All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[SquirrelMan]

Globe/Suffolk have Sanders on top of Biden now, too.

And Emerson and Survey USA have Sanders surging, too. Not ahead but surging.

Economist today has Bernie slipping to 3rd place while Warren is recovering.

Biden 28, Warren 21, Sanders 18, uttigieg 8, Bloomberg 6, Klobuchar 4, Yang 3, Steyer 2, Gabbard 3, Bennet 0, Delaney 0

[AnakinFlair]

Trump Ambassador Beat and 'Kidnapped' Woman in Watergate Cover-Up: Reports

Appropriate name- the guy sounds like a horror story.

Don't think this has been mentioned in this thread- A few days ago, Rep. Ted Lieu made remarks about Devin Nunes working with Lev Parnas to undermine the government. Nunes, the Trump disciple that he is, immediately sued Rep. Lieu and demanded an apology. Rep. Lieu sent a reply back to the lawyer, which ended with 'Take this letter and shove it."

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Feel the Bern:
CNN poll: Bernie Sanders surges to join Biden atop Democratic presidential pack

National polls don’t mean much in primaries it’s about individual states the day of

[kidfresh512]

Appropriate name- the guy sounds like a horror story.

Don't think this has been mentioned in this thread- A few days ago, Rep. Ted Lieu made remarks about Devin Nunes working with Lev Parnas to undermine the government. Nunes, the Trump disciple that he is, immediately sued Rep. Lieu and demanded an apology. Rep. Lieu sent a reply back to the lawyer, which ended with 'Take this letter and shove it."

That's hot. I hadn't read that

[Gray Lensman]

Appropriate name- the guy sounds like a horror story.

Don't think this has been mentioned in this thread- A few days ago, Rep. Ted Lieu made remarks about Devin Nunes working with Lev Parnas to undermine the government. Nunes, the Trump disciple that he is, immediately sued Rep. Lieu and demanded an apology. Rep. Lieu sent a reply back to the lawyer, which ended with 'Take this letter and shove it."

I read a thread elsewhere about that - the posters were comparing it to the 1974 Cleveland Stadium letter.

"Dear sir, we thought you should be aware that some ******* is signing your name to stupid letters. Letter enclosed."

[Tami]

I read a thread elsewhere about that - the posters were comparing it to the 1974 Cleveland Stadium letter.

"Dear sir, we thought you should be aware that some ******* is signing your name to stupid letters. Letter enclosed."

LOL sometimes you just have to remind people about how stupid they are.

[AnakinFlair]

I read a thread elsewhere about that - the posters were comparing it to the 1974 Cleveland Stadium letter.

"Dear sir, we thought you should be aware that some ******* is signing your name to stupid letters. Letter enclosed."

Googles '1974 Cleveland Stadium letter'

[Tami]

"The Trump administration secretly approved the transfer of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi without informing Congress."

Twitter Link

Trump sold nuclear tech to Saudis in secret after Khashoggi killing

The Trump administration secretly approved the transfer of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi without informing Congress.

One transfer was signed off 16 days after the journalist was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October and a second came in February. The remains of Khashoggi, 59, a Saudi-born US resident have never been found. His death threatened to damage Saudi Arabia’s relations with Washington and Western allies.

[Tami]

The White House Correspondents' Association (@WHCA), which does *NOT* make credentialing decisions, confirms to me that the White House credentialed the anti-Semitic TruNews.

WHCA says it is raising this issue with the WH.

Twitter Link

[Tami]

Trump Says He'll Add 'A Few Countries' To Controversial U.S. Travel Ban

President Trump says he'll widen a controversial travel ban that prohibits nearly all people from seven countries from traveling or immigrating to the U.S., calling it "a very powerful ban" that's necessary to ensure national security.

"We're adding a couple of countries" to the ban, Trump said when asked about his policy shift at a news conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He added, "We have to be safe. Our country has to be safe. You see what's going on in the world. Our country has to be safe."

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Trump's plan to expand the ban, citing an interview with the president in Davos. Citing unidentified sources, Politico then reported that the administration could double the scope of the ban by possibly blacklisting seven more countries: Belarus, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.

Trump did not share any more details about the ban's expansion, saying, "It's going to be announced very shortly."

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Twitter Link

Trump sold nuclear tech to Saudis in secret after Khashoggi killing

I’d wonder what Republicans would have to say about that. Then I came to my senses and realized the answer is....nothing.

