All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Tami]

https://twitter.com/DanielJCamacho/s...89391660457986

This is a good twitter thread.

Very interesting thread.

[Theleviathan]

https://twitter.com/DanielJCamacho/s...89391660457986

This is a good twitter thread.

Thanks, it really was. That said, any fractures on the right are fractures I want to see expanded. The margin needed for victory is going to be tight.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

It's my prediction that Buttigieg either wins Iowa or comes so close that it tilts the election significantly. I may be wrong about that, time will tell.

Even if Pete won Iowa and NH he's too far behind to have a real shot at making up 20 points. Warren and Sanders voters won't flood to him. And if it hurts Biden, it helps Warren and Sanders first because they are way ahead of Pete. He's also stopped surging for a month and is actually going down so the idea that he'll hold a margin of error lead in Iowa as more candidates filter in their ground game seems unlikey at this point

[Tami]

Even if Pete won Iowa and NH he's too far behind to have a real shot at making up 20 points. Warren and Sanders voters won't flood to him. And if it hurts Biden, it helps Warren and Sanders first because they are way ahead of Pete. He's also stopped surging for a month and is actually going down so the idea that he'll hold a margin of error lead in Iowa as more candidates filter in their ground game seems unlikey at this point

I think Pete should have run for Governor before tackling running for President. He may be very smart, but he strikes me as also being very green.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

I think Pete should have run for Governor before tackling running for President. He may be very smart, but he strikes me as also being very green.

He's never won an election where he needed to get more than 8000 votes. I'd rather know he could win a statewide seat before asking him to win the country. For better or worse, I see paths for Biden, Warren, and Sanders. I look at Pete and I see so many areas he's not competetive in. He's really just praying if he targets Iowa like crazy he can win it and then he'll get a magic windfall that carries him. Really it's going to come down to who between Sanders/Warren can win Iowa and NH vs Biden. That's the race. If Pete does win one of those, he likely is just giving it to Biden.

[JackDaw]

He's never won an election where he needed to get more than 8000 votes. I'd rather know he could win a statewide seat before asking him to win the country. For better or worse, I see paths for Biden, Warren, and Sanders. I look at Pete and I see so many areas he's not competetive in. He's really just praying if he targets Iowa like crazy he can win it and then he'll get a magic windfall that carries him. Really it's going to come down to who between Sanders/Warren can win Iowa and NH vs Biden. That's the race. If Pete does win one of those, he likely is just giving it to Biden.

Maybe he is hoping really to get some one to adopt him as their VP?

Even that..on facts you guys are coming out with...seems miles above what his experience justifies.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Terri Proud, a former member of the Arizona House of Representatives who during the one term she did serve in office, tried to get the Bible taught in public schools, while voting against having classes in the same schools that would teach ethnic studies, and once responded to a constituent's letter to ask why Proud supported a ban on abortion on 20 weeks by telling her that all women having one should be forced to watch a video of the procedure first, and saying "until the dead child can tell me that she/he cannot feel pain, I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living - I will be voting YES." Hopefully this means Proud has not sought out necromancers to talk to aborted fetuses. Anyway, when the media began to report on her irrational response, she released a statement that accused Planned Parenthood of running a for-profit industry based on aborted fetuses. After those PR disasters for the Arizona GOP, and against the wishes of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, Terri Proud was hired in the Women's Services Department of the Arizona Veterans' Services Department, where she gave an interview with the local media where she argued against women in the military, altogether, because they get periods, and was summarily fired for her remarks.

