only be failed.
gwangung
@Mnemosyne: I recall Propane Jane’s comments about racism preventing socialism getting a hold in America. Some folks disagreed, but I’m not sure that she’s that wrong about it…
Betty Cracker
@gwangung: I think she’s wrong about that, and ever since I read it, I’ve been meaning to do a post on the topic, but have never gotten around to it. It would require research, which is too much like work!
Mnemosyne
@gvg:
I have to admit, the thing that really pissed me off when the voter suppression was happening was all of the Bernie supporters insisting that it was Hillary’s fault and not, say, the fact that Arizona is controlled by Republicans from top to bottom.
Voter suppression is going to be a HUGE problem in this election, and accusing the “Clinton Machine” of doing it is stupid in the extreme because you’re giving the fucking Republicans a fucking free pass to do the EXACT SAME THING in the general election, you dumbasses.
cleek
@muddy:
i don’t want him out. i just want him to quit shitting on Clinton and the Dem Party.
// switching metaphors
he just keeps driving that wedge deeper and deeper because he likes the sound of his own hammer.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Betty Cracker:
You and Bernie Sanders.
Kylroy
@daves09: Finding out that both Barney Frank and Elizabeth Warren couldn’t stand Bernie was what cinched it for me. If his closest natural allies can’t say nice things about him, he would be an utter failure at the deal-making and coalition-building that is the core of the president’s job.
gwangung
@Betty Cracker: I don’t know. Data would be helpful. But there’s a wide range of behaviors (not all of them acknowledged as racism) that infect our population. And I think it’s something that drives more political behavior than what we’re comfortable with.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
My opinion would be that it’s racism at the base, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s been built on top of that racist base since then, so it’s hard to see. That other stuff needs to be dismantled as well, and just pulling out the base may not suffice.
It’s kind of like the way evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians were pro-abortion until the 1980s. As Fred Clark says, the fundie anti-abortion movement is younger than the Happy Meal. It was originally adopted as a way to make common cause with conservative Roman Catholics, but now it’s taken on a life of its own and you have a whole lot of people who sincerely think the Baptists have always been anti-abortion.
A huge amount of the anti-government stuff arose because of racism but, again, it’s metastatized to the point that a lot of its proponents don’t consciously realize it.
StellaB
@gwangung: I think that she’s very right about socialism and racism. Socialism is strongest in those countries that were the most homogenous when socialism was taking root. In France, for example, the Socialist party has become increasingly less socialist as the country has become more diverse. The party name is really just historical at this point. (And the UMP’s new name nauseates me every time I hear it.)
Amir Khalid
@muddy:
The fact that Bernie’s shown himself by now to be unprepared for the job of the presidency is by itself a sufficient reason to quit.
dslak
@Hillary Rettig: There’s a big difference between effective use of social media to aid in running a campaign vs. fundraising and sharing dank memes.
Kylroy
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: As Europe itself becomes less white in the coming years, we’ll find out if existing socialist structures can withstand the rising tide of racism in EU nations.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
Or, to use kind of a gross metaphor, if you have a nasty infected wound, you have to clear up the source of infection or it will never get better, but you also have to clean the wound of the rotting tissue because that will cause its own set of problems. Both/and.
muddy
@cleek: If he wasn’t adversarial they’d say he wasn’t trying. I too preferred the tone they took at the beginning and would have liked it to go on that way. I think I am pretty unrealistic, however, to have expected that. It’s not as though Clinton (and peeps) have been using kid gloves towards him either. It’s an election, it’s a contest, it seems to be that this is the way the world works.
I am just dying here waiting for an end to it.
I voted for Bernie as I am a Vermonter and it was early on. I thought many a time about how I was glad I did not need to have to really choose. It wouldn’t matter, so I could just go with loyalty. (I have teeth in my mouth due to Bernie getting dental clinics here) But if I were in a later state that would have been close, it would have been really hard. There are things I both like and dislike about both. I want a combo person I guess! Neither is ideal, the only imperative is that it just needs to be the Democrat. I don’t have issues with Hillary giving speeches for $ or any of that. Actually I am just tired of Bill Clinton and don’t want to hear any more about him and his stupid boner.
I will say that I have trended more towards Hillary as this has gone on. I don’t think Bernie ever thought he’d get that far, and he did not really expect to be having to discuss a lot of foreign policy etc.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Kylroy:
I’m watching the success of some far right parties all over Europe now, including Sweden. I have very little faith that human nature is any different in Scandinavia or western Europe than it is here. Scarce resources will be allocated by the privileged away from the less privileged, as a matter of fact if not of stated policy.
muddy
@Amir Khalid: I’ve just said that he needs to stay in for the issues, I doubt he thinks he will win at all. He has to run like he means it.
As far as foreign policy goes, what experience did Bill Clinton have? Obama? Well he at least lived overseas and had varied experiences. The last time we had a president with foreign policy experience it was GWB out of the CIA.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: My Danish macro professor agrees with the her. The far right parties are on the rise in Europe, and let’s see how long the current model of generous social benefits holds.
schrodinger's cat
HR is a true believer so she will keep the faith till the bitter end. I don’t think any facts are going to sway her.
eemom
That makes one of us.
Applejinx
@aimai: Obamacare passed. Medicaid got expanded. Hillary Clinton is going to be able to expand all that even more.
And if you think she won’t try to do that, we disagree.
The IGMFY wingnut streak is artificial, unnatural and unAmerican. There is NO reason we have to campaign from a position of being ashamed about redistribution. The tax-cutters have wrecked the country quite badly, and we’re running against the ugliest, most obnoxious, least telegenic billionaire we could possibly want as a straw-man to set against redistribution.
Bob In Portland
From Politico:
cleek
@Applejinx:
people, even Sanders supporters, don’t want their own taxes raised enough to pay for this redistribution.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/4/14/11421744/bernie-sanders-tax-revolution
Amir Khalid
@muddy:
Bernie’s got a point here and a point there, but he can’t pull his issues together into a coherent plan for governing as president. Not good enough. You’re heading into the final stretch of the Democratic primary, well past the point where it’s enough for him just to make the right progressive-sounding noises; You have to consider whether Bernie is up to presidenting. What I’ve seen says he ain’t.
Elie
@aimai:
Its a cult, aimai — a cult. Maybe not for all but for a good number. Not sure they can be easily de-programmed — Bernie doesn’t seem to have both oars in the water in regards to his future in this campaign and that is troubling because he is just stoking the resentment and anger of his followers at this point. I heard it in the gym yesterday — and its intense.. This didn’t feel like just having political support for a candidate — .. Old guys walking around with “never Hillary” signs — like some sort of apocalyptic visionaries. Weird —
rk
I don’t know you at all, but whenever I read anything that you write it always comes across as incredibly whiny. Bernie’s lost because Hillary is more popular than him and that’s it. There’s no voter fraud, no shenanigans, nothing, nada which is responsible for Bernie not getting enough votes to become the candidate for president. He has lost and instead of accepting the loss as a part of the process, we’re subjected to constant bitching and moaning by the candidate and his followers implying that if it wasn’t for the corrupt democrats (and corrupt Hillary) they had this in the bag. I’m not a fan of Hillary, but she was a hundred times more gracious, more sane and more rational that Sanders. And he is an idiot at this point. Anyone who can’t figure out when they’ve lost and it’s time to make a graceful exit is an idiot. He’s the guy who sits at the casino table after losing and knows that he’ll win it all back as long as he keeps playing.
Elie
@muddy:
Hillary has plenty of foreign policy experience — and other experience as well supporting other Democrats. Bernie hasn’t even supported other progressives in his home state.
April
Hillary Rettig,
Thanks for posting here. I do not often agree with you but I appreciate hearing from a vegan, morel hunter, progressive but not a ditto head to myself or the prominent commenters here. I believe you get unfairly dismissed by some who skim your words and have over developed sense of gate keeping this community.
