To Fellow Bernie Sanders' Supporters: It's Time to Think Strategically

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{ Special Note to readers of this thread:

Please also read the posted comment below (at #126) by Davidgn (link) "Are we witnessing a dishonest election?" with its important linked references to

1) a study examining indications of methodical election fraud and 2) a news report on the bias in the early (pre-primary) news-coverage by major national press organs. Thanks to LT member @Davidgn. }
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I ADDRESS HERE THOSE Bernie-Sanders-supporters who are now considering voting for or who've already decided to vote for Hillary Clinton (or for a third-party candidate as a protest-vote against Clinton ) this November. With the June 7th Democratic primaries just concluded, it is time for all of us to think carefully about how to proceed.

Hillary Clinton had already taken your votes for granted even before she used every trick in the Democratic Party's rules to keep Bernie Sanders from having an equal shot at winning the party's presidential nomination. Now Clinton and her early backers are more certain than ever that you have no choice but to vote for her. Many of you may even agree with them. I want to argue the case--a strong one--for your rejecting her claim on your vote.

Though the party's nominating-convention is still weeks away, she is convinced that all is settled. In her mind, it was already as good as settled even before the first state primary had taken place. She figured that she was entitled to the nomination and has been planning and preparing over the past seven years based on that assumption. In her mind there were only some perfunctory formalities to go through before being offered and accepting the nomination. This presumption of entitlement has typified her role in politics ever since she became "First Lady" upon her husband's election in 1992. As U.S. Senator from New York--a state to which she relocated just so that she could contest the senate seat--and as Secretary of State, she has always acted as though the rules and regulations were merely optional guidelines which did not fully apply to her. Whenever it was important to her, she dispensed with respecting the rules and took the more expedient course: the one, as she saw it, which favored her political career's advancement, by far the thing which has counted most in her life. She is a pure creature of politics--just like her husband--and is now the epitome of an Establishment Insider. She is so much so, that a multibillionaire real-estate developer and self-promoting businessman, Donald Trump, can even run against her as a political "outsider" on the Republican party's ticket--a maverick and a populist candidate whose appeal is precisely that, with him as president, we shall not have business-as-usual in Washington politics.

Though it has been completey foreseeable and even expected since 2008, nothing serious was done for seven years to prepare a serious challenger to Clinton's bid for this nomination until, at last, Bernie Sanders entered the race as a Democrat.

Clinton used that time to secure all the needed support in the key state and national political positions to help ensure her favored advance over any potential challenger. Presiding over caucus or rules meetings were chair persons who favored her.

Six months before he announced his candidacy, did anyone know that Bernie Sanders was going to run for the office? I doubt that many knew.
Six years before Clinton announced, practicallly everyone knew she'd run.

Having apparently sidelined our favored candidate, her argument shall be that it makes no sense for us to do anything other than give her our votes.

If we accept that claim, we'll validate this seven-year-long coronation process and, by doing so, also ensure that the Democratic Party remains the wholly-owned property of a faction within the neo-conservative political camp which once resided in the Republican party--with Hillary and Bill Clinton once again marking the farthest reaches of the Leftward on the already much truncated U.S. political spectrum. This is the political establishment's central objective: to monopolize the political ground from right to left so that no matter which candidate or party wins, their interests remain championed by the person taking office.

To achieve these results, the people in control of the the Democratic Party have taken care to arrange all the things which their absent opponents lack: an organization, a coherent national political strategy and the patient and sustained activism to them.

Still, they need to secure one as-yet unsecured element : your vote, as a Sanders supporter, safely transfered to Clinton's undeserving hands. Without that, her plans and her backers' continued part in the political duopoly of a fake two-party system would collapse. And they must collapse if we're to see this political fraud defeated so that a candidate like Bernie Sanders has a fighting chance in some future campaign.

To try and persuade you not to withhold your vote, they'll argue that it would be insane, foolhardy, to risk allowing Donald Trump's election as president. That was, from the first, their hope: that the Republican candidate should so terrify the carefully news-media-softened-up Democratic voters, that they'd not dare contemplate this outcome and, so, the election would once again be vouched safe by the very same Left-wing voters whose own preferences had been cynically and methodically foreclosed by Clinton's campaign strategy.

"Ah! Goodness us! It seems your first choice didn't make it! Oh well! You're welcome now to shelter with the next-best-thing. And, "better luck next time! (Suckers!)"

If you don't muster somewhere the political smarts to see through this now-blatant ruse of the Democratic party leadership and muster the political self-respect to refuse to go along with it, then such is the best you have to look forward to.

Next time, the so-called "sane" choice could be even further to the right-wing's right than the Clintons.

You remain at this point--just as you have been for some time now--hostage to a political con game. But any time you so decide, you can refuse to continue to allow yourself to be conned. You can get up, open the door and walk out.

But then you must be prepared to do more than stand by and be cynically taken advantage of.

You must do what your adversaries do:

Think and plan ahead, prepare for the coming contests.

Here's a place to consider starting:

www.brandnewcongress.org

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P.S.

As I was quickly reminded by the experience of it,
any such organizing efforts are going to immediately draw comment, strategic advice and practical participation by people who have only one thing in mind: sabotage the organizing efforts in as many ways as possible.

(Those who automatically dismiss all allusions to conspiracies because the very idea that people actually conspire to undermine their adversaries' efforts to defeat them is such a stigmatized idea might now want to look away.)

One the quickest, easiest and most effective means is to try and sow confusion and disagreement among organizers by promoting deliberately erroneous analysis as as the basis for their proposed practical strategies.

The beauty of such sabotage is that it can be very difficult to distinguish it from sincerely offered bad advice and mistaken strategy--since there is bound to be both-- and the saboteurs' recommendations might easily be the more appealing at first glance.

There's simply no substitute for thinking clearly and rejecting bad analysis and the plans proposed based upon it. But unless one can discover the motives behind such bad advice and spot those whose role is to derail a movement before it becomes effective, they'll continue to sow confusion and useless dissent (easy to do) as opposed to clarifying, constructive dissent. (relatively more difficult to do).

As an example:

from "SN1789"

In response to proximity1

" It is far far easier to build on the left in unions and social movements when a democrat is president. It automatically takes "lets just elect a democrat" off the table as an excuse to not build the left. In solid blue or solid red states - write in Bernie. In swing states vote for (and if necessary work for) Hillary. Be an adult about the election. Then, once the white nationalist is defeated - then build militant unions and social movement outside of the Democrats. The Dem party is a party of Wall Street. It wasn't going to get taken over by Sanderscrats in one election cycle. In took decades to get in this mess. It will take decades to get out."

View discussion

It's important to be able to recognise what's wrong in such an analysis and why, in fact, following it would be a trip into the wilderness--where opponents would just love to see us wander off.

My reply :

proximity1 SN1789

2
3

"It automatically takes "lets just elect a democrat" off the table as an excuse to not build the left."

Oh, _really,_ now?

Well,

1) Obama _is_ a (fake) Democrat
and
2) Clinton's team relied on,
" Let's just elect a _woman_."

Don't peddle confused nonsense. There's enough of it already.

As you might notice, the advice represents what it implies we must try to avoid: an excuse not to build the Left.

* Richard Wolff : "For Democrats, it's mission 'defeat Donald'. Step one: unite the party"

It’s time to admit Hillary Clinton is an extraordinarily talented politician
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/7/11879728/hillary-clinton-wins-nomination

If elected whatever damage he might do--I don't see Trump getting a second term. I think his incompetency will be very clear to so many of his supporters at that point. He'll have too many enemies on both sides of the aisle (that includes his own) in congress and the courts will be another roadblock. As far as his anti-Mexican racism--is it going to surpass the Obama administrations record of deportations?---a record that has pretty much slid under the radar. Strange as it might sound to some but---it might not.

Of the main problems with Hillary being elected I would offer---it will maintain the Democratic party's position in the center instead of where it belongs---which is on the left. Hillary stands with bankers, stockbrokers and CEO's--not really with union workers or even small business people. It will drive some people particularly younger voters away from the electoral process. A Hillary win is also at least an 8 year nightmare--not a 4. The Democratic party will move heaven and earth to reelect her in 4 years. So she'll either win again or most likely be replaced by the republican nominee in 2020. What that will mean for the democratic party is the reset to the left will be put off for at least 8 years and quite possibly longer. To me that's a signal for any one who thinks he or she is left--but until now has kept hope that the democratic party could self-correct---to leave the party. Who's got 8 years or plus to wait on a party to get its act together?

I figure the next 4 years with either Trump or Clinton are going to be fucking awful. It's what happens after that.........

>2 margd:

She's a talented cheat, fake and fraud, a talented liar, manipulator of the gullible and a talented servant of insider money and power.

>4 proximity1: no matter what you say about her (true or false) she's better for this country than trump. and that's all it should come down to.

It's time to get serious about creating viable "other" parties, while we continue to support all true progressive candidates in every race at every level. With that in mind, I have begun to look at the various groups such as the United Progressive Party, hoping to find strong purpose and the passion to push forward. In the meantime, I will vote for Jill Stein in order to give the Green Party a great enough percentage to gain a real place in the process. I will work for Bernie til the end; the early announcements of Clinton's "clinch" was the final straw of a huge pile of straws that collapsed my camel. I will not vote for her.

Mr Sanders is a decent person. However, at this point, Mr Sanders is an after-thought. Like the Elves of Middle Earth, his time is over.

Clinton will win. I wouldn't vote for her, but I haven't voted since 1980 anyway. I did vote for Jesse Jackson in the 1984 primary, if that counts. Sanders being the closest to someone I might have voted for, it seems to me that as he is of the Democratic Party, his party should be supported by his supporters if he is not the nominee, especially because the rule that the Republican is always a worse choice is a particularly obvious truth this year. But an avid Sanders supporter should probably, along with voting for Clinton, give some thought to whatever actions might be taken to keep the Sanders 'wing' of the party alive and growing for the next four or eight years...

Jill Stein wants to forgive all college debt--which is another thing I'm big on. Not that I went to college or ever had any college debt. I just think it's the right thing to do. You bail out Wall St. and the bankers. You spend trillions in Iraq. If you can find the money for that kind of shit then this shouldn't be an issue either. Any bank that got a cent of tarp money has nothing to complain about.

#8--anyway I've been over the issue of not being registered with the Democratic party and not being able to vote in the NYS primary because of it being a closed primary. There are a number of posters here who believe the democratic party had every right to exclude me from voting in the primary and they made their opinions very clear to me--so this is the other end of the equation in I don't think I owe the Democratic party anything. It's their job to come up with a candidate that I can live with and if they don't I'm not voting for their candidate. There are numerous variables for any other of those who preferred Sanders. I suspect many of them will pull the lever for Hillary. That is their business and all power to them. This isn't 2008 though. There are no previous narratives that anyone has to follow. A lot of people who like Sanders don't really care for the idea of unifying the democratic party and what Sanders can do about that is somewhat limited. Contrary to what some might believe a lot of Sanders supporters did not really believe he was the second coming of Christ--they just believed he was the best major party candidate out there and they look at themselves as free agents now.

>9 lriley: If you're saying you can't find a reason to vote for Clinton, I agree. I just believe those who are going to vote, and would have voted for Sanders, should without doubt vote for Clinton (or cast a protest vote, I suppose, but certainly not for Trump). For me, there is simply nothing to think about--I could never have voted for Obama, if for no other reason than that he mentioned his intention to invade Pakistan during his campaign. The second time around there was no question whatsoever.

I was fully intending to vote for Sanders yesterday (understanding that he had a snowball's chance in Hell of getting the nomination), but about a week and a half back, I got so fucking sick of the sanctimonious hectoring and tinfoil-hat batshittery of the more vocal Sanders supporters that I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I voted for Clinton instead.

Supreme Court.

'nuff said.

#10--I wouldn't advise anyone here to vote for Trump. Like Clinton--he's a nightmare waiting to happen. I don't care for nightmares.

#11--uh huh. Okay.

#12--that might be the best reason actually for voting for Hillary that there is. If she were however to continue with Obama's choice of Garland--who is a conservative's wet dream.......

>13 lriley:

Absolutely true.

The final straw was the superdelegate shit.

For months, I'd heard nothing more than that they were bought and paid for. A complete subversion of the democratic process.

Now, it's nothing but "Bernie still has a chance to win, if the superdelegates just back the candidate that needs to win."

If she were however to continue with Obama's choice of Garland--who is a conservative's wet dream.......

Sure, a judge who has been deferential to regulatory agencies, taken a broad view on whistleblower protection, and has a liberal view of the First Amendment, and has voiced opinions concerning the Second Amendment that Cato Institute representatives think are disturbing, that's a "conservative's wet dream".

In the upcoming November election, the most likely candidates are Trump...and Trump Lite.

As noted, Mrs. Clinton is a canny politician. Should she win, she'll calculate that if she can win over Trump supporters, her re-election will be even more certain. And so she will take as many of the Trump ideas that can be implemented (and aren't ridiculous, illegal, and/or impossible) and put them into effect. Major escalation of deportations? A slam dunk, given Obama has already been deporting a lot of people. Major military actions in the Middle East and Africa, to 'end' the War on Terror? Again, a no-brainer. A lot of rhetoric about improving the economy, without actually making any significant changes to the status quo that favors the current winners? Again, not a lot of thought.

In short, a vote for Clinton is a vote for 'business as usual'; endless foreign conflicts, and continued reduction of the middle class. (Not that the latter is intended; but it's not seen as a real problem.)

>16 BruceCoulson:

"And so she will take as many of the Trump ideas that can be implemented (and aren't ridiculous, illegal, and/or impossible) and put them into effect. Major escalation of deportations? A slam dunk, given Obama has already been deporting a lot of people."

So far, I agree.

But this next isn't stealing from Trump's talking-points:

"Major military actions in the Middle East and Africa, to 'end' the War on Terror? Again, a no-brainer."

This is Hillary's view.

Weidenmyer--

I neither see nor open your blocked/hidden posts. It's something I've achieved first and most completely in your case. Most moronic nonsense can still tempt my attention since I suppose that it could conceivably eventually contain something interesting.

Not so in your case. Your comments are an utter waste of time to read. So knock yourself out! I simply won't view them.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-bernie-sanders-hillary-clint...

Something strategic to take note of...

Weidenmyer--

I have followed the lead approximately: I have blocked/hidden your posts so as to enhance the surprise factor.

ETA: No really, honest, never look at them, never get curious and open them: the deft and forceful moronism itself opens them and--poof--there's Widnomoyer again...

At least a lot of the time when I've critiqued Hillary Clinton I've juxtaposed her policy positions with Bernard's--whilst also noting recent changes in positions by Hillary which I think is very pertinent when discussing her as a candidate as she seems to swing away from less popular past positions to more popular positions now at the drop of a hat. The tendency from Clinton supporters is to point me out as a hater--and I'll admit I do hate her at least as a political person---they almost never talk about her policy positions though--that is almost always ignored. Why is that? So........it's a whatever in a way but it's just about equivalent to voting for the most popular kid in your high school to be the class president or the prom queen. I wonder sometimes how serious people are and I know that St. Bernard is made out to be some kind of dreamer and that almost everything he dreams about is somehow impossible. Just think Martin Luther King had impossible dreams too---or John F. Kennedy. These days that kind of shit is always unrealistic. Having impossible dreams and making them into reality is what made America a great country. Doesn't happen anymore and the United States I'm sorry to say is not a great nation anymore either or maybe better said it's great in the wrong way--being the world's most heavily armed and belligerent nation.

My mother who is a very vapid and shallow person at least as far as things political was going on yesterday about Hillary being amoral and a demon. She's religious--at least she thinks so and is very much into apocalyptic imagery. I get to listen to shit like this all the time. What can you do with a very amateur would be 93 year old political scientist?---you roll your eyes and forgive her is what you do. I do go along with the amoral part. I look at both her and Trump as amoral narcissists. That's what the major party choice comes down to this time around.

FWIW I don't really give two shits how the rest of the world is going to look at us when the election is over. What I do give two shits about is there are things I want to see done and I guess I'm going to be waiting another 4 years to see any of that happen. Hillary is certainly not going to give up her fracking money or her banker friends. She's not going to end the war on drugs--if anything I suspect that either of her or Donald are eventually going send more of our troops and expand a war in Syria. Hello TPP--a minor tweak or two and it will be good to go again.

What I get out of all this is that somewhere around 60% of Democrats are so afraid of a Donald Trump presidency that the policy positions of Hillary Clinton don't matter at all. That's the winning strategy. Good luck with that.

Lots of room for next President to dial back America's penchant for war: http://www.visionofhumanity.org/#/page/indexes/global-peace-index

Trump might want to bring back good ol' days of isolationism, but "America First" wasn't without bloodshed, and not unlike what we saw pre-911: The Savage Wars Of Peace: Small Wars And The Rise Of American Power by Max Boot

Three words for people feeling the Bern, including a few in my own family: Bush, Gore, Nader. Hopefully, after a little reflection Sanders supporters will appreciate that Clinton, while not perfect, is good compared to Trump. Don't let perfect be enemy of good (enough), especially when scary-awful is alternative!

Re : >22 margd:

"Don't let perfect be enemy of good (enough), "...

HRC figures nowhere in that platitude for me or for millions of like-minded others. It is hilarious, though.

..."especially when scary(er)-awful(er) is (the) alternative!"

...to Trump.

You see--well, no, you don't, but never mind that-- The DNC and people like you (?) didn't just fail to take up the obviously better choice (Sanders), you deliberately did everything possible to permanently alienate his supporters by running a foul, dishonest and unfair process against his chances-- and in doing so, as was obvious weeks ago, you were setting up and hoping for a Clinton vs.
Trump race. To now hand-wring and "threaten" Sanders' supporters by saying, "Think of the risks! Think of the consequences!" is truly disgustingly cynical.

The time to consider the potential consequences of all that--including "scary-awful,"-- was way back before this dishonest system had rigged things to assure Clinton the dishonestly-"won" (and it isn't _yet!_) nomination.

Blocking posters is one thing, but to brag about it is just uncool.

>19 Jesse_wiedinmyer: That's bullshit. While most of Bernie's older supporters were white, his supporters among the youth, where it really counts in my opinion, were racially diverse.

What Hillary needs to do to win Bernie supporters is to take a few of his major planks and make them her own. Unfortunately, I doubt she could be credible on his major plank, getting money out of politics, but she should make the attempt.

#22--I don't think either of the two major parties has a very good read of voter moods on their side of the electorate. They spend so much of their time calculating things in advance of the election. Getting super wealthy donors on board and war chests ready. They dismiss the inconvenient whenever possible. They do live in their DC--lower Manhattan bubbles. The republicans thought they could control the tea party movement. The Koch brothers thought they could buy it. How'd that work out?--with Donald laughing his ass off. The problem that none of them seemed to see was that some of these backwood yokels actually had some political action in mind that their party leaders had been carrot and sticking them with and were sick and tired of being treated by their favorite political party like red headed step children. I don't like the tea party at all but I do like this part of their message--'hasta la vista Jeb and Marco and go fuck yourself George W'.

.....and in the meanwhile we've also had a movement that sprang out of student loan debt looking for anyone in the democratic party who hadn't been bought and sold by corporations and investment banks----a movement that wasn't interested in centrist sell out democrats lining their pockets whilst posing as progressives or leftists. The Democratic party was too wrapped up in their own little bubble to think that anyone could seriously challenge their most recognizable name this year. Too in love with her to realize that being the most recognized didn't mean being the most liked. For lots of people the adjective wouldn't have been 'loved' it would have been 'notorious'. And then along came Sanders and the people in this movement were like hey.....we finally found someone.

So to me anyway there is a cognitive dissonance between the two major parties and their base----which pretty much means the two major parties are clueless and that it might just be about time that they get the fuck out of the way.

>24 jjwilson61: I think the formula runs something like: The more times you mention having blocked someone, the more you read the hidden or blocked posts of that person. (I've actually never blocked anyone...it seems so...feckless)

>9 lriley: "You bail out Wall St. and the bankers."

If I'm reading the Wikipedia page correctly, TARP bailout recipients received $426.7 billion and paid back $441.7 billion. That doesn't seem analogous to forgiveness of college debt.

>29 cpg:

If I may intervene--

I think the arguments in the students' favor are even far stronger than anything the bankers had morally in their favor--on several levels.

The bailout not only saved numerous huge banks, it saved them from bearing the consequences of their own misfeasance and malfeasance--both wrongly and needlessly. For example, in bailing out the banks, the government didn't rescue the bank's depositors--who the bailouts left to fend for themselves. Instead, it rescued the banks' creditors, the holders of bank stocks and bonds who, without the bailouts, would have had to take the losses they should have been legally and morally bound to take as investors who'd made a series of terribly bad investments.

Had the bailouts simply covered the depositors' accounts, it should have cost far less in the end.

That's not all. Most of these students are innocent of any serious wrongdoing. They're not in need of a bailout because they'd been crooks-- but the bankers had been.

The bank bailouts saved the businesses and the future livelihoods of these wealthy bankers.

Why do the futures and livlihoods of the students--far cheaper to save--deserve less?

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Yours is an amazing "current reading" list. Are you really reading all those? I tip my hat!

