All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Malvolio]

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

ah huh .... yeah right



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.

In that case the Democrats could impeach again, on a different charge, like say, the emoluments clause, and actually have witnesses and evidence, but they would still need a super-majority to convict and remove Trump from office.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

John Kerry discussed 2020 run to stop Sanders and save Democrats – report

Former presidential candidate and secretary of state John Kerry has reportedly been overheard discussing a late bid for the Democratic nomination, in order to stop “the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic party – down whole”.
A day before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders leads the way in public polling concerning the first contest in the Democratic race to face Donald Trump in November. But many in the party see the independent senator from Vermont as too leftwing to be the nominee.

NBC News reported that one of its staff overheard Kerry talking on the phone at the Renaissance Savory hotel in Des Moines.

“Maybe I’m fucking deluding myself here,” he reportedly said, discussing with an unidentified caller how he would have to give up board positions and paid speeches if he ran but also saying donors like Doug Hickey, a venture capitalist, might “raise a couple of million” to help.

Asked about the call, Kerry said he was “absolutely not” considering a run, NBC reported.

He later tweeted: “As I told the reporter, I am absolutely not running for president. Any report otherwise is categorically false. I’ve been proud to campaign with my good friend Joe Biden, who is going to win the nomination, beat Trump, and make an outstanding president.”

A tweet which said “any report otherwise is fucking (or categorically) false” appeared to have been deleted.

Sanders was campaigning in Iowa on Sunday before flying back to Washington for the concluding days of Trump’s impeachment trial. He did not immediately comment on the NBC report. The People for Bernie, a campaign group, simply tweeted: “?”

Kerry was the Democratic nominee in 2004, losing narrowly to President George W Bush. A longtime Massachusetts senator, he was secretary of state in Barack Obama’s second term.

He flirted with a run against Trump in 2020 but has instead campaigned for former vice-president Joe Biden, who leads Sanders in national polling but has seen his lead shrink as the senator has surged.

The former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who ran for the nomination against Sanders and Hillary Clinton in 2016, is another senior Democratic party figure who does not want Sanders to be the nominee.

“I do not believe that he would be a strong candidate for our party in the fall,” O’Malley told the Guardian in an interview published on Sunday.

Sanders, O’Malley said, “has been a kind of stalwart of the National Rifle Association, a man who said immigrants steal our jobs right up until he ran for president, a guy who said the sound of John Kennedy’s voice made him nauseous.

“He’s a man who never has accomplished anything in public office, who has I believe demonstrated his inability to forge a governing consensus, let alone hold a governing consensus. And I think he’d be an awful choice.”

Win or lose (most likely he'll lose), Bernie Sander's run for the presidency will destroy the Democratic party as we know it.

A necessary step if there's to be any hope of destroying the right-wing in America.

[aja_christopher]

John Kerry discussed 2020 run to stop Sanders and save Democrats – report



Win or lose (most likely he'll lose), Bernie Sander's run for the presidency will destroy the Democratic party as we know it.

A necessary step if there's to be any hope of destroying the right-wing in America.

"Destroying" the Democratic party is not going to "destroy" the right-wing in America.

To the contrary, that's exactly what they are counting on so that they can remain in power, and likely cement said power with another Supreme Court pick.

[Jack Dracula]

But they never will, Trumpism is Republicanism without the mask, the GOP has been corrupt since the 1960s, they are the enemy here.

Yes, and hopefully the Democratic party leadership takes the impeachment failure to heart and finally understands that the GOP has abandoned all ethics in favor of grasping and holding onto power.

You either break the entire American political system which is inherently flawed being effectively a Beta covered in buggy patches, or you crush the Republicans and change **** over time

We needn't do either of those. If we can change campaign finance reform regulations and rules regarding lobbying as well as actively enforce ethics violations most of the problems we have will fall by the wayside. The system itself isn't broken. It's the influence peddling and dark money poisoning the well for all of us.

[Mister Mets]

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/

Their record under Obama and Clinton doesn't really address what the party will do now. The base has moved to the left on immigration, and it's been nine years since they've been able to control the White House and both branches of Congress.

Perhaps you're right and Democrats will do nothing on legal immigration, except occasionally leave more loopholes. I am unaware of anyone explicitly advocating for this, so it doesn't answer my specific question about what the party advocates for.

Things can change very quickly in politics. The Democrats went from having no major candidates in favor of gay marriage in the 2008 presidential primary to advocating for civil penalties against a baker who didn't want to make a cake for a gay wedding. So I'm not reassured that just because something didn't occur under Carter it won't occur under a post-Great Awokening President with a Democratic Senate and House.

If we did a similar analysis to Democrats as to Miller, we'd probably find that they would qualify as in favor of open borders than Miller is in favor of white nationalism (I will note that open borders is a morally superior position to white nationalism, but it feels odd to reject one comparison in favor of another that is more tenuous) and that Democrats will make similar arguments on economic issues that we've seen from extremist left-wingers.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

"Destroying" the Democratic party is not going to "destroy" the right-wing in America.

It's a necessary step, not the final step.

To the contrary, that's exactly what they are counting on so that they can remain in power, and likely cement said power with another Supreme Court pick.

Any leftist movement that hopes to destroy the right-wing will have to abolish the Supreme Court, or at least severely curtail its power.

The Democratic party is a buffer that needs to go.

