All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[aja_christopher]

Looking at what's supposed to be hard hitting criticism of Sanders in this forum and twitter liberals, it ranges from the complete nonsense to a lack of priorities. People will spend more time hanging this over Sander's head than him voting in favor of bombing Kosovo, voting for the AUMF, or his decision to continue drone killings if he were to become President.

People are spending far more time asking for real data on how Sanders will pay for his policies and how he will sell higher taxes and military budget cuts to an American public that doesn't support them when it comes time to vote.

Pretending those issues don't exist will not make them go away, and they will only be highlighted if he wins the nomination.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

The reaction to the Bernie/Rogan fiasco is a clear example of how fucked US politics are.

The Americans voting today have spent years, if not decades, voting for and supporting war criminals. The politicians they favor and see as moral actors, support an apartheid state, and run countries around the world into the ground. They pal around with war criminals, and have them campaigning for them, but all of that is normal.

George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, or Madeleine Albright endorsing one of the Democrats running would cause less backlash from liberals in the country than Joe Rogan. Obama or Hillary endorsing a candidate would be business as usual, no one would bat an eye.

Looking at what's supposed to be hard hitting criticism of Sanders in this forum and twitter liberals, it ranges from the complete nonsense to a lack of priorities. People will spend more time hanging this over Sander's head than him voting in favor of bombing Kosovo, voting for the AUMF, or his decision to continue drone killings if he were to become President.

People should scrutinize Sanders for him sharing Rogan's comments about him, but it's sickening to see people view this as a bridge too far and position themselves as morally superior as they accept or even fawn over support from people with so much blood on their hands.

Spoiler: they didn’t like him anyways so of course they were going to make a big deal about this. Every single one of them is on record excusing worse from their preferred candidate. Just take them with a grain of salt.

[aja_christopher]

Spoiler: they didn’t like him anyways so of course they were going to make a big deal about this.

Again, I have nothing against Sanders -- though the recent Rogan situation has changed that somewhat.

I'm making a big deal about how he will pay for and enact his policies because that is the kind of thing that loses elections, not because I "don't like him".

You might want to gamble on dream politics, but given the stakes, I'll stick with the facts regarding "progressive" policies and national appeal.

-----
"The real defect in the theory that America is moving left is that the polling evidence does not back it up. The country might not like the GOP, but it is generally not abandoning conservative views.

In fact, the longer you look at polls on specific issues, the less you see a picture of a country moving left. Obviously, there are specific and well-known exceptions—the surging marijuana legalization movement is generally considered a liberal cause (even though National Review, the leading conservative magazine, has favored it for years). Ditto same-sex marriage.

But on many other issues, even as the country’s demographics are changing, our core beliefs are not. It’s instructive to compare today’s polls on a range of other issues with those from 1999-2000, the last time we were nearing the end of a two-term Democratic presidency. Look at issues through a conventional left-right prism, and you see a public that has either not changed its views or has even shifted in a more conservative direction."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...ng-left-213095

-----
"There's zero question that President Donald Trump has moved the Republican Party to the right -- tonally and on things like immigration policy -- over the past few years. What is less well-covered is how far Democrats have tacked to the left in recent years, and how there appears to be some level of unhappiness within the American electorate about the liberalness of the opposition party.

New data from a Quinnipiac University poll paints that unrest in stark relief.

Asked whether the "Democratic Party has moved too far to the left, too far to the right, or would you say the Democratic Party hasn't moved too far in either direction", nearly half -- 47%! -- of respondents say that the party has moved too far left. Asked hat same question of the Republican Party and just 37% say it has moved too far right.

Almost 6 in 10 men (57%) say Democrats have moved too far left as do 55% of whites with a college degree. Whites, generally speaking, are much more likely to say the party has moved too far left (53%) as compared to Hispanics (33%) and blacks (17%).

All of which is very interesting -- and should be worrisome for a Democratic Party establishment already worried that several of their leading presidential candidates are too liberal for the country at large."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/24/polit...oll/index.html

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Noam Chomsky Torches Democrats’ Narrow Trump Impeachment: ‘A Tragedy’ That ‘May Send Him Back to Office’

Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics as well as the world’s most-respected—and most-cited—living public intellectual, harshly criticized the Democratic Party’s impeachment inquiry as an insufficient indictment that could inadvertently help President Donald Trump cruise to re-election later this year.

As Democrats insist against evidence that their concerns have leverage or relevance and lodge continued protests against Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) iron grip on the GOP Senate Caucus—and as pundits wonder credulously about the technicalities and nomenclature in the decidedly non-legal but trial-like Senate process—Chomsky ridiculed both the overarching process and recent developments.

