.
1. Here's a big question for @SenSanders heading into the #NYPrimary – why did you leave New York?
— Tom Watson (@tomwatson) April 3, 2016
Everybody knows that Bernie Sanders was born in Brooklyn; he’s hung onto his accent as grimly as Henry Kissinger does his. The Big Apple — if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere! But the converse of that hopeful song: If you leave New York, you somehow weren’t… capable. Of course it’s never easy to live in The City, but easy is for weaklings & losers. And not everybody can stay in the city, or there wouldn’t be room for all the ambitious migrants, but still… however good our reasons for leaving, we Settled for Less. I thought this attitude might’ve mitigated since my escape in 1973 (just a few years after Bernie bolted for a Midwestern college, I fled to a different one), but if that NY Daily News Editorial Board interview transcript is a true indicator, maybe not so much.
The Transcript of Sanders' meeting with the Daily News Ed Board is almost as damning as Trump's with the WaPo https://t.co/LLn3Z4HZrc
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) April 5, 2016
There’s a lot of people were negatively impressed by what Sanders said in that interview. Even Chris Cillizza, the Washington Post guy who joked about “Hillary ‘Mad Bitch’ Clinton,” called the interview “Pretty close to a disaster”:
… A large part of Sanders’s appeal to the throngs who back him is his insistence that we are in need of a political revolution. And, for those people, the Daily News interview will be much ado about nothing. But what the interview exposes is that once the revolution happens there will be lots of loose ends to tie up. Loose ends that Sanders either hasn’t grappled with — or doesn’t want to.
Remember that Sanders’s campaign began as the longest of long shots. He could propose the world and more because no one thought that he ever had a chance at winning… The Daily News interview amounts to a moment of reckoning for Sanders. Okay, let’s say you get elected — now what? And have you thought through what it might mean to the American worker and the American economy if all of the things you insist have to happen actually did happen? Judging by Sanders’s responses, he hasn’t.
Sanders has spent several decades focused on one political issue and he still can't answer basic questions about it. That's worrying.
— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) April 6, 2016
Jonathan Capehart, also in the Washington Post, has a good summary of “9 things Bernie Sanders should’ve known about but didn’t”. Three general categories: Beyond sputtering “Jay… Pee… Mawgan!”, Sanders doesn’t seem to have thought out how he’d “take down Wall Street”, or how he’d replace an industry upon which a great many New Yorkers who are not highly-paid hedge fund predators depend. He doesn’t seem to have given much attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (you may have heard, there’s a large NYC Jewish vote), or to what the next American president should do about ISIL (beyond not having voted for Dubya’s Iraq war, which would be sound policy if only the Oval Office had a working time machine). And then there’s the Great Token Question…
@thepoliticalcat @AlGiordano Not metro card. You mean Token? pic.twitter.com/W0m7fMPX1G
— Brother Mark B (@ProgressWeekly) April 7, 2016
The NY subways haven’t used tokens for a dozen years or more. Even I know that, and I haven’t been back to the city for almost that long. Yeah, it’s not a significant issue like Bernie’s other flubs… but it’s a signal to NYC dwellers (even Bloomberg takes the subway sometimes!) that Sanders is no longer a “real” New Yorker.
Which is not to say that every New York voter will immediately abandon Bernie — hell, for many apple knockers upstaters, LunGuylanders, and even the Staten Islanders who applauded Eric Garner’s murder, hating The City is practically a religious requirement. On the other hand, most of those people are gonna be voting for Donald Trump anyway…
Sanders is very fluent when speaking in broad moralistic terms. Less so on the nuts and bolts of his policies. pic.twitter.com/7Z7Qg0CIHf
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 5, 2016
6. Bernie Sanders got tripped up on the most basic question on breaking up the banks: "How?" https://t.co/KhcPsHNyz9 pic.twitter.com/2vNJfI53f6
— The Briefing (@TheBriefing2016) April 5, 2016
different-church-lady
Look, there are two people on the internet who have written articles about how this is all wrong. So there.
Betty Cracker
I think the token thing is kinda silly — isn’t it sort of a generic reference to A Thing That Gets You Through the Turnstyle? But otherwise, the interview was a train wreck, IMO, and I like Sanders, even though I voted for Clinton.
However, folks will descend on this thread soon to tell us that it wasn’t, in fact, a train wreck, but rather Sanders’ answers were so sagacious that they flew over our Hillbot heads. And then other people will show up to imply that the Sanders supporters are racist and/or sexist, and the whole thread will get really stupid.
And you will receive long-ass GBCW screeds via email. God, I can’t wait for this primary to end!
Baud
Sanders could stem the damage from the interview by giving a policy speech on the subject of his economic plan. Obama did that several times to prove his readiness in 2008, IIRC.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I agree about the token thing.
Anne Laurie
@Betty Cracker: I tried being polite to the Sandernistas, and all it got me was more abuse. Sod this for a game of soldiers, as my Irish granny used to say!
raven
So the “unqualified” comment supposedly uttered by Hillary was from an article written about what she said on Joe yesterday. He and Mika said they tried to get her to do so and she would not.
Mustang Bobby
This back-and-forth between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders about who’s “qualified” to be president is silly and a waste of time. You both are, so knock it off this minute. Don’t make me pull this car over.
Compared to the Republicans, my stuffed cat Snowball is more qualified to be president than some of them.
Baud
@raven: There were some comments in the thread last night that her not endorsing Sanders as qualified is effectively the same as her calling him unqualified.
OzarkHillbilly
Heh:
Verrrryyyy intelestinggggg….
Yeah, I’ll just bet.
raven
@Baud: xin loi
Baud
The last debate is coming up. It’s going to get ugly.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Yup, there was his race speech in Philly.
OzarkHillbilly
testing testing….
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Maybe Betty will post another thread titled “Mom and Dad are Fighting Again”.
OzarkHillbilly
Ahhhh, so I can comment. I just can’t comment about David Cameron’s hand in the off shore trust cookie jar.
amk
citing that typical bw hack chris fucking cillizza does not strengthen anyone’s case.
The mobile version shows the tweets as they should be. So, why the dt version is so bad?
gene108
@Betty Cracker:
No. It’s not how things work anymore. If you used mass transit in NYC, at all, you would know tokens are obsolete and you use a MetroCard.
For most people it makes little difference.
If Sanders is trying to appeal to NYC voters because he is Brooklyn native, it shows he’s out of touch and doesn’t visit the old neighborhood much or not at all.
It’s sort of like the old way stores ran your credit card, where they slid it across a machine, to imprint the card on a receipt and a carbon copy.
And someone asks you about shopping, you say “make sure the store clerk tears up the carbon sheet, when you use your credit card”.
It’s just not how things work anymore.
Baud
@gene108:
Bush I and the checkout scanner!
NotMax
If he promises to work to bring back the Dodgers and commit to serving egg creams at White House state dinners, all will be forgiven.
:)
@Mustang Bobby
A clear case of being taken out of context. He didn’t say she wasn’t qualified, he said taking Wall Street lucre for the campaign and not condemning her superPACs doing so disqualifies her.
That is an eminently debatable stance, but very different than a pat statement that she is unqualified.
His wording was inelegant, but not what the media has chosen to portray.
Just One More Canuck
@raven: How is Augusta? Did you see Gary Player get his hole in one?
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Mom and Dad need to stop fighting in front of the children.
BillinGlendaleCA
@gene108: I always tell the clerk in all stores that I shop in to tear up the carbon paper, is there something wrong with that?
rikyrah
Good Morning ?, Everyone ?.
Betty Cracker
@gene108: I know about MetroCards — was in NYC a while back for my sister’s Big Fat Gay Wedding and used a MetroCard extensively! Maybe it really is a shibboleth, but if so, it’s a stupid one, IMO.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: Do you also collect Green Stamps?
bystander
Bernie is the white guy equivalent of the Rent Is Too Damn High guy. Yeah, he’s right, but he has no way to get from Point A to Point B.
BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax:
No problem, they’ll be back from San Diego soon.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: No, Blue Chip stamps.
Baud
@gene108:
Strom Thurmond “Please speak into your machine!”
OzarkHillbilly
Dirty campaigns, you ain’t seen nothing:
Baud
I am the only candidate who knows that most young people now get their porn online. I am the only candidate qualified to lead 21st Century America.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I think he learned that from Alexander Graham Bell.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I believe that everybody gets their porn online.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: You’d be surprised.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
The Democratic Debate: May the Best Cane Win!
NotMax
Make America Hydrated Again.
Bring back the 2¢ plain!
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I doubt it, remember I live in Porn Valley.
Ohio Mom
@Betty Cracker: No, it really isn’t a generic thing that gets you into the subway.
You got tokens from a human being sitting in the token booth. That person did all the thinking (if a token costs X how many can I get with this five dollar bill) gave you directions if you didn’t know what train(s) to take. In the morning if yu were running late and out of tokens in your change purse, someone in your household could give you one of theirs without any inconvenience to them.
To buy a metro card, you go to a vending machine and have to read and follow directions. The cards are heavy paper. You can mangle thme and then they are unusable. There can be odd amounts left on one, 25 cents. No one can go in their pocket and give you a spare one. Give someone your card and you are back at the vending machine.
In short, it was a major culural change to switch to the cards. No one calls the cards “tokens.” That would be the equivalent of calling coffee “tea.” Two completely different animals.
Sign me, Another NY ex-pat
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax:
That gave me whiplash.
BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax:
Sorry Rubio’s out.
Baud
@NotMax: Rubio agrees!
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: That’s the problem. You live on the cutting edge. Not in the boonies.
NotMax
@Baud
Cue Avenue Q>
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: If I want to see porn stars, I just go to the local supermarket.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: Cleanup in Aisle 69!
Betty Cracker
@Ohio Mom: Christ Jesus, I give up.
Schlemazel (parmesan rancor)
@OzarkHillbilly:
I had a rare accident the other night and witnessed an evening News show (NBC) they showed pictures of people mention with the off-shore accounts, including a couple I recognized. They then went into a long thing on Putin with a mention at the end of the PM if Iceland. But Cameron was one of the people I noticed in the photos! WTH?!? We expect Putin to be a lying, cheating SOB The PM of the UK is a much bigger story but it did not even mention a one sentence mention like Icelands did?
SFAW
@BillinGlendaleCA:
That deserves to be a meme, or at least have it’s own tag on BJ.
Not sure what the tag would apply to, but it deserves to be one
BillinGlendaleCA
@Betty Cracker: I’ve never really been to New York, so I’m agnostic on this. I’m still trying to figure out if I take Metrolink to downtown, can I use my ticket to take the subway(I think the answer is yes). I’m planning to taking some pics in downtown LA and Santa Monica(once the train goes there in May).
BillinGlendaleCA
@SFAW: Once I was in line behind a porn star at the local Home Depot.
Chyron HR
Obviously when Sanders said you use a token to ride the subway, what he MEANT to say was that he gets Killer Mike to put some money on his farecard.
==USER HAS BEEN BANNED FOREVER FOR THIS JOKE==
SFAW
@SFAW:
That should be “its,” you moron.
[Note to Alain: I do not have permission to edit my own comment.]
Betty Cracker
@BillinGlendaleCA: I’ve only driven through LA once — didn’t even know it has a subway! Well, I hope you’ll share a few pics here. You are a very talented photographer.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: Buying some screws?
EconWatcher
Occam’s Razor: I suspect that Sanders always was and still is a Marxist. I don’t mean that as a red-baiting slur; my favorite professor in college was a Marxist. But it helps explain Bernie’s apparent indifference to wonky policy issues.
Marxists don’t really believe in debating policy issues per se. They think that as long as the state is in the hands of the capitalist class, all policy will in the end serve the interests of the ruling class and will screw the working class.
Debating little policy issues to them seems pretty much a fraud–it’s a pretense that society as currently configured leaves the people the power to choose policies that will benefit them the most. For the Marxist, there won’t be any such meaningful choices for the people until the power of the economic ruling class is broken–i.e., until there’s a “political revolution,” not coincidentally the term Bernie loves to use.
This also explains why Bernie pounds so hard on Hillary’s Wall Street speaking fees. To him, that is much more revealing than any discussion of how we might optimally structure the earned income tax credit, or how much equity capital banks should be required to hold. The speaking fees show who will really call the shots and expose all of the policy talk as so much window-dressing to dupe the voters.
I’m not saying I agree, but I’m pretty sure that’s how he sees it.
Aimai
@Baud: very good point. It was insulting and sad that he had to do so–plus the one about religion he had to give and the one sbout rsce, but it was awe inspiring and made his voters confident.
Schlemazel (parmesan rancor)
@OzarkHillbilly:
Pasta but it would be joyous to see Cruz & Drumpf rolling around the debate stage, slapping at each other like a couple of weak wannabes. I would pay to see that!
Baud
@EconWatcher: Makes sense. But it would mean he has no chance in the general election IMHO.
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemazel (parmesan rancor): In the article in the Guardian, they take note that he actively persuaded the G20 and others to treat off shore trusts differently than off shore corporations and not expose their ultimate owners (IIRC).
When asked if they still had money in the trust his father set up, #10 Downing Street replied, “That is a personal matter.”
(I’d try to link again but FYWP 3rd time is not the charm)
BillinGlendaleCA
@Betty Cracker: Thank you for your kind compliment. LA has a subway line that goes from Union Station in downtown to North Hollywood(the Valley) as well as to Koreatown(it’s currently expanding along Wilshire to UCLA). We have a number of light rail lines(one out to Azuza, one to East LA, one to Long Beach, and one to Culver City(that will go to Santa Monica in May). We also have Metrolink commuter trains that run from Ventura County, Northern LA County, Orange County and San Berdo.
NotMax
@BilinGlendaleCA
Gonna resist inquiring what the line you were on was for.
Schlemazel (parmesan rancor)
@Baud:
Saw a commercial while in Chicago that was hilarious. Car breaks down and an Amish kid picks them up in his buggy. The kids are asking him how it must be tough to get by with no modern conveniences, One says “How do you get by without the Internet?”
“I get pictures of your mother in the mail.”
That struck me as really funny
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I think she sells screws. But she was buying some stuff for her patio, and was having trouble with her credit card and it took a while. I didn’t complain.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
There’s no room in the “The People’s Revolution” for a woman.
I’ve tellin you guys for 5 years that there was something wrong with him.
Aimai
@EconWatcher: ansolutely correct. My uncle is a marxist–member of SDS—and now a professor of history. This is just how they think. Needless to say a lot of suffering and pain happens in the near term while the revolution is getting its boots on. As a parent i dont refuse my child palliative care or minor surgery becsuse im waiting to cure cancer. Thats my rebuttal. Hrc can do a lot of good while bernie is waiting for godot.
Schlemazel (parmesan rancor)
@OzarkHillbilly:
Nice! I find it interesting that the media wants to whip up a bunch of Putin hate (which I have no problem with, it is fairly earned) while ignoring other rich and powerful people. About the only other name I have heard dropped is Jackie Chan. While it is still just as wrong I would be hard pressed to care less about what he does as opposed to the British PM, other world leaders and American fat cats.
Darkrose
@BillinGlendaleCA: Leaving dead Friars everywhere. Leave it to the Padres to get historically humiliated.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@Betty Cracker: Yes, it’s silly, but they take it seriously.
for example, every cycle out-of-town pols go to NYC for a photo op and eat pizza with a knife and fork, and while it is silly, the locals go nutz about it.
It’s like how they get upset in Nevada if you use an alternative pronunciation.
Schlemazel (parmesan rancor)
There are several quotes of his I love, I just had to look that one up for a FB post. And it reminded me pf several I thought I’d share as a palate cleanser
“People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.”
“We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that’s show business.”
“Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you’re any wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.”
lordy how I wish he would rise from the dead and smite all the empty, vapid jerkoffs infecting todays media
NotMax
@Schlemazel (parmesan rancor)
Dozens of names of political figures have been reported. From Iceland, from Britain, from Russia, from China, from Egypt, from Brazil, and on and on.
Baud
@Schlemazel (parmesan rancor): Heh.
EconWatcher
@Aimai:
As a hotblooded young man, I was susceptible to this kind of thinking. But as a cranky middle-aged dude, I would say that every time people who think this way have taken control of a government, it has been either a chaotic disaster (think Britain during the “winter of discontent,” 1978-79), or a charnel house (passim). Incremental progress is all we poor humans can hope for.
All that being said, Hillary never should have taken those damn speaking fees, to say nothing of the Iraq War vote, so there are plenty of reasons for non-Marxists to distrust her. :)
debbie
@NotMax:
Not just the media either.
I’d rather someone explain what it is these idiots think they’ll accomplish:
OzarkHillbilly
By now everyone knows Merle Haggard died yesterday. The Guardian has Merle Haggard: the country music legend’s 10 greatest hits and over at LG&M Erik Lookis directed me to a 1990 profile from the New Yorker, a really good read.
