Bernie Sanders’s magical thinking on climate change - The Washington Post - "Sanders wants to commit the country to achieving 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030, and the total decarbonization of the economy by 2050. These are laudable though ambitious goals. The question is, how will the United States go about meeting them?Under President Barack Obama, the United States reduced emissions more than any other country. It did it through many paths, but the biggest one was — fracking... Nevertheless, Sanders is opposed to natural gas. He opposes all new fracking and seeks to ban it nationwide within five years. He also intends to rapidly shut down all gas plants.Natural gas accounts for about 30 percent of the energy consumption in the United States today. Wind and solar are under 5 percent. So the plan would require an exponential jump in renewables — in just a few years. And even if that happened, it would be extremely difficult to replace gas as a source for electricity. Talk to any electric utility company and they will explain. Because solar and wind are intermittent sources, they require a backup source to provide electricity to homes, offices and factories 24/7. That raises the costs associated with solar and wind.Sanders has a solution: storage. If we had the means to store electricity on a massive scale, such as batteries, there would be no need for backup power. But we are not even close to having the kind of storage capacity we would need to make this work. One example: The Clean Air Task Force, an energy policy think tank, calculated that for California to reach 100 percent electricity from renewables, it would need 36.3 million megawatt-hours of energy storage. It currently has 150,000 megawatt-hours of storage. In other words, the state would need to increase storage by 24,000 percent in a matter of years. Batteries are getting cheaper, but not quickly enough.There is another path to clean energy, a source that has zero carbon emissions and provides a continuous flow of electricity: nuclear power... But Sanders opposes nuclear power. In fact, he plans to shut down all of the country’s nuclear power plants within 10 years. Fears about nuclear power, which Sanders clearly shares, are largely based on emotional reactions to the few high-profile accidents that have taken place over the past few decades. Such anxiety also ignores the millions of people who die each year because of fossil fuels. Our World in Data, an Oxford University publication, released a comprehensive accounting of the safest sources of energy, considering all harmful effects, including accidents. Nuclear energy was 250 times safer than oil and more than 300 times safer than coal... The Sanders green energy “plan” is based on magical thinking. It presumes that we can reduce emissions in electricity and transport to zero in 10 years while simultaneously shutting down the only two low-emission, always-available sources of power that together provide nearly 60 percent of our country’s electricity. And that makes me wonder: Is the real problem that Sanders will lose — or that he might win?"
JERRY DUNLEAVY on Twitter - "Please join me on this incredible journey."
New York Times headlines:
"Democrats block action on $1.8 trillion stimulus"
"Democrats block action on stimulus plan, seeking worker protections"
"Partisan divide threatens deal on rescue bill"
"The Coronavirus bailout stalled. And it's Mitch McConnell's fault"
Shane Gill - ""It's not just a protest against the president. It's a protest against everything good that this country was founded on. We love our country and we want to see it succeed. But it appears to us that our democratic party has been stolen from us by a bunch of communists."CSPAN registered democrat viewer that said she will never vote blue again, because of Nancy Pelosi's childish speech ripping.Well done Nancy. Here's to 4 more years of Trump."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Is it Bernie or bust? - "‘I met a fervent supporter.’
‘I think that Bernie represents a societal congealing. I think he can appeal to many different types of people. And I have been fortunate enough to see him do that in Vermont.’
‘But do you think that given a choice between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders can win?’
‘Unfortunately, no.’
‘So you'll vote for him even though you don't think he can win.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Many share that view. It's Bernie or bust, no point voting for a centrist, as they’ll only betray you. It'll be more of the same.’"
Bernie Sanders Campaign Organizer Says ‘F**king Cities Burn’ If Trump Gets Reelected, According To Project Veritas Video - "The organizer, identified in the video as Kyle Jurek, also compared Trump’s America to Nazi Germany, and suggested that supporters of the president might need to be sent to reeducation camps... Jurek also seemed to allege that Sanders‘s proposal to make all public colleges tuition-free could be used in part to reeducate the portions of the populace... Jurek also implied that reeducation camps under a Sanders‘ administration would be similar to the gulags set up by notorious Soviet Union communist dictator Joseph Stalin. “There’s a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags, right?” Jurek asked. “And actually, gulags were a lot better than what the CIA has told us that they were. Like, people were actually paid a living wage in gulags, they had conjugal visits in gulags, gulags were actually meant for like reeducation.”"
Rena♥️Happy New Year 2020 on Twitter - "Watch WOW! Here is a Democrat trying to get elected in the state of #Maine. He jokes about how good it is that the number of suicides among white men is rising. Sadly, this is representative of today's Democratic Party."
Saagar Enjeti on Twitter - "Biden 2020: I played a pivotal role in shipping your jobs overseas, sending your sons to die in war, and devastating your community. I would do it all to the Nth degree if you let me back in the White House
Now learn to code"
The New York Times - Posts - "Joe Biden stood by comments that he would not comply with a subpoena to testify at President Donald J. Trump’s trial in the U.S. Senate. Biden argued that testifying would shift attention away from the president’s own actions"
The hypocrisy of the commenters who defended this (before he changed his mind) but condemn Trump/Republicans for something similar is amusing, but not surprising. It seems only people they disagree with politically cannot be exempt from the law
Elizabeth Warren suggests her vice president may be non-binary or gender non-conforming - "I want to tell you exactly the kind of vice president I want: Someone who will be in this fight alongside me for your families. Someone who feels this fight passionately—and who brings his, her, or their own energy to get it done"
Bernie Sanders Released His Tax Returns. He’s Part of the 1%. - The New York Times - "Mr. Sanders’s higher income in recent years has created some political awkwardness for the senator, who in his 2016 presidential campaign frequently railed against “millionaires and billionaires” and their influence over the political process."
Sanders campaign manager says Fox News is 'more fair' to Bernie than MSNBC - ""the constant diminishment of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC" is "actively damaging" the Sanders campaign and "hurts his case for electability," Shakir told Vanity Fair. CNN is at least making "efforts to try and diversify their voices" with pro-Sanders hires, he added, and even Fox News has been "more fair than MSNBC" to Sanders. "That's saying something," Shakir added. "Fox is often yelling about Bernie Sanders' socialism, but they're still giving our campaign the opportunity to make our case in a fair manner, unlike MSNBC, which has credibility with the left and is constantly undermining the Bernie Sanders campaign.""
I imagine some heads exploding at this
Bloomberg once suggested farming, factory work don’t require much ‘gray matter’ - "Democratic presidential candidate and billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg suggested during a 2016 talk that farming and factory work require less “gray matter” than modern technology jobs.“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg told the audience at the Distinguished Speakers Series at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School. “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”... The remarks about farmers and factory workers in the resurfaced clip come as Bloomberg has been criticized by Republicans and fellow Democratic candidates over controversial statements he has made about stop-and-frisk, the practice of redlining and the sexist environment that existed at his media company.Some Democratic hopefuls also complained about Bloomberg — whose worth is estimated at $60 billion — trying to buy his way into the 2020 election with his immense national advertising blitz."
Ben Shapiro on Twitter - ""OMG BLOOMBERG IS BUYING THE ELECTION" say people whose chief candidates want to hand people healthcare, college educations, and housing they're not paying for."
Hemingway: If Bloomberg Couldn't Buy 2020, How Did Russia Buy 2016? - "“We had years where people were saying a couple hundred thousand dollars in barely literate Facebook ads from Russians caused Donald Trump to win. Here you had a guy spend nearly $1 billion and he went nowhere. It’s a humiliating defeat for Michael Bloomberg”... Bret Baier drilled the point home: “So Russians influenced the election with $200,000, or $300,000 in Facebook ads? And Mike Bloomberg couldn’t get more than 50 delegates with $600 million dollars?”“And this hurts Bernie Sanders’s message, too, because he likes to say the billionaires control everything,” Hemingway said. “Clearly Bloomberg having all this money didn’t do as much for him as Biden having the media and the establishment behind him. I would pick media and establishment over millions all day.”"
Inhumans of late capitalism - Posts - "Bloomberg has done so many outrageous things, it's easy to gloss over little nuggets like these in his book of aphorisms, he gets how sick it all is but loves it"
"ON EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION: "How do you motivate someone Simple. Are they addicted to three meals a day?""
Richard ️ Spencer on Twitter - "If you define your outlook with terms like “race realism” or express concern over “demographics,” then I must ask, unironically, is Mike Bloomberg not your man? While Trump brags about releasing minority criminals, Mike has a record of locking them up. Bloomberg’s entire reason for running is to maintain the status quo, another one of your expressed desires. Seriously, why not Mike?"
Of course, this won't get him cancelled since he's a Democrat
Twitter is suspending 70 pro-Bloomberg accounts, citing 'platform manipulation' - Los Angeles Times - "As part of a far-reaching social media strategy, the Bloomberg campaign has hired hundreds of temporary employees to pump out campaign messages through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram... organizers often used identical text, images, links and hashtags. Many accounts used were created only in the last two months. Bloomberg officially entered the presidential race on Nov. 24."