“Don’t think it matters,” Chomsky told Law&Crime of Harvard Law Professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz’s latest bid for publicity by joining Trump’s legal team. “It’s all predictable.”

The libertarian-socialist scholar then predicted that this impeachment will boost Trump to re-election:

I think the impeachment process, which avoids Trump’s major crimes and keeps to the fact that he tried to harm a prominent Democrat (like Watergate), will end up being a gift to Trump and may send him back to office. A tragedy.

“The worst crimes by far are those that literally threaten human survival, not in the distant future: his policies on escalating global warming and the race to develop still more destructive weapons,” Chomsky told Law&Crime email. “But the Dems would never agree that these are ‘high crimes.’”

The storied American dissident also said that Democratic Party leadership would never think to consider the Trump administration’s alleged human rights abuses along the U.S-Mexico border as impeachment-worthy crimes. Chomsky said that the situation was the “same” regarding Trump’s arguably unlawful use of military force against sovereign nations in the Middle East.

“How could the Dems regard it as ‘high crimes’ to carry out more deportations than any predecessor and a global assassination campaign of unprecedented scale?” Chomsky asked out loud—referencing the immigration and national security apparatuses and policies put into place by former president Barack Obama and taken to their logical extreme by Trump.

“Same as Watergate,” Chomsky explained. “There was an attempt, by Robert Drinan, to include [Richard] Nixon‘s real crimes, like the bombing of Cambodia, in the bill of impeachment, but that was cut out and the focus was on an attack on Democrats, much as today.”

Rev. Drinan was a prominent Jesuit priest, leftist, anti-war activist and Democratic Party representative from Massachusetts who drafted and introduced the original resolution calling for Nixon’s impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1973. Ultimately frustrated by liberal members of his own party, Drinan’s language regarding Nixon’s secret and unlawful bombing of Cambodia was swapped out for the Watergate charges.

“Can we be silent about this flagrant violation of the Constitution?” Father Drinan asked his liberal colleagues at the time. “Can we impeach a president for concealing a burglary but not for concealing a massive bombing?”

House Democrats answered that question in the affirmative—setting a behavioral precedent and squeamishness with criticizing war-making that has continued to the present day.

“The message appears to be the same: a real crime is attacking the powerful,” Chomsky continued. “It’s okay to murder [Black Panther leader] Fred Hampton (or any number of Cambodians, etc.), or to send children to concentration camps, and all the rest. But not to undermine those with power here.”

Chomsky’s impeachment-focused comments are in keeping with his prior public statements about the Democratic Party’s prior single-minded focus on the ultimately ineffectual Robert Mueller investigation.

“The Democrats invested everything in this issue,” Chomsky said at a forum with progressive radio host Amy Goodman in April of last year. “Well, turned out there was nothing much there. They gave Trump a huge gift. In fact, they may have handed him the next election…That’s a matter of being so unwilling to deal with fundamental issues, that they’re looking for something on the side that will somehow give political success.”

[Tami]

Des Moines Register editoral board endorses Elizabeth Warren

Why the Des Moines Register makes a presidential caucus endorsement and how the decision is reached

Endorsement: Elizabeth Warren will push an unequal America in the right direction

This might be a big deal for her campaign. Not sure if it is enough to push up higher in the polls.

[numberthirty]

The reaction to the Bernie/Rogan fiasco is a clear example of how fucked US politics are.

The Americans voting today have spent years, if not decades, voting for and supporting war criminals. The politicians they favor and see as moral actors, support an apartheid state, and run countries around the world into the ground. They pal around with war criminals, and have them campaigning for them, but all of that is normal.

George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, or Madeleine Albright endorsing one of the Democrats running would cause less backlash from liberals in the country than Joe Rogan. Obama or Hillary endorsing a candidate would be business as usual, no one would bat an eye.

Looking at what's supposed to be hard hitting criticism of Sanders in this forum and twitter liberals, it ranges from the complete nonsense to a lack of priorities. People will spend more time hanging this over Sander's head than him voting in favor of bombing Kosovo, voting for the AUMF, or his decision to continue drone killings if he were to become President.

People should scrutinize Sanders for him sharing Rogan's comments about him, but it's sickening to see people view this as a bridge too far and position themselves as morally superior as they accept or even fawn over support from people with so much blood on their hands.

Ditto.

..........

[numberthirty]

This is all conjecture though, and there's still the issue of passing legislation that will raise taxes or cut military spending to fund said programs.

Republicans -- and many moderates -- will almost always choose to cut non-military/entitlement spending rather than raise taxes.