Keep being absolutely fabulous in your own unique way! Not that you needed my permission……. Just, thank you and please don’t let the haters cloud your day!
Aimai
@Applejinx: hillary is going to expand it. Sanders wouldnt have. And ine of the resdons she is going to be able to expand it is because passing it in the first place made it a white people entitlement. People dont like to give up thrir entitlements even when they just five seconds ago tried to blow the thing up.
muddy
@Amir Khalid: I feel you should re-read my previous comments. You are talking past me.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@cleek:
The lack of imagination by Sanders supporters to envision the lines of attacks Trump and the Republicans would take on Bernie’s tax plan and economy disruption is the real headscratcher for me. You can hand wave away the pie in the sky aspect to a lot of what Bernie’s proposals imply with the Democrats, because to Hillary’s credit she hasn’t gone after that low hanging fruit (or anything really, about Sanders and his bullshit), but Trump’s attack ads write themselves, because they’d be true. “Even Bernie’s yooogest fans thinks his tax plan is crazy! He wants to make the government bigger than it’s ever been, to give our country away!”
muddy
Clearly she does! As I thought I implied when I said that Bernie was not ready for those questions.
I only said that saying Bernie didn’t have that experience wasn’t to the point because we usually have presidents without that. Examples: B. Clinton, Obama.
Applejinx
@Elie: The important thing is to consider who ‘programmed’ this ‘cult’. Bernie sure didn’t expect this, and yet there it is.
I think to know that, you’d have to ask the ‘cult’ what else it believes. And it comes down to the incomprehensibly wealthy owning and running everything with ever-diminishing concern for most of humanity… and they are NOT WRONG in seeing that. It’s true, and it’s happening.
That doesn’t mean Hillary Clinton automatically aligns with those interests just because she too is staggeringly wealthy. They ALL are, even Bernie is more wealthy than he’d like to admit right now. That’s politics after the 80s, the 90s, the 00s, half the 10s… it’s an opportunity for any Democrat to rather easily throw the poors a bone, or a whole skeleton full of bones, without getting too uncomfortable.
It’s getting more cost-effective to just do that rather than keep the con game going. I think Hillary sees that, few others do.
But first she has to be positioned as an apostate to the cult of money, because that’s what the bernie ‘cult’ really is against. And rightly so, seeing where it’s got us and all the rest of the world.
Cacti
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Voiceover: “Even Bernie’s home state of Vermont said single payer healthcare costs too much. Now Bernie wants to force you to take what Vermont didn’t want. Be like Vermont. Say no to Bernie’s socialist redistribution schemes.”
So many big, easy targets for the GOP to hammer against Bernie.
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne: You appear to be acknowledging a level of complexity that those at either end of the spectrum (i.e., racism doesn’t play a role at all / racism is the sole explanation) don’t usually acknowledge, so we probably mostly agree. It’s complicated, but since the US and its history aren’t the definitive experience for the human race, I think the history of other countries can be instructive when we’re attempting to square up sweeping generalizations.
Applejinx
@Cacti: So what? He will not be the nominee. You can stop writing lines for the GOP now! :P
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Does anyone remember the name of the young PUMA woman from 2008 that was a staple of the cable news shows until they ran their course and faded into oblivion? I think she had red hair. Maybe Rachel something? Anyone?
Amir Khalid
@muddy:
My point is simple: The presidency is an executive job. To justify staying in the race for it, Bernie has to demonstrate that he’s up to it; he has not. People have heard Bernie’s message, and decided they like Hillary’s better. The Prophet Bernie thing has its proper time; but not when you have to pick someone for that job, and not when Bernie’s own chances of getting the job are about to vanish.
Cacti
@Applejinx:
Just throwing cold water on the “Bernie is the stronger candidate” fantasy, as it’s based on Hillary campaigning against him with one hand tied behind her back.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Cacti:
Exactly. All those polls that show Bernie beating Trump would collapse once it got down to “which shouty old white guy is going to look after my interests” (“my” defined as your average anxious white American voter, and “interests” defined as maintaining privilege)
Elie
@Applejinx:
Is the goal to eliminate wealth entirely or to have more balance in income distribution? I think just stoking resentment against wealth or the wealthy is not really going to ever work and it distracts from the more important issue of having a strong working and middle class and shrinking the poor through improved education, jobs and other social supports. The problem I hear from Bernie and many of his supporters is just resentment without a thought out means to make the changes. Breaking apart all the banks and chasing off the corporations would be fruitless. Do you think that these organizations wouldn’t go somewhere else? Corporations still provide a great deal of employment in the US. Chase that off, you say? Look, we need more economic justice and fairness — I agree. But the pitchfork and torch threat method is not a) going to work and b) would be counterproductive, isolating the US and killing jobs and hard earned savings and retirement benefits that many middle class people have worked for. Being a reckless about that will just make more enemies of the vision for more fairness and balance. Too many of the people advocating for this are too angry to think clearly and Bernie is not helping by pumping the anger rather than working to develop a workable plan and an attitude that can make it become successful. He is very Trump like in his lack of any real plan and that is scary and frustrating…
Bob In Portland
@Amir Khalid:
No.
He doesn’t even have to justify staying in the race. He’s in it.
Meanwhile, how about some justification for her fraudulent fund-raising schemes?
muddy
@Amir Khalid: I got your point dude. I feel you did not get mine, twice.
1. Presidents are not generally that experienced with foreign policy. Did you make this same argument when it was Bill Clinton or Obama?
2. As I say I don’t think Bernie expects (or even wants deep down) to be president. He is playing the game as anyone would play.
3. I don’t remember Hillary bowing out early for the sake of unity in 2008.
ETA 2 and 3 are really the same reason, from opposite viewpoints
Applejinx
@Cacti: Oh, no no. Nope. Hillary Clinton pulled out all the stops and campaigned her butt off.
Which proves she can do that in the general, so mission accomplished. But don’t you go pretending she wasn’t trying. That’s more GOP-ad-writing. She fought clean and hard (possibly even, to the edge of the rules and hard), which is exactly what I’d want to see in a general election nominee. Nobody can say Hillary can’t run a campaign, now. Even the unforced errors tended to be about people trying to prevent her from adapting to the needs of the 2016 campaign. She’s right to smack down anyone who will tie her to old policies proven not to work.
dollared
@Elie: @muddy: “Maybe not for all” it’s a cult? Thank you for feigning being reasonable while insulting 40% of the Democratic voters.
You don’t think there’s an equal number of Clinton supporters that are, er, “unreasonably supportive” of their candidate? Read any comment thread on Balloon Juice.
Bob In Portland
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Why are you guys still whining about Sanders? You said it was over weeks ago. Why not move on to all the good things H. Clinton will do in office? It’s like you won the fight and are demanding a 16th round to prove to yourselves that you won.
No, Sanders will continue. He’ll definitely win Oregon. He’s closing in California. But who cares? H. Clinton already won.
Bob In Portland
@dollared: Heh heh.
Boy, she sure can raise money.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker: my own non-historian take is that the big difference between now and the 1930s , and everything from infrastructure to the social safety net to big government/government spending is that in the 30s people were more willing to see government as theirs, theirs to take and use as a tool to level the playing field. Reagan was able to embody the attitude of government being an enemy, an alien outside and usually hostile force. Race isn’t/wasn’t the only factor– Vietnam and Watergate were part of it, as Rick Perlstein IIRC said in Nixonland, Nixon made Reagan possible. As to ‘welfare’, even Medicaid, I think race explains a lot of that hostility– let’s dispel with this notion that Newton Leroy didn’t know exactly what he was doing when he called Obama the foodstamp president, it wasn’t a dog whistle, it was a hog call. But again, race doesn’t explain it all, I think it’s the broader terror of the Undeserving Poor. A lot of people, of all races, know That Guy, their cousin, neighbors, brother-in-law who, in their eyes, knows how to ‘work the system’. He’s on disability, but he went to Vegas! the infamous foodstamp crab claws (and why is it always crab?), et cetera. It’s not all race, but race is a huge factor. I don’t think there’s a political question in this country that isn’t affected in some way, to some degree, by race.