[Farealmer]

Todays Democratic party sucks and in the next decade we're gonna take it over, that's a ghost ship that needs cleansing.

You assume much about the state of your life and that of the democratic party for the next 10 years. Especially considering the stakes.

[Celgress]

First Warren & Sanders got at it and now the Ghost of Hillary returns to plague the Democratic Party lol. And some still wonder why I am pessimistic about getting rid of Trump. These people cannot unify. They have a talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

[Tami]

We Asked 81 Americans About Impeachment. Here's What They Had to Say

[Mister Mets]

For the Bernie fans, Matt Ygleisias makes the case for Sanders' electability and presidential potential.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...0-electability

The Vermont senator is unique in combining an authentic, values-driven political philosophy with a surprisingly pragmatic, veteran-legislator approach to getting things done. This pairing makes him the enthusiastic favorite of non-Republicans who don’t necessarily love the Democratic Party, without genuinely threatening what’s important to partisan Democrats. If he can pull the party together, it would set him up to be the strongest of the frontrunners to challenge President Donald Trump.
Sanders breaks from the pack in constructive ways on foreign and monetary policy, where the president has an unusual amount of freedom to act. And in the legislative arena, where any president is going to be sharply constrained, he stands the best chance of getting the left on board with the sure-to-be-disappointing compromises that will be necessary to advance the ball at all on important issues.

His views on foreign policy make him stand apart, but may be particularly appealing.

It’s clear that Sanders has a real desire to challenge aspects of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, compared with the rest of the field. He’s much more critical of Israel than most people in national politics, he’s a leading critic of the alliance with Saudi Arabia and he’s aligned himself with the Latin American left in ways that Warren doesn’t.

These ideas are coded as “extreme” in Washington, where there’s significant bipartisan investment in the status quo. But polls show that most voters question the narratives of American exceptionalism, favor a reduced global military footprint and less defense spending, and are skeptical of the merits of profligate arms sales.

He does have a history of overperforming Democrats in his home state, and sometimes gets voters who don't support Democrats (Perot voters in '92/ Jill Stein voters in '16).

But Sanders appears to be a candidate who overperforms in easy races. He consistently runs ahead of Democratic presidential nominees in his home state, which suggests he knows how to overcome the “socialist” label, get people to vote for him despite some eccentricities, and even peel off some Republican votes.

Sanders first got to Congress by winning a tough three-way race in 1990, when Vermont was an only slightly blue-leaning state. He went on to consistently run ahead of Democratic presidential campaigns as a candidate for Vermont’s at-large seat in the US House of Representatives:

In 1992, Sanders got 58 percent to Bill Clinton’s 46 (it was a strong state for presidential candidate Ross Perot, but Bernie also faced a “third-party” challenge from a Democrat).
In 1996, Sanders got 55 percent to Clinton’s 53 percent.
In 2000, Sanders got 69 percent to Al Gore’s 51 percent.
In 2004, Sanders got 67 percent to John Kerry’s 59 percent.
Sanders got elected to the Senate in 2006, so he wasn’t on the ballot in 2008 or 2016. But in 2012, he won 71 percent to Obama’s 67 percent.
This is not definitive proof of Sanders’s skills — over the past 20 years, these haven’t really been vigorously contested races. Yet because those weren’t tough races, it would have been easy for Vermonters who had doubts about Sanders to cast meaningless protest votes for his opponents.

Sanders also appears to be able to make lemonade out of the whole “not officially a Democrat” thing by getting the votes of some non-Republicans who backed Perot in the 1990s and, more recently, other third-party candidates such as Jill Stein, Ralph Nader, and Gary Johnson. Indeed, one noteworthy thing about Sanders is that in head-to-head polling matchups against Trump, he tends to do better than you’d expect simply by looking at his favorable ratings.

Sanders’s popularity seems to be concentrated among certain blocks of persuadable voters (likely those considering a third-party vote), while a chunk of those who disapprove of Sanders are hardcore partisan Democrats who don’t like his lack of party spirit but will vote for him anyway.

There is the risk that it'll scare away centrists who would be glad to nominate a sane Democrat but don't see Sanders as a sane Democrat, but there is an argument for his electability.

An argument elsewhere was that it could be useful for the Democrats to cultivate the Bernie Bros as allies in a general election context to offset Trump's more obnoxious online allies.