>18 proximity1:
It's unclear to me that he was even talking to you.

Thinking strategically (OP):

1. Hold your nose and vote for Hillary.
2. Put that energy into electing "good guys" to the House and Senate.

On the subject of war:

If we wind up throwing tons of troops into Syria it's not going to matter much to me whether it's Clinton's 'judgement' in foreign affairs that gets us there or Trump's buffoonishness. It equals out to the same thing. Clinton might try to outflank the Donald on his potential for belligerence but I'm not buying that she would be any better. That is a situation that needs to be avoided no matter who is POTUS---and it's another reason why I'm skeptical about our friendship with a right wing and very militant Netanyahu. Clinton is very friendly with this dickhead. She even thinks Kissinger's a good guy......and both those friendships give me a lot of pause. Kissinger-Thatcher...Kissinger-Pinochet Chile coup....Operation Condor....Kissinger undermining the Paris peace talks so as to help Nixon get elected......pretty much doubling American casualties in Vietnam--let alone the multiplication of pain to the actual Vietnamese.

Some republicans by the way still haven't given up on the idea of a convention coup. I saw an article today that mentions Scott Walker as a possible alternative candidate to Trump. As an experiment in Chaos Theory or we could even call it Chaos Theatre---I would like to see that happen. But...for those who might think Scott Walker an acceptable alternative to Trump I hate to break this to them but he'd be just as awful if not worse than Trump and there's a reason why he was one of the first candidates out--basically that reason is he sucks. The Teacher's and Nurse's unions that backed Clinton would be right in the line of fire if Walker became the republican nominee.

Choosing an alternative would be saying a big fuck you to the greater majority of republican primary voters and if Trump then ran as an independent I'd have to think that he would certainly lose to Clinton but he'd also badly outpoint the alternative republican nominee and split the party right in two and he might have the bigger half--though the other portion would have almost all the elected people. It also would work I would think to the libertarian Gary Johnson's benefit.

Elizabeth Warren comes out of the closet as just another power-seeking, power-serving hack politician pursuing her own career advancement. And, now, to do that, she's ready to throw in with the Creepy Dragon Lady, Hillary Clinton, the favorite of our corrupt power-structure.

She always struck me as being not-very-convincing. There was just something about her which struck me as phony and superficial.

So, here we are. Yes, Ms. Warren, go join Hillary Clinton--if she'll have you. Birds of a feather,...

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Memo to Americans who don't know these things already :

Adolf Hitler was politically of the Right-wing, not the political Left-wing. The term "Socislist" In the 1930s German party's name (abbreviated) "NASDP" is in no way related to the party's actual politics. It's a term that was useful for public-relations purposes but never described accurately what the party stood for in fact. There are and were Leftist authoritarian leaders but Hitler was never one of them.

Hillary Clinton is still not yet the Democratic party presidential nominee. IF that ever happens, it won't and can't be before the national party's convention in July.

Hillary Clinton's nomination--IF it occurs-- wouldn't represent any "sex-barrier-breaking" event for American women generally. Instead--and far from that--it indicates only that a woman who

is a multimillionaire & a former-"First Lady" & present or former U.S. Senator & present or former Secretary of State
& dyed-in-the-wool establishment insider
can, indeed, expect to have a very good chance of one day becoming a major party's presidential nominee. That represents exactly nothing in an advance for the rights or interests of America's women generally.

=====================

This is getting to be like watching the tea party complain that Eric Cantor wasn't pure enough.

>35 proximity1: "Memo to Americans who don't know these things already"

There's a great way to win over readers.

American (U.S.) political culture has long suffered from widespread acute cases of political stupidity. (This, by the way, is no less true in Britain and many other countries; and Britain's lack of respectable excuses and the precise nature and causes of the stupidity there make its cases very similar to the circumstances in the U.S.)

When people fall physically ill in typical circumstances, no one expects the illness to be treated as though it has rights to do the harm it does; no one expects others to respect its characteristics just for the sake of showing respect, or for others to humor the illness and allow it to proceed undisturbed on its way.

It's expected, rather, to be treated as a temporary condition to be treated and overcome, eliminated, so that the sufferers can be relieved of their suffering and return to a healthier life.

Just as I see no reason why I should treat a physical illness as if it deserved respect and kindness, I see no reason to treat others' unsound reasoning habits with respect or kindness.

One of the major types of reasoning error, affecting a great variety of issues, is a lazy tendency to view people and things of great complexity in a grossly reductive way. This laziness and the reductive thinking that flows from it is routinely given a "pass" out of misplaced notions of being "polite."

I object to that expectation of politeness toward people's lazy thinking. Polite acceptance of lazy thinking is a foolish custom which has itself grown up from having been accepted uncritically.

A doctor doesn't worry about whether the disease wants to be cured or whether it likes the therapy. He attacks the disease until it yields. And if politeness has proven to simply leave people in their lazy ignorance-- which it has --and if that politeness is defended by those who want to perpetuate that lazy ignorance--and it is--because it serves their purposes --which it does-- then the problem becomes one of not just lazy ignorance but also of deliberately defended lazy ignorance on the misplaced view that politeness and efficacy combine to require it from everyone.

I don't necessarily agree. I think that there are times when people don't deserve to be allowed to rest undisturbed in their ignorance.

Have to say that I was very disappointed in Warren. Her policy pronunciations in the past have been very much in keeping with those that Sanders has espoused throughout his entire political career and throughout his presidential campaign. Warren committed to the sidelines--only taking on Trump in a bunch of asinine twitter battles. Why waste the time?--with that knucklehead. It wasn't constructive. Neither was sitting on the bench. When you have a home run hitter you want them to play. She took herself out of the lineup and now that the whole thing is over she wants a piece of the pie. The thing is--lots of people were expecting Warren to run herself and if that would have happened there's a pretty decent likelihood that Sanders would not have run and almost certainly if that had been the case he would have endorsed Warren. No quid pro quo there. So Warren's endorsement comes across to me as merely political calculation and nothing more--nothing less.

Warren is probably not permanently damaged here but if she thinks she is going to influence any unification on my part she's very sadly mistaken. It's my turn to disappoint and disappoint I will. I would suspect there are a lot of Sanders supporters who think the same way. Some percentage of her political capital is at least temporarily in a frozen account.

It's almost funny that the Pope is more liberal than 98% of the democratic party.

A) Warren is in the Democratic Party, is she not? Therefore she should be expected to support the nominee. Sanders remains in the party and many consider his and Warren's principles the best hope for the future of the party. So if they don't break off and form a third party, obviously they support their nominee and use their stature to try to influence policy.
B) From the little I know of Warren, she has never been self-serving and there is no reason to suppose she is being so now. If Clinton chooses Warren as a running mate it will not be because Warren came out and supported her early, it will be because it is seen as an improvement of the ticket.

Is there a way to curb abuses of large corporations, such as say big banks that worked with our government to crash the economy, without overwhelming and expensive and unhelpful regulatory oversight.

My profession is mortgage lending, and my perspective is the regulatory effect that the CFPB has had on mortgage lending. The CFPB being the love child of Senator Warren.

>39 lriley:

"It's almost funny that the Pope is more liberal than 98% of the democratic party."

"Almost -- But it's too tragically true to be funny.

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Better that we see Warren in all her sordid splendor now than only after electing her to still higer offices of public trust. I feel gratified and relieved to learn it this way. Her words didn't ring true for me. Good riddance to her.

>42 proximity1:

"Better that we see Warren in all her sordid splendor now than only after electing her to still higer offices of public trust. I feel gratified and relieved to learn it this way. Her words didn't ring true for me. Good riddance to her."

This echoes the fanatacism of the Tea Party. Did someone else point that out or am I imagining it?

Politics is about compromise, something Republicans and hardcore Sanders ideologues have yet to learn.

Forty years of neo-conservative economic dogma and dysfunction from the Democratic Leadership Council ( See Wikipedia's page on this group). Serial disasters. Zero compromise with those more to the Left. Instead, lies, broken promises and the shit-end of the stick.

If you get Trump in November, that's now on you. You've cynically abused those from whom you constantly call for and expected compromise without ever undertaking any on your parts.

Game over. You can compromise with Trump now.

Sanders supporters --



Time to wake up. Post >43 RickHarsch: rings with he sneering insults and post >44 theoria: with the sanctimonious bullshit which exactly exhibits the genuine disregard or outright contempt with which these do-called "Democrats" view those of us for whom FDR's New Deal was the benchmark of what the Democratic party is supposed to mean and stand for.

The bloom is off the pose. These people deserve nothing more from us in cooperation or compromises. It's time we started seeing them for what they are: our adversaries.

The challenge you face as Sanders supporters could hardly be clearer: summon the political common sense to recognize how you're being suckered and refuse to stand for any more of the same. For pity fucking sake, open your eyes!

It should be made very clear: deal with us fairly or deal with Trump. At least Trump states his views. Wr know what ge means to do. The DLC Democrats are cynical in a way that makes Trump seem refreshing.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/democratic-vote-hillary-cli...

(Edit - Almost a double whammy, because I'm blocked and it's a guardian link.)

http://qz.com/644985/privilege-is-what-allows-sanders-supporters-to-say-theyll-n...

Or as a black poster on an FB thread recently stated...

For the Berners who refuse to get on board, remember, people of color will still have to live here after you help Trump get elected through your idealism. We simply can't afford President Trump. #DontMakeAmericaHateAgain

>45 proximity1: I do agree with Proximity in that there has been a strong drift to the right since Reagan and that progressives and their principles have been crushed on the national level. But this argument is about the coming election, and though I cannot stomach voting I will be pleased that Trump loses so that for the next four years my animosity is aimed at what is likely to be a lesser evil. And, if I trust Clinton on one thing it is that she will support Planned Parenthood.

I don't think I'm necessarily inclined to shut Warren off in the future. Her language has been the language of the right direction. It is frustrating to me when her actions don't keep pace with her rhetoric and her endorsement of Clinton here is a case in point.

One of the main problems I have with the Clinton's (and Bush's as well) is a lifetime of graft and corruption and both major parties legitimizing the graft/corruption needs to stop. This isn't just a problem of the Clinton's it's also true of practically the entirety of both houses of congress--seeps down into the courts and is definitely the way of the dog eat dog world of corporations and banks. The Clinton's and Bush's do do it better than most. For politicians of either side to continue to accept it because everyone else does doesn't make it right and the public shouldn't have to accept it. Governance isn't attracting the best people--not even close. This presidential election cycle reflects that. A choice between pretty much the two most polarizing and corrupt people that either party could have come up with. So........

#45---IMO it is still Hillary's election to lose. She could do that but if she wins we're certainly going to get another round of the same failed neo-liberal economics and I suspect the Donald if he were to win would not do anything to change the economic course we're on either.

A small victory for me would be the Green and Libertarian parties doing really, really, really well. We do need more voices and more choices.

#48--so I'm supposed to vote for Clinton because this other voter who happens to be black is afraid of Trump?

>46 proximity1:

One person's compromise is another person's treason.

So we beat on.

I like your phrase "The bloom is off the pose." That's a good one.

>51 lriley: Yes--if you vote. Voting against racism seems better than voting against Clinton. Or, back to my own example, voting for women's rights is better than voting for Trump. (I know, I said I don't vote...but I would have voted for Sanders, and would think it all through if Warren were the vice-presidential candidate.)

A small bit of why a no on Trump does not translate into a yes for Clinton:

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/07/report-details-how-us-backed-coup-un...

https://theintercept.com/2016/06/09/hillary-clintons-state-department-gave-south...

I am curious.

What is attractive about Senator Warren?

What happens when Mr Sanders endorses Ms Clinton?

Is Mr Sanders a politician or a cargo cult?

What happens when Mr Sanders endorses Ms Clinton?

I am soooooo stealing this.

#56--I expect that sooner rather than later he will. Probably during or right after the convention.

What happens then? I have no argument with what he does......he put up a good fight.

http://theweek.com/speedreads/629258/hillary-clinton-trails-libertarian-gary-joh...

Gary Johnson is going to take a shitload of votes away from Donald Trump. Not just independents but lots and lots of republican voters as well. Still it's interesting to note that Johnson who is not a celebrity, a brand candidate or even all that well known to the voting public at least right now is doing as well as Clinton among independents and that Trump is about 10 points ahead of both of them. This is one poll and a Fox poll--though as much as Fox plays very fast and loose with the truth in their 24-7 news channel--their polling accuracy tends to conform to other polls.

So I was at the Young Turks youtube site and they're doing their own poll of their own watchers and supporters. Young Turks are adamantly for Bernie Sanders and are one of the largest if not the largest online media network. Their main host Cenk Uygur over the course of this election cycle has often argued with Jimmy Dore about supporting Hillary if and when Bernie is out. Cenk thinking it's not only the best the only real fallback option. Cenk says the reason they decided to do this poll was that they were always being asked by other media about whether Sanders supporters would fall in line to vote for Hillary.

Anyway it's an ongoing poll and you can vote at their app store or in their youtube video that they made especially for it and so far it's not looking good for Hillary. At the app store 4414 (86%) have voted never Hillary and 694 (14%) have voted that they would vote for Hillary. On their youtube video 11942 (81%) have voted never Hillary and 2742 (19%) have voted to vote for Hillary. All in all Hillary has 17% positive and 83% negative out of almost 20000 votes. Almost certainly that 83% negative is going to decrease a lot between now and November---how much that actually will be remains to be seen but if nothing else it makes clear that the majority of Sanders supporters don't see Hillary as an acceptable second option.

> Initial frustration and by no means good news for Trump--the real ardent Sanders supporters wouldn't even consider it.

If the idea of a Trump presidency is too scary/sickening/embarrassing, then you vote the other way. I like Bernie, too, but he's not going to win. He'll endorse Clinton, if not literally, then by actions alone to keep out this detestable alternative. Warren detests Trump, too, and it's obvious by the way she sets him up and watches him take the bait every time that she enjoys making him look the fool.

What I don't understand is why people are so baffled and angry that powerful Democrats are ready to endorse their final candidate, and work to keep Trump out. It's politics, not a romance. And politics are dirty gray, not black and white. I think those who get into politics certainly have some need of their own to fill, and it's not realistic to expect them not to get occasional dirt under their fingernails. Somewhere under all that altruistic posturing is a need or a thrill for power.

I thought Sanders was the best candidate out there, but he'll be out shortly. That leaves two. I think Hillary is the best of the two left standing, so I will vote for her without too much disappointment. Disappointment, bitterness - that will come for me only if Trump gets the win because of a bunch of posturing like what I'm reading in this thread. I'm actually glad to see Warren coming alive at this moment, showing how articulate, smart, and biting she can be. I think the timing is right.

>62 terriks:

1) "If the idea of a Trump presidency is too scary/sickening/embarrassing, then you vote the other way."

Do you find Trump (more) "scary/sickening/embarrassing" than Clinton? Why?

2) "I like Bernie, too, but he's not going to win."

Isn't that a just a guess? And, as a guess, doesn't it negate the whole point of an election campaign: to discover what voters actually want rather than what they assume their fellow voters want?

Your logic goes like this: "I like Sanders." (You tell us this yourself. ) But he can't win. (Though he did "win" your initial approval over the others. ) You assume against your own case's evidence that "Despite my liking Sanders, most people won't vote for him." (It appears that in your case, the key reason that you don't expect him to win is that you're convinced most others won't vote for him. But you show that people like him. So we have to assume that people--you included--vote against their own stated preferences merely because they've become convinced that, though liked, "X" candidate "can't win." If people neither know for sure what other voters shall actually do on election day nor vote according to their own preferences but instead allow their hunches to influence their own behavior, then, logically, a potential landslide-winner could fail to be "elected" simply due to mistaken preconceptions by potential voters rather than actual election-day voters casting a ballot. Again, this negates the entire point of the election and instead turns it into a contest to see which candidate can preclude his or her opponents by the supposed but unproven appearance of invincibility prior to an actual vote . No wonder "democracy" produces such horrendous outcomes: supposed would-be "voters" betray it even before casting their ballots.

3) " I will vote for her without too much disappointment."

So in fact you find both Sanders and Clinton practically all equally acceptable. Clinton's judgment errors you either deny, ignore or don't mind. But this is apparently largely because you're convinced that Trump's election is just beyond the pale.

4) "Disappointment, bitterness - that will come for me only if Trump gets the win because of a bunch of posturing like what I'm reading in this thread."

!!??!! How is the "posturing" you're reading in this thread different (worse) than your own?

You like Sanders but won't vote for him mainly or only because you've chosen to assume that others won't vote for him--and not because he's an unworthy candidate but because "he can't win."

Now I'm "bitter and disappointed"--not over something that hasn't happened and might never happen but instead bitter and disappointed over something I see happening right here, right now.

Fellow citizens either are or aren't much concerned about their failed political order and, either way, they have little courage or conviction about making it work to actually represent them.

It's a sad fact that, if I really wanted to see the maximum harm come to the people and government of the United States—or of Britain, which is in a similar fix—I'd say and do nothing at all. Instead, I'd simply stand by with nmy arms folded, saying nothing and simply look on as a completely corrupt and insanely greedy and selfish oligarchic order blindly destroys the social fabric on which it depends.

If only there was some satisfaction in doing that—it would be so much easier than trying to persuade stupid people not to let themselves be so needlessly and so badly abused by people who care nothing for their suffering.

>60 lriley:

I'm also a never-under-any-circumstances-vote-for-Clinton-member but, about the poll, did you know that polls such as you describe here are completely worthless as representations of a general population? They offer no indication at all of how most people would respond because _all_ the data come from what are apparently self-selected participants. Thus, they are not a random sample, thus they have zero representative value for a general population.

>63 proximity1: I think the point is that Sanders lost.

>65 RickHarsch:

That maybe your point. It's also the narrow and short-sighted point.

In a dysfunctional political order, the basic causes and problems of the order's dysfunction are always the priority, the main point, and not who did or who might win some particular election now, next time or at some other later date.

"I think the point is that Sanders lost," is a transparenly cynical and piss-poor attempt to encourage others to miss the essential point.

In a genuine functioning democratic order, the press wouldn't be interested in preempting the proper running of the elections, trying their damnedest, and succeeding!, in convincing many potential voters that those voters' favored candidate"cannot possibly win" so there is no point in their trying to help him or her. In a healthy democratic order, a paper which tried such stuff would find its readership turn against it--even as the readers refused to heed such propaganda.

So, in a healthy democratic order, Bernie Sanders should have had the best chance to win the nomination. The papers should have treated his campaign with the same respect as they showed for their favorites.

In a healthy democratic order, the elections wouldn't cost billions of dollars and so wouldn't be the private reserve of the richest. Nominating Bernie Sanders should have been child's play.

But all this would be obvious to most people in a properly-functioning democratic order. Instead, these things are not understood, much less obvious to nearly everyone. Instead, people are distracted, demoralized and feeling defeated before they've even begun--except for the young.

I repeat, from my comment above, at >63 proximity1: : It's a sad fact that, if I really wanted to see the maximum harm come to the people and government of the United States—or of Britain, which is in a similar fix—I'd say and do nothing at all. Instead, I'd simply stand by with my arms folded, saying nothing and simply look on as a completely corrupt and insanely greedy and selfish oligarchic order blindly destroys the social fabric on which it depends.

If only there was some satisfaction in doing that—it would be so much easier than trying to persuade stupid people not to let themselves be so needlessly and so badly abused by people who care nothing for their suffering.

#64--it is a select group but the point of the poll 'is will Sanders supporters fall in line behind Clinton once Sanders is out?'---so that poll was aimed specifically at them. At least as of now they're not in the mood. It's obvious to me that Sanders has lost. The super delegates are not going to change their votes and very unlikely even if she is indicted will there be a large enough number to make that different. The democratic party is IMO behind Hillary Clinton all the way at this point in time and it would take a major scandal or absolute incontrovertible proof of criminality to change things and I just don't see that happening.

I'm not in this for Clinton or Trump. No dog in the hunt for me. I think they'll both be disasters--though a Hillary Clinton disaster though not maybe as bad on the surface will be a longer one. I voted Jill Stein in 2012. I have no problem voting for her again. If anything she is more left than Sanders and that's okay by me.

>66 proximity1: The point HERE is that Sanders lost (that is no longer a point of view--it's now a fact) and so what do VOTERS do. Your condescending lectures are, to me, a combination of preaching to the converted and simplistic repetitions of things I have known for 40 years. If you have an active recipe for overturning the established order in the US I would love to here it now, but if all you're going to do is try to connect the fact that the US is an oligarchic imperium with the charade of electoral politics you're just barking like a dog at the pound after the volunteers have gone home to bed.

>68 RickHarsch:

Don't like the critique? Tough.

It is not a fact at this writing that "Sanders lost." The party has not held its convention; the Democratic delegates have not voted, no one has been certified as having received a winning majority of qualified delegates and no one has been formally offered the nomination or formally accepted it. Until these "formalities" are accomplished, no decision has been made on the nomination contest's winner.

"Your condescending lectures are, to me, a combination of preaching to the converted and simplistic repetitions of things I have known for 40 years. If you have an active recipe for overturning the established order in the US I would love to here it now, ..."