Bloomberg on being accused of sexual harassment: "They didn't like a joke I told." - "as Bloomberg is on national television accusing these women of being humorless scolds, they remain bound by the NDAs that forbid them from speaking for themselves. By the time the segment was over, Bloomberg had repeatedly turned down direct invitations to release them from those gag orders, which he described as “consensual.”"
The 2020 Dems' Responses to Bloomberg's Defense of Capitalism Should Terrify All of Us - "When Bloomberg tried to defend the economic system that has raised more people out of poverty than any system in the history of the world, the other candidates on the stage groaned—and many in the audience booed."This is ridiculous," Bloomberg exclaimed in response to Bolshi Bernie Sanders attacking capitalism. "We're not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism and it just didn't work."... Most of them despise capitalism as much as they hate Trump, despite their occasional halfhearted defenses of the system that got them all (in one way or another) to where they are today"
Can Bloomberg and Hillary Swipe the Nomination From Bernie? - "Bernie may have blown it. Yeah, already. But not because the Democratic front-runner “plummeted” into the shameful spot of receiving “only” the most votes in the first two primaries—which is how a plethora of talking heads in the cable news business comically tried to dismiss his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. Instead, despite a massive ground game in key primary states, Bernie may have screwed up in a more serious way—by drastically underestimating his opponents inside the Democratic Party establishment... Surreally, the Democratic Party is heading toward a WWE-style Summer Smackdown of two Jewish stereotype/archetypes: The billionaire capitalist who has watched Citizen Kane too many times (and missed the point, apparently) and the Brooklyn-born, billionaire-slaying socialist who has watched Spartacus too many times (also missing the point, apparently)... For nearly any honest observer, the Democrats haven’t been the pro-labor, tax-the-wealthy, statist liberalist party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson for at least 30 years, if not 40. Like the European aristocrats of old, which Democratic Party elites and their media cohort shamelessly—even if unknowingly—aspire to emulate, establishment liberals see the electoral portion of the American left as theirs. They alone are entitled to lead the ignorant masses toward enlightenment; a vision they have conveniently insisted on seeing as social justice—sans economic reform—for quite some time now... Recent polling data from the Voter Study Group supports the notion that “fiscally liberal but socially conservative” is now the most underserved—and also possibly the largest—part of the American electorate. Along with this, last year’s Hidden Tribes study illustrated that most Americans hate “PC culture”—with most nonwhites disliking those who attempt to dictate manners to them at even higher rates than whites do... In fact, the most likely consequence of Bloomberg swiping the nomination from Bernie would be the reelection of Donald Trump. So why bother? The answer is that a Bloomberg primary win, even combined with a Trump win in the general election, would send a clear message that the Democratic Party is a pro-Wall Street, pro-corporate, technocratic organization.If Bloomberg is, as I suspect, aware of the stakes here, he is playing a particularly perverted game of chess designed to drive the Berniecrats into the wilderness—which is exactly how the Democratic Party disposed of the original People’s Party challenge early on in the 20th century."
WOAH: FiveThirtyEight Predicts 'No One' Will Win a Majority of Democrat Delegates
After Attending a Trump Rally, I Realized Democrats Are Not Ready For 2020 - "If you had told me three years ago that I would ever attend a Donald Trump rally, I would have laughed and assured you that was never going to happen. Heck, if you had told me I would do it three months ago, I probably would have done the same thing. So, how did I find myself among 11,000-plus Trump supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire? Believe it or not, it all started with knitting.You might not think of the knitting world as a particularly political community, but you’d be wrong. Many knitters are active in social justice communities and love to discuss the revolutionary role knitters have played in our culture. I started noticing this about a year ago, particularly on Instagram. I knit as a way to relax and escape the drama of real life, not to further engage with it. But it was impossible to ignore after roving gangs of online social justice warriors started going after anyone in the knitting community who was not lockstep in their ideology. Knitting stars on Instagram were bullied and mobbed by hundreds of people for seemingly innocuous offenses. One man got mobbed so badly that he had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the hospital on suicide watch. Many things were not right about the hatred, and witnessing the vitriol coming from those I had aligned myself with politically was a massive wake-up call. You see, I was one of those Democrats who considered anyone who voted for Trump a racist. I thought they were horrible (yes, even deplorable) and worked very hard to eliminate their voices from my spaces by unfriending or blocking people who spoke about their support of him, however minor their comments. I watched a lot of MSNBC, was convinced that everything he had done was horrible, that he hated anyone who wasn’t a straight white man, and that he had no redeeming qualities.But when I witnessed the amount of hate coming from the left in this small, niche knitting community, I started to question everything... The more voices outside the left that I listened to, the more I realized that these were not bad people. They were not racists, nazis, or white supremacists. We had differences of opinions on social and economic issues, but a difference of opinion does not make your opponent inherently evil. And they could justify their opinions using arguments, rather than the shouting and ranting I saw coming from my side of the aisle. I started to discover (or perhaps rediscover) the #WalkAway movement. I had heard about #WalkAway when MSNBC told me it was fake and a bunch of Russian bots. But then I started to meet real people who had been Democrats and made the decision to leave because they could not stand the way the left was behaving... I started to question everything. How many stories had I been sold that weren’t true? What if my perception of the other side is wrong? How is it possible that half the country is overtly racist? Is it possible that Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing, and had I been suffering from it for the past three years?And the biggest question of all was this: Did I hate Trump so much that I wanted to see my country fail just to spite him and everyone who voted for him? Fast-forward to the New Hampshire primary, and we have all the politicians running around the state making their case. I’ve seen almost every Democratic candidate in person and noticed that their messages were almost universally one of doom and gloom, not only focusing on the obvious disagreements with Donald Trump, but also making sure to emphasize that the country is a horribly racist place... while the 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to a tragedy precipitated by real racists and real nazis and real white supremacists, I started to see that those labels simply don’t apply to most people who support Trump... [At the rally] I even let it slip that I was a Democrat. The reaction: “Good for you! Welcome!” Once we got inside, the atmosphere was jubilant. It was more like attending a rock concert than a political rally. People were genuinely enjoying themselves. Some were even dancing to music being played over the loudspeakers. It was so different than any other political event I had ever attended. Even the energy around Barack Obama in 2008 didn’t feel like this. I had attended an event with all the Democratic contenders just two days prior in exactly the same arena, and the contrast was stark... With Trump, every single person was unified around a singular goal. With the Democrats, the audience booed over candidates they didn’t like and got into literal shouting matches with each other. With Trump, there was a genuinely optimistic view of the future. With the Democrats, it was doom and gloom. With Trump, there was a genuine feeling of pride of being an American. With the Democrats, they emphasized that the country was a racist place from top to bottom... The reality is that many people I spoke to do disagree with Trump on things. They don’t always like his attitude. They wish he wouldn’t tweet so much. People who are in cults don’t question their leaders. The people I spoke with did, but the pros in their eyes far outweighed the cons. They don’t love him because they think he’s perfect. They love him despite his flaws, because they believe he has their back... I think the Democrats have an ass-kicking coming to them in November, and I think most of them will be utterly shocked when it happens, because they’re existing in an echo chamber that is not reflective of the broader reality. I hope it’s a wake-up call that causes them to take a long look in the mirror and really ask themselves how they got here. Maybe then they’ll start listening. I tend to doubt it, but I can hope."
