All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[shooshoomanjoe]

I'm far more concerned about the anti left propaganda from trump's administration than I am about the coronavirus.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Media Covering Coronavirus to ‘Bring Down the President,’ Mulvaney Claims



This **** is so dangerous. These wild aspersions of being victimized by reporting on a worldwide virus because they don't want to be "blamed" for the poor response so far and lack of planning. And the connections to having cut the CDC budgets etc and prioritizing a racist do nothing wall over making sure we are ready for these things.

There are millions of people that easily buy into these conspiracies. And will disregard or not do basic things to protect themselves. That would be fine if their believing in conspiracies only effected them.

But just like anti vaxxers decisions we ALL have to live around these people and not believing science or warnings from doctors, or trusting reporting matters.

Its dangerous and supremely selfish and irresponsible

That's my concern as well. Gulliable Trumpanzees who get their news and form their opinions on the world based on what they see and hear on Faux News is VERY dangerous. I heard a report this morning about a woman in California having contracted coronavirus despite seemingly not having come into contact with a carrier. It won't take much for this to spiral out of control, while we're not talking about the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, because it's far easier for people to travel the globe than it was a century ago, the chances of this morphing into a global pandemic are problematic.

[sbo]

I'm far more concerned about the anti left propaganda from trump's administration than I am about the coronavirus.

The coronavirus is clearly just a hoax concocted by the Chinese, the liberal left-wing media, and Obama to convince you that you need health care, while "Real Americans" know all you need is tax cuts for wealthy people, a border wall, and Trump.

[Tendrin]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A political advocacy group founded by Bernie Sanders entered into a nondisclosure agreement with an African American political consultant that bars her from discussing a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination at the organization and the Vermont senator’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The consultant, Tezlyn Figaro, confirmed the existence of the nondisclosure agreement to The Associated Press without providing additional details.

The deal is tied to a 2019 lawsuit in which Figaro said she was fired from the Sanders-created political group Our Revolution a year earlier due to her race and in “retaliation for complaining about the organization’s treatment towards her and African-Americans.” The lawsuit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money. Though the lawsuit was aimed at Our Revolution, it included broad criticism of Sanders’ campaign, arguing an all-white leadership staff “was accused of racism” by black staffers and failed to engage black voters.

https://apnews.com/c5201196cdc5897e76e49a3352a2c8dd

[BeastieRunner]

Anybody see the combined presser this morning on the stock market and the pandemic response team?

It oscillated between we have no plan and this ...

[Celgress]

So, my friends who takes South Carolina?

I'm conflicted. I must say. I think there is a 55% chance Sanders beats Biden due to his momentum and youth vote, but barely, and a 45% chance Biden's "Southern Fire Wall" holds. I'm the least certain of this outcome than of any state yet.

[Tendrin]

So, my friends who takes South Carolina?

I'm conflicted. I must say. I think it there is a 55% Sanders beats Biden due to his momentum, but barely, and a 45% chance Biden's "Southern Fire Wall" holds. I'm the least certain of this outcome of any state yet.

I mean, Sanders seems really unlikely to take it based on what we know. Nothing is impossible but I'd say current projections hold and Biden wins by anywhere between 15 and 20%.

[Celgress]

Another thing, I don't see how Pete Buttigieg survives South Carolina as a viable candidate unless he overperforms by a huge margin. A Democratic nominee needs African American support to win the nomination and general election, something Mayor Pete is sorely lacking.

[Tami]

So, my friends who takes South Carolina?

I'm conflicted. I must say. I think there is a 55% chance Sanders beats Biden due to his momentum and youth vote, but barely, and a 45% chance Biden's "Southern Fire Wall" holds. I'm the least certain of this outcome than of any state yet.

Unless a Candidate is running unchallenged, it's rare for any to win every single state and territory. No matter how much momentum Sanders has, he's going to lose somewhere.