Also, we bang our heads against the wall that people who see corporations are the enemy but vote with Republicans. I think people see Big as the enemy, and don’t see a clear distinction between Big Business and Big Government. Sanders is right that things like the Wall St bailout reinforce this tendency– even Obamacare, when gov’t and Big Insurance work together, that was the attitude I think underlying a lot of the worries about “if you like you policy, you can keep it’. People with shitty, expensive policies that wouldn’t have helped them if they had that catastrophic illness didn’t want to hear it, they don’t care thet they’re better insured now, they just care that they’re paying more every month. They wanted change in ’08, but they didn’t want their boat rocked. They had found a status quo, however precarious, and they didn’t want disruption. That fear of disruption is why Sanders’ single payer plan is, politically, unfeasible.
dollared
@FlipYrWhig: Ah, now you’re into the “NeoConservatism never existed, liberals have always been in favor of wiping out unions, fiscal austerity, doubling military spending and undermining foreign democracies, deregulating dangerous industries, and collecting large sums of money for political favors to businesses at the expense of consumers and workers.”
Bravo! You’re up on the latest talking points.
muddy
@dollared: What are you scolding me for?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Elie:
60 Minutes had a segment on startup Fintech – a couple of actual brothers who are “disrupting” the banking industry. Like a couple of twenty something dudebros would, they addressed the job dislocation in a very dismissive fashion:
Emphasis mine. I’m sure all of those 40 and 50 year old bank employees will be comforted to hear they just lack creativity.
Elie
@dollared:
I actually said that not all his supporters were cult like but the anger and screamed insults that I heard were pretty scary given it was an opportunity to address all the Democrats who were delegates. The leader of the Bernie folks instead led a cultlike chant where people recited back key phrases and also said that they had no intent to come together around anyone but themselves. Hillary’s folks didn’t do that, in fact we spoke of party unity and support for Bernie’s followers and many of his ideas — and unless you were there you need to keep your swearing to yourself.
Applejinx
@Elie: I think ‘more balance’ will do nicely. And your other concerns are why it’s a blessing in disguise (to a rational Berniac) that Hillary’s out-campaigned him. I’m not sure Bernie would actually smash all the banks and break up every corporation over 20 people: I think what’s much more likely is that he would have completely not done anything of the sort, and brought incrementalism, ending up a pariah among his own craziest disciples.
We’ll never know. I just think the Saint Bernie cult business grows out of the people and isn’t being imposed by Bernie, who has little idea what to do about it.
If there’s a catastrophic failure of wealth and corporations in this country, it won’t be from King Bernie smashing it up. It will be because systemically, all that stuff should have been pruned and is severely overgrown and thus more fragile than it should be. I’m supporting Hillary as Pruner-In-Chief, but thank Bernie for making it politically possible to even talk about this as a thing.
LOTS of stuff in our world is ‘too big to fail’, not just banks. It all has to be dialed back several notches, it’s fragile and far from an efficient economic engine. The purpose really is not to funnel all the wealth to the one most competitive guy.
Amir Khalid
@muddy:
1. The better candidates spend time to studying or doing it. Bill and Obama did the former, Hillary has done the latter.
2. If Bernie doesn’t really want to be president, why is he still running when his chances are realistically gone?
3. This has been discussed in these threads before, She waited until after the last primary to endorse Obama (it was a much closer race between them in 2008 than it is now, remember) but she did not delay endorsing him after that.
Bob In Portland
@Applejinx: She won’t. She’s always been right-of-center, always been behind what America wants.
It’ll be another four years of Obama. The New Dems will continue to sell out to the wealthy, just like during Obama. Occasionally H. Cinton will appear before the nation “with a heavy heart” (taking a page from LBJ) to mourn the failure of this or that progressive legislation. Hillary supporters will accept the apology and blame those darned Republicans. She’ll wave the flag, repeatedly, and the BJers might even get behind the next war, or take the position that it was the best of bad options, or focus on the next bad guy.
dollared
@Elie: It is the only thing that has ever worked. Study your history. How do you think FDR succeeded? How do you think we got unions legalized and protected? People died in the streets, and the rich lived in fear. It is the only way it ever works.
Talk about coming from a position of privilege. People died to get you an 8 hour day. And you think it was some sort of parlor game back then.
Bob In Portland
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Perhaps the unemployed bank tellers can get microloans and start their own companies, be entrepreneurs. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
cleek
@Applejinx:
he could stop trying to demonize the Democratic Party and its likely nominee.
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
It may not be the best idea to lecture a Black woman about people having to fight and die for her rights. Especially since the Civil Rights Movement happened a lot more recently than the violent phase of the labor movement.
different-church-lady
I don’t mean to pound on you here, but it happened pretty much exactly as predicted. For weeks ahead people knew that Sander’s “momentum” was an appearance born of a string of caucuses in small states favorable to him, and that a string of closed primaries favorable to Clinton were coming right after.
In other words, “We tried to tell you.”
Give Sanders every single voter in question and he still loses New York by over 100k.
Passion is a wonderful thing, up to the point that it starts to serve as a set of blinders.
Chyron HR
@rk:
Yeah, that’s a real mystery, all right.
dollared
@Elie: Poliical tactics differ between organizations. If you are not able to handle politics, you should leave it to the people who can. Just because they play hard does not make them a cult. Any more than the whiny reaction of every Hillary supporter that sees sexism and racism in every statement of Bernie Sanders should not make them a cult – they are just engaging in political positioning.
Cowardly Democrats who aren’t willing to see politics as an urgent competition is how we got GWB- because the Florida Democratic Party let a corrupt Republican Secretary of State deny 100,000 minorities the vote and threw the election. And then the threw a riot to prevent a legal recount.
I truly am sorry it was a bad experience for you. But I really think you need to consider what’s at stake, and not be surprised if people get tactical within the political process.
Elie
@dollared:
You don’t know a thing about me, boy/girl. Not a thing. Is that dying in the streets something you like? Whats a few bodies here and there? My people have done that and have been hung from trees and lamp posts, attacked by dogs and whatever to win any kind of fairness and justice in this country. Only Khmer Rouge and Isis celebrate killing people for the righteous cause however. Noble death? What an evil jerk.
muddy
@Amir Khalid: I don’t feel like you read what I wrote here: @muddy:
As for your #3, the last primary is not yet over. She did it that way, but now he’s bad because he’s doing the same? I don’t feel we are communicating at all. Never mind.
Applejinx
@Elie: You know, in business there is an old adage about how you deal with people who are adamant about not coming together around anybody but themselves. It’s called ‘Not Invented Here’.
You make ’em think it’s their idea. Then they’re all for it ;)
Cacti
@Elie:
And when he had the chance to put some meat on the bones of his stump speeches with the NYDN editorial staff, he showed that applause lines are all he’s got. He’s not a wonk, or well informed, or a policy expert. He’s a 74 year old university student who just finished reading the Cliff’s Notes for Das Kapital.
dollared
@Mnemosyne: Oh, yes, because of her race history didn’t happen? Please keep me up on the rules.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
I think a lot of people on the “it’s race, stupid” side are basically hoping that Molly Ivins was right that once you can convince people that they’re being lied to about race, they start to wonder what else they’ve been lied to about.
