Whether you support @ewarren or not, read this by @juliaioffe to see how her campaign has caught fire. Campaigns matter and refusing to accept conventional wisdom, by being innovative and taking risks, pays off.
The Summer of Elizabeth Warren https://t.co/v2FtY66bwJ
— Tom Ochs (@tomochs) August 21, 2019
Even if I am prejudiced in favor of her subject, Ioffe’s profiles are always worth reading:
Elizabeth Warren was ready for the question. She gets a variation of it almost everywhere she goes. Often, it’ll come after she’s outlined any number of the big, sweeping things she intends to do once she’s assumed the presidency—wipe out student debt, say, or bring the private equity industry to heel, or revamp the State Department. Her immodest plans tend to inspire at least a few people in every crowd to wonder the exact same thing: Really? And how do you expect you’ll do all that?
On a chilly summer evening in a high school gym in Milwaukee, I noticed she’d begun preempting the question by highlighting her own audacity.
She recounted a little story of a colleague who had once approached her on the Senate floor to suggest that an idea of hers was maybe a bit improbable. “That’s just too hard,” Warren said he told her, and added she should “smile more.” (The good, liberal crowd booed on cue.) “And here’s what I remember thinking,” she said, her voice resonating with the righteous disbelief she must have felt then. “What do you think they said to the abolitionists? ‘You’re not going to change this country, that’s too hard!’…What do you think they told the suffragettes? ‘Quit now. It’s just too hard.’ What did they say to the early union organizers? ‘Quit now. It’s just too hard.’ But here’s the thing. They didn’t quit. They persisted and they changed the course of American history!”
The stakes of Warren’s run are historically significant. She is vying to become not simply the country’s first female president, but the architect of an ambitious rethinking of American government. (Her campaign’s central question is: Who does our government work for?) Yet for all the grandness of her vision, some of her shrewdest innovations on the trail can seem almost imperceptible. Consider her selfie strategy. “We’re going to take pictures,” Warren announced from the stage, shortly after invoking those trailblazers of yore. Here was a stealth weapon available to neither abolitionists nor suffragettes. “Someone will explain whether to go to that side or that side.”…
The selfie line has, by now, become a notorious feature of a Warren event—one that reflects the campaign’s savvy as well as the candidate’s unique commitment and stamina: She stays as long as it takes to pose with every person who wants a picture. Sometimes the line is so long that this obligation requires hours of Warren’s time—as it did in Chicago in June, when over three thousand people took two and a half hours to shuffle through. “I don’t know how she does it after doing the speech and taking those questions, which is very hard,” said former Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid. “I’ve never known anyone to do that before. I know that when I finished my town halls, I just wanted to go home.”
Warren, however, told me that she finds the selfie line “energizing.” Earlier that day, as we chatted in her hotel, I asked her about these post-rally meet-and-greets. “The selfie line is the chance to have the direct touch,” she told me. “I get to hear from one person after another what they want me to hear. Anything! This is their chance, and they can tell me anything they want as they come through that selfie line. And it keeps me connected to people in a powerfully important way.”…
Tall and wiry, Warren visibly thrums with good cheer. She’s got that kind of pert friendliness stretched taut around a core of steel that some foreigners find confusing in certain willful Americans. But in Warren, both the chipper facade and the steel guts feel genuine: She is a very nice lady who will put up with exactly zero bullcrap…Things have changed since the last election. In part, this is because Clinton did smash a glass ceiling: She was the first woman nominee for president and won the popular vote by nearly three million votes. In part, it is because she still didn’t get the job. It went instead to a man who was not only comically less qualified than she was, but was also accused by two dozen women of sexual misconduct and, in some cases, sexual assault. The result was the Women’s March, which dwarfed Trump’s inauguration crowds the day before, the #MeToo movement, and a holy rage in women that most men can’t fathom.
Though she refuses “to relitigate 2016,” as she puts it, Warren accedes that what happened three years ago—Hillary Clinton’s run and Donald Trump’s win—makes her current quest for the White House a bit easier. “Of course, it helps that Hillary ran in 2016,” she told me. She is aware that the energy and momentum generated by a record number of women candidates in 2018—spurred on in part by the presence of a committed misogynist in the Oval Office—also help her. The path now, Warren thinks, is much better trodden. “I believe that having six women in the race right now makes it easier,” she said. “It’s good to not be the only one standing on stage who’s female. Having started teaching in law schools decades ago when there were very few women, I taught in commercial law, which was largely male. Commercial and corporate and all the money and finance courses stayed heavily male-dominated much longer than some of the other fields, and I’ve just lived through years of ‘Gentlemen! Oh. And lady.’ ” She rolled her eyes. “Years of, I’d look around the room and there’d be 50, 75, 100 people, and I’d be the only woman in the room. And the idea that right now, there are six women who held up their hands and said, ‘Yup! I’m in this race!’ It’s just fabulous!”…
This was at the Iowa State Fair:
*Herzog voice* madness descended. the selfies were interminable pic.twitter.com/lIRD7xpoku
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 10, 2019
WhatsMyNym
Gov. Inslee is out of the running for Pres. He’ll go for a 3rd term as Washington’s governor; pissing off some other folks who were planning on running for governor.
oatler.
