Bernie Wins New Hampshire Primary

Does Sanders have a ceiling? He got 60% against Hillary in 2016 — where did Bernie’s 2016 voters disappear to?

Warren is no longer a viable candidate. That is big. Biden looks to sink without a trace. Could the polls that showed him the “frontrunner” for so many months have been fake in some way?

It really may be Bernie against the billionaire in California! At least that choice would be clarifying in some ways.

If I was the DNC the possibility that would cause beads of sweat to form on my overheated forehead as I toil to arrange the pieces to rig the primary so that they can keep Bernie from the nomination is if they do successfully muscle Bernie from the nomination in the same ham handed fashion they did in Iowa (one major embarrassment, one corrupt insider scheme revealed, and we got 48 states left to go!) and Bernie backs off and lets them run Bloomberg or whomever and there is no third party run is that now the DNC would be empowering the man who the democrats just impeached and tried to remove from office, the guy who they threw all those Russia Russia Russia accusations at, to have to make only one simple campaign promise to basically clinch the election: to do a thorough investigation of the DNC’s conduct during the 2020 democratic primary if reelected. That’s all it would take. The majority of the public, all of MAGA gang and a healthy portion of Bernie’s Army, would be for it and that would unleash a flurry of memes on the internet that an impulsive egomaniac like Donald Trump lives for: of him sitting at his big oak desk in his leather, high-backed executive chair and looking across at the DNC seated on a rickety wooden chair on the other side and The Donald saying, “You’re f*ed”. Not to mention he could walk away from the Oval Office in four years to a $50M advance for a book sequel to The Art of the Deal with a title inspired by Sun Tzu: The Art of Political War.

Ha! And wouldn’t there be ironic justice in that! The DNC’s stealing the 2016 primary and the leak that followed led to all the Clintonite misdirection that the Russians were behind the DNC leak, though Wikileaks continually insists it was an inside job, which they tried to tie to Trump to keep everyone’s eyes off the fact that their precious DNC, their neo-liberal democratic party presidential candidate sausage factory, is corrupt and was all in for Hillary. None of that stuff that got leaked ever was denied by the DNC and Wasserman-Schultz, the head of it, was forced to resign. Her successor, Donna Brazile, also got busted and resigned.

That ploy by the Clintonites to misdirect attention from the DNC, backed by their media who only makes ho-hum references to the fact the DNC got busted in 2016 basically working as an arm of the Clinton campaign, was what led to a lot of this Trump-is-Putin’s-evil-twin-cousin nonsense to begin with.

Would Trump make that campaign promise to clinch the election? Trump, the attention whore who craves to be admired for his shrewdness and for always coming up the winner in the end?

Could he resist?

Z

Hey 450,

Who is your number one favorite billionaire? Like say you had to pick one and shine his shoes, which billionaire’s shoes would you shine?

Z

My wish is that there was no oligarchy and there were no billionaires or multi-millionaires even, but IT IS WHAT WE HAVE and until the likes of you provide me/us with a roadmap of how we get to what we have versus what you wish it would be and/or what I wish it would be, which may be two very different things in fact, then I/we must deal with what we have. Your archaic political square isn’t fitting the current evolved (or devolved if your prefer) political circle, Z. It’s time to update your metaphorical operating system. Windows 95 doesn’t cut it.

I do not welcome, nor do I want to enable or support, the persecution of women and minorities and that’s exactly what we are getting and are going to get much more of with the oligarch Trump. There are distinctions betwixt oligarchs. Important distinctions. Distinctions that have substantial consequences for various at-risk groups that have historically been persecuted, especially in times of crisis.

How easily people forget. Those who learned, I mean. Of course, there are those who have never learned and will never learn. Fascism’s growth relies on both groups, those who have learned but have conveniently forgotten and those who have never learned and will never learn, to take hold and flourish.

To build on a joke that Different Clue made…

Peter, Peter, caucus cheater
Had a lead but couldn’t keep her!

The political class, of which Bernie has been a member his entire career, doesn’t represent you. It feigns to represent you. It represents the oligarchy. It is owned by the oligarchy. It ultimately acquiesces to the oligarchy’s demands and in that process muddles everything it touches and takes on. It stymies and stifles any chance at true progressive change.

Case in point. Perfect example. One of so many examples. Amy is a member of the muddling political class. She serves the interests of the oligarchy. Appealing to the likes of Amy will get you zilch. Bloomberg doesn’t have to pander to the likes of Petters. Both are oligarchs, or Petters was for a brief tenure, but there are distinctions between Petters and Bloomberg. Bloomberg is a billionaire by the book. Petters, and Donald Trump too, are, or were in the case of Petters, oligarchs by hook & crook. You may not like the book that helped make Bloomberg a billionaire, I know I don’t, but if that’s the case, until you do something about it, i.e. a revolution, it’s what is versus what should be.

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/01/29/peter-schweizer-profiles-in-corruption-reveals-democrats-are-in-no-position-to-talk-about-abuse-of-power/

“Amy Klobuchar had a record that was highly selective on who she prosecuted,” said Schweizer of Klobuchar’s former role as a prosecutor in Minnesota. “I think the evidence is pretty clear. She based that in part on whether you were a campaign contributor to her or not.”

