All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[aja_christopher]

"Both parties should not discount the powerful recent election results in which Black votes determined the outcome. Just a few weeks ago, Democratic Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards successfully fended off his Republican challenger in a runoff election, thanks to heightened turnouts in urban centers in New Orleans and Baton Rouge— two of the largest Black-majority cities in the country. But Edwards could have avoided a runoff altogether if there was an earlier, bigger investment in those Black centers, an unfortunately common oversight among candidates for statewide and federal office.

Similarly, in the 2017 special election for one of Alabama’s U.S. Senate seats, Democrat Doug Jones won in large part from overwhelming support of Black voters, specifically Black women. Ninety-six percent of Black voters and 98% of Black women in that election chose Jones. Had his opponent, Roy Moore, garnered even moderate success with this bloc—which accounts for roughly 30% of the Alabama electorate—Jones would not have succeeded. In the 2018 midterm elections, too, Black voters—especially women—swung elections to Democrats across the country.

“There are plenty of people who applauded Black women for the success for the 2018 election,” said presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris during last week’s Democratic debate. “But at some point, folks get tired of just saying ‘Thank me for showing up.’ And say, ‘Well, show up for me.’”

Harris is right: Black voters should not be an afterthought. That’s because momentum among Black voters is a better indicator of success than winning in Iowa or other early primary states.

The importance of Black voters to Democratic primary candidates has been clear for decades, particularly in areas where Black residents form a majority. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination (and ultimately the presidency) due in part to strong support from Black voters, particularly in the South. In 1980, Carter faced a strong primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, who decided to forego a pursuit of the Southern states to focus on the industrial Midwest and Northeast. And while Kennedy was ultimately the preferred choice of Black voters by a slim margin nationwide, Carter’s winning coalition included the overwhelming majority of Black voters throughout the South, where most Black-majority cities are located.

In the 1988 Democratic primaries, Black southerners’ support for Jesse Jackson led to a sweep of the Deep South and made him the runner-up behind eventual nominee Michael Dukakis. In 1992, Bill Clinton received roughly 80% of the vote from Black southerners, vaulting him into the nomination. And in 2008, Barack Obama was able to build a broad base that included overwhelming support from Black voters, allowing him to carry the Southern states on the way to the nomination.

But lately, Democrats may be losing their focus in attracting and energizing Black voters. When Donald Trump won the presidency, Democrats ramped up efforts to appeal to more of the white working-class voters who voted Republican in 2016. Economic hardship was supposed to have been the reason these voters aligned themselves with Trump. Yet Gallup research showed that Americans with a favorable opinion of Trump are “slightly more likely to be employed and no more likely to be out of the labor force than those who see him unfavorably.”

Meaning that Democrats were (and still are) chasing the wrong bloc.

“There’s always been something problematic about the Democratic Party’s fixation on white working-class voters,” wrote political commentator Sally Kohn for The Daily Beast. “[W]hile the entire rest of the marketing and outreach universe has moved toward niche markets…the Democratic Party continues to treat its black base like an afterthought, or worse, an inconvenience.”

Democrats in 2020 face an existential crisis about whether white working-class voters should be at the center of the party. They would do well to remember lessons of the past, and compete in the most important primary of them all—the one for Black voters."

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-a...y-of-them-all/

[Theleviathan]

The problem with the criticism with Bernie, is it's a lot of bunch of guilty by association and I do not think that is good faith criticism. I also see this Bernie Bro label as about as useful as the SJW one, its designed to shut down discussion, rather than further it. You are forgetting Biden's one big weakness, that all his talk of bipartisanship is naive and will make him a weak President, because the GOP will not play ball.

All this talk about Joe Rogan, makes it seems like too many people care about absolute moral purity rather than doing the tough work needed to win. Guess what, a lot the working class in the Rust Belt likely have boorish opinions I do not agree with, but we will need their votes to win. You cannot win, if you want to live in space only with people you always agree with. Do you want to win or will we exile anyone who is not morally pure enough?

Only one of the negatives on Bernie I listed is guilt by association. So not "most". It's just the one you want to harp on because you think it's a distraction. Ironically, and somewhat hilariously, it's YOU using it that way. Rather than talk about the other real problems Bernie presents as a candidate, you want to fall on your sword over and over and over again on one issue so you don't have to take on the others. (Just like SJWs and progressives who don't want to look in the mirror about how their tactics undermine their goals and prefer to pull shit like this too) You can save the purity arguments too, I'm consistent. That doesn't work on me. If you're going to have a discussion with me you have to drop the canned arguments you think work against people who just spout the usual BS. I don't roll like that, come with consistency.