Hope it turns out better than “The summer of George'”.
WhatsMyNym
@WhatsMyNym:
Seattle Times
Chigail
Um I’m getting an ad for Franklin Graham’s grift at the top here. Stop,
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
You knew this would happen sooner or later
Wilmer begins desperate smears:
Omnes Omnibus
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Go home, Susan. You’re drunk.
Ruckus
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
He may be the real deal. It is a piss poor real deal, a full of shit deal, a deal that is good for only one person, BS himself.
BruceFromOhio
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: sorry Susan, that’s just lame as fuck. Try a little harder, please.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
At least then she’d have an excuse, otherwise she’s just a moron.
Oh wait…..,,
zhena gogolia
@oatler.:
You scared me, I though you meant McGovern.
Steve in the ATL
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: she forgot to mention that he’s not a Democrat now and has never been one. Seems far more relevant than Warren’s past as a Republican since she has for years now held elective office as a Democrat.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Chigail:
Look at it this way, Franklin Graham is unknowingly subsidizing a site he’d undoubtedly hate, and that’s a good thing.
Ruckus
BS is that guy, the one that thinks his shit doesn’t stink. And he’s convinced a few other people who can’t tell shit from shinola either.
zhena gogolia
David Rothkopf
Verified account
AThornton
@WhatsMyNym:
Infotainment Medium template:
If you can fill in the variables, you can be a journalist at a major media outlet.
lee
2.5 hours of selfies.
I’m a 54 year old guy. I’m not sure I have that kind of stamina.
sdhays
@BruceFromOhio: Oooo!!! “Used to be a Republican”!!!
In the last 50 years, Republicans haven’t always been the bad guys, particularly at the state level. They pretty much are NOW, but not before. It’s such a lame and pathetic attack. But not surprising coming from her.
The funny thing is that, if anything, this “attack” would help Warren in the general election.
WhatsMyNym
@AThornton: I think you’re reading to much into it – – 8 years as governor here is long enough for most folks and they move on (they don’t run for a 3rd term).
Josie
@zhena gogolia:
This should be stated every time Sarandon raises her head at a Dem rally. I feel the same way about Sanders. We owe much to both of them for the mess we are in.
Kay (not the front-pager)
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: At least Elizabeth Warren is a Democrat now. Unlike Bernie…
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@lee:
I’m 57 and a quite accomplished ultramarathoner (50K and 6 hour races). In fact, I’m in Week 6 of training for one now.
What Senator Warren is doing leaves me in awe.
Shana
@Chigail: I know the irritation of those ads, but try to console yourself with the knowledge that’s they’re wasting their money. Even if it’s not much money it’s still wasted.
ETA: or what Darrin said.
trollhattan
“Campaigns matter”
So very, very true and Warren is emerging from the bloated field by campaigning smarter and probably harder than anybody else. So did Obama in 2007-8.
kindness
I’m a Kamela person but could easily support Warren. Honestly the MSM is once again not helping Democrats this election. I was talking with my moderate sister who lives in NYC and when the conversation came to Warren she started telling me her fears about her which are exactly the Republican talking points. I suspect she gets most her news from the GD NY Times & the evening news. I tried to show her how her fears weren’t about Warren’s actual positions but the demons out in the MSM. I’m not worried about my sis actually. She’s going to vote for which ever Democrat we nominate and so am I.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Sarandon openly campaigned for current republican nominee, Dump in 2016. Now she says Dems shouldn’t nominate an actual Democrat because she stopped being a republican 25 years ago.
J R in WV
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
This is a shame. Ms Sarandon had family around here, and was well liked, before she lost her mind politically. She never mentions that Sen Sanders is NOT a Democrat, never has been. Seems fundmentally dishonest to me.
the Conster
My working theory on the Sanders campaign is that he’s doing it as a quid pro quo for Trump’s DOJ letting Crooked Jane off the hook for bank fraud, of which they had her dead to rights. The timing of Jeff Weaver saying the FBI *closed* the case during the week of the Blue Wave was too suspicious. Putin’s 2nd choice seems to have no interest in expanding his base,only in ratfucking to help Putin’s 1st choice to destroy our democracy. He only hired Putin’s other stooge Stein voters to surround himself with. He’s an evil fucker, and if he’s the nominee (he won’t be), or if the Dem wins, the next day Barr’s DOJ will re-open that bank fraud case and indict Jane by finding *new* evidence. Tax fraud too, probably. I’m sticking with this theory until it no longer explains what the mediocre old fraud’s campaign is doing.
