klobuchar stinks (as a POTUS candidate). Booker is in my top 5, easy. Has great charisma and energy. See where he lands on the issues.
Booker has literally done shit himself to improve the lives of others. If you take a hard look at some other progressive heroes, they've barely actually lifted a finger. If he's "all talk", I'd hate to label the rest of the crew.
Yea I never understood the journalistic value of hosting the mouthpiece for CPAC and the Koch Brothers.
funny how talking points become an absolute reality. The truth lies somewhere in between the picture he paints of himself and the progressive talking points
That rhetoric works because the right is too dumb to know that Anti Israeli gov =/= Anti Israel =/= anti-Semitic
Forgot about Sherrod. He’d be top five for me, although he gets a little too “real America” for me at times. Bummed about Kander too.
His antics during the Kavanaugh hearings kinda tipped his hand. Which sucks because he seems to be a great orator. Saying you support Medicare for All bc it’s the party message while also saying you’re against eliminating private insurance is one I can’t figure out either.
Medicare for All has like 9 different policies towards it. Medicare as it is now doesn't eliminate private insurance as you have 20% you're responsible to pay (this is why Medicaid is the better avenue). You'd be fundamentally changing how Medicare works not just expanding the age range if you also wanted to eliminate private insurance. Also, if you're going by the quote circulated today the reporter doesn't understand words and wildly misquoted him.
And this proves my point. More whining with a “I don’t even know who you are” thrown in for good measure. I like it.
Can I see your rankings (tiered if you want) of who has done the most of the viable candidates (no Bernie/Biden/Hillary/Starbucks)
Fair point. My parents have benefited from private subsidies to outlandish drug pricing attached to their Medicare.
Most richers have a private drug plan(medicare part D usually) and a supplement to cover the 20% of cost you owe. Or a Medicare Advantage plan that often rolls the prescription coverage AND supplement together.
This dickhead has been in Congress for just over three years and is the ranking member of this subcommittee of 10 but is clutching his pearls at a freshman being on the same subcommittee?
Which of the likely Dem candidates are legitimately anti-war? It's a set-in-stone moral conviction for me at this point. Nothing can be fixed if we can't stop the imperialistic inbreeding of corporatism, military spending, and regime change.
I genuinely have not noticed your posts. Just an observation, because I am responding to a guy who took the initiative to tell me that he didn't care about mine. In any case, I don't want to ruin the thread responding to your bullshit attacks anymore so feel free to PM me if you want to carry on. This is dumb. Trump sucks!
The Democratic Party Isn't as Left-Wing as You Think Progressives have gotten a lot of attention, but the moderate, centrist core of the party is far from dead. Spoiler These anti-right-wing protesters in Philadelphia are not representative of all Democrats. Photo by Cory Clark/NurPhoto via Getty Spoiler Former Starbucks CEOHoward Schultz's not-quite-official campaign for president is driven, he says, by a simple proposition: Donald Trump is too extreme, but Democrats have become too extreme in their own way. Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, according to Schultz, is "ridiculous," while Medicare for all, endorsed by Warren and fellow Democratic 2020 candidate Kamala Harris, is "unaffordable." Though Schultz's remarks have gotten a lot of attention, he's hardly the first to make this kind of critique. Democrat Jerry Brown, who just ended his tenure as governor of California, said in December his own party was in danger of going too far left and supporting policies that are "harebrained schemes." Before the midterms, former Democratic president Jimmy Carter, who said he's voted for Bernie Sanders, cautioned Democrats they needed to appeal to independent voters to beat Trump. Mike Bloomberg, like Schultz a billionaire who may run for president as a centrist, said Warren's tax is probably unconstitutional. Conservative columnists in CNN and the Washington Examiner have offered Democrats the helpful advice that they are going too far left, citing policies endorsed by Warren, Harris, and living meme Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These are easy criticisms to make, but they reduce the Democratic Party to a caricature that ignores the party's still powerful moderate wing. The Democrats' transformation into a truly left-wing party is an easy story to tell, and there's some evidence for that story. Medicare for all—the idea that the government should be the provider of health insurance to all Americans—has gone from a relatively fringe position to one most potential 2020 contenders embrace. Some Democrats, like Ocasio-Cortez, are now calling for a "Green New Deal" that would guarantee government-funded jobs for everyone while transitioning the US economy away from heavy carbon emissions. Lots of prominent political figures are now willing to use left-wing rhetoric that would have sounded hopelessly utopian just a few years ago; some left-leaning young people are even comfortable calling themselves socialists. And this message gets amplified because many of these young leftists are, like