Well, this is awkward. I don’t particularly like Hillary Clinton, but most of her supporters seem cool. I very much like Bernie Sanders, but a lot of his supporters seem to be assholes. So what am I to do?
The latest incident is that Sanders’ followers shouted Dolores Huerta off the stage when she offered to help translate at a Nevada caucus. Dolores Huerta? Civil rights and labor leader? The so-called Democratic Socialists chanted “English only!” at a woman who is a prominent activist for unions, equal rights for women and minorities, and for a more just immigration system?
Who the fuck are these people?
“The fellow that was running the caucus said that the first person to come up to the stage could translate, so I went up. Nobody else did,” she said. “Then the Bernie people started yelling no, no, no. One of their people came up, and I suggested we both translate. But the moderator decided we would have no translation. So the Bernie people preferred we would have no translation just because I was going to do the translating. It’s ridiculous, because if I had said something that wasn’t accurate, I’m sure somebody would have corrected me.”
It’s not clear who was opposing Huerta’s offer. It’s possible that there were Republican shills there to disrupt the proceedings; there are conflicting reports on who was against Huerta translating; I’m also hearing that it was only the moderator of the caucus who rejected the idea of a translator. Caucuses are an ugly, chaotic, obsolete mess, so who knows what was going on. The bottom line is that the amazing Dolores Huerta was on hand to translate the proceedings into Spanish, and the caucus ultimately rejected the idea. Bernie Sanders, at least, has deplored the action.
It’s going to be interesting when we have our caucus in March. I live in what is basically Lake Wobegon: very white, mostly conservative, lots of people of Scandinavian and German ancestry. However, we also have an increasing Hispanic population, largely relegated to doing the poorly paid scut work at local dairy and poultry farms…but there are now a few businesses in town that have Spanish language signs in their windows, and we see lots of brown-skinned workers being quiet and maintaining a low profile. I hope some of them show up at the caucus, and if they do, I hope our local moderator is enthusiastic about providing translation to bring them fully into the democratic process.
I’m still planning to vote for Sanders at the caucus, because as I said, I like him and his ideas better than I do those of Clinton. But Sanders’ more zealous followers, especially the ones who are supporting Bernie because he’s not a woman (and not a Clinton woman) rather than because they like his egalitarian ideals, have the power to turn me away.
I’ve seen a few other people say this, and I’m puzzled. Why do the actions of a candidates’ followers carry so much weight, to the extent that one might change their vote based on the actions or attitudes of the followers?
Snopes rates this story as False.
Don’t fall for it, apply a little more rigor.
Please don’t help team Clinton push this despicable false meme.
I’d still like to know why Hillary Clinton doesn’t have to apologize for Amanda Marcotte’s war on any Democrat not supporting Hillary, or why HRC supporters can say they’ll quit the party before they’ll vote for Bernie, yet it’s treason when some schmuck says the same thing about Bernie.
This is about more than the presidency. This is about the black heart and flabby soul of the Democratic party. Frankly, if HRC wins the nomination I may vote for her, but as an independent, not a Democrat. The party left me and the rest of the left for Wall Street money a long time ago. Bernie can bring me back but if not him, then screw the Democrats and their “we’re not Trump” brand.
@#5, markgisleson:
Yup. If Clinton gets the nomination, we’ll have a Democrat who voted for the Iraq war running against a Republican who didn’t.
I listened to the Snopes video. It was a chaotic mess. Trying to sort out what happened in an informally made video is just a bad idea — have we all forgotten the Dean Scream?
Look, the bottom line is that a caucus for the supposedly liberal, Democratic party had an opportunity to have Spanish translation. They turned it down. Can you explain why?
And don’t tell me that it was because Huerta was a Clinton proponent. This was a caucus. Everyone there was a proponent for someone or another. There was applause at the decision to go English-only.
Clinton supporters who say they won’t vote for Bernie against Trump are as stupid as Bernie supporters who say they won’t vote for Clinton against Trump.
I don’t like Hillary Clinton. I agree about the “black heart and flabby soul of the Democratic party”, and that Clinton represents it well. I’m just not at all happy about the flabby-souled Sanders supporters.
It was a screw-up. not having a translator available, if they knew they needed one. If the organizers didn’t know, then no one is really to blame, mistakes happen. Some people – some individuals – tried to take political advantage of it. I don’t think you can blame Sanders for some idiot screaming “English Only” any more than you can blame Clinton because some people blew it out of proportion. Really, if this is what passes for controversy in the Democratic primary campaign then they are doing pretty good compared to the other fools.
This is not the first time that team Clinton has falsely attacked Sanders in what should be clear is part of a pattern of calculated efforts to undermine Sanders’ support with Latinos and POC. It’s the same kind of disgusting gutter politics that she employed in 2008 with the “hard-working white Americans” racist dogwhistles against Obama.
As to the “applause” at the decision to go English-only, an actual witness who was there, Gabby Hoffman, tweeted that it was Clinton supporters, not Sanders supporters, that applauded.
That was in the Snopes article.
You fell for an “artful smear” and are ignoring the first rule of holes, which is that when you find yourself in one, stop digging. Please put down your shovel.
EXACTLY!
There seem to be some hints of a back-store or side-story here about the potential neutrality of the translator. From what I can surmise – I am hoping by putting this out here others may bring forward evidence to support or disprove this idea, I am by no means certain about this – there was some dispute about whether the audience would trust a translator who was aligned with one of the candidates, and possibly chants of English-Only were shorthand for “we don’t trust your partisan translator, don’t let them speak” – I am in no position to judge if the proposed translator was in fact biased and partisan, or neutral. But comments at the links provided by r3a50n seem to indicate it was an issue. I just cannot accept a crowd of Democrats ever shouting English-Only if they truly meant what we all expect that phrase to mean – what if it meant something else, something less nefarious?
As for “…part of a pattern of calculated efforts to undermine Sanders’ support…” – as usual, more baseless accusations of things “Team Hillary” supposedly have done in the name of her Highness. Some people were involved in a dispute about who should translate. And you are johnny on the spot ready to turn it into another nail in the coffin of your carefully constructed anti-hillary screed. Not buying it.
So, tell me, why is Bernie the One True heir of the diverse Obama coalition? He left difficult, diverse, complex Brooklyn for a political career in the homogeneous white postage stamp of a state Vermont.
You have to balance how many boxes your candidate checks with how likely they are to win the general.
Who are these people?
At the organizing meeting I went to yesterday they were mostly middle age women who are unhappy about their children’s prospects. At the debate parties at my house they were some underpaid university professors (this is Wisconsin), some stressed out school teachers and a young, unemployed, Hispanic man.
The thing here is that all our work and all our voices can be erased by some loud obnoxious people grabbing the stage just because that’s how they roll. It’s the same problem that atheism (and I bet other movements) face and it’s not a new problem.
Many years ago I went to some coffee house discussions put together by an aging-hippie-Quaker-war protester type and a fellow showed up who was loud, aggressive and talked all the time. The hippie-Quaker told us that precisely this sort of thing had bollixed up activism in the 60’s and ‘we’ (who was ‘we’, circa 1995? dunno) would have to figure out how to deal with it. I don’t know that we arrived at any brilliant solution other than outlasting the troll, which we did. Any time you have an open platform or a ‘people’s movement’ that isn’t rigidly orchestrated from somewhere, this can happen.
I would vote for Hillary almost as happily as for Sanders. I’m in it to see people try to pull together and speak up for ourselves.
I think I’m moving to the Hillary side despite my deep reservations about her policy ideas.
The single thing that concerns me most about Clinton is her foreign policy, which, sadly, is touted as a strength of hers. Beginning with the fall of the Soviet Union, which became Bill’s baby very quickly, Hillary has shown complete support for neoliberal military intervention. Russia was a mess because people were hungry and cold, and we intervened to make sure that as much of that nation was sold off to private interests as possible.
Then she voted for the Iraq War, nothing more needs to be said about that. It’s worth pointing out, though, that despite her later “come to Jesus” on the issue, Iraq was partitioned and sold in exactly the same way Russia was.
But fair enough, she wasn’t actually in charge of any of those decisions, but then we get to Libya. Once again, we managed to take a country under the daily terrorism of a horrible dictator and make it worse. What concerns me most is that I see no indication that Clinton or anyone on her team views that as a mistake. I hear here refer to the intervention as proof of her seriousness on the issue. That terrifies me. Bernie, for all his confusion on foreign policy, will be erring on the side of not bombing people.
But then…fucking shit, Bernie. Before all else, I think I’m in the anti-bullshit party. I agree completely with Bernie’s broad approach to economics: progressive taxation, investment in education, universal health care, strict regulation of Wall Street, focusing on the demand side…etc.
But then he releases these economic projections that promise growth higher than Jeb did, and we all made fun of that idiot. Look at this graph. It’s completely fucking insane:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/plausibility/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body
And now Krugman is feeling the wrath of the “Bernie Bro.” I think a lot of Greenwald’s point is important to remember:
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/31/the-bernie-bros-narrative-a-cheap-false-campaign-tactic-masquerading-as-journalism-and-social-activism/
Everyone sucks on the internet and the Bernie Bro phenomenon is being used to attack. But there is something unique about the way people are aggressively covering for some of Bernie’s BS.
I’m conflicted. At the time I was glad Elizabeth Warren stayed in the Senate – we need really good Senators – but now I wish she had run. She is a more realistic version of Bernie.
direlobo:
Thank you.
Tony! @ 1:
CaitieCat has a good answer here.
So, tell me, why is Bernie the One True heir of the diverse Obama coalition?
Perhaps because he is pretty much the only honest candidate in the race? Or perhaps because hes the only one currently in the race who has not been bought? Or perhaps because he’s the only one in the race who isn’t a warhawk? Or are you going to suggest Hillary is an Honest, peace loving, unbought candidate?
I’m really disappointed that you’ve apparently fallen for the false “berniebros” meme. I’m disappointed that the false meme is working so well that you, someone I respect as a person that has such keen insight to see through the partisan right-wing bullshit can be so casually ensnared by it.
Please think about why you believe what you believe about Sanders supporters and ask yourself if you’ve let yourself be influenced by anything other than the evidence. And please think about why so many establishment figures seem to be contributing to the spread of false memes against Sanders.
Except that there were no chants. If you are not certain about what happened as you readily admit, please do some research before you speculate based on false accusations.
What about the sea lioning that some Sanders supporters seem to be undertaking?
*cough*
There’s more than enough legitimate reasons to criticize either candidate, its silly that either candidate’s supporters are turning to things like this to give them an “edge.”
I also think its silly to hold a candidate’s supporter’s actions against the candidate, but I suppose there are times I’d do such, like if a hypothetical candidate was intentionally riling up supporters into violence. Regardless, my dislike for Hillary has nothing to with stuff like this.
With 100% reporting, we have final results from South Carolina:
Trump 32.5%
Rubio 22.5%
Cruz 22.3%
Bush 7.8%
Kasich 7.6%
Carson 7.2%
With 95% reporting, here are the results from the Nevada caucus:
Clinton 52.7%
Sanders 47.2%
Clinton’s victory speech in Nevada:
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/hillary-clinton-gets-her-victory-speech-road-nomination-clears-n522906
Sanders’ concession speech in Nevada:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/bernie-sanders-concession-speech-nevada
The turnout in Nevada was lower than in 2008.
davidsmith @ 18:
To quote someone (and make your posts easier to read), use:
<blockquote>Paste Text Here</blockquote>
Thank you Caine, I rarely ever post on the internet, I usually just wait till someone else posts what I was thinking.
I would love to see some legitimate criticism of Bernie, unfortunately all i ever see are easily disprovable lies. Anyone here have a legitimate criticism?
You clearly did not read the linked article. You’re free to disagree but don’t just metaphorically stick your fingers in your ears and sing “lalalalalala…!” and think that gives you the credibility to deny that people throughout the media and political establishment with ties to Clinton (hence “team Clinton”) like Jonathan Capehart and Claire McCaskill have shown a pattern of attacking Sanders with lies and red-baiting. Capehart is still clinging to his lie just as there are plenty of Clinton supporters that are still clinging to and trying to spread this false accusation.
PZ, you should take this post down. The story is incontroverrtibly false. You fell for a smear, please don’t leave it on your front page.
PZ:
Just hold your nose and vote Sanders if you are any sort of leftist. Just like you will hold your nose and vote Clinton if she becomes the candidate. As you have written many times.
Goddamn, American politics is stupid. But never worry, where I live it is almost as bad.
Perhaps I should clarify that from my perspective as a libertarian socialist, Mr. Sanders looks like the candidate of compromise. I think he has some good ideas but he is still a centrist and in no way a radical. He still would not be a radical if he proposed to cut the US military budget (at least) in half, which he does not do with so many words. Either way, he is your once in a lifetime chance to vote for an authentic, honest looking person for that specific position. The rest of the field are obviously power hungry murderers, thieves and liars with fake smiles. That includes Clinton.
I would feel profoundly sick if I were forced to vote for someone like her. It remains to be seen if I could bring myself to do it. Really grateful about not having to make that “choice”. Dear Americans, good luck with your elections – you will need it.
davidsmith@#26:
I would love to see some legitimate criticism of Bernie, unfortunately all i ever see are easily disprovable lies. Anyone here have a legitimate criticism?
His support for Israel. While he’s not as grovellingly supportive as Clinton, he’s still not in the right place.
Sanders makes the standard imperial mouthings about defense and supporting the wars we’ve stupidly begun. That makes him no leftist candidate, merely “lefter than all the right wing candidates”
That was easy. Next?
Haven’t we learned anything from the Atheist/Skeptic movement? Just because people label themselves as atheist, skeptic, liberal, progressive, etc, meant that they have learned to fully embrace all of the values that should be espoused by such groups. I don’t think that people who really like Sanders would have protested a Spanish interpreter, because she was going to speak Spanish. It seems more plausible that they would reject the interpreter because of candidate affiliation. But, I wasn’t there. It’s quite possible that there are assholes who support Sanders. It is quite possible that there are assholes who support Clinton. This will not change my vote, unless Sanders actually says something that makes me believe that he is harbors some kind of prejudice against minorities. I’m sure that there are really nice people who support Republican candidates, but those nice people aren’t going to make me vote for any of the Republican candidates. If the Sanders campaign responded poorly to this situation, it could easily be a result of confusion at the time. Sanders did respond and he said he did not condone the alleged behavior. If you base your support on what a handful of the candidate’s supporters do, then I don;t think you’re thinking it through. But, you are free to vote any way you wish for any reason you wish.
I see no citations..and what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. (learned that from you Marcus) Next.
Really? You’re still clinging to this?
LOL! Except that it’s really not insane at all; both you and Krugman need to check your confirmation bias.
Krugman is just another in a long line of establishment figures ready to destroy their own credibility to support Clinton. If he had been more careful and actually crunched the numbers himself instead of relying on the partisan ramblings of others that also did not crunch the numbers themselves, he may not have made as big a fool of himself as he did.
doubtthat, #15:
There is? There’s “something” over your left shoulder too. Naturally, I assume that nobody will ask me what that may be.
Sorry, it’s a little jarring to see such a vacuous statement, immediately after that link to Greenwald’s long ass article. But I guess at least it gets high marks for comedic timing.
Supreme Court. I’ll vote for the Democratic nominee.
