All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Kirby101]

Image of Bernie Sanders giving speech in front of symbol of white supremacy surfaces

Very funny

[Tami]

Beto O’Rourke Drops Out of the Presidential Race

Former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas announced that he is dropping out of the presidential race, ending a campaign in which he struggled for months to recapture the energy of his insurgent 2018 Senate candidacy on a national stage full of other big personalities and liberal champions.

Mr. O’Rourke made the decision to quit the race in the middle of this week, on the eve of a gathering Friday of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, according to people familiar with his thinking. He is not expected to run for any other office in 2020, despite persistent efforts by party leaders and political donors to coax him into another bid for the Senate.

His campaign has been under extreme financial strain, and Mr. O’Rourke’s advisers concluded that proceeding in the race might have meant making deep cuts to his staff in order to pay for advertising and other measures to compete in the early primary and caucus state.

[Iron Maiden]

Beto O’Rourke Drops Out of the Presidential Race

The remark about coming for the guns probably didn't help his campaign either and one wonders if that effected the fundraising. I admire his passion about it and it was right after the mass shooting in El Paso IIRC.

[Tami]

The remark about coming for the guns probably didn't help his campaign either and one wonders if that effected the fundraising. I admire his passion about it and it was right after the mass shooting in El Paso IIRC.

I don't fault him for it or for his passion, but he was lost among so many other candidates.

[Mister Mets]

The remark about coming for the guns probably didn't help his campaign either and one wonders if that effected the fundraising. I admire his passion about it and it was right after the mass shooting in El Paso IIRC.

He got positive coverage for his initial comments, although he did quickly go way too far. He was essentially a straw man candidate, saying the type of stuff that Democrats had earlier argued no one credible on their side actually believed, that represented straw man versions of their positions.

His campaign was botched well before that. There's an argument that he misread the positive media attention he got when he was running against Ted Cruz.

I think his biggest error was running in the progressive lane, when there's so little competition in the establishment moderate lane. Had he basically stuck with the positions that got him within three points in Texas, he'd be able to compete with Biden and now Buttigieg for the majority of Democratic voters well to the center of the typical twitter Democrat.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Very funny

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Beto O’Rourke Drops Out of the Presidential Race

If this holds true, Biden is going to get more of Beto's supporters than the other candidates.

https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/set...september-2019

Beto sucks, but he said some good stuff during the debates and him exiting the race now is going to help Biden and that isn't good.

[Mister Mets]

If this holds true, Biden is going to get more of Beto's supporters than the other candidates.

https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/set...september-2019

Beto sucks, but he said some good stuff during the debates and him exiting the race now is going to help Biden and that isn't good.

He was at two percent nationally, and averaged one percent in polls of Iowa and New Hampshire.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ep...ination_polls/

Beto supporters being up for grabs won't make much of a difference.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

He was at two percent nationally, and averaged one percent in polls of Iowa and New Hampshire.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ep...ination_polls/

Beto supporters being up for grabs won't make much of a difference.

Fair enough.

I am deathly paranoid about Biden winning the nomination so even the smallest sign of anything good happening to him sets me off.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Philanthropy is a sham.

Silicon Valley billionaires keep getting richer, whether they want to or not.

In an age of unprecedented generosity — the amount that Americans give to charity has increased almost every year for the last four decades — the very wealthiest tech titans continue to see their net worths increase every year. This is true even for billionaires who indicate that they are genuinely trying to give away their money.

All but one of the world’s 20 wealthiest tech figures have seen their net worth grow by billions of dollars in 2019, as observed by Business Insider. The only one who didn’t made a record-setting divorce settlement this year; even so, he remains the world’s richest person.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/11/1...-giving-pledge

[numberthirty]

Having heard some of what Biden had to say today...

I really don't get how folks think that you can bank on moderates saving the day while looking at the way this guy is essentially flipping the bird to any Democratic Primary and General Election voters who are anywhere left of "Center".

You are going to need to be able to run the table on the "Moderate" vote for the guy to be able to make up what it feels like he is trying to lose when it comes to voters to the left of "Actual Center".

[numberthirty]

As for O'Rourke...

It is just kind of tough to see where the guy is coming from.

From what he seems to be saying, everything is at such a critical position that he had to be in the running for the Democratic nomination to head off the damage that is happening right now.