Opinion: Who can be president? The usual suspects - "By now you may have come across, or read about, an article by New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen about the gay opposition to the presidential ambitions of gay candidate Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Ind.The essence of the article, which embraces much more hemming and hawing than the usual run of her otherwise forceful journalism, is this final paragraph: “What makes Buttigieg an easy and reassuring choice for these older, white, straight people, and a disturbing possibility for the queer people who seem to be criticizing him for not being gay enough? It is that he is profoundly, essentially conservative. He is an old politician in a young man’s body, a straight politician in a gay man’s body.”Hence the recurring theme that Mr. Buttigieg is “not gay enough” or “not gay in the right way.”... Suppose you slot into a non-majority demographic. Do you want to be accepted and embraced as part of the bell-curve middle, complete with weddings and kids and joint mortgages? Or do those victories of inclusion just mask an erasure of subcultural tribe identity, coded language and gesture, as well as the thrill of secret libertine lives? Do the long-overdue diminishments of prejudice and even violence compensate for basically becoming straight? (“I miss being gay,” a married gay friend of mine said recently.)... most Americans would sooner elect a gay man, a black man or a woman before anyone remotely describable as socialist... Barack Obama was undeniably the first black president of the United States, but that did not affect his status quo decisions on drone strikes, bank bailouts and mortgage foreclosures. Identity politics matter far, far less in electoral politics than the shadow parade of nominations and debates might suggest. You don’t get to be president of the United States by being radical. That’s for campus activists and special interest groups pursuing social justice agendas"
It is interesting how the writer equates the status quo with being straight, white etc instead of simply calling them establishment candidates
Why Policing Pete Buttigieg's Gayness Is Essentialist - The Atlantic - "There’s a hashtag going around, #PetesNotGay, that involves dissections of the mayor’s closed-mouthed kisses with his husband on the campaign trail. Onion articles have imagined Buttigieg revealing a wife and kids, or condemning his own sexuality. The New Republic last year published and then retracted a scathing essay by Dale Peck that blasted Buttigieg as so buttoned-down and assimilated that he undermines a movement based in what is still often termed deviance. In a New Yorker piece titled “The Queer Backlash to Pete Buttigieg Explained,” Masha Gessen ends by calling Buttigieg “a straight politician in a gay man’s body.” These arguments that present Buttigieg as not really gay so obviously flirt with the essentialism queer people fight against that it’s a bit shocking to see them get traction at all"
Is this homophobia? The same way saying Obama wasn't black (enough) was racist
Taibbi on Russiagate and the Effort to Derail Sanders Campaign - "The Washington Post ran a story — sourced, I’m not joking, to “people familiar with the matter” — explaining that Bernie Sanders had been briefed that “Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest.”Sanders was quick to see through the gambit. “I’ll let you guess about one day before the Nevada caucus,” he said. “Why do you think it came out?” He pointed to a Post reporter: “It was The Washington Post? Good friends.” The Post, after all, has spent years dumping on Sanders, a fervent critic of the paper’s billionaire creep of an owner, Jeff Bezos. Intelligence officials and pundits have been screeching for years that patriotism demands voters reject the foreign agent Donald Trump and the Russian asset Bernie Sanders, and support a conventional establishment politician. Voters responded by moving toward Trump in national approval surveys and speeding Sanders to the top of the Democratic Party ticket. A more thorough disavowal of official propaganda would be difficult to imagine. Russiagate will soon be four years old. For the first three years, it pushed parallel themes: that Russia had “interfered” in the 2016 election, and Trump conspired in the fraud. The latter theme at times garnered literal around-the-clock coverage. CNN and MSNBC especially (but also the The New York Times, the The Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and other major outlets) preached to audiences that the fall of the Trump administration was imminent. Special counsel Robert Mueller, news audiences were told, would reveal the Trump-Russia conspiracy and save the world.After this story died a violent death when Mueller’s probe ended with no new charges, conventional wisdom shifted to a new gospel: Russiagate was about foreign interference.Russiagate from the start smelled funny, like bad food. Multiple developments worsened the odor. Stories kept coming up wrong. There were too many unnamed sources, too frequently contradicting one another and/or overstating facts. Every hoof print was a zebra’s. Outlets stopped worrying about relaying unconfirmed rumors, which is how terms like “blackmail,” “Trump,” “Russia” and even “Golden Showers” kept appearing in headlines, without proof there ever had been blackmail. Moreover, while ordinary citizens like Reality Winner went straight to jail for leaking, senior government officials in the past four years repeatedly and with impunity leaked Russia-related tales. The leaks often pushed still more incorrect narratives, like for instance that that Trump aide Carter Page was a foreign agent. But the biggest red flag of all was the way in which “Russia” over the past few years became shorthand to describe any brand of political deviance...
“Since Trump’s election, we’ve been told Putin was all or partly behind the lot of it: the Catalan independence movement, the Sanders campaign, Brexit, Jill Stein’s Green Party run, Black Lives Matter, the resignations of intraparty Trump critics Bob Corker and Jeff Flake …”
Unnamed “officials” have since added the Corbyn movement in England, the gilets jaunes, protesters in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, militias in Africa, pro-government disinformation campaigns in Hong Kong, the presidential campaign of Tulsi Gabbard, and countless other undesirables to what has amounted to an ongoing, cumulative blacklist. The extraordinary thing about this campaign to identify basically the entire universe of political thought outside of establishment Democrats in the U.S. as Russian assets has been the obvious projection involved. The plot running through all of these stories has been the idea that Russia is trying to “undermine our democracy” by “sowing division.” But these charges are coming from the same people who spent the past four years describing Republicans as deplorable fascists, and progressives on the other side as racist, sexist, Nazis, and “digital brownshirts.” This has resulted in a four-year parade of official cranks muttering about Russian efforts to “divide” us, when their own relentless message has been that America is besieged by a pair of Hitlerian movements on the left and right that must be put down at all costs. The only vision of “unity” they promote is one of obedience to the crackpot anti-utopia of neoliberalism that populations around the world are currently rejecting at the ballot box... officials have spent the past few years furiously constructing a popular vision of the Russian enemy far bigger than the actual country, which the likes of Rachel Maddow and Barack Obama not long ago were correctly calling a “gnat on the butt of an elephant.”... Prosecutors asserted a Russian effort to boost Sanders rather than finding it as true. Nobody has seen the “proof” of this story, not even the Russians charged by Robert Mueller with the conspiracy to help Sanders. In fact, that evidence was deemed so sensitive that Mueller sought to prevent the Russian defendants from seeing it in discovery. The proof was somehow so dangerous, we had to overturn centuries of legal tradition to keep it hidden... we get situations like last week, where there was an assertion about an unknown level of Russian support — presumably, social media boosting — that could not possibly equal the impact of a single news story leaked to the Post on the eve of the Nevada primary... The logic of Russiagate is now beyond absurd. Vladimir Putin, somehow in perfect sync with American voting trends, seeks to elevate both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, apparently to compete against himself in the general election, in a desperate effort to suppress the terrifying political might of, say, Joe Biden... Who’s trying to divide us? Our own leaders, and as results like the Nevada primary show, the public now knows it."
Experts Dismiss Russia-Bernie Sanders Narrative - "“One of the best ways to undermine American democracy is for the media to constantly tell Americans that our democratic system is run by a foreign power, that polls [and] debate outcomes are based not on the appeal of our politicians but from the invisible hand of an enemy government,” explained Northeastern University Associate Professor and Quincy Institute Fellow Max Abrahms.“Terrorism researchers are familiar with the idea that overreaction to terrorism can be more destabilizing than the terrorism itself,” Abrahms, whose work focuses on international security and the strategic effectiveness of terrorism, added. “The same is true about the hysteria over Russia’s alleged destruction of American democracy. We can admit Russian meddling without going nuts.”But if you give a political operative a Twitter account and a narrative, well, advising caution is likely to go unheard... “The thing that gets me is that none of the purported experts I’ve seen talking about Russian interference seem to get what [Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin‘s play is here,” noted National Security Counselors Executive Director Kel McClanahan"
Poll: Socialism Unpopular Even As Sanders Rises In 2020 Race - "he self-identifies as a democratic socialist... Asked about their impression of socialism, 28% of adults said they have a favorable view, while 58% said they had an unfavorable one. If socialism is so unpopular with Americans, how can Sanders be on the rise in the Democratic primary? Because Democrats and, more specifically, progressives view socialism favorably. Half of Democrats said so, while more than two-thirds of progressives did. Just 23% of independents, though, and 7% of Republicans viewed socialism favorably... The percentage of Americans saying the country is headed in the right direction was just 41%, but that represents the highest level since March 2012 in Marist's polling... two-thirds of people say the economy is working well for them... The strength of the economy is likely aiding Trump's reelection chances. Democrats seem to understand that he could be tough to beat, which might be why, by a 55%-42% margin, Democrats say picking a nominee who has the best chance of beating Trump is more important than someone who shares their position on most issues.Not surprisingly, overwhelming majorities of Bloomberg and Biden supporters said it was more important to pick someone who could beat Trump, while the opposite was true for Sanders backers... 12% of Sanders backers said they would not vote for president if he is not the nominee... Independents were the least likely to say they would vote for whomever the nominee is"
Of course NPR got slammed on Facebook as biased for this. Questioning media bias is only bad if you're not on the left
I hope Bernie wins the nomination and then loses the race - just to see what all the excuses will be
Bernie Sanders Says He'll Attract a Wave of New Voters. It Hasn't Happened. - The New York Times - "The results so far show that Mr. Sanders has prevailed by broadening his appeal among traditional Democratic voters, not by fundamentally transforming the electorate."
Andy Ngo on Twitter - "There shouldn’t be any surprise that Bernie Sanders would sing praises to the Castro regime. Paid staffers on his campaign who were exposed advocating for revolutionary political violence & the killing of counter-revolutionaries were not only protected, but have remained on staff""
Sanders's Pricey Tax and Spending Plans - The Atlantic - "Bernie Sanders faced more pointed attacks last night over his potential vulnerabilities than he ever has at a debate. But the blustery and disorderly session once again failed to fully explore what could be the Vermont senator’s greatest general-election weakness: the massive size and scope of his spending and tax proposals, which, depending on the estimate, would cost $50 trillion to $60 trillion over the next 10 years. That would roughly double the size of the federal government, an unprecedented increase outside of wartime... On Sunday, on 60 Minutes, he brushed aside questions from Anderson Cooper about the full price tag, insisting, “Well, I can’t—you know, I can’t rattle off to you every nickel and every dime.” During a CNN town hall in Charleston on Monday, Sanders tried to preempt further questions by handing the moderator, Chris Cuomo, a document that he said cataloged all his spending plans, including the taxes—almost entirely on the wealthy and business community—that he’s proposing to pay for them. Yet the document inadvertently may have demonstrated only how difficult it will be for Sanders to produce a politically acceptable plan to fund his spending. “You would need even more revenue than he is proposing to fully offset those costs,” says Jared Bernstein, an economist and senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who is generally sympathetic to Sanders’s agenda. “It is not realistic to believe you can get all those revenues from the top 1, 5, or 10 percent [of households]. You would have to go down further than that. The rest of it has to come from a broader base of taxpayers or it has to go on the deficit.”... Even at a lower, $50 trillion estimate, the Sanders plan would increase federal spending as a share of the economy by about 20 percentage points, according to calculations that Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and former chief economist at the World Bank, shared with me earlier this winter. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the largest 20th-century peacetime spending program, increased federal expenditures as a share of GDP by eight percentage points... If Sanders’s tax plans were to raise as much money as he claims, they would increase federal taxes as a share of GDP by as much as 11 percentage points. “I think it is fair to say that the tax increase—assuming it is as big as Senator Sanders projects—is about as large as the [13-point] tax increases enacted to finance World War II,” as measured as a share of GDP, says Leonard Burman, a former senior Treasury Department tax official under Clinton and an institute fellow at the Tax Policy Center, which is operated by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. “It is more than five times as large as any tax increase enacted since. And even if it falls short of the campaign’s projections, it would be the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.” Burman, like other analysts, believes that Sanders is overestimating the revenue that several of his tax proposals would produce... Because he’s already exhausted almost every conceivable proposal to raise taxes on the rich, Ritz says, Sanders has only two options to cover the difference: “He’s either going to have to borrow the money or take it from the middle class.” In his stump speech and in debates, Sanders never acknowledges those possibilities."