But now we have folks here telling Black people that they don’t know what it’s like to have to fight and die for your rights like the labor movement did, so …
/headdesk
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
No, it’s because you sound like a moron when you act like the only people who died for their rights were people in the labor movement.
different-church-lady
@Bob In Portland: Hey Bob, perhaps you can give us more of your insights into racial issues today.
Slag
I don’t understand the voting irregularities concern. Last I recall, polls predicted a pretty decisive Hillary win in New York, and lo and behold Hillary wins pretty decisively in New York. If polls serve a purpose, I would think this would be it.
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
Yes, I can’t imagine why a Black woman would get nervous when a group of white people decides to “get tactical” and publicly shout others down at a caucus. A total mystery, that.
dollared
@Elie: Then you of all people should appreciate that progress is hard won. And has to be defended daily. And that the money will always try to reverse progress, hiring strikebreakers and propagandists and goons and off duty cops and Secretaries of the Treasury. And former Secretaries of State.
I don’t invalidate anyone’s struggle by pointing out that there are many struggles. And I’m not the only one who sees the labor struggle and the civil rights struggle as a single continuum. Do I need to provide links?
Ella in New Mexico
@msdc: @Jim, Foolish Literalist: @Calouste: @Cacti: @the Conster, la Citoyenne: @eemom:
Hey, you guys signed your time sheets yet? I heard the “Sink Hilary’s Chances by Pissing on Sanders Voters” campaign is shelling out double time for your hard work and dedication. Don’t spend it all in one place!
dollared
@Mnemosyne: see 166. And no, I never suggested that it was the only struggle. Yet another HRC supporter who is a specialist in mischaracterizing other peoples’ words and beliefs.
Cacti
@dollared:
Now that is some high quality whitesplaining.
Applejinx
@cleek:
*sigh*
You WROTE the famous Balloon Juice, don’t even listen to the opinions you find most annoying, “I LIKE PIE” filter. You are Cleek. You invented that filter.
While I envy the peace of mind you’ve gained by this sort of thing, I can only contradict you. YES the distribution of wealth has gone off the scale which is pretty trivially documented. YES wealth brings power and influence, not itself automatically a terrible thing, but it’s a matter of degree. And YES, “the incomprehensibly wealthy owning and running everything with ever-diminishing concern for most of humanity”. And I’m not only talking about Wall Streeters, though they’re the poster children as wealth is literally all they do for a living. I also look askance at the Silicon Valley technocrats and their ilk, such as Fintech:
@the Conster, la Citoyenne
When I agree with Conster, that’s a strange day. Maybe it’ll take bankers and white collar people being ‘disrupted’ before people figure out that radical wealth inequity doesn’t work. Because if Fintech is two guys and a world-beating algorithm, the wealth doesn’t go away. It just goes to them, and now thousands of stockbrokers are out of work. At that point it’s churlish to ‘yay’, because it overlooks the larger problem.
glory b
@Hillary Rettig: Obama won by the huge African American turn out. Remember “Souls to the Polls?” Lots of on the ground, door to door, little old ladies accompanying each other to polling places, calls asking if people needed rides, LOTS of word of mouth at barbershops, hair salons, choir rehearsals, bible studies, etc., etc.
Not saying that social media didn’t have a place, but the other stuff was strong too.
I’ve mentioned it before, the group with the largest percentage voter turn out is black women.
dollared
@Cacti: More dismissive mischaracterization from an HRC supporter.
cleek
@Applejinx:
huh? what does the pie filter have to do with anything? clue me in.
first of all, if you refresh, you’ll see that the comment you quoted is gone. immediately after i wrote it, i decided i didn’t want to get into that topic. but, since you quoted it before i changed it, let me explain: you said the wealthy control “everything”. you didn’t say “matter of degree”. you didn’t say “it’s not a terrible thing”. you said “everything” and “everything” was what i was responding to. they don’t control everything.
and then i decided that was going to be a stupid conversation to have.
Applejinx
@cleek: Well, fair enough then. I shan’t bug you about it.
Elie
I will also add to Dollared and anyone else — my parents worked their fingers to the bone to make sure that my sister and I received decent educations and could make a life here in the US. They grew up under Jim Crow and despite that, worked successfully to build our life. No one gave us anything — except what freedoms the political process guided by the Democrats allowed us to push for. We did not celebrate that people died to work for our freedom — but yes they did. I celebrate when I see successful black, brown and yellow people in this country who have made good lives! Why wouldn’t I or anyone! That you could spit on our efforts and successes just like that without understanding the cost of what we achieved! No — bringing down the whole house cause you didn’t get what you wanted — nope — not a fan. Its not a surprise to me that most Bernie “revolutionaries” are white people who are either young or haven’t figured out how to be successful in the system. So lets just burn it all down and if a few little people suffer, so what. Go eff yourselves!
Paul in KY
@muddy: Well, he needs to tone it down now.
Aimai
@Bob In Portland: america is right of center. She is way left of center. We arent measuring from moscow.
glory b
@muddy: No, Bernie has basically called her corrupt (another difficulty going forward), Clinton said he wasn’t ready.
He said the most solid base of the party, African Americans, didn’t matter in the south.
Even after he knew how upsetting it was, he said it twice more.
Trump has said he will defeat Hillary only using the things Bernie said about her.
Also, I’m sorry but this is worse than 2008. Obama and Hillary went after each other hard, but didn’t accuse each other of the things Bernie has, and were careful and subtle enough with their language that they didn’t give ammunition for the other side.
And Friday, Tom Hartman said approvingly that the potential super PAC Bernie supporters are starting should look for an alliance with the Tea Party, you know, those guys who carried around signs with Obama’s family as monkeys, with a bone in his nose, and said it wasn’t racist?
Give me a break.
Paul in KY
@Cacti: That’s a nice, measured one there. They would have ones that would curl your toes.
Aimai
@dollared: holy shit thats insulting!
Bostondreams
@dollared:
He succeeded to a great degree by almost completely abandoning the African Americans that voted for him when it came to implementing the New Deal.
dollared
@Elie: You don’t need me to applaud what your family has done. But I will tell you for the 1000th time that people have tried to tell you, Senator Sanders does not advocate “burning down” anything. He thinks we should enforce our antitrust laws. And reinvigorate our capitalist economy by taking health care away from the employment model, lowering costs for employers and ensuring a more healthy population. And he supports stricter regulation and more tactical taxation of Wall Street, so that more money is invested in productive capacity – JOBS – in this country. And he believes that we should stop exporting our economic base and jobs. And he advocates making college affordable for all our families.
How exactly is that burning anything down?
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
When you tell minority voters that they need to sit down and shut up because YOUR struggle is the important one then, yeah, you kind of are.
And yet, when push came to shove in the 1960s, labor sided with the racists, which is why minority voters are now very wary of white labor voters who come in and demand that their issues come first.
White labor activists sided with the racists when it mattered. It’s not minorities who now have to prove themselves. It’s the white labor activists who betrayed minority voters before and need to prove that they won’t do it again.
Cacti
@Bostondreams:
Hell, FDR wouldn’t even get behind anti-lynching language in the Democratic Party platform, for fear that it would hurt the feelings of the southern Democratic bloc.
dollared
@Bostondreams: Assuming you’re right (and you’re wrong, AA’s were eligible for the New Deal and have benefitted from it for the last 80 years). Should he have dropped everything, in the middle of the Great Depression, and invaded the South and eliminated Jim Crow?
Maybe he should have called Hitler and asked him to hold off on invading Poland for a coupla years first? Because maybe it would have been harder to fight WWII if we’d been in Civil War II instead.
I hate to deal in this kind of ahistorical bullshit but you decided to rewrite history first…..
scav
@Mnemosyne:
Well, maybe that whole wooing votes is only required for certain types of voters. All the others have to shut up and fall in line.
cleek
@dollared:
you first.