Klobuchar’s image of being a tough prosecutor is belied by the fact that she didn’t “go after the guy who created the second biggest Ponzi scheme in American history,” explained Schweizer. “That’s a guy named Tom Petters who lived in Minneapolis. We went through the court file, and what you find is, she went after people that worked with Petters, there was clear evidence at the time that this was a Ponzi scheme, there were all sorts of warning signs, but she never even investigated Petters, and you wonder [and] scratch your head, ‘Well, why is that the case?’”

When [Klobuchar] announced for the U.S. Senate in 2006, Petters Group Worldwide and its employees were some of her earliest and most enthusiastic donors. Just weeks after she announced her candidacy in February 2005, Petters and thirteen employees in his companies all gave her contributions in a single day (March 31, 2005). By the quarterly report released right before the 2006 election, they were her largest contributor by far—donating $71,600 or 32 percent more than her second-largest donor, her old law firm. By the end of 2006, Petters Group Worldwide had contributed more than $120,000 toward her successful bid.

“You see this pattern where, in one instance, dozens of corporate executives from a single company will send contributions to [Klobuchar’s] campaign, and in two weeks she introduces legislation to benefit that very corporation,” stated Schweizer. “So what you find with Amy Klobuchar is this very selective enforcement. If you’re with her and an insider, you’re going to be taken care of. If you’re not a donor and you’re an outsider, then you’re going to be in serious trouble.”

My take is that the election rigging of 2016 was less about blocking Bernie than it was about promoting Hillary. This year they have worries about Bernie’s “electability,” sure, but will they think Klobuchar has a better chance because she’s female? Dream on.

Bloomberg advertisments are featuring him paling around with Obama, so clearly Obama is now riding that horse after never even putting a saddle on Biden. Interesting.

A vote for Bloomberg is a vote for irony. Maybe billionaires cannot fail and can only be failed. Maybe oligarchs divided the country, managing it’s decline (within sheeple acceptable limits), so only an oligarch can unite the country and change things back to allowing their disempowered asses to be max taxed again. Seems like a case of fool me twice, never get fooled again. (Or is it three times?) Shouldn’t voters be judging their candidates on their veracity, consistency and proven record instead of their ability to game the system?

That said, the rapid decline of Biden is interesting. People have said it was Trump behind it all. So is this the power of the billionaire class we’re talking about?

I know that Mammon is America’s true god and the wealthy are his infallible priests, but I still think Bloomberg would go down big time. The Republicans can saturate the airwaves with disturbing videos. Bloomberg says in 95% of murders the perpetrator is always the same — you can take the description, xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops: male, minorities, 16 to 25 years old. In another video, he says that stop and frisk stop whites too often, and blacks not often enough. He explains the advantages of regressive taxes in taking money from poor people that they would otherwise use for bad behaviors. When NY City Council passed legislation requiring that workers on projects receiving certain city incentives be paid a living wage, Bloomberg vetoed it, saying the bills “are a throwback to the era when government viewed the private sector as a cash cow to be milked, rather than a garden to be cultivated.”

I think that’s all a toxic brew of racism, authoritarian misuse of police power, and belief in the bracing medicine of poverty to cure the poor of their vices. I’m always amazed at the ability of political fans to insist that their candidate didn’t really mean what he said, but I don’t think the minorities and the poor will cut him as much slack as he needs.

JiT;

I agree with your assessment, “Pete the Cheat” is the most odious of the group and has the DNC wetting their pants with arousal. He’s Obama/Hillary without the, [as yet], uncommitted war crimes…or as Obama said once; “an empty vessel in which to pour your dreams”

…and Bernie will fold, [once again] and gladly support “Pete the Cheat” as will his “movement”. This time, Bernie’s sheepdog speech ought to be a real doozy.

It looks like the Trump supporters in Bernie clothing are going to be quite disappointed come November. Bloomberg is going to beat the pants off Trump. A REAL landslide. And then, once inaugurated, hopefully he puts Schiff in as his AG and they put Trump and his family behind bars for the rest of their born days and then go hopefully they go after the NRA and dismantle that terrorist organization completely that is hellbent on minorities genociding themselves via gun violence.

In a matchup between Bloomberg and Trump, minorities will happily and overwhelmingly choose Bloomberg. It’s disgusting how many so-called progressives want to use the minority card to get Trump reelected. I say so-called because you really can’t be a principled progressive if you enable the reelection of Donald Trump. Trump is an anti-progressive. He’s a fascist.

Getting Donald Trump elected for a second term and beyond is not a revolution. Get up off your asses and spill your blood in the streets if you want a REAL revolution versus helping to elect a fascist for a second term and beyond with your keyboards from the comfort of your gaming chairs.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/black-voters-donald-trump-philadelphia-pennsylvania-2020-20200212.html

Growing that support will be an uphill battle. A Washington Post poll in January found that 8 in 10 black voters think Trump is racist, while three-quarters of black adults said Trump’s actions have been “bad for African Americans.”

And even the support Trump’s campaign highlights isn’t always as advertised. A national political action committee, Black Americans to Re-Elect the President, had 35 donors from Pennsylvania in 2019. The Inquirer confirmed identities for 18 of them, all of whom were white. Black Americans for the President’s Agenda, a separate PAC supporting Trump, also has many wealthy white donors.