SFAW
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
Which is on a par with MY “track record” as a college athlete. In other words: pretty much NOTHING for the last 40-plus years. And I use the term “athlete” VERY loosely when referring to my sports activity in college. Which is about as loosely as “legislator” should be applied to Bernie.
On the other hand, maybe she’s just talking about being shouty, as opposed to actually getting shit done. In which case — yeah, he has me (and SPW) beat by a country mile.
Betty Cracker
I don’t know if Warren can win the nomination, but I think she’d be a wonderful president. She’s running to DO something, not BE somebody, and it shows.
trollhattan
@Josie:
Wilmer is in town tonight for a rally. Not going, because while I’m curious I’m just not motivated. Plus it’s goddamn hot.
Ironically, they’re going to have to boot dozens of homeless denizens of said park, which will be both amusing and ironic.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: Sarandon has been tangling with folks on Twitter in a really stupid, destructive way, along with a couple of Sanders campaign officials: Sirota and Gray. The latter encouraged the rabid Sanders Twitter horde to out a dude with a pseudonymous account because MSNBC had used that person’s tweet to illustrate hostility toward Sanders among many Democrats. A responsible candidate would have fired her ass for that.
Elizabelle
@Kay (not the front-pager):
That’s the perfect comeback. And the Democrats should never, ever allow anyone who is not a Democrat run in their primaries. Just. Don’t.
@the Conster: Is there a statute of limitations on Jane’s
taxbank fraud trangressions? Or maybe it could be a civil or criminal case. Anyway, your theory makes as much sense as anything. I hope Wilmer gets walloped.NotMax
How long until Sarandon begins harping on how the beginning of Warren’s name spells – gasp – WAR and therefore we’re all DOOMED if she gets the nomination? //
the Conster
@Betty Cracker:
I’m 100% convinced he’s not doing this to win. He’s a raftucker, using internet trolls and sleazes like Sarandon and grifters like Shaun King to do his dirty work. He’s a compromised traitor. The End.
Elizabelle
@the Conster: I hope it all comes out. It must.
You guys, why let Susan Sarandon highjack a thread about Elizabeth Warren? It’s tedious.
the Conster
I just don’t understand why the other candidates aren’t going after him hard. Especially Biden, and Warren should too. If they can’t take down Sanders, they can’t take down Trump. It’s just that simple.
Elizabelle
Tee hee. From the WaPost: breaking:
One wonders at what Overstock was hearing about this critter. I know the newspaper threads were full of commenters who were never going to shop Overstock again.
Good.
ETA: Overstock’s stock was down 36% after this jackhole opened his mouth with the rambling disclosure letter re Butina and his own political principles. It’s up 9% with news he is severing ties.
Doug R
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: https://twitter.com/riotwomennn/status/1163630241203544069/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1163631446902394880&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alternet.org%2F2019%2F08%2Fsusan-sarandon-scorched-for-throwing-shade-at-elizabeth-warren-during-bernie-sanders-event-white-feminism-at-its-finest%2F
Burnspbesq
@Elizabelle:
On the civil side, there is no statute of limitation if the underpayment shown on the return was due to fraud. The flip side is that the burden of proof shifts from the taxpayer to the Commissioner.
TenguPhule
This was not the Onion.
TenguPhule
Fuck McConnell and FTFNYT.
TenguPhule
The Madness deepens.
TenguPhule
Sen. Cotton says he asked Danish ambassador about selling Greenland
They are all phucking nuts.
Betty Cracker
@TenguPhule: The good news is he’s worried enough about losing control of the Senate to publish that steaming load of horse shit.
TenguPhule
@Betty Cracker: True, but once again we have another example of why the FTFNYT needs to be set on fire.
NotMax
@TenguPhule
Stop the world, I want to get off.
h/t Anthony Newley
Baud
I seem to remember the Sarandon news a few days ago. Did she repeat it, or are people just getting around to it.?
I said last night that Warren had run the best campaign so far. The next test for her is how she handles being attacked, which she hasn’t yet (no, Delaney doesn’t count).
zhena gogolia
@Elizabelle:
Because we have six Elizabeth Warren threads a day? //
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
It’s the same news. Somebody must have just noticed it.
TenguPhule
@NotMax: And if you think that’s bad, I just found out that you can order Pumpkin Spice Spam online.
This is not a joke.
TenguPhule
@Baud:
The latter.
NotMax
@TenguPhule
Oh dear. This day has barely arrived and already I want to return it while it’s still under warranty.
:)
Litlebritdifrnt
OT – DH has booked his flight. He will be HOME August 31. His Visa gives him leave to remain for three years at which point he will have to reapply. He can also work (which he really wants to do). He really wants to go back into teaching so we will see. Full steam ahead!