On this date in 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled David Gowan, a former House Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, who served in that body from 2009-2017 before term limits ended his time in the legislature. He’s enough of a boob to have used the incorrect spelling of “Republican principals” rather than “Principles” upon his own campaign website, and in the eight years he was a state legislator in Arizona, Gowan’s name popped up as a supporter of some of the stupidest legislation to be submitted in the Grand Canyon State, from the anti-immigration law SB 1070 that allowed racial profiling of Latinos, to SB 1610, a bill to name an “official state gun” for Arizona, to HB 2625, which was meant to allow employers the right to reject health insurance coverage for contraceptives for their female employees, to his co-sponsorship of SB 1439, an insane bill that intended to make gold and silver as acceptable legal tender in Arizona, to HB 2284, to allow law enforcement to conduct an unannounced, warrantless search upon any abortion clinic whenever they choose, the Fourth Amendment be damned, to his vote for HB 2643, an attempt by Arizona Republicans to nullify the enforcement of the Affordable Care Act… those are just a few of the extreme pieces of legislation he was attached to. The moment that made him stand out enough to earn a CSGOPOTD profile back in early 2016 was how in January of 2016, Hank Stephenson, a reporter from the Arizona Capitol Times, published a piece about how David Gowan had logged nearly 4,800 miles on a state-issued vehicle over only a 19 day span. Some of the events he traveled to were related to Gowan driving around to campaign for a seat in U.S. Congress to represent Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, that he was running for in 2016, and using a state vehicle for that purpose is against the law. Gowan, as a result, was required to reimburse the state more than $12,000, and his office ended up under investigation by Arizona’s Attorney General for misuse of public resources. Gowan held a grudge and after two unsuccessful attempts at banning Hank Stephenson specifically from the floor of the Arizona House of Representatives, he made a third attempt that was peculiar to many, as moved to implement a new policy requiring reporters who want to cover the legislature from the House floor to undergo rigorous background checks (but still not for anyone purchasing a firearm), including an examination of their criminal, civil, and driving records. Gowan’s new policy goes as far as to list specific offenses, including misdemeanor ones like trespassing, which would automatically disqualify a reporter from being on the House floor for up to 10 years. And guess what? Hank Stephenson was convicted of misdemeanor trespassing following a bar fight he was in a couple years prior. Gowan tried claiming the move was to ensure the safety of legislators, and when opponents to the move pointed out that no legislator had been attacked in the capitol going back decades, Gowan invoked 9/11 to justify his attack on journalists, saying, “There had never been an attack on 9/11 either, like that occurred either, before on our shore. But it did.” On the bright side, as a result of Stephenson’s reporting, and likely, his treatment of that reporter after the fact, karma came in the form of a last place finish in the primary for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District in 2016.

In 2015, 2016, and 2018, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Arizona Secretary of State Michelle Reagan, who prior to winning that office, was a member of the Arizona State Legislature from 2002-2015, first with eight years in the Arizona House of Representatives and then with four in the Arizona State Senate. As a legislator, Reagan supported “religious freedom” legislation to allow for the legal discrimination of LGBT citizens and bans on same sex marriage, voted to allow employers to refuse to provide health insurance coverage for contraception, tried to extend waiting periods for divorces, supported disastrously ineffective drug testing for welfare recipients (always overturned by courts as unconstitutional), co-sponsored the anti-immigrant law SB1070, tried to make English the official language in Arizona (in spite of such laws being repeatedly overturned by the courts as unconstitutional, including in Arizona in 1998), co-sponsored Arizona’s version of a “Birther Bill”, tried to prevent the implementation of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 treaty based on paranoid conspiracy theories, and voted for a bill that would allow for surprise unannounced inspections of abortion facilities (which was overturned for being a flagrant violation of the 4th Amendment). After a single term as a state senator, Reagan filed to run for Arizona Secretary of State. During the lead up to the election, she was asked by reporters about her votes to support both Arizona's "Birther Bill", as well as Arizona's "religious freedom" law to allow discrimination towards gays. After an awkward pause, all she could muster was to meagerly say,"I just think that we just need to follow the state laws, and the state laws are pretty clear and, um, what is required in state law is what needs to be followed. As secretary of state, the laws are very clear." After taking office, she has begun using the power of her office to try and prevent the release of information by dark-money donors, announcing in late May 2015 that she would not enforce Arizona election law to do so, and declaring the law unconstitutional (which is for the courts to decide, actually). If that's not brazen enough for you, she then also threatened to sue the Clean Elections Commission if they themselves researched where the dark money in politics was coming from to create political ads. That might be precisely the main interest that Michelle Reagan has, as she's also trying to intervene to prevent Arizona's legislative map from being re-districted by the non-partisan Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. She also insists there is massive “voter fraud” out there, despite a lack of evidence to prove it, and thus keeps calling for stricter Voter ID laws, that could disenfranchise even more voters in Arizona. Michelle Reagan continued to find her name in the news a lot during the 2016 elections. First, after abysmally long lines to vote in the primaries of the 2016 election that she somehow was not prepared for, she feigned ignorance about the difficulties, and accidentally blurted out that her actions were meant to suppress the vote, before blaming the lines on people actually voting. She was also so breathtakingly bad at her job that she allowed Russian operatives to hack into Arizona’s voting rolls, trying to justify the security breach as “they looked like an employee” in an e-mail sent to her office used to fish their way in, and repeatedly was sued for trying to reject voter registration by Democrats (go figure). She was lucky that the state attorney general of Arizona is a Republican as well, as he launched an investigation into her activities, and deemed them to be not criminal, but decidedly incompetent. And, after all this gross incompetence, and with the Blue Wave mounting, Michelle Reagan was unseated in the 2018 GOP Primary for Arizona’s Secretary of State, earning only 33% of the vote in that race, and getting beat by a 2/1 margin by Steve Gaynor, the man who would go on to be narrowly defeated by new Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Hobbs takes elections seriously, and we’re hoping that much of the chicanery that Republicans like Michelle Reagan have used to disenfranchise voters will be out the window in Arizona in the 2020 elections. At least for the moment, though, Michelle Reagan is now out of office, and we’ll set aside her profile at this time, and profile a different wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 812-40, since this was established in July 2014.)