Trump has also driven some black Republicans away. James Williams, a former GOP ward leader who changed his registration to Democratic in 2018, said he’s one of at least four African American Republican ward leaders who abandoned the party since 2016.
“The local Republican Party is now, it’s cultish,” said Williams, who is volunteering with the Democratic presidential campaign of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “If you’re not with Trump, then you’re not a Republican.”

I’m always amazed at the ability of political fans to insist that their candidate didn’t really mean what he said, but I don’t think the minorities and the poor will cut him as much slack as he needs.

We’ll see. We’ll see. I think they will cut him some slack. Fact is, he helped save hundreds of lives in New York City if not more, most of them minorities and he helped remove thousands if not tens of thousands of illegal guns from the mean streets. Guns smuggled into NYC from NRA plantation country.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/482720-bloomberg-nabs-two-endorsements-from-congressional-black-caucus-amid-stop

“I first met Mike when I was searching for ways to fight against the dangerous gun laws that ripped my son from my life,” McBath, who lost her son to gun violence, said in a statement circulated by Bloomberg’s campaign.

“Mike gave grieving mothers like me a way to stand up and fight back. Nobody running for president has done more for the gun violence prevention movement than Mike. I am proud to stand with him in this race, and work with him when he is in the White House to keep our communities safe,” she added, referring to Bloomberg’s efforts to boost pro-gun control activist groups.

“The most vulnerable communities in America cannot weather another four years of a Donald Trump presidency,” Meeks said in a statement. “Too much is on the line to allow that to happen. We need someone in the White House who will unite us behind the common purpose of rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure and driving our economy forward into the 21st century. Mike Bloomberg will do exactly that.”

By your own logic, Bernie, if you and your supporters criticize these minorities from the Black Caucus for supporting Bloomberg and say they are dumb or they are just doing it for money, you are racist. Looking at the commentary to this article from The Hill, that’s exactly what these hypocrites are doing. It’s dishonorable, Bernie, and it’s cowardly to let your supporters do it for you and then claim you had no idea they were doing it and that you can’t control the tactics of your campaign supporters.

@450,

You’re not convincing anyone when it comes to voting for Bloomberg. He has a lot of money and will probably get votes via ad spending, sure, but no one under 40 will bother voting for him. Trump has a very passionate base that will make the effort to get to the polls. Bloomberg does not, and rationale like “this is what we have to work with” and “you’re a slave to the system anyways” is something my generation has been told our whole lives and we just don’t care. Fear is not motivating; Hillary tried that in 2016. Fear and despair are reasons to stay home and drink. Hope is motivating, and no one sees any kind of hope in Bloomberg.

Many Americans have been convinced that elections are a form of the game show Family Feud. What you’re trying to do when you vote is guess the most popular answer. This proves you are savvy. It also effectively discourages votes for anyone except so-called “Centrists”. For two years the centrists have done wall-to-wall analyses proving that Americans other than you won’t vote for anyone who isn’t moderate. So you do the smart thing and vote for a continuation of the rule of the Centrists. Did I say that this proves you are savvy?

Like it Joan. Couldn’t have said it better.

There’s more than hope and fear. There’s also anger.

Oligarchic sweetening of the poison, or making it appear so with better propaganda, smoke or mirrors, will eventually not work anymore. Even if Bernie comes under relentless attack from Trump, the Senate, the Judges and the Media to where he can’t get anything done, if most peoples lives continue to get worse and the demand for change increases, any institution seen as ‘centrist corrupt’ will quite likely become targets for mob violence. It’s been the way of things for millenia.

A sense of political futility — a form of learned helplessness — is very useful to the powers that be, which I suppose, is why so much energy and intelligence is expended on creating many flavors of political futility.

Americans, judging only among my acquaintances, are saturated with it. There is never any alternative (except sometimes some fantasy of bloody violence).

imho, the last ditch Bernie’s candidacy may die in is the deep hole of political futility dug for the American People. The identitarian left is at least as committed to futility as the centrists.

Democrats were inoculated against political possibility by Obama’s candidacy. I sadly doubt it can unlearned.

Note to Ian: write an article on why some people never unlearn. Just a thought.

I’m glad Sanders is winning, but his performance so far has been worrying. He’s lost a LOT of support since 2016, and I don’t think this can be fully explained away just by saying there are more candidates in the race. He actually has more support among non-white voters than white voters, so we’ll see if he can do better in Nevada and South Carolina. I hope he can.

Likewise, NR*! My own theory as to this, esp the bleeding of support in rural areas (and probably among working class voters–tho if so only relative to 2016, he’s still winning here in what little data I’ve seen) is his adoption of the IDpol stuff as opposed to his prior emphasis on class issues, and also some of his statements on immigration.

Re: the IDpol stuff, going full woke destroyed Beto, insured the stillbirth of Castro and Booker, and badly hurt Warren before she finished herself off w/the obvious backstabbing lie that no one believed. Now, Bernie tacking in this direction may have helped kill those campaigns, but he could’ve won w/out it and meanwhile has hurt himself BADLY among working class independents. What would have been an easy GE win in the fall will now be a nailbiter, and he probably hurt himself in the primary too. Things like “America is racist top to bottom” do NOT help with most people.