Clinton did not vote for war, she voted (reluctantly, she’s been saying for some time) to give Bush the discretion, because he claimed (a) secret, undeniable proof, and (b) that he’d only use the power to pressure Iraq into allowing inspectors.
Yes, these were both lies. No, I didn’t believe either one at the time. It is, however, not right that she voted “for war,” even if Bush ran off in that direction as soon as he had that power in his greasy little hands.
I think Clinton’s tougher than Sanders, but it’s a toss-up who the GOP will try harder to thwart. My guess is whoever’s elected will be relentlessly demonized and opposed by the Gops.
That does not fly sorry. http://inthesetimes.com/article/18813/the-five-lamest-excuses-for-hillary-clintons-vote-to-invade-iraq
davidsmith
Fine: He doesn’t understand intersectionality for crap. He said his only litmus test for a Supreme Court Justice was Citizens United, no mention of Roe vs. Wade (or the actual standard now, which is actually Casey). His plan to pass most of schemes is to somehow convince a lot of people to vote for Democrats and getting millions engaged in the political process, so he functionally has no plan. I remember the Obama primary as well, and I remember him speaking to crowds of people with great speeches with no numbers.
r3a50n
Stop trying to gaslight people. I know BernieBros exist. I know because they are on my Facebook feed. I know because I talk to them in real life. Instead of extolling the virtues of Bernie Sanders, they post sexist memes about Clinton. Her face, her voice, her clothes become topics of idiotic posts. Every right-wing smear that isn’t true gets brought up against her, like somehow it’s her fault that her husband did something 20 years ago. I know because they’re the ones telling me they’ll be voting for the Republican if “Shillary” gets the primary. She doesn’t know the difference between War Machine and 4DK, or Star Trek or Star Wars (seriously, I don’t even know why these memes exist). Nothing Hillary Clinton can do can be true or honest because she’s just some calculating harpy, right? And none of that is sexist, I don’t know what to tell you. So don’t tell me that BernieBros don’t exist, because they absolutely do. There are plenty of people who here “tax supported college” and there is nothing at all else liberal about them.
davidsmith@#32 –
I see no citations..
Glib bullshit. You’re posting here as if you know something about Sanders’ candidacy and politics. It’s reasonable for me to assume you’ve done your research and it’s absurd for you to demand citations.
Go do your own fucking work.
Actually no, he simply dismissed the Roe vs Wade question because it is obvious he would not appoint someone who was against it. It was a silly distraction for silly people. Its a disingenuous attack at best a deliberate obfuscation at worst. Here is his record on that issue its better than Hillary’s record on it. http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Bernie_Sanders_Abortion.htm
What I meant was that there’s plenty of matters of policy and history to disagree with a candidate over. Basing your opinion of a candidate over stuff their supporters do seems silly to me because I think there’s more important things than what Hillary/Bernie supporter X said on topic Y.
Not to be glib and i hate using your own arguments against you, but you made the claim that needs evidence not me therefore you need to supply the evidence not me. This has always been the standard here on Pharyngula has it not? I’m fairly certain I’m right on this. So go do your own fucking work you fucking hypocrital douchebag.
davidsmith#41
If you are asked for evidence, supply it. Or you come across as a True Believer™ who doesn’t really care about evidence.
As a Brit looking in from the outside, I must admit that I was surprised how nasty the Democrat nomination race got the last time around. You sort of expect it from the Republicans, but it was an unedifying spectacle when some of Obama’s supporters wheeled out some very ugly sexism (of the ‘only a fool thinks a woman can handle this much power or responsibility’ variety) against Clinton. I don’t think Obama was in any way personally responsible for that, and similarly in the not entirely unsurprising event that some of Sanders’ supporters might be misogynists who are simply there to keep a woman away from the oval office, that would not really be his fault either.
No candidate can personally vet every person who attaches themselves to their campaign as a supporter. I think Sanders and Clinton should both be judged on their own words, actions and track record rather than on the nastier reaches of their respective support bases. Of course, should either of them double down in support of those regressive elements, then they deserve whatever they get, but Sanders hasn’t done that here.
@r3a50n #10:
Dolores Huerta was an “actual witness” as well. I watched the video and it sounds like what happened is that Dolores Huerta was booed by Sanders supporters when she took the stage (based on the shouting, it sounds like they didn’t want her because she’s a Clinton supporter and they didn’t trust her to do an accurate translation). Why would it make any sense for Clinton supporters to applaud when the moderator declines her translation services at the crowd’s behest? I think we can reasonably infer that Sanders supporters were the ones applauding. The point of PZ’s post is that Sanders supporters booed Dolores Huerta off the stage when she offered to translate. Which is both true and pathetic.
@davidsmith, #26:
His vote for the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act” in 2005 ended a promising effort to go after gun manufacturers for negligently continuing to sell guns to the small number of dealers they knew to be engaged in illegal interstate gun trafficking.
You are still missing the point (intentionally?) in your attempt to further spread the meme, that point being that all political candidates have some unsavory supporters, including Clinton. Sanders has no more of them than any other candidate, which is what the false “berniebros” meme is all about. The false implication that somehow, Sanders supporters are worse than Clinton supporters or supporters of other candidates, or that there are more of them supporting Sanders than Clinton or the other candidates.
That has been disproved. Where is your evidence that it is true, aside from anecdotal?
A couple of comments:
1. It wasn’t just some translator, it was Dolores Huerta, and if that doesn’t mean much to you I strongly suggest you go find out more about her.
2. This thread is rapidly becoming exactly what PZ complained about. Yeah, both sides do it; neither should.
3. I just read this summary of a Dem debate, from a 16-yo deaf girl who follows them closely:
Back away from the opinion and look at the family dynamic described; she’s pretty smart, and that’s not taking either side.
4. Just for sheer fun, here’s what she said about the Rep primary yesterday:
They’re in this LGM thread:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/02/donald-denialism-an-ongoing-series
Martha @14
My theory, which is mine, is that these people, like the MRAs claiming to speak for atheism, are conservative agents paid to pull these stunts.
So basically just going with the anti-Bernie screed instead, as if that’s the objective, neutral position? Note that the videos show no sign of a chant, contradicting (or at least failing to corroborate) the anti-Bernie claim made by a pro-Hillary campaigner. Note again the conflicting witness accounts as to who applauded the ‘english only’ statement (not chant).
Some commenters on this thread have asked for criticisms of Bernie Sanders that are about substance and policy, rather than reactions to nasty “BernieBros.” Here are some of those criticisms. (Disclaimer, for the most part these are not my words. They are criticisms made by analysts, economists or journalists.)
Democratic debate analysis from Glenn thrush of Politico.
Scrutiny of the plan Bernie Sanders proposed for putting enough money in the pot to pay for free college tuition, etc.
Additional background added by Lynna: Jeb Bush and Chris Christie floated the promise of 4% growth, Scott Walker upped that to 4.5%. People made fun of them for that. Sanders at least has numbers and a plan to back up his 5.3% claims.
Still, it is, as economist Goolsbee said, “magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars.” Goolsbee asked the question: are there any modern presidents that can claim 4% or higher growth? No. None. Clinton, Obama, Reagan … none of them spurred growth to those levels. If they had done so, the Fed would have raised interest rates to cool inflation threats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/us/politics/left-leaning-economists-question-cost-of-bernie-sanderss-plans.html
More details at the link above.
Very sadly, the whole issue of Clinton v. Sanders is irrelevant. At caucuses and primaries so far, the two are neck and neck. But when you add in the “super-delegates” who have already committed to one candidate or the other, Sanders is so far behind that Clinton’s dust cloud has already settled.
I’ve known for years that the whole process of selecting party candidates is corrupt. Still, it is very depressing to see up close just how incredibly corrupt it is. Clinton will be the undisputed choice regardless of what actual party members want: the corporate owners of the party have already made their decision, and are already pulling their puppets’ strings to make that choice real.
This is why so few Americans bother to get involved in elections any more. Why bother? Why bother standing in line for hours to get into a caucus and wait another couple of hours to voice support for Candidate A, when that voice, no matter how many millions share it, will be utterly disregarded?
More response to the request for “legitimate criticism of Bernie,” which someone up-thread said they “would love to see.”
The issue of support for solar power was highlighted in Nevada. Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton commented and offered some solutions. This is less a criticism of Bernie Sanders, and more an illustration of the different approaches of the two candidates. Some voters would prefer the Sanders approach; others would prefer the Clinton approach.
The back story:
A summary of the Sanders approach:
A summary of the Clinton approach:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/02/16/3749765/bernie-sanders-nevada-solar-workers/
davidsmith@#41:
but you made the claim that needs evidence not me therefore you need to supply the evidence not me
So, then, either you actually do know about Sanders’ views on military spending, and Israel and are pretending you don’t – in which case you’re lying by omission and are just employing this line of argument as a dodge. Or you’re pretty ignorant about Sanders’ views in which case you probably should educate yourself.
Sanders’ opinions on Israel are hidden under some good waffle. He refuses to answer whether he’d continue to send billions of military aid. He won’t touch the question of whether Israel should give back occupied land. He did say that he thought Israel’s reaction of bombing civilian targets in Gaza was a bit rough – but temporized that by saying the whole situation is complicated (yes: that’s the point – the US keeps making it complicated) and that the US should broker a 2-state solution (see above) which is code for ratifying Israel’s conquest of Jerusalem and all of its land-grabs. By saying “Israel has a right to defend itself” he’s toeing the US’ line that supports Israel’s legitimacy, land grabs, and – right to invade territory ‘to defend itself.’ No, Sanders has not come right out and said that – and you’re being spectacularly intellectually dishonest if you’re demanding ‘citations’ from someone regarding a view that remains carefully un-expressed. Basically, Sanders – by saying very little – continues to ratify the US’ policy of approving occupation, displacement, collective punishment and overwhelming use of military force against civilians. He’s concerned that Iran not get a nuclear weapon, but he’s unconcerned that Israel’s got them. Bernie’s a hell of a good leftist, isn’t he? (Cite: *)
With respect to his views on defense spending – again – he doesn’t say anything much, which one would expect of a real left-wing candidate. I’ll grant that he appears to have made some mumbles about the US’ expenditures on WMD but his stated views on defense spending is that the pentagon’s budget must be made more efficient and be spent better. That’s washington code for “we’re going to examine what’s in your feeding trough” not “you’re going to get less.” In fact if you read (Cite: *) you’ll notice that he doesn’t say a fucking thing about reducing military expenditures – he has avoided answering any questions about the planned $1t expenditure on nuclear upgrades for the US – but he’s really really serious about Iran not getting a nuclear weapon in spite of the fact that everyone appears to be finally accepting the idea that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program.
(* https://berniesanders.com/issues/war-and-peace/ )
Gregory @50, the Super Delegate issue may not be as cut and dried as we think. Here is some background in a vdeo segment hosted by Rachel Maddow.
Maddow asked the chair of the Democratic National Committee about how super delegate voting works. Short conclusion: the media has mischaracterized the process.
The video is about 4:45 minutes long. I didn’t find a transcript. If anyone else has a transcript, please post excerpts.
I can read PZ’s post with my own lying eyes:
The word “boo” wasn’t used, it wasn’t even used by Huerta, so now you’re moving the goalposts and building a strawman to defend something PZ said that has been determined to be false by a non-partisan source.
What is clear if nothing else is, is that the initial report of horrible Sanders supporters behaving badly – and to a civil rights icon and Latina! – thus furthering the false “berniebros” meme were not at all as they were characterized initially by Clinton’s supporters and now by PZ Myers and that false characterization has been independently determined to be false.
You weren’t there and neither was PZ. Yet you both still want to cast aspersions on Sanders supporters based on partisan reports when there does not appear to be anything nefarious about what actually happened based on independent reports, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt that they would much more likely get had you and PZ not already bought into the false “berniebros” meme.
This is the most insightful article I’ve read so far this election, that speaks to the disenfranchisement of progressives that is fueling the Sanders campaign.
Anyhow, I think davidsmith was just posturing and doing a bit of well-poisoning with an intellectually dishonest “I would love to see some legitimate criticism of Bernie, unfortunately all i ever see are easily disprovable lies.” comment.
I think there’ve been a few posters (including myself) who have offered “legitimate criticism of Bernie” and now — instead of davidsmith ‘easily disproving’ them we see rhetorical tricks like demands for citations, etc.
Since my critique above was based on Bernie’s own website/stated views, I don’t see how you can claim I’m lying and I don’t see how you – as a presumed supporter of Bernie – can be so ignorant as to not know those views. I can only conclude you’re not arguing in good faith.
PZ, caucuses are different as you will soon be reminded. Had I been running that caucus, anyone saying anything negative from my side of the room would have been singled out and pushed out of the group while we loudly IDed them as probably Trump supporters.
Huertas is gaming everyone on this. And why on earth was someone from NH running a NV caucus? This smacks of party obstructionism (Sanders strong caucus so put an indie in charge). You can rest assured that every caucus that went for Clinton was run by a Clinton supporter.
So many ways the state party can put their thumb on the scale in a caucus state. Bernie will get his payback in MN (much to the surprise of the MN superdelegates who are RADICALLY out of touch with their rank and file).
You betray your partisanship and damage your credibility when you continue trying to advance false memes that have been disproved and you make yourself look as foolish as Krugman by taking someone like Goolsbee’s word for something that he didn’t even actually bother to analyze himself beyond simply thinking that it didn’t seem right in his gut.
While I do feel the progressives are disenfranchised, and Bernie is doing remarkably well for the way he is running, the low turnouts are disappointing to say the least.
r3a50n- Your exact words were “false BernieBros meme” and then linked to an article saying that anyone who says they have met BernieBros were either a) Clinton plants or b) it totally isn’t sexism. Neither of those are true. You’re “not every Bernie supporter” like every other “not every man” person out of there. I have seen it, I have experienced it, there are lots of sexist Bernie Sanders supporters. I don’t post much in the way of Pro-Clinton stuff, and I still see it on my facebook feed, and even if I was posting that Clinton was the goddamned angel-of-mercy, it wouldn’t make the sexism okay. BernieBros exist, they aren’t some nefarious political conspiracy, they are obnoxious as all fuck, and Sanders still won’t take two seconds to go off-message about class equality.
You think this isn’t worse for someone who is a liberal? If it was the Republicans pulling this crap, it would be easy to say this stuff isn’t okay. But I like Bernie Sanders, I like what he supports even if I don’t think he has the greatest plans. But now I have to defend the “it’s still not okay to be sexist” like I had to defend Sarah Palin because sexist smears aren’t just about one person. Instead of people posting about how Hillary Clinton will look like Cassandra from Dr. Who in 4 years (ha, fucking ha) while Bernie Sanders is going to be Gandalf, how about telling me how he plans to get his tax reform past? Instead of posting that Hillary looks like she’s going to eat that baby rather than kiss it, tell me how is he going to get single-payer and what is his plan to do with the Hyde amendment if he does? He has a great women’s rights record, he would be someone I would be inclined to back. But he’s spending all of his time talking about class issues, which tells me one of two things: this is the hill he’s willing to die on. He wants to focus on class equality more than anything else, and he is willing to trade other things to get it because that’s the nature of the beast. Or, he is going to maintain 100% purity on every single one of his stances, and have nothing to bargain with if he has a Republican congress and will be a do-nothing president. If it’s a, fine. But that means I have to decide if I’m willing to trade class equality for other things. If it’s b, then we wait for 4 years doing nothing.