[worstblogever]

David Stringer

Welcome to what is the 812th original profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, where we’ll be discussing former Arizona House of Representatives David Stringer, who advanced out of the GOP Primary in the 2016 elections in a conservative Arizona district by all of 700 votes. His time in office was brief, where his only real legislative moves seemed to be to vote for a resolution to declare pornography “a public health crisis”, and to vote for an insane anti-choice bill that would require physicians to attempt to revive “viable” fetuses after an abortion (we used quotation marks because by definition at the age the procedure is permitted, those fetuses would not be viable).

David Stringer was infamous not for any legislative action, but instead, for the series of racist statements he made during his brief time in office. In June of 2018, Stringer went on an extended rant where he said immigration was "politically destabilizing" labelling it an "existential threat" that would radically alter US demographics for the worse. He openly groused about how 60 percent of public school students were minorities, so there weren't "enough white kids to go around". That grotesque bit of xenophobia was enough to make even Gov. Doug Ducey, who’s been photographed with white nationalists, call for him to resign for being too racist.

David Stringer was supposed to apologize for his remarks at a press conference that he chose to hold at a LoLo’s Chicken & Waffles (really), where he appeared with the always-suspect civil rights advocate who’s disavowed by actual civil rights advocates, Jarrett Maupin (who we mentioned before on 4/1/17), where yes, he gave a non-apology that amounted to him being sorry if any minorities were offended by remarks he claimed were taken out of context, and did not immediately give a clear answer when asked if he was a white nationalist. We’ll make note again, that he chose the location for his apology for racist remarks at a fried chicken and waffle joint, and Maupin, when asked why the press conference didn’t take place in Stringer’s distict, said there were no colored people there before noting he wasn’t “serving up cubed watermelon”.

Stringer than started channeling white nationalist Congressman Steve King by talking about the benefits of racial “homogeneity”:

"If you look at the most stable nations in the world today – like Japan, for example – they have a high degree of homogeneity, if you will."

This is what any level-headed person would deem “bad optics”. A few weeks later, David Stringer decided to speak at Arizona State University, and again managed to get racist as hell, claiming that “diversity in our country is relatively new” and giving his opinion that African Americans “don’t blend in because they look different”, before finishing his polluted stream of thought with his observation that "The difference between the Polish-American immigrant and the immigrant from Somalia is the second-generation Polish immigrant looks like the Irish kid and the German kid and every other kid. But the immigrant from Somalia does not."


So other than a few Arizona Republicans calling upon Stringer to resign for his racist comments, they didn’t actually do a damned thing about it, and he kept hovering around the legislature for months, waiting for his next chance to blurt out something bigoted. They weren’t about to grow a backbone and actually expel him from his position, and he was going to stubbornly refuse to apologize or leave office.

That is, until a 1983 Baltimore Police Department report surfaced that showed David Stringer was arrested for soliciting sex from two underage boys, both under the age of 15, and also was in possession of child pornography. Stringer tried claiming the extensive description given of his disturbing behavior by the victims was false (even though he entered a special plea to the charges that earned him five years’ probation), but resigned in April of 2019 while claiming he was forced out of office and it was “deeply and shamefully offensive to free elections and democratic governance”.

This racist old motherf***ing pedophile shouldn’t have passed a background check to work in a school, let alone a state legislature. And we hope that the statute of limitations isn’t so long in Maryland that he can’t be brought up on charges today. David Stringer is one of the more vile people we’ve profiled in a while.
 

[Mister Mets]

Even if Pete won Iowa and NH he's too far behind to have a real shot at making up 20 points. Warren and Sanders voters won't flood to him. And if it hurts Biden, it helps Warren and Sanders first because they are way ahead of Pete. He's also stopped surging for a month and is actually going down so the idea that he'll hold a margin of error lead in Iowa as more candidates filter in their ground game seems unlikey at this point

If he wins New Hamphire and Iowa, he'll get a lot of positive attention.

Given how crowded the field is, he doesn't need to gain too many points in order to dominate.

It's also easier to gain a lot of points in primaries, just because the voters are generally picking between candidates they would support in a general election.

Buttigieg is quite green, but a younger Rhodes scholar who served in the military might be the strongest contrast against an elderly draft-dodger who no one has accused of being well-read.

Maybe he is hoping really to get some one to adopt him as their VP?

Even that..on facts you guys are coming out with...seems miles above what his experience justifies.

The dynamics of Pete as a running mate will be unusual since he's a white guy with a husband. Biden or Sanders would probably face too much of a backlash if they select him, because he is still a white man. I'm not sure a female candidate would want a gay male running mate, and I suspect Warren and Klobuchar also don't want a white running mate.