Speaking of which.....if you want the Rust Belt to help you win.....supporting Bernie seems like an odd choice.

[Theleviathan]

The focus on lily-white Iowa as some kind of harbinger of American politics speaks volumes about many of the core problems within the political system itself -- it works out to the advantage of candidates like Sanders who don't address racial issues at all, and it gives the false impression that somehow said state represents the democratic "base", which is predominately black and female with regards to party loyalty, and black in general with regards to winning national elections.

You must've forgotten about the long, glorious reigns of Jon Edwards and Rick Santorum.

[aja_christopher]

You must've forgotten about the long, glorious reigns of Jon Edwards and Rick Santorum.

That should be "Democratic base" and not democratic base -- most black people already know not to vote for Republicans.

You'd think they'd try to turn that around -- like Colin suggested -- but instead they double down.

[Theleviathan]

That should be "Democratic base" and not democratic base -- most black people already know not to vote for Republicans.

I know, I was just making a crack at how seriously we should treat Iowa. No matter who wins, Iowa is almost a kiss of death.

Obama used it nicely and I think Sanders could, but mostly Iowa is nutty.

[Superbat]

My prediction for Iowa.

1. Bernie will win the first ballot
2. Biden or Warren will win the second ballot
3. No one will be happy

[GindyPosts]

Why are Yang & the DINO Tulsi Gabbard still running?

[Superbat]

Chris Wallace ended Klobuchar's campaign.

[Mister Mets]

It's not the only thing that led to his win, but it's part of it. Vague policies make it hard to attack. You suggested candidates should have good policies and explain the details. I'm simply pointing out that the winners rarely, if ever, do that.

Vagueness probably helps if someone's policies are unpopular or can't withstand scrutiny (lower taxes and increased spending!) But it is still better to offer something that is somewhat popular and defensible (The rich do not need more tax cuts! School vouchers.)

Build the Wall was code for "hardliner on immigration at the border".

But it's not a policy proposal.

There are some arguments that vagueness helps by signalling to voters that you're on their side, so they're more likely to trust you even if you later go in a different direction.

I do worry about the implications.

Why are Yang & the DINO Tulsi Gabbard still running?

Yang has been quite successful at raising the profile of his signature issue.

I know, I was just making a crack at how seriously we should treat Iowa. No matter who wins, Iowa is almost a kiss of death.

Obama used it nicely and I think Sanders could, but mostly Iowa is nutty.

George W Bush also won Iowa in 2000, which paved the way for winning the nomination.
John Kerry also won Iowa in 2004, which helped beat fellow New Englander Dean in New Hampshire.

[Tami]

Joe Biden Could Be Impeached by GOP Over Ukraine if He Wins, Iowa Senator Says

ah huh .... yeah right

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst warned Sunday that Republicans would immediately push to impeach Joe Biden over his work in Ukraine as vice president if he win the White House.

“I think this door of impeachable whatever has been opened,” Ernst said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, right the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him.’”

She does know that it's the House, not the Senate that does the impeaching. Assuming that the Democrats keep control of the House, that's not going to happen.

If the Democrats take control of the Senate as well, they better hope Trump doesn't win reelection.

[Mister Mets]

Such as when you frame questions regarding immigration around Democrats not answering specific questions to your satisfaction and then claim they are for open borders?

There is a policy of separating children from their parents as a "deterrent" as well as forcing them into crowded, unsanitary conditions, denying them fair legal consultation, and attempting to ban people from traveling to this nation based on religion or because they come from "shithole" African countries (like Nigeria) instead of Norway.

Don't try to bring up Democrats as an excuse for Republican behavior because that's just more deflection, rather than taking responsibility for what happens under their watch -- your Republican leader actually calls it an "invasion" and many of his followers respond accordingly, with both hatred and violence.

You're not stupid Mets and neither are we -- all of his here know exactly what your party is doing with regards to non-whites, and exactly why it is doing it.



Sanders essentially tied Hillary in Iowa last time and still lost by millions of votes in the end -- and she had even less black support than Biden.

