Google pushes AOC news to my feed, otherwise I would have missed this gem from the shitty gossip rag The Hill, “Some Dems Float Idea of Primary Challenge for Ocasio-Cortez”. Now, to be clear, the story only quotes one Dem, anonymously:
“What I have recommended to the New York delegation is that you find her a primary opponent and make her a one-term congressperson,” the Democratic lawmaker, who requested anonymity, told The Hill. “You’ve got numerous council people and state legislators who’ve been waiting 20 years for that seat. I’m sure they can find numerous people who want that seat in that district.”
I’m sure those numerous council people and legislators are lining right up for the sure failure of a primary run against AOC, who raised $2 million last cycle, and has $400K cash on hand. I give this story four Pinocchios, three Goofys and a dozen Mickey Mouse turds, to use bullshit measurements that DC journalists can understand.
If AOC has a superpower, it is pissing off old school politicians who apparently are scared of popular ideas like restoring a 70% marginal tax rate. I’d love to see a person like the back bencher quoted in this article take a run at AOC – it would be almost as fun as watching a rich wanker like Howard Schultz smear poop all over himself by calling her ideas “un American”.
Snarki, child of Loki
“it would be almost as fun as watching a rich wanker like Howard Schultz smear poop all over himself”
If by “poop” you mean “napalm”, I’ll lend you some matches.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’ve been cautious about AOC, wanting to see how she does in her new job. I have to say I’m impressed. I think we need her where she it.
Patricia Kayden
AOC is a brilliant, young, energetic, outspoken progressive. I hope she continues to speak out about marginal taxes, climate change and other important issues. Of course, the MSM is going after her because they’re used to passive Democrats who don’t strike back. I’m confident that AOC has a long future ahead of her as a firebrand politician.
MattF
AOC seems to have a number of superpowers, including the ability to make conservatives shit themselves. You go, ma’am.
Cermet
Good morning Jackals – try to avoid freezing.
PST
The guy AOC beat, Joe Crowley, was well established and not a bad congressman. She’d wipe the floor as an incumbent against a lesser opponent.
OzarkHillbilly
I am sure that is absolutely true. They’ve all been waiting 20 years for Crowley to die and here she comes, a nobody from the Bronx and bumps him off.
Who does she think she is??? There’s a line here!!!!
Baud
I hope Chelsea Clinton moves into her district to primary her because I want to see the Internet BURN!
Dorothy A. Winsor
JCJ
@Baud: You are evil. Funny, but evil!
Kraux Pas
With all due respect to local officials, many of them doing amazing work for their constituents every day; waiting 20 years for positions to open up is not how it should go. Nothing in the Constitution that describes how our representatives are to be selected suggests we have a turn-based system.
I also don’t blame any such people for this quote. Well, maybe just one such person whose sense of entitlement
would have made them a bad choice for advancement anyway.
I get that a lot of good people work hard and want to move up and that internal primaries upset political parties. But you need to identify/make your own opportunities and if you think you have something to offer or think something important is being overlooked in your district, waiting 20 years shouldn’t be an option.
Betty Cracker
Here is the moment when AOC won my heart utterly and completely:
Baud
There was a recent NYT that used “some” Dems when they should have said “one” Dem.
Where I come from, they call this lying.
JCJ
@Dorothy A. Winsor: OMG. I read that thread. The esteemed Soonergrunt commented that he had been helping reset passwords and forcing updates all day.
WereBear
She is devastating on Twitter, and that matters.
SFAW
Actually, I’m OK with AOC getting primaried — as long as her opponent is Howard “EVERYBODY LOOK AT ME-ME-ME-MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!” Schultz, and if he swears, pinkie-promises, and avers not to run for any other office.
MattF
@JCJ: I imagine that most people will have forgotten their passwords. Not to mention all their PINs. When you’re forced to change your password every 90 days, it gets hard to remember.
SFAW
@Baud:
Reason # elebenty-gazillion why you are not running the FTFTFNYT.
MattF
@Baud: More like wishful thinking.
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
So Badger is now “old news”?
Dorothy A. Winsor
I actually surprised by how much AOC alarms them. I realize she’s not what they’re used to, but come on.
Sebastian
I want to smash Schultz’ obnoxious grin in that Grauniad article so hard. What an entitled prick.