Ocasio-Cortez, smart and funny on social media. If viral tweets won elections, private property would already be a thing of the past. This story of the Democrats' journey left is an attractive narrative for lots of different groups. Progressives like it because it shows that they've tugged the Democrats from being a truly centrist party in the 90s to one that's reflective of left-wing values—and they think a progressive party has a better chance of beating Trump anyway. Conservatives also like this story because it lets them paint Democrats as extremists. For the media, the rise of left-wing politicians is a new phenomenon to be reported on and debated (and debated, and debated, and debated). And it's true that the top-tier declared 2020 candidates are all progressives. Warren's entire career has been about fighting economic inequality, Harris has controversially stuck to her guns on Medicare for all, and Kirsten Gillibrand is possibly the most outspokenly feminist candidate of the cycle, having attracted a lot of attention for criticizing her fellow Democrat Al Franken when he was accused of sexual harassment. But all of them have obvious moderate streaks as well. Harris is running on her career as a prosecutor, to the anger of many on the left; Warren, unlike avowed socialists, has praise for capitalism, just not "capitalism without rules"; and when Gillibrand was asked on liberal podcast Pod Save America about ending the filibuster in the Senate—a necessary part of enacting any progressive agenda after 2020—she demurred: The latest polling from Gallup shows that more Democrats than ever identify as "liberal"—but that works out to only 51 percent of the party, compared to the 34 percent who think of themselves as moderates and 13 percent who are conservatives. And though no doubt some Democrats are confused about what those words mean, the midterms showed that the moderate wing of the party is alive and well. Ocasio-Cortez got a lot of attention partly because it's so rare that a left-wing challenger unseats an incumbent—most of AOC's fellow leftists didn't fare as well in Democratic primaries, and Dan Lipinski, maybe the most conservative Democrat in Congress, held off his own primary challenge. Digging into the Democrats' wave of victories in House elections last year, it's very difficult to sort out a cohesive narrative. Arguably, the center of the party has shifted to the left when it comes to issues like healthcare and the minimum wage, but a lot of non-radical Democrats got elected alongside lefty standard-bearers like Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. Advertisement This week, in a piece about the place of centrists in the 2020 race, the New York Times noted a Pew survey finding that 53 percent of Democratic-leaning voters wanted the party to move in a more moderate direction. The Times also quoted a Bloomberg adviser who thinks that "there is a clear and sufficiently wide lane for a pragmatic candidate, and that the progressive lane is really crowded.” There are a few political heavyweights who could fill that lane. There's former Texas Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke, who refuses to label himself a "progressive" and has been criticized for not supporting a left-wing agenda. There's former Vice President Joe Biden, who has positioned himself as the grown-up in the room who will work with Republicans. There's also Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, a dark horse potential 2020 contender who was recently praised by conservative columnist George Will. (Other moderates who may run include Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and Bloomberg himself.) There are an uncountable number of pressures and counter-pressures being exerted on the Democratic Party, with progressives advancing leftist policy goals, centrists trying to push back in the name of pragmatism or moderation, and many ordinary voters perhaps unsure of what specifically they want to see. This has left a jumble of polling results, such as surveys where support for Medicare for all swings wildly depending on what arguments for and against the policy you offer respondents. For more evidence voters don't quite know what they want, check out this January poll of New Hampshire voters where many of them have Biden and Sanders as their top two choices, even though those potential candidates are probably the furthest apart on policy. The only thing that duo has in common is that both are old white men, and that can't be what Democrats want... right? Advertisement Left-wingers like Ocasio-Cortez have attracted so much attention because they're a new phenomenon. But the average Democrat, if such a thing exists, is probably well to the right of AOC. While the Republican Party has become more solidly conservative over the years, the Democratic Party hasn't undergone an equivalent shift—at least not yet—and remains a messy coalition of people with a lot of different left-of-center views and priorities. The character of the party for the next several years will depend in large part on who it nominates to go up against Trump in 2020, and judging by the polls, that person could very well be Joe Biden. The Democratic Party may be transforming, but it's too early to say into what. Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter. from vice
Speaking of him being on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he skipped 67% of their meetings his first year on it.