Capitalism (politics): A way of life that favors formation of private wealth to own and control everything…is often considered synonymous with the economic relations that (supposedly) emerge naturally to control the world in the absence of political control (but it’s a deception). When a bank or a business venture is bailed out by the government it is called “a smart business move to protect the financial well-being of the planet.” But when a person or a family is bailed out by the government it is called “entitlement fraud and creeping Socialism.” Free-market laissez-faire (capitalism) (the most celebrated form of private wealth after inheritance) will not rest until all forms of public property and public wealth are “Privatized! (Which could happen as early as this summer…or the coming election in November if we get that far.)
Socialism (politics): A form of collectivism that emphasizes public ownership of all important public assets and the means of public production…it justifies subordination of the individual to the community through democratic means (not totalitarian or authoritarian means) but it does tend to be completely unfair and unsympathetic to rich people (because it treats the rich the same as everybody else when it is obvious to the rich that they deserve more than everybody else because they can afford to buy so much more than everybody else) and that’s always been a problem.
Collectivism (politics): A doctrine that an individual’s actions should benefit some kind of collective organization (such as a tribe, community, profession, or state) but, it too tends to be completely unfair and unsympathetic to rich people (unless the rich are collectively in charge).
Someone once said, “The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” And I think that’s right (or left) or true, especially when democracy requires us to talk to each other and learn things like, “The only cure for the ills of capitalism is social democracy.” Social democracy allows us to cope with the growing number of non-monetary problems we face… as our non-renewable planetary resources diminish, as our renewable resources aren’t regulated enough to make them stretch through the renewable cycle, and as our “one and only one biosphere” on our one earth continues to degrade at an alarming rate. We won’t be able to buy our way out of these problems…only our collective wits and collective actions will have a chance to cope… whether our collective hearts and minds are up to the task or not.
Dr. Peter Whybrow, MD, author of “American Mania,” (inspired by 9/11/2001) and in his latest book, “The Well-Tuned Brain, The Remedy for a Manic Society,” (inspired by our wrong-headed bailouts in 2008) he makes the case that “Our brain is a hybrid of ancient instincts with a bias toward short term goals and emotions that Trump reason,” which, on top of everything else, maybe all we can do about the rich is give them a spanking and send them to bed early without supper to ponder what they might do with their money…while there’s still time for them to do anything real and lasting (planet-wide) that might help. http://www.peterwhybrow.com/
Like maybe sponsor a world-wide symposium on the “complete” Adam Smith who recognized that human “character” (the delicate balance between pleasure-seeking and prudent self-restraint) is not born in us but crafted through thoughtful “self-command,” where each person is their own best critic… BUT that it’s also “A Social Problem with a Collective Responsibility that has been lost in the world over the past 50 years because of Extreme Modern Market Hysteria!”
@33
Come on, man, this is just undermining any credibility Bernie can have on economics. First of all, his “plan” gives no indication of exactly how he plans to generate economic growth that’s basically 80% higher than the maximum growth in the 90’s. There is no way that any president from either party will create growth that high.
But then you link me an article as “proof” of Sanders’ economic plan that says this:
He then says, “In any case, I’m sure that qualified economists will weigh in with more sophisticated evaluations fairly soon.” Yeah, they did. Those are the ones I read, rather than the layman who is just fucking around with numbers to make something historical insane seem somewhat less insane (but still pretty insane). Not the strongest argument.
Your second article is no better:
First, you have the exact issue that people are raising with the Bernie bros. Instead of actually dealing with the criticism, it starts with a smearing of the critics:
There was nothing dishonest about it. Additionally, Galbraith isn’t focusing on the issue that bothered Romer and Krugman and the rest, namely that there’s voodoo going on. It’s the same sort of thing that Paul Ryan did when he asked the CBO to score his economic plan, but included a rider that essentially requested that they didn’t include the loss of revenue a massive tax cut would cause. If you “crunch the numbers” based on Ryan’s assumptions, the budget works. The assumptions, however, were flagrantly unrealistic. That’s what is going on with Sanders.
He’s doing it both in his health care plan and also with this economic “analysis.” He’s calculating all the benefits of the proposal without analyzing the likely effects. People will pay more taxes in a universal system. I think that’s ok, and good, but Sanders is promising minimal effects. Hand waving away the cost instead of arguing why it’s justified.
He’s also basing his insanely rosy estimates on increased labor force participation on numbers that fail to take into consideration the main cause of labor force decrease: aging boomer population. He’s not putting 70 year olds back to work, and as that’s the largest population, any numbers relying on work force participation to generate incredible, unprecedented economic growth are going to be unrealistic.
@34
Read what’s above. Notice how Bernie supporters, instead of responding to the criticism by providing better, more specific numbers, choose to attack the motives of the critics. That’s what’s different.
The irony is pretending that the phenomenon doesn’t exist when the post directly above yours is a perfect example: legitimate, thoughtful criticism from experts in a field suddenly becomes a personal attack by “establishment” figures against Saint Bernie.
The Bernie Bro phenomenon that is different from shitty criticism made by Hillary supporters is that a large number of them act like they’re on a religious crusade. Bernie releases a plan with obvious bullshit. People point out the bullshit. Instead of responding to the criticism, all of a sudden critics are heretics. Paul Krugman? That’s the guy you want to argue is a shill for the right wing trying to subvert Bernie’s ideas? It’s unreal, and it’s sad that you cannot see it happening. I’m not accusing you of being a part of it, but notice that I gave pretty in-depth criticism of Clinton’s foreign policy in the same post, and no one has posted a sanctimonious reply in response.
r3a50n @58, Other commenters asked for criticism of Bernie that was considered legitimate by some. I tried to provide that. Your response is to attack me?
Yes, it does look like the data needs to be more carefully analyzed. That’s a discussion that needs to go further than the Huff Po article to which you linked. The Daily Kos article to which you linked does betray partisanship.
I disagree with your statement, “You betray your partisanship and damage your credibility when you continue trying to advance false memes […]”.
@35 kiptw
Come on. Your defense of Clinton is that she thought it was a good idea to vest unilateral war making power in the hands of Dubya? That reflects very, very poor judgment.
And we all know that she, like the rest of the cowardly congress, didn’t want to be responsible for the invasion. The country was in the midst of a patriotic orgasm, and Hillary didn’t want to face the criticism for “failing our troops” if we blasted our way through Iraq and created a paradise. It’s lame, lame nonsense.
And BTW, others have already penned mia cuplas about their initial skepticism of Sanders’ economic plan’s excellent projections, you need to catch up. Just because those projections are far better than the centrist establishment wants to give them credit for (to the point that Alan Krueger, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee and Laura D’Andrea Tyson would diminish their own credibility by publicly scoffing at them despite not having done any actual analysis of them) doesn’t mean that they actually are.
Look, I think Greenwald is 90% correct in his assessment that the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon is being used to subvert and attack Bernie’s positions without dealing with substance.
The remaining 10% is perfectly shown in this thread. People criticize certain aspects of Sanders’ positions, and immediately invectives are thrown about and people are attacked.
If you think Sanders’ numbers are right, then prove it. The articles linked do no such thing. You can come up with all the insults you want about Romer (the lone person in our government fighting for an appropriately sized stimulus in 2009) or Krugman (who has advocated positions close to Bernie’s even as he was called a traitor during the Bush years), but it just makes Bernie and his fans look silly, and does nothing to eliminate the fantasy in the plans he’s provided.
antigone10 @60:
I agree with you. I’ve seen Berniebros on my FB feed. I’ve seen their comments in various places online (and r3a50n, no one is saying they are worse than the supporters of other candidates, merely that they exist). There is much sexism that reeks from their comments. The dismissal of the impact of racism by some of them is also annoying as fuck. No, all issues in the country cannot be boiled down to class.
@ #51 Lynna, OM
Let’s not forget Sanders’ pie in the sky promise to reduce the prison population by 600,000 during his first term in office. Something not only impossible for a president to do, (only about 10% of prisoners are federal), but something which Sanders must know is impossible for a president to do. A “magic wand” proposal that actually damages the cause of criminal justice reform.
@65 r3a50n
Seriously? You keep linking that article, let me once again quote the conclusion:
Why don’t we go ahead and just wait for the qualified economists. Or, hell, you could just read them now. Interestingly, they’re the people you’ve been dismissing as “establishment” shills throughout this thread.
doubtthat@#60:
People criticize certain aspects of Sanders’ positions, and immediately invectives are thrown about and people are attacked.
When dealing with politicians it’s always difficult to read positions between the lines of what they didn’t say. And even when they do say something, that’s complicated. For example, Bernie says he’ll close Gitmo. I voted for another liar who said that once. But where I have problems is gigantic great big holes in a candidates’ platform. Like – say – the $1t WMD ‘upgrade’* the US defense establishment plans to do regardless of what anyone in Washington says. You can point and say “what is the candidates view on that?” well … they don’t have one. Since I know politicians are opinion-generating machines, I have to assume that if they don’t come out and say something about a particular topic, that it’s deliberate.
(* How do you upgrade 10,000 H-bombs? Easy! Make 10,000 more H-bombs then decomission the old ones. Maybe. Oh, and look for the US to start cheating on test ban treaties.)
Let’s not forget Sanders’ pie in the sky promise to reduce the prison population by 600,000 during his first term in office
He’s also going to rein in the NSA and close Gitmo.
I like a lot of what he says but most of it sounds like complete bullshit. Maybe he’s going to design an energy positive fusion powerplant next.
Let me reiterate the problem with what was dishonest about Alan Krueger, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee and Laura D’Andrea Tyson attacking Sanders’ economic plan: they did so without doing any actual analysis of the plan they were criticizing. Galbraith did. The reason they think there is “voodoo” going on is because it doesn’t conform with their neoliberal economic bias, not because they carefully analyzed the data and reached a well-researched conclusion.
Let me also reiterate that the initial analysis of the plan that projected such amazing growth, the one that Krueger, Romer, Goolsbee and Tyson attacked without doing any actual analysis themselves, was done by an avowed Clinton supporter.
If Krueger, Romer, Goolsbee, Tyson or Krugman actually had done an analysis with standard models, they would have reached a similar conclusion as this article makes clear. Instead, they talk about puppies and unicorns and voodoo when a far more reasonable answer as to why Sanders plans produces such amazing results is suggested by Occam’s Razor:
r3a50n, @65, You linked to “penned mia cuplas about their initial skepticism,” and those articles are interesting. Thanks for that Mother Jones link to the article by Kevin Drum.
I will point out that the text in that article includes:
This is, basically, agreeing with my comment that a more careful evaluation of the data needs to be conducted.
Also, I am skeptical about the “pretty massive spending and stimulus program” being something that one could get through the House and Senate.
The articles to which you linked do not debunk “false memes,” but they do point out weaknesses in the arguments against the Sanders economic plans/policies. That’s good resource material.
I think you may be falling prey to confirmation bias when you read the articles.
Certainly, your accusations that I have betrayed partisanship and damaged my credibility do not further the discussion.
I have been reading economists that are qualified to comment on Sanders plan, and that are qualified precisely because they have actually analyzed it. You are the one who is still relying on the word of economists that are not qualified to comment on Sanders’ plan (but that have commented on it anyway despite their lack of qualification) who are not qualified because they have not done any actual analysis of it themselves beyond pooh-poohing someone else’s analysis because it doesn’t fit their biases.
I’ll leave it to others reading the thread to determine for themselves which is the more reasonable position.
I completely agree, and this is a substantive criticism of the Sanders campaign, especially their rationale for government, which is predicated on motivating people who have been alienated from the political process in order to make a substantial change in the political dynamic. Bernie, like Gene in 68 and George in 72 and Jimmy in 76 and Jesse in 84 and maybe Jerry in 92 and possibly Nader in 00 and certainly Barack in 08, is winning at least a large fraction of the youth who never voted before. But if overall turnout is not particularly high, then this path to radical change is not viable.
That’s not the part of that article that is pertinent, the pertinent part is that someone that previously mimicked Krugman’s criticism of Sanders’ plan based on the ignorant reaction of Krueger, Romer, Goolsbee and Tyson has recanted their initial criticism after they did more thorough analysis themselves.
A careful evaluation of the data was already done by an economist that supports Hillary Clinton, Gerald Friedman. What set this all off is that then, Alan Krueger, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee and Laura D’Andrea Tyson attacked that analysis as full of puppies, unicorns and voodoo but they did so in an entirely dishonest and disingenuous way because none of them had actually done any analysis themselves. It just didn’t seem like it could be right so of course, it just couldn’t be! That was the extent of the analysis that they did.
Then James K. Galbraith analyzed Sanders’ plan and came to a similar conclusion that Friedman initially did, the one that was attacked by Krueger, Romer, Goolsbee and Tyson.
Then Kevin Drum, who was initially critical of the plan following Krugman’s lead, did some of his own analysis and also came to similar conclusions as Friedman and when he did, he penned a mia culpa (and just so there is no mistake, that article is titled “On Second Thought, Maybe Bernie Sanders’ Growth Claims Aren’t As Crazy As I Thought”).
But now, according to you, we need to wait for an even more careful evaluation. And why do we need to wait for a more careful evaluation? Because Krueger, Romer, Goolsbee and Tyson undermined a careful evaluation that was already done based on nothing but their neoliberal bias. Had they not unfairly smeared Friedman’s analysis, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.
@r3a50n
No, they did so without including that analysis in the short letter they penned. This is an important distinction.
I don’t know the reason those specific 4 people think it’s vodoo. I’m sure they will include more information in the future.
What I can tell you is that the reason many economists think it’s vodoo is because it relies on an analysis from a specific macro-economic model that makes certain assumptions about growth – like, for example, the fact that increasing the labor force participation rate will do the work. It won’t. That number is largely made up of retirees – the boomers – and they will not be joining the workforce with Bernie.
Here are some other highly questionable assumptions made by Friedman:
-It relies on a VERY rosy assumption about the amount of money tax increases for healthcare will generate: http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/03/pf/taxes/bernie-sanders-health-plan/index.html?iid=EL
-That VERY optimistic assumption is then doubled down upon when growth is estimated, so one questionable number is now counted twice when it comes to guessing at the growth.
-Another serious problem with the analysis is that it makes the completely unjustified assumption that we can reset the clock the 2007-2009, engage in the stimulus we should have then, and expect the same growth multipliers. That simply isn’t true. Demand is still struggling, but we are not operating under the conditions that existed in 2008, so stimulus will not have the same effect:
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/praise-wonk-and-wonk-analysis-cea-and-sanderss-proposal/
-In order for Sanders plan to sustain 4+% growth, the output gap would need to be around 12% of GDP. It is nowhere near that: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/02/no-we-cant-wave-a-magic-demand-wand-now-and-get-the-recovery-we-threw-away-in-2009.html#more
And what’s so stupid about all of this is that we’re arguing about the analysis of Sanders’ plan (commissioned by his campaign), not the plan, which is great. A lot of it makes sense. It will redistribute wealth and it will make college more affordable and it will improve the lives of people (assuming it could pass), but then the campaign touts this flawed, goof analysis, celebrates the insane growth projection, and undermines the legitimacy of the proposals.
Growth will increase somewhat under Sanders’ plan as funds are taken away from resting spaces – corporate bank accounts, rich people’s investments – and moved into the economy. But it won’t result in 5.3% growth because he isn’t going to magically employ 80 year olds and the output gap isn’t suddenly going to fall to 2007 levels.