No "recipe for overturning the established order in the US" so concise as to fit into the confines of this medium could ever exist. And that fact is an example of how your comments invite condescending replies--because you either 1) didn't even think about it long enough (2 seconds) to recognize this or 2) you did recognize its impossibility and you threw it in anyway as an insult. I honestly can't tell which is the case.

The rot is so far advanced that what's required is a very thorough work in teaching people how to think effectively about their political problems. As things now stand, most aren't capable of that and your example testifies to that.

Many people's foolishly believing that the election was already such a foregone conclusion so long ago is one of the most serious obstacles to progress--and your own comment promotes the mistaken thinking. So, part of the recipe involves people like you figuring out enough of what I'm laboring to explain here that you cease spreading such Goddamned pernicious nonsense.

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Here are two examples of current political reasoning, both of them from Sanders-supporters and both seriously flawed:

"Asked whether she would vote for Clinton now it appeared all but certain Sanders would not be on the ticket, Diana Galbraith, a 39-year-old graduate student from Georgetown University was blunt: 'I have to. Number one: I am Democrat, and number two: Trump can’t win or else I have to move to Canada,' she explained.

"Galbraith remained concerned however that not all Sanders supporters would be as willing to compromise. 'I do think Trump could win, he has enough cross-appeal, there are Democrats who could vote for him,' she added.

"Others at the rally, which campaign aides said may well be the last if Sanders formally drops out after the Washington DC primary on Tuesday, were more defiant.

" 'I am going to write in Bernie. Whether or not he’s on the ticket, he’s getting my vote,' said Chelsea Denman, a 27-year-old who works in the legal profession in Washington. 'He’s gotten a movement going that’s not dying down anytime soon. He needs to continue on to the convention. He needs to keep himself out there and talk about the issues.'”

"Asked why she was so opposed to Clinton, Denman replied as many do: 'I don’t think she’s genuine. I think she says what she thinks she needs to be said to get elected. I don’t trust her. I think it’s unfortunate that as a woman I can’t trust potentially the first woman president.' ”

"Conscious of this continuing trust gap among young progressives, the Clinton campaign flirted with perhaps the ultimate response this week by meeting with Elizabeth Warren, the popular Massachusetts senator, for what many assumed were talks about making her a possible running mate.

"In contrast to other rumoured candidates, such as Virginia senator Tim Kaine or Cory Booker of New Jersey, sharing a ticket with Warren was once considered an unthinkable lurch to the left by Clinton that is likely to appease many Sanders loyalists.

“ 'I would love Warren, but I just don’t think Hillary is going to appoint her,' said Galbraith."

Trump and Clinton on Quest to Woo Sanders Fans and Uneasy Republicans

If the flaws in their assumptions, premises and conclusions don't leap out at you, then you're among the people to whom I refer as failing to reason effectively about important political matters.

So much for the idea that superdelegates are a subversion of the democratic process.

Bring on the Warren VP nod, and let's get on with it...

>69 proximity1: First you tell me it's too much to explain, then you whine about 'laboring' to explain. What's most bizarre is that I'm probably closer to your views politically than anyone else here and you don't realize it and I'm glad we're not seen in a bar together. You spend far more time raving than you do explaining what's wrong with the system, which doesn't do much to get your points across. You likely didn't read either of the Clinton posts I put up which would have been to your taste, I would hope. As far as the democratic nomination process, if you can explain to me the clear path to a nominee other than Clinton I would surely like to know how it will work, because throughout my adult lifetime primaries have settled the issue. Sanders lost both New York, where he is from, and California, where he should have had the best chance of winning; in between he lost early and too often and so he is out.

Now about your recipe...how about the first ingredient? I admit that I failed to come up with one and so ultimately left the country.

'...cease spreading such Goddamned pernicious nonsense.' Such as, for example?

Finally, it helps to know when you are boring, something you are entirely lost about. Your Guardian thread is an example. Arguments about arguments after Guardian articles are boring. The second half of your last post is too potentially boring for me to read. When you behave like a screech owl you are far more interesting.

> 63 proximity1:

"Do you find Trump (more) "scary/sickening/embarrassing" than Clinton? Why?"

His racist comments. His misogynist comments. His bullying posture.

"'I like Bernie, too, but he's not going to win.'

Isn't that a just a guess?"

No. It’s the way it is.

"So in fact you find both Sanders and Clinton practically all equally acceptable. Clinton's judgment errors you either deny, ignore or don't mind."

None of the above. You make a lot of presumptions. But I accept them. Better a flawed Clinton than a Trump.

"!!??!! How is the "posturing" you're reading in this thread different (worse) than your own?"

Fair enough.

"You like Sanders but won't vote for him mainly or only because you've chosen to assume that others won't vote for him--and not because he's an unworthy candidate but because "he can't win."

I voted for him when I had the chance to – in the primaries. He won’t be on the general ballot – so yes, that means he can’t win.

"Fellow citizens either are or aren't much concerned about their failed political order and, either way, they have little courage or conviction about making it work to actually represent them."

You’re making a lot of assumptions about my concerns just based on the fact that I’d rather see Clinton in the WH than Trump, now that the Sanders campaign is winding down. I can assure you, there is next to nothing about Trump that is representative of my own ideals, and I think it would be an awful thing to have him in the WH, picking a SC justice (or 2), among other things. I will vote in the best way possible – in this 2-tiered, inadequate system of ours – to keep him out.

I think your heart is in the right place and it grieves me as well that Bernie won't be the Democratic candidate. We have that in common. But our approaches after this fact are very different. I'm not willing to scream and rant at everyone who disagrees with me, making assumptions about their thoughts, intentions, or beliefs. It's not possible to do that without sounding (sorry) a lot like Mr. Trump himself. The writing was on the wall by mid-April that Bernie was lagging too far behind to catch up in this process, as it exists right now, for this election. Doesn't seem fair? Don't like it? Then perhaps the work and focus needs to be on challenging this system by the time of the next election. That is something with realistic possibilities. The rest of your posts are growing increasingly insulting to your fellow posters, when in fact it is likely we have more in common than not.

I haven't caught up on this thread for the last few days, but I do want to poke my head in for a minute here to draw attention to the small matter of election fraud. We don't hear so much about our inherently compromised system of black-box voting any more these days, but the elephant remains in the room. Here is a brief interview with the principals behind a very important lawsuit addressing this issue. https://youtu.be/cOGs36AyGTM?t=17m3s

>74 davidgn: That was disturbing.

>72 RickHarsch:

" First you tell me it's too much to explain, then you whine about 'laboring' to explain."

Of course I do: the 'it' which is too much to explain concerns that grandiose 'recipe' you asked for, while the 'laboring' concerns those things which do admit a rather full treatment in this medium but which still require time and effort to explain so they are qualitatively unlike any such 'recipe' and there's nothing incongruous about the one being labored over while the other is too vast in scope for this kind of thread. Again, as so often, it does amaze me the things like this which have to be explained to you.

"What's most bizarre is that I'm probably closer to your views politically than anyone else here" ...

What counts is not "how many" things we have in common in our political views but rather "which" things--the key, essential, things. When you give Clinton's campaign a pass as because you (prematurely) regard it as a done deal--and then appeal for a grand overarching project to wrest power from a corrupt longstanding oligarchy-- you demonstrate that, where it counts most of all, we're not even in the same galaxy.

No matter what the recipe contains, breaking the current DLC stranglehold on the Democrats is the current sine qua non which, yes, I've been laboring to explain because 1) it's indispensable and 2) it's within the scope of these limited means.

But you don't, won't or can't get these points. (Again, mind-boggling!) So, I'm not exaggerating when I say that, in my opinion, you might as well be Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan or the Koch brothers or be working for one of them. Liberal Democrats like you do their work for them.

(The Kochs) : we don't have to actually "win," or "persuade," : enough of our opponents shall surrender to our propaganda. The Clintons are their candidates and, though they neither could nor ever shall admit that fact, they shall be delighted to see her win the nomination rather than Sanders, for that means that they have no competition at all in November.

" Sanders lost both New York, where he is from, and California, where he should have had the best chance of winning; ..."

I regard California as an arch-conservative state. Why in the world should Sanders have had the best chance in a state long represented by "Democrats" like Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer? That's a question.

In New York state--another phony liberal bastion--Clinton's campaign ran under rules which were designed to hobble an opponent like Sanders.

" You’re making a lot of assumptions about my concerns just based on the fact that I’d rather see Clinton in the WH than Trump, now that the Sanders campaign is winding down. I can assure you, there is next to nothing about Trump that is representative of my own ideals, and I think it would be an awful thing to have him in the WH, picking a SC justice (or 2), among other things. I will vote in the best way possible – in this 2-tiered, inadequate system of ours – to keep him out."

No. I understand your view : better the Clintons and others as bad, or worse, in perpetuity than what has now become the very severe but the only means to break their control. Anyone of that opinion is no ally of mine.

All my assumptions are drawn from your comments.

Personally I see neo-liberals/neo-conservatives as fascists.

Maybe this will seem like it's not being inclusive--but I agree with Proximity that the democratic party needs to dump, get rid of, expel, shit out the neo-liberal, third way faction of their party that has been setting their agenda for the last 3 decades. They should do that as soon as possible--or like right this minute. If Trump winning this year makes that happen it will probably be worth it.

You never get anywhere without a little bit of pain.

The late Paul Wellstone made it pretty clear years ago saying he belonged to the democratic wing of the Democratic Party--he was making a distinction when he said that between what he stood for and what other so-called liberals/progressives/democrats stood for. Bill Clinton was Reagan in sheep's clothing. He carried on and expanded on Ronald's economic agenda.

>76 proximity1: You're a very poor reader if you still think I'm a 'Liberal Democrat'.
Pausing, hopefully briefly, from trading insults, I ask again:

1 for examples of my pernicious nonsense
2 By what means are people to prevent Clinton from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee?

>77 lriley: "Personally I see neo-liberals/neo-conservatives as fascists."

Mr Sanders will meet with a neoliberal fascist Tuesday evening. http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/12/politics/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-meeting-tu...

Personally I see neo-liberals/neo-conservatives as fascists.

And that is why almost no one takes you seriously or cares what you think.

$Hillary is a dempsey dumpster of lying narcissistic scum. trump is a insane megalomaniacal dirtbag.

We are all doomed.

In the meantime I guess I will just party heartily because ....... well, why not? - does worrying make it better? - I don't think so.

Namaste.

>80 StormRaven: Much of what Iriley writes is interesting: he deserves better than a cheap shot at some loose language.

Loose language sinks threads ...

>83 theoria: In that case I must come off like the blindfolded man with the bazooka ruining the party...

--80--that is something that works both ways.

>84 RickHarsch: To paraphrase a famous philosopher, "your aim is true."

>77 lriley: Also, please don't forget what happened to the "late Paul Wellstone." People may find the following archival article to be of interest. The source will dissatisfy many, but in its time this newsletter claimed among its subscribers 40 members of Congress and the intelligence committees of both houses. (And yes, I do believe that's an accurate claim). I'll personally vouch for the late (Deceased--Suicide--Actual Suicide ETA: link) author's integrity and bona fides, though not always for his stability or his conclusions. http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110102_wellstone.html

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll return to folding my tin foil cats.

--80--that is something that works both ways.

Not hardly. There's a reason that you're sitting on the fringe and Clinton is the nominee. People who can't distinguish between fascists and neo-liberals are simply not serious about the business of governing, and as a result are not serious political thinkers or players.

>80 StormRaven:

Funny! Here's a little datum for you:

From post # 78 to # 86 lriley and JGL53 are the _only_ ones _not_ on my "ignore" list. That's nothing new. I can no longer even remember the particular details as to why in any of those cases. All I know is that, in each case, these people repeatedly proved by their own commentary that they have absolutely nothing intresting to say to me, that their reasoning capacities are less than minimal.

>87 davidgn:

It might have been sabotage--I.e. a case of murder. I don't know. We need to know more and that's the problem. I take the fact that Wellstone was travelling with his wife and daughter to indicate that he felt completely confident of the reliability of the plane and crew. There is one datum that could figure strongly in support of a sabotage: the airport's remote signal could have been corrupted to send false data on the approach. But that wouldn't work if either of the pilots were experienced with this airport _and_ there was good visibility.

For other problems with the murder theory in this case, see, @Wikipedia

Law of small numbers .

>90 proximity1: I'm aware that the data set is too small; that's the weakest part of the argument. I wouldn't draw any definite conclusions in this specific case either, but it remains a prominent question mark.

> 91

True. My _first_ question upon hearing of the crash was, "Accident?"

The thing for me is, I lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin for a few years as a very small boy. My father was an Air Force officer based there--but no longer flying when the family lived in Wisconsin. However, he spent all of WWII flying in the Yukon and Northwest Territories in little camps where the airstrips were primitive things--patches cleared out of the dense surrounding forest. Flying in shitty cold weather conditions was something he knew well. He described the landing approach at Skagway when the prevailing winds were in the wrong direction. Margin of error : "not great." He had thousands of hours flying a "Norseman" and "Gooney Birds," the Douglas "Dakota" 3 (DC-3)--the workhorse cargo plane of the time.

>74 davidgn:

I watched the video. Thanks for posting it. Since the election of 2000, election-returns in the U.S. have not been worth the paper they're not written on.

This oligarchy's capture and corruption of the electoral and legislative institutions is complete. It now wants to eliminate any serious fight-back from a national press which it already owns.

All more reasons why arguing that re-electing Bill Clinton/Obama--this time wearing a dress--is somehow acceptable amounts to abject surrender to the kleptocracy.

>93 proximity1: That's the spirit.
I also hope we see a lot more lawsuits like this one in Massachusetts, which is seeking to force a hand recount. (And no, you won't hear about this lawsuit in the mainstream media, either).
ETA: Also, "Bernie or Bust" is not just a slogan; it's a pledge. (ETR: a second-rate link, but to the effect that "Bernie or Bust" is also a prediction). Philadelphia is shaping up to be a watershed event.

>94 davidgn:

David,

I understand the motives for the pledge but I wouldn't personally adopt that course. I regard the damage done to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council) by a Trump victory, should that happen, as both a more likely outcome than a write-in based victory by Sanders and, in the event that the write-in effort failed to elect Sanders, politically more useful in the interim.

That said, whatever happens in November, Sanders' spark has ignited a new movement which I applaud--(Esp. www.brandnewcongress.org)--and is likely to carry on producing good things. But If Clinton wins, your votes for Sanders will be shrugged off by the DLC which shall argue--with some justification, "See? Our 'brand' is still valid!" We have to put a stop to that or the other efforts shall be reversed--I suspect.

As for the prediction, I was making it more than sixteen years ago and, if anything, it's more valid than ever. Now, acquaintances bring this point up in casual conversation: "How long before the lid just blows off!?"

>95 proximity1: I believe we're closer to such a point than many without an ear to the ground would expect. There's a reason they're building a giant wall around the DNC in Philly. The question is whether a critical mass has finally been reached. For the first time, I think it may indeed have been. (Yet, as I understand it secondhand, mainstream media recently quoted an official saying that the DNC is expected to be a less intensive affair than the recent Papal visit. I wouldn't count on it!)

ETA: Anyone looking for a portal into electoral issues with this Democratic primary campaign could do worse than to look here. The blog and video series cast a wide net, but there's some good citizen reporting in the mix.

lriley --

Have you compared your comments in >77 lriley: ( with which I can hardly fail to completely agree) with your comment in >13 lriley: ? (Ref. #10). Is there anything contradictory in them?

>94 davidgn: So you advocate simply withholding any general election vote, and focusing on the New Congress project going forward? Or did I misread?

>93 proximity1: 'Bill Clinton/Obama--this time wearing a dress--'

How do you get Obama wearing a dress?

>99 RickHarsch:

Politically, Hillary Clinton is or might as well be Barack Obama--as a woman, she has a different wardrobe, but, really, politically, that's of no consequence.

Some people want to vote for Clinton because, politically, she's so very similar to Obama. While, for me, that's more a reason not to vote for her, I still have slightly more respect for those voters than I do for those who are going to gobble up uncritically the "Let's just elect a woman" gambit.

>100 proximity1: Obviously, just awkwardly rendered (Bill Clinton/Obama). So, what are YOU going to do?

>98 davidgn:



"So you advocate simply withholding any general election vote, and focusing on the New Congress project going forward?"

I definitely advocate contributing in every way possible to advance the Brand new Congress project--no matter what else one does.

In order of priority and importance,

goal #1 is getting Sanders nominated
at the convention-- which is next month. Not a single delegate, whether "pledged" or unpledged, has voted and none shall vote until the convention. Clinton's backers are now working on the details of ensuring that nothing interesting and surprising can happen at a convention at which, supposedly, nothing has yet been voted or determined. If Sanders can be nominated, then everyone should vote Sanders in November.

goal #2 (as I see it, speaking for myself, if Sanders isn't the Democratic Party nominee) is to prevent Clinton's election by the most reliable electoral strategy ; this can vary according to one's state or congressional district but in nearly all cases--since this election is so unusual--abstaining would not be more effective than a (positive) vote for the candidate who, by election day, stands the best chance of defeating Clinton.

>102 proximity1: And since goal one is impossible?

Related reading :

" The Democrats' Da Vinci Code " by David Sirota, (December 8, 2004) from the archive of The American Prospect.

Elliot Gould in "The Long Goodbye": 'Looney Tunes, Mr. Wade.'

>93 proximity1: All more reasons why arguing that re-electing Bill Clinton/Obama--this time wearing a dress...

Shouldn't that be pants suit?

>51 lriley:

A much delayed response, but...

http://www.bustle.com/articles/166412-dear-white-hetero-cis-people-please-dont-c...

As a key part of "progressive/liberal" politics seems to concern advancing the position of marginalized groups, yes.

Unequivocally YES.

If you are doing something for someone that they do not wish done, you are not doing it for them. You are doing it for yourself.

And the very assumption that they cannot speak for themselves is central to the discussion.

107--all that is very nicely put Jesse but you yourself made a comment a short time ago about why you made your primary vote for Clinton and it was something along the lines of being sick and tired of angry Sanders purists.

The truth for me anyway is I don't see a corporatist, banker friendly neo-liberal like Hillary Clinton doing very much to help minorities at all. Looking at what her husband did with his crime bill should give you pause. The main thing that seemed to do for people of color was give them a concrete floor and ceiling, three walls and a metal door, a single person cot, a toilet and maybe or maybe not a roommate to fight and/or have sex with--whether desired or not and three meals of poor quality food every day. Keeping in mind that Hillary does take money from the privatized prison system--more than any other politician and by the way New York State's prison system is run by the state and not privatized so that kind of disconnects that link between the privatized prison people and her actual work as an elected politician--so why is it that the privatized prison people are so enamored with her?

It's obvious to me--maybe not so much older people of color I'll admit that--if we wanted to make a vote to help the poor and minorities in this election cycle we'd have voted for Sanders and not come around with some petulant reasoning for why we voted for Clinton. True that minorities might have a rougher time with Trump--even so I don't see Hillary doing much of anything for them and she's basically run a campaign on continuing in Barack's footsteps and incremental change.....so make of that what you will. Is she even interested in ending America's insane war on drugs? Legalizing marijuana? Amnestying non violent drug users? What are her positions there--do you know? We do know she takes lots of cash from the private prison people and the more incarcerated people the more profit the privatized prison people make--I don't think that's too hard to figure out.

>108 lriley:

"+ 10"

Them's my sentiments, too!

If it's obvious to you, one can't imagine why people of color don't see it.

Luckily, people of color have you to explain why they're idiots and save them from themselves.

> 110

The majority of people of color in the U.S. are idiots.

What makes it a hard sale for you to convince anyone that that is racist is that the majority of white people in the U.S. are also idiots.

That better?

So the core problem isn't racism, but narcissism?

>108 lriley: Interesting that you should bring up the Crime Bill. As long as we're demonstrating our long memories, people might also take an interest in the phenomenon that led to the social conditions (i.e. the crack epidemic) that led to the Crime Bill. The writings of the Gary Webb (Deceased--Suicide--Actual Suicide) are essential here. His short chapter in Kristina Borjesson's Into the Buzzsaw is a great place to start (excerpt here; there's also a bad OCR of the whole chapter hosted by a looney-tunes site called whale . to that I refuse to link to, but it will come up on search engines). And of course, the relevant tome is Webb's Dark Alliance.

>113 davidgn: Mr Sanders vote for the crime bill when he was a member of the House. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/103-1994/h416#

>114 theoria: I'm aware of that as well. In all honesty, my support for Sanders as a candidate was lukewarm at best until recently (on account of a basic perspective best summarized in this article by Prof. James Petras). Sanders is deeply problematic on a number of levels, not least in his refusal to denounce(ETA: preceding link) the White House's claim to the exercise of ultimate power over life and death. I also haven't heard him mention any intention of ending the State of Emergency that was enacted on 9/11 and is quietly renewed by the President every year without Congressional review, despite the fact that such review is mandated every six months (50 U.S.C. 1622, 2002) -- a discrepancy apparently attributable (at least, so far as Congressman DeFazio was able to determine) to secret laws superceding 50 U.S.C. 1622, 2002, which are classified. (See also: 1 and 2.)