Kraux Pas
It’s because she upsets their narratives about what should work and what doesn’t. You know, the stuff they say to keep Dems in line, not upsetting monopolists and assorted white collar criminals like Trump.
mad citizen
@Sebastian: I noticed that too–completely agree!
Hoodie
AOC may be replacing Pelosi as the right’s bogeyman. I consider that progress because (1) AOC is not all that powerful (yet) and (2) she actually is a soshulist, which means the O window actually may be moving left. More reason not to worry about wankers like Schultz.
Kay
Guffaw. His bullshit campaign was created just for headlines, which they’re giving him. It’s a campaign to protect the interests of the very rich, larded with meaningless nonsense like “opportunity culture” to give it a caring sheen.
The only reason he’s running as an “independent” is because if he ran in either party primary he would lose.
Kay
Here’s Schultz’s brilliant and innovative idea:
Every single voter has heard “run government like a business” every election of their adult lives. Because he’s a billionaire this boilerplate is quoted as if it’s profound.
We created these people. We encouraged them to believe they were uniquely brilliant.
lee
How much you want to bet that anonymous Dem was actually Lieberman?
Immanentize
Was that anonymous Dem. Seth Moulton?
Irresponsible not to speculate….
Immanentize
@MattF:
No joke, one of my recurring stress dreams is that I am back in Junior High after a break and I can’t remember my locker combo and I’m late for class which is swimming which I have to pass or I will fail out of college!
It’s a dream, no internal logic.
NotMax
So let’s summarize – she’s been in office less than a month (still learning which drawer the paper clips are in) and uttered a rude word.
Yup, the republic totters.
Immanentize
@Kay:
We prove it in their salaries.
Nicole
Isn’t it interesting to speculate about what the coverage on her would be like if she were white and male?
Wait, I think we’ve already seen it with Beto O’Rourke.
(Note: don’t come after me, I like Beto fine and hope he sticks around but it was a lot of flattering coverage of a guy who didn’t even win. My comment is about the media.)
NotMax
@Kay
Fortunate it’s not a company then, innit?
If America was a race horse it would have been put out to pasture well over 200 years ago. Makes as much sense as Schultz’ ignorant ranting.
satby
@Dorothy A. Winsor: ???
The retained corporate brain trust at one account I was on ordered us to reset all the passwords one day because they thought they had a security breach (they hadn’t, long story). The fallout from that lasted weeks, because these geniuses decided they had to personally verify every new login… For an international staff of thousands. There were 4 of them.
God save us from MBAs and “running like a business”.
The Midnight Lurker
I’m listening to Schultz! on NPR right now.
1. HATES the word ‘free’.
2. He’s thinks we need ‘comprehensive tax reform’, but this whole idea of taxing the rich is ‘crazy’, ‘far left’, are far too punitive to poor billionaires.
3. HATES Elizabeth Warren. HATES her.
4. Has trouble counting to numbers like ‘two’, which for me, particularly if I was a stock holder, is a little disconcerting.
5. Maintains he is NOT dodging questions as he does exactly that.
6. For a C.E.O. whose company is going to be one of the first to be adversely affected by global warming, he never mentioned it, and avoids the subject.
6. And this last one is just my personal opinion based on listening to the man twice (once and once equals twice, right?), is that he really isn’t very bright.
Go home, Howard. You’re already done.
waratah
Beto managed to have politico dredge two old dinosaurs for comment. Ed Rendell and James Carville. I do not think these old ones quite realize their time is finished.
OzarkHillbilly
Where does the CA Republican party go from here? We’ll soon find out:
There’s a very illuminating graph there showing which party House seats belong to from 1944 to now. They track pretty closely over the years with the rising population but then diverge right around 2000. I wonder what happened?
Raven
@waratah: Easy with that “old” shit.
Brachiator
I really love this expression of political entitlement. The idea that political offices belong to the party machine and not to the people.
I saw this story about AOC this morning and pretty much had the same reaction. It is either BS or a death wish of some Democratic Party morons.
Wapiti
I’m hopeful that the Democrats can carry this populism forward through the election. The last two Presidential campaigns I feared the Republican would pivot and seize the economic populism bandwagon. It matters to the 70-90% of the country that their lot has not gotten better since Ronald Reagan. Maybe, with Warren and AOC and others, that message will get through and become a bigger part of the Dem goals going forward.