Does anyone vote for a president based on the specific growth number they promote? Hell no. This is a bad, bad mistake by the Sanders side as they alienated the wonk community, which is one major advantage the left has over the right. No we’re engaged in an argument about one dude’s unrealistic projection, instead of policies that I support and think are far better than what Clinton has offered.
Come on, PZ. People get really emotional and divisive at a caucus – it seems quite plausible that a Clinton partisan would be rejected by Bernie people not because she’s speaking Spanish, but because she’s for Hillary. Even us Democrats are not Spock.
To not vote for Sanders because his supporters are a-holes, then voting for a 2nd best in revenge, is a form of ad hominem logical fallacy. Vote for the candidate who offers the policies you’d like to see implemented. The behavior of their supporters is irrelevant.
The economy under Sanders:
without numerical analysis, sounds pretty nice. By ensuring people will have decent wages and government get funded fairly, seems a win-win. Money is best when it flows through the economy and not hoarded into the bank accounts of the most very few. When welfare is given to the poor, the money doesn’t stay in their pocket, but to the store for food, etc, etc. So far more people benefit from welfare payments than just the recipient. This could be why Sanders is so reluctant to spout off economic growth projections. Honestly, it would have to be _better_ than today.
carolineborduin@#78:
it seems quite plausible that a Clinton partisan would be rejected by Bernie people not because she’s speaking Spanish, but because she’s for Hillary
If they rejected her for being for Hillary mightn’t they have shouted “Clintonite!” instead of “English Only”??
@slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))
The problem is exactly the opposite: he is spouting off growth projections. Absent the ridiculous projection that his campaign is very excited to promote, his economic policies make a great deal of sense for exactly the reasons you listed.
I really don’t understand why he thought it was necessary to toss a totally ridiculous number on top of that litany of great principles and proposals.
CHRIST ON A SYBIAN!
Moist towelettes all around…
Hasn’t it been established that there’s no evidence, and witnesses to the contrary, that such thing happened?
The closest to a reasonable explanation, that doesn’t make liars of people otherwise believed to be honest, is that the moderator was the one that said “English only”, but in an “English only, then” sense after they realized they could not use a partisan translator. Might just have been a misunderstanding fueled further by high emotions on either side.
And also, who did the booing, that’s under dispute but it’s only witnesses accounts, so we can’t really be too sure, I guess.
That should be: “the closest to a reasonable explanation I’ve read“, as it is not my own speculation based on nothing, but it’s in the Snopes article.
That’s more or less what they did. Granted, I only heard the one video, but I didn’t hear anyone other than the moderator say anything like that. I heard lot of “No!” and a few “She’s a surrogate!” but nothing like “English only.” There was a cheer when they decided to lose the translation, but that seemed more like they were happy that a Clinton surrogate wasn’t going to be up there rather than that there wouldn’t be a Spanish translation.
I’m just going on the OP. I don’t watch political hackwork in progress so I have no idea what was said. I was merely pointing out that the comment didn’t line up with the claim.
I hope Sanders wins, because he’s the one who will actually challenge the status quo (and we desperately need that) and the one slightly less likely to bomb the shit out of other countries (being a foreign citizen this affects me, you are basically electing the guy who will decide where my country will bomb next).
Still, we are skeptics, we know about the halo effect, we know how it affects us, so I try not to delude myself and keep in mind that he has huge flaws.
It’s easy to imagine that many would vote for him, or anyone with a penis, over Clinton.
Clinton… She’s the first woman ever to have an actual shot at being POTUS and making history.
I will be disappointed if she fails, but if she succeeds she’ll be just another warmongering POTUS with a terrible taste in friends (Kissinger, Mubarak) and her more than enthusiastic support for Israel does not bode well for the Middle East.
And yeah, banks. She’s the candidate that reminds me that “we the people” are not in power.
Im not american, but – and this is my personal opinion – i find the republican candidates laughable or/and repulsive; and when we talk about the democrats, i find Sanders the best choice, if we compare him with Hillary Clinton.
Maybe, just maybe, if Sanders is the next president of the USA, the government and the political decisions could be decided by the People and for the People, and not acording to the objectives of a bunch multimilionnaire suporters and bosses of some presidential candidates.
@doubtthat #15
As I understand, Sanders never originally claimed he was going to improve the GDP to that level, Friedman did, independently, and then the Sanders campain cited him on some occasions. I think it’s unfair to blame Sanders for exaggerating, when he isn’t the one who did. Blame him for pointing to a well known, reliable economist who supported his plan if you want, but I don’t think that makes him deserve the alienation of the “Wonks”.
(That said I do think Sanders’ plan is unrealistic. I’m hoping he is more pragmatic that he presents himself, and that he considers his plan a general long-term goal, or a starting point for discussion and compromise if he gets elected).
But… there was no chant, and the only discernable statement of ‘english only’ was apparently by the moderator, and only once.
But… there was no chant, and the only discernable statement of ‘english only’ was apparently by the moderator, and only once.
Then PZ was wrong and ought to be retracting his post.
I don’t know what was said; I was just pointing out that the comment didn’t make sense in light of what supposedly happened.
Marcus Ranum:
In fact, there is already a design. But, like all good things in life, it may not meet expectations. Also, of course, Sanders has nothing to do with it (as far as I know… perhaps he voted for a little funding years ago?).
I think I’d always prefer somebody with the right kind of plan, the right sort of view about how things ought to be (not necessarily on every topic, like you mentioned), even if their specific approach turns out to be infeasible, or their projections/predictions turn out to be too optimistic — as opposed to somebody like Clinton who, when it comes to numerous issues, has no coherent plan that I can actually support. It’s obviously “practical” and “realistic” to change nothing about the way the country already is, but what’s utter bullshit is portraying that as some sort of selling point. No president can do everything single-handedly or making good on all their promises, but as the executive they should be ready to execute the right plan when the opportunity presents itself, not preparing themselves to be irrelevant and/or promising to do nothing (while advertising that as some form of “progress”).
fernando:
Well, that’s a little much for a president to do — a benevolent dictator, maybe, but one person can’t control that without tossing aside most of the Constitution. There’s also the fact that, in this particular democracy (probably all of them), a whole lot of the people have lots of shitheaded ideas. I mean, I do understand what you’re saying and the point is well taken, but it is still the case that large elements of our democracy are in favor of the sort of capitalist oligarchy we have now.
Educating people about it (or simply persuading them) is a reasonable democracy-friendly way of addressing the problem. This is not to be confused “education” as a generic all-purpose good that we ought to be supporting anyway, since I mean the specific lessons here that need to be understood and acted upon, which aren’t being understood or acted upon.
In any case, I have very little hope that much would change with one election (or several successive elections, for that matter). Even if we had an army of Sanders clones running for every available federal/state/local office this year, it would take more than a few years for many people to budge (if they ever would). Some will just die off eventually of course, but then again, pre-Cold War socialists also died off… so sitting on our hands and waiting for the world to take care of it for us isn’t the way to go (it’s about like saying “let the free market decide”).
PZ is basing his information on this article and his impression from reading it. Maybe believe the article is in error. If PZ is wrong, I don’t know that he is obligated to retract or verify the article if it is what he believes but others believe other wise.
Well, duh. That’s because what supposedly happened maybe didnt happen at all according to other sources. Even according to the quoted source:
===
PZ @7
But none of the Sanders proponents were speaking on the Clinton stage and none the Clinton proponents were speaking on Sanders stage. Have you ever heard of any other caucus where a proponent from one side volunteered to speak on stage for the other side and the other side said “sure, why not?”
For that matter, have you ever heard of a supporter from one side volunteering to speak, translate or assist the other side? Why would one? Of course, they rejected her. Who in their right mind wouldn’t?
Supporting someone with no practical solutions and lots of unrealistic, impossible to realize promises, may not be the way to go, either.
@89 ealloc
His campaign is really promoting the study. I guess it’s unclear the degree to which he controls the campaign, but it’s at the point that he needs to make a clear statement. He can win me back pretty easily on this by just distancing himself from the specific number on focusing on the stuff he says that is absolutely true.
Friedman’s analysis was independent, but it was commissioned by the Sanders campaign.
Fuzzy world of politics.
Is it “practical” to support a system that has made life miserable for so many?
Consciousness Razor@#92 –
I think I’d always prefer somebody with the right kind of plan, the right sort of view about how things ought to be (not necessarily on every topic, like you mentioned), even if their specific approach turns out to be infeasible, or their projections/predictions turn out to be too optimistic — as opposed to somebody like Clinton who, when it comes to numerous issues, has no coherent plan that I can actually support.
I agree. I’d be happy if Bernie won, simply because it would mean that the machine that owns the two party system wasted a lot of money and didn’t get much of its investment. It’d be a good thing to see Bernie beat Trump if only because Bernie is farther from Trump than Clinton.
WRT fusion energy – yeah, if I saw a candidate saying they were going to cancel the F-35 and the Littoral fighting ship, and the massive new production of WMD – and spend a fraction of that on fusion – I’d be out there on the street passing out leaflets (even though I would expect them to be lying) If the US wants to keep handing out subsidies to the military/industrial complex I don’t have a problem with throwing money at Lockheed-Martin to build fusion energy systems – as long as they’re not the kind that monsters plan to explode over cities.
Either way, the democrats are going to put forward a warmonger. The democrat warmonger will look better than the republican warmonger, but once again the two party system gives a choice between a bowl of shit, and a bowl of shit with chipotle sauce. I’d choose the bowl of shit with chipotle sauce but nothing on that menu is what I can get excited about.
I’m not anti Bernie. I was reacting to the now-vanished provocateur who said he hadn’t seen any credible critique of Bernie’s policies. I had a good laugh at that. I notice he appears to have slunk off.
F.O.:
Honestly, I’m just sitting and shaking my head over the unshakable faith of people in Sanders. It’s exactly the same, right down to the words, as what was being said before Obama was elected the first time.
Sanders wouldn’t be any different, at best, he’ll end up a centrist who might be able to do a few good things. Maybe.
My experience with some Hillary fans has actually been rather alarmingly like dealing with right-wing fundies and denialists. I’ve been met repeatedly with erroneous assertions, attempts at emotional manipulation, and refusal to concede any ground whatsoever — combined with a sort of cold fury at the idea that anyone could even consider supporting Bernie, even in the primary. One person even went so far as to say that challenging Hillary was some sort of betrayal of the Democratic Party on the part of Bernie and his supporters.
I’m not sure where all this is coming from, but it has soured me considerably on Hillary (though I will still vote for her if she is the Dem nominee).
Meanwhile, the worst I’ve heard from the Bernie side is to call Hillary a “bitch” — which is anti-progressive, but such arguments are at least easy to dismiss on an intellectual level. The anti-Bernie campaign, by contrast, is coming from people who seem to be dedicated progressives…
Does anyone have any comments on the theory that Republicans are going soft on Bernie during the primary season because they see him as the easier candidate to defeat in the final election? (They do seem to like him better than Hillary, oddly enough — despite the fact that Hillary is clearly closer to their ideology than Bernie is — but my take on it is that they got so deeply in the habit of hating her that they’ll take any alternative.)
@Caine Yeah, after Obama people have become very jaded, and with good reason.
I should have qualified better my words… Sanders is the one *promising* to challenge the status quo in a more fundamental way than Clinton.
If he ever gets elected, what he’ll actually do remains to be seen, but at least he’s bringing economic inequality and wealth redistribution to the front of the public debate, something that I would have thought impossible in the US.
@#8, PZ Myers
I love you, too, PZ.
Say what you like; if Clinton gets the nod, I will be voting Green. Jill Stein already got my vote in 2012, she can have it again if the other choices are Clinton or Trump. (But, of course, I’m sexist for not liking Clinton.)
@#38, kiptw
Bob Graham, the then-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and also a Democrat (and therefore someone Clinton should have been listening to), went to the trouble of having the CIA perform a full National Intelligence Estimate in Iraq and cite all their sources. He noted, and told Congress, that all of Bush’s claims about Iraq rested on the word of Iraqi exiles who had a vested interest in the removal of Saddam Hussein, and none of whom had actually been inside Iraq for years. Clinton ignored this and chose to believe Bush’s claims. Roughly a third of America, according to you, were more perspicacious than Clinton on the subject, even without the benefit of insight into the (classified) NIE.
But furthermore, this is an attempt to dismiss not only the Iraq war vote, which was infamous enough all by itself to warrant permanent dismissal of Clinton and which should have kept her out of both Congress and the Cabinet ever since, but also the later wars and bombing campaigns, in which Clinton has emerged as consistently pro-war. The Libya campaign, which has already become a disaster and is apparently managing to get even worse, was (according to the accounts of the others involved) pushed through by Clinton over the objections of the rest of the Cabinet and the Pentagon, and also over the decision of Congress not to declare war with Libya. There is no plausible way to claim that Clinton is not a warmonger.
@#52, Marcus Ranum
Absolutely. This is one of the two issues on which I feel Sanders is legitimately bad. (This and gun control.) The problem is, though: Clinton is notably worse on Israel, and Clinton’s pro-war stance (which I cannot possibly believe has actually changed, no matter how much she claims the contrary, because her actions have been consistent across more than a decade now) kills more people and does more damage, overall, than America’s gun fetishism. And when you compare them on other issues? Bernie has been right all along on most things, Clinton has been wrong all along on those things and now, when she is under scrutiny, is saying “don’t look at my record, trust my campaign promises that I will do the opposite from now on”.
Contrary to what Clinton supporters claim, Sanders is already a compromise candidate. Any principled person would need to hold their nose to vote for him, and if he were to win he would constantly have to have his feet held to the fire. Clinton is so very much worse that I, for one, cannot see myself ever voting for her — there’s no way to squeeze my nose tight enough to block out that amount of stench.
@#71, Marcus Ranum
Heh. Maybe it’s like the way both Democrats and Republicans “reduced” the Pentagon budget during the 1980s through the 2000s — project that you’re going to increase it by $X, actually increase it by $(X-Y), and issue a press release that you have “reduced the military budget” by $Y.
I suspect that a president who was willing to use the formerly-nonexistent powers that Obama and Bush both claimed and used, but against things like the NSA, would get a lot done, and then be able to present Congress (and the people) with a fait accompli. Obama could have closed Gitmo and said to Congress “okay, the base is gone, either you give these people trials and new prisons which are where they can be seen and thus are harder to mistreat, or else they go free”. Instead, he used Congress’ unwillingness to fund a closure as an excuse not to do this.
@#75, petesh
Youth give up because they observe that the Democrats are very happy to take their votes (and their money) but refuse to consider them on policy. It is telling that your list starts with the year of the infamous Chicago convention where the conservative old guard reacted with violence to protests by youth. It is also telling that your most recent example is Obama in 2008; Obama had a massive social media and e-mail system for getting young people involved (and also for collecting donations), which is how he got the youth vote that year. After taking office in 2009, he dismantled it completely, and instead switched to the standard system already in place by the Democratic Party, which strongly favored corporate donations and had no means of mobilizing the young. Then he proceeded to ignore the mandate for financial reform. Young people concluded that he didn’t care, and gave up — would you have them do otherwise in the face of the evidence? In essence, your list says “the Democrats keep moving right and betraying young people who vote for them”. Hardly a surprise that young people have stopped turning out — the Millennials are a lot smarter and better-connected than most Boomers are willing to admit, and they can see what the score is.