Elizabelle
@Litlebritdifrnt: Wonderful news. Congratulations. Being able to work is huge. Yea, DH.
satby
@Litlebritdifrnt: congratulations to you both! What a relief.
Litlebritdifrnt
@NotMax: Fabulous musical! While Anthony Newley was brilliant it was the even more brilliant Anna Quayle who played four different characters that really shone. My Mum used to play the record of the soundtrack and to this day I know all of the lyrics to all of the songs.
Gravenstone
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
A few modest edits to your spiel there, Suz…
Betty Cracker
Sounds like the Great Patriot Farmers are sick of all the winning:
Reap, sow, etc.
TenguPhule
@Betty Cracker: It would be nice if they would threaten Trump instead of innocent USDA officials.
TenguPhule
Has anyone talked about how Dick’s Sporting Goods Stores are ending their gun sales?
Frankensteinbeck
@Ruckus:
Nope. Bernie Sanders is a hypocritical fake. He’s been anti-gun control his whole career, until the Florida shooting made it a huge political issue with new voters. He immediately 180d in his positions and tried to join their first big rally, claiming he’s a leader of the movement. Same with immigration when Trump’s concentration camps became a public outrage. Sanders is a straight-up ratfucker, trying to get idealistic young voters to hate the Democratic Party. The only debatable question is if it’s ego, a grift, or he’s working directly for Russia. All three are plausible, fit facts, and could be simultaneously true.
@SFAW:
Not a problem. Bernie Sanders’s followers have compiled a long list of his accomplishments by saying he ‘worked with’ and ‘campaigned for’ other Senators’ legislation.
kindness
Don’t worry about Sarandon. She’ll be voting for Jill Stein AGAIN.
I liked most her movies…her politics? Not so much.
Miss Bianca
@zhena gogolia: Yeah, baby!
I don’t know why I hate Susan Sarandon in particular for her 2016 ratfucking – she had plenty of help from others – but as far as I’m concerned, she can not only die in a fire, I’d probably volunteer to push her into it myself.
Until November 2016, I was pretty sure I was becoming a nicer person.
rikyrah
I hope a FrontPager will take this:
Am I right that everywhere he bought the hospitals were states that refused Obamacare Medicaid Expansion?
Go with the Con Man, rather than accept healthcare from the Black Man who was President.
The Collapse Of A Hospital Empire — And Towns Left In The Wreckage
By Barbara Feder Ostrov and Lauren Weber
Photos by Heidi de Marco
AUGUST 20, 2019
Mandalay
@Elizabelle:
That sounds noble and worthy, but it’s a disastrous idea.
If Sanders was unable to run as a Democrat then he would run for president as an independent, get ~15% of the vote, and Trump would win 2020 in a landslide.
The Dangerman
I’m just curious, but has anyone projected how much it would cost to actually purchase Greenland (if it were for sale, which it is not, but roll with me here)? Roughly how many Mexican Walls would that be and how would Trump have paid for it? Would he have raised taxes on the 1% (cough, sputter, aieeeeeeee) or just try to bounce a check to Denmark?
Spanky
@TenguPhule:
Nah, I’m going to chalk this one up to mere blind stupidity.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
But, IT IS welfare, Dear.
rikyrah
@Litlebritdifrnt:
YEAH!!!!
YEAH!!!!
May you all have a party.
Marcopolo
@TenguPhule: I think every time McConnell says anything about the Senate it is appropriate to link this fundraising page for flipping the Senate blue in 2020.
The most flippy seats right now are in CO, ME, AZ then maybe NC, IA, and GA. If Bullock decides to run in MT that seat would be listed with the first three. If McConnell thinks he needs to make the case for keeping the filibuster it is quite possible the polling he is seeing is showing a good chance the D’s take the Senate in 2020.
And this is one of my favorite parts of the GQ Warren article:
Nevertheless, she persisted!
Spanky
@Litlebritdifrnt:
American as a Second Language?
Congrats and good luck to you two crazy kids.
rikyrah
@TenguPhule:
Get the ENTIRE PHUCK OUTTA HERE, Turtle.
the Conster
@Betty Cracker:
Don’t kid yourself. They’ll pay any price for white supremacy. Idiots screaming to take their country back from Obama, are now finding themselves on the front lines of socialist state control of certain sectors of the economy, 2 years into the Four Year Plan of Leopards Eating All The Faces.
Frankensteinbeck
@The Dangerman:
Can’t calculate a price on something there’s no standard market for and the owner isn’t even considering selling. Nobody buys countries.
EDIT: Not even Vlad. He’s only paying to corrupt the government.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah: Wow, that’s an interesting article. I had no idea that was going on.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker: from Betty’s link. A comment from the president of the Minnesota Farmers Union:
But that’s the Cheater in Chief’s modus operandi. Stiffing banks, forcing other people to swallow the loss, walking away from disaster after disaster. Sucks to be the farmers, hmmm?