Adam L Silverman
@Hillary Rettig: Every empirical study says the only significant effect was on Western audiences well outside of the Middle East and Central Asia. Your tweets, your facebook page, this blog, imgur, what have you are not changing the world. There was no single, monolithic Arab Spring. And none of the separate, specific to their country and society events that have been lumped together as the Arab Spring have even been remotely successful with the exception of Tunisia. And even that has stalled and started to backslide.
dollared
@Mnemosyne: Nope, it is about solidarity. It has always been about solidarity. The white labor racists failed that in the 60s and have paid for it ever since. The HRC positioning around Bernie Bros, with the implication that 40% of Democrats are racist and sexist, is incredibly divisive.
And that’s OK with her, because she can always count on corporate support. Watch how well that works out for all of us.
And to be clear: I didn’t tell anyone to shut up, and that’s another mischaracterization.
different-church-lady
@dollared:
A grapefruit and a plum are not the same damn thing just because they’re round fruits.
God, please, no, I’ll take you at your word.
FlipYrWhig
@dollared: Oh, so YOU don’t know what “neoconservative” means either? That makes you, Bob, and DCF. Strangely enough, there appears to be substantial overlap between the people who don’t know the meanings of basic American political words and the people who are very excited about Bernie Sanders.
HRA
I often am sent back to the time of coming from another country to the US and having teenage girls look up and down at me to see what I wore that day as I read some of these comments. Yet, that is not the worse of it at all. It is the usage of cult. It means “a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.”a cult of personality surrounding the leaders” This could also be said of you who point in the direction of others. Others who will be needed in November.
HRC has won. It seems like you do not believe it.
different-church-lady
@dollared:
How can that be when we keep hearing that closed primaries are unfair and Bernie only does well in open primaries, where one doesn’t need to be a Democrat to vote?
muddy
@Paul in KY: From my first comment in this thread, I am not disagreeing:
I did also further up state my reasons for why I voted for him in the primary. It wasn’t based on the general, as I say I had a personal loyalty. I also did say that after initially being torn, I have moved more toward Hillary. I am enthusiastic about Hillary’s chances in the general and look forward to that! (As I said, it’s Bill I wish would fade away.) People still seem to read that I am saying Bernie should or would win. It’s frustrating.
Hillary will be facing these same objections in the fall, it’s not like Republicans couldn’t think of things to say until Bernie drew their attention to them. She may as well get the practice. Remember Bernie going off about “the damned emails”? He’ll go off on the Republicans the same way after the primaries are done.
Cacti
@dollared:
Appeals to “solidarity” have this nasty habit of pretending that race-specific injustice has a race neutral remedy, and it always happens to be the remedy favored by the racial majority group.
muddy
@HRA: +1000
ETA: I also moved to the States just in time to start high school. I getcha there.
dollared
@Cacti: That can happen. It’s a lot less likely to happen in a majority-minority country. And I’m pretty sure at this point that below the 60th percentile in median family income, we’re already majority-minority. But that’s why building the coalition, rather than dividing it, is so important.
muddy
@glory b: I didn’t know who TH was until I googled it. Not sure what he has to do with my comments.
chopper
@Ella in New Mexico:
HAW HAW HAW you really showed them!
Paul in KY
@muddy: Know you have no control over him or message. Guess I was just pilin on.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@HRA:
No, Bernie Sanders doesn’t believe it, and his disciples refuse to accept the reasons why and come here to project their bullshit all over the rest of us. When we push back, it just triggers another round of more passive aggressive whining about how hurt their delicate fee fees are, and why oh why won’t we stop being such meanies to our progressive betters? It’s so fucking tiresome.
dollared
@FlipYrWhig: No, I just used the most common definition of it. The one HRC supporters started denying about……two weeks ago.
Like I say, you are definitely caught up on the latest propaganda from the Clinton-Chait-Vox-Krugman camp (which, by the way, each of those people (except Clinton) have a documented history of using the definition I just provided, and now they are denying it).
muddy
@Paul in KY: Just cuz yer a mean bully!
Bostondreams
@dollared:
Oh, get over yourself. African Americans benefited from the New Deal, sure. But it was purposefully discriminatory, period. The NRA had separate pay scales for blacks and whites, the FHA supported housing discrimination, and the Civilian Conservation Corps had segregated camps all over the country, not just the Jim Crow South. The record of FDR on race issues was decidedly mixed, and the New Deal, while beneficial to African Americans as a whole, was certainly not this unparalleled boon to African Americans you pretend it was.
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
Paid for it how? They’re the ones who keep voting for Republicans. If they don’t realize they’re shooting themselves in the foot by now by choosing racial affiliation over economics, I don’t know how to get through to them.
White men are not 40 percent of Democratic voters. Not even close. You may be confusing this with the statistic that 40 percent of white men vote for Democrats, but that doesn’t make them 40 percent of the Democratic vote.
And by “corporate support,” you mean 90 percent of the African-American, Latino, and Asian-American vote, plus most of the single white women.
Do you really think that African-Americans voted for Hillary because the corporations told them to do it?
dollared
@Mnemosyne: See how insanely sexist you are? Bernie did gain 40% or so of Democratic support, as a percentage margin in all races. And you assume it is all male.
cleek
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
my new favorite is when they start the special pleading about how the Sanders supporters are the new generation of the left so all us old people need to step aside and let them have their way, or else.
because they’re a special generation.
FlipYrWhig
@dollared: “Neoconservative” has nothing to do with unions or whatever the hell else gobbledegook you, Bill et al keep throwing around. You’re a very confused person.
Bob In Portland
@FlipYrWhig: You aren’t the dictionary. However, just to clarify, BJ is right of center and willing to sell the bottom 70% down the shithole to celebrate your coronation of the queen of triangulation.
Clinton is and always has been a Republican. Maybe a Rockefeller Republican, which was what she seems to have been when she went to the Republican National Convention in 1968. She is a Republican who will send lots of poor people to jail but “feel the pain” of minorities from on top of her pile of three billion in quid pro quo that she sits on.
You poor poor villagers.
Paul in KY
@muddy: I know how they work, as I got my share of viewing it from the bullied side in HS!
Like your comments, even when we don’t agree.
cleek
@FlipYrWhig:
it’s BernieVocabulary. you just don’t understand.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: Neoliberals this time? I gets confused about those 2 breeds of assholes with ‘neo’ in the name.
dollared
@FlipYrWhig: Um, neoconservative? Who was talking about that? And you accuse me of being confused?
Adam L Silverman
@schrodinger’s cat: I don’t know who started it, but like the various color revolutions it obscures more than it illuminates. There are certainly some similarities and there are also a lot of differences. And I’m honestly never certain we can actually control for all of these when trying to understand what is really going on.
Did the ability to communicate goals to the outside world engage millions of people? Yes. Did the ability to communicate within the states and societies where the uprisings occurred help? Data is mixed. 1) Its hard to really get at decent data here, especially now that none of the Arab Springs has made progress. No one in Egypt is going to honestly answer a social survey and trying to do them in Libya or Syria is almost impossible as they’re non-permissive environments. 2) It is unclear how well the Egyptian or Syrian internal security services were able to crack and track the communications. Moreover, those done over twitter aren’t secure at all and easily trackable by anyone. So even if there is a significant mobilization effect its countered because you’ve just announced your revolutionary mobilization plans – who, what, where, when – over an insecure communication medium. 3) A lot of what was broadcast over social media was clearly contrived. Analysis of imagery and video of mass demonstrations in Iran during the Iranian Green Movement/Revolution were quickly determined to be the same, single demonstration shot from multiple angles and posted at different times and in different ways to give the impression that a) more people were showing up to protest than really were and b) more protests were occurring than actually did. The people within Iran who knew the locations were easily able to know they were being pitched false information. Everyone outside of Iran just ate it up.