And if rich dude who doesn’t pay a state income tax wants to spend his money demonstrating that AOC and Warren and others are right about the rich… That will be amusing for some time.
tobie
@Kay: Whenever I hear the line we should ‘run govt like a business,’ I want to point out that W was our first MBA President, and he sucked at his job, and Trump is our first small business owner President and he mega-sucks (or maga-sucks) at his job, and Tillerson, our first corporate-executive Secretary of State, was awful at his job, too. Running a business doesn’t teach you anything about public welfare and the public good, which is the purpose of government.
waratah
@Raven: only for politicians that stay too long
The Midnight Lurker
@Raven:
Second that!
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Yeah, trying to dump one of the best liked young politicians to come along in years, who’s getting young people excited about politics seems like a truly genius plan… Who the fuck are these people?
WaterGirl
@Patricia Kayden: Bonus: and there will never be dick pics!
Chetan Murthy
@tobie:
Yeap. Also, there’s the record of government outsourcing and public/private partherships, both of which cost more than if government had just done the damn job itself. I remember well the insane billing practices of Halliburton during the Gulf War. And of course, we’re being treated to a royal reaming by all the corrupt crony contractors hovering around Putinfluffer like fies on shit, but I guess I shouldn’t count those — such epic corruption is an exception, I suppose. I suppose.
Kay
@The Midnight Lurker:
Impossible. Rich = brilliant, or so he and we have been told for 50 years.
Have you heard his remarkable insight on how government should be run like a business? I know. Groundbreaking.
We might have some low information voters but we also have a huge group of low quality elites. Maybe people stopped listening to them because they’re not that bright or interesting. This problem is bigger than 25K Trump voters in Michigan.
WaterGirl
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
I think you meant to say “Who the fuck is THIS person? It’s only one.
The Moar You Know
I’m going to say this in every thread that even mentions Howard Schultz: I worked for his shitty coffee company, Charbucks as the employees still call it, many years ago before going to a workplace that was far less stressful and awful, a federal defense contractor.
If one can safely assume that a company is a reflection of the CEO running it – and make no mistake, Schultz is extremely hands-on in the running of Charbucks – his ideal society will look a lot like North Korea. Slaves, party elite (better-paid slaves) and the people actually in charge who make an offensive amount of money.
WaterGirl
Even as these old rich guys are taking action because they see the world changing around them and they feel they are at risk… they are peddling old shit that used to work, you know, back before the world started changing.
This alone shows that they are not smart enough to be in the game.
Kay
Schultz may make me like Bloomberg, who has his faults but doesn’t seem to be completely full of shit. Bloomberg comes out smelling like a rose in that comparison.
tobie
@Chetan Murthy:
I forgot about that. Absolutely true. I think we’ve lost count of the number of things the military has outsourced to private companies from pre-packaged meals to military and civilian infrastructure and the exorbitant spending this has led to. The Army Corps of Engineers did the same jobs for a song.
kindness
I think The Hill is worse than any of Jim VandeHei & Mike Allen’s unreadable trash wallows, and that isn’t an easy bar to slime your way under.
The Midnight Lurker
@The Moar You Know: I worked a gig in Toronto years ago. All the Canucks called it, “Four bucks.”
And I insist we start calling him ‘Shultz!!’, after my beloved ‘To Be Or Not To Be’.
Fair Economist
@OzarkHillbilly:
Hopefully the answer is “away”.
JR
@OzarkHillbilly: Prop 187 backlash was a big part of it
NotMax
@The Moar You Know
Three rousing rahs
A few huzzahs
And a hip hip hip hooray
What’s good for General Bullmoose
Is good for the U.S.A.
:)
Immanentize
@The Midnight Lurker:
So this is why he’s running. That totes makes sense now.
Immanentize
@tobie: Just because there isn’t a declared war doesn’t mean there are no profiteers.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Progess Is the Root of All Evil.
;)
Spanky
Run, Howard! Run! Having an upper class twit sniveling about taxing the rich and complaining about Elizabeth Warren and AOC is only going highlight the issue, and not in his favor.
I’m kinda tempted to try to get hired onto his campaign. Get a few Star bucks tossed my way while I offer all sorts of useful advice.
mad citizen
@The Moar You Know: My wife worked at a couple in the mid-2000s and would agree. She opened a new store, and I think became a shift manager or something, but yes, starbucks is not run well at all. She has continued to be a customer on and off, and her biggest complaint is how they are really good at taking a bunch orders, but then you have to wait forever for your drink. I can’t count the number of times I’m waiting in the car for 15-20 minutes for her to come out with a crappy overpriced starbucks drink.