Political parties exist to serve the people. When they don’t, they deserve to lose support and wither away. The Democratic Party has made it very clear that “serving the people” is at best an optional task, reserved for times when their two real priorities, collecting money from the rich and providing cover for the Republican Party, cannot be immediately accomplished. Democrats who expect the youth vote to persist in supporting Democratic candidates in the face of being ignored and (by Clinton) insulted are naive. (And I reiterate: I am not in the “youth” demographic; I’m just not blind enough or foolish enough to ignore what has been done to them, over and over, by the Powers That Be (which is to say: the faction currently represented by the Clintons) within the Democratic Party.
The Democrats really should become, really need to become the anti-corruption party. It’s what most of the country really wants to hear, and it’s what a lot of Republicans think they’re going to get from the liars they support. The Democratic Party could do this, but they choose not to, and the people standing in the way of that are the Clinton faction. No more half-million-dollar speaking fees from banks or donations from private prison companies for presidential hopefuls if they go down that route.
@#98, Caine
So… if a Democratic president will automatically move to the right to such an extent, who in their right mind would ever, under any circumstances, bother to vote for a Democratic candidate who started off as anything other than an apparently unreasonable leftist? If you think Sanders would become a centrist, Clinton — who is a centrist by her own claims but right-of-center by her actions — would become what kind of monster?
@#??? Somebody-or-other-I-can’t-find-again-now-without-rereading-all-the-comments
Yes, it’s true. Bernie is a one-note campaigner. I don’t see anything particularly wrong with that. As I commented here, years ago now, every gay person I know said that, given the choice, they would have preferred that the Democrats take on the mortgage crisis and the Too-Big-To-Fail banks first, rather than attacking DOMA. (Obviously, doing both would be the top choice, but the Democrats themselves presented it at the time as being one or the other.)
Clinton isn’t going to do anything for black people — the Clintons a lot of things worse for African-Americans the first time around; ironically, some statistics got better when W came in. Clinton isn’t going to do anything for Latinos — certainly not if she’s trying to position herself as a continuation of Obama. She has already repeatedly tossed gay and trans people under the bus during her career. As for women, Sanders is already pro-all-things-feminist, so Clinton doesn’t even beat him there. In other words: in terms of ethnic and gender and sexual groups, Sanders will meet or exceed Clinton. Therefore, those are not issues to beat the drum on in the first place.
On the other hand, practically every issue can be related back to the economy. Black employment has dried up at a rate faster than white employment, because the former was more heavily blue-collar. Being for education and bringing blacks into the white-collar workforce is a no-brainer as a long-term solution (or part of one, to be more accurate), but it won’t help people who currently have no education and are already in the workforce — at best, you can train them and then put them into competition with the white-collar workers who are already having problems. So what would actually help in a hurry? Getting the blue-collar jobs back — and preferably getting the unions back, etc. etc. etc. Illegal immigrants? You can legalize them if you want, but then they’ll have a harder time finding work because businesses don’t want to pay full wages — that’s why they hire illegal immigrants (which is why the illegal immigrants are here) in the first place. Citizenship is not enough, you have to put pressure on businesses to pay full living wages. Similar arguments can be made for other issues.
In other words: an honest analysis of social issues requires an admission that social issues are intersectional with economic ones, and if we are given the choice of One Issue Or The Other — which we shouldn’t, but which the Democrats just love to do — then working on economics (provided that the work is not done solely for the privileged, as with the initial rollout of Social Security not including most black people) will at least guarantee that fewer people starve. (And yes, starving is literally becoming a serious problem here.) That’s why gay people were in favor of economic action — they wanted gay marriage, but they wanted even more to keep their houses.
Golly, good thing we have infallible folks who can decide for women and minorities that Bernie Bros are not a thing. Fuck anyone who keeps telling us that are experiences aren’t fucking real when they can be seen all over the place online. This is the last place I thought I’d see that shit being bandied about.
Markgisleson5
Depending on your State voting independent may prevent your local vote.
Davidsmith17
Yeah; according to ORAC both he and Hillary accept CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) and “integrated “ medicine. I don’t think this is a very important issue as regards the candidacy, Sanders has a lot on his plate and can certainly be informed of his error..
The Vicar, #100
Between Clinton and Trump, which do you prefer as president?
@100, The Vicar:
I rather hate this statement. Very good of you to decide what a “principled person” is for the rest of us. I guess if I were to vote for Sanders or Clinton without holding my nose, I’m objectively not principled.
I’ve asked where this ‘BernieBro’ horde lurks, and have never recieved an answer beyond implying that I must be sexist, and that they are everywhere except where I can see. Perhaps you’d like to be the one to change that trend?
@103 Saad
You already got your answer, Trump.
@#103, Saad
I have no preference. Both are entitled egomaniacs with a history of tremendously bad judgement, both have supporters who ignore the fact that their current stated positions don’t match their actions (the difference is that Trump’s history is less repugnant than his stated positions, while Clinton’s is more), and I don’t have the slightest bit of confidence that either one would be anything less than right of center, and would probably be much further to the right than that. Clinton is lying to pretend she’s left of center, Trump is lying to pretend he’s way off to the right. Both of them have records which demonstrate their lack of honesty. Trump might start a war out of sheer ego (assuming that his egomania isn’t just a part of his fictional public persona), but Clinton seems bent on starting a war with Russia (over Syria) and possibly others as well on the basis of neoliberal “the exercise of power is a justification for power” Kissinger nonsense. Trump would be a disaster to the environment and to unions, but Clinton will rather obviously return to being a TPP cheerleader the minute she has the nomination, which will be a disaster to the environment and to unions. Clinton will appoint corporatist right-wingers to the Supreme Court, Trump might be worse but also might do otherwise just to defy the Republican establishment. They are both so far beyond the dishonesty event horizon that trying to predict the actions of either one is pointless, and making a choice based on information you know is unreliable is bad policy. (That, after all, is what I am accusing Clinton of having done on Iraq, yes?)
@#104, gakxz1
If you are against the insane gun culture we have in the U.S., then voting for Bernie Sanders — presuming you do it with your eyes open — involves doing it in defiance of his position, which has been that of an enabler if not an enthusiast. How many people die of gun violence every year in this country, again? I think it would be possible to convince Sanders, as a president, to reverse that stance — he has had a consistent set of ethical positions which I think could be used to argue him into agreement with gun control, particularly if it were simultaneously given a media spotlight and the party gave him an ultimatum — but the best you can say about him on his history with this issue is that he didn’t actually accept money from the NRA to take their positions, he simply voted along with their goals. (And yes, I’m aware that the NRA hates Sanders. That means nothing. The Republicans hate Clinton and Obama, and that doesn’t mean that either one of them is left of center.)
(And there are other issues where Sanders is problematic as well — the reason I’m not listing them is that they are also issues where Clinton is even worse, such as unblinking support for right-wing Israel.)
As for Hillary Clinton, on what issue has she not demonstrated at the very least a willingness to throw those who are to her left (which is most registered Democrats) under the bus at her convenience? Even on abortion, her first instinct when Planned Parenthood was attacked with that faked video was to blame Planned Parenthood, rather than ask for an investigation, and that’s part of the package of practical feminist issues where her stance is not seriously questioned. On the environment (TPP, Keystone XL, fracking), and labor (TPP, NAFTA), and war (Invading Iraq, Syria, and Libya, drone bombing in Yemen, the ban on cluster bombs used on civilians, saber-rattling with Iran, etc.), and government surveillance (calling for a “new Manhattan project” to let the NSA break all encryption), and race (she was a cheerleader and whip for every policy which cemented the school-to-prison pipeline under Bill Clinton’s presidency, among many other things), and the banks (she thinks the banks aren’t too big yet!), and on so many other things, she has been on the side of the right wing over and over and over again, and she never learns from her mistakes, or from anyone else’s. It’s bad judgement all the way down.
The Vicar, @107
I disagree with much of that. Not necessarily with your positions (perhaps Sanders has a bad record on guns, Hillary on Keystone), but with your presumption that anyone who did not form the same opinions you did, or who did, but would still *happily* vote for someone with different beliefs from theirs, is either an idiot or a fraud. It’s a stifling certainty you have…
Take the intervention in Libya. I was certainly for intervention 5 years ago. Protect people getting slaughtered by a dictator? No brainer! All to hasten the revolutions the middle east desperately needs, like the ones in eastern Europe that led to the end of the cold war. Sure, Libya was (is) basically a loose association of tribes that probably hate each other. But why accept a status quo that subjects the region to decades of crushing dictatorial rule? And until the UN gets a truly international force that does these things, or until we shrink our military and presence in the region, surely we shouldn’t just stand by. Are we not a part of this world? Past mistakes are suddenly a warrant for deep isolationism? Well, as it turns out, drones != ( do not equal) solution. Perhaps an international occupation would’ve been better? But then, such an occupation would need to be well planned, and probably on the ground for decades (else… Iraq). But, perhaps the problem *to begin with* was western medaling, and if we just stopped, that would be better for the region than random, seemingly parental moral injunction, by way of drone. But then we must accept that, not attacking Gaddafi in this instance would have led to death and dictatorship. When is intervention then acceptable? If I invented a time machine, went to the 90’s, and told President Bill Clinton that he should act in Rwanda, or else, genocide, should he have acted? If he did, and 1000 American soldiers died, and 100,000 Rwandans, would that intervention be better than 1,000,000 dead Rwandans? But then, is this just a new colonialism…
All this is just to say that… I don’t bloody know. You might. Congratulations.
Boy, lots of you sure can find things to be angry about. Both of them seem alright to me, given the alternatives. And both have positions I don’t care for. But I’m gonna vote for one or the other. And I hope you all do too. And please encourage your friends to vote for one or the other. Turnout helps Democrats. And we sure could use someone nicer than Fat Tony replacing Fat Tony on the bench. I know that’s a lame reason to vote Democrat. But Liz Warren ain’t running. So come on out and vote for Bernie or Hillary. It’s your fucking duty. I’m sure they both suck to half of you, but honest to goodness, recalibrate your definition of suck, and then hit the polling station. Vote early, vote often, vote Democrat. Twice, if you’re in Boston.
I’m going to probably annoy everyone here, but I think we’re spoiled for choice as far as good candidates go. Both Clinton and Sanders are proposing platforms well to the left of Obama. Both have demonstrated the ability to work with a hostile Congress. Neither is perfect, as people have noted above. Neither is above using dirty tricks to win. What do you expect from a politician who has made it this far? Bernie’s taking money from corporations and PACs (far less than Hillary). Hillary’s leftist sentiments are probably not heart felt. So what? They’re both orders of magnitude better than any Republican running and both are probably better than Obama. It’ll be fine, whichever one wins.
@ #10
Doesn’t annoy me. You’re exactly right.
#110, that is.
Not but that if either Sanders or Clinton wins I expect to be disappointed in them.
A few people in this thread have commented negatively on Hillary Clinton’s commitment to reproductive rights, abortion access, and the like. As someone who cares passionately about these issues and contributes time and money, let me highlight two stellar examples of how this pernicious falsehood has apparently convinced people (who should really know better) that Clinton does, in fact, hate abortion, or at least is really wishy-washy about it.
[Apologies for tone: this kind of historical revisionism simply makes me incredibly angry. You can attack Clinton on many, many issues, and I’ll highfive you from here to Sunday (or whatever metaphor is appropriate). But this issue? Fuck no.]
@ davidsmith, #39:
This is false. Not saying Sanders is bad on this issue. I’m saying that you’re ignorant (charitably) re: Clinton’s position on abortion. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover why, because this is outright bullshit.
HINT FOR THE READER NAMED DAVIDSMITH: No Sanders position quoted on that site references a date before 1993. Clinton’s position on the same site go rather further back. No, really, go read and compare.
Given that both candidates are basically completely in agreement with each other (some differences about how to ensure access, fight regressive forces, etc.), claiming that Sanders > Clinton is to ignore the immensely detailed historical record of Clinton’s support for reproductive rights. That’s an enormously ridiculous thing to do, no?
@ The Vicar, #107:
I know, right? Hillary’s willingness to sell out Planned Parenthood is probably why Planned Parenthood … endorsed Hillary Clinton*. Why, it’s almost like she has a decades-long record of vigorously supporting abortion access and reproductive rights in general, and specifically Planned Parenthood! We should just ignore that because you say so!
For fuck’s sake, this whole “HILLARY IS ANTI-ABORTION” thing needs to die in a fire. Right now. Preferably yesterday. It’s beyond demonstrably false. It’s absolute bullshit, and it’s downright embarrassing for all who spout the claim.
* Yeah yeah, Cecile Richards is a Clinton plant who’s willing to betray the organization’s mission because Clinton threatened to cap her from the grassy knoll or some such. Spare me.
According to Planned Parenthood, both Clinton and Sanders have a 100% rating. Again, either is a fine choice from that point of view. The Republicans, not so much. Source.
On a more temperate note:
I can’t comment on the issue of abortion rights at FTB without acknowledging the outpouring of financial support this community gave to the Kentucky Health Justice Network a few years back during the National Abortion Access Bowl-a-thon. Just because I posted a silly promotional thing in the Lounge way back when.
I’m just a tech support guy who happened to luck into linking awesome people with an awesome group, and those
assholesfantastic people at KHJN tried to give me a silly award for bringing in so much money. I made sure they knew who the actual awesome people were!@gakxz1 #108
Past mistakes should at the very least make you question twice and hard before bombing the shit out of a country.
Mobilizing an army costs a shitload of money. No one is going to do it unless they expect a solid return of money.
Also, contrary to US belief, the US is not the world’s police.
And neither should other countries.
Stay the fuck out of other countries business.
You want to avoid massacres?
Stop supporting bloodthirsty tyrants, for starters. Stop selling them weapons. Stop deliberately sabotaging their democratic processes and their economies.
Hey, you know, maybe even respect UN decisions.
But, no, we can’t have that. Too difficult. Sorry, bomb away.
I think this is one of those circumstances where Hanlon’s Razor needs to make an appearance. This was a cock-up caused by there not being an appropriate translator on hand. I neither believe the idea that Sanders supporters were booing someone for offering to translate nor the idea that Clinton supporters manufactured this as a smear. Something confusing happened and each side saw something different in the inkblot it produced.
PatrickG 114
Or, y’know, they endorsed the candidate they expect to win because having that candidate more intimately tied to your organization makes it more likely that candidate will defend you.
Not saying you’re wrong about Clinton’s abortion record, just saying there are reasonable explanations between “PP really feels Clinton exemplifies the tenants of the organization” and “hair on fire conspiracy”
F.O, @117 and @118
You might’ve mistook my purpose when I posted @108: I wasn’t arguing for an interventionist US policy. I was saying that it’s reasonable to be uncertain about what to do in such situations, and Libya is an example about where *I* have been uncertain over the years. It seems to me that The Vicar is arguing for a blind certainty in voting, and for abstaining from a candidate when they, god forbid, fail whatever test you force on them. I might be being a bit melodramatic…
@#108, gakxz1
“Perhaps”? Try “Definitely”.
We’re not talking merely about opinions, though, we’re talking about a combination of opinions and history. If you were selecting an architect to build a new house, and your choice fell between three unknowns with no significant track record, then even if your choice ended up being a bad one, you couldn’t be faulted for making it — how could you have known? But if you chose one who was notorious for physically impossible designs, materials recommendations which weren’t up to code, and massive cost overruns, while the others were either unknown or had no such history, then your choice would be a bad one. We have a history of these candidates. Hillary’s is terrible. Sanders’ is barely acceptable — his proposals are basically a modern-day repeat of the New Deal, that’s hardly “radical”.