Baud
@debbie:
Ah, to be six years old and full of hope again.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
This isn’t the first time he gave an interview that exposed his shocking lack of knowledge for someone who has been paid to study public affairs for 25 years in the Senate and Congress.
From last July’s interview with Ezra Klien:
later in the interview:
How can you be 75 years old, spent a life time in government and politics and not know the words “realist” and “zionist”?
There isn’t a person reading this thread that doesn’t know the meanings of these words; even though it’s not our job.
Nobody made a big deal at the time, but when the interview came out and I read it, I was dumbfounded.
Think about the firestorm if Clinton has said this.
JPL
@EconWatcher: shoulda/coulda.. Bernie blamed her for Americans dying in Iraq. Her vote did not kill our soldiers. Bush led us into a war on lies.
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: Ooooopppsss… From the New Yorker, Ornery
debbie
@Baud:
And, apparently, the only one with brains in that family.
JPL
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: The other day I typed Barney instead of Bernie. Baud mentioned the dragon, in response. Maybe Bernie is similar to Barney Fife. We just need Andy to rein him in.
Crusty Dem
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Required “did you see how much wood she loaded into her trunk?” joke.
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker: I was on the LA subway once. As an expat NY-er, I was surprised it didn’t smell of stale urine.
And, Betty, you should indeed give up on the token thing. To non-NY-ers it seems small and foolish. To NY-ers it’s a BFD. Just accept that.
AnonPhenom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeiGkEEBM_c
OzarkHillbilly
@EconWatcher:
I don’t think there is anybody here who if offered $100K for a 2 hour platitudinous speech, they would turn it down. Hell’s Bells, I’d even pop for first class air fare to go there.
Chyron HR
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
B-b-but Sanders wanting to get rid of Obamacare was just a slanderous lie that the
White House dogChelsea Clinton made up. :<JMG
One thing I have yet to read about in this campaign, which could be on me but I don’t think so, is a story about Bernie’s policy posse. Who are his advisers or outsiders he turns to for counsel? All I ever see or read about are his campaign staff or surrogates, which is not the same thing. I mean, it makes me worry he doesn’t know enough people to staff an administration.
Chris
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
I have a BA and an MA in international relations.
1) I have never expected that anyone outside of my sphere would know what a “realist” or the other schools of thought are. In the foreign policy/national security establishment, sure. From politicians and political appointees? Absolutely not. We’ve had enough evidence of them not knowing much more elementary things – George Bush mixing up Sweden and Switzerland, John McCain (I think?) mixing up the Republican Guard and the Revolutionary Guard and Hamas and Hezbollah. I could go on. The average politician and the average guy just do not know much about foreign policy. Sad, but a fact.
2) I may be showing my young age, but what the hell is a “democratic socialist” – in the international relations context, that is? At both my universities, the three schools of thought we were taught were “realism,” “liberalism” and “constructivism.” There was some attention paid to “critical theories” that were outside the mainstream, like Marxism. Maybe “democratic socialism” was one of these theories and I just don’t remember it. Regardless, it’s not one of the Big Three in American IR discussions, and I don’t blame Sanders a bit for “not knowing what that word means.”
Gindy51
@Betty Cracker: It reminds me of the major gaffe George HW Bush spewed out about grocery store scanners. I think that one sealed his doom with the little people.
OzarkHillbilly
@Chris: Just out of curiosity, where do the Neocons fit in?
EconWatcher
@JPL:
I don’t want to start a flame war, but the reason I can’t let that vote go is that half of the Dems in the Senate had the guts to vote the other way. And the vote with the Clinton name on it wasn’t just any Senator’s vote; the vote from the wife of the immediately preceding Democratic President had a LOT of significance in giving W bipartisan cover for his little adventure.
Also, think about how much pressure that put on the other Dems: Even the Clintons agree this a no-brainer! Get with the program! I’ll bet more opposition votes could have been lined up if she had done the right thing. Probably not enough to stop it, but maybe enough to create a clear majority of the opposition, which would have left the Democractic Party in a much more honorable position (and a stronger position to replace W in 2004).
Also, for those who were adults at the time, do you really buy that she believed the whole WMD thing? I could see it was BS, and so could many others; you didn’t have to be a genius. She was just afraid the war effort would be just as successful as Gulf War I, and dissenters (no matter how right their cause) would be left politically in the cold.
That’s a trust issue that won’t go away, and it’s a big part of the reason why she’s having so much trouble putting this on ice, even against a crazy old Marxist.
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
I still have a token (the 75th anniversary one) on my keyring as a reminder of my time in NYC.
Aimai
@EconWatcher: i was angry about the iraq war vote but to say it is a reason to distrust her is just wrong. I believe its very hard to have lived in the white house and worked with a president and really understand that the Bush team and their senatorial buddies were going to be flat out liars. In the end even someone as cynical as she ought to be probably thought that when it came to forcing war they would be more chary of burning every bridge with the democrats by lying to them. Kerry thought the same. When you work with people everyday you have to develop a reliance on some things.this was a doozy of a mistake but one thing for hillary she learns from her mistakes.
Patricia Kayden
@Mustang Bobby: That’s how I feel. Sanders or Clinton will make fine Presidents. All that matters is the general election. I suppose Clinton should be okay with this heavily contested primary season since she competed all the way through June against Obama.
JMG
The vote on Iraq cost Clinton the presidency once already. Without it Sanders would be running against Vice President Obama right now. That seems a suitable penalty. Aimai, I have no idea why Clinton hasn’t just said “I never dreamed any President would take us to war on false pretenses.” That would answer the question, but maybe it violates some rule of the ex-Presidents club.
debbie
Apparently, John Kasich still thinks he’ll be the candidate “after several ballots” in Cleveland. As big a joke as this is, it’s worth it just to know how angry it’s making Cruz that he won’t leave the race.
NonyNony
I think she bought it because Rumsfeld showed her the paperwork showing that Hussein had bought them from us. And like much of the rest of DC she was convinced that he still had them.
This is actually a point where I disagree with a lot of liberals – I think Rumsfeld and W and his entire cadre were absolutely convinced that they would find WMDs in Iraq because they knew that we had sold them to Hussein and they absolutely did not believe that Hussein had destroyed them. Because had they been in his position they wouldn’t have destroyed them, so why would they believe that he would? Obviously the weapons inspectors were either chumps or being paid off by Hussein because look – we have documentation that he bought them, he’s not an idiot, Iran is still a threat to him on the east and he has no other real allies to fall back on, therefore he’s still got them somewhere. QED.
I think that the fact that Hussein actually had destroyed those weapons was the first big surprise that anyone in DC who supported the war had (though it wouldn’t be the last). They thought that it was a completely safe justification for the war because they knew he had them, whether their intelligence could actually back it up or not.
NotMax
@JMG
*cough* Quemoy and Matsu. Gulf of Tonkin resolution. *cough*
BillinGlendaleCA
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: You’d think, having lived in Israel, he’d know what a Zionist is.
Baud
@debbie: He’s done. If they screw over Trump and Cruz, it’ll be with Paul Ryan.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Chris: …and Ben Carson mixing up Hamas and Humus.
EconWatcher
@OzarkHillbilly:
Sorry, but no. I’m no moral paragon, but I’ve taken a big pay cut to go to a job that’s more socially meaningful, and I think that I can say with confidence that I wouldn’t take money from Goldman Sachs right after they brought the world economy to its knees and then were massively bailed out by taxpayers through the AIG rescue. I’m quite sure many on this blog could say the same. So you’ll have to speak for yourself on that one.
And let’s forget moral judgment. What about political judgment. Given her experience, how could she not realize that this was toxic?
Finally, how do you know that the speeches were only harmless platitudes? If that’s so, why hasn’t she released the transcripts in full?
Kay
@Aimai:
But there IS a middle ground there and that gets lost in this discussion of “possible” and “impossible”. I don’t think it has to be so narrow. There IS a need for someone to say “why are we limited to such a narrow range of possible options?”
I think it feels insufficient to a lot of Democrats because the conservative “movement” takes a much more aggressive approach. If I were a conservative I would have said “it will be impossible to gut the Voting Rights Act- they will never go that far” but it wasn’t impossible They did it.
They feel the counter to “movement” conservatism can’t be “whatever a majority of Democrats in the Senate will vote for” because that’s an unequal force.
Maybe that isn’t the President’s role and I actually think Sanders as an individual isn’t up to the job, but there should be something or somewhere for that energy to go, because it doesn’t have to be “practical” to have value, it can just be an idea. I feel as if the Democratic Party has gone too far in the direction of “show me results!” and to the more liberal Party activists that can feel less like a group of people they voluntarily associate with and more like a job. We already debate the ideas that are acceptable to a majority of Democrats in the Senate. Party activists have a different role, a much broader set of possibilities, and they don’t, actually, have to lay out a timeline for passage or identify 60 votes in the Senate.
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker:
Seriously? That’s an actual thing?
Baud
@Kay: I disagree. Conservatives win elections at all levels. Progressives do not. That’s the basis for the difference in aggressiveness between the two camps.
Betty Cracker
@EconWatcher:
Yes, I do believe she bought it. Many people did. I also think she made the political calculation you outlined in the last sentence above. The two are not mutually exclusive.
NonyNony
@EconWatcher:
However I’m going to say that this is wrong – the thing that is the reason that she’s having trouble putting this election down is mostly because her support among women is around 54% and her support among Democratic men is around 46%.
I know for a fact that there are Democratic men who refuse to vote for her even though her stances are closer to their positions because she’s a woman. I know this because I’ve had long arguments with old dudes of my acquaintance who voted for Sanders in this primary despite the fact that they’d describe themselves as conservative Dems. Every one of them has at one point or anther explained to me exactly how he could never work for for woman and how women shouldn’t be put in charge of men.
So while some of Sanders support comes from people who don’t trust Clinton because she’s a Clinton, I’m convinced that there’s a good chunk of his support that he gets from men who don’t trust Clinton because she’s a woman.
(And I say this as a guy who voted for Sanders in the primary – following my own rule of always vote for the candidate that is furthest to the left. I’m starting to worry that I may really regret making that vote like I eventually regretted voting for Edwards in 2004, though for different reasons.)
Kropadope
@NotMax:
You can say that again. And while the NYDN was clunky, I wouldn’t call it a complete trainwreck. Still, it’s refreshing to see Hillary’s fan club going after Bernie for something somewhat substantial, something that isn’t completely petty or retrieved directly from their posteriors.
ETA: Even still, the NY Times has pointed out that his answer on breaking up the banks was fundamentally correct. Bernie said he’d pursue legislation, but failing that he’d go after them administratively. Whether he tried to do that through the fed or through his cabinet, there are going to be legal challenges, and this makes the path sans legislation unclear, not necessarily unworkable.
Aimai
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: come on. He is tefusing to be pigeonholed and forcing ezra to back up.
raven
@Betty Cracker: It’s not a subway.
debbie
@Baud:
I’d like to think he’ll stick around, if only for the comic relief. We could use some.
Baud
@NonyNony:
I said this the other day, but I believe now that very little about the D primary is about ideological distinctions.
Baud
@debbie: He’s not even that funny though.
Patricia Kayden
@JMG: Secretary Clinton has explained that she believed her vote was not for Bush to go to war but for diplomacy.
“In other words, Clinton was now claiming she voted the way she did in the interests of diplomacy; the problem was that Bush went back on his word—he invaded before giving the inspectors enough time.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2016/02/hillary_clinton_told_the_truth_about_her_iraq_war_vote.html
different-church-lady
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: David, how just how dense are you? He knows what those words mean. Saying he doesn’t know what they mean is just his way of saying, “Your question is stupid and I’m not going to answer it.”
It’s part of his authenticity, donchaknow.
Matt McIrvin
@NonyNony:
I will admit, one of the reasons I voted for her even though her stances are further from my positions is that she’s a woman. It’s just been too long. It’s ridiculous that the US has never had a female President. She’s almost absurdly qualified to be President, maybe more so than anyone who’s run for the office in my lifetime. I voted her down in a primary election once, because I thought there was actually a better person running. I always figured she might run again and I’d give her a chance then. Voting her down again in favor of a glorified message candidate just felt wrong, even if I liked the message.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Ah, an authentic Brooklyn dodger.
;)
OzarkHillbilly
@EconWatcher: Well, I’ll just bow down before a paragon of moral virtue and go back to counting my filthy lucre.
This is an an argument you can make.
Funny thing, I read that exact same argument from a Republican in the Missouri state senate concerning Planned Parenthood’s refusal to release the names of their patients. “If they have nothing to hide…”
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: The Red and Purple lines are subway lines(heavy rail, all underground).
Aimai
@Kay: the fundamental difference between the tea party and billionsires forcing the republican party to do its bidding and the progressive left forcing the dems to do theirs is that neither the republicans in congress nor the raging voters or donors have any fear of hurting people. In fact thrir goal is to hurt people. They arent process oriented or rule bound AND they are not trying to protect znyine but their own voters and donors. And they are willing to take their voters votes for anti gay/anti woman legislation while letting thrir voters literally die of stupidity and lack of health care.
The democrats have an ethic of responsibility in a weberian senseand so do thrir voters (for the most part) . Bernie, in promising more than he can deliver and handicapping hillary is basically taking peoples votes and willing to let them die in the streets for his failed policies. Thats fucking immoral even though he has convinced them its noble.
Tripod
Even the mighty Chittenden County Transportation Authority uses oyster cards ffs. So yeah, Bush I, I have no I idea how the modern world works, is a bit of an issue. Especially that he combines his Marxism with industrial revolutionism. He really does believe seizing the commanding heights means a return of the steel industry to Pittsburgh.
Betty Cracker
@debbie: Kasich is the only clown in the car who worries me. He’s awful, but I think he could win, whereas I believe the Dem would beat Cruz or Trump like a rented mule. If I were Rinses Repeatus, I’d be trying to orchestrate a Kasich nomination on the 2nd ballot.
Kropadope
@NonyNony:
If this were the case, why was the administration pushing so hard on the idea that Iraq was actively building WMDs? Yellowcake! Aluminum tubes! Mobile chemical weapons manufacturing! It was all bullshit and if their strongest argument that Iraq had WMDs was a sales receipt, maybe they would’ve led with that.
sherparick
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: It is strange how many of the Bernieistas channel, absorb, and then regurgitate right wing conspiracy memes about both Clinton and Obama. As another poster Econowatcher notes there is a strong influence of Marxist thinking in Sanders and much of the progressive left that supports him which deemphasizes wonkish policy debates as merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Capitalist Titannic. I expect this lack of interest in details and constant gadfly attitude is the reason Barney Franks finds Bernie insufferable. And it is the reason Bernie and his biggest fans really don’t see much difference between Hillary and Ted Cruz since both are seen as being instruments of the ruling class. On the other hand Mothers trying to feed their children on food stamps and Black people trying to save their right to vote on the other hand do notice a bit of a difference.
This emphasis on the class struggle is also been the chronic problem with Bernie’s lack of appeal to Black and Hispanic voters, who both see race and ethnic civil rights issues – often in conflict with white working class voters of Southern sensibilities – as just as important, and at times and places, more important than class struggle issues. And although Bernie and Thomas Franks like to disparage this part of the Democratic coalition, the educated, professional middle and upper middle class, people (particularly women of this class), people who a generation ago use to be moderate Republicans, don’t find the militant class struggle of the Bernistas particularly compelling as opposed to the gender, gun, and environmental concerns. And this is a particularly significant block of voters in the upcoming primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Connecticut (states which also all have large minority voting blocks).
I think we probably have hit peaked Bernie at this point. Appeals to Bernie to curb his rhetoric and attacks on Hillary in loyalty to the Democratic Party probably will not work to well, since really, Bernie is not and has not ever been a member of the Party. (Which is probably why Hillary she found it really rich, belly laughing rich, when asked to respond to Jeff Weaver assertion that she should drop out of the race for the good of the Democratic Party.) So it will be a tough couple of weeks (as was in 2008 when Hillary was on the losing end and the Pumas were hating Obama well into the summer – and creating memes that the right wing and Republicans have continued to use to the present in the process.)
I will say this, Bernie has proven to be a remarkable politician and in the big picture we all owe him a big Thank You for shifting the Democratic Party’s Overton window well to the Left over the last year. Would the $15.00 movement be where it is without Bernie making it a feature in his campaign? Would free Community College and State colleges be something we can debate but for Bernie? Would raising the base Social Security benefit by $100 a month? I may not have voted for the man, but I am sure glad he ran.
Iowa Old Lady
The NYDN interview and Clinton’s record will influence voters more than who called whom what. To me, the most telling part of this is that when Joe Scar prodded Clinton to say Sanders was unqualified, she resisted, while Sanders lost his cool, when they both have to be tired and cranky. (God knows Juicers are.) To me, this was a small echo of Clinton’s Benghazi hearing performance of keeping her head when tired and under pressure.