Far-left activists are taking over the Democratic Party - "Chase Cross is the Vice Chair of the 37th District Democrats and a member of the leadership for the King County Young Democrats (KCYD). When Cross isn’t hanging out with Democrat Senators like Patty Murray and Cory Booker he is protesting with Antifa. In a video taken by conservative activist Katie Daviscourt, Cross and Antifa are seen cursing and hurling racial insults at conservative African Americans and immigrants at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event. In another video, Cross is seen embracing Jamal Williams, a known Antifa leader, agitator and extremist, while Williams is energizing his masked Antifa protestors approaching a police line. In October, Williams was arrested for hate crimes and criminal harassment after he allegedly assaulted two Jews in Seattle, one of which was a Rabbi... Violent socialist extremists have taken over the Democratic party in Seattle and elsewhere. Blue dog, moderate, even liberal Democrats are now labeled, “Alt right”, “white supremacist”, “white nationalist”, “fascist”, “Nazis”, “Republicans” and “conservatives” by these fringe activists... Phil Tavel, a Jewish Democrat challenger to Sawant’s council ally, Council Member Lisa Herbold, was accused of “being supported by Nazis” by the Chair of the 34th District Democrats during an endorsement meeting of the group. Later in the evening a drink was thrown in a Tavel supporter’s face by the Chair’s partner.Ann Davison Sattler, a long-time Democrat and former candidate for Seattle City Council, recently wrote an op-ed explaining that she is now switching to the Republican party"
Andrew Yang: Identity politics is 'counterproductive' way to campaign - "Andrew Yang was the only candidate of color at December's Democratic presidential debate, which he called "an honor and a disappointment." He's also spoken with Insider about the racist bullying he says he endured as a teenager.But Yang is also the rare 2020 Democrat who has expressly criticized the use of identity politics as a campaign strategy... "identity politics, as it's used in many contexts, serves to highlight differences and separate Americans from each other and does so in a way that's not very productive."Yang added: "I believe the biggest problems that concern Americans concern the vast majority of us. Things like an economic system that's leaving more and more people behind. Climate change. A broken healthcare system and an underperforming educational system with record-high levels of student-loan debt... "most people are drawn to messages that talk about how we can work together, rather than saying that people who have certain experiences or don't have certain experiences aren't allowed to relate to each other.""
Democrats ponder a coup d'Bernie - "There are all kinds of reasons to think it would be bad for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to end up as the Democratic nominee. But it would be far worse for the party's superdelegates to deny him the nomination at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee in the event that he ends up the plurality winner in the primaries but fails to cross the majority threshold. That significant numbers of party leaders apparently don't understand this is a very bad sign about what's going to unfold over the coming months.Believe me, I get it. Sanders, a lifelong self-declared socialist, is at best a nominal Democrat. He has taken positions and said things over the years that would make crafting negative ads for the Trump campaign the easiest job in Republican politics. The faction of the party that's tempted to vote for billionaire Michael Bloomberg might stay home on Nov. 3, or even opt to vote for the president's re-election, when confronted with the prospect of a Democratic nominee who's proposing $53 trillion in new government spending. Sanders' plan for defeating Trump by mobilizing millions of new voters is so far nothing more than a pipe dream with no empirical foundation.I could go on. Anointing Sanders the Democratic nominee could be very bad. But it wouldn't be as bad as trying to deny him the nomination after he'd won a plurality of the delegates during the primaries. Thinking that the institutional party has the requisite legitimacy and power to pull off such a coup against the plurality winner — especially one with such a large and passionate base of support, and one motivated in part by anger at that very same Democratic establishment — is delusional."
If Democrats Aren’t Terrified, They’re Not Paying Attention - "Watching the Brexit debacle from afar, it seemed impossible to understand how the Labour Party could know full well it needed to win a national election in order to prevent an irreversible setback, yet harness itself to Jeremy Corbyn, whose toxic leadership made victory nearly impossible. The rise of Bernie Sanders, at a moment when Donald Trump is accelerating his war on the rule of law, is retroactively illuminating. A liberal party drifting helplessly along as a small radical cabal steers it toward likely catastrophe? I didn’t think it could happen here. At the heart of Sanders’s campaign is a hard-core socialist vanguard which is indifferent to the Democratic Party except as a potential vessel for the Bernie revolution. Their calculation is perfectly rational. Even if Sanders is likely to lose, the small chance of success is worth the risk to a party they don’t care for to begin with. What is odd is watching rationalizations take hold among a much larger group of progressives who very much do care about denying Trump a second term, and who have explained away the risks of a Sanders nomination with a series of fallacies... Historically, major candidates try pretty hard to avoid taking extremely unpopular positions. If candidates stop following this principle, on the grounds that electability is a myth, then the risk they’re dismissing will grow. It’s a bit like emphasizing the fact that animal attacks at zoos are rare. If people decide this means they can start flinging themselves into lion dens, then the zoo-safety stats will go south pretty fast.The Democratic primary can be seen as a series of candidates goading each other to jump into the lion’s den. All the candidates have exposed themselves by taking at least a few unpopular positions, but none have gone quite as far as Sanders. What makes Bernie’s profile uniquely toxic is the way his liabilities all reinforce each other. He combines discrete, deeply unpopular policy positions with an unpopular socialist label, which in turn reinforce the fact that his campaign is premised on radically changing the economy, the one thing most voters believe Trump has done well. His historic statements praising various leftist dictators reinforce the impression of kookery. One of the things Democrats have been telling each other is that it doesn’t matter what attacks Trump uses, because he’s going to make hyperbolic charges against them no matter what. And yes, Trump would call any Democrat an open-borders socialist who will throw everybody off their private insurance and drastically change the economy. But accusations work better when the target agrees with them. In 2016, Trump drew a lot of blood calling his opponent corrupt, but if Hillary Clinton had openly promised to use her office as a platform for lawbreaking and self-enrichment, it’s fair to say she would have done worse... But what about those polls showing Bernie doing about as well as anybody else against Trump? “Virtually every national and swing state poll shows Sanders tied with or beating President Trump,” notes VandeHei. Alas, as political scientist Brendan Nyhan has explained, trial-heat polling at this stage of the race has little to no predictive power. The likely reason for this surprising fact is that trial-heat polling during a primary is distorted by the primary itself. Candidates who are targeted by opposing party messaging will tend to sink, while for those who are spared, it will rise. In 2008, Republicans began shifting their attacks to Barack Obama after he took a delegate lead over Hillary Clinton. By the end stages of the primary, Clinton was outperforming Obama in polls against John McCain... Trump has been directing his criticism at almost every candidate except Sanders, whom he, in fact, frequently defends as the innocent victim of a rigged process... many of the same cadres who spent years insisting Corbyn would somehow prevail, dismissing all skeptics as paid-off shills for a discredited neoliberal regime, have simply shifted to making the exact same claims now on behalf of Sanders."
One thing unites establishment Democrats: Fear of Sanders - "It could be impossible to blunt Sanders as long as a trio of moderate candidates — former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar — stay in the race. And with former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the swath of states that vote on Super Tuesday, March 3, the effort to stop Sanders will become even more challenging when the campaign goes national next month.“You see this tremendous angst in the party — ‘What are we going to do?'” said Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor who was also chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “We need to unify as fast as we can.”The dynamic is complicated because each of the major moderate candidates has glaring vulnerabilities."
