All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[WestPhillyPunisher]

It’s a rare night when liberals and conservatives can come together and laugh at a common foe. Bloomberg’s disastrous debate performance has united a nation!

Speaking of which:

Mike Bloomberg is a disaster

Not only has Mike Bloomberg spent a lot of money on buying TV airtime, the ads his team has made for him are generally really good. If you knew him primarily through those ads, plus a vague sense that he seemed to be a popular mayor of a big city and made a lot of money running some kind of business, then it’s easy to see why you’d be impressed by his campaign.

What we saw on the debate stage in Nevada Wednesday night is a reality New Yorkers have long been aware of: the man is a wooden charisma vacuum with no natural talent for campaigning.

On one level, that shouldn’t matter so much. The presidency is not primarily an acting gig, after all, it’s a matter of substance. On the other hand, in a campaign where “electability” has loomed so large as a consideration, it’s important to be clear that possession of vast wealth is the entirety of the electability case for Bloomberg.

In terms of his political skills, he’s well below replacement level and compensating for it with money. Money genuinely is valuable in politics, and the fact that Bloomberg has plenty of it to spend shouldn’t be totally discounted. But to the extent that he is sincere about getting President Trump out of office, it’s clear that what he should do is keep paying his talented ad team to keep making attack ads against Trump and keep paying to put them on the air — then let a better politician be the nominee.

But on another level, Bloomberg’s inability to speak from the heart in a convincing or plausible way cuts to a much deeper problem with his candidacy — much of his policy agenda appears to have been cooked up by consultants over the past few months and has no connection to ideas he’s espoused over the rest of his career. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind over time, but you ought to be able to come up with some explanation of what’s going on. And Bloomberg can’t.

[Billy Batson]

So every candidate on the stage but Sanders basically said "yeah we'll let the superdelegates mess with it even if the person with the most votes and delegates doesn't get the nom". Yeah that's a recipe for disaster and why about half the country doesn't believe in the process

This kills the other candidates.

[PaulBullion]

This kills the other candidates.

All candidates knew the rules when they ran. Only one candidates now wants to change the rules to improve his chances of winning.

[PaulBullion]

Hey, remember this gem?

Sanders’ team plans to fight for superdelegates even if Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote.

Mark Longabaugh, a top aide to the senator, told The Huffington Post that Sanders is prepared to stay in the race even if it becomes clear that Clinton has a majority of the pledged delegates and an insurmountable lead after the final primary on June 7.

The strategy outlined by Longabaugh echoed the case made the night before by Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, who told MSNBC that the campaign will try to flip superdelegates away from Clinton before the convention. Neither candidate, Longabaugh argued, will have enough pledged delegates to secure the presidential nomination without the help of superdelegates. The latter officials will then have to decide which candidate gives the party the best shot to win in November. Sanders and his aides believe they have the better case.

“We intend to go to the convention and make the superdelegates vote,” Longabaugh said.

[Billy Batson]

Superdelegates had much more autonomy and power back then, making them a more active part of both campaigns' strategies. An ugly business, not his best moment, and one that he ultimately pushed to do away with
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/de...c-move-n903866

[worstblogever]

Speaking of which:

Mike Bloomberg is a disaster

Unless Michael Bloomberg's real plan was to be the most expensive punching bag in American history to let Elizabeth Warren work over to make her look good, yeah, he's a disaster.

[Tami]

The Secret of Bernie’s Millions

BURLINGTON, Vt.—Early on in his eight years as the mayor of this city, when he typically dressed in a tieless ensemble of work boots and corduroys, Bernie Sanders one day left City Hall and found a ticket on the windshield of his rusty Volkswagen Dasher. The offense: This was the mayor’s spot, and, surely, a cop had thought, this was not the mayor’s car. But it was. It matched perfectly with both Sanders’ image as a scrappy advocate of the little guy and his own shaky financial reality. It was the beginning of the 1980s, and he was approaching 40, a single father of a not-quite-teenage son, renting a sparse second-floor apartment and having a hard time keeping up with his bills. “Not only,” he wrote on his yellow, coffee-splotched legal pads kept in archives at the University of Vermont, “do I not pay bills every month—‘What, every month?’—I am unable to …” His scribbles in barely legible cursive in the margins read like reminders and afterthoughts: “gas,” “light,” “water.”