Peale
@OzarkHillbilly: clamping down on abuses…in other countries. The shell companies in Gibraltar, Jersey, Gurnsey, and the British Virgin Islands…goodness nothing could be done about those. Because tradition.
Shantanu Saha
The Constitution of the United States has two qualifications to be President of the United States.
1. You have to be a natural-born citizen
2. You have to be at least 35 years old when you assume the office.
Under those two rules, both Clinton and Sanders qualify.
It’s interesting to note that under the first rule, there is (still, as it is not yet resolved by a court decision one way or the other) that Cruz is not qualified to be President.
As for whether a person is ready to be President, Bernie’s interview raised some questions about that. Trump’s entire campaign thus far has strongly answered that question in a negative manner, and Cruz’s manner leads me to believe that while he may be ready to become President, he is not ready to give up that office, ever.
different-church-lady
The thing about the subway isn’t that he didn’t know about MetroCards. The thing about the subway is that he claimed he was on one a year or so ago. So apparently its either that he was bullshitting about that, or he had an assistant take care of the fare. Or he was comp’ed. Who knows?
He could of just said, “It was a lot of years ago. I miss it,” or something of that nature, but instead he tried to BS his way through. I’m curious as to how the interviewer sniffed out the guess that the fare card was the thing that would snare him.
Matt McIrvin
…I also have at least one friend who, while he favored Hillary Clinton, was convinced that there was simply no way she could win the general election because Americans are still just too sexist to elect a woman. But he figured the fix was in on the Republican side and her opponent would be Jeb Bush. When Trump became the frontrunner, he decided she actually could beat Trump. But it’s quite possible it won’t be Trump after all, it’ll be someone who is somewhat harder to beat.
I think that, aside from Bernie’s trade-protectionist angle which resonates across the political spectrum, sexism really is a part of the reason that the further-left Democrat has this unusual appeal to more conservative white Democrats who you’d expect would be attracted to the centrist. But it also does speak to the electability question: just as Obama got some hard-to-quantify penalty for blackness, however unfair it is, the fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman is going to make it harder for her to win the general election by some fractional amount. My every instinct is to reject that as a reason not to vote for somebody (and, indeed, to actively push against it), but maybe when the stakes are high enough it becomes a consideration.
NotMax
@Peale
Not to mention Wyoming and Delaware, prime real estate for creation of shell companies by non-Americans.
blueskies
@Baud: Yep, but’s it’s SOP for dear Annie, bless her heart.
sherparick
@Kropadope: Well, they wanted to believe their own WMD story as much as they wanted to believe that invading Iraq would enable them to make the Middle East the 51st State. They came to believe their own con.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Baud: Yup. Bernie could help himself a lot with people who are skeptical of his approach to governing (even when they agree with the general outlines of his policies) by spending some time to explain how he would do what he proposes. He doesn’t have to say, “well, this will never happen under a GOP House and Senate”, but he does have to say something like:
Look, let me just say (wagging pointing finger), what G-S and AIG and Citi did was wrong, here’s the laws that were, IMHO, violated, and here’s what should have been done to bring them to the dock. That’s water under the bridge now due to the statute of limitations and so forth, but here’s what I would do going forward. I would change the TBTF rules so that it would be in the big financial institution’s interest to get smaller by extending and strengthening Dodd-Frank by …
Bernie has his canned campaign speech with his ™-ed slogans down cold. He needs to put some meat on the bones.
Will he? I kinda doubt it. He’s being run ragged by trying to compete in the next primaries. His team probably figures what they’ve been doing is “working”, so they’re not going to change much.
We’ll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who agrees that the “token” thing is no big deal.)
PurpleGirl
Maybe the token mistake is minor but there is an economic element to it that is very important or should be to Bernie. Other large systems are heavily subsidized. The NYC subway and bus system is funded by farepayers to the tune of 85% of operating costs. The state keeps wanting to cut back on its subsidy to the transit sector. For low and moderate income people the increases in the fares take a huge toll on their budgets. I woulkd think that Sanders would be interested in understanding the economic issue in transit fares.
Peale
@Betty Cracker: I guess the token question can be seen as a gotcha question (real man of the people! Public transit for thee but not for me!). But it just seems like one of those clowny “is he New York enough. Does he root for the Patirots or the Jets?” questions, which is the New York equivalent of making politicians eat deep fried SPAM at the Iowa county fair.
Kay
@Aimai:
I’ll give you an example of how the other approach, the “results” approach could hurt people. Sanders said he wanted “free college” and that was immediately shut down as impractical, states will never, ever do it, it will benefit only rich people who have the best K-12 schools, and on and on.
Except the US is already moving to “free college” – it just isn’t within the narrow frame of “4 free years living on a state school campus”. Both Clinton and Obama support free community college and my state has a wildly popular “get free college credits in high school” program. It isn’t for rich people and a GOP led state passed it.
The US will move to free pre-k thru 14, and probably in the next decade, because they don’t have any choice if they want a workforce above poverty level. Why are we shutting down the ‘free college” debate? It’s already mainstream. Is it 4 free years at a state university? No. But it’s happening. High school didn’t used to be free either. I wouldn’t want to belong to the political Party who said “impossible!” or “only rich, white people will benefit from that zany ‘free high school’ idea!”
There’s a narrowing that happens when we allow the 15 most conservative Democrats in the Senate to limit PUBLIC debate. I’m not the majority leader. I don’t have those restrictions. That’s not my role.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Baud: Heh.
When I was a little kid, my mom would save the little coupons (Betty Crocker?) on top of the cereal boxes, etc., to buy flatware occasionally. I always called them “Good Towards” because that seemed to be the largest text on them.
Cheers,
Scott.
(We mainly saved TopValue rather than S&H.)
raven
@Just One More Canuck: Oh, we only had Monday tickets. It was swell!
NotMax
@
I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Older folks can engage in that sort of use of obsolete terms as a matter of habituation, especially if tired, rushed or speaking offhandedly. I occasionally find myself uttering the word Victrola, for example.
guachi
All I remember about the last time I rode a New York subway in 2010 was I paid $2 to someone in a booth, I think, after getting off the train.
sherparick
@EconWatcher: I do see this as right wing meme, this “trust” issue with Hillary Clinton. Probably voting for the use of force vote in 2002 was in part political. She was one of the Senators from New York post 9/11 and, lets face it, the mood of the country was still “blood thirsty” at the time. And she voted for it, as did the Democratic nominee in 2004 (Kerry) and the Democratic Vice-President in 2008/12 (Biden). I think it is less of a “trust” issue then a “judgement” issue; e.g. a willingness to go with the prevailing “group think” of the moment. That to me is a legitimate criticism and worry if Hillary becomes the President. This is also my the problem with the e-mail kerfuffle; a group think decision on what was most convenient for her at the time and a shutting out of other concerns in order to please the principal. (By the way, her use of her own private server was never a secret since every e-mail she sent had her non-government e-mail address in black letters on it.)
raven
Here’s my shot of Amen Corner
FlipYrWhig
@JMG:
I don’t think anyone in policy circles likes the guy (which for him as for Ted Cruz he takes as a badge of honor), for reasons sherparick helped to delineate. He grandstands and lectures and mostly opposes and grudgingly participates in constructive things when he feels like it, and even then he shakes his head at how awful it is all the while. Who would willingly want to work with that person? I have to work with many such people, and it fucking sucks.
OzarkHillbilly
@sherparick:
This. I have said it before and I will say it again.
sherparick
@Mustang Bobby: Hillary apparently failed to rise to the bait when Scarborough asked her if she though Bernie unqualified. Perhaps Bernie misheard her or heard some surrogate question whether he was qualified post the New York Daily News interview. But we going to hear lots of nasty back and forth the next two months up to the California primaries. That is why the call primaries circular firing squads.
Shantanu Saha
@different-church-lady:
Maybe he relived his youth and jumped a turnstile?
Just Some Fuckhead
@NotMax:
Sometimes I’ll refer to the box that cleans laundry as the “Washing Machine”.
PurpleGirl
@guachi: The standard one-ride fare is currently $2.75. You can get Metrocards in various demoninations that somewhat reduce that depending on what you can afford. A monthly pass is currently about $111.900 and in unlimited. The Weekly unlimited card is $31.00 But you have to pay at one time. If your employer joins a certain a program they will take the money out of you pre-tax income. Again, though, if you can afford to have thaqt much taken out at once.
If you paid a fare after getting off the train then you were probably buying a metro card for a return trip. You need to pay the fare before going through the turnstiles.
Cleos
And last week I laughed at the odd brand of provincialism that wastes energy in indignation over how anyone — even a Republican — eats pizza. Ditto Sanders’ departure from New York and his command of subway riding liturgy.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Just Some Fuckhead: It’s pronounced “Warshing Machine”.
PurpleGirl
Also, the last time they raised the fares, they also cut back on certain bus lines, shifted bus stops, played around with some train lines. It made certain connections much harder to make and made commutes longer.
FlipYrWhig
@sherparick:
It’s all because of something someone used to describe what the Clinton campaign would do next, which used the word “disqualify”: ” it’s going to be called disqualify him, defeat him and then they can unify the party later.” Which then the special snowflakes at Team Bernie turned into a puling whining fundraising (of course) email about how mean Hillary was so mean that you need to send cash quick to prevent her from taking down the movement. That’s why they started fighting about forms of the word “qualify” like “dis-” and “un-.”
Kay
@Aimai:
There’s this famous “story” in Ohio, it’s basically true but it’s now this cherished tale of how progressive German immigrants pushed this crazy idea of “kindergarten” and then it became real and we all go to “free kindergarten”, which we love and it’s all very ‘Merican.
I meet nasty conservatives here who bitch about the free prek program in the public schools. It’s only been around for 5 years. It’s now the NORM here for low income parents. They expect it. It’s not even mandatory! There’s no state law that says we have to offer it, but there will be, and probably in my lifetime. We just built prek rooms into a new public school. They’ll never beat it back now :)
Kropadope
@NotMax:
I’m not even that old, but I’m still in the habit of calling any handheld video game a “Gameboy.”
@Kay:
This, exactly.
Just because there isn’t a plan that’s both fully-formed and universally-agreeable on any given issue doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t debate it, nor does it mean that a Presidential candidate shouldn’t be able to promote the issue in a broad sense to help people understand its importance and to get people talking about it. Getting people talking and thinking through an issue is an important part in constructing that fully-formed, enough-of-the-people-agreeable plan.
It can’t just be ALEC on the right and Hillary Clinton and her favorite lawyers on the left. We have a Congress, we should use it.
sherparick
@gene108: I voted for Clinton, but this one of those silly stories produced by modern political journalism as high school level theater criticism (also known as “Dowdism” where the kulz kids point at the silly folks running for Student Government offices). As Charlie Pierce said neither Bernie or the NY Daily News editorial board covered themselves with glory in this interview.
OzarkHillbilly
@Matt McIrvin:
While this is certainly true, I think the far harder mountain to climb is the fact that she is a Clinton. The Republicans have been relentlessly attacking all things Clinton since 1992 with the constant refrain of how “corrupt” they are. It has gotten to the point where Dems repeat the GOP talking points without ever examining how baseless these claims are, a fact that is born out by the all but numberless investigations that always, always, come up empty. (except for that one time Bill had fun with a cigar in the Oval office)
Betty Cracker
@Peale: That sounds about right.
@raven: Pretty!
Steeplejack
@different-church-lady:
I assume that Sanders always travels in a mini-cloud of staffers wherever he goes—similar to the way that when Rick Scott left that Starbucks in the YouTube video four or five people sort of materialized from the background and went out with him—so it’s not completely far-fetched that some staffer handled Sanders’s MetroCard and he was oblivious to the details. But, on the other hand, it is a bit disingenuous for him to play the ordinary-joe “Yeah, I ride the subway” card.
Hmm, just thinking about this now for a minute, it does seem like Sanders was ambushed in a bit of “gotcha” journalism. But he walked right into it.
This campaign is making me crazy. We seem to keep descending into “inspecting the countertops” mode on a daily basis.
Peale
@different-church-lady: yeah. If he answers that way “a long time ago” he gets creamed as well, as if he admitted that having moved from the city years ago, he’s now rotting for the Red Sox. The press here likes to believe that joe-lunch-pail who lives in Staten Island votes based on whether or not someone is a troo noo yaorker.
Lurking Canadian
The other side is still standing firm for tire rims and anthrax, while our side is near to fisticuffs trying to decide between Tuscan or Sicilian.
I can’t wait for this primary to be over. It is hurting my heart. Was 2008 like this?
Baud
@Steeplejack: Spoken like someone who has Formica.
Uncle Cosmo
@NotMax:
Um, remind me how the Sino-American War of 1959 turned out? IIRC the fighting was a purely Chinese-on-Chinese affair. The PRC shelled the islands, killing ~2000 ROC soldiers;we gave the ROC some heavy artillery to shoot back with, killing ~250 PRC soldiers; PRC MiGs & ROC Sabres dogfought (izzat a word?) over the Taiwan Straits & a few planes were shot down…& that’s about it.
@JMGExcellent point. Jimmy Carter was roundly pilloried for his “Georgia Mafia” which (allegedly) fumbled & stumbled about the corridors of power in the process of learning the ropes. If St. Bernie can’t be bothered with the details, who in a BS Administration will be tasked to deal with them?
Poopyman
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Visiting the Plumbing section?
Betty Cracker
@Lurking Canadian:
Much worse, IMO!
FlipYrWhig
@Kropadope:
I don’t think the second part of this is right. Advocacy and awareness-raising and so forth are vital, but presidential campaigns are terrible vehicles for them, because the candidate will invariably be asked “How? Like, specifically?” and if she or he doesn’t know, instant gaffe. Seems like the flow should be that people make demands, their demand catches fire and spreads, and then politicians who are drawn to that demand set their staffs to work on how law and policy could be adjusted to address it, and then a bunch of logrolling and sausage-making happen that produce some degraded and compromised version of the original vision, but that makes progress. Running for president is a lousy way to get involved in that flow. Running for president is a good way to get media attention, but the candidate kinda needs to get practical rather than visionary in the process, or the media, and through them the public, start to get suspicious.
NotMax
@Uncle Cosmo
Remember the Maine!
OzarkHillbilly
@Lurking Canadian: Worse.
Linnaeus
@Kay:
I’m with you on this. Sure, politics is “the art of the possible”, but what is possible is not fixed and can be changed.
Cleos
@sherparick:
A few days ago I heard Thom Hartmann and a guest engage in A Very Serious Conversation about Vince Foster and how his demise might Become An Issue.
Cue the black helicopters, schloop-schloop-schloop….
FlipYrWhig
@Uncle Cosmo:
Bill Clinton was knocked for the same thing. And for Bernie Sanders it’s probably even worse of an issue because he has such contempt for the institutional power centers of Democratic Washington (a/k/a The Establishment, including Human Rights Campaign, Sierra Club, etc.).
WarMunchkin
Speaking as a NYCer who actually does commute on the subway every day, I couldn’t care less about that – the issues are what matters. The reason the interview is damning is because Sanders was asked relevant, simple, issues-based questions and didn’t answer them in a way we broadly expect presidents to be able to answer policy-related questions.
Yeah, this is *still* the model of decorum compared to the 2008 shitshow.
NotMax
@Uncle Cosmo
Quemoy and Matsu were a hot (and major) topic of the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960.
While no American war was undertaken, Nixon repeatedly agitated for one.
Immanentize
“He [Bernie Sanders] is just too old to be president.” This from my 85 year old mother who still lives alone in the four bedroom, split level I grew up in. All of these issues regarding lack of details, get off my lawn, yelling at clouds, and yes even the token thing goes to that underlying issue.
To her credit, Hillary has not played that card. But Cruz will.
And FWIW, my mom thinks that if she wants to serve more than one term, Hillary is too old too.
Linnaeus
@Betty Cracker:
I realize it’s a bit late in the thread (the hegemony of Eastern Time!), but I agree that the token thing was silly.
Cleos
@NotMax:
And sometimes not just older folks. I was eligible for the AARP ten years ago and find it odd how often I hear people referring to “dialing” a phone number. That includes people I can tell by looking at them have never used a dial phone.
El Tiburon
Ok, you people have really gone off the rails. Quoting Chris Cillizza? Comparing Bernie to HCR’s favorite war criminal Henry Kissinger? Or perhaps HRC’s favorite monster is Mubarak, can’t remember.
Once again, Ryan Grimm did a pretty good job of dismantling some of the bullshit you all believe about this ‘TRAINWRECK INTERVIEW’ Looking like Bretibart or Free Republic over here with all the frothing lunacy.
Ryann Grimm.
As the interview went on, though, it began to appear that the Daily News editors didn’t understand the difference between the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. Follow in the transcript how Sanders kept referring to the authority of the administration and the Treasury Department through Dodd-Frank, known as Wall Street reform, while the Daily News editors shifted to the Fed.
Daily News: Okay. Well, let’s assume that you’re correct on that point. How do you go about doing it?
Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.
Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?