Ah, I see. You don’t know history, and you don’t expect your elected officials to know it, either. Well, that certainly explains why you find me overly critical.
Pretty uniformly through the history of the last century, the only definite exception being World War II where we were actually attacked, when America interferes with foreign governments, we end up making things worse. Even if we manage to avoid screwing things up irretrievably, the temporary order collapses when we leave. That, all by itself, is an argument for not interfering with foreign governments, or at least being very, very cautious about it. The absolutely disastrous aftermath of Iraq ought to be sufficient to make even the most strident American exceptionalist pause when we’re told “they will welcome us as liberators”. Hillary Clinton is not cautious, she does not pause, she rushes in where angels get a clunk on the head.
For that matter, why is it okay for us to decide that foreign governments are insufficiently good? We certainly wouldn’t accept it if, say, the E.U. said “you Americans have a government which is harming your people by letting greed run unchecked” and sent over an army to remove our autonomy. Why are we constantly surprised when doing the same thing to other countries isn’t viewed with rapture by the targets? (Unsurprisingly, those foreign governments which Need Overthrowing somehow always have control over a big chunk of natural resources, and never seem to be white Christians. There may be a country without oil or rare minerals which our government would like to invade, but if there is they’re keeping quiet about it.)
Then there’s the fact that our military isn’t actually reliable. Every incoming general in Iraq said the same bland phrases about how “you can’t fight an insurgency by killing people, you have to get the people on your side”, and yet every one of them more or less immediately turned to killing people, destroying infrastructure, and looking the other way to torture and corruption. Our attempts at “winning their hearts and minds” were ludicrously badly imagined and implemented — I remember reading of a truckload of soccer balls which were supposed to be dispensed to children, which arrived deflated, came with no pumps, and were sent in any case to an area which we then bombed. Even when we are actively occupying another country to “keep the peace”, the result is not an improvement for the natives. We really should be self-aware enough to start asking: “is our occupying army going to treat these people any better than their own home-grown dictators?” The answer is, sadly, frequently “no”.
And finally there’s the monetary cost: the Pentagon said, back in 2008, that every soldier we keep in Afghanistan is costing a million dollars a year, because of all the costs involved in feeding, housing, and supplying them in a region where such things are unreliable. How many soldiers do we have there?
But hey, don’t listen to me. Those poor middle-easterners will welcome us as liberators! And they have oil! Full speed ahead and Mission Accomplished!
@#110: dianne
If you believe Clinton has the intent of implementing any of her promises, which are mostly in direct contradiction to the positions she has held during the period when she was actually in Congress and acting as Secretary of State, then I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. She wants to have a “third term of Obama”, in her own words, which strongly suggests that her goal is to get into office and then throw up her hands, say “can’t take action, the Republicans won’t let me, now let’s go bomb [fill in the blank with one of the many places she wants to bomb]”.
@#114, PatrickG
It’s not that she’s wishy-washy about it. I’m willing to admit that, of all the liberal issues out there, Clinton will probably defend the availability of abortion, it’s the only issue I actually trust her to defend (although I don’t trust her to try to do anything to actively assist on it, she will be purely defensive) — provided that the defense does not involve any big sudden surprises, which history suggests she is bad at dealing with. My point was that she has the instinct to sacrifice others for a momentary — often ludicrously brief — advantage to the point that she was still willing to sacrifice Planned Parenthood when the attack popped up. It’s her first reaction to criticism. Her own explanation of her behavior over the last two decades is peppered with “I had to do [repellant action which had easily foreseeable bad consequences] to avoid looking soft on [crime or terror]”.
You know what? I’m tired of candidates who “look tough on terror” or are “tough on crime”. I want a candidate who looks wise on terror. I want a candidate who is calm and cautious. I want a candidate whose immediate response to a terrorist attack is not to want to send out the military. “Terrorists attacked, somebody’s gotta die for this” is a reaction which just begs for bad outcomes.
@#120, Matrim
If Hilary Clinton would stop defending Planned Parenthood on the basis of PP endorsing someone other than Clinton, then I don’t see how she could be said to be pro-choice. Saying that that is even possible is an admission that Clinton puts her ego before good policy.
Now that I think of it, given that PP says both Sanders and Clinton have 100% A-OK top-grade records, I question the utility of them endorsing either one before the primaries. If Sanders had been anti-abortion in record but claimed to be pro-choice now, or if — as with so many issues — Clinton had been on the right-wing side until the last year or so, and was now paying lip service, that would be very different, but neither of those two things is the case.
Details? Which specific current positions are in contrast to past positions? This is the sort of data I’ve been trying to get and haven’t yet found a good source for. Neither she nor Sanders has much of a record as far as getting bills passed. A lot of the bills Sanders puts out seem to be symbolic…though if the right scandal occurred he might be able to shove them through…and he’s got a good record as far as being able to get favorable amendments added to bills. Clinton didn’t sponsor many bills but cosponsored a number. So trying to fairly evaluate them has been difficult. Not to mention the difficulty of trying to sort out how their legislative accomplishments would or would not translate into executive accomplishments.
Much as Obama has been a disappointment, I wouldn’t call getting the ACA passed nothing. I don’t want a third Obama term. The man is bomb happy. Clinton likely would be too. Probably less so than Donald “why do we have nukes if we’re not using them” Trump, though, so I am not inclined to refuse to vote if she wins the nomination. Sanders might be better about that: he is the only congressperson to actually vote against invading both Afghanistan and Iraq, for example. It is, frankly, one of the few things that makes me a “probable Sanders” voter rather than a “true undecided” voter. Or he might do a Woodrow Wilson. I have reservations.
Holmes @105
You know that sounds no different to me than the dudes who are like “harassment? I don’t see any harassment. Just friendly criticism!” when women point out the torrents of harassment they receive online. What exactly is so special about this situation that women and minorities need to provide evidence of the not at all unusual act of being harassed for not falling in line?
Oh, and you can start at the Bernie subreddit, and maybe @angryblacklady or @elonjames on twitter. If that doesn’t do it for ya, I don’t really care.
My experience with some Hillary fans has actually been rather alarmingly like dealing with right-wing fundies and denialists. I’ve been met repeatedly with erroneous assertions, attempts at emotional manipulation, and refusal to concede any ground whatsoever — combined with a sort of cold fury at the idea that anyone could even consider supporting Bernie, even in the primary. One person even went so far as to say that challenging Hillary was some sort of betrayal of the Democratic Party on the part of Bernie and his supporters.
I’m not sure where all this is coming from, but it has soured me considerably on Hillary (though I will still vote for her if she is the Dem nominee).
Meanwhile, the worst I’ve heard from the Bernie side is to call Hillary a “b****”[1] I’m — which is anti-progressive, but such arguments are at least easy to dismiss on an intellectual level. The anti-Bernie campaign, by contrast, is coming from people who seem to be dedicated progressives with arguments whose wrongness is much more subtle.
Does anyone have any comments on the theory that Republicans are going soft on Bernie during the primary season because they see him as the easier candidate to defeat in the final election? (They do seem to like him better than Hillary, oddly enough — despite the fact that Hillary is clearly closer to their ideology than Bernie is — but my take on it is that they got so deeply in the habit of hating her that they’ll take any alternative.)
(Note 1: I tried to post this comment earlier without censoring that word, but the comment never appeared; I’m guessing it’s a trash-trigger or something.)
(Sorry about extra “I’m” in paragraph 3… wish comments were editable.)
Yeah, gendered insults are so minor and dismissable. Nothing worth getting excited about. How would you feel about it if Bernie were running against Obama and his supporters called him nothing worse than a n–? Totally no big deal, right?
This is actually, to me, one of the strongest reasons to vote for Sanders. The US currently has a wealth concentration problem not unlike that it had in the 1920s/1930s. People are tired of this and want a change. That could lead them to vote for Trump out of desperation for someone, anyone, who is different. But if Sanders comes along and can make a convincing case that he is different, really ready to make a difference, then maybe he can pull the disaffected voters away from Trump and give the country a positive change rather than a negative one. Not a revolution, but a reformation that could lead to redistribution of wealth without (as much) destruction. Sanders can project that image. Clinton would have much more trouble doing so, both because she is already associated strongly with Wall Street and because, as I think Clinton herself said, no one wants to see a woman talking about revolution.
Ah but dianne,
So that makes it totally dismissable and okay because it’s not like there’s anything intellectual about a lack of progressive values re: feminism (or the presence of anti-progressive sentiments like gendered slurs).
Dianne & rq: I’m not saying that sort of argument is okay; clearly it isn’t. (I said it was “anti-progressive”, i.e. goes against the spirit of everything we’d be hoping to get in voting for Bernie — or for Hillary over a Republican, for that matter.)
I’m just saying it’s clearly a stupid argument: one not worth engaging, one that doesn’t need careful consideration in order to see how wrong it is.
As someone who does not consider themselves a feminist (long story short; history of shitty relations between feminism and trans people makes me not want to identify as one), I think it’d be fairly hypocritical of me to hold someone else not openly identifying as a feminist against them.
#125
The difference being, when people ask about harassment on twitter, the response has been to point to an overwhelming number of examples. (And yes these exmaples are dismissed far too often.) Contrastingly, when I have asked about this supposed pro-Bernie anti-Hillary wave of sexism, the response has been ‘it’s everywhere, trust a man not to see it though’ in which no examples are given and I am assumed to be a sexist for not seeing it.
So, your reply there stands as the only time examples have been given to my repeeated requests here and elsewhere. I will peruse them tonight / tomorrow.
@133: How about the example Woozle mentioned above? Not sexist? Not at all?
I presume either this (#1 result for “bernie subreddit” on DuckDuckGo) or this (#2 result) is “the Bernie subreddit”?
@123, Vicar
Never said she would, never said she wouldn’t. All I said was it looked like a pragmatic decision rather than an ideological one.
I would agree with that, but I assume that they felt a statement before the primary would hold more weight than one after.
ianrennie @119: I agree. The hoohah about Huerta has distracted from the fact that no translation service was provided, and I can hardly imagine anything better calculated to make her mad. She then offered to step in! And was refused, with at least the moderator saying “English only.” Maybe she lost her cool, but I would not blame her for that. She has been working for well over 50 years to integrate Spanish speakers into the American political process. This seems to have been lost in the welter of “Clintonistas” vs “Bernie bros” which I sincerely hope we can lose right now.
Vicar @100: The telling part about my starting with 1968 is that I remember it very clearly! I am less aware of the detailed pre-nomination dynamics in 1960 or earlier.
Your analysis, while not uninteresting, completely fails to address my point, which is that if Sanders cannot increase turnout substantially then his entire rationale for joining the Democratic Party fails.
ianrennie @ 119, well said.
Saad@#103:
Between Clinton and Trump, which do you prefer as president?
If I am given a choice to eat two bowls of shit, one of which has chipotle sauce, it’s a no-brainer – I’ll take the one with the chipotle sauce.
It is actually quite easy to reduce the US prison population by 500-600k in one presidential term.
All you have to do is police black and brown communities the same as white communities.
Assuming that race has little to no correlation with crime levels, the demographic disparity of prisons is due to how cops and courts treat people differently based on skin tone. Holding the flux of whites coming into prison constant and adjusting the black and brown numbers to be the same proportion of their community as whites, there would be approximately 250k less people going into prison each year than there is coming out.
How would the president make police departments behave? Simple, distribut smart phone apps that records and live uploads footage to federal government servers and encourage citizens to record police interactions. The chain of evidence is impeccable and thus can be used in court no questions asked. Then have the justice department make an example of a few cops and departments. It won’t take long for the rest to fall in line and start acting like decent humans to people of all races because they fear prison in a way a hardened criminal never would.
You can get a 500-600k reduction in prison population in 2-3 years without pardoning anyone or changing any laws, and without any help from congress.
Asking which would be the better president is pointless — neither one of them will be able to accomplish squat.
The sole issue that matters to me is electability — which of them has the best chance of shutting down the Republican horror show. Some coattails would be nice too.
My primary is in a week and a half, and I still haven’t made up my mind yet. Time to read more polls.
@Holms
I don’t really think it’s people’s job to prove their harassment to your personal liking. I feel like we’ve been through the whole listening to minority experiences without acting as if it needs the same fine toothed comb investigation as Big Foot. Guess that went out the window for lots of my fellow lefties during election season.
F.O. #118:
Butbutbut, it’s the White Man’s Burden!
MME @141: Two non-trivial, and closely related, problems: Grand juries and jury trials. I understand that if a real radical were swept into office with overwhelming public support these might not be issues; but in that case, nor would Congress.
Some news hosts have flagged the “Hillary Clinton is not trustworthy” meme as a rightwing tactic that’s been used for a couple of decades. Now that meme sticks, even in Democratic circles. There are plenty of issues on which to question Clinton, but the overall, generalized “not trustworthy” meme is one the rightwing is pushing.
Here’s just one example of a news program pushing back, however ineffectively:
That last sentence is Kohn referencing the fact that the program she is on is also painting a generalized “untrustworthy” picture of Clinton without providing details.
Link.
Trump has been pushing the “dishonest” and “liar” and “not to be trusted” line against Hillary Clinton, and he has been pushing it hard.
I think that’s different from critics of Clinton picking a particular example of her actions or words and saying that they disagree, or that they think Clinton didn’t tell the whole truth.
@145
Unfortunately, juries are trivial: only around 2.8% of cases wind up in front of a jury.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2013/jan/15/dramatic-increase-in-percentage-of-criminal-cases-being-plea-bargained/
It’s not so much that I think Hillary is lying about anything — although she has seemingly stood behind what I understand to be false statements about universal healthcare — as it is that I don’t trust her intentions. She makes great noise about being progressive and getting things done, but the only things she seems to want to get done are deals with the established powers that basically surrender to them, sweetening the deal for us with token concessions that seem subject to future erosion.
The pragmatists argue that this is necessary in order to move forward — but how is surrender moving forward?
She’ll probably win the nomination, so I hope I’m wrong (and I do think there is plenty of room for me to be wrong), but that’s how it looks from here.
Seriously? TRUMP is calling CLINTON a liar? Hillary Clinton, the only major party candidate to still have a >50% true/mostly true rating on politifacts* is accused by Donald Trump, who has a true rating of a whopping 1% (though to be fair he has a whole 7% true/mostly true rating) of being a liar? Um…is this one of those logic puzzles where one person always lies…
*Sanders has a 49% rating to Clinton’s 51%. None of the Republicans break 40%.
Oops. My bad. I forgot Kasich. Poor Kasich: everyone forgets him. Anyway, he appears abnormally honest for a politician at 52% true/mostly true. Wanted to correct that since we’re talking accuracy in political reporting here.
@dianne
Politifact is a bit arbitrary for my taste…their “rulings” seem to fluctuate as to what qualifies for “mostly”
@147: Fair point. But I still think the precondition for any of this to work the way you suggested is a major, as yet unseen, change in popular opinion, especially in the areas most in need of it, but emphatically also in so-called liberal enclaves such as the one in California where I live. Just for example: There are enough commie pinko liberal fellow travelers here to raise a big public stink about the cops getting an armored vehicle (militaristic, essentially useless, symbolic, waste of resources yadayada) … and they went ahead and got it anyway. Chasing that mentality is going to take a while.