The disaster of a Sanders nomination - "In 2016, I wrote that Sanders’ reputed flirtations with the Soviet Union were limited to a “sister city” program between Burlington, Vermont, where he was mayor in the 1980s, and the Russian city of Yaroslavl. But previously unseen videos from Sanders’ 1988 trip to the Soviet Union have raised new questions on this issue.While Sanders acknowledged problems in the former USSR, he also asserted that we should “take the strengths of both systems” and “learn from each other.” This, at a time when the Soviet system was coming apart at the seams and the main thing to learn from its experience was that Soviet-style socialism breeds human misery. Sanders also praised the beauty of the Moscow subway — a Stalin propaganda showcase with palatial stations — while ignoring the fact that most Soviet public transit was overcrowded and environmentally disastrous.Around the same time, in a statement unearthed by The Washington Examiner in University of Vermont archives, Sanders praised the “very deep revolution” in Fidel Castro’s Cuba for not only providing free health care, education and housing but also “creating a very different value system than the one we are familiar with.” (The entire document has not been released, but the Sanders camp has not even tried to claim that these quotations are taken out of context.)Other troubling facts include Sanders’ association with the Marxist-Leninist Socialist Workers Party. In 1980, Sanders was an elector for this fringe group at a time when it defended the Islamist revolution in Iran and its capture of the “imperialist” U.S. Embassy. He also spoke at rallies for its candidates in 1982 and 1984. Granted, this happened decades ago. But Sanders has never apologized for his past. And aside from the morality of being on the wrong side in the Cold War, there is the issue of what it means to his ability to win in the general election when Republicans will make full use of this baggage.Couple this with the fact that one of Sanders’ chief campaign surrogates today is militant anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour, whose anti-Zionism includes rhetoric about “Jewish supremacy,” and Sanders looks more and more like an American version of Jeremy Corbyn, the radical British labor leader who got trounced in last year’s election."
How Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden Enriched Their Families - The Atlantic - "Since the 1970s, Senator Bernie Sanders, who has spent his entire career railing against the political establishment, and Joe Biden, who likes to point out that he was for years the poorest member of the Senate, have repeatedly directed campaign dollars to close relatives. As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders even directed taxpayer money to his wife. Some of these practices were touched on in reporting at the time, but the full picture has acquired new importance in the context of the campaign against Trump, whose golf outings alone have sent millions of taxpayer dollars to his family-owned firm"
Is Bernie Sanders the American Version of Jeremy Corbyn? - "An outlier long at odds with his party’s establishment? Check. A legislator with decades of voting who has almost no legislation to call his own? Yep. A 70-something beloved by 20-somethings? Check. An insurgent movement with cultish overtones that took over the party from more moderate figures? Yes. A more left-wing platform than any in his party’s history? Uh-huh. A man with many, many embarrassing connections in the past with hard-left figures across the globe? Oh yeah. Someone who hasn’t changed his mind on almost anything since the 1970s? Pretty much. Some highly unsavory hangers-on and followers? To put it mildly... His visceral hatred of actual billionaires like Mike Bloomberg — and not just the system that creates billionaires — was striking to me. He’s all but incapable of nuance. I remember my own interaction with him on the Bill Maher show, where I begged him to consider at least that there might be a middle ground between clobbering the pharmaceutical companies’ profits and encouraging research and development in the private sector. He wouldn’t. The profit motive in health care was evil, even if it had saved and extended countless lives... What Sanders needs, just as Corbyn did, is a massive show by the young and previous nonvoters to counteract the populist right’s strong support among boomers and retirees. But in Iowa and New Hampshire, no such surge was visible. Corbyn too promised victory by a huge youth turnout, and much of his success in 2017 was initially attributed to a big surge in young voting. The trouble is, it didn’t happen. The best voter survey eventually found youth turnout in 2017 was roughly where it had always been. In 2019, the same happened: No youthquake emerged to save the left. Instead, older voters, many scared by Corbyn, showed up in droves to back the Tories, and nonvoters were closer to the Tories than to Labour... Corbyn was also crippled by cultural issues... this is uncannily similar to Bernie’s trajectory. Sanders was, until quite recently, against open borders — “a Koch brothers’ proposal” — and an advocate of controlling immigration to strengthen wages for domestic workers. But check out his platform now: more liberal than any of the other Democratic candidates. He’s in favor of decriminalizing border crossing, a moratorium on all deportations, no more spending on the border wall, the abolition of ICE, federal health benefits for illegal immigrants, and no mandatory E-Verify. It’s a Koch brothers’ agenda — just woker — and all but an invitation for a new surge in illegal newcomers. He’s also promising to ban, yes ban, private health insurance that could compete with Medicare for All — something that even socialized medicine in Britain doesn’t do. And behind him is an army of young, woke zealots, eager to fight “whiteness” and the patriarchy and erase any biological distinction between men and women — an army Bernie seems incapable of managing or resisting, and who are not exactly restrained in their tactics either online or off. Corbynistas also became a troll army, and his close retinue were derided as “brocialists”; the parallel with Sanders’s young fanatics is unnerving... socialism is a far more mainstream position in British politics than in America, where the label remains toxic to many — but even there, it wasn’t mainstream enough."
Brawl breaks out at Bernie Sanders rally in Colorado - "A fight broke out at a Bernie Sanders rally in Colorado on Monday after a white man reportedly attacked a black man for booing the Vermont senator and wearing a 'Black Guns Matter t-shirt... Mike Bloomberg released a new web video that took direct aim at 'Bernie bros' who have lashed out online at rivals to Sanders, after Sanders accused him of trying to 'buy' the election.The ad featured a series of screeds from Sanders' supporters. 'We know where you live. Where you work. Where you eat,' said one. One called Massachusetts Sen Elizabeth Warren a 'snake,' and another warned cryptically: 'Libs who are flirting with Bloomberg now should be aware that they are going on lists.''We know where you work. Where you eat. Where you live' said another... Topless protesters disrupted Sanders while he was on stage. The anti-dairy demonstrators stormed the stage"
Bill de Blasio on Twitter - "And hey @PeteButtigieg, try to not be so smug when you just got your ass kicked. You know how we form a winning coalition to beat Trump? With a true multi-racial coalition of working Americans: something @BernieSanders has proven he can do + you haven’t. Dude, show some humility" - Feb 22
Bill de Blasio on Twitter - "Congrats @PeteButtigieg for running a great campaign! You made history + took us a step closer to the truly inclusive America we need to build. When you are ready to turn the Governor’s Mansion blue in Indiana, you will have a whole lotta us around the nation ready to help!" - Mar 1
Victor Davis Hanson: This Is The Worst Democratic Field Since Mondale Lost To Reagan In A Landslide - ""What they do care about is they want to control the House, they want to win back the Senate and they want Supreme Court picks because they are interested in power," Hanson said. "They're not interested necessarily in diversity or people of color being the new face of the Democratic party or any of that. They are interested in power. They think they can't get it with Bernie Sanders and they are absolutely right. He will be a disaster.""This is the worst field we've seen since Walter Mondale lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan," Hanson said. "If they go the Bernie route, they are going to lose big and they are desperate. They are down to the 11th hour. The only candidates they have they think they can save the House and maybe win back the Senate are Bloomberg and Biden and they are pathetic candidates."It's kind of a tragedy to watch this thing unfold. It really is""
Robert Jenkins - "What America doesn’t seem to understand is that the Bernie Sanders candidacy is the last time that people are going to ask nicely.His supporters are organizing and fundraising and doing all this hard work because they are trying really hard to work within a system that doesn’t want them and play by the rules of a game that is clearly rigged against them.If you say they are radicals or outsiders, you have no real clue what that means. They are still invested in democracy. They are still playing by the rules of electoral politics.If the powers that be actually steal the nomination from them, the movement that rises up from the Sanders campaign in later years will be your worst nightmare.People will eventually become whatever you call them."
"Threatening violence of they don't get what they want. Imagine my shock."
It's only dangerous to call the system rigged if you're not a Democrat
Trailblazing Pete Buttigieg Revealed the Extent of ‘Progressive’ Homophobia - "I never imagined that when a gay man finally had a legitimate shot at becoming president, the loudest attacks on his identity would come not from the Right, but from the Left. While Buttigieg’s politics, qualifications, record and platform all were open to good-faith criticism, many of the “woke” progressive journalists and activists who opposed his candidacy went beyond this, and resorted to personal attacks that blurred into outright bigotry. Yes, there were some conservatives here and there who made homophobic comments about Buttigieg, or who seemed otherwise bothered by his sexuality. But most, frankly, didn’t seem to care. Even Republican President Donald Trump said he thought it was “great” that a gay man was running for president, and that he himself would vote for a gay candidate. For most of Buttigieg’s conservative critics, the real sticking points were his support for late-term abortion, proposed tax increases, and his intention to pack the Supreme Court with liberals—not his sexuality. The same wasn’t true of various LGBTQ activists, who took issue with the former mayor’s lack of effeminate mannerisms, his moderate policies, and even his whiteness. Consider one viral essay published in the formerly center-left New Republic, which decried Buttigieg as an “Uncle Tom”—or in this case, “Mary Pete”—in terms that can only be described as unhinged... The New Republic, which still trades on its formerly respectable inside-the-beltway brand, actually published a spoken-word-style screed blasting a trailblazing gay Democrat as being the wrong kind of gay person—specifically, a gay person who hadn’t experienced enough gay sex. Another nasty essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books mocked a photo of Buttigieg and his husband Chasten on the cover of Time Magazine as “Heterosexuality without women.”... If you’re not a flamboyant queer socialist with a non-white partner, you apparently don’t really count as being gay. One piece in the Outline went so far as to say that Pete Buttigieg is actually “bad for gays,” because he is too “palatable.” Which raises the question of whether these progressives are actually sincere about wanting gay politicians to succeed. Since being “palatable” enough to attract votes is a prerequisite for success in all forms of politics, it sounds an awfully lot like these critics would prefer that a gay stereotype decked out in night-club leather would fail spectacularly on the national political stage—as this would at least allow them to revert to the usual script of America being dominated by right-wing bigots who aren’t “ready” for gay men and women... There is a certain kind of progressive writer who has convinced himself that there is only one way to be gay; and if you don’t fit that mold, you’re a class-war traitor who doesn’t even count as part of the LGB community. This kind of bigotry may be disguised as progressive extremism. But at root, it’s no less offensive than the attitude displayed by those few homophobic voters who openly admit they wouldn’t vote for a gay man... The ironic result of all this is that Buttigieg’s candidacy indirectly propped up the most radicalized candidate—Sanders—by splitting the center-left vote between Joe Biden, Buttigieg (and, in New Hampshire, at least, Amy Klobuchar). With Buttigieg out of the race, many of his supporters seem likely to flock to Biden. Then again, if Biden gets the nomination, that’ll simply give these same progressives some other new thing to be furious about, which "seems the real goal."