I could cite other problems with Sanders as a candidate. The point is not Sanders the man (though he is basically decent, and about the best statesman we have in relative terms); the point is the movement behind him. There is real potential here to rock the boat, and as I hope to highlight with all of my background references here, the boat is badly in need of rocking.

FWIW Sanders does do a whole lot better with younger minority voters than he does with older minority voters. He has not connected very well with older minority--particularly older black voters. The black congressional caucus establishment IMO has a lot to do with that--particularly those from southern states. The southern states tend to be more conservative and the primary season is front loaded with them--nonetheless a lot of Hillary Clinton's advantage in minority voters comes from them and these are states that for the most part she's not likely to win in November.

Generally as well when we talk about older voters they have more conservative values. They think more in terms of what's safe. It's more about going with the politician devil you know than the politician you don't know and in this case they've absolutely made the wrong decision.

113--the Clinton and Bush families have had a friendly relationship for a long time. You never really ever hear them saying negative things about each other. There are reasons for that and CIA links are part of that.

>118 davidgn: Correct. On the Bushes, the most important read is Family of Secrets, by Russ Baker. On the Clinton side, I haven't done enough digging to make an endorsement of any given exposé. The field is, as one might expect, rife with disinformation.

110--it's interesting that you ignore the substance of the comments I made as to the negative impact that Bill Clinton's crime bill has had over the years on minorities and particularly Americans of African descent. I noticed you really didn't dispute any of that. Nor did you dispute that Hillary Clinton has taken more money from the private prison entities than any other politician from either major party.

So we'll go a bit further--the US of A has about 5% of the world's population and about 25% of the world's incarcerated. Our incarceration numbers skyrocketed after Bill Clinton's crime bill became law. That law dispropotionately targeted black Americans--are you following where I'm going Jesse? It's pretty much a fact that if you're a Caucasian and get caught with cocaine you're chances of not going away for it are much much (almost stratospherically) higher (and especially if you're a wealthy or connected individual) than if you're a black (and particularly a poorer one) caught with crack in your possession. And by the way whilst on the campaign trail and stumping for Hillary--Bill Clinton vociferously defended that same crime bill to some less than impressed Black Lives Matter activists. One might give him some credit for at least responding--when it came to Hillary she ignored them completely. Want to bet whether we'll continue the drug wars when Hillary becomes POTUS? Want to bet on whether our incarcerating one out of every four of the world's entire population of prisoners will decrease when Hillary becomes POTUS? Want to bet whether the % of those incarcerated will still heavily target minorities after Hillary becomes POTUS? Want to bet whether she'll stop taking money from private business entities after she becomes POTUS? If you don't think Hillary and her husband haven't done a shitload to harm African American communities I don't know what to tell you other than you are being willfully stupid or blind.

Anyway I don't know why I bother with you so much Jesse. You don't seem at all willling to dispute or debate the substance of anything. There is nothing about the issues from you--nothing about policy proposals. Like the person you voted for you try to get by just as a personality but there is almost nothing from you that speaks to anything.

>119 lriley:

If you don't think Hillary and her husband haven't done a shitload to harm African American communities I don't know what to tell you other than you are being willfully stupid or blind.

Try making that point to the POC who overwhelmingly didn't support your candidate. Maybe Proximity can throw a good rant in about the PC crowd (sounding oddly at home at a Trump rally.)

http://verysmartbrothas.com/maybe-black-people-arent-feeling-bernie-sanders-beca...

>119 lriley:

..."it's interesting that you ignore the substance of the comments I made"...

It's only "interesting" the first time. After that, it's the constant, predictable and repeatedly boring modus operandus.


"I don't know why I bother with you so much Jesse."

Nor do I.

"You don't seem at all willling to dispute or debate the substance of anything."

Right.

"There is nothing about the issues from you"...

Right.

"--nothing about policy proposals."

And right, again.

Condescend away.

It's working so very well for you.

>120 Jesse_wiedinmyer: '(sounding oddly at home at a Trump rally.)' Same occurred to me.

So here's where we are on the favorable/unfavorable polls - (But it is early yet - unfavorables could continue to rise, lol)

1. trump has an unfavorable rating of 70 per cent overall.
That includes 89 per cent unfavorable among Hispanics and 94 per cent unfavorable with Black voters

Hmmmm. Not that good.

2. OTOH, HRC has an unfavorable rating of 55 per cent overall.
If one eliminates Hispanic/Black from the poll then HRC gets a 75 per cent unfavorable ratings with whites. With just independent whites? - "only" 63 per cent unfavorable.

Jeez -this is looking more and more like just a race to the bottom - that is to say the least disliked candidate will win. So far trump is winning the race for most disliked. lol.

So, time to celebrate, HRC fans. Break out the cocaine and send out the orgy invitations.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-blacks-hispanics-poll_us_57615a...

Are we witnessing a dishonest election?

A between state comparison based on the used voting procedures of the 2016 Democratic Party Primary for the Presidency of the United States of America

Axel Geijsel
Tilburg University – The Netherlands

Rodolfo Cortes Barragan
Stanford University – U.S.A.

June 7, 2016

Link

See also: Media Coverage of the Primaries Was Awful, Harvard Study Confirms

Business as usual is unacceptable. At some point, it all becomes too much. My parents, who are pushing 70, are squabbling about the logistics of getting to Philly in July. I think I'm gonna have to recharge the A/C in their van. ;-)

In supporting Bernie, we signed on for a revolution. I hope that wasn't just empty sloganeering.

It's a fallacy to think that voting blocs always vote in or for their best interest. If that were so--the Teamsters and especially PATCO would never have endorsed Ronald Reagan. PATCO endorsed Reagan and within months of coming into office he annihilated them as a union and broke the back of the labor movement. Some years later Bill Clinton with the NAFTA will kick that same crippled labor movement in the head and in its balls. Give it another nice working over.

That's only one small example. The population can be easily manipulated. Case in point--the lead up to the US of A's preemptive invasion of Iraq. To put it mildly after Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations Americans (to borrow a phrase from Obama) were all fired up and ready to go. I have to admit I didn't watch the entirety of Powell's speech. He's a very intelligent human being but he made a complete ass out of himself and he is to a degree culpable for all the death and destruction that came as a result of that speech. The parts I did see I remember thinking 'is someone attempting a rewrite of Graham Greene's Our man in Havana?'--changing the locale to some shithole of a desert location and in an even more fucked up country? Anyway they did a very bad job of re scripting. So I didn't think it very believable--nor did I ever think that Saddam or anyone in his govt. had a thing to do with 9-11......and yet at the time the majority of Americans of all genders, races, religious creeds, democrats,republicans and independents--okay some more-so some less-so depending--but still in great majority--did believe Powell and were at the least very okay with the scheming and machinations of Bush/Cheney administration and the majority of Americans did approve the Iraq invasion--all the bullshit and lies despite what they might say today and to a degree they are culpable for all the death and destruction that entailed from that.

As an aside-- when I was hired by USPS in 1986 there were about 600 people working in that distribution plant of which about two thirds had a military background of some sort or another. By 2003 we were down to about 350-400 people and maybe a quarter of them had a military background. It wasn't the popular thing at that time and in that place to have doubts about the good intentions and revengeful motivations of Bush and Cheney. Then again very very few of these people had real skin in the game. When ranking their priorities a lot if not most would have listed their religion over their union.....which is fucking absurd...but then again I'm an atheist....but even so...what put bread on their table?--what allowed them to send their kids to college?--because they're going to need an education to have any chance at all after the neo-libs and neo-cons have traded the manufacturing and industrial component of their future for their own personal aggradizement. What allowed them to handle medical emergencies without upsetting their entire economic apple cart? It wasn't church on Sunday.

As a further aside Bush and Cheney got us into that quagmire--Obama (after almost 8 years) has never really got us out. That should require people to have a think over--a serious think. Anyone believe that either Trump or Hillary are likely to pull the troops out of these bullshit situations? I don't.

Two more recent items, one positive and the other, ah, not so much:

1. There's a site to sign on to pledge not to vote for either HRC or trump but to either write in Bernie's name or to vote third party. So far only 118,000 have signed up. Even if that increases by tenfold that would not be enough, I think, to make any difference, so there's the positive.

2. There is recent polling that as many as 25 per cent of respondents are undecided. I fear a large portion of them, maybe even a majority, are planning on voting for trump but are not going to admit it. Obviously, that is the negative.

In 5 minutes, there's due to be a live stream briefing from Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis, who are behind Trustvote.org and the racketeering lawsuit over vote fraud. They allege that their statisticians have determined that Bernie actually would have won, and by a margin sufficient to override the superdelegates, had the votes been counted accurately.

Should be a hell of a show, at any rate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNXZEVvKgvs

Okay, for now they're streaming the movie Uncounted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB3SWBDYung
Live speakers in 30 minutes.

Also, there's a 20-minute introduction at http://justiceserved.org for those getting up to speed.

Again, live speakers should be here on the stream at around 10:30 P.M. Eastern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNXZEVvKgvs

The person from whom I heard about the event overpromised what would be presented (apparently there was concern about presenting prior to the filing of the lawsuit in Ohio -- ETA: expected this week), but the highlights from the event (along with ongoing updates) can be seen here: http://trustvote.org/ Audio is bad in portions, but even if you want to skip through those, it's well worth the time to get the view from the ground from knowledgeable election integrity activists.

Meanwhile, Uncounted (linked above) is well worth watching for anyone who wants to understand what happened in the California primary.

On the Clintons' private e-mail-server scandal

What surprised me are some of the implications brought out in the testimony:

● classified secret e-mail traffic is sent and rec'd in clear text (unencrypted)! ? That's implied here. I mean, of course, that the message is entered/composed (just as this is) on a text editor programme in clear text and, if it's encrypted at all, that's apparently only later--either by a special house encryption or, heaven forbid! some commercially available encryption programme! Thus, if someone hacked the server, he'd have the unencrypted editions of the mails--and! worse! could conceivably also intercept the encrypted messages and compare them--meaning the encryption programmes themselves are compromised.

● apparently, no one junior in rank to Sec. Clinton saw fit to risk his or her career in order to put the national security and laws of the U.S. first. No one. In short, there was no one at all anywhere in Clinton's entourage of the moral calibre of an Edward Snowden--even after Snowden had given us the example of how a real patriot acts. Everyone around Clinton was, in effect, an ass-covering, ass-kissing career-first-protecting weasel. No one can say, "Well, Sec. Clinton herself was the highest authority in "State"--where else, after being told 'shut up and get back to work,' could one have gone? There was no State Inspector General to whom one could turn--even anonymously."

There was the F.B.I., and, as a last-resort, thank heaven, there are still some press organizations which can report even when all of law enforcement fails us--as it did, again, in the case of Edward Snowden, who had really no other recourse than to the press--which he first had to train in basic on-line security-practices just so he could communicate in safety with those journalists!

● So think about it! Think about the shitty fact that we not only live under a thoroughly corrupt political order, but also, the vast majority of the time, there's virtually no one with a combination of guts and integrity who can and shall see and do the morally right thing even if the boss in charge won't!

Think about the shitty country this is: that, all these revelations notwithstanding, it appears that the vast majority of American voters are resigned to marching, robot-like, to the polls in November, pulling the lever or marking their ballot and conferring upon this insufferably arrogant and self-obssesed bitch, the highest political office in the national government.

● Does anyone here seriously believe that Donald Trump could enter the White House as president with even an equal sense, let alone greater sense, of smug entitlement and undue self-confidence in his personal capacity to meet the challenges of that office than those of Hillary and Bill Clinton?

Does anyone here seriously believe that Trump could play so carelessly with the established protocols of classified-document safety and security?

If so, please explain how--very slowly and clearly.

> 133

trump is a very serious maniac - or he is the world's most successful performance artist- who the fuck can know for sure?

No one can guess what a trump Presidency would be like. No one. Including trump. Most people suspect it would be something bad.

So - it's the devil we know vs. the devil we don't know - HRC vs. trump.

Traditionally Amuricans have chosen the former for their President.

But it is common wisdom now that the old rules don't apply.

So there you have it.

The (allegedly) traditional Chinese curse applies here: 'May you live in interesting times.'

Well, if so then it seems we the Amurican people are completely cursed - and utterly fucked.

We have Senator Bernie Sanders standing right there--the obvious great choice over both the self-obsessed and egomaniacal Clintons and over Trump--who's not so very different from these latter but who doesn't know how to game the government system the way the Clintons do.

And Sanders is no Devil of any kind--neither the one we know nor the one we don't know.

Jill Stein has made offers to Bernie Sanders before--this time the offer is she'll step aside and let him be the Green Party candidate.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article88419552.htm...

That would help Trump's chances and very much damage Clinton's chances. OTOH it would be a major boost IMO for the Green Party in the United States. For those sick and tired of the two parties and how they've rigged the system--that's a good thing. It would give Sanders' supporters someone they could vote for who they actually can believe in. Personally I would encourage Bernie to take Stein up on her offer. To get us away from neo-liberal economics--to give us a chance of seeing a nationalized health care---to stop predatory lenders from undermining the education and the futures of our young people--to actually have a President that might do something about climate change--to end our war on drugs and maybe then we could see our incarceration ranking and rating drop---to put the brakes on our war mongering middle eastern foreign policy---amongst other things.......so I would say to Bernie--don't fall in line---continue to run.

>135 lriley: If Bernie could get the poll numbers high enough (is it 15%?) then he'd get into the Presidential debates which would be even more of a boon for the Green Party.

> 135

Well, I could envision that scenario, as is said, easily "handing" the Presidency to trump. In any case it would certainly make it hard to bet on the race with any confidence if that were to happen.

One is put in mind here of the gubernatorial elections in Maine in recent years.

So let's say Bernie goes Green and trump then gets elected. Will we then ALL instantly become dead men - and women - walking? I don't know but it seems unlikely. Too many restraints exist on what a President is allowed to do. I could see the republicans themselves joining with democrats to remove a President trump if he just becomes too much of a turd-brained embarrassment to everybody.

If that happened then such would not doubt redound to the advantage of some party other than the republicans.

If impeachment and conviction/resignation does not happen and trump goes on to be such a fuck-up that george bush, jr. seems a genius in comparison, then trump will be voted out in four years and some party will reap the benefit of his gawdawful Presidential reign, again to the detriment of the republican party.

In either case the republican party is hurt, and hurt badly, perhaps even fatally.

I really do not see HRC as the new modern-day Jesus, saving us all from the madness of the republican party in general and donald trump in particular.

IOW, I do not buy into the meme, now being promoted by DNC apparatchiks and old-line democrats in general that we MUST vote for HRC, and we MUST NOT vote third party or refrain from voting because doing so helps to elect trump - and trump is Satan incarnate - and if he were to be elected we would all turn into rock salt like Lot's wife or something similarly horrible - so he MUST BE STOPPED at any and all costs - even electing a bag of crap like HRC. So their advice is we progressives must NEVER knock HRC in any way, but only say nice things about her, because she is our last firewall to prevent a trump Presidency, and we will all die if that were to happen, yadda, yadda, yadda, so please vote HRC, she is our SAVIOR, blah, blah blah.

Well, Fuck that Fucking Shit. I am god damn sick of hearing it. Tell it to the Marines, mothergrabbers.

Plus - it is fuckloads of fun to poke a stick into the eye of diehard party-first democratic sycophants by telling them we would NEVER in million years vote for a crooked lying influence-pedaling P.O.S. like HRC - or vote to let Slick Willie and his slick little willie get anywhere near the White House. Hell, the cleaning crews haven't yet got all the semen stains out of the draperies since those two creeps last graced 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.

#136--#137---FWIW I don't think Bernie Sanders is going to take Stein up on that offer. At the beginning of his campaign he pledged that he would support the democratic nominee and wouldn't make a third party run. Notwithstanding that IMO the democratic party has done plenty to undermine his campaign--some of which was more than probably illegal and much else of which was very unethical and favoring his opponent. To me that's good reason to say 'Fuck these guys!' but I don't think he's going to do it. If he did though IMO it would change the dynamic of the entire election--I think the Green party numbers would at least head into the twenties--making it a for real three party race.

Keeping in mind as well that if Sanders were then to somehow pull out a win in November--he'd literally have 0 support in the House or the Senate from either side. The democrats viewing him as someone who went back on his word and betrayed them and the republicans thinking he's a socialist/communist who is the antithesis of Ronald Reagan. It might be nearly impossible for him to get any of his agenda passed. Trump would have some of the same issues though at least some support from republicans in the House and the Senate--though effectively I don't see him accomplishing much.

Hillary is the only one I can see getting anything done--though there will be a lot of resistance to her as well---and the question then is whether what she will try to accomplish will be good for ordinary Americans?--and I have real doubts about that. Her connections to banks and multinationals--to oil companies and pharmaceuticals to the private prison industry etc. etc. etc. tells me that sometimes that accomplishing stuff isn't always a good thing.

Basically however November turns out the next four years is going to be shit. If you don't have a helmet to put on--you better get one. The 2020 election already promises to be exponentially even more explosive. Even more people are going to be looking for even more alternatives than what the two major parties have to offer. If they both continue as they are doing---become even more useless their grip on power is going to break. It's a matter of time.

If 20 years from now sea levels have risen 9 feet (as many scientists are predicting)--swamping coastal cities and areas and possibly as many as 12 functioning nuclear power plants just along the east coast--there are other nightmare scenarios that could be heading our way that would make the disaster of a 4 year Trump presidency seem like very small potatoes. It's reason why we need a true progressive leader who isn't beholden to anyone--who will make the right decisions. Sanders did not like all the other major party presidential candidates say that international terrorism was the biggest threat on the horizon to the United States---he said climate change.

>138 lriley: "If 20 years from now sea levels have risen 9 feet (as many scientists are predicting)"

How many?

Wild stuff this HRC business, putting lots of people in bed with people they will wish in the morning they hadn't slept with.

Many states have "sore loser" rules that prevent those who have run for the nomination for one party from appearing on the ballot in the general election under a different banner. That would greatly hamper any Sanders switch to the Green Party.

I also think Sanders won't do it, because he knows if he does that means the end of his ability to have any future impact at all in the Senate.

I'm busy, but a couple choice pieces.

Mike Gravel: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Bernie-Sanders-has-Options-by-Mike-Gravel-Berni...
speaks to >141 StormRaven:

And the first mainstream online piece giving full-throated recognition to election incongruities.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/exit-polls-are-the-thing-wherein-to-catch-th...

#142--Agree very much with Gravel that Sanders should link up with Stein and run with the Green Party. This election is very likely his last chance to make a difference and bring his progressive agenda onto a national stage. At 74 years old--being Senator from Vermont really doesn't amount to much. I wouldn't over exaggerate its importance. In any case he could always run for Governor and win. If anyone has ever seen Sanders numbers in Vermont--he pretty much destroys all comers. There's nothing really that the Democratic Party can offer him that amounts to anything he should really care about---what's more as is fairly clear in the huffington post exit poll link--the Democratic Party has undermined his campaign and allowed those exit poll numbers to go pretty much unremarked when it's fairly obvious that they stink. He owes them nothing. Arguing over the democratic plank is not going to stop HRC from ignoring it if she becomes POTUS. His efforts would be much better spent running with the Greens. I'm voting Green whether it's Sanders or Stein makes no difference---I'm voting Green. I suspect a lot of other Sanders supporters particularly among millennials are going to do the same.

Follow on from >132 proximity1: which included

" Think about the shitty country this is: that, all these revelations notwithstanding, it appears that the vast majority of American voters are resigned to marching, robot-like, to the polls in November, pulling the lever or marking their ballot and conferring upon this insufferably arrogant and self-obssesed bitch, the highest political office in the national government. "

-----------------------

We have a national political scene in which the departing incumbent president's job-approval rating hovers around 49 to 51 percent. He has now begun actively campaigning beside his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, herself the subject of a State Department probe into her use of a privately set-up and run home-based e-mail server over which, an F.B.I. investigation revealed, she and some of her staff sent and received and discussed sensitive classified secret State Department matters, putting their security at risk of interception--despite her previous denials of having done so. The State Department probe, previously closed, is now re-opened--with much of the public surprised at the F.B.I. Director's personal and public intervention in attempting to explain his opinions, in the wake of his bureau's own official investigation, that there should be no reasonable ground for the U.S. Attorney-General to refer the case to a federal grand jury for hearing.

In tandem with the above, the two major parties, Democrats and Republicans, are poised to hold national nominating conventions
at which they're each expected to nominate one of the least popular presidential candidates in their party's history. The next nearest --and as some see and argue it, the actual--most popular would-be presidential candidate has, the Democratic party's national elite hope, been effectively sidelined. Whether that happened fairly or not is now disputed and may soon be tested in court in California.

Those voters who've ignored this alternative to the Democratic party's nomination of Hillary Clinton are now divided almost evenly between Clinton and the apparently-likely Republican party challenger, Donald Trump--a multimillionaire or billionaire who has no experience in any elected public office and who stands as something of a scarecrow figure to his opponent's supporters. This seems to be mutually felt by his suppporters toward candidate Clinton.