Here are the top five posts from People For the American Way's RightWingWatch.org of the past week. Click on the images or headlines for the articles. Trump’s ‘Prophets’: ‘We Are at War’ with Satanic Opponents of Trump, his Wall and his Divine Destiny More... Outside Roger Stone’s Hearing, There Was a Circus Alex Jones Says Roger Stone Contacted WikiLeaks at Jones’ Behest While Seeking Infowars Job Trump’s HHS Gives OK to Taxpayer-Funded Agency That Rejects Catholics, Jews, Gays Liz Crokin Says She’ll ‘Have to Bow Out’ of QAnon Movement if ‘Mass Arrests Don’t Happen This Year’
Glad Drew didn't die. Spoiler: A little taste Here is another fact: future generations should endeavor to make sure a man of President Trump's ilk never ascends to power again, and yet that won’t happen because our media and most of our politicians treat him very much like a normal president. They do this because they don’t want to alienate Trump’s ever-shrinking base, but also because they believe covering him as a traditional leader and not a deranged 72-year-old seems like the proper and objective thing to do. It is not. Trump’s ascension is an emergency and a global catastrophe waiting to happen, and yet here’s Chuck Todd welcoming the president’s grotesque sycophants onto his show like they’re esteemed intellectuals. And here’s Twitter taking what is clearly a joking tweet about billionaires never cleaning toilets and framing it as a neutral “debate” people out there are having. This passes for objectivity among the powers that be right now, but it’s not. It’s the deliberate sanding down of a criminal ruling class and the strife it has created. That is a crime itself. Right now, putting up the façade of having no opinion is its own form of punditry and is a deadly act, one that allows miscreants like Trump and his Cabinet to freely loot the national coffers while being presented as legitimate politicians. This is how an obvious blowhard and cheapskate like Schultz can get taken seriously as a potential candidate despite having no grass roots support, no platform, no any experience of any kind working in government, nor even a steady habit of voting as an adult. He’s a rebel only within the norm keepers’ extremely narrowly defined limits of what a rebel ought to be: Yale management expert Jeffrey Sonnenfeld expects big things from Howard Schultz…. “Howard has never been a member of the business roundtable. He's not a standard part of corporate America. He's a maverick." Christ, not another faux maverick. The only thing Howard Schultz rebels against is doing anything useful. Watch him react to the idea of Medicare For All: Please note that a majority of Americans support the idea of Medicare For All. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became a sensation not merely because she pulled off a huge upset in the primaries or because she’s good at Twitter… it’s because she supports NORMAL, good ideas. Making sure sick people don’t die in debt? Totally normal idea. Tax the wealthy more? Let’s get on that. And yet the billionaire shitting on such ideas is the rebel, and AOC is a dangerous kook? I don’t think so. Howard Schultz is nothing but an empty suit that even emptier suits can root for. This isn’t an independent candidate at all. This is a man who is thoroughly dependent on the current, horrific state of affairs to make his cash. https://www.gq.com/story/useless-political-machinery
This is good clarity, I am pretty full up w uninformed as fuck takes on MFA from people who know nothing about healthcare or Medicare. Shit is too complicated to remain a political soundbite.
love his writing. he links this older article of his in the piece you posted and it is also good https://www.gq.com/story/there-is-money-in-fascism
It's crazy, I thought someone was Spliff'ing and posting old news, but that was the FL Secretary of State or something just last week. Blackface sure was popular among this crowd for some reason, I can't precisely nail down why though.
That picture, alone, no. Unless he just irresponsiblly ignores this, then that’s more suggestive of his character today.