ETA She is not a regular customer, it’s intermittent and only for some afternoon pickup. She much prefers, and frequents a local place called The Well that donates all profits to global charities.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: Imm, in case you haven’t seen it… there is more encouragement for you on last night’s thread, from multiple people.
The Midnight Lurker
I dunno… now that I think of it, ol’ Shultz!! might be just the man for the job.
I mean, that ‘red cup’ stroke of genius finally forced an armistice in the ‘War on Christmas,’ right? Right?!
VOTE SHULTZ!!!
“Piece of cheese!”
ruemara
AOC is a gross camera hog like her patron. There, I said it. Pithy things on social media don’t cover that. If she can’t stop mugging for the press & provide good constituent service, she won’t last long. I find not much impressive about her & I’m sorry I ever was excited she won.
Immanentize
@WaterGirl: Cat encouragement? :-)
I oddly was near tears thinking about poor Toast and our soon to be quiet home.
The Moar You Know
@mad citizen: I can’t do it anymore, unless I’m in an airport or similar environment that’s been made free of decent food and drink. Far as I’m concerned, they sell hot sugar milk, not coffee.
Really got into studying how to make coffee well (pour over, slow drip, Turkish, Vietnamese, they all have merits) after working there, and I can and do. Want to learn how to roast my own next, that’s a lifelong study project right there.
Still will sometimes bring an Aerochino and make lattes in the office. My co-workers love me, lol.
The Moar You Know
@ruemara: A possible Alan Grayson part II. That being said, there’s a need for that, and so long as she can hold it together on the homefront, she can hog it up all she likes. There’s a lot of value in someone who gets all the press while others go about the business of governing. Look at what the GOP has done to the courts with Trump, and virtually nobody who is not a hardcore politics junkie knows about it.
The most important thing is that she’s on board with leadership, and if Nancy can stand her so can I.
Nelle
Someone once criticized my husband for being too extreme in his environmental work. I replied that my husband had just created more space for the complainer to be reasonable.
Ella in New Mexico
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUK! I just gave that completely worthless pile of “one pissy spoiler-bitter -wanker Democratic lawmaker and one pissy self-entitled-wanker of a country club member in AOC’s district says” article a click.
daveNYC
@Kay: Bloomberg would be a bad president, but I would at least be interested in hearing the specifics when he says “Run the government like a business.” He might have a few good ideas in there.
Salty Sam
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I actually LOVE how much she alarms them…
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Fair Economist: I actually worry about single party rule. It seems to promote corruption because no one wants to undercut their own party. As an example, two D governors from my current state are in jail.
VFX Lurker
Whether AOC stays or goes hinges on the voters of her district. She won a low-turnout primary by knocking on more doors than her opponent. Nothing stops a challenger from doing the same.
She made mistakes last year. She’s smart, and she has nearly two years to learn from her mistakes. We’ll see.
Salty Sam
@tobie:
Anyone who says this has not spent enough time working for private business.
montanareddog
The Republican Party – dedicated to the proposition that the younger generations should have a shittier life than their parents
Howard Schultz – dedicated to the proposition that the younger generations should have shittier coffee than their parents’ (shitty) coffee
Darkrose
@Immanentize: I have a similar recurring dream, where I missed a required class in high school and I have to go back and complete it or my college degree will be invalid.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: Late coming back to the thread, but yes, cat encouragement!
Nike says: Just do it!
Darkrose
@ruemara: I’m not entirely sold on her, but she’s doing something that’s necessary at the moment: serving as a lightning rod while the rest of the Dem caucus quietly goes about their business. And to be fair, some of the camera hogging is because conservatives are obsessed with her. She’s confounding the right-wing narrative that leftist women are unattractive, humorless scolds and the right’s tiny mind is exploding.
wasabi gasp
She so hot buttered, all others ooze jelly.
Gex
@Nelle: So often we are encouraged to start off by negotiating down before even negotiating with the other side and it only serves to help the other side.
Quaker in a Basement
I give this story four Pinocchios, three EFFIN’ Goofys and a dozen Mickey Mouse turds