US military academy says white nationalism is a-ok.

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5...ushpmg00000013

Nope. They said that it wasn't an example of white nationalist.

[Mister Mets]

As opposed to what, exactly?

The moderate Democrat whose sound strategy easily won the Presidency in 2016?

Are you sure the election would have been close with Sanders as nominee. It seems like it would've been easier for people on the fence to back Trump with an argument of "he's flawed, but at least he's a capitalist."

2016 was lost because people didn't like Hillary. It had zero to do with her being moderate or liberal or whatever other term you want to use. People didn't like Hillary Clinton.

And even if that wasn't true, progressive candidates have ZERO wins. Including even primaries. Let me rephrase in your style:

The progressive Independent who pretended to be a Democrat so he could use their structures to get elected and bitch about them later whose sound strategy easily won the 2016 Democratic Primary and didn't, in any way, lose by 12% and 3 million votes.

Well, Hillary Clinton changed politics.

Before she lost to Donald Trump in the General Election, allowing him to be a much more significant political figure capable of implementing his policies (less immigration, more tariffs), she performed much worse than expected to Sanders, giving American socialists hope that they might be ascendant, when it may just have been that the other alternatives were terrible.

It has been a really long time in American politics that Democrats went with someone far left, so there isn't the memory of McGovern's 49 state loss.

Put simply...

That I honestly believe that Castro/Booker/Harris have almost no shot at the nomination has nothing to do with that a set of rules put into place by the party stands only to potentially alienate minority voters. Those voters will likely be needed to have any realistic chance at a win next year.

So, yes. It is concerning even if a less divisive primary process will most likely eliminate each of them. It is concerning because it stands to hurt any eventual nominee's chances while providing no benefit that I can discern.

The party created the rules well in advance. If voters don't select minority candidates as their first choice, a lack of African-American and Hispanic candidates on the debate stage is inevitable.

There are major advantages in winnowing out the field.

Part of the problem of why Yang was the only minority candidate on the stage may be the limited bench. If there are two African American Democrats and two Hispanic American Democrats in the Senate, they're more likely not to be represented among the more successful presidential contenders, even if you figure they have above-average political talent. Odds are that the top three talents in the Senate won't include four out of 47.

[Tami]

Second Amendment Sanctuary push aims to defy new gun laws

BUCKINGHAM, Va. (AP) — A standing-room only crowd of more than 400 packed the meeting room, filled the lobby and spilled into the parking lot recently in rural Buckingham County, Virginia. They had one thing on their minds: guns.

The vast majority favored a proposal to protect their right to carry firearms: declaring the county a Second Amendment Sanctuary.

Similar scenes have played out across Virginia over the last six weeks. Gun owners are descending on local offices to demand that their government leaders establish sanctuaries for gun rights.

The resolutions, promoted heavily by the gun rights group Virginia Citizens Defense League, vary from county to county, but most declare the intention of local officials to oppose any “unconstitutional restrictions” on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. In the last two months, more than 100 counties, cities and towns in Virginia have approved such resolutions.

[Tami]

Here's How Much Pete Buttigieg Is Worth

The Net Worth Of Every 2020 Presidential Candidate

[Tendrin]

well this is going to make WBE's day... well, okay, it's probably gonna make him reach for the booze.

https://twitter.com/alkapdc/status/1...303353351?s=21

[Theleviathan]

Even if Pete won Iowa and NH he's too far behind to have a real shot at making up 20 points. Warren and Sanders voters won't flood to him. And if it hurts Biden, it helps Warren and Sanders first because they are way ahead of Pete. He's also stopped surging for a month and is actually going down so the idea that he'll hold a margin of error lead in Iowa as more candidates filter in their ground game seems unlikey at this point

November/December is when Obama went from 20 points down to Hillary in 2007 and started picking off primary wins. Now, Buttegeig is a little further behind, in a more crowded field, but he also has a less substantial favorite than Obama had against Hillary. I'm not even saying it's likely, just that I think he has a shot to be among the final three candidates with either Bernie or Warren dropping out.

The Democrats he pulls from are the ones who tend to be pragmatic and moderate. Yes, that pulls from Biden, but it is also the largest part of the Democratic base so there are more votes to split.

Either way, I think Klobuchar's shot at him at the debate was spot on. He shouldn't be up there and I don't think he's a particularly good candidate. I do, however, think he is a serious threat to get the nomination if he performs well in Iowa. He's well-spoken, milquetoast enough not to be threatening but with enough checks on the resume to be appealing to certain groups, and he is good in front of a camera. Again, not saying likely or certain or praising him, just pointing some things out.

[Iron Maiden]

Very interesting thread.

Interesting thoughts and something that has been going around for a while. Side note: I hate when people use Twitter for detailed discussions. It's such a horrible tool for that kind of thing.