Meanwhile, the electorate is absorbed by the minutiae of various trivial and superficial issues which passionately and often bitterly divide them by gender, race, age, income and social status leaving virtually no room for any interesting, useful or productive consideration of the nation's needs for political reform and the elimination of widespread and endemic corruption which serves, first and most of all, the national power elite among both parties.

The mutual distrust, anger, bitter and trivially-based divisions in the general public is an ideal scenario for these privileged elite. Their power and control remains complete, safe and in no risk of any serious challenge--which is, as they enter into internecine squabbles of their own, just as they like things: their potential opposition confused, divided and angry at each other, too politically self-centered to organize themselves into any kind of effective opposition.

>143 lriley: " This election is very likely his last chance to make a difference and bring his progressive agenda onto a national stage."

Mr Sanders won't shape any agenda by running as a Green. If he works to help the Democrats retake the Senate, he's in line to become Chair of the Senate Budget Committee. He would certainly be bypassed in favor of Patty Murray if he opposes Ms Clinton in the fall. He has a choice: remain an ineffective outsider (which appears to be his most comfortable position) or gain actual influence as an insider (which would put to lie his revolutionary pretensions and alienate his Berniebros). Tough choice, but the latter would be preferable if he's a practical politician.

142: It actually doesn't address much of anything that I said. He probably cannot appear on the ballot as a Green party candidate in many states because the laws prohibit him from doing so.

>146 StormRaven: All right; please tell me, then: does anything in this breakdown jump out at you as incorrect? https://ballotpedia.org/%22Sore_loser%22_laws_for_presidential_candidates. Looks like those "Sore Loser" laws apply to Presidential candidates in only South Dakota and Texas.

http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Man-Shot-Killed-in-Northwest-DC-38631639...
The DNC's voter expansion data director, shot dead on the street in D.C., nothing stolen.
My eyebrow's raised...

ETA: Could be complete chance. If I were investigating the case, though, I'd want to know more about exactly what his job involved.

>148 davidgn: Probably the reptiloids. Maybe the gnomes. Always fear the gnomes.

Damn straight.

It doesn't cost anything to speculate so I'm going to guess a gay lover's quarrel.

Of course we might find out that it was really an Illuminati hit. I mean, Robert Anton Wilson may not have been insane.

Just something to keep an eye on. I don't jump to conclusions reflexively. Perhaps some others here do, however.

> 152

No joke?

Jumping to conclusions winds up sometimes being the equivalent of jumping on a flaming bag of dog poo.

E.g., about a year ago there was a gay Black guy who was running for mayor of Clarksdale, MS. who was found tortured and murdered near a river bank. It obviously made national news. Internet forums became replete with non-Southerners yammering full blast about the shithole known as Mississippi and how no one was surprised, yadda yadda yadda. Boy, they were having themselves some fun feeling superior to the ignorant rednecks down in Mississippi.

For a couple of hours.

Then the (majority Black) police force in Clarksdale identified the murderer - it was the gay Black guy's gay Black boyfriend. Seems there was some personal dispute.

- Also, the mayor at the time was a Black guy, as are the vast majority of elected officials in Clarksdale. -

Of course I spent a couple of hours on line calling out each and every one of these conclusion-jumping assholes as the assholes they were.

In general. pointing out that most white people in Mississippi are ignorant rednecks is MY job. I don't need no stinking wise-ass Yankees helping me out.

You're quite right; the truth is quite often much more interesting than people's silly preconceptions. Especially when the people in question don't know shit about what they're talking about.

>153 JGL53: At the same time, Jungle53, it would have been a fair assumption...but your point about patience is well taken.

> 155

I am not sure I agree with the possibility of "fair assumption" if and when one generalizes from the many to the one example, at first blush, speaking as if it were just a given. Perhaps agnosticism for at least the first couple of hours, or perhaps days, seems to me a splendid idea in all cases which do not involve a forced choice in some gun-to-the-head situation. I.e., just emoting an immediate reaction to some serious matter into the public square in a non-joking way - wherein one has no personal knowledge of the facts - may not be highly recommended if one cares to avoid potentially winding up with egg on ones face.

>156 JGL53: Fair enough.

This Is What Hillary Clinton's Advisors Really Think Of The American Public --by Tyler Durden
Jul 12, 2016 2:54 PM / zerohedge.com

To more easily read the substantive part of Durden's reference (without having to go through the tide of annoying advertisers at ZeroHedge) simply go straight to the pertinent comment by Robert Reich at his Facebook page.

"Acquaintance" (on the phone to Robert Reich) : "Don't you think your blog post from last night was a bit harsh?"

#158----it's hardly surprising. I expect once she's elected she's going to flip again on TPP. I can't recall once in my lifetime that she and her husband haven't been full bore in favor of any trade bill that's been up for ratification. Her initial view on the TPP was that 'it was the gold standard of all trade bills'. She flipped to being anti-TPP simply because Sanders was getting very good leverage from being anti-TPP. Sanders has been against just about every if not every neo-lib/neo-con trade bill since the Nafta in 1992-93. So he's been where he's always been and she's positioned herself now where she's never been. I suspect that once elected there will be some faux negotiation to tweak some point or two of the bill and then she'll declare that the renegotiation has fixed everything and then her administration will push it through congress and it will pass--no matter how harmful it turns out---it will pass. Republicans lawmakers can't resist these kinds of bills either.

As a by the way Tim Kaine the Senator from Virginia--who is supposedly one of the handful of politicians being considered for VP has come out and pretty much called people who oppose TPP as 'losers'--borrowing terminology from Trump if you will. Kaine is very much pro-corporatist and pro-bank. If he actually is her choice for VP that would pretty much send a signal where she's heading on trade bills, fracking and a few other things she's flipped on.

To a good % of the public discussion over politics is more a discussion over personalities than policy. Dependent on ideology this politician or that is assigned either a white or a black hat.

Here's a very interesting piece, supposedly from a DNC insider. I haven't authenticated or vetted, but this is electrifying reading. And it's a clear reminder that nothing is settled until the convention is done and over.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/don-ford/lets-have-a-talk-about-the-current-state...

ETA: Please read the preceding in the context of the following:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump...

Polls are now showing Clinton statistically tied with Trump, with one poll showing Trump ahead by seven points.

ETA: And this:
http://usuncut.com/politics/hillary-clinton-bad-week/
"This was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s best week — How it turned into a total nightmare"

ETA: I have no idea what to make of the Facebook post, but the fact of the matter is it's DEFINITELY making the rounds.

And in today's un-news...
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/

Alt-media
http://usuncut.com/politics/dnc-email-leak-exposes-bias/
http://usuncut.com/politics/dnc-leaks-9-emails/

http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-bernie-list-directory-pho...

> 161

HRC and the DNC are scum-sucking pieces of pure shit.

N.e.v.e.r.t.h.e.l.e.s.s........ Let's vote for and elect HRC so as to stop donald trump, a bigger, oranger piece of shit.

No, really. Take your medicine, Amurica.

We can't let the perfect be the enemy of the ........ second smelliest piece of shit in present Amurican politics.

In a nutshell, we must bite the bullet - to dodge the bullet.

Nope. There is no dodging this bullet. There is no good option but a third option. I ain't marching anymore.

I voted for Jill Stein last time--so it's not going to be hard to do the same again. Even when a voter opts in his/her mind for a lesser evil---they are choosing evil. That's fine if you're a masochist.

>164 lriley: You too? ;-)
Stein was good enough to come and speak to the Occupy the PGA event in Benton Harbor, MI back in 2012 (some nice photos at the link, though they didn't get her appearance).

(And incidentally, the organizer of that event, the Rev. Edward Pinkney, is now languishing in state prison on trumped-up felony charges stemming from a zero-evidence allegation that he falsified signatures altered dates on a recall petition for the Benton Harbor mayor -- Jim Crow justice to make a Klansman blush!

ETA:

Rev. Pinkney remains in prison, serving a 3-10 year term for altering the dates on petitions to recall the Mayor of Benton Harbor. However, according to Victoria Collier and Ben-Zion Ptashnik, who covered the trial in depth for Truthout:

“There was absolutely no evidence to convict Pinkney, and, legally, the altering of a petition document should have been a misdemeanor offense. Instead, they charged him with felony forgery - though no signatures were forged and all signatories testified that they signed willingly on the correct day. Incredibly, the all-white jury was urged by the prosecutor to believe that direct evidence was not required; they only had to "believe" that Pinkney was motivated to cheat and that he "could" have changed the dates while circulating the petitions.”

In reality, Rev. Pinkney is guilty of being an enemy of the Whirlpool Corporation and their crony politicians. Stein is the only politician drawing national attention to his case.)

>164 lriley: Even when a voter opts in his/her mind for a lesser evil---they are choosing evil. That's fine if you're a masochist.

Imagining that you're choosing something is a simpleton view of voting. In reality, it's a mathematical game; you're trying to make a move that will produce an optimal outcome for you. Masochism is making a suboptimal move because you "don't want to choose evil". If you live in a state that's locked up who its electoral votes are going to, then the marginal effect of an extra vote for Jill Stein might be worth more to you then the minute potential to change the election. If you live in Florida, a vote for Clinton that keeps Trump out of office is worth way more than a vote for Stein and Trump wins.

Again, masochism is a Trump presidency because you voted irrationally.

#166--if Stein gets to 5% next time around the Green Party gets federal matching funds. The rest of your post---blah, blah, blah.

> 166

Yes, that is my thinking. I will vote for Stein and no harm, no foul because I live in a very red state wherein trump will win by hundreds of thousands of ignorant redneck votes. I think I have made this point before but I am nothing if not redundant.

For each person living in a purple state - there is a miniscule chance his or her individual vote will tell the tale - i.e., if HRC wins by one vote and that vote was yours, then, well, there you are - good job. OTOH, if you have voted Green then, what, there is now a tie - so that is not good. I think the odds of such a scenario actually occurring in real life must be incredibly small - like vanishingly small - but I leave the decision to those in purple states (who are not going to listen to my advice anyway, even if exposed to it, which is another vanishingly small probability).

What I was really referring to in my post #162 is the fact that millions of voters will make the "lesser of" calculation and vote HRC. It doesn't matter who likes it, including me, davidgn, Iriley, or whomever. And voters in aggregate make the call, not any individual, at a 99.9999 confidence level. That is my only theme here.

And that is why I feel perfectly comfortable voting Green. And it is why I see no point in proselytizing others to do the same. They either will or they won't, and so what, individually-speaking?

In the final analysis, my vote will serve no actual or pragmatic purpose other than me doing my patriotic duty and voting - and in utter compliance with my conscience. And that is what really matters when all is said and done, isn't it cousins?

Also, BTW, I think Michael Moore's analysis of the election and where all the shit will really go down is very possibly correct.

On the Bill Maher show this week Moore made the point that trump will probably win the states that Romney did (206 electoral votes) and he then needs only 64 votes to get to 270.

The mid-west sort of Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan together are 64 votes.

Moore, who hangs out in these places, has detected an undercurrent of fear, hate and frustration - not to mention overt racism - that indicates to him the blue collar white vote may turn out in such numbers and vote for trump that he has a good shot at winning these four states.

I think that could happen. It certainly is not to be utterly ruled out. So be afraid, be very afraid, is Moore's point and I agree.

I certainly hope that will not occur - but if hope were dope I would be high as a kite right now.

>166 prosfilaes: >167 lriley: Amazing how in a 'democracy' so many people call you names for voting your conscience.

>170 RickHarsch: Amazing how in a 'democracy' so many people call you names for voting your conscience.

It's amazing how in a democracy, a system that gives power to the people to make decisions, that so many people will demand that you make decisions wisely. It's almost like with power comes responsibility, to vote with your brain, not your gut.

>169 JGL53: The mid-west sort of Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan together are 64 votes.

It's a story, but it doesn't seem to be as neat as that in reality. http://www.270towin.com/ gives you the option of showing the "2012 actual" in its "Select a Starting View". http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ shows 538's latest estimates, and you can click through to the polls themselves. Wisconsin and Michigan are fairly clearly in Clinton's court. Ohio and Pennsylvania are too close to call. If we take the 270towin "2016 toss-up map", which has Michigan blue and the rest of those states grey, and set Nevada, Colorado and Virginia to blue, Florida is a must-switch state for the Republicans to win... which doesn't seem that unlikely, unfortunately.

If the Democrats keep Florida and Virginia, the Republicans must win all of PA,OH,NC,WI, plus three of CO, NV, IA and NH to win. (270towin does most of the calculating for stuff like that, which is convenient.) Florida seems like it's going to be the swing state again.

>169 JGL53:

Note to Michael Moore :

That's not even a French flag on the hat, Michael. "Made in China"?

http://www.c-span.org/video/?413130-1/bernie-sanders-delegates-hold-news-confere...

Required viewing. Bernie Delegates news conference.

>171 prosfilaes: Don't you think, P, that there has been far more than enough people telling others what is smarter? Do you have to start up, too? I haven't voted in a US election since 1980--but as my brain and gut are quite well aligned I do not fall into your paradigm.

As for your democracy, well, if you can't see it's an oligarchy, then start over, read C.Wright Mills' Power Elite, think it though with your brain, the big one so many here are apparently lacking, and when you come to realize that the system hasn't any spare change for the voter to buy decision making with, come back and lecture Iriley and davidgn--and me.

>174 RickHarsch: Don't you think, P, that there has been far more than enough people telling others what is smarter?

It turns out that people who accuse others of being masochists are going to get some feedback on that line. And what is this forum but an forum for people to argue about what the best choice is?

if you can't see it's an oligarchy,

Bill Clinton was the son of a traveling salesman, stepson of a man who owned a car dealership. Ronald Reagan was an actor, the son of a salesman. Hillary Clinton is the daughter of a textile wholesaler and a housewife. Romney is a Mormon (!?!) and Obama is the son of an anthropologist and a (black) Kenyan economist, stepson of a Indonesian geographer. You've got an oligarchy here that has few similarities beyond starting out at least middle class. They're all Christian (but no longer all Protestant); that's about it. Whatever your complaints about the system are, I don't see that an "oligarchy" is anything but a huge stretch.

>175 prosfilaes: Well, I haven't kept track of who calls who what, but both you and your interlocutors are generally rather restrained.

As for the oligarchy, your argument is rather barren. It does not take into account who puts these people into power, who keeps them in line, who they are beholden to. No true democracy could have as inequitable a spread of income as the US. Again, C. Wright Mills back in the 1950s laid it out pretty succinctly, the concept of interlocking directorates (think Cheney and Halliburton) remaining as accurate a dissection of how power in the US works as any I've come across. Who gained from the war in Iraq? Why did Obama not take on Wall Street as Iceland did its criminal bankers?

>176 RickHarsch: It does not take into account who puts these people into power, who keeps them in line, who they are beholden to.

Who? I think this deserves some explicitness. Ultimately, there's a lot of unhealthy influence in our political system, and you may not classify it as a "true democracy", but there is no neat set of people running things like a true oligarchy. There's a diverse set of people with money and sometimes just influence who don't view themselves as a coordinated group, don't act as a coordinated group, and don't act to preserve the power of that group as a group. The people with power are no longer the Lowells and Cabots, male folk from the old WASP families, but a more mixed selection of Americans.

Biased and problematic and this, that and the other, it's simply not the neat, closed group of a oligarchy. I would say it is the messy group of movers and shakers of a real-world republican democracy.

No true democracy could have as inequitable a spread of income as the US. ... Why did Obama not take on Wall Street as Iceland did its criminal bankers?

I think you're missing the fact that Americans are largely capitalists who believe rags to riches stories.

You remember how, when Nixon was re-elected, a lot of people on the left could hardly believe that his supporters could be so blind to his many dangerous traits? What was to become the Watergate scandal had already occurred by November of 1972 and the emerging facts simply confirmed what so many liberals already thought about Nixon. And yet many Nixon supporters stubbornly defended and made excuses for him. I recall at the time thinking--and saying to others--"if these circumstances concerned a politician of my party, I'd denounce that person."

Well, the Democratic party has long since ceased to be anything resembling what I'd consider "my party," but I still consider myself obliged to denounce the Clintons rather than defend and make excuses for them as Nixon's loyalists then did for their selfish and deluded ideas of him.

Trump's megalomania is matched by a deep-seated sense of insecurity. The wealth, needs for power, authority and control over others are compensation for the insecurity which, for him, I believe, is the real major factor in his life. Very simply, this is not a man who is at ease with himself as he knows himself to be. So what we're given and what we see is a very labored drama acted out relentlessly whenever he's in public or, indeed, with anyone in whose presence he's unable to let down his guard. That would be practically everyone outside a small circle of family members.

Wealth doesn't ensure a secure sense of self-worth and ease. It's a matter of his personality. For extreme contrast, take Franklin Roosevelt for example. He held and used both wealth and power but didn't need it to bolster his sense of well-being.
Warren Buffett and George Soros are similar in this.

It's mainly this that makes Trump a poor choice for public office rather than what the major press warns us of. He does have lots of bad ideas but many of them simply won't work and aren't ever going to be implemented.

That's not so of HRC. When she has a bad idea--which is often and usual--its implementation spells a disaster or a crisis. I think where Michael Moore and nearly all other liberals like him get things most wrong is in their belief that Clinton, for all her faults, can and shall save us from someone significantly worse than herself--Trump.

But unlike Clinton, who's a disaster as the substitute for a genuine liberal democrat, Trump is nothing particularly unusual from the right-wing. The things which actually set him apart from the rest of the RW political crowd are his candor, his challenge to technocratic rule from whatever party, and his general populist iconoclastic tendencies.

Otherwise he's not very different in knowledge, experience or temperament from Nixon (his nearest psychol. counterpart) or from Reagan or George W. Bush--in their earliest political days.

Trump is loud and makes a big scene but I don't think he holds anything like the dangers for the country that the Clintons do and have already done.

> It is an oligarchy, but not in the neat sense your definition requires. But it IS rule of the many by the very few and that few is not very fluid. Your last sentence you perhaps should think about. The US progressed towards an equitable tax structure that in, say, the 70s made enough sense, was fair enough because there was also a good enough welfare safety net. That was destroyed by Uber-olligarchs.

>177 prosfilaes: Ultimately, there's a lot of unhealthy influence in our political system, and you may not classify it as a "true democracy", but there is no neat set of people running things like a true oligarchy.

Maybe not a "true oligarchy" but its closer to that than a "true democracy".

Open insurrection: Live on CNN, Bernie addresses his delegates ahead of DNC to boos, jeers and heckling at the mention of Clinton, chants of "We Want Bernie!"
And now DWS has just decided she won't be showing her face. Smart move.

> 181

It is available on youtube now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRbBVULW73M

I myself don't hate Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I just think she is a total piece of white trash who should be tarred and feathered and rode out of Philadelphia on a rail. In fact, I promise to donate $5 to the democratic party if they would actually do that.

>182 JGL53: That was earlier. The Bernie episode probably still isn't up yet, but I'll post it if I see it.

ETA: Here's a very short clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYeHOGuiPmU

Here we go! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqRzdojkiJQ

Wasserman Schultz simply should have never been in the position she was in. I'll go so far as saying I hope she loses her congressional district over this and leave it at that.

The democratic party needs to fix its DNC. Part of the problem is the personality cult in politics (both major parties) overrides policy all the time. This shitshow became more about getting someone elected and it didn't matter what the candidates had to say about anything. The democratic party and the DNC needs to start getting its ducks in a row---they should start by getting at least some general information about what their grassroots party members and what the American public want on the entire myriad of issues---to work on that and let candidates come forward that will push progressive policies forward.

This DWS led DNC resembled more an exclusive high school sorority and college fraternity whose leading members were barely able to conceal their contempt for a candidate who was strong on policy but didn't have the brand name recognition of their favorite. Basically it shows me that the DNC is about as clueless about the needs of the American population as it's possible to be. Are they criminals? No. Are they jerks? Yes. I'd say dump them all and clean house.

> 185

It remains to be seen if the democratic party, because of people like HRC and DWS, have now jumped the shark and we are all off to a trump presidency, regardless of the incredible number of (fill in the blank bad thing) of which trump is guilty.

In the final analysis a vote for trump will be seen by a certain number of people as the only way to tell the whole political establishment in this country to please eat shit and die.

There is a growing number of people who now think HRC is as bad a choice as trump. There is a growing number of people now, thanks to DWS and company, who think HRC is a WORSE choice than trump.

Will these disillusioned people be of such a number as to elect trump? That is the question, the answer to which - at this juncture - is pure speculation.

Let's see how the democratic convention goes.

And then let's see how the debates go.

And then let's see how much more of a crappy campaigner HRC can be as compared trump.

-

Thank god I am an atheist or I would be screaming up at the heavens right now, Job-like, asking de Lawd "What the eff have we Amuricans done to deserve this pain and seeming destruction of all that well-meaning people hold as righteous and dear?"

>186 JGL53: There is a growing number of people now, thanks to DWS and company, who think HRC is a WORSE choice than trump.

Thanks to, you know, the Russians. Perhaps that should give people pause, but it seems that believing in people pulling the strings only applies when it's the people we want to attack.

>186 JGL53: The answer would be clear, but a long list.