Similar things occurred in Egypt during the anti-Mubarak uprising and the Muslim Brothers did a masterful job coopting the student movement. If I had to guess, the Brothers were clearly monitoring the student movement’s social media and were better organized and prepared and took full advantage for their own purposes. The Brothers, despite significant indications otherwise (please see Ashur’s De-Redicalization of Jihadis or my book review of it for further details), had long planned out what they would do if they got the opportunity. And as my political science dissertation chair always says in regards to religious and other identity involvement in politics: it always comes down to means, motive, and opportunity. The Brothers long had motive, they were waiting for means and opportunity and when those came along they moved and moved quickly.
And we’ve seen this here. How many 9-12/Glenn Beck rallies have we seen photographed, even by news media, in a way that makes it look like there are thousands in attendance, when its really a couple of 100? Its always debunked within a couple of hours. Is social media a great way to exchange ideas? Definitely. Does it likely helping in mobilization in favor or against specific issues? Most likely. Did it play a significant role in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak? No it did not.
Here’s some links that provide a good understanding.
http://www.journalism.org/2012/11/28/role-social-media-arab-uprisings/
https://publicpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/impact-social-media-social-unrest-arab-spring
http://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/PW80.pdf
And that’s just from five minutes of poking around.
Adam L Silverman
@gwangung: Its a contributing factor.
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
You realize that no one has ever used “Berniebros” to refer to all Sanders supporters except that subgroup of asshole supporters who want to claim they’re being oppressed, right?
If it was not a small group of Berniebros but was Bernie supporters as a whole who were telling John Lewis that he was a liar and that Bernie did more for civil rights than Lewis ever did, then I gave Bernie supporters as a whole way more credit than you assholes ever deserved.
Elie
@dollared:
When you scream break up banks and label anyone involved with corporations as corrupt you are setting up a rationale for destruction. Break up and corruption are not associated with language that implies improvement or anything but destruction. “Revolution” conveys complete destruction and disruption, no? Those are words out of St Bernie’s mouth plus what glory b said upstring.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@cleek:
God help us all. I knew nothing good would come from all that self-esteem movement bullshit from the 80s.
muddy
@Paul in KY: Like yours too. You were very kind to me one day when I had some unpleasant shit going down in the neighborhood.
Mnemosyne
@dollared:
Also, claiming that it’s sexist for women to support a woman for president is going to work about as well as it did in 2008 when people claimed it was racist for minority voters to support Obama.
Bob In Portland
@Applejinx: Thank you. In Balloon Juice when the villagers smile they look like they’re about to spit. On someone.
I used to come over here and engage in conversation and could manage to go through a post without the namecalling and abuse that is de riguer around here these days. We have people in the BJ Village who would burn books rather than entertain alternate positions, which doesn’t speak highly of their faith in their own positions.
Hillary’s fundraising scam will finally hit the mainstream, probably during the general. The boys and girls of the Village think if they can ignore it it will go away. They think that sitting quietly as the US continues to destroy huge stretches of foreign real estate around the world and the people who by happenstance are living on it will be sufficient. They think that money means nothing, that H. Clinton cannot be bought. All that happy horseshit.
Come on, Cacti. Go ahead. Spit.
cleek
2016 average turnout for caucus states: 9.9%. avg for primary states: 32.4%.
Sanders wins again!
https://lawyerscommittee.org/caucuses-right-vote/
Bob In Portland
@Mnemosyne: You mean when they were Obama Boys?
les
@FlipYrWhig:
Thanks. I despair at the number of words spent, trying to get it that simple. And it ain’t just political words. Like labeling someone a corrupt liar is “nuance.” Like including “voting irregularities” in a list of reasons Bernie lost doesn’t mean irregularities helped Clinton. There’s a disconnect from reality.
different-church-lady
@Bob In Portland:
Well Bob, you’re just going to have to accept the fact that those days are long over for you.
muddy
@Adam L Silverman:
I remember getting into a big argument with an idiot on Usenet regarding this 20 years ago or something. He was on about the thousands of protesters at the Embassy in Tehran, he knew it was true because he saw it on tv! And he knew more than I did, even though I lived there for years and was familiar with the layout.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: i think they’re confusing the catch-all insult of “neoliberal” with “neoconservative”.
Bob In Portland
@Aimai: That’s the mainstream narrative. Glad to see you’ve been assimilated to The Hive.
one more dave
one of my favorite comments from the past
Adam L Silverman
@muddy: It happens. People want to believe the best. And we have a news media that really isn’t interested in accuracy or clarity or actually having an informed citizenry. Rather it is all about eyeballs, or in the case of radio ears, on advertising. So anything that can be reported as breaking news and milked for days and hyped and reported on breathlessly is what they want because it means you’re paying attention to the advertising. They could care less if anyone learns anything.
This is, perhaps, one advantage over blogs and some of the other social media platforms. There are some folks who care enough to put out correct information and analysis in posts, videos, even tweets to some extent in the hope that someone will see it and remember.
Adam L Silverman
@one more dave: It shouldn’t be too hard to get VP Cheney’s Fourth Branch of Government Undisclosed Location back up and running. Just stick him in there, providing a cable and internet feed (inbound only), take away his cell phone, and bring him meals, clean clothes, linens, and towels on a regular basis. The occasional visit with his granddaughter. He’ll be fine.
glory b
@Mnemosyne: Yep. Like the white male students at Carnegie Mellon yelling at middle aged and older black folks who came there to see Clinton speak.
Nothing insulting or profane, but disrespectful nonetheless.
Pity no one told them it wasn’t a good look, not designed to win them supporters.
muddy
@Adam L Silverman: I was mostly amazed that someone thought they knew the conditions on the ground by seeing it on tv and saying they know more than someone who has seen it personally. You’d think people would be embarrassed to say such a thing, it’s so witless.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Elie:
Bernie says the shit he says because he hasn’t really thought about it beyond the sloganeering, and he’s an old white guy who has secured a sinecure in the Senate by virtue of the demographics and geographics of Vermont. He knows he’ll never see or have to deal with any kind of real revolution since his privileges are quite safe, and he’s been able to run a nice little con by throwing off some campaign cash to his friends and family while spouting all of his purity shit and being a scoldy crank no one wanted anything to do with. Jane has been able to do the same thing under the radar, but with all the “Hillary’s doing to be indicted” bullshit, ironically it’s Jane who is now under a real threat of indictment for bank fraud. Whoops! LOL.
Bob In Portland
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Who is by far the biggest interventionist candidate in this cycle?
Who is walking around with three billion in pocket cash from the free market?
Maybe if you guys stopped trying to define yourselves out of an argument and you just accepted who you are, then we could talk about how many children starving is sufficient, or how many wars to secure the energy market is enough.
Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright. Heh heh.
Adam L Silverman
@muddy: You would.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@one more dave:
I want Hillary to shut Bill in a closet. He’s a loose cannon. And just btw, I’ve asked myself a million times about why I had such negatives about Hillary, and I couldn’t answer my own question. I started off wanting anyone but Hillary to run, but when it became binary, she was the one who promised to continue Obama’s legacy, and in the absence of Obama, that’s the most compelling case for her of all.
I do worry about Bill still, though. He’s going to have to find something to do to stay out of the limelight.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Keyboard revolutionaries, emo-progs, angry drunks and gibbering wearers of tin-foil-hats. How did this awesome coalition not win the primary for Bernie!
glory b
@Ella in New Mexico: Please. If they aren’t going to vote for her because of a few snarky statements on a blog, then their feelings are too sensitive for existence in the modern world.
aren’t these the “yoots” who are soooo socially media savvy? Haven’t seen anyone get their feelings hurt online before?
Who was it that just said that Bernie’s caucus voters were “playing hard?” When Hillary voters say something, they warn us about taking their ball and going home.
