All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[BeastieRunner]

A little over 9M Americans voted for Obama twice and Trump once.

That overlap is who I would be targeting if I was running.

A New Hampshire strategy might be the best this election.

[kidfresh512]

Republicans need to be removed from power.

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"Appeals Court Finds Arizona Intended To Suppress Nonwhite Votes"

"The national conversation around voting rights is deeply skewed. Republican lawmakers and operatives openly endorse disenfranchisement; they brag when their attacks on suffrage succeed; and they work feverishly to rig redistricting in favor of white people. But all too often, judges refuse to acknowledge the racism of voter suppression laws, dancing around the purpose of these measures. Only rarely will a court admit what every reasonable observer should already know: The disproportionate impact of these laws on minority voters is no coincidence; it is exactly what legislators intended.

It is refreshing, then, that on Monday the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not tiptoe around the bald facts: Arizona Republicans’ recent crackdown on voting rights was motivated by racism. The court invalidated a law that was plainly designed to stop Native American, Hispanic, and black voters from casting a ballot—not just because it happened to burden minorities more than whites, but because it is flat-out racist.

Arizona’s “long history of race-based voting discrimination,” combined with legislators’ “false, race-based” claims of voter fraud “unmistakably reveal” an intent to discriminate on the basis of race, the 9th Circuit announced.

The Supreme CourtÂ’s conservative justices may well reverse the ruling. But the 9th Circuit will at least force SCOTUS to confront the reality that white supremacy remains a driving force in RepublicansÂ’ assault on the franchise, despite Chief Justice John RobertsÂ’ declaration that racism is a historical relic."

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...on-racist.html

I just wish it was easy for people to see and understand and comprehend that basic fact. People that are otherwise aligned get so mired down in unnecessary silly little differences. When in reality they have FAR more in common in terms of GOP need to be put in their place permanently.

But, the majority allow them to have outsize levels of power compared to their support. Silly infighting and protest voting/non voting just let them put their foot on the necks of the rest of us. Let them do what they want to the environment. Let them hand over our cash to the rich.

I just had to sit through a corporate Fidelity benefits lecture this morning. It may as well have been a fear mongering propaganda meeting on if Democrats get power they will bring back the lower level triggers for estate taxes and fuck up your 401k y'all!

And the irony that this guy is talking about estate taxes like the majority of America has that much money to give to their families when they die to make that a voting priority.

But, that's how they think. They don't look at what would benefit the most Americans.

[PaulBullion]

Feel us Biden our time!

If the election for the Democratic Presidential Primary in Florida were held
today and the candidates were Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Pete
Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, Elizabeth Warren
and Andrew Yang, who would you vote for?

Joe Biden: 41.3%
Michael Bloomberg: 17.3%
Pete Buttigieg: 5.7%
Amy Klobuchar: 5.3%
Bernie Sanders: 9.4%
Tom Steyer: 1.9%
Elizabeth Warren: 6.9%
Andrew Yang: 2.3%
Undecided: 10.0%

http://stpetepolls.org/files/StPeteP...ary28_WN2A.pdf

[Michael Watkins]

leave it to Florida Man

[PaulBullion]

two Iowa polls out today, one with Biden in the lead, one with Sanders.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Looks like in the end, it'll be Biden and Bernie, two of the three people I didn't want to be the nominee.

[PaulBullion]

This could be good:

Lev Parnas’ lawyer ties Lindsey Graham to corrupt Ukraine scheme

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

two Iowa polls out today, one with Biden in the lead, one with Sanders.

That’s why I go by RCP. It aggregates the most recent polls

[PaulBullion]

That’s why I go by RCP. It aggregates the most recent polls

RCP is also a right wing propaganda site, that sometimes lets polls drop under the table if they don't like them.

They are pure scum:

The company behind the non-partisan news site RealClearPolitics has been secretly running a Facebook page filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears, The Daily Beast has learned.

Called “Conservative Country,” the Facebook page was founded in 2014 and now boasts nearly 800,000 followers for its mix of Donald Trump hagiography and ultra-conservative memes. One recent post showed a man training two assault rifles at a closed door with the caption “Just sitting here waiting on Beto.”

[Michael Watkins]

This could be good:

Lev Parnas’ lawyer ties Lindsey Graham to corrupt Ukraine scheme

finally. this guy couldn't be more deserving of bad karma.

[Theleviathan]

A little over 9M Americans voted for Obama twice and Trump once.

That overlap is who I would be targeting if I was running.

A New Hampshire strategy might be the best this election.

What do you mean by a New Hampshire strategy?

And I agree, those voters are mostly located in the rust belt and midwest. Ultimately winning comes down to swing states, so any candidate needs to sell me less on how great their plan is intrinsically but how it extrinsically yields votes in the places that matter.

[Superbat]

Super PAC Attacks Sanders in an Ad. Sanders Raises $1.3 Million in a Day.

As Bernie Sanders shows strength in the early-voting states, his opponents face a challenge: Attacking him can help fuel his campaign.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/u...ttack-ads.html

"DES MOINES — A Democratic super PAC wanted to undermine Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy just days before the Iowa caucuses. It may have handed him a gift instead.

Mr. Sanders’s campaign said on Wednesday that it had raised more than $1.3 million since it began fund-raising the day before off a negative ad produced by the super PAC that targets Mr. Sanders by name.

The ad, backed by the political action arm of the group Democratic Majority for Israel, argues that Mr. Sanders, of Vermont, would be unable to beat President Trump in the November general election, citing his heart attack nearly five months ago and his left-wing ideology as evidence that he would be too risky a choice for Iowa caucusgoers focused on winning back the White House.