Sanders: Well, I don’t know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.
Daily News: How? How does a president turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the treasury turn to any of those banks and say, “Now you must do X, Y and Z?”
Sanders: Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, make that determination.
Daily News: You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?
This is simply a factual dispute between the Daily News and Sanders, not a matter of opinion. The Daily News was wrong.
Linnaeus
@Immanentize:
Sanders’s age does concern me as well, and I don’t mean that in an ageist, you-can’t-be-a-contributing-citizen-to-our-society-if-you’re-over-65 way, but being president is hard on you. Just look at presidents when they start their service and then when they end it.
El Tiburon
But hey, take your Chris Cilliza
Mike Konczal
Let’s Dispel Once and for All With This Fiction that Sanders Doesn’t Know How to Break Up Banks
Bernie Sanders gave some fairly normal answers on financial reform to the New York Daily News editorial board. Someone sent it to me, and as I read it I thought “yes, these are answers I’d expect for how Sanders approaches financial reform.”
You wouldn’t know that from the coverage of it, which has argued that the answers were an embarrassing failure. Caitlin Cruz at TPM argues that Sanders “struggles to explain how he would break up the banks” and that’s relatively kind. Chris Cillizza says it was “pretty close to a disaster” and David Graham says the answers on his core financial focus is “tentative, unprepared, or unaware.” Tina Nguyen at Vanity Fair writes that Sanders “admits he isn’t sure how to break up the big banks.”
This is not correct. Sanders has a clear path on how he wants to break up the banks which he described. Breaking up the banks doesn’t require, or even benefit from, describing the specifics on how the banks would end up, neither for his plans or the baby steps Dodd-Frank has already taken.
Generally, I believe Sanders would benefit from taking the important points Clinton has made in expanding how to tackle the financial sector as a whole. But bad arguments are bad arguments, and the arguments against Sanders here are bad.
Amir Khalid
My takeaway from the NY Daily News interview is that Bernie hasn’t done his policy homework and isn’t making a real effort to catch up. Not presidential, Bernie!
scav
@Just Some Fuckhead: Ask many toddlers what a train sounds like, and we’re back in the age of steam.
different-church-lady
@Peale:
No, Pablo Sandoval is doing that.
Chyron HR
@El Tiburon:
different-church-lady
@El Tiburon: so why didn’t Sanders correct the interviewer rather than saying, “Well, I don’t know if the Fed has it”?
Doug R
@BillinGlendaleCA: Doesn’t the “Speed” bus go from Downtown to Santa Monica? If you head to the Old Getty in Santa Monica, make sure to keep your transfer.
FlipYrWhig
@different-church-lady: BERNIE DOESNT NEED TO GIVE DETAILS BECAUSE PEOPLE DON;T CARE ABOUT THOSE AND ALSO HE GAVE GREAT DETAILS THAT WERE RIGHT
different-church-lady
@WarMunchkin:
No, no, it’s fine, he has two, maybe three people on the internet who can explain to us that when he said “I haven’t put much thought into X” it was actually a perfectly clear answer and we’re just being dense. That’s how presidents operate.
Steeplejack
@Baud:
That was uncalled for!
:: slinks away in shame ::
Betty Cracker
@El Tiburon: Seems like your argument from authority isn’t resonating. Pity. But speaking of right-wing framing straight from a cesspool like Breitbart or Free Republic from so-called liberals, here’s an actual example of that.
FlipYrWhig
@El Tiburon:
These two things aren’t exactly irreconcilable.
AxelFoley
@Baud:
LOL, I’d love to see Sanders’ “Race”-type speech. Not necessarily a speech on race–he’d do terrible on that–but kind of speech that would boost his campaign (not that I’m cheering for him, just want to see if he could give that kind of speech).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
A buzzfeeed reporter reporter gets a call from the Bernie! campaign
ETA: As someone who at least once a day experiences mild shock when I face the fact that X (a song, a movie, a trip I took, graduating high school) was not a year or two ago but actually Y (or 10xY) years ago, I’ll give the deluded, self-righteous, self-indulgent, pissing-inside-the-tent old coot a pass on subway tokens. Nothing else.
rikyrah
UH HUH
UH HUH
How White Georgia Republicans Are Derailing an African-American Candidate
Without the protections of the Voting Rights Act, local elections are a free-for-all.
BY SPENCER WOODMAN
April 5, 2016
Gerald Greene, a white Republican from Georgia, has represented the heavily rural, majority-black District 151 in the state House of Representatives for the past three decades. Because, according to Democrats, 151 is the state’s only minority-dominated district represented by a Republican, the Democratic Party had been eyeing it as a promising pick-up for the next election—a win, Democratic leaders say, that would signify a significant correction to years of the county’s black Democrats lacking legislative representation. In early March, the party finalized the candidacy of James Williams, a retired police officer from Albany, to run what Democratic strategists believed could be a winning challenge to Greene.
Yet on March 26, Williams went from campaigning against Greene to struggling to preserve his right to run in the election at all. That day, Williams says he received a call from the office of Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, informing him that Greene had challenged his residency—and thus his eligibility to run in the district. Greene’s petition against Williams’s candidacy had found a receptive audience among the state’s top Republicans, who decided that, on closer inspection, Williams did not in fact reside in District 151. Suddenly, the majority-black district appeared to have no Democratic candidate residing within its lines, and the Williams campaign against Greene entered a realm of deep uncertainty.
“It was astonishing that I was being challenged after having voted in District 151 for approximately 18 years,” Williams told me. “I never thought something like this could happen in Georgia.”
This development has infuriated state Democrats, who have previously accused Kemp of deploying tactics to suppress the state’s Democratic-leaning minority vote. Democrats contend that, on March 7, using Kemp’s own residency data, the party qualified Williams to run in District 151. Yet sometime around March 18, the party alleges, the boundary lines of District 151 quietly changed in Kemp’s database, edging Williams just outside of the district. Kemp’s office on Tuesday essentially confirmed this account. An emailed statement from Georgia Secretary of State spokeswoman Candice Broce said that during redistricting, “Dougherty County elections officials incorrectly designated Mr. Williams as living in House District 151. When alerted to their error, county officials corrected their mistake.” Williams, the statement noted, apparently lives in House District 154. “Our office sent the challenge to the Office of State Administrative Hearings as we do with any challenge we receive, and a hearing is scheduled for April 13.”
boatboy_srq
@Betty Cracker: @Ohio Mom: The token thing, though trivial, is indicative. It says he’s out of touch. It’s his Ted Stevens’ “series of tubes” moment. It’s his GHWB-and-the-supermarket-scanner moment.
For a San Franciscan, it’s the same as not knowing your BART ticket doesn’t work on MUNI, and that your FastPass only works for BART travel within The City™. For a Floridian, it’s trying to take the Turnpike, Bee Line or Crosstown Expressway without a SunPass and looking for the toll booth. It actually sounds to a Nyawkah exactly like Betty’s comment at #53 does to an Angeleno (for the record, LA’s subway system as a real thing – not some pie-in-the-sky municipal project or regional transit boondoggle – is older than NYC electronic transit passes, but not by much).
There are localized technological advances and experiences – advances that change the culture as much as the specific behavior – that showcase familiarity (or lack thereof) with a place, and with what the local ordinary people go through on a daily basis. If you aren’t familiar with them, it broadcasts that you’re not familiar with ordinary people’s wants and needs.
Sanders may have a good idea of why The American Dream is FUBAR. He may have sound high-level ideas for how to fix it. But comments like that one tell the ordinary person that he has no idea how to do that in today’s environment. He can complain about HRC and her Beltway Insiderness, but that one line telegraphs that when it comes to concrete proposals to address national problems he’s just as out of touch as the Beltway crowd. In itself it’s a small thing; however, when you combine it with his non-policy policy statements, his vagueness on the nuts and bolts of what specifically to do to deploy tuitionless education and recreate the finance industry, and it becomes shorthand for a disinterest in the attention to detail required to get those things done without the uprising of the proletariat.
I’ll admit that Sanders had already lost me with his “wait and see” approach to downballot contests: all his grand ideas will go nowhere without a receptive Congress, and his apparent disinterest in supporting candidates who could provide that was a dealbreaker for me. But that last interview really did him in. EconWatcher @ #55 nailed it: Sanders isn’t interested in repairing the systems because it’s the systems themselves that are the problem. He’s pushing the left-wing equivalent of the GOTea’s “Big Gummint is the problem / drown it in a baththub” mantra, and while he has sound philosophical underpinnings for that position (unlike the GOTea, who have only avarice and malice driving theirs), the effect for the rest of us is the same.
Emma
@NonyNony: You’re not alone in that belief. It was clear to me from the beginning that one of the greatest failures of the Bush administration was its inability to understand that others might do things differently, and plan accordingly.
D58826
@EconWatcher: He does remind me of the college paper columnist who was the leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the sort late 60’s radical group. Lots of high sounding rhetoric about the evils of the system but not a lot of practical real world solutions. If it was ‘economic’ it didn’t matter
Anya
I think the most problematic part of the train wreck interview with the New York Daily News, is his response to the question of whether victims of gun violence should be able to sue the weapons’ manufacturer. It sounded so insensitive. He didn’t even spare a sympathetic words for the victims. And when he was asked about comments of Sandy Hook victims, he was shouty and went on a rant against HRC instead of responding to the victim and offering some sort of sympathetic and respectful response. Just no to shouty grandpa & his “how dare you question me” attitude.
ETA: And now his campaign went to the classic republican response of saying “Hillary is shamelessly using the victims”
rikyrah
I love this site.
WHITE PRIVILEGE SEEMS LIKE AN ABSTRACT CONCEPT, UNTIL YOU REMEMBER IT KILLS BLACK PEOPLE
Damon Young, 4/5/16
……………………………
At this point, you might be wondering how this connects to race, racism, and White privilege. Well, although White privilege is often dismissed as an abstract and academic term with no basis in reality, it doesn’t exist without the perpetual cultural, social, political, and legal reinforcement that White people’s feelings, thoughts, desires, and opinions matter more than the feelings, thoughts, desires, and opinions of non-White people. (Black people, specifically.) This phenomenon also affects how physical pain and discomfort are assessed and treated. White pain is just taken more seriously than Black pain; a fact proven in numerous studies, including this one:
From The Washington Post:
African Americans are routinely under-treated for their pain compared with whites, according to research. A study released Monday sheds some disturbing light on why that might be the case.
Researchers at the University of Virginia quizzed white medical students and residents to see how many believed inaccurate and at times “fantastical” differences about the two races — for example, that blacks have less sensitive nerve endings than whites or that black people’s blood coagulates more quickly. They found that fully half thought at least one of the false statements presented was possibly, probably or definitely true.
Moreover, those who held false beliefs often rated black patients’ pain as lower than that of white patients and made less appropriate recommendations about how they should be treated.
Do I know, with a 100% certainty, that my mom’s lung cancer could and should have been found earlier? No. And do I know, with a 100% certainty, that if my mom happened to be White, her pain would have been treated earlier as a dire and life-threatening concern instead of an annoyance some yoga and a carb-free diet would stem? No, I do not. But I do know that if her race affected her treatment and, ultimately, shortened her life, she wouldn’t have been the first and won’t be the last Black person that happens to.
And that is not an abstraction.
Doug R
@Chris: Democratic Socialism is a democracy with a lot of state owned monopolies. Here in BC, the electrical company and the automobile insurance corporation are both crown (state) corporations.
FlipYrWhig
@boatboy_srq:
I think he’s interested in repairing the systems, and has done yeoman work in repairing systems (like the VA, like his relatively energetic participation in [other people’s] lawmaking). But all of his juiciest rhetoric is about how the systems themselves are the problem, in essence because of the corrupting influence of big money. And that’s where I just get tired of his complaining. Yes, there is big money in politics. It’s protected by the Supreme Court. People in states that have populations and businesses, unlike Vermont, need to raise money and build networks of influence. WHILE WE’RE UNDER THE SYSTEM THAT EXISTS, let’s work on how to twiddle its knobs and levels so that it works better for more people.
I have many coworkers who complain about the way things are. I’m the sort of person who tries to make a plan to address those complaints. The coworkers who complain most do not make their own plans and eagerly shit on the insufficient-ness of the plans that other people make. That’s Bernie Sanders. It’s all too familiar.
guachi
Sanders could have a detailed proposal on financial reform on his website for those who care to read it.
Remember Richard Mayhew’s post about a proposal on the Clinton website? It was maybe a month ago and was about a Clinton proposal to “look the other way” on cost/access considerations when deciding on whether to issue a Wyden waiver to a state wishing to expand Medicaid.
His article excerpted from Clinton’s website and it referred to the relevant statute and didn’t call it a Wyden waiver. It was very wonky. Richard Mayhew termed it “aggressive small ball”.
Breaking up a bank is vastly more involved than this and Sanders could (should!) have something more in-depth and he could easily summarize it and reference it in an interview. Especially an interview that will appear in a newspaper. The paper can take the time to expand upon what a candidate said.
But, no, Sanders didn’t. Clinton, regarding Medicaid, did.
El Tiburon
@Betty Cracker:
I’m speaking more of the unadulterated and oragasmic glee all of you Bernie Bashers get from wallowing in all of his perceived gaffes and idiocies. Did I really read that now his “token” comments prove he is unfit for office? Who gives a fuck?! Oh, right, you people do. You are now jumping on the Bernie carcass like a rabid bunch of hyenas gnawing at his bones.
I am not shocked at this behavior, but it is still a bit frightening to view in real time. Bernie has morphed now from a true champion of many liberal/progressive ideals that most of you around here care about to some bumbling old fool whose only aim is to destroy the Democratic party.
The buzzards are circling.
Shame on the lot of you and a pox on all your homes!
(For the record, I will continue to fully support HRC if she gets the nomination even with her ties to Wall Street and love of more war.)
FlipYrWhig
@Anya:
This. So much this.
rikyrah
I love this video too:
HOW “BRAIDS,” LUPITA NYONG’O’S VOGUE SHORT, CAPTURES PEAK BLACK WOMAN AWESOMENESS
Shamira Ibrahim, 4/6/16
…………….
Beyond all reason, however, the other day I moseyed my way onto Mark Zuckerberg’s social media cesspool. Fortunately for me, I was rewarded for my adventures in the form of a fantastic two-year-old original short film with Lupita N’yongo from Vogue.
Called “Braids,” the Austin Peters-directed spot was peak Black woman excellence. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Black woman who doesn’t identify with having a long-term relationship with her hair, and Lupita and her friends manage to capture a multitude of ways that hair can be a defining moment of a Black woman’s life.
Amir Khalid
@AxelFoley:
If Bernie can avoid another public scolding for having failed to do his homework, that might be a good idea.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Yup. It happened when he drank his own kool-ade and indulged in the silly fantasy that he could win not just the nomination (which I guess at one time was a possibility) but the White House (which is not and never was possible, and is a silly, dangerous, self-aggrandizing delusion on his part).
You’re welcome.
FlipYrWhig
@El Tiburon: He’s not a champion of anything. I liked the old Bernie I’d heard about, the one who seemed like the important thing to him was progressivism. Instead it turns out the actual Bernie is the Ron Paul of the left, a career backbencher with a lot of slogans, a lot of sour attitude, and a hell of a lot of misplaced adulation from people who think they’re superior to the peons.
Uncle Cosmo
@NotMax: Sorry, champ: No American president “lied us into a war” over the Taiwan Straits. Which is what you were *cough*cough*cough*ing so hard over.
FTR I am well aware of the “controversy” over Q&M & its role in the 1960 campaign, which I followed in real time as a fairly precocious 6th-grader. But it wasn’t our fight & we never fought it. IOW it doesn’t qualify for the use you put it to.
Doug R
@EconWatcher: Yeah, but it also signaled the need for bipartisan trust. It wasn’t a vote for war.
different-church-lady
@El Tiburon:
Wait, I thought he wasn’t dead yet?
Anya
I agree with Betty and others that the token thing is trivial. It’s up there with Cokie Roberts questioning Obama going to Hawaii instead of Myrtle Beach, or the “Obama arugula eating elitist” debate. Everyone knows Sanders doesn’t live in New York.
The Other Chuck
Speaking as a guy who just visited NY, but got pretty damn familiar with the subways: you really want to sound native, point out that the metrocards may be new-ish, but they’ve still got those wacktastic turnstiles that turn both ways. Not to mention the really old exit ones that need Hercules to turn ’em.
Ahh MTA, only place I still regularly saw rats.
Betty Cracker
@El Tiburon: Christ, you’re an unhinged drama queen. For the record, I said the token thing was stupid, and I’ve never once said Sanders was a bumbling old fool or unfit for office. I’ll certainly vote for him if he wins the nomination, but a “pox on my home,” okay, whatever.