[aja_christopher]

Their record under Obama and Clinton doesn't really address what the party will do now. The base has moved to the left on immigration, and it's been nine years since they've been able to control the White House and both branches of Congress.

If we did a similar analysis to Democrats as to Miller, we'd probably find that they would qualify as in favor of open borders than Miller is in favor of white nationalism (I will note that open borders is a morally superior position to white nationalism, but it feels odd to reject one comparison in favor of another that is more tenuous) and that Democrats will make similar arguments on economic issues that we've seen from extremist left-wingers.

I'm not going to waste time with your biased hypotheticals regarding "open borders" while you openly defend a white nationalist Republican administration with "whataboutalism" and the same deflective arguments you give every time this discussion comes up.

I don't expect any better of you -- or your party -- at this point, but don't pretend as if your party isn't directly promoting white nationalism under Trump and immigration architect Stephen Miller, just as they did before he came into office.

You are actively turning a blind eye to white nationalists running American immigration policy in America because you claim that's the "cost" of preventing "open borders" in America -- your bias against Democratic leadership does not justify white nationalist policies being enacted in the White House, nor your support for them.

[InformationGeek]

MEANWHILE, over with Trump BS, he wants to strip the medals of Navy prosecutors for doing their jobs and handling war crime trials.

[Tami]

MEANWHILE, over with Trump BS, he wants to strip the medals of Navy prosecutors for doing their jobs and handling war crime trials.

Trump, eternal idiot

[master of read]

MEANWHILE, over with Trump BS, he wants to strip the medals of Navy prosecutors for doing their jobs and handling war crime trials.

ok. i DARE someone to defend this.

[4saken1]

More Clinton voters went for McCain than Bernie supporters went for Trump. This has been stated quantified many times. Further more Bernie traveled all over the country stumping for Hillary, Clinton struggled to say she would support Bernie.

The data is clear. The toxic voters who are more liable to throw the election for Trump predominately exist on one side

Absolutely true. Hillary isn't running, though. Sanders supporters need to grow a thicker skin and maybe even kiss a little ass if they want him to be President, precisely for this reason. Enjoy that bitter pill!

[Steel Inquisitor]

What actual evidence is there that Bernie Sanders is racist or sexist? Not a handful of obnoxious fans online, him, where is the evidence?

There's been evidence in this thread from posters like aja_christopher on Bernie's campaign's reaction to the Black vote in '16 earlier in this thread, it's frankly alarming but predictable that you'd ignore that since any critique of Bernie is inconceivable to you. He walks on water in your eyes, there is no claim I could make or association damning enough to make you take it to heart.

For those reading I'll give them this:

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/...ference-speech

“It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman. Vote for me,’” he added later. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.”

As Jeff Stein noted at the time, it was hard not to see this last comment as a criticism of Clinton. She and many of her supporters, however, would argue that her campaign was about more than her gender. And when it comes to Rebecca, it’s not clear why Sanders would assume her entire political message would boil down to “Hey, I’m a Latina. Vote for me.” The moment made him look like he was talking down to a woman eager to enter politics, even if that wasn’t his intent.

Reducing Clinton's campaign to be simply about her being a woman is a sexist opinion, this was after he made a quote of another woman running for office and reduced it to being about her being a Latina in the same article.

I'm not going into his surrogates and staffers who have said terrible things in his name, which he won't fire. We'd be here all day.

You continue to be dismissive about the conduct of the Bros. Do you know what occurred at the Nevada convention?

Also I think unless Warren surges in some key primaries, it's not looking likely she will capture the nomination, at least that the moment. I thought a couple of months ago it would be her, but now I am not sure. It may come down to Biden or Bernie. This could change, but at the moment her chances are not as strong as they were in the past. I am fine with Warren winning personally, I still think she is the second best choice.

Your concern for Warren isn't convincing when you've shown you don't care about her, or anyone else, getting attacked by hostile Bernie supporters and thought everyone here went to Biden rather than Warren when conflict arose with Bernie.

[4saken1]

In that case the Democrats could impeach again, on a different charge, like say, the emoluments clause, and actually have witnesses and evidence, but they would still need a super-majority to convict and remove Trump from office.

I was hoping that they would have handled the impeachment and Trump's failure to cooperate a little differently. 'Oh, you don't want to hand over any evidence or let anybody testify? Fine! We'll start impeachment proceedings on your obstruction of justice wrt the whole Stormy Daniels thing. After that, we'll take on emoluments. Then we'll bring back Mueller for some more questions. We can end this whenever you choose to cooperate!'

[Steel Inquisitor]

It's a necessary step, not the final step.

Why can't a strong left abide by competition for left leaning voters?

Any leftist movement that hopes to destroy the right-wing will have to abolish the Supreme Court, or at least severely curtail its power.

The Democratic party is a buffer that needs to go.

That "buffer" is a big reason why the country is still held together, rather than becoming a theocratic nightmare permanently held by the GOP. The leftist movement has its third party: the Greens. They're not a party which fills anyone with satisfaction they know what they're doing.

[Celgress]

...Any leftist movement that hopes to destroy the right-wing will have to abolish the Supreme Court, or at least severely curtail its power.....

If the Supreme Court is abolished (likely along with the judiciary in general) what is to keep the government from curtailing a person's freedoms? I'm not saying the Supreme Court is perfect but it is better than a naked authoritarian system that is only as benign or vile as whoever is in power at any given time.