His 2016 position on immigration was good. This time, while his supporters who keep arguing he’s still the same might be right, he sure sounds like he’s for de facto unlimited economic immigration, making a great part of the world eligible for asylum, and has people like AOC saying he’s for ending border enforcement. Most Americans of all races do not want this, and think it will screw up wages. It will also overwhelm the social programs he wants to implement and make us even more overcrowded. Bernie used to know all this.

Oh, a third thing, his doing things like apologizing to Biden for Teachout’s true article AND letting Linda Sarsour’s smear of Tulsi go unremarked, when Tulsi is the one person w/a D after their name whos’ had his back every step of the way. This makes him look weak and unreliable. He’s still BY FAR the best we’ve got among the leading contenders, but weak and not having reciprocal loyalty is not a good look and among people who aren’t die hards, could swing the election away from him. (this point should stand regardless of your personal feelings about Tulsi; and if you LIKE Tulsi, it could keep have you looking elsewhere if Tulsi never becomes viable)

(I have a friend who used to be for Bernie who’s trying to convince me Klobuchar is worth looking at now; apparently she actually does have some good plans but as with Kamala and Warren, what good are plans unless one expects follow through? Tho Amy may be more consistent than those two, she still strikes me as a warmongering neolib)

Before 90% of the commentariat jumps on me, I like Bernie and want him to win. I’ve been praising Bernie since 2016. But these are real and easily identifiable flaws that he needs to fix; if I can see it presumably his opposition has someone vaguely competent who can also see it. A Tulsi VP spot would fix all of this, Nina would fix some of it, and even Klobuchar would be a good fit, though I worry about his surviving the first two years if he has a neolib as VP, even if that person is personally loyal; his VP needs to be someone the establishment also doesn’t like but is ideally younger, female, tough as nails, and willing to take on all comers with whatever the appropriate level of fury.

*btw, NR, once way back I thought you were and called you a troll. You may not even remember, but I long ago realized I was wrong on this one and feel bad about it. Apologies. (that stands even if you hate this comment)

Back in moderation again. Something I left out of the last comment just in hopes of avoiding the mod bin, this is interesting if true:

http://www.mockingbirdpaper.com/content/how-buttigieg-stole-delegate-new-hampshire-exact-way-we-predicted?fbclid=IwAR0Ohx6CWJSX6erN5GS8oNTff_K63v1PZlCdTTQGvxU_iLzRNh1NHc0V8ZI

For those who don’t want to click, it’s an article saying that the results matched the exit polls in the 7 of 10 New Hampshire counties that used hand marked, hand counted paper ballots.

In the other 3, Buttigieg outperformed his exit polls by 10%.

Had those 3 counties also matched up, Bernie would have had a slightly greater margin of victory and a delegate win instead of a tie, and Buttigieg and Klobuchar would have been neck and neck and even in delegates.

I’m unfamiliar w/the source, but after what happened in Iowa would not surprise me in the slightest. Would also indicate a pattern of election fraud on someone’s part. (not necessarily Buttigieg, could be on his behalf by someone else and he has naught to do w/it)

this is interesting if true

Will we ever know if any thing is ever true ever again?

The vote count in the 2016 California primary, I am convinced, was corrupted and the scope for vote count fraud has been greatly increased since.

The role propaganda plays in setting us up for this nonsense is basically aimed at making everyone an idiot. To passively accept “tech” solutions without question and then be interested in the consequences only if what is hidden is shown to be true. (If they wanted you to be interested in a true thing, they would not hide it.)

@MW
IDpol is designed to be offensive and alienating and, surprise! It is.

I think it is tough for any politician who wants to be leading a crowd, when a crowd volunteering to be led seems to demand acquiescence to some shared idiocy.

The country needs a reality check, but I would not count on actually being told the truth being welcomed.

People still seem to love “tough talk” about “hard choices” and “getting things done”. They do not always love actually thinking as opposed to feeling their way thru a predictable narrative.

I would not be entirely shocked if Bloomberg’s campaign had a role in surfacing those stop-and-frisk audio recordings. If you are a Republican running for the Dem nomination with your eye on the big prize, alienating the Right Sort of yapping Democrat on certain issues attracts more support than it loses (adjusted for depressing turnout!) The condemnations from the Twitter are unintentionally persuasive, of the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

Sanders, to succeed on his own terms, really needs to be able to engage in conversations that end with narrow agreement on policy framed by agreement to disagree on ideology, motives, et cetera. The Woke want a revolution in shared consciousness, which is not compatible with a revolution in material conditions and institutions of political economy.

Lyin’ Brennan:

All the Bernie folks applauded when subterfuge was used against other candidates…a little late to complain.

Remember when this happened? When “the Bernie folks applauded when subterfuge was used against other candidates”? No?

You wouldn’t because this comes from a lying, selfish piece of trash who defended Bill Clinton for two decades, a grown “man” who gets his jollies … tee-hee-hee … by lying and then acting like he’s trolling people when they respond, and would like nothing more than to have Sanders flame out so that our chances for medicare-for-all would go into the waste bin and tens of millions would continue without affordable health care. Why? Because Lyin’ Brennan is already covered.