That said, it feels like he just ruled out a run for Senate to try to play a role in contending with this same damage that was so massive that it created a scenario where he had to get into contention for the Democratic nomination.

Just odd. Thought he might address it when his likely exit eventually happened. Sorta stumped by how he has dealt with it thus far.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Chomsky stating the obvious

The only policy that you can discern clearly in the Trump administration is a very simple one: me. Anything that benefits me I’ll do no matter what the consequences. If it destroys the world, okay.

Yeah, he’s off the spectrum. But the fact is that that’s true of the Republican Party generally. Two well-known commentators from the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann and Norman Orenstein years ago, described the Republican Party since Newt Gingrich as a radical insurgency that has abandoned parliamentary politics, and is now often a different dimension. What’s actually happened is that during the neoliberal period both of the political parties have shifted to the right. So the mainstream Democrats, the ones who are now meeting with their billionaire friends to try to figure out how to get rid of Sanders and Warren, they’re basically what used to be called moderate Republicans.

I think she’s seems to me quite honest. I think many of her plans are perfectly reasonable. She’s working with quite serious economists, some of them friends. But she doesn’t pretend to be to try, to hoping to institute radical institutional changes. Sanders does. Furthermore, she has not organized a mass political movement which Sanders did. And it’s had a lot of effect. That’s how you get people in Congress like Ocasio-Cortez and others because of this movement.

Well, I don’t think the word socialism should even be used in this context. Bernie Sanders is a decent person. I like what he’s doing. To be quite frank, his major policies would not have surprised President Eisenhower very much. He’s a progressive, New Deal Democrat. Politics has shifted so far to the right during the neoliberal period that things that were sort of conventional and mainstream 50-60 years ago now sound radical.

Well, you have to take each case on its own. Take the Electoral College, that’s bad enough, take the Senate. The Senate is one of the most undemocratic institutions in the western world. Take a look at the number of voters that each senator represents. If a country tried to enter the European Union with the U.S. political system, they’d be turned down by the European Court of Justice. I mean, there’s a whole history here that has to be thought of. The Constitution in the 18th century, though it was a pretty conservative doctrine nevertheless, by the standards of the eighteenth century was pretty novel and even progressive in some respects.

But to adhere to the 18th century constitution in the 21st century is a pretty strange phenomenon. I mean, take the people who are called originalists, you know the right-wing originalist Gorsuch and so on who say we have to interpret the Constitution the way the founders and the framers in the 18th century understood it. I mean, does that even approach rationality? To discuss the modern world the way somebody in 1780 perceived it?

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Obama’s Very Boomer View of ‘Cancel Culture’

Old, powerful people often seem to be more upset by online criticism than they are by injustice.

It’s telling that it’s the powerful and privileged people in society who are most agitated by this form of online activism, and most convinced that it represents unnecessary evil that is tearing away at our civil discourse. The group that Mr. Obama joins in his scolding of outspoken young people is dominated by white straight men, far-right conservative talking heads, and celebrities who feel entitled to audiences who appreciate their art and dutifully ignore their missteps. It’s no surprise that Fox News fretted that his comments were “snubbed” and didn’t receive sufficient coverage from broadcast television networks.

Given that drones account for only a small portion of the munitions dropped in the past eight years, the numbers of civilians killed by Obama’s bombs could be in the thousands. But we can’t know for sure as the administration, and the mainstream media, has been virtually silent about the civilian toll of the administration’s failed interventions.

If Obama had a shred of dignity he'd spend the rest of his life apologizing and making amends for all the havoc he wreaked. But nah, dude's a dirtbag complaining about ‘cancel culture’.

[Tendrin]

Just a reminder that Bill Maher is trash.

In February of 2017, Bill Maher, the “politically incorrect” satirist and stand-up comic, welcomed Milo Yiannopoulos onto his popular HBO show Real Time. Maher’s decision to provide a millions-strong cable platform to the alt-right troll prompted journalist Jeremy Scahill, another guest scheduled to appear that week, to drop out.
“Milo Yiannopoulos is many bridges too far,” wrote Scahill, who co-founded The Intercept. “There is no value in ‘debating’ him. Appearing on Real Time will provide Yiannopoulos with a large, important platform to openly advocate his racist, anti-immigrant campaign. It will be exploited by Yiannopoulos in an attempt to legitimize his hateful agenda.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bill-m...ils?ref=scroll