The focus on lily-white Iowa as some kind of harbinger of American politics speaks volumes about many of the core problems within the political system itself -- it works out to the advantage of candidates like Sanders who don't address racial issues at all, and it gives the false impression that somehow said state represents the democratic "base", which is predominately black and female with regards to party loyalty, and black in general with regards to winning national elections.

My comments about the Democratic position on open borders have been nuanced and typically included caveats. If you compare my comments on the Democratic position on immigration to others' criticism of Republicans here, you'll find my comments less strident and more conscientious.

On the most consequential immigration question, what limits should there be on legal immigration, Democrats do not have any kind of concrete answer. On the question of what to do with the people who already here, they're generally against any efforts to deport anyone who isn't a felon (Joe Biden has said that he would not consider deporting someone who has crossed the border illegally and has developed multiple drunk driving arrests, and he's one of the moderates!) And then there are all the officeholders pushing against the law enforcement agencies, or issuing legal challenges against the idea that the country should be able to deport immigrants who are public charges.

I bring up Democratic positions because it isn't just about what Republicans are doing, but what the alternative is. Every policy has some kind of tradeoffs, and in order to criticize the tradeoffs of what one party is doing, it's not enough to argue for a nonexistent policy by the other party, but what they actually want to do. With the arguments about the treatment of children, it seems largely to be about different priorities. Republicans prioritize border security, and keeping out people who shouldn't be coming to the country, who should not qualify for refugee status. It is worth noting that there has been a decline in these crossings, which means we do have the positive outcome of less parents endangering their children.

I believe there is a powerful moral argument for open borders. If you like informational graphic novels, the economist Bryan Caplan and the cartoonist Zach Weinersmith make a great case for it in their graphic novel The Case For Open Borders.

As I've said before, I support a modest increase in legal immigration. According to polls, this puts me to the left of the majority of Democrats.

If too many activists start taking the position that a center-left position is anethema, you're going to start sending a lot of potential voters to the loving arms of the Trump campaign. Look at Trump's ego when he lost the popular vote. Imagine how he'll act if he gets reelected with the one state Reagan never won.

[Tami]

GOP’s Lamar Alexander mocked for saying Trump ‘didn’t know’ to call attorney general instead of Rudy

“What the president should have done, if he was upset about Joe Biden and his son, and what they were doing in Ukraine, he should’ve called the attorney general and told him that, and let the attorney general handle it the way they always handle cases that involve public –” Alexander told Chuck Todd.

“And why do you think he didn’t do that?” the NBC News political director and MTP moderator asked.

“Maybe he didn’t know to do it,” Alexander responded.

[Michael Watkins]

And the new NBC/WSJ poll once again finds Biden is the safest choice to beat Trump.

"Looking ahead to the 2020 general election that’s still more than 270 days away, the NBC/WSJ poll shows former Vice President Joe Biden leading Trump nationally by 6 points among registered voters, 50 percent to 44 percent — though that’s down from Biden’s 9-point advantage in October."

50% Biden
49% Sanders
48% Warren (the only one whose lead over trump hasn't dropped)

The margin of error in the poll is plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.

[Tami]

Law firm representing Rudy Giuliani beset by sordid allegations, partner exodus

A law firm representing Rudy Giuliani in the Ukraine affair is locked in a bitter court battle with a former partner that has revealed allegations of financial misconduct, sexual assault and office masturbation.

The firm, Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht, has faced an exodus of lawyers as the litigation stretches on, including two who were defending Giuliani amid a criminal probe launched by New York federal prosecutors.

Those partners, Eric Creizman and Melissa Madrigal, spent their last day at Pierce Bainbridge on Friday and are set to join the New York office of a different firm, Armstrong Teasdale, later this month, the lawyers confirmed to NBC News. Their departures were first reported by the New York Law Journal.

[aja_christopher]

My comments about the Democratic position on open borders have been nuanced and typically included caveats. If you compare my comments on the Democratic position on immigration to others' criticism of Republicans here, you'll find my comments less strident and more conscientious.

On the most consequential immigration question, what limits should there be on legal immigration, Democrats do not have any kind of concrete answer.

Their record under both Obama and Clinton is their "answer" and that's good enough for anyone with no political bias against them, unlike yourself.