Tee-hee-hee, Brennan, I guess you trolled me again. Tee-hee-hee.

You defending Bill Clinton for two decades and telling people who criticized him “to go work for Pravda” says everything about you and your character.

Z

One of Bernie’s biggest supporters, and always has been, with a substantial audience he influences is the animated, bombastic, militant Cenk Uygur. This is the revolution? Seriously? You call this a revolution? You call this anti-establishment? Get out of my face with this sh*t. Yeah, Hugh, you’re right. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The political class, by virtue of Citizens United, is now superfluous. The political class is like the health insurance companies. A wasteful and restrictive unnecessary layer. Direct oligarchic rule is here and it’s not going away. The likes of Bernie had many years to foment a revolution against this trend towards autocracy if he was truly serious in his conviction, but he/they failed. It is what we have. Cenk Uygur and his ilk, which is representative of Bernie’s support, does not a revolution make let alone a resistance to fascism.

I don’t watch TYT but I stopped momentarily on the show yesterday and they were going on and on with their disingenuous anti-establishment tripe and then cut to a commercial. The commercial was Cenk’s cohost, Ana Kasparian, pimping for Wall Street. No lie. This is beyond irony. So far beyond, we need a new word for it.

This is what Ana was pimping. A stock trading company called Dough. There is no resistance and there will be no revolution. It’s all fake. Considering that, I will remove the middle man political class myself and take the most benevolent, or least malevolent, oligarch for $1,000 Alex.

https://dough.com

@Mojave Wolf

“For those who don’t want to click, it’s an article saying that the results matched the exit polls in the 7 of 10 New Hampshire counties that used hand marked, hand counted paper ballots.

In the other 3, Buttigieg outperformed his exit polls by 10%.”

Oh, wow, that’s sensational, if it’s true. I think the gold standard for tolerable exit poll deltas is something like 3%.

I heard Jimmy Dore just this morning going on about Bernie being cheated, but I don’t recall anything about exit polls. http://tinyurl.com/wxnju8u

If this is legit, it represents an opportunity for either Trump, Bernie, or both to focus national attention on the election fraud issue. But I doubt either has it in them to do so.

I think it’s still true that Israel uses paper ballots. It can be done.

….if most peoples lives continue to get worse and the demand for change increases, any institution seen as ‘centrist corrupt’ will quite likely become targets for mob violence. It’s been the way of things for millenia.

This is pure projection and wishful thinking. It has not been the way of things. Revolts and revolutions have always been misguided from the start and have always ended up a tragedy with the wrong people being targeted and victimized. Trump is case in point. Centrist corruption, or the endemic corruption of a now superfluous political class considering Citizens United, gave us the fake populist reactionary Trump who blames society’s ills on the most vulnerable amongst us — the hard-working immigrants escaping despotism and the Mooslims. Nothing is being done to stop him and his throngs of fascists. America’s institutions are failing.

I’ll repeat it because it can’t be said enough, women and minorities should be very afraid. Fascism, which was formerly creeping but is now sprinting, is coming for them. With a Bloomberg presidency, full-throated fascism can be held at bay for another eight years. That time should be used wisely, otherwise, fascism will be back and even stronger. Four more years of Trump or more, and it’s too late. Bloomberg needs to jail these fascists when he’s elected. That is crucial. Bill Barr needs to go to jail. All of Trump’s enablers need to go to jail. The trials need to be televised so the world can see what needs to be done to be done to fascists. It’s that crucial. Anything less is spineless. Fascism feeds on spinelessness and ignorance.

“Hinting that Trump should deny he lost in November and claim it was election fraud”

I wasn’t hinting that.

I’m just referring to the fact that evidence of hackable machine votes abound, as well as what should be unacceptable deviations from exit polls (and regular polls, for that matter) – these have favored both Democrats and Republicans; and furthermore, I know of suspicious (apparent) ballot stuffing going on in Democratic areas, from a first cousin (that I live with).

Yet, even though Bernie was definitely screwed during the primaries in 2016; and Trump not only is aware of what was done to Bernie, but doubtless knows about other Democratic screw jobs of Republicans, neither has lead the charge to switch to more secure paper ballots.

Neither has led the charge to reveal the truth about the assassinations of JFK, MLK, or RFK; nor the truth about UFO’s. The media has made such inquiries toxic, and I’m guessing that neither has the gumption to tread on sacred myths of {cough}{cough} the Republic.

As for Barr, if he was into protecting the rule of law, never mind Trump, why haven’t Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and John Brennan been indicted? Why did Barr not make sure that Epstein wasn’t offed, to begin with; and the crime thoroughly investigated, after the fact?

I’m not ashamed to be a conspiracy theorist, but I much prefer plausible conspiracies….

> vet our presidential candiates ceo talents by requiring they ceo one of these corps rather than cake walking through the tee bee debates and state primary scenes.

This is just silly. For-profit corporations are very different from the government. If Apple doesn’t want to support the Macbook because it isn’t profitable, they just kill it. The government can’t decide that Indiana now sucks and just get rid of it.