Still, I think Clinton will win handily. I think the DWS is nothing to most folks in the long run. And Sanders' endorsement should take care of the rest. She isn't a great campaigner, true, but is far better at controlling herself than Trump and will probably be quite good and knowing when to pounce and knowing when to let his idiocies speak for themselves. I think the number of your eat shit and diers are fewer than you think. They're just loud. Think of Hillary as our generation's 1968 Nixon. The quiet majority is still a majority.

eta #

179> It is an oligarchy, but not in the neat sense your definition requires. But it IS rule of the many by the very few and that few is not very fluid.

Who? If it is very few, then name them!

Frankly, I don't give a damn who hacked the server. And furthermore, whether it was the Russians or not, I'd expect the Clinton campaign (and the entire Mighty Wurlitzer behind it) to say it was.

>189 prosfilaes: You want their social security numbers as well? or How few is few to yew.

Good god: military, oil, insurance, arms, banks...The United Fruit Company! Enough said? Do you really not understand the driving force behind US foreign policy? Are the average USAmerican joes demons, or, please let it be true, the folk up there at the top who murder opposition politicians and install dictatorships? Who supported 80% (financially) of the post-war French war effort in Vietnam? Who decided not to allow the agreed upon free elections, propping up a dictator later killed with US complicity in Vietnam? Who wanted war with Iraq? I didn't. Did you? Did the great democracy vote on whether the war was worth the lies it took to bring it about?

I know you are not daft, so I can't see why this is necessary.

Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism

Whether or not it was hacked by the Russians---the content of what was hacked showed the DNC undermined one of it's candidates to and for the benefit of another---a subverting of the democratic process and something the DNC absolutely should not have been doing. Without that there would be no controversy and no cause for anger.

So I don't give a shit who did the hacking either.

Whether or not it was hacked by the Russians---the content of what was hacked showed the DNC undermined one of it's candidates to and for the benefit of another---a subverting of the democratic process and something the DNC absolutely should not have been doing.

Exactly what did the DNC do? What we've seen is one suggestion to ask him a question he wouldn't want to answer in front of an audience that might not like his answer - a suggestion that was not adopted, and a collection of private e-mails that talk about Sanders with some contempt.

So what did they actually do to "undermine" the candidate? What actions did they take? Specifics please.

>192 davidgn: Grazie

It seems that the Sanders campaign doesn't agree with those who think that the election was somehow "stolen" from them: https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/757704927036772352

The actions of Sanders supporters thus far have demonstrated to the world that their support was never about supporting Sanders and the agenda he represented. If it was, when Sanders asks for people to support the party's candidate, they would do so. He knows that the only chance for any of his agenda to get enacted or implemented is a Clinton administration. None of his proposals have any chance if Trump is President. The remainder of his career in the Senate would be spent sitting impotently on the sidelines if there is a Trump administration. Anyone who supports Sanders' vision would heed his call to support the party's candidate.

As far as many Sanders supporters go, it is now clear that their support was never about the agenda, but was only about vanity and childish foot stomping.

Mr Sanders is learning first hand how politically naive his most fervent supporters are.

> 196, 197

Ah, yes, the sensible and rational ones speak. Thanks, mom and dad.

Too bad in the real world you two can't go around and spank each and every one of the BernieBros and put them all to bed without their suppers.

- Of course it is all about numbers. If the younger, darker, more educated voters - who generally vote democratic in the Presidential years - all get excited about stopping trump and come out and vote for HRC, then all will be well. That is certainly true.

But if not, then not.

I make no predictions. It is HRC's to lose. That is quite clear.

We are just gonna hafta see what the future holds. So far, HRC and the DNC seem hell-bent on getting everyone in the country to hate them - except HillaryDittoHeads like you. lol.

But they can turn it around. Anything can happen.

Me - I'm not a gambler. I wouldn't bet on this race with the house money.

Ah, yes, the sensible and rational ones speak.

At least you realize that your position is irrational and stupid.

One has to wonder, given that, why you hold to it?

>196 StormRaven: Do not rush to judgment: I hear tell that much ado was made by non-delegates in a delegate only meeting, for one instance. And recall the tea party: loud but not many. The convention is a show and so more attention may be grabbed by the few...I would guess 90% of long-term Sanders supporters will vote for Clinton.

As for the DWS bullshit--was it ever in doubt that the Democrat establishment was Hillary's? Sanders did great. Maybe there will be some effect in the long run, if not, maybe an energized opposition will remain energized.

Sarah Silverman brings the rationality:

"Can I just say, to the "Bernie or Bust" people, you're being ridiculous."

Mic drop.

201: Every one of the people that the die-hard Sandernistas claim to love is endorsing Clinton. Sanders, Warren, Franken. Everyone. The Sanders supporters are currently booing Booker.

> 201

Sarah Silverman uses the (actual) N-word in her act AND she tells Holocaust jokes. PLUS, in one episode of her old show entitled "The Sarah Silverman Program", Sarah performs analingus on her pet dog.

So, then, well, theoria, maybe you are not the radical uptight feminist I was convinced you were. Good on you.

Mic drop.

> 202

It is indeed a sad world, i.e., people just being too dumb to triangulate the moral issues - like one would think they would.

Well, we must soldier on. I am sure, nevertheless, amidst all the booing at the horror of the second worst politician in Amurica today becoming POTUS, the inevitable will happen, followed by the Big Inevitability on Nov. 8. Then we can all settle down to a nice quiet life and put all this ugliness behind us.

In the meantime, just for fun, let's all guess what The Clinton Foundation's final take will be by the end of 2024.

I'm going to guess 50 Billion.

(I know this seems high but many of you no doubt just don't appreciate the potential that TCF has. Domestically, maybe only 5 billion will be vacuumed in - it is the foreign money that will come in such giant fucking wads that most citizens today can't even begin to imagine.

>202 StormRaven: They booed Warren too.

Okay Berniesta's, Bernie just explained why you should support Clinton. Your move.

> 205

It may be too late, Mr. less-than-genius.

And don't blame Bernie Sanders and his followers for the looming failure caused by you and yours - the less-than-geniuses - who nominated a god damn loser like Hillary Goddam Clinton - who looks like she may very well lose to the orange nazi asshole:

http://www.businessinsider.com/nate-silver-donald-trump-polls-2016-7

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/25/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-poll/index.h...

Thanks for nothing, you absolute fools - by nominating HRC you may very well have elected trump.

And again, if and when trump cleans HRC's clock - DO NOT blame Sanders or his followers - blame yourselves for voting for the nomination of the stinking turd in a pantsuit in the first god damn place.

Triangulate THAT, Mothergrabbers.

>205 StormRaven:
I don't vote for proto-fascists. I don't vote for neocon-endorsed warmongers who never met an ill-advised foreign intervention they didn't like. If the Democrats won't nominate the strongest candidate -- and the only one I could bring myself to vote for -- then there's simply no choice other than Stein. My take-away from tonight is that there will be no writing in Bernie Sanders. The Green Party must now be made into a major party in this country.

> 207

Time is of the essence. We may be able to determine a month or so out from November that voting for Stein is the only hope left to stop trump. We shall see. Maybe HRC and her TPP-humping, fracking-loving pasty-faced white boy VP can turn this thing around. I will wait and see but not with bated breath.

Here's something to warm the hearts of republiKlans everywhere:

From CNN link listed in post #206 -

"...The new findings mark Trump's best showing in a CNN/ORC Poll against Clinton since September 2015. Trump's new edge rests largely on increased support among independents, 43% of whom said that Trump's convention in Cleveland left them more likely to back him, while 41% were dissuaded. Pre-convention, independents split 34% Clinton to 31% Trump, with sizable numbers behind Johnson (22%) and Stein (10%). Now, 46% say they back Trump, 28% Clinton, 15% Johnson and 4% Stein...."

Even with Johnson taking nearly four times as many independent votes out of the mix than Stein, trump still wins 46 per cent of independent votes compared to 28 per cent for HRC.

Throw in the millions of those "progressives" who normally vote democrat who will not this time and what do we have?

The HRC numbnut supporters may very well have destroyed this country by nominating a shit-stain like HRC and thus allowing a larger shit-stain like trump to win.

Thanks again, HillaryBots. So how's that "lesser of evils" thingie working out for ya?

I don't vote for neocon-endorsed warmongers who never met an ill-advised foreign intervention they didn't like.

How is it living in that delusional bubble of yours? You're proving what I said earlier to be correct: You were never about Bernie's agenda, you were just in it for the vanity and childish temper tantrums.

If the Democrats won't nominate the strongest candidate -- and the only one I could bring myself to vote for -- then there's simply no choice other than Stein.

Have fun trying to elect someone who has never held elective office in her life. I'm sure her positions in favor of homeopathy and in opposition to vaccines don't bother you at all.

My take-away from tonight is that there will be no writing in Bernie Sanders. The Green Party must now be made into a major party in this country.

It will never happen. The Green Party is a grandstanding vanity project and nothing more.

> 209

Every time now when I read one of SR's steaming jeremiads I get this vivid vision arising inside my giant head of Jehovah god hurling down huge thunderbolts from the mountaintop to destroy the apostates who are worshipping The Golden Bernie. Uh, I mean, Calf.

lol.

Indeed, it's the very fact that we are not infantile adults having a temper tantrum which obliges us to pay attention when our political adversaries offer us rare glimpses of their actual working assumptions about politics and our roles in it.

Thus, when they talk down to us, describing us as petulant children, when they lecture us on how we're obliged to fall into line with the views and exhortations of a campaigner in whom we'd placed our trust to faithfully represent and defend our political views, they reveal their true contempt for any worthy idea of democratic practice. These people who would presume to lecture us like we were unruly children expose their real views of democracy and what we can expect from their practical views about it. We're expected to take whatever we're served and shut up and be grateful for it.

At the very most, what they and the candidates they expect us to settle for are offering is a vision of democratic life in which we get lots of distracting technological gadgetry—which happens to be immensely convenient as tools for supervision of every aspect of our once-private lives—but next-to-nothing in genuine self-respecting democratic rights and responsibilities.

That's in part because these people want us all to surrender (to others whom they'll designate for us) the cares and burdens that come with our poltical responsibilities because they're simply too busy or too lazy to be concerned enough to deal witht them. They tell us that this is simply the fact of modern life as it is—yet another “there is no alternative,” claimed flatly and fatalistically. Theirs is the “happy-slave” vision of democracy, a puny vision of democratic life. That's the best we're allowed to expect from it. We're supposed to accomodate ourselves to a moron's ideas of what democracy can and should be—the resigned life of the happy slave.

By another view of democracy, Bernie Sanders is neither our political master, guide or even our leader. Instead, he's the temporary representative of our political desires and claims for democratic practice. He draws whatever legitimacy he may enjoy from us and not the other way around. We owe Senator Sanders nothing but our fair-minded support and vigilance for so long as he is faithful to our ambitions for this potential democratic order. If he at some point betrays that or fails to live up to our expectations, then such are his faults and short-comings, not ours.

I am not interested in the offer to join the company of happy slaves in their imbecilic concepts of the best that we can expect from democratic life. If these people are happy to settle for such a puny vision, let them go and live in Britain where it is firmly entrenched.

The fact is that we do indeed see and understand some important things about our dysfunctional pseudo-democratic order. First, you do not “stop” the 'Donald Trumps' by electing Hillary Clinton. Instead, at best, you put off to a later date and to far worse circumstances a reckoing which cannot be avoided at last. Just as likely is that, in the meantime, your blind attachment to partisan nonsense and venality will lead you--as it is now leading you-- to embrace things which are actually much worse than the things you foolishly regard as certainties about those you warn of as such great dangers to the nation's political order. The Clintons are the full-scale embrace of this broken and failed political and electoral system. They stand for and ensure its worsening continuation, not reform and certainly not a challenge or turning away from all that is so wrong with our political society of a tiny handful of “haves” versus the vast majority of the rest us—both willingly and unwillingly shut-out of any meaningful part in the political life of the nation.

To elect Clinton is to indulge in the worst kind of cheap, shallow political vanity project. And yet, we're accused of having vain pretentions for democratic life! The fucking nerve!

They have no lessons to offer us! When the best one can offer is a future as happy slaves in a tightening oligarchic technocracy, then one is exposing one's self and one's vision as an outrageously arrogant and disgusting failure.

We neither want or need it and we're certainly not going to calmly accept it as inevitable.

>206 JGL53: And again, if and when trump cleans HRC's clock - DO NOT blame Sanders or his followers - blame yourselves for voting for the nomination of the stinking turd in a pantsuit in the first god damn place.

Primarily, we should blame Republicans who allowed such an unprepared, unsuitable person to come this close to the presidency.

Reportedly, right after the RNC, his moment of great triumph, Trump looked into super PACs to oppose Cruz and Kasich in any future elections--can you imagine how he would use the nuclear codes if ever he got his small hands on them?

... "Trump looked into super PACs to oppose Cruz and Kasich in any future elections--can you imagine how he would use the nuclear codes if ever he got his small hands on them?"

What the hell is that even supposed to mean?

Do you know even the first fucking thing about nuclear-weapon launch-order protocols without first looking them up?

Go on! Goddamn it! Tell us: just what the fuck do _you_ imagine him doing? huh!? You have no fucking idea what you're talking about. But it sounds so scary that you'll just throw it out there for dramatic effect.

Come on! Tell us what Frankentrump will do with those "nuclear codes" if he's elected. Yours is bullshit scare-mongering.

But this isn't : when that ugly bitch Clinton gets into office and puts the TTIP through on a fast-track a lot of people who are now struggling and just managing to get by are going to think some delinquent has unleashed the virtual equivalent of a nuclear bomb on their lives' prospects.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/26/85116/
An Update on the Hate…

…The hate, that is, of reigning corporate Democrats for the many tens of millions of left-leaning progressives and liberals stuck in the ranks of the Dismal Dollar Democratic (DDD) Party. Perhaps, dear CounterPunch reader, you saw my May 26 CP essay “Feel the Hate,” in which I detailed various ways in top corporate and imperial Clinton Democrats have expressed this patrician contempt from the first two Clinton administrations (1993-2000) through the Bernie Sanders campaign and the spring of this year.

I don’t have time or energy to synopsize all that history here so please peruse that essay here before continuing on. It’s not a pretty story.
....
“The Barn Door Open”

Meanwhile, mass populist and working class resentment abhors a left, social-democratic vacuum. In steps a Le Pen, a Trump, and, at the historical worst, a Hitler, to take ugly right-nationalist advantage of the sad silence/silencing of the Left. Listen to the following recent Facebook rant from Jeff Upthegrove, a progressive campaign consultant:

“Well surprise, surprise, Donald Trump revealed in his acceptance speech that he’s going to pivot for the general election to those populist and working class issues around which the Democrats have dropped the ball these last 20 years. He’ll keep the belligerent nationalism and the xenophobia, but he’ll add opposition to shitty trade deals, opposition to endless wars and interventions, and opposition to blind fealty to Wall Street. It doesn’t matter if he actually believes a word of it. The neoliberal corporatist Clintonist Democrats have left the barn door wide open for too long. Now guess who’s waltzing right in? Yep, fascists that’s who. Nice work idiots.” (emphasis added)

I’d replace “20 years” with “40 years.” It’s too much to call Trump a fascist in my opinion (though his fascistic tendencies are clear enough). I’d add that Trump announced his determination to steal progressives’ populist and anti-Wall Street thunder quite some time ago. Still, that’s a helluva good rant, quite dead on regarding the wide open populist “barn door.” It’s the same with the so-called Labor and Socialist parties of England and Europe.

ETA: More worthwhile commentary:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/26/dont-cry-for-me-dnc-notes-from-the-democr...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/26/pillory-hillary-now/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/26/the-banana-republic-of-america-democracy-...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/26/a-call-to-action-walk-out-from-the-democr...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/26/dnc-now-less-popular-than-atheism/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/26/undermining-bernie-sanders-the-dnc-campai...

>209 StormRaven: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4ixbr5/i_am_jill_stein_green_party_candid...
Mainstream the Green Party, and it won't have to pander to the homeopaths anymore.

#201---I think some people have yet to clue into the idea that the Bernie candidacy wasn't just about Bernie. That there were issues and ideals and policies and so forth that brought people together. The idea we were blindly following Sanders or that we would blindly follow Warren or Franken? (is he really that progressive?). Sanders structured his campaign around issues and policy themes that polling had shown the American public overwhelmingly wanted. What an idea? Who would think of such a thing? Certainly not Clinton or the majority of democratic office holders. Obama did and then he became president and he didn't anymore. Sanders had the utter temerity to ask people what they wanted and encouraged them that they could get it. So he came with big dreams not incremental change. When Bernard surrendered---to me it's simply on to the next who will take the banner up and that's Jill Stein. Too fucking bad if it seems hard to get but you can roll out all these progressive democratic icons but when they're on the wrong side it doesn't mean a thing. Respect and love to Bernie for what he did but I'm not following him any farther.

>194 StormRaven: :

.... " So what did they actually do to "undermine" the candidate? What actions did they take? Specifics please."

POLITICO...

DNC sought to hide details of Clinton funding deal
CAMPAIGN FINANCE 07/26/16 06:32 AM EDT
---------

DNC sought to hide details of Clinton funding deal
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and ISAAC ARNSDORF
----------

CAMPAIGN FINANCE

The Hillary Victory Fund still had $42 million in the bank at the end of June, and it seems likely that more money will be moved to the state parties in the coming months. |

PHILADELPHIA — Leaked emails show the Democratic National Committee scrambled this spring to conceal the details of a joint fundraising arrangement with Hillary Clinton that funneled money through state Democratic parties.

During the three-month period when the DNC was working to spin the situation, state parties kept less than one half of one percent of the $82 million raised through the arrangement — validating concerns raised by campaign finance watchdogs, state party allies and Bernie Sanders supporters.

The arrangement, called the Hillary Victory Fund, allowed the Clinton campaign to seek contributions of hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend extravagant fundraisers including a dinner at George Clooney’s house and a concert at Radio City Music Hall featuring Katy Perry and Elton John. That’s resulted in criticism for Clinton, who has made opposition to big money in politics a key plank in her campaign platform.

Clinton’s allies have responded publicly by arguing that the fund is raising big money to boost down-ballot Democratic candidates by helping the 40 state parties that are now participating in the fund.

But privately, officials at the DNC and on Clinton’s campaign worked to parry questions raised by reporters, as well as Sanders’ since-aborted campaign, about the distribution of the money, according to a cache of hacked emails made public late last week by WikiLeaks.

The emails, released the day before the opening of the Democratic National Convention here, exposed DNC staffers seemingly undermining Sanders’ insurgent campaign against Clinton. The leak hampered the convention’s mission of uniting the party by convincing fervent Sanders supporters to get behind Clinton. And the controversy forced the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a close Clinton ally accused by Sanders backers of using the party apparatus to undermine them.

The emails show the officials agreeing to withhold information from reporters about the Hillary Victory Fund’s allocation formula, working to align their stories about when — or if — the DNC had begun funding coordinated campaign committees with the states. They also show one official blaming Sanders for putting the DNC between “a real rock vs hard place” by forcing “a fight in the media with the party bosses over big money fundraising.”

The DNC’s deputy communications director Eric Walker in late April emailed a group of top officials asserting that the party shouldn’t “discuss funding allocations in the press for the RNC to see what we’re doing.” His boss Luis Miranda responded “There's been no coverage that we've found, which is what we wanted.”

Miranda argued in the emails that the committee should try to shape any coverage by claiming that “while the funds are going to the DNC right now to build tools and capacity for the general election, there will be a point when the funds stay in the states to fund coordinated campaigns that are now beginning to get organized.” But in a subsequent email in early May he admitted he wasn’t sure if the coordinated campaigns with the state parties were already getting started “or does it start later in the summer?”

Wasserman Schultz responded: “It starts now.”

But a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission records shows that very little money from the victory fund went to the states after that point.

Between the creation of the victory fund in September and the end of last month, the fund had brought in $142 million, the lion’s share of which — 44 percent — has wound up in the coffers of the DNC ($24.4 million) and Hillary for America ($37.6 million), according to a POLITICO analysis of FEC filings. By comparison, the analysis found that the state parties have kept less than $800,000 of all the cash brought in by the committee — or only 0.56 percent.

Officials from the DNC and the Clinton campaign did not respond to questions about why so little of the cash raised by the fund has gone to — and remained with — the participating state parties. But they have previously argued that, even when state parties aren’t receiving cash transfers, they are benefiting from the political infrastructure paid for by money raised by the fund.

The fund represents one of the most ambitious hard-dollar fundraising efforts in modern presidential politics. It was made possible by a 2014 Supreme Court decision in a case called McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission that struck down aggregate limits on total giving to federal campaigns. They had capped donations to joint fundraising committees to $123,200 per person per year.

Hillary Victory Fund, which now includes 40 state Democratic Party committee, theoretically could accept checks as large as $436,100 -- based on the individual limits of $10,000 per state party, $33,400 for the DNC, and $2,700 for Clinton's campaign.

Clinton’s GOP rival Donald Trump started a joint committee called Trump Victory with the Republican National Committee and 11 state parties. By including various sub-funds within the RNC, it can accept donations as large as $449,400. But Trump has not shown an ability to raise big checks, and Trump Victory and another Trump joint committee had raised only $32.4 million combined through the end of last month, FEC filings show.