Liberal homophobia is good
So much for "stereotypes"
Warren Says Democrats Must Oppose Billionaire Who Calls Women 'Fat Broads' and 'Horse-Faced Lesbians' (She Wasn't Talking About Trump) - ""I'd like to talk about who we're running against: A billionaire who calls women 'fat broads' and 'horse-faced lesbians.' And no, I'm not talking about Donald Trump. I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg," the Massachusetts senator said. "Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk."... Bloomberg responded that at his foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, "the person that runs it's a woman, 70 percent of the people there are women.""
Pelosi cites 'element of misogyny' after Warren drops out
So apparently Democratic primary voters are misogynists!
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "It’s troubling that Elizabeth Warren blames the failure of her candidacy on sexism. Women outvote men by ten percentage points. Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in 2016 and won the most votes in the general election. Several women entered the race (and one still remains). Warren was first or second in the polls last summer... The sad thing is that Warren, in scapegoating her loss on sexism, is doing a more powerful job of telling girls and young women they can’t succeed than any living misogynist"
“It isn’t empowering to scream “sexism!” every time life doesn’t go according to plan, and in the end, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When Democrats have, for the past four years, been beaten over the head with the belief that a female politician can’t win for this reason, they will act accordingly, and vote for a man to contend against Donald Trump.”
Presumably sexism is what doomed Tulsi
Five Theories for Warren's Losing Performance - The Atlantic - "1. She couldn’t pick a lane—a problem symbolized by her positioning on Medicare for All.
2. She was hit by the curse of the front-runner: She peaked too early and never recovered.
3. It was the scourge of electability: Warren was seen as a risky choice.
4. Blame The New York Times/Siena College poll that showed President Donald Trump beating Warren in head-to-head matchups in several key swing states.
Democrats are obsessed with electability. No. 2, Warren’s support is very concentrated among liberal whites with college degrees. No. 3, we know that happens to be a large New York Times–reading demographic."
Lucas Lynch - "A fun way to make your woke friends' heads spin - if they complain about how unfair and sexist it was that Elizabeth Warren tanked so badly, remind them that it was especially boomer African Americans who made her tank especially badly - despite the fact that she consistently rated the best on social-justice issues - and see if they will still rail against how unfair and patriarchal it was.""
Lucas Lynch - "The really interesting contradiction in hearing people talk about all the sexism that Elizabeth Warren suffered from is they are basically saying that Democrats - and older black voters in particular - are bigots irreparably besieged by sexism, despite the fact that they nominated the first viable female nominee for president four years ago.OK there, I guess go around saying that. Because her real problem wasn’t some anonymous troll saying mean things, it was all those voters you hold up as somehow sacred not even remotely wanting to give her a hearing, lol.  Despite the fact that she consistently ranked the best on so-called “social justice issues” and had the most detailed plans for implementing solutions. "
Eoin Higgins on Twitter - "The DNC has changed the format for the next debate, where Joe Biden would have had to stand at a lectern for two hours and answer questions from professional moderators, to one where both men will be seated and answer questions from the audience."
Tulsi Gabbard booted from next Democratic primary debate - "Maybe it’s the Democratic Party that’s the misogynist one.Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — the last remaining woman in the Democrats’ presidential race — has been shut out of the party’s next debate with a rule change that makes it mathematically impossible for her to claim a podium.“To keep me off the stage, the DNC again arbitrarily changed the debate qualifications,” Gabbard tweeted late Friday. “Previously they changed the qualifications in the OPPOSITE direction so Bloomberg could debate.”... Former rival Andrew Yang tweeted rueful sympathies.“Someone asked me what the qualifications for the next debate would be,” he posted. “I responded ‘whatever Tulsi has plus one.’”"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Thousands of employees left jobs and joined Bloomberg’s campaign on the promise of nearly a year of employment and above standard salaries. It was a false promise. Those outside of battleground states have been terminated without a cash severance."
"“But now, less than a week after Mr. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, left the Democratic presidential race — endorsing former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and pledging to put his vast resources behind him — hundreds of Mr. Bloomberg’s field organizers and regional organizing directors around the country are suddenly without jobs, having received emails on Monday that encouraged them to keep their campaign-issued electronics as a sort of severance payment.”...“As a token of our appreciation, we are offering you the opportunity to keep your laptop and iPhone.”...“The email specified the value of those devices — ranging from $1,400 to $1,700, depending on the model of the computer — and noted that employees would be required to pay taxes on those amounts.”"
Biden tells factory worker 'you're full of shit' in tense argument on guns - "This is not the first time Biden has locked horns on the campaign trail. After a man in Iowa made baseless accusations about Biden’s son Hunter, the former vice president called the man “a damn liar” and “fat.”A spokeswoman claimed at the time that Biden had said, “Look, facts,” not “Look, fat,” referring to the man."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Joe Biden’s exchange with an auto worker over gun rights didn’t get much coverage. The worker stated that he was “actively trying to end our Second Amendment right and take away our guns.” Biden responded that the worker was “full of shit” and that “I’m not taking your gun away at all.”When pressed, Biden did admit “we’ll take your AR-14s away,” and the worker responded that it was “not ok”. Biden’s response was “Don’t try me, pal . . . Do you want to go outside?” and later called the man a “horse’s ass”.What’s telling about the exchange is not that Biden speaks intemperately, much like Trump regularly does, but that Biden’s comments about a hot button constitutional issue was treated with deference by the press. It’s not a stretch to imagine the reaction if Trump had insulted a constituent, offered to “take it outside”, and gotten a basic fact wrong — it would be major news."
Bernie Sanders: The 2020 Democratic candidate vs 2016 - "It's clear from exit polls and results in the primary so far that Sanders' base of support has shrunk rather than expanded in the four years since he last ran for President, even as his political power has grown."
Did Bernie Just Accuse Dems of Voter Suppression in Michigan? - "Christian Slater, the Michigan Democratic Party's director of rapid response, told Newsweek that new election rules passed in 2018, including same-day voter registration, were partially to blame for the delays. Michigan voters can register in-person to vote right up to Election Day. This policy likely tied up election staff... While Michigan's voting reforms did not go to the radical extremes Sanders demanded, they represented a step in his direction. It is more than a little ironic that the very kind of reforms Bernie wants may have resulted in what he condemns as an "outrage" comparable to voter suppression."
If they didn't allow same-day voter registration, that would be voter suppression too. Excellent kafka-trapping!
I'm Mad at My Husband for Voting for Bernie Sanders - The Atlantic - "Ever since Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race, I’ve been mad at my husband... for the first time in the eight years I’ve known my husband, we voted differently—I voted for Warren and he cast his ballot for Sanders... while both men and women were more likely to vote for Sanders than for Warren, Sanders consistently received a greater share of his votes from men than Warren did... "I was never able to convince him that acting in solidarity with a woman candidate with a strong feminist agenda could be a vital way to resist the sexism that informs so much of our lives"... After a few tearful conversations in the week leading up to Super Tuesday, I could not make my husband understand what seemed so monumental to me about Warren’s campaign... After we voted, I told him I was upset that the Democratic Party had not prioritized a woman and/or a person of color, and that he didn’t support a woman with a real shot at the nomination—a candidate he loved— when it mattered"
No wonder women initiate most divorces - given that even women were more likely to vote for Sanders, she can't even openly call him a sexist
Apparently if you don't vote for a female because of her sex, you are sexist
Perhaps we should be mad at men for voting the way their wives want, rather than the other way around
A Confused Joe Biden Says 'We Can Only Re-Elect Donald Trump' - "[He] was attempting to argue that infighting within the Democratic Party will result in the re-election of President Trump, but Biden had difficultly making his point after stumbling over his words... At one point, he even mispronounced his own name... In the past few weeks alone, the candidate declared repeatedly that he was running for the U.S. Senate, confused which state he was in, said there were 150 million gun deaths in America since 2007, called Super Tuesday "Super Thursday," and announced that he would have the ability as president to appoint the first African American woman to the United States Senate."