We’ve been in a continuous constitutional crisis for decades, and none of the candidates wants to say so, though I think they all know what the problem is and what could be done about it. The notion of expanding the supreme court and changing the way judges are put on the bench is one way to deal with part of the problem, but discussion of it has disappeared from public notice. In other words, the crisis has been normalized, and to the extent it remains a crisis, it is considered an opportunity for those prepared to take advantage.

I don’t see any of the Democratic candidates except Bloomberg ready to do that, and he’s a snake on the same level as Trump. Birds of a feather and all that. Thing is Bloomberg could buy and sell Trump many times over and get richer in the process. 450 might cheer but not me. These kinds of fights do nothing for the masses, it’s that simple.

I’ve been concerned about Bernie’s age. It’s not just the infirmities that come with age, it is that his thinking hasn’t kept up with the times (not that any other Democratic candidate’s has). Bernie’s prescription would have been wonderful 20 – 30 years ago. Now? Our reality has changed so much that even if he could get done what he recommends, it wouldn’t accomplish what’s needed.

I noticed last night that the woman (of color) who coined the term “identity politics” is a Bernie supporter, quite proudly so. The freak-out over identity politics is mostly generated and sustained by rightist propaganda. In the real world, it’s barely a thing. Those who are offended by it would most certainly be offended by something else if it went away.

Bernie may well have tapped the limit of his natural constituency — around 25% of the current electorate. Truth is, that ought to be enough to be elected, but the way our system works, it isn’t. 50-60% isn’t enough because the system is biased toward the right. We’ve seen over and over again how minority support for a rightist president can win repeatedly, but not so for a leftist. None of the Democrats who have been in office since LBJ have been leftists, and LBJ blew his chances with the war in Vietnam.

So I hope Bernie does well, but the road ahead won’t be smooth for anyone.

Willy, sure, some immigrants aren’t hard-working but most immigrants are, especially those from Latin America. This has been my experience. They’re hard-working and industrious and they sacrifice a great deal. They live a meager but happy existence and one reason they’re happy is because of family and community. They do not take the jobs of other citizens. The jobs they take are the jobs American citizens will not take. Yes, these jobs pay less. That’s why they’re available. But that’s another issue altogether even though it tangentially relates to immigration. A living wage. At what wage will born & raised Americans be willing to work in the fields harvesting the crops? At what wage will they be willing to do the work immigrants now do? Tell me. I’d like to know where that sweet spot is if there is one. I’m talking about doing the job right with a non-combative attitude, not just showing up to pick fruit for $50,000/year without giving much effort but giving a ton of attitude.

A revolution? Seriously? You call the support Trump has received a revolution? Bull. That’s no revolution. Obese opioid-addicted diabetics are incapable of a revolution, but they’re very capable of supporting and voting for an orange fascist dildo to stick it to their favored defenseless scapegoats.

I’m not being misanthropic, Willy, I’m being a realist.

Willy, sure, some immigrants aren’t hard-working but most immigrants are, especially those from Latin America. This has been my experience. They’re hard-working and industrious and they sacrifice a great deal. They live a meager but happy existence and one reason they’re happy is because of family and community. They do not take the jobs of other citizens. The jobs they take are the jobs American citizens will not take. Yes, these jobs pay less. That’s why they’re available.

Sounds like specious baloney to me. You are not speaking from personal experience or very rationally.

You speak of Latins. If Latins are all so hard-working and industrious and sacrificial and family and community, please tell me why Latin nations aren’t the leaders of the civilized world? Why is Mexico not wealthier than Japan? Shouldn’t their corporations have taken over places like South Korea by now?

Drive by any Home Depot parking lot and ask any of them how much they want to do the most menial of work you have available, then go on your Nextdoor network to see if you can get a neighborhood kid to do the same for less. I have. I’ve worked alongside undocumenteds. Maybe it’s just back luck, but I’ve found out personally and many times, that their care about quality and quantity is highly self-serving (varying on a case by case basis) and not any kind of innate characteristic earned from desperation and hardship. I’ve found that they quickly adapt to American economic culture (adapt, not covert) and will turn into normal people just like the rest of us, with the honest ones remaining fairly honest and the scammers becoming better scammers.

The American citizen workers who are pissed off aren’t pissed off because of any fascist “racism”. They’re pissed off because their skill careers, whether it be house framer or data programmer or physian, is under sever pressure from illegal immigrants, who outside of cheaper labor, are a draw on the American system.

I take umbrage with Bernie supporters like Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian pimping for Wall Street all the while criticizing Bloomberg for being a billionaire.

One of the most black and white backwards comments I’ve ever seen here.

Helmut Norpoth predicting Trump winning 2016 before it happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_tydsmzhOc

Allan Lichtman making the same prediction, based on a different set of qualitative instead of quantitative criteria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MVuRIiD4s

@KT Chong

“It’s just math, no personal bias or emotion.”

Impossible. Equations are written by people, and people have bias, even when they try not to.

Regardless, those two guys models are bunk because all mathematical models of human behavior are bunk. They just happened to be correct in that election. There was always going to be an outcome of some kind, either Trump would win or he would lose. That doesn’t mean a model projecting he would win has somehow tapped into the super secret sauce of reality.