It is taking way too long to find out who was financing the Trump Organization.
Miss Bianca
@Litlebritdifrnt: YAY!!
chris
Intermission. With cats.
TenguPhule
@Frankensteinbeck:
Rent to Own.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
“I mean, it was one thing when those comments were directed at that bitch Hillary, but now he’s directed them to people like me…”
They still think they are better than us.
JMG
It irks me no end that the Times (and the Post, which is even worse about it), publish op-eds by elected officials, be they Democrats or Republicans. They’re public figures. McConnell has the ability to go on C-SPAN and say whatever he wants on the Senate floor. Let ’em give a damn speech and cover it or not as news. If they must see their words in print, let ’em buy an ad.
Miss Bianca
@TenguPhule: I’m not so sure that any Trump administration official can be considered “innocent”. Certainly not Sonny fucking Perdue.
Betty Cracker
@Mandalay: You’re probably right. I suspect this puts me in the minority here, but I don’t believe Sanders is a witting Putin accomplice or committed enemy of the Democratic Party. I think he’s a self-righteous old fart who’s high on his own stash. He has and may again cause damage, but it’s probably better to keep such a person inside the tent than not.
Baud
@Litlebritdifrnt: Excellent!
rikyrah
@the Conster:
this theory works for me
Patricia Kayden
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: She actively campaigned against Secretary Clinton and voted for Jill Stein after Bernie lost the nomination. Sarandon is clueless and needs to take several seats.
Brachiator
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
Has Wilmer ever been a Democrat?
It’s good to know, I guess, that people like Sarandon never change. We need to crush Wilmer’s dreams early and hard.
TenguPhule
@Betty Cracker: He still votes the right way most of the time in the Senate, which is more then we can say about some of the actual Democrats.
Patricia Kayden
@Gravenstone: I listen to the Majority Report with Sam Seder and company and they are head over heels for Senator Sanders. You’d think he was the Messiah the way they gush over him. I don’t get it but I’ll vote for him over Trump, of course.
Miss Bianca
@Patricia Kayden: The Messiah? I thought that was Trump’s role now?
chris
@The Dangerman: Bounce a check to Denmark? Got you covered.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
I think you’re right about Sanders. A hard core of his base seem to be perpetually alienated from either party.
Marcopolo
@rikyrah: I live in MO & back in 2018 when I was going to outstate town halls to hear Claire McCaskill & knocking on doors for a state house candidate in central MO I spent time in several communities which had recently lost or were on the cusp of losing their local hospital. I also feel like I read something about this lab test scam back then as well. Thinking it was some reporters from the Missourian (paper in Columbia, MO) who were…
Just went and looked it up at the newspaper website. It was this article almost a year ago:
Kansas couple says hospital billing scheme spread to others
Glad to see it is getting wider coverage now, but the rural hospital situation in states that did not do the Medicaid expansion is horrendous atm.
Yarrow
@Mandalay:
Very true. It’s much better to let him sink on his own merits while ostensibly inside the Democratic party tent.
@Betty Cracker: Why not both? A guy who honeymooned in the Soviet Union while already an elected official in the United States was an obvious target for kompromat collection. The old Soviets were known for cultivating assets early. He one of only two Senators (Rand Paul was the other) to vote against sanctions on Russia. He can be a Russian asset and an old crank with an ego. Our job is to see through people like that and make sure they don’t get into power.
Brachiator
BTW, Millennials, people born between 1981 and 1996 may be the largest voting Bloc in 2020. This is according to Professor Stella Rouse, who has a new book out about this group.
Also, the Pew Research people recently put out a report that included this little tidbit
It will be interesting to see how the Democrats play to these groups. I suppose that the college proposals are part of this.
TenguPhule
@Yarrow:
To be fair, Sander’s argument for that was that it also targeted Iran for no good reasons.
And we’ve all seen how its worked out. Zero enforcement of the sanctions against Russia, while increasing on Iran.
So that vote really didn’t matter.
catclub
@TenguPhule: I thought Denmark should have said, we will consider offers above $60Tr – in Euros, not dollars printed by the US. I bet at 1 cent a gallon, the water alone is a steal. (I suspect bulk water does not cost that much. Anybody know?)
Baud
@TenguPhule:
If that were the only vote, it wouldn’t matter. But he has a pattern of avoiding votes against Russia.
Gin & Tonic
From WaPo via Twitter: “White House considers new project seeking links between mental health and violent behavior.”
I can well remember when the USSR would diagnose political dissidents as “mentally ill” and confine them to institutions.