The Hillary Victory Fund still had $42 million in the bank at the end of June, and it seems likely that more money will be moved to the state parties in the coming months. Typically, though, national parties steer disproportionate resources to the handful of states that are legitimately competitive in presidential years, often leaving the party committees in other states grumbling.

But what happens to the cash in the Hillary Victory Fund after its initial distribution is left almost entirely to the discretion of the Clinton campaign’s chief operating officer, Beth Jones, who serves as the treasurer of the victory fund.

FEC filings show that, since the inception of the Hillary Victory Fund, participating state parties have received $7.7 million in transfers, but within a few days of most transfers, almost all of the cash — $6.9 million — was transferred to the DNC.

The only date on which most state parties received money from the victory fund and didn’t pass any of it on to the DNC was May 2, the same day that POLITICO published an article exposing the arrangement. But those deposits were token by comparison: each state received $10,000, compared with transfers that were passed on to the DNC as large as $300,000, FEC records show.

Beyond the transfers, much of the fund’s $42 million in direct spending also appears to have been done to directly benefit the Clinton campaign, as opposed to the state parties.

The fund has paid $4.1 million to the Clinton campaign for “salary and overhead expenses” to reimburse it for fundraising efforts. And it has directed $38 million to vendors such as direct marketing company Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey and digital consultant Bully Pulpit Interactive — both of which also serve the Clinton campaign — for mailings and online ads that sometimes closely resemble Clinton campaign materials.

Campaign finance watchdogs and the Sanders campaign had argued that the arrangement represented a circumvention of campaign contribution limits by a national party apparatus intent on skewing the process to help Clinton defeat Sanders, and then win the White House.

And some participating state party officials and their allies grumble privately that Clinton is merely using the state parties to subsidize her own operation, contending that her allies overstate the fund’s support for their parties.

The fund is a bad deal for state parties, said one operative who works with state party committees. State party officials have been buzzing about the WikiLeak emails, said the operative, arguing they show that “the extent to which the game has been rigged goes much deeper at the DNC than what many of us expected.”

In April, when POLITICO began asking state parties about why they weren’t keeping the money being transferred to them from the fund, officials looped the DNC and urged the states to stonewall, according to the leaked emails.

“There is no reason to share that level of strategic information with a reporter,” wrote Ohio Democratic Party communications director Kirstin Alvanitakis.

But the emails show that officials and lawyers at the DNC and the Clinton campaign became frantic after POLITICO’s May 2 story, which led to substantial follow-up coverage that put the Clinton campaign and the DNC on the defensive. It led the Sanders campaign to accuse the Clinton campaign of “money laundering” and prompted Politifact to downgrade its rating — from “mostly true” to “half true” — of the claim that the bulk of the money collected by the victory fund would go to down-ballot Democrats.

“The DNC should push back DIRECTLY at Sanders and say that what he is saying is false and harmful to the Democratic party,” Marc Elias, an attorney who advises the DNC and the Clinton campaign, wrote in an email to DNC officials.

CEO Amy Dacey responded “I do think there is too much of this narrative out there — I also worry since they are emailing to their list (which has overlap with ours!)”

In another email, Miranda, the communications director, suggested that the campaign tell other journalists seeking to follow POLITICO’s story that “Politico got it wrong.” But the rest of his email failed to indicate any errors in POLITICO’s story, nor did the DNC or the Clinton campaign seek a correction.

Miranda did not respond to a request for comment.

Authors:

Kenneth P. Vogel
kvogel@politico.com
@kenvogel
Isaac Arnsdorf
iarnsdorf@politico.com
@iarnsdorf


© 2016 POLITICO LLC
---------

That there were issues and ideals and policies and so forth that brought people together.

If that were true, then you'd follow Sanders lead and support Clinton. In a Clinton administration, at least some of the ideals and policies he pushed for in his campaign will likely be implemented. Voting for Stein won't accomplish that at all. Those progressive Democratic icons have two huge advantages over Stein when it comes to actually being progressive: (1) They have actually won an election and held office, and (2) they are actually in a position to implement policy.

Voting for Stein is a worthless stompy foot maneuver, and you know it.

>209 StormRaven: I'm sure her positions in favor of homeopathy and in opposition to vaccines don't bother you at all.

That gave me pause, so I looked it up and there doesn't seem to be any truth to it. The Green party platform is pro-homeopathy but apparently she isn't and neither a anti-vaccine.

..." In a Clinton administration, at least some of the ideals and policies he pushed for in his campaign will likely be implemented. "

Nothing that counts would be implemented. That's the whole point of having lied, cheated and stolen to keep Sanders out.

217: That doesn't actually show any "undermining" of the Sanders campaign. If that's the best you've got, you've got nothing.

Nothing that counts would be implemented.

And you know this how?

That's the whole point of having lied, cheated and stolen to keep Sanders out.

Sanders' press secretary doesn't agree with your assessment.

>221 StormRaven:

It completely shows guilt-ridden efforts to hide blatant partisan aid to HRC to the direct detriment of Sanders. Your denial is flagrantly untrue. As I thought, you aren't the slightest bit sincere in asking for details. You don't give a shit for the damning facts. You just put up a challenge in an attempt to shut down the point being made. Well, you asked for details and you got them.

Now you're forced to pretend dishonestly that they don't matter.

Exactly what I figured you'd do.

219: Her public position on both is a mess of pandering and evasion.

It completely shows guilt-ridden efforts to hide blatant partisan aid to HRC to the direct detriment of Sanders.

What aid? That Clinton raised money? How does this actually undermine the Sanders campaign? The claim is that they undermined the campaign. All you've shown is that Clinton was effective. You're grasping at straws and babbling incoherently. Neither is new for you, but neither has ever been effective for you either.

You don't give a shit for the damning facts.

You haven't provided any damning facts.

I wrote you off months ago as having nothing of value to add to any conversation. Given the drivel you've posted here, I see no reason to change that assessment.

But this isn't : when that ugly bitch Clinton

I can't even begin to understand where the BernieBro/misogyny comments come from.

>225 StormRaven:

The e-mails reveal that the DNC, acting in collusion with the Clinton campaign, took money due to state campaign use and funneled it first to the benefit of the HRC effort to the direct benefit of Clinton and deliberately sought to evade questions when asked about the practices--by which some states' Dem. parties were instrumentalized to subsidize the Clinton effort--while Sanders got no such financial favors.

To pretend this is nothing--

... "You haven't provided any damning facts."

-- is a flat out lie.

>213 proximity1: "ugly bitch"

Wipe the spittle off your face and listen up, grasshopper: a trade agreement, even a flawed one, is not in the same league as nuclear war. And a US president has many, many other weapons. We don't need someone unable to control his passions in such a position.

'Bye.

I'm beginning to think Proximity1 is actually a Trump supporter, faking all of it simply to make progressivism and liberalism look like the last refugee of the people who can't buy enough tinfoil for their hats.

>228 margd: "ugly bitch" (I.e. Hillary Clinton)

So then, when pressed to account for your fucking bullshit hyperbole re Trump, it's as pointed out:

You have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

>225 StormRaven: Only a small group of Berniebros, the rump of which is at the DNC, continue to nurse their hurt feelings. Calls of "sellout" directed towards Sanders and Warren are signs of emotional disturbance. However, their numbers do not justify the coddling pleas they are receiving from Democrats and rational people more generally. Let them vote Trump or Stein in November. Let them bathe in the pure waters of self-righteous self-pity. And let them don hairshirts during Ms Clinton's Inauguration.

>231 theoria:

Let you and your lot learn the hard way how Clinton's tenure can make you rue your support of her presidential bid.

The last time there was such a scandalous partisan disregard for a presidential candidate's malfeasance in the quest for that office, it was the Republicans who were disgraced and got, in return for their irresponsible attitudes, the Nixon second term, the Watergate scandal and their hero impeached and forced to resign to avoid being convicted and removed from office.

Shall the first female U.S. president also have the distinction of being the first female president to be impeached, convicted and removed from office?

Imagine! Both Clintons elected, both impeached! What a family! What a fucking disgrace! Now the Democrats, too fucking stupid and arrogant to learn from Republicans' hard lessons, have to go through something similar.

Let them understand how harmful trusting an ugly bitch can be.

Bring it. Bring on the matriarchy.

>231 theoria: And when HRC drags us needlessly into a major war -- a likely outcome, as far as I can see; mark my words -- let her supporters don hairshirts of their own. I'll have nothing to do with her.

For a brief moment, I had hope that the Democratic Party establishment could be saved from itself. Sadly, it seems that Prof. Petras' analysis, which I had initially adopted, has proven more accurate.

>235 davidgn: What "major war" would that be? It's fine to speculate, but could you put some meat on the bones of your claim (with evidence and sourcing)?

Mr Sanders is a politician, not a martyr. He achieved what was achievable.

In his speech, Mr Sanders tried to save the nation. He also tried to save his supporters from themselves. The few who did not listen make themselves irrelevant.

>236 theoria:
There are any number of flashpoints. I'm not going to turn this thread into a world geopolitical overview, and I don't have any crystal ball. I don't even have time right now to dredge up the best analyses in this vein that I've read over the past year or so. But off the top of my head, here's a few relatively recent pieces highlighting Clinton's bellicose tendencies and the arch-neocons who have endorsed her. That'll have to do for now.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-friends-of-detente-with-russia/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/hillary-is-the-candidate_b_9168938.h...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/hillary-clinton-necono-rep...
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/12/donald-trump-calls-hillary-clinton-trigger-h...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/11/the-warmongering-record-of-hillary-clinto...
ETA: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/20/hillary-clintons-neocon-resume/

ETA:
Also, for more background on New Cold War issues, after you've listened to Stephen Cohen at the first link, look into Clinton's relationship with Nuland -- architect of the Ukraine fiasco; hence the waggish term "Nulandistan."
e.g. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clintons-hawk-in-waiting/

And if you want to know what happened in Ukraine, you might try this series: http://www.watchdogmediainstitute.com/p/blog-page.html
17 feature-length segments of sequentially- and parallel-edited media and eyewitness video reportage, interspersed with press conferences -- and yes, I've watched them all. Insanely addictive. (The first episode by itself, though, is immensely instructive).

ETA: On Ukraine: in addition to everything Stephen Cohen et al. wrote in Counterpunch at the time, the series of Pando pieces from members of the former Exile crew (Mark Ames and John Dolan/a.k.a. Gary Brecher/a.k.a. "The War Nerd") -- beginning with this installment -- is essential reading. https://pando.com/2014/02/24/everything-you-know-about-ukraine-is-wrong/ (ETA: Just note that the source of the sniper fire in the video linked at the bottom of section 2 is hotly disputed; there's good evidence (e.g. here, among other investigations) suggesting that it did not in fact originate from Yanukovich regime forces, which undermines Ames' final argument in section 2 of this particular piece).

God bless Manafort.

Well, here we go.

No, here we watch the same 4 posters (2 completely new) assure us repeatedly that Hillary is an ugly bitch.

>240 Jesse_wiedinmyer: I'm not even sure what you're talking about now. I was talking about the roll call. As far as I can tell, you seem to be implying that everyone you don't agree with is secretly working for Trump's campaign. Which seems to be good enough reason to ignore you.

I wonder how many posters have actually participated in this thread. With 242 posts, there must be a diverse range of views presented.

>242 Jesse_wiedinmyer: All right, you got me. Everyone who posted here is actually the same person. Shocker, huh?

If trump calls HRC an "ugly bitch" during the debates that should be worth about 3 or 4 per cent increase in his polling - if the past is any indication of the future. That is not a LOL comment. I seriously think it is possible. The only persons who will be outraged will be MSNBC talking heads and some slight majority of Democrats.

Nate Silver is not known as a punk-ass screwball. Right now he says trump is beating HRC 285 to 253 in electoral votes. trump has turned this election around in the Midwest and the rustbelt states.

Sure, trump could blow up in the next 3 months. But no insane thing he has said or done to date has done anything but make his poll numbers go up. Will this begin to change soon? Why would one think so?

trump has name recognition equal to the Clintons now. Everyone - those who hate him and those who love him - know all about him now. We all know about the university, the steaks, the bankruptcies, the birther crap, the lie after lie after lie, the obvious incompetency, the border wall and the immigrant bans, the misogyny and racism and the utter uncouthness - And yet right now he is beating HRC 46 to 28 per cent among independents - who make up something like 40 per cent of the electorate and who are not particularly informed about issues and are certainly not ideological and cannot for the most part be swayed by "rational" argument. These are the people who elect Presidents, not ideologues. (So even if ALL the BernieBros roll over now and take it up the pooper for Hillary, it will not be enough.)

How will HRC turn all this around? Somebody fucking tell me.

A wrestler won the Minnesota governorship. A comedian won a Senate race in the same state. An actor/body builder won the California governorship - twice.

Just thinking there is no way a reality show host can be elected President - that such a thing is so outrageous it must be impossible - well, actually, no - and not according to me but according to the latest scientific polls.

Don't blame the republicans. They have been shit for years now. What would any sane person ever expect from those shaved apes in blue suits with red ties?

Blame the asshole democratic base - and the vast majority of democratic leadership - for nominating the absolutely worse candidate in modern history, excepting trump.

Maybe something will happen to turn things around. Maybe HRC can squeeze out a victory in a close race.

But right now I agree with Michael Moore - the democratic party has apparently set up donald trump for the win - inadvertently, stupidly, blindly - but nevertheless they in essence will be the ones who elect him IF he wins.

In a nutshell: It turns out that a vote for HRC back in the democratic primaries is a vote for trump on November 8 - failing some miracle.

Stupidity is its own reward. As always.

>244 JGL53:

I basically agree with your analysis :

In sum, motivated by their breathtaking arrogance, selfishness and complacency, the DNC and all the Democratic party's elite--most of all the cohort known as "superdelegates"--when given many opportunities to include the party's left-wing and the millions of Americans for whom they speak, stubbornly refused to give so much as an inch.*

Instead, they consistently treated these activists and their supporting voters as trash, as irrelevant nuisances who had the temerity to imagine that their opinions counted for something in Democratic party politics. In all the discussions at this site, these voters and activists have been the objects of nothing but insults, ridicule and abuse from this site's Hillary Clinton-supporters for daring to doubt or question the inevitability of Hillary Clinton's presumed right to become the next president.

Just even the idea that it is possible that the Clintons could be at least as bad or worse for the nation than a Trump term in the presidency is inconceivable to these people.

The upshot of their working assumptions is that democracy is no place for non-specialists, no place for anyone who does not have a technocrat's credentials. That view boils down to what is in fact a complete contempt for democratic principles as such.

Since electoral politics is now the exclusive province of the very wealthy, it stands to reason that any "maverick," any challenger to the established order who survives the fraudulent primary races is bound to resemble a Trump-like figure.

As a "good-government" reformer candidate, Trump is of course a joke and a disgrace. But, amazingly, he's actually better on this score than the Clintons are.

Whatever comforting lies they tell themselves, those who are going to vote for Clinton in November--after having either helped eliminate Sanders as a candidate or having feebly accepted his programmed and deceitful elimination as just the way the electoral game is played-- are voting _for_ a perpetuation of the status quo to which Hillary Clinton poses not the slightest challenge.

From your comfortable homes and your jobs, you're saying, "Yes, I'd rather we carry on as we've been doing here rather than risk spoiling this completely rigged game :

Center on Budget & Policy Priorities

A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

UPDATED
OCTOBER 26, 2015

BY

CHAD STONE, DANILO TRISI, ARLOC SHERMAN, AND BRANDON DEBOT ¹

"The broad facts of income inequality over the past six decades are easily summarized:

● "The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity.

○ "Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, roughly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms between the late 1940s and early 1970s.

○ "The income gap between those high up the income ladder and those on the middle and lower rungs — while substantial — did not change much during this period.

● "Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth slowed and the income gap widened.

○ "Income growth for households in the middle and lower parts of the distribution slowed sharply, while incomes at the top continued to grow strongly.

○ "The concentration of income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen more than 80 years ago (during the “Roaring Twenties”).

● "Wealth — the value of a household’s property and financial assets, minus the value of its debts — is much more highly concentrated than income. The best survey data show that the top 3 percent of the distribution hold over half of all wealth. Other research suggests that most of that is held by an even smaller percentage at the very top, whose share has been rising over the last three decades.

"Data from a variety of sources contribute to this broad picture of strong growth and shared prosperity for the early postwar period, followed by slower growth and growing inequality since the 1970s. Within these broad trends, however, different data tell slightly different parts of the story (and no single source of data is better for all purposes than the others).

"This guide consists of four sections. The first describes the commonly used sources and statistics on income and discusses their relative strengths and limitations in understanding trends in income and inequality. The second provides an overview of the trends revealed in those key data sources. The third and fourth sections supply additional information on wealth, which complements the income data as a measure of how the most well-off Americans are doing, and poverty, which measures how the least well-off Americans are doing."

••• ------- ••• ------- •••

" Although the average level of income of the top 1 percent of households remains well below its 2007 peak, the increase in the average income of the top 1 percent of households from 1979 to 2011 was four to five times larger than that of the middle 60 percent and bottom fifth. Moreover, CBO’s latest baseline assumptions predict earnings to grow faster for high-income earners than others in the next decade, ⁽³⁰⁾ suggesting that the Great Recession and financial crisis may have had only a temporary impact on the rising trend of income gains at the top, much as the impact of the dot-com collapse in the early 2000s was only temporary."

-----------------
Note : all emphasis as in original.

¹ The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Hannah Shaw, who helped create this guide and was one of the original authors.

³⁰ Congressional Budget Office, “An Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2015 to 2025,” August 2015, p. 24,



* I remind all those who would attempt to dismiss the gross and outrageous unfairness of the Democratic presidential primaries by glibly pointing to Senator Sanders' endorsement of Hillary Clinton of the fact that Senator Sanders holds no sacred place as the final arbiter of what was or was not right and just in his (and our) opponents' behaviours in the primaries. His claims to authority and legitimacy derive from us, his former supporters. In endorsing Clinton and in contending that his campaign defeat must be accepted without complaint, Sanders is speaking for himself and his opinion deserves no more weight than that of any other similarly concerned citizen and voter. To claim otherwise is, again, an outrage to democratic principles of equality in such a matter.

Lunacy has broken out in all the wrong places. This thread reminds me of university, the 11 Spartacists fighting the 13 Neo-Trotskyites outside a classroom at night over a film they both hate. How unsightly, how DUMB, to get so riled at this point when the thing has already played out. It appears to me the Sanders loss has ramped simple supporters to psychos and that Clinton supporterss are letting the stockings of their self-disgust show. What need was their at this point to vie with Republicans over absurdity? The once proud and high flying Storm Raven (the name itself should have been a giveaway) flies too close to the mirror and comes crashing to earth along with all in proximity...over what? A foregone conclusion and how to live with it.

>236 theoria: Let's put it another way. Just listen to that Cohen/Batchelor interview on the first link above and think about it really hard. The Obama/Kerry lame-ducks see and dread what's coming -- to the point that they're engaged in a desperate last-minute about-face to achieve a rapprochement with the Russians on humiliating terms, apparently hoping that they can somehow bind a Clinton administration to the same.

A Clinton administration that will have the following in mind (linked by Giraldi in the comments to his piece above):
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/neoconservative-plan-will-cripple-...

There should be a new Cohen/Batchelor piece posted later today; I'll share that too.

ETA: Not on The Nation yet, but here's the original.
https://audioboom.com/boos/4865089-new-cold-war-mccarthyism-weaponizing-putin-st...
These are really required listening. The neo-McCarthyism Cohen points out really is chilling -- particularly given its source.

ETA:
See also the Turkish question and the fragility it portends for NATO's future.
http://www.librarything.com/topic/226334#5668565

I see Clinton attempting to stem hegemonic decline by doubling down on stupid, over and over again. At any rate, rest assured of one thing: with Clinton in office, the war-dog "diplomats" we heard baying last month will no longer be in the opposition.

There's no point in looking at polls right now. Trump has his post-convention bounce and we have to wait and see if it holds up and what kind of bounce Hillary gets. Next weeks polls and the following week should give more accurate results.

Political theatre of the absurd


To really take the measure of the idiocy that reigns among many Americans in their thinking about politics you should consider a number of things in their context.

We have, for example, the spectacle of the parties' nominating conventions with, at the Democrats' version, the festive celebration of what's billed as "women's" "finally" "breaking a glass-ceiling" with the nomination of Hillary Clinton.

There's an amazing naivete and lack of political awareness in this celebration because those celebrating largely miss the real point and significance of the phony drama to which they lend themselves. When the very plain and simple fact is that the established power-structure presented the electorate with a cynical fait accompli in virtually hand-picking and annointing Barack Obama's successor in the person of Hillary Clinton, it is completely ludicrous to suppose that anything truly momentous and ground-breaking has occurred in her nomination. Rather than the voters themselves imposing a woman presidential candidate upon an established order which was opposed to that, the very opposite has happened. And the kicker here is that not only did the establishment determine all this wholly within and among its own closed ranks, they pulled this as the centerpiece of a cynical project to once again preserve and perpetuate unchallenged their own rule.