That wasn’t a popular move then, it isn’t now. Don’t forget about that Mumia t shirt.
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The organic farmers really let him down.
Bob In Portland
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: You have no basis to pretend to know Sanders or his motives.
Does it make you feel better to create your own version of Sanders to knock down?
When Trump calls her “crooked Hillary” do you actually think he’ll avoid pointing out her money-laundering scam? How many of the 56% of Americans who find H. Clinton untrustworthy will flip to her side when that gets out?
Elie
@glory b:
I actually do not understand strategies that are designed to “show up” anyone who you might eventually want as an ally or to understand and possibly support your goals. This whole Bernie chant thing is fine in a Bernie rally — but in a mixed group of all delegates or possible future allies, it makes no sense…
Bob In Portland
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: And why should any of them vote for the least trusted (or second least trusted) candidate?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Bob In Portland:
Only Hillary is corrupted by cash and St. Bernie’s motives when he gets around a big pile of money are pure, because reasons? Is that what that flight to Rome was? For the good of the people? He’s hiding his tax returns because he doesn’t want us all to be blinded by the light of purity from them, for all of our good? OK.
one more dave
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Fair enough. I feel/felt the same way. It was on this blog that I first heard “Bill Clinton was our best Republican president” and as a Democrat I want better.
chopper
@glory b:
…then they were hunting for some rationalization for not pulling the lever anyway. if it wasn’t ‘someone was mean on the internet’ it would end up being something else.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t know whether AA people “don’t trust” labor, but I do know this:
Some Democrats have some outdated ideas about union membership. Fight for Fifteen is 100% labor. Labor unions funded and organized it. It is probably majority non-white.
I saw this in the campaign to overturn Kasich’s anti-labor law. There was this idea it was about steelworkers in hard hats or something, and it wasn’t like that all.
muddy
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I feel like it’s a weird compulsion for him. He wants to do it right, but then his jealous subconscious pokes up and he needs it to be all about him. Reminds me of someone who says they want a new relationship, but on every first date all they talk about is their ex.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
villager!
Robert Sneddon
@muddy: A question, if I may?
I got the impression the Green Revolution in Iran as shown on Western media was mostly an urban affair, with little of the fervour shown on TV being matched in the rural population and people in other cities. Can you tell me how much of a political divide, if any there is between the urban and rural populations in Iran? Is there a religious factor to any such divide?
Bob In Portland
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I will look into it.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@muddy:
I think her instincts are much better than his at this point, and are getting better the more she listens to other people – like Robby Mook. I think the last time Bill made the news, Robby pulled Bill aside or told Hillary to, to tell him to keep away from interpreting her message. Put him on a rope line, and have him do the hale fellow well met Big Dog meet and greet shtick. That’s a win/win for everybody.
different-church-lady
@Elie:
You don’t understand it because you’re thinking of it as a means to an end. They’re thinking of it as an end.
FlipYrWhig
@dollared:
You were, you stupid motherfucker.
@dollared:
glory b
@Bostondreams: Also, lots of the provisions of the New Deal didn’t apply to agricultural and domestic workers, most of whom happened to belong to one particular race…
dollared
@FlipYrWhig: Thanks. My typo. Substitute “neoliberal” for “neoconservative”
There, that solve it for you, Senor Charming?
Kay
@dollared:
I never understood the “labor union = white people” argument from Clinton supporters for the simple reason that Clinton got most of the labor endorsements. It just makes no sense on any level :)
dollared
@Elie: So yup, you are just exaggerating for effect. You don’t actually deal with the facts. Got it.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Well, that’s interesting. I plead guilty to falling into the Tweety trap on labor demographics.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
i think that’s yet another word you don’t understand, Comrade
dollared
@Mnemosyne: The first sentence is a lie. Read Amanda Marcotte’s article that coined the term on behalf of the Clinton machine.
The second sentence, well, just bears no relation to the facts. How does one deal with fantasy and exaggeration?
terry cahy
Just wanted to say that John Cole can sometimes really pick some winners as front pagers. Maybe he wanted to balance out Young Conner to show that Both Sides Do It™.
dollared
@Mnemosyne: Never made any claim about women being sexist. Nope. Never. I’m not as stupid as you are. I told you the all-up support for Sanders was 40%, and you said that’s not possible because men aren’t 40% of Democrats. You were being reflexively, totally sexist, and I called you on it. Just you. Nobody else.
Of course many women support Senator Sanders. They recognize that Senator Sanders’ program would be much better for American working people. But that is just incomprehensible to you, apparently.
muddy
@Robert Sneddon: I was speaking of the hostages at the Embassy in 1979. I left Iran in 1975, so my personal knowledge is not up to date in regards to the Green Revolution. In general the people in rural areas are less educated and more religious (surprise!). The daily life in rural areas probably provides enough challenges that the people don’t have the time or inclination to be revolutionary.
Bob In Portland
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t recall anyone ever saying that Sanders did more for civil rights than Lewis did. I think that’s another one of your lies. I guess technically when Lewis said he never saw Sanders at any rally where he was isn’t a lie, although it is a commentary on Lewis and what he will do for those to whom he owes fealty.
He said he saw Hillary and Bill at civil rights demonstrations. I presume that’s a lie, since Hillary was either running the Goldwater Girls club in a Chicago suburb or being the President of the Republican Club on Wellesley’s campus, I don’t think Lewis ever saw her at a demonstration he was at. Likewise, unless he joined Bill in an anti-war sit-in at Oxford I doubt he saw him at any demonstrations.
So Lewis tried to downplay someone who actually was active during the civil rights of the 60s in favor of two right-of-center triangulators who were making their way through the lower echelons of American politics.
Bob In Portland
@dollared: Mnem lies a lot.
dollared
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: You’ve never typed an incorrect word? Wow. Are you in the Guinness Book yet?
When you head over to the shelf, look up “comrade” as well. It might mention that Republican redbaiting kinda died after Reagan. You might want to work on some 21st century insults.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
It’s connected to race, actually. African Americans were hired and promoted within the public employment system because there were objective standards for hiring that didn’t exist in the private sector. They could use the civil service system to get ahead and since more public employees are unionized, they are over-represented in labor unions. Taking a civil service exam is a much more objective and rule-bound process than applying for a private sector job. There’s a score and after hiring there are “step raises”. That process reduces discretion and discretion introduces bias. I can quietly not hire black people in the private sector because who the hell knows what measure I’m using? I actually learned about it in the Ohio fight. Public sector employment in urban areas in Ohio built the black middle class and they’re union members.
FlipYrWhig
@dollared: Hey, you realized that “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” are two different things! Bob and DCF still haven’t figured that out yet.
Bob In Portland
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: You are equating the three billion that Hillary has been given by the wealthiest of the wealthy with rumors of Sanders’ tax returns?
Okay, but what do you really think about Hill’s money-laundering scam? Pretty neat, eh?
dollared
@Kay: Yeah. Thanks for the facts. You know, I’m not a Sanders die-hard. It’s just that I really hate the constant redbaiting and adoption of two really corrosive tactics by the Clintonites: using Republican economic arguments to undermine the New Deal, and the divisive use of identity politics to accuse opponents of racism and sexism when there are legitimate differences of opinion on policy and tactics.
Ultimately, these tactics are not winners in the long run, and the demonization of Sanders supporters is just stupid.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: Robert Townsend in _Hollywood Shuffle_ keeps coming back to the idea that there’s always work at the Post Office, so no black artist ever has to degrade himself. The median level of melanin in the public sector is much darker than in most lines of work. I have to think that’s part of why conservatives are so hung up on the DMV and Post Office as outposts of oppressive government: they have to wait in line behind people of color while other people of color assess them. Doubly upsetting.
dollared
@FlipYrWhig: I guess that’s small (p) progress…..
chopper
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
i’d expect that kind of talk from a neomoderate like you.