Marcopolo
Democratic National Committee Votes To Reject Climate Debate
This does not affect the planned CNN Climate Change town hall thingie next month which is not a formal debate but would prevent there being an official DNC sanctioned debate focusing on climate change.
Btw, anyone hear anything about massive swathes of the Amazon burning over the past few days? Asking for a friend.
TenguPhule
@catclub:
Normally its priced per thousand gallons.
Normally works out to less then one cent a gallon. Unless you are unfortunate to live in one of the armpits of America.
TenguPhule
@Marcopolo:
Brazil’s president is currently insisting that his political opposition is intentionally lighting all those fires to make him look bad.
Apparently Donald Trump is contagious.
Elizabelle
@Marcopolo: Yeah. Have become interested in shyster Jorge A. Perez and his Empower schemes.
From the Fulton, Missouri Sun, June of this year:
Anatomy of a hospital billing scheme
Perez-associated hospitals affected, some closed
Marcopolo
@catclub: I think Denmark should have called Putin and offered to buy the US.
ps i stole this from somewhere else…not original material…but i thought it was pretty funny.
Denali
I really support Elizabeth Warren and am happy to see a thread about her, instead of he who will not be named. Why do we waste time on Susan Sarandon and Bernie Sanders?Sanders is not going to win the nomination. We have a great candidate; lets get behind her!
TenguPhule
@Baud:
And Manchin has a pattern of voting for the worst Republican nominations. But we still got to suck it up and support him for the greater good.
catclub
@Gin & Tonic: If the GOP actually supported funding for better mental health treatment, of any type, it would probably be the first time. If they supported it and it had an emphasis on gun control/red flags/etc, I would be doubly surprised.
Instead they will identify something useful that Democrats like and want to take the funding from cutting that.
Brachiator
@chris:
Wow. She certainly failed “up.” To be fair, it’s unclear the degree to which she has continued to guide her husband’s business. But like other ambassadors with plum assignments, she has zero foreign policy experience. But Denmark was probably supposed to be non-controversial.
the Conster
@TenguPhule:
He voted the day before that vote to tie Iran sanctions to Russian sanctions, then voted against Russian sanctions and said it was because of Iran. His cult of dipshits swallow everything that fraud says whole.
Kay
@Gin & Tonic:
It’s terrifying- thinking of some Fox news host and any other assorted grifters who apply “analyzing” anything related to vulnerable people with mental illness. OTOH. The Trump Administration announced they were addressing gun violence after the Florida school shooting, they gave it to Betsy DeVos and she convened a series of meetings – the Trump hires attended only the first one, for photographs and they passed out some money. So other than wasting tens of millions of dollars there was no harm done because there was no work done.
We’re saved a lot of the time because they barely show up for work.
Baud
@TenguPhule: That’s a relevant argument to make if Bernie wins the nomination. Not in the primary.
Baud
@the Conster: Oh, I didn’t know about that.
brantl
@Betty Cracker: What people don’t know about McSuckel is that he is incontinent, and walks on his hands, backwards, that stuff he’s spewing isn’t hot air.
Betty Cracker
@Yarrow: There’s so much embarrassing shit on Sanders out there already, including video of him sitting around in his underwear singing “The Internationale” with Soviet friends, video of him attending a Daniel Ortega rally where people were chanting “die Yankee die” or whatever. I guess anything is possible, but I think Sanders is exactly who he appears to be: a gadfly with a giant ego.
Betty Cracker
@Denali: I’m for Warren too, but there’s by no means a consensus around here yet! :)
Elizabelle
@Denali: Yup. I love Elizabeth Warren.
Why waste energy on Trump?
the Conster
@Betty Cracker:
That’s what we know about was filmed in Russia – you can be sure there is more we haven’t seen.
Kay
@Gin & Tonic:
It’s amusing because they elevate and exaggerate what are ordinary things every President does. Ivanka does exactly what a First Lady might do as far as “policy” but she’s really good at making it seem bigger :)
They’re pros at not doing anything but seeming to be doing something. A “project” you say? Hmmm. What does that entail, exactly?
Dan B
@Marcopolo: Amazon fires have been featured in The Guardian, Huffpost, and front page of Seattle Times. Between these fires and Siberia / Alaska we may be looking at the abyss.
Bolsonaro’s interior minister (I believe) was booed at a big public forum. The smoke was thick enough to turn Sao Paulo, hundreds of miles away, pitch dark and spread a thousand miles to the Atlantic.
It may not be viable to plant a trillion trees a year if that many burn each year and the new trees find themselves in baking droughts.
The World Economic Forum reports that investment in fossil fuel power increased in 2018 while renewable investment remained the same. Lack of government action was the reason. Steering towards the abyss.
Chief Oshkosh
@TenguPhule: That cinches it. Someone has done the geo-petro analysis and there’s a HUGE oil pool under Greenland.