Willy, Willy, Willy. Surely you’re familiar with The Associated Farmers of California. It was a fascist organization comprised of, you guessed it, farmers. It was very much anti-union and anti-labor. It sought to break any organizing attempts by farm laborers. This book explains the appeal Mexicans had for these fascists. It wasn’t the Mexicans’ fault. They just wanted a job and were willing to work hard under terrible conditions and keep their heads down and their noses clean. You can’t blame the slave labor, Willy. You must blame the slavers. Building a wall is not the answer. A living wage is a large part of the answer.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739185759/American-Fascism-and-the-New-Deal-The-Associated-Farmers-of-California-and-the-Pro-Industrial-Movement

The fascists kill me. They want slave labor and they have slave labor and they decry the slave labor they demand and have. Let’s take Texas as an example. It’s always been strongly anti-union and anti-regulation. Business owners and lawmakers in Texas are the ones responsible for the flood of immigration. They want slave labor. They have slave labor. And yet they help elect Donald Trump to build his stupid wall that presumably is intended to stop the flow of the slave labor Texas clearly has and wants more of. Get out of my face with that hypocritical bullcrap.

You want to change the equation, Willy, throw the fascist lawmakers and business owners in jail in the border states and replace them with decent people who will pay a living wage. Once you do that, you’ll find you will still need immigrants. But that’s never going to happen, Willy, because it’s so much easier to blame the slaves.

Once you do that, you’ll find you will still need immigrants.

If all your arguments ultimately just circle back to no real change, if every argument is designed only to deflect criticism on its way to no where, why do they have to be so many and (collectively) so long?

The U.S. political culture is degenerate. NC had a link to a lovely essay on cheating and lying as markers of elite political culture — maybe it extends all the way down, the essay did not say that and I do not know.

But, it is remarkable to me how much the rivalry among factions comes down to advocating for cheating as policy: war without just cause, poisoning the environment as a job and profit creation strategy, predation as finance. And, so often resistance consists of limp acceptance of implausible denial. Or, making up absurd stories.

The way the two Parties have mirrored each other’s scandals is phenomenal.

In my own State of California and City of Los Angeles, a system of vote counting has been instituted that makes tampering as easy as calling Uber, and few can muster even impotent concern. Meanwhile, a narcissistic Republican billionaire is instituting a friendly takeover of the cadre and infrastructure of what little remains of the Party of the People.

While the Democratic National Committee over the past 10 days has tried to distance itself from the troubled app that threw the results of the Iowa caucuses into disarray, a copy of the contract and internal correspondence provided to Yahoo News demonstrates that national party officials had extensive oversight over the development of the technology.
An unaffiliated Democratic operative in Iowa provided Yahoo News with a copy of the contract between Shadow and the Iowa Democratic Party. The contract, which was signed on Oct. 14, 2019, and refers to Shadow as the “Consultant,” specified that the company had to work with the DNC and provide the national party with access to its software for testing.
The contract also specifies that Shadow agrees to “provide DNC continual access to review the Consultant’s system configurations, security and system logs, system designs, data flow designs, security controls (preventative and detective), and operational plans for how the Consultant will use and run the Software for informational dissemination, pre-registration, tabulation, and reporting throughout the caucus process.”
Yet the contract demonstrated that the DNC should have had the opportunity to foresee some of the problems. One provision in the contract says Shadow would provide “monthly written updates to the DNC regarding the Software status and timeline for implementation.” It also required Shadow to work with outside consultants and cybersecurity specialists, which the DNC could “choose in its sole discretion.”
According to the source who worked on the caucus, the DNC did have Shadow work with an outside cybersecurity firm. The source blamed the DNC and its security consultants for some of the issues that took place with reporting the results on caucus night.
“They were intimately involved in this process,” the source said of the DNC, noting the committee’s deputy CTO, Atwater, was on multiple conference calls during the app’s development.

https://news.yahoo.com/shadow-inc-idp-contract-dnc-documents-224407455.html

The DNC claims that they wanted to make sure the software was secure so the Russians couldn’t hack into it. Here, we are with the Russians again.

Like I said, if the DNC f’s over Bernie and no third party run is forthcoming, they leave themselves open to the Machiavellian master political move by Trump to clinch the election by promising to investigate the DNC’s conduct during the 2020 primary if he gets reelected. He won’t even have to do it to win, but he still might just for the ego boost of it, just for the perception that he outsmarted the democrats. And for the spite.

Z

Both of those stories … the DNC being involved in the development of that software (which they were far from forthcoming about) and Mikey $B’s large number of sexual harassment accusations … are potentially politically game-changing events.

All it takes is a few people to start talking …

Z

What’s next, Z? I bet you’re going to tell us Bloomberg is an anti-semite. You can throw the whole kitchen sink at him, Z, nothing will stick. Trump has proven that. Trump has set the precedent. He’s cleared the path. Remember what Trump said? He said when you’re rich and famous like him you can do anything you want to women including and especially grabbing their pussies. That got him elected. It will get Bloomberg elected too. What’s good for Donald’s goose, is good for Michael’s gander.

@Plenue

Thanks for the info. I was, however, just kidding. I will need rots of ruck to acquire new friends, Japanese or not.