Today, he might still be cheap, but he’s sure not poor. In the wake of his 2016 presidential run, the most lucrative thing he’s ever done, the 77-year-old self-described democratic socialist is a three-home-owning millionaire with a net worth approaching at least $2 million, taking into account his publicly outlined assets and liabilities along with the real estate he owns outright. In a strict, bottom-line sense, Sanders has become one of those rich people against whom he has so unrelentingly railed. The champion of the underclass and castigator of “the 1 percent” has found himself in the socioeconomic penthouse of his rhetorical boogeymen. This development, seen mostly as the result of big bucks brought in by the slate of books he’s put out in the past few years, predictably has elicited snarky pokes, partisan jabs and charges of hypocrisy. The millionaire socialist!

Sanders has been impatient to the point of churlish when pressed about this. “I wrote a best-selling book,” he told the New York Times after he releasing the last 10 years of his tax returns. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” Asked on Fox News if this sort of success was “the definition of capitalism,” he bristled. “You know, I have a college degree,” he said.

Based on a deeper examination of his financial disclosures, tax returns, property records in Washington and Vermont, and scarcely leafed-through scraps of his financial papers housed at the University of Vermont, Sanders’ current financial portrait is not only some stroke-of-luck windfall, it’s also the product (with the help of his wife) of decades of planning. The upward trajectory from that jalopy of his to his relative riches now—as off-brand as it is for a man who once said he had “no great desire to be rich”—is the product of years of middle-class striving, replete with credit card debt, real estate upgrades and an array of investment funds and retirement accounts.

[Tami]

Trump Has Now Shifted $1.9 Million From Campaign Donors To His Business

Billionaire Donald Trump still has not donated a cent of his own to his 2020 campaign, opting to fund the effort with money from supporters around the country. At the same time, Trump’s private companies are continuing to charge the campaign for expenses like rent and consulting, according to the latest federal filings. That means that since January 20, 2017, the day Trump officially declared his intent to run for reelection, his campaign has put $1.9 million of donor money into the president’s private business.

“This is a man, who when he first said he was going to run for office, was saying that he was going to do this all out of his own pocket,” said Karl Sandstrom, a Democrat who served as a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission from 1998 to 2002. “And now he’s taking money from others and putting it in his pocket.”

Forbes first reported on this arrangement more than a year ago, when Trump had already shifted $1.1 million from his campaign to his business. The amount of money has continued to swell since then.

[jetengine]

I hate it when people go "aha your a millionaire so you cant be a socialist" its a very shitty gotcha. There are FORTY SIX MILLION millionaires right now. Their a dime a dozen. Its the billionaires that are messing with the system.

[PaulBullion]

I'm wondering if we'll see Wall Street react to Elizabeth Warren being the new front runner. Keep your eyes on the DJI today.

[ed2962]

Warren just said "We Need A Better Pitch Than 'Let's Trade Our Arrogant Billionaire For Your Arrogant Billionaire."

The woman has a point.

This is how I've been feeling for the last few weeks. I'm a little shocked at how many Democrats were acting like they'd settle for Bloomberg over Trump.

[Gray Lensman]

I'm wondering if we'll see Wall Street react to Elizabeth Warren being the new front runner. Keep your eyes on the DJI today.

We've already seen the first reaction - she has been removed from a lot of the headlines. They are pushing Bloomberg being eviscerated rather than who did it.

[Billy Batson]

Ah yes, the fourth one in the race is the front runner.

[PaulBullion]

Ah yes, the fourth one in the race is the front runner.

She is third in delegates after the first two contests and just wiped the floor with EVERYBODY at the debate. You may lie about her being fourth because that is what you do, but I am calling it now: She is our new front runner.

[Theleviathan]

I hate it when people go "aha your a millionaire so you cant be a socialist" its a very shitty gotcha. There are FORTY SIX MILLION millionaires right now. Their a dime a dozen. Its the billionaires that are messing with the system.

Shitty argument? Of course. Effective? Very much so. Bernie has to form a better response to that attack.