Immanentize
@scav: I blame Thomas the Tank Engine
Uncle Cosmo
@El Tiburon: Shorter El Tib: WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH LEAVE SAINT BERNIE ALONE WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH.
japa21
@El Tiburon: Give me a quote where anybody said his “token” answer disqualified him from office. What was said is that it could hurt him with NY voters, like Bush I’s answer on scanners.
Doug R
@EconWatcher: Like John Oliver pointed out with his latest episode, campaign finance is a real bitch. Why not take $100K for telling Wall Street everything’s gonna be ok as long as they behave?
Uncle Cosmo
@FlipYrWhig: Nicely put.
BS could’ve been Moses & gotten at least a glimpse of the Promised Land. His grifter campaign staff played on his vanity & talked him into holding out for Pharaoh. All that’ll get him is drowned, as he wrecks the “democratic-socialist” brand for the rising generation, who’ll walk away from politics in disgust when they don’t get their pink unicorns on time.
Gin & Tonic
@El Tiburon:
No, you did not really read that, because nobody wrote that.
Bobby Thomson
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: that just seems like basic defensive driving – “I’m not going to sign onto your label until you tell me what you think it means” – it’s not ignorance, just ducking the question
Aimai
@rikyrah: thank you for posting this.
Anya
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I love this so much. It perfectly describes how I see him now.
scav
@Immanentize: Perhaps now, but my generation is pre-thomas and post diesel and we chuffs-chuffa-chuffaed with the best of them.
Immanentize
Does Bernie use a computer? Email? Text? I’d really like to know.
Immanentize
@scav: Western movies?
NotMax
@Uncle Cosmo
If you insist on getting unduly nitpicky, all right. That example was of a presidential candidate (and sitting v.p.) using lies to advocate for war. If you can’t accept that as a precedent HRC ought to be cognizant of, that’s your lookout.
Chris
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’d argue that they’re a bastard child of the “realist” and “liberal” schools of thought, but I’ve heard other POVs. My Republican/realist friend in the grad program (yes, despite my frequent bitching I do still have a few Republican friends… like, three? Maybe four?) argues that they belong altogether in the “liberal” camp.
“Realists” believe that nation-states are the only entities that really matter in international relations, that nation-states act will always act according to their interests, and that the international world is in a state of anarchy with all the nation-states fighting to best protect their interests. They’re skeptical of anything multilateral and tend to believe that ideological factors have no place in international relations (and that anyone claiming to base their foreign policy on ideology is just doing propaganda for the masses).
“Liberals” are the internationalists – they reject the notion that it’s all about power politics, believe in the power of international institutions and treaties and norms (like the UN or World Bank or IMF), and tend to believe in the promotion of Western values i.e. democracy and free markets. Woodrow Wilson and, more successfully, the generation of American foreign policy makers who built the post-1945 world order are associated with this line of thinking.
The reason I call the neocons a “bastard child” of both is that in my mind they combine the worst of both schools of thought without their good parts. They have the liberals’ beliefs in promoting Western values, but not their appreciation for multilateralism, international institutions, or “soft [i.e. non-coercive] power.” And they have the realists’ belief that nation-states are the only actors that matter, but not their desire to look at problems coldly and dispassionately – it’s all about the ideology for them.
(I should add to all the above that Realism, Liberalism and Constructivism aren’t monolithic things – there are sub-schools of thought and some schools of thought that, intentionally or not, are a hybrid of two or more of them, which is where I put the neocons. And, like I said, other theories that aren’t accorded the same amount of attention. But I maintain that I’ve never heard “democratic socialism” as a significant thing in the IR field. Granted, I wasn’t that focused on IR theory, but still…)
Immanentize
@scav: Ahh, hell, steam trains are just cooler!
Aimai
@Kropadope: both can be true.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Immanentize: HE HAS A COMPUTER BUT HE PUT HIS MUG OF SANKA ON THE DAMN CUP HOLDER LAST WEEK IN 1998 AND THE DAMN THING BROKE AND HIS DAMN GRANDSON WON’T COME OVER AND FIX IT AND JANE WHICH DAMN REMOTE GETS ME TO TEH CHANNEL WHERE THE GUNSMOKE RERUNS ON?
msdc
@El Tiburon: What Grimm leaves out of that little excerpt: Sanders only goes to Dodd-Frank after the NYDN editors bring it up as something that already does what Sanders claims he’d do.
In my view, this is one of the most damning parts of the interview, and one that hasn’t received nearly enough attention. Sanders spent the first couple of debates inveighing against Dodd-Frank and calling it ineffectual. It was one of the early policy differences between him and Clinton. Then the NYDN points out that it already does what he wants to do, and then he spends the rest of the interview running back to its shelter every time they press him for specifics. He comes across like a student repeating the last thing his teacher said in the hopes that he can bluff his way through the question.
I know many people have said this here in recent days, but I find I’ve gone from “I’m glad Bernie’s in the race” to “I think I like Clinton” to “oh god we cannot allow this man to be our nominee.” I knew he was dangerously indifferent to everything that was not his signature issue – now it turns out he’s profoundly uninformed on his signature issue, too.
Doug R
@Kropadope: That aluminum tubes argument scared the shit out of me, because I believed them when then said the tubes were for centrifuges. Turns out they were for rockets. Another proof of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing-doesn’t that come back around to the trouble with Bernie?
El Tiburon
@Betty Cracker:
Well, at least a sideways glance down my nose at your house.
As far as the token comment, sure I may have embellished, but that it’s a thing to hold onto in any form or fashion is a bit ridiculous.
My point with all of this is that all of you are casting stones at Bernie’s house while IMHO Hillary’s glass walls are much more target rich. I could care less about Bernie or Hillary, only the policies they will be championing. And if any of you can, with a straight face say that Hillary has the BETTER POLICY positions than Bernie, then ok. But all I’m hearing is huffing and puffing on trivial matters only meant to tear down Bernie as a person and unfit and unqualified.
They are both imminently qualified – both have been champions of the greater good for a generation. But again, Hillary seems more ensconced in the establishment with no strong will to rock the boat, ie, go after the banksters or really change the course of our disastrous foreign policy.
So, you liberal freepers, freep away! I’m off for Body Pump Class at the Y with the girls.
Elizabelle
Is there no boxer pup out there to save us, with a fresh thread?
This topic is the opposite of readership capture for me.
Maybe an otter pup, even? (Spoiler alert: looks like Otter 501 was saved, and thrived, and whelped a pup of her own. At least up to 2012. Speaking of last night’s PBS rebroadcast.)
Woke up this morning to Sesame Street. Their motto is along lines of making kids “smarter, stronger and kinder.”
Kind of the opposite of Morning Joke, I thought.
different-church-lady
@msdc:
Yes, but the only reason you believe this is because you read the interview yourself and drew your own conclusions about it instead of allowing writers on the internet to explain to you why you are wrong.
scav
@Immanentize: Again, true, or just B&W ones in general, esp with fast-taking dames (because those we watched, not the cowboys so much). But there are scads of old phones and typewriters in media still, but I think toddlers are now fully cell-orientated and have lost the understanding of the noise you make when you eat an ear of corn (ding!). But there’s just something about steam – even Hogwarts couldn’t resist.
Robert Sneddon
@Doug R: Aluminium tubes won’t hold up to the centrifugal strains imposed on them if they were meant for enrichment centrifuges. Carbon fibre is the material of choice for that sort of work.
FlipYrWhig
@El Tiburon: Bernie Sanders definitely wants to be in the boat and rock it. He has no idea where the boat is, how he’ll get there, or what the effects of rocking it will be. But if your criterion for a president is boat-rocking from an unexplained origin and for unexplained purposes, he’s your guy.
msdc
@different-church-lady: Who am I going to believe, them or my lying neoliberal warmonger eyes?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@msdc: I stepped off the “glad he’s in the race” thing when he embraced, and apparently now has a death grip on, Chuck Todd’s theory that Clinton should release The Speeches, the ‘prove you’re innocent’ thinking that has supported every right wing talking point from the IRS “scandal” to the shape-shifting outrage underlying Benghazi. I wasn’t happy when he elided the difference between universal health care and single payer, which at the time I thought was cynical self-promotion, and I know think was just intellectual laziness and indifference to details that aren’t his own bellowing points. Then there was the the “look out the window, Mitch” moment, which was less about what he said than the way he telegraphed the lazy and narcissistic attitude, not that he would make this happen, but that it would happen because he said it should. “We’ll see” put me permanently in the “Jesus, this man is an asshole” camp. One of the few times in my life I’m glad to be in a growing crowd.
Princess
Hillary keeps her cool. Her response to Bernie saying she’s “unqualified”:
Linnaeus
@msdc:
I don’t think you’ll need to worry much about that. The upcoming primaries aren’t favorable for Sanders.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Princess: good for her, I’ve been worried about an overreaction. I hope someone is detailed to walk Bubba through some calm, on-message, anti-Repbuilcan talking points.
Robert Sneddon
@El Tiburon: Senator Sanders is the candidate with more inside-the-Beltway establishment experience, he’s been a Congressman and Senator, one of the five hundred and thirty-eight most powerful people in American politics for over twenty-five years now. Sure he’s not got a big list of important achievements under his belt but I’m sure that quarter-century of wheeling and dealing in the Capitol has been valuable to his constituents and groups he’s supported in that time. Perhaps that’s why he’s been a little… sluggish in producing his tax records for public scrutiny?
Betty Cracker
@Princess: Well played, HRC! That’s exactly the right response (along with incredulous laughter as appropriate).
MomSense
@JPL:
I didn’t trust the Bush admin and I predicted before Shrub’s selection that he would go to war with Iraq for unresolved father issues (even though I know that it is extremely wrong of me to play armchair psychiatrist). Clinton, Biden, Kerry and many others who are generally reasonable people believed the Bush admin justification that they needed this leverage to secure UN weapons inspections. Bush went to the UN and said this was his intention. Saying they needed congressional authorization was a legitimate request, but I just never believed Bush was being truthful about his intentions.
It all fell apart for Bush when the weapons inspectors kept coming back without the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud or any other form. That’s when he pre-empted the completion of the inspections and shocked and awed us with his power and stupidity.
Ben Cisco
@Anne Laurie topside:
Same year I left. I wasn’t as happy about it as you were. Then again, I was only 10…
Elizabelle
@Princess: That’s a perfect response.
Gracious, and reminds her audience of the very real danger out there.
Redshift
@Kay: Yeah, this is an example of what bugs me about this primary: Sanders’ people make obnoxious, destructive attacks on Clinton, and Clinton people make stupid attacks on Sanders.
There are valid criticisms of a lot of his proposals, but they seem overly inclined to pick dumb ones instead, like “free college is no good because it could go to rich people.” Probably because it fits better in a sound bite, it’s not immediately obvious it’s dumb, and if you’re explaining, you’re losing. But it still bugs me.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: My town only got free all-day kindergarten for the first time a few years ago. When my daughter was in it, only half-day was free and we had to pay tuition to get her in full-time. I think they fully funded all-day the following year (2012?)
msdc
@Linnaeus: I will certainly do my part to make them unfavorable. He’s reached the “3 am phone call/hard-working white people” stage of the primary where he subtracts more than he adds.
MomSense
@Chris:
Damn, they don’t teach interdependence anymore?
Not sure how old you are but if you took any kind of poly sci/IR/political economy class as a student during the Cold War days, you knew about realism. We even discussed it in high school “social studies” classes. Containment, Domino Theory, MAD, etc were all pretty standard topics even in high school.
Iowa Old Lady
@Princess: What an excellent response! I can’t wait to see how that’s framed at GOS.
Ivan X
@Ohio Mom: The cards are only paper if you buy a SingleRide, which I think expires in two hours. The other cards that have more than a couple of bucks on them, or are monthlies, are plastic and perfectly durable, and are refillable without having to get a new card. A bigger problem is that they expire after a year or something, but you can still get their value transferred to a new card if you can find a staffed booth, which is increasingly rare. Same goes for consolidating dinky amounts left on used cards, but usually you’d just add more money to the same cards. (And now the cards themselves cost $1, so you’re incentivized not to lose your card.)
It’s true that you can’t just give someone a token, but if you have a money card (as opposed to a weekly or monthly card), you can certainly give someone a swipe before you swipe yourself, whether you know them or not. You’re correct in that you can’t however give someone “a swipe” before they leave the house though; but I couldn’t be happier about not having to carry tokens in my pocket when I can just have a card in my wallet.
I moved to NYC while they were still accepting tokens but had already switched to Metrocards, and actually am and continue to be pleasantly surprised that the cards work well and that the dispensing machines’ interface is clear and quick, unlike many public transport systems’ machines (New Jersey Transit, ugh).
You definitely know an out of towner when they have to keep reswiping the card multiple times because they haven’t calibrated themselves to the correct swiping speed. Making that less sensitive would be one thing they could improve.
different-church-lady
@Iowa Old Lady:
We’ll know the moment the next Sanders fundrasing email goes out.
Original Lee
@NonyNony: That’s the first time I’ve seen this explanation, and it makes a lot of sense to me. I guess I’m not Nixonian enough to have thought of it myself.
Chris
@Doug R:
No, I get that. What the hell does it mean in the international relations context? Why is he being asked if he’s a realist (International Relations Theory term) or a democratic socialist (a term for domestic politics?) It’s as absurd as asking Hillary Clinton “hey, are you a Methodist or a Democrat?” Or “hey, are you a feminist or a socialist?”
(In case it wasn’t clear already, I strongly suspect the answer is “the journalist is repeating big words and has no idea what the fuck any of them mean.” But maybe I’m wrong and democratic socialism has also spawned a notable IR theory branch).
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: Democratic Socialist is not a real ideology so far as I can see but a talking point to throw out there when some one points out that Bernie is just reviving socialist tropes of the past when Communism and socialism were forces to be reckoned with.
ETA: When asked for examples of democratic socialism they cannot go beyond the minuscule and homogeneous Scandinavian countries.
Kay
@Redshift:
I’m less and less impressed w/Sanders as a leader but I still don’t want to put “free college” in the “crazy!” category or jam it into a “only rich people” frame. I went to a program at my son’s middle school about Ohio’s “college credit in high school”. It wasn’t rich people. These are people who would go to community college after high school. They’re NOT the people who are assured a spot and funding at Ohio State.
This is a my experience so I’m not claiming that it’s broadly applicable, but I see a lot of the parents who are using free prek. When it started it was the most motivated parents, because free prek is actually a pain in the ass as far as scheduling if you’re a lower income parent who relied on day care. It means two schedules for the 4 year old and we don’t offer transportation (yet). But as it has become the norm it’s almost now in the category of “this is what normally attentive parents do- they send 4 year olds to school”.
If people need more and better education to make even 30k a year (and they do) we have to make that at least POSSIBLE. It’s not that the country got more “progressive”- it’s the politicians are responding to the reality of the economy for younger people. This is real. It WILL be harder for them.
Linnaeus
@schrodinger’s cat:
Democratic socialism is a thing. There’s a lot of overlap with social democracy, which is probably a better descriptor of the European welfare states.
Doug R
@NotMax: And when a war was undertaken, Nixon made sure it kept going by sabotaging the peace talks.
FlipYrWhig
@Redshift:
Uh, that doesn’t seem dumb to me. College is something that correlates pretty well with middle-class priorities and aspirations. A plan to help people do better who are already doing fairly well, relatively speaking, seems like a misplaced priority. (The Clinton-era shift to make student loan interest tax deductible had some similar problems ideologically IMHO.) Expanding access to college, which is another key piece, is a different story. But if the kind of person who wouldn’t otherwise go to college gets to go now, which is great, are there enough seats in these colleges for them to go to? The countries that have lower-cost university education also have high-stakes entrance exams. They aren’t trying to do mass public grade 13-16 education.
Frankly I’d rather see the big-ticket domestic item be subsidized daycare. And I don’t even have kids.
Bobby Thomson
@sherparick: maybe the Republicans feeding him talking points forgot to update them after their foot soldier Scarborough came up empty.
Technocrat
@Redshift:
The free college criticism is one of those things that’s very strongly rooted in unconscious assumptions. From the day my daughter was born, it was assumed she would go to college. But I know lots of 20-26 year olds for whom that is not the case. College is a pipe dream for them, and not because of the cost of college. Some of it is because they’re not academically prepared. Some of it is because you have to work and eat and pay rent even if college is free. And part of it is because they have absolutely no desire to leave their social context behind and become a “college boy”.
For people like that, the idea of free college sounds like a giveaway to the more fortunate. And it is. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but neither is the criticism completely misplaced.
Linnaeus
@msdc:
Sanders is the weaker candidate on the Democratic side, but for me, it’s more about what his candidacy represents than the candidate himself.
Doug R
@El Tiburon: Sorry. I started reading your comment and I think I got the gist of it, but the details escape me.
Ivan X
@PurpleGirl: That, or it was the JFK AirTrain, which takes MetroCards, but you do pay upon exit, IIRC. Otherwise, you’re right, and that’s another thing that makes NYC transit superior to, say, DC or Bay Area transit — no card check on exit, and a single fare for everywhere the system covers.