TooTall
@April: So, where do you get the training to identify mushrooms that are safe, vs. mushrooms that are not safe, and of course, the ones that make you hear colors on a wild trip?
singfoom
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
We shall overcome?
FlipYrWhig
@dollared: Funny, I really hate the “quien es mas macho” dick-swinging over the true meaning of liberalism–i.e., that there’s only one way, the Sanders way, which is never mistaken even if it’s sometimes betrayed by lesser beings–that’s been characteristic of Team Sanders since Day One.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
is red the color of the keyboard revolutionaries?
Ella in New Mexico
Jesus, it’s not enough to just shred the “Bernfeelers” anymore.
Now you Hilzers are eating each other. ;-)
Kay
@dollared:
Me neither. I think his campaign leaders are gross. I agree with you though that this narrative developed that baffles me on many levels. I’m not clear why Social Security not covering domestic and farm laborers in the New Deal has anything to do with Sanders supporters. Overtime doesn’t cover home health care workers now. That means…what? It never will? No one should ever try? Obama tried. I guess he could have said most of them are black and Latino so it’s impossible because white people won’t allow it, but Democrats have never said that.
FlipYrWhig
@Ella in New Mexico: dollared is one of yours, Ella.
Bob In Portland
@FlipYrWhig:
Dickforbrains, I posted the two definitions at 235. Judging from the definitions the difference is that while both neoliberals and neoconservatives embrace the free market neoconservatives are more open to foreign intervention, which would put H. Clinton well into the neoconservative column. Those of you cold warriors who can’t quite admit your international bloodlust can tell yourselves that you’re neoliberal. Or liberal. Or progressives. Or true progressives. Or peaceniks. It doesn’t matter. You are what you are.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
mocking dopes on the internet used to be ‘hippie punching’, now it’s flat out murder!
I say again, Good god.
ETA: ah, somebody figured out how silly she looked. Still fairly early in the afternoon, I guess.
Bob In Portland
@Cacti: How is raising the minimum wage favoring whites over blacks? You know, you sound like a chucklehead when you say such things.
FlipYrWhig
@Bob In Portland: Look at the big brain on Bob! It only took you, what, 60 years to figure that out?
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Ah, comment vanished… BY GENOCIDE PROBABLY
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
Women were promoted more in public sector jobs too. I had more women managers in the postal service than anywhere I have ever worked. It feels fairer, to be honest with you. They post jobs and there’s a process and you feel like there’s some objective measure. The private sector isn’t nearly as transparent.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: the Clinton machine can do fiendish things with computers, just ask Sheryl Atkinson
Bob In Portland
@FlipYrWhig: F
Liberal v. conservative is a pretty useless argument, just like free market is a bullshit description of nothing that has ever existed.
Let’s make it simple for those here who want to hide behind definitions. Are you for raising the minimum wage to $15? Are you for taxing the one percent at a higher rate? Are you for free college? Are you satisfied or not with the current state of medical care in the US?
Money changes everything.
Bob In Portland
@Kay: True, although at some point the USPS began hiring supervisors from outside the workforce and a lot of them seemed less familiar with the jobs and hired more for their piss-poor management style. But plenty of diversity, yes.
Bob In Portland
@FlipYrWhig: I was on to the Clintons by December 1992.
dollared
@FlipYrWhig: I think there is a legitimate battle over the Third Way stuff – the trade agreements, the reluctance to rein in all the M&A which results in really concentrated industries, the lax immigration rules which hurt unions and older workers, etc. But when it should really be a restrained battle over how you compromise with the political power of big economic players, instead it turns into a nasty, intrafamily battle. While Baghdad burns, so to speak.
Ella in New Mexico
@FlipYrWhig: realized that too late, unfortunately. But I still believe I’ll see some Clintonite-on-Clintonite hate here at some point.
There’s got to be some sunshine between you all to start exaggerating to extreme proportions and willful oversimplification. Otherwise there won’t be any more reason for a lot of you Hilzers to wake up in the morning.
singfoom
@Bob In Portland: I’m your huckleberry.
Yes, and I think it should be indexed to the Cost of Living and rise further, but I’ll take $15 first. It’d be great if that was federal, but it looks like piecemeal states first.
Yes, I am. And taxing the .01% and the .001% at even higher rates than the 1%!
I’m for really cheap but not completely free college, but that’s because I’m 16 years into paying my degrees off and it’s gonna be another decade or so… But I am for DEBT FREE undergraduate education, which is relatively the same thing.
Yes, I think we have the best medical care in the world! Now I am not satisfied at all with the healthcare ACCESS in our country or the way we pay for it. I’m for a move towards the Danish (I think) model, which has a basic govt single payer with very very very highly regulated insurance addons for those who wish to have something beyond that.
None of those things says which label I am though, other than an asshole, but I’ll say I’m a liberal.
dollared
@Kay: Yup. I love love love what Obama did with the overtime rules. And I’d actually really love to see us take on the home health care and farmworker rules. Would it really cause the collapse of the American economy to pay farm workers $12/hour and have some safety rules? It might sell a lot of cars in the interior of this country……
Cacti
@Bob In Portland:
How about that.
“Progressive” Bob is still bitter at the invasion of the browns and broads into his public agency.
Tell us again how you didn’t white flight to Oregon, Bob-O. It’s always good for a laugh.
FlipYrWhig
@dollared: Yes, I totally agree. Trust in markets has been ill-placed. The financial sector peddles incomprehensible fiction. Sanders is, for the most part, mad at the right people, IMHO. I don’t have a lot of trust in his ability to fight them, though, and there’s a huge difference between being mad, getting other people mad, and getting enough people mad enough to act enough to create a situation where fewer of them will be mad in the first place. I think the Sanders phenomenon has been far too invested in signaling outrage and sharing it. The other day I realized that it was a bit like the early days of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, where people on the liberal-to-left spectrum would just say, Wow, I’m so glad someone is saying the things I feel, I had started to feel like I was the only one. But when you’re the president, you have a different function than that, and you have to balance outrage with coalition-building and co-opting of opponents before they knock you down. And that’s where I think Hillary Clinton can shine. AND on top of all that I think she has a very interesting life story about public service and the uses to which she puts her heart as well as her muscle. And it irks me to no end that the Sanders online campaign just pisses all over that. So of course I want the things on Bob’s list of desiderata. I just don’t know how to get them without that whole “slow boring of hard boards” thing. Start locally, then scale up.
Kay
@Cacti:
That isn’t what he said. I said the postal service was diverse partly because of how it’s structured and he agreed. The part about the private sector managers coming in was intended to mean it was LESS diverse with private sector managers, not more.
Kay
@dollared:
The rationale for home health care/farm exceptions is Right wing fearmongering. “Babysitters and relatives helping on the family farm will have wage and hour rules!”
tones
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: you really are the very worst kind of malicious troll aren’t you ?
Dear God, what an asshole.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
I have whiplash watching college students go from valued members of the Obama Coalition in 2008 to pampered moronic “bros” in 2016 who must learn “civics” when they supported Bernie Sanders. Remember “Obamicans” and how he was famously attractive to “independents”? Why was that okay in 2008 but not okay in 2016?
tones
@dollared: the cognitive dissonance required to support Hillary and still believe you are a liberal is killing most of them here – more melt-downs each thread as they fight desperately against the realization they are finally the baby boomer I got mine ef you generation.
punching hippies is icing on the cake, just for fun.
same as it ever was…same as it ever was.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@tones: yes, Precious, you’re the only True Progressives
Aimai
@Kay: because its not particularly true in 2016.
No One You Know
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Slactivism libel! Mice and keyboards at 20 paces! Wish I was quicker on the thread for these opportunities…