The ad was scheduled to begin airing in Iowa on Wednesday, but the Sanders campaign sent an email to supporters on Tuesday warning that Mr. Sanders was being targeted by negative ads and alluding to an “outside spending group” without citing Democratic Majority for Israel.

By Tuesday evening, Mr. Sanders had posted a video on Twitter addressing the ads. “It is no secret that our campaign is taking on the political establishment and the big-money interests, who are now running negative ads against us in Iowa,” he said in the video. “The billionaire class is getting nervous, and they should.”

[Tami]

Caught Nadler answering a question about High Crimes and Misdemeanors, and he explained it very well. He ended with, paraphrasing, 'every constitutional scholar knows this, except Mr. Dershowitz' which actually made me laugh.

[Mister Mets]

Writing for New York magazine, Jonathan Chait sums up the argument against Sanders.

Sanders has gleefully discarded the party’s conventional wisdom that it has to pick and choose where to push public opinion leftward, adopting a comprehensive left-wing agenda, some of which is popular, and some of which is decidedly not. Positions in the latter category include replacing all private health insurance with a government plan, banning fracking, letting prisoners vote, decriminalizing the border, giving free health care to undocumented immigrants, and eliminating ICE. (I am only listing Sanders positions that are intensely unpopular. I am not including positions, like national rent control and phasing out all nuclear energy, that I consider ill-advised but which probably won’t harm him much with voters.)

Not every one of these unpopular stances is unique to Sanders. Some have won the endorsement of rival candidates, and many of them have been endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, Sanders’s closest rival. In fact, Sanders seem to have overtaken Warren in part because she spent most of 2019 closing the ideological gap between the two candidates, which made Democratic Party elites justifiably skeptical about her electability, thereby kneecapping her viability as a trans-factional candidate. Sanders probably wasn’t trying to undermine Warren by luring her into adopting all his policies, but it has worked out quite well for him, and poorly for her.

But Warren at least tries to couch her positions in a framework of reforming and revitalizing capitalism that is intended to reassure ideologically skeptical voters. Sanders combines unpopular program specifics in the unpopular packaging of “socialism.” The socialist label has grown less unpopular, a trend that has attracted so much media attention that many people have gotten the impression “socialism” is actually popular, which is absolutely not the case.

Compounding those vulnerabilities is a long history of radical associations. Sanders campaigned for the Socialist Workers’ Party and praised communist regimes. Obviously, Republicans call every Democratic nominee a “socialist.” But it’s one thing to have the label thrown at you by the opposition, another for it to be embraced willingly, and yet another thing altogether to have a web of creepy associations that make it child’s play for the opposition to paint your program as radical and dangerous. Viewing these attacks in isolation, and asking whether voters will care about Bernie’s views on the Cold War, misses the way they will be used as a stand-in to discredit his entire worldview. Nobody “cared” how Michael Dukakis looked in a tank, and probably not many voters cared about Mitt Romney’s dismissive remarks about the 47 percent, but both reinforced larger attack narratives. Vintage video of Bernie palling around with Soviet communists will make for an almost insultingly easy way for Republicans to communicate the idea that his plans to expand government are radical.

Sanders has never faced an electorate where these vulnerabilities could be used against him. Nor, for that matter, has he had to defend some of his bizarre youthful musings (such as his theory that sexual repression causes breast cancer) or the suspicious finances surrounding his wife’s college. Democrats are rightfully concerned about attacks on Hunter Biden’s nepotistic role at Burisma, but Sanders is going to have to defend equally questionable deals, like the $500,000 his wife’s university paid for a woodworking program run by his stepdaughter.

Ross Douthat considers the upside from the perspective of liberals.

Nominating Sanders is like nominating Reagan in 1980; a calculated risk that could have big ideological consequences if it pays off.

Writing for Bloomberg (hmm, potential conflict of interest) conservative writer Ramesh Ponoru considers what a Sanders win would mean.

If Sanders wins, it will mark a huge change in American politics. Self-described socialists have been elected in other developed countries; never in this one. Here, “socialism” has been an accusation, not a boast. Politicians on the left wing of the Democratic Party have considered the label, and the associations that come with it, deadly to their electoral chances. Republicans hope it still is. If Sanders beats them, the taboo will be broken.

It’s not just a matter of the label. The limits of what’s politically possible will shift left as the political world adjusts to the new reality. Politicians, strategists, journalists, activists and voters who thought that certain ideas were too far left to make it in America would revise their sense of the country, and of what counts as extreme or as realistic within it. The ground on which future races for president, governor and Congress are contested would move left. That doesn’t mean the U.S. would be Venezuela, or even Denmark, by the start of 2022. But it is reasonable to expect that government policy 10 or 20 years from now would be considerably more socialistic than it would be if Trump were re-elected — or if Biden were elected.

In that sense, Sanders’s election really would live up to the billing. Just by taking office, he would have delivered his political revolution.

A little over 9M Americans voted for Obama twice and Trump once.

That overlap is who I would be targeting if I was running.

A New Hampshire strategy might be the best this election.

Where do you get that number?

[Steel Inquisitor]

Nominating Sanders is like nominating Reagan in 1980; a calculated risk that could have big ideological consequences if it pays off.

Sanders isn't Reagan, he's Jimmy Carter and Jeremy Corbyn. Him being president wouldn't cement him as the party's paradigm shift, unlike with Trump or Reagan, the Democrats will fight back and hard, they won't back down without a fight. Sanders isn't a uniter like Obama was and he's remarkably worse at maintaining political alliances.