Correcting the recession was essential to our survival as a country and even then the Republicans did their best to curtail spending, promote tax cuts, and oppose stimulus packages that buttressed needed social programs (like unemployment and health care funding) and helped save our automotive industry.

I'm no fan of walking into the next election without a solid plan, and higher taxes and military cuts will definitely come up in the debates with Trump.

We can either address those issues now, or wait until they are hammered by Trump and his Republican allies in the debates.

https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-amer...e-for-all-poll

Majority of Republicans supports 'Medicare for all,' poll finds

The survey, conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company, found that 52 percent of Republicans polled said they supported the option, while 48 percent said they opposed it.

Twenty-five percent said they "strongly" supported "Medicare for all," while 27 percent said they "somewhat" supported it.

However, other polling has shown that the increased attention on "Medicare for all" could be peeling away senior citizens' support of Republicans in the midterms.

A Morning Consult survey released last week found that 52 percent of voters whose top issues are Medicare and Social Security said they would vote for a Democrat in the midterms.

[aja_christopher]

https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-amer...e-for-all-poll

Polls aren't votes.

[numberthirty]

Polls aren't votes.

If we apply that to your case for Biden, the entire thing falls apart.

[aja_christopher]

If we apply that to your case for Biden, the entire thing falls apart.

Get rid of your tunnel vision and apply that logic to Sanders instead, since he lost badly last time around regardless of how well his policies did in polls.

I don't have a "case for Biden" -- if you interpret the information provided as advantageous to Sanders in a real election then that's a personal choice.

My main question remains how Sanders will pay for his policies, how he will win the election with those policies, and how he will enact them in Congress.

[Kusanagi]

On the 'will the public accept raised taxes for Medicare for All question', I think it depends on the spin really.

The big thing about this is while taxes will undoubtedly go up, if you can sell the US populace on the fact that they pay more for their current premiums than they would on taxes for medicare for all, it might be doable. But it definitely requires the Dems taking the Senate and maintaining the house to even have a shot in hell.

[worstblogever]

How are Warren and Sanders going to pay for their health care plans? Two words: wealth tax.

And to every poster on this board, from WBE to #30 to Mets to WPP to everyone else: Vote for whoever you want in the primary (if you are, in fact, a registered Democrat). Vote for Bernie, vote for Warren, hell vote for John Delaney if that turns you on! But when the nominee has been chosen, if it's not who you voted for, please, please, please don't be a sore loser. Swallow your pride and vote for that nominee in November, because if you insist on voting for some odd third party candidate, or staying home and not voting at all, out of spite, then we're all doomed.

Oh, I'll vote for them, and from the nomination on, and I won't be dumb enough to s*** talk them all over the internet from that point.

Because that's how this is supposed to work. Someone's fan club seem to be the only group unable to grasp how that works.

[numberthirty]

Get rid of your tunnel vision and apply that logic to Sanders instead, since he lost badly last time around regardless of how well his policies did in polls.

I don't have a "case for Biden" -- if you interpret the information provided as advantageous to Sanders in a real election then that's a personal choice.

My main question remains how Sanders will pay for his policies, how he will win the election with those policies, and how he will enact them in Congress.

Put simply...

- Trump ran on a better alternative to the ACA. He had the Presidency and Congress. His supporters do not have that better alternative.

Past that...

https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-amer...e-for-all-poll

Majority of Republicans supports 'Medicare for all,' poll finds

The survey, conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company, found that 52 percent of Republicans polled said they supported the option, while 48 percent said they opposed it.

Twenty-five percent said they "strongly" supported "Medicare for all," while 27 percent said they "somewhat" supported it.

However, other polling has shown that the increased attention on "Medicare for all" could be peeling away senior citizens' support of Republicans in the midterms.

A Morning Consult survey released last week found that 52 percent of voters whose top issues are Medicare and Social Security said they would vote for a Democrat in the midterms.

[aja_christopher]

On the 'will the public accept raised taxes for Medicare for All question', I think it depends on the spin really.

The big thing about this is while taxes will undoubtedly go up, if you can sell the US populace on the fact that they pay more for their current premiums than they would on taxes for medicare for all, it might be doable. But it definitely requires the Dems taking the Senate and maintaining the house to even have a shot in hell.

Sounds like a long shot, and this isn't the time to be taking long shots when you could go with a layup for the win.

Put simply...

Put simply, despite his policies, Sanders lost by millions of votes on the "left".

[numberthirty]

Sounds like a long shot, and this isn't the time to be taking long shots when you could go with a layup for the win.

If the following reflects actual reality, we cannot assume that your "Layup..." is actually what you say it is.

Polls aren't votes.