There was a "kind of", "sort of" real challenger to politics as usual in the person of old man Sanders, U.S. senator from Vermont. But, as a man, and as a mild critic of the status quo from what passes as the political "Left" in the United States, Sanders wasn't qualified to play a leading role in this canned sham-event. He had, instead, a useful secondary role: he could present evidence to support the illusion that there is sometimes something not entirely pre-ordained and foreclosed about the operation of the presidential electoral processes. He drew so much unexpected popular support that the people behind Hillary Clinton actually had to resort to some hastily improvised cheating to supplement the cheating that they'd already planned.

In the end, Sanders had no alternative to leaving the stage at his appointed hour in a graceful manner because he is so thoroughly an creature of the system that he could not exist without his life's meaning-giving "work" in the Senate--where he watches as democracy continues to be crushed under the neo-liberal global steamroller. To ensure he had a place to which he could return, he bowed out, endorsing the opponent he'd just spent the past four months exposing as a lying, cheating, shallow, self-obsessed creep in dresses and pants-suits, shamelessly playing on her being a woman, trying to guilt-trip the politically correct morons of the electorate.

Thus we have millions of supposedly intelligent adults treating a choreographed electoral con-game as though it were an actual real-life drama with real stakes and real glass-ceiling "break-throughs."

Does it get any dumber than that? No, but there is more to this pathetic story.

There's Donald Trump who, despite being a real or a former billionaire--as opposed to his poorer opponents, the Clintons, who probably have less than two hundred million dollars between them--is in fact in the role of the anti-establishment "outsider" challenging Clinton and her establishment pals and pal-ettes. It really says something about Hillary Clinton when billionaire property developer Donald Trump can run against her as the political outsider in the race. Sanders was as well except that he was not taken seriously.

Trump had to be taken seriously because he actually posed a challenge to the choreography which had been planned and prepared. He was never supposed to or expected to actually win a primary race--let alone win most of them and defeat sixteen other establishment approved actors in the electoral con-game.

In this spectacle, Trump actually has the part of genuine spoiler, genuine challenger to the otherwise completely preordained electoral process. It's mainly this fact which lends such ironic highlights to the supremely self-satisfied triumphalism of the feminists, women and men, who so naively suppose they're players in an historic act of genuine liberating progress for all (sexist) womankind. These people have to be incredibly unaware to be so completely taken in. But they are. It is very difficult to find a group of Americans who top them for political stupidity.

The elites who run things are quite well aware of all this. They know what works, know how to play suckers with a long tested and proven finesse. In.the establishment, when there ought to be some genuine concern about the levels of popular outrage and alienation from all levels and types of official authority, there are not even furrowed eyebrows. Their game is fully and firmly in their hands and nothing could so completely demonstrate that fact than the utterly pointless and stupid intra- and inter-party bickering over supremely trivial stuff such as the legalization of marijuana or the establishment of gender-neutral toilets or whether Tim Kaine affords anything of "party-unifying value" in what is itself a completely phony spectacle from top to bottom.

There is simply no point in such anguish over "stopping Trump" by uniting around Hillary Clinton when it is Hillary Clinton herself who represents the centerpiece of the current electoral fraud being committed upon us all--believers and apostates alike. That is the kind of stupidity allied with confusion which not even mega-billions of campaign-dollar contributions can buy.

The picture, seen in all its sordid splendor, is dismaying, stunning, hope-crushing. It saps one's force and leaves one staring, slack-jawed, at a loss as to how to convey it or where to begin.

This election was over before it began and we are all--well, nearly all, except the tiny fraction in the upper three-fourths of the top one-percent of the wealthiest--its losers. And the vast majority among us are too blind and too foolish to even guess at how and why that is.

>248 jjwilson61: I read an article in The Guardian that suggested Trump' bump was more significant than the usual bump. It had numbers to back up the claim--discussed the difference between telephone polling and less direct polling--but it still wasn't convincing. A great deal is written out of need to fill space during the long long process....

Sanders took a step back but many of his supporters a step forward and want to continue the fight. It's like the aftermath of Lee's surrender at Appomattox. They're at the end of the road with the democratic party. They either suck it up and vote for Hillary or they're going to have to go somewhere else.

Had Bernie taken Jill Stein up on her generous offer to head the Green Party ticket (and I wouldn't have minded if he had) it would have split the democratic party in two which probably would have meant Trump wins in November---that's not a good thing but what can I say except I'm attracted to and by chaos. Bernie succumbs to the fear of a Trump presidency and endorses Clinton. To me that's what it was. Nothing to hate him over. IMO if he had continued the fight with the Green Party his movement would have grown some more and a third party option at least in the next couple election cycles would have very much more viable. It's not going happen. There's no time for him to run independently either. He wouldn't get on the ballot in a lot of states--if not most.

I do find it hilarious--though not very believable---that Hillary and Tim Kaine are both against the TPP now. Another very recent happening is that the UAW's president has come out and said that his union's endorsement of Hillary in May came after she told them that she considers the NAFTA to have been a failed trade deal and that she is going to try to renegotiate it. Does the UAW think it's going to get some of its lost jobs back? I don't know. Politicians might tell you anything to get your endorsement if it's important enough at the time. It's only been in effect what?---22 years? I think it was January 1st--either 1994 or 95 that the trade deal went into effect simultaneously with the Chiapas revolt. And it's not just Mexico involved---it's Canada too. May be she's thinking about getting this pipeline thing through too.

>251 lriley: It's not too late for that Sanders switch. In fact, only after the convention does it become a realistic possibility. There are no overt signs pointing towards it, but if it does happen, I expect it will be announced after the convention-- and probably within the next week or two. I'm not predicting it, though.

#252--the Green Party's nominates it's challenger in early August I believe so yeah there's that. I really don't see Bernie doing it. He made a pledge at the beginning he would support the eventual democratic nominee. He's also said over and over again and throughout the entire process that he will do whatever it takes to defeat Donald Trump. Bernie strikes me as one of those honorable to a fault people--and even if in his mind his campaign has been undermined and/or cheated I think he'll stick by his word. I really do. In any case he's not going to offer anything all that different as far as issues or solutions that Stein will offer---and actually Stein's shtick is a little bit better in my eyes than Bernie's. The main difference to me always was Sanders had a legit shot of winning and Stein doesn't. That being said Stein's candidacy could have a real impact with all the dissent going on and getting to matching funds would be a big step forward for the viability of her party. I also think she's right in that the democrats are a reactionary and corrupted and anti-revolutionary party and trying to work change within such a structure is almost impossible to do. The idea that one could finance a campaign without big money donors considered an absurdity until Sanders proved different and it's too bad that so many people are too narrow minded that they can even think outside of those kinds of parameters. Personally I don't see myself and haven't for a long time as a proponent of capitalism. Both major parties are committed to that at all costs. I have been a Green Party member for quite a while so I'm not really a good fit as far as the Democratic party is concerned anyway. If they put up a good candidate and I considered Sanders a good candidate I'll support them. Otherwise not.

>252 davidgn:

"It's not too late for that Sanders switch."

This is mind-boggling.

Sanders stood on the stage at the convention and asked for Clinton's nomination by acclamation.

He cannot possibly join the Green Party ticket in any capacity and run against Clinton. That can't happen and that won't happen. Sanders intends to go back to his work in the Senate--that's obviously the most important thing to him, more important than this "revolution" he says shall go on despite his having betrayed it.

>254 proximity1: You're right that it's just about impossible now, in practical terms. And I honestly don't think Bernie wants it. There are plenty of people who would urge him nonetheless, though, citing Democratic Party treachery. It would be ugly, and Bernie probably doesn't have the appetite.

ETA: The grapevine reports that after the nomination, amid the walkout of Bernie delegates (which was spontaneously organized and got good participation, notwithstanding the non-reporting), ~800 Bernie supporters and volunteers had their Bernie signs seized and ripped up, then were purged and ejected from the convention, with Clinton supporters bused in to replace them for the TV cameras' sake. People are livid.
Also in the air: http://www.ibtimes.com/who-nina-turner-bernie-sanders-surrogate-reportedly-eject...
ETA: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/07/26/was-nina-turner-prominent-sanders-de...
Still awaiting clarity about what actually happened with Nina Turner.

ETA: If you want to see the half-empty arena that the TV cameras didn't show...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGRo1mH2_8w
And the meme pic:


ETA:
Here's some grassroots video reporting of what I relayed above.
https://www.facebook.com/claudia.stauber/videos/10208786058181771/
5 minutes, and at the very least it gives you some names of people to watch. Mostly bloggers and journos in the video.
53,000 views on this one, but entirely grassroots.

ETA:
This one is making the rounds now. Legit? Who knows! Probably not, I'd say. But it's being believed, and to some extent it's perception that counts.
Original:
https://philadelphia.craigslist.org/tlg/5702670381.html
Wayback Machine Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160727162242/https://philadelphia.craigslist.org/t...
Screenshot:

Almost certainly a prank, but whoever put it up is a genius and right on the money!

The democrats are really at war with a lot of their activist wing. There's the anti-war wing and Hillary voted for both Iraq and Afghanistan--Bernie for Afghanistan. There's the anti-fracking environmentalist wing opposed to oil and gas and coal entities amongst other things. Corporate entities like to buy politicians. There's the millennial and student movement with ties to Occupy which was pretty much ignored by the Obama administration but they're still simmering out here. There are those on the front line of health care--those trying to organize labor. The black lives matter activists. Immigrant rights. LGBT. Groups like these are really the left and for the most part they're not corporatist or neo-liberal at all. If anything they're anti--they're pushing things to the left and if you're a politician you're not going to get very rich off of them but they're all growing and organizing. It's why the Democrats are soon going to have to say fuck the corporate money and the big donors because what the corporations and big donors want is pretty much counter to what all this activist organizing is building.

Saw Trump on TV today saying he's for enhanced interrogations. Why doesn't he just say he's for torture? It's a disgrace that a guy who could become POTUS would come out and say such a thing.

Sure, but a popular disgrace.

>256 lriley: Actually... he already did say he's for torture.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-torture-waterboarding_us_5775d740e4b04...
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-torture-waterboarding

"He may be talking, but he'll talk faster with the torture," Trump said, suggesting torture could have prevented Tuesday attacks which have left at least 30 people dead.

And here's the Nation post & summary for that second Cohen/Batchelor episode.
https://www.thenation.com/article/neo-mccarthyism-and-olympic-politics-as-more-e...

I have not been watching the dem convention, as I certainly did not watch the repub one. I have no more interest in watching such horrors as I would in watching an ISIS beheading video.

But Jumping Jesus on rubber crutches! This Nina Turner thing - shades of Tina Turner .... and Nat Turner!

The DNC is stupidly destroying HRC's chances so much that, at this rate, it will be trump who will wind up winning in a landslide on Nov. 8.

I still wait for the turnaround. When will it come, Hillary-suckers? WILL it come?

There are different kinds of gross, disgusting, off-putting, unacceptable behavior. It looks to me like the kind HRC represents trumps the kind that trump represents.

That, and the fact that when enough people get convinced the system is rigged against them and they are being played for fools then there is a human tendency to just say "FUCK IT ALL" and the masses do what they can to just blow everything up.

No one can deny that electing a President trump will damn sure blow shit up - real good.

So here we are - sitting in shit - waiting for the flowers to bloom.

Unless the dems have some plan - which they obviously have not revealed to date - that they will use to scare the absolute shit out of the Amurican majority about the infinite horror of a trump Presidency - then trump will win.

As I have pointed out before - this election will come down to who is hated the least being elected.

Right now the majority hate HRC more than trump - according to many experts and scientific polls.

HRC better get a good bump from "her" convention or she might be unsalvageable dog meat in the next month.

Right now, as I understand it, the dem convention is a shit storm, a shit avalanche and a shit tsunami rolled into one. Not exactly what I would view as a clarion call to victory in November.

The only UNITY I see right now is that a sizeable plurality of Democrats, a goodly majority of independents, and about 90 per cent of republicans are all coming together in hatred of Hillary Goddam Clinton.

Putting this in Greek mythological terms - trump may be the Minotaur, but HRC is Medusa.

Who scares you more?

>260 JGL53: There are different kinds of gross, disgusting, off-putting, unacceptable behavior. It looks to me like the kind HRC represents trumps the kind that trump represents.

A statement you see no reason to defend or clarify.

#260--to be clear the media and a lot of people are making the Clinton campaign out to be the victim of a Russian hack orchestrated by Putin and Trump (and it's not even clear the Putin/Trump thing is true)--the hacked emails show that the Clinton campaign (maybe even with Hillary's approval) colluded with the DNC to undermine in a variety of ways the Sanders campaign and the real victims are the millions of people of the Sanders campaign who put their time, sweat, tears and money trying to get him elected and it is a kind of disenfranchisement. It's telling them that all this energy of yours was useless--we were always going to manipulate to get our outcome. The major reason for all the concern in the media and elsewhere now though seems to be about how all this is blowing back at Hillary and her campaign--in that as tough a sell as it was before to get some of those Sanders voters to vote for her in November---it's so much harder now. I'm sorry but this is self inflicted damage. And apart from the Democrats taking DWS's job away from her and then Hillary rehiring her for her own campaign there has not even been so much as an apology to the Sanders camp for some pretty nefarious activity on the DNC's part let alone anyone actually other than DWS walking the plank and being fished out of the water almost immediately. Where and for whom the consequences?

The important thing about the emails is the content and there's no evidence that any of it doesn't reflect the anti-democratic thoughts/actions of the senders/receivers who seemed keen on manipulating a particular outcome. They are not really victims so much as would be victimizers who got caught with their pants/skirts down. Am I sorry for them?--fuck no. Amy Dacey one of the big shots at the DNC is from my neck of the woods almost---my advice for her is go fucking home.

I don't mind at all what Wiki-leaks did. I've suspected there's been a lot of manipulation throughout the democratic primaries that have gone beyond the beyond. This is some proof and I'd always rather know than not know. I have not liked the disconnect between exit polling and the vote totals in a number of states. It's not supposed to happen. The purging of hundreds of thousands of voters particularly in NYS and California is anti-democratic. There should be major investigations going on in regard to these discrepancies. We don't really know the why yet--and I'd rather know. Whether it's something like this or something the CIA or NSA or whoever is up to---I'd rather know---not blindly follow waving a flag like a moron. Eyes wide open rather than eyes shut. If the political system is a farce then it's up to us to at least try to take it back from those who have made it so.

>261 prosfilaes: It isn't self-evident? I mean if you have an objection it seems to me it could only be that there is no proof of trumpage, only trumpery (high).

>262 lriley: We already knew the DNC was biased against Bernie so the leaked e-mails don't tell us anything we didn't already know. In addition it led to the ouster of DWS which was a key demand of Sander's people, so what's there to get excited about?

> 264

The exciting part is that the DNC and their beloved "best candidate" HRC are mutually fucking themselves over and thus (possibly) allowing trump to fuck the entire nation in the short term.

That is not exciting enough for you?

Well, as the republican joke goes (paraphrased) maybe for you - jjwilson61 - the obvious option is just to lie back and enjoy the rape, seeing as how you are not going to fucking understand that you are even being raped.

URL says it all.
http://heatst.com/politics/bernie-sanders-leaves-the-democratic-party/
Too little, too late. But a welcome gesture.
ETA: http://www.people.com/article/bernie-sanders-leaves-democratic-party-senate-inde...
Before someone answers with this: http://www.snopes.com/bernie-sanders-leaves-the-democratic-party/
To which I respond: Snopes doth protest too much.

>266 davidgn: From what I understand Sanders joined the party to run for President. He lost, kept his promise to support the winner of the primary process, and now is going back to Independent. Pretty simple.

Personally by the time you hit 74 you should be retired and retired a long time. I wouldn't much argue with Sanders over what he's done in this election cycle or what he decides to do now. You know--coming out of nowhere---and showing you can finance a national election off of small donations pretty much in defiance of everything that passed as accepted knowledge was a feat in itself--for a 74 year old WTF! And he's proven if you have the right message that can connect with a lot of people that you can get by without big donors, lobbyists and corporations and he has pushed Clinton and her campaign at least for the time being out of many of her entrenched centrist positions and towards the left. If she stays there maybe I'll even come to like her at least a little.

>267 RickHarsch: He didn't need to emphasize it while the convention was still going on. And now just watch the man scowl all through Hillary's acceptance speech.

>268 lriley:

... " And he's proven if you have the right message that can connect with a lot of people that you can get by without big donors, lobbyists and corporations"...

You miss the point. Surely these things had already been "proven" again and again by candidacies such as those of Gene McCarthy, George Wallace, Fred Harris, John B. Anderson, Ralph Nader and many others you've probably never even heard of. Sanders' effort "proved" nothing we didn't already know except that, despite his surprisingly strong showing, even so mild a challenger such as he was can still being easily thwarted, and poses no serious threat to the entrenched corruption that characterizes this fraud upon democratic government.

In the same way and for the same reasons, Clinton's nomination "proves" nothing which we didn't already know: ever since the Constitution enshrined women's rights to seek and hold public office, the question of the right and the possibility of a woman being elected
was settled in the affirmative; the established powers could have chosen to promote and nominate a female presidential candidate any time they so desired.

That they have now done so represents nothing in any "breakthrough" for "women" or anyone else. It is instead an act of con-artistry of the grandest proportions--sold as and accepted naively by millions as proof of the wonderful qualities of our political system, e.g. this patent nonsense:

(Huffington Post ) POLITICS | "America Has Finally Put A Woman At The Top Of The Ticket --
It’s about damn time" 07/28/2016 11:05 pm ET

No, "America" didn't do that. A tiny and powerful oligarchic rule put a woman there--a woman selected by them for her complete reliablitiy to behave according to that oligarchy's wishes, just as Obama has done --and imposed her on the rest of us whether we like or want it or not.

What's demonstrated is in fact the firm political control which this unrepresentative oligarchy exercises. It can install a woman candidate even against the popular will of the majority--shutting out and shutting down Sanders' bid with a presidential candidate described as the party's least popular in living memory.

RE:

..."and he has pushed Clinton and her campaign at least for the time being out of many of her entrenched centrist positions and towards the left."

This is yet more wishful thinking. Again, Clinton has done nothing other than what we already knew she was quite ready and willing to do: lie openly in order to gain a political advantage. She hasn't in the least changed her real intentions. She's merely given that deliberately false impression. For such a practiced and accomplished liar, this represents nothing new or remarkable.

It's the Mid-term (2018) state and federal U.S. election-day.

If you're going to the polls--and it's at the polls that today's elections are going to be determined-- then you should consider the following review of what the House and Senate races are really all about. Don't be fooled by idiot-tempting propaganda from the now-deplorable national press corps .

Let's recap:

The hijacked Democratic party, once a party which tried to do a better job of pretending to be defenders of the vital interests of the average man and woman on the street, had proven itself brain-dead sell-outs to corporate power: the same power which ruled the former opposition party, the Republicans.

In November 2016, the Obamas and the Clintons smugly assumed their captured electorate had no where to go except to vote for Hillary Clinton, the anointed one, having used every trick in the book to keep Bernie Sanders (just marginally better than Clinton but still the best choice of the two) from having anything resembling a fair shot at the party nomination.

Clinton and Obama could not imagine the possibility of losing to a challenger such as Donald Trump.

We know the rest.

Now: what today's House and Senate elections are all about is really quite simple.

You're going to be asked to validate the former Obama-Clinton losing strategy by going once more, hat in hand, and, despite the national Democratic party's having made it abundantly clear that those of its electors who weren't happy with the old "New Democrat" version can continue to go to Hell, begging these stupid and malign "New Democrats," traitors to liberal left principles, to let you elect or re-elect them so that they may go on doing or go right back to doing exactly what they'd been doing:

IGNORING US AND TAKING US FOR GRANTED.


Since they've proven they learned nothing at all from their 2016 shellacking, the only sane course now is to give them a refresher lesson and, in order to keep from making a wasted opportunity of all the anguish that Trump has caused certain true and anything-but-true left-wing liberals, it's essential today to reinforce 2016's lessons---

WE WANT OUR PARTY BACK--and you're staying out of power until you stop blocking that.

until the National (New Democrat) Democratic party fuck-wads can feel the stake being driven through their evil, disgusting, corrupt, sell-out 'hearts' and die the electoral deaths they so richly deserve.

No one can say for sure how this is going to turn out right now---though in all probability the Democrats are going to take back the House of Representatives. For them not to do so would be a major disappointment. The polls certainly suggest they are going to do that and enthusiasm seems to be on their side. But we will see.

I will say to the above post #271--that the establishment leadership in both parties is pretty much awful. If I had to choose between McConnell and Schumer or Pelosi and Ryan I'd probably jump off of a bridge so as not to choose. I detest them all.

That said the Republican party is not running against Hilary Clinton this time. They are running against caravans and health care which are both ridiculous positions to have and in both case their wish is to appeal to people's fear--which is fucked up especially for a party which has had two years of control. There are too many centrist democrats--well I'd agree with that. There are also too many very right republicans. Which is worse? That's a matter of opinion but mine is the Republicans are by far worse.

The Republicans have had complete power now for their two years and all they've pretty much have done with it is divide and then divide again. Whether they lose or not they certainly deserve to.