Joe Biden campaign walks back false Nelson Mandela story. - "He would mention his being arrested trying to see Mandela “twice more in the next seven days,” according to the New York Times. And in one mention, he offered a coda to the story: “After he got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said in Las Vegas on Feb. 16. “He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said: ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’ ”... for four days after the Times story first went up, neither Biden nor Biden’s campaign offered a word (on the record) about the South Carolina front-runner’s fascinating, previously untold story for which there is no apparent supporting evidence.It evoked a different piece of late 20th century history: the 1988 presidential campaign, when Biden’s bid for the nomination unraveled after he delivered passages from an autobiographical speech by the British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock as if they were his own words. Then, Biden had talked about “my ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania,” although his campaign was unable to come up with the names of any of his relatives who’d been coal miners"
Is Joe Biden the American Brezhnev? | Ben Judah - "Biden has effectively been the campaigner against structural reform: rather than articulating where he thinks the left flank’s analysis fails, he chooses to criticise their solutions as unworkable or unelectable. He was being honest when he told rich donors “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected president.But there is more to this than merely waiving proposed wealth taxes. Unlike the Obama administration, his would be a government with no policy roadmap, no reformist agenda and likely no executive energy. Biden’s visibly frail mind would be in the driving seat and, with it, his nostalgia for days of civility and collaborative politics on Capitol Hill that have plainly failed the Democrats for decades. There would be no rethink of the US’s role in the world, despite the country having spent $5.9tn on conflicts in the Middle East and Asia that have not demonstrably made it safer."
Naturally, no mention of Corbyn at all
Bernie Sanders Has Stuck To The Same Message For 40 Years - "Over 40 years, Sanders has built his political career on a very focused message about what he calls a "rigged economy."... The question now is whether this consistency, this focus, is an asset or a problem for Sanders' candidacy. His supporters say that's one of the things they love about him. They don't want him to get distracted by the latest news."
Warren Urged by National Organization for Women Not to Endorse Sanders: He Has 'Done Next to Nothing for Women'
I thought patronage politics was a bad thing and you should vote what's best for the country. Naturally, presumably it would be racist for white people to vote for candidates who would help white people
Lucas Lynch - ""I'm glad to see that [ Elizabeth Warren ] is willing to forego endorsing a candidate who purportedly is her ideological sibling, potentially punishing the whole country, due to her personal resentments.
She sounds very committed to the betterment of America!"
- Glenn Dell -"
Susan Solomon - "*Warren taking stairs and Bernie the escalator*
Final thought of the day: Look carefully at this photo—it speaks a thousand words of thousands of years. Let’s show Liz some love tomorrow at the polls and send a message to that angry, self-interested white male on the escalator that thoughtfulness and humility matter. Grace matters. Unity matters. Women in executive roles matter."
I guess the moral of the story is that women's so-called problems are self-inflicted
Tom Woods - Posts - "My question to Bernie Sanders supporters:When someone in Bangladesh observes your lifestyle, it seems as incredible to them as that of the 1% seems to you. Why are they not entitled to help themselves to your things, the way you consider yourself morally entitled to help yourself to the goods of the American rich?In your answer, avoid moral irrelevancies like national borders; can we tolerate inequality just because it's cross-border?Extra credit: take a picture of yourself divesting yourself of most of your goods in the name of global equality."
Biden: 'I think we've had enough debates' | TheHill - "Former Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday said it’s time for the Democratic primary to draw to a close and signaled a disinterest in participating in a final debate against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)."
"Imagine having the entire Democratic Party backing you and still being scared to debate your only opposition on national t.v"
Imagine if Trump refused a debate
Why Did Joe Biden Disappear Right as the Coronavirus Pandemic Exploded? - "Joe Biden just abdicated national leadership by disappearing for a week in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. According to mainstream media, it’s no big deal... While the Democratic leadership ignored the advice of public health officials and urged in-person voting and turnout in the midst of a pandemic, the Sanders campaign declined to urge voters to endanger themselves, saying going out to vote in these circumstances was “a personal decision.” And rather than continuing to fundraise for the presidential contest, the campaign instead mobilized its staff and volunteers to call and text to raise money for five charities, gathering $2 million in forty-eight hours to be distributed to Meals on Wheels, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and others.Then there’s former vice president Joe Biden, currently on track to cruise to the Democratic nomination. Biden, like Sanders, first held a press conference on March 12, the day the crisis first became real for many people, which started half an hour late due to technical difficulties. He then held a virtual town hall the day after, which saw Biden falsely claim credit for the Endangered Species Act before wandering off camera, an event so marred by technical difficulties that the “disjoined effort,” in Biden’s words, had to be ended early. Then came the debate, in which Biden was allowed by the moderators to brazenly lie about almost every aspect of his record, a contrast from debates in the past. In the lead up to the last Tuesday’s elections — even as the coronavirus death toll climbed, cities went into lockdown, and health and government officials urged people to stay inside at all costs — Biden’s campaign encouraged voters to turn out, falsely assuring them it was safe. The result was a day of chaos and confusion that almost certainly assisted the virus’s continued spread. Biden then gave a brief victory speech that ended in another odd moment that quickly went viral, now par for the course for the campaign... Besides what has, since 2019, become a trademark lackluster speaking performance — the candidate slurring and stumbling over words throughout and abruptly cutting off his own thought process mid-sentence several times — the speech saw Biden suddenly trail off midway through, visibly signal for someone behind the camera to lift either the teleprompter or cue cards he was reading off, before losing his train of thought, saying, “Let me go the second thing. I’ve spoken enough on it.”But beyond that, Biden’s address suffered from another shortcoming that all of his public addresses have shared. Instead of outlining bold, specific proposals to deal with the crisis — like, for instance his opponent’s calls for $2,000 direct payments to every American, emergency universal Medicare coverage, and an oversight agency to fight price-gouging and self-dealing — Biden prefers to criticize Republicans and issue vague calls for action and results: “We should be doing everything in our power to keep workers on payrolls … help the economy come out on the other side strong. The federal government should provide the resources to make that happen, while still protecting American taxpayers.” Other than promises to mobilize the military, Biden elides specifics, instead instructing Americans to read the nearly 7,000-word plan up on his website... It’s becoming increasingly unclear what voters should be listening to: Biden’s actual public utterances, or the plan he keeps insisting has all the answers... In 2016, then–Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s avoidance of press conferences became grist for a seemingly endless, months-long series of articles about the practice, which the Washington Post even labelled a “dangerous precedent” at one point. But Biden isn’t simply avoiding press conferences — he’s avoiding the press full-stop, not even appearing on any of the Sunday shows yesterday as his likely general election opponent uses his incumbency to take command of the narrative around the terrain over which this election will be fought. Forget the political malpractice going on here for one second. It’s not that today’s press hasn’t noticed Biden’s outrageous behavior— the media actually cheerfully remarks upon it as a conscious campaign strategy... As I found when I examined two months’ worth of MSNBC campaign coverage last year, the political world depicted by that network is unrecognizable to anyone who doesn’t rely on cable news to be informed — it’s one in which Biden’s policy positions, corporate fundraising, campaign stumbles, and worrying political record are almost entirely ignored or minimized in favor of the latest poll numbers.And it’s not just MSNBC. In These Times’s Sarah Lazare recently found that CNN’s coverage of Sanders was three times more negative after his blowout Nevada victory than its coverage of Biden after his game-changing South Carolina win, with Sanders’s negative coverage consisting of questioning his “electability” or tying him to Putin, and Biden’s focusing more on advice for how to improve his campaign. When we consider that Biden received nearly $72 million worth of free, positive media between South Carolina and the end of Super Tuesday alone, is it any wonder that Biden’s wins are built almost entirely on the back of his domination among older voters, who make up a larger share of both cable news viewers and Democratic voters? Nor should we be surprised that such an electorate trusts a man who can’t even set up a livestream to lead the world out of what may well end up a worse crisis than the Great Depression. For four years, the prevailing narrative among liberals has been that all of the world’s ills, particularly the election of Donald Trump, were due to misinformation spread on Facebook and other social media. It was a charge critics like myself refuted by pointing out that, among other things, the numbers show most voters still get the vast majority of their news from television. Other studies have since come out throwing cold water on this deep-seated belief.In fact, the narrative had it backwards. It’s the continuing domination of television news, particularly for older voters, that misshapes public perceptions, whether about elections or critical issues like climate change. It’s TV coverage that helps explain not just Trump’s rise, but the dynamics of this primary that have proven so frustrating to the Left"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Trump is “going to the mattresses”. Since Trump’s inauguration, Senate Democrats have considered Trump a threat to the republic and a possible Russian asset. They embarked on never-ending process of slow walking almost every presidential nomination to slow his efforts to effectively run the administrative branch.Yesterday, Trump pointed out that the nominee to head oversight over food distribution in the country had been waiting for approval for 2 1/2 years. Trump’s argument is that this has hampered his ability to respond to the coronavirus-related food distribution issues... The early Democrat response has been to use the “King Donald” rebuke and to say Trump doesn’t want his candidates to get a proper review by the Senate"
Obama: ‘I’m So Proud To Endorse Joe Biden—That’s Who They Went With, Huh?—For President’
Irami Osei-Frimpong on Twitter - "Warren endorsed 20 candidates. All women. She did not endorse AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, or Pramila Jayapal. Not even Ayanna Pressley. lol https://t.co/YBtDaf3JGi We dodged a bullet with Warren."