@Matrim: It’s a decent argument. I personally was wondering a bit about how they decided what to call a statement and rule on. I don’t, for example, consider the difference between Sanders and Clinton significant. However, the contrast between Clinton and Trump is extreme and can not be accounted for by fluctuations in the mostly versus partly rulings.
@ #141
So you think that’s the plan Sanders has to reduce the prison population? If so, I’d be more worried that he’s living in a fantasy land than I already am. Meanwhile, back in the real world, problems like harsh sentencing, fair sentencing, access to counsel for poor defendants — those decisions get made at the county level. County elected officials like prosecutors and judges are making decisions about who gets charged, how they’re charged and how they’re going to be punished. This is where reform needs to begin – there is little, if anything, the federal government can do about it. The idea that uploading police interactions to a federal server will in any way mitigate these problems is, not to put too fine a point on it, cuckoo.
It’s not his plan, but it is a plan that fits perfectly with his platform, is technically feasible, and the math works.
It is far from cuckoo.
Remember when the NYPD got their diapers in a twist over being diss’d by the mayor and decided to ignore the petty shit they would normally crack heads over? Life was grand for new yorkers during that brief time. Whip out the big stick of the DOJ on cops across the country, and it would take no time at all (<<1yr) to get all cops to act as hands-off and polite to black and brown Americans as they do to whites.
How else do you expect the federal government to change local cops and prosecutors but through DOJ prosecution? How do you expect the DOJ to break down the blue wall of silence except with evidence that can't reasonable doubted away?
Our criminal justice system is broken. Black and brown Americans are treated far worse every step of the way than white Americans. If this is fixed (by treating POC better rather than whites worse), the prison population problem will go way down. Expecting that fix to come locally ignores all of US history. Unless you want to go all 'Battle of Athens' the most effective way to bust up a corrupt local cop/prosecutor/judge clique is with copious federal indictments and the occasional national guard muster.
Also, you don’t need to stop with cops.
A bit of data mining and some subpoenas could pull out a nice list of dirty DAs. Jail a few, disbar more, and pretty soon you might have something approaching ethics in the court room.
http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-lying-prosecutors-20150201-story.html
http://www.propublica.org/article/who-polices-prosecutors-who-abuse-their-authority-usually-nobody
The wonderful majesty of a Nevada caucus.
If Clinton gets the nomination, I’m voting KPD!
The Vicar, @122
I was not making an argument for intervention, just pointing out that it’s not unreasonable for an intelligent observer to be conflicted with large issues like foreign policy (even after reading “all of the facts”, never mind the impossibility of that), and taking (temporarily or permanently) a moderate position (or being fine with their candidate doing so). That was the *point* of my post. I was only listing how conflicted I am, in the hopes that you realize that as not unreasonable (this is condescending of me, granted).
And I am still conflicted! Would you have been for helping the Yazidi people escape by bombing ISIS? Would you have been against the Korean war (what would South Korea have been if Americans didn’t participate)? Well, those are my two examples, because indeed, “intervention” is dubious (you haven’t really made the case why it shouldn’t be an option when there’s, say, genocide: by your logic, we should only have fought a war against Japan, and brokered a deal with Germany. But I’m sure we can both agree that these cases should be firmly in the minority, and most others smell of colonialism, 2.0).
So you still come across, to me, as utterly set on your certainty. I’m only arguing (with my own hubris!) that you stop doing that.
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2016/02/22/yes-progressives-berniebro-problem/
MassMomentumEnergy
I understand the DOJ cracked down on Ferguson.
And recently sued them in a civil suit for not following through with the promised reforms.
Wow, that sure was a lot of change in a very short time!
@#124, dianne
Let’s start with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, because it’s a particularly egregious thing.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership will, if ratified (Obama, that “liberal” whose presidency Clinton says she wants to extend in emulation, has already signed it), permit corporations to challenge national laws of signatory nations on the basis that these laws are preventing them from turning expected profits. The adjudicating body will be neither the courts of the nation nor a panel of national representatives but the World Bank, which is notoriously anti-labor and anti-environment, meaning that it will be roughly as effective at preventing abuse as the secret NSA surveillance approval courts are at preventing abuse of NSA spying powers. In effect, the TPP will destroy all labor and environmental laws throughout its area of effect. The treaty is so egregious that it was kept secret — even the Senators who were going to be asked to vote on it were not permitted to have copies or to take notes on it; they had to go and look at a copy in a secure location, without any sort of electronic devices or paper, and leave it behind when they left. (WikiLeaks, fortunately, managed to publish several versions.)
Hillary Clinton, during her time with the Obama administration as Secretary of State, has been solidly boosting the TPP. She called it the “gold standard of trade agreements” and gave 45 positive references to it in public during the period before the debates began. As of the first debate, she reversed her stance — gee, trying to overturn all labor and environmental laws turns out not to be popular with Democrats, who could have guessed?! — and has then claimed (see the link I just gave) that she never boosted it, which is an outright lie.
(Her support for the TPP is hardly a surprise, because back during the Bill Clinton presidency, although she could not vote on it, she was one of the major public proponents of NAFTA, which had similar effects on labor and the environment. She now disclaims that, too.)
She has had a similar flip-flop on fracking. She was even pushing it after the price of oil fell back to the point where oil obtained via fracking was no longer economically competitive with regular oil. But now she is against it, has always been against it, it’s a bad idea. (In other words: Sanders took a stand and it was popular, so she copied it.)
(I also am too tired to find links, because this is a topic where more recent debate has pushed older stuff off of Google, but: a few years back, people asked Hillary Clinton about Keystone XL. She replied that she thought it was a done deal, and didn’t understand why anyone would oppose it. If you have more energy/patience than me and want to, you should be able to find this. She changed her official position last year, IIRC, around the time when she started her campaign.)
Then there’s her Iraq vote, of course. For reasons which are beyond my comprehension, people are more willing to forgive her for this as time passes, rather than less. In 2002, she bought into the Bush administration’s arguments and doctored evidence — despite Bob Graham, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee pointing out that all of the justifications were built on claims made by expatriates and exiles who had a vested interest in the removal of Saddam Hussein, none of whom had actually been in Iraq for years. She went so far as to publicly give an ultimatum to Hussein a few days before the invasion, telling him to give up his WMDs (which didn’t exist). By 2005 she was blaming the Bush administration for what was, in effect, her own inability to do due diligence — which was her job. Given the disastrous nature of Iraq and the consequences which have followed — the whole existence of ISIS is just a part of the consequences of the Iraq invasion — this ought to be enough to disqualify her from participation in government, ever again.
Nevertheless she was made Secretary of State. During the debates, she explicitly denied being involved in the bombing of Libya, which is turning out to be another big disaster (and which was likewise obviously going to be a disaster, and which Congress explicitly voted not to start). This, again, is a lie; she basically started the bombing campaign over the heads of the rest of the cabinet and the Pentagon. (I feel that an outright lie disclaiming responsibility for a disastrous policy counts as a flip-flop.)
On the subject of the middle east: Clinton was publicly a proponent of the Arab Spring — but up until it happened, she was in favor of U.S.-backed dictators across the middle east, and she continued to support Mubarek even after it was clear he was on the way out.
On healthcare, Hillary Clinton now says that single-payer, and even universal coverage, is impractical — talking about healthcare is where the infamous “incrementalism” idea came up in the first place. (Again, go watch the debates.) However, the plan Hillary Clinton was specifically in charge of trying to implement back in the Bill Clinton presidency — and which, the other people involved have uniformly said, failed because of her involvement — was universal coverage, and — the irony of this is delicious! — Bernie Sanders has an autographed photograph from Hillary Clinton, thanking him for helping him try to pass it.
This is just what I can think of off the top of my head, on a day when I’ve lost a bunch of sleep. I know there’s more, if you’ll go and look.
People like to claim that Clinton’s views have “evolved”. This is not a valid word for what has happened. “Evolved” is when, say, you are pro-choice in general but willing to limit access, and then find yourself deciding that perhaps those limits are unreasonable. When you support something and then turn around and disclaim it, that’s not “evolving”. That’s direct contradiction.
Okay:
1. Obama deliberately killed the public option and single payer. The ACA was not “the best we could do”, it was a corrupt and cynical take on things right from the start. (And, furthermore, it was used as an excuse not to take action on breaking up the banks, on which issue Obama and the Democrats had a genuine, honest-to-goodness mandate. At the time, polls showed over 90% support for the idea across all stripes of political affiliation. The ACA was a way to distract the electorate from what was actually the major issue of the day without actually making any serious changes to the status quo, and it worked like a charm.)
2. Go look at the Libya link I have above. Hillary Clinton isn’t “probably” bomb-happy, she is bomb-happy. She’s one of only 15 Democrats who voted against banning the use of cluster bombs against civilians — every Republican voted with her. (This amendment had no other purpose, so she wasn’t voting because of some other related issue.)
@#139, petesh
No, I don’t blame her for getting mad. But I do blame her for making what appear to be false statements about the supporters of the candidate she publicly opposes. Oh, and it turns out she did something akin to this to Obama during the 2008 race, where she also supported Clinton. She may be great at her job, but she apparently can’t be trusted not to go off the rails with partisan lies during elections.
@#148, Woozle
Libya. She’s definitely lying there.
@#159, gakxz1
No. Bombing ISIS actually helps them, and that isn’t a big secret. I suspect that there were options to help the Yazidis without doing exactly what ISIS wants us to do.
Oh, but that would involve doing a little more research than reading news sources which do nothing but echo inside-the-beltway consensus opinions and report without criticism the words of administration officials. And to be brutally, even rudely, honest with you, that sounds like more than you want to do, or even expect anyone else to do.
The Korean War… let’s see, that’s the one where the U.S. military commanders thought (as has come out in later revelations, along with the admission that nuking Japan was completely optional and therefore totally immoral) that they could establish a presence and then invade China and Russia, got beaten back by the Chinese who saw what was happening and rushed troops in, ended up cementing the Kim family as dictators of North Korea as a kind of buffer for the Chinese against the American military, and then spent the next 50 years saying “we were totes innocent, it’s all the fault of those naaaaasty Chinese”? Not sure exactly where I would have stood on that had I been alive at the time (it’s proverbially easy to be wise after the fact), but I’m pretty sure that what the U.S. did was at least not the best option. It was a war we chose to go into because the U.S. military leadership were frothing at the mouths to try to attack “the commies” in Asia, and thank goodness they didn’t.
A consent decree that the city is fighting in court is nothing like throwing corrupt cops and DAs in jail.
Even so, cops in Ferguson are behaving much better. If departments across the land had the DOJ breathing down their neck, it isn’t hard to imagine that they too would stop the bullshit practices that results in such a huge racial disparity in prison.
http://www.npr.org/2016/02/20/467499878/the-city-of-ferguson-and-department-of-justice-battle-on
Even though the conversation has died a bit and moved on to other topics, I feel a need to conclude my concern over Sanders and his supporters with Krugman’s post from today:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/realistic-growth-prospects/?module=BlogPost-ReadMore&version=Blog%20Main&action=Click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body#more-39591
This lays out very, very clearly and empirically why 5.3% growth rate is both insane and a totally unnecessary claim for a progressive to make:
We are entering a time period where worldwide growth will be limited because population growth has almost ceased everywhere save Africa. As Thomas Piketty points out in Capital in the 21st Century (which everyone should read, especially progressives), in periods of slow growth, inherited wealth becomes much more powerful. The task for Sanders and progressives in general is not to meet some arbitrary growth number, realistic or not, but to make sure that as we enter this slow growth period, we do not allow tax cutting assholes on the right to establish a permanent aristocracy.
Sanders progressive agenda is perfectly supportable based on it’s own merits, and he doesn’t need voodoo analysis to justify it. As Krugman, who Sanders’ supporters have been dismissing as a right wing (?!) shill for Hillary, pointed out very nicely.
@gakxz1
You raise the important issues. Incidentally, I recall asking this same question of Howard Zinn after a lecture. I was pretty certain that he was a pacifist. He spent most of the lecture slamming various US military efforts, including Hallowed WWII. This was around the time we intervened in Kosovo, and I asked him whether it was moral to let people die if you could save them, even if military intervention was the only way. He basically said, “I never said all intervention was wrong.”
So, I don’t know. It’s one of the toughest questions facing the modern world. My basic principle for addressing these issues is as follows:
-Are you as a nation willing to commit a massive ground force that would actually be forceful enough to cease the hostilities?
-If no, are you relying on some compromise position that involves bombings and sending arms to poorly vetted groups?
It seems to me that regardless of how noble the cause, if you’re going to go the “let’s just send some dangerous shit to a bunch of people we can call rebels and hope for the best” route, then you should just stay away and provide as much aid and support for refugees as you can.
If you think it’s worth committing the entire military, as we did in Korea, then we can move forward with the next step: is there actually a plan for victory.
On the few occasions after WWII we’ve decided it’s worth it (decisions that are largely dubious, by the way), we have yet to take that second step and bother to map out some reasonable mission.
Absent a just cause, total commitment, and a coherent plan (even in a general sense), history seems to indicate we will cause more harm than the initial tragedy that ignited the process.
@163
Again, Krugman spends a whole column slamming Friedman’s analysis without ever actually running the numbers. It is all gut feelings, which won’t get you published in anything other than a propaganda rag like the NYT.
@165 MassMomentumEnergy
Nonsense.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the insanely rosy growth numbers are based entirely on an assumption that the current output growth is equivalent to what it was in 2007 and 2008. Krugman shows why that is false. That is “crunching the numbers.” Krugman is showing a more reasonable assessment of what investment in the economy could produce.
He additionally points out that other than infrastructure spending, the investments touted in the Sanders plan (which, again, are awesome ideas) are not likely to contribute to growth. Friedman assumed that, for example, a standard multiplier could be applied to something like pre-K services. Increase services, stay at home parents can work, work force participation increases, X growth occurs. It’s much more complicated than that. Maybe some people stop working because they don’t have to pay for private daycare…etc.
Assuming that every tax dollar invested will result in funds pumped into the economy is daft. Ignoring the fact that labor force participation will continue to decline because of Boomers retiring is daft. The assumption of how much money the tax increases to pay for healthcare will generate is, at best, insanely optimistic.
Those numbers have been “crunched.” The assumptions are way off base. This is made obvious by the numbers provided by Krugman. Show me your empirical evidence to support the notion that the output growth is even remotely similar to what it was when it was above 10% unemployment.
*output gap
The real unemployment rate is still over 10%. Plenty of room for the growth that standard models predict.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louisefron/2014/08/20/tackling-the-real-unemployment-rate-12-6/#5e89b4161e12
PZ, again regarding “Who are these people?”
I just re-read your post, & I think you were referring exclusively to the alleged Bernie Bro types at the caucus, but I still think you owe it to your principles to go watch this:
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/23/nina_turner_on_switching_from_clinton
(Btw, Nina Turner is the Ohio lawmaker sponsoring the “Viagra Bill”: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/03/11/442208/affidavit-confirming-impotence-viagra/)
@170 MassMomentumEnergy
Dude, seriously, this is rapidly becoming unproductive.
1) Does it even give you a moment’s pause that you are now parroting Donald Trump and Ted Cruz’s criticism of the economy under Obama? This, by the way, is a disgusting habit of both Clinton and Sanders supporters: they are, waaaaay more than any decent person should, joining in with right wing bullshit to attack the other person.