Ivan X
@The Other Chuck: The rats are one of the few remaining things to help you still feel like you’re a gritty person in 2016 Manhattan.
Kay
@Technocrat:
There’s no middle ground in that though. That starts with the assumption that “college” means the same thing to everyone. It doesn’t. “College” here is MORE likely to mean community college or classes taken at the not-selective public university 60 miles away while living with your parents. I have people who have a technical cert who tell me they went to college. They did. They put together classes for a tech certificate at a community college.
Surely we have the capacity to inform people that there is a huge middle ground between packing a trunk and heading off to State U for 4 years and getting some kind of post-high school training or education. That seems to me to be the opposite of “elitist”.
We spout all this bullshit about how we value work and there’s no shame in skilled work that is NOT a profession yet we limit this whole discussion to a traditional bachelors degree because we’re afraid to seem like we’re not some egalitarian ideal. We’re not. They already know that. I don’t want to kill anyone’s dream of attending Harvard, but suggesting that free post-high school education might be a great thing doesn’t do that unless I’m somehow ashamed of someone who will happily grab a free certification or 2 year degree. I’m not. I think that’s great.
schrodinger's cat
@FlipYrWhig:
Quoted for truth. Newspapers in India are full of14 and 16 year olds committing suicide after the results of 10th and 12th grade board exams.
ETA: For fun, google the JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) for the IITs.
Bobby Thomson
@Just Some Fuckhead: what else would you call it?
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
I’d love to see subsidized daycare, and I also have no children (and no plans to have any).
Note, however, that that means that I’d be funding something without directly benefiting from it. You can say that about any public good – it will always be funded, at least in part, by people who do not use it or gain from it. I don’t own my own home, for example, but I effectively subsidize those who do through the mortgage interest tax deduction.
So while I think that free college has some problems, the idea itself has some merit if we combine it with other reforms.
boatboy_srq
Oops. Still wrong thread.
aimai
@OzarkHillbilly: I wonder if this is really true. She has vast name recognition. In politics this can be an enormous advantage. Sure, the Republicans have spent years defaming her but the reality is that probably a majority of new voters have no associations with her other than as Obama’s sidekick as SOS, mumble mumble Senator. She has time, if Bernie would get out of the fucking way, to start to figure out how to redefine herself for a new generation of voters as “grandma who has your back.” Its true that there are a million fake scandals for the Republicans to rake up, and there are some Republicans who (say) they will never, ever, vote for her but you know what? There is a reason that there is an expression “the devil you know.” If I were a republican leaning asshole voter, a genteel racist, a middle class business type, I would hold my nose and vote for Hillary over Trump any day of the week, and possibly over Cruz once the dominionist shit show starts being revealed. For one its obvious that she is a manager, first and foremost. And a lot of people just want the presidency to be in the hands of a manager. For another lots of people don’t really want to take the fallout from their own party’s worst impulses. They would far rather live to vote again than see the entire party crumble with another massive fuck up at the helm.
NotMax
@Ivan X
Plus they keep the subway monsters in check.
;)
Howlin Wolfe
@bystander: Does Hillary have a way? I haven’t heard. Is Hillary’s slogan “Vote for me because we can’t get anything done anyway!” or “Hillary – She’s the Placeholder!”.
I mean, y’all pile on Bernie because he doesn’t have a flow chart for every policy goal he articulates, and when he does have a plan, all the Hillbot experts can do is pick it apart, and shrug, saying “I guess American health-care delivery will always be a clusterfuck!”
And I never hear Hillbots say they’ll vote for Bernie if she doesn’t get the nod. Look, I don’t have a problem voting for either Hill or Bern. But the smugness and condescension of the Hillbots is just as bad as the Bernie Bros. obnoxiousness. Very off-putting. It doesn’t make me enthusiastic for HRC, who, I admit, will probably be the nominee. We will need the enthusiasm of as many people as possible to get her elected.
ruemara
@Betty Cracker: you know, just because most aren’t, doesn’t erase the fact that some are.
Not even sure this slow motion disaster of an interview is worth discussing. Sanders fans, and they are fans, simply do not read this and have an issue. I think I’d much rather switch to maybe showcasing each state’s November ballot choices and identifying who to vote for and even covering what’s needed to vote in each state.
Bob In Portland
When was the last time Hillary used the subway?
schrodinger's cat
@Howlin Wolfe: Hillary is not the one making tall claims of revolution to get free college and free healthcare.
japa21
@Bob In Portland: Who cares and why does it matter?
FlipYrWhig
@Howlin Wolfe:
Hillary’s implicit slogan is “I am a grind, and I will do the work.” That’s the opposite of smug. Bernie’s implicit slogan is “Work is icky, griping is better, I am a vessel for your outrage.” That’s smug.
Cacti
@Kay:
The kids complaining about “crippling student loan debt” are generally not the ones who spent a year to 18 months in a medical assistant or auto repair course. It’s the ones who wanted the 4-year experience and a bachelor’s in _________.
different-church-lady
@Linnaeus:Just thinking out loud here…
I am child free by choice. When I pay my property tax, it goes to schools that my non-existent kids will not benefit from. I’m good with that. I want the population of my town to be well educated — well educated kids mean a safer community, and probably higher property values. There are indirect benefits.
But then there’s one town over. There’s a little phenomenon that see happen on a recurring basis: people move to my town and stay until their kids get to school age, at which point they figure out some way to move to the next town over so that their kids can be in the “better schools”. The town line goes down the middle of a major street — a house on the “right” side of the street might be worth a hundred thousand dollars more than an identical house on the other side. Merely because of the schools.
But the thing about the town with the better schools is one of the reasons they’re so much better is because that town won’t prioritize spending money on anything but the schools. The won’t repair the roads. I mean, they literally don’t repair the roads — all over this town there are side streets you can barely drive on because so many potholes have accumulated over the years that the patches don’t stand a chance of holding. This is a town with a huge tax base and high property values and wealthy residents. If I owned property in that town I’d be completely pissed.
We sometimes talk about “The Public Good” as though it’s one clearly defined formula. But in fact everyone has their own individual idea of it. And it takes some maturity to accept that one’s own idea of it isn’t the only legitimate version.
And vast swaths of our electorate show no signs of having that maturity.
Bobby Thomson
@Steeplejack: Joe Biden uses the amtrak ticket kiosks himself. True story.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Then you haven’t been reading this blog
She can win a general election and not let the next two or three USSC Justices be chosen by a Republican with a Republican majority Senate. That’s enough for me.
Without googling, how many non-Wisconsin Bernistas know who Rebecca Bradley is, and what her case might tell us about the “Revolution”?
different-church-lady
@aimai:
scav
@japa21: Bob is nothing if not all about the trivial.
JGabriel
@Betty Cracker:
Yes … if you don’t live in NYC. If you live here, as I do, it’s a pretty glaring error, but not one that has anything to do with a Presidential election – so, still not a big deal, or at least it shouldn’t be.
Linnaeus
@Cacti:
That doesn’t mean that issues of cost and access aren’t important for those who don’t go to a four-year college or university. I have a good friend who is going through a career change and her classes at a local community college are paid for through one of our state’s unemployment programs. She’d have a much harder time doing that if she didn’t get state support.
Ivan X
@JGabriel: It’s like when our dumb mayor ate his pizza with knife and fork. On the one hand, who gives a shit, but on the other hand, seriously? And then, when called on it, he dissembled about how his ancestors eat pizza, as opposed to saying, “Do I tell you how to eat your food?”
Humans are tribal, New Yorkers certainly so. You have to at least respect the local customs and rituals to be seen as authentic and trustworthy.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@BillinGlendaleCA: I saw Ron Jeremy at the Burbank airport. I also met him when I briefly worked at a sex shop, but the airport sighting was the much more “L.A.” moment.
WarMunchkin
@Kay:
This article might be relevant for you.
Technocrat
@Kay:
“Some kind” of post-high school training is a much broader thing than free college. If we mean free welding school, free commercial driving license, free electrician training AND free community college, we need to say so. A lot of these kids are done with traditional academics, frankly. If they have made it to graduation (not a trivial barrier) the idea of learning more trigonometry or calculus isn’t something they see they’d be good at, and who likes to suck?
Maybe it is just a matter of tuning the message. But right now, what we’re saying is “free college”.
japa21
@Howlin Wolfe:
I can’t verify if you never hear that, but if you have actually been reading comments here you would have seen virtually unanimous commitment to voting for Bernie from Clinton supporters.
D58826
Bernie is now trying to link Hillary with the Panama Papers scandal/leak or whatever it is now. Is he getting paid by the GOP to road test general election attack lines??
Technocrat
@Howlin Wolfe:
I will crawl over broken glass to vote for Bernie if he’s the nominee. I will stand in line for hours to do it. So will 85%+ of the POCs who are currently supporting Hillary. Better?
japa21
@D58826: I am starting to feel the same way about Bernie that I did about Clinton in 2008. Granted, compared to the GOP fiasco and prior campaigns, the Dem primaries have been almost genteel, but the negativity coming from Sanders is getting very off-putting.
Corner Stone
@Howlin Wolfe:
The fuck you don’t. You asked this same GD question – outmotherfuckingright – on a thread last night and got multiple replies in the uncouched affirmative.
D58826
@japa21: didn’t we beat this one to death yesterday
Ivan X
@Howlin Wolfe: I’ve been 100% for HRC from the start (and I narrowly supported her in 2008), even if, as with many, I’m sympathetic to Bernie’s complaints. But I’m with you that, even here, there’s more smugness and condescension from some HRC supporters than I like to be see, a) because smugness and condescension is ugly and lazy, and b) because we do need to be a united front in November.
But this is always the problem with the primary season, on both sides — if you’re behind one candidate, then the other candidate is, by definition, the opponent, and opponents need to be defeated. So there’s always gong to be an uneasy tension as to just how polite and civil we’re going to be in trying to win when our opponent is someone we may well need to support later. I’m not sure how to solve this problem other than to expect a certain amount of people for either HRC or Bernie or whomever being excessive.
chopper
@Peale:
it was a total NYer test and he passed it. the test was, “if I ask you something you don’t really know will you cough up some bullshit rather than admit you don’t know it?”. that’s NY all over.
go ask a new yorker directions some time. even if they have no idea where to send you they’ll still come up with something rather than admit they don’t know.
chopper
@Howlin Wolfe:
I’ve never heard a single person (and certainly not here) say “hilz or bust”. and people here told you the same the other day. yet I’m willing to bet money you’re going to keep this bullshit going.
different-church-lady
@Howlin Wolfe:
I don’t want a flowchart. I do want an answer that’s better than “I don’t know what you mean” or “I haven’t put a lot of thought into that” or “They’ll figure it out.”
*cough*
gwangung
@Howlin Wolfe: Are you serious? Or are you in your own echo chamber and never read anything on this site?
different-church-lady
@japa21:
Apparently she/he doesn’t hear that because Howllin’ doesn’t read the replies to his/her own fuckin’ questions.
redshirt
@chopper:
I’m in on this bet.
I don’t know why some of you are complaining. This stuff embiggens even the smallest blog.
Ivan X
@chopper: Yes, but we still take that civic responsibility with great seriousness. I once gave someone wrong directions and it haunted me for a week.
WarMunchkin
Seriously guys, stop making puerile arguments about NYCers. There’s no “real ‘murikan” test. Tokens, philly cheesesteaks and random bullshit doesn’t matter. Political punditry seems to think it does, but it’s all nonsense. Just focus on policy; there’s plenty to criticize there.
Ken
I’m not taking sides on the Hillary/Bernie fights, and am withholding judgment until the convention.
After that, if the losing candidate does not endorse the winner and pledge all possible support, that candidate is scum who will never get a kind word, or a dollar, from me. They may or may not be qualified to be President, but they sure aren’t qualified to run as a member of a major political party.
different-church-lady
@Bob In Portland:
I have no idea, but when someone asks her I hope to hell she’s got a better answer than Bernie’s attempt to bullshit his way past it.
Ken
@David Canadian Anchor Baby Koch: I expect the caller who said “Obamacare is a travesty” is part of the 20% of the population who thought it didn’t go far enough and wanted single-payer/Medicare-for-all, maybe with a universal basic income and unicorn in every garage on the side.
Corner Stone
@Bob In Portland:
A couple hours ago.
Linnaeus
@different-church-lady:
I agree that there’s no single, objectively definitive idea of what “the public good” (broadly speaking) is. Certainly there are competing priorities and we hash those out though our participation in the political process, in civil society, and so forth.
What I’m pushing back against, a little, is the argument that we can’t do X as a public good (in the more technical sense) because some people who pay for X (through taxes) will not use X. To me, that sounds a little too close to right-wing antitax/antigovernment arguments, even if unintentionally so. It’s fine to ask if, say, free college can be paid for, or if the overal social and economic benefit is worth the costs. But there are public goods that not everyone uses because we have decided (at least for the time being) that their benefits are generally worth the costs to everyone.
This dynamic played out a few years back in the suburban city in which I grew up. The city was facing a budget shortfall and said that, with its current revenue, it could no longer pay for the public library. So the city put a tax increase measure on the ballot to keep the library open. That riled up the antitax brigade in the town, who mobilized to defeat it, even if that meant the library would close. The arguments ranged from, “I’m taxed enough already” to “The problem is that we pay library staff too much” to, you guessed it, “I don’t use the library, so why should I pay for others that do?”. I find that last argument in particular to be short-sighted and a little silly, given that the people who made it are certainly consuming other public goods that others are paying for and not using themselves. Fortunately, library supporters were able to get enough voters to vote yes on the tax levy, so the library survived.
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: I read on Breitbart she jumped the turnstile. INDICTMENT!
Ken
@Corner Stone: How does taking the subway work when you’ve got a Secret Service detachment? Do they clear the platform and the car, or just get really antsy?
Chris
@Ken:
So much this.
Ivan X
I gotta say that all this shit about DO THEY RIDE THE SUBWAY would carry more weight for me if there was continuous, seamless cell coverage throughout the system like they have in Japan. Half the time I stay aboveground even though I’d rather take the subway just because then I can get some fucking admin work done between clients. Without email that’s difficult. I’d expect any busy person such as a Presidential candidate to make the same calculus.
Of course, in Japan people don’t make calls, and if they do they murmur in the lowest of voices; I don’t see that happening here.
glory b
@rikyrah: I like this site too!
I have a nephew who had a lung issue (can’t remember the name of it) that involved the sudden onset of extreme breathing difficulty. In the ER, they had to puncture his chest (without time for anesthetics) to re-inflate his lungs, and he was in the hospital for around a week.
At the time, he was a graduate of Pitt and Harvard and was doing a post doc in Pittsburgh. The hospital personnel were always suspiciously late with his pain meds. When I went to see him once, he was clearly in pain, but asked me not to got to the nurse’s station to ask about it.
I didn’t, but I should have. I later read about another study that mentions African Americans being shorted on pain meds compared to whites with the same conditions, doctors and nurses think we’re faking to get high.
And I will point out with pride that Mr. Young lives in Pittsburgh.
different-church-lady
@Ivan X: If Bernie’s platform included a promise that none of us would ever have or need cell phones ever again I would quite gladly go out and assassinate all the other candidates to help him make it happen.
Corner Stone
@Ken:
She seemed to be surrounded by local pols, actually. I have no idea how they do it but did notice they don’t clear the cars, at least not all the way. The door she exited had a youngish black man in a grey hoodie holding his smartphone up, looking like he was videoing the thing. He could’ve been undercover LEO or SS, I guess, but he looked like a muggle to me.
rita forsyth
@EconWatcher: and i think you would be correct. Confirming your thinking is my personal opinion of Bernie
Sanders leaving NYC and moving to Vermont’s most isolated area. basically like him I grew up at the same time he did in NYC. had anyone suggested I move to Vermont I would have called them Nuts! Opportunity was here, along with hard work and focus. Sen Sanders doesn’t appear to have had either,never had a job until he was 44 and got elected mayor. No one really seems to know what he did all those years. some fact reporting is laughable. documentary film maker? LOL can we view one wonder how much weed he smoked?
Corner Stone
The editing window closed on me but I wanted to add that I left the word “muggle” in there on purpose, even knowing it will draw the inevitable “black man” + “mugger” jokes.
D58826
@Ken: At this point I guess what bothers me most about Bernie is his loyalty going forward. Obama and Clinton certainly traded sharp elbows in 2008 but you knew at the end of the day they both wanted a democrat in the white house and would come together, as long standing party members, to achieve that goal. How long has Bernie been a democrat – a year maybe. By his own admission he became a democrat so that he could latch on to the party apparatus for his presidential run. The democrats gave him a committee chairmanship if the promised to vote the party line on procedural issues but not policy issues. Much of his campaign has been a protest against the corrupt establishment, i.e. the democratic party establishment. He seems to be willing to burn the party down as part of his campaign. I just wonder how much of a team player he will be.