Intersectionality strikes again!
Trump licks his chops as Biden veers left on sanctuary cities, fracking - "Republicans could barely contain their glee. To them, Biden’s pronouncements on a range of issues — from energy to immigration to health care — provided a trove of on-camera material to paint him as a radical in moderate’s clothing in the general election. Though Biden drew praise for a strong debate performance, his commitments underscored the line he’s trying to straddle between pragmatism and progressivism as he works to unite the party as the likely Democratic nominee... “He effectively called for open borders — no deportations — and has already raised his hand for taxpayer-funded health care for illegals,” Scott Jennings, a former political aide in the George W. Bush White House, said of Biden’s leftward drift. “So, at the same time he’s called for a ban on fracking, he’s opening up America to a flood of illegal immigration. I’m sure this will fly in Pennsylvania and the rest of the upper Midwest. This issue — not to mention the tax increases to pay for abortions — will hurt badly in rural areas and in the big Senate races.” A Trump campaign aide told POLITICO on Monday that Biden had “openly declared war” on traditional energy sources, effectively pledging “a death sentence for the oil and natural gas industries.”Biden called for an end to new fracking (his staff later clarified he only meant on federal land). He said he’d endeavor to take millions of cars off the road, convert gas-powered fleets to clean-burning and end drilling on federal lands. He’d haul the world’s 100 biggest polluters before the U.S. in his first 100 days and make them pay an economic price. He’d convene the hemisphere to provide tens of billions for Brazil to stop burning the Amazon. And that was on the environment alone... For months, Biden has unveiled far-reaching plans that would make him a more progressive nominee than Hillary Clinton or his 2008 running mate, former President Barack Obama. Yet Biden has continued with his move left on past statements and policies relating to immigration, abortion, criminal justice and entitlement programs like Social Security... America Rising, the Republican opposition outfit, cited a Wall Street Journal infographic that tallied up Biden’s agenda as costing more than twice as much as Clinton’s, with his proposed taxes totaling three times as much as the Democratic nominee four years ago. The message: Biden and Sanders “will be virtually indistinguishable.”“As we have said over and over, the eventual Democrat candidate will have to adopt the agenda of the extreme left in order to become the nominee in the first place, and Joe Biden proved that""
Joe Biden Rails Against "Illegals," Calls For 700 Mile Border Fence In Resurfaced 2006 Video - YouTube
Sanders divided Democrats and handed Biden the lion's share - "In an election season in which most Democratic voters told candidates, party leaders and pollsters they cared only about beating President Donald Trump, Sanders focused first on smashing party pillars with a purist brand of progressive politics that demonized Democrats nearly as much as Republicans.He chose to divide a party desperate for unity, and he ended up with the smaller share. Now, the rest of the party has turned on him... voters soundly rejected Sanders in favor of Biden... It's little wonder why Biden's friends want the primary to end now. His performance on the campaign trail has been uneven... Ultimately, Sanders' plan to divide Democrats was effective. He just ended up on the wrong side of the split."
Why Democrats Are Still Not the Party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - The New York Times - "Voters appear to be in a death match between those who crave an aggressively progressive policy agenda with little tolerance for dissent and more moderates whose central goal is to undermine the populist movements in both parties and defeat Donald J. Trump. Both believe theirs is the winning formula to unseat President Trump... The results were pretty unequivocal. Justice Democrats lost virtually every primary race in 2018 when they fielded a homegrown liberal candidate, but they won one very important race: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset Representative Joe Crowley in a New York seat he had held for years.At the same time, scores of middle-of-the-road Democrats were able to get through crowded primaries and win over Republican and independent voters in the general election, giving their party a net gain of 40 seats and flipping the House.The theory of the case for progressive candidates is that they galvanized the Democratic base, and if people would just give them a chance, they will force through policies that most of the country supports. But the data — and many of the experiences of the 116th Congress — tell a more nuanced story... The Ocasio-Cortez victory was considerably more complicated than the postelection analysis, which focused almost completely on shifting demographics in her district. While the narrative of her victory portrayed younger, nonwhite and working-class voters as her secret base, in reality Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had soundly beaten the incumbent in the areas of the district that were by and large more wealthy and educated, in particular parts of Queens filled with white residents fleeing overpriced Manhattan.Mr. Crowley prevailed in most working-class corners of the district, including the district’s Hispanic and African-American enclaves; he beat Ms. Ocasio-Cortez by more than 25 points in her own Parkchester section of the Bronx.David Freedlander neatly summed this up in his analysis for Politico magazine soon after the race: “Ocasio-Cortez, the young Latina who proudly identifies as a democratic socialist, hadn’t been all but vaulted into Congress by the party’s diversity, or a blue-collar base looking to even the playing field. She won because she had galvanized the college-educated gentrifiers who are displacing those people.”... The 116th Congress also demonstrated that political influence outside of Washington does not always translate into legislative victories, as progressives are promising... “There are some people who one don’t really seem to understand the math of the majority making”"
Democrats Want Red Flag Laws for Everyone Except Gang Members - "House Democrats on Wednesday refused to include gang members in a list of who should have their guns removed via red flag laws...
'The majority of violent crime, including gun violence, in the United States is linked to gangs… My amendment is quite simple. It would allow the issuance of a red flag order against anyone whose name appears in a gang database if there was probable cause to include that individual in the database.'...
Representative Doug Collins, of Georgia, was swift to call out the hypocrisy of the Democrats, for previously supporting the “No Fly, No Buy,” motion, which would stopped anyone on the federal “no fly” list from buying guns.This is despite the list having misidentified many individuals as potential terrorists, such as the late Senator Ted Kennedy...
[Under] Project Exile... any convicted felons who were caught in possession of a firearm were instantly sentenced to 5 years in jail. The second offense was an automatic 10 year sentence.It was first tried in Richmond, Virginia, in the late 90s, and gun crime dropped by 40% after 1 year. Of course, the Congressional Black Caucus opposed it, claiming that it was a racist program that targeted minorities."
Did Bernie Sanders really spend his honeymoon in the USSR? - "The popular Democrat senator did indeed travel to the Soviet Union soon after his wedding in 1988 and even called the trip his “strange honeymoon.”"
Why Do Democrats Feel Sorry for Hillary Clinton? - "everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’ — those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department — was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was. And this, of course, is how Clinton sees it as well: She wasn’t responsible for her own campaign — her staffers were... Do you know the real reason Dr. Dao was so brutally tackled and thrown off that United flight? It was all about white supremacy. I mean, what isn’t these days? That idea is from the New Republic. Yes, the cops “seemed” to be African-American, as the author concedes, so the white-versus-minority paradigm is a little off. Yes, this has happened before to many people with no discernible racial or gender pattern. Yes, there is an obvious alternative explanation: The seats from which passengers were forcibly removed were randomly assigned. New York published a similar piece, which argued that the incident was just another example of Trump’s border-and-immigration-enforcement policies toward suspected illegal immigrants of color. That no federal cops were involved and there is no actual evidence at all of police harassment of Asian-Americans is irrelevant — it’s all racism, all the time, everywhere in everything.It’s easy to mock this reductionism, I know, but it reflects something a little deeper. Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society?... Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years... Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?"
S&P 500 joins Dow in exiting bear market as Sanders suspends presidential campaign
Joe Biden mixes up number of jobs lost, coronavirus deaths - "In his latest blunder, self-proclaimed “gaffe machine” Joe Biden claimed “millions” of Americans have died of the coronavirus and 85,000 jobs have been lost as a result of the pandemic... In other pandemic-related foot-in-mouth moments, Biden has referred to the disease as COVID-9 rather than COVID-19, and called the Chinese city where the pathogen emerged “Luhan,” not Wuhan... President Trump and his allies often describe Biden, 77, as senile, pointing to campaign-trail gaffes."
Biden: ‘If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black’ - "The eyebrow-raising remarks from the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee came during an at-times contentious interview on “The Breakfast Club” that aired Friday morning, during which co-host Charlamagne tha God challenged Biden over his decadeslong record on racial issues and current contemplation of a black, female running mate... an aide to the Biden campaign could be heard interjecting into the conversation, attempting to cut short the interview. “Thank you so much. That’s really our time. I apologize”... “You can’t do that to black media!” Charlamagne retored.“I do that to white media and black media because my wife has to go on at 6 o’clock,” Biden shot back, apparently referring to a subsequent media appearance by Jill Biden, before adding: “Uh oh. I’m in trouble.”... "If you think about the numbers, 1.3 million African Americans voted for Trump. He's saying [to] the 1.3 million African Americans that you're not black," Scott told Fox Business. "Who in the heck does he think he is?"Lindsey Graham, Scott's fellow South Carolina senator, tweeted that Biden's comments "were truly offensive, but a rare and honest insight into liberals' thinking. Liberals believe you really can’t be black, Latino, female, or intelligent unless you support their liberal agenda."... Biden also sought to respond to concerns among African Americans that Democratic politicians take their votes for granted by emphatically defending his ties to the black community, which was largely credited for contributing to his comeback primary victory earlier this year."
If someone took my vote for granted and held me in contempt, I wouldn't vote for him