[worstblogever]

Unless a Candidate is running unchallenged, it's rare for any to win every single state and territory. No matter how much momentum Sanders has, he's going to lose somewhere.

Florida looks like a longshot for Bernie. Especially after he went and said nice things about Fidel Castro for no discernible reason.

[Jack Dracula]

Never mind that there is a scenario where the rest of the world sorts it, and potentially leaves Trump with an upswing to run on in the fall.

While there's no telling where it will go, there's an "Upside..." scenario for Trump.

Despite Trump managing to not break the healthy economy Obama left him, how much of a positive impact has it really had on the average American?
The rich became even richer and have less to pay in taxes on their gains, but overall the ones who were middle to lower-middle class haven't seen their situations change much. Some have seen things get worse.
That's what the Democrats need to respond every time the Republicans talk about the strong economy. "Sure the rich get richer, but how's it helped the regular people?"

[worstblogever]

In both 2015, and in 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Gene Alday, a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives who is a pro-life and pro-death penalty, Voter ID supporting, climate-change denying, God fearin’ American who also happened to be quoted in 2015 saying, “I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call 'welfare crazy checks.' They don't work.I had to go to the emergency room for pain. I liked to died. I laid in there for hours because they (blacks) were in there being treated for gunshots." But don’t worry, in his apology for those remarks, Alday insisted he was being taken out of context, just like the majority of Republicans do when they frequently say racist things. Alday lost his seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives in the 2015 elections, and hopefully will not be heard from again.

On this date in 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled Angela Kaaihue, who has taken two shots at running for the U.S. House of Representatives for Hawaii's 2nd Congressional District in 2016. She describes herself as a "real estate developer", and has previously failed to be elected Mayor of Honolulu. Kaaihue's first attempt at getting elected to Congress in 2016 was actually in the special election for Hawaii's 1st Congressional District, where she bizarrely ran as a Democrat trying to replace the Congressman Mark Takai, who was dying from pancreatic cancer. She was utterly wrecked by Colleen Hanabusa, only receiving 3% of the overall vote. Perhaps her poor performance had something to do with her choice to run campaign advertising where she proudly declared herself "healthy and cancer-free" as a positive trait, and later gave a radio interview where she defended her ads, saying, "Would you want to vote for someone who has cancer?" She then continued to dig the hole even deeper when she later added the assessment that, “If you have cancer, it's almost like having AIDS, you don't want people to know." Now, given how disastrous her performance was in the special election, one would hope the Republican Party wouldn't welcome someone with a questionable educational background and poor campaigning skills into their ranks with open arms. Alas, the Hawaii GOP did just that, and had Angela Kaaihue as a candidate in the primary to run against their chosen son, Eric Hafner... and she won with 56% of the vote. And that decision blew up right in their faces, almost immediately. It was just a tad disconcerting, perhaps, to GOP insiders that Kaaihue actually was arrested in 2013, sentenced to probation, and ordered to undergo a mental health exam. Or maybe they should have balked because she chose to have a website that looked, at best, like a Myspace page with auto-playing music when you went to it. And they chose not to get upset about the fact that Kaaihue was a fanatical Christian who believes that a Christian religious identity supersedes any other qualifications for office, and put out bigoted campaign ads to tout herself as a Christian, and try and attack Tulsi Gabbard, her opponent, for being Hindu. She then took it a step further by claiming both Rep. Gabbard, and her previous opponent, Rep. Hanabusa, were both devil-worshippers, or that a vote for Gabbard was "a vote for Satan". And then, for whatever reason, Kaaihue decided to get on Facebook, and start hysterically ranting about Japanese people in a now-deleted post where she said they were "murderous", "lieing" (her typo, not ours), "stealing," and "conspirators." She told them to go back to Japan and "eat your fucking radiation at Fukushima you f***ing low life scum," among other things. When the local media asked her to explain herself, she walked her comments back, although continued to underline that she was a theocratic Christian twit when she said, "I truly regret posting that about Japanese people. I don’t think all Japanese people are bad, I just think that the non-Christian Japanese people.” (NOTE: That didn't help.) Kaaihue was disavowed by the GOP, and of course responded rationally to being denounced by the Hawaii GOP. HA! Of course she didn't. She started raving on social media further about it, getting even more fanatical than normal, and insisting that everyone was silencing her, a true "Messenger of God". Kaaihue got crushed by Tulsi Gabbard, getting a little less than 19% of the vote against her in the general election that year. She is likely too toxic politically for any party, even the GOP, from giving her a chance to run for any office going forward.