According to the various stories about the campaign he has done very little for the down ballot candidates. In Wisc. on Tuesday there was an important down ballot race for an open supreme court seat. Apparently he did little or nothing to support the democratic candidate and based on the exit polls 14% of his voters selected the ultra-conservative GOP candidate. In spite of his revolution Democratic turnout was 100k less the the GOP turnout.
If he is the nominee the party will support him but there might well be an enthusiasm gap. How many Congress critters are going to go to the mat for him when he has lumped them into his campaign against a corrupt system. He might win the White House but I suspect he will be very very lonely when it come to political allies.
Bob In Portland
The villagers in Balloon Juice Land are beating this horse to death.
Does Hillary normally ride the subways? Does she ever ride the subways? But she lives in NYC. So what does it matter if they use magnetized cards in the NY subway now?
Likewise, the Clinton media hacks have been beating the Daily News interview with Sanders, which again is ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s money-laundering scheme through thirty-three state Democratic parties raises all sorts of flags that the villagers and the talking heads they follow refuse to acknowledge, like they refuse to acknowledge the approximately three billion dollars in the rich people’s money that the Clintons have accumulated since 2001.
We don’t need to know what Hillary said to Goldman Sachs.
As long as the corporate wing of the Democratic Party refuses to represent the working class there is no reason for the working class to support them. It’s really that simple, villagers.
FlipYrWhig
@D58826:
He already is. He thinks it makes him honorable-slash-superior. I don’t want to put too much stock in this but I find it telling that the people in Congress who stick up for him, like Keith Ellison and Alan Grayson, are people who _didn’t_ serve in the House with him. (I suppose Raul Grijalva is an exception, but even he arrived only in 2003, while Sanders was there starting in 1990.) Berniacs tend to think that THE CLINTON MACHINE intimidates everyone into lining up behind Hillary, but maybe the politicians who have known Bernie Sanders’s views, habits, and personality for 25 years just don’t care for him. We know that’s how Barney Frank feels.
Keith G
I have always liked Sanders. I feel he is at root a very decent and intelligent person. He is also an amateur when it comes to pressurized campaigning that occurs at this level of politics. I have never felt, and he has never shown me, that he has the temperament and the high level of ability to be the chief executive of the most complex government in the world. Plus, he is an old man and I have my doubts as to how much access to executive governmental power we should give to old men.
I think now his status as a relative amateur is showing as well as his inability to be a closer.
While I wouldn’t mind Hillary throwing a few high and inside, I hope she sticks to policy and to the issues and just continues to show that she is the person that the Left needs to occupy the Oval Office despite the fact that she is a warrior with some problematic parts to her history. If she does just that, it seems to me that more than enough of Bernie’s supporters will vote for her to give her the victory we need to see happen.
Intra-party spats over words spoken during the heat of a campaign are on the whole rather needless.
ruemara
@sherparick: I agree with nearly everything but this whole “he’s a remarkable politician who’s moved the race to the left” thing? I’ll ask again, based on what evidence? If anything, he’s given much credence to rightwing propaganda. Where has he moved issues to the left, in your view?
Linnaeus
@glory b:
I’ve read that one of the effects of this is that black Americans have been less affected by addiction to prescription opiates. Which, of course, doesn’t justify denying them to people who genuinely need them.
Cacti
@Bob In Portland:
Any good books or blogs you can recommend us, Bob?
Bob In Portland
@Corner Stone: Photo op? Or was she taking her usual A Train?
different-church-lady
@Cacti: And failing that, any of the crappy books or blogs you usually recommend us, Bob?
different-church-lady
Who wants to bet BiP doesn’t understand the racial significance of the A service?
Miss Bianca
@Kay:
The problem that I *never* hear people addressing, with regard to issues of the merits of programs like universal pre-k or Head Start is that the educational gains made by children don’t mean squat unless the educational level of the parents is raised at the same time. It’s just a fact that the more highly-educated the parent, the higher education level a child reaches. And yet in all this talk about “free college”, I’m not hearing either candidate on the Dem side (forget about the Republicans) talk about the need for increased funding for adult basic education, including GED and ESL classes. You could argue that free community college addresses it, but I don’t think any of those credits go towards remedial classes (I could be wrong. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong). (And HRC has addressed the issue of workplace training and education, but I’d need to look at her plan more closely to see if it comes off as more than just talking points).
The thing that drove me craziest about working in adult and family literacy programs – besides the constant testing scramble and completely unrealistic achievement goals set by the feds to continue federal funding, all of which should be all too familiar to anyone in K-12 – was the constant need to explain to people *why* we needed these programs, and justify their very existence.. I found a really punitive attitude towards the whole idea of adult basic ed – an attitude of “well, they (the parents and adult students in our programs) had their chance in K-12 and they blew it – why should we pay for them to learn to read *now*?
Oh, and that and the fact that a “proven effective” program like Even Start – which *did* mandate adult and parenting ed as part of the program, and which consistently showed higher levels of achievement for both parents *and* children than either adult ed or early childhood ed classes on their own – got its funding eliminated. Because, you know, Reasons. And the sequester.
les
@Howlin Wolfe:
Is the inability to hear the real world cause or effect for Bernie Boosters?
ruemara
@chopper: that’s bullshit. We just have multiple ways to get around town.
Bob In Portland
@Cacti: Here’s one. LISTEN, LIBERAL. But I hesitate to waste energy on you. You don’t read things that contradict your fixed views. You are quite comfortable with the oligarchy, so to point out how the Democratic Party of the Clintons and Obama and Schultz don’t serve the old Democratic constituency of the working class doesn’t have any resonance with you. You are essentially a Republican without the nativist fervor. You defend or ignore the financial web spun by the corporate Democrats, because it can’t be changed (or so you say) and you seem to be doing just fine yourself.
When the working class is ignored there are only so many choices: You can continue to vote for the people who deregulate banks, who send jobs overseas, who don’t raise up the minimum wage, who fight unions and screw the poor. Or you can vote Republican. They do all of the above but with religion and fascism thrown in. The poetry he invented was easy to understand. Or you can support a third party. After discovering that our state party here in Oregon was laundering money for Hillary this seems like my general direction. Or one can choose to stay home. When a political system is owned by the rich and when it doesn’t represent the majority that’s the ultimate surrender.
But be proud, stand shoulder to shoulder with the giants of a monopolized media. Salute the innovators of the world who make their money by atomizing organized labor.
D58826
@Keith G:
His entire political career has been in Vermont. Nice state, beautiful scenery but off the beaten path political/media/economy wise. This time last year I suspect 1% of the US population knew who he was and where he came from. Sure in 2008 Obama wasn’t a household name but he was from a big state with political roots in a major city. His 2004 convention speech had marked him as a political comer. Bernie has been a backbencher his entire Congressional career, except for his brief, and maybe not so stellar, chairmanship of the Veterans Affairs committee.
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: Jeez, I thought you might be kidding, but it turns out that…
* It was actually the 4
* She knows what a MetroCard is
* But she’s not very good at swiping the thing.
Here in Boston we have the Charlie Ticket and Charlie Card. The ticket is like the MetroCard: stiff paper with a magnetic stripe. The card is plastic and vastly superior in that there is no magnetic stripe — you simply tap it on a sensor. One might not even have to take it out of a wallet.
Bob In Portland
@different-church-lady: I used to play it when I was playing jazz guitar, back in the seventies. So yes, I know the significance.
You apparently don’t know the significance of money in politics. You certainly don’t acknowledge it. You cannot discern between Democrat and corporate Democrat. You will not acknowledge how the Clintons and Obama have abandoned the working class.
D58826
@different-church-lady:
Why is that a surprise. We have learned from the e-mail fiasco that Hillary has a problem with any technology more advanced than flipping on a light switch. Fortunately ‘her finger on the nuclear trigger’ is just a metaphor. :-)
Bob In Portland
@different-church-lady: Thomas Frank is crappy? The Nation is crappy? Well, when the world contradicts you you shrink your information base.
Since you will never read LISTEN, LIBERAL you will never even be able to dispute the book, but you can call Thomas Frank and his book crappy because, well, you don’t read it.
When Russ Bellant wrote his book around the 1988 it got a little more press because it connected fascists and Nazis with the Republican Party. Now that the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party have made supporting Nazis respectable you know that you cannot read that article that I’ve been linking to for the last two years.
That’s fine. Yes, you can call people stupid while remaining in the dark, just like Republicans. If you weren’t so quick with the insults and dismissals I would feel sorry for you.
FlipYrWhig
@Bob In Portland: THE RACISTS GAVE UP ON THE DEMOCRATS AND IT’S THE DEMOCRATS FAULT
Cacti
@FlipYrWhig:
Bob lives in a state that’s less than 2% black. Go figure.
different-church-lady
@Bob In Portland: I love you Bob — you’re just so easy to bait.
Bob In Portland
Cole, have you read LISTEN, LIBERAL yet? Do you intend to? I’m curious if any of the villagers here will read it.
different-church-lady
@Bob In Portland: I wasn’t asking about the song. I was asking about the actual train.
Cacti
@Bob In Portland:
What’s the difference between Bob in Portland and a devout Jehovah’s Witness?
Eventually, the JW will give up on trying to convert you.
FlipYrWhig
@Bob In Portland: Thomas Frank, professional smug slummer, thinks that liberals aren’t populist enough? That’s a bold contention in 2008, 2004, 2003, 2000, and 1997, when he also said it, because he has one thing that he says: that. Frank and Sanders deserve each other.
Kay
@Technocrat:
Okay, but I would ask you to think about why no one freaked out when Obama and then Clinton announced they were for free community college. What’s that about? Why isn’t free community college elitist? Plenty of people pay for it, and plenty of people have borrowed for it.
The country will have to move to more free education. They can’t get a 30k a year job w/out it. That’s reality for them. Of course I’m talking about people who finish high school, but if we make that the measure of when we offer it millions of low income people who DO graduate from high school will remain in low wage jobs.
Some of this sounds like excuses to me. An 18 year old only has one 30 year work span. They can’t wait for the K-12 system to be perfect before we offer them some way out of 9 dollars an hour.
It’s 70% of people
D58826
Some depressing speculation that Bernie will go 3rd party if he loses the nomination. Now what was Susan Saradon saying about it not being an ego thing.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-schlesinger/will-sanders-gothird-part_b_9630264.html
Bob In Portland
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Please. If you are saying that Hillary is the corporate icon for WOMAN, I agree. But she’s not every woman. The women whose spouses and children are doing time for drug charges are not getting a quarter mill per speaking engagement. The women who saw their and their spouses’ jobs go overseas from all those trade agreements H. Clinton has wholeheartedly supported are not represented by the icon of H. Clinton. What wonderful words of wisdom do you think fell from her lips when she appeared in front of those people in Deutsche Bank? Any idea why the rich of the world would put two billion into her personal charity? Because she’s so charitable? Why don’t the women of Iraq, Syria and Libya count? Maybe she can arrange micro loans for a few of them so if they manage to swim across the Mediterranean fleeing the wars she has fully supported they can become successful entrepreneurs.
Corner Stone
@Kay: I can’t seem to tell if there’s an argument on this topic or not? I, for one, am all for the idea of free college and would love it if that became a thing over the next decade.
I once had a prof in CC that had an odd reaction when I registered for a class. I signed up as being in-district and paid the lower tuition, which I thought was a pretty good thing. He laughed at my naivete and informed me that he loved in-district people because they paid a tax each year that went to the CC as subsidy. So even though I may only use the CC for a limited time, myself and my family were paying for maintenance every year. That was why he lived out of district.
It seemed odd to me at the time, but I later realized he was just an asshole republican.
Bob In Portland
@different-church-lady: If you know about the song you know about the actual train. Or try the Chambers Bros “Uptown”. Or the “Uptown” by the Crystals.
Of course, we can talk about the Lower East Side, but I believe that’s all been gentrified since I lived there.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: I’m sick to fucking death of people using Thomas Frank as a platform for an argument.
Bob In Portland
@Howlin Wolfe: In defense of the villagers, they know the game is fixed and H. Clinton will be the nominee so they can clutch their pearls and claim to be loyalists to the party that has been disloyal to most of the country.
Bob In Portland
@D58826: Everything is an ego thing, including our posts here. If he does go third-party, which I don’t think will happen, he does it. There are plenty of Sanders supporters who will follow.
different-church-lady
@Bob In Portland: Sooooo… you gonna tell us, or are you just going to keep playing coy?
(Warn you, the follow-up question will be, “And why did you pull that service in particular out of your hat?”)
Kay
@Technocrat:
These are the most in-demand jobs for low income people to make a decent wage.
Some of them require college and some of them require training past high school. It’s no longer optional. This is the minimum all 18 year olds need. It’s not about “wanting free stuff”. It’s the equivalent of free high school 50 years ago.
Bob In Portland
@FlipYrWhig: As does America.
So yeah, smug populist. As opposed to being a smug corporatist like you.
Cacti
@Bob In Portland:
So you’re a white-flighter too, Bob?
kc
Well, shit, I was gonna vote for Sanders, but now that I know he hasn’t ridden the NY subway in years, I’m voting for authentic NYC subway-rider Hillary.
Seriously, what is this stupid shit? Isn’t this as bad, if not worse, than bitching about HRC tying up NYC traffic for hours whilst getting her $1,200.00 hair maintenance?
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: Hey, have you heard about this book, LISTEN, LIBERAL? I hear it’s pretty good.
Bob In Portland
@Corner Stone: Yeah, really, damn people talking about the “left-behinds” as a villager described them yesterday.
What separates the rich and the poor, Corner Stone? Think hard. Once you figure it out why should anyone in the bottom 80% of our population vote for the corporatist candidate?
kc
1. Here’s a big question for @SenSanders heading into the #NYPrimary – why did you leave New York?
God DAMN, this is dumb. Why did the Clintons leave Arkansas for New York? Why did they buy a nice country house instead of settling in the Bronx?
Here’s another question: Why does Tom Watson think Rosario Dawson is incapable of forming her own opinions?
Cacti
@kc:
Knock me over with a feather. I actually agree with you. The subway token thing is a stupid, non-issue.
Not being able to articulate things like how the banks should be broken up, what laws were broken that would warrant prosecutions in the subprime meltdown, or why he opposes Palestine seeking redress for alleged Israeli war crimes at the ICC…
Those are the things that made him sound like a naïf.
Bob In Portland
@Cacti: You’re so despicable. You try to use race as a cudgel against people who want to see an improvement for the working class. That puts you on par with Trump. I left the Lower East Side in 1970 because I could not get a job because I was #1 in Nixon’s lottery and there seemed to be a recession at the time.
Bob In Portland
@kc: Yes.
tastytone
@kc: The “token” debate is cracking me up. The end-of-interview, local question is such a standard (mostly light-hearted) way to vet pols when they come to (city name here) proclaiming their oh-so-deep connections to said city (Obama certainly got his share of them here in Chicago). Sanders’ fail was that he basically answered “I don’t know” to important policy questions during the body of the interview, and didn’t answer “I don’t know” to the one question on which he would’ve (relatively) been given a pass.
Bob In Portland
@different-church-lady: Better book, IT BOMBS A VILLAGE.
Cacti
@Bob In Portland:
So, someone held a gun to your head and forced you to relocate to a state that’s less than 2 percent black, Bob?
Corner Stone
@Bob In Portland:
I’ve done my best to consider this. And it seems to me that the rich live on the upstairs floor and the poor live on the downstairs floor. I suppose that’s a metaphor, but as I have not ever been poor it eludes me.
Bob In Portland
@tastytone: Will you release the texts of your speeches to Goldman Sachs?
Some answers are more important than others. Did you know that the Clintons vacationed in the Hamptons right next to the guy who owns the NY Daily News? It’s a small world after all!
kc
@Cacti:
You’re white.
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone: No, silly, the rich have money.
Cacti
@kc:
Your favorite candidate is so white, his hair’s the color of cotton.
Technocrat
@Kay:
It is a little elitist. Or rather, it’s benefits will tend to accrue to those who already have a leg up in life. Look, can we stop trying to push everyone through “History of English Lit” and “Microeconomics 101”?
I’m not saying that free college is a bad thing. I’m saying that a focus on college as the sole means of economic self-improvement is a huge cultural blind spot. There are lots of economically rewarding skills that don’t have “Bachelor of” in the title. Welder, electrician, cook, mechanic, HVAC technician, medical technician, carpenter, plumber etc, etc.
Personally, I’d prefer “Free Job Training” instead of “Free College” (although that would be included). How about offering people an array of choices that fit their talents, proclivities and background, rather than making sure they meet their Humanities quota each semester?
FlipYrWhig
@Bob In Portland:
“Women are good,” “I’ve had an interesting life,” and “the future has many interesting features,” most likely. She was on a speaking tour. She wasn’t custom-crafting content for each stop. This is like wondering if the Rolling Stones played “Satisfaction” at the last stadium, or changed it all up and admitted everything they did was all in praise of Beelzebub all along just like the moralists predicted 50 years ago.