That long-winded response of yours was just a way to deflect from the points I mentioned regarding how Republicans treat people of color.

You won't address that because you know better -- it's a lot easier for you, and other Republicans, to just keep trying to demonize Democrats instead.

The rest of the Republican base, and your president with the help of Stepher Miller, will take care of the direct racism while you play the role of "reasonable conservative" on message boards. While you wax poetic about hypothetical "open borders" that never existed under Carter, Clinton or Obama, we already know exactly what your party "wants to do" -- limit or completely end non-white immigration into America, which is the top goal of white nationalists -- because that's exactly what they are trying to do as we speak.

That said, just because you choose try to focus on "Democrats" doesn't mean we don't see the obvious regarding your party.

-----
"Trump’s White-Nationalist Vanguard"

The emails of a key presidential aide show an extremist ideology influencing policy in the White House.

"A cache of Miller’s emails, provided by the former Breitbart News staffer Katie McHugh to the Southern Poverty Law Center, draws a straight line between the Trump administration’s immigration policies and previous, explicitly racist immigration laws. The emails show Miller praising racist immigration restrictions from a century ago, while bitterly lamenting the law that repealed them.

Donald Trump’s defenders might be inclined to dismiss those views as irrelevant, as they have in the past. But if they want to have any chance of stifling the rise of the extreme right, they shouldn’t. There is a reason that a cadre of white nationalists and their fellow travelers descended on the nation’s capital in the aftermath of the 2016 election, seeking jobs in the Trump administration and right-wing media. A small, dedicated ideological vanguard, with the right influence and connections, can steer the direction of the country. After all, that’s exactly what happened in the previous Republican administration.

That Miller himself possesses a Jewish background is no obstacle to his believing that the racist and anti-Semitic restrictions of the 1920s were a great achievement, and that the law that repealed them was a great tragedy. These comments shed a great deal of light on Miller’s motives in shaping administration policy.

For instance, in a 2015 exchange, Miller complained that Mexican survivors of Hurricane Patricia could be given temporary protected status, or TPS, which would have allowed them to stay and work in the United States. Shortly after taking office, Trump sought to end TPS for about 400,000 El Salvadorans, Hatians, and Hondurans in the U.S., those from nations the president has privately referred to as “shithole countries.” In September, he prevented Bahamians fleeing Hurricane Dorian from coming to the U.S. and being granted TPS, saying he was worried about “gang members” and “drug dealers.”

Miller was also at the forefront of constructing the Trump administration’s travel ban targeting Muslim countries; he helped devise the child-separation policy designed to deter Latin American immigrants; he worked to scuttle a deal with Democrats following Trump’s repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which prevented the deportation of young undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children; and he is trying to reduce the number of refugees being admitted to zero. The emails help explain Miller’s zeal.

Miller is not alone. As I reported in 2017, his former boss and Trump’s former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, also praised the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, in an interview with the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and while Miller worked for Sessions’s Senate office, the senator regularly sent out press releases warning of the dangers of Muslim immigration and lamenting a lack of immigration from Europe. Michael Anton, a former Trump national-security official, wrote a screed in 2016 urging conservatives to back Trump in part because of the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.”

On Fox News, on a nightly basis, conservative figures with direct lines to the president urge conservative audiences to view the presence of nonwhites in America as an existential threat, which is to say that viewers are encouraged to view their countrymen in this way. Fox personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham tell their viewers that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country” and that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.” Ingraham and Carlson are reliable apparatchiks—in the Bush era, they echoed the hawkish views of neoconservatives. Now that Trumpism is ascendant, both dedicate their nightly broadcasts to convincing Republicans that the president’s nativism is both brilliant and necessary, recognizing it as the ideological core of his presidency.

Having adopted the premises but not the rhetoric of the racist right, mainstream conservatives now find themselves besieged by white nationalists wielding the same ideas in more explicit language. When liberals warned that conservatism had been infected by racism and nativism, conservative writers insisted that liberals were claiming racism in bad faith; that describing things as racist simply made people more racist; that accurately labeling actions as racist was an attempt to stifle debate; that, in fact, white people were the true victims of racism.

Now mainstream conservatives face those same arguments from a resurgent white-nationalist movement, which deploys this same logic against them as they weakly try to respond with anti-racist rhetoric they have spent the past four years training their audiences to dismiss with a sneer.”"

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...emails/602242/