On this date in 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Jeffrey Guice, who was first elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives back in 2007 by running unopposed, and other than a challenger who he crushed by over 40 points in the GOP Primary in 2015, has been allowed to have a career as a legislator without any competition whatsoever. Guice’s odds of seeing a challenger in 2019 went up, though, in 2019 because after a mother wrote to him to express her difficulties in getting her Medicaid benefits to cover the cost of her daughter’s medications for her Type 1 diabetes to keep her alive, Guice responded to her e-mail thusly:

"I am sorry for your problem. Have you thought about buying the supplies with money that you earn?"

The parents, between the two of them, were working three jobs to cover medical expenses. And they posted Guice’s response (one of only 3 they received from state legislators) onto Facebook, prompting him to apologize to try and save his own ass politically, going forward. But really, Guice was probably too busy trying to preserve the public glorification of the Confederacy to bother trying to save a poor diabetic girl’s life.

That’s actually understating how awful his legislative career is:

• March 14th, 2012: Guice votes for HB 921, a GOP “Voter ID” bill aimed at suppressing the vote in the state.
• April 1st, 2014: Jeffrey Guice votes for HB 1400, a ban on abortion at 20 weeks that flies in the face of the Roe v. Wade ruling.
• February 17th, 2016: Guice votes for HB 786, a nice little bill to allow people to be authorized to carry firearms in church.
• February 25th, 2016: Jeffrey Guice votes for HB 519, an anti-choice bill to prohibit “dismemberment abortions”, which might mean a D&E, but who can even tell with these anti-abortion morons anymore.
• March 2nd, 2016: Guice votes for HB 983, to make it easier for parents to get exemptions for having to get their children vaccinated.
• March 26th, 2016: Jeffrey Guice votes for HB 683, to authorize the use of the gas chamber, the firing squad, and the electric chair as possible means of execution in Mississippi.
• February 5th, 2018: Guice votes for HB 1510, a ban on abortion on 15 weeks even more likely to be overturned by a judge than the 20 week ban Guice voted for four years earlier.

When you put all that together with his exchange with his constituent simply trying to keep her daughter alive… suffice to say Jeffrey Guice is kind of a ****hole. Regrettably, he won re-election in the 2019 election in Mississippi, only getting an Independent candidate as a challenger, and coasting to re-election by over 50 points. He will remain in office until 2024. Jesus wept.

[PaulBullion]

Florida looks like a longshot for Bernie. Especially after he went and said nice things about Fidel Castro for no discernible reason.

If both Buttigieg and Bloomberg dropped out before Texas and California, Biden would be unstoppable.

[PaulBullion]

As the stock market crash is trending on twitter, a reminder that both supposed Trump tweets about what should be done to the president during such crashes are actually false. I find it infuriating that with all the stupid and evil tweets out there, people feel the need to create fake ones.


So what do you guys think how deep the DJI is going to dip? My guess is down to 22,500 points within the next 8 business days, and a bumpy up and down stretch after that.

[Celgress]

Florida looks like a longshot for Bernie. Especially after he went and said nice things about Fidel Castro for no discernible reason.

Well, I think we know what the reason might be. Fidel and Sanders are (or were in Fidel's case) fellow travelers as the saying goes. Often those who believe in the same radical ideology don't want to criticize each other openly.

Edit- I agree it was a stupid move especially in this case.