Technocrat
@Kay:
Kay, I’m not sure where we’re disagreeing. I already mentioned commercial drivers, which is second on that list. And I never mentioned “wanting free stuff” at all. I said the focus on “college” is subject to criticism. Many of those jobs don’t require college.
kc
Ooh, here’s video of Hillz OWNING Bernie Sanders with her subway skills!
kc
@Cacti:
So’s yours, genius. What do you think she paid a hairstylist $1,200.00 for?
tastytone
@Bob In Portland:
Oh, okay: I’ll not bother about Sanders and his inability to articulate the FUNDAMENTAL mechanics of his proposed legislation–even to those of us (like myself) who went into this contest despising Clinton and excited by the prospect of his candidacy. I’ll focus on your vacation home-proximity argument instead. Sounds very juicy…
Cacti
@kc:
Your favorite candidate is so white, he thought he’d win the black vote by sending a rapper to talk to them.
Miss Bianca
@Technocrat: What it’s coming down to is the notion that “adult education” – period – whether it be traditional college, remedial ed,GED/HS equivalency, or job training/retraining – MUST be on the agenda, must be cheap, or free, and readily available to all. “Free college” rhetoric has to shift or give way to “free/low-cost ADULT EDUCATION.”
Rant off.
Technocrat
This thread has straight-up become The Dozens.
redshirt
@Bob In Portland:
At last! The truth! Clearly Hillary got the NYDN to make Bernie look bad.
Cacti
@redshirt:
And the centerpiece of the plot was to ask him about issues that are part of his stump speech boilerplate.
I can just seem them all twirling their evil mustaches and laughing deviously as they planned it.
kc
@Cacti:
Sanders should have articulated a specific plan for breaking up the TBTF banks, just as HRC articulated her plan to defeat ISIS (it was “Defeat ISIS,” in case anyone is wondering).
kc
@Cacti:
You know who else is white? You.
tastytone
@Technocrat:
Ha! Right? Maybe an exercise in deconstructivism?
kc
New site looks OK, scrolling is all jumpy and annoying.
ETA: That’s on the web. On a mobile device, scrolling thru comments is nigh impossible.
ETA pt 2: That’s probably just as well.
Bob In Portland
@Cacti: I’m sorry, racist, but where I live generally depends on how much money is in my pocket. I am currently living in Portland because I could no longer afford to live in the SF Bay Area on my post office pension, where I lived for about forty years. In a town where whites were a minority. But thanks, racist. You have really evolved to being a true corporatist Dem, whatever your roots. Why, I bet you take pride in being despicable. Sort of like the lunch-lady takes pride in being ignorant.
Technocrat
@Miss Bianca:
Yes. Very much this.
Bob In Portland
@Miss Bianca: The illusion of education as a game-changer is proving not to move poor people into your offices and neighborhoods. At least not enough.
Not that you’ll read it because Thomas Frank is a smug populist and the villagers here don’t like that, but LISTEN, LIBERAL actually addresses the fraud of the promise of education.
Calouste
@Howlin Wolfe:
The problem with Sanders is that he couldn’t even articulate a flow chart for his main policy goal he advocates.
Besides of course that someone who has been in Congress for 25 years and first ran for office 44 years ago should really be expected to have these things pat down. But he hasn’t.
Bob In Portland
@kc: Cacti is a racist. From the occasional sexual attack he engages in he’s probably homophobic too. There are a number of the boys around here who don’t actually discuss anything but attack individuals. I think geg6 fantasizes on oral sex with Putin, and I could have sworn that Cacti did too, but I won’t swear to it. Not sure about Cacti’s feminist chops, but around here all you need to do is worship the corporate feminist icon for street cred in the village. This place has really gotten toxic. You have any recommendations for sites with less Hillary bullshit?
Miss Bianca
@Bob In Portland: Oh, for God’s sake, Bob…an educated populace is A GOOD THING, and A GOAL, in and of itself. It’s not just the right-wing that falls into the trap of only seeing education as a means to an end. Because of that, I don’t doubt your new guru shits on it.
Bob In Portland
@Cacti: Mort Zuckerman. Neighbors with Hillary in the Hamptons. Is part of the wealthiest one percent. Owns the NY Daily News. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s networking. Why would people whose success in life has been measured by making vast fortunes while the working class sink farther into poverty toss their wealth on H. Clinton? Even more so than the Republicans?
Bob In Portland
@Miss Bianca: Never said it wasn’t. That’s one of Sanders’ strong campaign goals, more education. But the promise of education as the great equalizer in a society that is separating by wealth at lightning speed is false, like micro loans would ever solve the poverty of the third world. (ref., LISTEN, LIBERALS)
redshirt
@Bob In Portland: Daily Kos. Have a good time. See ya!
Mike D.
The people on this thread trying to make an earnest argument about “token” are making me laugh.
He grew up calling it a token. So he called it a token. No one’s under the impression he’s spent a lot of time riding around the NYC subway in the last ten years; he wasn’t trying to give that impression. He was just saying he rode the subway the other day.
It’s not news to anyone in NY that Bernie hasn’t lived in NYC for decades. Almost no one’s going to base their judgement of whether he’s “still” a NYer on saying “token” rather than “Metrocard,” (especially concerning a single fare), especially since I guarantee you there are thousands of young people running around NYC whose 74 year old grandparents in Brooklyn still call it a token. And anyone who concludes he’s not a NYer on that basis is still just a fraction of people who are going to base their vote on whether they feel Sanders is still a NYer, which is assuredly a small fraction of primary voters. This is the definition of a non-thing.
If anything, all this “token” talk by Hillary supporters reflects insecurity about whether NYers in fact see her as a real New Yorker yet.
redshirt
@Bob In Portland:
I thought, possibly, you were being sarcastic earlier. But this makes it clear you are not – are you really stating that Sander’s poor interview with the NYDN is because of Hillary’s connections with the publisher? Be clear, please.
Bob In Portland
@redshirt: Where we aren’t supposed to talk about Sanders after March 15th? Run by the guy who says that Joe Biden is second in the Democratic race? That Daily Kos?
redshirt
@Bob In Portland: Hmm, good point. Maybe there’s nowhere for you to go. I wonder what that says about you?
Bob In Portland
@redshirt: I am saying that our media is mostly owned by the wealthiest corporations and individuals. Wealthy Americans, wealthy people all over the world, want H. Clinton as our next President. It is in their interest to have another Clinton in the White House. They go to the same parties. The “innovative crowd” gives TED talks to each other, and bathe in the glow of the cult of the educated. You may be surprised to hear this, but generally Fox News, owned by a very conservative man, very very often reflects its owner’s political beliefs. Shocking, isn’t it?
Perhaps in your circle you’ve never had an acquaintance make that connection. Perhaps that’s why that pile of money the Clintons made from pleasing the wealthy was because they please the wealthy.
If you folks won’t read LISTEN, LIBERAL, or that Nation story I linked to, for whatever your rationale is for your ignorant bliss, may I suggest this old article from the New York Times, which I presume is still not banned by the church of BJ.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/style/hillary-clinton-hamptons-vacation.html?_r=0
Cacti
@Bob In Portland:
So, networking prevented Bernie from articulating his ideas at more than the slogan level?
Bob In Portland
@redshirt: It says that I’m closer to being poor than you are. And you gloat about it. That makes you a corporatist Democrat with a shortage of empathy for people with less money than you, which is common for people like you. It says I’m in the majority in the US and that you feel superior to us. That makes you a classist. I spent my life in a good-paying blue-collar job and even have a pension, and there are still vast stretches of this country where I can no longer afford to live. And you gloat. You mother must be proud of you.
tastytone
@Mike D.:
I’d agree it’s not a whopper, and like you implied. However, I’d think Sanders’ team would be grateful people are focusing on the subway question and not the rest of that interview.
redshirt
@Bob In Portland: I think you’re confusing me with someone else. When/where have I gloated about income?
redshirt
@Bob In Portland: So yes, you’re excusing Bernie’s poor interview on Hillary’s 1% connections. Go ahead and just say it if that’s what you mean.
Technocrat
@Bob In Portland:
What kind of human being doesn’t like TED talks?? Granted they have a bunch of corporatist talks like New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century by some Piketty guy.
Rhoda
@Chris: A democratic socialist is the German model – democracy, socialism with capitalistic features would be how I describe it.
Ohio Mom
@efgoldman: I must be cuter than you, no one’s ever snarled at me.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@sherparick: If he’s such a remarkable politician why hasn’t the minimum wage been raised to $15 in his own deep, deep blue home state?
If he’s such a remarkable politician why hasn’t the minimum wage been raised to $15 in any of the states he’s won?
Please – walk away from the koolaid
Bob In Portland
@redshirt: Comment # 402.
What does it say about me, redshirt? Hint: I talked about affordability. If you were not commenting on my brief narrative about not being able to afford living in the San Francisco Bay Area, what by chance could you have been referring to? What does not having enough money to rent an apartment in SF say about me, redshirt?
redshirt
@Bob In Portland: I was referring to the comment I quoted, that you fear there’s no where to go on the internet where your love of Bernie is unchallenged.
Technocrat
@Bob In Portland:
Bob, I am fairly well-off and I couldn’t afford to live in San Francisco. $5500 a month for a 2 bedroom apt is multiples of my mortgage.
Bob In Portland
@redshirt: I am saying that the news media generally have either ignored Sanders or have distorted what he said. Not citing specific laws in a brief interview is not the most grievous sin in a political campaign, but the echo chamber repeats it, attaches some BS to it, and then, as echo chambers do, repeats it.
Instead of using the word “qualified” he should have said she is too morally reprehensible to be the Democratic nominee.
redshirt
@Bob In Portland: Ha!
First off:
Are you saying that the NYDN somehow distorted or misrepresented Bernie’s answers in that interview?
And secondly,
For someone who you should want to vote for, since they will be directly opposing TED CRUZ or DONALD TRUMP or FSM help us, PAUL RYAN.
Do you want to see any of these people as President? If not, why not let go your purity, and vote for the person who CAN stop the Republicans from winning?
Bob In Portland
@Technocrat: I believe it was Cacti who above kept intimating that my various choices of where I lived were based on racism. His insinuation was that I left San Francisco and moved to Portland as part of a white urban flight movement.
Bob In Portland
@redshirt: Actually, there are plenty of places on the web where there is plenty of Bernie love. Not Daily Kos.
I think that printing responses immediately below a comment makes for a more coherent dialogue and unfortunately Balloon Juice is not formatted that way. As is the case here at BJ, getting into multiple discussions at the same time usually crosses conversations. I was being accused by Cacti of moving from the San Francisco Bay Area on account of racism when your comment appeared. When you said “Maybe there’s nowhere for you to go. I wonder what that says about you?” in the context of my brawl with Cacti you sounded kind of like a rich asshole.
But since the Democrats and Hillary essentially serve the most wealthy at the expense of the working class, and most posters here adore Hillary, it was either someone being an asshole over the division of wealth in this country, or as Cacti demonstrates, an asshole racist. Because, as you well know, there are plenty of places where Sanders is treated with dignity and respect. Not here, but elsewhere. I wasn’t looking for agreement, I was looking for civility and possible discussions that don’t start with making suggestions about having sex with Putin.
Technocrat
@Bob In Portland:
Ahhh. Carry on then. Not getting in the middle of that one.
redshirt
@Bob In Portland: I can’t believe I want to seriously ask this question, I never thought I would sincerely ask this question, I mean, I thought about it, but it’s crazy, and yet here we are:
Are you a Communist, Bob in Portland?
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
–
Bob In Portland
@tastytone:
Did you know that Ben Bradlee worked for Voice of America out of the CIA’s Paris offices for a campaign to convince Europeans that the Rosenbergs were guilty of espionage and deserved the death penalty? Far more juicy. So Ben Bradlee worked as a propagandist for the CIA, and the owners of WaPo had histories with the CIA. And then Bob Woodward, who admits he first met “Deep Throat” in the basement of Nixon’s White House while bringing a briefcase of top secret documents to the President from the Office of Naval Intelligence, suggests that a number of people involved with the Watergate scandal, on all sides, were connected to the CIA. It doesn’t put any of them on the Grassy Knoll or overthrowing Arbenz, at least at the WaPo, but anyone curious about what Watergate was about would scratch his chin. But Balloon Juice Land is the land of no conspiracies.
You see, tastytone, I presume that if people who give lots of money to politicians they expect a return on their investment. Two billion in the Clinton Foundation, unknown what’s in the Clinton Global Initiative but we know it’s lots of money. As of fall 2015 the Clintons had gotten over a $130 million in speaking fees, somewhere around seven hundred million in campaign donations from 2001 with the projection of a billion by her election in the general. In short, we’re flirting with three billion dollars here.
I know this may appear to be a wild conspiracy theory to Balloon Juicers here, and maybe from my elusive relationship with money I should defer to wealthier people, but if you don’t want anything from a politician then why give her around three billion?
Now, we know that while the general public weren’t wiped out by bubbles during the Clinton era we also know that a lot of the bills that Bill signed ended up screwing and lessening many millions in the working class. And working class people whose jobs disappeared overseas were now in competition for the remaining jobs here in the US, which further depressed wage growth. This is not rocket science.
So:
1. Bill Clinton screwed the working class in oh so many ways while Hillary cheered him on. Meanwhile, the top echelon of America got fabulously wealthy.
2. After 2001 the Clintons have accrued around three billion dollars from people all around the world. Rich people, big corporations, the very folks who benefited from the free trade deals and easing of anti-trust enforcement. Is there a connection? The BJ villagers try very hard not to notice it. Perhaps it’s because some of them are part of the professional class and have benefited from New Dems while the American working class suffered. Maybe they think their class provides them with enough cache to look down on less wealthy and their problems.
3. During her time as Senator H. Clinton supported just about every free trade agreement that burbled up from the Bush Administration. Cui bono? I’ve posted links to stories where one is able to suss out quid pro quos between arms deals approved by Hillary as SOS and a hundred million or so in donations from the parties in the arms deals.
The ultimate problem is that the great minds here at BJ are incapable for following money. Now, it could be because they’ve been trained all their lives to not be a conspiracy theorist, to not notice until their thought leaders say so.
Whenever the assassination of JFK comes up here I am assaulted because (insert your reason why the CIA, the world leader in committing assassinations and overthrowing governments, didn’t play a part in JFK’s murder). It’s over fifty years since Dealey Plaza, the CIA and the government agencies are still blocking release of documents on the case. Documents released show that most of what we learned from the Warren Commission were intentional lies. But no, BJers have been trained to know that you can’t be a serious thinker if you’re a conspiracy theorist.
You can’t admit that the US was behind the Ukraine coup and that the US has had a seventy-year relationship with Ukrainian fascists who are playing prominent roles in the post-coup government. Interesting factoid: How many times is Putin mentioned in the Panama Papers? Don’t know? Not once. How many times is Putin’s immediate family mentioned? None. There is a childhood friend of Putin’s who’s mentioned. How many friends of the Clintons or Obama are mentioned? Gee, not important. Listen to what Sanders said five years ago about the Panama Free Trade deal. But let’s not connect cause and effect. Corporate Democrats who supported the Panama Free Trade deal were either too stupid to realize that it would make it easier for corporations and rich folks to hide their money from US taxes, or were for it to enable corporations and the rich to hide their money. Or, as has been represented here by BJ villagers, people like Clinton are too pure to actually benefit from these kinds of deals, three billion notwithstanding.
Considering that major media spent so much time on “outsider” Trump while ignoring Sanders it’s hard to imagine that corporations who keep profiting from the deals that corporate Dems have made with them would report honestly on Sanders or report on him at all. Trump has shown himself to be quite despicable. I didn’t go to his wedding. The Clintons did. When Mort Zuckerman and Hillary Clinton took their lobsters off the barbie in the Hamptons they don’t have to discuss how to help each other. They’re on the same team. And BJ villagers are their cheerleaders.
Bob In Portland
@redshirt:
No.
But what if I were? Would that be a reason not to discuss issues with me? Or would that be a reason for you to dismiss me? Vernon Parrington made a critical observation about the problems between the state and business over a hundred years ago, and it still holds up today. He pointed out about how the power of the federal government had to be increased in order to balance itself against the power of corporate entities (this was the era of trusts and trust-busting). But, he asked, how are we to prevent these monopolies from gaining control of the augmented powers we give to government.
Anyone with any understanding of the CIA knows it grew out of the WWII OSS, which was populated with corporate lawyers who’d been cutting deals with fascist governments and their corporations up until war was declared. And these same corporate lawyers who settled into the CIA and the State Department, what happened with them running our secret police. They allied with fascists and international corporations in league with American equivalents. The murder of JFK was just another regime change, because he was threatening profits of the wealthy.
No, I consider myself an anti-fascist. Unfortunately, here at the Land of Balloon Juice the villagers don’t understand how fascism works, or at least are unable to see it.