Kay
Man-u-fact-uring. I told you-all. I swear, people complaining about not getting overtime in this county is all you need to know. They are a leading indicator :)
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: I tried reading that article and just got too infuriated to finish it. Fuck these asshole red-staters that refused the Medicaid expansion. Paving the way for hucksters like this. I’d say they got what they deserved, but no one deserves to have their hospitals bankrupted. Those politicians who thought they’d show the uppity black President that he and his fancy Obamacare weren’t the boss of them, nosiree? *They* deserve to be tarred, feathered, and denied medical services afterwards. But as Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman, so pungently observed: “The RIGHT people NEVER get hurt.”
Betty Cracker
@Kay: No wonder Trump is shitting his pants.
TenguPhule
@Kay: I suppose having to eat a 25%+ hike in their materials cost was a bootstrap too high for them to pull themselves up.
TenguPhule
@Miss Bianca:
I’ve come to the conclusion that Republicans do.
Brachiator
@the Conster:
There is no Soviet Union. There is no Soviet communist state opposing the US.
Trump is a puppet of an active criminal regime which controls Russia. He is more a danger than Wilmer.
I pretty much detest Sanders, but I don’t see how he could have transferred loyalties, if he had any, from a bunch of commies to a bunch of crooks.
Yarrow
@the Conster: This, this, this. The good stuff won’t be made public. Gah.
@Betty Cracker: The Russians were boosting him in 2016. It’s in the Mueller report. He should have come out strong against Russia and he didn’t.
Brachiator
@Kay:
I kinda glossed over this at first. But first decline since 2009? Very Interesting.
Maybe Trump will still be obsessed over Greenland and miss this info….
Yarrow
@Brachiator: Once they own you they own you. The “loyalty” was transferred on the Russian end.
the Conster
@Brachiator:
Russians cultivate assets for decades. Trump was cultivated in the 80s, around the same time as Sanders was there while Putin was rising in the KGB. Putin is the world’s biggest mob boss, and there isn’t anything that he won’t do to get what he wants. Trump has a lot of what Putin has, including now, through Barr, all of the Epstein evidence, and if you don’t think Crooked Jane’s bank fraud case was politicized to get Bernie to play along OR ELSE, then I can’t help your naivete. Bernie’s got those rape essays and those weird essays fixating on young girls’ sex lives. If you don’t think there’s more there, again, I can’t help you.
TenguPhule
Planned Parenthood seeks cash after bailing from federal program
Kay
@TenguPhule:
I don’t know. It’s cyclical so the older people are accustomed to boom and bust. They all knew it was going to end. How bad off they are often depends on how much they borrowed. Auto loans are HUGE now. The amount borrowed. It’s insane. They’ll owe like 60k on a truck, which is literally more then their house, and of course the truck depreciates. There’s also a newer process that I didn’t use to see- they roll over the debt from the last car they couldn’t afford into the new car they can’t afford. Negative equity. It’s just magical thinking. There’s no way the car is worth that much. It’s an unsecured loan. They may as well just lend the money outright. The collateral doesn’t cover the loan.
the Conster
@Yarrow:
Once you work for Putin or the mob (same thing), you always work for them. HELLO TAD DEVINE.
Brachiator
@Yarrow:
That Sanders is currently owned by Russia simply because he visited the old Soviet Union requires actual evidence, not the application of templates from spy novels.
With Trump you at least have indirect evidence of contact with actual Russians and some traceable financial connections.
zhena gogolia
@Brachiator:
THE COMMIES ARE THE SAME PEOPLE AS THE CROOKS
Brachiator
@TenguPhule:
Damn.
Baud
We’ll need to vet our electors better.
.
Yarrow
@the Conster: Yep.
@Brachiator: Not just because of that. It was just an early and known opportunity for kompromat collection. Tad Devine is another connection. As the Conster said, there is plenty of questionable activity. Sanders has had plenty of time and opportunity show he’s not involved with Russia. He hasn’t done that to my satisfaction. Perhaps he has done so to yours.
Brachiator
@zhena gogolia:
Yes. I know. I also know people who actively supported the Soviet Union because they passionately believed in communism. And there were people who voluntarily worked for the Soviets because they believed in the cause, even though the system was obviously corrupt.
Could Sanders have been compromised or his sympathies exploited? I suppose. Got proof?
@the Conster:
Wow. He’s a regular Nabokov. Must mean… something.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
Welcome to the wonderful world of credit default swaps II, Same Shit, Shitter collateral.
Its basically the same brilliant idea they came up with during the Housing Crisis. Only this time they decided auto sales were the new tulips.
Interesting times ahead.
TenguPhule
@Baud:
Baud 2020 is going to impose a loyalty oath?
the Conster
@Yarrow:
He’s been more consistent playing footsie with Russian sanctions than he has anything else in his career. He’s filthy. His campaign was designed by Tad Devine to split the winning Obama coalition up to give cover to Russian interference, which we still don’t understand the full scope of. Jill Stein votes provided the winning margin in a few, the other Putin stooge.