Z, I’ve been reading Ian for years. A decade or more in fact. I like Ian. I respect his brilliant mind. I respect his open mind. I respect his moxy to speak truth to power and not be swayed & cajoled by insiders of which he knows many. I’m not on Bloomberg’s payroll. I cannot be on anyone’s payroll. Like Ian, I have my own mind and it cannot be compromised by money or adulation.

450, You need a living wage, defended borders, and slavers in jail. That’s what real Rule of Law owned by the citizenry looks like. You build a wall and pay for it with taxes gained from that living wage. You gain that living wage by eliminating the power and influence of the slavers.

The beauty of modern conservatism is that Rule of Law is easily bought by Freedom and Liberty. Since a living wage with open borders becomes a fantastic way to supply and demand wages downward, with the world full of the persecuted desperate to move to more peaceful places, and sociopathic slavers usually get rich that way, Rule of Law is easily perverted.

But this supposed to be about Mini Mike’s ability to actually serve the people voting for him, isn’t it?

I don’t have time today to itemize all the differences between Trump, Bloomberg and Sanders. I’d want to lay out every policy, then every way said policy positions were more than just talk.

Bloomberg has too much in common with Clinton/Obama. His commercials stress a bit too much his masterful success after his being fired. In my experience people like that tend to have less respect for the 99.9% of the rest of us who are “losers” than they should.

Since everybody, even you and I and Ian and bruce wilder and all the rest, tend to project whatever it is that works for us, or doesn’t work for us, onto the rest of the world, I’m unconvinced that Bloomberg can “feel” the experiences of the stressed out common worker. It’s very hard for humans to step outside themselves and be completely objective.

In politics as in so much of life, at best you get what you pay for, one way or another.

Mini-Mike may well buy the Democratic Party, outbidding Sanders’ supporters.

If he wins, it will be Mike’s government, not mine.

Arguing over which oligarch has the best climate plan (or which one even has a plan at all) is utterly pointless at this stage. We aren’t heading for a cliff; we’re already over the cliff. At least two degrees of warming is already baked into the system, and the positive feedback loops have already started. No one’s plan, and that includes Sanders Green New Deal, is going to alter that reality. We should have been putting a GND into action thirty years ago. And even that probably wouldn’t have been enough, because modern civilization is utterly dependent on fossil fuels for a lot more than just energy generation. I don’t think I’ve even seen much discussion of how to do industrial farming or make plastic without oil.

We’re already looking at the end of globalized industrial civilization, at a minimum.

Now putting all that aside, if Bloomberg manages to get the nomination, much less to win, then democracy in the US will be well and truly dead. He will have demonstrated it is possible for a rich person to simply self-fund their way to power, bribing where needed and if ads don’t seem to be working, just buy more ads.

I’m hoping that Bloomberg will go the way of Biden (or Steyer), and that when it comes to his first real-world test his supposed support proves a mirage.

If he wins, it will be Mike’s government, not mine.

You guys kill me. Really, you do. It was never your government unless you’re an oligarch and for all I know you may be one.

I’ll take Mike’s government versus Donald’s government any day of the week. What we want, or some of us want who read here and/or comment here, is not attainable. That includes everything Bernie presents and more. I truly wish it was. But the peeps manning the so-called resistance/revolution are not made of the right stuff. It’s simply not there so at this point we have to take the best we can get considering our predicament.

If you are right that we are powerless, 450.org, we are powerless. Why fry your own brain, obsessing over which authoritarian Republican billionaire becomes President? That non-choice choice is, as you tell it, out of our hands.

I can still choose not to legitimate the end of the republic by making it appear that I support either bastard or their political goals and methods. That is all you are advocating here: legitimating Bloomberg’s candidacy.

Atrios of Eschaton summarized well the source of position: “Broken brains”

@Plenue,

I have read that 90% of the oil used is burned for fuel. Only 10% of the oil used is made into chemicals including plastics. So delete oil from the energy portfolio of the world and oil use is reduced 90% right there. And then one could further shrink down that 10% by going back to the various oil-free materials we used before plastics existed.

About industrial farming with less oil and gas . . . there are several thousand-acre-or-more farmers who have eliminated oil-and-gas based chemicals from their farming operations. There are so few of them that their names can all be known. But they exist. Gabe Brown, Garry Zimmer, Klaas and Mary Howell Martens come to immediate mind. There are others.

Once oil use has been reduced to only the fuel for the machinery, then the question arises . . . how much land would be required to grow veggie-diesel oil to power the machinery? If it took an acre to grow enough veggie-diesel oil to plow/plant/cultivate/harvest/etc. an acre, then the excercise is pointless. But if it took one acre to grow enough veggie-diesel oil to machinify a hundred acres of land, then the excercise is very pointful indeed.

And of course agriculture might be de-industrialized and re-artisanised in any event, creating much more scope for hand labor, horse labor, ox labor, etc.

Of course that only addresses the agriculture questions you raise, but it shows that some questions may have answers.

@450.org

What makes you think Bloomberg doesn’t also equal fascism? A somewhat kinder, more enlightened fascism perhaps, but he’s a scumbag oligarch all the same.

Bruce Wilder:

If you are right that we are powerless, 450.org, we are powerless. Why fry your own brain, obsessing over which authoritarian Republican billionaire becomes President?

Because she’s getting paid by Mikey $B!

Z