2) The “real unemployment rate” is the labor force participation rate that I have mentioned a half dozen times. That number is high almost entirely because of the Boomers retiring. It is higher than it should be, and Bernie’s plans, especially investment in infrastructure, will definitely positively impact those numbers. But to get to Friedman’s nonsensical growth number, you have to make two gigantic and obviously false assumptions (a) That labor force participation rate creates an output gap equivalent to the gap in 2007-2008 (it doesn’t because retirees are not going to reenter the workforce), and (b) all of Bernie’s proposals will have the effect of putting people to work without removing them from the labor force. As Krugman points out, this is not true. Better social services (which are 100% justified on their own merits) may also have the effect of removing people from the labor force (only working for health care or to pay for daycare…etc.) or causing people to reduce hours.
3) Since when do progressives need to point to growth as a justification for their positions? Economic growth would increase if we eliminated a number of labor abuse restrictions. One way to increase productivity is to eliminate restraints on work hours, who can work, how much they can be paid…etc. Perhaps there are diminishing returns generated by abusing workers, but no progressive I’ve ever known justifies labor laws by pointing to growth. Why are you so wedded to this ridiculous study? It’s a distraction and places important progressive goals in the petty arena of Republican claims about economic growth being of primary importance.
Maybe this is a better way to think about it:
If tomorrow Friedman comes out and says, “Oh shit, my bad, I had a decimal point in the wrong place. Growth will only increase to 2.8%…” would that, in any way, change your support for universal health care, affordable college, universal pre-K…etc? If the answer is “no,” then I think people need to ask themselves why they care about this silly study so much that they’re willing to adopt Ted Cruz’s rhetoric.
If the answer is, yes, I will give up on universal health care and infrastructure spending unless it gets us to 5.3% growth, then you and I are progressives for very different reasons.
Just as an aside, I’d like to address something. While politicians in general, and Republicans in particular, tend to use exaggeration and outright lies when addressing issues; I remind you that just because a Republican said it that doesn’t mean it’s not true. So if someone criticizes Clinton for dishonesty or Obama for the economy or whatever, the important thing isn’t who said it, it’s whether or not the criticism is valid. Now, I’m not saying that any particular point brought up here is true or false. What I am saying is “you’re adopting Ted Cruz/Donald Trump/whatever right-wing dipshit’s talking points” is only a valid criticism if they are actually wrong. If a person is wrong, tell them why they’re wrong, don’t just compare them to bad people. This is the the stuff that Godwin’s Law is made of.
@r3a50n, #54:
Uh, I picked the word “boo” based on watching the video. The video that you linked. Your takeaway seems to be that if only one person said “English only” it’s okay, but what I’m seeing is that Sanders supporters booed Dolores Huerta offstage when she offered to do a translation.
Is that you, Ken Ham? I thought you were still in prison?
P.S. Please include my ‘nym if you’re going to respond. It makes it easier to find the posts.
@Matrim
While that is obviously true in a logical sense, it is absolutely false factually and practically. The right wing generates amazing bullshit that they use to attack Democrats. If you’ll notice, I pointed out that in order to support a nonsensical pro-Bernie study, a poster was aping the same bullshit you hear from the right about Obama’s economy. I then pointed out exactly why it’s bullshit.
It’s not bullshit BECAUSE Ted Cruz said it. It’s bullshit, which is why Ted Cruz says it. The fact that your argument drew you to the same bullshit that Ted Cruz buzzes around should be cause for reflection, especially when it’s so obviously ridiculous.
@#176, doubtthat:
The problem with the Republicans, vis-a-vis criticism of the Democrats, is that they have a strong preference — amounting to an addiction — to lies.
A right-winger who didn’t have such a problem could come up with criticisms of Clinton or Sanders (or Obama) which were based on fact and which would at least be difficult for Democrats to sidestep. (Take Obama as an example: he specifically said that the ACA would be negotiated in public, in front of cameras, so everyone could see what was going on. It ended up being a back-room deal negotiated in secret in which private hospitals and insurance companies had an overwhelming amount of influence; Code:Pink tried to observe and was summarily ejected. Regardless of whether you like the contents of the bill, the process broke a bunch of promises and involved a complete lack of transparency.)
You could also formulate criticisms which were based in fact but which required people to agree with your ideology. For example, if you believed in Grover Norquist-style “government spending is bad”, then you could point to specific things the Democrats have put money into.
But actual Republicans forego both of those options in favor of just making things up. Obama is coming for your guns, and then he’s going to lock you up in an internment camp! Clinton had Vince Foster murdered! Sanders is a communist!
Consider the whole Benghazi flap: the charges which were actually pursued were a mountain of bullshit. Nevertheless, the investigation did uncover a genuine scandal: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to conduct government business. This exact issue — the use of a private e-mail service for public business — had been a scandal for Sarah Palin a few years earlier, so there is no excuse whatsoever for this. Furthermore, a hacker in Korea apparently broke in and looked around at the messages, which the State Department has declared to contain classified secrets. One really must conclude that either Hillary Clinton is an utter fool (which I for one don’t believe) or that she doesn’t really believe that laws and regulations apply to her, just to other people, or possibly that she thinks the State Department’s classified secrets aren’t actually important, in which case she has lied in public apropos the leaks of State Department cables a while back.
That’s a real scandal. A career-ending one? Probably not, or at least not by itself, but a genuine one nonetheless. And yet the Republicans are still trying to claim Clinton conspired to… whatever it is they think she was actually doing re:Benghazi. (Honestly, I never quite followed how the whole thing was supposed to work; the claims I saw had no possible rational motive attached to them and just kind of assumed that Hillary Clinton was a kind of demon of anarchy who took delight in causing trouble.)
As a result, Clinton supporters are able to claim that the e-mail scandal, which is real, is just a Republican smear, the same way that Obama supporters can claim that objecting to the secrecy of the ACA is just a smear because the Republicans attacked the rest of it on made-up grounds. It’s a very dangerous thing, because it leads Democrats to reject valid criticism which they really should be looking at carefully.
The Vicar, @163
When did I say my posts were carefully cited research papers? When did I say no one else should do research when talking on this forum? I never said my opinions were set in stone, and have mostly tried to tell you how they, in fact, are not. Apparently, my having done less research means we cannot hold a conversation.
I rather love history, and one day, I’ll sit down and try being more thoroughly informed when it comes to many of the issues we’ve discussed (I might be a bit better than average now, but then, “I” *would* say that).But I don’t imagine, after reading thousands of book, I’d be as certain as you are now.
Well, I’ve thoroughly hated this conversation with you. Guess that means it should stop.
If you read the full Dunning-Kruger paper you’ll find that people tend to rate themselves as a little better than average regardless of their actual skill, including those who were really stellar at the thing. So I’m afraid your estimation of your knowledge is uninformative and I’m totally off topic.
doubtthat, @166
Yep, that all makes lots of sense (and yes, I also still don’t know). The Iraq war gives an interesting example of where total non- commitment is entwined with no coherent plan (not that there was a just cause there either). I actually agree with sentiment voiced at some point by The Vicar, that these decisions shouldn’t be made by the Ol’ US of A (I’d add that, in cases where they must be made, that should be in the UN). The most damning thing about US intervention is that one can’t ever quite nix that sort of, “We’re the greatest country on earth, going somewhere foreign to help the natives, so long as we don’t start new colonies” vibe. I picture that 1000 years from now, there will be so many “modern” (or post 1900 “globalized”) examples of what to and not to do that “we” will know exactly how to act when faced with, say, a brutal dictator, or marauding terrorist. Well, that’s optimistic…
Anywhoo, I think I’m all foreign policy-ed out as far as this forum is concerned…
dianne, @179
Lol (I tried thinking up synonyms that sounded better, but nothing seemed as good as lol…). Yep, I agree with that assesment…
@181: Note that that means that you might be top 1%…
@177: While I agree that the Clinton email scandal was “real” in the sense that it uncovered something that she did that she shouldn’t have been doing, as far as I can tell, it wasn’t an unusual act. That is, quite a number of other high level government employees did the same thing without ever getting so much as mildly reproved for it, much less having it be considered a career ending scandal. So while I’m willing to take it into account when assessing Clinton’s reliability and ability to follow security protocol, I do consider the amount of fuss made over it evidence that Clinton is undergoing special scrutiny that no one else, including the other presidential candidates, is.
/off topic/
@dianne 179
A nit to pick: this is only true for easy and average tasks. With regard to very difficult tasks the situation flips and almost everybody thinks they are below average (this has been established in the second paper on the issue, “Skilled or unskilled…”, you are correct about the conclusion of original Dunning-Krueger paper).
/off topic/
After reading this I stand further convicned that CZ’s attempt at emulating american voting systems – trying to establish only two parties by strongly disempowering minority parties, direct vote of president – is all in all dumb.
@184: Do you have the reference? I must admit I’ve only read the original DK paper. Interesting that the basic problem, i.e. that people can’t judge their own skill accurately, continues to be an issue.
That’s a thing? 0_o
@dianne #185 I cannot preview code right now, so I hope this works: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39168/1/956.pdf
@#178, gakxz1
Actually, just paying attention to the news from sources other than the TV and USA Today would have gotten you up to date. Not once have I gone to a published book, just Google and some news sites. This isn’t rocket science, it’s basic political literacy. And yet you seem to think I spend all my time on this stuff; knowing what has happened is just the result of paying attention over the last decade or two, but you not only believe it’s okay not to know any of this, but apparently — and more concerningly — that it’s okay for our elected officials not to know any of this.
Get proven wrong and then try to make a virtue out of your ignorance. Yeah, I’m a real egghead for… well, mostly for bothering to plug things into Google and seeing what the coverage is. How shameful.
Yeah, I can imagine you’ve hated it. To borrow a famous phrasing, I never gave you hell, I just told you the truth and you thought it was hell.
@176, doubtthat
I wasn’t targeting you specifically, your post was just the one that really made me consider how much it was popping up in the thread. Again I wasn’t making statements about the various claims in question, I just want to be sure people aren’t just indulging in the genetic fallacy.
But that’s also not true, at least the first part (you should always reflect on your beliefs). Ted Cruz doesn’t say it because it’s bullshit. Ted Cruz says it because it’s politically useful. The difference is that the truth or falsehood of the statement is irrelevant to him. He would be just as ready to make an argument that was based on truth if it were politically expedient to do so. Again, that a right-winger says it doesn’t mean it’s false; the fact that it isn’t true makes it false.
@#183, dianne
Ah, quoting Howard Dean, huh? As for it being career-ending, I already said that I don’t think it is — by itself. As for whether it’s a common occurrence, sorry, but Politifact says that’s not actually accurate: although many politicians have used private addresses while in office, only a handful have had their own servers, and it has usually been a scandal when discovered. (More or less for the same reason that Clinton’s e-mail server is a scandal: a private server is more likely to be insecure; we know her server was hacked from Korea.)
There is actually very little fuss being made about it, relative to how much fuss minor scandals have caused in previous elections — or even non-scandals. Al Gore “inventing the Internet”, Kerry getting swiftboated, or Howard Dean giving a momentary yell all got played ad infinitum, and none of those had even the relatively small amount of importance Clinton’s e-mail scandal does.
(Incidentally, I consider that the e-mail scandal, such as it is, becomes much, much graver in light of the positions she has taken on the subject of computer security. She wants Snowden punished for being a whistleblower on the excesses of the security state. She wants the NSA to have complete access to everything, at all times — she has called for a “New Manhattan Project” to break all encryption*. In other words: leniency and opacity for her, no matter how important security may be to her job, and punishment and surveillance for us.)
(*In this, actually, she is echoing Obama, who called for much the same thing. This is a phenomenally bad idea; any deliberate technique for breaking encryption would most quickly be either leaked to or discovered by both foreign governments and organized criminals, particularly since any encryption method which is going to be part of standard communications will have to be based on a published algorithm. Even the idea of requiring companies to be able to break their own proprietary products under law is a very bad idea.)
@ The Vicar
Can you just fucking stop arguing with me? GO back to my first post; I am just challenging your pompous way of talking, that’s it. I’m sorry I chose foreign policy, sorry. I understand that on certain issues (ex, gay rights) one would be caught dead telling people, “Well ok, that’s just your opinion” (rather, it’s their hateful prejudice). I should’ve said that at the beginning. Now all you have to do is say, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t reflexively call people non-principled”, and we can tell each other to fuck off and never speak again.
*wouldn’t be caught dead…
Well, I can’t seem to stop responding. Can you please do me the favor of either not responding to my last post, so that this stops, or responding in a just slightly nicer way? I would appreciate this
@Matrim
That’s perfectly valid, especially in a logical sense, as I said. But if you have a group of people who actively lie and 90% of what they say is total horseshit, it should be concerning when you find yourself using their arguments.
I mean, Ken Ham may be right about something, but if for some reason I’m arguing about biology and I notice that I just said something that Ken Ham says, that would be a pretty gigantic red flag.
In the modern GOP, the difference between what you said and what I said has no practical value. They are creating a false reality. The rely upon fact-free statements about the world. Bullshit is politically useful. The causality, in a logical sense, runs in the direction I stated: Ted Cruz says these things because they are bullshit. If they weren’t bullshit, he wouldn’t say them because the truth ruins his claims.
But fair enough, I could have articulated that point much more clearly. I don’t really think we’re disagreeing on anything meaningful.
@The Vicar
Yes. That is the logical – practical gap I mentioned.
But more importantly, what Sanders and Clinton supporters are often doing is using right wing attacks on the other candidate that are obviously lies. It’s not even in the hypothetical stage. Republicans love creating a narrative (Clinton is “untrustworthy”; Bernie is a crazy old man yelling at windmills…), and that enters the media. It’s very tempting to use those easily available attacks to go after one or the other in a primary.
I mean, just researching the Friedman analysis of Sanders’ economic proposals, it’s a lot of work to separate the thoughtful criticism from the onslaught of right wing sources blasting the study. There’s so much noise that it becomes difficult, but it’s also our obligation (in my mind) to realize that the stakes are very, very high, and whoever wins the primary needs our support. Spending time lending credence to right wing bullshit to win arguments about the primary is dangerous.
doubtthat:
I don’t understand. My lack of trust in Clinton has nothing do with any right-wing attacks. How am I supposed to express the fact that I don’t believe she’s worthy of my trust? It’s not a lie, obvious or not, because in fact I actually don’t trust her. I think I’d be the one who knows that, not you.
Is there another word or phrase that you would like to hear instead, which doesn’t amount to the opposite of untrustworthy? I might consider using that, not as some kind of an “attack” since I don’t know how that by itself would constitute one anyway, but simply to say that I don’t trust her.
Or, if you can’t think of a decent substitute and can’t explain why this is some kind of important problem, you could just be less ridiculous and resign yourself to the fact that people of a wide variety of political alignments don’t trust her. They’re not obviously lying, there need not be any conspiracies or nefarious right wing influences, and it’s not more important than most things I can imagine.
Maybe there’s a more specific right wing smear against Clinton that you could use an example … you know, one that’s actually some kind of a smear and is actually right wing. I’m open to that too.
So after checking out the Bernie reddit in particular, I have yet to see a single gender-based criticism of Hillary. Perhaps they were veiled enough that I didn’t notice them, but then again perhaps the BernieBro meme is bullshit. I’m leaning towards the latter rather heavily.