Sanders knew that his campaign was being helped and he refused to say anything, and now he’s surrounded himself with Jill Stein voters in this campaign. Everyone needs to wake up.
Brachiator
@Yarrow:
Involved with Russia. Kinda vague. Sanders is not my guy. If there are reporters digging away at a Wilmer/Russia connection, God bless ’em. Otherwise, I don’t much care until he gets closer to the nomination. Would you like to have him investigated for possible expulsion from the Senate?
the Conster
@Brachiator:
Are you serious right now? Is there something you want to confess to, or is it just A-OK for the *Dem* candidate to be sketchy creepy perv too?
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
There are no loyalties in the relationship between Sanders and the Russian intelligence services. They own him top to bottom, front to back, based upon their kompromat regarding his activities as a young Marxist. He has no choice but to do as his handlers suggest. Just like Comrade Trump!!
This isn’t hard, are you not paying attention? ;-)
Yarrow
@Brachiator: I would like people who have accepted help from enemy states to be exposed, removed from politics and punished appropriately. I don’t care if they’re Republicans, Democrats or whatever party Sanders is a member of at the moment. As a Senator he has the potential to do damage, so I’m fine if he goes so long as he’s replaced by a loyal Democrat.
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
We aren’t prosecutors, just voters, we only need indicators and suggestions. If I was on a jury, I would be all over looking for proof. I’m not on a jury, not even writing investigative stories about Comrade Sanders.
If all I suspected was that Sanders was a Marxist, I might still vote for him.
But by the time the Soviet fell, it was wholly corrupt, and everyone knew that, except Senator Sanders… And Russia is even more corrupt today than the Soviet was in its day.
ETA fix formatting
Bill Arnold
@Gin & Tonic:
The US right (and I think DJ Trump) is big on reversing de-institutionalization, which mostly driven by old memories of arguments the right lost in the 60s and 70s. Also reading between the lines (as you did), they want to bring back easy involuntary commitment for those deemed
dangerous to the stateto be likely future mass murderers. That’s anti-individual-freedom bullshit, so such plays will get a lot of hard and harsh pushback.Omnes Omnibus
The ghost of James Jesus Angleton is pretty active on this thread.
Brachiator
@J R in WV:
Yes, the Internet standard for proof is effectively zero.
Let’s say that Wilmer somehow becomes the Democratic Party nominee. What are you going to do?
Meanwhile, I understand all the concerns about Wilmer. I file it away, but otherwise there is nothing that I can do with any of it.
KSinMA
@Betty Cracker: Exactly.
zzyzx
My big night terror is that Warren/Biden/Booker/etc wins around 280 EV next year and a combination of people who wormed their way into the process, a few tricksters like 2016, and some electors having family members kidnapped or something leads to enough voting for Trump. It’s an obvious problem with our system and I don’t think we survive it.
As for Warren, the post above is why I can’t buy into her the way others can. Her entire brand is about having plans, having thought deeply about issues and what’s important. When asked how it’ll come to pass, she just hand waves and obfuscates. It’s a classic politician non answer.
It’s a legitimate question and IMO she needs a better answer than America is great and we have done hard things before.
Annie
@Marcopolo:
This reminds me of a great story about Franklin Roosevelt. An aide, listening to him spin another grand plan, said “Mr. President, you can’t do that!” to which FDR replied, “I’ve done a lot of things I can’t do.”
Annie
@Bill Arnold:
I was on the sharp end of de-institutionalization back in the 1970s. My uncle had been placed in a mental hospital because of paranoid schizophrenia with violent episodes — violent like he tried to shoot the neighbors and his sister, my mother, whom he adored when he was in his right mind. When his hospital closed in the 1970s my grandparents were in their seventies and too old to cope with him — he was 6’5″ and quite strong and still subject to hallucinations and nice episodes of throwing furniture. They couldn’t afford a private mental hospital and there were no other public facilities in Florida that could/would take him. Somehow they managed to get him SSI (I think, I was in my teens and in college and not told all the details) and found a board-and-care home near their own home that would accept him. But for about 2 months it looked like I was going to have to drop out of college, and another relative leave his job, and both of us move into my grandparents’ house to try to help with his care.
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
I will fight against his nomination until the National Convention completes the nomination. Then I will probably shut up, and vote for the other Russian stooge. But I don’t think that’s in our future — too grim for me.
Chris Johnson
Maybe you should learn, Harry.
Yarrow
@Chris Johnson: What does he need to learn? He’s retired. He’s a great politician and his machine has helped turn Nevada blue. He’s dealing with long term effects from his injuries and also has pancreatic cancer, which is in remission. What exactly do you want from him?